Showing posts sorted by relevance for query The fort. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query The fort. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Flashback 2003: Lumbering fears not all that bad

     For a guy who likes to loaf, I hate being sick. I suppose most people do. That drained, feverish feeling. Gobbling Tums to settle the stomach. Hours sprawled in bed, flipping through a book — P.G. Wodehouse, not as funny as I recall — or the random hodgepodge of Facebook videos. I looked at a table saw on the Home Depot yesterday, and today half the videos are woodworking porn. I can't figure out how to make it stop,
     At 4 p.m. I ventured into my office to figure out something for tomorrow. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson, the bard of being sick at home. "When I was sick and lay abed, I had two pillows at my head..."
     Nah, too much effort. Into the archive, looking for columns that take place in bed. I found this, too fun not to share. This was part of the "Hammered and Nailed" series of columns I wrote about repair in our home section. You might recall, I outlined the Fort last November.  Too soon for another installment, but I really feel as if someone hit me behind the ear with a sock of nickels, so this will have to do. If you decide to read it, strap in: it's twice as along as my usual column. Back in the day when we had time on our hands and newsprint to fill.


     Night. Bed. Sleep. A crash and then the tumble of lumber. Unmistakably. I was on my feet in an instant, moving fast toward the door, thinking, "The Fort has fallen over." I stopped, went back, got my pants, started to leave, then checked the clock: 3:19 a.m.
     Hurrying through the darkened house, I braced myself for the sight. Timbers lying in a shattered heap. All that work and money for nothing. My wife would laugh at me about it for the rest of my life. The Fort has fallen over.
     Still, somewhere deep down I was relieved. Cart the ruins away, I told myself. Be done with it. My own fault. My folly. I had haughtily rejected the premade forts as beneath my fever dreams of fatherhood, instead designing my own Taj Mahal Fort, 15 feet high with a 90-square-foot floor plan. The lumber alone cost $1,700.
     When I began work, on Father's Day, at 5:30 a.m., I was energetic, excited. I had marked with four little red flags on metal rods where the concrete supports would go. Concrete a yard deep. I would do it right. I had carefully dug around the 10-inch cardboard concrete form, removed the circle of sod, and then dug down. And down.
     If you've never dug a hole, it's hard work. Not so much the first foot, or even the second foot. But that third foot. Each hole took about 90 minutes to dig. Still, the process was very satisfying. It's hard to mess up a hole. Sometime that morning my wife and boys came out with a glass of lemonade and sang "Happy Father's Day," and that was nice.
     After digging the first two holes, I poured the concrete. Also a backbreaking-yet-satisfying experience. I mixed the concrete with a shovel in a big plastic trough, then spooned it into the holes. Before it set, I positioned the big metal brackets for the 6-by-6 beams. I carefully checked them with a level, ensuring a solid foundation.
     At the end of the day, I cleaned up, hosed out the trough, looked at these two little 10-inch circles of concrete, with their metal brackets sticking out. It seemed a lot of work for two holes.
     The second day I did it again, for the other two holes. The work seemed to go easier. There was one truly frightening moment — I thought I had put the brackets in too soon for the first holes, so I waited until I had filled the fourth hole with concrete before I tried to sink the bracket in the third. Big mistake. I went to shove the metal into the wet cement. It went down halfway and then stopped. Sick with fear, I contemplated having to dig up the entire mess of drying concrete and repour it.
     At that moment my wife wandered over. She can smell panic, and has a genius for happening by at the pinnacle of crisis. She stood smiling at me, her Mister Handy.
     Sweating like a pig, I fixed a false grin on my face and gave the metal bracket a mighty push. It went in, barely, but was skewed hard to the left.
     "You know honey," I grunted, through gritted teeth, trying to muscle the bracket upright, "this is not ... the best moment."
     That was a weekend's work. The next weekend, I bolted in the legs of the Fort — huge honking 6-by-6ers. I was a little concerned that the cut was not exactly flush, but went halfway across the broad end of the beam and then jumped up 1/16th of an inch. The lumber place must not have had a saw big enough to do it in a single cut. A few of the beams also had cracks in them.
     Not terrible cracks, I decided. Normal, probably. I couldn't imagine dragging those beams back to Craftwood. So I pressed on. Across the top of the upright 6-by-6 beams, two 4-by-4 horizontals then a series of 2-by-6 joists, to hold up the floor, nearly 6 feet in the air (this was before the deadly porch collapse; I'd use 2-by-12 joists now. Instead, I will just have to hope that genetic Steinberg unpopularity prevents my boys from having too many friends over).
     As I began contemplating putting the floor down atop the joists, I ran into a problem. The Fort is basically a little house sitting on a 9-by-10-foot platform, with a little railed porch in front. The little house is framed by 4-by-4 beams, and I knew that if I merely screwed the beams to the floor, they wouldn't be as sturdy as if I put them through the floor and bolted them to the joists. But doing that meant making complicated cuts in the flooring, cuts my fancy new DeWalt chop saw couldn't do.
     I pondered: easy and unstable or difficult and locked in? The thing was wiggly as it was. The beams seemed to sway on the concrete footings. I was standing there, trying to figure out how to proceed, my stomach in a knot, when wife happened by — "Howzit going?" she said breezily. I started trying to explain the dilemma.
     "Do I bolt the post to the floor or have it go through the floor and bolt it to the beam?" She just looked at me. I said it several more times, in several ways, and she still didn't understand, and then I did something that scared both of us: I slammed my head against the joist, deliberately, out of frustration, a quick dip to the side and then a thud. I've never done something like that before in my life. She remembered something she had to do in the house.
     Things actually got worse from there. Taking the tough road — always the tough road — I fished a jig saw out of the basement and made the cuts in the first floorboard to accommodate the Fort beams, a laborious process, but mismeasured, and put one cut in the wrong place, so that the beam couldn't pass through. I thought of taking the jigsaw to my throat but, collecting myself, grabbed a new $14 cedar board and measured again, more carefully this time, measured twice in fact. The new board was an even better job — the cuts neat and precise — and I joyfully went to put the board in place. I was on the ladder, moving it into position when my wife came by, smiling.
     "I don't believe it!" I said, aghast. "I've done it again."
     "Done what?" my wife asked.
     "Cut the board wrong. I screwed up the measurement again!" She had a bright idea, but I just didn't want to hear it.
     "Can I suggest ..." she began.
     "No!" I shouted. "No you can't suggest! Leave me alone. I can't believe it. I did it again."
     "Can I share an idea with you ..." she said quickly.
     "No!" I snapped angrily. "No ideas. This is a disaster. I can't understand it." I raved on in this vein for a bit, until my wife said,
     "Flip the board over."
     Flip. The. Board. Over. Hope dawned. I wasn't as stupid as I thought, not at least in this instance. I flipped the board over. It fit. I had measured correctly, but then turned the board around.
     At that point I had decided to call it a day. Now 12 hours had passed. It was 3:19 a.m. and I was at the back door, hurrying to see my collapsed Fort. I flipped on the floodlights. The Fort was there, intact. I couldn't understand it. I had heard a crash then a tumble of lumber. It was not a dream. I walked out into the cool night, walked all around the Fort in the darkness, looking for a shattered timber, something, touching it lightly with my hand as if I couldn't believe it was still there. But it seemed fine. Eventually I went to bed, mystified.
     Later that morning, when the sun was out, I went back to look at the Fort. I walked around the Fort once, twice, then I noticed something in the driveway. The garbage can, where I had piled some wood scraps, was knocked over, probably by hungry raccoons. The lumber scraps had tumbled out — that was the crash and tumble I had heard. Not the Fort. At that exact moment my wife walked over and I unwisely told her what had happened. It took her five minutes to stop laughing.
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 10, 2003



Thursday, November 21, 2024

The Fort


     In Wednesday's column about  woodworking, I might have given the impression that I've never touched tools before. That isn't true. This post was ready to go over the summer, then never ran. I'm not sure why.
     Maybe I wanted to keep The Fort private. I haven't mentioned it here before, to my recollection. A structure built in the backyard for the boys when they were small. Maybe it was somehow special, to me — the boys won't care one way or the other — and I didn't want to turn it into material. Not everything is for public consumption. You're allowed to keep some things for yourself. But that ship has sailed, hasn't it? Maybe I just didn't want to offer up to public scrutiny an amateur structure that I designed and built. That sounds right.
     This is from my unpublished travelogue, "The Quest for Pie," written about a five-week trip across the country I took with the boys in 2009 when they were 12 and 13. In this section, I am wondering whether to really go through with the trip, simply because I said that we would.

     Selfishness is a father’s friend, or can be. If you view everything you do for your kids as a sacrifice, every effort as putting yourself out over something you aren’t interested in and getting nothing in return for your trouble, then you’re going to end up not doing much with them. Where luck comes in is when a dad does what he wants to do, and it ends up being good for his children as well. 
     This trip thing, I realized, might work to my advantage. I had been beavering away at the newspaper business for years, for decades, scrambled to the top of this small hill at the very moment it was being washed away. Now I was king of the damp, dwindling mound. Why not take a break to travel, to reflect? What was I afraid of? 
     And I had a previous experience, a template for rashly committing myself to an endeavor that turned out to be both a ton of effort and worth it. We moved to the suburbs from the city nearly a decade earlier, when Ross was about to enter kindergarten. That wasn’t a coincidence. The Chicago public schools try hard but fall short — way short. Ross was a bright, mischievous, talkative little boy, and just the thought of sending him to a substandard city school felt like contemplating child abuse. The public schools weren’t good enough and we couldn’t afford private school. Hence the suburbs, our only option. Ross was as nostalgic and change-averse as any 5-year-old, and didn’t want to go. Hoping to soften the transition, I promised him that, after the big move, he would have a play fort in our ample backyard. What kid doesn’t want a play fort?
     A couple years later, we’re living in our old shambling ruin of a home, an aluminum-sided former farmhouse built in 1905, on its half-acre lot in Northbrook with The Forest running down one edge.
     “So…” I said, probing. “What do you want to do this summer?” 
     “Oh I don’t know…” Ross said, laying the trap. “I wouldn’t mind playing in my fort.” 
     He looked hard at me. Oh right the fort, I thought. I did promise you that, didn’t I? I should pause here to touch upon the idea of unfulfilled paternal promises. When I was growing up, my father often told me how, when he was a boy, his father Sam, a sign painter in the Bronx, tricked him into working every Saturday morning at his sign shop with the promise of a real Lionel train set, the Holy Grail toy for boys in the 1940s, which my grandfather claimed he had already acquired, and was on a certain high shelf in the sign shop, waiting to be earned. He pointed out the box to my father on his first day at work. 
     My father cleaned brushes and painted what he could that Saturday and on many Saturdays to come. Then one day, curious, he got on a chair to take a peek at this train set he would be getting, and it turned out the box supposedly filled with his reward was merely the transformer from a neon sign. There was no train set. There had never been a train set. 
     Something about that story lodged under my skin. Maybe it was the high shelf, or the bald lie of my grandfather’s. The haunting image of a train set that wasn’t there, compounded by the variety of half-plans that my father, despite his own disappointments, nevertheless had dangled in front of me. We would climb Mount Rainier together. The family would move to a series of cities, from London to Baltimore. He would buy a car for me when I turned 16. It never happened. Nothing ever seemed to happen. 
     Okay, that’s harsh. Good things did happen. They did. When I was a teenager, my father spent two summers working in Boulder, Colorado and took the family along. We hiked the Arapahoe Glacier in Rocky Mountain National Park. When business took him to Europe, we all went to Geneva for a month, then London and Paris for a week apiece. One summer, while I was away at camp, my father built in our backyard something we called “The Shed,” but was actually an attractive, well-built, two-story A-frame structure — cherry-stained, matching our home, with double doors that swung out to store the lawnmower and his tools on a tongue-in-groove floor below solid enough to drive a truck on, with a wooden ladder that led up through a trap door to a space above, a secret clubhouse just for me with a skylight window that opened. It was fantastic, and that I would initially overlook it and give the impression I was raised in a closet should tell you something important about myself. 
     Memories of that structure were foremost in mind while I was dismissing, out–of-hand, the play fort kits that suburbanites buy at garden centers and put outside their custom-built, million-dollar homes. The kind with the little strip of green fabric as a roof and the flimsy yellow slide. Those pre-fab forts struck me as an astounding lapse, a mystifying cheapness, similar to how some people stick stackable white plastic chairs out on the luxurious wrought iron balconies of their four-story townhouses. My father designed and built The Shed; I would design and build The Fort. For who wants to be a lesser man than his father? 
      I bought a big pad of blue-square graph paper, sharpened pencils and sat planning with a ruler at the dining room table. The Fort had to sleep four — two sons and two friends. It had to have a ladder and a slide and a cargo net. It must be made of cedar: there would be no need for stain or paint.
     Eventually the drawings were done — careful schematics, precise scale plans, thanks to a mechanical drawing class taken in 7th grade. A front view; a side view, a 3-D view. The Fort wasn’t in a tree, but stood on four five-foot-tall, 6 x 6 beams standing atop four concrete footings. To support the structure, the footings — I calculated — should be three feet deep. How much concrete would you need for four cylindrical footings, each 10 inches in diameter and a yard deep? Nearly a thousand pounds, dry. 
     A week passed. Two. I contemplated the drawings. Really, very nicely done, very skillful drawings. The fort had a porch and a flagpole. It looked like a lot of fun to play on, and a world of work to build. I’d never done anything like it. An incredible task, to actually construct this thing. What was I thinking, taking on this burden? Just because I’d promised my son I would? The most complex structure I had built up to that point was a compost bin behind the garage, a rectangular box lined with chicken wire. Building it took a day. 
     But if I balked, what would I do? Show the drawings to the boys someday, tell them: this was the fort I was going to build you, but I chickened out? That sounds familiar. My Lionel train set on the high shelf. 
     No. Impossible. I would build the Pyramids if doing so kept me from being a disappointment to my boys. I went to Home Depot, took one of those low rolling orange platform carts and piled it with nearly 1,000 pounds of concrete — a dozen 80-pound bags. The platform was very heavy, slow to get moving — you had to really lean into it — and tough to push. And at one point, between the concrete section at the far wall and the registers up front, I stopped and just stood there, thinking, “This is insane.” I hesitated for what seemed like a long time, in the middle of the vast warehouse of a Home Depot, frozen before a pallet of concrete, hands around the scuffed metal bar, my own life, stretching back in my head, and the life I hoped for my boys stretching forward. Hope for a life where they might be better off, better tended, better loved, just in general better than their father. I weighed the thought of returning to the concrete section, pictured sliding the bags back into their places. Looked at the thought, almost as if it were a small object nestled in my hand. Then I made a decision, firm and irrevocable, tightened my grip on the bar, bent forward and pushed that concrete until it started to roll toward the checkout counter. 
     The Fort took three summers to build, from the time I staked out the holes and began to dig, to when I nailed in the last cedar shingle in place and signed a hidden message to the boys high up on a beam facing the eaves. The three of us slept in it that night, the night I completed it, a jumble of pillows and sleeping bags, a rare warm November night. They never slept in it again. But they play in it sometimes, during Super Soaker battles and snowball fights. It looks swell, gentling aging in the seasons, the cedar slowly going to gray, like the guy who built it, and while I wish I had started a few summers sooner, I never regretted all the time and effort and money it took to build. I think some of the happiest moments of my life were standing out back in the summer sun, with the yellow DeWalt chop saw set up on the deck, a boombox blasting music, cutting the lumber for that structure, kneeling on the half-completed flooring to screw planks into place, standing up with a pencil behind my ear and a leather belt heavy with tools slung low on my hips. The big hexagonal-head stainless steel carriage bolts used for the ladder — stainless so they wouldn’t rust and streak the wood — were a joy to hold in the flat of my hand and contemplate; so well machined, they made me proud to be a human being. 
     The Fort was in mind when I considered the trip. I could ignore it, for a while, and did. But I could not abandon it. A promise is a promise.



Thursday, September 4, 2025

Soldiers in our streets — as the city braces, remember: they're been here before

The National Guard patrols Madison Street during the riots following the assassination of 
Martin Luther King Jr. (Sun-Times archive)
 
     Chicago began with soldiers.
     Capt. John Whistler, to be precise, an Irishman who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he joined the United States Army and was sent to the western frontier, which at the time was Indiana.
     There he helped build Fort Wayne. In the summer of 1803, he and his company of the 1st United States Infantry were dispatched to build a new fort at the mouth of the Chicago River, named after Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war, Henry Dearborn.
     A small settlement grew around the stockade. Then, on Aug. 15, 1812 the garrison's 66 soldiers tried to evacuate Fort Dearborn, joined by 15 friendly Miami, plus nine women and 18 children. They ran into an ambush of 500 Potawatomi warriors. Two-thirds were killed.
     That first military effort in Chicago — for years called the Fort Dearborn Massacre, but really a battle, a minor skirmish in the War of 1812 that went very badly for one side — was a mixed bag. The Army's presence planted the seeds of the city. They also got its residents killed by mishandling relations with the local Native Americans.
     The history of American soldiers in Chicago — about to get a significant new chapter with President Donald Trump planning to deploy the National Guard to the city — is also checkered.
     At times, soldiers provide a welcome, calming presence, such as during the 1919 race riots, when they created a buffer between Chicagoans bent on murdering each other because of the color of their skin. At times, they made matters worse, such as during the 1894 Pullman Strike, when their arrival — despite the governor's objections — sparked days of deadly rioting.
     Troops trampled American freedoms. One of the nation's worst cases of journalistic suppression happened in Chicago during the Civil War at the point of a bayonet. But soldiers also protected those rights, or tried to.
     In July 1951, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. Each was issued two rounds of ammunition, told not to shoot unless ordered and sent to Cicero, where a mob was rampaging around the home of Harvey E. Clark, a CTA bus driver whose family would have been the town's first Black residents.
     Except their potential neighbors rioted instead, trashing not only their apartment, but the building it was in. The Guard used tear gas; six Guard personnel were injured, four rioters were cut by bayonets. Young Guardsmen got a life lesson in hate, Chicago style.
     "I didn't think there were people like we saw last night," one admitted the next day.
     Military force isn't consistently effective. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to do. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the West Side, but were deployed too late, or in the wrong locations, to keep Madison Street from burning down.

Dispatching troops as a show of power

     Sending in troops as a vindictive show of power is nothing new. On June 3, 1863, two companies of the 65th Illinois Infantry marched out of Camp Douglas to the offices of the Chicago Times — no relation to the Sun-Times, thank goodness, as it was a Confederate-sympathizing scandal sheet run by an odious bigot, Wilbur Storey.
     Gen. Ambrose Burnside, chafing at recent Union defeats, decreed that "declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed" and closed down the Times, citing its "repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements," though the paper referring to him as the "butcher of Fredericksburg" might have also been a factor.
     That night, thousands of Chicagoans gathered to protest this "spectre of military despotism." The next day, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Burnside's order.

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Sunday, June 15, 2014

"I wondered what I wanted out of this trip"


     Father's Day.  
      Like many men my age, I am sandwiched between two generations. Prompted by the holiday, I can either look to my own children, or to my dad, 81 and living in Boulder, Colorado.  
     I'm thinking more of my father lately--I just saw the old commander a few weeks back, when my oldest boy graduated from high school.  
     Then in a bookstore Saturday, I came upon a copy of Bowditch's "The American Practical Navigator," a thick nautical reference. "I read this on the ship," I told my wife, and suddenly I was sailing the Empire State.
      You might not know it, but I wrote a book about my dad.  No reason that you would: the thing sold 2,000 copies, maybe. Sank like a stone. I don't talk about it much. Frankly, I don't think about it much. It was 15 years ago that we crossed the Atlantic together on his old ship, the Empire State, run by the State University of New York Maritime College, used to train cadets. 
     In 2002, my book about it came out, "Don't Give Up the Ship." I had high hopes for the book--unlike all these feel-good dad and lad adventures, this was a challenging tale without the classic epiphanies or happy ending. I thought people would relate to its very human messiness. 
    Instead we annoyed people. "I found these two men highly irritating" said the critic for UPI, which nevertheless had picked it as "Book of the Week." 
      Yeah, well, hard to argue that one. But you have to be who you are, and you have to dance with who brung ya.  I thought, in honor of the holiday, I would drag out this excerpt, which ran in the Sun-Times. Happy Father's Day, if possible.

     The big morning finally arrived. My father and I did our sweeping checks of the room, the "V.I.P. Suite" at the State University of New York's Maritime College in the Bronx. Thin industrial carpeting over a concrete floor, nautical prints, spartan, sturdy furniture; a state college's idea of luxury. We peered under beds, searched every drawer and closet, even those we had never used, not wanting to leave anything behind, trying to be smart and thorough.
     We wheeled our suitcases into the bright 7 a.m. mid-May sunshine and across the Maritime campus. Mostly 1950s brick buildings, square and charmless, in the shadow of the Throg's Neck Bridge, but also Fort Schuyler, an 1830s pentagonal stone structure built to defend the Hell Gate against the British, with thick walls and gun slits and a parade ground. We walked toward the Empire State--our ship, for the next month, sailing down the coast to the Caribbean and then across the Atlantic to Italy-- gleaming white at the pier.
     The pier was hectic with a festive, pre-summer-camp sort of commotion, busy with families, girlfriends, boyfriends and cadets--trim teens in bright white shirts and dark navy pants, their "salt and pepper'' uniforms. They towered over their parents. Mothers held bunches of balloons. Fathers lugged big portable coolers, cases of soda, cases of juice. I worried that we were unprepared--we had no juice--and puzzled over the balloons. At least a dozen families had brought bunches of them. They seemed an odd, child's-birthday-party touch.
     My father stopped short and I ran thud into him. Like a vaudeville act. Disentangling ourselves and our rolling luggage, I wondered, "Is this how it's going to be? Frick and Frack?" I looked around to see if anybody noticed.
     Turning onto Dock 19, where the ship was tied up, I saw that the dock was named for A.F. Olivet, the no-nonsense captain during my father's cruises. I paused to make note of that, and of the dinghies moored under a protective wooden roof leading to the ship--they had bold, forward-straining names: Courageous, Freedom, America, Magic.
     Looking up, I saw that my father, the good New Yorker, had kept walking. I called to him--"Dad! Wait!"--and he turned. "I'll go slow," he shouted back. But he didn't go slow. He strode toward the ship. I hurried after him, the luggage wheels humming against the concrete.
     I got alongside the ship, almost to the gangway, just in time to see him go up without me, lugging his suitcase, a wide smile spread across his face. He said something pleasant to the officer at the top of the gangway and disappeared inside the Empire State. I stood on the pier a moment, shocked, then raced after him, hefting my suitcase in both hands and clattering up the awkward low metal steps. After months of arranging--the conversations, the phone calls, the formal letters, the visits--I had figured that our boarding the ship would be an obvious moment of high drama: an exchange of loving glances, a pat on the back, a shy filial smile, a fatherly ruffle of the hair, a deep breath and up we go together, arms linked. Ta-daaaaaaaah!
     Not in this life.
     "What's your hurry, sailor?" I hissed, out of breath, catching up to him at the cabin, C1, marked by a note card reading "Mr. Stienburg Sr." and "Mr. Stienburg Jr."
      He offered this explanation: he wanted to get his suitcase aboard before the tide came in, raising the angle of the gangway, making it more difficult to walk up. He actually said this. Stunned, I turned away, puzzling whether his excuse was a mountainous lie or, worse, a sincere delusion.
     I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: how was I going to do this? Six weeks with my father. A month at sea, then 10 days in Italy. We'd kill each other. Or I'd kill him. Or myself. Or he'd kill me. One way or another, somebody was going to be killed.
     Then the anger, a hot fluid at the back of my brain, drained away and I almost laughed--the tide; so ridiculous--and I remembered that, up to this moment, I had been genuinely worried my father wouldn't get on the ship at all. That despite his promises, when the moment finally came, he would freeze up on the gangway. Many times I had imagined, not entirely without pleasure, him grasping the handrails, white knuckled, rigid, me behind him, ramming the heel of my hand into the small of his back, forcing him forward. "Get on the goddamn ship, dad!"
     That had been the preconception. The reality was 180 degrees opposite. Instead of hanging back, fearful, needing a shove, he had raced ahead, excited, forgetting all about me. Realizing this shocked away the anger. It struck me that, after all these years, I didn't know my father at all. Not a bit.
     We stowed our luggage in the cabin. When we had seen it for the first time, the night before, it had seemed huge. But now it looked very small. Two single beds, bolted to the floor, 19 inches apart. Between them, a single square window, facing forward, offering the vista of the foredeck, nearly the length and breadth of a football field. The window couldn't open.
     I set my laptop computer on the desk. The newspaper had refused to grant me the leave I requested. Instead, they insisted I file my column from the sea. Not exactly convenient. Still, given how I had botched my request, I was relieved they let me go at all.
     Newspaper editors-in-chief are not famous for their bonhomie, and my boss at the time at the Sun-Times, Nigel Wade, was perhaps more aloof than most. A large, ruddy, well-tailored New Zealander with a dramatic head of silvery hair, he was not given to long, friendly exchanges with the staff. Or even short, friendly exchanges.
     Granted, it would have been difficult to pick a worse moment to bring up the trip. I had written a column about not having an idea for a column--something I thought was very hip, very Seinfeld, and also happened to be true, always a plus in journalism. I enjoyed puncturing the notion of columnist-as-infallible-font-of-endless-wisdom, and admired the portrait I painted of myself slumped before the computer, mouth open, head empty. "This must be what stupid people feel like all the time," I wrote.
     Nigel hated it. "If you can't think of an idea for your coh-lum, then perhaps you should not be writing a coh-lum," he said, after I was summoned to his office for a chewing out. At first I bristled--the column did have an idea behind it: not having an idea for a column. He just didn't like my argument, didn't like the suggestion that some days there is no wisdom to sell for 35 cents. That didn't go over well either. I tried a second approach: I was tired, working very hard, maybe the grind was getting to me, but I certainly still had something left to say. He liked that better. I was off the hook. The flames died down, we entered in that phase of relaxation that comes after a tense talk; the raking of embers, decompressing back into the workday, when I unwisely said something along the lines of: Besides, I've got this ocean voyage with my dad coming up, will need to take off a few months from work, and that should give me a chance to recharge my batteries.
     What could I have been expecting? "A nautical adventure? Jolly good! Splendid. Just the medicine for you. Don't know why you waste your time on all this newspaper nonsense anyway. We must lift a few brandies at the 410 Club before you sail."
     The actuality was different.
     "Fuck off then!' Nigel shouted, leaping up and waving me toward the door. "Fuck off! Get out of here!" I fled, backing out of the office, babbling apologies, hands spread in defensive entreaty, almost bowing. Not the heigh-ho send-off I might have hoped for.
     Just before the Empire State sailed, my father and I went back down to the pier, to walk around on land one last time, more relaxed, without the physical and psychological burden of our luggage. People were hugging. A girl sat on the low concrete wall by the water and wept. Their own stories being forged, I thought. Would their unborn children someday be drawn to the sea after them, sucked into the vortex of their parents' romantic notions? I sent a mental message of solidarity to those unborn voyagers--good luck, kiddos, I'm with you!
     Departure approached, and we went back aboard, together. Officials from the college, alumni, all sorts of people crowded the officer's lounge on the cabin deck and along the rails outside, picking at cheese and pretzels, a cocktail party without the cocktails. Joe Gerson, a spry old gent in a baseball cap emblazoned "EMPIRE STATE--1949-1999" had been on my father's cruises, and knew a lot of the same people, such as third mate Bill Hawley.
     "Bill Hawley was my rabbi," Gerson said. "He was a great guy. He was my rabbi, Mr. Hawley. Without Bill Hawley I would never have made it. I remember him telling me as if it were today: 'Every stevedore carries a tin cup. Have a drink with him. You'll get more with a little booze than with the vinegar. Remember: be a Third Mate and act the part. Always be in the swim. Never be out of the swim. . . .'"
     At that moment, the ship's horn blasted and the pier began to move away. I checked my watch: 10 a.m. We were leaving. I clanged up the metal stairway to the bridge and scanned the huge crowd lining the shore. Admiral David C. Brown, the head of the school, was leaning against the rail, watching the fort recede. "You will notice," he observed, "that the ship left promptly at 10 a.m."
     I nodded, thinking: A complete anti-climax. The second dramatic high point of the morning shot to hell. I didn't even know where my father was at the moment. That's why it is bad to anticipate. The times you imagine are going to be significant fall flat, while excitement boils up where it isn't expected. Whatever this trip is going to offer, I thought, won't be in the departure. Still, I kept my eyes on the skyline of New York City as it fell away, feeling very much out of the swim, wondering how things would be by the time Charleston--our first stop--loomed into sight. The people on the dock were tiny dots, interrupted by bunches of balloons. That's what the balloons were for: so those on board could spot their families and loved ones, could cling to the sight of them as long as possible as the ship sailed away.
     All the first day, my father and I explored the ship, at first together, and then splitting up. Living in a world of general flimsiness, of thin sheet metal and plastic bumpers, all designed to just barely work and no more, I found a real thrill in the overengineering of a ship, basically a 50-story building designed to lie on its side and be pounded by the might of the ocean.
     I wandered, delighting in just how solid everything was. In the bow, twin capstans to pull up the anchors--a pair of 12,000 pound, two-pronged black monsters. The capstans were huge spools, three feet wide and made of a brass alloy that you could tell, just by tapping with a knuckle, were something far denser and stronger than the fragile substances typically encountered on shore.
     The links of the anchor chain were eight inches long, shaped like the numeral 8, the center stud to prevent tangling. Bolts as thick as forearms were secured by nuts as big as fists.
     I went to the bridge, a wide, shallow room at the top of the ship, glassed in on three sides.
     A cadet stood at the helm, which was not a grand wooden spoked wheel like in the pirate movies, but small, the size of a dinner plate. The tiny wheel lent a certain air of delicacy to the act of piloting the ship, like an immense chef cracking a quail's egg. Other cadets--maybe half a dozen--stood at charts and at the two new, colorful Raytheon radar stations. I slipped behind the helmsman and watched, quietly.
     Perhaps 15 seconds later, my father appeared in the starboard doorway, a look of concern etched on his face. I smiled at him. He made an abrupt, "come here" gesture. I went there.
     "You're on the bridge," he whispered, deadly earnest.
     "I know," I whispered back. "That's where I can see what's going on."
     "The captain won't like it," my father warned.    
     "Let's see," I said. I turned around and walked over to the man who was obviously Captain Joseph Ahlstrom--the tall, pleasant-faced officer with sandy hair whom everybody was listening to. I introduced myself. We shook hands. "Do you mind if I'm on the bridge?" I said.
     "Make yourself at home," the captain said, in a strong Staten Island accent. Flashing my father an "easy-as-pie" shrug, I returned to my spot behind the helm. When I next looked in my father's direction, he was gone.
     It took a while for my father to actually step inside the bridge, and when he did, he ventured in tentatively, as if expecting snakes. It was a different world than when he was a sailor, and he never quite adjusted to it.
     I left the bridge and returned to wandering, stepping through high doorways, over chains. At the very end of the ship--the stern--I stood on the fantail and watched the foamy white trail of the ship bubbling back fast, spreading behind the ship. A cadet always stood watch at the stern, on the platform above the supply house, facing backward, to make sure some careless faster ship didn't sneak up on the Empire State, unnoticed, and ram her.
     That, and as a final, desperate hope to anybody who fell overboard. I studied the churning surf passing behind the ship, focusing on a particular bit of foam and counting. It moved away fast. You'd have about five seconds to catch that lookout's attention. Then it would just be you, alone, in the vast, wide, deep ocean.
     I wondered what I wanted out of this trip. People do not change. I firmly believed that. My father and I would come to no understandings. The past would remain enigmatic. Nothing would be solved. No hugs at the happy ending, eyes wet with love and reconciliation. No epiphanies. No life's lessons learned. We would end up, I was certain, exactly as we began, shaking our fists at each other as the taxicabs screeched away in opposite directions.
     That's what I told myself. But it was a lie, a protective fiction, concocted to soften the impact of what I feared would happen to my unspoken hopes. In my secret heart, I wanted everything to work out. To salve the old wounds, to discover something new, to find some better, more genuine father beneath the one I knew too well, to craft myself into the son he truly wanted. I was a fool and, like most fools, believed that I was wise.

From Don't Give Up the Ship by Neil Steinberg. Copyright 2002 by Neil Steinberg. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, a division of Random House Inc.


You can buy the book online for a penny, $4 total, delivered, if you include the $3.99 shipping, on Amazon, by clicking here


Sunday, November 17, 2013

"Get off get off get off"—Chicago spread the shocking news from Dallas



     This started as a story about Chicago the day Kennedy was killed, but the more I found out about the UPI office here, the more that seemed the story to tell—given how familiar we are with the Kennedy assassination, it struck me as something that most people would not know about.


     Nov. 22, 1963, was a Friday. Unseasonably warm in Chicago, in the mid-60s, cloudy with light rain.
     There was plenty of news going on around the city. At the Municipal Court, Hugh Hefner was on trial for obscenity. Miss December sat in the gallery, in street clothes.
     At 9:30 a.m., the World’s Invitational Bowling Championship kicked off at McCormick Place. Members of the Bowling Proprietors Association of Greater Chicago proudly wore identical maroon sports coats made for the event.
     Not all news of interest to Chicagoans was happening in Chicago. Cassius Clay, “the punching poet,” was in New York for a broadcast of the Jack Paar show that put him in the ring with another flamboyant showman, Liberace.
     Longtime Sun-Times Washington correspondent Carleton Kent was in Texas, traveling with President John F. Kennedy, at a breakfast with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where its colorful president, Raymond Buck, “Mr. Fort Worth,” praised “our great, courageous and brilliant leader of the world’s strongest nation.”
     Kennedy then flew 30 miles away, to Love Field in Dallas. From there, his motorcade headed to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart. Kent, 54, but with hair that turned snow-white during one endless night on Guadalcanal in World War II, was in the press bus, following along at hundreds of yards behind the president’s blue 1961 Lincoln Continental limo. Unable to see ahead, he looked at the buildings, noticing signs in the windows: “Because of my respect for the Presidency, I despise you and your brand of socialism,” read one.
     His colleagues on the bus agreed that Kennedy probably laughed at that.
     Further ahead was Merriman Smith, of United Press International, a “reporter’s reporter.” He was in the front seat of the press pool car, on loan from the local Bell Telephone office because it had a radio-telephone. Two other newsmen were in the car, one Jack Bell of the Associated Press.
     “Suddenly we heard three loud, almost painfully loud cracks,” Smith later recalled. “The first sounded as if it might have been a large firecracker. But the second and third blasts were unmistakable. Gunfire.”
     After the shots echoed across Dealey Plaza, there was a tussle for the phone. Smith won. He grabbed the receiver and rolled under the dashboard, curled up dictating as Jack Bell beat him on the back with his fists.
  

   ‘Stay off all of you’
 

    Chicago was the headquarters of United Press International’s broadcast department, UPR. Step off the elevator at the fifth floor of the Apollo Savings & Loan building, 430 N. Michigan, and you would hear the teletypes, 100 machines in a row, a constant clattering “din-din-din” as they spat out news, at 62 words a minute, from bureaus across the country, plus an “A-wire” for national feeds, a B-wire for lesser news, a London wire. The UPI and UPR office had a staff of 22, ran in three shifts 24 hours a day, editing the news into readable prose and transmitting it to UPR’s 3,500 radio and TV subscribers.
     It was a smoky room of scattered coffee cups and take-out trash. At 12:30 p.m., Henry Renwald, a shortish, quiet teletype operator, flipped a switch, “splitting the line,” to allow regional offices to transmit nationally.
     At 12:34, five bells — hollow metallic dings — pinged, an “urgent,” as the A-wire clacked out the news that Smith had dictated into his phone to UPI’s Dallas office as the press car veered out of the motorcade and chased Kennedy’s car toward Parkland Hospital.
     “Hey look at this,” said Bill Roberts, second desk editor. He tore the sheet off and read, “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”
     “Jesus Christ!” replied editor Larry Lorenz, a bespectacled Marquette English major.
     Stories were typed, creating holes in a pale yellow tape then fed into machines that sent it over Western Union lines. Renwald started to resend the news to his broadcast outlets, but Kansas City was transmitting a weather report:

(SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY (KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI) -- THE WEATHER BUREAU AT KANSAS CITY HAS ISSUED THE FOLLOWING SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY... HAZARDOUS T Z
     Chicago had the power to override the feed, and tried:
BULLETIN PRECEDE (KENNEDY
     But Kansas’ tape kept transmitting. Renwald typed “GET OFF GET OFF GET OFF” then sent:
B U L L E T I N(DALLAS)1--AN UNKNOWN SNIPER FIRED THREE SHOTS AT ...
     Meanwhile, the A-wire machine started ringing again: 10 bells this time. A “flash”— the most urgent code they had. Roberts brought him the copy:
FLASHKENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED -----
     New York tried to resend the news from Dallas, but Renwald warned them off: STAY OFF ALL OF YOU GET OFF.

     Here is a bulletin


     “As the World Turns” was broadcast live in Chicago on the CBS affiliate, WBBM Channel 2. At 12:40 p.m, the image shifted to a card reading “CBS News Bulletin” and the voice of Walter Cronkite read a report rewritten from the UPR’s Chicago feed:
     “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting. More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy, she called ‘Oh, no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News, President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.”
  

    Flash president dead

     At 1:30 p.m., Alice Guenther, took over the teletype keyboard at UPR Chicago. Four minutes later, official word from Dallas: The president was dead.
     UPR’s national news editor, John Pelletreu, a lean, hawk-eyed man with a small mustache, said, “Alice, type ‘Flash President Dead.’” Instead she raised her hands from the keyboard, covered her face and cried out, “Oh my God.”
     In one smooth motion, another operator lifted her by the elbows out of the chair, eased her, sobbing, onto the floor next to her desk, and sat down to type the words.
     Of course UPI was only one of several wire services — there was the Associated Press, Reuters. The news filled the newspapers — Chicago had four, the Sun-Times, its afternoon sister the Daily News, the Tribune and the American.
     The news spread, passed along by radio, TV, “Extra” editions, word of mouth. Chicagoans heard the news in their schools, homes, restaurants and experienced a surreal shock that would remain a vivid emotional wound for the rest of their lives.
     When Larry Lorenz got off work at UPR, he walked over to the Chicago Press Club for a drink, but a couple of advertising men at the end of the bar were complaining loudly about how their commercials had been yanked off the television. He couldn’t take that and left, walking south down Michigan to the Radio Grill, where he knew other UPI colleagues would be gathering.
     It was raining again. Lorenz started to cry, thinking, goddamn it. He was glad it was raining so nobody would see him. Newsmen weren’t supposed to cry.

Larry Lorenz’s online essay, “FLASH President Dead,” contributed to this story.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Or is she just a big gal in a spiky hat?



      The dedication of the Statue of Liberty, on Oct. 28, 1886, was a loud affair, with blaring brass bands, cheering crowds, clanging bells, the vigorous tooting of steam whistles and occasional cannonades from of the flotilla of naval vessels and private boats that had journeyed to Bedloe's Island to witness the dedication of what is still the tallest metal sculpture ever built.
    After the French flag was pulled from the the face of "Liberty Enlightening the World" as she is officially called, a "full fifteen minutes" of cacophony ensued, while President Grover Cleveland stood by, grinning awkwardly, waiting to speak.
    His remarks were bracingly brief, particularly compared to the endless oration delivered by the famously-prolix New York politician Chauncy Depew. 
    The president said something surprising.
    "We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance," Cleveland said. "But we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America."
    No politician would dare utter the phrase "open gates of America" today; even Democrats scramble to outdo each other welding those gates shut. For a nation of immigrants, we have grown alarmingly xenophobic, the sons and grandsons of those who came to these shores, in sad-but-typical pattern, often issuing the loudest calls for the most recent crop of immigrants to be barred, blocked, sent back.
    The original purpose of the statue was to celebrate a century of U.S./French friendship, but even as the ceremony unfolded, it was being repurposed. 
     French ambassador W. A. LeFaivre said the statue "affirms human dignity." 
    "The republics of the past were debased by hostility to foreigners," he said. "Even in the modern world, liberty was during long ages the monopoly of privileged castes or races."
     Haven't quite put that hostility behind us, even 127 years later.
    In those long ago days before the 20th century's global butchery murdered optimism, the statue was seen as evidence of humanity's steady march toward perfection, "the triumph of reason and of justice over the material dominion," as LeFaivre put it. "It means, in brief, the extinction of bloody struggles and the union of all peoples , through the study of science the respect of the law, and sympathy for the weak."
    Not quite. "Sympathy for the weak," another phrase not heard much at political gatherings of any stripe. Shameful to see it uttered so easily by our Golden Age ancestors. And maybe it was hypocrisy, spoken at a time when children worked in thread factories, when women couldn't vote, when bigotry didn't even know enough to be ashamed.
    But at least they said the words. We've made progress, yes, but also seem to have lost the polestar of lofty ideals. We're so busy trying to regain the past we can hardly imagine a future.
    On the program that day was a piece of tripe by John Greenleaf Whittier ("The land, that, from the rule of kings/In freeing us, itself made free/Our Old World Sister, to us brings/Her sculptured Dream of Liberty:")
    A better poem, "The New Colossus," had already been written, three years earlier by Emma Lazarus. She was a Jewish poet, alarmed by Russian pograms, who had recently awakened to the importance of immigration to her people. She was solicited in 1883 to write something to donate to a fundraiser for the base (Congress, tight then and now, refused to appropriate the $300,000 needed to build the statue's pedestal, so the media, history take note, stepped in to fill the void, led by Joseph Pulitzer, mobilizing readers, ordinary Americans, often children, to send in their pennies and nickels and dimes). 
    Lazarus's poem reads:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
    The "twin cities" were New York and Brooklyn, then separate municipalities.    
    Looking at the statue, it seems solid but it's not. The copper skin is 2.5 millimeters thick -- .09 inches, thinner than two pennies placed together. Like the idea it represents, it gives the illusion of solidity, but its actually very fragile, and requires support. The copper skin is spread over a superstructure of iron, at first, now steel after refurbishing.
    Particularly now. The Statue of Liberty's symbolic function has been sapped by years of expropriation, in everything from "Ghostbusters II" to kitschy New York souvenirs. We're forgotten her ideals, and Lady Liberty could use an infusion of respect and wonder that has dribbled away over time.
     Although, that's not so new either. Originally the torch glowed, and the statue, the tallest structure in New York City between the time of its dedication to when the Empire State Building topped out 43 years later, was considered, not just a present from France, not just a celebration of freedom, but an aid to navigation. The original congressional resolution setting aside Bedloe's island for its use also maintains the statue's "future maintenance as a beacon." Originally, the Statue of Liberty was administered by the Lighthouse Board and, later, the U.S. Army, since it had a base, Fort Hood, on the island. Liberty in the hands of the army — now there's a concept.
      And a reminder that liberty -- as a statue, as an idea -- requires effort to maintain.  Freedom, as the vets like to say, is not free. The Statue of Liberty isn't glorious because she is really big.  Even its sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, saw that.
     "It ought to produce an emotion in the breast of the spectator, not because of its volume," he wrote in 1884, while the statue was still in 210 crates and heading to America, "but because of its size in keeping with the idea that it interprets, and with the place which it ought to occupy."  
     Big ideas required big statues, back then. Now ... I'm not even sure we have the national will to talk about our shared beliefs any more. What would those ideals be and what kind of statute would represent them? What would it look like? And how would we feel if we saw the statue that truly represented our convictions of today? It would be a whole lot smaller, that's for sure.



Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Art and the suburbs

"Factories at Clichy" by Vincent Van Gogh

       I have an amazing capacity to miss things: the big game, the hot concert, the hit TV series, the latest best-seller. General acclaim is off-putting to me — I avoided the Harry Potter books for years because I assumed anything that popular had to be crap.
      My Achilles heel is museums. If I go to a city, I want to visit the local museum, to see what they've got. There isn't much in Dallas after you've clapped eyes on Dealey Plaza, but if you slide by to convenient Fort Worth, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art does have Grant Wood’s wry masterpiece, "Parson Weems' Fable," and that's enough to make a trip to Dallas worthwhile, almost.
      Museum shows are even more compelling — unprecedented in-gatherings of great works from all over the world. You miss one, and it's never coming back. You can motivate yourself to go see a famous work that has taken up brief residence at the corner of Adams and Michigan. Or you can haul your ass to the Hermitage.
     Though I don't rush to be among the first. I've done that. I think it was opening day of the Monet show, years ago. The advertising had been particularly aggressive, and everybody else in Chicago had the same idea. I said to Edie, "This is like trying to look at art in a crowded 'L' car."
     And I don't come at the very end, because that too, is crowded with stragglers. (Though I do remember arriving 90 minutes before closing of a Georgia O'Keeffe show, flashing my press card and blowing in).

     So I wanted to see the Dali Show before it closed. Even though I don't particularly like Dali. Why? The paintings are small, distorted, dark, weird. His showman's aspect. His paintings are circuses in oils. His whole personality. The waxed mustache. The affectations. The way Dali let himself be taken advantage of at the end, signing stacks of blank paper. All art is fraud, but Dali overdoes it.
     But you never know. Sometimes the comprehensive museum show of a particular artist will win you over. I didn't think much of Andy Warhol, either, until he got the full Art Institute treatment. You had to be impressed with the skill, the creativity, he shifted from an ad illustrator drawing shoes to the darling of the creative world. This was Dali's first major exhibition at the Art Institute.
   Plus my wife really wanted to go. She had seen an early 1925 Dali portrait of a woman turned away from the viewer, when we were in Barcelona at the Reina Sofia, and it struck her.
     The optical illusions were not without charm, though his phallic tower seemed more juvenile than transgressive. Fame and art are generally at odds, and there he was, part of the 1939 New York World's Fair and on the cover of time. He's more in the realm of Peter Max of artists famous for being famous more than famous for being good. Though I invite readers who disagree to make their case.
     After dispensing with Dali, we headed to the "Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape" show. Such are the riches of the Art Institute that I didn't even realize the Van Gogh show was there until we walked in. 
      I am not, as a rule, a big landscape fan — I like people in my art  — but this focused on the tortured Dutch painter and his circle of younger artist friends lighting out for the suburbs to find their muse — as a suburbanite myself, I enjoyed the narrative that Van Gogh had to escape the narrow confines of Paris and find his true artistic self in the suburbs an hour away.
"The Seine at Saint-Ouen, Morning," Charles Angrand
     It groups five artists — not just Van Gogh, but Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand, who painted together, argued, inspired and disgusted each other between the years 1882 and 1890 during the three months he painted at Asnieres, Clichy and the Island of La Grande Jatte. One was Charles Angrand, and I admired a painting of the Seine that was mostly green and blue dappled water.
     Indeed, I found myself appreciating the words of the lesser-known artists even more than Van Gogh, who could include these stiff little figures in his landscapes, and had not yet entered into the blazing glory of his final phase.
     The show not only discusses the artists and their work, but the societal changes going on at that exact moment, as greenery gives way to train stations, bridge embankments, and the factories that Van Gogh captures so charmingly above.
     If the "Grand Jatte" above sparked an association, you've seen the Georges Seurat masterpiece "A Sunday on the Isle of Grande Jatte." He was among the group of painters working in the Paris suburbs — the first to fix on the bucolic retreat in the Seine between Neuilly-sur-Seine and Levallois.
     He did hundreds of sketches and preliminary studies for the enormous canvas, a number included in this show, and one of the takeaways for me was just how much trial and effort it took for him to get the composition right, arranging and rearranging the trees, playing with the angles of their limbs, experimenting with various groupings and individuals.
     Some of the quick studies were themselves engaging works of art, such as trying to get the exact angle of a woman turned away from the viewer in this Conte crayon sketch, and it's only now that I realize it's something of a mirror image of the Dali work at the top of this short summation that captivated my wife. Birds of a feather. 
      We spent a lot of time reading the commentary of the show. Van Gogh died at 37, but Seurat was even younger, 31, when he succumbed to an infection. If "Grande Jatte" weren't singular enough on its own, it's the only major painting he created, along with "Bathers at Asnieres." 
      On that note, it's probably best for me to start my day and let you go about yours. My apologies for this awkward veer into art criticism — a reader in the comments section yesterday asked for it, and I figured, it's as good a theme as any. 
      The Dali Show only runs until June 12, so you'll have to get a move on if you want to see it.  The landscapes exhibit — Van Gogh's name is in the title, but only 25 of the 75 works on display are his, opened mid-May, and will run all summer, until Sept. 4. Many of the works are from private or obscure collections, have never been publicly displayed before and might never been seen again. Now's your chance.


Saturday, February 11, 2017

Black History Month: Why does society value white lives more?



     They call it Black History Month, though public attention has a way of petering out in the early days of February, ground down by the pro-forma parade of familiar icons—Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks. Though I suppose they must be fresh revelations to a certain segment of the population, unfortunately, and we shouldn't dismiss anything that slides them under the public nose. 
     But history—black or white or whatever hue it's cast in—shouldn't be rote. Not something dull you memorize. It should live, and be real, and talk to us, and relate to our present moment somehow. Otherwise what good is it?
     Look at this relic of the Civil War, the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, by August Saint-Gaudens. The original version is a bronze on display on Beacon Street next to Boston Commons—this is the later, plaster version, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where I noticed it last June.
 
The Latin inscription translates as "He left all to save the Republic."
     Shaw was a 25-year-old Harvard graduate, the son of wealthy abolitionists, put in charge of the first all-black Union Army unit assembled after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. Its formation was controversial—racial biases were such that some felt blacks would not follow orders or comport themselves well under fire—and two of Frederick Douglass's sons joined the 54th.

     Their first battle was a suicidal storming of Fort Wagner, the well-defended battery that guarded Charleston, South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, Shaw led the charge and was killed almost immediately. Half the men in his 600 soldier regiment were killed or captured.
    "Not a man flinched, though it was a trying time," Lewis Douglass wrote to his wife. 
     Saint-Gaudens, America's greatest sculptor, spent a dozen years on the sculpture, hiring African-American models to pose for the 16 figures of the black soldiers. On the Boston Memorial, an inscription on the monument begins, "The white officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war." As a reminder of just how despised, when the monument was unveiled in 1897, it contained the names of the white officers who fell, but not of the black officers, though their heroism was noted, and the fact that for the first 18 months they were unpaid. 
     Therein lies a tale. When the War Department approved the idea of black soldiers, it paid them $10 a month, versus $13 for white, and black soldiers refused the unfair slight, until Congress decreed that all soldiers, of whatever race, would receive equal pay. (The pay stand-off was a theme in Edward Zwick's melodramatic film about the 54th, "Glory.") Some 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army in the Civil War. 
    Three hundred black men killed or captured. One of those wounded, William Carney, became the first African-American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. Awarded in 1900 for his role in the battle—Carney snatched the flag from its hurt bearer and, though wounded himself, carried it aloft throughout the fiasco. "Boys," he said afterward, "the old flag never touched the ground." 
    But the monument is to Shaw, whose body was pierced, pierced with bullets, was stripped and thrown into a mass grave with the corpses of his troops. Still, the inclusion of the marching men he led in his memorial was nearly incidental. Saint-Gaudens almost depicted him charging on horseback, alone, but was deterred because the charge was on foot, so the scene depicted is him leading his regiment out of Boston, on the way to fight, past the very spot where the bronze memorial stands.
     The Irish-born sculptor did a masterful job--some call it the greatest American sculpture of the 19th century, and when the version above was displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Auguste Rodin is said to have taken his hat off and stood before it, head bowed in silent veneration. It represents a heroic view of memorializing war that Maya Lin ended with her Vietnam Memorial, a black gash of stone that Robert Lowell predicted in "For the Union Dead," his marvelous poem about the Civil War, memory and the Shaw monument, in these lines:
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
    You can read the entire poem here, and should.
    But his work also reminds us that American society holds the personhood of African-Americans cheaper than whites. It did so in 1863, and in 1897. It also did so in 1989 when Edward Zwick made "Glory" ("I didn't understand why it had to be told so often from the point of view of the 54th's white commanding officer," Roger Ebert writes in his review of the film. "Why did we see the black troops through his eyes — instead of seeing him through theirs? To put it another way, why does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor?")
    Good question. And why does that primacy of white lives over black persist today? Knowing what we know now, why do we still act the way we do? Another good question.