Welcome to my past.
I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays on Facebook.
Before long, readers started telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea, this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color, involved in over 200 (and counting) essays.
I next considered a website, but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing about 20-30 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size and/or eccentricities in spacing as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Welcome to my past.
(Photo by Laura Goldman)
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania to Booneville Arkansas; June, 1931
DAD’S FIRST ROAD TRIP,
Or,
WE AREN’T HIGH HAT!
Although he would have dearly loved to go home to Arkansas for a summer visit, this was the depths of the Great Depression; he was a scholarship student; and he just couldn’t afford a train or bus ticket.
They weren't High Hat.
As he sat on the front steps of his living quarters, quietly resigning himself to not seeing his family any time soon, he was accosted by another student, a muscularly cheerful guy named John Evans.
“Hey,” said John, “I heard you were wanting to go south. Me too—my folks are in Texas. What do you say we buy a car and drive there?”
Dad, being 19 years old, readily agreed to this plan. Since they had very little cash between them, the two lads began scouring nearby used-car lots for bargains. These were few until they happened on a place that appeared to deal in abused cars. They wandered around and kicked tires, and decided the most likely candidate was a 1925 Model-T Ford.
Which didn’t run.
The dealer, seizing his chance, offered to charge them $15 for it, get it running and throw in a free tire, on the condition that they never, ever bring it back.
Since the two boys were underage, and the college “in loco parentis,” they needed to get permission from the dean of students.
This august gentleman eventually gave them his blessing on the condition that they send him postcards along the way to reassure him (especially after he saw the car) that he wasn’t making a big mistake.
And thus, one fine June morning, off the two adventurers went, pumped up with great expectations, which were somewhat deflated when they discovered that their bargain car refused to go faster than 25 MPH.
They tried everything they could think of to increase their pace. Finally, in desperation and disgust, Dad performed a maneuver that he described in his memoirs as: “yanking the spark lever all the way down.”
The car leaped ahead, and to their delight they were able to achieve a breathtaking top speed of 40 MPH on the flat.
1925 Model T
On that first day, they drove 430 winding miles into Virginia, primarily so they could impress the dean by postcard.
In those days, it was apparently customary for kids who owned cars to cover them with crazy slogans, like “Watch My Dust!,” “23-Skidoo,” or “Free Rides for Ladies.”
Observing this, John suggested that they attach a large sign to the back of their car. It read: WE AREN’T HIGH HAT! (1930s slang for stuck-up, snobbish, or conceited).
This turned out to be a stroke of genius; everyone that passed them (and many did) offered a friendly wave or horn-toot.
Dad recalled that one woman in a chauffeured limousine was so charmed by the two boys and their sign that she got up on her knees to wave to them through her back window until they were out of sight.
When they stopped for whatever reason, people were glad to help out with an extra push, water from their wells, or just smiles and words of encouragement.
They soon developed strategies for dealing with the Ford’s eccentricities, parking, for instance, at the top of steep grades when they wanted to catch a few hours’ sleep. This allowed them to coast downhill and engage the clutch to start, thus avoiding the long exhausting chore of cranking the car’s temperamental engine.
Cars in the 1920s weren’t equipped with thermometers or temperature gauges, so the boys had to monitor the well-being of their engine by watching the exhaust pipe that ran under the passenger side (a former owner had thoughtfully removed the floorboards on that side for this purpose).
“When the exhaust pipe glowed a dull red,” Dad later wrote, “conditions were excellent. When it was cherry red, things were still tolerable. But when it turned bright red, it was time to stop and look for water.”
Their long drive through the mountains of Tennessee was a series of switchbacks and curves snaking around deep ravines. (One of these, filled with leaves, provided a comfy place for them to spread their blankets and catch a night’s sleep.)
Those crazy kids were fortunate in that the weather for their entire odyssey was warm and dry, as the car’s open cab (and ventilated floorboards) afforded scant protection from the elements.
The constant back-and-forth on those Tennessee switchbacks not only made them dizzy, but also took a toll on the old flivver. They stopped on one steep mountain road when the car began to vibrate strangely.
Checking the tires, they discovered that only one loose bolt on a wobbling rear wheel had been keeping them from a long drop into a deep valley. Luckily, they were both country boys who had been fixing old machinery since childhood.
They then arrived at a section of highway that had been “improved.” “The brains behind this ‘miracle of engineering’ (Dad wrote) “had apparently calculated its grade so that newer automobiles could navigate it easily in high gear.”
Their 1925 jalopy, however, had only a high and a low gear. The high gear was useless, and in low gear, they crept along at about 3 MPH.
Ever resourceful, they discovered that if one of them jumped out and ran alongside, they could remain in high. (Fortunately, both were strong and athletic—Dad was a track star, and John the college welterweight boxing champion.)
In some places, however, they BOTH had to get out and run alongside, with one of them steering the car with one hand. Passers-by found this highly amusing, and razzed and cheered them along with cries of “Get a horse!”
Eventually they made it safely to Booneville. John dropped Dad off and continued on to his hometown in Texas. He expressed no reservations about making the rest of the trip solo. “After all,” Dad wrote, “We’d pretty much been through it all.”
Arriving home without further mishap, John later reported that he’d driven the car throughout the summer, courted his future wife in it, and sold the noble vehicle to a friend for $12.50.
Dad didn’t mention how he got back to Lafayette— presumably his family scraped up train or bus fare—but he never forgot that eccentric and gallant 1925 Ford that “had only our determination and a jaunty sign on its backside to keep itself together.”
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Easton, Pennsylvania, 1950s; Sebastopol, California, 2025
GRATITUDE: A MEMORY IN CALLIGRAPHY
Recently I was searching for a quote by somebody or other on one of those online aphorism sites, and was struck by the words depicted in the photo at the end of this story.
Long ago, in the 1950s, I encountered a young girl named Susanna Gaertner in a ballet class, and we were so taken with each other that we remain friends to this day.
A tiny Susanna with her dad Johannes at Lafayette.
I also remembered meeting, on several occasions, her beloved “Papa,” who, from 1947 to 1977, was an author, artist, art educational theorist, and professor of art history at Lafayette College (my dad’s alma mater) in Easton, PA.
Susanna and her papa.
This gentle and courtly man would be described by his daughter in the introduction to his 1990 book WORLDLY VIRTUES (from which my quote originated) as: ”One of a dying breed: the European émigré humanist in whom vocation and avocation, learning for a living and living for learning, ran in perfect parallel harmony.”
I decided to celebrate this lovely coincidence in calligraphy—a tribute to a long friendship, a remarkable man, a gentle memory, and the mysteries of serendipity.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1950s; Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, California; 1976-1980 and 1994
STRANGLEWOODS: A SOMEWHAT TWISTED TALE OF LOVE AND STRANGENESS
When I was growing up on Mammy Morgan’s Hill, one of my favorite playgrounds was an 80-plus-acre swathe of pristine valley woodland belonging to our closest neighbors.
Google Earth reveals that my childhood playground woods (looking oddly bra-shaped) is still intact.
It contained everything an adventurous kid could want in a woods: a stream with actual waterfalls, in which one could move stones around to engineer wading pools; deer trails to follow; log bridges to navigate; jutting rocks where one could dig out hideouts and construct forts; even the occasional arrowhead to be found.
Me as a country kid.
Back then, my busy parents were refreshingly free of helicopter tendencies; as long as we kids showed up for meals, chores and family activities, we could pretty much go where we liked in the surrounding forests and fields.
One of my favorite sylvan activities in those days was hunting for “stranglewoods.” (I once heard a neighbor use the term, and have employed it ever since.) These living artifacts are created when young trees and vines such as bittersweet, wild grape, or honeysuckle compete for the same space, with the latter inevitably twining tightly around the former.
You can see the scars where the tree on th right has escaped strangling.
Sometimes the trees win this silent contest, growing fast enough to more or less shrug off the competition. Otherwise, you’re likely to get stranglewoods, elegantly twisted forms created in the soft sapling wood by the inexorable tightening of the vines.
In the mid-1970s, in my second year of creating the Renaissance Faire character of “Mad Maudlen,” I began to envision her, in her endlessly wandering state, as a pilgrim. And, as in illustrations of the period, I pictured her as carrying a staff.
I forget exactly how Maudlen’s first staff, a delicately flared and fluted length of sassafras wood, got from Pennsylvania to California, but it proved the perfect accessory, helping me to navigate barefoot over rough spots, and adding yet another subtle layer of strangeness to the character.
When I left to take a job on the east coast several years later, I passed the staff on to artist and sundial-meister Gino Schiavone, who had always admired it.
In 1994, I received a request from the Faire promoters to re-create the role of Maudlen that fall, and was delighted to accept. On a visit to my parents in Pennsylvania during the summer, I mentioned to my dad, who, in his retirement years, had begun crafting unusual items from unusual pieces of wood, that I was in need of a new staff.
Dad, as it happened, had become as fascinated by stranglewoods as I was, and had even taken to creating his own, substituting lengths of clothesline for vines, and patiently waiting years for the results. He disappeared into his workshop and emerged with a five-foot-long six-twist length of oak that had grown considerably before losing the battle with a grapevine.
With Dad and his collection of odd walking sticks.
We cleaned it up, trimmed and smoothed the ends, embedded a tiny pilgrim’s seashell into the top, and shipped it off to San Francisco. It and Maudlen navigated the Faire wonderfully.
Not long after that, an accident left me with a broken leg. During my recovery, when I still needed a cane to walk, I received another long thin parcel from Dad. He’d turned one of his manufactured stranglewoods into a sturdy walking stick, complete with leather strap, thumb-rest, and my name meticulously carved into the handle.
Sometimes love, like strangeness, comes with a twist.
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(A NEW) THROWBACK THURSDAY: Versailles, France, 1750; Sebastopol, California, 2010-Present
GOOGLING FOR TREASURE/GETTING THE BIRD
Back in 2010, I began volunteering at the wonderful Sutter Hospice Thrift Store in Sebastopol. Around here, when you admire a piece of clothing or jewelry, you might get the reply: “This? Oh, I got it at Hospice,” as if it were a brand name, like Target or Tiffany’s.
Light and airy at Halloween
Located in a former department store in a shopping center, the Hospice store is light, airy, colorful and tasteful, a far cry from the musty jammed warehouses of my thrifting youth.
A summer display
The small city of Sebastopol, in the heart of Sonoma County wine country, is a friendly, upwardly mobile and generous place. which explains why, seven days a week at 10:00 AM, a line of donation-crammed vehicles forms in the parking lot behind the Hospice store, and bags and boxes of potential items for sale pour into its back room. Although the official time-frame for this activity is listed as 10AM-1PM, donations are often cut off early, simply because there’s just nowhere else to put them.
I must say that volunteering at Hospice is a three-times rewarding activity: helping the community, retail therapy, and a lively social scene, with both the constant stream of customers and with a volunteer and managerial staff full of colorful (and competent) eccentrics.
The Thursday backroom gang
I started out straightening clothing on racks, re-hanging dropped garments, and policing dressing rooms, and eventually migrated from cashiering to the ongoing treasure-hunt in the back room; this is where decisions are made as to which items are new, like-new, seasonal, valuable, relevant and/or otherwise special enough to go out onto the sales floor.
Unlike Goodwill Industries, Hospice doesn’t have space or facilities to repair and launder clothing and linens, so items with stains, musty or overly perfume-y odors, missing buttons, rips, split seams, etc., are saved for an organization that deals with these flaws and provides clothing for needy people in Ecuador. (On a smaller scale, facilitated by willing volunteers, some items go to local homeless shelters.)
Amidst all the donations, which can range from bags crammed full of grimy mildewed rejects to brand-new items with tags still on them, we get an amazing amount of valuable stuff—collections of designer clothing, art, jewelry, etc. left over from estate sales, leaving-town discards, lifestyle changes, or de-cluttering projects.
The two most common questions one is likely to hear from volunteers sorting through the flood of clothing and objects are:
“Who ever thought THAT was a good idea?”
And, more commonly,
“What the hell IS that?”
For years, we depended on our own experience and various types of personal volunteer expertise in fashion, jewelry, handbags, shoes, books, electronics, toys, artwork, ceramics, vintage objects, etc.
And for years, we received bits of feedback about objects purchased for a few dollars that turned out to be worth MUCH more. All we could do was shrug and return to the stream of donations pouring through.
Then somebody discovered Google Lens™, an app available free to anybody with Google on their phone. (I’m still surprised at how many people haven’t heard of it.)
Google Lens allows you to take a photo of an object, select settings like “Identify,” “Translate,” and “Shop,” and AI will respond with a photostream of the same or close-to identical objects, usually with prices shown; links to where they can be seen or purchased; and an automated opinion on what you’ve got there, like ANTIQUES ROADSHOW without having to wait in line.
Armed with this technology, more quickly than you might believe, we began discovering hidden treasures: commemorative T-shirts selling for $200 on Etsy or eBay; belt buckles made by famous silversmiths; high-priced antique dolls mingled with headless Barbies; pieces of Tiffany jewelry culled from baggies full of tangled costume junk.
We don’t, of course, charge anywhere near the actual value of these discoveries (we are, after all, a thrift store), but we can get a bit more than we'd ask for a run-of-the-mill item in our quest to help fund the county’s hospice services.
Of course, once I realized that this technology was available on my own phone, I went around my house Google-Lensing any interesting-looking object—I have many—and finding some surprising treasures.
Eventually I got around to a handsome engraving of a hawk-like bird that used to hang just inside the living-room door in the house where I grew up. My dad had acquired it at a farm auction in the late 1930s or early '40s; my mother later put it in a larger frame, and I eventually wound up with it.
Here’s the online description:
"'Le Milan Noir' is a hand-colored lithograph of the black kite, or MILVUS MIGRANS, from HISTOIRE NATURELLE DES OISEAUX edited by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French polymath and head of the royal botanical gardens under Louis XV.. The lithograph was engraved by French engineer, engraver and naturalist François-Nicolas Martinet and the volume was published in 1770.
"The book includes a description of the black kite and a hand-colored plate of the bird, a raptor that lives in tropical regions of Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia."
I didn’t want to try to take apart my mother’s framing, which is pretty much held together by duct tape and thumbtacks, but on checking the piece closely with a magnifying glass, I could see that it was rendered on a fine watercolor-type paper, and note the texture changes and small unevenness caused by the application of watercolors. Yes, our family "Black Kite" is not a print, but the real deal, a 275-year-old hand-colored engraving.
If you compare it with one that was auctioned off at Sotheby’s (see below), you can see small differences in the shading at the edges of the tail, the top of the wings, the throat, and the beak, as well as on the log on which the kite perches. The all-over difference in color saturation can be explained by the fact that the Sotheby’s bird still appears to be in the original book, while ours has been hanging around outside, guarding Hill doors for at least 80 years.
I have no plans to sell or exhibit Le Milan Noir; I just kind of like the idea that a museum piece hangs on the wall inside my doorway, well out of the sun’s rays, as it did in our family home all those years ago.
So here’s my advice: get yourself some Google Lens, and go on your own treasure hunt.
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Another New THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, Northern California, and Seven Continents
OOPS!
Or
YOUR TATTOO? YEAH, IT’S PROBABLY ALL MY FAULT
Although in other geographical areas (e.g. Japan, Polynesia, Borneo, Hawaii, and Samoa) it was celebrated as an art, a ritual, even an honor, in the USA tattooing was frequently condemned as a shadowy bastard craft, mostly associated with drunken servicemen, circus freaks, felons, outlaws, scofflaws, and other forms of degenerate lowlife.
It seemed to take place primarily in waterfront dives, back alleys, prisons, and semi-legal and unregulated “parlors” located in seedy neighborhoods, practiced by tough guys who tattooed under nicknames like: “Sailor,” “Tatts,” “Doc,” “Pop,” and “Prof.” To make things worse, in the 1960s, tattooing was adopted by biker gangs as a tribal bonding/initiation ritual.
Nice people? Well, they didn’t get tattooed, and avoided scrupulously (or persecuted) those who did.
Enter Lyle Tuttle.
A country boy born in in Iowa in 1931 to a conservative family, Lyle acquired his first tattoo at the age of 14, ditched high school, and never looked back. After a stint in the Marines, he began tattooing professionally in 1949, spending the next few years apprenticing, learning to design and build tattooing machines (you couldn’t just buy one), and working in various parlors.
Lyle as a young hunk.
He opened his own studio at the corner of Seventh and Market Streets in San Francisco in 1960. From this point on, he embarked on a series of adventures and activities that would eventually earn him the honorary title of: “The Father of Modern Tattooing.”
For one thing, his shop was large, bright, airy, and scrupulously clean. A sign in front read “Welcome Art Lovers.” Part of the layout was dedicated to an informational Tattoo History Museum filled with photos and momentos of the craft’s early days and of Lyle’s predecessors.
With Tim Page and Karen Lucius at the entrance to the 7th St. studio in 1973.
Visitors could take in examples and explanations of antique tattooing machines and implements, along with exhibits of “flash”—early artists’ design illustrations from which their customers could choose.
As his business grew, Lyle began to lobby the City of San Francisco and the State of California to institute standards of health and safety for tattoo practitioners,
and as the 1970s rolled around, his lifestyle and designs began to change with the times.
After singer Janis Joplin displayed her newly acquired tattooed bracelet and raved about Lyle on the Dick Cavett Show, a Tuttle tattoo suddenly became one of the latest “cool” accessories in emerging hip music and entertainment circles.
Janis Joplin and Dick Cavett
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9RU9TQsFw6s (Janis Joplin and Dick Cavett; Warning: lots of naughty language)
Lyle went on to tattoo, among others, singers Cher, Joan Baez, and Jo Baker; actor Peter Fonda; all of the Allman Brothers band; members of the Grateful Dead; and Paul Stanley of the group Kiss.
With his rugged good looks, sharp and folksy sense of humor, and unexpected scholarly intellect, Lyle found himself a demi-celebrity, in demand for talk shows, fine arts festival panels, and society parties.
He posed in the altogether for noted photographer Imogen Cunningham, and for Annie Leibovitz (on a ROLLING STONE holiday card), wearing nothing but his tattoos, a string of lights, a strategically placed star, and a smile.
He parlayed his machine-crafting skills into jewelry-making, designing an entire line of skull-themed jewelry for the Grateful Dead, and incorporating tattoo images into silver body décor.
He began to travel; he lectured at arts symposia in Europe; was inducted as a Chief with a traditional waist-to-knee “Pe’a” tattoo in Samoa; hobnobbed with Beatles in London; and sat in with famed skin artists in Japan. He would eventually be the first person to tattoo on all seven continents, including, in 2014, Antarctica.
Psychedelic flash
All of this was mostly in his future back in 1971, when I was writing articles for ROLLING STONE and always on the lookout for ideas. Encountering a female RS staff member with a bracelet tattoo inspired by Janis Joplin’s. I thought: “Hmmm, there’s got to be a story here.”
I wound up getting a ring tattoo (see photo below), a ROLLING STONE cover story, and a four-decade friendship with Lyle, eventually writing a number of articles about him for other magazines.
Then, in 1972, when my friend Karen Thorsen was a junior editor at LIFE magazine, I introduced her to Mr. Tuttle. She, too, immediately saw the story potential, and in March of that year, a lavish photo-essay called “Skin Game” appeared in LIFE.
It included a double-page spread showcasing the “Lyle Tuttle Bodyshirt,” a faithful reproduction of his lavishly inked upper half. (That shirt, now a collector’s item, will cost you big bucks online.)
The article featured photos of singer Jo Baker, artist Judith Weston, and me, all tastefully displaying our tats. Another page contained, oddly, a collection of cropped tattooed body parts—Karen explained that their owners had been deemed too “hippie-looking” for LIFE readers.
Pre-cropping
By the next year, according to Lyle, it was clear that an entirely new population had opened up to tattooing. Where previously this form of adornment, as far as women were concerned, had been limited to sideshow “tattooed ladies” and biker chicks, now over half of his clients were female.
Jo Baker
Me
Judith Weston
Nowadays it’s gotten to the point where your favorite movie star, musician, or sports hero, your dental hygienist, your kids’ third-grade teacher, hell, even your grandmother, might be sporting one or more tattoos.
The Father of Modern Tattooing
“It used to be something special, having a tattoo,” Lyle mock-grumbled the last time I saw him, shortly before his passing in 2019 at age 87, “like being in a tribe. Now they’re just everywhere.”
“And it’s all YOUR fault,” he continued, “you and that ROLLING STONE thing. You started it.”
Well, maybe; after all, who was I to contradict the Father of Modern Tattooing?
Personally, I prefer to blame Dick Cavett.
The Original article, complete with ads:
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AN AMBITIOUS THROWBACK THURSDAY: London, England; Leicestershire, England; and Dublin, Ireland; 18th Century; Sebastopol, California 2019-2025
REVISIONIST FAMILY HISTORY
Or,
A VERY ODD BROMANCE
For some time now, I’ve been a fan of the brilliant podcast REVISIONIST HISTORY, in which zeitgeister Malcolm Gladwell investigates “overlooked and misunderstood” events of past history in the light of hindsight.
Little did I know, when I wrote the Throwback Thursday below years ago, that it would provide an opportunity for me to create a Revisionist History episode of my very own.
This all started a few weeks ago, when I happened upon a library book called EVERY VALLEY: THE DESPARATE LIVES AND TROUBLED TIMES THAT MADE HANDEL’S MESSIAH, by Charles King.
(Incidentally, there’s actually no such word as “desparate.” I assume it’s an intentional portmanteau word combining “desperate”— meaning hopeless— and “disparate,” meaning things not related to each other. Both are oddly apt here.)
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So, here’s the original TBT:
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A MUSICAL OFFERING, Or,
WHAT MY 7X GREAT-UNCLE CHARLES AND HIS GOOD FRIEND GEORGE GOT UP TO IN THE SUMMERHOUSE
Once upon a time, long before my 8X great-grandfather William Jennings arrived in the Virginia Colony (around 1690) as a captain in the British Army, my paternal grandmother's ancestors had become, to put it politely, stinking rich.
The family fortune, dating from the 16th century, was derived from the iron trade, and G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Granddad William was the 10th child of 13 sired by Humphrey Jennings, Esq., who loved to invest in property, at the height of his career owning 17 towns and other properties in Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Yeah, rich.
Although 8XG-Dad William made out OK in Humphrey’s will, it was William’s oldest brother Charles who (as was usual in those times) got most of the land and loot, including a fine country house called Gopsall Hall in northwest Leicestershire.
In the fullness of time, the now-very-wealthy Charles Jennens (the spelling he preferred) and his wife Mary Cary Jennens had a son, also called Charles.
Along with having inherited the family flair for making and keeping money, the younger Charles was a bachelor gentleman scholar who loved to dress well (check out all that elegantly frogged green velvet in the portrait below), and hang with writers, artists and musicians.
Charles Jennens (1700-1773)
An 18th-Century engraving of Gopsall Hall, with the "summerhouse," (actually a temple) at left.
Among other extravagances, Charles Jennings commissioned a fancy summerhouse on the grounds of the Hall, and had a full-sized pipe organ installed in it for the use of his good friend George, another confirmed bachelor who liked to dress well.
George
One day in July of 1741, Charles gave George a new libretto for an oratorio.
"Thanks," said George," This looks good; I'll put some music to it."
The resulting collaboration debuted at an Easter charity event in Dublin on April 13th, 1742. Although its initial reception was so-so, this piece generated some good buzz (especially that catchy chorus), and has survived to this day.
Gopsall Hall (now Gopsall Park Farm) currently belongs to the British Crown.
The portraits of Charles and George below, both by Thomas Hudson, belong to the Handel House Collections Trust.
Their MESSIAH belongs to the ages
I want this on a T-shirt.
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THE REVISIONS
1. A DIFFICULT CENTURY
So here’s where the revising and amplifying starts. It helps to remember that all this took place in the 18th century, in times at least as extreme and troubled as our own.
I’m talking about, among other dire events: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); the Seven Years' War (1756–1763); the American Revolution (1775–1783); the French Revolution (1792–1802): a major financial crisis known as the “South Sea Bubble” (1720): the beginnings of the agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and the bloody Jacobite Rebellions (1715 and 1745), that followed the transfer of the throne of England to the Hanoverian Dynasty (1714).
This was also a century of raging slave trade (which, ironically, flourished side by side with an intellectual movement known as the “Enlightenment”); the rise of the Abolitionist movement; the experiments of Sir Isaac Newton; and the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, not to mention famines, pestilences, cockfights, bear-baiting and Italian opera.
And, of course, the music of Handel.
2. WHO’S YOUR GRANDPA?
THE FIRST REVISION to the original TBT above is the family relationship, here “untangled” by AI, and still pretty confusing:
[My 8X great-grandad] William Henry Jennings (1676–1775) was the paternal uncle of librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773), and was the brother of the librettist’s father, Charles Jennens Sr. (1662-1747).
AI sez:
You are your 8X great-grandfather's nephew's first cousin, once removed. This is because his nephew is your distant great-great-uncle, making you first cousins, but then with a difference of one generation.
Well, I’m glad we cleared THAT up.
3. THE ORGAN IN THE SUMMERHOUSE
It’s a long-standing online tale, but turns out to be more like an urban (or rural) legend. Charles did have a pipe organ constructed to Handel’s specifications, but it was part of an enormous renovation of Gopsall Hall (in the then-trendy Palladian style) In 1747.
The Palladian Gopsall Hall
That was the year that Charles Sr. passed on and Charles Jr., already wealthy in his own right, inherited the legendary Jennings fortune. It was also a year after the death of one of Charles’ few close and dear friends, the poet and classical scholar Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746).
As part of the renovation process, Charles decided to construct a grand classical temple in honor of his friend. This imposing edifice, located some distance from the house, collapsed in 1835 as a result of exposure and neglect, its ornate carvings and statuary long since carried off to museums and private collections.
The temple remains in 2024
“Over the years,” writes historian King, “[the temple ruins] became so much of a local landmark that a legend grew up around their most famous association.
“Today, a fading tourist placard gets its history spectacularly, exquisitely wrong: ‘George Frideric Handel is said to have closeted himself inside the Temple for 3 weeks in August/September 1741 to write his masterpiece “The Messiah.’”
Not.
He composed it in his house in London.
The Handel House on Brook St., London
4. OF BROS AND MAGGOTS
Firstly, there’s no question that Charles Jennens was a total Handel fanboy.
red chalk, 1760s.
GFH first traveled to London from Germany in late 1710, for the production of his opera RINALDO. Following its great success, he returned to his role as kapellmeister (musical director/composer) to George Louis, then Elector of Hanover.
Two years later, George Louis, unexpectedly and through a series of genealogical shenanigans, became George I of England.
Another George.
Handel settled permanently in England in 1712, and became a naturalized British citizen in 1727. He wrote and produced operas in the Italian style and held various royal commissions, such as those that resulted in his “Water Music” and “Fireworks Music,” as part of spectacles designed to establish the new monarch in the eyes of the populace.
Charles, like many others, was blown away by Handel’s genius. Unlike many superfans, however, he had an actual means of getting close to his new idol: money.
Handel was an immense talent who always seemed to be in need of cash for his lavish opera productions. Charles had not only an immense fortune, but, as it turned out, a flair for assembling quotations from scripture and poetry to create oratorios, which, being sung from a stage without costumes or scenery, were a lot cheaper to produce.
Beginning in 1725 with the opera RODELINDA, Charles began financing the publication of Handel’s musical scores as they appeared. Then, around 1735, he sent his musical crush his own libretto for an oratorio called “Saul.”
He was everywhere.
Charles was in his early 30s and Handel in his late 40s when they likely first met in person, sometime around the late 1730s, to collaborate on the production of “Saul."
They would go on to work together, probably on “Israel in Egypt” (1738–39), and certainly on “L'Allegro, il Penseroso et il Moderato” (1740–41); “Messiah” (1741–42); and “Belshazzar” (1744–45).
The two men developed what historian King describes as a "continuous but contentious friendship." Fanboy or no, Charles was downright persnickety about the use of his texts. By all reports, he often snippily intervened in the composition process, scribbling changes directly onto Handel's manuscripts and complaining about the "maggots" (twiddley improvisations and/or misplaced phrases) he saw in them.
Charles wrote to a friend: "I shall show you a collection I gave Handel, called ‘Messiah,’ which I value highly. He has made a fine entertainment of it, though not near so good as he might and ought to have done. I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition; but he retained his overture obstinately, in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the ‘Messiah.’”
Far from resenting this interference, Handel's willingness to restore the "Hallelujah" chorus to its original position in the “Messiah,” and to make other suggested improvements in his work, shows he valued Charles's input, even when it was not-so-adoring. Their long connection went well above and beyond an artist’s mere flattering of a wealthy patron.
Handel's surprisingly tidy letter to Charles with pipe organ specifications.
After the “Messiah”'s first performance in Dublin in 1742, Handel referred to it in a letter to Charles as "your oratorio Messiah," and conveyed respect for the text and for Charles’ contribution. They would continue this odd-couple friendship for the rest of their lives. Neither married, nor was known to engage in relationships with women.
Portrait bust of Georg Frideric Handel by Louis-Francois Roubillac
Historians opine (according to AI) that the intensely sociable Handel was probably gay, though deeply closeted, since homosexuality was punishable by death in that era. Charles Jennens, on the other hand, was most probably not homosexual, just misanthropic and misogynistic, except, apparently, with certain artists and scholars whom he hosted at Gospall Hall.
(And one can only imagine his reaction had he known that a distant relative would be publicly discussing his sexuality three centuries later.)
Handel died in 1759, aged 74, obese, near-blind, and mourned throughout Europe. Charles, though profoundly saddened and unsettled by the loss of his friend and collaborator, continued his literary and artistic pursuits, preparing critical editions of Shakespeare's plays, developing extensive collections of rare music manuscripts and paintings by old masters, and making changes and additions to his beloved Gopsall Hall.
5. THE TRAGEDY OF GOPSALL HALL
Gopsal Hall in decline.
After Charles’s passing in 1773 at age 73, the Hall went to a grand-nephew, and got passed down in the Curzon family from owner to noble owner.
In the following centuries, it housed distinguished guests, such as King William IV’s widow, Queen Adelaide (1772-1849); King Edward VII (1831-1910); Queen Alexandra (1844-1925); Kaiser Wilhelm II (1849-1941); and Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
A turn-of-the-century gathering at Gopsall Hall to celebrate the coming of age of one of the Lords Curzon.
Eventually, however, the estate and Hall, being ruinously expensive to maintain, fell upon hard times. In 1919, the 4th Earl Howe sold it to a wealthy businessman, Baron Waring, who disposed of it it piecemeal to the Crown Estate (the property-holding branch of the British Monarchy) between 1927 and 1932.
Gopsall Hall was never to be a stately home again; it was shut up until the Second World War when it became the No. 1 Radio Mechanics School of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) who used the house and estate as an experimental radar base from 1942 until 1945.
In 1951, the Hall was demolished in an ill-conceived wave of postwar destruction of declining mansions, and the site is now used as a glamping site and RV storage park. Handel's pipe organ found a home in a nearby church, and the art and music manuscripts had long since been dispersed to museums and private collections.
This destruction of a building that dated (the original structure) back to the 11th century ("Gopsall" is an Old Saxon word meaning "Hill of the Servants") and William the Conquerer’s “Domesday Book” was later termed “a tragedy” by historians and architectural scholars.
It's probably a good thing for all those glampers, however, that Charles was buried in the Jennings family vault 15 miles away in the next county.
Otherwise, they might have to contend with one VERY grumpy ghost.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: The US South, Southwest and West; Summer 1961
SKETCHING THE WEST (KIND OF)
In 1961, my family went on a six-week odyssey that’s enshrined in our history as “the Western Trip.”
We happened to hit Disneyland on July 4th, and almost had the place to ourselves because everybody else assumed it would be crowded. Then we visited San Francisco and Berkeley, where my Uncle Jim and his family were on a sabbatical from Cornell, and living in a house where Carl Jung had stayed on visits to the University. Then up the coast on Route 1, etc., etc.
It was quite the long haul, and then as now, I tended to crave a lot of “alone time”—hard to come by when traveling as a family pod.
My go-to tactic became wandering off and ensconcing myself behind my sketchbook, rendering my own unconventional take on the places we visited. (I should mention that at the time, I tended to draw a lot of cartoon mice.)
Recently, going through some stored memorabilia, I found a collection of musty sketchbooks, dating from 1959 to 1962. (I stopped drawing when I got to college and roomed with students doing “Serious Art.”)
Among the sketches were those I’d made on the Western Trip. About the same time, my brother, who was 11 in 1961, sent me a collection of my dad’s wonderful photos from that summer.
How could I not combine some of them?
(Note: Although Dad took some spectacular shots of scenery, I've mostly used human-interest pics here.)
Taking off in the Ford Fairlane
On a beach somewhere. I frequently attracted little kibitzers, so I drew these kids...
A whale in pajamas.
More kids. One of our most interesting stops was at Acoma (ACK-oh-ma), the oldest continuously inhabited town in North America, located on top of a high mesa in New Mexico. We happened to arrive on the occasion of a festival that included games on horseback.
These kids were teasing their little brother about falling off of his pony, so I memorialized the event.
My brother David (foreground), sister Sue and me at a roadside stop. I was clowning around about taking a jump. Sue was a blonde that summer.
This bear at Yosemite...
...inspired the above drawing.
...on the wildlife.
Four on the road: me my mother, brother David, Dad.
Somewhere in Texas
We thought this was a big tree until we hit the California redwoods.
At the Grand Tetons
Grand Canyon artist...
...and the product.
Sue meets a Sanitary Engineer.
Disneyland
Dad gets frisky at Knott's Berry Farm.
Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Little girl, Chinatown, San Francisco.
We split up toward the end of the trip; my dad having business at home, and I, needing to prepare for my stay as an exchange student in Germany, flew cross-country (my first time in an airplane), and my mother, Sue and David drove back to Pennsylvania.
Dad had wanted to give us a memorable trip. That he did.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; February, 1964
SHE LOVES YOU, Or,
A SIGN OF THE TIMES
(Although it was rambling, musty, and located in a particularly dicey area at the very edge of the campus, Sherbrooke was actually a step up from my freshman living unit, Washington Arms, an erstwhile fleabag hotel popularly referred to as “The Armpit.”)
The Armpit
Among the Sherbrooke residents were quite a few art students, distinguishable by their ever-present portfolios and tackle boxes full of art supplies, and their unconventional swoopy garments—the rest of us were trotting about meekly in pleated skirts, crewnecks, knee socks and penny loafers.
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| Arty Types, early 1960s |
One of the more swoopy of the art gang was a young woman named Sue, a free spirit and wild dresser with close-cropped brown hair topped with a blonde wig that, as she informed us, was called “Murgatroyd” when she was drunk, and “Elizabeth” when she was sober.
This hairpiece almost seemed to have a social life of its own, as Sue was wont to leave it here and there all over campus, often to be returned to Sherbrooke by some male art student, fraternity lad or sports hero (Sue had wisely equipped Murgatroyd/Elizabeth with a discreet sewn-inside name-and-address tag.)
Sue was the first among us to sniff out the beginnings of Beatlemania, even before the Liverpudlians’ landmark appearance on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW in February of ’64.
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| The boys |
She celebrated the Fab Four far and wide throughout the dorm, with posters on the walls, stickers on the windows, and the strains of “She Loves You” on repeat blasting from her open doorway.
If she thought you deserved it, you would be invited to join a select group in her room to listen to more obscure cuts like “Anna,” “Till There Was You,” and “Don’t Bother Me.”
The culmination of her devotional campaign was an event recorded by a photo in a local newspaper, with the following caption:
“’Beatlemania’ has hit the SU campus, and the British boys might be flattered to know that a dormitory has adopted their name. Residents of the former Sherbrooke Apartments at 950 Madison St. voted at a Sunday night house meeting, to call their living center ‘Beatle Brooke.’”
It didn’t last long, but oh Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
I even had a quasi-Beatle haircut. (Photo by Chan Rudd)
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Boston Massachusetts; July 4th, 1976
SO HE USED CANNONS
One of my all-time favorite Fourth-of-July moments came in 1976, with a PBS Bicentennial broadcast of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra playing the heck out of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”
They expected 25,000 people. They got a LOT more. In this rare video (the PBS coverage was better), there’s a warm-up with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” odd footage of an uneasy commentator who thinks he’s off-camera, and then the main event. (If you don’t want to sit through the beginning, the real fireworks start at about 15 minutes in.)
I’ll never forget it: full orchestra sawing and blowing and banging away; howitzers blasting from barges on the Charles River; churchbells ringing throughout the city of Boston; fireworks erupting, and 750,000 spectators on their feet screaming as if they were at a rock concert.
And in the middle of it, in his shirtsleeves but barely breaking a sweat, Maestro Arthur Fiedler, calmly conducting as all hell breaks loose.
Now THAT's a Fourth of July party.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: 1970s Swingin' London, England; Sebastopol, California, 2020s
PIRATES BANNED BY THE BBC, Or,
SQUATTING 101: A GUY NAMED JOE
My friend Arnold Martin David Levine is a slight, bespectacled, soft-spoken Englishman. Meeting him, one would never suspect that he once, long ago and far away, had a career as a nefarious pirate and notorious fugitive from justice.
Arnold
Anyone who has seen the wonderful film PIRATE RADIO is familiar with the tale of the rock ‘n roll “ship pirates” who broadcast the “degenerate” music of the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and other breakout stars of the early-to-mid 1960s while anchored out past the three-mile limit in international waters off the coast of England.
These brave ships were legally scuttled in 1967 by the Marine Offences Act, a law backed by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC or “The Beeb”).
The Beeb, which held a legal monopoly on the airwaves, considered rock “an abomination,” and not only refused to broadcast the very music that was establishing Britain as a powerhouse on the music scene, but also made it a crime for anyone else to do so.
Here; delight yourself with the film’s official trailer:
What many people don’t realize is that, after the pirate-radio ships disappeared, daring bands of “land-pirates,” broadcasting illegally from ever-changing locations, sprang up and stealthily undertook to carry on their mission.
This was an even more dangerous undertaking, as there was no longer a body of water between the land-pirates and the trackers and police units tasked with conducting search-arrest-and-destroy forays.
This five-star Amazon review by Englishman R. Wells provides a lovely precis of these events:
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“Remember growing up as a teenager in the '60s and 70s? An amazing time for rock and roll. Great music everywhere! Except London.
“Tuning across the radio dial brought you a grand total of four (yes, FOUR) radio stations, each programmed by the Government's BBC, in typical Government fashion. All quite upstanding and tame. The Beatles couldn't be heard in their Home Country!
“Enter ‘Pirate Radio’.
“The forbidden music was first broadcast from ships anchored far off-shore, and then by land-based pirates like Arnold Levine and his band of rag-tag radio scofflaws, the creators of “Radio Concord.”
Oh, the glamor of radio pirating! This photo, taken in a temporary makeshift squatted studio, was used in a newspaper article, so Arnold's face (L) is carefully blocked out.
“To avoid police raids, they had to move their operation from one place to another, often at a moment's notice. And, escape the Rozzers they did, most of the time.
“A well-told mix of English life and times, adventure, a bit of sex, some drugs and lots of rock 'n' roll! Related in a most charming fashion in the Author's native tongue. Not to worry, there's a glossary at the back of the book.
“So, settle down with a cuppa, some bikkies and a good story!”
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And here’s another:
“Levine does a wonderful job of showing what it was really like to be part of a pirate radio station in London, trying to free the airwaves from the tight control of the BBC.
“We follow him over rooftops, running from the cops, connecting with similar souls, meeting famous musicians and being on the cutting-edge of London culture in the 1960s and 70s.
“His radio shows become more political as he connects with a cast of characters from all walks of life, always aiming to create a more humane society. In our world of screens right now, this is a riveting, humorous and refreshing read!" (Louise Nayer)
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…and one more:
“This is a memoir by a pirate with an engineering degree, a Jewish Englishman with a plum exterior (scratch the surface of Sacha Baron Cohen and out pops Borat), a shy young man who falls into bad company and quickly becomes bad company, stringing wires in nunneries and posh London homes of friends of friends to broadcast rock-and-roll throughout London.
“At that time the BBC was the only thing on the air and illegal broadcasters were tracked down by a special squad, backed by the London police….
Rich with the flavor of the sixties/seventies rock-and-roll scene, as viewed from behind the plum curtain of BBC censorship, and how the lads pulled it back by hook or crook.” (Daniel A. Lee)
Arnold was thrilled when this photo, taken in someone's kitchen, appeared in MELODY MAKER magazine with his face blacked out.
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But what is this book these folks are so enthusiastic about, and how did it come to be written?
Well, here’s what happened: I had known Arnold for years as a mild-mannered structural-engineering consultant who hosted a weekly show on KOWS-FM Community Radio.
One day around 2019, I knocked on his home-office door and found him bent over what looked like a thick manuscript. I naturally inquired about it.
“Oh, it’s just some stuff I’ve written down about the days when I was a radio pirate.”
???????
“May I read it?”
“Oh, sure.”
I took the pages home and devoured them almost in one sitting. “Arnold,” I said, “This is going to be a book. And I’m going to edit it.” BANNED BY THE BBC, the book reviewed so enthusiastically above, was published in 2021.
Here’s just one of its riveting tales; but first, a little backstory:
1970s London, which had been heavily bombed during WWII, was suffering a severe housing shortage for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the many young people attracted to the vibrant scene known as “Swinging London.”
By the middle of the decade, Arnold’s pirate station, Radio Concord (co-founded as a lark with his childhood friend Jeffrey Schwartz, and abetted by a wild collection of colorful eccentrics), had become one of the most influential in the country. Eventually they were approached by leaders of the “squatting” movement.
Squatting, simply defined, means taking over an abandoned structure and living in it without permission of the owner. Now outlawed, at that point it was actually legal, due to a statute dating back to the Magna Carta.
Squatting Stonehenge, mostly naked.
It was, however, a bit of a precarious lifestyle, as many of the buildings were owned by landlords who had boarded them up rather than pay for costly repairs, and could send police to evict squatters at will. The powerful Squatters’ Movement provided a central clearing-house for those needing shelter, legal aid, medical help, and other forms of assistance.
Radio Concord soon became the official “Squatters’ Radio” station, interspersing their music programming with relevant news, interviews, and information. Here, from the pages of his book, Arnold describes an encounter from those days, one that he still fondly remembers as: “perhaps my most exciting pirate-radio musical achievement.”
Here's Arnold:
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"In the London of this era, music was still the key binding factor in all the new street movements, and the squatting movement was no exception. Just as Concord was known as the “Squatters’ Radio,” there was an unofficial “Squatters’ Band” called the “101’ers;” inevitably, we were destined to meet.
"[One day] three of us went to their eponymous 101 Elgin Avenue squat, where the band lived communally on all four levels of the old house. As we talked, the musicians began to see the advantage of radio exposure on Concord, since there was no chance of any play for them on the BBC.
"We all got on very well, and planned some live and taped broadcasts of their performances. As a great bonus, they all agreed that we could do a live transmission from their squat!
“The lead singer and guitarist of this motley crew was a charismatic, hard-working Orbison-coiffed musical dynamo with the squatting name of “Woody Wooderson.” The 101’ers were, unashamedly, a very basic pub-rock/R&B/rock & roll band, with nary a nod to the punk movement emerging at the same time.
Portrait of the artist, by Froehlich
“The number of members varied from gig to gig and from day to day, which naturally made the quality of the music just as wildly variable, but the danceable beat was always there in any iteration.
"Along with all the old rock-&-roll chestnuts, they mainly featured Woody’s original songs, delivered in a powerful throaty emotional voice, and accompanied by slashing guitar riffs.
“When I saw him for the first time, at a gig in a squatted bank by the old Tolmer Square Cinema, I felt immediately that he was special, and definitely on his way somewhere in showbiz.
“The 101’ers would often play in such abandoned squatted halls, banks, and buildings, as well as in regular-world clubs like Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, where I witnessed a truly wondrous gig in which Woody and the band had the crowd in the palm of their collective hand.
“His (their), “Gloria” was the most powerful live version I have ever heard. (Personally, Woody’s own “Keys To My Heart” was always my favourite of his original 101'er songs, and I always requested it. I recorded the Ronnie Scott's gig on a cassette, and played it on my next show.
Bumper stickers. The station name was briefly changed to "Radio Dynamite," which they thought sounded exciting. The authorities thought they'd become terrorists, so it was changed back.
…Eventually, wisely realizing that the squatting-band scene was way too limited for his talents, Woody began to cast around for another musical outlet, and started to play with a couple of younger guys.
One afternoon during this time, as I was hanging out in his room waiting for him to return, he came in, flipped a tape cassette over to me and said casually, “Hey Supremo,” (El Supremo was my then-current DJ name) “Check out my new band!”
He had finally broken with the 101’ers, changed his named to “Joe Strummer,” and formed a new band called the Clash. Yes, at that moment I had in my hand Joe’s very own cassette of the master of their debut album. I played the tape on my next show, a first for the Clash, Radio Concord, and the world!
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(For those youngsters who might be wondering what the big deal was, here’s some stats from WIKIPEDIA):
In 2004, ROLLING STONE ranked the Clash number 28 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
In 2010, the band was ranked 22nd on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
According to THE TIMES of London, the Clash's debut…is "punk's definitive statement" and “London Calling "remains one of the most influential rock albums".
“London Calling” was ranked eighth In ROLLING STONE's 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
In the magazine's 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, "London Calling" was ranked number 15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c (London Calling/The Clash/1979/3:21)
"London Calling" ranked number 48 in the magazine's 2008 list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time.
In 2010, the cover art of “London Calling” was one of ten albums by British music acts whose albums were commemorated on a UK postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail.
The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January of 2003.
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Sadly, Arnold reports, that precious one-of-a-kind tape disappeared in a police raid a week or two later, but the thrill of “breaking the Clash” has stayed with him to this day.
To learn more about Arnold’s wild adventures and/or to purchase a copy of the book, go to:
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Sonoma County, California; 2015
I must report, however, that although B. did eventually get toilet trained, it was not through use of the iconic potty, which he preferred to admire from a respectful distance.
Campbell founded a settlement he called Windsor, based around the operation of several water-driven mills for processing lumber from pine logs cut from the surrounding virgin forest and floated down the lake, with the remnants thriftily lathe-turned into clothespins.
The reason for Windsor’s decline was quite probably the “Great New England Sheep Rush,” which began about 1810, as embargoes on English wool and the import and breeding of fine-wooled Merino sheep resulted in the denuding of about three-quarters of the state’s forestland to create pastures for the valuable ungulates.
THE OBJECT IN QUESTION #1: STEAMPUNK POTTY
My friend Ed, aside from his job as a medical professional, is a whiz at designing and building stuff (he’s currently constructing a new home for his family—by hand).
About a decade ago, his eldest son (to prevent future embarrassment, I’ll call him “B.”) was at the age usually deemed appropriate for toilet training, but seemed totally uninterested in the concept.
Not wanting to traumatize the lad, Ed approached the situation from a different direction: “What if I build you your own potty?”
B. showed distinct approval of this plan, so Ed asked him to describe his ideal potty. The boy, who was of a mechanical bent even at that early age, had recently become fascinated with the workings of their on-demand water heater, and he had no trouble coming up with the following desired features:
• Vents
• Gears
• Lights
• On/off Switch
• Outlet
• Smokestack
• Pipes
• Meters
“My goodness,” thought Ed, “I think my kid wants a Steampunk potty."
He got to work, despite a broken arm, and produced the masterpiece pictured here.
I must report, however, that although B. did eventually get toilet trained, it was not through use of the iconic potty, which he preferred to admire from a respectful distance.
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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Interlocken International Summer Camp, Windsor/Campbell’s Gore, New Hampshire; Late 1980s
LORE OF THE GORE, Or,
THE QUEST FOR THE DRUID CROWN; A CAUTIONARY TALE
This strange story rightfully begins in the early 18th Century, when the Colony of New Hampshire was parceled out into counties and townships. In this process, odd triangular snippets of land were occasionally left over, and, because of their spear-like shape, became known as “gores” (after “gar,” the word for “spear” in Old English).
In the mid-1700s, one such parcel, which included the spillway of a good-sized lake, became the property of an enterprising fellow named John Campbell, and became known as “Campbell’s Gore.”
Campbell founded a settlement he called Windsor, based around the operation of several water-driven mills for processing lumber from pine logs cut from the surrounding virgin forest and floated down the lake, with the remnants thriftily lathe-turned into clothespins.
Incorporated as a town in 1798, Windsor once had two hotels, two stores, a church, and two schools, but by 1885, a townsman wrote: “We now have no church, no minister, no lawyer, no trouble, no doctor, no hotel, no drunkards, no post-office, no store, no voice in legislation, no paupers, and no prospect of having any. Taxes are very light, being this year a little above the average, but still bring only $6.30 on one thousand dollars. There has never been a settled minister, a post-office or public library in town.”
Canoeing in Farimaki Swamp with Joan Wales and Pam Butler.
The reason for Windsor’s decline was quite probably the “Great New England Sheep Rush,” which began about 1810, as embargoes on English wool and the import and breeding of fine-wooled Merino sheep resulted in the denuding of about three-quarters of the state’s forestland to create pastures for the valuable ungulates.
By the late 1980s, and the time of which I write, however, the Town of Windsor had essentially melted away into nothing, and the majority of the surrounding land had reverted to second-growth forests, with the stone walls of former pastures snaking oddly through them.
The woods were also punctuated by stone-lined cellar-holes, the remains of homes summarily abandoned after 1840 when the bottom fell out the American wool market (and presumably the clothespin market), and the majority of former sheep ranchers, presumably having had their fill of New Hampshire’s rocky soil and hard winters, packed up and headed west toward better opportunities.
The land of Campbell’s Gore was, however, entirely suited to the foundation of summer camps, of which, by the 1960s, it had accumulated three, of which one was The Interlocken International Summer Camp.
From the first, the ISC was known for the maturity and diversity of its staff, who tended to be working professionals—teachers, coaches, artists, craftspeople, actors, musicians, and just plain interesting adults rather than just college kids.
Richard Herman
Also from its beginnings, the camp manifested a large amount of what Interlocken co-founder Richard Herman called “the crazy quotient”—a mindset that embraced the unusual, individual, and fantastical as part of and in the midst of a solid curriculum of experiential learning.
One summer in the 1980s, a group of energetic and whimsical staff members learned the history of the area and began spinning tales to the campers about this mysterious land of Campbell’s Gore, which soon acquired its own legend (the Lore of the Gore), presiding spirit (the “Well Being”), and eventually even its own language and script (Goreish).
Learning to write in "Goreish" script.
The last two were the work of Richard Herman’s nephew, Peter Jackson Herman (now a prominent Boston architect), who was one of several prime movers of this mythology, as was New Hampshire State Storyteller John “Odds” Bodkin.
Odds Bodkin
Of the following summer, Richard Herman recalls:
“With Odds here for the summer, we wanted to come up with a story or an idea that would plant seeds at the beginning of the season that could grow into something the kids could relate to and carry forward all summer.
“We came up with an adventure that was irresistible to anyone’s imagination, and which involved preparation and intellectual challenge and physical activity, and built up momentum on its own which didn’t have to be artificially primed or fed. There was a certain amount of archaeology, a certain amount of history, and a lot of ingenuity and learning involved.”
The amount of preparation for this ongoing event during staff orientation was somewhat astounding. Peter Herman, who had become somewhat of a pied piper to brilliant future tech-heads, was detailed to offer a class called “Windsor Archaeology” during the first week of camp, with the supposed goal of investigating the many abandoned cellar-holes in the woods near the camp. He and other staff members plotted out the tale, and scoured nearby antique and junk shops for likely materials.
Odds Bodkin relates how it all unfolded:
“I remember an amazing and wonderful group of staff people from all over the world sitting in the meeting house and talking for hours, coming up with ideas that would just add to the whole adventure that summer.
Howard Stith was one of the mainstays of the search.
We put together the most extraordinary map and aged it with coffee and smoke, then tore it into pieces and hid them in the woods and caves all around Windsor. To go with them, we concocted a story about a pirate captain and his crew landing on the New Hampshire coast and sailing up an underground river to what was then Campbell’s Gore, and is now the Township of Windsor.
“Amie “penmanshipped” the account into an old book with burned edges [note: this, and rendering the story into diary form were my sole contributions], as if the tale had been written down there by a surviving crew member.
“One day Peter Herman and his Windsor Archaeology class had stopped in for refreshments at Williams’ store down the road, and Bill, the owner, pretended that he’d found the book somewhere in the back of the shop, and nonchalantly plopped it down on the counter in front of them, saying they might find it interesting. The kids took it and began to discover a story, a diary written in the margins in what appeared to be antique script.
“The actual treasure was a crown, the “Oak King’s Crown,” that [stonemason and metalsmith] Peter Jordan made out of raw iron and a great blood-red stone, and we put it in a wooden chest that had been beaten and burned and aged, and dropped into the bottom of an 18th-century well near the [older campers’] Tent Unit before the kids arrived.
“And once it had been placed, we began to lay down the trail of clues. My wife Mil and I climbed up into the skunk caves on Windsor Mountain and chiseled Druids’ marks way in the back, and cut more of them on stones in the middle of Bagley Pond, and buried all kinds of containers —old rusty tin boxes, old-fashioned bottles, a monocular brass telescope —with pieces of the map inside. along with odd bits like antique spectacles and buckles.
“The map slowly came together over the summer as the kids found and deciphered the clues, many of which were written in Celtic Runes or an antiquated English, or Old French.
“They had to use all of their scholarship and research capabilities to figure these things out, which they did with remarkable speed. There was a cadre of kids who got totally involved and it became the focal point of their summer.”
But toward the end of the summer, all this willing suspension of disbelief unexpectedly became somewhat of a problem. Peter Herman recalls:
“I remember the quest for the crown as a magical time of running through the backwoods of Windsor with a bunch of kids. I was completely aware of the fact that we were chasing a fictitious history, but as it evolved, I became more and more convinced that I was actually uncovering something real—the playing became so vivid.
Questors Jamie Hanover and friend in costume.
“A lot of the kids got diverted to other activities, or were only peripherally involved, but I had a crew who were completely taken by the whole endeavor. And the deeper we got into the apparent realism of the Quest, the more difficult it became for me to reveal to them that it wasn’t true.
“We got to the end of the summer, and found the crown, but it wasn’t until that point that the kids learned that they weren’t finding real artifacts. They were SO excited and wanted to call the Boston Museum about this wonderful archaeological find, so we had to bring them back down to earth.
“This is where experiential learning became a dicey matter. Some of the kids were fine with it, but some felt betrayed and manipulated, and lied to, and embarrassed that they been taken in by the whole thing.”
Peter Herman
Odds Bodkin: “I suppose if we had said: “This isn’t really real,” and told them that they were playing a kind of on-the-ground Dungeons & Dragons game, they might have participated, but I don’t know whether it would’ve resulted in such excitement, or in such things as the underground newspaper that the two-month kids created for the July kids who had gone home, to keep them informed about the progress of the search.
“We had no way of predicting their reaction because we are all fairly untried at that point. But it was truly experiential education, and it certainly did lay the groundwork for the many years of quests that followed, de-bugged versions of this kind of search-and-adventure which grew out of the original Quest
“The year afterwards we did a Riddle Festival, kind of another treasure hunt, but as nifty an intellectual conceit as it was, it wasn’t nearly as effective as the Quest for the Crown. It just didn’t have the grip.”
So was the Quest for the Druid Crown a brilliant experiential- education technique or a slightly embarrassing misstep?
You know, over a quarter of a century later, we still haven’t figured that out.
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