Thusness, Zen and Not Zen

I was considering a lot of Zenish nonsense not long ago and found some wonderful archival videos (home movies and tv film excerpts) of the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara from the 1960s that was very evocative and memory jogging. What I liked especially were the segments featuring Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Japanese founder of the Zen Center.

I was driven to find these YouTube videos by part of a day-long intensive program through the New Mexico Zen center I associate with that featured Kazuaki Tanahashi, a Japanese Zen artist, writer and elder who had been a colleague of Suzuki Roshi and who became part of the San Francisco Zen Center after Suzuki Roshi's death in 1971. He shared some of his memories of those long-ago times, and I sought to rekindle some of my own. The videos I found more than satisfied my interest and curiosity, and I suspect I'll go back to them many more times. This is one of the playlists I found consisting of segments of a KQED documentary from 1968, close to the time when I first got in contact with the SFZC (c. 1964-65). The film above is quite long but includes most of the clips on the playlist as well as quite a lot of other archival material.

Zen has evolved so much in this country since then it's sometimes hard to believe it's the same practice, and I believe that in many centers these days, it's not. Sukzuki Roshi might laugh, I think, at what passes for Zen these days, and yet he'd probably say "Why not? Sure." Zen Not Zen.

Zen practice had been evaporating in Japan since before the War in the Pacific, and after the War it seemed close to disappearing altogether from the land of its birth in the 1200s AD.

This is kind of ironic given Zen's cultural grounding among samurai and the shogunate; ie: warrior culture. It was in effect Buddhism for warriors and rebels. 

And that was the essence of what Suzuki Roshi brought to the United States starting in the late 1950s.

That was still the essence of what I came across through the SFZC in the mid-1960s.

In those days, Zen was sitting practice (zazen) and other Japanese Zen rituals, study of the sutras, Dharma talks which involved extensive Q&A with participants, and learning to live a fulfilling, happy, and 'generous" life. It was not psychotherapy, grief counseling, or rehab. It was practice, training. It was based on Japanese Soto Zen practice, but it was not monastic Zen, at least not for lay people though some monastic practices were incorporated. And after the Tassajara retreat opened, monastic Zen was offered to those who were interested and could withstand the rigor.

But for the most part the rigors of the Japanese monastery were applied lightly if at all, and the practice was less about form and ritual than it was about doing more or less what came naturally within the structure of Zen. The structural outlines of Japanese Zen practice were there, some of the fashion and props, but most of the practice was involved with the rebel counterculture of the era, and that meant many modifications from the stricter Japanese Zen observance, even if those who were involved with Zen practice in San Francisco and Tassajara didn't quite know what was being modified to accommodate them, how or why.

Following those outlines kept Zen in America sort of Japanese yet not. Zen was becoming Americanized, and after Suzuki Roshi's death in 1971, the San Francisco Zen Center became something else again under his successor, Richard Baker. Something Big. Important. And Eccentrically Fashionable. It was "out there" in the sense that Zen still wasn't commonplace, but it was attracting the rich, the famous or would-be famous, and the well-connected. It was a hotbed for striving to see and be seen among the powerful and influential in California and San Francisco society and what was left of the counter culture. And it began to change.

When I lived in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, I consciously avoided the San Francisco Zen Center though some of the people I worked with attended zazen there (At the Page St. facility) more or less regularly and encouraged me to attend as well as I'd been introduced to Buddhism through the Center when it was at the Sokoji Temple in Japantown. I declined. At the time I was practicing zazen on my own, usually in my apartment on Geary St., but not infrequently in Union Square or in North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, and other destinations where the cable car or 38 Geary bus would take me. (I had a car but hardly ever used it in the City.)

I had learned very early on that zazen practice did not require a formal set up, a zendo, a cushion, or really any of the trappings of traditional Zen practice. It could be done anywhere, any time, for as long or as short a time as one wanted or could, and in any position. Full lotus or no lotus or anywhere in between, or lying down, sitting in a chair, it was fine. The point was to sit without conscious desire or aspiration, without conscious thought, just sit. Once you learned to do that -- it takes practice -- you've found your center, and once you do, you can return to it pretty much any time under almost any circumstance. It was liberating. 

After 10 years or so of regular practice I entered into what I called The Void whenever I sat zazen. It's a state we were warned about because it could be (probably was) a delusion and it was best to let it go if you wound up there. Well, needless to say, striving to "let it go" merely reinforced it in me, so I let go of regular zazen practice instead. 

Afterwards, I engaged in zazen practice a few times a year, always encountering The Void, and being wary about it. I didn't have a formal teacher, so there wasn't really anybody I could discuss it with. 

But I think these encounters with The Void changed me significantly.

After I returned to regular practice this spring, I did not encounter The Void -- so far as I know, and things may have been happening that I was not aware of consciously. I did mention it to one of the teachers, but she didn't think it was particularly worrisome. I found sitting zazen to be easy most times, and that the way of zazen practice was akin to a body memory in me. It centered me. And it was almost automatic. 

I sat to sit, no other aspiration or motivation, and each time it was like a renewal.

I usually didn't sit for more than 20 minutes at a time, sometimes quite a bit less, but I found myself sitting throughout the day, not just at scheduled zazen times. I still do. It's still refreshing and centering and enables me to continue my tasks in a "proper" frame of mind, which means focused on the now and what is real in the now, not wandering (too much) off on tangential matters.

Richard Baker, who took over operations of the San Francisco Zen Center after Suzuki Roshi died in 1971, appears in a number of the films from the '60s. Though I don't recall ever meeting him or Roshi for that matter, I recognized him immediately even when he wasn't identified. Though advanced in age, he's still around I understand, founder of Zen centers in Colorado and Germany between which he spends his time, an honored if somewhat tarnished elder. As far as I know, the Zen center I associate with in New Mexico was started by him after he left SFZC in the '80s, and gifted in the '90s to the current roshi.

Baker took SFZC into realms and in directions I have a hard time thinking Suzukl Roshi would have imagined, particularly when it came to raising oodles of money, going into business, numerous businesses, buying lots of property and otherwise becoming a significant economic and cultural force in the City and the Bay Area. Numerous offshoots were set up around the country as Baker's vision of expansion came true. Much of it wasn't really Zen in traditional sense at all.

Zen Not Zen.

But it was very rewarding financially and very appealing to some people of wealth, fame, and/or power and that helped keep the expansion going for some time, even after Baker Roshi was asked to resign as abbot. 

I won't detail the scandal or scandals to come at SFZC, but I will say that abuse of authority at Zen and Buddhist centers, monasteries and temples is not unheard of and in fact seems to closely parallel financial and sexual improprieties and scandals that have riven most religious endeavours -- probably throughout history. I'm pretty sure it's in the nature of the beast. Zen abbots and roshis are often granted enormous spiritual, moral, and temporal power and authority over their followers and over quite a lot of property and investments. They are supposed to act with wisdom, and most do, most of the time (at least we'd like to think so), but the kind of power and authority religious and spiritual leaders have or can acquire may lead to significant abuse, too. Zen monasteries in Japan can be notoriously abusive to monks and sometimes lay people as well. Mostly it's been forgiven or excused, or even routinized, but the power abbots and roshis have over participants and monks is nearly absolute, and that too often leads to inappropriate action and uproar.

So in some ways, I feel lucky to have encountered SFZC relatively early on, before it became famous and fashionable, before it expanded into Marin, Berkeley, and other locations, before Tassajara, before it was what it became and to some extent still is. I'm grateful that my first encounters with Buddhism and Zen were through Suzuki Roshi, not through some of his successors -- although apparently I was corresponding with Richard Baker when I contacted the Zen Center '60s, all the literature I received was either Suzuki Roshi's own work or that of previous Buddhist and Zen teachers.

As for Suzuki Roshi himself, I think I must have seen some short films of his Dharma talks back in the day, probably at the Midnight Movies which I attended fairly regularly in the late '60s. When I see the clips now, though I may not remember the individual clips, I do remember the settings, the man, and the sound of his voice rather clearly. "This I've heard before" even though it may not have been that particular talk. 

The zendo at the Sokoji temple in San Francisco looks identical to my memories of it -- even though I'm almost certain I was never physically there. I probably saw films of it, again at the Midnight Movies, and that's what I remember. There is a bare possibility I was there once during a visit to San Francisco with my mother when I was 16 or maybe 17, as we would sometimes go on adventures in the City, but I don't remember seeing the outside of the building (very distinctive) which I'm sure I would recall if I'd been there. 

I have no memories of Tassajara as such. When i see films of it, it's an unknown place to me. I was aware of it, though, soon after its acquisition and I can recall meeting some people who had been there. I was encouraged to go to the Zen Mountain Center myself, but I never did.

As for Green Gulch Farm in Marin, until I heard Wendy Johnson talk about it during an intensive workshop this spring, I can't say I'd ever heard of it at all. Isn't that something? How could I have been so oblivious? However it came about, I was oblivious to Green Gulch and to the various business enterprises SFZC set up around San Francisco and the Bay Area, as well as to the various centers and temples that sprang up around the Bay Area led by former students of Suzuki Roshi and Baker Roshi.

Much of the history of SFZC under Baker Roshi and his successors is still around, the players are still active, and their influence is strong. I'm convinced there wouldn't be more than a tiny bit of Zen in the US or much of anywhere outside Japan but for them. I saw a statistic once indicating that there were more Buddhist practitioners and Zen practitioners in the United States than in Japan and that Japanese Buddhism is slowly fading away. Zen was never a popular practice in Japan in any case, as it was meant for the upper classes where it has largely stayed. Some of what passes for Zen in the United States is also very class conscious and seeks to appeal primarily to the upper strata -- where it's had some success.

In Zen, lineage and history are very important. Though it may be convoluted, you can trace any number of Buddhist endeavors right back to Shakyamuni Buddha or his immediate successors. Some lineages may be partly legendary, but others are extensively documented and there is no doubt of their authenticity.

Those lineages can show how and when the practice was modified and by whom. Adaptations and modifications were going on all the time and still are. Various schools of Buddhism and Zen have developed over the centuries, and they sometimes dispute vigorously and occasionally violently with one another. 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Buddhists generally make terrible national rulers. Buddhism is not a governing ideology or philosophy; often it's just the opposite. Not anarchy as such, but rebellion, individualism, and practical autonomy are core principles. Gautama Buddha was, after all, a rebel, and his followers were rebels back in the day, and many stories from Buddhist history are of rebellion from whatever Establishment then existed. Even as part of the Establishment, Buddhists are intrinsically rebelling against it. 

Buddhism concentrates attention on the individual coming to "know" him/herself from the inside out, and from that knowing, coming to realize how interconnected all people and things -- physical phenomena -- are. In the end, you come to the realization that at the ground state of being there is no separation into individuals. Everything is one thing, and one thing is everything. 

But you can't do much with that realization as it has no practical application in everyday life. So Buddhists are encouraged to see their autonomous existence as connected with all of existence and thus be compassionate toward existence as one would be with oneself.

It doesn't always work on the individual level, and it seems impossible to work on a large scale. 

Thusness.

(Which will have to wait for another post)

Unless We Are Japanese

Much of Western Zen practice is modeled on that of Japan -- as would be expected given its origin in the West among immigrants from Japan in the 19th century. Too often, though, I think Zen practice in the West is completely divorced from its Japanese cultural, political and economic context, though not necessarily divorced from its history.

The history points to lines of transmission of the dharma from the Buddha through various teachers in India, then China, thence to Japan where three main schools of Zen developed from Chinese Cha'an Buddhism, and so here we are today. Most Western Zen practice amalgamates these Japanese schools without getting into the weeds of how they came to be and what their differences are and the many and sometime bloody struggles between them.

When the roshi tells you about the peaceful intent of Zen Buddhism, question it.

I've mentioned that Zen is in some respects a warrior cult, and Zen monasteries are partly modeled on samurai training. Zen's origins in China provide the foundation, but the development of Zen in Japan was  closely tied to the samurai and feudal Japanese culture. Zen flourished (and was sometimes repressed) under the Shoguns, particularly so, it would seem, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the ruling power in Japan from the 1600s until the Meiji Restoration of Imperial rule in 1868.

Zen declined from that point as did all Buddhism in Japan. The Imperial Shinto cult took its place. After the War in the Pacific, as it is called, the Imperial cult declined, but Buddhism, for the most part, did not revive much. Irreligion and secularism became the model to follow under American occupation after the war, but gradually Buddhist and Shinto practices reasserted themselves.

Zen, it must be understood, was never universal or even the dominant school of Buddhism in Japan. It isn't now. It is a special practice meant for a certain class or quality of individual. In old Japan, that was generally the samurai and some elements of the Shogun, Daimyo and Imperial households. In other words, very much upper class. Of course the lower orders could practice zazen, anybody can. But the hierarchy of Zen teaching and transmission, and admission to the monasteries was not open any but the "right sort", and the right sort usually meant high born and wealthy.

Monastic Buddhism can be criticized for being very class conscious. It's hard not to be, I think, given the Buddha's own princely origins. His example may apply to all classes, but he couldn't help being the aristocrat he was. His monastic life was outwardly poor and simple, but it was an aristocrat's expression of poverty and simplicity, not at all something grown from the bottom of society.

And so it has been with most monastics in the West as well as Asia. I don't criticize Zen or Buddhism for its classism, but I do acknowledge it, just as I would with Catholicism or any other religion.

St. Francis, my adopted patron saint, was also the son of an Italian merchant-aristocrat and a high-born French woman.

To see these high-born men and women putting on robes and going out begging is rather stunning when you think about it. But that's the way of monastics. Has been for many long centuries.

That aside, I think it's critical to recognize -- and honor -- Zen's Japanese origins without necessarily "turning Japanese." We in the West don't have more than a very superficial and probably erroneous understanding of Japanese society and culture and how Zen is integrated within it. We may be able to see and touch its outer shape and form, but Zen teaches us that's an illusion. We see nothing, really, because there is nothing really there.

Why would we put on robes or go on pilgrimage or chant the sutras? There's nothing to find, is there? No merit is gained.

There's nothing to learn, nothing to gain, nothing to have, nothing to be. Zen teaches knowing nothing.

There's a cow-kitten at my feet playing with a catnip fish taco.

That is Zen.

Other household cats will practice zazen randomly. We could ask "Does a cat have Buddha nature?" But why? Do the cranes flying overhead know and practice the dharma?

Seeing Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood [with updated notes]

Before all the recent massacres, we went with friends to see a movie, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," after consuming way too many plates at the Albuquerque sushi joint we like to patronize. It's on Tramway just below the  rise of the Sandia Mountains, and like many areas of 'Burque, it reminds me a lot of parts of LA a long time ago. V. B. Price calls Albuquerque "City at the End of the World" partly because of those mountains rising heavenward on the edge of forever. Los Angeles, where he and I both had shallow roots, has many similar mountains, and when I was a kid in far eastern LA County, the mountains I saw out my living room picture window were the San Gabriels, with Mount San Antonio ("Old Baldy") gleaming with snow all year long as the anchor to the mountain range. This is a Google street view of the mountains from the vantage point of the street where I lived from 1954 to 1959. The yellow house on the left is where I lived.

Imagine the scene without the trees and you have a good approximation of what I could see out my living room window.

Well, when I could see the mountains at all. It was a smoggy era, and more often than not, the mountains and everything else were obscured with a thick, choking yellow-brown haze. The smog defined what you could and couldn't see and more often than not, you had a very limited view no matter where you turned. The smog was worst on the still summer days when it built up so thick and heavy, you could feel it pressing down on you and you hesitated to take a breath.

I left LA in 1959 and didn't go back until 1969 when on a whim one June or July late summer day, Ms Ché and I drove down the coast on Highway 1 from San Jose in the 1951 Buick I'd purchased a few weeks before. * We were headed for who knew where. Somewhere south, places I'd known as a kid, maybe to a mission or two. I didn't know.

We wound up sitting in front of the house where I'd lived from 1954 to 1959. How I was able to find it with hardly a wrong turn on the road after ten years away and never having driven in LA before, I can barely imagine now. But there we were. The house had been painted yellow and looked much shabbier than I remembered. The whole neighborhood was shabby it seemed to me, and it seemed almost as if the life had left it. The smog was as thick as ever. It was a little before noon. I asked Ms. whether she wanted to see Hollywood and Beverly Hills and all that. She said "Sure."

This was Ms. Ché's first trip to LA and she seemed to like it. It was my first trip back but my umpteenth time in the City of Angels. And I didn't like it much.Which surprised me, because I'd long felt that LA was my home, and I had faced extreme culture shock leaving for Northern California when I was 10. Yet coming back when I was 20, more of a hippie rebel and wanderer than not, I felt it was a phony and dismal place, ugly at heart, and as we toured the sights in Hollywood, cruising Sunset, I got this notion that's never left me: LA is a killer culture. I was lucky to be out of there. I doubted I would have lived had I stayed.

I didn't tell her at the time, though. I'm not sure I ever have.

The Tate-LaBianca murders hadn't happened yet [*See below, yes they had], but there was definitely something in the air -- besides the smog -- that presaged a coming bad thing, something spiritually, psychically foreboding.. I attributed it at the time to my own personal sense of that killer culture I'd never quite grasped before. [As I've thought back on it, the murders may have been an underlying reason why I wanted to go back a few weeks after they happened, even if I wasn't consciously motivated at the time. Maybe I wanted to see for myself...]

I showed her places I recalled in Hollywood and up into the hills [was I looking for Cielo Dr.? Could be...], but mostly we just drove around at random and finally wound up at the ocean at Santa Monica Pier. A brief stop there, and then it was back up the coast, headed north, spending the night in Santa Maria, then in the morning driving nonstop up 101 to San Jose again then across the Valley to our home. An almost three day adventure.

So when we went to see the movie, before all the recent massacres, it was with a sense of anticipation and not a little dread. We knew what it was about --or thought we did. We were not Tarantino fans, but at least I had an open mind about what the picture might have to offer.

It didn't disappoint.

Though its climax shocked and appalled and horrified, it was a cartoon, and because it was a cartoon, the horror of the climax ultimately evaporated almost like a dream. This didn't happen. You imagined it. Or rather, Tarantino imagined it for you.

The climax is very bloody and worse, but... it wasn't real. That's not what happened.

The Tate-LaBianca murders really did happen. They were a pivotal event and not only in Hollywood. They began to bring the curtain down on an era. The Counterculture had run amok. Woodstock was yet to come and the dreadful Altamont. We continued to protest and march against the Vietnam War. Nixon was a lightning rod for youthful anger.

But after the murders, something changed --again, not to forget all the psychic changes after the assassinations and insurrections of 1968 -- and there was no going back.

Tarantino is too young to remember much of the '60s, and yet he recreated a version of Hollywood c.1969 that mostly felt right. I'd put it this way: we didn't know what was to come, and because we didn't know, we put on a brave face and continued with our lives regardless. That's the case for the characters in the movie as well..They could feel that things were changing, particularly the main characters, but they didn't know what or how. My guess:50 years on, and they still don't know. They're in the business of creating illusion after all, an illusion which reality rarely penetrates.

After the movie, I said to our friends (all much younger than us and with no memories of the '60s or Hollywood as it was or... well, you get the idea ... that what really bothered me about the picture was the license plates on the cars. (They were the right color/style for the era -- black with yellow letters and numbers, though they would start changing to blue and yellow in 1969) -- but Tarantino was fucking with our memories by jumbling the letters and numbers, instead of having plates with three letters followed by three numbers the way they were in California back then. He was fucking with us.

Yes. Yes he was. Quite deliberately too.

Things really did change in 1969. Nothing would be quite the same again. LA and Hollywood wouldn't be the same again.

Having someone too young to remember tell us old farts what happened -- as he sees it -- is really more valuable than not. No, his history is skewed, but what if...?

What if...?
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* Ms. Ché and I were talking about it the other day, and she remembered something that was going on at Cal Expo the day we left, so she said we could probably figure out the date from that. Sure enough, it was September 4, going into the weekend after Labor Day. This struck me as odd at first because I thought we were still taking classes and would have to be at college. She said, "don't you remember?" I graduated that June and she'd graduated the year before. We were done with our educations for the time being. Oh. No. I didn't remember. Later that month I would take a job in Stockton and we would move there.

September 4 was several weeks after the Tate murders, so obviously, they were on our minds. No one knew who had done it, though the caretaker had been arrested. At that time, the Tate murders were not officially connected with the La Bianca murders nor with a string of other murders the Manson followers would be accused of. Arrests of Manson Family suspects for the Tate murders would not come until October.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere in LA, heavy with smog as it was, let you feel the burden of death. How much of it was on our minds, I don't know. But Ms. Ché confirmed that we went out to Santa Monica before leaving, and it was a relief to be by the ocean and feel the ozone wash over us, almost cleansing.

Refugees

While doing some random pondering the other day, I came upon a news item saying that the regime had cut the number of admissible refugees from 100,000 a year to 20,000 and suggesting that the real number let in this year would probably be less than that.

This in a world of displaced people -- most of them victims of the various wars of aggression instituted, supported and maintained by our dauntless civilian and military warriors -- numbering upwards of 65 million and growing thanks to the effects of climate change.

Well. How special.

As we know, the immigration fight, including the admission of refugees, is part of the budget impasse that has resulted in yet another "government shutdown" which may or may not get resolved some time soon. Ya never know with these things, but every time there's been a "shutdown" something else appalling is integrated into the formulas for budgeting and operating the government of These United States. With Shitball in the White House, you can bet a whole raft of Awful will emerge with the restoration of government function (probably some time in March) and few will be the wiser. So it goes.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about the plight of refugees in general and particularly how some of my ancestors were themselves refugees from the policies of Great Nations and Empires which found it useful to scapegoat, starve, and run out of their homes certain segments of their own populations and those of nations, empires and imperial conquests they went to war with -- thus creating any number of refugees in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

The practice never really ended, did it?

I learned recently of the Huguenot French heritage of my mother's father and his paternal ancestors. They were refugees driven out of France during one of the intolerances of the 1600s and wound up in England where they weren't exactly welcomed and assimilated. So about 100 years later, they emigrated to America, winding up on the Frontier -- such as it was -- first in Virginia and then Kentucky, moving on to Indiana in the 1830s. That's where my mother was born and that's where some descendants still are.

I've known about my Irish ancestors for some time, but I wasn't told the truth about them when I was growing up. An elaborate fiction was created connecting them with a prominent colonial family in Maryland and their arrival in America between 1688 and 1705. Or so.

But there is no connection between my ancestors and that family. There may be a distant connection in Ireland well before then, but there's none now.

Instead, it looks like my Irish ancestors were in fact Famine refugees who arrived in America between 1848 and 1854.

The Famine was never mentioned in the family lore I heard. Nor was the journey from Ireland to eventual settlement in Iowa ever detailed. Over time, I've learned a little bit about it, and how anti-Irish/anti-Catholic sentiment in Ohio, where my ancestors first tried to settle in America, drove them out and set them on a long route across the Mississippi River to take up homesteads in Iowa's Scott County.

Not only were they refugees from Ireland, they were among many internal Irish and other domestic refugees in the US.

Meanness was endemic among some Americans then as it is now.

I'm still trying to find out more details about my German ancestors. There are some indications they might not have been ethnic Germans at all. Indeed, there is family lore that they were Jewish conversos, and some of the DNA evidence suggests they came from somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly from territories of the Russian Empire, likely some time in the 18th century. They settled in Baden and in the Palatinate and converted to Catholicism. But it seems their settlement was uneasy at best.

In 1850, my father's German grandmother's large family all left Koblenz for America, almost immediately heading west to Iowa where many of their descendants still are. They settled as farmers and merchants and their descendants are now found all over eastern Iowa.

Were they refugees? I don't know, but I suspect they were. During the 1840s and '50s what would become united Germany in the 1870s was wracked with rebellion and revolution. Some of the victims included Jews and conversos who were subject to all manner of discrimination and sometimes death presaging in part the later Nazi anti-Jewish programs.Those who could get out did so -- sometimes under compulsion by authorities or the mob.

I think something similar might have happened to my father's German grandfather Reinhold. But there was a twist. He left his town in Baden in 1854 -- when he was 14 (or maybe 16 or even 17, records suggest he was not truthful about his year of birth. He said it was 1840, but it was probably 1837 or 1838). He was not the first of his family to leave. His older brother left in 1852, his parents would leave in 1856, and his younger siblings would leave shortly thereafter. Ultimately, the entire family emigrated to America.

Reinhold went to France and sailed to New York in 1855. He stayed in New York apprenticed to a book binder in Brooklyn until 1863 when he went out to Iowa. Some of his relatives were already there. Shortly after he joined them, he married my father's German grandmother, and over time, they  had many children, including my father's mother Elizabeth who was the great beauty of the family, though she was deaf.

Thinking about when Reinhold left Baden and then when he left New York, I find a common thread: the military draft. If he was 17 when he left Baden, then he was of draft age. There were military campaigns throughout the region against rebels in those days, and so it's quite likely he sought refuge from the draft. There were draft riots in New York during the Civil War, and I can well imagine he went out to Iowa to escape the draft in New York.

Refugee? It's possible he felt the sting of antisemitism in Germany that was part of the revolutionary fervor of his youth, and it's likely that he wanted no part of military service in either Germany or the United States.

But it's as likely that he was descended from refugees who escaped pogroms in the east.

And then there are my English ancestors, all of whom arrived in America between 1620 and 1640. They settled in New England and New Jersey which suggests to me that they were probably religious dissenters, but I haven't found any details to confirm it one way or another. Religious dissenters of the era were in many cases refugees, and some of them, when they got to America, became refugees from persecution by earlier arrivals. There was little respite.

But the point of going through this is that were it not for refuges like America and the US many of my ancestors probably wouldn't have survived the conditions they faced in their homelands, conditions created by forces beyond their control. Their situation was in some ways comparable to the refugee crises of today.

The US has had both "open door" and "closed door" policies toward refugees. When the door has been closed, as it was during WWII and its lead-up, millions of people were sacrificed abroad so that nativists at home could feel protected from their taint. It was a shameful display of racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice that we seem to be headed into once again. Since 1924, the immigration door has been either closed to "undesirables" (ie: non-Northern European Christians) or cracked open just a little bit.

The lie is that the US has had an "open door" immigration policy at any time since 1924. It's false.

Asylum for refugees has always been limited since 1924 as well.

Now it looks like immigration and asylum will be further restricted. There may be reasons to do so, but the anti-immigrant and anti-refugee campaigns are full of lies and deceptions and should be rejected as unworthy of the nation's best qualities.

On the other hand, "open door" immigration -- which enabled many refugees to immigrate, survive and prosper in the US -- had a deliberate and devastating effect on Native Americans, a topic to explore in another post.

"Larry"

[Note: My mother's birthday was November 14. She would be 106; my how time flies...]

[Further Note: This is a long one, so I've split it at what may be an inappropriate point...]

The only picture I've ever seen of my mother's father

"Larry" was my mother's father. His name was Lawrence, and in fact, I don't know that he was ever called "Larry," though there are a few hints in the record that he was known as Riley, his middle name and the maiden name of his grandmother on his father's side.

When I researched the family history, I found that his grandfather Robert (a hatter, and probably quite mad) was married twice and both wives were named Mary Riley. How odd and interesting thought I. The one was about 20 years older than the other, and it appeared that Mary Riley the Elder died about a year before Mary Riley the Younger became Mrs. Robert. But -- and this is where it became interesting -- Mary Riley the Younger had lived in the household since she was a child. I've been in touch with some of "Larry's" other descendants, and the suspicion among them is that Mary Riley the Younger was Mary Riley the Elder's daughter by another man, and she was probably illegitimate. The alternative explanation was that Mary Riley the Younger was a serving girl recently arrived from Ireland who just happened to have the same name as her household mistress.

At any rate, she was the mother of Larry's father, David, and of two other children. There were four children by Mary Riley the Elder. Big families were the norm in those days.

Larry's paternal ancestors were (according to lore) originally French. They were Huguenots driven out during one of the Intolerances, and they wound up in England in the 1670s. About a century later, a branch decamped for America, settling first in Virginia, then in Kentucky, then, finally in Indiana in the 1840s. Descendants still live there. I of course do not and would not. Perhaps it's due to too much history.

Larry was born in 1878 but he claimed to be much younger than he was. His third wife, Marie, claimed he was 32 when he died horribly in 1916. He was actually 38. The likelihood is that he lied to her about his age, just as he used a false name on his marriage license to Marie.

I suspect he used a false name on the license because he was still legally married to my mother's mother, Edna, who had sued him for divorce in 1912, but that divorce may never have been granted. The record isn't clear.

On my mother's birth certificate issued in 1911, Larry lists his age as 31, and my mother's mother is listed as age 22. Neither is correct. Larry was 33 and Edna was 21.

At any rate, Edna claimed to be a widow-woman when she remarried in 1917. And before that, she claimed that Larry was a bigamist when he married Marie and fathered their daughter Helen in 1914.

For years, my mother claimed to have been born in 1914. She knew about Helen and she told me that Helen was only two years old when she, her mother, and Larry's St. Louis wife and daughter attended Larry's funeral in 1916. My mother was herself barely five at the time.

To put it charitably, Larry lived a brief but checkered life. He was the second youngest of six sons born to Caroline E. and David H. in Lebanon, Indiana, where David swanned about as Civil War veteran and newspaper publisher. Which was the more important aspect of his life is not entirely clear, but later, when most of the family moved to Indianapolis, David's veteran status helped him to secure a number of patronage positions with the state and federal governments.

So far as I can tell, the family's status was "solid middle class" -- neither poor nor rich -- and David's government service was the reason why. He seems to have made enough money to take care of his family well if not lavishly.

1917

1917 was the year that my mother, her mother, and her step-father came out to California from Indiana, changing their lives and future forever.

My mother said she remembered very little about her natural father -- or Indianapolis, for that matter -- but as I've written elsewhere, after doing a lot of research, I don't think she remembered her biological father at all. He was gone from Indianapolis, establishing a new life and family in St. Louis, by the time my mother was two years old. She could have had some vague memory of him, I suppose, but it's not likely. Also, her mother sued my mother's father for divorce in the summer of 1912, when my mother wasn't even a year old. The parents were not living together at the time and it's possible they never lived together as man and wife.

I always thought that Leo, the man who became my mother's stepfather, was Irish-American, but in fact his grandparents were German. I'm pretty sure my mother thought he was Irish, too. Maybe he pretended to be Irish for the hell of it. "Passing" as it were.

Leo was definitely a romantic, and he must have believed that something wonderful was inevitable. He worked as a machinist in Indianapolis, but when he went out to California, he worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership in Santa Maria -- after a brief sojourn in Santa Ana, the end of the line for the railroad that brought him and my mother and her mother to California. Leo and Edna (my mother's mother) were married in Santa Ana in October of 1917. Edna stated on her marriage certificate that she was a widow. Leo claimed it was his first marriage, but I've found records that suggest he was married before in Kansas City where he lived for about ten years, married, if he was married, to a woman who died in an asylum in 1921. I found no record of a divorce, and it is possible he was still married to her when he married Edna in Santa Ana. Which would be ironic as hell, since my mother's biological father had another wife and family in St. Louis when he was killed in that rail yard incident. We won't even get into my mother's grandfather, shot and killed by his mistress when he threatened to leave her...

As far as I can tell, Leo did very well for himself and his family in California. He became the service manager at the dealership, he was able to buy a nice bungalow a few blocks from the shop shortly after he started work, he had a car of his own, and my mother said he always provided very well for her and her mother. All of this would have been almost impossible had they stayed in Indianapolis among the suffering and seething working class.

But sometime in the early '30s Leo quit his job at the dealership and bought a filling station which he ran profitably for a while. He sold that and bought a motor court cum filling station in Willits on the Redwood Highway which he operated until 1939 when he sold it in order to invest in a "mine" in Nevada -- a phony mine as it turned out. He lost everything, and I think he just barely escaped going to jail for fraud, though it didn't appear that he knew that the partners in the mining operation were engaged in swindling their marks, chief among them Leo.

Leo and Edna returned to California in 1941, where he went to work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard building Liberty Ships for the War. Edna was sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. Leo himself died in 1945, still working at Mare Island.

1916 was the year that started this sequence. My mother's father had been killed in a rail yard incident in St. Louis in December of 1916 -- actually just before Christmas. His funeral was on December 23. My mother said she remembered going to his funeral (she was five) but she never mentioned St. Louis. I think she "remembered" all of this happening in Indianapolis. She never mentioned the trip to California, either, but she had strong memories of living in Santa Maria from a very early age -- she was still only five years old when they arrived.

She considered herself a California girl for the rest of her life  -- even though she was born in Indianapolis. She never really wanted to live anywhere else, and if she'd had her druthers, she'd have stayed on California's Central Coast the rest of her life.

1917 was the year the US entered WWI, and although I only heard about that  from my father -- he was a junior officer on the Home Front in Iowa during WWI -- I think the War was a critical element in the decision of Leo and Edna to move to California. The opportunities were greater on the West Coast, or seemed to be.

It was a risky move as I doubt Leo had a job lined up before the departure from Indianapolis. But what did it matter? There would be plenty of opportunities once they got there. And so it was to be.

Dumb luck? I don't know.

At any rate, he did well, and he would have been wiser to have stayed in his position rather than going out on his own with his filling stations and disastrous mining adventure. But I can imagine his romanticism informed his vision. He couldn't believe he could fail.

Of course I didn't know either Leo or Edna, let alone my mother's father, as they had all passed on by the time I was born.

In fact, all my grandparents were dead by the time I was born. At the time, it was a fairly unusual situation, as nearly everyone had grandparents. I didn't.

Not having the anchor of grandparents -- among other things -- has helped differentiate my point of view from that of many people who did have grandparents. I see and experience things somewhat differently than most people, and I always have.

1917 -- and WWI -- are considered the era when the US "came of age." That is another topic for another day, but I would agree there's something to it. Given the devastation in Europe and the creation of the Soviet Union, the impending collapse of the global economy and the breakup of the European Imperial Projects, the role of the US in world affairs had to change. It did. We thought for the better, but recent events -- say, over the last 60 years or so -- bring that into question.

We (collectively) seemingly aren't better at all. In fact, many of our collective worst aspects are on display. There's little or nothing "good" about it. And our model is being adopted widely.

I don't know that Leo learned his lesson with the collapse of his mining venture, My mother had nothing good to say about him afterwards, but I didn't know him, so I have nothing to base an opinion on. The indications prior to the collapse all seem positive, so whatever happened afterwards I think would have to grow out of that.

Much the same can be said for the US -- many, many positive indications that go haywire toward the end.

We'll see.

[Note: this post has been difficult for me to write,  not so much for the topic as for the continuing problems I'm having with my condition. For the last week or more, I've been experiencing an RA "flare" that has been very painful and debilitating, and has been devilishly difficult to control. All part of the disease they say....]

Spring Is Nearly Here

Had a wonderful day in Santa Fe Monday enjoying the weather and three of the museums in Downtown Santa Fe I dearly love: The New Mexico Museum of Art; the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors; and the Museum of Contemporary Native Art.

Santa Fe (or "Fanta Se" as the City Different is sometimes known) can cause a lot of tittering among the cognoscenti -- I titter about it myself from time to time. It's also called "Adobe Disneyland" -- and for good reason. There is a certain artificiality about it, a certain belief that "what you see is what it was meant to be -- but it was never really like this, and it isn't really like this now." Not real.

It's a stage set for tourists. Even though it's not high season, and there's still a nip in the air (they say there might be snow by the end of the week) the tourists are assembling in their multitudes. Oh my yes. They come from all over. Yesterday, I encountered  tourists from the South, some from Germany, some from Japan.

They come from all over, they do.

Once there in Santa Fe some are enchanted, some complain. Well, the altitude (7,200 ft or so) affects people differently.

Ms Ché and I tend to take the Old Pecos Trail which leads to the Old Santa Fe Trail into town. The historic route. The road gets narrower and narrower the closer you get to the Plaza, but interestingly -- at least to me -- it doesn't go directly to the Plaza. Instead, it jogs on Water St. a sharp 90 degree turn, then another sharp turn on what's now Washington, and even then, where it ends at the corner of La Fonda Hotel, the trail is just off the Plaza. How supply trains maneuverered through that maze -- or even if they actually did -- I have no idea. I have a hard time imagining that a fully loaded supply wagon pulled by a team of mules, horses or oxen -- six, eight, or ten strong -- would even attempt it.

Many of the complaints of tourists today have to do with getting around and finding this or that attraction in Santa Fe -- once you find the city different itself. Or rather, its historic district. It's not exactly hidden, but it's not on the freeway, either, and the signs that seem to point you toward it aren't necessarily helpful. Unless you know your way around -- or have the patience of Job -- you're bound to get lost and frustrated, annoyed and even angry. I've seen it happen.

It must have been similar in the old days. Except in the Old Days, Santa Fe wasn't really a city at all. It was barely a settlement. There was  cluster of adobe buildings huddling around the Plaza and a big old adobe church -- the Parroquia -- a block off the Plaza, and that, pretty much, was "it." The rest of what constituted the town was a smattering of scattered farmsteads and haciendas extending north and south along the superlatively named Santa Fe River (which then and now was an intermittent creek.) At most, the area population amounted to a few hundred families, Hispano and Indio in several combinations. There were also a few Anglos from early times, but the demographics weren't like California's where the Anglos seemed many.

Santa Fe was more like a frontier garrison in the Old Days, with the Presidio dominating everything. A small remnant of said Presidio, grandly styled the "Palace of the Governors" remains across from the Plaza today. Although some of the building is "historic" -- ie: contains elements that were built in the 17th, 18th or 19th Centuries -- nearly all of it is a recreation. And the facade which greets tourists today and the portal under which the Indians sell their wares dates from 1913. It has not changed since 1913. When the Palace was being used for government and military affairs -- as opposed to being a museum -- the facade was regularly changed and the building was continually modified to suit whatever necessity or desire its proprietors envisioned. It was a living building. It hasn't been "alive" since it was re-skinned with a heavy beamed portal in 1913. And its mummification is one of Santa Fe's many peculiarities.

Josef Diaz, a curator of the History Museum, took us on a "backstage" tour of the Palace on Monday-- actually it was "on stage," and he was explaining how the set would change over the next few years. I've been to the Palace many times, but I saw rooms Monday that I've never seen before. I also saw rooms lit by natural light that had always been dim and shrouded in darkness in the past. One of the persistent frustrations of Palace exhibits is that they were so dimly lit, you could barely make out what was on display.

Now some rooms have been opened to daylight for the first time in decades, and Josef said that many more rooms will be. So. That's good. I'm all for it.

He also said that many of the current exhibits in the Palace will be removed and allowed to "rest." Some of them have been on display for 20 years or more and they are deteriorating. Others, he seemed to think, don't belong in the Palace, and they will move to the History Museum behind it. Or they duplicate what's already at the History Museum and they'll be retired. What they want to do with the Palace is focus less on New Mexico history per se and more on the actual history of the building itself -- particularly its period as governors' offices and residence -- and its role in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-92. Well, now, there's an idea, I thought.

During the Pueblo Revolt, I've read, the Palace -- or rather the Presidio of which the Palace was a corner -- was transformed and rebuilt into typical pueblo housing  and at least one kiva was built in the Plaza. There may have been other kivas in the Presidio courtyard as well.

After the return of the Spanish, the Indian pueblo aspects were removed and the Presidio/Palace was restored to what it had been -- more or less -- before the Revolt, much as the churches that had been destroyed during the Revolt were re-built more or less like they had been prior to the Indian uprising. But exactly what the Indians had done to modify the Presidio and Palace was never entirely clear -- though there is a good deal of evidence of it remaining -- and there was very little on display in the Palace that made sense of that period at all.

Josef said that the plan was to turn over an entire room to the Revolt, and to open up many of the floors and cover them with glass that could be walked on so that the buried elements -- both Spanish and Indian -- can be seen more fully and clearly.

That's good, too. I'm all for it.

It will take years to change the Palace set, and then to populate it with holographic actors might take even longer. Yes, holograms are in the offing, and I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea. Governor Armijo is supposed to offer his holographic greetings in a room off the main entrance to Palace, and Governor Prince and his wife might have their holographic discussion in another restored residential room. This Governor Prince I don't know, so I asked Josef "What about Lew Wallace?" He seemed momentarily startled: "Didn't I mention him? Oh yes, we'll have an extensive display on him. There's a problem getting artifacts from his tenure as New Mexico governor, as they are in other museums or private collections and arranging a long-term loan can be problematical." I said, "Well, wouldn't he make a good holographic subject?" Indeed. Indeed he would -- thus obviating the need for many artifacts it seems to me.

Other things that Josef pointed out would be changed over time are that the Segesser hide paintings would be moved from a dark and narrow corridor to a building of their own which was previously used for storage. Murals that once graced the entrance hall would be restored and replaced and other murals in the building would be restored and better lit. The print shop would -- maybe -- be reconfigured (Tom Leach, Palace Press honcho, is not entirely convinced it's a good idea)  and the entire Palace would be lightened and brightened.

It all sounded great.

They only need $6 million and change to get it all done, and they have a million or so from the State to do the structural repairs. The rest gets to come from "us" -- the public, starting in 2018. OK. The amount of private wealth available in Santa Fe for these sorts of projects can be positively breathtaking.

At the Art Museum, curators took us through the current Alcove Show and the "Stage, Setting and Mood: Theatricality in the Visual Arts" exhibit that was prepared to go along with the (brief) exhibit of a Shakespeare First Folio. The First Folio/Stage exhibit was located in a room beyond the guitar exhibit, and the guitars were the main draw once people learned they were there. The Art Museum had publicized the First Folio extensively, but not the guitars. So when people arrived to see the Folio and had to go through a really extraordinary display of contemporary and historic guitars, including an air guitar, to get to the Folio, they stopped, stunned and intrigued. I bet half of those who arrived never got to the Folio at all, they were so captivated by the guitars.

It happened even on the tour I went on on Monday. The Folio was gone, but the guitars were still there, and about half those on the tour stopped and gawped. The curator for the "Stage, Setting and Mood" exhibit encouraged them to come join her in the next room -- they could appreciate the guitars on the way out. Well, that seemed to bring them into the "Stage" exhibit, but I could see some looking longingly out the archway into the other room.

The curator (didn't get her name -- was it Carmen Vendelin?) had selected works that demonstrated "theatricality" in painting, sculpture, and other media. Most of the items were from the Museum's own collections, and many of them I had seen before. There was no problem in seeing them again and appreciating them this time for their theatricality. But there was one standout work I had not seen before, a painting by William Jacob Hays from the 1860s of a huge buffalo herd on the move that was lent from Tulsa's Gilcrease Museum. As the herd rumbles toward the viewer, one of the animals appears to stop to consider the skull of a long departed buffalo on the ground before it. The moment is compelling, almost otherworldly, and that is one reason why the painting was selected for this show.

Theatrical? Positively Shakespearian!

The Alcove Shows have been a feature at the New Mexico Museum of Art since its opening in 1917. A handful of artists are offered alcoves off the entrance to the Museum proper to exhibit their works for a week. Works in all genres and media are acceptable. The emphasis is on New Mexico artists -- of which there is an inexhaustible supply -- and the frequent rotation of artists and their works is energizing. We saw works by Scott Anderson, Gloria Graham, Scott Greene, Herbert Lotz, and Bonnie Lynch. Media varied from ceramics, to photography, to paintings and mixed media. Whether one "liked" the work or not was beside the point. The point was exposure to it and to its varied point of view. I found myself intrigued by everything shown at this Alcove Show.

Ms Ché and I have long been participants and patrons in the arts, and now that Ms Ché is a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, our participation and patronage seems to be growing. One of the reasons we live in New Mexico in our dotage is the pervasiveness of art and the presence of so many artists, galleries and museums to showcase the work.

It's a never-ending wonder.

Dan Hicks -- Dead, Dead, Dead

"I Scare Myself" at the Warfield, San Francisco, December 9, 2001

Musicians from the Old Days have been dropping dead left and right lately, but this is a hard one for us. I would almost go so far as to say Dan was a friend, but that's going too far. He had lots of fan-friends who he wouldn't know from Adam or Eve, they were just folks who wandered into -- and out of -- his long and storied life.

When we lived in San Francisco in the mid-Seventies, Ms Ché and I would go out to the Sweetwater in Mill Valley practically every weekend when Dan Hicks and whatever assembly of Hot Licks, Lickettes and Acoustic Warriors he could get together were playing. The Sweetwater was a smallish bar with a stage at one end, and we'd stay for hours drinking and carousing, and Dan and the band would sometimes play quite long into the night beween their own bouts of drinking and carousing among the fans and patrons. One time I remember it was very late, probably closing time, and he invited the remaining bar patrons out to his house for a jam session with Sid and Mary Ann and Naomi, and so we went to where he said he lived, and sat on the glassed-in porch, waiting. But Dan never showed up. It may have been somebody else's house for all we knew, or just as likely he got way-laid along the way -- and forgot.

His persona was ever casual and laid-back, utterly imperturbable. A friend to everyone, a master of none. He was Just Dan, Plain Ol' Dan, an easy-going country boy, or so it seemed, yet he burst on to the counterculture music scene in the '60s and never looked back.

He was never a huge star, no, for Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks was a novelty act by category. They were throwbacks to another era, but just what era was never quite clear, sometime in the '40s maybe, maybe not. They accessorized in a Victorian manner, in fact they were one of the first San Francisco bands that I remember which used the then-plentiful remains of Bay Area Victoriana in costumes, on stage visuals, and seemingly their lifestyles.

Their evocation of times past was part of their appeal.

We first saw them in San Francisco around 1969 as second billing to another group, probably British, at the Fillmore. I think. Well, one's memories of those times are always hazy at the best -- "if you remember the '60s you weren't really there" and all that. I remember being quite taken with them in person. I'd heard them on the radio and was familiar with some of their music, but seeing them live was a treat. I don't remember who the headliners were.

We still have most of their albums from that era, but don't ask me where they are, because I don't know. I know where a couple of the CDs are because we bought them at a performance maybe ten years ago in Sacramento -- "Last Train to Hicksville" and a couple of others -- and had them signed by the always-gracious Mr. Hicks (by this time he was old and courtly enough to be a Mister) and his then-current line up.

That was a funny show. There wasn't a large audience (maybe 150 or so) and some were calling out "Where's the Money! Do Where's the Money!" Or "I Scare Myself!" and he refused to play them, at least for the longest time. "Nope, nope. You've heard them before. Many, many times. We're doing our new music now."

Eventually they were persuaded to do "Where's the Money," but I don't think they ever did do "I Scare Myself" that time.

Dan Hicks and the various incarnations of the Hot Licks and Lickettes was one of the few Bay Area bands that wasn't so full of itself that they wouldn't come to the Central Valley to play a show now and again.  For so many artists in every field in California, the Valley is Terra Incognita, a country that is filled with monsters and otherwise bewilderingly foreign. Even as close as San Francisco was, the Valley was way too far away for comfort. But Dan didn't seem to have any qualms at all about venturing forth into the Darkness of Davis and Sacramento and even Roseville, omg.

So we saw them as often as we could, the last time in Sacramento at Harlow's, an intimate bar not unlike the Sweetwater. At least I think we might have seen them there. Memories fade. It was about a year before we moved to New Mexico.

Guess what? We get to New Mexico in the fall of 2012 -- we have not been back to California since -- and the next December (2013), who shows up in Albuquerque but Dan Hicks doing his Christmas Show at the South Broadway Cultural Center. Of course we had to go.

He said he'd never played Albuquerque before; he didn't know why. Or maybe he did play Albuquerque, forty years ago, and he didn't remember. He'd played Santa Fe plenty of times, but never Albuquerque -- that he remembered.  The house was full, and not everyone was a geezer, though there were plenty of geezers in attendance. Some of them remembered more than he did, more than I did too.

It was nice to know that not everyone who remembered him was pushing a walker around, though.

Not yet, anyway.

It was a memorable evening, Christmas or not, and yes, they did do "I Scare Myself" without hesitation, but this time they didn't do "Canned Music" despite the pleas from the crowd.

Afterwards, we chatted a bit, and I mentioned those weekends at the Sweetwater, and he chuckled at the memory, if he remembered. Turned out there were several others in attendance who had Sweetwater memories, and we got to wondering how we'd wound up in the Land of Enchantment rather than sticking around in California, particularly the Bay Area. Well, some of us thought California was becoming uninhabitable, but Dan still lived in Mill Valley, and he said he couldn't imagine living anywhere else. It was his home-place, and no matter the changes -- there have been so many -- he wouldn't want to up and leave for, say, Albuquerque or even Santa Fe for that matter.

Dan was looking thin. I wouldn't say he didn't look well, because for a man of his advanced age he looked pretty fine, and the show was solid and close to two hours. He came back a couple of more times, the last time just a year ago, February 6, 2015. He looked even thinner, and this time he didn't stay for meet and greet. It was the last time we saw him. According to what I read today about his death, he was already quite ill with throat and liver cancer, but you wouldn't know it from his performance. Not even a hint.

Sorry to see him go, but as Ms Ché said when she heard the news this morning, "That's life. I'm glad we got to see him before the end."

Here's a link to an interview in Local IQ that may expand a bit on what I've written:

Local IQ

Something from the Sacramento Press about the Harlow's performance in 2011 together with a whole lot of history, too.

Sacramento Press

One of the underappreciated songs from Striking it Rich:

"You've never spoken of your people -- who you came from -- so perhaps it's natural...."

 

"You'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing..." -- Veda Pierce to her mother Mildred in Mildred Pierce, 1945

Well, it wasn't quite that bad. My mother did speak of her people. She just didn't know all that much about them.

She said she knew very little about her biological father, she hardly remembered him at all. He was a streetcar conductor, killed when she was five, she said, "crushed between the cars" in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis -- this would have been late in 1916 or sometime in 1917 -- and she could no longer even picture him in her mind's eye. Her memories were so few.

But there was a scandal, she recalled, when, at his funeral, it was discovered he had another family at the other end of the line. Therefore he was a bigamist. And in those days such scandal was enough to drive one or another of the households he maintained out of the city, and so it would be.

My mother said that her mother married a friend of her father's after a suitable interval, and they all packed up and moved to California where my mother grew up and lived most of the rest of her life. She knew the man her mother married was not her father, but he was a good man just the same and my mother used his last name as hers until she married. The end.

Not quite. Over the past weekend, Ms Ché and I attended a number of events involving Jimmy Santiago Baca and his personal and family story, and Nasario Garcia and the stories he collected from the viejitos of the Rio Puerco Valley before they all died off, and for whatever reason, these stories triggered in me questions about my own family's unknown past and heritage.

I wanted to know particularly about my mother's biological father.

I thought I'd found him a number of years ago, but it was after my mother died and I couldn't ask her about him. I found a record of a man in Indianapolis named Frank, whose last name was the same as my mother's father's last name, married to an Edna, which was my mother's mother's first name, and they had a daughter whose name was Florence around the same time my mother was a little girl. My mother's first name was Virginia, though. I thought that perhaps my mother's name had been changed after her father died and that she'd been born "Florence." But I couldn't find out, not easily at any rate.

I assumed that I'd found my mother's biological father, and that was enough to carry on. I didn't think about it much after that, at least not until this past weekend when I made a commitment to find out for sure who her biological father was, to find out as much as I could about her step-father, too, and to see if I could piece together something of a life-story for them.

Now, I almost wish I hadn't. The story may be fascinating, but it's not quite what I expected, and there are elements that are not at all pleasant when you get down to it.

The Frank and Edna I found years ago, who I thought were my mother's parents, were not her parents. And apparently Florence wasn't their daughter. She was my mother's half-sister, though. And Frank and Edna were their aunt and uncle.

Florence was apparently the daughter of my mother's father's previous marriage to a woman named Maud. Florence was being raised by my mother's father's older brother Frank and his wife The Other Edna (who wasn't my mother's mother). This was a common enough arrangement in those days, especially after a family breakup.

For my mother's father (his name was Laurence or Lawrence, both spellings were used) and Maud were divorced sometime between 1900 and 1910. I'm not sure when. I found a marriage record for them dated 1897, and their first child -- a boy, George -- was born in 1898. They had Florence in 1902. And another child, David, came along in 1905.

In 1910, my mother's mother, Edna, was living in a household with her mother, a brother, a cousin, and a couple of aunts. Her mother and aunts were widows, but Edna claimed to be married, though she was using her maiden name; her husband's name was signified by the middle initial "O" which she used instead of her actual middle initial which was "A" for Alice. Her aunt Lillian, who was the head of the household, worked as a laundress while her mother, Ida, Lillian's sister, was a seamstress. Her cousin, Lillian's 17 year old son Harry, was a machinist apprentice. Edna, then 20, worked as a telephone operator. Her 22 year old brother Ralph was a railway fireman.

Edna said she'd been married for three years in 1910, which meant she'd been married since 1907 or thereabouts, but I've found no record of it, nor has a divorce judgement turned up between Laurence and Maud. Maud, however, claimed she was divorced in the 1910 census, as did Laurence. So let us assume there was a divorce. Maud at the time was said to be a servant in the household of some pals of Laurence's, pals he'd apparently run around with since he was very young. There will be more about them in due time.

Laurence was living with his parents in 1910, along with his two sons and a brother. They were living not too far away from Edna and her mother and aunts and brother and cousin. Assuming there was a streetcar available (and in Indianapolis at the time, that would have been likely) it would have taken all of ten minutes to get from Edna's place to Laurence's and vice versa. They weren't close neighbors, but they were close enough.

Florence, Laurence's and Maud's daughter, was living with her aunt and uncle in a much nicer part of town. Frank, Laurence's older brother, was a well-known and respected attorney, quite fancy indeed.

Laurence had other brothers. One was an up and coming CPA; another was a renown botanist who'd got his PhD at Harvard. His father was a pension clerk for the Federal Government. So far as I can tell, they were a pretty solid middle class family.

Well, except for Laurence. He was the Black Sheep. Oh my, was he ever.

Laurence was first arrested, so far as I could find out, in 1893, accused of a string of robberies and burglaries with a pal of his, the family of whom his ex-wife Maud would be living with in 1910. I don't know whether he was convicted. However, Laurence's accomplice in the string of robberies in 1893 was not part of the household in 1910 when Maud was living with them.

Laurence would later be accused of robbing and burglarizing many of his friends, neighbors and colleagues, and in 1912, about six months after my mother was born, he was chased down the streets of Indianapolis by a "merchant policeman" who was firing his gun and yelling up a storm until Laurence was apprehended by a couple of regular city police who knew him. I'm sure they did.

Laurence went to a hearing in police court a few days later, waived "examination" -- whatever that means -- and the judge turned the case over to the grand jury. Laurence was accused of burglarizing a drugstore, though according to the proprietor, nothing was taken and the only witness was the merchant policeman who'd chased Laurence through the streets and shot at him.

At the time, Laurence was a conductor for the street railway -- the most extensive streetcar system in the nation. He'd had a number of different positions over the years since coming into adulthood, most having to do with the railway, but he was also a milk inspector for the city of Indianapolis for a time, and did other odd jobs, including, apparently, petty crime.

Oh, and womanizing. Let's not forget that. So far as I've been able to find out, Laurence had at least six children by four different women, two of whom I'm pretty sure he was married to. I suspect he was never actually married to my grandmother Edna, though, and the real scandal in her case was that my mother was illegitimate.

I don't know that for sure, but that's what I think after all the information I've been able to find out about Laurence.

By 1914, Laurence was in St. Louis, where at least one uncle and a brother were also living and working on the Wabash rail line. He took a job as a switchman in the freight yard. He married a woman from St. Louis named Marie and fathered a daughter Helen who was born in November of that year.

On December 19, 1916, he was killed when a refrigerator car crushed him as he was switching a freight train.

He's buried in St. Louis -- actually a cemetery in Bellfontaine Neighbors. His marble headstone appears to have been toppled and the year of his birth is incorrect, but every report of his death is larded with misinformation, probably because those who were interviewed didn't know the truth and he had probably lied anyway.

As far as I could figure it out -- and of course I could be wrong -- he was "sent" to St. Louis by his family after his 1912 burglary arrest, whether or not he was convicted of the crime he was accused of, with orders to straighten up and fly right or else. In other words, get out of town and get your life together.

Well, except there was Edna and my mother still back in Indianapolis. There were Maud's children, too. What happened to them? Florence may have been living with Frank and Other Edna -- apparently she stayed with them throughout her childhood as they had no other children. Florence died at a ripe old age in Florida having never married.

George and David, Laurence's sons by Maud, may have stayed with Laurence's parents, but I'm not sure of that. Laurence's mother, Caroline (Carrie), died in 1918 -- Spanish flu victim? -- and Laurence's father, David H., died in 1921. George would have been 20 and David 13 when Caroline died.

George and David both moved to California at some point in their lives, George to Los Angeles by way of Idaho, David to San Diego.

George, my mother's half-brother, would have been the one she eventually tracked down and met with in our home in Southern California in the mid-1950s. His story is pretty interesting, too. He had changed his name "professionally" due to all the hooey and scandal he and his siblings had been through. He'd served time in Folsom and San Quentin in the late 40s and early 50s for check-kiting. Before that he'd been a deputy sheriff of Los Angeles County. He sold refrigerators and other appliances, was for a while in insurance. He had a large family of his own and lived in a nice place in LA. It's on the market if anyone's interested. I recall him as being quite pleasant, and he and my mother got along well. They had never met before, and they talked for hours and hours. I was probably seven or eight at the time and was quite occupied with whatever children do at that age, but I do recall his visit.

There was apparently another woman in Indianapolis who Laurence was seeing at the same time he was supposedly married to my grandmother Edna, for there is a record of a boy born to her in March of 1911, eight months before my mother was born. The boy's father is supposedly Laurence, at least that's what his descendants think. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit. And there may be others. Who knows how many and where they are?

Laurence had a very active social life, at least according to the newspapers -- he was mentioned a lot, and not always for criminal activity. He was frequently visiting friends and relations around the Indianapolis area, and apparently his presence was newsworthy. There was one news item I found that was a little strange, I thought. He and his wife and daughter Florence had gone to visit relatives in Mechanicsburg in 1912. What wife? She's not named. And just a few minutes ago, I found a filing for divorce, dated 20 August 1912. Edna vs Lawrence R. in Marion County Superior Court.

I don't know whether the divorce was granted. I haven't seen a final decree. No grounds are mentioned, but the indications are that Laurence was gone from Indianapolis, possibly in jail, or already headed to St. Louis by the time Edna filed for divorce.

I know that Edna would marry Laurence's friend Leo in California in October of 1917, because I've seen their marriage license, and she would list her status as "widow." So apparently she never seemed to think her divorce from Laurence -- that until now I didn't know anything about -- was ever finalized. I'm not sure my mother ever knew anything about it, either, or I think she would have mentioned it. "She tried to divorce the cad but she couldn't find him."

Yes, well. All this was a long time ago, of course. Laurence was killed almost a century ago, and from every indication, my mother never really knew him at all. I don't think she ever mentioned his first name. She may not have known it. Or if she did, it didn't make an impression on her. She didn't use her step-father's first name either. Nor did she use the first name of her first husband. Maybe there's a reason for it. I don't know.

What I do know is that life was tough in those days, especially for women trying to make it on their own, with or without children in tow. My mother was very proud of being from independent female stock, and the stories she told of the women in her family who made independent lives, stories in which men hardly figured at all or only peripherally, were something to hear. Her step-father was a fine man, but her mother and grandmother were the strong ones she would say.

I've found much more information in the last few days than I can possibly process so quickly. There are many more stories to come from this research, some of which will be pure fiction, but that's often how people engage the past. At least now I can say I know something specific about my mother's father. Something I didn't know before. I didn't  -- for example -- know he'd died in St. Louis. Who'd a thunk?

113

Himself, c. 1930

My father would be 113 years old today.

He was born July 5, 1901, in what was then a vibrant Mississippi River railroad town, a transhipment point for crops and hogs and lumber and such from the vast "New Northwest" of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

He was a patriot. Being born on the 5th of July, the day after Independence Day, was always thought significant by his family. He was always considered an Independence Baby.

As he got older, he took up the patriotic cause. He signed up for service in a battalion that was never sent overseas in WWI. As the battalion's 17 year old second lieutenant, he drilled the troops around the town square and took them on bivouacs into the wilds of the Mississippi River islands. By the time his drills and the expeditions were completed, however, the war in Europe was over.

He was drafted for service in World War II.  By then he was a middle aged lawyer, though still quite enthusiastic to serve. He never went overseas. Instead, he was assigned to domestic Army Air Corps bases where he conducted investigations into problems and practices of training which he reported to his HQ at Wright Patterson Field in Ohio before being reassigned to the Office of Contract Settlement of the War Mobilization and Reconversion Office where he spent the rest of the War. He remained in the ready reserves until the end of the Korean Conflict, though he was never called for that one --

so far as I know.

As this is the anniversary of his birth, I did a little research, as I usually do, into his ancestors and their lives before and after they came to America. The Google is sometimes useful but often not when it comes to finding out about one's ancestors. I've tried many times to find out more over the years by plugging in the names of known ancestors only to be led on wild goose chases or coming up against a pay wall -- or coming up blank.

But this year, I encountered for the first time the obituary of my German great-grandfather, and a detailed biography (up to 1911 anyway) of my Irish-American grandfather that explained for the for the first time what had happened to his mother, and why his father was listed on Census rolls as married to someone else.

Transcription of my great-grandfather Reinhold's obituary: (I'll redact the last names merely because it's what I do...)

July 20, 1901: 

Reinhold S_______, an old and respected citizen of C__________, died at his home at 312 9th Avenue about four o'clock Friday afternoon after a long illness. Mr. S_________ lived in this city for a long time and was in the employ of the North Western Railroad continuously for 28 years.

He was born in Weibstadt, Germany, July 21, 1840. He came to this country in 1855 and settled [here] in 1861. In 1863, he married Miss Veronica C_________ . He is survived by his wife and seven children, four daughters, Mrs Anna K__________, Mrs. George F. S_________, Mrs. W. H. C________ (note: she my grandmother), and Miss Josephine at home; and three sons, Frank J., John W., and William P., all of this city. He also leaves one sister, Mrs. A. Dietz of Chicago. He was a member of the Roman Catholic Mutual Protective Association. Funeral services will be held at the German Catholic Church, Monday morning at 8 o'clock.

Brief, to be sure, but it tells me a lot that I didn't know. First, that his date of death was July 19, 1901, the Friday before the obit was published. It was two weeks to the day after my father's birth. I didn't know his address in town, and from what I'd been told, I thought he lived on the bluff above the river, not down by the river essentially next to the railyard. That house is no longer standing as the whole block has been taken up with a supermarket. I didn't know that he'd worked for the railroad itself for nearly 30 years, as I'd been told he was alternatively a carpenter or a banker. He may well have been a carpenter for the railroad, but no one in the family ever mentioned the railroad. I learned much later that his son John had been a banker, and that may have been where the story came from that Reinhold was a banker. I didn't know about his sister in Chicago. I'd been told he was a Roman Catholic converso born in Bavaria or "Germany" -- which didn't exist when he was born -- but I didn't know exactly where or when. I thought from some of the stories I heard that he was born in Frankfurt which was a free city before it was absorbed by Prussia. Weibstadt apparently is -- or rather was -- a village outside of Heidelberg; it has apparently since been absorbed by Heidelberg and no longer exists. Heidelberg is in Baden-Wurttemberg, not Bavaria, so the origin of the origin of the story of Reinhold being born in Frankfurt or Bavaria is something of a mystery. I may have confused stories about him with other German ancestors, or the stories I was told were... wrong.

I didn't know that he had emigrated to America when he was fifteen, in 1855. I had assumed he left Germany after the Revolutions of 1848 and that he was an adult when he left. I didn't know when he was born, however, and thought he was probably born about the same year as my other great-grandfather James, who I knew had been born in Ireland (though exactly where -- County Meath is hardly exact -- I still don't know) in 1833. The  information about James came from census records, but I could find very little about Reinhold in the census records I looked at.

Reinhold died at the age of 61, and I thought he was older. I have found very little information about his wife Veronica, though she was apparently German, born in 1840 as well, and died in 1918.

Their daughter Elizabeth Veronica was my grandmother. She married my grandfather, William Henry in 1899, and in 1901 had their second son, my father, Raymond J.

My father's father was a relatively prominent man in that part of Eastern Iowa, maintaining law offices with his brothers in two towns simultaneously and having lots and lots of children on poor-suffering Elizabeth Veronica. I never knew more than a few of these people -- my grandparents were deceased long before I was born -- so I only heard stories about most of them, and most of those stories were incomplete or, as I would come to find out about the "ancient ancestors", inaccurate. As in... Blarney.

So, when I come upon stories in print/online that I hadn't known before, as I did yesterday, it's with more than a little interest.

This is an excerpt of a story about my grandfather published in the County History in 1911.

"Through struggle to triumph'' seems to be the maxim which holds sway for the majority of our citizens, and. though it is undoubtedly true that many fall exhausted in the conflict, a few, by their inherent force of character and strong mentality, rise above their environment and all which seems to hinder them, until they reach the plane of influence toward which their faces were set through the long years of struggle that must necessarily precede any accomplishment of great magnitude. Such has been the history of William H., one of the most popular attorneys of [this] county and one of her most public spirited and honored citizens.

Mr. C_____ was born ... April 16, 1869. He is the son of James and Alice (O'Brian) C______. The father was for a number of years a prosperous farmer...  He is now living retired in the city and is highly respected by a wide circle of friends and accquaintances. His wife passed to her rest on October 17, 1870.

William H.  grew up on a farm ... and attended the rural schools, and he was graduated from the Dixon Normal School in 1888, receiving an excellent education. He began teaching in Scott County, also continued to teach after coming to [this] county, having been principal...for a period of one year, giving the greatest satisfaction to both pupil and patron, being both an instructor and an entertainer in the school room. Had he continued teaching he would doubtless have become long ere this one of the notable educators of the state, but believing that the legal field held especial inducements for him, he entered the law department of the State University of Iowa in 1892, where he made a splendid record and from which institution he was graduated in 1894.

He soon afterward entered the law office of his brother, [Alexander], in [this city], and has remained in the same office until the present time....  As a trial lawyer he has few equals and no superiors, and he is always a very busy man, his services being in great demand at all times. Owing to his ability and his interest in public matters, he was soon singled out for offices of trust and for the past six years he has filled to his own credit and to the satisfaction of all concerned the office of assistant county attorney. ...Fraternallv, [he] belongs to the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Columbus, being a charter member of the latter and is past grand knight. He is also a member of Sheridan Club.

Among the many things I learned from this bio was that his mother, Alice O'Brian (alternatively spelled O'Brien), died in 1870, when William H.  was barely one year old. This helps explain why James's wife is sometimes named "Margaret" in subsequent census records I've seen. Sometimes she's not mentioned at all, and in one record, Margaret claims that James has died, though the census worker found him quite alive a few doors down the street and made note of it in her book. I guess James and Margaret didn't always get along, hm? But you know what? Until I saw the census records, I never knew "Margaret" existed at all.

I also learned that my grandfather had been a teacher, something I didn't know previously, and that he had even been a principal for a time. He would have been 19 in 1888 when he graduated from the (quite rural) normal school, and he started law school in 1892 when he was 23, graduating in 1894, when he was 25. Quite an accomplishment given what are said to be the rigors of legal educations today. I didn't know that he served as assistant county attorney, though I knew he was prominent in Democratic Party politics, something that isn't mentioned in this bio. I knew he was a Knight of Columbus but not that he was an Elk or a member of the Sheridan Club (not sure quite what that is come to think of it... does it have something to do with General Sheridan? Dunno.)

Stories of ancestors were limited when I was young, partly because the dead tell no tales. A good deal of what I was told was simple fabrication, too. Sorting it out has not been easy, as it has never been easy to find records. I'm not sure the ones I've found recently are particularly reliable in any case. The living do tell tales, and not all of them are true.

Nevertheless...

Cheers, Dad!

How The Past Trembles in the Hands of Historians

Union Traction Company service map, Indianapolis to Muncie, c. 1910. (Clickage will make the image larger)

He was my mother's father, her natural father. She knew that he had died in Indianapolis when she was very young, died "in a streetcar accident," but didn't know the details until much later. She found out some of it from her mother, but she would find out most of the story from a half-brother she learned about when she was an adult -- but whom didn't meet until I was about 7 or 8 years old and she was well into middle age.

She found her half-brother when we were living in Los Angeles. He was living not very far away in San Dimas and came to visit. I remember one visit quite clearly and he may have come by several other times that I don't remember as well. His name was Frank King; his father's name -- my mother's father, too -- was Frank Olive. He said he'd taken a different name partly because of what had happened in Indianapolis. It wasn't his step-father's name, it was a name he had chosen himself. How my mother had found him, I don't recall in any detail, but it had something to do with military records and I remember she had been calling anyone with the same name she found in those records for years.

Frank Olive was a streetcar conductor for the Indianapolis interurban transit company, and he was also a union organizer who had had an increasingly important role in all the strikes that had hit the system since the early 19-teens. He was well-known to the company as an agitator and a troublemaker. He died on the job, yes, but it wasn't an accident (and he didn't die in one of the riots). After one of the strikes was settled, I believe it was around 1915 though the date was always a bit hazy in my mind, so it may have been earlier or a bit later, he was told that there was something hanging off the front of his car, and to go get it before he began his run. When he got to the front of the car, another conductor or motorman started the car moving forward and it struck the car ahead, crushing Frank between them, killing him. Everyone knew what had happened. He had been murdered in a way that made it look like a careless accident. As were a number of strikers and strike leaders who went back on the job that year.

His funeral was huge, apparently, and at that funeral, Frank's widow, my mother's mother, found out about his other widow, Frank King's mother. Oh. Yes, Frank had two wives who lived at opposite ends of the interurban line, in this case, one household in Indianapolis and one in Marion. Apparently the discovery was quite the scandal at the time. One of Frank's close friends at the transit company took it upon himself to marry my mother's mother quite soon after Frank's demise, and thus make her an honest woman again. He had been fired from the transit company due to the most recent strike, and figured it was the perfect time to move out to California and start over, which they did. He ran Flying A filling stations and sold Dodge cars on the Central Coast, then retired around 1940 and bought a motor court up in Willits where my mother's mother died not long after, and he passed within a few months of her death (or maybe the sequence was the other way around... I wasn't there, and my mother was always pretty anguished about it).

Frank King's mother also remarried fairly soon after her Frank Olive's death, but they stayed in Marion. Frank King moved out to California on his own after WWII. My mother didn't know about them at all until she was well into her twenties, and she said she was shocked when she found out her natural father was a bigamist who had another household and family. When she learned about her father's union activities and the strikes and the violence that went with them, and how her father had actually died, she was horrified. She had no idea it was like that, she said. But she developed a greater (albeit grudging) respect for him. She said she got a much greater understanding of why she herself felt the need to stand up for the downtrodden, to fight for her own rights, and to try to change bad situations she or others found themselves in -- though that didn't always include her own relations.

I didn't realize until much later myself how pivotal the Indianapolis transit strikes had been -- I hadn't even heard of them at all before my mother's half-brother told the stories to us at our house in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Much of labor history in this country has been suppressed or forgotten, just as civil rights history has been. We may have romantic notions of what happened and believe in stories and myths of "heroic struggles," but have no idea at all of what really happened. The Indianapolis and other transit strikes were essentially disappeared from history, just as so much of civil rights history was disappeared.

An example was just last night on PBS. We were watching the "1964" program -- it was a pretty big year for both of Ms Ché and me, after all. That was the year Ms saw the Beatles at the Cow Palace, and one doesn't forget things like that, and I was mesmerized by the Civil Rights marches and Free Speech Movement in Berkeley -- and for the most part, it seemed the program was pretty good. It tried to show how events were linked together and not just discreet incidents, the way so much "history" is presented. The premise was essentially: "Everything changed on November 22, 1963, and the '60s as we remember them really began in 1964." True enough. I've been saying pretty much that for years and scholars have been making the same point though somewhat less stridently than people like me. But it was odd how much was missing -- and who was missing -- from this program. One huge absence really stuck out to me (for reasons I may get into another time). Stokely Carmichael was never mentioned. Huh? Whut the...?  He appeared in a picture or two of civil rights events, and SNCC was mentioned briefly, but his name was never breathed.  I could not believe it. You cannot have a history of the Civil Rights Movement, even in 1964, without Stokely Carmichael -- but apparently he's been disappeared, as if he were a Soviet dissident.

Todd Gitlin was all over the place last night being interviewed about this and that, his title changing depending on the topic, but what he was doing in 1964 and where he was was never mentioned; it was implied he was at Berkeley in 1964 and had some role in the the Free Speech Movement, but so far as I know he wasn't there. He was at Harvard (or maybe Columbia, he moved around a lot back east) -- and he was running the SDS (which also was never mentioned.)  There was some well-coifed and manicured woman  (wish I could remember her name [looked it up, it was Stephanie Coontz, listed as a "Berkeley student," which I guess she was in 1964]) describing FSM events accurately enough but with little seeming interest, though she claimed she was part of the struggle, and "stood up and walked out of" [Sproul Hall] (though the iconic name of the administration building at UC Berkeley was never used) rather than being dragged down the stairs as so many were, and I thought it would have been more interesting if they'd had Alice Waters yakking "spiritually" about it instead. She may not have complete memories, but they're both more fun and more personal.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that what we think we know about historical movements and events is definitely not the whole story, and in many cases, it's not even close to what was really going on. It's often a highly romanticized and cleansed version that leaves out many important aspects and people, and which declares "X" result, when the result was actually "Y". Or the result might have been something else altogether.

The Indianapolis and other transit strikes in the early 19-teens were pivotal in part because though they were declared to be settled in favor of the workers, they were failures, despite the huge number of people participating and supporting them. They literally brought the city and a good deal of transport in the region and the country to a halt, and though the official violence which was brought to bear against the strikers -- and the many murders that occurred as a result -- were widely condemned, the strikers did not win much of anything despite their enormous sacrifices. This was the pattern of the labor movement of the time. While discreet incidents may be recalled, and minor victories celebrated, the pattern of failures leading to tiny advances often isn't. I've read transcripts of the investigation into the conditions that led to the Indianapolis transit strikes, and it was horrible. It didn't get much better, despite the struggles, not until after World War I, and even then, victories were reversible. My grandfather lost his life in the struggle, but for what? A noble sacrifice? Maybe. But he was a flawed human being, and so, like the largely failed strikes themselves, largely forgotten.

1964 was a pivotal year for the American consciousness, but even as close as we are to it now, only fifty years on, it appears that key people and important events are being disappeared and whitewashed for some purpose, perhaps to enhance an official mythology, to simplify the record, to glorify certain aspects, diminish others -- on behalf of...? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Always the question. What are we being led to believe? On whose behalf? Or on behalf of what objective?