The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew's Dog
#005: A Japanese admiral, a dread disease, and a girl detective's best friend
Dear Reader,
It’s Bess who suggests calling the bull terrier “Togo.” Nancy Drew simply falls in love with him. The teen sleuth and her loyal chums Bess and George are on their way to the opening of a new park when a stray dog bounds into their path, determined to play. It’s the dawn of the next thrilling mystery for Nancy and company, The Whispering Statue—not that any of them knows it yet.1
Togo immediately prances into a lake with a stranger’s pocketbook, setting in motion a chain of coincidences and calamities that will propel the fourteenth book in Carolyn Keene’s beloved Nancy Drew mystery series. Like most of its predecessors, The Whispering Statue (1937) was ghostwritten by Iowa-born journalist Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson.2 Working off an outline from Edward Stratemeyer’s juvenile book packaging outfit, she received a flat fee for each Nancy Drew book but no royalties or public recognition as “Carolyn Keene.”3
Figure I. Spine art from The Whispering Statue (1937)
When she received the fresh outline for The Whispering Statue, Benson probably didn’t think twice about what to name Nancy’s new dog.4 She and her bosses, Stratemeyer’s daughters Harriet and Edna, likely all knew a canine Togo or two when they were growing up in the early 1900s. Turn of the century Americans apparently had a proclivity for naming their pets after naval heroes, and Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s accomplishments in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 spawned hundreds of four-legged namesakes.
Togo, born to a samurai family less than a decade before the opening of Japan to international trade, studied seamanship in England as a young man and once wrote in his diary “I am firmly convinced that I am the reincarnation of Horatio Nelson.”5 The comparison to the famous British sea commander was one that his contemporaries would soon make, too.6
Figures II and III: Japanese caricature of the tsar and a Russian admiral, 1904; Admiral Togo visits West Point, 1912
Mounting tensions between Russia and Japan over Manchuria and Korea led to open warfare between the two empires in 1904.7 The following August, Admiral Togo destroyed the Russian fleet at Tsushima Strait (halfway between Japan and Korea) as it attempted to flee towards the safety of the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok. The Russian battle line was annihilated; 12,000 Russian sailors were killed or captured.8 The crushing defeat worsened a domestic crisis for the tsar, and in 1906 Russia and Japan signed a peace agreement under the guidance of American president Theodore Roosevelt.9
Immediately after news of the Battle of Tsushima Strait broke, a Minneapolis reporter predicted that “Japan’s famous victory is bound to make Admiral Togo’s name, with its material, staccato sound, popular among animals.”10 A Nebraska post office clerk with a bulldog named Togo gave his local paper more insight into the choice, boasting that “the dog will accomplish, in a fight, all that his name would indicate.”11
Figure IV. “Dogs Named Togo Are Becoming Much Too Numerous”: Excerpt from the Los Angeles Herald, August 15, 1905
Admiral Togo died in 1934, long after his name had gone to the dogs in the United States. By the time of The Whispering Statue’s publication in 1937, the most famous Togo in America was a probably a heroic husky who had made national headlines the decade before for his role in a dramatic dogsled relay to deliver medicine to an isolated Alaskan town in the midst of winter.
In January 1925, the only doctor in Nome, Alaska realized with mounting dread that he was facing an outbreak of the deadly respiratory infection diphtheria. The former gold-rush town had no railroad depot and was cut off from the outside world every winter when the harbor froze.12 Memories of the influenza epidemic of 1918 still loomed large in the region: about 1,000 people had died around Nome, including fifty percent of its Alaska Native population.13 Although Nome had a small supply of the diphtheria antitoxin on hand, it was old, possibly no longer effective, and certainly not enough to quell an incipient epidemic.14
Figure V. Dog team, Nome, early 20th century
The town’s doctor promptly sent out messages to territorial and national authorities begging for an immediate shipment of antitoxin to Nome. Rugged Alaska was still proudly “dog country” as a 1924 editorial in Outdoor America proclaimed, describing the dogsled races and vital transportation routes that were so deeply a part of Alaskan culture.15 The territory’s ominously named Governor Bone made the decision to allow a dogsled relay to deliver the antitoxin rather than test out surplus WWI-era airplanes in a risky midwinter flight.16
Brave men on the way to Nome from the nearest railway terminus holed up in roadhouses with their dogs, waiting to drive the precious serum through horrendous winter conditions. Norwegian-born musher Leonhard Seppala completed the longest and arguably most dangerous stretch of the relay with his beloved twelve-year-old Siberian dog Togo in the lead. Gunnar Kaasen, Seppala’s coworker at Nome’s gold mining operation, completed the last miles of the relay and brought the serum into Nome with his lead dog Balto.17
Balto earned a statue in Central Park for his deeds; Seppala later admitted he “resented the statue to Balto, for if any dog deserved special mention it was Togo.”18 Togo did get wider recognition the following year, including a tour of the States culminating in a gold medal from polar explorer Roald Amundsen at Madison Square Garden.19 At the age of eighty-one, Seppala wrote of his vision of the afterlife: “When I come to the end of the trail, I feel that along with my many friends, Togo will be waiting and I know that everything will be all right.”20
Figure VI. Leonhard Seppala and Togo, 1927
Safe to say that the fictional Togo has a lot to live up to, and the bull terrier certainly does his best in The Whispering Statue.21 His antics jumpstart the plot of the 1937 book: when Nancy and her chums return the pocketbook he nearly destroyed to its grateful owner, the woman is surprised by Nancy’s resemblance to a famous statue at a place called “the Old Estate,” conveniently located in the equally generic resort town of Sea Cliff. Wouldn’t you know, that’s just where Nancy is about to head off on vacation! Now with Togo at her side, Nancy is determined to find her lookalike statue. Hijinks ensue.22
Nancy is extremely loyal to Togo. At one point she fights a bratty child over ownership of him (this is in no way relevant to the plot, if you’re curious), at another she learns an important moral about leashing dogs in public spaces. Witness the following exchange between Nancy and George just after Nancy unfastens Togo’s leash in a campground:
“Oh, Togo is a good dog now,” she laughed. “You forget that I’ve been training him.”
“Maybe he will forget it, too,” George said dryly.22
Togo of course immediately menaces a suspect and gets beaten with a stick. He comes out all right in the end, but lesson learned: leash it or lose it, Nancy!
Figure VII. Bull terrier postcard, 1930s
The Whispering Statue also features multiple sets of long-lost lovers, a plane crash, ongoing litigation over a silk and woolen goods company and, of course, that whispering statue whose resemblance to Nancy will change multiple lives.
“This sounds like a great book,” you’re saying to yourself. “But when can I expect a stereotypical Italian immigrant to throw a rock at his pet monkey?” You only have to wait until the end of Chapter VII, gentle Reader! (“Of you, I make-a da hash!”)23
The Whispering Statue was rewritten by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and republished in 1970 during a larger revision effort begun in part to remove offensive stereotypes.24 Togo makes one appearance in the new edition—he is released from the basement, described as his habitual exile when company calls, and allowed to sit on Nancy’s lap.25 The 1937 Togo would never stand for that: as Nancy informs a client in the original Whispering Statue, “Togo has very pronounced likes and dislikes, and hates any kind of restrictions.”26
Figures VII and IX. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (left) and Mildred Benson (right, diving) in college
It’s a commonplace among critics to observe that Adams’ Nancy Drew is also “milder, more sedate, and proper” than Mildred Benson’s original character.27 The later Nancy is less likely to make mistakes or lose her temper, and she’s a little more reliant on her boyfriend Ned.28
Although Mildred Benson was unhappy with Harriet Adams’ rewrites and her attempts to take full credit for the series in the 1970s, the prolific children’s book author and journalist didn’t see breathing life into the Stratemeyer outlines as her greatest accomplishment. “I’m so sick of Nancy Drew I could vomit,” Benson once confessed to a young reporter.29 By the time of her death at ninety-six, she had published more than one hundred other books for children and was still a regular columnist at the Toledo Blade.30
But Nancy Drew stories haven’t captivated generations of readers because they knew anything about the lives of “Carolyn Keene” or the backstage drama of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. And falling for Nancy’s loyal pup Togo requires no background information about the Russo-Japanese War, a hundred-year-old Alaskan epidemic, or the history of American pet naming. As Nancy tells Togo at the end of the 1937 Whispering Statue, “you belong to me now.”31
But what amateur sleuth could neglect the puzzle of a famous dog’s mysterious moniker?
Sincerely,
Miss Remember
SOURCES
Primary
Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer [as Carolyn Keene]. The Whispering Statue. Grosset & Dunlap, 1970.
Alessandri, Katryn. “Book #14: The Whispering Statue (1937 and 1970 comparison review).” The Nancy Drew Project, December 2, 2013, https://thenancydrewproject.blogspot.com/2013/12/book-14-whispering-statue-1937-and-1970.html.
Benson, Mildred [as Carolyn Keene]. The Whispering Statue. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1937.
Breede, Adam. “Alaska is Still a Dog Country.” Outdoor America, republished in the Seward Daily Gateway [Seward, AK]. October 21, 1924. Accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87062169/1924-10-21/ed-1/seq-2/.
“Famous Dog Is Given Museum.” The Daily Alaska Empire [Juneau, AK]. December 17, 1929. Accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045499/1929-12-17/ed-1/seq-8/.
“Famous Fights on the Sea.” The Fergus County Argus [Lewiston, MT], July 28, 1905. Accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84036228/1905-07-28/ed-1/seq-8/.
Kingsley, Owen. “Togo, legendary sled dog, has statue unveiled at Poland Springs.” WGME News. September 17, 2022. https://wgme.com/news/local/togo-legendary-sled-dog-has-statue-unveiled-at-poland-springs.
“Museum Celebrates 90th Anniversary of Serum Run,. Cleveland Museum of Natural History press release. January 6, 2015. https://www.cmnh.org/in-the-news/media-inquiries/press-releases/balto-day.
“The Price of Fame.” The Los Angeles Herald [Los Angeles, CA]. August 15, 1905. Accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/1905-08-15/ed-1/seq-7/.
Vallongo, Sally. “Thoroughly Marvelous Millie.” Toledo Blade [Toledo, OH]. Section E, pages 1 and 3. December 23, 2001. Accessed online through Google News: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Pw4wAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yAMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5968%2C2429309.
Walton, Thomas. “A tribute to Millie Benson, who gave Nancy Drew life.” The Blade [Toledo, OH]. December 30, 2013. https://www.toledoblade.com/Tom-Walton/2013/12/30/A-tribute-to-Millie-Benson-who-gave-Nancy-Drew-life/stories/20131230009.
“Wednesday Siftings.” The Norfolk Weekly News-Journal [Norfolk, NE]. August 18, 1905. Accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn95070058/1905-08-18/ed-1/seq-5/.
Secondary
Andidora, Ronald. Iron Admirals: Naval Leadership in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Blond, Georges. Admiral Togo. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1960.
Butler, Shannon R. “Voyage to Tsushima.” Naval History 26, vol. 3 (May 2012). Accessed online through the U.S. Naval Institute: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2012/may/voyage-tsushima.
Dobson, Martha. “Togo and Balto.” Iditarod.edu. September 12, 2010. https://iditarod.com/edu/togo-and-balto/.
Garson, R.W. “Three Great Admirals—One Common Spirit?” The Naval Review 87 (January 1999), pp. 63-64. Accessed online through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20120426045355/http://www.naval-review.co.uk/issues/1999-1.pdf.
Kowner, Rotem. “Becoming an Honorary Civilized Nation: Remaking Japan’s Military Image during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905.” The Historian 64, no. 1 (Fall 2001), pp 18-38. Accessed online through JStor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24450670.
Lindquist, Eric and Doug McElrath, et al. "The Stratemeyer Syndicate." Girls' Series Books Rediscovered: Nancy Drew and Friends. University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections Exhibits online. https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/nancy/influential-authors/stratemeyer-syndicate.
Lundlin, Leigh. “The Secret of the Ageless Girl.” Something is Going to Happen. May 28, 2014. https://somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2014/05/28/the-secret-of-the-ageless-girl-by-leigh-lundin/.
Rehak, Melanie. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. New York: Harcourt, 2003. Accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/girlsleuthnancyd0000reha/.
Rubini, Julie K. Missing Millie Benson: The Secret Case of the Ghostwriter and Journalist. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015.
Salisbury, Gay, and Laney Salisbury. The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Smithsonian Institution. “Diphtheria Treatments and Prevention.” Antibody Initiative website, National Museum of American History, 2017. si.edu/spotlight/antibody-initiative/diphtheria.
Thorson, Winston B. “Pacific Northwest Opinion on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 35, n o. 4 (Oct. 1944), pp. 305-322. Accessed online through JStor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40486672.
Valliant, Robert B. “The Selling of Japan: Japanese Manipulation of Western Opinion, 1900-1905,” Monumenta Nipponica 29 (Winter 1974), pp. 415-438. Accessed online through JStor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2383894.
Longtime fans of the Drewniverse will be familiar with how its characters always refer to Nancy’s past cases with full book titles: in the 1970 revision of The Whispering Statue, Nancy’s housekeeper tells a prospective client that Nancy “discovered The Secret of the Old Clock and recently solved The Mystery of the Ivory Charm.” Researcher Julie K. Rubini explains that this was a deliberate tactic by Edward Stratemeyer to remind readers that they should buy the other titles in the series. See Julie K. Rubini, Missing Millie Benson: The Secret Case of the Ghostwriter and Journalist (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015), 41.
Walter Karig wrote numbers 8-10 (Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, The Sign of the Twisted Candles, and The Password to Larkspur Lane) when Benson refused to work for lower pay during the nadir of the Depression. See Melanie Rehak, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 151-152, accessed online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/girlsleuthnancyd0000reha/.
Edward Stratemeyer founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1905. He came up with the series and plots and then contracted ghostwriters to finish the books, selling the finished products to publishers. See Eric Lindquist and Doug McElrath, et al., "The Stratemeyer Syndicate," Girls' Series Books Rediscovered: Nancy Drew and Friends, University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections Exhibits online, https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/nancy/influential-authors/stratemeyer-syndicate.
Benson researcher Julie K. Rubini reports that Benson received $125 per Syndicate book (about $2,300 in 2024 money according to CoinNews’ inflation calculator): see Rubini, 49. A 1980 legal case revealed Benson’s identity as the first Carolyn Keene on a national scale, but it wasn’t until a researcher at Benson’s alma mater discovered the connection and organized the first Nancy Drew conference in 1994 that Benson became a national celebrity.
It’s also entirely possible that the name was already included in the outline that Edna Stratemeyer and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams sent to Benson to complete in manuscript form. The Stratemeyer outlines had grown more detailed during Benson’s break from writing Nancy Drew (Rehak, 174).
As quoted in R.W. Garson, “Three Great Admirals—One Common Spirit?” The Naval Review 87 (January 1999), pp. 63-64, 63. Accessed online through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20120426045355/http://www.naval-review.co.uk/issues/1999-1.pdf.
“Famous Fights on the Sea,” The Fergus County Argus [Lewiston, MT], July 28, 1905, accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84036228/1905-07-28/ed-1/seq-8/.
On the Russo-Japanese War and Americans’ perspective on it, I consulted Ronald Andidora, Iron Admirals: Naval Leadership in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Rotem Kowner, “Becoming an Honorary Civilized Nation: Remaking Japan’s Military Image during the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905,” The Historian 64 (Fall 2001), pp 18-38; Robert B. Valliant, “The Selling of Japan: Japanese Manipulation of Western Opinion, 1900-1905,” Monumenta Nipponica 29 (Winter 1974), pp. 415-438; and Winston B. Thorson, “Pacific Northwest Opinion on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 35 (Oct. 1944), pp. 305-322.
The exhausted Russian Second Pacific Squadron had already been forced to sail 18,000 miles around the coast of Africa, fed on rotting provisions, to avoid the Japanese and reinforce the struggling First Pacific Squadron—a moot point, because by the time they arrived, the First Pacific Squadron was eight months defeated. See Andidora, 30-31, and Shannon R. Butler, “Voyage to Tsushima,” Naval History 26, vol. 3 (May 2012), accessed online through the U.S. Naval Institute: https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2012/may/voyage-tsushima.
Andidora, 43. On a trip to the U.S. in 1911-1912, Togo personally insisted on cleaning the rust off a set of samurai swords owned by Roosevelt. See Georges Blond, Admiral Togo (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1960), 247-248.
“The Price of Fame.” The Los Angeles Herald [Los Angeles, CA]. August 15, 1905, accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/1905-08-15/ed-1/seq-7/.
“Wednesday Sifitings,” The Norfolk Weekly News-Journal [Norfolk, NE], August 18, 1905, accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn95070058/1905-08-18/ed-1/seq-5/.
Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 36.
See Salisbury, pages 42 and 50 for details of 1918 pandemic death count. The authors draw on the records of the U.S. Department of the Interior for their figures.
For more on the history of diphtheria and its treatments, see the Smithsonian Institution’s Antibody Initiative article, “Diphtheria Treatments and Prevention,” 2017, si.edu/spotlight/antibody-initiative/diphtheria.
Adam Breede, “Alaska is Still a Dog Country,” Outdoor America, republished in the Seward Daily Gateway [Seward, AK], October 21, 1924, accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87062169/1924-10-21/ed-1/seq-2/.
Salisbury, 105.
More dog name trivia and controversy: Seppala named Balto after a Saami explorer who worked with Roald Amundsen, but Seppala didn’t think the dog was capable of leading a team. He claimed that the dog he had chosen to lead for Kaasen, Fox, was actually in front when the sled pulled the serum into Nome. Seppala thought Kaasen might have publicized Balto because of his more distinctive name (see Salisbury, 218 for Kaasen/Seppala disagreement on Balto’s abilities, and Salisbury, 249 for Seppala’s claims about Balto).
You can compare the taxidermy of the two dogs here: Togo and Balto. Togo’s pelt is at the Iditarod Museum in Anchorage; his skeleton is still at Yale’s Peabody Museum, where it was donated in 1929. Balto’s taxidermy is at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland, Ohio.
See: “Famous Dog Is Given Museum,” The Daily Alaska Empire [Juneau, AK], December 17, 1929, accessed online through Chronicling America: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045499/1929-12-17/ed-1/seq-8/; Martha Dobson, “Togo and Balto,” Iditarod.edu, September 12, 2010, https://iditarod.com/edu/togo-and-balto/; “Museum Celebrates 90th Anniversary of Serum Run,” Cleveland Museum of Natural History press release, January 6, 2015, https://www.cmnh.org/in-the-news/media-inquiries/press-releases/balto-day.
As quoted in Salisbury, 249. Togo has recently received his own statue in Poland Springs, Maine, where he spent the final years of his life: Owen Kingsley, “Togo, legendary sled dog, has statue unveiled at Poland Springs,” WGME News, September 17, 2022, https://wgme.com/news/local/togo-legendary-sled-dog-has-statue-unveiled-at-poland-springs.
Ibid, 250. The founder of Madison Square Garden had a special connection to Nome, having spent time there as a prospector during the town’s gold rush (ibid, 17).
As quoted in ibid, 253.
Nowadays the most famous bull terrier is probably Bullseye, the Target mascot. Interestingly, the current featured photo on Bullseye’s Wikipedia page is Bullseye at the 2008 opening ceremony of the annual Iditarod dogsled race, which follows a trail from Anchorage to Nome and was founded in 1973 to preserve Alaska’s dogsledding heritage (Salisbury, 238-239).
#/media/File:Target_dog.jpg){kind=link}
As long as we’re here and can’t leave well enough alone, I also discovered that the most famous bull terrier in Alaska was a contemporary of Nancy Drew’s Togo. Patsy Ann of Juneau roamed the port city’s docks as “official greeter” during the 1930s, beloved by locals and especially longshoremen. A search of Alaskan newspapers archived in Chronicling America turns up loads of adorable newspaper articles, including a July 12, 1934 piece from The Daily Alaska Empire describing how Juneau residents pitched in to buy her a gold-plated collar. Click here to explore more Patsy Ann stories.
Whispering Statue 1937, 114.
Ibid, 73. Animal lovers need not worry: Nancy becomes obsessed with the wellbeing of this monkey and rescues him from the crumbling mansion where he has taken refuge. Come to think of it, animal lovers do need to worry: Nancy promptly returns the pet to his mercurial owner and goes on her merry way.
Rehak, 246.
Whispering Statue 1970, 16.
Togo the sled dog was equally high-spirited. Initially, Seppala didn’t think he was suitable for driving and gave him to a local woman as a pet. Togo escaped and ran back to Seppala’s kennel (Salisbury, 160).
Leigh Lundlin, “The Secret of the Ageless Girl,” Something is Going to Happen, May 28, 2014, https://somethingisgoingtohappen.net/2014/05/28/the-secret-of-the-ageless-girl-by-leigh-lundin/.
In the 1937 Whispering Statue, Ned is merely Nancy’s “tried and true friend” who suggests ice cream at opportune times and “[does] not annoy the girls with any useless questions” (17). In the 1970 rewrite, he gets to take the lead in saving Nancy from an extremely ridiculous situation at the end of the book (no spoilers but the chapter title is “Nancy in Marble”) and he also gets upgraded to “special friend” and date (22).
If Nancy (arguably) and Togo (certainly) are more subdued in the 1970 Whispering Statue, Bess and George are much more formidable. In 1937, they spend most of their time cowering in the car and fretting while Nancy investigates. In 1970, George gets to use judo twice to subdue suspects and even the more timorous Bess heartily assists (4,113).
As quoted in Rehak, 308.
For a list of Benson’s published works, see Rubini, pages 99-106. Benson retired in December 2001, five months before her death. “Be sure you say I’ll still be coming in one day a week,” she instructed Blade writer Sally Vallongo for a piece on her retirement (Sally Vallongo, “Thoroughly Marvelous Millie,” Toledo Blade [Toledo, OH], section E, pages 1 and 3. December 23, 2001, accessed online through Google News: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Pw4wAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yAMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5968%2C2429309).
In addition to her writing, the adventurous Benson was a former champion collegiate swimmer and diver noted for her xylophone skills. She survived two widowhoods, raised a daughter, earned her pilot’s license at age fifty-nine, and applied to an abortive NASA program to send journalists into space. In her NASA application, she wrote of her hope to tell the public about “the joy of winging unafraid into the unknown” (as quoted in Rubini, 81). Benson was also an amateur Mayanist and made multiple trips to Central America in the 1950s, including one where she was kidnapped by robbers overnight (see Vallongo).
Benson’s interest in the Maya must date back as far as 1931 with the publication of Ruth Darrow in Yucatan, part of the Ruth Darrow Flying Stories published under her own name. Benson made extensive use of her local public library to research topics for her books and probably first read about Maya culture there (Rehak, 141).
Whispering Statue 1937, 217.