Then and Now: Mourning in America

 In a 1964 essay Joseph Campbell chose as his example of  "the high service of ritual to a society" the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963:  "For here was an enormous nation; yet during those four days it was made a unanimous community, all of us participating in the same way, simultaneously, in a single symbolic event.  To my knowledge, this was the first and only thing of its kind in peacetime that has ever given me the sense of being a member of this whole national community, engaged as a unit in the observance of a deeply significant rite."

It's not hyperbole (if a bit exaggerated in detail): that's how it was.  And as it has never been again--which probably makes it inconceivable to the majority of Americans today, who were not old enough or even alive then, sixty years ago this month. 

Among the contributing factors to the national response was the status of the presidency, and of the President as a kind of personification of the nation, that's largely gone now.  There was the shock: it broke the continuity of time.  Few if any then alive could remember McKinley's assassination in 1901.  There was also the new intimacy which the Kennedys brought, largely through the relatively new national medium of television.  People had never been as familiar with a President and his family.  

John F. Kennedy became a national figure at the 1956 Democratic convention, one of the first covered by television, when the presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson left the choice of the vice-presidential candidate to the convention.  So there were nominating speeches and a tense vote.  Kennedy came up short by about 20 votes, and took the platform to move that the nomination of his rival Estes Kefauver be made unanimous. 

 Early in 1960, Kennedy was frequently seen on the evening news as he took the new route to the presidential nomination of competing in primary elections.  The campaigns in Wisconsin and West Virginia were particularly dramatic and heavily covered.  The Democratic National Convention was in media-saturated Los Angeles and dominated the networks all that August week, as they played up the drama, though eventually Kennedy secured the nomination on the first ballot.

The 1960 campaign featured the first four televised debates.  The election was close and so demanded a lot of media attention.  Once Kennedy became President, he and his administration and especially his family were everywhere in the broadcast and print media, which included not only newspapers but magazines from newsmagazines to glossy photo-rich weekly magazines like Life and Look, plus glossy women's magazines like Good Housekeeping that featured Jacqueline Kennedy and daughter Caroline. Jacqueline Kennedy refurbished the White House public rooms to reflect their historic character, and the networks all carried her one-hour tour of the result. 

The nation watched not only as JFK confronted crises in Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere internationally, and domestic crises like his confrontation with Big Steel, but as he and his wife brought a baby boy into the White House, and also lost a son at birth.  Kennedy was the first to hold live televised press conferences, which displayed his charm and wit as well as command of the issues.  He entered the White House at age 43, as the youngest man to be elected President in American history.  

In other words, the American public had the opportunity to become more intimate with JFK than any President before him. 

In both senses of the word, Kennedy appealed to a wide variety of Americans.  The industrial and working middle class was strong and unionized, and he was supported by the unions.  His first big legislative goal was to increase the minimum wage (to $1.25 an hour.  Opponents warned it would tank the economy.)  The young flocked to join the Peace Corps that he began.  He proposed and fought for "medical care for the aged," that became Medicare, finally passed in 1965.  He spoke often about education, and about the arts.  He brought artists and entertainers to the White House.  He supported the sciences, committed the US to landing an American on the moon, which at first resulted in probably the global event that came closest to presaging the attention to his funeral rites, which was the fully televised launching of John Glenn as the first American to orbit the Earth, as well as those three orbits and his splashdown. 

 

Then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962--which definitely had the nation's attention.  On its 40th anniversary, when several of the principals involved were still alive, his Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara and White House aide Theodore Sorensen agreed, that if anyone else then on the scene--Democrat or Republican-- had been President (with the exception of his brother Robert) and faced the same circumstances, thermonuclear war would most likely have resulted.

Kennedy called for and negotiated a nuclear test ban treaty with the USSR, crucially important as the first reversal in Cold War hostilities and the arms race.  He gave his signature speeches on the test ban and on civil rights one after the other in two days, and it was his words--the eloquence and directness of his argument-- even more than the acts themselves that set the stage for at least the near future, and that continue to echo through history. Most historians and political observers now agree that he was about to end direct American involvement in Vietnam.  As 1963 was coming to a close, he told political advisors his 1964 campaign issues would be pursuing peace and addressing poverty in America.    

 He was up and down politically, and he was hated by some. There were cynics, as there are many more now.  But Americans felt a connection, and he inspired widespread affection and admiration, confidence in his ability as President, and an optimism for the future.  His assassination was a shock on so many levels--of vulnerability, of an unimagined violence, of reality cut loose, then of grief for a young family we'd come to know. Part of it for many was the feeling that it was a turning point in history--a turning back, a turning away.  It turns out sadly that we were right.  

It is true that most of us experienced those four days through television.  Although I don't recall watching all that much on Friday, the day of the assassination itself.  I was in an afternoon class in high school when the principal, Father Sheridan, came on the p.a. (as he often did), but this time announced that TV was reporting that President Kennedy had been shot in a Dallas motorcade.  My next class was gym, which we held outside, engaged in some sports activity that allowed me to almost forget what I'd heard, as if it hadn't happened.  Then we showered and dressed, and as I walked up the narrow stairs to the gym itself, a boy coming down for his own gym class answered my inquiry with a fatal nod--President Kennedy was dead. 

I remember wandering the dark silent halls, then walking home with my two best friends, including my debate partner, Mike.  We were scheduled to work on our debate case at my house.  Instead we spent the evening talking about what had happened and what might happen next.  

But by the next day I was watching almost all the time.  The entire broadcast day was devoted to this news coverage, and would be through Monday.  There were no commercials whatsoever.  Much of the time on Saturday especially, the TV coverage highlighted events in Kennedy's campaign and presidency--at least for another day, he was more alive than dead on the TV screen.

  On Sunday I didn't go to Mass with my family so I could watch the procession to the Capitol, and thereby happened to witness Oswald being shot on live TV.  A moment before I'd been startled by what I thought was a gun, but it turned out to be a microphone. Then the real shot, and the chaos.  Like most people, I watched the funeral Mass (in the same church where, two days after his Inauguration, Kennedy reached back to shake my 14 year old hand), then the procession to Arlington National Cemetery on TV (although Margaret, having grown up in Arlington, was there.)  We saw the caisson drawn by six horses--one of many deliberate echoes of Lincoln's funeral--and the riderless black horse, rearing and bucking.  We saw Kennedy's three year old son John and his salute, and all the closeups of Mrs. Kennedy, a contemporary portrait of Our Lady of Sorrows.

But though we were bound together through television, it wasn't the total measure of our participation or expression.  I remember going with my father to Main Street in Greensburg, probably late Friday or early Saturday, to the Singer Sewing Machine store he managed, where we placed one of my Kennedy photos in the storefront window, surrounded by black bunting.  Every store on the street had a similar display.  None of them would be open for business until Tuesday.  Main Street was in mourning--here and everywhere.

When Kennedy's coffin was displayed in the Capitol rotunda, nearly half a million ordinary Americans filed by to pay their respects, all day and night and into the next day.  On Monday, the coffin entered St. Mathew Cathedral at 12:14 pm.  Historian William Manchester wrote in his book The Death of a President, that "millions of individuals, reading the funeral timetable in the morning papers, had spontaneously chosen that moment to express their own bereavement."  

"For the next five minutes, the continental United States was virtually isolated: telephone and cable communication with the outside world was suspended until 12:19."  Traffic in cities stopped. The New Jersey Turnpike was deserted.  Trains across America stopped. Subway trains under cities stopped in their stations.  Buses pulled off the highways and stopped.  Planes scheduled for takeoff remained on the runways. Even elevators stopped.

There were official memorials: sailors on US ships at sea cast wreaths into the waters.  Thousands of artillery pieces at 7,000 US military posts fired salutes.  But citizens invented their own tributes.  Two Eagle scouts played taps to a totally silent Times Square, where taxi drivers stood by their cabs with bowed heads.  A railroad conductor got down from his stopped train in rural Pennsylvania and blew taps on his own trumpet.  And it wasn't just Americans.  It was rush hour in Athens but Greek police still stopped traffic for a period of silence.  A tribal ceremony of mourning was held in Nairobi.

Manchester reports that television viewing dipped to its lowest during the funeral Mass, as people attended memorial services in their own churches, synagogues and mosques, and in San Francisco, at Buddhist temples. There were memorial programs at all fifty state capitals.  These rituals kept the country from going crazy, but they did not heal the nation completely, nor the lives of many of us. 

The mourning, and certainly the effects, did not stop at the end of those four days.  But those days remain a moment in America without precedent and without repetition (though the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 prompted extensive response.)  For most Americans now I'd guess, it is only the faded black and white television images sampled briefly now and then that prevent it from sliding completely into the historical obscurity of the response to FDR's death, or Lincoln's assassination.  Those of us still around who lived through it consciously will remember a different America, and especially the different America that could have been.  

Then and Now: Conspiracy Theory

 Sixty years later, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy still reverberates through American culture and politics.  For example, the matter of conspiracies.

 Apparently the first "conspiracy theories"that were applied to a presidential assassination, followed the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield and his subsequent death.  What befuddles me is that hardly anyone mentions the documented conspiracy to commit the first presidential assassination, of Abraham Lincoln.  John Wilkes Booth conspired with at least two others to also kill the vice-president and secretary of state on the same night. They were angry white supremacists and ardent supporters of the defeated Confederacy.  But our histories tend to ignore this, and focus on Booth as a deranged lone gunman with mysterious motives.

Still, the contemporary pattern of conspiracy theories really began a few years after JFK's death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  The Warren Commission Report in 1964, published in a fat tome that a lot of people bought (including me) and almost no one read, repeated the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.  But talk of conspiracy began almost immediately: it was the Mafia, it was the Pentagon, it was the CIA, it was Cuba, it was LBJ, it was none or all of the above, mix and match.  There was so much of it that Barbara Garson wrote a Shakespearian parody called MacBird! that pinned it on LBJ, and it ran for several years in various theatres on the West and East coasts beginning in 1966.  

At first the receptivity to these possible conspiracies was fed by the sense of loss--not only of JFK himself but of his promise--of the kind of presidency and country he embodied.  LBJ was a lesser usurper in every way; JFK's differences with some military leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis and perhaps the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty fed other (or contributing) scenarios.  That LBJ and the military and "Intelligence" establishment swiftly escalated the war in Vietnam that JFK was winding down, only added credibility to these impressions and suspicions.

And then the evidence started coming in--not of actual conspiracies, but of the implausible single gunman/"magic bullet" official explanation.  The same debates are renewed today as they basically were formed over the past half century.  A conspiracy in which nobody talked remains as implausible as the magic bullet single assassin explanation.  Now nearly everyone who might have been involved is dead, and pretty clearly, we will never know.

Just to entertain the idea of some dark plot among the powerful was further encouraged by the revelations of the conspiracies of lies that supported the Vietnam war.  That systematic lies and secret wars and assassinations have been used by US government agents since at least the start of the Cold War if not much earlier, is documented.  

With those shocking revelations and speculations as background, all kinds of conspiracy theories are now available for those who need them.  Perhaps only a small number of Americans believe the transparently absurd conspiracies pushed by Qanon and other extremists, but apparently a lot of Republicans believe federal and state governments conspired to steal the 2020 presidential election (though they seem less willing to concede that the Republican Supreme Court actually did steal the 2000 election.)  

The link specifically to the JFK assassination is strong, as in the QAnon announcement two years ago that its anniversary in Dallas would be marked by the return of John F. Kennedy, Jr., to stand beside Donald Trump as they triumphantly expose the usual suspects, and return to the White House.  For just as tabloids for years "revealed" that JFK was still alive and hidden on an island, his son's death in a plane crash also didn't happen.  These wish fulfillments have apparently become part of today's extremist fever dreams, complete with a MAGA conversion. (See this Guardian piece by Steve Rose for more.)  

This 60th anniversary also marks the first year in which a Kennedy not of JFK's generation is ostensibly running for President, though not nominated by either major party.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s candidacy has been linked with a number of what are called conspiracy theories.  I don't know all that much about him, but he does seem a puzzling and paradoxical character.  He was a persistent and effective environmental advocate (and still supports efforts to address climate distortion), and his foreign policy speech earlier in his campaign put his finger on the change that JFK brought, from a policy of war to a policy of peace, and of the return since to what RFK jr. called "the forever war," and the attitudes it reflects and engenders applied to every area of foreign policy.  His distrust of Big Pharma is well-earned, since he represented its victims in many successful lawsuits.  But even though some nuances in his positions do get ignored, he does go to extremes, which we identify with the extreme right, along with playing fast and loose with facts.

A piece this summer in Slate reviews his positions and troubling tendencies, and relates them to the characteristics of conspiracy theories and those who adhere to them.  But it never mentions what is very likely their origin in his life: the assassinations of his uncle and his father in the 1960s.  Reputable sources have suggested that RFK senior did not much believe in the Warren Report explanation.  Others suggest the killing of RFK was not necessarily as simple as reported.  When I was the editor of an alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks in 1975 and much of 76, we covered the forthcoming congressional hearings that seriously examined alternative explanations to the lone lunatic orthodoxy of the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, Coretta Scott King (we learned exclusively) was coming to Washington to be part of it.

It now seems likely that there will never be explanations of any of these monumental and world-changing events that convince everyone, or perhaps even a majority.  But there are distinctions to be made between credible conspiracy "theories," and insane explanations promoted as fact.  

I reinterate: I don't know Robert Kennedy, Jr.  But it's not hard to imagine the residual suspicions and perhaps the psychological damage that might come with the burdens of uncertainty with such high stakes, for a nephew of JFK and the eldest son of RFK.  A very long book about Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page was titled An American Melodrama.  I think of RFK Jr.'s campaign as an American tragedy, a further ramification of that day in Dallas sixty year ago.

But there is another 60th anniversary this week that is of course related but too often gets overlooked as it is conflated with the assassination itself: the funeral of John F. Kennedy, and what that was like for America and the world.  Which is my subject next time.

Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

 Every year, for who knows how long, Knox College seniors in Galesburg, Illinois (though apparently only men) would receive a mimeographed note in their campus mailbox.  I got one my senior year of 1967-68.  It read:

  “ Mr. Lester Smiley, Vice-President of the American Chicle Company, will be on the campus Friday, February 23.  He would like to hold a group meeting for those men interested in a job opportunity with their company. The interviews will be held on Friday, February 23 in the College Placement Office.  Mr. Smiley is a Knox College graduate and, as you know, we have placed many Knox graduates with American Chicle.”

 I can quote this notice so precisely because I experienced it as a bit of found poetry, and literally stapled it into the draft of the play I was writing, “What’s Happening, Baby Jesus?”  When the play was performed that May, freshman Michael Shain came out in a business suit and recited it, with the cheerful addition: “So come on out and keep America chewing!”  It got one of the bigger laughs of the show.  

Rockford High yearbook 

For decades, American Chicle made chewing gum in Rockford, Illinois, and (at various times) in Newark, Brooklyn, Cleveland, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon and around the world. They don’t make so much of it anymore (in fact, after being swallowed up by a succession of bigger companies—even though swallowing is something you shouldn’t do with chewing gum-- a company by that name no longer exists.) Chewing gum has apparently dropped out of fashion, at least for awhile. But for a long time, America kept on chewing.

 “Chewing gum” as we know it began in the USA, though humans everywhere have been chewing stuff without swallowing it for a very long time.  Some Indigenous peoples in South America (for example)  chewed particular plants for energy and stamina, and/or to get high.  Chewing tobacco is another such instance.

 People chewed various leaves, nuts, twigs and gummy substances for millennia, as breath sweeteners and digestive aids, to stave off hunger and thirst, and just for the fun of it.  Denizens of the far north chewed whale blubber, and Europeans chewed animal fats, sometimes in social hours at the end of meals (hence, perhaps, the expression “chewing the fat” to mean convivial—and trivial—conversation, though the origins of this phrase are obscure, based on what seem to be barely educated guesses.)  By the nineteenth century in America, chewing wax was the popular if not entirely satisfactory favorite.

 But the substances we know as chewing gum had their origins in the 1850s.  For some of us you could say the story starts with Davy Crockett.

 Just about anyone who went to Knox College—or any college-- in the 1960s would have experienced the Davy Crockett craze of the 50s, centered on TV films starring Fess Parker, shown endlessly on the Disneyland anthology hour.  The last of the three supposedly biographical tales was about Davy Crockett joining the heroic band defending the Alamo—150 or so men facing 1500 Mexican soldiers.  After holding the Alamo for ten days, Davy Crockett and his compatriots were all killed in the battle or executed afterwards.  The general of the Mexican forces, who was named but never seen in the Disney film, was Santa Anna.  We knew that name. 

 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was not only the General of the army ruthlessly intent on putting down a rebellious attempt of Texas to secede from Mexico—he was also at the time the President of Mexico.  In fact he was President of Mexico at least five times.  He was also the General that soon after the Alamo, was defeated by Sam Houston’s forces, and thereby lost Texas.  Later he was the general (and president) who provoked and then lost a war with the entire United States. 

 Santa Anna’s career was marked by idealism, hypocrisy, vanity, charm, chicanery, avarice, incompetence and betrayal, and by a remarkable ability to survive.  He was also in it for the money.  His brief last term as president was a mockery of a monarchy.  After he was deposed he went into exile, and ended up for a time in—of all places-- Staten Island in New York, where he cultivated a partner in a get-rich-quick scheme.

 There are several versions of this story. In one, he brought with him about a ton of chicle, the sap of the manikara zapota or sapodilla tree, an evergreen found in jungles of southern Mexico and Central America.  His American partner (or employee or go-between-- the exact relationship varies with the telling) was Thomas Adams, a photographer and inventor.  Santa Anna liked to chew the chicle, so Adams was tasked with finding a market for it—as the basis for rubber tires attached to buggy wheels.  Santa Anna convinced him it was a great idea.

  No one was interested.  Then Santa Anna decamped, leaving Adams with a ton of chicle.  He recalled how one of his sons picked up the habit of chewing it from Santa Anna, and got another son, a traveling salesman, to try selling it as a chewing substitute for paraffin wax.  Probably unbeknownst to him, the product had been test-marketed for ages by the Aztecs, who chewed this chictli.  But after a little success, Adams gave it the American mass-production spin by inventing a machine in 1871 that divided the chicle into strips. He also invented the first gumballs. 

An enterprising druggist in Kentucky began adding flavor to the gum, though the taste was medicinal.  Adams then created a licorice-flavored gum he called Black Jack. It was the longest surviving brand of chewing gum, still sticking to the bottom of movie theatre seats almost a century later. Adams sold Black Jack and another venerable brand, Tutti Frutti, through vending machines in New York.  Later he would market Chiclets.   

In the late 1880s, a candy store owner in Cleveland named William J. White, who supposedly invented chewing gum all over again when he mistakenly ordered a barrel of Yucatan chicle, added a peppermint taste. Then other brands familiar to my generation began arriving.  Physician Edward Beeman began processing pepsin for its stomach-soothing properties, and heeded a suggestion to add it to chewing gum: Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum. It was still marketed as such in the 1950s and possibly longer.

 In 1890, Adams brought together several existing manufacturers, including Beeman and White, to form the American Chicle company. Eventually it would become an international giant. Together with production and product refinements (the first Adams chewing gum was the consistency of taffy), chewing gum became a lucrative product. 

Helping that popularity along was a former soap salesman named William Wrigley, Jr., who introduced his Spearmint gum in 1892, followed by Juicy Fruit in 1893.  Wrigley was also a pioneer in advertising and publicity—perhaps giving rise to the expression “selling it like soap.” 

 Wrigley headquartered his own company in Chicago, which became enormously prosperous, presenting the city with the Wrigley Building and the classic ballpark Wrigley Field for his Chicago Cubs baseball team. 

Another company that formed around this time was Beech-Nut, which started out as a baby food company but soon branched out in some weird ways, into chewing tobacco, for instance.  Beech-Nut also entered the chewing gum market with their peppermint, spearmint and Doublemint brands.    

 Like the first manufactured cigarettes and American chocolate bars, the presence of chewing gum in the rations of American soldiers during World War I created a larger market when the soldiers returned, in addition to giving Europe a taste of America. So it was in the 1920s that chewing gum began to be a defining feature of American life, and began its spread to Europe and beyond.  Even Coca Cola briefly got into the act with its own gum.

 By my childhood in the 1950s and adolescence in the early 1960s, chewing gum was a somewhat controversial but still ubiquitous part of the every day.  The brands we knew and chewed included some of the age-old: many early brands failed, but bright yellow Juicy Fruit packages were everywhere, and Black Jack and Cloves rattled down from the lobby vending machines at the movies. 

Chewing gum brands were heavily advertised, including on television (Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint Gum!) Though chewing gum became associated with rebellious teenagers (teachers generally frowned on it, and institutions hated the mess) it was mainly marketed to adults.  New additives, it was claimed, helped clean teeth and breath as well as calm nerves. If a stick of chewing gum stuffed in your mouth seemed too vulgar, there was cinnamon flavored Dentyne, in a different sized package and divided in petite pieces, marketed as a dental—and mental--health aid.

 There was chewing gum for everything: Aspergum contained aspirin, there were nicotine gums; my father regularly chewed tablets of an antacid gum called Chooz.  By the 1970s there were sugarless gums, marketed as dieting aids. 

My generation got the gum habit from childhood bubble gum.  It had a separate and later history, because it took longer to create a gum that produced durable bubbles. But the techniques were finally perfected, and the Fleer Company began selling Dubble Bubble in the 1930s, though with sugar shortages it devoted its entire production to the armed forces in World War II and didn’t resume domestic sales until 1951.  Around then, Topps began selling Bazooka bubble gum.

 In my childhood we got Dubble Bubble and Bazooka in small, fat squares, wrapped tightly and individually. Both brands were wrapped on the inside with paper containing a comic strip or panel.  For Bazooka it was the adventures of Bazooka Joe.  Dubble Bubble’s hero was called Pud.  Both also included fortunes; Dubble added interesting “facts.”  

In the 1930s, Fleer also started selling packages of bubble gum with cardboard photos of major league baseball players.  By my 1950s childhood, Topps had joined and perhaps surpassed them.  Those packages were single thin rectangles of gum slightly smaller than the cards that we all collected, treasured, traded and played with.  It was also our early form of gambling, as you did not know what players you were getting in each package.

 We also got football cards, with pictures of professional football players (much less popular than baseball players--college and even high school football teams were better known then.)  Eventually there would be cards of many different kinds: from Davy Crockett to the Beatles, Star Trek and Star Wars, and yes (I reluctantly admit) the Brady Bunch. 

A switch from bubble gum to chewing gum exclusively was part of the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the Beech-Nut gums in particular were part of that, if only for sponsoring Dick Clark’s Saturday night music show starting in 1958, which featured many of the current stars lip-synching to their latest singles.  Though this was black and white television, I still remember the dark green package of spearmint gum he would display.

 Chewing gum in a bewildering number of new tastes continues to be sold around the world. Still, as the 20^th century wound down, chewing gum began to lose its cultural flavor.  It was less fashionable, a little déclassé.  Beemans got a boost when the Tom Wolfe book and the 1983 film The Right Stuff revealed it as famed test pilot Chuck Yeager’s favorite ritual before a dangerous flight.  But that didn’t slow the trend downward.

 

Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. One of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience.  By the 24^th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

 The fortunes of those great chewing gum companies has followed, along with the disappearance of many classic brands.  American Chicle is gone, Beech-Nut is back to making just baby food.  Though now a subsidiary of a candy company, only Wrigley remains an international giant in chewing gum.

 But such is the power of nostalgia for classic chewing gum brands that a wrinkled up package,  a decades-dry stick or related item can fetch tens, hundreds, even thousands of dollars.  And of course it’s become a cliché of my generation to bemoan the bubble gum baseball cards that were thrown away with the other detritus of childhood.   A 1952 Mickey Mantle hauled in $12.6 million. Chew on that awhile.

Gallery

American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.

Thomas Adams (and sons) put their name on several products, and the Adams name was used for others long afterwards.  This is one of the brands that didn't last.

Baseball players were known for chewing substances other than chewing gum.  Nevertheless,  Beech-Nut did a series of endorsement ads with prominent players--none more prominent than Stan the Man. 

The classic Dubble Bubble...

In the effort to give chewing gum legitimacy, especially in the early days, companies made various health claims.  Beemans however was sincere--he was a champion of pepsin, and many other companies later used pepsin in their gum, and featured the word prominently in packaging and promotions.

When I tried to recall specific baseball cards I actually had in my collecting years, I could remember of course the prominent names, like Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, etc.  But the actual card?  For some reason the first I recalled was the Gene Baker card with the dark green background.  Gene Baker is a forgotten player from the 50s and early 60s, but his last team was the Pittsburgh Pirates, which I followed religiously, especially in the 1957,58, 59 and World Championship 1960 seasons.  When he came to the Pirates in the Dale Long trade in 1957, I kept waiting to see him but he rarely played, hobbled by injuries and better players in front of him.  He'd been a shortstop, converted to second base in Chicago (sharing the infield with the great Ernie Banks--the two of them were among the first black players in the NL after Jackie Robinson) and a utility infielder in Pittsburgh.  He was on the 1960 team, used sparingly to spell Don Hoak at third and pinch-hit.  He soon retired but stayed with the Pirates organization, and became the first black manager and coach in organized baseball (in the minors), and if only for part of one game in 1963, the first black manager in the Major Leagues.

  

Now and Then

 

On November 2, a new song recording by the Beatles was released, the product of three recordings over 50 years or so: a demo cassette tape that John Lennon made at home in the mid-1970s (latest guess I've heard or seen was 1977, just three years before he was killed), then an aborted attempt to make the song into a Beatles record by Paul, George and Ringo in the mid-1990s, during the time they crafted "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" from another Lennon tape, and now the final version created this year of 2023.

Technology that filmmaker Peter Jackson developed for the Get Back TV film made it possible recently to extract Lennon's voice from the piano and extraneous noise on the 70s cassette, which was one of the problems that led to the song being abandoned in 1995.  But George had recorded a guitar track before they gave up on it, so that was available for this recording.  With Paul playing bass and slide guitar, and Ringo on the drums, this song--now titled "Now and Then"--includes all four Beatles.  Since there are no known recordings of new songs with both John and George (who died in 2001), this is in effect--and officially--the last Beatles song.  

The song was first played on BBC radio, and became available on vinyl, together with the Beatles first release, "Love Me Do."  The official version appeared on YouTube with just the plain blue and gray box, with the song's title in white.  Although John's demo has been unofficially available, I'd never heard this particular song before.

The first thing that got to me was the clarity and vitality of John Lennon's voice.   At a time when death seems all around, this was less a revival than a resurrection.  The melody is enchanting, and the production is seamless.  I liked the quickly neglected 90s songs more than many others did, but this is a contemporary Beatles record--part now, and part then. 

The song itself has been edited from the demo version (partly because John hadn't finished the lyric), given a slightly faster tempo, and generally gets the Beatles treatment, with guitar solo and a string orchestra section.  Paul and Ringo do new vocals but high harmony backgrounds by George, Paul and John are taken from previous recordings, notably "Because" on Abbey Road.  There is one entire section of the demo that was dropped (which furnished its bootleg title, "I Don't Wanna Lose You,") that's now the center of online debates among Lennon enthusiasts.  There were probably technical reasons for this as well as musical ones, but the song is given a classic Beatles shape, and I love it.

On November 3, the official music video by Peter Jackson was released.  It contained a few images never seen before, but that isn't its main contribution.  Jackson crafted these few minutes to celebrate the Beatles career but most tellingly, he does so in the context of this song.  "Now and Then" can seem to be a wistful meditation on a delicate love relationship, perhaps a lost love (The interrupted relationship with Yoko is an obvious possibility.) But the video presents it as a commentary on the bond among the Beatles themselves, estranged as they were for a time in the 1970s. (Though throughout that decade, two or three or even all four of them continued to work together on solo projects, and the big break between John and Paul was largely healed by the late 70s.)

Instead of just intercutting clips from the past with some shots of the 2023 and 1995 recording sessions, Jackson created dazzling combinations in which Beatles from different eras interacted with each other, and even versions of themselves from another time, just as memory is part of the present.  The video suggests the power of playing together over time, with the visceral effect of presence even in absence.  Now and then exist together. 

 (Another layer is added with the brief shot of Giles Martin, co-producer of this record and son of George Martin, who produced all the Beatles records.  In this shot he even looks like his father.)

The video starts with the reality: Paul and George working out guitar for the song in 1995.  While John's voice is heard, the first images aren't of him but the gauge that measures the sound level, moving with his vocal.  He's present through the machines.  And yet...

To get inside the song, the first image of him is a kind of silhouette, in which a scene of sunset (or sunrise) on the sea is reflected in his glasses, and a mirage appears of the four very young Beatles clowning around.  Then the dizzying combinations of all four of them in different times, mostly playing together (suggesting a higher octane version of the subtly surreal baggage car scene in A Hard Day's Night, and some scenes in Help!) The images of young Lennon are so bright and full, though Jackson presents only John the cut-up and clown, rather than his more intense or gloomy or distant moments.  In fact, the others are also seen frequently being silly. (Even present-day Paul gets in the act, mocking his shot playing bass, with a mugging young McCartney behind him.)

The video ends with a series of images that go backward in time to the four as young boys, and then the famous early 60s black-and-white bow from the stage with the bright Beatles sign behind them.  Then their images disappear and the light goes dark.  

(It's the last Beatles song, but unlikely to be the last Beatles release. A number of remixed albums are in the works, and I look forward to some machine-learning magic applied to those 1995 vocals, and a new tech update to the accompanying videos.) 

Clearly there is a lot going on in this mesmerizing video, so I suggest that in addition to watching it, you also listen to the song with no visual accompaniment, as I did the first day of its release, to feel its full effect. Either way, joy and tears, now and then. 

Inevitably, the song applies to us as listeners, for however long the Beatles have been part of our lives.  For me there was a time I thought of them every day.  I needed their rhythms to face everyday life. These days I think of them only now and then, and I miss them. But I know they will be there for me.  

Origins: The Jungle Gym

 The Jungle Gym turns 100 years old this year, sort of.  The patent filed by Sebastian Hinton was approved in 1923, starting off its worldwide replications.  However, Sebastian Hinton was not really an inventor -- he was a patent attorney in Illinois, so he wrote a good patent.

  The idea and the basic structure was dreamed up and built many years before by his father, Charles Hinton, who was an inventor (he created the first baseball pitching machine.  Unfortunately, it was powered by gunpowder.)  Charles Hinton also wrote scientific romances in the era of H.G. Wells' classics, but chiefly he was a mathematician.  And so the purpose of his jungle gym was to...teach his children math.

Charles Hinton came from a radical but highly educated family in the UK.  His mathematical interest was what he called the fourth dimension, within which exist the three dimensions we know.  Or something like that.  (It wasn't the Wells' version of the fourth dimension, which was time.)  In the late 19th century, when he proposed his ideas (more influential now than then), he came to believe that people couldn't understand his fourth dimension because they really didn't know the mathematics of three dimensions.  

So to teach his children how three-dimensional math works, he built a backyard structure to illustrate it, and encouraged his kids to identify the junctures of the x, y and z axes by climbing to each point and calling it out.  They climbed all right, but they ignored the math lesson.

Charles Hinton built his structure out of bamboo, since he was in Japan at the time.  Later he moved to the US, taught at Princeton (where he invented the pitching machine), and worked at the US Naval Observatory and the Patent Office, though he never bothered to patent his "climbing frame."

Years later his son Sebastian suddenly remembered it, and described it to an educator at the progressive school system in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, who encouraged him to build a prototype.  It was tweaked, and eventually kids in Winnetka were climbing on the first jungle gyms (one of which still exists, also made of wood) and Hinton filed his patent.  He didn't personally profit by it or see its success, for this is also the centennial of his death.

The patent referred to the structure as a version of tree branches upon which "monkeys" climb.  Experts say it's really ape species that do this kind of climbing, but kids are often called monkeys. and the name stuck for one part of the jungle gym: the monkey bars.  The jungle gym has been varied over the years, getting more elaborate and more safety- (and lawsuit-) conscious.  But something like the original still features in many if not most playgrounds and a lot of backyards.

There have been a few notices in the media of this centennial, notably the NPR All Things Considered segment by Matt Ozug.  But no one answered the question that I had (nor did they ask it):  The name "Jungle Gym" seems like an obvious pun on "Jungle Jim," of comic strip, film, radio and TV fame.  But is it?

Nope.  Sebastian Hinton patented what he called the "junglegym" in 1923.  Jungle Jim didn't appear in the newspaper comics pages until 1934.  Jungle Jim was created by comics artist Alex Raymond (with writer Don Moore) as a lead-in to Raymond's other famous hero, Flash Gordon--they both appeared for the first time on the same day.  The other thing that seems obvious about Jungle Jim is true: he was created to compete with the wildly popular Tarzan, who started out in a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, then swung into the movies (the first Tarzan in silent pictures was Elmo Lincoln, of Knox College) before dominating the funny papers starting in 1931. 

So is it the other way around?  Jungle Jim comes from the Jungle Gym?  The official story is that Jungle Jim Bradley was named after Alex Raymond's brother Jim.  But did the brothers ever play on a jungle gym as boys?  I await the definitive Alex Raymond biography to answer that question.

Junctions of Dysfunction

 There’s no certain or complete explanation for the current social and political dysfunction in the United States. A full analysis would need to include psychology and whatever human nature might be, as well as strands of history going as far back as history goes. Any such speculations might be dangerous, and certainly inexact. 

 But human institutions arose to cope with various manifestations of psychology and historical tendencies, to establish some sort of common order and public good.  It occurs to me that people under the age of 50 or so wouldn’t remember that in the decades after World War II, the United States reached a sometimes uneasy but functioning consensus on organizing its institutions to foster a basically stable society and political order, while providing the tools for the society to improve.

 In confronting the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II, that consensus was forged, and it created the stability, growing prosperity and progress of the 1950s through the 1970s, regardless of which party had the White House or the majority in the houses of Congress.  (By consensus, I don’t mean the lack of spirited disagreement or even vicious conflict, or even consciously held convictions.  I mean a functional consensus, an acceptance of core institutions and roles of government to foster the common good.)

  Major political institutions operated by rules and tradition, with the respect and consent of the governed, even when some or many of whom were adamantly opposed to certain policies and leaders. The sanctity of the vote was never questioned.  

To this was added the new core of the postwar consensus, which held that the government, particularly the federal government, had the key responsibility to guard and improve those public elements that benefited everyone.  Just as FDR realized that new power generation in the South would benefit the entire region, Eisenhower saw that among those driving on a federal highway system would be patricians and paupers; that it would convey freight for everyone. 

 In order to pay for public projects, as well as the common defense etc., income taxes were graduated based on ability to pay, with higher brackets paying a higher percentage.  The top bracket during the Eisenhower years reached 90%.  

The government was seen as the arbiter that leveled the playing field, so that through regulations the costs of ensuring the health and safety of Americans would fall equally on all competitors.  Those institutions deemed vital to everyone in the society, like electric and gas companies, and some hospitals, were publicly or community owned, or highly regulated in exchange for virtual monopolies in a given place.  Everyone knew them as “public utilities.”

It wasn't perfect. McCarthyism and rigid conformity poisoned the 1950s, and institutions could not respond fast enough to challenges of the 1960s and 70s.  And though the era served a large proportion of white people, blacks and other races suffered institutional prejudice, and largely rural sections of the country didn't share in prosperity.  But progress was being made, slowly and painfully, and largely within established political and social institutions (which included expressions of dissent.) 

 With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, all of this began to change.  The Reagan administration began the series of deep cuts to the taxes paid by wealthy individuals and corporations, depleting government funds which impoverished programs and added to the federal deficit.  Over time, this was a prime factor in an income transfer from the middle class to the very few most wealthy.

 Other devastating Reagan era policies included de-regulation and privatization.  De-regulation hampered or ended government’s ability to monitor and control vital aspects of health and safety.  At the same time, government or public institutional functions were transferred to corporations, on the theory that services would somehow improve when hefty profits were added to claims on income. 

 Big changes take time to exhibit their full effects, but the world we’re living in is largely a result of these and similar changes, many of which have become the new orthodoxy, especially as fewer remember when they were not so.

 Apart from the near collapse of institutions that used to be considered essential for the public good, resulting in a general cynicism and sense of helplessness, the most conspicuous change is the extent of the gap between the few obscenely wealthy and everyone else.  It’s not just the proportion that’s the problem, but the lack of security of what must be close to a majority of Americans.  The usual example is that they are only a few inflated medical bills away from financial disaster.  This is a double failure—the income transfer, and the lack of public support for a general and essential good, medical care.  Though it may seem that anger is the chief motivation of frenzied politics, beneath that it is fear.

 Other factors play into this, such as the de-industrialization and resulting collapse of labor unions in the 1970s and 80s. But the social insecurity that is roiling politics, making them more extreme, can largely be traced to how the US responded: with Reaganomics.

 At the same time, de-regulation began to extend to political contributions, until the Supreme Court made them nearly boundless.  Money is a huge factor in making our politics crazy.  Money plus television and Internet celebrity multiplies the insanity. 

 Just as both parties participated in the postwar consensus, the responsibility for our current condition resides also in both Republicans and Democrats.  Republican policies laid the groundwork, and Republican politics are wounding and challenging institutions of our very republic.  But Democrats have largely failed to confront the basic problems.  Too many mollify wealthy interests for political gain.  And to date no major Democratic leader has plainly explained these problems, and proposed direct solutions as the core of an agenda.

 What we are in part witnessing is a series of challenges to core institutions, and the institutional responses.  These are dramatic, and involve individuals, from federal judges to county election clerks.  The outcomes of these battles themselves tell us whether our institutions will be able to respond to both the usual and the unique challenges the world—and the planet—present us.  For the sense of selfishness and cynicism legitimized by the end of this consensus has given us so-called public servants who openly act with no responsibility to the public good, but only to their careers and the ideologies they believe they can ride to power and wealth.

 The institutions of the world also face severe challenges, even apart from the greatest challenge of all, the climate distortion crisis.  Right now warfare in the Middle East is the latest.  I had the eerie experience of coincidentally reading an essay by Joseph Campbell just as the first Hamas attack became news, detailing the “war mythologies” of this region, copiously quoting both the Old Testament and the Koran on the divine instructions for waging war without limit, with no cruelty too great. 

 Campbell wrote this essay during the 1967 war, and commented:  “These, then, are the two war mythologies that are even today confronting each other in the highly contentious Near East and may yet explode our planet.”  But we are also witnessing the efforts of established and ad hoc international institutions to limit and end the violence, to maintain some sense of common humanity.  International institutions also arose as part of a post-war consensus, though they were never very strong.  They too are being challenged now.   

from "Little Songs for Gaia"

across salt marshes north of

 San Francisco Bay

 cloud soft grays

 blues little fuzzies

 illusion structures—pale blue of the edge,

          sky behind, 

hawk dipping and circling

 over salt marsh

 ah, this slow-paced

 system of systems, whirling and turning

 a five-thousand-year span

       about all that a human can figure, 

grasshopper man in his car driving through.

---Gary Snyder

History of My Reading: Friends and Other Strangers 1973

 In 1973 I was the Managing Editor for the Boston Phoenix arts and entertainment section, roughly half the newspaper each week.  In addition I was still its Books Editor and I was expected to keep writing regularly.

 One of my first unfamiliar tasks as managing editor was authorizing that week’s payments for our section’s freelance writers. A number of writers wrote for us regularly but were paid as freelancers (as I had been with my Book Reports column) but I discovered that the amount of those payments varied wildly.  Pretty much without anyone’s authorization, I increased the fees for those getting much less than others.  I got away with it.

I made a number of changes to the section, discontinuing some regular features and adding others, setting up rotations for the coverage other than the major areas of movies and pop music, and so on.  These and other changes were also meant to give the section an identity.

 The Arts Editors for music (Ben Gerson) and movies (Janet Maslin) continued to write lead pieces and to assign other pieces in their area.  I dealt directly with regular contributors and freelancers in other areas, as well as books. I didn’t hire staff on my own but I assigned to new freelancers. I had the final edit on all copy for the Second Section.  In several cases I was pleased to do for others what had been done for me: give that first assignment to writers who went on to writing careers. Most of the time I advocated for writers when there were problems, but there were also situations in which they were disappointed and there was nothing I could do.  Listening to people's problems--and bearing their secrets-- was part of my job, and also part of my social life.  

 I attended the weekly staff meeting but the business there mostly involved the news section.  Ideas for our stories got generated through conversations with the Arts Editors, staff members, freelancers and others, and (pretty often) out of my own head. I fielded some calls and a lot of mail from organizations and venues looking for coverage.

 That was the first thing to greet me when I arrived at the office—our receptionist Martha handed me a pile of pink slips with my accumulated messages, along with bigger piles of mail (including books.) She handled all calls first.  We must have had some kind of intercom system or perhaps she just rang my phone with the line number of my incoming call.  Working the phone was occasionally pleasant, mostly a chore, and sometimes maddening.

 The first part of my week generally involved working with writers on possibilities for future issues.  I might tinker with the lineup of stories scheduled for the next issue, if necessary.   When copy came in for that week, I worked with that.  I recall meeting with our regular contributor on art, Kenneth Baker, often down in the small lunch counter tucked into our building at street level.  I would peruse his usually immaculate copy while maneuvering a sandwich and coffee.  I didn’t understand much of what he was writing about, but if he could interest me in it as a reader for the time it took to read the piece, then it could appeal to other readers as ignorant as me as well as to contemporary art aficionados.  Baker went on to be the long-time art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

 In general text editing was something of a challenge—deciding whether first impressions and sense of the piece were right, versus second or third reading. Copy- editing was a pleasure if I was relaxed enough—I was good at it.  I became aware of the temptation to change things just to show I’d worked on it, and fought it off as best I could. 

 Once I had enough copy in hand, and I factored in the photographs our staff photographer (Michael Dobo) had either taken or would take, and the advertising staff told us how many pages we could run, I met with the layout editor to solve the jigsaw puzzle of every page—where the copy, the ads and the photos would go.  There was often a little leeway, and decisions to be made later, not infrequently at the last minute. Often the layout had to be completed before I had all the copy.  An event near (or sometimes past) deadline was being covered, or essential copy that simply came in late.  Space was saved for those.   

Janet Maslin

Janet Maslin had moved to New York, so theoretically she saw movies sooner than their Boston run, but in practical terms, there was often some suspense as to when her review copy would arrive. (Janet had married Jon Landau, who had switched from editing record reviews to writing movie reviews for Rolling Stone, while he still wrote on music for The Real Paper. At a certain point Janet was also writing on music for a new national magazine based in New York, called New Times—which is unrelated to any current publication of that name.  I had been invited to their wedding, and had even picked out their wedding present: since they were both reviewing movies, at the Harvard Coop I found matching pens with a little light near the tip, so they could write in the dark.  But I came down with a sudden illness and didn’t make the trip to New York—not the first time this happened within view of a wedding.)

In any case, their New York experiment didn't last very long.  Within months they were back in Boston.  Once I happened to pass the Italian restaurant in Inman Square and saw them sitting at the window table where Carol and I used to eat, when that restaurant was smaller and unknown.

 Ben Gerson’s music pieces were always meticulously written, but also invariably late. They were so late at times that he took his piece directly to the composing room at the last possible moment to fill the space waiting for it, thereby coincidentally also avoiding any editor messing with his copy.

 There would be one day in the week that could last well into the night when the paper had to be put to bed, and I was wrestling with late copy as well as making adjustments when stories came in too long or too short, photos were missing or didn’t work, or ads that got dropped or added. I wrote headlines and captions, copy-read the printed copy on what I believe we still called the flats, then approved each page before it could go to the printer.

 The next day there would be “blue pages”—the paper as printed, except on a different kind of paper with blue print.  A few corrections were still possible at this stage.  When they were made, the issue was done.  And it was time to start work on the next.    

 I still wrote for the paper—among what survives in my files is an impressionistic rant on Muzak, an appreciation of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the occasion of Garcia Marquez’s birthday, a few Talk of the Town type pieces for the inside-cover column I started, and a Second Section cover piece on Picasso when he died.  There were times that a section cover story fell through, and I had to quickly write one.  I recall one forced ramble on the big awards in the arts and the various entertainment award shows.

 I started out working in the office next to the Editor’s office that used to belong to Kate Herriges.  Kate had been my strongest supporter when I started out in 1971, but she’d moved on.  Eventually the paper took over a large room on the building’s third floor, and I set up my headquarters there.  At one point, I shared that office with staff writers R.D. Rosen (eventually to be the author of the book and therefore part of the language: Psychobabble) and Jim Lardner, also a subsequent author, whose grandfather was Ring Lardner (and Ring, Jr. was his father.)  

 It was in that room that we entertained Ted Solataroff, editor of the New American Review (recast as American Review), one of the great publications of the era.  What I recall most about the afternoon he visited was basking in the sunshine coming through the high window, and speaking in euphoric and awestruck tones about the magnificence of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  That book, especially at that time, was the most magical literary work I’d ever encountered.  For years, whenever anyone asked me to recommend a book, I gave them a copy of this one, and it never failed, from Cambridge sophisticates to a western Pennsylvania waitress.

 Another interview I recall from that year was with writer Anthony Burgess.  He was in Boston for the premiere of the new musical based on Cyrano, for which he’d written the book and lyrics.  We were supposed to have lunch in his hotel suite but we never got past the drinks stage before his next interview was scheduled.  It was an exhilarating conversation as well as interview.  As I left he shook my hand and said with apparent feeling, “a very great pleasure.” 

 The Burgess interview came out when I was filling in for our regular theatre critic Carolyn Clay.  I was also writing about music and movies, which at that point constituted mini-vacations from managing, editing and books.  In February 1973 I wrote about a Neil Young concert.  His current album was Harvest, his biggest seller and the top album of 1972. He did three concerts in Boston that week, two of them at the huge Boston Gardens and one at the smaller Music Hall. His surprise opening act was Linda Ronstadt, who sang on his biggest single, “Heart of Gold.”

 In Young’s last appearance in Boston, he’d been nursing a bad back and did an all-acoustic tour, mostly seated and playing guitar and harmonica, and piano. This time he was playing a mixed set with the Stray Gators, the session musicians on Harvest, but his back wasn’t completely healed, so he again sat in a chair for part of the gig.  My piece began like this:

 “The band’s instruments were in place and tuned, and after suitable pause, a roadie finally brought out the final prop and placed it carefully at center stage.  The Chair: one part papal, one part electric, an all-organic, down-home chair, obviously not one of your backstage fold-ups, but something special that traveled with the tour. Then the house lights went out, part of the stage was darkened, then all of it—each change brought gradually louder swells of oohs and ahs.  As eyes adjusted to the dimness, a single shadow emerged from the back of the stage.  Tumultuous applause greeted a still longhaired, baggy-jeaned Neil Young, wearing what appeared to be the same flannel shirt he wore for his last Boston appearance more than two years ago, its condition suggesting that he’d been wearing it ever since.  He sat down.  The crowd went wild.”

 I then quoted Linda Ronstadt’s comments from the stage on the Boston Garden show the night before.  “Usually at these big concerts the kids come in and then get messed up, until they’re ready to be taken out in stretchers at the end.  Last night it was like they came in on stretchers.”  It was the beginning of the Quaalude era in pop music audiences.

  The concert itself included songs from Young’s entire career, already extraordinary, and was taped for possible inclusion on a live album.  At that point in my life, he was the songwriter and rock musician I most identified with. 

At some point in 1973 I met Harry Nilsson at a press affair.  I've forgotten this entirely but found a letter I wrote to him later with some information he wanted, which I also don't recall.  Apparently we had an actual conversation.

Then in April I reviewed the reggae-filled film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, and predicted it would play in Cambridge forever—which it more or less did, running at the Orson Welles Cinema for over a year.

 Meanwhile the Phoenix was undergoing a couple of  major changes.  A managing editor for the entire paper was hired—a genial Englishman who was startingly older than the rest of us, though probably not by much.  But it was the new Editor that became consequential.

 The search for a new editor came down to a few remaining candidates (several top choices had dropped out of contention.)  I thought we’d found a pretty solid one, but then another candidate showed up, and exuded a cheerful charm.  I can’t say I was entirely immune to it—he quoted the likes of Wordsworth and Yeats, and offered bold ideas, like reviving the Dickensian tradition of serializing novels—this time in the Phoenix.  But I was also suspicious—I’d seen the damage so-called charismatic figures could do, not to mention con artists.  In Dickens tradition therefore, let's just call him Wily Brass.

Others also had misgiving but in the end, an editorial meeting vote was taken and Wily Brass was selected. He was the third of the three finalists; the top two had turned down the job. Steve Mindich took the recommendation and hired him.  At first Brass and I got along very well—after a pleasant dinner conversation, we walked around Boston until he found what he wanted to show me—an historical marker commemorating a reading of his work given by Charles Dickens on one of his two American tours (probably at the site of the old Tremont Theatre.) 

 But things quickly devolved between us, and between him and everybody else. His bold plans, like the serialized novel, went nowhere.  He was perceived to be arbitrary and unresponsive, petty and abusive, and borderline incompetent.  We had a number of staff and freelance defections, often to the Real Paper.  At one point I discovered that he was intercepting packages of books meant for review, including those addressed to me personally (once he purloined a personal gift), and keeping those he liked for his personal use.

 Over those months, Brass chipped away at my innovations and authority. I told at least one staff confidant that I was sure he intended to take control of the arts section, even if it meant driving me out.

 At the same time there was a movement to unionize the paper, including editorial staff, and become affiliated with the United Electrical Workers. It had begun the year before but was getting more intense in early 1973.  I thought the affiliation was a bit absurd but I supported the efforts to organize. There was a lot of discontent, and a lot of reasons for it.  It didn’t occur to me at first (or seemingly anyone else) that I was actually management now, so I attended some meetings.  After one, I was called into the publisher’s office where the paper’s lawyer grilled me on what I knew.  I simply refused to talk to him, and only Steven’s intervention kept it from becoming a shouting match or worse.

In addition to all this, I edited a Book supplement that spring.  I wrote the cover piece on Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Breakfast of Champions (which soon became the NYT top best-seller), a review of DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, reviews of poetry collections by James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates, and a number of short notices of forthcoming books. I solicited a piece on the new collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories from my Knox professor and ongoing friend, Doug Wilson.  Much to my embarrassment there was not enough room for it, but it was later published in a literary journal.

 

The supplement also included reviews of two avowedly ambitious novels: Philip Roth's The Great American Novel and American Mischief, a 500 page novel by Alan Lelchuck, who taught at Boston's Brandeis University--both pretty much forgotten.  Earlier that year we reviewed another massive work, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. This is the one that has lasted.  Its length and complexity were daunting,  though clearly it was a work of genius. In college I'd read maybe 100 pages of Pynchon's first mega-novel, V, (I remember in 1973, the New York Times Book Review relishing the pun of calling the new book V2, since that Nazi rocket was a main character in it.) I loved Pynchon's dynamic style but I couldn't follow the story.  Although I'd had no such problem with Pynchon's shorter 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, it recurred with this book. 

 My experience was similar to my periodic confrontations with Joyce's Ulysses.  I would read and rapturously re-read the first Stephen Dedalus section, but I could only dip into fragments until the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end.  Similarly I so loved the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that I couldn't get past my confusion about the story to go much beyond it, for years.  It would in fact be at least a decade before I read it through--still mostly for the writing and its rhythms--and another several decades before I read it through again, with the help of a plot guide, and actually knew what was happening.  But in 1973, the style was exciting and inspiring enough, though I was pleased to find another dynamic voice in novels I could follow, by Don DeLillo.

The supplement went over well.  I got a letter from Joyce Carol Oates praising it: "What a marvelous issue! My husband and I are really impressed by the depth and background of reviewers.  Nothing seems treated flippantly or casually..." She passed along individual compliments, and mentioned she was sending a copy to her friend, Margaret Drabble, also reviewed in the supplement.  

 It was shortly after the books supplement came out in May that I took several weeks off.  I flew to Minnesota where I was hosted in St. Paul by Barbara Azer, sister of my Knox classmate, Mary.  I’d never been to the Twin Cities before, and Barbara and her roommates were excellent guides.  We picnicked on a bluff overlooking the place where the Mississippi began, and drove up past the immense devastated landscape in the iron range near Duluth to a little cabin on Lake Superior (where now there are expensive condos.)

 We even did some literary touring, visiting fields where Robert Bly lived (I got out of the car to imitate him reading poems about them), and a hotel bar once frequented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I asked the bartender reputed to have served Fitzgerald what he was like, and he gave the perfect answer: “He was a good tipper.”  Whether or not he actually had been there that long, it was a ready, pointed and potentially lucrative response.  

At that time in the early 1970s, what most of America knew about Minneapolis was that was the home of Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  On my first visit to downtown Minneapolis (to meet up with one of Barbara’s housemates at the department store where she worked), we saw people lined up along the sidewalk watching some other people walking right down the middle of the street.  One of them was Mary Tyler Moore, on possibly her first visit to the city (though probably her second), filming a new introduction to the show.

 So on my first visit to downtown Minneapolis, the first person I saw was Mary Tyler Moore. This was the second such coincidence of that spring, and it wouldn’t be the last.  The first was while making my way to the Twin Cities.  Just before I left, I’d put the Phoenix second section to bed, leaving space in the music section for a review by Peter Herbst of the Paul Simon concert occurring the next night. It was in fact Paul Simon’s first concert as a solo performer—that is, without Garfunkel, for he had lots of musicians and singers as part of his show. 

 I went to that show, and the next morning to the Boston airport, where I picked up a copy of the Phoenix and read Peter’s review on the plane.  He hadn’t liked the concert as much as I did (or as Jon Landau did, writing in The Real Paper.)

 I was to change planes for Minneapolis at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, as many people did—it was the busiest in the country, and a hub before there were hubs.  As I walked to my new gate, carrying my guitar case and copy of the Phoenix, I had a stray thought of—wouldn’t it be something to run into Paul Simon?  After all, he was starting a tour, he might go through O’Hare.  Then I turned a corner and saw…Paul Simon.

 He was standing near a ticket counter chatting with a young woman wearing the uniform of an airline.  I realized I had a copy of the Phoenix in my hand, and took it over to him.  “Here,” I said, “you can read about yourself.”  As he opened the paper, I suddenly realized it was not my review in there but Peter’s more mixed one.  I quickly tried to cover: “I was at the concert, too, and I loved it.”  At which point the young woman looked puzzled, and I realized she didn’t know who he was, just some guy chatting her up.  For him perhaps a rare normal moment, charming someone who didn’t know he was a celebrity rock star.  “Don’t say anything else,” Paul Simon warned me.  I backed away, saying only, “I’ve got to a plane to catch.  Nice seeing you… Fred.”

 After the Twin Cities I flew back to Pittsburgh and spent the rest of my time off visiting my parents and other family and friends in and around Greensburg.  My mother had suffered through treatments for breast cancer over the past several years.  My recollections of what happened when are hazy, partly because in those years no one talked about these things (especially cancer, as if you could spread it by saying the word)—certainly not my family, and specifically not my father.  I was home for part of the time and I kept in touch when I wasn’t, but mostly these treatments and her health were distant backdrops to everything else. At this point the cancer was in remission. She was getting close to the five year survival point, which at the time was believed to signal something like a cure.

 She was still a bit fragile and tentative, but mostly herself.  I helped her plant flowers in pots and flowerboxes, and we watched the movie “Stormy Weather,” just about the only program on this new cable TV, just starting up.  She and my father had put a down payment on some land in Florida, and she showed me the plan for the condo where they eventually would live.  Before that, she said, she hoped to see Hawaii. 

 But I had a hard time sitting still.  Even in Minnesota, surrounded by even younger energies than mine, I had trouble gearing down from the relentless demands of my job, the frenetic hours of phone calls and conferences, quick evaluations and instant decisions, generating story ideas for the endless appetite of the Second Section, keeping track of rock concerts and promo events, while juggling a hundred things in my head that had to be done.  I was often tired and I experienced things at a distance, as if I wasn't really there.

 So in Greensburg I went out with old friends, hung out with my sisters and their crowd.  Eventually my mother said she was disappointed I didn’t spend more time at home.  As was typical in our family, she said this when it was too late for me to do anything about it.  I was due back in Boston.      

 I returned to the Phoenix to find an editorial staff in turmoil.  An ongoing conflict (I no longer recall what it was about) had come to a head.  The staff was united against Editor Brass, and conspired to steal the copy for an entire issue to force him to confront the issue.  I joined them.  When Brass realized what was going on, his dismissive arrogance turned to beet-red fear.  He gave in, temporarily settling things down.  Though I wasn’t particularly a leader in this action, it didn’t escape his notice that it happened once I was back.

 Meanwhile the unionizing efforts were stalling, and there were secret conclaves to discuss the possibility that there was an agent provocateur among the staff. 

In early June, another eerie coincidence.  I was walking near the Ritz when I had one of those wouldn’t it be strange if I ran into thoughts…this time it was Kurt Vonnegut.  But no, he wasn’t around the next corner.  However…That evening I attended a performance by a new band called Stories.  I’d been following them, gathering material for a piece ever since Ben Gerson and I had been flown down to Nashville by their record company to see them perform there.  (We stayed in the King of the Road motel, where the Bee Gees were also staying, but I didn’t catch a glimpse.)

 That night I went out with the band to a large all-night restaurant.  I was sitting in a booth with bassist Kenny Aaronson, listening to him comically complain about the absence of all these groupies he’d heard about, when I glanced across the room and into the somewhat hostile stare of Kurt Vonnegut.  He was there with a group of people apparently after a university speaking engagement. 

 The last was perhaps less of a coincidence than a portent.  One night in late June, probably after I’d put the Second Section to bed that week, I was walking home from the subway station at Central Square, when I cut through an alley from Mass Ave.  Ahead of me I saw a car’s headlights coming towards me, and a kitten facing me.  The car ran over the kitten.  I was more than upset—I felt immediately that it was a portent, and that night I called a woman at the Phoenix for whom I had, let us say, romantic feelings, of which she was well aware.  She reassured me and calmed me.

 After some problems with missing mail at my Columbia Street apartment, I had added a post office box at the main Post Office on Mass Ave. in Central Square. The next day I picked up mail there and got on the bus to work, down Mass Ave. to Bolyston Street in Boston and the Boston Phoenix offices, to wrap up the week and start on the next. There might have been an early birthday card in the mix, but there was a business-sized envelope with the orange Boston Phoenix return address but no name.

 Inside was a very short note written by the woman I’d been pining for, the one I’d spoken to the night before, telling me that in my time away from Boston she and one of my closer friends had begun an affair.  At the time it seemed grudging and cold, though perhaps it was trying to be gentle and even affectionate.  But both of them were on the Phoenix staff and I worked with them every day.  It felt like a betrayal, as well as a humiliating, impossible situation.  

 And suddenly there I was, approaching the Boylston Street offices.  I walked up the long stairs, then up another flight to my third floor office, unusually empty.  Perhaps I examined the blue pages one last time. I wrote a brief letter of resignation, gathered what personal belongings I wanted to take, left the letter in the reception area, and walked down the dark stairs to the bright street. 

 I’d been on the edge of quitting once before this. The incessant demands, the tawdry office, and the constant onslaught of emotional and auditory noise, had me shattered by my day's end.  Steven assured me then that over time I’d get used to the pace and intensity of the job. But since I’d been back I’d struggled to gear up again, after my vacation had been marred by my anxious inability to slow down. I felt oversaturated and isolated, especially with added layers of shifting conflict.  All the egos and agendas, the moods and misunderstandings, the hormones, the noise, everything out of proportion.  Surrounded constantly by so many people, I was often exhausted and lonely.  This final sudden situation was almost a metaphor for it all, as well as the paradigmatic last straw.

 Meanwhile, Editor Wily Brass was so eager to prevent any second thoughts or attempts by others to persuade me to return, that he accepted my resignation that same afternoon—by telegram.  I don’t think I’d ever received a telegram before, or since. (As I learned later there were such attempts to get me back, but Brass was intransigent.)  Within a few days, I was later informed, Brass mumbled aloud his plans to take over the Second Section himself, fulfilling my prophecy.

 I had a Saturday ritual of doing the week’s food shopping (including cat food) at the Purity Supreme supermarket in Central Square, and eating a tuna sandwich in their adjacent lunch counter while reading the Boston Globe, in particular the weekly “Lit’ry Life” column by George Fraiser, which dealt in Boston literary and media tidbits.  The Saturday following my resignation, this column noted a decline in quality at the Boston Phoenix, which “a number of Phoenix people” informed him was due to the incompetence of Editor Wily Brass.  Only a fierce loyalty to the paper, he wrote, kept old hands like Ben Gerson and Janet Maslin from resigning. 

 My name, as usual, wasn’t mentioned—I don’t think Fraiser ever mentioned me—probably a networking error on my part.  And this time I didn’t read the column at Purity Supreme.  It was hand-delivered to my mailbox by Phoenix poetry editor and friend Celia Gilbert, along with a note and birthday greetings.  That particular Saturday I had turned 27.  

I eventually heard from a few other editorial staff and writers (or just ran into them) but as was to be a pattern in my departures, the most open regrets came from support staff.  

I kept very much to myself the rest of that summer, with strange long days awake—sometimes 24 hours straight-- followed by almost as much sleep. For awhile I entertained the fantasy of sailing on a transatlantic liner to Europe to visit Carol (though by then only the Queen Elizabeth II was left) but I couldn’t even focus the energy to visit a friend in Gloucester up the coast as promised, which ended that friendship. I couldn’t be around anyone for very long. 

My one public responsibility was teaching a course in the Boston Adult Education program, which I’d been persuaded to do some months before.  It was called Best of the New Books, so basically a reading and discussion course, meeting one early evening a week (Mondays at 6:50) for eight weeks. I had a class of 13, seated easily around a long table. There was a nice age range, and though there were a couple of college students with an academic approach, I especially appreciated the openness and direct responses of the post-college age adults, including an older married couple.  In the midst of a melancholy haze, I enjoyed it as much as was possible.  

  Since I opted for paperbacks to limit the costs to students,  most of the books were months old, despite the course title.  So instead of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (very new in hardcover), I chose  Slaughterhouse Five.  For the third class we read two fairly short novels: Don DeLillo’s End Zone and Margaret Drabble’s  Thank You All Very Much. The books in subsequent weeks were Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates, You Might As Well Live (biography of Dorothy Parker), Norman Mailer's collection of pieces titled Existential Errands, Anne Sexton's poems based on fairy tales, The Book of Folly, and finally,  the one I knew would be a winner, One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Although I didn't choose it, I would think I considered Kosinski's Being There. It’s interesting to reflect that in 1973 Marquez, DeLillo, Kosinski and Drabble were all relatively early in their careers, at least in America.

 I spent much of my time trying to write myself into coping with and even understanding what I’d been through, mostly in the forms of fiction and poetry. (But also the inevitable Shakespearian parody, with Wily Brass as Richard III.)  I was in revolt against concentrating exclusively on what was new—forthcoming books, new records. As I explained in a letter to Lester Bangs at Creem, most of the record companies had dropped me from their mailing lists when I became an editor, and now I was listening to music the way I used to—one or two albums at a time, repeated many times.  My records that summer were John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses.  Her "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" in particular.

 I did something similar with books, turning my reading to non-new writers in old paperbacks.  I had a definite Hemingway phase, which unfortunately showed up in my writing.  I recall reading several novels by Balzac and Stendhal for some reason. I applied for unemployment when I became eligible, and stood in the long lines at the unemployment office (there was a recession on) reading The Red and the Black. 

 I emerged somewhat in September, when I wrote a cover story for The Real Paper on Marlon Brando.  I wasn’t sure I was ready for a staff job yet, but I wasn’t offered one there anyway. Its editor confided that if I were a black woman he could hire me immediately.  I pass this on now with the amusement I felt then.  This was the social justice I’d supported, in action.  That it might have personal consequences for me was a fitting irony—even if I believed him, which I’m not sure I did. 

I still occasionally got invitations to music events. I always got music critic treatment at Passim, the Cambridge club down below the street, where the fabled folk Club 47 that had opened in 1958 with the debut of Joan Baez.  One evening that fall I sat with Janet Maslin and some others at the table near enough to singer Maria Muldaur to pick up the cable connector to her microphone that dropped to the floor.  This was her pop moment with “Midnight at the Oasis” on the radio, and she was radiantly beautiful.  When she clicked the cable back into the mike and thanked me, it was the closest I’d gotten to sex in some time. 

At some point that fall I found myself in the apartment of an attractive woman.  There’d been a bit of a vibe when we met one Saturday night through mutual friends from the Harvard Bookstore, and I went to see her Sunday afternoon to explore the possibilities.  It didn’t take long for me to realize I wasn’t really interested, and I don’t think she was either.  But I saw a paperback book in her living room of Larry McMurtry’s novel, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers.  I’d seen it before—it was fairly fashionable—but I’d resisted it because the title made me angry: it was too close to my title for an admittedly still unwritten fiction to be called “Friends and Other Strangers,” after the Dylan line.  I hadn’t read any other McMurtry.

 Still, something should come of this wasted trip, so I took the T back to Harvard Square and bought a copy. I read it straight through, and then I read it again.  Its protagonist, Danny Deck, was soon my current tortured alter-ego.  McMurtry also was in the early phase of his long writing career.  These writers of 1973--Vonnegut, Garcia-Marquez, DeLillo, Pynchon and McMurtry--would be mainstays of my personal literary arcana for decades to come.

Probably in October I spent a week on assignment for a magazine--fascinating in its way but basically disastrous.  Carol returned on a visit from Europe for a week or so.  She'd had a scare in Switzerland that her Hodgkins had returned, but her doctors at Mass General confirmed it had not.  I went with her on the train to New York and she flew back from there.  We continued to correspond regularly for about another year, but this was the last time I saw her.

According to contemporaneous notes and letters, I spent some of November back in Greensburg, which must have included Thanksgiving.  My mother's health was of concern, though reports were typically vague.  I returned to Greensburg from Cambridge for Christmas.  It is also a blank in my memory, but I chanced upon a page torn out of a notebook that recorded my impressions of Christmas in Greensburg that year: the traditional dinner at my Severini grandmother’s, the annual visit to my Kowinski grandfather and his daughter’s family in United.  I noted that my elders seemed noticeably older, and that my mother was experiencing pains again, and that her hair had started to thin.  “Gone with the wind,” she said. 

 Then it was late January 1974 and I’d been back in Cambridge for awhile when I got a call one night from my father, who said my mother was in the hospital again, and I should come home as soon as I could.  I had one housemate left at the time, and I quickly arranged for her to again take care of my cats, and booked the next flight to Pittsburgh I could manage.