by Peter Cates

Eleanor Sterling

The 1987 anthology Maine Speaks contains the short story “Whale!” by Eleanor Sterling, originally published in 1974 as part of a Yankee Magazine collection. It depicts, as the author beautifully puts it in her opening paragraph, the following situation:

“On an afternoon in mid-August, a very large gray whale appeared up out of Casco Bay and swam between the rock ledges off Harpswell Island, scattering the perched seagulls to the winds, and washed ashore finally in little Dingley Cove; there it lay on its side like a stone half in and half out of the water, blowing lazily and dreamily through the opening in its head.”

This paragraph is not just good writing; it’s very good writing. It quietly, almost unobtrusively, sets the scene for a momentous event in this bucolic location on the Maine inlet waterway.

The second paragraph then lists the floating trash that had wound up on the cove in the past…”strips of old linoleum, spars, wooden crates and kegs, broken lobster pots, buoy markers, plastic beach bottles, dead fish of all kinds, and once even a dead seal pup all fat and spotted, but never before a whale.” The Coast Guard’s already on its way along with most of the Harpswell citizens.

The story then shifts gears to the point of view of a little boy Willan, whose family has lived on the island for generations and whose own personality is one of “laconic” reserve as were his ancestors and so many New England Yankees such as former President Calvin Coolidge. But, as was Calvin, he is observant and curious about everything and is already soaking in a lot of information through reading, overhearing conversations and asking his Mam lots of questions, most of which she answers endearingly and affectionately.

We find out that Mam is Willan’s guardian since his mother died the previous year, that she owns the Island’s only diner and that Willan helps her with picking blueberries for baking pies to sell and with other chores.

Meanwhile as the gray whale is in its death throes, a baby calf emerges from the side crying for its mother. Willan is suddenly thrown back to the painful memories of when his own mother died and is fearful something terrible will happen to the calf if it sticks around trying to arouse its mother. Willan was with his mother when she died and empathizes with the calf’s desire to stay with its mother but knows it too must leave for its own survival, as Willan had to go live with Mam.

The brief biography of Sterling in Maine Speaks mentions she was born in 1937 in New York City, moved to Maine in 1961 as a wife of a Bowdoin College professor, wrote about Maine people and happenings for the former Brunswick Record and, as of 1987, had moved just north of San Francisco, California, where she and her husband bought a farm, growing grapes for wine and raising German shepherds for physically challenged people.

I have not been able to glean any information on her whereabouts since then.

In July 2020, a woman was mauled and killed by a Great White Shark while swimming 20 yards from shore on Bailey’s Island in Harpswell. It was the first such fatality in the island’s history.

by Peter Cates

Charles Durning

A select number of actors and actresses could enhance mediocre films and television shows with their contributions; in vehicles worthy of their talents, the nominations for Oscars and Emmys came pouring in.

Those no longer living (excluding the obvious superstars) would include Max von Sydow, George Sanders, Robert Ryan, Jo Van Fleet, Susan Hayward, Lee J. Cobb, Ray Collins, Agnes Moorehead, Judith Anderson, Everett Sloane, Martin Balsam, Alastair Sims, Jeannette Nolan, etc. (Those still living will be saved for another day.).

I add Charles Durning (1923-2012) and give a brief summary of his background.

When he served during World War II, his unit was part of the D-Day invasion, at Omaha Beach, and all of its members were killed except for Durning, who was severely wounded. A few months later, he recovered and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded several medals for bravery under fire and would be a popular speaker at Memorial Day and 4th of July commemorations.

While working as an usher in 1951 at a Boston burlesque theater, he was asked to replace a drunken actor on stage, thus beginning a part time career in mostly minor roles in such plays, until the famed Shakespeare-in-the-Park producer Joe Papp saw him and liked what he saw.

Work on stage and in films and television began pouring in more often.

I jump ahead to my first experience of Durning in the mid-’70s Burt Reynolds film Starting Over, as the brother-in-law of Burt’s character. Durning brought an understated reserve in his performance that drew attention away from Reynolds and his leading lady Jill Clayburgh.

Next would be Durning’s appearance in the early ‘80s TV film Night of the Scarecrow as the leader in the lynching of an innocent, educationally-challenged man under wrongful suspicion in a rape case and dressing his corpse up as a scarecrow.

The scarecrow becomes a night of the living dead creature and members of Durning’s lynch mob start mysteriously turning up dead. He worries, but not enough, and is home by himself after dark watching television in his recliner when he starts hearing shuffling noises in the dining room.

The choreography of his leaping out of the recliner and skating all over the floor before he’s executed by the scarecrow was absolutely hilarious.

Other notable roles:

Durning’s one man show on a Boston University stage as baseball legend Casey Stengel, which was hosted by the legendary actor George C. Scott in the audience and televised live on National Public Television.

His role as the sadistic warden in 1987’s HBO miniseries The Man Who Broke 1000 Chains.

His appearance as a governor of Mississippi in the Coen brothers O Brother Where Art Thou; the manner in which Durning stared at stupid sycophantic underlings is worth the viewing.

A guest appearance on a 2004 NCIS episode as a shell-shocked World War II veteran undergoing flashbacks.

In a Parade magazine interview, Durning stated the following about acting:

“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about. There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. The place that no one knows about – horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”

Charles Durning died from natural causes in 2012 at the age of 89. The New York Times paid tribute to him and Jack Klugman as “extraordinary actors ennobling the ordinary.”

by Peter Cates

Dorothy Maynor

African-American soprano Dorothy Maynor (1910-1996) sang at the inauguration of Harry S Truman in 1948 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953; however, while singing frequently in concert and on radio and recordings, she was never invited to the Metropolitan Opera during her peak years.

In 1964, she founded the Harlem School of the Arts, which provided low cost music education to African-American students, and served as director for many years. Its enrollment had gone up to 1,100 students by the time she retired in 1979. Interestingly, while the Metropolitan Opera would never engage her due to prevailing racism in earlier decades, she was invited in 1975 to become the first African-American to serve on its board of directors.

A 1950 78 rpm set of three 12-inch discs, Sacred Songs (RCA Victor Red Seal M 1043), features arias by Bach, Handel, Mozart and Mendelssohn in which her uniquely warm, very heartfelt soprano voice is a special pleasure. Unfortunately, only a couple of the selections from this album are available on YouTube but there is a sizable number of others and, in time, somebody may post the other four sides.

Last Man Standing

I recently finished watching all 9 seasons of the comedy show Last Man Standing, starring the incredibly gifted cast of Tim Allen, Nancy Travis, Hector Elizondo, Jay Leno, Amanda Fuller, Molly Ephraim, Kaitlyn Dever, etc. Even the facial expressions and body movements were distinguished by brilliant timing, as well as the dialog and constant insults and repartee.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Maine poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was born in Rockland and spent her adolescence in Camden.

After graduation from Vassar College, she found her way to Greenwich Village and published books of her poems, achieving fame and being awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Although, and very unfortunately, little read today, her writing had a particularly extraordinary power and eloquence, as seen in the closing stanza from Renascence:

“The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,-
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat-the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.”

by Peter Cates

Composer Richard Wagner

Composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was an egomaniac who, as my high school glee club director put it succinctly, knew he was great. His 16-hour Ring of the Niebelungen was premiered at Bayreuth, in Germany, in 1876 and has been produced many times since then. It is a mammoth quartet of four operas – Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung; and, depending with whom you speak, it is either a windy, bombastic spectacle of Teutonic screeching, screaming and shrieking or a masterpiece of operatic genius.

After listening off and on for over 40 years, I hold with the masterpiece view but plan to focus on my current favorite of the four, and one which has been a shade less popular than the other three, Siegfried.

The basic premise is simple. The Ring is one that enables its owner to control the world and its owner is the Niebelungen, a dwarf named Alberich who creates the ring, is robbed of it and tries to get it back. The 15 or 16 hours deal with an array of mythological gods and goddesses, giants and good and evil humans in this life/death struggle.

Siegfried is the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who fall in love and create this son before they find out they are long lost twin siblings, and becomes a central hero who is eventually killed by the treacherous Hagen , son of the dwarf Alberich.

Other details of this ever thickening plot are too detailed to go into but synopses are available on the Internet.
The opera Siegfried deals with Alberich’s brother Mime, a dwarf who found Siegfried as a child abandoned in the woods after his parents were killed and has been raising him. Unfortunately, Siegfried detests his foster father who meanwhile is plotting to steal the Ring from another thief. As stated earlier, the rest of the story can be enjoyed elsewhere.

The music in this opera has a savage, growling brilliance in its large-sized orchestra with extra brass and percussion and the singing when done well. And for me, the best listening approach is to forget about reading up on the plot ahead of time or follow the scripted libretto; simply let the music happen. It is some of the most piercingly eloquent music to be heard anywhere with a phenomenal range of emotions and dynamics from tenderly soft to climactically exhilarating.

The performance I have been enjoying for a while is a 1949 broadcast from the Vienna State Opera which has been available in a set of three CDs since 2009 (Myto, 00190) and also accessible on YouTube. The recorded sound is very good for its era while the musical cast was one of the finest, in particular tenors Gunther Treptow (1907-1981) as Siegfried, and William Wernigk (1894-1973) as Mime, soprano Gertrude Grob Prandl (1917-1995) as Siegfried’s sweetheart Brunnhilde and baritone Ferdinand Frantz (1906-1959) as Brunnhilde’s father Wotan, who is also King of the gods and temporarily in disguise as the Wanderer.

Maestro Rudolf Moralt (1902-1958) and, for several years music director of the Vienna State Opera, led a very exciting performance.