Bertha Damon

Bertha Clark Pope Damon (1881 – c. 1976) was an American humorist, author, lecturer, and editor. She wrote the best-selling humorous memoir Grandma Called It Carnal.

The composer Ernst Bacon dedicated two songs to Bertha Damon. Benjamin Lehman, English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said she “had a real talent for gathering people around her, and that she "was so great a wit that we were all delighted periodically into really uncontrolled laughter.” Well-known writers who were part of her circle include Stella Benson,Witter Bynner, Oscar Lewis, Winfield Townley Scott, and Marie de Laveaga Welch. She was also active in the Sierra Club and wrote accounts of some of its camping trips for the Sierra Club Bulletin.

Bertha Louise Clark was born in a small town in Connecticut in 1881. After graduating from Pembroke College in Brown University in 1905 and teaching school in Providence, Rhode Island briefly, she married Arthur Upham Pope, who had graduated from Brown in 1904 and was soon hired to teach philosophy there. Pope did graduate work at Brown, Cornell and Harvard. In 1910 the couple moved to Berkeley, where he taught until 1917. During the 1915-16 school year Bertha taught English at Oakland Technical High School. Discovery of Arthur Pope's affair with student Phyllis Ackerman (who later became his second wife) led to his resignation from the university and a divorce from Bertha. Bertha continued to live in the Tudor-style house they had purchased after its use at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. She sometimes had long-term guests and boarders, including Peter Case and Stella Benson, in that house, which she named "High Acres."

...
Wikipedia