NANCY DREW AUTHOR HAD DEEP ATTRACTION TO MEXICO AND THE MAYA WORLD

Who of us girls as young teens did not love Nancy Drew? The sleuth known for her voracious appetite for getting into trouble, being at the center of crime scenes and mysteries? Who taught us how to signal SOS with a tube of lipstick, break out a window using spike heels, and remember to always keep an overnight bag in the car, just in case?

CAROLYN KEENE? UMM, NO

For years I thought Carolyn Keene was Nancy's author but later discovered Keene was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson. The prolific Benson would write 135 of the first Nancy Drew detective tales that came to shape Nancy's "steely bravery," according to an article by Jennifer Fisher in "Zócalo." Benson's image of Nancy would create "the tenacious, bold and independent heroine we have come to know."

Mildred Wirt Benson aka Carolyn Keene

The real author of our favorite girl detective was an Iowa homegrown born in 1905, daughter of a country doctor, and the first student—male or female—to earn a masters degree in journalism from University of Iowa (later home to Iowa Writers Workshop). For 50 years Benson worked in journalism while penning famous mysteries, covering the courthouse beat, crime and corruption at "The Toledo Blade" and "The Toledo Times."

HEADING TO NYC

As a child, Benson was an avid reader of children's classics. Her first short story, "The Courtesy," appeared in "St. Nicholas," a children's magazine, and won her second place in a monthly contest. Finding Iowa too dull for a woman with an agenda, she ventured to NYC and landed a job with an icon in publishing, Edward Stratemeyer. In 1934, "Fortune Magazine" said of Stratemeyer, "As oil and gas has its Rockefeller, literature has its Stratemeyer."

Stratemeyer published The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys and famously hired ghost writers for a flat monthly fee. Benson's pen name remained a mystery until the 1970s when researchers discovered Benson was the Oz behind the curtain. During the Great Depression and WWII, parents were candid with their children, according to Fisher's article, and didn't hide life's gravities. Enter Nancy Drew, a new kind of heroine for a new age of young girls. Stratemeyer penned a three-page outline for Benson and depicted Nancy as an "up-to-date American girl at her best—bright, clever, resourceful, and full of energy."

TREATED AS AN EQUAL

In 1973 Benson wrote an essay about her famous heroine, stating Nancy was treated as an equal by her father and by many in law enforcement and she never gave up when the going got tough. Her spirit struck a chord. Nancy Drew personified "the dream image which exists within most teenagers," Benson said. According to Fisher's article, this 1930s teen remained culturally relevant for more than 80 years, even as young women's roles changed dramatically. Mothers and grandmothers passed the books down to their daughters. "Women still tell me how they identified with Nancy Drew and that Nancy Drew gave them confidence to be whatever they wanted to be," Benson said in an interview in 1999.

In 1928 she married an AP telegraph operator, Asa Wirt. In 1936, he was transferred to Chicago, and that same year, her daughter Margaret Joan Wirt was born. Neither change of location nor motherhood would deter her, however, from her writing, but things petered out with Stratemeyer as he tried out various other story lines. In 1940 Asa had a stroke. AP transferred him to Toledo, Ohio. He had another stroke in 1943 and permanently left his AP job. These were hard years for her family especially as WWII was raging. But for Mildred, this gave her an opportunity. "The Toledo Times" took on female reporters for the first time, under the stipulation that they knew once the war was over, their work days would be numbered. In 1947 Asa died from complications with another stroke. 

Her mother came to live with her and her daughter while Mildred reported for the newspaper. In 1950 she married Edward Benson, an editor at "The Toledo Times." These years were happy ones and they traveled to Puerto Rico and Central America where Mildred gained a fascination with the Maya ruins. In 1959, enroute to Puerto Rico, Benson died unexpectedly. 

The next years again were hard as she worked the beat at her newspaper gig. Another juvenile publisher asked if she would consider writing young adult books, but she felt the world had changed too much, and she decided to focus on her reporting, now at "The Toledo Blade."  

MAYA CONNECTION

As she always loved to travel and loved the Maya pyramids, she began to charter bush pilots to visit less accessible archeological digs. She canoed down the Usumacinta River to Yaxchilan on a three-day trip with local guides. "I used to hang my hammock in Maya temples, and once, when no other shelter was available, I hung it in a corn crib. Those were my adventurous days." 

Canoeing Down Usumacinta River

She traipsed through crocodile-infested rivers and hacked her way through jungles with a machete. She trained as a pilot in the 1960s and took solo trips to Guatemala. Benson was becoming her own best role model for the very Nancy Drew we all came to love. 

In a particularly harrowing Nancy Drew-like experience, she was even locked inside a room in Guatemala by locals who thought she knew too much about criminal activity in their town. Channeling Nancy, she overpowered one of her captors and escaped. "Like any good sleuth," reporter Fisher went on to explain, "she later returned to Guatemala to learn more about what had happened to her."

Mildred Wirt Benson in Skywriter

THE SMITHSONIAN

In the 1990s, twenty years after dedicated Nancy Drew lovers had discovered Keene's real name and ID'd Mildred Wirt Benson as Drew's creator, Benson donated a series of papers she'd written about her heroine, along with her trusty Underwood typewriter used for creating Nancy, to the Smithsonian where it sits to this day. And finally, the mystery author got public credit by her native Iowa in 1993 when the University of Iowa had a Nancy Drew Conference. That same year, she was named Person of the Week by ABC's Peter Jennings.

Mildred Wirt Benson's Trusty Underwood

Asked later if she would ever give up writing, Benson said, "The undertaker will have to pry me away from my typewriter." That's pretty much what happened. At 96, in 2002, she was sitting at her trusty Underwood when she died. 

Unintentional Feminist (From CBC.ca) 

If you enjoyed this post, check out Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, on Amazon. My website is www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are also on Amazon/ And my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is on Amazon.

DID 2012 MAYA CALENDAR'S LONG-COUNT END DATE USHER IN AN EPOCH OF CHANGE?

 

Scribe on Maya plate

Have we entered a new epoch that began in 2012? You may recall the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. First off, the media got it wrong. The Maya never predicted the world would end on the last day of their thirteenth baktun in the Maya Long Count cycle. But Maya elders did say we were in for a time of transition. Is that transition now?

As a Mayaphile and student of Maya culture, I wrote Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the supposed "end date" in their Long Count calendar, one of 28 in the time-obsessed Maya system, that was being dangled like a piece of fresh meat before a pack of hungry wolves. The calendar simply rolled over into a new cycle and they started counting anew.

Maya Calendar (Historyonthenet.com)

But old habits die hard and just over a year ago a ruckus erupted over a tweet that suggested the Maya 2012 end of the world prophecy was off by a good eight years. That catapulted said end date smack dab into the cross hairs of 2020 —what a year that ended up being. 

The prediction however was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted.

With ongoing global events, that very possibility—the world ending—may have crossed your mind.  And for the beginning of "the end" to start in 2020? Well, we've lived through two years of continuous threat from a raging pandemic still not fully in check. Let it be said some of us may have considered that to be a precursor of things to come. But it looks like we're still standing.

END OF 13TH BAKTUN

To explain biologist Tagalogquin's reasoning, apparently he did a math re-do on the Julian calendar that dates back to 8 CE and was used until the Gregorian or Christian calendar came into being in 1752. After his calculations, he came up with this tweet: "Following the Julian calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into the Gregorian calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian calendar (1752 - 2020) times 11 days equals 2,948 days / 365 (per year) equals eight years."

The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order.

Dresden Codex providing clues to Maya calendars (NGS photo)

Back in 2012, some believed December 21, 2012, might be the end. The media blared non-stop that this was when the Maya Long Count calendar completed a 5, 125 year cycle known as the 13th baktun. The ancient Maya, an advanced culture of mathematicians (they invented zero) and naked eye astronomers, viewed this moment as consequential.

CALENDAR SHUFFLE

Why is this even important? If the Maya code had not been deciphered a few decades ago, we wouldn't even have known that an end date to the Long Count calendar existed.

In researching the Maya end date, I realized that converting both Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Maya calendar had been no easy task. Spanish speaking priests were used for the conversion and needed to interact with the Maya who had their own language. Not only was there room for error in language differences, but the Julian calendar had gone through several trial runs over the centuries as the world coped with a one-time-fits-all calendar system.

During the conversion, some countries used different calendar renditions simultaneously, and some time in the 1500s while trying to play catch-up, eleven days were lost in a single month. My overall impression: whoever had been relegated to configure dates from Julian to Gregorian to Maya had stared down an impossible undertaking. And furthermore, who was their fact checker?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ CHEN

As the end date blossomed into a full-on media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the "Maya prophecy" as it came to be known. Great change doesn't happen overnight and can span decades or even centuries, and as with all things Maya, the present is determined by the past. Everything repeats. Everything is a recurring pattern.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Laureate

In 2012 Nobel laureate and author Rigoberto Menchú Tum, a Ki'che' Maya from Guatemala who was forced to leave her country when her government disappeared thousands of indigenous Maya, said this, "There are a lot of people speaking for the Maya with little respect for the sacred Maya calendar or the culture.

TIME DOES NOT EXIST

"For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is 'disordered time,' when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.

"The Maya elders say if we do not take right action today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish."

Tum said this in 2012. Flash forward to 2020—especially the "plagued by loneliness, stress and fear" part of her quote and we can cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And we can all agree that in the past several years numerous issues have caused hardship: floods, hurricanes, raging fires, wars, racial inequality and unwarranted deaths. The stark reality of all the above drives away any hope for a soon to be bright future.

A MOMENT OF CHAOS

Maya Renaissance film by PeaceJam

In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, film makers and founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the interview, Menchú Tum said we're living in a moment of chaos, and though there is global disorder, 2012 would usher in a more balanced period, if only we allow it.

DISORDERED TIME

"A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, and our personal and collective light," she said. "We are passing through a period of disordered time which began in 1992 and will last forty years. There are things that happened that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos."

TRANSITION TAKES TIME

In the film, Menchú Tum references her spiritual advisors, Maria Faviana Chocoy Alva and Pedro Celestino Pac Noy, who state that apocalyptic predictions misrepresent the true meaning of the end of the Maya Long Count cycle known as the thirteenth baktun. Their position is that this would be a time of great transition.

Calendar cycle cogs (By DK)

Who cannot agree that this is a time of transition, said Menchú Tum. "For humanity, it is the darkest of times. Humanity is being called to a great respon-sibility, affected by our actions. We call them natural disasters but they are not natural. Much pain is already occurring."

Again, Menchú Tum's sagacious predictions are synonymous with what we are presently living with—the human pain endured by the Covid pandemic, the earth's pain due to our disconnect from Mother Nature, and the atrocities humans have unleashed on the planet. Time, as the Maya might say, will tell.

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If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy.