Volume 6, Number 4 - Summer 1977
The Editor Speaks
Cinita Brown, editor, found herself a busy mother preparing to send a son away to college. You know that one like his mother is a child of the WRVHS. He began coming with his mother to the meetings of the society when just a child. He listened to the talks, then later you would see him standing with the group surrounding the speaker, and you know he was catching phrases and putting them away for future thought and reference. So really, we too, will find a catch in our throat as we say, "good wishes, good luck, and clear sailing young man".
We old timers who have watched Cinita come into womanhood and motherhood got together this issue of the Quarterly. We did it with love, leaving Cinita free to send a boy away to college to return a man. God Bless you.
We find that usually with each good deed, there is a preconceived wish, sometimes a selfish one, too. And so we must confess that we had something we wanted to do and wanted it done in August when we must prepare the copy…For a long time we have wanted to honor Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey on the Hundredth Anniversary of her birth, August 16, 1877. So what an opportunity for us. So we are giving to you the poems of Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey as a birthday gift from her. Hear what John G. Neihardt says in the Foreword:
My interest in these lyrics is less concerned with the great art of Literature than with what I believe to be far more important in the last analysis--the personality of the human being who wrote them. The sympathetic reader cannot fail to note how often, here and there throughout the collection, something like a warm, soft light breaks through, lives briefly in phrase or line, and then is lost awhile in undistinguished words as commonplace as common living mostly is. As the friends of Mrs. Mahnkey know, the light thus briefly but often revealed is that of a rare human spirit, and the warmth grows out of the womanly heart of one who is truly a good neighbor to her fellows and to everything that lives.
John G. Neihardt
JRM
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