RIP George Bookless

 

I learned recently from the Knox College alumni magazine of the death of George Bookless last spring.  George was a senior in my first year, 1964-5.  He was one of the older students known on campus as what was then called a public intellectual--someone involved in campus and political discourse as well as in their field of endeavor. Along with those known as literary writers,    they were role models.

There were others I remember.  Some, like Gordon Benkler, I knew of mostly through his writing and speaking, or Jim McCurry as a literary writer and scholar.  Others I knew a little, like the well-known wild man Cecil Steed, or the poet and editor of the literary magazine Jay Matson.  And others treated me as a friend, even if I was still a little in awe, like Gary McCool and Mary Jacobson. (Mary was in her third year then, so I got the chance to know her better the next year, along with Judy Dugan, Bob Misiorowski, Kevern Cameron, Gerry Roe, James Campbell and others.)  

In that first year experience, George Bookless was somewhere in between. I remember him as a public presence, but also as a witty and affable raconteur who was often in the company of Gary, Mary and their friends.  In fact, Mary Jacobson is the source of two memories.  She joked with him that after he became a great success in the world, he should endow a library for Knox, but insist they name it the Bookless Library...  It was funnier in those pre-computerized days than it is now.

The other is one of those stray memories--in the Gizmo, with the new Beatles song called "Yesterday" playing often on the jukebox, Mary laughed at the line "I'm not half the man I used to be," something George used to say that she thought was ridiculous but endearing.

But the direct memory that has stayed with me is from a day that spring, shortly before graduation when for various reasons the campus was in tumult.  I was staring at the bulletin board near the entrance of the student union after dinner when George surprised me by stopping to speak with me.  Exactly how he knew I was an aspiring literary writer I no longer recall, but he talked to me about that, quite seriously.  He offered advice and encouragement.  (The one specific piece of advice I remember is the one I didn't take--to write about my early adolescence rather than my life now, because I was too close to it.  He was right of course, but I was too emmeshed in the fast changes of the moment to yet be gripped by anything else.)

These many years later I am still astonished by the attention these older students paid me, especially this spontaneous moment with George Bookless.

The last I remember hearing of him was that he'd joined the Peace Corps, as did may Knox students I knew over the next years.  According to his extensive online obituary, he quickly wound up being witness to a civil war in Nigeria, and in essence a part of the government.  Though he was an English major with biology minor at Knox, he'd learned photography from his father, who had served in the Army Air Force photography unit.  Photography and related activities became his profession.

George visited historic Galena, Illinois on the Mississippi River to photograph eagles, and decided to make his life there.  He became an Alderman at Large and worked on many civic projects including downtown reconstruction, consistent with his advocacy and activism at Knox. 

He seems to have led a full life, with family (including two children and I count four grandchildren), a civic and community life, and life outdoors, camping, hiking and canoeing. He displayed a talent for cooking, and in their tributes, one of his children and one grandchild offered that a dish he learned to make in Nigeria remains their favorite.  I admire all of it more than I can say.

But the best image I have is of George as storyteller, which both of these tributes and the obit mention. I'll remember his kindness to me and I wanted to acknowledge it here, as well as the kindness of those other older students.  But I'll want to remember George Bookless like that: out on his Galena front porch, telling tales.

Dreaming Up Daily Quote

by Kiowa artist Stephen Mopope 1937

 “My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words…She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being….You see, for her words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold….”

N. Scott Momaday (1934-2024)

 House Made of Dawn

R.I.P. 2023

 Honoring some of the prominent people who died in the past year as I usually do seems a little hollow this time, for my thoughts are heavy with people prominent in my life who passed away in 2023, even if they are not so famous.  They were all good people, and they live in my memory.  So I can't go on to more generally recognizable names without at least mentioning them. 

 I've written previously about my uncle, Carl Severini.  I've mentioned my friend since high school, Joyce Davis (my first prom date, and first teenage kiss.)  Towards the end of the year there were more: Bernadette Cheyne and Charlie Meyers, friends from Humboldt State drama department (I wrote about them here); and most recently, Janet Morrison, who I knew first at Carnegie Mellon drama and as Margaret's close friend, and who we saw a few times more recently.   The world is a lesser place without them.

But here's at least a curtain call for people who were part of many lives, some of whom will continue to live in films, books and recordings, and some of whom will remained anchored to a particular time in our memories.

So a last hurrah to Harry Belafonte, as admirable a man as he was talented.  After stardom with The Band, Robbie Robertson explored his Native roots and wrote tantalizing film scores. He must have been an interesting guy to know.  Michael Gambon was masterful in so many roles, from his early work on The Singing Detective to the great French detective Maigret in a British TV series, to international fame as the second Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, with lots of wonderful supporting roles as well (I recall expecially his role as Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 BBC/PBS series of Jane Austen's Emma.) 

Glenda Jackson had a superb run as a movie actor, as well as a theatre actor in the UK (the only time I saw her onstage in the US was in a regrettable production of Macbeth.)  The British actor Tom Wilkinson and the American actor Alan Arkin were always worth watching in everything they did.

In an episode of NCIS, DeNozzo asks Gibbs what Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard looked like as a young man.  "Illya Kuryakin," he replied.  David McCallum of course played both, replacing the smoldering enigmatic spy with the vitality and charm of the older doctor.    

I've written at length about the timeless Tony Bennett.  I remember Jimmy Buffett and Randy Meisner (a founder of the Eagles) from the 70s, the dynamic Tina Turner from even earlier.  I met and interviewed David Crosby, not an entirely happy experience, but perhaps as much my fault as his.  I suddenly came face to face with Raquel Welch in a Manhattan bookstore--she seemed shorter than those statuesque poster poses.  

I fell absolutely in love with Melinda Dillon in Close Encounters, and though she got a bit typecast, she played her character well in Absence of  Malice. Andre Braugher and Richard Belzer I will remember from the Homicide series (though I recall Belzer even earlier as a standup comic.)  I was not a Friends fan, but admired Matthew Perry's work on The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  I encountered Barbara Bossom, a western Pennsylvania girl, at CMU with her husband Steven Bochco.  I of course had watched her on the iconic Hill Street Blues.

Jane Birkin

Mary Quant and Jane Birkin are linked forever to the England Swings 1960s (as is the lesser known actor Shirley Ann Field in several British films of their golden era in the early 60s.)  Daniel Ellsberg represented a different 60s and 70s, as did Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, and Vietnam era pacifist David Harris, while Newton Minnow will forever be associated with "the vast wasteland" of TV he described as FCC commissioner in the 60s.  Astrud Gilberto had a hit with "The Girl From Ipanema" in 1964, influencing a generation of musical talents.  I recall the bold installations of Robert Irwin as part of the liberation of the 60s.

I remember Dick Groat as the shortstop on my beloved 1960s Pittsburgh Pirates world champs (He hit .325 that year and won the batting title and was the co-MVP, and I don't even have to look those up.)  Johnny Lujack was the fabled record-setting quarterback for Notre Dame and the Chicago Bears who had a long career as a sports announcer.  My father told me he was a second cousin, probably through my paternal grandmother's family, but I never met him. 

Even further back, Phyllis Coates was the first Lois Lane in the 1950s Adventures of Superman TV series, and Franco Misliacci was the lyricist of "nel blu, di pinto de blu," one of a few Italian language hit records of the 50s, which later was a hit again for Robert Ridirelli (Bobby Rydell) and others by the title of its most recognizable word, "Volare."  

I've written about writers who passed away in 2023 here. Many of these strangers were part of the texture of my life, so in partial and mysterious ways, you could say I knew them.  May they rest in peace and in our memories.

Waiting By the Sea

This tidepool day you inhabit contains more than

 you need. It stirs now and then to bring

 faint news of old storms deeper than the earth.

 From caves around you feelers and claws wave

 their greeting, then slowly withdraw

    and wait for tomorrow. 

 Sunlight is alive when it swims down where you are,

 and you stand still, alert to take in the sun.

 You become a stone, then a ghost of a stone,

 then the gone water’s brilliant memory 

    of where a stone was.

 Making the day expand in your heart and return,

 you play a limited part in whatever life is,

 practicing for that great gift when enlightenment

 comes, that long instant when the tide

     calls your name.

 --William Stafford

Joyce Morgan, a long-time beloved friend, died last week.  Since she once mentioned that she enjoyed Poetry Monday, this repost is dedicated to her memory.  May she rest in peace.  The good she did and was lives on.

Tony Bennett 1926-2023

I must have been around 9 or 10 years old when I was allowed to play my parents records, including 45s on the black RCA 45 rpm player with the fat spindle.  Among my favorites was an extended play 45 on the Columbia label (which included an ad for Coca Cola) with six songs by Tony Bennett that included several of his first hits in the 1950s: “Because of You,” “Cold Cold Heart” and “From Rags to Riches,” along with other releases and B sides (“In the Middle of An Island,” “Come Next Spring” and “Can You Find It In Your Heart.”)  Judging from the wear on the record I played it a lot, and I certainly remember those first three hits.

 

If I knew Tony Bennett was Italian it would have seemed perfectly natural: many of the singers I heard on the radio or saw on TV in the 1950s were Italian-American, including some whose records had Italian titles and included lyrics in Italian.  We had some of those records, too, like Lou Monte’s comic songs mixing Italian and what he called “British,” and the 1953 hit “Eh, Cumpari,” in which Julius La Rosa introduces instruments of the orchestra in Italian (which was fitting, since the orchestra as we know it was invented in Italy.) 

 Another 1953 hit was Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” The trend reached its culmination in 1958 with a song entirely in Italian sung by an Italian artist (and composer) Domenico Modugno, that became an international number 1 hit with the title “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” but has forevermore become known as “Volare” (and a hit under that title for Dean Martin and Robert Ridarelli, otherwise known as Bobby Rydell.)

 The Italian accented song was so popular in the 1950s that non-Italians like the Andrew Sisters, Eddie Fisher, Tony Martin and Vaughn Monroe (a local favorite as well as a big star who graduated from Jeannette High School) recorded them. My Italian grandmother had no problem accepting “Mambo Italiano” and “Come on a My House” sung by the blondish Irish beauty Rosemary Clooney. She wasn’t Anna Marie Alberghetti, but… 

Tony Bennett, often paired with Rosemary Clooney

 I remember Saturdays when we visited my grandparents, ending in the darkened living watching the Perry Como TV show.  It may have helped that Como was a local boy from Canonsburg, PA, the son of an Italian barber who had plied that trade before becoming a full-time singer.  He was part of the culture I’d been born into, when my grandparents conversed with their friends in Italian, and my mother, my uncle and my aunt spoke Italian with them especially when they didn’t want the grandchildren to know what they were saying.  I went to school with lots of Italian kids, a number of which I was somehow distantly related to.

 The 1950s were the Italian decade in music and American culture, especially if you include singers at the end of the decade and slightly beyond not usually associated with their Italian heritage, like Rydell, Dion DiMucci (Dion and the Belmonts), Connie Francis (who did record Italian favorites later in her career), Frankie Valli (of the Four Seasons) and Lou Christie (also a Pittsburgh area singer.)

 According to Mark Rotella in his book Amore: Italian American Song, more than 25 Italian singers made the hit parade between 1947 and 1954.  Even competing with early rock and roll, singers like Vic Damone and especially Perry Como had hits in later years.  I was very aware of Como's “Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes,” “Hot Diggity Dog Diggity” and “Round and Round” (a big hit in 1956), for example. 

  But it wasn’t just Italian voices or Italian language lyrics—many of their hits were based on Italian folk songs and opera. And they brought an Italian style to what became known as crooning.  That style was a combination of opera and “bel Canto,” or beautiful singing—a style that Frank Sinatra pioneered and others adopted, including Tony Bennett.

 In his 2012 book Life is a Gift, Bennett attributes some of his longevity to training in this style.  “The style emphasizes phrasing, pure, even tones, and a disciplined form of breath control.  It never fails to improve my voice.”

 “Bel canto teaches you to love every note that you sing,” he wrote.  “It’s the art of intimate singing; you’re singing into someone’s ear.”

 I remember hearing Tony Bennett’s 1962 hits “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “I Want to Be Around” played often on the radio, competing with “Mash Potato Time” (the year’s Number 1) and “The Twist.”  After that I lost track of him, like a lot in my generation.  But he outlasted them all—well beyond the Italian crooner years into the second decade of the 21^st century.

 Apart from sheer longevity, he had other things going for him.  Bennett was drafted into the infantry in World War II, and after a scarring experience relieving soldiers who had fought in the traumatic Battle of the Bulge that turned him into a pacifist, he began singing with a U.S. Army orchestra put together to replace the one begun by Glenn Miller that ended with Miller’s disappearance in a light plane over the English Channel.  

He then used his G.I. Bill higher education benefits in an unusual way—he attended the American Theatre Wing, as did Harry Belafonte (the two became friends later.)  Bennett didn’t try to act professionally but applied what he’d learned about the Stanislavsky system to express the story within a song.  That subtle dramatic expressiveness was a key to his style. 

Another fascinating aspect of his life and career was his close relationships with black music and black performers, partly due to his love for jazz, and partly because he was just that kind of guy, with a multiethnic upbringing in the working class Bronx.  So while Bob Hope was instrumental in giving him an early break, so was Pearl Bailey.  Bennett was the first non-black singer to perform with Count Basie.  He toured with Lena Horne and was so close to Ella Fitzgerald that they and their families had Christmas together in Los Angeles every year that it was possible. Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were also close friends. Through Belafonte he got involved in supporting Martin Luther King and marched, not just in Washington but where it was really dangerous: in Selma, Alabama. 

with Lena Horne

His mentors (principally Frank Sinatra), seniors (Bing Crosby) and contemporaries all lauded the quality of his voice and his singing.  He was known as well as an all-around good guy.

 He had his career struggles: starting out as a singing waiter, then after success in the 1950s he ran up against the dominance of rock music that panicked record labels in the late 60s and 70s and ended the careers of most crooners. 

 He also faced at least one occasion of the prejudice against Italians that was also present throughout the 20^th century, even in the Italian decade and beyond it.  In the late 60s Bennett was in a meeting at Black Rock, the Columbia Records headquarters which was on the exact spot where his father had worked in his family’s grocery store, when he overheard an executive of his record company talking about him and saying, “We have got to get rid of that wop.”  (That prejudice still exists, when all Italians are equated with the Mafia, and a collection of the Italian decade songs is marketed as “Mob Hits.”)

  Bennett seemingly sidetracked himself at times, insisting on recording jazz albums as well as pop.  But in particular his two albums with pianist Bill Evans gave him credibility beyond the hit parade, helping him to outlast musical fashion.  His return to popularity came especially in the 1990s, including a hit performance on the MTV series Unplugged.

with Judy Garland

 Throughout his long career Bennett continued to perform in clubs and other venues, and continued his creative approach to recording.  So he was prepared for the happy accidents that so often define a career. In the late 1950s a pair of New York songwriters gave sheet music of some of their songs to Bennett’s accompanist, who stuck them in a dresser drawer and only found them two years later when he was gathering clothes for a tour.  Upcoming gigs included San Francisco and one of those songs named that city in its title, so he brought it along.

 Bennett sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” for the first time in San Francisco.  The response encouraged Columbia to ask him to record it for his next single.  It was supposed to just be the B side, so Bennett did it in one take.  Once released it slowly built to a major hit, winning a Gold Record, and becoming his signature song.   

When Tony Bennett died this summer at age 96, stories often lauded him as a champion of the Great American Songbook, a recent categorization of classic pre-rock songs.  That’s true but a bit antiseptic. Bennett favored songs that connected with his audience. Apart from their musical pleasure, you can imagine how such songs as “This Is All I Ask,”  “The Good Life” and “Who Can I Turn To” spoke directly to people out there in the dark, maybe nursing their last drink late at night. I imagine “This Is All I Ask” became particularly powerful as Bennett and his audience aged.

 But the wonder of his late career is his new audience, partly due to his jazz cred, and partly because he recorded duets with younger artists.   Like Sinatra in the 90s, Bennett in 2006 and 2011 made two albums of duets, and did so with the same producer (Phil Ramone, who’d produced Billy Joel.)  But there the resemblance ends. 

with Lady Gaga

 Sinatra’s voice had faded, and his duet partners recorded their parts at different times and places to Sinatra’s pre-recorded vocals.  Tony Bennett recorded live only with his duet partners singing with him in the room (they included Barbara Streisand, James Taylor, Celine Dion, Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, Sting, the Chicks, Elvis Costello, Juanes, Aretha Franklin, Amy Winehouse, Natalie Cole, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson and Lady Gaga, with whom he did subsequent albums.) Not only did he and those songs inspire excellent performances by his partners, but his  vocals on these reinterpretations of his own hits were thrilling and new.  “Because of You” was the first of his songs I knew, and his version with k.d. lang on Duets is singularly moving. 

   In the early 1950s Bennett was often paired with his young contemporary, Rosemary Clooney; he sang with Judy Garland in the early 60s, and ended his career on stage with Lady Gaga in 2021. 

Cary Grant evidently introducing Bennett to
Robert F. Kennedy

His friends included painter David Hockney, cellist Pablo Casals and poet Allen Ginsberg. For just about anyone else, the typical stories Tony Bennett told would be called name-dropping and humble-bragging.  But his sincerity was unquestioned.  And now we have irresistible tales of Cary Grant horsing around with Fred Astaire, or Astaire dancing alone to a song on the radio when he thought no one could see him. 

 Tony Bennett’s voice was strong and supple to the end. It could and did express a lifetime. There has  been no one like him, not for this long. May he rest in peace.  His work certainly lives on. 

R.I.P. Carl T. Severini 1932-2023

Carl outside home in Youngwood with his sister
Flora (my mother) and his mother Gioconda

 Carl Thomas Severini was my mother’s younger brother. He was born in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression.  Nevertheless he grew to be about a foot taller than either of his parents and either of his sisters.  He played pickup football with neighborhood friends in the very small western Pennsylvania town of Youngwood, even when nobody could afford an actual football.  They used an old evaporated milk can, sealed at both ends. 

 He remembered flooded railroad tracks before New Deal era flood control projects cut down on their frequency, and he remembered watching people stream past his house on Depot St. with food baskets, on their way to catch the special train to Idlewild Park for Youngwood’s community picnic. His family soon joined them.

 During World War II, Carl participated in scrap drives, collecting cans, old nails and other discarded metal in his wagon, which he took to Holy Cross school, so it would eventually be loaded into box cars at the Youngwood depot and sent off to be re-purposed for the war effort. He remembered hearing the news of President Roosevelt’s death on the radio.

 The Severini home in Youngwood had a player piano—not uncommon in those days—and Carl began taking piano lessons when he was about 10.  By the time he started college he performed in a series of local dance bands.  

He was such an excellent student that he completed two grades in one year, and finished 10^th grade with honors at the age of 14.  Perhaps influenced by his Tom Swift novels and other futuristic fiction, he was interested in science. By the time he was a senior at Youngwood High, he told the school yearbook that his ambition was to become a chemical engineer.  He also expressed preferences for Cary Grant, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, relaxing at the Rexall Drug soda fountain and playing basketball. He and his neighborhood friends had chipped in and bought a hoop that they mounted on a pole on First Street.

 He graduated from nearby St. Vincent College in 1952, and in 1954 he married Rose Morozowich, my beloved Aunt Rose.  They eventually would raise three daughters and two sons in a marriage that lasted for 67 years, ended only by Rose’s death.  

One of Carl’s first jobs was at Callery Chemical in Evans City, PA.  As the newest employee, Carl was often left to mind the store when everyone else went to lunch. That’s how he met Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was overseeing the construction of the first nuclear powered submarine.  He was touring facilities that might contribute to the Nautilus, and arrived at lunchtime, so it was up to Carl to show him around.

  Callery soon decided it could use an employee with a law degree to handle its patents, and offered to pay (or perhaps help pay) for law school. After someone else turned it down, Carl jumped at the offer.  He graduated from the law school of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1960.  Patent law would become his career.

 He soon became a patent attorney at PPG—then still known as Pittsburgh Plate Glass-- and remained there for 32 years.  He became PPG’s Chief Patent Counsel, and served as president of both the Association of Corporate Patent Counsels and the Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Law Association.  His work involved extensive travel around the United States as well as Europe and Asia. Sometimes he would drop into antiquarian bookstores to find first editions of the Tom Swift series he’d read as a boy.  He eventually collected the entire series.  

My Uncle Carl was a major figure in my young life.  He was just 14 when I was born. To get a little perspective on that, my mother—his oldest sister—was 12 years older than him.  While I never thought of him as an older brother, his youth and the things he did—playing basketball, playing piano, going to college—were more interesting and exciting.  He was also fun.

 At some point in my first few years he worked in the summer at a drug store in downtown Greensburg, and would walk down to College Avenue to our apartment, where my mother would make him lunch. But my first memories of him are situated at my grandparents home in Youngwood, where he lived in high school and college. I recall watching him play piano, his left hand flying back and forth on the base notes while his right hand did something completely different.  Sometimes I would crawl under the keyboard and listen from there, watching his feet work the golden pedals.  If he wasn’t at home when we visited I would ask where he was.  At least once I found him playing basketball on First Street.

 We moved into our house on what was then called Lincoln Avenue Extension just outside Greensburg when I was four or so. Probably when Carl was at St. Vincent College he would suddenly show up in his car.  Though he spent most of the time with my mother, his visits were special events for me.  Once before I started school I was out in the yard writing numbers and letters on a blackboard.  He approved, but noticed that I was making the 4s wrong.  I didn’t make that mistake again.  His visits were impromptu, or a least I usually didn’t know he was coming.  Once it occurred to me that when he wasn’t there, he was doing other things that I didn’t know about.  At first I could almost understand how he had a life away from me—or that in general things could happen without me being there, then I couldn’t, and then I could again, and forever.  These are some of my earliest memories, and there aren't many more.  My Uncle Carl was part of them.

 When I was nearly 8, his wedding reception at the Roof Garden of the Penn Albert Hotel was a major event—perhaps the first time I’d heard a live band.  This was when wedding bands played Italian tunes as well as Big Band numbers from the 1940s.

  When I was old enough, Carl’s visits to our house included playing catch with baseball or football.  I threw my first forward pass to him, leading him and hitting him in stride on my first try, earning his praise.  A big moment.

 Now I notice that in the photos I have of the two of us from my childhood, we are always in physical contact.  Twice I’m perched on his shoulders, and there’s a group photo taken in the early years of his marriage.  We are all visiting his other sister, my aunt Toni, in Federalsburg, Maryland.  We’re sitting on the stoop of her house at 305 Morris Avenue (an address I remember because it was one of the first I learned—my cousin Dick was probably my first correspondent.) There’s Carl and his wife Rose, my sister Kathy and cousin Dick.  I’m sitting on a step between Carl’s legs, with his arms draped down over my shoulders.  I remember the warmth and comfort of that contact.

 Even when he and Rose moved away—to Butler, to Evans City—we would have family visits, and of course the big family meals in Youngwood, especially on Christmas and Easter.  When his first two daughters (Susan and Shirley) were little girls, and I had two younger sisters (Kathy and Debbie), our families took a vacation trip together, through New York state to Niagara Falls.  Then when I was in high school, Carl discussed colleges with me.  He was the only person I could talk to in person who’d even been to college.  He told me what only a graduate knows: that the people you go to college with will remain in your life to some degree thereafter.

 Carl and Rose’s first son Tom was born in 1959, then their third daughter Nancy ( I remember carrying her as an infant to the front door of another relative’s house.)  Steven was born when I was away, but I saw more of him when I had moved back.  Our dinners at Carl and Rose’s home in Murrysville, and later at their vacation farm, would typically involve Carl leading some athletic activity outside afterwards with all the kids, usually involving a football. I noticed that at that point we did a lot more running around that he did.

 Once when he was in Boston in the 1970s and I was an editor at the Boston Phoenix, we had dinner together atop the new Prudential Building. Over the years, Carl was present at important family moments, from weddings to funerals. He spent time with my father in the months after my mother died. When his father died he watched over his mother for decades, and oversaw her care in her last years.

 After I moved to California I made it a point to see him on my infrequent visits to family in Pennsylvania. I had lunch with him on one such visit and told him what he had meant to me as a child.

 When he was in his late 80s, Carl and I began corresponding by email regarding his early memories.  He remembered the names of grade school teachers, his first music teacher, and the bands he’d played in. He especially remembered my mother, and her kindnesses to him as a child. 

 The last time I saw Carl and Rose was a little earlier, in the fall of 2019.  My sisters and I visited them at their home in Murrysville.  We marveled how little it had changed.  The piano that had been a fixture of my grandparents’ house was still in their living room.  They looked and seemed the same, even as they told us about the many cruises they had taken after Carl retired.  Carl still had his lively sense of humor, perhaps even more so.

   We had some wine and cheese—Carl pointed out that the wine was a Montepulciano Abruzzi, made in the region when the Severini family came from and where Carl had visited several times, maintaining ties with the Old World family (though they were actually descendants of my grandmother.) Then we went to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 It was a still point in a turning world.  For as unchanged as they seemed, both Carl and Rose had experienced serious health problems by then.  In the next several years, they sold their house and moved closer to their last child who still lived in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Nancy and her husband John took care of them from then on.

 Carl had a series of heart problems and was near death more than once.  But it was Rose who passed away first last year.  Carl moved to a skilled nursing residence nearby. He celebrated his 91^st birthday in January. As this June was coming to a close he had a particularly alert week, visiting with daughter Nancy on Sunday the 25^th.  He had a good morning on Monday, and then suddenly slipped away. 

 May he rest in peace.  His legacy lives on.

R.I.P. Barbara Ehrenreich and other authors 2022

 

I first knew of Barbara Ehrenreich from a mutual acquaintance as another freelance writer struggling to get published and especially to get paid.  This puts additional light on her most cited work, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she documented her own experiences working at minimum wage jobs. 

 But she was also well-educated and well-connected, and was published in the best newspapers and periodicals.  Besides her single subject books, like the aforementioned 2001 volume, her periodical pieces were collected. For instance a volume covering the 1980s, which was for her (and many others) a grim and disenchanting decade, as reflected in her title: The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed.  Her 1995 collection is titled The Snarling Citizen. All of these essays exhibit her wit as well as insight. She spotted important destructive trends which unfortunately still pertain. Throughout the decades, she wrote with great acuity about the conditions and injustices women face (and she faced some painful ones herself), and for that and her lively if uncomfortable reporting on both gender and class, she deserves to be read and remembered, learned from and imitated. 

 Greg Bear was a productive and insightful science fiction writer who I met at a Star Trek convention in Seattle, where he was based.  I especially admire his visionary novel Darwin’s Radio. 

Hazel Henderson

I once saw Hazel Henderson essentially take over a World Future Society convention.  As a futurist, environmental activist and economist, she was most dynamic in person, but she reached wider audiences with her books, including Creating Alternative Futures and Building a Win-Win World.

 Suzi Gablik was an artist who wrote about art.  In 1970 she published the first in- depth book on Rene Magritte (and helped make him the highly visible artist he is today), after living with the artist and his wife. In the 1990s she broadened her conception of art to include Indigenous and other worldviews, publishing The Reenchanment of Art. As she became more concerned about self-destructive civilization, she published Conversations before the end of time, a collection of amazing interviews. Both I consider to be landmark books.

 Ted Mooney’s day job was editing Art in America (so he may have edited Suzi Gablik.)  But his contribution to literature is his individual vision in four novels, the first being the best known: Easy Travel To Other Planets in 1981, which an American literary critic placed on his list of the best 100 novels of the twentieth century. 

Roger Angell was best known for his writing on baseball in the quintessential New Yorker style, but he also wrote fiction and other non-fiction (plus the witty annual New Yorker Christmas rhymes), as well as serving as the New Yorker’s fiction editor for many years.  In that capacity he wrote me the most flattering and most heart-breaking (literary) rejection letter of my life, in which he said the New Yorker “could hardly bear not to publish” my story.  History shows they all managed pretty well. Angell was 101.

  Doris Grumbach wrote novels and was known for literary criticism in the New Republic and other periodicals.  Among those she reviewed (approvingly) was novelist Maureen Howard, a writer I also enjoyed.

I admired Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Hilary Mantel wrote various kinds of novels and stories but is most famous for her historical fiction. Nicholas Evans was a British broadcaster and writer whose best-known book is The Horse Whisperer.

 Larry Woiwode published much-praised fiction, essays, biography and poetry from 1969 to 2022. Besides writing some 18 books, he taught writing and ran university writing programs, so his students got the benefit of somebody who walked the walk.  

Before he was a familiar narrator for historical and nature documentaries, David McCullough was a prize-winning author on mostly historical subjects.  Educated at Yale and a model of aristocratic culture, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh, which may have given him particular perspective on the subject of his first book, the Johnstown Flood.

Mike Davis wrote penetrating books about cities and their future, especially Los Angeles. From 1971 to 2012, Todd Gitlin wrote about mass media and politics. Peace activist Staunton Lynd wrote and edited books on political action and nonviolence. William Rivers Pitt is best known for his reporting and political analysis of the American war in Iraq.  P.J. O’Rourke wrote from the other end of the political spectrum, though he started out as just a funny guy. 

Then there are those who are prominent for reasons other than writing, but also published useful books. The latest name added to this year’s rolls is Barbara Walters, whose death was announced on December 30.  She was 93.  She was a television news pioneer and an expert interviewer, and she was famous.  Though I never met her, I once interviewed her on the phone for a piece on Hugh Downs.  Because of her schedule she had to call me, and I didn’t know when she would.  When she called—evidently in the makeup chair for some television appearance—I was in the shower.  So I in fact interviewed Barbara Walters while naked.

 Others who authored books in addition to their day jobs were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (whose penultimate book was titled Fascism: A Warning), Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union; and for all I know, Pope Benedict and Queen Elizabeth. 

Scientist James Lovelock saw Earth as a living system, developing (with others) the Gaia Theory, and warned of the dire consequences to the planet of the climate crisis in a series of popular books.  He had 102 years of a remarkable life. Environmentalist and writer David Foreman founded Earth First!

 Revered Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh reached millions with his lectures, audio meditations and his many books. Stage director Peter Brook wrote several important books about theatre.  Before he made films, Jean-Luc Godard wrote about them, and continued to talk about filmmaking at book length.

 Print and television journalists who published books (and some who didn’t) but passed in 2022 include: film critic Sheila Benson, Mark Shields, Bernard Shaw, Bill Plante, Jim Angle, Michael Gerson, John DiStasio, Francis X. Clines, John Hughes, Ann Garrels, Richard Lopez, Shelby Scott (who I remember from WBZ in Boston), and Robert Herman.

 

Chronicled in books and other media, the legendary work of World War II and fashion photography Tony Vaccaro, and of the photos of Tim Page in Vietnam and afterwards.

 Some subjects of journalistic and other writing that should be mentioned but haven’t fit into previous categories include General Charles McGee, last of the Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg; American Indian activist Clyde Bellecourt, artists Claus Oldenberg and Margaret Keane (those big-eyed figures popular in the 60s); sportscaster Vin Scully, men’s basketball great Bill Russell and women’s basketball great Lusia Harris; legal scholar Lani Guinier, co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund Art Cooley.

 In general, writers don’t get a lot of respect in America, though they may be celebrated locally or within a profession.  So whatever degree of success or failure, fame or obscurity these following writers had in their lifetimes, as long as they have a book or a periodical piece in a library somewhere, or something buried in the depths of cyberspace, there’s a chance some stranger may read it, and their words will live again.

 Also passing away in 2022 were: Andre Leon Talley, Anne Harris, Barbara Love, Geoffrey Asche, Terry Garrity (The Sensuous Woman), Carleton Carpenter, Bruce Duffy, Valerie Boyd, Leonard Kessler, Paul Cantor, Shirley Hughes, Sally Watson, Bethany Campbell, Thomas F. Staley, Sydney Shoemaker, Francois Bott, Tom Maddox, Julia Powell, Sharon Presley, JFK conspiracy theorist David Lifton, Stuart Woods, Joanna Clark, Raymond Briggs, Andrew Hubner, Helen Potrebenko, Terrance Green, Mark Girouard, Michael Malone, Antonin Bajaja, Sue Hardesty, Luis Agular, Jean Franco.

 Poets Gerald Stern, Peter Landborn Wilson, Simon Perchik, Dennis Wilson, Noah Eli Gordon. Editor and publisher Jason Epstein, and literary agent Sterling Lord (I was once represented by his esteemed agency.) Let this list also honor the writers whose deaths were unnoticed.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.

R.I.P.Christine McVie and other musicians 2022

 What strikes me now about the Fleetwood Mac records of the mid 1970s is how clean the sound was.  The instruments had distinct separation and pop, the lead voices and backup harmonies balanced and flowed, there was no excess or noise. There was no rush or frenzy. Yet somehow this produced an irresistible  momentum over a tasty beat, and unleashed the emotional force of the music and lyrics.  This music rang like a bell.  It was cleansing, but at the same time, it startled you and grabbed your attention and emotion.  In the context of the mid-1970s, it was also hopeful.

 I noticed this at the time—after all, I had been paid to make that kind of observation for years leading up to this moment—but the emotion and physical energy generated by the songs were primary.  I just felt it.

 It was a magic lineup musically: Mick Fleetwood’s drums, John McVie’s bass, Lindsay Buckingham’s unique guitar and Christine McVie’s keyboards.  Buckingham was a vocalist and songwriter, but the voices unique in pop music at that time belonged to Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie—very different from each other but both distinctive.      

 As is well known now, their lives were messy in many ways (I once stayed in a Santa Monica apartment where a few weeks before, Stevie Nicks conducted a secret tryst with—I believe it was—a Beach Boy) but their music was precise.  You could listen to it with admiration and awe, if you could keep yourself from moving.  Their uplifting brilliance was all the greater for being so widely shared.  These records sold millions and there was always at least one of their songs on the radio. 

At the center of it all was Christine McVie.  Her keyboards anchored the music, and her songwriting defined the group.  Nicks and Buckingham were flashier, but she wrote and sang more of the hits.  She had an elegant blues-based sense of playing and writing (as Christine Perfect—her real unmarried name—she’d been the mainstay of the 1960s blues band Chicken Shack—and of course Fleetwood Mac had started as a blues band) and a genius for musical hooks.  Her singing style was simple and subtle, never strained, yet it carried these songs to the heights.

 The band predictably imploded by the 80s, though it made several near-perfect albums in the 70s.  It reformed when unexpectedly, the Bill Clinton/Al Gore campaign chose McVie’s song “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” as their theme/fight song for the 1992 election, and the band came back together for an Inaugural concert. They were again a great band in the late 90s. Eventually McVie left the band again and stopped making music, but then she rejoined and the songs kept coming.  They were and are irresistible.

  It’s probably clear from the first entries in this series, but I’m primarily honoring artists and others who touched my life.  The time limits to that are most obvious with music.  The music that moved me and may well still move me was first generated in the 20^th century and before.  I stopped listening to much that was new as the hip hop and rap era took hold, and I still hear almost no contemporary pop music (the best of which tends to suggest to me a watered-down variation on artists that came before. I’m probably wrong, but there you are.) 

 Musicians associated with the 1950s:

Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the original rock and rollers, a weird guy and crazed performer it was impossible not to watch. Ronnie Spector (the Ronettes), Fred Parris (the Five Satins), Bobby Hendricks (the Drifters), bandleader and novelty musician Gloria Parker.

 Songwriters Paul Vance (Perry Como’s hit “Catch A Falling Star”), Sonny West (Buddy Holly’s “Oh Boy!”) and country songwriter Dallas Frazier.

 

 Bobby Rydell was the best singer among the Philadelphia Italians crooners promoted by Dick Clark in the late 50s/pre-Beatles 60s. He had a string of hits, and a big screen role in Bye, Bye Birdie.  I bought his 45s and saw him live at the Allegheny County Fair, partly because some girls in school thought I looked like him, an impression I encouraged with my pompadour, until I went full JFK.

 Musicians who broke through in the 1960s:

Loretta Lynn

Country great Loretta Lynn, singer (Ian and Sylvia) and songwriter (Four Strong Winds) Ian Tyson, rocker Ronnie Hawkins, Dino Danelli (The Rascals), Kim Simmonds (Savoy Brown), Don Wilson (the Ventures), Rosa Hawkins (the Dixie Cups), Gary Brooker (Procol Harum), folksinger Judy Henske and Broadway singer Robert Morris.

 Jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis had a 60s hit with “The In Crowd.”

 Bob Neuwirth hung out with Dylan (in the film Don’t Look Back he tells him that Donovan is a better guitarist) and co-wrote Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz song with Janis and poet Michael McClure.

Judith Durham

 Composer Tom Springfield (“Another You” and “Georgy Girl”) and the lead singer of the Seekers that turned these songs into hits, Judith Durham.

 Composers Montey Norman (the Bond Theme), Lamont Dozier (“You Can’t Hurry Love”), Lenny Lipton (“Puff the Magic Dragon”), and Ivy Jo Hunter (“Dancin in the Street.”)

 Impressarios of two major 60s events: James Rado (co-creator of Hair!) and Michael Lang (co-creator of the Woodstock festival.)

 From the 1970s:

Pop singer Olivia Newton-John, Meat Loaf, folksingers Paul Siebel and Mary McCaslin, country and western singer Mickey Gilley.

 Klaus Schulze (Tangerine Dream), Warren Bernhardt (Steely Dan), Calvin Simon (Parliament-Funkadelic), Dick Halligan (Blood, Sweat and Tears), Nathaniel Ian Wynters (the Wailers.)  Songwriter Jon Lind.

 

From the 1980s and 90s:

 Irene Cara (“Fame”), Naomi Judd (the Judds), and Andy Fletcher (Depeche Mode).

Composers Vangelis, Angelo Badalmenti, Lucy Simon and Shirley Elkhard.

 

Pharoah Sanders

Also passing in 2022 were jazz and R&B artists Pharoah Sanders, Taylor Hawkins, James Mtume, Bobbie Long ‘Beegie’ Adair, Michael Henderson, Jessica Williams, Barbara Morrison, Jessie Powell, Janet Thurlow, Joyce Sims, Geraldine Hunt, Barbara Thompson, salsa singer and songwriter Hector Tricoche, samba singer Elza Soares, calypso singer Kenny J.  May they all rest in peace.  The music lingers on.

 

R.I.P. David Warner and other actors 2022

When Alan Rickman died in 2016, stories emphasized his movie roles as villains, despite the actual range of the characters he played in dramas and comedies.  Yet the images and clips accompanying the stories often were from his only romantic lead (however offbeat a romance, in that his character is dead) in the wonderful film Truly, Madly, Deeply.

 Something similar happened when David Warner died in July 2022: stories focused on his villains, though he played more honorable characters, but the images were usually from his only film as an offbeat romantic lead, the 1966 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, known in the US also as simply Morgan! 

That movie, stylistically a quintessential 60s film directed in England by Karl Reisz, made a big impression on me when it came out.  Caught between working class communism he grew up with, and the self-satisfied world of the rich he married into, partly because he became a commercially viable artist, Morgan is a kind-hearted man who identifies his rebellion with the natural instincts of apes as well as the symbols of revolution.  He longs for his ex-wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave in her first film role, who is also torn between her accustomed comforts and Morgan’s rough charm.  The gap between his idealistic fantasies and reduced reality, as dramatized by his futile gesture of breaking up her wedding reception while dressed in an ape costume, gets him committed to a bucolic asylum.  

Warner’s character and performance in this film suggest what his 1965 performance as Hamlet might have been like: highly physical and mercurial, alternating catatonic brooding with sudden frenzies of speech and action.  When David Tennant was slated to perform as Hamlet in 2008, he made a short TV film in which he interviewed other actors who had played the role.  Most acknowledged that the greatest Hamlet of their lifetime was David Warner.

 Warner did play a lot of film villains, and eventually tired of it, but he also played Bob Cratchit in the 1984  George C. Scott version of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and the Klingon Chancellor modeled on Gorbachev (who also died in 2022) in the last Star Trek original cast feature film.  He played historical characters from Jack the Ripper to the young William Wordsworth.  He performed in at least two filmed roles in Chekhov plays: in the 1968 Sidney Lumet feature version of The Seagull, and a 1991 BBC production of Uncle Vanya.  He returned to the stage in the early 21^st century, playing King Lear in 2005, the traditional capstone to a career that includes a Hamlet.

 Warner’s voice was always a stage asset, and became the source of his many roles in animated and audio stories that included playing Doctor Who.  Because of Morgan (and the fact that I identified with both the character and the actor), I followed David Warner’s career with affection as well as appreciation and admiration. 

It would take a book to begin to describe the importance of Sidney Poitier’s movie performances in the 1960s, just as the Civil Rights movement was moving into unavoidable prominence.  No history of the racial attitudes and official changes in those years would be complete without referring to A Raisin in the Sun, Lillies of the Field (for which Poitier became the first black recipient of the Best Actor Oscar), Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, To Sir With Love and In the Heat of the Night.

 His career began in the 1950s, though he was a Blacklist victim for part of that decade.  In addition to more popular movies like The Defiant Ones, he was in some lesser known films I saw on television and loved: Go, Man, Go (a low budget look at the origins of the Harlem Globetrotters) and Paris Blues ( Blacklisted director Martin Ritt’s look at American jazz musicians in Paris, with comment on race issues, costarring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as well as Diahann Carroll and Louis Armstrong.) 

After the mid-1960s when he was the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, he turned to directing, producing and playing occasional lead and supporting roles, as well as political activism.  The only comparison I can come up with concerning his onscreen charisma and distinctive line-readings and physicality is Marlon Brando.   In 2009, his list of honors—and his work for racial justice—were capped by receiving the US Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.  He died in January 2022 at the age of 94.

 There aren’t too many actors left from the classic Hollywood period before 1950, so I take special interest in the ones whose names get one more mention as their deaths are announced. 

Angela Lansbury is the most prominent among them, for her career started in the 40s with two best supporting actress nominations, but it extended well into the 21^st century on stage as well as television, where she was best known for her 1980s series Murder She Wrote.

Marsha Hunt

 Beginning at age 17, Marsha Hunt appeared in Hollywood films of the late 1930s through the 1940s (including the Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson version of Pride and Prejudice, and the 1944 film None Shall Escape, regarded as the first film about the Holocaust), and was Blacklisted for most of the 1950s.  She did theatre and played a few movie and TV parts in the 1960s and afterwards, and in the 1990s appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  She remained a political activist and humanitarian.  She was 104.

 Mildred Kornman was one of the last surviving cast members of the Our Gang comedies in the 1920s and 30s, though she had a non-speaking role.  She was a bit player in 20^th Century Fox films of the 1940s, and a magazine model. She was 97. As a child actor, Mickey Kuhn was the last surviving cast member of the 1939 blockbuster Gone With the Wind.  He appeared in other major films in the 1940s and early 1950s. He was 90.  Faye Marlow played a few leads and supporting roles in 1940s movies and early 1950s TV before becoming an author.  She was 96.  Nehemiah Persoff was a sometimes familiar face (when not disguised) if not a familiar name in supporting roles in more than 200 television shows as well as movie roles, including a few in the late 1940s. He was 102.  

Irene Papas in Zorba the Greek

Memorable performers from 1950s television passed away in 2022, among them: Tony Dow (Wally on Leave It To Beaver), Dwayne Hickman (Dobie Gillis), Tim Considine (Disney’s The Hardy Boys and various Disney movies), June Blair (Ozzie and Harriet—she played and was David Nelson’s wife), and comedian Pat Carroll (Sid Caesar, Danny Thomas shows.)  Actors in 1950s movies include Akira Takarada (Gojira), Hardy Kruger, Linda Lawson, Georgia Holt, Andra Martin and Greek actress Irene Papas, who went on to a film and stage career of more than 50 years.  Bernard Cribbins began his movie and TV career in this decade and it never stopped until he did—he’d become a beloved icon in the UK.

Yvette Mimieux

 Actors who helped characterize the 1960s include Nichelle Nichols, Yvette Mimieux , Henry Silva, James Olson, Mitchell Ryan and Ann Flood as well as European actor Monica Vitti (Antonioni films.)

Sally Kellerman & J. Caan

Actors first associated with the 1970s include James Caan (The Godfather), Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Sally Kellerman (M*A*S*H), Howard Hesseman, Dani (Truffaut films), Bo Hopkins, Ruth Madoc, Stuart Margolin (The Rockford Files), David Birney (Bridget Loves Bernie); Emilio Delgado and Bob McGrath (both Sesame Street perennials), Bob Elkins, Susan Tolsky, Jo Kendall and Mary Alice, who began her long film, TV and stage career in this decade. 

William Hurt

Known best for their work in the 1980s and 90s are William Hurt, Fred Ward, Paul Sorvino, Ray Liotta, Anne Heche, Tadeusz Bradecki (Schindler’s List), Kirstie Alley (Cheers), Robert E. Mosley (Magnum P.I.); Al Strobel, Kenneth Welsh and Gary Bullock (Twin Peaks), Mary Mara (Nash Bridges), John Aniston (Days of Our Lives), Estelle Harris and Kathyrn Kates (Seinfeld), Jack Kehler and comedians Judy Tenuta and Bob Saget.  In the 2000s: Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Helen Slayton-Hughes, Leslie Jordan, Gary Friedkin; Tom Sirico and Bruce MacVittle (Sopranos.)

 Finally, actors who mostly graced the stage include Joan Copeland (sister to Arthur Miller), Robert LuPone, Rae Allen and Doreen Brownstone.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.