Events coming up: Party (Dec 7); Historic Marker for Pearl Buck (Dec 8).
1. The FHIA Holiday party for 2024 is on Saturday December 7 from 5-8 pm and is a potluck meal. Residents should have received messages with details via the FHIA mailing list. If you are a new resident, send a request to be added to the list to foresthomenews@gmail.com with your name and street address.
2. The next morning (Dec 8), the ceremony to install the Pearl S. Buck historical marker will begin at 11am. The plaque will be mounted and unveiled by Tom Campanella and FHIA president Charlie Trautmann. We will meet first in the basement of the Forest Home Chapel at 224 Forest Home Drive, where there will be hot coffee, then move to the marker location just out front. Parking is limited; please use the Mundy Wildflower Garden lot if you are driving. More information about the historic marker is below.
3. Minutes from the FHIA Annual Meeting are now available at https://www.fhia.org/minutes/
4. Details about the new historic marker prepared by Tom Campanella, who has spearheaded this project.
The Buck marker was funded by a grant from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, awarded via community partner Historic Ithaca. It is the second marker that we collaborated on for a Pomeroy grant (the first marks the 212 Cascadilla Street birthplace of Verdell L. Payne, a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen).
The new marker recognizes Pearl Buck’s brief but formative residency in Forest Home a century ago. Pearl, her husband J. Lossing Buck and daughter Carol lived in the community in 1924-1925, mainly at the Chapel parsonage (Lossing was assistant pastor). Each was enrolled in a master’s program at Cornell—she in English (studying with Martin Sampson), he in agronomy (studying with George Warren). Lossing, who helped found the Department of Agricultural Economics at Nanjing University, later carried out the earliest comprehensive survey of crop production in China (Chinese Farm Economy, 1930). Pearl’s help was vital; she interviewed hundreds of farmers in Chinese for the project. The family returned to Cornell in 1932 for Lossing to pursue his PhD, residing this time at 614 Wyckoff Road. Buck had just received a Pulitzer Prize, and six years later was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China.” She received the Nobel medal in Stockholm 86 years ago next week.
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was born in West Virginia but raised in China, where her parents were Presbyterian missionaries and Chinese her first language. She developed a keen interest in the lifeways of the rural peasantry, which she drew upon in writing one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century—The Good Earth (1931). Effectively banned in China after 1949, the book is today better known there than here (though interest was revived when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2004). As Nanjing University’s Liu Haiping put it to the New York Times, Buck was a “revolutionary . . . the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals. Many of us feel we should include Buck as part of Chinese literature.” Buck went on to write scores of other books—novels, non-fiction, translations, biographies, young adult and children’s books. She died in 1973.
