Sunday, March 03, 2024

Origins: Chewing Gum

ad from the 1930s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 


Still, even some celebrities kept chewing, if somewhat secretly. A home movie camera caught JFK chewing gum. Perhaps one of the last public gum chewers was John Lennon, who famously was seen chewing gum while singing “All You Need Is Love” to an international TV audience. Though there's enough gum around to keep the famous Gum Wall at Pike's Market in Seattle fresh, it's not as fashionable as it used to be.  By the 24th century, gum is so unknown that when offered a stick of gum by a libidinous desk sergeant in a 1940s holodeck simulation, Doctor Beverly Crusher committed the cardinal rookie mistake, and swallowed it.

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

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

Gallery


American Chicle Building in Portland, Oregon.








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


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

The classic Dubble Bubble...

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

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

  

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Origins: Valentine's Day


As is often true, the ultimate origin of Valentine's Day is unknown, though there are plenty of juicy legends repeated as fact, all disputed by at least some scholars.  But the one makes the most sense to me is this: its roots are in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, held on the Ides of February (February 15.) 

 Lupercalia was an early spring fertility festival, ostensibly in honor of a god of agriculture but also of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus.  According to that origin legend, they were twin boys abandoned in a cave and raised by a wolf (Latin and Harry Potter scholars will recognize that "lupa" in Lupercalia means a she-wolf.)  The festival traditionally began with a rite at that legendary cave.

But the rest of Lupercalia was dedicated to different sorts of fertility, with naked drunks running through the streets (some suggest the day also honored the god Pan), past married women who hoped they would become pregnant or have an easy delivery if they were touched by the goat's hide strips the men brandished. 

Yet another custom--more related to today's holiday-- was a lottery in which unmarried women dropped their names into an urn for unmarried men to randomly extract.  The two would become a couple, presumably including sexual favors, either for the course of the festival or (according to other sources) the entire year.  This even speedier variation on speed dating often (it is said) resulted in marriage. 

All of this went on for centuries, until the Catholic Church finally predominated.  In the fifth century, the Pope banned Lupercalia, and replaced it with St. Valentine's Day.  Some sources claim that the choice of St. Valentine was simply because he was officially martyred on that date.  Maybe.  But whenever the Church replaced a pagan feast day, or built a church over a pre-Christian sacred site, the replacement is often related to the earlier intent-- especially since Indigenous and other pre-Christian special days were related to natural cycles of the calendar, such as when birds and other animals begin mating in the early spring.

Besides, there are stories of at least three St. Valentines, all supposedly martyred, and none proven to have existed.  But by the Middle Ages the Church had a great cover story to relate Valentine to the Lupercalia, without saying so.  According to this legend, it all started when the third century Roman emperor Claudius II banned marriage.

Claudius had risen through the military (the first Emperor to have done so, and the first to be of "barbarian" birth) and thought marriage made soldiers weak and fretful, distracted by wives and children at home. And Claudius was often at war.

 But a Christian prelate in Rome called Valentine continued to secretly marry couples, until he came to the attention of Claudius.  During Valentine's imprisonment, he and Claudius had lively discussions, each trying to convert the other to their religion.  But only one of them was the emperor, so Valentine was executed.

Did any of this happen?  Outlawing marriage was not entirely unknown in Rome, but the encyclopedia entry that Wikipedia uses doesn't mention Claudius II (also known as Claudius Gothicus) doing so.  There is a further addition to the legend that says while he was imprisoned, Valentine had some sort of relationship--perhaps even fell in love with--his jailer's daughter.  Before his execution, he left her a note, "from your Valentine."  Right--at least a degree of cuteness too far.  

But by the Middle Ages, Valentine was a popular saint across Europe, and St. Valentine's Day became a day for celebrating early love, a sanitized--or at least euphemistic-- version of the Roman holiday.  The tradition of the card now called the valentine may have also derived from the age-old traditions of  Lupercalia.  Denied their lottery, it's said that young Roman men sent handwritten greetings to women they admired on the mid-February date.

But the first documented (and still existing) valentine card was sent by Charles, duke of Orleans in 1415.  He sent it to his wife, who happened to be a prisoner in the Tower of London at the time. 

 Handmade cards began to bear the image of Cupid (also related to Roman love customs) and to include amorous verses.  The printing press made the "mechanical valentine" a thing, and lower postal rates in 19th century England meant they didn't need to be hand-delivered, and could even be sent anonymously.  This led to more explicit imagery and racy verses, to the extent that in 19th century Chicago, some 25,000 valentines were deemed too obscene to deliver.  

Among the rude cards of the 19th and early 20th centuries were "vinegar valentines," that expressed insults--doubly so, since it often was the receiver and not the sender who had to pay the postage. Meanwhile, erotic valentines--intended as humorous or maybe not--survive into the 21st century.







The first printed valentines in America were pricey, but when greeting card companies produced less expensive versions, the practice of sending them became almost obligatory, rivaling only Christmas for predominance.  Through the 20th century at least, many faced Valentine's Day with anxiety and dread, counting the cards they got from fellow fifth graders, or mourning the first February 14 that their mailbox was bereft.  

As for the Xs denoting kisses on valentines and other written notes--which likely makes it the first emoji--they seem to be a remnant from illiterate times when many could sign their name only with an X, and sealed it with a kiss. If present trends continue, those days may not be gone forever.       

Thursday, February 01, 2024

Origins: The Jungle Gym

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, January 18, 2024

New Year's Guides

 


The new year (which began really as the winter solstice passed in December) is traditionally a time for looking back and looking ahead but at a deeper level.  New Year's resolutions are the most familiar expression now, and though they tend to be superficial and repetitive (hence the boom in weight loss and exercise products this month), they at least suggest this impulse to reevaluate and resolve.  

Another way to look at it is to pause in the journey to reflect on it, and perhaps make more conscious use of our commitments and our guides.  I recently saw what to me was an unusual interpretation of the Buddhist (also Hindu) concept of dharma, as "a particular purpose and work in the world that is unique to us and of benefit to others."  For some of us, that purpose is defined and defining.  For most of us, it is complex, multiple, ambiguous, hard to define even to ourselves.  But we can define some of our guides on the journey, and hope the rest takes care of itself.

Three of my guides are represented here by concepts from other cultures, in other languages.  The fourth is an American way.  Though they are personal values, they govern my relationship with others: other people, other beings, others of any description I share this planet and this universe with, in my time.  

 Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word which literally means non-harming, the most basic Buddhist precept.  Poet Gary Snyder, who studied Buddhism for many years, defines the concept as “do the least possible harm.” "Least possible" refers to contexts as well as physical limitations.  So it is less restrictive than total non-violence, but it is broader in application.  It means do the least possible harm to everything—not just humans but animals, plants and even rocks.  It turns out to be an ecological as well as a moral principle. In life it means a change in assumptions—that is, think first before making a harmful change, not exactly second nature to western civilization.  Personally it means being mindful, respecting the other, and sincerely evaluating whether causing harm is necessary.  This is a key to the sacred attitude towards eating and other aspects of ordinary life that nevertheless have profound meaning.

 Hozho is a concept from Navajo culture, part of the Beauty Way.  A Navajo character in a Tony Hillerman novel explains it with an example: In times of drought the Hopi and some other cultures will pray for rain. But the Navajo do something else, based on a different approach to life.  “The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought…. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.” 

This does not eliminate trying to right wrongs, address problems, or change what needs to be changed.  But where it applies, this concept is not only a profound act of humility, but a necessary human response of adjustment to reality.  It’s something that other animals do instinctively—they find ways to cope with drought, for example. They adapt to the environment.  Instead of being angry or frightened, or obsessing on things as unjust and taking them personally, people accept the conditions and work within them to make life better—by conserving water, for instance.  Being in harmony is not easy.  The Navajo ceremonies take days.  But as a general principle, it only makes sense.

The third concept is Italian, and so part of my own Italian American culture.  Sprezzatura can be defined in various ways, but it can come down to making a personal style part of life, an elegance that is natural and appears effortless.  Tony Bennett applied it to music, but outwardly it can most often be seen in modes of dress.  There are places where such expression is noticed and valued, but more places where it isn’t.  But that doesn’t matter so much, because sprezzatura is an attitude, and expression (playfulness, authenticity) for its own sake.  Or to quote another Italian saying: Niente senza gioia.  Nothing without joy. 

The fourth concept I regard as the basis for all community.  It is expressed in the common phrase: "You'd do the same for me."  It expresses not only a commitment but a confidence that this commitment is shared.  It is a phrase of the people, by the people and for the people.  Which brings us (in a way) back full circle to ahimsa

Friday, January 05, 2024

R.I.P. 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, January 01, 2024

New Year's Resolution?

  "Are you going to try to improve yourself, or are you going to let the universe improve you?"

Dogen

Thursday, December 21, 2023

The Morning


Would I love it this way if it could last
 would I love it this way if it
 were the whole sky the one heaven
 or if I could believe it belonged to me
 a possession that was mine alone
 or if I imagined that it noticed me
 recognized me and may have come to see me
 out of all the mornings that I never knew
 and all those that I have forgotten
 would I love it this way if I were somewhere else
 or if I were younger for the first time
or if these very birds were not singing
 or I could not hear them or see their trees
 would I love it this way if I were in pain
 red torment of body or gray void of grief
 would I love it this way if I knew
 that I would remember anything that is
 here now anything anything

 --W.S. Merwin

Happy Holidays