The temperature hit fifty again today, and the sun shone. The ground is pretty firm now. When Fooboo walked me around the block this afternoon, I spotted only one small patch of ice remaining in a shady spot on a neighbor’s lawn.
Fooboo is a yanker. I survive these walks, Dear Reader—which are like non-mechanized tractor pulls—though a combination of dexterity, guile, and inborn inertia.
Three days ago, February 28, a robin sang at us from a bare lilac bush as we rounded a corner near our house.
Here in Madison, snow can fall in mid-May.
But it sure seems spring is here for real, easily a month ahead of time.
Birch logs
I’ve been sawing up some birch logs a neighbor gave me. But also, I’ve been sitting in my zero-g chair out in the yard, reading a book. Everything’s dolce, I’ve got a whole lot of niente, and it only goes so far.
With a hey and a ho and a hey nonny-no, I’ve been sprung.
Seek nothing ponderous, Gentle Reader. Hold me to no word-count. Let me be, I prithee.
As regular readers of this blog know, I reminisced, in a May 2019 post, about my acquisition of a lovely Chinese waterscape, in oil, by a Taipei artist called Peco Yeh, in 1968. And I showed a photo of the painting, which graces a wall in my house to this day, almost fifty-seven years later.
Then in July 2023, I heard from a woman named Earline Dirks, who had a Peco Yeh painting that she had acquired at Goodwill. The subject matter and style were much different from my painting of a boatman on the Tamsui, and different from other paintings by Peco that I saw in his studio shop on Jungshan North Road in Taipei near sixty years ago. Yet it clearly was an original by him, as attested by his distinctive signature.
I posted a piece showing Earline’s painting, and mine, and speculating on this change of style. Since then I have received communications and photos from four other owners of Peco Yeh paintings— Joshua Lowe, Jane Upchurch, Michael Tomczyk, and Antonia Lonquist. All these proud owners generously agreed to let me share their paintings with you, as I have done in the posts hyperlinked immediately above.
The more of Peco’s paintings I have seen, the more I am impressed with his restless artistry, his constant grasping to experiment with and master a wide variety of styles, techniques, and subjects. I think if you look at all the paintings shown in these posts you are bound to agree.
Now, from Gloucester, Massachusetts, comes Matt O’Connell, with the canvas below.
I don’t know much about art, but to my eye this is a fairly spectacular example of Peco’s work. Unlike my canvas, and most of the others I have seen, this one is brilliantly polychromatic. A bright red ball of sun, sinking with surrealistic draftsmanship into a fiery sea, illuminates a few dark boats in the left foreground and a silhouetted fisherman tending one of them. The paint in most of the scene is applied in a blocky, chunky style, maybe with a palette knife. The fisherman and boats, on the other hand, are rendered rather minutely. The whole effect is dramatic.
Forgive the funny look of the frame. The photo was a little off-center and I cropped it to show as little of the frame as possible without cutting out part of the canvas.
Thanks, Matt, for sharing this. It gives us another window into the work of this enigmatic Chinese artist.
Dear Reader, I don’t know whether or not Peco was a great artist, but the more of his images I see, the more I realize he was an interesting artist. This blog you are reading, with this post and the others I have linked above, may be the world’s largest collection of extant Peco Yeh paintings. And of all the owners of these canvases, I believe I am the only one who actually met and conversed with the artist in those long-ago days in the 1960s version of Taiwan.
In this first full week of 2025, it seems appropos to look back to a simpler, perhaps stranger, winter many years ago, when the snow was purple. This is a repost of a column that was first shared in July 2019. Enjoy.
When geezers gather, the gab gets garrulous. There is boasting value in extremes.
“We were so poor that the patches on our jeans, had patches on their jeans!”
“What! . . . You had jeans?”
Tales of poverty can still score points, but people who remember the Great Depression are mostly gone. So the extremest thing most of us can conjure these days is the weather.
Eco-warriors among us—whippersnappers!—construe any bump in the barometer, any thump in the thermometer, any slump in the sling psychrometer as a harbinger of the woe we are to reap from Global Warming. Well, maybe.
I can say this for sure: Nobody ever weathered weather like the weather we weathered, back in The Old Days. Gathered geezers may tell of the Terrible Winter of 1935-36, the Great Floods of ’93, the Summer That It Rained Alligator Eggs, or the Year With No Summer Atall. You never know, Dear Reader, when you may find yourself swamped in a five-hundred-year flood of such remembrances.
Winter of Purple Snow
When I mention the Winter of the Purple Snow, people look askance. When I claim that, actually, every winter in The Old Days was a winter of purple snow, a ceiling-mounted wide-angle lens would show a frenzy of Brownian motion away from me and toward the exits.
But it’s all true, every word. We did have purple snow, at least in Streator, Illinois, where my boyhood was misspent. Other cities must have had it, too.
Each winter, the snow tumbled down in December—pure, fluffy, altogether white. Over the next three days, the snow on the ground—not the snow in my backyard, but the snow on every city street—became empurpled. The cause of purple snow is easiest to explain in retrospect: Snow tires had not yet been invented.
In these apocalyptic times—even as we face continual peril from CNN-scale floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and disaster films—one thing we no longer worry about, much, is sideways slippage on winter streets. All our cars wear radial tires. Radial tires slump a bit. This increases the surface that contacts the road, thus improves traction. Those who like to gild the lily may put on special “winter radial tires” in the fall. They have a deeper, more “road-gripping” tread design in addition to the famous radial slump. Most of us don’t feel a need for this. But before radial tires were invented, deep-tread “snow tires” were better than nothing.
However, in the 1950s, we didn’t even have those. There were only regular bias-ply or belted-bias tires. No special deep tread, no radial slump. They just perched on the ice and slid this way or that. In heavy snow, you might put messy, inconvenient “tire chains” on your tires. These were circular cages, made of interlinked chains, that enveloped each tire. They bit into the snow and ice. If you had to climb a long hill in the country, you needed chains. But on city streets that were half snow-covered and half clear, as is often the case, those chains chewed up the pavement, the tires, and themselves. So you didn’t use them any more than you had to.
“Where,” you ask, “is all this headed? Have you forgotten about the purple snow?” Stay with me, Kind Reader.
We needed something short of chains to help tires grip the street—especially at intersections, where most winter crashes occur. Sand would have been dandy. But why use expensive sand, when you can get crunchy, gritty cinders free of charge? This thrifty solution appealed to the city fathers in Streator and, I’ve got to believe, elsewhere.
Coal
You see, our houses were heated by coal. In Illinois, Mother Nature, 350 million years ago, had buried a generous layer of bituminous coal not far underground.
There are three forms, or “ranks,” of coal: anthracite, bituminous, and lignite. Lignite is brown, not much harder than the peat burned by poor Irish cottagers and rich Scottish distillers. Anthracite is hard, black, almost-a-diamond coal that’s mined in Pennsylvania. Bituminous is harder lignite but not as hard as anthracite. In other words, it is just right—not too hard, not too soft. Goldilocks would have used it in her furnace, for sure.
One ton of bituminous coal cost about five dollars—1950s dollars, that is. About fifty bucks in today’s money, so it wasn’t as cheap as it sounds. But if you could heat your house halfway through the winter on fifty dollars—that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Bituminous coal was useful, abundant, and cheap.
But “O! The horror!” Did not all this burning coal cause sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, toxic metal residues, acid rain, air pollution, and so forth? Why, yes. It did. That is why we have air-quality regulations now, why the coal industry looks for low-sulfur deposits. It’s also why most coal-burning homes converted to gas, oil, or electric in the 1960s and ’70s. Through a combination of governmental action and industry initiatives, air and water in most places is cleaner now than it was in the 1950s.
Even in the Fabulous Fifties, however, pollution from coal was not very bad—in most places. It was quite bad in some heavy industrial corridors. But for most of us, the worst side effect was a thin film of soot on our walls.
“Spring cleaning” in those days meant something very particular. Our mothers each April removed coal dust from every interior wall. This was not a happy task that added joy to Mom’s relentless mission of caring for her family. My mother seemed to regard it as an irksome chore. But it must be done, and done it was.
Casey Stengel. Public Domain.
She bought wall-cleaning putty at the hardware store. She rubbed it over the wall surface, then pulled it out, folded it over to expose clean putty, rubbed again. At the end we had clean walls. Plus many little balls of soiled putty to throw away. When homeowners abandoned coal, the makers of wall-cleaning putty added bright colors to the stuff and called it “Play-Doh.” That’s right, they did. (As Casey Stengel might say if he were alive today, “You could Google it.”)
“BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PURPLE SNOW?”
How to Be a Kid, 1950s Edition
When I was seven, Dad introduced me to my first regular chore—stoking the furnace. The furnace lived in the basement. It was a huge cylinder with ducts about a foot in diameter that sprouted all directions from its head. The main chamber and all the ducts were padded with asbestos insulation. (See “O! The horror!” above.)
Bituminous coal filled a room near the furnace, called “the coal bin.” Two or three times a year, the coal deliverymen would pour a ton of coal down a metal chute into the coal bin through a basement window.
Our coal came in rough lumps the size of a baseball or softball. It was shiny and black. You could break a lump in two with your bare hands. This exposed the striations of the rock. Sometimes it also exposed a fossil—the outline of a small leaf, for example—that had been trapped in the coal back in the Pennsylvanian Age of geology.
Coal was lightweight, for a rock. It was friable; when you handled it, you got greasy black dust on your hands. I scooped it from the coal bin with a giant shovel, set it in the furnace on top of the coal already aflame there. I had to make sure the new coal caught flame, augmented the fire and did not smother it.
Then I shook down the grates. (Purple snow coming up, Gentle Reader!) Two metal handles protruded from the furnace below the coal door. I rattled these handles; dead ashes and cinders fell through the grates into a hopper below. Once a week we shoveled ashes and cinders—also called “clinkers”—out of the furnace. We carried them to the alley behind our house in a five-gallon can. When the garbage men came by to collect our refuse, they dumped our ashes and clinkers into a separate compartment on their truck.
They collected these materials from every alley in the city. The product, as donated by householders, was a mix of fine, white fly ash and dense, iridescent clinkers. The city washed the fly ash away, leaving the clinkers—small, irregular rocks of metallic slag. A single clinker could be round, bulbous, sharp, jagged—all at the same time. They were multi-hued, but dominated by purple, blue, green, and pink.
The Empurplement of Streator, Illinois
When snow blanketed city streets, crews dumped these clinkers on every intersection for traction. Every passing car crushed them into smaller pieces. Periodically the city replenished the clinkers at the intersections.
Voilà! Purple snow. This image is a modern re-enactment, because I only had black-and-white film for my Brownie camera in those days. And besides, purple snow was so normal that nobody would have thought to photograph it. “purple snow” by TORLEY is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Numberless bits of cinder got dragged down the street—transferred from interesections to tires, then deposited in mid-street, in driveways, in alleys, even on sidewalks. By mid-winter, all streets were festooned with purple snow, colored by the powdered residued of our furnace clinkers. It ranged from bright purple-pink to a dull brown slush with just a bit of rosiness.
Snow melts; cinders remain. They lay in small, sharp bits, in gutters and on sidewalks. They formed a light coat over asphalt schoolyards and potholed alleys. They lay in wait for innocent childen.
Cinders paved athletic running tracks before the invention of GrassTex, Tartan Track, AstroTurf. Sprinters and middle-distance runners got cinders in their low-cut track shoes, chewing up their feet. Or they fell on the track and embedded tiny chunks of metal under their skin.
The same hazard faced every child who strapped on a pair of roller skates or drove a tricycle pell-mell along uneven sidewalks while clad in short pants and tee shirts. Nobody escaped. Some kids had cinders embedded so deep that years later you could still find the black speck in cheek, knee, or elbow where the projectile had burrowed in.
Was anybody killed or maimed by these clinkers?
Come on. We were made of sterner stuff.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Larry F. Sommers
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
We here at World Headquarters of the Society for the Belated Appreciation of Artist Peco Yeh pride ourselves on staying abreast of recent developments. By “staying abreast,” we mean, in this case, “only recently made aware.”
I refer thus to a pair of early November emails from attorney-at-law Antonia Lonquist.
In what can only be called a flippant disregard of professional norms, attorney Antonia has not filed suit against the society or me, Your New Favorite Writer.
Rather, she begs to inform us that she is the owner of this painting by our Old Favorite Painter:
Antonia’s canvas.
“I am fascinated,” Antonia wrote on November 6, “by the different styles Peco has used in his paintings that you displayed in your post. I feel it gives my piece a new perspective to see the other styles in his works.”
As you and I know full well, Dear Reader, Mister Yeh—who held forth in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s at least, and perhaps in other decades as well—flaunted his talent in quite a variety of different styles. His brush-strokes, composition, subject matter, and even, one might say, his basic artistic approach varied widely from one canvas to the next.
It was as if he was not satisfied to paint only one way when there was a whole world of ways to paint.
In an earlier email, Antonia explained how she came into possession of her genuine Peco Yeh painting: “My aunt was cleaning out her house this past weekend and gave me a painting my father had purchased for her some time ago while he was stationed overseas. My father was stationed in Vietnam and Cambodia during the war and would spend time on R&R in Taiwan, Thailand, and other Asian countries. He must have purchased the painting on a trip then.”
I, Dear Reader, happened to be stationed on Taiwan in 1967—possibly even at the same time Antonia’s father visited there on Rest and Recreation Leave.
It was on Chung Shan Pei Lu (Chung Shan North Road) in Taipei that I met Peco Yeh and purchased from him the painting below, which has been seen before on this site.
My Peco.
It’s easy to see that Antonia’s painting and mine have something in common. Both are waterscapes. Peco told me that mine represented a scene on Taipei’s local river, the Tamsui. I don’t know the fancied locale of the watery scene in Antonia’s painting, but it’s not unreasonable to think it is also the Tamsui.
In any case, it hardly matters. Each is really a universal scene. Each could depict any waterway in East Asia. The composition in Antonia’s painting is what I would call eccentric or idiosyncratic. The lighting is contrasty, the brushwork what I would call blocky. It looks like at least part of it was done not with a brush at all but with a palette knife.
Mine, on the other hand, is more traditional or even conventional in composition and brush style. It harkens back more than a thousand years to the great landscape works of the Song dynasty.
I like mine better, but there’s much to be said for Antonia’s canvas, in terms of mental challenge, frenzy, and ferment.
These two paintings exist within a spectrum of other paintings by the same artist, not all of them water scenes. If you have an interest in Peco’s work, you can see those that have come to my attention by searching “Peco Yeh” in the search box at upper right. There are, to date, five posts which have paintings by Peco.
Thanks very much to Antonia Lonquist and other correspondents who have brought forth Peco Yeh canvases for our enjoyment.
He was slender and handsome, in just that particular handsomeness of a little boy trying hard to be a big boy. In his faultless uniform—neckerchief symmetrical, neckerchief slide perfect, patches sewn on properly—he stood with adults at the airport in Washington, D.C., and offered his hand to every red-clad veteran he encountered. “Thank you for your service,” he said.
He thanked me for my service. I wanted to thank him for his service, but I reckoned he would have no idea how the two related—the here-and-now earnestness of an eleven-year-old boy paying honor, versus the martial exploits, now barely recalled, of a seventy-nine-year-old man.
Never mind. It’s the thought that counts. My eyes welled.
#
I was a Boy Scout myself.
One night Troop 27 camped at Lily Lake Public Hunting and Fishing Grounds, a favored site. Billy Harff and I had been sent out to gather firewood for a troop campfire. We had found few promising branches on the ground.
Billy Harff. Fair use.
In the dark, Billy took a swing at a thick tree trunk with his hand axe. The axe-head glanced off the tough bark and bit Billy’s leg, just below the knee. “I think I’m hurt,” he said.
I helped him sit down. “Lean against the tree trunk. You don’t want to go into shock.”
I ran back to the main campsite. Dave Schmelling, an assistant scoutmaster, came out with a big first-aid kit. I led Dave to Billy and held the flashlight while he wound a long gauze strip around the wound. The cut was deep but clean, and Dave wrapped it tight. With one arm on my shoulder, Billy hobbled back to the campsite. The scoutmaster, Ralph Kirkpatrick, drove him into town, to the hospital, to have the wound stitched and dressed.
To this day I don’t know what possessed Billy to take that wild swing at a large tree he couldn’t possibly cut down.
It hardly matters now. I found Billy’s name on the Wall, when we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial today. He was killed when a mortar shell burst above his head at Landing Zone Swinger in Kontum Province on April 28, 1968.
Billy was my friend—a good friend, even if he did something goofy like take a wild swing at a big old tree in the dark. Now all that’s left of him is the name on this Wall. He ought to be here with me, in a red shirt, jacket, and cap, receiving the nation’s thanks for his service.
#
It’s been an emotional day, Dear Reader.
Eighty-seven of us, veterans of all military branches, each with an appointed “guardian,” flew to Washington on the 57th mission of Badger Honor Flight. My guardian was my daughter, Katie. We veterans were given red polo shirts, windbreaker jackets, and baseball caps blazoned with the Badger Honor Flight logo. The guardians wore blue, to prevent confusion.
A host of volunteers in-processed us at Dane County Regional Airport at 0430 hours. That’s 4:30 a.m. to you civilians. They checked our IDs and photographed each of us with a big blowup of the logo. Red Cross volunteers served coffee and donuts as if we had just given blood.
After a brief sending-off ceremony, we boarded. For the first time in over twenty-five years, I got on an airplane without being closely inspected. They just looked at our IDs and checked us off against the Badger Honor Flight roster. The Catholic nun who said the invocation at the ceremony was handing out small coins with a cross in the middle and the words of John 3:16 around the edge. A volunteer at the head of the jetway gave each of us a sack breakfast.
Ninety minutes later, we landed at Reagan National Airport. As we walked in the arrival gate, a crowd of Washingtonians greeted us with signs reading “Welcome to Washington D.C.” and “Thank You, Veterans!” They stepped into our path to shake our hands. That’s where the young Boy Scout shook my hand.
We arrive at Reagan National Airport. Badger Honor Flight photo. Fair use.
I knew what this mission was about. Why did this reception take me by surprise?
Tears sprang forth. I tried to say “Thank you” back to each well-wisher, but words could not get past my throat.
Five buses took us to view the nation’s major military memorials. We visited the Marine Corps War Memorial, where we ate a bag lunch on the grounds; then the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the Air Force Memorial.
Billy’s name on the Wall, upper left.
At the Vietnam Wall, which I had never visited before, I found my friend Billy’s name in one of the panels on the eastern wall. Katie and I both photographed it as best we could in the reflecting surface on a sunny day.
Veterans pay respects at the Marine Corps Memorial.
We climbed the Lincoln Memorial’s many steep steps . . . past the spot where Martin Luther King stood to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech . . . and entered the exalted, high-ceilinged chamber with its huge marble rendering of the seated Lincoln. I had been there once, long ago, but Katie had not. She read the whole Second Inaugural Address, which is incised in the right-hand wall. She knows the Gettysburg Address, but this was the first time she had read through the Second Inaugural, which happens to be among the half-dozen best bits of rhetoric in the English language. This, in itself, justified the whole trip.
The Air Force Memorial.
The Marine Corps War Memorial is a giant bronze replica of Joseph Rosenthal’s famous photo of marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima. Marine Corps veterans eagerly photographed one another with the statue in the background. At the Air Force Memorial, an abstract group of three steel swoops on the brow of a hill above the Pentagon, we zoomies did likewise.
#
I had expected to hear war stories, possibly exaggerated, from old vets. But I heard none. Instead, I heard the sounds of quiet camaraderie. We had all shared certain experiences and now, half a century later, the details faded to inconsequence.
Because we were a large group of veterans, mostly male, we faced what women routinely endure: long lines at the public toilets. It put some of us in mind of long lines in our military past—chow lines, or lines we stood in while waiting to be immunized by medics wielding high-pressure air gun injectors. Chuckles came forth.
Our bus caravan had a police escort going from one memorial site to another in the midst of the Washington rush hour. A hapless, or ill-advised, driver in a red Tesla cut off our lead bus and incurred great wrath from the escorting police officer. We were duly impressed by our importance.
#
We got back to Reagan Airport, with its majestic passenger terminal, after a long, tiring day. Again, getting through security was simple. Volunteers handed us our supper in a bag as we boarded the plane. The meal was hot, from Chick-Fil-A, and most or all of us had eaten it before we taxied from the gate.
Once aloft, we were surprised by mail call. Badger Honor Flight program volunteers handed each of us, by name, a large envelope full of mail. Dozens of cards, letters, notes expressing appreciation for our military service. Personalized.
I was overwhelmed. Tears once again came to my eyes and continued streaming as I opened one missive after another, reading each one with fixed, minute attention. Some were from close friends of mine, others from chance acquaintances or friends and co-workers of my daughter. Obviously Katie had been at work quietly drumming up a groundswell of correspondence to me on the occasion of the Badger Honor Flight. But there were many more. Lots were from perfect strangers—some obviously from children who wrote as a school project, but others just as obviously from adults who wanted to support old veterans. Many of these were personally addressed to me and called me by name. Others opened “Dear Veteran,” yet were hand written and seemed to express genuine care and concern. Two special ones were from my grandchildren, Elsie and Tristan. I was a blubbering baby all the way home.
#
And then we got home.
A color guard from one of the local police departments—sorry, I don’t remember which—stood at attention as we came off the plane. At the end of the gate concourse, perhaps fifty men and women of the Wisconsin Army National Guard greeted us with hearty handshakes and “Welcome Home!”
As we rode down the escalator to the main concourse of the airport, a band was playing. Fifteen or twenty Boy Scouts held American flags along the staircase paralleling our descent. At the bottom, pandemonium reigned. Hundreds of our friends and relatives and many unrelated citizens—maybe a thousand or more—thronged the concourse. We walked down a long avenue between rope lines, shaking all their hands.
Jo and I, right, with longtime friends Wayne and Boni Kuenzi. Photo by Kari Kuenzi Randall, used by permission.
Over and over again, perfect strangers told me, “Thank you for your service.” Their faces were full of joy, friendship, sincerity. I tried to thank each one of them. Over and over I said, “Thank you for coming out.”
I’m sure the experience was largely the same for the other eighty-six veterans of Badge Honor Flight Mission 57. It was like the world’s largest group hug. Maybe V-J Day in Times Square was similar, I really couldn’t say.
All I know is, this was wonderful.
It was wonderful not only because I was on the receiving end of a great deal of love. I’m happy to say that has been the story of my life.
It was wonderful not only because some of my best friends were there in person, by mail, or online to share the joy with me, although that was precious.
It was wonderful because all through this eventful day, culminating with the welcome home at Dane County Regional Airport, I learned there were hundreds, thousands of individuals, young and old, male and female, military and civilian, from all walks of life, extending themselves—going out of their way with great purpose and pride—to make sure due honor was rendered to us who in our past, maybe only for a few years in our youth, answered the nation’s call to service and did not reject that call.
It tells me that there are a great many of my fellow citizens who value our nation’s existence and nationhood, and who honor the meaning of its call on our lives.
You need not be a bloodied hero to earn their thanks; you only have to show up.
Thank you, America, for giving me this opportunity, and thank you, fellow citizens, for giving me a splendid day.
You’ve been sweating over something for weeks or months, and all of a sudden you see it from a new angle. One thought breaks in and lights up a bevy of questions, the answers to which bounce off one another in ways you never suspected. It can be profound when that happens.
It doesn’t happen to me much. But yesterday morning, it did.
I’d been thinking about podcasting. I don’t mean I had considered doing a podcast. In fact, I don’t even know what “doing” is, where podcasts are concerned. Rather, what I mean is, I’ve been pondering the whole subject of podcasting.
It’s a bugaboo for writers. We are told to become a guest on somebody’s podcast, because podcasts are the best avenue to increased book sales. You must pitch podcasters with . . . well, with whatever it is you do, or what you have to contribute to the conversation, or . . . something.
Did I mention, Dear Reader, I was born in the twentieth century? The year 1945, to be precise. Almost eighty years ago. So what do I know from podcasting?
Tens of millions of people make podcasts and listen to podcasts, often with great regularity and brand loyalty. According to Pew Research—which, as you know, researches every social trend worth researching—large portions of a podcast’s audience will buy something, read something, or take an action because they heard it on their favorite podcast.
#
Gutenberg. Public Domain.
But I don’t understand why someone would listen to podcasts in the first place. I am mostly a printed word guy. To me, Gutenberg invented the latest reliable technology. I watch very little TV, listen to very little radio, and take in nearly zero podcasts.
Those things seem like giant time-wasters to me. You have to wait for someone to speak, or in the case of video, to act, before you can learn that which you could already have grasped by skimming a line or two of prose. And it’s inconvenient, sometimes even impossible, to go back and re-check something that was said a while back. Why would a person want to do this?
“Yes, but—” I hear you cry. “But you can ingest a podcast while doing something else—driving or jogging or washing dishes.”
Maybe you can, but I am no multi-tasker. I have to pay attention to every single thing. I guess they call that a one-track mind. It leaves me no way to pay attention to something else.
That’s not absolute, Gentle Reader. I can, for example, talk with someone while driving a car. I won’t run over any pedestrians, but I’m almost certain to miss my turn-off.
#
So why do I need to pay attention to podcasting at all? Because podcasters are powerful influencers. The folks who subscribe and listen to podcasts become attached to the voices they hear repeatedly. They invest great authority in their pronouncements. That’s what makes podcasting a valuable vehicle for promoting a book.
Still, I—antedeluvian creature I am—bridle at the idea of pursuing podcast appearances. It is unseemly. It is very now. Therefore I hate it.
But I was mulling over the authority listeners invest in the podcaster, and suddenly—Fair Reader, you might recognize that this is where you came in—A LIGHT BULB WENT ON above my head, just like we used to see in the funny papers.
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, there was a man in whom listeners invested great authority. So much authority, in fact, that you could buy time from him at an expensive rate . . . but if you paid, oh, ten times that rate, the great man himself would deliver your message, in his own voice.
His name was Arthur Godfrey.
Arthur Godfrey at a CBS microphone in 1938. Public Domain.
He was a creation of radio, and by his own audacity, he became king of the medium. While recovering from a near-fatal car crash in 1931, Godfrey spent a lot of time listening to and analyzing commercial radio broadcasts. He noted, according to Wikipedia, “that the stiff, formal style then used by announcers could not connect with the average radio listener. The announcers spoke in stentorian tones, as if giving a formal speech to a crowd and not communicating on a personal level. Godfrey vowed that when he returned to the airwaves, he would affect a relaxed, informal style as if he were talking to just one person.”
That’s just what he did. Jim Ramsburg says: “In their 1963 book, It Sounds Impossible, former CBS executives Sam Slate and Joe Cook describe Godfrey’s return. ‘. . . Listeners heard for the first time the casual, unhurried speech . . . the ruminating, hesitant pace . . . the purring growl that has since opened the doors to millions of American homes.’ ”
Godfrey’s informality extended even to adlibbing and joking while delivering on-air commercial scripts that sponsors had paid good money for. Godfrey sometimes appeared to be mocking the very product he was selling. But sales zoomed, and canny sponsors realized that having your commercial butchered by “the Old Redhead” was better than having it read meticulously by an ordinary announcer.
He hit his stride on April 30, 1945, when CBS gave him a half-hour coast-to-coast slot at 9:15 a.m., Monday through Friday, under the title Arthur Godfrey Time. Eventually it expanded to ninety minutes.
The Old Redhead delivered long, unscripted monologues; interviewed celebrities; introduced and sometimes interrupted or joined in with musical selections by his own in-house orchestra and regular vocalists. It was all spontaneous and informal.
He got beyond the scripted sound of commercials by inserting adlibbed comments. I recall his reading a commercial for Bufferin that was filled with Madison Avenue catch-phrases. He stopped ten seconds in, paused, and said, “So forth and so on. To tell you the truth, folks, I don’t know what’s in this stuff, but I’ve used it myself and it works.”
He was the ultimate pitchman because it never seemed he was pitching—he was simply commenting, in a folksy, down-to-earth way, on the passing scene. According to Ramsburg, he realized that radio was a personal medium and he spoke directly to the individual listener.
People listened to Arthur Godfrey every day. They knew him, they trusted him, and they were loyal.
Aren’t these the same reasons podcasters are said to be so influential?
#
So when the light bulb went off over my head, it said: “Podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today.” Even an old wreck like me can understand that.
Few podcasters enjoy as big an audience as Godfrey commanded. That’s just as well, because anyone whose book is not yet on the New York Times Best Sellers list is unlikely to get a foot in the door of those giant podcasts.
The media scene today is fragmented. Many podcasters have only a few followers, or a few hundred, or a few thousand. That’s where I ought to start.
And the first thing to do is to pick a few likely candidates and listen to their podcasts. When pitching somebody, it never hurts to know what they’re all about.
You can help me, Dear Reader. Do you subscribe, or listen regularly, to any podcasts that seem related to the theme of this blog—“Seeking new meanings in our common past”? If so, drop me a line at larryfsommers@gmail.com, or just add a comment to this post.
We’re in the hot part of summer, when the glass jar of tea left to brew by sunshine gets so hot you might as well have boiled it up on the stove.
His Foobishness, under sentence.
Our big black dog, recovering from ear-flap surgery, lies cone-headed in the sun and doesn’t seem bothered. But for us humans here in Madison, Wisconsin, the temperatures—mid-90s by day, down to around 75 at night—feel extreme.
In fact, we know so, for the National Weather Service is issuing Excessive Heat Warnings, and if you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?
When I was a boy, we needed no heat warnings. We could tell it was hot, all by ourselves.
You didn’t even have to go outside; it was hot everywhere.
That was in north-central Illinois, in a little town called Streator. Summer temperatures ran about ten degrees hotter than they do here. Every summer, we’d get a pretty good string of hundred-plus days.
A local entrepreneur, to get his picture in the paper, would fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of his gas station—at nine o’clock in the morning!
We kids, being kids, were not bothered by the heat. If we stopped and thought about it, we’d get to feeling kind of droopy and sweaty. But usually we didn’t stop and think about things. We were too busy running around the neighborhood, playing tag, or cowboys, or space cadets. Sometimes we armed ourselves with squirt guns, which provided a welcome spritz of coolish water.
If we got to feeling too hot, we’d find some shade or go inside. We’d stop running and sit still for a while. Let the sweat dry.
Have I mentioned—there was no air-conditioning? There was no place you could go to escape the fervid ambience. Not unless you went to the movies.
Our town had two theaters—the Plumb and the Granada—and both were air-conditioned. A child’s admission at the one cost a quarter, the other fifteen cents. But you didn’t ordinarily take off in the middle of a day without your family and go to the pictures.
Not when you could get cooled off for free by wandering through E. C. Van Loon’s Sporting Goods store on Main Street. That was the only other air-conditioned space in town. They kept the temperature cranked way down, and the lights off. I suppose the juice to run the A/C cost so much they couldn’t afford to turn on the lights, too.
Stepping into Van Loon’s on a blazing August day was like exploring an Egyptian tomb. The only light was what managed to slip past the dark green street awning and seep in the front windows, then bounce in ever-diminishing waves back to the rear of the store. You walked along narrow aisles full of balls and gloves, rifles and shotguns, and bright-colored fishing lures of every description—some of them designed to mimic bright-colored creatures never seen in any Illinois pond or stream.
It was all tantalizing. Intriguing. Great entertainment. But it was freezing. You could catch your death of cold.
Fleeing the store by the front door, you stepped into the vast sauna of a small-town summer and knew you were back where you belonged.
None of us had houses or cars that were air-conditioned. Such a thing was unheard of—like private citizens owning electronic computers.
We must have smelled terrible all summer long, but nobody noticed because we all did.
Gentle Reader, here we are again—this time with a new, new update.
As a devotee of this site, you no doubt recall my post of May 7, 2019. It featured the curious curio pictured above—a telegraph key that looks like . . . well, like something else.
It is a Foote, Pierson & Co. Twentieth Century key, put on the market in 1901 and widely known as a “speed handle” or “pump handle key.” It came down to me as a family heirloom from my grandfather, William P. Sommers, who was a railroad telegrapher. The odd-looking device was one inventive response to a work-related stress injury known as telegrapher’s paralysis—which I innocently supposed to be just another name for carpal tunnel syndrome.
Oops!
After an email from David Pennes, a physician in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I stand corrected.
Penne has been tracking this historical affliction of railroad telegraphers for years and is just about to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
Telegrapher’s paralysis, says Penne, was not carpal tunnel syndrome. It was either (1) task-specific dystonia or (2) compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. Maybe a combination of the two.
This diagnosis took a lot of detective work, because as Penne points out, “[t]he condition was never described in medical journals of the day.”
Lacking such professional data, he says, “I used a database of 60,000 searchable .pdf pages from the union and trade publications, whatever medical literature was out there, and was able to track down a handful of individuals who either had the condition or worked with people who did, which put a human face on it.”
In the course of his research, Penne encountered my 2019 post erroneously equating telegrapher’s paralysis with carpal tunnel syndrome. He also ran across a fleeting reference to my grandfather in a 1901 publication from the Order of Railroad Telegraphers—a sort of fraternal guild Grandpa Sommers once belonged to. I have his membership card somewhere.
Penne’s email correspondence with me straightened out another point as well. I had assumed that Grandpa had the key in his possession because the railroad let him take it with him when he left their employ. In fact, Penne says, “Anyone working for the railroad wishing to use anything other than the employer-supplied straight key had to buy their own.”
So Grandpa must have owned the key outright, having laid out the heavy sum of $8.95.
Why?
But that raises another conundrum. In 1901, when the Twentieth Century Key experienced its brief surge of popularity, Grandpa would have been only seventeen years old—having worked as a railroad telegrapher since age fourteen. Three years’ work would not have included enough tappings of the standard telegraph key to give him telegrapher’s paralysis, whether task-specific dystonia or compressive neuropathy of the posterior interosseous nerve. So why did he buy it?
Well, you had to know Grandpa. He came from a technological family, had the highest regard for his own brains, and was apt to back anything he considered a good idea—or a sound, well-engineered solution to a problem—even if it cost good money. Things he bought over his lifetime included a Pierce-Arrow Touring Car, several Studebakers, lots of fractional partnerships in oil-drilling operations, and a weird ultraviolet light device imagined to cure rheumatism.
He would have been aware of the old operators’ complaints about “telegrapher’s wrist.” Thus, he took a flyer on a new key—one that might spare him the anguish suffered by others.
All this is supposition, of course. And every once in a while, Your New Favorite Writer is reminded that he ought to beware of suppositions.
Not every sore wrist is carpal tunnel syndrome.
Whatever your calling, Dear Reader, take care of your digits. One day you’ll grow old and you’ll need them to keep on buttoning your buttons.
It’s time to reveal the cover of IZZY STRIKES GOLD!, my new middle-grade novel from Three Towers Press. In the near future, I’ll post the link for pre-publication orders, but for the moment, just revel in this beautiful cover, please!
I think sensational cover artist KINGA MARTIN got it just right.
IZZY, the twelve-year-old hero of the book, is a real boy, battling real problems in a realistically rendered 1957 setting. But Kinga’s cartoon-like rendering universalizes him, makes him into an Everykid, while perfectly capturing his innocence and venturesome spirit. And all in a brilliant woodland frame that shows the half-magical woods where Izzy’s tormenting secret lives.
MATT FIEDLER, fifth-grade teacher at Winnequah School, pointed out the style of illustration is reminiscent of animé, an art form “the kids really like.” I know already that the kids in Matt’s 2022-2023 class like the book itself, because I read it to them in installments last year.
But I didn’t have a juvenile audience in mind when I wrote it. I was thinking EVERYBODY could identify with Izzy, a kid trying to balance the child and adult worlds. I know old folks of my generation will enjoy this trip back to the Fifties. If they read the book to their grandchildren, who knows what illuminating conversations might ensue?
IZZY STRIKES GOLD! launches July 24. It will be available from Amazon, Three Towers Press, or your favorite local bookstore.
(NOTE: The following offering is pure fiction. No chickens, roosters, donkeys, parakeets, or speckled trout were harmed in its production.)
I always figured I would wind up doing something remarkable, like disprove the Pythagorean theorem, or find a cure for chemistry.
Imagine my chagrin upon receiving in my mailbox a summons to show cause why I should not be disheveled for keeping more than six live chickens on a city lot.
Eddie Albert as Oliver Wendell Douglas. Fair use.
It would be mortifying to go down in history as a poultry scofflaw, especially considering I don’t even like Buffalo wings.
Surely they’ve mistaken me for the guy down in the next block who’s always playing Green Acres on his brown furlong. Many’s the bright morning I’ve spotted him standing out in his driveway in vest and tie, seeming about to sing a hymn of praise to The American Farmer. If you ask me, he’s just the type of enthusiast who would breed an egregious brood.
There was a time when the city fathers had too much on their minds to bother with a thing like this. It’s not as if I had a rooster for my flock. That is, if I even had a flock—which I most definitely do not.
I have not a single hen. Why would I get a rooster? Those things go off at four a.m. and can be heard for miles around.
Gao Qipei (1660–1734), Braying Donkey (1713). Public Domain.
We once stayed at a vineyard in Tuscany where the vintner kept some sweet little donkeys. Each dawn, at the first ray, they brayed a paean to the sun god, demonstrating why they are called “mountain canaries.” At least they were cute, unlike any rooster you ever met.
But I digress.
Who You Gonna Call?
Æthelred the Unready. Public Domain.
The point is, I didn’t know what to do. So I called on Milo Bung.
My old schoolmate Milo—fourth cousin to Slats Grobnik and a direct descendant of King Æthelred the Unready—has a big reputation as the nemesis of all officials. He once reduced a building inspector to a heap of wilted artichoke leaves in under thirty seconds.
I don’t know how he does it, but in this hour of crisis, I want Milo on my side. Nonetheless, I hesitated several moments on Milo’s doorstep.
Finally, I took a deep breath and pressed the button.
The great man himself flung open the door. He was clad in smoking jacket, ascot, and waders. In a brief second, he discerned my status. Milo always could read me like a book.
“Hmm,” he frowned. “Well, you’d better come in, then.”
He withdrew from the door and led me through endless dim corridors to his sanctum sanctorum. I mean, his den.
Fly rods, woven wicker creels, hand nets, and all the impedimenta of the compleat angler lay strewn over every horizontal and vertical surface.
“Sit anywhere,” Milo said.
“Going fishing?”
Milo smiled. “Thought I’d sneak up on a few of those speckly little trout things. Season opens on Saturday.”
“May their finny tribe increase,” I replied. “Perhaps I could just set this tackle box on the floor for a moment.”
“Be my guest.”
“I am,” I reminded him. I shifted the tackle box and sat.
Down to Business
“Now,” Milo said. “What’s on your mind?”
I opened my mouth to speak.
“Don’t tell me. It’s the old excess urban fowl runaround, isn’t it?”
I stared at him. “How did you know?”
“Oh, they’ve got a little calendar down at City Hall. Last week in April, it’s time to hassle homeowners about hens.”
I whipped out my notice and brandished it in his face. “Look here!” I said with righteous anger. “I don’t even keep a parakeet, let alone a chicken.”
“Utterly irrelevant.”
“Is that so?” I huffed and puffed as he gazed on me with pity.
“Well,” I said after a decent interval. “What should I do?”
“Ignore it.”
Briar pipe, maybe a Kaywoodie. Photo by Petey21. Public Domain.
“Ignore it? An official summons from City Hall?”
Milo nodded, fiddling with a vintage Kaywoodie briar pipe.
“How can I ignore it?”
“You’ll be a sucker and a fool if you don’t.”
“Explain.”
Genius At Work
“When they send you a provocation like this, they mean for you to quail and quiver. It gives them shivers of joy, like a male grunion at the height of the run.” He tapped his Kaywoodie against the heel of his hand and dislodged a few shreds of stale tobacco into a large glass ashtray. “See, they want to get you on the run.”
“What good does ignoring the summons do?”
“It lures them into overplaying their hand.”
“How so?”
Milo chuckled. “They will descend on you with a flying squad of chicken inspectors, most likely backed up by a SWAT team.”
“A SWAT team?”
“Exactly. If you’re lucky, they’ll stage a three a.m. raid.”
“You call that lucky?”
“I should say so!” Milo packed fresh tobacco into the bowl of the pipe, tamping it down with his index finger. “If they make enough fuss, you’ve got them just where you want them.”
“I want them nowhere near my house, is where I want them!”
“Nevertheless, there they are. And no excess chickens to be found on said premises. You really don’t have more than six, do you?”
“I DON’T HAVE ANY CHICKENS AT ALL!!”
“No need to raise your voice. Now, it would help if you could arrange for Biff Brash and his Action TV News Crew to be there with cameras and lights—lots of lights—when the SWAT Team arrives.”
“Must we go to these lengths, Milo? At last, sir, have you no shame?”
He sucked on the stem of his pipe. “They’ll be so worried about a lawsuit for false prosecution—you’ll be exempt from even mowing your front lawn for at least two years.”
It’s All Upshot From Here
I stared at my old friend, not in a warm and cherishing way. “Aren’t you going to light that thing?” I asked.
His mouth twisted in horror around the stem of his Kaywoodie. “Light it? Start a conflagration in the house? Muriel would kill me.”
This from the fearless facer of SWAT teams.
Guess my chickens have come home to roost. I’ll just quietly pay the fine.
NOTE TO POTENTIALLY CONFUSED READERS: What you have just read should have been posted on April Fool’s Day. It is pure fantasy, every bit of it. Not one scintilla of fact. Except the donkeys. I distinctly remember the donkeys.
