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| Unfinished Self-portrait c. 1988 |
Welcome to my past.
I was born the year before
WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and
colorful life.
I can’t remember when friends
first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began
posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays
on Facebook.
Before long, readers started
telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea,
this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color,
involved in over 200 (and counting) essays.
I next considered a website,
but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive
proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.
Since I’ve long been familiar
with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing
about 20-30 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size as a result of importing material from other sources)
These tales are not in any
kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve
known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.
Photo by Laura Goldman
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1. LEARNING LOVE FROM PETER JORDAN
2. A STING IN THE TALE
3. CRABS 101, or, THANKS FOR THE MEMORY (I THINK)
4. EARLY ARKANSAS CAR WARS, or, GRANDFATHER HILL, THE TRAVELING SALESMAN, AND THE ROAD HOG
5. THE MAPLE
MYSTERY TOUR
6. FLIRTING
WITH THE NEIGHBORS, a Photo by Roger Steffens
7. LAVENDER
LAVENDER DILLY DILLY, or, WHY I LOVE
THIS PHOTO
9. THINGS DISCOVERED BETWEEN THE PAGES OF OLD BOOKS #4: A FAIRE AND FOLDED NOSTALGIA
11. HALLOWEEN BIRTHDAY
12. SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS
14. A DOMESTIC GODDESS (AUNT DOT)
15. ROCK MEDICINE
16. THE RIGHTEOUS RAG AND THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS ANTEATER
17. MY SECOND FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
18. MY VERY FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
19. ME, LARRY CSONKA, CHARLIE BROWN AND THE HEIGHT
OF NAUGHTINESS
20. THE INTERLOCKEN TOILET SPEECH, or, TWO SHEETS
PER WIPE
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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Interlocken Center for Experiential Education; Hillsboro, New Hampshire 1960-1996
LEARNING LOVE FROM PETER JORDAN
In the late 1990s, when I was putting together a book called The Interlocken Difference, about the groundbreaking New Hampshire-based experiential learning center, there was no question about to whom it would be dedicated.
Not to the organization’s founders, nor to the distinguished educators who had inspired the center’s creation, but to a rough-hewn New Hampshire stonemason and self-taught artist who stunningly personified the Interlocken belief that outstanding and inspiring teachers can come in unexpected packages.
In 1960, local WWII veteran Peter Jordan was hired as a builder and maintenance worker for the fledgling Interlocken International Summer Camp. Unexpectedly, Peter also turned out to be irresistible to kids, who loved his crusty no-nonsense attitude, his subdued twinkling grandpa humor, his stories, his utter authenticity, and his simple belief in their ability to create.
With Peter, what you saw was what you got. As a stonemason, he built for the ages (one of his favorite maxims was “Thick is Beautiful!”), but also with art and imagination. Asked to construct a simple pump housing, he would build a miniature cathedral. His massive stone fireplaces defied gravity and description.
His workshop was a glorious tangle of tools, various genres of equipment, and the scavenged trove of of junk metal that, year after year, he helped kids form into beautiful folk-art iron sculptures in what became the ISC’s all-time favorite class, with lengthy waiting lists to get in.
When Peter passed away suddenly in 1996 at the age of 79, it was as though one of his indestructible chimneys had fallen. Of the many tributes to his memory, this perceptive reminiscence by Andrew Upton, now a prominent Boston attorney, was one of the most humorous and poignant:
Andrew Upton, all grown up
“ In 1977, I took part in the camper-counselor doubles tennis tournament. In the frenzied pre-event atmosphere, most campers hoped to draw as their partner one of the tennis instructors or gifted staff athletes. I drew Peter Jordan—barn-builder, iron sculptor, backhoe operator.
“Peter, with his characteristic work ethic, decided we should practice. We cut a fine figure on the court, with Peter appearing in the heavy flannel shirt and khaki pants he inevitably wore. Once we got going, it was clear that Peter hadn’t spent much time on the tennis court: “Been here once before,” he remarked, “Had to weld the pole that holds up the net.”
“As I sketched out the basics of the game, he demonstrated his grip on the racquet—a sort of modified flyswatter/blacksmith method. My explanation of the rules and scoring held little interest for Peter; when I explained that 30-love meant 2-0, he gave me the kind of look that John Wayne might have reserved for an electric toothbrush.
“After several attempts to play an actual game, we settled on a plan: Peter would be stationed at the net and attempt to flyswat anything that came near.
On the day of the tournament, we had surprising success with this strategy; Peter stood in the middle of the net and pummelled the ball at every opportunity. I stood in the center of the baseline and lobbed back anything I could get to.
“Every time Peter executed one of his patented put-aways, he would seem surprised, and no matter how often he hit a clean winner, he would soundly assert each time: “You won’t see one like that again!”
“Eventually we won the whole shooting match. How and against whom have faded into the mists of time, but I clearly remember the presentation ceremony. The trophy was a beautiful iron sculpture of a tennis player, but the problem was, there was only one. I suggested that we keep it in his studio half the time and in my tent half the time.
”Forget it,” Peter whispered, “I can make another one like it in 20 minutes.”
"I still have the sculpture, but we don’t have Peter Jordan any more—we’re left with memories and stories and tributes to a man whose style was captured mostly in what he didn’t say. But when I think of final words for Peter, I have to defer to what he DID say: you won’t see one like that again."—Andrew Upton.
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2. THROWBACK THURSDAY: KOWS Radio Station, Occidental & San Francisco, California
A STING IN THE TALE
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One day Laura and I, along with Ann-the-Master-Gardener, Geoff-the Bee Guy, and a walk-in visitor or two, were sitting around exchanging bug stories. I told the following, and everyone said, “You should write that down.” So I did.
Once upon a time, children, before Bay Area Rapid Transit put all the streetcars underground in 1972, there were trolley-cars in San Francisco. They ran on rails, and were frequently noisy and jolting (I once missed an entire earthquake while riding the J-Church line—it just felt like more of the same), with unscheduled stops for the driver to get out and replace the easily dislodged current-collector trolley pole back onto its overhead line.
This vignette took place on a San Francisco trolley in stop-and-start
traffic downtown at the height of rush hour on Market St. I’d gotten on
early and was sitting about mid-car in a window seat. All other seats
were occupied, and the aisles jammed. It was, uncharacteristically for
SF, a hot day, and all the windows were open.As I sat with my left hand resting on the seat-bar in front of me, I felt a tickle on my knuckles. A large and nasty-looking hornet had apparently flown in through an open window, and had chosen my hand as a landing spot.
Imagining the effect of waving it off and sending a trapped hornet buzzing through a packed streetcar, I sat VERY still.
I was wearing a tank-top, and so could feel every tiny little foot-tickle as the bug began climbing up my bare left arm, up over my shoulder, ascending to my neck and face, crawling across the bridge of my nose and all the way down the other side onto my right arm, which I raised very slowly, just resting my fingertips on the edge of the open window.
I heaved a sigh of relief, and looked up to see all of the other passengers on the bus staring at me in astonished disbelief; everyone had gone completely silent, until the little girl sitting in the aisle seat next to me looked at me with big eyes and asked politely: “Was that YOURS?”
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3. THROWBACK THURSDAY; The Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, California, late 1960s
CRABS 101
or
THANKS FOR THE MEMORY (I THINK)
Rolling Stone, 1972
My first introduction to the pest known as Pediculus pubis was secondhand but unforgettable.
In 1969, I was working at a trendy Haight Street boutique to supplement my salary as a graduate assistant at San Francisco State University. A few stores down was a crafts-collective marketplace where shoppers and lookers could watch the craftspeople at work, request custom items, etc.
One of these workers was a hulking former Hell’s Angel named Ray, who had somehow been born again as a monk-robed leather craftsman—his specialties were heavily embossed arm cuffs and calf-high gladiator sandals embellished with studs and buckles.
Ray and I became acquainted through the informal network of the Haight-Ashbury retail scene, and seeing me for the relative innocent that I was, at least in terms of current Haight realities, he took on the role of protector/educator about life on the street. “I’ve done some bad stuff in my life,” Ray admitted, “Now I just want to help take care of people.”
At that point, the H/A scene, while still a high and colorful good-time carnival, was well on the way to losing its innocence. The idealistic flower-child glow was slowly giving way to tour buses full of gawkers, homeless panhandling runaways, harder drugs, and STDs.
Ray’s attitude toward me (and other youngsters) was entirely big-brotherly, and not sexual in the slightest; I watched him as he helped newly arrived runaways find meals and safe places to sleep; warned off drug dealers and unwanted guys on the make, spread the word about bad drugs circulating, advised on people and areas best avoided, and shepherded sick kids to the newly created Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
A few times when I had to work past sunset, and the street scene was especially wild, he walked me safely to my door.
One afternoon at home, I answered that same door to find Ray standing there, looking both embarrassed and determined. “Do you know anything about crab lice?” he asked. Having barely heard of them, I said no.
“That’s what I thought.” He stalked into my room and pulled down the shades. I began to get a bit nervous. He walked over to my desk, turned on the reading lamp, angled it so that it pointed at his crotch, reached into his pocket, whipped out a magnifying glass and pulled down his pants (whereupon I learned that he went commando). I can only imagine the expression on my face.
“OK, now look,” he commanded, and proceeded to give me an up-close-and-personal illustrated lecture on the life cycle and habits of the common crab louse; how to diagnose a case of crabs; find their eggs and their hiding places; the difficulties of getting rid of them and not getting re-infested; and all the best ways to do that.
“Got it?’ he growled. A bit stunned but certainly edified, I nodded. “Good.”
Whereupon he pulled up his pants, and stalked out again muttering something like “Kids don’t know a damn thing; pass it on.” I assumed correctly that he meant the information, not the crabs.
Not long after that, Ray was invited to join a crafts commune near Mendocino, and left the Haight scene behind; we were all sorry to see him go. I started volunteering at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, doing triage, and had frequent encounters (from a safe distance), with people infested with crabs and their close relatives Pediculus capitis (head lice), Pediculus corporis [body lice) and scabies, a parasitic skin-burrowing mite.
As the “sexual revolution” proceeded, the unwilling louse-hosts showing up at the clinic were no longer just homeless street kids, but often clean-cut high-schoolers or other members of “polite society,” too embarrassed to go to their own parents or doctors. It became clear that the whole thing was reaching epidemic proportions.
I had meanwhile begun writing articles for Rolling Stone, and along with occasional music-related pieces, turned out a few on lifestyle advice—how to buy, install and maintain waterbeds (it was a new fad and people were getting ripped off); the long-term medical effects of certain street drugs; tattooing; safe hitchhiking practices for women, etc. I was asked to think of similar subjects that would be useful to readers.
It was when one of my housemates, a young woman student with a quiet lifestyle and a steady boyfriend, came to me in tears about a mysterious itching “down there,” that I suddenly had a clear flashback of Ray and his impromptu personal tutorial. I went to my editor and said “I think I have a feature for you.”
The article was extremely well received. Ray didn’t get a byline, but, boy howdy, he should have. Pass it on.
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4. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Vicinity of Booneville, Arkansas, About a Century Ago
EARLY ARKANSAS CAR WARS
or
GRANDFATHER HILL, THE TRAVELING SALESMAN AND THE ROAD HOG
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| My great-granddad C. J. Hill, with auto. |
In early 20th-century rural Arkansas, there were few decent roads, most of them being in a sorry state of evolution from narrow mud-rutted wagon trails. There were certainly no speed limits, highway patrols or driver’s-license requirements. If you could afford a car, you drove it, by golly, any way you damn pleased.
My grandfather, Carlton Judson “C.J.” Hill was a salesman, frequently of the traveling variety. In the 1910s, as did many of the other salesman who gathered at the local travelers’ hotel of an evening for refreshment and tale-swapping, he acquired an automobile.
At the time of which I write, a lot of the hotel talk (in indignant tones) concerned an individual known as the Road Hog, a hulking local man with a very large car and a stinking attitude.
When approaching another vehicle on the narrow roads around Booneville, this fellow would grin, pull down his driving cap, clench his pipe between his teeth, take a death grip on the steering wheel and charge his car down the center of the road, gleefully forcing the other driver to take to the ditch.
My granddad, having been run off the road several times by this bully, decided it wouldn’t happen again. Like many of the salesmen, he kept a .38 pistol and a box of ammo in his car, to load up when had to go into feuding and feudal backwoods areas.
When he was about 50 feet away from Granddad’s car, the R.H. spotted the gun, nearly swallowed his pipe, stood on the brakes, jerked the wheel to the side, and took off across the nearest pasture.
Although he (understandably) never bothered my granddad again, the Road Hog continued his reign of terror over other drivers. It was another resourceful salesman who, coming across a big old junker Dodge in a local garage, had an idea. He asked the garage owner, how much he’d sell it for.
“How about $50?”
“I’ll take it, if you’ll weld a length of railroad track across the front for a bumper, and leave about eighteen inches sticking out on the left side.”
“What the hell for?”
The salesman explained his plan.
“Damnation, if you’ll really do that, I won’t charge you a cent!”
Now, at that time, most cars, even expensive ones, were made of wood with a thin metal covering, and fitted with exposed wooden-spoked wheels. The salesman took his customized vehicle out for a spin, and after a few miles, sure enough, here came the Road Hog in his big old machine, roaring straight down the center of the road for his customary “chicken” faceoff.
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| Typical wooden-spoked wheels of the period |
The canny salesman swerved to the side, but only just enough that the protruding steel rail handily demolished half of the other car as it passed.
The Road Hog was left sitting in the dirt, uninjured, but a sadder and wiser piggy, cured of his nasty driving habits from that day forward.
(I’m greatly indebted to my dear “Uncle Dus,” the late Justin Hill, who heard his dad re-tell this story numerous times and passed it on to me.)
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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, and worldwide. 1971- present
THE MAPLE MYSTERY TOUR
I first met Maple in 1971, and we frequently hung out together at the newly opened Boarding House in San Francisco. This no-frills 300-seat-club, which stayed open for less than a decade, nonetheless managed to attract and showcase a dazzling variety of acts on their way to superstardom.
Maple (holding bottle) with Steve Martin fans in the 1970s.
A slender, kind of quiet little guy (a New York Times reviewer would later accurately describe him as ”elfin”) with a wild mane of hair and a soft Missouri twang to his voice, Maple served as the Boarding House’s techie, stage manager, sound-and-light man, occasional artistic-relations dude, and gofer, moving silently and invisibly from task to task with almost spooky efficiency.
His job over the years evolved into nothing less than an advanced course in no-muss-no-fuss stage production, dealing with every thing from soulful male soloists like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Billy Joel, Tom Waits and Jim Croce, to up-and-coming goddesses (Bette Midler, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Patti Smith, for example); off-the-wall comedians (think Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, George Carlin, Ellen DeGeneres, Jay Leno); and musical groups of all descriptions (e.g. Talking Heads, Bob Marley, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, Old & In the Way, the David Grisman Quintet, Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders, any latest David Bromberg or Grateful Dead spinoff).
All of these performers, of course, had their various staging and tech requirements, personality clashes, degrees of diva-ness, entourages and fans, not to mention the frequent inclination to crowd onstage for late-night jam sessions with equally distinguished audience members.
Through it all, Maple coped, improvised, watched, listened, learned, and eventually morphed into a cross between McGyver and Jeeves when it came to dealing with technical management, instrumental rescues, and artistic unpredictability.
Steve Martin (who recorded his first three comedy albums at the Boarding House) was the first to lure Maple out of the club and onto the road, where he’s essentially been ever since.
After Martin, he did a stint with the Grateful Dead, then with Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Steve Goodman, Rufus Wainwright and numerous other country/folk luminaries, becoming a sought-after and valued presence on any tour.
In the early 1980s, he signed on with 13-times Grammy winner Emmylou Harris, and has been her right-hand guy and guitar genius ever since, contributing his technical skills both to her worldwide performances and to her storied collaborations (the source of about half of those Grammys).
Hanging at the ballgame with Emmylou.
(Photo by Jim McKelvey)
(Photo by Jim McKelvey)
Since I first knew him, Maple has also been acquiring guitars remarkable for their age, uniqueness, previous history, former owners, construction techniques, and just plain beauty (his collection, now over 200 instruments, has been featured in every major guitar publication in the world). He’s happy to share their stories, and even to (very judiciously) let talented folks handle and try them out.
He collects and plays these fabled guitars for the sheer joy of it, with no ambition to perform onstage, except for the occasional mob sing-along session, as in the lovely shot by Jim McKelvey below. (Maple is at right.)
Two conversations with Maple, 45 years apart:
1) At his home in Nashville, a few weeks ago, when he and Emmylou had just gotten back from a gig in Georgia and were headed west the next day to a National Parks benefit at Yosemite “to save some geysers or somethin’.”
“How long have you been with Emmylou now?” I asked.
“Oh, about 34 years.”
“Do you ever think of retiring?”
“Why ever would I want to do that?”
2) Back in the early 1970s, as I was embroidering a western shirt for him with twin versions of the autumn-colored maple leaf tattooed on his chest:
“So why did you decide to call yourself Maple?”
“Well, I didn’t think I could get away with ‘Velvet Tree Squirrel.’”
That’s why he’s Maple.
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6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Berkeley, California, c.1973
FLIRTING WITH THE NEIGHBORS, a Photo by Roger Steffens
In
the early 1970s, I could frequently be found visiting the all-in-a-row
Berkeley apartment complex wherein lived my sweetie Tim Page and our
wonderfully creative friend Roger Steffens.
(Roger’s daughter Kate and son Devon, then unborn, now curate and post their dad’s photos on Instagram, and in various gallery exhibits, including the one reviewed in the NEW YORK TIMES Arts section in the pics below.)
Located atop a hill behind the end of the complex (with a clear view of its front walk and patio) was the backside of a UC-Berkeley fraternity, whose members entertained an ongoing fascination with Tim, Roger, and their colorful and hip collection of friends—Vietnam-vet journalists, and photographers, writers, working actors and artists, and world travelers, including intriguing-looking women of all descriptions. Who knows what those young Greeks thought we all got up to? (They may even have been right.)
This little scene came about when a stray frisbee “accidentally” flew down the hill and bounced off the bedroom window, whereupon Karen Lucius (at left) and I went in from the front room and stood on the bed to see what was going on.
Here you see us prolonging the conversation with the eager young jocks so that Roger could sneak around and snap this photo, after which we promptly disappeared, leaving the boys to their sweaty imaginings.
Family Acid post of Roger holding his NEW YORK TIMES review.
The online version of the review by Martha Schwenender:
(The above phot is a photograph I took from The Family Acid book; Gloria was actually another resident of the apartments, sweet, shy, and happily married.)
The Family Acid
Benrubi Gallery
521 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through next Friday
Roger Steffens is an actor and an author of several books on Bob Marley, but he is also a photographer who started taking pictures while in a psychological operations unit of the United States military in Vietnam. His images, mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, are organized by his daughter, Kate; his son, Devon; and his wife, Mary, under the name the Family Acid.
In this show at Benrubi, the Family Acid captures the surreal, psychedelic and utopia-minded aspects of counterculture California and other places in the ’60s and ’70s with a perfection approaching cliché. A 1969 photograph taken from the back of a military vehicle on the streets of Saigon underscores the chaos and confusion of that war, while “Marrakesh Rainbow, April 1971” shows a Volkswagen van painted in bright, elaborate patterns under a rainbow in Morocco. Several photographs made by double-exposing film merge images to create a hallucinogenic effect.
With its stock themes of peace, love and freedom, and a tempered version of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll (Mr. Steffens and his wife apparently met while tripping on LSD at the Albion Peoples Fair in California), the Family Acid mostly provides a feel-good version of the ’60s and ’70s: the trip that didn’t go bad, the sunny walk in nature or the blissfully stoned afternoon at a music festival. These are images you could put in a book — say, a psychedelic family album. You could even let your children be curators, celebrating rather than critiquing the experience.—Martha Schwenender
7. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, late 1990s
LAVENDER LAVENDER DILLY DILLY
or
WHY I LOVE THIS PHOTO
I don’t know these young women’s names, but they represent to me one of the many remarkable facets of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires (1963-1998).
Many Faire performers were either: 1) professionals (or talented amateurs) playing featured roles; 2) carefully selected street entertainers; or 3) already formed and auditioned troupes of actors, dancers, singers or instrumentalists who returned year after year.
Each spring and fall, however, the required pre-Faire workshops attracted large numbers of people who had no particular performance skills or training in environmental theater, but who just knew they somehow had to be part of the magic, in any capacity.
These folks tended to sort themselves out through a combination of job availability and alter-ego exploration; they became non-speaking members of the Queen’s Court, or Her Majesty’s guards or chair-bearers; they joined the fringes of the wild Celts who paraded barbarically through the Faire each day, or of the creepy black-clad skull-brandishing Danse Macabre. They found jobs running the free games, or as ale-serving wenches and varlets; they got absorbed into guilds like St. Blaise’s town criers, or the street mongers of St. Swithin’s.
The
largest catchall guild was St. Cuthbert’s, suppliers of extras in
parades and pageants, of flag-bearers, cart-pullers, maneuverers of
giant puppets, skippers and dancers and tambourine-shakers. Everyone
eventually found a place.
Including the Lavenders.
Not many people realize that lavender, the fragrant herb useful for soothing headaches and keeping linens fresh, took its name from a profession, that of laundrywoman.
The RPF Lavender tradition started with the Market Cross, a medieval-era marker erected to distinguish towns that had been granted the legal right to hold public markets.
From the very beginning, the Market Cross was a feature of the RPF, solidly constructed of mortared stone in a wide conjunction of paths near the front gate.
At first a simple garlanded pillar, The RPF Market Cross gathered accretions over the years—a step where one could sit and await a rendezvous; rudimentary landscaping and flower plantings; a little fountain that became a wishing well, and then a bigger one with a pool, which soon attracted the attention of some young women (randomly designated as “wenches”) who were looking for an actual gig.
They began bringing baskets of discarded costumes and rags to “wash” while loudly exchanging gossip, flinging double-entendres and droplets from sopping cloth at passers-by; speculating on the virility of young men; soliciting “trade” by remarking on the sorry state of a visitor’s linen.
They flirted, engaged in catfights, belted out (often off-color) songs of the period (on- or off-key), and in general enlivened the stolid old Market Cross with their antics. Before long, they had become became one of the beloved ongoing street entertainments of the Faire, Queens of the Washing Well.
Years later, the young women in this photo, whatever their names, were clearly worthy heirs to those first lusty Lavenders, and to another marvelous Pleasure Faire tradition—finding one’s own place.
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8. Throw–WAY-Back THURSDAY: Wayne County, North Carolina; 1740-1818
SUSANNAH’S WILL, or, THE ENTERPRISING LADIES OF WAYNE COUNTY
The only visual image I have for my great-great-great-great-grandmother Susannah Hill is a photocopy of her handwritten will. It’s not actually in her own handwriting, as, despite the rest of her surprising history, she seems to have been illiterate, and signed it only with a blurred “X.”
The will (text below) reveals that Susannah (then widowed for decades) was not only a pious woman, but also a remarkably well-to-do and independent widow, wealthy in land and possessions, and mother of six very clever daughters.
In the mid-1990s, my cousin Wayne Hill and his dad Justin turned up, in addition to the will, other official documents that provided an interesting look into the life of Susannah and her family. Thus, in spite of a number of tantalizing information gaps, we know that:
Susannah (Howell) was born sometime before 1750, when she first appeared in public records. She married my 4X g-grandpa, John Hill, who was born in 1740 (and deceased by 1789, possibly in the War for Independence) and by him had six girls:
1. JEMIMA, who, sometime before 1785, married one William Hasty, a Continental soldier who survived the war.
2. DELILAH, who married Edwin Hasty in 1785 (and later a Mr. Davidson).
3. RHODA, who married John or James Hasty, or possibly both in succession.
(If you’re beginning to see a theme here, it’s no accident. A 1995 visit by Wayne and Justin to Pine Mountain, GA revealed that the Hastys and Hills had been marrying each other for centuries, even before the clever Jemima—my 3X g-grandma—and her offspring, including 2X great-gran Nancy Hasty—who later married James Hill—moved her extended family to GA in the 1820s to take advantage of a land lottery for the widows and orphans of Continental soldiers.)
The last three daughters were:
4. MARY (known as Polly or Polley)
5. SARAH (aka Sally)
6. CINTHA
They received the bulk of Susannah’s lands and estate and acted as her executors.
WILL OF SUSANNAH HILL - WAYNE COUNTY, NC, WILL BOOK 4, page 220
In the Name of God Amen: I Susannah HILL of the County of Wayne and State of North Carolina being weak of body but of perfect mind and memory, blessed be God for the same, and calling to mind the Mortality of my Body, and Knowing that it is appointed for all men once to die, do therefore make and ordain this my Last Will and Testament in manner and form as follows,(to wit)
I recommend my Soul to the hand of Almighty God that first gave it my body to the Earth to be Buried in a decent Christian like manner at the discretion of my Executors herein after to be mentioned not doubting but at the General resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty power of God and as touching my worldly Estate wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me with in this life I leave and dispose of in the following manner.
Item: I give to my daughter Jemima HASTY ten shillings.
Item: I give to my daughter Delila DAVIDSON ten shillings.
Item: I give to my daughter Rhoda HASTY ten shillings, to them and their Heirs.
Item: I give to my grandson Wills HASTY one feather bed and furniture to him and his heirs forever.
Item: I also give to my daughters, Polly, Sally and Cintha HILL, my land and Plantations together with all my stock household and kitchen furniture and all the remainder of my Estate which I may died seized or possessed with to them and their heirs forever: to be equally divided as they may think proper.
I nominate and appoint my three daughters, Polly, Sally and Cintha HILL my sole Executors to this my last Will and Testament, in Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and Seal this 18th day of February 1818. Signed and acknowledged in presence of us
Susannah her(X)mark HILL
A. DARDEN
Sarah DARDEN
Wayne County – Feby Term 1819 – Then was the within Will of Susannah HILL proved in open court by the oath of Abraham DARDEN one of the Subscribing Witnesses thereto and at the same time Polly HILL one of the within named Exrs. Quald. only. Test. P. Hooks, Clk.
________________________________________________________________________________
SUSANNAH HILL’S ESTATE INVENTORY WAYNE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
A true Inventory of the Estate of Susannah HILL deceased. Taken Feby 15TH 1819
110 acres of land 1 horse 6 head of cattle 2 sows & pigs, 5 shotes [newly weaned piglets)]12 Geese & Ducks Some Dunghill Fowls Quantity of Corn Quantity of Bacon 3 Cotton Wheels 1 Linen Wheel 1 pr. of Cards 2 Hackles * 3 Pewter Dishes 2 Pewter Plates 1 Bason “ 8 Spoons 1 Earthen Dish 10 Earthen Plates 5 Earthen Bowls 1 Tin Coffee Pot 1 Pepper Box 2 Tin Tumblers 1 Jug, 1 knife & Forks 1 Pot, 1 kittle 1 Dutch oven & skillet 2 prs of Pothooks & 1 Rack 3 Washing Tubs, 2 Pails 2 Buckets, 4 Bread Trays 2 Meal Sifters 1 Table, 1 Chair, 4 Slays 1 Spice Morter 4 Baskets 1 Barrell & Meal gum 2 Flat Irons 1 Bed & Furniture & Stead 3 Axes, 1 Grubing Hoe 4 Weading Hoes 2 Plow hors , 1 Cutr. 1 Weg, 1 Hammer 1 Cart & Gerses Quantity of Slat Quantity of Flaxseed Quantity of Flax Quantity of Cotton Some Wool Some Hogs Lard Some Fodder Some Leather 1 Cowhide 1 pr. of Fleshforks 1 Saddle & Bridle 2 pr of Cotton Cards 1 pr of Wool Cards 1 Trumpit 3 Bells 1 pr of Sissers 2 Earthen Pitchers 1 Jug. I Weading hoe 1 pr. of Winding Blades 1 Churn, some cups & sassers Some spun cotton 1 Gimblet, ** 1 Piggin *** 3 Dollars in Cash 35 Dollars & Accts
Signed Polley (X) HILL, Execr.
* Comb for dressing flax or hemp * * Tool for boring holes *** Small wooden pail or tub
Susannah and her daughters, especially the three eldest, were apparently a force to be reckoned with when it came to land deals in Wayne County. By a strange twist in North Carolina law, only unmarried women could buy or sell land (married women could own and bequeath land, but not buy or sell it), and they made the most of this odd quirk in the lawbooks.
A search in the Wayne County deed registries (entries reproduced below) reveals some delightfully convoluted shenanigans by the women of the Hill-Hasty families in order to legally buy and sell property. The same cast of characters—widowed mother, unmarried sisters, daughters, husbands, and in-laws—appears over and over.
WAYNE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, DEEDS (All of the names appearing in red were part of the Hill/Hasty land dynasty)
Book 7, p. 121 – Jemimah HILL to Rhoda HILL, 2 tracts of land on North side of Appletree Swamp for the sum of 60 pounds current money, being part of tract granted to Drewry SAVAGE and part of tract granted to James EDMONDSON. Dated 1 Feb 1785.
Book 7, p. 146 – Jemimah HILL to Delilah HILL, land on North side of Appletree Swamp, South side of Watery Branch, for the sum of 60 pounds. Joins: Samuel BARTLETT, Drewry SAVAGE, Rhoda HILL, Delilah HILL, John MINSHAW. Dated 1785.
Book 5, p. 381 – Jamimah HILL from James EDMONDSON, 2 tracts on Appletree Swamp, for the sum of 200 pounds. Dated 25 June 1785.
Book 3, p. 378 – James HASTY to Cornelius OUTLAND, both of Wayne Co., land on South side of Great Cotentnia Creek and on Dunaho Swamp, for the sum of 40 pounds specie. Dated 18 Feb 1786.
Book 5, p. 165 – John HASTY from John STANTON, both of Wayne Co., land on South side Contenteney Creek and the North side Watery Branch, for the sum of 67 pounds, 10 shillings specie.. Dated 2 Jan 1792.
Book 7, p. 228 – Susannah HILL from James EDMONDSON, 130 acres on Appletree Swamp, for the sum of 100 pounds. Witnesses: Edwin HASTY, George DOWNING. Dated 29 Jan 1789. Proven in court by oath of William HASTY.
Book 7, p. 133 – Edwin HASTY and wife Delilah to John MINSHAW, both of Wayne Co., land on South side Watery Branch where HASTY now lives. Conveyed by deed of Jemimah HILL, now HASTY, to Delilah HILL, now HASTY. Part of land patented by Drewry SAVAGE. Witnesses: Jesse MINSHAW, James GREEN. Dated 28 Feb 1800.
Book 7, p. 313 – William HASTY from John MINSHAW, both of Wayne Co., for the sum of 75 silver dollars, 51 acres on South side Watery Branch, joining land of Delilah HASTY, which she got of Delilah HILL. Witnesses: James HILL, James BRIDGER. Dated 7 Mar 1802.
Book 10, p. 116 – Susannah HILL to Delilah DAVIDSON, tract of land.[before 1818]
Book 12, p. 150 – Jemimah HASTY to Thomas HOLLOWELL of Johnson Co., for the sum of $215.00, 100 acres on North side Appletree Swamp, joins HOLLOWELL, Stephen COOK, Rhoda HASTY, now Thomas MORINGS, being part of patent granted to Andrew SAVAGE on 19 Aug 1779. Dated 25 Jan 1821.
So in the end, Susannah, having seen her country through a revolution and her daughters well provided for, passed on in February 18th, 1818. She left her three oldest girls a token amount of ten shillings each, secure in the knowledge that they knew what they were doing when it came to husbands and land.
The rest of her estate went to her three youngest (no doubt poised to become wheelers and dealers on their own account), with a single sweet exception. To a favorite grandson, Wills Hasty, she bequeathed “one feather bed and furniture to him and his heirs forever.”
When I tried to get an idea of exactly what kind of value was changing hands in the will and the land deals, I ran headfirst into the scholarly swamp that was currency in those days, with each state issuing its own version of British pounds, shillings, and pence, all with varying worth, and newfangled dollars making an appearance in the above list of Susannah’s household goods. If you’re interested:
https://www.in2013dollars.com/ (Inflation calculator from 1635-present)
Those ladies; you've got to hand it to them.
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9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: April and May, 1977; Paramount Ranch, Agoura Hills, CA.
THINGS DISCOVERED BETWEEN THE PAGES OF OLD BOOKS #4: A FAIRE AND FOLDED NOSTALGIA
Although
I stopped performing in the Southern California version of the original
Renaissance Pleasure Faires in the early 1970s, I recently came upon a
copy of the 1977 Southern Faire mailer.
This was a single sheet of paper far-ranging and comprehensive in its utility, combining as it did the functions of advertising medium, calendar, workshop and performance schedule, contest listings, mail-order form, and showcase of art, imagery and jolly Elizabethan exhortations to pleasure.
The reason I’d kept it became obvious once I unfolded it: it included a time-traveling candid photo of my role as “The Grape Lady” (aka Mistress of Revels) taken at the previous Northern Faire. To my delight, it also included photographs of some of the iconic figures of that time…
The magnificent Peg Long, as Her Indisputable Majesty Queen Bess (she also moonlighted as Entertainment Director).
The lusty, witty and tuneful Dale Hill as Sir Vivian Underhill, gentleman-about-the-shire and baritone singer with Oak, Ash and Thorn.
The lovable, picturesque and winsomely oddball Keny (not a typo) Milliken.
The
adorably competent Fiona Zimmer. Little May Queen, Fairy, Peasant
Child, Smallest Member of the Queen’s Court—show her a role and she’d
step into it with aplomb and poise.
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10. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Booneville, Arkansas, c. 1923
HOWARD VS. THE OUTHOUSE
or
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE CHAUTAUQUA
(My dad, Howard, noted that his mother always said he was more trouble to raise than her two other boys put together; this anecdote illustrates her point.)
On
a late summer afternoon, in the small town of Booneville, Arkansas, my
dad, about eleven years old and dressed to the nines in a clean white
shirt, white knickerbockers, white knee socks, and white tennis shoes,
was on his way to a Chautauqua.
(For the uninitiated, the Chautauqua was an adult-education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and specialists of the day traveling throughout rural America, bringing entertainment and culture to isolated communities.)
Howard carried, tucked under his arm, a package of crochet-work that his mother had asked him to deliver to his Aunt Tonkie, who lived, with her husband Uncle Mac, in a house vaguely on the way to the Chautauqua venue.
Now, Andrew J. “Andy Mack” McAmis was a big man, with a healthy sense of his own importance. He had, after all, served as Auditor of the State of Arkansas, ran a large dry-goods store, and played the commodities market with some success.
In
a town where few houses boasted indoor plumbing, Uncle Mack’s outhouse
reflected his status; it was a handsome two-seater built of brick and
fragrant pine, with plenty of leg room, good cross-ventilation, and a
liberal supply of old catalogs suitable both for reading and personal
hygiene.
Moreover, it was situated behind shrubbery that blocked the view of it from the house, this circumstance presenting an irresistible temptation, both to neighbors who preferred its imposing comfort to their own smelly shacks, and to passers-by on the road that ran behind the property.
As a result, at the time of which I write, the waste containment area had just overflowed, creating a kind of noxious swamp behind the otherwise elegant privy.
Enter our young hero, approaching the house from the aforementioned back road. There was a nice firm path running beside the outhouse, and it would have been easy to avoid the smelly bog simply by keeping to the path.
Alas, poor Howard. Instead of watching where he was going, he was busily running imaginary football plays, package tucked under arm, fending off equally imaginary tacklers. Inevitably, this zig-zag progress landed him at full length in the stinking ooze.
Howard was near tears. He desperately wanted to go to the Chautauqua. There was no time to run home, bathe and change. He picked himself up and slunk into the yard behind the house, where Uncle Mac was watering his tomatoes with a hose.
Manfully attempting to keep a straight face, Mac turned the hose on his nephew, sluicing most of the disgusting matter from the outside of his clothing and shoes.
“I can still go to the Chautauqua, right?” pleaded Howard when this worst was washed off. He turned and headed in the direction of the venue, only to be stopped in his tracks. “Howard,” boomed Uncle Mac, “Come back here. You smell like a buzzard.”
At that point, they were joined by Aunt Tonkie, who was a sport about the crochet work (“I was going to dye it with tea, anyway”), and obligingly went through her missionary barrel filled with worn-but-not-worn-out clothes destined for the poor.
While Uncle Mack hosed Howard down from the skin out (no indoor shower), Aunt Tonkie found a large man’s shirt and a well-mended pair of stockings, but unfortunately no nether garments or shoes large enough. In the end, they patched together an outfit of clean and…not-so-clean.
Howard was so entranced that he barely noticed the shuffling around him, the whispers of ”Phew!” and folks examining the bottom of their shoes and surreptitiously checking out their neighbors for signs of the embarrassment that often accompanies public flatulence.
When the lights came up, however, he was startled to find himself surrounded, in that crowded room, by an island of empty space. Head high and face aflame, he stood up, and made a dignified exit, already imagining the rounds of teasing, catcalls, muffled fart-noises, and elaborately held noses that were to follow him him for weeks.
His mother just sighed.
PS: I only heard Howard tell this story once; if anybody has heard a different version, let me know.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1908;
SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS
Or
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE LITTLE GUY
In 1997, I was more or less drafted to write a history of the tiny Western Sonoma County village of Occidental, CA.
Founded in 1876 as a railroad town and lumbering depot, Occidental’s fortunes had gone rapidly downhill when the surrounding hills were nearly denuded of redwoods; the railroad had likewise disappeared in 1930 because of competition from highways and trucking. Depression wasn’t the word for it.
In the early 1980s, however, a coalition of merchants and townspeople got together to transform the village (kept alive through the years by a few good shops and restaurants) from kind of a dump into a bona fide tourist attraction.
Occidental, once an eyesore, acquired elegant landscaping, buried electrical wiring, and a thriving center for the arts, with refurbished eateries, shops, lodging places and galleries jostling for space with excellent civic amenities in a slightly less than three-block area. Visitors started asking, “What’s the story on this place, anyhow?” Thus the history project.
When I really started to dig (with the help of local historians), I discovered that this charming townlet boasted a very peculiar past, kind of a Goldrush-era mashup of “Northern Exposure” and “Twin Peaks.” Here’s just one of its unexpected oddities:
One of the more picturesque characters in 19th/20th-century Occidental. was an immigrant Swiss, Jacques “Jakie” Fehr, who arrived in the prosperous little village in 1897 to open a jewelry store on Main St.
Jakie and his Swedish "mail-order bride" Tillie in front of their store.
Fehr was remarkable for both his diminutive stature (he was 4’8”), and his business sense. He and his mail-order Swedish bride Tillie, who towered over him by at least a foot, eventually expanded their stock to include “Watches, Clocks, Jewelry, Fine cigars, Toilet Articles, Notions, and Choice Candy,” later adding newspapers, ice cream, sheet music, condoms, and comic books.
Jakie was also noted for his irascibility, and at least one older Occidentalite remembers him as “always popping off about something or other.
One July day in 1908, San Francisco Chronicle sports cartoonist Harry Conway “Bud” Fisher stepped down from a Northwestern Pacific Railroad train that had stopped in Occidental en route to the famed Bohemian Grove, where Fisher planned to attend the Grove’s annual Summer Revels.
At that point, Fisher had recently become the very first artist to produce what would soon become known as a “comic strip,” with recurring characters and a story line as opposed to single-panel one-joke cartoons. His “Augustus Mutt” strip, featuring a tall, skinny, dimwitted and greedy racetrack gambler, was then becoming wildly popular with Chronicle readers.
That day in July, while stretching his legs on the railway platform, Fisher spied the tiny walrus-moustached Fehr in animated altercation with the train’s tall and lanky “candy butcher,” who sold sweets and newspapers to passengers and distributed them to town merchants along the route.
This amusing scene, according to Fisher, inspired him to add a quite recognizable character to the “Augustus Mutt” story line, resulting in “Mutt and Jeff,” a cartoon strip that was not only syndicated in newspapers
throughout the US until 1983, but appeared in comic-book form, was brought to life in the form of stage shows (“Mutt and Jeff Divorced;” “Mutt and Jeff in Panama,” etc.), inspired comedy teams, sheet music and songbooks, and—oh yes— added a new figure of speech to the American lexicon.
Meanwhile, back in Occidental, Jakie was not exactly cheerful about his elevation to cartoonhood: “This Fisher has put me in the papers as this man Jeff,” he was heard to grumble, “I think I will take him to court.”
He never made good, however, on this oft-repeated threat. In later years, he could even sometimes be seen chuckling clandestinely over certain comic books with those two unmistakable figures on the cover (they were always promptly whisked under the counter when customers arrived).
Perhaps the little man had realized that imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.
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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Black Point, Novato, California; Late 1970s
EVOLUTION OF A MADWOMAN
Mad Maudlen
Around 1975, I was ready for a change and a challenge, and approached RPF Director Phyllis Patterson to propose a new character: Mad Maudlen, the wife of archetypal madman Tom O’ Bedlam, as described in a seriously uncanny 16th-century ditty sometimes known as “Mad Maudlen’s Search for Mad Tom.” Here’s a stripped-down version of what it sounds like (photos are of the singer)
:
I should mention here that, after a few unfortunate experiences early on, the RPF management was quite wary about what they referred to as “grotesques.” A certain oddity was allowed, nay encouraged, as were frissons of mortality in the form of grinning masked headsmen and danse-macabre parades of black-clad figures painted as skeletons and brandishing skulls and bones.
But
authentic or no, the patrons of this particular re-creation of
Elizabethan times were never to encounter, for example, characters
stricken with leprosy or the pox, beggars with oozing sores, anyone
dripping blood that was not a part of an approved stage performance, or
drooling caricatures of village idiots.
When I proposed Mad Maudlen, Phyllis looked at me askance for what seemed like a full minute before she finally said “Go ahead; I trust you.”
Most people who encountered Maudlen in the 1970s remember her as a slow-moving enigmatic cloaked being drifting silently through the Faire, carrying a twisted staff and only speaking when spoken to, often replying with fantastic tales of her adventures and those of her “son” Willie,” a strange little rag mammet that she carried everywhere.
That first year, however, Maudlen was a totally different being, a sweet-natured mixture of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and a precocious three-year-old. She sat on the ground and played with small children, sang odd little songs, joined in on dances and games (often to their great good-natured confusion), and plaintively inquired of strangers if they had seen Mad Tom, her husband.
These
conversations were the beginning of the “Willie tales,” in which
Maudlen and her child went on impossible journeys in their search for
Tom. It was an effective, interesting, and often satisfying role to
play.
However.
Between that Northern Faire and the next, I started meditating regularly at the San Francisco Zen Center. Not only had my worldview begun to shift somewhat, but I also cut my hair short rather than try to deal with the mass of it at 4:30 AM. When the morning of first Faire day rolled around, I suddenly realized I had no idea any more of who or what Maudlen was.
I donned her white shift, added a dusty pink over-vest, and covered my shorn hair with a biggins cap.
Remembering last year’s sunburn, I added a neckcloth and some cheesecloth veiling, and a touch of mud. Then, realizing I couldn’t stall any longer, I picked up Willie and the twisted wooden staff I’d found in the woods that summer, and walked out from behind the backstage curtain.
In zen practice, sitting meditation is sometimes alternated with a very slow walking meditation called “kinhen”—one step, one breath—so I decided to do that until I could figure out something else.
It was oddly restful, even semi-hypnotic. I found myself unfocusing my eyes somewhat, letting the opening moments of the fair wash over me, all of the light and color and sound blending into a kind of bright living-wallpaper effect as I moved along, step by very slow step.
For a long time, though we were vaguely aware of people watching and whispering, no one spoke to us. Finally a brave little girl approached from the side and asked “Where are you going?’
Maudlen stopped, turned, looked into her eyes and answered her.
Easy as that.
She also came with a delightful accessory, her mother-in-law Anna “Gammy” Gesler (elderly women in our little corner of rural Pennsylvania were frequently spoken to/of with the honorifics of “Grammy,” “Mammy,” or “Gammy”)
“Skippy,” I knew, was the name of a dog once owned by my grandparents, though I had only ever seen him in a photograph. Convinced that there should be a picture of a dog on the label, I sought out Aunt Dot.
Aunt Dot: (examining the jar) “Well, it says Skippy, but I don’t see no doggie.”
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(Roger’s daughter Kate and son Devon, then unborn, now curate and post their dad’s photos on Instagram, and in various gallery exhibits, including the one reviewed in the NEW YORK TIMES Arts section in the pics below.)
Located atop a hill behind the end of the complex (with a clear view of its front walk and patio) was the backside of a UC-Berkeley fraternity, whose members entertained an ongoing fascination with Tim, Roger, and their colorful and hip collection of friends—Vietnam-vet journalists, and photographers, writers, working actors and artists, and world travelers, including intriguing-looking women of all descriptions. Who knows what those young Greeks thought we all got up to? (They may even have been right.)
This little scene came about when a stray frisbee “accidentally” flew down the hill and bounced off the bedroom window, whereupon Karen Lucius (at left) and I went in from the front room and stood on the bed to see what was going on.
Here you see us prolonging the conversation with the eager young jocks so that Roger could sneak around and snap this photo, after which we promptly disappeared, leaving the boys to their sweaty imaginings.
Family Acid post of Roger holding his NEW YORK TIMES review.
The online version of the review by Martha Schwenender:
“Gloria’s Medication,” a 1974 photograph by Roger Steffens at Benrubi Gallery in Chelsea. Credit Roger Steffens
(The above phot is a photograph I took from The Family Acid book; Gloria was actually another resident of the apartments, sweet, shy, and happily married.)
The Family Acid
Benrubi Gallery
521 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through next Friday
Roger Steffens is an actor and an author of several books on Bob Marley, but he is also a photographer who started taking pictures while in a psychological operations unit of the United States military in Vietnam. His images, mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, are organized by his daughter, Kate; his son, Devon; and his wife, Mary, under the name the Family Acid.
In this show at Benrubi, the Family Acid captures the surreal, psychedelic and utopia-minded aspects of counterculture California and other places in the ’60s and ’70s with a perfection approaching cliché. A 1969 photograph taken from the back of a military vehicle on the streets of Saigon underscores the chaos and confusion of that war, while “Marrakesh Rainbow, April 1971” shows a Volkswagen van painted in bright, elaborate patterns under a rainbow in Morocco. Several photographs made by double-exposing film merge images to create a hallucinogenic effect.
With its stock themes of peace, love and freedom, and a tempered version of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll (Mr. Steffens and his wife apparently met while tripping on LSD at the Albion Peoples Fair in California), the Family Acid mostly provides a feel-good version of the ’60s and ’70s: the trip that didn’t go bad, the sunny walk in nature or the blissfully stoned afternoon at a music festival. These are images you could put in a book — say, a psychedelic family album. You could even let your children be curators, celebrating rather than critiquing the experience.—Martha Schwenender
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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Renaissance Pleasure Faire, Black Point, Novato, late 1990s
LAVENDER LAVENDER DILLY DILLY
or
WHY I LOVE THIS PHOTO
I don’t know these young women’s names, but they represent to me one of the many remarkable facets of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires (1963-1998).
Many Faire performers were either: 1) professionals (or talented amateurs) playing featured roles; 2) carefully selected street entertainers; or 3) already formed and auditioned troupes of actors, dancers, singers or instrumentalists who returned year after year.
Each spring and fall, however, the required pre-Faire workshops attracted large numbers of people who had no particular performance skills or training in environmental theater, but who just knew they somehow had to be part of the magic, in any capacity.
These folks tended to sort themselves out through a combination of job availability and alter-ego exploration; they became non-speaking members of the Queen’s Court, or Her Majesty’s guards or chair-bearers; they joined the fringes of the wild Celts who paraded barbarically through the Faire each day, or of the creepy black-clad skull-brandishing Danse Macabre. They found jobs running the free games, or as ale-serving wenches and varlets; they got absorbed into guilds like St. Blaise’s town criers, or the street mongers of St. Swithin’s.
The
largest catchall guild was St. Cuthbert’s, suppliers of extras in
parades and pageants, of flag-bearers, cart-pullers, maneuverers of
giant puppets, skippers and dancers and tambourine-shakers. Everyone
eventually found a place. Including the Lavenders.
Not many people realize that lavender, the fragrant herb useful for soothing headaches and keeping linens fresh, took its name from a profession, that of laundrywoman.
The RPF Lavender tradition started with the Market Cross, a medieval-era marker erected to distinguish towns that had been granted the legal right to hold public markets.
From the very beginning, the Market Cross was a feature of the RPF, solidly constructed of mortared stone in a wide conjunction of paths near the front gate.
At first a simple garlanded pillar, The RPF Market Cross gathered accretions over the years—a step where one could sit and await a rendezvous; rudimentary landscaping and flower plantings; a little fountain that became a wishing well, and then a bigger one with a pool, which soon attracted the attention of some young women (randomly designated as “wenches”) who were looking for an actual gig.
They began bringing baskets of discarded costumes and rags to “wash” while loudly exchanging gossip, flinging double-entendres and droplets from sopping cloth at passers-by; speculating on the virility of young men; soliciting “trade” by remarking on the sorry state of a visitor’s linen.
They flirted, engaged in catfights, belted out (often off-color) songs of the period (on- or off-key), and in general enlivened the stolid old Market Cross with their antics. Before long, they had become became one of the beloved ongoing street entertainments of the Faire, Queens of the Washing Well.
Years later, the young women in this photo, whatever their names, were clearly worthy heirs to those first lusty Lavenders, and to another marvelous Pleasure Faire tradition—finding one’s own place.
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8. Throw–WAY-Back THURSDAY: Wayne County, North Carolina; 1740-1818
SUSANNAH’S WILL, or, THE ENTERPRISING LADIES OF WAYNE COUNTY
The only visual image I have for my great-great-great-great-grandmother Susannah Hill is a photocopy of her handwritten will. It’s not actually in her own handwriting, as, despite the rest of her surprising history, she seems to have been illiterate, and signed it only with a blurred “X.”
The will (text below) reveals that Susannah (then widowed for decades) was not only a pious woman, but also a remarkably well-to-do and independent widow, wealthy in land and possessions, and mother of six very clever daughters.
In the mid-1990s, my cousin Wayne Hill and his dad Justin turned up, in addition to the will, other official documents that provided an interesting look into the life of Susannah and her family. Thus, in spite of a number of tantalizing information gaps, we know that:
Susannah (Howell) was born sometime before 1750, when she first appeared in public records. She married my 4X g-grandpa, John Hill, who was born in 1740 (and deceased by 1789, possibly in the War for Independence) and by him had six girls:
1. JEMIMA, who, sometime before 1785, married one William Hasty, a Continental soldier who survived the war.
2. DELILAH, who married Edwin Hasty in 1785 (and later a Mr. Davidson).
3. RHODA, who married John or James Hasty, or possibly both in succession.
(If you’re beginning to see a theme here, it’s no accident. A 1995 visit by Wayne and Justin to Pine Mountain, GA revealed that the Hastys and Hills had been marrying each other for centuries, even before the clever Jemima—my 3X g-grandma—and her offspring, including 2X great-gran Nancy Hasty—who later married James Hill—moved her extended family to GA in the 1820s to take advantage of a land lottery for the widows and orphans of Continental soldiers.)
The last three daughters were:
4. MARY (known as Polly or Polley)
5. SARAH (aka Sally)
6. CINTHA
They received the bulk of Susannah’s lands and estate and acted as her executors.
WILL OF SUSANNAH HILL - WAYNE COUNTY, NC, WILL BOOK 4, page 220
In the Name of God Amen: I Susannah HILL of the County of Wayne and State of North Carolina being weak of body but of perfect mind and memory, blessed be God for the same, and calling to mind the Mortality of my Body, and Knowing that it is appointed for all men once to die, do therefore make and ordain this my Last Will and Testament in manner and form as follows,(to wit)
I recommend my Soul to the hand of Almighty God that first gave it my body to the Earth to be Buried in a decent Christian like manner at the discretion of my Executors herein after to be mentioned not doubting but at the General resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty power of God and as touching my worldly Estate wherewith it hath pleased God to bless me with in this life I leave and dispose of in the following manner.
Item: I give to my daughter Jemima HASTY ten shillings.
Item: I give to my daughter Delila DAVIDSON ten shillings.
Item: I give to my daughter Rhoda HASTY ten shillings, to them and their Heirs.
Item: I give to my grandson Wills HASTY one feather bed and furniture to him and his heirs forever.
Item: I also give to my daughters, Polly, Sally and Cintha HILL, my land and Plantations together with all my stock household and kitchen furniture and all the remainder of my Estate which I may died seized or possessed with to them and their heirs forever: to be equally divided as they may think proper.
I nominate and appoint my three daughters, Polly, Sally and Cintha HILL my sole Executors to this my last Will and Testament, in Witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and Seal this 18th day of February 1818. Signed and acknowledged in presence of us
Susannah her(X)mark HILL
A. DARDEN
Sarah DARDEN
Wayne County – Feby Term 1819 – Then was the within Will of Susannah HILL proved in open court by the oath of Abraham DARDEN one of the Subscribing Witnesses thereto and at the same time Polly HILL one of the within named Exrs. Quald. only. Test. P. Hooks, Clk.
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SUSANNAH HILL’S ESTATE INVENTORY WAYNE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
A true Inventory of the Estate of Susannah HILL deceased. Taken Feby 15TH 1819
110 acres of land 1 horse 6 head of cattle 2 sows & pigs, 5 shotes [newly weaned piglets)]12 Geese & Ducks Some Dunghill Fowls Quantity of Corn Quantity of Bacon 3 Cotton Wheels 1 Linen Wheel 1 pr. of Cards 2 Hackles * 3 Pewter Dishes 2 Pewter Plates 1 Bason “ 8 Spoons 1 Earthen Dish 10 Earthen Plates 5 Earthen Bowls 1 Tin Coffee Pot 1 Pepper Box 2 Tin Tumblers 1 Jug, 1 knife & Forks 1 Pot, 1 kittle 1 Dutch oven & skillet 2 prs of Pothooks & 1 Rack 3 Washing Tubs, 2 Pails 2 Buckets, 4 Bread Trays 2 Meal Sifters 1 Table, 1 Chair, 4 Slays 1 Spice Morter 4 Baskets 1 Barrell & Meal gum 2 Flat Irons 1 Bed & Furniture & Stead 3 Axes, 1 Grubing Hoe 4 Weading Hoes 2 Plow hors , 1 Cutr. 1 Weg, 1 Hammer 1 Cart & Gerses Quantity of Slat Quantity of Flaxseed Quantity of Flax Quantity of Cotton Some Wool Some Hogs Lard Some Fodder Some Leather 1 Cowhide 1 pr. of Fleshforks 1 Saddle & Bridle 2 pr of Cotton Cards 1 pr of Wool Cards 1 Trumpit 3 Bells 1 pr of Sissers 2 Earthen Pitchers 1 Jug. I Weading hoe 1 pr. of Winding Blades 1 Churn, some cups & sassers Some spun cotton 1 Gimblet, ** 1 Piggin *** 3 Dollars in Cash 35 Dollars & Accts
Signed Polley (X) HILL, Execr.
* Comb for dressing flax or hemp * * Tool for boring holes *** Small wooden pail or tub
Susannah and her daughters, especially the three eldest, were apparently a force to be reckoned with when it came to land deals in Wayne County. By a strange twist in North Carolina law, only unmarried women could buy or sell land (married women could own and bequeath land, but not buy or sell it), and they made the most of this odd quirk in the lawbooks.
A search in the Wayne County deed registries (entries reproduced below) reveals some delightfully convoluted shenanigans by the women of the Hill-Hasty families in order to legally buy and sell property. The same cast of characters—widowed mother, unmarried sisters, daughters, husbands, and in-laws—appears over and over.
WAYNE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, DEEDS (All of the names appearing in red were part of the Hill/Hasty land dynasty)
Book 7, p. 121 – Jemimah HILL to Rhoda HILL, 2 tracts of land on North side of Appletree Swamp for the sum of 60 pounds current money, being part of tract granted to Drewry SAVAGE and part of tract granted to James EDMONDSON. Dated 1 Feb 1785.
Book 7, p. 146 – Jemimah HILL to Delilah HILL, land on North side of Appletree Swamp, South side of Watery Branch, for the sum of 60 pounds. Joins: Samuel BARTLETT, Drewry SAVAGE, Rhoda HILL, Delilah HILL, John MINSHAW. Dated 1785.
Book 5, p. 381 – Jamimah HILL from James EDMONDSON, 2 tracts on Appletree Swamp, for the sum of 200 pounds. Dated 25 June 1785.
Book 3, p. 378 – James HASTY to Cornelius OUTLAND, both of Wayne Co., land on South side of Great Cotentnia Creek and on Dunaho Swamp, for the sum of 40 pounds specie. Dated 18 Feb 1786.
Book 5, p. 165 – John HASTY from John STANTON, both of Wayne Co., land on South side Contenteney Creek and the North side Watery Branch, for the sum of 67 pounds, 10 shillings specie.. Dated 2 Jan 1792.
Book 7, p. 228 – Susannah HILL from James EDMONDSON, 130 acres on Appletree Swamp, for the sum of 100 pounds. Witnesses: Edwin HASTY, George DOWNING. Dated 29 Jan 1789. Proven in court by oath of William HASTY.
Book 7, p. 133 – Edwin HASTY and wife Delilah to John MINSHAW, both of Wayne Co., land on South side Watery Branch where HASTY now lives. Conveyed by deed of Jemimah HILL, now HASTY, to Delilah HILL, now HASTY. Part of land patented by Drewry SAVAGE. Witnesses: Jesse MINSHAW, James GREEN. Dated 28 Feb 1800.
Book 7, p. 313 – William HASTY from John MINSHAW, both of Wayne Co., for the sum of 75 silver dollars, 51 acres on South side Watery Branch, joining land of Delilah HASTY, which she got of Delilah HILL. Witnesses: James HILL, James BRIDGER. Dated 7 Mar 1802.
Book 10, p. 116 – Susannah HILL to Delilah DAVIDSON, tract of land.[before 1818]
Book 12, p. 150 – Jemimah HASTY to Thomas HOLLOWELL of Johnson Co., for the sum of $215.00, 100 acres on North side Appletree Swamp, joins HOLLOWELL, Stephen COOK, Rhoda HASTY, now Thomas MORINGS, being part of patent granted to Andrew SAVAGE on 19 Aug 1779. Dated 25 Jan 1821.
So in the end, Susannah, having seen her country through a revolution and her daughters well provided for, passed on in February 18th, 1818. She left her three oldest girls a token amount of ten shillings each, secure in the knowledge that they knew what they were doing when it came to husbands and land.
The rest of her estate went to her three youngest (no doubt poised to become wheelers and dealers on their own account), with a single sweet exception. To a favorite grandson, Wills Hasty, she bequeathed “one feather bed and furniture to him and his heirs forever.”
When I tried to get an idea of exactly what kind of value was changing hands in the will and the land deals, I ran headfirst into the scholarly swamp that was currency in those days, with each state issuing its own version of British pounds, shillings, and pence, all with varying worth, and newfangled dollars making an appearance in the above list of Susannah’s household goods. If you’re interested:
https://www.in2013dollars.com/ (Inflation calculator from 1635-present)
Those ladies; you've got to hand it to them.
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9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: April and May, 1977; Paramount Ranch, Agoura Hills, CA.
THINGS DISCOVERED BETWEEN THE PAGES OF OLD BOOKS #4: A FAIRE AND FOLDED NOSTALGIA
 |
This was a single sheet of paper far-ranging and comprehensive in its utility, combining as it did the functions of advertising medium, calendar, workshop and performance schedule, contest listings, mail-order form, and showcase of art, imagery and jolly Elizabethan exhortations to pleasure.
The reason I’d kept it became obvious once I unfolded it: it included a time-traveling candid photo of my role as “The Grape Lady” (aka Mistress of Revels) taken at the previous Northern Faire. To my delight, it also included photographs of some of the iconic figures of that time…
The lusty, witty and tuneful Dale Hill as Sir Vivian Underhill, gentleman-about-the-shire and baritone singer with Oak, Ash and Thorn.
The lovable, picturesque and winsomely oddball Keny (not a typo) Milliken.
Two beautiful young women inspecting candles, and I’ll bet someone out there knows who they are.
I certainly remember this gentleman’s face (the lower one), but time has robbed me of his name. Anyone?
The
adorably competent Fiona Zimmer. Little May Queen, Fairy, Peasant
Child, Smallest Member of the Queen’s Court—show her a role and she’d
step into it with aplomb and poise.
That's a lot of character folded into one sheet of paper.
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10. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Booneville, Arkansas, c. 1923
HOWARD VS. THE OUTHOUSE
or
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE CHAUTAUQUA
(My dad, Howard, noted that his mother always said he was more trouble to raise than her two other boys put together; this anecdote illustrates her point.)
 |
| Howard on the left, with brother Horace |
(For the uninitiated, the Chautauqua was an adult-education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and specialists of the day traveling throughout rural America, bringing entertainment and culture to isolated communities.)
Howard carried, tucked under his arm, a package of crochet-work that his mother had asked him to deliver to his Aunt Tonkie, who lived, with her husband Uncle Mac, in a house vaguely on the way to the Chautauqua venue.
Now, Andrew J. “Andy Mack” McAmis was a big man, with a healthy sense of his own importance. He had, after all, served as Auditor of the State of Arkansas, ran a large dry-goods store, and played the commodities market with some success.
 |
| A grown-up Howard with Uncle Mack |
Moreover, it was situated behind shrubbery that blocked the view of it from the house, this circumstance presenting an irresistible temptation, both to neighbors who preferred its imposing comfort to their own smelly shacks, and to passers-by on the road that ran behind the property.
As a result, at the time of which I write, the waste containment area had just overflowed, creating a kind of noxious swamp behind the otherwise elegant privy.
Enter our young hero, approaching the house from the aforementioned back road. There was a nice firm path running beside the outhouse, and it would have been easy to avoid the smelly bog simply by keeping to the path.
Alas, poor Howard. Instead of watching where he was going, he was busily running imaginary football plays, package tucked under arm, fending off equally imaginary tacklers. Inevitably, this zig-zag progress landed him at full length in the stinking ooze.
Howard was near tears. He desperately wanted to go to the Chautauqua. There was no time to run home, bathe and change. He picked himself up and slunk into the yard behind the house, where Uncle Mac was watering his tomatoes with a hose.
Manfully attempting to keep a straight face, Mac turned the hose on his nephew, sluicing most of the disgusting matter from the outside of his clothing and shoes.
“I can still go to the Chautauqua, right?” pleaded Howard when this worst was washed off. He turned and headed in the direction of the venue, only to be stopped in his tracks. “Howard,” boomed Uncle Mac, “Come back here. You smell like a buzzard.”
 |
| My sister Sue (in a blonde phase) and I meet Uncle Mack in the early 1960s. |
At that point, they were joined by Aunt Tonkie, who was a sport about the crochet work (“I was going to dye it with tea, anyway”), and obligingly went through her missionary barrel filled with worn-but-not-worn-out clothes destined for the poor.
While Uncle Mack hosed Howard down from the skin out (no indoor shower), Aunt Tonkie found a large man’s shirt and a well-mended pair of stockings, but unfortunately no nether garments or shoes large enough. In the end, they patched together an outfit of clean and…not-so-clean.
 |
| Aunt Tonkie |
Desperately
running and squelching, Howard managed to arrive in a crowd of
last-minuters and found a seat off to the side, next to a window through
which a warm breeze was blowing. The lights were already dimmed for the
Chautauqua, a magic-lantern slide lecture on the Holy Land.
Howard was so entranced that he barely noticed the shuffling around him, the whispers of ”Phew!” and folks examining the bottom of their shoes and surreptitiously checking out their neighbors for signs of the embarrassment that often accompanies public flatulence.
When the lights came up, however, he was startled to find himself surrounded, in that crowded room, by an island of empty space. Head high and face aflame, he stood up, and made a dignified exit, already imagining the rounds of teasing, catcalls, muffled fart-noises, and elaborately held noses that were to follow him him for weeks.
His mother just sighed.
PS: I only heard Howard tell this story once; if anybody has heard a different version, let me know.
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11. THROWBACK THURSDAY: October
23rd, 1949.
HALLOWEEN BIRTHDAY
My birthday, combined with a Halloween party. The first photo commemorates the event, with big sister Sue second from the left between two cowgirls, and me in the dainty bonnet and long dress.
The second bit of surrealism emerged when my dad asked those with masks to put them on (the adults were our neighbors). In both photos, I seem to be pretending I'm somewhere else, a trait that would serve me well later on at Renaissance and Dickens Fair(e)s.
HALLOWEEN BIRTHDAY
My birthday, combined with a Halloween party. The first photo commemorates the event, with big sister Sue second from the left between two cowgirls, and me in the dainty bonnet and long dress.
The second bit of surrealism emerged when my dad asked those with masks to put them on (the adults were our neighbors). In both photos, I seem to be pretending I'm somewhere else, a trait that would serve me well later on at Renaissance and Dickens Fair(e)s.
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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1908;
SEE YOU IN THE FUNNY PAPERS
Or
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE LITTLE GUY
In 1997, I was more or less drafted to write a history of the tiny Western Sonoma County village of Occidental, CA.
Founded in 1876 as a railroad town and lumbering depot, Occidental’s fortunes had gone rapidly downhill when the surrounding hills were nearly denuded of redwoods; the railroad had likewise disappeared in 1930 because of competition from highways and trucking. Depression wasn’t the word for it.
In the early 1980s, however, a coalition of merchants and townspeople got together to transform the village (kept alive through the years by a few good shops and restaurants) from kind of a dump into a bona fide tourist attraction.
Occidental, once an eyesore, acquired elegant landscaping, buried electrical wiring, and a thriving center for the arts, with refurbished eateries, shops, lodging places and galleries jostling for space with excellent civic amenities in a slightly less than three-block area. Visitors started asking, “What’s the story on this place, anyhow?” Thus the history project.
When I really started to dig (with the help of local historians), I discovered that this charming townlet boasted a very peculiar past, kind of a Goldrush-era mashup of “Northern Exposure” and “Twin Peaks.” Here’s just one of its unexpected oddities:
One of the more picturesque characters in 19th/20th-century Occidental. was an immigrant Swiss, Jacques “Jakie” Fehr, who arrived in the prosperous little village in 1897 to open a jewelry store on Main St.
Jakie and his Swedish "mail-order bride" Tillie in front of their store.
Fehr was remarkable for both his diminutive stature (he was 4’8”), and his business sense. He and his mail-order Swedish bride Tillie, who towered over him by at least a foot, eventually expanded their stock to include “Watches, Clocks, Jewelry, Fine cigars, Toilet Articles, Notions, and Choice Candy,” later adding newspapers, ice cream, sheet music, condoms, and comic books.
Jakie was also noted for his irascibility, and at least one older Occidentalite remembers him as “always popping off about something or other.
One July day in 1908, San Francisco Chronicle sports cartoonist Harry Conway “Bud” Fisher stepped down from a Northwestern Pacific Railroad train that had stopped in Occidental en route to the famed Bohemian Grove, where Fisher planned to attend the Grove’s annual Summer Revels.
At that point, Fisher had recently become the very first artist to produce what would soon become known as a “comic strip,” with recurring characters and a story line as opposed to single-panel one-joke cartoons. His “Augustus Mutt” strip, featuring a tall, skinny, dimwitted and greedy racetrack gambler, was then becoming wildly popular with Chronicle readers.
That day in July, while stretching his legs on the railway platform, Fisher spied the tiny walrus-moustached Fehr in animated altercation with the train’s tall and lanky “candy butcher,” who sold sweets and newspapers to passengers and distributed them to town merchants along the route.
This amusing scene, according to Fisher, inspired him to add a quite recognizable character to the “Augustus Mutt” story line, resulting in “Mutt and Jeff,” a cartoon strip that was not only syndicated in newspapers
throughout the US until 1983, but appeared in comic-book form, was brought to life in the form of stage shows (“Mutt and Jeff Divorced;” “Mutt and Jeff in Panama,” etc.), inspired comedy teams, sheet music and songbooks, and—oh yes— added a new figure of speech to the American lexicon.
Meanwhile, back in Occidental, Jakie was not exactly cheerful about his elevation to cartoonhood: “This Fisher has put me in the papers as this man Jeff,” he was heard to grumble, “I think I will take him to court.”
He never made good, however, on this oft-repeated threat. In later years, he could even sometimes be seen chuckling clandestinely over certain comic books with those two unmistakable figures on the cover (they were always promptly whisked under the counter when customers arrived).
Perhaps the little man had realized that imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.
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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Black Point, Novato, California; Late 1970s
EVOLUTION OF A MADWOMAN
Mad Maudlen
I first
started performing in the original California-based Renaissance
Pleasure Faires in 1969, and in the next six or seven years portrayed
saucy Harvest Maids, flirty May Queens, Mistress of Misrule, Moon Lady
on Stilts, and, for several years, Mistress of Revels.
Around 1975, I was ready for a change and a challenge, and approached RPF Director Phyllis Patterson to propose a new character: Mad Maudlen, the wife of archetypal madman Tom O’ Bedlam, as described in a seriously uncanny 16th-century ditty sometimes known as “Mad Maudlen’s Search for Mad Tom.” Here’s a stripped-down version of what it sounds like (photos are of the singer)
:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBPBOQHXjYc
(Tom O’ Bedlam)
I should mention here that, after a few unfortunate experiences early on, the RPF management was quite wary about what they referred to as “grotesques.” A certain oddity was allowed, nay encouraged, as were frissons of mortality in the form of grinning masked headsmen and danse-macabre parades of black-clad figures painted as skeletons and brandishing skulls and bones.
 |
| Keny (not a misprint) Milliken, one of the Faire's most delightful grotesques |
 |
| The "Skull and Bones" procession |
When I proposed Mad Maudlen, Phyllis looked at me askance for what seemed like a full minute before she finally said “Go ahead; I trust you.”
Most people who encountered Maudlen in the 1970s remember her as a slow-moving enigmatic cloaked being drifting silently through the Faire, carrying a twisted staff and only speaking when spoken to, often replying with fantastic tales of her adventures and those of her “son” Willie,” a strange little rag mammet that she carried everywhere.
That first year, however, Maudlen was a totally different being, a sweet-natured mixture of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and a precocious three-year-old. She sat on the ground and played with small children, sang odd little songs, joined in on dances and games (often to their great good-natured confusion), and plaintively inquired of strangers if they had seen Mad Tom, her husband.
 |
 |
| The early Maudlen |
However.
Between that Northern Faire and the next, I started meditating regularly at the San Francisco Zen Center. Not only had my worldview begun to shift somewhat, but I also cut my hair short rather than try to deal with the mass of it at 4:30 AM. When the morning of first Faire day rolled around, I suddenly realized I had no idea any more of who or what Maudlen was.
I donned her white shift, added a dusty pink over-vest, and covered my shorn hair with a biggins cap.
Remembering last year’s sunburn, I added a neckcloth and some cheesecloth veiling, and a touch of mud. Then, realizing I couldn’t stall any longer, I picked up Willie and the twisted wooden staff I’d found in the woods that summer, and walked out from behind the backstage curtain.
In zen practice, sitting meditation is sometimes alternated with a very slow walking meditation called “kinhen”—one step, one breath—so I decided to do that until I could figure out something else.
It was oddly restful, even semi-hypnotic. I found myself unfocusing my eyes somewhat, letting the opening moments of the fair wash over me, all of the light and color and sound blending into a kind of bright living-wallpaper effect as I moved along, step by very slow step.
 |
| Maudlen interacts with a developmentally disabled young man |
For a long time, though we were vaguely aware of people watching and whispering, no one spoke to us. Finally a brave little girl approached from the side and asked “Where are you going?’
Maudlen stopped, turned, looked into her eyes and answered her.
Easy as that.
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14. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1940s
A DOMESTIC GODDESS; Or
AUNT DOT, THE DOGGIE, AND THE PEANUT BUTTER
In the early 1940s, my parents moved, along with my sister Susan (a toddler) and me (an infant) to a ramshackle farmhouse in the midst of 25 overgrown acres.
My dad worked an eight-hour day in an office to pay the mortgage, and spent most of the rest of his waking hours either in (re)construction mode making our surroundings livable, or working in the garden growing food for the family.
This left my mother, all 5’2”, 103 lbs. of her, to do the bulk of the cooking, canning, preserving, cleaning, and laundry (in an old side-wringer washer), not to mention working in the garden and riding herd on two active little girls.
My father, detecting signs of overwhelm, decided to find someone to come in once a week to help her out.
Enter Aunt Dot.
Dorothy Gesler was not our actual aunt, but a neighbor from up the road, and for Susan and me, isolated in the boonies before the era of daycare, preschools and playdates, she was that wondrous thing—a new person. She showed up every Friday, which quickly became enshrined in our tiny worldview as “Aunt Dot Day.”
 |
| Me doing my Aunt Dot imitation |
She also came with a delightful accessory, her mother-in-law Anna “Gammy” Gesler (elderly women in our little corner of rural Pennsylvania were frequently spoken to/of with the honorifics of “Grammy,” “Mammy,” or “Gammy”)
Gammy Gesler was a diminutive white-haired sweet-faced crone of a fairy-tale grandmother who became our regular babysitter. Fortunately Susan and I were well-behaved children, because I think either of us could have easily overpowered Gammy and locked her in a closet.
A big strapping cheerful woman, Aunt Dot initially awed us by bossing around the scary vacuum cleaner, effortlessly shifting the heaviest of furniture, and leaving a gleaming trail of cleanliness and order where ever she went. We adored her, and she never seemed to mind when we followed her around like puppies.
Occasionally, however, to get us out from underfoot, she would resort to giving us each a cup of water and an old toothbrush and setting us to scrubbing the patchwork-laid slates on the big front porch. “We’re helping Aunt Dot!” we proudly announced to anyone who asked.
Although I'm not sure that nannying was part of her initial job description, she kept an eye on us, tucked us in for naps (“Now, close them peepers”), applied big warm hugs and bandaids when we fell down, and always seemed happy to answer questions and deal with infant conundrums.
For instance: I was a precocious reader, and upon encountering a jar with the word “Skippy” emblazoned on the stylized white-fence background of its label, I got confused.
“Skippy,” I knew, was the name of a dog once owned by my grandparents, though I had only ever seen him in a photograph. Convinced that there should be a picture of a dog on the label, I sought out Aunt Dot.
 |
| Grand-dad Verne with Skippy |
Aunt Dot: (examining the jar) “Well, it says Skippy, but I don’t see no doggie.”
Me: (worried) “Did they maded him into peanut butter?”
Aunt Dot (thinking fast) “No, honey. See that fence? He’s just gone behind it for a wee-wee."
Me: “Oh. OK. Can I have a samwich?”
The last time I saw Aunt Dot was after a long interval, when I was home on a visit as an adult. I stopped by her house, and found, not the robust amazon of my childhood, but a small skinny elderly woman with a tight grey perm, glasses and a stylish pantsuit. “You look…different,” I told her.
She grinned, did a runway twirl, and announced “Weight Watchers!”
Times change, even for domestic goddesses.
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15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: San Francisco, California, Early 1970s
ROCK MEDICINE
A little history from Wikipedia:
"Through the benefit concerts organized with Bill Graham in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Inaba and Dr. George "Skip" Gay created Rock Medicine with the support of Dr. David Smith. In the spring of 1973, Bill Graham staged two consecutive Saturday concerts at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, CA featuring The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.
Bill Graham asked the Clinic to staff a "medical emergency care tent" during both concerts. These small stadium concerts, about 18,000 at the Dead and 25,000 at Led Zeppelin, evolved into Bill Graham's Days on the Green concert series. The "medical emergency care tent" became Rock Medicine, which is a branch of the Clinic that still exists today and provides medical care at hundreds of Northern California music concerts and events each year."
In early 1973, rock impresario Bill Graham contacted Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic
founder/director David Smith about creating a group of trained personnel to
deal with the increasing problem of overdoses, sunstroke and injuries at his
outdoor concerts.
Thus Rock Medicine was born, and, having trained intensively by talking down numerous ODs in the Hog Farm rescue tepee at Woodstock, I was a first-round draft pick.
Our first major event was a concert in Kezar Stadium, located at the edge of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a few blocks from the clinic and home of the 49ers before pro football went wide-screen. The selection of acts was perplexing but inspired: the Beach Boys opening for the Grateful Dead. Go figure.
It was a beautiful day as we set up our tent and equipment at the edge of the
action. We had docs, nurses, paramedics, and OD “counselors,” as we were
called. There were also “searchers,” whose job was to be a visible and
available presence in their white-dove-on-blue-cross T-shirts, and, if
necessary, get overdosed fans out of the crowd and into the med tent with the
least possible fuss.
This was sometimes a tricky proposition with concert-goers who had overindulged
in LSD, strong pot, alcohol, sun, or any combination of the above. The usual
technique was to get the ODed ones onto their feet, leaning on one or two
sturdy searchers, and literally dance them out of the boogying throng. Only in
severe cases was a stretcher employed.
Once inside the tent, the patient was checked out by medical personnel and injuries treated. If an OD was in progress, a counselor would go one-on-one with the strangeness until the problem was resolved. Piece of cake.
Or, on this particular occasion, a very trippy piece of cake. One of the amenities for the Rock Medicine personnel was a curtained-off break area supplied with fruit, juices and homemade snacks. On that day some anonymous joker had decided to spice a donation pumpkin-ginger cake with hashish.
It was very good cake, and just about everybody had a piece. It was not long before we all figured out what was happening; by that time, however, nearly all of us were in, shall we say, an enhanced state.
Fortunately, this didn’t seem to affect anyone’s effectiveness; on the contrary, at was an absolute blessing with OD patients, somehow making our job much easier.
(Counselor to patient) “Hey, man, listen, it’s the Dead; they got your back;
it’s all right.”
(Patient) “Oh yeah, man, it’s the Dead, it’s the Dead, hey, listen, it’s the Dead! (begins to move and groove, smiling broadly).
Before long, everyone—docs, patients, counselors, security guards, anyone within a 100-foot radius of the tent, was grooving happily as the Beach Boys got on stage with the Dead and jammed on into the sunset. No casualties, no hospitalizations, no Thorazine, no problem.
Rock Medicine did, however, develop a darker side. As times passed and changed and concerts got larger, as psychedelic rock and Indian raga gave way to punk and heavy metal, and as experimentation with harder drugs washed down with alcohol became more widespread, the Rock Medicine job changed considerably.
It was after going mano-a-mano with a large escaped guy on PCP in the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum at a Led Zeppelin concert that I decided to cede my place in RM to larger and stronger volunteers for whom a bit of brawling and barf-dodging seemed a fair trade for being part of the concert scene.
I’m happy to say that Rock Medicine is still going strong, and now includes many non-rock events involving large numbers of people. Below is a great article describing the phenomenon 40 years on. The music has changed many times over, but not the caring.
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16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Haight Street, San Francisco, California, 1968
THE RIGHTEOUS RAG AND THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS ANTEATER
In 1968, while working as a graduate teaching assistant at San Francisco State, I began to supplement my tiny academic income with a job as salesperson for a Haight St. Clothing shop called the Righteous Rag.
The Rag, owned by an inventive clothing designer named Corky and his partner
Wayne, specialized in one-of-a-kind and custom-made creations, featuring Corky
and Wayne’s work and that of other aspiring local designers.
The shop’s own interior design was not particularly “hippie.” It was more like an art gallery—spare, open and well-lit, displaying unusual fashion pieces as if they were objects d’art, which many of them were.
I was encouraged to wear some of these creations while working, and to submit my own designs (one of these, a strategically peekaboo arrangement of leather straps, was Lady Gaga before its time, and sold almost immediately).
The Rag’s patrons were those who were both cool and had money, which often meant rock musicians and their friends; some would go on to become (or were already) household names, while others...would not.
The big record companies were falling over themselves to sign new San Francisco bands, just in case one of them turned out to be another Santana or Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Many of these groups were one-chance wonders, with names
like Wedge and Morning Glory and Raspberry Wristwatch, full of themselves,
spending newfound cash and dropping references to “the album” into every other
sentence.
Occasionally the store would host a reception for one of the more promising groups. Needless to say, it was a kick to lead a double life—serious graduate student and cool Haight Street hippie chick.
Oh yes, the anteater. It seemed that everyone was inventing styles and personalities, some of which utilized live accessories. One of these innovators was a gorgeous transperson who strolled about with a baby anteater—it was about the size of a small dog, and nicely leash-trained.
I was asked to mind the little guy one day in the Rag while his owner was in a dressing room, and I picked him up for a cuddle. I learned quickly that you just can’t cuddle an anteater.
They are densely solid muscular creatures, and their greatest impulse when picked up, I discovered, is to pull themselves forward with a series of digging movements. Before I knew it, the anteater had propelled himself over my shoulder and down my back.
Inside my dress.
It’s difficult to describe the sensation of a slightly panicked anteater trapped in one’s clothing, especially when there’s no one in the immediate vicinity to help deal with it.
Fortunately, its owner, overhearing the encounter, leaped out of the dressing room and quickly unzipped us. No anteaters were harmed in the making of this anecdote, although I sustained a few scratches to my back and booty, and was never able to put that particular dress on again without giggling. Close as we were, I never got his name.
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17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Early 1970s
MY SECOND FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
I met San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle at the perfect time for both of us. I was a fairly new Rolling Stone feature writer, always in search of a hot story; Lyle was in the early stages of a double lifetime crusade: 1) to improve levels of sanitation and professionalism in the then-fairly-raunchy tattoo world, and 2) to liberate his profession from its somewhat sleazy biker-gang-drunken-sailor image and legitimize it as an actual art form.
Lyle’s version of our first encounter appears at 2:15 in the following video:
(Lyle Tuttle/3:23)
It was SO easy to write about Lyle, a colorful character in every sense of the word, with a good story for every occasion, not to mention an insatiable intellect and curiosity.
He was an especially good fit for Rolling Stone, as a Lyle Tuttle tattoo had by that time become a Very Cool (and a little badass) Accessory for rock musicians and other 1970s luminaries—among them Janis Joplin, Cher, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and Peter Fonda.
In 1972, I introduced Lyle to another friend, Karen Thorsen, who was then an editor at LIFE magazine. Karen got a dainty butterfly tattoo and her own Lyle story.
The hook for the main photo in the four-page LIFE spread was a brilliant
fashion statement: a long-sleeved bodyshirt with Lyle’s upper-half tattoos
faithfully reproduced on it.
The shirt was an instant bestseller, and Lyle became somewhat of a media darling, a role he took in stride, not altering his impish county-boy persona one bit.
He began to be invited as a novelty item to exclusive parties, like the one in London where he encountered John Lennon—resplendent in a new Lyle Tuttle bodyshirt.
When Lyle, sporting a modest long-sleeved dress shirt, complimented him on the garment, Lennon, having no idea to whom he was speaking, enthusiastically described its origin at length, pointed out various tattoo features, praised its coolness, and offered to tell Lyle where to get one.
Lyle, casually unbuttoning his own shirt, pulled it open to reveal his upper body, smiled sweetly, and replied; “No thanks, I own the original.”
Beatle gotcha.
##########################
18. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Rome, Italy; 1970S
MEMENTO MORI: MY FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
After media appearances in the early 1970s had made him somewhat of a celebrity, my friend, tattooist Lyle Tuttle was invited to speak on tattoo art at a fine-arts festival in Rome, Italy.
A little backstory is necessary here: having learned to build tattoo machines
from scratch in his teens (all tattooists did at that time; there were no
manufacturers), Lyle had since become an accomplished metalsmith.
At the time I met him, he was just beginning to create silver jewelry inspired by tattoo design. He had also become, at that time, more or less house tattooist for the Grateful Dead and their families and entourage.
As a human skull crowned with roses played a large part in the band’s image and mythology, its members started asking Lyle to make them skull-themed jewelry. Lyle was happy to oblige, and, characteristically, began deeply researching skull- and death-related imagery and mythology, including, inevitably, the somewhat arcane concept of “Memento Mori.”
This exhortation—Latin for “Remember Death”—was an integral part of religious and daily life in medieval times of plague, war, and early mortality. It was also a common artistic theme, repeated in images such as the famous painted, drawn or sculpted “Dances of Death” still to be found throughout Europe.
One of Lyle’s finest cranial creations was a memento mori he kept for himself: a bracelet of eerily grinning skulls linked by silver bands and balls, simultaneously very elegant and very creepy.
So, back to Rome, at a time when LT was in the midst of his skull research, and decided, naturally, to take a look at the city’s famed Catacombs, repository of thousands of disused noggins.
The Catacombs have many entrances, and Lyle obtained directions to the nearest. It was late afternoon, shading into sunset, and this particular entrance was accessed by crossing a shadowy tree-bordered parking lot, in which, as Lyle approached, he noticed there were no cars.
As soon as he entered the lot, however, a disreputable-looking fellow sidled out of the trees, saying, “You want guide? Me, I know Catacomb.”
Ignoring a polite refusal, the lowlife grasped Lyle’s shirtsleeve and started towing him toward a dark pathway, along which could be seen other shadowy figures, lurking.
Naturally, Lyle planted his feet. His "guide" whistled, and suddenly our mild-mannered tattooist found himself backed up against a wall by a semicircle of unsavory and predatory characters, some of them holding knives. Oops.
His response, fortunately, was typically Lyle: taking in the situation, he
quickly conjured up his best Clint Eastwood stink-eye ( a tool acquired while
dealing with rough customers in his youth), then slowly and dramatically lifted
his left hand, swept it across his body, and hauled up his right sleeve,
revealing that his powerful-looking fist was connected to a sinewy length of
tattooed arm braceleted with skulls—glowing and grinning eerily in the last of
the daylight—which he thrust forward and rattled menacingly, intoning, in his
deepest whisper/growl: “MEMENTO MORI !!!”
The thugs jumped, shrieked like little girls, and took off running. Lyle, all things considered, decided he’d better visit the Catacombs during the daylight hours. (He said later, recounting the story, “It was the only thing I could think of to do. If it hadn’t worked, I was screwed.”)
You gotta love the guy. A cool cat. A smart cat. And, oh yeah, nobody’s pussy.
##############################
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY Syracuse, New York, 1966
THE HEIGHT OF NAUGHTINESS
So, this photo of me and football-legend-to-be Larry Csonka, just a few years
before he morphed into the most terrifying running back in the AFL, was taken
in 1966, in his dorm room. No, not what you’re thinking; let me explain.
From 1962 to 1966, I was an English major at Syracuse University, and a tutor in English for several members of the Big Orange football team.
This was in one of the eras of SU gridiron glory in which the school actually cared about players’ GPAs, thus I found myself periodically sitting in the library discussing the mysteries of Wordsworth and Shakespeare with very large, very nice men who treated me like fine china with a brain.
The photo was taken on a late winter Saturday afternoon; Larry’s friend and roommate Charlie Brown had just gotten the news that he had been signed by the Chicago Bears, with a new Corvette thrown in.
I was huddled in my dorm room nursing the last of a very nasty flu (check out the red nose and pallor in the photo) when I got a call from two very jubilant fellows who wanted me to come out and celebrate with them.
What else could I do? They offered to buy me hot cocoa, and they were both thoroughly nice guys, so I stuffed my pockets full of tissues and coughdrops, wrapped up warmly, and went downstairs.
Larry wasn’t in great shape either, having unintentionally punched out the door of a telephone booth the day before (he was a growing boy who often still didn’t know his own strength), and his right hand (not visible in the photo) was heavily stitched and bandaged. He was stuffed with antibiotics and painkillers and off alcohol, I didn’t drink, and Charlie was the designated driver, so our celebration consisted of cocoa and pretzels at a local bar.
That apparently seemed tame to the guys. They got it into their heads that it would be fun to smuggle me up to their dorm room, wrapped in a rug, just to see if they could get away with it. These were much more innocent and more restrictive times (no members of the opposite sex in the dorm rooms EVER), but these were also friends of mine who wanted to act like kids; moreover I was too tired to argue, so I went along with it, was duly wrapped and smuggled by two giggling hunks, and wound up in their dorm room on one of the higher floors of Sadler Hall, jock haven.
In the photo (taken by Charlie), Larry is showing me a photo of his fiancée Pamela, whom he would marry in 1967. We stayed in the room for about five minutes, posed for two photos (I lost the other), and wrapped and giggled back down the stairs and back to my dorm, where I went to my room and slept for 24 hours.
When I woke up, I figured I’d dreamed the whole thing. But then there was this photo.
Larry Csonka played fullback at Syracuse from 1965 to 1967, and was named an All-American. He established many of the school's rushing records, was the Most Valuable Player in the East–West Shrine Game, the Hula Bowl, and the College All-Star Game, and In 1989, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
He was the No. 1 draft pick of the Miami Dolphins in 1968, and in 1973 was
voted “Super Athlete of the Year” by the Professional Football Writers
Association, when the Dolphins won a second straight title and
"Zonk,"as he was known, was the Super Bowl VIII MVP.
He was dubbed the 10th toughest football player of all time in the 1996 film The NFL's 100 Toughest Players. When asked about Csonka's bruising running style, Dolphins' offensive line coach Monte Clark responded, "When Csonka goes on safari, the lions roll up their windows."
After his retirement in 1979, Larry became a motivational speaker, coach, general manager (in the USFL) color commentator and analyst, restaurateur, advocate for several charities, and the host and producer of a popular TV show called North to Alaska.
Charlie Brown, who actually liked poetry as much as football, played for the
Chicago Bears and the Buffalo Bills for several years before retiring from the
sport to attend the prestigious Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs, do his time in the Army and go to work for United Airlines. He is
currently president of the Chicago NFL Alumni Association.
###############################
20. THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Wilds of New Hampshire, c. 1983
THE TOILET SPEECH
or,
TWO SHEETS PER WIPE
The late Susan Herman (1943-2009), co-founder and co-director of the Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, may have been barely over five feet tall, but, by golly, she was a force to be reckoned with.
Organization with humor and compassion was her specialty, and she was
especially ingenious when it came to the very practical annual necessity of
adjusting the toileting habits of incoming residents at the Interlocken
International Summer Camp.
This was the situation: the camp was located in a pristine New Hampshire wilderness area, far from any sewer hookup. Thus, the daily plumbing arrangements for about 200 people—students, staff members, administration and guests—centered on a delicate system of septic tanks, perforated pipe and leachfields (see below).
The students and staff at the summer camp came from a dizzying array of socio-economic backgrounds in the US and many other countries. They arrived from big cities, tiny villages, jungles, suburbs, deserts, inner cities, wealthy regions and poor ones, all with varying elimination habits and degrees of plumbing sophistication.
Given the camp’s septic limitations, it was absolutely necessary from day one to get certain practical points of toilet behavior across to all potential potty-users, whatever their upbringing and/or previous experience.
Thus was born The Toilet Speech. At the beginning of each summer session, Susan would stand and solemnly deliver a pokerfaced and delicately hilarious oration about toilet use at Camp.
“Some people,” it began, “live in the city; some people live in the country.”
Then the props would begin to appear: a section of pipe to show the actual width in use at Camp: a toilet seat to act as a visual gateway, an escalating collection of objects (large wads of toilet paper, facial wipes, paper bags, cardboard TP tubes, tennis balls, socks, underpants, rubber duckies, teddy bears, etc.) that were NEVER under any circumstances to be put into the toilet.
Then the part that EVERYONE remembered about what doesn’t go into the toilet: the ceremonial and straight-faced unwrapping of a sanitary pad, followed by the dipping-by-the-string of a new tightly-furled tampon into a cup of tea, and its subsequent formidable expansion, greeted by giggles and horrified shrieks.
The speech ended with the solemn exhortation that the only things that should go into the toilet were “your bodily wastes and” (everybody chant along) “TWO SHEETS PER WIPE!”
Susan Herman, among her many other subsequent honors in education and academia,
thus also served as Official Muse for yours truly and John “Odds” Bodkin, musician
and storyteller extraordinaire, who was an artist-in-residence at Interlocken
for several years. In the mid-1980s, we abridged The Toilet Speech into
country-music form; It received, of course, a sitting ovation.
THE TOILET SONG
1. There are toilets in the city,
There are toilets in the town,
If they fill up in the city,
You just flush, and it goes down,
Disappears into the sewer
And gets floated clean away,
And you never have to worry
That it’ll stop. And stink. And stay.
(Chorus) If it’s yellow, let it mellow,
If it’s brown, flush it down,
One moment it’s inside you,
And the next it’s in the ground,
It goes back to where it comes from,
That’s what makes the world go ‘round.
It’s such fun to use the toilet in the country!
If you sprinkle when you tinkle,
Please be neat and wipe the seat.
If you stoop when you poop,
Look out where you put your feet.
Keep the bathroom looking tidy,
And your bottom smelling sweet,
It’s such fun to use the toilet in the country!
2. But toilets in the country
Need particular attention,
Or they soon become congested with
Debris too gross to mention,
As the septic tank regurgitates
And the murky water rises,
Full of charming earthy colors
And unspeakable surprises
(Chorus)
3. So if you live in the country,
Just obey these simple rules
For avoiding floods and stop-ups
And unsanitary pools,
When you use your toilet paper,
Don’t just give a hasty swipe,
(Only amateurs need any more
Than two small sheets per wipe),
Don’t flush sanitary napkins
(They’ll just bottle up the pipe),
You must remember that you’re living in the country.
(Chorus)
Susan, wherever you are, I’ll bet the toilets are immaculate.
End of Part Three; More to come.ROCK MEDICINE
A little history from Wikipedia:
"Through the benefit concerts organized with Bill Graham in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Inaba and Dr. George "Skip" Gay created Rock Medicine with the support of Dr. David Smith. In the spring of 1973, Bill Graham staged two consecutive Saturday concerts at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, CA featuring The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin.
Bill Graham asked the Clinic to staff a "medical emergency care tent" during both concerts. These small stadium concerts, about 18,000 at the Dead and 25,000 at Led Zeppelin, evolved into Bill Graham's Days on the Green concert series. The "medical emergency care tent" became Rock Medicine, which is a branch of the Clinic that still exists today and provides medical care at hundreds of Northern California music concerts and events each year."
 |
| Bill Graham (R) and Dr. David Smith |
Thus Rock Medicine was born, and, having trained intensively by talking down numerous ODs in the Hog Farm rescue tepee at Woodstock, I was a first-round draft pick.
Our first major event was a concert in Kezar Stadium, located at the edge of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a few blocks from the clinic and home of the 49ers before pro football went wide-screen. The selection of acts was perplexing but inspired: the Beach Boys opening for the Grateful Dead. Go figure.
 |
| Kezar Stadium, 1973 |
 |
Once inside the tent, the patient was checked out by medical personnel and injuries treated. If an OD was in progress, a counselor would go one-on-one with the strangeness until the problem was resolved. Piece of cake.
Or, on this particular occasion, a very trippy piece of cake. One of the amenities for the Rock Medicine personnel was a curtained-off break area supplied with fruit, juices and homemade snacks. On that day some anonymous joker had decided to spice a donation pumpkin-ginger cake with hashish.
It was very good cake, and just about everybody had a piece. It was not long before we all figured out what was happening; by that time, however, nearly all of us were in, shall we say, an enhanced state.
Fortunately, this didn’t seem to affect anyone’s effectiveness; on the contrary, at was an absolute blessing with OD patients, somehow making our job much easier.
 |
| The Dead; better than Thorazine. |
(Patient) “Oh yeah, man, it’s the Dead, it’s the Dead, hey, listen, it’s the Dead! (begins to move and groove, smiling broadly).
Before long, everyone—docs, patients, counselors, security guards, anyone within a 100-foot radius of the tent, was grooving happily as the Beach Boys got on stage with the Dead and jammed on into the sunset. No casualties, no hospitalizations, no Thorazine, no problem.
Rock Medicine did, however, develop a darker side. As times passed and changed and concerts got larger, as psychedelic rock and Indian raga gave way to punk and heavy metal, and as experimentation with harder drugs washed down with alcohol became more widespread, the Rock Medicine job changed considerably.
It was after going mano-a-mano with a large escaped guy on PCP in the bowels of the Oakland Coliseum at a Led Zeppelin concert that I decided to cede my place in RM to larger and stronger volunteers for whom a bit of brawling and barf-dodging seemed a fair trade for being part of the concert scene.
I’m happy to say that Rock Medicine is still going strong, and now includes many non-rock events involving large numbers of people. Below is a great article describing the phenomenon 40 years on. The music has changed many times over, but not the caring.
########################
16. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Haight Street, San Francisco, California, 1968
THE RIGHTEOUS RAG AND THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS ANTEATER
In 1968, while working as a graduate teaching assistant at San Francisco State, I began to supplement my tiny academic income with a job as salesperson for a Haight St. Clothing shop called the Righteous Rag.
 |
| 2000s legs protruding from former Righteous Rag building On Haight St.. |
The shop’s own interior design was not particularly “hippie.” It was more like an art gallery—spare, open and well-lit, displaying unusual fashion pieces as if they were objects d’art, which many of them were.
I was encouraged to wear some of these creations while working, and to submit my own designs (one of these, a strategically peekaboo arrangement of leather straps, was Lady Gaga before its time, and sold almost immediately).
The Rag’s patrons were those who were both cool and had money, which often meant rock musicians and their friends; some would go on to become (or were already) household names, while others...would not.
The big record companies were falling over themselves to sign new San Francisco bands, just in case one of them turned out to be another Santana or Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service.
 |
| A duo called Silver Apples plays inside the Rag. |
Occasionally the store would host a reception for one of the more promising groups. Needless to say, it was a kick to lead a double life—serious graduate student and cool Haight Street hippie chick.
Oh yes, the anteater. It seemed that everyone was inventing styles and personalities, some of which utilized live accessories. One of these innovators was a gorgeous transperson who strolled about with a baby anteater—it was about the size of a small dog, and nicely leash-trained.
I was asked to mind the little guy one day in the Rag while his owner was in a dressing room, and I picked him up for a cuddle. I learned quickly that you just can’t cuddle an anteater.
They are densely solid muscular creatures, and their greatest impulse when picked up, I discovered, is to pull themselves forward with a series of digging movements. Before I knew it, the anteater had propelled himself over my shoulder and down my back.
Inside my dress.
It’s difficult to describe the sensation of a slightly panicked anteater trapped in one’s clothing, especially when there’s no one in the immediate vicinity to help deal with it.
Fortunately, its owner, overhearing the encounter, leaped out of the dressing room and quickly unzipped us. No anteaters were harmed in the making of this anecdote, although I sustained a few scratches to my back and booty, and was never able to put that particular dress on again without giggling. Close as we were, I never got his name.
#############################
17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Early 1970s
MY SECOND FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
I met San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle at the perfect time for both of us. I was a fairly new Rolling Stone feature writer, always in search of a hot story; Lyle was in the early stages of a double lifetime crusade: 1) to improve levels of sanitation and professionalism in the then-fairly-raunchy tattoo world, and 2) to liberate his profession from its somewhat sleazy biker-gang-drunken-sailor image and legitimize it as an actual art form.
 |
| Our Rolling Stone debut (not my behind, though) |
Lyle’s version of our first encounter appears at 2:15 in the following video:
(Lyle Tuttle/3:23)
It was SO easy to write about Lyle, a colorful character in every sense of the word, with a good story for every occasion, not to mention an insatiable intellect and curiosity.
He was an especially good fit for Rolling Stone, as a Lyle Tuttle tattoo had by that time become a Very Cool (and a little badass) Accessory for rock musicians and other 1970s luminaries—among them Janis Joplin, Cher, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and Peter Fonda.
In 1972, I introduced Lyle to another friend, Karen Thorsen, who was then an editor at LIFE magazine. Karen got a dainty butterfly tattoo and her own Lyle story.
 |
| Lyle's LIFE magazine debut. |
The shirt was an instant bestseller, and Lyle became somewhat of a media darling, a role he took in stride, not altering his impish county-boy persona one bit.
He began to be invited as a novelty item to exclusive parties, like the one in London where he encountered John Lennon—resplendent in a new Lyle Tuttle bodyshirt.
When Lyle, sporting a modest long-sleeved dress shirt, complimented him on the garment, Lennon, having no idea to whom he was speaking, enthusiastically described its origin at length, pointed out various tattoo features, praised its coolness, and offered to tell Lyle where to get one.
Lyle, casually unbuttoning his own shirt, pulled it open to reveal his upper body, smiled sweetly, and replied; “No thanks, I own the original.”
Beatle gotcha.
##########################
18. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Rome, Italy; 1970S
MEMENTO MORI: MY FAVORITE LYLE TUTTLE TATTOO STORY
After media appearances in the early 1970s had made him somewhat of a celebrity, my friend, tattooist Lyle Tuttle was invited to speak on tattoo art at a fine-arts festival in Rome, Italy.
 |
| Lyle with '70s sideburns |
At the time I met him, he was just beginning to create silver jewelry inspired by tattoo design. He had also become, at that time, more or less house tattooist for the Grateful Dead and their families and entourage.
As a human skull crowned with roses played a large part in the band’s image and mythology, its members started asking Lyle to make them skull-themed jewelry. Lyle was happy to oblige, and, characteristically, began deeply researching skull- and death-related imagery and mythology, including, inevitably, the somewhat arcane concept of “Memento Mori.”
This exhortation—Latin for “Remember Death”—was an integral part of religious and daily life in medieval times of plague, war, and early mortality. It was also a common artistic theme, repeated in images such as the famous painted, drawn or sculpted “Dances of Death” still to be found throughout Europe.
One of Lyle’s finest cranial creations was a memento mori he kept for himself: a bracelet of eerily grinning skulls linked by silver bands and balls, simultaneously very elegant and very creepy.
So, back to Rome, at a time when LT was in the midst of his skull research, and decided, naturally, to take a look at the city’s famed Catacombs, repository of thousands of disused noggins.
The Catacombs have many entrances, and Lyle obtained directions to the nearest. It was late afternoon, shading into sunset, and this particular entrance was accessed by crossing a shadowy tree-bordered parking lot, in which, as Lyle approached, he noticed there were no cars.
As soon as he entered the lot, however, a disreputable-looking fellow sidled out of the trees, saying, “You want guide? Me, I know Catacomb.”
Ignoring a polite refusal, the lowlife grasped Lyle’s shirtsleeve and started towing him toward a dark pathway, along which could be seen other shadowy figures, lurking.
Naturally, Lyle planted his feet. His "guide" whistled, and suddenly our mild-mannered tattooist found himself backed up against a wall by a semicircle of unsavory and predatory characters, some of them holding knives. Oops.
 |
| Lyle's stink-eye |
The thugs jumped, shrieked like little girls, and took off running. Lyle, all things considered, decided he’d better visit the Catacombs during the daylight hours. (He said later, recounting the story, “It was the only thing I could think of to do. If it hadn’t worked, I was screwed.”)
 |
| Lyle in his eighties, c. 2010 |
##############################
19. THROWBACK THURSDAY Syracuse, New York, 1966
THE HEIGHT OF NAUGHTINESS
 |
From 1962 to 1966, I was an English major at Syracuse University, and a tutor in English for several members of the Big Orange football team.
This was in one of the eras of SU gridiron glory in which the school actually cared about players’ GPAs, thus I found myself periodically sitting in the library discussing the mysteries of Wordsworth and Shakespeare with very large, very nice men who treated me like fine china with a brain.
The photo was taken on a late winter Saturday afternoon; Larry’s friend and roommate Charlie Brown had just gotten the news that he had been signed by the Chicago Bears, with a new Corvette thrown in.
I was huddled in my dorm room nursing the last of a very nasty flu (check out the red nose and pallor in the photo) when I got a call from two very jubilant fellows who wanted me to come out and celebrate with them.
What else could I do? They offered to buy me hot cocoa, and they were both thoroughly nice guys, so I stuffed my pockets full of tissues and coughdrops, wrapped up warmly, and went downstairs.
Larry wasn’t in great shape either, having unintentionally punched out the door of a telephone booth the day before (he was a growing boy who often still didn’t know his own strength), and his right hand (not visible in the photo) was heavily stitched and bandaged. He was stuffed with antibiotics and painkillers and off alcohol, I didn’t drink, and Charlie was the designated driver, so our celebration consisted of cocoa and pretzels at a local bar.
That apparently seemed tame to the guys. They got it into their heads that it would be fun to smuggle me up to their dorm room, wrapped in a rug, just to see if they could get away with it. These were much more innocent and more restrictive times (no members of the opposite sex in the dorm rooms EVER), but these were also friends of mine who wanted to act like kids; moreover I was too tired to argue, so I went along with it, was duly wrapped and smuggled by two giggling hunks, and wound up in their dorm room on one of the higher floors of Sadler Hall, jock haven.
In the photo (taken by Charlie), Larry is showing me a photo of his fiancée Pamela, whom he would marry in 1967. We stayed in the room for about five minutes, posed for two photos (I lost the other), and wrapped and giggled back down the stairs and back to my dorm, where I went to my room and slept for 24 hours.
When I woke up, I figured I’d dreamed the whole thing. But then there was this photo.
Larry Csonka played fullback at Syracuse from 1965 to 1967, and was named an All-American. He established many of the school's rushing records, was the Most Valuable Player in the East–West Shrine Game, the Hula Bowl, and the College All-Star Game, and In 1989, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
 |
| "Zonk" |
He was dubbed the 10th toughest football player of all time in the 1996 film The NFL's 100 Toughest Players. When asked about Csonka's bruising running style, Dolphins' offensive line coach Monte Clark responded, "When Csonka goes on safari, the lions roll up their windows."
After his retirement in 1979, Larry became a motivational speaker, coach, general manager (in the USFL) color commentator and analyst, restaurateur, advocate for several charities, and the host and producer of a popular TV show called North to Alaska.
 |
| Charlie Brown (#22 for the Chicago Bears) comes to check on a sacked teammate. |
 |
| Larry Csonka, retired and fishin'. |
 |
| Charlie Brown, lookin' sharp post-football. |
20. THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Wilds of New Hampshire, c. 1983
THE TOILET SPEECH
or,
TWO SHEETS PER WIPE
The late Susan Herman (1943-2009), co-founder and co-director of the Interlocken Center for Experiential Education, may have been barely over five feet tall, but, by golly, she was a force to be reckoned with.
 |
| Susan presents the Toilet Speech |
This was the situation: the camp was located in a pristine New Hampshire wilderness area, far from any sewer hookup. Thus, the daily plumbing arrangements for about 200 people—students, staff members, administration and guests—centered on a delicate system of septic tanks, perforated pipe and leachfields (see below).
The students and staff at the summer camp came from a dizzying array of socio-economic backgrounds in the US and many other countries. They arrived from big cities, tiny villages, jungles, suburbs, deserts, inner cities, wealthy regions and poor ones, all with varying elimination habits and degrees of plumbing sophistication.
Given the camp’s septic limitations, it was absolutely necessary from day one to get certain practical points of toilet behavior across to all potential potty-users, whatever their upbringing and/or previous experience.
Thus was born The Toilet Speech. At the beginning of each summer session, Susan would stand and solemnly deliver a pokerfaced and delicately hilarious oration about toilet use at Camp.
“Some people,” it began, “live in the city; some people live in the country.”
Then the props would begin to appear: a section of pipe to show the actual width in use at Camp: a toilet seat to act as a visual gateway, an escalating collection of objects (large wads of toilet paper, facial wipes, paper bags, cardboard TP tubes, tennis balls, socks, underpants, rubber duckies, teddy bears, etc.) that were NEVER under any circumstances to be put into the toilet.
Then the part that EVERYONE remembered about what doesn’t go into the toilet: the ceremonial and straight-faced unwrapping of a sanitary pad, followed by the dipping-by-the-string of a new tightly-furled tampon into a cup of tea, and its subsequent formidable expansion, greeted by giggles and horrified shrieks.
The speech ended with the solemn exhortation that the only things that should go into the toilet were “your bodily wastes and” (everybody chant along) “TWO SHEETS PER WIPE!”
 |
| Me in those days |
 |
| John "Odds" Bodkin, New Hampshire State Storyteller and composer of the tune for "The Toilet Song." |
1. There are toilets in the city,
There are toilets in the town,
If they fill up in the city,
You just flush, and it goes down,
Disappears into the sewer
And gets floated clean away,
And you never have to worry
That it’ll stop. And stink. And stay.
(Chorus) If it’s yellow, let it mellow,
If it’s brown, flush it down,
One moment it’s inside you,
And the next it’s in the ground,
It goes back to where it comes from,
That’s what makes the world go ‘round.
It’s such fun to use the toilet in the country!
If you sprinkle when you tinkle,
Please be neat and wipe the seat.
If you stoop when you poop,
Look out where you put your feet.
Keep the bathroom looking tidy,
And your bottom smelling sweet,
It’s such fun to use the toilet in the country!
2. But toilets in the country
Need particular attention,
Or they soon become congested with
Debris too gross to mention,
As the septic tank regurgitates
And the murky water rises,
Full of charming earthy colors
And unspeakable surprises
(Chorus)
3. So if you live in the country,
Just obey these simple rules
For avoiding floods and stop-ups
And unsanitary pools,
When you use your toilet paper,
Don’t just give a hasty swipe,
(Only amateurs need any more
Than two small sheets per wipe),
Don’t flush sanitary napkins
(They’ll just bottle up the pipe),
You must remember that you’re living in the country.
(Chorus)
Susan, wherever you are, I’ll bet the toilets are immaculate.
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ALL MY BLOGS TO DATE
MEMOIRS (This is not as daunting as it looks.
Each section contains 20 short essays, ranging in length from a few paragraphs
to a few pages. Great bathroom reading.
They’re not in sequential order, so one can start
anywhere.)
NOTE: If you prefer to read these on paper, you
can highlight/copy/paste into a Word doc and print them out, (preferably
two-sided or on the unused side of standard-sized paper).
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part
One
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part
Two
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part
Three
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Four
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Five
THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part
Six
NEW! THROWBACK
THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Seven
NEW! THROWBACK
THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES: Part Eight
*********************************
ILLUSTRATED ADVENTURES IN VERSE
NEW! FLYING TIME; OR, THE WINGS
OF KAYLIN SUE
(2020)
(38 lines, 17 illustrations)
TRE & THE ELECTRO-OMNIVOROUS GOO
(2018)
(160 lines, 26 illustrations)
DRACO& CAMERON
(2017)
http://dracoandcameron.blogspot.com/ (36
lines, 18 illustrations)
CHRISTINA SUSANNA
(1984/2017)
https://christinasusanna.blogspot.com/ (168
lines, 18 illustrations)
OBSCURELY ALPHABETICAL & D IS FOR DYLAN
(2017) (1985)
https://obscurelyalphabetical.blogspot.com/ (41
lines, 8 illustrations)
**************************************
ARTWORK
AMIE HILL: CALLIGRAPHY & DRAWINGS
AMIE HILL: COLLAGES 1https://amiehillcollages1.blogspot.com/
***********************************
LIBERA HISTORICAL TIMELINE (2007-PRESENT)
For Part One (introduction to Libera and to the Timeline, extensive overview & 1981-2007), please go to: http://liberatimeline.blogspot.com/
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