Art is 80

In Race #2, I talked about my views of Blacks during my elementary school years. What about during high school?

I don’t think there was a great lag in integrating St. Louis area schools after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board in 1954. I remember a gray morning in an eighth grade class when, without any advance notice, much less preparation, an administrator came into the class with two nervous and shy Black girls, and announced “These are Ella and Charles and they are joining your class.” I don’t remember anything that was said after that. I remember the teacher showing them seats. I don’t remember anyone saying anything to them one way or another. I remember looking at the girls and wondering which one was Charles, and why.

I never learned which one was Charles and which was Ella. I never talked to them. I don’t know if anyone else did. I also don’t remember them in the class the next day, or at any time after that.

Were they only at school one day? Where they in school on subsequent days and I just don’t remember? Did they stay in school but switch to a different class? I remember it was all sort of a mystery, and I remember being curious, but not curious enough to ask anyone, and certainly I wasn’t looking at moral implications then. If I ever spoke about this to anyone, such as my parents, I don’t remember.

Ella and Charles were two of the three African Americans brought into the 8th grade that day. The other, a boy, did stay with us, was fairly popular throughout high school, even at one point becoming a class officer if I remember. He was friendly, and an athlete. I don’t really know what happened to him. He is not in our yearbook. I don’t know if he graduated with us. I have no idea where he is now. (I have tried to Google him to no avail, but someone with his name plus “Sr.”, who was born in 1917, died in 1985 and is buried at Jefferson Barracks Military Cemetery near St. Louis – that could be his father.)

Ella and Charles clearly did not last at the school. And I am sure it wasn’t their fault.

There were no other Blacks in my high school class. In looking at my high school yearbook, I see only three Blacks pictured in the classes of 1961 and 1962. They are all male. I assume that all of the Blacks at Ladue lived within a small area at the very north end of the school district called Elmwood Park, which was an historic Black community. Nowhere else. Remember what I said: St. Louis was completely segregated.

I realize that I have no idea where the Elmwood Park kids went to school before integration. Because there was no “colored school” in the Ladue district, I assume that the Black school districts were drawn somewhat differently.

There was a Black elementary school, the Attucks School, in Clayton, the county seat suburb to the east of Ladue. I remember that there was a Black neighborhood in Clayton when I was young, sort of around Carondelet and Bonhomme and Hanley. But those small frame houses were sold and demolished as the Clayton business area expanded. They are long forgotten.

The Attucks school was sold by the county and became a Polynesian restaurant (I think it has been torn down). Not that I can tell you what they served at a Polynesian restaurant, but I know they served Mai Tais in the bar. I remember, during college years, being with a friend from my high school class. We were in Clayton and hungry, and I suggested that Polynesian restaurant as a place we could go. “No”, he said, “I would never eat there.” “Why?”, I asked. “Because it used to be a colored school”, he replied. “What does that have to do with anything?”, I next asked. His response? “I’m not prejudiced, but I would just never eat in a building that used to be a colored school”. That’s the story of America in a nutshell, isn’t it?

But there were worst things afoot in Clayton. Here is where my memory fails me as to exact dates. Was I in junior high or high school? Clayton has a very well used park, Shaw Park, and a highlight of that park was the Shaw Park swimming pool, where I first learned to swim. The pool had always been a whites-only pool (of course), and it was announced (perhaps it was the result of a law suit; I don’t remember) that the net year when the pool opened, it would be open to all, regardless of race.

Well, that was too much for the good citizens of Clayton, whom you would expect to be an open, liberal lot. So a big to-do ensued, and to satisfy both the residents of the city and the law, the City Council made its decision. The pool would close. As I recall, it was closed for two summers, devoid of any water, much to the dismay and the amazement of many.

Anything else I remember about contacts with Blacks during those years? Not really. Maybe one more incident that I can’t date precisely. There was a showy (pink Cadillac convertible with pink interior) and popular Black disc jockey in St. Louis (whose audience I think was primarily Black as well, although I am not sure of that), named Spider Burks, on radio station KXLW. The KXLW studio was in Clayton (thinking about that now, it surprises me), in the basement of a retail strip on Forsyth just south of Maryland. One day, I was walking through Clayton with some high school classmates (don’t remember at all who any of them were) and we decided to go and see if we could watch Spider Burks in action. To our surprise, not only could we do that, but he invited us in the studio, introduced us and asked us some questions. Unfortunately, we didn’t take any of this very seriously and we (I think I include myself in that) began to give silly answers and start giggling. After he introduced the next record, he politely (not) asked us to leave. I was very embarrassed about that – but did nothing. I certainly don’t remember sending him an apology.

But that was it. No social contact with Blacks. No contact at all that I can remember.

(An aside: Some time ago, you could call someone African-American or black. Then we learned that African-American was not sufficiently politically correct, and that “black” should be spelled with a capital B (“Black”). All media began to use Black, and some media also began. to use White. I used Black in this post, but – truth be told – I don’t understand why it should just be black. If we are trying to build a society where racial differences matter less than they do today, capitalizing the names of Whites and Blacks sends the absolutely wrong message. IMHO)

(1) Let’s first talk about the weather. Yes, people say that everyone talks about it and no one does anything about it. But that is an overstatement. Think about this: the Washington area has been in somewhat of a drought. That drought ended yesterday with the first of what promises to be several days of moderate to strong rain. Why did the drought end yesterday? Because Edie and I took action.

What did we do? We got tickets for the 4 pm Nationals/Cardinals game. You don’t need to thank us. It was just our way of helping out the world.

By the way, they played the entire game in the rain and the Nats won 3-0. Normally, this game would have been canceled, but the schedule this year has each of the 30 teams play each of the other 29 teams, meaning that if a game is canceled because of weather, coming up with a replay date is difficult if not impossible. So expect more of this. I did turn on part of the game. How many people were actually sitting in the 40,000+ stadium? Not 40,000.

(2) One of the recent Penguin books I read is “The Cinema 1950”, a book that no one but I have read since approximately 1950. But the book, an anthology, has several interesting articles, such as one by Robert Flaherty on the 18 months he spent in the Arctic filming Nanook of the North and the 24 months he spent in French Samoa making Moana, two early and well received documentaries (I saw Nanook at the National Gallery of Art several years ago).

Another of the articles ask six English critics what they thought the best films of the previous year were. One critic said, without a doubt, it was “Cry of the City” with Victor Mature and Shelly Winters, among others, “an American gangster film”. We saw that it was available on YouTube and….why not?

Well, I should have read further in the article itself: “Indeed, it has been a surprise to me that Richard Murphy’s script, Robert Siodmak’s direction and the finely balanced playing of Richard Conte as the killer and Victor Mature as the detective have not been more enthusiastically received by the critics as well as the public.”

And then I looked up Victor Mature on Wikipedia, and found the following comments by David Thomson under “Critical Appraisal”: “Simple, crude and heady – like ketchup or treacle – he is a diet scorned by the knowing, but obsessive if succumbed to in error. It is too easy to dismiss Mature, for he surpasses badness. He is….a barely concealed sexual advertisement for soiled goods.”

The other favorite movies of the 1950 critics were, by the way, “Bicycle Thieves”, “Whisky Galore”, “Jour de Fete”, “The Third Man” and “Louisiana Story”.

(3) My Thursday morning breakfast group presentation and discussion this morning was on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (I think I gave my views on this in an earlier blog post). But to reiterate, one day, a 400 pound man (to quote Donald Trump) living in his parents’ basement in Bangladesh (I know, there are probably very few, if any, basements in Bangladesh that haven’t long ago been flooded) is going to figure out how to use AI to detonate a series of nuclear weapons and wipe out humanity and several million other species in the blink of an eye. And with this, all the great benefits that AI will have otherwise brought to society will obviously come to naught.

In the meantime, we can use AI to create a haiku:

A man in Dhaka

In the house of his parents

Sets the world on fire.

Or a limerick:

There once lived a man out in Dhaka

Who wanted to give us a shock-a

He created a mesh

In old Bangladesh

Bombing Brazil and Morocc-a.

(4) As my readers today are all saying to be in unison “Enough already”.

OK, I had more to say, but it can wait. Happy Chocolate Eclair Day.

Like most people, I like to think of myself as not having a racist bone in my body. But is that really true? Probably not. Who was it who said “You have to be taught to hate to hate and fear”? Was it Oscar Hammerstein or Emile De Becque? So hard to keep those guys straight.

I think it is time to do a bit of racial self analysis.

What did I learn about race growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in St. Louis? Were there any Blacks in my family? No. Did my parents or my grandparents have any Black friends? No. Were there any Blacks in my school, teachers or students? No. Did any Blacks live in my neighborhood? Not at all. None.

So you get the idea. It would not be accurate to say that I never say anyone who was Black. I did see one all the time. I saw Alice Tennyson. Until I was in the third grade, we lived with my grandparents. And a woman named Alice lived there, too. She was my grandparents’ maid. She was a small woman, her hair graying and tied back, she wore rimless glasses and I don’t think she spoke much. I have no photographs of her. I am not sure what her responsibilities were. I think that my grandparents did not think she was very good at what she did, but she was – in a strange sense, I guess – part of the family.

I remember she was always on duty, except for Thursday nights, which was her night off. And on Thursday nights, she went to stay with her brother. I don’t know who he was or where he lived, and I don’t know if my grandparents knew, either. I also don’t know when she came to work for my grandparents and when she started to live in their basement. I vaguely remember a story about how she simply showed up on their front door on a cold, rainy night, and how my grandparents invited her in, and she just stayed and stayed. Sounds like a tall tale, I know. But who am I to say?

I said Alice lived in the basement. She did. But it wasn’t a fancy finished basement, it was just a basement. And she had a room that, from my memory of the very few times I was down there, was barely habitable. I can blame that on my grandparents or my parents, but it was clear to me that Alice probably bore some responsibility as well. She could have fixed it up, decorated it a bit. There was also a bathroom down there. I am sure Alice was not permitted to use any other bathrooms in the house.

For a short time, there was another Black woman who came to the house once a week, or maybe once every other week. Her name was Susie and she did laundry. I don’t know how many years she came. I don’t remember ever talking to her at all. She was a large woman, much larger than Alice, and she seemed more worldly. She probably was.

Alice and, sometimes, Susie. That was basically my Black world for the first eight years or so of my life. The only other Blacks I saw were also maids; they worked for other relatives, or for friends. I think that was it.

There were a lot of Blacks in St. Louis, to be sure. Did I see some of them, just here and there? I am not sure, but I imagine I did, although I didn’t go to neighborhoods where Blacks lived, so I am really not sure.

When I was quite young, 7 or 8 I think, I was allowed to take the bus by myself or with a friend – to a movie on Grand Avenue, or to my grandfather’s office, or my father’s downtown. I remember being on a bus, and there was a Black woman sitting across the aisle from me. I think she got on the bus before I did. Then, a Black man got on the bus. He walked right by her and sat further in the back. I was astounded that he didn’t say hello to her, or at least smile and nod. At that instant, I realized something. I realized that all Blacks didn’t know each other, and that they didn’t acknowledge each other as members of the same group. How stupid of me to think otherwise, I thought even then, but I think it was the first time that I realized there were things in society that I really didn’t understand at all.

St. Louis was a segregated city. It was a city with a white population divided between northern liberals and Confederate sympathizers. Missouri had been a slave holding border state, as you know. A lot of that carried over. Even today.

St. Louis was not a deep South city. It didn’t have white and colored entrances and waiting rooms, it didn’t have white and colored drinking fountains, and Blacks didn’t have to sit in the back of the bus. But other than that……..

Schools were segregated. Parks were segregated. Blacks were not welcomed in restaurants or in most stores, in hotels or in theaters, and in sport venues, they were restricted to certain areas. For example, at Sportsman’s Park (home of both the Cardinals and the Browns), Blacks had to sit in the left field pavilion. They couldn’t catch a home run ball, because the pavilion was screened, and they sat on wooden benches, not seats. And when Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby and others came to play major league baseball in St. Louis, they could not stay in the same hotels, or eat in the same restaurants, as their teammates. St. Louis was the only major league city where this was true.

In St. Louis, no Blacks lived in white neighborhood, and no whites lived in Black neighborhoods. Period. At some point, after urban renewal took hold in the 1950s, Blacks began to move into some nearby neighborhoods, chasing the whites out to the suburbs. But in the 1940s, I don’t think even that had started yet. There was no city with more residential segregation than St. Louis. Rich or poor, you lived apart.

This segregation forced the Black population of St. Louis to fend for itself – it had its own groceries, theaters, shops, funeral homes, newspaper, and so forth. We whites knew nothing about that. At least I didn’t.

I have a book to recommend. I am sure you haven’t read it, and it may not be easy to find. It’s a short novel called “Mrs. Palmer’s Honey”, and it was written by Fannie Cook, a Jewish woman who was a friend of my grandparents. It is set in St. Louis in the 1940s. Honey is Mrs. Palmer’s maid. Honey knows everything about Mrs. Palmer. Mrs. Palmer knows absolutely nothing about Honey. (Their worlds clash at the University of Missouri when Mrs. Palmer’s son, a student and frat boy, meets Honey’s son, a waiter at the fraternity house – but that’s another story.) What is important is that the reader of the book, as opposed to Mrs. Palmer, learns a lot about Honey, and Honey’s family, and the neighborhood where they all live. Mrs. Palmer had no clue.

If you were white in St. Louis at this time, you would be like Mrs. Palmer. You would come into contact with the Blacks that worked in your house (and if you worked outside of your house, maybe you would see some Black factory workers or custodial workers), but you would know nothing about them. You would not be curious. You would not think that there are things about them you didn’t know. You just wouldn’t think about it at all. Just like you wouldn’t wonder why no Blacks ate in the restaurants you ate in, or sat next to you at the movies, or swam with you at the pubic park pool. It would never occur to you to wonder about that.

For those who are growing up today (and perhaps for all those under, say, 50 today), this may be impossible to really comprehend.

But this is how I grew up.

(To be continued)

Race is so central to this country’s past and present, and on this Juneteenth Plus One, I want to explore some aspects of it, and explain some of my continual confusion about it.

Let’s start with the Emancipation Proclamation. I understand that I am looking at it with the eyes of someone in 2023, and not 1863, but……..isn’t it a bit overblown? Starting in 1860, eleven states seceded from the United States. So my first question is: during the Civil War, were these states part of the United States, or not? Was their secession successful only to be ended by a war and readmission, or were the Confederate troops fighting against the Union rebels against their own government for the duration of the war (i.e., was the secession itself invalid)? Is that a simple question that everyone but me can answer?

From what I have read, I believe the better answer is that the seceding states did successfully secede and had to be brought back into the Union. That, during the Civil War period, the eleven Southern states were not part of the United States.

Assuming this to be the case, the Emancipation Proclamation was a declaration with no legal effect whatsoever. It only “emancipated” enslaved persons in states which were no longer part of the United States, and therefore emancipated no one.

There were at this time, of course, also slaves in four states that did not join the South. They were the four “border states”, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, to be effective on January 1, 1863, he did nothing to outlaw slavery in the border states. Okay, maybe this was a tactical necessity. Perhaps an Emancipation Proclamation that purported to end slavery in the entire country would have led one or more of the border states to secede and join the Confederacy. That’s possible. I understand that.

But, and this is what is key: After the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1862, slavery remained untouched in the eleven Southern states where it purported to have effect, but actually had no effect at all, and slavery remained untouched in the four Union border states because the Emancipation Proclamation did not even pretend to abolish slavery there. In fact, Maryland retained slavery until some time in 1864, Missouri until January 1865, and Delaware and Kentucky kept slavery as the law of the land until the 13th Constitutional Amendment was fully ratified on December 6, 1865.

So on June 19, 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, when the Black population of Galveston Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation and realized they were free (perhaps not by law yet), slavery continued to exist unabated in Delaware and Kentucky.

Not only that, but the end of the Civil War did not mean that the eleven states of the Confederacy were all of a sudden readmitted to the United States slave-free. There were conditions of readmission, one of which was the state’s ratification of the 13th Amendment, which wasn’t part of our Constitution until December 1865, seven months following Appomattox. And, the ratification of this amendment by the Confederate states could not occur in December 1865, but had to wait until certain preconditions involving the establishment of new state governments were met.

The first southern state to be readmitted back into the Union was Tennessee which was admitted in 1866, and most were readmitted in 1868. But Georgia was not fully readmitted until 1870. To be sure, during that interim period, slavery was not continuing as as it had been in the southern states. But this is because these states were occupied by Union armies. I don’t think that the Emancipation Proclamation itself controlled these still-formerly states of the Union and, until they were readmitted to the Union, we cannot say that slavery was fully, legally abolished there.

So it seems to me that June 19, 1865, the Juneteenth day that is now celebrated as a federal holiday, is an artificial day, and that slavery continued de facto in the United States until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, and until the last seceding state was readmitted to the Union in 1870.

As I said yesterday, more power to the Black community of the United States if they want to celebrate Juneteenth as a traditional day of celebration. But I don’t think it should be the basis of a federal holiday. If we want to have a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery (and I think that is a great idea), it should be December 6, not June 19th.

Just sayin’

I have to admit it. I am not acclimated to Juneteenth. I imagine I will get there, but I view it as a Black holiday (and more power to them), and I don’t feel comfortable taking it from them. I also admit to not fully understanding it. And I don’t like the word, because it isn’t a word. And, as they celebrate related, but different things, I don’t want Juneteenth to take away from the civil rights victories celebrated on Martin Luther King Day.

(My first aside of the day. If you are 80 and want to feel young, just go to the Round House Theater for a Sunday matinee.)

Yesterday, we went to Round House, and saw a production of August Wilson’s last play, Radio Golf. I think Wilson is one of the greatest American playwrights (but what do I know?). No question about it. And I think that Radio Golf has within it several sparks of greatness. But I don’t think it fully succeeds.

As i said, this was his final play. He died at age 60 of a virulent liver cancer that had been diagnosed only a few months earlier. The play had its first performance at Yale after (I think) his diagnosis, but before his death. It’s the only time he could see it on stage.

I have read that Wilson was an active writer, never satisfied until he was, editing and rewriting as he watched early performances. Here, he did not get that chance.

I did not know this when we watched the play. And I was surprised when one of my first thoughts leaving the theater was that “this play needs some editing.”

Radio Golf is the final play of Wilson’s brilliant Pittsburgh Cycle. Each play is set in a different decade of the 20th century. Each is set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and many of the characters, play to play, are the same or are related to prior characters. They tell the story of interrelated families, of a neighborhood, of a city, of the United States. They mix reality with fantasy. They tell the story of the Black man trying to find his place in what he perceives as a White man’s world. We have seen most of these plays. They are universally brilliant.

Very briefly, Radio Golf, set in 1997, is about Harmon Wilks, a Black real estate entrepreneur, the son of a Black real estate entrepreneur, who is leading a massive redevelopment of the Hill and at the same time running to be the first Black mayor of Pittsburgh. His partner, Roosevelt Hicks, is a Black man, and old school friend, who is out to make as much money as he can. The mayoral candidate already has money. His aim is to make the Hill and Pittsburgh better.

A ground breaking on the first major project is nearing. But an old Black man (“They call me Old Joe”) objects to the developers tearing down his family house. The two men make fun of him, until Wilks discovers that Old Joe was not given the required notice before he, Wilks, bought the house from the city at a tax sale.

No one else knows this secret. What to do? You can imagine that Hicks and Wilks have very different ideas. Their views diverge even more when Wilks realizes that he and Old Joe were distant cousins and that this house had, in a way, been his family house, too.

A terrific plot, I am sure you will agree. And it brings up so many questions. Marginality. Gentrification. Black politicians trying to do good. White businessmen using Black faces to get city contracts. The “successful” Black man with little or no concern for Blacks mired in poverty.

I thought the first act showed Wilson’s usual brilliance. But he lost it in the second act, where the play ended with Hicks being backed by a White businessman with connections buying out Wilks and getting city approval to tear down the house. I believe that Wilson, had he the opportunity, would have made major changes to the second act.

There are only five actors in the cast of Radio Golf. Because I am trying hard not to be overly critical in this blog, I will only say this. Four of the actors were terrific.

Should you see it before it closes? Of course. And tell me what you think.

First, for a change, a digression……I never paid much attention (i.e., I paid no attention) to Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Did anyone? I just saw him interviewed by Jake Tapper. I was quite impressed.

Now, back to the main topic of the day: Father’s Day (see above).

Father’s Day never meant much (anything) to me, and I don’t think that it meant much to my father. At least, I don’t remember anything commemorating Father’s Day when I was younger. Perhaps, some years it passed without notice.

Whether Father’s Day meant anything to my grandfathers, I don’t know. I never knew my father’s father, who died in 1939 and, although I knew his eight children very well until the last one passed away a few years ago, and of course I knew his widow until her death when I was 30, he remains an absolute mystery to me. My grandmother never spoke about him at all. And I mean at all. And I asked her very little. I only remember when I asked her how they met (in Europe), her answer was simply “Oh, you know…..”, which I took to mean “I’m not going to talk about that now or ever.” And when I asked about him to my father or my aunts or uncles, I used to get answers like “Oh, you would have liked him a lot”. Period. Mystery.

On the other hand, I was very close to my mother’s father, with whom we lived the first eight years of my life. Of course, I say that because I have always said that and always heard that. What “close” means, I am not sure. Did the two of us ever go anywhere together? Yes, to the Browns/Yankees games every year. But that’s all I remember. But I know that I loved and respected him. What did he think of Father’s Day? No clue.

My father was a consistent father, and I think that is good. Over the years that I knew him, he remained the same, principled, ethical, constant. We didn’t go on father/son ventures. He was not a Good Time Charley (did I just make up Good Time Charley?). He was very quiet and reserved. I hardly ever remember him raising his voice. My mother, not he, was the disciplinarian…..but he would stand by her discipline, even when a rational person (such as me) would find it outrageous. He was a calming influence on a rather volatile relationship between a mother and her son.

We have a busy day today. Tickets to see August Wilson’s “Radio Golf” at the Round House Theatre this afternoon, and then Hannah’s and Michelle’s families are coming over for a casual dinner. The fathers in attendance will be Andrew, Josh, Josh’s father Vernon, and me. Do any of us care about Father’s Day? I don’t know the answer to that, either.

But the role of a father is important, both for the father and his children. We see that from various studies and statistics and we know it instinctively. But with divorce rates continuing to be very high, and out of marriage births equally high, we know that it isn’t always possible for fathers to be the fathers they wish they could be.

Father’s Day has no theme, other than to say “Happy Father’s Day” to your father. Perhaps it should. Perhaps there should be more concentration on the role of the father (whether or not the father is still married to and living with the mother of his children) and on the encouragement of surrogate fathers for those children who lack a real one.

I’m not sure how this would work…..but it is something to ponder.

Which was pretty amazing.

(But before we discuss that, Let’s digress. In Peru, Lima is pronounced Leema, but in Ohio, it’s pronounced Lie-ma. Why? Same with MiLAN, Italy, but MEI-lan in Ohio. maDRID in Spain, but New MAAdrid, Missouri. Ver-sigh in France, but Ver-sales in Indiana. Athens in Greece, but AYthens in Kentucky. BerLIN in German, BERlin in Connecticut. CAIro in Egypt, but CAYro Illinois. REEga in Latvia, RYE-ga in New York. And on and on. Why?) [Rhetorical question]

My old friend (who shall be nameless – but you can call him Michael) and I took a trip to the Amazon in 1974 or so. We responded to a newspaper or magazine ad sponsored by a group called something like “Amazon Trips”, something very original. It wasn’t a guided tour; it was just that they would give you advice and make arrangements. How exactly we decided on our itinerary, I am not sure.

I was coming from Washington, and he was coming from St. Louis. We were meeting at the airport in Miami to catch a flight to Bogota, in Columbia. The day after that, we were flying on a domestic Columbian flight to the Amazon River town of Leticia, via Cali. My plane landed at Miami-Dade on time, and I went to the gate for the overnight flight south. Where was Michael?

Now remember, 1974 was a long time ago. The concept of a cell phone was not even a concept. So, I just couldn’t call Michael and ask him where he was. It was time to board the plane. I decided to board. But where was Michael? The stewardess announced that the door was about to close so we could take off. At the last minute, Michael appeared, looking a bit disheveled. His St. Louis plane had been very late, and he had had to run from one gate to another barely making the plane. I wondered what would happen if he hadn’t made the plane. We had made no arrangements in Bogota; how would we have ever found each other.

I remember nothing about the flight. I remember some high rise buildings and some visible mountains at Bogata, but I don’t remember what we did, or where we stayed. But the next morning, we flew south. I was surprised at how mountainous the country was, and – although we didn’t leave the airport or probably didn’t leave the plane – how modern Cali (a city I think I had never even heard of at the time) looked.

Leticia is a relatively small city, population even today under 40,000, and it is Colombia’s only port on the river. The Amazon river coast of Columbia, as any map will tell you (just ask one), is very short, squeezed between the enormous Brazilian Amazon to the east and Peruvian Amazon to the west. Leticia was very much a frontier town then, both in look and feel, and very remote. Now, I understand the tourist industry is highly developed. Then, I believe, there only a few places with accommodations. We stayed at a motel like place, with separate white cabins, a dining room, and a swimming pool. It was a place to leave for various river tours, but not one to spend a full day at. It was, as Michael would undoubtedly say, adequate.

I remember we flew into a very small airport. We were greeted by two young Americans, probably younger than we were, a guy whom I don’t really remember and a girl, blond and attractive. I thought then that, if they were indicative of the hotel staff, we might have some people with whom we could converse. But I don’t remember seeing them much after they drove us to our home away from home, just here and there. I remember seeing where they were living (why, I can’t tell you), and being very suspicious as to why they were there and what they were doing.

Now those who know me know that I am very naive. But I recently read this about Leticia: “Leticia – the capital of the State of Amazonas – was once used as a place of business for some of the region’s most infamous traffickers, with a flourishing open air drug market overseen by a powerful local cartel during the so-called “drug trafficking bonanza” of the 1970s and 1980s.” [From Insightcrime.org] We saw no signs of that (did we Michael?), but weren’t really looking.

Was our hotel related to the drug trade? Were the young Americans involved with drugs? My firm guess would be “yes”, but this is not based on anything specific that we saw while we were there.

For the few days we were in Leticia, our time was spent on excursions to small Indian villages (I use the term Indian only because I don’t know what other term I should use), which were accessible only by water. These were primitive villages where the only buildings were probably the local school, these with either wood or metal walls. The houses were elevated, one-room affairs, open to the air, with thatched roofs. The young kids were dressed like young western kids – shorts and t-shirts, but the adults were dressed like natives – most adults, male and female, were topless, and the women were as often as not nursing very young children. Everyone seemed friendly. We were told they were Ticuna Indians. There were no vehicles. I don’t remember commercial establishments.

We visited several such villages, but they were relatively indistinguishable. One of the trips we took was across the Amazon to the Brazilian town of Benjamin Constant. This was a really depressing place, with seemingly nothing to look at or do. We were told stories about the places we visited, all of which I have forgotten. At some point, I ran into someone selling “bark paintings”, made by the natives, generally paintings of animals (from large cat-like creatures to insects) and geometric forms. I bought about 100 of them for $8 American each and brought them home. Later I sold them for $10 or $15 each, and covered the cost of my trip. (By the way, there was no passport control for traveling between Colombia and Brazil deep upriver, which surprised me but made sense.)

From Leticia, we flew via Varig Airlines to Iquitos in Peru. I mentioned this place before – a large inland city, not reachable by land, very colonial in appearance, with a very busy riverfront and, as I remember it, a large number of simple houseboats, and a larger number of vultures hovering about. We spent some time exploring the downtown and riverfront areas, before being picked up by a small boat which was to take us to our lodging.

As opposed to our home in Leticia, our lquitos home – at least an hour, maybe more, downriver from Iquitos – was the height of luxury. It was then a fairly new resort built on platforms reaching out over the river. The rooms were open to the river, reachable by raised walkways. There was no electricity; lighting was by gas. The hotel had a restaurant, again quite luxurious, with some of the best fish that I have ever tasted. We did some more river exploration, spent a few nights there, and were transported by boat back to Iquitos for our various flights (see earlier blog posts). I have good memories of our hotel, and particularly of the young native boys (teenagers, young teenagers) who were working at the hotel. They were raised in small river villages, went on hunting expeditions with their fathers when they were young, but were educated at local schools and, in addition to their native languages, seemed to speak every western European language. They were also, every one of them, charming. I thought they’d have a great future.

The river, even almost 2,000 miles from its mouth is extremely wide, and completely beautiful and engrossing. The fish, the foliage, the tributaries, the villages, the family boats, the transport boats, women washing clothes in the river, children swimming. All of great interest.

I was sure that I would go back to this part of the world, perhaps multiple times. It’s not too late, I guess, 50 years later. I really wonder (really wonder) how much it has changed.

Thinking about immigration again.

I have said before that I think that border control is always one of the most difficult problems for any nation, at any time. And especially for a nation that is attractive to people (such as the United States) in times of world stress (such as now). And because so many people (in any country) have a knee-jerk reaction to the prospect of unknown people with unknown habits coming into their country, the problems of immigration provide a very rewarding channel for opposition political parties to state an appealing case. This is certainly the situation we find ourselves in today.

(Okay, let me digress. Last week, I spent some time with a cousin who has long lived in Portland, Oregon. Portland has, like immigration, become a target of political grandstanding by the Republican opposition. It is portrayed as a failing city, ungovernable, filled with leftist rioters and would-be rioters and led by incompetent political leadership. My cousin doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as a very livable city, with problems like all others, that simply has become a right wing talking point, without any basis in reality. A few days ago, I decided to look at what are the “most dangerous” cities in the United States. Surely, anarchic Portland must be high on that list, right? Well, according to PopulationU.com, of the 75 largest cities in the United States, Portland ranks 64th in its crime/danger level.)

I am not today going to list all the arguments, pro and con, for tighter border controls, building a wall, sending troops to the border, or any of that. That’s for another time. I am not going to write about all of the dangers and problems in Central America, Haiti, Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria….none of that. We hear enough about those problems. We know that there are tens of millions of people who have been forced from their homes by war, poverty, climate change or other causes and that all of them need to find a place to live. We know that.

I am also not going to talk about the history of immigration to America – the “we are a nation of immigrants” argument. We have heard enough about that, as well. We know that all of those “real Americans” who vote red and want to make America great again are as much the descendants of immigrants as are the third generation American Jews or the first generation Indian-Americans. In fact, I don’t want to talk about the United States at all.

I want to talk about the British Isles.

Not about today’s Britain, filled with immigrants from the Commonwealth countries (when the Commonwealth was a real thing) and from EU countries (when the UK was an EU member). I want to talk about Britain at the time the Normans came to conquer, in 1066.

As part of my reading of my Penguin paperback collection, I recently read “Britain B.C” by S.E. Winbolt, a British home archeologist who passed away in 1944, and “The Beginnings of English Society” by Dorothy Whitelock. In these books, they explain who the real British people are – not those who immigrated to Britain over the last 1,000 years, but those bedrock Brits who were there well before that.

Well, guess what? There may have been no true native Brits at all, or none or very few who have genetically survived. As early as the Stone Age, Britain was populated by peoples who immigrated to there from what is now France (the Celts, etc.), and then the “English” came (i.e., the Anglo Saxons) who came from today’s northern Germany, and then there were the Vikings and their relatives, who were Danish or Swedish, and then of course the Normans who were French. It was all of these people who made up what are considered today the native Brits (and Irish and Welsh and Scots). Without immigration, the U.K. would be as empty as Antarctica (with no penguins – but with puffins).

Similarly, I watched a video on YouTube yesterday about the earliest Russians. Well, there as well, the earliest people seemed to have migrated from elsewhere and to have at some point come together linguistically and be identified as Slavs. But wait a minute, there is more there, too. The “Russ” were Scandinavians, and the “Russians” became an amalgamation of these two very distinct groups.

My conclusion? Immigration – broad scale immigration – is inevitable over time, and opposition to immigration is just as inevitable. But the opposition never works, and just like you can’t fight city hall, you can’t fight the migration of people who are forced away from where they live, and need to find a new place to build their lives.

Yes, indeed, the “real Americans” will soon be a minority in what they consider to be their own country, and today’s “undesirable” or “questionable” immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, no matter how they enter the country, will comprise the future of the country and will probably do just fine. And you can huff and you can puff, but you really can’t do anything about it, and when you huff and when you puff, it might be your own house that gets blown down.

(I know, you say this is a very simplistic piece. You are right. But as Occam said “simple is best”. And if there is no record that he said that, I wish to remind you that there is no record that he didn’t.)

As you might by now know, every Thursday morning, I have a breakfast meeting (sometimes Zoom, sometimes in person) with several dozen other older and mainly retired men, with each week one member making a presentation of their own choosing. In about a month, I am scheduled to give a presentation on community organizer Saul Alinsky – I am sure you will see more about that here.

Today, our oldest member who is now 99 going on 70, gave a presentation on J.P. Morgan’s original art advisor and assistant, Belle de Costa Greene, a Black woman who passed as White. It’s a mesmerizing story, much of which involved Greene’s success as Morgan’s agent at various rare book and art auctions.

And it reminded me of my best auction experience.

I moved to Washington in 1969, and shortly after that (I don’t remember exactly when) I was wandering through downtown DC, I passed an auction house and the sign told me it was auction day. I went in and saw a about 30 people waiting for the start of the weekly auction and saw that being auctioned were various items consigned by people for sale. A miscellany.

You could wander through and look at the various numbered lots and figure out what you might want to bid on. You had to register to participate and for some reason, I did. It was certainly not a time in my life (living in a small apartment as I was) that I was looking to collect anything, and so I just casually examined things as I passed by. When I got to the books, I saw that they were being sold in groups – one group might include six books, one might include ten books.

None of the books looked very interesting to me until I got to a box of books that included a number of ordinary books and one that looked sort of special. It was an older (published in 1881) coffee table sized (did they have coffee tables in 1881?) book entitled “The History of the St. Louis Bridge”. The bridge is now known as the Eads Bridge, the oldest bridge over the Mississippi River, completed in 1874.

The book had a heavy embossed cover, and is about 18 inches by 12. It has hundreds of pages, which include a lengthy narrative history of the bridge from concept to completion. But wait – there is more. The book contains many photographs taken in the 1860s and 1870s of the bridge under construction. But wait – there is still more. The book contains full pages with all of the engineering and construction specifications of the bridge.

So, clearly this is a special book. But wait – there is even more. The book is inscribed by James Buchanan Eads. Eads, a cousin of the 15th president of the United States, was – believe it or not – a self-educated engineer, a man whose last schooling ended when he was 13, and who became a world known ship and bridge designer, largely through self-instruction. The inscription by Eads clearly made this book more desirable.

But wait – yes, there is more and more. To whom did Eads inscribe this book? The book was inscribed to Supreme Court Justice L. Q. C. Lamar in 1882, when Lamar was a United States Senator from Mississippi. In 1885, Lamar became the Secretary of the Interior and in 1888, was appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Before his career as a United States governmental official, Lamar was a Confederate official and army officer, and he remained a racist throughout his life.)

Moving back to 1869, as I said, this book was part of a group of books set to be auctioned the day I was in the auction house. As I was looking at the book, the auction itself started with Item #1. The box in which the book was sitting was something like Item #200. I didn’t want to spend all day at an auction house.

So what did I do? I took the book out of the box, went to one of the auction assistants and asked if this particular book could be auctioned separately. To my surprise, he said he would see. He disappeared and came back saying that the auctioneer agreed to sell it next.

I sat down in the auction room. The auctioneer held up “The St. Louis Bridge” and said “I have a book here called “The St. Louis Blues” – will anyone give me $10?”

I watched to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I had no competition. I was emboldened (one of the few times in my life) and said “I will give you $5”. The auctioneer gave me the evil eye. But no one said anything, and he followed with “Sold for $5”.

And that’s how I got a copy of “The St. Louis Bridge” inscribed by James B. Eads to a future Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

I do have a few other auction stories, but they pale by comparison. Maybe some other time.

We left off when I entered Machu Picchu in 1974, in a weakened condition from my culinary adventure in Pisac. As I said, in 1974, Machu Picchu was quite remote and the only hotel rooms were in a small and relatively primitive lodge on site. I had a reservation.

During the day, I was a normal tourist. I followed the guide around, learned about the Incas, saw the terraced agricultural plots, the famous mountain and parts of the Inca trail. I remember I thought the guide very informative, but of course I have no idea what he said 50 years later. I was not alone with the guide, there was a group of us. And there were other groups with other guides, and some people roaming around by themselves. It was (for 1974) fairly crowded.

At the end of the day (maybe about 5 p.m.), everything changed. An announcement was made that the park was closing and that everyone needed to board their buses (the buses went to the train station) within something like 10 minutes). They did, and the buses pulled away.

Silence reigned. There were only about a dozen of us left (those staying the night) and a few staff members. Suddenly we were joined by a herd (flock? coven?) of goats, who seemed to have been hired to keep the grass short. And we were given free reign over the site ourselves. No restrictions. We could go anywhere. No longer any guides. Just us.

Because Machu Picchu is near the equator, the sun goes down every day about the same time, about 6:30. Even though we were permitted to roam the site in the dark, there seemed to be little reason to, and I think all of us went up to the lodge. Dinner was served (that was part of the deal); I don’t remember what the dinner was, or if it was good or if it was only mediocre. But at dinner, the few guests had an opportunity to talk to each other. I spent my time, as I recall, talking to a small group of Peruvians about my age, from Lima, who had come up as a group. I don’t really remember the details, or anything about them individually. But I don’t think they were “couples”, just a group of friends.

By now, I was used to this, so when I heard that the electricity would go off at 10 p.m., I was not surprised. Besides, we were all planning to get up very early, so we could climb the famous mountain (Inca steps go to the top) before sunrise. We did and watched the sun rise over the surrounding mountains from the top.

I left Machu Picchu the next morning on the same bus that brought the next group of tourists up. I was going back to Lima for a few days, and I had agreed to meet my now Peruvian friends that night (or was it the next?) to go out for pizza. They lived in a part of Lima called Miraflores, and I was given the address of one of the girls’ houses (her parents’ house – I don’t know if she lived there or not) to meet up with them. As grimy and unappealing as most of Lima seemed to be to me, that is how much I was impressed with Miraflores – attractive, well maintained, filled with fancy shops and fancy homes. In fact, the house where I rang the bell was one of the most luxurious I had ever seen anywhere. I had no idea I was traipsing around with the elite.

We went to a pizza house on one of the main commercial streets and I was surprised to see that each pizza was named for a different Italian-American gangster. I ordered a Lucky Luciano. My stomach was feeling almost fully recovered, and I thought nothing about ordering an overloaded and very spicy pizza.

Once again, big mistake. That night, alone in my hotel, my stomach struck back at me again, maybe even worse, although this time I had running water. I remember the next day (or was it two days) being too weak to get dressed, much less leave my room, and my only sustenance was room service coca-cola that I ordered one after another.

But I did survive, although I was not able to see anything else in Lima, and on the day I emerged, I flew out of Lima, changed planes in Panama City (where I bought a mola, which still hangs in our living room) to catch a flight home.

And, as someone said (I think), that was the day that was.

I never have written about our day in Hermann, Jefferson City and Sedalia, Missouri. I guess it’s not going to happen. Let’s just say on this interesting drive from St. Louis to Kansas City, that I had my second bratwurst in about 40 years in German Hermann on the Mississippi River (the first was about 10 years ago in Viroqua Wisconsin – details on request), that most of the state capital Jefferson City seemed vacant or closed and the liveliest place was the library, and that Sedalia was bigger and more active than I thought it would be. Sedalia is the home of the Missouri State Fair and, if you used to watch Wild Bill Hickok on television, you might remember that Jingles (Andy Devine) was from East Sedalia.

I thought I would probably write today about Prof. Lauren Strauss’ excellent presentation last night for the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies on “Jews and Social Protest on Broadway”, a fascinating look at the Jewish aspects of the history of the American musical theater and how it presaged and/or reflected social issues facing the country throughout the 20th century. But that isn’t going to happen now, either.

Instead, I am going to talk about Pisac, a town nestled in the Peruvian Andes, about 20 miles from the old Inca capital, Cuzco. A town I visited about 50 years ago, one fateful day.

Why Pisac? Because, in this week’s Washington Jewish Week, there is an article titled “Israeli’s Flock To This Tiny Town in Peru”. Apparently, this town of fewer than 10,000 residents, an Inca market and crafts center, and significant Inca ruins, attracts hundreds of young Israelis, some of whom are settling there for rather lengthy periods. Although the article’s explanations are far from complete or perfect, it appears that the biggest attractions (other than the fact that the surroundings are absolutely beautiful, and the climate invigorating, and the prices cheap) are the availability of various types of psychedelic drugs that are derived from the natural vegetation and that I assume have been used by the Incas for centuries. There are so many Israelis in Pisac, it appears, that some have started their own businesses, that restaurants have Hebrew language menus, and that there is a Chabad, which feeds 50-100 people every Friday night. There seems to be a spiritual quest going on here, with Chabad competing with the drug culture. Go figure.

I think it was in 1974, when I was in Pisac. There were no Israelis, I am sure I was the only Jew, and everyone else seemed to be Incan and Quechua speaking – I remember the lack of Spanish as surprising to me. I had been on a trip up the Amazon with an old friend, and after we spent some time in and around Iquitos on the river in Peru, we went our separate ways. I wanted to stay in Peru and see Machu Picchu. As I recall, he wanted to visit friends he had in Costa Rica. (He can correct me if I am wrong.)

I had flown from Iquitos, an isolated but interesting colonial-feeling town of about 500,000 (now – my guess is less than half that amount in 1974). It is still the largest continental city in the world that you cannot drive to. On the upper Amazon, you can only reach it by boat or by air. I remember the tiled architecture, the 19th century feel, and a small women’s clothing store called Tienda Edith (I photographed the sign over the door – it must be somewhere).

When I got to Lima, I was quite disappointed. Obviously a large city, I remember it at surprisingly unattractive, and the weather was cloudy, cloudy, cloudy. I was told it was always that way. I remember really be amazed at the Gold Museum, but nothing else. I remember a rather chaotic city, overly crowded, filled with food carts and retail street vendors. In 1974, food carts and street vendors were unknown in most of the U.S. and I viewed it as a sign of poverty and underdevelopment. And I decided to leave Lima the next day and make my way to Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital.

Cuzco was to Lima as night to day. It was a step into the past, as atmospheric as a sizeable city could get. If you haven’t been there, Google it. But my goal was not to stay in Cuzco, although it would have been a good idea. My goal was to continue on to Pisac and then to Machu Picchu.

Why Pisac, other than it was on the road to Machu Picchu? Because, I was told it was the Inca town to visit, and that it’s Sunday market was famous because it was so extensive. So off I went (I think by train. I think).

It was an attractive, old town, small and very atmospheric, set in the Andes. It was already clear to me that rural Peru was one of the most beautiful places in the world, with fascinating people. As soon as you leave Lima, the clouds (really, I guess it is haze) vanish and the sky becomes as blue as the sky can be. You really do see alpacas and llamas, and the people (the character written on their faces, the colors of their clothing, the variation in the women’s hats, and the tough soles on their barefoot feet) are unforgettable. As proof, you see I have not forgotten.

I checked into a small hotel. It looked new, which surprised me as it seemed out of character with its surroundings, but it looked comfortable, and I did want some comfort in such strange surroundings. The market was a promised, very extensive with a mix of art, crafts, textiles and food. I bought some cheap watercolors (still have them, unframed in a drawer), and ate some food. I recall the food as being contained in something like a corn tacos shell, but I wouldn’t swear to what exactly it was (if I knew even then).

The food was a big mistake. I should have known better. That night, I woke up in the wee hours sick as a dog. It is tough to be sick (both vomiting and diarrhea) in the middle of the night in a place where you know no one and the only language most people speak is Quechua. But it is infinitesimally tougher, when you learn that, during the night, both the electricity and the water power disappears. You can’t see anything, you can’t turn on a light, you can’t turn on the tap, you can’t flush the toilet. Apparently that happened there then every night, but, as they say, who knew? The only thing that gave me optimism at all was that I knew that sometime fairly soon, day would come.

The next morning, after I was able to clean things up a bit, I felt better (not best, for sure), but weak. But I decided to continue on my way and get on the train to Macchu Picchu (I skipped breakfast, as I recall, and was living on Imodium, or something similar, that I must have brought with me). At that time, the train was the only way to get to Machu Picchu – perhaps now you can drive, I am not sure.

I remember sitting on the train wondering if I had made a mistake, sipping my Inca Kola. If Pisac was isolated, just think about Machu Picchu. Things are a bit different now, but then there was a guest house at Machu Picchu with four rooms (I had reserved one), but no hotels, nothing else. What if I continued to get sick there?

I tried to put that out of my mind, as I enjoyed the mountains, the river valley and everything else. Shaky as I felt, there is no way I regretted this trip.

To be continued (maybe even tomorrow).

Ah, politics in America. I wrote a poem about it:

Small towns are red,

Big cities blue,

You live in the suburbs?

Now what will YOU do?

Last night, we got home from our week long trip to St. Louis and Kansas City. Two deep blue cities in a deep red state.

In the last two presidential elections in Missouri, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by about 15% and beat Hillary Clinton by almost 19%. But in St. Louis City, Biden received 82.3% of the vote, and in St. Louis County, 61% of the vote. Boone County (home to the University of Missouri and more than 100,000 people) voted 55% for Biden. Jackson County (Kansas City) voted for Biden over Trump 60-40. No other Missouri county voted for Biden (that means Trump won 110 counties and Biden won 4), and most of the Trump:Biden ratios were in the 70:30 range.

By the way, Johnson County Kansas (suburban Kansas City) voted 53% for Biden. Missouri and Kansas voting patterns are almost identical. Kansas has 104 counties – 99 supported Trump. Even Wichita voted for Trump – only the counties surrounding Kansas City, Lawrence (home of the state university) and Topeka, the capital, did not.

Having said this, when we drove from St. Louis to Kansas City, we avoided I-70 and basically paralleled the Missouri River, going to Hermann, Jefferson City (the state capital) and Sidelia (home of the Missouri State Fair) on smaller, two lane roads. And here is what we saw:

Trump lawn signs: None

Biden hate signs: None

Confederate flags: None

And as we wandered through this highly red part of the state, and as we wandered around the blue cities of this highly red state, we heard virtually nothing about politics and, looking around, having casual conversations, going into restaurants and the like, you could not tell if you were in red or blue neighborhoods. It all just looked like America.

Which brings us to tomorrow’s arraignment and the potential for Jan 6 type violence. This fear was also present when Trump was arraigned in New York on the charges relating to Stormy Daniels. But nothing happened then. And the hope, of course, is that nothing is going to happen this time.

I have not read the indictment and I don’t know the laws involved, but everything that I have heard tells me that, based on the evidence, this is a good case. The arguments against the charges, it seems to me, are completely specious and thus doubly dangerous. Because they don’t go away if Trump is convicted.

The first argument is that the Trump situation is no different from the Biden or Hillary Clinton situations. The fact that they have virtually nothing in common with each other is irrelevant, and Trump’s conviction would just increase the argument that he is being treated differently.

The second argument is that this is all political. Frankly, I don’t even know what that means. If Trump indeed committed serious crimes (i.e., if he in fact violated the federal criminal laws he is charged with violating), he should be tried, found guilty and punished. That seems obvious – and that makes politics irrelevant. What would be wrong is to let someone (Trump or someone else) off the hook for political reasons, and this is equally obviously what the Trump supporters are doing.

As to Clinton and Biden, it appears to me that no one in any prosecutorial office has the evidence to present to a grand jury of the violation of a criminal law. Regarding Hillary Clinton, Trump had four years to have his Justice Department investigate and prosecute her. But there was apparently nothing to prosecute her for. As to Biden, even putting aside the argument that you can’t indict a sitting president (something that Trump used to believe and that he will believe again if he is re-elected), there has clearly been no evidence of criminality. If such evidence comes up regarding either of them, investigation and possibly prosecution would follow. And guess what – virtually all Democrats would support that prosecution.

Why? Because Democrats in 2023 don’t think like Republicans do in 2023. Democrats respect the law and legal process; Republicans appear not to do so. Democrats respect the constitution as a living document meant to shape a living nation; Republicans do not. Democrats believe their own candidates can be flawed; Republicans do not. Democrats do not believe that the ends always justify the means; again Republicans seem to.

Nevertheless, the arraignment of a former president (and current presidential candidate) on criminal charges is beyond unfortunate and, as much as I think Trump deserves this and more, I am sorry to see it happen and worried about the possible consequences, immediate and long term.

A country like ours has to be governed from the center. Even if you would rather, in your perfect world, see it governed from the left or from the right, you should want it to be governed from the center. Only this can save this country from more of the dangerous polarization we now see. But where would that center government start? Who would be the politicians who would be relatively honest, show leadership qualities, and have sufficient charisma to excite the public?

The No Label Movement has the right idea. But the timing is wrong if the backing of a third choice candidate would split the center and the left and give the right wing candidate (Trump) the plurality.

The 2024 campaign will be interesting. Interesting in the way of the presumed old Chinese proverb about being cursed to live in interesting times. Throughout this period, whatever is going to happen – I wish it would take its time and wait a while.

Arraignment, arraignment, go away. Come again some other day.

My additional thoughts on Kansas City. Comments welcome.

1. As to the 21c Hotel, see previous post. Add to it the following: room and bed comfortable. But no shampoo in shower shampoo holder. Did not change towels second night. No trash bin at front door of hotel. Stay there again? Nope. Eat there again? Sure.
2. As to American Jazz Museum (see previous post for Negro League Museum), it is fine, but doesn’t compare to Negro League. A museum that concentrates on sound is tough. There’s a lot to listen to, but who has time? And some neat artifacts. But the museum is a bit schizophrenic – is it an American Jazz Museum or is it a Kansas City Jazz Museum? I think it’s a Kansas City museum with an American name. The exhibits concentrate on Kansas City musicians like Charlie Parker and on musicians that played Kansas City. Those featured are 99% Black musicians. I say 99% because I did hear two clips from Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. But no one else. Not that I find that a museum problem, just a problem with the name of the museum.
3. The Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. Clearly a good museum, we were able to see about half of it in the time we had. There is a special Giacometti exhibit, and we saw the modern and European sections, but missed the ancient and middle ages and American art. Did have time for excellent peach cobbler, a highlight of the museum, no doubt.
4. Wow, what a friendly city. Three examples: (1) Our second day for breakfast at Succatash (see earlier post for the first day), Edie ordered scrambled eggs, has brown potatoes, and toast. When the order came, there were also two strips of bacon, which quickly left her plate. When one of the servers came by our table, she asked if everything was OK. I told her all was good, but that there was a bacon mistake. She was very apologetic and asked what she could do to help (“Isn’t there ANYTHING I can do?” I think was the quote.) We told her all was fine, that we just wanted her to know. She said: “Weren’t you here yesterday, too?” We said, we were, but we were leaving town the next day. She was very friendly and, as we were leaving, she came up to us and gave Edie a large glass of fresh orange juice to make up for the mistake. We couldn’t say no, as we were walking out the door and were very appreciative. (2) We went to the Jazz Museum the day after we went to the Negro League Museum. The two museums share a lobby, and there is one “greeter” for both museums. The greeter who we had spoken to the first day was on duty the second day. Sure, he was very friendly; he’s a greeter. But, beyond being friendly, he started by saying “I remember you. You were here yesterday, weren’t you?” and (3) As opposed to most museum guards in DC museums who stay mum, every room guard at the Nelson-Atkins Museum says hello and smile at you when you walk into their room.
5. What a confusing city. I don’t know if you know Kansas City, but – on a map – if you start downtown and want to go to the museums (either the Negro League/Jazz area or the Nelson-Atkins), you go south. And if you want to go from one of the museums to the Country Club Plaza area (the largest tourist area of Kansas City), you go either further south. You would think that was easy – but it isn’t. For one thing, the major north-south street, appropriately called Main Street, is broken up for construction that something to do with a new transportation system, so you can’t drive it. And that’s the only street that goes through. The most important other north-south street, Broadway Street, takes you, for a mile or so, onto and then off I-35, a major 65 MPH interstate highway. Every other street is interrupted by a park or a similar blockage. What this means is that, whenever you want to go anywhere that we wanted to go from our downtown hotel, we were directed by Ms. GPS onto a major highway. It is clear that the city is broken up by highways, and that neighborhoods have been torn apart. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I knew Boston as a group of subway stops, but I had no idea how these various neighborhoods related to each other. That’s the way I felt in Kansas City.
6. A lot of Kansas City is very nice. The Plaza is an area any city in the world would be proud of, the museums (the ones I have mentioned, plus the World War I museum we saw the last time we were there) are outstanding, and downtown is extensive and filled with important and impressive buildings. But that does not mean that everything is peachy. Downtown, there are a lot of vacancies – retail and we think maybe also full office buildings; we don’t know if this has always been the case, if it is a pandemic result (DC has this problem, for sure), or what. And, there are a large number of homeless-looking, vagrant-appearing, drunk or high-seeming people on the street in many neighborhoods. It isn’t a pretty site.
7. Kansas City has a type of construction we have not seen anywhere else. There are many buildings, especially homes, built of stone, gray or tan. But not only this, there are many part stone homes – homes with stone first floors and brick or shingle or frame second floors. Or homes built of other materials with a stone foundation or a stone front porch or even stone columns. Just odd architecture and we think unique.
8. Two small points: (1) All of my relatives, and everyone we know in Kansas City live in suburbs in Kansas, but we stayed in Missouri the entire time. (2) In three days in Kansas City, how many Teslas did I see? One. And (3) Next time we are there…..the Truman Presidential Museum and House in Independence.

The last time we were here, in 2019, we went to the extraordinary World War I Museum. This time, we went to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Just as extraordinary.

Growing up in St. Louis, baseball was all about the Cardinals and Browns. I never heard of the St. Louis Giants or the St. Louis Stars. They were already in the past. The Market Street stadium, in the heart of St. Louis’ notorious Mill Valley (notorious because it largely, even in the 1950s, largely consisted of row houses without indoor plumbing), had been demolished.

Now, the Negro League(s) get more attention. Living in DC, I do hear of the Homestead Grays, who played in both Pittsburgh and Washington until 1950, fairly often. But if I had grown up in Washington, I probably wouldn’t have.

The Negro League once drew crowds comparable to major league baseball. But the Depression and World War II hurt the league badly, as did Jackie Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and Larry Doby joining the Cleveland Indians in 1948.

The museum highlights both the history of the league(s) and individual players. It tells a great story, moving you along chronologically from the days long ago when only Oberlin College had a biracial team, and when there were actually a few Blacks signed by major league teams until there were threats from other teams that they would not play against Blacks and from fans who would not buy a ticket.

The exhibits highlight the talent of the players and the hatred they faced. It is, to a great extent, the story of 20th century America and, as Edie says, a great way to teach children about race in 20th century America. In addition to the lengthy chronology, there is a wonderful 15 minute film narrated by James Earl Jones, a baseball field with life size statues of all stars and much, much more. Google the museum and see how much you will learn.

And then there was my terrific cousins’ lunch (my four remaining first cousins on my father’s side). We live in Kansas City, Washington DC, Portland OR and Hot Springs AR. I think it’s the first time the four of us got together since our grandmother’s funeral in 1972. So much to talk about.

We met in the Plaza District at Jack’s Stack Barbeque, which turned out to be a great place for the reunion. Long table, relatively quiet, very good food, even for the pescatarian.

What else? Breakfast at Succotash, an informal place not far from the museum, located by googling Breakfast Near Me. Informal place, pretty crowded, they serve very good food. We were appreciative that they let us in even though we don’t have any tattoos. And it’s the only place we have been in where several staff members went out of the way to thank us for coming.

We did take the mandatory tour to the block where my father lived until he was 14. And of course went to the pre-wedding party of my cousin (once removed). The wedding takes place this evening.

Where should I start?

Two different friends suggested that we stay at the 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Kansas City. The hotel is a historic hotel, formerly called the Savoy, originally opened in 1888, and renovated a few times, most recently in 2018. It has received very good reviews and signs on the door say that Conde Nast has said this is one of the 15 best hotels in the world. The hotel is relatively pricey.

We drove to the hotel about 5:30 yesterday afternoon. The hotel is an 8 story brick building. The outside door is not very elegant. There is a sign on the block that says no parking. But you have no choice, but to park. There is no doorman, and you soon learn there is no bellman or woman to help you unload your car. There is also no curb cut, so you can’t simply roll your bags in. You are told you can remain parked for about 15 minutes.

The hotel provides no parking. There is no valet service. You are told there are two lots, one open a block up the street, one enclosed across the street. The open lot is a bit less expensive and you are told you pay by scanning a QR code at the lot, giving them the requested information and everything else is handled automatically. I read the code and get a request for credit card info. I try four times and the card is declined four times. I leave the lot and go to the garage where I take a normal ticket from a machine.

Meanwhile, Edie checks in, using a different card. The card is rejected at the desk several times before going through. Edie gets a fraud alert from Citibank, but after she answers a few questions, all seems ok. I get a fraud alert from Barclays telling me that there look to be four instances of fraud on my card. They tell me four different vendors with strange names have each charged my card $1. I can only associate this with the QR code. Barclays tells me they are going to cancel my card and send me a new one. I tell them I am out of town and need my card. They tell me if I accept the 4 $1 charges, my account can stay open, but they believe these four entities will put large charges on my account and I will not be able to appeal them. That makes no sense to me, but they insist it and tell me that I should let them cancel the card. I do and will be without my usual card for a week or so. In the meantime, Edie has a secondary Barclays card with a different number and apparently she can still use hers. We are also assuming our Citi cards are going to be ok, although our two Citi cards have the same number.

What else? The hotel, in addition to our room fees, put another $100 on our card for each night as security for “incidentals”. I show my email confirmation showing nothing about a $100 hold and I am told it is on the website. I go back to the room, look at the website and see nothing. Oh, well, that’s a discussion for later, I guess.

Let’s see. What else? Maybe I should say that the people who stayed in our room before us had bad taste in snacks?. We know that because the hotel staff didn’t seem to clean out our refrigerator. And also, please be careful if you walk on the third floor of the hotel. There’s broken glass on our hall floor. Not much, but enough.

Is there anything good about this place? Yes!! The restaurant. The Savoy Grill. We had a first class (yes, very expensive) meal last night. I had swordfish again, this time in a spicy farro sauce, and Edie had a morel and pea risotto. We split a Caesar salad. And we sat in Booth #4 – the booth where Harry Truman and sometimes Bess used to sit.

The original plan was to tell you about our adventures in Hermann, Jefferson City and Sidelia, Missouri. Maybe tomorrow? Doubt it. My guess is this hotel stay will need more discussion. For instance, do you think our car will be where we left it?

When I was a high school student in the 1950’s, my school had a soccer team. So did most St. Louis schools. For the United States, that was unusual. Now, St. Louis has a major league soccer team and a brand new 20,000 seat soccer stadium prominently (and I mean prominently) placed on Market Street just west of Union Station. And the stadium is being pretty much filled for games.

DC United, the Washington MLS team, is also drawing well. And are many of the other teams in the league. Which brings me to my point……

Throughout the rest of the world, soccer is the biggest spectator sport. It looks like the US is catching up. What does that mean? That means that all these 20,000 seat stadiums will so be obsolete and need to be replaced. Just watch.

On to the next subject. We promised to provide the dessert for dinner at a friend’s house last night. There would be 5 people. We thought a cake would be good and it was suggested that we try the Nathaniel Reid Bakery on Manchester Road. We never heard of it, but we went. It’s a small bakery in a small strip, and its counter is divided between breakfast pastries, which are supposed to be the best, savory things, and cakes. But not normal cakes. Fancy-dancy designer cakes, and you can get individual cakes (I hesitate to call them cup-cakes, but they serve the same purpose) or whole cakes. We hesitated to get chocolate and concentrated on a lemon tart-cake that we thought would go well with a fish dinner. Or, maybe get 5 individual cakes. Or……maybe go somewhere else.

We had passed another bakery, Bello’s, which we hadn’t heard of but which Google likes a lot, and went there. A more normal bakery, their cakes were more normal, but very big. We just didn’t need a big cake like that. What to do?

We went back to Nathaniel Reid. I went in by myself. The lemon cake no longer interested me. But the cake they called Caia (don’t know why), a sour cream sponge cake with a layer of raspberry something and fresh raspberries and white chocolate wafers on the top looked interesting. I took out a second mortgage on our house and bought it. The verdict?

Unanimous. Probably the best dessert in the history of the world. Clean plate club.

Third and last. Century Electric Company was one of the many large industrial enterprises in St. Louis, making electric motors of all sizes in their large foundry and related buildings. Century is gone, but their buildings have now been repositioned as City Foundry, currently the home of a 17 restaurant food court, 14 non-chain shops, an Alamo Theater and Draft House, an entertainment venue and more. The food court places are all very unique, but we stopped at Killer Pizza for our lunch. Perhaps the least exotic of the 17 possibilities, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unique. You ever had a shakshuka pizza (red pepper/tomato sauce, garlic, and two fried eggs)? It was good.

Today, heading west. Hopefully a few good stops before we get to Kansas City.

The last few times, we have been here, we have eaten in very good restaurants. This trip, we are eating in homes three of the four nights (not complaining), so my ability to test out the eating out scene (no, two outs do not make an in…..nor an inning) is limited. But……

We met friends at a coffee shop, Deer Creek Coffee, Monday at 10 a.m. I decided to hold off and have breakfast, not just coffee. DCC (I may be the only one who uses this abbreviation) is on Clayton Road in Ladue, near my high school. It has a good reputation. It is a very informal but comfortable place. I ordered two scrambled eggs, a bagel and hash browns. And coffee. The coffee was quite good, and the eggs looked delicious, yellow and fluffy and in fact it looked like maybe they gave me three.

I eagerly anticipated my first bite. It was luke warm at best, and devoid of taste. Not edible. How could this be? I went up to the counter and asked “are these eggs fresh or from some sort of mix?” “Oh, they are fresh”, he answered, “We make first thing every morning.” “Like three hours ago, or four?” “Yep.”

Another thing about this place (and I say this without bias): every staff member looked a little off. The fellow with a full beard wearing large green drop earrings. The young woman with full tattoos covering what appeared to be everything from her wrists to her neck. The 400+ pound man. The fellow you would hire to play the nerd in a high school romcom. I was glad they all got jobs.

Yesterday morning I had some time by myself and I stopped by to get a coffee to go. Not one of Monday’s staff was to be seen. And everyone working there looked perfectly normal. It made me wonder how the eggs would be. Go figure.

Yesterday for lunch, we tried a brand new place, Deli Divine in the new Delmar Divine reconstruction of the old St. Luke’s Hospital. Meant to be an authentic 100 year old eastern European American Jewish deli, it is very cute and has an extensive menu (not kosher), indoor and outdoor seating, and an attached specialty food market that you would love. We had sandwiches – Edie liked hers, I didn’t care for mine. But I liked the Zingerman potato chips from Ann Arbor and Mexican Coca-Cola (not very Jewish, but no corn syrup). I wish them success. Off the beaten path for most of the St. Louis Jewish community, and in a sketchy neighborhood (but they have parking, etc), it’s owned by a well known St. Louis/Israeli restaurateur and just may succeed. The Delmar Divine redevelopment has office space for a number of civic nonprofits and there is nowhere else to eat.

We did have dinner out last night. But at Westwood Country Club, not a restaurant. My swordfish sitting in a spicy artichoke tomato sauce was excellent.

I’m thinking.

There’s a lot of talk about crime in St. Louis. And that’s because there’s a lot of crime. St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis – they go back and forth as to who wins the title of most dangerous city. And crime here is something on the minds of people. Not only fear of being murdered and other violent crimes, but perhaps property crimes (like car thefts and break-ins) even more so.

But most of these statistics concern the city only. And if you look at the St. Louis metropolitan area but exclude the city, things look more normal (not that normal is good). And that’s important because St. Louis City contains only about 10 percent of the metro population.

That is weird in and of itself. The estimated population of the city is about 290,000. The population of the metro area is about 2,800,00. When I was in high school, St. Louis City population was, according to the 1950 census, 856,000. That was about 1/3 of the metro area population at that time.

There is also a racial aspect to the crime statistics unfortunately. St. Louis city is about half white and half Black. Very few Asian or Hispanic residents in the city proper. The city is racially segregated. The north part of the city is almost all Black. Actually, it about half Black and half empty. The west and south of the city are not all white, but predominantly so. Most of the crime, and especially most of the violent crime, occurs in the northern section of St. Louis.

But the fear of crime seems pervasive and must have, along with a rational fear to some extent, a racial component. But this gets complicated because the statistics do show that Black residents are involved in most of the violent crime.

My thoughts about St. Louis and race growing up would take a post in and of itself and is not for today. Suffice it to say that St. Louis when I was growing up was virtually totally segregated residentially. And the Black population was, obviously with some exceptions, extraordinarily poor. This was in part a result of the reactionary policies of the state of Missouri government (it was always bad), and the general feelings of the white population (Missouri had its heritage as a slave state of course) which by and large had Black inferiority built into its genes.

There were no race riots in St. Louis in 1968, something the city was proud of but that I always thought just reflected the hopelessness of the city’s Blacks at the time. And fear of Blacks led to the very high white flight from the city. And my guess is this legacy continues today to a great extent.

Still today, on the whole, the city and the suburbs are different and they come together only to support the Art Museum, the Zoo, and the Cardinals and other sports teams. I know I exaggerate and there are many exceptions, but I think this separation remains a general problem, leading to isolating a large part of the inner city Black population and to personal hopelessness and crime.

Enough for today, except to make it clear that this crime problem does not blot the whole city. Western and southern St. Louis City are prosperous, thriving, lively and welcoming. And very diverse. But the sense of fear of being a victim of some kind of crime seems to be pervasive across the entire area, and seems to delay, rather than foster, positive change.

As I said yesterday, we just took our first flight since 2019. It went smoothly and here we are. But……I would rather have driven, even though it would have taken more time (which, for this trip, we did not have).

Let’s look at the difference.

When you take a road trip, you decide when to start. You put your suitcase in the car and you go. Some things don’t fit in the suitcase or you want to keep handy? No problem. Throw them in the back seat or the trunk. Want to take something to eat or drink? Take it. Want to be warm? Turn the heater on. Cold? The air conditioning. Want to talk to someone? Bring your phone. Loud radio? That’s OK. Stop and get a snack? See a site? All that is fine. Forgot something? Buy another.

How different when you fly. You must calculate when you need to get to the airport. You must pack and take “only one personal item and one carry-on”. Everything must fit. You cannot bring certain items per TSA rules.

You must get to the airport. We went by Uber. You must make a reservation. When your driver comes, you must take your suitcases to the car and put them in. When you reach the airport, you must take them out of the car and bring them into the terminal.

Then, even though you have already checked in and received boarding passes on line, you must check in using machines that want to confuse you. The machine spits out luggage tags, which you attach to your suitcases (making sure not to attach them to your hands). You now take your luggage and stand in another line. This one leads to a man who asks you to put your suitcase on a scale to see if they weigh less than 50 pounds. Then he asks you if you have lithium batteries or atomic bombs. He stamps your luggage tags and points you to the man down the way who will hopefully put your suitcases on the correct plane.

Now you must go to the gate. At Reagan National, this means you must turn the corner and take an escalator down. Then you must walk a bit to security, and stand in a long line after showing someone your boarding pass and picture ID. When you get to the start of the line, you must empty your pockets and take off your shoes and belt and put all of that and your carry-on on a conveyor belt and see them float away out of sight, while you stand in another line to go through a metal detector and raise your hands. Then you retrieve your possessions and put on your shoes and belt.

Now you need to find your gate. To do that, you first must walk through a shopping center with stores and restaurants. Then you must turn into a hallway where you walk past fast food restaurants. When you finally get to the gate, you see hundreds of chairs, virtually all filled. You finally find one, sit down and look at your watch. You see that you will be sitting for almost an hour. You look around you and realize that everyone has COVID.

A loudspeaker tells you that it’s almost time to board. Another loudspeaker tells you there will be a delay. A third tells you it’s time. You get into another line to board the plane. You show your boarding pass again

The line on the plane moves slowly. It’s because everyone has COVID, I think. Once in your seat, you settle down for a couple of hours. The lady next to you is wearing a mask. That’s because she thinks it will keep her from spreading her COVID. You appreciate that.

The plane lands and you reverse the boarding process, but don’t show your boarding pass. When off the plane, you follow the sign to the baggage claim. It is about 5 miles away, but you break up the trip by going to the bathroom.

You reach the baggage claim and have to find your carrousel. No line, but people milling around wondering if their suitcases will appear. Eventually they do.

Now you follow signs telling you where you can get on a bus to get your rental car. It is only 3 miles away and you go out the door, across one street and look for the Alamo sign. A bus comes. You lift your baggage into the bus and sit down and drive halfway around St. Louis to the rental car station. You retrieve your bags. There is only one person in front of you. He only takes about an hour to get his car.

Then it’s your turn. You have already done everything on line, so you get finished in about 30 minutes. You decline everything they offer you. You initial wherever they tell you.

They point to the parking lot and tell you to take any car you want. We choose a Nissan Altima. We lift our luggage into the trunk. Carry-ons in the back seat. We drive to the exit. We show our rental contract and drivers license. The gate goes up.

If we had driven from home, we feel like we’d be in San Diego by now. Or on Oahu.

When I was much younger, anxiety was my enemy. Why I became anxious, and why I couldn’t easily escape, I don’t know. What helped was a dose of so of Librium, which I consider a wonder drug, but which is now proscribed, not prescribed, because it apparently is habit forming. Nobody asked my opinion.

For the past 50 years or so, anxiety hasn’t really been a problem. Every now or then, I feel anxious, it may affect my sleep one night, and then it fades away. Often, I don’t know why it comes, or why it leaves when it does.

Today, maybe I do. In a few hours, we fly to St. Louis and in a few days drive to Kansas City and then back to St. Louis. So, you wonder. So what? For one thing, this will be our first time in an airport and on an airplane since September 2019. That’s almost 4 years.

So we are out of practice. How early should we be at the airport? We already “checked in” and have boarding passes, but what does that mean? Do we still go to the check in desk (we have baggage to check) or right to the X-ray machine? Is TSA going to nix anything in our carry-ons? Do we wear a mask in the airport, or on the plane? Has something else changed?

It’s not that we haven’t traveled in the past 4 years. We have driven to New England and upstate New York several times. We have driven to and from St. Louis. And a few months ago, we drove to Florida and South Carolina. But no planes.

So this may be one cause for my anxiety.

Then there’s illness. One of my close relatives in St. Louis has some serious chronic issues and there is always a question as to how she will be. Then, an old and very good friend has recently been diagnosed with a severe prostate condition and is very uncomfortable waiting for surgery. We had planned to spend some time with him and now may not be able to. Another cause for anxiety.

When we are in St. Louis, we generally see the same group of friends and relatives. Well, we have some plans this trip, but some of our regulars are in New York, Hilton Head and South Africa. How should we fill out time? Anxiety provoking?

Kansas City is a wedding of the son of my late first cousin. Naturally, it brings back memories of my cousin, with whom I was close and who died much too soon. As part of this part of the trip, the four remaining first cousins on my father’s side are planning on getting together. We live in Washington, Kansas City, Hot Springs AK, and Portland OR. We all recognize that this may be our final full get together. And there are the six cousins no longer with us.

Finally, the 2 1/2 day KC portion of the trip requires us to be downtown, in the Country Club District, Lee’s Summit MO and Overland Park KS. And everything depends on Alamo having our car ready at the St. Louis airport, and a car that is the right size, clean and easy to drive.

I know my anxiety will leave me. But, until then, it’s right here with me in the room.

Thomas Buergenthal passed away this week at the age of 89. You may not have heard of him, but his story is worth knowing, and it is equally worth knowing that his story, unfortunately (or fortunately), is far from unique.

Buergenthal was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. You can already see where this is going. Ghetto, arrest, Auschwitz, and a three day “death march” to Sachsenhausen which he survived with his mother at the age of 11. A Polish orphanage, a miraculous reconnection with his mother who was living in a small town in Germany and in 1951, when he was 17, he was sent to his aunt and uncle in Paterson, New Jersey (I am not sure about his immigration status then), where he was sent to high school and then to a small Christian affiliated college, Bethany College in West Virginia. Then, he studied law at New York University and got a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard, and decided to specialize in international and human rights law.

His New York Times obituary then lists the jobs he had. I quote: “President of the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Committee, from 1972 to 1974; dean of Washington College of Law of American University in Washington DC from 1980-1985; held endowed professorships at the University of Texas, Austin, the State University of New York in Buffalo, and Emery University in Atlanta , where he was also director of the Human Rights Program of the Carter Center…….also served on the United States Truth Commission on El Salvador from 1992-1993, was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the Ethics Commission of the International Olympics Committee” and he was vice-chairman of the Holocaust related Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts.

From 1979 to 1993, he was a member of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and for a time served as its president, and he was – perhaps most importantly – the United States Justice on the International Court of Justice in the Hague, a UN tribunal, from 2000 to 2010. He then served as a law professor at The George Washington University in Washington. His memoir is titled “A Lucky Child”.

Quite a life story, to be sure. And Buergenthal was not the only European Nazi period refugee to find success. Look at Henry Kissinger, who just turned 100, or Elie Wiesel from a town in Romania, or so many others.

I am not sure what to make of this. Today, so many think that their children’s success will be based on going to the right elementary school (or even pre-school), or summer camp, or what have you. These Holocaust survivors often went to no school at all. So many today think that their children’s success will be influenced by what books they are exposed to, or by receiving information about gender characteristics or sexual preferences. The Holocaust survivor kids were exposed to situations well beyond reading about two male animals in a book who love each other – and if anything it made them better people, not worse.

What these people did have (beyond native intelligence and a background that sharpened their sensitivity to the world around them) was support and mentorship from everyone from relatives to strangers in the new world in which they found themselves. And they had a innate sense of confidence, I suppose, from having survived the ordeals of their childhood.

Which, of course, brings me to today’s immigrants, and especially the young immigrants, who have not yet reached the time of their lives where they are tied down by family obligations. These are also survivors – and we don’t hear (or don’t want to hear) enough of their stories. Shouldn’t they be given the same degree of support and mentorship, rather than be treated as insects that were able to sneak through the cracks in the wall? After all, they are – to a large extent – the future of this country. Shouldn’t we be giving them the chance to become its leaders?

As the Reverend Solomon says, in his radio messages, “not a sermon, just a thought”.

I am a curious person, and am interested in a lot of things. I read a lot, watch a lot, go to a lot of places and generally try to pay attention.

BUT…….there are many things in which I have absolutely no interest. And many of these things are subjects that most others that I know have great interest. Here goes:

(1) Popular music. By popular music, I don’t mean Frank Sinatra – I like him fine. I mean the stuff that most people like, stuff that is popular. Rock and roll is popular. So is hip-hop and rap and blues and so forth. I pay no attention to it, so that while I might know names of singers or groups, I have no idea who they are. I was very sorry that Tina Turner died, and Aretha Franklin, but…….who were they? What did they sing? Can you tell one from the other? Same with, say, the Rolling Stones. I can name one or two of them, and even recognize Mick Jagger, but can I name one Rolling Stones song? Not on your life. Bruce Springsteen. Who is he? Is he different from Billy Joel, or are they the same person? And all those other groups which I can name (the older ones) or not (the newer ones).

You ask if there are exceptions. Yes, the exceptions are those who performed before 1960 when I graduated from high school. So I know Elvis Presley, and Harry Belafonte, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bill Haley and the Comets. (Wow!! I just realize that Bill Haley called his groups the Comets because there is a Haley’s comet. I had put that two and two together until just this minutes. How important it is to write a blog.)

But after 1960 – no one.

One more thing: I see a lot of “what’s the last (or best) concert you have been to recently (or ever) questions on Face Book and the like. I must say: I have never been to a concert (OK, maybe a few outdoors concerts a hundred years ago) by any artist or band that fits the definition above.

(2) College sports. Now, when I went to college, I went to my school’s football and hockey games, and rooted for them. But I didn’t care about any other colleges. And after I got out of college, I didn’t even care about my college any more. Today, especially during football season, everyone wants to talk about Michigan and Oregon and Notre Dame. Football and basketball especially. And it’s become more common, and more complex, now that you need to talk about women’s as well as men’s teams. I pay no attention. I don’t care. I don’t see why anyone else does. Professional sports are different, and I pay attention to them.

(3) Television shows. I watch a lot of screen stuff. I watch movies on TV, and I watch a lot of today’s Netflix, etc., series, and of course news and professional sports, and occasional game shows, but again I don’t think I have regularly watched a TV show (a network show) since I left high school. So now, I see an article in the newspaper about “Friends”, or “Cheers”, or “Golden Girls”, “CSI”, or “Everyone Loves Raymond” – these are obviously old shows that I know nothing about. As to the newer shows (i.e., those that have aired over the past 30 years)? No clue. Can’t even pull up names.

(4) Certain books. For example, I have never read, and don’t intend to read, “Harry Potter” or anything by Tom Clancy, or most of the other contemporary mystery or espionage writers. I don’t know why. I do read a lot, and I am sure these writers write as well as those whom I do read. I just have no interest.

I am sure that, if I tried hard enough, I’d think of other things that are of no interest to me. I don’t care how automobile engines work, or how a clock keeps time, or even how to manufacture a safety pin. But I am going to stop here. It’s time for me to get on with my day and back to things that do interest me.

I don’t know about you, but I think that Rodney Dangerfield was one of the best comics of any time. A master of one liners (sure beats Bob Hope or Henny Youngman) I keep watching snippets of his self-deprecating humor. I can laugh at the same lines time after time.

He gets no respect:

(1) He’s on the beach as a kid and gets separated from his parents. He goes up to a policeman and asks him if he will be able to find his parents. “I don’t know”, says the cop, “there are so many places they could be hiding.”

(2) He decides to commit suicide. A priest is called. The priest sees him sitting on a ledge and says: “On your mark…..”.

(3) His uncle is dying and tells him that his last wish is that little Rodney sit on his lap. His uncle is sitting in an electric chair.

(4) He is kidnapped. The kidnappers send his parents a ransom note, a enclose a portion of Rodney’s finger. His father says “I need more proof”.

(5) He lives in such a bad neighborhood that once, when he bought a waterbed, he found a body in the bottom.

(6) His father took him to the zoo, and told him that he hoped that his real parents claimed him.

(7) He asked his father how to get his kite into the sky. His father said “Run off a cliff”.

(8) His son likes to play pranks, like the one time he mixed super glue with his Preparation H.

(9) He told his father he wanted to go skating on the lake. His father told him to wait until it got warmer.

(10) He had a lot of pimples when he was a teenager. Once he fell asleep in a library and woke up to a blind man reading his face.

(11) He’s so ugly that on Halloween, kids knock on his door and give HIM candy.

(12) He drinks too much. His doctor asked for a urine specimen. There was an olive inside.

(13) When he went hunting with his father, his father game him a 3 minute head start.

(14) When they were finished hunting, his father put the deer in the back seat and tied HIM to a fender.

(15) He is so ugly, his father keeps the picture of the kid that came with the wallet.

(16) And his wife…..One time someone stole their car. He asked his wife if she could identify the thief. She said “no, but I got the license number”.

(17) He figures his wife cheats on him a lot. Every time he comes home, the parrot says “Quick, out the window”.

And then there’s the end of the show he did for Ronald Reagan at the White House: “Don’t blame me. I voted for Randolph Scott.”

See you tomorrow.

Every Wednesday, we pick up our 2 1/2 year old grandson at his pre-school and drive him home to his house, which is about 30 minutes from our house. We get to his house between 5:30 and 6.

Last week, we had a brilliant idea. Why don’t we, after we drop him off, go out for supper? It’s relatively early, and we would still have a full evening at home after we ate. We made two rules. First, we would only go to restaurants that were new to us. Second, the first priority would be good and free parking.

We started last week by finding a place to park on 14th Street NW, just south of W Street. Now, if you know 14th Street, you know that there are about 10,000 restaurants in that neighborhood. We chose one called Lucy, at the corner of 14th and Florida Ave, or – more literally – Lucy Bar. It has a fairly small, but friendly and comfortable plant bordered patio facing onto Florida.

We hadn’t looked at the menu before we sat down, and were surprised that we were primarily looking at a pizza menu, not a dinner menu. (Later investigation showed that Lucy Bar, which opened last year, is meant to be just that – a bar, and that it shares a kitchen with a restaurant next door, called Slice & Pie, owned by the same restaurateur, which is in fact a pizza restaurant. When we were at Lucy, we didn’t even know that Slice & Pie existed.)

So we got a drink (a margarita and an Aperol spritz) and a pizza. We had a lot of pizza choices, and we each focused on a different one, but we ended up with a pizza with a rather unappealing name (to me) – Artichoke-me. It was a white pizza with artichoke hearts and garlic. The pizza itself was fine, the garlic better than the canned artichoke hearts, and when we were done, we were probably still a bit hungry. But it was very pleasant watching people walk by with their dogs, and listening to the three person subdued jazz combo which plays there a few evenings a week.

But next time, we’d order a different pizza. Which one? There are many vegetarian choices from which to choose. And, truth be told, I am being unfair to the menu. There are also four pasta choices, or you can get eggplant Parmesan, a cheese board, a couple of entrees and oysters. So it’s not just a pizza place – but for some reason that’s what it seems like. I know, what I have written about Lucy makes no sense at all. You just have to deal with it.

Our second Wednesday was last night, which you may recognize as a Tuesday. Let’s blame it on Memorial Day, even though I don’t see a connection. At any rate, this time we went to Cinco Soles, an even newer restaurant on 11th Street NW, one of a number of restaurants spread over a few blocks of 11th in what is otherwise a residential neighborhood.
If you Google Cinco Soles, you (for reasons only halfway logical) get a description of an Italian restaurant called Ossobucco. The reason is that Ossobucco was a restaurant at this location that closed a year or so ago, and was replaced two months ago by Cinco Soles, a Mexican restaurant. Same owner. Cinco Soles has a number of outside tables facing 11th Street, which are well spaced and comfortable.

The menu is interesting, and has some similarities to the menu at another Mexican restaurant we have gone to a number of times, Corazon DC on 14th and Randolph NW. There are a variety of tacos, as well as some entrees and so forth. This is not a restaurant where you get enchiladas with beans and rice; it is a bit more imaginative.

We had guacamole (I don’t eat that, and half of it is now in our refrigerator), fish tacos and vegetarian (brussels sprouts and almond) tacos, and a dish called mahi Abobado, described as seared mahi mahi, guajillo abol mole, nopal, and potato salad. The delicious and very fresh mahi mahi was sitting in a delicious reddish brown (or was it brownish red) sauce which the server told me was spicy, maybe a 7. I told her that I didn’t mind spicy food, as long as it wasn’t overly spicy. She then told me that, if I liked spicy food, this was more like a 5. Not sure what that means, but the spicy was much more a 5 than a 7. As to the guajillo abol mole and the nopal, I don’t know what either is, but I approve of both, and as to the potato salad…….there was no potato salad. Wonder what happened. I didn’t pay attention to the menu details when we were there. (Now, I do know that guajillos and abols are peppers and nopal is a type of cactus – but will I remember this when I go next to an upscale Mexican restaurant?)

Lucy Bar gets a B+ rating based on ambiance, music, drinks and decent pizza crust. Cinco Soles gets an A- based on the quality of everything, but the lack of potato salad.

Want to go to either of these places with us? Just let us know. We can go any night but Wednesday. They no longer meet our criteria for Wednesday nights.