Were he alive today, Emilie Loring’s father, George Melville Baker, would be on all of the entertainment and talk shows. Funny and eloquent, George could sing, act, and keep an audience in stitches with one-liners and jokes.
He was a Boston insider, connected with the movers and shakers of his day: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, theater players, opera stars, suffragist Julia Ward Howe, and Charles Sumner, the abolitionist. As a performer, author, and publisher, he felt the public’s pulse, sensed the average reader’s taste, and always stayed just one step in front of it.
George Baker had some important firsts. He was responsible for the first, American editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He published the first play about electronic dating (only it was telegraph then!); developed young readers with the first, successful children’s magazine; and created nineteenth-century serials that paved the way for standards like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins…
View original post 790 more words
Cape Cod is lighthouses, sand dunes, boardwalks, and sand fences. It’s shellfish—take your pick: lobster, clams, or scallops—plus cranberries, ice cream cones, and coaster bikes. When you grow up in Arizona, as I did, Cape Cod seems magical. I invoked it when I painted my home a salt-sea gray and again when I planted clambering, pink roses in my gardens. But Emilie Loring finally got me to visit. She lived in Barnstable when she was in her twenties, and I had to go see.
If there is a quintessentially “Emilie” quote, this is it, and it appeared first as the dedication to Lighted Windows. It’s a wonderful statement. “The beautiful things of life are as real as the ugly things of life.” My family has heard me repeat that so often that my daughter put it on a mug for my birthday. (Yes, that is a blueberry birthday cake in the background.) But even without the dedication, Lighted Windows
1929’s “most fashionable” yellow roadster 
“I’m perched on the lookout spying for goodwill ships and treasure islands, and priceless friends, and lovely summer seas with just enough squalls to make me appreciate fair weather.” Uncharted Seas
It’s that time of the year when gardeners’ fingers itch to get back into the dirt. Snuggled under afghans, cradling hot drinks in our hands, we turn the pages of our gardening catalogs and dream of the months to come.
Emilie Loring in her garden at Wellesley Hills 
tempehighschoolclassof1971 