The Blaisdell Blog

  I once taught with a great woman who was Irish to the core.   She had asked me when I was going to put up my St. Patrick’s Day decorations and, was appalled when I asked her when St. Patrick’s Day was.   I knew it was coming up in March, but could never remember the date.   Everyone agreed that not being Irish didn’t make up for my blatant ignorance.               This brings to mind a much larger question.   Why does the whole country celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17, as it turns out) but nobody celebrates St. Olaf’s Day (July 29)?   I am mostly Norwegian (though on St. Patrick’s Day I am allowed to be Irish through the use of large amounts of green and/or beer).   I know a little about St. Patrick, and a great deal more about St. Olaf and I can think of no reason for the lack of celebration for one and too much celebration for another except, maybe, good press.             Olafr Haroldsson (995-1030) was also known as Olaf the Fat, though now days he is called Olaf the H

  March is Women’s History Month.   It coincides with International Women’s Day, which is celebrated March 8.   I was reminded of this when I was searching for a bread recipe.   I keep my cookbooks in a hall closet, along with two shelves of vintage books—one’s I have read and choose to keep for one reason or another.   Reaching for a cookbook I happened to see my biography of Baby Doe Tabor—the Silver Queen.             Baby Doe was not a paragon of womanly virtue.   In fact, she was a woman with a past, a questionable present and a fallen-from-grace future.   But she had true grit.   Tenacious, focused to the point of obsession and a die hard are the words that best describe this second, flamboyant wife of a Colorado silver mine baron.   Her life was marked by deprivation, soaring success, a precipitous fall and, finally, not just a return to deprivation, but a return to hopeless, lonely deprivation.             Elizabeth McCourt Tabor was born in 1854 the fourth of eleven child