 Hello, from the National Archives Education and Public Programs team. My name is Missy McNat and I am an Education Specialist in Washington, D.C. And welcome to the National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners Program. You can find information about future programs on the National Archives website under events and on the National Archives Facebook page. Today, we meet Daryl Blaine Ford, Walt Whitman devotee for 80 years. And Mr. Ford will fascinate us with the story of how he discovered Walt Whitman, perhaps America's greatest poet. Walt Whitman captured the spirit of the American nation with his 19th century poetry and what better month than April, National Poetry Month, to learn more about Walt Whitman and his innovative and at the time in considered unconventional poetic devices. So we will talk with Mr. Ford at the Walt Whitman birthplace and now a historic site and interpretive center on Huntington, on Long Island in New York. So in this slide, we see the beautiful, blooming lalikes outside of the Walt Whitman birthplace that give us a sense of nostalgia for times past and hope for the future. They also evoke the Walt Whitman poem when lalikes last in the door yard bloomed about the untimely death of President Abraham Lincoln on April 15th, 1865, 156 years ago today. In this next slide, we see the bedroom of Walt Whitman's bedroom, or possibly where Walt Whitman was born, and the cradle where he spent the first months of his life, where he slept the first months of his life. And next to it is the photograph of the interpretive center with the Walt Whitman exhibit. In addition to being America's premier poet, Walt Whitman was also a nurse, served as a nurse during the Civil War in the Washington DC, and he later went on to work for the federal government for several years. And the National Archives has in its holdings numerous records related to Walt Whitman that can be found in docsteach.teach.org. And in this next slide, we see the photograph of Walt Whitman that was taken at a Matthew Brady studio in the 1860s. And next to it is the letter that Walt Whitman wrote to Walter Elms when he worked for the federal government. And I'm always so impressed with his beautiful, cursive handwriting. In the next slide, we see the featured docsteach activity for today on Walt Whitman. And again, it's in docsteach.teach.org. We will share this slide again at the end of the program. After Darryl Blaine Ford's presentation, we will have a question and answer session with him. So please write your questions in the YouTube chat box. And we have a National Archives staff member who is monitoring it. And let us know where you are watching from today. Now it is the this program is brought to you by the National Archives education and public program staff by the National Archives. And by the National Archives Foundation. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Darryl Blaine Ford, Walt Whitman devotee and scholar and actor. So Darryl, tell us how as a nine year old boy, you first discovered Walt Whitman. Well, it gives me great pleasure to be talking to you about my favorite topic, which is Walt Whitman, a man whose poetry I've been reading for 80 years. When I was nine years old, I had been reading for five years. And so one of the things that I was very enthusiastic about was airplanes. And when I got my roll fast big boy bike, I started to travel hither and yon around where I lived in Amityville, Long Island. And I came upon an old airport that was practically on its last legs. It wasn't doing well financially. And a group of pilots who had either been World War One pilots or had been stunt pilots or male pilots, they had something in common. They had married women who had told them, you have to get a real job. So they would come to this little old airfield, which had a lot of planes parked around the edges. Most of which were probably very close to being antiques by then. And one day, one of the pilots who happened to have been a German pilot in World War One, but had been accepted by these American pilots, he came up to me and he said, you like plane? I said, yes, I love planes. He said, would you like to go up? And I thought, is he actually asking me if I would like to ride in a plane? And I said, yes. And he said, what your parents say? And I said, they would consider it to be a very worthwhile thing to do. I didn't tell my mother about it until I was 36 years old. But at any rate, he took me out to the old plane, which was a biplane with open cockpit. He put me in the plane, buckled me in, put a smelly old helmet on my head that had goggles. And he got in the plane, the engine started and we bounced along and then we cut the surly balans of earth and sailed up over Long Island. And suddenly I was looking at it from a totally new perspective. And I looked down on the village of Amityville. I looked down on the Great South Bay, a shallow, large shallow body of water on the south side of Long Island and then beyond the barrier islands. And then most impressive of all, I saw the Atlantic Ocean and I suddenly realized its power and majesty and it had a great effect on me. Then the plane wheeled around and went up over across the island to the north shore, where I could see the Long Island sound and then the blue-gray smear of the Connecticut shore beyond. And so and then we came back home and I got another look at my neighborhood and then we landed. And before we landed, I said to myself, I can ride my bicycle from the Great South Bay to the Long Island sound. When you're nine years old, you don't do the math. I was contemplating a 40-mile round trip. I'm glad I didn't know that because early one morning, a few days later, I set out and got up long before the rest of the family and headed north on what was then called, was a two-lane country road and is now a six-lane highway. And as I paddled along, I passed farms and woodlands and forests and very few dwellings and I saw very few cars because Long Island then was a paradise of very few inhabitants. And when I finally began to feel really tired, I slowed down and then eventually I couldn't go any further and I dropped the bicycle and lay on the side of the road. And when I did, I saw a little plaque that said, this is the birthplace of the great American poet Walt Whitman. And I knew who he was because my mother, some mothers sing to their children, my mother recited poetry, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Brownings, and best of all, to her, Alfred Lord Tennyson. But she did do some American poets as well. And one in particular was O'Captain, My Captain, which was the poem that Whitman wrote about the death of Lincoln for what he hoped would appeal to the average person. And apparently it did because it became the most popular of his poems to his chagrin. At any rate, that is how I first became aware of Whitman. I went and knocked at the door and an ice-spike haired lady came to the door and we chatted and she invited me in and I joined the house with her and she showed me the room where Walt was born or where she thought he was born. And if she thought it, I thought it. Then we went to the kitchen and she gave me a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk and she said, before you go, I have something I want to give you. So she rummaged around and she came back with a volume very much like this one only with a black cover. And she, she said, and it had no front cover. And she said, you read that because it will do you good. So I took it home and I decided when I got home that I was going to read a 600 page book and I decided that I could probably only read about five pages a day. So it was on my desk on one side and the dictionary was on the other side because almost immediately I began to run into words that I had not seen before. But I persisted. Some days I didn't for whatever reason, but I kept that all through the rest of my ninth year and into my tenth year. And one day I read the last word of the last poem, all 300 of them. Now in many, in many ways, it was extremely difficult because so much of what Walt was talking about, I could not understand at all. He didn't write most of it for children. There are certainly poems that Walt wrote that aren't appealing to children. And, but there was so much that I didn't understand, but I, I loved the words that he wrote and the way he, he put them together and the optimism they expressed. And so it was a labor of love. And when I went to school and talked about my visit to Walt, uh, home, uh, the teacher said to the class, I am a collateral descendant of Walt Whitman. I'm descended from Walt Whitman's mother. And she, and she, and when I talked to her, uh, later on, I said, do you like his poetry? And she said, I'm very proud to be descended from America, one of America's great poets, but I, I don't approve of some of his poets. I hope that answers your question is how I got involved with Walt Whitman and his leaves and grass. Well, thank you. That is just, is absolutely fascinating and that you've continued throughout your entire life to be devoted to him. So, you know, from the National Archives, you know, one of the ways we think about our records are how we have, what records we have about that person. And of course, the connection with Walt Whitman is that he worked for the federal government. So, can you tell us a little bit about what you know about his years in Washington, D.C.? Yes. The way he came, he came to Washington, he was living in Brooklyn and in New York. The way he came to Washington was that he read in the newspaper that his younger brother had been wounded in action. And so, he hurried south and had his pockets picked in Philadelphia on the way, but he arrived in Washington and then he went looking for permission to go to the, the battlefront, to the battle, the battlefield of Fredericksburg. He secured permission and made his way there, found his brother. He was not seriously wounded and he stayed with his brother for about a week. And then he was going back to Washington and he was asked to help to bring some of the most seriously wounded to, back to Washington Hospital, a Washington Hospital. And he did that and they had to travel partly by boat, partly by train, but they got back to Washington and they saved all, they arrived with all of the very seriously wounded men, save one, had survived. And he decided at that point that he would stay in Washington because he wanted to be close to the war and action. And he had to find employment and he was, he was sort of a correspondent for the New York Times in that they paid him for articles that he would send to them and he did that throughout the war. But his job was to become a human copy machine. There was no provision or machinery to make copies of important documents that had to be on file. And his usual handwriting is really very bad, but when he was copying as a professional copy machine, his, his, and you've mentioned the fact that it was beautiful to read, it was so clear and perfectly done. I did that and then he began to go to the hospitals and when he saw the situation of the men, they were so isolated. When they left their units, they were no longer paid, they no longer received mail and many of them were very, very seriously injured. And so he decided that he would make it his job to do what he could to alleviate their sufferings. Now he's said to be a nurse and he said that himself in a poem, but actually he did everything that he could possibly do to help if they needed somebody to help with an operation. He would help with an operation if he needed somebody to be a bedpan specialist, he would do that. He would bring them in all kinds of things that he hoped would boost them around reading material, material to write letters to the family. If the patient was too sick or to be able to write or was unable, did not know how to write, he would write letters for them. He would read the letters that arrived for those who couldn't read. He spent time with them and when they were very, very sick and dying, he would hold their hand all through the night sometimes. And what he was trying to do was to alleviate suffering as much as he could for men who felt so isolated. Well, you know, it sounds like an amazing humanitarian and of course, one of the other topics in Washington at that time was President Abraham Lincoln. And so a question that I think people often ask is, did Walt Whitman ever meet President Lincoln? The answer to that is yes and no. They did not meet formally, but Washington was staying in a building that Lincoln had to pass on his way to the summer White House. He would, every morning he would come with a cavalry escort from the house where his wife and children were when it was on higher grounds because Washington is fiendishly hot during the summertime. And so the cavalry would escort him to the White House and then when he was finished with the day's work, he'd be escorted back by horseback back. And they passed right where Lincoln's house was. So they frequently saw each other, waved to each other. One of Lincoln's law clerks said that before Lincoln ever went to the White House before he even ran for president, he had read Leaves of Grass and he liked it and he read it aloud to the law clerks. So to that extent they met. So there were several poems that were written about Lincoln and we've already mentioned two of them about his death specifically. Oh, Captain My Captain and when Wylox last in the door yard bloomed. But any other poems that he wrote about Lincoln and any other comments, I mean your comments that, oh Captain My Captain was not the poem that he wanted to, he wrote it for the public, but did not think it was going to become his most popular poem. Yes, he wanted to express for people who were average people their sorrow at the death of the great man because he truly loved and admired Lincoln. And so that's why he wrote, oh Captain My Captain and it was enormously popular and effective. And in fact when I began this career of mine of appearing not as I don't appear as Whitman, I like to remind people that Whitman was a flesh and blood person. He did have a white beard for most of the latter part of his life. And so to that extent I make some effort to look like him and I say that I personate him and I have done it on many different venues. And the question about his most famous poem I think probably is the one about when Wylox lasted the door yard bloomed, which was his real personal reaction to the death of Abraham Lincoln, where he attempted to express his sorrow at the loss of such a wonderful man who had done so much to help bring the country through a serious crisis in many ways, perhaps similar to the the crisis that we are living with at the moment. Yeah, so how about do you have a favorite Whitman poem other than the ones we've been talking about with Lincoln? Is there one that just you always have love throughout your life or perhaps that's changed? I'm the father of five children and that's like asking me which one of my children I like. But I do have some real favorites and of course when Wylox lasted the door yard bloom is certainly one of them. I like to when there was a child went forth because the building that you see behind me is where he was born in 1819 and he was there for long enough so that he seemed to have had some very vivid memories of that place and he did return to it on occasion in his adult life because he lived in Huntington. He founded a newspaper when he was 16 years old and he also was a school teacher in Huntington and many places on Long Island when he was still very young. I'd like to read just a little. There was a child went forth. There was a child went forth every day and the first object he looked upon that object he became. That object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early Lallax became part of this child. The grass and red and white morning glories and the white and red clover and the song of the Phoebe bird and the third month lambs and the south pink litter and the mare's foal and the cow's calf and the noisy brood of the barnyard or the mire of the pond's side. The field sprouts of the fourth month and the fifth month became part of him. Winter grain sprouts and those of the light yellow corn and the escalant roots of the garden and the apple trees covered with blossoms and the front afterward and wood berries and the commonest woods by the road and the friendly boys that passed and the Carlson boys and the tidy and fresh cheap girls in the barefoot. That's a little taste of that poem and it's all about this building behind me where he lived and a building that I discovered when I was nine years old that introduced me to Walkwood. Well it certainly inspired me to go back and read some of that poetry and you know that sense of youth and spring comes forth in that poem so clearly. So we have a few questions that have shown up and one is did you travel much for work you know as Walt Whitman did Walt Whitman travel for work? Walt Whitman was not a very well traveled man. He was constantly as his career began to blossom because he received recognition in Britain to a much greater extent than he did in his own country as the years went by and each new edition of Leaves of Grants there were eight different editions. There were each different books with different poems some some of them would be older poems but each is separate and the last one was the one that I read as a child and let me have that question again please. So just traveling did you did did Walt Whitman travel I mean we know he went to Washington D.C. but did he go did he ever go west of the Mississippi or even you know? He lost his job as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle which was an important newspaper in the New York Manhattan Brooklyn area and he lost that because of his views on slavery which was very negative and the owner of the paper didn't want him to continue to write editorials to that effect and when he lost his job he met a man who said I can use you I just bought a newspaper in New Orleans so he is one of his younger brothers by the way I think you might glean from the the names that his father was a patriot. George the Walt's younger brothers were Thomas Jefferson Whitman George Washington Whitman and Andrew Jackson Whitman and one of the three accompanied him to New Orleans and he only stayed with the paper three months because it became apparent that Walt was against slavery in the midst of slavery and that he was opposed to the Mexican war which had proved to be a valuable source of wealth to New Orleans because most of the shipments that went to the army that was in Mexico came through the port of New Orleans so he had to come home and he came home by river boat on the Mississippi River he went up into Canada he made some friends there that were lifelong friends and then he came down into New York state and back to New York and with the exception of one trip that he made later in life to the west as far not well not all the way to the Pacific Ocean but he did get to see some of the west and that was the sum total of his travel the rest of his travel was his in his imagination now well that's thank you very much and also I just want to say too we've heard that I want to say hello to the students from the Calverton school and I'm glad you are joining us today and the folks from Long Island and anyone else who wants to tell us please jump in there so another question did you meet famous people celebrities of your day we talked about Lincoln but any anyone else any other celebrities that you might have met well you have to understand that Walt Whitman came from the lower echelon of society his his mother and father were poor people they had eight children so there was a very serious struggle they probably left the house behind me there because they lost it they were unable to pay the mortgage so they loaded everything in a wagon and went to live in a village on the east river called Brooklyn which eventually became the name of the the common name for the for Kings County but at that time it was just a village on the east river and from from the beginning of his time there he would wander about and he found the ferry boat and he became a kind of a pet of the ferryman and so they would let him ride back and forth on the ferry to Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn and later on he lived in Manhattan for a time when he was 15 years old and had become a journeyman printer there was a plague going on and people were moving out of New York as much as they possibly could and then there was a terrible fire that burned down all the print shops so he was unemployed he had to come back out to Long Island to stay with his family and his father wanted him to become a farm hand and he wouldn't didn't want any part of that so he became a school teacher and he and he had to keep moving because the schools were rarely open longer than 13 weeks and then the state money would stop and so then it would be up to the local people to raise money if the school stayed open and instead they would close it until more state money was available so he went from town to town as a teacher all over Long Island and then at one point he got tired of teaching and so he found in a newspaper which is still being printed it was called the Long Islander and he only had it for about a year and he would do all the work he would write the articles unfortunately not one example of those newspapers survives however many other newspapers copied things from his paper which was a common practice then thank you any anybody else out there have any questions about Walt Whitman or his poetry or his his life and that's okay well so this question I think is from Tamara Frazier I've got that right so it was did you have any adventures or perhaps I mean you kind of been talking about your adventures but perhaps what was your greatest adventure or what was Whitman's greatest adventure well I think his whole life was an adventure and he had a he had a wonderful ability to observe and recall detail which is throughout his poetry he he really had the ability to observe and then remember and then and that turns up in his poetry endlessly I don't know as I can add to that okay and a question at what age how old was Walt Whitman when he was a teacher he was 16 oh wow he was younger than many of his students because he would he would teach in these one-room school houses and they would have as many as 80 children listed as but not all 80 ever showed up at any one time and he had to uh teach them he had to tend to the fire and the cold weather and uh the at the time there was a system of schooling called the Lancastrian method which included corporal punishment and he never ever subscribed to that he he felt that the way to get people to learn was to uh make an adventure of it and to he used the 20 questions method very often and he uh he was remembered by his students later on after he became fairly well known people would go back and find these students and they would all say what a wonderful teacher he was and how different from most teachers at that time I must add that Walt Whitman before he would he decided to be a poet which was when he was in his mid 30s and was rather lower in at low ebb in that period of his life because he couldn't get a job as a newspaper man which is what he really loved earlier in his life when he was 23 he wrote a best-selling novel which he begged people never to read later on in life um he uh he wrote many many editorials and uh he loved the job of being an editor of newspaper because everybody would send him books in hopes that he would mention the book or give them some free advertising and so um his teaching day is extended until probably about 1920 and then he was able to go back to work uh at what he loved to do and that is he was he was studying to be a printer but he eventually evolved into a reporter and then a journalist and finally an editor and and I also would like to add that he was totally self-educated he only went to school for five years and he uh and the rest of his education was self-education and he was an he was an avid reader he read all the time he just loved reading and uh and that was his uh he was he called himself an autodidact that was a self self-taught and and he did a good job of it but also considering that he had no extensive formal education Shakespeare introduced more words into the English language than any other writer second to Shakespeare was Whitman wow I did not know that so we have actually a couple more questions what other poets or artists did Walt Whitman admire you said he read a lot so I'm guessing he must have read other poets Alford Lord Tennyson and he had sort of a mutual admiration society they corresponded with each other another person that corresponded with him was the uh the painter uh the uh French impressionist painter um Gauguin Gauguin had lived in England for a time even though he was Dutch and then he lived in France but he um he somehow or other got a copy of Leaves of Grass and wrote uh uh Whitman a glowing letter and they corresponded with each other oh and another what age did Walt Whitman become dubious about religion at what age did he become at what age did Walt Whitman become dubious about religion we haven't talked much about religion and his views um but I I would say he was never dubious about religion he was raised by a family of people who were Quakers uh that not necessarily actually Quakers but they were fellow travelers and so in his childhood he attended many Quaker meetings and at the time most Quaker meetings were just people sitting there quietly and then if they felt they had something to say that they had been inspired and hopefully uh they were inspired by uh some some deity above uh they could say whatever they wanted so he and he never had a negative thing to say about religion that I'm aware of he certainly was not a member of any formal church but on the other hand uh he wasn't really negative about religion so here okay I think um we're gonna have to you know we're we're getting we've been here for a while so a couple more questions um I read that he made a death bed edition of one of his books um do we know what drove him to do so do you know anything about that a death bed edition of one of his books does that sound good idea that was the people who were selling the book oh that okay gotcha um and then yeah um so I think we have one last question for you and um that is what message do you have for our young people today what message what would you like to tell our young people my message is that at some time in your life not necessarily at age nine that was unique to me uh but at some time in your life I hope that you read Leaves of Grass because uh it it was a very liberating uh experience for me which I am grateful and have been grateful for all my life uh and it is so full of optimism and acceptance of the nature of our existence um and and the enormous amount of ability he had to enjoy life and it certainly was contagious in my case and I think that everybody at some period in their life should read Leaves of Grass and I it certainly is relevant today so thank you thank you so much um Daryl Blaine Ford for joining us today um and thank you also to the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site and Interpretive Center in Huntington Long Island New York for hosting our program and for hosting our speaker today so thank you again and I wish everyone a a good day and go out and find your copy of Leaves of Grass and enjoy thank you thank you for the opportunity well thanks