An Old Art School Story (sort of)

So when old stories came to mind, the first one I used to think about involved this guy Lou somebody and his wife Gail who owned a coffee shop in Baltimore in the early 60’s. The shop was called the Ablamov (I believe).

My good friend stayed there way too late one night drinking (not coffee) the night Gail decided to leave her husband and run away with my friend to New York.

He was too drunk to know much about this, but woke up sleeping with her in her car on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, early one morning. He demanded to be driven back to Baltimore, as he didn’t want to run away with her and he was supposed to be in school (MICA) with the rest of us.

He returned sheepishly and we welcomed him back to class.

Big Guy

Last week I was in the plane wending my way back home via Chicago. I arrived at the seat with trepidation, knowing I’m a big boy and hoping there would not be three people in the seats as it would be bound to inconvenience someone and I was to blame. I got to row 25 and laughed. In the window seat was a guy who was at least 500 pounds! I was the least of anyone’s problems. I said to him, “It looks like they put us together on purpose!” He laughed and I sat down in the aisle seat and knew there was no way anyone could possibly seat between us unless they were the size of a clarinet.

This was a full plane!

He told me not to worry, as he had purchased two seats and no one could sit next to us. He proudly showed me his ticket stubs. I did ask about one first class seat but he assured me they were sometimes too small for him.

I looked at his produced ticket stubs as he asked me to, and I laughed.

I said,” You have two seats all right but you have 25B and 26B. This means you have to be in two different rows!”

Needless to say when the guy in his seat showed up and looked at us he was happy to move into 26B.

We had a nice conversation which did not dwell upon size and made it easily to Chicago.

You said Hookah Bar, not Hooker Bar......

Having been in the bars for several hours, my sons and I, on vacation together,  decided we needed some food. We went to the concierge, and he told us about a Mid-Eastern restaurant, right across the road from our resort, where we could find a good meal. We all love Mid-Eastern food so off we went.

What we didn’t know was it was a Club, or sort of, it was a Hookah Bar and it was Natasha’s 17^th birthday.

So, you ask, who is Natasha? We still don’t know, but she was having a huge birthday party, with a DJ, and we ended up in the middle of it.

Much like a Saturday Night Live skit, we had gone into the Twilight Zone.

There were at least 30 people celebrating Natasha’s 17^th birthday, with an age range of about 17 or 18 to about 35. They were perhaps Russian, Lebanese, and or Greek. They were all beautiful, sexy and well dressed, and it kept looking like the opening of CSI Miami. I kept waiting for the guys with the machine guns to run in and blast us all.

The music was loud,  and they passed the mike around so all of Natasha’s friends could wish her a happy birthday and it included her business partner. Who has a business partner at 17?

We kept drinking and eating amazing food, and it got wilder as the night wore on. The dancers (guests) were so sexy that none of us could believe it. The atmosphere was wonderful and loud.

As we neared the end of our ability to keep on eating and drinking, it just seemed so natural for us to get the Hookah, although none of my boys ever smoked.  I last smoked in 1968. It came with the ever popular Apple Mint flavour and we all smoked. I guess it must be a flavour enhanced herb of some sort but we persisted. It was fine, and later I used my “puffer” so I could once again breath.

As we left the party sometime after one, and they were all going strong. My youngest son and clearly our designated walker decided to go back across the middle of the street with me following, with traffic flowing, and we hit the median bushes with a chain link fence enclosed in them. There was no way two inebriated gentlemen would ever cross over a fence in the dark on a busy street, and after a number of close calls we made it to the light and crossed.

When we got back to our hotel, the good news was the bar had closed so we all went to sleep.

The next day was a “sit by the pool and repair our heads” day.

My mother was an interesting woman...

My mother had retired, and as a former office manager, she had great office skills, back in the day. She could file and type and stuff, way before the computer was a reality. Way back in 1978, when Harry Hughes was beginning his campaign for governor of Maryland, he had a small base of support. He was fighting a large Democratic machine, the then Lieutenant Governor Blair Lee and he was the independent candidate.

The night he won the State Democratic primary, he thanked three people by name; his Campaign Manager, his wife Patricia, and his one full-time permanent volunteer, my mother, Rena Greenblatt. Once the candidate became the party nominee, there was a complete office staff, but my mother stayed on anyway, and later was appointed to the Commission on Aging, and was, by her own admission, the only “old person” on the committee.

The morning after the soon to be Governor had won the primary; he was on television thanking his three stalwarts. Soon after that announcement, my mother received a call from a friend in her seniors building. “Rena”, she said, “you’ll never believe it!” “There’s another woman out there with the same name as you”!

It was simply too hard to imagine my mother, at her age, in a place of importance.

“It’s so small!”

I was given a cute little martini shaped pin, that had a blinker in it, so it blinked and blinged all day. It was very cute and my beautiful, young (younger than me for sure) friend loved it. She was excited by it, and came over to me and pulled it. It came off in her hand, upsetting her of course because she hadn’t meant to do such a thing.

She looked at the back and realized it wasn’t held on with a pin mechanism, it was “magic”. “What held it in place”, she asked? “A magnet”, I exclaimed. “Where did it go?” Down my sweater, “I guessed. I pulled out the bottom of my sweater and the magnet fell to the floor.

Embarrassed, she went down on her knees to retrieve the magnet from the floor in front of me. She found it, and held it up, and with an apologetic look she said, “It’s so small!”

OK, it’s my birthday I know, and she’s trying to help, but when you get as old as me, the last thing you want is for a beautiful woman to be in front of you, on her knees, exclaiming to the world, “It’s so small!”

I wrote this as an email in May, 2001

My father in 1933.

I knew that my on my father’s side my Grandfather came from Russia. I had donated his papers to the Jewish Historical Society in Baltimore when I inherited them from my father. In those papers was his Russian draft notice. I knew he came to Baltimore, was married to my grandmother who had passed away in the 20’s, had 5 children of which my father was the youngest, and I knew all the children of his children, although I didn’t know many of the next generation. I was born when my father was 43, so I was a late son of the youngest child so my first cousins that are left are now all in their 70’s and 80’s (updated to 80's and 90's). I had no more information, and wasn’t looking for more.

My youngest daughter was part of a Heritage Day program at her school, in which each child brought in some information and “stuff” pertaining to their heritage. Her heritage is German, English, Lithuanian and Russian, as far as we knew, so we chose Russian, and provided her with a Russian Doll, some Russian money a family picture or two from Russia.

So…one day, a few months ago, I was fooling around on my computer, something I have been paid to do for years, and I tried my Grandfathers name on Google, and began to read various dead ends for fun. I ran across a question of a web site devoted to Lithuanian Jews and Jewish settlements in Lithuania in the 19^th century, which asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of my Grandfather and his family. They listed him by name and my grandmother and an Aunt or two. The question was dated 1993. I returned the email but the link was gone.

A few days later, I tried the woman’s name who asked the question on Google, and found her still actively involved in a Lithuanian search. I wrote to her and asked if she was still interested, and she was. She had spoken with two of my cousins several years ago, but cut the conversation short as she was on her way to Salt Lake City for more research. I began to include many of my cousins and my sons in the email, and sent her an up to date history of my family, as far as I could, including numbers of kids but not always names.

She began to correspond, and it seems that my grandfather was in fact from Lithuania, was one of six children, she had all the names and ages, I’d never heard of any of this. She gave us the ship info for when they arrived in New York. She gave us a new world! My son said we began to see people in our minds, real flesh and blood persons with names and histories. The sky had opened!

That’s the story. It was quite a week.

Paranoia?

I don’t know if I should be thankful or unhappy. I may be a sad soul, or just old and fat, or it may be just a nice gesture from a friend, so let me tell you what happened and you can figure it out for yourself.

On Sunday, I was taking my daughter to the airport in the morning. She had packed her new suitcase (a Christmas present from her parents) and it weighed 58 pounds. I struggled with it down the steps and out to the car (on wheels once it left the house) and put it behind my car and opened the back to put the case in.

My neighbors, their whole family, were going out for a walk on this beautiful sunny, clear winter day and they spied me. The head of the household (the guy) came briskly over and said, “Here Arthur, let me give you a hand with that” and he picked it up and put it in the car.

I thanked him but was concerned. Did I look too weak to lift it, since I had brought it down the stairs and out already? Did he perceive me as too old to lift it? He is a young man of about 40 or so.

Was it just a neighborly gesture of help? It was meant well for sure and I did appreciate it. However, he wasn’t going to go to the airport with me to get it out of the car so what’s the difference?

Am I paranoid? (of course!)

Steering ....

Last Tuesday, when I left work, I got into my car and found out quickly that I had no power steering. As it turned out, a line had fallen off and the fluid had drained out, mostly it seems in my driveway.

It was no big deal in the end and was quickly fixed the next day.

But for one drive home, I was reminded of the "old days". As I remember, my father-in-law had a 1956 Oldsmobile he purchased without power steering. My ride home with a 4400 pound Cadillac with no power steering reminded me of parking that car. Even though I learned to drive with power steering, the gear ratios on the steering units were different than a car built with power steering and losing it.

My first car, a 1950 Ford two door had no power steering but was simple enough to steer. The one thing we never wanted to do with one of those was park without rolling. To turn the wheel sitting still was agony. Only weight lifters could turn those wheels. And on my ride to the garage to make an appointment and check that it was safe to drive, and on to home afterwards, I kept remembering to roll forward and not to try and turn sitting still.

From Wikipedia:

The first power steering system on an automobile was apparently installed in 1876 by a man with the surname of Fitts. Little else is known about him. The next power steering system was put on a Columbia 5-ton truck in 1903.

Robert E. Twyford, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, included a mechanical power steering mechanism as part of his patent (U.S. Patent 646,477) issued on April 3, 1900 for the first four wheel drive system.

Francis W. Davis, an engineer of the truck division of Pierce Arrow began exploring how steering could be made easier, and in 1926 invented and demonstrated the first practical power steering system. Davis moved to General Motors and refined the hydraulic-assisted power steering system, but the automaker calculated it would be too expensive to produce. Davis then signed up with Bendix, a parts manufacturer for automakers. Military needs during World War II for easier steering on heavy vehicles boosted the need for power assistance on armored cars and tank-recovery vehicles for the British and American armies.

Chrysler Corporation introduced the first commercially available passenger car power steering system on the 1951 Chrysler Imperial under the name "Hydraguide".The Chrysler system was based on some of Davis' expired patents. General Motors introduced the 1952 Cadillac with a power steering system using the work Davis had done for the company almost twenty years earlier.

Charles F. Hammond, an American, born in Detroit, filed several patents for improvements of power steering with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in 1958.

Most new vehicles now have power steering, owing to the trends toward front wheel drive, greater vehicle mass, and wider tires, which all increase the required steering effort. Heavier vehicles as common in some countries would be extremely difficult to maneuver at low speeds, while vehicles of lighter weight may not need power assisted steering at all.

and when we took down the kiln…..

and when we took down the kiln…..there was a message from the kiln builders…

A few years ago we removed the old kiln. The bricks were beginning to crumble, and the arch was beginning to deteriorate. It had some time left, maybe, according to all our home made” experts”.

Some were sure it would fall any moment, and some were sure it would last forever. But one thing we knew, it had lasted at least 30 years, and we had spent $5,000 upgrading it to meet modern standards with proper digital gauges and fans, and it was like the bionic man, part “old school” and part newly minted.

The time had come, the grant had been written after much research, and we knew we would need a kiln shipped in one piece from California, to do gas reduction, and delivered with all of its 4700 pounds of brick and metal.

The Canadian dollar went down the day after the grant was sent and the actual cost was going to exceed our grant by almost $10,000, but we were already in process.

The kiln delivery was smooth as it was sent to a heavy equipment moving company, a place that delivers bank vaults. We opened walls and they built ramps and with lots of men, might and equipment we had the new one moved. But my story is not in the move, it was in the destruction of the old kiln. As we removed the layers of brick we found a message, delivered by the late potter and teacher Ann Sneath and her building crew from sometime in the past, and not unlike finding the entrance to the pyramids, we were left a message:

There is no greater pleasure than to have your arch supported by your friends.