Fun with UC Regents – or – Goddamned Chimpanzees

I am still researching the 1958 Mosk campaign for Attorney General of California. One of the pivotal issues is why, how and when Pat Brown chose (finally) to run for Governor thereby opening the way for Mosk to run for the vacancy Brown created. This naturally got me into the wider issue of the 1958 campaign for Governor, a fascinating, confusing and even funny story in itself. One of the richest sources on the elections of 1958 turns out to be a lengthy oral history given by Fred Dutton, Brown’s confidante and campaign manager in ’58 and a Democratic power broker in both Washington and California who served as assistant to President John F. Kennedy and chief of staff for Gov. Brown. The portrait photograph in the printed version looked vaguely familiar. Reading a few paragraphs in explained why: Dutton had been on the University of California’s Board of Regents for the years of my employment in the University-wide offices of President Charles Hitch.

Fred Dutton

This got me to reminiscing about some of the entertaining incidents that arose in my very few contacts with the Regents. One of the perks of my job was being occasionally allowed to attend a meeting of the Board. Four of them are fastened in my memory.

At one meeting the location of which escapes me, probably the Regents’ own meeting room in University Hall where I worked, the Vice President in charge of physical plant, Joe Something, had a couple of presentations on the progress of some ongoing construction projects. The first had to do with some remodeling or expansion of Roadhouse Hall, the dairying school on the Davis campus. The VP went on and on with all the details and complications, work schedules and so on. When he was finished there was an awkward pause while the Board members tried to come up with a question or a comment. Then Catherine Hearst (who was head of the Audit Committee, believe it or not) asked “Does it have to be called ‘Roadhouse’ Hall?” The VP answered, “Professor Chester Roadhouse was one of the most widely known and respected members of the Davis faculty who taught dairying there for more than thirty years.” “Oh.”

Professor Chester Linwood Roadhouse

Then the VP took up the subject of a new project, still in the planning and preliminary phases, a Chimpanzee building on the lagoon of the Santa Barbara campus. This one was fraught with environmental problems and therefore, legal problems because of the site selected, the edge of the lagoon, and putting together the required EIR was posing a lot difficulties. After an exhaustive and exhausting exposition of all of this the VP concluded and awaited questions and comments. Once again, after a pause, Catherine Hearst asked, “Does it have to be called the ‘Chimpanzee’ building?” “You know, the same question occurred to me, so I called up Professor So-and-so and he said ‘Yes, Goddamn it! They’re not simians, they’re not primates, they’re not anthropoid apes, they are Goddamned Chimpanzees!’” “Oh.”  

Catherine Hearst at the time of Patty's kidnapping

*********

In the midst of the student uprisings (I think in 1970) the Regents held several meetings in an auditorium of the UC Extension campus on Laguna Street in San Francisco. This was done so that the Board could avoid the unpleasantness of confronting crowds of students shooting their pictures with Hasselblads and Nikons (described in my post “Above and Beyond …”). The room had a stage and arena seating. The Board sat around a large table on the stage running almost the entire stage width.

One meeting I attended there featured a presentation by Verne Orr, Reagan’s Director of Finance (after being the director of the DMV) and personal factotum. He was perfect for the job being a natural born bureaucrat, capable of carrying out long-running boring and trivial tasks and seeming to be devoid of ego. Reagan had a bug up about the Governor having a lower salary not only than the President of the University but of more than a hundred other university staff members. Most of these were professors in the medical schools who commanded movie star wages but they also included Edward Teller who held two chairs simultaneously and others of that sort.

Orr appeared, set up an easel with flip charts on it and distributed hand-outs containing the same material as the charts. One regent who was missing at the start of the meeting was Edward Carter, former chair of the Board, CEO of Broadway-Hale Stores (formerly called Carter-Hawley-Hale Stores), on a dozen or more boards of major banks, Pacific Tel and Tel and other prominent corporations, a major power broker and huge contributor to the Republican Party, leader of the right wing faction (along with his pal Ed Pauley) of the Regents (such as the group that was the toughest opposition to the Free Speech Movement in 1964) and so on.

After Orr had been droning on for about ten minutes Carter, attired in at least a thousand bucks worth of dark brown Italian suiting, made an intrusive appearance, crossed to the middle of the downstage side of the table and took a seat, so that his back was to the audience. He was a big man, very wide of back and seemed to fill half the stage aperture. He started going through the handout to catch up to where Orr’s flip charts were. Orr stood silent as Carter flipped each page up with a loud enough snap to be heard in the back of the auditorium – Snap! Snap! Snap! When he caught up, he asked in a very aggressive tone, “Verne what is this all about? What’s your point?” Orr started mumbling something about governor …  president … salaries … Carter interrupted “Excuse me Verne. If the Governor has issues about his salary, it is the State’s problem, not the University’s.” Orr stood silent for a moment looking defeated and perplexed, meekly folded his easel and left.

Two other meetings stick in my mind because of the appearances of the governors of the time. I think the first was also in the San Francisco UC Extension theater during the height of student protests over the Viet Nam war when Reagan was governor.

The Governor of California is a member of the Board of Regents by virtue of his state office but, as a rule rarely attends meetings for a number of reasons not least being that it would take too much time to be both informed and a participant in the complex considerations involved in governing a major university. They usually handle the matter by appointing friends and political allies to the board and relying on them to represent the governor and keep him informed.  Pat Brown’s appointees Fred Dutton and Bill Coblentz are good examples of this approach.

On the occasion in question, Reagan made a grand appearance, striding down the aisle of the auditorium with his retinue behind, making an attention commanding commotion as befits the Great Governor of a Great State. What was really astonishing though was his appearance. He was in full Max Factor make-up, a bright rosy color, with his well coiffed hair dyed a rich chocolate brown, apparently wanting look just so for the evening TV news broadcasts. It was like having a street mime in attendance. Everyone in the room pretended not to notice.

The other gubernatorial appearance I remember was early in 1975, the first Regents’ meeting after Jerry Brown was elected, when he introduced himself and his philosophy to the rest of the board. He proceeded to tell everyone there how to run a university. Mouths were agape at the arrogance and the snotty manner. I don’t know whether he ever attended another meeting but I’m sure he wasn’t missed. That scene has left me with a deep distaste for Jerry Brown; I never voted for him again for anything and find the possible or probable prospect of his becoming Governor again rather depressing.

New Governor Jerry Brown 1975

Management Seminars

Another perk of my job was a standing invitation to the President’s management seminars which, I believe, were held about monthly, though probably not the year around, in the Regent’s Meeting Room in University Hall. These were always very interesting and often entertaining to boot. I’ll recount a few that stand out in my memory.

Angus Taylor was, at the time, Vice President for Academic Affairs. His career with the university was as a teacher of mathematics for many years at UCLA. He wrote a fairly successful calculus text with much of its sales coming from UC campuses (support your neighborhood professor!). (In my father’s day the most popular calculus text was Love’s. In my youth it was Granville’s. After that it was Thomas’ and I think these days it’s probably Strang’s – the last two were from MIT which gives their texts a lot of “clout”. While I am on this digression, I have to bring up my favorite trivia item: who invented the textbook? Answer at the end of this post.)

In 1963-1964, Angus Taylor was chair of the statewide Academic Assembly and Academic Council of the Senate and, as such, was deeply involved in resolving the contentious issues brought forward by the Free Speech Movement. Taylor was one of the very few involved who emerged from the episode with an enhanced reputation. It was the Academic Senate’s simple, reasonable proposal which became the basis of a compromise between the hard-shell Regents (Carter, Pauley, Hearst, et al) and the FSM that ended the conflict. This, in part, led to his appointment as Vice President. Not long before I left Taylor was appointed University Provost by Hitch’s successor, David Saxon, but left that post to become acting chancellor and then chancellor at UC Santa Cruz, where he completed his career, once again receiving accolades for a successful reorganization and administration.

Angus Taylor was almost a caricature of the beloved professor – he was charming, engaging, interesting and interested in all he encountered – intensely loved by faculty, students and administrators.

For the life of me, I cannot recall the subject of his presentation that day. What I do remember was that he circulated around the audience a pair of pitons, for he was an enthusiastic climber of mountains all over the world. The first part of his presentation had to do with a famous incident he was involved in about a year earlier. He was in a Swiss cable car which had gotten stuck mid-flight hundreds of feet above an Alpine gorge. It took something like twenty-four or more hours for rescuers to get the passengers down safely. His account had the audience alternately holding its breath and rolling with laughter. 

Angus Taylor as Emeritus Professor, VP and Chancellor

William Coblentz was a very successful, fast-talking, witty and personable real estate lawyer to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights set who was something of a celebrity (often showing up in Herb Caen’s column, for instance). He was also the favorite lawyer for San Francisco’s numerous rock-and-roll musicians – which I will explain later. His “presentation” was personal, anecdotal, apparently completely impromptu and funny.

One of his stories was about an encounter with a grungy student in Sproul Plaza who said “You’re Bill Coblentz that smart rich Jew San Francisco lawyer Regent, aren’t you?”  Coblentz said “I wasn’t sure just what the charge was, so I thought it best to plead guilty.”

Coblentz said being the lawyer to a great number of rock stars had its difficulties, often involving more than business services, but on balance he considered it a good thing because it made him a hero to his adolescent daughters. He explained how it all came about. Bill Graham had been one of his clients for a couple of years, initially brought to him by another client who was a promoter. One day Graham appeared with a young woman singer (Grace Slick – Coblentz was very careful not to use her name but I knew who it was). When introduced to Coblentz by Graham she went up to him and asked, “Gettin’ enough?” Here too he wasn’t sure what the question was but thought it better to say yes.

A couple of years and a large number of performer-clients later a new one appeared and Coblentz finally decided to ask why he had come. The new client said Grace had highly recommended Coblentz saying she has this really cool lawyer who drops acid.

When we lived on the “big mesa” of Bolinas there was a property nearby, containing a house and an old barn, that had a sign at the driveway saying “Coblentz.” Also, while we were at that location Grace Slick and Paul Kantner bought the house at the beach entrance at the west end of Brighton Avenue which was originally built in the 1920s by Marin Pepper as a teahouse, serving the beach goers of the day.

Grace and Paul did some remodeling of the house, added a big gazebo for rehearsing, double-glazed for noise suppression, in the surrounding yard and a large, irregularly shaped swimming pool. The pool, bottom and sides and its surrounds, was completely covered with a mosaic (depicting what, I do not know) which took well over a year to create. (In the small world department: several years later my son and I went to a tire sale at the Cow Palace and the long-haired hippie salesman assigned to us asked where we were from and when we told him Bolinas he said he was the guy who did the tiling.) 

The "Jefferson Airplane house" today. Note the camera is so good the diving board is visible.

 
She became pregnant while living here and when asked by the old ladies she encountered at the post office or village store what she was going to name the baby she said ”God” just to stir them up. (This anecdote is incorrectly related elsewhere as happening in the hospital and being said to an obstetric nurse.) Not long after the baby, a girl named China, was born they bought a house in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood and sold the Brighton Avenue house. A few years later a big winter storm sent waves crashing over the sea wall that carried off the gazebo. I think the pool tiling was damaged as well.

After his presentation I went up to Coblentz and told him that I lived near his Bolinas property. “Not mine – my wife’s – I hate Bolinas.” Then I mentioned the Slick-Kantner house and he seemed to get genuinely angry (he is a real estate lawyer, remember) and said, “They sold that house for half what it was worth!”

A few years later Coblentz was Catherine Hearst’s lawyer during her daughter Patty’s kidnapping ordeal.

William Coblentz

When Earl Cheit spoke to the Management Seminar he was between jobs, being no more than a mere professor in the Haas School of Business. To see what I mean just look at his list of posts given on the School’s website:
At Haas since 1957
            1993 – 94 Interim Athletic Director, Intercollegiate Athletic and
            Recreational Sports, University of California, Berkeley
            1990 – 91 Acting Dean, Haas School of Business
            1976 – 82 Dean, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
          1981 – 82 Acting Vice President, Financial and Business
                         Management, UC Berkeley (I think this should read
                         “University-wide” – author)
            1965 – 69 Executive Vice Chancellor, UC Berkeley

Cheit was one of the “good guys” in the Free Speech Movement uprising in 1964, Chairman of the Faculty Component of the Committee on Campus Political Activity which took the position that the University had no right to limit students’ off-campus political participation (which agreed with the ACLU and UC attorney Cunningham). Cheit put forth a proposal for the CCPA which was supported by the Academic Senate and agreed to by the students only to have it rebuffed by the intransigent administration. In the end something very like it was proponed by the Academic Senate (see Angus Taylor above) and finally accepted (with added requirements regarding “punishing” the Sproul Hall sit-ins). Cheit was a member of the committee which met with Clark Kerr and the regents in Los Angeles on December 18, 1964 which led to the denouement of the FSM affair. He also was on the search committee that found Roger Heyns to be the new Berkeley Chancellor.

On January 2, 1965 the Regents finally terminated Edward Strong as Chancellor at Berkeley. The next day Earl Cheit notified Alex Sherriffs, Strong’s Vice-chancellor for Student Affairs (described somewhere as “rabidly anti-communist” which had a lot to do with the odd behavior of the administration) that he was to join Strong. This is a passage from an oral history interview of Alex Sherriffs years later:

Sherriffs
So I went out when Roger [W.] Heyns was coming in as chancellor and Earl [F.] Cheit was setting up the palace guard and so on

Rowland
Did you resign?

Sherriffs
Well, Cheit came to me and he said, “This afternoon we’re having a staff meeting and I’m going to announce that you’re resigning.” [pause] I said, “Is this your idea? Is it Roger Heyns’ or is it Clark Kerr’s?” And he wouldn’t answer me. I said, “Well, that’s enough of an answer. I’m tired of empty in-baskets. I think I can do something better for the cause than sit here anyway, so go ahead. Announce it.” Then Cheit said, “Let’s have lunch.” So we had lunch and he said, “You should have six months to get caught up so you can go back to teaching with a fresh start, and so forth.” I didn’t feel hostile. He was doing what he was supposed to do. Actually, I didn’t want to be somebody’s vice chancellor who didn’t want me. I had been somebody’s vice chancellor who didn’t want me because there was a war going on and nobody seemed to know who was on what side: I refer to the
Meyerson episode. 

In the Management Seminar Cheit was lively and spirited and his talk was lively and spirited – all done ex tempore, of course (in case you haven’t noticed, professors are usually great talkers). He talked about university administration issues from an economist’s viewpoint which often appeared as insights. I remember that he spent a lot of time on the subject of Berkeley’s tenure rate, the proportion of faculty that was tenured which also would be the probability of tenure for a new appointee. He said that Harvard’s rate was something like twenty-five percent, Oxford’s five percent and Berkeley’s seventy-five percent! Each year the average age of Berkeley’s faculty increased by nearly a full year. At the time Cal’s pay scale was comparable to other universities of similar size and stature so a high tenure rate wasn’t needed for recruiting and Cheit felt it was a real threat to the quality of the staff. I don’t know what the situation is today.

After the presentation as people were leaving I overheard a number of the conversations of members of the audience saying that they wished Cheit would be the next University President. Alas, it was not to be.

Earl Cheit

Bob Adams was an econometrician who transferred from Berkeley to Santa Cruz in the first round of appointments to Crown College, third of the colleges to be established (after Cowell and Stevenson). Crown was to be the science college at Santa Cruz much like San Diego is the science university of the UC system. He was a cranked up sort, very emotional and obsessed with the tensions that existed between the collegial (or English) and the departmental (or German) models of a university. He kept referring to his job at Crown as “intense”. He said his bedroom window looked across a field toward the college and that he couldn’t stand to wake up in the morning and have that as his first sight – so he kept the shade drawn.

He said that in Berkeley his office was in a building full of economists (think of it!), that his friends were all economists and that his social life, dinner parties and the like, was also exclusively with economists. When he got to Crown his office was on the ground floor with a window and exit right onto the courtyard and in the neighboring office was a professor of English who specialized in eighteenth century English poetry. Adams said that to his surprise he found his neighbor to be quite intelligent and rather good company. He made a number of other funny and witty remarks along the way and had the audience in complete sympathy with his problem: how to combine departmental and collegial affiliations.

After the meeting I went up to him and told of the organization of the Iroquois nations. Each Iroquois was a member of a tribe and of a clan or longhouse. The clans crossed all the nations and each nation contained all the longhouses. Among other things this made war between member nations impossible. I suggested this was analogous to being a member of a department and of a college.

It turned out Adams’ problem was nearly universal at UCSC and a rather serious one to boot. Dealing with it led to an administrative shake-up and the appointment of Angus Taylor chancellor of UCSC. There is an “In Memoriam” document on the web signed, among others, by Clark Kerr and Fred Balderston, which contains this passage:
“…But there was a cluster of issues concerning the relationships at UC Santa Cruz between the colleges and the boards of studies (i.e. academic departments – author). Built into the original campus design was a commitment to have a significant portion (originally, 50 percent) of faculty positions controlled by the colleges and to have the colleges offer some courses in-house.
  
Conflict over control of faculty appointments and course assignments was, in effect, built into the initial academic design of the campus. Many courses that would be given as high-enrollment courses at other University campuses were organized small-scale at UC Santa Cruz. …”

Months later I had an interesting and amusing encounter with Adams again but it takes some setting up, some background, to tell it.

UC Santa Cruz had a campus computing facility like all the others, but it was pitifully underpowered. When University-wide (U Hall) was given the IBM 360 model 65 that had been at Santa Barbara we sent our puny IBM 360 model 40 to Santa Cruz. (The Santa Barbara 65 was famous. It was held hostage for a couple of days by a black student group who were photographed waving a stilson wrench over one of the memory boxes. The students said they were grabbing the man by his computer.)

The titular head of the campus computing center was Harry Huskey who had been an engineering professor at Berkeley for many years, one of the pioneers in building computers (e.g. SWAC) and one of the early presidents of the Association for Computing Machinery and who was nearing retirement. Huskey’s primary function was to lend prestige to the facility. The actual operation and administration was left to Marshall Sylvan, a young lecturer in statistics from Stanford. Among the well known users of the computer center were William McKeeman and Franklin Deremer also from Stanford and near contemporaries of Marshall’s. They were involved in some rather advanced work involving compilers (“compiler compilers” for example) and would seem to have required better computer service than was available at Santa Cruz.

On the next block west of University Hall on University Avenue there was a discount “drug store” that I called the schlock shop. It had the broadest spectrum of crap imaginable – I don’t remember whether there actually was a pharmacist or not. I used to go there to get cigarettes cheaply (I quit thirty years ago). On the day of this story I went to the schlock shop and bumped into Marshall Sylvan. I guess I was in a puckish humor and started teasing him. I asked how he was managing with our hand-me-down feeble 360/40. Before he could finish saying how he was managing I fired another question: how could he meet the requirements of people like McKeeman and Deremer? He said something about having a Burroughs but again before he could finish I asked: what are you doing with wild men like McKeeman and Deremer at that hippie college anyhow?

At this point Bob Adams, whom I hadn’t noticed before, put his face between mine and Marshall’s and said, “I know this isn’t the true measure of a university’s quality, that it should be measured by the value added to its products, the students …” (I love it! He is lampooning his own field, mocking himself.) “still, such things do count for something: did you know there are more fellows of the National Academy of Sciences at Santa Cruz than there are at Ann Arbor?” “No, Bob, I didn’t know that.”

 ***********

The answer to the trivia question is William Whiston, Isaac Newton’s successor to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge. He studied mathematics under Newton and was chosen by Newton to be his successor. He had a prodigious output of books, papers and broadsides in mathematics, theology and history. He contributed to a number of scientific and technical problems (such as the famous longitude problem). Today he is best remembered for his translation of Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews which is still in print. I have a two hundred year old edition I found in a bookstall on University Place in New York.

Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews 1806 edition of Whiston's translation

In a book on algebra Whiston broke the subject up into lessons and provided problems to be worked by the student, the first book ever in this form.

Author’s note: I have been granted permission by the Bancroft and UC Berkeley Libraries to limited use of material contained in their oral history transcripts according to the usual rules of the Fair Use doctrine.

Charles O’Brien and the end of California cross-filing

The Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008 edition the San Francisco Chronicle had an obituary for Charles O’Brien, lawyer and for some time, Chief Deputy Attorney General for California who died September 3.

Charles O'Brien - Chief Deputy Attorney General, California

I was acquainted with Charles exactly fifty years before and the occasion for that acquaintance and associated events have some historical interest. The fabric of the story involves a number of threads which I will take up one at a time and try to weave together: Marianne Evans, Leo Dardarian, my time at Mount Zion Hospital, Bert Feinstein, the 1958 California Democratic Convention, Stanley Mosk and Dianne Berman.

Beginnings

Marianne Evans was born in June of 1928 in Longview, Washington, an interesting variant of a classical mill town on the Columbia River. She grew up there and attended local schools through her sophomore year in high school. She then entered the University of Chicago under the early entry program started by Robert Maynard Hutchins who felt most high schools were simply a waste of time. She was housed in Kelly Hall and was part of a loose clique that included Terry Flambert and Molly Bower (see the post about Satish Gujral). After Terry and I married in 1948 we had less association with Kelly Hall and lost touch with other women in the dormitory. During that time Marianne was dating Leo Dardarian. 
 
After graduating from the U of Chicago, Marianne went back to the west coast. She took a job teaching for a year or two in an elementary school in Dunsmuir, California on the upper Sacramento River, a situation somewhat similar to Longview.

Marianne Evans Dardarian in the 1950s

Leo Dardarian was born December 23, 1926, in Buffalo, New York. His Armenian father was a child refugee from the Turkish attempted genocide, sent from his village by his parents under the cover of darkness in 1915.  In Niagara Falls, NY he became the owner of two restaurants and his son grew up learning the trade from early childhood. Leo was drafted toward the end of WW II, taught basic Japanese by the Army and served a year and a half in Occupied Japan. At the U of C he was associated with a group whose members I barely knew (one of them was Charlie Einstein, son of “Parkyakarkas” of Eddie Cantor Show fame, and prolific sports and mystery writer; Charlie’s son David writes a very nice technology advice column in the San Francisco Chronicle; Charlie’s half-brothers Albert Brooks and Dave Osborne are famous Hollywood actor/writers).
 
I am rather vague on the next part of the story. I believe Leo went out to Dunsmuir and proposed marriage (or, perhaps, it was done long distance), that Marianne and Leo lived in Niagara Falls while he managed his father’s restaurants and had their two daughters, Wendy and Nancy there. They moved to Allston Way in the West Portal District of San Francisco in late 1954 or early 1955. (I remember one cute story about their move: when five year old Wendy first saw their new home she said, “This is a nice neighborhood, Daddy”; when Leo asked why she said that, she replied, “No dog doo”; apparently she had a penchant for stepping in it.)
 
Almost as soon as the Dardarians moved into the West Portal neighborhood Marianne got involved with the local Democratic political club which served the west side of San Francisco. There was a young woman who was prominent in that group that earned considerable admiration and praise from Marianne: Diane Berman, wife of a well known lawyer, Jack Berman (who subsequently became a Superior Court judge, appointed by Jerry Brown).
 
Not long after arriving in S.F. Leo took the position of Food Service Manager at Mount Zion Hospital. It is likely that arrangements for him to take this job had been made before the family moved here. It was then that Marianne and Terry got together again and I first met Leo. I had been having a rough time trying to find employment in San Francisco so Leo arranged for me to start at the bottom in Mount Zion’s food service department.

Leo Dardarian in a publicity picture for a staff art show

 

(This photo is from a Mt. Zion Hospital staff newletter page about an annual art show. This show was installed by Barbara Ruthman an accomplished artist herself {Chicago Art Institute} who is at the left in the top right and lower left pictures below. About three years later she became my wife – our fiftieth anniversary was March 2, 2009.)

My time at Mount Zion began on April 18, 1955 which was the forty-ninth anniversary of the Great Quake and Fire and the date of Albert Einstein’s death. I was assigned to the dish room in the kitchen, working the cleanup from all three meals. The small chamber with limited ventilation contained a huge, thunderous, steam belching machine – it was the ante-chamber to Hell. I learned a lot about the social workings of people in such agonizing situations and came to have deep respect for their way of dealing with hopeless lives and prospects. Some time I will try to describe the people and how they lived in another post.
 
After about a year I was “promoted” to manager of the employees’ cafeteria which was in the basement down the hall from the kitchen. As manager I was really a fill-in for all the other employees when they had their days off or were absent for sickness or whatever. Leo would come in and shout down the length of the service line, “Roger, who are you today?” and I would answer, “Charlie” or “Helen” or “Iola”.
 
In this position I became familiar not only with all the employees of hospital and all the residents and interns but also with nearly all the visiting medical staff. One oddity was that I grew to know all the medics names, mostly from the announcements over the PA system, and I knew all their faces from seeing them in the cafeteria but often did not know which name went with which face.
 
The job was just as dreary as the previous one, just not as physically punishing, so I did little things to lighten the atmosphere. Sometimes, when I was Charlie, the cashier, I would paste little bulletins on the side of the cash register designed to pull medical legs. In one case I wrote “Proctology is not a medical specialty, it is a point of view” (this in the best tradition of medical humor which is often fairly crude, especially for proctology; for example, “what is the definition of a proctoscope?” “a long tube with an asshole at either end”; some others: “what’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? An enzyme is quiet”; a variant on that is, “what is the definition of a hormone? if you can make one you don’t need one”). 
 
Once, after Terry and I had made a Sunday visit, our first, to the Stanford University campus, the old main building of which I thought uncommonly ugly, I made up a mock petition filled with whereas-es asserting that the school was a depressant of local property values, an aesthetic atrocity, a blight on the landscape and so on, followed by a be-it-resolved that the buildings be torn down forthwith. I put this on a clip-board and the next day that I was Helen (steam-table server) I handed it to each doctor coming through. Most took it in the right spirit, some even agreeing, but to my surprise some thought it was serious. Many of the psychiatric residents had some connection with Stanford (they “did” women and children at Mt. Zion and did men at the VA hospital in Palo Alto which served as a Stanford teaching hospital) and one of them, after reading the petition said, “Are you crazy!?”, which still breaks me up (psychiatrists are not supposed to use that word).
 
Bert Feinstein Returns:  A year or so after I started working at Mt. Zion an excited buzz went through all the halls with people in all sorts of jobs telling others “Bert is back – go to the Post Street side of the hospital”. I did as instructed and found what seemed to be the entire staff on the steps and the sidewalks with much laughing and chattering going on. It was a remarkable sight: the entire block of Post Street between Scott and Divisadero had been cleared of cars and the traffic blocked and there, in the middle of the street, in the middle of the block, was a fire-engine-red Mercedes 300SL with its gull-wing doors up.

A 1955 Mercedes 300SL

The background to this incident to the best of my recollection was this. Bert loved cars. He was steeped in the 1950s English sports car craze, little plaid peaked cap, long scarf wrapped around the neck, the whole bit, but he didn’t drive a trite MG, he had an Aston Martin convertible.

A 1954 Aston-Martin covertible driven by Tippi Hedren on a street in Bodega Bay in Hitchcock's "The Birds"

Bert had converted from his previous profession, experimental neurology, to neurosurgery under a famous master in Sweden (see the Ben Libet pages at the end of this post). A short time before I started at Mt. Zion Bert was sent on a federal grant back to Sweden to learn about their continuous monitoring neurosurgery suites. At the time there was only one like it in the United States, at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Bert learned about the design, construction and operation of the facility and the neurosurgical methods that were required for its use. This surgery was then constructed at Mt Zion. The entire facility was mounted on springs to protect it from earthquakes and more ordinary vibrations. It had a separate monitoring room where a technician observed the readouts from a number of diagnostic instruments and relayed his findings to the surgeon – a very advanced facility in its time.

Bert had a partner in his practice at that time named Grant Levin. The story goes that Grant said to Bert when he left for Sweden, “Don’t you dare come back without bringing me a chick-wagon like yours” (Bowdlerization provided by the author) – hence the scene at the beginning of this section.

Grant Levin (in Army uniform - from a WW II photograph)

There is one small incident involving myself and Bert that sticks in my memory. The medical staff at Mt. Zion was broadly divided into two large groups, an older, politically and medically conservative set and their younger, liberal opposition. The big face-off came every year with the election of the Chief of Staff. The hospital hosted a medical staff dinner and the voting followed dessert. On the occasion in question, after years of frustration, one of the young liberal group, Jack Gordon (an internist and my own primary), won the seat. Although Bert was older than most of the liberals, he was firmly with them. That night I was working swing shift and came across Bert in the hallway. He was carrying a paper cup of whiskey, spilling a little, and was, as they say, feeling no pain (this calls to mind all the old burlesque routines of the brain surgeon with a hangover). He raised his cup as in a toast and said, “See? Once in a while the good guys can win”.

The Middle

{In the process of trying to fill in the gaps and correct the errors of my previous account of the 1958 Democratic campaign for Atorney General I learned several disconcerting things in adition to how erroneous my account was. First the transcripts from the State’s oral history interviews for Mosk, O’Brien and Zirpoli almost seem to be about different sets of events. Mosk doesn’t mention O’Brien in remembering the campaign; O’Brien doesn’t mention Leo and Zirpoli also doesn’t mention Charles. This has more to do wih the vagaries of memory (and, perhaps, some clandestine motives) than anything else. In addition to those frustrations, there is a baffling lack of documentation about the ‘58 AG campaign everywhere. When I am able to produce a more coherent account I will update this section.}

From the days of Hiram Johnson, almost from the inception of direct primaries in California, the rules had allowed candidates to cross-file, that is, run on several parties’ tickets without even stating their own party affiliation. As things worked out, from 1940s on this arrangement favored the Republicans. Earl Warren won three terms starting in 1942 running as both a Democrat and a Republican and Goody Knight did the same for the election of 1954. The Democrats had gotten comfortable with Republicans running on their ticket because the Republicans tacitly surrendered the Attorney General’s election to the Democrats.
 
In 1959, after the election, cross-filing was finally ended.

 Stanley Mosk
Charles was selected to run Mosk’s campaign in Northern California, a job for which he was preeminently qualified not only by his Harvard Law degree but also by his Boston ward politics schooling – there was no greater master than James Curley. Leo put in a lot of time, effort and a knack for politics, pretty much co-leading with Charles in San Francisco. One of their practices for garnering both votes and funds was the old-fashioned coffee klatsch in supporters’ homes. As often as possible, Mosk would make an appearance and give a five minute speech at these affairs. I went to only one, at the Dardarians’ Allston Way house. Bert was there adding his charm and enthusiasm (and, I might add, good looks) to the mix, which I believe he did quite a few times. I do not know if Diane was there – she very well could have been.

Stanley Mosk

Charles and his Southern California counterpart must have done an excellent job: Stanley Mosk won by the largest margin of any state level contest in the entire United States that year.
 
Now I do not know this for a fact – that is, no one has told me this was how things went – but it seems likely. I believe Bert and Diane became well acquainted during the campaign. Of course, they probably moved in several other common circles: Jewish High Society, which is very influential in San Francisco; medical groups (her father was a prominent surgeon at UCSF), supporters of Mt. Zion and the SF Symphony and so on. In any event, she divorced Jack Berman in 1960 and married Bert in 1962. 
 
Charles was appointed Deputy Attorney General for Northern California by Mosk and later became Chief Deputy Attorney General.

Endings

Leo left Mt. Zion a year or two later and started a food and liquor service consultancy (imitating my then father-in-law, Richard Flambert whose firm Flambert and Flambert was well-known). One of the biggest contracts Leo landed was with Leonard Martin developing The Cannery. Leo was in charge of designs and installations not only for the several restaurants but other food merchants as well. In the course of this he became involved with a young French woman who was opening a kitchen supplies store. This led to separation and divorce.
 
Marianne went back to teaching, this time English at the high school level. I don’t remember whether this was before or after the break-up. One of her assignments was to McClymonds High School in Oakland, a school filled with tough, demoralized black kids. She viewed her job as helping her students break out of the confines society and background had built around them. She felt that mastery of standard middle-American speech was essential to those ends. In other words, she anticipated the Ebonics controversy, which centered on this very school, by thirty years. She also believed there was no point in pussy-footing with her kids – they needed straight talk and they respected her for giving it to them. She wrote across the top of the front blackboards “People who aks for a job don’t get it!”
 
The last time I spoke to Marianne and Leo was from her hospital bed in Mt. Zion. She was to undergo a biopsy the next morning on a lump in one of her breasts. Marianne’s mother had survived breast cancer for some years at that point and I guess we all felt she would too (the girls called their Evans grandparents Noc and Papa – I don’t know where that came from).
 
I guess Leo was there to provide some sort of support – I believe he was living with (married to?) the French woman by then. I was angry with Leo for his shabby treatment of Marianne (still am). His business was not going well at the time and I rubbed it in a little. He told me to do something to myself that I don’t think is possible. Those were the last words we exchanged.
 
Marianne woke up the next day after the surgery having undergone a radical mastectomy. I don’t know if her doctors had deliberately misled her about what was likely to happen or that she simply misunderstood what was possibly going to happen or that it was unforeseen by the doctors as well. In any case she was shocked, horrified, felt betrayed and was furious. She discharged the surgeon and, with the support of her primary, refused follow up radiation treatment (I should note that I know the names of all the doctors involved but see no point in offering them).
 
All of this was going on at about the time Barbara, Alex and I had moved to Bolinas and I started a daily commute to Berkeley. We lost touch with all of the Dardarians. About a year later Barbara was taking one of her customary walks with her dog across a pastureland belonging to the original Niman-Schell ranch on her way to Agate Beach when she bumped into Wendy coming back from the beach. Wendy tearfully told Barbara that Marianne had died a year before, two months before her forty-second birthday. What an awful loss!
 
Leo and his new wife moved to Southern California where he started his consultancy anew. I heard somewhere that he was involved in the creation of Spago but that doesn’t seem possible chronologically. Around 1980 Barbara said she saw Leo in Stinson Beach, but I now think she was mistaken, that it was somebody else who seemed to resemble Leo. Marianne and Leo had one of the early houses in the Seadrift development which was for a time the northernmost one on the sandspit. Perhaps that property remained his. Some recent searching on the Web revealed that Leo was divorced from Jeaniene, his French wife, and that he died a month before his fifty-sixth birthday in 1982. His father, Sarkis, born in 1901, outlived him by 12 years. I don’t know the cause but when I knew him he smoked too much and drank too much, factors that could very well have played a part.
 
The last time I saw Bert was in the small parking lot of the small neighborhood Safeway (yes, they existed) that I think was between Lyon and Presidio on California (?). At that time Bert and Diane were living a couple of blocks up from us on Lyon, around Washington or Jackson. The very nice house had belonged to one of them prior to their marriage – I think it was hers. Diane had not yet been elected to the SF Board of Supervisors so I think the date was around 1967 or 8.
 
Bert was a very happy man at that time. As I have said, Bert loved cars and he was the proud owner of a mid-1930s coffee-colored Rolls Royce, with  very unusual wicker work on the sides, he brought home from England – which was right there in the supermarket lot. He went on and on about the glories of the car.

I haven't been able to find a picture of a Rolls just like Bert's - his was "regular" Phantom (not open in the front) with the basket-work on both front and rear doors.

He also went on and on about the glories of his wife, how brilliant she was, how talented, how dedicated to her career and that she would go far (he got that right), how beautiful, etc., etc., etc. They had been married five or six years by that time and he sounded like they were still on their honeymoon. Seven or eight years later he was diagnosed with colon cancer and two agonizing years after that he died.
 
About five years or so ago Diane and husband Richard Blum and her daughter Katherine, herself a Superior Court judge like her father, were in a local restaurant in Stinson Beach, where they had (have?) a Seadrift weekend house, when Barbara and I were there. I went up to their table and out of the blue asked the Senator “Do you remember Marianne Dardarian?” She looked nonplused for a second (well, wouldn’t you be?) and then said, “I certainly do.”

Postscripts and footnotes

If you have been paying attention, you might have noticed a curious omission: there is no photograph of Bert Feinstein. The explanation is simple enough – I haven’t been able to find one, not a one anywhere. Apart from being frustrating to the point of infuriation it is also very baffling. How could anyone who became as famous in San Francisco as he did (he even conducted a brain surgery, live, on KQED television) not appear somewhere on the Web? Let me know if you know of one.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Obituary for Charles O’Brien

Charles O’Brien, prominent S.F. lawyer, dies
      Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
      Sunday, September 7, 2008

      Charles O’Brien, a longtime San Francisco lawyer who was second in command at the state attorney general’s office in the 1960s and narrowly lost an election for attorney general in 1970, died at his Danville home Thursday, two days after he turned 83.

      Mr. O’Brien, born in Lawrence, Mass., enlisted in the Army at 17 and was  an infantry machine gunner in World War II, where he earned five European theater battle stars and a Purple Heart. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and took part in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, family members said.

      After the war, he graduated with honors from Harvard College, got his law degree from Harvard and began a law practice with a San Francisco firm in 1954. He joined the attorney general’s office in 1959 and stayed through   1970, leaving for brief stints as a top aide to Gov. Pat Brown in 1961 and     campaign manager for Attorney General Stanley Mosk’s re-election in 1962.

      Mr. O’Brien served as chief deputy attorney general under Mosk and Thomas Lynch, who became attorney general after Brown appointed Mosk to the state Supreme Court in 1964.

      Mr. O’Brien was the Democratic candidate to succeed Lynch in 1970, but  lost to Republican Evelle Younger by 86,000 votes out of more than 6.2 million votes cast. Mr. O’Brien campaigned against Nixon administration measures to expand police search and detention powers.

      As a state lawyer, Mr. O’Brien led the legal team against Chevron in a       suit over cleanup costs for the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, said his son       Brennan O’Brien. He also advocated gun control and warned in a 1969 speech that the nation would become an “armed camp” unless would-be campus revolutionaries were persuaded that change was possible within the law.

      After his defeat, Mr. O’Brien returned to private legal practice with his       own small law firm, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. He was the attorney for physicians who founded the Doctors Co., which became one of the nation’s largest doctor-owned providers of medical malpractice insurance, his son said. He said his father also helped to draft landmark California legislation in 1975 that limited doctors’ liability for malpractice.

      He also became a breeder of Arabian horses on a Gilroy ranch.

      In 1954, Mr. O’Brien married Marie Fox, a Radcliffe honors graduate and  schoolteacher whom he had known since the eighth grade. He is   survived by his wife, sons Devin O’Brien of Moraga and Brennan O’Brien of Wallnut Creek, daughter Erin O’Brien of San Jose, and nine grandchildren.
     
      This article appeared on page B – 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The Wikipedia entry for the California Democratic Party has this on the end of cross-filing:

Near the end of the Warren era in California, a measure passed requiring cross-filing candidates to list their party affiliations passed. This enabled the Democratic Party to reclaim its nominating process and Democratic registration increased. At about the same time, Democratic activists were organizing into clubs and the powerful association of these clubs, the California Democratic Council (CDC) was formed. Consequently, in 1958, the California Democratic Party rode back into power. The Party captured a United States Senate seat, control of both state houses, and all executive offices except the Secretary of State. Victory that year is often credited to the decline in cross-filing, the power of the CDC, and the personal popularity of the newly-elected Governor, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.

In 1959, a law to prohibit cross-filing was adopted. The Democratic Party swept the 1962 elections, with Pat Brown being re-elected Governor over former Vice President Richard Nixon.

Feinstein excerpts from  Neurophysiology of Consciousness  By Benjamin Libet: 

 

************

An Arthur Krock NY Times article on the national significance of the California primaries:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing an African Game

I Googled myself for the first time in a couple of years the other day and was surprised to see a decent number of references to a book I “published” in 1995. You might find it of some interest. The price is right – $0.00.

 

 

 

Oware game set by Barbara Kovach

 

 

 

In October of 1993, less than three months before my sixty-fifth birthday, I was fired from a job I had held for twelve years with Boole and Babbage, a firm, co-founded by my friend and sometime boss, Ken Kolence, that specialized in computer performance measurement software. In the old days it was a common practice to fire a longtime employee in his last year in order to avoid paying full (or any) retirement benefits. For example my onetime neighbor in Flushing was fired at age sixty-four by Eli Lilly after thirty years of service to screw him out of his retirement (and you thought we don’t need unions!). In this case retirement benefits were not the issue because like all Silicon Gulch firms they had no fixed benefit retirement plan. I was the highest paid non-management employee, was tied (by management) to a package that was no longer producing much revenue and it was more convenient and remunerative to throw me out with the programs than to assign me elsewhere.

 

My high school mathematics teacher, Irving Adler, was an avid collector of books on mathematical recreations and frequently used puzzles and games as a teaching device. For several years he had been after me to program an African board game described by W. W. Sawyer in Scripta Mathematica called Oware. When I became dis-employed in 1994 he brought the subject up again and I had no good excuse to avoid the task any longer. History made the timing unfortunate. I programmed the game to operate on a DOS platform and by the time I was finished the first Windows versions were taking over.

 

Instead of just writing a users manual, I decided to make the book a treatise on the game and had a very good time tracking down all sorts of interesting books, papers, treatises and articles on Oware and the whole family of Mancala games. This was the early days of the public Internet and finding titles, tracking down copies and scanning and OCR-ing them was a difficult but gratifying series of tasks. The details are documented in the preface of the book.

 

 

As I said above there are quite a few references to the book in respectable academic publications (some by people I became acquainted with in the course of my searching) and even a listing in Amazon which didn’t tell you where or how to get a copy so I “commented” with instructions on how to download. You can download free here  or Go to the Order page in the Oware website and click on the download link.

MLK and the Bolinas Motorcycle Gang

My wife, Barbara Degenhardt Kovach, started making day trips from San Francisco to Bolinas in 1951. Her sister, Paula Gower, had a sister-in-law, Mavis Gower Lundmark, living on the “Little Mesa.” Mavis’ husband Herb Lundmark was the manager of RCA’s Bolinas transpacific transmission station which was built by Marconi in 1913 and sold to the new American company in 1916 (today the buildings are owned and used by Commonweal).

I started going to Bolinas in 1956 because a cook in the Mount Zion Hospital kitchen, where I worked, told me of the wonderful small seaside town and, in particular, of Tarantino’s, a good seafood restaurant there.

I became acquainted with Barbara while working with her staging staff art shows at the hospital. In the spring of 1958 we got together, married in the spring of 1959 and had our son, Alexander Frederick Kovach, in the fall of 1960. By the time Alex was three years old, we were renting a small guest cottage from Glory and Bob Berry above Terrace Avenue, a main road in Bolinas. Later, we time-shared a somewhat larger cottage about a block away from the Berry’s with another young couple from San Francisco. That turned out to be more trouble than it was worth because Barbara was so compulsive about leaving the place immaculate after a stay that she spent all her time cleaning and didn’t get much pleasure from our weekends there.

In 1967 I left my job at the US Naval Supply Center, Oakland to work at PG&E, which I did for a little more than year and then, in July of 1968, started working for the President’s Office at the University of California. I cashed out my federal retirement fund of $5,000 and with it bought a house, still in the frame, from the builder, Bob Callagy. We continued living on Lyon Street in San Francisco but after a while that didn’t seem to make much sense. To ease the financial burden we rented our Bolinas place to a college instructor for about a year which meant we couldn’t use it. When we regained possession Barbara would wait for Alex at the Grant School on Friday afternoons to get to Bolinas as soon as she could for the weekend and I would leave University Hall and drive directly to Bolinas. We also spent every holiday and Barbara and Alex would spend the entire summer there. After two years of this, I decided we were paying extra rent and putting Barbara and Alex under unnecessary stress just so I could have a shorter commute to Berkeley. In April of 1970 we moved in full time to our Bolinas house and I started fifteen years of long distance commuting (after Berkeley to Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale). In October of 1980 we moved to our present house, across the street from the cottage we time-shared fifteen years earlier.

Somewhere in the course of the year following our move to Bolinas a young man from Philadelphia, named Dave Duffin, arrived. He took a job with the local school driving one of their buses.

Bolinas was, and is, an artists’ town. If you were not a musician or a painter or sculptor you could just say you were a poet because there was no way to deny your claim. We have well known specimens of all of these. Of course, the school was (and is) heavily biased towards the arts and there was little to no provision for the kids not inclined that way. In his youth, Duffin had been a motorcycle racer so he decided to set up a biking program. He got nervous and conditional permission to set up such a program from the school administration.

A shed adjacent to the school property on Ellen Bourne’s parcel was generously loaned by her to be the workshop. Dave went “over the hill” to East Marin to cadge parts from all the local motor cycle vendors. Then the kids built a motorcycle. Dave taught them sensible and responsible riding – wouldn’t let anyone throw a leg over the saddle without a helmet on, for example.  Pretty soon there were a number of little motorcycles (70-75 cc engines) all over Bolinas (because of the hair styles and costumes at the time it was sometimes difficult to tell a boy from a girl – my rule of thumb was ”if it’s on a horse it’s a girl – if it’s on a motorcycle it’s a boy”)

Then the fighting started.

At the school there were fights over the track, its size, location and surface and fights over scheduling of riding because of the noise and dust (and, I suspect, because of fear of the competition for student attention). In the larger community there were complaints about the noise mainly. I tried to get the kids to stop their habit of riding in a limited circuit – “spread the pain as much as possible” but was only partially successful.

A number of meetings were held to try to negotiate some sort of compromise. The most amusing – and productive – was held at the local public utility’s building after a couple of the kids accused some of the men on the Mesa of chasing the riders brandishing baseball bats and hammers. When I stated this accusation to one of them he said “that’s a lie and if you say that again I’ll punch you in the nose!” That absurdity became a watershed moment, defused the situation and a real understanding and compromise was reached.

Some of the group. My son Alexander is the one nearest the seat.

The whole gang. Duffin is in the rear. All photos were taken by Dave.

Dave used his familiarity with the motorcycle racing world to have the kids meet with a couple of then current racing champions notably Kenny Roberts who became national champion three times (and is in the motorcycle hall of fame) and Brad Lackey a cross country racer who lived in Richmond across the bay. The kids also became interested in dirt-biking and Dave arranged cross country rides at Alvin Gambonini’s ranch east of Marshall and several camping trips in the Sierra foothills. They got to meet Roger Decoster a living legend in cross-country or motocross racing. There were also trips to Laguna Seca and Sears Point (now Infineon) to watch races.

Meeting Kenny Roberts, 1971. He won 3 champioships in the early '80s

With Roger Decoster, five times world champion motocross racer

After a couple of years, with most of the original participants gone, the program was terminated. Dave went on to have an interesting hop-scotching career.

He worked for Carolyn Brown (a local personality) at The Growing Mind, a school for children with learning difficulties in Berkeley, for a couple of years. At the time I was commuting to University Hall so Dave rode with me every day.

With his GI Bill scholarship funding about to expire, Dave decided to use it to get a pilot’s license. He went on to get an instructor’s rating and then taught nearly all the old motorcycle troupe to fly, gratis. Two of them went on to become commercial jet pilots.

Alexander Kovach as a flyer.

After that he owned and operated AAA Photo on First Street (between Mission and Market) in San Francisco. The principal business was passport photographs for patrons of the US agency just around the corner on Market. His staff was mostly made up of Bolinas kids working part-time.

Then he worked for movie production companies doing on-location shoots in the Bay Area (and further afield in Northern and Central California) finding suitable sites and arranging all the logistics, equipment, food and so on. He may still be doing this work at least part of the time. A consequence of this is he is now Chairman of the Alameda Film Commission whose mission is to encourage film production in the area.

He started Oasis for Kids, a nonprofit concerned with providing learning and travel experiences for young teens. Motorcycle trips are featured prominently in the program – so this is a blending of Dave’s previous experiences in Bolinas and Berkeley.

************

Shortly before Martin Luther King’s eightieth birthday (he was born four weeks after me) Dave sent an email to a list of friends containing this extraordinary photograph:

Martin Luther King jr at the Penn Center

There was no explanation given. In response to my demand that he provide some sort of background he sent this note:

Hi Roger,

I finished boot camp at Parris Island, SC in Dec. 1964 and then returned to PI after Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Lejeune, NC. Because of my previous training and background I was put into the base PR offices. I became our two-star’s favorite photographer. I also had a chance to take a photo one day of Dorothy Lamour and her son who was graduating. When I used the well-worn photographer’s phrasing “One more Miss Lamour?” she smiled demurely and said “you’re real cute General”.

As we move along, I was out one Sunday (Spring ‘65) exploring the moss-lined back roads of some one of the coastal islands in my MG-B and came across a sign indicating PENN COMMUNITY CENTER. I drove into the gravel entrance and was soon met by Courtney Siceloff the director. We found out we were both from Philadelphia. I knew the name Penn well from the history of my city and state and also the connection to the Quaker religion of which Courtney and his family were members. The center was established by Philadelphia Quakers in the 1860’s. I came to be a frequent social guest for dinner and they let me use their guest house on the beach many times. They never mentioned their views about conscientious objection nor did I mention much about my USMC training. I also ended up volunteering my photojournalist skills and helped the center produce two brochures about the center and the social work they did in the (very) poor low-country areas of South Carolina (Google – “Gullah”).

One afternoon I got a call from Courtney to see if I could come out that evening. He said a special event was taking place but to “keep it quiet”. When I got there at dusk I was ushered into their sitting room and there was MLK. I had a chance to shake hands, talk about the photo project and about my background. I asked him if he would mind if I took a photo. I called in the Siceloff’s and made the photo with my Nikon-F with TRI-X and no flash. Later that night King gave a talk to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff (including Andy Young, Hosea Williams, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, and others). His oratory was spellbinding and he warned the group to stay on the non-violent track. He was an utterly calm soul.

I showed their son John my cameras and gave him some lessons in photography – that’s him looking at Dr. King in the photo. I recently contacted the center and learned Courtney was retired in a senior residence in Savannah, Georgia, his wife passed and son John was now a producer for PBS NOW and Bill Moyer’s Journal. The center had heard of the photo so I recently sent them a copy and gave them the publication rights. I have now been in the same room as JFK, MLK and RFK, but that’s another two stories.

And that’s the way it was,

Dave

PS: I also contacted John Siceloff (NYC) and he told me I inspired him to become a photojournalist. I like surprises even if they are not “wrapped”.

David Duffin
344 Westline Drive – Suite C113
Alameda, CA 94501
415 999 5322 cell

Director: Oasis for Kids, Inc.
See: www.oasisforkids.org

Chairman: Alameda Film Commission
See: www.filmalameda.com

Studs: Move on up a little higher

Studs Terkel died the other day, aged 96.

I only saw him once but it was a memorable occasion, a preamble of sorts for several careers.

I am not able to pin the time down with any certainty but I think it must have been in 1947, perhaps in the spring. The laborers of the University of Chicago, the maintenance workers, groundskeepers, dormitory housekeepers and the like, people who would today be members of the SEIU, were striking for better pay and working conditions. The business manager for the university was an infamous hard-headed son of a bitch, no more popular with the students than he was with the workers. The union put on a concert in Mandel Hall, which seated a thousand (1066 actually), to raise funds for the strikers, publicize their cause and seek support from the students and faculty. The concert was organized and MC’ed by Studs Terkel who had a popular radio show at the time and wrote newspaper columns about the goings-on in Chicago.

There were three principal performers, all Studs’ projects, people he was promoting – but not for any gain for himself, just as a public service.  First up was Mahalia Jackson who was just getting known outside of the black churches where she had been performing for several years. What a sight and what a sound! That great plain of a face and those small eyes and that huge round voice that made the whole chamber resonate with it. The audience was overwhelmed.

Mahalia Jackson

Next was the choir from the South Park Baptist Church, featuring as director, accompanist and singer Myrtle Jackson (not a relative). The group’s performance was a mixture of gospel and jazz – the choir (which included the director’s grown son)  would start out, setting the background and then Jackson’s wonderful (big!) soprano would come in, riding over the top like Louie’s trumpet. Later in the concert Mahalia sang with the choir and the combination was dazzling.

Myrtle Jackson

The third performer was Brownie McGhee who was known to folk and blues cognoscenti but not in the wider world. He started out by snapping a string on his guitar (even from my seat I could see he had large and powerful hands) which took several minutes to replace and a bit longer for retuning but the audience didn’t seem to mind and sat quietly until he was able to resume. The one piece he sang that I distinctly remember was “Black, Brown and White” in which the refrain goes “If you’re white, you’re alright. If you’re brown, stick around. But if you’re black, O brother, git back, git back, git back”.

Brownie McGhee

Thanks, Studs, for a good memory.

Kay’s First Flight

In the post about Freddie and truck-stop counter slang I opened a couple of topics without completing them, promising to do so later. Here’s the fulfillment of that promise.

First, about the McGraw-Hill building: it’s still there. I had trouble finding it in Google’s Satellite and Street Views for reasons that will soon become apparent. I was surprised to find that the building is considered an Art Deco architectural treasure by most critics and, as a result, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989. NHLs aren’t knocked down. Here are some views of the building from various sources – there is an abundance of such pictures.

The McGraw-Hill building

 

The top floors and the Logo

I was surprised by the entrance – I had absolutely no recollection of this gaudy (not Gaudi) entryway. It looks like a movie theater.

I had great difficulty seeing the building in the satellite photograph until I realized that the angle the light was coming from (lower left) was the opposite of the conventional upper right, creating a sort of optical illusion, so I rotated the image 180 degrees and everything became clear. The rounded rectangle in the middle is the cap holding the company logo, the name done in an Art Deco type font.

Satellite View rotated 180 degrees

The Google Street View pictures were taken at night apparently and, until I saw what the entrance looked like, very difficult to distinguish from the complicated collection of structures and construction scaffolding and what-have-you. Finally, there it was, right where it belonged, at 330 West 42nd Street, not far east of Ninth Avenue.

McGraw-Hill entrance today (at night)

The brightly lit store on the right of the entrance with the glass revolving door is where the Walgreen’s in the Freddie story was and, from the look of things may still be (or, more likely, a Duane Reade). I think there was another entrance to the store from the building lobby.

Curtis was the reigning McGraw at the beginning of the ‘50s – he took over in 1950 when his brother Jay retired and died in 1953. The McGraws were stalwarts of the Republican Party, friends and allies of Tom Dewey, and so vehemently anti-union that they paid all union-eligible workers over scale as long as they refused to join a union (this is one way unions improve the lot of all workers in unionized trades – and they don’t pay any dues).

At that time McGraw Hill was mainly a magazine publishing outfit. They had some twenty-five magazines, mostly trade journals such as Engineering News Report (which was the merger of the publications of McGraw and Hill when they merged companies), Factory Management and Maintenance, Aviation Week, Nucleonics and others for the chemical industry, iron and steel, coal mining and so on. The flagship, of course, was Business Week – still a major business magazine and still a large part of McGraw’s income.

The staffing for all of these companies plus the headquarters and its support operations must have amounted to two or more thousands of individuals. A very large proportion of them were Catholics. There was a church directly across forty-second street which was heavily attended by people from our building. In the morning when I came to work there would be people leaving the church crossing the street in the middle of the block to enter 330; four times a day, at morning break, lunch time, afternoon break and quitting time people would stream out of the McGraw building, cross the street mid-block and go into the church. It looked like the one building was pouring its contents into the other.

I worked for McGraw Hill Research which was a company within a company like the magazines and book publishing concerns. Its main function and responsibility was to shill for the publications. The staff at the home office was not large, three or four dozen, I would guess. There were people in the field, mainly sales force personnel. The big boss, a man in his late fifties or early sixties, had an enclosed office with his secretary guarding the gate outside of it. I only saw him two or three times. There were three second level bosses, Bert Peller, Allen Cobb and a third whose name I can’t remember. Peller and Thirdguy were typical office politicians, immaculately decked out in their Brooks Brothers outfits, backstabbing each other (while displaying false congeniality) and ganging up to sabotage Cobb when the occasions presented themselves. Cobb was a shirtsleeves sort, stayed out of all the games and just did his job as well as he could – which was usually as well as anyone could. (It’s amazing how frequently this sort of situation occurs. I’ve witnessed or experienced the same scene and scenario several times in very, very different contexts.)

I’m very unclear on the functional breakout among the three or just which of the next level of managers reported to which of the middle managers. I think Cobb was in charge of operations and I know that Fred Holzer, my immediate boss, reported to Allen Cobb. There were two women somewhere in here – Kay something, quiet and self-effacing, who was some sort of office manager, may have reported to Cobb, and Barbara Ruzitsky (a rare sort of name in that building), a classic “Smith Girl” who may have been part of Bert’s staff. My dealings with both of these were on a cordial, even friendly, basis as were those with Allen and Fred. My dealings with Bert and Thirdguy were always at arms length, stiff and formal. (A death notice in the NY Times, Oct. 10, 2006, says Peller was at J. Walter Thompson for 24 years. An epigraph to an article by Peller in Folio magazine dated 1/1/1991 says “Bert Peller is currently a consultant. He was vice president and manager of media for business markets at J. Walter Thompson for 24 years”).

Fred Holzer came to his position as a result of a background with IBM punched card equipment and procedures and no other particular qualifications for the situation he was in. As a result he never felt quite adequate for the job, operated in a state of anxiety all the time, often so much so that he stammered. He was obsessed with the idea that Peller and Thirdguy were out to get him, which, unfortunately, was probably true because it was a way for them to damage Cobb. Quite inadvertently and unintentionally I compounded Fred’s problem as will become clear after I explain my work there. He was my supervisor because I was using the IBM 080 sorter/counter to produce tabulations and he was also Marie-Wilson’s-lookalike key punch operator’s supervisor, obviously.

The job we were working on, which I mentioned in the Freddie post, was a magazine readership survey. As I said above, the department’s responsibility was to promote the advertising business of the twenty-five magazines in the company. In this case they got a group of about a dozen major American industrial companies to pay for the survey which set about “proving” to those selfsame companies that they should only advertise in McGraw Hill’s magazines – talk about slick scams! This was done by creating “duplication” statistics, showing for instance that if you advertised in Factory, there was no sense in also advertising in Mill and Factory (a competitor). They also did “coverage” studies, showing how to reach a wide range of readers with as little duplication as possible or at the lowest total cost.

My job was to do tabulations from a deck of approximately 43,000 cards (the number 42,787 sticks in my memory) by passing the cards through an 080 sorter equipped with optional counters. There is a decent brief description of the 080 in Wikipedia. The first picture is actually of an 075 but it was structurally and functionally identical to the 080.

An 075 sorter, identical in appearance with the 080

An 080 showing storage bins behind

By using the selector switches I would break the deck into various subsets and make counts of those and selected sets within them. In this way I could develop duplication and coverage counts.

Someone from Peller’s group would make a request for a “study”. Let’s say for illustrative purposes that they wanted to compare Collyer’s and Liberty Magazine. The request would be given to Allen Cobb. He would ask Fred to estimate the cost which was primarily determined by the number of cards that would have to pass through the sorter. Fred had counts that I had given him from previous passes (if a job required me to first sort/count on column 35, say, I would write down all the hole counts a give it to Fred) or if they didn’t yet exist, we would make estimates based on what we knew of the popularity o the magazines involved.

Nominally, the 080 passed about 400 cards per minute, so the first pass should have taken about 109 minutes. In practice, however, it took quite a bit longer because of card jams and the like. The cards had to pass through a very tight slit at the bottom of the hopper to the chute blades. If the edge in the center of the card had been slightly blunted or the card swollen from frequent trips through the slit or from absorption of moisture from the air or from handling, then it wouldn’t go through and I would have to remove all the cards on top of it, pull the offending card and ask “Marie Wilson” to duplicate it on her 029. If she were in the middle of some other task, I might have to wait until she could dupe my card, get the new copy (which I would check for completeness), put it at the beginning of the deck for the hopper, load it and resume the sort and count. This sort of thing would happen a number of times during a pass.

Much worse were the jams. If a card didn’t fall into a stacker and get out of the way quickly (sometimes the spring supported plate wouldn’t move fast enough, particularly as the pocket was getting near to full) then the card behind it would run up on it, crush it and then become crushed itself and so on. By the time I could push the stop button there would be a dozen or more destroyed cards. I then lifted the glass cover over the pockets, pulled the damaged cards from between the chute blades, flattened them as much as I could and asked Marie to reproduce them. Those that couldn’t be flattened had to be repunched, with the operator reading the holes and keying them in.

Sometimes I caused the jams. Under “normal” operation the machine would stop any time a stacker became full. This would require the pocket to be emptied, cards joggled to line them up, and then stored in the storage bin behind the stacker and the sorter restarted. With thirteen pockets (twelve for punches and the rightmost one, reject, for the no-punches) and 43,000 cards, this would happen very often adding a lot of time to a pass. To avoid the stops the operator slips a finger between two cards in a near-full stacker and pulls the lower stack out with the other hand – this is rather like the diningroom trick of pulling the tablecloth out while leaving the dishes on the table. The only trouble with this stunt was that it sometimes produced a jam.

(Because of all the wear-and-tear on the cards on several occasions I had to have the entire deck reproduced. This was a big job because the Reproducer was a rather slow machine. That, in turn, brought me into contact with the large data processing facility, called the Tab Room, which was run by a Mrs. Pilkington. Tab room supervisors had to be a pretty tough lot, if only because their staffs were a pretty tough lot. Dealing with the graveyard shift often meant dealing with drunks and all the problems they entail. Pilkington filled the bill with some to spare – she and I became quite friendly.

The most entertaining thing I encountered in the tab room was the Senior Tom Watson’s birthday. IBM had a global party for the old tyrant. Every major IBM installation in the whole world was connected by telephone and PA systems so that we could all hear the IBMers sucking up speeches and singing Happy Birthday and the IBM anthem.)

The point of this windy digression is that estimating the cost of a job was complicated by all the unforeseeable mishaps – so a fudge factor was always added. Fred would then give a time estimate for both charging and scheduling purposes to Allen who would pass it on to Peller’s crew who would then decide whether the study was worth the cost. Fred had another problem with the estimates – I often did the job in less than half the time he estimated. I tried to get him to use my estimates, which were based on a mathematical “trick” which allowed me to do a couple of simple pencil calculations rather than lengthy machine passes but he didn’t understand them and he relied on his more “solid” estimates. The net effect of this was to please Peller’s people because of the windfall savings in cost and Allen because it made him something of a hero – but it also meant that Fred’s estimates were deemed untrustworthy.

The “trick” is a rudimentary fact from set theory: the number of elements in the union of two sets is the sum of the number in each set minus the number in the intersection of the two (this is the basis of what is called the principle of inclusion and exclusion in enumerative combinatoric). I’ll illustrate with the Collyer’s Liberty example. Let’s say that Liberty was represented by the 9-punch in col 21 (all the general magazines were in col 21, Life, Saturday Evening Post and so on) and Collyer’s by the 5-punch. The selector on the sorter sends a card to the pocket of the first hole it “sees”. The cards are normally fed nine-edge first. So if a card has a 9-punch, regardless of what others it has, it goes to the 9-pocket. The counters count all the holes regardless of what stacker the card goes to. So, in our example, I would push in the selector switches for the 6, 7 and 8 punches so that no cards containing 5-punches could go into them, run the deck and then, after noting the counts in the counters, would run the cards from the 5 pocket to get the count of (5s without 9s). Now, by the above, the number in the intersection (the duplication) is the original count of 5s minus the (5s without 9s) and the total number of cards (the coverage) is the original count of 9s plus the original count of 5s minus the intersection. So I saved a second pass on the cards that originally fell into the 9 pocket. If I knew that the number of cards in the 9 pocket would be significanly less (from some earlier run) I would turn the cards around feeding the 12 edge first (instead of the 9 edge as God and IBM intended) and sort on column 59 instead of 21 so that the second pass would be the shortest possible.
                                                               *******
Not only was Kay Rooney the most interesting character in that rather dreary office, she had the most character. Kay was Brooklyn Irish, a much more distinct ethnic group then than now, which every New Yorker was familiar with. She lived with her parents, had at least one brother and one sister also in Brooklyn (probably within a couple of blocks of the parents), was a devout Catholic but wore her faith lightly and had the most wonderful sense of humor. Everything about Kay was big. Even in the low heeled shoes she wore she stood about six feet; she was what is politely called buxom, that is she had a shape like a Helen Hokinson matron even though she was not yet 40 years old. She dressed as though she were still in parochial school, white long-sleeved blouses, dark pleated skirts – I can’t remember how her hair looked except that it was pure blond (and not out of a bottle – heaven forfend). When Kay talked she filled the room but I never heard anyone object or shush her. When she laughed she not only filled the room but she made the venetian blinds rattle.
I’m not sure just what her job was. She must have worked for the office manager because she distributed supplies and seemed to spend a part of her day visiting other offices. Not only did everyone in our office love her, everyone in the whole building did. I would see her joshing with the elevator operators only as a girl who grew up with brothers could have; the same went for the counter women in the Walgreen’s and so on.

Kay’s closest friend in the office was the boss’ secretary, Bertha. Bertha was the direct opposite of Kay in every regard: she was petite and demure, always elaborately made up and dressed expensively (but not to my taste); she spoke in a small quiet voice, never seemed to laugh, certainly not audibly. Aside from their friendship, Kay and Bertha shared one other thing: they both had terrible asthma.

One of them heard of a “clinic” in Mississippi that purported to cure asthma by developing a tailor-made syrup just to fit your case, a scam rather like the ones for cancer by the infamous Hoxie. In order to get your prescription you had to go to their resort and clinic, stay for about four or five days (at high prices of course) while they fitted you out with your “medicine” which was also very expensive. The boss gave them a week off to go to but no longer. This meant they had to fly – and neither of them had ever been in an airplane before (not that unusual in 1950) and both were scared to death at the prospect.

The next Monday they were back in the office with Kay describing their big adventure to the entire staff who had gathered around her. She described going to LaGuardia airport and seeing the insurance machines everywhere and feeling that she had to buy some because she was sure the plane was going to crash (about five years later, at the Hungry i, I heard Shelley Berman’s wonderful routine on this very theme). As she stood in front of the dispensing machine, quarter in hand poised above the coin slot she became paralyzed with inner conflict. Who should she name as beneficiary? If she named a brother or sister then the others would feel deprived and her parents offended by the lack of filial devotion and so on. While she was in this suspended state a priest from St. Christopher’s church in Brooklyn approached and asked her what the problem was. After she explained he said “Why don’t you make the St. Christopher’s Building Fund the beneficiary?” “Oh no Father! I couldn’t do that!” Then with a wide, downward sweep of her arm, “St. Christopher himself would swoop out the clouds and knock the plane down!”

Then came her roaring, room shaking laugh.

“You should have seen the look on that priest’s face!”

Saving Joey

One afternoon there was a discreet knocking on the kitchen door which was the main entry to our cold water flat on 6th Avenue and Prince Street (see the Mama Savarese post). When I opened the door standing there was a most unusual looking man for that neighborhood. He was wearing a suit, with tie, hat and carrying an attaché case – definitely not someone from around there. He said he was from the Immigration Service (I don’t remember if they were called INS in those days) and asked if I knew the Savareses who lived on my floor at the rear of the building. I told him only to say good morning to in the hallway, no other contact.

Although I number three former deputy sheriffs among my friends (two retired and one who quit because he couldn’t bear the contempt of his townsmen), I generally hold cops of all sorts, both institutionally and individually, in low regard. It is my feeling that anyone who wants to be one has something wrong with his head, either intellectually or psychologically or, most often, some of both. Immigration cops seem to me to be the meanest spirited of the lot providing fresh assaults on one’s sense of fair play nearly every day. (I know, I know, they’re just doing their jobs – that was Eichman’s defense too – also see how this tale turns out.) When the agent asked if he could come in and talk to me about a critical matter I became alarmed for the Savareses, so I invited him in.

He told me that the Savarese family, parents and several children, had entered the U.S. legally in 1935 as refugees from the Mussolini fascists. One of the sons, Giuseppe, known as Joey, entered illegally a couple of years later when he was in the Italian merchant marine and jumped ship in New York. He said Immigration had been looking for Joey for years and had never been able to find where the local Italians had been hiding him (It’s remarkable how immigrant communities are able to do this so well. An immigration cop once said the Chinese in San Francisco’s Chinatown could hide an elephant there completely undetected.) Then he said that the immigration cops thought that Giuseppe was about to flee to Canada where the local Italians had several safe-houses and that if he re-entered the U.S., again illegally, from there he would be guilty of a felony and that they, nice guys that they were, were only trying to prevent him from getting into worse trouble. I am embarrassed to say that I mostly bought this line. I told the cop I would tell the family about his visit.

I became quite alarmed for the Savareses. I didn’t know if they could handle English well enough or had enough education to understand the intricacies of immigration law, whether they knew about possible legal assistance available to them and so on.

I kept an ear cocked for Papa Savarese’s return from work. He was very punctual, arriving at 5:30 in the afternoon, tip-toeing up the stairs and quietly opening and closing the door to their flat, which made it difficult to know when he had arrived. On many occasions he was accompanied by one of his sons who worked with him in the family business. They made an amusing pair, almost indistinguishable in appearance, more like identical twins than father and son. They were small, perhaps 5-4 in height, slim and nattily attired in expensive Italian suits (despite my remark in the first paragraph about the rarity of such attire in our neighborhood) and expensive “Italian” shoes which were made in their own factory further east on Houston Street. On the evening in question the son was with his father. I went out to the landing just in front of their flat and told them about the immigration cop being there. The son said he would stop by later and talk to me about the whole situation.

I recounted the immigration agent’s story about Giuseppe, the illegal entry, the Canadian safe-houses, the felony re-entry and so on. As I did so the son asked me several pointed questions, sounding almost like a D.A. getting my testimony. When I was through he told me that Joey had indeed entered fourteen years before by jumping ship, that immigration had been pursuing him fruitlessly all that time, that he was at the time right in New York where they would never find him and that their second-generation Italian Congressman was presenting a private bill the next morning to grant Joey legal status. He further said that this was driving the cops insane and that they were trying, right up to the last minute to grab Giuseppe and throw him out of the country. Talk about rat-terrier dispositions! And nasty, vengeful and mean natures!

And that was how the smart college boy helped the poor New York Italian deal with his government.

Satish, Diego y Miguel

In the autumn of 1952 Molly Bower asked me to take a deaf Indian artist to specialists in hearing problems in New York.

 

There is a great deal of background behind that simple sentence – and some interesting consequences.

 

Mary Margaret “Molly” Bower was a one-time room-mate of my first wife, Terry Flambert, in Kelly Hall at the University of Chicago. At the time of the request she was living at 18 Christopher Street, about a block east of Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.

 

 

 

 

 

(I believe 18 is the doorway in the deep shadow of the tree. I remember it as unusually narrow with the odd little stoop without handrails. Both images from Google.)

 

 

Terry and I were living at the foot of MacDougal Street, about seven blocks away (see the post about Mama Savarese). Molly was the youngest of an unusual brood of six who were born in slightly separated pairs, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl. The middle pair was Ted and Joan (pronounced Jo-ann). Molly and I remained good friends throughout her life. At some later time I will tell you of her very interesting career.

 

Ted was an architect who studied and apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, spending six years working on Taliesin West. Wright and Le Corbusier had a serious disliking for each other, and not just over architecture, which led to Wright sending Ted to observe the development of Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh. While there Ted became acquainted with a young painter, scion of a prominent political family, Satish Gujral. Later, Ted had his own architectural firm in Seattle for nearly fifty years.

 

Joan Bower went to Wellesley where her room-mate was Santha Rama Rau, the first Indian woman admitted to that WASP citadel (I am sure there have been thousands since). She is the daughter of Sir Benegal Rau who people of my age remember with admiration and fondness for his good work at the UN during the Korean crisis. Santha went on to write a number of popular travel books, novels and articles and her name is familiar to anyone who reads The New Yorker. She married Faubion Bowers, who had been Douglas MacArthur’s personal interpreter in Japan and became a well known expert on Japanese and other Asian theaters. Joan married Arnold Horwitt, a very successful writer of musicals (including Pins and Needles, Make Mine Manhattan and Plain and Fancy which featured Barbara Cook (see my post on the Janice studio parties)). Later Joan became an Episcopal priest, in Connecticut. 

 

 

Santha Rama Rau

 

Satish Gujral was born in 1925 in Jhelum in western Punjab. His parents, Avtar Narain and Pushpa, were both well known, both to the British and the Indians, as freedom fighters. That term, in this context, means they were active in trying to obtain Indian independence from the British Empire. Satish’s six years older brother Inder Kumar was also in the movement and was jailed and beaten in 1931 at the age of eleven for organizing a children’s resistance movement in Jhelum. The parents and brother were prominent in the Quit India Movement started by Mohandas Ghandi in 1942 and led by Jawaharlal Nehru and the India Congress Party. Inder Kumar Gujral eventually became the Prime Minister of India at a very turbulent time in Indian politics so that his administration had a brief life.

 

Inder Kumar Gujral 

 

At about age seven, Satish suffered a disease that left him completely deaf which, at that time and place, was a calamity both for Satish and for his family. His father spent a great deal of time and thought deciding how Satish was going to make his way in the world, eventually deciding on the graphic arts in which he had demonstrated both ability and interest. He was sent to a school in Lahore named Mayo, which was more designed for artisans than artists, probably in early adolescence. Nonetheless, it provided him with a wide range of knowledge of materials and methods which stood him in very good stead later. Fortuitously this school was near where his brother was in college and, because Satish didn’t like the food served at his own school’s hostel, he ate with Inder at his hostel and came under his leftist influence in social and political thinking. 

 

After leaving Mayo he went to the J J School of Arts in Bombay. This posed several problems for Satish. First was language. It was difficult enough for him to communicate in his native language, Urdu, but nearly impossible for him to follow the language used in classes. Fortunately, in several ways, Pran Nath Mago took him under wing acting as interpreter and tacitly influencing Satish’s thinking in the arts.

 

All through his adolescence at Mayo and now, in his early maturity at J J he was afflicted with disabling attacks in his legs which forced him to retreat to the family home. This was much more easily done when in Lahore than in Bombay. With a year to go at J J he suffered an especially serious attack, which pretty much ended his career there. (Author’s note: I have been relying on Satish’s autobiographical art book, The World of Satish Gujral – In his own words; UBS Publishers’ Distributors, Ltd; which in some respects is a difficult source. It is more concerned with the origins and evolution of Satish’s thinking in the arts and about the arts, especially their social and political roles, than it is with basic biographical data, such as dates. He never states what the disease was that cost him his hearing and he doesn’t say what the malady was with his legs, or whether it was the same one or not, but at one point he says the many surgeries on his legs caused the deafness(!).)  

 

Shortly after Satish recovered from the last attack, on August 14, 1947, India finally achieved Independence which came at the price of Partition. The horrors that ensued, mass murders of refugees from both sides by machine-gunning overloaded trains and other atrocities, are still vivid in many a survivor’s memories.  Like many another family the Gujrals found themselves on the wrong side of the new border, in the newly created Moslem nation of Pakistan. Satish told me that his family had to flee for their lives in the

middle of the night, leaving behind everything they owned. (I do not see any mention of this incident in his book, however.)

 

Last August (2007), sixty years after the event, the legacy of misery from the Partition was still evident and the rancor over Kashmir is a threat to peace in the entire region, if not the world. 

 

At this point Satish’s narrative talks of the paintings he was doing while recovering in Shimla. As far as I can make out, this is his first mention of Shimla and his first mention painting while on his own. He wonders whether the paintings, which were very violent in their imagery, (I saw photographs of them – I’ll have more to say about them later) were engendered by his experience during the Partition holocaust or were the product of some inner rage which would have manifested itself whether there were outside stimuli or not. He decides that the latter was the case.

 

Satish states that toward the end of his years (how many?) in Shimla he became acquainted with Charles Fabri, a Hungarian émigré who was the arts critic for The Statesman and, it appears, was a major taste-maker for the Indian art world. Fabri told Satish he should go to Mexico to study the muralistas which was inspired, no doubt, by the similarities between Satish’s work and that of Orozco and Siqueiros. He further told Satish of a grant being offered by the Mexican government at the newly opened Mexican Embassy in New Delhi. Somewhere, somehow during this span Satish met Ted Bower who, among other things, worked on teaching Satish English. He consulted with Ted on the advice Fabri had given about applying for the Mexican grant. Both Ted and Satish’s brother were apprehensive about his prospects both in applying and, should he get the grant, managing in yet another language and alien culture. Ted wrote to Santha Rama Rau in the U.S. After some further complications in the application process Santha unexpectedly showed up in New Delhi with no less than Octavio Paz, who was at the time the Cultural Attache to the Mexican Embassy, in tow. Satish was awarded the grant.

 

Just before his trip to the US and Mexico Satish had his first one-man show in New Delhi which was praised by Fabri and another prominent critic S. H. Vatsyayan who also wrote the introduction for the catalog. Satish says, “Overnight, they transformed me into a celebrity.”

 

Which brings us back to the start of this post.

 

I took Satish to several places to see if anything might be done about his hearing and, as I knew would be the case, he was told nothing could be done at that time. At the end of the week Terry, Molly and I took Satish to Grand Central Station and waved good-bye as his train slowly pulled away from the platform. The trip by train from New York to Mexico City was an entire week in duration. I find the very thought of what must have been a rattling ride to be mind numbing – I can’t imagine how he felt by the end.

(Added 4/5/09: Terry sent me a note containing her recollection of Satish’s departure:  My last visual memory of him is his “talking” intensely to a rather lovely young lady before boarding the train with her.) 

 

From his book.

 

*****

 

Quite coincidentally, about a year later in October of 1953 Terry decided that we should move to her home town, San Francisco, to which I somewhat reluctantly agreed. In order to help with the travel expenses, it was agreed that I would take my mother to Mexico for about 6 months and at the end she would return to New York and I would go up to San Francisco. My mother was a dragging anchor much of the time but I had an interesting and often very enjoyable visit nonetheless.

 

After we had been in Mexico City for a couple of weeks, having moved from the Hotel Maria Cristina to a casa de huespedes in a residential district (Guadalquivir 19 – all the streets in that section were named for rivers), I decided to try to find Satish. I went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes because I understood they had an art school where all the big names were teachers. I found some class studios, asked the people I found there if they had seen Satish, “a hindu with a big black beard and a blue turban” and on several such visits just got blank looks. Finally a young woman said she thought she had seen such an individual and that she thought he was in a class taught by Diego Rivera. I asked where I could leave a message inquiring about Satish and she said, “Why don’t you just call him up?” Did she know his number or where I could find it? “He’s in the book.” I found a phone directory and sure enough, there was Diego Rivera’s name at an address in the Piedras Negras neighborhood, a rather toney residential area built on an old lava bed, hence the Black Rocks name. I called, Rivera answered and after I gave the name and description he denied ever seeing such an individual. I was stumped. The only line of search I could think of had just dead-ended.

 

Not long after that there was an announcement in the newspaper of a retrospective exhibition of Mexican art, from pre-columbian times to the current day, opening a day or two later at the Bellas Artes (a note on this exhibition: it was absolutely huge, the whole museum was given over to it, and it was perhaps the finest show of its sort I have ever seen. A small part was set to travel to a number of museums in Europe and the US over the next five years, ending, I believe in the Met in NY). We went to the opening day and there in the cupola covered antechamber, looking at a painting, was Satish.

 

He told us what happened after he left Grand Central. The train ride was uneventful, he made friends of some the other passengers and generally found the trip to be not unpleasant. When he got to Mexico City he expected some sort of greeting party – not a brass band, mind you, just someone to tell him where to stay, how to get started at the school and so on. There was nobody there – nobody. It would seem that the problem was in lack of continuity in the Mexican government. Satish had been awarded the grant in the last months of the Aleman regime. Between the time Satish was given the grant and his arrival in Mexico a new president was elected, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines; no one in the new administration knew anything about the commitments of the old administration. I cannot remember if he told me how he even found a place to stay that night much less how had managed through the long process of getting the government to recognize his existence and legitimate claims. He did tell me that other art students had supported him with loans and probably shared quarters. In the book he mentions a Canadian expatriate, Arnold Belkin, who was Siqueiros’ student before Satish. Perhaps he helped sustain Satish during that anxious time.

 

When I mentioned the call to Rivera, Satish said he had been in his class for about a week. When Satish told Rivera his colors looked like they came from a candy box, Rivera threw him out of the class, which accounts for Rivera’s “faulty memory”.

 

Satish invited us to visit his quarters, his studio, which we did a few days later. I do not know where his place was; I do remember a long cab ride on Insurgentes, but which direction, north or south, I do not know. When we got there we were confronted with a very large house, a single residence, in which a large number of students were quartered. The stairway was so large that two students were housed on the first landing – there was ample space between their cots to proceed up to the next floor where Satish had a garret-like room.

 

He showed us a number of paintings showing the same sort of vehemence I had seen in the photographs of his work in India. To me they suggested Orozco, who had died before Satish ever got to Mexico, but I am not qualified to make such distinctions. He was very excited by a discovery he had made and thought it might make him rich: he was mixing dry poster paint powder with acrylic resin. The colors were brilliant, more resistant than oil paint to fading or changing because the colors were sealed in by the plastic so air couldn’t get at the pigments. By varying the amount of powder to resin he could get rich textural effects, from impastos to glazes and so on. Unfortunately, as history unfolded, the big commercial paint producers all came out with acrylic paints in a tube and beat Satish to the punch.

 

His studio was a classical garret shape: a long narrow room with a dormer window high up on one of the long walls. Out of curiosity I pulled a chair under the window, stood on it and on tip-toes looked out the window. What I saw was a big surprise. There was a very large swimming pool, with a two level diving board at one end, a row of cabanas running along the length of the pool on the side opposite the window and around the width on the right – at least a dozen in all. “Satish, what is this place?” “Don’t you know? This was Miguel Aleman’s private bordello when he was President. He kept it filled with sixteen-year-old girls.”

 

(There was a lot of public interest in Aleman’s sex life, whether real or purported. The landlady at our boarding house asked me “Why is the national flag like Maria Felix’s panties? Because both are raised and lowered by presidential decree.” Maria Felix was an extraordinarily good-looking woman, a movie star with an interesting ‘private’ life. I’ll go into all of this in a post about my Mexican visit.)

 

*****

 

That was the last time I saw Satish. About a decade later there was a big spread in Life magazine about the flourishing Indian arts. Satish was given two whole pages – he truly was a celebrity by then. Subsequently Satish became internationally known for an architectural achievement – the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi.

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

 

In his book, in the section regarding Mexico, there is a lengthy discussion about the conflict between the muralistas and Rufino Tamayo. Both camps are used metaphorically to stand for different ways to achieve a truly Mexican art. It so happens I became familiar with this subject in Cuernavaca in my discussions with some young intellectuals (included were two poets, a painter and an architect). The muralistas painted Mexican subjects, matters of historical or political or social importance. Tamayo tried to evoke an intrinsically Mexican mode of expression in colors, forms and emblems. I was in the Tamayo camp and the locals, who sometimes got rather sidetracked, saying Tamayo’s time in New York and Paris made him un-Mexican, were in the muralistas’. This sort of debate was going on in India at the time as well – as it was in many a newly freed nation trying to throw off the colonial cultural yoke.

 

One last note about Satish’s book and his early work: I mentioned that he felt that his smoldering rage might have expressed itself in his paintings whether or not there had been the atrocities consequent on Partition. None of those paintings are shown in the book and I cannot find any on the Web. Clearly, he has disowned his own past in that regard – did he destroy the paintings?

 

About two years ago I asked Molly Bower Kux’s three children, Sally, Leslie and Brian, all of whom followed in their parents’ footsteps as Federal Civil Servants (both were in the State Department, Dennis Kux is a retired ambassador; Molly worked for AID until her death), if they knew Satish, if their mother’s connection was through Ted or Joan, and if their uncle Ted was still in touch with him. Sally said, “I do know of the Indian artist to whom you refer below, although I don’t know the connection.  I think you are right that it might be through Ted.  I think Dad saw Gujral’s brother when he was in India some months ago.” Leslie wrote: “I met Satish when I visited Dad in India in 2001.  I actually went to a fancy party at his house.  He and his wife are very charming and nice.  I think Ted may have seen him in NY the next year.  I can’t remember the story of how he and Ted hooked up, though.”

 

A more recent photograph of Satish

 

Seated: Molly Bower Kux, the author, Sally Kux. Sally was a doctoral candidate in Russian language and literature at Stanford; the young man was also.

Some Bars in Some Places

Student Bars in Chicago

University Tavern

It was past 1 a.m., November 3, 1948 when Severn Darden in his black opera cape sidled by my seat in University Tavern, then the favorite bar for U. of Chicago students. The place was packed – we were all there because UT was one of the few places in those days with a television set and we were all anxiously watching the election returns, which came in much slower then and were indeterminate at that late hour. We kept hearing H. V. Kaltenborn’s assurances, which Truman gleefully imitated later, that Dewey would win when the downstate vote came in. I was getting anxious about the time because the bar had to close at 2 a.m. and it appeared we would not have a decision by then, so I asked Severn if he had the time. He fumbled around under his cape, tugged at a chain and produced a goose-egg watch. I don’t know whether this was the real thing or some sort of replica but knowing Severn, I would guess it was a genuine, rare and valuable antique. He said, “This damned thing always says 4:30”, pocketed the watch and left without answering my question – typical Darden wit. I am ashamed to admit it took me two days to remember the Mad Hatter and the reason for his perpetual tea party.

(There is an amusing “sidebar” to the above ’48 election story. A rumor rapidly went around a day or two after the election about a young instructor in economics who concluded that the polls were badly done. His estimate was that the error was sufficient for Truman to win. He made bets with a lot of the faculty at very favorable odds and cleaned up. 

His name was Milton Friedman. 

This story may be apocryphal but I am inclined to believe it because it is so characteristic of Friedman.)

The Woodlawn Tap

Very soon after that UT’s very popular bartender, Jimmy Wilson, opened his own place a couple of blocks away, the Woodlawn Tap. A large part of my time – and education – took place in Jimmy’s bar and I became good friends with him and his principal bartender, Tom Claridge. (Over the next six years or so, bars played a big part in my life – too big a part, if you take my meaning.) Jimmy bought a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and installed it on the back bar to try to settle the many disputes that arose amongst the patrons.  The shot from Google’s Street View reveals that the place is unchanged from sixty years ago …

 

(There are some better pictures at www.josephsittler.org/jimmys/  and www.aklehr.com/chicagohood2.html)

I was often there with members of a clique of sorts that included Fritz Weaver and his girlfriend at the time, Annie Norris, a resident of Kelly Hall where my girlfriend, Terry Flambert also resided. Fritz had a creamy baritone voice and Annie a creditable mezzo so I would often cajole them into singing the seduction scene from Don Giovanni – one of the few pieces of classical music I am capable of enjoying. Another occasional member of the group was Ned Polsky, the most insane Joyce fanatic I have ever encountered – he could declaim yards and yards of Finnegan’s Wake from memory, for instance. Ned and I would often play Botticelli, the only game better designed to induce violence than Bridge.

Botticelli is “Twenty Questions” with strategy. It is played this way: one player thinks of a “famous” person (who could be well known only in some very limited area); the questioner has to earn the right to ask a general question (such as “Is it male?” or “Is she living?”) by stumping the answerer with a very specific question which is to be answered by a name (such as “Is this the person who coined the word ‘physicist’?”); now here’s the weenie, the joker in the deck: the specific question has to be within all the classes established by the answers to the general questions. So, for instance if it had been established that the subject the answerer is thinking of is a living female then the above specific question could not be asked because it is about a dead male (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). To play the game well you must be very careful not to take away your area of expertise too early. I knew a lot of obscure mathematicians or obscure facts about mathematicians so I would never ask a question about the subject’s trade, (“was he a poet?”) which could deprive me of my best specific questions (i.e., if the answer was ‘Yes’). Ned and I would often play this game until someone broke us up as our egos got more and more involved and our hostility was spoiling other people’s evening. (I have appended an obituary for Ned at the end of this post.)

I stayed in Chicago one of the summers (probably 1949) but was not in school. It was terribly hot all summer so I got into a pattern of staying up late, closing the bar each night and then sleeping until 2 in the afternoon to avoid being active in the heat. One night Jimmy and Tom decided they would go to an illegal after-hours joint after closing the bar and asked me if I wanted to go with them. Of course I did. I have no real recollection of where this place was, can’t remember if we walked there or went in Jimmy’s car. It was a large wooden house, three main floors of railroad flats and a ground-level flat. We walked down a breezeway on the right side of the house to about the middle of the building where there was a doorway with a brass peephole nearly six feet up. Tom rang some sort of doorbell, the slide in the peephole went to one side and an eye appeared in it – it was all so corny I almost laughed (which would not have been a good thing to do). The door opened and a six foot five hairy ape stared at me with suspicion if not disapproval. Tom said, “He’s OK. He’s with us.” and I was grudgingly granted admission. 

Inside was a single very large room with a bar running along the left half of the entryway wall and an over-under table in the middle of the room. There was a craps table and other gambling going on as well. Over-under is a game where you bet either that a roll of two dice will come up less than seven, more than seven or exactly seven. The table has a felt top divided in half by painted lines with a lozenge-shaped space intruding equally into the two halves, which is the exactly-seven space. You bet by throwing some money in one of the spaces. There were some tables and chairs scattered about. The bar and tables were being worked by some dreary looking whores; various illegal transactions were being conducted everywhere in the room; there were several rough looking bouncers who, Tom told me, were detectives from the local precinct (not surprising in ‘40s Chicago). At the over-under table was a short Italian gangster with a roll of hundred dollar bills in his left hand so big he couldn’t get his pudgy fingers all the way around it – he stood there peeling off hundreds and flipping them indiscriminately on the table.

We had a couple of drinks and left – but the scene is indelibly imprinted on my memory.

There was a guy who was hanging out at the UT where he was becoming famous for a stunt he performed regularly. If you bought him a bottle of beer, he would place it on a table, bend over and pick it up with his teeth, and without using his hands, raise it over his head and drain it in a gulp or two without spilling a drop. He did this to get the free beers until he became too drunk to do the stunt. His name was Ralph Winder and he was a Marine veteran who had served almost the entire second war in the South Pacific, operating a flame thrower for some part of that time. If there ever was a case of PTSD, he was it. I never saw him perform his trick at Jimmy’s but he must have done it there on occasion. Jimmy hired him as a part-time fill-in bartender, I think as one of his reclamation projects. Ralph did a good job, was on his best behavior (when at work) and was well liked by the patrons. He became my third behind-the-bar friend as well. Eventually Ralph found a nice middle everything girl, married her and had a daughter. His level headed wife got him on his feet, got him going – he was hired for a very good job doing public relations for a downtown nightclub (the Chez Paree, I believe). He liked the job, was good at it and was earning a good income.

Not long after Christmas 1950, when Terry and I were living in New York, we received a Christmas card from Tom. Inside was a note that went something like this: “Ralph was called up again by the Marines. After about a week of preparation he was sent to Korea and was in the Chosin Reservoir slaughter. He is now in the mental ward of a hospital in Hawaii. Merry Christmas!” The whole process, from the States to Hawaii to Korea and back to Hawaii, took about six weeks.

That was the last I ever heard of Ralph and the last I ever heard from Tom. 

*****

The Beehive

There was another bar in Hyde Park, on 53d street I think, that was very popular with both U of C students and staff, especially on Sunday afternoons, called the Beehive. It featured Dixieland during the week nights but on Sunday afternoon it was a place where musicians congregated for socializing among themselves and holding impromptu jam sessions which was free to the ordinary patrons. Some big names showed up – I remember that Armstrong and Bechet were said to be there one Sunday.

I went there only once, not on a Sunday, with Terry, in the middle of the day and the middle of the week. I remember the day as being very sunny, so in all likelihood, it was a hot summer day and we retreated into the bar for the air conditioning. There were three other patrons, two men and a woman, already there. Suddenly there was a big uproar, with the woman screaming and shrieking as she attempted to tug one of the men out a side door half way down the room. The men were snarling at each other. Then the bartender, a pretty big guy, cart-wheeled over the bar – literally cart-wheeled, feet over his head and all the rest. He immediately got between the two men, gently pushed them away from each other by putting a hand on each one’s chest. The woman succeeded in dragging her guy out the side door and the other guy left by way of the front door a minute or two later.

The bartender came over and said, “It’s a good thing I got between those guys. I felt their chests as I leaned on them – this guy had a cannon in there.” Terry and I figured if there had been any shooting, it would have been through us.

*****

The Kentucky Tavern

Another popular student bar, on the east side of Hyde Park, was called Ken and Jock’s Kentucky Tavern. We went there because they served a passable pizza (!). On one Sunday evening (when the dormitory didn’t serve dinner) there was a large group of us, four or five males, Kelly Hall lounge lizards, and seven or eight females from Kelly Hall.  The waitress was having a difficult time getting the group to pay attention to the business of ordering. One of the Kelly Hall women, Heather Axelrod (known as Heemer – some sort of low feminine humor arising from a menstrual event) loudly commanded, “Order now or forever hold your pizza!”

On another occasion there I got a nasty lesson in practical sociology. It was a Friday evening. There were five or six steel mill workers, most likely from Gary, Indiana, sitting at the bar. At least a couple of them were pretty drunk. I arrived with Terry and another good looking college girl (can’t remember who – I keep thinking it might have been Lucy Prinz,  Joachim Prinz’ daughter) and found a couple of familiar guys at a table. One of them was Shag Donohoe, a local book-store owner in his thirties, one of those people who can never get off a university tit, who apparently had been exchanging unpleasantries with one or more of the mill hands. As soon as we arrived he got up and left as did the one or two others who were there with him.  Thereafter, one of the drunks at the bar kept glaring at us or, rather, me. We became uncomfortable enough to decide to leave and even take a cab (unusual for impecunious college kids). While I was in the process of trying to hail a taxi the same guy comes out, with one or two others in his wake, rambles on in an incoherent manner and then says something about shaking hands. As I extended my hand he unleashed a powerful blow to my face. My nose and one front tooth were broken. The sober one of the group rushed out of the bar, apologizing and begging, “No cops, please, please, no cops”.

I had ticket selling duties the following week for the upcoming University Theatre play and was in the very public cage in the hallway outside Ida Noyes. I got damned sick of explaining my two black eyes and other facial damage to everyone who came up. I did not report the matter to the police. It would have been a waste of time in any case.

*****

Bars in New York

The Golden Eagle in the Village

Our favorite hangout for a couple of years was the Golden Eagle on Ninth Street just east of Sixth Avenue in an English basement. It was owned by Amedeo X (I have been probing and prodding my memory but just can’t come up with his last name – it may be that I never knew it). The bar was served by Jimmy Y (Irish last name – ditto) and the few meals were prepared by Mario Z and served by his daughter Tessie. Mario filled in at the bar when the occasion required it. It was just a neighborhood bar with a set of regulars who showed up several nights a week thus becoming a sort of extended family. The only “notable” I remember was John Carradine who showed up one night, very drunk, with two very drunk younger women. He was, loud, obnoxious and arrogant, offending everyone in the place. When he was offered a police escort he left and never came back.

Amedeo was not your usual village Italian bar/restaurant owner – he was very refined, a gentleman in any setting. He had owned an elegant restaurant in the ‘20s on Thompson or Sullivan Street between Houston and 3d named L’Aiglon D’Or, (which had been the name of a Parisian restaurant of note) hence the name of the 9th street place. L’Aiglon D’Or was not just an expensive dining room it was also a speakeasy, patronized by the likes of Jimmy Walker and many of his Tammany underlings. Across the street was an elegant bordello run by a beautiful Creole woman from New Orleans with some sort of nom de madame such as Lola or Rose followed by a French last name. Amedeo said she had introduced him to the pleasures of the boudoir – he would get a sort of dreamy look, as though in a reverie, when he talked of her.

After a couple of years the lease on the Ninth street location was ended, perhaps for the building to be reconfigured and remodeled, and Amedeo sold the business to Jimmy and Mario who moved into new quarters on 11th, again just east of 6th Avenue.  Mario owned a deodorized skunk named Sweetpea which lived in the tunnel created by the wooden box footrest for the stools, which ran the length of the bar. Sweetpea would emerge from his cave just before closing every night so that Mario could feed him Italian rum cake, his favorite food. We occasionally would win free drinks making bets with newcomers about the existence of a skunk in the footrest.

*******

Reddington’s

About two blocks northwest of Village Square (actually a triangle formed by 6th Ave, Christopher and Greenwich Ave.) on Greenwich Avenue was a wonderful place called Reddington’s that we would go to a few times a year. Someone associated with the place had been a farrier or blacksmith for harness racing horses, probably the owner or his father. There were sulky wheels and bits and bridles and jockeys’ shirts with racing colors decorating the barroom in the front of the establishment. In the back were dining tables where they served rather good American fare and a grand piano on a dais about six inches high. These were for the use of a rather large group of old-time vaudevillians who congregated there, especially on Friday evenings, putting on impromptu performances of song and dance. They were absolutely wonderful. It was a veritable orgy of sweet nostalgia.

*****

Bleeck’s

Around 1951 Terry took a job as one the secretaries to Eleanor Herrick, Personnel Director for the New York Herald Tribune. This introduced us to the Artists and Writers Club, commonly just called Bleeck’s, a bar right next to the Trib building and a well used hangout for their staff, especially the reporters.

Eleanor Herrick was a powerful figure in more ways than one (somebody once described her as looking like George Washington in drag). It is my understanding that she was a friend of both Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt and that she had been on the short list of candidates for Secretary of Labor in FDR’s first term, which was filled by Perkins. (It appears, from an item in Google Books, “Out of the Sweatshop”, that she had been a labor reporter at the Herald Tribune before being made a director of personnel.) There was a main secretary, named Jean something and Terry and a young black woman named Rita reported to Jean. (Once, Rita was given the task of taking some papers to Mrs. Herrick at her home on Park Avenue. The doorman told her to go around to the service entry in the back. Rita refused, demanded that the doorman call Herrick on the house intercom. After Herrick got through with him he ushered Rita to the front elevator.)

The publisher of the Herald-Tribune was Helen Rogers Reid, the widow of previous publisher Ogden Mills Reid (who was the son of Whitelaw Reid who took over the Tribune after Horace Greeley). She had two sons Whitelaw and Ogden Rogers (there doesn’t seem to be much variety or originality in the Reid men’s names). Mrs. Reid was always called just that, Mrs. Reid. Whitelaw was the day-to-day operations boss (Managing Editor?) and was known as Whitey, so, of course, the twelve-years-younger brother, who joined the staff as a novice reporter while Terry was working there, was called Brownie.

Bleeck’s (pronounced Blake’s – the name is German) had a history as old and as revered as the Herald-Tribune itself. During the twenties it was a speakeasy like many another respected drinking establishment. It was, as I have said, virtually an adjunct to the offices of many of the Trib’s reporters – when an editor couldn’t locate one of his crew one of the first places he would call was the phone behind the bar in Bleeck’s.

One of Jean’s good friends was a well known and respected reporter named Bob Bird. I believe he was a Pulitzer recipient. Since we often went to Bleeck’s with Jean, we got to know Bob too. At just about the time we became acquainted Mrs. Reid pulled Bob out of the cold, off the road, and appointed him an editorial writer. It had to do with his difficulty managing his drinking while away from home. I remember one evening with him and Jean where he was consoling himself with many drinks. It seems that when he left home in a Westchester suburb that morning he backed his car over his wife’s cat – and was afraid to go home.

For a time the constant occupant of the seat at the far end of the bar was John Crosby the well known TV reviewer. He wrote very witty and very acidic reviews. He was married to a woman who called herself Merrie Crosby in her cutesy wootsie children’s afternoon TV show (this one would have made Dorothy Parker really fwow up). Apparently their marriage was foundering and John consoled himself in the classic manner. I note in the obituary that they didn’t divorce until about eight years later so that must have been a passing storm.

The editorial staff of the paper was divided into two camps by the rivalry between Homer Bigart and Marguerite Higgins. Most of them were in the Bigart camp partly because he was a more established member of the paper’s club and partly because Maggie was routinely referred to as a “pushy bitch” (a familiar MCP refrain but it was also said by women). Here is an account published in the American Journalism Review, November 1991, By Karen Rothmyer on the occasion of Bigart’s death:

“A few years after World War II came Korea, where Bigart had his own battle to fight with fellow Herald Tribune reporter Marguerite Higgins. At a time when women war correspondents were virtually unheard of, Higgins displayed a fearlessness and ferocious competitiveness that, according to Bigart, threatened to get both of them killed. ‘She was a real trial to me,’ Bigart recalled. ‘When I came out I thought I was the premier war correspondent and I thought that she, being the Tokyo correspondent, ought to be back in Toyko. But she didn’t see things that way. She was a very brave person, foolishly brave. As a result, I felt as though I had to go out and get shot at occasionally myself. So I resented that.’ Higgins, Bigart and four other correspondents shared a 1951 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage.”

As Bigart was returning to New York following a stint in Korea, Truman fired MacArthur. Telegrams were quickly sent to Bigart in San Francisco telling him to stay there and cover MacArthur’s return (there were all sorts of humorous speculations circulating as to whether the Generalissimo would wade ashore at Ocean Beach or the municipal beach on the bay at Aquatic Park). A day or so later The Return took place but there was nothing from Bigart, so the Trib was the only paper in the world that had no eyewitness account of the event. Mrs. Reid was furious and ordered other San Francisco based staff to find Homer. A few days later he was found in a south-of-Market flop-house. When he returned to New York he was ordered to take a couple of weeks off and was sent to Florida. When he showed up in Bleeck’s I got my first glimpse of the great reporter. His face was bright red which was due to all the sun he was exposed to – I thought. However, several weeks later his face was still bright red.

Brownie Reid the novice reporter was the source for all sorts of entertaining foolishness. This was the McCarthy era, remember, and he was deep into the business of ferreting out commies. His desk was in a large open room along with a number of other junior reporters. He subscribed to several Communist publications, The Daily Worker, The New Masses, things of that stripe, which were delivered to his desk by a copy boy. One day he very publicly chewed out the copy boy for leaving his subversive literature out in full view and instructed him to place them face down with other papers from the desk top covering them. I guess that way he wouldn’t attract suspicion from the FBI.

One day the big front page item, above the fold, with a screaming headline was a story by Brownie about how communist spies were transmitting microdots (little round microfilms), containing all sorts of American top secret information about A-bombs and so forth in cans of Norwegian sardines. There, right in the middle of the page, was a large photograph of a can of sardines, with the lid rolled half way back. The photographer tapped to create this revealing image was Fendl Yerksa, an editor for the week-end magazine who was mercilessly derided for his effort. In Bleeck’s at the end of that day, Yerksa sought anonymity at the far end of the bar when in walked Tex Riley, a leading space salesman, who yelled, “Hey, Fen, how do you tell boy sardines from girl sardines?” Yerksa clutched his head with both hands and tried to hide his face in the bar top – “Watch ‘em coming out of the can!”

(A footnote: More than twenty-five years after this I arrived in Seattle on a Sunday afternoon for one of my customary week-long business trips and, as I always did, turned on the local TV news. It is a great way to get the flavor of an unfamiliar town quickly. There was Fendl, a member of the week-end anchoring crew on the ABC outlet.)  

The last time I was in the neighborhood, it must have been eight or ten years ago, I went to see what had become of the old place. The half a block’s worth of structures had been leveled, leaving a bare lot, except for the Bleeck’s building, two stories of old brick bowing down waiting for the executioner’s swinging ball. 

*****

San Francisco

Hanno’s

When I first got to San Francisco in 1954 I started looking for work. Since I had no particular experience and no idea what I wanted to do, it was a painful search. I had a reference from one of the Golden Eagle denizens, Johnny Gale, to an army buddy, Mike Harris, a reporter on The Chronicle. When I called he directed me to meet him at a bar across an alley from the Chronicle’s office at Fifth and Mission, called Hanno’s. We met and he quickly let me know that he couldn’t do anything for me so we spent a half an hour or so just socializing. There was a well known woman columnist there (9/5/08 – just remembered her name: Adeline Daley; she went to Hawaii after retiring) knocking back several in the middle of the afternoon. ( Added 4/9/09 – I  met one of Adeline Daley’s daughters today in a local store, another resident of our small town, Patrice Daley, who corrected me about the Hawaiin retirement. Adeline Daley never left her San Mateo home where she died  May , 1984, aet. 62. I can’t remember where I got the misinformation.)  ( Added 4/10/09 – Correction to the correction: In the conversation with Patrice Daley yesterday I gave an incorrect description of her mother. It occurred to me that I must be remembering the wrong woman and then another name popped into my remembrance, Marjorie Trumbull.)    Also there was a reporter who was having a private celebration of his 30th birthday (which would make the date June 14, 1955) and getting a new job on Collier’s Magazine named Pierre Salinger. Collier’s closed down about a year later. When I heard that Salinger had joined the Kennedy campaign in 1960 I remember thinking “poor Pierre joining another losing cause”.

Mike Harris and I crossed paths again around 1973 when we were both on a citizens’ advisory committee to the Board of Tamalpais Union High School District. Mike had been active in community affairs for some years by that point, having joined Mel Wax in overthrowing the insiders club that had run Sausalito for some years (Mel became mayor). By then I was living in Bolinas and my son was entering Tam High. One amusing incident came out of this part of my life. In 1973 we had both the gas crisis and a drought in California. At one meeting I said “Don’t throw the bathwater out with the baby – hot water is too hard to come by these days”. Some years later when there was another drought and, I think another fuel crisis, Herb Caen printed my quip in his popular column, with the correct attribution, correctly spelled. It took me a couple of days to remember Mike and that virtually the entire Chronicle staff fed items to Caen.

North Beach and Beat Hangouts

I never did much bar hopping in San Francisco from the time of arriving in 1954 until 1958 when my second wife, Barbara and I went a few times to Beat bars in North Beach. Prior to our acquaintance friends like Malcolm Bissell (yes, of the carpet sweeper Bissells) and some of the doctors at Mount Zion hospital, where she worked, would take her to places like the Iron Pot and Vesuvio’s and a couple of the waiters and bartenders became her friends.

One of those was an Austrian Jew named Leo Something (can’t remember – again!). I first met him when he was working as an assistant in a fancy (read expensive) pet store on Maiden Lane, across from the Frank Lloyd Wright designed store. Later, we became his customers when he was bartending at the Coffee Gallery. Later, he became the owner. The Coffee Gallery was one of the central gathering spots for the Beats, right up there with the Coexistence Bagel Shop and Miss Smith’s Tearoom.

Another of Barbara’s friends was Specs Simmons who had been a bartender at Henri Lenoir’s Vesuvio. In the early sixties we took a flat at 1941 Lyon Street, between Sacramento and Clay streets (at the time Bert and Diane Feinstein lived two blocks uphill from us – but that’s another story). Specs and Sonia Simmons lived around the corner of the same block, on Sacramento, next door to the Vogue movie theater. Specs was working as a welder for outfits that built custom kitchen equipment for hotels and restaurants such as Dohrman Hotel Supply. He worked with sheet stainless steel, a very tricky material that takes superior skill to work. I believe Specs told me he had learned metal working from his father who was a gold smith.

Specs played a passable guitar and sang some folk songs and the like. In his youth he was a leftist and an activist (as they say nowadays) and he put his guitar to use in political causes. In 1948 he and a young woman colleague wrote a song to support the campaign of a Wallace Progressive named Murphy running for mayor of Boston, using the subway system (MTA) there as a sort of political football (a common practice in Boston and New York in those days).  At issue was a surcharge for transfers (I think) so a poor guy named Charlie gets on the MTA and can’t get off. At the time Specs was living around the corner, the rising-in-popularity Kingston Trio made a hit out of the Charlie on the MTA song and out of the blue he started getting royalty checks. At one of Sonia’s annual latke parties (she made the real thing) I went into their bathroom and there over the toilet was a framed check for one dollar – the first royalty check.

Across Columbus Avenue from Vesuvio’s (and Ferlinghetti’s City Lights) was a bar called 12 Adler Place. When Barbara and I first went there it was a belly-dancing night club owned by a UC student named Naji Baba. Naji’s wife was a professional performer of near-eastern dances and taught a number of local women. The show consisted of her and her disciples performing belly dances. Barbara got a huge kick out of it – she loved the thumping dumbek and all of the music. In time, the belly dancing fad faded and Naji sold the place to Specs. He still has it and it is a very popular bohemian hangout.

(There is an incident involving Sonia that is burned into my memory. Sonia had called for a little neighborhood meeting with several other parents. I think the issue was the behavior of one black girl, about twelve or thirteen years old, who was bullying the little white kids – or something like that. We were in a meeting room provided by the branch library a block to the east on Sacramento waiting for the others when the librarian walked in and told us Martin Luther King had been murdered.)  

*****
Jimmy Wilson’s Obituary
from University of Chicago Magazine   April 1999
          Chicago Journal

Jimmy of Jimmy’s dies at age 86

James (“Jimmy”) Wilson, owner of Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap on 55th Street, died of heart failure February 22 at age 86.
Known for good beer, burgers, and most of all, conversation, Jimmy’s has been a part of the University community for more than 50 years. The owner was as beloved as his bar.

The late Francis Kinahan spoke for many in a 1984 citation—the “Cointreau Award”—he wrote for the Alumni Association to present to Wilson. It read in part: “The University gave us the Life of the Mind, but the man we honor tonight gave us the Life of the Spirits.…Others have educated; Jimmy has stimulated. There are people here who will swear they learned more at the Woodlawn Tap than they did in the Common Core.”

Wilson started bartending in Hyde Park at the old University Tavern in 1940. Eight years later he bought the Woodlawn Tap.

Wilson is survived by two daughters, a son, five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, a brother, and a sister.—K.S.

*****

Ned Polsky’s Obituary
from Footnotes, newsletter of the American Sociological Association.

Robert Kahn, University of Michigan (emeritus)

 Ned Polsky   (1928-2000)

Ned Polsky, who died suddenly and unexpectedly this past June 13, is best known and will no doubt be remembered by sociologists for his ventures into the field of deviance. The five essays that make up his book Hustlers, Beats and Others, recently republished in an updated edition by Lyons Press, are both sociological and literary masterpieces indicative of the author’s ambitions and perspectives

Ned himself was a deviant in many ways. He surely did not fit into the conventional mold of a sociologist, which is exactly what endeared him to his many friends inside and outside our discipline. He loved books, of which he was an avid collector, had a passion for literature and the arts, had tried his hand at writing a serious novel, played pool well enough to have participated in several tournaments and to have qualified as a referee in the International 3-Cushion Billiards Tournament in Las Vegas in 1999, a sign of recognition he valued as much as praise from his sociological colleagues. He was a high-brow but hardly a prig. One conversed easily with him on just about any subject. Once he surprised me with his encyclopedic knowledge of wild mushrooms, of which he had not previously spoken.

Not surprisingly, Ned roved almost as widely in his professional activities as in his conversations. Having graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at the tender age of 16, he studied linguistics and literature at the University of Wisconsin, followed by graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, which he left without a degree. During his career, he was in and out of publishing, was the editor of several prestigious magazines, became professor at SUNY-Stony Brook and, after retiring, opened and ultimately sold an antiquarian book business specializing in biographies.

Although intellectually a cosmopolitan, Ned joined the world only as it suited him. He learned to drive rather late in life and, as far as I know, never made any serious attempt to exploit the capabilities of the computer for his sociological work. Information on events, persons, and works in all of the humanities, a mammoth project on which he had been working — on and off — for over thirty years, was kept on literally tens of thousands of 8 by 11 file cards. These files, so he hoped, would ultimately help scholars to develop and check interesting propositions about peaks and troughs of cultural achievement. One cannot help but wonder what will happen to the material he so painstakingly put together.

Most appreciated by those who knew him best was his cool judgment on just about everything and his warm personality. His often sharp criticisms were typically in a soft voice and he was always generous with help and advice. Above all, he was a friend on whose loyalty one could count when things got rough. He is survived by his adored and talented daughter Claudia, a very young granddaughter, both of Berkeley, California, and his companion, Sarah White, a recently retired college language teacher, of New York. A memorial was held for him on October 27 at the Ethical Culture Society in New York City.

My Life in Theater (seats)

In the November 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, in the Onward and Upward with the Arts section, there is an article by Claudia Roth Pierpont entitled The Player Kings – How the Rivalry of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier made Shakespeare Modern. Along with the stated thesis the article consists mainly of a long list of Olivier’s successes (at least some of which were undeserved) and Welles’ failures (at least some of which were undeserved).

The piece opens with an account of the Old Vic’s 1946 American tour, starting with Henry IV parts one and two in New York. I was in the audience for part two and have a few memories of the event. This recollection got me to thinking about a number of my theater experiences, many of them Shakespeare performances, which had some significance derived either from the presentation or from some coincident event.

In part two as presented in New York, Ralph Richardson played Falstaff and Olivier played Justice Shallow. The theater was very large and my seat was very far back so that I could barely make out what was being said and mostly remember the consistent roar of laughter following Falstaff’s lines. It must have been a hell of a performance by Richardson – I wish I had heard it. I have added as an appendix Woolcott Gibbs’ review from the May 18, 1946 issue of The New Yorker. (I trust they will not object. I have this due to the thoughtful generosity of my stepson, Rex Ruthman, who gave me the Complete New Yorker on DVDs.) I must say that I am in almost perfect agreement with Gibbs on both the play itself and the performance as far as I was able to make it out.

In 1982 I saw Henry IV, parts one and two on a rather auspicious occasion. I arrived in London on one of my frequent business trips on Sunday, June 6 (D-Day for those of you old enough to remember). The pattern of these trips was that I would land at Heathrow around noon and right after checking into my hotel (usually the Park Court on Bayswater between Lancaster Gate and Queensway) would buy a copy of What’s On in London, which was a very good listing of all the upcoming week’s events of interest. This issue said that there was to be an opening of the Henry IV sequence at The Barbican, which I knew nothing about at the time. I had a hard time finding the place from the Moorgate station in the City of London, which was listed as the nearby Underground station in What’s On. It turned out to be nearly adjacent to one of my favorite haunts, the Museum of London. I went there late afternoon Monday and found myself walking immense corridors which were completely empty – I felt like I was wandering in some de Chirico landscape. When I finally found the ticket office I told the young woman I needed to see Henry IV parts one and two, preferably in that order. She asked, “Are your free Wednesday the ninth?” I said yes and she asked “And Thursday the tenth?” Yes. “I have two reviewers’ tickets which are unused.” So I had two tickets in the first row of the stalls, to me the best seats in the house, for about six pounds each. Wonderful.

I went early Wednesday evening to have dinner at the café in the Barbican, a buffet service (the Brits say “buffy”) with acceptable food and an outdoor dining area next to the artificial pond which makes up the core of the Center. The place is overrun by some of the boldest pigeons I have ever encountered. While I was having my meal and fending off pigeons some unusual people started arriving. The women were all done up in brocade gowns, dripping jewelry, and the men in tuxedos, which seemed out of place in the bright afternoon sun. When we entered the theater the program that was handed out said it was a Royal Gala honoring Prince and Princess Michael of Kent – this was the Grand Opening of the Royal Shakespeare’s tenancy at The Barbican (The Barbican Center itself had only been open since March 3 when the Queen did the honors). After we had taken our seats, suddenly everyone stood up and, not wanting to be out of step, so did I. Then the royal couple entered their box which was about thirty feet to my left at the same level. The Princess had one of the longest necks I have seen gracing a woman – she was wearing a four strand pearl choker (big pearls of course) and looked to have room for a couple more. (Her father was German and a Nazi and there was something of a scandal years later about allegations that he had been an SS officer.)

I thought the Trevor Nunn productions were abysmal. Patrick Stewart’s Henry was pedestrian at best. The Irish ingénue playing Hal was so puerile that I thought that he should have stamped his feet in the argument scene in part two. The worst thing, however, was the set and scene changes for Part Two. There was a big framework representation of The Boar’s Head and neighboring structures which were on tracks that allowed them to be turned this way and that. The stage hands were deliberately visible in the half-light between scenes and one found oneself more interested in the scene shifting than the actors’ performances. (I found this to be a common failing with Royal Shakespeare, overwhelming the performance with elaborate or tricky sets or other “clever” devices.)

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I saw Ralph Richardson just once more, about a year or so before his death, probably in 1981, in an arena style presentation of The Wild Duck in a small studio theater – the Cottesloe in the National, I think (it was too early to be the Pit in the Barbican). I have been unable to find any reference to this production on the Web, which is quite maddening. Richardson played Old Ekdal. His costume included a cap which he held in his hand much of the time. At one point he dropped the cap – and everyone in the place froze, actors and audience alike. He was rather rickety at this time and as he stood for several seconds staring at the cap absolutely no-one was breathing. He slowly, teeteringly, bent over and retrieved the hat and slowly, teeteringly, straightened up. Then the old ham looked around the house sporting an ear-to-ear grin and the audience and cast exploded with laughter, partly in relief and partly acknowledging the masterful bit of scene thievery.

I have seen Patrick Stewart just one other time as well. He was in a production of The Merchant of Venice at the Donmar Warehouse another studio theater used by the Royal Shakespeare Company as a training camp for its young actors. This place really was a warehouse and the seating was a done-on-the-cheap framework of iron plumbing pipes with boards laid across them, which were damned uncomfortable. The audience surrounded the performance space, so it was arena style staging, without sets. The productions always included one RS regular, probably with an eye to increasing attendance and, perhaps, to be an additional level of instruction for the student cast. Stewart played Shylock and resorted to the cheap trick of using a (bad) lower east side Yiddish accent which suggested Borscht Belt stand-up comics rather than the evil usurer. His whole performance seemed downright lazy and I have never been able to muster any respect for him since.

(A note on performing Shylock: When I was performing in the University of Chicago’s University Theater we did Oedipus translated by David Grene, a popular (!) professor of Greek and classics, who sat in on some of our rehearsals and provided advice, stories and good conversation. Grene professed to be such a Shakespeare nut that he was willing to drive hundreds of miles just to see a small college performance of any Shakespeare play.

In his youth he had been a hanger-on at the Abbey in Dublin – it was said that, asked about Grene, Barry Fitzgerald said, “Was he that little red-headed bastard that was always climbing over the seats during our rehearsals?” Grene said that the problem with most performances of Shylock is that out of the natural desire to be loved the actor tends to soften him, taken in by the “do we not bleed” argument. He said that he had seen a performance of Merchant in Ireland where the actor played Shylock as pure evil, like Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and that this provided the most effective Merchant he had ever seen.)

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In 1943 I saw the famous Margaret Webster and Eva Le Gallienne production of Othello featuring Paul Robeson, Jose Ferrer, Uta Hagen and Webster herself. Although I am about to do bit of caviling, let me say at the outset that I think this was the most magnificent Shakespeare production I have ever seen – it stands out in my memory all by itself and still gives me pleasure just in the recollection.

Robeson had been performing and perfecting his Othello for several years in England but there was trepidation about showing a coupling of a real black man with a white woman in 1930s and 40s racist America. Robeson’s performance received universal acclaim (still does) on both sides of the Atlantic. While many reviewers of other performances of Othello fault the lead actor for not being regal enough, that certainly wasn’t the problem with Robeson.

As I recall, his entry in scene two was preceded by some of the initial dialog with Iago offstage right. You could hear the audience almost gasp in response to the booming bass voice. Onstage he was a head taller and much more massive than any of the other players – and very regal in bearing. Therein lay several problems. Robeson’s “regalness” was just this side of appearing wooden and his majestic bass voice, with only one dynamic, reduced volume, became monotonous, literally, and was on the verge of being tiresome.

It is difficult for the actor portraying Othello to maintain control, to remain central, in the face of the very lively and active Iago. In this case Ferrer, mustering an absolutely brilliant performance, took command of the stage and the drama. It was a great pleasure to watch him but it did upset the balance of the play. Lewis Nichols’ New York Times review makes a shrewd observation about Ferrer’s performance, “Mr. Ferrer also is excellent as Iago, his interpretation taking no sides in the long quarrel as to whether the Moor’s “ancient” had been inspired by thoughts of Cassio’s gaining a position he wished, or his wife’s having yielded to the Moor. By taking no sides, Mr. Ferrer follows the track that Iago is unexplained evil, and he holds that throughout.” Note the parallel to ‘David Grene’s’ Shylock. All of this seems to me to be just another paragraph in the long Coquelin vs Stanislavski (or its various Method offshoots) debate. I’ll come back to this later.

Uta Hagen (then Ferrer’s wife) was an engaging and melting Desdemona. In later years she conducted a very well known and respected acting academy. I found out only recently that my college friend and acting colleague, Fritz Weaver, studied with her. Margaret Webster not only did a great directing job but she was also was an excellent hot-blooded Emilia. Cassio, whoever he was, looked like a window dummy amongst this crew of firecrackers.

I have seen only one other stage presentation of Othello. That was in 1980 at the Olivier Theatre (Royal National Theatre, South Bank) with Paul Scofield playing the lead. It was in all respects but one a run-of-the-mill production. Scofield’s Othello was another matter altogether. I detected two technical details that were interesting and, to me at least, very effective. One was a hint of a Jamaican accent which not only was consistent with the fact that Othello was not a Venetian but, to a Brit, subtly evoked racial feelings. (This was very different in intensity and intention from Stewart’s Lower East Side mistake.) The second was that he delivered several speeches, most especially the final one, in a manner that suggested military officialese. The final speech sounded almost like a recitation of a military resume. You might not think that this was an effective ploy but I can tell you that at the curtain the audience stood while it applauded and when the lights came up I saw tears streaming down the cheeks of those veteran, hardened Shakespeare watchers.

(This just in: the current New Yorker (Jan 21, 2008 ) has a review by John Lahr of a new production of Othello with a Nigerian-Englishman playing the lead role. It is in the Donmar no less which I believe is no longer a Royal Shakespeare venue. I trust the seating has been improved. It also sounds like it now has a more conventional stage because the sets are mentioned. Lahr restates the arguments about Iago’s motivation and does mention the evil-for-evil’s sake theory.)

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One can’t get through this life without seeing a number of Hamlets (I often think T. S. Eliot wasn’t much off the mark when he said Hamlet is the Mona Lisa of the stage). Since it is Shakespeare’s longest play, more than 3900 lines, it can often turn into an endurance contest. Two performances stick in my memory for almost extraneous reasons. I saw Maurice Evans in a truncated version called “The GI Hamlet” which he performed for the troops during WW II. Evans was the prince of the “elecutionists” mentioned in Pierpont’s New Yorker piece. The way they popped their “p”s must have given the first row a bath. (I heard a recording of Barrymore doing the main soliloquies (“To be …“ and “What a rogue …”) and he was just as bad.) As far as I could make out, the whole purpose of this production was to glorify Evans.

I saw a Korean kid from Hawaii play the lead in a production at the Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis. It was a very entertaining evening. He got more laughs for Hamlet’s jokes than any other actor I have seen. He got one gratuitous laugh for the line that contains “with heavy lidded eyes …” when he paused and looked around the house, seeking a response. Nonetheless it was a pleasant evening.

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Woolcott Gibbs reviewed three plays in the April 19, 1949 issue of The New Yorker, the first was the opening of Death of a Salesman, which I will come back to in a while, and the second was a production of the Boston Repertory Association, Richard III. Richard Whorf produced, directed, performed the lead and designed the costumes and the sets for this remarkable performance.

The costumes were made of a stiff material, probably a thick felt, the main body being black and the whole costume being very geometrical looking with large triangular lapels and wide cuffs on the sleeves the color of the character’s house badge, red for the Lancastrians and white for the Yorkists. The whole appearance reminded one of the figures on playing cards. Aside from being visually striking and appealing, the costumes helped the audience identify affiliations in the confusing jumble of participants. The sets were abstract, very tall flats of a dark textured color, suggesting stone, placed in various offsets to provide paths for entrance and exit. The lighting only illuminated the lower areas and the dark looming walls disappeared in the darkness as they rose into the flies.

Whorf’s performance as Richard was just as striking as his design. He really played up the deformity of both body and motion (which is not that unusual) and his speech would rise almost to falsetto when a line indicating one of Richard’s evil intentions was spoken. The whole effect reminded me of German expressionist film performances (Conrad Veidt in Caligari or Max Schreck in Nosferatu come to mind) and was impressively effective. Clearly, Richard Whorf was firmly in the Coquelin camp.

This might be the best place to very briefly discuss the Stanislavsky v. Coquelin disputes. Roughly, very roughly, Coquelin’s approach to acting was for the actor to consciously and deliberately employ mechanisms to evoke responses from the audience. He called the mechanisms “conventions” even though they may have been invented in the performance rather than arising from any cultural context. (Some theater is entirely determined by cultural conventions – Kabuki for example.) Constant Coquelin’s exposition of his theories, Art and the Actor, is available via Google books (this is one of their digitized books from the Stanford Library – it would be gross understatement to say that I was surprised and pleased to find this book available – without cost no less! Google is to be praised and thanked for this wonderful contribution to our intellectual resources.)

Just as roughly, Stanislavsky methods (he had several and his various descendants have several) are based on the actor psychologically merging with the portrayed character. The ways of doing that are many. Sometimes the actor is told to identify aspects of his own personality in that of the character and others do the reverse, find aspects of the character’s personality in himself – it all comes out about the same. The idea is that if the actor and the character become one then the behavior of the actor will be the character’s and the visible and audible manifestations will empathetically evoke the “right” responses in the audience. These methods seem more appropriate for modern, “realistic” plays, with their heavy emphasis on character as the driving force for the events of the drama. Whether it is appropriate or helpful in portraying Richard III, Iago or Shylock is doubtful. Also doubtful is whether theories have any real consequence for the actor – they may be just props (in both senses).

In any event, Richard Whorf’s production and performance were very unusual and unusually effective, deserving more attention than Woolcott Gibbs afforded them.

In 1979 I saw a RSC production of Richard III featuring John Wood in the Royal National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre. This was the first time I had been to that auditorium. It is very large and has the largest staging area I have ever seen. When opened all the way the backstage area appears to reach the vanishing point and this production used every available inch of the space producing some very impressive scenes.

This performance was quite the opposite of the Whorf Richard, brightly lit, big and noisy and filled with vibrancy. The set was semi-abstract; in particular there was a wall-like structure stage left that had an irregularly shaped opening cut into it about waist high. When Richard becomes king there is a series of mimed executions where the victims’ heads were projected through the opening and a swordsman swings his blade. After that had gone on for awhile I noticed that running along the edge of the stage (which was at floor level) was a gutter which was (audibly!) running with a red liquid. I felt like jumping up and cheering. This sort of uninhibited theatricality was just right for this particular Shakespearean drama and one occasion where RSC’s “cleverness” paid off.

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As I mentioned above, the April 19, 1949 New Yorker also had a review of the first production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman which I also saw during the early weeks of this initial run. When the final curtain came down I remarked to my companion that Lee Cobb should have been given credit for writing the play. What I meant was that Cobb accomplished more with beautifully timed silences than Miller did with his ham fisted dialog. That “attention must be paid” speech Willie’s wife delivers in the graveyard is the work of a dramaturgical lummox. Mildred Dunnock should have walked downstage, plunked her rear end down on the apron, legs dangling into the pit, and delivered it directly to the audience. It certainly doesn’t fit into the context of the play.

There was an interesting example of a Coquelin convention developed by Cobb. There is a well known Jewish gesture used to indicate resignation, submission to fate, the futility of resistance. The shoulders are shrugged, both hands, palms up, are raised almost to shoulder height – well, whadda ya gonna do? In the course of the performance Cobb created a modified form of this gesture, raising only one hand half way with a sort of half-shrug. He used it every time fate handed Willie a new insult: when the refrigerator breaks right after the last payment, when he’s fired and so on. In Willie’s final scene Cobb stands alone in the middle of the stage looking like a bull after the picador is through with it and he stands there and he stands there and then the shrug and very slowly the hand floats up. It was far and away the most powerful line in the whole play.

Lee J. Cobb came from the Group Theater of Stella Adler (studied under Stanislavsky), the empress of the actors, who influenced Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and all the other Methodists.

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Macbeth is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, partly because it is the least polished, the least reworked and, therefore, most spontaneous of all his works. Rather like David Grene, I would go to see any production of Macbeth under the belief that any reading of it is at least acceptable. I did see one amateur performance at the Bear Gardens Museum in Southwark which proved the above generalization, like all others, not to be true. The hard seats and the dreary performance and the late hour proved to be too much and I left in the middle of the performance.

I don’t think I could have seen the Judith Anderson performance in 1941. I was only 12 at the time and have no recollection of the play. But I do recall seeing her do the sleepwalking scene, with sets and costume, so it must have been on television, perhaps the Ed Sullivan show. It was not unlike her portrayal of Medea, Robinson Jeffers’ take-off of his own Tower Beyond Tragedy, which was a take-off of Euripedes’ Medea, which I did see. She gave scenery-chewing a good name.

The best Macbeth I have ever seen, another performance for which I can find no record, was presented in a reworked, undistinguished nineteenth century church in Islington, a working class enclave on London’s northeast. I believe the troupe was called The Shakespeare Repertory Company and one of its founding board members was Tyrone Guthrie. Across the street was a large group of multistoried residences that we in the US would call Projects and in Britain are modern forms of Council Housing. On the walk from the nearest Underground station, crossing under railroad trestles with ads for brake pads attached, I passed a number of food shops selling an age-old poor Englishman’s staple, boiled eels. Unfortunately, I had just had supper was not able to consider having some – I like very much some other eel preparations that I have had over the years.

In the church there was an excellent modified form of the hypothetical stage in Shakespeare’s Globe. All that was missing was the upper level stage over the inner stage to the rear of the main one. Lady Macbeth was played by Sarah Miles and I believe that, without qualification, she was the best I have ever seen. I don’t remember who played Macbeth but, for some unexplained reason, I keep thinking it may have been Jeremy Brett – I have absolutely no evidence to support that belief.

This was in all regards an excellent production. As far as I could make out the only text removed was that nonsense by Hecate in Act IV Scene 1 which is universally credited to someone other than Shakespeare, probably Middleton. In particular, the handling of the Witches was straightforward, avoiding any hint of self-consciousness, embarrassment or hokiness. This is important because, in a sense, the change in the Witches’ relationship to Macbeth is the very heart of the drama.

Miles made the motivation for Macbeth’s submission to her believable by making her sexy, as unlikely as that sounds. Most performances of Macbeth err in making Lady Macbeth the main, or even only, villain. At worst, she only gets him started on his evil course, thereafter his villainy is entirely self-generated. By act four he is a devil incarnate, a witch.

To explain that last remark I need to go on a long circuitous digression, so please bear with me.

Among Victorians, especially Shakespeare critics, there was something like a parlor game posing hypothetical questions such as ‘what courses did Hamlet take at Wittenberg and what were his grades?’ One of the most popular of these was ‘how many children did Lady Macbeth have?’ (One cannot start such a discussion without the obligatory quotation of Sir Thomas Browne’s famous line from the introduction to Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial) “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.” I should also point out that Robert Graves did, in fact, provide such conjectures.) In the early fifties, while I was living at the foot of MacDougal Street (see the post about Mama Savarese), I wrote a long paper to answer the question about Lady Macbeth which was really about the interesting things that came to mind along the way.

The strongest possible answer to the question is indicated in two passages: Lady MacBeth’s “I have given suck …” and MacBeth’s “… whilst I hold a barren scepter in my grip … To make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings” The answer is at least one but none by MacBeth.

In the process of trying to extract a stronger answer I found myself more and more examining the symbolism in Act IV, Scene 1, especially the contents of the Witches’ cauldron which is a seething pot of emasculation symbols (“…Eye of newt, and toe of frog, … tongue of dog, Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg … Nose of Turk, and …
Finger of birth-strangl’d babe Ditch-deliver’d by a drab … sow’s blood, that hath eaten Her nine farrow). The theme of emasculation and sterility is symbolically carried throughout the play from the hypothetical baby whose brains Lady MacBeth would dash out to the “abjuration” wherein Macbeth compels the witches to answer his questions, to the bloody babe, MacDuff, ripped from the womb. It is a leitmotif.

Then I got to wondering about the rest of the dumb-show in that scene. The armed head probably means nothing more than battle and the bloody child is MacDuff and the crowned child with branch is Malcolm but who are the eight kings followed by Banquo and why does the eighth hold a mirror in his hand?

At about this point I tried to find out something about the “real” Macbeth, the history behind the play. Fortuitously an article appeared in a Sunday newspaper magazine at about this time giving these “facts”: Lady MacBeth’s name was Gruoch; she was married to Gillecomgain who fathered her son Lulach; Gillecomgain was killed in the Viking fashion, his house and grounds with their staff surrounded and burned (the Sicilian Mafia also inherited this technique from the Vikings), perhaps by MacBeth; Duncan was the usurper, Gruoch had a rightful claim to the throne; Lulach died with MacBeth in the battle on Dunsinane and the hill is now called Lewis Height; Fleance ran to Wales where he became the royal steward to the Prince of Wales; his son, Walter Steward became the royal steward to Scotland; a long line of Stuart kings in Scotland descended from Walter right up to James VI of Scotland, James I of England.

A lot of this is speculation or surmise but the basics are pretty close. Lulach probably died years after MacBeth and I don’t know about Lewis Height. Lady MacBeth had some claim on the throne but it is a complicated business. It is unlikely MacBeth had anything to do with the death of his cousin Gillecomgain. There is an excellent explanation of the culture and history of the Scottish succession practices and a more accurate account of the facts as far as they are known, in “What Do We Really Know About MacBeth?”

There were more than eight kings in the succession – I found this in a forum on the web:

DESCENDANCY OF KING JAMES

Banquo
Fleance [married a daughter of the Prince of Wales]
Walter Steward [Lord Steward of Scotland]
Alane Steward
Alexander Steward
John Steward
Walter Steward [married Margaret, descendant of David I]
Robert II 1371-1390 King of Scotland
Robert III 1390-1406 King of Scotland
James I 1406-1437 King of Scotland
James II 1437-1460 King of Scotland
James III 1460-1488 King of Scotland
James IV 1488-1513 King of Scotland
James V 1513-1542 King of Scotland
Mary Queen of Scots 1542-1567 Queen of Scotland
James VI of Scotland 1567-1625 King of Scotland

James IV married Margaret, daughter of Henry VII
James VI became James I of England 1603-1625

I believe this play was written in considerable haste in response to a royal command from the new king of England a year or more before the customary date assigned, 1605, presented at Whitehall on an “arena” stage as described by the remarkable literary detective, Leslie Hotson (Shakespeare’s Arena – Sewanee Review, Summer, 1953), and that it is blatant political pandering to further the cause of Shakespeare’s performing group. The last king in the apparition is holding a mirror up so that James would see his own face – the last king in the line.

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On one of my many business trips to London I was surprised by a language oddity from the news readers on BBC regarding the pronunciation of “controversy”. Instead of saying con’-tro-ver”-sy (primary accent on the third syllable, secondary on the first) they said con-trov”-er-sy (with perhaps a slight secondary accent on the last syllable). I had never heard the word pronounced that way and had hard time believing it was acceptable. In any event, it seemed like a BBC affectation to me.

At some later time, I was in London with my wife, Barbara, and by coincidence our San Francisco friend and lawyer John Burke was also there. We all decided to see the Royal Shakespeare production of Coriolanus, directed by Terry Hand, at the Aldwych. The theme of the play is controversy and the word is used over and over and it was pronounced in the customary fashion.

We were in the third row of the stalls and when the first intermission lights came up I leaned across Barbara and said to John in my usual loud voice and distinctly New York accent “The British can’t speak English and I can prove it!” You should have seen the backs of the people around us stiffen! “On the BBC they say con-trov”-er-sy” The backs relaxed and the man in front of me turned around and said “You wouldn’t believe how many letters to the editor of The London Times have been printed about that!”

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Appendix

Woolcot Gibbs’ review of Old Vic’s Henry IV

It seems likely that more dismal critical nonsense has been visited on Shakespeare than any other topic in the theatre, and the reasons for this aren’t especially hard to find. ‘The Works are part of the early cultural equipment of every reviewer, with the exception of the occasional happy illiterate who has entered drama criticism by way of the sports desk or the night-club beat; the body of scholarly comment on them has been enormous, celebrated, and practically required reading for any-conscientious student of the stage; it is still growing and the temptation to add to it, to ally oneself cozily with the best thought of three hundred years, is nearly irresistible; and, finally, the actual composition of an article on Shakespeare needs to involve none of the usual hazards of trying to determine whether the play itself is any damn good-it is simply a matter of comparing interpretations, and in this, since one lay opinion about acting is just about as useful, or perhaps just about as preposterous, as the next, the writer is limited only by the richness of his vocabulary and the ingenuity of his syntax. The resulting prose was once discussed by Max Beerbohm, who has usually said whatever it is that I am trying to a great deal better, and generally about fifty years earlier. In this case, he was writing in 1898 about the dangers attending a revival of “Julius Caesar”:
“The thing will become a classic in the drama, and one will be able to regard it only as a vehicle for acting…. Its interest will be merely histrionic:-”Is M r.* so powerful as **? … You never saw **? Ah, what a performance! Not so subtle as ***’s perhaps-but oh! the way he said, ‘Was this ambition?’ He just put his hand in his toga and-why, * holds his hand straight in front of him-misses the whole point of it. For my own part, I always thought that, in some respects, ***vs idea-”,.. Nothing could be drearier than this kind of comparative criticism; yet a classic play makes it quite inevitable. The play is dead. The stage is crowded with ghosts. Every head in the audience is a heavy casket of reminiscence. Play they never so wisely, the players cannot lay those circumambient ghosts nor charm those well-packed caskets to emptiness.”

Being in cheerful agreement with all these remarks, I will try to deal with the two parts of “Henry IV,” the Old Vic’s initial American offerings, without reference to past performances and with a minimum of critics’ adjectives, those dubious coins that, though they have no precise values in the reviewer’s mind, are still customarily passed off as valid currency on the reader. This review, that is, will attempt to report on what Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and all their gifted associates are doing on the stage at the Century in a calm, journalistic manner, just as if they were no more than mortal men, engaged in mortal enterprise.

To begin with the material, then, it strikes me that both parts of “Henry IV” are rather trying samples of the Master’s art – involved in plot, not especially eloquent in expression, and broad and repetitious in humor, even for Shakespearean clowns, who habitually amuse me somewhat less than the comics on the radio. The beginning of the fifteenth century in England was apparently a time of confused border insurrections against the Crown, of which the one led by Hotspur may easily have been the hardest to follow. Obscure in origin (the King had exasperated Hot-spur by refusing to ransom his brother-in-law, Mortimer, from the Scotch on the somewhat reasonable ground that he was a pretender to the throne), the rebellion gathered momentum and complexity (I doubt whether anybody knew what the hell was going on at the Battle of Shrewsbury), faded away temporarily at the end of Part I when Hot-spur was killed by Prince Hal, carne to brief life again in Part II when the Archbishop of York took up the cause with Bardolph and Northumberland, and finally petered out forever in a rather silly engagement in a Yorkshire forest, This was really no more than a scuffle in the underbrush, but it served its purpose in that it left the nobles free to engage in a war with France, which, next to a good Crusade, was, of course, the chief delight of all their childish hearts.

Against this background of dubious battle, we have the personal histories of Hotspur and the young Prince, who eventually became Henry V and the subject of what is said to he the damnedest moving picture ever made. There is a good deal of drama in these contrasting careers: Hotspur, the perfect hero of a lost cause, the victim of cynical and treacherous allies as well as of his own violent and mercurial spirit; the Prince, conceivably the most insufferable prig in English letters, redeemed from low associates to save the Crown heroically in battle and in the end to comfort his father’s deathbed with the smug assurance that his heart had never really been in the revelry at the Boar’s Head Tavern – like any conscientious novelist, he had been consorting with vice purely for literary purposes, the better to scotch it in his own good time. Throughout both plays, we have Sir John Falstaff and his disreputable companions – Bardolph the Souse (as distinguished from Bardolph the Rebel), Pistol, Dame Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Shallow, Silence, and all the rest of that noisy company of the damned. The comedy, at least in the script, consists mainly of the fat knight’s lusty speeches, full of elaborate paradox and bothersome Elizabethan terminology, in praise of drink and wenching; his friends’ comments about his shape, which have infinite variations, though “Go to, thou butt of sack” will probably do as a sample; and scenes of enormous gaiety in the tavern with everyone shouting and falling down as enthusiastically its characters in a comic strip. I know very well that all this is generally regarded as the pinnacle of gusty English humor. I can only maintain that I find it elementary and monotonous and that it seldom makes me laugh, a purely reflex or muscular judgment, of course, but one from which I find it hard to appeal.

The foregoing might he called my library opinion of “Henry IV,” Parts I and II. The Old Vic, I am happy to say, has improved it somewhat. In the first part, Mr. OIivier’s performance as Hotspur seems to me physically and intellectually almost perfect. From a bare hint in the text, he has invested his role with a nervous impediment in speech, and though this is no more than a nearly imperceptible hesitation before the letter “w,” it is curiously effective as a symptom of the interior desperation, of the spirit too quick and furious for the flesh, that drives him relentlessly to his end. It is also characteristic of the brilliant imaginativeness of the whole portrayal. Since Mr. Olivier is handsomely endowed by nature for heroics, his Hotspur has the additional advantage of being romantic visually, and altogether it is one of the real triumphs of the re-cent theatre. In the second part, as Shallow, he is strangely wasted and contorted in person and equipped with a putty nose, and while I admired his versatility, the humor of the part escapes me, so I have no reliable opinion to offer of his execution. Mr. Richardson’s Falstaff, burdened with even more than the traditional crepe hair and cotton batting, is, however, a vastly appealing figure in spite of the rather primitive nature of his wit. His words are often tiresome and incomprehensible, but his posture and expression as he tries to impose his lordly vision of himself on a disrespectful world are marvelously funny (I kept thinking of a broker I once knew who might have been Falstaff back in 1928), and he is not without real pathos, either, especially in the nightmare scene in which he is denied by his old play mate, the new King.

While Mr. Olivier and Mr. Richardson are, naturally, the chief personal attractions in the two plays, there are a lot of very satisfactory subsidiary efforts. Nicholas Hannen, as Henry IV, has a genuine regality, not too common in monarchs on the stage; Margaret Leighton is a sweet and touching Lady Percy; and the whole frowzy crew at the Boar’s Head seem to Inc admirable in behavior, if not in speech, especially Joyce Redman, who, as Doll Tearsheet, produces a wonderfully insane and boneless comedy that almost suggests that she has been animated by Walt Disney. In fact, if I have any real complaint about the cast, it is only in the case of Prince Hal, as played by Michael Warre, who seems singularly lacking in dignity and stature, so, unfortunately for one of the principal purposes of the plays, he is apparently a good deal more at home in the tavern than on the battlefield or in the palace. Altogether, however, I’m afraid that I was seriously disappointed in the Vic’s first two offerings. I can only say, on the brighter side, that the acting was generally of such superior quality that I am looking forward hopefully to seeing it applied to some less numbing works.