In the summer of 1897, the 25th President of the United States William McKinley, had barely moved into the White House. The nation’s first subway opened in the city of Boston while, in Seattle, the Klondike gold rush was just getting underway. Thomas Edison was granted a patent for an early projector called a Kinetoscope. Mark Twain penned a rebuttal as only Mark Twain could, to his own obituary in the pages of the New York Journal: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
(Left: Laura Virginia O’Hanlon. around 1895)
One day there came the Dread Question asked by eight-year-olds the world over and answered by fathers since the dawn of time: “Go ask your mother”.
Just kidding. This was the Other dread question. The Santa Claus question.
History fails to record the conversation nor the exact time, or place. Perhaps the little girl went for a walk with her father, on the streets of Manhattan’s upper west side. Maybe it was over dinner or perhaps tucked into bed after a goodnight story and a kiss on the forehead. Papa, is there a Santa Claus? My little friends say he isn’t real.
He was coroner’s assistant, Dr. Philip O’Hanlon. She was 8-year-old Laura Virginia O’Hanlon.
Dr. O’Hanlon neither sent his little girl to ask her mother nor did he try to answer, himself. He suggested she write the New York Sun newspaper. “If you see it in The Sun”, he said, “it’s so.”
So it is a little girl’s note made its way across the city to the New York Sun, to the desk of Edward Page Mitchell. The hard core science fiction buff will remember Mitchell for tales about time travel, invisibility and man-computing-machine cyborgs long before the likes of H.G. Wells ever thought about such things but on this day, the editor and sometimes author had a job to do.
Mitchell believed the letter was worthy of reply and brought the assignment to copy writer Francis “Frank” Pharcellus Church.
It was a curious choice.
Church was not the dilettante, partisan idler who’d style himself today, as “journalist”. This was a hard-bitten News Man of the old school, a cynic, street reporter, atheist and former Civil War correspondent who’d seen it all and didn’t believe the half of it.
Picture Perry White, the irascible editor-in-chief of the fictional Daily Planet newspaper in the old Superman series, and you’ve got a pretty good picture of Frank Church. You can almost hear the walrus-mustachioed old curmudgeon grumbling across the ages on the way back to his desk, a little girl’s note in his hand. “Why me”?
The old grump didn’t even want his name associated with the reply.
The New York Sun published Church’s reply on September 21, 1897.
“Dear Editor, I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 W. 95th St.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole truth and knowledge. You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.
Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God he lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10 thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood”.
Church’s friends, family and colleagues scarcely knew the man had it in him. You can almost imagine the excitement of a little girl, scouring the pages of The Sun for two months to find nothing and then…THAT. Through the rest of that Christmas season to this day and on for the rest of her 81 years she would never forget, that reply.
Frank Church’s letter would become the most widely reprinted editorial in the history of the English language albeit anonymously until the year of his death, in 1906. According to New York Sun internal policies, that’s when Church was finally revealed as responding editor and author of that timeless response.
Virginia went on to marry one Edward Douglas in 1910, a man who stuck around just long enough to abandon her with the couple’s first child, as yet unborn. Not exactly a credit to his sex, that one.
Perhaps the childlike sense of delight in that newspaper column is what helped the young mother through her darkest hours. Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas went on to devote her life’s work to children. Following Bachelor’s, Masters and Doctorate degrees at Hunter, Columbia and Fordham University, O’Hanlon went on to become a lifelong teacher, assistant principal and finally principal.
Virginia’s childhood home is now a school called The Studio School offering an academic scholarship, called the Virginia O’Hanlon.
In 1932, The Sun’s response was adapted to a cantata, the only known newspaper editorial ever set to classical music. The 1989 film Prancer contained a fictional editorial entitled “Yes, Santa, there is a Virginia“.
Every year at Christmas, Virginia’s letter and Frank’s response are read aloud at a Yule log ceremony at Church’s alma mater, Columbia College.
In a 1960 appearance on the Perry Como Show, Virginia told the host her letter has been “answered for me thousands of times.”
Laura Virginia O’Hanlon Douglas kept the name of her long-since absconded husband for the rest of her life, according to the custom of the day. She passed away on May 13, 1971, at the age of 81.
She received a steady stream of mail about her letter throughout her long life and never failed to pen a personal reply, including a copy of Church’s column. She was quite sickly toward the end but, throughout countless interviews over the course of her 81 years she’d always credit the Sun’s editorial with changing her life, for the better.
Perhaps it was that Christmas Spirit or whatever you’d like to call it, which most of us have learned to experience, but one time a year. For Virginia O’Hanlon that sense of warmth, of generosity and kindness to be found at the bottom of all human hearts but one time a year, never really seems to have gone away.
So, may all the cynics come to understand, at this Christmas season and beyond. Yes, Virginia, there really IS a Santa Claus.
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….another delightful delving into something we’ve known of but not known of quite so fully. How cheering and encouraging. Thank you.
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I came down with some crazy plague Lance. I’ve been in bed, since Wednesday. Covid19 test tomorrow. Some Christmas. I just found enough energy to write this morning. I can’t tell you how this story cheered me up.
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….please keep your followers posted about how you are so we can keep you in our thoughts, and if Covid, our prayers.
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You’re a good man.
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Finally got the test yesterday, Lance. Came back positive. That explains a lot about the last six days. If losing my wife were the only rotten thing that happened in 2020, that would be enough to make it a lousy year. Somehow, closing the calendar in bed with the curse of Xi Jinping seems oddly perfect.
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Rick, indeed you will be in my prayers before my icon wall twice a day. It isn’t being overly dramatic, it is simply being allowed to do for you what we are allowed to do in these times. I pray you receive all the necessary support and care and attention, and that it be presidentially mild (minus the bleach injections). Please do keep your fans posted as to how you are faring. Bless you, Rick.
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Thank you kindly, sir. I picked up mom in North Carolina and drove down to my brothers place in Alabama, for Christmas. The good news so far, is the rest of the family is healthy.
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….yes. That does now become the focus. You’d think it would have presented by now if that’s the case. So, do everything you can to buoy yourself up–decide which movies you want to rent–order yourself some very nice slippers–sleep whenever you damn well feel like it, and best of all…..be as curmudgeonly as you please.
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That “curmudgeon“ thing is kind of an inside joke between me, and some buddies in Texas. I started bitching about politics one time and that’s what they took to calling me. My adopting that as my pet name was just a way of having a laugh at my own expense.
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Reblogged this on Dave Loves History.
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Merry Christmas Dave
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