AFTER TWO OR THREE YEARS tutelage in George's Court (equivalent to a lifetime elsewhere) and considering I was now a big-shot editor of a national magazine (Modern Patternmaking - indeed its very founding Editor (!) - all as related there, we decided to get married. Jean was a vivaceous young brunette - her father a Piedmontese. He was not only the grandest cook I have ever known, he was the only one who sang opera as he cooked. And thus, Irish-Anglo that I am, I gained entre' to the Italian-American culture which so dominates much of the Northeast. We moved in fact, into the top half of an Italian two-family home on Glenbrook Road. Our landlord was Andy Racinello (he of the mossy fish scare in Gothic), and because of Jean's parentage, we were accepted right into the bosom of the "familia" and became downstairs kitchen regulars with all the cumbahs and others who regularly gravitate to where the smell of "gravy (i.e. tomato sauce) and provolone prevails, and the eating is first class and non-stop. ("First-a we eat!"). This is a world denied to most outsiders, and one I would never have known but for my wife. It is why today I think The Soprano's is one of the most superb and realistic TV shows ever made anywhere: not the blood-and-guts part, for there are innumerable Italian-Americans who repudiate the Mafia - but rather for the mannerisms, the home furnishings, the meals, the "respect" for elders and betters; the deference to seniors, dialects, the finger-signs and the "eye" that are the common lot of Italians. In this community, because I was a college graduate, and "Anglo" I was taken close to - but not entirely into - the heart of the group and was often asked for my solemn opinion on many affairs. Rather like Robert Duvall, the 'consigliore' in The Godfather. (Grin!)

The closer we get in time here, the more this stream bifurcates and bifurcates... like the "distributaries" of a major river delta versus the "contributaries... And the harder and harder it is to decide what stays in and what goes out. Decisions, decisions, decisions!

My "natural history" proclivities were in full swing now, and included searching for, excavating and publishing on a growing number of prehistoric sites in the region and looking for "pitchblende" (a will-o-the-wisp that suckered many of us back then, as uranium (rather like gold in the old prospector's mantra: "Silver comes in veins and dikes, but gold is where you find it!") was getting top dollar and a grateful Nation's blessing (not to mention that of the AEC) if you could come up with a workable deposit). "Mutually Assurred Deterrance (MAD)" was the name of the game back then as Mother Russia and the U.S. of A. squared off in the Cold War and the biggest game of chicken the world has ever known. I bought a Geiger Counter and thereby hang a couple of tales. (Rumors abounded: one was that a "strike" had been made by some rock collector over around West Point on the Hudson... And there were others...). I was also "bigtime" into fossil collecting in those days, and had the great good luck and good fortune to discover one of the most complete specimens ever found of a Diplurus newarkii - a Coelacanth fish from beneath the Triassic sill of the New Jersey Palisades! (It was in the so-called Granton Quarry near Ft. Lee - by then a noisome town dump, but one to which my NYU Geology Classes frequently repaired to - partly by subway! LOL! - for "Field Trips" and this is how I knew of it.) The coelacanth, the more astute here will know, is the "living fossil fish" unknown till the first one was dredged up in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. Its several peculiarities include appendages (fins) on peduncles or "lobes", and it is quite celebrated among the afficionados. (The "Creative Design" crowd knows it not).

This find led, in turn, to mention no less, in the long ago "Amateur Scientist" section of Scientific American. And as result, my meeting thereby with several of the Staff on SA (including no less than Gerard Piel, its illustrious publisher, Dennis Flanagan, its equally illustrious editor and C.S. Stong - sort of schlep and volunteer editor/writer on staff).

And one time, Stong somehow acquired a batch of straight pins, each having cemented to its head, a tiny speck of really "hot" uranium (!). Where or how he got these I do not know - but they were the real McCoy! He also, I believe, was the source who once gave me some radioactive "trinitite," too - this is fused sand from the site of the first atomic bomb at Almagordo.

He was a man for all seasons, this Stong! I only met him once or twice - he had sort of reddish hair I recall, and I think a day job with Western Electric (though how or why I would recall all that is a mystery to me). But he ran the "Amateur Scientist" column, and was always spelling out all manner of "experiments at home" that inquiring minds could tinker with. And to this end he sent me the "hot pin", gratis.

And I promptly 1) lost it, and 2) forgot about it. Months passed. Our firstborn, our daughter Candy, now shared my cramped "office" as a partial "nursery." One day a letter came from Stong, rather panicky in tone, and it was about the hot pins. Seems that someone had "analyzed" them and they were hot, indeed! I mean really hot! Dangerously so, and he wanted everyone to send their pin back to him. Pronto! By way of illustrating: some of the "guys" who had got the pins, were so unwise as to wear them (proudly!) as stick pins in their neckties, and had developed stomach cancer as a consequence! Stuff like that...

But where was mine? I had not got into atomic physics as a hobby quite yet (about the only scientific endeavor I had not at least stuck my nose into - being somewhat a math cripple as you may recall from my "tums tables" traumatization during my Texas youth...). Oh me! So I got out my geiger counter and began a sweep of my entire office-cum-nursery. And (you guessed it!) the "hottest" item in the room was Candy - gurgling at me from her nearby crib! Oh Gosh! Push the panic button!

Jean went bonkers! "The baby has swallowed your atomic pin!" was her anguished cry! Civil Defense was a big deal in those days, and you could call them on phone just like 911 today. In no time huge all-white, panel trucks with the radioactive "propeller" symbols on their sides pulled into Andy's driveway. (The largely Roman Catholic Italian contingent below stairs had always vaguely thought I might be league with the Devil himself, or at least Nostradamus, in my upstairs quarters there - and my gazing at stars silently out in the backyard alone at 3 o'clock in the morning, was taken as further proof of this. BTW - I ground and figured my own - perfect! - 8-inch Newtonian, for the star-gazers here amongst you. And "perfect" by the say-so of no less than the Head Optician, one Mogli, at Perkin-Elmer (Yes! THAT Perkin-Elmer: creator of the Hubble mirror) as my mirror got surreptitously alumnized by PE through machinations of a friend, and thus "checked out" by Mogli himself - who maintained to the end that no amateur could do such a job - and therefore wanted to keep the item as obviously one of theirs! So there, too - now I will not have to relate my tedious "ten-thousand steps around the barrel" tale of my sojourn into the Halls of Astronomy, and applied optics added to my idle pursuits in later years...

But the Civil Defense guys... Jeezul! They were "all in white" with rubber gloves on and tin hats like air raid wardens, and they were knocking on Andy's door in broad daylight and the neighbors were peeping out behind the curtains next door and and and and... They went over my office/nursery, if not with a fine tooth comb, at least "counters" superior to mine, and pronounced (at long last) that Candy was "not hot" (at which point Mary Racanello who had stood in the wings all the while these strange proceedings were going on under her own roof - stepped forward, scooped up "Nino, Baby!" and departed with her posthaste to her kitchen downstairs and the cumbahs there assembled. (We almost "went to the mattresses" that day... Whew!)

But we never found that grain of uranium and (the Old Man said), "It's whereabouts remain unknown to this very day....!" Sigh. (The trinitite I slipped overboard in mid Long Island Sound one dark night in a weighted can). "One man in his life lives many lives." (I think that was Solomon).

A final uranium story and then we shall move along in our relations. Around this time, Jean and I took a trip out West. Ostensibly to see the "Anasazi Indian Ruins" of the Southwest - but we strayed into (and out of , fortunately!) a great many strange places and adventures. As I said, at that time the Government was Gung Ho! to buy up any workable uranium finds. Many of these were being found in the Colorado Plateau. The sought for mineral here was Carnotite, and it looked like nothing so much as block, massive sulfur - bright yellow and crumbly. One day we were driving down the highway (no doubt US 66 of my youth...) and a big truck wheeled out of a side-road into the highway ahead of us. A sign said the road led back to an A.E.C. mine in the LucaChuki's (you don't know the Lucachuki's? Pity!) and had "Keep Out!" all over it. When the truck hit the highway bump, some of its earth load bounced off and fell in the road. We stopped the car and got out to look. Several real nice pieces of carnotite lay in the road and we picked them up. Our geiger counter gave a most reassuring series of clicks... hot stuff! We threw them in the back seat and continued on our way.

That night, and hundreds of miles further on down the road, we pulled up to a motel. We registered at the desk, and while there got engaged with the desk clerk and several hangers-on about the "hunt for uranium" which was so much the concern of the day. People began to tell tales and produce rocks and specimens for examination and pass them around. I decided to play dumb and the "Eastern Dude" bit. I "Ohhhhddd!" and "Ahhhhd!" over every cheesy piece of rock they showed me, and exclaimed about same. Then I allowed as how their rocks all bore a faint resemblance to some rocks I had picked up that morning. Had them out in car... be right back!

When I returned to the lobby, eyes popped! Someone's geiger counter clicked rapid pace! Wow! "Where at did you find these at, buddy?"

I grew vague. "Don't really know. Couple hundred miles back - more or less I guess." I allowed as how I thought it was off to side of road maybe - a sort of dirt bank or something - Yes ! That was it! A road-bank - highway had cut through here. Right there for the taking! Whole mountain of it! (That was no lie! LOL!).

Man! Like the movie, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (remember that one?), this total group of strangers was all for forming a "company" on the spot - voting shares and so on - and setting off posthaste to find this "road-cut."

When I finally pulled the punchline on them and revealed what had happened - no one laughed at all! One by one they all drifted away. Some folks just got no sense of humor at all!

We did in time visit most of the major ruins in the Southwest... Mesa Verde, Aztec (NM), Betatikin, Hovenweep, Chaco Canyon... and the famous Canyon de Chelly with its fabulous White House Ruins in the Canyon del Muerto (Canyon of Death.. Br-r-r-r-!) - where Jean almost "bought it" in quicksand testing the river crossing after one of the innumerable flash floods. As she floundered and sank slowly, I hollered encouragement from shore. Like Archie Bunker in TV's much later "All in the Family," I called helpfully "Save some for the homestretch, Alice!" We camped out in lean-tos on the Navaho Reservation for days and days - and no one bothered us. Save the sheep on several occasions who walked right through our camps en masse! LOL! Once, caught by a thunderstorm, we jumped into a dark cave alongside the trail - to be greeted with the alarming sound of a zillion clanging bells: around the necks of dozens of unseen sheep who had crowded into the dark recesses ahead of us! LOL! Many adventures. But I shall move along here...

Maybe not before I relate how I did mange however, to "pal-av-ery", with signs and cigarettes, my way into a "sacred" dance on the Hopi's Third Mesa (where we were the only whites I estimate in a crowd of at least a 1000 Indians...)! Hopi Mesas. Our tribal mentor was one Jack (sounds like) "Pong-yes-via" ("His Father Dances Like a Snake") and he was a guy maybe about 40 then - and he had met one other white man (!) - his name was "Frank" - and did I know him? (Frank had paid Jack and some pals to fight a forest fire in the area once long before...). I explained to Jack the White Men were to be numbered as the stars in heaven, of course - but it fell on deaf ears. He disliked, even feared, the Navahos who were everywhere about the base of the mesas on which the Hopi lived (and this reflects to this very day, you see, the ancient inbred fear going back to the prehistoric Athabaskan invaders out of Canada, who fathered the historic Apache and Navaho tribes, who in turn so bedeviled the "Sky People" living way up on top of the mesas) - and across whose intervening flats he rode nervously with us on our way to the dance. (Jack actually lived on Second Mesa, if I recall aright...). When we had first seen him and tried to talk to him, he had been sitting amicably up against his house wall, skinning a fresh-killed sheep across his lap, and wiping his knife from time to time on his bloody trouser leg. He spoke enough English to ask if we wanted to "go to a dance" and you bet I took him up on that! He grunted "we go Third Mesa" and climbed into the front seat alongside Jean! LOL! But she was good troops indeed, and asking him to crank down the window please, so she could shoo out the attending horde of flies which had entered with him, we were soon off!

He was concerned I not be a missionary (I assured him I was not). The only thing good about Missionaries so far as he was concerned was their coffee they gave out if you would come in off the Mesas for a "sing" and to be preached at. I made up for my coffee-deficit with cigarettes - and handed them to him sideways as the rangers had told me to, since shaking a pack as we do, makes cigarettes jump out and "point" at you - and pointing is a no-no at any time anywhere in their culture. He reciprocated in a way I bet few students, field anthropologists, missionaries, rangers or stockmen have ever known: at sundown when we brought him back to Second Mesa, he took me into his house! I tried to see everything at once, but remember mainly the kachinas on the walls and in niches. And an old brass bedstead. I think what endeared me most to him was my early-on assurance I was not a Missionary and held no beliefs about "god-talk", etc. He then assurred me he, too, was a "non-believer" (almost unheard of, for a Hopi, indeed!) too - and thus we hit it off. But still waters run deep: the dance was a rain dance you see, and in the process of it a great crowd of us all stood on the roof of a subterranean kiva. At a critical juncture, a stream of old women, naked from the waist up, and wearing spruce bough skirts only (and being covered with corn meal dust and ashes all over) issued from the Kiva opening and formed a huge open circle of dancers. As they danced by in front of us, Jack nipped forth and broke a branch off one of their skirts. When he returned, I asked him why he did that. He replied that he would put the (now sacred!) branch in his cornfield at the base of the Mesa - to assure the Gods would bring rain! (I said nothing - but was somewhat skeptical of his skepticism - if you take my meaning plain! LOL!).

As we bumped along over the wagon track back to Second Mesa, he said rain was the most important thing there ever was - and he would pray that the Kachinas would rain on us and ours wherever it was we came from. I tried to explain we lived way to the East (CT) in a place where we had too much rain most summers - far more than any of us wanted or could "use" - and "thanks but no thanks" please don't do us any favors! LOL! My further descriptions of the "ocean" and Long Island Sound and boats and white people everywhere - brought little comprehension and even less interest, so I gave up.

When we got back he gave me a kachina ("Mud Head") he had made (he was a kachina maker for their own ceremonies only - and this was the real McCoy, not tourist junk (the latter often made by Navahos anyhow...). It is made from a yucca root and native-plant dyed. I shall leave this to some responsible faction: it is a museum item I am sure....

As the years unfolded, and back in CT, my interest in American archaeology deepened. And the curiosity centered on my own geographic area of Southern New England. Who had been the first inhabitants? And when? What of any of their sites today? Etc. The "literature" was sparse indeed (formal scientific archaeology hardly dates earlier than about 1927 in our nation, and was a long time after that even getting under way in many places). Antiquarians, historians and collectors had left their mark - and their cum-grano-salis records and notes - but basically one was faced with a terra incognito wherever one looked in those days.

One place I looked, was along the shores of nearby Long Island Sound, where remnant shell middens were a commonplace.

Another place, was in the "back country" - the sometimes rugged uplands of glaciated bedrock outcrops, incised streams and kettle ponds stretching away west to the Hudson Highlands and north and east clear to the Berkshires and beyond. One pristine area, actually the first preserve I believe ever acquired by the well-known Nature Conservancy, was the Mianus Gorge north of Stamford. This, and the nearby "Devil's Den," were natural areas that had been largely passed by from Colonial times onward as too steep and tortuous and not worth the effort to try and farm or work. Exceptions being the ministrations of 19th century colliers and loggers. But basically the region still harbored traces of the original biota: magnificent stands of uncut hemlocks and other native hardwoods and plants.

And rockshelters once inhabited by early peoples.

Since my efforts hereabouts and in adjoining states and other places are largely all recorded in the "literature" elsewhere, I shall not repeat myself here. Those interested may read these at Site Reports. The time span is several decades.

And since confession is said to be good for the soul, I guess here is as good a place as any to bring up an early (and later abandoned) involvement with one of the loonier aspects of New England Archaeology: the persistent notion that "Vikings" - indeed! -actually any number of "Pre-Columbian" voyagers and venturers, once touched on these shores! It would unduly prolong these proceedings if I were to relate all the harum-scarum pratfalls I got into pursuing this will-o-the-wisp:

"And from the incursions and furies of the Northmen, Oh Lord!, deliver us!" (Said to be the opening and closing lines of every prayer given in the long ago coastal monasteries of Hibernia during the Viking Ages...).

Suffice I shall post a lead or two to this intriguing subject here Viking Ladies and a sequel (of sorts) More Viking Ladies.... Then there is Resailing Leif's Route, also Viking Oddments as articles written and posted elsewhere for readers who might be interested. And then there is one - my favorite in this genre - but not really relevant to the Viking Era: Did Ulysses Once Reach New Haven, CT?. And by way of wrapping up this "Viking Intrusion Section" here, I shall close with a wandering somewhat tongue-in-cheek recounting of another "Pre Columbian Find" -this one even more problematic perhaps than the foregoing - but intriguing withal An Exercise in Archaeological Sleuthing. Perhaps all the foregoing is a bit more than any one reader wants... but ALL the incidents, anecdotes or what you will, are "true" as related here and based on actual happenings...

Eventually we moved from Glenbrook. Our Italian-American "alter familia" sad to see us go. Andy, I know, was much bemused: during our sojourn, and because of lack of space in the apartment, I had taken to storing rock specimens collected on our outings up in the attic over our heads: there was a small access hole in the ceiling of one closet and it was a simple matter to toss cobbles up there. And later... to forget them! At the last moment on the final day we moved out - I recalled my rocks! I was busy re-collecting them (halfway up through the access hatch) when I heard Andy's voice down below me (he was checking out the premises before we left). I told him I would be right down - just a few more rocks to retrieve...

"Rocks?" he said. (Pause) "Yuz got rocks in my roof?"

"Just a few Andy," I warbled back. "Just a few... be right down." Soon I descended with another sack of rocks.

Andy was dumfounded. My reputation as Seer, Soothsayer and General Neocramancer was yet secure, I could see. "Yuz had rocks up in my attic?" Then, "Yuz got them all now, right?"

"Right, Andy! Right! I got all my rocks."

"And bones and anything...." he offered feebly. I assured him "clean sweep". Nothing left. I would miss Andy. He was a hard-working, devout (his Catholic Church was right across the street, so he and Mary were always coming and going from services there...) kind of guy. Tool-and-die maker over at Norma-Hoffman's (nearby) plant. He had done his best to relate to the odd newly-marrieds who came to share his home with him. And his kitchen. In those days, TV screens were about 5-inch or so - you couldn't see them much over five feet away! Nites, Andy would come up the hall stairs and knock on my door, "Yuz wanna see ta' fights?" So I would obligingly follow Andy back downstairs and in the flickering gloom he and I would silently eat provolone and sip wine - while these shadowy clowns tossed one another in and out of equally shadowy rings... I would repay in turn. I had a small fishing boat. Some nights I would get Andy and we would go out and anchor off Grassy Island and fish for eels. (I had a great spot). We would bring them home, and Mary would cook them up with garlic and parsley. It was good.

   






ANDY HAD A VEGETABLE GARDEN, and for my part, I had now added Meterology to my largely unfocused repetoire of interests. In fact, I was now the Broadcast Weatherman on Station WSTC, Stamford, and had my own daily Weather Show ("Tex Powell and the Weather") and soon I was teaching Marine Meteorology to the local Power Squadron chapter down at the Stamford Yacht Club. And I had a large outdoor "instrument shelter" - an official one given by the USWB. You may have seen them from time to time; many people do not know what they are. They are shaded and properly ventilated sort of boxes on four legs that sit out in fields for proper exposure of max-min thermometers, sling psychrometers and other instruments. I set my shelter up in Andy's garden (with his permission). Since Instrument Shelters, to the unknowing, seem to bear a faint resemblance some way to a "bee hive" - Andy and the neighbors all concluded I was now also somehow in league with the bees. The instruments inside (which I showed them), only confirmed them in this surmise. I also bought a cup-anaemometer - which I installed on Andy's roofpeak. It growled faintly on windy nights and could be heard throughout the house. It also squeaked when the wind backed or veered. This, too, was taken as a wonder in this working-class neighborhood and people took to stepping aside when they saw me coming down the sidewalk. I'm sure Andy spoke more than once to the Father across the street about harboring such as I under his roof...

AND HE NEVER GOT OVER MY TELESCOPE! A 4.5-inch Unitron, it was more than just a modest refractor, and was some nuisance and some doing to set it up. So I rigged it up on casters so I could roll it in and out of my half of the garage. Then I took to leaving my car out in the driveway nights and the telescope grandly sitting in its stead in the garage. Andy shook his head here, too.

"Your car dere - it's-a gonna rust-a all up ya know."

"I know Andy, but to use a telescope you have to get its optics all at equilibrium after sunset - and this way I can have it all ready to go."

"Yuz were out here the other night. I saw ya. Four a.m. Four a.m. I saw ya."

"Yes, Andy. I was. I admit."

"Whatcha look at?"

"Oh stars, planets... things. (Pause) Would you like to look?"

He approached slowly. "What I have to do?," he asked sort of suspiciously.

"Look in here," I said - guiding him to the eyepiece.

He never forgot his first view of the mountains on the Moon... Few of us do! And some evenings later, Sputnik went over (the first Sputniks had just been launched by Russia). Its tiny streak as it passed overhead, and the fact that I knew where to look (the track was published in the paper! LOL!) was considered to be black magic, and next night he had several cumbahs back with him...."Dey want to see da Moon, too" he said.

Nostradamus had a fulltime night job now...

Sigh.

Andy raised my rent. To be truthful, we had got a real-deal right off the bat: his previous tenant had been a relative-cumbah and he had given him a ridiculously low figure. But the War Time Rental Board or some such agency had "frozen" rents you see back about that time, and you could not get more if you were the landlord than what you charged during the War years..

During our tenancy, the law was rescinded, so Andy naturally raised the rent in conformance with rents around us. I really had no objection: it was imminently fair. But about an hour later he was back (clump-clump-clump on the outer stairs...) and I answered his knock.

"Mary says ya and ta Missus and the bambin' kin have the apartment at the old rate - however long ya stay." He looked uncomfortably around, as though he were a kid that had been caught stealing apples or something. Then he added, "An' Mary says ta get Jean and the Nino and come on down for supper wid us. We got chicken cachitore tonight..."

Andy was a good guy. He fell off the roof fixing his own leaks not long after we moved out, and died on the spot. The good always die young...

   






WE BOUGHT a small house on Thistle Lane, in back of Norwalk - backed right up to the Merritt Parkway. Lawn, gardens - the works. Not a moment too soon: Candy's brother, Travis arrived about then. (Later - here at left - in my "first cabin" I ever built, he takes a call on his front porch) And he and his sister were soon joined by a never-ending stream of gerbils, cats, dogs and assorted pets... It was a new house, but the cellar leaked. Real bad. I mean like a foot deep at times. I dug ditches and laid pipe and knocked through walls, but like the Dutch Boy in the parable, there always seemed to be more leaks than I had thumbs for. About the time I got it all patched up and dry - it was time to sell and move again. Story of my Life...

WE MOVED SOME MILES FARTHER NORTH - to Wilton. Stonebridge Road and now we were in really nice suburban CT. A pond abutted our property in back, and we damned this ourselves and put in a sand beach. And a floating dock for diving. And a float (see below) just to laze around on and paddle away hot summer afternoons... My kids had all the "things" (Huck Finn style, true) that I had wanted and dreamed of in youth. How much of it they "appreciated" - or even remember - I don't know. I only rarely hear from either of them anymore...

Candy became interested in horses, so Jean and I conferred and decided to stretch the budget to include. Smokey (part Morgan and part Fiend) arrived later, and began to kick down barn (he should have been made into baseballs and pop-flyed out of Ebbetts long before!), and later, Missy, joined us. Horses need barns: I got into barn-building. I mean oldtime, authentic recreations of New England style barns. I pored over Eric Sloane's Age of Barns duplicating many of his details in my handiwork. (Once, long after, I met him personally at a book-signing - he signed my copy). My kids - and their friends - helped me. In summer, we even used to have a "Fresh Air Kid" up from the Brooklyn slums under the old Journal American program (anyone here remember "Fresh Air Kids"? Anyone here even remember the old Scripps-Howard Journal American? Oh , well ... moving right along now....) This kid joined my "work crew" and led them all out on strike one day with his.... "Mistah! We are all kids and youse can't use child labah in 'dis country...!"

I had a friend who was foreman on a big power plant construction site down in Bridgeport. They were bringing in all the machinery for the plant on flatbed railroad cars - with lots of "dunnage" (rough-cut timbers used for temporary bracing and props...) to secure them in their cross-country passage. He told me I could have all the "dunnage" I could haul away! It was perfect for oldtime barn-building: big oak and pine timbers, all rough-cut and shaggy. Nights and weekends Jean and the kids and I hauled in timbers in our old Station Wagon. I had more than I ever needed....

   






EVENTUALLY, THE BARN GOT FINISHED. I found a deal somewhere on rot-proof real redwood siding and took it off the guy's hands. We put this up vertical in board-and-batten style and it looked real great! There was a "tack room" for horse gear and other stuff, a small open "equipment shed" in front, and down behind was Missy's stall. Over the main part was a hayloft. And up on top of the gambrel, I put a real old-time cupola - and before long a barn owl actually moved in! This was an idyllic time and an idyllic place... On the other side of the drive which passed in front of the mini-barn, I plowed up a small section of our lawn and every year put in a corn patch and pole beans along with squash and tomatoes. (See left). It was a "Gentleman's Farm" writ... small..., so to speak. I sometimes wonder if my (later childless) kids ever remember it all, and their mother's and my struggle to make it happen. Shangri La's take a lot out of you, as well as putting something back in...



I CLEARED OUR LAND MYSELF. I was the Handy-Andy from Hell, I was. With the logs from clearing, I built a log cabin. I took up oldtime blacksmithing, and forged myself a froe: with it I split all my own shakes. Grandad first told me about froes - and the long hours he spent as a youth splitting shakes..."to and fro," as this linguistic fossil enshrines, and not one in ten today know what that means...

In honor of which, one of my first endeavors with my froe was to split all my own shakes out of wood billets, too. You can see the topmost ridge line in the picture at right, with the shakes all "set" the way grandad did it: "...to the wind," as was the custom back then and no neat and prissy "cap ridge" the way moderns do! My "signature" in the wet chinking (see further below - in front wall of the cabin) I am also sure, owes inspiration to these Grandfather tales from times long gone.

I adzed out a heavy plank door from some old rough planks - and put it together with my own forged doornails (clinched on the inside so In'yuns and bar's couldn't pull them apart! LOL!) An early meaning of "clinched" was "deadened"... hence "dead-as-a-doornail!"... Another linguistic fossil. I thought you might like that! No extra charge!...

I forged heavy strap hinges for the door and I hung log shutters on "bullhide" hinges over the window openings. Noted Artist Paul Calle, whose painting of the interior of my cabin-smithy also appears further below, wanted me to "leave" that door to him for his studio - when or if I ever left town (or was driven therefrom! LOL!). But I never did... (I also never was...LOL!). The only shot that shows this door that I have at hand, is of the front of the cabin and it is rather too distant a view, and does not show it well. You can however, see just one vertical plank of it at the extreme left edge in Calle's painting... where the adzed texture is revealed by the shadow patterns, captured by his marvelous talent. For more on my efforts as an iron-pounder, see: Blacksmithing

The floor was scavanged brick, laboriously hauled in from a distant building site... Sometimes I think I built my cabin more as a tribute to my grandfathers than anything else. My grandfathers exercised a major influence on me when young. Both had grown up in the Late 19th Century milieu of the Vanishing Frontier. I was mesmerized by their tales. My maternal Grandfather had actually been born in a cabin (as family legend has it) - itself later "incorporated" right into an emerging frame farmhouse... This, all down in the "Ohio Country" (near Salem Center - itself no longer extant, I believe). I yet hang over my fireplace, the "family rifle" (muzzleloader) which has come down to me from those days (and whose future seems uncertain, since neither of my children had children of their own...). I remember yet his tales of "making meat" for his family with this rifle - while he was yet no older than I was at the time of listening...

My paternal Grandfather grew up on a hard-scrabble farm in Missouri - man-of-the-house already as a pre-teenager, for his father had perished young from an ailment contracted during the Civil War. His tales of harnessing mules with scrap harness made of twisted rope, old shirts, rags, and cast-offs from his mother and sister stick with me yet. As does his often wistfully related description of a "...big, flat, white rock" on some nameless creek of childhood, where the fish were always sure to bite - and his longing to "return" there which grew ever-stronger with age. (I, too, now have my fishing spot for which I long - only it is not a rock - it is the bole of a huge tree once athwart the West Fork of the Trinity River somewhere near Fort Worth, TX...)

Others own the land now, and I live far away. Long time, indeed, since I have last seen it. And my onetime cabin. For all I know, the new owners may have burned same to the ground, or removed it all together, or maybe even (gasp!) turned it into a... 'kid's playhouse' ...(!) But whatever its Fate, it was built - as I now come late to understand - as a tribute to things not always seen or understood.

********************

SO I BEGAN TO WRITE UP my "do-it-yourself" activities and sell the articles to the How To market. I became almost a regular in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics - and other of the big, mass-circ, and big newsstand magazines: Southern Living, Better Homes & Gardens, etc. etc. Easy money! By now I was working in the advertising agencies, and many of my clients made the products that I was using to fix up my place. Thus, with free product coming in on one end, and getting handsomely paid on the other by the editors for writing up "how to use it" stories about the same on the other - it actually paid me to fix up my own house! LOL!

How ya gonna lose?

Eventually, one of the mags did a big profile story on "How America Lives" sort of thing - comparing the lifestyle of how the "Bernard Powells of Wilton, CT and the Robert Redfords of Utah...!" live. Hot Dang! LOL! Be sure to check that link out! Jean and I gave the kids almost a perfect, fulltime (as a kid I had known only fitfully...) childhood "surround" for my money (and it was my money! LOL!). A country home, horses, barns, a swimming (and fishing!) hole, (the dam for which we built ourselves - haulng in many loads of rock by hand...) Below is the spillway in Winter...

We must have been doing something right (I at least was doing "the write" part "right"...LOL!) - for we were subject again and again in major stories and editorial write-ups in the Nation's leading "shelter mags" (as we journalists know them), newspapers, and elsewhere. But that was long ago and far away ... and today my children march to a different drum...

But, as usual, I am a bit ahead of my story here...

**************

AFTER I LEFT GEORGE'S EMPLOY, I decided to jump out of the trade mag field and try my hand as book publishing editor. As luck would have it, I finally got a job in the encyclopedia field - at the bottom: Funk & Wagnalls - one of the schlockiest in the bizz. Our offices (for some bizarre reason) were way up near 125th St, almost in Harlem those days - in an old brownstone that had once been a home to Cordell Hull (I think it was). I worked in a tiny little garret way up sort of a corkscrew staircase that led to a cubby in a spire way up at rooftop, and I rode the NYNY&H RR commuter train into and out of here every day for several years.

My fellow editors were all "academics" with bells on - and it was here I first began to understand what misfits academics really are in this world. Let me explain:

I am myself, "sort of" an academic. Many people in fact assume I actually am credentialed and all. But I am not! What I am, in fact, is intensely interested in all the subjects academics are - but with a tendency to organize, produce and get things done - which academics seem to universally lack! I was one of the "Science Editors", and as such was charged with finding and inducing "names" in "my field" (!) - Earth Science - to author definitive articles for us. At half-a-cent a word ("knowledge" you see, is bought and sold in the encyclopedia world like cheese in ethnic markets: a slice at a time...), This was not always easy - but the thought of being listed up front "with your peers" and all in a universally distributed encyclopedia often brought in the laggards! LOL! "Every man has his price!" - including academics and "subject matter experts," as we sometimes termed them.

We had Ralph Lapp, the celebrated atomic physicist, I remember, and I believe the celebrated Naturalist Ivan Sanderson (I have had occasion to mention him previously), and many other "name" scientists. And we "on staff" were also charged with being competent too - in "our fields" and had to do much of the heavy lifting with articles (not bylined of course) that we wrote, too. One I did was on "Caves." In the course of which I had occasion to use the phrase "caves of solution," a bona fide geological term for a type of cave formed in karst. And with this phrase I came a-cropper the Chief Editor, one Morgan Walters, I beleive his name was. He maintained it was a totally meaningless phrase, and little short of idiocy: I tried to convince him it was perfectly clear and legitimate, being used by geologists themselves, if he would but attend. Push came to shove and we parted company (i.e., I was fired!) LOL! And the reason given was my abominable article on "Caves" for the general reader.

I tell this little tale out of school, because once - decades later - and after I had married the second time and was visiting in Florida, my wife and I chanced to go into a Supermarket in a distant city one night, and there lo and behold! - was a big display stand of the "Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia" - no home should be without one! (F&W was big on this type of merchandising in supermarkets, malls, and so on. They operated so near the bottom of their own field that scamming, and rhebus contest awards, "First Prize" in direct mail appeals, and all similar devices were the only ways they could really push this rather inferior product...).

But I walked over to the display nonetheless and ran my finger along a set of volumes - to the "C" volume, in fact. I plucked it out and idly flipped it open to the entry for "Cave". The opening line began ....."Caves of Solution are commonly found in karst limestone areas around the world... etc. etc." My unvarnished copy, word-for-word.... my "execrable" Cave article! Now maybe in its 15th press re-run after all these years!... LOL. I began to laugh till the tears ran down my face. Surely, it is written: God has many ways to humble a man (Solomon, no?). However, a grapevine rumor during the intervening years suggested Walters had met his comeuppance, too. When last seen, according to these informants, he had been spotted by someone - selling kitchen gadgets in a rolled-up blanket with pockets, out of the trunk of his dilapidated car...

But F&W had served its role as an "entry-level" slot to this unique field, for now I was a bona fide Science Editor and could interview for same. And I snagged a good berth not long after: Science editor with The Grolier Society up on about Lexington and 53rd in a gaudy gold-anodized skyscraper. Grolier, of course, had and has, the credentials in the trade that F&W lacked... the very name tracing to one of the French philosophes, I believe, of the 18th Century French Enlightenment. Grolier's several publications (Encyclopedia Americana being one) are of a kind with the "industry" leaders: The "Great EB" (as we all called it: Encyclopedia Brittanica), Colliers, and others.

And the Staff was definitely a leg up, too (i.e., could amass more degrees per square foot. LOL!). During my interview, the Chief Editor was much taken with my knowledge of "publishing" generally - including production, typography, "writing to fit" and other journalistic tricks, etc. and we were getting along famously. Then he shifted to my "field of study." I told him that I had a BA in Creative Writing. He brushed that aside and bored in for my academic credentials. "Oh," says I, "Actually I have done a little bit of everything..."

"But what is your specialty," he said.

"Well - Earth Sciences sort of, I imagine" ... I offered.

He was getting irritated. "But which one? Name it!"

"You have no degree in Geology even. How can you presume to edit copy in the subject?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "If it doesn't bother you, it doesn't bother me," I offered lamely.

He looked long and hard at me in silence for a moment - then he said,

"Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to ask you to do a little test here. You don't have to, and we have never asked any of our academic fellows here to do this before. But you seem like you know these science things and all, and you do seem indeed to know how things get done in publishing, which no one else in this playhouse ever seems to understand....

"I have an article here on 'Glaciation' that one of our contributors has sent in, and it is badly in need of revision and partial rewrite. Would you mind taking a crack at it over the weekend and bringing it back in on Monday?"

"No problem," says I and took the draft and left.

I burned a bit of midnite oil over the weekend and was back at his desk Monday morning. He took my article and settled back in his chair to read.

He skimmed through it first, then he settled back and read it in more detail. Finally he lay it down. And he looked at me.

"How do you know these things? he said.

"Oh, I studied them here and there in college," I said, "And I read science papers and all when I can get them"

He looked at me long and hard. His name was Walters. Mr. Walters. Chief Editor. The Man!

"Listen!, he said. "This is the best, tightest, most meaningful article I have ever read on this subject! I don't know how you do it - since you have no "degree." But I'm hiring you and you are named "temporary" Department Head of our Science Section."

Jean was as elated as I!

Time passed. Every Monday was "Staff Meeting" I wouldn't have missed those for the world! Talk about weirdos and weird things You wouldn't believe! The Editor in charge of "Southeast Asian Dance," for instance, was near tears one morning over some kind of "to-do" in copy or writing or whatever. Jeezul! And one could always count on protracted quarrels between those in charge of Religious articles and "Sociology" and so on, and the "hard core" guys in "my" department...Whoopee! I would have paid money to sit in on these fiascos and here it was part of my job! Dang!

In the course of my duties, I met many notables from many fields. I remember Issac Asimov was a consultant to us, and came in for lunch on several occasions. Another time I had lunch with Willey Ley - the famed rocket scientist who with Werner Von Braun helped Hitler develop his infamous V-2's before they came to the U.S. Ley was also a generalist in that he had authored several "scifi" type works, and his paleontological classic, "Dragons in Amber" is one of my favorites to this day.

But the day came when Walters had to appoint a permanent "Head" to the Science Department. He called me in. And he said, among other things, that my work was exemplary and that moreover I really "knew" my science and had proven him right in his "gamble."

Then he said, "And so, I am appointing Herb Kondo as permanent Head of the Science Department."

(Kondo, a little guy with very thick glasses, had a degree in Physics which he knew up one side and down the other. But no other Science).

So I said, "Why?"

And Walters said, "Don't you know? Herb's parents are Nisei, and their orchards were taken away from them in the War by Roosevelt and our Government, and they had to go to internment camps and it seems the only fair thing to do...."

If you don't know what or who Nisei are, I'm not going to tell you. If you want to know, go here Jap.

I said to Walters, "Fuck you, Walters! And fuck Herb Kondo, and the Nisei, too! What in hell have their troubles and your personal social engineering notions got to do with the issue here?"

And I left the encyclopedia field for good.

As to encyclopedias, two final observations: 1) It was a curious fact that among those of us "on staff", not one had been raised "on encyclopedias" in our homes during our school years - as just the opposite condition was pushed vigorously by Grolier's marketing staff to parents across the land as the guaranteed way to "knowledge" for their children...(LOL!); 2) And ultimately, I swapped a set of Americana, which as an employee I could buy for a song, for Jean's obstetrician's bill for Candy, our daughter. Best, and only, "good" deal I ever got in the book publishing bizz...(Grin!)

Back To Contents Page For Next Chapter

(Click Here)


Contact Bernie