(A Medium publication I regularly write for — with the ungainly if apt name of “Crow’s Feet” — issued a writing-prompt challenge about doing things the old-fashioned way and my brain was starting this piece before I even turned the digital page. Enjoy.)
Impeccable digestive system. We’ll get this issue out of the way first.
Coffee, toast and the New York Times to start the day = longevity and the bloom of health. I’m staring at 93 next June, feeling just fine, thank you, and — more to the point here — thanks, NYT print edition.
Before I entered upon what would be a joyful, 26-year late-life marriage there was one delicate issue to be settled. We both required the print edition (in 1992 you weren’t yet a weirdo if you read newspapers) of the New York Times with our morning coffee. As if an augury of that future bliss: he needed the sports section first; I begin with page one and go straight through every section as it comes. Deal.
You cannot digest breakfast while scrolling; it is against the natural order of the universe. (News on TV? God help you.)
There’s more to my read-the-news-the-old-fashioned-way fixation than maintenance of my digestive system, however. Or perhaps the two are related. It’s the angst factor. Watch the faces of two people getting today’s news. The one scrolling through will react with widening eyes and clenched teeth. It’s the way the body handles impending disaster. But the newsprint reader? She gets the disaster one slowly and carefully printed word at a time, just the way God intended. Emotionally digestible.
OK, it’s yesterday’s news by the time it gets to your doorstep. That’s the whole point. You’ve already heard the headlines blaring from everywhere in the world including all of your state-of-the-art devices. You’ve survived the headlines, now you sit down and read what actually happened.
Not to be blunt about it, furthermore, we print subscribers are quietly subsidizing your scrollings. We don’t mind, really. We try not to talk to you about it when your nose is glued to your screen all day.
My obsession may have a tiny bit to do with having had a lifelong career as a freelance writer that spanned decades of working for old-fashioned newspapers. The newspaper world was, in the olden days, one of equal parts grit and glamour. It was also never-ending fun with dashes of enlightenment, watching the business of courthouses and penthouses, trying to communicate the truth of it all.
This ingrained obsession crept up on me slowly. When I was first beginning to read my sister Mimi and I would grab the morning paper and spread the comics on the floor before breakfast. My father, an educator to the bone, soon discovered a tool. “Girls,” he remarked, “if you’re going to read like that, at least start with the front page; then you can skip to the comics.” We actually cheated a lot, doing the comics first; but knowing we’d get a headline question with our orange juice we also spread the front page on the floor.
All these decades later, there may be a symbolism and a further lesson here: Perhaps we should all start the day reading the news on our knees.
Whatever. The like-clockwork digestive system, the mild-mannered demeanor, the frugality in every area of life except print media subscriptions — I credit it all to the foundational daily print newspaper.
Here’s to your health, New York Times print edition. May you live long and prosper.
# # #
This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye (@franjohns,) where I post, once a week, something positive on the political front. It’s almost always possible to find something, I promise. Feel free to visit any time; subscriptions are free.
(Heading into a short week that nonetheless promises long days of news both dark and discouraging, here’s another diversionary tale of people and politics in bygone days. You can’t make any of this stuff up.)
My husband-to-be, then a young bachelor newsguy named Bud, was looking out the window, talking to his friend Tom while waiting for a woman who had answered his house-for-rent ad.
“Interesting,” he said, as he spotted her crossing the street. “It’s Kathleen Cleaver.”
“What are you going to do?” Tom asked?
“If she wants, it,” Bud said, “I’m going to rent the place to her.” Which he did. Bud settled into the garage apartment, renting the two main floors of a dilapidated San Francisco Victorian he’d recently purchased to newlyweds Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. Its location, at 2777 Pine Street a dozen or so blocks west of Fillmore, could have been generously described, at the time, as sketchy.
This was in 1967. It was shortly after Eldridge was paroled from Folsom and San Quentin prisons where he’d been incarcerated for eight years after being convicted of rape and assault with intent to murder. His official position with the Panthers was minister of information.
Many of the houses in the vicinity were in disrepair; others were occupied by citizens of questionable repute. “Aren’t you a little nervous about living there?” Bud was regularly asked by friends who did not come over for tea. “Why?” he regularly replied. “Either the police or the Black Panthers are here at any given time, usually both.”
In little more than a year Eldrige would win fame with publication of his prison memoir Soul on Ice, and subsequently become a fugitive after leading an ambush on Oakland police officers that left two officers wounded. Eldridge was also wounded in that dust-up and his friend and fellow Black Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.
All of which pretty much terminated the lease. Undaunted, Bud went to Black Panther headquarters in Oakland and asked for the remaining rent, which they paid.
Kathleen was the one who handled business affairs at their Pine Street domicile. She was mostly working to advance the causes of the Black Panthers, but helped the family finances by writing for Ramparts Magazine.
Landlord and tenants got along fine though they weren’t exactly close personal friends. My favorite memento of those days is a letter neatly typed on Ramparts letterhead which reads:
“Mr. Johns:
“Please excuse the delay but I have been so god damned busy with these pigs and courts and chaos that I completely forgot to pay the rent. You are very sweet to be so unobtrusive and gentle with me, I think you ar a perfect landlord and I would just like to warn you that you should prepare yourself for any day now some time of assault on this house. I think it is beautiful, I love it, I won’t go away, but the local, federal, international, secret and off duty pigs as well as reagon (sic) . . . wallace . . . alioto et all (sic) want to do us in, Eldridge first, then me. Here’s the rent.
“Peace. – (signed in ink) Mrs. Cleaver”
The Cleavers divorced in 1981 after two children and a life that must never have been dull. Kathleen followed her fugitive husband around the globe before coming back to the U.S. and laying the groundwork for him to come home too. She did post-grad work (law, etc) at Yale and elsewhere, eventually becoming a distinguished lecturer and law professor. He eventually became a Mormon and a conservative Republican. Eldridge died, at 62, in 1998. Kathleen is, as far as I know, alive and well and I would give almost anything to know if she remembers her Pine Street landlord.
Or, for that matter, 2777 Pine Street. Bud sold it not long after the Cleavers left, to help raise the down payment on another Victorian a mile or so farther west that I would later happily call home.
I suspect he sold it for something under $20,000. You could pick it up today — if it were on the market, which it is not — for three or four million. Gentrification has been kind to Pine Street property values.
I sometimes reflect on it all as I walk by the former home of my good husband, who is now, in all likelihood, on some celestial cloud trading stories with Black Panthers and other interesting friends. I try not to take offense at the plaque testifying to the nineteenth century origins of the house and proclaiming it to be the former home of Eldridge Cleaver, “Black Panther and Republican leader.”
Great-Uncle Samuel? I figured he was a horse thief. Maybe a train robber or a bank bandit — those being favorite jobs for early-20th-century gangsters.
In truth, I wasn’t sure he was actually real. When I was a child Uncle Samuel (not to be confused with the patriotic Sam) was spoken of only rarely and always in whispers. I heard enough of those whispers to be eternally curious; but no one, not my mother, aunts or cousins, would offer details or even confirm his former existence.
In 1954, as a budding reporter for the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, I got my mother, then in failing health, to come clean. She told me Samuel was indeed her uncle and “had died in prison,” adding that he had shown up twice in her childhood and she remembered him as a great storyteller. I made brief, unsuccessful attempts to uncover his own story.
Not a pretty story! It seems my great uncle Samuel Hardy (1869–1929) ambushed and murdered his erstwhile friend and neighbor Tiberius Gracchus (Grac) Jones in Nansemond County, VA on October 26,1908, after learning that Grac was planning to prosecute him for selling liquor without a license, among other things. The dying Gracchus is reported to have gasped, “They killed me for telling the truth.”
It took the internet and, more importantly, my committed-genealogist niece Janie in Atlanta to dig up the court records and concurrent reports of Gracchus’ dying words. Otherwise, this little snippet of family history might have been lost forever — which would have suited more than a few members of the clan now living. But for my part, I wanted the Truth.
C’mon. Anybody can have illustrious landowners or famous generals in her past; how many can boast a bona fide n’er-do-well convicted felon?
Samuel’s brother, my gentle-mannered maternal grandfather Porter Hardy, was a Methodist preacher who shepherded small, rural Virginia flocks. He was often paid in eggs or sacks of corn; he fed his family with the help of several chickens, a cow and whatever vegetables they could raise. Nevertheless, he managed to send all six of his children to college in the early years of the twentieth century. My mother, his second child, studied Latin and the classics with her parents and graduated valedictorian of her class in 1915, after two years in an actual schoolroom. The other member of the Class of ’15 was Salutatorian.
The youngest of those six Hardy (in soul and name alike) children, my greatly beloved Uncle Porter, Jr., left the family farm to enter Congress the same year that John F. Kennedy first went to Washington. These tidbits are offered as explanation for the general agreement to keep the family felon as far in the background as humanly possible.
Uncle Porter (center) & friends, c 1946 (Author family photo)
My mother’s confirmation of Uncle Samuel’s existence came as she was beginning a long descent into stroke-related dementia, so I was never able to dig out further details. It was somewhat of a stinging defeat, though, to have turned up absolutely nothing in Virginia prison records, especially since I saw myself as a mid-century Brenda Starr, Reporter.
Seventy years later I was exonerated by Ancestry.com (and Janie, my niece.) My search had been for a Samuel Mahood, my mother having implied — intentionally? I’ll never know — that the errant uncle was her mother’s brother. Had I searched those musty, pre-internet files for someone with my very own name — my given name being Frances Hardy Moreland — I might have solved at least a part of the puzzle. Oh, well.
Here’s the ignominious truth: Samuel somehow learned of his friend and neighbor Grac’s plans, probably through other friends and neighbors. There were few secrets in those rural, county-newspaper-reports-all days, and selling liquor without a license might have been only one of several shady dealings Samuel had going. The local paper didn’t reveal the back story but its account, alongside the eloquent language of the court records in Hardy v Commonwealth paints a vivid picture:
“It appears that the deceased” (that would be Grac) “in company with his next door neighbor, one J.H. Joyner, returned on the railroad train from a trip to Suffolk . . . and after lingering a short time near the office of a justice of the peace . . . left for their homes, walking together till the pathway to Joyner’s home was reached, and then the deceased proceeded in the direction of his own home nearby.”
Sadly, also nearby was my Uncle Samuel, waiting to ambush him with a shotgun blast to the stomach; and, for good measure, an additional three bullets from a pistol. After which, the court records show, “Joyner, who was not far away, not only heard the shots but heard the victim exclaim, ‘You scoundrel!’” Scoundrel indeed. It’s hard to think kindly of Samuel at all. And as the true friend approached (Samuel having by then fled into the darkness) he heard, further, the famous words, “Joyner, they have killed me for telling the truth.”
About this “they” business: it was pitch dark that night and there were no streetlights in the Virginia countryside. Presumably, the multiple weapons suggested multiple assailants to the dying Grac; as far as the lengthily-detailed trial records show, Bad Samuel did it totally on his own. He seems to have taken his pistol with him, but left a №12 bore Ithaca shotgun “known to have been in the accused’s possession” at the scene of the crime.
The plot thickens. “It further appears,” the court learned, “that the accused and the deceased, who had lived for some years within less than a mile of each other, had been friends until within a few months of the murder, when they became exceedingly unfriendly, in fact, bitterly hostile.” Samuel made little effort to protect himself from prosecution in advance. The records show that he “cherished such intense hostility toward the deceased that he had made repeated and malignant threats against his life.”
By this time, as your faithful reporter studies the records, she is becoming convinced that Uncle Samuel was not only a supremely bad dude but possibly the dumbest criminal around. Another neighbor, Joseph I. Johnson, testified to Samuel’s having recently said, “All right. If things turned out like they looked he was going to kill him, damn him.”
The whole business had to have been hard on all these former friends. Joyner and Johnson “clearly appear to be reluctant witnesses,” the records state; with Johnson adding to the above “that he did not know whom the accused was talking about, ‘whether a man or a snake or a mule or who…’” but it was “within the province of the jury to determine the facts…”
Personally, this reporter thinks there may have been more than meets the eye, or at least met the court records. All these gentlemen appear to have been young bachelors. Was there a lady somewhere in the background?
Early on during the court proceedings much was made of the fact that the jury was allowed, “in company with two officers, to attend a moving picture show wherein two suitors for the hand of a lady quarreled, and one of them lay in wait along a road, attacked his rival with a dagger, and felled him to the ground.” The court officers were declared “highly censurable” for taking the jury to such a moving picture show, but the trial proceeded.
If there was a redeemable quality within Samuel Hardy, it never showed up in the court records or family whispers. Not only did he show no remorse and pay no respects to the neighbor family, but as soon as he heard about bloodhounds being called he “mounted a wagon and rode into the forest and remained there until all fear of being pursued had past.”
So here are the facts: Two generations separate me from a murderer, a faithless friend, a dim-wit criminal and a coward. Good grief.
Convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, Samuel went to prison and stayed there for a very long time. No family records indicate that anyone ever went to visit him (though who knows?) and they are unlikely to have been able to afford lawyers. But the wheels of justice grind slowly onward. Samuel died — under circumstances never recorded but presumably in prison — in 1929.
My only consolation is that rumored storyteller reputation. Perhaps it’s the hidden gene that led me to a perfectly respectable MFA in Short Fiction.
Otherwise, the only hope for family redemption lies in niece Janie’s discovery of an earlier possible ancestor who may have been a delegate to the Continental Congress.
This one lived from 1758 to 1785. He had to have been somebody’s uncle; his name was Samuel Hardy.
A publication I write for featured a writing prompt recently asking what historical event is most significant in your memory and how it affected you. Interesting assignment. My life has gone on too long to choose, I think — and including recent years of the Women’s March (and other marches and tumults) quickly gets everything murky. But the prompt immediately prompted this response:
It was simply beyond belief. I think that’s why the Challenger tragedy stays so starkly in my mind. Surely there were plenty of notable others:
I was hitting tennis balls against the garage wall with my sister Mimi when our father called us in to hear FDR on the Philco radio, telling the nation that we were at war. It was December 7, 1941.
I remember Harry Truman on the train platform making a whistlestop speech after that war ended.
There were the appalling shocks of McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. There were assassinations and celebrations and tragedies. Men would walk on the moon.
When the plane struck the first World Trade Center tower, it was barely dawn in San Francisco. My CNN anchor son-in-law called from New York. My husband took the call in another room, came back to bed, and said to just go back to sleep. Later, as we made coffee and turned on the TV, he explained that decision. “I knew we’d be awake for a very long time,” he said, “and I figured you would need another hour or two.”
Each of the above events shifted the world a little on its axis for the creatures who live upon it. Any of them, and countless others we’ve lived through, have shifted our perspective to some degree. Or if not, we weren’t paying attention. Paying attention is never a bad idea.
On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was driving home along the main highway of Daytona Beach, FL, having dropped my step-daughter off at her high school. En route, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched into the brilliant blue skies directly ahead and above.
Living in Daytona, as I briefly did during the 1980s, included many memorable times at Cape Canaveral. Often when there was a night launch we’d take the fishing boat down the Halifax River, drop anchor, and watch the beauty of a flight roaring into the black sky. Daytime launches were possibly less dramatic but equally beautiful.
This one I was idly watching as I drove. Suddenly, the looping white contrails seemed to disintegrate into a large puff. Smaller contrails began to appear in the sky as they fell earthward on separate paths.
It was as if the world stopped.
Like almost every other car on the road, I pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. We simply stared. I remember saying out loud, “No. Nooooo.”
I don’t remember how long I sat there. I remember tears beginning to pour down my face. I remember thinking I could not go home to an empty house, and driving instead to a coffee shop next door to the church I then attended. There was already a small group gathered around a portable TV someone had placed on the counter. There were more tears of disbelief and quiet questions without answers. The coffee was free.
Here’s what we were saying, and what I learned: Life is precious. Hug someone. Try to be kind.
Because no one knows when the contrail ends and splits, or where its spirals go.
Maybe what this country needs is a boarding house revival.
In the very olden days, specifically the century or more ending with the housing boom that followed World War II, the boarding house was everybody’s answer: a home, for a while or a generation, for maiden ladies and traveling salesmen, families on the move but not quite sure where, immigrants and itinerants, students of all ages and inclinations.
Boarding houses were run by couples whose children had grown and left home, by young families in need of extra income, and often by women in the days when few other options existed. Or older people of all types who enjoyed company and had a few spare rooms.
Granted, there was no oversight for health and safety etc; but it was in the boarding house that the citizenry learned manners, handiwork, new trades and how to love — or at least get along with — one’s neighbor. Violations of civility could lead to cold eggs for breakfast.
Memories of these establishments came to me recently at 3 AM, in the form of a song I have certainly not sung for at least 60 or 70 years. There is, I’m sure, some scientific explanation for why I can’t remember what I was talking about at breakfast, but a tune from my college guitar quartet days in 1951 pops into my head, unbidden and utterly precise, words & music complete, at 3 AM. In a continuous loop that is still playing.
In case you don’t want to Google it (several versions appear but mine is the right one) the ‘Boarding House Song’ is below. It is sung to the tune of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ — which is also embedded in my brain but that can wait.
In the boarding house where I lived, everything is growing old; Long gray hairs are in the butter, and the cheese is full of mold.
When the dog died we had sausage; when the cat died, catnip tea. When the landlord died I left there; spareribs were too much for me.
I take the return-of-the-boarding-house-song as an omen.
Problems of housing and homelessness are everywhere today, not to mention the struggle to accomodate immigrants and asylum seekers. Folks in the low-income bracket are often inadequately or improperly housed, and there are all manner of economic pressures on the middle class. Loneliness and depression are on the increase everywhere.
For the obvious solution to all of these issues I refer you to paragraphs three and four above. Civility would be an add-on bonus.
I was six years old when Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. I don’t want to see another one.
If a big country is given permission to invade its smaller neighbor and “do whatever the hell it wants . . .” that’s the way World War III will begin. I’m sorry we have a popular politician — a man who never knew war, never served his country in the military, never knew hardship or had to work for a living and cannot understand the concept of loving one’s neighbor — now cheering for autocrats around the world and wanting them to do whatever the hell they want to the powerless.
The powerless are seldom all bad, weak or soulless; tomorrow we could be them.
Power corrupts, as wise folks have long said; absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m sorry we have a popular politician who wants — and whose followers want him to have — absolute power. Given the power to do whatever the hell he wants, I don’t expect him to love his neighbor — or to care one iota for anyone but himself — which seems to be his pattern.
I remember Germany’s invasion of Poland not because I was a precocious six-year-old but because my parents drummed the evils of autocracy into my sisters and me almost daily over those years. Democracy, we believed and I still do, requires doing whatever seems best rather than whatever the hell some nut case wants.
Among my earliest memories is that of being gently carried downstairs in the middle of the night because my father wanted my sisters and me to hear what a destructive madman sounded like. It was Hitler on the short-wave radio. The message of those childhood days was that we were safe, we were fortunate to live in a democratic free society, and our country would not let any autocrat do whatever the hell he wanted. My father, a compassionate man with language skills the politician in question lacks, would have used different phraseology. The politician in question is, IMHO, another destructive madman.
It is heartbreaking to watch my country, which throughout my long lifetime has welcomed the tired, the poor and the immigrant masses, now tilt towards becoming a country willing to turn its back on them all. And as for our allies — well, this popular politician is encouraging his followers to let our allies’ bigger neighbors do whatever the hell they want to them too — as long as his strongman heroes stay in power.
I remember Pearl Harbor, when my country entered that last World War, and the kamikaze pilots who knowingly turned themselves into suicide bombs because their autocratic emperor led them to believe this was the brave and honorable thing to do. And I remember D-Day and V-J Day and V-E Day and the eventual end to a terrible war that cost untold loss and suffering to brave and honorable military men and women along with millions of innocents.
I remember dark times for my country’s democracy in the years that followed, when it was threatened by extremists driven by fear or a thirst for power or both. Democracy always survived, and nobody was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted without suffering consequences. The politician in question knows nothing of all that. Having no interest in history, he also knows nothing of its mistakes, or of the lessons history could teach him.
Such as: war is hell. Democracy is fragile but worth preserving. And if humankind is to realize its humanity, no one should consider it his right to do whatever the hell he wants.
It gets worse. After yesterday’s post, in which the linking of abortion to “Black Genocide” by Georgia Right to Life was reported with sadness and a little rage, I received a link to a story in the European edition of Telegraph U.K. It concerns a newly launched campaign to link abortion in Poland with Hitler’s extermination of Polish Jews. It reaches a brand new low.
Accompanying the article is a large, color photo of the poster which is at the centerpiece of this campaign. A leering Hitler, two horrific pictures. You may or may not want to read the Telegraph story or view the nightmare-producing poster. You are probably not old enough to remember Adolph Hitler, but I am. His images were all over the newsreels of my childhood. My father woke my sister and me in the middle of the night one night to hear his voice over the short wave radio so we would know the voice of a madman. Some of my most cherished and admired friends are Holocaust survivors or children of Holocaust survivors. Now, because I believe in a woman’s right to control her own body, to be equated with Hitler is a little much.
The provocative images, which appeared in the western city of Poznan as a part of a promised nationwide campaign, also carry the slogan “Abortion for Poles: introduced by Hitler, March 9, 1943.”
Fundacja Pro, the organisation behind the billboard, said that it wanted to remind Poles that abortion was first introduced to Poland during the Second World War by the country’s Nazi occupiers as a means of limiting the population of a people they deemed inferior.
One of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries, Poland now has some of the strictest abortion laws in the EU, and any attempt to have them liberalised arouses furious and passionate debate.
“It was Hitler who first introduced abortion to Poland, and in several days it will be the anniversary of that event.
“In this context it is worth recalling the words of Pope John Paul II: ‘History teaches us that democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism’,” Fundacja Pro said in a statement.
Values? Whose values? Does the value of a woman count? Does a woman still have a right, any right, to determine what happens to her own body? Or are only a few pontificating men allowed to decide what our ‘values’ should be?
(T)he use of Hitler, along with the torn foetus pictures, has already incurred the wrath of critics. Nazi Germany inflicted horrific levels of death and destruction on Poland, so any perceived attempt to hijack that suffering for the sake of a political or ethical agenda can be viewed with distaste.
“I understand that this campaign is designed to shock but there are limits to the use of shock,” said Elzbieta Streker-Dembinska, an MP and member of the Polish parliament’s health committee. A foetus and Adolf Hitler is unjustified comparison. The design of the billboard is unacceptable and crosses the boundaries of decency.”
Well, yes. One wonders if decency is a word the creators of this campaign can even begin to comprehend.
