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Back in print: the playful and personal memoir of Meredith Willson’s creative tribulations and triumphs before The Music Man

Composer, musical director, writer, lecturer, and piccoloist Meredith Willson laid many eggs throughout his career—but not all those eggs would hatch quite so gloriously as his Broadway hit The Music Man. In Eggs I Have Laid, Willson genially chronicles the failures that he faced as he made his place in show business during the pivotal early 1950s, when radio was being overtaken by television.

From Hollywood to New York, London, and Paris, and back to his hometown of Mason City, Iowa, Willson sets each scene vividly, bringing to life his encounters with zeitgeist stars, from collaborators Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Allen to Orson Welles and Carmen Miranda. His signature wit excels as he relates his tales of eggs dropped, notable among them the lavishly produced variety program The Big Show, his ill-fated attempt to be a radio bulwark against the encroaching tide of television.

First published in 1955, Eggs I Have Laid features delightful curiosities, like an eight-page “platonic dialogue” about quitting smoking and the lyrics to a love song with the occupancy limits of the New York Fire Code as its central metaphor. It is at once a vivid chronicle and a trove of insight from the hilarious, perseverant mind of Meredith Willson.

Before modern binoculars and cameras made it possible to observe birds closely in the wild, many people collected eggs as a way of learning about birds. Serious collectors called their avocation "oology" and kept meticulous records for each set of eggs: the bird's name, the species reference number, the quantity of eggs in the clutch, the date and location where the eggs were collected, and the collector's name. These documented egg collections, which typically date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now provide an important baseline from which to measure changes in the numbers, distribution, and nesting patterns of many species of birds.

In Oology and Ralph's Talking Eggs, Carrol L. Henderson uses the vast egg collection of Ralph Handsaker, an Iowa farmer, as the starting point for a fascinating account of oology and its role in the origins of modern birdwatching, scientific ornithology, and bird conservation in North America. Henderson describes Handsaker's and other oologists' collecting activities, which included not only gathering bird eggs in the wild but also trading and purchasing eggs from collectors around the world. Henderson then spotlights sixty of the nearly five hundred bird species represented in the Handsaker collection, using them to tell the story of how birds such as the Snowy Egret, Greater Prairie Chicken, Atlantic Puffin, and Wood Duck have fared over the past hundred years or so since their eggs were gathered. Photos of the eggs and historical drawings and photos of the birds illustrate each species account. Henderson also links these bird histories to major milestones in bird conservation and bird protection laws in North America from 1875 to the present.