When Time Finally Caught Up

Picture this:

1.  A cool morning, the river down the hill misty, the air fresh.  As the sun comes up--a beautiful red ball--the gauzy blues and greens of early morning sharpen as brilliant sunlight begins filling the day along with the sounds of birds, bells, and clattering kitchen pans.  Not many miles to the north--the direction of the river's source--distant-blue forested hills rise, giving way to wide stretches of remote upcountry wilderness where the only sounds (or so you imagine) are birds, monkeys, and maybe a wild pig or two. In this place-beyond-time, you find yourself easing into the languid and dusty days, the beauty, the quietude, the simplicity.

2.  You have been here a good week now, staying with the staff in a bungalow on the outskirts of what is little more than a village in this land of red earth and banana trees.  By afternoon, as the heat builds, sleepy dogs lie on the grass, yawning.  Roosters and pigs wander.  A green parrot chatters in its cage. Occasional jeeps scutter back and forth along the town's dirt roads. Down the hill, open-air shops sell cigarettes, soap, cans of condensed milk.  Belled pack ponies make their way through town as radio music filters throughout the neighborhood.  People wait beside the river for the ferry to take them to the small town on the opposite bank.  

3.  Other than that same small town on the opposite bank where you can buy textiles, wood carvings, embroidered shoulder bags, the next place of any size is maybe two days by boat.  But as you continue your work, your stay, you find occasional visitors appearing at the door.  From New Zealand, France, Australia, the U.S.  An anthropologist.  Someone gathering research for a doctorate.  A Defense Department official.  Each seems a bit dazed, as if they've just stepped into some far outpost.  You invite them in for iced tea and introduce them to the man in charge--a doctor from the Dominican Republic.  For this is part of a small hospital compound, the hospital being a 14-bed bungalow raised on cement blocks with a corrugated tin roof.

4.  So where are you?  Where is this timeless back-of-beyond spot?  It's in The Land of a Million Elephants--Laos:  the far northwestern corner, across the river from the town of Chiang Khong, Thailand, in what is known as The Golden Triangle.  Somewhere not that far away, opium is being processed and heroin refined, then transported by those pack ponies with their tinkling bells.  The river, of course, is the Mekong.

5.  Rather than 2019, however, and despite its remote quiet sense, this particular scene is set in the mid-'60s, in the middle of what has come to be called the Secret War when the CIA was working to push back the Communist Pathet Lao. Though it served the local people, the hospital also tended wounded Lao soldiers working with the CIA--brought in by unmarked U.S. helicopters.  The paradox, of course, lay in the fact that while maintaining that certain sense of peacefulness, the country was infiltrated with fighting.

6.  Okay.  Now picture this.  Remember looking north to those remote blue hills and the timelessness that seemed embodied there?  Those were the hills of Burma in hidden land filled with forests, wild orchids, and occasional CIA irregulars making forays into China.  That Burmese borderland, reached only by river boat, lay barely 28 miles from the little Lao town I've been describing--Ban Houei Sai.  Now, take that same borderland and put there instead a $500 million casino recently (in today's terms) built by the Chinese on Lao land given over to the Chinese where (mostly) Chinese tourists come to play. Here is their new playground with green domes and a tall gold-painted crown rising above what was once a canopy of jungly trees. Here are replicas of Greek and Roman statues and Michelangelo reproductions, enormous gambling rooms, a golf course, limousines galore.  With this being just one casino of what may be many to come in this Land of a Million Elephants.

7.  The country has gone from one extreme to another--from opium processing to garish tourism.  Tourism and kitsch are now king.  (And largely Chinese tourism it seems.)  A road now connects the casino those 28 miles to Houei Sai where a brand new bridge has replaced the ferry service to Thailand.  What time had left behind, it has now caught up with.

Ban Houei Sai (now Houay Xai) on the Mekong, Laos, 1966

N.B.  I had not planned on getting involved in a war, secret or not, but was newly employed by the NGO that supported this hospital, and I was soon sent off to the task I was originally hired for:  to work in Nepal.



I'd like to acknowledge the BBC's "The Mekong River with Sue Perkins" program for its Laos update.

The Automotive Experience Then and Now

Anyone remember when gas station attendants used to put gas in our tanks, check the tire pressure and fluids, AND wash the windows?  Must have been some other life time.

And then, more recently, every three months, when I had an oil change, they automatically adjusted my tire pressure.  I never had to think about it.  That's when getting an oil change cost something in the low two figures.  But now, my 2015 model car, uses a synthetic oil that only needs changing every 6 months (and costs a bundle) so I now need to adjust the tire pressure myself since I can't expect it to maintain itself for that length of time.  But for some reason, I tend to make it more complicated than need be.  First, I have to be sure to screw off the pressure caps before even starting the process.  Then, I ask myself, does applying air produce a swishing noise ... or does that come when the desired pressure has been applied?  (Once I thought I was all finished when in fact, I'd let air OUT of my tires.  I know because I found a gas station with a real attendant and asked him to check my work.  If it had been a class room project, I would have gotten a failing mark.) Then, another time, I nearly drove off with the four caps still in my pocket.

Then my 2015 car has a little dashboard light that tells me that either my tire pressure is low or I have a flat tire.  (I wish it would distinguish between the two.)  So when that little light comes on, I have to pull over (if there even is a place to pull over), get out, and inspect all the tires to see if one is flat.  If it is, that's a whole different ball game.  Or if it isn't, I need to find a place to try and fill the tires.  It's not that I've gotten lazy.  It's just that I feel less competent about how to do things.

On the other hand, I can remember when radiators had to be filled ... or when they boiled over on a hot day climbing a mountain.  Then you had to wait for them to cool off to refill--that is, if you remembered to bring a container of extra water.  Then cars were standard shift, not automatic ... which made it very difficult to drive someplace like San Francisco.  You'd stop for the light at the top of a hill, only to slip back a bit (hoping you wouldn't bump the car behind you) in order to get started again.  I drove a standard shift for years but now wouldn't have anything but an automatic.

And then (I've mentioned this before), drivers used to have to open their windows and hold their arms out to signal left or right turns.  That seemed simple enough, I thought, but we lived in a warm dry climate so always had our windows open.  That meant, of course, that when we got to where we were going, we had really messy hair.  Then air conditioning came along and windows had to be closed.  And turn indicators took the place of putting your arm out.   It seemed a great innovation.

Here are some photos of a few of our old family cars.  Pre-war, they are.

This belonged to my parents.

Then they bought this Nash sometime in the very early '40s.  It had the "Bed in a Car" feature which converted the back into a sleeping compartment--handy when we took camping trips.

Our Nash.  I think it was a 1941 model, a good car, but it didn't appreciate pulling a 26-foot trailer when we bought one after the war to "take to the road."

This is what road signage could look like then.  We were near California's Anza Borrego State Park

18th Century Version

I don't know about you, but whenever I run into the term, "Revolutionary War patriot," I waft through a few visions including Mel Gibson yelling, fighting, making a big fuss in the movie, Patriot, which, in fact, I never saw.  (Who needs more bloodshed!)  Or, I envision our F. Fathers in their 18th century attire doing Their Thing to Make Things Right.  Patriots, all.  All, of course, done with fervor, for flag and country.

So, when I came upon a piece from that day requiring every male to take an oath, I realized it had been less fervor and more livelihood.  That or else leave the country, please.  All this came up when I was working on my genealogy bit last year and found several antecedents with a little subscript note to the effect that they had "taken the oath."

That meant, at least in their state of Maryland, that all free males over 18 were required to go to the magistrate of their county by a certain date and take an oath renouncing the king of England and supporting the new revolutionary government.  Or else.  If they didn't, they would have to pay triple their annual taxes on real and personal property.  They would be prohibited from practicing their trade or profession including medicine, pharmacy, law, education, church.  They could not vote or hold any civil or military office.  And then the magistrates had to submit the proper paper work or be fined 500 pounds.   Hmmm ... why did I imagine the whole thing was more voluntary than that?

So one, then, became a patriot or remained a loyalist, royalist, or Tory and skedaddled off to Canada or returned to Albion unless he didn't care about his job or could afford to triple his tax rate.  One family antecedent, finding himself in Boston in 1775, decided things were heating up so got himself north of the border where that branch of the family remains.

It's the 75th Anniversary of ... What Was That Again?

On the night of February 24-25th, 1942, an incident took place over the skies of Los Angeles which has come to be called The Battle of Los Angeles or The Great Los Angeles Air Raid.  Sometime after midnight something overhead triggered an abundance of searchlights scanning the skies plus anti-aircraft artillery firing away and air raid sirens sounding across the city. It was thought to be the Japanese who, not quite so incidentally, had shelled the Santa Barbara coast (Goleta, actually) from a surfaced submarine just the night before.  And so people supposed they were now swarming over L.A.  But there were no bombs, no damage.  But it did stir up the city and remained a puzzle for years ... in fact, it's still a puzzle.  Who was it up there and what were they doing?  Since that time, the ufologists have entered the picture, turning what were searchlights beaming up into the sky into mother-ship lights projecting down onto the city.

So, why do I speak of it?  Well, as it happened, I was a witness to it.  Yes, a little tot at the time.  It was possibly my earliest memory.  But I well remember my mother waking my brother and me from our sound sleep and telling us we had to get up and see what was happening.  Keeping the lights off, we went to the living room window and looked out over our city of Los Angeles.  There indeed were searchlights getting a beam onto very-high-overhead aircraft. Airplanes.  Not a space ship, not barrage balloons, but airplanes.  There were several, as I recall, flying in formation ... well-lit by the searchlights but also too high, it seemed, to be shot down.  It all quieted down soon enough as the planes flew on and disappeared. "Next day," as my mother liked to tell it, "there were many houses up and down the block with For Sale signs." But ever after, when we still lived there and high beamed searchlights played back and forth some evenings, I would ask my parents if it was an attack ... or the premiere of some movie over there on Hollywood Boulevard.

In my father's air raid warden outfit

You can check all this out online.  (Don't pay any attention to the doctored photo that looks like a space ship.)  Apparently, L.A.'s Fort MacArthur Museum hosts an event every February commemorating this little piece of history.  (Incidentally, the Japanese say it wasn't their planes.)

An Elsewhere Land

• Since cars didn't have turn signals, drivers had to open their window and stick their arm out to indicate a left- or right-hand turn.  Straight out for left; bent up for right.  I haven't a clue what they did in snowy climates.
• Laundry was hung out to dry on a line with clothes pins.
• Women weren't called "moms" except by their own children; they were called "mothers."  As in Happy Mother's Day.  They also weren't called "stay-at-home-moms."  They were "housewives."
• Generally, a man's salary could support the family so women stayed home to tend house and children.  They sewed clothes, gardened, made three meals a day from scratch, laundered, ironed, dusted, vacuumed, took the pets to the vet.  There were no drip-dry shirts; all cotton shirts had to be ironed.
• Doctors made house calls.
• Popcorn at movies cost 10 cents a bag.
• Movies played continuously; two for the price of one.
• Marshmallows were a legitimate ingredient in Jell-O salads and sweet potato dishes.
• Children rode bicycles or walked to school.  School buses were only available for those who lived some distance.  School started at 9:00 and got out at 3:30.  Anyone could walk into a school at any time.
• No one ate pizza until around 1956.  Then it was called pizza pie from the lyrics to That's Amore sung by Dean Martin.
• There were no shopping malls or fast-food restaurants.  The first fast-food hamburger place that I remember charged 15 cents for a burger.  That was around 1953.
• A family of four could get a month's groceries for $50.
• There was no aluminum foil or plastic wrap.  Plastic bags came out in the early 1950's.
• People lived in small houses.  A couple of bedrooms (with small closets), one bathroom, a living room and a small kitchen.  Plus a back yard to play in.
• Three people could sit comfortably in the front seat of a car (no bucket seats) and children spread out in the back seat.  No seat belts until ca. 1961.
• Gas stations weren't self-serve.  An attendant filled your tank, opened your hood, checked your water and oil levels, and made sure you had enough air in your tires.  Sometimes, they gave out free steak knives to entice you to go to their station instead of the one down the road.
• There were no credit cards.  You paid in cash.  Or you charged it.
• Many roads were two-lane only.  A few had a third/middle lane for passing.  Of course, to use that lane, you had to be sure no one was already in it coming toward you.
• With no television, children listened to radio programs after school:  The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.  Otherwise, they played hop scotch on the sidewalk outside their house.  Or they built forts in their bushes.  Or they practiced shooting a bulls-eye target with bows and arrows.  Or they made a cake and iced it.  Or they set the dinner table, peeled carrots, washed dishes, played rummy, checkers, chess.  Or they sat around the radio after dinner listening to the Bob Hope or Jack Benny shows.  Or they practiced a musical instrument.
• People were optimistic that the government was doing its best for everyone.
• The word "hippies" hadn't been invented; such people were called "beatniks" or "bohemians."
• One didn't have to fly to cross the Atlantic or Pacific; one could travel by freighter or ocean liner.
• Young and old, people smoked.   (Trains, too ...)

Seeing Blue

It seems that people could literally not see the color blue until "modern times," as one source phrased it.  It was William Gladstone, Britain's four-time Prime Minister, who started something when, as a Homer scholar, he realized that Homer referred not to a blue sea but to a "wine-dark sea" ... as well as to violet sheep and green honey.  Was he (and were all the ancient Greeks) color blind, Gladstone wondered?  So he made a count.  There were plenty of references in both The Iliad and The Odyssey to black and white, a fair amount to red, barely any to yellow and green, and none to blue.

Others taking up the study found that none of the ancient texts--the old Icelandic sagas, the Indian vedas, the Bible, Japanese and Chinese writings--mentioned the color blue.  Only the Egyptians because it seemed they made a dye which was blue.  But, as the researchers pointed out, other than the very obvious blue sky and blue water, there are no blue plants, animals, people, foods, hair.  Sky and water was passed off as being white or wine-dark or dawn/sunset red.  As it turned out, too, the introduction of words of color into these languages all came in the same order:  black, white, red, yellow, green, and lastly, blue.  The researchers suggested that until a culture could make something which was that color (such as the Egyptians with their dye), they may not have been able to distinguish the color.

Interestingly, in a recent study, a researcher found that the Himba tribe in Namibia cannot see a blue spot in a wheel of otherwise green spots.  But ... but ... we can't see a slightly different green spot (in a wheel of otherwise all green spots) that they can point out with ease.

For more, or if you want to try picking out the green spot, see:http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

How's that for a deep blue sky!

Remembering Those Goofy, Corny Days

It all started when I looked out the window a few weeks ago and said to myself, "It's going to be chilly today."  At which an image of my mother instantly popped into my head along with her amused little saying, "It'll be chile today and hot tamale."  I mean, even as I write that, it makes me laugh.  Yes, corny, but it so reminds me of my mother, I don't care.

Then I remembered my father liked "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs."  A popular saying of that day.  No one says that anymore.

It got me to thinking about how that sweet, silly, sappy, old fashioned humor has gone the way ... things that we just came up with ourselves.  Now if we want to laugh, we tune in to some program.  Of course, programs have been around a long time:  Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny on the radio in my day.  But it seems that now, rather than just being nutty and goofy, humor has become mean-spirited, or else it's ironic or sarcastic. Or Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey tosses off what are called "zingers" as impromptu wit, but, still, this isn't the humor I remember.

Of course, a lot of it is style, and corny jokes aren't Maggie Smith's style.  They were my parents' style, though ... and, as I say, part of the style of that time.

My father briefly tried his hand at being a cartoonist and used 3 x 5 cards to record the family's cute sayings that he wanted to illustrate.  I still have those cards and find, now, how really innocent our humor was.


*Distracted father:  Our money goes so fast these days we don't even get a chance to spend it.

*Woman:  For years I've been catering to my stomach.  Now, I'm going to think about my'sylph!

*Definition of a cat washing itself:  A little spit and paw-lish.

*Child:  We're studying insects at school and now I've got the bug.

*Kids going to bed, say to parents:  Please be quiet, we want to talk.

*Young mother:  Well, after all, I gave up swearing to be a good influence on the children.  If they're going to take it up, so am I.


Well, all that may have gone out of style today, but I'm glad my parents had their goofy moments, especially considering what their generation had to take on!

Clackity Clackity Clack Clack ... Ding!

A friend recently told me she was considering getting a typewriter.  It got me thinking.  I always had a typewriter--one Smith Corona after another, then an electric IBM, and finally a Xerox Memorywriter with its floppy disks.  But a typewriter can still be handy.  If non-electric it can carry on if the power goes out.  And it doesn't attract cyber-snoops.  Of course--disadvantage--if you do any editing at all, you have to retype everything.

The whole typewriter culture was a culture in itself.  All gone now.  But there was the special equipment such as typing erasers, now obsolete:  little round rubber erasers with a brush on one end to whisk bits away.  And ribbons.  All black.  Or the top was black and the bottom red.  Or, I had one once that was black, red, green, and blue.  Most of the ribbons were reversible so that you could use them over and over.  Until carbon ribbons came along--a one-shot deal only.

Then if the typewriter was portable, you had a case. My father had a Corona typewriter from sometime around 1920--I still have it--that folded down, something I loved fiddling with as a child.

Here it is folded down on itself

Then there was the paper.  You used carbon paper to make copies.  I used to work with what we called Jiffy Sets of some six different copies all interlaced with carbon paper.  Of course, that was even before duplicating machines.  Then, there were different weights and qualities of paper.  Onion skin was light-weight and crinkly.  Second sheet paper (used under carbon paper) was light-weight and smooth.  And the paper you actually typed on was generally a better quality than the copy paper we use today.

As for the font, except for my IBM and Memorywriter, there was no choice ... you took what you got, often Courier. 

Finally, there was the typewriter's song.  The "clackity clackity clack" with a "ding" at the end of the line to tell you to manually shift the carriage to start a new line.

Of course, I mustn't forget the practice of typing.  I remember once--I'd just arrived in Florence, Italy, hoping to work for an American there in the art book business--when, just realizing something, he stopped the interview and said,  "You type using the touch-type method, don't you?"  (That is, typing without looking at the keyboard. Whereas, having to look at the keyboard when typing is called "the hunt and peck.")

"Yes," I said.

He put his hand to his head and said, "Oh, you'll go mad, mad."  Italian keyboards, it turned out, used a different layout, not the one we use called the Qwerty system.  So the letters were in different locations on the keyboard.

"I'll use the hunt and peck," I offered.

"No, no ... you'll go mad, mad,"  he said, ending the interview then and there.  So much for my attempt to land a job in Florence.

But I still love typewriters.  We were good friends for a long time.

Little Kid Art Over the Years

(Note:  next blog posting will be in two weeks--August 8th.)


We used to wonder about what I might call Little Kid Art for which school children were given Styrofoam meat trays on which to produce a collage ... or macaroni for necklaces.  I figured that since it was all supposed to be fun, those in charge thought that good materials were the least of it ... although my own mother had the opposite view.  She always gave my brother and me good paper for our artwork.  We both had our own red sable brush, not something made from pig whiskers.  She figured that using good materials gave one a sense of self-worth.

But somewhere along the way kids have been told that whatever they produce is just Jolly Marvelous.  That's because we mustn't tamper with their sense of self-expression which would stunt their growth.  Rather than directing them in any way, we must let them go along at their merry pace.  Well, I can see some sense in that.  But, I can also see the advantage of raising their standards by expecting more from them than meat-tray art.

A friend and I once judged some local student art, giving prizes for watercolor, drawing, and painting.  The painting turned out to be mostly acrylic, not oils.  Nothing wrong with acrylics but oils are an excellent medium and not hard to use.  The drawings were done with pencil and pen-and-ink, as you would imagine.  The "watercolors" were done with colored pens.  No tubes of paint.  No brush-work.  Just colored drawings.  My friend and I had a hard time finding any piece that was actually done with watercolor paint, using a brush.  The students probably went from pre-k poster paint to colored pens, never venturing into watercolor at all. 

I suppose little kids in the Old Days were busy doing other things:  bringing in the cows, helping make the family's candles, walking miles to/from school.  I know almost nothing about one of my great grandmothers except that she lived in Maryland and produced a truly beautiful needlework sampler--her own embroidery--in 1829 when she was either nine or ten.  She was surely given some direction in handling the medium (embroidery) ... as well as in doing as good a job as possible so that she could feel pleased with the result.  She surely was not simply given a needle, some "twist" (embroidery floss), and told, "Susan, go for it!"

Just something I wanted to say!

Sorry, discoloration in all these photos is really my reflection in the glass.

With Love and Remembrance

Hanuman Dhoka

13th century temple

Pots and barbers on temple steps

Little Swayambhu

Vadyasatra

Nyatpola, Bhatgaon
(It survived.)

Drying rice

The bazaar

Durbar Square, Patan

Farm house, Kathmandu Valley

Getting there:  the road from India

A Child's Life Without Television

(Continuing from last week's posting)

I've long considered myself fortunate to have spent my formative years without television.  First, it didn't exist.  Then, buying a set was beyond our budget.  And rather than having programmed images and stale interpretations set before our daughter (or us, for that matter), my husband and I chose to keep television out of our house, as well.  We did not try to coerce her out of watching it at friends' houses.  But we always felt there were more important things to do, even if that was sitting and gazing out a window.

As children back in the '40s and '50s, my brother and I felt there was more to fill each day than there was time.  Daydreaming reverie, of course, was still an honorable pastime.  As well, we swam in a nearby creek with its yellow-green scummy boulders.  We nibbled our rabbits' food-pellets from an open barrel in the garage.  We played 78 RPM records or got out our John Thompson's First and Second Grade music books to practice the piano.  My brother read the children's classics, many illustrated by N.C. Wyeth.  I wrote poems and studied ballet with Madame Katrina who wore her hair up off the back of her neck.  We went down to the wharf (we lived in Santa Barbara) and fished or roller-skated along the beach-walk.  We played Robin Hood with bow and arrow, built forts in the bushes behind the house, or, butterfly net in hand, collected Lepidoptera.  At one point, I rode my bicycle ten times around the block, no hands.

Boy Scout sharpening his knife.

That's how children grew up then.  Until one day everything changed.  For the society we were, what had seemed a cradle of boundless space became confined to half-hour segments.  Where the experience of life itself had stirred us and helped make us wise, we were asked to hand over reality to a fictional substitute.  What we had accepted as ours without price--ritual, play, celebration, fantasy, discussion, leisure--we gave away only to have it restructured and sold back to us.  What had given little cause for concern became potential dark corners for real or imagined fear.  Where we had celebrated function, we became addicted to dysfunction.  What we had once mulled over, we were now asked to evaluate at flash-point speed so that we could accelerate our absorption of crises, enabling us to go on to the next and the next and the next, dulling our senses, disconnecting us from ourselves, exhausting our sweet, fragile selves into a weariness of boredom, isolation, cynicism, and malaise.  When visiting relatives, we now sat in their darkened room watching stilted figures performing the raucous and slapstick.

Perhaps this disconnect/disconnection would enable us to re-connect later with a broader plug.  But it's no state secret what appeared in the early '50s that changed us completely.  Those of us born early enough to have escaped its brain-altering influence from the verbal to the visual and those of us financially disadvantaged enough never to have had it enter our house, surely have more in common with earlier generations than with the very one that followed ours.

So what did we come away with?  Without the daily bombardment of info-junk, we could look at our present and at our future as worthy times, times in which to do the necessary work and play in order to turn us into those ready to go out in the world and make our mark.  We were not brow-beaten by info-litter or an entertainment mentality or disastrously clownish and truly stupid politics, or quite so much greed and hubris.  Of course, we had things still to learn, attitudes still to hone.  But somehow things then felt a bit better (for many of us, at any rate) than they came to feel.

We Lucky Few

Our street, 1940

I'd been thinking of writing about this subject for some time.  But when I recently found myself watching a special on Peter, Paul and Mary's 50th Anniversary, I asked myself, how is it that my generation has been called The Silent Generation?  We who were born between the 1929 crash and the end of World War Two.  Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom.  During all of the '30s and half of the '40s.  And all of us, well before television came in.

Silent, indeed!  Were Peter, Paul, and Mary silent?   Martin Luther King?  Gloria Steinem?  The Chicago 7, the Freedom Riders, the anti-war protestors?  And in more recent years, Bill Moyers?

I take it we were called The Silent Generation because we didn't make a fuss, at least early on. But I also take it that looking out onto the world we were born into--the Depression, War, Holocaust--we may have asked what we'd gotten ourselves into.  In Europe, certainly, we children would have all experienced war or else been sent off to a foster home in some foreign country.  Maybe we were called Silent because, after all of that, everyone needed some time in which to catch their breath.

But then after a bit of sleuthing, I found another name for us in a book called The Lucky Few by a demographer, Elwood Carlson.  We were "few" because there weren't that many of us due to those hard times we were born into.  We were the first generation smaller than the one before or after.

And we were "lucky" because, according to Carlson, we were/are the healthiest, best educated, and wealthiest generation.  That was because our place in history enabled us to generally serve during peacetime, to find jobs without great difficulty, and to experience what he called "the last, and perhaps fullest, exemplar of the traditional family" (p. xix).  We were also able "to take advantage of the longest economic boom in the nation's history" (p. 23).  Even in old age, in our retirement, he says we're not doing too badly.

From my perspective, I think we started out as idealists.  I do believe we still thought that our government had everyone's best interests at heart.  We also felt that we were the ones Kennedy was talking to in his 1960 inaugural address. Certainly, we were the first to go out into the world as Peace Corps volunteers.  To walk on the moon.  And as Peter Yarrow pointed out in that already-mentioned special, we wanted to join together to bring about the greater good.  Though the times, they were a-changin', it was a philosophy which highlighted our early years.

In no particular order, here are a few of the Lucky Few/Silent Generation:  Edward Kennedy, Calvin Klein, Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor, Joan Baez, Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Elvis Presley, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Neil Armstrong, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Sean Connery, Dan Rather, Joseph Biden, Sandra Day O'Conner, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Maximilian Schell, Ted Turner, Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Russell Means, Warren Buffet, John Updike, Susan Sontag, Ralph Nadar, Shirley MacLaine, Zubin Mehta, Carl Sagan, Woody Allen.

For anyone wanting to read more, click here   (This link shifts the dates a bit--from 1925-1942.)


Next week's posting will be about growing up without TV.  (Stay tuned!)




(A reminder:  all photos in all postings of this blog are copyrighted and should not be reproduced without my permission.)

Memory Palaces

Somewhere in all my years, the concept of memory palaces totally escaped me so that when I recently picked up a book I'd once given a family member--The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin*--and read the chapter, "The Lost Arts of Memory," I was totally intrigued by what I read.  By how people had maintained information before the printed word by using a particular mnemonic device to refresh their memory by associating whatever they wished to remember with location.  (Also called the mind-palace technique.) 

Here is how it worked:

Preferably, you were to pick a large building filled with rooms and furnishings.  Say, a palace, castle, cathedral.   If you didn't already know such a place, you could make one up.  But whether real or imagined, you had to be very precise about what lay where.  Then, matching one item-to-be-remembered to each window, door, room, candlestick, gallery, salon, alcove, each set of linens, you "attached" by association what you wanted to remember to what lay in that location so that from the time you entered the building until you left, you had matched--in proper order--whatever it was you wished to remember.  This technique of storing specific images in specific places was apparently used by both the Greeks and Romans among others.  (And "entering" the building of course did not mean you actually had to set foot in it.  You could remember the building and thus, by association, resurrect the memory of what you had left in each spot.)

Of course, people used other mnemonic devices, as well, to the extent, as Boorstin says, that such literature as the Iliad and the Odyssey "were performed by word of mouth without the use of writing."

We are so print-oriented, we've lost our old memory skills ... such as a great grandfather of mine once demonstrated when he took a prize for committing to memory during the short space of three weeks, 1,750 verses from the Bible.  Who would attempt that today?  And then one more question: are school children even asked to memorize poetry any longer?  My impression of education today is that instead of being taught the thing itself, we are taught where to look it up.

*Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers:  A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, published by Random House, 1983.  Daniel J. Boorstin was the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987.

The House That Rudyard Built

(Note:   Hoping for the cooperation of the weather this time, I'm making another attempt at getting away for three weeks and may or may not post during that time.  At least I'll be here for the March 29th posting.)


Yes, Rudyard Kipling built the house and he built right here in town, living in it with his family for four years at the tail end of the 19th century, afterwards packing up and returning to England.  After that it was mostly closed up until the UK's Landmark Trust bought and restored it as one of their few U.S. properties, all in Vermont.

Kipling and his wife had stopped off here on their honeymoon to visit her family.  Enamored with the area, he bought twelve acres from her brother who lived across the road and situated the house on top of a hill that sloped down toward the Connecticut River.  Imagining the rolling, hilly pasture land to be waves, he designed the house to resemble a ship, making it long and narrow--some ninety feet long by a mere twenty feet wide.

Kipling's study with his desk and chair to the left.

An inscription just under the mantel reads, "The night cometh when no man can work."  It is thought that Kipling's father, who did plaster work, put it there. 

Kipling named the house Naulakha, meaning "jewel beyond price."  Among his visitors was Arthur Conan Doyle who came one Thanksgiving bearing a gift of skis--said to be Vermont's first pair and something Doyle had picked up in Switzerland where he'd taken his wife to convalesce.  Another first for Vermont was the tennis court that Kipling built on the property.

Though an interior room, this "Loggia" was made to look like a sun porch. 

It was here that Kipling wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous and began Kim and Just So Stories.

Though the house is rarely open to the public for viewing, it is available for vacation rentals and can sleep eight.  The piece over the fireplace may have also been done by his father.

At one point, Kipling's wife (who managed his affairs so that he could spend his time writing) found that people were not cashing his checks, preferring to keep his signature as a memento.  So she instituted the practice of selling his autograph for $3 each.  Finding him thoroughly fascinating, the locals would try to peek through the windows to get a glimpse of the great man at work.  To quote one source, "Neighbours say he is strange; never carries money; wears shabby clothes and often says Begad; drives shaggy horses and plays with the baby." 

The entrance is here at the back of the house so that the view and front meadow are not disturbed.