Peabiddy, Peabody, and Peabodys
Posted: May 31, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
In Massachusetts there is a town called Peabody. Locally it is pronounced “PEE-biddy.”
The town was once part of Salem, and then became “South Danvers,” and then, in 1868, changed its name to Peabody, in honor of George Peabody, who was born there.
George Peabody was a financier and pioneer of trans-Atlantic banking. He started out, like every other rich American of the 19th century, in “dry goods,” and then selling cotton in the UK. He expanded into banking. He would sell the bonds of US states in London.
Here’s some of what Ron Chernow says about him in House of Morgan:
Peabody, a good talker, was not prepossessing. Over six feet tall with light blue eyes and dark brown hair, he had a rumpled face, with knobby chin, bulbous nose, side whiskers, and heavy-lidded eyes. That this homely man would found the House of Morgan-later a white-glove affair with high-society partners famous for good looks and stylish dress—is ironic. He carried the scars of early poverty and was quick to feel slights and perceive enemies. Like many who have overcome early hardship by brute force, he was proud but insecure, always at war with the world and counting his injuries.
Born in Danvers, Massachusetts, he had only a few years of schooling. When he was a teenager, his father died, and Peabody worked in his brother’s shop to support his widowed mother and six siblings. When he later prospered in a Baltimore dry-goods business with a rich older partner, Elisha Riggs, he remained haunted by his past. “I have never forgotten and never can forget the great privations of my early years, he later said.3 He hoarded his money, worked incessantly, and retained a lonely air.
In 1837, Peabody moved to London. A year later he opened a merchant house at 31 Moorgate in London, furnishing it with a mahogany counter, a sate, and some desks. He joined a select group of merchant bankers who traded in dry goods and also financed such trade; hence, their businesses became known as merchant banks. They developed a form of wholesale banking remote from the prosaic world of bank books, teller windows, and checking accounts.
Late in life, he looked for a successor:
Ordinarily, Peabody would have chosen a son or nephew to take over the business. Most merchant banks were family partnerships with a few talented outsiders. But as a bachelor, Peabody was in the unusual position of having to shop for an heir and bequeath his empire to a stranger.
He was, however, no stranger to the company of women. While he didn’t smoke or drink, he resorted to the shadowy world of illicit pleasure
(He had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter.)
Peabody took on a young partner, also from Massachusetts, named Junius Spencer Morgan.
Late in life, this Peabody became charitable:
The Civil War years saw the metamorphosis of George Peabody from Scrooge to Santa Claus. He had been a prototypical heartless banker, a one-dimensional hoarder. As a contemporary said, “Uncle George, as Americans… call him—was one of the dullest men in the world: he had positively no gift, except that of making money.”29 Yet this dour man suddenly became prodigal in his gifts; his philanthropy was as immoderate as his earlier greed. He found it hard to break his miserly habits. “It is not easy to part with the wealth we have accumulated after years of hard work and difficulty,” he confessed. 30 Now a lifetime of hoarding was disgorged in one compensatory binge, cleansing his Yankee conscience.
Wikipedia declares him “the father of modern philanthropy.” The list of his causes is many. The Peabody Museum at Harvard is one that made an impression on young Helytimes.
The Peabody Education Fund, for the purpose of promoting “intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute portion of the Southern States,” post-Civil War, was another big one.
It may have been this effort that Robert Campbell Brinkley had in mind. Brinkley founded the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. The story goes that he was going to name it the Brinkley Hotel, but just then he found out his friend Peabody had died, so he named after the great philanthropist.
In Memphis they pronounce this hotel “Pee-Body.” My Massachusetts pronounciation caused me no end of queer looks when I lived in this hotel for a week in 2022 while my wife was working on Young Rock. What a happy time that was.
There was more than one philanthropic George Peabody. There was also George Foster Peabody:
This George Peabody was connected to Junius Spencer Morgan’s son, J.P. Morgan. When J.P. Morgan put together General Electric, he had this George Peabody on the board of directors. Did J.P. and George ever discuss his father’s friend George? No doubt. If George Foster was closely related to the first George, I can find no evidence of it, but they were probably connected somewhere.
George Foster Peabody was also a benefactor to the South. He was raised in Georgia, and developed Warm Springs, where his friend Franklin Roosevelt came to soak (and eventually died).
The Peabody Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting are administered by the University of Georgia, and are named after this Peabody.
Start researching Peabodys and they are legion. Nathaniel Hawthorne married a Peabody. The first English language kindergarten was started by Elizabeth Peabody:
Imagine having this lady teach you finger painting.
Two different Peabodys, Harlan Berkley Peabody Jr and Francis Peabody Magoun, were important in the study of oral poetry. (Berkley Peabody’s obituary is soothing reading). There was Frank Peabody the paleontologist, and Frances Peabody the doctor and essayist, and James Hamilton Peabody, governor of Colorado, who crushed the Cripple Creek miners’ strike, and Richard Peabody who fought alcoholism. The town of Peabody, Kansas is named after a vice president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (boy if you wanted a town named after you, 19th century railroad exec was the way to go).
How about tough old Endicott Peabody, the fighting reverend:
After his first semester of classes, Peabody was invited to take charge of a fledgling Episcopal congregation in Tombstone, Arizona. He arrived in January 1882, three months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Though Peabody felt unqualified, his stay in Tombstone proved that he could attract donors and manage a congregation, two traits he employed to great effect in his educational career. Within months, he raised $5,000 to build St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It opened on June 18, 1882, making it the oldest Protestant church building in Arizona.
It is said that he visited saloons to ask gamblers for donations and “would challenge locals to boxing matches on the condition that if he won, they had to come to church on Sunday,” although Peabody dismissed most of these stories as apocryphal.
This Peabody founded the Groton School. Isaacson & Thomas, in The Wise Men:Six Friends and the World They Made, say:
Groton’s driving force was Endicott Peabody, who ruled the school for its first sixty years. Educated in England at Cheltenham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Rector was a perfect Victorian. Tall and muscular, regarding his body as a temple, he always dressed in highly polished black shoes, blue suit, and white starched bow tie. As a thirteen-year-old Averell Harriman described him in a letter home:
“You know he would be an awful bully if he wasn’t such a terrible Christian.”
Peabody cared more about sportsmanship than scholarship. “I’m not sure I like boys who think too much,” he once said. “A lot of people think a lot of things we could do without.” He personally taught two subjects: football and sacred studies. “The way of the non-athlete at Groton was not so much hard as inconsequential,” wrote the school historian. “Football was the King of the Games. Theoretically, a boy does not have to play the game, but moral suasion on the part of the faculty and students makes it almost impossible to avoid doing so.”
…
Although Peabody was thoroughly intimidating, most of the students also revered him. He remained a loyal and powerful force to most of them throughout their lives, marrying them off, christening their children, and even on occasion visiting them in jail. (When one of his old prefects, New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whit-ney, was convicted of embezzlement, Peabody visited him at Sing Sing. He brought Whitney a first baseman’s mitt so he could play on the prison team.) Franklin Roosevelt cited him as “the biggest influence in my life.
… At the school’s twentieth anniversary celebration, the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, summed up that message for the students by paraphrasing the gospel of Luke: “Much has been given you. Therefore we have a right to expect much from you.”
Groton did produce more than its share of public servants. The school history notes that Groton’s first thousand graduates included a President, two Secretaries of State, two governors, three senators, and nine ambassadors, grandly extrapolating that it the rest of the U.S. population had produced leaders at the same rate, “there would have been 37,000 Presidents, 350,000 ambassadors, 110,000 Senators…” With some exceptions, most notably Franklin Roosevelt, Groton’s graduates avoided politics and tended to prefer the more discreet branches of government, particularly the OSS and the CIA. Few entered the ministry, and virtually none pursued the arts. Service to God and Country was overshadowed by service to Mammon. The largest single category of career choice in the school history is “finances, stocks, bonds, etc.”
The grandson of this Endicott Peabody was Endicott “Chub” Peabody, who served one term as governor of Massachusetts and then ran and lost for a series of offices of diminishing importance in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Chub. From his obituary in The Economist:
Young Endicott went to Groton, inheriting the nickname “Chub” from his father, who had also attended the school. They love tradition in Massachusetts.
In fact, as a young man he was more bulky than chubby. He was a football star at Harvard, a “baby-faced assassin” according to a writer in the Boston Globe. He had a brave war against the Japanese as a submarine officer, afterwards practising as a lawyer in Boston and getting political ambitions. He was in love with politics and after his string of failures moved to Washington for a time, just as a hopeful actor will go to Hollywood, without prospects but just to be there among the glamour. He did some lobbying and was given some minor political tasks by sympathetic Democrats.
In the tributes since his death “gentleman” is a word often used. He sometimes seemed to be too gentlemanly to be a successful politician. When he lost his bid for the Senate in 1966 he seemed genuinely pleased that his opponent, Edward Brooke, a black, had won. Ending racism was a family passion. At the age of 72 his mother was arrested in a southern town in 1964 for entertaining a group of whites and blacks in a segregated restaurant. Ending the death penalty was another of his campaigns, and he was always receptive to the latest liberal cause. One of his last tasks was to chair a meeting in Boston calling for the abolition of landmines.
What about the Mr. Peabody mentioned in John Prine’s song “Paradise”? That is Francis Peabody, founder of what’s now Peabody Energy. He was from Illinois, I don’t think he’s closely related to these Peabodys.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of bragging that Common Side Effects won a Peabody Award:
The ceremony will be at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a place that would probably shock Endicott. Then again is it worse than Tombstone?
We would be very remiss if we didn’t mention the greatest Peabody of all:
strange dream
Posted: May 24, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a commentwhere I was looking up this phrase I remembered from a 2001 New Yorker article.
John Lahr writing about a Kristin Chenoweth sitcom, Kristin.
Leaning against the bar across the room was John Markus, a goateed forty-four-year-old TV writer, who was about two weeks away from completing the pilot script for a sitcom starring Chenoweth, and who was wondering, as he watched her bask in the affection of her fans, whether he was doing the right thing.
At the time I read that he must’ve seemed impossible aged to me.
Stephen King on TV
Posted: November 15, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
from this Rolling Stone interview, old:
You mentioned watching a lot of TV. What’s the best show of the past 15 years?
Breaking Bad. I knew it was great from the first scene you see him wearing jockey shorts. I thought it was amazingly brave since they look so geeky.Do you think if you had been born at a later time you would have wanted to work as a TV showrunner?
No. Too much time for too little payoff. I don’t mean in terms of money. Also, showrunning is a thing where you have to work with tons of different people. You have to schmooze people, you have to talk to network people. I don’t want to do any of that.
Cheers for TV
Posted: September 16, 2022 Filed under: TV Leave a commentKurt Vonnegut and Nicholson Baker embraced good television. Vonnegut said he’d rather have written “Cheers” than any of his books. In Baker’s novel “The Anthologist” (2009), the poet-narrator comments, tongue only partially in cheek, that “any random episode of ‘Friends’ is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than 99 percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.”
from Dwight Garner’s review of David Milch’s book in the NYT. Also enjoyed this part:
Entertainingly, Milch spends money the way you think you might like to spend money, if you had it: He impulsively pays people’s hospital bills, college tuitions and funeral expenses; he’s an absurd tipper; if he likes a pair of Prada loafers he’ll get wardrobe to find out the shoe size of everyone in his crew and buy them a pair, too. He’ll spring for a hundred Egg McMuffins, because they’re delicious, and hand them out.
OK well one of those things costs thousands of dollars and one costs exactly $279.
E in P
Posted: November 17, 2020 Filed under: TV Leave a commentThe purpose of “Emily in Paris” is to provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone, refreshing your own feeds—on which you’ll find “Emily in Paris” memes, including a whole genre of TikTok remakes. It’s O.K. to look at your phone all the time, the show seems to say, because Emily does it, too. The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing; when you glance back up at the television, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways, lovely but meaningless. If you want more drama, you can open Twitter, to augment the experience. Or just leave the show on while cleaning the inevitable domestic messes of quarantine.
from a New Yorker piece, “‘Emily in Paris’ and the Rise of Ambient TV,” in the NYer by Kyle Chayka.
I swear, meant to write about this very show and this very idea here on Helytimes but was too sluggish, kudos to Kyle Chayka . Watched the entire series of E in P. The outfits are funny, Emily is amusing, the shots are pretty and colorful, the plots don’t require any taxing neural processing. I don’t say that as a knock on the show at all, you try making one as appealing. But for me, ambient.
Other shows do this for others. Chayka doesn’t mention this one but Below Deck Med, I sense that might be part the appeal there.
Is this a reversion to what TV is meant for? Is TV truly just an appliance and the content is meant to be pablum you can sort of have on for an ambient effect? Was the “golden age of TV” just a glitch of art that emerged in between the end of movies being interesting and the arrival of all-consuming phone content?
What about rewatches? Does some of the ambient effect explain the popularity on streamers of F*R*I*E*N*D*S and The Office? You can tune it in and have some friends in the room without the stress of seeing what will happen with Jim and Pam?
We’ve been rewatching Game of Thrones, phones nearby if not in hand, and I find it very satisfying to watch while knowing what’s gonna happen. Come to think of it, spoilers never bothered me, almost all the famous spoiler things were “spoiled” for me by the time I saw them and I didn’t care. I thought The Crying Game was fantastic.
Intrigued by what was on TV in 1940
Posted: October 20, 2020 Filed under: business, TV Leave a comment
From Larry McMurtry’s review of Connie Bruck’s bio of Lew Wasserman, in the newly unlocked NYRofB archives.
From those same archives, Renata Adler’s savage attack on Pauline Kael drops a parenthetical on TV:
this scene from Newsradio
Posted: October 19, 2019 Filed under: comedy, TV Leave a comment
(for when YouTube removes the link, it is a scene where Matthew and Joe bet on whether the next song on the radio will be good or not. The song that comes up is “Wichita Lineman.”)
Some things I like about the scene: the idea that depending on the circumstances you could believe this was a good or bad song. Matthew trying to sell it. Also Matthew’s honesty.
This may have been the first time I heard this song?
They turned the cat cafe into a guinea pig cafe as part of the Emmys campaign for Fleabag
Posted: August 11, 2019 Filed under: the California Condition, TV Leave a comment
Top Of The Rock
Posted: April 14, 2019 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
Purging some books from my collection.
This one no longer sparks joy. Perhaps because the cover itself is too busy, and also summons up a specific 90s period that now feels almost grotesque?
I got a lot out of this book. What an era – when the most popular TV show really was the funniest. On Frasier:
What a great, brilliant innovation. It really gave Frasier a different, quieter feel than some of the other shows of the era.
How about this story about Clooney on the first day of E.R.:
Writing Course from Stephen J. Cannell
Posted: September 14, 2018 Filed under: TV, writing, writing advice from other people 2 Comments
Our friends over at Monkey Trial put this one up. Led us to the Stephen J. Cannell website, where there’s a short but thorough and helpful writing course available for free. Adding it to my category Writing Advice From Other People.
Succession
Posted: July 11, 2018 Filed under: TV, writing Leave a comment
Watching (and enjoying) HBO’s Succession. Reminded me of something I heard Francis Ford Coppola say in an interview (with Harvard Business Review of all places) about how he tries to write down the theme of a project in one word on a notecard.
ALISON BEARD: And when you get stuck creatively, if you don’t know where a script should go or how a movie should end, how do you get yourself unstuck?
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, if my intuition and asking the question just what feels better to me doesn’t give it to me, I have a little exercise where any project I work on, I have what the theme is in a word or two. Like on The Conversation, it was privacy. On The Godfather, it was succession. So I always have that word, and I encourage my children to do the same, to break it all down beyond everything else. Don’t tell me it’s a coming-of-age story, because that’s not specific. What, specifically, is it?
And if you have that word, then when you reach an impasse, you just say, well, what is the theme related to the decision? Should it be this or should it be that? Then I say, well, what does the theme tell me? And usually, if you go back to that word, it will suggest to you which way to go and break the roadblock.
Is succession the one-word theme of Succession?
How about this part:
Conan on Hans Gruber
Posted: June 4, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
from this Vulture interview
Loved this comparison
Posted: March 15, 2018 Filed under: comedy, TV Leave a comment
As Zinoman puts it, “His smirking tone was so consistently knowing that he seemed as if he must know something.” This was an attitude fit for the cynical mood of the 1980s, and Zinoman emphasizes Letterman’s significance as an avatar of cool noncommitment, a figure of his time. In that, Letterman resembled that other pop-cultural phenomenon of the era, Jim Davis’s Garfield – the rotund cartoon feline also riven by self-doubt and haunted by grandiose fantasies of domination while projecting an aloofness that often verged on the cruel.
from Naomi Fry’s review of Jason Zinoman’s Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night in the Summer 2017 issue of BookForum. (A little behind on my Bookforum).
To My House Guest:
Posted: April 22, 2017 Filed under: TV 1 Comment
If you found a note on a scrap of paper in my house that said “Maybe I can stop masturbating” on it I promise it was related to an upcoming work of television comedy.
Enjoy VEEP on Sundays at 10:30pm and then on HBO Go forever!
Huell can’t take it
Posted: February 9, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition, TV Leave a commentEd Harris in Westworld, Ed Harris in Walker
Posted: December 5, 2016 Filed under: TV, Uncategorized, Wonder Trail Leave a comment
If you enjoy Ed Harris in Westworld, as I do, you may be curious to have a look at his role in Walker (1987) in which he plays a similarly attired character:
Harris plays the real life William Walker who went down to Nicaragua with some armed guys and declared himself president there from 1856-1857.
I went down to Nicaragua and visited some of the places Walker shot up.
I tell the story of Walker, and of Nicaragua, and of the troubled film
in my book, THE WONDER TRAIL: True Stories From Los Angeles To The End Of The World
available at Amazon or your local indie bookstore. You’ll enjoy it.
Westworld semi-theory
Posted: December 3, 2016 Filed under: TV 2 Comments
SPOILER warning
Arnold
Bernard
Charlie
Dolores
Elsie
The order in which they were made?
Magnum, Everyman
Posted: October 29, 2016 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
from Wiki as I prep a Halloween costume.
In real life more going for Robin Masters, “the celebrated-but-never-seen author of several dozen lurid novels.”
A recurrent theme throughout the last two seasons, starting in the episode “Paper War”, involves Magnum’s sneaking suspicion that Higgins is actually Robin Masters since he opens Robin’s mail, calls Robin’s Ferrari “his car”, etc. This suspicion is never proved or disproved, although in at least one episode – “Déjà-Vu” S06E02 – Higgins is shown alone in a room, picking up the ringing phone and talking to Robin Masters, indicating they are two different persons.
Five questions about Westworld
Posted: October 17, 2016 Filed under: TV Leave a comment
from HBO.com
- How many flies, real and robotic, are there in Westworld?
- Is “I can’t tell who is human and who is a robot” a fair complaint about the show or the dumbest thing you can say because duh that’s the point?
- What’s Westworld’s policy on hate speech?
- Anthony Hopkins made Bernard, right?
- Does the show owe it to Julian Jaynes to shout him out by name if they’re gonna cite the wild inventive theory he made up?
Def worth reading if you are in your twenties and have tons of time on your hands and love Ancient Aliens type stuff and want to take that to the next level
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal.
Acknowledge me!
Thanks a lot bitch
Posted: October 6, 2016 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
that some of you have not seen the thirteen second video entitled Thanks A Lot Bitch. The context is some reporters trying to interview Mark Cuban before the first presidential debate.
Helytimes 