Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning

Bertha Armstrong, News Writer of Summitville

Mavis Gallant (MG) had just turned 22 when she began her career as a features writer with the Montreal Standard. In the fiction to come, she would time and again demonstrate a great sensitivity towards children and childhood, particularly towards children in the thrall of lost, feckless, hopeless, self-absorbed or simply incompetent adults. So, there’s something prognosticatory about how she launched her journalism career with “Meet Johnny,” a profile, with photos, of street-wise six year old Montrealer, a boy left to his own devices to figure the world out and find a way to bend it to his considerable will. It appeared in The Standard of September 2, 1944. “City streets,” she writes, “do not breed gentle children, and Johnny loves to fight.”

Bertha Armstrong was the second of nine surviving children born to May Armstrong and her husband, John, who farmed north of the community of Summitville, in Madison County, Indiana, in the late 19th / early 20th century. I’ve been reading and writing about the family in another substack. It’s free to subscribe, and I admit that it’s a self-indulgence. I’d be surprised if my voyeuristic fascination with this clan is generally shared. I can’t quite explain why I’ve spent this much time with them, except to say I was so intrigued and actually shocked by what I read about the Armstrongs that I wanted to find out more and work it out by setting some of it down.

I was surprised and delighted to find out that Bertha, second born and first to die, was a well-thought of journalist. She was only 22 when she succumbed, in 1907, to what was then called Bright’s Disease: a degenerative kidney condition, now more specifically described. Her entire career, which ended when she was the same age MG had attained when she began, couldn’t have been longer than 4 years, 5 at the outside. She was extraordinarily productive. Her obituary notices in the papers for which she was a stinger — papers in Muncie, in Elwood, in Alexandria, in Fairmount and in Summitville — spoke of a young woman who was industrious, fearless, and a darn good writer. In the chapter just published, I look at some of her work. I feel quite sure that MG would never have heard of her, but that, had she had the chance, she would have read Bertha with admiration and a sense of sisterhood. Reading Bertha — which requires digging through on-line archives, and hazarding guesses at which unsigned reports might be hers — I’m inhabited by the same feeling that settled on me while reading, reading about and writing about MG: that I wish the work were easier to lay hands on, and that more people knew about it. I’m going to put together a little collection of Bertha’s writing and publish it as a supplement to the substack. In the meantime, here’s something about some Johnny-like characters from Summitville, Indiana, published in The Elwood Call-Leader, November 22, 1904. This made me laugh out loud, I think it would have pleased MG, and I hope it does you, too. Thanks, cheers, Bill