When I hear the name Sydney Smith, my thoughts fly to the English wit and cleric (1771- 1845) whose letters are among the most delightful ever written. However, there is another Sydney Smith who, while not so quotable, is still interesting. Born in 1883 in Smithville, South Carolina, a small town just south of Camden, Sydney Smith grew up to become the only polo player in America to play major league baseball.

Smith’s athletic career began at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., where he played baseball and football. He moved on to the University of South Carolina and in 1903 played right tackle on the football team. By 1904, he was playing baseball for the Charleston Sea Gulls in the South Atlantic (Sally) League. He was best known as a catcher, but served as a utility infielder as well.

Sydney Smith, second from the left, in 1906 when Camden played Orlando, Florida

Also in 1904, his name first appeared on the roster of the legendary Camden Polo Club, the only polo team he would ever play for. He was later to note that polo in the early spring was excellent conditioning for the baseball season.

In baseball, Smith was all over the place. In 1906 and ‘07, he played with the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association. The Charleston News and Courier noted, “His advent into professional balldom came as a result of such good playing on college teams that managers made him flattering offers. Before he realized it he found himself wanted as a player by half a dozen men at the same time… he has a college education and can spout Greek as well as he can play ball.”

He was also a force off the diamond. The Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide tells us that when Smith was accosted by a “highwayman” in November of 1907, he “beat him into submission, and handed him over to the police.”

In 1908, the Atlanta Crackers sold Smith to the Philadelphia Athletics for $2,000. He was 24 and playing in the big leagues. His manager was Connie Mack and his mentor was the famed pitcher, Charles Albert “Chief” Bender.  He later recalled, “By the time Chief had completed teaching me the inside stuff, I think I was a mighty wise catcher, for there is nothing about the game the Chief does not know.” Smith played in 46 games for the Athletics before being traded to the St. Louis Browns, where he played 27 more games.

In 1909, the Browns returned him to the Crackers. The Atlanta Constitution praised Smith’s play as a catcher, noting that in a 14-game stretch there were 54 attempts to steal second base, and only four runners made it safely. The Crackers’ manager, Billy Smith, called Smith the “best all-round player that ever pastimed in the Southern league… Without Sid, we would never have won the pennant of 1909. It was his willingness and his ability to star in utility roles and his pinch hitting that saved the day.”

On September 1, 1910, Smith was drafted by the Cleveland Naps (named by the fans for the team’s star player, Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie). Smith played nine games for the Naps that season, and 58 the following year, primarily as catcher.

In 1911, the New York Times wrote about Smith’s two-sports career and his polo prowess:

“Usually as No. 2 on the team, he is very good at carrying the ball, and is said to be accurate in his drives, making many long shots from seemingly impossible angles. He has several fine ponies, among them being Billy and Sewing Machine, which he trained himself.”

In 1912, Smith went back to the minors, playing for the Columbus (Ohio) Senators; in the next few years he played briefly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, coached the University of South Carolina baseball team, and played for the Atlanta Crackers (again) and the Shreveport Gassers.

He always maintained his connections with South Carolina, however, and was a member of Camden’s polo team during the 1920s. Also an avid tennis player and golfer, Smith died on June 5, 1961, and was buried in the Old Quaker Cemetery in Camden.

* * *

My thanks to Nancy Snell Griffith, Horace Laffaye, and the New York Times for “Catcher Smith Plays Polo,” March 18, 1911.

The doctor, concerned about my grandfather’s heart, ordered him to leave the room when the Friday Night Fights came on the television. Following the doctor’s instructions to the letter, Grandpa Braun left the room, stood in the hall and watched from the doorway, shadow boxing and puffing.

I was in the room, on the sofa, my Buster Brown shoes not yet reaching the floor. I loved television, regardless of what was on, because we didn’t have a TV at home. I don’t remember much of the fights, but I can still hear the ringside bell and sing along with the Gillette jingle, “To look sharp!”

I owe this memory to King C. Gillette, who made a fortune as the first to sell an inexpensive safety razor with blades stamped from sheet metal. He sold the handle at a loss, and the disposable blades at a handsome profit. In 1903, he sold 51 razors and 168 blades; the next year, he sold 90,000 razors and 12 million blades. By 1915, razor sales topped 450,000 and blade sales passed 70 million.

Gillette believed in the power of branding and advertising. His face was on every package; his ads were brilliant and everywhere.

J.C. Leyendeck illustration for a 1912 Gillette ad

King C. Gillette died in 1932, but his brand still thrives and the memories are still golden.

* * *

Suggested listening:

The “Look Sharp/Be Sharp March” by Mahlon Merrick

Sharpie the Parrot sings “How Are You Fixed for Blades?”

If you find the contemporary Tea Party to be obnoxious, there’s a reason to be found in history. The Sons of Liberty, the perpetrators of the original Boston Tea Party, although enshrined in patriotic memory, were themselves obnoxious.

They were not, I was sad to learn, the clean and well-mannered men who sang “The Liberty Tree” in Walt Disney’s Johnny Tremain. I was probably ten years old the first time I saw that movie, and it made a lasting impression. A chorus of manly men and saintly women, placing lanterns in a tree, uniting in song to cast off tyranny.

Alas, the light in the Liberty Tree was more often provided by straw men burnt in effigy and the soundtrack was primarily the jeering of the crowd and the screams of real men stripped, coated in hot tar and then perhaps, as in the image above, choked with hot tea poured down their throats.

Why tea? The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, imposed no new taxes but rather enabled the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the American colonists. Prior to this, colonial merchants prospered by buying and selling tea bought from the Dutch and smuggled into the colonies, tax-free. With the Tea Act, the British tea would cost less than the smuggled tea.

The new choice was dreadful: People could pay more for tea obtained by smuggling, or pay less and acknowledge the British right to tax colonists. The smugglers knew that American merchants and tea-drinkers would go for lower prices every time. And they couldn’t let the people or the free market decide. Their solution: Before the tea could be put up for sale, dump it into Boston Harbor.

And who would do that? The Sons of Liberty. They were funded by smugglers; John Hancock in particular made a fortune by evading government regulation and taxation, and he wished to continue to do so. He’d already been dragged into court and fined by the British and had lost a ship. By inciting rebellion, he could eliminate British laws, and thus his past and future liability. So he invested heavily in a “grass roots” rebellion, from the top down.

Boston, like other port cities in the colonies, was an excellent recruiting ground; sailors between voyages haunted the waterfront taverns, and were happy to do a bit of dirty work in exchange for money up front and the license to steal. Hence the more elevated members of the Sons of Liberty were able to keep their hands clean.

To intimidate those who stood in their way – such as those who collected taxes, enforced laws, preferred government to anarchy, those who wrote or spoke well of the British, or even those whose hatred for the British was deemed to be insufficient – the Sons of Liberty used mob violence, home invasions, beatings, arson, and death threats. They vandalized and looted houses, terrorized the occupants, carried off the silver, drank up the wine cellars and ripped up the gardens for good measure.

Founding Father and future President John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, wrote, “The poor people themselves, who, by secret manoeuvres, are excited to insurrection, are seldom aware of the purposes for which they are set in motion or of consequences which may happen to themselves; and when once heated and in full career, they can neither manage themselves nor be managed by others.”

The Boston Tea Party came early, and was one of the more polite affronts to authority. The Sons of Liberty boarded three American ships in Boston harbor and destroyed £10,000 worth of private property – 342 chests of tea – owned by the East India Company. But they did not damage the ships or harm the crews.

The British Parliament, from a distance of 3,000 miles, felt that order was breaking down and sent more troops. The arrival of more British soldiers gave those inclined to rebellion someone to shoot at, leading to the battles at Lexington and Concord, and the Revolutionary War, which left 25,000 Americans dead and drove an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Americans, colonists who remained loyal to the British, out of their homeland.

Lots of suffering to be sure, but the men behind the Sons of Liberty got what they wanted – the ability to make lots of money without tiresome government regulations. And thus the destruction of private property and a triumph of violence over the free market came to be enshrined in conservative memory.

* * *

The picture above is “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring and Feathering” (1774) by Philip Dawe.

It was 1969. I had just finished language school in Monterey, California, and had been sent for Intelligence Training to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. It was a six-week course, but we were a week late and had to wait five weeks for the next cycle. So we had five weeks of KP.

Those of us who were married lived off base, and we were told that if we were going to be in Texas for very long, we’d better get Texas plates on our cars. A friend with Kentucky plates was ticketed for driving 18 miles an hour, in a 15-mile-per-hour school zone. Being in uniform was no help; it was essentially a Union uniform. Our civilian clothes fared no better; people in supermarkets stared at us like we were from Mars. One of the two local television stations ran the British series “The Prisoner” on Saturday nights, but preempted the final episode for a taped Billy Graham crusade. I was not comfortable in San Angelo.

But one evening in a supermarket, I saw a rack of paperback books, and right in the middle, Brak the Barbarian, with a Frank Frazetta cover. I needed to get away, and this took me away. It may not have saved my life, but it saved my sanity.

That was more than 40 years ago, and recently I thought I’d like to relive that, without going to Texas of course. So I found a copy on Abebooks and read it when it arrived. I’d like to say I didn’t remember a word of it, but I did remember two: “ensorceled” and “ichor.” Nor had I forgotten how the book made me feel. And I am still grateful to John Jakes.

In February of 2014, Dr. James David Manning, pastor of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York City, shocked America when he revealed that the President of the United States practices ceremonial magic and has the ability to summon and control demons. In particular, homosexual demons.

Manning said, “Obama has released these demons particularly upon the black males, this homosexual demon, to enforce as many black males to subscribe to ideas of a homosexual, perverted, LGBT as possible.” And once black men have been possessed, “They are being scooped up by white homos, leaving the black woman in more dire straits and with less of a choice of a man to come and be her husband, and father her children.”

Dr. Manning then spelled it out for black women:

“You’ll have a very hard time competing against a white homosexual male. He’s usually got money. The white homo usually has an American Express card. He usually has an opportunity at the theater. Homos love the theater. They love to go out to dinner, parties. They love that kind of thing. And as a black woman, you can’t compete!”

What a segue: from the evocation of demons to show tunes. And demons aren’t just haunting Harlem.  When televangelist Kenneth Copeland asked would-be historian David Barton why politicians change when they move to Washington, he explained:

“There are principalities that sit over certain areas. And I can tell this in the U.S. Capitol. When I walk from the House side to the Senate side, I cross the middle line of the Capitol, I can feel a different principality because they have jurisdictions over different things. And there are principalities that sit over different government entities that cause them to think really goofy and you can’t get prayers through, they get delayed 21 days because the principalities are up there fighting in the Heavenlies.”

Three weeks for a prayer to get through! No wonder they vote wrong all the time.

Pastor John Benefiel, an “Apostle” who leads the Heartland Apostolic Reformation Network supports the claim that demons rule Washington, D.C. Plus, the Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol and the Washington Monument – “that obelisk, that evil symbol” – are demonic. And the Statue of Liberty?

“You know there’s a statue in New York harbor called the Statue of Liberty. You know where we got it from? French Free Masons. Listen folks that is an idol, a demonic idol, right there in New York harbor.”

Nor is the U.S. alone in the battle. Following the 2011 earthquake in Japan, C. Peter Wagner of Global Spheres, Inc., revealed that the disaster was punishment from God because the Sun Goddess Amaterasu knocked boots with Emperor Akihito in 1990 during his Daijosai ceremony.

“And at a certain time that night the Sun Goddess visits him in person, and has sexual intercourse with the Emperor… So the emperor becomes one flesh with the sun goddess and that’s an invitation for the Sun Goddess to continue to demonize the whole nation.”

Demons everywhere. With American Express cards. You can’t compete.

* * *

The image of a sorceror summoning a demon is by Frank Frazetta, painted in 1965 for the cover of Eerie #2.

Years have passed, and I think I can talk about the bug now. It was Holy Week, 2010, at St. James’ Episcopal Church. I sang in the choir. The choir sat in the front of the church, a few steps above the congregation and a step below the altar. Which is to say, we were very visible, so it was best if we behaved ourselves. Especially on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the two most solemn days in Christianity. You know, Christ on the eve of his execution, and Christ beaten, mocked, humiliated, then nailed to a cross between two thieves. Dark times.

And when the scripture was read describing those events, the lights were dimmed until the church was as dark as those nights, and we were all still.

It was into this dark and stillness that the bug walked, out of the wall and into the darkened sanctuary. You might ask, “How could you see the bug if it was dark?” I’ll tell you how: This was a big bug. Our church was built in 1873, and I have no doubt that the bug entered the walls during its construction, and had been living at St. James’ ever since, growing stout on a diet of only God knows what. I’ve seen smaller mice. He had long, spindly legs, knees moving like scissors, and antennae that could have picked up the BBC World Service if he was interested in news from across the Atlantic.

He walked, in a business-like fashion, across the tile floor as if this was his route every evening. The basses seated at the altar-end of their row were the first to see him, as he emerged from the shadows; then the tenors, sopranos and altos. Under normal circumstances, such an appearance might occasion exclamations like “Holy Cow!” and “My goodness, what might that be?” Some brave soul, giving no thought to his or her shoe, might have sprung up to squash the thing.

But we were in church, in the front of the church, in white robes with black stoles, on the most Holy and somber day of the Christian calendar listening to scripture recounting Christ’s agony. All holding still just as Mom and Dad took great pains (usually our own) to teach us. And the bug kept walking. Phrases like “crushing mandible” and “venom with no antidote” flashed across our minds as we charted his progress.

For a time, the bug kept to a straight line, crossing the open portion of the floor between the facing rows of choristers, but then he took a slow left and disappeared behind the row of wide-eyed altos. I looked across at our choir director, who alone among us seemed unaware of the bug, and I thought that if the bug went up his trouser leg, we were going to hear something.

But the bug did not go up his trouser leg. After a minute or two of high suspense, it reappeared, having done no damage. Our relief, however, was short-lived. He was coming back our way. Across the floor. Perhaps mumbling or humming a bug tune in a register too high for our ears, still acting as though he was all alone, making his accustomed rounds.

I did not want to be the one to startle him, and watched with fascination as my feet, apparently acting on their own, moved slowly to the left, away from the bug. He passed within a foot of my chair leg and back into the darkness. Turning in for the night.

When my respiration returned to normal, I picked up the thread of the service, noting that I had missed a significant portion during the bug’s tour. But, unharmed, I grew calm and came to feel better about the bug. This was, after all, a house he shared with God, and he’d clearly lived in it much, much longer than I had.

Growing up, I saw my mother’s bookplate in many of the books I picked up at home, and recently saw it again in a cookbook that had been up in the attic:

But this time, I wondered where that quote came from. As it turns out, it’s from Shakespeare, Duke Senior exiled in the forest of Arden in As You Like It, Act II, Scene I:

“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery; these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.”

Nor would I.

Some time in the 1970s, I was in the dark of the microform room at Bird Library, Syracuse University, looking at some early English verse, when I stumbled upon a song from the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Forty years later, of course, the Beatles’ music has been analyzed and documented to the last note, but then, this was something of a discovery. I thought Lennon & McCartney had written “Golden Slumbers,” and here it was, almost word for word, as a verse written around 1599:

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

Care is heavy, therefore sleep you,
You are care, and care must keep you;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby,
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.

The other day, I listened to Abbey Road again and was reminded of this, however beyond “Thomas Somebody” I couldn’t remember who the earlier author was. But we have Google now and there he was, Thomas Dekker. And an interview with Paul McCartney, in which he said, “I was at my father’s house in Cheshire messing about on the piano and I came across the traditional tune ‘Golden Slumbers’ in a songbook of Ruth’s [Paul’s step-sister]. And I thought it would be nice to write my own ‘Golden Slumbers.’ I can’t read music and I couldn’t remember the old tune, so I started playing my tune to it, and I liked the words so I just kept that.”

“Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” were recorded as one song on July 2, 1969, at Abbey Road studios. They sound just as lovely today.

I’d like to put in a word for the ravens of Idaho.

Starting this spring, Idaho wildlife officials will spend $100,000 to poison ravens in order to protect the sage grouse population. Ravens are known to eat sage grouse eggs, among many other things, and the sage grouse population is shrinking.

But is the ravens’ fault? Sage grouse need solitude and sagebrush-rich landscapes to survive. As many as 16 million sage grouse lived on the sagebrush plains of the U.S. and Canada in the 19th century, but today their population is estimated to be between 100,000 and 500,000.

Yet Idaho wildlife officials themselves say predation – other animals eating sage grouse eggs – ranks 12th among the 19 factors that contribute to the bird’s decline. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service list the top three threats to the sage grouse as invasive plants, infrastructure and fire; predation comes in tenth on their list.

What items top the list? Loss of habitat due to human encroachment, such as energy exploration, mining, development, and cattle grazing by ranchers. And hunters, who have killed 83,769 sage grouse since 2000, according to Idaho Fish and Game estimates. Over the past three years, hunters have shot an average of 2,317 sage grouse a year.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is soon to decide if the sage grouse will be protected under the Endangered Species Act. If that happens, it could hamper the development of new oil and gas fields, wind farms, utility lines and roads. It also might lead to restrictions on ranchers who graze livestock on federal lands where sage grouse live.

So Idaho is scrambling to find ways to boost the population of the sage grouse so the bird will not be added to the list of endangered species. The ranchers want to keep on grazing; the energy companies want to keep on exploring; the hunters want to keep on hunting the sage grouse. Look! It’s the ravens’ fault!

Katie Fite, biodiversity director for the Western Watersheds Project, notes, “This is absolutely insane. It is like the [Idaho] Legislature isn’t dealing with reality here, and they just want to kill something and not address habitat issues.”

Of course they don’t. Ranchers, energy executives, developers and hunters all have money and telephones.

But ravens? They are the most intelligent birds, communicate with up to 30 unique calls, solve complex problems, engage in play, mate for life, remember the faces of humans and their previous interactions with them. But they do not have money, or telephones.

So Idaho will spend $100,000 to poison thousands of them. One more sad commentary on humanity.

* * *

Drawing of a raven, “Raven on Fir Branch” (2004), by Robert Bateman

In the closing days of World War II, with the German military collapsing on every front, U.S. forces reached the city of Leipzig. The 2nd Infantry, 69th Infantry and 9th Armored Divisions entered the city on April 18th and, after house-by-house combat, they secured it on April 19th. The next day, April 20th, war correspondents and photographers followed; one of the first was Margaret Bourke-White. At the Neues Rathhaus, the New City Hall, she found this scene.

Two days before, with the sounds of the approaching armies coming through the broken windows, the Deputy Mayor, Ernst Kurt Lisso, with his Nazi party card on his desk at his elbow, had taken his own life with cyanide, as had his wife, Renate, and daughter, Regina, still wearing her German Red Cross armband.

Waves of such suicides accompanied the last days of the Nazi regime, prompted by many factors: Nazi propaganda promising horrors should Germany be defeated,  attachment to the ideals of the Nazi Party, anticipated imprisonment and executions of those held responsible. Life magazine (May 14, 1945) noted:

“In the last days of the war the overwhelming realization of utter defeat was too much for many Germans. Stripped of the bayonets and bombast which had given them power, they could not face a reckoning with either their conquerors or their consciences. These found the quickest and surest escape in what Germans call selbstmord, self-murder.”

One account claimed that cyanide pills were distributed by the Hitler Youth during the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic on April 12, 1945. During the Battle of Berlin, almost 4,000 Berliners killed themselves. And yet, there are still people in the world who think a war can turn out well.

* * *

Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White from Bourke-White (1988), a catalog of a traveling exhibition of her work.

It began with a gift from a friend who was helping to clean out the house of a man who died without heirs. My friend saved an oak-framed picture from the dumpster and gave it to me. A couple of months later, I was looking on the Web for information on an artist and on the same page as the artist I sought was the picture on my wall. Its title was “Solitude,” and the artist’s name was Angelo Asti. A French artist from an Italian family, he worked in Paris, mostly, but spend some time in Cincinnati, Ohio, working for a lithographer. And he came to know the principals at Brown & Bigelow, selling them their first image of a beautiful woman and inadvertently becoming the Father of American Pinup Calendars.

So I went to eBay, to see if perhaps I could find an Asti postcard, and saw the one above, the same image as the print hanging in my office. And in the other works up for sale, there was another postcard, one that I already owned, a gift of another friend years ago, a Russian postcard, with another Asti beauty. And they were in the same room.

And farther down on eBay, an Asti illustration for a Job cigarette paper advertisement, and even a plate.

And then, oh my gosh, a beer tray by Asti. And it was not just any tray, but one that I had owned back in the 1970s, before some difficult times had prompted me to part with all my beer stuff. I clicked on the tray, to take a closer look. There was a picture of the front of the tray, with the Asti artwork and the name of the brewer, and then a picture of the tray’s back.

A note from the seller said that someone had put a hanger on the back, and taped it into place, almost an apology. And I looked at the picture, and recalled putting that hanger and tape on, and realized I was looking at my tray. Not just a tray like mine, but mine. The one I had owned. A tray I hadn’t seen in 40 years, and there it was. On eBay, waiting for me.

I bought it, again.

She arrived a few days later. I ran my fingers over the tape on the back, still nice and secure, flipped the tray over and smiled at her image, and said, “Hello, darling. You’re home.”

Thank you, Google. Thank you, eBay.

I had a teacher in college who suggested that the political spectrum is not a line, with the extreme left at one end and extreme right at the other, but rather a circle, and when you go to either extreme you actually loop around and bump into your “opposite.”

This could explain the love affair between the American Right and communist revolutionary Vladimir Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin, whose methods have been emulated by Roger Ailes, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Wayne LaPierre, David Green, et al. In Lenin’s words:

“The press should not be only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.”

“One man with a gun can control one hundred without one.”

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seeds I have sown will never be uprooted.”

At this point, it’s not about ideology any more, just power. The “ideals” and “beliefs” are window dressing.

What follows is a piece by a friend and mentor whose writing I value. He’s not Web-oriented, so I offered to post this piece for him, and he accepted. Enjoy.

A former student was in town the other day and came by for a visit. I hadn’t seen him in some time. He’s sixty-eight now (I was very young when I was his teacher) and tells me he’s thinking about retiring. He has worked for advertising agencies and businesses over the years writing creative copy. He’s also published a couple of non-fiction books and has written a novel. He’s a modest respectable citizen, happily married, a good father, and a church goer. Toward the end of the visit he said he wanted to show me his latest acquisition. He pulled up his right shirt sleeve and revealed a tattoo on his upper arm just below the shoulder. It pictured a fat bright red bird perched on a thin green branch.

He told me about where he’d found the image — it’s an illustration in a children’s book that has special meaning for him — and where he’d had the tattoo done, but offered nothing about why he’d decided he needed a tattoo at this point in his life. Which of course was exactly what I wanted to know. I shied away from asking him, though, probably because I felt it was the kind of revelation you waited for someone to volunteer — like revealing the tattoo itself.

What I did say after admiring the tattoo was that I had been thinking lately of writing something about tattoos – that it seemed I had been seeing tattoos everywhere lately, all over professional athletes on TV, on teenagers, boys and girls, seen around town, on the arms of middle-aged guys in super market check-out lines or at the next table in restaurants, and on the legs of young ladies jogging by in the neighborhood summer mornings. Tattoos, it appears, are no longer the provenance of prisoners and sailors, or rebels, outsiders and misfits. They are showing up now on all kinds of people, including respectable sixty-eight year old former students, and I have started wondering why: what is behind this apparent proliferation of pictures punched into the skin? What does it show about us as a culture, about our values, or needs, or whatever?

My friend was not inclined to speculate, personally or culturally. Instead, he has been sending me all kinds of stuff having to do with tattoos. I’m not sure if he’s doing this to further stimulate my interest and get me going on writing something or simply because he’s happy to have found someone who shares his interest. He has sent me Internet links to tattoo images that have to do with things he knows I’m interested in — for instance, a tattoo quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. He has sent links to pictures of particularly spectacular tattoos, covering whole arms or legs or torsos. He assembled and sent a CD of nineteen songs each of which has something to do with or mentions tattoos. (They’re wonderful songs and I’ll have more to say about some of them later.) And he sent me a book: Literary Tattoos – The Word Made Flesh by Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor, published in 2010. (More on it later.)

And, as if that weren’t enough, The Economist magazine ran an article a couple of weeks ago (August 2, 2014) on tattoos: “Ink Blots – Body art is growing more popular; though few employers are keen.” Finally, I took a look at what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject.

So I guess I should be ready to roll.

But I’m not. God knows what this tattooing craze is about. Or if it is a craze. If it is, it’s a very quiet one. It doesn’t seem to lend itself to facile generalization (my specialty). There seem to be all kinds of reasons why people are getting tattooed, all kinds of tattoos that they’re getting, all kinds of people who are getting them, all the way from the traditional rebels, outsiders, and misfits still, to people with literary interests, to people with other special interests that they apparently now want to personalize by carrying some appropriate image of on their skin, to people who are doing it as always because it’s an in thing to do, to people like my friend whose motivation I won’t pretend to fathom. It is obviously no longer a macho masculine thing, if it ever really was, nor is it primarily a show of rebellion, a defiance of waspy lily-skinned respectability. There are a lot of waspy types now who are showing lots of colorful pictures and designs and images on their very white skin. It’s like a lot of perfectly respectable men shaving their heads now, or wearing little stud things in their ears (like Shakespeare wearing a gold earring in that famous portrait of him – and, whoever he was, I don’t think Shakespeare was wearing an earring to express rebellion). The current tattooing may be nothing more than another way of fulfilling the old need for self-expression, like clothing and hair styles or like the slang spoken by particular groups such as musicians or technicians.

But why skin? That’s what intrigues me.

Clothes you can change. Hair you can cut or restyle or dye another color. Slang comes and goes. But tattoos are meant to be forever. They are pigments punched into the dermis — the layer of skin underneath the outermost or epidermis layer. They can be removed but at much greater expense and inconvenience and discomfort than they can be received. People having themselves tattooed aren’t anticipating removal. They’re committing for the long haul, like forever. They begin thinking about removal only when someone like a potential employer for a nice job they’d like to get expresses concern about the appropriateness of people with tattoos holding that job. The old profiling still prevails apparently amongst employers: “people with tattoos are seen as … well, you know…” According to the article in The Economist, tattoo removal is up 440 % in the last decade. But that’s because those getting the tattoo in the first place were young or, like the young, didn’t think ahead. I would imagine — though The Economist doesn’t cite figures for this — that there are plenty more who have committed to tattoos recently who are sticking with them. (Or the tattoos are sticking with them.) The Wikipedia entry on Tattoo tells us that in 2008 a Harris Interactive pole conducted online found that 14% of all U.S. adults had at least one tattoo – down from 16% in 2003 – while 32% of U.S. adults between the ages of 25 and 29 had one. Men were “slightly more likely” to be tattooed than women. Take that kind of online poling with its likely sample bias for what it’s worth.

Whatever the percent, those with tattoos stand out. They are noticed, though that is not always the point. My friend’s tattoo, for instance, like those of many other tattooees, is not visible unless he pulls up his shirt sleeve and shows it to you. Though being noticed for the sake of being noticed may often have been the point in the past, and still may be to some extent, my sense is there is something deeper going on with tattoos these days. Or maybe we just didn’t notice it so much in the past what with our more superficial profiling.

I think what the tattooed may be saying by means of their tattoo is something like this: “Here is an image having to do with something that is special to me, that I have a special interest in, and that may arouse your curiosity, and maybe if you are curious or have such an interest yourself, we might relate to one another.” I think the tattoo may be an invitation to dialogue. And, God knows, in a world of caution and suspicion and separation, there is need for things that bring us into dialogue. Tattoos can be an expression of personal uniqueness while at the same time a way of reaching out to and connecting with others.

And even those who keep their tattoos under cover may be drawing on them as dialogue with themselves: “I am one person out there in my public image, in my suit or uniform or dress-up outfit, but underneath, here on the skin of my real self, I am another person, a private person, a person with particular interests or commitments imaged as personally and permanently as I can make them, in my skin, and which I reveal only to myself and to certain others whom I choose.” I think that’s what undercover tattoos may be saying and that such internal dialogue expresses a separation many feel nowadays: between the obligatory public person they feel they have to be and the inner real person — the body of real flesh and blood — and skin tattooed to say so.

Such wondering about why people commit to tattoos brings me to the book and songs my friend gave me. In the book, Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor include, along with pictures of the tattoos, comments by the tattooees about why they have chosen the particular work of literature and the particular quote from it that they have turned into a tattoo, what the words and work mean to them. One person, for instance, has these lines from a poem by Theodore Roethke tattooed on the inside of her arm:

- O remember

in your narrowing dark hours

that more things move

than blood in the heart.

She tells about her remembrance of discussing this poem in her first college course on poetry and how it has stimulated her on her own road to writing poems and how she finds a significant ambiguity in the poem: Is it the destination or the journey that’s more important? (I’m not sure just how she finds that ambiguity in those lines, but no matter.) She carries the ambiguity expressed in the lines with her on her skin wherever she goes. It’s part of her own journey.

Another tattooee has the closing lines of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road imprinted into her back along with a picture of Kerouac working at his old typewriter. It’s another instance, perhaps, of the need to carry on the road wherever one goes – in this case looking back at where one has been – words and associations that provide sustenance along the way. Life is transient, we’re always on the move, but the tattoo is a means of carrying something permanent with us from where we have been. The tattoos shown in the book include quotes from Thomas Pynchon, E.E. Cummings, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (in Russian), William Gibson, William Blake, Virginia Woolf, etc., etc. There are pictures of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, pictures from Maurice Sendak’s books, and illustrations inspired by Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, etc. And comment after comment about why these words or this book or this author is significant enough in one’s life to have inspired carrying it around with oneself permanently as part of oneself.

The tattoos shown in Literary Tattoos - The Word Made Flesh cover a good body of western literature, words and works that are meaningful and of lasting importance in the lives of the people who have turned them into tattoos. Some of us memorize — or simply internalize — lines from our favorite poems; some mark special passages in copies of books. Some literature survives after a while as fragmentary echoes: to be or not to be; friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears; the quality of mercy is not strained. Those who have literature tattooed into their skin might be thought of as like walking carriers and preservers of the culture. And literature is of course only one part of the culture, and culture only one part of the kind of commitment that can be borne in this way — and bared — as part of one’s body — and being.

There is a song on the CD my friend sent, sung by Guy Clark, called “Stuff that Works.” Stuff that works is, for example, the singer’s old blue shirt and the old pair of boots that fit just right and his old used car that runs just like a top. Stuff that works is

Stuff that holds up

The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall

Stuff that’s real

Stuff you feel

The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall

Stuff that works is like tattoos. There’s plenty of stuff, I might add, that doesn’t work. It washes off and goes down the drain by the end of the day.

Another song called “True Love Will Never Fade,” sung by Mark Knopfler, says it in another way.

“Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” is my all-time favorite tattoo song. I have an old recording of Groucho Marx singing it at an appearance made late in his career at Carnegie Hall. On the CD, Faith Prince does a version I think would set Groucho’s eyebrows awaggling. Lady Lydia, it seems, is a history buff — in the buff. She has eyes that men adore so and a torso even more so, and on said torso are depicted, among other scenes, the wreck of the Hesperus, Washington crossing the Delaware, and the Battle of Waterloo – with proudly above them waving the red, white, and blue. When Lydia’s muscles start relaxin’ up the hill comes Andrew Jackson. As the song says, you can learn a lot from Lydia.

You can learn a lot from tattoos, and not only from the subjects of the pictures and the words inscribed into the skin. Lydia’s tattoos are not only encyclopedic, they are seductive. There can be something mysterious in the colors and intricate designs and supple shapes and movements of tattoos. I find that the music of many of the tattoo songs catches this feeling. The sound is often ethereal and far away, like the tingling of wind chimes. There can be something ominous, too, in the appearance of tattooed skin, a feeling that the tattoo endows the bearer with certain charms and powers. I suspect the tattoos done by so-called primitive peoples have always had spiritual meanings — for instance, to protect against or ward off evil, or to introduce into the tattooed person’s being certain characteristics symbolized by the tattoos.

In Melville’s Moby-Dick, Queequeg, the chief harpooner, is a native of the South Seas whose skin is covered with tattoos. Early in the book, when narrator Ishmael and Queequeg share a room together at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford prior to setting sail on the book’s voyage, Ishmael observes:

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.

Whatever the original intent of Queequeg’s tattoos may have been in his land, in Ishmael’s Christian country they have the power to take control of Ishmael’s imaginings. The scene is comedy, but the tattoo power is real.

In Ray Bradbury’s collection of stories, The Illustrated Man, the man’s tattoos come alive at night and tell stories that take place in space and other planets and galaxies. And the last story is about an illustrated man who had his tattoos done as cover for his unattractive overweight aging real self, to make himself appear more attractive, he thinks, to his wife and to the world. Tattoo as cover. But to the wife he is still what he has become for her – a tub of lard – and she tells him she’s leaving him. And to the world, which sees him in the freak show he has joined as its illustrated man, the tattoo on his chest depicting him committing a murder makes him a horror. Tattoo as terror. Then, after he has murdered his wife out of frustration and despair, the other freaks chase and hunt him down and beat him with tent stakes, and, on then turning him over and pulling away the adhesive on his back covering his last yet until then unseen tattoo, reveal a scene showing “a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a dark and lonely road, looking at a tattoo on his back which illustrated a crowd of freaks bending over a dying fat man on a …”  Tattoo as mirror.

There is ordinary everyday skin and then we make it something more. We give it another dimension. We also make sounds and marks on paper and screens mean something more, and we make pigments on canvas and hunks of marble and wood into something more; but it’s tattoos that make live skin something more. It’s tattoos that give the tattooed skin in the game.

– John Milner, 8/2014

Time has passed, and I think I can talk about the bug now. It was Holy Week, 2010, at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Skaneateles, N.Y. I sang in the choir. The choir sat in the front of the church, a few steps above the congregation and a step below the altar. Which is to say, we were very visible, so it was best that we behaved ourselves. Especially on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the two most solemn days in Christianity. Christ on the eve of his execution, and Christ beaten, mocked, humiliated, then nailed to a cross between two thieves. Dark times.

And when the scripture was read describing these events, the lights were dimmed until the church was as dark as those nights, and we were all still.

It was into this dark and stillness that the bug walked, out of the wall and into the darkened sanctuary. You might ask, “How could you see the bug if it was dark?” I’ll tell you how: This was a big bug. Our church was built in 1873, and I have no doubt that he entered the walls during its construction, and had been living at St. James’ ever since, growing stout on a diet of God knows what. I’ve seen smaller mice. He had long, spindly legs, knees moving like scissors, and antennae that could have picked up the BBC World Service if he was interested in news from across the Atlantic.

He walked, in a business-like fashion, across the tile floor as if this was his route every evening. The basses seated at the altar-end of their row were the first to see him, as he emerged from the shadows; then the tenors, sopranos and altos. Under normal circumstances, such an appearance might occasion exclamations like “Holy Cow!” and “My goodness, what might that be?!” Some brave soul, giving no thought to his or her shoe, might have sprung up to squash the thing.

But we were in church, in the front of the church, in white robes with black stoles, on the most Holy and somber day of the Christian calendar listening to scripture recounting Christ’s agony. All holding still just like Mom and Dad took great pains (usually our own) to teach us. And the bug kept walking. Phrases like “crushing mandible” and “venom with no antidote” flashed across our minds as we charted his progress.

For a time, the bug kept to a straight line, crossing the open portion of the floor between the facing rows of choristers, but then he took a slow left and disappeared behind the row of wide-eyed altos. I looked across at our choir director, who alone among us seemed unaware of the bug, and I thought that if the bug went up his trouser leg, we were going to hear something.

But the bug did not go up his trouser leg. After a minute or two of high suspense, he reappeared, having done no damage. Our relief, however, was short-lived. He was coming back our way. Across the floor. Perhaps mumbling or humming a bug tune in a register too high for our ears, still acting as though he was all alone, making his accustomed rounds.

I did not want to be the one to startle him, and watched with fascination as my feet, apparently acting on their own, moved slowly to the left, away from the bug. He passed within a foot of my chair leg and back into the darkness. Turning in for the night.

When my respiration returned to normal, I picked up the thread of the service, noting that I had missed a significant portion during the bug’s tour. But, unharmed, I grew calm and came to feel better about the bug. This was, after all, a house he shared with God, and he’d clearly lived in it much, much longer than I had.

May 10, 2003

After I posted a piece about my mother’s childhood, a number of people noted what a hard man my grandfather was. True, but all my memories of him are good ones. Growing up, I knew he was a force of nature and not to be crossed, but mostly I remember him smiling or laughing, or leaning forward to tell me something important.

I was told that William L. Braun, the son of German immigrants, ran away from home when he was a boy, crawling out a bedroom window to escape his family. And that no one in his family bothered to look for him. He had no schooling. In his obituary, one of his friends said that he came up through “the College of Life.”

My grandmother once said that he was a complete gentleman during their courtship, and for the first week of their marriage. Then one day, he came home from work shouting, and he never stopped. (I always felt the change may have been related to Grandma Braun’s belief that all men were beasts and that intimate contact with them was a loathsome thing to be endured only for the sake of a marriage. Not exactly gladsome tidings to a groom who has just said, “I do.”)

Although he was not a tall man, Grandpa Braun seemed bigger than anybody. It could have been his personality, or it could have been his head, a big head with a shock of white hair, a wide smile, eyes that sparkled with energy, and perhaps the largest ears I have ever seen. Tall ears that framed his head like French doors.

Grandpa had terrific scars on his chest, from a splash of molten metal at his shop. “The doctor said it would have killed any other man,” my grandmother told me, the one time I ever heard her speak of Grandpa with anything approaching pride.

Whenever my Grandmother was upset with him, she’d say, “Oh, Will!” I heard that dozens of times.

He always walked like he was in a hurry, bent a little bit forward, charging into the day. When he drove, he drove too fast, and was pulled over in spite of his Police Athletic League medallion. My cousin told me that he once slipped a cop a $10 bill folded with his license; it came right back with the speeding ticket.

Grandpa’s doctor worried about his heart. He told him not to be in the same room with the television when the Friday Night Fights were on. So he watched from out in the hall, shadow boxing, throwing punches in the dark.

Grandpa loved to go hunting. He shot the second largest caribou taken in Alaska one year, and the largest brown bear. When I was very young, Grandpa had a retriever named Freckles, who was not allowed in certain rooms of the house. And because I was so small, I was not allowed in the same room with Freckles. But I could stand in a doorway and look at him. My brother, who was older, learned the secret of befriending the dog. All you had to do was give him a Clark Bar, of which there were many in my grandmother’s kitchen. But by the time I learned this invaluable piece of intelligence, Freckles had gone to play in the fields of the Lord.

Abbie Winship, my father’s mother, told me about the time Grandpa Braun came to Salamanca to go hunting with Grandpa Winship. This was cause for alarm. Grandpa Winship was every bit as grumpy and grouchy as Grandpa Braun. (In fact, I never heard him laugh as long as I knew him, and only saw him smile on Christmas Eve). Everyone feared this was going to be a clash of titans, the meeting of two storm fronts. And they’d both have guns. The day of the visit, Abbie spent the whole morning cleaning her house on Academy Street. The absolute last thing she had to do was put a new bar of soap in the bathroom upstairs. She came down to get one and there was Grandpa Braun at the front door. Hello, hello and up the stairs he went, and a moment later, Abbie heard him shout, “What kind of a house is this? They don’t even have soap in the bathroom!”

Grandpa Braun & Grandpa Winship, loaded for bear, December 1938

Grandpa was never at the center of family gatherings. He would put in cameo appearances, but mostly he stayed in his lair. At the Lasalle Avenue house, he had a bedroom and den on the top floor, with oak furniture, oriental rugs, a Hudson’s Bay blanket on the bed, a lamp glowing on his desktop, a real man’s room. It was like Aladdin’s cave to me. I could stand in the doorway and talk to him, but I couldn’t set foot in the room. At the house on East Depew, I was allowed in his den, and it was a privilege. I used to read his copy of Shooter’s Bible and look at the guns in his gun case. “This is an elephant gun,” he told me once, cradling a particularly large rifle. I had no clue why he kept an elephant gun in Buffalo, except perhaps for the pleasure of having it and seeing his grandson’s eyes grow large.

I remember him reaching into his safe once, pulling out a small bag and rolling four or five gray stones in the palm of his hand. “You know what these are?” No, I didn’t. “They’re uncut diamonds.”

In his mind, everything he owned was the best. He took me out to the garage and showed me his new Cadillac one afternoon, while my mother and grandmother were inside chatting, and said, “The dealer said to me, ‘Bill, this is the finest automobile that has ever been made.’ ” He drank Black & White scotch, or Haig & Haig in the “pinch” bottle, but one day he showed me a bottle of Ne Plus Ultra, and said, “Kihm, this is the finest Scotch money can buy.” It was the Cadillac, the elephant gun, of Scotches.

One of my favorite stories about my grandfather was that he went to four different doctors before he found one who would prescribe Canadian Club. A drink in the afternoon and a drink in the evening as a mild heart stimulant. If every patient followed instructions as well as my grandfather, we’d be living in a healthier country for sure.

Grandpa at a party in his honor, perhaps his retirement

He explained altitude and oxygen to me with a story about the time he had just arrived in Mexico City, had three drinks and couldn’t get off the bar stool. He brought me back peso notes from that trip, for my foreign money collection. He often bought my cousin Daryl stamps for her stamp collection.

Grandpa was not much of a domestic. In the summer, Grandma, Aunt Rhea, and my cousins Snookie and Daryl used to go to Alexandria Bay for a week or two. Once they asked Grandpa to water the plants, of which there were scores in the house. Grandpa said fine, he’d take care of it. When they returned home, they found each and every plant with a pool of clear water sitting atop bone dry soil. “He must have remembered it when he heard their car in the drive,” my mother said, in telling the story.

Once my brother was home from college and went to visit Grandpa at Phoenix Die Casting, his business in Buffalo. “What do you want?” Grandpa greeted him. “I just came to say hello and see how you’re doing,” Kent replied. “Oh,” Grandpa said, “in that case, have a drink!” pulling a bottle of Scotch out of his desk drawer and doing the honors. While they were chatting, the postman came in. “Hey,” Grandpa said, “have a drink!” and the bottle came out again.

On June 10, 1965, Grandpa died of a heart attack while shaving. My grandmother was “upset,” and I thought that an odd choice of words, but my mother insisted. Until that morning, I’d had four grandparents, the full complement, and no familiarity with death at all. I went to the funeral, my first. The following Monday, I began my summer job at Elmlawn Cemetery, and on Friday, I trimmed the grass around my grandfather’s grave.

My legacy included a five-pound, hand-knit Cowichan sweater (now in Japan) and a trophy deer head, a fine looking buck (now in my house).

Grandpa had been a Rotarian since 1929, and in his obit in the Rotary magazine, his friend Milton O. Hager wrote, “He was an astute business man with unswerving honesty and integrity… He worked long hours and had no compromise with things half done. As an employee or an employer he gave his best and expected those who worked with him to do the same… Bill was an independent, positive thinker, unafraid to take a stand on what he believed to be right. He had a great gift for separating the worthless things of life from the relevant and the essential… He enjoyed life with its hustle and bustle. He liked the society of his friends. He appreciated a good story. It is his laughter that I remember best today.”

Before he died, Grandpa set up a trust fund to take care of his wife and daughters. His lawyer said, “It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to somebody taking it with him.” That was Grandpa.

In 1889, Colorado lumberman James W. Clise moved to Seattle. He arrived on June 7th, one day after the Great Fire destroyed Seattle’s business district. Other men might have viewed the smoldering vista as inauspicious, but Clise began buying real estate – probably at fire sale prices – and was soon a successful developer.

Lyman C. Smith

In 1890, Clise came east in search of investors, and in Syracuse, N.Y., was introduced to Lyman C. Smith. Mr. Smith had made a fortune with the L.C. Smith shotgun and was on the way to a larger fortune manufacturing Smith Premier typewriters.

Sold on Seattle, sight unseen, Smith wrote Clise a check for one of the largest purchases of real estate in the city’s history. In 1901, Smith also joined Clise and others in starting a gas company to provide fuel and illumination for Seattle, and a transportation company for shipping to the Orient.

In 1909, Smith returned home from a trip to Seattle with plans to build a 14-story office building on the land he owned. But his son, Burns Lyman Smith, had seen the publicity that taller buildings created for Woolworth’s, Singer sewing machines and Metropolitan Life. He felt that if the L.C. Smith Building was the world’s tallest outside of New York, it would lift sales of Smith Premier typewriters.

The L.C. Smith Building was completed in the summer of 1914, and its opening saw a rush to the 35th floor, where an observation deck gave the people of Seattle spectacular views of the city, waterfront and mountains. Visitors were also charmed by the 35th floor’s Chinese Room.

The builders had first said the room would be finished in Washington fir with Alaskan decorations. Later, the plan was changed to a Japanese tea room. But ultimately a Chinese temple motif was selected. It was a logical choice: Among the original tenants of the office building, 28 were shipping companies doing business with the Orient.

In the present day, there is a story circulating that the Chinese Room was a gift to Lyman C. Smith from the Empress of China. Occasionally, writers preface the claim with “local legend says” or the oft-used “it is believed.” However you serve it up, the story is baloney.

Sources from 1914 say clearly that the furnishings are replicas, the ceiling tiles represent historic tablets from Chinese temples, and the room is decorated with Chinese characters depicting Northwest history. There is no mention of a Chinese empress, much less Ci-Xi, who hated foreigners and supported the Boxer Rebellion which sought to throw westerners out of China, preferably after they’d stopped breathing.

Many writers embroider the tale with the Wishing Chair – whereupon a dragon and phoenix represent the union of a man and a woman – saying that if a woman sits in the chair, she will be married within a year. They recall that L.C. Smith’s daughter sat in the chair and was married exactly one year later, in the Chinese Room!  Fun story, except Smith’s only daughter, Flora Bernice Smith, never married.

Unfortunately, the Empress folklore slights the people who really did the work.

The walls, doors, ceilings and furniture of the Chinese Room were hand-carved in Burmese teak by G. Gerald Evans of Philadelphia. Evans and his craftsmen could, and did, duplicate any style of woodwork. Evans did furnishings for DAR Memorial Hall in Washington, D.C., patterned after a room in the City of London and made of oak from the 1777 wreck of the British warship Augusta. Evans did ornate wood carving for the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, and pews and pulpits for churches all over America.

The porcelain ceiling tiles were made in Syracuse, N.Y. We have that on the authority of Louis Merz, a master carpenter who was interviewed in early 1914 about the progress of the construction and identified Syracuse as the source. At that time, the city was the center of the Arts & Crafts ceramics movement; the Onondaga Pottery Company was producing Syracuse China and Adelaide Alsop Robineau was creating exquisite ceramic art. No one had to loot a temple.

One more item in the Chinese Room, seen in a single postcard, briefly presented a mystery. Could it have been a prayer wheel?

The answer was more prosaic. One year after the Smith Tower was completed, Burns Lyman Smith perfected a truck wheel cast in one piece. The object of veneration in the center of the Chinese Room is a Smith Wheel. And no, it’s not from the Empress of China.

In November of 1888, Scientific American published an article on “The Making of Postal Cards” which follows, but I thought it needed a brief introduction on how postcards themselves came about.

In 1870, citing the success of postal cards in Europe, U.S. Postmaster General John A. J. Creswell recommended to Congress the issuance of a one-cent postal card, citing the need for a “prompt and easy mode of communication by mail, adapted to the convenience and habits of business men, as well as of that large class of persons who have not the time or the inclination to write formal letters.”

In 1871, Representative John Hill of New Jersey introduced a bill to authorize postal cards, setting off a year of heated debate. Representative James Garfield (later to become President), thought the cards too dangerous. A postal card with a libelous message, passing through the hands of so many would-be readers, could be “a vehicle of great injury to the person to whom it was addressed.” Garfield was also troubled that anyone with a penny could write his Congressman, warning a colleague that he might “find these postal cards coming back upon him like barbed arrows, from anybody who may wish to shoot at him.”

Another congressman saw darker motives on the part of the executive branch, calling postcards “the vain and trifling whim of a corrupt and extravagant Administration vainly seeking for some plaything to amuse the people with, while it steals away their liberties.” The administration was that of Ulysses S. Grant and the opposition included many bitter Southern congressmen who disagreed with everything Grant said or did. (The phrases “corrupt and extravagant” and “steals away their liberties” were in wide circulation in the 19th century, so I cannot credit this particular critic with originality, but “vain and trifling whim” seems to have been his alone.)

In June of 1872, perhaps exhausted by their own paranoia and fulminations, the members of Congress authorized the Postmaster General to issue postal cards on “good stiff paper, of such quality, form, and size as he shall deem best adapted for general use.” However, shortly thereafter, the original legislation was amended to specify that postcards could not be used to carry immoral, obscene, lewd or lascivious matter, indecent or scurrilous epithets, or information on the prevention of conception or the procuring of abortion.

In January of 1873, funds were appropriated for postal cards’ manufacture and, because the Government Printing Office would not be established until 1910, Congress awarded the contract to a private printer. When the article below was written in 1888, that printer was the Fort Orange Paper Company.

(Since no illustrations accompanied the original article, I have included some from The Manufacture of Paper (1908) by R. W. Sindall, and a photo of women in the “rag room,” from the Crane Paper Company, circa 1870.)

* * *

“The Making of Postal Cards”

“The people of the United States use annually about seven postal cards for every man, woman, and child; that is to say, our total consumption for a year reaches 400,000,000, which is considerably more than are employed by all the rest of the world. This enormous number are all printed, cut apart, counted, and wrapped up in packages of 25, by machinery that would stand comfortably in a small bedroom, and that requires no assistance whatever from any operative, so long as it is supplied with paper, ink, and paste. A visit to the abode of this wonderful mechanism is naturally full of interest.

“The postal card factory—the only one in this country—is part of the great establishment of the Fort Orange Paper Company (C.C. Woolworth, president) at Castelton, near Albany [N.Y.]. These works, employing 200 hands and occupying (though, of course, not covering) a tract of 35 acres of land, have quite a picturesque location among the hills a mile back from the village, with which they are connected by the New York Central, Hudson River, and Fort Orange Railroad—the name is about as long as the track—and include every appliance for the manufacture of many different kinds of paper and cardboard—white, brown, and colored.

“Approaching this place from Castleton, one notices first the immense and very graceful chimney, founded on solid rock and rising 125 feet into the air—a tower-like structure of no little beauty. Around and near this are grouped a number of large buildings, one which we will enter, following the course of the raw material from which, in part, most kinds of paper are made—being bales of rags of every possible color, size, shape, and condition of dirtiness.

“This unpleasant stuff needs a lot of cleansing, as may well be imagined, and accordingly the first thing done with it is to toss it by handfuls into a “duster,” where it is tossed and shaken at a great rate, and liberated, so far as may be, from adhering and extraneous dirt.

“Next it goes to a long line of women and girls, who remove hooks and eyes, buttons, rubber, fragments of whalebone, and whatever other foreign material they find.

“Then it is cut up by a fast-running, steam-driven machine into fragments of moderate size, dusted (or ought we say undusted?) again by another machine, and dropped into great boilers below, where for six or seven hours it is subjected to the action of a hot chemical liquid, under pressure, to loosen its color and its still remaining dirt. Coming from the boilers, it is then soaked for three or four days in a solution of chloride of lime, which bleaches it completely, leaving it pure snowy white.

“It is next beaten and squeezed by beating engines until reduced to semi-pulpy condition, and then conducted into large hogsheads called “stuff chests,” whence it is pumped directly to the Fourdrinier paper machine. This imposing piece of mechanism, really a compound of a variety of machines by which a great number of operations are kept going simultaneously and harmoniously, receives at one end the pulp prepared as above, which comes pouring in from the stuff-chests in the form of a very thin, watery paste; and delivers, at the other end, the completed paper, calendared to its final surface, trimmed at the edge, and tightly rolled up like so much ribbon.

“The pulp first flows upon a fine wire netting, where it is sharply shaken for the purpose of causing its fibers to knit together like felting and acquire some degree of consistency. Then passing along on endless blankets, it is squeezed by a succession of rollers to get it into proper shape and remove the moisture (some of the rollers farthest along being steam-heated, to aid the drying), and finally pressed hard or “calendered,” to smooth the surface, and wound up in rolls. We should not think that more than two or three minutes could elapse between the entry of any particular portion of the pulp into the machine at one end and its exit from the calendars, [as] finished paper, at the other [end], and during that time it has traveled 125 feet.

“Now supposing that it is postal card paper that we have been watching, we follow a roll of it to the printing room and see it put into the combined printing press, cutter, counter, and wrapper—a machine that the inventor thought he could construct in three weeks at a cost of five hundred dollars, but it actually took four years and eight thousand dollars.

“This machine prints from a number of engraved plates on the surface of a fast revolving cylinder, against which the web of paper is closely pressed, thus repeating the pattern over and over again on the ribbon, as one might say; and then, as before stated, cuts the cards apart, wraps them up in packages of 25, with a band pasted around each, and delivers them by belt conveyors to the packing tables, where girls put them into paper boxes, each holding 500 cards. These again are inclosed in wooden cases of varying size, and shipped to every post office in the United States—so that the dispatching department of the works may be said to have some sixty thousand separate customers to attend to.

“Orders for the current month are unusually heavy, aggregating fifty-five to sixty millions, which will weigh about 175 tons; and we saw a fireproof vault containing some 25,000,000 cards ready to go. These are all domestic postal cards, it should be understood, no international cards having been called for during the last six or eight years. They now cost the government 48 cents per thousand, being less than two-thirds of the sum paid when they were first manufactured.”

* * *

When I began to read, one of the first books my mother gave me was Penrod by Booth Tarkington. I loved the book, in part because Penrod’s boyhood was preferable to my own, but also because Tarkington was fun, funny, and his prose flowed like a brook in the woods. I still return to him from time to time, and recently discovered a collection of letters he wrote to his nephews while he was traveling in Europe in 1903 and 1904. Your Amiable Uncle was published in 1949 and it’s filled with letters anyone would enjoy receiving. But for the nephews — aged 14, 12 and 1 — these must have been a hoot.

Tarkington began with ever varying salutations — “Dear Men,” “Angelic Nephews,” “Dear Sunday-School Models,” “Most Pious,” “Gifted Ones,” “Sons of Belial” — and closed similarly — “Your Helpful Uncle,” “Your Encouraging Uncle,” “Thoughtful and Instructive Uncle,” “Your Exalted Uncle.”

He wrote of the gifts he was collecting for them: “I am going to put one of the best right in the envelope with this letter: a picture card from St. Stephen’s in Paris! Of course, you won’t expect the other things to be quite so fine as this, or so interesting, yet I assure you that all are helpful and pious. How I wish I might behold your joy when this engaging object meets the eye! I think with pleasure almost equaling yours of the long November evenings which will not pass so quickly, as you sit engaged in contemplation of, and reflections engendered by, this treasure!”

And again, “We have bought you each a lovely, calfbound hymnal. You will be mad with joy. But that is not all. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, so far ahead — it may spoil half your pleasure in getting them, but I can’t resist. Each of you is to have a fine woodcut engraving of the Apostle Peter! Voila! After that, what more has life to offer you?”

More in line with the boys’ tastes, he wrote, “You would enjoy this hotel. There was a murder on the next floor yesterday afternoon, and my friend the Baron offered to get me a ticket of admission when they guillotine the gentleman who did the shooting. I fear I cannot stay, much as I enjoy such social occasions.”

After Paris came Rome. “I hope to find in Rome something really gruesome to tell you about. In the meantime, we are adding to your presents. In my next, I shall inform you of what we got for you today. You will dance with glee.”

He also included many drawings to illustrate the letters. This is my favorite:

With references to Indianapolis, he wrote, “Then we saw Lucrezia Borgia’s house, also her portrait in the Borghese villa. She was the old, original Nancy Clem of Rome; she poisoned more people than Sherman’s Restaurant.”

From Capri, he wrote about a waterspout he had seen over the sea: “I would have bought it for you but couldn’t find the proprietor. I am sorry, because you would have liked to own one, I know. Probably your mother wouldn’t let you bring it into the house — except as a great favor when you are good; but that wouldn’t be often enough to do any damage. You could have kept it in the cistern, ordinarily.”

And this as well: “This is the true Isle of the Sirens — nobody could stay here a little while without hearing them calling to him to stay here forever, amidst the kindly Southerners, with music and palm trees and ripening oranges and gentle greetings — it is a place that is like a good sermon without the minister.”

From Naples, this observation: “We landed into the Camorra. The Camorra is a secret society banned by the police, who nearly all belong to it.”

While they must have been glad to see their amiable uncle come home after his months abroad, I am sure they missed the letters they received while he was away.