REVIEW POTPOURRI: Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Harry S. Truman

The 33rd President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), upon being sworn in as FDR’s vice-president, was told by his mother, “Now you behave yourself.”

Like every other president since George Washington, Truman was, warts and all, a character. A highly controversial 1974 book, Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller (1919-1986) has Truman recounting a number of fascinating stories about his life.

One in particular recounts his problems with General Douglas MacArthur (Old soldiers never die, they just fade away!). It seems that MacArthur had a very high opinion of himself and treated Truman as a small town hick from Missouri. He also disregarded several orders from Truman which included talking to the press out of turn and trying to provoke a full scale war with Red China.

Truman finally fired MacArthur and the before and after repercussions have been extensively documented elsewhere. Truman commented that he fired MacArthur for insubordination, not because he was a dumb [son of a gun, censorship of the other word Truman used instead of gun because this is a family newspaper]. He also stated that if generals were jailed for stupidity, three quarters of them would already be there.

Truman’s daughter Margaret published her own biography, simply titled Harry S. Truman, in 1973 and provides some hilarious details of her parents later years in Independence, Missouri. One tells of Truman’s own laziness about mowing the lawn, instead wanting to hire a neighborhood kid, against the opposition of his wife Bess, who could be just as stubborn.

One Sunday morning, Truman told his wife he was going to mow the lawn. Bess quickly realized that people would be driving by their house on the way to church and would see the former president of the United States mowing his lawn on the Sabbath Day instead of going to church. She decided to hire a neighborhood boy.

When Truman was vice-president for a few short months, he rarely saw Roosevelt. However, a photo was taken of them having lunch at the White House; Truman later commented that Roosevelt was already showing signs of his failing health and that, when the latter lifted the cup of coffee to his mouth, he kept spilling it due to his shaking hands.

FDR kept Truman in the dark about a lot of national security issues, including the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, but Truman made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing that it would force Japan to surrender a whole lot sooner than otherwise.

At the 1944 Democrat Convention, Roosevelt’s decision to replace vice-president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman became known as the Second Missouri Compromise.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Music Potpourri

Tiny Bradshaw

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Tiny Bradshaw

Singer Tiny Bradshaw (1907-1958) was an important figure in the development of what came to be known as rhythm and blues. A 1951 King label (4447) ten-inch 78 rpm record features him vi­brantly vocalizing two blues selections – Brad’s Blues; and Two Dry Bones on the Pantry Shelf – with very leisurely paced but riveting backup instrumentalists who convey a very powerful sense of oneness with his singing.

Theresa Brewer

Theresa Brewer

Teresa Brewer (1931-2007) will forever be associated with Music! Music! Music! which she recorded first for London records in 1949, a second time for Coral in 1953 and a third time in 1962 in Europe for the Dutch label Philips.

A 1952 ten-inch 78 rpm, also on Coral, features her peppery singing of two novelty songs, Ricochet; and Too Young to Tango. Her arranger/conductor is Jack Pleis (1917-1990) who provided exquisite backdrops for some of Kitty Kallen’s best records from the 1950s – Little Things Mean a Lot, In the Chapel in the Moonlight, I’m Old Fashioned.

Reginald Kell

Reginald Kell

I have a 1940 Victor Red Seal 78 rpm set of four 12-inch fragile records featuring clarinetist Reginald Kell (1906-1981) performing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, a piece composed towards the end of that genius’ much too short life before he died at the age of 35, in 1791, from a variety of health problems, was bedridden the last two or three months, and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

The Concerto was the 622nd among his almost 800 works and was yet one more incredible example of quantity of work combined with quality.

Kell collaborated with Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) and the London Philharmonic where he had been principal clarinetist since 1932 when Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) hired him, oboist Leon Goosens (1897-1988) and several other brilliant ensemble virtuosos and transformed the orchestra into the finest group for recording purposes during the 1930s.

Kell eventually moved to the U.S. where he numbered among his pupils the legendary Benny Goodman (1909-1986).

With respect to the Mozart Concerto, Kell was noted for a very expressive vibrato in his playing but very strangely, I found the performance of the Mozart rather bland.

Along with the Brewer and Bradshaw 78s, it too can be heard via YouTube.

Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt

Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt

Hundreds of books have been written about Franklin (1882-1945) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) but I do share two items of possible interest:

In 1974, noted journalist Jim Bishop (1907-1987), who was acclaimed for his The Day Lincoln Was Shot and The Day Kennedy Was Shot, published FDR’S Last Year: April 1944-April 1945, which revealed much previously unknown information about the 32nd president’s declining health in an immensely fascinating book of more than 500 pages and was critically acclaimed.

Secondly, South China’s most famous native and the Quaker founder of the American Friends Service Committee, Rufus Jones (1863-1948), was friends with Eleanor and former President Herbert Hoover.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Conductor: Charles Adams Prince; Violinist: Oscar Shumsky

Charles Prince

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Charles Adams Prince

From August 1915, a ten-inch acoustically recorded shellac (Columbia A1882) presents Prince’s Band under the direction of Charles Adams Prince (1868-1937), Columbia’s highly-accomplished musical jack of all trades and a relative of former Presidents John and John Quincy Adams.

The two marches are Under a Peaceful Sky and R.B. Hall’s New Colonial March.

R. B. Hall

R.B. Hall (1858-1907) was a Maine native, having been born in Bowdoin­ham, and resided in the Pine Tree State most of his life. But his marches achieved renown in this country and, even more, in England, bandleaders and listeners there frequently believing that Hall was an English composer despite efforts to inform otherwise.

The marches are not that musically captivating but they do pass the six to seven minute duration nicely; the performances are perky, precise and imbued with conviction; and the 1915 acoustic sound is quite vivid. Interestingly, Hall’s March was used in later years by Palo Alto, California’s Stamford University as the melody for its school fighting song, whatever that means.

Both sides can be heard via Internet Archive.

Oscar Shumsky

Oscar Shumsky

Violinist Oscar Shumsky (1917-2000) was born in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish parents and started playing at 3 years old, giving his first public performance at seven with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He was invited personally by ArturoToscanini, when he was 21, to join the NBC Symphony in 1939.

Shumsky also had a phenomenal memory. Once, after hearing violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) play a cadenza that the latter composed for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, the younger man played it by heart shortly after that concert .

During the 1960s, Shumsky collaborated with pianist Artur Balsam (1906-1994) in the complete Mozart Violin Sonatas for the mail order record label Musical Heritage Society, of which I have one LP of Sonatas K 454 and 481. The music is among this composer’s finest.

Some of these recordings can be heard via YouTube.

Shumsky also had an avid interest in photography and became a close friend of Ansel Adams.

Artur Balsam taught several summers at Blue Hill Maine’s Kneisel Hall during the 1970s.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Herbert C. Hoover

Herbert C. Hoover

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Herbert C. Hoover

The 31st president Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) heavily criticized FDR’s New Deal policies and increasing big government spending; he stated the dollar decimal point was “wandering around among the regimented ciphers trying to find some of the old places it used to know. ”

In res­ponse, FDR launched fishing investigations into Hoover’s four years (1929-1933) but came up with zero.

As a one term president before the four terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hoover’s most serious blunder was his glaring lack of sensitivity to the nationwide collapse of businesses, and to the horrific unemployment and near starvation of millions during the early years of the Depression, continuing to believe that private enterprise , local charity, etc., would suffice.

Sadly and ironically, it was Hoover who led relief efforts in Europe after World War I to save many millions there from starvation.

Herbert Hoover was born to Quaker parents in West Branch, Iowa, on August 10, 1874; was orphaned at ten and raised by uncles and aunts; showed initiative and self-reliance during these early years, entering the then newly-founded Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, in 1891, at the age of 17, where he totally supported himself; earned degrees in engineering; and, through his success as a mining engineer, became a millionaire by the age of 40.

Hoover met his wife, the former Lou Henry (1875-1944), while attending Stanford and they had two sons, Allen and Herbert Jr., both of whom pursued careers in engineering.

After leaving the White House in 1933, the Hoovers settled down in a mansion in Palo Alto. When Mrs. Hoover died in 1944, the former president moved to a suite in New York City’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and assumed the role of an elder statesman and advisor, when asked, to both Republicans and Democrats until his own death at 90 years old.

Hoover was shunned by FDR but welcomed back to the White House by both Truman and Eisenhower who asked him to set up a group known as the Hoover Commission to help with food distribution in Europe after World War II and to help eliminate government waste in the U.S.

Interestingly, during the 1920s, Herbert Hoover and his wife would dine frequently with the Roosevelt’s and moved in the same social circles.

Delmore Brothers

Delmore Brothers

Recommended listening and accessible on You­Tube is a ten-inch 1945, 78 rpm re­cord on the King label by the Del­more Bro­thers who were outstanding early country singers and guitarists. The two selections are Midnite Special, and Why Did You Leave Me, Dear?

 

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Music, TV and books!

George Raft

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

George Raft

Having for so long equated actor George Raft (1901-1980) with his role as the Saint Valentine’s Day killer/bootlegger Spats Columbo in the 1958 comedy Some Like It Hot, I found it interesting to see him in a good guy role in the 1952 film noir Loan Shark. He portrays a just-released ex-convict Joe Gargen who simply wants to live a quiet life and mind his own business.

Through his sister’s husband, he lands a job at a tire plant.

Unfortunately, he finds out there’s a gang of loan sharkers preying on workers there and at other plants. And after his brother-in-law is killed because he tries to rally workers to fight back, Joe decides to go undercover to find the individuals behind the operation.

The script was written by Martin Rackin, who also did a superb one for 1950s The Enforcer with Humphrey Bogart. And with a very good support cast, including Dorothy Hart, Paul Stewart and John Hoyt, the movie is highly entertaining.

Black List

I am watching the 10th and very unfortunately last season of NBC’s Black List starring James Spader as Raymond Reddington, a master criminal who knows everything there is to know about every other criminal and becomes a secret informant for a secret branch of the FBI.

In its 10 seasons, Spader constantly steals the show with his wit and insights.

Elevator Music

Lee deForest

A 1995 book entitled Elevator Music, by Joseph Lanza, is the first to provide a history of easy listening. Its practitioners in the U.S. include the orchestras of Lawrence Welk and Mantovani, the synthesizer musician Yanni, pianist Richard Clayder­man and Celtic New Age singer Enya, etc. With all due respect to individual talent, this brand of music making from them relaxes people, provides background noise and even works as a sleeping pill.

According to the author, easy listening came in with early radio and one of its inventors Lee De Forest believed “in the physical existence of a universal medium termed either, …’those silent etheric voices, which seem often less of nature than of the spirit realm.’…..Merging the language of science and fantasy, we can infer that from ether came ethereal music” – thus a jump from ethereal to elevator music that lifts the passive listener to the shining stars of the solar system and its dreamland. Enough said!

Hunter Thompson

Hunter Thompson

The late writer Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) created the term Gonzo Journalism which is a form of journalism having little to do with objectivity and more to do with the subjective participation of the reporter and whatever the point of view is being conveyed by him.

In his crazily witty 1988 book A Genera­tion of Swine, Thompson not only mentions the well-known fact of Benjamin Franklin flying his kite during a thunderstorm and getting a shock but also blubbering like a baby every time a thunderstorm occurred after that experience, which just might be a fabrication of Thompson’s imagination.

Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff

I wrote some months ago about composer Sergei Rachmaninoff’s desert island melodic masterpiece, the Second Symphony, and how it has generated several distinguished recordings during the last 80 years, including four different ones by his close friend Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

A recording from September 19 and 20, 1994, and released by the BBC Music Magazine featured the late Edward Downes (1924-2009) conducting the BBC Philharmonic in a performance that glows with a consummate combination of power, beauty, rhythmic pulse and a shining array of exquisite details . And copies are available from Internet vendors such as Ebay and Amazon.

During the last two years of his life, Downes had been going both blind and deaf, and suffering from other health problems after hip replacement, totally dependent on his younger wife Joan’s caregiving.

Meanwhile she had come down with pancreatic cancer and had just a few months to live. Both believing that life under these conditions was no longer viable, they jointly terminated their lives at an assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, with their son and daughter in attendance, on July 10, 2009. Downes was 85, Joan 74.

An example of classy easy listening done with good taste is a budget-priced LP on the t$2 RCA Camden label which was a subsidiary of the parent label RCA Victor. Its producer Ethel Gabriel organized a group of skilled singers known as the Living Voices who recorded numerous albums with different arrangers such as Nashville’s Chet Atkins; the superb Anita Kerr who passed away last year at 95 and whose records with her singers are consistently lovely; and several others.

A 1964 LP, Living Voices Sing Moonglow and Other Great Standards, has ten favorites from the ‘30s and ‘40s Great American Songbook – the title song, Solitude, I Get a Kick Out of You, My Funny Valentine, These Foolish Things, etc.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge

by Peter Cates

Calvin Coolidge

The 30th President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) had the kind of wife in the former First Lady Grace Goodhue Coolidge (1879-1957) who was a rarity when it came to truly being on the same page as her husband. She catered to just about every whim in him possible, although Cal had such a calm balanced unflappable personality and may not have given into whims very often.
The seven pages devoted to Mrs. Coolidge in Christine Sadler’s book America’s First Ladies abound in choice anecdotes and quotes, especially in its first three paragraphs:

Grace Goodhue Coolidge

“After Grace Coolidge became First Lady in the middle of a hot August night in the Plymouth, Vermont, farmhouse of her father-in-law, she went back to bed and slept easily. Not many women could have accomplished this feat, but then nobody else was married to Calvin Coolidge; the little red-headed president who always looked as if he smelled something burning and who never spoke to anybody if he could avoid the experience.

“If Grace had not been an unusual woman she never would have married Coolidge in the first place, and her mother, for one, could never see why she did. But Grace and her merry father, Captain Andrew I. Goodhue, a steamboat inspector for vessels plying Lake Champlain, always understood the Coolidge appeal. She was the completely happy wife, and that was the secret of her phenomenal success as First Lady.

“Grace had found an extra kerosene lamp for the dramatic swearing-in rites so that anxious reporters, who rushed to Ply­mouth after news of the unexpected death of President Harding, could see what they were writing. She watched with interest while a telephone line was strung up by emergency crews. But at around two-thirty in the morning, after the hullabaloo connected with becoming president was over, it would never have occurred to her not to accompany her husband back to bed. Nor would he have permitted such deviation from the norm. And naturally she would go back to sleep if he ordered her to do so. “

So begins, on August 3, 1923, the almost six years Coolidge would serve in the White House and ones bombarded with challenges:

The scandals of Harding’s cabinet.

The rise of the Ku Klux Klan from very low numbers to 4 million members by 1924 and the increase in lynchings.

The rise of bootlegging gangsters, and not just in Chicago, due to the “Noble Experiment of Prohibition and the naïve belief of its supporters in the perfectibility of human beings.”

The sometimes violent reactions of big business, government and society itself to any form of non-conformity, not just with progressives, socialists, free-thinkers and any other individuals whose world views deviate from their norms.

The wild partying and increasingly “loose” morals to be found at social gatherings of what’s been termed the “Jazz Age.”

The frantic speculations on Wall Street.

And finally, in a strange cause and effect manner, a terrible disillusionment with the traditional values and hopes that had sustained the country since the American Revolution, especially among veterans returning from the bloodshed of World War I.

Coolidge responded much of the time to these challenges with a hands off leadership style, admittedly disastrous in certain respects, but he did keep a close eye on events.

He also may have had a problem with narcolepsy and reportedly slept 12 hours a night while still needing a four-hour nap; these figures might be slightly exaggerated, even as H.L. Mencken did not help with the real truth about Coolidge’s sleepiness by such comments as the following – “Coolidge’s chief feat was to sleep more than any other president…The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves.”

Mencken did concede some good points – “His failings are forgotten: the country remembers only…that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaph for a statesman.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Sarah Orne Jewett & others

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett

South Berwick native Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) advised younger writers to “Write about what you know!”

Aroostook County native Helen Hamlin (1917-2004) once commented on the fascination of one’s childhood for so many:

“It is only natural that a person’s childhood environment should always remain the most glamorous and most interesting phase of one’s life, and I am no exception. Growing up in a town like Fort Kent, with a generous dose of Grandpa’s rich woods lore of old Aroostook, and in a mixed French and English household, has done more than just build a collection of reminiscences. It has left a distinct love and admiration for a land, and no other place can ever seem as attractive.”

Have Gun Will Travel

Richard Boone

Many episodes of Richard Boone’s TV series Have Gun Will Travel, which ran for six seasons from 1957 to 1963, can be accessed via YouTube; a season 6 episode, The Fifth Bullet, has Boone’s character, a well-read gunfighter named Paladin giving a man just released from prison some safe passage back home to his wife and their young son (For reasons not totally clear, five outlaws have contracts to kill him.).

Guest star Ben Johnson conveyed a most vivid presence as the man eager to be reunited with his wife and son. He did memorable acting in the movies Mighty Joe Young with Terry Moore, Shane with Alan Ladd and Van Heflin, and the Last Picture Show with Cybill Shepherd and Ellen Burstyn.

Martha Scott

Martha Scott

One very heartfelt movie on a wonderful teacher is the 1941 Cheers for Miss Bishop, starring Martha Scott (1912-2003), with a superlative supporting cast that included Marsha Hunt (who passed away last year at the age of 104.), William Gargan, Sidney Blackmer, Edmund Gwenn, John Hamilton (perhaps best known as the Daily Planet editor Perry White on the 1950s Adventures of Superman), Pierre Watkin (who portrayed Perry White for the Superman late ‘40s movie serials starring Kirk Allyn) and Mary Anderson.

Gerry Mulligan

Gerry Mulligan

In 1955, baritone saxist Gerry Mulligan assembled a sextet that included Zoot Sims on tenor sax, drummer Dave Bailey, trumpeter Jon Eard­ley, trombonist Bob Brook­meyer and bassist Peck Morrison on the Mercury Emarcy jazz LP simply titled Presenting the Gerry Mulligan Sextet.

According to the liner notes, Mulligan’s greatest fear was “musical stagnation and boredom.” Thus, after completing a very successful concert tour with his acclaimed quartet, he disbanded it and chilled out for six months to figure out what was next.

This LP of eight selections has some very eloquent musicianship ; the six participants were reported as being very pleased with the results.

Of the then-very young musicians, only Dave Bailey is still living at the very young age of 97.

In 1968, Gerry Mulligan collaborated with pianist Dave Brubeck in the Columbia LP, Brubeck-Mulligan Compadres, also featuring eight selections and recorded live in Mexico.

Before the comments on the album, a personal memory – during the summer of 1965, I attended New England Music Camp, in Sidney, along the fabulous Messalonskee Lake and had as a fellow camper Chris Brubeck.

One afternoon, he comes into the bunkhouse with a sly grin and states, “Peter, my father’s here.”

I replied, “Bulls..t he is, Brubeck!”

Within less than half a second walks the great man. And a truly down to earth gentleman.

The above album came as a result of Brubeck assembling another quartet (the famous one from the 1950s into early ‘60s had been disbanded in 1967) for a concert tour of four cities in Mexico arranged by promoter George Wein. The new quartet had Brubeck, Mulligan, Alan Dawson on drums and bass player Jack Six.

One of the concerts was held in a bullring.

All in all, a good record.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli

Arturo Michelangeli

Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelan­geli (1920-1995), much like fellow virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, not only had a superhuman technique with the keyboard but could also be quite eccentric and reclusive and was prone to depression.

Unlike Horowitz, Michelangeli could play the same composition twice over a period of months and both performances would have the same exact timing.

After winning first prize at a competition in Geneva, Switzerland, Benito Mussolini gave the pianist a full time Professorship at a Conservatory in Bologna.

Michelangeli made very few studio recordings but his live concerts have been released on numerous LPs and CDs. One such LP has him performing the Beethoven 12th Piano Sonata, better known as the Funeral March Sonata, and Schubert’s A minor Sonata, one of 22 magnificent ones that poured out of this composer along with over 600 songs, nine symphonies, numerous chamber music works and other pieces before he died at the young age of 31. The pianist performed both Sonatas with a cutting edge combination of dexterity and vibrant beauty.

Michelangeli had all 22 Sonatas of Schubert committed to memory.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Warren G. Harding

The 29th former President Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923) was born November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio, the son and oldest of 8 children of George Tryon Harding (1843-1928) and his wife, the former Phoebe Dickerson (1843-1910).

The father was basically a jack of all trades, including farmer, teacher, businessman, veterinarian and doctor who did receive a medical degree. He was also rather lazy and opportunistic but did provide help to his son from time to time while the two had a very close relationship.

A key experience in Harding’s childhood – when he was six years old, his father became part owner of a small town newspaper and little Warren worked as an errand boy for the printer and became quite fascinated with the sights, sounds and smells of the inner workings of a newspaper.

During later years, Harding would share fond memories of growing up on the farm and of rural life but he detested doing chores, much preferring socializing with his friends in town. And his ability to win friends and influence people manifested itself early.

Meanwhile Harding’s mother thought her son would make a good preacher, even though his grades were average, and got him admitted to Ohio Central College . He took to college life socially, did intermittent debating, played althorn in the school band and edited the yearbook but had no interest in preaching; he even admitted he didn’t know what he wanted to take up as an occupation.

After graduating from college in 1882 at the age of 17, Harding taught briefly, studied law and sold insurance ; nothing clicked there.

Meanwhile the family had moved from Blooming Grove to Marion where Dr. Harding was cultivating greater Ohioan opportunities for his medical practice. The son moved in with them, loved the social life of Marion as well and became a reputable manager of finances for the local baseball team and marching band.

Harding at age 18.

At 18 in 1884, Harding and two friends bought a struggling newspaper in Marion, the Star, for $300 and the mortgage on it. It floundered for a few years but managed to survive and Harding bought out the two friends.

The Star was at first politically neutral but eventually became a mouthpiece for Republican ideals, especially since the businessmen around Marion who bought ads were card carrying Republicans.

In 1891, Harding, at 26, married 31-year-old Florence Kling De Wolfe, a rich widow with a young son, and she helped him on the business end of the newspaper while he wrote the editorials and won even more friends and influence in town , particularly in calling Marion the finest small city in the state to raise a family.

In 1898, Harding won a seat in the Ohio State Senate and quickly became the most popular politician at the State House. Like all good politicians, he remembered everyone’s name, was a great poker player and could charm squabbling members of the Ohio Republican party into reconciliation with each other.

Due to a certain laziness, Harding was lacking in political expertise but soon made the acquaintance of Harry M. Daugherty, a shrewd lobbyist and political fixer who never won an election himself but could guide others to victory.

When Daugherty first saw Harding, he immediately sensed future presidential potential. Their immediately begun friendship got Harding elected as Lieutenant Governor in 1902.

But by 1904, the Ohio Republicans were engaged in unholy internal warfare and Harding refused to run again as he wished to distance himself from these divisions.

Another reason – the Democrats were dominating state politics, an occurrence usually as rare as hen’s teeth.

After losing campaigns for governor in 1910 and 1912 , Harding won election to Congress as Senator in 1914.

His Senate career in terms of achievement was not that good but he continued to exude phenomenal charm; Harding loved people and they loved him in return.

Warren G. Harding and vice-presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge won the White House by seven million votes over the Democrat ticket of fellow Ohioan James M. Cox, who had served two terms as governor, and his vice presidential running mate, former assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harding and Coolidge campaigned on an isolationist back to normalcy platform while Cox and Roosevelt were supporting progressivism, social reforms and entry into the League of Nations, a forerunner of the United Nations. The voters were tired of anything international after World War I and wanted the normalcy and enjoyment of private life.

Volumes have been written about the scandals and corruption of Harding’s two-year presidency and his sudden death in a San Francisco hotel on August 2, 1923, at the age of 57, so, for reasons of space, I move on to a note of sympathy that his widow wrote to President and Mrs. Coolidge when their son Calvin Jr. died from blood poisoning at the age of 15, not long before she died at 64 from a kidney ailment: “No matter how many loving hands may be stretched out to help us, some paths we tread alone.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Maine Novelist Ruth Moore

Ruth Moore

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Maine Novelist Ruth Moore

Maine novelist Ruth Moore (1903-1989) was born on Gott’s Island, spent several years as an adult out of state, and published the very successful novel Spoonhandle in 1946, which was adapted for the 1948 movie Deep Waters; the money enabled her to move back to Maine for the rest of her life.

During the 1930s, Moore was active in the NAACP , having begun working as a researcher. In 1930, she traveled to the Deep South where her investigation led to the release of two African-American men who had been falsely accused of murder.

A very powerful opening in Moore’s 1943 novel The Weir which takes place on one of the outlying islands along the Maine coast resonates on a universal level with any of us who sat through long years of school in quiet desperation:

“Sayl Comey went to school every day, but it seemed to him that things got worse instead of better. He couldn’t get used to the routine, and he couldn’t see any sense in what went on. In class he presented a face of bleak and absolute boredom.”

A writer well worth checking out.

The Adventures of Superman

George Reeves

My favorite childhood TV show was The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves (1914-1959). One particular episode started the 1953 season, 5 Minutes to Doom, which guest starred Dabbs Greer (1917-2007) as an innocent man wrongly sentenced to the electric chair. The depiction of the chair itself has stayed in my memory for decades, it was so well filmed.

Arvo Volmer

Arvo Volmer

Now 60, the quite gifted Estonian conductor Arvo Volmer recorded the 7 Symphonies, Finlandia, Valse Triste and Violin Concerto (with soloist Adele Anthony), of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius between 2007 and 2010 with the Adelaide Symphony of Australia for the ABC Classics label on 4 CDs; while these performances don’t have the craggy power of other conductors (Sibelius used the entire string/woodwind/brass/percussion apparatus of the modern orchestra to evoke the rocky ocean landscape, fields, woodlands and hills that are so similar to our own Maine), they do have a lot of poetry and are quite effective on their own terms.

For anyone new to classical music, I recommend sampling any of the many YouTubes of Sibelius’s music, especially the stirring patriotic Finlandia, the rhythmically gripping Violin Concerto, the powerful 1st and 2nd Symphonies with their rich outpourings of gorgeous, brilliantly sustained melody and the haunting mystery of Valse Triste and the otherworldly Swan of Tuonela.

Country Music Anthologies

During the early 1980s, Time Life Records marketed a series of LP anthologies devoted to country music artists and sold them by mail and through supermarkets.

They included Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, George Jones (of course), Johnny Cash, Elvis, Barbara Mandrell, Tammy Wynette, etc.

I recently listened to the one devoted to Waylon Jennings (1937-2002) which contains nine selections drawn from his albums for RCA Victor and include Brown Eyed Handsome Man, MacArthur Park, Ladies Love Outlaws and Love of the Common People.

The man knew how to communicate a song in an impressive manner.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Thomas Woodrow Wilson

The 28th president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), had been a professor of history and president of Princeton University before being lured into New Jersey Democratic party politics, and he soon found out that he enjoyed politics a lot . In the three-way race of 1912, Taft and Roosevelt split the vote among Republicans, thus assuring Wilson the White House.

A little more background: Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Virginia but spent most of his childhood in Georgia where his father had taken another church position and moved the family.

He got degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins and studied enough law at the University of Virginia Law School and through home study to get admitted to the bar in Georgia where he practiced for a short period of time.

But he was drawn back to academic life and taught at both Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, and Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, after which he was offered a professorship at Princeton in 1890 .

Wilson wrote at least nine books and numerous articles; I highly recommend his five volume The History of the American People, published between 1901-1902, which I own and read most of, finding his narrative gifts superb.

After teaching there for 12 years, Woodrow Wilson was appointed president of Princeton, in 1902, and brought about a reorganization of the curriculum with an emphasis on campus life being one of serious study and not socializing. But he absolutely would not allow any African-Americans admission.

In 1910 Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey and served for two years before he was elected president of the United States.

Wilson had a world view mixture of Deep South Confederacy racism as a believer in segregation, progressivism when it came to such issues as workman’s compensation, regulation of public utilities and cronyism in government and, later in his presidency, internationalism in his pro-active participation in the Paris peace talks and his fight to establish the League of Nations. There is a vast amount of material on the pros and cons of his eight years in the White House, in particular his last two years after suffering a series of strokes.

Wilson was married first to Ellen Axson (1860-1914) who was studying art in New York City but gave it up to be a wonderful helpmate to her husband and gave birth to three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor.

Jessie married a Harvard professor Francis Sayre, Eleanor her father’s Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, while Margaret remained single indulging her love of culture and beauty (a photograph shows her listening to records which resonated with yours truly on a very personal level.).

In 1915, Wilson met a widow Edith Bolling Galt (1872-1961), and initiated an ardent courtship; by December, they were married.

After Wilson’s incapacitating strokes, the country was pretty much being secretly run by the First Lady, Wilson’s physician Dr. Cary Grayson and his private secretary Joe Tumulty while Vice-President Thomas Marshall was kept out of the loop.

After leaving the White House in 1921, the couple moved to a house on S Street which has since become a tourist attraction.

On Veterans Day in 1923, the former president summoned enough strength to give a brief speech to people gathered in front of his house in which he stated:

“I have seen fools resist Providence before and I have seen their destruction, and it will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt; that we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.”

On February 3, 1924, Woodrow Wilson died at the age of 67; his successor Warren G. Harding had passed away the previous August and been succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, who was among the tiny group of mourners at Wilson’s funeral held at the S Street residence.