Hans, maybe your "unquestionably" is written with glossa firmly in bucca. But of course all we know is that whoever wrote that "Quote Investigator" piece about it was unaware of any mention of that rhyme prior to 1939. This is not the same as knowing there isn't one. (E.g., in 1772 Euler proved the primality of the largest prime known by then: 2,147,483,647. (In 1951, before computers were used for this task, the largest known prime was 20,988,936,657,440,586,486,151,264,256,610,222,593,863,921: 44 decimal digits. (By April 2016, the largest known prime has 22,338,618 decimal digits.) And of course your discovery of when Mrs. Pinchot died brings more doubt about the reliability of Quote Investigator. —Dan
On Apr 1, 2016, at 2:49 PM, Hans Havermann <gladhobo@teksavvy.com> wrote:
The poem can unquestionably be credited to Claire MacMurray who penned it for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in November 1939. No earlier appearance is known and until such is found, there it rests. But wait (I hear you think), she attributed it to a Mrs. Amos Pinchot. Quote Investigator states that "a cite in 1942 claimed that she [Gertrude (Minturn) Pinchot] denied the attribution" and that (therefore, presumably) "no decisive candidate for authorship has yet emerged". Ouch! Gertrude died in May 1939. It would have been difficult for her to deny the November 1939 attribution.
On Apr 1, 2016, at 4:28 PM, Dan Asimov <asimov@msri.org> wrote:
Yes, Jim, I read that and many more equally inconclusive web pages.
On Apr 1, 2016, at 1:25 PM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote: