Jay is Fay (The Broadway Gangster)

 

           Larry Fay               Live fast and die young

There was, very likely, a real-life model for Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), forgotten today, whose life was as colorful as they come.  Larry Fay, like the fictional Jay, made his money the old fashioned way -- from bootlegging, bringing liquor in from Canada and from the rumrunner boats.  He sold it at his nightclubs in New York, the Casa Blanca and the El Fey, playing the part of the fashionable bon vivant dressed in custom Bond Street clothes.  Like Gatsby, he had a mansion on Long Island where he threw lavish parties.

And he had a Daisy of sorts, former showgirl Evelyn Crowell, who quickly became a mistress of Joseph P. Kennedy and then married another rich man after Fay's dramatic death.  He was shot four times by his club doorman, Edward Maloney, on New Year's Eve 1932, because he had reduced employee hours and pay.

Fay had hardly made a mistake before in the dangerous life he lived.  In the early twenties he made so much from a winning 100 to 1 odds bet at Belmont Race Track he bought a taxi fleet.  Then came his scheme to corner the New York milk market and fix prices, for which he was indicted but skated away free.  

Mary Louise "Texas" Guinan, former stage and film star, headlined at Fay's establishments -- so successfully that she took half the profits.  "The Queen of the Nightclubs" was the epitome of the Jazz Age,  still remembered for her catchphrase greeting, "Hello, suckers!"  Barred from bringing her road show to France because of her reputation, Texas opened a new one back home called "Too Hot for Paris."  The 300 Club, often raided, was all hers, but there was little time left to enjoy it as she died shortly after Fay, in 1933.  

Since Prohibition was over, maybe their time was up, too. 

  

 

Prime and Plus

 

How many times a day do they come at you through advertising (in any of its myriad forms)?  Unless you have the radio off driving through western Nebraska, it's endless.  One thing I've learned is that anyone proffering an unsolicited sales pitch does not have a good deal for you.  If you wanted and needed something, you would have already done your research and gotten it yourself.  

Take Amazon Prime "membership" or all the "+" streaming channels.  You can get free shipping without a whole lot of effort and don't need any Prime.  And Disney+ (and all the others): first, do you need any more content or entertainment?  There is always a lot that needs to be done, and you're not doing anything productive for yourself or your family by sucking in all those empty electronic calories.  The local library donation sale has all the Disney productions you might want, and they probably will be the older, really good stuff.  For a dollar or less.

We will never figure out why people fall so completely for the clever words and exhortations of others, be it a dictator or a marketer.  

Single-use small kitchen appliances, recreation vehicles which lose their value quickly and either must be maintained, insured and licensed or they will become yard clutter,  big houses, luxury cars, vacation homes...nothing you need, and the satisfaction felt after acquiring them is brief.  We used to think we needed a television in every room; it became clear they were really just ugly and space-wasting dust catchers.  We keep reducing the number of cable TV channels, but can't just get down to the half dozen we actually watch, which is undoable and may lead to the return of the cable box someday.

Unfortunately, novelty and quantity trump quality for the most part in an overheated global economy.  Two examples why quality is always the best route to go:  I have my father's WWII uniform jacket, made by Hart Schnaffner Marx (officers buy their own uniforms) -- it still looks great, actually new, after all these years.  I had several pairs of Florsheim shoes and they were near perfect many decades after they had gone out of style.

Less stuff is so much more.  This fellow knew what is needed and what is not --

  

"Let me tell you about the bear necessities..." 

That's Just Silly

 

It surprised me that the Beatles didn't lose their popularity when their work went in unusual new directions after "Rubber Soul."  "Yellow Submarine,""Sergeant Pepper's" and "Magical Mystery Tour" sounded more like musical theater than what we were familiar with from the lads.   We had heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, but thought that to be antique and quite dead.  But that tradition was long (operetta, minstrel shows, commedia del 'arte, all the way to the scatological Roman popular stage) and lived on in all the media forms of the 20th century -- vaudeville, radio, movies and television.

The appeal of irreverence, satire and skewering bureaucracy and especially officiousness increases in trying times.  The tragic events and head-turning rate of change of the last 110 years called for an antidote in the repartee of Burns and Allen, the fast paced exchanges of Abbott and Costello, the madcap hijinks of the Marx brothers, Monty Python, Benny Hill and Robin Williams.  

The Beatles would have known about a fellow Liverpool native and multitalented singer, Tommy Handley, whose show "It's That Man Again" held the record for the largest radio audience ever.  It ran on the BBC from 1939 to 1949.  Absurdity reigned at 8:30 on Thursday nights, helping in no small way to get Britons through terrible times.

                                            

A  crew of 70 characters presented a rapid fire, up-to-the-minute topical comedy sketch show -- doesn't that seem a lot like "Saturday Night Live"?  One of the most popular, Mrs. Mopp, with all the double-entendres, had to have been the model for the randy Mrs. Slocombe on the 1970s television riot "Are You Being Served?"  Her famous tag line "TTFN" spoken as she ended a scene, went on to become part of the language.  Television and  movie characters have since had to have one ("Dynomite!" "All right all right all right" "Bond.  James Bond" -- the list is endless).  

Wherever it's found, we can always use a little silliness.   

  

     

   

Old Gold

 

When I was a boy, one of my favorite things was to hang out with Grandfather in his large detached garage.  It was his man-cave for sure, full of gardening and canning equipment, a small tractor or two, a .22 and a small-gauge shotgun, a detailed rain and weather log, onions drying on a suspended rack, pesticides that are banned today, and that corner stuffed with oil and gas cans with the smell of getting things done.  I once looked around and said, "You know, I really like old things."  With a big grin he replied, "Well, you must like the hell out of me, then!" 

It all went after he passed, but I did save the Maryland Graham Wafers tin from the kitchen because it was always there, reminded me of them (I always wondered when did they get it?) and had the appeal of great midcentury commercial design.  Today it is still in plain view and has a use again, holding the birdseed.  Someone might also save it one day, but what about all the knotted, crocheted and embroidered fabric items Grandmother made that we have had on tables for decades?  Without a story, and some little acquaintance with the person who created them, meaning is lost and they may be, too.

I admire antiques, but fortunately don't have the room for them.  What I really am drawn to, and have quite enough of, are old pieces of little value that ordinary people bought and used.  They have all been refinished (I guess all they had back then was varnish, but that is so ugly) and serve as well as they ever did.

Having two cassette decks with bad belts and many audio cassettes I didn't want to get rid of, I recently went to Just Audio in Middle River, Maryland where they not only repair old equipment but have a showroom full of that sort of thing, all restored.  Talk about a kid in a candy shop.  I traded in my two and when I saw a Kenwood deck from about 1985, I knew I'd made a new friend.  It now sits atop a receiver from 1986 and they look like twins.  The point of this seemingly unrelated story is that audio gear from the 1970s to mid-80s, the vintage stuff, is what I (more than) like.  I could have gotten a new machine for only a little more, but that's not for someone who "likes old things."

And just sometimes, the old comes back even better:

Play It Again

 

The previous post on the end of the Gaucho era leads to today's on the infamous Pincheira Brothers gang of the early 19th century; not just another tale of bad actors and rascals, it has a bigger point.

Royalists fighting against the independence movement in Chile, the brothers lost and took up a new career as bandidos, much like ex-Confederates did in the U.S. after heading west after 1865.  Mostly mestizos themselves, they allied with Native tribes such as the Boroanos to ravage Chile and Argentina, rustling and robbing.  The Natives were being hard pressed by General Juan Manuel Rosas conducting a war of extinction against them (at least 6,000 were killed).   As in our American West, the motive was to take their land for stock ranching and grain farming.  As usually happens, in these two arenas or even after the Norman conquest, a few thousand favored ones were given the land (and were very lightly taxed, as users of Federal grazing land in the West are charged little).  The gang (over 1,000 strong -- a considerable force) stole away to a hidden cave at the Andean foothills their pursuers could not find.  Just like Pennsylvania's Robber Lewis in a previous post.

               La Cueva de los Pincheira

This phenomenon of mass crime and disorder occurs again and again throughout history after wars as soldiers and sailors are discharged en masse, usually penniless and homeless.  The rise in piracy after a succession of European wars of empires is another clear example.

Another parallel:  Rosas held close to absolute power for 23 years (until 1852), not hesitating, along with his loyal wife Dona Encarnacion, to send out his thugs to intimidate and murder anyone expressing even a hint of opposition.  How they resemble the Perons a century later.  He was vengeful, cruel and popular, pursuing an aggressive and botched foreign and economic policy.  If that doesn't remind you of some of our own fearless leaders since 1980, this stands out: red was his theme color, and everyone fell in line wearing it on hats and clothing, waving banners as he passed by.

Below is a picture of Facundo Quiroga, the "Jaguar of the Plains," a powerful provincial Argentine warlord who was Rosas' ally until they fell out and Rosas had him assassinated.  He reminds one of rogue Republican state governors who defy Federal government today (he summarily rejected an earlier new national Constitution), and his fate is shared (minus the bloody end) by officials and hangers-on who  dare to deviate from total and unquestioning loyalty.   Not to their country or the idea of justice or democracy, but to a demagogue. 

 Human history, unfortunately, is like the same side of a recording being played over and over again.  

"They Don't Do That Anymore"

 

Ricardo Guiraldes, scion of a notable Argentine ranching family, saw the end of the gaucho way of life coming forty years ahead.  His novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926) idealized the cowboy era much like Zane Grey did for the North American West; an elegy for tradition passing away.  The story is based on real-life neighbor Segundo Ramirez.

Guiraldes wrote in the estate house, La Portena, of the 1500 acre estancia in the heart of cattle country near Areca until his death at age 42, and was affectionately known as the "voice of the gaucho."  

The gauchos wandered from job to job all over Argentina, supporting themselves in between on wild cattle and ostriches.  Their distinctive accoutrement of beret or Andalusian sombrero, baggy pants, large knife, poncho and scarf reminds me of the Cossacks, another hard-living brotherhood whose glory days are gone.   

 The urban and land owning elite of Argentina grew tired of the gauchos' drifting, drinking and lawlessness, working over decades to rein them in.  Like the wild and free clan life of the Scots highlanders,   it was soon after popularized and romanticized when the threat was removed.  The moment the gauchos must have known it was over came in the late 1960s with the last traditional cattle drive.  Five ranch hands drove around 400 cattle from San Antonio de Areco to the stockyards outside of Buenos Aires in three days.   Said one, "They don't do that anymore.  Now they put the cattle in big trucks."

Segundo Ramirez himself

     

The Point Is...

 

People have always rewritten or spun history to suit their point of view, the discoverable facts taking a back seat.   Engaging, made-up stories live on forever -- Nero certainly didn't fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome and likely didn't set it, as the popular tale goes.  There was a great worldwide flood and sea level rise as the Ice Age ended, but the story of Noah doesn't really explain that very well. I have several late 19th century U.S. history books; the common theme is we're heroes and everyone else inconviently got in the way.  It took getting  to Guns, Germs and Steel to see why and how things happened.

I think most of it can be interpreted, beyond events triggered by fear and hate, by considering two related factors:  control of trade and resources, and the millennia-old quest for free or very cheap labor.  Julius Caesar enslaved about a million Gauls, Middle Easterners  raided Africa constantly for the same reason, children worked in deadly factories and coal mines, and we in the New World had that Atlantic trade in humans running for centuries.

You won't find it in the Iliad or most accounts, but the Trojan War was about control of the lucrative trade between the Aegean and the Black Seas.  The Romans were motivated to eliminate those great traders, the Phoenicians, from the Mediterranean and the silver mines of Spain and despite passionate Senatorial speeches obscuring this goal, that was the reason for the three Punic Wars.  Commerce was everything to the Carthaginians and they were willing to fight for it until their utter destruction. 

 We learn in school that the War of 1812 was ignited by the kidnapping of Americans to serve in the British Navy; that was an important, but not the only, part of the war's close relationship to the Napoleonic conflicts.  More importantly, for Great Britain's blockade of European trade to work, they had to stop American commerce from crossing the Atlantic to France.  Resources were in contention also, as Britain also wanted control over the Great Lakes to be under Canada.  

After Napoleon abdicated in April 1814,  four invasion forces were freed up to put an end to a war that did not need to be pursued any longer.  All failed to achieve their main goals, (as at Ft. McHenry and New Orleans) while support for continuation faded rapidly among governments and the mercantile class.  As for the territory issue, the Empire was not going to keep American expansion out of the Lakes anyway.

World trade pursued peacefully and in good faith has had much better results historically than going to war to seize power over wealth.  But I wonder what the eventual outcome will be from Nixon's (really big business') opening up of China.