R. Frank Lockridge, Parisien and The Bakers
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A Junior Year Abroad: R. Frank Lockridge, Parisien, 1933-1934 "With the help of a scholarship from the Institute of International Education, Ross's Junior Year, 1933-34, was spent in France as a member of the Delaware Foreign Study Group. During his first year in France, he received a new name, discovering on his first night in Paris that his first name is used in France as a term of vulgar abuse. Thus he was "Frank," pronounced a la fran ç aise , during his year in France. "Frank" attended the Sorbonne, travelled in France, Switzerland, Italy, and England, lived in a French family in the Latin Quarter, just off the Boule Miche, and acquired his first real acquaintance with modern intellectual, artistic, and literary trends. He received a diploma in Courses in French Civilization, taking first honors among the foreign scholarship students at the Sorbonne. The awakenings and wonders of this year are too numerous to record here. He traveled by bicycle over much of France, which became a second country of his soul. An amusing incident: On a bicycle tour of Southern France the Lockridge competitive spirit was put to a severe test. He raced a mysterious cyclist for thirty miles into the City of Marseilles, where/in a state of collapse he discovered that his opponent was a recent champion of the Grand tour de France."
--Quotation taken from: Some Biographical Facts About the Author of RAINTREE COUNTY, written in the third person by Ross Lockridge, Jr. {Case 10 & 11]
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The Bakers
--"The Diary of Hugh Baker" (father of VBL), 1874-1946
The "Index" reads, in order, Ancestry (p. 5), Births (p. 240), Marriages (p. 250), Deaths (p. 260), Life in Detail (p. 13), Preface (p. 3), Weather, Extraordinary (p. 274), Obituary, 266. "Ancestry" gives the best available genealogical history of the Baker family, concluding with a claim to a notable ancestor. "The blood of my ancestry was a mixture of the Dutch, Irish, and English, but all American born."
Hugh Baker was a farmer, then mailman, then bookkeeper, who lost his job during the Depression. His diary is a record of life in a lower-middle-class family, formerly working farmers, in Bloomington. The single most memorable event of the era, to judge by the emphasis he gave it, was Haley's comet in 1911.
Other Items shown in Case 18:
--The Thrasher sisters; Lillie Thrasher (mother of VBL) is in the back row on the right.
--Hugh Baker, age 50
--Hugh and Lillie Baker with children, circa 1908 (Vernice, not yet born)
--Vernice Baker, age 14
--Photo of Vernice Baker taken to Paris by RLJ, 1933
--Vernice Baker the day before her wedding, July 10, 1937
--"My Memory Book", filled by Vernice BakerTo: painting by John V. Morris for dust jacket of Raintree County and remnant of the original manuscript, page 1 To: Raintree County Background Texts & RLJ's Original Art Work for the Novel, page 2
Copyright © the Estate of Ross F. Lockridge, Jr., 2014, All rights reserved