BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

a Cool fine eveninge Musquetors verry troublesom, the Praries Contain Cheres, Apple, Grapes, Currents, Rasp burry, Gooseberris Hastlenuts and a great Variety of Plants & flours not Common to the U S Journal of William Clark, August 1, 1804

Today’s anniversary has Missouri meanings, for August 1 is the birthdate of William Clark, born in 1770 in Virginia. The Clarks were small planters of modest means but took care to educate their ten children to read and write—but not to spell. His older brothers served in the American army (or Virginia militia) during the Revolutionary War, and William—beginning his daily journal, which he kept all his life—joined up in 1789. After participating in raids against Indian settlements and missions of exploration, he resigned his commission in 1796, but then was recruited by Meriwether Lewis to be the military commander of what we know, today, as the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806. He proved more than competent at that, and his journals show him to have been well read and genuinely interested in the flora, fauna, and geology he described and sketched. It’s a tribute to these interests that three western species (an evening primrose, a trout, and a nutcracker) are named after him. A frontiersman of southern origin, William Clark inevitably bequeaths to us a hodgepodge heritage: a child of the Enlightenment with a positive curiosity about nature; a supporter of Indian assimilation who respected Indian cultures but, in the crunch, implemented Indian removal; a slaveowner known to be cruel to his slaves who nevertheless (circa 1816) freed York, his slave on the famous Corps of Discovery.



The Memorial Arch to the Lewis-Clark expedition dominates the St Louis skyline.

[Stanley]

"I am the grandson of a slave. And I am a writer." James Baldwin

August 2, 2013 is the 89th anniversary of the birth of James Arthur Baldwin, whose public career began as a teen-aged Pentecostal preacher and ended as an influential man of letters, essayist, dramatist, novelist, literary and social critic. Born in Harlem in 1924, and the product of a famous local high school (DeWitt Clinton), his youth was made more difficult than it might have been by a drug-addicted father and then an abusive stepfather. Soon enough, James’s talents and interests drifted him into Greenwich Village where at age 15 he made the personal discovery that black men could be successful artists. Working at part-time jobs, he began to write essays and stories, collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), which I read as a college freshman and which affected my evolving views on race. Meanwhile, Baldwin decamped to Paris, not so much to become an expatriate writer as (he would put it) to be read as something other than “a Negro writer.” But that was a difficult fate to evade, and it is as a black writer we should know him, angry and exceptionally clear headed, and by no means afraid—as a gay person—to take on what he saw as the linked issue of gender. To get a flavor of the man, and the writer, read the two remarkable essays in The Fire Next Time (1964). James Baldwin died, in France, of stomach cancer in 1987.

[Stanley]

"If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone." Ernie Pyle

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born on August 3, 1900. He joined the navy in time to see service in WWI and then edited the student newspaper at IndianaUniversity. He withdrew a semester before graduation to take a job with the LaPorte, Indiana, newspaper, and became a working journalist. And a good one. As Ernie Pyle, in WWII, he established a new style of war reportage, telling it like it was for the soldiers in the front line. While Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pictured the tribulations of “GI Joe”, Pyle wrote about the ordinary guy, the enlisted man from Kankakee, the captain from the Bronx and the SeaBee from Santa Fe. He was popular with the rank and file, and the generals figured out that he was so good for morale that they would have to tolerate his gimlet eye view of the war. Like most soldiers, Pyle feared death, hated the war, and did not want to go back to it. But he went back, again and again. Ernie Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1944 and was killed in battle in April 1945. According to a neighbor, Ernie’s parents did not “take the news too well.” President Truman paid tribute to Pyle as the reporter who told “the story of the American fighting man the way American fighting men wanted it told.”

[Stanley]

"Logic is not concerned with what men do believe, but with what they ought to believe, if they are to believe correctly." John Venn.

Scholarly arguments (or even agreements, which can happen) about the logical interrelationships between things, attributes, and propositions, often turn to set theory to analyze or illustrate the problem, and when they do you will often run across a “Venn diagram.” Visually it’s represented as intersecting geometric shapes (usually two or three circles), and their intersections (and non-intersections) help to define the relationship(s) being discussed. Those whose schooling was completed before about 1970 will have some trouble with the more complicated sets, but those who’ve lived with “new maths” since it was new should, in theory as one might say, be OK with the concept. And all will be glad to know that the eponymous Venn, John Archibald Venn, was born on August 4, 1834, in Yorkshire, into a family already known for its Christian radicalism and its academic brilliance. John’s reverend father and his mother were leading evangelicals and abolitionists, and for good measure were prominent in prison reform and anti-blood sports movements. So we shouldn’t be surprised that John was a brilliant student at Cambridge and, upon his graduation, was elected a fellow (in “moral science”) of Gonville and Caius College. That he became a leading mathematician is more of a puzzle, whereof the solution may lie in set theory. Or, possibly, not.

[Bodger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_ ... etters.svg

[Stanley]

"in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive." Wendell Berry

August 5, 2013 is the 79th birthday of Wendell Berry, prolific writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, who may prefer to be known as a farmer. He certainly came from farming stock—his parents’ families had been farming in Henry County, KY, for five generations—but young Wendell first seemed bent on a writing career. He got English degrees (BA and MA) from the University of Kentucky and then struck out for Palo Alto where he joined Wallace Stegner’s fertile writing seminar (studying with—among others—Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Tillie Olson, and Edward Abbey). And he wrote a lot in the 1960s, two novels and three essays on nature, not to mention quite a bit of poetry. But at some point he decided to go back to the land. That by no means ended his fiction writing (he’s now up to fifteen volumes) or poetry, but since he became a farmer in his own right in Henry County (1965) he’s become best known as an environmental activist, an advocate of sustainable agriculture, small-scale societies, local economies of production and exchange, and what might be called the traditional values except some of his values clearly don’t qualify with the self-proclaimed keepers of “traditional values.” And we might group him with the Southern Agrarians, but there’s not a breath of elitism in him. Wendell Berry is best thought of as unclassifiable, and therefore—perhaps—especially worth reading.

[Stanley]

'It is a poor head that cannot find a plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.' Richard Hofstadter.
It is sometimes said that historians do their best work in their sixties and seventies. If that’s the case—and I’m betting on it—then goodness knows what miracles Richard Hofstadter might have wrought, for he died at 54. Born on August 6, 1916, in Buffalo, NY, Hofstadter majored in history and philosophy at a local university, and while there joined the Young Communist League. He would later distance himself from that association, in more ways than one, but it helps to insure that, among conservatives, he is still known as a liberal historian. That’s probably a mistake, and certainly there were aspects of American liberalism that aroused his contempt, but he’s really unclassifiable. His first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1942), won him a tenured position at Maryland, and from there to Columbia where he wrote The Age of Reform (1955). Hofstadter is best known today for The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), closely-related books that presciently do much to explain the current Republican malaise, but his brilliance was most spectacularly demonstrated in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), a dozen finely chiseled essays on American leaders. The stunning chapter on John C. Calhoun, the “Marx of the Master Class,” is itself well worth a trip to your local library.

[Stanley]

'no problem of human relations is ever insoluble.' Ralph Bunche.

Perhaps the least well-known factoid about Dr. Ralph Bunche, 1950 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, is that he was brilliant at billiards. He played caroms off cushions for relaxation, but playing international politics was what made him famous. That seemed an unlikely role for the Detroit-born (August 7, 1903) son of a barber and the grandson of slaves, but on his father’s side there was a long history of freedom and on his mother’s side there was a grandmother who took Ralph to California and raised him to be free, and smart. So off he went to UCLA, where he graduated (1927) summa and valedictorian, and then to a Harvard PhD, plus post docs at Capetown and the LSE, and a stint as special assistant to Gunnar Myrdal’s classic study on “the Negro problem.” And all this while Bunche chaired the Political Science department at Howard University!!! Along the way, someone who didn’t care about the color noticed the talent, and in WWII Bunche moved into the Office of Strategic Services, then to the State Department under Alger Hiss, where Bunche helped draft the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and finally to the UN itself where he brokered a Middle East truce in 1949 and performed other peacekeeping miracles in the Congo, Kashmir, and Cyprus. Throughout he retained a burning desire to see racial justice in his native USA, and made many contributions to that end. This astonishing career came to an end in 1971 when Bunche succumbed to a medley of fatal ailments. It was thought that not one of them, on its own, could possibly have killed Ralph Bunche.

[Stanley]

The godfather of the American Revolution . . .

When was it that American politicians (as a sort of species) were last concerned to develop a philosophically consistent approach to the issue of public ethics? A good candidature would be presented by the “founding fathers”, so called, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, and many of their contemporaries. Their disagreements over policy were often bitter, but perhaps because they believed more strongly in “government by consent” than we seem to, they did manage to construct a working polity out of a revolutionary era. They were able to do so partly because most of them paid homage to the importance, in their philosophical thinking, of Francis Hutcheson, born in County Down, Ireland, on August 8, 1694, and destined to become (in 1729) the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University. Sometimes known as the founder of the “common sense” school of Scottish Philosophy, Hutcheson and his ‘disciples' (e.g. David Hume and Adam Smith) developed a strongly moral, and modern, view of society, taking humans as they were, so to speak, and exploiting our self-regard to argue that we should be eager to help others and, in general, improve things. Hutcheson listed six ‘moral senses’ that he thought innate, and it’s good to know that two among them were a sense of humor and a sense of the ridiculous. For our purposes today, though, the more important moral sense was the sensis communis, “a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery.”
Robert M. Bliss

[Stanley]

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth." Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, my favorite poet, is difficult to summarize and more difficult to love. But a man who could be the model and inspiration for Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), the funniest novel of the 20th century (in English, anyway), must have had something going for him. Larkin was born in Coventry on this day, August 9, in 1922. His father was a self-made man of Nazi leanings and his mother a serious neurotic. Philip rose above their baser instincts (qv “This Be the Verse”), but there’s no doubt that a dark strain runs through his poetry. Poor eyesight denied him a military role in WWII so instead he went to Oxford, where he nabbed a First in English, met Amis, and with their (few) friends cultivated a romantic cynicism sometimes smelling of prolonged adolescence. Larkin went off to an unusual career as a librarian-poet, becoming director of the Hull University Library in 1956, and an innovative librarian at that (his was the first library in Europe to be computerized) as well as being a rather good, and humane, manager. Meanwhile, he wrote not many poems, and rewrote them, and then rewrote them again, until all their sharp corners and dark moods were perfectly wrought. And some happy ones, too. For such a major figure, his output is amazingly small, but therefore you should read it. And in Larkin’s case you can start (and finish) with The Complete Poems (2013), widely welcomed as “standard.”

[Stanley]

"Let there be bass." Leo Fender.

Clarence Leonidas Fender was born on August 10, 1908, 104 years ago today. His parents were orange farmers, in Anaheim County, CA, and given Anaheim’s subsequent history Leo might have become a real estate tycoon, but he had an uncle who was a tinkerer, already making a living from repairing automobile electrics, and Leo messedaround his uncle’s shop. He was fascinated by a “car radio” his uncle had made and taught himself how to do the same, all the while training to become an accountant. But the best laid plans of mice, men, and college students oft gang agley, and Leo’s reputation with amplification was big enough that a local bandleader asked him to create a sound system for the band to use in its ballroom dances. About the same time, he got married. Then a little later the depression hit Anaheim and he lost his accountancy job. Then he borrowed $600 ($10K in today’s $$) and started his own business, making and repairing radios and creating sound systems for local bands. He soon started working on guitar amplification, and decided there was no good reason to splice amplification on to a normal, acoustic guitar. All you needed was a board, strings, neck, and juice, and in 1949 the“Fender” was born, just in time for Rock n Roll. Soon Fenders in various styles flooded the market, but today an original Fender, in fair condition,will go for $10,000 and up. Just what Leo borrowed in 1938.

[Stanley]

The 'Ecstasy' of talking on your cell phone.

On August 11 1942 a patent was issued for an invention that—in time—would make it possible for millions of cell phones and computers and tablets and nooks and crannies (or, rather, kindles) to use very narrow frequency bands to receive, and transmit, vital information, inaccurate information, and completely bogus propaganda. In 1942, the invention was known, somewhat awkwardly, as “frequency-hopping spread spectrum,” and it used only 88 slots on the spectrum and was timed by a piano roll. Today it parades under several names, but you know it as CDMA. Check out your cell phone. Anyway, it’s a communications miracle, enabling us all to talk to each other on the 2.4Hz band but what you might not know about it is that one of its inventors was an avant-garde composer, George Antheil (1900-1959) who was interested mainly in sound frequencies, and the other was an Austrian immigrant with a head for mathematics, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (1913-2000). And what you really might not know is that this lady mathematician was better known as Hedy Lamarr, who had been brought to the USA for an entirely different reason—having little to do with mathematics—by cinema impresario Louis B. Mayer after her notorious role in the Czech film Ecstasy (1933). It just goes to show that you never know enough about people, do you?

[Stanley]

The man with the cat.

Erwin Schrödinger’s birth anniversary is today, August 12. Born in Vienna in 1887, to a family of scientists (his mother was Professor of Chemistry at a technical institute), it was likely he would be, too. In fact, he became famous for likelihood, for his main contributions to science would be in quantum physics. After service in WWI, Erwin moved up the academic ladder in German universities. However, he did not like the Nazis and moved away for a time (his grandmother was English and he called his cat “Milton”), but his unconventional living arrangements (he traveled with his wife and his mistress) may have denied him permanent places at both Oxford and Princeton. Meanwhile, he collared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 and continued to speculate on religion, color, relativity, biology, and other curiosities, and would in 1944 publish a book with the challenging title What Is Life? (an interesting question indeed for someone suffering from tuberculosis). In the lay mind he is most often associated with the mind game (mind games are big in theoretical physics) known as Schrödinger’s Cat (possibly Milton?). It’s complicated but it has to do with a cat in a sealed box, a cat whose survival (or not) depends on the vagaries of a quantum particle, itself a chancy matter. Whether the cat (viewed from outside the box and after the experiment) is alive or dead is the interesting problem. If you want Schrödinger’s answer, look it up.

[PanBiker]

Celebrated in Googles Doodle yesterday.

[Stanley]

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Alfred Joseph Hitchcock.


August 13 is the birthday of both Alfred Hitchcock (1899) and the Disney movie “Bambi” (1942), and since “Bambi” is undoubtedly the scarier of the two we’ll go with Hitchcock who, according to an excessively alliterative obit writer in the New York Times (April 30, 1980), was “the master manipulator of menace and the macabre, and the leading specialist in suspense and shock.” Hitchcock was born in London, 114 years ago today, into a Catholic family. He had a moderately unhappy childhood, remembering ritual beatings at his Jesuit school and a formative visit to a police cell. It may be that his family wanted him to be an engineer; on the sly he took art courses at London University and became an illustrator for an ad agency. But by age 21 he was stuck into the cinematic industry, and by age 26 he was a director and very soon one with a marked taste for suspense. At 27, he married his assistant and collaborator, Alma Reville, and began a long family life (Alma survived him) that was (according to the Times) “routinized, stable, and serene.” His most famous movies were anything but. But there was more to them than the suspense, as excruciating as it could be. He’s remembered as a meticulous and methodical creator, one whose vision was total, forming frame, action, plot, and character into a brilliant whole. This little, rotund, private, and rather affected man may have been the greatest filmmaker ever.

[Stanley]

When there is no joy in Mudville . . . .

Only a month ago, the Cardinals were the hottest team in baseball, and now they’re in a tailspin that puts them behind the once-lowly Pirates of Pittsburgh. One searches for consolation, and one place it might be found is poetry, and as luck would have it, August 14, 2013 is the 150th birth anniversary of Ernest Thayer, who explained it all many years ago. First, a bit about Thayer. Born in Lawrence, MA, on this day in 1863, he would in due course inherit a woolen mill fortune, but first he followed generations of male Thayers to Harvard College where he did all the right things, joining the Hasty Pudding society, editing the Lampoon, becoming close friends with George Santayana when George was just another undergraduate, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and immediately setting out on the Grand Tour of Europe, to get a bit of culture. While at Harvard, Ernest Thayer also become close friends with the Lampoon’s business manager, one W. R. Hearst, who on becoming an adult thought it would be a good thing to hire Thayer at one of his papers, the San Francisco Examiner. Thayer spent a couple of years there writing editorials and, the point of today’s anniversary notice, a few light verses. One of those verses explains why there was no joy in Mudville, for Casey has struck out. Our Cardinals need to stop striking out. For the consolation he offers, we wish a Happy Birthday to the shades of Ernest Thayer!! ©

[Stanley]

Courage . . . must have hope for nourishment." Napoléon Bonaparte
Napoléon Bonaparte was born on 15th August 1769 at the Casa Buonaparte, Ajaccio, Corsica. Although his father was of the minor Italian nobility, he was still just a lawyer, which gave some weight to the view (shared ironically by Marxists and monarchists) that Napoléon was just a jumped-up bourgeois. Not far wrong, for this short, rough islander would become Emperor of France, King of Italy, and Protector of the Rhine, among other titles. This happened partly because there was a Révolution, and as we know “when the pot boils the scum will rise,” but truly the pipsqueak had tons of talent. His skill at mathematics gave way to a wider facility of assessing problems and using a powerful intellect and a remarkable memory to find solutions. He presciently took the measure of men (and women) and knew when to make friends, and also when to drop them, from the first having a string of personal alliances that brought lesser (or less flexible) men to the guillotine. Yet Napoléon survived to rise to the pinnacle of power. He was above all a great general and knew how to choose great generals to command his armies. He conquered France and then conquered Europe, bringing new laws (and, be it said, new freedoms) everywhere he marched. It is little wonder that Bonaparte early enjoyed a great vogue in democratic America, but our 20th-century experiences with Hitler and Stalin (et al) have altered our views on the charms of “talented dictators”, and it is a phrase that no longer slips easily off our lips. ©

[Stanley]

"Anything we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense, sacred." E. F. Schumacher.
August 16, 2013 is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of E. F. Schumacher whose quiet life as a distinguished economist was rudely interrupted by his 1973 publication of Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. It was a collection of essays that urged great caution in developing technology to exploit natural and human resources. Corporations should not be ruled by the bottom line, nor countries by their GNP, but rather by the qualities of life they engendered for the present and, crucially, for future generations. It made Schumacher famous, and he is seen, along with scientists like Rachel Carson, as a founder of the green movement. In truth, it should not have been all that surprising. Born in Bonn, Germany, on this day in 1911, Schumacher won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and stayed in Britain because of his deep opposition to Hitler. For a time, he was a conventional Keynesian, championing democracy, urging growth and serving as chief economic advisor to the UK’s Coal Board (a major polluter). Much more important to his developing “environmental” views was his sojourn in Asia in the 1950s where he became interested in Buddhism, small-scale development, and the writings of Gandhi. But the story of Schumacher’s intellectual migration from the Coal Board to “small is beautiful” cannot be fully told without acknowledging the importance of his 1971 conversion to Catholicism à la Thomas Merton. His distrust of markets and materialism made him religious and gave us his memorable book.

[Stanley]

If you've traveled our roads or enjoyed our parks or admired the murals of Benton and Wood, you know his works.
Of all the famous speeches of World War II, perhaps the shortest was delivered by Harry Hopkins to Winston Churchill and a few members of the British War Cabinet at the North Britain Hotel, Glasgow, in the late winter of 1940-41. At issue was whether the USA would support Britain, then fighting alone against Hitler. Hopkins, frail and already afflicted by the stomach cancer that would kill him in 1946, was President Franklin Roosevelt’s special envoy to the UK, and had crossed the north Atlantic on an unescorted destroyer. He rose for the evening’s last toast, quoted from the Book of Ruth, 1:16-17 (look it up in the King Jamesversion), and the deal known as Lend-Lease was struck. Born in in Sioux City, Iowa, on August 17, 1890, Harry Hopkins caught the social work bug at Grinnell College. His first welfare work innovation came in 1915, in New York City, and in 1930 he came to the attention of FDR, then governor of New York. When FDR moved to DC, HH moved with him to do miracles as the director of the Works Progress Administration, perhaps the biggest social work project ever. Its marks are still all around us today. In 1940, diagnosed with cancer, Hopkins moved into the White House to became Roosevelt’s “do it” man, a role he fulfilled with dispatch for the rest of the war (during which his son Stephen was killed at Kwajalein Atoll). Today, Harry Hopkins’ ashes rest serenely in Grinnell, undisturbed by ludicrous charges that he was a Soviet agent. ©robertbliss

[....whither thou goest I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy god my god. Where thou diest I will die and there will I be buried. The lord do so to me and more also if ought but death part thee and me.]

[Stanley]

Methodus incrementorum directa et inversa.
Whether the calculus was first elucidated by Gottfried Leibniz or Isaac Newton, it had the effect (rather common in math and science) of suddenly opening whole new fields of inquiry, and so it was in the late 17th and early 18th centuries with the Bernoullis, a whole family of Swiss mathematicians, and so it was with Brook Taylor. Born into comfortable circumstances in Middlesex on August 18, 1685, Taylor entered St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1701. There he studied law (bachelors and doctorate) but basically did mathematics, and did it brilliantly, moving calculus on to a new branch, the “calculus of finite differences” which, I am assured, is fundamental to differential calculus. It also enabled Taylor to offer a mathematical analysis of the movement of a vibrating string, which reminds us at once of the connections between music and math and of the tendency of mathematicians to play around with their astonishing insights. In common with many scientists of his age, Brook Taylor had wide interests, and wrote also on astronomy (a crater on the moon is named for him) and on linear perspectives in art, but his insights remained little known because the man couldn’t express himself very clearly. Taylor was recognized in his time by his election (1712) to the Royal Society (where he served as an adjudicator on the claims to priority of Newton and Leibniz) but in time his genius became better known through the writings of others, including his grandson. ©robertbliss

[Stanley]

"There have been several duchesses of Westminister, but there is only one Chanel." Coco Chanel.
The extraordinary and not entirely admirable life of Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel— ‘Coco’—began on 19th August 1883, in Saumur, France. It is probably an accident that her father sold undergarments as a street peddler; in any case, she was brought up by nuns of the Congregation of theSacred Heart. From there her life is shrouded in legends, many of her own invention, but her story certainly changed when in1907 she fell in with a wealthy army officer, Étienne Balsan. He showered her with gifts but was unable to keep her, and her next lover, Arthur Edward Capel, moved her into the world of fashion where she would stay. Her friends a virtual who’s who of English and French society (including the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Westminster), Chanel’s boutiques (first in Deauville, then Biarritz, then Paris) made her famous by the 1920s and also brought her a cocaine habit. She acquired her friends’ prejudices along with their money, and her anti-Semitism inclined her to collaborate with the Germans during WWII. This included her attempt to use Vichy law to dissolve the interests of Jewish firm (Wertheimers) in her famous parfum, Chanel No. 5. After the Liberation, Coco escaped a formal trial, revived her old deal with the Wertheimers, and thus financed her resurrection (by 1954) as the leading female couturier of Paris. Coco Chanel died at her rooms in the Ritz, rich and by some unlamented, in 1971.

[Stanley]

"Architecture is the work of nations." John Ruskin.
Today we celebrate the birthday of another pesky immigrant (there are a lot of them in American history), and one who had a graphic effect on St. Louis. Eero Saarinen was born on August 20th, in Finland, in 1910, 103 years ago. When his father Eliel got a job at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, the family emigrated with him, and Eero got much of his training at Cranbrook, where he got to know Charles and Ray Eames, but also at Yale and in Paris. During WWII, the gummint put Eero to work drawing diagrams of bomb assembly (and disassembly) for the OSS, but he had already won design prizes with Charles Eames (for a chair) and made his mark as an architect with a remarkable school in Winnetka, IL. After the war, Illinois was graced also with his John Deere HQ, in Moline, where he used a new kind of steel that rusted its own coat, so to speak. Yale University commissioned him for three major projects, including two residential colleges, and Eero served on the panel overseeing the design competition for the Sydney Opera House, another iconic structure. But of course we know Eero Saarinen best for the Gateway Arch, that great curve that rises over The River and opens the way to The West. It’s perfect. Perhaps it took an immigrant to interpret in stainless steel the aspirations of a previous generation of immigrants. ©bliss

[Stanley]

"It's the way you play that makes it." Count Basie.

August 21, 2013, is the 109th anniversary of the birth, in Red Bank, NJ, of William Basie, who was bitten by the music bug early and aimed first at the drums. Ambitious to a fault, he felt his way was barred by another Red Bankian, Sonny Greer (who became Ellington’s lead drummer), and so William migrated to Harlem and to Fats Waller, a keyboard genius who started William on the organ. Soon William was Bill, and he had his own band, and he was playing in Kansas City at the Reno Club where in the mid-30s my father used to go after his day’s work as editor of the Soybean Digest. I don’t know what dad’s pay was, but Bill’s was less ($250 weekly in today’s $$), low pay for a genius. His break came on radio, when the announcer asked him to introduce his band members, starting with himself. The announcer joked that “Bill” wasn’t a great name when you considered “Earl” Hines and “Duke” Ellington, and suggested that Bill Basie become “the Count.” What’s in a name? The music was no different but “Count” Basie struck a chord and soon he was playing The Grand Terrace in Chicago and then The Roseland Ballroom in New York and, bang, 25 years on, at John Kennedy’s Inaugural Ball in D. C. Before he died in 1984 the Count was known everywhere as a king of jazz. Benny Goodman said so. So did Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, and Lena Horne. And so say many more.

[Bodger]

turn your sound down? "the kid from red bank" played by the man & his band
http://oneguyfrombarlick.co.uk/posting. ... 42&t=13729

[Tripps]

Showing my age here - I went to see Count Basie live at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Must have been about 1960. He had Jimmy Rushing (Mr five by five) with him. Not my thing really - I found it quite boring.