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Why Has D.L. Merritt Been Punished So?

Why Has D.L. Merritt Been Punished So?
Dixon Lanier Merritt (1879-1972). Courtesy Tennessee State Library and Archives.

On our recent Pacific coast vacation, we noticed pods of pelicans migrating southward, flying in a line, gracefully riding the air flows between the bubbling wave crests breaking on the sands of Arch Cape, Oregon. Perhaps predictably, the mention of “pelicans,” stimulated one of our party to recite the first few lines of the world’s most famous pelican limerick, The Pelican:

A funny old bird is a pelican.

His beak can hold more than his belican.

Food for a week

He can hold in his beak,

But I don't know how the helican.

"Brown Pelican," by John James Audubon, from The Birds of America.

We all knew some variation of the silly rhyme, of course, but none of us could remember its author.

Another one of us thought the original scribe must be the American poet and humorist Ogden Nash, but quickly set to looking the question up on his smartphone to be sure. 

Within seconds, a New York Times obituary from Jan. 11, 1972 popped up with the headline, “D.L. Merritt, Wrote Limerick on Pelican.”

Curiously reductive send-off, but our question was answered. And the thought of the lines constituting a “limerick” within the heralded genre of “There Once Was a Girl from Nantucket,” was also revelatory to the group.

But, who was this D.L. Merritt? And what must it have been like to be so famous for just this one little frivolous five-line pelican opus – and not much else, apparently, in his 92 years of life?

So, we looked further into the biography of Dixon Lanier Merritt of Tennessee (1879-1972) to find out whether this poor man’s time on Earth had any broader purpose or meaning. 

Turns out, during his lifetime, Merritt racked up an impressive list of accomplishments. But he was also cursed, apparently, to have his little pelican ditty serve forever as an albatross around his neck.

Courtesy Find a Grave, "Dixon Lanier Merritt." Note: "The Pelican" was written in 1913, not 1910.

Merritt’s Lifetime of Accomplishments

The dude was a professor at Cumberland University in Tennessee and was arguably among Tennessee’s most consequential social historians and newspaper editors. 

He co-authored the 8-volume series of books:A History of Tennessee and Tennesseans: The Leaders and Representative Men in Commerce, Industry and Modern Activities" (1913). According to Amazon, the series has been determined by scholars to be “culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”

According to the Nashville Banner, he “began his long journalistic career at 16 when he became a county correspondent for the Lebanon Democrat.” Following his graduation from the University of Nashville, he located Marmaduke B. Morton, editor of the Nashville Banner and “pestered him” for a job. 

“A craftsman at the newspapering style of the early 1900s, Merritt was famous in the years before World War I as an ‘editorial paragrapher,’ when editorial columns consisted of cogent, cutting one-sentence opinions,” the Nashville Banner wrote. He was described as an “editor, historian and poet who was known as the dean of Tennessee newspapermen.” 

He was the editor of the newspapers, The Tennessean and the Lebanon Democrat. His papers regularly featured his column “Our Folks.” He was the Southern correspondent and later an associate editor for Outlook magazine – a weekly news magazine aimed at rural readers – during the 1920s.

He “won national attention during World War I with an editorial entitled ‘The Little Sister of the Fleet,’ based on the futile invasion of Gallipoli in the Dardenelles,” according to The New York Times. In his eighties, he edited a comprehensive “History of Wilson County (Tennessee).” 

He served as Tennessee’s state director of public safety. “During both World Wars, he worked for the U.S. federal government and ultimately retired from the Rural Electrification Administration’s telephone program office,” according to Wikipedia.

Perpetrating The Pelican

In 1913, he published – or as he said, “perpetrated” – his now world-famous pelican limerick in his column “Along the By-Paths.”

And he regretted the move until the day he died.

“I wrote editorials and a signed editorial page column,” he said in a 1970 interview according to the Nashville Banner, and “It was in this column that the damned Pelican limerical was perpetrated. It was almost an accident and I never had any pride in it – didn’t even think it a good limerick.” 

Dixon L. Merritt was a "distinguished journalist," per the Nashville Banner.

In 1919, he served on special assignment in the Press Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture “where he wrote humorous press releases.” According to the Nashville Banner, he was once asked to “describe war-time London where he conducted one of his ‘secret missions’ for the USDA, and he replied, ‘It was foggy when I got there, and it was foggy when I left, and I never saw anything of it.’”

He wrote a history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture which he later described as being ‘still something of a Bible within the department, but unread and unknown everywhere else.” He was the president of the Society of American Press Humorists.

As an avid birder, he served as a founding member of the Tennessee Ornithological Society. At the Tennessee Cedars of Lebanon State Park, a nature center is named for him. 

“Following World War I he returned to the familial farm near Lebanon, TN and using portions of various cedar log cabins nearly one hundred years old [the original built in 1790], assembled a new structure on a hill which he dubbed ‘Cabincroft’ — 'croft' being a Scottish word for a place of shelter. He maintained a working farm into his seventies preferring natural methods,” according to Wikipedia. 

After his death in 1972, Merritt was "buried in the town cemetery in Lebanon, Tennessee,” according to the Linda Hall Library. Then, in 2012, 40 years after his death, “a memorial sculpture was erected in his honor at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, where the nature center was named in his honor. Considering that ‘The Pelican’ is much better known than Merritt, it seems appropriate that the sculpture portrays, not Merritt, but the bird,” the library quipped.

"Dan Goostree's metal penguin sculpture at Cedar Forest State Park Nature Center." Courtesy Find a Grave.

Per his Times obituary, Merritt was “survived by his widow, Mrs. Ruth Yates Merritt; three sons, a daughter, nine grandchildren and three great‐grandchildren.”

By all accounts, Merritt seemed a good fellow.


By Christopher Jones