12 Wednesday Dec 2012
Posted in Quote of the day
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There was a cheering crowd at the Auburn train station in August 1870 to send Seward and the Risleys on their way. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young introduced them to eleven of his sixteen wives and almost all of his forty-nine living childrem.
–Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man
11 Tuesday Dec 2012
Posted in The new South
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Last week I watched the documentary The Best that Never Was. The film is an installment in ESPN’s 30 for 30 franchise, and explores the life and times of legendary football player Marcus Dupree. Dupree is not a household name to most Americans, which is unfortunate. Had fate not intervened, Marcus Dupree would be mentioned today in the same conversation with Jim Brown, Tony Dorsett, Marcus Allen, Barry Sanders, and Emmitt Smith. He was that good. I say it was about the life and times of Marcus Dupree because it was just that. The best sports books and documentaries are not about balls and strikes, or touchdowns and extra points; done well they explain why one should care about sports, and that rarely has to do with the final score.
Marcus Dupree was born in Philadelphia Mississippi in May 1964, less than a month before the disappearance and murder of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It was these deaths that led President Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act the following year. Dupree entered public school a few years later and was a member of the first class in Philadelphia to attend integrated classes from kindergarten through high school.
I found the film touching for a number of reasons. Dupree’s lack of bitterness is one reason. It also covers subjects I have always found interesting. Then there is the fact that Dupree is just a few years older than I am, and my recollections of the events is vivid. We remember what happened during our high schools years with great clarity, even when they happened to someone else. I will leave it to the film to explain how and why it all unravels for Dupree.
Mississippi has always been a place of intrigue and fascination for me. I went there several times on my own when I visited my father each summer at his home in Arkansas. In 2009 I took my soon-to-be bride there to see Graceland, among other things. Elvis, Faulkner, Muddy Waters go hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights Movement, poverty, illiteracy, and other social ills. Like America itself. Yesterday, December 10, was the anniversary of Mississippi statehood. The Magnolia State entered the Union 195 years ago. Of course, less than five decades later it would become the second state to leave the Union. Yesterday the former lieutenant governor spoke at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson.
(image/ErgoSum88)
10 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ellis Island, National Park Service
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About two weeks ago I mentioned the layoffs at Ellis Island National Monument. At first I was cautiously hopeful that Ellis would not be closed to the public for the six months the Park Service originally estimated. Apparently it will indeed be off limits until Spring 2013. Now federal officials are saying that they must move 1.7 million artifacts from the island to prevent their damage. These items, relating to the arrival in America of nearly 12 million immigrants between 1892-1924, will be held in Maryland. No word yet on when they may be returning, but I imagine it will not be until late 2013 at the earliest. The biggest objective right now is rebuilding the island’s infrastructure and making the buildings safe for visitors. This is a really sad story.
I am no longer a volunteer at Ellis Island National Monument and so don’t have the inside bead on the extent of the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy I once might have. All I’ve had to go on has been a phone call from a friend saying that he has been laid off for an indefinite period and what I can glean from the news. Last week it was announced that the Liberty and Ellis Islands would remain closed through the end of the year. Today the news is that 400 have been laid off, perhaps though April 2013. That would be a full six months closed to the public. I cannot tell you how sad this makes me. What hurts the most is that the it is now the holiday season–the busiest time of the year at Ellis. I know that by the end of the year is unrealistic but I hope they can manage to get at least partial visitation up-and-running in early 2013. For one thing this touches a great deal of the New York economy, as anyone who as ever been to the Battery knows. We shall see.
(image/Kadelarr)
07 Friday Dec 2012
Pearl Harbor 2011, the final gathering of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association
I wrote the piece below for the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack and am posting it again. As I said last year, I will always remember anniversaries such as December 7, June 6, and May 8 though they no longer resonate in the way they once did. I have been watching Eric Sevareid’s magnificent Between the Wars over the past several days.The sixteen part documentary, produced in 1978, provides a remarkable overview of the 1918-1941 period. What I find most striking is how recent the war, even the lead-up to the war, was as late as the 1970s. (One gets the same impression watching Lawrence Olivier narrate A World at Arms as well.) The Second World War was almost still current events in a way it obviously is not today. The highest leadership had died off by this time, but the majority of the people who fought in the war were now in full blown middle age and in the prime of their careers. Now those people have pretty much died off, or have aged considerably. I couldn’t help but think about this when I learned about the death of Congressman Jack Brooks earlier in the week. Maybe it is my own sense of aging, but I am not sure how I feel about this. Anyways, from Pearl Harbor Day 2011 . . .
A few years ago the father of a good friend of mine happened to be in the food court of a shopping mall on Memorial Day. This is a man, now in his eighties, who served in the Air Force and later played semi-professional football. He still has his leather cleats. Lou is the essence of Old School. Like shopping mall food courts throughout the country, this one was full of teenagers. Striking up a conversation with the 4-5 at the neighboring table he asked them if they knew what Memorial Day was. After the blank stares, one offered that it was a day off from school. My friend’s dad was not impressed.
When I was in school in the seventies and eighties a visit from a World War 2 vet was a HUGE deal, even in the most cynical of times just after Vietnam. (I graduated high school just a decade after the Fall of Saigon.) One vet recounted today that during a recent school visit a girl asked who Pearl Harbor was and why he was there to talk about her.
I offer these stories not to blame our country’s historical amnesia on young people, but to emphasize the educational crisis we face.
I have written about the significance to me of D-Day and aging veterans before. Personally, Pearl Harbor Day 2011 is the end of something tangible, akin to the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg in July 1938 when aged veterans turned out for one final gathering. President Roosevelt was in attendance; three years after dedicating the Eternal Peace Light Memorial in front of the 1,800 veterans and 150,000 citizens that summer day he would tell the country that December 7 would forever live in infamy. Today in Hawaii the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association held its final gathering. There are just too few Pearl Harbor survivors left seventy years later to justify a seventy-first. There will be more World War 2 anniversaries between today and the commemoration of V-J Day in 2015, but for me they will no longer seem the same. By 2015 there will be fewer WW2 veterans, and those remaining will likely be too infirm to participate in any meaningful fashion. Time moves on. It was ever thus.
(image/U.S. Navy)
05 Wednesday Dec 2012
Posted in Jazz, Those we remember
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04 Tuesday Dec 2012
Posted in Memory
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Here is a reminder that our great civil war was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. Juanita Tudor Lowrey, she of Kearney, Missouri, is the daughter of one Hugh Tudor, who fought in the Union Army’s Fourteenth Corps. Apparently he was one the young men, described by Bruce Catton, who wrote “18” on a piece of paper, stuck it in his shoe, and told the technical truth to the draft board that he was “over eighteen.” I have always suspected that there are a larger number of veterans’ children still among the living than we might believe. In the 1920s and 1930s there were a surprising number of May-December relationships between veterans and young women. A young woman might marry an aged veteran, take care of him in his final years, and then become eligible for his pension when he died. These were difficult times. Remember, the Depression began in the early 1920s in many parts of the country, not with the Wall Street Crash and Dust Bowl as our collective memory has it today. There was no Social Security yet either. People do what they have to do to get by. It probably did not happen that often, but enough for it be a phenomenon worth noting. At least often enough to produce Ms. Lowrey.
(image courtesy Kansas City Star)
03 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ellis Island, Film, Sound, & Photography
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Irving Berlin, 1906
The Hayfoot and I put up our Christmas tree last night. Tonight we watched Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire’s Holiday Inn, which neither of us had ever seen before. I learned my lesson last year when we missed out entirely on Christmas movies because of the Long Wait from Netflix. As it turns out the queue for Christmas flicks gets longer the closer you get to December 25. Who knew? This year I was determined to learn from this experience and began ordering early. As I said I had never seen Holiday Inn before. I feel there is so much about about our culture I missed along the way, and that I am now playing catch up. Not such a bad feeling. It is probably just as well anyways. Most of our popular culture was geared toward adults in a way it is not today. A great deal of the film, and the milieu that it came from, would have been lost on the my younger self anyway. That goes for the songs of Crosby and the dancing of Astaire as well.
When I was a volunteer in the Interpretation Division I often spoke to visitors about immigrants who passed through and eventually went on to bigger and better things here in America. One of them was Irving Berlin. born Israel Isidore Baline in Russia in 1888. Ironically it was primarily immigrants, many of them Jewish, who gave us the Great American Songbook. The songwriter probably was not dreaming of a White Christmas in Tyumen as a youngster. Our favorite scene was Lincoln’s Birthday number, sung in blackface no less. I have come never to be offended by such things; for better and for worse they are part of our culture and history. Never run away from the truth.Fascinating on so many levels. The Fourth of July number, with its lyrics about the Four Freedoms and images of FDR and American servicemen, are reminders that the film was released in 1942 as the United States was entering the Second World War in case you missed the point. If you haven’t seen there’s still time, and I am going to drop it back in the mailbox tomorrow morning.
(image/Life)
02 Sunday Dec 2012
Posted in Rod Serling
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This piece about Rod Serling produced for Australian radio came through my in-box. The narrator discusses watching The Twilight Zone as a young boy in 1961. I did not know that TZ had such an international audience even during its original run. We know people who live Down Under and it is quite literally half way around the world from Binghamton, New York where Serling grew up and he placed so many of his stories. Half a century ago before the internet, cable/satellite television, and cheap international phone rates Australia was metaphorically even farther away. I have learned never to underestimate the power of Rod Serling and his colleagues.
In case you missed it the first time around, here is a link to a previous post about the Twilight Zone complete with a link the the conference proceedings of the 2009 Rod Serling conference at which yours truly spoke in 2009. The week before I got married no less. Enjoy your Sunday.
The Strawfoot 