There is an interesting story about how Ruth Brylawski acquired the first name “Jere,” and it can be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 14th edition gave new form and shape to earlier editions of this respected reference work, and its appearance in 1929 was a major publishing event. The spine of Volume 12 of this edition indicated that it covered items ranging from beginning letters HYDR to JERE, with an article on JEREmiah closing out the volume. There is still some question as to when those final closing letters were first applied as a name to Ruth Brylawski, as well as to who applied them. Jere herself said that her father gave it to her as a joking nickname. Friends and scholars maintain that it was given to her by her husband, who was known for conducting word plays in his correspondence with his good friend e.e. cummings. And then there is the question of why either one of these men would have done this. Was it a play on the British term for a German: “Jerry,” and therefore a teasing reference to her German family background? Did it refer to her serious, driven manner by playing on the story of the Biblical prophet? And, finally, why did Ruth herself so wholeheartedly embrace “Jere,” to the exclusion of her birth name?
Ruth Frances Brylawski was born on November 25, 1907, into a prominent, well-to-do family living in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Brylawski, was a member of the governing board of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and President of the city’s Jewish Maternity Hospital. Her mother, Hortense (Mendelsohn), served on the governing board of the National Council of Jewish Women and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; she was also invited to sing at various social events. Both parents were Jews of German heritage. Ruth grew up with two brothers and a younger sister. Ruth’s older family members spoke German with her when she was a child. This, and the presence of young German immigrant serving girls in the household gave her fluency in spoken German. In many ways, her mother served as a role model to Ruth, showing how, while serving as hostess and helpmate to her husband, she pursued her own causes and interests outside of the domestic sphere.
Ruth’s childhood was privileged. She grew up with horses and dogs, and developed a passionate interest in fencing. When she was 12 she had her first poem published in a Jewish newspaper on a page edited by her aunt, Emma Brylawski. Entitled “Voices of Spring,” this poem read, in part, “From earth, dew-wet, blue violets rise,/ Matching in beauty the azure skies,/ And with their perfume, voiceless they sing/ The joyful message of youthful Spring.” The poem not only shows that Ruth already had a deep affinity for her natural surroundings; it also reflects her preference for the color blue. Her mother had, early on, taught Ruth to favor blue clothing, because it brought out the startling blue in her eyes.
Ruth’s parents encouraged her in her dog breeding, horsemanship, poetry, and in her love of fencing. She went to a private school that gave her fluency in French, she then went to Paris and spent a year studying at the Sorbonne. Upon her return home to the States she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in languages and psychology. She then went on to earn a master’s degree in political science. And, in the summer of 1928, she and her sister spent 6 weeks in Montreal, studying at McGill University’s French summer school.
Upon completion of her master’s degree, Ruth got a job as secretary for the Pennsylvania chapter of the League of Nations Association. During these years, Ruth showed jumping and gaited horses, although fencing continued to dominate much of her free time. She became an active member in the Philadelphia Sword Club and participated in local and regional competitions. The Jewish Exponent closely followed her progress, reporting in June 1932, for example, that she was one of a roster of “outstanding Jewish athletes [… ] proving that the female of the species is as medley as the male ,[… and] without conceding a mite of brain-pan, either.” In June it reported that she had won the division senior foil title for the fourth consecutive year at the championship fencing tourney held at the Penn Athletic Club. By now she was touted as “the best-known Philadelphian in this field.” The paper noted, too, that she was “one of many Jewish women interested in sports,” even though Jewish women fencers were rare. In 1930 she was nominated to the 1932 Olympic Fencing Team, was fencing with the Olympic junior team, and was named an alternate to the Olympic Games.
Ruth Brylawski, 1928
While engaged in all these activities, Ruth was courted by Robert Archer Pierce, a young naval officer and grandson of former US President Franklin Pierce. Pierce was, as his high school yearbook noted, “a real gentleman of imperturbable disposition.” Their engagement was short-lived, and, in 1930, Pierce married another woman, went on to father two children, and served in the Philippines, where he died from surgical complications in 1937.
Eric Knight’s courtship of Ruth was more persistent and more enduring. They met by accident. As Ruth would tell of their first encounter in the fall of 1930: "We’d been to the Philadelphia Orchestra and dropped in afterwards at the Russian Inn where a mutual friend introduced me to Eric Knight. I was working for the League of Nations Association. Eric and I got into this fantastic argument about wars. He said there would always be wars because wars offered things we can’t get in peace."
They did not meet up again until the following spring. She recognized him immediately: Eric came through the door all dressed up. He said: “There’s a newspaper party. I”ll introduce you to a world you never knew.” "I went to the party with Eric and that was it, just like that. He was multitalented, not only a film critic with a formidable reputation but an artist who had studied at the Boston School of Fine Arts, as well as a born story-teller with a magnetism that could light up a room. He had perfect pitch. Hum a tune and he could play it [on his piano accordion]."
Eric Knight was a proud Yorkshireman who had worked his way up from the poor working class by dint of hard work, charisma, and chutzpah. He had a delightful Yorkshire accent and an unruly shock of red hair; he was also ten years older than Ruth and had a failed marriage behind him. He had, only recently, been reunited with his oldest daughter Betty, who had found him by accident after having being told at the time of her parents’ separation that her father was dead. Eric was completely smitten by Ruth. He sent her two letters every day, many written in humorous imitation of well-known poets. Ruth called these letters “hand holding by proxy.” One of these letters, reminiscent of Cole Porter, read:
You’re like Shakespeare sonnets or Swinburne couplets
You’re a bigger thing than those quintuplets
You’re a flight from coast to coast by Wiley Post
You super superlative girl
His effusion knew no bounds. Eric was a celebrity through his articles and movie reviews for the Philadelphia newspaper The Public Ledger, and, when he and Ruth were married in the Philadelphia Town Hall on December 2, 1931 Eric wrote it up in in the paper, repeatedly asking, “Did I tell you the bride was beautiful?”
Ruth now became a part of Eric’s world. From now on her name was “Jere”; she dropped her Jewish identity completely, and became a Quaker, as he was. She even claimed that Eric greatly improved her personality. Before meeting him, she said, she had been “a horrible bluestocking,” but Eric had liberated her by his “leaven” of humor. As Eric Knight’s biographer has put it: “They made an exceptional couple. Eric Knight alone was irresistible company in any circle, but he and Jere together were magnetic.” Jere’s friend Geoff Gehman explained it this way: “Eric and Jere felt unloved by their families, and they compensated by being everything for one another. They were ‘the best of their lot,’ they were ‘going to win the war,’ they were ‘Jeric’.” For over ten years they lived a magical life together, consorting with the likes of writers Ernest Hemingway and e. e. cummings, artists Peter Hurd and Grant Wood, singers Paul Robeson and Nelson Eddy, movie stars Spencer Tracy and Mary Pickford. They took tea at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt and were invited to the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. Jere introduced Eric to horseback riding, and he became an enthusiastic rider. And she shared with him her love of dogs.
Jere had withdrawn from the Olympic Junior Team when she and Eric married and, throughout their life together, she adjusted her own work to Eric’s needs. When Eric went to Hollywood to serve as script writer and adviser for the Fox Film Corporation, Jere followed, and took a job as assistant story editor for Selznick International pictures. Her job was to read and evaluate foreign language film scripts, and translate the best for studio consideration. In her work she supervised, among others, Ring Lardner Jr. and Budd Schulberg Jr. When Eric quit Hollywood and moved to New York, Jere returned to the East Coast as Eastern story editor for Selznick; she is credited with playing a role in the acquisition of film rights for Gone with the Wind. Eric and she fully supported each other to the extent that neither felt any resentment or jealousy when one of them happened to be earning more than the other.
Eric and Jere Knight with Toots and one of her pups.
This allowed Eric the freedom to develop his skills as a novelist. He shared his work in progress with his wife, and, as a result, it is likely that Jere used her editorial skills to help improve the final drafts.
Jere even had an indirect hand in the creation of Eric’s best-known novel Lassie Come-Home. Soon after her arrival in Hollywood to join Eric, her pet fox terrier was struck and killed by a car. Eric immediately went out and bought her a 6-week-old border collie from a fellow Yorkshireman. He named the dog “Toots. ” The name came from a popular song recorded by Eddie Cantor in 1934, about a couple of “newlyweds” who’d been “newlyweds for years.” Eric had often sung it to Jere. The text read, in part:
Okay Toots!
I'll bring all my dough to you,
I'll keep every vow;
I'll never say no to you,
You've got a yes-man now!
Eric came to adore the dog, so much so than it came to be regarded as more his dog than Jere’s. He marveled at the dog’s intelligence and loyalty. Jere shared his admiration:
"She was the most warm, the most loyal, the most loving, devoted dog. We had her from babyhood on, until she died of old age, at 14. The intelligence of that dog was exceptional. She had an unusual range of vocabulary—an unusual number of words she could understand, and commands she could execute. She simply would not leave where we were. If we were gone, she’d wait for us indefinitely. When Eric was in Washington, on military duty, she used to sit at the front gate of our farm, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and watch for him. She’s buried there, on the farm.”
Eric was inspired by Toots’s love and loyalty—and by stories of unemployed British workers forced to sell their beloved dogs—to write a short story, “Lassie Come-Home,” about a collie who travels from her new home in Scotland to the home of her original Yorkshire owner. The story appeared just before Christmas in the December 17, 1938 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, and it drew such an enthusiastic response, that Eric then expanded the story into a novel of the same name that appeared in 1940. Jere helped teach Eric about collie behavior, while Toots served as “canine consultant.” Eric was the exclusive creator of the story line, however. Jere recalled: “At the end of each day […] he’d always read what he’d written to his daughter Betty and to me. And we’d sit there, with tears rolling down our faces over the sad parts, saying, ‘You can’t do that!'”
But Eric and Jere were also following the war news in Europe. Eric was frantic that the United States do more to rescue Britain from Hitler’s plans of conquest, and he wrote a novel This Above All, published in 1941, that played in England and featured an AWOL officer and an English nurse during the London Blitzkrieg. Through this novel he hoped to force Americans to look at the very real threat Britain was facing in the war, and to force America to get involved. He followed the same pattern as he had with Lassie, reading to his family each evening what he had written during the day. Jere recalled: “If it didn’t sound well when read aloud he’d tear it up and start again. We had exciting times analyzing what ‘he’ and ‘she’ should do in various circumstances, and I used to smile when I’d find myself in some character’s lines.” Hollywood turned the book into a 1942 film starring Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine. In the meantime, Jere served as ghost writer for Always Room at the Top, the memoirs of Polish opera singer and garden enthusiast Ganna Walska, that was published in 1943.
Eric had now signed up for the army, and, in 1942, was recruited by Major Frank Capra to write the basic scripts for a series of military propaganda movies entitled “Why We Fight.” Eric also wrote The US Forces Handbook, as a way of introducing American soldiers to British ways and manners. He was appointed a commissioned US Army officer, and quickly given American citizenship.
Like Eric, Jere was involved in promoting support for American involvement in the European war, despite her nascent pacifism. When she and Eric went to England in the winter of 1941/42 to witness the efforts the British were making in their determined fight against Germany, she penned an article for the June 6th issue of the Saturday Evening Post on “Britain’s Petticoat Army.” In describing the article, the Post editors noted that “Women’s place in England is apt to be behind an aek-aek.” They characterized Jere herself as “A Knight Sans Peur.” “Mrs. Knight is an Anglophile, but was born in Pennsylvania and is as American as buckwheat cakes and Philadelphia scrapple,” they said of her. As to her purpose in writing the article, “If she is fulsome in her praise of the women of Britain […,] it is in the hope of stimulating the women of America to the realization of the part they must play in this war if it’s to be won with the greatest possible dispatch.” And, in speaking of her and Eric’s Pennsylvania farm, they wrote that Jere found only one defect in the farm that she and Eric lived on: “It is too small to be used as a headquarters for a possible American Women’s Land Army.”
Jere with a Peter Hurd Portrait of Eric Knight
Jere rejoiced when the US Congress passed the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Bill in May 1942, and supported its first director, Oveta Culp Hobby, by serving her as an aide and speechwriter. In July 1943, President Roosevelt signed legislation that changed the name of the Corps to the Women’s Army Corps, thereby making it part of the US Army and giving women all the rank, privileges, and benefits of their male counterparts. A month later, Jere joined up.
For Jere, the timing was beneficial, since, in January of that year, Eric had been killed, when the military transport plane he was flying in to Cairo exploded over Dutch Guiana [Suriname]. Many believed that a bomb had been planted on the plane, since Eric had been involved beforehand in secret talks with Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s most trusted advisor, and since other passengers on the plane were intelligence men headed to the Casablanca Conference to plan strategy for the next phase of the war. Jere received a personal condolence letter from the President and, in 1946, accepted Eric’s posthumous award of the Legion of Merit.
Jere found some comfort for her heartbreak in Toots. As she wrote in a poem:
Two doves
are making love
outside my window
perched on a strut
of summer canopy
while I sit here alone
with only a dog
for companion
[…]
I wonder whether Mrs. Job
complained when God
destroyed all they
had built together
children, cattle, domicile,
did she cry out
or did she smile
because she had a dog.
Jere, as a newly commissioned
WAC officer, 1943.
Jere and Eric had always fought together in their battle to support Britain. Now Jere had even more cause to go to war, since she was acting not only for herself but as Eric’s representative. She threw herself into her work, was commissioned a lieutenant and, after working at the Pentagon under Oveta Culp Hobby, and completing her stateside service at Camp Ritchie, was sent to England to work at SHAEF headquarters. Here she directed a team of cryptographers active in translating decoded messages into English; she reported directly to General Eisenhower. But the SHAEF headquarters also took full advantage of Jere’s writing and editing skills. She was charged with writing reports on intelligence and well-being, and wrote a speech on logistics for General Eisenhower. In 1944 she was assigned to the Pentagon before returning to SHAEF headquarters in London. She had three private luncheons with Eisenhower during the time she was stationed there and confessed to a young friend that Ike was “sweet” on her.
Immediately after the German surrender, she traveled throughout Central Europe as WAC Public Relations Officer, in the company of veteran journalist Elizabeth May Craig. On this tour she spoke with former prisoners of war—Americans as well as Poles, Germans, and Italians, and made careful observations on the toll the war had taken on European civilization. She also spent time in Paris, where she focused her PR on the service troops who had backed up the men at the front. “It takes eight men to keep one fighting,” she said. “These people work hard and nobody ever writes anything about them.” She interviewed the heads of all the service departments in Paris and wrote numerous reports describing their crucial war work. She was gratified to find that one of these articles made the first page of the New York Times.
At the time of her discharge in May, 1946, Jere held the rank of Major and was the recipient of a bronze star for her work in establishing the WACs.
Jere now returned to Springhouse Farm, the home where she and Eric had lived, and where she now developed her own reputation as WAC veteran and as lecturer. One of the first talks she gave, in May 1946, was before the Quakertown Women’s Club, where she began, provocatively enough, declaring that American women were “spoiled to death.” She then called on on them to “exercise real citizenship, […] make their votes count and bring pressure on the government through their actions.” “We have real power,” she stated, “and it is up to us to use it.” While Eric had been alive, she had refused personal interviews, and remained private about her own work. Now she developed her own professional profile, always, however, using it to enhance Eric’s life and work. She held Eric’s copyrights, and, in the 1950s, released two of her own versions of Lassie that she geared especially to child readers: Lassie Come-Home (1956) and Lassie’s Long Trip (1957).
Jere introduces her son Jeffrey to
President Eisenhower, 1957.
Then, in early November 1946, the local paper made a startling announcement. Under the heading “Author is Bride,” it printed a photo of Jere, in army uniform, and stated that “announcement has been made of the recent marriage of Mrs. Jere Knight, widow of Major Eric Knight, and Frederick Lindtner.” It went on to state her background, the fact of Eric’s death, but nothing at all about her new husband. Lindtner was, in fact, a strappingly handsome Major in the US Army Air Force. Blond and blue-eyed, Lindtner had been born and grown up in Stavanger, Norway. He had come to the States when he was 17, had served as a staff officer with the Eighth Air Force, and was in the first contingent to arrive in England in 1942. He remained in the air force after the war, serving first in Paris, then in the States as Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel at the headquarters of the Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base. He moved up rapidly through the ranks, and, in August 1951, was promoted to Colonel. When they married, Frederick was 44 years old, and Jere was 38.
The couple kept Springhouse Farm as their home base, and retreated here as often as possible. But Frederick’s duties required that they spend a good deal of time in D.C. Here Jere, as “Mrs. Frederick Lindtner,” hosted teas and spoke to numerous groups on topics such as “Ernest Hemingway, His Background and his Books” and “John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.” But in Bucks County, she was “Jere Knight Lindtner” and was involved in charitable causes, speaking at a the unveiling of a wishing well money-raiser in Quakertown and dedicating new fire engine equipment to her late husband.
But the biggest event in Jere’s life was giving birth to a son, Jeffrey Lindtner, in 1948. Jeffrey not only brought great delight to her as a small boy, but also became an equal and friend when he grew up, ran the family farm, arranged for the publication of some of Jere’s poetry, and even surprised her with a long-promised collie pup descended from the Lassie in the original Lassie movie.
Given Jere’s previous life, it is surprising to see her listed, in the 1950 census, as a “housewife,” and her address as being in Alexandria, Virginia. It appears that she was trying, as she had done with Eric, to downplay her own activities while working to support her husband. In 1951, for example, she and Jeffrey accompanied Frederick when he was assigned to an eight-week tour to Britain and to western Europe. Following their return, she did, however, address the Woman’s Club at Langley Air Force Base, giving her own “Impressions” of the situation in these countries. It is unclear when the marriage began to go bad, but, in June 1956, Jere filed for divorce on grounds of “indignities.” This was before Pennsylvania granted no-fault divorces, and was the most common reason given before one could plead “irreconcilable differences.” Jere now went from her role as “housewife” to that of “writer, editor, educator.”
She became more and more active in the mid-fifties, especially in mental health issues, first, as part of a group involved in studying childhood mental illness, then, as Director of the Bucks County Mental Health Association. Under these auspices she gave presentations on “Our Mentally Handicapped,” and pushed for reforms in treatment. She also taught for two years at Moravian Preparatory School in Bethlehem, PA.
Jere and “Blackie,” 1988.
One of Eric’s closest friends had been the poet e. e. cummings; Jere had maintained the friendship and, after cummings’ death in 1962, served as literary executrix of his will. She also devoted a great deal of time to promoting Eric Knight’s legacy — through interviews, exhibits, and public lectures. She donated Eric’s papers to the Yale University archives in 1948. She continued breeding collies at the Springhouse Farm, and took her prize collie “Blackie” to schools for talks with children about animal behavior. In 1972 she authorized a new edition of Lassie that made some textual changes that she ascribed to Eric. A few years later she made a pilgrimage to Suriname to view the site where his plane had gone down. “Bits and pieces of the wreckage was all that had ever been found, and the traces were gone,” she remarked, “but I think he’s really lots of places. He planted bluebells and daffodils over the woods here [at Springhouse Farm], and they’re still blooming today.”
In 1990 she participated in the organization of two special exhibits on “Lassie”, one at Yale, and one in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. She also went to Britain, to speak, on site, as it were, about her husband’s inspiration to write the novel in 1940.
But Jere was also creative in her own right. She served Lehigh University history professor Lawrence Henry Gibson as research and editorial assistant, helping him complete his 15-volume history, The British Empire Before the American Revolution. One of the volumes she edited, Volume 10, won the Pulitzer prize in 1962. In 1967 The Bethlehem Globe-Times published her book-length supplement on the Lehigh Valley's economic history; in 1976 she wrote The Bicentennial History of Northampton County. And she began publishing her own poems.
One of Jere’s more pleasurable undertakings was penning the libretto to an opera, Helen in Egypt, composed by Lehigh music professor Jonathan Elkus. Jere based her libretto upon the epic poem of the same name that had been written by the modernist/imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in the 1950s. H. D. was a Bucks County native, and Jere had first become aware of her in the 1930s. “She was for us, my generation, a romantic figure,” she said. She finally met the poet in 1956, when she was teaching at the Moravian Preparatory School, at the very time H.D. was working on “Helen in Egypt.” H.D.s poem—and Jere’s libretto—gave the myth of the Trojan War a feminist interpretation. The opera premiered at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee in 1970. And in September 1986, Jere participated in a symposium held at Moravian College on the centennial of H.D.’s birth, by reading from “Helen in Egypt” at a session where she appeared together with the young poet, translator, and jazz critic Zoë Anglesey. The occasion seems to have opened up a conversation about Anglesey’s desire to edit and publish a volume of Central American Women’s “Poetry for Peace.” Published in 1988 under the title Ixok Amar.Go, the volume contains Jere’s translations of poems by Guatemalan poet Margarita Asurdia, and by Costa Rican poets Virginia Grütter, Esther María Osses, and Consuelo Tomás. And she and Anglesey appeared in a reading of these poems at the Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse in Bethlehem.
Jere was getting on in years, but that did not seem to stint her activities in the least. She traveled to the Near East and to the Soviet Union. She opposed the Vietnam War and participated in anti-war demonstrations. And she spoke out for nuclear disarmament.
In 1986 she went to Nicaragua with a group of pacifists, and, on her return, gave numerous lectures on the situation in that country; she even published a long poem on it. She joined her fellow travelers to Nicaragua in publishing an open letter to President Reagan, petitioning him to withdraw US forces from Honduras, to abandon his support to the contras, and to work with Nicaragua’s legally elected government by sending true humanitarian aid to assist in rebuilding the country.
She also turned her lifelong love of nature to serious environmental concerns. In 1972 she went to Stockholm to attend the first United Nations Conference on Human Environment. Jere went, knowing full well that the UN hadn’t the sovereign power to implement or control anything. Still, she said, “If nothing else, the conference laid down principles for an environmental ethic.” She noted that, at this conference, the United States was “roundly condemned for ecocide in Southeast Asia—of not only destroying human life but of “rendering the land in Vietnam unfit for human habitation and causing longterm damage to the land, air and water.” She was adamant that Americans get involved cleaning up the environment, noting that “as the world’s most highly developed nation, we contribute most to world pollution problems.”
Jere Knight, 1994
Jere wrote up her experiences in Stockholm for the Bethlehem Globe-Times, audited an ecology course at Lehigh University, and became co-director of the Cook’s Creek Watershed Association. She wrote numerous newspaper articles explaining the threat to the Cook’s Creek watershed from agricultural runoff and called for its protection. In 1980 her work was recognized when fellow Cook’s Creek Watershed members Peter and Joan Fuller created a Jere Knight Nature Trail on the farm property that they later donated for a natural preserve. The preserved area was later expanded to 100 acres and, in 1990, opened to the public.
Other honors followed. In September 1994, the Springfield Township supervisors named Jere its first community quality-of-life honoree, or township “Czar.” After hearing about all that she had done for the town as a volunteer, as a historian, and especially as a pioneer conservationist active in open space preservation and recycling, Jere remarked, “They put in everything but the kitchen stove.” She then used the opportunity to hawk a new video, produced by the Bucks County League of Women Voters, that addressed water pollution in the county. As to her honor: “In 80 years you do a lot. The best part of me now is my mind. It seems to be good.”
Then, in January 1995, Jere was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Lehigh University, in recognition of her many contributions to the university and of her work as poet, writer, editor, and environmental activist. Upon receiving this degree, Jere said that she couldn’t help suspecting that she was being honored for her love of animals, especially dogs, especially collies. Perhaps, she joked, she should donate her degree in humane letters to a humane society.
Jere suffered a stroke in November 1995, and died the following June at age 88. Her ashes were interred at the Richland Friends Meeting Burial Ground. But a portion of her ashes were buried at Springhouse Farm, next to the grave of the collie Toots. It was Jere herself who provided the best summary of her life: “It was a joy to walk beside Eric, but I’ve gone on to do a lot on my own.”
Beverley Driver Eddy
December 2022
1. The Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia), 9 Apr. 1920, 5.
2. Oscar Loeb, “The Observation Car,” The Jewish Exponent (Philadelphia, 10 June 1932, 10.
3. The Jewish Exponent [Philadelphia], 29 Jan. 1932, 5.
4. The Brownsville Texas high school yearbook, 1923. Cited in “VMH: Robert A. Pierce, Lt., USN.” https://usnamemorialhall.org/index.php/ROBERT_A._PIERCE,_LT,_USN
5. Cited in Greg Christie, Knight: Yorkshireman, Storyteller, Spy. Folkestone, Kent: Ouen Press, 2018, 58.
6. Cited in Time Lines of Jere & Eric Knight.” https://www.jereknight.com/time-lines.html#:~:text=JERE%20KNIGHT’S%20TIMELINE%201907%3A%20Born%20Ruth%20Frances%20Brylawski,HYDR%20to%20JERE%20volume%20of%20the%20Encyclopedia%20Britannica.“
7. Cited in “Time Lines of Jere & Eric Knight.” https://www.jereknight.com/time-lines.html.
8. Geoff Gehman, “Ecologist, Advocate of Meaningful Literature Jere Knight 1908-1996, The Morning Call, 30 June 1996. https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-06-30-3084740-story.html
9. Greg Christie, Knight, 60.
10. Geoff Gehman, “Author’s Widow Nurtured All with Quiet Quaker Compassion,” The Morning Call, 9 July 1996. https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-07-10-3110529-story.html
11. “Okay Toots.” Music by Walter Donaldon, lyrics by Gustave [Gus] Kahn. https://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/o/okaytoots.html
12. Cited in “Lassie: ‘She Was Our Dog, Eric’s and Mine’,” TV Guide, Triangle Publications, 10 June 1972. http://www.lassieweb.org/lasseric.htm
13. “Time Lines of Jere & Eric Knight.” https://www.jereknight.com/time-lines.html
14. Cited in “Lassie: ‘She Was Our Dog, Eric’s and Mine’.”
15. Willa Martin, “A Lady Knight Joins the WACs,” The Evening Star (Washington DC), 28 Nov. 1943, C-5.
16. “A Knight Sans Peur,” Saturday Evening Post, 6 June 1942, 5.
17. “It Isn’t Fair,” The Uphill View. Richlandtown, PA: Petoskey Stone Press, 1993. https://www.jereknight.com/poetry.html
18. Jere Knight, The Uphill View. Richlandtown PA: Petoskey Stone Press, 1993.
19. Geoff Gehman, “Author’s Widow Nurtured All with Quiet Quaker Compassion,” The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 10 July, 1996. https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-07-10-3110529-story.html
20. Anne Shultes, "Jere Knight shared with her husband an amazing range of talents,” Doylestown Intelligencer, 22 Feb. 1987, 52 [C12].
21. “Says American Women ‘Spoiled to Death’,” The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 15 May 1946, 7.
22. “Author is Bride,” The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), 6 Nov. 1946, 19.
23. Anne Shultes,“Lassie came home, the author never did,”Doylestown Intelligencer, 22 Feb. 1987, 52 [C12].
24. Geoff Gehman, “Hilda Doolittle’s art—and life—remain an enchanting mystery,” The Morning Call [Allentown PA], 8 Sept. 1986, 42 [D2].
25. Anne Kovalenko, “Saucon Woman Describes Talks On Environment,” The Morning Call [Allentown, PA], 15 Oct. 1972, 126 [F6].
26. Rochelle Craig, “Jere Knight Honored by Bucks Township,” The Morning Call [Allentown, PA], 22 Sept. 1994, 24.
27. Rochelle Craig, “Jere Knight Honored by Bucks Township,” The Morning Call [Allentown, PA], 22 Sept. 1994, 24.