Betty MacDonald, a very witty niece and very trusted loyalist

Hello 'Pussy' it's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Pippi Longstocking:

You are expected to name Anthony Scaramucci, a major Republican donor and investor, as his new communications director, a senior administration official said on Thursday.

Mr. Scaramucci is one of your most trusted loyalists and a key defender of you on television. He is expected to replace Mike Dubke, who resigned in May after a brief and tumultuous tenure as the communications director for a president who sees himself as his own best spokesman.

 
  
Should I remain in bed, leave my country or fight against the dragon?

( see also the story by Wolfgang Hampel, 
' Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say ' )

 

Betty MacDonald fan club fans,

you can join Betty MacDonald fan club on Facebook.

I adore Alison Sydney Beck. 

Alison Sydney Beck was so witty when she shared her golden memories with Betty MacDonald fan club founder and Vita Magica organizer Wolfgang Hampel. 

Betty MacDonald fan club member - author Peter Sieruta was delighted too.

Peter D. Sieruta, author of Heartbeats and other stories:

I heard Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald Fan Club audio interview with Alison Beck who came and stayed with her aunt Mary Bard as she wrote Best friends at school. Mary’s own daughters were grown by that point, and she needed a real live girl to serve as a “consultant” when writing about young Suzie and CoCo. Alison Beck recalled that magical summer of 1960 and how the sunlight filled her aunt’s window-lined office during the day as they worked together; in the evening they gathered around the television to watch JFK accept the Democratic nomination for president. Alison Beck remembered how grown-up she felt that summer, helping to create book and discussing politics and current events with a special aunt.

Thank you so much in advance for your support and interest.

Alison Bard Burnett's daughter and Betty MacDonald's niece Alison Sydney Beck passed away at the age of only 65 three years ago.



Alison Beck is the sister of Betty MacDonald fan club honor member Darsie Beck. 

Many Betty MacDonald fan club fans from all over the world know very witty and intelligent Alison Beck because she shared her fascinating memories and thoughts on Alison Bard Burnett CD/DVD. 

We can't wait to see the new Alison Bard Burnett CD/DVD.

New  Betty MacDonald documentary will be very interesting with many new interviews.

Alison Beck,  Darsie Beck, Alison Bard Burnett and other Betty MacDonald fan club honor members will be included in Wolfgang Hampel's  Vita Magica.  

Alison Beck Obituary

Alison Beck, 65, passed away on July 19, 2014 of natural causes at her home in Tucson, Arizona. She is survived by her son Oliver Saul of Tucson, Arizona, brothers Darsie Beck and Bard Beck of Vashon Island, and her nieces, nephews and second cousins. 

Alison was born in Seattle July 26, 1948 to Alison Bard  and Bernard Beck. She grew up on Vashon Island and Mercer Island. Graduating from Helen Bush School in 1966, she attended Mackinac College, and obtained a BA in English from the University of Washington in 1992 where she worked as Editor of the Newsletter for Institute on Aging. After several years in Todos Santos, Baja, Mexico, Alison bought a home in Tucson in 2004. She worked at St. Ambrose School and Temple Emanuel, and volunteered at the Tucson Botanical Gardens.
Her passions and delights were: her writing as published in Sun Magazine, brightly colored quilt making, remodeling her home and garden, her son, family and friends, and her devoted dogs.
Those who knew Alison remember her ability to see the humor in things and her memorable laughter. Inquisitive, she enjoyed having long conversations. Her artistic talents were expressed in her writing, quilt making, creating a home filled with color, and cooking and hosting for others. 

We are going to publish some new Betty MacDonald fan club interviews  by Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel.


Anita and Eartha Kitt II are working on their new Betty MacDonald fan club project: Betty MacDonald's life on Vashon Island.

Our two very popular and beloved ladies are going to visit Vashon Island and other places where Betty MacDonald lived.

Therefore this will be a very interesting documentary.

We adore very beautiful Vashon Island although we've never been there.

Our favourite place for a future Betty MacDonald fan club event would be Seattle and Vashon Island.

Greetings,

Greta & Tina

you can join 

Betty MacDonald fan club

Betty MacDonald Society  

Vita Magica  

Eurovision Song Contest Fan Club 

on Facebook

Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen

Vita Magica 

Betty MacDonald 

Betty MacDonald fan club 

Betty MacDonald fan club on Facebook

Betty MacDonald forum  

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I 

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( Polski)   

Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( German )

Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )

Wolfgang Hampel -  cyclopaedia.net ( German ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia  ( English / German )

Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )

Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )

Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )

Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French ) 

Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)

Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University 

Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel 

Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD

Betty MacDonald fan club items 

Betty MacDonald fan club items  - comments

Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I  

Betty MacDonald fan club groups 

Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund  

Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Greta Larson

Trump May Turn to TV Defender for White House Communications Post

By MAGGIE HABERMAN

 JULY 20, 2017

 

Anthony Scaramucci speaking to the news media at Trump Tower in New York in November. Credit Drew Angerer/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — President Trump is expected to name Anthony Scaramucci, a major Republican donor and investor, as his new communications director, a senior administration official said on Thursday.

Mr. Scaramucci is one of the president’s most trusted loyalists and a key defender of Mr. Trump on television. He is expected to replace Mike Dubke, who resigned in May after a brief and tumultuous tenure as the communications director for a president who sees himself as his own best spokesman.

Mr. Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump met with Mr. Scaramucci for more than 30 minutes on Thursday in a small dining room off the Oval Office, the official said.

Mr. Scaramucci could not be reached for comment. His expected appointment was reported by the website Axios.

Mr. Scaramucci is close to Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. He is also respected by Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who is a senior adviser to the president. And Mr. Scaramucci has a direct line to the president, whom he has known for years.

Even so, his appointment would be unusual, given his lack of a traditional communications portfolio. But he has been seen as an avid and effective defender of the president on television as the number of Mr. Trump’s open backers has dwindled.

Mr. Scaramucci was recently the subject of a retracted story by CNN that dealt with investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He accepted an apology from the network, but Mr. Trump’s supporters were gratified by Mr. Scaramucci’s approach to getting the story removed.

It is unclear if Mr. Scaramucci’s appointment will be blocked by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. Officials have said Mr. Priebus helped jettison an earlier plan to put Mr. Scaramucci in the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Mr. Priebus was not aware of the expected appointment before it was made public, according to the senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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Trump and Putin Held a Second, Undisclosed, Private Conversation

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS 

JULY 18, 2017

 

President Trump with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the G-20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, this month. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Hours into a dinner with world leaders who had gathered for the Group of 20 summit meeting, President Trump left his chair at the sprawling banquet table and headed to where President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was seated.

The two presidents had met earlier in the day for the first time and, as the White House put it, had developed a rapport even as they talked about Russia’s interference in the United States’ 2016 elections.

The July 7 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, was the single most scrutinized of the Trump presidency. But it turned out there was another encounter: a one-on-one discussion over dinner that lasted as long as an hour and relied solely on a Kremlin-provided interpreter.

No presidential relationship has been more dissected than the one between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, a dynamic only heightened by the swirl of investigations into whether Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election in his favor. Nevertheless, the meeting was confirmed by the White House only on Tuesday, after reports surfaced that some of the guests had been surprised that it occurred.

The dinner discussion caught the attention of other leaders around the table, some of whom later remarked privately on the odd spectacle of an American president seeming to single out the Russian leader for special attention at a summit meeting that included some of the United States’ staunchest, oldest allies.

A White House official said there was nothing unusual about it. And in two tweets late Tuesday, Mr. Trump derided news reports about it as “sick.” He said the dinner was not a secret, since all of the world leaders at the summit meeting and their spouses had been invited by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. “Press knew!” he tweeted.

“Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!” Mr. Trump added.

Graphic

What We Know About Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting

President Trump’s eldest son was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to the meeting.

OPEN Graphic

While the leaders-and-spouses dinner was on Mr. Trump’s public schedule, the news media was not allowed to witness any part of it, nor were reporters provided with an account of what transpired. Mr. Trump’s traveling press contingent did note, however, that his motorcade left the dinner four minutes after Mr. Putin’s did.

The dinner at which the private conversation took place stretched for more than three hours after a concert for the leaders and their spouses at the Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River.

In the earlier, formal meeting, Mr. Trump said later, he asked the Russian president twice about his role in the American vote. Mr. Putin denied involvement, and the two men agreed to move beyond the dispute in the interest of finding common ground on other matters, including a limited cease-fire in Syria.

There is no official United States government record of the intimate dinner conversation, because no American official other than the president was involved.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he had heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

The encounter occurred more than midway through the lengthy dinner, when Mr. Trump left his chair and approached Mr. Putin, who had been seated next to the first lady, Melania Trump. It was described to Mr. Bremmer by other guests as lasting roughly an hour and not initially disputed by a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, disputed that account. He said Mr. Trump had described the exchange with Mr. Putin as purely social, and as lasting far less than an hour. “It was pleasantries and small talk,” Mr. Spicer said. In a separate statement, the White House said the two presidents had spoken through the Kremlin’s interpreter because the American translator with Mr. Trump did not speak Russian.

Experts in United States-Russia relations said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — was a concern because of its length, which suggested a substantive exchange, and because there was no note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.

“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes in Russia and nuclear arms control.

“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The Trump administration is struggling to improve its relationship with Russia while under pressure from multiple investigations into possible ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Moscow. Those inquiries have cast a shadow over what would normally be seen as an attempt at diplomacy between world leaders.

The evening after his two meetings with Mr. Putin — the first lasting 135 minutes and the second an hour — Mr. Trump returned to Washington. On the Air Force One flight back, his top advisers helped draft a statement about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

“We have the worst relationship as a country right now with Russia that we have in decades, and yet we have these two leaders that, for reasons that do not make sense and have not been explained to anyone’s satisfaction, are hellbent on adoring each other,” Mr. Bremmer said. “You can take everything that’s been given to us, and it doesn’t add up.”

On Tuesday, the Kremlin intensified its demands that the Trump administration return two compounds in the United States that the Obama administration seized from Russia last fall in retaliation for the election meddling. After meeting with Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the under secretary of state for political affairs, Sergei A. Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said he had warned the Americans that there must be an “unconditional return” of the property or Moscow would retaliate.

The State Department said no such agreement was in store.

“These deals, so to speak, are going to take some time,” Heather Nauert, the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters on Tuesday. “Nothing is coming together anytime soon.”

Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday night that he planned to nominate Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former envoy to China and Singapore, as his ambassador to Russia. Mr. Huntsman’s nomination has been expected for months, but the investigations into Mr. Trump’s campaign and whether it colluded with Russia are likely to figure prominently in his confirmation hearing.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and Putin Had Second, Undisclosed, Private Conversation. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Finding Island Time: Vashon from Seattle

Take an illustrated day trip through Washington state’s largest city with artist Candace Rose Rardon.

by Candace Rose Rardon 

I will always remember the first time I heard about Vashon Island — one of several islands located just off the coast of Seattle — because of how vastly different Vashon sounded from where I was then in the world: India.
My good friend Erin, who grew up making regular pilgrimages to Vashon to see her grandmother and other family members who lived there, was visiting me in the bustling Indian capital of New Delhi. As we sat in a café, the outside world of crowded streets and chaotic traffic whirled as madly as a spinning top; inside the café, the island Erin described seemed like another world entirely.
She spoke of ferry rides and quiet harbours, digging for clams at low tide and filling bowls with fresh blackberries from the wild and rambling bushes that cover Vashon — it sounded like a place where the top stops spinning and you can hear yourself think.
I knew then — even from 11,265km (7,000 mi) away in India — that Vashon would be a place that I loved.

I knew that I would love Vashon even before I got here.

Taking the ferry to Vashon Island.

Picking blackberries right from the vine.

Since that fateful conversation in Delhi, I’ve had the chance to make several pilgrimages of my own to Vashon — with and without Erin; in the gray, rainy heart of winter and in the sun-soaked glory of summer. Sometimes just for a couple of nights, other times for as long as a month — but no matter the different circumstances and lengths of each visit, I’m reminded every time of the gifts that Vashon has to give.
The island’s first gift is that of its proximity to downtown Seattle, making it an ideal day trip for anyone passing through Washington state’s largest city.
One moment can find you wandering the lively stalls of Pike Place Market, while another moment, you can catch a local C-Line bus to the Fauntleroy ferry terminal in West Seattle, where a 15-minute ferry ride brings you across the Puget Sound to the northern tip of Vashon. From door to door (or shore to shore, you might say) the journey is but an hour.
There are more than a dozen islands in the Puget Sound — not including the well-known San Juan Islands located a few hours north of Seattle — and some of these islands have bridges connecting them to the mainland. But the only road to Vashon is the ferry’s path across the sound. Being technically comprised of two islands (Vashon and Maury Islands), the only bridge you’ll find on Vashon is a man-made isthmus connecting it to Maury Island.
This is something the island’s residents feel strongly about. When a bridge to the mainland was proposed in 1992, more than a fifth of Vashon’s population at the time (around 2,000 people) appeared in protest at a public hearing. A bridge, they felt, would surely bring development, and take away from their island’s natural beauty and rural calm.

The road to Tramp Harbor.

Be sure to get your coffee fix here.

Because that is Vashon’s second gift — its extraordinary nature, and the chance to explore such sylvan landscapes so close to a bigger city like Seattle.
Even still, Vashon has much to offer those who travel for culture and food. Its quaint downtown is lined with art galleries and restaurants — from the Hardware Store (home to the best burger in the Pacific Northwest, I might argue), to a Thai restaurant and cozy tea shop. And just down the road, another stretch of shops holds the Vashon Island Coffee Roasterie, an organic health food store and the Seattle Distilling Company.
But for me, the delicious meals and moments of art or culture I have on the island are always framed by the greater number of hours I spend outdoors. It’s there where I immerse myself in Vashon’s unique blend of expansive skies and acres of fir trees, harbours and beaches, and the frequent vistas that open up of nearby, snow-capped Mount Rainier.
If you’re able to rent a car, head south to Point Robinson to visit a 10-acre park, historic lighthouse and hiking trails; or head west to a small peninsula called Jensen Point, where it’s possible to rent kayaks or stand-up paddleboards, and glide along the placid surface of Quartermaster Harbor. There, besides a few sailboats or passing crew teams, your main companions will be eagles, herons and harbour seals, who seem to delight in popping their heads above the surface when you’re least expecting it.
Glimpsing the island from the seat of a kayak is always my favourite way to see Vashon, most especially when I get the timing right and start heading for shore just as the sinking sun sets the sky ablaze with colour.

Out on a kayak in Quatermaster Harbor.

Taking in the shoreline on a sunny day.

Those moments of being wholly surrounded by a glowing pink sky — a sky more vivid in colour than my humble paintbrush could ever hope to capture — will forever stay with me, because they speak to Vashon’s third gift: the very feeling of peace that first resonated with me on the other side of the world.

Pink skies and peaceful nights.

There are places we travel to in order to do things — visit museums, retrace the steps of history, linger in the shadow of famous landmarks. I’ve come to learn through my visits to Vashon, there are places that simply invite you to be. To slow down, set your watch to “island time” and join the quiet rhythms that govern its days. To let your mind relax and reflect as your world becomes just sea, sky and tree-lined shores.
If your journeys lead you through Seattle soon, I hope you’ll cross the Puget Sound and experience Vashon, even for a day. But let me warn you… it’s the kind of place that once you step foot on it, the island soon draws you back for more.

Sometimes it's good to look back.

Getting There

Start the National Parks of the Northwest US tour with a day trip to Vashon Island. We’re thrilled at the prospect of showing you this big blue planet of ours — check out our small group trips here.