Word: audubons
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...half of his 65 years, John James Audubon did not appear to be destined for anything in particular. The bastard son of a French sea captain and a Santo Domingo Creole, he grew up in France when Jean Jacques Rousseau's back-to-nature notions were the rage. Sent to America to seek his fortune (as overseer of his father's estate near Philadelphia), young Audubon looked and acted like an absentminded candidate for the horsy...
...remembered it (in his journal): "I had no vices but was thoughtless and pensive, fond of shooting, fishing and riding ... as active and agile as a buck." He married a girl named Lucy and opened' a general store in Henderson, Ky., which flopped from the first. Audubon had to go hunting to fill the cupboard...
Reality on Wires. Audubon noticed far more than the game birds. He got in the habit of shooting birds of every species and toting them home to paint before their colors faded. When he should have been behind the counter in his store, Audubon was wiring crumpled, feathered things in lifelike positions to copy them. The family finances deteriorated, until Lucy took up schoolteaching to support their two children...
Respectable Woman. To keep abreast of the woeful tide, Mrs. Gilmer is up at 7 a.m. With a stenographer and her companion-secretary, she zips through her daily grist with a sharp eye out for the "angle" that will cue a sermonette. Every afternoon her chauffeur drives her through Audubon Park and back to the swank Prytania Street apartment. Her stock wisecrack, when showing guests her fine Louis XIV bed: "I'll bet I'm the only respectable woman who ever slept...
Died. Dr. Frank Michler Chapman, 81, father of the U.S. bird-sanctuary system, for 34 years the American Museum of Natural History's curator of birds, builder of the world's finest collection (750,000 specimens); in Manhattan. The most influential ornithologist since the great John James Audubon, gentle, ec centric Dr. Chapman - who was a confirmed but surreptitious duck-shooter - -once paid bird-loving statesman Lord Grey his highest compliment: "A charming host . . . just like a bird...