By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

No Memorial Day, USA or elsewhere, is without heartfelt words and tribute, parades, wreaths, re-mourning. What is always missing, though, are the voices of the fallen. Would that we could hear them. What would they say?

“Mom, I was as scared as you, but I could not show that with you there. So I never really said ‘goodbye’. …”

“Dad, you told me about your ‘war stories,’ and I figured we’d swap them when I came back. …”

“Mary (any sweetheart’s name), I was crying inside when you were showing tears, and we both felt that we had been pulled from our door to the future so that I could enter another, for a time. …”

“Mr. Singer (any teacher’s name), I know you expected me to be the same distracted fellow day-dreaming in the back row, but I was really awake that final day, and I remembered you telling me to pay attention. It helped my pals in the squad, the ones who survived. …”

“Mayor Jones (any public official), I know there are speeches every Memorial Day, and parades and gun salutes and tears and then the barbecues, fireworks,  leisure. Understand that all this is fine with me. I’d be there, too, if I could. But also believe that the man who fell next to me, the ‘enemy,’  isn’t one for me any longer, and he has mourners, too. …”

“I read the ‘Red Badge of Courage’ in Miss Rouy’s literature course and could not understand then the fine line between courage, the chance of it, the millisecond for choice, and the instant when cowardice could win. I thought it was black and white but now understand it is not really so, that military training and society’s expectation may of necessity set it up as clear choice, but in the moment of decision, there is fear, opportunity and the possibility of both heroism and cowardice. There is much more humanity to it. …”

And it is for humanity that I am ‘gone,’ the hope of it anyway. I am not truly ‘gone,’ of course, since I have not died in vain. The sacrifices of any of us, dead or living, is for betterment, for that continual ‘thirst’ for the world’s life and its great possibilities. Otherwise, why did you all lose me? …”

 The writer is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com This essay may be reproduced.

 

 

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@yahoo.com

 

Rockland County, N.Y. — Though this suburb 20 miles north of New York City has been most diverse since the Dutch came in the 1600s, a religious  community movement strongly under way threatens the balance of planned growth and opportunity for all, including current residents.

In recent years, large Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish families have been moving, from Brooklyn principally, so that their communities can grow. Such religion-based intent surely must be respected, but so must the effect of rapid and great growth, which is creating an imbalance as housing density and numerous religious schools stress the infrastructure, municipal services and taxing ability.

Local, long-developed zoning, set forth in master plans, is being challenged through a 2000 federal law, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, the key provision of which is to blanket-grant religious institutions a free pass to circumvent zoning.

The law is not well-conceived, rushed into law by voice vote in both the Senate and House to fix portions of the 1993 Religious Freedom Act, which had been found unconstitutional over Congress’ enforcement powers. If there were an appeal of RLUIPA, it might well be found unconstitutional. While it was designed to protect religious groups against prejudicial local zoning, in fact it actually disenfranchises existing residents by forcing them to adopt a community environment that is negative to what they have agreed is planned development. You can’t have balanced law if it promotes one group over others, and that is what RLUIPA does.

And it avoids what should be sensible community discussion rather than law enforced from on high: How can we plan for diversity, for the inclusion of all, in a way that harms no one, that is fair to everyone, that is affordable, that continues the area’s overall vision?

While the laudatory intent of both the original RFA and RLUIPA is to battle against prejudice, to be an ally for religious groups, the law has been taken misused in Rockland.  It has forced density in a suburb where one-third acre zoning has been the average since farmers’ fields were plowed under post-World War II.

The effect has been to stress municipal resources in the Town of Ramapo, negatively affecting the expensive water supply for all of Rockland, the sewer system and town services such as police and building code enforcement. In addition, there is a growing county social services tab for the poorer religious communities. Most impacted has been the East Ramapo School District, which is now serving  far more private (religious) school students than public and which has a school board elected principally from the religious bloc that, in effect, has disenfranchised public schoolchildren through numerous cuts and management decisions.

Given rapid and continuing growth in the religious community and the subsequent legitimate need for housing, schools and services, other Rockland towns, villages and school districts can expect religious community expansion, some of which will come via RLUIPA. Government may well be scared off, coerced into abandoning long-developed, sound zoning and planning by the guillotine effect of RLUIPA:  Plaintiffs can collect attorney fees and, in some cases, receive damages for the delayed cost of construction. This is great incentive for zone busting.

The Orthodox have been a vital part of Ramapo since the 1800s. But now RLUIPA is encouraging such a great imbalance that parts of the Rockland suburb soon will no longer be recognizable as such. Housing density already has brought stressed infrastructure and higher taxes; education in East Ramapo is unequal to that offered literally next door in the other districts; building departments in Ramapo and Spring Valley, as well as volunteer firefighters, are overwhelmed by dangerous code violations that are the result of great, haphazard, ill-planned growth. There is much fallout in the rapid, imbalanced, unplanned growth.

The future promises much more of the same, and, economically that is not sustainable. Nor is it socially, with such great imbalance in community, one that fosters prejudice rather than Rockland’s traditional acceptance of diversity. Educationally, children are already disenfranchised.

RLUIPA was never meant to cause all that. It is flawed law, and either Congress should rewrite it to balance the needs of the existing community with that of religious institutions, or an appeal should be brought before the Supreme Court. Clearly, too many are deprived of the lives they want to lead

to satisfy the needs of others. There is great imbalance, and it must be addressed.

 

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

The world has always had potholes — that’s why it is not Heaven. And it has always had people who fix potholes as well as the many more who fail to do the assigned job.
These days in the United States, potholes — the literal type that forms on roads in freeze/thaw or the ruts in government — take forever to repair, some without any fix ever. Regulations, political priorities, a “not my job” attitude, red tape — all get in the way. Once, things were better. Not that there weren’t potholes, not that government worked, for often it has not, but once more individual pride and moxie got the job done.
An example: In Orangetown, N.Y., back in the 1950s, the highway chief was one Sterling Theis. A former mechanic and road repair guy himself who worked his way up the ladder in an old-fashioned way, he would get up at 4 every morning, have coffee and then head out in his truck. Each day he would take a different route in his town, which covers a number of hamlets and, back then, quite a few rural roads. Theis would note of every pothole or developing one that he saw, or a clogged storm drain or a missing curb section. He would jot down the location of each one.
When he got  to the DPW office, his foreman would take the expected list and, following Theis’ standing order, get the jobs done or either started that very day. No excuses, no matter the weather, the sick list, the budget.
Sterling Theis retired long ago and is now gone. His method of pro-active repair did not continue. Today, a pothole fix probably has to go out to bid.
You can extend this metaphor to any part of government’s “service to the people.” Things just do not get done these days, at least not as many, not as quickly. Perhaps there is some good reason, such as making sure the repair will last, observing environmental rules, providing jobs, etc. But mostly the slowdown is because government — ever bigger, ever more complex, ever more a “system” — falls all over itself, and along the very expensive path on which the turtle moves, bricks of gold are taken up by the favored few who work the system.
Another example: In our Washington, D.C., which is our land, our seat of government, the George Washington Monument formally opens today, May 12, 2014, after being shut for three years following a 5.8-magnitude quake in August 2011. Three years, when our involvement in the great landscape of World War II was three years, nine months. How many tanks, ships, Jeeps, training camps, rifles, bridges, etc., were built in that period?
At the Monument, more than 150 cracks have been repaired, rainwater leaks have been sealed, and the 130-year-old structure is OK to go so that we, the people, can once again visit our tribute to the Father of our Country. But why three years?
Yes, the memorial  was properly closed so that engineers could conduct an extensive analysis and restoration of the 555-foot stone obelisk that once was the tallest structure in the world. But should that have taken three years? And why $15 million for the repairs, or about $10,000 per crack? That’s a big hit for taxpayers, even with half of the tab paid by philanthropist David Rubenstein.
Once, initiative got you to the top, and that kept service to the people at a higher level, too, whether in government action or manufacturing product quality. For whatever reason, with some great exception, general no-nonsense, get-it-done, non-bureaucratic service that’s so overdue everywhere is as illusive as was the Washington Monument when it, this people’s statue, was closed to the people.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Fifty years ago, visiting the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York City was like riding a train on what was supposed to be a vacation, but troubling, intruding bad news from home interrupted the anticipated gaiety you had when you boarded, and you could not concentrate fully — there was a buzz in your head. When you got off, you didn’t know where the next stop would be. You did realize, though, that you could not go home again.
The stirring of lost illusion that began with the John Kennedy assassination less than a year before was the bad news, and the bubbling over of long-contained emotion — from anger to euphoria and all the in-between that would become the 1960s civil rights movement, the Beatles, Vietnam and government distrust — would be the many stops ahead. In the years and decades after the fair, not all trains pulled into all stations, and not everyone got off at every stop.
It is odd that the previous New York City World’s Fair, the 1939-40 event also set in Flushing Meadows, Queens, was equally an uneasy citizen layover, that uncertain moment before the second war to end all wars. Then, as at the 1964-65 fair, the day’s job seemed to be distraction. In 1939, “Building the World of Tomorrow” theme would prove severely understated. In 1964, “Peace Through Understanding” became an illusive dream.
Yet there was fun and joy at both fairs, the first an escape from the lingering Great Depression and a chance for people and nations to mix, albeit in tentative fashion. The second fair included recognition that there had been post-war achievement even on the shaky ground of the Cold War. The bright, cheery pastel colors of the 1950s were still popular, American cars were bigger than ever, more suburban homes were being built, and the latest recession was over. In 1939, and in 1964, we all could have a bit of fun, for a time.
A highlight of the 1964-65 World’s Fair was the The Pietá, Michelangelo’s Renaissance sculpture that was installed on loan from the Vatican at its World’s Fair Pavilion.  Though commissioned for French Cardinal Jean de Bilheres, the famous work long ago had been moved to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.  This art, which depicts the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion, was visited by 27 million at the fair, including Pope Paul VI.
The sculpture, so beautifully telling of a mother’s lost and earthly mourning, offered fair-goers, Christian, Catholic or not, a story of pain, of suffering but also of hope. (Just look at the way Mary holds her son.) As such it may have been the perfect “exhibit” at a world’s fair caught between the ever-greater expectancy of the 1950s and the institutional foundation shaking of the 1960s.
The 1964 fair brought us full-blown consumerism. Such fairs are 90 percent that by nature, of course, but the last Flushing Meadows event was particularly gaudy. Larger-style waffles, called “Belgian,” were a smash hit at $1 each, not the 10 cents you paid at Joe’s Diner for the ordinary but still tasty variety. A 20-ounce soda was also $1, not the 5-cent, eight-ounce vanilla cream Pop Roth’s store mixed at fountain service. 
     Prices would rise and rise after the 1964-65 fair, even at Joe’s Diner and Pop Roth’s, and the inflation as well as an emphasis on things bigger continue today. So does the entire story of consumerism, though a shrinking U.S. middle class will  change that. The Pietá is back in the Vatican, visited by millions yearly, its message even more relevant in a world where the “tomorrow” of the 1939 event happened but not as planned and where  1964’s “Peace Through Understanding” remains the slippery, illusive dream it has always been.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H.Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

Older folks like me have become our grandpas and grandmas in complaining that the “good, old days” are long gone, that things were always better back when. Well,  of course they were not, at least not always. Advances in medicine, social understanding and tolerance, vehicle safety and quality of life have progressed as has an awful lot more. Yet, since advancement is usually two steps forward and one back, and because we don’t always go back to fix what’s wrong in the new, yes, some things were better back when.
For example, ice cream. Eons ago, I had a bit of someone’s homemade vanilla with real June strawberries, the wild sort that grew in many backyards in my Rockland County, N.Y., area, and that was the best I ever enjoyed. Second to that was the hand-packed variety from old-fashioned ice cream parlors and stores with fountain service, such as the Wooden Indian in Nyack, N.Y., where the Traversons would take their time to scoop from large buckets into cardboard, delicatessen-type containers . They packed the ice cream so tight that the sides would bulge, and then mounded off the product so high you could not close the top and waxed paper had to be slapped on so you could bring it home.
Once home, it took a strong hand or the heat of August to get the packed ice cream out of the package. What a treat. What taste. Compare that to today’s air-injected commercial products that never seem to freeze in the kitchen ice box.
In my elementary school, the 25 cent school lunch (soup 5 cents extra) could be topped off by the occasional, maybe twice-a-month 10-cent treat, a paper cone filled with ice cream from a New Jersey firm. It was labeled “Country Club Ice Cream” and was exceptionally creamy. The paper cone was perfect since you could squeeze the last bit out of it. It, too, came mounded with a paper top. Vanilla was best. Most of the girls bought chocolate,  as they do today.
In the early 1960s, someone with limited thinking power decided to substitute some  ice cream varieties with ice milk, which, while it offered less fat, was also just what it said it was: ice. Not worth the effort.
Today, you can spend a small fortune, perhaps a year’s worth of the 10-cent Country Club treats, on one single cone, triple-decker though it may be and perhaps tasty enough because there still is good ice cream on the planet.
But few places will pack ice cream,  and almost no one, I bet, can pack it the way Ed Traverson did. And it would not have a mound on it.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

Why does war often begin with a parade and end with one? At the first, youthful excitement, naivete, innocence, natural inclination and lack of experience and judgment as to horror fuel the adrenalin of patriotism as the quick steps of those who would save the world or avenge a wrong rush to enlistment. On the return march, the wounded, the hardened, the ones now in the know, step forward arm in arm with with the ghosts of the fallen, accepting the gratitude of a citizenry that can never grasp the horror of conflict. In each parade, organized first by fever and then on return by politicians, there is the constant cadence of background music for “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the 1930 American film based on a book the previous year by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War.
The novel, the film, describe the extreme mental and physical stress of the battleground and how civilian life is never the same for many, if not most veterans. The book and movie may be about an older war, the frightening technology of which is far surpassed today, but a young, as they now say “warrior,” mind was then as now a heartbeat from the mother’s womb and embrace. It is easily and perhaps irreparably damaged.  Read or see “All Quiet …” and you know today’s story for post-Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. vets.
The genuine reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, events brought a surge of young people who enlisted for the cause in a parade of honest patriotism for conflicts now recognized as both debatable and mismanaged, war that has put us into debt when we need investment for a shrinking middle class, infrastructure and quality of life. And for veterans’ care, too.
Now, a parade, the inevitable returning one, is proposed in New York City as the Afghanistan moment winds down, at least America’s part in it. Who can deny these vets their  march down Gotham’s Canyon of Heroes? Who would not feel pride and a moment of gratefulness for the men and women who went off so willingly and quickly?
But when the parade is over, as it also inevitably is, when our veterans are home alone with their nightmares, thinking of lost comrades; when so many are unable to get or hold a job; when a major national newspaper reports that one U.S. veteran commits suicide almost every hour; when brain-damaged or emotionally disturbed warriors barely exist  with seizures and drugs as long waits for woefully underfunded and bureaucracy-laden care never seem to end; when we forget our veterans except to give them a parade, how “quiet”  are we the American people?

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

We the people must declare war. Our nation has been attacked, this time not by overseas terrorists but by special interests who buy our officials and who cunningly direct growing populist rage against big government and its spending, playing on the fear foaming out of the stirred pot of a prolonged economic crisis.
Taxes are up, people’s confidence waning. The rich are richer, and no cash is trickling down. 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. (Recall the fall of Rome?) Those parts of cities not gentrified by the uber-wealthy and the ever-costlier suburbs will decay, and crime and social problems will increase. Education will not progress in such limited optimism and weak investment. Children’s dreams will be lost as we regress, choking our nation’s future.
Today, greed is the name of the game, aided and abetted by ever-more powerful special-interest groups, through 501C (4) political action committees and, now, two Supreme Court decisions that essentially allow big money to shout over opponents, especially the hoarse whisper of the ordinary citizen. Big money rules elections, rules what was once a serving Congress. All this is an attack on America.
Special interests – some of polarized political bent but most commerce-driven (banks, other financial houses,  military suppliers, etc.) – also influence our state legislatures, our executive branches, too.
Special interests, hiding behind a warped sense of 
“free speech,” use money to polarize politics, their paid-for words 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 properly 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 to forge a simplistic agenda, such as “take government back” or “change,” behind which the real operation – greed – can operate. It’s now the bottom line, and profit is king.
We the people must declare war against the special interests that are greed’s lobbyists. No more fat wallets for any candidate or office holder. Instead, every campaign must be fully funded by the people. No other money allowed, period, set by law throughout the land. Special interests would still have voices, but they would be heard via public hearings, a true free speech tradition.  No one running for office or serving the people or retired from government would be allowed to take one penny from any special interest.
If we do this, even if it requires a constitutional amendment,  the national focus could turn to a new “Marshall Plan” for economic recovery, this time not for Europe but for America. An industrial/scientific age would begin that creates innovative work (jobs), and so another frontier that can guarantee a vibrant middle class, and with it, the wealth of the upper, yes,  and also the sustenance and dreams of the lower. But most of all it would ensure the future hopes of this nation by rebuilding the vital middle class.
Declare war, people. Tell your president, tell your Congress.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com This essay may be reproduced.

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

There are many things a boy or girl must learn if the magic of childhood is to remain intact, as it should in this forever scary world made by adults. One certain skill is the art of burping.
I recently instructed my grandson Sam in this most necessary practice, not by direct teaching but by example. We both enjoyed carbonated beverages, seltzer actually. I let nature take its course, and in a few minutes I had bubble relief. I said nothing to Sam and just went about my business. The grandson continued watching Ninja Turtles. Not long after, Sam got up, and I heard a noticeable burp. He said nothing, so I assume the lesson has been learned and the torch passed to a new generation. Sam knows burping is natural and that it is acceptable.
What makes it acceptable is that, by example, I burped with dignity, covering my mouth. Sam saw that and got the message.
The point of the story is that Sam enjoyed his burp, as did his grandfather. This growing boy, a child of innocence and wonder, who though he soon enough will be older and then a teen and then an adult, with all the worldly weight that carries, found a moment of priceless delight without guilt, one that required no heavy instruction from the tall people — adults.
My wish is that Sam, whenever he burps, no matter when he does that, even at age 99, remembers his grandfather’s silent example.
Life does not have to be complicated, and if most of Sam’s lessons are learned as easily as burping, he may not ever leave a childhood behind. Would that we all should keep that connection.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

The first rule of old newspapering, when there were composing rooms where pages of metal type were assembled for the press, was to make a friend of a printer. Otherwise, he could do you and your career harm.
“Printers” was a general term for anyone working on the production or mechanical side of pre-computerized newspapers, including the typesetters who used large machines to cast type lines of type from lead and compositors who assembled those and other metal pieces such as artwork into a page. The printers were men took years to learn and hone their exacting craft, and they worked in composing rooms that often hit over 100 degrees because of the lead-melting machines.
If you toiled in the newsroom as a page layout fellow, or if you were an editor of any sort, you had to make a printer your friend. They not only produced the type you needed to get pages completed before deadline, a finish line by which your career was daily gauged, but they helped you read the backward type where all your errors lie. Being a friend was not always easy.
As in any profession, there are cheerful and grumpy sorts, competent and more competent, natural “teachers” and not. And, no matter our disposition, we all have good days and bad and in between, so each new session with the individual known as “printer” was yet another challenge in  helping give birth to news delivery every day.
Among the printers at my wonderful old stand, the original Journal-News of 53 Hudson Avenue in Nyack, N.Y., was “Big John” DeSevo, whose cigar was a permanent facial feature, lit or not. He was 20 years on the job when I met him, having started as a composing room gofer, then typesetter, then compositor.
I was dummying or laying-out the Local page in those days, which was the second front page, this one highlighting major local stories that did not make page 1 or go inside. It had to have a neat look, this presentation cover, with strong-enough headlines to grab readers and photographs that also caught your attention. John was my main man, the printer who did my page and saved my rear end numerous times.
He could not be bought by false praise or chitchat. If he liked you, and that usually was related to your competence, you did OK with him. If he thought you were a newsroom idiot who hadn’t so far bothered to learn reading type backward, then on John’s bad day, you could be lost. Or worse, harmed.
One morning, near the 10:15 deadline  after my own pages were put to bed — sent off to the pressroom where forms would be made and fitted to the rotary printing presses — John was called to the other side of the composing room and asked to work with Tom on an inside page, the one with obits and last-minute news. Tom was a snarly fellow, full of himself and not practiced in the news business. Whatever job he had moving up was too short to learn much, but he had risen to city editor nonetheless, or maybe because that is often how it’s done.
Well, Tom was in a rush. He simply wanted the page finished, and he told John to hurry. John did not hurry. His name was on the page, and he wasn’t going to see mistakes on 35,000 copies. So, he took his time, even with deadline a minute away.
Tom didn’t like that and elbowed Big John, who for once lost his cigar, turned a mighty red, took a deep breath into his 250- pound frame and  “pied” the page’s type, all 200 pounds, onto the floor and Tom’s shoes.
“Pied,” you ask? Well, in the great and honorable world of old composing rooms, pied type is jumbled or mixed up. That it was, sitting on the floor and enough on Tom’s shoes and now sore feet.
Tom missed deadline. And not a person in the newsroom, not one in composing ever blamed Big John, who remained with the paper until retirement decades later. Tom? He was soon gone.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This may be reproduced.
     

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

On an expectedly festive St. Patrick’s weekend that began in low spirits with three favorite draft beers out of stock at a village pub in my outer New York area, a mortal sin, my namesake hiked spirits when he ran 13th out of 3,500 in the Shamrock Marathon on Sunday. That was worth drinking to.
So is my mother, an Irish lass born on St. Patrick’s Day, the daughter of Mary Bonner and John Lyons, a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks. Six years later Patricia would lose her mom, waking one morning to her lifeless being, a grandmother I never knew, gone at age 32.
Those days in the first quarter of the last century were not easy for many, and Mary and John had their troubles. They lost 10 of their 13 children, some to the worldwide flu pandemic, others to the raw dangers of at-home birth. Patricia survived and so did John, the first born, and William, the last. With their mother gone and a father unable or unwilling to care for them, all three were sent to orphanages.
None ever complained nor overly judged. My mother was as Irish as tea in her acceptance of misery and fate, of the dirge that is every Irish person’s accompaniment. Yet she never sang that song for her own two children, working hard for family and home and not looking back at the ghosts always chasing her. Her wit was inherited, to be sure, and she recalled enough of the old stories to pass on.
My own childhood was made festive enough on St. Patrick’s Day by the stories, the wearin’ o’ the green and the grand family birthday my father always arranged for Patricia. She had many more than Mary, until Alzheimer’s eased her from the ghosts but also from we, the living. A long, sad goodbye, that.
But this is St. Patrick’s Day, or it will soon be after this column’s posting, and so my mother’s birthday. Grand it was that her grandson Arthur 4th, in a run called the Shamrock no less, gave her a present in his fine win.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

With Daylight Savings Time officially installed, the one hour we lost from sleep over the weekend has been quickly forgotten in my parts of the Northeast, 20 miles or so from New York City. But Gotham has had nothing to do with the wonderful freshness of what soon has to be spring.
Though winter may still show itself in cold and snow, it lost some of its icy tongue in recent high 40s temperatures and must inevitably see its potency whither. Winter must move on, just as fall did. Queen of the mountain will be spring in all its fragrance, showering of color, crops beginning, longer days and the promise of renewal in body and spirit.
Years ago, even before I learned the  calendar, and certainly eons back when there were none, spring announced itself not so much by date but by a single whiff escaping winter’s breath, a distinct freshness not unlike the smell of wash your mother hung out on clotheslines, if you were lucky enough to have one who did.
Walking home from school in those days  I knew — we knew — it was spring, or the promise of it, when we carried our winter coats. We had been buttoned up morning-side, with scarf, but the sweat began flowing in the warmer sun at about 2:30 dismissal time, the warmth itself a teaser that beyond even spring is the hot summer.
My longings, thankfully, have been few in this life, but if I had to add to those unfulfilled, it would never be a lack of seasons. Though I may not always chill out over winter’s cold, and though heat and humidity are never my friends, the beauty of  a fresh snowfall, the crispness of leaves fallen and, especially, the potential that is every spring tells me I must never leave where I am.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

Westwood, N.J. — Rising taxes, a dwindling middle class, O-Care debate, world events and life itself are so full of uncertainties and dilemma that we all need a day off. I got mine recently in a fabric store in this Bergen County borough. Oy, what an experience.
Time does stand still in places, and Discount Fabric King is one such oasis in hurly-burly living. The interior looks 1952; some of the fabric may be older than that though the newer styles are there, too. In fact, you could probably order any pattern in the world from the many style books thrown here and there but quickly accessible. There are bookstores like this, where tomes are piled to the ceiling but the bookseller knows where everything is. So, too, at this Jersey fabric palace.
On a recent awfully cold day, the sort we used to, have in, well, 1952, we were there to find upholstery for two old wing chairs that should be saved. While I didn’t enter the cloth discussion all that much, the trip was worth it since I like 1952 scenes; as a photog and painter I always look for color and pattern; there was steam heat that warmed us like a grandmother’s home; and as a writer the more characters I meet the better. There were two such jewels here in this comfy place.
First, the owner. Name not important. What he is is the point. Head full of fabric knowledge; easygoing, patient manner as a businessman helping guide selections, never a simple task; a fellow for whom the “deal,” the sale, is what makes the day, not the money. One way or another, behind the wonderful charm, was a fellow going for the order, and he did that easily. If he were a cat, he would have been purring as we left the store.
And then there was the counter lady, obviously long in the business. Knowledgeable, too, she looked you in the eye, kept her presence with you and still was able to say what was where, pointing with her head. When it came time to cutting fabric for a customer, she was still talking, hardly looking down as her scissors glided through, cutting the goods almost without ever closing the scissors. And the folding,  the folding! Maybe she glanced down twice as she took five yards and deftly folded over the fabric, beginning with a doubling, then another doubling and so on, pushing the accumulating pile out for another fold, ending up with a completed pile so neat that it seemed to have hospital corners.
Now, you don’t meet people like those two very often. Not nowadays. Not in fast-food places where employee turnover is as quick as the burgers eaten. Not in glossy super-duper markets. Not in banks just taken over by yet another bank. No, two well-practiced, friendly, self-educated people long on the job in a very old, non-frilly place who, once again, made me trust in humanity.
They gave me a nice day off from the cares of the world.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com. This essay may be reproduced.

My Nyack view (preferable to Tappan Zee Bridge)                                                                AHGunther photo

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@yahoo.com

  Nyack, N.Y. — There’s a new bridge a-building across the Hudson River just 20 miles from New York City, though the original is nearing a really short but stressed 59 years. Some in these parts, a village in Rockland County, N.Y., never wanted the first crossing.
You see, growth came rapidly post-1955, so quickly that profit rather than wise planning ruled the day, then the months and years. Natural drainage areas were filled in, downtowns abandoned, endless strip shopping appeared and municipal services expanded so much that now they are cost-prohibitive, especially with no relief from the state on mandated costs such as health care and pensions.
These days the suburbs, surely this one, are graying, and seniors, so many of them, live in houses too large and few smaller properties to be had, if enough sales could be made anyway. School taxes, also with federal and state mandates, are reaching breaking point, and it is clear that income must also be a factor in the levy rather than just property wealth, often just a paper figure.
Many of our young prefer living not in suburban development with its anonymity and sameness but in walkable areas such as the once-abandoned villages. So, it’s back to the future a bit, a theme that could have been kept in place and beautifully expanded when the first post-World War II housing was constructed. Houses could have and should have risen around existing villages and hamlets, renewing the downtowns and keeping car travel down.
This time around, the new Tappan Zee Bridge will not add much to suburban development, which in this area is maxed out save for over-density building, a new worry. No, the crossing, which will continue to be fed by an under-maintained Thruway on both sides of the Hudson, will simply be a safer bridge, with walking and biking provision, but existing principally as an interstate, quite unsuitably for trucks, the freight of which would proceed more efficiently on railroads. Gotham-bound commuters and other travelers  should have that option as well. But money, big money, long ago went to the highway lobby, with drastic effect for suburban hurly-burly growth at the expense of community strengthening.
Ah, progress, which can be another way of saying, “Ouch, who pinched me and told me it was for my own good?”
As one who wished the first Tappan Zee had never been built where it was, who as native son will forever rail against bad area planning, who hopes against hope that whatever growth lies ahead will be better, I prefer to drive down Memorial Park way, in  Nyack, and stare out not at the bridge but toward a very old barge, now moored for marine life, and view even that in the abstract, as the accompanying photo shows.
Reality denial? You bet.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay may be reproduced.

New carriage, old Central Park  (AHGunther photo).
By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

MANHATTAN — On a snowy Saturday that did not seem to bother hardened Gothamites and assorted visitors, a trip to the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library to see the near end of “The Armory Show at 100”  was art in itself.
The original 1913 installation at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue offered about 1,250 paintings, sculptures and decorative works by more than 300 European and American artists. The new exhibition, “The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution,” features approximately 100 masterworks from the first show, which was a watershed art event, introducing work that swung to the avant-garde and which shook up American audiences, critics and the art establishment.
1913 Armory provided the path for  baby steps toward the abstractionism that would increasingly rule into the 1970s and so affect every other art form, continuing through today.
Since the Historical Society is about, well, history, the new exhibition revisits the original from an art-historical point of view, spotlighting artists, audiences, political and economic themes, music and literature.
Radical for its time, on the doorstep of the cataclysmic Great War, the unregulated greed of the 1920s and the subsequent Great Depression, 1913 Armory offered a look at the early works of such painters as Picasso, Renoir, Duchamp, Cezanne, Bellows, Henri, Hopper, Degas, Van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse, many others and that of the 1913 co-organizer Arthur B. Davies. The theme was that times were a-changin.’ The installation of living American and foreign artists, favoring works ignored or rejected by past exhibitions, however shocking in 1913,  would embolden American artists and give them voice, independence and “artistic language” of their own. The logo for the International Exhibition of Modern Art show was “The New Spirit,” and that it was.
The present armory show, which closes Feb. 23 and is a tribute to such Historical Society officials as Brian Allen, director of the Museum Division, and
Marilyn Satin Kushner, PhD, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections, is set in intimate rooms reminiscent of the paneled sections of the original installation. You see up close what the fuss was all about as you look at this challenging art.
When visitors left the Historical Society Saturday, they faced even more history, literally, as snow pushed against face and a carriage could be seen in the old Central Park, not unlike that of a Saturday in 1913 or long before. That there has been both continuity in human affairs, in ordinary living, in the daily goings-on of a metropolis such as New York City while culture constantly changes and evolves gives proof that you can grow, as the 1913 Armory Show implored, but also stray grounded, as Central Park and the Historical Society show us every day.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman. He can be contacted at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

At Tallman Mt. State Park (AH Gunther photo)

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Snow — pristine, fresh, covering all the warts of ordinary land — is a childhood delight that we don’t give away to growing older, though the demands of getting to work and to the store and to the shovel and to utter humanity and the inhumanity of that, too, make us think twice.
Yet we must fight against that tide, for in the end the child grown very old, it is hoped, again becomes the child, as if by natural cleansing there is preparation for the innocence of eternity.
When a youngster finds there is no school, that a snow day has been declared, though his/her parents may fret over child care, the youngster knows that the point isn’t escaping class, for education may well be fascinating. No, this snow day is a treat, a sudden gift, a ticket to explore.
Time to build a snowman, throw snow balls, walk to the hot chocolate shop, stay in pajamas all day, hearing the furnace turn on, adding to the warmth of a blanket on the couch.
It is a moment to daydream, to use unscheduled time for whatever, even nothing, for out of nothing often comes something.
Maybe adult-dom ought to have its snow days, too, releasing the minions from the treadmill, from encapsulated thinking, from the usual choices.
Just as long as the child and the adult never share the same day “off,” for the twain should rarely meet.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be contacted via ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

COLOR IN THE HILLS, a view off Bear Mountain (Arthur H. Gunther photo)

February 3, 2014

     Bear Mountain, N.Y. — You would have to be close — about 48 or so miles from New York City — to hear, even in this verdant wonderland of forestation, an urban fellow say to his four year old: “They call Bear Mountain that because it is bare on top.” Well, it is bare, but that’s not the reason for the moniker. We hayseeds know that.
     This beautiful part of the heavy mountain ranges off the Hudson River, so close to Gotham, is part of the New York State parks system and specifically in the Palisades Interstate Park network. Despite being underfunded for decades (in tougher times, libraries and parks always get the shaft), Bear Mt. State Park, its umbrella the Harriman State Park, and other New York parks in the Hudson Valley region are full of trails, famous stone structures crafted by Depression-era men, some pools, quite a few lakes and the historic Bear Mountain Inn, itself awaiting fuller restoration when the money is there. A hotel, cafe and trading post are now in place in the inn, as is a continuing gallery operated by Artists in the Parks, a non-profit collection of artists who share sale proceeds with the park system.
     For decades, at least since the inn’s construction in 1915, we locals have driven or hiked or, once upon a time, taken the West Shore Line train to Bear Mountain on weekdays, when the city crowds were back at work. No complaint about urban folks, of course — they help keep the parks going, too, and what a weekend respite, but it’s like when company goes home. You have the house to yourself once again — it is a delight.
     Bear Mountain Inn  was designed in the Adirondack Great Camps style, and it never goes out of style, literally. Even a poorly done 1970s retrofit with blonde wood, now removed, could not wither the great oaks and other dark woodwork of this monumental building.
     My hope is that the Palisades Parks Conservancy, properly formed to aid “the improvement of and activities in the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, and for the purposes of promoting and expanding the preservation of natural, historical, and cultural resources in the Park for the benefit of the public”  will some day be successful in specifically restoring Bear Mountain State Park, its parking lots, its trails, its zoo, its inn, its skating rink and many other features so that the “great masses” will continue to visit, from New York City and beyond and from local communities, too. That is what was intended so long ago in the Teddy Roosevelt-style founding of the parks.

Arthur H. Gunther is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

A recent New York Times edition unintentionally offered proof of the growing American economic contrast in this topsy-turvy world of post-recession stall.
On its Opinion Page January 6 was a third-position editorial, “Republican Disdain for the Jobless,” which rightly castigated the GOP for not extending temporary unemployment benefits for 1.3 million. Just two pages later, on the back cover of the first section, in obvious, deliberate and expensive “paid position” advertising, was a call by the famous Bonhams auction house for a very rare and expensive automobile.
Such contrast between the rich and those who are not. Collector car prices continue to rise, almost exponentially, as Wall Street investments pay off and as corporate salaries/bonuses increase, while permanent unemployment and under-employment escalate, too, but not in the same fun way.
It is irony that with the same newspaper, the front section of The Times, January 6, 2014, a relative few but nevertheless expanding class of our people could read the classic car ad and ponder offering a bid for such needless luxury while others, also a growing number of our people, might glance in nothingness at the same ad as they wrap themselves against the overnight cold on the streets or in the ever-longer employment line.
This isn’t a liberal’s lament, for this columnist believes in the promise of individualism, even if it must be rugged. There are enough without responsibility for self, and government programs cannot prove a lifetime — sometimes generational — parent.
Yet in a more enlightened time, and that is what America is supposed to be in 2014 — it is not 1914, nor 1814 — economic, and, so, social progress must depend as much on those with resources as it does on pulling yourself up with bootstraps. Otherwise, what is the purpose of democracy? Isn’t it a progression of betterment for all?
A modest parting of the super-rich’s riches, aka a “trickle,” could begin a re-employment boom in this once middle-class-led nation. Dare we say, the rich would be even richer?
Now, you can get fancy with this argument, and so probably stall it, which seems Congress’ way these days. For example, you can say that big government costs too much and that reducing it — its reach into our lives —  would prompt investment in new or modified industry and business. Doesn’t work that way, so proclaimed  bully pulpit Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who waited and waited for a “trickle,” and when he saw no tap open, offered the “Square Deal,” anti-trust actions and improvement of urban working and living conditions to fuel a progression that made solid the nation’s emerging middle class. And the rich made even more money.
You can and should argue that big government is its own enemy, for even in good intention, large bureaucracy is ripe for overcharging, waste, corruption by special interests and most fertile for endless red tape. Involving responsible, government-checked private business is better for employment and cost control than government-run bureaucracies. (This may prove true for Obamacare, largely a private system, once the government application end of it runs better.)
The road to less government spending, and, so more money for all  taxpayers, is jobs in new-world business, technology, industry. That requires seed money, as surely as did the lift out of the Great Depression that World War II spending and then the great G.I. Bill brought to our nation. Think of how many professionals came out of the G.I. Bill, how much growth there was in the middle class. Less government regulation can be the result of greater, meaningful employment.
The popular Pope Francis says his grandmother would say that “burial shrouds have no pockets.” You cannot take your money with you, and if you are super-rich, you don’t even know your worth. Why not do good with some of it, “pay it forward” as it were? Invest in re-shoring the middle class. There would then be less of a need for government programs. And have greater faith that people will better themselves if you also invest in their dignity, their humanity. Contrast that with the greed that now exists, with “A Christmas Carol” playing all year long.

    The writer is a retired newspaperman. Contact him at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. GuntherIII
ahgunther@hotmail.com

My Colorado pal writes on a subject that many of us recall — clothes drying not in a metal machine but on a line. Elaine Muise Calabro, once of Rockland County, N.Y., says she “preferred to line-dry clothes, and always did when weather allowed while the kids were young. Nowadays, many subdivisions will not allow clotheslines of any sort. Ridiculous, when we are forced to recycle, pay for ‘alternative’ renewable power sources in our bills, etc. If solar-powered heating/cooling is such a great thing, why isn’t solar-powered clothes-drying actively encouraged? …”
Her remarks recall a column I originally wrote, on July 15, 1997, for The Journal-News in Nyack, N.Y. Entitled “Stringing ideas on a line,” it went like this:

Remember the laugh your mother gave when, as a youngster, you took in the stiff-as-a-board wash from the backyard clothesline? The pants looked as if they had been in a press.
We do not see many clotheslines anymore, and my guess is that there are more busy psychiatrists and pharmacies these days partly because of that fact.
In a slower age (although my mother, who always worked as well as kept house, never had a ‘‘slow’’ day), everyone seemed to have a clothesline. In my youth, I lived in several sections of Rockland, including Sloatsburg, Tallman, Airmont, Pearl River and, mostly, Spring Valley and Hillcrest, and in each neighborhood there were many clotheslines or clothes poles, usually homemade contraptions built with whatever lumber was handy.
My mother’s line was the ubiquitous white cotton twill, drawn through two pulleys and knotted. There was a line keeper, which helped prevent sag, and, of course, the usual canvas bag full of clothespins, preferably spring-loaded. Trees served as poles.
Every Saturday morning in the 1950s, on what was everyone’s main wash day in Hillcrest, this lazy fellow would be awakened by the squeak-squeak of the pulleys as my mother hung the wash. It is a sound that, to this day, recalls the peaceful weekend lounging of a teen-ager. Lazy me rolled over and went back to sleep.
My mother would take her time hanging the wash. It almost seemed like therapy of a sort, time to get out of the house, to feel the fresh breeze, to smell a new morning and to let her mind wander. As she sorted the wash, she also seemed to sort her thoughts, and I do not doubt that it gave her a sanity boost.
At other homes, where the clotheslines might be closer together, there was over-the-line talk between neighbors, and for many this became a ritual not to be missed. Gossip was exchanged, hopes were defined, news was spread. If a photographer could have spent some time at such a clothesline gathering, he could have captured facial expressions ranging from interest to skepticism, to wonder, to joy, to sadness. But almost never boredom.
I’m told that in the old New York City neighborhoods, where buildings’ rears met in a courtyard, there would be a central pole to which were attached many pulleys carrying lines from second-story-unit windows. What gathering spots they must have been, with enough news daily to fill a weekly paper.
And, of course, everyone would know everyone else’s fashion. When you hang it all out, including your underwear, that’s not hard to miss.
My mother used to carry the wash in a straw basket, which she had for many years until it literally fell apart. When I first carried it out for her, as a little fellow, it was so heavy that I could hardly do so. By the time I was a senior in high school, it was light, and I was aware that I would not be doing the chore much longer. I wished for the old moment when it had been heavy.
You do not see many clotheslines anymore, with dryers in homes and with people too busy to take time for such labor. Life seems too quick for passing, even absent, thoughts, strung along a line ready to evaporate, as with the water in the clothes.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H.Gunther III

“LEAN ON ME,” said the healthy pine to its brother, the roots of which were torn from the earth during Superstorm Sandy in fall 2012.   In a metaphor, how many Rockland County, N.Y., residents required help as they did without power and heat, some for weeks?
The mighty pine, a symbol of the Northeast and a non-deciduous offering to get us through sometimes harsh and colorless winters, has shallow roots, a reminder that life is fragile but enduring. That some pines grow and stand for decades is due to the closeness of their neighbors in a forest buddy system.
But Sandy was extra-mean, and this poor pine at the Nanuet School District park off Convent Road in the Town of Clarkstown had just one brother, to its left, and none to the right, making it vulnerable. It tilted in a great burst of wind and could not be righted. Nothing could “put this Humpty-Dumpty together again.”
And so the metaphor went for Rockland in the Sandy aftermath. Not all came back as they were, but in the troubles, there was certain and sure neighborly help.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who lives in Blauvelt, N.Y. Reach him at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

For some years, my son Arthur IV, a writer too, offered a holiday story published in this space. Reprinted here is his Dec. 24, 2007, piece.

 
Franklin was a man of routine. Perhaps such a person had become an antiquated notion in this day and age, the very word “routine” summoning visions of safe havens and early dinners. Someone for whom risks were akin to strangers at your night door. What a shame to reduce a person to such a narrow universe. There had been a time where Franklin would have been moved to debate and argument over such labeling of his being.

He was older now and less ready to argue. So old in fact that he would rather not seek new memories for fear of crowding out the old ones which kept him warm, the ones that had made him who he still was. This was easier than it sounded. The year itself, with its familiar cycle, cooperated nicely. The ebb and flow of the seasons lent a rhythm to his days that evoked memory at every turn. Despite the changes that had settled around his town, there was still so much to remind him of his past days.

Which brings us to Christmas. Here it wasn’t so easy. Franklin himself had never been what most would call religious. He never attended a church or other religious house, even on the most popular of churchgoing days, Christmas. His wife had been another story. Molly had been a regular churchgoer, attending church every Sunday morning for the entire 55 years of their marriage. She rarely spoke of her beliefs, preferring to let the way she lived her life do the talking.

Franklin did not label himself some kind of heathen. He had plenty of belief in God. Proof was everywhere. Franklin saw God in snowstorms and surprises, laughter, nature and seeming coincidence. Franklin had seen God every day for 55 years in his wife. Church just was never a place where he sought Him. 

     Franklin’s wife had been accepting of his ways. She never asked him to attend church with her. On Christmas Eve, she may have dressed a bit nicer and left a little earlier, but she still attended alone. When Molly died a few years back, Franklin was stunned, as he knew he would be, though her passing was not unexpected. Slowly, however, he found those familiar routines and let the memory of all the sweet days before settle in more deeply than ever. In his own way, Franklin’s wife walked with him through his days.

It was on Christmas that Franklin was at a loss. He had depended more on living vicariously through Molly’s routine on that day than he had realized. Franklin first tried ignoring the holiday, but that didn’t seem right. He had never ignored religion, just celebrated it in his own way.

The second year after his wife’s passing, Franklin instead sought distraction and tried hiking in the woods, but this wasn’t much better. Before he knew it, here came the season again.

By Christmas Eve, Franklin was restless. After trying to distract himself with some of the old Christmas movies that his wife and he had always appreciated, he put on his coat and went for a walk. He decided to head toward town and maybe see if he could find a place open where he could drink hot chocolate. As he walked south on Broadway, he noticed more cars than usual parked on the side streets. People left and right were emerging from their cars dressed quite nicely. Slowly Franklin realized that these must be the extra people who always attended Christmas Mass. Without consciously making a decision, Franklin found himself following the crowds up the hill toward the church. As he crested the rise, he was taken with how the building flooded the normally quiet Tuesday night of the street with light. This was a street where Franklin rarely found himself, never having a reason to walk here. He couldn’t remember the last time he walked this way.

Franklin stopped at the corner adjacent to the church and stood still. As he contemplated whether to go inside, he suddenly was startled by the noise of a collective standing up. An organ note rang out as all the lights around him went out. His first thought was that a blackout had occurred, but then Franklin saw that inside the church candles were being distributed and lit. Candles were soon being passed around for those who stood outside on the steps, too. Franklin guessed that the church must have been filled to capacity. Thinking his decision had been made for him, he turned and was about to walk home when a little girl ran up to him with a candle. “Here you go,” she said and was quickly gone.

Franklin had forgotten to wear gloves, and his cold hands dropped the candle as quickly as it was handed to him. Bending down to pick it up, he noticed that he was standing not on a sidewalk but on a brick walkway. The bricks were all engraved with dedications. Franklin read the ones he could see illuminated by his candle: “John, with love from Elaine.” Then another: “Margaret and Stuart, 45 years” and finally: “For Franklin, thank you for your faith, always, Molly”.

Franklin was frozen in place. He read the brick again to make sure he wasn’t seeing things and then slowly stood up. He could hear the church choir start to sing as he turned to walk away. Maybe next year he would return and go inside, Franklin thought. Maybe tomorrow he would walk down this street again. For once, Franklin was glad he had changed his routine.

   Arthur H. Gunther IV, a schoolteacher, lives in Upper Nyack, N.Y., with his wife Laura, son Sam and daughter Beatrice. His e-mail is clausland@yahoo.com

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Nanuet, N.Y. — There’s a shopping center here that’s never been without parking vehicles since it was built in the later 1950s, a remarkable thing because such strips in suburbia — actually almost all of America — just seem to multiply, knocking one another off, their inevitable fate weed- and litter-covered lots and empty storefronts. But not the old E.J. Korvette complex.
This large discount chain of mostly Northeast stores, some with supermarkets, furniture outlets and tire centers, operated in Nanuet, a hamlet 20 miles out of New York City, for about two decades, until bankruptcy in 1980. Ever since, the site has been home to various retailers operating in divided E.J. Korvette space. That means the huge parking lot, about the size of three football fields, has always been used. And therein lies the heart of this essay.
Since the old Korvette store is a long building, it has a fire lane stretching about 60 percent of the length of the parking lot. And it is usually blocked. Maybe it’s a Clarkstown, N.Y., thing, or a Northeast habit, but the cars are ignored by the local gendarmes, at least the ones I have observed.
A run into Posa Posa pizza, or A.C. Moore or the UPS store or other shops means some irresponsible motorists leave the motor running in a lane clearly marked by the traditional yellow lines and painted curb. Newly painted.
Should there be a fire, which certainly is a possibility given the age of the old department store and the modifications made over the years, volunteer firefighters might not be be able to park their rigs, wasting valuable, life-saving moments  setting up  the “job.”
Motorists park illegally since they are not challenged, at least not often enough. I am in that center about once a week, have been for years, and there is just about always a vehicle or more in the fire lane.
Nearby, in another shopping center, the same situation. I once asked a state trooper, who was also parked in the fire lane while getting a bagel, why he didn’t  ask the fellow sitting in the car in front of him to move out of the lane. He said that it wasn’t his “jurisdiction.” Did not know that fire hazards were defined by jurisdiction.
A suggestion beyond the obvious, which is to use common sense and not park in fire lanes, and for police to enforce the law: Keep the fire lane yellow, with diagonal lines and curb in that color, but overlay with deep red markings. This would make the lane more noticeable and make the offenders stand out. It would also pay tribute to our firefighters, volunteer and hired. Red is their color.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman who lives in Blauvelt, N.Y. He is reachable directly at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
(ahgunther@hotmail.com)

In this time of holiday parties, we went to see Jerry Donnellan at his West Nyack, N.Y., home. For decades now, he has been the veterans guru for Rockland County, and Jerry’s daily, weekend and evening life is centered around helping his fellow comrades. It is a God-given thing he does, and though Jerry is a local government employee, his job is to muddle through the red tape officialdom creates so that the ordinary soul receives his/her due, sometimes in an extraordinary fashion.
The holiday affair was just fine at Jerry and MariEllyn’s place, as it always is since they are humble, gracious hosts. What made this year special, though, was that Jerry told us more than half a million souls have now been afforded treatment at special veterans clinics throughout the U.S., apart from the usual veterans hospitals. Not too many years ago, there were no veterans clinics, and those who served under our flag often endured the indignity of the bureaucracy in getting an appointment and/or treatment at the vets hospitals. Not enough funding, insufficient staff, long trips  and the indifference of any large organization made our veterans wait and suffer even more. Government can sure shoot itself in the foot and then trip up its citizens.
Jerry saw the need for change, and he made his voice quite clear, calling upon a willing C. Scott Vanderhoef, the Rockland County executive, to help provide limited funding for a local clinic in New City. Almost immediately the walk-in was a success, assisting vets in getting checkups, prescriptions and care. It has proven a blessing to thousands of ex-servicemen and women.
And the idea took off, spreading nationwide from Rockland in great numbers. All without a big fuss. All without D.C. direction, all without legislation that today surely would be debated, filibustered or somehow labeled anti-American.
Jerry Donnellan saw a need, and he and Scott acted on it, homegrown-style, can-do style, the sort that won a world war in the 1940s when creative Yanks took bulls by the horn and made things work on the  battlefield even as the generals debated tactics.
Good work, fellows — those guys then and Jerry and Scott now.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who lives in Blauvelt, N.Y. He is reachable at ahgunther@hotmail.com. This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

NYACK, N.Y. — In the birthplace village of Edward Hopper, the famed American realist artist (1882-1967), it is a simple thing to note the early morning Hudson River light that he bottled and used in all the paintings of his long career. That was his gift, and it is has been shared with generations, especially in his present renaissance in America, Europe, elsewhere. Yet we humans, and Hopper was that, too, also have the most ordinary of moments, no matter the ability. Some even suffer in the ordinary for the ability.
When the artist was studying in France and also living in Nyack and in the lower New York City neighborhood where he would spend most of his life, he received short letters — almost conversational tidbits — from a friend, Alta Hilsdale, whom he seems to have loved. But the emotion was unrequited, and reading the Hilsdale letters, 1904-1914,  is a sad experience. It is a classic relationship in which expectations are not shared and are in fact so different that you wonder how it could have lasted a decade.
But it is also a known tale, and that is why moving romance novels have been written in hoped-for explanation. Hopper did not write, not often anyway (unfortunately, we don’t have his letters to Alta). Nor did he speak much. He painted. That was his language, his expression.
Writer Beth Thompson Colleary offers Hopper fans, and actually anyone who explores human interaction, a chance to look into Hopper’s art and mind in her recently published Hilsdale letters collection, “My Dear Mr. Hopper” (Yale University Press). The book is scholarly in that it offers primary source material, and it allows the reader to enter the Hopper-Hilsdale relationship. Perhaps the last two letters are the most compelling and revealing. The first, Sept. 18, 1914, just two paragraphs long, tells the artist: “I suppose I shall have to begin to tell some of my friends that I am to be married soon to Mr. Bleecker … We are to live in Brooklyn, at 42 Sidney Place … and if you should care to come over, I would be glad to see you. Always your friend, Alta Hilsdale.”
Imagine, after 10 years, such a short and explosive letter. Hopper may have assumed a developing romance where he should not have done so, but, still, the letter is cold. The second letter, written from Brooklyn on Oct. 14, is a bit longer though still short. More a note than a letter.  It begins, “I cannot tell you how sorry I am to have made you unhappy.” And it ends with, “I thank you with all my heart for all you have done for me and offered me, and beg you to forgive me for causing you unhappiness. Most sincerely, Alta Hilsdale Bleecker.”  That last letter is probably her most emotional one in all the 10 years. (The assumption is Hopper wrote back between Sept. 18 and when she penned the letter on Oct. 14.)
Who knows how the artist handled this loss. He married painter Josephine Nivision 10 years later, and that seemingly less-than-romantic union probably informed his art, since he became most productive and, finally, sellable, with Jo at his side. And, surely, Alta is in the artistic effort, even if a painful memory.
This brings me to the point of my essay. Hopper appears to have painted just one work set in Brooklyn, where Alta moved in early marriage. Most of his works are about Manhattan or  Cape Cod, Maine and Vermont, with some western U.S. scenes. “Room in Brooklyn” (1932) is quite an emotional piece, as Hopper’s paintings are, but this one is different. Almost all Hopper women are voluptuous or at least sensual, many nude or nearly so. The woman in Brooklyn is fully clothed in a modest dress, sitting in a rocking chair and looking out the window while also apparently reading. We do not see her face, but the brown hair is set in the exact style Alta wore in an early 1900’s portrait of her, perhaps by Hopper. The Brooklyn room is sparse, with an unset table behind the woman. The view is toward what some Hopper scholars see as Hopper himself, that long row of Brick tenements, such as in “Early Sunday Morning.”  (It is repeated in many paintings.) On the floor near the woman is a shaft of light, the traditional Hopper pointer, as if he were a teacher revealing knowledge.
Is “Room in Brooklyn” a look at Alta 18 years after her last letter? Is she alone for a reason? Is she looking at Edward or the memory of him? Is she re-reading his  letter? Is she clothed as the virgin he remembers, or as a woman not fulfilled? Who knows? Hopper is a mystery that even he spent a lifetime exploring.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Nearing the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, so much reflection has already been written, some by younger writers who were not alive to absorb the year 1963, the 1950s and God, what happened in the killing’s aftermath, that turbulent continuation of a decade still changing America.
Kudos to scribes who analyze and who get it right, especially if they did not feel the earth, smell the air, taste the water of the time. Yet, first-person reflection is as valuable as primary research, for setting the record, for authenticity. It’s a check on analysis after the fact. So, here goes, from someone who was there, before, during, after.
Fifty years ago, Nov. 22 was a Friday, as it is in 2013. 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, professional 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 stodgy government, when hope seemed a sure bet despite a lingering 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. Moneyed lobbies increasingly rule the nation.
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.

  The writer is a retired newspaperman. Reach him at ahgunther@hotmail.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

On the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour in 1918, World War I mostly ended with the hope that such a dramatic finish would cement the promise: “The war to end all wars.” No such luck, and World War II, Korea, Vietnam and all the conflicts to the present in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere continue the folly of some — too many — leaders, the failure of diplomacy, the effects of special interest that profit from conflict but surely, too, the bravery of the grunt soldier, airman, Marine and seaman, all the military men and women of wartime/peacetime.
I say leaders’ “folly” because even in good intent, the mistakes — repeatedly — are many and often disastrous. Consider the Hurtgen Forest campaign of September-December, 1944, during World War II, which saw 33,000 U.S. killed or wounded — including my Uncle Winfield, who lost three fingers — and 28,000 for the Germans. Historians contend that the American  battle plan never made strategic or tactical sense, though the sacrifice and bravery of the fallen can never be challenged. Had the generals thought it through and established an objective rather than fight as if replacements were unlimited, the battle might have been won. Actually, it did not need to happen in the first place.
And so it is in any war. Name any, and you will see mistakes, lack of good sense, why it might have been avoided, and in some rare cases, why it had to happen. What is most common, though, is that everyone who serves in  a war theater and those who do so in rare, blessed  peacetime, deserve all the applause, if you can applaud a war or the preparation for it.
Today is Veterans Day, which is the old Armistice Day in the United States, the day that commemorated the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the last war ever. Now, after the wars that have followed, it is Veterans Day, honoring the living and the dead. The focus is on the ordinary man or woman who shows up to do his or her duty, not so much the generals and almost never the politicians.
What happens in war can only be understood by those who have been there, absolutely no one else. Stephen Crane, the Civil War author, came close when he described the thin line between bravery and cowardice in “The Red Badge of Courage,” but the rest of us who have never been baptized cannot. Those who have gone to war return far different, changed forever. Perhaps more thankful. Perhaps more forgiving. Perhaps hateful. Perhaps possessed by unseen but constant demons.
My uncle lost fingers in the Hurtgenwald but went on to live a productive life as a husband, father, worker, son, citizen. Surely he had his emotional difficulties, but he was able to handle them. Other vets were — are — not so fortunate.
When we die, the hope is we pass over to the other side. The believers call it Heaven. If we could return having gone there, we would be changed forever. Well, our veterans, so many of them, have gone to hell, and they came back changed in certain ways. Know that, appreciate that, and until they use their free pass to Heaven, nod in respect, this and every day.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com This essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

New York City — With the April Boston Marathon bombings still pulling at the heartstrings of runners everywhere, some 45,000 of them rallied Sunday in indomitable spirit in the resumed New York City event, canceled last year in the lingering dark clouds of Superstorm Sandy.
My son, Arthur 4th, was among the participants, and we are proud to say that he finished 134, 114 in his gender, 17 in his age group (40-44), with a 2:43:14 time in 26.2 miles. Awfully good, considering a headwind for the first several miles and those hills in Brooklyn and Manhattan. And the fact that he ran past his mother’s early childhood home in Bensonhurst, my mother’s birthplace in DUMBO and my great-great-grandparent’s home in  Yorkville’s “Little Germany,” well that covers a lot of family history.
But my son would leave the applause to others, as humble as he is, and which makes him a great man, father, husband, teacher. From the time he began running with Coach Bob Hudson in the Tappan Zee schools, he has always been there for teammates, and they for him.
This race certainly was about team spirit, though runners, of course, are individual sorts. But this year, following the tragedy in Boston, knowing that so many remain displaced by Superstorm Sandy, and in a nation where, frankly, government cannot seem to get to the finish line, it is most reassuring to see that some people at least will not let themselves become dispirited by the nation, by the world, too.
Perhaps it should be a requirement for public office that one complete a marathon, even on foot, so as to know what team spirit, what individual drive means and can achieve.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com Any or all of this essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Whether it be global warming, the Tea Party, the Democrats, cranky Mother Nature or nothing at all, fall color seems to be coming later every year. We were in old industrial-town North Adams, Mass., and Stockbridge, last home of Norman Rockwell, during what was supposed to be peak “peepers” season, but it wasn’t. Nippy mornings, yes, and the usual fog that comes in Berkshire land with its mountains and valleys, but most leaves were still on the trees. It was as if the Washington shutdown had furloughed the process, and time was suspended.
Actually, time has moved on in North Adams, once a very large industrial center where the fabric for Union Army clothing and then electronics for atom bombs and missiles were manufactured. More than 200 years were invested by workers and industry in this community, with 26 original buildings along the Hoosic River now part of MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, The site includes courtyards, bridges, viaducts and Industrial Age architecture that are works of art in themselves. So, while we found so little autumn foliage to see, the visit was worth it for the richness of the art installations and the results of preserving and enhancing American history. In a nation that has always been on the march, building and building, it is reassuring that some record of the past is kept.
In Stockbridge where artist Rockwell had a home and studio, continuing his Saturday Evening Post covers and later a 10-year association with Look, there also was little fall color, though the artist’s museum offered enough of every hue from the palette of America’s chronicler of what makes us who we are. As Rockwell said, “Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.” And that includes Americans. His Look covers, coming as they did in the 1960s after the John F. Kennedy assassination, depict a nation in transformation, and the worry and uncertainty of that, including major work on civil rights and other social issues.
This trip brought light traffic, a rare delight, and while we did not fill up on the great reds and yellows of autumn foliage, there was fine color for the soul — the art work and historic preservation in  North Adams and the catalog of a national treasure in Stockbridge. It made us forget the drab grayness of a forlorn Washington, D.C.

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. Any or all of this essay may be reproduced.

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

Spring Valley, N.Y. —  The time: 2:55 a.m. Place: parking lot of the United Church. Reason: Tuesday start for the Rockland (County) Interfaith Breakfast Program. What’s unusual: a special whiff of fallen leaves returning to nature in early fall.
Deciduous leaves drop every autumn in so many parts of the United States and world, some in beautiful colors. And drying leaves, kicked about on sidewalks by youngsters and oldsters and those in between is common, too, as is the wind gathering a dozen or so and swirling them about as if in Dorothy’s cyclone. The  “taste” of all this is in the smell, even the fragrance of leaves losing their living liquid and drying to crispness, then morphing to mulch and renewal.
In Spring Valley, at 2:55 a.m. on a Tuesday that would soon be bustling at United Church as a cook and food preparers and servers volunteered in common effort, the leaves, some anyway, had fallen, and there was the expected whiff, so pristine though life of a sort was ending, as pristine as a spring and emerging flowers. With a slight chill in the air, you knew fall was coming, and wasn’t that just fine. For some of us, wonderful.
What made it unusual, this moment shared by so many thousands worldwide, was that I stepped out of the car at age 70 but in a millisecond I was again 12 and at this same church, then the Dutch Reformed. There for a Boy Scout meeting on a Friday night, I had walked from my home about two miles away and had rustled the leaves with my feet, taking in the smell of old oaks and maples.
Now I have done this, rustled leaves, hundreds of times since, and there is always the special fragrance. Yet, this time, at 2:55 a.m. in Spring Valley, in the parking lot of United Church, under an ancient oak that predates my grandfather’s time in the village, I instantly caught in my nostrils the very same smell I had in the very same place 60 years earlier. That fragrance has never been duplicated elsewhere.
Can one place, even in different times, give you the identical smell? Maybe. Maybe it’s in a community’s DNA.
A fine morning start that Tuesday was.

   The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. Any or all of this essay may be reproduced with credit given.

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

Civility is what it is these days, which generally means watered-down manners, some to the point of not being recognizable social behavior. It’s as if no one taught some clowns how to act toward others.

In my parts, north of New York City in the burbs, some public meetings become shouting matches and physical altercations as if town hall were the place for a street rumble. And there is always the incivility of the street, with impatient drivers, including myself.

But the lack of manners most distressing is in communication, or the absence of it. Too many people, “important” ones, too, fail to answer letters and e-mails, even when they solicit same. I have written or emailed (on required forms) to the president, to Ford Motors headquarters, to Ford engineers, to Dunkin’ Donuts and to others. All these business and people pay big bucks to solicit your opinion and some have flashy websites announcing just how “valuable” your view is. Yet write a constructive, balanced criticism with helpful suggestions, and you not only do not get a form-letter reply when you should receive at least a considered individual response, but you don’t get a reply at all. None of my letters or emails in the past few years have been acknowledged. That is bad manners, and it is not civil.

If people do not listen to others, there is no communication, and that is sloppy for society. The individual writer may have a harebrained idea, but if he or she presents it in a non-shouting, well-considered, non-offensive way, it should get a reply.

Adding to this social incivility are some tradesmen. I recently considered installing a gas fireplace insert to my home and requested quotes from three businesses, all local. Two never replied, though they run ads shouting for business. One firm sent a fellow who never got back to me, despite several calls to his office.

The bottom line is that my project is probably too small for their effort — the companies could use their staff on bigger jobs, with more profit. Not civil behavior. Bad business, too, as I won’t speak well of these outfits.

When some of us went to school, we were taught how to write personal and business letters. We also penned replies. The point was not only to learn how to compose such missives but to reinforce the standard that in a civil society, communication — the back and forth of it —  is necessary and expected.

Not today, it would seem.

The writer is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. Any or all of this essay may be reproduced at will if credit is given.

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

Always in an age, a theme. In 2013 it is the words and non-words from Rome and Washington. What the new Pope Francis is saying is not being said in D.C. The theme is survival of the middle.

The pope is trying to regain the Roman Catholic middle, the core that is the engine for the church’s mission. In Washington, no one — the GOP, the Democrats and especially the Tea Party — is courting the middle, that class which rose largely post-war and which drives the American (and world) economy, which assures stability for achievement and human progress and which, most of all, protects democracy from the wackiness and jaw-boning of mostly non-accomplishing rightists and leftists. The middle class is the hope of the lower and the check for the upper.

Francis offers a message to the church: Lose the pomp and regalia, think forgiveness, empathy, giving, humility, simplicity, which is the message of Christ. It is also pragmatic since the wish is that the lapsed middle’s ears will hear and hopefully agree, and then act on such faith. And, if it does, the entire world, not just the Roman Catholic church, will benefit, leaving behind the decades of “me” and excess.

In our nation’s capital, no one is courting the middle class save the false voices from talking heads, largely propped by the puppeteers of special interest, who care not a whit for the workers, citizens and families that offer stability and who can carry the banner toward an ever-new American frontier. In a “governing” system that is so broken that it must be re-invented, a handful of strange politicoes has seized the great Congress, our Congress. And, we the people seem as impotent as were the good German citizenry following the burning of the Reichstag.

The crazies tell us Obamacare will bankrupt a nation already spending beyond its debt limit, rescued only by printing more money. They want large entitlement cuts; reversal of laws protecting gays, lesbians and women’s reproductive rights; abandonment of environmental protection to drill for oil (for China); and severe limits on federal budgeting, pushing a balanced spending plan but one that first grants banks and super corporations tax perks which no one in the middle class would ever see.

As with all messages that galvanize one section of the public or another, there is some truth in our overspending, in sometimes mismanaged entitlements, but in this time so long past the Founders’ declarations on the American mission, the social progress, the betterment that has been the American Dream must not be abandoned to let the odd ones win their hollow, selfish argument. We have to figure out ways to provide opportunity and show humanity, but without overcharge, special interest, mismanagement and personal irresponsibility. There are riches for all in such selfless pragmatism, financial and otherwise. But first, the middle must hear the call to action. And there is but a whimper in D.C.

Pope Francis may prove disarming. His humble message, so welcome in a world that seems off its nut, may in the end be rhetoric, however earnest the man. Still, his is the language of hope. In Washington, there is no such tongue.

 

The writer is a retired newspaperman. Reach him at ahgunther@hotmail.com. Any part or all of this essay may be reproduced at will, with credit given. 

 

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

Though I am a newspaper writer — editorials and essays mostly — I do verse from time to time. So, this week, with not much else to ponder about, I’ll offer three pieces, the last of which  is song verse. Thanks for reading.

 

#1: A GLIMPSE

 

I saw a love

of long ago.

She moved swiftly

between my dreams

and reality, appearing

clearly, although

the facts were otherwise.

I reached out,

grasping for a moment

never realized.

She looked at me,

then left so quickly

that I knew she was

never there. Nor was

the moment.

 

#2: ARMCHAIR GENERALS

 

War drums begin, the old come alive.

Visions of battles never fought.

Now the chance to march

from the safety of a desk.

Young go to fight, marshaled

by the marshals of battle,

exacting in righteous allegiance

to what they insist is just.

Old men who pick up no weapon

beyond pen and phone

to issue this order or that.

Great destruction is their right,

these old men say, for the fight

is to save us all. Trust demanded.

Mistakes by command cannot

be undone. Limbs, psyches torn asunder,

continual dying for the lifetimes

of the once young.

 

 

#3: GONE

 

I locked the door last night, though it never had a key. You are gone, and I must forget.

Forget the soulful moments, the depth we reached without a word said.

Forget you in my arms, fitted like a glove, your heart in mine, my soul with yours, facing eternity.

Forget our plans together, though I never cared for detail as long as you were here.

Forget your eyes were blue and magnetic, that looking into them made me feel weak but so warm.

I locked the door last night, though it never had a key. You are gone, and I must forget.

Forget the calm we were at, our silence speaking for us.

Forget that being together was a book of understanding. Forget I came upon old doubt and could not trust real emotion. I left the embrace and could not return. Now I have locked the door, and there is no key.

You have gone away, and I must forget.

 

 

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be reached at ahgunther@hotmail.com. His work can be republished at will, in any form, with credit given.

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

About this time of year comes the memory of the apple smell, sweet fragrance that for me opened the door a bit to Heaven when I was a child at my grandmother’s house. She made apple pies, as many nanas did and do, from scratch as my friend Elaine does as well in the present. And she is a grandma, too. My grandfather would peel the apples, quite slowly and deftly, within a few millimeters of the skin so as not to waste anything. I never have had the patience for that, my own pared apples probably about two-thirds of the original product. My gramps sat on an upturned apple crate to do the job, outside, of course. And that is where the apple fragrance came from.

Making an apple pie brings its own wonderful, delicious smells, especially when the spices are added to the mix and, of course, when the pie is baking. And, then, oh then, when that pie just seems to sit forever on the windowsill awaiting our tasting. But the real eau d’apple came from the drops, those decaying, over-ripened, never-picked discards from my grandfather’s small tree. The drops always landed near his 1900s garage, its old, wooden floor soaked with the car oil of decades gone by. The garage, particularly when it was warmish, offered its own beckoning smell — of automobiles, wrenches, human labor, all a promise of what was to come for a future motorist, even at age 5.

When I visited my grandparents, a few miles from my own home, the whiff of the garage in fall made me feel extra welcome, not that it was difficult to achieve at that house, at that home. And when I also smelled the drops, all was extra sweet, and my fingers almost crossed that my grandmother was making a pie.

She usually was, and on those days, at that time of year, even without introduction to any of God’s religions, I knew there was a Heaven.

Contact this retired newspaperman at ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

ANYWHERE, USA — It’s back-to-school, and while many cliches can be uttered about that, the fact is this is like spring planting. The renewed hope is there that the new field of fertile, young minds will see germination in gained knowledge, reasoning and a healthy outlook on life. Hope they have fun, too.

Teachers will tell you, and you will recall yourselves that each school year and each collected class is different. The feeling is not last year’s, the classroom is physically apart from others, the mix of students may have been altered and the teacher is probably new to the group.

And the world has changed, and the individual student’s self and environment, too. Likes, dislikes, friends, needs, desires, what has happened over the summer, how the community has morphed, and the state, the nation, the world — all this bears on the back-to-school moment of any particular year.

This means some students will fare better than others, and some will do very well, others not and probably the majority will be fine. The chemistry of the new school moment will help decide, though free will, as free as it may be, can turn the tide, too.

Nationwide, school budgets continue to be slammed. Inflation in supplies, health care and other benefits, utility charges and the costs of this program or that seems 50 to 100 percent against the  recorded U.S. rate (August) of 2 percent. Doing more with less is yet another challenge for teachers, students and parents in this back-to-school moment.

And then there are the tests, the push to have students meet some sort of standard, though those who set them do not seem to agree on what they should be. In-the-trenches teachers will cringe at lost time “teaching to the test” and will wonder why so many non-educators, or those so long out of the classroom, decide on the test. Yes, standards are required, goals must be in place, but the best teaching comes from teacher to student and  student to teacher. Too much gets in the way — parental over-managing, distracting environment at home and in the streets,  extra-curricular overload,  too hands-on administration. Teachers should be trusted more to teach and given the support to do so.

Good luck to those going  to school 2013, particularly the ones just beginning the journey in kindergarten. When you first get ready to sow a field, you till the soil well and then you fertilize. You don’t simply cast seed willy-nilly on hard pack. In this nation of the growing rich, the accumulating poor and the disappearing middle class, not enough attention has been paid to preparing schools and our young for the first years. Will the crop be what the children need, what the nation requires?

 

The writer is a retired newspaperman who can be e-mailed at ahgunther@hotmail.com

 

August 26, 2013

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

I do not know where you live in this world or where your mind is in it, but I will tell you about the future of this planet. It could be seen clearly, not far from my Blauvelt, N.Y., home.

Driving down Western Highway, just before Dominican College, a private, Roman Catholic four-year institution, there was a “Welcome” sign on campus as volunteers directed freshman and their parents to parking areas. Vehicles filled with luggage, bedding, lamps and electronics and also jammed with adults plus young people came in an almost endless stream. You saw the anxious, sometimes puzzled, somewhat curious look on parents’ faces and, from students,  a mix of excitement and apprehension. This was a scene repeated in almost countless locales across the United States, and with varying custom, in Europe, Asia, the world. It was the setting of another field of hope, the soil plowed, the fertilizer in place, and now new seeds were to be planted.

Yet there were storm clouds, too, and hope was mixed with worry. In these United States, where super-sized student loans are necessary to get most people through ever-more expensive colleges, the last fields were harvested just a few months ago, and the ripened fruit of four or so years of labor, following on 13 years of public or private school plus pre-school have yet to sell. There are few jobs for 2013 graduates, or 2012 graduates or 2011 graduates. …

In America, the middle class is shrinking, and with it the bulwark of democracy is weakened. Greedy special interests bent on maximizing profit without re-investment in society, in our young, in workers, in the promise of life are simply not employing enough people, firing longtime workers and hiring part-timers with little or no benefits. Pensions are disappearing.

And yet fresh college fields are plowed each summer, readied for a new crop of hopefuls who face unemployment and, if they work, a change of jobs many times in their lives.

Post-World War II America prospered  because of the G.I. Bill for returning veterans, which educated professionals who could serve industry and big business, greatly enlarging a middle class withered by the Great Depression. There was strong economic growth and enough profit for many. The world benefitted as trade and commerce grew.

Today, despite the “Welcome” sign at our college campuses, even while seeds are planted in fresh fields of hope for our precious children, the storm clouds of unemployment and income grown principally for greed are ominous.

We should all show apprehension on our faces, not just freshman and their parents.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

August 19, 2013

By Arthur H. Gunther III
ahgunther@hotmail.com

The price of “progress” is not always worth the results. Once, in my region of the world — “upstate, country” but just 20 miles from New York City — tasty, fresh, clear water came from underground wells, springs and fissures in the glacial rock that covers well-named Rockland County. Just dig a bit or drill a little, and for two centuries there was much supply to be had, cheaply. The water encouraged fruit and vegetable farming and the growth of villages and towns. Many people had their own wells. Rural life was pleasant enough, and communities prospered.
In the “progress” that is constant but not well-planned growth, industries and filling stations and strip highway shopping rose along with housing, bringing oil, gasoline, industrial chemical and pesticide pollution. Large parking lots and numerous paved streets put impermeable covers on the land, and rain water could not return as easily to the wells. Flood plains were eliminated to make room for the march of “progress.”
In Spring Valley, a village named for its natural water source and where the first public utility began in the 1800s, pollution was so great that the water could not be tapped. Still, the utility grew with other supply, absorbed first by an out-of-state company, then a French-owned worldwide conglomerate that treats water. There is money to be made in water — it is the next “oil” — and there is also cash to be had in treating water, which is an even bigger business than supply.
My region now has strongly treated water, so much so that we cannot use it as it comes from the tap. There is a strong chlorine smell and off-taste, and it must be filtered, at our expense, before use. When I was a boy, I could take a very cold draw from a neighbor’s well, which no longer exists. It was not treated water, no chlorine smell, no poor taste. It was free. But that was before “progress.”
In these parts, reservoirs have been constructed to aid development, and that was all right. They form pretty lakes, and green space is preserved. However, much of the original buffer land surrounding these reservoirs is now gone, sold off for new development, for additional “progress,” for more big company profit. Government, which has a good ear for lobbies, has signed off on this, advising, “Just treat the water more.” The buffers helped reduce pollution runoff, but in the name of “progress,” it is OK to use chemicals instead.
Now, there is super growth in some of my area, and there is an insatiable thirst for more aqua, so much so that the salt water in the famous Hudson River could soon be treated, at very high cost, to add to supply. This waterway is the second-largest Superfund target because of industrial PCB pollution.
Once, before “progress,” I could have a tin cup full of water free from a neighbor’s pump, super satisfying on a hot day in the rural summer. Now I pay dearly for a glass of water that has its taste obliterated by chemicals. And we face perhaps a doubling of expense to have salt removed from an commercial river.
Ah, “progress,” it can have a bitter taste.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

Not all car dealers are so lucky, but one in  Blauvelt, N.Y., offers test drives over a mountain named Clausland, with winding, country-like roads  busy enough since this is built-up suburbia. And despite the bromide view, the burbs are never sleepy, especially one less than 20 miles from New York City.

Other auto hawkers must send consumer wannabes to heavy truck routes like Routes 303, 9W, 59, 45, and that can be a testing time for someone not familiar with a new or used car. In fact, the Mercedes guy in the next town, along Route 304, almost lost a salesman and a customer when a very expensive model was slammed as it left the dealership. Maybe that’s why the Ford place across the way lets you take the car by your lonesome. Salesmen can be hard to find.

For someone who likes to observe humanity, even out of the corner of the eye when you are already concentrating on a fine tune from the radio or a beautiful woman walking along the road, the Mazda dealer’s customer jaunts over Clausland are quite interesting. You see old fellows zooming along in sports cars they could not afford in their 20s and which will no longer get them a girlfriend, as if that were ever true. You watch old ladies cautiously driving a basic sedan, going ever so slowly, whether they are old or even women. Even a fellow can be a little, old lady in a car. (This isn’t to denigrate little old ladies but merely to offer observation.)

On the trip over the mountain to and from Blauvelt to Nyack, you also see the teen-ager with nervous parent in the back seat, a son or daughter with the biggest grin ever as they anticipate freedom, dates and whatever else a car brings, even if it’s a used jalopy with 153,567 miles.

Then there are the truck try-outs — fellows or gals in ever-bigger, shiny machines with back seats and extended beds that will never see manure or tools or work. Trucks not used on the job but as recreational rides are a huge seller, perhaps the biggest, in the U.S., and my section of the Northeast is no exception.

Finally, the Clausland trip offers glances at a mix of salesman types, from well-dressed to casual; from talkative to quiet; from bored to engaged. At least they get out of the office and maybe even make a sale, albeit taking their being on a potentially dangerous ride with a stranger on curved mountain roads. The scenery is beautiful and there is a chance to get a doctorate in watching people.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

By Arthur H. Gunther III

ahgunther@hotmail.com

BETHESDA, M.D. — Rituals in our lives change, but that does not mean they are easy to get used to, even to accept. Here I was in beautiful Bethesda, a neat D.C. suburb with all modern amenities, expecting 1961 and a few decades after to remain the ruling time. But it was 2013, and I don’t get the language.

An early-morning ritual is to take a walk, have some java and read the local newspaper, in this area The Washington Post. And so I sought a paper. But there was none, at 6:30 a.m., long after morning editions have gone to bed. I asked a very polite but matter-of-fact store clerk when the newspapers might arrive, and I was told,  “When the man gets here, he gets here.” In other words, the news, the information that impacts our lives, which entertains, saddens, enlightens, exposes charlatans and connects us to the full range of human emotions, and  which once would await no man’s delay, would now “get here when it got here.”

I was a newspaperman for four decades and remain one in soul. Never missed a deadline, thank you. No bragging – the first rule of newspapering is to get the info out on time, quicker than that, if possible.

Now, with so many fewer print readers, information delivered in bites via Smart phones and iPads and TV, the morning newspaper no longer seems vital. Sad, for a much fuller report can be had in print, all the better to be informed in a democracy that you want to keep as such.

While I waited in a Bethesda strip mall parking lot for the paper delivery guy to get there, I saw descendants of folks like me, but they were not buying papers as their dads and granddads did or still do. Instead, they were in their cars, lined up at a bank, at ATM machines, to get money for the day.

Once, we carried money in our pockets from our cashed-pay checks for a week or two. We went to the bank to cash the checks. And we used some of our pocket change to buy a newspaper.

I doubt if many of the good, hardworking people on the ATM line buy a paper after they get their bank machine cash. Probably quench their thirst for information via mobile devices or computers.

The world has changed, and so has its ways. I simply forgot to get on the train.

But I’ll never read about it in a newspaper.

 

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

July 22, 2013

Lessons at grandma’s

By Arthur H. Gunther III
thecolumnrule.com

For a child staying overnight at grandma’s, the sounds of a kitchen are never forgotten. It is always an adventure to sleep away from home for a four year old, and a grandparent’s house is a special place, full of treats, nooks and crannies in which to seek adventure and a sanctuary from routine. Even a child needs to get away sometimes, if only to grow a sense of security.

And security comes at grandma’s. She has snacks for the youngster and perhaps too many hugs, but such is love, and it is reassuring and certainly remembered more fondly in later decades.

Each grandmother’s house has its idiosyncrasies, as does every child, every adult, and that’s another lesson to be learned at grandma’s. The child newly awake not in his or her regular bed hears a cupboard door creak open, and he knows that breakfast is coming. What child does not want breakfast? We wake up hungry, the child in all of us.

Then the youngster gets a whiff of pancakes grilling, and he can already taste grandma’s brown sugar, honey, vanilla and extra egg in the mix. Oh, and those blueberries, too.

The youngster is thus encouraged to get out of bed, forget the slippers that grandma is always telling him to put on — splinters on the old wooden stairs, you know — and bounce on downstairs to the kitchen where he will sit in that very big chair that will always be huge in his mind, even at age 70.

His grandma will go to the metal spice cabinet tucked away at the top of the cellar stairs and take out what she needs for a pie to be prepared as the grandson eats his pancakes. He will never forget the sweetness of that cabinet, its door held open just a quick moment. He also notices, if only out of the corner of his eye, his grandmother’s kitchen competence and confidence, another lesson.

Life unfolds on another morning in grandma’s house, one so precious that it seems it might burst into a thousand pieces of china but which actually proves so durable that all through life, grandma’s early attention is indeed a form of building security in what can be a tough world for all of us.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.