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France and Germany were mastered by Charlemagne at 30. Lord Clive conquered India at 32. Philip Sheridan was a 31-year-old general. Hannibal was but 31 at Cannae. Alexander conquered the known world at 33.
In poets, painters and musicians the thin blue flame of genius has ever flickered early. Bryant wrote Thanatopsis at 17, the age of Chatterton when he destroyed his promise by suicide, and of Mendelssohn when he composed Midsummer Night's Dream overture. Shelley's Queen Mab came at 21, Keats' Endymion at 23, 40 of Raphael's madonnas before 28, Rembrandt's Lesson in Anatomy at 26. Schubert, dead at 31, wrote over 600 songs. . . . Joan of Arc restored France at sweet 16.
But what of a woman who founds a college at the age of 89? What of a woman born under William IV who now discusses the Coolidge administration, a woman who taught school when Lincoln was a country lawyer, who helped found a newspaper in the year 1873?
Ellen Browning Scripps was seven when her father, a London bookbinder, settled at Rushville, Ill. Nearby, at Nauvoo, Joseph Smith reigned over his Mormons with a lusty lieutenant, Brigham Young. She can remember how the threat, "Mormons!" was addressed to recalcitrant children; how houses were barricaded against Mormon raids. California, where she was one day to live, was a lonely coast unknown to golddiggers.
She wanted a college education and got It, at Knox College in neighboring Galesburg. When her brother James started the Detroit News she joined him, read proof, prepared miscellany. In the '70s, Woman Suffrage and Prohibition were unheard of doctrines. She wrote, taught, thought them. Her brothers* continued building newspapers, the Cleveland Press, St. Louis Chronicle, Cincinnati Post. She became a rich woman, "with a remarkable capacity for statements and figures."
"Miss Ellen" has always regarded her wealth as "a trust for the benefit of humanity." Her personal expenditures are trifling. She gives, has made giving an art. She runs her eye down a contribution list, matches her donation with the largest there, says "Whatever you lack, come to me. . . ." When the La Jolla Women's Club was founded, she sought out women of literary tastes financially unable to join, penned them notes, "Please accept membership as a present from me. . . ."
She gave the world's largest aviary to Balboa Park, San Diego; the San Diego Community Welfare Building; the La Jolla playground (stipulating free speech thereon); the Scripps Memorial Hospital; the Scripps Biological Institute at Miramar (to further the work of Dr. W. E. Ritter, world-known marine biologist). She met an artist who was compelled to live outdoors, commissioned him to make 20 volumes of Golden State wildflower paintings. She underwrote a similar project to publish Birds of California. Yet the bulk of her giving has been indirect or anonymous.