Tale Spin

Embroidered stories, spin and lies didn't begin with the printing press, but that pivotal invention was like spreading fertilizer on weeds.  Creation myths, hero tales and even propaganda go all the way back to, well, probably the first "the one that got away" story heard around the Paleolithic camp fire  The mighty Battle of Kadesh between the Hittite and Egyptian empires was actually a draw, but to see Pharaoh tell it on wall inscriptions he was the undisputed victor.  Representations on coins of the ancient world are often the same sort of thing.

Actual events and people are behind the legends of King Arthur, El Cid and the Trojan War as well as Bible stories.  "Dragnet's" Sergeant Friday may have only wanted "the facts," but humans in general much prefer an epic story.

And so the life stories of a 14th Century French couple would have been long forgotten along with those of millions of others but for the imaginations of writers and generations of wide-eyed readers.  

Perenelle Delamere Flamel lived from 1320 to 1397, and was married to Nicolas Flamel in 1368 at age 48, after surviving two previous husbands   Nicholas, a scrivener (one who wrote for the illiterate and made copies) as well as a manuscript seller, lived on to a very old age (d/ 1418).  They owned several properties, and Perenlle was likely a wealthy widow.  They might have been remembered as philanthropists, if at all, since they donated generously to the needy, hospitals, churches and established two alms houses.  But their wealth and long lives excited dark speculation that their success was due to alchemy -- changing base metals into gold -- and having discovered the elixir of immortality in an ancient manuscript.  Perenelle was assumed to be a witch, having the "sight" and great powers as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.  It was said the couple had traveled the world for twenty years to find and grow these skills and had returned fabulously wealthy.  Tomb raiders were said to have found their graves empty, proof that they lived on.  Of course, there is no extant evidence of their world journey or being missing from their graves. 

Two centuries after they lived, printers, writers and publishers were competing to cater to a growing reading public eager to hear strange and fantastic tales -- which both came back from, and sent explorers to, the far East and West in search of El Dorado, Cathay, the Isle of California and the Fountain of Youth.  The remembered rumors about the mysterious French couple got the treatment also.  Present day writers J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Umberto Eco and Michael Scott continue to spin out the legend of the alchemist and the witch, who have actually found an eternal life in a way.

There are two streets in Paris named after the Flamels, and their home (or possibly one of the almshouses) still exists at 51 Rue de Montmorency, the oldest stone house in the city.  Whether they live on in some disguise or not, their story lives and grows, as good ones do, true or otherwise.

The Flamel home in Paris

Yankee Vampires

No, that's not the title of a Presidente Fidel Castro speech (at least as far as I know).  The vampire panic in New England lasted from around 1790 to 1895 and involved some very strange scenes in the graveyards.

All over the world, when livestock, crops or people suffered misfortune, disease or death, people have been wont to blame supernatural forces, often embodied in those they identified as witches, vampires or agents of the Devil.  To stop a vampire's predation, it had to be exhumed from the grave, and identified by a well-preserved corpse, have the internal organs -- especially the heart -- cut out and burned.  After Bram Stoker's Dracula came out in 1897 it was easy to imagine this happening in medieval Transylvania, but in  nineteenth-century New England?

Rhode Island farmer and orchardist Stukley Tillinghast began having nightmares in which his orchard was dying and his daughter Sarah was swept away by a cold wind.  Poor Sarah, 19 years old, took ill soon after and passed away.  Another daughter became ill and said that Sarah visited her every night.  She too then died, followed by four more children, who also claimed Sarah visited and touched them.  In a panic over this devastation, the farmer and others exhumed the bodies finding them all decomposed except for Sarah, who was, after six months, in good condition with her eyes staring and open.  They cut out and burned her heart, but the deaths continued with a son.  Then they ceased.

A hundred years later, in the same area of Essex, Rhode Island, the scenario played out again:  farmer George Brown lost his wife and two daughters to a wasting illness.  When son Edwin showed the same symptoms, George and neighbors exhumed those bodies to see if they were vampies preying on their own family, but only bones were found.  Except for daughter Mercy, who was well preserved (although she died in January and may have been above ground in a nearby stone crypt -- you can't dig graves in New England in the winter).  They, of course, cut her heart out and burned it.  Again, the last son did die anyway, and again, no one after that did.

Between these two events, around 1850 in Connecticut, Henry Ray's three sons wasted away and died one after the other.  The two elder were disinterred and burned, but Henry followed them in death in 1854.

There are too many similar stories, such as that of Rachel Harris who died in 1790.  Her widower subsequently married her stepsister who soon showed the same symptoms.  A mob of about 500 residents of Manchester, Vermont exhumed Rachel and burned her liver, heart and lungs.  When the second wife died anyway, they concluded that Rachel must have been a witch rather than a vampire.

But the culprit was not either one, but the bacillus which causes tuberculosis, called "consumption" previously because it consumed the body with weight loss and fever.  When the cause of the disease was identified in 1882, the vampire panic faded away.  Even today, with treatment finally available, it is still the leading infectious disease killer.

My grandmother would never drink milk.  When I asked her why, she said the "milk disease" had killed too many of her rural neighbor children when she was young, and it still scared her.  Milk infected with bovine tuberculosis was indeed often the source of TB before pasteurization became widespread during the first half of the twentieth century.  That is what finally quieted the vampires.

Mercy Brown, the "last New England vampire"

   

Near Miracles

A few years ago, I was having no luck plunking annuals in the ground out front in an empty area.  Despite pretty diligent watering and fertilizing, they would grow feebly and burn up in midsummer.  So one year I spotted a pot of daffodils on sale and gave them the spot in which to do or die.  With even less water and fertilizer, they have dependably greeted early Spring with enthusiasm every year since.  Especially as the deprivation of Winter ends, we are very grateful for this spunky bulb family, and everything else green, growing, flowering, furry or feathered that is right outside the windows. 

Bird seed put out front and in the back on the deck rewards us with generations of squirrels, chipmunks and birds.  The pair of cardinals stop by most days, and later in the season the hummingbird pays a nervous visit.  Blackberry (the cat) twitches with excitement as busy groups of sparrows -- or best of all, doves -- peck and scatter the seeds.  No one is sure if cats feel gratitude, but it is clear he appreciates the show a great deal.

Cicero said, "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."  I think it does strengthen character, makes one more positive and happier, and thus may be a basis for other areas of self improvement.  It did not make the list in the ancient world (those virtues were: temperance, wisdom, justice and courage) or later on in the Christian Catholic era (there are seven, counterpoised to the seven sins: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility).  The Book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha holds that wisdom, not gratitude, is the font of the virtues; so it appears Cicero was alone in his estimation.  Gratitude is formalized in Thanksgiving Day and prayers of thanks, but like all the best things it's really free and unlimited and you can enjoy it any time.  Those best things can be big as the serene blue sky or small as a bee. And we should always be especially grateful for the bees.

Sometimes gratitude is hard to come by:  are children, prisoners, soldiers or the privileged very grateful for their food and shelter?  It is hard to feel positive when you have little control over your life.  Your perspective improves if you are in a different situation where you are more independent, secure and less distracted.

The motto of the Campbell family of Cawdor Castle in Scotland says it best:

  

    

No Burke, Please

"I'm a writer," Wade said.  "I'm supposed to understand what makes people tick.  I don't understand one damn thing about anybody."

-- from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

A while ago I decided to read some of the classics I hadn't gotten around to, and that project has been aided by a rich harvest from local library sales.  In fact, last week I bought a sealed grocery bag labelled "classics" for one dollar.  Everything in it turned out to be good, so I'm set for the rest of the year (most are very long).

I had already started with several volumes from home and previous sales, but it's been disappointing.  For example, I began with one of Sir Walter Ralegh's histories of voyaging and exploration.  Yikes! the first paragraph was a distressing page and half long.  In his time, and continuing through the Victorians, more was definitely always more:  the vastness of your vocabulary and prolixity of your words demonstrated inarguably that you were an educated gentleman to be taken seriously by others.  Fine, but you're unreadable.

Next up was George Eliot's Middlemarch, picked due to my interest in the setting and time (Great Britain and the Reform Act era).  But I will never know what it had to offer since I could not get past the first overblown and pretentious page. 

I was beginning to think classics are like 1950s cars:  icons surely, but unsafe, uneconomical, unreliable and a pain to park.  Today professional restorers can retain the look (body and interior) while greatly improving the original badly executed parts and mechanical design.  A sorely needed corps of editors could do the same with those creaky literary classics.

Edmund Burke wrote what is considered the founding classic of conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which should definitely be on anyone's starting list of classics along with Adam Smith and many others from the Enlightenment.  It turned out, however, that Mr. Burke seems to have not noticed the Enlightenment at all.  His arguments seem to come from the medieval era instead.  The tone of the tract is emotional and outraged:  he is incensed that the Church was separated from the State by the revolutionaries, that the King was removed (government is divinely ordained and not to be touched by the unworthy governed!), and that titles and tradition were, to put it mildly, questioned.  He believed that power in government derived only from ownership of land.  He particularly loathed paper money (feeling it was illegitimate wealth not tied to land). In other words, change is not a challenge that societies should meet positively: though the Industrial Revolution had made the feudal order obsolete and dangerous, there were no solutions outside of established religious and aristocratic authority.  The wild emotions of the mob and the folly of the new self-made political philosophers in France were not good bases for the needed change in government, true, but Mr. Burke's devotion to the selfish, shortsighted and reactionary establishment at home was equally misplaced.  Extremism -- too much revolution or too much tradition -- is always bad, whether you're holding tight to the royal standard or the red banner.

(Why the illustration above?  I was going to write about gratitude and got off the rails.  Will try again.)

  

Small Towns With Spirit(s)

It was a small town in western Iowa, just a half-square mile in size, with a shrinking population.  It might have well disappeared like many other specks of settlement on the prairie but instead became notorious.  That was due to a law known as the Volstead Act which implemented the new Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, going into effect on 17 January 1920 --Prohibition.

These few hundred farmers were having none of it.

One of them, Alphons Kerkhoff, is said to have developed the recipe for a fine rye whiskey and was one of the biggest producers.  The bootleggers hid their stills (one supposedly in a church basement), and their product for the customers in hollowed fence posts and local cemeteries.  None other than Chicago's Al Capone became aware of the quality of the product from Templeton, which he not only distributed to cities all over the Midwest but called "the good stuff," by which slogan it has been known ever since.  The bad stuff -- hooch, bathtub gin, rotgut -- was made even more lethal in 1926 when the government required a larger quantity of poisonous methanol be added to industrial alcohol (which bootleggers used as a base from which they made their chancy fake liquor) to discourage illegal drinking, which Prohibition was failing to do.  They also promoted adding chemicals such as benzine and mercury; it is estimated that 10,000 people died taking the risk of possibly purchasing deadly tainted alcohol.

From 1920 to 1933, the bootleggers of this enterprising little town brought in three railroad car loads of sugar a month while sending out cattle cars to Chicago filled with barrels, not bovines.  Alphons' grandson Meryl  resurrected the legendary brand, respectably legal now, in 2006.  His birthday is coincidentally January 17, which has been declared Bootleggers Day.  You can't keep a good Iowan down.

(2021 update:  Today's revived Templeton Rye had actually been made in the giant MGP distellery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, but a class action lawsuit forced the deletion of claims on the label of "small batch" and "Prohibition Era Recipe."  Flavor had been added to approximate the original.  Now a new $35 million distillery, visitor center and museum has opened back in Templeton Carroll County, Iowa which will produce 2.4 million bottles annually.  The founder's grandson, one of the principals, says "Grandfather would say this is great, but where's my cut?")

                                                                            ***

Prohibition did not interrupt the 121-year operation of Nelsen's Hall and Bitters Club on remote Washington  Island, Wisconsin or even break its stride.  Originally opened as a dance club but thriving as a bar and social center, owner Tom Nelsen wasn't about to close its doors after January 1920, Constitutional amendment or no.  The law allowed medicinal alcohol or sacramental wine to still be served, and Tom had noticed pharmacies selling Angostura Bitters (which happens to be 90 proof, or 45% alcohol) for stomach disorders.  So, with nothing else to sell except for (bleh) near-bear, he offered shots of this "medicine" after he cleverly procured a pharmacist's license.  A visiting Federal agent thought this sure looked and operated as a speakeasy, and charged Nelsen with a Volstead Act violation.  In court, this creative barkeeper demonstrated that it tasted pretty awful and could only be considered a medicine.  The judge agreed that no one would purchase it as an enjoyable drink, so the G-men had to take the loss while Wisconsinites kept on taking the ferry to the Club.

Today you can become a card-carrying member of the Bitters Club (if you can down a shot) and be entitled to "mingle, dance, etc., with all the other members."   

October 8, 1963

The original "Jazz Corner of the World" at 1678 Broadway, NYC

The first LP I ever bought was Dave Brubeck's "Time Out."  Still have it, and it has aged like a fine French wine -- even better now than then.  Most things (think 70s fashion) are quickly dated and lose their appeal.  So we know what a classic is: that rare other that defies the damage of time and tide.

Someone decided to record the John Coltrane Quartet at the original Birdland club (1949 - 1965) on a particular night.  The album issued a few months later only included three selections (just 27 minutes +), with two added from a studio session from following month.  These five cuts on "Coltrane Live at Birdland" are all you really need to know, so be sure to take this disc when you depart for that desert island.

Another thing lost today, in our era of mindless "beats" and tattooed morons, is the extensive, thoughtful liner notes that used to be commissioned for LPs.  Poet LeRoi Jones wrote the essay for this recording, and I'm glad he did.  He says "the few people who were at Birdland that night of October 8 who really heard what Coltrane, Jones, Tyner and Garrison were doing..."  Emphasis on heard, because the club could seat 500 and surely it was pretty full for this appearance of giants, but people are also out to socialize, too. Ah, if one could go back in time...

I'm in full agreement with Mr. Jones on the role that drummer Elvin Jones played:  "...rising in the background like something out of nature...a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds."  His work alone bears several listening-throughs, it's that surprising and bold.  And Mr.Coltrane plays soprano sax in addition to tenor, a delicious treat.  On top of all that, legendary Rudy Van Gelder was the recording engineer -- a rare alignment of the stars!

Stars, indeed: the club was named after already popular Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, who was on hand the opening night.  Jack Kerouac lyrically described hearing Lester Young there in "On The Road."  There was a dark side, too.  In 1959, Miles Davis was beaten by a city policeman while outside on the sidewalk.  The same year co-owner Irving Levy was stabbed to death after a January midnight and nobody noticed for hours. 

All these people have gone on now, but the magic of that one night is ours still, to be grateful for.

Thirty Two Years Gone

Cold currents run slow and deep in the oceans, one I've heard of taking thousands of years to flow from Greenland's glaciers past Hawaii.  So do the things that pass into our hands and back out again.  Some keep their stories, most are lost to the landfill, and others float through the lower levels of the economy anonymously.  A cut glass punch bowl set for sale at the Goodwill store is surely a legacy of Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, maybe a retirement party, of some family whose name you will never know.

The other day we dropped in on one of the regular half-price sales at said local Goodwill store, immediately finding one thing we'd been looking for (new, for only $5).  Then we threaded our way to the back corner where the artwork, frames and books are to be found, our favorite spot.  One old painting was on the floor, propped against the end of the metal shelving, which made me do a double-take.  It looked familiar, the way something would if you had donated it yourself and saw it again, surprised.  It looked like the reproduction oil painting (in the exact frame, too) that was on my grandparents' living room wall above the long grey sofa for the entire time they lived there -- 38 years -- and had probably been in two previous homes they had in the area.  My father had given it to them at the end of the Thirties, when he was working downtown and living at home.

I had always liked it, and was sorry to see it disappear when the auctioneer cleared out their house after my grandfather's death in 1988.  I was at work all week and missed my chance.  Not knowing the artist or its title, I couldn't look for another.  What were the chances it stayed in the community for thirty two years -- who knows where -- and just we happened upon it?  So, for $3.50 and quite a long wait, it came back with us.

The label on the back with the title and artist noted, along the yellowed, torn backing paper, looked right for being from either side of 1940.  Online, I found there were several other very similar pictures by Anthony Thieme of the same scene from different viewpoints, one copyrighted 1939.  The title, "Sunny  Afternoon," was also shared, with slight variations, with some of them. He was quite a prolific landscape painter, whose work is still in museums, galleries and at auctions today.

I had always guessed this Impressionist work was by a 19th century artist who depicted a familiar French village, due to the sycamore tree and the look of the houses with red roofs, shutters and white stucco exteriors, as well as its feeling of serene timelessness.  Good thing I'm not pretending to be an art appraiser.  It is actually a 20th century rendering of a street in Rockport, Massachusetts.   Despite the facts, I'm going to keep on thinking quiet French village anyway.

Anthony Thieme, 1888 - 1954