Charting Van Wallach's adventures and obsessions, from small-town Texas to Princeton, Russia, Latin America and beyond. Open mic videos are included at no extra charge for your viewing enjoyment.
Who has ever heard a message from the dead, had a near death
experience, or had vivid memories of a past life? Ever played with a Ouiji
board? Consulted mediums? Joined a seance, saw a ghost?
None of these interested me other than near-death
experiences. Teen Ouiji board parties were as close as I got. But last month’sopen mic involved a graveyard and since then other datapoints made me consider links
between the living and the dead. For example, I read the book of Deuteronomy’s warning about occult practices:
You shall not learn to do like the
abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you a soothsayer,
one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer.
With its carefully documented chapters on channeling past
lives, mediumships, poltergeists, moving objects and materializations, Kean’s
book talked in terms of highly credible evidence about the reality of the World to Come and other matters. The book opens with cases of
two boys who from a very early age identified details from past lives, one from
a pilot killed in World War II, the other a Hollywood talent agent. She uses
real names and photos of the boys, and the men whose lives they channeled.
Kean also wrote about near death experiences where people saw
light, heard music and encountered loved ones.
If this wasn’t enough to stir my imagination, I saw the final
episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s season 5, “The End.” Larry David donates a
kidney to comedian Richard Lewis, then months later is dying in a hospital room. His wife, father, friends and a rabbi gather around him. As he expires, they start bickering over money owed and other matters. While comic, the scenes closely track real near-death
experiences. He flatlines, then finds himself flying through light and clouds
to heaven, emerging with a full head of hair. Kindly robed guides (played by
Dustin Hoffman and Sasha Baron Cohen) meet him. The World to Come looks ready
for him, with legendary Ben Hogan eager to play golf with him with the news
that Marilyn Monroe was a big fan of Seinfeld and is eager to meet him No need for bathrooms! Then he encounters his querulous mother Adele, played perfectly by Bea Arthur.
But David’s earthly behavior patterns get the better of him.
His guides decide he’s not ready for Heaven and he reluctantly slips back into
his body. The machines start beeping with life. even as Marilyn Monroe appears
to sigh, “I really love your sense of humor.” The flatlining machines start beeping
to signal a fluttering return to life, everybody is stunned, and Larry lives to
speak his mind in many more seasons. While the intent is humor, David’s foray
into and out of the World to Come closely tracks other near-death experiences. Dialogue
with his wife Cheryl (played by Cheryl Hines a/k/a Mrs. Robert F. Kenney Jr.) shows the profound
impact of such a glimpse of the other side:
Larry: “What a thing, huh?”
Cheryl: “Yeah. How do you feel? Do
you feel different after all this?”
Larry: “Yeah, I mean, come on, I’m a
changed man. I’m a completely different person.”
[Series spoiler: He doesn’t change at
all.]
This all comes as we approach the Jewish observance of Yom
Kippur, starting on October 12. That involves the Yizkor service, remembering
those who have gone before us. I post the names of relatives in my synagogue’s
Yizkor book. Would I like to hear from them, my parents, grandparents, friends
gone too soon? Sure, but I’m not seeking them out with all the techniques so
well discussed in Surviving Death.
“Our dead are never dead to us until
we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know
all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the
kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”
I once wrote a science fiction story based on this idea. A
cop killer was sent to a penal colony on the Moon. His punishment: he wouldn’t
die until everybody forgot him. But people kept remembering him. He truly had a
life sentence.
So if the dead aren’t talking to me even in my dreams, I’ll
just talk to them. They may be there, in a realm surrounding us but beyond our reach,
glimpsed hazily in shadows and during a blink of our eyes. Or do our realms interact?
At the Yizkor service I’ll remember, I’ll tell stories and write stories, I’ll
say their names. In doing so, I keep them alive. The questions we all have
about near death, after death, the World to Come—we all discover the answers in
the end. And that may just be the beginning.
I recently read the novel The Price You Pay, by Jim Fusilli. I knew of him through his music writing for The Wall Street Journal but I hadn't read any of the novels he's written since 2001's Closing Time. I've now corrected that with his latest novel.
It tells the story of Mickey Wright Jr., part-time business major at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, N.J., sleep-deprived worker at an Italian bakery and a liquor store, and target of his ill-tempered and violent father, a widower and cop with the Jersey City PD. Early in the book, his father forces Mickey to get a "real job" working at a trucking company in Union City with the Teamsters, starting in the office as a "router-typist."
But Mickey soon learns that the office job is just the start of a position that involves much, much more. The Price You Pay has been described as a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and a crime novel, and it brings all those elements. What made it memorable for me is Fusilli's total grasp of the time and the blue-collar union/mob milieu that's utterly foreign to me. But not to Fusilli; according to Wikipedia, "While in college, Fusilli joined the Teamsters Local 560 as a clerk at Smith Transport, headquartered in Hoboken." And that first-hand experience shines through in the details of work at a transport company, along with descriptions of Jersey City and adjacent towns. He shows the mean streets with no romantic coloring.
Fusilli grabs readers by the elbow and serves as a Hudson County Dante escorting us as Mickey Wright struggles against his seemingly unstoppable descent through the circles of deceit, larceny, political corruption, family violence and murder. He does so with prose that always aims to describe and move the story along, without navel-gazing. This passage about the approach to his new employer, Impact Trucking, captures Fusilli's pitiless eye (and olfactory abilities):
Drawing near on his drive from the Heights, Micky was jostled by potholes, then greeted by the odor of gasoline and motor oil and the sound of grinding gears and barking men. He watched as incoming trucks, their steel-gray bodies sullied by grime, zipped in backwards to their stations while the semis required pinpoint dance-like maneuvers to precisely position them for loading.
The corrupting process started early, with Mickey recruited to lie to wives and others calling about drivers. Here's how it goes:
One late afternoon, Joey Baldessaro Jr., a Jersey City-based driver, pulled Mickey aside. He said, "Listen, if my wife calls, you tell her I ain't in yet."
Baldessaro was in his early 30s; like most of the drivers, he was fit and rough around the edges, but had had a kind of charm and an easy laugh. His father was a driver too; Joey Sr. gave his son his good looks but was taciturn and often abrupt. It was said both men had quick tempers.
"What?" Joey Jr. said.
"I'm not comfortable with that," Mickey told him.
"Yeah, well," Joey Jr. said. "Pretend."
Soon, many of the Jersey City-based drivers counted on him for cover. "He's not in yet, Mrs. Flannery," Mickey said when she called looking for her husband, though Flannery dumped his load three hours ago. He lied to Tommy Malzone's daughter, telling her he wasn't sure where her father was when he knew Malzone was buying rounds and getting sloppy at Rudy's, spending cash he won when he hit the number.
Will Mickey escape the fate of a violent path? Can his toil in a bakery pay off? And what about Debbie Olsen, the young woman he meets in class and goes on a date with at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Get your hands on The Price to Pay and find out.
June always takes me back to my graduation from Princeton in
1980. Do my fledgling steps in the job market hold any lessons for the class of 2024? Read on.
I was an economics major planning a journalism career. To that end, I mailed out resumes hoping that summer newspaper jobs
and my economics degree might stir some interest. I had also passed the Foreign
Service exam, so global public service beckoned as a career option. As my classmates talked about travel plans, I thought a summer of backpacking in Europe could be educational. The Peace Corps intrigued me, but my practical-minded mother back in Mission, Texas, warned me, "Van, if you go into the Peace Corps, I'll make you pay me back every dime I ever sent to Princeton." And she was serious about that, too. So that option was off the table.
None of these pleasant fantasies happened. The job search plan worked – catastrophically well. Instead
of landing in Baton Rouge or Corpus Christi, I parlayed the Princeton
connection, writing samples and a gift for good job interviews into a reporter-researcher job at
Forbes Magazine, "the Capitalist Tool." The catch: I had to start a week after I graduated. Visions of
travel vanished as, buckling under maternal pressure to get a job, I accepted
the offer of a $12,000 yearly salary and scrambled to find a place to live. I
plunged into the world of work and New York living with absolutely no break. By mid-June I was in a sports coat and tie, humping along in the sweltering A train from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn to West 4th Street in Manhattan wondering what I had gotten myself into.
On the surface, an entry-level job like this made sense, a
way to build on my skills. And it would have – but not at Forbes. Back then it
was a twice-monthly magazine with a fearsome reputation for hard-hitting
stories and a delight at squeezing the gonads of executives. Insecure, inexperienced, anxious and wildly nonconfrontational, I
struggled like a guppy among piranhas in the Forbes fishbowl.
Problems began immediately. My journals from 1980 are full
of anxiety and pep talks to myself as I tried to get the rhythm of checking
financial stories that blended arcane (to me) business concepts with punchy
opinions and quotes that sources often did not want to appear in print. As I recall, fact-checking
required guile and mental gymnastics, since we could not read quotes directly
back to sources, only paraphrase them. That meant sources didn’t know exactly
what we wanted them to confirm, and they couldn't retract or alter a quote.
Trying to look like I know what I'm doing, 1980.
Forbes veterans felt exasperation with my bumbling. For example, senior
editor Bob Flaherty dubbed one hot-shot Wall Street investor a “cult figure.”
So I dutifully underlined the phrase in red ink on the draft as a fact to check.
When I called the guru, I asked him, “So are you really a cult figure?” That
didn’t help my reputation at all.
Indeed, I knew from the beginning I was out of my league.
From my journal, June 26, 1980:
Work is hell. I don’t know what I’m
going to do. I am checking my 1st story and it is a nightmare. . . I’m
afraid I’ll get run over when it hits the press. My manager is very helpful,
but my lack of attention and knowledge is hopelessly frustrating.
And on July 5:
Work has been an experience.
Fact-checking is much more difficult than I expected. My 1st story
was one by Howard on REITS [real estate investment trusts]. I am sweating
blood about some things I underlined but did not check. I think the spellings
are all OK, but I’m just not 100% sure. I’ve heard that capital punishment is preferable
to the penalties affixed to misspellings that checkers let past. I just have to
wait.
I don’t know how exactly to
evaluate the experience so far. The people are OK and the education is good,
but I can’t help feel a Sword of Damocles is over my head. The thought of
getting fired has of course entered my head, and it is possible after the 3-month
probation I might be let go. If that happens I could either try the Journal of
Commerce or Jewish publications. If they want me, fine. If not, it won’t be the
end of the world. I could have used a vacation. Now I know why I didn’t write
to the biz mags—I must have thought something like this would come up. I wonder
what I was thinking about when I started this search. I suppose I did the right
thing, given what I wanted to do and the market. Ideally I could work through
next May, try to get a position someplace else, then take the summer off. I
think my considerable strains of late will be alleviated when the July 21 issue
comes out w/o pain, and when I finally develop a social life. Last Friday I
attended services at The Village Temple and they made me feel quite comfy. As I
was leaving the rabbi said, “We could use a few more single men here, for these
young women.”
By August, the alarm bells rang loud enough for the head of
the research department to warn me about my lagging performance. While other
new reporter-researchers were getting articles published, I hesitated to write
anything, until I finally broke into print with short newsmaker items.
August 14:
My manager called me into her cubicle
and told me, essentially, I had the next three weeks to get my act together, by
the end of the three month probation period. It’s gotten so nobody has a great
urge to work with me, which probably accounts for the revolving door series of
people I’ve worked with. I’m too slow and unsure and just don’t seem to be
jelling with the system.
By December I had a talking-to that left me in tears, and I
should have cut my losses. Forbes management could have done that also, but I remained.
These days, I’d tell my younger self to bail out, get a Eurail Pass and don’t
look back. Use your post-college youth on more rewarding activities if you clearly see a mismatch and no future at a job. However, that
path would have required accepting that I had failed in the sort of high-status job worthy of
a Princeton grad. Given my utter inability to make that mental leap, I couldn’t slink back to Mission, Texas with my tail between
my legs, or stay in New York without a job. Instead, I soldiered on the best I
could.
Hovering over the entire operation at 60 Fifth Avenue was
the merry and mischievous warlord, Malcolm Forbes. He was an outsized, unique character who garnered massive press coverage. Reporter-researchers dreaded
the ritual of the “townhouse luncheon,” when Malcolm and his sales executives
would wine and dine a corporate chieftain who probably had been the subject of
a major article. Malcolm and the CEO would then sweep into the research
department with a copy of the fact-checked manuscript. The CEO would review the manuscript with the trapped reporter-researcher for errors and demand
explanations for anything that looked wrong, while Malcolm relished the fun.
My turn as the townhouse luncheon dessert finally
came. A compassionate and alert senior reporter-researcher, Gerry, warned me that Anthony O’Reilly, CEO of H. J. Heinz Co. (the ketchup company), would be the honored guest and peruse
a story I checked. O’Reilly’s host that day was actually Malcolm's son Steve Forbes, fellow
Princetonian, flat-tax advocate and presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. O’Reilly
looked at the manuscript, didn’t see anything amiss, and moved on. I collapsed
in relief at my desk, head resting on my IBM Selectric typewriter, and took
the rest of the afternoon off.
I began to think I was getting a handle on the job. How wrong I was. By the spring, soon after signing the lease for my first
apartment at 131 Amity Street in Brooklyn, my manager took me out for a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village and told me to find another job. She didn't set a specific timeframe for leaving. I thought I was getting a promotion, that's how deluded I was. Then
I found myself involved in a libel suit for my involvement in a story where a
touchy executive was referred to as “unsavory.” And then my mother had a fatal bone
cancer diagnosis. And then I had a tempestuous romance with Joanne, an
older woman (as in, she was 30 years old) from the Upper West Side who I met at Congregation Emunath Israel on West 23rd Street. Those tumultuous weeks in 1981 swamped my boat in every possible way but I stayed afloat.
Aghast and ashamed at this reversal of my post-college trajectory, I never could
tell recruiters why I wanted to leave the plum job at Forbes. I finally became
an editor at a meek trade magazine, Quick Frozen Foods, a monthly published by
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). This job was a better fit for my skillset at the time, and it
paid 50 percent more than Forbes. I did solid work there, with a fondness for articles on kosher food regulation in New York and the foodservice department at Sing Sing Prison.
Two years later, HBJ moved its New York
magazines to Cleveland. I decided to stay in town and try freelancing. My career arc plummeted from Princeton to Forbes to Quick Frozen Foods
to an unemployment line in downtown Brooklyn in three years. My mother died before I ever held another full-time job.
On the upside, I lived by my wits as a freelancer, which resulted in four years of enjoyable writing at publications like Advertising Age and Whole Life Times, the freedom to finally travel the world, fast times with the invaluable National Writers Union and eventually a job as the East Coast Bureau Chief of Video Store, a magazine then owned by HBJ.
May 29, 1981:
Do I want to remain in this type of
media work? Reporters, who demand such lofty ethics from others, often ply
their trade under the sleaziest of styles. That’s the contradiction of the job.
I keep mine high but I’m not often in the touchy situation. I love writing, I
find increasing evidence that I do it well, so I can certainly pursue it
through other channels than kick-ass reporting. . . . There’s something with my
name on it out there and I just need to find it.
June 26, 1981:
I’m leaving Forbes. Wednesday I got
an offer from HBJ’s QFF. I am bored beyond belief, which means of course it’s time
to clean my apartment.
Forbes magazine has struggled in the digital age, relocated to
Jersey City in 2014 and has been tossed from one owner to another. I wish it well in these traumatic times for publishing. Looking back, the pressure-cooker
environment of the reporter-researcher department incubated tremendously talented
people who went on to careers in journalism, publishing, Wall Street and law. Life in the editorial trenches created durable bonds and "Front Page" style humor. One writer groused after a particularly trying week, "I need a brain D&C." I grasped the humor in that after looking up D&C in a dictionary.
Management kept me on staff far longer than they had any reason to do so, a humane gesture that resulted in me staying in New York rather than relocating. I've been treated much more brutally elsewhere. In 2006, the accounting firm KPMG laid off almost its entire proposal team, including me, in a stunning four-minute listen-only conference call.
At Forbes, I
learned the value of fact-checking and wrote some of my favorite all-time stories
for the “Personal Affairs” section in the back of the book. One was about executive
portraits. My very last story, “Private Eyes for Inc.’s,” appearing in the July 6,
1981, issue, covered corporate investigators. Malcolm himself wrote “Fascinating story—MF” on
a draft copy, which I still have. That moment gave me great satisfaction, tangible proof that sometimes I knew what I was doing.
I stayed in trade magazines until 1995, when Video Store laid me off after eight years. A year later I
landed in firmwide communications at Price Waterhouse, the accounting
firm now known as PwC. I continue to work in accounting as a proposal writer, a
niche that ideally matches my skills and personality. Why do I like proposal
writing? Because it involves hard deadlines, high stakes, a respect for facts and a minimum of fluff, clear and persuasive
writing and, as I once explained, “I like to win.”
As unlikely as it would have sounded to me in 1980, I’ve evolved from the anxiety-wracked
20-something fact-checker to the informed, experienced and unflappable (outwardly, anyway)
proposal pro who confidently guides teams through the pursuit process and spins out persuasive
copy as fast as I can type. AI's got nothing on me.
My advice for new grads: Dare to dream, but if you fail, learn
from the experience, don’t be humiliated by it. Savor the wins, build skills and
be flexible. Use The Elements of Styleby Strunk and White to learn to spell correctly, use proper
grammar and write in a jargon-free and logical style—that will give you an
unbeatable advantage over AI and the semi-literate competition in
the job market. If Plan A doesn’t work, go to Plan B, don’t recycle Plan A. You'll be working a long time, so if you want to see the world, get that Eurail Pass and start packing.
And if the Peace Corps meets your vibe, then join the Peace Corps and find out what life has in store for you. Let that desire be the road you take.
Here's a collection of short pieces--two microstories and four entries in the Katonah Village Library's Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, in dubious honor of the 19th century English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with "It was a dark and stormy night." I did my best to equal his awfulness, but I didn't rise to the level of the winning entry at the library. But practice makes perfect.
Let’s open with two 100-word stories I recently wrote:
Embracing the Man-Bra
After years of hitching up droopy pants, I finally took
action beyond tightening my belt: I bought suspenders after seeing them on
“Queer Eye.” I chose a snappy black set at Tractor Supply Company. Immediately
I noticed a difference as my britches reach my bellybutton and shirts stay
tucked in. Eureka! I describe suspenders as the “man bra,” uplifting what an
aging body can’t hold up. I’m looking and feeling like a new hombre. Next up: thinner
suspenders for the Wall Street vibe and others to wear under summer shirts.
Finally I’m enjoying the support I need. Thanks, Man-Bra!
Demon Rum at Princeton
Given my teetotaler background, my first encounter with
booze at Princeton had to be memorable. Guys in my dorm organized a Friday
party with trashcan punch, as in screwdrivers. I liked it and kept pounding
them down. Soon, my roommates and I were drunkenly dancing in a circle. Next
memory: leaning over my bed barfing my guts out. Saturday morning: headaches,
nausea. I wobbled to Commons for a restorative brunch. Recovered, I pulled my first all-nighter writing a
psychology paper. That weekend introduced me Oscar Wilde’s axiom: “All things
in moderation, including moderation.” Alas, I took his advice too well at certain
turning points in my life, typically involving demon rum.
And now, my entries in the Katonah Library’s Bulwer-Lytton
bad writing contest. These are terrible very long opening sentences of novels:
The Long, Long Wait on the Train Platform
Sheila shivered under her tastefully knit woolen muffler as
she waited at the Katonah Metro-North station, the winter dawn’s icy wind pummeling
her like a dinner-deprived Labradoodle, while she peered up the track willing
the train’s arrival (“breathe,” she whispered, “Namaste”), since her large
macchiato from Dunkin’ Donut had raced through her digestive system like a
downtown express and she feverishly imagined the train’s clean, hopefully
unoccupied restroom, because she really, really needed to pish.
Another Day at the Ox Office
Jennifer’s request for “exotic, intense yarn” as a birthday
propelled husband Noah on a wild goose chase (not that geese produce yarn)
across a secretive network of farms dedicated to exclusive curated yarn
offerings, where sophisticated knitting connoisseurs jostled to personally
gather raw materials from pampered mammals, genetically bred for peak pelt
performance, and that resulted in Noah, sprawled legs akimbo on a musty
scratchy woolen blanket, gingerly plucking thick, yard-long hairs from the swollen
scrotum of a baffled but visibly delighted musk ox who moo’ed with masculine
modalities; for Mr. Musk, it was just another day at the ox office.
Stugots at the Seder
THAT Passover seder began when the college kids demanded the
right to cross out references to Israel in the siddurs and use the term
“enslaved future colonizers,” which enraged family patriarch Zaydie, who
clutched the siddurs to his bony chest and called the collegians “ungrateful shmucks”
in his Chernobyl-via-Miami accent, so in a compromise the collegians snapped
their fingers when they disagreed with a passage and that kept the peace until
somebody demanded “free range anti-Zionist vegan matzoh” and Zaydie shouted,
“You, stugots, go sit in the formal dining room we never use!” (when
excited, Zaydie lapsed into Neapolitan dialect he learned when stationed in
Italy in the 1950s) so the families could finish the ritual with the search for
the hidden matzoh piece called the afikoman, beloved by toddlers but
disrupted this time when teens chased the little kids around filming them for
social media and one knocked over a bowl of boiling matzoh-ball soup that slightly
scalded matriarch Bubbie through her Lululemon cargo joggers, but the doctors
at the table applied ice packs so this year’s seder ended with no shrieking trip
to the ER, Baruch Ha-Shem.
Manly Memories at the Dinky
Memories of Princeton University tumbled in Dudley’s memory while
he rode the “Dinky” shuttle from Princeton Junction to campus, where he had studied
classics, invaluable for his position as senior vice president of Poppy’s
investment house, and he mused on manly nude oiled initiates playing “Trees andTrolls” in his highly selective eating club on “The Street,” and his
junior semester abroad, spent pursuing lissome European coeds unencumbered by the rigid
Protestant neuroses of “imports” who flocked to Old Nassau on weekends, but, alas,
now he desperately fished for his Reunions hotel reservation misplaced in his paisley orange and black jacket and matching trousers.
I found the note in a stack of family letters. Dated July
15, 1968, the handwritten letter came from my father Mark’s wife Kate, whom he
married after he and my mother Shirley divorced in 1961. In elegant writing on stationery with
an embossed “W,” Kate wrote to my mother, brother and me:
I hope you are all well and having
a good summer. Mark and I are very very proud of your excellent grades Van and
Cooper. Shirley we comment over how in each set of pictures they change. Van is
certainly growing up fast and Cooper also. We would love to see them. Mark is
very busy and both of us delighted to be in NY. With kindest regards and love
to Van and Cooper, Kate.
Dad finally visited us for a weekend in Mission, Texas in
1970, our first time to see him in eight years, and he told us about Kate. Cooper
and I first met Kate when we visited them in New York for a week in 1972.
Kate, summer 1975, New York
Now, gazing at this brief letter from 56 years ago, I asked
myself: Who was Kate?
I remember Kate from visits in the 1970s and early 1980s. She
was slender, elegant, a great cook and always polite with what I describe as a Irish-tinged New York accent. She always existed in the shadow of my
father. He combined public charm with private bullying when my brother and I bridled at his unhinged criticism of our Texas
upbringing (especially our mother) and balked at his grandiose plans to mold us into refined East Coast preppies.
Dad shared details of Kate’s wide-ranging life: from a family of pioneers of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, ballerina with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, former nun, proprietress of a ballet school in McAllen, Texas. With all the
tension with my father, I couldn’t see Kate as an individual—that motivated
this essay, to attempt to imagine her apart from Mark Wallach. She had no formal role in my life, not as my stepmother, aunt or anything other than the woman married to my father. She must have walked an emotional knife's edge between empathy for two small-town teens and her relationship with her devoted husband. What was her life outside of her marriage?
The one time
she commented on my father’s bizarre plans for me came in 1975. Dad had
arranged for me to lose my virginity to the “physical therapist” of a friend of
his. While sorely tempted for my very own “Maggie May” moment, I refused to
grant him any say in this part of my life.
Kate offered she had met the woman and thought she was “very
nice.” That did not change my mind.
The McAllen dance school, photo courtesy of Mariessa Anton
Married in McAllen, my father and Kate moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1962, then Manhattan in 1967. In 1977 they left their apartment at
220 E. 63rd Street in Manhattan for an apartment at 101 Gedney
Street in Nyack, New York. They attended my Princeton graduation in 1980, meeting my
brother and me in one part of the campus while my mother and other relatives,
who drove up from Texas, waited elsewhere. My mother was adamant that she did
not want to see them. I last saw Kate in 1986 when I met her and my father for dinner in
Astoria, Queens, where I then lived. Photos from that meeting show Kate suffering from
Alzheimer’s. She died in 1988. They had been married for 26 years. My father remarried in 1995 and lived in the Gedney Street apartment until his death in 2018.
Finding the 1968 note, which my late mother saved in papers that
I eventually inherited, stirred my interest in Kate. Internet searches went
nowhere when I looked for “Mary Katherine Dougherty.” I knew she had operated a
ballet studio in McAllen until she and my father left in 1962. Finding nothing about her, I
posted a request on a Facebook page on McAllen history for any information
people could share. I had no idea what to expect.
To my surprise, I immediately had many gracious responses
from women who had been Kate’s dance students from the 1940s to the 1960s at her
McAllen studio at 409 N. 12th Street. No wonder the digital trail
went nowhere—I had been misspelling her middle name. They all loved her as a
teacher, role model and friend. To them, she was always Mary Kathryn.
The Brownsville girl who became Mary Kathryn Dolina
Equipped with the accurate name, I found many more details. Kate’s
picture came into sharper focus, thanks to digitized newspaper stories from 1909
to the 1960s. I found many through the invaluable Portal to Texas History, a project of the University of North Texas. Some findings:
The marriage license for her parents, William J.
Dougherty and Lillian Dougherty (yes, that was her mother's maiden name) was reported in
the Brownsville (TX) Herald on July 19, 1909.
Ancestry.com showed she was born in 1912 and
died in 1988. Her father, William John Dougherty, was born in New York City on December
13, 1878 and died in Brownsville on January 26, 1942. Her mother Lillian Sheridan
Dougherty was born in 1882 in Brownsville and died in 1952. Kate was their only
child.
eBay has signed ballet publicity photos of her from
the early 1930s, taken by New York society photographer Achille Volpe.
The research explored topics that place her in the context of the Rio Grande Valley’s history. The August 4, 1909 wedding article in the Herald had the headline, “Prominent Couple Married.” It gave invaluable details that connected Kate to the turbulent real estate market in the Rio Grande Valley. The story said,
The union of this couple is of general interest in this section. The bride is the daughter of one of the oldest families in Brownsville, her father, the late James Dougherty, having been for years the editor and publisher of the former Brownsville Cosmopolitan, which was afterwards bought by the Herald. For several years Miss Dougherty has taught school at Hidalgo, and it was there that she became acquainted with the man whom she is destined to wed. She is the sister-in-law of John Closner, of Chapin, one of the most prominent men of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
Dr. Dougherty is the son of Wm. A. C. Dougherty of New York. He attended Manhattan College, Columbia School of Mines, and New York University, taking his medical degree from the former institution. After his graduation, he became instructor in nervous and mental diseases at the New York post graduate college, going from there to the Bicetro in Paris, where he took two years of special work in nervous diseases under Prof. Pierre Marie, the pupil and successor of Charcot. Returning to this country, he began practice in New York, becoming connected with various institutions, among them the Hospital for Incurables [now St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx] and St. Vincent’s, being chief of clinic for nervous and mental diseases at the latter . . . In the latter part of 1906 he came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley to look after some land interests owned by him here, and has remained here since, devoting himself to the development of his land near Hidalgo. During spare moment in Hidalgo Dr. Dougherty has read law, as a result of which he was admitted to the bar at Galveston last October.
That union produced Mary Kathryn Dougherty. The Brownsville Herald of October 14, 1934
published a profile with the title, “Member of Russian Ballet is Former Brownsville
Girl.” The article provides an invaluable timeline on her life, worth quoting
at length:
Brownsville Herald Oct. 14, 1934
Mary Kathryn, who is the daughter
of Dr. Wm. J. Dougherty, noted neurologist, and Mrs. Dougherty of 132 Locust
Hill Lane in Yonkers, N.Y., was born in Brownsville and lived here until she
was two years old. She visited here frequently during her childhood and her
mother is now renewing old friendships while visiting in the home of her
sister, Mrs. John Closner.
Although under 20 [actually, she
was 22 based on a 1912 birth], Miss Dougherty has had a remarkable career as an
amateur, dancing at many charity and society events. She made her first marked
success at 14, when she danced during a notable affair at Madison Square
Garden.
Since the start of her
professional career she was a member of the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe and
rejected an offer to tour with the company this summer in Spain. Recently she
appeared for two weeks with the Fokine Ballet at the Lewisohn Stadium in New
York City.
Miss Dougherty was given the name
Dolina with her admission and will be known professionally as Mary Kathryn
Dolina. Only five new members were admitted after rigid tests and Miss
Dougherty was the only American accepted. Her unfamiliarity with the Russian
language, Miss Dougherty finds, has been offset to marked degree by her
splendid command of French. She also has a fair knowledge of Spanish as result
of childhood associations.
On June 16, 1935, the Herald reported that Kate was
performing in a satirical review in titled “Parade.”
Produced by The Theater Guild, it opened in Boston and then moved to New York’s
Guild Theatre. The Playbill brochure for Parade lists “Katherine Dougherty” as
one of the “Chorus Girls” and “Parade Girls.”
The next story I found in the Herald, Dec. 27,
1942, was her wedding. Her father had died earlier in the year. The article
describes her as the “daughter of Mrs. William J. Dougherty, and the late
Dr. Dougherty.” She married Albert William Reed, son of Mr. and Mrs.
Albert William Reed.” I couldn't find more information about the groom nor any reference to Kate as "Mrs. Reed."
The Mary Kathryn Dougherty Studio of the Dance
What happened with the marriage? When was she a nun? Nothing
turned up. The Mercedes (TX) Enterprise of April 26, 1951 ran a story with the
headline “Edinburg Orchestra to Present Dances, Violist Tonight.” The text
says, “Miss Mary Kathryn Dougherty of McAllen will present a number of her
pupils in a program of dancing, and Michael Wilkomirski of Edinburg will
present a violin program. Miss Dougherty, formerly of New York, was a member of the
Ballet Rouse de Monte Carlo there, and is recognized as a performer and
teacher."
The last article I found is from May 10, 1962 in the
Mercedes Enterprise, headlined “Benefit Dance Friday Night to Aid Crippled.” It
read in part:
The Mary Kathryn Dougherty Studio
of the Dance will present an evening entertainment at the McAllen Civic Center
Auditorium . . . for the benefit of the Hidalgo County Society for Crippled
Children and Adults, Inc. Miss Dougherty for the past
seventeen years has maintained her studio in McAllen.
Besides the Ballet Rouse experience, the article said she had been a "Guest Artist" at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center in New York. I especially noticed the fact that she had operated her McAllen studio for 17 years—that means it opened in 1945.
From Facebook comments of students from 60 or more years ago, I learned Kate
brought a classical rigor and wonderful teaching ability to her dance
instruction. She inspired devotion from her students. More than articles, their vivid memories brought the woman they knew as Mary Kathryn to vivid life. Students were heartbroken when Kate closed the studio and moved away in 1962, never, as far as I know, returning to McAllen, where she had such deep roots. One student shared a May 18, 1959 program guide from a performance
with me, where Kate outlined her approach:
In presenting myself to instruct my
students, it is my aim to stress the educational value of the dance as a means
of artistic expression, poise and self-discipline, attributes so essential if
we are to have a well balanced personality. Mere gyrations, that unfortunately
are frequently referred to as “dancing”, make impossible the attainment of this
desirable goal.
Wyleen Wilson King Aalberg recalled:
I was a student of Mary Katherine and loved her!
As a young girl, I never knew what happened to her. I
remember being so excited about dancing starting back up after the summer, and
then it didn’t. I was crushed.
The studio was in her home. I remember the wooden dance
floor, mirrors on three of the four walls, the pianist, handmade recital
costumes that were so beautiful, and recitals at the Woman’s Club and later at
the Civic Center.
I remember Mary Katherine tracing our feet on a piece of
paper to order our dance shoes.
I remember getting my first toe shoes and Mary Katherine
teaching us how to tie the pink ribbons on them.
I remember thinking how Mary Katherine reminded me of the
ballerina in my jewelry box, she seemed so delicate and graceful.
One memory especially surprised me, to put it mildly. Harriet Kirsh Pozen wrote,
Mary Katherine was my ballet
teacher, and Mark [my father] was my Jewish religious school teacher at Temple Emanuel in
McAllen. I still have a book about hieroglyphics that he gave me because I was
so engaged with him as my teacher, I still have the book.
She nurtured my love of dance and
in many ways feel like I am still a ballerina because of your mother. My
posture and the way I carry myself, the way I hold my fingers even in yoga is
the way she taught me. It’s beautifully engrained in me.
My mother also loved her and we
would visit her from time to time. Mom would say even if you don’t learn to
dance you will learn to be a “lady” from her.
I loved our performances and
especially the stunning costumes.
This Hebrew School reference was news to me, because I never knew my father taught
at McAllen's Temple Emanuel, where my parents were married in 1955. He always treated
Judaism as a club to pummel my brother and me with about our shortcomings. Had
he stayed connected to us and shared Jewish learning in a positive way while we
were growing up, as something meaningful to him, our relationship with him might
have been better.
Reflecting on Kate’s life journey, from Brownsville to
Yonkers to New York to European ballet to McAllen and back to New York, I
learned about her life force and devotion to dance as a calling. With her
education and expressiveness, she could have written a compelling memoir
covering everything from Texas land holdings to world-famous ballet companies
to serving as a beloved role model for young dancers. Had I known her under other less strained circumstances, we would have had a lot to discuss. She had the kind of intriguing life I wrote about as a journalist.
Still, the research brought more questions to mind:
What happened with the Dougherty family's extensive land holdings in the Valley?
What led Kate to leave her dance and ballet career in New York, which seemed to be thriving, for Brownsville?
How long was she married to Albert William Reed, and how did the marriage end?
When was Kate a nun?
Why did Kate close her dance studio in McAllen in 1962 and move with my father to Michigan? She was 50 at the time and, based on comments from students, very popular. She could have taught for years more.
Why didn't Kate and my father ever return to the Valley after leaving? Kate had family and social connections there, and my father had two very young sons. My father came back for one weekend in September 1970. What did Kate think about her husband visiting his sons one weekend in 10 years? Were they indifferent to us, or did some other factors come into play? I can't believe that my parents' frosty relationship alone explained for the permanent absence.
Perhaps writing about her life will lead to some answers. The woman I knew as Kate, always enmeshed in volatile family
dynamics, now stands on her own as Mary Kathryn.
But I'll never know either one of them.
The ballerina, New York, early 1930s, photo courtesy of Mariessa Anton
I have broad
musical tastes: Latin, 50s jazz, Israeli, The Great American Songbook, classical, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But what concert caused me
to drop everything, book vacation time and fly to Jacksonville, Florida in a
state of frenzied anticipation? In three words: Grand Funk Railroad.
My brother
Cooper, who lives in Florida and shares my fascination with Grand Funk, pitched me on the
opportunity to hear the pride of Flint, Michigan. Of course I said yes, yes YES. How could I pass on this
bucket-list thrill? In our early teens in Mission, Texas, we heard the power
trio’s epochal third album, Closer to Home, and that was it. We were hooked for
life on Grand Funk’s pounding, not-very-subtle sound and compelling lyrics.
Well, they're compelling when you’re 14 years old, but they do sink in. Live Album, Survival, E Pluribus Funk
and We’re an American Band were all on heavy rotation on our turntable at home.
The only downside
for a fan: Grand Funk never worked as a teen romance mood enhancer, if you get
my drift; nobody slow-danced to Grand Funk at Friday Night Lights post-game dances at the Mission Civic Center. The chicks I liked were more into the Carpenters, Carol King, the Jackson 5 and the Partridge
Family (and one really liked the Edgar Winter Group). So I cooled it on Grand Funk to show enthusiasm for Top 40 favorites. That didn’t add any more teen zip to my social life, but at least I learned a lot about the Carpenters.
Besides listening to the group, I kept up with all the Grand Funk gossip. Mostly that involved their disastrous legal battles with evil genius manager Terry Knight, who fancied himself as Grand Funk's equivalent of Elvis's Col. Tom Parker. I remember one headline in Creem or, who knows, maybe Tiger Beat: "The fight to control Grand Funk!"
While Cooper
heard Grand Funk in concert before, I never had. The group broke up in 1976 and spun
through several reincarnations. Lead singer Mark Farner was in and out of the band as he pursued a solo career, and drummer Don Brewer and bassist Mel Schacher at one point fired Farner. I read about
the band but never expected to hear them.
But then Cooper’s
call came, and I answered, “Yeah baby!”
Cooper greeted
me with Grand Funk t-shirts we’d wear to the concert on a Saturday night. My
black shirt accessorized well with black jeans and black hiking shoes, and my well-worn Tractor
Supply Company camo hat. We were ready for a road trip!
The Thrasher-Horne Center for the Arts in Orange Park was
packed, 1,700 seats almost all filled. We fell into the lower end of the age
distribution. I doubt 10 people there were under 40. I called the scene “rock
and roll and walkers.” And that’s OK, this was a bonding experience for Baby
Boomers who craved the visceral thrill of hearing Grand Funk live. And it’s a fact: Grand
Funk is Homer Simpson’s favorite band.
Before the show we posed in front of the stage, with its banner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of "We're An American Band." I recorded an open mic in the lobby to capture my enthusiasm for the moment. We were pleased
that drummer Brewer and bassist Schacher were still touring, then disappointed
to learn Schacher had been sidelined due to illness. Still, Brewer kept this
from being a tribute band.
The Grand Funk Brothers take the stage!
They mostly
played songs I recognized. Cooper remembered the lyrics better than I did,
singing along to “Paranoid.” We thrust our fists skyward and joined the serenade. The
crowd roared when Brewer, now the Grand Old Man of Grand Funk, waved an
American flag and wore an Uncle Sam stovepipe hat. The big finale was, of course, “Closer
to Home,” then “American Band.”
Don Brewer goes All-American
Back home in
Katonah, I told friends about my experience. Several guys responded with wild
enthusiasm; Closer to Home was the first album friend ever bought.
For one night,
I was back in 1972, 15 again. Unsure of myself, hormonally addled, I responded
to songs like “Heartbreaker” and “I Can Feel Him in the Morning,” with a children's spoken intro with the haunting line "if you're good, you'll live forever, and if you're bad, you'll die when you die." For a teen dealing with a serious crisis of faith, that song meant something.
Hearing Grand
Funk struck me with the notion of getting “closer to home.” I remembered my family,
my friends, the turmoil of being young in a small town. Maybe we cannot,
ultimately, go home again, but with Grand Funk’s musical support I can get
closer to home.
Afterward, I
wrote haiku poems about the Florida experience. Here’s one of them:
Sometimes,
timing can shift the shock of life challenges. What can feel like devastation
can become an opportunity.
Last week,
our area endured pounding rain. I anxiously checked our basement in Katonah for
dampness. Wednesday looked normal. Thursday morning I was lugging down the
traditional load of laundry when I saw rippling waves shining at the bottom of
the stairs. I yelped and stumbled back upstairs. My partner Naomi and I raced down to
gauge the extent of flooding. Estimate: 3-4 inches across the whole basement. My
look at the storage room where I keep writing examples, research materials,
records and books both relieved and shocked me. Many materials were in sturdy
plastic bins, records were on a table—but a cardboard box with tax returns and legal
papers was a solid soggy mass. Plastic bags with hundreds of pages of printouts,
including unpublished novels, were soaked. And my only electronic copies for the
novels were waterlogged 3.5 inch memory disks that went out of style in Y2K.
Naomi
immediately called John Hobby Jr. Plumbing & Heating, who are old hands at pulling our
plumbing nuts out of the fire. I feared they were swamped with calls from
flooded homeowners and it could be days before they could come over. But no! Our
timing was fantastic. Within 60 minutes a Hobby squad arrived in their
distinctive red van. They pumped out the water and replaced the sump pump,
which had given up the ghost in the wake of too much rain. Meanwhile, Naomi
contacted First Response, to get the drying process started (that’s First
Response as in the remediation company for home cleanups, not pregnancy tests).
Again, I thought the process would take days. Instead, Vinnie the project
manager arrived as the plumbers were leaving.
Vinnie
assessed the situation with a practiced eye. The next morning, his crew arrived
with industrial-strength dehumidifiers and fans that we moved around the
basement from Friday through Tuesday. While I tossed some stuff, I decided to
try to dry out tax papers and research materials. Every couple of hours I
probed the depths of my wet papers. I saw progress, as I rotated files in front
of the roaring equipment. Gradually, materials dried, even if they are
permanently crinkled.
But wait,
there’s more! A big part of cleanups involve brawn. As fate would have it,
Thursday afternoon we had a visit from Naomi’s nephew Ian, who was visiting the
area. Ian, you should know, is a 30-something commercial fishing boat and
tugboat captain from Alaska (and the brother of remarkable Alaska back-country athlete Ben Americus, who makes terrifying videos of his adventures). Ian arrived to see us at just the time when we
could use a strong, rugged Alaskan to move heavy cartons, flatten boxes and
make the clean-up process vastly easier. Otherwise, Naomi and I would have
struggled to move, flatten and throw out things, given our status as two increasingly
creaky baby boomers.
When we told
Ian the sump pump broke, he felt our pain. “On a fishing boat we always have
multiple sump pumps,” he said. That sounds prudent for a vessel sailing the roiling icy waters off the Bering Strait.
By Monday my
materials were dry enough to leave the basement. First Response picked up their
gear on Tuesday. We switched immediately to washing laundry, including every
towel we own.
I know the
recovery could have been much slower and messier, had the timing not gone our
way. If plumbers and remediators weren’t available, if the rain kept coming, if
Ian was out wrestling with giant tunas in Alaska. And the opportunity from the
flood: the clean-up turbocharged our decluttering efforts. The basement never
looked and smelled better!
This
afternoon I looked over my mostly dry papers, 20 to 30 years old. I’m trying to
smooth them out. This time around I’ll be smart and store them in plastic bins,
away from any watery threat. As an obsessive self-chronicler, I’m not going to let
something like a basement flood keep me from my materials. There’s still
literary gold in those stained, slightly soggy pages. From the grit of the
flood comes the essay.
I've become the unofficial bard of thank-you haikus, sent to friends and family after we get together. I try to do three at a time. Here are recent ones to wrap up 2023.
The Country Series
The country kibbutz
floats by the Delaware
Rachel and Alain's retreat
Rachel and Sonia
Lives depend on their work
Fighting the good fight
The sprawling kibbutz
Easy to wander its halls
The cats—never lost!
Brooklyn’s empty nesters
wonder how to fill the quiet
Well, why not more cats?
Alain's new ragtop:
Matthew's birthday Mercedes;
Drive it in good health!
NYC 8-8-2023
Van Gogh’s “Cypresses”
Breeze along the centuries
His gift to forever
Senior pass on buses
Such a deal! Hitting the road
Saves bucks for ice cream
2023 Rosh Hashanah and Christmas thank-yous
Cye, Mel, matzoh balls
Old family recipe
for a sweet new year
Founders of TBT
Cye and Mel are the Old Guard
That earns free parking
Mel at Samson AFB
Cold war front line of defense
but why no airstrip?
And here's one taken directly from the siddur today:
My hormones went crazy at a young
age. In the sixth grade I started shaving. A year later, I played shirts and
skins basketball in PE with a line of hair rolling down my chest.
Over the next decade matted curls
sprouted everywhere—back, front, shoulders, arms. Blessed with a positive body
image, I always enjoyed my look. The black froth washing over my collars marks
my visual brand. Shirtless at beaches, I think, “Gaze upon my swarthy Eastern
European-sourced Jewish physique! This is one Yid who’ll never get a back waxing.”
Validation felt good. A woman I
met in Brazil during my JDate days nicknamed me “Peludo,” Portuguese for hairy
or shaggy. I have the beach pictures of us as evidence.\
For real peludo acknowledgement, consider
New Orleans, 1987, at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. The sun, music and
crawfish made me groggy by mid-afternoon, so I stretched out on the ground,
shirt off, hat covering my eyes.
I had dozed off when I felt a
finger jabbing my chest. “What the heck?” I thought as I blinked to attention to
find two young women kneeling next to me, entranced.
“Why you are just the hairiest
thing I’ve ever seen,” declared one of them, a woman who gave her name as Mona,
from Mississippi. She’d come to New Orleans with another woman, a male friend and
the thickest Southern accent I’d ever heard to eat, listen and see the sights.
Mona kept running her fingers
down my chest in amazement; her frisky explorations tickled me, in more ways
than one.
I told her, “I bet you moan,” but
she was too sloshed to get my drift. I snapped a picture of her demonstrating a
drunken Cajun-Caribbean limbo dance move. Their male buddy took a photo showing
me flanked by Mona and her laughing
friend, as Mona’s hand stroked my peludo glory.
The peludo lifestyle isn’t all
fun and games. Shower drains clog without daily attention, bedsheets need regular
laundering. And consider the healthcare complexities. When I got a flu shot recently,
the nurse exclaimed, “I’m glad I don’t have to give you an EKG!” Ah, yes, the EKG
experience, the closest I’ve ever come to BDSM play, except there’s no “safe word”
to make them stop. Nurses dry-shave my chest and sides so the attachments will
stick. That’s the easy part. The nurses always apologize when they yank the EKG
attachments off. I tell them I’m used to the sharp but short ripping pain as
clumps of hair lift off me.
Knee surgery required my right
leg to be shaved to resemble a raw Thanksgiving turkey drumstick. I hadn’t seen
that much of my leg since I was in junior high. The shorn look didn’t concern
me—the fuzz always grows back thicker than ever (I learned that when, on a
whim, I asked a girlfriend shave her initials into my back, an escapade in body
modification that garnered peculiar glances at the gym for a few weeks).
As an adult I developed what I
call “hobbit ears.” My partner Naomi, as part pf my weekly home hair trim,
always plucks my ears and eyebrows. She’s very thorough in hunting down every
stray hair, so much so I often yelp, “Owww, this must be what childbirth feels
like!” I imagine she takes a discreet enjoyment from the vigorous tweezering, giving
me a little taste of the female maintenance experience. She also sternly warns
me to never, ever, wear a tank top in public, whenever I muse on that fashion choice
on hot days.
“No, Van, just—no,” she entreats
me. She has more common sense than I do on style matters.
I accede but still, if I ever do
this piece as an open mic, I may go all-in and let my furry freak flag fly in a tank top for
visual impact. My inner peludo needs to express itself. And if I can't do that, then I'll an OnlyFans page and monetize this look.
In July I entered a haiku contest organized by Katonah Poetry. I'd never written haikus and had barely read them. This sounded like a good use of my creative energies, so I entered with enthusiasm. To move the odds in my favor, I submitted 15 haikus for $30, or 5 for $10.
That didn't help, I didn't place. The winners were shorter than the classical 5-7-5 syllabic format, which I followed religiously, and more illusive in their images. Reflecting my mindset, my haikus were concrete and sometimes autobiographical. I strayed from observation on nature. Still, I enjoyed the creative effort and have kept writing them as the unofficial bard of weddings, baby namings and visits to friends' home. People like these snapshots of a moment. I envision them being printed and slipped into photo albums from these life events.
Here's my first batch, in the order I wrote them, with links to explanations and inspirations, plus photos. More will follow as they drift down from the ether into my imagination:
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