Under the green canopy: Hiking the Appalachian Trail the the Berkshires

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 12, 2012 by Richard L. Floyd

When I told Harold* my title for tonight’s paper he suggested it might be about a wedding! A great guess, but no, the paper is actually about my experiences of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires. “Under the Green Canopy” refers to the lush green foliage overhead when you are on the trail. The AT is also sometimes called the “Green Tunnel” by thru-hikers.

I first encountered the Appalachian Trail over fifty years ago in western New Jersey as a Boy Scout at camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. The camp, which is still going strong, sits alongside Kittatinny Ridge, near the Delaware Water Gap.

I went to camp there for several summers and we scouts hiked sections of the nearby AT. The trail skirts the opposite shore of Sand Pond. I have many memories of that lake; I came to camp as a beginner and learned to swim there, eventually earning my lifesaving merit badge, and when I was fourteen swam the Mile Swim there. I didn’t appreciate that the nearby trail was so special.

It was as a Boy Scout that I first learned to love hiking and camping. I know that when one thinks of New Jersey it does not conjure up pictures of beautiful forests and hills, but that is just what that part of northwestern New Jersey is like. If you don’t believe me you can visit. The camp is private, but years ago it ceded hundreds of acres to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Park and one can hike the trails there, including a portion of the AT.

Eventually one of the Scout leaders at camp must have told me that the trail went all the way from Georgia to Maine, and that some people hiked the whole thing in one season. From then on it was a dream of mine to thru-hike the trail, a dream I long deferred and have finally abandoned now that I’ve reached the age where one likes to sleep in one’s own bed.

Nonetheless, the AT has been a valued part of my life ever since those Boy Scout days. I met up with it again when I moved to New England to go to graduate school in 1971. I hiked portions of it with my future wife in the White Mountains in New Hampshire in the early 1970’s, and later with my brother in the 1980’s.

Then when I moved to Maine Martha and I took church youth groups hiking and camping on and near Mt. Katahdin, which is the northernmost terminus of the AT. I have run across the trail here and there through the years while hiking in Connecticut and Vermont.

But it has been during these last thirty years during which I have lived in Berkshire County that I have become most familiar with the trail, especially since 2000 when my hiking life took another turn.

It happened like this. In late September of 2000 I was a spectator for the Great Josh Billings Runaground, the Berkshires’ famous fun triathlon. I had been training all year to be a participant, but the month before I took a bad tumble on my bike and was on the disabled list.

As I was sulking on the sidelines with my arm in a sling, a good friend of mine approached me and asked me how I was doing. “Terrible,” I said, “I’m jumping out of my skin for lack of exercise because I can’t ride my bike.” He replied, “Well, I belong to a hiking group and you’re welcome to come along. It’s a bunch of old guys and won’t be very challenging for somebody in as good shape as you are, but, hey, if you want to come we’re hiking tomorrow and I’ll pick you up.”

So the next day I landed with my friend at the trailhead to the AT in Tyringham, not far from Tyringham Cobble. I saw some old friends, met some new ones, laced up my boots, and off the group went at such a fast pace that I was yo-yoing off the back for awhile.

And that was my introduction to the other men’s group I belong to which has Monday in its name, “The Monday Mountain Boys” (although to be strictly factual the name didn’t come about until a year later when the wives named us).

I liked the group so much that even after I rehabbed my body and fixed my bike the following year I kept hiking with them on Mondays, and I still often do. The hikes take us all over Berkshire County, but more than any other venue we hike the Berkshire section of the AT.

Those of us who live here tend to take for granted this iconic trail that wends it’s way through the length of our county. The entire AT in Massachusetts, some 90 miles of it, is here in Berkshire County.

Its official name is The Appalachian National Scenic Trail, but everybody calls it the AT. It is (more or less) 2,174 miles long and travels the spiny ridgeline of the Appalachian Mountains. It extends between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine.

It winds its way through the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. And of the fifteen states it passes through only in Massachusetts is the entire trail in a single county.

The making of the Appalachian Trail was a vast undertaking. How did such a project come to be? To answer that question we need to back up and have a little history lesson about mountain hiking and trail-making.

Our story really only begins around 1830, since hiking for recreation and leisure is a fairly recent development in the history of humankind.

The earliest settlers to this part of the country brought with them the attitudes of Europe, where mountains were viewed chiefly as obstacles to travel. In a famous example, Martin Luther kept diaries of his trip from Germany to Rome in 1510 without mentioning a word about the scenery, which would have included a good portion of the Alps. And when the first English settlers reached the Berkshires they called them “the horrid hills.”

That view was widely shared. Mountains were dangerous places afflicted with unpredictable weather, wind and rain and snow and thunder and lightning. The paucity of Indian artifacts on mountains indicates that Native Americans avoided them as well, perceiving them as places where larger powers and forces best not tampered with dwelled. During Darby Field’s historic climb of Mt. Washington in 1642 he could convince only one of his Indian scouts to approach the summit with him.

But Field’s ascent of Mt. Washington back in the 17^th century was very much an anomaly. Most of the Northeastern mountains didn’t have their first known ascent for more than a hundred years later. Mt. Mansfield in Vermont was first climbed in 1772 and Mt. Katahdin not until 1804 to give just a couple of examples.

It wasn’t until well after the Revolutionary War that men (and some women) took to the mountains in any numbers, and only during the 19^th century that hiking became a leisure pastime, and mostly (as I mentioned) after 1830.

That may surprise us since for us the mountains are so firmly fixed as sublime objects of beauty. But the “purple mountain’s majesty” of Katherine Lee Bates’ song is a product of the 19^th century imagination. Now that the land was tamed and settled, a movement arose that sought out the experience of wilderness as a retreat from urban life.

At the same time that Romanticism was taking hold in Europe, as a reaction to the harshness of the Industrial Revolution, there was in America a new aesthetic appreciation for the natural world. The mountains were no longer seen as dangerous, but as beautiful and soul refreshing. We can see this change in the writings of the time, in the essays of Emerson, the poetry of Whittier, the travel journals of Thoreau, and the idealized backwoods novels of Cooper.

These changing attitudes were soon followed by changes in transportation that made the mountains easier to reach. Where once a mountain climb was the pastime of the well to do and their paid guides, with the coming of the railroads the urban masses could now get to the country and did. Mountain tourism had begun.

By the end of the 1840’s Berkshire County had better rail service than we have today. Pittsfield was connected to the Hudson River in the west and to Springfield in the east, and in 1842 the Housatonic Railroad connected Bridgeport, Connecticut with W. Stockbridge.

The mountains became popular places to visit for leisure and recreation, and this new rail access created the fad of going to mountaintops. In the decades before the Civil War mountain vacation centers and summit houses sprang up throughout New England.

The Berkshires were something of an exception, as no major resorts were built here and there were few public accommodations. This was because it was the time when the great stately homes (called “cottages”) were being built as the wealthy came to enjoy the natural world in their own way (and with their own kind).

In many places in New England bridle paths were cut to reach the summits of mountains, and urbanites would travel by horse or carriage to see the vistas. But the summit house trend in New England ended as quickly as it began, and by the mid 1870’s many of the properties were abandoned or poorly maintained.

But hiking prevailed and more and more trails were cut throughout the region. One of the very earliest was the Hopper Trail, still in use today, which was cut to the summit of Mt. Greylock in a single day by an energetic (and obviously large) group of Williams College students in 1830.

After the Civil War hiking clubs sprang up throughout New England. An early club here in Berkshire County was the Alpine Club of Williamstown founded in1863 by Professor Mark Hopkins of Williams College. This club was coeducational from the beginning. One young member was Samuel Hubbard Scudder would later play a role in establishing the Appalachian Mountain Club in the 1870’s.

A later Berkshire hiking club was the Pathfinders or the “Leg-It” Club, based in Stockbridge and full of worthies like sculptor Daniel Chester French.

By the turn of the 20^th century a new big change was just around the corner. Just as the railroads had fueled the 19^th century hiking boom it was the coming of the automobile in the new century that finally set the stage for the building of the AT. One of the great ironies of this whole story is how decisive new transportation technologies were for changes in foot travel.

The automobile made remote trailheads easier to reach, and sadly true wilderness harder to find. The future environmental impact of greater numbers of trail users was yet unperceived, and the hiking boom continued unabated.

The auto was also instrumental in a new focus on long distance trails, and talk of connecting existing trails to make a long-distance trail began.

Many New England trails were being connected to one another to allow longer trekking, and various dreamers and big thinkers envisioned a great long trail following the spine of the Eastern mountains.

It is hard to say exactly when the AT was born, but the October 1921 publication of “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” by Benton MacKaye in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects is often recognized as the birth for the Appalachian Trail.

And if anyone deserves the title of “the father of the AT” it is MacKaye. He had a somewhat utopian vision for a series of work and farming camps along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, with a great trail connecting them, from the highest point in the North (Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina). But MacKaye’s focus was not on hiking or the trail itself, but on a communitarian retreat from the city life and work.

MacKaye, a regional planner, promoted his idea within his large network of friends and colleagues in Washington, New York, and Boston.

Although MacKaye had the vision it was others who did the actual work to make the trail a reality. New York newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey organized a work crew to cut the first AT-specific miles in Harriman–Bear Mountain State Park under the leadership of Maj. William A. Welch. It was Welch who expanded the goal to “Maine to Georgia,” and designed the diamond shaped marker still in use on the trail today.

More organization was need so the first Appalachian Trail conference was convened in 1925. Their stated purpose was to organize “a body of workers (representative of outdoor living and of the regions adjacent to the Appalachian range) to complete the building of the Appalachian Trail.” An organization of that name was formed, and Maj. Welch was named its first chair.

Real headway began when a retired Connecticut judge, Arthur Perkins, and a young federal lawyer in Washington, Myron H. Avery, took charge of the efforts as a hiking-focused cause.

Perkins died in 1932, and Avery carried on the work. Avery is an important figure in this story. He led a small corps of activists, numbering perhaps 200, in identifying and blazing routes.

They established local clubs from Pennsylvania to Georgia, set standards for the trail, and published guidebooks and maps.

They also negotiated with national parks and other federal agencies for land use and rights of way. It is extraordinary that a totally volunteer effort could accomplish such an undertaking.

But it wasn’t always pretty, and Berkshire County is a good example of how difficult it was to put all the pieces together and get everybody to work together.

Massachusetts got an early start, but was one of the last states to finally complete the trail.

Benton MacKaye was from Massachusetts and his article about an Appalachian Trail in 1922 immediately inspired nature writer Walter Pritchard Eaton to outline a route through the Berkshires.

Eaton’s route was not the one we have today. It started by using existing trails on Mt. Everett and going in a northeasterly direction until October Mountain Forest, much as the trail does today. North of that, however, his trail went west, south of Pittsfield, and then went along the ridge of the Taconics all the way to Mt. Greylock. From there he proposed following the Bellows Pipe Trail rather than the ridge to its west that the trail follows today.

Eaton organized some Berkshire schoolboys to work on the trail, but the effort sputtered and didn’t get much traction until 1928 when the Berkshire Hills Conference, a tourism organization, created a three-man Trails Committee. Eaton represented the south end, Archie Sloper represented the north and Mt. Greylock, and Franklin Couch of Dalton represented the middle.

Couch was a popular civic leader who was a scout leader of a large Boy Scout troop in Dalton and the hill-towns. He was our member Charles Sawyer’s fathers scout leader. Under Couch’s leadership, from 1928 to 1931 the Berkshire Hills Conference group cut a nearly complete trail from Connecticut to Vermont.

The Williams Outing Club and a Williamstown school principal named John B. Clarke cut trails in the north. Sloper and some local Boy Scouts cut the southern flank of Greylock. Couch and his Boy Scouts cut trails around Dalton. A Pittsfield man, S. Waldo Bailey cut much of rest. But they never quite finished it.

So far this was a purely local effort, but in 1931 the Berkshire Chapter of the AMC, which despite its name was dominated by leaders from Springfield and the Pioneer Valley, started sending work crews to the AT independently from the locals. Without communication between the two groups they worked at cross-purposes, cutting different routes and even taking down markers from the other group.

As you can imagine the involvement of “outsiders” didn’t go down well and a schism ensued between the groups. Eventually, in 1931, Myron Avery from the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) made two trips to the Berkshires to see if he could resolve the problem.

He didn’t. He may well have made it worse. Avery may have misread the situation, but in any case he ended up siding with the Berkshire Chapter of the AMC, who were then given authority for the trail.

Spurned by the ATC, Couch and the other actual builders of much of the trail withdrew.

The Berkshire Chapter of the AMC finally completed the Trail during the years 1932 to 1935. But the alienation of the locals made it hard to get workers for trail maintenance and the Berkshire portion of trail fell into disarray.

Between 1937 and 1940 two groups stepped up to rescue the trail, the Mount Greylock Ski Club, and Metawampe, the faculty outing club of U. Mass in Amherst. (The story of this schism is told in detail in Waterman’s Forest and Crag, p. 498-503)

The story of the problems in the Berkshires hints at what it took to get the whole trail completed with volunteers. After all, the Berkshire section in only 90 miles out of more than 2000. Any of you who have served as selectman of a small town or on a church board knows what it is like to get things accomplished with volunteers. The Berkshire story is just one of many in how this monumental trail got built.

But finally the entire AT officially opened on August 14, 1937. It faced challenges from the beginning. Born during the Great Depression and in a few years came the start of World War II, when gas rationing limited travel.

The end of World War II brought opportunities to fix the trail, but also brought new challenges in the form of rapidly expanding residential and highway development.

At this time nearly half the AT was still either on roads or used rights of way on private property that newly affluent people wanted for vacation homes. The battle between public use and private property has continued throughout the life of the trail.

In 1948 Earl V. Shaffer, a Pennsylvania veteran who said he was “walking off the war,” reported to a disbelieving Avery at the ATC that he had just walked the entire length of the trail in a single journey of less than five months. Shaffer had become the first successful thru-hiker of the AT. He would do it twice more, in 1965 and in 1998, 50 years after his first time. He was 79, the oldest person to accomplish it, a record he held until 2004.

Ironically, the founders of the AT had never envisioned an individual hiking the entire trail in a single season, and had dismissed the idea as a stunt. A popular one it turns out. Now every year thousands attempt a thru hike. Only about 1 in 4 finish it, about 600 a year in the past several years.

By the early 1960’s the popularity of the trail had outrun the capacity of its volunteers to run and maintain it. Long established rights of way were being lost to development and a crisis was looming.

Another important figure in this story is Stanley A. Murray, who would become the ATC’s second-longest-serving chair. Murray worked to both reenergize the ATC (by building up its base of individual members), and also to revive the idea of the federal government’s protecting of the AT and its surrounding lands from adverse development. This was something that both MacKaye and Avery had advocated.

On October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Trails System Act (NTSA), creating within the national park and forest systems a new class of public lands, national scenic trails, with the AT and the unfinished Pacific Crest Trail the first to be so designated.

States were encouraged to acquire lands for the AT, and the National Park Service (NPS), with administrative responsibility for it all, and USDA Forest Service authorized to do so. The ATC soon hired its first two employees.

In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law amendments to the NTSA directing federal agencies to move forward and authorizing almost $100 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for that purpose.

The most complicated public-land acquisition program in history was begun; NPS formed an AT Project Office and special AT Land Acquisition Office.

The ATC had to manage what would become more than 250,000 acres of public land, an estate with one of the greatest troves of natural and cultural resources in the entire national park system

In July 2005 the Appalachian Trail Conference changed of its name to Appalachian Trail Conservancy, still volunteer-based. The cooperation of volunteers with state and federal agencies has allowed the trail to flourish despite unprecedented use never foreseen by its early founders.

What began as an ad hoc enterprise by a loose collection of regional and local volunteers is today a large and efficient organization of cooperation between volunteers and agencies.

The result of which is that the AT is currently protected along more than 99 percent of its course by federal or state ownership of the land or by right-of-way. Each year an estimate of more than 4,000 volunteers contribute over 175,000 hours of effort to maintain it.

I’ve said a lot about the history and organization of the AT, but not much about the trail itself. So let me offer a highly selective and impressionistic picture of the trail as I have experienced it.

Here in Massachusetts the AT enters our southern border from Connecticut at Sages Ravine. Sages Ravine has a series of falls and cascades that are beautiful in any season, but spectacular when there has been a lot of rain or snow melt. Since most of the AT has been logged at one time or another it is rare to see old growth forest, but there is some at Sages Ravine.

This southerly most section of the trail is also one of the most challenging for the hiker, as the trail takes one over numerous rock faces, many of them during climbs. It was near here the very first day I hiked with poles that I lost my footing on a rock face and broke one of my new poles.

The trail goes through the beautiful Race Brook Falls before it climbs to Mount Race, which has lovely open views of the southern Berkshires and Connecticut. The trail then climbs to the highest peak in the southern Taconic Range, Mount Everett (2,602 ft.).

Descending from the summit the trail skirts the edge of Guilder Pond (where I usually have a swim in the hot weather) and then climbs along a rocky ridge before descending steeply to Jug End Road and down to the Housatonic River Valley. If you make this descant in the fall after a rain you are likely to slip and slide all the way down on the wet leaves.

The trail crosses Rt 7 south of Great Barrington and meanders in a general northeasterly direction through East Mountain, Beartown, and October Mountain State Forests.

There is a Shelter at Upper Goose Pond that has a caretaker during the hiking season. It was here I met a German engineer who had quit his job and come over to thru-hike the AT. North of here the trail goes over the Massachusetts Turnpike on a footbridge

The Trail goes by Finnerty Pond, where one of the weirdest of my AT experiences took place. Several of us Monday Mountain Boys were sitting on logs having our lunch when we heard someone coming towards us on the AT from the North loudly reciting what I thought was Shakespeare. The sound got louder and louder as the hiker approached until a young man finally emerged and greeted us. It wasn’t Shakespeare but “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It turns out this solo thru hiker was doing the International AT, with extensions north into Canada and South of Georgia. He carried a poetry anthology with him, and at night he would memorize poems and recite them aloud on the trail. He said, “It also alerted any black bears to his coming.”

Before the trail passes through the town of Dalton there is one of my favorite parts, from Kirchner Rd. to Grange Hall Rd. which takes you over Warner Hill, a small outcropping with beautiful views to the North and Mt. Greylock. At this point you are just East of the City of Pittsfield. I once met a couple of thru-hikers at Warner Hill who were waiting to get picked up by the sales staff at Eastern Mountain Sports at the Berkshire Mall in Lanesboro so they could buy new boots.

Another curious thing I have noticed at Warner Hill. You have to step off the AT and walk a few feet to see the nice view. Sometimes you will see thru-hikers make the turn and never look up. In fairness they are fighting time and the weather, but sometimes miss the sights.

North of Warner Hill is Kay Wood Shelter, one of the 15 huts and shelters in the Berkshire part of the AT, and named after an active AMC volunteer from Dalton who was once in a Bible study with me.

The trail goes through Dalton towards Cheshire to another of my favorites, Cheshire Cobble, a large outcropping with good views of Mt. Greylock and the Hoosic River Valley.

In the town of Cheshire the AT crosses the Ashuwilticook Rail Trail, crosses Rt 8 and climbs along the ridge of the Greylock massif before reaching the summit of My Greylock, the highest point in the state at 3,491 feet. As at Sages Ravine another rare old growth forest may be seen on parts of the Hopper nearby.

Another interesting fact about Mt. Greylock is that for thru-hikers coming from the south it is the first sub-alpine region they will have seen since  Mt. Rogers in Virginia. Mt. Greylock has a large sub alpine region, the only such forest in Massachusetts, extending down to 3,000 feet, which in the south would be far from the sub-alpine cutoff. This is a result of Mt. Greylock’s powerful prevailing westerly winds, as the summits along its ridgeline rise approximately 200 feet to 650 feet higher than any other peak in Massachusetts.

From the top of Mt. Greylock you get clear views in all directions. To the South you can see Pittsfield’s two lakes, Pontoosuc and Onota (less than a mile from my house) and Bousquet Ski Area and South Mt. To the East you can see the town of Adams and the Hoosic Range and all the way to Mt. Wachusett on a clear day. To the North you can see Williamstown and the Green Mountains of Vermont (and Mt. Monadnock in NH to the NE). To the West you can see the Taconic Range and New York State.

From the summit of Greylock the trail quickly descends to the valley within 2 miles of North Adams and Williamstown, before ascending again through the Clarksburg State Forest to the Vermont state line where it connects with the Long Trail.

The Berkshire Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club still maintains the trail throughout Massachusetts. Volunteer trail-masters are each assigned a portion of the trail that they are responsible for looking after. They walk the trail, noticing fallen trees, water problems, and erosion. The pick up litter and organize work groups.

Another group that looks after the trail are the AMC Ridgerunners, a group of about thirty young adults who travel the length of the AT and serve as ambassadors and educators, as well as unofficial cops with no legal authority. They use instead the “authority of the resource” to educate rather than scold the errant hiker walking off trail or washing dishes in a stream. They also carry some first aid supplies, which I have availed myself of after skinning a knee near  Mt. Everett.

What else needs to be said about the AT? Well, for one thing the trail is more frequently hiked from South to North. These northbound hikers typically begin in early April and finish in late summer or early fall. Southbound hikers typically begin in June. Northbound hikers are called NOBO (Northbound) or GAME (Georgia to Maine) and southbound hikers are called SOBO or MEGA. The entire trail is blazed with 2 by 6 inch white paint blazes. In my Boy Scout days there were metal markers, but they are rare today.

As mentioned hikers who attempt to complete the trail from end to end in one season are called “thru-hikers,” while those who complete it in separate trips are called “section hikers.” “Flipfloppers” complete the trail within 12 months using an alternate itinerary.

Thru-hikers are often given trail nicknames called trail names. These are often whimsical. A friend of mine from the Monday Mountain Boys who is wiry and a fast hiker was known as “Slimfast.”

Some people bring their dogs on the trail, but dogs are not allowed in the Smokies or in Baxter Park in Maine and must be kenneled during those portions of the trail. Guide dogs, however, are permitted and in 1990 a hiker named Bill Irwin, who is blind, hiked the trail with his dog Orient.

What is the future of the AT? To a great extent it has been a victim of its own success. The backpacking boon of the last quarter of the 20th century to our time has put more people on the trail than were ever imagined. In heavily traveled areas such as the White Mountains erosion from overuse can easily be seen. The advent of hiking poles has added new holes along the trail. Volunteers work tirelessly to maintain the trail, rerouting worn areas, limiting access to endangered portions. The tension between access to the trail and its conservation is a constant struggle.

As my story comes to an end let me put in a word that hiking on the trail is far superior to hearing a paper about it. From the hardiest thru-hiker to the most leisurely dog walker the AT offers great opportunities to get outdoors and enjoy all its benefits.

The section from Kirchner Rd. to Warner Hill can be walked in less than half an hour with one of the best views in the county. As we have seen, it took many people to put this great trail together, and it still takes many volunteers to keep it maintained. We are in their debt.

*Harold Salzmann, Club secretary

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Red and Blue Divided by 11 = Purple: The rival regional cultures of America

Presented to the Club by Jack Spencer on Monday evening, Feb. 27, 2012

This paper is dedicated to Martin [Langeveld], in appreciation for all that he does by making us part of the cyber world by posting our essays online.  But even more than the dedication is that, against all my instinctual inclinations, I have written this paper out so it can join the ranks of all the illustrative essays that are already there.  It will also mean that the club will have a reasonable dismissal time as an organized, written paper will mean that I ad lib less.

Before I partially explain my title, “Red and Blue Divided by 11 = Purple,” let me first express my regret that a title was not created which would get more hits, so that it would, at least, be in the top four.  An alternative title was thought up, “Sex & More Sex Divided by Catholic Bishops’ View of Birth Control = Rick Santorum on Steroids.”  This title would do quite well and might start a trend in the club that, rather than obscure titles, there will be titles that have even less to do with the paper being presented but will contain key words which will get hits, i.e. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, Giants and Super Bowl.

But back to my original topic and where it came from.  For many years, especially since the way the 2000 Presidential election was decided (and despite a period of hope with Obama’s election in 2008), I have been quite concerned about the divisions in our society and the inability to reach pragmatic and reasonable solutions to issues such as an understandable and fair tax code, modifications to social security so it is safe for the next 30-40 years, environmental trade-offs so real changes take place, transportations bill, etc., etc.  Some issues such as Medicare and the health system are more complex.  We appear to be unable, in many areas, to function in the 21^st century.

The reasons are many and this essay just means to touch on (1) defining some of the issues (2) presenting some theories on the complexity we have become.

In Colin Woodard’s book, On American Nations, he argues that it is too simplistic to describe us as red and blue states, with a few that are purple that can shift either way, such as Colorado.  We are eleven rival regional cultures.  This map I am handing out (it is the teacher in me) shows where the eleven are and what Woodard has labeled them.  Since we in the Monday Evening Club have people born outside of Yankeedom and many who have lived a variety of places in the United States, your vies in the discussion could be interesting.  For the sake of full disclosure, I am Yankeedom every which way, from ancestors to where I have lived.  Instead of the slogan, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts,” it should have been, “Don’t blame me, I’m from the steadfast Yankeedom.”

Here is a summary of Woodard’s thesis and clarification of his 11 nations.

But first, it is important to define what he means by the word “nation.”  It is not a state, a sovereign political entity, such as New Zealand or China.  “A nation is a group of people who share – or believe they share – a common culture, ethnic origin, historical experience, artifacts and symbols.  North America’s eleven nations are all stateless.”

Because of this, Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth.  There has never been one America.  He states, “America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red and blue states, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular.  Rather…that the United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations.

Rather than decreasing in the 21^st century, the “fault lines between North America’s regional interests have been growing even wider, fueling cultural wars, Constitutional struggles, and alarmingly frequent lease for unit.  Fox example – why are people still divided over such fundamental issues as whether the United States is a Christian nation or a secular one?”

These regional nations have regarded each other as competitors for political power and even as enemies, i.e. Civil War, cultural upheavals of the 1960s, and the upcoming Federal election for President and Congress.  They all continue to uphold their distinguishing ideals today with results that can be seen in the composition of the US Congress today or a county by county election may of almost every competitive presidential election.  As Tip O’Neil said, “All politics are local.”

1. Yankeedom – Founded by radical Calvinists…a cultures that put great emphasis on education, local political control and the pursuit of the great good, faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives, believe in social engineering, has a middle class ethos and considerable respect for intellectual achievement.  It has been locked in nearly perpetual combat with the deep South for control of the federal government.


2. New Netherland – Short-lived but has had a lasting impact by laying down the cultural DNA for what is now greater New York City – profound tolerance for diversity and a commitment to freedom of inquiry.  Today its influence over media, publishing, fashion and intellectual and economic life is hard to overstate.


3. Midlands – Most “American” of the nations.  Founded by English Quakers – spawned the culture of Middle American and the Heartland.  Skeptical of top-down governmental intervention.  Key swing vote in every national debate.  Moderating force.


4. Tidewater – Fundamentally conservative region – high value placed on respect for authority and tradition.  Played a central role in the writing of the Constitution.  Nation in decline – losing out to the spread of the Midlands.


5. Greater Appalachia – Scots-Irish, Scots and north England frontiersmen.  Suspicious of aristocrats and social references.  Warrior ethic.  Provided many of the nation’s military, rednecks, white trash, NASCAR.


6. Deep South – Bastion of white supremacy, aristocrats, privilege.  It remains the least democratic of the nations.  Center of state’s rights movement, racial segregation, and labor and environmental deregulation.  Locked in an epic battle with Yankeedom and left coast for the future of the nation.


7. New France – Near Canada, with New Orleans here.  Not important for this paper.


8. El Norte – Long has been a hybrid between Anglo & Spanish America.  Far our prediction is that by the end of the 21^st century, El Norte in the US and northern Mexico become a new sovereign state.  But today the Hispanic population is becoming more important.  This past week’s cover of Time magazine is Yo Decido – Why Latinos will pick the next President.


9. Left Coast – Has a strong strain of New England intellectualism and idealism even as it embrace a culture of individual fulfillment.  Been the birthplace of modern environmental movement and the global information revolution, gay rights movement.  Closest ally of Yankeedom, it battles constantly against the libertarian-corporate agenda for the far West.


10. Far West – With a few exceptions, this area could not be effectively developed without the deployment of vast individual resources – so much of it was done by large corporations (railroads) or by the Federal government (Hoover Dam).  Created a paradox of reviling the Federal government for interfering, while demanding it continue to receive federal money.


11. First Nation – Mainly Canada, except for Alaska and casinos in the US Vast region.  Starting to emerge as a force.

But are not we a melting pot?  Have not public education, popular culture, intermarriage, moving from one nation to another, sports, etc. etc.?  No, replies Woodard – they have altered but mainly assimilated into the culture around them – not replaced it.  “Doctrine of First Effective Settlement.”

And also since 1976, Americans have been relocating to communities where people share these values and world view.  The proportion of voters living in landslide counties for one party (a victory margin of 20%) increased from 26.8 per cent in 1976 to 4 per cent in 2004.

Of course, these boundaries are not set in stone, they’ve shifted before and they will undoubtedly shift again.  Culture is always on the move.

It is also very complex.  In any particular locality you will find minority enclaves, i.e. Mormons Far West, Republican towns in Berkshire County.

He argues that in the 20^th century, the alliance of Yankeedom, Left Coast and New Netherland have been the main influence on the federal government, that even Republican Presidents, such as Nixon and Eisenhower, “saw the quest for betterment of the ‘common good’ as best achieved through the creation of a frugal, competent, and effective government supported by a strong tax base and able to ensure the availability and prudent management of shares assets.”  But in the past 20 years, the Republican party has become the vehicle of less government, less taxes, less intrusion as noted by the very few Republicans who voted for health care overhaul, financial reform and for Clinton’s impeachment.  The block created by bringing together Deep South, Greater Appalachia and Tidewater accounts for the difficulty of Mitt Romney to be embraced.

This makes the swing areas (purples) Midlands, El Norte and the Far West.  Midlands so truly middle of the road and never sides unambiguously with one coalition, candidate or movement.  It also straddles but does not control many of the key battleground states such as Ohio and Missouri.  Far West as described before is a bit contradictory – less government regulations but wants federal money.  Also has a strong libertarian streak – balks at restriction on dissent and civil liberties.

But the future Woodard claims and the balance of power will “be shaped by the rapidly growing, increasingly assertive Hispanics of El Norte – inroad in New Mexico, south Texas, southern Arizona, southern California, Nevada and Colorado.  He argues that with Dixie ad Far West railing against the dangers of Mexican immigrants, El Norte can be expected to back the Northern bloc for some time to come.

Does this spell doom for the Republican Party?  Not necessarily, but it means that they need to nominate a Hispanic from California or Texas that has Yankeedom ideas.  Right now it does not appear to be likely this year, unless Rick Santorum goes to the mountain and receives a new ten commandments.

Woodard even speculates that it might have been good for the Deep South to have left the union.  But that is another paper.  He also states, “One thing is certain:  if Americans seriously want the United States to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union.  The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.”

Before I end, a digression will take place and a quiz will be given to you.  Here is a sample of four questions of the 25:

1. Have you ever lived in a neighborhood for at least a year in an American neighborhood in which a majority of your 50 nearest neighbors probably did not have a college education?


2. During the last month have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking a cigarette?


3. During the past five years, have you or your spouse gone fishing?


4. Have you ever watched an Oprah, Dr. Phil or Judge Judy show all the way through?

The scoring is not simple, so I have provided you with all 25 questions and how to score your answers.  Not now, but at your leisure.  Highest score wins a six pack of Budweiser to bring with him and his significant other to Lebanon Valley Speedway.

All this is from a book – Coming Aport: The State of White America 1960-2010 – by Charles Murray, in which he argues our nation is coming apart at the seams (recent statistics on children born to single mothers).  He argues white upper class still practice the “virtues” of family, marriage, work hard, importance of education, but that the upper class has become isolated from the middle and lower classes – i.e. disparity in income, zip code addresses, etc.

But thanks to Martin, I must not elaborate on this or Part 3 that I had as writing my paper out has made me realize that enough is enough.

So what is the predication for the future?  It is fun to speculate and will be even more interesting to see.  What I do know is that in 2028 (a Presidential election year), on a Monday evening in the Berkshires, there will be a group hosted by someone as gracious and warm as Bob Anderson and a paper listened to by a caring and thoughtful group which may or may not include women.

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The long haul: The Erie Canal's place in the growth of a nation

Photo by mcgmatt, via Flickr, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Albert Easton for on Monday evening, January 16, 2012

“As a bond between the Atlantic and Western states, it may prevent the dismemberment of the American Empire.  The most fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of its facilities for a market.  All their surplus productions will concentrate in the city of New York, for transportation abroad or consumption at home.  And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.”  In 1816, when New York governor Dewitt Clinton wrote those words, James Madison was president of the new and struggling country, the United States.  His predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, had scoffed at the idea of a canal across New York State, but Madison was more neutral, and actually was persuaded to sponsor a bill in congress providing some funding.  The United States was financially exhausted, however, from the costs of the War of 1812, and the bill went nowhere.

However, Clinton was successful in persuading the New York legislature to support the canal building effort, and it became known later as “Clinton’s Ditch”.  The advocate who had sold the idea to Clinton was named Jesse Hawley.  Hawley had gone bankrupt from trying to get the huge quantities of grain he had been growing on his western New York real estate shipped to market.  It was from debtor’s prison in Canandaigua that he began his agitation for a canal along the 90 mile long Mohawk River valley, and with the help of friends (including land speculator Joseph Ellicott, who later became the first canal commissioner) sold the idea to Clinton.

The project presented enormous challenges, of course.  The total rise from the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie is 600 feet, and the tallest locks available in 1800 could handle only 12 feet – thus a minimum of 50 locks over that 360 mile distance.  The costs would be enormous, and almost beyond the early nineteenth century imagination.  Nevertheless, the New York legislature eventually committed the then huge sum of seven million dollars to the project, and work began on the 4^th of July 1817.

Like any large financial commitment, the canal required elaborate funding.  The bill passed by the legislature established the Canal Fund, to be administered by elected officials, and funded by a loan from the state to be repaid from toll revenues.  The Canal fund also received revenue from the sale of state land near the proposed canal route, and the inevitable state lotteries.  Taxes designated for the Canal fund were on those who would benefit most from it: salt (it was plentiful in the canal region, and expensive to ship without it), steamboat travel (expected to increase greatly on the Hudson) and land within 25 miles of the proposed canal route.

The site for the start of work was well chosen.  The area from Rome, New York to Utica is fairly level, and a stretch of about 15 miles could be completed without locks, thus enabling a part of the canal to be put in to service the year after it was built.  This, of course, helped to sell the rest of the building effort.  The original canal was cut 40 feet wide, and 4 feet deep, with the removed soil piled on the downhill side to form a tow path.  Canal boats, then, could be up to 3.5 feet in draft, and pulled by horses or mules on the towpath.

There was only one towpath, generally on the north side of the canal.  When canal boats met, the boat with the right-of-way steered to the towpath side, and the other boat steered to the opposite side.  The driver of the mules on the right-of-way boat brought his mules to the canal side of the towpath while the other driver took the other side of the path and stopped his team.  The rope would go slack as the boat continued on by momentum.  The right-of-way team would step over the slack rope; the right of way boat would pass over it, and both would continue on.

As you might expect in any massive project, there were a lot of problems that had to be dealt with in building the canal.  The digging wasn’t all through marsh or farmland – some cuts had to be made through hard limestone, all with little more than the power of the muscles of men and animals.  Fairly often, the route of the canal cut a farm in half, and the state had to provide bridges over the canal.  In an effort to keep expenses down (and minimize the problem of getting livestock over the bridge), the bridges were not very high.  Not only did this put limits on the size of boats that could travel the canal, but it also resulted in the famous cry of: “Low Bridge, Everybody Down”.  Anyone caught on the high part of the deck as it passed under a bridge would have suffered unpleasant consequences.

There were some other difficulties in building the canal.  Dependable water sources had to be found to keep the canal and the locks full in all those seasons when the canal was open (it froze in winter, of course), and in several cases, aqueducts had to be built to provide them.  Aqueducts also had to be built to carry the canal itself over rivers and streams that were not active sources of water.  Not only did these aqueducts have to carry water, they had to provide for a towpath, so they were combination aqueducts and bridges.  The aqueduct over the Mohawk River from Rexford to Schenectady was one of the longest – 610 feet, but there were many others. 

The United States had no one who called himself a civil engineer before the building of the canal.  All the several geniuses who designed and managed the work were amateurs – lawyers, storekeepers, but later deservedly considered engineers.  None had seen firsthand the canals of Europe, but had to rely on written accounts of their design and operation.

The expertise of the engineers in this massive building effort would have meant nothing without the efforts of huge numbers of laborers.  While most of the canal laborers were native born, or immigrants from various other countries, canal folklore revolves around those who were Irish immigrants.  The Irish immigrants were more often single men without families, and tended to form their own social group.  Pay for the laborers was quite generous, and sometimes included room, board, and liquor.   The work was steady, but necessarily seasonal, and many found the winters hard to endure without any income.

All work for laborers was hard in the early 19^th century, and canal work was no exception.   Massive charges of gunpowder were used to help channel through some of the rocks, and attendant injuries were not infrequent.  In the course of building a channel through the swamp around the finger lakes, over a thousand were stricken with what appears to have been a mosquito-borne disease, and many died.

But all in a good cause.  On October 26, 1825, the canal was finally completed.  A fleet set out from Buffalo on October 6 headed by the boat Seneca Chief.  The Seneca Chief carried a large party of dignitaries, headed of course, by Governor Clinton, and was met along the way with celebratory cannon fire at its many stops.  It did not end its journey at Albany, but continued down the Hudson to New York, a trip totaling 500 miles.  There, in New York harbor, Governor Clinton emptied two barrels of water from Lake Erie into the ocean, in a ceremony that came to be called “The Wedding of the Waters.”

Many sections of the canal had been open for some time when the full length opened in October 1825, and commercial traffic was already well established.  Canal boats were capable of carrying 30 tons of freight, and this was a vast improvement over any form of overland transportation.  Eastbound cargos frequently consisted of lumber from the still nearly virgin forests of the Midwest, and grain from the Midwestern farms.  Westbound the traffic was usually manufactured goods from the quickly growing factories of the Northeast.

Passenger traffic began to increase too.  The trip by canal boat across the state was not only quicker, but far more comfortable than a trip by horse or stagecoach.  The boats were about 15 feet wide and forty feet long.  A special attraction for travelers was the food on board.  Here is a description from a boat captain:   "Breakfast: The meal may consist of a pike or bass, fresh caught on my overnight trawl line, a steak, bacon, sausage and ham;  a platter of scrambled eggs, boiled cabbage and squash, bread (both corn and white), pancakes (both wheat and buckwheat) with sorghum, maple, or honey to choice, and to wash all down, coffee, tea, milk, and cider.  Dinner will be heartier."

The journey across the state took several days, and passengers slept on board.  Here is a description from David Wilkie whose Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas describes his journey in the early summer of 1834:

There was a good company on board, considering the size of our vessel – about thirty gentlemen, and half as many ladies.  Four steps broad and 21 feet long was the size of our sleeping and dining cabin, and here, a score and a half of us had to be stowed away.  When we descended from deck between 8 and 9 o’clock, before the retiring hour, we found all the sleeping apparatus displayed in full form. On each side of the long narrow space were hung three tiers of canvas-bottomed frames, hardly broad enough to allow the occupant to stretch himself on his back, and three lengthwise, in all, affording accommodation for eighteen, and our surplus number had to betake themselves to the more humble couch afforded by the floor.



Our berths were allotted to us by precedence as our names were placed on the way-bill. When each cognomen was sung out by the captain, the individual doffed boots, coat and vest, and hoisted himself into place.  I contrived with little difficulty to crawl into my lair, and although enjoying less room, I believe, than if I had been a mummy in one of the pyramids, I passed a very unconscious and refreshing night.  

Wilkie was fortunate to have traveled in decent weather.  Many travelers complained of the excessive heat and stuffiness of the canal boat sleeping quarters.

Once the canal was opened, the problems of maintenance and repair began.  There were two kinds of problems – too much water and too little.  Actually, the results of both were the same.  Too much water caused breaks in the canal wall that ultimately left boats high and dry.  Walkers were assigned to pass along the tow path looking for weak spots that might cause problems at the next time of high water.  Inability for boats to move through the canal was a serious problem, of course.  An upstate newspaper from the 1830’s describes one such occurrence: “The break in the canal early last Saturday gave a few hundred canal men a rest they didn’t want, and cost them a lot of money they couldn’t afford to lose.  The lay-up came in the way of a bonanza of restfulness to horses and crews, but it was as welcome as sulfuric torments to the owners who saw drivers and steersmen with hearty appetites for corned beef and cabbage and horses eating their heads off in solemn ease with their noses buried in hay or oats.”

The reference to corned beef and cabbage, of course, is proof that many of the Irish laborers who had built the canal later became its steersmen, drivers and captains.  Canal men very often had no wives or families, they too seldom stayed in one place.  In Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick, Melville describes two canalers who have shipped on as part of the crew of a whale boat, the Town-Ho, and are the first to follow and last to abandon the rebellious Steelkilt in his attempt at mutiny.  Canal men were considered a tough lot.  One observer was quoted as saying “The boys who drive the horses [on the canal] are the most profane beings on the face of this whole earth, without exception.”

Then, also, the folklore of the canal is full of tales of the fearful storms that took place.  These are part of that staple of 19^th century humor, the tall tale.  Consider this example from Mark Twain in Roughing It:

On the Erie Canal it was, all on a summer’s day, I sailed forth with my parents, far away to Albany.

From out the clouds at noon that day there came a dreadful storm, that piled the billows high about and filled us with alarm.

Our captain cast one glance astern, then forward glanced he, and said my wife and little ones, I nevermore shall see.

The exaggeration we are supposed to swallow is that storms on the canal were as fearful as those at sea.  They were not pleasant of course, because breaks could occur in the canal wall, stranding boats.  But with a depth of only four feet, there weren’t likely to be a lot of drownings.

We need to understand the canal as more like a road than a waterway.  Its purpose was never to move or provide water, but to move people and goods from one place to another using the only motive power then available – draft animals.  At this it was quite effective, but looming on the horizon was the next great technological wonder of the 19^th century – steam power.  In 1807, many years before the canal was started, Robert Fulton’s steamboat had begun commercial service on the Hudson from New York to Albany.  In fact, Fulton was a member of the first canal commission, and a strong supporter.  Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, made the trip from New York to Albany in 32 hours on a regular basis.  By the 1830’s, helped by the extra traffic generated by the canal, there were over a hundred steamboats making the run and the time was down to ten hours. 

It was inevitable that steam power should next be applied to overland travel – by use of railroads.  In fact the Erie Canal spawned the earliest American railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson line, between Albany and Schenectady.  There is a rise of 215 feet between the two cities, and in the 19^th century this required 27 locks.  The journey of 16 miles between the two cities took a full day.  This was fine and acceptable for commercial cargoes.  It was most convenient that they be loaded from river to canal transportation only once.  But for passengers this added an extra and unnecessary day.  Even by horse or couch the journey was much quicker overland.  But as soon as the canal opened, a company was formed by, among others, Stephen Van Rensselaer, the patron and owner of most of Albany County, to operate a railroad over the route.  The railroad, chartered as the Mohawk and Hudson, began service in 1831, using a steam engine and cutting the time of passage down to 40 minutes. 

Other railroads quickly followed.  By 1842, the Boston and Albany line was moving goods and people from New England to the canal, and about the same time a line from Albany to Buffalo paralleled the canal.  For moving goods, it could not compete well on cost, but it was much faster because it avoided all the lock time that canal transportation required.

So the railroads and the canal and the nation grew up together.  The canal was widened and deepened in 1862, and in 1903 the entire canal was replaced by the barge canal.  The barge canal made some material changes in the route.  For example, instead of paralleling the Mohawk River, canal traffic now travels on it from Schenectady to Little Falls. There is, of course, no longer a towpath.  Vessels using the canal must now supply their own motive power.  And the locks have become much higher than they could have been in the original canal.  There are now only 8 locks between Albany and Schenectady.  More pleasure boats than commercial boats use the canal these days, but it is still open all the way from Albany to Buffalo.

Some authors on the canal put more emphasis on the role of the canal in the development of the nation than it may deserve.   It is certainly true that the city of Chicago and the entire Midwest went through a period of tremendous growth in the 1830’s and 40’s, and much of this was made possible by the canal.  But given the resources of the prairies, that growth was inevitable, and would have occurred with the help of the railroads, although perhaps somewhat later.  In any case, the canal was a triumph of American industry and ingenuity, and is an important part of our history.

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The mark of a champion: Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers

Presented to the Club by Erik Bruun on Monday evening, December 12, 2011









1. If you can walk, you can run



The best athlete I have ever known was a friend from college named Henry Fox. Henry had been the New England cross-country ski champion in high school. When I became a coxswain on the Trinity College freshman crew team, Henry was the strongest rower on the Trinity varsity lightweight team, the fastest lightweight boat in the country. He was the kind of person an underclassman like me aspired to be. He was funny, enthusiastic and drove himself incredibly hard. One of his favorite ways to push himself on a run was to pick a spot 100 feet away and hold his breath tightly until he reached the destination, his lungs exploding for oxygen upon arrival.



Henry loved to recite Vince Lombardi sayings and stories. "If you can walk, you can run," he crooned with delight. He told of a time Lombardi's Green Bay Packers played a particularly lackluster first half. As the players waited in the locker room, dreading the fury of their notoriously fiery coach, Lombardi instead opened the door, stuck his head in and with a surprised look declared: "Oh, I'm sorry. I was looking for the men's room." He closed the door and left, letting the players stew in their own shortcomings. The Packers stormed back on to the field and won the game.



Until last summer, Henry's stories about Lombardi were about as much knowledge I had about the legendary coach, other than the cartoon-like mythology of the NFL. To me, Lombardi was a string of clichés. When a theatrical group came to Great Barrington to work out the kinks on their pending Broadway production about Vince Lombardi, they offered to donate proceeds of their opening performance to Monument Mountain High School. A friend asked me to go and having nothing else to do that evening, I went. This was not a play about football, it was about the struggle to achieve perfection, knowing that it is not going to be reached, but embracing the full depths of that struggle. Vince Lombardi, I thought, is a perfect Monday Evening topic. The play was based on the book When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss. It is the primary source for this paper. The title of this paper comes from a saying of Lombardi’s: “The mark of a champion is not whether you fall, it is whether you get back up again.”



2. The Smallness of Reality



Vince Lombardi was born June 11, 1913, the eldest of five children to Matilda and Harry Lombardi in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, New York. His parents, immigrants from southern Italy, were devout Catholics from large, bustling families. Matty was known as a perfectionist, demanding high standards from all her children. Harry left his home every morning at 4:30 to a slaughterhouse on Manhattan's West Side. His job was to haul sides of meat. Tattooed across the knuckles of his two large hands were the words "Work" and "Play," two themes that marked his son's life.



Vince Lombardi's youth revolved around family, religion and sports. He was a strong, determined athlete, known more for his drive than his athletic talents. Lombardi was ambitious. When he spent a week working alongside his father in the Meat District, he quit, vowing not to end up doing manual labor. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer. Lombardi used football to get into Fordham University, then a powerhouse in the national college football scene. On the first day of practice, the head coach moved Lombardi from fullback to offensive guard, a position that called more for aggressiveness than size, which Lombardi really did not possess.



Lombardi took subways for an hour and a half each way to Fordham, a Jesuit school. One of his favorite classes was an enormously popular course on ethics. Lombardi seriously considered becoming a priest. The university imposed tight discipline. When Lombardi finally broke into the starting line as a junior, he was suspended for fighting when a fellow player jokingly called him a "dago" in the locker room. Lombardi erupted in fury, lunging at his teammate. Fortunately, he was reinstated on to the team the next year, becoming one of the legendary "Seven Blocks of Granite" that anchored Fordham's run as the national champion. Lombardi, however, was considered the slowest and least talented of the seven. When the season ended, his career as a football player also came to an end.



Lombardi wanted to get into the business world, but this was the Depression and he struggled to find work for two years before landing a job as a teacher and assistant coach at a small Catholic private school in Englewood, New Jersey, called St. Cecilia. He had recently married his wife Marie Planitz, but was frustrated by his slow start and the realization that his career might be centered around a game. His deep ambition transferred into an extraordinary drive to win. He was embarked on a similar struggle as the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, to reconcile "the intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality."



3. A Way to Live With Defeat



Lombardi learned how to be a teacher at St. Cecilia. In the classroom, he started with the basics — to teach to the slowest students and then build their knowledge up from there. He coached both basketball and football. Early in his 8-year tenure, the head football coach asked Lombardi to give the pep talk to the team before the game started. Lombardi went into a frenzy. "You haven't done anything for me this week," he roared at them. "Now go out there and show me what you've got!" The players stormed on to the field, ready to run through brick walls. Lombardi gave every pre-game speech after that. He soon became head coach, leading the best high school football team in New Jersey to 27 victories and 3 losses under his leadership. "I don't want any good losers around here," he told his players. "Good losing is just a way to live with yourself. It's a way to live with defeat."



Lombardi's success brought him into the college ranks, returning to Fordham as an assistant coach for two years and then to West Point where he was an assistant to Colonel Red Blaik for five years. General Douglas MacArthur took a strong personal interest in West Point's football team. While leading American forces in Korea northward to the Chinese border, MacArthur wrote long letters to Blaik offering advice on pending games. Lombardi often went to the New York City Waldorf Astoria Hotel to brief the general on the team's status, MacArthur in turn delivered talks to Lombardi on the paramount importance of victory at all costs. Blaik taught Lombardi how to run a professional organization, exacting high standards and imposing tight discipline. He introduced Lombardi on how to use films to study opposing teams.



In 1951, however, West Point went through one of its worst scandals when it was discovered that almost the entire football team had been cheating. Players informed each other on test questions, a blatant violation of the college's honor code. The scandal was national news and virtually every player was expelled from the school. There is no evidence that Lombardi knew anything about the violations until after the fact, but his sympathies clearly went to the players. As an immigrant son, he associated himself with the struggling up-and-comers that distinguished West Point's football players. He worked the phones with other college coaches to help players get into other universities. Lombardi also joined Blaik in not resigning. They knew that they would now have a terrible team, perhaps for years to come. Lombardi pushed the new players for perfection, and after two years West Point once again had a winning record.



The owner of the New York Giants, Wellington Mara, had been a classmate and acquaintance of Lombardi's at Fordham. Mara fired his coaching staff in 1954, and he hired Lombardi to be the offensive coordinator under head coach Jim Lee Howell. Lombardi was in his early 40s and ached to become a head coach. Mara implied that he would succeed Howell one day. Howell hired a promising young coach named Tom Landry as defensive coordinator. Landry and Lombardi respected each other, but they were not friends and they were very different. Lombardi had a brilliant, embracing smile; Landry a dour, distant grim. "You could hear Vince laughing from five blocks away," Mara said. "You couldn't hear Landry from the next chair." Both were extremely talented coaches and super competitive.



In his first year, the Giants scored 264 points, the most in the NFL. Lombardi gained a reputation as a sporting intellectual. The New York Daily News ran a photo spread with a large photo of Lombardi and a one-word headline "THINK!" Lombardi was no simple jock. Trained as a priest, and failing to enter law or business, Lombardi applied professionalism to his task and he demanded his players do the same. His signature play was the power sweep in which the ball is handed off to the running back who “sweeps” to the left or right. Every player takes on specific assignments to clear a path for him to run through. The play calls for aggressiveness, precise teamwork, and individual flexibility. These were Lombardi's trademarks. He once delivered an 8-hour talk about the power sweep and the various ways the play could unfold.



In 1958, the Giants lost the championship game in sudden death to the Baltimore Colts 23 to 17. Some people still call it the best game in football history. It was also Lombardi's last game with the Giants. The Green Bay Packers in way-off Wisconsin had offered Lombardi the job of head coach. The team, which is still the only NFL team owned by its community, had just gone through a season of one victory and ten losses. They wanted a change. Mara — who adored Lombardi--recommended he take the job. The news merited a single-paragraph notice in The New York Times.



4. A God-forsaken Place



Lombardi made an immediate impact on the Packers. The team’s committee-like ownership and governance structure had led to easy-going standards and an unfocused approach. Lombardi demanded and received total control of the team. He embraced that authority with a deep fullness, bringing a completely new attitude to the team. “You defeat defeatism with confidence,” Lombardi said, “and confidence comes from the man who leads. You just have it. It is not something you get. You have to have it right here in your belly.” Lombardi was driven to win, but he embraced losing as a learning opportunity. He was consistently harder on his teams if they won playing sloppy football, then if they lost but made a strong effort.

In his first year as head coach, the Packers were 7 and 5. Lombardi won Coach of the Year. The Associated Press declared of the national poll “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici — NFL’s Top Coach.” Lombardi coached the Packers for nine years. They won the national championship five times (1961, ‘62, ‘65, ‘66 and ‘67), including his final three seasons as head coach, which also corresponded with the first two Super Bowls. His string of championships still reigns as the greatest championship streak in professional football. When he died in 1970 from colon cancer, having retired after the 1967 season, the NFL named the Super Bowl championship trophy after Lombardi.



Lombardi started each season from scratch, as if he were teaching a class again at St. Cecilia. Winning a championship season meant knocking his team back to the ground the next season. “Gentlemen,” he declared from the front of the room at the team’s first pre-season meeting, “this is a football.” To which veteran championship player Max McGee once responded: “Uh, coach could you slow down a little. You’re going too fast for us.”



The story of the Green Bay Packers and Lombardi coincided with the emergence of football as a national sport, broadcast into living rooms across the country with the growing popularity of television. Football was an almost ideal sport for television’s format with commercial breaks, zoom-in lenses and the struggles the game evoked. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was a former marketing man and he understood football’s appeal and also Lombardi’s. Lombardi personified a deeply American story. The son of immigrants rising from obscurity through hard work and self-discipline, Lombardi went into the American heartland to lift a struggling team to victory through those very same traits. When Lombardi first went to Green Bay as a Giants coach, he told his wife that it was “a God-forsaken” place. But for him, it proved to be a place of opportunity, offering the right ingredients to bring his own life story to success. Lombardi set the tone for national football’s rise to prominence, and also represented the American ideal around hard work, determination and fair play.



5. “The Man Believes in Me”



One of Lombardi’s long-time players described Lombardi as “the biggest asshole in the world.” Experiencing him at work was often like watching tyranny in action. Having gone through the honeymoon period with the national press, articles later emerged portraying Lombardi as an arrogant bully. Lombardi pushed his players to the limits of their own endurance. These were tough, tough men. Linebacker Ray Nitschke grew up homeless and claimed to have beaten someone up every day of his teenage years. The sons of Pennsylvania miners, New England mill workers and prison convicts, football players threw themselves on the field with incredible violence. Lombardi said that football was not a contact sport, it was a collision sport. He used his own role as the authority figure to drive players’ aggression, converting it into an opportunity to become a stronger person. Almost every Green Bay Packer player said that they went through episodes of hating Lombardi.



When players appealed to Lombardi’s wife for help, Marie let them in on a secret. Her husband only yelled at players if he liked them. They should be worrying if he wasn’t yelling in their face, she told them. Many Packers came to love Lombardi. Bart Starr and Paul Horning adored him as a father figure. Lombardi’s secretary with the Packers described him as a “real softie.” One player, Em Tunnel, told a reporter “I’d get out of this town if it wasn’t for Vince. He’s the kind of guy you have to cuss out once a week when you are alone, but nobody else can cuss him out to me. In my heart, I know what he is.”



When friends and colleagues pointed out unfair things Lombardi had done, he often went to great lengths to make amends. He may have believed in tearing his players down, but he was brilliant in building them back up. Vincent Lombardi loved his players. “On this team, there is great love,” he said. “Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?”



In 1965 the Detroit Lions clobbered the Packers in the first half 21 to 3. Detroit lineman Alex Karres yelled at Lombardi as they were returning to their locker rooms at half time: “Whadaya think of that, ya big fat wop!” Surprisingly, the players were more upset than Lombardi. Rather than yell in frustration, Lombardi stepped on a foot locker and delivered a speech on loyalty. “Win, lose or draw, you are my football team,” he concluded. “You are the Green Bay Packers and you have your pride!” These hardened, beaten up men misted up, went back on the field and stomped on the Lions for a 31 to 21 victory.



When the Packers lost a game to the Baltimore Colts, rookie Willie Wood was burned for nine catches and more than 100 yards trying to keep up with Raymond Berry. His teammates teased Wood mercilessly, predicting his career would come to an end that week. But Lombardi took the rookie to the side and told him “Don’t you believe anything those fellows say. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here with me. Every one of those guys making fun of you has had the same thing happen to them. You’re going to be here as long as I’m here.” Wood, who later entered the NFL Hall of Fame, told Lombardi’s biographer “Lombardi gave me confidence when he did that. I said, ‘What I’m doing has got to be right because the man believes in me.’”



Wood was one of four black players on the Packers at that time. This was in the very early days of integration in national sports and in Green Bay blacks represented .01 percent of the county’s total population. Lombardi later said that he did not have black players or white players, with the Packers he only had green players. This was more than a trite truism. Restaurants and bars in Green Bay were warned that if any of them refused to serve black football players, no players would be allowed to frequent their establishments. During his first year as the Packer head coach, he delivered a speech on racism to his team. “If I ever hear nigger or dago or kike or anything like that around here, regardless of who you are, you’re through with me. You can’t play for me if you have any kind of prejudice.” Lombardi avoided games played in the South where Jim Crow laws would split the players into different accommodations. When this was impossible, he used his old army connections to arrange for housing on military bases so the team would stay together.



Tolerance ran deep in the Lombardi family. When his younger bachelor brother Harold Lombardi who was in his 40s living in San Francisco wrote their father a letter that he was gay, Harold dreaded the return letter. This was in the early 1960s when society viewed homosexuality as a disease. But when Harold opened the envelope, his father simply wrote: “I don’t care. You are my son.” Vincent Lombardi knew his brother was gay and never gave any indication to anyone that this was an issue.



“Vincent Lombardi,” Willie Wood said “was the fairest man I’ve ever known.”



6. The Greatest Mistake of Your Life



Lombardi was driven to win. He no sooner savored a victory with a party at his house, then his mood turned sour as he thought about the next week’s game. He left the party and went into the basement to watch films on the next opposing team until the early morning. It was such a predictable event that his family called it the Cinderella hour. Lombardi’s obsession with winning did not justify doing anything to win, however. He did not allow cheap shots. Winning was the outcome of his drive to achieve perfection. Winning also meant making sacrifices, something Lombardi often said, rarely noting what his own sacrifices were. But his obsession led to unfortunate imbalances in other parts of his life.



Marie told a visiting writer in the 1960s “I wasn’t married to him a week when I said to myself, Marie Planitz, you have made the greatest mistake of your life,” he told the surprised interviewer. “I found out what to do. When it gets so bad I that I can’t stand it, I stand right up to him and he backs off.”



The Lombardi household was an unhappy household. Marie was usually alone at home and when her husband was home, football was often the only thing on his mind. Drinking problems plagued her throughout her life. The couple had two children, Vincent Henry and Susan. Visitors often noted a tension inside the family. A friend of Susan’s later said it was a home of sadness. “It was a sad house as soon as you walked in, empty. You could feel the family void.” Although Vince Lombardi’s parents attended all of their son’s games when he was a player in high school and at Fordham and even afterwards when he became a coach, Vince Lombardi never went to his son’s games. The son longed for his father’s approval, but when he declared that he wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and become a coach, Vince Lombardi was furious. “You can do that, but I will not spend one dollar to support you,” he said. Lombardi wanted his son to become a lawyer, just as his parents had wished for him. Nonetheless, the son played football and received tongue lashings for his play, even when he did well. When he was injured, the legendary coach ripped into his son for falling short, bringing tears to the boy’s eyes.



Susan Lombardi felt herself to be almost a non-person to her father. He insisted on bringing her on the road for away games, but never interacted with her. She was left alone in hotel rooms and sent to the stands to watch the football games, thousands of miles away from her friends and an even greater distance in her own eyes from her father.



But the coach was not a complete goon at home. He loved to practice magic tricks and was notoriously bad at them. He relaxed by watching McHale’s Navy and cleaning closets. A friend of Susan’s recalled a time when Lombardi took his daughter and a bunch of her friends, all around 20 years old, out on the town to a bunch of restaurants and bars in Green Bay. “I danced with Mr. Lombardi,” Mary Jo Antil recalled. “I can still see him doing the locomotion and the watusi. He was totally out of his realm, and he enjoyed it immensely.”



In the off-season, golf was almost as much of an obsession to Lombardi as football was during the season. The difference was that he was a bad player in golf and no matter how hard he tried, he could not get better. In football, Lombardi could use the skills and talents of his players to extend beyond his own limitations. It allowed him to become greater than himself in a way that he could not do alone on the field of sports, or at home with his family.



7. The Shadow Self and the Real Self



Vincent Lombardi got up early every morning to go to mass. He prayed every time that he would gain control of his temper and be a better husband. But every day he went to work and lost his temper. He then went home and struggled to be a man connected to his family. Prayer was the essence of his religious practice. He exercised it with the same discipline he invoked in sports. Lombardi did not call upon God to win football games, but he did bring the same fundamental principles the Jesuits taught him to the task of winning. Repetition, discipline, clarity, faith, subsuming individual ego to a larger good were extensions of his religious faith.



Lombardi kept old black wooden rosary beads dating back to high school in his coat pocket and he carried a bible wherever he went. It was the Holy Name Edition of the Catholic Bible, which had been given to him as a gift. Inside were two black-and-white photographs of his children Vincent and Susan. Neither child knew the photographs existed or were constantly in his clutches. Years later Vincent said of his father: “He went to mass to repent for his anger. He thought, I’ve got this temper. I fly off the handle and offend people. I apologize. But it’s this temper that keeps me on edge and allows me to get things done and people do things. Life was a struggle for him. He knew he wasn’t perfect. He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect. His strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. He fought it by taking the paradox to church. It went back to the Jesuits and the struggle between the shadow self and the real self — your humanity and your divinity. He saw that struggle in clear and concrete terms.”



8. The Mark of a Champion



The Green Bay Packers played the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day in 1961. The Packers were undefeated going into the game, but Detroit had a brutal defense, anchored by a pair of 300-pound interior linemen named Roger Brown and the previously mentioned Alex Karras. The Lions leapt to a very fast 26 to 0 lead and the defense was absolutely pulverizing the Packer offense. Quarterback Bart Starr was getting sacked on almost every drive. Offensive lineman Fuzzy Thurston said this was the game in which he perfected the so-called “lookout block,” a maneuver in which he would look over his shoulder and yell “Look out, Bart!” By the time the fourth quarter arrived the Packers still had not scored and it was clear they were going to lose. Starr turned to his bruised and bloodied wide receivers and asked if any of them could get open. The ball-hungry players normally pestered Starr to throw to them, but not this time. Max McGee answered “Bart, why don’t you just throw an incomplete pass and nobody’ll get hurt.” The joke lightened the mood and the Packers scored two more touchdowns, not nearly enough to win, but to make the rest of the game bearable.



This would become a championship season for the Packers and Lombardi did not give up on his team. In fact, Lombardi saw the defeat as an opportunity. He gathered his team around him and told them: “Let it be an example to all of us. The Green Bay Packers are no better than anyone else when they aren’t ready, when they play as individuals and not as one…. Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

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