Dr. Metablog

Another Myth Debunked

One day, back in the 50s, our neighborhood softball team was hosting a team from some exotic location, such as Bensonhurst, at the PS 217 schoolyard. I think I must have been playing either shortstop or second base, because I had an excellent view of the earthshaking event that I'm about to describe.

It was the case that our guys were often a little less well-outfitted than the opposition because we didn't have enough baseball gloves for the whole team and had to borrow them from the visitors. Jimmy Nolan was playing first base and early in the game, possibly in the first inning, someone on the other team hit a grounder to third and the third baseman made a good on-target throw to first. But Jimmy, who happened to be wearing an official but I suspect borrowed first baseman's glove with a big pocket, reached out for the throw with his right hand (he was a southpaw) but let the ball miss the glove. He then casually caught the ball with his bare left hand which dangled nonchalantly at his knee. I was impressed, as was everyone, and I thought, "that's the way to show these visitors how tough we are -- we don't even need the gloves that we've borrowed." I was proud to be a PS 217 Misfit.

Sixty years later, last week in fact, at a reunion of PS 217 softball players, I asked Spike Cohen if he remembered the play. He did, much to my surprise. "Oh yes," he said, 'and I even remember who threw the ball. It was Marv Lasky, and he had a cannon for an arm." So The Play became even more dramatic and mythical. I thought, wow, I'm not the only one who remembers that catch, which ought to go down in history as one of the great iconic moments in PS 217 schoolyard athletics. And then, since Jimmy himself was present at the reunion, I asked him if he recalled the Great Event. He said he did. So I asked him,"Why did you do that? Why did you let the ball go under the glove?  Why did you catch it with the wrong hand?"  And he answered, "I misjudged the throw. It was a mistake." 

I was deflated, nay crushed. For all these many years, I had been convinced that Jimmy had made that play on purpose to make a statement. But now I know that it was merely an accident. And so another myth comes to be de-mythologized by revisionist historiography.

Next thing you know, they'll try to tell us Babe Ruth didn't point to the right-field bleachers just before hitting that home run. 

When I Lost Respect for Authority (Another Episode)

We were playing punchball on the PS 217 "big court." It must have been during school hours because Mrs. McGowan (a fifth grade teacher) was the umpire and the players included the entire population of the class, not just the regulars. Michael Lurie, the least athletic student in the grade, and perhaps in the entire borough, was told  to play third base, and obviously unfamiliar with the game and with Billy Cox, stationed both feet directly on the white-painted base. Someone hit (punched) the spaldeen toward him and he froze, but the ball landed precisely in his crotch, and lodged, and after a bit he found it there and held it up. We all knew that the batter was out, but Mrs. McGowan, as ignorant as Michael Lurie, shouted, "he caught it illegally" and awarded first base to the batter. I remember that several of us protested, but Mrs. Mc Gowan was adamant.
 
It was a miscarriage of justice. A violation of the rules. The umpire was incompetent. How could I ever trust authority again? 

Baseball, 1955 and 2012

In 1955, Duke Snider lived at 178 Marine Avenue (in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge). His was the middle house in this picture.

Gil Hodges lived here, at 1120 32 Street. Two floors, 1400 square feet. 

 
Harold "Pee Wee" Reese and family made their home in 970 square feet of 9714 Barwell Terrace. Carl Erskine's home, at 9318 Lafayette Walk, was even smaller,

   

just 910 square feet.

Sandy Amoros lived in Bed-Stuy, in this brownstone at 147 Bainbridge Street, most likely on just one of the three floors. His was the leftmost building.

 

 And here is Alex Rodriguez's 2012 house in Miami, Florida.  It's up for sale for $38,000,000,

      

which is what 19,681 square foot waterfront properties go for nowadays. A bargain, for all I know.

Dog-faced Man

Here's a sad childhood memory.

Just around the corner from us, on Ditmas Avenue, there lived the ugliest man I've ever seen in my entire life. He was a small, always solitary old man. He was not deformed, just plain ugly. His nose and mouth stuck way out, but his chin receded; he had very long canine teeth and the world's saddest eyes. He walked the ugliest little dog. 

I confess that when we passed in the street, I looked away, even though I was fascinated enough by his repulsiveness to steal a surreptitious backward glance. I imagine that everyone else whom he passed averted their eyes as well, and that the poor fellow lived in a world not only without friends, but even without eye contact.

Later I learned that he made his living my exhibiting himself nightly at a Coney Island freak show. He was the "Dog-Faced Man."

This was in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I hope that freak shows are a thing of the past. 

Songs My Mother Sang

My mother had a pretty fair soprano and as a young adult performed in amateur musicals. She sang in that high, quavering style that I associate with artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ruth Etting ("America's Radio Sweetheart"). I remember that sometimes, when she wasn't busy putting the laundry through the wringer or scrubbing the sink or dusting under the beds, she'd sit at the old Hardman piano and sing the songs of her youth. She sang tin pan alley songs, Gilbert and Sullivan ballads, so-called "Negro spirituals," and also what I now know to be Victorian parlor songs. Her taste was formed in the earlier part of the century (she was born in 1905) and had as far as I can tell ceased to change after about 1935 with the arrival of my older brother and diapers. My mother sang, for example, 1919's "Look for the Silver Lining": "A heart, full of joy and gladness,/ Will always banish sadness and strife./So always look for the silver lining,/ And try to find the sunny side of life." She sang "I've been Working on the Railroad" (first published in 1894) with the refrain "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/ Someone's in the kitchen I know/ Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/Strummin' on the old banjo."  Neither she nor I knew that "Dinah" was a generic name for a female slave, nor did we speculate about what the heck was going on in that kitchen. She sang "Oh, the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be,/Many long years ago."  She sang a version of what I can now identify as Ed Haley's 1894 hit, "The Fountain in the Park", with the familiar lyric "While strolling in the park one day,/ In the merry, merry month of May,/ I was taken by surprise/ by a pair of roguish eyes..."  Sorry, but I can't remember the rest. She sang, "Shine on harvest moon/ Up in the sky."  And also "Aint She Sweet." And "Home Sweet Home" ("Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,/ Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home").

But the song that stands most vividly in my memory was "Bill" from Showboat. It's a lovely song, but I took it wrong. When my mother sang "I used to think that I would discover/ The perfect lover some day," I  decided that she was finding fault with my father, to whom I was most loyal. In my mind, my father was noble and manly and intelligent, and I resented her singing about "Bill, who's not the type at all/ You'd meet him on the street and never notice him." The refrain was particularly painful to my seven-year-old self: "And I can't explain,/ It's surely not his brain that makes me thrill./ I love him because he's I don't know,/Because he's just my Bill."

I've since learned about fiction, and make-believe.  I can forgive her. 

Erasmus Hall in All about Eve

 
"Phoebe," she calls herself, but in the script she's just "girl." It's the last scene of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's (Stuyvesant '24) All about Eve. "Phoebe" has sneaked into Eve Harrington's hotel room and has pretended to fall asleep. Eve accosts her and is about to call the police when the intruderess proclaims herself a fan of the actress. Here's their conversation:   

"GIRL You know the Eve Harrington clubs - that they've got in most of the girls' high schools?

EVE I've heard of them.

GIRL Ours was one of the first. Erasmus Hall. I'm the president.

EVE Erasmus Hall. That's in Brooklyn, isn't it?

GIRL Lots of actresses come from Brooklyn. Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward - of course, they're just movie stars."

Phoebe might also have mentioned that both Barbara Stanwyck (Ruby Stevens) and Susan Hayward (Edythe Marrener) were not only from Brooklyn, but also from Erasmus Hall High School. Why doesn't she say so? Or is being a native of Brooklyn disability enough? 

Phoebe might have added to her list and mentioned that Mae West was also an alumna of the same high school. Cheers to Erasmus Hall, mother of actresses -- even though Erasmus's Barbra Streisand '59 was still in braces and still in P. S. something or other when All about Eve was being exhibited at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue.

Supposed Erasmian "Phoebe" was played by the young Barbara Bates, who was highly credible as an upwardly mobile Brooklynite. Her small part includes an iconic moment when, in the film's last scene, she appears in full narcissistic glory, preening in front of a triptych of mirrors as she tries on Eve's clothes. She is reflected in multiple, infinitely regressing fragments. Bates, a native of Denver, Colorado, did not, alas, live up to her early promise, but soon after the completion of this film fell into bouts of insanity that came to an end only when she took her own life in 1959. 

But why Erasmus?  Because its graduates had achieved a reputation for fierce ambition? Perhaps, but also because Erasmus (as Mankiewicz would well have known) was even more provincial -- as only the outer boroughs of New York can be provincial -- than Eve Harrington's childhood Wisconsin. "Phoebe" is another Eve and equally naive and countrified. She's a doppelganger on deck, a secret sharer in ovo, a Mr Hyde in the making; she's also defensive, megalomaniacal, unsophisticated, slightly loony, and ruthless. And so it was an excellent decision to root her in EHHS, where at least 20% of the students, if I remember correctly, had almost exactly the same traits of character.   

 

 

Whores

This reminiscence will not mean much to anyone but my born-and-bred-in-Brooklyn readers. 

One of my smart schoolyard buddies, Jimmy Nolan, won a scholarship to Columbia. He was a year or two older than I, and the first of our gang/crowd to venture out of the neighborhood. The summer after his first college year, we were sitting in front of the candy store, drinking egg creams and practicing our spitting, when someone asked Jimmy "what's it like up there." "Up there" was the far north, Morningside Heights, in Manhattan, where Columbia was located -- the end of the earth, kind of. Jimmy said, "You might not believe this, but up there they pronounce "hua," "hor."

I remember thinking, why would they do so?  Don't they know any better?

"Rio Grande" (1950) Then and Now

Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. 

In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to take in a double bill on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  It was a good way for our harried mothers to dispose of us for four hours -- and on the cheap, inasmuch as the price of admission was only fourteen cents. 

"Rio Grande" was a perfect kind of urchin movie. Good guys (cavalry) versus bad guys (Indians), lots of action, no overt sex. It offered much too much singing, but the slow periods would have been enlivened by hoots, whistles, popcorn-throwing, banging the head of the kid in the seat in front of you with the heel of your hand, primitive pre-flirting, and chasing in the aisles.

In 1950, Maureen O'Hara (John Wayne's estranged wife), was puzzling if not inexplicable  -- merely an impediment to the action. Sixty years later, she is beautiful, dignified, even majestic. The poor Apaches, who for me and for my heedless comrades were nothing other than targets for cavalry bullets, are now unutterably tragic. John Wayne was then an immensely heroic figure, but with the passing of years. he has become a rigid incompetent dope. 

The West, in those days, was part Monument Valley, part myth;  now I live in a West that has nothing to do with Coney Island Avenue, even less with John Ford.  

Dentists I Have Known

When I was a child, there were two neighborhood dentists.  One was named Caress and the other was named Yankowitz.  My parents chose Nathan Caress, possibly for onomastic reasons, but they might have made a mistake;  Nathan Caress should have been called Nathan Butcher.  Dentistry sixty years ago was much inferior to dentistry today, especially in our dark corner of the universe.  There was no anaesthetics, no novacaine.  Baby teeth that developed cavities were summarily yankowitzed with a pair of what looked like industrial pliers.  Adult teeth that needed repair were excavated with a low-speed mechanical drill, then sterilized with carbolic acid, and filled with a mercury compound that has over the years not doubt lowered my IQ by dozens or scores of points. Dentistry was painful. No, it wasn't painful, it was torture.  Dr. Caress, whose office was in the living room of his house on Rugby Road, had a big black ugly mole on his left cheek. I studied that mole for many too many hours.

Sometime in my early teens I was sent to an orthodontist, Irving Pollack, who had a very official suite of rooms in a high-rise on Joralemon Street, a subway ride away.  I am grateful to him because, although he made a miserable adolescence even more miserable, his "appliances" helped keep my mismatched, askew anthology of teeth in my head.  In fact, I have all but one of them to this day.  

No thanks to my next dentist, T. Gorfein of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a genuine criminal who asserted that I had twenty-two cavities and set out to fill them. I left him after a couple of weeks, not because I was wise enough to suspect that he was  a cheat, but because while he was working on me, he called over his assistant and said -- genuine historical quote coming here -- "Would you look at that sucker bleed."  At the university clinic, the dentist to whom I was assigned could find only two cavities, which she (my first female practitioner) painlessly filled. I must have had other dental experiences before Colorado's Amiot and Johnson, both of whom were competent but both of whom insisted on talking Republican nonsense to defenseless me while my mouth was filled with equipment and fat fingers. Johnson left a crown too high, causing enormous pain; searching for an alternative for his ham-handedness, I remembered that I had bus-commuted with a dental student who seemed intelligent. She became a dentista of high regard for many years until she took very early retirement from the trade -- I never knew why. She sold her practice to another competent woman who charges outrageous sky high prices for her services, but keeps me healthy.

So the score as we head into overtime:  one fake tooth, two root canal jobs, a couple of tender spots, two unerupted wisdom teeth waiting to cause trouble, but unabated ability to eat and enjoy corn on the cob. Nevertheless, lots of residual Caress-caused nervousness every time I need to see someone in the tooth business.  

More tooth news:

Miss Dusenberry

Miss Dusenberry, an English teacher at Erasmus Hall High School, was a formidable presence.

It was 1954 or 1955 and I was a junior, carrying just sixteen years of experience on my skinny back. To my shy, inhibited self, Miss Dusenberry (Edna? Grace?) was perceived as ancient (50s), statuesque (5' 10"), domineering (she spoke authoritatively on all things literary) and wildly eccentric. She wore fragrant cosmetics and bedecked herself with so many bracelets and bangles that, striding imperiously around the room, she jingled atonally and constantly.

My schoolwork did not please her. Miss Dusenberry derailed my educational career, demoting me from the honors track in English (where the bright students were grouped and where lessons were taught) to the general track where classrooms were disorderly, students ranged from noncompliant to sociopathic, and it was assumed that nothing would be learned, and it wasn't.

Yesterday, on an odd nostalgic impulse, I re-read Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown for the first time in close to sixty years. The story is more shocking to me now than it could possibly have been in the 50s, when I had no background to understand puritanism or the manichean view of the world. The story is more alarming in what it takes for granted about American culture than for what it consciously critiques. Hawthorne's world is not and never has been, my America. 

Not only was I distressed by the story, but my mind flew back, or regressed, to Miss Dusenberry herself, who tried to present the story to unsophisticated, un-empathetic me back there in the Duke Snider/Joe McCarthy/Sid Caesar era. No wonder that I flopped in Miss D's class. Good grief, was I ever unwordly/unPuritan! On my intellectual horizon, the big worry was whether Roy or Gil might go hitless two days in a row. I had not the merest tad of experience (or even reading) to bring to bear on the elucidation of a dark allegorical treatment of severe Calvinist soul-sickness. Didn't, for that matter, know what Christians were talking about, except that the women and the kids dressed up and went to mass on Sundays (in our Neapolitan and Sicilian immigrant neighborhood, men stayed home and washed the car). There were no devils, real, imaginary, or allegorical in my deep, mysterious forests -- and no forests either, in concrete Brooklyn. I had no concept of spiritual despair or sin or damnation or salvation or any such things -- still don't in fact -- not in any personal way. 

Anyway, back in Erasmus Hall, Miss Dusenberry led the class through some stories by Hawthorne. We might even have read The House of Seven Gables -- that other novel, the one with the A-word, would have been far too sexual and embarrassing. Then came the unit exam and that's when the allegorical world of Calvinism hit the fan of naive Flatbush literalism. The topic on which we were assigned to write an in-class essay was -- "Is there balm in Gilead?"

I got to tell you, I was buffaloed. 

It's easy to look back now, sixty years later, and translate Miss Dusenberry's question into "in Hawthorne's view, is there hope for spiritual redemption in a fallen universe?" An invitation, I must say, to turn the bullshittery up to eleven. But I didn't know the word "balm" and I had never heard of "Gilead." I didn't know the hymn and I most certainly didn't know that there was any such thing as a Book of Jeremiah which contained relevant dark sentences to be interpreted allegorically or mystically.

So I failed, ignominiously. Not the worst failure of my childhood -- being thrown out at home plate when I had been sent in as a pinch-runner was a far greater ignominy. But to tell truth, I've never made my peace with Miss Dusenberry. Her bangles occasionally rattle my sleep.

Hawthorne? well, I've just kind of set him to one side.  

Childhood Memory and Prolegomenon to Any Future Epistemology

I would have been six or seven years old, so it was 1945 or 1946. I was visiting the apartment at 334 Eastern Parkway where my grandmother lived with Aunt Mollie. Mollie and my father were engaged in an earnest conversation of which I understood not a whit. I suspect that they were speaking the language of the old country. Very likely they didn't want me to know what they were saying.

I was on the floor studying what I now realize was some sort of halftone illustration. Perhaps a magazine illustration -- something from Life or Look or Collier's. Halftone is a style of reproduction in which a picture is comprised of a myriad of tiny dots. When halftones are done inexpensively, as in comic books, the dots are plainly visible. When they're done expertly, they're almost beyond the perception of the human eye. But they're not invisible to the inspection of a small child.

I said to my father and to my aunt something to the effect that "if you look at this picture closely, you can see a lot of dots." I passed the illustration to my father. He said, "No, there are no dots there." I said, "Look again. I can see dots."  He looked again and so did Mollie. "Nope, no dots," they both agreed. They handed back the picture and resumed their discussion. I had been, in modern terms, totally dissed.  

"Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?" says Chicolini in Duck Soup.

I was shocked. My father, whom I knew to be correct in all things -- to deny the existence of something that I could plainly detect. And my aunt as well. Two adults, neither one who had ever been wrong about anything! What was going on here? What was a child to think? It was a moment of great revelation, and a turning point in my worldly experience.

Well, I wasn't about to argue with such formidable figures. But I knew in my heart that I was right and they were wrong, wrong, wrong.

I also knew that I had to choose between Authority and my own senses. And of course I chose sensation. The picture was made out of dots, no matter what they said.

But my infant mind did not rest. At that moment, I knew that I would never ever put blind trust in authority, never again. If my own father couldn't see the dots and I could, then how could I believe anything that was contrary to the evidence of my senses. My infant bosom got its back up, and I became a skeptic -- and I've remained a skeptic.

It was not until many years later that I realized that the senses themselves could be untrustworthy.  But by that time, my habits were fixed. In a contest between authority and the evidence of the senses -- it would be sense all the way.  

"Cat Got Your Tongue"

So it was 1946 and I was in first grade in P. S. 217 and I must have been throwing my massive seven-year-old weight around because one of the "class mothers" took me aside and accused me of quote picking on unquote her dear son Michael who was at least six inches taller than poor poor pitiful skinny me. I remember that I was astonished and taken aback but that I was still in my own head poised enough to think, what a jerk Michael must be to tell on me to his mother -- although frankly I don't know now and didn't know then what I could have done to earn her enmity or deserve the reproach. I was innocent! What I remember most clearly is that I was rendered quite speechless when Michael's mommy asked an explanation or apology from me and especially that she two or several times demanded of me, scornfully, "what's the matter, cat's got your tongue? Cat's got your tongue?" I had never heard that expression before and didn't know what it meant, but it sure added a deal of mystery to the confrontation. My tongue was still in my mouth and not in the possession of some feline and I was neither clever enough nor bold enough to stick it out at her. 

What does it mean, "Cat's got your tongue." It's still a mystery to me even today. Interestingly enough, the expression isn't of ancient origin and apparently dropped to earth only in the late nineteenth century. It's a puzzle, though. Why a cat?  But then, why "cat's pajamas?" Why "cat o' nine tails?" Why "cat's meow?"

In any case, I was nonplussed that Michael's mommy spoke to me so obscurely and I was indignant to be accused of misbehavior. In fact, sixty plus years later I'm still indignant.   

Is it possible that the cat-and-tongue episode stimulated my interest in language? 

I really don't know why this antique event swam out of the dark backward and abysm of the past. Just yesterday, when I mentioned it to Mrs Dr. Metablog, she recalled that one day, also in 1946, when she was in elementary school and she was not sitting as still as we were then expected to sit, she was accused of having "ants in her pants."  She's indignant.     

Some Mondegreens

When, In a Canterbury bar many years ago, I ordered a cider, the East Kent cockney bartender responded with a question that I interpreted as "strong Boer what knees?" Why would he ask me about the joints of a South African farmer? I was absolutely befuddled even when he repeated the question several times. Finally, in frustration, he held up two bottles of cider: the first was labeled "Strongbow" and the second "Watney's." He was simply asking me if I preferred Strongbow or Watney's -- but how was I to know?  Some years afterward I mentioned this incident to an English friend who countered with a story of her own. On her first visit to New York City, she said, she ordered a sandwich and the counterman asked her "fur rear oughta go?"

I recalled these events while musing on two moments of childhood linguistic extremity. The first was when I asked one of my P. S. 217 friends what they did during Religious Instruction (in the 1950s, Roman Catholic kids were released from class for two hours a week to study at the local parish church, which in my neighborhood was St. Rose of Lima -- popularly known as "Roe Salima."  Our teachers took the opportunity to catch up on the local newspapers while students twiddled the collective thumb). My friend's answer, "Cat kiss 'em." It was many years before I understood that the word I had no hope of understanding was "catechism." I was even more puzzled when a Jewish student, who could not know that I came from a family that regularly celebrated Yom Kippur with a roast pork dinner, asked me, "do you put on to fill in?" I construed the question to be some sort of insult, but after a decade or so I realized that I had been asked something rather serious: "Do you put on tefillin? -- tefillin being small leather boxes containing biblical verses donned by observant Jews during morning prayers.

In my neighborhood, it was common for people to shout "doozie pots" at each other.  I had no idea what that expression meant, except for a strong feeling that it wasn't praise. It was not until I studied a little Italian that I understood that what I heard as "doozie pots" was a Sicilian variant of tu sei pazzo, "you're crazy."

None of these misunderstandings, strictly speaking, meet the mondegreen threshold;  let's call them near-mondegreens. (The best-known mondegreen is "I led the pigeons to the flag" -- a mishearing of "I pledge allegiance to the flag." The word mondegreen derives from one of the Child ballads: "They hae slain the Earl of Murray/ And laid him on the green," the second of these lines misheard as "And Lady Mondegreen"). In my long list of personal mondegreens, the two that are most vivid in my memory are connected to my incomprehension of religion.  They are a) the luscious "round young virgin" of Silent Night, and b) the theologically implausible "The Lord is ice, the Lord is made of ice" in one of the choruses of The Messiah ("even so in Christ, shall we be made alive"). Here's another mondegreen from my childhood:  "Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement?" March 12:  Last night at dinner, I remarked  that one of my favorite innovations of the second half of the twentieth century was "fitted sheets."  A guest said, "You're right;  we didn't used to have feta cheese." 

Haute Cuisine, c. 1945

A friend of long standing (a Shakespeare scholar) has posted a recipe for a dish that she calls grieven but which was known as gribbinis in our part of the world. It was a staple of my childhood, perhaps even my favorite food. Gribbinis also linked me to my grandma. Inasmuch as she didn't speak the only language I knew, it was natural and appropriate for us to bond over food. 

"Accumulate a cup or two of chicken fat. Render the fat in a pan with about an equal amount of chopped onion. Slowly heat the fat and onions over a low flame, being careful not to let the mixture ignite. The onion will turn golden, then brown, and some of the fat will become crisp."

My friend suggests serving the resulting mixture over mashed potatoes, but for grandma and me the preferred vehicle was a hefty portion of about 3/4 grated black radish and 1/4 onion--along with some black bread to sop up the grease. I thought it was a delicacy for a king, not knowing, then, that it was a dish for an impoverished  peasant in a Ukrainian shtetl.    

Black radish? Not a vegetable familiar to you? Black on the outside, white on the inside, turnip-size. Very, very, very, pungent. Not widely used here in North America, nowadays, but apparently still common in eastern Europe, where mouths are more acclimated than ours to allyl isothiocyanates. 

Whenever I'm among folks who make a fetish of  food preparation, I fantasize about taking them home and plunking down a trough-size trencher of black radish, onions, and gribbinis. 

Would that be hostility? Possibly, just the merest tad. Or perhaps just a need to remind myself where I came from when, perchance, I find myself among tender and exquisite palates.

Another P.S. 217 Picture

Is it my imagination, or did we mature later in those days than kids do now?  These handsome juveniles are thirteen and fourteen years old.  To my eyes, the girls look barely half-grown, the boys variable but distinctly unfledged.

Claire R., who sent me the picture (thanks so much, Claire!!), looks womanly, but the others --not far out of childhood.  The boys in the second row look as though adolescence has not yet begun to rear its unhandsome head. 

Want to know the names of these unpromising lads and lasses?  Search here.  

I

My First Racist

There was this nasty kid in our class at P. S. 217, back there in the Flatbush '50s. I'm not going to name names, but if anyone is cares to look, you can tell him by his superior, know-it-all smirk in the picture of our eighth grade graduating class. For convenience, I'll call this guy K. K was not particularly smart, or athletic, or talented, or attractive, or congenial, so he was quite a way down the social pole, a resident of the land of the nebbishes. But to give him his due, he was intense, dogged, hard-working, and perpetually argumentative. He was not afraid to offend. He took positions that no one else in the schoolyard supported. I remember him haranguing me on the subject of social security. It was a bad thing, he asserted, because his father could make more money by investing on his own rather than contributing to the pot. "But, but, but...," I remember stuttering, "it's insurance, and not everyone is a good investor." This exchange must have taken place during the Truman years. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard, where everyone was the child or grandchild of immigrants, FDR was our guy and social security was a revolutionary improvement in the quality of life. Wasn't it the case that my widowed grandmother received $32 a month from social security -- not sufficient to live on, surely, but a great help, enough to pay her rent? To argue against social security -- where in the world did K get such weird, off-the-track ideas?  Plus, equally astonishing, K was an enthusiastic Yankees fan. What an unholy, contrarian jerk!

Then K disappeared for a month or a year -- some period of time, I can't remember exactly how long. He had relatives in a southern city -- Baltimore, I believe -- and he lived with them for an extended while. When he returned, he starting spouting the most grotesque racist claptrap. It's engraved on my memory:  "they have a lot of uppity blacks down there, they won't even get off the sidewalk for you." Whoa, daddy. First of all, no one said "blacks" in those days -- they were "Negroes." And second -- "uppity?" I had never heard the term before and was shocked out of my skull. And "get off the sidewalk" --WTF???  These were words and sentiments far beyond my experience or conception, beyond anything I had ever heard uttered in our part of the universe. I was offended and flabbergasted. Remember, dear readers, that the only person more sacred to P. S. 217 schoolyarders than FDR was Jackie Robinson. It was from K that I first heard the grotesque sentence, "Would you want one to marry your sister?"

I tell you, I gave K a lot of room after those conversations. Truth to tell, there was no need for our paths to cross -- we weren't in the same classes and K didn't play softball or basketball -- as I said, he was pretty much of a klutz.  

Recently I looked up K on the internet. He's a retired professor of economics and is a "fellow" at a right-wing think tank. He's made a career out of opposing third-world development and supporting "free market solutions" to all our ills. That dogged dullness has produced a number of books. I've even found a picture of him -- where he was once flabby and pimpled, he's now bald and sleek, with a malevolent cast to his eye. 

There's always been a connection in my mind between conservatism and racism. The link is narcissism. "I've got mine, let "them" take care of themselves." For the Ks of the world, it's not "how do we take care of less fortunate and of our old people?"  It's, "how do 'we' deal with 'them.'"  And "they" are usually, almost always, darker-skinned than "we."  I'm sure that K would deny that his "free-market" views have anything to do with racism. But I know better -- I was there at the beginning, before K became quite so sleek.  

P.S 217 Prosopography

After the passage of oh-so-many years, I've become shamelessly curious to know what happened to the friends and classmates who graduated from P. S. 217 in June of 1952. There were about 175 of these golden lads and lasses, and you can see their pictures here.

I know just enough to pique my curiousity. Lester Silberman became a gynecologist, Stephen Lewin an editor, Herman Bressel was career navy, George Coven an entrepreneur, Fred Litto a professor in Brazil, Buddy Sogluizzo a librarian, Melvin Polay a CPA.  Allen Guday emigrated to Israel and Stuart Blickstein to South Carolina.  Nicky Antonucci died in Korea.  But I have no information on 90% of the boys and 100% of the girls.  Hey, guys and gals, check out the pictures and help me track down those missing members of the class of 1952.  Where the heck are you?  What have you been doing since 1952? 

We're all 70 years old;  It's now or never.    

Am I the only one who's curious? 

Number 44 and Number 42

I'm jubilant that, come January 20, we'll once again have a president whose brain waves are dancing, who can bring an English sentence to completion, and who understands that America consists of much more than the Bushian roster of Fortune 500 executives, evangelicals, know-nothings, high school dropouts, gay-bashers, neocon imperialists, dittoheads, gun nuts, military contractors, upward redistributionists, fetus-worshipers and health insurance profiteers. The new president will abandon the present system of government (trust the market -- capitalism is always right!) and return us to the world of evidence and reason. Quite the revolution, isn't it?  And speaking of revolutions, the new president, if you haven't heard, is black (or to be more accurate, black-and-white, which is this country still means, in defiance of all logic, black). How splendid to bury a long-standing racial taboo. Nothing makes me prouder than that we've elected an African-American, Kenyan-Kansan president. With a brain. 

The election of Barack Obama brought me back to hometown Brooklyn of sixty-one years ago. I was eight years old on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson "broke the color barrier." It was Jackie on first or Jackie running the bases that alerted me to the idea that I lived in a conflict-riven society. We (family, friends, neighbors, writers for the Brooklyn Eagle) were enthusiastic about Jackie, but there were those reactionaries and bigots in other cities who were convinced that their world had just come to an end. No question but that the advent of Jackie Robinson was the major formative political experience of my early childhood -- even though it was decades before I could fully appreciate its cosmic significance.   

In my mind, and I think in the minds of others of my generation, there's a direct line from Jack Roosevelt Robinson to Barack Hussein Obama. Two smart, skilled performers; two ferocious but very cool competitors. Two very courageous gentlemen.Two barriers busted all to smithereens.Two milestones in American history. Never the latter if hadn't hadn't been for the former.    

Jackie's fabulously athletic body fell apart early and he died young of diabetes. He was born in 1918, and if he had been blessed with longevity, he would have been ninety years old today.   

Wouldn't that have been a pretty picture -- Jackie Robinson, frail, gray, stooped, leaning on his cane, but still in possession of that marvelous knowing glint in his coal black eyes, sitting right there on the platform in front of the United States Capitol, a tear on his cheek while Barack Obama holds up his hand and swears to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America. I see it oh so clearly in my mind's eye. It gladdens my fond old heart. 

CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend Otis Jefferson Brown reminds me of the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods. It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a child of Bay Ridge, was trudging his shining morning face to P.S. 102. Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA. The city -- New York City, especially Brooklyn  -- was electric with excitement. Headlines, victory parades, and demonstrations in all the neighborhoods. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- were great events in the public sphere but of even greater moment in our 9th Street home.  Back in the 1920s, my father had attended CCNY for a year, but like so many of the sons of impoverished immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team. Would he have made the varsity? Who can tell? He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the earliest stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later. So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the wooden Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo. My father, generally a restrained man, was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be. Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but they were all achieved by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers. Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as those of Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces. The CCNY players, or many of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread. There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials. O the shame!

My father was devastated. Although in size he was just a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

My father turned the disgrace into a morality play. Every day, for years it seems in retrospect, I listened to still another passionate sermon about keeping to the straight and narrow. (Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot; I could miss shots on my own. But I knew what he meant.)   

I've now read Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]). It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book, but it does help to put things in perspective. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little American nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg. It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to scapegoat the corruption onto big city immigrant depravity. It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes. Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments because the evidence against the Red Men was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood. And still a great sadness after all these years. But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback. It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home. And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes: Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Dick McGuire, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

More P. S. 217 1952 Graduates

Searching the out-of-the-way corners of this ol' house that we are leaving behind after thirty-five years, I discovered a mutilated copy of The Log, an eight-page mimeographed pamphlet produced by students of P.S. 217 in June of 1952.  The entries seem to have been written not by the students but by the teachers and  were designed to inculcate a moral. For example: "Class 8-1 has made many things in cooking, shop, sewing and arts and crafts. The girls under the supervision of Miss Willig have baked many good cookies and cakes while the boys, under the supervision of Mr. Kaminsky have made expertly constructed pieces of furniture. In grammar we have learned to diagram long sentences and are beginning to excel at it. On Graduation Day, when the girls wear their beautiful organdy dresses which they themselves made, they will be very grateful for the instructions they received from Mrs. Ennis." The bottom line: "you may have run wildly amok, you horrid little creatures, and created ruckus after ruckus, but some day you'll appreciate us, we hope hope hope."

Also In The Log,  and far more interesting and useful than the forced feeding of pre-nostalgia, is a list of the 1952 graduates of our fabled elementary school.

A month or so ago, I posted on this blague a formal picture of the assembled graduates, and, with the help of a committee of distinguished volunteer mnemosynists, was able to identify about half of the members of the class. With the discovery The Log, I am now able to to list the remaining students who graduated from P. S. 217 that last Truman June.  Here's hoping that my enthusiastic comrades will now be able to assign faces to the following seventy-seven most musical names: Carol Berse, Diane Goldberg, Norma Harris, Rosalind Symons, Sheila Slovis, Dorothy Steinfeld, Sara Steinman, Harriet Young, Robert Derwin, Harold Schienkoff, Myron Sklar, Maryann Abrahams, Sheila Carp, Ria DeCastri, Anita Friedman, Ricki Gottlieb, Marcia Katz, Sheila Katz, Sandra Kopelton, Rochelle Miller, Diane Spatz, Janet Solomon, Eleanor Troy, Appolonia Yacovelli, Carole Zietlin, Thomas Bellavita, Donald Carbone, Joseph Cassano, Robert Cohen, John McKay, Arne Neilson, Toby Anker, Renee Dickson, Sylvia Gordon, Francine Herskowitz, Marguerite McGinty, Florence Rosenthal, Yvette Rosenthal, Doris Sippel, Hope Steuer, Michael Gerber, Alan Lipis, Stuart Stillman, Stanley Weinberg, Michael Welch, Carol Coniglio, Carol Gerber, Marline Gold, Leah Goodman, Evelyn and Norma Greenberg, Laurie and Roberta Katcher, Selma Schnier, Edith Snyder, Robert Goldstein, Leslie Shernoff, Barbara Bider, Ann Cacioppa, Sheryl Jerome, Patricia McCabe, Marilyn Snow, Barbara Williams, Ruth Wintheil.

Identifications as well as news of our friends and companions are solicited.  Who are these people?  What paths in life, glorious life, did they tread?  Did they embark on careers of baking, or furniture making, or sewing long dresses?  Did they ever truly excel at diagramming long sentences? Your contributions are most welcome. 

P. S. 217 Graduating Class: June, 1952

On your left is the official photograph of the 1952 P. S. 217 eighth grade graduating class, contributed by a classmate who now teaches in Brazil. (Click to enlarge). It's quite the time capsule, isn't it -- the dated costumes, the old-fashioned hairstyles, along with the clean-cut and dewy enthusiasm of far-away-and-long-ago youth. What has become of these promising young people? Some of them have long since left the planet and some are no doubt still engaged in distinguished careers. Do any of them still live in the old neighborhood?  Sent their children or grandchildren to the old school?   

A panel of experts has tentatively identified some of the graduates. Some of these ascriptions are sure to be inaccurate. Corrections, suggestions and comments are very welcome. 

FIRST ROW, left to right:  Carl Bernstein, Robert F. Cohen (now Robert C. Forst, attorney, Montecito, CA), Michael Silver (ret. stockbroker, Queens), Michael Gerber, Nicholas Antonucci (said to have died in Korea), Arne Neilson, unknown, unknown, William Roberts, unknown, George Coven (entrepreneur, owner of Score Oil and Zodiac nightclub, d. 1983), Ralph Tromba, supposedly living in steamy Florida, Theodore (Teddy) Schorr;  SECOND ROW: Ira Bernstein, Bernard Sandigorsky, Anthony (Buddy) Sogluizzo (semi-retired from a career in librarianship), Elihu Pearlman (Boulder, Colorado), Helene Rosen, Sylvia Gordon, Harold Jacobson, Fred Ljubicich, Donald Carbone, Michael Brody;  third row: Ann Cacioppa, Ria De Castri, Claire Rabinowitz (now Claire Maret, formerly Dominican Republic, now Orlando), Charlotte Meineke, Carol Gerber, Marlene Gold, Ruth Rubinstein, Eleanor Troy, Sheila Katz, Carol Coniglio, Barbara Heiferman, Maureen Haynes, two unknowns, Josephine Casalino, unknown, unknown, Mary Anne Abrahams, Sandra Abrahams;  fourth row: Yvette Rosenthal, Beryl McLeod, Sandra Roseman, unknown, Anita Friedman, Karen Scheer, Jeanne Boyce, Barbara Dinner, Bridget Pugliese, Carol Zeitlin,  Marjorie Rennick, Selma Schnier, unknown, Wendy Rosenberg, Mimi Shyko, Barbara Wolowitz, Evelyn and/or Norma Greenberg, unknown, Leah Goodman, Rochelle Yasser, Ruth Wintheil, Beverley Leventhal, Lori Katcher (now Laurie Lindner, psychoanalyst, NJ), two unknowns, Hilda Tarud;  fifth row: Herbie Wessoly aka Percy Wessoly, Albie Luongo, Donald Schiebel, Daniel Roos (Prof at MIT), Thomas Bellavita, John McKay, Alan Lipis, Robert Goldstein (retired orthodontist, now of Asheville, NC), Alan Ihrig, Lester Silberman (ret NE ob/gyn), Harvey Greif, Melvin Polay (CPA, died 1996) Howard Nirenberg, Morton Kamienny, Eric Sanders, Herbert Damsky, unknown, unknown, Melvyn Krauss, Martin Wallenstein;  SIXTH ROW:  Anne Perkins, Linda Bly, Francine Hershkowitz, unknown, Diane Spatz, Appolonia Yacovelli, three unknowns, Pauline Aridas, Estelle Tarman, Lisa Pomerance (finance, LA), Phyllis Mancuso, Roberta Katcher, unknown, Janet Solomon, four unknowns, Marcia and/or Virginia Gargiulo, unknown, Evelyn Fleishner, unknown; SEVENTH ROW: Stuart Blickstein (now a South Carolinian), Allen Guday (longtime Israeli), Paul Citron, Stuart (Sandy) Stillman (atty, Southampton and Scottsdale), Donald Caress (MD), Carl Sprung, Norman Young, Jonathan Guliner, Michael O'Gorman, Stephen Lewin (ret from a career in publishing), Edwin Lawlor, Stanley Weinberg, George Molinari, Allan Stern, Robert Jaclin, unknown, Fredric Litto (Prof in Brazil), Fred Hohl, Richard Schwartz, Stephen Richard Conn (Cornell grad; deceased); EIGHTH ROW: Barbara Williams, Marcia Katz, Judith Peretzman, Norma Harris, Diane Wert, Marilyn Snow, unknown, Dolores Bormann, Rosalind Simons, unknown, Loretta Tillman; top row:  Alfred Podhurst, Michael Welch, unknown, Ira Blum, Herman Bressel (USN ret, Long Beach, CA), Norman Kaufman, unknown, unknown, unknown, Kenneth Tucker aka Drupiloff, Gary Steinberg, Charles Gillen.  

May 14, 2008.  More names of members of this class have been recovered.  They can be found at this site,  Match the name to the face and win the eternal gratitude of your classmates.

The Kent Theater/ Sex

I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.   

Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood. Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student). In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing. 

But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed. I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory. The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts. In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.   

It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time. Well, not exactly Bergman himself. It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention. Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films. 

Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette. All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again -- it might even have been a double feature -- and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture. How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends. 

In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view. Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe. I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years. Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.

Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.

"Cautionary" Songs of the 1950s

A while back, I recalled that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, students at P. S. 217 in Flatbush were force fed patriotic and religious music. I've now remembered (perhaps it's the DHA) that we were also indoctrinated with songs that could be called "cautionary."  For example: do not chase a bouncing ball into the street, because while you could get a new ball, but "you can't always get a new leg."

I also remember a lyric in which we were exhorted to solicit divine intervention, and which contained these deistic lines: "Pray in any language, to Him they all are dear/ Pray for it is music to His ear." It was this same song, I believe, in which we were allowed the ecumenical freedom to pray "in temple, mosque, or tabernacle,/ He won't need to search."  (I had heard of temples, but the word "mosque" was beyond my ken and "tabernacle" was a complete mystery, though it had warm associations with "pumpernickel.")

Does anyone out there in Bloglandia remember either of these songs?  Or other cautionary songs from the old days? They don't google. Any information or citations will be much appreciated.

Incidentally, despite the well-meant advice, I pursued many a rubber ball into the street. Nor was I ever once moved to pray in a consecrated building, except perhaps in Ebbets Field, and then only in tough ninth-inning situations. 

A Scene from my Youth

 
This Here is a photograph of Coney Island Avenue, the grim commercial thoroughfare along which I crept to school unwillingly like snail between the years 1944 and 1952. The unknown photographer who left us this record stood at the corner of Newkirk Avenue, just in front of the P. S. 217 schoolyard, and pointed his camera north toward Ditmas Avenue. It's the east side of the street; on the west side stood a used-car lot and a gas station, where, if the view were more panoramic, signs reading "Veedol" and "Mechanic on Duty" would have been visible.

It takes only a few seconds of detective work to date the photograph. In the center is the marquee of the Leader Theater, which advertises the 1947 release It Happened in Brooklyn, a soldier-returns-home musical with Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Peter Lawford, and especially Jimmy Durante, who was clearly the neighborhood favorite.  The second feature, Undercover Maisie, a policier with Ann Sothern and Barry Nelson, was released in the same year. (The double bill was standard -- and at 14 cents for kids and a quarter for adults, a darn good value). It's early autumn not only because the ivy and, in the distance, a Norway maple are still in full leaf, but because the Casa del Rey advertises High Holy Day services (the orthodox congregation's synagogue on 18th Avenue had not yet been constructed). I would guess that the large traffic sign that dominates the frame has something to do with the fact that the old trolley tracks had recently been removed. The shops near the Leader are too small to identify, but I remember Singer's drug store, Safier's candy store, a shoe repair place, a small liquor store owned by P. V. Melia, and Joe Montuori's barber shop.  At the moment the camera snapped, I was eight years old, in Mrs. Sherwood's third grade class at P. S. 217. 

The architecture is hodge-podge -- the featureless apartment house and shops, the vaguely deco Leader, and then, closer to the camera, the what-the-heck-is-it-doing-there Moorish Casa del Rey (for weddings and other gatherings;  I passed it thousands of times but never once entered).

The man at the right of the frame, jingling his car keys in the pocket of his voluminous slacks, stares at the camera unenthusiastically.

It's a dreary picture, I'm afraid. Gray. A nondescript street in a nondescript neighborhood.   

I'm trying, but I just can't seem to work up the requisite nostalgia for the old country. 

Summers at Sears Rosebush

I worked for Sears, Roebuck and Company at its warehouse on Utica Avenue during the summers of 1957, 1958 and 1959. The job lasted for ten or twelve weeks each year and I was paid $1.25 an hour for the first two summers and then was catapulted to $1.30 for the third. At 40 hours a week, I could, in theory, earn $50 a week and take home $40, but Sears managed to calculate it so that I had worked 39 hours or 38.5 hours. Always less than forty. I was routinely baffled and disappointed by my pay envelope. I'm utterly convinced that the time clock was rigged, but there was no one to whom to protest, and if I had made a fuss, I wouldn't have won my case anyway. No one did. (It might seem frivolous to worry about a few cents, but cents mattered a lot more in the 50s than they do now. Ten weeks at $40 amounts to $400. When I entered Cornell in 1956, tuition cost $450 a semester and a half of a double room in the dorm for the year was $315. At college, I survived on chocolate malts ($.25), hamburgers ($.25), and an occasional celebratory cheeseburger ($.30).)

At the Sears warehouse, my job was to pinch hit for people who were absent for their annual two-week vacations. I performed a variety of services of which I have clear memories of just two. I was a substitute "receiver" on the loading dock where I kept records of railroad cars and tried to minimize "dunnage." A second job: I operated the manual telephone switchboard, inserting jacks into receptacles in order to complete a connection; it's stunning to remember that such equipment, now seen in old black-and-white movies and found only in museums of early technology, was still in wide use. I can't remember my other jobs, except that each one took about two hours to learn, was interesting for a day, but stupefyingly boring for the remainder of the two-week stint. I developed real sympathy for the people who were Sears lifers. What a test of will to come to work every day, year in and year out, to the tedious rote dehumanizing employment that the warehouse provided! Job satisfaction? I doubt that anyone, employee or employer, had stumbled upon such a concept, let alone given it an instant's thought.

The warehouse stocked "big-ticket" items: washing machines, dryers, and reefers (refrigerators). Day one: sales orders were sorted and routed; day two: goods were pulled and lined up on the dock in the reverse of the order in which they would be delivered; day three: items were loaded onto trucks and sent out to various Brooklyn neighborhoods. The system worked well but there were always crises when a particular model in a particular color wasn't available. It might be impossible for this generation of youth to believe, but in those pre-civil rights years Sears didn't sell refrigerators at a fixed rate. Salesmen (at the main store on Flatbush Avenue) received 11% of the negotiated price on an item and therefore had an incentive to set the figure as high as possible. It quickly became evident to me that there was a pattern: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the sale price. Moreover, 99% of big-ticket items were purchased on time. The obvious corollary: the poorer the neighborhood, the higher the negotiated rate of interest. Prices and interest were most outrageous in Bedford-Stuyvesant, at that time -- and perhaps now -- Brooklyn's Harlem. Occasionally I'd see a repossessed used model (no cardboard carton) on the loading dock. It was to be delivered as if new to Bed-Stuy. When I questioned the practice, I was told, very definitively, "Who's going to believe them?" Working for Sears was, in a word that had not yet come into existence, "radicalizing."

The warehouse was a Staszewski-Sullivan stronghold. No Italians, no Jews, no "Negroes." Well, actually, there was one African-American, but he was assigned to a broom rather than to a forklift. I didn't make any friends at the warehouse (I was chronically, disablingly shy), and although I was fearful that I might be ostracized as a "college kid," I was treated not unkindly. I suspect that my paltry wage made me an object of pity.

An embarrassing moment: Sears held a sale on cheap, shiny suits. They sold so many that I was called to the main store to help fold and pack. Even today I'm a hopelessly inadequate folder and packer. It was a nightmare. After watching me fumble for a few moments, the wives would snatch the suit impatiently from my hands. "Here, sonny, let me do that."

A good moment: I was on the ROR desk for a week or so. ROR stood for "record of return." When a refrigerator or washer came back, Sears didn't reimburse the purchase price until the ROR had been cleared. One day, bored, trying to kill some time, I was searching the desk to which I had been temporarily assigned. Stuck behind a drawer I found a misplaced three-or-four-year-old ROR, unprocessed. I called the telephone number on the ticket and asked the woman who answered if she'd ever been reimbursed for the refrigerator she had returned -- $350 or so. There was a long silence. Then the woman broke into tears and into fervent thanks. "I've been trying to get my money back from Sears for years. I've tried everything. I can't get anyone to believe me." I arranged to have the money sent to her and I felt that I had done a good deed. Not much satisfaction for three summers of employment, but something.

The principal result of doing my time at Sears: a decision to give a wide berth to the much revered "corporate sector." It's a decision that I've never regretted, not for a moment.

Writing: a Personal History

My first writing instrument was the "straight pen," which was more durable but not different in conception from the goose quill -- simply a metal nib set into a wooden dowel. It was quite a trick for a six-year-old to carry a small drop of ink from the inkwell and draw a line or circle without blotting -- especially since there was a wartime shortage of quality paper and the the stuff that was substituted was coarse and maximally absorbent. At P. S. 217, in the 1940s, each classroom had an "ink monitor," whose job was to mix a dry powder with water in a tall jug and fill all the inkwells. Every desk had an inch-in-diameter hole in the upper right corner -- southpaws were expected to conform -- with a brass fitting into which a small glass removable "well" was inserted. I got myself into serious trouble for dunking the end of one of Josephine Casalino's long black braids into my inkwell-- though I believe that I was neither the first nor only boy who succumbed to so obvious a temptation. From the perspective of 2007, it's hard to believe that dexterity with the straight pen was still part of the curriculum -- it was as though we were being prepared to clerk in some gloomy Dickensian counting-house.

I think that ballpoint pens arrived in the early 50s, but they were flighty at first and regularly leaked onto the page or in the pocket. I remember that my right thigh was dyed a perpetual blue. In 1956, setting off for college, I invested $20 in a second-hand self-styled "portable" but nevertheless very heavy Smith-Corona. I would not have plunked down so much cash if I hadn't thought that I was making the purchase of a lifetime. After all, the typewriter had represented the state of the writing art for eighty years -- ever since Remington had taken Christopher Latham Scholes' invention into the mass market -- and I had no suspicion that it would ever be superseded. Nevertheless, the mechanical typewriter was obsolete by the 1960s, when I composed a document of several hundred pages on a borrowed IBM Selectric. Not only did the electric typewriter produce a more handsome page, but it made acceptable carbon copies. (Carbon paper is unknown to younger generations and is now only found in archaeological digs; it's shocking that internet-era folks have no clue that "cc" abbreviated "carbon copy".) The heyday of the electric typewriter was brief --twenty years or so. Sometime in the early 1980s, I was introduced to word processing -- at first on an Apple 2+. Its dot-matrix printer was nasty (no true extenders) and the hazardous program took perverse pleasure in displaying ominous messages, such as "Fatal Error # 45."  After a while, I moved to Wordstar, then to WordPerfect, and now, to whatever Typepad provides for this essaylet. Could my straight-pen self have possibly imagined that I would someday amuse myself with a self-published, self-edited internet blogazine?  Meanwhile, my once-magnificent writer's bump has atrophied. It's gone the way of carbon paper and white-out. 

Information-gathering has been equally transformed. In the 1950s, data had to be painfully copied by hand onto index cards, which were easy to misplace, misfile, and misread. Sometime in the late 1960s I first started to make copies of book and journal pages -- at first using a very smelly, expensive process, the name of which I can't recall, which could only make crude and blurry negatives, but was still far more efficient than copying by hand. It wasn't long before Xerox rendered all previous copy systems obsolete.  Then came the internet which made things easier still -- although for any depth of knowledge --let's not fool ourselves -- books are still the only way.   

At a library that I patronize, someone has taken fifty or so old wooden card files and assembled them into a sculpture of sorts. It's titled Top Drawer Society. For a donation -- I haven't inquired how large -- you can have your name inscribed on a drawer's brass plate. I couldn't begin to estimate how much time I spent searching through card catalogs in my lifetime: thousands of hours, I'd guess. I never anticipated that so useful an item as a tray of cards would be transformed into mere ornament and into a gesture to an antiquated technology.

There's no question that innovations in writing and researching in my lifetime are greater than anything that's happened since Gutenberg. I now know that change will continue, but I have no more insight into the future than I did when I plied my straight pen in first grade. What could possibly be out there beyond the wordprocessing horizon? 

What We Read in the Fifties: The Amboy Dukes

During my Erasmus Hall High School years, the hottest of all "hot" books was Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes. It was official doctrine that a single oblique glance at the inflammatory cover of this paperback could transform a well-behaved kid into a murderous, reefer-crazed, oversexed hooligan. Simply to read about the "juvenile delinquents" who populate The Amboy Dukes was to wander into a criminal twilight. A guy definitely did not want his mommy to know that he had heard of this book, let alone possessed a sticky contraband copy.

What was all the fuss about?  Why was the book condemned all over America and even banned (for a while) in Canada?    

Here's a paragraph that was much brooded upon in the local schoolyard. (I've since learned that some 1950s moralists condemned it as pornographic -- and perhaps they were right.)

They pushed onto the bus, and Frank watched Black Kenny and Mike get a nice-looking broad between them and give her a rub. Mike and Kenny hemmed the girl between them, skillfully pocketing her to prevent her escape. In her eyes there was loathing and fear of the two hoodlums, who did not look at her but nevertheless pressed against her lasciviously, pinioning her against their rigid hot bodies. Mike pushed against the girl's buttocks, thighs, and legs, while Kenny pressed against her stomach and breasts. The girl wanted to scream, to cry out, but she was afraid....

Ugly to be sure, abusive, sexist, nasty, but still rather tame by later standards. It's an effort of will to remember that during the Eisenhower years, words such as "breasts" and "buttocks" were not uttered casually and that their appearance on the printed page was rare and incendiary. But I don't think it was the language alone, or even the stark portrayal of adolescents in heat that rattled polite society. It was the intrusion of viciousness in the tame 1950s father-knows-best twin-bed universe that provoked the reaction. That "nice-looking broad" whom Mike and Black Kenny molest was, or was imagined to be, some respectable family's sister or daughter. Just as the two hoods thrust themselves against the young woman, so The Amboy Dukes flaunted itself in the face of respectability. The proper middle class went to great lengths not to acknowledge that brutes such as Black Kenny and Mike were their next-door neighbors. The Eisenhower era lived in denial; there were some things that everyone knew but of which no one spoke. In The Amboy Dukes, Shulman spilled the beans. 

That's why The Amboy Dukes fascinated the guys who hung around the P. S. 217 schoolyard. Unlike our parents, we couldn't choose to deny the existence of psychopaths such as Black Kenny and Crazy Shak (the novel's rapist and murderer). Guys like that smoked and spit on every street corner and disrupted many of our classrooms. We had to negotiate with violence or with the threat of violence every day. To read The Amboy Dukes was oddly refreshing; it validated the daily reality of teen-agers who weren't gang members.

Moreover, the novel had a strong vicarious appeal. While my friends were trying to manage their hormones, keep up with their schoolwork and occasionally get in a good game of basketball or stickball, the Dukes were cutting class, punching out their teachers, smoking dope, and getting laid. Reading the novel let us share in some of that other-side-of-the-track forbidden fruit. But it allowed us to participate safely. The Amboy Dukes, like so many such scandalous publications, is at heart a cautionary novel. Frank Abbot, the central character, is a bad guy but he's appealing and not irredeemable; he goes too far, gets in over his head, and winds up dead -- a warning to all of us. The Amboy Dukes allowed "normal" kids to enjoy the novel's transgressive moments and still return safely to the nest.

Although The Amboy Dukes sold millions of copies, I couldn't find it in any of the libraries that I use. Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to buy a tattered, yellowed-pages-unglued 35-cent 1949 Avon paperback. The object itself is a piece of history. On the cover, a woman with flaming red hair resists the embraces of a dark and handsome young man. Their facial expressions (he: lustful; she: fearful) are highly melodramatic, but the pair are dressed conservatively, as though they've just returned from a day of yachting. Also on the cover are a couple of claims to literary merit: "The one book that tells the inside story of juvenile delinquency no other novel has told before." And an appeal to the moralists: "This book is emphatically a reading 'must'" --Edwin J. Lukas, Executive Director, Society for the Prevention of Crime." Finally, in almost unreadable tiny print, "This book is specially revised and edited for Avon Books" -- an admission that leads me to guess that the paperback mass edition expurgated some words or events that were deemed too strong for the kids who bought the cheap edition and concealed it inside their official three-ring binders. 

Haircuts: A History

When I was a child, haircuts were perpetrated at Joe's Barber Shop on Coney Island Avenue. It was a pleasant place: there were wall-to-wall mirrors on either side of Joe Montuori's shop, and a boy sitting in the chair could lose himself in the infinitely-regressing images. Joe always had a friend or two in the shop with whom he spoke incomprehensible rapid-fire Italian. The haircutting itself was an ordeal. Joe charged 75 cents a head, but my mother had driven a bargain: three haircuts (myself and my two brothers) for $1.80. Joe revenged himself on me by a) working the electric buzzer as rapidly as possible, and b) frequently re-arranging the angle of my head with a blow from the heel of his hand. Back home, my mother would sigh and say, "Turn around.  Let's see what he did to you this time."

I've not big on personal adornment, and, perhaps because of my early hair experiences, I've never been comfortable in the barber's seat. As soon as the cloth is fastened around my neck I feel hogtied and hopeless. "What are they going to do to me today?" Once, on the west side of Manhattan, in the late 1960s, when my hair was rather long (it seems absurd that you could signal your opposition to the war in Vietnam by letting your hair grow, but such was the case), I walked into a shop and asked the barber to "leave it long." He immediately transformed me into a rabid supporter of carpet-bombing. Also in New York: when I naively wandered into a shop with a specialized clientele, a hair technician employing a razor and a variety of gels and lotions turned me into someone whose hair was giving off signals with which the rest of his body was not in accord. In Hanover, New Hampshire, in an upstairs 'salon,' the barber suddenly stopped work, drew back, studied me for fifteen or twenty seconds, and asked, "Are you Jewish." I mumbled something about not really wanting to discuss my ethnicity with him, whereupon he launched into a disquisition of which I understood not much and remember less, except that that it involved prophecy, the Book of Isaiah, and The Hatching of the Egg. He hauled out his heavily annotated King James Version and pointed me to various passages underlined in coded colors. As it happens, I'm more conversant than most people with scripture, and so I can assert with moderate authority that his reading of the Bible was -- how shall I say -- original. It took me an hour to extricate myself from his insistent and wayward scholarship: fifteen minutes of hair-cutting and forty-five minutes of exegetical enthusiasm.   

For a decade or so, when our finances were perilous, my wife cut my hair. There were some benefits (a guy could cop a feel while being ministered to) but I must admit that although my good woman was earnest and effective, she never fully mastered tonsorial technique. She had the habit of yanking upwards on the strands with the scissors, with the result that each snip produced a stab of pain -- although nothing more intense than might have been alleviated by the injection of a dozen or score shots of novocaine directly into the scalp. And then there were the ear nicks.

After a while, I returned hair responsibility to the world of commerce. I had success for many years with Liz of Chicago Hair across town. Liz was good at her work and respected my multiple cowlicks. But then she started to raise her prices. When she reached $20, I would just hand her the Visa and ask her not to tell me what she charged. When she went to $30, I retaliated by spacing the haircuts further and further apart in order to keep my annual cost constant. But when she broached the $40 barrier, the puritan in me rebelled. I started to patronize the cheap ($14) barbershop across the street from the college. There's a rotating staff and it's hit-and-miss: sometimes the results are acceptable, sometimes disastrous.   

When I come home from the expedition, my wife says, "Let's see what they've done to you today."

And then she sighs. 

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

"A Strange Slavery to Beauty"

On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much -- which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it."  Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations.  He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads.  Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."

 

But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?"  If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful.  For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing?  Music and song.  Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion?  the dance.  Speech and language?  literature from lyric to epic to novel.  Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant.  At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay.  Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is  -- you name it -- aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies.  Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious.  The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty.  Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange;  it's universal.

 

As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty.  My moment of ascension occurred in a garden.  I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human).  One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble.  So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could.  In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over.  And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin?  Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost.  Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo.  I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden -- one of the great artistic achievements in all of America.  I was dazzled in all my senses-- it was a true epiphany.  I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria.  Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria;  I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.

 

Here are some pictures of the garden.  Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.

 

What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!

 

I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden -- or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment.  When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape.  But it's not just gardens -- the most ephemeral of art forms --to which I stand in strange slavery.  I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places.  Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand.  Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear.  The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" -- a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas.  Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight;  in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably.  And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock -- the most beautiful and holy of buildings.

 

But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent.  My tastes have evolved over the years:  Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg.  Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances.  When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again.  Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita.  Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only).  The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.

 

It's not just classical music.  I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" -- the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites:  Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams";  perhaps the best of the best:  Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You."  In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human.