Tuesday May 31, 2016

Listen
Play
0:00/ 0:00

The Man in the Yard

My father told me once
that when he was about twenty
he had a new girlfriend, and once
they stopped by the house on the way
to somewhere, just a quick stop
to pick something up,
and my grandfather, who wasn’t well—
it turned out he had TB and would die
at fifty-two——was sitting in a chair
in the small back yard, my father
knew he was out there, and it crossed
his mind that he should take his girlfriend
out back to meet him, but he
didn’t, whether for embarrassment
at the sick, fading man
or just because he was in a hurry
to be off on his date, he didn’t
say, but he told the little,
uneventful story anyway, and said
that he had always regretted
not doing that simple, courteous
thing, the sick man sitting in
the sun in the back yard would
have enjoyed meeting her, but
instead he sat out there alone
as they came and left, young
lovers going on a date. He
always regretted it, he said.

“The Man in the Yard” by Howard Nelson from The Nap by the Waterfall. © Timberline Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It was on this day in 1889 that one of the worst floods in American history struck the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing more than 2,000 people.

Johnstown was 14 miles downriver from an artificial lake that had been created for a resort area by a group of Pittsburgh millionaires, including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. They’d created the lake by rebuilding an old dam on the river, but instead of hiring an engineer, they’d paid a railroad contractor to do the job, and he’d merely patched the old dam with rocks, tree trunks, and dirt.

The spring of 1889 was one of the wettest in memory, and on Memorial Day it began to rain hard, lasting through the night and into the next day. It was almost dinner time when people in Johnstown suddenly heard the sound of a train whistle, which was the signal that the dam had broken — letting loose a wall of water that reached heights of 70 feet, weighing 20 million tons, traveling at 40 miles an hour. It wiped out houses, bridges, freight trains, and everything else. Survivors described the wave as looking like a black cloud. By the time it had run its course, almost 2,000 buildings had been leveled, and 2,209 people had died, including 99 complete families.

The Johnstown Flood became one of the first international news events, drawing more than 200 photographers from around the world. A 70-year-old Walt Whitman wrote a front-page story about it for the New York World, declaring: “Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm. Holding Humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy.”

The event inspired a huge outpouring of charity from around the world. There were church drives in more than 15 countries, which raised almost $4 million, an extraordinary amount of money at the time.

It’s the birthday of American poet, essayist, and journalist Walt Whitman (1819) (books by this author), who changed poetry forever with the publication of 12 untitled poems in 1855. Whitman had been writing down his daily observations and musings in a simple 3.5- by 5.5-inch notebook for a year or so when he decided to self-publish a collection of free-verse poems he called Leaves of Grass. He could only afford to print 795 copies and his name only appeared 500 lines in, when he called himself “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” The first edition attracted little attention, though fellow poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Whitman a five-page letter and told him the book was “the most extraordinary piece of art and wisdom.”

Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island. He was the second of nine children and three of his brothers were named for men his parents considered to be American heroes: George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, and Andrew Jackson Whitman. His family struggled to make ends meet; his father tried farming, carpentry, and real estate before moving the family to Brooklyn when Whitman was three. Life wasn’t any better in Brooklyn, but Whitman was full of optimism. He’d discovered books and busied himself reading Dante, Homer, and the Bible.

Whitman’s father pulled him from school at 11 so he could work to support the family. He worked first for an attorney and then as a “printer’s devil,” which was the name for an apprentice who mixed the tubs of ink and fetched type at a printing press. Then he mucked around the country as a journalist and editor for various newspapers, usually getting fired for his progressive views concerning women’s rights, slavery, and labor issues.

By 1862, he was in Fredericksburg, Virginia, searching for his brother George, a Union soldier who’d been injured. What he saw of the Civil War profoundly affected him; he promptly moved to Washington, D.C., securing a part-time job at the Army paymaster’s office so he could volunteer as a nurse for the wounded. Whitman estimated he made at least 600 hospital visits and tended to almost 100,000 patients during his time as a nurse. He wrote about the war and the wounded in the collection Drum-Taps (1865), which includes the poems “Beat! Beat! Drums!” and “Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night.”

He kept tinkering with Leaves of Grass over his lifetime, adding more poems and publishing more editions, even a smaller, pocket-sized edition that he called an “ideal pleasure.” He wanted readers “to put a book in your pocket and [go] off to the seashore or the forest.” The book continued to draw attention, most favorable, but some not: a Boston district attorney tried to block publication of the book on the grounds of obscenity, and a geologist named John Peter Lesley wrote him a letter calling the book “trashy, profane & obscene.” The bad press spurred sales of the book, though, and Whitman, who’d been working off and on for several years, was able to buy a house.

Leaves of Grass is now considered a masterpiece of American literature and has inspired countless writers, particularly the Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The first poems in the book later became known as “Song of Myself,” which famously begins, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” The poem is used a plot device in two recent young adult novels: Paper Towns (2008) by John Green and Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets (2013) by Evan Rosko. The poem “O Captain! My Captain!” was written to memorialize the death of President Abraham Lincoln and was used as the centerpiece of the film Dead Poets Society (1989), starring Robin Williams.

When asked to give advice to young writers, Walt Whitman said: “To young literateurs, I want to give three bits of advice: First, don’t write poetry; Second ditto; Third ditto. You may be surprised to hear me say so, but there is no particular need of poetic expression. We are utilitarian, and the current cannot be stopped.”

And: “Practice is the main thing at all times, and subservient to this but almost equal in importance, is the statement never be discouraged. Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life — mechanical parts as well as the rest.”

On this day in 1927, the last Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line. It was the first affordable automobile, due in part to the assembly line process developed by Henry Ford. It had a 2.9-liter, 20-horsepower engine and could travel at speeds up to 45 miles per hour. It had a 10-gallon fuel tank and could run on kerosene, petrol, or ethanol, but it couldn’t drive uphill if the tank was low, because there was no fuel pump; people got around this design flaw by driving up hills in reverse.

Ford believed that “the man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.” The Model T cost $850 in 1909, and as efficiency in production increased, the price dropped. By 1927, you could get a Model T for $290.

“I will build a car for the great multitude,” said Ford. “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one-and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.”

It’s the birthday of Clint Eastwood, born in San Francisco (1930). He was a musician long before he ever thought of becoming an actor. “When I was a kid music was a constant,” he said. “After Fats Waller died, my mother brought home a whole collection of his records...I learned to play the piano by listening to his records and trying to imitate other jazz and blues artists of that era. I taught myself to play a little stride piano and a three-chord, eight-beat thing. I became interested in boogie-woogie, jazz, and bebop. I was telling stories on the piano long before I ever directed a movie. I like the image of the piano player: the piano player sits down, plays, tells his story, and then gets up and leaves, letting the music speak for itself.”

Even when he made his name in the movie business, music managed to find its way into his films. His directorial debut was the Play Misty for Me (1971), in which he plays a jazz disk jockey who has an ill-fated affair with a loyal listener. He directed and starred in 1982’s Honkytonk Man, playing an aspiring country singer who finally gets his chance in Nashville just as he’s dying of tuberculosis. In 1988, he directed Bird, a biography of saxophone legend Charlie Parker, and he’s also produced documentaries about Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck. He directed “Piano Blues,” an episode of the Martin Scorsese documentary series The Blues. He’s been contributing compositions to his films since Unforgiven (1992). He said, “If you ever go to a music session, you'll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they're reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®