OneGuyFromBarlick

Bel Geddes

I have seen the future. Model for the “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, attr. to Norman Bel Geddes.

In retrospect, 1939 was a year for nightmares, as (in September) Hitler’s mechanized legions crashed into Poland. ‘The War’ (which some say began earlier in Spain, China and Africa) would soon envelop the World. But for Norman Bel Geddes the World’s Fair was a chance to put forward his dream of a world designed to function as a streamlined model for life. He was a practical man, and since his client for “Futurama” was the General Motors Corporation, this dream centered on motor transport, in particular the private motor car, with a sprinkling of smallish motor transit vehicles and a very few large trucks. Bel Geddes’s 35,000 square feet diorama emphasized cityscapes, but in 1940, in his Magic Motorways, Bel Geddes saw “how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country—across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns—never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed, and economy.” He did pay some attention to suburbs, full of domestic houses with their integral double garages facing the street and emphasizing the home’s dormitory and transport functions. Sounds like a nightmare. Implemented here, it devastated East St. Louis, now a junction for five motorways. But to see the nightmare in action it’s best to visit two Paris suburbs: La Défense to the north and Les Espaces d’Abraxas to the east, the first lived in by corporations and the latter by the workforce. The fact that Bel Geddes was an enthusiast for eugenics makes it all seem sinister. But it’s easier to remember Norman Bel Geddes as a midwestern boy who in Emersonian fashion tried many fields and (nearly) always succeeded. He was born Norman Melancton Geddes, in Adrian, Michigan, on April 27, 1893. He had a tough childhood in several places, and never got beyond 10th grade. But he learned a variety of skills on a variety of jobs (from shipping clerk to magician), changed his surname (to fit his first wife’s middle name of “Belle”), and in 1916-18 landed as a revolutionary theater designer in Los Angeles (the city’s famed Little Theatre) and New York (the Metropolitan Opera, no less). His cool, simple sets shed the excessive detail of Victorian stages and yet seemed to capture the essence of whatever was being performed. They also tended to save money. Suddenly famous, Bel Geddes saw an opportunity to become the da Vinci of design, set up on his own, and began to design everything: cocktail shakers, radios, workdesks, serving trays, water jugs, even ocean liners. Other than the last-named, which never floated, Bel Geddes originals sell today for thousands of dollars and are much more pleasing to the mind’s eye than his 1939 city of tomorrow. ©.

NIGHT BASEBALL

I don’t believe there is any question that night baseball is the exact solution to attendance problems in the minors. There is a period from 8 o’clock to 10 at night that the average man has nothing to do, and I believe that the baseball park will be the place to find him this summer. Dale Gear, quoted in The Sporting News, March 20, 1930.

Whatever Mr. Gear’s take on the evening habits of the “average man,” he was president of two minor leagues and he knew that minor league attendance, after a boom in the early 1920s, was declining. He also probably knew of two clubs in his leagues who were planning to install lights for night games, the Des Moines (IA) Demons and the Independence (KS) Producers. Both teams were owned by enterprising businessmen. Des Moines’ Charles Keyser had begun his baseball career in his teens by capturing the franchise for selling scorecards at St. Louis Cardinals games, then moved to Des Moines to take over the Demons. And the Demons were the first professional baseball club to make (lighted) night games the main staple of their home schedule. But the honor (if such it was) for staging the first lighted regular season night game between professional baseball teams went to the Independence Producers, on April 28, 1930. A plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame says so, and so does another plaque near the site of the Producers’ “Baseball Park.” Of course the issue is contested. Lighted night games had been played before, here and there, since the late 1880s, between well-heeled amateur clubs, for instance, and sometimes by professional clubs, but it had been temporary lighting and quickly taken down. But why Independence, Kansas, and not Des Moines? The short answer may be that the Producers’ business manager was Marvin Truby, a self-made Kansas oil millionaire and (to judge by his portraits) the owner of a magnificent double-barreled moustache. And Truby had the enthusiastic support of Independence mayor Charles Kerr, portly and moustache-less, but willing to cut corners to get the lights properly installed (huge steel towers embedded in concrete) in time for the regular season opener against the Muskogee (OK) Indians. The Independence Producers had already played a night game, on April 17, an exhibition affair against a touring exhibition team from Benton Harbor, Michigan. That was the “House of David” club, financed by a Benton Harbor religious revivalist who required his players to follow (at least some of) the rules laid down in the Old Testament. For instance, House of David players didn’t cut their hair or beards, so they made quite a hirsute picture. Whether they played under lights on the Jewish sabbath, I do not know. Anyway, April 17, 1930 was a Thursday. Come the depths of the Great Depression, both the Producers and the Demons would go bankrupt. The “average man” might be idle from 8 to 10 in the evening, but he had no daytime job, either. ©

ARBUTHNOT

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies. John Arbuthnot.

It’s not clear that John Arbuthnot authored such a hopeful thought—“hopeful” in view of our present agonies. But he might have. Arbuthnot did write Proposals for Printing a very Curious Discourse . . . Intitled A Treatise of the Art of Political Lying (1712). The proposed ‘treatise’ was to run to two volumes, in quarto, so we must presume that Arbuthnot had plenty to say about political lying. Alas!! The full treatise never appeared, but one can speculate that Arbuthnot would have viewed the death-by-lying of a political party to be a near inevitability or (to put it another way) a very good bet. For John Arbuthnot was a pioneer statistician. John Arbuthnot ‘of that ilk’ was baptized in Arbuthnot, Scotland, just north of Aberdeen, on April 29, 1667. He was probably baptized by his father, who was an episcopalian priest. In Presbyterian Scotland, that was to be baptized on the wrong side of the religious blanket, and indeed Arbuthnot’s family suffered from a kind of political bastardy. Come the excitements of the Glorious Revolution, two of John’s brothers had to flee to France, tarred with the Jacobite brush. He might have followed them but for his other talents. For besides being entirely enamored of the new science of probability, Arbuthnot was a medic gifted enough to become (in 1707) Queen Anne’s physician in ordinary. How good his medical skills were is not well known, but Anne thought he’d cured her husband and that, in addition to his MD from Aberdeen, was enough. He dabbled in other sciences too, deeply enough to be elected to the Royal Society where (being such a hale fellow well met, he tried to make peace between Isaac Newton and Newton’s detractors). And he was a gifted writer, a satirist of great skill and good (if sometimes biting and bitter) humor. Moving to London in 1691, he honed his satirical skills as a reviewer and soon was a member in good standing of that Grub Street fraternity of literary guns for hire, character assassins of immortal fame. In that great group, Arbuthnot became a high Tory. True to his own family past, he was dubious about the ‘glory’ of 1688-89. True to his satirical skills, he was contemptuous of the ‘Whig Supremacy’ that followed, and he became an intimate friend of the greatest conservative satirists of his age, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Both felt that Arbuthnot should have produced more satire than he did (Swift tells us Arbuthnot let his children play with, even burn, his manuscripts). When in 1734 Alexander Pope heard that Arbuthnot was dying, Pope wrote the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, an eloquent, angry protest against the statistical certainty of mortality. Arbuthnot’s Proposals and Pope’s “Epistle” are easily available online, and I recommend both to your attention. ©.

ANNE OF WOODSTOCK

Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine . . .

What shall I say? to safeguard thine own life,

The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death.

Thus (in Shakespeare’s Richard II) the widowed Duchess of Gloucester urges John of Gaunt to take revenge on her husband’s murderers, including King Richard II. She speaks a truth. One of medieval England’s biggest problems was that too much royal blood flowed in too many noble veins. His nobility required Gaunt to take revenge. In the play, Gaunt sickened and died, leaving us only with a great, prophetic speech, and for her part the Duchess died (offstage) of her grief. In real life, the Duchess’s noble daughter, also named Anne, forsook revenge for the meaner course of “patience.” Despite her admixture of royal blood (Edward III’s) she played a waiting game. This Anne, known to history as Anne of Woodstock, was born on April 30, 1383. Wealth and royal blood made her a hot property, and in 1391, aged 8, she was married off to the Earl of Stafford. He died in 1392, and his widow was then (1396) married to his younger brother, the new Earl of Stafford. He died (in battle) in 1403, at which point Anne (already, at 20, twice-widowed) married Sir William Bouchier. All very confusing, but what melds the narrative together is this young woman, Anne of Woodstock. By the time of Sir William’s death, in 1420, he (a hero at Agincourt in 1415) had been made Count of Eu, in Normandy. Now Anne of Woodstock was a dowager countess three times over. Accidents of death (her mother’s, her father’s, and her brother’s) had also made her an heiress in her own right, and now in 1420 as dowager Countess she held title to estates all over England and in Normandy. Her letters and papers survive to show us a woman capable of managing those interests. As a well-placed courtier, she also helped to make excellent marriages for the children she’d had with Sir William Bouchier and the one son, Humphrey, she’d had with the younger Earl of Stafford. She was not without courage. Her marriage to Bouchier may have been a love match and was certainly contrary to the wishes of King Henry IV (her cousin). In spite of that Anne made good her claims to the estates of her mother and father, and managed Bouchier’s properties while he was off making a hero of himself in France and then after he died. Literate in French and English, knowledgeable in the law, she proved an astute manager (much admired by her stewards). In her last will and testament (which she wrote in English “for best reading and understanding) she recognized all her surviving children (including one, unmarried, who would become Archbishop of Canterbury) and made gifts to her stewards. She was buried in 1438 (beside her third husband) in the priory that was another of her beneficiaries. Anne of Woodstock could not qualify as a Shakespearian heroine (or villainess), but she was a remarkable person. ©

PORTER

R. Porter & Co. . . . are making active progress in the construction of an Aerial Transport, for the express purpose of carrying passengers from New York to California , , , It is expected to put this machine in operation about the 1st of April . . . for $50, including board, and the transport is expected to make a trip to the gold region and back in seven days. Advertisement, posted and in newspapers, early 1849.

The ad boasted that over 200 tickets had been sold and that further subscriptions would be welcome, so (as capacity was limited to 100) further voyages were to be expected. The ad offers yet more evidence of the astonishing virulence of the ‘Gold Fever’ of 1849. Given the date of the first flight, April 1, 1849, one is tempted to see this as a satire, but R. Porter & Co. was deadly serious. Porter actually built three dirigibles (the drawing suggests it was to be propelled somehow by steam power). The first was destroyed by a tornado before it could take flight, presumably before April Fools Day, 1849. The next two failed less dramatically. The Porter in question was Rufus Porter, born near Salem, Massachusetts on May 1, 1792. He was descended from an old Salem family, once very prominent. One ancestral Porter had been involved, fatally, in the witchcraft panic of 1692. Another survived to become the richest landowner in the district. But by the time Rufus came along his branch of the Porter tree had withered. He responded in Yankee fashion by becoming one of his era’s most prolific inventors. He began, modestly, as a shoemaker’s apprentice. Marriage followed, and ten children. He supported them not by cobbling but by painting, “folk art” we might call it today: portraits, farmhouses, landscapes, done in a variety of ways. Inventing, and patenting his inventions, seems to have been a sidelight but in the end a spectacular one, for Rufus’s obituary (1884) remembered him for his “water wheels, windmills, flying ships, rotary engines, and sundry contrivances for abolishing as far as possible agricultural labor.” In the process, Rufus Porter took out over 100 US Patents, a remarkable achievent. Almost all of them, sadly, were commercial failures, He did sell one of his patents, a “revolving rifle” to one Samuel Colt, for $100. That was a not-inconsiderable sum, at the time, but wisely Colt put it aside for different designs. But you can’t support 11 children (there was a second marriage, in 1849) on pipe dreams, and Rufus Porter seems to have made most of his money in publishing tracts about his inventions, and others. Undoubtedly Rufus’s most successful periodical was Scientific American, first published in 1845. He intended Scientific Americanas a weekly, but after ten issues he sold the venture, for $1,000, to two equally ingenious (but more successful) Yankees, Alfred Beach and Orson Munn. Scientific American is still going strong, and I am a subscriber. But I have never flown from New York to California. ©.

PEARLY TEARS

The tears of man in various measure gush

From various sources; gently overflow

From blissful transport some—from clefts of woe

Some with ungovernable impulse rush;

And some, coëval with the earliest blush

Of infant passion, scarcely dare to show

Their pearly lustre—coming but to go

--from William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, number XXXII, “Edward Signing the Warrant for the Execution of Joan of Kent.” (1832).

‘Joan of Kent’ was Joan Bocher, who was executed for heresy—brutally, burned at the stake—on May 2, 1550. She died impenitently, loudly proclaiming that her heresy, in the fullness of time, would be seen as true faith even by her chief accusers. Amongst these men she certainly singled out Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who is believed to have browbeaten King Edward VI into signing the warrant for Joan’s execution. Perhaps Cranmer did. He certainly led the ‘examinations’ of Joan and her heresy. And, probably, Cranmer took it personally. Joan had been involved in a previous religious dispute, in 1543, and Cranmer’s enemies accused him of letting her off the hook, thus encouraging her into even worse heresies. Joan was indeed a radical Protestant, perhaps brought up in it. The name Bocher is even associated with Lollardy, a peoples’ movement against Roman Catholic orthodoxy (particularly clerical corruptions) and anxious to see the Bible in print, in English, and a man named John Bocher figured in religious trials in 1528. But really very little is known about her. It’s interesting, though, that three centuries later William Wordsworth chose to write a sonnet about her and not, for instance, about the Catholic martyr of 1534, the “Maid of Kent” Elizabeth Barton, a nun executed for her outspoken opposition to King Henry VIII’s first divorce and remarriage. Wordsworth had experienced his own religious trials, and this poetical homage to a Protestant martyr was one evidence of his movement towards a moderate if mystical Anglicanism. It strikes me, however, that the real subject of Sonnet XXXII was Edward VI, the boy king, only 12 years old in 1550 when the aged Thomas Cranmer browbeat the lad into signing Joan Bocher’s life away. Did the boy-king really cry tears of pearly luster when he signed the warrant? It’s an unanswerable question. In any case, Cranmer himself would be burned at the stake, only five years later, for his own heresy. Two other bishops involved in Joan Bocher’s examination and trial, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, would suffer the same pains in 1656. We can’t call it Joan Bocher’s revenge. Had Joan survived into the reign of Queen Mary, she would have joined her persecutors at the stake. They were, all of them, Protestant heretics. ©.