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One Story High

It was just a little over thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, when Yuriko Urayama moved here, to her new pre-fab house in suburban east Denver, the very first place in her life where she got to herself more than one small room and one small dresser to unpack and even start collecting a few things.



35 MM Color Film, Ashley Vaughan 

She moved in with her husband, who was American, a military man and her two young daughters, who, like her husband, were also American. But only in part, for even though they were Colorado born and bred they were, because of her blood and birthplace, also part Japanese.

Yuriko is one of nineteen people I have gathered here in cyber-space to tell the story of right now, of today, of this moment in American life, their lives so hauntingly similar and different from one another that the only way to describe them really is to just simply list them all by name, Oscar Wilde, Chief Pale Moon, Paul William Martin, John, Lothar Patten, Jack Dracula, Carol Brobeck, Joel Woodruff, Suketu Mehta, Michael Jackson, Odetta, Frank McCourt, Walter, Grace Meadows Hope-Gill, Johanna Justin-Jinich, David Amram, Ervin Brindowski, Roscoe Holcomb. Some, like Yuriko, make their homes in suburban brick bungalows and others in tenement buildings or on tenant farms. Some are on the road from the place where they have been living en route to someplace else. But each one of them offers a quick, intimate glimpse into a life, a truly remarkable gallery of short flickering sociological biographies, which, though quite variable in content and expressed through six very different ethnographic mediums each stand the same height at one - story - high.

We have in disciplinary sociology, a long tradition of doing this, of pushing past the doors of people's homes to get a closer look at how they live inside, many of these inquiries becoming the most beautiful and intimate sociological analyses ever made, (W.E.B Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro, Nels Anderson's The Hobo, W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant, Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown, William Foote Whyte's Street Corner Society, Douglas Harper's Working Knowledge or Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader For A Day). Each one of these texts lays bare the life of some memorable person, (Dzienmik Zwiazkowy, Doc, Willie, J.T.), and in turn raises to the surface some otherwise forgotten community or place, (first generation inner-city dwellers, the shanty towns of the Chicago loop, postwar Boston), to have collectively created, over the past hundred years or so, a remarkable narrative map of, what Robert Park would have called, the social ecology of the United States. These works, both individually and as a genre, are rhetorically durable because they capture people's lives in ways that are both timely and timeless.

And I, along with a set of contributors, continue in this analytic tradition here today with this small, gallery of writings, photo essays, paintings, film and audio tapes (originally created for the academic journal Fast Capitalism) by a select mix of academics, artists, writers and documentary makers we specifically sought out for their particular talent in telling good biographical stories. People like anthropologist Katie Stewart, A Space On The Side of the Road; literary critic and novelist Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos; political commentator and newspaperman John Nichols, Dick: The Man Who Is President; sociologist Charles Lemert, Dark Thoughts; and filmmaker and folklorist John Cohen, The Young Bob Dylan.

I was, quite frankly, just curious to see who and how they would write about or document when given the chance to do so just off the top of their heads and hearts in a relatively short period of time, using very few words or sounds or images or some combination of any of these three. I told them they could tear a scrap from some larger project they were working on or had hidden away or to make-up something completely brand new on the spot, so long as their story was about a person other than themselves be that person real or fictional, living or dead. And in the end, about half of what my contributors came up with conformed to disciplinary sociology's traditional topics and standard measures of objectivity, accountability, certainty and authenticity and about half did not. Consider, each one of them, works of the imaginative sociological imagination. I'm fairly certain C. Wright Mills* wouldn't mind.

-- Audrey Sprenger, Cambridge MA, November 2009

*In 1959, Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills encouraged other working sociologists to pay attention to the everyday ways people made sociological sense of themselves and others, as well as the social institutions they regularly interacted with. A strong believer in both the rhetorical and political power of social science, Mills was also an aspiring novelist, though he never professionally merged these two kinds of writing. We actively sought pieces for this project, which do, in fact, blur the lines between both scientific and narrative forms of sociological writing and representation and collected them from both sociologists and non-sociologists alike.




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Oscar Wilde

Around ninety years before Yuriko Urayama moved into her first house in East Denver Irish playwright and author Oscar Fingal O'Flahetie Wills Wilde traveled from London to Denver, Colorado on a lecture tour to promote Gilbert and Sullivan's newest operetta at the time, Patience.




Oils On Canvas, Ed Adler

A beloved and gossiped about literary star in both Britain and the United States in those days, Wilde would, thirteen years later, be accused of "gross indecency with other men" and sentenced to two years hard labor after a highly publicized and sensationalized trial. Upon his release from prison in the spring of 1897 he would travel to Dieppe on a nighttime ferry, settle in France under the name Sebastian Melmoth and never return to England or Ireland again. He would die three years later in November of 1900.

Painter and art historian Ed Adler envisions Wilde's time in Colorado here in a series of paintings -- the very first to ever be published not simply as art, but as sociological analysis. With pop and fauvist colors, pulp fiction imagery and a bold sense of composition, the young and urbane Wilde, resplendent in his dark purple velvet coat, reminds us that as we pause to envision this moment in American life through these sixteen very geographically specific stories, every terrain we tread upon once absorbed the footing of someone else.

Ed Adler has taught art history and cultural studies at New York University and the Sorbonne in Paris. He is also the author of Departed Angels, The Lost Paintings of Jack Kerouac. This series of paintings of Oscar Wilde in Denver was first exhibited in the Morrison Concourse between the Denver Art Museum and Denver Public Library in the spring of 2007.







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Chief Pale Moon

We shift now from the story of someone visiting North America to someone North American born and bred, but still find ourselves on a bright comic book landscape, since writer and English teacher Philippe Ernewein's hazy childhood memories of Chief Pale Moon, member of the League of Iroquois, could easily have fit into the foreground or background of Ed Adler's vividly imagined wild, Wilde west.

Set in Ontario, this is the first of two biographies included in One Story High which tells a distinctly "American story" using a distinctly "Canadian place" -- a common occurrence in disciplinary sociology ever since John Seeley and his research staff used a middle class neighborhood just outside the city of Toronto for their classic "one story high" study of the "postwar American suburb," Crestwood Heights.

Chief Pale Moon is also the first of seven purely narrative pieces gathered in One Story High.  All of the rest include some form of visual or audio representation.

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Moeke asked the Indian to put his headdress back on, "Please, sir, for the picture." Moeke learned her English when her family housed Canadian soldiers in Belgium during World War II. This was her second visit to Canada. The first time was as a war bride in 1945. She had fallen in love with Lloyd Ernewein, one of the soldiers her father, my great-grandfather, housed during the Nazi Occupation. We were in Ontario to visit the family of the grandfather I never knew. He passed away when my father was three. 

My father, mother and Moeke flew to Ontario from Brussels. It was July 1973. At fourteen months old, I was the youngest passenger on the plane. The intent of our visit, I’ve been told, was not to visit Doon Village, but it was that place that had the biggest impact on me. It was there that I met my first American Indian.

Doon Village was a cross between a museum and an outdoor memorial built to honor both the pioneers and the people of The League of the Iroquois, specifically the Mohawk, so there was a huge tower, Pioneer Memorial Tower, and it was surrounded by a field of teepees. The Ontario Pioneer Foundation hired Indians from the nearby Iroquois Reserve to play the part of the natives. They walked around the village in traditional clothing, ground maize, sold beads and sat by their showcase teepees.

Moeke remembers she paid a dollar to take a picture of Pale Moon and me. She still has the picture in a scrapbook along with the plane ticket from 1973, the brochure of Doon Village and a book about the history of the early Canadians.

My father took the picture. I stood next to Pale Moon mimicking his posture, hands behind my back and looking straight ahead. His headdress started with small white feathers above his forehead and became longer and more colorful ... red ... yellow ... black ... as they stretched down his back. He had a band of blue pearls around his right arm. He wore beige pants with beige moccasins. His naked chest was partially covered with feathers hanging off his long, gray braided hair. His braids came out from behind his ears and covered his nipples like a pair of suspenders. Like Chief Seattle, Crazy Horse and Mohawk Chief Hiawatha before him, Pale Moon had his picture taken for the money.

I felt like I was part of the League of the Iroquois for a moment. I was one with the Mohawk tribe. Of course at fourteen months old all I really knew was that I wasn’t standing next to my father, mother or Moeke.

But now, as a grownup, as a father myself I wonder, who was that I was standing next to? What was his history? What might I have been thinking? What was I feeling standing next to this old and barely clad man with feathers on his head? What did I see in his eyes? And why did he leave such an indelible impression on me?

I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But what I do know is that my encounter with him left a deep impression on me. It was the first of a series of events that led me in my early twenties south of Doon Village and west to New Mexico, to Colorado, to California, always on the lookout for another glimpse of Chief Pale Moon or at least a glimpse of Tonto.

Philippe Ernewein is a writer who has been nationally recognized for creating, developing and teaching innovative English and American curriculum for secondary education students.







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Paul William Martin

In the early 1970s about 1800 miles west of the place Philippe Ernewein first met Chief Pale Moon lived another native North American, Paul William Martin.  His grandson, literary critic Paul Martin, writes of his life here pairing his story with a series of five family snapshots taken by his father Paul Jerome Martin. 
Deeply reminiscent of the work of famed documentary photographer Walker Evans, these stark black and white images capture in the most realist of terms not only the Canadian landscape and Paul Martin's subject, but also Paul Martin himself, as a little boy, thirty years ago, at the exact moment his memories of his grandfather were made. 
This is the first of two biographies about a grandfather included in One Story High. I have also included the stories of two grandmothers.




Family Snapshots, 35 MM Slow BW Film, Paul Jerome Martin
Paul William Martin was born December 6, 1913 and died September 8th, 2001, not three full days before the deadly terrorist attacks on the United States.  At his funeral on September 13th, I could not help but ponder how the world in which my grandfather died now seemed markedly different from the one in which he was laid to rest.  Yet, as a prairie person, liminal space was nothing new to him. In body, mind and spirit, he was, at least in my eyes, inseparable from what W.O. Mitchell described in Who Has Seen the Wind as "the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply, of land and sky -- Saskatchewan prairie."  In some ways, there is nothing simpler; in others, nothing more challenging -- hard land and big sky as far as the eye can see, with nothing to shield you from the fine line between success or failure, bounty or blight.

My father, Paul Jerome Martin, wrote before the funeral that my grandfather "was a prairie person, one of those people Wallace Stegner described in Wolf Willow: 'It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent man. Puny you may feel there, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow's fall.'"

The question of where ancestry ends and individuality begins seems more complicated when one shares another’s full name. Although my parents chose my middle name, William, as a tribute to my maternal grandfather, they discovered later that it was also my Poppa's middle name. That revelation surprised everyone, including my grandmother who to that point believed her husband to have no middle name whatsoever. We were fated, it seems, to share these names.

What does it mean, though, to be twinned in name to someone of another generation? To share genetics and perhaps even character traits, but to have few common experiences? Despite my emotional ties to the prairie, I remain a city boy, having been born and raised in Edmonton, 700 km from the Martin farm. I am the first in several generations of Martin men never to have tended the land, to have harvested a crop, to have scoured the sky for signs of the fickle weather that could either nourish or destroy the work and hopes of the growing season.

What I do share with my grandfather alone is the moment of recognition when I hear or read our name, one that will never be mine alone. It connects us, as well as my father, Jerome, and my son, Aidan Paul Martin.  We are all richer for these multiple echoes, which remind us that, although stretched across geography and generations, we each will forever find solace on the Saskatchewan prairie where nothing obscures the endless horizon and the majestic sky.

Paul Martin teaches Canadian literature at the University of Vermont where he is also the Director of the Canadian Studies Program. He writes about his work and life as a Canadian living in the United States in his blog, As Canadian As Possible and is also the author of a new book of literary criticism, Sanctioned Ignorance; The Politics of Knowledge Production and the Teaching of the Literatures of Canada. His father, Paul Jerome Martin, has been documenting the Canadian prairie, as well as both rural and urban landscapes all over the world for over fifty years.  He has also worked in agricultural, arts and social scientific research since 1976 and in 1995 founded the Spotted Cow Press.







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John

We jump forty years ahead now, from the biography of Paul William Martin to the biography of just plain John -- anthropologist Katie Stewart identifies him only by his first name -- firmly pulling our analysis out of the past and in to the present, through we will find ourselves on much less solid terrain.

Unbound by any family or ancestry and unprotected by any permanent shelter or address, we enter John's life just as he is learning what Stewart calls "the sensory labor of living on the streets," capturing in a single stream of raw, ethnographic observations how vulnerable a body can become when it is left to run on empty, getting more and more ragged, more and more beat.

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Things accelerate into a life weighted with the buzz of atmospheric fill. Rhythms, sensory habits, gathering materialities rind up into a compositional present. Worlds bloom up, fall apart and leave you standing or, same thing, catch you up and never let you go. A body has to attune itself like a musical instrument to a world’s singular texture and shine.

For John, now, it’s becoming homeless. When he was in high school, he skipped classes to play basketball with the guys even though it often ended in assault suffered. He disappeared at night into the budding neighborhood gang and nothing could pull him back into the something of our household instead. Not even close.

His buddies shaved gang symbols into his hair and painted them down his arms. He got thrown out of school under a no gang tolerance rule. He was arrested for trace amounts of marijuana possession – an event set off by him looking suspicious. And all of that was just the beginning. Take ten steps forward (alternative high schools, Job Corps (kicked out for fighting), the military (fraudulent enrollment for failing to report his marijuana conviction), training and working as a nurse’s assistant (he forgot to bring his ID to the certification test), group housing (kicked out for losing his job and not working his program to get another one), transitional housing he followed someone home to (that didn’t last long). 

Now he’s on the street, learning its sensory labor. The walking, the finding places to sleep, the broken nose from rolling over on a rock, the encounters with the police, the talk – "I’m gonna get a place of my own with Jimmy, I’m gonna get my job back, I'm gonna get myself off the street, I won’t be on the street for long, I give it 90 days. Give me 30 days and then I’ll be back. It’s not as bad as you think." 

He and his running buddy have a fight, split up, then reconnect; the counselor at the homeless shelter gives them the language of watching each other’s backs. Their blankets are stolen. One night when it’s below freezing someone throws a blanket over them while they sleep, wasted. It’s like a miracle.

They find a free city pool that has showers; they swim for hours. He shows me what’s different about him now; he has no hair on the insides of his calves because of all the walking for food -- a church on the East side of town (Wednesdays at 9), some mornings there’s a truck down on the tracks, the Sally serves but everyone hates the Sally, Lifeworks is for the kids; they go there for lunch. He’s had so much milk, no coffee, he’s lost weight from not having enough to eat.

He’s proud of his new shirt -- it’s worth like 20 bucks -- and he took a shower before he showed up on our steps this time. Every time he comes he has forgotten what he said last time, what he was planning. He says he looks good. He says he can’t go into the army because of the ulcers on his feet and the swelling in his testicles. I say you need medical attention; these things can be fixed. Not these things, he says.

Katie Stewart is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin. She is the author of two now classic ethnographies, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an 'Other' America (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, 2007).







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Lothar Patten

Like John, Lothar Patten's biography is deeply rooted in the streets. Known simply as "the nice man" in his hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he became an important advocate for the homeless during the 2004 Presidential Elections. 
Documented here by sociologist James Tucker on digital videotape, Lothar's is the first of five stories included in One Story High, where we actually get to hear the subject speak -- a common rhetorical strategy in disciplinary sociology, but one, which takes on an added poignancy here, when we learn that Lothar died a few short years after these sunny frames were shot.

We hear Tucker's voice too, off camera, asking questions, offering us a rare glimpse as to how sociological stories like these are often made, through the simple act of one person taking interest in another, then the two of them just spending time together -- talking. 



Digital Color Video, James Tucker

James Tucker is a professor at the University of New Hampshire. His full length feature documentary about Lothar Patten, The Nice Man Cometh, won a "Best Documentary" award at Cheap Shot LA, a film festival for low and no budget films.Tucker also writes and teaches about the sociology of law and social deviance.





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Jack Dracula

Jack Dracula was born "Jack Baker." He was also known as "Jack Martin" and "Barcelona Jack." So, quite unlike Lothar Patten he didn't feel a need to hang on to his given name. 
Documented here by filmmaker Henry Ferrini, Jack talks of his name, as well as being famously photographed by Diane Arbus in the 1960s while working at Hubert's Museum as a sideshow attraction.

Filmed against a plain black backdrop, Ferrini's story of Jack is completely devoid of any discernable landscape, as well as any of the questions Ferrini asked him.  As a result we are able to hear Jack's story from Jack himself without any distraction -- except, perhaps, his own sensationalized self. 



Digital Color Video, Henry Ferrini

Henri Ferrini lives and makes films out of the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He has produced several highly acclaimed narrative documentaries including Radio Fishtown, Lowell Blues, The Words of Jack Kerouac and the recently release Polis Is This, Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place. He is currently working on a film about jazz saxophonist Lester Willis Young.







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Carol Brobeck & Joel Woodruff

We fade now from Jack Dracula's tattooed face into the voices of Carol Brobeck and Joel Woodruff.  Documented here by audio producers Shea Shackelford and Virginia Millington, this story, like Dracula's, emerges out of "nowhere," its storytellers letting their subjects do all the talking and leaving behind no obvious trace. 
Shackelford and Millington's story is also one of two biographies included in One Story High where two people occupy a single biographical space, reminding us that all life stories, no matter how singular, are always inextricably linked to the story of somebody else, in this case, the story of a son to his mother and a mother to her son.



Digital Audio Recording, Shea Shackelford and Virginia Millington

Shea Shackelford is an audio documentary producer and co-founder of Big Shed Audio. He is also the creator of The Place + Memory Project, a public radio series and Internet map of places that no longer exist, recreated from first-person memories. Shackelford produces work for syndicated pubic radio shows like NPR’s Weekend Edition and All Things Considered. Virginia Millington is an audio producer, photographer and library exhibitionist currently pursuing graduate studies at the Pratt Institute in New York. She is a founding member of the DC Listening Lounge, an experimental audio collective and has worked at the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library. Carol and Joel's story was produced with support from the Speakeasy Storycast.







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Suketu Mehta

In their audio story of Joel Woodruff & Carol Brobeck, Shea Shackelford and Virginia Millington pare down an entire biography, or two, to a single voice, or voices. Now, here, literary critic and novelist Amitava Kumar chips away at the genre even further by telling the story of a writer, Suketu Mehta, in order to create a biography of Maximum City, Mehta's book.

The eighth in our sequence of sixteen biographies, Kumar's "life story" of Maximum City, a book set in India, not only effectively broadens the geographic boundaries of our slowly thickening American landscape, it playfully turns the very premise of our project -- to document this moment through the lives of actual, "real life" people -- completely inside out.




Movie Still From Firaaq, 
A Bollywood film made up of many small stories

 While doing research for his book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Suketu Mehta would interview several people each day. On one occasion, while talking to men from a right-wing Hindu group about the riots in Bombay, Suketu asked: "What does a man look like when he’s on fire?" And got the following answer: "A man on fire gets up, falls, runs for his life, falls, gets up, runs. It is horror. Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white, you touch his arm like this … the white shows, it shows especially on the nose … Oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over."

Suketu is now writing a book on New York City, where he lives and works. It has long been clear to me that people reveal truths to Suketu, truths that you suspect they are discovering at the same time as the writer. It is a unique relationship he develops with his interviewees. It wouldn't be wrong to say that more than the cities that Suketu writes about, it is his subjects' inner selves that stand exposed in his writing -- the place of darkness, the complicated paths to the past, the outskirts of feeling.

In the nineties, the Village Voice had carried Suketu’s first major story, a report on the aftermath of the tragedy in Bhopal. But things had gone wrong. The editors had made too many cuts and the story’s point had changed. Suketu said, "They ran it as if they were ashamed of it."

There had also been a long wait. Once, he had even been shown the proofs, but when the issue hit the stands, his piece was not there. Another time, the editors said that it was appearing as the cover story. Suketu arranged for a party, the champagne cooling in the fridge. But then, at the last moment, the story was replaced by a report about Tupac Shakur’s death.

There was need for money. Suketu had paid for the trip to Bhopal himself. He was not employed, and his wife was pregnant. Before it was accepted by the Voice, his essay had been rejected by all the major publications in New York. Suketu said, “I felt like a failure.” Once, on the road back from Connecticut, he thought he’d welcome death.

The tale he was telling me began to sound like a Bollywood story. Then, Suketu took a friend’s advice and contacted Ian Jack who was the editor at Granta.

Suketu had another conversation with Ian Jack. Jack had liked his Bhopal piece and wanted him to write something for Granta. Maybe Suketu could write about Gandhi in Africa, Jack suggested.

"And then he said the words that changed my life: 'Have you heard of a man called Bal Thackeray?' I said, ‘He is the man who has ruined the city in which I grew up.'"

The essay that Suketu wrote for Granta earned him a book contract and a substantial advance -- he moved to India for several years -- but the point that Suketu keeps insisting on is that it all came out of the "colossal failure" of the work he had done in Bhopal. I could understand this but what I have often wondered about are those thousands of conversations that Suketu had for his book. After all, when it comes to people, there’s no happy teleology describing a path from failure to success. Thousands of conversations, thousands of streets or alleys, false signs, roads ending in places he thought he had been before, dead ends.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of non-fiction, including Husband of a Fanatic.







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Michael Jackson

We bring actual people back into our analysis now, having let them over the course of our last three stories to almost completely disappear from view, but one whose life and sudden death was to most nothing more than the glossiest of images. 
Pop and child star Michael Jackson is eulogized by the Reverend Gregory Seal Livingston here. It is the first of five biographies included in our collection, which explicitly commemorate the dead -- a common state of being for most biographical subjects of study explored outside the field of sociology, (such as in documentary studies, feature films, commercial publishing and the news media), as well as by people in their everyday lives, (when they compile family photo collections and geneological histories or make home movies).
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The moment: Pop culture. Popular culture shoves Obamaism, uprisings, wars, health care and gainful employment out of the public’s consciousness and off the airwaves. And pop music, the poetic, the lyrical, the melodious, all of it, is the spirit of pop culture. Too often and too readily critiqued as superficial and shallow, pop music carries with it the sentiments of the majority. And one man, Michael Jackson, embodied it the best. 
I wanted to avoid writing anything about the King of Pop. I didn’t want the reader to think that I was taking the easy way out and thereby trivializing this opportunity to communicate. However the extended nowness of this pop icon’s death moment is powerful, pervasive and saturated with meaning. 
How does the King of Pop define this moment in time? What does his intercourse with mass culture mean? His fellow icon, Prince, offers this meaning through the experience of his song Pop Life. Here's the hook: Pop life/ Everybody needs a thrill/ Pop life/ We all got a space 2 fill/ Pop life/ Everybody can't be on top/ But life it ain’t real funky/ Unless its got that pop/ Dig it.  Prince draws us into the exciting, egalitarian, meritocratic and soulful promise of popular culture. 
The King of Pop fulfils this promise of popular culture. Born into a black family of eleven in the steel town of Gary, Indiana. He never learned to read music nor play an instrument but still becomes one of the greatest forces in music industry history. Motown taught the brothers how to step in sync while they performed but God taught the King how to dance. The high brow music and dance lessons of the higher classes – music and dance lessons that his parents could not possibly afford because of America’s tragic history of discrimination and the classism created by racism – lacked soul and were much too carnal for one who was learning to walk on the moon. Popular culture didn’t guarantee him fame but it did guarantee him fun. 
Popular culture offers accessibility to the masses. Education, wealth and pedigree are not required to experience the promise of pop culture. The King of Pop is a child of the Civil Rights Era. Civil Rights is about access, opportunity and the leveling of inequality in society. Popular culture is the tidal wave that washes away the lines and sand castles of exclusive and elite cultural norms that only a few can enjoy. Popular music is about evolution. He evolved from child prodigy; to teenage heartthrob; to grown man; into a living, breathing colorless icon. 
America is still a pigmentocracy however our most popular icon was not post-racial but trans-racial. He evolved into a being that transcended color. His look began to confuse and frighten. His behavior became suspect. The pauses between albums became longer. He sold out 50 tour dates in minutes. He died the death of a pop icon – mysterious and shocking. His global fandom is reignited. Rumor has it that seven persons have committed suicide because of his death. He is more popular dead than alive. Surreal isn’t it. So is this moment. So was he.
Reverend Gregory Seal Livingston speaks regularly to and for universities, religious organizations and non-profits all over the United States and world incorporating the stories of people he meets everyday community-by-community and family-by-family as a working Minister and social activist. His writing often appears in the Huffington Post.




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Odetta & Frank McCourt

We follow the Reverend Gregory Seal Livingston's short eulogy for Michael Jackson with the stories of two more American icons now dead, Odetta Gordon (known as Odetta) and Francis (known as Frank) McCourt.  
She was a singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter and human rights activist; he, a high school teacher and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Both were born in 1930 and died within six months of one another, she in the winter of 2008, he, in the summer of 2009. 
Both lived and worked and made their home in New York City and would, over the years, occasionally run in to one another at an awards ceremony or fundraiser, the kinds of functions where only the very accomplished are invited to meet. 
Which is why photographer and filmmaker Christopher Felver decided to bring them together here in a pair of formal portraits, hers, a head shot, his an author's photo -- as if two high school classmates coupled together in their senior yearbook: Here smile Odetta Gordon and Francis McCourt, the Class of 1947's "Most Likely To Succeed."


Black & White Portraits, Chris Felver
Christopher Felver has photographed practically every twentieth century American painter, poet, musician and novelist. He has also just recently completed his sixth full-length cinematic documentary on poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.







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Walter Cronkite
It's hard to say what it means when a person who is also an iconic image dies. Their name and face tend to remain a part of our collective imaginations much in the same way they always did, like some distant family member, but a little more larger than life. Still, there is something very real, very tangible, which is lost when a body we know intimately in spirit suddenly passes away and forever dies. In the case of the man political writer and newspaper man John Nichols profiles here, an entire genre of broadcast journalism and almost half century old brand of trust.  
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Walter Cronkite was the most serious of serious journalists. The former CBS anchorman cared not just about the next story but about the future of reporting in a country where was known for the better part of a half century as "the most trusted name in news." 
So it should come as little surprise that what worried Cronkite in the last years of his life was the collapse of journalistic quality and responsibility that came with the increasing dominance of news gathering by a handful of media corporations. 
"I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that," Cronkite told me the last time we spoke about media issues. 
The iconic American anchorman, who has died at age 92 in July of 2009, recognized that Americans would always need diverse and competing media outlets, with the resources and the skills to examine issues from a variety of perspectives -- and to challenge entrenched power. 
Cronkite was, almost by definition, an old-media newsman. He covered World War II, the Nuremberg trials, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, the civil rights movement, the killing of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the space race and the moon landings, Watergate and the last stages of the Cold War in a career that his successor in the CBS anchor chair, Dan Rather, said was characterized by "a passion for reporting and journalism." 
Yet, as his twentieth century gave way to our twenty-first, Cronkite made common cause with media reformers who objected to corporate monopolies and the dumbed-down discourse fostered by big media outlets that were more concerned with commerce and entertainment than with civics and democracy. 
Speaking of the relationship between media and democracy, Cronkite told me several years ago: "The way that works is to have multiple owners, with the hope that the owners will have different viewpoints, and with the hope that the debate will help to air all sides, or at least most sides of the issues. But right now I think we're moving away from that approach." 
The reporter, editor and anchorman from 1962 to 1981, whose name remained synonymous with American journalism to the day he died, fretted in particular about a 2003 move by the Federal Communications Commission to relax media ownership rules. After the commission approved proposals that would permit a single media company to own television stations that reach up to 45 percent of American households, and that would permit a single media company to own the daily newspaper, several television stations and up to eight radio stations in the same community, Cronkite said, "I think they made a mistake, I do indeed. It seems to me that the rule change was negotiated and promulgated with the goal of creating even larger monopolies in the news-gathering business." 
The veteran television journalist was especially concerned about monopolies developing at the local level. 
"We are coming closer to that (monopoly situations) today, even without the relaxation of the rules," Cronkite said. "In many communities, we have seen a lot of mergers already and that is disturbing. We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me. I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy." 
Cronkite stepped down as the CBS anchor in 1981. But he remained active as a journalist well into the twentieth century, writing a nationally syndicated column that appeared weekly newspapers across the country until just a few years ago. 
It was as he was preparing that column that Cronkite and I got to know one another and began an ongoing conversation about the state of the media. 
Much had changed since his days at the anchor desk, Cronkite said. And while he shied away from suggesting that everything was better in the good old days, he admitted that he was deeply troubled by the timidity of broadcast media when it came to questioning those in power. 
In 1968, Cronkite stunned the nation when, after reporting from Vietnam on the Tet Offensive and events that followed it, he went on air and openly questioned whether the U.S. military would ever prevail in that conflict. "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate," Cronkite told his national audience. The anchorman went on to call for the government to open negotiations with the North Vietnamese. 
Bill Moyers, who was President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, has speculated that Cronkite's blunt assessment of the war contributed significantly to Johnson's decision to propose negotiations and to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. (Moyers and Cronkite tangled in the 1960s, when the younger man was President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary. But they eventually became so close that, when Moyers was honored for his lifetime of achievement as a broadcaster at the 2006 Emmy Awards, it was Cronkite who led the cheers). 
As the war in Iraq went horribly awry, I asked Cronkite whether a network anchorman would dare speak out in the same way that he had? 
"I think it could happen, yes. I don't think it's likely to happen," he said with an audible sigh. "I think the three networks are still hewing pretty much to that theory. They don't even do analysis anymore, which I think is a shame. They don't even do background. They just seem to do headlines, and the less important it seems the more likely they are to get on the air." 
In an era of increasing globalization and speed of communications, Cronkite frequently suggested in our conversations that the networks should be airing hour-long evening news programs. "For a country this big and this powerful and this diverse, a full hour is necessary," he explained. "To try to cover that in 19 minutes is simply impossible." 
Cronkite also argued that the networks needed to get more comfortable with criticism. He believed that, after years of battering by conservative media critics, the networks were too averse to taking risks. During the discussion about whether a network anchor might question the wisdom of the Iraq war, he said, "If they (the networks) didn't do it, I think it would be because they are afraid to get in an ideological fight or that doing so might lose them some viewers. I think that is a bad thing, a bad way to decide how to approach a story." 
But what about Cronkite? Did he think that, if he were an anchorman today, he would have spoken out against the Iraq war? 
"Yes, yes I do. I think that right now it would be critical to do so," he told me a few months after the invasion in 2003. "I think that right now we are in one of the most dangerous periods in our existence. Not since the Civil War has the state of our democracy been so doubtful. Our foreign policy has taken a very strange turn. And I do think I would try to say something about that." 
What exactly would Cronkite have told America from the CBS anchor desk? 
He said he would have suggested that the Bush administration had "confused" aggressive with defense and force with democracy. 
"The policy we're following has involved us in a very expensive set of projects trying to export democracy at the end of a bayonet," he said. "That has caused a great deal of concern around the world and I think Americans need to understand this." 
In particular, Cronkite said, he would have bluntly discussed his concerns about Bush's view of when it is appropriate to make war. 
"Preventive war is a theory, a policy, that was put forth by the president in his policy address," Cronkite observed. "It upsets all of our previous concepts about the use of power. It is particularly worrying when our power is almost unchallenged around the world. It seems to me that this preventive action is a terrible policy to put forth to other nations. If we are viewed as a pacesetter by other nations, this is a policy that could lead to eternal war around the world. If every small nation with a border dispute believes they can go ahead and launch a pre-emptive war and that it will be approved by the greatest power, that is a very dangerous thing." 
To Cronkite's view, Bush was a distinctly aggressive president. 
"I actually knew Herbert Hoover, believe it or not. And my time as a journalist goes back to Franklin Roosevelt. In my time, I don't think we have had any president as aggressive, except possibly Roosevelt. With Roosevelt, there was in his time a call for leadership, which he gave us. With this White House, they are aggressive on all fronts, whether there is a call for leadership or not." 
At the same time, Cronkite said, the U.S. Congress had grown too pliant. Asked about the congressional debate on the Iraq war, he asked rhetorically, "What debate?" 
Cronkite was heartened as the years passed and more members of Congress challenged the executive branch. He delighted when younger journalists, many of them working in new media, began to ask tougher questions and make blunter statements. He appreciated bloggers and independent media producers who used documentaries and YouTube to hold the powerful to account. 
Still, he recognized the lingering power of television in our society. And Cronkite continued to worry that broadcast news, his medium, had grown too deferent to power, too stenographic, too consolidated. 
"I don't know if I am in a position to encourage Congress one way or another," the old anchorman said. "However, if I were going to offer my opinion on the thing, I would certainly express my feeling that it would be better to have multiple ownership." 
Walter Cronkite said he would, as well, remind the powerful that the role of journalism is not to tell Americans what they want to hear but what they need to know as citizens -- because, he said, "journalism is what we need to make democracy work."

John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers. He is the author of The Genius of Impeachment, Jews for Buchanan and a biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President.







Gallery Index

Grace Meadows Hope-Gill

Unlike the death of Walter Cronkite, the death of Grace Meadows Hope-Gill, was much less newsworthy, but like Cronkite's it left an important gap in twentieth century world history. 
Grace's granddaughter, writer and alchemist Laura Hope-Gill explains why here in a biography she was only able to piece together after, she writes, "the tumor removed the censors from my grandmother's brain."  
Written both in poetry and prose, much like the way poet and cultural critic Gloria Anzaldùa recovered her own ancestral story, Hope-Gill uses the very liminal space between these two distinct kinds of narrative writing to try and give voice to the dead. 
I present Hope-Gill's poetic version here first, with links to the prose version embedded in the text to, for a few more moments at least, preserve Grace's long kept secret and equally long kept mystery.  
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Family Snapshot 1934, BW Film, Courtesy of Laura Hope-Gill 

My grandmother possessed a box of watercolor paintings of The Forbidden City on postcards she showed to me almost secretly on the white couch after dinner. 
While other details of her life in China shifted and vanished to reappear in a later telling, she told me about brushing the emperor’s niece’s hair in there, inside the grand gates, how she was allowed to pass almost all the way to the center. 
It was as though the city itself had become a mirror of her memory, fading, some parts run across by a finger (pointing: there) and others left untouched, almost fresh or fierce in their vibrancy. 
In the family history there were two time zones -- before the camp and after. Not until the brain tumor was there ever a during which in silence expanded to cover us like the white silk cloud of a parachute arriving a day or so after the white cloud over Hiroshima. 
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Prisoner's Badge, The Courtyard of the Happy Way in Weihsien, Courtesy of Laura Hope-Gill

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My grand-mother is dead. Right now, this is important because she was in a prison camp in China during World War II. Everyone I talk to doesn't know there were prison camps in China during World War II, and that there were English, American, European, Russian people in them. If it weren't for Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, even fewer people would know. 
I wrote Iris Chang one afternoon to thank her for clarifying for me why my high school history teacher told me, when I asked why we didn't cover the prison camps in China during our unit on the Second World War, "Because there weren't any." Chang had committed suicide just weeks before. But because of her I know that a code of silence between the U.S. and Japan kept the information out of 89% of textbooks. 
The fact that my grand-mother is dead is important because her story isn’t told anywhere, except in me. There’s a list-serve of other people who were interred by the Japanese at the same camp. But they’re getting along in their years as well. It’s important because I grew up being told in school that something did not happen which did. I look at my culture and I see us forgetting everything, losing our capacity for prolonged fascination. 
I am fascinated by my grand-mother’s stories -- of the scorpion my father picked up near the electric fence and announced to her, "he is my friend," of the sugar cube she smashed with the heel of her shoe so each of her sons could have some, and how my uncle divided his portion in half and told her she needed some as well; of the tomatoes someone mysteriously left on the stoop of their hut and which saved my father’s life, of the Trappist monks who broke their vows of silence to pray out loud near the fences while local farmers rolled eggs through tubes under their robes, of the day the parachutes descended and word of "the bombs" spread, of the white silk underpants a schizophrenic woman had kept clean and safe for three years while waiting for this day and offered to my grandmother, and of the way my 5 year old father, after the bombs, collected firewood in the garden of their house in Canada and piled it up next to the stove. 
These are the stories I did not grow up hearing because even my grand-mother kept them a secret until a brain tumor lifted the censor in her mind that kept them silenced. All I knew was there was a "camp." This found no context in my education. 
At a moment when the youngest survivors of Auschwitz are nearing their seventies and eighties, websites and declarations claiming there never was a Holocaust proliferate. And I want to believe that it takes more than that, more than some text and rumor, to erase history. But I know from experience it does not. All it takes is for people to stop telling the story to make people stop remembering. I know. I grew up without the story that in so many ways makes me who I am. 
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Laura Hope-Gill is the Director of Wordfest poetry festival in Asheville, North Carolina where she also directs The Healing Seed, a program for teaching alchemy and creative writing as spiritual practice. Her book, with photographer John Fletcher Jr., The Soul Tree: Poems and Photographs of the Southern Appalachians is now available from Grateful Steps Publishing.   



Gallery Index

Johanna Justin-Jinich 
Unlike Grace Hope-Gill, Johanna Justin-Jinich's death was utterly unexpected. Sociologist Charles Lemert remembers her here and in doing so reminds us that all sociological biographies are not so much set in time, but rather, people's expectations of that time -- including, he points out, our own. 
It is, Lemert shows us, perhaps the only way to think through "the unthinkable" and to know that even in the darkest of moments, we can always turn our faces up towards the sky to try and find some light. 
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If there is a here and now, it is neither here nor now. Life goes on in a present that can never be certified. We have only the ghosts of a near past to haunt the life that slips away. 
One day I with others were being led by the guards down a bleak corridor in a near-by maximum-security prison. It was the first day of class. As we passed a group of inmates heading to the classes we would teach, one of them was overheard to say, "They look at us as if we were ghosts." 
Those on the inside saw us seeing them as if they were not real. But who were the ghosts? They whose lives are not real to those on the outside? Or we from the outside whom they see as if we did not see them? In that instant we were each, insiders and outsiders, ghosts. We were absent to them as they to us for reasons that go beyond the confining walls. 
Among those who could have been on the inside but, so far as I know, was not is the young man accused of having murdered a student of mine. Johanna Justin-Jinich was, in a word, brilliant -- truly, in every way possible. One day in May, near the end of school, Johanna was at work on campus, when a ghost stepped out of her past. For reasons that can only be imagined, he shot her down without mercy or warning. 
The police later found evidence that he had known Johanna in earlier years and that he bore a tormented grudge. If the one accused is found guilty, his life will be over as is hers. Whatever his story, whoever he is in fact, whatever he thought he was up to, he too will forever be a phantom of what might have been -- alive perhaps, but not real; less real even than Johanna who will forever haunt us. We will think of her as the shadow of a shining light that came into our nows, only to be taken away before she had time to realize what she was meant to be; so too her murderer. We begrudge him the mercy he begrudged her. 
The night Johanna was killed I heard of her death while boarding a plane for Central Asia. The next day in Kyrgyzstan, college students and faculty boarded a bus for the annual end of the year trip to the mountains. As we left Bishkek for the Ala Archa National Park in the mountains, I was worn down from the journey from one to another unfathomable. But the students were happy with their work and hopeful for their futures. 
Some thirty kilometers out of town, just before the hills begin to rise toward the snow, our bus broke down. In Bishkek, all buses and most cars are themselves ghosts, imported and resold in Kyrgyzstan after years of wear and tear in Turkey or Germany or Argentina. People live with machines that move them about in cities built on the ghosts of the Soviet era. Still the young look for a future. 
As we stood stranded by the road, a few ambled into the fields. Soon most followed. After a while, without a word, the students among us paused amid the poppies. Several started to play a child’s game. They were from Turkic China, but others from Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, Korea and Russia, recognized their versions of the game, as did I. We ran about in circles playing, eventually laughing, and singing. None of it made any sense. 
I am way too old to be running like that, still I did and as I fell clumsily in the grass, the phantom of my grief joined the souls of Johanna and all the other children who yesterday were with us but are no more. 
The sun rose. Another bus came. We climbed the mountains. Our lives went on. It is unlikely that any in that field will see each other again. Yet the inexplicable pleasures of that then and there breached the walls that confine. 
We are all prisoners of times we cannot control. The inmates are no different from the outsiders. We are all ghosts of our various unrequited could-have-beens. The present just now disappearing as we let a thought or breathe pass through head and body is the only true reality. There is no here in this now and that is far from the worst that could be. 
Charles Lemert is a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, as well as a student and teacher of religion and psychoanalysis. Arguably the best sociological storyteller of all time, he has written both short and long biographical sketches of Muhammad Ali, his children, Matthew, Noah and Annie, as well as practically every working sociologist and social theorist since the 1850s. His books include The Race For Time, Dark Thoughts and Social Things. 






Gallery Index

David Amram

Forty-one years before Johanna Justin-Jinich would die too young, composer David Amram was thirty-seven years old and planning to make his will. 
Typed out quickly on a to-do list that Amram tucked away among his massive collection of personal papers, musical scores, photographs, book drafts and concert reviews, I came across it by chance while working on a gallery exhibit of Amram's life and work, Rising Young Composer, as well a new Afterward to his classic 1968 memoir, Vibrations, in the summer of 2006. 
I write about it here to fit it carefully, like a puzzle piece, into the chronology of Amram's life and to show how even the most mundane and everyday of objects can leave behind an intriguing biographical trace. 
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To-Do List, Courtesy of David Amram  
It was sometime in 1967, just after he had been named by Leonard Bernstein as the first composer-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic, that composer David Amram wrote a to-do list, where first on his agenda was to "make a will."
His life, up until that point, had simply been too busy. A musical prodigy in his youth, he had skipped out of his studies in music composition at the Manhattan School of Music in 1956, after his daily schedule of working at the Post Office, performing practically every night, all night, with his jazz trio, as well as jazz greats such as Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie and composing music for Joe Papp's Shakespeare in the Park and New York playwrights like Arthur Miller, started getting in the way.
He eventually was able to give up his job at the Post Office, after getting some work in the movies, writing scores for John Frankenheimer and Elia Kazan.  Then came the call from Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and David found himself profiled as America's most rising young composer in a four-page feature article in Life magazine.  Yes, he thought, now was time to take stock, act like a grown-up and make a will.  It would literally be, among other important practicalities he needed to take care of during those days, (like buying fireproof cabinets, calling the neck doctor and writing his mother's friend), be the first thing on his list.
He never did, however, though it remains on some of his to-do lists to this very day.  He plans to, he tells me, now in his seventy-ninth year, to get around to it, the very first moment the distraction of making music doesn't get in his way. 
Audrey Sprenger is currently finishing fieldwork for her new book, The Beauty Parts, An Impossibly Romantic Biography About Jack Kerouac.  






Gallery Index

Ervin Brindowski

Ervin Brindowski, an electrician and family man who makes his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is of the exact same generation as David Amram. Introduced to us here by his granddaughter, sociologist Valerie Chepp, she warns us to be a little wary of his tendency to tell tall tales and then undermines her own warning with a short digital audio clip of him regaling her, (as well as two of her uncles, Jimmy and Ratty, and her brother, Andy), with some questionable anecdote, catching her grandfather's voice and mischief-making in complete full sail.

By documenting both herself and her subject in words and on audio tape, complete with an annotated transcript, Chepp follows traditional ethnographic rules. However, much in the same way playwright, novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote about and recorded her family and community in the early 1930s, Chepp deliberately compromises her social scientific objectivity by fading the voices she recorded as ethnographic data into a song she closely associates with her grandfather, making her sentiment and love for her subject quite plain. 
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He coughs. He’s always tired. "That’s the chemo,” he tells me. "The doctor said I have …" he thinks, then yells to his wife in the other room. “Alice, what did the doctor say I have?" She yells back, "Fatigue." "Yeah, fatigue. That’s what I have." Alice responds unsympathetically, "We all have fatigue." He laughs, "Oh, you think your fatigue is like my fatigue?" They take a minute to argue over who suffers from more fatigue, an earnest banter I’m well familiar with. I wait patiently for my grandparents to finish. 
In January 2009, my grandfather, Ervin Brindowski, was diagnosed with mesothelioma: lung cancer resulting from exposure to asbestos. He remembers being surrounded by the carcinogen during the decades he worked as an electrician in a Milwaukee factory. "Nobody knew any better back then," he tells me matter-a-factly. 
My grandfather is fiercely loyal to his former employer, a loyalty surpassed only by his allegiance to his country and family. The second son of two Polish immigrants, Ervin sees his time in the Navy during World War II, and subsequent years mastering his trade on the factory floor, as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that provided for his seven children and wife, together in a small bungalow in an all-Polish neighborhood on Milwaukee’s Southside. 
Dziadek (pronunced: JAH-jah) means grandfather in Polish. Ervin deviated from tradition and named himself Grampy. He has sixteen grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and a remarkable gift for storytelling. His own biography makes up his stories, which themselves are often made up. But, like any skilled storyteller, it’s difficult to determine his fact from fiction. Skepticism usually sets in about mid-story, when the momentum is building, Grampy’s eyes get twinkly, his smile becomes wily and he pushes the story’s climax just to the limits of believability. "Nooo way," a Southside Milwaukee accent will call out. But Grampy always stands by his truth. 
I remember summers at his house as a little girl. At night after dinner he drank black coffee and sat outside for hours on the big wooden swing he built in his backyard. Sometimes he swung with his wife; other times he swung with a small portable radio, listening to the thrill of Bob Uecker’s voice broadcast Brewer’s games.  When his grandchildren visited, they piled together on the swing and sang songs, some in Polish -- probably an unintelligible dialect, a product of three generations lived in America -- and others in English.  His grandchildren were particularly fond of a song he wrote years before called The Lamplighter’s Serenade. It was almost my twenty-seventh birthday before I learned Grampy didn’t write this song -- it was written by Paul Francis Webster and Hoagy Carmichael, recorded by Glenn Miller’s Orchestra and later by Sinatra, Crosby, and others. When confronted about it today, Grampy simply smiles, as if the joke is (still) on us. 
Several years ago my grandparents moved from their bungalow; it became difficult to navigate the steps. "Besides," they say, "the neighborhood has changed" -- from Polish to increasingly Mexican.  Their local parish now delivers more masses in Spanish than English. They live in a small apartment, no backyard, only a narrow balcony that awkwardly fits two chairs, rarely used. Their children and grandchildren continue to visit. They feel loved. Grampy still follows every Brewer’s game.  Every third week, chemo drugs are pumped through his 85-year-old body. Grampy courageously struggles to adjust to his changing life and changing country. With every breath he agrees to hope, yet is haunted by uncertainty. He copes by remembering a fictionalized and real past, believes in the possibility of a secure future, and prays for a peaceful ending. 
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Digital Audio Recording, Valerie Chepp

Transcript to Digital Audio Recording Above
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Voice 1, Uncle Jimmy:  Tell these guys the story about the arrow in your leg.  This is another good story. 
Voice 2, Andy:  Is it true? 
Voice 3, Uncle Ratty:  Yeah, it's true. 
Grampy:  I was eleven years old and I had a buddy that lived two doors away from us.  Of course at this time my brother was like seventeen years old already, you know.  So I was like, about twelve.  So I didn’t have to take care of him anymore now because he drove the car and everything, you know, my dad used to give him keys to the car  (because Grampy's brother Joe had polio).  And, well, one day I was going hunting in Austin Woods, bow and arrow, with my buddy -- 
Andy:  Hunting for what? 
Grampy:  Rabbits.  And, we (laughing), I went over to his house to pick him up and he wasn't quite ready so I sat on one of the swings going back and forth -- 
Ratty:  With his sister! 
Grampy:  With his sister, she was a little bit older than I. 
Ratty:  There's nothing wrong with that. 
Grampy:  And I was sitting there and I was talking to her and then he came out of the house and said, "Let’s go," and he starts to walk towards the alley and he got by the alley and I just kept on talking to her, you know.  My legs were going out like this, you know (making the motion of legs on a swing), and --  I think I stayed too long, I guess, because all of a sudden -- 
Andy:  Now I know why Nanny left she didn’t want to hear this story again. 
Grampy:  All of a sudden (laughing) --  All of a sudden, "Ow!  What the hell is?"  And I look and here, sticking out of my leg, was this arrow. 
Ratty:    He shot an arrow at him. 
Grampy:  And luckily he didn't kill me! 
Jimmy:  We wouldn't be here! 
Voice 4, Valerie:  Did he shoot it because you were talking to his sister or he wanted you to? 
Both Jimmy and Ratty:  He wanted to go hunting! 
Jimmy:  And this guy was sitting there with his sister talking. 
Valerie:  That's payback. 
Jimmy:  What did you do then? 
Grampy:  Well, I pulled the arrow out of my leg. 
Ratty:  It wasn't like this (inaudible). 
Grampy:  Yeah, it wasn’t one of those (inaudible), but it's got a point on it.  And, uh, so I pulled it out and, well, naturally it was bleeding, it was right between my knee and my ankle, you know.  And, what the hell am I going to do?  I can't go home and tell my folks.  So, I went home and of course, my mother and dad were both gone, and so was Joey and, I wanted to stop the bleeding -- 
Andy:  Wait, wait, wait, back up a second.  Did you like say, "What the hell are you doing shooting an arrow at me?" 
Grampy:  No, no, no.  I pulled it out and went home.  I knew I was hurt. 
Ratty:  He was trying  to show off.  There was a girl there. 
Andy:  And what did he do?  Did he go hunt rabbits? 
Jimmy:  (Mimicking the friend) --  Now are you coming or not? 
Grampy:  I went home and I’m going to stop this bleeding -- I got to do something -- and so I opened up the medicine cabinet and of course at that time peroxide was the best thing for everything.  I mean it, it  -- 
Andy:  Kind of like Neosporin today. 
Grampy:  And so, I just put my leg over the bathtub and I took this bottle of peroxide and I poured it right in the hole. 
Andy:  How did that feel? 
Grampy:  Oh, (laughing) --   
Ratty:  So it must've hit a meaty area or -- 
Grampy:  Yeah, yeah, it did.  But then the peroxide must have -- Then I wrapped it, you know, bandaged it, and it must’ve did something because -- 
Andy:  And your parents never knew? 
Grampy:  No.  I never told them, nope, no, no. 
Voices fade into a song -- The Lamplighter's Serenade. Lyrics follow: A moment after dark around the park/ An old-fashion gent comes parading/ Dressed in funny clothes but singing as he goes/ The Lamplighter's Serenade/   Bridge:  The old boy loves to talk with couples on the walk/  But when it's half after love time/  He reaches for his sticks and from his bag of tricks/  He lights every star in the sky/ And if a lady or a beau should answer No/  He sprinkles their hearts with his magic/ Then he steals away to sing another day/ The Lamplighter's Serenade.  
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Valerie Chepp is currently working on her doctorate in sociology at the University of Maryland specializing in ethnographic methods, audio production and theories of knowledge, critical race and feminist/queer studies.