A Promising Young Esperantist

William P. Bonbright in 1904

There was more than one William P. Bonbright in 1909. One of them was the founder of a banking firm which bore his name, with offices in New York, London, and Colorado Springs. (The New York Times referred to him as a “New York banker.” Those other places don’t count.) To provide a small amount of clarity, in his case, the P stood for “Prescott.” The other was his first cousin once removed, William Parker Bonbright. That’s the William P. Bonbright who was also an Esperantist.

This is the moment where I need to clear up the genealogy, since the question probably has arisen, “just what is a ‘first cousin once removed.’” If you’re Chico Marx, this would be followed by list of reasons for which the cousin was removed. I could point you to the Wikipedia entry on cousin, and I was tempted to bury this in a footnote,[1] but it seemed to make much more sense to explain it in the main text.

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A World Government in French and Esperanto

This monarch, are we going to have an election, or will it
be done by strange women lying in ponds?

Herbert Stanley Jevons (1875–1955)[1] was a British professor of economics, the author of several books, such as The British Coal Trade, The Theory of Political Economy, and The Economics of Tenancy Law and Estate Management.,[2] but he seems to have been overshadowed by his father, William Stanley Jevons, as the elder Jevons is the one with the Wikipedia entry.

In 1909, the elder Jevons had been dead since 1882 and it was H. Stanley Jevons’s moment of prominence, for he was the prophet of a whole world monarchy, as reported in the Chicago Tribune (where I cannot find it), and then reprinted in the Washington Post on February 7, 1909. The reference to Esperanto in the piece is somewhat slight,[3] amounting to a single reference in the entire piece, but it’s interesting how far off Jevons was in his predictions.

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A Traveling Professor Talks about Esperanto

Ĉu lil parolas esperante?

It seems fairly likely that “Professor R. B. Maitland of San Francisco” is responding to a 1895 New York World article, “Volapuk Has a Rival,” one of the early articles on Esperanto.[1] What isn’t clear is just who R. B. Maitland was, or even if his name was “Maitland.” Several online sources have indexed the name as “Maltland,” which is a real, though more obscure name. There doesn’t seem to be a Professor Maltland in the Bay Area at the end of the nineteenth century either. He doesn’t show up in the University of California Register for 1894 through 1897. There is a reference in the 1896–1897 volume, but it to Maitland, Nova Scotia.

Perhaps the Los Angeles Herald expected its reader to instantly grasp who Prof. R. B. Maitland (or Maltland) was, but to use the reference has dropped below the obscure all the way to the opaque. If I had to make a bet, I’d say they garbled the name, but my skills at name de-garbling haven’t been of any help here. Or maybe the person identified himself as “Prof. R. B. Maitland” with no further checking from the Herald. The item appeared in a column “Talks with Travelers,” which was presumably a reporter talking with recent arrivals to Los Angeles.

This item is one of the rare references to Esperanto in the nineteenth century. As the years progressed, there would be articles on Esperanto made with the assumption that the reader had never heard of it, and that it was something new. On February 6, 1896, Esperanto still was very new.

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Mondays, Mrs. Roe Teaches Esperanto

Ŝi volas paroli esperante kun vi

Esperanto seems to have been at the center of the social world of Omaha, Nebraska in the period before World War I. In 1909, according to the Adresaro published by the Esperanto Association of North America, the Omaha Esperanto Club had forty-two members, with an additional twenty-two in the evening class (what this distinction indicated, it’s not quite clear). Oddly enough, Omaha had fifteen additional members of the EANA who were not members of the Omaha Nebraska Club.[1] Given this, it’s no surprise that the Omaha Daily Bee covered the local Esperantists so thoroughly.

I’ve already written about two of these Omaha early Esperantists, Charles J. Roberts (EANA membership number 923) and Mrs. W. B. (Alice) Howard (1346). Alice Howard’s mother, Mrs. E. A. (Abigail) Russell (1713) was a member of the First Nebraska Esperanto Club, of Ord, Nebraska (her number seems to indicate that she joined the EANA some time after her daughter did). According to Wikipedia, about this time Omaha had a population of 124,000 people. Not bad to have sixty-four people speaking or studying Esperanto.[2]

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A New Day for Day One

Day One
I use it daily

I have been keeping a journal (with no great regularity) since March 14, 1978. I only wish I had been more diligent about it. There are vast stretches of time for which I have no journal entries. The first few are in composition notebooks (I’ve lost one of those, unfortunately), followed by a collection of notebooks of varying sort, not all of which are filled in to the last page. It’s more-or-less a portrait (sketchy at times) of my life over the last thirty-eight years.

The Holy Grail of journaling for me has been to write in my journal every day, something I have never done. I’ve already missed a day this year, and we’re only thirty-five days in. But missing a day is nothing considering that I look at my journals and find that six months elapse at times between entries. It became clear to me long ago that scribbling in a paper notebook would never get me to my goal of writing in my journal daily (or at least nearly daily).

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The Mysterious A. E. Handley

There might not have
been any takers.

What you can accomplish through research can only go so far and every once in a while, instead of tracking down an early Esperanto speaker, I come up with nothing. Such is the case, unfortunately in the case of A. E. Handley, who lived in Ocala, Florida in 1908.

In 1908, starting on January 28, (Mr.? Mrs.? Ms.?) Handley ran a series of advertisements in the Ocala Evening Star, offering his services in the teaching of French, elementary German and Spanish, and Esperanto. The advertisement ran in the 17 subsequent non-Sunday issues of the paper, from January 28 to February 24, exclusive of the 2nd, 9th, 16th, and 23rd, additionally missing the 19th (a Wednesday). That last one was probably the fault of the newspaper, since the advertisement appears on both pages 5 and 6 of the February 18, 1908 newspaper.

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Playground — Not Feeling the Love

You gotta work for my love.

If I had gone planning to write a review, I probably would have done the hipster foodie thing and shot pictures of my plates; we had plenty of lighting for it. I was there for my anniversary and didn’t feel like spending the meal shooting pictures of my food. I did shoot a picture of my menu, and I’ll get to that.

Playground is #66 in Jonathan Gold’s recent list of the 101 best restaurants in the L.A. region, and in all honesty, I can think of three restaurants in Orange County that are better than Playground that didn’t make Gold’s list (these are places that I prefer to Marché Moderne, #50 on his list). But since Jason Quinn, the head chef at Playground, has a mission statement (or something like that) that said “people only judge what we put on the plate,” I’m starting with the table.

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