A footnote to the Ida Benfey Judd discussion:

I've found documentation that she began her annual Mark Twain quotes 
contest in 1927. I have a list of every winner from 1927 to 1935, and 
the rules for entering, and some of the winning quotes (the cash prizes 
totaled $100 during the Great Depression). I also found a letter she 
wrote in 1933 on Mark Twain Association letterhead with her (and her 
husband's) Central Park West address and a blurb for the Mark Twain 
quotes contest. Her signature and closing on this letter occupies the 
bottom half of the letter-sheet, scrawled in enormous letters measuring 
one inch tall and her signature six inches long: "Joyous greetings/ Ida 
Benfey Judd."

From this evidence (and that quote somebody posted from Lyon's diary 
about her kissy visit with Twain) I conclude that she was an eccentric 
wealthy woman running a one-woman operation using the "Mark Twain 
Association" name prior to the group founded by George Ade and others in 
1941.

Or, as Twain, might have concluded, "She was not quite what you would 
call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was 
the kind of person who keeps a parrot."

Kevin
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