It’s the birthday of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (1908-2006, #nicelonglife), co-author with her brother Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., of the best-selling memoirs Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and Belles on Their Toes (1950), which chronicled the rollicking efforts of two efficiency experts to raise their 12 children according to efficiency principles. Both memoirs were made into movies almost immediately, and Cheaper by the Dozen was remade in 2003 starring Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.

Gilbreth was born in New York City but raised in Montclair, New Jersey, the setting of Cheaper by the Dozen. Her parents, Lillian Moller Gilbreth and Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were pioneers of efficiency engineering and carried out many time and motion studies as consultants for industrial companies. They often applied these methods to the running of their household, at one point even filming the tonsillectomies of six of the children in an operating theater set up in their own home, in hopes of helping the doctor learn to streamline the process. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up: Ernestine was out cold on the operating table when the doctor realized he’d confused her with her sister Martha, but there she was, so he removed her tonsils anyway, while poor Martha had to have impromptu surgery after a full breakfast (ugh). To cap things off, the photographer did something wrong and none of the films turned out. The episode has been called “the single funniest tonsillectomy chapter in literature.”

Of the 12 Gilbreth children, the second oldest, Mary, actually died of diphtheria at the age of five, but this is never explained in the first book and only appears in the second as a footnote. Both parents were devastated and didn’t talk about Mary after she died; if there was a funeral, the other children were not even told about it. The oldest daughter, Anne, made sure this didn’t happen again when their father died of a heart attack at 55 the day after Ernestine’s high school graduation: she insisted that the family talk about him so that the youngest children would remember him.

Gilbreth studied at Smith College (1929) and was a department store buyer and manager for 14 years in New York City. She married Charles Carey in 1930 and they had two children. She also authored three more books on her own: Jumping Jupiter (1956), Rings Around Us (1956), and Giddy Moment (1958). She died at 98.

(NB: Yesterday was the birthday of Washington Irving, 1783-1859, who wrote what are often considered the first American short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. My apologies to Mr. Irving for letting the exigency of tax preparation and other obligations push him to the back burner.)

Have a perfectly acceptable Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.