Saturday, April 1, 2017

The Music I Grew Up With, 1966-1972

It was the music of Simon and Garfunkel that brought me to admit I liked popular/rock music. Sounds of Silence wasn't silly and it wasn't about love. I have no idea what it is about. But it seemed deep. Sounds of Silence was the first 45 record I ever bought and the album was one of the first albums I ever bought.

I soon was buying records with most of my allowance. I bought record boxs at K-Mart to store them in and wrote all the records on the index card provided.
I had record boxes like these

Index cards with the records I bought
Some were great records; others have been long forgotten.

Missing from my collection were the songs so often played I didn't need to buy them, especially The Beatles, and living in Metro Detroit, Motown.
Sheet music cover For Once In My Life by Stevie Wonder
Here are the records I bought between January 1966 and 1972. I have links for the songs that are not as well known.

1967
  • Sounds of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel. Simon says he was inspired by Bob Dylan.
  • Michelle, Billy Vaughn's cover of the Beatles hit.
  • Lightnin' Strikes, Lou Christie.
  • Flowers on the Wall, the Statler Brothers. My mom liked this one.
  • Ebb Tide/I Love You for Sentimental Reasons, the Righteous Brothers.
  • Elusive Butterfly, Bob Lind. Learn more about it here.
  • Can't Grow Peaches on a Cherry Tree, Just Us. Very folk-rock.
  • The Ballad of the Green Berets, St. Barry Sadler. The patriotic hit just before the anti-war movement.
  • Homeward Bound/Leaves that are Green, Simon and Garfunkel. I still sing both of these.
  • What Now My Love, Tijuana Brass. Mom was a big Herb Alpert fan. We had all the records and Mom bought me the piano music to learn.
My music book of Herb Alpert

Sheet Music cover of Bang, Bang
  • Bang, Bang, Sonny and Cher. Mom liked this one.
  •  Message to Michael, Dionne Warwick. What a voice!
  • Sloop John B, The Beach Boys. Still singing this one. Love it.
  • Norwegian Wood, George Edwards. Folksy with an ethnic flair.
  • Monday, Monday, the Mamas and the Papas. I loved their harmonic singing.
  • Sweet Talkin' Guy, The Chiffons. Upbeat girl band song.
  • I Am A Rock, Simon and Garfunkel. I told you I was a fan. This song is my antithesis.
  • Strangers in the Night, Frank Sinatra. So sweet I didn't realize it was about getting laid.
  • Paint it Black, The Rolling Stones. I was getting edgy in my music taste.
  • Rainy Day Women, Bob Dylan. And getting edgier!
  • You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, Dusty Springfield. Schmaltz for sure.
  • He, The Righteous Brothers. The girl who bought this also bought Rainy Day Women?
  • Red Rubber Ball, The Cyrkles. Bubble Gum Music.
  • Little Red Ridding Hood, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Warning girls about boys.
  • Tar and Cement, Verdelle Smith. Loss of country beauty.
  • Sweet Dreams, Tommy McLain. Rockified Country.
  • The 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky came free from Puffed Rice.
  • Out of this World, Chiffons. Another upbeat song from the girl band.
  •  Reach Out, I'll Be There, The Four Tops. So good. That driving beat.
  • The Dangling Conversation, Simon and Garfunkel. Love the poetry.
  •  I've Got You Under My Skin, The Four Seasons. I love this so much. "So deep in my heart, you're really a part of me...I've got you under my skin." Those bells. "Never win." That pause before the coda. Sigh.
  • Hazy Shade of Winter, Simon and Garfunkel. Remains one of my favorites; I sing it every November.
  • I Who Have Nothing, Terry Knight and the Pack. Written by Ben E. King. Performed by a local DJ. Overwrought.
Sheet music cover for Born Free with Roger Williams
Sheet music cover of Stand By Me, Ben E. King

Sheet Music cover of Easy to Be Hard from Hair

1968
Sheet music cover for Witchita Lineman by Glen Gampbell

Sheet music cover of Don't Let Me Down by the Beatles

1969
Sheet music cover for theme from Love Story
Sheet music cover El Condo Paso, Simon and Garfunkel
1970
  • Indiana Wants Me, R. Dean Taylor. Man murders to protect his woman's honor.
  • Peace Will Come, Melanie. Hippie folk rock from Woodstock.
  • El Condor Paso, Simon and Garfunkle
  • Fire and Rain, James Taylor
  • Ticket to Ride, The Beatles. An old one I found somewhere.
  • If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot. Lovely.
  • Deja Vu, Crosby, Sills, and Nash
Sheet music cover for Leaving on a Jet Plane
performed by Peter, Paul and Mary
written by John Denver

Sheet music from Carly Simon

Albums were expensive. But I bought quite a few, there were lost by accidental water damage. Here are the ones I remember:
  • Happy Together by the Turtles
  • Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel
  • Rubber Soul by the Beatles
  • Beach Boys album--but I forget which one
  • Procol Harem. A Whiter Shade of Pale, Reid said, is 'evocative,' not about sex or drugs.
  • Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967)
  • Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Songs of Leonard Cohen. I loved Suzanne.
  • Realization by Johnny Rivers. It had a great sound.
  • Beggars Banquet by The Rolling Stones. Sympathy for the Devil.
  • Remember the Wind and the Rain by folk singer Jamie Brockett
  • Abby Lane by the Beatles. Everyone was so excited when it came out.
  • Candles in the Rain by Melanie
  • Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel
  • Crosby, Sills and Nash. It was so fresh.
  • Chicago, the big Chicago band sound was all the rage at college that September, blaring out of the dormitory windows.
  • Sweet Baby James, James Taylor
  • Tommy, The Who
  • Jesus Christ Superstar
Sheet music cover of Colour My World, Chicago
Some of my piano sheet music didn't make it through 14 moves, including Sounds of Silence and Yesterday by the Beatles, but they were easy piano versions. I started collecting sheet music in the late 1970s and the photos in this post are from my collection of over 1,000.

Some recordings have grown on me over the years. Like Unchained Melody. That longing. Sigh.
I heard a college friend sing The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel and I've loved it ever since.
"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains"
Much later I bought CDs of music I grew up with, including The Temptations. I sang, "Sugar pie honey bunch/You know that I love you/I can't help myself/I love you and nobody else" to my baby son. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On album also ended up on my shelf. I also bought piano music books of many artists, including Paul Simon.

I met my husband at Adrian College. We both loved classical music and choral singing. He also liked folk rock including The Kingston Trio, The Irish Rovers, and Peter, Paul and Mary. We became John Denver fans in the early 70s and saw him in concert several times. In 1978 we attended the Philadelphia Folk Fest and discovered many wonderful artists, including Stan Rogers, Priscilla Herdman, Roberts and Barrand, Eugene O'Donnell, and Jean Redpath. By this time the Disco/Philadelphia Sound was big and I wasn't keeping up with popular music.

For a long time, I avoided classic rock because the memories associated with the music was so strong, and too often so sad. I didn't want to think about those tortured teen years or the painful memories of the social and political upheaval of the '60s.

But to this day, when I hear a classic rock song on the radio I can tell you what year it came out and what was going on in my life at that time. It was, after all, the music I grew up with, interwoven in my life.

What music is part of your story?




Thursday, March 30, 2017

River of Ink by Paul M. M. Cooper: Resistance in 13th c. Sri Lanka

Writers and artists employ powerful tools that can shape how a society views itself, its past, and how it envisions its future. They are often the front line of resistance.

River of Ink by Paul M. M. Cooper came to my attention when the author followed me on Twitter. I downloaded a sample of his book and enjoyed his writing and bought a copy of River of Ink. (Yes, I bought a book, this was not a free review galley!)

The novel is fiction but the downfall of Sri Lanka under a destructive military takeover is history. It was fascinating to read about a time and place so foreign and unfamiliar.

"Do you remember the mynah birds that used to live in the courtyard outside your room? On the day the city fell, they were all twittering louder than I'd ever heard them, and flying from tree to tree in a flock. The noise was tremendous...You must remember this. You were sitting right there beside me, your back straight and your forehead furrowed, murmuring the letters to yourself as you cut them." from River Of Ink chapter one

Asanka is the court poet in the diverse, international Sri Lanka of the 13th c. He enjoys a pampered and luxurious life. He writes love poems for men wishing to please the women they love. His own love life is murky; his wife disdains him for he has a mistress, a palace servant, Sarasi. He is teaching her how to write.

The ink is mixed of charcoal and oil. A metal stylus cuts the palm leaf paper into sinuous shapes.

Life in Polonnaruwa changes in an instant when Kalinga Magha comes from the mainland with his army and elephants, intent on destroying the Sri Lankan civilization, looting and murdering his way to the capital. He murders Asanka's king, forces the queen into marriage, and demands that Asanka translate his favorite Hindu sacred text into Tamil, the language of the working class. Magha intends to enlighten the Buddhists with a story of dharma, the battle between lord Krishna and Shishepal over the girl they both love. Magha demands the burning of books as part of his cultural takeover. And finally, Magha decides to take Asanka's love for his own queen.

The downfall of a society, a city, a culture is a horrible thing to read about, and I was very aware that it has happened over and over again throughout the ages. Powerful men believe they bring a better religion or government to justify their motives. And the ordinary people are trampled and murdered, and yes, resistance groups rise up. In the story of the particular lies the story of human history.

In his acknowledgments, Cooper finishes by saying "Finally this book goes out to all the translators, artists and writers around the world who continue to create beauty and freedom from beneath the heel of oppression. Today you are more necessary and powerful than you could possibly imagine."

River of Ink is an impressive book that both entertains, enlightens, and inspires.

River of Ink
Paul M. M. Cooper
Bloomsbury



Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman: Imagining a Better World

We have lost our vision, Rutger Bregman writes, mired in old paradigms and blind to the possibilities we should be imagining. We could be realizing the world predicted by 20th c thinkers.

Subtitled "How We Can Build The Ideal World," Utopia for Realists is an international best seller, first published in the Netherlands where it ignited a debate and inspired a movement.

Bregman begins by reminding us of how recently life was a "vale of tears," "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as philosophers wrote in the 16th c. With the explosion of new technology and prosperity over the last two hundred years, humanity has achieved a standard of living that Medieval folk would consider Utopia; indoor heat and cooling, flush toilets and clean water alone would make them marvel. So would obesity from an overabundance of easily obtained food, the magical ability to protect ourselves from smallpox and polio, and paved roads we travel at 70 mph--without fear of highwaymen robberies.

Have we reached Utopia? Or is there something we can do to make life even better? How can we solve the problems that remain: fearfulness, unemployment, quality of life, poverty.

The welfare state 'from a bygone era' doesn't work today. Globalization and the cost of higher education have impacted the stability of the Middle Class. Upward mobility for the poor no longer happens.

Bregman wants to "fling open the windows of our minds" to discover "a new lodestar." He presents studies and experiments about how we treat the homeless and the poor and challenges our traditional mindset that people are to be blamed for their own poverty--they just have to work hard and save. We have created welfare programs for those in need, which are costly and do not solve the basic problem. What happened to the expectation of the 15-hour workweek? Why are we spending more time working, impacting our health and our families?

Bregman wants us to dream new dreams and embrace ideas that can change the world for the better. Thinking outside the box has made a difference: abolition, universal voting rights, and same-sex marriage, he reminds, were all once considered impossible. All it takes is "a single opposing voice.

The basis of Bregman's new Utopia is a guaranteed basic income. He presents studies that demonstrate the success of such programs. In 1967 universal basic income was supported by 80% of Americans and President Nixon submitted a bill to eradicate poverty.

Other changes he offers include shorter work hours, proven to increase productivity, reconsidering the importance of the Gross Domestic Product as our economic standard of success, improving quality of life, open borders, taxing capital instead of labor, and adjusting salary to a job's societal value. At a time when productivity is a record levels, there are fewer jobs and lower salaries. "We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits," he writes.

There is an old saying: Insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results. Instead of holding more tightly to the old ways we need to envision innovation. Perhaps books like this will spur discussions and reevaluations.

One can only hope.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Bregman's TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIL_Y9g7Tg0

Utopia for Realists
Rutger Bregman
Little, Brown & Co.
$27 hardcover
ISBN:9780316471893

Sunday, March 26, 2017

The Life and Times of Folk Musician and Social Activist Peggy Seeger

Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics by Jean R. Freedman is the first biography of folk musician Peggy Seeger.

The Seegers are famous as musicians and musicologists. Peggy was half sister to Pete Seeger the famous banjo-strumming political troubadour, and sister of Mike Seeger who specialized in 'old time ' country music of the rural South.

Their father Charles was a folk music scholar and collector, taught at University of Berkeley, and was responsible for creating the first musicology course in the United States. Charles' first wife Constance was a concert violinist and taught at the Institute of Musical Art, which became Julliard. Their children included Pete Seeger.

After their marriage failed Charles met Ruth Crawford, a musician, composer and folk music anthologist. They married and their children included Peggy and Mike. The children grew up surrounded by folk music, pacifism, and a political bent supportive of the working class.
Peggy and Mike learned banjo from their half-brother Pete's book How To Play the 5-String Banjo.

Alan Lomax invited twenty-year-old Peggy to London for a job singing and playing the banjo. She had a sweet, clear voice. An older, established British folk singer, Ewan McColl, saw Peggy perform and their lives were changed unalterably.

Ewan McColl was "equal parts poetry and politics, artistry and activism," a collector and singer of Scottish folk songs with a remarkable baritone voice. The forty-one year old Ewan said his senses were "utterly ravished' when he heard Peggy play. McColl came from the poor, working class. His plays, songs, and radio theater addressed political issues of his day-- workers rights, human rights, fascism, and apartheid.

Ewan and Peggy fell in love, but it was years before Ewan was divorced. Peggy became a British citizen by marrying another singer so she could remain in England. They created the Radio Ballads documentaries, Festival of Fools, The Critics Group, and founded Blackthorne Records.

Ewan wrote Peggy a love song to use in concert, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, in 1957. When Roberta Flack covered the song in 1969 it became a hit. Suddenly McColl and Seeger were financially secure. You can hear Peggy sing the song at: https://secondhandsongs.com/work/31003


 Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in 1965. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns
As the times changed so did Peggy's music. She reflected the Women's movement with her most famous song, Gonna Be An Engineer. The song from 1979 begins with traditional social expectations for a girl:

Momma told me, Can't you be a lady
Your duty is to make me the mother of a pearl
Wait until you're older, dear, and maybe
You'll be glad that you're a girl

The girl does as she is told until she finally gets the job as an engineer. But she faces stereotypes at work:

You've got one fault, you're a woman
You're not worth the equal pay

To sum up, she sings,

I listened to my mother and I joined a typing pool
I listened to my lover and I put him through his school
But if I listen to the boss, I'm just a bloody fool
And an underpaid engineer
I've been a suck ever since I was a baby
As a daughter, as a wife, as a mother and a dear
But I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady

I'll fight the as an engineer


Ewan's later years were plagued by illness. Shortly before his death in 1989 Peggy and fellow singer Irene fell in love. In 2006 they had a civil marriage.

I was glad to learn more about Peggy, who I knew through the radio and recordings. She was an amazing woman, pioneering feminist, and accomplished artist.

I have long enjoyed Ewan McColl, especially his Broadside Ballads on which he sings King Lear and His Three Daughters (which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vF7n-f72Ig). You can hear Peggy on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/PeggySeeger.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Peggy Seeger
Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
Publication March 13, 2017
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-252-04075-7

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Nancy's Sophomore Slump

Me, age 15
By Tenth Grade I felt like an 'old pro' at high school. The year was a heady journey of ups and downs. I went on my first date, studied journalism, saw the end of a friendship and the deepening of others. That spring, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. A boy at school died. And Mom suffered a major health crisis that hospitalized her for weeks.

Me, fall 1967
I had taken Algebra in summer school so I could 'catch up' to my friends and take Geometry as a sophomore. I started out ok, but couldn't keep up and failed the class.

My geometry teacher Mr. Jacobson and I had a 'special' relationship. One day he said I was his favorite geometry student. "He kept bugging me and asked, "Who's your favorite geometry teacher?" That spring, when I was flunking the class, I told one of his honors geometry students to "kick Mr. Jacobson hello for me," and she did. She said he laughed and thought it was 'sweet of me' to remember him. When I came into class he told me, "I got your hello." I apologized, but he said, don't think of it, adding that he was "happy to fill my head with geometry."

About Journalism class I wrote, "Mr. Rosen's going to be a real peach of a teacher." I loved the class, even selling the Herald newspapers and Lancer yearbooks. I wrote, "Everything Mr. Rosen says sinks and goes deep into me. I looked through all my old Heralds and my Lancer.  I bet I’ve looked at my yearbook a million times."

I had Biology with Mr. Gasiorowski whose passion for his subject was infectious. What a great teacher and a great guy. He was a Chicago Cubs and Eddie Stankey fan.

When my dad brought home two rabbits in the spring I named them Eddie Stankey and Stanley Miller, a chemist Mr. G talked about who made amino acids in a test tube. My brother called the bunnies Spot and Snow.
Me with Edie Stankey and Stanley Miller
When Mr. G talked about Desmond Morris' book The Naked Ape I bought a copy. Mom picked it up to look at and was appalled by the description of the human body response during sex. I told her I had read more salacious things in her books which I had picked up and read!

In October my folks went to the Parent open house. I wrote, "Apparently Mom and Dad had a good time at open house tonight. They liked all my teachers, especially Mr. Rosen and Mr. Gasiorowski. Mr. R said, “I don’t know if any of the kids have been telling you what we’ve been doing..”
“Yeah!” Mom said.  “Two hundred sentences…”
“That was a while back.”
“Now you're doing verbs and photography.  She likes your class best, I think.”

Girl's Choir 1967-68. I am in the second row from bottom, fifth from the right.
I was thrilled to be promoted to Girl's Choir. We wore a navy blazer provided by the school. I felt really sharp wearing it to school on days we sang. I was always singing, walking home or through the school hallways. They were a great group of gals and I made many friends in choir. I enjoyed Mrs. Ballmer.

Gym was required for two years. My gym locker was near that of the 'Greaser' girl who had bullied me in junior high, taking my hat and throwing it. One day I was singing while dressing and she said, "She's singing. Are you singing for me?" I replied, "If you want me to." And so I sang the second alto part of the song we were learning in choir. Her friends listened, too. They said I was good. I was never picked on again. It was a confirmation of something I had believed when a girl: if a bad guy came along all I had to do was play the piano or sing to calm the wildness.

I was still pining for the same boy. I wrote, "Mom left me with no hope. But Dad did. He said, “Don’t give up.” He said anything—even a fumble—boosts a guy’s morale. Let’s hope so. Of course, he ought to know, being a guy himself—once."

My old neighbor and friend Mike D. who had moved away was now a freshman at Kimball. I was too shy to talk to him. One day he gathered his courage and asked if I was me and then asked if I remembered the telescope and Homer the Ghost. I didn't have the courage to let him know I really had liked him. Partly it was pride, as I was a year older, but mostly I was shy.

A boy from my homeroom teased me for a while then asked me out. We dated for a few weeks, going to a school dance. We were dancing to My Girl when he kissed me, my first kiss. He wanted to go steady. I liked him as a friend, but we had little in common and I broke it off.
My homeroom class, 10th Grade. I am in the second row, third from right.
I followed several friends and joined the Political Action Club.

I never cared about sports but went to the football games at school to see my friends. I did learn a little about football.

I was writing more poetry:
The sunlight from the window,
Formed a stream of light flowing into the room.
The light illuminated the particles of dust
Floating on the river of melted sun.
The slowly sinking silver moon
Abandoned its position in the heavens
Giving it up to the victor, the sun.
A rosy dawn slowly, silently
Took over the sky transforming
A midnight blue to rainbows.
I read Gone With The Wind and wrote, "I feel I know Scarlet and Gerald and Rhett and Melody and Ashley all personally. I suffer with them. They haunt me, through Rhett's asking Scarlet to be his mistress, through Ellen's death, through when Scarlet finds the Tarleton twins have died. War is horrible. The book is so much a love story, but also it gives an excellent picture of Southern life and a great background to the Civil War. I never knew that was like that."

Other books I read included Alfred Hitchcock's Stories Not for the Nervous; The Moonspinners; The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy; Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote; J. D. Salinger's books; John Knowle's A Separate Peace; Green Mansions; The Foundation Trilogy by Issac Asimov; Kingsblood Royal; The Chosen by Chaim Potok; Anna Karenina; and Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein.

Tom and Dad playing at dining room table, Me and Mom.
No one else wore their hair that way. I always did something weird.
The fall began with the murder of a classmate's little brother in the Quickstead Woods near Kimball. Then my Grandfather Ramer was hospitalized after his first heart attack. One night some boys were trying to get the attention of the girls who lived across the street. Dad yelled at them to be quiet. They threw a beer bottle through my parent's second-floor bedroom window.

That October, listening to my records I wrote,

"Life is so baffling and unpredictable. It schemes, and you can only hope you’re on the right side of the conflicting forces and not on the overpowered side. It can cut you down like a scythe cuts the wheat. You fall at its mercy. It can be endless in every way as the stars. It can make you as exhausted as one lost in a pathless woods.

I won’t cry, no I won’t cry,
I won’t shed a tear
Not as long, not as long as you
Stand by me.

I feel so strange to feel so friendly
To say “good morning,” and really mean it,
To feel these changes happening in me,
But not to notice still I feel it.

"It’s all so strange. To say “good morning” and really mean it.  It makes me think.  Do they?  Does someone care, even if to say a “good morning?”  What is there left to say?  Is there something I’ve forgotten?  One person left blank?

“I can no longer keep my blind drawn,
And I can’t keep myself from talking.”

"But I notice, I feel it. What a strange effect a beautiful, overdubbed melody can have, creating a whole new emotion out of nowhere. Changing instantly how you feel. Maybe tomorrow I’ll know the answers. Maybe tomorrow I’ll know. I can only wait. And hope He will stand by me, as before."

At Christmas, our neighbors the McNabs joined my family for a turkey dinner. I played Christmas Carols on the piano and they sang along. Afterward, Grandma Ramer, Dad, my brother and me took a drive to see Christmas lights.

We ended up in Detroit. I wrote, "We saw Cobo Hall, Ford Auditorium, The Spirit of Detroit, Hudson's Christmas display windows. It began to snow, not much on the ground, but it does look beautiful to look out your window and see snow falling. Yes, we saw Detroit in all its glory, and the dark, back alleys that chill you to the bone. Not far from Grand Circus Blvd. and it's lighted stores, are broken-down tenements. But even there, in cracked windows, can be found a few colored lights, a lighted candle."

We spent New Year's Day in Tonawanda. I wrote, "Now I'm grown I can see people's personalities. Aunt Alice and Uncle Kenny, Skip, Tom Wilson. Skip says I can't marry until I'm 30--get an education. Uncle Ken is funny. Aunt Alice will have a baby in July. John [Kuhn] pities poor dad--"even your own daughter!"--because I pick on his big nose." I wrote that "Nancy Ensminger was impressed by my description of my life in Michigan." Sadly, Aunt Alice lost that baby.

In January I wrote, "I think the world's falling apart. Riots, wars, crime--dear God, I wish I lived on some obscure island in the Pacific or on an iceberg off Greenland. When will man find peace? Will he ever? We destroy all the beautiful things with ugliness. I wish I were a child again able to live in my own magical world and leave the rest up to the adults. But in this day and age, teenagers are caught up in it. Ever since I heard [a boy] talk about being drafted I've been scared for the boys I know. I hate war. Cutting down the nation's youth, without a chance, growing up too quickly."


The Herald, our school paper
On April 5, I wrote, "It happened again. Martin Luther King Jr's murder. Students wore black armbands, shaking their heads silently during Mr. Stephan's speech. They protested that the flag wasn't at half mast until the governor proclaimed it. They were emotionally upset. We all felt bad, and perhaps guilty for our race. We are the future who will deal with this problem. It's fortunate most felt compassion instead of victory."

On April 6, I wrote, "It seems we just all exploded happily over Hanoi's wanting a peace talk, and up, up, up went the stocks. LBJ had to stay and cancel his trip as riots broke out over King's murder and down, down, down went the stocks. I am convinced this country is a mess. Mr. Jacobson's been talking politics in class lately, and Mr. Burroughs is great on current events. I've learned a lot about him about Vietnam, stocks, the racial problem, and other problems of this Rat Race. Mr. Gasiorowski has been preparing us for sex, marriage, and other things about Adult Life and responsibilities. With Mr. Rosen we try to take this world and report all the latest facts on the Rat Race to the Rats themselves. So, in the end, you've gotta get involved. Mr. Gould tries to help your 'love life,' and Mrs. Ballmer helps you get enjoyment out of succeeding and working hard to get to the top. And Mrs. Dubois teaches teamwork. In school, they prepare you for Life."

On April 18, I went to Great Scott on Crooks Rd. with Mom to buy easy meals. Mom was going into the hospital for two weeks and I would be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and getting my brother up and to school. Every few years Mom would try another treatment for her psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.

In May, my journalism class attended a conference for high school students held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We got press cards. My friends and I spent time wandering around town among the college students. I hoped to go to college, too. But I had not talked to my folks about it.


The photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook was the step-son of my Ninth Grade English Teacher, Mr. Botens. He would hang around our classroom, talking to Mr. Rosen. One time they were discussing how to photograph a person in a jar and they asked me to pose. I was wearing the Mod suit I'd bought with the money I found on my way to summer school. I liked Joe, but he was older and I thought he was too cool for me. My friend Dorothy knew him and one day we went to his house so she could return chemistry papers she had borrowed. In April she told me she asked him if he'd date me. She said he said he thought I was cute and would consider--it but he had a girl. That was bitter-sweet.

On May 15, 1968, I came to school and my friend Kathy gently broke the news that Joe had suffered a serious accident. I was stunned. At choir, my friend Peg told me Joe had died. The Girl's Choir sang Happy Birthday and I was offended, unwilling to have life go on in the midst of death. I grieved for days, recalling all my losses over the years. In the end, I decided, "So, follow his example, when he lived. Find the ambition and vigor he met life with. And die with the courage and determination he did, but only when it is time. Now you know death for what it is."
Newspaper articles on the death of Joe Botens

1969 Lancer tribute to Joe Botens
On June 5, I turned on the radio and heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot. One of my close friends was upset, saying her parents didn't understand. There was another school rally and the Principal gave another speech and a prayer for Kennedy's recovery. On June 6 I wrote, "I prayed as I fell asleep: Don't let him die, don't let him die."
October 1967 Free Press photo of RFK visit to Detroit



While Mom was at the hospital the doctors discovered that she was being harmed by the medications she was on and they took her off them, cold turkey. She became very ill, losing both weight and her hair. The family feared she would die. Dad came home from work, ate, and went to the hospital. I was not allowed to go. I stayed with my little brother.  It was an awful, stressful time.

The school year ended. The last day I walked home alone, for all my friends had left already. I was very blue. Summer of 1968 was the lowest point of my life.

The stress of Mom's illness showed in my family. I was falling into depression, moody and unhappy. My folks were short with me. There were fights. They did not understand that stress affects the whole family.

My Uncle Dave was in a horrible car accident in Annapolis. I went with the McNabs to see The Graduate. I traded bedrooms with my brother, making me nostalgic thinking about all I'd experienced while in that room. I went bike riding with my girlfriends. We saw the fireworks display at the Clawson park, just a block away from where I now live.

Mom was still not well when my July birthday came. Instead of a Sweet Sixteen party like my friends had, I was lucky to have a cake and a family gathering.

I struggled with the evil in the world, the loss of my naive belief in the innate goodness of all people. Now, I wondered if I wanted to live in such a world. I prayed to just die and then felt terror. I realized my terror was because I believed in God and feared that my prayer might be answered. I had at least accomplished one goal: I was on my way to a real faith.

One summer day I took my brother Tom and his friend Bruce McNab to show them my daily walk to Kimball. After Freshman year all I could think about was getting back to school. This summer I was nostalgic for simpler, happy days. One year had changed everything.
Bruce McNab and Tom Gochenour




Thursday, March 23, 2017

The Underworld by Kevin Canty

Why is it so hard to escape the town of our birth? What keeps us from growing into a new life? Are we trapped in brutal, short lives?

In 1972, Silverton, Idaho is in the middle of nowhere, it's only reason for being the silver mine that needs workers. Men are paid well, trading long lives and their health for good money. They work hard, then play hard, frequenting the bar to drink and brawl. They are proud of their toughness.

Silverton is infused with toxins that ruin skin and health.

"There was arsenic in the smoke, chromium, cadmium, lead. Part of what it cost to live here...people died here after a while, lung cancer, liver cancer, for a few months the other year everybody seemed to have leukemia."

The women think about leaving their men, and do leave men who can't leave the only life they know. And when someone does break out, like David who is in college, they feel alienated and conflicted, resenting the pampered life of green shady lawns and uncalloused soft hands.

"This was never going to be his life, anyways, these leafy maples that meet overhead, a canopy over the street. Shingled houses with white trim, green lawns, third stories, turrets and arches. In a way, it feels good to let go, stop pretending. This place has its membership and he isn't part of it."

The third year of college is ending when David hears there has been a disaster at the mine. He drives his VW home. His father and his brother work in the mines.

The disaster claims 91 lives. David's brother is one of the dead. The stunned town struggles. Widows drown their sorrows in booze but find there is no haven from regret and grief. Two men are trapped for 14 days, and coming above ground reevaluate their lives. David reconsiders his choice to leave for another life.

This is a story about grief.
"Everything in life can be taken from you in an instant. Any minute. She had known this before. But now she understands it."
"Her friend is dead. But she could only forget it or else think about nothing else, and there is nothing to think, nothing to say. It cannot be undone. It cannot be fixed. It cannot be tolerated...Something breaks inside her, a little thing like a Popsicle stick." 
One widow, Ann, who at twenty-two was already weary of her life and childlessness before the accident, now regrets not cherishing her husband more. Ann realizes she had closed the door on so many possibilities when she decided to stay in Silverton and marry. Now she is 'free' to choose again, but the choices seem limited.

Ann goes to a bar seeking a bartender who once seemed interested in her; now he doesn't recognize her and she thinks, "all this just seems so corrupt. A stimulus, a response, a line, a body. People just want to fuck...They see a woman, alone, vulnerable, they move in for the kill. That's how it is. A lonely woman is the devil's playground."

Ann had sung as a schoolgirl and now joins the church choir. She experiences the sense of greater community found in choral singing.
"The third time through the 'Ave Maria' she feels it, that lovely moment in which everything else drops away and she becomes this column of air, supported by the hips, her jaw dropping into the high notes, this physical thing becomes musical, becomes music, and all around her the same thing is happening and  they are singing together, almost beautifully."
Ann becomes friends with David's brother's widow Jordan, whose grief plays out in angry and self-destructive behavior. David is drawn to Ann.

Some don't survive the death of their loved one, some try to leave. Ann and David turn to each other in their grief and in their need reach, again, for love. They have been to hell and back. Perhaps they will yet find some comfort in the world.

The Underworld is fiction based on an actual mine disaster. I loved the writing and Canty's moving characters. I look forward to reading more of Canty's work.

I received a free book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Underworld
Kevin Canty
W. W. Norton
$24.95 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-393-29305-0

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Ice Ghosts: 200 Years Searching for the Lost Franklin Expedition


In 1847 Sir John Franklin left England and his adoring wife Lady Jane to seek the fabled Northwest Passage. He was 59 years old and it was his fourth journey to the Arctic. He had survived starvation on his second journey. This expedition was prepared with three years of food, included new-fangled canned foods. He had powerful, heated ships. The explorer Ross promised to rescue Franklin if he did not come home.

Nothing went as planned. Extreme ice stranded the ships. Their canned food was tainted. Their maritime boots and clothing were inadequate. Franklin died and his men left the boats encased in ice, journeyed on foot, and died of exposure and starvation.

Lady Jane pressed for a search and rescue mission and spent her fortune in the quest to find her husband. For over a hundred years, enthralled by the mysterious disappearance, men went on the hazardous journey to the Arctic, hoping to solve the mystery of the lost Franklin Expedition.

My interest in polar exploration dates to junior high when I read The Great White South about the lost Scott Expedition. Over the years I've read books including Frances Spufford's I Shall Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination and Knud Rasmussen's biography White Eskimo by Stephen Bown. I loved the historical fiction book based on Franklin Voyage of the Narwhal  by Andrea Barrett and Dan Simmons' supernatural take in The Terror.

The first part of Ice Ghosts recounts the history of the expedition and the early rescue attempts, presenting the historical facts. The second part of the book is a wonderful examination of the the modern search for Franklin, including Inuit culture and history and their contribution of new information about Franklin.

Watson vividly describes the experience of the Arctic--the initial thrill followed by the freezing that can take mere minutes. The months of darkness and isolation. This environment demands cooperation to survive. I loved learning about the Inuit culture and people and their contribution to the knowledge of Franklin through their oral histories.

Louie Kamookak is the great-grandson of an Inuk storyteller and respected shaman who assisted the the Inuit anthropologist Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen recorded the Inuit way of life as it was before being disrupted by Europeans, including enforced separation of children into mission schools where they faced abuse, resulting in 4,100 deaths.

Kamookak also had a grandfather who was an Irish trader, Gibson, who had found a marker left by an 1859 search party, and who found skeletons in another location. Kamookak's grandmother had told him that as a girl she had seen Franklin artifacts; she had taken a blunt metal knife and refashioned it into an ice chisel.

A history of tragedy and bad luck shared by Franklin searchers did not prevent Kamookak from an obsession to learn more.  He recorded oral histories from his elders to understand what had happened to the expedition. The native people knew where Franklin's men had died and where the ships settled.

The search for the Terror, Erebus, and Franklin's grave has become an international battleground. Artifacts left in situ can be disturbed by a storm and lost. But if they are collected they will soon decay. As climate change melts the ice it turns the land into swamps. Oil companies hope to drill in the Arctic, which would endanger the environment; they have funded researchers whose knowledge and new equipment are helpful to their goal.

The ships have now been found and some artifacts collected. But the grave of Franklin is yet to be discovered. The 'epic hunt' remains, as does our fascination. Watson's book is an important contribution and is sure to help another generation fall under the thrall of the tragic story of the Franklin Expedition.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

See recovered artifacts at
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/20/magazine/franklin-expedition.html?_r=0
See a video of the Terror at
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/sep/13/sir-john-franklins-ship-found-in-arctic-168-years-after-sinking-video
Hear Stan Rogers singing Northwest Passage at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVY8LoM47xI&list=RDTVY8LoM47xI#t=0

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition
Paul Watson
W. W. W. Norton & Company
$27.95 hard cover
Publication Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 9780393249385