The major joy of my life has been that of teaching teenagers for 37 1/2 years! Although to many I may have been Mr. Smith, to most I was WASM (the letters on my car's license plate; WAS had already been taken by someone else).
I was enrolled at Iowa State Teachers College (now called the University of Northern Iowa) as a piano major from 1940 to 1942. Russell Baum was my piano prof, and others who stood out were George Holmes (journalism); Brock Fagan and John Cowley (English); Martin L. Grant (biology); Malcolm Price (President; I had his beat as a reporter on The College Eye ); and Carl Wirth (musical composition). During my freshman and sophomore summers, I worked as a counsellor at the Des Moines YMCA Boys' Camp. Drafted into the US Army in 1942, sent to Fort Knox and then on to Fort Dix, Omaha Beach, and the Little Red Schoolhouse in Reims, I was discharged (two battle stars) in 1945. Using the GI Bill, I chose to attend the University of Chicago for one semester (studying logic with Charner Perry and metaphysics with Charles Hartshorne ), then returned to Iowa where I switched my major from music to English and was graduated with the B.A. in 1948.
Upon graduation, and following my having been in the Army for 3 1/2 years, I took a job for the remaining quarter of the school year at West Chester, Iowa, High School . The English teacher there had been fired, and when I walked into the classroom I found eraser marks on the ceiling, the walls, everywhere. On my first day, I used a tool learned at what then had been called Iowa State Teachers College: To show who's boss, commence by looking around the room, pick whoever appears to be a potential troublemaker, and order him or her to open the window an inch. That showed who was in charge. The trick apparently worked, and I had almost no discipline problems throughout my career. That, plus my mother's advice (never have sexual relations with a student or a faculty member, which I guess she implied when she said never leave the door closed if you're alone in a room), worked 100%.
West Chester, Iowa, was a distance from any large city, may have had fewer than 250 residents, the school was very small, and the few students who were enrolled lived on nearby farms. The senior class had been learning lines for the senior play, a mystery, and I found I had inherited being drama coach in addition to being the English teacher. To the kids' delight, I changed the script so that just before the end of the play all the lights everywhere were extinguished for 15 seconds, then someone entered from left stage very slowly with a weak flashlight. Even the kids were scared, let alone those in the audience! The mystery was a big success, I don't remember having flunked a student there, and the year ended happily. The only unhappy day was the time a Mennonite father accompanied his son, the brightest in his class, and the father informed me that Iowa required children to attend only until they were 15, his son was 15 that day, and he was withdrawing his son because of religious reasons "you'll find explained in the Bible." Years later I returned to the bleak Bible Belt community (now even bleaker). Its school was now a historical society, my old room looked just the same, but employees at the town's small bank were unable to help me locate that 15-year-old who had been yanked from the Garden of Eden lest he become too smart.
At Columbia University in the fall of 1948, I pursued my M.A. in American literature with the leading intellectual of the time, Lionel Trilling . I talked him into allowing me to do my thesis on humanism, what the word connoted, its different interpretations, what creative people had said about it. I delved into the university as well as city card catalogs, received an important letter on the subject from Thomas Mann, and wrote "The Seven Humanisms." Trilling's reaction was that, because the word had so many meanings, he would never again use it. He did, however, use some of my research to write an article on humanism in Nation , or possibly New Republic , under his own name. And when at the end of the year I asked for a letter of recommendation, he inquired why he should write it I reminded him that the article he'd written illustrated how important a researcher I had been. Besides, I said, I'd like to apply to the progressive school in Chicago to which he once had applied . . . but which had hired Clifton Fadiman instead. [I told this to a laughing Mr. Fadiman years later when he volunteered to help administer some oral exams to my honors seniors&endash;that experience, incidentally, led to his writing The Lifetime Reading Plan .]. My wacky verve worked. Trilling wrote the letter. My other favorite profs at Columbia and at Teachers College: Allen Walker Read (English); William York Tindall (English); George Counts (history); and Lennox Grey (education). At New School for Social Research, I had a great course with Horace Kallen (aesthetics) and years later a superlative course with the editor of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Paul Edwards.
WASM in his MGTD on his way to an ice hockey game
WASM in his MGTD with faculty members' (Kepes and Knaus) kids
The Cadillac garage that painted the car said the color was California coral. I've always been color-blind, but I THINK I was driving around in a PINK car!
New Canaan High School
One of my lucky days was the the time I drove my rear-engine Renault up the Merritt Parkway to apply for a position at the New Canaan High School. Teachers College, Columbia University, had been asked to forward my folder with letters of recommendation, and I appeared before Supt. of Schools Dr. Albert P. Mathers and High School Headmaster Harold Kenney. (Though a public school, Mr. Kenney called himself Headmaster.)
To my horror, the one letter I'd asked the university to withdraw (from philosopher Corliss Lamont , whom Sen. McCarthy had just cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer if he was now or had ever been a Communist) was there in my folder! To my relief, neither Dr. Mathers nor Headmaster Kenney seemed to notice. At any rate, and despite Headmaster Kenney's alarm that my funny-looking car had a noisy muffler, I got hired @ $5000/year, which was double what I'd been paid at Bentley School, the private progressive school where I'd been teaching.
My first residence was on Silvermine Avenue, where I rented an upstairs bedroom from Louise Murray. She was a proper and stereotypically New England Puritan old maid. Cleanliness and quiet were requisites, and I was careful to keep my radio at a low level. The place was cold in the winter but the area was positively idyllic. The house was set back off the east side of Silvermine Avenue, one passed a red barn (then allegedly the most-photographed in all of New England), then drove over a small bridge and up to her driveway. Louise sometimes had me for tea, and one day she told me about the cottages she rented out to the south of the house. One, she said, had been rented to architect Philip Johnson during the time his glass house was being built. Another, she said, was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Kerensky, a nice couple who had knocked on her door one day. Later, she said, she was SHOCKED to learn that Mr. K was the hated Russian the Bolsheviks were looking for. Why, they could have blown the cottage up and killed her, too! "Would never have rented to them had I known!" she said, with proper intonation. Nearby neighbors were economist-journalist Henry Hazlitt and popular sociologist Vance Packard . Upon leaving Miss Murray after the first year in town, I celebrated by placing some firecrackers in the fireplace, lit a match, and exited by the nearest egress.
Moving to Millport Avenue and Lakeview, I rented the smallest house in town (just big enough for the garage underneath to hold landlord Huddleson's Beatle and my Renault or MG). The neighbors were deathly quiet (beyond the delightful creek that flowed past the house lay the town cemetery), and I stayed there for 31 years. Mrs. Huddleson, who had earned a listing in Who's Who because of her having been a World War I nurse and editor of an international dieticians' journal, had built the little house adjacent to her own in order, apparently, to have a place to edit the journal . . . and possibly to get away from Doc, her husband the psychiatrist who had been hired to test Bruno Hauptman, the Lindbergh baby's alleged kidnapper. All Doc would tell me, because he said he had professional responsibilities, was that Hauptman had some kind of marks all over his back. He did regale me, whenever he came home from his second home out West, with stories about having been a psychiatrist in Greenwich Village during the 1920s. When Mrs. H. showered me with John Birch and other ultra-conservative materials to read, I thought it best not to let her know I was reviewing books for The Humanist and receiving letters from such non-conservatives as Socialist Norman Thomas and non-theists George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, as well as dozens of others including New Canaanite Henry Hazlitt.
I became English Department Chairman and, like my mentor James Duncan , think I gained a deserved reputation for being a strict taskmaster (sociologist Vance Packard 's description, for I taught two of his children). I started by asking for a greatly increased textbook budget (only 2 1/2 teachers in the department then!), buying controversial titles such as Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" (the junior high English Department Chairman warned me against such, but then she was also the Methodist Church Sunday School director so what could one expect), arranging for a citizens' committee to help advise (whereas most teachers dreaded parental involvement in curriculum matters), and editor Norman Cousins (I taught all four of his daughters, including Hiroshima Maiden Shigeko Niimoto) was a big help.
I'm often asked if I ever had a teacher's pet. Well, no, and I think I was quite empathetic about every student, attempting as a professional to see things as if I were standing in their shoes and looking ahead to what was happening in the classroom. If I had any really special "pets," I guess they would have been Reyna Piola's two children--she was the Uruguyan teacher of Spanish at the high school, and her two teenagers liked to have me come for Sunday night dinner, after which we watched the Ed Sullivan telecast together. They were without a father--I was without a son or a daughter. It was a natural. Neither received any special favors, of course, but probably neither of them knew that I regularly checked with each of their teachers much as any parent would do. Like a responsible parent, I helped look out for them as well as, often, taking their side against their mother (which a good father sometimes does). Both kids--Monica Methol and Bill Methol --were the first two siblings that I had ever befriended in such a way. How lucky I was to have had their love, and I am happy that over the years they and their mother have kept in touch. (Monica and Bill: in 1998 and 1999 that combination of names took on an entirely different connotation!)
I know my deficiencies. For example, I don't think I did a good job teaching speech. I know I was better with brighter students. I wish I had turned more kids onto reading and writing. But a sign of my devotion was that I was always one-half hour early to school and almost always stayed an hour or so afterwards. Furthermore, dozens and dozens of my ex-students continue to keep in touch!
From time to time, faculty has asked me to help chaperone their classes when they came to the Big Apple. I enjoyed taking a business class to the Stock Exchange, and several times Mr. Ronald Russell-Tutty has invited me to accompany his humanities classes when they attend opera rehearsals or dress rehearsals. I honestly believe that NCHS in the 1950s and early 1960s enjoyed its Golden Age, and I am happy I played a part.
When I retired, I started a private newsletter, Emeritus , which I continue to send annually to all retirees of the entire New Canaan school system. They are invited to forward news about their activities, and I simply copy them into the newsletter. I format it by zipcodes, allowing individuals in different parts of the country to see who lives somewhere nearby. That way, all 200 of us can all still stay in touch.
Not that I ever formulated a definite philosophy of teaching, but I was definitely Deweyan in my approach (and I was one who had actually read Dewey, not just received his $1 dues for membership in the Humanist Club I founded on the Columbia U campus). One learns more not from books! My mentor, James Duncan , had been my high school teacher and principal. A graduate of Drake University in philosophy when only 20 or 21, he apparently mistook my little town of Minburn (population 328) for Ancient Athens. Each student in every class he followed carefully, exams were given almost every day, mistaken answers on exams were gone over individually and then exams were re-given at a later date to insure that the mistake did not continue. It was assumed everyone was capable of much more, and students worked in many respects because they were afraid of what Duncan would say if they erred. In short, he cared as well as scared. Standard tests were administered regularly. Everyone took the Iowa Every Pupil Test in every subject, and those who scored high had their grades posted and were praised highly. At one point, our little school was adjudged the best scorer in the entire state, better than Des Moines and other city schools. Duncan, never satisfied, thought we should have done better. Instead of a class textbook, we had to cover two textbooks for most of our classes, and we were coached to look for differences in those books. Duncan required that we do math in our heads, so 20 times 199 was easy but 38 times 42 was far more difficult. The easiest of all was to multiply identical numbers ending in 5; ergo, 65 times 65 was 4225 [all such ended in 25; we added one to the first number, 6, obtaining 7, then multiplied that by the remaining 6 for a 42]; and 95 times 95 was 9025, 105 times 105 was 11025 and so forth. Much rote learning was required, so the Battle of Hastings was 1066, the First Crusade started in 1095, the English defeated the Spanish armada in 1588, the Louisiana Purchase was in 1803, Iowa became a state in 1846 . . . facts I still recall. Little wonder that some in our school scored #1 in the entire state on certain tests. In the entire state of Iowa, I was Iowa's 39th best student in algebra in 9th grade, and I was 55th in English Correctness in 10th grade. At the State University of Iowa when I was 15, I scored #1 in economics despite never having studied the subject (for, as graduate students know, no one slings the bull better than an English major). This was because we were required to spell correctly, write formal English, have a topic sentence in each well-developed paragraph that was planned to insure clarity of purpose and contain a rational conclusion, cut our verbiage, and to revise everything legibly.
Jim Duncan, when he left Minburn High School, joined the faculty in Des Moines of Drake University. After "Dutch" Reagan, as our radio station WHO announcer was known in his pre-presidential days [and this means that he supplied me with all my sports news when I was a kid], Duncan became the main sports announcer. The track at Drake is named after him.
My own classes were conducted much like Mr. Duncan's. I bonded more with my students, however. Like Duncan, I was not interested in sympathizing but, rather, in empathizing. One plan I had was to invite creative writing that could be submitted under a pseudonym. If, for example, Napoleon got his paper back with a low grade, he could resubmit it as many times as necessary to get a high grade, even submitting the revision under the name of Marie Antoinette. Only when the student was ready to record his grade were pseudonyms revealed. Thus, students learned to like, rather than detest, revising, a habit I trusted they would continue.
I required one fully developed four-paragraph book review per month (what does the title mean and why did you choose the book and author; what were the novel's strengths; what were the novel's weaknesses; how does it compare with a best- and a least-liked book, and what is your over-all evaluation). Also, the entire class read certain titles in order to compare our evaluations. I taught that some authors were recognizably better than others; that, for example, the US had not yet produced a "rung one" writer like Shakespeare or Hugo or Goethe; that "rung two" on the US ladder included only Clemens, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Henry Adams, Dickinson, and Whitman; that "rung three" included such as Hemingway or Faulkner; and that someone like Michael Crichton, whose sister was in one of my classes, was not yet up on the third rung. Then I invited discussion, in which students sometimes got really angry because Salinger was not deemed "rung one" or that Robert Frost was rated below Dickinson, etc. (A student whose father at Henry Holt published Frost's poetry, Gordon Edwards, invited me home to meet Robert Frost, telling him what I'd said in class, that E. E. Cummings would possibly outlast Frost over a period of time; surprisingly, Frost agreed that Cummings was the most original poet of the day.)
On standard tests, I emphasized going over the missed responses, making students figure out what "ratiocination" they had used to get to the wrong answer, for this directed attention to our thought processes. To avoid parental problems concerning assigned books, I made assignments in which one could choose a "quality II" work (e.g., Salinger's Catcher in the Rye or Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath ) and have the grade doubled, or a "quality I" book that they chose to substitute (e.g., Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch ). Instead of letter grades I gave top grades of 4.0 with .8 being the lowest. A 3.8/quality II on Salinger rated 7.6, or double, whereas a top grade on Mrs. Wiggs netted only a 4.0 Further, I totaled on a grade checksheet everyone's standing several times a marking period (to pique those further down on the list), then gave the top 10% the equivalent of A's, the next 25% B's, the middle 33% C's, the next 25% D's, and the bottom 7% X's. Thus, if one read only one quality book for the entire quarter and received a top grade of 4.0/II or 8 points, he would have flunked. The system, termed "Your Own Thing,"encouraged much revising of work and quality as well as quantity. Even better, it illustrated the quantity some individuals were completing, and I suspect Adam Smith would have understood the method to my madness. Each calendar year my median grade was close to a C, or 75, which I understand is not the custom these days.
In retrospect, I don't think I ever had a teacher's pet. Each semester a student would probably stand out as being exceptional, but to me "exceptional" meant the student was way up at the top or way down at the bottom. A note to parents that their child was exceptional was obviously ambiguous. One failing student, an excellent jazz drummer, I took to the city with me and introduced him to Gene Krupa. "This chap wants to be a drummer, Mr. K. What advice do you have for him?" And Krupa told him to go to college, that life is more than simply hitting on drums. Another was Shigeko Niimoto, one of the Hiroshima Maidens Norman Cousins brought here for surgery; she knew no English whatsoever, and I helped arrange that she learn English . . . not from books but from kids much younger than she was. Here's an actual progress report I sent 18 Feb 1958 to some parents regarding their son in my junior English class:
Peter's present average is incomplete, for he is behind one term paper and one book report. Spending 45 minutes per day on English homework is about the only solution I can think of, for his first semester average of 51 simply must be raised to at least 69 this semester if he is to pass junior English this year. On the positive side, his oral work in class has been remarkable, and his written work - particularly the poetry which is far above average for a junior boy&endash;is especially to be commended. If you would encourage him to read regularly in the evenings, particularly the enjoyable type of reading for his monthly book reports, and if he can get his back work up-to-date, perhaps all will work out satisfactorily by the time the third quarter marks come out around April 3rd.
And, yes, I flunked students if they failed to work, often on tests and individual assignments but seldom on final course grades.
In 1997, I received the following from the son of the Chief of Police who had once been in my class:
Back in 1958 I was in an English class I thought I'd never pass. It was the first class that ever really challenged me, and I vividly remember a teacher who among a few others set the course for the rest of my life! I wrote a term paper entitled "The Violent Skills of Ice Hockey." Oh, it was tough work and was of average quality, but I knew it made an impact because you and a raccoon coat and a little MG never missed a game of ours. Your interest in my becoming the best that I could directed me to teach, and I have never been sorry for that choice in the past 33 years. Since those days I coached and taught and then realized that teaching academia needed more of my time. I began our California district's first Marine Biology classes and also taught Anatomy/Physiology. I had a chance to try administration for a year but missed the classroom. I taught in college for a year but missed the young raw hormone-laced adolescent mind. College was great, with lad aides doing everything for me, but I loved teaching high school. I am now 55 and have been married since 1975. I have three kids, the youngest now a 6' 5" soccer goalie at Point Loma College in San Diego. He wants to be a teacher like his dad. I could go on for hours, but a great deal of time has passed since those glorious days in high school. Thanks for all you did for me. I'm convinced that God placed you in my life to get me where I am now." [That last part will get a laugh from my secular humanist friends, but replace God by "Duncan and Smith" and one can extrapolate that the chap's many students will add his name to that cycle of goodness. Who, I now wonder although now it's too late to ask, would Duncan have credited . . . and so forth back to Socrates!]
Teaching things that are not in books was always important to me. To make speaking more attractive, I gave extra credit for 2-track tapes on one track of which was the student's own creative writing and on the other track some kind of accompaniment, such as sound effects or music. Mary Powell 's project of singing her own song resulted in its sale to the singer Peggy Lee (made easier because Lee was her godmother, her father being bandleader Mel Powell ).
Then there was the class trip to the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where more gold is stored than in Fort Knox. During that visit, I almost got jailed for holding the tray with $1,000,000 in paper bills and giving it (until stopped by several guys with guns) to the student whose dad had arranged the trip. A class trip to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, arranged by the daughter of a specialist, resulted in papers as profound as explaining how a point-and-figure chart is useful. I even gave extra credit for research completed jointly and step-by-step for another teacher (such as for a science or history project) and me.
For several years during my Advanced Placement Class, I had students make up a humanities chart (nationalities of writers along the top, centuries in which they lived along the left side), and it contained specific works they would be willing to be examined upon. For example, Candide in the 18th century French column, Moby-Dick in the 19th Century US column, Antigone in the Ancient Greek column, and so forth. Then, instead of my giving the final exam, townspeople were invited to come in and test my students. The 3-hour Oxford-like exams were a hit, and townspeople who helped included editor Norman Cousins (who questioned many students' failure to find fault with authors); sociologist Vance Packard (who said he learned a lot through osmosis about literature, for he had worked in a library and simply pulling a book out of the 800s was educational); Mr. To Sir With Love Braithwaite (who also taught one of my other classes one day, during which I tricked my students by telling them I'd tell him I was a substitute teacher, not Mr. Smith, and I told him the trick I was playing so he asked the kids about this Mr. Smith and his techniques, to everyone's amusement); a Congregationalist minister (who focused in on the importance of the library in ancient Alexandria and who insisted upon Biblical stories as being examples of myths); various housewives and other friends who had majored in English and who jumped at the chance to get involved in such an event; and an insurance executive who had actually experienced the tutoring system at Oxford, England, and who helped greatly with his British overview.
These, alas, are just a few instances concerning the method to my madness. I could go on and on, but my point is already made: I loved teaching. I was absent only one day for the entire 37 1/2 years (I sat too close to a sunlamp and I was so blind I had to ask the telephone operator to dial Headmaster Kenney for me), mainly because I didn't want to miss the fun. Like the clown who told us at a school assembly one day, "I've never worked a day in my life!" I disliked being absent for class trips or other school-sponsored events, because it meant stacks of assignments to correct, usually until midnight. And somehow, probably because I feared complaints that I ran a recording studio on Wednesday nights and on weekends, I got every (repeat, every!) paper and every exam back by the students' next class period! No exceptions! Oh, there was an exception: one Wednesday night I went to Joe Allen's after handling the financial business at the recording studio, and actor Dom DeLuise hailed me and a Costa Rican friend over to his table where he was sitting alone but waiting for a date. The date, it turned out, was actress Raquel Welch. I stayed on so long I didn't get home until 2 a.m., too late to do my homework. And what did we talk about? Her teenager, homework, parenting of high schoolers.
Following is a mid-year journal sent those old school friends in Iowa who ask me to keep in touch. I also send something similar to retirees in the New Canaan Public Schools:
15 May 2001
--In the past few years I've sent some $350. Who's Who books to the Minburn and also the Adel school systems. No thank you's. So this year I sent them to A-D-M's English Department. No thank you's. So I mailed the A-D-M administration telling how in Jim Duncan's day, we were all taught to send thank-you's. No response. (If anyone asks me to tell why I changed my Last Will and Testament to delete these schools, can you guess what I'll say?)
--(Jan 2001) My 15 months is stretching out a bit. Rob Lloyd of "To Tell The Truth" called from Los Angeles to get me on an April program. However, when my publishers Carole and Lyle Stuart sent him the book he found it too serious for his kind of entertainment program- interestingly, Carol had been on the initial program way back when. . . . Dr. Yuri Tchjornij (or Iouri Tchernyi, in the French manner) congratulated me on my book's Russian entries. The Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he has been studying at the Free Inquiry Library in Buffalo. Darwin scholar H. James Birx of Harvard and Canisius has taken a copy of the book to Moscow for presentation to the Russian Academy of Science.
--(Feb 2001) The Nation's cartoonist Edward Sorel purchased my book. . . . New Yorker (19-26 Feb 2001) featured an ad for my book. . . . Brian Lehrer interviewed me for an hour over Radio WNYC, focusing on agnosticism. Calling in from his car, an Iraqui asked if I knew about Mandeans (you can't be one unless both your parents were born Mandeans)- I really finessed this by reading the Mandean entry from page 708; then I disagreed with a physicist who insisted that in science you need faith to separate fact from fiction, particularly when teaching the young: "Nonsense!"; to a person of a major denomination who called in saying he believed in immortality but commended agnostics for being skeptics, I got a laugh by asking, "I didn't quite hear. Is it a Catholic or a Protestant cult in which you're a believer?" . . . After listening to the program while driving to work, my one-time chief recording studio engineer ( Bill Wittman) got in touch after years of our not having heard from the other- he's currently engineering sessions for Cindi Lauper. . . . Christopher Lydon, who interviewed me so intelligently for National Public Radio, parted ways with WBUR in Boston because of problems concerning his program, "The Connection."
--I avoid my own and others' funerals, but I do gravitate toward showbiz memorials. During the 185 days I was not teaching, I owned and ran a major Broadway recording studio with Fernando Vargas, my Costa Rican companion. Many familiar faces were at the memorial for Gwen Verdon at the Broadhurst on 44th. On the back of the program was a photo of this best dancer-actress-of-the-last-century as well as a Hirschfeld3 sketch on the cover. Clips of Gwen and Bob Fosse dancing together were shown, as well as excerpts of scenes from various plays in which Gwen had starred. (I'd seen "Can-Can" in 1953; "Damn Yankees" in 1955; "New Girl in Town" in 1957; "Redhead" in 1959; "Sweet Charity" in 1966; and "Chicago" in 1975, in which my companion Fernando Vargas and I were $2K angels- it took about 10 years to earn our money back [without any profit!]. Verdon will be in the upcoming "Walking Across Egypt."
Cy Coleman played one of her tunes. Ben Vereen (now in "Fosse," also at the Broadhurst), Bebe Neuwirth, and Chita Rivera reminisced. "My God, how she danced!" Chita said. There was the humorous story about how, as the funeral procession had started, Gwen wondered about a pact she and Fosse once had: never for safety's sake to travel anyplace together . . . and wondering if now she could break the pact; two top-hatted couples danced "Cool Hand Luke" as only Gwen and Bob could have choreographed such a scene; John Kander and Fred Ebb played and sang "Nowadays," which she had soloed so successfully; and daughter Jennifer Henaghan Verdon told the memorable tale about how as a youngster she had accompanied her mischievous mom to buy a Christmas tree, Gwen pleading dramatically that she was from an orphanage, that Jennifer was one of the mute children there who could use a free tree.
(Admittedly, it was a better- but not any more humorous- showbiz memorial than the one I threw for my buddy, 4-time Tony nominee Gilbert Price, at Actors Chapel (helped out by two gay Jesuit priests as well as pianist Harold Wheeler and Geoffrey Holder). . . . Just across the street, André deShields in his "The Full Monty" dressing room told me after I'd seen the play (fabulous orchestrations by Harold Wheeler) with Pinhooker Bob Shirley (who visits me several times a year from Oregon) that no one had yet filled the niche left by Gil's death in 1991. . . .)
Gwen had shot the breeze with me several times at the old Variety Arts building on 46th, where my recording studio was on the ground floor and she was rehearsing "Sweet Charity" upstairs. Scuttlebutt was that she wore black panties because she perspired so much "down there," but I certainly wasn't one to check. When Fernando and I heard a noise late one evening and rushed to find a burglar trying to get out through the locked gate, we weren't at all impressed by the assumed burglar's explanation that he had been working on "Sweet Charity" and had missed the lockup call over the loudspeakers. "You're not supposed to be in the building," Fernando had said with his quasi-Desi Arnaz intonation. "But I'm Bob Fosse," the man kept repeating. "We don't care who you are--you're not supposed to be in the building!" we both exclaimed. And just about the time we left to call 911 the poor guy confessed, "But I'm Gwen Verdon's husband!" We immediately released the unlikely looking Broadway star (whose name was not well-known in those days) . . . with heartfelt apologies!
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke e-mailed me that he had shown the above Verdon memorial précis to author Charles Hulse, who happened to be visiting that day in Sri Lanka. Hulse not only knew several of the names but also thought he might be able to help publicize my book in the UK.
--(March 2001) Taslima Nasrin in Sweden e-mailed 19 chapters of the book she is writing about her childhood. Gopa Majumdar translated it from Bengali to English, and I'm editing the work to "make it sing." (Shades of correcting student papers until midnight!) . . . To those who inquired, no, my studio never recorded Puffy Combs. He and Heavy D came one afternoon because of an interest in buying me out. On the elevator when they left, I asked where they were headed, and they told me they were on their way to CCNY (where Puffy's big dance affair resulted in some deaths caused by a stampeding crowd that very night, for which the uninspiring "role model" is still being sued). . . .
--(April 2001) The May Vanity Fair's article about Jerome Robbins jiggered my memory about (a) actor Gil Price's younger brother Stanley having, uh, spent weekends with Robbins at a cabin upstate; (b) Robbins had worked with Jerry Bock , who, when I had asked how to file a number he had just recorded in my studio, had said the play had not yet been titled, suggesting I put it under "Tevye"- that became the Jewish religious dance number in "Fiddler on the Roof"; and (c) when the producer for Arthur Laurents, Zero Mostel, Leonard Bernstein, and Robbins plays once telephoned the studio for something, I responded, "Yes, sir," but on the other end was the masculine-sounding New Canaanite, Cheryl Crawford.
--While I'm reminiscing, I'm now practicing the piano daily, including playing the song I was probably the second to hear, Anthony Newley 's "Who Can I Turn To." Gil Price had rushed from a cattle call upstairs to have me rehearse the song with him, and when he went back upstairs Newley hired him on the spot for "Roar of the Greasepaint," which eventually led to Gil's getting one of his four Tony nominations. . . .
--I started production of a " Manuel Salazar: Costa Rica's Forgotten Tenor" compact disk and asked the U.S. Ambassador for advice as to how to donate 500 copies to the human rights association I helped found there. The country's opera house is named after Salazar.
-- Frank DiGiacomo, who wrote such a great front-page article about me (with caricature) in New York Observer, was brutal (23 Apr 2001) in attacking Anne Robinson's "The Weakest Link" TV shows. In that same issue (of the weekly read by more millionaires than any other journal) is a first-time-ever inside story with photos (analogous to revealing secrets of the Freemasons) about the secret rites of Yale's Skull and Bones- now we learn what Justice Potter Stewart, John Kerry, George Bush Sr. and Jr., the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the Harrimans, the Lovetts, the founders of Time Inc. and the C.I.A., several Secretaries of State and National Security Advisors (the men who made the decision to drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs, and plunge us into Vietnam) have in common. Ugh!
--The Jane Street Fair in June plans an authors' table for Jamie Pastor Bolnik ( Living at the Edge of the World: A Teenager's Survival in the Tunnels of Grand Central Station); feminist Susan Brownmiller (In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution ); me (Who's Who in Hell ); and others. Jonathan Ned Katz (The Invention of Heterosexuality) may or may not attend, because he and his MacArthur Award companion have recently moved (and James "Tony Soprano" Gandolfini is reportedly buying a $2M loft elsewhere; I see him riding around on his bicycle, and saw another neighbor, Monica Lewinsky , having brunch with some gals). Whodathunk I'd ever end up a Greenwich Village author! But, alas, not in the 1920s!
--At a freethinkers' conference in Atlanta, Georgia, I chummed with Carleton Coon Jr. ( Culture Wars and the Global Village: A Diplomat's Perspective ), son of the famed anthropologist, who recently was our Ambassador to Nepal- he was nonplussed at how much my book contains about Nepal. During one of the working sessions, I asked for a show of hands as to how many are listed in my book, and 50% (!) raised a hand. The only complaints I heard were from people like the U of Tennessee's Massimo Pigliucci ( Tales of the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science ) who were clamoring to get into "Hell."
--The British journal that publishes my scandalous "From Across the Pond" column now has my total output for the last four years on the Web:
http://www.galha.org/glhgoss.htm
--I've just been made Treasurer of SAIL (Stonewall Action Identity League), and again our float will lead the annual June Heritage of Pride Parade down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village.
--(May 2001)
--When Ted Nelson, one of my first Manhattan private school students, invited me to hear him speak about his invention (hypertext transfer protocol, http) at Cooper Union, his sweetheart, son, and first wife were on my right and actor Celeste Holm, his mother, sat on my left. Celeste, 82, had recently broken her hip and was carrying a cane- when rehearsing for one play, she used to keep her lunch cool in my recording studio's Coke machine, for we were on the ground floor.
--It's end-of-semester for several of my tutees: Mardi is applying to teach in the New York City school system, and I've been advising her how to fill out the papers and prepare for her interview- a one-time Folies Bèrgere dancer who worked extensively on Broadway, hopes to become an elementary teacher. . . . Randy worked with me on a big hotel conference planning project. . . . Simon is scheduled to receive his B.S. from Sacred Heart in Fairfield on May 20th, and we've been working furiously on political science final tests- I, along with his wife and 5-year-old daughter, will be his only guest at Graduation. Meanwhile, one of my first NCHS students, Didi Goldmark '58, has talked me into proofreading her autobiography, Diary of a Deranged Debutante- she tells about her famous father (Peter, inventor of 33rpm records) and her famous brother (Peter Jr., presently editor in Paris of The New York Herald Tribune. But her description of being a manic-depressive is what she hopes Vanity Fair will take as an article.
-- Michael Shermer, California editor of The Skeptic and author of Why People Believe in Weird Things, saw me when he spoke in Manhattan (the Isaac Asimov Lecture) and said he's thrilled to be listed in my book between Union General William Tecumsah Sherman and Nobelist Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, the expert on neurons.
-- Smart Money (June 2001) did a thorough story about Mensa's oldest interest group, the M-Investment Club that I started back in 1965. The journalist described me as looking "more like a beat poet than the 79-year-old generalissimo of the Mensa investment club." However, I rather like the photo taken of me standing under my signed Dali etching, the Weschler electric painting, the mobile, and the oil painting of my partner Fernando Vargas and me that New Canaan's Al Knaus created some years ago. The article then tore into Geoff Cox, the young Virginian I appointed as Stock Selection Chairman, and generally had great fun detailing how dumb some of us alleged geniuses have been in our investing. I immediately asked for a vote of confidence from the elected Management committee, got it, and we enrolled new members because of the publicity.