by Peter Cates

The Klansman

by William Bradford Huie

A 1965 novel The Klansman, by William Bradford Huie (1910-1986), depicted the exacerbated racial tensions in a Deep South town in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. What particularly distinguished it from other novels was Huie’s ability to convey the attitude of the sheriff, himself a racist; a childhood friend who is not; and a host of other characters ranging from members of the KKK to civil rights workers risking their lives.

Most importantly, Huie was one incredible storyteller; I read the 400 and more pages in less than 24 hours while the plots and sub-plots moved right along.

Huie also wrote a non-fiction book Three Lives for Mississippi dealing with the 1964 murders of Civil Rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman by the Klan and local law enforcement officers. A book which is also recommended.

An Inspector Calls

by J. B. Priestley

An Inspector Calls is a suspenseful 1945 play by J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) in which a British police inspector calls on a wealthy family at their country estate during a dinner party celebrating the daughter’s engagement. The year is 1912 and each family member is smug and selfish.

The inspector is investigating the suicide of a young woman and shows her photo to the parents, son, daughter and her fiancé. From the looks on every face, he correctly ascertains that all five crossed paths with the young woman and may have contributed to her destruction.

A 2015 BBC film assembled a very good cast led by David Thewlis as the inspector is available on Pluto TV and DVD.

Haydn String Quartets

Two very beautiful Haydn String Quartets – the Opus 20 #4 D major one and the Opus 76 #2 D minor – were recorded in 1961 on a Concert Disc LP by the then Chicago-based Fine Arts Quartet consisting of first violinist Leonard Sorkin, second violinist Abram Loft, violist Irving Ilmer and cellist George Sopkin .

By the late 1970s, Sopkin (1914-2008) would retire from the group after almost 40 years to live in Surrey, Maine, not too far from Ellsworth. I met him in 1980 at the Blue Hill Congregational Church where he performed as part of the Maine Trio with violinist Werner Torkanowsky, who had also been music director of the New Orleans Philharmonic and in later years led the Bangor Symphony before his death in 1992, and with pianist Mike Ikemiya.

The Trio was formed for the purpose of giving free chamber music concerts in small Maine villages that had never experienced these events. One very worthwhile endeavor.

by Peter Cates

The Beast That Walks Like a Man

The Beast That Walks Like Man is a 1955 history of the grizzly bear by author, naturalist and explorer Harold McCracken (1894-1983).

He writes “I have never lost that deep fascination which Old Ephraim inspires, and in the matter of personal experiences with these marvelous creatures, out in their natural haunts, I have been considerably more fortunate than most men.”

The book is rich in anecdotes of his own experiences in the grizzly country extending from the western United States and Canada to Alaska. It recounts much anthropological information and legends of the creature’s relationship with native Americans and other groups.

McCracken also provides an appendix listing 86 known species of the grizzlies and big brown bears of North America, starting with the Big Plains Grizzly or Ursus Horribilis Horribilis – huge in size, long massive skull, long curved claws and a killer of buffalo.

The author quotes an account of the explorer Kit Carson (1810-1868) in one vivid encounter:

“While out procuring meat for camp, Kit shot an elk with his muzzle-loader; and he hardly had time to observe the effects when the echo of the blast ‘was broken in upon and completely lost in the terrific roar from the woods directly behind him …..and he instantly saw two huge and terribly angry grizzly bears. As his eyes first rested upon the unwelcome guests, they were bounding towards him, their eyes flashing fiery passion, their pearly teeth glittering with eagerness to mangle his flesh, and their monster fore-arms, hung with sharp, bony claws, ready and anxious to hug his body in a close and most loving embrace.”

I found my copy, still with its dust jacket, for a quarter at a yard sale but noticed a penciled in price of $40 for a previous owner at a used bookstore, so there is no telling what prices for it are being listed on Ebay. And its research findings have been probably surpassed by ones published since 66 years ago.

But its colorfully written style does score points for connoisseurs of these delightful beasts of prey.

State Fair

The 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical State Fair stars Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, Jeanne Crain, Fay Bainter, Vivian Blaine and Charles Winninger; features such classic songs as It’s A Grand Night For Singing, and It Might As Well Be Spring; and has very pleasing technicolor cinematography in its Iowa locale, making it one DVD worth re-watching numerous times.

* * * * * *

For a few months, I have been working my way through a megaset of 40 compact discs comprising the complete recordings of French pianist/conductor Alfred Cortot (1878-1962). They cover the years from 1919 during the acoustic era to 1959 when stereo lps had been developed.

His musical interests ranged from Bach and Beethoven to Brahms, Chausson and Falla but his interpretations of the keyboard works of Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann and Claude Debussy had a special eloquence and insight based on close study and outstanding virtuosity that did include wrong notes but brilliant wrong notes.

He collaborated in several recordings of trios by Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn etcs with cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) and violinist Jacques Thibaud (1880-1953).

Conclusion to Robert PT Coffin’s Kennebec Crystals

Finally, the concluding paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals about the ice harvesting industry in Maine:

“Now the Kennebec icehouses are rotting and falling back into the earth. Their interiors are taken over by the wasps and the mice. The old piers are sinking into the water. No ships come up in tow of a tug through the first leaves of May. School keeps week after week, and there are no bells ringing out to greet the steamer that leads up the spring. The gougers and saws are rusted half away.

“For the Kennebec crystals, last harvest of Maine’s finest river, have joined the white pine and the spruce, the sturgeon and shad and salmon. The end is elegy. The day of natural ice is done. New men, outside New England, bring their sons in their strength to the work of refrigerating homes and factories. And the small farmhouses, back from the river, that once housed great numbers of young men and boys, are full of empty rooms where the swallows bring up their young, or they have only a few children who work at their tasks and never need turn their heads toward the river, where the strength of their fathers lay and their fathers’ lives.

“The other day my good Kennebec friend whose great house looks up the river and down, over a twelve-foot hedge of spruce, took me out and showed me the tools of the ice harvesters. They were dark with rust and covered with cobwebs. They had joined the flint arrows and bows that once bent to bring life to the men along the ancient Kennebec.

When we were coming back we passed a strange depression in the woods, grown up with lusty spruces. It was the refrigerator men of my friend’s house used 150 years ago. It was the ruins of the earth cellar where they had stored their vegetables in summer and winter, to keep them from heat and cold. It was the Kennebec refrigerator his ancestors and mine learned how to make from the Indians when they drove them away into the everlasting dark from the bright blue river. That refrigerator was a ruin, and the Kennebec was as young and lusty as ever as it hurried toward the sea. Someday our own sons’ far great-grandchildren may find among the timbers of my friend’s house the rusted shards of the electric refrigerator that serves the house today. And the Kennebec will be going down to the sea, as young and as fresh and blue as ever.”

by Peter Cates

Church steeples

The Protestant church steeples still seen in The Town Line’s surrounding communities include the towering beauty at the China Village Baptist Church. Back during the decades of 80 or more years ago, some of these steeples summoned the citizens of the surrounding communities to Sunday morning assemblies to an extent not seen as often today, no matter what the weather was.

This might seem like a big leap here but bear with me for a moment. I was reminded of the required weekly attendance at both church and Sunday school from my parents, for what seemed like untold years to my immature mind, at the East Vassalboro Friends Meeting AND how often we kids heard about Quakerism’s 17th century founder George Fox (1624-1691) after recently reading a quote from him about steeples in his Journal, itself quoted in a critical essay by Sir Victor S. Pritchett (1900-1997).

Pritchett wrote:

“One hesitates, since Freud, to admit to a strong personal feeling for church steeples, and yet who does not respond to the ring and vividness of that phrase which occurs again and again in George Fox’s Journal and which puts the man and his book a key higher than the common chord of living – ‘As I was walking in a close with several Friends, I lifted up my head and espied three steeple house spires and they struck at my life.'”

Both Fox’s Journal and Pritchett’s 1991 Complete Collected Essays, which contains over 1,300 pages of his book reviews, are highly recommended.

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town is a wistful and, at odd moments, sardonic tribute to pre-World War I village life in the fictional Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, in three acts with the subtitles 1901, Daily Life; 1904, Love and Marriage; and 1913, Death and Eternity.

Whether it’s two housewives, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, chatting outdoors while snapping stringbeans, the alcoholic church organist Simon Stinson rehearsing the choir on Wednesday night, the young high school graduates George Gibbs and Emily Webb falling in love or the recently departed spirits of a few villagers conversing in a holding pattern at the cemetery while a funeral is occurring during a driving rainstorm, Wilder caught the immediacy of life more than a century ago in this village quite brilliantly.

One quite apt quote from the main character who’s referred to as the Stage Manager – “We like to know the facts about everybody.”

A very good movie version came out in 1940 starring William Holden, Thomas Mitchell, Martha Scott, Faye Bainter, etcs.

Kay Starr

Jazz singer Kay Starr (1922-2016) recorded a Capitol lp, Movin’ (ST 1254) which contains 12 positively vibrant performances of Great American Songbook classics – On a Slow Boat to China, I Cover the Waterfront, Around the World, Sentimental Journey, Night Train, Indiana, Lazy River, etcs. She had the arrangements of the gifted conductor Van Alexander while the album was produced by Dave Cavanaugh.

And it can be heard on YouTube.

Robert PT Coffin essay Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals, on Maine’s once most important winter industry, the harvesting of ice from the Kennebec River:

“May saw the ice ships arrive and tie up at the docks. The Kennebec crystals came down the runs, slithered across the decks of the four-masters and into the holds. When a number of the old hulls were loaded, which had once breasted the waves on the underside of the world, white under thunderclouds of sail, a tugboat steamed down-river on a neap tide, dragging the old veterans of the Atlantic back to the Atlantic again, below Popham.”

More next week.

by Peter Cates

H.L. Mencken

The delightful scoundrel H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote the scholarly and hilarious Treatise on the Gods in 1930 and revised it in 1946. Like so much of Mencken’s writing, it is very biased, scores points both intentionally and unintentionally in spots, reveals blindness in other spots, and was never intended to be taken very seriously.

In his 1943 On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) spoke of Mencken’s popularity among the younger generation of the bootlegging 1920s:

“As it was, he not only rallied all the young writers together and imposed his skepticism upon the new generation, but also brought a new and uproarious gift for high comedy into a literature that had never been too quick to laugh….Mencken proved that one could be ‘a civilizing influence’ by writing like a clown.”

Mencken’s own passage on the conflict between love your neighbor as yourself and loving yourself shows his devious wit:

“So long as it was believed that the end of the world was at hand it all was well enough to be poor and humble, but when years of uncertainty began to stretch ahead every man of any prudence had to take thought for his own security and that of his family. Thus the Beatitudes were forgotten and the immemorial game of dog-eat-dog was resumed.”

Cop Land

One highly recommended film, the 1997 Cop Land, depicts a group of New York City’s men and women in blue, the community they live in across the George Washington Bridge, and the harrowingly moral ambiguity in their conduct both on and off the job.

It even takes on the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragedy in its gritty realism, hopeless cynicism and the struggles to do what’s right.

The cast included Robert de Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Sylvester Stallone, Janeane Garofalo and Annabella Sciorra, along with others, in one outstanding ensemble performance.

Also highly recommended is Howard Shore’s very eloquent soundtrack.

Robert PT Coffin’s essay
Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“That year the Hudson did not freeze over ‘til March. The betting of the Maine farmers had been three to one against its doing so. They won their bets. The rival river, the only rival the clear blue Kennebec had among the rivers of earth, had lean-kine stalls along its banks that year of our Lord. The Lord had been good. The Kennebec ice farmers heaped great towers of the harvest outside their houses and covered them with spruce boughs and sawdust, for extra measure. The Knickerbocker Ice Company lost nothing. For they owned most of the icehouses along both the Hudson and the Kennebec. All ice was ice to them. The Kennebec crop was better than the Hudson, in fact, for the water in the Maine river was clearer and purer. Kennebec ice stood at the head of all ice. It was the Hudson ice cutters who lost. But if Peter was robbed, Paul was paid. The Kennebec farmers went back to their hens and heifers with wallets stuffing out their trousers and their sons’ trousers, after the $4-a-week lodging and eating bills had been paid. The grocers canceled whole tomes of ledgers. The schoolteachers kept their patience right up to ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ in the Friday afternoon’s speaking. New barrels of pork and flour came home to the high farms on the whistling runners of the horse sleds. And barrels of halibuts’ heads and broken-bread. Active Frost stopped moving his checkers when his foreman turned to take a shot at the spittoon. And Timothy Toothaker asked the question when he brought his Susannah the first bunch of mayflowers. They were married and setting up housekeeping on new pine floors and in the new spooled maple bed before the catkins were gone from the popples.”

To be continued next week.

by Peter Cates

Harry C. Browne

A ten-inch acoustically recorded shellac, Columbia A2179, featured singer and banjo player Harry C. Browne (1878-1954) performing Balm of Gilead, while side two contained another banjoist Fred Van Epps (1878-1960) playing Southern Medley, comprised of such quaint tunes as Old Folks at Home, Jordan Is a Hard Road to Travel, Kentucky Home, Clime Up Chillern and Carve that Possum.

Harry C. Browne was a native of North Adams, Massachusetts, and fought with his home state regiment in the Spanish American War. He was also a noted actor and appeared in several staged productions, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (whose author Kate Douglas Wiggin attended Gorham Female Seminary, now University of Southern Maine, and whose home in Hollis still exists and can be seen in a Google photograph) and later found his way to Hollywood where he starred in several films during the silent era.

Browne was a very active campaigner for the Democratic party and, in 1914, was offered a diplomatic post by then Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) which he declined.

During the late 1920s, Browne was an announcer for CBS radio.

He started recording for Columbia records in 1916, scoring a hit with Turkey in the Straw; that selection’s initial title was horrifically racist and won’t be mentioned here.

Balm of Gilead was recorded later the same year on October 16; side two was set down for posterity on November 29.

Fred Van Epps was the father of jazz guitarist George Van Epps (1913-1998), one of the busiest studio session players for various LP record labels.

Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals continued

Continuing with paragraphs from Robert PT Coffin’s essay Kennebec Crystals:

“Inside, men caught the thundering cakes and switched them, this one to the right, this one to the left, to their places. The walls of cakes rose gradually, aisles of air spaces left between the walls of solid crystal. The workers here were in their shirt sleeves. They were the youngest of the men, sons more often than fathers. Their work made them glow inside like cookstoves. The sweat ran down their faces. They stood by the cataracts of ice and flung the bright streams each way, stepping as in a dance to keep clear of a blow that would shatter their bones. The work was like the thunder of summer in their ears, thunder all day long. And the house filled up with the cakes. Square cakes piled as even as the sides of a barn, true and deep blue in the steaming dusk. The men walked between walls of Maine’s cold wealth.”

To be continued.