Happy birthday, Bach: A broadcaster’s finest war story

Presented to the Club by Brad Spear on May 11, 2009

The Roman poet Horace once wrote that poetry should be dulce et utile…”sweet and useful.” My first Monday Evening Club paper…the one dealing with my stroke just over three years ago…was meant to be useful. Tonight’s paper will be sweet…mit Schlag…”with whipped cream”…as the Austrians are inclined to say.

No tough issues tonight, no wrestling with the future of the economy or the give- and-take of politics. Tonight is meant to be an entertainment…a diversion…a divertissement…nothing more.

Gentlemen, for your consideration: Happy Birthday, Bach: A broadcaster’s finest "war story.”

Ah, yes, “war story.” Where did that term ever come from? My mostly male sixth-grade classmates and I were able to avoid the rigors of long division by asking Sergeant Jack Bannon (that’s “Mr. Bannon” to you, young man) to tell us war stories about having spent time in a Nazi POW camp after D-Day.

Nope, this is a different kind of war story…though it’s tangentially involved in the Cold War. And like any profession’s war stories, the best ones are clear illustrations of good fortune….of having been in the right place at the right time, and this tale is no exception.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21st 1685 in Eisenach, Germany…a time when Germany was a loosely affiliated collection of electorates or principalities, a vestige of the Holy Roman Empire. Bach was born approximately 50 years after the founding of Harvard College, to put it into an American context.

He died on July 28th 1750, and when he passed away, he was considered by his peers to be a pretty good keyboard player…a passable ensemble player…and, certainly, a prolific father. After all, he squired no fewer than 20 children…though only 10 lived to adulthood.

But a composer? No. His friend and competitor Georg Philippe Telemann, the godfather of his son Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach…now there was a composer. But Johann Sebastian Bach? No. The poor guy lost out on most of the court composer positions that he applied for.

Ironic, isn’t it? The fella who today is considered to be one of the pillars of classical music…along with the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms…was considered to be a so-so composer in his own day. Ask the average person if he recognizes the name of Telemann, the greatest composer of Bach’s day…and the response will be “Tele-who?”

It wasn’t until over 75 years after Bach passed away that a group of scholars and enthusiasts approached a 20-year-old name Felix Mendelssohn, and encouraged him to conduct an edited version of Bach’s oratorio, the St. Matthew Passion, that the world finally began to appreciate the huge body of work that Bach had compiled in his 65-year lifetime.

An aside: 2009 is the bicentennial of the birth of Felix Mendelssohn, the scion of a wealthy Jewish German banking family, whose parents, for whatever reason, had elected to convert to Christianity before his birth. He was raised a Lutheran. Before he was ten, his grandmother, for a Christmas present, had given him one of three original manuscript copies of the score to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Today, a handwritten score from almost 100 years ago would be a priceless treasure destined for a rare manuscripts department of a university library. But in 1818, it was simply a Christmas present.

Mendelssohn noodled with the music for some ten years, finally creating a much condensed version of the work. And by the time he was 20, he’d already spent seven years studying with the most famous composition professor in Germany… he’d toured Europe, spending weeks and sometimes months in each of the Continent’s cultural capitals….and he had been appointed the music director of the Berlin Singspiel, a chorus and orchestra of some renown.

For some months, while rehearsing other works for performance, Mendelssohn had put the chorus and orchestra through its paces with his own condensed version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion…purely as an academic exercise. Word of the rehearsals reached a group of Bach enthusiasts, who, in turn, encouraged Mendelssohn to present his edition of the work to the public.

Mendelssohn, a modest man of profound intellect, and someone, who at the age of 20 had a stellar reputation throughout Europe, obliged. On March 11th 1829, he presented the work in Berlin…and it was no less than a huge hit. Who was this fellow Bach?

The rest, as they say, is history.

Fast forward now to Boston, Massachusetts in the year 1983…some 298 years after the birth of Bach.

In late 1980, I’d been hired as the new radio manager for the WGBH Educational Foundation…the operator of Channel 2 in Boston…and 89.7 FM, WGBH Radio in Boston. I was 30 at the time…which was hardly unusual. My predecessor had been 34 when he’d left…and his predecessor had been 32 when he’d started as the WGBH Radio manager.

It was a plum assignment…but it was an institution that was in serious financial trouble. In the previous year, my predecessor had run up a $750,000 deficit on a $1.25 million dollar budget…and by the time I’d arrived…some five months into the organization’s fiscal year…we were headed toward additional deficits.

In my first months there I slashed, burned, and set the place a-right. Whatever my predecessor had put into place had to be dismantled…as the core business, serving as a public radio station in service to Boston and environs, had to be re-invigorated.

By the time 1983 rolled around, the team I’d installed had reinvigorated the core business admirably. Costs were down; revenues were up; and the fundamentals of running a radio station, which had been neglected for some years, were being respected.

Over the years WGBH through its television operations had developed a reputation for innovation. But the radio station had dabbled with new technology and new programming approaches, too…particularly with the creation of a program in the early 1970s called Morning Pro Musica…with a curious character as its host by the name of Robert J. Lurtsema. You may remember him…as his daily, seven day-a-week program was carried locally by stations throughout New England…including WAMC.

As the manager of WGBH, I’d wander around the station from time to time…what is it called? “management by wandering around?” My office was on the second floor, and the radio broadcast facilities and the staff offices were on the first.

In late 1983 (or maybe early 1984) I wandered through the air studio while Lurtsema was presenting his daily program. Much to my surprise, in a chair next to Robert J, sat a bearded fellow of approximately the same age. Lurtsema piped up in his basso best:

“Brad, this is Kurt Masur. He’s got a program idea that might be of interest to you.”

Kurt Masur? The East German conductor and music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra? Yes, I’d heard of him…but had never met him before. The previous spring I’d attended a meeting of the “serious music experts” committee of the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva and had heard a couple of Scandinavian broadcasters joke about how Masur was more of a politician than a musician.

Regardless, Masur had come to Boston several times in recent years as a guest conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He’d had a personal reason for wanting to do so…his Japanese wife had a sister who lived in Carlisle, Massachusetts…a western suburb of Boston adjacent to Concord.

“Yes,” said Masur in a thick German accent,” in March of 1985 we will be presenting a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in celebration of the composer’s 300th birthday.”

During a brief discussion, he offered to arrange with East German Radio…Rundfunk der DDR…a live relay to America. Masur certainly had the political clout to make it happen…after all, the Scandinavians had said so. He advised me to contact a man by the name of Horst Fliegel….who was the head of classical music programming for East German Radio.

Keep in mind that these were the days before e-mail…before faxes…and it was during the day when countries of the Eastern Bloc of Europe were said to be

“behind the Iron Curtain.” I’d spent the previous autumn visiting the capitals of two Eastern Bloc countries…Czechoslovakia and Hungary…hoping to develop program exchange relationships with their state broadcasters. In essence, I was trying to develop an import-export business at WGBH…and both my counterparts at Radio Praha (Prague) and Magyar Radio (Budapest) were eager to participate. On my return to the West, I’d passed through East Berlin, but I’d elected not to approach Rundfunk der DDR. Too close to the Soviets, I’d thought.

To contact Herr Horst Fliegel, I had to use a Telex…a text machine in Boston, connected to another text machine at a telephone number in East Berlin. I crafted a message in simple, straight-forward English and shipped it off.

Several days later, I received a reply in German which basically said, “Sounds interesting. Come to Berlin and we can discuss it.”

Come to East Berlin? Hmm. That would take some work. First I’d need a visa…and then I’d need a plan.

In those days I used to travel to Washington, DC with some regularity. I had business with National Public Radio in DC, and flew down every other month or so. I used my next trip to visit the East German embassy in search of a business visa.

With my telexed invitation in hand, I took a taxi to the East German embassy well into the northwest section of DC. It was a large white structure in the midst of a large wooded lot. After being dropped off by the cab, I entered the front door and followed the signs to the reception room. In a stark white room, half of which was filled with hard plastic chairs, an attendant, behind three-inch-thick bullet-proof Plexiglas, sat behind a counter. I spoke through an opening in the Plexiglas.

“I’m here to apply for a business visa to see Horst Fliegel at Rundfunk der DDR.” I tucked Fliegel’s telexed message through the hole in the Plexiglas.

The attendant reviewed the telex, and told me to have a seat.

An hour later, I had a business visa in hand. I was on my way to East Berlin.

Fast forward three months. I was in West Berlin in a hotel room along the Kurfuertstendamm, West Berlin’s Fifth Avenue. In those days, West Berlin, buried deep within East Germany, was a showcase of materialism…all things glittery and bright…a capitalist irritant beneath the communist skin of East Germany. The wall was over 20 years old…and it was a great cultural callus…at a point where two cultures…the materialism of the capitalist West and the deprivation of the communist East…had rubbed each other incessantly.

With my business visa in hand, I took a cab from the hotel to a famous crossing in the wall, “Checkpoint Charlie.” Leaving what was the American Zone in West Berlin was simple; entering East Berlin was somewhat more complicated. I had to produce papers and have my briefcase searched. But after several inspections by members of the Vopos, the People’s Police, I was waved in.

It was a gray day, and the streetscape before me was grim. The buildings within 100 feet of the east side of the wall had been torn down, and the grounds where they’d stood were covered in rubble. I walked two blocks through what looked like utter devastation to the eastern side’s main boulevard, Unten den Linden…which before World War II had been a famous thoroughfare. I was in search of a cab.

I ended up walking to a nearby hotel and asked the concierge in my halting German for a taxi. The man behind the counter waved me toward a taxi stand outside and said to wait. I waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, a wheezy, beat-up old Wartburg…a decrepit example of East Germany’s auto industry…came along with the roof light atop lit. I climbed in an asked for a ride to Rundfunk der DDR, “Nalepastrasse 18-24, bitte.”

Once there, I walked along polished corridors, up several flights of stairs, into a conference room, before a long table. Five executives were seated on one side, five on another, and at the far end was a smiling, handsome senior executive, who, in halting English, asked me to be seated opposite him at the other end of the table. He introduced himself as “Horst Fliegel.”

After introductions, with the aid of a staff translator, a plan was hatched.

It short, it would utilize television circuitry, of all things, to ship a signal from Leipzig…”behind the Iron Curtain”…back to Boston, where it would be sent via domestic satellite to as many public radio stations nationwide as cared to carry it live.

Why television circuitry? Wasn’t this to be a radio broadcast?

That’s a bit a story unto itself. By the time the early 1980s had rolled around, in the USA, it was almost impossible to get FM-quality audio signals from point to point. In Europe, audio circuits were maintained proudly by national post office systems. But here in the United States, the task had fallen to Ma Bell, an entity that saw more prospective revenue in maintaining long-line video circuits than in the relatively paltry demand for high-fidelity audio connections. America’s three commercial television networks needed to send signals all around the country at all hours of the day. There was no equivalent demand for radio.

To compensate, National Public Radio in the late 1970s designed and constructed a domestic satellite system with eight regional uplinks (one of which was located at WGBH in Boston) and a rapidly growing system of downlinks (every NPR member station did then, and to this day still does, have one). As of 1978, when NPR abandoned its 5 kHz bandwidth AM-quality audio long-lines and switched to 15 kHz FM-quality satellite distribution, a local public radio station airing All Things Considered no longer sounded like the program was being sent from Washington by way of a string and tin-can. Instead, the program’s co-hosts sounded like they were in the studios of the local station.

But when it came to country-to-country connections, radio was still at a loss. Yes, with special regulatory permission, an NPR satellite signal could be received and re-broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s own domestic satellite distribution system, as its primary downlink in Toronto was within the NPR satellite system’s “footprint.”

But sending signals from Europe to America or from America to Japan…or vice versa….required the construction of temporary…and very expensive…high-fidelity circuits by both AT&T and Intelsat, the international agency responsible for operating transatlantic and transpacific satellites since the days of Telstar.

The television situation, however, was quite different. Thanks to regular use, there were television circuits that circled the globe. The state broadcasters of Canada, the UK, Japan, and Europe, and the commercial broadcast networks in the United States used them often enough to ensure that these circuits were always available and that they were well maintained both by AT&T and Intelsat.

Enter the Japanese technology giant Sony.

In the early 1980s Sony was a key player in the field of digital audio. Even though digital audio had a brittle, less rounded sound than that of analog audio, it had the advantage of the absence of the background hiss that was a singular shortcoming of analog audio. A digital audio “encoder” created a computerized code which could be laid onto an audiotape and which later could be read by a digital audio “decoder.” What went onto the tape was what was read by the decoder…nothing more and nothing less. An analog recording, on the other hand, contained background hiss, which grew more prominent as the tape was copied, and then copied again, or in the case of long-range transmission, at each leg of a relay as it was received and re-amplified for re-transmission.

Because Sony was hoping to sell thousands of its new $1,500 digital audio encode/decode unit, given the moniker of “the PCM F-1,” Sony rather wisely chose to avoid manufacturing a considerably more expensive digital recording device. Instead, they designed their first digital unit to produce a video bandwidth signal, which, in turn, could be recorded onto video cassettes in then-ubiquitous video cassette recorders (VCRs). Ergo, with a Sony PCM F-1, any recording studio with a $250 VCR could begin making single track digital audio recordings.

Interestingly enough, because the output of the F-1 was a video bandwidth signal, you could actually see the digitally encoded signal by connecting it to a television screen. The resulting image was that of “square snow,” which would dance about the screen as the audio recording changed volume and pitch.

At WGBH, even though we had experimented with the F-1 for recording purposes, we also used it in a novel application to solve a problem that had bedeviled us for over ten years.

Since the early 1970s, WGBH had produced and broadcast the Friday evening, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon live performances from Tanglewood. We sent the full-fidelity stereo signal back to Boston by modulating the two 15 kHz subcarrier audio frequencies contained within the signal of a two-way, terrestrial, line-of-sight TV microwave system. It had been built in the early 1960s to ship television signals up and down the Eastern Seaboard. However, between Mt. Tom (which overlooks the Connecticut River) and Boston, one leg of the two-way microwave system traversed the Quabbin Reservoir.

During the summer months, water vapor would rise from the reservoir and would degrade the microwave signal. In WGBH-TV’s master control, the main channel television signal from the terrestrial system, which by the early 1980s simply served as a back-up link connecting WNET in New York City to WGBH in Boston, looked fine. But in reality, the vapors degraded the signal to such a degree that it would interfere with the subcarrier audio from Tanglewood.

On more than one occasion during my first summer at WGBH in 1981, soft passages during live performances from the Koussevitzky Music Shed would be overwhelmed and completely obliterated by a rising tide of hiss.

By 1982, the solution was obvious. Use the microwave system’s rarely used main channel television signal to carry the video bandwidth output of a Sony PCM
F-1. When decoded back in Boston, the signal would be as pristine as when it was encoded. No hiss. No degradation. Problem solved.

In the years between 1983 and the Bach broadcast in 1985, WGBH successfully used the Sony technology internationally to ship live transmissions to Boston from the Musikvereinshall in Vienna for the annual New Year’s Day broadcast by the Vienna Philharmonic and to provide live coverage of performances by the Boston Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras at the late-summer Salzburg Music Festival. We even collaborated with an American technological competitor to Sony, the late, lamented dbx Corporation, using its rival “delta” digital encoding system to produce broadcasting’s first single-point-to-multi-point digital broadcast, a live radio performance by L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande from Kresge Auditorium at MIT, sent via the PBS television satellite system to radio stations attached to WQED-TV, Pittsburgh, WXXI-TV, Rochester (NY), WETA-TV, Washington (DC), and KQED-TV, San Francisco.

Fast forward to March 21st 1985. To cover the cost of the video circuits from Leipzig to Boston…the princely sum of $15,000…I’d negotiated a cost-sharing arrangement with several parties. BBC Radio 3 in Britain put $5,000 in the kitty…they’d be able to receive the first leg of the international relay, as they were in the Intelsat “footprint” that covered both London and AT&T’s international downlink in West Virginia. American Public Radio in St. Paul, Minnesota (now known as “Public Radio International”) was willing to put another $5,000 in the pot…and make the broadcast the crown jewel of a day’s worth of programming dedicated to Bach and distributed nationwide. Lastly, I approached the head of classical programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Oops: roadblock.

CBC would be interested in carrying the broadcast on their coast-to-coast classical network, but they had no money to dedicate to the connection costs.

I went back to American Public Radio. “Hmmm,” they said. “We could come up with another $5,000, but only if the broadcast carried an underwriting credit for Northern Telecom, the Canadian communications equipment manufacturer…and only if CBC committed to carrying the underwriting credit, too.”

I swallowed hard and called CBC. They had never carried an American-style public radio underwriting credit before. They were totally non-commercial in those days, and as they were supported directly by tax revenues, they had rather rigorous prohibitions against commercial language. But, so long as they were able to carry the broadcast at no cost…they’d be willing to forego their restrictions and would broadcast the Northern Telecom underwriting credit.

Phew!

We had our connection costs covered…the only significant out-of-pocket cost the broadcast would require. Yes, we were to send our 24-year-old assistant operations director Anita McFadden to Leipzig with a Sony PCM F-1 encoder tucked beneath her arm…but we had a trade-out relationship with Lufthansa, and we could get her from Boston to Frankfurt and then on to Leipzig without a cash outlay.

On the day before the broadcast, McFadden was at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with our digital encoder; we had scheduled a test of the transmission circuits. The television signal…dancing square snow and all…would travel from Leipzig across the border to Intelsat’s European uplink at Raistang in West Germany. BBC Radio 3, as I mentioned earlier, would take down the Intelsat signal in London for their purposes, and AT&T would receive the signal in West Virginia. They would then place the signal on their video long-lines, first to a relay station in Pittsburgh, then to a station in New York City, and then to the main New England Telephone technical offices on Franklin Street in Boston. Finally, it would travel on a specially ordered local video circuit the final three miles from Franklin Street in downtown Boston to the WGBH radio studios at 125 Western Avenue in Allston. The video signal would then be plugged into the PCM F-1 decoder in one of the WGBH Radio studios, would be converted to analog audio, and then would be transmitted via WGBH’s satellite uplink over the NPR satellite system to the CBC in Toronto and the 180 public radio stations across America electing to carry the live broadcast.

Exactly twenty-four hours before the broadcast, the test commenced. In a matter of moments, we had a clear, crisp audio signal in Boston coming all the way from behind East Germany. The sound decoded at WGBH exactly matched the sound encoded in Leipzig. The technology was going to work quite handily.

Thursday, March 21st, 1985, Bach’s 300th birthday was the second day of spring that year, and it was the new season’s second balmy, glorious day. Somehow spring had arrived early in New England, but no one on the staff at WGBH had a moment to notice.

The Leipzig broadcast was to be the “crown jewel” of a day of live performances of music by Bach, which the station’s program director and promotion department had dubbed “Bach around the Clock.” Robert J. Lurtsema and his staff had left for New Haven, Connecticut the afternoon before. Morning pro musica from 7 am to noon that morning would originate from Batell Chapel at Yale University and would feature around a live performance by Yale’s organist Charles Krigbaum of 33 newly discovered Bach organ preludes.

The afternoon program, MusicAmerica, at least until the Leipzig broadcast at 2 pm, would consist of an in-studio performance by the Boston-based a capella ensemble, the Wintersauce Chorale. They were to sing a series of Bach-based pieces made famous in the early 1960s by the Swingle Singers. After NPR’s All Things Considered at 5, which most certainly would include a feature story on Bach’s 300th birthday, Boston listeners would hear a rare, live edition of Chamberworks at 6:30 pm, with Boston-based musicians playing an all-Bach program. And the day would end with Eric Jackson, the host of Eric in the Evening, presenting a survey from 8 pm to midnight on how elements of Bach’s approach to music still pop up today in contemporary jazz performances.

The day, as a whole, went swimmingly well, so much so, in fact, that it earned the station a special George Foster Peabody Award that year, recognizing WGBH Radio’s industry leadership in innovative programming and the use of new technology. Yes, all went swimmingly…except for the Leipzig broadcast.

I arrived in the radio control room that would be used to decode the digital signal and to control WGBH’s satellite uplink at 1:30 pm, a half hour before the broadcast. The room was being staffed by our youngest radio engineer, a cocky, red-headed 23-year-old named Ray Fallon. Ray was a member of the family who operated Boston’s major ambulance service, but he had decided somewhere along the line to forego going into the family business, and had decided instead to pursue a career in broadcast engineering. He’d only been with WGBH for a little more than a year, and in recent months he had been responsible for operating WGBH’s satellite unlink, the last stage of getting the live Leipzig broadcast to 180 public radio stations nationwide and to all of the Canadian FM stations in the CBC’s coast-to-coast network. Ray had a quick smile, an even quicker temper, but would prove to be one cool customer under pressure. Only problem: I found him in a cold sweat.

“We don’t have a signal,” said Ray.

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Twenty-nine minutes to airtime.

No signal? What on earth were we going to do? We called Anita McFadden at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Yes, they were sending a signal. Maybe we should check the Intelsat uplink at Raisting in West Germany.
Tick-tick-tick-tick. Twenty-three minutes to airtime.

Raisting said it had a signal. We elected to check with BBC Radio 3 in London.
Tick-tick-tick-tick. Eighteen minutes to airtime.

Yes, the BBC had a signal; it was coming directly off the transatlantic satellite. At least the Brits would be hearing the broadcast.

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Ten minutes to airtime.

AT&T’s international downlink in West Virginia had a signal.

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Seven minutes to airtime.

The relay station in Pittsburgh had a signal. Better try New York.

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Five minutes to airtime.

Yes, New York had a signal and they were sending it to Franklin Street in Boston.
Tick-tick-tick-tick. Three minutes to airtime.

Oh, yeah. We’ve got a signal here on Franklin Street. But we don’t have any way of getting it to you.

What about the local circuit we used yesterday in the test?

That was just a test? Sorry, pal, that circuit has been reallocated.

Ray and I just looked at each other.

At that very moment, in walked WGBH Radio’s senior engineer Bill Busiek, the WGBH employee of longest standing, who had served as the audio engineer for the live Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts since 1951.

“There’s a standing circuit between Franklin Street and TV master control,” said Bill. “Tell them to patch into it.”

Ray barked the order over the phone, and the New England Telephone technician complied.
Tick-tick-tick-tick. One minute to airtime…but now we had to get the signal from WGBH-TV’s Master Control to the radio control room…some 75 feet down WGBH’s first floor hallway.

Two TV engineers quickly raided the equipment locker, and came up with a 100 foot length of coaxial cable. They hurriedly patched it into TV Master Control and unspooled the cable down the hall to the radio studio.

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Ten seconds to airtime.

Ray Fallon plugged the end of the coaxial cable into the Sony PCM F-1 decoder. We had a signal.

The satellite uplink fired up, the decoder did its job, and the broadcast began. Ray Fallon, Bill Busiek, and I breathed our first deep breath in many, many minutes. We’d done it.

Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Chorus and Orchestra belted out Bach’s St. Matthew Passion for the next three hours. It was a magnificent tribute to a musician whose music had only begun to be appreciated seventy-five years after he’d died.

For the remainder of the broadcast, I sat in my office listening to the work as if I were hearing it for the very first time.

The performance was so moving that at its end, seven minutes before 5 pm EST, the audience rose as one to its feet and let out a shout. Then came a cascade of applause, a veritable Niagara that continued and continued and continued. It was clear our East German broadcast colleagues weren’t going to cut short the adulation of the audience. By 4:59 pm, we had had hastily ordered up another quarter hour of domestic satellite time. The 5:00 pm start time for All Things Considered had passed, and the audience was still applauding. Not until 5:05 pm EST did the applause lessen; only then did the Rundfunk der DDR announcer begin his multi-language program close. By 5:07 the broadcast had ended, and stations across America, after complying with FCC regulations by identifying themselves, joined All Things Considered “already in progress.”

By 5:10 pm my office phone rang. It was no less than one of my most powerful peers, the founder and president of Minnesota Public Radio, Bill Kling (who in those days also served as the president of American Public Radio). He proceeded to read me the proverbial riot act.

“Why on earth did you run over into the start of All Things Considered?” screamed Kling. “Couldn’t you have just cut off the broadcast and close it out from your studios?”

I slumped in my chair. I had no good answer.

About ten days later the April 8, 1985 edition of The New Yorker arrived at my house in the mail. As is my usual habit, I turned first to “The Talk of the Town.” A huge grin crossed my face. The opening item, titled “Notes and Comment” in those days, read:

“Last Thursday afternoon, I listened on my local public-radio to Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in a satellite-relay live digital broadcast from the Neue Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig, the city where Bach is buried…It was pretty moving. At the conclusion, good old J.S.B. received a ten-minute ovation: It went on and on and on and on. For some reason, I didn’t turn off the radio or change stations. I kept listening to the fuzzy, sustained clapping, which sounded a lot like static, and which mesmerized me the way the minimalist music of today is supposed to. It was quite gratifying to listen to this applause…I think Bach would have been (or maybe even was) pleased by the outpouring of love and appreciation that was heard around the world and across all borders that day.”

Happy birthday, Bach, I thought to myself. Happy birthday.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

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On ice: a business that has melted away

Presented to the Club by Albert E. Easton on May 3, 2004

I don’t know about you, but I like my scotch poured over a good sized pile of ice. I drink ice water at the table when it’s available, and I like cold beverages all year round. Red wine is about the only thing I drink at room temperature. I’m not sure why we like our beverages cold, but we do. It wasn’t too long ago, though, that cold beverages were much more difficult to obtain during warm weather in our climate, and not available at all in many parts of the world. The production of ice is now a simple matter with artificial refrigerating equipment, but was once much more complicated.

For most of mankind’s history, natural ice from lakes, ponds and glaciers furnished all the available ice at all times of the year. During the summers, in places where the weather was warm and the ice had melted, ice was often brought in from mountain areas where glaciers persisted throughout the year. The Medici in sixteenth century Florence are said to have enjoyed ice from the alps. It has been said that the ice in Ice Glen, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, used to last late into the summer, but I tend to discount this. I have visited Ice Glen on Memorial Day, and saw no sign of any natural ice. It may be that ice lasted there late into May some years, but probably not into the summer. If there were any natural sources of summer ice in the Berkshires, they were more likely to have been on Mount Greylock than in Stockbridge.

As the interest in having summer ice increased, ways of storing winter ice to prevent it from melting began to be explored. The first ice houses were usually built as much as 20 or 30 feet into the ground in as shady a spot as was available in the area where ice was to be saved. A drain at the bottom carried away the melt. Building ice houses into the ground was a result of faulty science. The original theoretical reason for burying ice derived from the belief that ice was a compound of two elements – water and earth, and surrounding the ice with earth was the best way to keep it cold. Practical observation also showed that a freshly dug hole is usually somewhat cooler at the bottom than the surface temperature. As we now know, however, air is a much poorer conductor than earth, so raising the floor of the ice house above ground level will actually preserve the ice longer. This was discovered in the nineteenth century, and the large commercial ice houses built in that time tended to be built on this better plan.

The first ice houses were intended only for the owner. Large estates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had an ice house as an outbuilding, with the ice harvested from a nearby pond. Even some small farms of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have such an outbuilding. As the taste for ice began to expand to a larger and larger middle class, ice began to be harvested commercially, and large ice houses were built both near ponds where the ice was harvested, and in large cities where the ice could be stored for delivery to customers.

Between New York and Albany, there were 135 ice houses on the Hudson River in the late 1800s, and even this was not enough to supply the needs of the New York City, which also relied on imports from as far away as Maine. The ice houses of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were quite different, of course from the small estate ice house of earlier years. They were huge wooden affairs, built not into the ground, but above it, to get the benefit a layer of insulating air between the earth and the floor with ice on it. The walls were often insulated with saw dust, which must have made these structures anything but fireproof. They were not built to last, and not the kind of structure that appeals to antiquarians, so it would be difficult to find any trace of one today. I remember on a small pond in Rhode Island that lasted into the 1950s, although it was not in use for its original purpose any time after 1945. A housing development now stands in the spot where it was.

I can even remember living in summer houses (this was in the 1940s) where delivery of ice was a necessity several times a week. Although the houses had electricity, they were rentals with ice boxes instead of refrigerators, and the ice man made his deliveries based on a card in the window, turned one way for 50 pounds, the other for 25. By the 1940s, ice boxes, which were large wooden cabinets with insulated sides, were considered very old fashioned, and even a little quaint, but they did a reasonable job of keeping food fresh, and for ice in your drink, you could chip off a few pieces with an ice pick. Ice picks, and ice tongs, for lifting the ice, were standard equipment in a house with an ice box. There was a difference of opinion over whether to wrap the ice in newspaper. This was said to make the ice last longer, but it left the food not quite as cold. In any case, we never bothered. The 50 pound block usually had a little left over when the next delivery was made, so it didn’t seem necessary. Melt from the ice drained into a small pan that had to be emptied periodically, and that was often my job.

Before any ice could be stored in ice houses or ice boxes, it had to be harvested. The ice harvest took place late in the winter, after ice had frozen to its maximum thickness, but before any substantial melt had begun. After a week or so of subzero temperatures, soundings would be taken to check the thickness of the ice. If it had frozen to a depth of eighteen inches or more, it was ready – strong enough to support the weight of dozens of men and horses, and thick enough to yield good-sized cubes of ice.

Local farm workers were usually joined by migrant workers to make up teams of ice harvesters. The horses were shod with special spiked shoes for traction. The men wore boots with cork soles and wrapped their lags in layers of cloth to protect them from the cold. The weather was very important. Warm weather could spell disaster as the ice melted, and snow delayed the harvest while it was cleared with a horse drawn scraper. Often they worked at night by torchlight to take advantage of favorable weather. Ice was valuable, and competing companies working on the same pond had to observe boundaries. Ownership was established by buying sections of shoreline, with every owner having a piece of pie to the middle of the pond.

Once a favorable section of ice had been determined, and the snow cleared to reveal the crystal surface of the ice, it could be marked out. This was done by men who drove teams of horses drawing iron cutters in parallel lines across the ice, and then again at right angles to the first cut, so that the whole area was divided up into a series of squares. The size of the cubes varied according to the ultimate market for the ice, but the standard “New York” cut was 22 inches square. I calculate that, depending on thickness, a block of ice that size would weigh around 150 to 200 pounds.

When the surface had been marked out, horse drawn plows with metal teeth sawed the channel between blocks deeper. This enabled men with long handled chisels to pry the blocks free. The giant ice cubes were then floated down the channel of free water to a mechanical conveyor that lifted them into the lakeside ice house. Loading was from the top, with blocks sliding down a chute from which they were hauled into regular stacks, and insulated with sawdust. In a good ice house, blocks stacked like that could last through several summers, re-freezing every winter.

Ice from American ponds was crystal clear, and considered clean enough to put directly into drinks, a custom that was novel to Europeans. Before the civil war, the mint juleps of New Orleans and other southern cities were made with ice shipped down from Boston. The abundance of natural ice that could be delivered daily also made possible another American treat – ice cream. In fact, ice cream has become so identified with America that Mussolini is said to have banned ice cream in Italy for that reason.

Americans cannot lay claim to the origination of ice cream, however. That honor seems to belong to the Chinese who enjoyed the treat as early as the seventh century AD. Eighteenth century Americans, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, are known to have enjoyed it. Freezing ice cream requires adding salt to chipped ice so that the temperature of the cream and sugar mixture gets cold enough to freeze the mixture of sugar, cream, and whatever flavor is added. As an asaide, the “Peoples Choice” ice cream store in Schodack offers ice cream without flavor added as one of their choices, but I’ve tried it and don’t recommend it.

As I mentioned, ice was a valuable commodity in the nineteenth century. Here are some quotes from the 1890 price card of the Knickerbocker Ice Company in Philadelphia: 5 pounds daily, 35 cents per week, 12 pounds daily 63 cents per week, 25 pounds daily $1.05 per week - “Pure imported ice delivered daily to all parts of the city. Ice served on Saturday afternoon for Sunday”. We needed about 25 pounds daily in our ice box in 1948, although we got it every other day in 50 pound blocks, so the normal supply for a family would have cost over a dollar a week in 1890 Philadelphia. This was a fair amount at that time, but probably justified by the amount of labor, transportation cost and capital investment needed to make the ice available.

With this much money to be made, you may be sure that there were Yankee entrepreneurs who developed the ice trade. Frederic Tudor of Boston was one of the first and in some ways the most successful. His enterprise began in 1805 when he visited the island of Martinique to arrange for ice sales there. It became necessary for him to purchase his own boat (at a cost of $4,000) to transport the ice, since other captains of the time who normally transported goods for hire considered the enterprise folly. Only 21 days were required to sail from Boston to Martinique, and he arrived in March 1806 and began selling ice for 16 cents a pound, directly from the ship. He was offered $4,000 for the entire cargo of 80 tons, but he had calculated that his cargo was worth $10,000. So he decided not to take the $4,000 offer, and instead to sell ice in small quantities in hopes of building up a trade. Since there were no ice boxes in Martinique, and most of the islanders had never seen ice before, they had little idea of what to do with it, and business was sluggish. His best trade was in making ice cream, and this he did with some success, but overall the loss from this first venture was about $2,000 – a substantial part of his original capital.

In 1807 he had somewhat better luck, selling a 180 ton shipment in Havana for about $6,000. But by the end of 1807, President Jefferson had placed an embargo on shipping from United States ports to help maintain U. S. neutrality in the European conflicts that eventually led to the war of 1812. This put Tudor out of the “frozen water trade” as it was called, until 1815, when he built a new ice house in Havana. This house was built upon the plan that eventually came to be adopted universally, with walls and floor insulated with sawdust and peat. He began offering free ice to bartenders on condition that they offer customers cold drinks, at no extra charge. His theory was: “A man who has drunk his drinks cold for one week can never be presented with them warm again.”

As years went on, he expended his sales to many ports in the southern states, including Savannah, Charlotte, and New Orleans. His business began to expend past the point where he could get a large enough supply at Whenham Lake, where he owned property, and he began to buy ice from other lakes and ponds in the Boston area. His crowning achievement came in 1833 when he loaded a ship called the Tuscany with 180 tons of ice for Calcutta, then the headquarters of the British East India Company.

The Tuscany departed Boston on May 4, and arrived in Calcutta over four months later on September 6. News of its impending arrival had reached Calcutta much earlier, and was eagerly anticipated by the sweltering Brits. Over 120 tons of the ice had survived the journey and found a ready market. It was unloaded from the ship as quickly as possible, and after paying all expenses, Tudor realized a profit of over $3,000 on this first shipment. After some discussion, the British voted to grant Tudor a monopoly, and to erect a substantial ice house for him. He sold ice there by placing a 100 pound block on display behind glass – replacing the block each morning with a fresh one to make up for whatever had melted the previous night.

Nineteenth century America, to a much greater extent than Europe, considered ice more necessity than a luxury. Ice wagons were a familiar sight in the summer, as was the ice man, carrying his cargo up stairs and into doorways with his ice tongs. Water was almost always drunk chilled, and just as Frederic had predicted, once people had tried chilled drinks, they were hooked. I quote briefly from a travelogue written by an English lady in 1840: “of all the luxuries in America, I most enjoyed ice. Its use was then rare and expensive in England. It is customary, when you pay a visit, for the attendant to present you immediately with a glass of iced water or iced lemonade.”

The earliest City Directory of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Athenaeum is for 1868, and I found just two ice dealers listed in that directory, both located in town, one on Depot Street, and one on McKay Street. Both were also dealers in coal and wood, which partly explains the fact that they were located near the railroad depot, where the supply of coal could be conveniently unloaded and stored. The combination of coal with ice was a natural, since both required frequent deliveries in a heavy cart, and they were seasonally complimentary. (Although I’m not sure how they cleaned up the coal cart for delivery of ice.)

While looking at ads for ice, I also kept an eye out for ice cream parlors, of which there were 3 in 1868. The number grew slowly to 6 in 1895 through 1910. I would like to have visited one of those turn-of-the-century parlors. They advertise all kinds of candy and confections as well as ace cream. The number suddenly exploded to 13 in 1920, probably a result of prohibition. Then it slowly began to shrink. Are there any ice cream parlors left? Or just restaurants that serve ice cream?

F. Guilds, one of the ice dealers who advertised in 1868, continued in business at least until 1890, when he advertises “Ice and Sawdust at wholesale”. But at the same address, 21 Depot Street, we also find W F Francis Coal, which advertises: “Established 1848 by G Guilds”. Is this a buy out? Or has a son-in-law taken over the business? Read and Burns, probably the successor to Root and Burns, who advertised in 1868, has moved slightly from McKay Street to 3 West Street, and they advertise: “Silver and Onota Lake Ice”. The advertisement for the same firm in 1895 only mentions Onota Lake ice, so probably even in the 1890’s Silver lake was a little too close to the sources of pollution for its ice to be appealing. Also in 1890 we have an advertisement for ice from Augustus Bruey, who lists his address as “West Street beyond Jason Street”, which I take to mean “further out West Street than people usually go. Probably this represents the first instance of ice being offered from an ice house actually on the lake from which it came. Later on we find ads from The Onota Lake Ice Company, located on Pecks Road. Also, in 1910 we find ads for the Pontoosuc Ice Company, 173 North Street, and “Pure Spring Water Ice” from the Moorewood Lake Ice Company, 24 North Street. So it appears that ice harvesting occurred on all four of Pittsfield’s Lakes at some time.

By 1930, we find The Berkshire Sanitary Ice Company on Curtis Street, The Gaylord Ice company on Pecks Road, George Miller on Circular Avenue, and the Southern New England Ice Company, Frank Smith Manager at the Pecks Road address formerly occupied by the Onota Lake Ice Company. All four are still listed in 1940, and the City Ice and Fuel Company also was added in 1940 – with three addresses – 208 New West street, 219 Elm and 519 Fenn. It is reasonable to suppose that at least the Berkshire Sanitary Ice Company was relying by this time, primarily on artificial ice, although in 1930 the Southern New England Ice Company proudly advertises: “Distributors of Natural Ice.”

The decline in the natural ice trade was caused more by concerns about pollution than by competition from artificial manufacturers. Growth in the cities caused the rivers and lakes from which ice was cut to be less and less clean, and there were health scares. By 1920, the authorities reported that the Hudson River was an open sewer, yet ice from it ended up in drinks served in New York hotels. The realization that diseases such as typhoid were not killed of in frozen water added to the urgency of finding safer forms of refrigeration. Almost all of the ice houses are gone now, many burned, since they were fire traps, others torn down to take better advantage of waterfront property or simply decayed. Every so often, a young diving enthusiast emerges from a lake or river with a strange implement – a plow or chisel or saw, with no real idea of how it came to be at the lake bottom.

Photo from americanartmuseum under Creative Commons License

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On the writing of lives

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd in February, 2006

When Izaak Walton, the seventeenth century writer best known for The Compleat Angler, set out to write a life of poet and divine John Donne, there was as yet no word in English for a biographer, and the very concept of a biography as we know it did not exist. There were “Lives” written going back as far as Plutarch and Suetonius, of course, but these were in no way distinguished from history. There were also “Lives” of the saints written for the edification of the faithful. It was works such as Walton’s “Lives” in the seventeenth century and Johnson’s and Boswell’s in the eighteenth that helped to create the literary genre we know today.

You would never know by the popularity of biographies today what recent phenomena they are. The Twentieth Century saw the blossoming of the genre, beginning with Aylmer Maude's Life of Tolstoy, first published in 1910. Since then the floodgates of biography have been opened and never closed. “Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote St. John The Evangelist, and this is particularly true of biographies today.

How popular are biographies? Last Sunday’s (this was written in 2006, but make the necessary changes) New York Times Book Review had reviews of new biographies of John Cassevetes, Phyllis Schafly, Ronald Reagan and Christopher Marlowe.

Half of the books on the current New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction are either memoirs or biographies, although there is more than a little doubt now whether James Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, has as much fiction in it as did his Million Little Pieces, which tops the paperback list.

Frey’s situation is a case in point of the popularity of the factual over the fictional. Unless you are one of those rare souls who actually reads books rather than hearing about them on TV, you probably are aware of the flap caused by the disclosure that Frey’s Million Little Pieces, which was published as a memoir, contains a considerable amount of what charitably could be called fiction.

Oprah Winfrey, a force to be reckoned with in the book world, had strongly recommended Million Little Pieces, sending it to the top of the lists, and, when the expose broke, she at first defended Frey. Oprah called in to a Larry King Live show where Frey was taking a beating, and told Larry and his TV audience she thought the criticisms were no big deal, and to stop picking on her guy.

After some days of reflection, and a blizzard of editorials about her, Oprah recanted, and invited both Frey and Nan Talese, his editor, onto her show. There she delivered to the unsuspecting objects of her wrath a rather severe admonition about the importance of truth in general and publishing in particular. Nan Talese made some half-hearted attempts to defend the lying by saying that memoirs involve the intersection of fact with imagination. I will return to the fascinating subject of where the line is between fact and fiction, but for now let us note that the negative publicity hasn’t seemed to hurt sales of either of Frey’s books. But the nugget of fact that I find most fascinating in this tale is the recent disclosure that Frey had originally submitted Million Little Pieces as fiction to 17 publishers, and had been rejected each time. When he reclassified it as a memoir, he had a ready publisher and public.

In other words, many of us love a tale we think is true, better than one that is simply well told. A purported true story may find an audience where fiction cannot, as Frey discovered. This may help to explain today’s flourishing biography trade, and the peculiar fact that people will buy literary biographies of author’s whose books are no longer to be found in the same bookstore in which the biography was purchased. It’s not always true, of course, that biographies of authors are more interesting than the fiction that made the authors famous, but it often is. How many of you wouldn’t rather read about Gertrude Stein, for example, who is fascinating, than actually read her books, which are impenetrable, at least to me.

One of the marks of modernity is a fascination with the individual, and since Isaak Walton’s time the rise of the biography has coincided with the rise of the individual. There were great men in antiquity, of course, whose lives were well worth knowing about, but the focus of writing about them was on their place in a larger narrative of history, a story of battles and empires. Today we read biographies of people who have nothing to do with the sweep of history, some of whom are merely famous for being famous, such as the ubiquitous Paris Hilton.

We are greedy for biographies, and they cover every literary brow, from high to low. Whether your taste runs to the British Royal Family and Hollywood celebrities or to the literati of the 1930’s you’re in luck. The menu has almost too many choices. Recently there have been major biographies of Lords Byron and Nelson, John Coltrane, Edvard Munch, Rudyard Kipling, Emma Goldman, W. B. Yeats, St. Augustine, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Pepys, Sandra Day O’Connor and John James Audubon, to name but a few. Even James Boswell himself, the Ur biographer, is the subject of a new major biography. There were two biographies released simultaneously of Madonna, the singer, not Mary the mother of Jesus.

The recent biographies of America’s founding fathers are a regular growth industry. We have had recent major biographies of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.

Any Civil War General worth his salt has his own Life; I have read biographies of both Grant and Lee in the last year and started one about Longstreet, but decided after a few pages that I didn’t want to know that much about him. Nonetheless reading several biographies can often make you intimate with a period better than a standard history.

So what is a biography? If biology is the study of the organization of life, biography is the writing about life, from the Greek words bios for life and graphein, to write. Like many words biography has expanded from its strict meaning, so now it can be used to denote the mere facts and information about a person. Used in this looser sense, a Wikepedia entry on the Internet, or a Hollywood biopic are both biographies.

But biography, in the strict sense, is a life in writing. It isn’t the life itself, but a written account of it. By way of analogy, I have often explained to people over the years that my written sermon manuscripts are not actually sermons, but only literary artifacts of oral events. To read the sermon is not the same as to experience the sermon. The manuscript has words on a page, but it leaves many questions unanswered. How many people were in the congregation? Were they alert or sleepy? Was the preacher animated, somber, or amusing? Did he mumble or speak up? What was he wearing? Was there a thunderstorm going on outside, or a baby crying? You get the idea.

In much the same way a biography is also a literary artifact, but of a much less ephemeral event, not a half-hour oration but the entire life of a person. This is no easy task. The complexities and nuances of a human life can only partially be captured in words. If only the bare facts of a human life were needed, then a biography could be condensed into a few paragraphs. Where did he live? What did she do? Why is he famous? When did she die? (That sort of thing.) Dictionaries of biography can sum-up several lives this way on a single page, but a full-dress biography, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example, do far more.

They try to capture something of the genius of the life they portray, as a portrait painter tries to do more than simply mirror the physical image of the subject. An engaging biography leaves you feeling you understand something of the person’s inner life, his passions and motivations. And since every life must to some extent remain a mystery, even to its closest intimates, even to oneself, good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art.

The biographer must ask, “What made this person tick?” What is it that she accomplished that makes her a worthy subject for the biographer? Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, put it like this: “The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”(Jay Parini, SALON | Nov. 19, 1997.)

I have said that good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art, and both are necessary. Without careful research, the art will not create a good biography. So how does the biographer go about the task of finding the information necessary? Edel was asked the secret to biographical research, he said, “Get a big desk.” The biographer is like a detective, putting together the pieces of the puzzle, some of which are missing. There will be gaps and silences as well as letters and diaries. James Boswell, who did as much as anyone to create the modern biography, was blessed with a personal acquaintance with Samuel Johnson. He ate with him, drank with him, and traveled with him. He egged him on into lengthy discourses while he took notes in shorthand. In other words, he had access. But that is the exception.

Most biographers aren’t so lucky. The paper trail can be hard to find. Letters are lost, or even burned by protective family members or lovers. Ian Hamilton has written a fascinating account of the obstacles placed in the way of biographers in his book, Keepers of the Flame. He himself knows something of these frustrations in his own attempt to write a life of the notoriously reclusive J. D. Salinger. Hamilton’s book is full of stories of widows and executors fighting off those they perceive as predatory biographers.

Some examples: Lord Byron’s executor put Byron’s memoir to the flames. Thomas Hardy destroyed most of his life’s papers and then conspired with his second wife to pretend she was the author of a biography he was actually writing about himself. Jane Austen’s sister destroyed letters she thought revealed personal material. Poet Ted Hughes, husband of Sylvia Plath, destroyed her last two journals, and then published his own edition of the rest.

And those are only some of the problems associated with writing about dead people; there is a whole different set of problems when dealing with the living. First there is the problem of authorization. If you seek permission to write an authorized biography, does it make you beholden to the author and family so as to skew the final picture? On the other hand, an unauthorized biographer can be perceived as not much better than a stalker.

Listen to Janny Scott of The New York Times tell of the trials and tribulations of two biographers of living subjects: Carole Klein, who was writing about Doris Lessing, and Ann Waldron, who was writing about Eudora Welty:

“These may be boom years in the biography business, but the economics of publishing and popular tastes have put pressure on writers to select living subjects instead of the kind one biographer calls ‘nice and dead.’

The problem is that the living ones tend to say no. Some even encourage their friends to do the same. Which can make spending three or four years reconstructing a hostile subject's life a lonely, dispiriting way of paying the bills.

Letters go unanswered, calls unreturned. Sources hang up when the biographer introduces himself over the phone. One potential source let Ms. Klein fly all the way to London before canceling their lunch date.

'“I will never, never do another living person,'' said Ann Waldron. ‘I have a pretty thick skin but not that thick to undergo this for the rest of my life.’

Ms. Klein was ‘a tremendous fan'’ of Mrs. Lessing's books, interested in the social and cultural context of her life. As she puts it: ‘I had this feeling that we would connect.'’

Mrs. Waldron and Ms. Klein . . . each approached their subjects before making a book proposal. They had known them, at least slightly, before. . . . But Miss Welty and Mrs. Lessing said no, repeatedly. They were not interested in having biographies done, they said. They gave reasons subjects often give: Miss Welty said she wanted her writing to stand on its own; Mrs. Lessing said she was writing a memoir.

‘I was a fool,’ Mrs. Waldron said in retrospect. ‘I rushed in where angels would have feared to tread.’ She said she allowed herself to believe Miss Welty was not adamantly opposed. And being from the South, like Miss Welty, she figured she would be able to get Southerners to talk.

One of the first people she called was a man she had interviewed for an earlier book. ‘I’ll have to call Eudora,’ she remembers him saying. When he called back, he said he had been asked not to cooperate. He said Miss Welty had said: ‘Ask Ann to call me.’ Mrs. Waldron didn't. “She’d just talk me out of it,'” she explained.

Mrs. Waldron went to Memphis and tracked down a retired college administrator who had known Miss Welty years before. Does Eudora know you're working on this book? The woman asked over the phone. Mrs. Waldron said yes. Do you have her permission? No. The woman hung up.

Mrs. Waldron wrote to another man; he never answered, then declined to talk when she reached him by phone. Still another agreed to see her as soon as he returned from Europe. When he got back, he called her. ‘Don't come,'’ he said. ‘I've talked to Eudora.’

Mrs. Waldron drafted and redrafted a letter to him, explaining how much she wanted and needed the interview. She offered not to quote him, if that would help. To try to convince him she was a serious literary biographer, she sent along a copy of one of her earlier books.

He sent the book back unopened and a one-line letter saying: ‘The last thing Eudora needs at this stage in her life is an unauthorized biography,’ Mrs. Waldron said.

Ms. Klein ran into similar problems. When she published an author's query in The New York Times Book Review, looking for correspondence and personal recollections about Mrs. Lessing, Mrs. Lessing's agent sent a frosty letter to the editor that was then published in The Book Review.

‘I am writing on behalf of Mrs. Lessing to say that this biography is totally unauthorized, that no permissions will be granted for extracts from the author's work and that her letters are also copyrighted and cannot be used without her permission,’ the two-paragraph letter said.

Ms. Klein was stunned. ‘If you were an unsophisticated person reading this, you would have thought it was illegal to answer,’ she said. ‘I did think that was out of bounds. This was cutting off the most valuable research tool a biographer has. It was such an extreme step, particularly for a writer to do to another writer.” (New York Times article October 6, 1996. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” by Janny Scott)

And yet, can we not understand why someone would be leery of a lurking biographer? Most subjects of biographies are famous people, and most biographers are not. Can this writer be trusted with something as precious as the way posterity will view ones life? These doubts are natural, and if truth be told, not all biographers are reliable, fair or even truthful. The market for scandalous biographies is insatiable and often lucrative. Who can resist? Many cannot, and the tradition of scurrilous lives is as old as the emerging genre of modern biography.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, as the literary life became increasingly detached from the royal court, writers began to earn their bread in the marketplace and rogue publishers would accommodate their publications to public tastes. The poet Alexander Pope battled one Grub Street hack named Edmund Curll, who has the distinction of being the first peddler of scandalous biographies:

“It occurred to (Curll) that, in a world governed by the laws of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another’s remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, on famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime. He had learned the wisdom of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and knew that there were many rotten corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in. So he seized on them before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches. . . . His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.” (Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson, Clarendon Press, 1910, p 117 quoted in Hamilton, p 50)

So a tradition of suspicion and distrust towards biographers began at the creation. But even with cooperation the research into biography is hard work. James Atlas describes his ten-year effort to write a biography of Saul Bellow: “Over the next decade, I made my biographer's rounds, like the postman deterred neither by sleet nor snow--nor by occasional emanations of reticence or frostiness from my subject--from the routine (often a fascinating routine) of poring over his unpublished manuscripts in the rare book and manuscript division of the University of Chicago Library; lugging my laptop all over America in quest of high-school classmates, cousins, friends, and lovers of my famously peripatetic subject; driving Avis rental cars into the remotest suburbs of Los Angeles and flying into Buffalo, N.Y., in pursuit of letters in private hands. Biography is no vocation for old men; it requires physical stamina. By the time I'd filled up my cupboard with the building materials for my book, I was, to borrow one of Bellow's favorite words, bushed.” (James Atlas, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999)

After all this collecting then the biographer must choose what to leave in, and what to leave out. Out of his particular collection of information, including the gaps and silences, the biographer must sift and sort to create a literary artifact that conveys a living life. What you leave out may be as important as what you put in, and the holes must be respected. Julian Barnes once wrote that a net may be defined two ways, as a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. . . But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net . . . as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” (Quoted in Lee p 5)

And what to leave out is no easy matter as authors get attached to their research like parents to their children. James Atlas again: “The trouble is that you've gone through so much pain to collect the damned junior-high-school transcript or the quote from Bellow's landlord in Paris in 1948 that you feel you have to put it in--just to get credit. Only after you have a completed manuscript does your confidence build to the point where you can go through the top-heavy pile of pages and, encountering the third reference to Bellow's occasional book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, decide: Who cares? and slash it with the red pen. On my second go-round I cut 200 pages. . . . On the third pass, recalling Proust's admonition to one of his correspondents that if he'd only had time he would have written a shorter letter, I managed to cut another 200 pages.”

And when does the biographer know that the research part of the project is over? Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, about which we have had a paper here in the Monday Evening Club, tells of her plight as she finished her research:

“It was July of 2004, and I had just turned in the 765-page manuscript of my biography of the Peabody sisters—three women at the center of New England's Transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and '40s—a project that had taken me nearly 20 years to complete. Free at last—or so I thought—I was on vacation in New Hampshire when a family friend asked me, hesitantly, over gin-and-tonics at a cocktail party, ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ For once, I sensed, this question didn't carry the usual subtext: Why haven't you finished your book yet? She'd been poking around in her attic, my friend told me, and found a trunk full of letters that had belonged to her husband's great-grandmother. One thick packet, tied in pink ribbon, was labeled ‘Mary T. Peabody’—the middle of the three sisters. Would I be interested in reading more letters? Or was it, finally, too late?

After a certain point in the research, as any biographer will tell you, such information induces a shudder of dread. Letters take a long time to read, especially handwritten ones like those I'd plowed through by the hundreds for my book. . . . (And) there was the all-too-real possibility that some new information in these letters would throw off everything I'd written. What if I had to start over again—as I'd already done once before? That was after a manuscript find at the 10-year mark turned up Elizabeth's adolescent diary, the daily journals she'd kept while visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1830s. The same material yielded my greatest scoop, Elizabeth's confession of love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer who ended up marrying her youngest sister, Sophia, a landscape painter, in 1842.

In truth, far more of the material I uncovered in the Peabody sisters' letters had to do with intellectual disputes than with love triangles. Yet the confessional nature of the manuscripts I was working with seemed to bother some people when I talked about them. ‘Don't you feel guilty, reading all that private mail and then quoting from it in your book?’ my friends would ask. It's a common attitude: What was written in private is meant to stay that way. A few years ago I had a tough time trying to convince my own aunt not to pitch a diary my grandmother kept as an Army bride in Paris during WWI, which gave a rare glimpse of civilian life in wartime; she was only trying to protect my grandmother's privacy, my aunt protested.

. . . Perhaps most biographers are plagued with the worry, as they near the completion of their books, that they haven’t been as faithful to the facts as they might have been. As a first-time biographer, anxiously proofreading nearly a hundred pages of documentary endnotes, I certainly was. The farther a biographer is removed from research in the archives, the more she suspects the characters in the historical drama she is constructing may have become her own creations—not invented out of whole cloth, as in a novel, but shaded to make certain personality traits more vivid and to fit a larger narrative. But reading these new letters, I was struck by how distinct each sister's voice was, emerging from the clutter of pages, and how true to the characters I'd put forward in the book. I could almost predict what each one would say as I pulled her letter from the pile. It was as if the Peabody sisters were speaking to me, one last time, across the centuries.” (“The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail. By Megan Marshall.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005. Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.)

In these accounts we get glimpses into the creative process of putting the material together. This is where the deft art comes in to shape the research. With or without cooperation you have your big table full of research, now what do you do with it? The biographer must get a feel for the material and find the way to convey the truth of it. The English writer Richard Holmes has described the biographical process as a “haunting, an act of deliberate psychological trespass, a continuous living dialogue between subject and author as they move over the same historical ground.”

Although the idea of some objective magisterial biography still lingers among us, careful thought tells us that biographers must have a point of view. That point of view can enlighten the picture or distort it. Two opposite besetting sins of biographers can be an excessive love of their subject, hagiography, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, an excessive preoccupation with the dark side of their subject, what Joyce Carol Oates calls “pathographies.” It is all right to like the subject of the life you are writing, after all, who wants to spend that much time with a distasteful subject? But one can overdo it, and biographers often do. The historian Thomas Macaulay called Boswell’s worship of Dr. Johnson “Lues Boswelliana,” or disease of admiration. For as useful and interesting as Boswell’s Johnson is, many later biographers have faulted him for excessive attachment to his subject, what has been called biography as a work of love.

On the other hand, a biography can be a good place to settle scores or get even. I am thinking of Hannah Tillich’s biography of her husband, theologian Paul, in which she depicts his marital indiscretions. Or Susan Cheever’s fine biography, Home before Dark, about her father, writer John Cheever, in which she discloses his promiscuity and alcoholism. These purgings of the soul are often done in the name of healing, but to my mind they often seem like a cheap shot.

It is clear by now that every biographer is an artist, not conjuring up a spirit, but creating in words a facsimile of the life in question. This means each biography, even of the same subject, will be unique. We nod to this reality when we talk of Ellman’s Joyce or Edel’s James. Biographers call this versioning.

So if the old God’s-eye view has been discredited what takes its place? Contemporary biographies now often fly their ideological flags openly, for example the feminist versions of Jane Austen that have proliferated since the seventies. Some of these say she was a feminist and some say she was an anti-feminist. Modern biographers often operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion of class or race or gender. “Was Lincoln gay?” a recent biographer asks, on the basis of documents showing that he once shared a bed in a rooming house with another man, a not uncommon practice in the nineteenth century.

Or if it is not Marx behind the curtain, it is often Freud and his gang. Perhaps Lincoln wasn’t gay at all, but depressed, as another recent biographer has suggested. These make me long for the magisterial Lives of yesteryear, such as Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, or even Gore Vidal’s.

One would think you couldn’t get someone long dead on the therapists couch, but it has been tried. Our former neighbor from Stockbridge, Erik Erikson, wrote psychoanalytic biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther. In the latter, Young Man Luther, Erikson’s interpretation suggests that Luther’s famous Anfechtung, often translated as “doubt” or “despair,” was, at least in part, caused by his recurring constipation, which would explain why there is often more scatology than eschatology in Luther’s Table Talks. But I find Erikson’s hypothesis, apart from being unprovable, highly, may I dare say, irregular.

And the canons of biography change from generation to generation. If Victorian biographies were sanitized, today’s are anything but. Bodily ailments, mental illness, sexual infidelities or fascinations, are standard fair. A spate of recent biographies about British writers in the 1920’s tells us more about their sex lives than what motivated their work.

Which illustrates that biographies in every generation say as much about us and about our times as they do about their subject. This recalls Albert Schweitzer’s famous dictum in his book Quest of the Historical Jesus, that each generation peers as if down a deep well in search of the face of Jesus and instead sees its own reflection.

This should make biographers modest about their claims. Some subjects are well documented, while others leave a scant trail. For example, we know practically nothing about Shakespeare’s life, although a whole industry churns out their best guesses. Theories that Marlowe or Bacon wrote his plays flourish because we know so little real facts. He had no Boswell, and kept no diary. On the other hand, we do know a good deal about Samuel Pepys, but only for the nine years in which he kept his diaries. Biographers can only use the materials they can find, but the temptation to say more is often irresistible.

So in my view good biography is a modest work. The biographer should make no claims he can’t substantiate. Where she makes inferences from the record she should say so. Too often the biographer says that her subject “must have felt” or “must have thought.” Who knows what they felt or thought? Unless there is a journal or a letter speaking of the subject’s interior states and deepest thoughts we are left to guess. If it is a guess, let it be an educated one and say it is a guess!

Otherwise the truth is not served, although a story might be. Those who saw the film version of The Hours will always think of Virginia Woolf as a young Nicole Kidmann with a prosthetic nose calmly walking into the river to her death on a lovely spring day. It was, in fact, an unwitnessed death that took place on a cold, dark, winter day. This is versioning twice removed from an actual event, and raises the question, at what point does biography become fiction? It’s a fine line.

A responsible biography, I am thinking of Hermione Lee’s Woolfe and Victoria Glendenning’s Trollope, for example, will leave questions as questions and honor the essential mystery of a human life. The holes will be acknowledged as such. Yet the biographer will shape and serve up the facts as they can be known in a flowing narrative which can be every bit as engaging to the reader as the very best fiction. This doesn’t happen too often, but when it does a life comes alive, and if we don’t know the subject with completeness, we know enough to feel they would have been worth knowing.


Bibliography

Atlas, James, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999

Hamilton, Ian. Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton, 2005

Marshall, Megan. “The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005.

Scott, Janny. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” New York Times article October 6, 1996.

Photo by Daniel Y. Go — used under Creative Commons License

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The Fifth Romance: Teaching actuaries in Romania

Presented to the Club by Albert E. Easton on April 29, 2002

Two millennia ago, the Roman Empire spread over most of Western Europe and Asia Minor by conquest. While local languages were tolerated in some of the conquered territory, to a great extent Latin became the only accepted language in most places. As the empire fell apart, the speakers of Latin developed local accents and ways of speaking that have evolved into the five Romance languages that we know today. In order by the number of speakers, they are: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Curiously, although Romanian is the Romance language with the fewest speakers, most Romanians consider that it is closest of the five to the original Latin. Each noun, for example has five cases, from nominative to ablative.

The Romans called the inhabitants of Romania whom they conquered the “Dacians”. I almost said the Dacians were Romania’s original inhabitants, but considering the history of that land over the past 20 centuries, that seems unlikely. Romania has been subject to invasion many, many times. In the 16th century, the country became a vassal of the Ottoman Turks, sending tribute to the sultan, and was not free of that domination until the mid-nineteenth century. The Hapsburgs also dominated the area from time to time, but from about 1878 to 1914, Romania enjoyed a brief period of freedom and prosperity. Romania sided with the allies in WWI, and was rewarded with reunification after the war. Unfortunately, the country succumbed to nazism and anti-Semitism in the late 1930s, and while the government was changed to a pro-Russian form in 1944, the inevitable result was that Romania lost some territory to the USSR and fell in the communist sphere in 1945. In December, 1989, a popular revolt in Bucharest overthrew the communist dictator and installed a democratic regime.

On May 30, 2000, I received an e-mail from my friend, Godfrey Perrott, asking for someone to teach “an upcoming seminar in Bucharest, Romania planned for the week of June 12.” Godfrey added a comment that he had taught a similar seminar in Russia eight years ago and found it a rewarding experience. The agenda for the seminar, which was attached to the e-mail, seemed to cover pretty much the same ground as the textbook that Tim Harris and I published last year. While I have only a small amount of experience in teaching, I decided to give it a try, for two reasons:

First of all, it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do – Romania was one of the last countries to abandon communism, and is really struggling to develop a private economy. A viable insurance industry would be an important part of that, and a viable insurance industry can't exist without actuaries.

Second, I was hoping Godfrey was right, and it would be a rewarding experience, although not financially. The trip was sponsored by the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, which is supported by USAID, and it was clear from the start that the sponsor would pay expenses and nothing more.

By the time I had contacted all the people who needed to be contacted and been approved as the seminar leader, it was already the first week in June, so it was lucky that the date of the seminar was changed to the week of July 24-28. Even the six weeks this gave me to prepare really wasn’t enough, but at least it was more realistic. I spent the time that I could make available during those six weeks reviewing the literature that I thought might be useful, and developing a series of 289 slides in PowerPoint and some numerical examples. I wasn’t sure that I could get PowerPoint to work in Bucharest, so I made transparencies of all the slides.

One of the contacts in Bucharest for the seminar was Adina Lupea, actuary for Asigurari de Viata Romania (also sometimes called by its holding company parent’s name: Nederlanden Romania), an ING subsidiary based in Bucharest, and currently the country’s second largest life insurer. (The largest is ASIROM – the remainder of the state owned life insurance fund.) It was helpful that Adina visited the United States during the third week of June, so I had a chance to meet her in advance and discuss what the teaching strategy would be.

On Saturday, July 22, I checked my luggage at the Albany Airport and climbed aboard the first of the three airplanes that would take me to Bucharest. With me, in my briefcase, luckily, were the 289 transparencies and my notes on the talks. Inevitably, 18 hours later when I got to Bucharest, my luggage didn’t. I waited in line with quite a few others to file a claim for lost luggage. One of my worries was that Romeo Eftemie, the Romanian FSVC employee who was meeting me at the airport might conclude I’d missed the flight and give up. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. When I didn’t appear, Romeo concluded that my bag was lost, as happens often in Bucharest, and waited until I did appear. He wasn’t at all surprised that I was the last passenger to appear from that flight.

By now, it was 5 p.m. Sunday in Bucharest. Romeo took me to the Bucharest Hilton, a very comfortable air-conditioned hotel, one of the best in Bucharest. Although I was dead tired, I had made arrangements to meet with Bill Taylor at 7. Bill is the Country Director for the FSVC in Romania, and the only other American I would see during my stay. Bill and I met for dinner at a Romanian restaurant, where I had one of the best meals of my trip. Restaurant food is a bargain in Romania – a full dinner for two at a nice restaurant, including wine, coffee and dessert came to less than $20. On the other hand, since the average rate of pay is only about $80 a week, this means only the wealthy can eat out. Romania struggles with very serious inflation. From July 24 to July 28, the official rate of lei to dollars increased from 21,678 to 21,824, about 2/3 of a percent in four days., which is very typical in recent years. That works out to annual inflation of about 85%. But some progress has been made. By contrast, the legal exchange rate on April 19, 2002 was 33,189 lei, so in about 21 months, inflation has been only about 53 percent.

After dinner, Bill filled me in on things like how to get to the seminar site, what to expect from the students, and other last minute details about the assignment. Back at the hotel, I stopped at the newsstand to pick up a razor and a few other necessities that were in my missing suitcase, and fell into bed for a long overdue sleep.

Bucharest seems like a grand old dowager who’s a little down on her luck. In the late 19th century, Bucharest was called “the little Paris” and its wide boulevards and impressive architecture do call Paris to mind. (There’s even a spot where boulevards come together in a star with a copy of the Arc de Triomphe in the center.) But the years under communism have left a serious legacy of poverty. Beggar children are probably not unusual in countries where the economy is weak, but those in Bucharest are especially persistent. If they spot you as an American (and I’m not good at disguising myself) they will follow you persistently, grabbing at your clothes and asking for “money, money, money” – apparently about the limit of their knowledge of English. Perhaps unique to Bucharest are the packs of wild dogs, descendants of household pets that had to be set free during the revolution against communism in 1989. The dogs roam the streets in packs of four or five even in downtown areas and are best given a wide berth. Capturing or destroying the dogs is apparently a political hot potato, so nothing is done by the city government. Between the kids and the dogs, I found that it was not pleasant to walk around the hotel in the evening.

On Monday morning, I took a taxi to the seminar site (across the street from the offices of Nederlanden Romania). I have yet to figure out how taxi drivers in Bucharest support themselves. The fare for a six or seven kilometer taxi ride was about 28,000 lei ($1.25) Even though the taxi was a wreck, I’m not sure how he even paid for gasoline, which cost almost one dollar a liter.

At the site, I got the slides ready for the overhead projector, got set up for the simultaneous translation, and awaited the arrival of the students. The simultaneous translation was an interesting process. Monica, the translator, sat in the back of the room translating as I was speaking. I wore a lavaliere mike that fed into Monica’s earphones. Each student had a set of earphones that brought in Monica’s translation. I also had a set of earphones. If a student asked a question in Romanian, I could put my earphones on and get Monica’s English translation of the question. This helped a few times. Even though most of the students understood enough English that they didn’t bother with the earphones, some were not good at phrasing questions in English. If a student asked a question in English that I couldn’t understand, I’d ask that it be repeated in Romanian, and try to formulate an answer based on Monica’s translation.

There were about 15 students, about an equal number of men and women, most in their 20’s – what young Romanians call the “Coca-cola generation”. (Under the communist regime, Pepsi was freely available, but not Coke; so the generation Xers of Romania call themselves the Coca-cola generation after the beverage that their parents didn’t have access to. I saw lots of Coke while I was there – no Pepsi.) Most of the students had jobs in life insurance companies, but two worked for the Romanian insurance regulatory authority, and at least one was a recent college graduate and not yet employed. Most of the students were also members of Romania's actuarial society, Asociata Romana de Actuariat, which was the organizer of the session with the FSVC.

I had prepared about 80 slides for the first day of class. Included in the slides were some pauses for class discussion of the material being covered. This didn’t work well. The students were quite reluctant to talk much, probably partly because of the language problem, and maybe partly because they didn’t want to expose their company’s practices or show how limited their practical knowledge was. I also had some numerical problems for the students to work on, but not enough of them. I wound up covering about 120 slides before the day was over.

Monday night I went out to buy some clothes, since my luggage still hadn’t arrived and I was wearing stuff I had originally put on Saturday. I didn’t have much luck. The first store I stopped in had about six men’s shirts, none in my size. The next store had more – about three in a size close to mine. I chose one that cost 335,000 lei, about $17. When I got back to the hotel, my bag had arrived, of course. I had dinner with Bill and Adina at an Italian restaurant. Since I’m used to the American version of Italian food, the Romanian version seemed strange to me and I didn’t enjoy it as much as the Romanian food I’d had the night before.

Class on Tuesday went about the same as Monday. Again, I covered far more material than I had planned. It was clear that I needed to do some work to have enough material for the rest of the week. The more knowledgeable students indicated that they would like to see more examples worked, so I set out Tuesday night to get some examples for them to work on.

Somehow, it all worked. I was able to get a projector set up so we could work with live spreadsheets, and the time spent exploring the spreadsheets seemed extremely well received. The last few days of the seminar, the weather was unusually warm, with temperatures as high as 43 degrees C. (=109.4 degrees F.!) and the seminar site wasn’t air conditioned, so we ended our sessions about 3 p.m.

By Wednesday night, I was feeling relaxed enough to visit the Casino in the hotel for a little recreation. This turned out to be a mistake. At 8:30 p.m., about an hour after the casino opened, I was the only patron in the entire casino. The staff seemed to consist of a cashier, and croupier who would have dealt baccarat or spun the roulette wheel. I asked the cashier for some change for the slot machines and was given one hundred coins in exchange for my 100,000 lei bill. The coins were not legal tender, but the equivalent of casino chips, and worth between 4 and 5 cents each. The slot machines were of an ancient mechanical variety and in need of a good lube job. I lost my 100,00 lei as quickly as possible and went back upstairs.

On Friday, we had planned a half day, and most of the morning consisted of a discussion of actuarial ethics. I presented the US Code of Professional Conduct, showed some examples of our Standards of Practice, and discussed how the profession polices itself, using bodies like the Actuarial Standards Board and the Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline. Romania still has a lot of work to do in getting its Insurance Law up to a reasonable standard, but I wanted the students to be aware that a lot of what needs to happen to make a healthy insurance industry goes beyond what can be legislated.

We adjourned at noon on Friday, and I got to use the rest of the day to explore a little bit of the part of Romania that is outside Bucharest, with Romeo driving. I saw many contrasts. Agricultural fields back up to industrial parks, and horse carts share the highway with trucks and automobiles. Our destination was Sinaia in the Transylvanian hills. In addition to passing about a hundred kiosks that offered merchandise stamped with images of Dracula or Vlad the impaler, a fifteenth century Romanian king, we visited the castle of King Carol, Romania’s last independent king, and stopped for dinner. The dinner of wild boar meat, which tasted like lamb to me (probably because of the heavy use of garlic in its preparation) was accompanied by huge amounts of very good Romanian wine. Enough that I was encouraged to sing along with the accordion and violin duo who strolled among the tables. Needless to say, I fell asleep on the ride back to Bucharest.

On Saturday morning, I returned to the Bucharest airport for my return flight. The flight from Bucharest to Paris included several American couples who were accompanied by Romanian speaking children, and this helped to make me aware of another unhappy aspect of Romanian life. During the last communist years, all forms of birth control were outlawed, and many unwanted children were born. Immediately after the overthrow of communism, Romania became a haven for childless American couples hoping to adopt. Because poverty persists, there are no social services available to single mothers, and placing a child in an orphanage for later adoption is still perceived as the best alternative.

I came to like the Romanian people that I met, and to hope that their efforts to make their economy work in the twenty-first century are successful. When I finally returned home I was very tired, but satisfied that Godfrey had been right – It was rewarding.

Photo: Castelu Peles, Sinaia, Romania. Photo by Chodaboy, used under Creative Commons License.

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Out of print: The future of news, newspapers and journalism

Presented to the Club on April 25, 2009 by Martin C. Langeveld



The topic I’m presenting tonight will be familiar to most of you, even if you have not been a regular visitor to my blog. Not a week has gone by in the last six months without news of a threatened or actual closing of a major newspaper, the bankruptcy of a major newspaper publisher, layoffs, buyouts or mandatory furloughs imposed on newspaper employees, and other symptoms of the travails of a once-powerful and monopolistically rich industry. This month [April, 2009], readers of the Boston Globe were shocked to find a front-page headline and story disclosing that its owner, the New York Times Company, was threatening to stop publishing the paper on May 1 unless it got major concessions from its unions.



It’s not surprising the New York Times Company would make this threat, since the Globe is reported to be losing well over a million dollars a week. The Times company has run out of credit lines, has sold and leased back a chunk of its recently completed Times Square headquarters building, is peddling its stake in the Boston Red Sox, and has borrowed $250 million from a Mexican tycoon the flagship paper had earlier called a robber baron. Clearly the Times is not in a position to subsidize the red ink at the Globe, for which it paid $1.1 billion in the mid 1990s.



And among newspaper owners, the Times company is relatively well off. Among the publicly-owned US newspaper firms, several are bankrupt, and most have credit ratings at or near junk-bond status. Their collective market value has fallen by more than 90 percent in the past few years. Collectively, the industry has laid off more than 10 percent of its workforce since the start of 2008. The combined paid circulation of American daily newspapers has fallen from more than 63 million in 1984 to less than 50 million today — a drop of 21 percent during a time when the number of households grew by about 40 percent. U.S. Daily newspapers today have less than 14 percent of total U.S. advertising expenditures. In 1989 it was 28 percent — so they’ve lost half their market share in 20 years. These are long-term trends that predate the arrival of the World Wide Web, and they have continued unabated through economic expansions as well as recessions.



For people with an appreciation for the importance of good journalism to the maintenance of a free and democratic society, and for the historical role of newspapers in providing what is often considered the best, broadest and deepest journalism available, the industry’s decline is a concern. What went wrong? What can be done? Will there be newspapers a few years from now? Where will essential journalism happen if newspapers depart the stage?



The origins of the present crisis in newspapers, as I’ve indicated, go back many years. The question is, what’s driving the trend away from newspaper reading?



Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, newspapers noticed that younger people weren't reading newspapers as much as their elders. The industry responded with youth-oriented features and a Newspapers-in-Education program, hoping to inculcate the daily newspaper habit. And, the philosophers among us said, "Look, when these kids grow up, get married, buy houses, have kids in school, and pay taxes, they'll read newspapers because they need to know what's going on." And indeed, some of them did. But the experience since the 1970s is that each succeeding age cohort reads newspapers less than the prior cohort. Moreover, as each cohort ages, it tends to reduce its newspaper readership. This is true even of the oldest age groups. Nothing the industry has done has made the slightest dent in these inexorable trends.



The industry now tends to point to the internet and suggest that it is both the problem and the opportunity — younger people read newspapers less because they get their news online, but the industry can benefit from rapid growth in online readership and revenue.



But, hold on: the age-cohort readership trends started in the 1960s, not in 1995 or so when the online readership started to make an impact. This problem has been a long time coming. The readership figures show that around 1970, the nation was still fairly monolithic in its readership habits — all age groups were heavy newspaper readers with rates ranging from 70 to 76 percent, but then all age groups started reducing their newspaper reading.



Why? What happened to that solid franchise? I think it relates to the gradual proliferation of concerns and interests in our society. Go back to the Great Depression of the 1930s: Everyone was in the same boat; the country was unified in its interests and concerns; everyone read newspapers and listened to radio to know what was going on. This continued through World War II, the Korean War, the early stages of the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. But the Baby Boom generation changed the game. With greater prosperity and less international turbulence to worry about, interests began to diversify enormously from the 1970s right through the current decade. It was a luxury we could afford — more cable channels, more movie screens, more books and magazines focused on more niche interests, more sports franchises, more highways to go to more malls, more resorts and more entertainment venues, more exotic foods on supermarket shelves, more cheeses from more countries served at dinners like this, more recreational drugs, more diversity in every possible direction.



Daily newspapers can no longer reflect all this diversity in their pages. The idea of a single mass medium that everyone in a community or metropolis would want to read is no longer logical, any more than we are all likely to watch the same television programs log in to the same website or tune to the same radio station.



The World Wide Web, of course, has only accelerated this trend of diversification; it is tailor made to cater to an unlimited number of niche interests.



The demographic trends clearly show that within a few years, the average newspaper reader will be of retirement age, and only the 65-and-up age cohort will still have a majority (but barely) that reads a daily newspaper. That's not a sustainable business model.



Now, you might think that newspapers could simply shrink into being a smaller, but still substantial piece of the media landscape. Thirteen percent of the advertising market is still real money, after all — almost $38 billion, to be precise. But other factors layer onto the demographic trends to make this a perfect storm. For many decades, newspapers enjoyed monopoly power in the pricing of advertising: there was generally one newspaper in town, and if you wanted an ad, you paid the price. Starting even a weekly newspaper to compete with the daily was a costly proposition — so the dailies were protected by high barriers to entry. This pricing power was particularly true in the classified pages, to which the principal media competitors, radio, TV and billboards, could offer no alternative.



The usual financial formula at newspapers into the 1970s looked like this: the circulation revenue — what customers paid to subscribe or to buy single copies — covered the cost of printing and distributing the paper, and for the cost of the circulation department itself. Display advertising and preprinted inserts paid for all the other expenses: the newsroom, the ad department, the building, the business office, and so on. This meant that the income from classified advertising was pure profit, and as a result, newspapers were able to earn operating profits of 20 to 30 percent from the 1920s right through the Depression and World War II and into the 1990s, despite losing audience and overall ad market share.



The promise of that kind of profit margin kept the market value of newspaper properties high, encouraged the creation of newspaper chains fueled by leverage, and created a corporate culture that discouraged innovation and strategic planning. But along the way, personal computers, Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law and other technological trends eliminated most barriers to entry — newspaper competitors in the form of alternative weeklies and more recently hyperlocal web sites could be started from proverbial kitchen tables to erode the monopolies of the dailies.



And then in 1999 along came Craigslist, another kind of kitchen-table startup with a classic piece of disruptive innovation for which newspapers were totally unprepared — free classified ads. Craigslist now offers classifieds online free, nationwide, in almost any category. It charges only for a few categories in a few markets, which is all it needs to cover costs and make a profit. With just 28 employees, operating out of a San Francisco storefront, Craigslist’s impact has been to cut in half the classified advertising volume of the entire daily newspaper business in the last 10 years, an impact of about $9 billion. And Craigslist’s web traffic as measured in pageviews is now six times as much as that of the entire daily newspaper industry.



The only further impact that stems from the current recession is that all the downward trends have accelerated, and now the loss of market valuation and credit standing means that the industry, which has never been big on R&D anyway, has no resources it can apply to innovation, at least not to innovation that requires upfront investment.



Consequently, when the current recession ends, there will be no bounceback for newspapers. Estimates are that nearly all of the top 100 newspapers by circulation are operating in the red. Results for the most recent quarter show revenue declines larger than those in any quarter of 2008. It seems very likely that many of these newspapers will be closed, merged, or very substantially restructured in the next 12 months.



Out here in the hinterlands, the picture is better. Most of the newspapers in small towns and small cities, with circulations under 50,000, continue to be profitable at least on an operating basis, before debt service. This group contains about 1100 of the roughly 1430 newspapers in the country. And in the so-called community newspaper category, weeklies and very small-dailies, some reports indicate that they have lost very little revenue over the past few years — and a majority of them are still privately owned without much leverage. So outside the metro markets, newspapers can survive, though not necessarily thrive. And to get the small-town dailies owned by big chains, including papers like the Berkshire Eagle [in Pittsfield, Massachusetts], out from under highly-leveraged ownership, there is going to have to be some restructuring pain — read: fire sales during bankruptcy proceedings.



Still, the future of print is bleak, considering the loss of pricing power and the continued migration of eyeballs to online news sources. Look at it this way: if journalism had just been invented, would you invest in a startup that proposed going to Canada, cutting down trees, putting them through an enormous machine to make newsprint, trucking that paper halfway across the continent, putting it through another enormous machine to print newspapers, and finally driving down every back alley and dirt road to deliver those papers, every single night? Besides not passing environmental muster, you would not get a call back from any venture capitalist with that concept on your executive summary. The future is online, the investor would say, and correctly so. During 2008, for the first time the percentage of Americans who report getting most of their national and international news online exceeds the percentage who still get most of their news from newspapers – the ratio is that about 40 percent go online, versus 35 percent who go to newspapers. The ratio for local news still favors print, but not by much.



So you would think that with all these trends and factors, online news ventures, designed to step into the breach and provide the journalism so necessary to our democracy, would be easy to get financed and would be popping up all over. And to some extent they are, but what makes it difficult to get new online news sites started is that there is no clear business model. The sites of newspapers themselves are not even profitable, because the audience migration from printed newspapers to the web has mostly bypassed newspaper web sites, which get only about one percent of all U.S. web traffic. MSNBC.com and CNN.com together get more unique visitors than the entire newspaper industry.



The snag with coming up with a business model to sustain online journalism is this: they don’t actually sell journalism in print. For the last 100 years, good journalism at newspapers has, in effect, been a charitable endeavor engaged in by publishers earning monopolistic profit margins. The business of newspapers is to sell eyeballs to advertisers — news content is simply a convenient lure to get the public to buy and read newspapers. Publishers, to their credit, often took pride in their newsrooms, competed for Pulitzers and other honors, and generally spent more than strictly necessary to fill the paper with news. Society benefitted from this largesse. But this doesn’t work very well anymore in print, and it won’t translate online at all, since there is no monopolistic pricing there. So what are the options for business models that can deliver the fruits of journalism via the Web?



I could discuss a variety of options, each of which could turn into a Monday Evening Club paper of its own, each of which has its pros and cons, but in the end, none of which will work as a ubiquitous model. Among the proposals floating around are these (and notice that we have a tendency to dissect the potential models in traditional terms):

• Pay-for-content models supported by readers who buy subscriptions, just like printed newspapers or magazines


• Pay-for-content in which readers purchase individual news items through a micropayment system, just like downloading songs from iTunes


• Non-profit models, similar to public radio or public television, supported by public contributions


• Models supported by advertising, also just like print


• Publicly supported models, such as the BBC


• And of course hybrids of two or more of these, as well as print/online hybrids like the current newspaper model, are possible.

As I said, each of these defines a model in traditional terms by analogy to an existing legacy media (even iTunes is in a sense a reversion to the old way of selling songs singly on vinyl). But if we know anything about the Web, it’s that things will not be the same tomorrow as they are today. Witness the speed with which the general public has adopted social networking — Facebook was founded at Harvard in 2003 as a network limited to college students. Within 3 years, 85 percent of U.S. students had signed up, or about 4 million members. In September 2006, less than three years ago, Facebook opened membership to the general public; today it has 200 million active users worldwide. And it is just one of many social networks. Social networking is an aspect of what is being called Web 2.0. Web 1.0 was driven by the hyperlink. It simply connected pages and sites to each other. (Incidentally, one of the failures of newspapers is that most of their stories published online are still devoid of that very basic ingredient.) Web 2.0, into which we are now shifting, is driven by connections between people, through social networks. Newspapers and news sites in general are still trying to discover how to operate in the 2.0 environment and to incorporate social networking in their business models. Web 3.0, also called the semantic web, is the next big step being envisioned. Going beyond connecting pages (1.0) and people (2.0), it entails the connection of facts, ideas, and concepts – something very relevant to the world of journalism. In the semantic web, search (a 1.0 concept) and personal recommendations (a 2.0 concept) will be augmented by tools that can more or less automatically deliver content strongly relevant to a user’s instantaneous needs, interests, concerns, questions and interactions. It may entail intelligent personal agents that can recommend content, answer questions, make simple online arrangements and purchases, and otherwise help organize your life. And all of this will be ever more mobile on pocket-sized devices that will only incidentally make phone calls, serve as your wallet, your set of keys and your GPS navigator, and verify your identity. To conceive of enterprises that can create and deliver journalistic content in that environment is not easy, but today’s news enterprises need to be thinking in that direction. What I can suggest is that they ponder the following.



Hanging on to bricks, mortars, machinery and other legacy concepts including ink on paper is not realistic. All of that is baggage that will hinder, not help, in a truly digital enterprise.



There will be open source networks creating journalistic content, not newsrooms with four walls. Collaboration and flexibility will be key. In these networks, individuals can have as much credibility and influence as organizations (a point proved by Anton Kutcher last week when he beat CNN in the race to have one million Twitter followers).



News is a process, not a product. The basic unit of news, the story, will be part of a continuous flow of content through blogs, microblogs, wikis, discussions and links. News publishers will do what they do best, and link to the rest. Readers will not come to content; content must find readers.



Free is a business model. Monetization will come from creating conversations between people and brands, not from traditional advertising.





Photo: the "newsboy statue" in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, by Mary F. Lutz, used under Creative Commons license.

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The Center of the world: Frederic Church’s Olana

View of Olana

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, March 23, 2009



The year was 1859 and the subject of our paper tonight, the artist Frederic Edwin Church, was exhibiting his latest painting, “Heart of the Andes,” in New York City. His exhibition of this very large painting — 5 1/2 by 10 feet in size — was unusual — actually unique.



He charged 25 cents admission (the equivalent of about $5 today) to people who wanted to see it. And people came in droves — about 600 a day came into a strategically darkened room with spotlights on the painting. Opera glasses were provided to examine the painting's details. It was a dramatic experience, very successful and well publicized. Church was 33 years old at the time and considered to be America's most notable painter. He was at the top of the new country's artistic echelon and an interesting man in many respects.



Church was born in 1826 in Hartford, Connecticut. His father, Joseph Church, was a wealthy silversmith and watchmaker who subsequently became an official and director of Aetna Life Insurance Company. Church's grandfather, Samuel Church, incidentally, founded the first paper mill in Lee, Massachusetts.



In 1844 at the age of 18, Church became the only pupil of Thomas Cole, who was a well known landscape artist at the time, and who lived in Catskill, New York. Church and Cole roamed the nearby Catskills and the Hudson River environs making hundreds of sketches of the landscapes of the area. One year later, in 1845, Church had his first painting exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York. His work was widely acclaimed.



During the next 20 years Church traveled the world extensively — from the Arctic to the tropics. His South American travels in the 1850's which eventually resulted in the earlier discussed painting, “Heart of the Andes,” was financed by Cyrus West Field who wanted to use Church's paintings to lure investors to his South American ventures. “Heart of the Andes” was sold shortly after its exhibition in New York for $10,000 — the highest price paid at that time for the work of a living artist. (The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum where he was a trustee for almost 20 years.)



Church's meteoric rise in the 1840's and 1850's, as one critic has said, was fueled by the tumult of the times. His landscapes gave pictorial voice to the political, social, and cultural issues that concerned many who saw his paintings. His construction of ideal American landscapes and dreamy South American acadias spoke of the seemingly infinite riches of New World nature at the same time as they reaffirmed man's right to use and enjoy those bounties. Church combined intricate, precise details with sweeping compositions. His firm faith in the rightness of American national identity and its foundation in Protestantism resonated deeply with the admirers of his paintings. He and his art were perfectly suited to the moment in American history. As was said of Thomas Cole, his teacher, he depicted nature, especially American nature, as the “visible hand of God.” But, aside from the high price that his art commanded, the New York exhibition was notable for another reason, too. One of the visitors was a young lady by the name of Isabel Carnes.



Church told a friend that on seeing her he “glimpsed a ravishing vision, a star illuminated with a light never before seen on land or sea.” He married her the following year.



By this time, in 1860, Church had a studio on 10th Street in New York, but he wanted a place in the country that would be suitable for raising a family, and his thoughts turned to the Hudson River area near Catskill where he had wandered as a pupil with Thomas Cole years before.



And so, shortly before his wedding, Church purchased 126 acres of fields and woods overlooking the Hudson — just south of where the Rip Van Winkle Bridge now crosses the river near the city of Hudson. He built a small house, called Cosy Cottage, and then in 1867 he acquired additional acreage that included the adjacent hilltop with sweeping views for miles around. He engaged the noted architect Richard Morris Hunt to design a French chateau for the summit.



The Churches had had two children — a boy and a girl — who both died of diphtheria when very young. Looking for a change of scene to assuage their grief the couple embarked on a long journey to Europe and the Middle East. The fascinating result of this trip was a complete change of plans for the house. Instead of a French chateau to be built overlooking the Hudson, the Churches changed architects and became determined to build and furnish a Persian feudal castle. And that is what is there today.



Church essentially was his own architect, getting help primarily with structural and mechanical issues. He designed the building and all its ornamentation. His and Isabel's three months in the Middle East led to a plan for a traditional Damascus house with thick fortress-like stone walls and a courtyard with rooms radiating from it. The rooms are stenciled in colors, some metallic and some pastel, with mirrors on walls and ceilings that are highly decorated and placed to reflect light to great advantage.



Church designed and drew stencils on the archways dividing interior spaces of the house debased on Persian patterns and colors that he sketched whileabroad. Completion of the woodwork and painted decoration of the first floor took at least four years. No aspect of the decoration was left to chance. Mixing pigments on his palette, he prepared color swatches for the walls and ceiling of each room. The Arabic calligraphy over the entry door translates as “Welcome.''



In furnishing the house, one of Church's first aims was to create a repository for the objects of civilization. (This man had no small goals.) The house became a museum of fine arts, rich in bronzes, paintings, sculptures, and antique and artistic specimens from all over the world. The rooms are filled with exotic objects: painted tables from Kashmir, rococo revival furniture inherited from his father, and furniture built to Church's own designs are intermingled with Persian and Syrian metalware, Mexican religious statuary, and Turkish rugs.



Church conceived this collection and began to collect it while he was in the Middle East. He sent at least 15 crates of goods home from his trip.



But not only did he build his Persian fortress on the hill 600 feet above the Hudson, h set out to transform the property from an agricultural landscape into an ornamental farm. He developed the landscape as consciously as he created a painting. Over a period of thirty years he transformed his property. It was still to be a working, profitable farm, but a part of its bounty was to be beauty. Orchards and fields of corn, hay and rye joined the flower and vegetable gardens. There were livestock and buildings to house them. He planted thousands of trees set out on the slopes. A swampy stream became a lake with edges carefully sculpted to echo the shape of the Hudson River beyond. He had five and a half miles of carriage roads put in that were strategically placed to show views of open fields, dark hemlock forests, sun-dappled woodlands, and serene bodies of water. (He had, incidentally, sent three white donkeys back from Syria to pull pleasure carts on the paths.)



After the American Civil War and as the 1870s progressed, American taste in art changed dramatically. Fewer and fewer people, including Church himself, looked to the natural world as an affirmation of divine order and wisdom. His large paintings showing the grandeur and perfection of nature declined severely in popularity. Younger painters like Winslow Homer became popular, painting more intimate scenes of American citizens as soldiers, farmers, school teachers, and so on. There was much more interest in all things foreign.



In 1876 Church had his first attack of inflammatory rheumatism which led him to paint with his left hand. By 1880 his painting activity declined markedly. His interest in his estate on the Hudson, however, continued strong. There Church was creating a world — in his Persian fortress — that was a safe and perfect place for himself and Isabel and the four children they now had.



It wasn't until 1880 that the Churches settled on a name for their property. It was, after much discussion, to be called “Olana'' — a variation on the name of a fortress house in ancient Persia. Church called his house and its 250 acres of romantically designed grounds “the Center of the world,” By 1891 one visitor called it “a perfect Eden of picturesque beauty.” By that time Church had spent 30 years creating it. It was truly his “Center of the world.”



Frederic Church died in 1900. His wife had died the year before. The estate was left to their son Louis who had managed it for several years for them. He and his wife Sally lived there, modernizing it a bit, but essentially leaving it and the furnishings unchanged. Louis died in 1943, and Sally lived there until her death in 1964 — again with a keen interest in preserving it intact.



After her death, David Huntinton, an art history professor at Smith College, worked to save the property from being sold and the contents auctioned off. An energetic fund raising campaign ensued. And in 1966, with both private contributions and funds appropriated by the New York State legislature under the leadership of Governor Nelson Rockefeller (who had been enlisted because of his long-time support of the arts), the house and property were purchased and the title was conveyed to the State of New York. It is now a New York State Historic site — and well worth a visit to Church's “Center of the world.”



Photo by Orlando's World of Photos, used under Creative Commons Attribution License.

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