R.I.P. 2025

 In  some of the lists of Notable Deaths of 2025 published in various newspapers and other outlets on the Internet, I'm just starting to see some names of people I know little or nothing about.  That proportion will undoubtedly grow for however many more of these I will view in the future.  But for now, the lists are still dominated by names I know very well, and people I may even have encountered in my life.

For example, I once was walking into the West Village in Manhattan with two young women, both writers at the Village Voice, from the West 4th Street subway station down towards Bleeker Street, when on a patch of grass between buildings we saw someone with a cardboard box that was filled with kittens.  We paused a moment, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple beside us stop to look.  I didn't recognize the man but the woman was definitely Diane Keaton, just months after her breakout performance in Annie Hall.  I glanced at my companions, who were so engrossed in their New York conversation that they didn't notice anything.  When I looked back, Diane and her companion were hurrying across the street, and around the next corner.  

I've seen her other movies with Woody Allen (she was even funnier in Love and Death) and many of her later films, and read with admiration her book, Then Again.  Once her death was announced, we watched again her 2003 movie with Jack Nicholson, Something's Gotta Give. It may be her best performance in a very good movie. In Annie Hall days she was a kind of model for some young women and a heartthrob for a certain kind of young man (we were born the same year) but for me she also became somebody I paid attention to over the years, because she was so uniquely herself, sensitive, smart and adventurous.  She was probably also high maintenance but I'll bet she was a fascinating friend.

There were other people who died this year I especially admired.  I've already written at length about Bill Moyers, who died last summer.  Months later I realize more acutely that we now have no one like him, and it seems unlikely we ever will.  Rachel Maddow is carving out her own importance in more ways than one, but there's nobody with Moyers' breadth and depth, his abilities as an interviewer and his incisive writing.  I wouldn't like to imagine my life and who I would be without all those years of Moyers.

In her long life, Jane Goodall did so much for what's been called the more than human world--a true inspiration for young people passionate about saving the variety, the beauty and the viability of the planet. When Native American stories and writers burst into TV and film in the 1990s, actor Graham Greene was always there, bringing incisive life to this important moment.  

Robert Redford was a fine actor, a great movie star (some say the last) with a vibrant intelligence both contemporary and classic.  He not only made All the President's Men; he made it happen. I guess my secret favorite of his films is The Electric Horseman, though Three Days of the Condor is maybe his most perfect film.  Though I expect the one closest to his secret self was Jerimiah Johnson.

The Princess Bride, as directed by Rob Reiner, is on a lot of favorite movies lists as well as mine, but the William Goldman book is already a great template. Reiner found another great writer in Aaron Sorkin for the other of his movies on my list of favorite, The American President.  That movie probably birthed The West Wing television series as well.  

In their public lives these were all good people, and forces for good that continue to sustain those of us who were around when they were active, and can serve as inspiration for the young.

When last December I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists--it led to a couple of months reading all his work, both books I'd read before and those I hadn't, which then resulted in two essays posted on another blog.  This December I've already embarked on a reading (and viewing project), exploring the life, thoughts and works of playwright Tom Stoppard.  It's going to take awhile.  I've started by re-reading the beginning of Hermione Lee's fine biography, and stopping at the points where a play appears, and then reading that play.

Tom Stoppard died in November.  From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.) 

From the first I knew he was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: that ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams, with further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook.  And the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, he seemed to be reading what I was reading or had read.  We had similar literary tastes.  That we would seldom have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me.  These were beside the point.  Besides, by the time his work overtly took sides, in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

 From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Besides, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared Cancerian night owl, with even less digital tech than I have.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few productions: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard had previously written the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

There are one or two of his other television plays on YouTube, and a few of his radio plays, including Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (It also concerns the struggle to define the good.)  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams.  In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy.  To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime. 

 Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son.  Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?"  Herzen replies:

 "No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?...   Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question." 

R.I.P. Clayton Davis (1947-2025)

In terms of years of acquaintance rather than age, I lost my oldest friend this passing year. I first remember Clayton Davis from our fourth grade at Sacred Heart School, when after Christmas we suddenly had a teacher who for the first time wasn’t a nun, but a tall blond young woman named Miss White. 

 For awhile we and some other classmates escorted her on her walk home after school—the girls walking with her while the bedazzled and confused boys shambled behind, until the point where Miss White sent us back. Once on our return walk I recall I accompanied Clayton to his house, and I met his mother and the first group of what would eventually be his nine siblings. They would be a part of my life for a long time.

 His family moved away but Clayton and I became reacquainted at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. We were in the same year and we had most of the same classes. We shared the jubilation of the Pittsburgh Pirates winning the 1960 World Series with what has been called the greatest game ever. 

 That first fall we both volunteered for the local John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, and were rewarded a few years later by being named “ushers” so we could attend the only speech President Kennedy made in Pittsburgh—in the fall of 1962, just a week or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 On November 22, 1963 we heard at the same time the news of Kennedy being shot in Dallas, and then of his death. We walked together after school as we usually did that year—I lived just across the weedy fields and Clayton walked to his former home, now his grandmother’s, to await a ride back to his new home in the country. Mostly that year it was the two of us, talking about school and the endless iteration of who was the “toughest” girl in each class.

 But on that day I had prearranged to bring my debate partner home so we could work on our case. He was Michael Krempasky. We all knew that the conditions of our lives and futures had just changed dramatically. The three of us would become lifelong friends. 

 In the next few years we would form a kind of comedy group, starting with taped skits in the manner of That Was the Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Steve Allen and Stan Freberg, then adding music and performance. The folk music boom dominated our senior year, and we became a Kingston-like trio, complete with matching striped shirts: the Crosscurrents. 

 I started writing songs, and Clayton—a serious musician—began writing as well. Then I went off to college some 800 miles away. One day I sat in the college library writing lyrics on a yellow pad. I sent them off to Clayton, and he wrote the music. The song turned out well and so we did it again, as we would off and on for the next 20 years.

 When I got home on vacations, the Crosscurrents would work out how to do these songs together, along with songs that each of us wrote on our own. We soon discovered the magic of the Beatles together, returning from seeing their movie Help!--possibly a few times in a row--to learn and instantly sing the songs in Clayton’s basement. Our own songs changed as well.

 I’m writing about this in some small detail because I know now, as I sort of did then, that communicating through the making of music, through the sharing and shaping and indeed the creating of our songs, made these friendships unique in ways I can’t explain, except to say that there were many intuited levels of what we shared. 

 That was especially true of my relationship with Clayton, particularly as the years went on and he pursued music professionally in a series of groups, often including some of our songs. We would play together informally, and collaborated in a public way as late as the mid-1980s. The three of us had a last hurrah at an open stage in the early 2000s. 

It wasn't all music, of course.  The three of us generally had a good time together.  Clayton had a quick wit, a way with a pun.  Once when we were on an epic road trip in Ohio in Mike's yellow VW bug, Mike felt something on the back of his neck, like an insect bite.  "Is there a red spot there?" he asked.  "No," Clayton said.  "It's a pigment of your imagination."

 Through the years I attended both of Clayton’s weddings, and spent time with his daughter Nora when she was small. He visited me in Boston and Connecticut. He was there for the funerals of each of my parents. After I moved here to California I never returned to western PA without seeing him, though our lives diverged and we talked less. One of our last phone conversations was just after the death of his first wife, Joyce. 

 More than a year ago, he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor in Pittsburgh, with a stroke or something like it. He was unconscious for weeks in the hospital, so long that the puzzled doctors were losing hope. Then one day his son Ian said something that made him laugh. Slowly he came back to full consciousness.

 He had other episodes and never fully recovered, but eventually he was well enough to leave the rehab facility and live happily with Ian and Ian’s wife Stephanie in Pittsburgh, where Clayton was also reunited with his beloved dog Nelson. His daughter Nora and sister Mary were frequent visitors. In September he faded and then slipped away.

 Mike, who lives in central PA, visited him several times, but I was always 3000 miles away. I tried to communicate with him in the way we used to—through music. I sent him several mixes of songs from our past (including the Brubeck jazz we first listened to early in high school) plus some of our own songs we recorded in one basement or another over the years, and once in a real studio.

 I also wrote to him a few times. I learned he was having memory problems, and it seemed he was clearer on the far past, and sometimes felt he was living in it. So in my last letter I recounted some of the same memories from our early days as I have here—the Kennedy experiences in high school, and fourth grade with Miss White.

 His sister Mary told me she’d read him that letter, and he responded: “Miss White! She was hot!” 

 A more complete obituary appears here. May he rest in peace. He lives on in those he left behind, and in the music.  And I'll keep playing our songs, as long as I can.

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.