An Errant Connoisseur

                                               

                                                Kagoshima, Japan, 2015  Wikimedia
    My best lobster so far was consumed at the original Palm Restaurant on 2nd Ave in New York City - the late 1960s. I was dining with Ray Schillmoeller, a hotshot, national sales rep for TRW. I was a poor pedagogue - he picked up the tap. Our waiter was surly, the table covered with newspaper and the lobster so large it should have been returned to the sea to breed. But it was delicious, ingested with copious amounts of butter and draft beer. The worst lobster was a slightly smaller crustacean served up at a restaurant on Cayo Largo, Cuba in 2006. What it lacked in flavor it made up for in tensile strength - try chewing on Teflon body armor.
    The finest pasta dinner ever occurred in the late 1950s, on a sunny Sunday afternoon at the Nicotera family camp near Hinckley Lake, N.Y. I had been courting Annette, my future wife. As was then the tradition all the men - uncles, cousins, Annette's father Louie and guests were seated on two benches on each side of a twelve foot table. The table, benches and extra chairs filled the spacious screened-in porch. The women - aunts, cousins, Annette, sister Madeline, their mother Josephine, began serving the meal - rigatoni with a perfect marinara sauce, spicy sausage, plump garlic meatballs slightly crisp in one spot, beef marinated in sauce, herbs and rolled up and crusty Nicotera Italian bread. To drink a satisfying red wine and Genesee Cream Ale. The pasta course was followed by a magnificent anti-pasta. Finally, coffee and Nicotera Bakery cookies - almond nut were my favorite. Sexist as it may sound now I remember thinking, "Boy! This is great!" In addition to wonderful food what made this dinner for me exquisite - three aunts, Agnes, Petrina and Tina and two uncles, Frankie and Arthur - each went out of their way to call me "John" for the very first time. I then understood that I was under serious scrutiny as a possible match for their beautiful niece. 
    Best fish dinner - a Chinese restaurant on Massachusetts Ave in Cambridge - a short walking distance from the Harvard campus - late 1970s. Accompanied by daughter Cathy, I ordered a Hunan Crispy fish. What arrived was a whole carp. I know the joke, "Bake carp on an oak board for 8 hours at 500 degrees. Remove from oven, throw away the carp, eat the board." But this carp as prepared was beyond delicious. To this day I scan every menu looking for a comparable dish - which leads naturally to a recollection of a fish dinner nightmare.
    On Longboat Key, Florida there is a respected restaurant the (something) House. In 2013, Carol Hanlon and I were dining there for the first time. The menu offered "a whole fish" prepared with a sales pitch of ingredients. My memory flashed with that crispy fish of long ago - I bit. The fish that arrived was indeed lips to tail but had been deep fried so long that the fish was literally gone - what remained was brownish skin stretched over bones. Respectfully I pointed out to the waitperson that I could indeed tell the difference between a fine dinner and garbage, strongly suggesting I was in the presence of the latter.. The trash was removed, the financial charge quashed, apologizes received and I skipped the main course. But my quest continues for that now mythical carp dinner of yore.
    Kagoshima, Japan 1970, dinner with eight Japanese businessmen and one American, David Mosher. We sat on tatami mats in a "L" formation. A geisha clad waitress (five in total) sat directly in front of two men and was charged with keeping our Saki cups full. There was much laughing, toasting while exotic dishes kept appearing before us. I was drinking and eating everything in reach. I gingerly picked up a hot ceramic bowl and with my sticks pulled the contents up and partially into my mouth. I tried to bite through the contents but failed. And the portion between my teeth was connected ropey-like to everything below in the bowl. So moving my lower jaw back and forth I tried sawing through - unsuccessfully - then my first wave of panic. The contents were slippery, greenish and sinewy as hell. I thought of kelp rotting on a Maine beach. Sawing! Tiny beads of sweat popped out on my forehead. Dave was watching my anguish with a perfectly straight face. "Well I think I am going to pass on that dish" and then he smiled and reached for his Saki cup.
 

Memorials - Volgograd

                                                       

                                            Mamayev Mount - "Rodina" - Volgograd
                                       

                                                  August 23, 1942
      Methodically I stepped along the water line trying to keep my boots dry, while stooped over looking for something, anything, that might be metallic and "connect" me with this place and history. Connections must be found - they cannot be purchased in a gift shop. The Volga was calm, dappled by sunlight and flowing with power south. A hundred yards off shore a reddish hydrofoil
sliced a course north.
     Ahead was a quarter mile of uninterrupted shoreline. To the right the river stretched away a mile or so to the eastern shore. On my left the bank rose up and away over two hundred feet. On top was a squat, granite platform supporting the turret of a Russian T-34 tank. A four inch hole in the turret created by an armor piercing projectile killed the crew. The tank's 76.2 mm gun slightly elevated, was pointed west and even in death seemed to be acquiring targets. A series of similar tank memorials are spaced along the west shore of the Volga and indicate the "high water mark" of the German assault on Stalingrad. For five months, one week and three days - August 1942 to February 1943 - the battle raged. The city was reduced to gutted structures and rubble. Amid winter temperatures of -20 to -30 degrees (F) surviving inhabitants had neither heat nor light. One million were killed and another million were wounded or captured in the most horrific combat since Verdun - 1916. The German 6th Army - 350,000 men - was encircled and destroyed. The Wehrmacht would never recover from the losses incurred at Stalingrad and thereafter would be fighting a "defensive" war. In the 1960's, surviving German POWs - a total of 10,000 men - were repatriated to Germany from the Soviet Gulag. In the post Stalin USSR the city's name reverted back to Volgograd. *
     I continued my walk seeking a connection to this history. Once as a callow faced lad, I was stumbling along near a rampart at Fort William Henry in Lake George, NY. One of my large shoes kicked up what first appeared to be a stone but upon examination was a 50 caliber "mini ball". I was now "connected" with life two hundred years earlier, with men and women who used muzzle loading weapons, lived, loved and died around the fort. The mini ball remains a prized possession.
     Now along the shore of the Volga I reached down and picked up a metal fragment, two inches long and a half inch wide. One side was encrusted with tiny stones and sediment. The other smooth and slightly rounded like a piece of a small barrel or shell casing. In the 1980's it was still possible to walk the streets of Volgograd and see the facade of an occasional building pockmarked by small arms fire and shrapnel. But maybe this fragment had absolutely nothing to do with the battle on the Volga.
     The sun was dipping and the T-34 relic above was beginning to cast a shadow down towards the river. I put the fragment in my pocket and began the walk back to city center. On the way I passed a department store with a bronze plaque affixed to the wall next to a bright window display. It stated that Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus had used this building as the Headquarters of the 6th Army - from here its surrender order had been issued.
     *See - Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov The Battle for Stalingrad NY: Holt Rinehart and Winston; 1964.
       Also - Wikipedia; Wikimedia for photos and Robswebster.com.

Libraries With Posthumous Voices

                                         

                                             Harvard - Widener Library
                                       

                                             Utica N.Y. Public Library
     The Argentine, Canadian scholar Alberto Manguel has a personal library of 30,000 volumes. Manguel ". . . conveys a sense that posthumous voices and literary characters converse among themselves under his roof." He is also the author of Library at Night. *
     From a sitting position on the floor I reached up, seized and pulled a book toward me - half a dozen others fell with it. A memory from the Dunham Public Library in Whitesboro, N.Y. Regularly my parents took my brother and I there on Saturdays to refresh our reading supply. "Remember" my mother would harp, "never go any where without a book."
     My grammar school had no library and the high school had a large room with a few books - The Lives of the Saints - many trophies and two office desks. I was not a quality or even an adequate student. In the third year of high school my mother contemplated sending me off to barber school. Toward the end of my sophomore year in college I found myself in the Utica Public Library, a neo Greco-Roman construct from 1903. My reason for being there is lost but on the second floor rear were stacks. There I happened upon Samuel Eliot Morison's History of US Naval Operations World War II, or at least 12 of the 15 volumes. I read them all with pleasure sitting in those stacks over the next few months. Then following a surprising surge in study habits I received a BA from Utica College of Syracuse University.
     1959 - I arrived at New York University. The NYU library was quite user friendly for graduate students. But the New York City Public Library was overwhelming - its immense card catalog required concentration and saintly patience - on every subject there was always more ! Home eventually became the sub-basement of the NYU Law School Library. There below the street, in a silent, sealed, artificial environment I reviewed the transcripts of the World War II war crimes Tribunals, IMT Far East and Nuremberg. My happy view of the value of the species homo sapien was scorched and human activities since then have reinforced the pessimism.
     I would utilize the Hartwick College Library for 34 years. Because of earlier efforts by Professors Boris Schzockov and Dan Allen, Hartwick had a fine, modest, yet intense Russian/Slavic collection. (It had much Russian Orthodox material but then the splendid RO Holy Trinity Monastery was just 25 miles north in Jordanville, N.Y.) I tried to enhance the collection and remember being quite pleased in the early 1990s, that as the USSR imploded Russian students were already studying at Hartwick. I could also go into the Library and right next to the New York Times and Times of London, peruse the latest copy of Izvestia. This was a time of hope.
     During this period I spent a summer at Harvard researching Soviet nationalities. My first visit to Widener Library - I followed a bright line on the floor through different rooms, floors until I arrived at the "Slavic Section". It was quiet, cool, with the aroma of leather and musty paper. I wandered among the stacks - every volume touched required reading. Few things in life satisfy anticipation. Widener Library exceeded mine - and I had yet to visit the Russian Research Center.
      2016 - It is the future - now and then I visit the Fruitville Branch of the Sarasota Public Library. It is a bright, spacious, multi-purpose place (meetings, lectures, books for sale) with much technology as well as stacks with CDs and books. It has a children's section where youngsters can sit on the floor and pull down books.
     *See Robert Harrison, NYRB  October 22, 2015.
   

Loss, Destruction and Idiocy - Excerpts

                                                 

                                                          

     The Death of Winnie the Pooh's Friend Christopher Robin, age 75, April 1996.
     ". . . Owl says that immediately beyond our garden TIME begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in you go down and down very quickly and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in but he came back and then I asked him about the well. 'Old bear' - he answered - 'I was in it and I was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long. I  was a big person. I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a grey beard, then I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, then I died. It was probably just a dream, it was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear and our shared fun. Now I won't  go anywhere, even if I am called for an afternoon snack."  
     Czeslaw Milosz  NYRB 2/6/1997.  PX - Winnie and friends at New York City Public Library. _____________

"Almighty Father, Strong to Save,
  Whose arm has bound the restless wave,
  Who bidd'st the mighty Ocean deep
  Its own appointed limits keep,
  Oh hear us when we cry to thee,
  For those in peril on the sea."
      U.S. Episcopal Church - 1940 - (Wikipedia) PX  USS Newport News ____________________

"Day is done. Gone the sun. From the lakes, From the hills, From the sky.
  Rest in peace, Sol jer brave. God is nigh."
      From Horace Lorenzo Trim.  (Wikipedia)___________________________________________

" ' The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, Western Civilization, or any
   flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. ' "
       John Gray  The Soul of the Marionette . . .  David Bromwich, NYRB  11/5/2015 ______________

  "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a   tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
     William Shakespeare  Macbeth - Act V; Scene V. __________________________________________

  "I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me."
  "I'm really good with war. I love war in a certain way."
     Donald Trump - See The Hill June 19, 2016. _______________________________________________
   

Utica, N.Y. - the old "Sin City"

                                                   

                                          "The Cardsharps" Caravaggio  - 1594
   
      Utica's branding by a New York city newspaper with the epithet "Sin City" in the 1950's made many youthful residents quite proud. In 1957, roughly a hundred men, America's Mafia elite met to discuss the nation's criminal business in Apalachin, New York. The site was a well appointed stone house owned by Joseph Barbara - a local soft drink distributor. During a late afternoon barbecue the conference was abruptly terminated by raiding New York State Troopers. The Applachin Gangland Conference with hindsight seems an act of remarkable Mafiosi hubris remembered today mostly as comedy. Nevertheless, three participants, the brothers Salvatore and Joseph Falcone and Rosario Mancuso attended representing the Utica region and thus solidified Utica's bona fides as a "Sin City" - at least in our memories.
     "Sin" at that time included all forms of gambling, (games, slots, ponies, lottery) prostitution, loansharking, and bribery. Illegal drug sales and extortion were still deeper underground. But gambling was ubiquitous. The first barber shop I was allowed to visit by myself - "Paul's" across the street from the massive Bossert plant - had a back room with a round table, five chairs and three slot machines.
     Most summer days for several years in the 1950's, Addison Miller playground unofficially hosted
a pitch game in the shade of enormous elms. It was cutthroat pitch, seven hands dealt with pots beginning at $3.00 in early afternoon and rising to $40 - $50 by dusk. The patrons were of high school and college age with some individuals from the neighborhood. Pete Pazik, a proprietor of the Downtown Billiards pool room was a player of note for a few memorable evenings.
     More serious gambling opportunities were always available. My former father-in-law Louie Nicotera, as good a man as I'll ever know, had in youth run his own "joint" and was the dealer - at least until he lost two fingers on one hand in a shotgun accident. A friend of his "Joe the Turk" reported once of a singular experience he had at a game in the 1960's. Twenty plus players were seriously engaged in games of chance at a Bleecker Street location, when three armed individuals - one with a Thompson - swept up the doorkeeper and broke into the room. Players were ordered to line up against the wall and lower their pants. As they did their cash, wallets, belts (some with secret compartments), and a few watches were collected. In spite of the great stress a few began laughing -
one of the players, somewhat obese, was wearing a woman's silk bloomers. The laughter spread throughout the room, including the gangster with the now shaking machine gun. He pointed the muzzle at the nose of the humiliated victim. "I ought a blast you!" and then broke out laughing again. The stickup was rapidly concluded without injury. Three months later the body of one of the alleged thieves was found deceased - drifting in the Mohawk River. The other two gunmen were never seen again - most probably escaping gangland retribution and living to enjoy and squander their ill-gotten swag - perhaps.
     In the 1980's I wrote a piece about Utica that mentioned the widespread illegal gambling of it's past. Days later I was stopped on Main Street in Oneonta, N.Y. by one of that town's leading citizens and proprietor of a downtown restaurant. His face radiated a complete smile - "John, you'll never know how much I miss those games up in Utica."

Sex Education - 1950s - Utica, NY

                                         

     My parents hoped the Sisters of St. Joseph at Sacred Heart Grammar School would educate me in the mysteries of life - especially sex and procreation. It did not happen.  Simultaneously Holy Mother the Church seemed to believe that parents had the responsibility for enlightening children in these matters so fraught with potential mortal sin. (I also feel the need to note that I was never sexually abused.) Whatever sex education I was exposed to registered somewhat imperfectly on my dense psyche. Still by 8th grade I had things pretty much figured out. Life was a perpetual struggle against sexual, carnal  lust. When a man and woman married the struggle intensified. They could sleep together, preferably in twin beds, but never have sex. It was God's test. When God was satisfied with their purity He would allow the wife to become "with child" - a kind of modified immaculate conception for the masses.
     In high school - Utica Catholic Academy - the Sisters of Charity adhered relentlessly to the purity message and occasionally brought in hooded Passionist Priests to stoke up our focus on hell's tortures. After a session with the Priests many of us didn't want to touch a girl for two, maybe three days. When faced with difficult questions the good Sisters also fudged some. A serious sophomore, Jack K. standing next to me asked the Principal, Sister Margaret -  "What does 'masturbation' mean?" Her hands clasped while the sea gulf headgear fluttered. "Well how was it used in the sentence?"
     At noon the school bell would ring and boys with brown bags would rush out the doors, run west on Bleecker Street two and a half blocks, up one flight of stairs and enter the Downtown Billiards pool room. There for twenty minutes we would shoot pool and eat lunch before the dash back. Along with my home and school this eight table pool hall was for four years a critically important educational resource. For instance at some point there was a heated discussion of procreation. My friend Charlie expounded before some fellows a most convincing explanation I thought, of modified immaculate conception. The proprietor of the establishment, Pete P. had even stopped to listen. Charlie concluded with an impassioned question, "IF not with God's direction how could people possibly get here?" Pete, quite incredulous responded, "They fuck!" and walked away. For me an alternative possibility - from an unimpeachable source! This was my "Eureka" moment.
     Around 11:00 PM on a Friday night, Jim, Ronnie and I, after hours of financially unsuccessful labor on the billiard table (unusual in its self) decided to conclude the evening while each of us still had $5.00 remaining (plus 20 cents for bus fare). We left via the backdoor and descended the exterior, wooden staircase, crossed the street under a dim streetlight and knocked on the front door of the brothel. Coke let us in and we began to survey the ladies in the parlor. Then Jimmy surprised us. "Coke, I am a little short of $5.00. Lend me 34 cents - Please!"  Coke's eyes crossed. "Geezzz, now I'm lending them money!" and he reached into his pocket.
     Ten to fourteen minutes later, after making a selection, being examined for STD, then a sexual event, we were out the door and on the corner waiting for the late bus to take us to the west side - home.

A Utica Democrat

                                                     

                                                                       Utica, N.Y
     There was as much chance I would grow up a Republican as there was I would morph into a Klingon. In a household with an Irish, Roman Catholic, Democrat mother and a liberal, Swedish immigrant father - my path was set. Utica was a city of 100,000 citizens, blue collar, with blocks of two family houses on streets shaded by towering elms. We resided on the west side, a neighborhood dominated by Polish, Irish and German ethnics. My very first friend was a blond, blue eyed Polish kid, "Stosch". The NYS Education Department in the 1950s complained that youngsters were graduating from Holy Trinity Grammar School speaking English with a Polish accent. East Utica was Italian, RC and Democrat. (I played basketball briefly for the East Utica Democrats.) WASPs and Jews lived in south Utica, New Hartford and the rural communities of Oneida County - bastions of Republican  power- and almost alien. African Americans had a small enclave in north Utica and voted mostly Democrat. I rarely saw a black face during my first 18 years - mostly at downtown movie theaters - they sat in the balcony.
     America's great presidents; Washington, Jefferson, Jackson had to be Democrats - there were no Republicans yet. In the 1860s, the Democrats lost their way and President Lincoln freed the slaves, saved the Union and unhappily nurtured the Republican Party. T.R. Roosevelt should have been a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson was - but we had to wait through years of mediocrity before the next great Democrat presidents - Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
     Utica's mayors were usually WASP or Irish with names like Boyd Golder and Frank Dulan. But the city was led from the east side. Rufus Elefante (1903-1994) political boss and regional legend managed Utica for perhaps 20 years - from Marino's Restaurant - going booth to booth to consult with politicians, bureaucrats and citizens. In the late 1960s I would bring Hartwick College students to Rufie Ventura's Restaurant on the east side to meet and talk politics with the mostly retired Mr. Elefante. He was perhaps 5'4" in a dark, perfectly cut, pin stripe suit. "We would select someone to run for mayor - kind of attractive but not too smart - like your professor there." Students loved him.
     Yes, there was corruption, gambling and brothels - Utica was the "Sin City". Rumor had it that the mobster Lucky Luciano had been scheduled to be "whacked" during a visit to Utica. But the city also had a sense of stability - there were jobs, wonderful parks, a fine zoo and a belief that things could get done - might need Rufie's assistance and a "deal" but good constituent relations mattered - call your councilman and the City at no charge would remove your dying elm tree. 
     At the national level among the pluses (and yes, there were also minuses) Democrats brought about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Obamacare. I cannot imagine life in the United States without these programs - so I remain a Democrat.

Photo - Jmancuso of EnglishWikipedia