by Peter Cates

Clifton Fadiman

In his 1941 anthology Reading I’ve Liked, editor Clifton Fadiman (1904-1999) wrote why he felt that so many children’s books are terrible:

“The trouble with these juveniles is that their authors are greatly interested in children and not at all interested in themselves.”

Having enjoyed many of the Golden Books, basal readers, etc., between six and nine years old, I was particularly fascinated by picture storybooks depicting life on a farm with a variety of two- and four-legged creatures and vividly remember one such book from second grade entitled Farm for Sale – it dealt with a married couple fed up with city life who take a ride in the country, find a ready-made farm, purchase it and live happily ever after. The drawings of the animals, pond, pasture and the farmhouse, especially after nightfall, drew me into its spell and fed into this three-year enthrallment with farms in the Vassalboro of my childhood.

And I never stopped to notice whether these authors were interested in me or themselves.

Until sixth grade, the only other reading that interested me were books and magazines where the pictures outnumbered the words.

Such examples were a Classics Illustrated edition of Gene Stratton Porter’s Pollyanna with illustrations from the 1960 Walt Disney production starring Hayley Mills, Jane Wyman, Adolf Menjou, Agnes Moorehead, etc.; A Pictorial History of the American Presidents by John and Alice Durant; and issues of Life, Look, TV Guide and American Heritage magazines.

During sixth grade, my first novel without any pictures was Penny Nichols and the Knob Hill Mystery, which I read twice. But I don’t remember its author. And, again, I never noticed whether the authors were interested in children or in themselves, my only concern being to continue reading the books and magazines.

During seventh and eighth grade, I gradually discovered the joys of collecting books through the Scholastic Book Club and local outlets such as Waterville’s long gone Farrow’s Bookstore, later renamed Canaan House at Main and Temple Streets and devoured George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, numerous Hardy Boys mysteries, Horatio Alger rags to riches novels and Reader’s Digest magazines and condensed books.

Now 60 years later (with a few thousand titles too numerous to mention during the intervening decades), I am reading Alfred Kazin’s Journals , Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, Joseph Conrad’s Letters and Michael Korda’s biography of Eisenhower while dipping into numerous other volumes.

Collecting both books and records have become lifelong addictive hobbies impossible to break. And, with reference to Fadiman’s comment, I still could care less whether the authors are interested in us adult children or in themselves, only that they are interesting.

For what it’s worth, I did slog through Fadiman’s anthology of more than 900 pages from April 22, 2000, to August 11, 2002, and its mix of classic writers with long forgotten ones, along with Editor Fadiman’s comments, proved a very interesting, at times long-winded, experience, along with at least five or six other books I had going at the same time.

The classic writers included Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Maine’s own Sarah Orne Jewett, and E.B. White.

Fadiman himself was a judge for more than 50 years for the Book of the Month Club, reviewed books for such publications as the New Yorker, was the host of Information Please on radio and later television, and edited several additional anthologies, including The Lifetime Reading Plan.

by Peter Cates

Carlo Maria Giulini

Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was born May 9, 1914, and passed away June 14, 2005. He displayed talent by the age of five on the violin, but took up the viola as an adolescent, was gainfully employed in Italian radio orchestras, and had priceless opportunities to observe an array of some of the greatest conductors of the last century – Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, Victor de Sabata, Bruno Walter – Giulini once commented that Walter had a unique gift for making each musician feel important, Fritz Reiner, and Hancock Maine’s summer resident/teacher Pierre Monteux.

Giulini was taking up conducting himself and getting a few engagements but World War II broke out and he was conscripted into the Italian army. Being a pacifist, he couldn’t bring himself to kill enemy combatants, especially alongside German soldiers, and became a deserter, going into hiding until the allies removed Mussolini from power and drove out the Germans. During the period of hiding, his face was displayed on posters all over the countryside with orders to shoot on sight.

After the war, Giulini got numerous engagements as a guest conductor, and in 1949, was rehearsing a lesser known opera by Franz Joseph Haydn at La Scala; Toscanini happened to look in, stayed for the rehearsal, and used his influence to solidify Giulini’s engagement as La Scala Music Director Victor de Sabata’s main assistant at that opera house, eventually replacing Sabata when the older man’s health failed.

In 1955, Chicago’s own arch perfectionist Fritz Reiner told his players just before he went away for the summer that the very talented young man Giulini will be conducting them for the orchestra’s outdoor festival at Ravinia and the players will be finding the young Maestro a very gifted musician.

Years later in a New York Times interview, Giulini told of meeting Reiner just once in the lobby of a Viennese hotel and having a pleasant chat for 15 minutes.

Giulini’s working methods were quite lengthy and carefully detailed but singers and musicians enjoyed working with him because he knew exactly what he was doing yet had a very pleasant supportive personality, unlike such tyrants as Reiner, Szell, Toscanini and others. He considered them colleagues and friends and that he and they were servants of the great composers – Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Verdi, Mahler and a handful of others, he being also highly selective of which piece to focus on.

For example, he conducted Tchaikovsky’s 6th or Pathetique Symphony but the 5th Symphony made him physically ill.

In 1979, I attended a concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall in which Giulini conducted the touring Los Angeles Philharmonic, of which he was music director from 1978 to 1984, in a program consisting of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and the Dvorak 7th, two works which he adored and brought something truly beautiful that Sunday afternoon. I own the three recordings he did of the Pastoral and both Dvorak 7ths and they are all good for different reasons.

Two highly recommended operas that Giulini recorded during the 1980s were Verdi’s Rigoletto and Il Trovatore, both with tenor Placido Domingo singing important roles and, even though he had a voice I didn’t usually care for, he sang with beauty and power while still in his 40s.

During roughly the same decade, Giulini refused all engagements for two to three years when his wife Marcela suffered a series of strokes and stayed home to take personal care of her until she recovered.

Many of the Maestro’s recordings can be heard via YouTube and other Internet sources.

A quote by the Maestro on working with people:

“What matters most is human contact. The great mystery of music making requires real friendship among those who work together. Every member of the orchestra knows I am with him and her in my heart.”

by Peter Cates

Gerard Robichaud

Novelist Gerard Robichaud (1908-2008) was born in Québec, moved with his parents to Lewiston as a child, returned to Québec at 18 to study for the priesthood and practice writing stories during his spare time, but then left the priesthood to return to Lewiston in 1928 and over the next twenty years began developing further as a writer .

Maine Speaks contains a chapter, The Bad One, from Robichaud’s 1961 novel Papa Martel which easily stands on its own as a short story. The setting is a 1920s mill town, Groveton (strongly resembling Lewiston) and depicts a French Canadian family living in a very crowded apartment.

A local priest talks the parents into taking in a 17-year-old orphaned girl who’s been very difficult to manage. What gives this story a special quality is how the situation unfolds in a most unusual manner; how again people are so seldom what they seem; and how clouds have surprising silver linings.

The orphan Bad One Sophia ends up engaging the family and community in a most endearing manner while there are the elements of sly humor, local color, snappy dialog and unspoken attitudes that are the meat and potatoes of any good story.

In an interview, Robichaud summed up his own approach as a writer- “I wanted people to be better than they were after they read the story.”

A choice four lines of dialog between the family patriarch Louis and the priest Father Lebois before the parents make any decision:

“And this little girl?” Louis asked. “How old is she?”

“Just seventeen,” said Father Lebois sadly, “and already the boys chase her. It’s a pity, but she’s also very beautiful. “

“At seventeen,” Louis murmured, “everybody is beautiful.”

Tony Williams

Tony Williams (1928-1992) was lead singer for the Platters from 1953 to 1959 and contributed to the group’s extraordinary success with such hits as The Great Pretender and Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

In 1957 as a solo singer, he recorded a seven-inch 45 (Mercury 71158) of two selections – Let’s Start All Over Again; and When You Return, its melody being that of Danny Boy/Londonderry Air. And they were vocally top notch doo wop style arrangements.

White Heat

White Heat is a 1949 film noir classic starring James Cagney (1899-1986) as the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarrett, Margaret Wycherly (1881-1956) as the equally formi­dable Ma Jarrett and a superb supporting cast that included Virginia Mayo, Steve Cochrane, Edmund O’Brien, Fred Clark etcs. and astutely directed by Raoul Walsh.

Fritz Kreisler

Two acoustically recorded 12-inch shellacs present two violinists who shared the same birthday of February 2 and ex­changed greeting cards.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) recorded Dvorak’s Humoresque (Victor Red Seal 74180) in 1919 and played with his justly famed unique delicacy and exquisite lyricism. In 1947, he closed his violin case for good.

Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) recorded Sarasate’s splendid virtuoso piece Introduction and Tarentelle (Victrola Red Seal 74626) the previous year at the age of 17 and even then displayed the total technical and musical supremacy as possibly the greatest violinist who ever lived. Itzhak Perlman once commented that Heifetz again and again could do bowings and phrasing that he and other violinists could never do.

by Peter Cates

Gingersnaps

A 1956 seven-inch 45 (Kapp K-226X) features the Gingersnaps, four women from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who had been friends in high school. They perform two novelty bubblegum pop songs, Gingerbread; and Lenny! Lenny! This record was for me an intriguing historic curiosity because, having been born in 1951, the ‘50s have remained an immensely fascinating time warp.

The father of one of the women was friendly with the Chordettes, also from Sheboygan, whose megahit records Mister Sandman; and Lollipop Lollipop each sold over a million copies in 1953-54 and helped these singers get bookings for concerts and recording sessions, although only this record and two or three other discs were released.

Musically speaking, the vocals and arrangements weren’t half bad, the women singing with sincerity, but the results were derivative and sounding too much like their fellow Sheboygans, the Chordettes.

Two other groups with the name Gingersnaps need to be mentioned to avoid confusion. One is an African-American blues group of singers from the Deep South who signed a contract with RCA Victor in 1945 and recorded a few 78s, the second consisting of musicians from Ukraine who started performing as an electronic rock group in New York City in 2019.

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred (Lord) Tennyson (1809-1892) published a book length poem In Memoriam in 1850 as a tribute to a close friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died from a stroke in 1833, at the age of 22. The poem was not only a powerful elegy about the loss of a friend but also a critique on the “modern age” in England during the age of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) when religious faith was increasingly seen as being replaced by hard cold materialism, prosperity and scientific progress. Thus a certain cynicism and despair among more sensitive souls was on the rise.

This cynicism and despair is touched on quite brilliantly and astutely in some verses on the life of a couple who have been married for decades and these verses just might resonate in the world we live in today:

“These two-they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die.

“Their love has never passed away;
The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate’er the faithless people say.

[But then this note of marital happiness is pretty much destroyed by the next verse in which there is so often one spouse who loves still and is no longer loved in return, just co-existing, and getting the raw end of the deal. The cold fish husband in the marriage is still living with the loving wife, he still loves her, but he’s just not showing it any longer. ]

“Her life is lone, he sits apart,
He loves her yet, she will not weep,
Tho’ rapt in matters dark and deep
He seems to slight her simple heart.”

Tennyson implied a certain sarcasm about the oafish husband being “rapt in matters dark and deep” and seeming “to slight her simple heart.” This poet conveyed a tough yet needed realism about marriage among our ancestors, the perils of living under the same roof for decades and the suffering so often occurring between husbands and wives having to live under that same roof. And he articulated these thematic concerns with power and eloquence.

by Peter Cates

A childhood memory

Among my many childhood memories were the innumerable Sunday drives, when gas was inexpensive, down to Pemaquid, Rockport, Port Clyde, Belfast, Owl’s Head, St. George.

One particular memory is of the humongous rock quarries in St. George and it was brought to mind when I was browsing in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (1995, University of Maine Press) and came across a paragraph on the beginnings of the quarry industry during the early 19th century:

“Maine’s granite quarries were first opened by local companies using local capital. These were usually small firms with fewer than twenty-five employees. The business was fiercely competitive, as was the construction industry generally, and wages and profits fluctuated widely. In the second half of the century, the industry was stabilized through two developments. During the 1870s, the federal government issued lucrative contracts for public buildings, known as “fifteen percent contracts” because they guaranteed that amount of profit to the builders and, by extension, to the suppliers. Several large quarry owners gained a monopoly over these contracts and profited heavily. ”

Needless to say, greed increased with the wealth and relations between management and labor deteriorated.

Dean Martin

Dean Martin recorded two quietly wistful ballads – Dreamy Old New England Moon; and Three Wishes – on a ten-inch Capitol 78 that was released in April 1949. What particularly enhanced Dino’s decently professional singing was the exquisitely crafted arrangements of Paul Weston who directed a studio orchestra consisting of some of the best strings and woodwinds session players to be found on the west coast and a backup group of harmonizing women.

NCIS Hawai’i

Though not quite on the same level as the Mark Harmon original, NCIS Hawaii’s first seven episodes for season one have proven entertaining. Vanessa Lachey as Jane Tennant, the lead agent for the Pearl Harbor branch of the Navy Criminal Investi­gation Service, had conveyed commendable presence.

Episode 5, Gaijing, which deals with the murder of a visiting Japanese officer, has an unusual plot twist. A woman who was close to both the victim and his girlfriend who had been murdered the previous year is the prime suspect because of what seems to be a psychopathic personality disorder. It’s the surprising plot twist that gave this episode unusual merit.

Madeline Zima’s performance as the suspect was quite extraordinary in her development of this character.

Leopold Stokowski

A 12-inch acoustically recorded shellac of the concluding part three of the Overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhauser had Leopold Stokowski conducting the Phil­adel­phia Orchestra in one of the most exciting performances to be heard when the horn was used for recording instead of the microphone. Stokowski not only drew extraordinary playing from the orchestra but achieved the most vivid sound from the still crude horn technology.

Stokow­ski’s other discs from before 1924, when Victor developed the electric microphone system, were also quite vivid in sound. And he would live long enough to record with stereo and four channel microphone set ups before he passed away in 1977 at the age of 95, and with a recording contract until he reached 100.