January 30, 2012
Saving the nation
The people know what must be done to rescue the great United States of America from stagnation and dysfunction of every sort, beginning in Washington and morphing to the state and local level. There will be little advance to our historic new frontier, to our manifest destiny, scant hope that our children will remain in or join the middle class until money no longer controls Congress and other branches of government. The only way to end billions of dollars in lobbying -- now set at about $3 billion annually, $4.7 million for each senator and House member -- is by a constitutional amendment to require full public financing of congressional and presidential campaigns and to ban special-interest cash, gifts and jobs.
The amendment is necessary to address lobbyists’ predictable, hypocritical cry of free speech denial. That right can and must be satisfied by conducting public hearings, town hall forums and national referendums on issues where great and extensive voice should be heard.
The ordinary American, whom the late and wonderful columnist Ernie Pyle would describe as the really extraordinary citizen because he/she is so common, so ordinary, so concerned with being decent, raising family, doing the job right, is now without representation.
President Obama can proclaim, as he did in a strong and clear State of the Union speech last week, that the country can recover from a near depression by doing this and that, following traditional Democratic ideals, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels can counter that platform with solutions presented in his Republican-conservative response, but neither person will move forward an inch until the special-interest stranglehold withers in both Congress and the White House.
Greatly bolstered by the unwise Supreme Court decision -- the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court -- greed takes no holiday in Washington, and its example is copied in our states. The system is so perverse that even well-intentioned, once idealistic officials must take the cash if they are to wage successful but uber-expensive election battles.
Ask the average American -- Ernie’s people, you, the sort who ties shoelaces every day and shows up for work (or did when you had a job). They know that Congress and the isolated White House are broken institutions, stuck in stalemate, supposedly over ideology but really over meeting lobbyists’ demands. These moneyed people run your government, ever more so, day by day.
We people require a constitutional amendment to end their influence. Not their voice -- listen to that and any other in public hearing. But make these suitors keep their wallets in their pockets. The relatively small amounts required for reasonable campaigning and paid for by the taxpayer will prove money that will save the nation.
January 23, 2012
How’s the weather?
Blauvelt, N.Y. -- My part of the universe, in the Northeast not far from New York City, was hit over the weekend with a small snow, about 6 inches. From the pre-storm hype, though, you would think the Blizzard of ’88 was about to fall from the skies. Even a national drug store chain e-mailed to “stock up on storm supplies TODAY.”
The weather is changing, surely. Super heat in Texas, floods in the Midwest, tornadoes in New Jersey (not Gov. Christie), ice in Seattle, extraordinary drought and too much rain in areas unaccustomed to both. What gives? Environmental pollution? Cyclical weather patterns catching up? Or, at least with flooding, nature not finding the old flood plains to fill when it rains since Huggy Bear Estates or other “progress” construction now occupy the sites?
What does give is that no matter why the nation -- the world -- has been experiencing weird weather, media hype over many storms is overdone. I am not talking about disastrous weather, where reporters take great chances to accurately give the who, what, when, where, why and how. No, storms like the six-inch snow we faced in this part of the Northeast. Except for several hours when the very cold road surface turned powdery snow into dangerous ice, the snow came and went and was hardly a storm in the sense of 15-inch, blowing white stuff we have tackled over the years.
Yet every newscast from mid-week on warned of possible dire situations: roads blocked, power out, emergency rooms jammed, first responders overwhelmed. Comparisons were made to a major storm about a year ago in which New York City found itself behind the eight ball when it didn’t clear streets quickly enough and cars were abandoned by drivers who perhaps should not have been out in the first place. Apples and oranges, this comparison.
The media were underwhelming, and I can say that. I was privileged to toil for a newspaper for 42 years at a serious sheet where good and underpaid reporters, photographers, deskmen, editors, printers, pressmen, delivery people and advertising staff took the job to heart and sought out “real” news. Not just fluff, for there has always been that. Not just the dog saves man story, always that too. Not just the tabloid “Headless torso found in topless bar” copy. But the day-to-day, seemingly ordinary government news that, after hard digging, reveals corruption, malfeasance or incompetence. We and others didn’t always do the job the best we could, but we tried. And with enough of us trying, the news got out.
Newspapers today have lost their ad and circulation bases, and so their staff. More fluff fills the pages instead of news. On TV, its “news” shows are more about entertainment, and the stories seem to come out of reality shows. They relate little to the average Joe and Sue trying to make ends meet, keep a job, pay taxes, have a decent quality of living.
Remember when some of us picked up a date and you didn’t have anything to say to the mother? You talked about the weather. Today, the media, my old shop, is a-courtin’ readers, viewers, listeners, Tweeters, Facebookers, but this time talk about the skies won’t get them anywhere.
January 16, 2012
The pause that refreshes
An erudite correspondent from Colorado writes that she doesn’t much go for “pop,” which is what they call carbonated beverages in her parts. We in the Northeast, New England and Mid-Atlantic say “soda,” though as kids decades ago, we heard the fuller term: “soda pop.” Parts of New England, the Midwest and the Northwest seem to like “Pop.” Once upon a time, some requested “fizz water” or “phosphates.” And it’s said that some people just ask for a “Coke,” even if they want a lemon soda. (Talk about dumbing down the language.)
I am not into soda, pop, fizz water or phosphates these days and enjoyed them as a kid in the 1950s only when I had a dime, except in NJ where the government meanies had the nerve to tax we little ones one penny on a 10-cent bottle of soda. It was difficult enough to get a dime in our pockets, and it almost never kissed a penny there. Pennies come from change, and we didn’t have money to spend in the first place and so receive change.
You could get a small, 7-ounce Coke -- they were called “party cokes” for use at sweet 16 parties -- in the red machine at Connor’s gas station, corner of Routes 59 and 45 in Spring Valley, N.Y., a price that did not go up for at least 10 years, but I wasn’t a Coca-Cola fan. Could tolerate Pepsi, but my real favorites, usually shared with my pal Joel Levenson, were Mission orange or lemon line, which came in a bottles shaped like a Spanish mission. Or we would get the long-necked Seilheimer (New Jersey company) cream or sarsaparilla.
On an occasional Sunday, I would walk from my Hillcrest home 2.5 miles to play cards with Joel, who lived on John Street behind Jack’s store. After five or six games, we would hustle over to Jack’s for our soda treat, which we nursed for 30 minutes or so. Part of the action was dipping our arms up to our shoulders in icy water, into a bin where the bottles were kept. The trick was to find the bottle by shape. We became adept at that.
Such Sunday visits seemed to set us up for the school week back in the ninth grade. It seemed a civil way to bring a Sunday afternoon to a close and get ready for new tasks. What Joel and I specifically talked about I don’t recall. No matter since it was the camaraderie of the friend-visiting that counted. You could probably accomplish the same thing today, except that lunch with a pal can cost you a combined $40, not our total of 20 cents.
Pardon the pun, but my Sunday ritual, as well as my favorite soda brands -- and drinking carbonated beverages itself -- eventually fizzled out. Still grab a seltzer though it is no longer two cents plain. The Colorado correspondent? “I like tonic water -- fizzy refreshing but not sweet. Add a slice of lime, and I don't even miss the gin.”
January 9, 2012
Upstairs, downstairs
The last time this scenario played out, I was upstairs, age 13, laying vinyl-asbestos (yes, asbestos) tile and my father and brother Craig were downstairs watching a 17-inch TV -- the Giants were playing. This time, 57 years later, my father was still watching the Giants, but on a 38-inch flatscreen, and I was also doing my thing -- flooring. Only he was upstairs and I was on the ground floor of his bi-level home. Some things never change.
I was the handyman -- even as a young boy -- in my growing-up family in Spring Valley-Hillcrest, N.Y. My father is not exactly all thumbs, but he certainly did not inherit the hands-on, do-it-yourself abilities of his father, a smoking pipe maker, and his grandfather, who fashioned cabinets. Since my dad subscribed to Popular Mechanics, sometimes Popular Science, too, and simply because I took a liking to things electrical, mechanical, to wood, etc., I picked up this or that skill. Local tradesmen and my shop teacher Mr. Carroll didn’t hurt, either.
Nor did my parents’ trust. How else can you explain allowing a seventh grader to install an electrical outlet so his mom could use her very first washing machine? I didn’t burn the house down -- in fact I was super careful -- and the word got around so that I was soon working in this neighbor’s house or that.
But back to flooring. It took some time, but my father found a few bucks here and there, and some scrounged materials, to finish two bedrooms in the expandable attic of his Cape Cod home. He and my mother bought the place in summer 1953 for $12,500, and the idea was that if later the family found need and had some savings and offered sweat equity, the attic could be finished. So, in 1955 the Gunthers were at that stage. Some wiring was in, set by me. Wallboard, a ceiling, doors, trim, paint, wallpaper arrived too, with labor from my grandfather and Ike Pfeffer, a neighbor. We were ready for the floor, and I talked my dad into buying a three-tone (light, medium, dark) 9 inch by 9 inch Armstrong tile, in a “cork” style. I would install it, first following instructions by measuring the width and length of the room and marking the starting point.
Tiling went easy, and to cut it, I softened the tile in a lukewarm oven, then used a knife. No cutting, no asbestos dust. My guess is the floor is still in that old house, safe for the environment as long as no dust is created by sanding it, breaking it up, etc. I must say that the overall look was grand, and I can see it still in my mind.
Now, decades later, I am laying new vinyl, non-asbestos tile, over, yes, vinyl-asbestos in my dad’s 1964 Pearl River, N.Y., home. He’s a single man now, our mom having passed away in 1999, but he’s with it at almost 90. I get to take care of the house, but the fact is I’ve always taken care of it, and the one before this one. It’s the DNA I was granted.
Whatever thoughts I had years back laying the Armstrong tile are long forgotten -- perhaps they were of girls, school, future, cars, electrical work. Today, now retired, doing flooring or otherwise, I still think a bit about girls, no school, though, not much about the future, not really about cars, but electrical work, yes, since I do some volunteering with that skill.
Most of all, downstairs cutting tile in 2012, I am grateful I spent time in 1955 doing the same job upstairs.
January 2, 2012
The new year
Although most of us have already ushered in the new year, perhaps celebrated, maybe made resolutions, felt as if we had a fresh start and wondered where 2011 went, another season is about to come soon, the Chinese lunar new year, celebrated on Jan. 23 as the most auspicious animal in the Chinese zodiac struts its stuff.
Amidst end-of-the-world Mayan and other predictions for late in 2012, the Year of the Dragon is traditionally associated with new beginnings and good fortune.
That’s the sort of balance Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great U.S. Supreme Court justice, would have favored in his persistent optimism.
So, what will 2012 be like, tempering any astrological or other predictions with the obvious: whatever the omens portend, you are the real master of your fate?
• America will have its next presidential election, and where that will lead could cause even an optimist to tear hair out, considering the undeniable fact that just as soon as the winning campaigner leaves the stump and has his (her?) last roast beef dinner with the common folk in the village social hall, the big door closes at the White House and the new leader of the free world doesn’t see real people ever again, at least while in office. Only the scripted will have the president’s ear. Elected senators and congressmen shut their own big doors. Maybe the Year of the Dragon will offer enough fire breathing to burn the locks of all these blocked passages and let Joe and Sue Citizen come visit a spell and be heard.
• Most likely, crazy weather will cause trouble, as has been nature’s habit of late (or is it humankind’s?). Solar flare-ups won’t help, especially in communication disruption at a time when there is almost no discourse without electronics. (Isn’t it odd that with a greater ability to communicate, we seem to hear each other less?)
• The world’s banks, said to be sitting on some $17 trillion, may finally get off their duff and use the money they gained through no hard work of their own to actually put people to work. So far in history, the world has not progressed without investment.
• Reality shows may -- deservedly -- lose their appeal when common sense in people awakens them to the fact that they have been sitting in the modern Roman Colosseum yelling for blood as victims sacrifice one another.
• Twitter Tweets, Facebook blurbs, phone texting and anonymous postings to online material may at long last find melody, rhythm and sense, some structure that allows understanding beyond pig-Latin shorthand, awful grammar and incomplete thought.
• Organized religion and atheists, too, may realize that there can be no exclusive god or theology since we are all born as we are, into whatever belief. As a result, we are held harmless for such fate and its consequences except when we do no good, or even if we fail to do good. In short, if any god is the cat’s pajamas, it’s because he (she?) is good. Do good and you are “religious,” even as an atheist.
Actually, good is an ultimate act of faith in this ride on earth, and that’s where I leave this piece in a year that some predict as half empty while others like the Chinese see half full. If we blow up or end up better off on December 31, 2012, it’s the flowers left on our path that will make us smile and prove our worth, however long the earth lasts.
For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, offered a holiday story published in place of my (former) newspaper column. That tradition now continues on the web. – Arthur H. Gunther III
December 25, 2011
A tradition borrowed
By Arthur H. Gunther IV
Stanley had always been wistful. Or was it nostalgic? He couldn’t remember not feeling a bit worshipful of the past. Didn’t it used to snow more? Didn’t more people walk the streets of villages? Didn’t there used to be more villages?
Despite all this, Stanley wasn’t ignorant. He knew the present was improved in vital ways: disease, war, racism. Though still present, weren’t these and countless other evils less pervasive? Stanley, however, was tired of thinking about it. What becomes of a man who is wistful at the age of four and is fast approaching 80? Stanley had known fellows whose complaining and dissatisfaction were the only memorable things about their personality. Luckily, Stanley had never been dissatisfied. Not at all. He was simply appreciative of the past and had always wondered why so few others seemed to care. So many were far too willing to sacrifice aesthetics for speed, for ease, for convenience. Stanley had always preferred beauty. It was the only thing that was truly timeless.
Which leads us to Christmas. Though now 79, Stanley followed the same Christmas Eve routine that had started in his 60s. It began by accident but was now something that he couldn’t imagine doing without. Stanley had always attended the early service on Christmas Eve and then come home to wrap presents with his wife and watch whatever old Christmas movie was on TV. Sometime around 15 years ago, his wife could no longer keep herself awake and Stanley came home to find the house silent. Not wanting to simply go to bed himself, Stanley decide to take a walk. He bundled up against the December cold and started heading toward town. From there he walked away from the river, up the steep hills that bordered the town to the west until he found himself at the old high school, which still stood proudly where it had been for the previous 100 years. The old clock towered above the field, casting a glow into the night. That first year, Stanley simply stopped and sat in the wooden bleachers bordering the track and football field. When it was too cold to sit any longer, he walked home.
Stanley found this walk the perfect antidote to the noise that filled his head in the weeks before Christmas. He had always felt unsettled when he lacked time to simply be alone and think. It felt wrong to let it all speed by without some thought. The next year, which found Christmas Eve even colder, Stanley stopped in town for hot chocolate, which he waited to drink until he was sitting in the bleachers. From there, the tradition became entrenched.
So here it was 15 years later and Stanley was starting to slow down a bit. The walk up the hills had gradually grown a bit harder, the cold a little more difficult to bear. Despite this, he didn’t consider for a second amending his tradition. He still needed to quiet the noise in his head. He still wouldn’t allow all the beauty of December and winter and his town to be simply passed over and taken for granted. More and more lately, Stanley wondered if he were the only one who felt this way.
Stanley crested the hill and switched the hot chocolate from his left hand to the right to give the other appendage a chance to warm. He had almost bought two cups. The temperature was already dipping into the twenties and, for the first time in all his Christmas Eve walks, there was the prospect of snow in the air. He walked through the unlocked gate and made his way over to the bleachers. Walking to the top row, Stanley sat down, and removed the top from his cup.
After maybe 20 minutes, Stanley had reached the bottom of his cup and readied himself to stand and make his way back down the hill when he heard a voice in the distance. It was a girl’s voice, and as Stanley’s head turned in the direction of the sound he could see that she was holding something in her hand. As she came into focus he began to make out what it was -- a football. He also realized that the sound he heard wasn’t talking. She was singing the opening line of "Winter Wonderland." In fact, she kept repeating it. The girl had not seen Stanley, though she walked in his direction, heading toward the center of the football field. Suddenly from behind, Stanley heard a child scream, “Mommy!” and run out to the girl. He couldn’t have been more than four or five. He reached the girl, the woman, and jumped into her arms, knocking the football loose. Before Stanley could wrap his head completely around this scene, a man emerged from the same direction as the boy had previously. He jogged over to the two and joined the fray. They horsed around with the football for a few minutes. In all the Christmas Eves Stanley had sat here, he had never seen a soul and now here were three. He would have liked to stay, but it was already too cold to sit still any longer. Stanley rose and headed down the bleachers and toward the gate.
“Mommy, look! A man!” The boy’s words stopped Stanley in his tracks. The couple and the boy seemed taken aback by the sight of a solitary figure at ten at night on Christmas Eve, but Stanley couldn’t have appeared all that threatening and they soon made their way over.
“Hi,” said the boy, “Are you waiting for Christmas, too?”
“Well, I guess I am,” Stanley answered.
The man and woman introduced themselves and Stanley explained that he was out on his yearly Christmas Eve walk.
“Wow, that sounds like a great tradition,” said the woman. “We love it up here. The high school was closed by the time we were in school, but we’ve always thought this was one of the most perfect spots in town. The clock tower. The old cinder track. The wooden bleachers.”
“It is beautiful,” Stanley agreed. “I’m glad it’s still here.”
“Us, too. What a perfect place to spend Christmas Eve." The woman held Stanley in her gaze for a second.
“Mommy, I’m cold! Let’s go home!” The boy broke the momentary silence.
“Well, we’d better go,” the mom said. We hope to see you again next year! Do you mind if we borrow a bit of your tradition?”
“Not at all,” said Stanley. “Merry Christmas.” He turned and walked down the hill toward home, forgetting for a few minutes how cold it had become.
Arthur IV can be reached at clausland@yahoo.com
December 19, 2011
A real holiday present
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS -- In the holiday lead-up that is again dressing the nation, in a time of poor economy and worries about not only the American future but the world's, yet another perspective emerges. I am here for a moment with grandchildren -- actually it is always just a "moment" since kids change minute by minute -- and concerned for them, for anyone's young, as you must be, too.
My own Christmases were modest, but there were enough simple presents from two hardworking parents to leave my brother and I awestruck. Never was there a failure to communicate with Santa Claus, and these days when expenses for an elderly dad hit, we who can pay are grateful to help balance the sacrifices made. That we are able to
do so reflects a general American tradition that each succeeding generation will do a bit better. Ever since the Great Depression, that forward movement has built a middle class.
Now in San Antonio, I wonder if my grandchildren will be able to assist their parents if ever in need, or if the parents will have to provide for their young even when they are old, if the money does not run out as the middle class runs for its life.
This Texas city is more a mix than most in the state -- many residents include military and business professionals from other areas -- and so the political persuasion is less Texas conservative and more combined conservative/liberal, a fine point and counterpoint that can bring real and efficient compromise. My guess is that growing children in San Antonio are immersed in political dialogue that includes varied points of view. At least I hope so.
Such mix is elsewhere in America as well, save the nation's much-ruling capital, where the Capitol and the White House seem to act as hardheads unwilling to stop shouting political rhetoric so they can hear the people instead of special interests. Meanwhile, my grandkids in San Antonio or the two in New York or your offspring or your friends' or neighbors' very young, or teens or young adults - all hoping for a Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza or whatever joy the holidays bring - are left as unwilling bystanders in the grossly irresponsible political deadlock over basic human needs, over disappearing jobs, over an unfocused, obscenely costly war, over what the future should be for America, and surely the world.
The holidays will come to San Antonio, to the many in America one way or another this year, but what will they be like in 2025 or so? Holidays, yes, but. ...?
Ah, what a present it would be if common sense for the common purpose were to appear under the national tree.
December 12, 2011
Amidst change, tradition
I am certain that if you had asked my grandfather or anyone beyond 50 in the Spring Valley, N.Y., of 1956 if community life were more tight knit when they were young, the answer would have been “yes.” And some 55 years later, if you query now-older me, I’d have to give the same reply. Such is nostalgia and the sometimes convenient forgetfulness that happens as we look through rose-colored glasses.
Yet, as with all potential black and white situations, there is a gray area or two or three. In time, certain standards may well disappear, or traditions or quality of living. We may seize upon those to prove our argument that the old days were better despite evidence that always there have been problems, bad situations, difficulties. But, ah, the gray.
I have an example in mind. When I pass through my hometown village these days, the Spring Valley landscape has changed so very dramatically. A long downtown decline was brought on by failure -- here and elsewhere in the nation -- to meet the challenges of suburban sprawl, including the competition posed by shopping centers. Today in the Valley, expensive urban renewal is bringing some hope, though it is an incomplete approach that remakes the mistake of the 1960s-on. Then, downtowns should have been rebuilt by integrating them into new housing for all income levels so as to create walkable, desirable places in which to live and shop in a mixed economy. Today, while urban renewal brings affordable housing, a very good thing, no community can thrive just on government help. It must stand on its own at some point. So, there must also be non-subsidized homes and retail shops and businesses. That will have to come to Spring Valley if the village truly is to be “renewed.”
In 1956, when Gary Onderdonk III, then about 13, followed his Christmas season route of flipping telephone pole switches to turn on brightly colored lights, the Spring Valley economy was enough to support duplicates of hardware stores, bakeries, luncheonettes, stationeries, druggists, clothing stores and whatever else long marked American downtowns.
Garry’s father, Garry Jr., was a local electrician who installed the lights and kept the strings stored in his home. His own father, Garry Sr., was the head of the local draft board and was well-respected and, yes, feared. At one time, the Onderdonk forebears owned much of what would become Spring Valley as well as land in Piermont and Nyack.
The fact that Garry's grandson walked the downtown -- about 7 blocks from Maple Avenue to Route 59 -- as an early teen and flipped switches on perhaps 50 poles assured the 1956 community that it was still close-knit, that although post-war suburban growth was about to explode and break many ties to heritage, tradition continued. The lamplighter yet walked his route.
Even my grandfather and his over-50 friends would have admitted that, though they saw change they did not like. And now, in 2011, this writer, 69, also concedes that while Garry no longer walks the Spring Valley downtown, that while he isn’t there in just about any town you choose in America, the great changes to neighborhood society wrought by the Consumer Age, the Electronics Age, the Digital Age and the “Special Interest Age” that now disenfranchises the ordinary citizen are still not enough to make life simply white and black, good and not so good. There remains the gray.
In the Nyack, N.Y., area, including another old and small village with a downtown that also has undergone serious change, is a fellow I know well, joined by others who choose to live where there are old buildings, where there is history, where you walk to the library, to a memorial park, where neighbors are recognized in a mixed economic community. He and others are the lamplighters of today for they wish to keep old community tradition while also embracing great change. They may use LED lights, not incandescents, but they are mixing with the old and reinvesting. There is balance, without which no community can fully thrive.
December 5, 2011
Virginia read it right
In my part of the believing and non-believing world, in this economy, in this doubt of government, corporations and people, the local paper recently ran a story about a teacher telling her second graders there was no Santa Claus. Hullabaloo ensued.
Yet the rapid and firm push children get into adulthood today already unceremoniously strips them of belief in cartoon characters, super heroes, magic fairies and -- sometimes -- all that seems possible. Maybe that’s why we end up with little faith in government or anything else.
I don’t know enough about the teacher’s words, their context -- perhaps no one does except the students. We weren’t there, and I will not judge her. The report is that when the 7 year olds said they knew about Santa’s North Pole, the teacher responded that the bearded fellow did not exist and that Christmas presents were bought by their parents. Media coverage then exploded, the teacher is said to have issued an apology and the community asked to move on, into the holiday spirit. Yes.
In Virginia O’Hanlon’s 1897, it was her friends who told the 8 year old that Santa Claus was a myth, to which New York Sun Editor Francis Pharcellus Church responded in his now famous and oft-republished editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.”
He wrote: “Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except (what) they see ... All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little ... How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. ...”
The sum of Church’s editorial argument was that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. ...”
Second grade, in my parts and yours, is a fleeting moment of moving molecules, emotions and whatever is brewing in the individual soul. Its oh, so temporary dwellers have a brief second in which to recognize that all is possible, that good exists, that there is, as Editor Church put it, an "eternal light with which childhood fills the world. ...”
Can you see him now, can you see Santa?
November 28, 2011
The Magic Pocket
UPPER NYACK, N.Y. -- Babysitting two grandchildren, one half way to 5 and the other galloping toward 3 means an old codger like me has to be on his toes, literally, in order to survive. There are more questions, emotional turns, spats, hunger moments and funny faces than grown-ups are used to. So, the survival answer is to not be so adult, to join the crowd.
Which is what I did last Thanksgiving weekend, with Sam and Beatrice jumping all over me, the couch and each other. There is never a dull moment since kids do, indeed, say the darndest things. They also have sharp minds, recalling the mistakes you made last time you babysat. And their questions are so simple and direct that you wonder why the gods allow children to become adults. Perhaps our business and government decisions would be far less troubled if there was the young’s directness and clarity.
Children are also more trusting for they have not yet been let down. Beatrice, for example, likes to pretend that every small scrap she gets from rough-housing or other play requires a Band-Aid. And she knows where to get one when I am around since this not-always-watchful handyman carries them for my own cuts. After I once took a Band-Aid out of my pocket to stop her tears, she figured it was filled with all manner of items.
So, she is apt to come to me and ask, “Do you have a flashlight in your pocket? “Or a Gummy Bear?” “Or an iPad?’
Anticipating her needs, I have added things to my pocket, which I must remember to remove when I fly to Texas in a few weeks or the frown of Homeland Security will not see the humor.
The pity is that as the young get older and become us -- mature, ever-so-wise, know-it-all adults -- they stop asking what's in the Magic Pocket.
Therein lies the ruin of civilization.
November 21, 2011
A thankful day
We always knew it was turkey time back in sixth grade when we took a look at a very old painting of Pilgrims and Native Americans at a Thanksgiving feast, which hung all year long in the cloakroom. Why it was there I cannot relate, but kids seemed to notice it just before we went off for the holiday.
Today, gatherings for those fortunate enough to have family and means arouses the same feelings as it did with the early settlers, I presume. Any day you are off the treadmill, when there is a variety of wonderfully smelling food, when kids are running about in innocence and mayhem, when there are many under one roof, you appreciate -- are thankful for -- what you have.
Thanksgivings this year in our still bountiful nation, a country I remain thankful for, cost more if you have the money, have fewer goodies on too many tables and offer less time to enjoy since so many are worried about keeping jobs or getting them, the health of their pensions and the fitness of their health care.
Now, this is not entirely new -- we have been in distress many times in America’s history. Think of the tough life early settlers had the days before the first Thanksgiving and the days after; during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War; on farms when the crops were wiped out for one reason or another; in immigrant sections of our cities where sweatshops and dangerous tenement conditions prevailed; during the Great Depression and two world wars.
Yet in all that, there was always someone offering the optimistic view, such as Norman Rockwell in his famous Saturday Evening Post cover, “Home for Thanksgiving” (November 24, 1945), which shows a safely returned soldier peeling potatoes with his mom. Our Thanksgivings are the stuff of legends, family and nation, and of genuine gratefulness and of hope.
Where America is headed in these perilous times, so close to another precipice, is not easily predictable, but I will tell you one thing: If we could round up most of our “leaders,” if we could put the money managers with them, if we could squeeze in the greedy and make them all sit out this Thanksgiving, the rest of us, in good and poor circumstances in November 2011 might just have a thankful holiday, thankful for the goodness that is essential America; thankful for the things that matter most, like family and friends; thankful that we remain breathing. In that there is the same hope of manifest destiny and new frontier that lie before the first Pilgrims.
November 14, 2011
The spice cabinet
In a time of simplicity and quiet, which can be that moment when the lucky child, alone to explore and imagine, finds again and again that magic can happen, I took a journey. My travel to that special land began on an early wartime morning in late 1944 in my grandmother’s Ternure Avenue, Spring Valley, home when I was very young and the family was temporarily staying there.
I was wandering about, probably 6 a.m. or so, out of sleep and morning hungry, remembering that my grandmother, whom I called Nana, kept the corn flakes, raisin bran and Wheaties in a five-foot-high metal cabinet at the top of the basement stairs.
I continued tip-toeing until I managed to get to the basement door, reached for the 1915 doorknob and used two hands to turn it. There was the cabinet, in faded yellow, its own door held closed by a flip-up shiny chrome latch that seemed out of reach for a little guy. But stretch I did, also quietly, until the door swung open, aided by its tilt on lopsided, old stairs.
There was the cereal, all right, but something else, too, boxes of wonderfully smelling things, which later I learned were spices like ginger, cloves, cinnamon. Some of those boxes must have been in that airless metal cabinet for years, held tight, too by the latched door. What a wonderful collection of smells that brought, a gathering that I have never been able to duplicate in several spice cabinets I have bought or built.
I knocked my raisin bran box out of the cabinet and took it to the table, putting it next to where I sat, to await breakfast, which came just a short time later (maybe I had awakened the house).
Over my many years, getting a whiff of this spice or that, I am instantly taken back to my Nana’s cabinet, that early morning exploration, my pride at achieving success. I can smell the real fragrance of that cabinet if I deeply concentrate, and its memory has gotten me through more than enough less-pleasant times.
That 1944 exploration on a quiet morning offered a lifelong lesson -- that we need so little to make us happy.
November 7, 2011
A moment my own
Spring Valley, N.Y. -- If, after 55 years, you remember where the bathroom is at your former elementary school, old age isn’t here yet. Not only was I blessed in finding that but I managed to get to my eighth-grade science classroom, conducted so very well by Mrs. Keesler.
My return to what once was the North Main Street School, which both my father and I attended, was for a Rockland County Arts Council session on grant applications. The science classroom where I spent seventh and eight grades was on the third floor, southwest corner, and is now divided into an office and a meeting room. But the hallways are still in the glossy tile of the Craftsman age when the building was put up for children north of Main Street, with, yes, the South Main Street School for the other half. In my time I went to both.
So much changes in life, especially your perspective. North Main seemed much smaller in 2011 than in June 1956, but I was smaller then, too. Some of my teachers -- Mrs. Keesler, Mr. Gram, Miss Margulies, Mrs. Churchill, Mr. Carroll, Mr. Fazio, Mrs. Badami, Mr. Duggan, Coach Thompson -- also saw to my father and were already legends of a sort. They had quirks, like we all do, and we kids sure exaggerated them, but if I were on the last bus to anywhere, I’d want them with me. Perspectives change, and I did not know then how very well these teachers taught their subjects and better ways of living. I reference them constantly.
I arrived early in Spring Valley so that I could park my car in nearby Hillcrest and walk to North Main, as I did for three years, but that hamlet is now so developed that “No Parking” signs are everywhere and I could not leave the car. So I parked at the school, walked to Hillcrest and back. It took just minutes compared to memory’s half hour, but in those 1956 days there might be pals to jawbone with or a stop at Roth’s store across the street or at Mager’s in Hillcrest. Most of the old sights, such as the great Burn’s estate, are now gone and there is way too much growth and subsequent neglect in their place, but in every step I could recall events, friends, girlfriends, good report cards and not, quick walks home for the holidays, quicker runs when I was late. I could see my parents, then my grandparents driving to our Hillcrest home. I could see myself in my first car.
At my meeting, I was the only one with a connection to the building. None of the panelists had even grown up in Rockland, let alone Spring Valley. Deliberating on serious matters for the Arts Council gave me enough time to day dream back to 1953-1956, when I also day dreamed in Mrs. K.’s class. I even managed to sit in the same area where my desk was.
I was the only one with pedigree that day, in the old North Main Street School. And I was most proud.
November 2, 2011
When in a ‘perfect storm’
Rockland County, N.Y. -- The freak early snow that last weekend took down so many trees and branches and with them the power lines of ever-larger suburbia came as a “perfect storm” since (1) the trees still have largely green leaves that acted as a weight for the heavy, wet stuff, and (2) there simply is too much foliage. The suburbs, having lured homebuyers for decades to “the country,” now must eat the fruit of overgrowth.
Trees are wonderful -- they help clean the air, provide stress relief, shade us and remind us that the concrete of “progress” must be eased. But when you plant a tree, just as when you have hair on your head, trims are necessary for both styling and practicality. Nature takes care of tree overgrowth in a forest by lightning, fire, light, disease and drought. But homeowners usually don’t do much to their trees, and many a yard in these parts is out of hand. Overgrowth brings mold to siding, inside, too, and the worry that the trees will fall on something.
This year, a very warm and wet summer in the Northeast helped trees grow at probably twice the rate, and it has kept the leaves green and still attached to branches. So, when the unexpectedly early and heavy snow arrived, the many trees, especially with overgrown branches, came down, in many cases bringing power lines with them. There were outages everywhere in this, New York’s smallest county geographically outside New York City but also a densely populated, built-up suburbia with thousands of utility poles and lines.
When I was Editorial Page editor of The Journal News in Rockland, I penned perhaps 25 edits over 30 years calling for (1) underground electric, cable and phone lines in all new construction, paid by developers; (2) a ban on trees over 10 feet tall within 15 feet of overhead wires and regulation of species (for example, no maple or oak); (3) aggressive trimming of all existing trees in utility right of ways, not the barbershop whisk now provided, which guarantees return work for the contractors already getting big bucks from ratepayers.
Most of all, we advocated for a comprehensive storm response plan. While the Rockland Fire Coordinator’s Office has put together a remarkable blueprint that involves utilities, firefighters, police, highway departments and first-aiders, more needs to be done by municipalities and by the utilities.
• For example, there might be a plan to have on call the great army of landscapers and their workers, quite happy to do immediate tree cutting. Surely liability insurance waivers can be obtained to press these people into service when needed. In the recent storm, trees made safe from power lines were still left for overburdened highway departments and utility workers.
• For public safety, drop-down, four-way stop signs might be installed at all intersections with traffic lights, which could be put into operation immediately. However, officers should be stationed at the most dangerous crossings, with all personnel on notice that they must report whether off duty or not and with auxiliary police and retired officers volunteering.
• To enlarge the community spirit, there should be volunteers ready to help in debris removal, running errands for the sick and elderly, etc. A phone list should be ready.
• Utilities and municipalities should have communication briefings on the hour, via TV, Internet, the media, cell phones. They should have enough live operators to handle calls. Retired workers should be available to help.
Such ideas -- and surely there are others from the full public -- must be welcomed since it seems nature will be blasting us with more bad storms. Rockland must be better prepared.
October 24, 2011
Halloween moment
TALMAN, N.Y. -- Quietly done, non-fussed-about, get-it-done moments strike deep chords in the reflections of older life, or so it appears in a Halloween memory.
More than a few seasons ago, in the 1949 of my youth, living in this small hamlet of fruit orchards in Rockland County, an equally small church offered a Halloween party, and someone told my father, who was then working at both a nearby hospital and in a nursing home. He was trying to make ends meet, though my brother and I never knew it, so kept were we from the home economy by both our working parents.
In this second grade year, excitement was had by playing in the apple and peach orchards off Cherry Lane (never saw a cherry tree there) and watching horses train at the polo club where actor Burgess Meredith kept a steed. There was no downtown to walk to, a luxury, then a necessity I would come to enjoy when we again moved back to nearby Spring Valley. For this part of young life, imagination had great latitude and deep encouragement in a rural setting where sitting in a tree and day-dreaming was as good as watching “Captain Video and his Video Rangers” on TV came to be in the next year or so.
My brother Craig and I did manage to get together with other boys and some girls, however, and the Halloween party was to be one of them. It was a last-minute invite, an offer made by a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital who thought it would be fun for us.
So my father left the hospital and picked us up at the Airmont and Cherry Lane schools, and we both sat in the 1939 Dodge as it made its way to the small church and its basement. When we arrived, the very nice woman organizing the party opened the door, saw us and quickly came outside. It seemed neither my brother or I had costumes, which are expected at Halloween parties. My father had had no time to get costumes and would have been pressed financially anyway.
The church lady who dashed out to save us embarrassment just as quickly had my dad bring us right across the street where there was another kind woman, a seamstress who worked from her home. In a jiffy, this lady whipped up two creative costumes, pinned together in flourish. We were fun-ready, my brother and I.
The memory of that 1949 Halloween party is now a blur, but its circumstances and three good people -- the woman at the hospital, the one in the church and the seamstress -- can never be forgotten.
October 16, 2011
Occupying America
When was the last time America smiled? You see tears now, in the households where the unemployed sit for two years or more, from college graduates without hope, from those who bought into the American Dream only to have it dashed by an economy once built on the middle class and now controlled by those who ignore that class.
The young, the vibrant ones, the easy protesters, perhaps even attention-seeking, occupy Wall Street and increasingly across the world, but older people are now coming, too, their grievances of unequal opportunity and clueless government and lobbied officials stirring in a cauldron that promises to be a stew of real taste, a flavor that can grab attention. The focus toward changing government may well come.
Why are we here in this place, in America, in the world? When did the smiles of generational improvement, college and other achievement, satisfying, productive careers, improving health and a better future for more and more turn to forlorn, scared faces?
Nothing great happens in this great nation, in this, God’s experiment in participatory democracy, without going through a “system.” Prohibition, though a costly mistake that gave birth to organized crime, began with populism not unlike today’s Occupy Wall Street, which took on steam when it was legitimized -- enabled -- by the 18th Amendment. It took the system to make it real. World War II was not won by patriotism alone, by selfless soldiering, but by the system forged by a huge defense industry, by that system.
We see the system at work today against Occupy Wall Street, in New York, the nation, across the world. Police respond to a loose movement of occupiers as trespassers, even trouble-makers, and make arrests. Some leaders and candidates, the media, too, characterize the protest as ragtop, young, without a message beyond claiming that it represents the 99 percent who suffer from the 1 percent holding the purse strings. Give this movement time, though, a more diversified membership, set goals, offered solutions, charismatic leadership and demonstrated responsibility for non-violent protest that focuses on free airing of grievances, and it could grow to the point where the system recognizes it, and then things could begin to change.
It’s happened before -- this nation’s independence was not likely. How could the disorganized, under-funded colonials defeat the British Empire? But here we are, a power greater than Britain. The Occupy Boston Harbor movement of the day gained focus, and so may Occupy Wall Street. The key is developing a system.
America is a gift from God. Its shaky beginning has endured, and we have helped save the world from inhumanity. This experiment must not end, must not go down in flames. The majority of our citizens are not physically with the few on the protest line, but the many in America today know full well that Congress and the presidency are broken systems, and great change must come if the nation is to survive. Special interests rule the roost, and somehow the people’s voice must become a lobby.
Maybe then the system would create jobs, perhaps in emerging technology, where we can again become world employment leaders.
Maybe then elected officials would be free of lobby money, with campaigns funded only by limited tax dollar so that Washington, states and municipalities listen to the people instead.
Maybe then the wealthy with conscience, who recall their own upward climb, would help by loaning money to create jobs and also outright invest in America. They have the funds, and you know what? They would be repaid handsomely in renewed economic activity as consumerism “trickles UP,” not down (as it rarely has).
Maybe then the nation, free of special interest, whether moneyed or of political ideology, would decide what sort of health care, pension system and social service network a progressive world leader must have. We must work with private industry to fund it, not government, make it a profitable enterprise, but with greed controls.
Maybe then we would recognize that the super rich were made even more so by our outsized expectations -- bigger houses, bigger cars, goods bought on the credit cuff. We enabled them through the system, shot ourselves in the foot.
America can smile again, should smile again, but it won’t come without change and sacrifice, not only from the ordinary people but from those who have the investment funds, who should be persuaded within the system.
October 10, 2011
Of a holiday, of holidays
On this rearranged Columbus Day, courtesy of Congress’ move to make three-day weekends for pleasure, there were early signs this morning that not everyone had a day off, though too many have unwanted leisure time -- the growing number of unemployed, some chronically. But a portion of those still getting a paycheck were on the roads, adding to the noise level as minimum-wage landscapers started lawnmowers and leaf blowers to sing a shrill suburban tune and manning the counters at convenience stores, malls, etc.. No holiday for these guys.
On such a day, there will be parades to note the Italian explorer, who, working for a Spanish queen, stumbled upon what would become the Americas. Italian-American accomplishments will be noted, as they should be, though the achievements of all ethnic groups, which built and build these United States, stem from the first footprints of Columbus’ landfall at Hispaniola in 1492. Though Leif Ericson made it to North America about 500 years before, it was Columbus who set in motion European exploration of the “New World.”
Exploration of all sort ensued, and the cauldron of experimentation, inventiveness, democracy, independence and influence continues to be stirred. There have been missing ingredients, such as overdue recognition of the Native Americans chased to reservations, and, worse, killed, in manifest destiny; slavery; ethnic prejudice; and greed, which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt trust-busted for the public good and which on this Columbus Day again feeds growing protest across the land.
No American holiday is for itself any more, and perhaps never was. Labor Day. Memorial Day. Veterans Day. Workers may be off; children have no school; good weather brings out the barbecue and other leisure activities; officials note the particular day’s purpose, which some of us are reverent about, but for the great majority, the holiday is just that -- “a day of festivity or recreation when no work is done.”
Enjoy Columbus Day. But please know this: Every holiday is actually followed by “labor days,” for when the 24 hours are up, it is those many days and nights that will make or break our stressed nation, as has been the challenge before, as has been the opportunity to afford us true holidays.
October 3, 2011
Too many choices
Perhaps the country began going to seed when Dunkin’ Donuts ended the belly-up coffee counter, its wonderful java offered in welcome-pardner ceramic mugs. For a small price relative to these days, you could nurse the brew while you day-dreamed or maybe shot the breeze with a pal. There were no double-mocha lattes, no designer croissant sandwiches to complicate.
Reaching farther back, the old diners also had counters where the cuppa was even cheaper (5¢, 10¢), and where you were more likely to meet someone you knew or a village character, to have more of a hometown visit. Most “diners” today have menus longer than the counters back when. How did life get so entangled? When did so many choices hit us?
Some parents begin making college plans for their children right out of the box, before they enroll them in the correct pre-school. Seniors on Part D of the national prescription drug plan face quarterly choices over which is cheapest, which gives the most. Young adults don’t know where they should build their lives -- will the jobs last? Will there always be a middle class?
The electorate is totally confused. Candidates push great rhetoric, make many grand promises that get lost in the system once elected. Whom do you trust?
The technologically challenged are befuddled by cellphones, computers, big-screen TVs. What buttons to push? What media/data/voice plan to buy?
The world promises to become even more complex. What careers to pursue in this economy? How to invest wisely?
This isn’t to say that back in the 1960s when Dunkin’ had a counter, life was always so simple it was easier to get through the day, to build a future. That was the decade of continuing civil rights battles, unsettled, unsettling controversy over the undeclared Vietnam War, the sexual renaissance and the start of Great Society social programs. Everything was already changing much more quickly than in the previous several decades. Even Dunkin’ was part of that, its coffee and donuts a leader in the rapidly appearing, ever-more-complex fast-food culture.
It is inevitable that change will beget more change, and that like a bus going downhill with uncertain brakes, the curves ahead will prove challenging. The curves will be many, as will be the bumps in the road. Do we, as individuals, as the nation, as the world get off and take another route?
I think, for me, I’d find that old diner, grab a cup of joe and sit a spell, day-dreamin’.
Too many choices, that’s what.
September 26, 2011
Deodorizing progress
An apple may not fall far from its tree, but if one drops in 1932 and another fruit in 2011, that’s a story. Or a column.
I live in Blauvelt, New York State, now part of the New York City suburbs but in my youth and in my father’s, this hamlet was about as far away from Gotham as a suit is from a tractor. Yet, the intersection of Western Highway and Erie Street was the busiest in Rockland County in 1932, my dad’s time.
The state had recently opened a psychiatric hospital, and the many jobs afforded during the Great Depression brought heavy traffic along Native American/colonial roads, so much so that the intersection, with no traffic light, was labeled by The Journal-News as the most traveled daily. An amazing fact since the crossing was smack dab in the country, not far from a newly built state highway, yes, but really in a bucolic setting. Tomato farms, orchards, a few summer bungalows and historic homes comprised the area.
Near the corner of Western Highway and Erie was a small apple tree left over from a strand of them. It was next to a recently constructed semi-Craftsman home sitting at the intersection. This tree, like all of Blauvelt and all of Rockland, was not used to the smell of automobile and bus exhaust nor the vibrations heavy daily traffic brought. Maybe that’s why it dropped apples more quickly than, say, the trees at Concklin’s, Davies’ or Brown’s orchards where acre upon acre afforded the fruit kinsmanship. The apples would quickly turn soft in the near-autumn sun and fill the air with a sweet fragrance, a fine counterpoint to the exhaust of progress. Children walking by would smash the fruit under their feet or kick them back and forth to one another.
In the decades since 1932, which include post-World War II super growth, the apple tree has gotten old but, amazingly, still produces fruit. The home at Western and Erie is also there, front porch and all, and the American scene at the intersection is even more hectic than it was 79 years ago. No longer Rockland’s busiest corner -- about 100 intersections vie for that dubious distinction -- the crossing probably handles more than 1,500 vehicles a day, including huge tractor trailers hauling trash to a compacting plant over roads that can hardly carry the load.
The psychiatric center long ago downsized, and by then its workers came from all directions, across many intersections. Western and Erie lost its busiest corner marking a long time ago.
But the apple tree still drops fruit from vehicle vibration and the air still smells of exhaust, the fallen apples trying their best, as always, to deodorize progress.
September 19, 2011
What’s in a smile
America doesn’t smile much these days. Jobs gone, debt, deficit, taxes, disappointing “leaders,” the greedy, less spirit, confused purpose -- not much to be happy about. Until you see a child’s face.
Not talking about my own grandchildren, for I am prejudiced. Nor the smiles of any particular kids I know. As with so much of life, it is the anonymous who are seen most acutely, most honestly. We have no direct stake in who they are, where they have been, where they are going. There are no ties, no responsibilities in the seconds it takes to glance at their openness, the smile from non-cluttered thinking in childhood expression.
Where are they, the young who smile? In innocence, surely. In curiosity, yes. In mile-a-minute thinking as their fertile, inquisitive minds begin to collect and catalog sights, sounds, smells, emotions. Most of all, in imagination, in that magical world where there are few limits, where super heroes are made and trusted, where Cinderella can meet her fella, where right can win out, where the frontier is the jump over the moon into the cosmos, and of course any child can do that. He/she has not been taught otherwise.
Adults have forgotten so much of a child’s world and come to tolerate it as a growing phase worthy of a nice pat on the head as they plan for college way too soon, not remembering that the best education in their own lives was when they were young and few boundaries had been set. Who is the wisest in the set? The youth in imagination or the “accomplished” adult who has made a mess of things in today’s America?
The nation no longer smiles, but the young still do, in almost any circumstance. All things seem possible in such early time, anything.
Pity that we grow up.
September 12, 2011
Of Saturdays and moms
A Colorado correspondent and I had a recent e-mail exchange on moms and Saturdays, 1950s style, and the conclusion was that we each pretty much were on our own, though with a different “push” from mothers. My friend reported, “I don't recall ever being chased from the house ... Saturday mornings were always trips to Nyack (New York) for laundry and shopping, and they were enjoyable. Much more to me, I'm sure, than to my mom. I was responsible for cleaning my room and doing the household dusting -- probably why I recall the lamps and knickknacks from my youth fairly well -- and then was free. Kept out from underfoot well because I didn't want additional jobs. ...”
I didn’t do any chores, at least on Saturday, and I was definitely chased out of the house by my working mom, who with my father, would tackle the week’s laundry and dust. They, particularly my mother, did not want my brother and I to be in the way, and so we were sent packing for six or so hours.
Not a bad deal as it turned out, since my parents had some peace, and though Craig and I generally went separate ways to individual friends or haunts, the key companion for both of us was imagination. No cell phones or pocket video games, no “booked” activities. We had long periods when imagination kept boredom away. We let our minds wander, in day-dreaming, sometimes in the imagination offered by books and their plots and characters, and in hands-on effort like building huts and tree houses.
I had a regular Saturday walking route as well. I’d sleep in Saturdays, get up about 9:30, quickly wolf down raisin bran cereal and, knowing my mom would soon be looking my way, leave the Hillcrest, N.Y., house, turn left on Karnell, then right on State and right on Hickory where there was a wooded path that ran through the back of one of the numerous summer hotels in the area. In off-season, it was abandoned, and we kids used to take it as a shortcut to North Main Street, but not before we stopped at the open barn and sat at an old grinding wheel and gave it a spin. On North Main, I would head through downtown Spring Valley, past the same shops that greeted my father and grandfather in their day. It was a brief walk in town, six-streets-long, but coming from the countrified area of Hillcrest, the hick in me had come city-courtin’, and I was less of a hermit for a moment. It was like getting warm sun on your face on a chilly day, a welcome necessity though you wouldn’t want to stay in the sun forever.
Soon I was across the 1840s Erie track, headed for the South Main Street School where I played in a yard enjoyed by my dad 20 years before. It had not changed a bit.
I might run into a friend, but more often I was alone, day-dreaming my way across town, looking at the stores, the street characters. I passed the time, enough so that I could come back home just when my mom finished her cleaning.
It was a routine, a 1950s moment in which kids like myself and my Colorado correspondent kept busy, out of trouble and with enough visiting in imagination, in day-dreaming, that I can say I was hardly ever lonely.
September 5, 2011
No 'labor' from leaders?
EVERYWHERE, USA -- How is labor supposed to rest on this noted day when there are so few jobs? The many unemployed already have nothing but downtime. How did a rich, progressive, innovative, democratic, promising nation, always one with a frontier to conquer, become stuck in high joblessness and its growing disease, low expectation? Where will our children’s children be on Labor Day 2051? Where are many Americans today?
This nation, conceived in liberty, should not have won its war against the well-trained and equipped British; came close to returning to the king in 1812; could have been destroyed by our worst conflict -- brother against brother in the Civil War; could have collapsed economically in the later-1800s depressions; could have lost its identity in the great immigrations, if Old World prejudices had lingered; could have withered and collapsed in the Great Depression; and could have been permanently misdirected in the civil rights crisis, the Vietnam War, Watergate and Sept. 11. But our citizens' bearings remained set. We continued our optimism, inventiveness, innovation, charity and move toward equality.
Not so government, which has lost its way. Today, the presidency and the Congress are isolated, reacting largely to the monied interests required for re-election, encumbered by procedure and lobbies that keep the executive and legislative branches apart from the American mainstream -- its pain and suffering, its hopes and desires.
On this Labor Day 2011, the sweat of many millions of our men and women, our forebears, are now the tears in the eyes of the jobless, in the eyes of parents who fear for their children’s future. Yet we retain our great energy and patriotism and native can-do American spirit ready to tackle the next frontier, if only, if only, that would be set by our leaders.
Where are they?
August 29, 2011
Can you hear them now?
NORTH OF GOTHAM -- Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, was uber-careful to stress the potential destructive power of a hurricane named Irene that seemed headed straight for Queens Boulevard. In the second-guessing that now follows what became a tropical storm, he is criticized for being too careful. Not possible to be too prepared. The beast that was could have paralyzed the five boroughs.
It also could have taken out my suburban area 20 miles north and the surrounding five counties, but authorities here, too, were on the horn warning people to be prepared, even to evacuate. Though there were deaths, major flooding, heavy power loss and much disruption, the storm was weathered.
How much it will all cost has to be totaled, certainly a figure far above the 2 percent budget caps imposed on schools and government by the governors of New York and New Jersey. You cannot put a price on safety, however.
The full damage from Irene, in the burbs as well as in Gotham, though not as great as feared but in the millions nonetheless, did not have to happen as scripted. The grief, the expense, was largely debt-due after decades of poor land-use planning, even greed and incompetence.
Filled-in floodplains, overbuilding by profit-seeking developers, weak construction codes, too much strip-shopping and its impermeable asphalt parking lots as well as maintenance neglect of storm drains, tunnels, transit and other infrastructure have overtaxed government’s ability to manage the quality of life on a sunny day, let alone a rainy one and almost never on a stormy day except by borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
And that’s what will happen now as the tab for overtime and repair will mean cuts in basic government operation as well as added debt. The bill could have been less if municipalities, counties and states had long ago cooperated on proper building and code practice to seek “progress” sensibly and within reason.
Mayor Bloomberg was right to hit the airwaves and the Internet on storm preparation. So were the governors of New York and New Jersey. Will they now use their considerable voice to plan better for Irene’s sister? For our everyday quality of life? Will there at long last be sensible land-use planning?
August 22, 2011
The gathered clan
When a family comes together, there is a certain dynamic in play. It matters not which family, where it is geographically, in what age or how many people are involved. It is a study in human nature, in what matters dearly, in a species' survival.
Perhaps on my street in Blauvelt, N.Y., yesterday, there were several homes where families were gathered -- parents, young or grown children, in-laws, grandparents, uncles, cousins, whomever. Food was prepared, conversations had, kids watched super hero movies, memories were repeated. There was laughter, maybe an inward tear on recalling a now absent loved one. The cook was rushing about, assisted by the minor cooks -- but there was just one cook, of course.
Later, after hours spent in a busy pace not normal to the household, this family member and that left as the great cleanup progressed, with help at first and then the entire scene was left to the two or so people who really live in the house. Cleanup takes a long time, for it is not just the putting away of plates and silverware and the floor sweeping, but the arrangement again of one’s home, where routine is cherished. Routine is always interrupted by company, thank goodness, but it must be returned. It must.
In all, a warmness to any of the visits on my street, including in my own home where family gathered yesterday as my father in law had his 98th birthday. There was electricity or at least the steady current that makes life worth living. The few hours were well enjoyed.
But we all cherish our quiet, so while we are happy to see company arrive, we are also pleased to see them go. As they are when we visit their homes and also take leave at some point. That is the price of bonding, one gladly paid to enjoy a family gathering as well as the comfort of kin when we are not together.
August 15, 2011
How one class fared
This essay was written for my class, the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School, Spring Valley, N.Y. We had a fine reunion Aug. 13. It is offered here in hope that other former students, of whatever school, in whatever time, can relate to the feelings expressed.
On a sentimental evening, we are not just about sentiment. There’s sentimentality in this room, of course. How could it be otherwise five decades later in this now retouching of friendships and the opening of memory pages? No, sentiment did not get us here, we collection of the successful, the survivors, the lucky. We are as youth once again, yet our lives prove the long journey beyond.
Each class, in whatever age, wherever in the world, has its flavor, its special stamp. Geography, the decade, social direction, the economy, our parents, teachers and whatever other influences the universe gives in the moment help spawn and grow the class. There is the reality of local, national and international events, including war. Economic change. Vast social change. Our own maturing. How our dreams fared. What we wish for succeeding generations. Our health. Our relationships. The complications-- the joys and sorrows -- of the last 50 years, different lives but still, in all that, shared high school DNA, the leitmotif of the Class of 1961.
That peculiar mix, so well stirred in our years at Spring Valley High, began with the bringing together of kids from varied neighborhoods -- the North and South Main Street Schools, St. Joseph’s, Monsey, English Church, Camp Hill, New Hempstead, Happy Valley, Lakeside, and then, toward the end of our high school run, transfer students from New York City as the suburbs started to build. We had a first year of being together in the new junior high of the old Ramapo II School District -- ninth grade in 1957-58 at the former high school, a building that many of our parents attended. Time went so very quickly that season, but the months were enough to push us away from our elementary years and those particular communities into the yin and yang of high school, and to stir the juices of anticipation of what being sophomores, then juniors and, finally, big seniors would be like. How eager were we to grow up.
Each of us has particular memories of Spring Valley High – the teachers who meant the most, some giving us life-changing direction. The friends we made, some for life, others now seen again, with 50 years just a second in time, so mutual are our thoughts and ways, even if not shared for so many seasons. Some recall the sports we played, the socialization of football and basketball games, the clubs we joined, Regents exams, the proms, first dates, first love, first cars. All remember the sudden passing of our classmate Fred Yatto and how on that November 1960 day we among the young learned that life was finite. Some 16 of our comrades have reminded us since.
Most of us have moved away from Rockland, from the Spring Valley area and a main street where we knew all the shopkeepers, a downtown recognizable only in revisited memory. But for a time, in our time, the Spring Valley Theatre, Brown’s Luncheonette, Arvanite’s, Bauer’s market, Ro-Field Appliances, Nat Kaplan’s, Shapiro’s, Perruna’s, Kulle’s Tire, K&A Hardware, drug stores, bakeries, barbershops and so many other businesses gave us a sense of continuity in our hometown. We were all part of Small Town, America.
We took the hometown feeling and that of the close high school community with us, even as we rushed on graduation night, cap and gown flung off, diploma in hand, to jump into college, the workplace, families, careers, other towns. We were in such a hurry that we did not see the door closing on such a vital chapter in our individual lives.
Where were our hearts and heads these 50 years? We built careers, families, relationships, lost parents and friends, experienced joy and sadness and the great in-between that fuels most of life. As the decades passed, we became far removed from the youth of our high school years, from the village where we were cast. Yet, the experiences of Spring Valley high, our elementary seasons before, our downtown, all that we then had remained in our subconscious, as circuits that simply were not switched on for a long time, save the occasional flashback. Now, tonight, this weekend, after the preparation of two years by the extraordinary reunion committee, the circuits are again energized.
So, it is not sentiment alone, this reuniting. It is a deliberate turn of the head back to the closing doors of Spring Valley High as we left pomp and circumstance in June 1961. We did not look then; we do now. This time, we can see what the future brought. This time we know that within the walls of that Route 59 building were the ingredients of a unique alchemy that made us, and only us, the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School.
August 8, 2011
Saving America from a fall
Congress and the presidency are now broken systems, and great change must come if the nation is to survive. Otherwise, the road traveled by ancient Rome in its decline -- high debt, reduced revenue, war distractions -- will be a metaphor for the U.S. The fall will be catastrophic.
History tells us how we got here, and it dates from 1918, the end of “The War to End All Wars.” In the rush to “normalcy,” American inventiveness and manufacturing began to produce consumer goods like refrigerators, toasters and radios. Enterprising marketers came up with the time-payment plan to help a rising consumer class buy these goodies on the cuff. It was the beginning of purchasing beyond one’s means. Price inflation ensued, and the greed of the moment extended to margin buying in the stock market. On Oct. 29, 1929, the first day of the Great Depression, over-priced, unsecured stocks, frenzied purchase and high personal debt all proved to be the loose mortar of the new American economy.
In the Depression, Americans pulled pack to the lowered expectation of just a few decades before and survived with the novelty of major government spending until the defense jobs of World War II added more national debt but also personal income. The end of conflict saw the U.S. on top of the world economically since the Axis was destroyed and, among the Allies, we were the only country in good shape. We ruled the universe in our post-war manufacturing and innovative product development. But our 1920s’ habit resurfaced -- a huge and steady regrowth of consumer installment-plan buying and a “must-have” attitude. In the largess, government also expanded, largely through social programs as we marched through the 1960s. We flexed muscle internationally in the deadly and expensive, misdirected, confusing Vietnam War, and the continuing Cold War added to American debt as well. But we were still tops economically, and despite recessions, we thought our system highly resilient. What the ordinary citizen did not realize is that concurrent with our growing desire for more material goods, special-interest groups that could get the ear of presidents and congresses were becoming stronger and stronger. Not the least of these was the military/industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower, our American general and president, warned would become deeply imbedded. Every undeclared war since has had its strings pulled in part by this special interest. Now there are also lobbies that protect big financiers, huge manufacturers, oil companies and corporate-owned farming, etc. There are lobbies for political belief, for religion, for social causes. Special-interest groups for plausible reason and for sinister action.
By the time we got to 2000, lobbies of all sorts were so entrenched that government, which by then was so big and so involved in individual lives, marched largely to special-interest direction. Today, with the awful and real worries about world terrorism; the polarization of government philosophy between heavy and active involvement (investment spending) and deficit reduction at any cost; and the great isolation from the reality of ordinary people’s lives that is both Congress and the presidency, we see special interests taking advantage at every turn. No decision is made without these lobbies. They fund expensive re-election campaigns, provide jobs for former officials and hold the keys to House and Senate committee doors. They are, despite some legitimate aims, largely a cancer on the nation, for they interfere with the legislative, executive and judicial branches. They affect the checks and balances of our democratic system. Government is ever so remote from the people.
End special interests
Until American campaigns are fully publicly funded, with no lobby money allowed, until the concerns of any special-interest group are heard not through the wallet but in open public hearing alone (to protect freedom of speech), U.S. leaders will hear no other voices. The congressional system is corrupted, as are state legislatures. So, if the nation is not to fall as Rome did in its own greed, special interests must end.
As for the presidency, the last time you see a living, breathing White House leader is when he is elected. On the stump, the candidate appears like the people, able to digest their fears, their needs, their hopes. He talks the language. Once elected, as has happened with Obama, the great collection of advisers (read special interests here, too) and the security apparatus isolate the man. Who has his ear? Not Joe and Sue USA.
We, the people, who have allowed the growth of special interests, who have permitted our remote presidency, have, over the past four decades, enabled special interests to end kill U.S. jobs by sending them overseas. This we have done by (1) not insisting on government reinvestment in competitive industry, like steel; (2) by over-regulating business; (3) by making consumerism, principally the buying of goods financed by debt (home equity, credit cards) our basic economic engine. Now, in tough times, as on Oct. 29, 1929, that house of cards is falling part.
How do we rescue America?
• We end special interests. We ask our elected officials to serve by conscience and principle alone.
• We add a “people’s cabinet member,” an ordinary Sue or Joe America who serves a few months and has the ear of the chief executive on “real” concerns. Then a new American is appointed.
• We, the nation, creates jobs, jobs, jobs -- in emerging technology, mainly, where we can again become world employment leaders.
• The very wealthy “loan” us the money to create jobs and also outright invest in America. They have the funds, and you know what? They will be repaid handsomely in renewed economic activity as consumerism “trickles UP,” not down (as it rarely has).
• We, the nation, decide what sort of health care, pension system and social service network a progressive world leader must have, and we work with private industry to fund it, not government, make it a profitable enterprise, but with greed controls.
• We end unfunded mandates and micromanaging of education and housing while enforcing agreed-upon quality and humanitarian standards.
• We the people cut back our own expectations. Do we need McMansions? Super-sized cars? Vacation homes? Or should we live within means, growing the economy, yes, but within reason? And paying as we go, perhaps helping others in need, too?
.• We decide what wars will be fought and who else in the world will fight them with us. No more unilateral U.S. action.
America is a gift from God. Its shaky beginning has endured, and we have helped save the world from inhumanity. This experiment must not end, must not go down in flames. We must take action.
August 1, 2011
An America still enduring
Ernie Pyle, perhaps America’s greatest columnist ever, told a depressed nation in its worst economic calamity that smiles were still to be seen. His subjects, often found in out-of-the-way places, were people long without jobs in the 1930s, with few relief programs, with a future so very uncertain. Pyle mined them for funny tales and lessons in survival character and served up weekly Scripps Howard newspaper columns in conversational letters to the reader. He was a hit for his honest observations, relaxed writing and, most of all, the faith and hope he found at a time when pundits thought the sky was falling in, that the great experiment in a democratic republic was failing.
The people, so many not sure where the next bit of food was coming from, knew another nation, one not far removed from the pioneers who opened the West, from the tinkerers, inventors and manufacturers who brought the world electric light and assembly line-produced automobiles, and from the great waves of immigrants who laid the foundation for the middle class of their children and their new country.
Ernie Pyle, killed at age 44 covering the war in the Pacific, was the roving Mark Twain of his time, with an acute eye for the ordinary person’s special nature. Though he criticized his writing, Pyle’s columns produced great literature, for his words reported truth, and his readers nodded their heads as they found comfort and assurance through his observations.
Pyle would note the very same things today, in this difficult economic time, even in an age he could scarcely recognize for the intense consumerism of at least three decades. The individuals he would talk to, the places he would visit would still reveal the essential quality of American character-- conservative in thought, often liberal in giving and forgiveness. His take on government, on political leaders -- that they are as remote as ever from the national heartbeat -- would remain.
Most of all, Ernie Pyle would tell us in his “letters to readers” about old Joe, or about Smithtown, USA, or about anything so awfully ordinary that we come close to tears, or laugh, or say “yes, I know” -- that America is alive, enduring.
There is great hope in that these days, as well.
July 25, 2011
On the Outer Cape
NORTH TRURO, Mass. -- Many communities on old Cape Cod are trendy and expensive in these days of the growing super-rich, but some towns have not yet put a price tag on their charm. For the cost of a decent pair of walking shoes and an old pair of shorts, you can amble by Dutra’s Market and the Village Cafe, perhaps linger at either and tune into the tempo of the locals of the Outer Cape. An ordinary coffee, a Boston tabloid or the long-running and still with-it, still-read Cape Cod Times add to the chill-out, which ends only with the time limit of your particular day. No designer clothing required. No Mercedes or Lexus SUV.
Walk up the old Kings Highway, Route 6A, and 500 yards from Dutra’s you see the vantage point that painter Edward Hopper used in “High Road” (1931). The refractive light is the same. You can hoof it or bike down Pond Road to Cold Storage Beach, scene of some of Hopper’s other Cape works. You are just miles from Provincetown, and you can spot in the distance where the Pilgrims first landed (opting to move on to Plymouth).
There’s an older look here, in North Truro, probably one not all that different from Hopper’s time in the 1930s-1960s. More scrub pine covering what were apple orchards and farms, yes, but the lay of the land is still as God intended, albeit with paths set by Native Americans, then rutted by colonial wagons, then by growth and summers at the Cape.
A certain peace is what enough still seek from a vacation, and if the suburban-like bustle of the mid-Cape now add louder notes, or if bigger, expensive homes or high realty prices sing the wrong tune in some Cape areas, then head north to Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham.
The Highland Light at the National Seashore will bring you back generations, when whaling ships and their crews counted so heavily on a beacon in the Cape fog, when this light welcomed many a mariner home. The house and tower were moved inland in 1996 because the coastline continues to erode, but the structure, an active U.S. Coast Guard aid to navigation, is still set close enough to the Atlantic to be a watchfire, as it has been since 1797. Hopper, America’s foremost realist artist, captured it in a 1930 watercolor, bathed in setting sunlight. It changes you, this look at Highland Light late in day, opening a door into another realm. It is a poetic trip to calm.
Artists, writers and individualists have long spent summers in the Truro region, and if spirit can be left to linger, it surely is felt in the Outer Cape today.
Highland Light
July 18, 2011
On turning 40
I used the same headline for myself, some 29 years ago when a weekly Column Rule essay in The Journal-News touched generically on the coming of one’s fourth decade and specifically my own. It was a sum of amazement, reflection, regret, gratitude and fear of the road ahead.
Now my oldest son, namesake Arthur IV, has himself so quickly arrived at the gate, though he hardly seems older than my memories of him and his brother Andrew -- having pillow fights, learning to ride a bike, studying in the third grade, in the seventh, high school, college. Does a parent ever see his offspring without a flash of the mind’s photo album?
Yet our oldest is hard to miss as an adult since -- and this is praise -- his act is together and has been since he could first make decisions for himself. He is bright; he is fit, running and winning road races as he has since middle school; he is a hard and diligent worker, a fine school teacher by any standard.
Arthur IV is a family man who more than shares parental duties, housecleaning, diaper changing, etc. His hours are always long, and he continues his teacher’s voice long after the work day, since he is an instructor, too, to his son Sam, 4, and daughter Beatrice, 2. He is also their partner in crime, passing on some of the harmless shenanigans that he learned growing up with an odd father.
My son is a true Rocklander, cognizant of his lower Hudson Valley, N.Y., roots -- not going back as far as the original county families but by modern standards four generations anyway. He has lived in various places in college and has visited here and there, but Rockland is home, though that was never a requirement. Home is where you make it. Arthur rails against county overdevelopment, complains about political decisions and wonders why there is so much suburbia and not enough village living. That is why he chose to move to the Nyacks, where he can take his children to the library, to the ice cream shop, to the Hudson River, to Hook Mountain for a hike, all on foot. He knows his neighbors, and they know him.
What is next for my 40-year-old son? Good health, I pray. More running (his high school bumper sticker -- “Run Forever” -- is still on our garage wall). Decades of proud years as his own family grows. Many, many seasons in the old home he and his wife Laura bought, a place that particularly fits my son’s personality. I will tell him not to have too much fear. At 40, I worried about career, money, health, life’s purpose. I revisited old doubt, had confidence challenged. There was so much unknown ahead. And there still is. Having traveled almost 29 years beyond 40, though, I can say that the benefits of life, if you are so fortunate -- of children maturing, of relationships enduring, of reflected appreciation for one’s roots, new challenges, joy and tears, life itself -- all are behind the many doors in the long hallway past 40.
Have a fine walk, my -- our -- son.
June 11, 2011
A day at dad’s house
If you are fortunate, as I am, to have an elderly dad who still lives quite independently, in his own home, then you don’t mind, at my own age of almost 69, if you have to paint his house.
Did that the other day -- the same beige/tan that matches the aluminum siding he had installed 25 years ago, a color to which he is now attached because my late mom liked it. In fact, my father will not change much about his house because my mother chose the furniture, etc.
It’s not that he is maudlin nor romantic. He’s an ex-Marine who doesn’t get too emotional over anything. (“If I survived Marine boot camp, I could face anything,” he once told me.) No, my dad honors my mom by not changing much, and I think it’s the reason he rattles around in a 1,500 square-foot home.
You are never far from returning to childhood when you are around a parent, no matter what your age, despite being a parent and grandparent yourself. There are always the old issues, the usual father/son posturing that never steps down, and probably a sub-conscious desire to get back to the more carefree days of youth.
My day of painting went smoothly enough -- my dad leaves me alone to do my job, as he learned to do when I put in the attic electrics in the sixth grade. (House wiring was pretty simple then, and a few issues of Popular Mechanics pushed me into the self-taught world.)
As I painted, I came to areas of the house that needed repair, and I used tools from my dad’s garage, including an old hammer that went to the woods with me for treehouse building in the seventh grade. There was also the box of nails from those days.
I see my father often enough, but it’s usually just a check-in and some conversation. He likes no fuss, and visits from anyone can be overdone. This time, it was not a visit but a day of work, a very different feeling. The painting ended up not taxing me, and I felt warm about the experience. I did a good deed for the old gent, but I think I got the better part of the bargain given the emotional reward of that day, use of old tools and all.
July 4, 2011
Independence Day
In writing professionally for 46 years, there has been just one rule: Get rhythm. Words strung together without the right flow of sound are like ball bearings that fall from a holder -- there is no stated purpose. Put together there is function.
Writing is best understood, even appreciated, by “hearing” the words, the sentences, with certain syllables stressed, some not, some longer than others. For example, when someone reads a good novel or short story, there is not only the acquired acquaintanceship with the characters and the plot, but the road that takes you there -- the writing. Each punctuation mark is a stop sign, curve, change of direction, hill, valley, level grade on that route. The length of scenes, the amount of dialogue, repetition, emphasis -- all are controlled by the writing and its governing rhythm.
Today, our nation celebrates the Fourth of July and the written Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The writing in the historic document of July 4, 1776, owes its rhythm in part to England, given the heritage of the signers, including the Magna Carta and common law. But not entirely. The Age of Reason, increased writing (in sometimes stirring rhythm) about abuses of state and church and a growing belief that, in common, the people should seek equality -- all this changed the tempo. A writer knows that what affects him or her personally -- because of society, upbringing, circumstance -- directs the music, often the score as well.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, as writers of the Declaration, may have been trained in the ways of colonial America, that is close to the motherland in customs, etc., but the rhythm of their prose was distinctly from this side of the pond. The British never got the tune, for they never bothered to listen to the music.
On Independence Day 2011, the mother tongue of a nation now 235 years old reflects deepening and variation after centuries of immigration, but the rhythm of our American theme is as it was when Jefferson’s pen inscribed “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Happy Fourth of July.
June 27, 2011
At the playground
A woman of wisdom once told me she is happiest when “everyone (in her family) is under the same roof.” That’s certainly true for those of us who have made it to grandparent-land, having survived both trial and tribulation in raising our young, accepting their departure for their own living, getting used to the quiet and slower pace of the empty nest and then welcoming the arrival of grandchildren.
The old saw, of course, is that grandchildren make grandparents happy in part because they eventually go home, that you can enjoy all over again the wonder of growing children, their imagination, their frank questions, their idiosyncrasies, but at the end of the day, there comes a time to depart. Most of us could not go through parenthood again but being grandparents is just right, keeping us in this special loop of humanity. It is its own blessing.
On a recent playground jaunt with Beatrice, one of my three granddaughters (plus a grandson) in Memorial Park along the Hudson River at Nyack, N.Y., I was reminded of my own two sons’ upbringing, now so deep in the past but yet as if it were yesterday.
Beatrice is inquisitive, bright, says “no” most of the time, wants to do everything by herself as two years olds are wont to demand. In my own time with my sons in this same park, then just steps from my crazy-hours newspaper job at the old Journal-News, I was probably thinking more about job/career stress and paying bills and therefore paying less attention to the boys at the playground than I should have.
Beatrice had my attention, though -- on the swings, on the animal figures, in the treehouse, wherever her short interest span took her. A retired “Gramps” is just naturally better at grandparenting than he was back in the saddle as a parent.
I was not alone then, of course. My wife Lillian was an excellent parent, making up for my own shortcomings, and is better today at grandparenting than this old coot. The offspring of the offspring will learn manners and all other good things from her, as did the sons. From me they shall receive wacky answers, fierce independence, self-reliance (I hope) and questioning of unquestioned authority.
My boys, too, heard the same line, and I am proud to say they are as pioneering and individual as an American ought to be, now or back in 1776. But they are fine parents, too, which their mom taught them to be, not me. I see that when their children come to the park to play with an oddball grandfather or when they all gather “under the same roof.”
June 20, 2011
State of the Union
Where are we in America, we sons and daughters of liberty, of immigrants, factory workers and hardscrabble farmers?
The news in my part of the patch isn’t full of hope: soaring local, state and national debt; borrowed money for just about everything; education and municipal budgets slashed, money from foreign nations for two increasingly fuzzy wars, to be repaid with heavy interest and God knows what by those not yet born. Roads and other infrastructure neglected while the human skeleton, sinew and mind no longer meet health care for a full tune-up.
Yet we see more rich, enabled by greed, lobbies, bailouts that carry no price tag while the benefactors see no moral need to "pay forward" their rescue. If there is supposed to be re-investment in America from this largesse, most of us are still waiting. I wonder if the top 400 richest people, who according to the IRS pay just 17 percent of income in tax, even know how wealthy they are or how sorely their country needs their money, and so little of it overall.
We are now a country of union against non-union, private worker versus public, fighting over the leftovers, squeezed by the ever inflation of the supermarket, gas pump and taxes. With so many jobs lost, with scarce re-investment, there are fewer people left to pay the bills. This, in turn, increases unemployment and reduces spending, in a vicious cycle not even noticed by the rich. Only their handlers know how much they have in the bank, which they also own.
Now, the rich alone have not caused our stagnation. Some politicians, even of eloquence, fail to serve. Common sense too often is bested by personal irresponsibility. The government must do much but cannot do it all, and what it does must be for need and investment, not special interest.
Logic tells us that if the economy doubled in GNP since 1980, surely the middle class would be larger. Yet every day hundreds turn in their identity card, in a democracy long built on a vibrant, growing middle class and its aspirations, its solidity, its buying power. Where can democracy be headed without a large and strong middle class? It has been our greatest frontier, the frontier of hope. It is why we send our young on to further education, why we take pride in the doctor in the family.
Where are we in America, we sons and daughters of liberty, of immigrants, of factory workers and hardscrabble farmers? It is 2011, and the worry lines are deepening in our faces.
June 13, 2011
The people are not a registered lobby
ANYWHERE BUT WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The ordinary American, an enduring species usually known to senators, congress people and presidents only when on the campaign trail, is suffering. Loss of jobs, homes and hope have brought nervous frustration not felt since the Great Depression.
Democrats talk of job incentives through deficit spending and higher taxes, Republicans of program cuts and lower taxes, but the rhetoric of each side is largely script-written by special interests that in both hidden and obvious ways deal the real mojo. Nothing happens in war and peace, in flush times and not without their say-so. Not in 2011.
Driven by profit goals and sometimes rightist or leftist aims, lobbies care nothing about people, their public relations, if any, to the contrary. Big money can buy big speeches and wonderful feel-good.
Special interests also "grow" government to suit their purposes. Our national, state and local jurisdictions are now so large, complex and bureaucratic that their cost may not measure their performance. Yet government is necessary, especially in today’s security worrisome age, in a time when unregulated greed threatens to destroy the middle class and its hopes, when economic, social, health care and especially old-style American inventiveness are life-and-death issues. The best government is the most simple, as described by A. Lincoln: “... of the people, for the people, by the people.”
If government were more transparent, if special interests were prohibited from giving money to any candidate simply by requiring all campaigns to be publicly funded, then perhaps government would become simpler, more connected to the people, with more principled “Mr. Smiths” articulating the citizenry’s needs and with government acting upon them. Office-holders might actually become beholden to the people beyond stump rhetoric.
Ah, but this is anywhere-but-Washington, D.C. thinking, and it has no special-interest stamp of approval. Too bad the citizenry is not a registered lobby.
June 6, 2011
From here to there, 1944
PIERMONT, N.Y. -- In the 67 years today since the allied landings at Normandy and other French beaches began in earnest the push to Germany, suburbia has replaced what was the staging ground for the end of the Second World War in Europe. It was in Piermont that Army personnel and their massive equipment lined up to board Hudson River boats that would bring them to New York City and overseas carriers. And it was in nearby Orangeburg that 1.3 million Army personnel were processed through the largest East Coast port of embarkation. Indeed, the order of battle for D-Day began at Shanks as units were assembled in logistics and support.
On this day of remembrance, anyone with a smattering of that history who walks in this village, this “Last Stop USA,” just less than 20 miles from Gotham, cannot fail to touch the spirits of the good people who marched by in 1943, ’44 and ’45.
Some years back, in a Memorial Day speech I gave in Piermont, dedicating the life-sized, bronze statue of G.I. Joe that watches over the soldiers’ route, I tried to put stories to the men:
• The young man from Wisconsin who saw his mother’s face on a woman he did not know, sitting on her porch off Paradise Avenue as he passed. Soon enough he would be with the 36th Infantry Division at Cassino, and the images of the two women would become one, warming his soul in the cold of battle hell.
• The fellow from Camden, New Jersey, brought to Camp Shanks in the middle of the night on a troop train, who a few weeks later would ride on a transport driven to the Piermont Pier by one of the many women of the home war effort. Maybe he recalled her deft steering of the deuce and a half when he saw the Red Ball Express materiel delivery teams after the breakout at St. Lo and the race to the Rhine.
• The two brothers who last touched American soil at Piermont, one off to the U.S. II Corps at Kasserine Pass and the other with the 45th Infantry at Ragusa, Sicily. Only one son would make it back.
• The older man, still a private, who was not drafted but who joined and became “Pop” with the 106th Infantry at the Battle of the Bulge. The calm hills over Piermont, one of his last sights of America, were in his mind in bitter cold, snowy woods of that awful blitzkrieg December.
• The fellows who shaped up at Shanks for the 32nd Field Artillery and the First Medical Battalion, units that saw a quiet U.S. sendoff and then the shouting, cataclysmic horror of D-Day and D-Day plus one.
• And all the men, almost all civilian soldiers, once machinists, salesmen, the unemployed, farmers, professional workers, sons and fathers, neighbors and strangers, immigrants and Native Americans and all whose forebears came to this nation, free or not.
They are the spirits who once moved as humanity through this Piermont, past this spot where the inanimate but full-of-life G.I. Joe statue gives constant nod to their service, their courage, their sacrifice, their protection of one another.
This scene of continual reverence plays not just in Piermont but every day of the year, in every year, in every small and big town in these United States. Not one community has been left untouched in the world wars, by the Korean and Vietnam wars, and now by Iraq and Afghanistan.
Wars are fought by the then living and endured for decades afterward by the survivors. The memorials we erect to those gone are in worthy and humble tribute and comfort the living, but it cannot end there. What Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg must be remembered, must be repeated: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
Many good people, many ordinary ones made so extraordinary in calamity’s forging, marched in Piermont on the way to war. Not all returned, and those who did had to live the lives of their buddies, too, fulfilling the promises of a safe and secure democracy, so that, as Lincoln added, “... this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
You hear such voice still, here in Piermont, from the one-million-plus spirits who passed through to the European Theatre of War. They will never stop speaking, in this village and in all of this America.
We must listen.
May 30, 2011
Bringing a great artist home
NYACK, N.Y. -- Edward Hopper, native son and famed painter of realism, whose “Nighthawks” and other works articulate American solitude as mood, thought and destiny, is “back home” where he was born in 1882.
Hopper House, the art center in the family’s 1858 home at 82 North Broadway, is celebrating “The Year of Edward Hopper” in recognition of four decades of rescue, renovation and use. As part of the celebration, and in the first scholarly effort to connect the painter to his roots and formative years, Hopper House is trying to awaken Nyack to the incredible Hudson River light that is everywhere. Young Edward, who began drawing at least at age 5, saw that illumination each morning as it shot up Second Avenue into his bedroom. In the afternoon today, you can almost touch the light as it baths the parlor, now the principal gallery.
Hopper House, which has the dual mission of preserving the home as well as advancing all manner of art, hopes visitors and villagers alike will observe as Edward did, taking in what contributed to his many paintings, watercolors, prints and sketches, produced almost to the day he died in 1967. A full listing of “The Year of Edward Hopper” events, including the current “Prelude: The Nyack Years,” the May 21-July 17 unprecedented showing of his early works, is available at www.edwardhopperhouse.org
Wherever you live -- in the Nyack area, in the Midwest, in the South, wherever in America -- I urge you to “see Hopper,” as his home community is now doing. His works often include a person in contemplation, say a man sitting on a wooden sidewalk in front of a store (probably his father, a Nyack dry goods merchant) or the “effect of sunlight on the wall of a house,” geometric patterns that seem to be windows inviting the viewer to interpret, the sort of lighting you see all over Nyack. But you need not be in this village to see his take on American solitude.
You spot the “snapshot effect” of his art, moments in time that have an obvious history and the future of which might well be guessed. Look about the Nyack of today, at the woman catching a bus at Cedar and Main, at the couple leaning on a porch rail, at an upstairs window framing humanity. Always a story -- here in Nyack, and elsewhere, too.
Today Edward Hopper is iconic, his “Nighthawks” and other works recognizable worldwide. Recent museum shows in Boston, Washington, New York City and Europe have drawn many thousands in reverent communication with an artist who said so little by speech but who in his paintings expressed deeply and extensively facets native to the American being. Hopper offered as much in this quote: “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint. The whole answer is there on the canvas.”
The artist’s boyhood home is part of that “canvas,” a source of the light, real and figurative, that was Hopper’s painting harmony. Nyack helped form the vision of an artist who celebrated American solitude and the great quiet, the self-reliance, even the genius within. Now, Edward Hopper has returned home in this local recognition of his gift.
Light at Hopper House
May 23, 2011
The 'changeable' world
I did not have to look up, as I was arranging my pocket money, to know the age of the fellow counting my change. He had to be about 62 or older. The clue? The bill was $11 and I gave him $21. Quickly, I was given $10.
There was no electronic register in this farm store, just a man in work jeans who moments before was hauling plants off a skid and, looking over at the check-out counter, saw me waiting. He just ambled by, nodded hello, added up the cost of my items in his head and said “$11.”
I had no $10 bill, just a $20 and some singles but did not want a bunch of singles back, so I gave him $21,” which of course meant that he would flip back a ten spot. I had another motive, and that was to see if people really could still add in their heads and also recall how such common sense currency exchanges as $21 against $11 was the norm.
The fellow came through with flying colors -- never hesitated, though I think he was a bit surprised by my old-fashioned move. Until he looked up himself and saw his contemporary.
Today’s electronic registers will also instruct cashiers to give $11 in change after the operator inputs $21, but I can tell you, when I have tried to give some clerks $21, they have handed back the $1 bill, saying “You gave me too much.”
This isn’t a complaint about electronic registers. Progress happens. It must, whatever the consequences. It’s just that my generation and before and perhaps for a few years after, had to use their heads to add and subtract, divide and multiply. You could grab a piece of paper, yes, but at least in my fourth-grade class with Mrs. Still, we had to do the arithmetic in our heads. It was a challenge, and I still do it today as a brain exercise.
Countermen and women of years back did it in their heads, too, or added the bill on the same paper bag that would contain your goods, the fellow or gal pulling a pencil from between the ear and head, sometimes wetting the tip out of habit, as if to sharpen skills and be precise, and then do the bill.
A lost art. Quaint perhaps, but also somehow an intimate connection in an ordinary shopping experience. One that came even if you and the counterperson didn’t exchange a word.
May 16, 2011
‘Docs’ on the job
In “retirement,” you get asked the same question -- politely, of course, and with sincerity: “Are you enjoying it?” My answer is always matter-of-fact: “No, I’d rather be at the newspaper.” And that’s the truth even if I am otherwise “enjoying retirement,” certainly a relative term.
If you have reasonable health, if other creative opportunities have opened since leaving the job -- ones that would not have appeared if you were still under the clock -- if you have grandchildren to visit in Texas and locally, if you can help as a volunteer, if you can take a daily walk, if you can share time with family when the crazy hours of decades of deadline newspaper work often detoured that, then how can you honestly deny that you don’t “enjoy” retirement?
And I do, and I hope the same for other retirees. The trouble for me, though, is that I always felt like the country doctor -- I did a necessary job that others could perform, yes, and I was as expendable as the rest, but my calling (and I think I was sent to it) was the sort, as is the doc’s, that you don’t leave until God takes you away. I wrote, I photographed, I commented. I cursed my job and many of the bosses every day, but that was part of the difficult daily birth that is a newspaper. In delivery, people were informed, and that is a blessing and a gift for those who receive and those who give. I never would have retired.
But newspapers and the rest of the media are in sea change, and though there will always be insatiable demand for information, delivering it economically and to people who absorb it electronically rather than simply in print are forcing downsizing everywhere. I could no longer get out of the way of the train, though I was grateful that it didn’t let off any of my colleagues, at the time at least. I made way for some younger people, who kept their jobs for a few years.
Five seasons out, I am thankful for the renewed simplicity of life, though I sleep no longer than I did working various shifts for 42 years. I am grateful I can fly to San Antonio to see son Andrew, daughter-in-law Patricia and grandkids Isabella and Emme, or, in Upper Nyack, son Arthur, daughter-in-law Laura and grandchildren Sam and Beatrice. I am blessed for artistic and volunteer involvement at the Edward Hopper House, in various historical societies and, so far, 10 years in a breakfast program in the village of my soul, Spring Valley. I can write online, to the ether at least, photograph, paint and wonder about the same things in life that I did as a boy on Karnell Street, Old Nyack Turnpike, Cherry Lane, Johnsontown Road, Route 59. Curiosity is still my companion, and though the body ages, does the inner life ever get old?
But I can no longer -- with fellow newspaper stiffs -- glance up at the clock in the editorial office, chase deadline and then step back wringing wet from the day’s (night’s) delivery. We were docs of a sort, and you don’t leave the job. It leaves you.
May 9, 2011
A ‘boulevard’ for generations
One of the newest places available for walking in my neck of the Northeast woods is in Nanuet, on the grounds of the old St. Agatha Home for Children, where once New York City sent youngsters to be reared by the good sisters of the Catholic Church. The large late-1800s housing/school and outlying dormitories are gone in changing times, and, a few years ago, much of the land was sold through public referendum to the Nanuet School District.
It was a fine save since more suburban housing, with greater land density and higher school and other government costs would have risen overnight. Enough already in this overbuilt ex-patch of the woods. The district’s taxpayers showed great foresight in rescuing the property, and some money has been found to pave a walking/bike path that gently follows the hills and valleys where youngsters once played.
I am on site three times a week, early at about 7 a.m., and share the path with two or three others. One of the sections I walk is a longish stretch flanked by very old oak trees, perhaps 125 years old. One fell down during the harsh winter, its insides long rotted though the upper branches were still budding. Five trees are left, standing almost in military formation, as if set by a surveyor’s line, resembling boulevards in France.
In the great open field that is now the St. Agatha walk, this line of trees is the only bit of formality. Other sections pass ballfields, which tell of suburbia, or woods, which speak of old Rockland County, N.Y., or the winding Convent Road, named for obvious reason. I am loose when walking anywhere else on the one-mile path, but when I come to what I now call “the boulevard,” I stand straighter and nod in respect that these trees have long stood where they have, enduring great summer heat and deep winter cold; their trunks etched with initials in 1902, 1935, 1943, 1960, 1995, etc.; their leafed branches providing shade for generations of boys and girls thinking through their plan of life; the roots drawing water from Rockland’s many underground sources. The history these oaks have witnessed span three centuries now.
I can be casual elsewhere on my St. Agatha walk, lost in the solitude that is the fortifying effect of a stroll or quick step or in between, but in the shadow of the trees on the boulevard, I am in the presence of life lived, the voice ghosts still whispering.
May 2, 2011
Dandelions in spring
I took a whack at my grandfather’s long spring habit the other day, and it was as satisfying for me as for it was for him.
He lived in a small New York village called Spring Valley, pre-World War II, at the corner of Ternure and Summit. The property was not quite big enough for two lots but still larger than the standard single-family plot. There was much lawn to trim.
And it was a fine lawn, doing well without modern, expensive fertilizer, mowed by hand with a reel mower maintained by the self-taught mechanic that all homeowners had to be in those days. My grandfather was meticulous at keeping his lawn neat and trimmed. Perhaps it gave him relief from stress after working all day in a smoking pipe factory (Briarcraft), a Depression time job never secure.
Every spring, early on, my grandfather would take a whack at the dandelions that popped up like smiling lollipops mocking the landowner. They were not welcome, on the lawn or in the cracks of the sidewalk that ran 75 feet one way and 50 more around the corner. The man would get on his hands and knees, and using a well-sharpened, old paring knife, he would insert the blade into the ground, circle the roots and pull out the entire dandelion. At the sidewalk, he would tilt the blade to remove dandelions and strips of moss between the cement slabs. He’d pile these up on the walk, and his young grandchildren (there were five of us) -- whoever was visiting at the time -- collected them and piled the debris alongside the garage foundation. I don’t think any of us have ever forgotten such moments.
My grandfather did not speak much, cutting dandelions or not, but he did tell us that his own grandfather, which would have been Robert, the first of our Gunthers to hit American shores from Prussia about 1848, made dandelion wine. My grandfather made root beer.
Standing in front of my own home the other day, in this spring of sudden blooming, I saw many dandelions. And I had a whack at them, too. But with a hand-held sickle. I don’t have my grandfather’s patience for digging out the plants, and this is a faster-paced world anyway. But I do have four grandchildren, two so very far away in Texas, two much closer. None were about this particular moment
-- I said it is a busier time -- so I played that part as well, dumping the debris in the woods.
I am thankful, though, that there are times -- dandelion season or not -- when my family, hopefully like yours, can all be together under one roof. Never seems to be any weeds then.
April 25, 2011
A chance to visit
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. -- Sixty years ago, when you add 10 years to my high school Class of 1961, just about all of us were from this then-country village a mere 22 miles from New York City but, oh, so far away from urbanity. We were either raised there or lived close enough that we went to elementary and secondary school in the area. Some went to the South and North Main Street buildings, to the Monsey School, to Brick Church, to New Hempstead. Some went to St. Joe’s, the Roman Catholic school. We formed our early friendships, even the beginning of life’s outlook, in these community schools, just as did the kids from the nearby private Lakeside and Happy Valley schools.
After school, on weekends, in the summer, some of us from one school might mix with others from another place, though that was rare. We might play with each other in Memorial Park, on the big swings or the merry-go-round. We might see each other in the original Spring Valley Theatre, 14 cents for admission. But, all in all, we were South Main Street, or North, or Monsey, or Brick Church or St. Joe’s kids or from, whatever school. The bonds formed in our elementary sub communities of greater Spring Valley, itself a relatively small village, would remain with us as we all gathered in September 1957 in the first Spring Valley Junior High School.
That one year of ninth grade gave us a moment to meet new friends, keep the old, grow in our bodies and minds, hearts and souls as this new, bigger, unified class would soon begin high school in the relatively new building on Route 59, in September 1958. For three years we would all face the toughening that was speech class with the wonderful Mr. Scott, as well as the challenges of our math, English, social studies, art, music, industrial arts, business, phys ed and other instructors.
We would go to football games in chilly weather, warmed by the joint experience. There would be school dances for some, clubs for many and friendships with the transfer students now arriving in what was becoming suburbia. Many of these students had reluctantly left lifelong neighborhoods and their own high school bonding but quickly became part of what was to be fully cast in three years’ time as the Class of 1961, Spring Valley High School.
Now that class, my class, the class of gathered Monsey elementary students, St. Joe’s kids, Brick Church, from wherever, is planning its half-century reunion August 13 at the Marriott in Park Ridge, N.J. (for information, visit www.50thsvhsclass61.com). Now, not all of us want to go back, especially 50 years. Some may say that it was in elementary school where they formed ties, not SVHS. Others may fence-sit, indecisive about the reunion.
I’ll be there, and I hope many of my classmates will come. You will notice that I do not write “former classmates.” We can never be that, just as servicemen and women who are once together in an experience of growth and emotion can never be ex-comrades. The moment -- and it is just a brief one -- that is high school is classic in life, as much of an emotional lighting as were your parents, your heroes, your first car, your first love. How much would any of us give for a chance to hold hands with any of that again, even for just a few hours before life marches on in certainty and not?
Walk away your ...
April 18, 2011
Growing up in a country area, as I did in lower New York State in the 1950s, even as the sure and steady march of the suburbs was at my heels, I walked everywhere, as did all youngsters. School bus limits were set at two miles in Spring Valley, so we walked to the South Main Street School. After school, we might hoof it downtown. On weekends, when my mother cleaned house, my brother and I (and many a friend) were left on our own, and to our imagination, and so a walk to the woods or the hills kept us busy and in adventure for a hours.
The walking pushed the fat levels down, exercised us, cleared the mental cobwebs and gave us time to think. Walking became such a habit that I often found myself “turning on my head” as if it were a TV set whenever I took a hike. I’d leave school or the house and instantly began thinking about something -- say the life I wanted when I grew up; or I tried to solve a first-year algebra problem that I had been assigned; or I came up with the essay that Torger Gram wanted for sixth-grade English. Actually, I purposely walked for the essays. They were due Mondays, and I would leave my Hillcrest home, head down Karnell Street to State, to Hillcrest Avenue, to Route 45, to East Williams, to Hillside, to Stewart, to Trinity, back to Williams, to East Eckerson, to Buena Vista, back to Karnell. On that two-mile jaunt, I’d figure out what to write, though I would not pen it in my head since I’d learned that would spoil the sauce, that if I wrote the composition on my walk, it would not be as good the second time, on paper.
Young walkers often lose their stride to the lure of cars, and I certainly did that, barely using shoe leather for 20 years, until one very early morning, after a particularly stressful work at the newspaper where I toiled, I could not sleep. I had also gained 35 pounds more than I should have and, at 38, was without the energy I had always had. Instinctively, I took a walk, and it were as if I had been sent on vacation. I walked slowly at first, with some huffing, even on a level grade. But the next day -- and there was not only a next day, but a next week, next month and 31 next years now -- I found myself with renewed energy, 30 pounds lighter and with time for imagination.
All for free.
If I were the health care guru for the nation, I would offer baskets of apples, oranges and other fruit, free admission to state parks, money for walking trails and other encouragement to get those who wanted to do so into walking shoes. The country would save billions in health and mental health care expenses. And the people who walked would get the best benefit of all, the great "freeing" that comes with a good jaunt.
April 11, 2011
Magnificence of solitude
When one of my two sons was in the second grade, I took a call from his fine teacher, who in routine discussion told me that he was doing quite well, but that he was “quiet,” and she wished he were more outgoing in class. I did not respond, having heard the same story in own earlier life, and, no doubt, my father in his. We three, as well as my other son, are very different from one another but in one regard -- a craving for solitude -- we are one. And quite proud of that.
There are drummers for all people, and we each hear the sounds according to disposition, place, time, circumstances, need. Both my sons have gone on to very good careers, with much responsibility, to marriage, their own children (five in all). They are who they are -- principled citizens and humanitarians -- not because they raised their hands often in class, though that is fine and necessary for many individuals (and society needs both vocal and not-so-vocal joiners), but because they often found magnificence in solitude. They continue to grow in that non-limiting space.
Solitude -- not being alone -- but venturing off to that realm where thinkers go, where, Tom Edison, accused of day-dreaming in school, ignored such criticism and went as an adult every afternoon of his long life, just before his nap. Imagine Edison without solitude? No light for the rest of us, literally.
Consider Edward Hopper, America’s foremost realist painter, now so popular worldwide. Though his iconic oils and watercolors capture this nation’s solitude and the great possibilities within, Hopper’s acclaimed work was once labeled by critics as a look at loneliness. Not so. Hopper rejected that view as much “overdone,” and those who study his art today instead see endurance, quiet, introspection and the great independence that has long typified the ever-frontier spirit of America. I recently asked a Belgian woman why Hopper is so very popular in Europe, indeed why she paints beautiful “Hopperesque” scenes, and she said one word: “American.”
Each nation has its particular character, its attributes, its failings, and, most of all, its overall look after a mix of individuals is averaged. Some foreign movies peg the United States as a land of noisy, pushy, loud, spoiled people living high on the hog, and my Belgian friend could accept that stereotype but is also reflective enough to know that America offers other themes as well, including caring, generosity, patriotism.
Yet as Americans might see the French as romantic or the Germans as industrious or Asians as hard workers, etc., I think others in the world view a vast America and in that big space many individuals in solitude, on a porch, looking at the hills and the sea, lost in thought. Even in the magnificence of it.
April 4, 2011
The Bab-O Moment
Some decades ago, on one of those school’s-out days in early spring when the sun has not yet chased winter’s cold and a youngster doesn’t feel like leaving the house, I decided, half out of boredom, to help my working mom by cleaning the white kitchen sink. She was rather neat, though not compulsive (didn’t have time for that), and the three-year-old basin was usually spotless. I liked that look -- still do -- and so the other half of the motivation was to keep it bright on this particularly lazy day.
It was 1956, in former country that was becoming a New York City suburb in Hillcrest, N.Y., with small, expandable Cape Cod-style homes rising monthly and selling for about $14,000, all with white kitchen sinks. Not every basin was extra-clean, however, owing to humanity’s variety. One neighbor was particularly messy, another left dishes in the sink without visitation rights for days. But just down Karnell Street and off on Orchard was Mrs. Broat, whose kitchen in toto was shiny enough to be in Tiffany’s windows.
My mom was simply neat, as a housemaker, as a person as a mother. She worked all my years with her but also managed, with my father’s hands-on help, to keep a home going as well. Sinks included.
On that school’s-out day, I had just finished the 9 a.m. movie on Channel 9, invariably a 1930s or 1940s black and white -- a Great Depression “comedy” or some film noir -- when I walked into the kitchen to round up Saltines with butter. That was enjoyed at a Formica-covered table with four-inch chrome moulding popular in the mid-1950s. The chair also had chrome legs and the seats were over-padded with thick vinyl in the optimistic pastel colors of the day, especially aquamarine, pink and gray.
Snacking over and moving to the white kitchen sink to wash a glass, I realized it wasn’t as shiny as usual. Since I had nothing to do, I reached below for the Bab-O, then a popular cleanser containing bleach. It sure got everything clean, and its strong smell and reactive foaming action made you think you were restoring whatever to factory new.
For 20 minutes, I used probably one-quarter of the Bab-O to scour the sink and the faucets. About half-a roll of toweling later, it sparkled as well as it ever did. I knew my mother would be happy. I already was since the kitchen now had the same sense of order usually given it on “cleaning Saturday.” No compulsion here, but it set the day right for me, killed time and made me feel as if I was contributing the house I lived in.
All that, until the Bab-O Moment was obliterated in a second when my brother Craig, neat enough but no sink washer, tossed a bowl of orange peels into the jewel of a white basin just before my mother walked in the door with her tired dogs in her work shoes. She tackled the sink within minutes.
March 28, 2010
N.Y. Gov. Cuomo: Ban special-interest
campaign funding
National implications, if adopted
NYACK, N.Y. -- Andrew Cuomo, in his first visit to this riverfront village as New York governor, announced today two bills to end special-interest financing of political campaigns. Assembly A. 165 and Senate S. 276 will, if approved, ban all election spending not funded by taxpayers, especially that from lobbies.
“We must return government to the people,” said Cuomo from the bandstand in Memorial Park. “This beautiful Hudson River that we now look at was once polluted with industrial waste and sewage. It was the people’s outrage against that environmental poisoning which prompted river cleanup four decades ago. Now we must rid Albany, our towns and our villages of the pollution of elected officials chosen by the moneyed interests.”
In symbolic gesture, Cuomo walked to the river’s edge, scooped up a bucket of water and poured it on a pile of currency marked “Tainted”. “Tainted,” the governor said, “tainted profits obtained for big business and others by lobbies that vigorously push legislation feeding the voracious greed appetite and which give us a lightly regulated financial market, lax environmental law, overcharging for public works projects, favoritism for particular groups, tax inequality, goughing utilities, the blocking of health care reform and government change for all the people -- Democrats, Republicans, Tax Partiers, independents.”
Cuomo said special interests would no longer hide behind “freedom of speech” to justify paying for campaigns but instead would have their voice heard at public hearings. “If any lobby, if any special interest wants to tell the people why such and such should be done, why this or that law ought be passed, it can do so loud and clear in the public forum and not by throwing big bucks into campaigns and then end up owning the officials.”
The governor was asked by Richard Kavesh, Nyack mayor, how candidates would, without contributions, finance ever more expensive campaigns. Cuomo replied that each candidate would receive a set amount based on the type of office and the number of voters to be reached. The fund would be underwritten by taxpayers, and each candidate could choose how to spend the allotted amount. Government-sponsored forums in counties, towns and villages would also provide a message platform, and Twitter and Facebook accounts would be established.
“Despite the seemingly large expense for taxpayers,” Cuomo said, “the people will actually save billions when true-cost contracts are let, when we seek real health care and other reform, when we protect the environment, when we watch investment and other financial dealings. And you know what? Big business will make billions, too, because New York will be a leader in doing what’s right for the citizenry, and it will be the place to live and work. We will add business.”
Bills A.165 and S.276 will hit the floor of the Legislature later today. Cuomo predicts overwhelming passage since opposing the legislation would have public officials admitting they trade favors for money.
OOPS! Sorry to say, good people, but this is an early April 1, April Fools Day, piece. Perhaps some day, some leader, somewhere, will have the courage to ban special-interest money from ever lining a politician’s pocket. Gov. Cuomo has at least tried.
March 21, 2011
‘Lost’ in Rockland
Here I reside, in Rockland County, N.Y., just 20 miles from New York, for many more city than country since, these days, decades after the beginning of the post-World War II suburban push, most of our residents hail from Gotham or are the offspring of urbanites. For these good people, the county is comfortably near New York, close enough to reach in commute and shopping and visiting. Yet for others like me, in a dwindling group, where we live is more country than city. And never a suburb.
That’s because our roots go back to when there was no big bridge called the Tappan Zee linking two shores of the Hudson and providing a puddle jump for a major U.S. interstate. No parkway from New York City either. No large mall. No highway shopping strips. Instead, walkable downtowns like Nyack, Spring Valley, Suffern, Pearl River and Haverstraw where hardware stores, dress shops, shoe stores, small family restaurants, taverns and all manner of mom and pop places could keep you busy on a Saturday ride in from rural places like Pomona, Congers, Airmont, Tomkins Cove.
When the world seems too busy, when the traffic gets heavy, when my suburban tax bill rises, when someone seems suspicious rather than friendly, I get lost in the old Rockland. Sometimes I have tangible help for that.
Last week, on that wonderful 70-ish Friday, with a sun so warm but not so hot that it felt as if you were young and holding a girl’s hand, when there was a slight breeze that brought the promise of spring budding, I took off layered sweaters down to my winter cotton work shirt and sat on a rock.
When I was a young fellow looking for something to do in early spring, after school or on the weekend, I’d head for nearby woods, which were always nearby, and find a rock, catch the sun, feel the breeze and think I was the richest fellow on earth. That touch of nature was repeated, as the gift it always is, at the rock where I rested Friday after working in the Historical Society of Rockland barn at New City.
This ancient structure on the old Jacob Blauvelt place is filled with donated family furniture dating back centuries, well-used farm implements, blacksmith tools, etc., all representative of the farm/industrial/country life in Rockland up until a mere 60 or so years ago. It has the smell of old wood, seasoned by years of heavy sweat, worker and animal. It has an honesty to it, integrity even, sitting proudly on the few hundreds of feet left from hundreds of acres. You can get lost there, lost in the past, especially if your roots sense the nourishment.
Of course, roots are relative to the individual, and later arrivals to Rockland have their own foundation in various urban neighborhoods, with wonderful memories recalled in street games, knowing your neighbors, stores on the block, etc. They are blessed to have them.
And so am I, so are we of an earlier Rockland persuasion where emerging spring, the warming sun, an old rock, a barn setting, recollection and a breeze make you feel as rich as ever.
March 14, 2011
Almost St. Patrick’s Day
It is the nearness of things -- emotions, events, people, history -- that steer existence for most of us rather than 100 percent occupancy. Some find the nearness of full success, and that is enough. Or the nearness of complete health, which can be reasonable. Or the nearness of absolute affection. Or, this week, the nearness of being Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, when so many of us wear a bit o’ the green.
I am blessedly of Irish descent because of my mother’s side, which was almost 100 percent. But she left that to marry into other culture, and so I grew up with the nearness -- not the completeness -- of Irish ancestry. My mom, whose birthday was the day itself, March 17, had the native wit, a bit of a temper, loved tea and always carried in her kit a few stories, including the one about “chasing the growler,” or on occasion as a young girl fetching a pail of beer for her aunt from the tavern’s back door. My mother did not talk at length about her heritage, mostly for reasons of sadness in a difficult childhood that saw her lose her mother at age 7, awakening next to her to find she had passed on at 32.
As a child, she encouraged my brother and me to wear green on the day, to watch the New York City parade and to tell us proudly of her relative Hugh Bonner, once Gotham’s fire commissioner. Yet we kids were no different from our friends -- most of no Irish ancestry -- on St. Patrick’s Day when our elementary schools made it a fun time and many wore green. For them there was a “nearness” of the day to honor the Irish.
In my geography, 20 miles north of New York City, there is another “county” of both the Irish Republic and the North of Ireland in a hamlet called Pearl River, once of mostly German heritage and now heavily infused with the accent of the Emerald Isle.
It, too, has a large parade, the marchers of which include the same New York firefighters and police who step out on Fifth Avenue. Indeed, many live in Pearl River.
Now, it is almost St. Patrick’s Day, when this writer wears green and each year feels more acutely the nearness of an Irish heritage. With a bit of color also left for my late mother at her grave atop Mt. Nebo, the day’s feelings won’t be the only emotion that is near.
February 7, 2011
Not the Cookie Monster
Retirement can seem like things are crumbling a bit -- too much time, lack of reinforcing work structure, advancing life, etc. -- but then I think of one of my many “jobs” in the so-called “golden years.” I am a “cookie” in sometimes crumbling times.
Like some other retirees. I am a volunteer. I do electrical, plumbing and carpentry work for historical societies, churches and museums, and give of my time in art-related endeavor. This is all a gift, a blessing to me, for it offers a post-career career. I am grateful, for goodness results, and that’s what it’s all about.
One of the volunteer jobs is as a cook, or “cookie” in Navy terms, for the Rockland Interfaith Breakfast Program out of United Church, Spring Valley, N.Y. I have been with them since before I retired as a newspaperman, as part of the Tuesday crew. Into my 10th year, I am now the only cook on Tuesdays, after the passing of George Chalsen and the “retirement” of Al Witt, two colleagues at the old Journal-News in nearby Nyack.
I try not to poison the 120 or so people we get for breakfast, offering French toast, pancakes, sausage, soup and grits. The recipes are not basic -- we try to present unexpected cuisine, with the French toast, for example, made from many real eggs, honey, cinnamon, milk and a bit of coffee.
It is an odd turn of events being cookie since I open the church at 3 a.m. (there are numerous tasks to take care of before the cooking begins). For me it is deja vu all over again. United Church used to be called the Dutch Reformed Church of Spring Valley, and I attended Boy Scout meetings there from 1954 to 1961, also opening the church, then at 7 p.m., for the sessions. (I like to get to places early, and that’s why I am often the opener.)
So, here I am 58 years after first entering the church where I am now cookie, and despite many major changes and challenges to the village where I, my father and my grandfather lived, 3 a.m. Tuesdays in 2011 and 7 p.m. Fridays in 1954 are the same. I still hear the Pascack Valley Line train (the old Erie). I look at the storefronts and recall Brown’s, Arvanite’s, the Valley Theatre, Perunna’s, Slavin’s, K&A, Tancos, Kulle’s and many more. I remember elementary school, high school, think about my father’s days there, my grandfather’s. As I cook, I look out the window and see Memorial Park, which I watched being constructed in 1948. I hear the voices of so many gone and see the faces of my teachers, my friends. I recall the cops on the beat, chasing us home at curfew, checking the store locks.
The rhythm of a time past reassuringly reverberates in my post-retirement job as cookie, and it links me to the present. I am thankful I am able to serve, that so many of us at the program are able to do so. I am especially grateful that I am cookie in my old hometown. It kind of ensures that my time-on-my-hands won’t crumble.
February 28, 2011
A royal treatment
Long after the fall of the great Hollywood movie factories, those wonderful studios like the original MGM and Paramount that gave us “Gone With the Wind,” “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Best Years of Our Lives,” “42nd Street,” “Greed” (a 1924 film which could have been made today, with the same title), “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Quiet Man,” tremendous silent films and all our favorite titles, today’s cobbled-together studio conglomerates offer some remarkable work despite, as always, being driven by profit. Witness “The King’s Speech,” winner now of Academy Awards.
The old studios were guaranteed to produce winning movies, since they were long-running and huge, with an uncanny eye for budding and developing talent, training actors, directors, choreographers, camera operators, lighting and sound people and everyone else in what truly became a craft. With so much constant expertise and the insatiable appetite of the pre-TV movie-going public for new films, there were bound to be many winners. And so there were.
One of the staples of old Hollywood was the “historical” movie, not always accurate as the films took dramatic license, but usually close enough to give many of us lessons in history. Some, including myself, may have day-dreamed through social studies, but we did learn about the French and Indian War via Spencer Tracey’s “Northwest Passage.”
With the withering of the big studios, beginning with 1950s TV and federal anti-trust suits, and because moviemakers were then going for psychological dramas like “On the Waterfront,” historically set films became a disappearing treatment.
Many fine movies have been made since the passing of the old structured studios, especially through the creativity of independent, ground-breaking directors and gifted actors, but for so long, the flicks have been set on personal relationships that seems to depend on what is good for one person or two rather than for the people affected by those one or two.That reflects the me-centered society, of course. And such films are of interest to many.
So, it might surprise that “The King’s Speech” has become a winner. At first glance, this movie about soon-to-be King George VI’s speech difficulty and his wife’s remarkable, matter-of-fact search for an unorthodox teacher to help him, set in the mid-1930 against the backdrop of the coming war with Germany, and, first, the abdication of King Edward VIII, attracted an audience of 95 percent senior citizens when I saw it some time back. But then the buzz began about Colin Firth’s stunning performance as the Duke of York, of the film’s other great acting, of the precise British touch of it all, that what might have been seen initially as a “boring,” old-style history movie suddenly became a deeply moving study of human difficulty, struggle, stumble and success.
A metaphor for our times. A script and performances that we can all relate to in a difficult economic, changing age. And don’t we all learn a bit of history in watching such a film as “The King’s Speech”? Not a boring moment. Not a second to be wasted in day-dreaming. Not a movie about something or someone dysfunctional. Not a film about personal feelings alone, but those set in relationship with the greater nation and its people. A story that old Hollywood would have done no better. And a “welcome home” of sorts for the historical film genre.
Bravo.
February 21, 2010
Temporary respite
Snowy winters seem easily predictable after the fact. “Yeah, I seen them squirrels collecting acorns, so I knew it was gonna snow big,” says neighbor Ben in July, safely away from the previous heavy snowfall and still far enough from next season to make him sound authoritative. He didn’t tell me about squirrels and nuts in November.
Or, Sally tells you in spring that “I was just sitting on my deck overlooking the river, and the chill that hit my bones that August night told me we would have five storms.” She never mentioned the chill in winter.
Where I live, in a sometimes-memorable part of the Northeast, 25 miles from New York City, we don’t get the relatively heavy winters of Albany or Buffalo, but we can be hit hard every so many years. The current season is one example, with a gently falling but heavy snowfall as I write this. It is beautiful, covering the very dirty ground left by ice, once-white snow and tons of road salt, sand and other debris. Leftover leaves and litter are there, too, the product of the untidiness that comes with suburbs around here, though Fred’s house, a small, even modest, one-level abode always kept neat as a pin, was shining like a jewel in the recent but short-lived thaw.
Fred’s fourth generation, having lived through the Depression when so little was to be had and what you did have you kept clean and working so you could reuse. He also recalls non-suburbia in Rockland County and a less consumer-oriented time, when the roadside had no litter. There were no fast-food places, so no wrappers tossed from car windows. And how many had cars anyway? And did people toss things into the street save in city gutters, where they were supposed to do so and which were cleaned by manual street-sweepers?
Leaves were raked and burned in the country before suburbia, and that method added to pollution, yes, but the fact is the lawns were raked in the first place.
Snow in suburbia is a sometimes welcome sight since it covers faults, fooling you for a short while that all is hunky-dory under the great cover. But like Henry, who quietly says in November that December, January and February will see many storms and is simply right, nature has its smarts, too. It will tell you the truth, eventually.
For those of us who see “progress” as inevitable but who reluctantly but actually welcome gradual and planned change as opportunity for others, the misuse of land through overgrowth, through insensitivity, through greed and selfishness, is a collective eyesore that literally can be next door. Many in suburbia keep their places neat, a fair number do not.
Old Fred’s place is a model of care. The McMansion nearby is not, three abandoned cars left on a deteriorated driveway. Ironically, an army of landscapers descend weekly in season, keeping the green grass trimmed. They mow around the cars protruding off the broken drive. Up a bit, there is the 1977 home not painted since, cars parked on the lawn but at least registered, a broken washing machine under a huge deck just completed for many thousands of dollars. This is the second owner, the first having left the building in long disrepair after telling us he was going south because suburbia was too built-up and the taxes too high. He was welcomed from Gotham in the “progress” of 1978 but for 25 years abused the invitation through property neglect. Taxes rose to provide him services. Then he left us holding the bag.
Now it is snowing, and the unsightliness look at his old home and the McMansion are covered by the same white blanket that graces Fred’s small spot. But spring is coming, in suburbia, too. The truth awaits.
February 14, 2011
Warming more than heart
Today is the one set aside for valentines, and I hope you all get them in one form or another, but my love affair for this moment is more about another sort of heat -- steam heating, actually.
It has been a long, cold, old-fashioned winter this season in my part of the Northeast, and the forced-air and water-filled baseboard heating systems that are either in my house or my sons’ or in other places have proven inadequate. Once, there was steam heating, used way back in the later 1800s, and some of those installations are still operating beautifully. The setup, with his occasionally hissing valves, puffs of humidity shot into the air and some pipe-banging, has done the best job of keeping me warm whenever I have found it.
It was “progress” that took us to forced air, in which a coal, then oil or gas or even electric furnace heats air and then forces it out registers by a fan. It was “progress” that put hot water rather than steam into cast-iron radiators, which at least retained heat after the furnace had stopped running, and then into thin sheet-metal baseboard units, which go to cold almost instantly. These systems generally get you warm but then quickly have you chilly as they cycle on and off.
Steam heat, on the other hand, not only warms cast-iron radiators but fills the room with humidified air, which makes you feel warmer at lower temperatures. It has a psychological component, too, since the gentle sound of steam rising out of a radiator valve makes you feel cozy. It also has you nostalgically recalling old school classrooms with steam heat, wet mittens and hats drying atop. I add the memory of leaning my derriere and the back of my legs against steam radiators in various Rockland County, N.Y,. town halls when I was a newspaper photographer some decades ago. Running from assignment to assignment in a small Volkswagen Beetle, which had a poor heating system, left me chilly, and I was thankful for the radiator stops.
Radiators of any sort are difficult to locate anywhere these days, though I have hit upon a few in nearby South Nyack and Orangeburg.
I suppose that heating engineers can give you reasons why forced air, hot water and other systems are used today instead of steam. Perhaps there is greater efficiency. Maybe radiators take up too much room. Perhaps it is really the bottom line: the more profit you seek, the more “progress” has to be shaped away from product improvement to compromise on quality.
If I could, I would retrofit my own abode to steam heat, tossing the baseboard units into recycling. But that is not affordable. Instead, come winter, I will just have to visit friends who have steam heat.
February 7, 2011
Come to the show
NYACK, N.Y. -- Pardon the marketing, but there will be a free photographic exhibition in this village of artist Edward Hopper’s birth Saturday, Feb. 12, 5-7 p.m., when “Hopperesque: Realism and Light in Photography” is presented in the famed American realist’s family home at 82 North Broadway.
Hopper caught his first glimpse of Hudson riverfront light at his Nyack birth in 1882 and never drew the curtain on it, imbuing his copper-plate etchings, watercolors and, most of all, his haunting horizontal oils with interpretive illumination. His portfolio is a spotlight on the American experience of the 20th century.
This was the man, tall and lean, quiet and introspective, whose symbiosis with film noir was so interwoven that it is difficult to say who or which came first. Until he passed in 1967, Hopper captured urban solitude and country landscape, his reduced painting symbolic of the independence, the moods of America, its very idiosyncrasy.
Today Edward Hopper is iconic, his “Nighthawks” and other works recognizable worldwide. Recent museum shows in Boston, Washington, New York City and Europe have drawn thousands in reverent communication with an artist who said so little by speech but who in his paintings expressed deeply and extensively facets native to the American being. Hopper offered as much in this quote: “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint. The whole answer is there on the canvas.”
The artist’s boyhood home is part of that “canvas,” a source of the light, real and figurative, that was Hopper’s painting harmony. After the deaths of Edward and his wife, the painter Josephine Nivison, the house was rescued by local residents who organized a committee to obtain incorporation in 1971 as the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation. For 40 years, this non-profit organization, its trustees and members have contributed time, expertise, labor and donations to maintain 82 North Broadway as an multi-arts center; to keep an archive of Hopper documents and memorabilia; to serve as a resource for scholars, art historians and art lovers worldwide; and to encourage and nurture community engagement with the arts.
The Edward Hopper House is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2011, presenting "The Year of Edward Hopper," a series of special events and exhibits honoring the painter and his legacy. Highlight of the year will be a major exhibition of his early work, entitled "Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years," scheduled from May 21 to July 17.
Before Prelude unfolds, Hopper House will mount a photographic show, “Hopperesque: Realism and Light,” from February 12 through March 27. To launch the exhibition, Co-Curators Art Gunther and Ken Karlewicz began an international search for photographs inspired by Hopper’s use of light, his color saturation, his take on realism and his view of American solitude. Thirty-three photographers from Rockland as well as Europe and Australia were selected to express photographically how Edward Hopper got into their artistic souls.
So, if you are anywhere near this New York part of the universe, come on by and see Hopperesque. If you can’t, go look at some Edward Hopper works and be inspired in your own way.
January 31, 2011
Once, the quiet morning
We all have our time and mood anchors, those moments of memory that moor us in ordinariness as well as the storms which hit our lives. Stress of any sort -- financial, emotional, health -- drive us to port, and we are grateful for the safe harbor.
When I was a youngster, one of my safer slips was early morning in winter, about 6:30, when the house heat had started to come up and I was rousing to get ready for elementary school. My working mother was already off to work, and my father, on the night shift, would be getting breakfast for my brother and me, a simple affair of Rice Krispies, as well as making our lunches.
In those years, when there might be a new school to attend (we moved around a bit), friends to make, classes to get used to, different woods to explore in the semi-rural areas in which we lived, having the routine of a small breakfast prepared by a busy dad, in a house just getting nice and warm, with the dark of winter yet to raise its nightshade on dawn, with the wonderful smell of my father’s fresh-brewed coffee and the sound of radio’s Martin Block on 1130 AM, there was reassurance that the day would proceed in good-enough fashion.
The scene was the same, you see, no matter where we lived, so it was one of those safe harbors. The available anchorage continued through high school, and the memory of it still comforts today.
When I was older but not far beyond my teen years, yet some seasons removed from my father’s breakfast morning routine, another early-day moment came my way and also reassured.
In that time, I drove a friend daily to a New York City college, and since one of my many faults happily did not include honking the horn for someone to come out, I was invited in to wait a short while. In the winter, the same sort as my youth, in the dark, I again felt the rising heat of a household and the strong whiff of coffee brewing as my friend’s mother prepared breakfast for her daughter.
Not much conversation passed between me, shy enough, and the mother, though it was more than what was said between father and son just 10 years or so before. Yet nothing had to be spoken. It was the reassurance of the moment, and even if we were all deaf and mute, we could feel that, appreciate it. The memory of this woman’s welcome, as with my dad’s morning routine, was one of those small treasures available in the box that you open to begin your day today.
A polished jewel, really.
January 24, 2011
‘I’m My Own Grandpa’
An old song, “I’m My Own Grandpa,” made youngsters like me laugh back in the early 1950s when grandpa seemed ancient though mine was just about 52, 16 years younger than I am now. Listening to that ditty, I never thought about getting older. Or, for that matter, talking and acting like my grandfather.
Or grandmother. Or teachers. Or early bosses who seemed long on the horse. Being young means that you never get old, or at least it’s not what you think about, thank goodness. Youth may indeed be wasted on the young since when we are older, we wish we could go back and better live that time, make wiser choices, tell our family, friends and other loved ones how we really felt about them. Regret is a heavy blanket to carry.
In the metamorphosis that generations make as time passes, grandpa and the other oldies come with you. For example, I have long found myself saying things my gramps uttered, or thinking like a long-gone teacher who I might have characterized as an old fogey back in the day. If there is a heaven, these folks surely must have smiles on their faces, shaking their heads as they utter, “We told you so.” Of course, standing right behind them are their own elders, adding “What goes around comes around.”
I guess this natural progression of thought explains why once-liberal youth, so rebellious, become a tad conservative, or at least less laid-back. The responsibilities of life surely weigh more as you age, and the looking back that you do can sober your views.
It’s a good and fine thing, though, that other youth, liberal and rebellious, take your place, because it is a certainty that we adults don’t have all the answers, and, in fact, what we offer is sometimes dead wrong. Wars, greed, inequality, pestilence are not caused by the young.
If the human race is said to mature, if we are on the whole less barbarian, if material goods mean less drudgery, if humanity has become more humane in 2011, then we are different versions, improved models, than some of our old grandpas.Yet, on balance, many things my grandfather said and did were of better example than I have offered, so there is learning in both directions as I become even more “my own grandpa.”
January 17, 2010
‘Secretary of the People’
More than ever, special interests can buy an election, influence sitting officeholders and deeply direct U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
Investigative media that once would have looked at such a growing web of influence has shrunk in corporate downsizing. Attempts to bring light to deeply rooted, hydra-like interests, including the military/industrial complex, Wall Street-managed health care and lobbies of varied sorts, are met with planted news pieces, talking heads and blitzkrieg – misleading advertising and loud din that seeks to give lie to truth. Mr./Mrs. Smith are simply shouted down.
Yet this nation has not arrived in the 21st century – after war, division and economic and social calamity – without a moderating factor, an accurate description since it has been the moderates in both major parties who have always represented basic common sense in America, the dream that is this nation, the ordinary person. They have kept the extremes, and they are more so today, from getting us into too much trouble, and they have provided much-needed course correction in various elections. They have done this, this middle-way steering of the American experience, by being so vast in number.
But in 2011 moderates are in danger of extinction. The power of special interests to wither away moderation is frightening as they seek high, sustaining corporate profit that offers downsizing, not new jobs; lobby for a banking and financial industry which grows profit but not re-investment in Main Street; boosts a health care industry in which Hippocrates’ model of serving the ill is shamelessly missing; and supports a military/industrial complex where expensive, long-term wars are the only way to maintain its profits.
The complexity is so great that the simple voice of Mr./Mrs. Smith, or a clergyman’s call to help your neighbor or a fledgling candidate’s eloquence in defining how civility and the other tenets of humanity require a boost in our nation are all increasingly drowned out by the orchestration of power and money.
It is time, then, for the country to have a spokesperson for the populace, a “Secretary of the People,” a Cabinet-level post as powerful as the Secretary of State. It would be filled by someone who advises the president, who can bring to that person’s ears the drowned-out voice of all the citizenry, surely, but especially those from the moderates, who speak the words of common sense, of everyday concerns.
If there were such a secretary sitting with other counselors of government, perhaps the White House cocoon that is inaccessible these days to ordinary people would at long last have an inside man to get to the man.
To prevent special-interest wooing of the Secretary of the People, the post would be held for just one year at a time, with the president choosing each successor from somewhere in ordinary America. The chief executive would not select the individual himself, but rather an independent, volunteer group would search the nation far and wide and make a recommendation. Senate ratification would be almost a given, in the spirit of cooperation and to avoid lobbying by groups sure to be hurt by “common sense.”
Special interests already have their counselors, appointed and otherwise. Why not the people?
January 10, 2011
‘What’s it all about?’ (take one)
There are very few left who recall when movies and not TV, and certainly not the Internet, Netflick, iPods and MP3 players, etc., delivered most visual entertainment, a time when if you were a bit tired of using your imagination listening to a radio comedy or drama, or if you felt a need to socially mingle, you walked down the street to a local theater, and for a quarter or less saw two features, a newsreel, travelogue and cartoons.
My grandparents’ generation did that and my father’s to a large extent, too, though my dad bought his first television in the late 1940s. That purchase brought my brother and me into a new age, but since 1950s programming was limited, and the stations numbering 7 in my New York parts, we also went to the movies. Not on weekday nights like my grandparents but for Saturday matinees.
These days all the generations see the movies of 1920 to the present on whatever device is available, with a sort of democratization talking place as the greater world becomes ever more visual. Hail that, but all this flooding of the senses, especially via large-screen TVs, brings a ponder from a fan in Colorado. An intriguing ponder.
She writes, “When viewing ‘old-time’ movies, I wonder about the atmosphere that does not translate to film. What were the smells like in those weekly – at best – bath days? And all the animals and their ‘residual benefits,’ the myriad urban stables needed for city transportation, etc.? And the wood, fire and coal fumes?Then the sounds that went along with the smells?
“And, what is rarely offered in the made-up, coiffed, perfection of Hollywood appearance of the characters has got to be so far from reality: What about the smallpox-scarred faces and the physical remnants of other diseases long banished from the modern world? What were gaslight and candlelight really like, and how dark must it have been without all the ‘light pollution’ we take for granted in 2011?”
My fan (labeled as such since she’s a loyal reader who doesn’t have to contemplate my true visage) further asks if I “also strive to hear and see and smell ‘reality’ when watching such historically set (and often inaccurate) films?”
Well, fan, I do consider what life was like in pioneering days, or in the gritty Great Depression, or in the Cold War 1950s. I don’t think I have thought so much about the fragrance of a particular time, but, yes, about the harshness and drudgery of a long farm day, or when ketchup sandwiches were the main meal or when someone on screen was caught in one of the emotions of life and or death.
Perhaps there will come a day when old films can be reconstructed to give us the smells and whatever else of the particular time, to involve us in virtual reality. If so, and despite “historical inaccuracy,” that could benefit humankind. For if we could stand on a bread line or be a dying soldier or Joan of Arc or Napoleon or Hitler’s vioctims or Moses or Mr. Smith or George Bailey, how much more understanding we might become of our joint existence and what it’s all about.
January 3, 2010
90 miles to go
It seems impossible that one decade has already passed in the 21st century. Though it was marked with the horror of Sept. 11 and awful war and terrible economics, these past 10 years ran faster than a super track star in the 100-meter dash. Perhaps our ever-more technological times, with rapid communication and the concentration of anything held to a few seconds make the clock spin so rapidly. Sitting by candle and anticipating the early milking of the cow gave more time to reflect.
But progress is supposed to be good for us – it is light against the darkness, a chance to better lives, to bring ease. Progress has accomplished all that, our history shows, but in its name some have profited more than others. In this new century, special interests that seek money without giveback responsibility and political influence without an adjustment for all the people's needs largely steer growth. While most of us take the train ride – for it is the history of our nation that we chase a new frontier – we’re seated more toward the caboose than the locomotive. We can’t see the tracks ahead.
There are more people – rich ones – in first class these days, and they can see just fine. There are more of the good folk back at the end of the train, too, grateful for a ride though the engine’s cinders may fly through their windows. There is the hope, still, that on the next run, they may move closer to the locomotive. The passengers in the middle, those in second class, are no longer numerous, and it’s more than a pity, for it was their ever-growing ranks and the appetite for middle-class living which built the railroads. And the output of the factories. And the need for housing, the roads, etc. - all progress, surely.
The speed of the 21st century is so rapid that we can’t see who is on the train, nor have we bothered to care. Americans have taken progress for granted for decades now, in a steady drive since 1945. If we can obtain cell phones and flat-screen TVs and an equity loan or a tax rebate or two to buy them, and if our days pass comfortably enough, we won’t look at the clock and notice it is close to midnight. That’s for another day, yet that dawn may not come. We don’t see horrible war, for it is not in our yards. We don’t hear the gold leaving Fort Knox to pay for a bigger and bigger national debt. We don’t fathom that more and more of us are not on the train to progress any more.
What was the wind that just passed through the station? Was it just a decade in modern speed?
Maybe we’ll get to reflect on it all, even by candle.
December 27, 2010
Respite
If life were just about cozy socks, maybe adding hot chocolate, reading material and a log on the fire would give most of us enough peace for a long time. But the socks eventually need changing, the chocolate is enjoyed and the log burns down. The book is read. Yet the story is not over since the moment, if we are lucky to have it, is but a page in life.
It took a snowstorm to bring the metaphorical equivalent of that moment to me in my particular part of the Northeast where a relatively weak but genuine “blizzard” hit us for the first time in decades. We have had plenty of snowstorms and drifting over the years but not such fierce winds that even just a foot or so of snow was made into mountains here and there. Bitter cold, too.
Travelers returning to home and hearth after the Christmas holiday were caught in the storm, though most people were able to sit within and chill out, the Sunday after set to 33 1/3 rpm rather than 78, the stomach satiated enough that it could rest and sufficient presents to keep children occupied and out of the SUVs where all too many seem to spend all too much time going to their numerous appointments.
I did not cozy up to a book, though other family members, good readers all, were happy to do so. I did not change into cozy socks though I received a few pairs under the tree, and I am not a hot chocolate fan. But a good microbrew, a newspaper and three pairs of already washed socks brought the purring on in my quiet moment, stolen from the fast pace of life as if I were on a fast train that had pulled into a siding.
There I remained for a good part of the day, happy that the hands of the clock did not move so fast, happy that I barely looked at the time. I sought no complication, did not push my brain to rack over political mistakes in my beloved country. I just put my being on autopilot and perused – did not study – the paper. The beer was not swished but sipped, and my three pairs of socks, regulation uniform on a cold day, constantly telegraphed that they were keeping my feet warm. Reassurance of blessed simplicity
What more could I want in my quiet? Not a thing, except perhaps that it last a bit longer.
For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, offered a holiday story published in place of my (former) newspaper column. That tradition now continues on the web. – Arthur H. Gunther III
December 20, 2010
Transistor Radio
By Arthur H. Gunther IV
The transistor radio was black. Long ago, the small plastic piece that held its battery in place had been lost. Black electrical tape had by now done the job of the forgotten plastic piece for so many years that the back of the radio was inevitably sticky near its bottom. Max remembered with clarity the eyes of the Eveready cat peeking out from in between the loops of tape. Nine volts was all the radio needed for months of listening. It seemed to Max that the metal antennae, necessary only for FM reception, had never been there, though it must have at one time. The radio’s listeners had never had much use for FM anyway.
The radio belonged to Max’s grandfather. He lived in a small house overlooking the Hudson River, bought long before there was any cache to being near the water that bore the Dutch explorer’s name. Max would ride his bicycle over the mountain from his house on school-year Saturdays and summer afternoons and sit outside with his grandfather while the radio hummed with the sound of that afternoon’s baseball game. The announcer’s voices were both familiar and friendly, their chatter the ideal accompaniment to whatever conversation Max and his grandfather were having. The easy rhythms of the game left plenty of space for old stories, memories, reading and commenting on the articles in any of the several newspapers that were always around Max’s grandfather’s house. The radio even had an ear piece, not head phones, attached to a long white wire which Max would sometimes find stuck in his grandfather’s left ear. He always unplugged it upon seeing Max.
Around the time of his ninth birthday, Max’s mother became sick and found herself in the hospital for several months. When December arrived and it was clear that she would not be home for Christmas, Max’s dad sent him over to his grandfather’s house for Christmas Eve. Max’s father knew the value of waking up to a warm, glowing, happy Christmas morning and doubted his ability to provide it for Max that year. Though Max welcomed every opportunity to see his grandfather, and grandmother too for that matter, he lay in bed that night unable to sleep, filled with thoughts of worry about his dad and mom. Max crept downstairs at midnight, looking for distraction. There on the table that stood by the old green sofa sat his grandfather’s transistor radio. Max picked it up and brought it back to his room. The December night was clear. Max could see the moon reflecting on the river from where he lie in bed. He turned on the radio and scanned the dial for something to take his mind off his worries. The weather, Max’s room on the water and the winter night combined for ideal AM reception, and it seemed that every fraction of an inch the dial turned revealed new sounds, many from places that Max had never come close to visiting in his short life. There were call-in shows from Washington and Baltimore, weather from Buffalo, news from Cleveland, Christmas songs from Hartford, Philadelphia and Princeton, New Jersey, even a hockey game from Toronto. Eventually, Max settled on the voice of Jackie Gleason. A station from Boston was playing audio of an episode of “The Honeymooners” that Max had never seen. It was a Christmas show that was essentially a retelling of the O. Henry story, “The Gift of the Magi.” Though Max was years from reading the actual text, the story was the perfect distraction, and he quickly became absorbed in the voices of the characters until he fell fast asleep as the show ended, barely able to turn off the radio.
Max’s mother recovered and that year ended up being the only Christmas Eve he ever spent at his grandfather’s, though his family continued to visit on Christmas Day for years to come. Years later, Max was at college, in the thick of the all-night studying that was the inevitable sacrifice for surviving the December final exams of the fall semester, when he wandered down to the TV lounge in his dorm for a midnight study break. He found a girl there, presumably with the same idea he had. Max sat down and noticed that on the TV was “The Honeymooners.” After watching for several minutes, he realized it was the same episode he had heard that Christmas Eve long ago at his grandfather’s house. Though Max had always meant to, he had never seen the actual episode. Max gasped out loud at the lucky coincidence of finally finding the show. The girl who sat there turned to Max, as if just realizing he was there.
“Sorry to startle you,” Max said, “but I’ve always wanted to see this episode.” “I think I know it by heart,” answered the girl. “When I was a kid in Boston, there was this one radio station that played it every Christmas Eve at midnight. It was some kind of tradition. I used to fall asleep every year listening to it in my room. It’ll always remind me of home.”
Max sat there tongue-tied, with a goofy smile curling across his face. Two weeks later, when he was home for the winter break, Max told his grandfather the story. And when Max married that same girl five years later, he opened the gift from his grandfather to find the transistor radio at the bottom of a small box. It is all so clear in my memory. Max is me.
Even now, on clear, cold winter nights, when my wife and children are fast asleep and I just can’t seem to settle my thoughts, I’ll find a quiet room in my house, take out my grandfather’s old transistor radio and scan the AM dial, wondering what will be out there for me to find.
Arthur can be reached at clausland@yahoo.com
December 13, 2010
A holiday tale
Growing up in little Spring Valley, N.Y., a country village near New York City, but oh so far from urbanity, holiday lighting was minimal. Ostentatious wasn’t yet in, very few of us had any extra money, and cheap, overseas-made decoration wouldn’t arrive until nations recovered from the Second World War. Indoor and limited outdoor lighting depended on strings and sets kept for years, with bulb replacement just about all that was necessary.
Most people in the Rockland County of the 1940s-50s would travel to one of the five and tens or hardware stores in the Valley, Suffern, Nyack, Haverstraw or Pearl River and get fresh tinsel for the Christmas tree, perhaps a new ornament and a few seven-watt bulbs. Many would wait until Christmas Eve to decorate. Few put up elaborate outdoor lighting. Our Jewish neighbors lit Menorahs for Hanukkah. Neighbors of any persuasion were invited on the eight nights to participate in the lighting.
Downtowns were lit with heavy strings of colored bulbs across main street from telephone pole to pole. In Spring Valley, Garry Onderdonk, whose electrician father installed the lights, would have to switch each string on nightly, using a long pole. Merchants would add color to their window displays for both Christmas and Hanukkah.
In all, there was enough bright and varied lighting to make the season warm and festive. Just right, most of us thought. In keeping with both reality and our expectations
So it is with prejudiced view, or at least non-approving thought, that I cannot accept the lavish displays I now see in the suburbs, including Rockland. Some homeowners are hiring outfits that bring 10 men and a bucket loader to trim large evergreens with string after string of lights. Giant air-blown figures sway with the wind and against other lighting on the lawn. At the street is a sign proclaiming that the Disneyland spectacular was “professionally” installed.
It makes you wonder how many holiday lights there are at the unemployment office or in homes where people go to sleep solid middle class and awake in lower economic ranks.
Now, I am not blaming folks well enough off to have a design team temporarily triple their electric bill. Yet, the contrast is still there for all to see in a nation that faces Christmas 2010 more worried about debt, jobs, government viability and the national mojo than it has since the Great Depression.
But, hey, it’s holiday time, and colored lights take our minds off reality. Enjoy, please. Come January, the lights again will be white and bright. Enough that we can see what’s what. If only we then take a look. …
December 6, 2010
‘Night carpenter' at work
I think doors have a way of fitting in, just like long-gone Uncle Jack in town for a comfy visit. He gets that way fast. Or people who initially stand out and are somehow morphed into the crowd, hopefully adding to the whole. It’s as if the universe has a carpenter on staff who, in the secrecy and dark of night, planes here and sands there, making adjustments to assure a fit, whether it's doors or people.
Several weeks ago, I replaced six interior doors in my 1973 home with more stylish, six-paneled molded ones. Now, this house, like me, has lost its plumb and level a bit in 37 years, so just one factory-produced door fit without having to trim an edge, more deeply mortise a hinge or move the height of a lock.
The refitting took time, and when the work was done, despite the usual mistakes and miscalculations by this practiced but non-pro carpenter, and with almost a full vocabulary exercised in the cursing language that is always in my tool kit, the doors looked just fine and worked fairly well. Not perfect, you see, since (1) they were not the original doors, which had been fitted to the jambs on an assembly line, but (2) replacements made by another manufacturer decades later. Sizes were off, as they often are. So was my work, a tad.
It has taken these weeks since installation to give a nudge here and there to a few doors, and it is nearing winter, too, when the house moves a bit. That has required further adjustment to the doors.
All is now fine, yet something else is happening. Last night, I went into my office area and flipped the door closed, as I did with the old one. It smoothly went into position, as easily as would a machinist’s pin in a milled location. This is not my “fine” carpentry at work, though. I really believe the doors feel at home, that they finally fit in.
They are now part of the house, as its predecessors were for so long. I miss the history of those doors, two of which were on my sons’ bedrooms, with their signs and posters affixed, different in each season of growth. But today is today, and the hope is the doors will also open to tomorrow.
I am grateful that they fit so well. It must be the finish work of the unseen night carpenter.
November 29, 2010
Sam’s hiccups
Had a conversation with a young fellow at a train station in chilly, windy weather when the topic turned to hiccups since that was what the 3.5-year-old was using for punctuation in what otherwise was rapid-fire language. We were waiting for his mom and dad, my son and his wife, to return from an anniversary trip to New York City, and I figured he would like to see the Metro-North local arrive. It isn’t every day that a kid looks at a train these days – it’s still a thrilling sight, as it has been since the first Erie ran in my parts in the late 1840s.
But keeping a youngster occupied at a busy station, even for the 10 minutes I figured were left before the train pulled in, is challenging. I don’t know his world, and he doesn’t know mine. What are Sam’s day dreams? His fears? His concept of time, space? How does he look at people? What does he think of his old codger grandfather, an odd-enough fellow?
Discussing hiccups seemed an excellent way to keep him occupied. We had a conversation, parts of which, maybe even the whole, might seem silly, but then again, pondering the universe in any which way led us to the electric light and other good things, too. In the least, it can be entertaining.
I asked Sam where he got his hiccups. Did his mom put them in his breakfast cereal? Did his teacher give a Thanksgiving treat? Since, I, too, wanted hiccups so as to not be left out, I asked Sam where I could buy them.
He answered with a bunch of “no’s” and “I don’t know.” He did so quite seriously, as if we were professors pondering quantum physics. Sam thought it quite natural that his grandfather and he would be having such a conversation, and he pondered every answer. At no point did he think the questions silly. Perhaps in a few years he will see nonsense, but not now.
Now is still time for Sam to have an awfully broad imagination, an unlimited field of dreams where he can race this way and that, chasing this thought or another. Why not? He has not yet been told to limit his thinking, to set boundaries. Sam -- any youngster his age -- can be what Tom Edison always was, a thinker without qualification whose imagination is without limits.
Soon, thanks to a conversation about hiccups, including asking Sam what color his were, whether he saved a few in his pocket for an after-lunch treat, and whether he could see them on his computer, the train with mom and dad pulled in.
The very sight of his parents made Sam lose his hiccups and eagerly embrace his favorite people. Wonderful. Gramps moseyed on.
Hope Sam had some hiccups later, though.
November 22, 2010
When a door closed …
Forty-seven years ago this was a Friday, and about 12:30 p.m. I was flipping TV channels when I paused at WCBS-TV, New York. A soap opera was in progress, of no interest to a young fellow age 21, but the long thread of its story line, including every emotion there is, caught my interest and I lingered. But not for long. Quickly, on the simple black and white set, with just seven channels available through a rooftop antenna, came a bold screen with large letters shouting “CBS-TV NEWS BULLETIN.” Then the signal switched to a live newsroom, Walter Cronkite at a small desk, professionally but with almost incredulous tones, reading wire service copy: “There has been an attempt on the life of President Kennedy . …” The venerable reporter and commentator did not leave his post for a day, and this America remained glued to the TV for even longer, over an increasingly somber weekend and through JFK’s burial.
So much changed on Nov. 22, 1963, when 90 minutes later, after numerous news flashes of increasingly negative tone, Cronkite read another bulletin: “From Dallas, Texas, the flash is apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. today, Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.”
As a young man, idealistic as so many of us were in that folk-singing era when youth had infused government, when hope seemed a sure bet despite a recession, the Cuban missile crisis and still-distant war drums in Vietnam, the president’s death shortened our sunny days, coinciding with the coming winter solstice. In JFK’s place was an older man, the less articulate, old-style politician Lyndon Johnson. He reassured the country as an uncle might after you lose your cool dad, and perhaps that made you get into bed, feel a bit tucked in and have some sleep. But the next morning you knew things would never, ever be the same.
And they have not been the same. Presidencies since JFK have become increasingly isolated, surrounded by necessary security to protect our national leader from nuts but in the process putting the person into a cocoon apart from the people. Elect a president and you never see him (her?) again except through the filters his advisers employ. They have his ear, these special interests of whatever bent, not the citizens who cry when their presidents are taken from them.
Ever more complex is our government today, and the super economic power concentrated in the secretive military/industrial complex that Eisenhower the old warrior warned us about is much stronger and deeply entrenched.
Today no president has simple choices, for the world is so very complex. Idealism seems reserved for the political stump, not for the Oval Office.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, may he rest in peace, kept the stump with him for much of his short tenure, continuing his well-phrased speeches, strumming the rhythm of the song of hope. What success or failure or a mixture of both he might have brought to the nation – in the economy, in dealing with the Cold War, in Vietnam – can only be conjectured. Was his the last approachable presidency? That, too, is speculative.
November
15, 2010
Never forgotten
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – It is another moment now for my
classmates and me, Spring Valley High School 1961, a season
so very far removed from senior year autumn 50 years ago
when “fall madness” brought the football team
to its new playing field and General Organization President
Fred Yatto Jr. stood at half-time with Gerd Bitten
Andersen, our Danish exchange student.
In a few weeks’ time, the rush of giddy feeling from
knowing that in just months we would graduate and move to
adulthood and its freedom would be tempered with loss and
sadness, too.
On Nov. 19, 1960, Fred, 17, passed away after very
difficult, even impossible, heart surgery. A routine school
sports physical the previous spring had detected an unusual
sound in his heart. Further investigation revealed a hole.
This meant open-heart surgery, then in its infancy and far,
far riskier than today.
Fred knew his operation was coming up in early November
1960, but he tried to make light of it, hoping not to worry
his classmates. Most of us were too immature and
inexperienced to know the very grave danger he faced. Fred
understood that and continued to be everyone’s
friend. His ability to get along with people proclaimed
great promise.
On Nov. 12, he presided over a pre-game ceremony on the new
field off Route 59 in which Bitten was officially
recognized. And about two weeks before his surgery, he went
to a party in nearby Pomona with some friends, this writer
included. The small amount of alcohol he had there, in his
condition, caused him to pass out. We carried him onto a
bed in a spare room at Joan Prescott’s Pomona Road
home so he could recover. It was a prescient moment.
Just a few weeks later, some of us would again carry Fred
Yatto, this time to his final resting place on this Earth,
the West New Hempstead Cemetery, only two miles from the
Prescott house. Fred died Nov. 19, after the open-heart
operation revealed a hole the size of a half-dollar, and in
those days it could not be successfully repaired.
When our classmate passed away, so ended the innocence of
school life for the Class of ’61. We have had other
classmates leave us too soon in later years, 15 by my count
from a class of 201, but Fred was the first, and the
sobering it cast will never be forgotten.
Good times eventually returned to SVHS, but the black fact
that death comes to us all, including the young, was
forever imprinted on our psyche. It changed us, some for
life. The journeys each of us have taken since Nov. 19,
1960, have been set by it.
While I know that, in an earthly view, Fred Yatto was
denied the right, the joys, even the sorrows of life beyond
high school, the journey into middle and old age, and into
the season that is now, it must be said that his spirit has
lived a life.
Fred’s memory, his influence, lives in friends and
former classmates, who, once in a while, reflect on the
young man who was and the man who should have been.
I recall his eagerness, his humor, his sense of
responsibility, his deep love for living. What were to be
his hopes, his aspirations, his ups and downs, have been
experienced in some way or another by the Class of
’61. Some of us have thought: What would Fred have
said about this or that, or what would he have done in such
and such a moment?
The realization that 50 years later, a 17-year-old fellow
has not been forgotten is proof that a life did not finish
on this earth on Nov. 19, 1960.
November 8, 2010
The loss at Woodside
NEW HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. – History isn’t always
rescued. Sometimes it costs too much. Sometimes
“progress” is a big bully and wins. Sometimes
no one cares. Sometimes there are priorities. The given,
though, is that all history lost is heritage gone, memories
set to fade mode, to hazy recollection such as
“Wasn’t there a barn over there?”
New Hempstead, in the Spring Valley Postal District, is a
smallish village carved out of the Town of Ramapo several
decades ago, in part to slow the development bulldozer,
protect quality of life a bit and perhaps save this or that
part of history. Yet now a big piece of the past is gone.
It is a sad story, one that almost anyone, anywhere can
relate to since change, while often beneficial, also is
like a wake.
On a recent Sunday, the volunteers of the Moleston Fire
District, Hillcrest Fire Company, held a training exercise
at the long-standing Woodside Dairy barn off Brick Church
Road. The barn, not used for many years, had become
dilapidated, and it was determined it had to go. So it was
put to the torch, doing one last bit of good for the
community it long served, training hardworking volunteer
firefighters.
Perhaps it was fitting, too, that Hillcrest would bring the
barn down since the Moleston District’s first
commissioner was Enoch
Erickson, predecessor of those Ericksons who worked the
dairy farm.
According to Marty Erickson,
wife of Gene, daughter-in-law of Clarence (Pete), the
Woodside Dairy Barn and Milk House began on purchased Smith
farmland. Woodside was a working dairy farm until the
1960s. During World War II, says Marty, “The family
made sure local children had dairy products, often at no
cost. When the Rockland Leader (a Spring Valley weekly
newspaper) burned in the 1960s, the barn stored rescued
editions.”
As Rockland County moved from pre-war rural to post-war New
York City suburb, local dairies and other farms were sold
for housing developments and strip shopping centers,
“progress” paving over a long-practiced way of
life. Soon enough, people began buying milk from large
companies in convenience stores and supermarkets, and home
delivery died out.
Woodside was sold “for a token amount, in a spirit of
patriotism, for a county veterans cemetery … In
recent years, the buildings have been vandalized, the
barn roof succumbed to the weather … and the silo
was covered with vines,” writes Marty.
The Woodside barn has not been rescued. If it could have
been restored, perhaps Rockland schoolchildren could see
demonstrations of old-time milking, smell the hayloft straw
and the old barn timbers, get away from the hustle and
bustle and step back in time to a moment of American
history when independence, hard work, self-sufficiency,
community spirit and service and pure survival were parts
of ingrained country character.
Saved
from Woodside are a few milk bottles and fading memories.
Yet there must be a repository for all the emotions this
farm witnessed over so many years. Somewhere, somehow, some
time, they may emerge in realization and enlightenment that
progress doesn’t mean just building the new but
securing the past as well.
November 1, 2010
Election Day
Election Day this year is more important than in many
seasons. If this nation (1) does not show up at the polls
and (2) does not elect those willing to forgo special
interests and secret money, America will not progress. The
economy will stagnate and taxes will rise. Major issues
– true health care reform, job creation, fair trade,
education reform, immigration, security and the rescue of
the dwindling yet vital middle class – will not be
addressed.
According to national newspaper reports, in the 2006
mid-term elections, outside groups not connected to
political parties spent $51.6 million. So far in 2010,
courtesy of a high court decision guaranteeing “free
speech” to big-moneyed interests that can bully with
unlimited cash, such groups have spent $280 million, 60
percent from undisclosed donors.
It is power and greed, hiding behind political philosophy
and jingoistic, simplistic slogans that are behind large
secret donations. Continual war makes money for all too
many, as Ike warned us in far less involved times. Health
care is not about human needs but about profit.
Manufacturing, once and for a long time made successful for
companies and the nation by hard-working blue collars, has
left the USA for other countries, a slap in the face to
those still owed for building these companies. But money
rules, even if only for the short term since without
income, Americans won’t buy products and so keep the
economic stream replenished.
If God’s lighting could strike Tuesday, it might
bring us a full turnout of thinking voters; it might cause
the special interests to wither; it might see the election
of thousands of “Mr. (Miss/Mrs.) Smiths, who go to
Washington or to state capitols or to town and village
halls as disconnects from the almighty dollar, who seek
only to do right by their fellow man, woman and child.
Such equality of purpose has not been seen in the
Founders’ Land for decades.
October 25, 2010
Progress and a playwright
There is in my county – Rockland – in what just
a short 50 years ago was mostly rural land, a slice of
leftover heaven. Though within 25 miles of New York City,
the absence of interstates and direct rail had until the
1950s kept growth on the other side of the Hudson River. To
this place, this country of apple farming since the 1700s,
came many artists and writers, who could keep in touch with
business/career matters in Gotham and then escape to create
in soulful respite. One of these gifted people was John
Patrick (Goggan), playwright of “Teahouse of the
August Moon,” screenwriter of “Love is a Many
Splendored Thing” and other notable properties.
The author guarded his privacy, and he could do that well,
living on more than 200 acres of God’s land in the
woods, hills and marsh of the Town of Ramapo, off old State
Highways 202 and 306. For a very long time, even as
“progress” filled in surrounding acreage,
Patrick was able to keep his retreat, and, presumably, his
quiet so that “Some Came Running,” “High
Society” and “Three Coins n a Fountain”
could be written. His lavish parties at the estate, which
included stables and farm animals, attracted well-known
neighbors like the actor Burgess Meredith.
In time, Patrick would leave, as would Meredith, playwright
Maxwell Anderson of South Mountain Road, New City, and so
many others. The assumption is Rockland’s loss of
innocence had something to do with the exodus.
What seemed heaven-sent, so much open and wooded land, in a
place where seasons changed, where long country walks in
great quiet could be had for free, was replaced with
too-many-to-count housing developments, strip shopping
centers, then low-rise and high-rise apartment houses,
indoor shopping malls, traffic, congestion, noise and high
taxes, all made possible by two interstates and a bridge
called the Tappan Zee.
This “progress” surely was that for many, just
as 1800s growth on the island of Manhattan gave us part of
New York City, enormously influential, enjoyable yet
teeming in great emotion with all the elements of human
living. Paved over was simplicity, nature’s sounds
and the awe of masterful creation, there for the taking by
eye, ear and heart.
Now, the same “forward” movement of growth is
set to gobble away John Patrick’s farm, which,
amazingly, has not yet been developed. And it would not be
today, in the stress of the challenged and changing
economy. There is little money for more housing, even in
such a bucolic setting as Patrick’s retreat. Too many
homes are already for sale, too many through foreclosure
alone.
The equation here for “progress” is a different
formula. Ramapo government is trying to accommodate a
religious group that contends it needs God’s bucolic
acres for its interpretation of God’s work. So, the
acreage, once zoned for homes on two acres, with much of
the land held back as flood plain, has been rezoned, and
the town Planning Board is probably going to approve 87
single-family homes and 410 multi-family units. Guarding
the marsh areas in the aquifer will mean heavy, urban-like
density, quite unsuitable for this relatively country-like
section of Rockland.
Government is failing to balance the quality for life for
all in this rezoning, and the religious group is not seeing
the wisdom of building a smaller complex so as to be a
better neighbor.
Such a script is part of the “progress” play,
for old-time Rocklanders could argue that too many
developments replaced the apple farms, or early
Manhattanites could contend that their neighborhoods were
blitzed for growth. Or our Native Americans could
justifiably claim that sacred land was taken from then for
the white man’s “progress.”
An old story. One even worthy of a John Patrick theme.
Certainly fodder for Maxwell Anderson, whose play
“High Tor” detailed growth and consequences,
too.
Ironically, it is for the sake of God, or, more exactly,
for one people’s view of His call to life on this
earth, that “heaven” will transform into what
would others would term its opposite.
October 18, 2010
We must declare war
It is time to declare war, America. We are at our united
best in such action, one that begins after an attack on our
people, noted by the president in a stirring speech and
legalized by the Congress. We’re talking World War
II-like declaration and subsequent adrenalin load,
mobilized defense and full use of our can-do brains and
muscle.
Our nation has been attacked, not by terrorists but by
special interests who buy our officials and who cunningly
direct growing populist rage against government and policy,
playing on the fear foaming out of the stirred pot of a
prolonged and most severe economic crisis. Feeding the fire
are rumor-mongers, nonsensical beings who reason not, who,
for example, blame minorities for anything and everything,
as if no minority ever helped build this country.
The American middle class, created by the Industrial Age,
Progressivism, two world wars and manifest destiny, is
disappearing. Corporate greed has outsourced jobs overseas.
Focusing on the immediate bottom line instead of the future
of the American economy/social structure is creating a
third world-like underclass that will be out of work
permanently.
At stake is much more than loss of buying power, a stalled
economy and the threat of renewed recession, even
deflation. No democracy long sustains itself without a
healthy middle class and the hopes therein. Cities and
suburbs will decay, and crime and social problems will
increase. Children will be lost as progress regresses for
the short-term almighty dollar.
Aspiring to be in the middle class, with its great
comforts, its sense of arrival, has been the carrot that so
many Americans have chased, even while under the stick of
poor job conditions, long hours and sacrifice. It has
always been worth it – the carrot usually has been
eaten. Until now.
Now, the rules are different. Greed is the only rule, with
profits ever higher for the very rich, for corporations
built by the middle class that now outsource work overseas.
Greed that is aided and abetted by ever-more powerful
special-interest groups, through 501C (4) political action
committees and a Supreme Court decision that essentially
allows big money to drown opponents and their contributors
in a sea of cash. In 2010, big money rules elections, rules
Congress. That is an attack on America.
So, let there be war, never desirable but once again
necessary since the conflict has not been avoided by true
campaign finance reform. Call it “The Greed
War,” one that awaits national address by an
articulate president who nearly has been done in by special
interests and their manipulation of national rage into
awful moments of untruths, extremism and even violence, and
by himself, since his leadership has been most lacking on
what he promised to do. But he is still the national
leader, and he can still help save the nation.
Once his words are given in an address to a joint session
of Congress, that body will then, as agent for the people,
declare that this nation is now at full war with those who
thwart our national aims of equality and social and
economic advancement through their push for the big dollar
and for the special powers –
military/industrial/political – the investment dollar
might bring.
Once war is declared and the enemy is identified as special
interest, it must be eliminated. No more fat wallets for
any candidate or office holder, with each and every
campaign instead fully funded by the people. Lobbyists
would still have their voices, but through public hearings
on any cause or government question and not through
questionable “donations.”
Then, the war won, a new “Marshall Plan” of
recovery, not for Europe but for America this time. Funded
will be a new industrial/scientific age that creates
innovative work (jobs), the seeking of a new frontier that
can guarantee a vibrant middle class, and with it, the
wealth of the upper and the sustenance and dreams of the
lower. And the hopes of the future for all in this nation.
October 11, 2010
Free speech takes courage
Most postings to online news stories are an embarrassment
to free speech. The same people seem to post over and over,
often answering one another back and forth, in diatribe
reminiscent of the old radio call-in shows, also dominated
by “regulars.” What is written is usually not
thought out, poorly phrased, full of spelling and
grammatical errors and not edited by anyone. Worst of all,
they are unsigned, which makes their frequent fear- and
prejudice-based “reasoning” all the more
troubling since their authors strike in anonymity.
Rumor-mongers, these posters play on “e-bites,”
the Internet equivalent of sound bites. But the full meal,
the thoughtful argument, is rarely there.
Is this how we are to “inform” in the new age
of declining print and quick electronic comment? If so, the
nation, the world, the neighborhood is in trouble.
It’s like uttering a joke in one language,
translating through the idioms of 10 other tongues and then
back into English. The intended meaning is lost, even
skewed toward idiocy.
How did we get here? As revenue has declined in dwindling
print journalism, newspapers and other media have
encouraged online viewpoints, thus giving almost anyone a
shot at speaking in the public square. In doing so, there
has been editorial ballyhoo about protecting democracy
through added, unrestricted comment, but that's a
convenient argument used to rationalize marketing for
website hits. The more people who visit the sites, the more
advertisers you get.
How is public discourse encouraged when too few posters
think through what they want to say, often getting off the
subject completely and instead pushing whatever agenda they
may have? Some examples: A recent Associated Press story
about Kim Jong Un, the new North Korean leader, contained
many postings, including one that suggested
America
send “that fat little pork chop” to South
Africa where sharks could eat him alive. Attached to a
suburban newspaper piece about a highly paid police chief
who may retire was the comment that many houses
“where lost do to forecloser.” No, many homes
WERE (perhaps) lost DUE to FORECLOSURE. In a Louisiana
story about that state’s review of the Gulf oil
spill, there was this: we should
“believe the findings of this committe? yeah tell it
to the friggin pope!” (Spelling, grammar, vulgarity
not changed “to protect free speech.”) How do
these postings add anything coherent to debate?
As a retired 42-year newspaperman who fought for the right
to access facts and print them and for the right to express
both the newspaper’s views and the people’s, I
cannot call for a narrowing of the online response
pipeline. Instead, since I am still free in this nation, I
will continue to ignore most of this comment, just as I
switched off many of the old “hotline” radio
callers. But as a former editorial page editor who,
together with my newspaper, insisted that letter writers
identify themselves, I urge all media companies to require
the same for online posters. And any poster immediately
should show courage of conviction and stand up using
his/her real name. This should make people think first, and
think deeply, before posting. It would weed out the
ridiculous.
In the letter-writing days, some of the correspondents
would ask me to use a pseudonym, for fear that “some
nut will call me” or “I will be harassed by
calls.” I would reply: “When you use our
– your – free speech forum, you hang yourself
out there. The right to offer opinion comes at risk. Be
willing to take it.” Almost all did.
That’s not the case with online posting. There are
too many participants who do not have the courage of their
convictions.
October 4, 2010
State of the nation
Taxes are up, people’s confidence down. Health
insurance is ever more costly despite
“overhaul,” the rich are richer, and they
don’t share opportunity. Manufacturing, once the
bedrock of our economy, is silent, its machines now
spinning in China. The American middle class, created by
the Industrial Age, Progressivism, immigration, two world
wars, suburbia and manifest destiny, is disappearing. A
third world-like underclass is forming, one that
permanently will be out of work.
At stake is much more than loss of buying power, a stalled
economy and the threat of entrenched recession. No
democracy long sustains without a healthy middle class and
the hopes therein. Cities and suburbs will decay, and crime
and social problems will increase. Education will not
progress in such limited optimism. Children’s dreams
will be lost as opportunities dwindle.
The squeeze of the common man is on for the short-term,
almighty dollar to enrich the already wealthy, with scant
evidence that the largess ever trickles down to
reinvigorate consumers who buy most of the products and who
want to climb the ladder of success that is the foundation
of the middle class.
Our longest war continues without clear strategy. There is
no end in sight. It is killing our young and draining not
only the borrowed treasury but the nation's future as it
will be our children’s children’s children who
will have to repay the borrowed debt, if they can.
Special interests – some of polarized political bent,
many others industry-driven (health insurance companies,
military suppliers, financial houses) – determine our
legislatures, our executive branch, too. If “Mr.
Smith” went to Washington to tell us this in what was
once plain, simple, direct – and honest –
language, he probably could not get through Homeland
Security.
Politics in 2010 is polarized talk, not service to the
people, now delivered in quick sound bites and e-bits meant
to inflame, not inform, playing off slogans, playing off
fear, based not a whit on facts. The downsizing and
less-profitable media devotes too little in investigative
reporting and explanatory writing to structure the debate
and thus forge the choices that a democracy must make.
Instead, we have sloganeering, innuendo, deliberate
distorting of facts, pushed rumors – all meant to
push a simplistic agenda, such as “take government
back” or “change.”
If only it were that simple.
Government investment – deficit spending – was
supposed to gas up the stalling economy, but it has not.
Bureaucracy, special interests and deliberate distortion of
aims have largely wasted borrowed money. It seems the
system we have simply shoots itself in the foot, yet the
ordinary American feels the pain, not government.
The handwriting is on the wall, and it is one word:
“greed.” What the nation requires is a teacher
who will erase that from the blackboard and write
“investment.” Investment in jobs, in what must
become a new industrial/scientific age in America that
creates innovative work, the seeking of a new frontier that
can guarantee a vibrant middle class, and with it, since it
is America’s historical bent, the wealth of the upper
and the sustenance and dreams of the lower.
All good will follow – money for schools, for health
care, for infrastructure, for defense, for debt.
One last
thing: Teacher should send special interest to the
principal, recommending permanent suspension. Can’t
teach with a bully in the classroom.
September 27, 2010
Balance in suburbia
In 1945, even before troop ships brimming with returning
World War II veterans hit ports in America, the suburban
“plan” had been hatched. Defense contractors
like Levitt & Sons knew many of these men, and some
women, would never go back to their cities after their
breakout. No longer were aspirations shelved by the make-do
years of the Great Depression and then a devastating
conflict. As well, there was renewed confidence in
survival. The G.I., the sailor, the Marine, the airman, had
made it back, and maybe these Americans could forge yet a
new frontier, as is written in our national genetic code.
The newest
frontier was affordable housing for the average American,
to fulfill the dream of home ownership. William Levitt and
his family, businessmen surely seeing great profit as well
as possessing the ability to meet a need, were the first to
step up to the plate in 1947 when they began selling homes
fabricated in an assembly-line method, with payment as low
as $57 a month. “Levittown” would completely
alter the Long Island farm landscape, and everywhere else.
Quickly, housing developments would grow across the nation,
including in New York City’s suburbs, fertilized by
eager investment and cultivated by willing towns and
villages, which envisioned much more money for tax coffers.
What was not expected in the heady rush was
suburbia’s cost, its great and growing expense that
today is helping drain treasuries from the federal
government to the states to communities.
Aging infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, utilities,
parks and public buildings; hastily built homes now
requiring new plumbing and electrical work; houses
illegally modified over the years against zoning
regulations to create multiple units; insufficiently
maintained homes, some of which stand out as eyesores, with
unregistered cars on lawns, litter and unpainted siding;
and bulldozed-over floodplains that raise the water table
for other residents, filling their basements in storms
– all these concerns now haunt graying suburbia, just
as many of them have afflicted the old cities from which
suburbanites fled in the decades after World War II. Yet,
ironically, many of our urban areas have been rebuilt in
their rediscovery. Children of suburbanites, turned off by
the great development expanse, shopping strips that you
have to drive to and the loss of old neighborhood
downtowns, seek closer community in walking, downtown areas
in Brooklyn, for example.
But this leaves suburbia wanting, for our growing national,
state and local deficits and the ever-escalating cost of
government combine to raise taxes prohibitively while
concurrently not providing sufficient re-investment. Our
infrastructure repair budgets are cut; our social services
and health care expenses increase as suburbanites age.
Reductions in manufacturing jobs and other workplace losses
shrink the ranks of the middle class, the suburban bedrock.
Suburbia no longer is growing, yet the rather big elephant
in the room needs to be fed, its appetite almost
insatiable. Who will pay?
A partial answer is in balance, which is necessary in the
maturing of the suburbs. When the suburban boom began,
planners, developers, investors and government should not
have abandoned our downtowns and hamlet centers, instead
balancing rebuilding there with the growth of fringe
development. Without visionary thinking, we left areas to
sometimes unscrupulous, exploiting landlords who turned
them into substandard housing. And we vacated our downtown
shopping zones in the process.
The proper plan would have been to reinvest in the
downtowns, to tear down and renew the old and build a
community of shops and housing, tied to outer suburbia.
Instead, a gazillion shopping strips went up, with yet
another pizza shop, dry cleaner and now the standard bagel
joint. No visionary was available then (1945-2005 at least)
with a strong enough voice. Everyone thought the suburbs
were the best thing since toasted bread. Leave the crowded
cities behind, people said. So, many Gothamites fled to the
suburbs, but many, too, have now fled from them as well in
the inevitable aging of suburbia.
Balance is required in development, particularly in
rebuilding suburbia; that is, if growth and regrowth ever
happen in this scary economy. But will visionaries speak up
and be heard this time, over the shuffling of the mighty
greenback?
Sept. 20,
2010
A neighborly cruise
ABOARD THE NORWEGIAN DAWN (Sept. 12-19) – I’ve
cruised seven days as a tourist in calm waters, though in
truth I would rather have been on a high seas adventure as
correspondent during trying times. I saw clear to the
horizon, literally and otherwise, no other vessels near,
the Norwegian Cruise Line ship, its ballasts and
stabilizers set for a senior citizen-comfort ride, pushing
along at 13 knots, bound for Halifax, St. John, Bar Harbor,
Boston, Newport and then back to New York City.
Security
was tight shore-wise, ship-wise. It is the price we pay
these scary days – 99 percent of the people showing
photo ID, facing deep scrutiny by eye, computer and X-ray
detector against the 1 percent who might do harm. This puts
a damper on fun activities, especially when the rare
official is overzealous, but not so much that what you pay
for doesn't deliver on a cruise. If you are a casino
aficionado, a shuffleboard player, a Las Vegas-type show
lover; if you like to eat, to socialize, to relax on deck
lounges, a cruise is custom-made; if you like to get off
the ship in varied ports (not all do), this is the way to
travel.
For me,
a cruise is a way to people watch, to observe humanity, to
overhear accents - from England, the American Midwest,
Canada, France, all over the world, 70 nations represented
on my trip alone. It’s been an opportunity to have
conversations – so many people were friendly, so many
were interesting. Some were endearing. Living as most of us
do in a microcosm, interacting with the same neighbors,
workers, family and friends every day, immersed as we are
in whatever region in which we live, we get used to the
habits – the politeness, the impoliteness, the
yin/yang – of our particular little world – the
moaning and groaning, the good deeds, the
annoyances.
I can
report that getting out of our cubicles and meeting new
people makes you feel optimistic about humanity. You are
reassured once again that while we have always been
troubled by greed, hate, wars, the better nature of us all
is still a good bet for the long run.
As I cruised along, my sense of pioneering, the security
blanket of independent spirit that I have carried since
birth still wrapped tightly, I was reassured that this
nation, this world must never be looked at through the eyes
of the self-annointed suspicious, through the greedy,
through those who profit by hardship and who would have us
live in fear, but through the hearts, minds and values of
the corn farmers I met on this trip, and of the English
couple bent simply “on a holiday, you see,” and
of the Filipino staff most courteous, and of the American
westerners with wonderful, disarming manners, and of the
older lady looking at an immigrant baby who saw only
promise in a nation that once gave her Polish grandfather a
shot at a dream.
If only
the world we live in – the one determined by our
governments – was as neighborly as this cruise has
been.
Sept.
11, 2010
In honor of Sept. 11, this is a reprint of my column for
Sept. 14, 2001, just days after the awful attack on
America.
Weeping in Pearl River
They are weeping in Pearl River. Weeping for New York
City’s Bravest and Finest, lost in the rubble and
horror and smoke of the World Trade Center disaster.
They are weeping elsewhere in Rockland County, surely, for
civilians and city workers alike, but it is Pearl River and
all of Orangetown where so many of the Bravest and Finest
live.
Some neighborhoods are almost an extension of the city, and
firefighters and police officers living there have taken
the jobs of fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers.
This is another Rockland, set apart from the country and
historic days, and distinct from the regular post-war
suburbia of New City or the ethnically diverse
neighborhoods of Spring Valley and Haverstraw.
In that, there is as much heritage, distinction and pride
as in any section of this geographically small county so
close to New York City. Indeed, it is the physical
closeness that makes Pearl River, particularly, so
attractive to city workers.
When the Palisades Interstate Parkway partially opened in
1955, Orangetown was the first accessible Rockland area, 16
miles from the George Washington Bridge. Firefighters and
police officers, seeking a country life for their families
and unable by law to live in New Jersey, which is closer to
Gotham, flocked to the relatively affordable housing here.
And they formed a community. It is not the usual suburbia.
Yes, there are the bi-levels; the block parties; the hustle
and bustle of car pools and family activity. But there is
also the “Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood of deep
concern and respect for each officer, active or retired,
and son or daughter or father or grandchild of that
officer.
You might just as well be in the firehouse or the police
precinct station house on many streets of Pearl River.
These people stick together, and when one suffers, all do,
fueled by the deep sense of mourning that the Irish (so
many of these officers are of that heritage) instinctively
carry in their souls and hearts.
Rockland, Pearl River, do not yet know how many of their
New York City Bravest and Finest will be counted on the
honor roll of the dead. That may take weeks, and the toll
may be high. But already the darkness of grief has
descended, and with that sweep of fate are also seen angels
of mercy and comfort.
The mutual-aid system of the Brotherhood of firefighters
and police officers has eased into the grief, separating
the dark from hope and resurrection and thanks for
sacrifice.
The bagpipes will be playing a long time in Pearl River and
in Rockland. The Masses will be many. There will be a
lifetime of sorrowful memory. But already there has begun a
healing, thanks be to God, by the goodness of the
Brotherhood.
September 9,
2010
Curiosity, a lifesaver
Curiosity, we are warned, killed the cat, but the naysayers
never tell you about the nine lives.
In the University of Higher Education that is life, you can
earn a doctorate via Curiosity 101, 201, 301, 401.
Curiosity was a welcome affliction for Thomas Edison and
Albert Einstein, who thought out of the box, who often
applied barely basic skills of learning to journey, as Buzz
Lightyear says in “Toy Story:” “To
Infinity and Beyond.”
Einstein did poorly in school arithmetic and early math.
Had he been the traditionalist, had he earned his gold
stars in calculus, he might have ended up a fine professor
of that discipline instead of spending 10 years daydreaming
about gravity and the speed of light and whether a fellow
saw himself in a mirror the same way traveling through
space as he would moored to earth. His e=mc squared formula
might not have been written.
Tom Edison endlessly tinkered in his lab, trying this and
that out of curiosity more than straight applied science.
Had he followed strict dictum, he and his people might have
given up. If they had let curiosity kill the cat the first
time out on light bulb filaments, there would have been no
ninth life, no pushed inquisitiveness that found carbonized
thread as the winner. And then there was light, literally.
Edward Hopper, the famed American realist painter whose
works of solitude and intensity of emotion are so
especially defining to the world right now, spent long
months in utter curiosity, going to 1930s movies, peering
out his Washington Square studio window, looking away from
the sea at South Truro, Mass., walking Gotham’s
streets and reaching into his mind's file cabinet for human
and architectural sketches squirreled away on so many trips
of curiosity. From here and there, Hopper took what he
needed, and when the time was right, he brushed in strokes
of interpretation that make us shiver decades later.
So, I say to all of you, especially the young yet not
spoiled by too many limiting rules: Go for it – be
curious, day dream, move to a different, unique place in
your mind. Be independent, dare to “go to infinity
and beyond.” This America, in particular, needs your
innovation right now.
August 30, 2010
Coincidence?
UPPER
NYACK, N.Y. – There are too many coincidences in life
– for any of us – to continue believing there
is no connection, casual or otherwise. I learned that
(again) the other day.
My son lives in this Hudson riverfront village, in a 1928
house built by the Lewis Family. One of the Lewises had
three daughters and wanted to give them homes. He tore down
his own house on Van Houten Street, constructed two small
look-alikes and another on nearby Castle Heights Avenue.
For generations, Lewises and Buckouts lived on Van Houten,
until my son won out over others to buy one of the homes
from LeRoy Buckout. Arthur IV had no grandiose ideas to
tear the place apart and remake it according to modern
“elegance.” Instead, “George
Bailey,” whom I can truly call my son, has simply
fixed up a simple but truly comfortable home. That intent
made LeRoy quite happy.
Yet the time arrived when Arthur needed space for wife and
two children, and that meant converting what was once a
dirt floor basement into a romper room/living area. Yours
truly has been the volunteer “contractor” on
the job, along with experts in drainage, heating,
electricity and dry-walling.
After months of building stairs, putting in a floor, adding
to the pro electrical work, wall finishing and trim, I came
to the drop ceiling portion, where old-fashioned tin was
used. This required sturdy gloves, big tin snips and some
muscle.
It was while working on a small table, set up by chance
under the southeast window, when I realized, as I cut a
circle for a light, that I was handling tin in the very
same spot where Mr. Lewis had his commercial
tinsmith’s workshop in the late 1920s.
If a photograph could have been taken of me at 11:30 a.m.,
August 27, 2010, in a brightly lit, almost finished room in
what was once the unfinished basement of the house at 25
Van Houten, and if a shot had been snapped of Mr. Lewis at
11:30 a.m., August 27, 1929, and if the two had been
compared, the latter would have been of a professional
craftsmen making a living and the former of a man helping
his son build his family’s space.
Similarities, yes. Coincidence? No, no more than my son
Arthur 4th resembling good George Bailey. He even has the
same white picket fence in front of his home.
August 23, 2010
Tools of the trade
Craftsmen/women are inventive people. Take electricians,
for example. With all the fancy lithium-powered drills and
saws and other modern tools to hang from your belt, most of
the sparkys I’ve known and/or observed use
lineman’s pliers as combination hammer, cutter,
measuring device and coffee stirrer.
It’s probably easier to stick with one tool, be it
1929 or 2010. Your hands are married to the pliers in their
symbiosis. You can save time by not putting one tool in
your pouch and then taking out another. Most important,
this tool is basically an electrician’s only, not a
plumber’s or a carpenter’s. It is therefore the
mark of the trade. And anyone in a trade or a profession
likes to be noted as such. It is pride.
In the old newspaper composing rooms, printers had line
gauges in their apron vest pockets. Also called “pica
poles,” these rules measured type, 6 picas to the
column inch, 14 agate lines to the inch.
Doctors carry stethoscopes. Carpenters hammers, or more
recently, pneumatic tools. Mechanics have wrenches in their
pockets.
Two generations ago, grocery clerks had a pencil resting on
an ear so as to quickly pull it out and tally up the bill
on a fresh brown paper bag, the speed of their arithmetic
amazing. Some of my teachers stuck pencils in their hair,
usually red ones, for difficult marking (or was it a
warning?).
Fishermen return from the sea with their nets, and, it is
hoped, their catch, but when they are set aside, their
trade is marked by sun-etched faces and a distant look that
says “I go to the beyond every day, and so far I have
returned.”
Children have a mark of the youth “trade” as
well. Imagination, curiosity, wonderment – gifts to
the early ones so quickly obscured by the details and
distraction of puberty and adulthood, only to return in
aging years.
The observant can tell often tell who is in what job, or
where the life has been, sometimes where it is going. For
we all carry the tools of our trade.
August 16, 2010
The
5&10 adventure
You can be as old as I am – 67 – and still be
age 12 when you step into the 2010 version of a
5&10-cent store. You can have $200 in your pocket but
again feel the wonder of what a quarter might buy in this
magical palace.
Once, every downtown had a 5&10, sometimes two. Usually
there was the omnipresent Woolworth’s where in my
grandparents’ time, many items did, indeed, sell for
a nickel or a dime. In the 1950s, in Spring Valley, N.Y.,
at the Consolidated 5&10, 25 cents and up was more
likely.
Nyack, a nearby village, had two dime stores, and each was
set up in honorable, cherished fashion. Double entry doors
to the right, double exit to the left. Railroad flat floor
plan, a shotgun drive in a long room. Wooden floors once
varnished but never again. Islands of counters with 5-inch
glass walls, goods spread neatly.
(An odd thing about those counters. They never seemed
messy, even on a sale day when dish towels, for example,
might be on special at 10 cents per. Maybe consumers were
neater then. Today, in major department stores, counters
without glass walls but with originally well-stacked piles
of say, shirts, soon become jungles of goods in disarray.)
In the old 5&10, hardware items were usually toward the
back of the store, and that’s where I headed. Once,
with 25 cents in hand, probably a quarter from my
grandmother, I could not wait until Boy Scout Troop 13 had
finished its Friday night meeting at the Dutch Reformed
Church so that I could get over to Consolidated, zoom down
the long aisle to the right, back to the last glass-walled
counter and then to the small bottles of turpentine. I got
one for 19 cents, no tax, and once out of the store and on
my walk home to Hillcrest, I opened it up to get the pine
smell. The next day it was used on a wood-working project
in my parents’ unfinished basement.
In larger downtowns, the dime stores had candy counters
where you bought by the pound or fraction thereof. Loose
candy – nonpareils were a favorite – were
scooped up by the counter person, weighed in a hopper and
then slid into a white paper bag, which you clutched
tightly all the way home. Other 5&10s had wonderful
donut counters, and as soon as you entered the store you
could smell the sweetness. Every mom’s hand was soon
tugged by a child with watering mouth. Even bigger stores
had lunch counters with fountain service and quick, simple
sandwiches, such as grilled cheese and chicken salad.
Just as Automats were once urban fixtures, complete with
characters and good, dependable food, so 5&10s were
small and big downtown meccas, one of the required stores
that made main street Main Street, a place for every income
level, almost always affordable, even for a fellow with an
rare quarter burning a hole in his pocket. What an
adventure they were.
August 9, 2010
On local identity
It’s Rockland County, this place from which I write,
this land north of New York City. It is not the Carolinas.
Not Boston. Not San Francisco. Not Europe or Asia or South
America. Or the Bronx or Brooklyn or Manhattan. Not even
New Jersey, our closest relative. It’s this special,
unique place, defined by and for the individuals who live
here. Whatever each of us finds pulling about this county
is in that mix of emotion, personal attachment, gathered
history and the sinew of having so far survived suburbia.
Rockland helped define suburbia. As with Long
Island’s famous Levittown, this county quickly built
suburbia’s framework – in hundreds of housing
developments since 1950; in civic associations that gave
voice (sometimes loud) to former, once-living-in-anonymity
Gothamites; in greater diversity in a region known for its
varied mix since the 1600s; in added national
infrastructure like the Thruway, Palisades Interstate
Parkway, and, of course, the Tappan Zee Bridge; and in the
growth -- the constant growth -- of everything, from
government to schools to the tax load.
Has the trip been worth it so far? Yes … and
… no. There are few Rocklanders who do not pine for
some of the so-called “good, old days,” who
would not take less traffic; a generally friendlier
attitude from people; no air, visual or noise pollution
from the Palisades lnterstate; more green space;
fewer-filled in floodplains; our farms returned; downtowns
restored; unlocked doors; less government; simplicity.
It’s the nature of things to look back
wistfully, and even a Rocklander of a few
years’ residency can and does that. Take a
countyite of 75 years' duration or one
whose family dates back to the I600s, and
you really intensify the feeling. But we all
know that “progress” stops for no one,
and no change is entirely welcome.
That said, I would not trade my existence here in Rockland
for any other spot that I have visited. This is a county of
great variety in its people, groups and geography, and you
have only to reach out
to touch some of it. Walk South Mountain
Road on a foggy morning; climb High Tor in
the fall; take the Hook Mountain path in the
summer; sail the Hudson; traipse through
downtown Suffern with the Ramapos in the
distance; look at the beauty of some of the
old custom-built homes on South Madison
Avenue in Spring Valley; hike the Dunderberg; bike through
Tomkins Cove; spend an early morning on
Camp Hill Road in Pomona.
Attend some function sponsored by our many caring agencies;
go to an art show; hear and see
local performers; recognize the work of our many volunteer
firefighters, ambulance corps people and others; realize
how, in a pinch, even complaining Rocklanders help each
other.
Yes, we are a busy place, sometimes too
fast-paced, too impersonal, too abrupt, even arrogant and
cold. But this Rockland is also a mix of many interesting
people with varied outlook and diverse background.
That is how it is in Rockland today; that is it was in
1798, and is one of the reasons more sedate, more
countrified, Iess slower-paced Orange County was willing to
let us go that year as we formed this county of Rockland.
Our die was cast the moment the first
settler realized we were close to the great
port of New York. We are not the city by far, but
we are influenced by it, then, now and forever. We also
exert influence, and even the most brusque former urbanite
gets his edges polished and becomes this different breed
called Rocklander.
Here’s an example of a Rocklander couple, Betsy and
Jim Miller. They wrote me at The Journal-News to tell us of
the old days in this county. “Many years ago,”
they said, “when we had goats, chickens, etc., the
schools used to make the property their yearly trip.
We taught children to feel a warm egg, freshly laid, and
they learned to get a squirt of milk from a goat and about
nature.”
Such description of an earlier time in Rockland speaks to
the “quiet” of those days. Once, the close,
personal family touch was more evident.
In my own youth, the Rockland neighborhood of the 1940s and
1950s, there was Spring Valley's John Romaine, a radio and
TV expert, running projectors at the Hillcrest Firehouse
during holidays so the area
youths could see cartoons and other films. He also had a
small theater in his Locust Street home. There have been
and are individuals in Rockland who care enough about their
neighbors to do something for them. They should continue to
be heard, for they speak eloquently.
You define someone who lives in Rockland as either a
countyite -- a “Rocklander” actually -- or
someone who is just passing through, who may pick up some
of our mannerisms but who simply wants to move on, who
never really invests faith and emotion in this county. Make
your choice. And be proud of the town, village or hamlet
where you reside if you stay.
No “community” can be called such unless it has
residential interest. I’m old enough to have lived in
pre-Tappan Zee Bridge, Thruway and Palisades lnterstate
Parkway Rockland, and in those semi-rural days you were
damn happy to call yourself a Valleyite or a Nyacker, Stony
Pointer, Haverstrawite, Piermonter, Suffernite or whatever.
Even in really countrified areas like Stony Point, there
were geographical subsets, and termed yourself a Tomkins
Cover or a Grassy Pointer.
The late James Farley, the famous organizer of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's first two presidential campaigns and the former
postmaster general, never forgot that he came from Grassy
Point. Rockland, yes. Stony Point, yes. But Grassy Point in
particular. The air is a bit different there, you see, by
the high tide and the lowlands on the Hudson River. A
little different, you see, than living up in the hills off
Franck Road.
Now, in this busy land we call Rockland, in a new century,
so many residents just pass through. They are transferred
here. They move from urban areas to seek a quieter
lifestyle. They plan to reside here for a time and then
retire to the Carolinas, along a golf course. That’s
OK, and may they have a beautiful life, but while these
people are here they ought to get to know their host.
Rockland is the host. Specifically, a town, village or
hamlet is the host. Live on Germonds Road? Then don't say
you reside in New City. You exist, for a time anyway, in
the hamlet of Germonds. Go to school at Rockland Community
College? That's not in Suffern; it’s in the hamlet of
Viola. Call the Clarkstown police for information? Well,
you are calling the police department, not the “local
police precinct,” as one
Journal News reader put it to me. Likewise, it’s
village hall, town hall or the county seat at New City, but
not “city hall.”
And, speaking of New City, though that's where the
courthouse, Legislature and many executive county offices
are located, it is merely a hamlet, not
even a village and certainly not a city.
lf you run a business, put the name of your community on
the truck. Tradesmen were once quite proud to include the
community location. Now we see merely a cell phone number
or an e-mail address.
Why harp on this loss of identity? Because if we do not
make an effort to know the area in which we live, we become
disconnected automatons. We might as well be living
anywhere. We work, come home to sleep in a development, go
to malls (which are about the same everywhere) and never
realize that each of Rockland's areas has uniqueness.
This Rockland is different, just as any area has its
characteristics; revel in them. Our county is chock-full of
history, far example. It is where the plan to end the
Revolutionary War at Yorktown was hatched by Gen. George
Washington (at Tappan); it is where this nation received
its first gun salute from the British (at Piermont); it is
the site of the first national railroad, the old Erie out
of Piermont; it has figured in every major war; and its
karma is such that no matter what happens in a big way
nationally or internationally, there is usually a Rockland
connection.
People ought to live where they want and for as long as
they like. And you do not have to be a dyed-in-the-wool
Rocklander, shouting “rah, rah” every time the
name is mentioned, but if you live here, even for just a
few months, get to know where you are, who you are.
You are a Rocklander; you are a Dutchtowner or
Montebelloite or Garnerviller or Snedens Landingite or
Pearl Riverite or (fill in the blank). You are not just
someone who lives “upstate” or “near New
York City.”
Cherish this Rockland.
August 2, 2010
Fall follows summer (thank God)
The unexpected bonus of a very hot summer is anticipation
of a boffo fall. This year, in the Northeast anyway, it
better have moxie. The heat so far in these parts has been
too much already.
We have been averaging temps in the 90s, even very high
90s, when we usually have high 80s. Add extra-sticky
humidity, and this is Georgia North. Fine for the Georgians
but not for we climatically inbred northerners.
The summers many of us had as children in this part of New
York State – seasons without house air conditioning
– were hot, too, it seemed as if we had enough
respite in the swimming areas then so easily accessible at
low or no cost. Now, state budget cuts have closed some
pools, and the free areas once available are long gone,
bulldozed over for “progress.” (Trouble is,
some people have houses sitting in old lake areas, and
their basements become swimming pools, unwanted ones.)
In old summers, too, before the developments arose in the
suburbs, boys built huts and tree houses out of scrap
lumber and small felled wood, which we cobbled into
overnight sleeping quarters. Many a present-day
do-it-yourselfer learned how to saw wood and swing a hammer
on these construction jobs.
Such night adventures took us away from attic heat and set
us on an independent road. We all felt like pioneers or
Davy Crockett. We all believed that Americans, by their
nature, set out with little and chased a frontier. While,
as 10-14 years olds, we didn’t sit down and
philosophize this belief, it was there nonetheless, felt
deeply and instinctively, passed along by the culture and
the economic times we lived in. Waking up with the animals
in the woods was a free rite of passage then, and no boy
came back home just a boy. The future usually looked
brighter.
In 2010, it is summer heat, once again, that is promoting
hope of a different sort. It can’t last forever, and
I look forward to the morning and evening chill of autumn,
its beautiful colors, the crunch of walking in leaves, the
shift into cruising gear after chugging uphill. Like the
young fellow toughing it out overnight in the woods,
emerging more prepared for what’s ahead, this
summer’s unforgivable high temps has cast a whetted
appetite for fall.
May it come sooner than later.
July 26, 2010
A seasonal move
These hot days in the Northeast, recalling some boling
summers of decades ago, also bring to mind a routine that a
fellow I knew followed seasonally. He was a radio/TV
repairman whose self-made career began with early 1920s
radio through the great period of that medium in the
1930s-1940s, into the emerging, life-changing TV birth
years of the 1950s and toward the beginning of color,
though he would not repair the last innovation.
By then, in the early 1960s, John Romaine had settled into
a pattern comfortable enough, reliable enough,
no-surprises-enough that he didn’t want to tackle new
technology. He had his longtime, reliable customers, many
of whose families he knew as well as his own, growing up in
a small village north of New York City.
Once, he and a partner had a radio/small appliance store,
which later sold televisions, including, in 1948, a 22-inch
model. That was when the typical screen was 7 or nine
inches. RCA, his prime supplier, had come out with a set
that projected an image onto a mirror without too much
distortion, a forerunner of the projection Tvs of today.
The changing way of American life – the decline of
the typical small town in favor of suburban shopping strips
and malls – plus a growing number of competitors in
what became a huge suburb helped shutter Ro-Field
Appliances on Main Street. It was then that John brought
his repair business home, making a living out of that.
Downstairs in his older house, on a tree-lined street just
a mile or so from Spring Valley, he set up shop under a
basement window. He stood on a wooden platform to resist
shock as he touched high voltage areas, especially in TVs.
A large soldering iron was at the ready - to sweat in a
resistor or a capacitor. An observer would always find it
amazing that an ailing TV or radio could suddenly come to
life with the replacement of just one or two tiny parts.
The man would then put the receiver back in its polished
cabinet, unless he had removed it in the customer’s
home, and then manage his way out of the basement and into
a green Ford station wagon, which could be seen all over
Spring Valley and Hillcrest, where John lived.
That trek out of the basement made over and over was
seasonal. In summer, when the breezes might be obtained,
the man took to his garage, where he had a second shop much
like the one downstairs. Here he was among the birds and
cooler mornings and evenings to do his work, leaving the
heat of the day to pass.
It is doubtful today if repairs to highly sophisticated
electronics could be made in basement and garage shops or
that a well-liked neighbor whose family went way back and
knew other families that went way back would be driving
around picking up, repairing and delivering your TV.
John Romaine did this all year round, whether from basement
or garage, and his reputation for quality work and a
friendly manner were as reliable as the guaranteed change
of seasons.
July 19, 2010
A subtle art
Ice
cream, especially in this summer of awful heat, is to
adults the childhood reminder that there are Band-Aids when
needed. For we too get boo boos, and a treat like we had as
kids not only satisfies the palate but nurtures the soul in
whatever hurt there is. Sort of like having grandma with
you forever.
I am
partial to butter pecan but will take coffee, strawberry
and a classic -- half-vanilla, half-chocolate. Don't cotton
to the cheap stuff, though, and I don't judge by price
alone. "Cheap" can mean ice cream with a fancy name but
bearing false promise, like a suitor who dresses well and
flashes a thick wallet but who is inadequate as good,
engaging company.
With
ice cream a rarely but deliciously visited friend, reserve
it for special need or special fun. For such sacrifice, I
want to taste creaminess, flavor and richness. Keep the gum
additives on the shelf, use fresh ingredients. The
manufacturer can still make money keeping to a high
standard -- witness those ice creams that sell well at
reasonable price.
There
are ice cream favorites for you and me, but once there was
a type that is now rare to find, which even then was
costlier but which always guaranteed the best tasting
experience. And that was hard-packed ice
cream.
Sold
from old-fashioned fountain service stores -- those
downtown, hometown beauties with long marble counters and a
soda jerk behind who mixed seltzer and flavor to give you a
drink -- hard-packed ice cream was the same lovely variety
you enjoyed in a cup or cone at the
counter.
Taken
from large tubs in a waist-level freezer, this ice cream
was so hard that it didn't melt on the way home. It took
expertise and strength to scoop out the ice cream, using a
stainless-steel paddle and digging down hard, as if mining
coal.
The
paddle was deliberately shaped so as to slide against the
tub wall and slice off the eagerly awaited dessert. The ice
cream would be packed, tightly, if done right, into a white
cardboard container shaped like a large version of the ones
used in delicatessens for take-out potato
salad.
Each
container had a metal fold-up handle for
carrying.
The
best ice cream packers would paddle a bit extra onto the
top of the container, which when finished, should have had
a mound on top. The box top would not close, and waxed
paper would instead be stuck to the ice
cream.
No ice
cream tasted so wonderful as hard-packed, no matter what
the flavor. If my dad brought this treat home, we knew
either the national economy was picking up or his horse had
come in (which can be synonymous).
Today,
you might be able to locate hard-packed ice cream
somewhere, but even if you do, it probably won't come from
a soda fountain, the jerk doing double duty as the
experienced and giving packer. And maybe it would not taste
the same, either.
July 12, 2010
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – If you were in the sixth grade
hosted by Torger Gram, an English teacher who gave you
weekly compositions to write, the heading of this column
would be familiar. Of course, it was once a bromide, too,
in almost every English instructor’s class, public
and private schools.
Nationwide, returning students would be asked to build
descriptive, adjective-laden sentences (hopefully) by
relating what happened to them in a relatively carefree
time. The paragraphs would be about the same across the
U.S. – details of trips with family, hanging out with
friends, birthdays, swimming, even boredom – but
different as well, unique to the area.
So it is that we come to the summer of 1954 in a village
called Spring Valley, 30 miles north of New York City but
with the suburbs yet to build out, still far removed from
Gotham save the visiting of summer bungalow dwellers. This
is still a community where the soon-to-be sixth grader, the
fellow or gal who would write compositions for Mr. Gram at
the North Main Street School (or for teachers at the South
Main Street, Monsey or St. Joseph’s schools) was
probably third generation Valley, at least, headed for the
same desks their parents sat in (some of whose reputations
would precede them). In many cases, kids who played
together were the sons and daughters of people who had also
mutually passed sleepy summers in the Valley.
Vacation time would bring youngsters together at the Spring
Valley Theatre, where we would watch “Stalag
13,” “House of Wax,” and, later, The
Diary of Anne Frank,” “On the Beach” and
“The Bridge on the River Kwai.” We would buy
candy from Brown’s next door since the theater
charged triple for Necco wafers, Jugifruits and
non-pareils. What Brown’s did not have was Bon-Bons,
a box of vanilla ice cream bits covered with chocolate. The
cost was 25 cents, almost double the admission sticker for
the Valley Theatre (14 cents).
We might head back to Brown’s after the movie, if we
could afford a soda, or go across Main Street to
Arvanite’s Luncheonette. (In later years, there would
be trips to Perunna’s, Bartero’s or
Martio’s for pizza.)
Since we had free summer time, our parents would send us on
errands. We might go to DeBaun’s Hardware or K&A
for something, or to the five & ten or to
Slavin’s Drug Store. Haircuts would be had at
Balogh’s, Rocco’s and a few other places. We
took our portable radios to Ro-Field Appliances and picked
up dry-cleaning items at Ideal Cleaners on Church Street.
No matter where we went “downtown,” we’d
end up in Memorial Park, where we’d find other pals
on the swings or the merry-go-round. We might also head up
Church Street to West Street, past the Ukrainian Church and
onto the old Erie tracks, which could take us to Monsey and
the sandstone Indian caves down in the glen. If we came
back to West Street, we might play with the huge piles of
scrap metal at Consolidated Stamp or head off to the Clopay
factory on Church where boys found scraps of shade material
to use in building summer huts.
Days were spent outdoors, under shade trees, playing
canasta or other card games with friends, and on some
occasions, indulging in an innocent-enough “spin the
bottle,” organized whenever three or so girls located
three or so boys.
The hot nights were endured without air conditioning,
tarrying out as late as we could, given the 9 p.m. Spring
Valley curfew, “enforced” by friendly police.
Some evenings found the boys sleeping outdoors in their
huts in the woods not yet bulldozed for post-World War II
development.
Each summer was its own, with physical and mental
development driving moods from one to the next for growing
youngsters who enjoyed themselves without much money, who
had few luxuries, but who enjoyed pals who seemed to be
there forever. The key ingredient in these sleepy seasons
was stability, in a village that never seemed to change.
Come September, it was easy for many Valleyites to write
“What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” since that
time had passed so easily, so simply, with good memories.
All across America in that year of 1954, the writing surely
came fairly effortlessly as well, with distinct area
flavor. Yet not one experience elsewhere was fully
interchangeable with that in Spring Valley. That was our
unique gift.
July 5, 2010
‘Daydream of youth’
ANYWHERE, USA – The young woman, about 17, joined by
another of the same age, stood side by side in the time
capsule that is an ice cream shack. They could have been my
high school classmates, 1959, or my sons’, late
1980s, or the 27 year olds of today, back in 2000.
What is it about young women working part-time at Dairy
Queen, Mr. Frostee, Carvel’s, any ice cream take-out
place? No matter what generation, the dress is the same:
shorts, tops; the hair is pulled back; the overheard
conversation is about boys, college; there is sometimes a
vacant stare: the daydream of youth; and the attachment to
job, place, time is so fleeting that it will be remembered
hardly at all.
Except maybe if the summer also includes romance.
Now, not to be sexist, young men working the Dairy Queen
shift are also in passing time, place, but there seems less
vacant staring and more of “What’ya
need?” and getting the order out. The female/male
difference – Venus/Mars – is there, too. And it
seems most ice cream shops employ young women, not young
men.
In high school, a fellow like me (or you?) might have had a
crush on one of these ice cream girls; later, you might
have felt fatherly; now it’s grandfatherly.
But it is also reassuring, especially on this July
4th
weekend where there
is so much pessimism in America – worries about the
loss of jobs and the shrinking of the middle class; costly
wars that seem endless and confusing; budgets in trouble;
greed; lack of personal responsibility. In all this, the
nation that began with difficult birth against heavy odds,
this child called America, is still not fully grown, ready
for retirement. Young people – like the women and men
of the ice cream shops, with their dreams, their needs,
their concerns, their many flavors – promise to whet
their appetite on the next frontier.
No wonder American apple pie is often a-la-mode.
June 28, 2010
Weather and democracy
I guess people born and raised in areas of great humidity
adjust to that, perhaps even prefer the wet warmth. But for
those of us who live where there are seasons, it is
unavoidable stickiness. The common refrain up north here
near New York City is that “I don’t mind the
heat (say 90 degrees, which is hot for us), but I
can’t stand the humidity.”
Of course, the same lips, including mine, also form the
words, “I don’t mind the snow, in fact,
it’s beautiful, but the ice, no.” Obviously
there are regional variations to the weather – the
dry but very hot conditions of the Southwest, for example.
In Texas, where I visited in December and found
temperatures in the mid-70s, that was a cold snap, and some
were pining for summer’s constant heat wave.
At least many in Texas, though not all, have air
conditioning, and in the Northeast, etc., too, or
“chillers” or heat pumps. This is America, and
the middle class, low, true middle and high, has made
creature comforts widely available. The seasons are more a
function of the outdoors, if you choose them to be.
The great middle class civilizes America, even applying it
to home and car comfort, and as such is a bulwark for
democracy. I cannot imagine what social troubles might
ensue if suddenly there was a reduced middle class and, so,
less paid-for AC and heat.
This is not 1936, with a Great Depression having thwarted
American higher expectation and materialism not yet the
routine anyway. The middle class was much smaller, though
it had begun to develop at large in the dizzy-hot economy
of the later 1920s. It took the Depression tryouts of one
government program after another, some failing, some not,
some working, to keep the people’s mind off their
class worries. World War II production and post-conflict
largesse brought a real American middle class, along with
government as an economic but increasingly involved, even
smothering “buddy.”
Now, as the rest of the world also develops a middle class,
our own is shrinking from high unemployment, The AC is
still on in the great heat, and there is warmth for most in
winter. Yet, where there are seasons and where there are
not, there is a growing, disturbing worry that when it gets
hot and when it gets turns cold, there won’t be
relief. Government only does so much, for it spends largely
in deficit, not investment.
In the old days, the middle class came to the rescue. Or at
least the aspirations of those seeking such status
propelled effective government of least, but necessary,
intervention. Soon enough, who will stave off the humidity?
June 21, 2010
A road changes direction
WEST NYACK, N.Y. – It’s déjà vu all over again
as Route 59, one of the state’s major highways,
returns to two lanes after about 52 years. It’s just
for a time, but for people like me, so few of us now,
it’s like returning to the countrified area of lower
New York where I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s.
What’s happening, or beginning to happen since the
Albany budget crisis may delay work, is that New York is
getting around to replacing the four bridges along Route 59
that cross the Hackensack River and the West Shore rail
line. The approach is to cut off one side and take out
those bridges first, then reverse the process. Ironically,
after only a half century of use, the Department of
Transportation has chosen to replace the newer bridges
first. Those left from the 1920s will soldier on until the
children get new shoes. Perhaps that says something about
old-style durability.
Traffic east and west has been routed from four lanes to
two, over the old crossings. I drove that route the other
day, riding across the old bridges eastward for the first
time since 1958. Though the vista has changed as you leap
over the railroad tracks and then across the beginnings of
the Hackensack River (which later gathers force as it heads
for New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean), the goose-pimply
feeling was that I had returned to my teen years, sitting
in the back seat of my dad’s Ford, brother Craig next
to me and my mom in the front.
We would have been headed for Nyack on a Saturday, then a
thriving, typical American town, pre-mall, pre-suburban
shopping strip, where shoes, dresses, shirts, sporting
goods and five and dime items and so much else could be
bought, shoes repaired as well, clothes left at the tailor,
baked goods picked up, with time left on a very ordinary
but oh so wonderful family outing for a stop at the Main
Street diner or soda fountain.
Nyack – all American towns – have changed now,
downsized, gone out of business or morphed into trendy
weekend stops for restaurant goers or antique hunters. The
four-lane highways built to them, as was the enlarging of
Route 59 half a century ago, somehow caused traffic to
bypass, to race instead to super malls. The mom and pop
places downtown could not compete, though some precious
ones still remain in Nyack and in other Americana.
There are so few like me who still recall old Nyack, and
the original two-lane Route 59, too. I ride that route of
the Old Nyack Turnpike in memory now, though the Albany
reconstruction will, for a time, sharpen the focus as I
actually get to cross the bridges in the
“right” direction. Déjà vu all over again, and
I smile at the picture.
June 14,
2010
How
Jon’s day began
NYACK, N.Y. – Once upon a time but for a long 50-year
run, there was at 53 Hudson Avenue in the downtown heart of
this Hudson River village a thriving newspaper which daily
gave birth under the masthead The Journal-News. It was
blessed with many “Front Page” characters over
its decades, perhaps a karmic tribute to the famous Ben
Hecht/Charles McArthur play written just up Broadway.
In the mid-1970s, The Journal-News would add to its
wonderfully odd roster one Jon Murray, then toiling in the
trade at The Reporter Dispatch, a sister paper across the
Hudson in Westchester County. Once destined for pro
baseball but sidelined with injury in the way hopefuls are,
Jon first was a sports writer, since he had to do something
with his love of the game, and he was a good one at that.
But he was also an artist, not the sort who makes a living
at painting, but one gifted with creative graphic design.
The mini-gods who ran the RD saw this talent and moved Jon
from sports to the copy desk, assigning him to
“dummy” or lay out newspaper pages.
And Jon was good at that, too, quickly becoming known for
eye-catching front pages in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
when newspapers were getting away from cover pages with
lots of gray type and small photographs. Jon made these
presentation fronts sing, adding grabber headlines, big
photos and creative typography.
When a position opened up at The Journal-News in the
mid-1970s, Jon took it and eventually became chief copy
editor, the “slotman” job, the person who, in
pre-computer days, sat in the slot of a horseshoe-shaped
desk and parceled out pages to be dummied, stories that
needed headlines and photographs requiring captions. He
also did the front page, always the key design element.
The man was unflappable on deadline and constantly
gracious. He ordered no one around. On busy days, say when
a heavy Wednesday paper, replete with many ads, had to be
dummied, Jon would simply say to his copy editors or
deskmen: “Put your sneakers on.” And they did.
Jon’s daily rhythm began with a ritual. His first
task wasn’t his tea, or the initial look at that
morning’s wire service material or getting his desk
in order. Jon began his day with a trip to the pencil
sharpener, where he slowly but deliberately put a fine
point on his No. 2 pencils, precious tools to this artist.
That task took about a minute, and the deskmen (and women),
already in their seats, laced their sneakers at the sound
and sight of Jon readying his pencils. The race to deadline
was next, and all knew it.
This newspaper artist would remain with The Journal-News
for about two decades, and his ritual stayed the same, even
after the paper gave up pencils and layout sheets for
computers. Jon continued to rout hand-drawn design to his
copy editors, who then filled in the blanks on the monitor
screens, and the sound of the pencil sharpener was, as
ever, the factory whistle.
June 7, 2010
Seeking the old synergy
There is a synergy, a working relationship that creates an
enhanced, combined effect, when three people are lucky to
hit the right notes in a given profession. That was the
score when George (Weep) Chalsen, Aloysius (Al) Witt and
Arthur (Art) H. Gunther toiled at the old Journal-News at
53 Hudson Ave. in downtown Nyack, N.Y. It was a
decades-long partnership that was to be repeated many years
later in the Rockland Interfaith Breakfast Program in
nearby Spring Valley.
Newspapering, like a breakfast program, means meeting
deadlines, and there is no room for lollygagging. Weep, who
never sat down, was always on the move, a 50-year printer
who daily felt the hot sweat of casting metal type and
arranging it to form words on the printed page. At the
RIBP, he sweated, too, as a longtime soup, vegetable and
grits cook.
Al was chief photographer for years at the JN, and he had
to be ready at a moment’s notice to grab his camera
and take a breaking news photo. He was also adept at
working with the public. In a previous existence, of which
Al had a few, he was a camera salesman at Macy’s
Herald Square in New York City, so he had perfected the art
of talking to people.
At the RIBP, where Al worked in various positions for 25
years, he continued his gift of schmoozing the public,
entertaining and putting at ease fellow volunteers and
program participants. His old ability to grab a camera and
get to the job at hand easily translated to changing the
breakfast order when food supplies abruptly ran out or
taking on other tasks when there was illness.
Now this Art Gunther fellow, 21 when he came to the
newspaper in 1964 as a “flyboy” (one who
“caught” newspapers as they flew off the
“fly” or end of the press), and who then became
a copyboy, was taken under Al’s wing at the JN. He
saw the potential for photographer in me, a gift from
mentoring Al that led to many full-time positions at the
paper over 42 years: writer, layout man, editor,
editorialist, essayist.
In those decades, I would find synergy with both Al and
George. The first thing a newspaper editor learns is that
he must have a friend in the composing room if he is to
meet deadline. George, always with exacting standards, was
that fellow, and he made my career happen as much as Al.
George and Al eventually retired, with Al coming first to
the breakfast program at United Church, then some 12 years
later, George and his wife Phyllis. I later learned of the
RIBP and told Al that I would be there as well when I
retired. When I found out that George was already on board,
I moved up the date and began in the RIBP almost five years
before I retired.
It was a no-brainer to work the synergy again with Al and
George and to help the people of Spring Valley, once the
home of the Gunthers dating back decades. I also went to
Boy Scout meetings at United Church, back in 1955, so it
was a coming home in several ways.
George passed last year, and Al again
“retired,” deep into his 80s while still
looking 65.
The synergy today at the breakfast program is the
cooperation between Phyllis, Carol, Moucille, MaryAnn,
Helen Jean, Elnora and Jane. (I’m the only male
except when Pat Gorman occasionally volunteers.)
In 2010, I constantly remind myself how much better Al and
George did the full trick, with Art the helper, not the
fellow who inherited being cook and bottle washer. At least
I have the old synergy to push me toward the standard.
May 31, 2010
‘Les cochons’ among us
ALMOST ANYWHERE, USA – One of the problems with a
graying, older suburbia, which is the lower New York State
area in which I live, is that often land and building
neglect have arrived over the decades. The same is true of
urban sections of this nation, surely, and rural and other
regions, though untidiness certainly seems dependent on the
people who live in a particular place. Some, bless them,
always take care of their property, no matter how little
money they have. Others are, well, simply “les
cochons,” a much nicer, French way of saying
“pigs.”
If I had a magic wand, I would compel communities that have
property maintenance laws to enforce them, and make those
that do not enact such ordinance. It is in the general
public interest to protect property values.
Many towns and villages declare, as my local Orangetown
community notes in its “Chapter 24c, Property
Maintenance Code,” that “Properties which are
not adequately maintained and repaired may serve as an
attractive nuisance … (they) tend to …
detract from the appearance of adjoining properties, which
may lead to the progressive deterioration of a
neighborhood.” Absolutely, we all have seen that
happen.
Such law is fine on paper, but what happens when a
homeowner keeps unregistered junk cars in his driveway,
when someone leaves litter on his land, when trash and
recycling containers are not removed after pickup, when
fences are falling down, when gutters are falling off
roofs, when sidewalks are not cleared of snow or are
hazardous because tree roots have pushed up the slabs? And
what about shopping centers where debris is not picked up,
the parking lots are shabby and the building facades
rundown?
These are real conditions in most communities, and it seems
the onus is on neighbors to be the bad guy and make a
formal complaint. Instead, the municipality should be
noting the neglect and notifying property owners to
correct.
One way to improve property appearance is by certificate of
occupancy renewal whenever a home or business is offered
for sale. The community sends out an inspector after a
small fee is paid to cover that, and neglect such as poor
sidewalks and yard litter are corrected before the property
can be sold.
Neglected property not being sold should be cited. We
realize building inspectors are busy enough, but while they
are in their cars going to their jobs, they can jot down
addresses. So can police on routine patrol. For that
matter, so can the mayor, the town supervisor, the
trustees, council people, any concerned citizen. We all
have a financial and quality-of-life stake in how our
villages and towns look.
If owners do not correct the neglect, the municipalities
can step in and do the work, adding the tab to the annual
tax bill. However, the property owner cannot afford repairs
because of illness, job loss, pending foreclosure, etc.,
perhaps community service organizations can lend a hand and
take on these properties as projects.
The
point is to clean up blighted properties and to enforce the
law, not just have it on the books. As James Dean,
Orangetown highway superintendent, said recently about his
campaign to prevent graffiti from spreading to the point of
blight, “If you have a building with a broken window,
it seems to attract more people to break more
windows.” Property neglect can mushroom.
Think of your mother, who I hope told you to wash your
hands before dinner, to pick up your toys, to not track mud
into your house. Well, communities are homes held in
common. There is no room for “les cochons” to
spoil it for the rest of us.
May 24, 2010
The mad dash
It may be decades between runners, but the quick leap and
the mad dash are the same, differing gender aside. As I was
tooling down a local street at 7 in the morning last week,
the high school gazelle sprinted toward the school bus. I
am quite familiar with her story.
I, too – you, too – were late for the school
bus, some of us chronically, others in the occasional mode.
One awful morning, I heard my bus, No. 15, yellow (we also
had green-colored ones) coming, its characteristic hissing
air brakes announcing arrival at the Eckerson and Buena
Vista roads stop in Hillcrest, N.Y.
I jumped out of bed, pulled on the pants I wore the day
before (which had been left on a chair, natch), stomped my
feet into already tied shoes, the heels pushed down, threw
a sweater over my PJ tops, grabbed a coat after I almost
fell down the stairs and ran for No. 15, just barely
getting in the closing door at the Eckerson and Pascack
roads stop.
My hair, then in ample supply, was uncombed, I still had to
get my shoes on right, and my stomach was growling for lack
of breakfast. I had yet to go to the bathroom.
My father, who for years had gotten my brother and I ready
for school, now left it to high school-age boys to do the
job. My mother was already at work. So, there was no one to
blame for my lateness but myself. Guess watching The
“You Bet Your Life” rerun the night before, at
11:15, did the trick. Or maybe I was just lazy.
At least the high school gazelle who I saw barely make it
to her bus – number unknown, but still yellow –
looked in pretty good shape. Yet I had to chuckle that
youngsters were still like we were now so long ago.
Zillions of minutes later, in a life so quickly lived, I
see today’s young world tethered to iPods, iPads,
Internet everything. Schools are very expensive. Everything
is expensive. There are so many things for a youngster to
do, so much so that appointment books are kept. Yet the
simple fact that the grandfather-aged fellow overslept in
1960 and so does the kid in 2010, and the same mad dash to
the bus is made, offers comforting kinship.
And renewal for me. It made me feel as if I had to study
for the coming June New York State Regents exams.
May 17, 2010
The harbingers …
We have
chirping birds in these parts, particularly in the spring,
and they are the harbingers of Northeast America’s
April to September love/hate affair with what now amounts
to three seasons in two: early spring, summer and the newer
mixed season of spring/summer, that one marked by
un-delightful humidity. The birds are unusually silent in
that developing “season,” initially limited to
a few days now and then and now sometimes lasting a week or
more.
We know we have more humidity in 2010 than in 1990 or 1960,
because clumps of green mold grow on the north side of
buildings, rarely seen before. People report more headaches
and sniffles and aches and pains. Even a little bit of
garden work brings humidity-driven sweat, and the birds, a
welcome accompaniment in the season of rebirth, don’t
chirp as much.
Not all will agree with me about humidity. Millions live in
parts of the United States and the rest of the world where
it is a daily part of the weather and welcomed as such. But
up here, as the saying goes, “It isn’t the heat
that bothers me, it’s the humidity.”
We also proclaim, at least those who choose to remain here,
that “We are fortunate to have four seasons,”
even though we naturally complain when snow and ice
overstay their initial holiday wonder arrival, or the winds
of March chill us too much and extend impossibly high
utility bills.
In this American democracy, at least when there was the
requisite growing middle class so necessary for the
economy, social progress, human rights and for fulfilling
the ideals of the Founders, there was choice to move about,
to take in four seasons if you wished, to enjoy
humidity-laden areas, the dry sections of the West, the
plains of the Dakotas, the light of the Pacific Coast.
I fear that with the extending polarization of the economy
– the very, very rich, the high rich, the very, very
poor and the poor – there will be fewer of our
children and grandchildren in the middle-class ranks. I
enjoy my four seasons, and I would fight any battle to
assure my own and your own can choose different geography.
Perhaps my concern is unfounded, but I swear that even in
spring’s renewal this year, there have been fewer
birds chirping. Seems there’s an ailment among us
called Greed, and I guess even some of the songbirds have
flown away.
May 10, 2010
Rediscovery
NYACK, N.Y. – This is a community mostly of the later
1800s and the 20th century, along the shore of the
historic Hudson River. It bustles in its moments, like most
villages, though in 2010, much of the movement is by car or
truck, with even many pedestrians hopping from those for
small jaunts. So much is missed in the process.
Once upon a time, with walkers in the majority, the scenery
didn’t just pass by. I rediscovered that fact on a
recent four-mile walk from my home in Blauvelt to downtown
Nyack.
On a hot and also humid early summer day that had its date
confused and arrived in spring, with the temperature near
88, I found myself going to an appointment in Nyack and
feeling bloated from too much of a love affair between a
sweet tooth and pastries. So, I tried to work off the guilt
and bring back the energy by burning calories on an
over-the-mountain run. It’s a moderate hike up
Clausland – not Mt. Everest, not San Francisco, but
way beyond the plains of Iowa. It was challenge enough.
Most of the walk to Nyack via the mountain route is
pleasurable scenically, since you pass through a town park,
see deer, raccoons, even a fox or coyote, none of whom seem
particularly interested in you. There are cars, too, more
than enough of them, taking this shortcut trail to Nyack.
I saw what those motorists did not, and what I don’t
spot when I often take this run in the car. Winter was
harsh this year, with ice storms and high winds, and the
woods were damaged. Many branches, even full trees, fell,
but nature has already used that destruction as renewal for
the land, with green shoots of new vegetation cropping up
everywhere. I spotted so much of this beauty, and it was
heartening. Made me feel like the perpetually optimistic
Sagittarius.
I also saw rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks scampering
amongst the green looking for food even though the fox and
coyote were a challenge. I never notice the animal kingdom
in my car while going 35 mph.
Looking up at the forest canopy, newly opened spaces
offered funnels for great streams of light to the green
floor and old Rockland County rocks. It was the very sight
that Native American Lenni-Lenapes saw. I never think about
that on the fast-paced car run over the mountain.
Once beyond the Clausland summit, I could see old Nyack as
its 1800s and 1900s homes stretch down to the river on
streets where my great-grandfather drove and walked.
Walking and not riding in a car afforded me a great
opportunity to see the magnificent handicraft of ancient
carpenters who fashioned these Victorians, American four
squares and Tudors. I could see the great variety of
landscaping and the individuality of the homes, so common
to any village in America but so often never spotted.
When I hit the downtown area of Nyack, I looked at the old
storefronts, some of which I first noticed as a tiny
youngster. Walking in downtowns, we usually don’t
look up, to see above the stores. This time I did, since I
was in the habit of spotting the usually unseen on this
entire trip. Again, what fine architecture and
craftsmanship.
Though I had just finished a four-mile walk over a
mountain, I swear it seemed my heart was beating slower
than it usually does in my busy world. I wonder if
that’s because I took time to smell a flower or two?
(Maybe I should eat pastries more often.)
May 3, 2010
No pipe tale, but …
Recently, I managed not to put anyone sleep during an
address I gave for the 75th anniversary of the Spring
Valley, N.Y., Rotary Club. The speech was easy to do since
the Rotary there has included so many influential, giving,
caring business and other professional people over its
nearly eight decades. It was a simple task to recall them
and their influence on a village, from the Great Depression
onward.
Since the address was given in the old Dutch Reform Church
where 56 years ago I went to Boy Scout meetings and in the
same building where I am fortunate to participate in a
morning breakfast program as cook, there seemed to be a
“speech angel” or two making sure my words were
clear and not boring. Even W. Francis Scott, my speech
teacher at Spring Valley High, would have passed me on
this. Strangely, the last time I spoke publicly in the
village was at the graduating speech dinner in spring 1961
(our “final exam”). I again thank Mr. Scott for
giving all of us courage to stand before an audience.
What he could not prepare me for was the emotion you can
reveal before an audience, with your raw insides showing,
as it were. That happened as I talked about many people I
knew in my small-town community who have moved on – a
bit of throat clearing was necessary. But I did not stumble
in my 20-minute speech. That happened afterward.
When the address was over, and the audience generously gave
approval, Ed Frank, president of the Rotary, Len Binder, a
past president, and Jim Mellion, son of the well-known
grocer in town, gave me a present.
In 1947, when Spring Valley was nearing the economic height
of post-World War II renewal, the new Memorial Park was
dedicated on the site of the old village dump. A time
capsule was buried with the usual artifacts, such as a copy
of the Rockland Leader (the village newspaper), a $2
million check to the present mayor from then Mayor Anthony
Milewski (uncashable, of course) and a Smokemaster pipe
manufactured by the Briarcraft Smoking Pipe Co. in Spring
Valley.
Undoubtedly donated by Bernard Shoemaker,
Briarcraft’s owner and a founding Valley Rotarian, it
surely was handled, perhaps even made, by Arthur Sr., my
grandfather and foreman of the factory. For 50 years, until
1997, the pipe was in a metal box under the memorial
monument at the center of the park. I was in kindergarten
when the time capsule was buried. I played in that park,
walked through it on the way to elementary school and high
school, passed the monument as I attended Boy Scout
meetings and drove by in early adulthood.
Now, 63 years after my grandfather helped prepare that pipe
for the time capsule, it has been presented to me and to my
family. I was so overwhelmed that I could not speak for a
moment. I hope the audience forgave me that.
It may be difficult for some to understand how Spring
Valley was so life-forming to me, to my brother, my father
and my grandparents and to so many thousands in our years
there. Growing up, I had both success and failure in the
Valley, and I have never felt satisfied that I was one of
her better native sons. Now that almost does not matter,
since I was welcomed home and perhaps forgiven with this
precious gift. I must have walked by that buried smoking
pipe and played above it on the big monument a thousand
times. Now it sits on my desk. Amazing.
April 26, 2010
A
downtown, once
SPRING
VALLEY, N.Y. – In the 1940s-1950s, I grew up in this
village just northwest of New York City yet a world apart
from urbanity. My father was a youngster here in the 1930s.
Over the years I have been asked by people raised in much
more populated areas how so many ex-Valleyites like myself
can have such deep attachment to the community. We do
because it was a small, close town, and its businesses and
professions were stocked with people we all knew. Everyone
was family, including the grouches, the characters, the
guiding folk.
In the early 1920s, Spring Valley became the "Hub of
Rockland County" because two major state roads had been
built, Routes 59 and 45, leading to and from Suffern,
Nyack, Pomona and New Jersey. This put the village at a
crossroads, and as a result business grew.
Soon, there were hardware stores like K&A, DeBaun,
Scharf’s and Call Me Dave. There was the Widmann
commercial bakery behind the famous Henry Kulle tire and
battery dealer. There was Mellion’s Market, the Plaza
Restaurant, Rakow’s, Shapiro’s and Nat Kaplan
clothing stores, Burns’ Florist, Stevens’
Florist, the original Spring Valley Theatre,
Arvanites’ luncheonette, the Ramapo Trust Co., The
Second National Bank, the 5&10, the Briarcraft Smoking
Pipe factory where my grandparents, father and mother
worked, Consolidated Stamp, Schack’s Glass, Ro-Field
Appliances, Brown’s soda shop, Perruna’s and
Bartero’s and Cullen restaurants, various
barbershops, including Mayor John Balogh’s, and car
dealer Driscoll Chevrolet, then located downtown.
Many of these businesses began in the Great Depression, and
the fact that they succeeded in the hub of Spring Valley
was because they offered valuable services by trusted
merchants and others close by for villagers and other
Rocklanders. Many business and professional people also
lived and toiled above the stores as doctors, dentists and
lawyers.
If any of you readers were privileged to grow up in a small
community, even you urbanites who lived in neighborhood
areas, you can easily sub out the names of the stores and
people I’ve mentioned for your own. You get the
picture.
These downtown people were dairymen, bakers, lawyers,
factory owners, undertakers, grocers, etc., who had such a
symbiotic working relationship with each other that they
succeeded, In the process, they supported many who could
not easily get by. This was America in the tough, a going
enterprise.
Today, highway shopping strips and malls have replaced our
downtowns, and the closer-knit residential housing is gone,
too, in favor of easily anonymous suburban developments and
isolated “McMansions” that drive wedges against
the opportunity for neighborliness.
In time, with the opening of the Tappan Zee Bridge and the
Thruway and Palisades Interstate Parkway, the Rockland
suburb grew around Spring Valley and other downtowns, and
the old closeness began to disappear as stores were
shuttered and the outward population grew so large that it
was difficult to link names with the past, with long-time
families.
In its age, Spring Valley and Anytown, USA, too, defined
people particularly determined to succeed, who sought
better lives for their children, who enjoyed the company of
friends and neighbors, who reaffirmed and articulated both
their gratefulness for a land and village of opportunity
and their determination that the children should do even
better.
If there can be an American “back to the
future,” it might be a return to the downtown.
April
19, 2010
Chasing the quiet
ROCKLAND LAKE, N.Y. – The once thriving hamlet where
much of New York City’s ice was carved and shipped
down the Hudson River until people bought refrigerators
was, in the 1960s, obliterated through eminent domain to
forge a state public park – blunt bulldozing for
“progress” that could not easily happen today,
even if Albany could pay for it. Now, almost 50 years
later, years of under-funding and near bankruptcy have made
parts of this park look more than sad.
Yet, yesterday there was hope, if not for Rockland Lake
State Park, then for humankind as the 21st annual George Wodicka Hook
Mountain Half Marathon and Hope 5K Run/Walk were held in
March-like weather.
It was the sort of chilled sky and brisk air that old-time
Rockland Lakers would have recognized: The cold water that
provided local employment in winter was still lowering
temperatures as if to delay its season’s end. Summer
boaters and fishermen were next, then the buildup in fall
to new income.
But that was then, now so long ago. The community was
destroyed, its people, descendants of generations,
relocated. Some still return, as walkers on a meandering
path around the lake, or in burial at the Gethsemane
Cemetery.
Yesterday, hundreds of others came on a charity-inspired
day, chasing hope to battle the prostate cancer which had
claimed Rockland Road Runners member Wodicka. So poor is
New York State that the local Clarkstown Police Department
had to provide supervision, and runners had to begin their
races in a parking lot crumbling so badly that some
complained of nearly twisted ankles.
That makes one wonder at the wisdom of wiping out a
community of property taxed homes and businesses to
construct a park which now cannot be funded. A park that on
balance was not necessary given the many then in place in
the Rockland and Bergen counties area so close to Gotham. A
balance was required as early as 1965 between urban needs
and suburban availability to meet them without giving up so
much history and identity.
Simple people, some complex in particular nature as many of
us are, led simple lives in two centuries in the hamlet of
Rockland Lake, and the great quiet that is found and
cherished in this area atop the cliffs leading to the
Hudson and adjacent Hook Mountain was once theirs alone.
Progress could not relocate that feeling, though, and it
has been left to those able to visit the park in less-busy
moments.
My son Arthur 4th, who captured the win in the
5K, long ago tapped into the quiet of Rockland Lake, Hook
Mountain, nearby Talman Mountain, Clausland Mountain and,
of course, Bear Mountain, where he romped as a child, as
did his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. And now
his son Sam, too.
The building of New York State’s parks, most of them
early in the 20th century, was a gift for
urbanites in particular whose own geography was built upon
to fuel this nation’s growth, success and
opportunity. But progress pushes quiet aside, and some
place must be found to relocate it if civilization is not
to be overwhelming. For city dwellers, there is relative
quiet in busy-on-weekends state parks.
Some lucky people find the quiet in their soul, in their
walks or running or hobbies. Or on a March-like day in
April when motivated participants chase quiet in the once
hamlet of Rockland Lake.
April
12, 2010
Lack
of acceleration
A good long time ago, I owned a 1960 VW
“Beetle,” which was cherry red and which broke
down often, perhaps because my hard driving was not matched
well with the 40 horsepower engine. Yet it was so simple a
car, with technology borrowed from Henry Ford, that, like
the Model T, it could often be repaired on the road, on the
run.
It was not unusual for me, then a 21-year-old, to pull off
the road and change the VW’s four sparkplugs or take
the carburetor apart and then get moving again. Once, when
coming off the Palisades Interstate Parkway in Bardonia,
N.Y., I had to coast to a stop onto West Clarkstown Road
after I realized I had no accelerator pedal.
Now, this was in 1963, 47 years before Toyota, then not
even a pronounceable name in the United States, had its
celebrated accelerator problems. Unlike Toyota’s gas
pedals, which are electronic, the old VW’s was
fastened to a long wire than ran 10 feet or so back to the
rear engine. The cable had rusted and snapped, and so I had
no way to control acceleration.
Or did I? I said this was an easy vehicle to repair. The
German “people’s car,” ordered by Adolph
Hitler and owing its design to Ferdinand Porsche, was built
with some components based on Ford’s ideas, after
German engineers visited his factories.
While Hitler’s thoughts and application were
madman-oriented, the VW spawned during the 1930s and
adapted for military use during World War II actually
proved good for people all over the world following
rejuvenation by the British, who took over the factory.
So little changed in the car over the decades. And so it
was that when the accelerator cable broke on my Beetle in
1963 I was able to come up with a commonsense solution,
just like so many did with the Model T. It wasn’t my
brain working so much as it was the American genius Ford.
I found a piece of wood on the side of the road and wedged
it into the carburetor linkage, which made the engine race.
I then let out the clutch in gear three of four and went up
the one-mile hill toward my Hillcrest home, pushing in the
clutch when I had to stop and lurching forward when I
wanted to move.
Once home, I borrowed neighbor Isaac Pfeffer’s big
Buick, went to VW and bought a new accelerator cable for
$7.95, soldered the old one to the new one and threaded it
back to the carburetor, where I made a connection. All was
well again – until the next simple-to-fix breakdown.
No simple fixes for the Toyota pedals, however. No $7.95
repairs. Also, no comparison between the ancient VW Beetle
and today’s safer, smoother, more comfortable cars.
Yet somehow, lost in the transition of
“progress,” is the Henry Ford idea that the car
ought to be fixable by the user. Or maybe we should start
taking mechanics with us, as Ford did in his race cars,
riding “shotgun.”
April 5, 2010
A hat story
NYACK, N.Y. – Nearing Memorial Park, an acre of
recreational ground inimitable to almost any American
village, is an old sidewalk along Piermont Avenue, trod for
perhaps 80 years now. On that walk, on a recent nascent
spring day, when hope that the odd winter of quick and
heavy snow and furious nor’easter had finally passed
was a woman who looked to be 85 or so, wearing a
grandma’s hat, a wool cap that could be drawn over
the ears if the promising sun gave way to an April chill.
Behind this lady was a child, probably 5, conceivably the
same age the woman was when she first stepped on the
avenue’s sidewalk.
“Mommy, that lady looks funny in her old hat,”
said the child as she jumped from walk to street and back
again. “I don’t have a hat on because
it’s not winter – it’s spring and the
birds are chirping, and they don’t have hats,
either.”
The mom, obviously hearing this as question number five of
maybe 25 on one day alone, answered in patience.
“She’s cold. That lady doesn’t run all
over and climb jungle gyms and chase her brother like you
do. She’s just taking a nice walk in the warming
sun.”
“Well, I still think her hat is funny,” replied
the five-year-old as the mother and daughter walked past
the lady. The woman heard the remark, smiled in reflection
of acquired knowledge, and told the child, “This is
not my hat. I borrowed it.”
“Mommy, maybe we can buy the lady a new hat since she
had to borrow this old, funny one,” said the child.
“No, I’m just fine,” answered the woman.
“I’ll tell you a story. When I was little,
probably your age, and playing in this park near the Hudson
River, my grandmother would come by to watch. She would
make sure I did not go more than a few steps into the
river, that I didn’t play on the slippery rocks, that
I kept my coat on. But one thing I would not do is wear my
hat. Other kids wore hats, but I thought they were silly. I
would make sure I left mine at home, or I would take it off
as soon as I left the house.
“I had a lot of fun playing in this park then. We
didn’t have swings and a jungle gym like you do now,
but the hills, the stream, the waterfront are much the same
except that the wonderful old dock is gone.
“My grandma would tell me over and over to put my hat
on. Once, she took hers off and pushed it over my head. I
got mad and threw it on the ground, and that made my
grandmother sad. She didn’t speak all the way home.
“The years passed, and I grew up, leaving Nyack to
get married and then came back after raising our children.
I inherited my grandma’s house and began walking to
this park as I did as a child. I don’t play on the
slippery rocks anymore, and I don’t run, but I see my
young self in children your age. And I now wear a hat
because I’m cold.
“Do you know who I borrowed this very hat from? When
I went into my grandma’s attic, I found many old
things, including her old wool hat. I gave it a good wash,
added a stitch or two of repair and now I wear it to
Memorial Park. I can still hear my grandmother telling me
to put on my own childhood cap, and I can feel her slipping
this hat over my ears. Only now I don’t take it off
and throw it on the ground. And I don’t think my
grandma’s sad any more.”
“Cool story, mommy,” said the five-year-old as
she said goodbye to the lady and ran to the slippery rocks.
March 29,
2010
Facing a grilling
I am writing this at 5:48 a.m. about a subject that at this
time on Tuesday would have me standing before a large
restaurant grill flipping pancake no. 97 or French toast
no. 60. I am, on the second day of the workweek, the
volunteer cook in a 25-year-old breakfast program in Spring
Valley, N.Y.
Others, like Al Witt, my former boss at The Journal-News,
where I worked for pay for 42 years, and George Chalsen, a
50-year printer there, preceded me as cook. The “soup
kitchen,” operated as the Rockland Interfaith
Breakfast Program using the good will and facilities of the
United Church in Spring Valley, now serves three times as
many homeless and poor men and women as it did just three
years ago. I am only the Tuesday cook and can report just
that day’s figures – about 150-170 people
served.
My newspaper jobs as copyboy, photographer, writer, editor,
essayist and editorial page chief were arrived at in
hands-on learning in the old style once available at
thriving newspapers. You watched others work, asked some
questions, tried your hand and more often than not, the
Horatio Alger effect took place and you moved up the
ladder. Such hands-on training provided new blood to carry
the torch of an honored profession. It worked well, as it
did in other professions, as many acquired the
“college degree” of job experience.
Now, in volunteering as a cook, I have been fortunate to
continue the hands-on training from my newspaper time, even
with two of the same people – Al and George, whose
grill technique – not running it too hot that it
smokes; avoiding water/oil fires; mixing the right batter
and French toast dip; the art of flipping itself; and
dividing your time so that while you work the grill, you
also watch the soup, make grits, boil hot water for a
variety of tasks, monitor two ovens full of sausage, keep
the Bunn coffee maker in its 10-cup cycle for 100-plus cups
and take 15-second breaks to bring the food to the
cafeteria.
Al and George did it all and well. George was particularly
organized and Al offered jokes along with perfectly shaped
pancakes. I cannot duplicate their methods, just as I could
not at The Journal-News. But I have acquired experience
through hands-on training, and I imagine both Al and George
would give me a passing grade.
What a privilege in life to have spent 50 years learning on
the job(s).
March 22, 2010
Friends, in snapshot
It was a walk you see on any road, in any town, anywhere in
the world -- two young fellows (they could be girls)
bouncing along in spurting growth, in gangly gait,
jabbering away.
What could be so important to discuss at age 14? Well,
anything and everything since age and needs and concerns
and wishes and dreams and worries and warts are relative to
age.
I saw just the backs of the two young ones as they ambled
down Western Highway, the old pre-Revolution kings road in
Blauvelt, N.Y., where I live. I did not need to see their
faces, for once those two were Mark Broat and I in nearby
Hillcrest, 1958. Our conversation then was probably what
the Western Highway boys were addressing: school, girls,
other people, sports, teachers, nothings and everything.
For a moment, I was back with Mark, for the universality of
friends walking is obvious. It was reassuring, too, since
while each ruling generation seems to condemn the newer
ones for going to hell in a handbasket, somehow the newest
quickly becomes the oldest -- surviving, succeeding, making
mistakes and producing more youngsters who take walks
together as friends on any road, anywhere.
So fleeting is time that I instantly recall those 1958-era
walks as if I had just walked into my house at 25 Karnell
Street after a one-mile trip with Mark to downtown Spring
Valley. No aches and pains then. No taxes to worry about.
No concerns over politics. No angst over trials and
tribulations in family or among friends. A rather protected
world, fortunately, yet a world that not every 14-year-old
shares, though even there, friendship blossoms.
My two sons, Arthur 4th and Andrew Edward, had their own
walks with friends and now their children will, too. So
will youngsters you know. Such is life. Such was the moment
yesterday on a sidewalk off Western Highway.
March 15, 2010
The Great White Wall
Calling President Obama. Anyone in?
It seems that no matter who becomes the nation’s
chief executive, even if it’s a popular stumper like
Obama, the cadre of advisers, the moneyed interests that
will fund the next campaign, the congressional people in
the know and any others with access keep us from ever again
seeing and reaching the candidate we choose.
What this does in modern America, where even visiting the
White House as an ordinary citizen requires prior security
vetting, is to keep the people from the powerful head of
state of a democracy, and, so, from moderate views, from
common sense approaches to what are major problems in the
economy, health care, defense, quality of life, immigration
and education.
Look at the health-care issue. Many suggestions, carefully
drawn, some already in practice, have been made by regular
citizens who can’t get an ear at the White House. At
least that is what appears to be happening.
Candidate Obama was soundly elected on populist views,
appealing to moderates in both parties, after the failing
government of decades brought us no solutions and put us
into debt for our troubles. Democrats and Republicans have
been to blame.
John McCain, the GOP maverick, also spoke to populist,
moderate views since they are the heart and soul of
America, and he would have been elected had not voters
really counted on the “change” that the winner
forcefully and articulately promised.
McCain, back in his longtime Senate seat, returns to
Peck’s bad boy image, though that is now tempered by
his years and, of course, the lobbyists who these days
really seem to run government. Yet count on him to offer
the same views he did on the election trail. Not so Obama.
He’s in the White House now.
It seems the only time the man can take off his suit
jacket, roll up his sleeves and be populist again is when
he runs away from Washington and stumps somewhere. Then he
is candidate Obama anew. People ask him questions, and he
responds. His views, modified by the reality of the office
and the nation, still seem moderate.
But put him on Air Force One and then Marine One and secure
the president in the White House, and no ordinary citizen
gets to ask anything, except through scripted means. We
really don't know what he is thinking.
George Bush would cite a letter from a citizen. So did the
Clinton and Reagan administrations, as if the solitary
missive pulled from many thousands was proof that, golly,
gee whiz, the folks in the White House are just like we
people out there in America.
Well, they are not. The office requires dignity, yes, but
it does not necessitate distance. Until modern presidents
open their ears to ordinary Sue and Joe, all the chief
executives will hear is what he or she is told by vested
interest. The pulse of the people will not be
felt.
March
8, 2010
Once, in the country
VIOLA, N.Y. – Almost 50 years ago, in a time that
could be today if progress had not marched, the American
Pussy Willow was predominant as a first sign of spring
along College Road, then newly named from Viola Road for
the small two-year school that began in 1959.
Rockland Community College would become one of the largest
of its kind, taking land from old farms and former county
almshouse property, as needed. In less than a decade from
its start, the furry catkins that are the buds of the pussy
willow (and so the name “pussies”) would be
found no longer in the wet lowland off the road and in
front of the 1800s Hudson River brick-built main hall.
The American Pussy willow, and the European variety both
herald spring and are used in some religious services when
palm cannot be grown. As a harbinger, the catkins, so soft
to the touch, seem a transition between winter, when fur is
needed to keep warm, and the bright then deep green foliage
of spring into summer.
If you have the blessing of living in changing seasons, the
willow buds warmly remind you of renewal. And since the
plant is so easy to grow, hope is there as well for an easy
and successful planting into harvest. At least the
opportunity exists.
Pussy willows are still to be found in Rockland County,
N.Y., just 20 or so miles up from the great gotham that is
New York City, and probably in Viola, too, but not in front
of RCC.
Progress thrives on growth and hustle and bustle, which can
push aside natural, simple beauty, replacing it with
expensive horticultural landscaping, maintained by squads
of men carrying leaf blowers, weed-whackers and trimmers in
chalk-on-blackboard-like cacophony.
The young college woman who could be gifted with furry
catkins on willow stalks still exists as well, and perhaps
such an un-fussy, modest present would still be welcome.
But the search for the stalks is no longer easily
satisfied.
Colleges aid progress, aid humankind, aid the individual
and are a general blessing. Long – very long –
before the college at Viola was there, even before the
almshouse of life’s endings was replaced by a house
of beginnings, the American pussy willow plant thrived in
soil native to native Americans. And it was a thing of
beauty, indeed.
March 1, 2010
Squeeky wheel gets no oil
One way to save taxpayers money is to sentence non-violent
criminal offenders to (1) community service and (2) to push
shopping carts full of cement sacks and with one
malfunctioning wheel around a home center for 35 minutes.
An alternate venue can be the supermarket, the broken cart
overfilled with heavy food items.
No unsuspecting consumer, though, should be forced to push
these bad carts, which under the law of averages, ends up
in my hands or yours about every fifth try. How do they get
this way, with one lopsided wheel, or one squeaky wheel
that has everyone looking at you and silently asking,
“What is the matter with that guy? Can’t he
pick the right cart?”
I have historical interest in the matter, since one of the
earliest carts was cobbled together in the 1920s and used
in the Packard-Bamberger department store in nearby
Hackensack, N.J. Since it had four wheels, the potential
then began for one of them to malfunction. Yet in defense
of the original inventor, I’ll bet the
machining and the parts were superior and thus less
prone to breaking down. Why modern wheels are not better
made is baffling. The squeeky wheel is said to attract
attention in society, to “get the oil.” Not on
carts.
Today’s carts are a mix of plastic and stamped steel.
Those in our local big-chain super-duper markets are huge,
especially if you choose the ones with car seats for the
kiddies or even small toy cars that the children sit in.
That adds even more wheels to the cart, now the SUV
version. Trying to parallel-park that style next to the
cookie aisle is formidable, with junior tipping it as he
reaches for the Oreos.
The carts I encounter, bad wheel on the fifth try or not,
won’t hold four bags of groceries in brown bags, as
logic would tell you they should. You end up smushing the
packaged bread, already made soft by the preservatives.
Designers should have to test their designs in the market,
and their wheels should break down.
How does one wheel get broken? Do senior citizens drag race
with the carts? And bang into one another at the
supermarket roller derby? Do parents load four kids at one
end, putting too much weight on a wheel?
At the home center, the carts, also super huge, are not
well-designed either. Small items fall through the holes
(probably jamming the wheels). Try hauling four 8-foot
pieces of lumber -- you need red flags at the end as a
safety precaution.
Perhaps the wheels are busted when people take the carts to
the streets, dropping them off at apartment houses and
other stores (maybe that’s how some of them end up in
creek beds in these parts). One of my newspaper
predecessors suggested that the wayward cart problem could
be solved by making them radio-controlled. At the push of a
button, small motors would steer them back to the stores.
He added that any senior or junior in need of a lift might
hop in and get a free ride.
But, of course, that might break a wheel.
February 22, 2010
The broom dance
“Put your shoulder to it,” a chief petty
officer might tell the swabbie pushing a mom or broom deck
side, but in truth, there’s more dance than brawn.
The closest I ever got to a CPO was my Great-Uncle Herbert
Gunther, a walking advertisement for tattoo parlors who
charmed women in the Asian ports just after World War I. I
was never a swabbie, except in my own home, where I can mop
a deck mighty fine, thank you.
I can also do a broom dance, in the garage or on the
basement floor. And I barely put a shoulder to it.
Decades ago, I was a jack of all trades at a smallish
community newspaper in Nyack, N.Y., called The
Journal-News. That was back when there was enough
advertising to support newspapers chock full of local news,
back when enough people read papers and back when costs
were low enough that a chain didn’t come in and buy
up the community paper and dress it like all its other
papers, so as to attract national ads and raise stockholder
income.
No, this was in the early 1960s, and I was a copy boy in
addition to being the coffee guy, the perforated wire
service tape collector (tape with holes was used to set
type) and an in-training photog, writer, editor –
almost anything connected to a newspaper that you wanted to
be. The door was wide open to the individual with get up
and go.
Some days I also did the floors, either by direction or
because I just felt like grabbing a broom. I had watched
the high school custodians handle brooms so deftly that not
a hair was missed and with action so effortless that you
thought the floors were made of polished marble.
These guys would start at the left side of a hallway, push
the broom a bit, angle at about 45 degrees, then tap it
until the collected debris fell off. They then began
sweeping anew, this time maybe at 55 degrees. They would
make a 10-foot forward movement, then circle back for a
parallel sweep, and so on to until the width of the hallway
was done. It was then onto to other 10-feet set of
parallels, and eventually the pile of debris was picked up
by shovel.
This was a sure dance of a particular sort, and you could
put music to it, the notes so evident. At the newspaper, I
adopted that rhythm as best I could, and I perform it still
in my basement and garage. My wife Lillian loves the tune.
February 15, 2010
The completed task
UPPER NYACK, N.Y. – At age 67, I’ve handled
more than a few broken windows that required removal,
repair and replacement, but it wasn’t until the last
half of 2010 that I learned almost everything I know about
doing so. This thanks to a volunteer rehab project at the
Old Stone Church in this village just north of Nyack on the
Hudson River.
I’ve written about this before, and you may recall
that Win Perry, Joe Diamond, Vince Morgan and I have spent
about seven months removing paint from
19th
century double-hung
sash, replacing broken glass, re-puttying, re-varnishing,
installing antique sash locks and reinstalling the windows
in what is now village property. It is probable that the
sash, with their hand-made wavy glass, had never been
removed, so we mimicked the hands and the work of men so
long gone now that they could have been our great-great
grandfathers.
What satisfaction resulted from the joint effort – a
bunch of older guys not saying too much, just intently
working at their own tasks, as directed by Win, the Upper
Nyack historian and an architect by trade who knows period
detail. As I have noted, it was his insistence on detail in
every phase of the project that changed my work habits.
When I was a youngster in Spring Valley, my grandfather
Arthur Sr. took me to his workshop since he knew I had an
interest in wood. We did a project together, but when it
came time to clean up, I was lazy. In fact, my finish work
on the small woodworking project was sloppy. I can still
recall my grandfather’s words to my father that I had
to learn patience and task completion. Well, 55 years later
I have done so, finally.
I have lived in two homes and have added onto and rehabbed
them and a dozen others belonging to family and friends,
with all manner of plumbing, electrical and carpentry
projects. That work was at first passable and then improved
with experience. But all along, my modus operandi has been
to get the job done. I could always hide the mistakes, in
carpentry at least. I never compromised on safety, but I
found creative ways to let other things slide.
Win, Joe and Vince, do not do so. They are like craftsmen
of old, and I learned on the Stone Church window detail
that, well, detail really counts. And detail means
patience. And patience brings you on a journey not unlike
what those who toil in monasteries must feel. You reach a
point of deep quiet where your pulse is slow, where
concentration is effortless, where your hands seem to know
what to do instinctively. It all gets better the longer you
stay.
My grandfather is finally back in the room, and I think he
is smiling.
February 8,
2010
Black and white, mostly
I have
never understood life’s complexities - love, hate,
war, peace, success, failure. My limited brain focuses on
absolutes, and while I can see the outline of supposed gray
areas, I get a headache trying to fathom them. I am too
simple for my own good.
One of my junior high school friends is a super
intellectual, author of books and incisive major national
magazine articles that have helped shape U.S. political
thinking. He knows how to walk the talk in the gray zone.
I knew another person who is a math whiz. She can take the
absolutes of that discipline and see the flexibility that
nevertheless exists. Her brilliance and way of thinking
mimic Einstein’s theories.
When I was much younger, there were those around me
“deeply in love.” That initially euphoric state
morphed into practicality with enough magic to offer some
lasting storybook romance. It is a language difficult to
understand if you can’t wade into the necessary gray
areas of life.
In sports, there is all this talk of absolute victory, yet
the subtlety involved in getting there means some pretty
good smarts must first be employed, a calculated run
through the gray zone.
Yet being simple has benefits. You can offer bon mots that
sound good, even connect to utterly deep meaning, if you
are not required to discuss at length. It’s a form of
“twittering” on the Internet. You offer
“tweaks” and move on.
And living simply means you don’t question too much
– you take so much on faith, so you can exist, so you
can survive. It’s fine as long as you don’t
have too much time on your hands and feel the pull to look
into the gray area. Then you need an aspirin.
February 1, 2010
No quick sale
In Nyack, N.Y., circa 1964, there was an old fellow with
ever-present cigar at Arnold’s, the pre-chichi
luncheonette where coffee and a scrambled egg on hard roll
to go was 35 cents. These days the wonderful but
unwonderfully expensive breakfast/lunch place at this
location offers 10 varieties of pancakes alone.
In the old simplicity, “Moe,” which may or may
not have been the cashier’s name, yet the name fits,
would never look directly at you. His time seemed to be
spent grunting, not in observation or conversation. But he
was more than sharp enough to be the gatekeeper, and nobody
got past Moe without paying the tab. He took the cash (no
credit cards then) and the standard-sized check that the
counter waitress had given you and threw the paper money on
the marble shelf of the old wind-up register while quickly
but intently squinting at the tab, which then went on a
spike as he pressed the big keys on the National Register.
The door popped open, and Moe reluctantly gave you the
change, holding his fingers against the paper in hope of
finding an extra bill there that should not be.
Moe came through the Great Depression, you see, and he was
as frugal as he was downright cheap. And not too trusting.
He was also Arnold’s father-in-law, and Arnold needed
him as the gatekeeper. (Moe didn’t seem to need
Arnold. Maybe he was looking out for his daughter.)
The old Nyack luncheonette, Moe, the cash register, the way
you paid the tab, comes to mind because yesterday I tried
to buy a copy of the Gotham tabloid, the New York Daily
News, in Pearl River, a hamlet close to Nyack. It
wasn’t an easy purchase.
In Moe’s day, which was also mine and quite possibly
yours, I would pick up a copy of the News, tuck it under my
left arm and reach in my right pocket for 5 cents, which
would be slapped on the marble soda counter next to
Moe’s register. Moe wouldn’t look up, but he
heard the sound, and by its tone knew that you left 5
cents, not less. He also knew you had the paper under your
left arm, for, as I said, he saw all, and Moe was the
gatekeeper.
The entire transaction at Arnold’s, if you were just
picking up the paper from the rack outside, hopping in,
dropping the nickel and leaving, was a few seconds. But my
Pearl River buy took considerably longer.
There I stopped at a chain store pharmacy, open 24 hours,
which also sells newspapers, and picked up the Sunday News,
took out $1.25 and plopped it all on the Formica, not
marble, counter. I then turned to leave. The young fellow
at the counter, about 60 years less in age than Moe, asked
he if could have the paper I just bought. I gave it to him
and asked why. He replied that he had “to scan
it” before the cash register, an electronic model far
removed from Moe’s brass one, could open its cash
drawer.
Ah, "progress." But also a column idea.
January 24, 2010
Humility by art
Well, of course that title could indicate one of two
directions – “humility” as defined by me
(Art) or humility through art, which is the subject here.
I’m not sure someone short of Mother Teresa could,
with ego, apply lack of vanity and self-importance.
I am retired, but once upon a time the workplace
requirement for humility, often desirable in keeping a
low-enough profile to be left alone and really do the job,
was also a necessity when the raises were handed out by the
pooh-bahs, the grand one or the lessers. That situation
required a bit of bowed head, some minor groveling and the
comment “Gee, thanks, boss. I’ll do even better
for the company now.” Even if you were muttering
under your breath and then threw a fit in your assigned
cubicle, humble you were for the long minute.
Humility is also practiced in marriage, especially if peace
be kept and if longevity is the goal. And there is always
the nagging feeling (not the spouse nagging you) that
she’s right. You can’t say that readily, of
course, so a humble walk-through saves the day.
I’m not retired from marriage, so though the
workplace no longer requires the drill, I am cognizant of
what’s what in marriage, at least most of the time.
The humility venue of which I write today is somewhere
else, in a new world for me, the art universe actually. I
have known preteniousness there over the decades, taking
photographs for the newspaper I long toiled for. But those
were in-and out assignments, and I did not linger, nor did
I take time to see beyond, to what is humility among
artists. Now, I am occasionally hanging on the wall at a
show or gallery – a photograph or two or a
“painting” – and I am humbled.
In retirement, we don’t have to prove as much anymore
– for the company’s well-being and growth, for
self-satisfaction, for the raise, for promotions. Post-work
focuses on keeping to good health in self and family --
physically, mentally, financially. And hopefully on giving
more in volunteering ways than the working days allowed.
But, art, a world I have been gifted to enter, even though
it’s much like being a freshman, is extra fun, and I
hope that makes me humble. In art, there is so much of life
and death and hope and despair and the future and the
unexplained that its expression can never be limited, for
to do so would be to forever reinterpret what was, what is
and also to limit growth.
In artistic expression, you see the gifts of the individual
in comparison to your own. That is naturally humbling. But
also hopeful since in the journey called art, you
don’t remain in one spot. The life there evolves.
I know egoism as well as great, great doubt are the twin
maladies of art, but they are also the creators. I would
add humility to the palette, its own color.
January 18,
2010
The old post office
In a very simple time when things were still complicated
for grown-ups, of course, country children of the 1940s and
’50s found diversion in rustling through the woods,
playing hide and seek with other kids and going on small
errands with dad or mom.
Absent the video games, cell phones, Twitter, Facebook,
HDTV, ballet school, karate lessons and all the other
appointments now penciled in the datebook of a youngster,
if you were staring at the wall as a 7-year-old, and dad
was warming up the 1949 Studebaker Commander (once red,
then repainted green), he might beckon you to hop in and
travel a few miles to the Spring Valley (New York) Post
Office so he could retrieve mail from Box 74.
You weren’t tall enough to see in the small box, set
in a long row of decorative brass containers with
combination locks. In a year or too, you could actually
open the box yourself, anticipating mail as you walked home
from school.
But for now, dad went to get what was there, and you would
hang around the Art Deco lobby, standing on a grand marble
floor and looking up at a Social Realism mural, courtesy of
the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Postmaster Jim Farley Post
Office rebuilding projects of the Great Depression.
The Spring Valley branch on Madison Avenue was and is a
most solid structure, meant to convey the ability of a
nation to rebuild itself and to endure. And the inside was
deliberately set as a small palace, with wonderful hissing
steam heat that warmed you on the coldest of February days.
The government could help take care of you, you see, and
the mural of laborers, farmers and industrial smokestacks
billowing the white smoke of progress underscored this
“we can do it” recovery.
A socialism-tainted view, though it was lost on the
7-year-old in 1949. He was there, escaping boredom with his
dad, and he liked getting his fingers warm at the radiator.
He also wanted his own mail, so the routine was to head
over to the huge wire basket where people threw junk mail
that arrived even in those days, and without messing about
too much, take out a sealed letter and hold it, then open
it, a grown-up thing to do.
The trip home was usually uneventful. Dad might stop for a
loaf of Sunshine bread at Roth’s store, the motor and
heater left running as he ran in and out. Soon you would be
back in the quiet of the house, no TV to watch, and you
might seek imagination in adjacent woods, within earshot of
mom calling you home for supper at about 5:15.
Like I said, a simple time.
January 11, 2010
Win
Perry’s tutelage
UPPER NYACK, N.Y. – It seems that at age 67, you can
still learn new tricks, lots of them. About windows, for
example. Old windows.
Since last summer, I have been privileged to be part of a
volunteer crew restoring 1800s windows at the Old Stone
Church in this village north of New York City. The 1813
former Methodist Episcopal church, now community property
rescued to save and showcase history, naturally requires
maintenance and restoration, given its age. Right now, the
crew, including Win Perry, Joe Diamond and Vince Morgan,
are focusing on double-hung window sash almost untouched in
more than a century.
Win, the Upper Nyack historian, first ordered old-style
replacement storm windows, which were carefully fitted,
primed and painted and then set in the six downstairs and
two upstairs primed and painted frames. Then we took out
the sash that were in place when Win’s long-ago
relatives passed by on horseback and when so many
great-great-great-grandparents stared through the wavy
glass panels while attending church.
Next, we set up a ladder on sawhorses and began the
laborious task of removing old paint with caustic chemical
stripper, a very messy process. I have done some of this in
my time, but never the way Win masters it, with great
attention to detail – making sure not to scar the
old, old wood, delicately scraping off the layers of paint,
some applied 120 or so years ago. Paint removal alone took
several weeks to accomplish.
Then there was priming with spar varnish to enable new
putty to stick, replacing broken sash (and reusing parts of
the old for smaller panes), puttying, oil priming, and now
in January 2010, almost six months after we began, applying
two coats of finish paint and then a varnish stain to the
inside part of the sash.
In a month or so, we should begin to reinstall the
double-hung windows. In all, the restoration will be the
first such major effort on the sash, one that may never be
duplicated, or if so, not for 80-100 years or so.
There is great satisfaction in all this since, as someone
interested in history, I am part of it, and because the Old
Stone Church is in my son’s village. His son Sam
could some day, as an old fellow, walk past the very
windows his ancient grandfather helped refurbish. Perhaps
he will be part of the 2100 crew.
Though none of the skills involved are new to me, the
methods of doing so under Win Perry’s exact direction
are. I have learned to be more particular, to have
patience, and, most of all, to take exceptional pride in
the outcome. So, an old dog learning new tricks.
January 4, 2010
The letter was lost
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – In my father’s time,
during a depression, this then semi-rural community
northwest of New York City one day found a ray of hope in
the opening of a brand-new post office on Madison Avenue.
Its construction arranged through the political pull of Jim
Farley, a Rockland County son who helped win Franklin D.
Roosevelt his first term and who in turn became the
postmaster general, the new edifice was so solidly built of
brick and granite, its lobby of durable marble, its teller
cage of shiny brass, that it seemed to my father, then a
teen, that if the nation could bring something like this to
a relative backwater, it could rise all the way out of the
worst economic calamity the modern world had ever seen.
Dad’s optimism proved correct though a world war
ended the Great Depression and a devastated Europe gave
America a leg up on world manufacturing. Still, the can-do,
let’s-build-it-solid motto of the American industrial
empire, its work guaranteed and its profits assured by
many, many hardworking people, really did the trick –
for the war effort and for peacetime.
But then came growing competition – from Japan, then
other parts of Asia and re-emerging Europe, Mexico, Haiti,
the Dominican Republic and bigger and bigger China. Instead
of meeting that competition and sharing the world market
through innovation, cost-cutting reduced staff, closed
factories and outsourced manufacturing. Bill, the
gray-haired 60-year-old, in the factory since age 20, was
out. So was Ken, 40, whom Bill taught. Their expertise and
the proper line of succession were deemed not necessary.
A computer could design the product, say a mailbox, and the
company could find cheap labor to build it, in a country
where factory emissions were not regulated.
The Postal Service, once the Post Office, which inherited a
wonderful part-steel/part-cast iron mailbox that stood
outside the almost indestructible Depression building on
Madison Avenue in little Spring Valley, could now replace
that box with a new one, built overseas perhaps, but even
if constructed in the good, old USA, put together on the
cheap.
Competition, you know. Profits, you know.
Well, that double-sized stamped sheet steel mailbox that
now sits on the sidewalk off Madison doesn’t look
right. Doesn’t look like a mailbox ought to.
Doesn’t work right, either, its bin door not properly
cantilevered so as to flip back without citizen assistance.
Old Bill and Joe could have told the manufacturer that
before the replacement mailbox left the factory. Only they
had already left.
Not sure why the mailbox needed to be replaced anyway. The
first one saw service through a Depression, World War II,
Korea, peacetime, Vietnam, Watergate, the coming and going
of the Ford Pinto, 2001, iffy presidencies and the
stimulus. Guess I’d write a letter to ask, but
don’t know to which lobbyist, and I’m not
certain that I’d get it into the new mailbox.
December
28, 2009
R U SPKG TO ME?
Once, so very long ago on the time clock of the young,
“tweet” was the language of the bird Tweety,
the cute Warner Brothers Looney Tunes character. Now
“tweet” is shorthand posting on
“Twitter,” a social networking and
micro-blogging site. Tweety Bird caught our attention with
high-pitched sound, and modern tweets are supposed to grab
you in their abbreviated look, much like the reduced
wording of an ancient telegram.
There should be no problem with that since any way of
communicating, especially one as popular as tweeting, is
democratizing for humanity and should be encouraged.
Spreading information, though it often may be loaded with
gossip, rumor, falsehood and prejudice, is still
enlightening. And it can be self-correcting, as one tweet
leads to another, including setting the record if not
straight, then straighter.
My only reservation is that any language shorthand also
forces the brain to think that way, too, so while focus on
any particular subject may be intense, the attention span
is not, and it’s on to the next thought all too
quickly. Any thought not fully developed with deep rooting
will wither as a plant without sustenance. Result: We may
all find ourselves in a twitter for lack of complete
tweeting.
Or, just as disappointing, more words and phrases will be
lost to what was once well-developed languages. Just look
at the advertisements in the 1930s’ U.S. magazines.
The copy often carried 100-200 words plus the images. Now,
it’s a few grab-your-attention phrases for people on
the run. The English language, as must be happening as well
to other tongues across the globe, is being truncated. And
with that comes loss of universal expression and
communication.
An example: I was in a supermarket early one recent morning
and went to the bakery section to get a donut, maybe a
pastry, etc., from the self-serve racks. The baker was
late, and so the day’s fresh goodies were not yet
placed. I stood about until a young woman asked me what I
wanted. “When will the baked goods come out?” I
asked. She went silent for about five long seconds and then
answered quizzically, “You mean the donuts?” I
said, “Yeah, the donuts, the pastries, the crumb
buns, the flavored croissants, the Danish, all the baked
goods.” She retorted, “What kinda donuts you
want? I’ll get them from the back.” Three
minutes later, I had a powdered jelly and a crumb bun in
hand. One of the two was a donut. I did not tell her which.
I hope I did not put the poor thing in a twitter. Her
experience with an old guy probably pushed her to post a
few tweets.
If twittering with tweets is to continue, as it will, if we
are to follow the dictionary definition of twittering,
which is “to tremble with nervous agitation or
excitement,” in this age of shorthand, pulsating
language, I hope we at least find abbreviations for
descriptive phrasing, such as baked goods.
Otherwise, as with a fine painting where the viewer fails
to see the subtlety of color or when a reader of fiction
does not hear the author’s unique, layered voice, we
will end up living in a world of skimming.
And you
know skimming barely scratches the surface. It’s no
way to live life.
For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, offered a
holiday story published in place of my former newspaper
column. That tradition now continues on the web.
–
Arthur H. Gunther III
December 21, 2009
‘Christmas Eve’
By Arthur H. Gunther IV
Perhaps it was more a habit than a tradition. At what point
do habits become traditions anyway? It’s like
anything else, thought Charlie as he drove around early
Christmas morning – it’s all a matter of
perspective. Charlie had been battling the cynics all his
life, and though he was nearing 75 and had days where it
was hard to muster up the energy to care, he still did.
Charlie had been retired from his job at the plant for 10
years now. When he had started as a young man, there was no
choice but the overnight shift for the newly hired. By the
time he reached his mid-thirties, Charlie had been offered
the option to switch to more “regular” hours,
but by then he had grown accustomed to beginning his
workday at seven at night and leaving the plant at four.
Charlie also realized somewhere along the way that the
night shift fit him perfectly. Everything was a bit
quieter, a touch more solitary. When he retired at 65,
Charlie had been working the overnight shift for 40 years.
As the day of his retirement neared, it had been a common
theme to joke with Charlie that now he could finally sleep
in. “Better buy a bathrobe and some slippers,”
he was told. Charlie himself didn’t know what to
think. He actually wasn’t sad to be retiring. Most of
his friends at the plant were long gone, and Charlie had a
few other things he wanted to do. The first few weeks, he
actually tried to keep more normal hours. Going to sleep at
9 or 10 didn’t turn out to be a problem, it was the
waking up. Charlie felt lost getting out of bed with the
sun shining. His whole day was thrown off. He felt as if he
were missing something. After three weeks, Charlie had had
enough. He kept the 9 o’clock bedtime but began
making sure he was out of bed by 4 a.m. After a week, he
didn’t even need an alarm clock.
At first, Charlie figured he needed a task to occupy his
pre-dawn hours, so he took to delivering newspapers. It was
a chance to revisit one of his first jobs, except for the
fact that back then he had delivered the papers by bike
after school and now it was in the dark with his
Volkswagen. Charlie stuck to this for the first year but
eventually realized he really didn’t need an excuse
to be up early and out in the world, so he quit.
Which is why Charlie found himself driving around his
hometown at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning of the year he
turned 75. Charlie always listened to music on his drives,
never a tape or CD. He loved when one of his favorite songs
came on the radio, it was like someone was agreeing with
him. This morning the radio was filled with Christmas
music, and Charlie waffled between three stations,
skillfully avoiding commercials. Charlie loved his town at
this time. He chose routes that visited places that had
seen little change in his lifetime. It was still possible
to steer clear of roads with numbers and strip malls if you
knew what you were doing. There were memories along each of
these routes. The still of 4 a.m., the radio and the rhythm
of the drive were all conducive to thinking. Thinking and
appreciating went hand in hand. Charlie had learned this
long ago. Time. Time like this is invaluable.
It was still quite dark on this starless night as Charlie
crested the hill behind the college. Pulled over to the
side of the road was an old Volvo station wagon, its right
front tire jacked up in the air. A woman and two young
children stood nearby as a man who couldn’t have been
more than 30 worked on the car. Charlie pulled in right
behind the family and got out to see if he could help.
The younger man introduced himself as Bill and was grateful
for Charlie’s help. It took the effort of two to
loosen the lug nuts, which were stuck on tight due to the
cold and a bit of rust. As they worked, Charlie asked Bill
if he were getting an early start to his Christmas Day
traveling.
“No,” Bill explained, “this is a bit of a
tradition that I have. Luckily my wife and kids tolerate
it. When I was a kid, my father worked down the hill at the
newspaper. He would always work the Christmas Eve shift and
get off at 4. My mom thought it was sad that the family
couldn’t be together for Christmas Eve, so one year
she woke up at 3, cooked a big breakfast, packed it up, and
we drove down just as my dad was getting out of work to
surprise him. We all ate together in the car down by the
river. The next year, even though it wasn’t a
surprise, we did the same, and eventually it became a
tradition. Even after no one was around anymore I kept it
up. That’s where we’re heading right now. We
always end up being a bit tired on Christmas afternoon, but
it sure makes the day go by a bit more slowly.” Bill
waited a beat and added, “That’s a good
thing.”
The spare tire was now on and the family wished Charlie a
Merry Christmas as they drove off. As Charlie got back in
his car and continued on his drive, he couldn’t help
but smile. “Score one for the optimists,” he
said aloud, with no one but the night listening.
(Arthur is reachable at clausland@yahoo.com)
December 14, 2009
Going beyond
When you go to an art museum, the standard pose, of course,
is the one that has you pondering in front of a particular
work, perhaps stepping back, putting one hand under chin,
tilting head, moving forward, all in a studious attempt to
“get” the painting, photograph, sculpture,
woodcut, print, collage, whatever. Some of us do this
studiously, some in affectation, some because we are simply
joining the crowd. Others don’t have any pose and are
just tagging along, with a spouse or friend, even under
mild protest.
The point, whether there is a workable pose or not, is that
what is in the eye of the beholder is central to the art
experience. The person who just tags along but who might
take a glance up at, say, Edward Hopper’s
“Nighthawks,” the well-known film-noir painting
of a night diner scene in 1940 lower Manhattan, might in
that instant understand more about the work than the fellow
who has stood before this wide horizontal piece 20 times
with hand under chin.
There is a dialogue going on between artist and viewer, and
the language and its comprehension come from that simple
but deep-in-subtlety well of “going beyond”
understanding that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about. In
“Nighthawks,” the viewer
“transcends” any actual experience in a diner
to understand beyond.
Hopper, the famed American realist painter, uses the bright
inside light of the corner diner to contrast with night
darkness. The light reveals the faces of the four figures -
the counterman, the couple (perhaps Edward and his wife,
artist Jo Nivison) and a man opposite. This light is
transcendental – beyond ordinary perception – a
realism that we normally do not notice. Hopper’s
paintings are infused with that light. Even the shadows are
functions of it, as are the people.
That’s my take on
“Nighthawks” and on Hopper, a painter well
received in his time but much more so in his revival, which
began a decade or so ago. This is the artist most often
characterized as the “lonely painter,” whose
urban oils are painted with figures who do not look at one
another, who instead seem in isolated thought or which have
no people in them at all. His Cape Cod summer works –
oils and watercolors – are brighter than the city
ones, yet are as transcendental in the use of light, a
metaphor for revelation and understanding. But you, the
viewer, the self-reliant as Hopper would have you be, has
to do the work. He will not instruct you.
I do see not loneliness in
“Nighthawks” but urban
alienation, which is the cityite's cautious way of bonding.
Three people sit on diner stools, two may be strangers to
the third; they each need some degree of company (because
they are human) but cannot speak to one another readily, as
is the urbanite's apprehensive, even suspicious way, so
they sit in silence, not looking at one another but surely
knowing another human being is next to them. That is not
loneliness but the gothamite’s survival, his
self-reliance.
So,
“Nighthawks” becomes Emerson-like, taking the
viewer, whether he has the standard pose or not, to the
inner, spiritual and/or mental essence of us living
creatures. There is also, like Emerson, utter simplicity,
so reduced, but yet saying so much. The individual exists
even in the big city and the broad summer experience. There
is the dignity of each of us, going beyond ordinary
description.
There is art everywhere –
in old architecture, in sunlight rooms, in a pre-war diner
– and to me that is what Hopper is all about. The art
museum pose, certainly useful, isn’t necessary to
understand that.
December
7, 2009
Faith renewed in San Antone
SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- So this is Texas, this American city
of great Mexican/Spanish/native Texan heritage, surrounded
by hill country and covered by a deeply blue sky. This is
not the light of an Edward Hopper urban mood piece or New
England landscape but a shower of little, exploding stars
that make you squint. Not so much, though, that you can't
see the Texan character.
And that is utter honesty, and directness and the most
sincere politeness I have ever been gifted with in my life.
"Howdy, Podnuh" is inimitable here, whether those actual
words are used or not. Good manners is inbred. After this,
I will have a difficult time back in my native
Northeast.
Texas star figures – metal, wood, in print –
are everywhere, just like you see in the old Hollywood
movies, and there actually are people here like the film
characters at “Reata,” the fictional Texas
ranch in the fictional movie "Giant." Rock Hudson and James
Dean captured the look, strength, independence and sense of
right and wrong as well as other deeply set principles of
the Texans I've met and watched in my few days' visit
here.
San Antonio proper has its beautiful River Walk, with its
sensible and useful links to stores, a museum, the
botanical gardens. It makes you realize what's lost in the
huge American building of the suburbs and one shopping
strip after another that must be reached by
car.
There are suburbs here, too, and many shopping strips. Pity
the poor traveling salesman, in from Iowa, awakening in
Motel 75 on Austin Highway, thinking he was in Secaucus,
N.J., or outside Pittsburgh. The Great American Lookalike
Anonymity, with its chain stores, is
present.
When Ernie Pyle, the great American traveling columnist and
later war correspondent, trekked across the nation before
World War II, he could not complain of such suburban
lookalikeness and instead was able to celebrate more of the
local character he found everywhere. And which still
exists.
But you must go to the haunts in San Antonio – and
elsewhere in the nation – to find them. Well worth
the search. In just hours I spotted tall drinks of water in
cowboy hats that would not fit heads in New York; drivers
who yell "Howdy" to one another instead of cutting each
other off; simply no litter at all; conservative politics,
such as the sign on the lawn next door to my son Andrew's
house in Alamo Heights: "No Socialism," set on a pure black
(Mussolini's Black Shirts?) background.
Each of the people I met or watched was a truly interesting
character, underscoring and renewing my faith in people in
general. Each place I visit and the place where I live my
life most of my days have individual characters who make
emotions rise and fall, who give you hope and sometimes
send you off in despair, who remind you that this America
of ours, always of diversity, is one thing most of all:
fiercely independent, still the pioneer
sort.
Would that those who fashion policy in that non-state
called Washington, D.C., understood this. Then the health
care snafu – and everything else – would be so
much easier to work out.
November 30, 2009
The sock test
The rapt attention of a child watching “The
Aristocats” can be like the fixed stare of the later
day-dreamer, in each case the individual giving
concentration to sights, sounds, thoughts that will somehow
play a role in the evolving life. So, both moments can be a
worthwhile investment.
The other day, a babysitting one for grandson Sam, who is
2.5-years-old on this date, offered a look into youthful
concentration. In fact, I studied the moment and did a
test.
Sam had just come back from a half-walk, half
carry-by-gramps jaunt to a downtown (Nyack, N.Y.) diner,
The Skylark, where one pancake with strawberries competed
for his attention with curiosity about the eatery and its
patrons. Thirty minutes later, his grandparents long
finished with their own breakfasts, Sam ordered,
“Take home!,” nodding to the still mostly
uneaten pancake. The waitress nicely wrapped up the food,
and we got moving, Sam all the way home (about 1.2 miles)
fixing in on this and that, as toddlers do. Yours and mine.
Back in the house, he played a short while with puzzles and
building blocks and then took off shoes and socks, his sign
for watching a DVD movie, which he retrieved from a shelf,
looked at the cover and decided that it was “The
Aristocats.” “Put on!” came another
order, and after his grandmother bargained with him for a
diaper change first – one most resisted – Sam
settled in on a large couch ready for a favorite movie, a
film that has also been a buddy to millions of children
over the decades.
Since his grandfather was seated next to him, Sam did not
have a chance. The older fellow set his own day-dreaming on
pause, and noticing Sam’s rapt intent as the butler
sets out to cheat the kitty cats of their inheritance,
decided to test the young fellow’s concentration by
putting a sock on Sam’s head.
Well, the sock, sort of a “Cat-in-the-Hat”
striped design, remained in place for several minutes as
the TV viewer spoke to himself, sang a song or two, swayed
his body slightly but, most of all, kept the gears and
wheels spinning in that young, developing mind.
Now this was an odd metaphor but nonetheless promising. In
this world, this fast-paced time of quick news bites,
abbreviated language by cell phone text and just seconds of
concentration where once there were minutes at least, there
was hope that if a 2.5-year-old could keep his mind and his
senses fixed on words, pictures and thoughts, he would also
stay with the many books his parents surround him with each
day. The sock on the head might prove to be the covering
for the eventual well-placed feet on the ground as it were.
An odd but apt metaphor.
Children are not supposed to watch much TV, the dictum
goes, and Sam does not. But a movie that offers well-spoken
words, lovable characters, a sense of right and wrong and
so a moral, can be part of the mix of play activities that
get the wonderful gift that is the mind going and growing
in life.
I do not know where Sam went, where his thoughts traveled,
as he watched “The Aristocats” after a spirited
morning with his grandparents, but my sock test, the proof
of concentration, gives expectation that he’s
building castles and moats and fields and streams and woods
and mountains and grand adventure, all set for a life that
is, well, an ever bigger, total grand adventure. May it be
so.
November 23, 2009
‘Once upon a time …’
Once
upon a time in the nascence of suburbia, there was a street
in a community called Hillcrest that had a model home at 25
Karnell. Being such, it was wallpapered with huge floral
print in 1953 style. But that was the extent of added
attractions. It was still a $12,500 Cape Cod-style house
with two bedrooms, dining room, eat-in kitchen, full,
unfinished basement and expandable attic, then also in
vogue for, well, expanding families.
Time came when that attic was built-out, usually with scrap
wood found here and there (a friend located beautiful
hardwood in a bowling alley that was to be torn down for
strip shopping). “Repurposing,” you see, was
not invented in today's “going green” age,
although originally the term was synonymous with
“saving money.” The annual income tax refund
also helped construct expandable attics into two big
bedrooms, with, if the shekels were there, a modest bath.
The finishing of the attic, in Hillcrest and elsewhere in
this nation, was a suburban ritual, a mark that the family
had grown, and so its needs, and that there was a bit more
money to move forward in overall progress. Only well-heeled
professionals lived in the McMansions of the day,
still-modest brick ranches that cost a whopping $40,000.
For most, the ready-to-be-enlarged capes were a godsend,
especially for families who had come through the Great
Depression and survived a world war.
Everything was new on those suburban streets, including the
water, sewer and electric/gas infrastructure. And in
Hillcrest, there weren’t yet enough homes to
overwhelm. The woods were still there, if no longer
everywhere.
But suburbia is to expansion as a weeping willow is to
rapid growth. Water the latter, and it multiplies. People
the former, and suburbia explodes. So, in time, the
expandable capes were built no more, replaced by fully
finished and bigger spilt levels, then larger high ranches,
then even bigger colonials, then McMansions of various
super sizes. These never-ending developments would take
over the woods, stress the old infrastructure and crowd the
land with density.
The 1953 Hillcrest cape my parents bought in 1953 and sold
in 1964 for $19,000 would sell for about $380,000 today,
but it now includes apartments in the basement and attic.
It was concern about neighborhood overgrowth –
illegal and illegal – that caused my mother and
father to leave for a less-dense community in the same New
York county.
Now we have the graying of suburbia in troubled times for
lack of foresight and planning; for too many homes built;
for infrastructure neglected; for anonymous strip shopping
that must be accessed by car; for illegal housing and other
zoning violations that are officially ignored.
Suburban planning could have arrived more responsibly,
providing for new residents by expanding walkable village
centers, just as we built expandable cape cods; by limiting
growth; by protecting flood plains and the air-filtering
and mind-easing woods. Instead, developers were allowed to
follow a timed-release policy of “scorch and
burn,” in this case bulldozing the woods and fields,
building too much density, making a quick profit and
walking away from the seeds of conditions that would
inevitably result in greater traffic, a stressed
infrastructure, higher schooling and government costs and
reduced quality of life through both density and what it
often spawns – illegal apartments.
It all could have been different, this suburban story, in
Hillcrest and elsewhere. But, as the first paragraph of
this piece introduces, “Once upon a time.
…”
November 16, 2009
Man of conviction
It was a time of national unity against the obvious enemies
– Hitler’s Germany and an imperialist Japan
that had staged its Dec. 7, 1941, sneak attack, but in the
democracy that was at home, the one U.S. citizens and
military were soon to protect, there was supposed to be
room for dissent; otherwise, why the republic?
Yet the price for being a conscientious objector was high
– public ostracism and the harshness of federal
prison, including the injustices within those jail walls
that were counter to the democratic rights of humankind,
those very entitlements that are at the foundation of this
nation.
There can be – must be – argument in a
democracy about war, about relative “good war”
(say World War II) and “bad war” (say the
Vietnam War); about any government’s historically
complicit failure to prevent the death of so many young
people; about war’s devastation, war’s
aftermath, war’s cost; about the vested interest of
the military/industrial complex of which the good soldier
Eisenhower warned us; about the polarization of one citizen
against another, creating dislike, even hatred, just as
brother was pitted against brother in our worst war, the
Civil War.
There are no “nice,” safe, easy answers in such
debate, yet this much is certain: If the patriot is to lay
his or her life down in battle for the democracy, which at
times is surely required, then it must also be understood
that the sacrifice comes, too, on behalf of the living who
choose to protest. Dissent can be sure patriotism as well,
and it must be guaranteed.
I know
of a distinguished fellow, quite accomplished in his
professional career, as a husband, too, a father, a local
New York historian, now 90, son of a pacifist, who
was the
valedictorian of his high school class in 1936, and went on
to graduate from Columbia University in 1941. He was called
up for the draft during World War II but failed to register
because of his conscientious objection to war, and was
sentenced to three years in prison, at Danbury, Conn., and
Lewisburg, P.A., in March 1943.
The man willingly paid the price, as also befitting a
democracy, for expressing his conscience in a time of war
and national sacrifice. He knew that and took his
punishment without complaint. What this man of principle
could not abide was the hypocrisy of injustice against his
fellow man, as seen in jail.
He took part in several prison strikes with other
conscientious objectors – a work strike at Danbury in
1943 to protest racial segregation in the prison, and two
hunger strikes at Lewisburg to protest mail censorship as
well as a ruling that lengthened the terms of prisoners who
staged work strikes.
Segregation
was part of our nation before, during and after World War
II, in the military too until 1948, even as a war was being
waged against Hitler, who said in no uncertain term that
some people (Jews, the mentally ill, social outcasts) were
not people at all.
The man
I know, who to this day speaks his mind and backs his
conscience in peaceful civil protest, was, with others,
locked in solitary during their strike to end jim crow
seating in the Danbury mess hall. There was also protest
against blacks being given menial work tasks.
It took
more courage than most of us could muster to do what the
man did, along with his fellow conscientious objectors, in
defense of others in this democracy. I am not sure I would
have had conviction in such a situation.
World War II was not my generation’s war, though I
had relatives who served, one of whom was severely wounded.
You can argue that this conflict could have been prevented
by numerous governments worldwide, including our own, in
the 1920s and early 1930s, but there was no other choice
but a fight given the German invasions and Pearl Harbor. I
believe I would have served if drafted after Pearl Harbor,
but whether I would have had the red badge of courage under
fire, I cannot tell. I do hope that I would have tolerated
in this “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” style of
democracy that is my belief, those conscientious objectors
like my acquaintance, who is also my friend.
He
edited my collection of essays for the Historical Society
of Rockland, knowing well that one of my favorites was
“1944:
A fellow doing his job,” about the wounding of my
Uncle Winfield Gunther in December, in the battle of the
Huertgen Forest. I wrote that my uncle, an Army private,
was “Unannounced by name, almost anonymous on
purpose. He went where he was told and did what he was
supposed to do. He never expected anyone to say thanks
because he was just one of many called to the task then at
hand. …”
Winfield, in 1944 a father, was drafted along with so many
for the retaking of Europe and the expected invasion of
Japan. It was his conviction that he could and would serve,
and at peril. I am immensely proud of my late uncle, not
only for his service but for the way he also continued a
democracy as a civilian in responsible fatherhood, in the
work place.
My friend, the man of conscientious objection, served his
nation, too, for without dissent and without toleration of
other views, there is no democracy. Patriotism that is
blind to injustice or will not allow railing against it in
hope of honest and truthful debate and betterment is
infatuation for your country, not love.
As a patriot, I am proud of my friend’s courage then
and now.
November
9, 2009
Stepping into the season
I realized something was missing the other afternoon on a
sharply brisk fall day with enough breeze to part golden
and bright red leaves from their summer home and chase them
in wisps and twists down the street. Incomplete in this set
piece for autumn? My slippers.
I had gone through the whole of the last season without
such need, for the weather was too hot for wool-lined
footwear, even for socks. The cold wood floor of the house
was great relief.
But now we step into fall, and one of the joys of coming in
after walking around in the grownup shoes of adulthood,
doing this errand and that, is to anticipate coming home,
closing the door behind you, knocking off the brown
footgear and dropping ten toes into comfy slippers. That
and maybe hot cocoa or a hearty soup plus reading material
or interesting e-mail or a blanket and the recliner would
bring me to the place where I wanted to be.
Yet I could not get there since the slippers from
last-winter-into spring were not there. My footsies were
getting cold and they had no friends to play with. I looked
under beds, in closets, in storage, in the garage, in the
car (out of desperation) and on shelves. No slippers, no
where.
I then did what every husband does, and called out in the
ether: “Where are my slippers?” The
“answer” from my spouse was automatic –
silence, for that is most usual when I offer a certain tone
of voice.
It was only after I showed up in person in front of the
other half and calmly repeated my question that I was
directed to a drawer in furniture unit b, sub-compartment
626 that I found my old friends.
“Well, you left them in the middle of the hall last
spring, so I put them away,” was the rationalization,
as if my annual habit of parting winter-spring and
cautiously approaching the hot humid time of summer was as
usual as an animal awakening from hibernation.
The slippers located, my feet said hello. And there was
purring to be heard.
Ah, another good step into fall.
November 2, 2009
Autumn
in New York
ROCKLAND COUNTY, N.Y. – With the second day of
November arriving here in this part of the Northeast
– lower New York State but north enough of its great
southernmost city that the vestiges of long-ago country
autumn can still be recalled, the air this morning was
about 1948 vintage, I’d say. It was as if that fall
had been bottled as rural wine and kept to mature, though
that seems impossible, and why would anyone want to mature
what already smells wonderful?
I claim this morning’s air as 1948 because in that
season I was just turning six, and we then were living in
the hamlet of Nanuet, having just moved from Sloatsburg
village. (In those days, we tended to relocate when the
rental lease was up in October, a bit jarring since my
brother and I had to change schools after classes had
begun, but often the move was economically driven.)
Nanuet was then rural as was most of pre-Tappan Zee Bridge
Rockland. I was in the first grade and yet walked along
Highway 59 to school, about 1.5 miles away. No real danger
as I stuck to the marsh side, making my way through the
beautiful cattails and skirting behind the large billboard
signs.
It was in that marsh that I deeply took in the cool air,
not yet with the icy breath of winter but surely without
summer’s humid overlay. It was refreshing, that bit
of air in 1948, my birthday two days away, Thanksgiving
coming, too, then Christmas. Nice time of year, as I
already liked my new school on Highview Avenue.
Later that day, the still-strong sun would warm the air and
the scent of morning would be lost forever. Or so it
seemed.
This morning, in 2009, also on Nov. 2, I got out of my car,
my legs considerably longer than in the first grade, and
took in a deep breath of fall air that had come from the
nearby direction of my old Nanuet homestead.
Could it be? Could that scent be autumn 1948? Well, yes, it
seemed so. I guess someone bottled what this once-first
grader whiffed 61 years ago and saved it until 2009. And
now uncorked it.
What a birthday present.
October 26, 2009
The welcoming house
Ask any
Realtor, or a five-year-old free in spirit, and they will
tell you that every home offers an immediate feeling, and
either you want to take off your coat and stay awhile, or
you think you should run for the hills or you’re
rather indifferent – no strong vibes up or down.
Houses – by their design, furnishings, color, upkeep,
orientation to the street and to neighboring properties
– create an impression that telegraphs to the
individual. Some of us are as perceptive as the young child
and get all the dots and dashes.
My grandmother’s home in Spring Valley, N.Y., had
good feeling about it, certainly since my grandparents
lived there and every visit was a treat, but also because
the circa 1912 house was simply inviting by design and
period, full of sunlight, with an attic to explore and a
huge, comfortable chair in which to curl up and read The
Saturday Evening Post by the bright light of a standing
lamp while the grownups talked. The time to leave that home
always came too quickly.
I wish I could say that about all the houses I visited in
that village where I grew up, or the homes I’ve been
in and out of since, here, there and many other places.
Some have been almost foreboding, immediately cold to the
emotional touch. Others were neither warm nor cold but
bland for my taste, though not for others’ obviously.
Individual attraction determines so much.
Yet sometimes there is space that almost all of varied
taste can agree is special. You walk into the foyer, and it
feels like you have come to sanctuary after a long and
arduous journey. You are “home,” though it is
not your house, and you wonder why you have not walked
through this door before. You can see the bright kitchen
ahead, the parlor, though formal, made inviting by a
charming fireplace, a dining room where you could play
cards with friends on any night without intruding on space
usually reserved for holidays.
You see a bath almost in doll house whimsy, tucked near a
steep stairway with well-worn treads, polished by the steps
of many people over 150 years or so.
You are turned onto the second floor by one of two
handmade, built-in caticorner storage cabinets, as if a
hidden hand gently directs the way. On that floor you see
bedrooms that also capture light, another tastefully
remodeled bath, with ancient claw foot tub repurposed to
this home and perhaps rescued from the landfill. In the
bath is a gift for children, a small cupboard that is
attached to a “secret” door leading to the
stairway for the third floor. You need not ask why the
stairs open in the bath since no one is required to justify
why a youngster’s smile is encouraged.
The third floor brings more delight for the child and the
child within since it is finished space filled with eaves,
the lines from which fairy tales are strung. Small dormers,
probably added to the house and by the same person who did
the caticorner pieces, are just the right height for
someone young or old lost in dreams on a rainy day.
Now this grand old house does exist, and I visited it not
long ago in South Nyack, N.Y., a home that has connection
to my 42-year newspaper career since a columnist
predecessor long lived there. Six degrees of separation.
The house has been properly and carefully and thoughtfully
restored via expert craftsmen directed by a fellow arts
center trustee.
I don’t know the depth of welcome this home would
have offered anyone before the restoration, but I can tell
you its basic vibes were in place the day it began life.
It’s just that sort of house. Like the person you
meet and you know in certainty that you can trust him/her,
this house offers the same sort of assurance.
October 19,
2009
‘Number, please’
Ah, how the modern world has morphed into blitzland, with
everything so fast that a sentence isn’t even
finished before the “listener” focuses on
something else. Consider cell phones, those gadgets that
deliver and receive often barely audible calls at four
times the cost of Alex Bell’s nearly perfected
instrument, the one tethered to a solid wall.
Once, we need not suffer the angst of wondering whether
anyone wanted to talk to us. We simply waited until we got
home, and the person rung us up when we were in. Later, we
bought answering machines because (1) they were invented
and (2) life had speeded up enough to add anxiousness to
curiosity. Then we bought cordless phones that we could
carry with us into the bathroom, the garage, even on a very
short walk up the street. Couldn’t miss that call,
you see, as if we were going to be told we won $65 million
in an East Anglia lottery.
Today, cell phones are almost sewn under our skin as are
heart pacemakers, and we constantly check to see if they
are still there. We flip open the gadgets for messages as
regularly as heartbeats, perhaps hoping that though we
goofed up on the job and lost the company much money last
fall, this autumn all is forgiven and we can expect a call
giving us the amount of a bonus payment from the national
stimulus.
Or perhaps we just have to know someone wants to speak to
us, or sell us something or e-phone us a photo of their dog
doing cartwheels or text us a message in e-phone/mail
shorthand. We just have to know.
Well, to each his/her own, but as for me, don’t
include my ears in the calling circle. I don’t want
to overhear a loud conversation in aisle three of a store,
nor do I want to be held up on a checkout line as someone
talks and fumbles with a credit card while ignoring, quite
rudely, the cashier, who is there to communicate as well as
to check one out.
I don’t want to know about love gone wrong, weird
ailments, lost pets, unruly children, money and job woes
and really personal stuff, all of which I have picked up in
public phone conversations.
Years ago, when Ma Bell offered wonderful, clean, odor-free
mahogany booths inside lobbies from which to make a
telephone call for a dime, we all closed the folding door
for privacy. Then on the cheap, she took the booths away
and gave us shelves and a small wall panel to hide behind.
But our calls could be overheard. Maybe it was then that
the woman who had raised us on good manners in making and
receiving telephone calls became a modern parent and
indulged our self-centeredness. She gave us cell phones,
and now we can be publicly discourteous to the max, if we
should so choose.
Yet it’s too modern, too, to blame mother alone. She
cut the umbilical cord. We still have ours plugged in, to
the cell phone on our belts, in our hands, on our ears, in
our purses.
October 12, 2009
Fall, as you like it
It is a crisp fall day in this part of the Northeast, up
the Hudson River just miles from the Great Gotham –
New York City – but in my mindset I do not see nor
feel nor taste nor smell any connection. I am wrong, of
course, since this county, Rockland, is now the home mostly
of ex-urbanites. My own family, too, came from that
direction, although enough decades ago that the cityscape
was far different.
I grew up in a pre-Tappan Zee Bridge semi-rural, farming
and light manufacturing community, not yet the site of
hundreds of cookie-cutter housing developments that were
supposed to continue the old neighborhood connection as
families sought grass and air and good schools for their
post-war families. Such realization occurred, but in early,
small developments only. Today’s Heather Lane and
Michael Court and Sparrow Run are streets of anonymity, and
it is possible to live on them for 30 years and not know a
neighbor by sight, let alone name. The lack of front
porches, the utter necessity of cars to get anywhere
don’t make for social discourse, meeting one another.
If your children are in elementary school, you might see
the neighbors at events there, or at sports activities, but
soon enough high school graduation comes, and the fellow or
woman you talked to once or twice 12 years ago is now in
row 3 watching his daughter move on as you see your son get
his diploma. You and your neighbor probably will not meet
again.
In my own lucky time in Rockland, before suburbia, I was
fortunate to know some neighbors, to sit on then-available
front porches, to walk to stores in a downtown, to kick my
feet in fall leaves, to take in the crisp air without
flavoring by exhaust as yet another SUV goes off to yet
another strip shopping center. Fall here and then had a
particular smell, too, the wonderful musk dampness of
overturned wet leaves; the sharp pungency of bursting
colors; the woodsy hint of winter straw, soon to be
gathered for insulation in children’s winter huts.
I make no apologies for my dreaminess about and nostalgia
for the county of my youth; I appreciate the added
diversity a bridge and time have brought; I rail at
“progress” but applaud opportunity for others,
though the net result of poor planning – deteriorated
downtowns, crowded roads, stressed resources, high taxes,
anonymity – must forever be assailed if right is to
make its point.
But it is fall, and the great joy in that has its
interpretation for the individual. I have stressed mine,
and now I say may all enjoy it as they wish, as the season
reveals its ties to one and another, maybe all.
October 5, 2009
Making life grow
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. — Unabashedly, this week’s
column is written for the Class of 1961 from the high
school in this village, then still a country town and its
place of secondary instruction almost the way it was for
the students’ parents, too, many of whom had the same
teachers. You not of this ilk nevertheless may find
symmetry and relevance and association, for all education
in all communities in all ages share similar bent, no
matter the age, the language, the ethnicity.
I write now of football season, part of our education,
which for SVHS, especially the 1950s, was like a warm
communal blanket that drew everyone back from the summer
and got us going as classes. The spirit was infectious even
if you didn’t give a hoot for football. The crisp
air; shuffling the fallen leaves on the sidewalk jaunt to
the game; getting in with a “G.O.” (General
Organization, student governing body) discount pass;
Sabrette hot dogs; hoping to see that girl or guy you had a
crush on; meeting the girl or guy on the sly (often); the
band and halftime; the first run of the bulls (players)
onto the field and the great pride you felt being part of a
community of like and emerging age.
This was school spirit that was not forced, that was not
jingoistic, that was felt in the heart and on the
goose-pimpled skin of growing teens who were just forming
their lives, together and separately.
Time would come soon enough when the high school seniors
would toss their caps, take off the gowns and leave the
building door for the last time on many separate paths,
never again to be part of those high school football games,
that time of coming closer without a word spoken.
No matter what high school you went to, no matter where or
when or with whom, the ties that were forged still bind
despite the inability, even in some cases the disinterest,
to be part of that cohesion once more.
No, youth is not wasted on the young; it is part of the
fertilizer that makes the rest of life grow.
Happy football season!
September 28, 2009
‘Life
as a continuum’
If time is seen as a “continuum,” a succession
of moments in your life that are, by chance or direction,
relative to everyone else’s existence, even if you
never meet them, then what I have to report is
understandable. If not, it’s interesting, I think.
And, again, probably relative to your own experiences.
Once upon a time, though this is not a made-up tale but it
was so long, long ago, the sixth grade at North Main Street
School in Spring Valley, N.Y., was on Christmas leave, and
the day itself was in progress. Presents already unwrapped
in happiness, my family was looking forward to a two-mile
trip to Nana’s house for holiday dinner. This would
be the most satisfying part of the day – physically
filling our stomachs and emotionally massaging the heart.
But that trip was a few hours away, and my parents had
another present to offer – their bedroom telephone
extension. They received few calls, my father did not like
being awakened when he was sleeping days after a night
shift, and he and my mother knew that two growing boys
might have use of a simple phone to talk to their pals.
But how to get it upstairs? My brother Craig and I wanted
the phone that very day, of course, but an installation
order to the New York Telephone Co. could not be placed
until after Christmas, and then there would be a short wait
before the installer could come, given the ever-busier Ma
Bell, whose Nyack, N.Y.- based installers could barely keep
up with new phone orders from suburban tract homeowners in
1954.
My brother and I had a solution. This writer, whose reading
material then included “Popular Mechanics,”
with its detailed but simple electrical, etc., drawings,
thought he had absorbed enough information to move the
phone. My father did, too, to his credit. In a flash, the
few tools at hand (my dad is not handy) were located, and I
eagerly unscrewed the phone terminal from the bedroom
baseboard. In those days, the wonderfully heavy and
reliable “desk sets” were tethered to these
terminals, and you did not normally plug in the phone. Such
devices were reserved for the rich, who might bring them
outside to their large patios.
I had to measure carefully since I did not have new
telephone wire, a product that was nearly impossible to
obtain because you were not supposed to touch New York
Telephone installations (oops!). The wire measured for
usable length, I pulled it off its basement staples, routed
it out the sidewall, ran it up to the newly finished attic
and then mounted the old terminal on the wall baseboard,
just between our twin beds. The final connection made, my
brother and I heard the dial tone and, boy, did we feel
grown up. The bonus was that the move was completed in
enough time to skedaddle to my grandma’s house.
In the years that followed, as a 12- and 11-year-old grew
through our teens, that shared phone would be dialed to
many a friend, including that new species in our lives
– girls.
Now, the “time as a continuum” part. Fifty-five
years later, I find myself a trustee of the Edward Hopper
House Art Center in Nyack. One of my happy duties is to
help fellow Trustee and Master Handyman Lynn Saaby take
care of the 1858 home of the famed American realist
painter. The main office is being relocated upstairs to a
small sewing room (or perhaps it was a bedroom), and a
phone line is required.
In much the same manner as that long-ago 1955 Christmas Day
phone relocation, I recently strung a line at Hopper House
from the original phone terminal upstairs. These days, you
can fiddle with inside phone wiring since you own it, but
other than that difference, the procedure was the same for
me as it was in the sixth grade (though it is a bit more
difficult to get off my knees in 2009).
So, time has continued for me in a succession of events,
many connected, all related. What I was doing 55 years ago
affects me today and also connects to others, as the new
phone at Hopper House will surely bring in calls from
around the world.
September 21, 2009
When the shouting stops …
Some Americans have always shouted down others, a rudeness
that becomes a distraction clouding over the possibility of
thoughtful debate. We must do better.
The shouting, as well as its opposite – reasoned
point and counterpoint – can be traced to our
independent, pioneering spirit, the deliberate severing of
any head-bowing connection to Old Europe and the wars, the
economic and social suffering and the religious persecution
that sent so many of our forebears to America. In the new
land, we were going to speak our mind, even if we were
sometimes rude. Centuries later, too many of us are still
shouting, especially at government, avoiding clear thinking
just to make sure we are heard. The health care debate is
the latest – one of the worst – examples of
that.
Those of us in the media have not helped, emphasizing the
mayhem at some town hall meetings over the facts of any
health care plan.
Our shouting, our irrationality over things official, is
enabled by our fear of big government, something this
nation and its immigrants have tried to avoid because there
must be no allusion to any king or dictator. Besides, the
track record of official handling of anything – the
recent “cash for clunkers” red tape nightmare
is a case in point – confirms our worry about
government incompetence.
The shouting is assisted, too, by prejudice against those
who we perceive as not meeting the pioneer requirement of
carrying the load. We showed that discrimination in
opposition to immigrants in the 1800s, the ancestors of
families now well established economically and socially.
Then, in the last century, we gave racism a push. And now
we are against undocumented aliens. Just as we have the
ability to reason rather than shout, our prejudice is set
against our oft-stated sense of compassion and charity.
Knowing our history, then, we must stage the necessary
debate over health care by restating our thirst for
independence, by recognizing our continued call for
individual responsibility, by overcoming prejudice to help
those in need.
End the shouting and polarization at town hall meetings and
in the media. Look at where we are faltering and where we
must climb if the ever-soaring cost of health care is not
to quickly assume so much of the gross national product
that our economy soon falters. And then we will all suffer.
Debate must happen rationally. I’ll offer my own two
cents, no better perhaps, no worse I hope, than anyone
else’s, but at least it is offered in the quiet,
thank you:
• Accept that health care costs have risen way beyond
the inflation rate, boosted by key factors, including
over-testing to protect against lawsuits, use of emergency
rooms as doctors’ offices, obscene profit-taking by
too many medical care and supply providers, lack of a
preventive care and malpractice.
• Recognize that the number of uninsured and
under-insured is a black mark on a nation that has yet to
realize that affordable health care for all is essential to
its well-being, as necessary as military defense. A sick
nation cannot be productive, and it cannot seek new
frontiers.
•
Acknowledge that health care might be better run by private
companies, not a potentially fumbling government
bureaucracy.
• Understand that individuals should be allowed to
remain with present insurance companies and plans, the cost
of which must be modified by government-encouraged
competition. Perhaps, instead of any government-run plan, a
quasi-official setup can be used, in the style of the
Postal Service.
• Accept that any health care plan must be regulated
as to prices and profit margin, just as the utilities once
were, quite successfully.
• Know that prevention must be the focus,
as this will increase longevity and productivity, save on
medical bills and improve quality of life.
• Accept that no-limit catastrophic care
must be provided, no questions asked and all compassion
given.
• Agree that free walk-in fitness centers,
rehab instructors, nutrition counselors and longevity
experts must be provided to assist in preventing disease
and the devastation that throws people into nursing homes
at great cost.
• Acknowledge that low-cost and no-cost
care to indigents, to anyone in need, should be given in
centers run by a consortium of health-care providers. A
national health corps could be established to help fund
medical schooling, with the graduates serving as lower-paid
physicians and nurse practitioners.
• Understand that computerization and
paperless administration would be required so no one is
overwhelmed by forms. All payment would be handled
instantly in the health care provider’s office.
Obviously, these suggestions are just one person’s
participation in the necessary debate. They can be improved
upon by many minds in the national persuasion – they
are but a starting point for necessary debate that will
begin only when the shouting stops. Our future depends on
sound reasoning. We must at long last listen to each other,
or we will shout ourselves into the fall of America.
Sept. 14, 2009
Transcending
the light
NYACK, N.Y. – For most of this year I have been a
trustee of the Edward Hopper House Art Center in this
Hudson River village of the American painter’s 1892
birth. That position, and the activities it affords,
continue to be a trip into the famed realist’s mind.
In the
past 20 years or so, especially, Hopper’s work
– “Nighthawks” as among his most
recognizable – and his method of “painting
sunlight on a building” have become almost a religion
to some. His oil paintings of urban (New York City) and
Nyack scenes and the watercolors from Cape Cod and Maine
bring fantastic prices, if any ever make it to the market
since most works are held by the Whitney Museum in New York
and at other venues. In Hopper’s lifetime
(1892-1967), very little money, relatively, was realized
though his fame was certain from the 1940s at least.
I’ve had “Nighthawks” on a wall of my
home office for years, originally because the artist is a
native Rockland Countyite, and that drew this hometown boy
to him. I have looked at it many times, but only in past
months have I stared INTO this painting of a late-night
diner scene in Greenwich Village. Now I see that it is all
about the light that paints itself on the buildings, on the
diner, on the three patrons and the counterman. The light
is transcendental – beyond ordinary perception
– a realism that we normally do not notice. Even the
shadows are functions of the light. So are the diner
patrons and the counterman. You can see what you wish, and
for some that is urban loneliness, others the film noir of
a city in the 1940s. Hopper did not analyze his works,
though he said, “The inner life of a human being is a
vast and varied realm.” My own take is that he let
the light in any scene – day or night – speak
for him. I never see loneliness.
In this past year as a Hopper trustee, I have studied many
of the artist’s works and have been privileged, as a
professional photographer, to interpret some of the
Rockland locations that inspired the artist, such as the
old shop, still standing at School Street and Broadway in
Upper Nyack, which is portrayed in spareness and
transcendental light in “Seven A.M.’ (1948).
The
Hopper House Art Center, at 82 North Broadway, will soon
include eight interpretative photographs in its hallway, on
a “living wall” meant to demonstrate how
Hopper’s birthplace village influenced his art. It is
hoped that photographs, paintings, collages, etc., from
others will follow my limited run in a continuing exhibit
for years to come.
Entitled “Hopper’s Rockland Inspiration
… Interpretations in Photographs,” this hall
of Edward’s “reach” could prove unique in
art centers/museums because it will attempt to have living
artists continually re-examine and reinterpret a master. It
will also bring Edward Hopper home to a house long
recognized for its art shows and events but not necessarily
tied to the artist who ran down this hallway as a
youngster, who saw the light play out when the front door
was opened and rays of early-morning brilliance shot up
Second Avenue from the Hudson River. In that, a life was
changed forever. As was American art realism.
I write this piece not because I am a plausible interpreter
of Edward Hopper’s work, his being, his absorption in
light – I am merely a neophyte study, perhaps with
great limits. I pen this essay because I am a Hopper House
Art Center trustee who wants to promote one of its
exhibition ideas, yes, but much more than that. I want as
many people as I can reach to feel as I do about this giant
of a man, who was quite tall and whose long fingers pushed
a very long brush that took the light God made and
magically stretched it onto canvasses that transcend, that
are outside consciousness.
May many see that light and take a journey with
it.
A 2009 photographic interpretation of Edward Hopper's 1925
painting "House by the Railroad".
September 7, 2009
The house on the corner
Spring Valley, N.Y. – For just about 90 years, nine
decades that brought this village through post-World War I
prosperity, the Great Depression, an awful Second World
War, new post-conflict boom and the growth and the
beginning decline of suburbia, a beautiful Craftsman-style
home has stood on the corner of South Madison and Castle
avenues. It has been a polished jewel in a once well-kept
neighborhood now suffering from dense multi-family and
boarding house zoning that has encouraged landlord neglect
and official indifference, balanced in favor of added tax
revenue.
Two brothers were raised in that home, sons of the owner of
a large commercial bakery. One became the General
Organization president and all-around popular man on campus
at the high school across the street. Both brothers were
successful businessmen, even after the bakery closed
because much larger corporations undercut the price as they
also cheapened the bakery goods.
Well into their 80s, the brothers followed the wishes of
their parents, who were meticulous in keeping the corner
home beyond neat. The lawn was always mowed, the trim
painted in its usual yellowish cream, the art-style glass
polished. The boarding house up the street gave up its lawn
so multiple cars could park there. The high school was sold
to a private group that has allowed it to deteriorate
almost to ruins. There is litter. There are neglected
homes. There is a general shabbiness in what used to be one
of the best sections of a once-prosperous village.
Now the jewel at South Madison and Castle avenues has
joined the community’s decline. The last of the
brothers has passed away, and the family home, an example
of how to keep your property neat, has passed, too, into
the hands of those who see such houses merely as a place to
live, a place to make profit. The lawn is cut when
it’s cut. The trim gets no paint. The glass goes
untouched. “Why are these things important?”
the new owners seem to suggest.
Soon, what stood for so many years at this corner will
morph into look-alike modern suburbia, at least that part
of suburbia recognized as decline.
Village leaders seem uninterested in the decay, for they
have let it happen for almost four decades now, as housing
developments sucked away old village families and strip
shopping promised a better trip than the downtown Main
Street stores. Now, many of those strips have themselves
fallen victim to mega malls, and the housing developments
are graying, many in need of repair and many owned by
seniors who have no use for the numerous rooms.
(Didn’t anyone think of that when these large homes
were built?)
Even as suburbia has declined, though, even as the village
of the two brothers’ birth withered, the corner at
South Madison and Castle was a shining example of what can
be done, what must be done, in such decay. Pity that their
neighbors never saw the light.
August 31, 2009
Summer into fall
The humidity has decreased and the door doesn’t stick
any more. It opens relatively easy – you don’t
have to fight it. An analogy, yes, for summer going into
fall in these parts, the increasingly humid Northeast.
Once upon a time, although it was no fairy tale, we had hot
and humid summers, with the wetness peaking in August but
the cooler nights making that bearable. Now, because of
whatever – climate change or just the passage of time
on an ever-aging earth – there seems to be more
humidity in my section of the land. In years past, you only
occasionally spotted mold on the north side of a building,
and now it is common, a sure sign that Georgia weather
likes to pay a visit, and to linger a spell.
Now, on the eve of fall’s September, the door opens
with a bit of ease – not complete ease – but
without a struggle. Some trees have dropped their leaves
and the air has lighter smells, no longer masked by
humidity or with one scent held suspended, as has been the
case this summer with the smoke from evening open-pit
barbecues.
(They are the rage here, with huge pits crafted in backyard
cement or bought ready-made from the home improvement
store, holding mesquite and other seasoned woods, lit and
roared up to a great fire upon which slabs of meat are
thrown in a ritual that may hark back to the primitive but
which now is so, so suburban. The rest of us have to endure
the lingering smoke and food smell.)
As the nose of summer fades, the door is opening to the
promise of fall – crispness, a warm coat, walks in
the leaves that take me back to youthful memories, shorter
days and the coziness of that and the greater quiet in my
suburbia.
Yes, this is leave-taking of the summer, in this
year’s instance, an unusually cool season. Swimming
was oft-denied, as was sunbathing and general appreciation
of the hot weather. I am sorry sun lovers never got their