December 13, 1946

Is it possible I played as a kid with someone who was born in 1946? Yes, when you're born in 1949 and that person is only 25 months older than you.

In a typical chain reaction of thought that was kicked off by reading a recent story about Keen's Steakhouse in the NYT, I once again came to dwell on my childhood friend George A. Trampler, the only child of our upstairs tenants when I was growing up in Flushing, NY.

I've often thought about George and the particular circumstances of how he passed away at 22 in 1969 from encephalitis contracted at Fort Dix, NJ during his Army training. But this time I went a little further. I Googled if those kinds of cases were common to Fort Dix. It turns out they were on several occasions.

George and his mother and father and his paternal grandfather moved into our upstairs apartment in our two-family home in Flushing some time in the 1950s. I really don't remember exactly when, other than it was the winter

George was an only child like myself, and we came fast friends that first winter playing outside in the snow. He went to the local Catholic elementary school, St. Andrew of Avellino, where eventually my girls started their education.

I remember George talking of his Latin homework in high school, conjugating verbs in Latin and reading Cicero. Might have even been in elementary school. I went to P.S. 22 around the corner, and Latin is what was on pennies.

George and his grandfather slept in the same bedroom. His grandfather, whose name I don't remember, it might have also been George like George's father, had been a concert pianist of some regard. I don't know how they got a grand piano in the upstairs living room on the second floor. I never remember it being moved in, or out, when they left some time in the early '60s.

The grandfather's playing could be heard downstair in our place. Nothing intrusive, but my mother always said he was playing "finger exercises." There were stacks of sheet music all over the piano when I played with George upstairs.

George didn't play baseball or touch football in the street with the rest of boys on the block, but he and I were always playing at his place, usually Monopoly. The Tramplers were big Monopoly players and would leave unfinished games out to be finished later.

George and I played so much Monopoly that I memorialized a picture of a board showing the tokens we always chose. The game in the '50s came with wooden tokens, before the metal pieces came to be used. I always took the orange piece; he the adjacent white piece.

Together he and I devised an extension of the board to be added alongside St. Mark's Place as a detour. We identified property names, created deeds and amounts. You came back to the standard board at the Electric Utility property.

We didn't play with a $500 bill to be scooped up if you landed on FREE PARKING. That was unknown to us.

George never came downstairs to play at my place. I don't know why that was. My mother was not social with too many people on the block. George's mother may have kept a tight rein on where he went.

George got into taking home movies. He saved his allowance money and bought a Bell & Howell movie camera, light bar, screen, and splicing unit. (Not all at once.) How'd I love to see those movies again. Not going to happen. 

I don't remember when the Tramplers moved out. I know I was too upset to join my folks in saying goodbye. As it went, that would have been the last time seeing my friend.

This whole rekindled memory was touched off my a recent NYT story on Kean's Steak House on West 36th Street. I've eaten there twice, and I knew of its connection to the Lambs Club, but not fully.

It seems Keens Steakhouse was started by Albert Keen in 1885, a theater producer who ran the Lambs Club, a hangout for theatrical folk. And the Lambs Club is where the Tramplers come in.

George's father, also named George, was a manager at the Lambs Club at 130 West 44th Street. The Club has since moved to 3 West 51st Street. There is a very upscale restaurant named Lambs on West 44th Street.

The father was a tall, distinguished, good looking man who my father said must be playing the horses, since the $125 in rent was often paid with a $100 bill, common to racetracks, then and now.

The Tramplers were good tenants, and were never behind in any rent, which I'm sure, knowing my father, was going for way below the market rate.

The upstairs apartment was equal to our downstair apartment in size, having two bedrooms an enclosed porch, one full bath, living room, kitchen and dining room. There was plenty of sunlight that came into the upstairs apartment.

The kitchen however was never modernized. My father did little to upgrade things. Our downstairs kitchen had a cupboard, cabinets, Formica counters and a kitchen table wedged between the stove and the refrigerator that you had to pull out to sit at. Upstairs, there were no cabinets, only a small counter, table and the same cupboard like we had.

Eventually, my father installed separate oil heating units in the cellar for each apartment, with the proviso that the Tramplers paid for their own fuel. They were happy to do so in lieu of any rent increase. Oil was very cheap then, maybe 11¢ a gallon. 

The separate burners eliminated the enormous, inefficient oil burner that was installed to heat both levels after the coal furnace was replaced. Before I was born, coal was chuted through cellar windows by the driveway into a bin. My parents initially were shoveling coal into the furnace with shovels. We still had the long-handled coal shovels and used them for shoveling snow.

The Tramplers moved out when the father got a job managing a country club in Riverside, Connecticut. The only contact we ever had after they moved was when we heard that the son, George, had passed away from encephalitis at Fort Dix, where the story went he was undergoing R.O.T.C. training.

George had gone to the local Catholic high school, Holy Cross in Flushing, and then Fordham University to study business. Digging into this a bit I can't reconcile the R.O.T.C. bit and passing away at 22, buried in Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, NY with a headstone at says PVT ARMY.

If an R.O.T.C. program is completed, and at 22 George was old enough and smart enough to have finished college, you get a commission in the Army as a 2nd Lieutenant.

George was born on Friday the 13th in 1946 and passed away on March 18, 1969. When we learned of George's passing it was sometime after he had died. We learned the parents passed away sometime after. 

George was the second of four boys I knew in the neighborhood who didn't make it such much past their 20s. One went to drugs, another to drugs after coming home from Vietnam. Another, an elementary school classmate of mine, went to an accident with a CO2 cartridge he was fiddling with for a science project that he punctured, that exploded and ripped him apart. I used to keep the Daily News story of his death in my wallet for the longest time.

If a young male in his 20s can keep living, he might make it to 75 and wonder where the time went.

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The Iceman

Before John Marley appeared in Love Story and Cat Ballou as the father of daughters played by Ali McGraw and Jane Fonda, and in The Godfather as a movie producer who wakes up in a blood soaked bed (he's a VERY sound sleeper apparently) with a horse's head, he was Garabet, a Greek in Turkey who makes money by chipping ice off a mountain in the 1963 Elia Kazan movie America, America. Having seen Marley in all those movies before ever seeing him in America, America, you're in for  a surprise when you see him in Kazan's autobiographical movie. Kazan was born in Turkey in 1909.

And lest you think that chipping ice off a mountain and selling it is an odd way to make money, you only have  to read the recent NYT obituary for Baltazar Ushca Tenesaca, 80, who kept Andean ice harvesting alive.

Before there were refrigerators there were ice boxes in kitchens. These boxes were cooled by large blocks of ice delivered by the ice man. The now long departed comedian Flip Wilson had a great narrative routine about the Ice Man and the horse who could climb stairs and talk, but only when it wanted to. 

It seems the horse was savvy enough to keep the fact that it could talk away from the owner, because if the owner/wagon driver knew the horse could talk in addition to climbing stairs and delivering the ice, the owner would want him to yell "Ice" as well. The horse wanted none of that added responsibility. This was a smart horse.

You do have to wonder how Mr. Ushca came to the attention of the NYT obituary desk. It is probably safe to safe that Andean ice harvesters were not sitting in a pre-written obit waiting for the subject to pass away. No matter. This subject almost passes the test of someone the late Robert McG. Thomas Jr. would have written about.

Baltazar had been chipping ice since the age of 15, from a glacier on Ecuador's highest peak, Mount Chimbarazo, a dormant volcano (thank goodness) with an elevation of 20,549 feet, the closest point on earth to the sun. Baltazar's father and brothers were in the business as well, but the brothers Juan and Gregorio left the family business a while ago.

The beauty of the online obit is that imbedded in it is a 2012 14 minute documentary link "El Último Hielero" or the "Last Ice Merchant."

Refrigerators and commercial ice have just about ended the business of harvesting ice from the glacier. Apparently though, all ice is not the same, with Chimborazo ice considered to be the testiest and the sweetest, full of vitamins for your bones.

Baltazar unloads two huge straw wrapped bundles and sells them in town, The merchant has been selling Chimborazo ice now for four generations. You do wish someone made the ice available for tasting beyond the town of Guano. Think of the price a 2nd Avenue bar would be able to charge for liquor cooled with Chimborazo ice.  

Watching the video you have to conclude that Baltazar was a very strong hombre. The glacier has been receding over the years, and the last time he took ice from it he had to climb to an elevation of 15,000 feet.

His lungs must have had the air capacity of jet turbines, because he walked up the mountain with his donkeys with no special equipment. He wove straw from the hillside into rope to fashion slings for carrying the ice down the mountain.

When the documentary was made, Baltazar was 67. He quit the business at 75 but didn't quit working. Not having a pension plan or a 401-K, he last worked at ground level herding cattle.

And just to prove that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Baltazar spent five years herding cattle, but met with death when he was trampled by a bull.

As Pete Hamill once said: life is the leading cause of death.

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Newspaper Osmosis

Members of Club dei 27 in Parma, Italy

I first thought I might be imagining things. Was the NYT adopting a front page, below the fold A-Hed-like piece feature for its front page, mimicking the WSJ?

The front page A-Hed piece is a time-honored feature of the WSJ. Its name derives from newspaperspeak about text framed with borders that resemble an A. I couldn't find a formal definition of A-Hed in the OED, but Google tells me it means headline, and is purposely misspelled by the WSJ to distinguish it from a top-of-the fold headline.

The A-Hed piece is so popular with WSJ readers that there is a collection of pieces in a book, Floating Above the Page. Not all that long ago Rupert Murdoch wanted to get rid of it for some reason. The staff revolted, (to say nothing of what the readers might have done) and it has never been discontinued that I know of. It is one of the first things I land on when picking up the WSJ, and it has given me many inspiration for blog postings. 

Lately, and I can't remember when I first started to think that the NYT might be trying out its own version of an A-Hed piece. While not framing it the same way, or stuffing it with sometimes truly groaning dad puns, they have definitely started to do something I haven't seen before.

How else can you explain a recent NYT front page piece, with a photo of a quadruped and the headline: The Mule Was a Menace. But He Wasn't a Mule. I kid you not. This is not a front page story about NATO and the Ukraine. 

Note: Mules and Donkeys are not biologically the same animal. But that's another story.

The NYT pieces (and I don't know what to call them) lack the utter levity and lightness of the WSJ pieces, but clearly someone at the editor's desk is changing something.

I think it was the story about the Verdi Club that got me thinking things might be changing over there on Eighth Avenue.

On November 4 the front page piece went with a headline and photo: To Join This Club a Member Must Die. And You Must Adore Verdi. Not quite the white smoke coming from the Vatican, but close. It was a true WSJ-like  A-Hed piece.

The WSJ has an A-Hed piece nearly every day, always front page and below the fold. The NYT version is not every day. I guess it depends how much other news the NYT needs to give front page status to.

Reading the WSJ can be fun, with its A-hed piece and its "Pepper...And Salt" cartoon on the editorial page. The NYT would seem to be trying to capture some fun of its own. It's not always easy to find fun in the NYT.

But consider some of the following recent front page pieces that have that A-Hed feel to them. This is not your grandfather's NYT.

Ohtani's Ruthian Feats Can't Coax Japanese Yankees Fans to Turn Dodger Blue

Paraguay Adores a Cartoon Mouse Named Mickey. Just Don't Bring Up Disney

Maps Show Landslide Risk in Alaska, but Some Aren't Interested

A Reminder You Can't Light Up Will Now Stay Lit All the Time

Dead Poet Talking: Polish Radio Experiment Bares Pitfalls of AI

Village So Spooky, Even Skeptics get the Jitters

In Tumultuous Times, More Readers Are Reaching  for Magical 'Healing Fiction' 

The paper is becoming fun to read.

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The Wailing Wall

 

This subway wall display started after the 2016 presidential election in NYC's Union Square Station. It is still attracting Post-It notes after 2024 presidential election. It's where Democrats go to complain and worry. There might even be a line.

I think I know where this wall display is. Near the 16th Street/17th Street exit there used to be a piece of tape on the individual tiles for every person who died on 9/11 downtown. The names were arranged alphabetically and when I was in the area I always stopped and looked for the names of the people I knew who died that day.

Over the years the tape got dirty and some names became illegible. I suspect there names are now gone, but not forgotten. 

The Subway Therapy wall has been put to another use of certainly less value.

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What Time Is It?

I'm not going to go so far as to say I hate the first Sunday in November. After all, the NYC Marathon is being run and broadcasted with way too many political ads this year, along with the usual come back from medical ailment stories. The Hospital for Special Surgery is getting a lot of free advertising.

This is a tough year for political ads. It's the perfect storm of midterm elections and the presidential race. The midterm elections are giving us ads for candidates that aren't even in our district. Win or lose, I will be happy when whoever is paying for us not to vote for "Radical Sue Altman" goes away. I'm not even in her state.

What I find unlikeable about this day is having to set all the clocks back an hour so that we'll be on the same page as the rest of the country, and most parts of the world. I never counted the number of devices that need this adjustment until today. It is a lot.

Sure there are the smart devices that adjust themselves. The computer, the three cable boxes and even the stove. One smart device is not so smart, my wife's nightstand clock. It's got the old factory setting date for when we used to go through this rigamarole, the last weekend in October. But things change. Therefore, twice a year she doesn't know the correct time when she gets up. Surprise!

We have an outstanding 30! clocks and phones that need adjusting every time they keep Daylight Savings time in effect. Therefore, twice a year there is a lot to do. The three cable boxes are smart, as is the stove. But smart ends there

At the outset of our nearly 50 years of marriage my wife and I started to collect antique clocks. Grandfather, regulator, box clocks, cottage clock, ship's clock, bee hive clock (figure eight clock) All but one is in working order and all keep fairly accurate times.

When these clocks need to be set back the pendulum is stopped and we wait for an hour to pass. This beats plowing through the time by advancing 11 hours and going through all the attendant bonging routines. Going forward is easy because all you have to do is stop the pendulum, move the hands an hour forward and restart the pendulum. Easy.

A room by room march through is done twice a year. There are two thermostats which are the most important. The clock for the front irrigation usually doesn't need adjusting because by now the water's been turned off and the lines blown out. But not this year.

With the drought, irrigation has stayed on. But rather than fight with the outdoor box I've chosen to ignore the time reset and will just wait for them to come and shut off the water and blow the lines out. It will be soon enough. 

Every year we hear stories about end of going through all this. After all, Arizona and Hawaii—entire states—do not bother with Daylight Savings Time. 

We also hear stories about doing away with the penny, since it costs more to make a penny than it is worth.

At 75 I don't think I'm going to live long enough to see either of these two proposals come into effect. Daylight time is here to stay, as is the penny.

After all, if we did away with the penny, Ben Franklin's "a penny saved is a penny earned." would be meaningless.

Ben? Ben who?

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Bag It

We are surrounded by things someone invented and hardly realize someone invented it. Take the flat bottom paper bag. Someone invented that? 

Yes. A woman invented it and wound up in the Inventors Hall of Fame and was the recent subject of an Overlooked No More NYT obituary, those occasional obits that are meant to be a sort of an atonement for ignoring the subject back when they should have received a tribute obit, if a tribute obit existed when they passed away—and if women were more recognized. These obits are always interesting. 

Margaret E. Knight lived from 1838-1914. I always try and think about what the deceased's world was like during their time on earth. 1838 puts Margaret squarely in the world of sailing ships, lots of candles, wars fought with horse pulled caissons, and horses as the best way to get from A to B. No tractors either. Mules or horses pulled plows. 

She was born in York, Maine, and was later brought up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and might have even known someone who fought in the American Revolution, and probably most likely someone who fought in the Civil War. And then of course there's the Spanish-American war. When she was born there were 26 stars in the flag, and Martin Van Buren was president. She read about Abraham Lincoln.

The bag above is on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Margaret was installed in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio in 2006. She was working in a paper bag factory, making paper bags by hand, when she got the inspiration for making a machine that would make the paper bags, which at the time were really envelopes. No flat bottom sacks to hold the potatoes.

Anyone who's been to a store lately knows that paper bags are back. I get them at CVS, and my wife brings those tote bags (flat bottom) to the grocery store. No more plastic bags, which were great when we had an indoor cat and needed to scoop litter.

When the ruling came down that New York was going to outlaw plastic bags I started to hoard them so I had them for the cat. I kept a few trash bags full of them in the shed. Now the environmental pendulum has swung and paper's back and plastic is out. We're either saving the whales in Italy or trees everywhere. Go figure. 

Margaret in 1912

At an early age Margaret showed she wasn't going to be pigeon-hold into what girls were expected to do. She made her own wooden toys, sleds, and kites.  She told The Woman's Journal in 1872, "the only things I wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet and pieces of wood."  

She was no pushover. When a machine shop owner tried to claim  her invention of the machine that made flat bottom paper bags as his own, she took he guy to court. He claimed that a woman couldn't produce what she did.

But Margaret had the plans, original notebooks, etc. and the patent judge ruled in her favor. Justice prevailed, even for a woman in 1871. She received patent No. 116.842.

She successfully won other intellectual property cases. Her paper bag machine is in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

And lest if there is anyone at the NYT who currently feels that woman were never recognized for anything, they have only to read Glenn Rifkin's Overlooked obituary where he tells us that in 1913 the NYT did a story on the increasing number of woman among the ranks of inventors who singled out Ms. Knight as the oldest and "the one having most to her credit." She had been referred to as the female Thomas Edison. High praise indeed.

She remained single, and lived comfortably, but hardly in a state of wealth, having $300 to her name when she passed away.

Quite honestly, I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a free standing flat bottom paper bag and not think of Margaret Knight. Someone invented that.

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Murder with Stunning French Scenery

Viewing choices have greatly expanded when you add what you can watch on your computer through streaming services. Take out a NetFlix, Acorn TV, Masterpiece, Peacock, Hulu subscription, and you can get shows and sports you would never see even on cable TV. Of course your bill goes up. Sometimes way up if you're impulsive.

And watching these streaming services, many with English subtitles from countries like Norway, France and Germany, you realize every country has a police procedural series. 

I've gotten so used to watching shows with subtitles that I go Close Captioned even with regular TV. It helps when the pronunciation isn't always so clear. I steer away from anything dubbed. The words and mouth can't be synchronized seemlessly, and it looks funny.

One of the streaming outlets I've latched onto is Mhz, which I guess is MegaHerz. They seem to favor French police procedurals, and the one I like the most is Murder In... A stunning locale in a French province follows the In. There are something like 13 seasons of it, so it will be awhile until I run the table. 

The series has been a French favorite since the mid 2000s. The plots are very procedural, but the scenery is stunning and makes you want to tour the French provinces and eat. Especially eat and drink wine and sit in outdoor bistros and watch the world go by in cobblestone town squares surround by stucco pastel buildings with tiled roofs and narrow streets. The French tourism board must have a hand in the production.

And the settings! Who knew France had so many tiny islands holding so much beauty? Take a recent episode set in the Porquerolles Islands off the coast of Marseille. The main island is a postcard of 200 people living in luxury surrounded by beaches, blue water and boats (bateaus). Lots of boats The weather is so perfect the male cops wear shorts.

All the episodes in the series are about 1½ hours long, just enough time to develop the family backstories, give you a few red herrings, then move in for the denouement, often played back as a flashback so you see what really happened.

Through subtitles I now know how to say "shit" in French, "merde," uttered by male and female cops, as is "fuck," "putain". It's like taking a Berlitz course in languages.

The plots have a core similarity. There is a murder (no kidding) and body is found right away. No sooner have the credits finished than the Gendarmerie are racing to the scene, securing the perimeter, putting up yellow tape and taking photos.

Generally, there is only one corpse in the episodes. Maybe two, tops. Nothing like the wholesale slaughter that goes in the British Midsomer Murders series where a new census is need to count who's left in the thatched roof village.

The male and female leads who are thrust into solving the crime are wary of each other and invariable let little out about their past at the outset. They generally tell us it's complicated, comp-le-kay.

The pathologist (there is always a pathologist) on the scene who tells us the victim was strangled (there are marks on their neck and petechial hemorrhage—you learn a lot by watching these shows.), or it was "blunt force trauma." Sometimes the victim was shot, but this not being the States, guns are not often even seen in the plots. (All the French police do however carry weapons on their hip) An estimate on time of death is offered by the pathologist. Cell phone, wallets and id are searched for. Not always found. DNA will of course be taken. There is no show without DNA. Drs. Crick and Watson have contributed mightily to crime plots.  

The Gendarmerie who shows up and promptly puts the police armband on is generally from a province nearby, from a larger city. They are on loan to help the local force. They are not always welcome, but they eventually achieve cooperation grudgingly.

White coated forensic team members descend, and then the guest investigator makes their way out of the car and needs to know, "what have you got?" (In French, of course.) Generally the investigator is known to someone on the local force from having worked with them decades ago. "You came back!"

Like any country's police procedurals, woman can be in charge, and can be the highest rank. What usually ensues is a male/female matchup, sometimes with simmering sexual tension. There isn't much sex in these episodes. It is generally quickly implied that a pair are doing it, but there is little to no nudity.

Coffee, or café, is as much a part of the episodes as the actors. A paper cup demitasse always emerges from the police vending machine. No Grande Starbucks for these folks.

Watch enough of these episodes and of course you start to recognize familiar actors. Florence Pernel will usually show up as the prosecutor, or examining judge who gets assigned to the case directing the police investigation. France does things a little differently in this regard.

Also showing up with some regularity is Phillippe Bas, a solid looking hunk with steel-grey hair and a close cropped beard who will appear in at least one scene with his shirt off. Beefcake ladies.

One thing these episodes portray other than the usual back stories of divorce, and family estrangements is that family members work under the command of other family members. How realistic this is not known. In one episode, a young female officer accidently shot her mother, the commander, during the investigation of a burglary, putting Mom in a wheelchair and early retirement. She feels guilty, of course, and lives with her to take care of her. Until of course when she doesn't.

Sons seem to run into their fathers. It's almost like in Indiana Jones, with Sean Connery teaming up with Harrison Ford.

There are family dinners where the good wine (Not cheap plonk!) is poured and someone makes their specialty. You can get hungry and thirsty watching crime being solved.

The locales are also the stars of the shows. There have been two episodes I watched where Mt. Saint Michel has played a part. The setting for the Alexandre Dumas story of The Count of Monte Cristo gets shown off, Chateau D'If on the Frioul archipelago off the coast of Marseille. The plot of that episode even resembles the Dumas story.

One plot device is the unknown offspring seeking revenge. And oftentimes it is a woman who is the killer.

I'll guess the director uses drones to get the overhead shots of these lovely tiled roof settings that hold so much lurid crime. Bodies are found buried underneath churches. We get a history lesson on local legends and superstitions.

The killer is of course always found and the parties that were estranged make up. The pair that you figure were going to get together after hopping on top of each other in the police car do go further in life. They generally do leave together in a vehicle, even if one of them is divorced with a kid. Happy families.

Watch this series and you don't have to take your shoes off at the airport and you can sleep in your own bed. You will have to do your own cooking and pour your own wine though.

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