Amelia Walker as Pearl S. Buck

Amelia Walker as Pearl Buck

Cindy Walker or Beckeley, WV, mother of Amelia Walker sent us a picture of her 3rd grade daughter dressed as Pearl S. Buck for a presentation about the author's life. The family had visited the Birthplace some weeks before. Her mother writes that Amelia also

received a certificate for reading 75 books this school year...and the results from a STAR reading test at school that indicate "she reads at a level equal to that of a typical twelfth grader" based on a national average of students in her grade. We are very proud of her.

We're interested in hearing about schools that study Pearl S. Buck, or students that do reports on her or related topics, so send us your pictures or stories.

Jim Minnick Reading June 26, Buy Blueberry Years Now

On Tuesday, June 26, 6:00 p.m. Jim Minnick will be at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace for a dual purpose event, sharing tips on raising wild blueberries and reading from his award-winning, 2010 book, just released on paperback, The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family.  A variety of delicious, homemade blueberry treats will also be available!

It was the winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance's Best Nonfiction Book for 2010, and took second place in the Southern Environmental Law Center's Annual Book Contest.

The Blueberry Years captures the story of Minick’s experience creating and operating one of the mid-Atlantic’s first certified-organic, pick-your-own blueberry farms. For a decade, the author and his wife planted, pruned, and picked while also opening the field to hundreds of people who came to harvest berries. These pickers shared blueberry-flavored moonshine and sober religion, warm hugs and cool hats, and always bushels of stories.

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace has joined the Amazon Associates Program.  Click on any of the links in this post to purchase the book through Amazon, and a portion of the sales will benefit the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace through this program.  Whenever you begin your Amazon shopping from a link on a site of the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace a percentage of the proceeds of anything you purchase will benefit our work. You can begin your search in the box below.

A Google Doodle Honoring the 120th Anniversary of Pearl Buck's Birth?

Today Google debuted another Doodle.  Some users of the world's most popular search engine logged on today and saw San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge instead of the usual Google logo.  In a post on their Google+ feed the company explained that the doodle celebrates it's 75th Anniversary.  Google frequently marks significant events and anniversaries with doodles, such as the birthday of some significant figure or the anniversary of an important event in human history.

The birthday of composer Igor Stravinsky and filmmaker Federico Fellini have been celebrated on anniversaries of their birth, as have the anniversaries of the flight of the first man in space.  They can be limited to specific regions, countries, and groups of countries or they can be run worldwide.

Sometimes the doodle are animated or interactive.  Click here and hit play and you can listen to my composition recorded on the synthesizer that took the place of the logo on May 23, the 78th birthday of Robert Moog, creator of the Moog Synthesizer.  Turn your volume down. It's bad! 

June 26th is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Pearl S. Buck.  Surely she is as worthy of a Google Doodle as most of the figures the company has already honored! 

Subtle and Not So Subtle Changes

Sometimes when I close the office at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace something catches my eye and instead of leaving right away I linger, my attention captured by something that is going on on the grounds.  Our groundhog guests have moved from under the porch of the Stulting House to under the Carpenter Shack.  That's good because they're no longer undermining the porch of a National Historic Structure, not so good because it's awfully close to the garden!  But they're as cute as ever, darn those things! 

This would be the Good Earth Garden

After locking up I walked around outside to see if things were growing in the garden yet, and if they had done any damage.  Whenever I seem them out of their borrow they are nibbling on wild flowers, in other words, the weeds in the yard.  But that may well be because that is all that is available so far this year.  Once that garden is producing delicious vegetables, it may be too much to pass up.

What strikes me almost every day I walk around the property is that things change really fast this time of year, almost day to day, hour by hour!  It was only a few weeks ago that I used the arch in the top image to the right to frame an image of the Stulting House for what I thought was an interesting angle on side view of the house.  Now the leaves are so thick on the grape vine they practically block the house from view.

First Signs of Leafy Vegetables Planted by HE students

At that time the plot where we plant The Good Earth Garden had been so overtaken by grass, you could hardly tell there had ever been a garden.  Then one day I walked behind the house and it was plowed.  Shortly thereafter people began planting.  Even the seeds planted by the Hillsboro Elementary Schools Students during our opening week are popping up above ground!

Perhaps more strangely, one of the trees in the orchard by that parking lot to the back of the Stulting House is bearing fruit!  It's not an apple or pear tree, though.  I had thought all those trees were varieties of apple, excepting one pear tree. 

An Invitation to Stop By on a Sunday in June

In June you'll see the "Open" flag on Sundays, too.

On Sundays in June the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace will be open a half day on Sundays, opening at noon.  So if you're in the mood for a Sunday drive, why not make the birthplace your destination?

We frequently receive request for Sunday hours, so we are doing this on a trail basis to see how it goes.  We will offer tours at the regular times: 12:30 pm and 2:30 pm.  We try to offer tours anytime visitors show up during our open hours, but we have very limited staff on site and they are responsible for everything, so these regularly scheduled times are the only times that we can guarantee a guide will be available.  At any other time, you may have to wait a while.  

Don't forget the Birthplace is already open Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with tours at 10:30 am, 12:30 pm and 2:30 pm.  With local schools finishing early due to the mild winter, you may be looking for something to do when the weather isn't conducive to being outside.

I look froward to welcoming you!

Pearl S. Buck in Schools and Universities Today

Pearl grew up in this home in Zhenjiang China and then
was a teacher herself, at the university there. 
All rights reserved by meckleychina

Do you study the life of Pearl S. Buck at your school?  

In a recent New Yorker article "Why is Literary Fame So Unpredictable?," Tom Vanderbilt uses Pearl S. Buck as proof that literary prizes do little to ensure the enduring reputation of an author, and asserts that her work is hardly read anymore.  I don't know how Pearl Buck stacks up against her contemporaries in terms of how much she is read these days, but Vanderbilt seems to have forgotten that The Good Earth, the best-selling, highly acclaimed novel that was most responsible for getting Pearl Buck all those honors back in the 1930s, received a huge boost in sales when Oprah's Book Club featured it in 2004.  

Pearl Buck: The Mike Wallace Interview

Though she didn't pass away until 1973, well into the era of television, it's surprisingly difficult to find recordings of interviews with Pearl S. Buck.  This February 8, 1958 interview with Mike Wallace is one of the best known and most enlightening.  It focuses largely on Pearl's view of gender relations and the role of men and women.  She is outspoken and her views are intriguing.  The site includes the video and a transcript.

Almost as intriguing are the shots of Wallace smoking and hawking Parliament cigarettes, as well as the content of the ads themselves, all of which are left in the video.

Symposium on Pearl S. Buck Part of 110 Anniversary Celebrations of Nanjing University

A symposium on Pearl S. Buck and her time in China was recently held as part of a series of events celebrating the 110th anniversary of Nanjing University. According to a short article on the symposium in China Daily, approximately 20 scholars and researchers from around the world attended the symposium, and the prevailing view was that,

Pearl S. Buck was a remarkable cultural envoy who played a pioneering role in demystifying China in the American mind in the early 20th century...

Pocahontas Times Article on Good Earth Garden

The Pocahontas Times has published an article on the Farm to Schools program in Pocahontas County that mentions the garden planted by the 3 through 5th grade students of Hillsboro Elementary School in the Good Earth Garden of Pearl S. Buck Birthplace.  It also includes photos of the the students' visit to the garden on Thursday, May 3.

Click the link to read, "Farm to School teaching students about gardening, healthy foods."

(Photo by: Suzanne Stewart)  Farm to School AmeriCorps volunteer Adrienne Cedarleaf, talks to students from Hillsboro Elementary School. 

"The Good Earth" on the Underground New York Public Library

Check out the latest in "The Good Earth" series on Underground New York Public Library.  This site is just a collection of people reading literature on the subway.  The photo to the right is of a woman reading Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in a subway station.  It can be very interesting to see who is reading what in the photographs and how wrapped up in it they seem to be.

Teacher Appreciation Day

“to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." --Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women 

“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.” --Pearl S. Buck, Source?

Today is National Teacher Day, part of Nation Teacher Appreciation Week.  Do you have a teacher in your life that you admire?  Do you plan to show your appreciation.

Pearl Buck began her career as a teacher at Nanjing University in China, and as you can see from the quotations above, had clear ideas about the role of education in society.

Opening Week at the Birthplace

Students from the elementary school await instructions.

It's opening week at the birthplace.  We've not marked it with any fanfare, and you won't find any sales in the gift shop, but it's been busy.  Until today, that is.  It's now 11 am on a drizzly Saturday, and there have been no visitors today.  A few cars have pulled into the parking lot briefly, did what they wanted to do, then left, but that's a topic for another post.

Rainy days tend to be slow, but I'm not complaining.  It gives me time to tell you about Thursday and yesterday, our first of the season of the season.  They were not at all slow!