Thanks Greg for info....that certainly answered a lot about both White families....as for the canoe that E.B. got at 11 (or 12) and other aspects of canoeing related to E.B. White here's some of what I posted in the original blog entry,
http://reflectionsoutdoors.wordpres...noe-and-the-outdoors-in-his-life-and-writing/, (in case any here haven't read it yet):
In E.B. White’s Drafts of “Once More to the Lake” (page two) by Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide,
http://grammar.about.com/od/writersonwriting/a/ebwlakedrafts_2.htm, comes this:
Postscript (1981)
According to Scott Elledge in E.B. White: A Biography, on July 11, 1981, to celebrate his eighty-first birthday, White lashed a canoe to the top of his car and drove to “the same Belgrade lake where, seventy years before, he had received a green old town canoe from his father, a gift for his eleventh birthday.”
From
http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-charlottes-web/abouttheauthor.html:
Born Elwyn Brooks White on July 11, 1899, to Jesse Hart White and Samuel T. White, E. B. White grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb of New York City. The youngest child in a large family, born at the beginning of his father’s greatest prosperity, White enjoyed a childhood of unusual privilege for those days. He had the first bicycle in the neighborhood, and at age twelve, his father presented him with a canoe.
In the NY Times obituary,
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0711.html, On This Day, October 2, 1985, E.B. White, Essayist and Stylist, Dies by Herbert Mitgang comes the following:
….after he had begun to slow down, he typed, with his usual good humor, a long letter to a friend: ”I have a first degree heart block, have lost the sight in my right eye because of a degenerated retina, can’t wind my wrist watch because my fingers have knuckled under to arthritis, can’t tie my shoelaces, am dependent on seven different pills to stay alive, can’t remember whether I took the pills or didn’t.”
”On the other hand, I am camped alone, here at Bert Mosher’s Camps on the shore of Great Pond which I first visited in 1904; I have my 15-foot green Old Town canoe with me, which I brought over on the top of my car; I sat out a New England boiled dinner this noon by anticipating it with martinis and cheese-and-crackers before walking up to the farmhouse, and after dinner (or lack of same) went fishing for bass in my canoe.
Unfortunately it appears that the canoe may have also led to E. B. White’s demise as stated in the recollections of Roger Angell of the personal history of his stepfather in Andy: For E. B. White’s readers and family, a sense of trust came easily, as published in The New Yorker, Febuary 14, 2005,
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact?currentPage=all:
….one evening in August, 1984, when he came for dinner he complained that he’d knocked his head the day before while unloading a canoe from the roof rack of his car, over at Walker Pond; now he was having trouble knowing exactly where he was or what was happening around him. Carol and I smiled at him. “Yes, that happens sometimes, doesn’t it?” we assured him.
But he knew better. A couple of months later, after we’d left, he took to his bed and never again knew exactly where he was. It looked like a rapid onset of Alzheimer’s, but more likely, the doctors thought, was a senile dementia brought on by the blow to his head that day. He was eighty-five now. Nurses and practical nurses and other local ladies were hired, round the clock, who took extraordinary care of him. My brother managed it all, and somehow managed his own life as well. When I came up for a visit, early in the winter, Joe said that Andy would know me but that our conversation would be interesting. “How do you mean?” I said. “You’ll see,” he said.
I walked in and found him restless in his bed and amazingly frail. His eyes lit up and he said my name in the old way: “Rog!” He wanted to know how I’d come from New York and I said that Henry Allen had picked me up at the Bangor airport. “Did you fly over Seattle on the way?” he asked. He didn’t seem troubled when I said no, and after a moment murmured, “Lost in the clouds.”
He died the next October, still at home and able to recognize the people around him. Joe told me that in that long year he’d read aloud to his father often, and discovered that he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn’t always clear about who the author was. Sometimes he’d raise a hand and impatiently wave a passage away: not good enough. Other evenings, he’d listen to the end, almost at rest, and then ask again who’d written these words.
“You did, Dad,” Joe said.
There was a pause, and Andy said, “Well, not bad.”
(Note: E. B. picked up the nickname “Andy” at Cornell, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student surnamed White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White.)
Let me end with a quote by E. B. White that I love….from the review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06365/749712-148.stm, Sunday, December 31, 2006, ‘Letters OF E.B. White: Revised Edition’, Letters collection affirms wit, charm of E.B. White, by James A. Butler comes this priceless observation:
On age:
“For an old man, a canoe is ideal; he need only sit and move his arms.”
As somebody who sometimes feels his age (even if I don’t always act it LOL LOL), I like the idea that the canoe is ideal for even just an older man….and that all it requires is for him to sit and move his arms….even I can do that much LOL LOL. But then E. B. White was still picking up his canoe on his own late in life, so I guess I don’t have many excuses for not portaging LOL LOL.
Obviously, the question regarding any possible family connection between E.B. and E.M. has been resolved....there was little or no family connection, certainly no direct connection....about all that both likely had was the state of Maine....however I'm still interested in those initials on Kathryn's canoe....and think how cool it might be if it was.....?????