Best of the West

The Post Blazes a Trail

In the early part of the 20th century, The Saturday Evening Post commissioned numerous illustrations that collectively helped define the American West for the rest of the country. One of the best known of these artists is N.C. Wyeth, appreciated for his wonderful sense of color and light as well as for being an authority on Western culture.

Cowboy in Profile
Cowboy and the Setting Sun, N.C. Wyeth, The Saturday Evening Post, November 30, 1907
© SEPS

 

Romantic Vision

A full generation of Americans owe their impression of the soulful, spiritual Native American to artists like Remington Schuyler and W.H.D. Koerner. Interestingly both artists lived, studied, and worked in the east, developing a fascination with Western culture and lore from afar, before making Western art a primary focus.

Native American sitting on a high ridge, overlooking a prairie
Indian on Ridge, Remington Schuyler, The Saturday Evening Post, April 21, 1906
© SEPS
Plains Indians riding horses
Plains Indians, W.H.D. Koerner, The Saturday Evening Post, March 3, 1934
© SEPS

 

Riders

As a young man, artist Frank Hoffman settled on a working ranch in Taos, New Mexico, using his own horses and other animals as models for his paintings.

Cowgirl riding an agitated bronco
Woman on Bucking Bronco, Frank Hoffman, The Country Gentleman, April 19, 1924
© SEPS

John Clymer painted more than 80 covers for the Post, many of them with Western themes. He’s known for his painstaking research and for the rich historic and geographic detail of his work.

A cowboy and his daughter leading horses through a shallow creek
Herding Horses, John Clymer, The Saturday Evening Post, September 13, 1952
© SEPS

The Wait List

I have a few complaints about waiters and waitresses. Having held my share of service jobs, I know how hardworking and caring most people in the industry are. Several things they do or say, however, drive me up the wall.

1. The overly familiar greeting. “Hi! My name is Mike, and I’ll be your server today.” Really? It’s not necessary that we all get on a first-name basis, is it?

2. The elaborate intake interview. “Have you dined here before?” Some waitstaff just can’t wait to tell you about the singular way the menu works or the unique serving style. Please, do us all a
favor: Allow that we’re intelligent enough to read the menu without remedial help.

3. The withheld price. The flip side of the above is when servers tell you too little. They’ll tantalize you with specials but neglect to say what the dishes cost. I have a friend who was invited to try a Kobe beef appetizer, the special of the day. He ordered it only to find that the charge for that dish alone was a jaw-dropping $250!

4. The never-ending customer satisfaction survey. When food arrives, some waiters will ask if everything’s OK — even before you’ve started eating. Some will circle back several more times, as if monitoring your progress. It’s enough to put you off your feed. A variation is “does everything taste OK?” That’s an odd way to put it. Are we guinea pigs on whom they’re trying this dish for the first time?

5. The off-putting rejoinder. If one makes a request, such as “can you do something about the fly in my soup?” most diners would prefer not to hear “no problem” in reply. A simple yes will do nicely.

6. Rampant table clearing. Please, don’t try to take my plate away when I’m only half done. And speaking of overeagerness to clear the table, I find it more disturbing when accompanied by an “Are you still working on that?” On the rare occasions that I dine out, I’d like to think that I’m there to enjoy a meal rather than “work” on it.

7. The tipping point. When you leave cash for a meal, you frequently get the question “do you want change?” I humbly request that the waiter make the change and bring it to me. If a diner wants to leave all of it or some of it (or none of it!) that’s his business.

A Modern Master of Western Art

Howard Terpning is widely regarded as the greatest living painter of the Native American West. Among indigenous people dwelling today across the deserts, high plains, and foothills of the Rocky Mountains, he is known reverently as “the storyteller.” The same kind of dramatic flair that the novelist Larry McMurtry puts into his Westerns with words, Terpning wields mightily with a brush and colorful palette.

A Cheyenne medicine man in traditional dress performs his services for a patient.
Medicine Man of the Cheyenne is considered one of Terpning’s finest works, winning Gold from the Cowboy Artists of America. “The American Indian fascinates me,” Terpning says. “I feel privileged to be one of their storytellers.”
© Terpning Family Limited Partnership, LLC, Courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop®, Inc.

His narrative portrayals of Native American tribal ceremonies, oral traditions passed down over countless generations, and significant — sometimes tragic — events drawn from the past, are considered important historic touchstones. As the late Western art historian Anne Morand, former curator of art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, told me, Terpning, in his own way, is akin to the great Renaissance painters of Florence and Rome who opened windows into antiquity, breathing life into human dramas that happened at a time when there were no cameras available to record them.

Terpning’s epic masterworks have sold for more than $1 million and reproductions of his more popular pieces hang as decorative art in thousands of homes and offices. Meanwhile, the artist himself, whose studio resides in a neo-adobe abode in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert surrounded by tall columnar saguaro cacti, has been honored with practically every major award in Western art.

But even at age 87, Terpning, still active behind the easel, acknowledges there is a special thrill that comes with achieving a feat that had eluded him all these years, seeing one of his pictures make the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. With pride, Terpning told me recently, landing the cover of this edition of the Post now elevates him into a distinguished, exclusive club that includes American masters who influenced him nearly 70 years ago. Painters like Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, and John Clymer.

The Saturday Evening Post represented the summit. For an artist, getting the cover was a feat of enormous prestige because it was so high profile,” Terpning says. “With a single image, you could influence the way millions of people in this country thought about a topic.”

For 25 years, Terpning toiled as a magazine illustrator, having studied under Haddon Sundblom (the artist made famous for portraying Santa Claus in ads for The Coca-Cola Company). During that period, Terpning’s illustrations adorned the pages of Reader’s Digest, Time, Newsweek, Field & Stream, and Good Housekeeping, among others. And he was tapped by Hollywood to create movie posters for some of the best-known films of all time, such as The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia, Cleopatra, Dr. Zhivago, and 75 other movies.

Still, his greatest passion has been authentically depicting aboriginal tribes in the West, a fascination that started in his youth on a trip to Colorado.

The West may be a single region but it evades any attempt to associate it with a single place or to define it by a single picture. More or less, it begins, geographically speaking, around the 100th meridian west and extends to the incoming tide of the Pacific Ocean; north to south, it arguably begins its spatial descent at the Arctic Circle and wends downward along the path of the Old North Trail (the route that various tribes followed at least 12,000 years ago) and reaches across the U.S. border into Mexico.

Terpning says his early career as a commercial illustrator first in Chicago and then based in Connecticut, taught him how to work fast to meet tight deadlines and to distill the essence of a scene down to its simplest elements.

“As young artists, we couldn’t wait to run down to the newsstand and see what Rockwell and others had on the latest Post cover,” he says. “Many of those Post artists ended up in the West. Tom Lovell and John Clymer were at the top of their game. They blazed trails with their portrayals of history.”

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US Army cavalry in pursuit of Geronimo's and his men.
“I think it’s important to tell the story of the Plains Indians because their history is our history, part of our heritage,” Terpning says. The scene for Search for the Renegades took place during the second Geronimo campaign that ended in 1886. The epic five-foot-wide painting portrays the Army cavalry’s pursuit of Geronimo and his men; the original sold for $1.46 million in 2007.
© Terpning Family Limited Partnership, LLC, Courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop®, Inc.

In the late 1980s before he passed on, I had an opportunity to interview Clymer about the work he did for this magazine. Born in Ellensburg, Washington, in 1907, Clymer had received tutelage from Harvey Dunn, a student of the legendary Howard Pyle, considered the godfather of what became the Golden Age of Illustration. Notably, Clymer had also been a colleague of Post artists N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwell.

Clymer’s first cover for the Post was completed prior to World War II. It featured a view of Alaska’s Inside Passage with a totem pole in the foreground and U.S. Navy destroyers and aircraft in the background. Even with this view of the West — in this case the far Northwest — a message was being sent via the Post. And it was to potential adversaries that the U.S. was a power to contend with, Clymer said.

Half a century later, I visited Clymer in his studio in Teton Village, Wyoming, and he recalled the transition he made by moving west to be in the middle of the geographical milieu he loved best. “I like to do, and always did, what you call storytelling pictures,” Clymer told me. “With illustrations you had only two or three days to get the work finished. Here, you have two or three months — as long as it takes to get it right. This type of work finally became accepted as Western art and was viewed as more than merely Western illustration.”

Clymer and Terpning have been giants in contemporary Western art, part of a tradition of visually interpreting the region that dates back to the first pictographs and petroglyphs carved into the alcoves of sandstone cliffs.
As a distinct category of fine art, the Western genre came to the attention of the world with Romantic portrayals of cowboys, Indians, wildlife, and geography in the latter decades of the 19th century. Painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell — whose works can be seen today in America’s premiere museums — cultivated a larger than life, mythological impression of the West.

Cheyenne Indians stopping for water at a creek deep in a forest.
“It is important to show the American Indian as he appears in his natural surroundings,” says Terpning, who portrays a party of warriors stopping for water in Cheyenne at the Disappearing Creek Called White Woman.
© Terpning Family Limited Partnership, LLC, Courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop®, Inc.

Clymer shared his thoughts about striving to portray historic events as they actually happened and not filtered through an over-romanticized lens. “The movies and the early writers gave the world an impression of what the West was like. It’s partly true and partly not true.”

Clymer — and Terpning, too — set out to paint for posterity events such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition and mountain man trapper rendezvous. “I don’t paint the Battle of the Little Bighorn,” Clymer told me. “I don’t paint Custer. I wouldn’t touch that one with a 10-foot pole because it’s been chewed to pieces. But there are subjects that have never been done.”

Clymer credited the Post assignments with building his confidence, giving him a loyal legion of viewers who knew his work, and with knowing how to deliver scenes with high impact. Both Clymer and Terpning told me of their reverence for the artists who were there to witness the last gasp of the Wild West. “[Charles M.] Russell commented that as soon as white settlers started to show up, there went the reign of native people and along with them the bountiful game such as the buffalo. He painted Indians with grace and empathy,” Terpning says. “Other artists were aware that one kind of human relationship with the West, that had existed on this continent for thousands of years and was older than the Egyptian pyramids, was about to be lost forever. Replacing it was something else.”

Since that time, the West has continued to evolve through different cultural iterations, including cowboys, ranch and rodeo life, the era of oil wildcatters, loggers and fishing fleets in the Northwest, tourism in national parks, and the sprouting of retirement communities for northern snowbirds fleeing wintery weather. All of these themes were explored on covers of the Post.

Changeless, however, have been the purple mountains’ majesty, the big open vistas, and the sense that inside the West a person can still reinvent himself. Rising as bold declarations of regional identity have been depictions by pure landscape painters.

The oldest and most prestigious Western art show — indeed it serves as a barometer for gauging excellence — is the Prix de West Invitational, hosted annually by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. One of the most eminent artists in recent years at that show, and one who commands Terpning’s admiration, is George Carlson. He, too, started his career as a commercial illustrator and hails from the same birthplace as Terpning — Chicago.

Carlson, who now lives on a lake near Harrison, Idaho, is the only artist to win the Prix de West Purchase Award in two separate media, first as a sculptor and more recently as a landscape painter. Terpning and cowboy and Indian painters Tom Lovell, Martin Grelle, William Acheff, and Morgan Weistling are the only other two-time winners in painting. The late Hollis Williford notched double wins for his work in bronze.

“The grandeur of the West needs no embellishment as it received in the past. There is plenty of space for the human imagination to wander around and experience its mystery,” Carlson says.

A portrait of a Native American in traditional garment.
In The Power of the Medicine Robe, Terpning enjoyed “pushing” the yellow in this striking garment. The Native’s somewhat inscrutable expression is amplified by the head turned one way and eyes the other, denoting a man of caution.
© Terpning Family Limited Partnership, LLC, Courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop®, Inc.

Earlier in 2015, Carlson won the top award at the Masters of the American West show sponsored by the Autry National Center & Art Museum in Los Angeles for the piece Witness of Time. The painting is a depiction of the geographical area known as the Channeled Scablands in eastern Washington and northern Idaho that was gouged by an epic glacial flood. Stark and serene, Carlson says it conveys the real spirit of the West.

“For an artist, the landscape will breathe you in if you let it,” he says. “In order to feel the rhythms and vibes of color and then to translate it through your own emotions, you have to allow yourself to become immersed. To me, that’s what great art from the West does — it translates the feelings and moods and senses of place that cannot be communicated in words.”

“Our beloved West is still coming of age,” says William Kerr, who with his wife, Joffa, founded the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming. “My native region is big, bold, and beautiful. It is also selfish, wasteful, and like other areas of our country, parochial,” he says, noting that what’s required is an honest assessment of the toll wreaked by Manifest Destiny and the false notion of a limitless frontier.

Kerr, the son of former U.S. senator and Oklahoma governor Robert S. Kerr, recalls that his home state was historically a place where eastern Indian tribes were “resettled” after being uprooted from their homelands and exiled west along the Trail of Tears, themes that Terpning and others have explored. “Art in its purest forms is truth telling,” Kerr says.

For his part, Terpning hopes that viewers see in his Native American works universal human qualities. His Medicine Man of the Cheyenne, for example, is based on actual accounts. It features a medicine man who is attempting to heal a fellow Cheyenne tribal member using traditional remedies and prayer. In the foreground is a helper sprinkling sage and burning sweetgrass and juniper as part of a sacred ritual. The work conveys a kind of spiritual experience, unexplainable perhaps on a printed page, yet timeless. A place of fact and fiction, reality and the dreams of possibility. “The West doesn’t belong to any one thing,” Terpning says. “It is our common story.”

Scott Usher, president of Greenwich Workshop, an art publisher that markets reproductions of Terpning paintings around the world, says Terpning is respected for the depth of research that goes into each new work. He knows how buffalo rugs were tanned, the process that went into making bows, arrows, and arrowheads, and the precise nuances of individual ceremonies.

Terpning has been invited to sacred rituals normally not accessible to outsiders. His voice cracking with emotion, he says, “I’ve felt touched and honored that traditional elders, who have become my friends over the years, trusted me enough to let me into their camps. They see a little of themselves in my paintings, and for me there’s been no greater satisfaction.”

“When I think about Howard Terpning’s legacy, I put him in the same category as Rockwell. The imagery he created for The Saturday Evening Post grow in importance with each passing day,” Usher says. “A century from now, Terpning’s portfolio of Indians in the West will be treated with the same level of respect now afforded Remington and Russell.”

A Blackfoot Indian family at camp
For Terpning, every detail must be true and authentic. In The Family Home, the artist depicts a Blackfoot camp identified by the designs on the lodges — mountain peaks at the base of the central tepee and above the blue-striped sky and a red stripe for life.
© Terpning Family Limited Partnership, LLC, Courtesy of the Greenwich Workshop®, Inc.

News of the Week: Hamm, Peanuts, and a Free Cup of Coffee

The Emmys

Jon Hamm at 2015 Emmys
Jon Hamm at 2015 Emmys (Helga Esteb/Shutterstock.com)

I could list all of the winners of the 67th Emmy Awards, but not only would that take up an entire column, you can see all of the winners at the official Emmys site with interviews, pictures and video of what was going on backstage. But there’s one category I would like to talk about.

Jon Hamm finally won! After seven previous nominations, Hamm took home the Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series statue for his role as Don Draper on Mad Men. It was his last chance, since the show ended earlier this year, so maybe that was in the minds of voters when they filled out their ballots. But he truly deserved it. In fact, he deserved it almost every year he was nominated. It was odd he hadn’t won until now.

In his acceptance speech, Hamm thanked several people by their first names but didn’t really explain who they were. Turns out they were parents of friends and other people who had helped him after his mom died when he was 10 years old.

I made a decision that if Hamm lost again and Modern Family won Best Comedy again, I would never watch the Emmys again. But since he won and Veep won Best Comedy, I guess I have to tune in next year.

Peanutizing and Tattooing

Snoopy theme park
(GuoZhongHua/Shutterstock.com)

A few years ago, AMC and illustrator Dyna Moe created a website where you could create a Mad Men avatar for yourself, a picture to use on social media and other places on the Web. Now the people behind the new Peanuts movie and the people at NBC have created similar sites.

You can “peanutize” yourself at this site, turning yourself into a Peanuts character. I tried to do one, but they don’t have my particular hair pattern, which is bald on the top but with hair on the sides (I tried an all-bald look but ended up just looking like Charlie Brown). NBC’s Tattoo Yourself site lets you see what you’d look like if your body were covered in tattoos, like the lead character of the new action-drama Blindspot.

I don’t want to know what I’d look like with tattoos. Unless they were on my head and in the shape of hair.

The Return of Brian Williams

Brian Williams
Brian Williams
(Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com)

After losing his job as anchor of The NBC Nightly News and serving a seven-month suspension for stretching the truth and fabricating stories — okay, let’s face it, he lied — Brian Williams made his debut on MSNBC on Tuesday to lead the channel’s coverage of the Pope’s first visit to the U.S. This is actually a return to the news channel for Williams. He was the lead anchor when MSNBC debuted in 1996. I still remember the late night Williams broke into regular programming and announced that Princess Diana had died.

Tuesday was a fine debut, and I have to admit it was good to see him again. He’s very good. None of his guests or the other reporters made any mention of Williams being back, and Williams didn’t mention the break at all. It was just a straight-forward newscast and very well done.

Williams will not have a regular show on MSNBC. Not yet anyway. For now he’ll be the lead anchor for breaking news and other important events. It’s part of a complete overhaul of the network.

Apple Watch to the Rescue!

If you had no intention of buying an Apple Watch, maybe this will change your mind.

One of the functions on the watch is a heart rate monitor. Paul Houle Jr., a high school football player in Massachusetts, had a fast heartbeat and was having back pains and shortness of breath during practice. His Apple Watch told him that his heart was beating at 145 beats per minute, around 60 to 80 more than it should be. After talking to his trainer, he went to the hospital, where doctors told him he had rhabdomyolysis, which is when your muscle breaks down and floods your system with protein. He had damage to his heart, kidneys, and liver. Houle says that if it weren’t for the watch, he probably would have just thought it was ordinary aches and pains and would have gone to bed. Apple CEO Tim Cook heard about what happened and called Houle. He not only gave the kid a new iPhone, he also said that when Houle’s ready he can join the Apple internship program.

I think I know who’s going to be first in line for that Steve Jobs movie.

RIP

Yankees catcher Yogi Berra attempts to catch a fly ball.
Yogi Berra
Earl Mayan
April 20, 1957

They say that celebrity deaths often come in threes. The truth is, celebrity deaths almost always come in threes (at the very least), it’s just that often the deaths aren’t reported in a mainstream way because the people aren’t ultra-famous.

This past week we lost actor and writer Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on the Adventures of Superman TV series; Jackie Collins, who wrote novels about the lives of the rich and famous; and Yogi Berra, New York Yankee catcher and creator of some fantastic phrases.

My favorite Berra quote, though he didn’t take credit for it: “Always go to other people’s funerals. Otherwise they won’t go to yours.”

Grab a Snickers Bar, Get Insulted

The next time you go to buy a Snickers bar, you might be in for a shock.

Mars, the company that makes the classic candy bar, has created new packaging for a new advertising campaign. Instead of the word Snickers on the front, you’ll see words like whiny, impatient, feisty, grouchy, snippy, and loopy. I know those sound like the long-lost dwarfs, but they’re actually hunger symptoms. Don’t worry: if you don’t want to be insulted by your candy, there will still be bars in the original packaging.


National Coffee Day

Tuesday is National Coffee Day, which is funny because anyone who would celebrate such a day literally has coffee every single day of the week already. But here’s something: If you usually go to Dunkin’ Donuts for your java fix, Tuesday is a good day to go. The company’s giving away free medium hot or iced dark roast coffee to customers all day. If you want to make your own, check out these 15 easy coffee recipes from Food.com. And since everything seems to be pumpkin-spice flavored these days, here’s a recipe from AllRecipes for a Quick Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Or if you don’t want to go to all that trouble, you could just pick up a jar of Folgers instant. It was good enough for Mrs. Olson:


Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Political cartoonist Thomas Nast born (September 27, 1840)
Nast was known as the Father of the American Cartoon.

Ted Williams hits .400 (September 28, 1941)
Will the elusive batting average ever be reached again?

James Dean dies (September 30, 1957)
The actor’s official website has some great info, including rare photos.

The Ford Model T introduced (October 1, 1908)
The Saturday Evening Post ran the very first ad for the car in our October 3, 1908, issue. The ad’s also featured in our special collector’s edition Automobiles in America.

Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show (October 1, 1962)
Sadly, only 33 episodes of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (between the first airing through May 1, 1972) exist. The others were erased. Here’s audio of his very first episode.

Oh, Dad!

It was the third time the Guru of Income Tax had called for Dad. Guru, not as in doyen, master, or spiritual authority, but guru as in Satguru, Income Tax officer, Ward 14, scourge, terror, and nemesis of industrialists, businessmen, and hoarders of wealth. What was he doing calling Dad?

“I like you, sir,” he told Dad. “I will see what I can do to get you a refund. That should help, huh — at your age?”

It wasn’t surprising that he said that. Fact is, everyone liked Dad, children and dogs included. Oh, and not to forget the girls I got home. They waxed eloquent over him. “He is so cute, your father! Why aren’t you like him — gentle?”

How could I answer that? How could I explain why some of those genes never got transferred? Why I could not do half the things he did? He would, for instance, place six glasses of water for my mother, every morning, neatly arranged on the table. At regular intervals, he would draw her attention to them, reminding her to stay hydrated, to retain her body fluids in the midst of a long, unsparing Indian summer. And he would teach English to every servant we hired. It did not matter that the servant invariably left us for a better salaried job. “It’s good,” Dad would say, smiling. “Good that they have the motivation to better themselves, good that they progress. And that they take away something lifelong from us.” Mom would give him a hostile look. “Yes,” she would say sharply. “Good that they don’t even give notice, spring this on me overnight, when I have so much work and no other help.”

When our neighbor’s dog, Romeo, went blind — having scooped the rangoli powder at the door into his eyes — he was left at the animal hospital in Parel. He was admitted not just for treatment but as punishment for tearing into a tall, fat Chinese jar, a ceramic marvel, painted in the tradition of the Tang masters of the eighth century. The jar had swayed, staggered, and toppled over, splintering into a million pieces.

When that happened and Romeo was banished to a world of darkness and to the confusion of a netted cage, Dad was the one who’d visit him. He’d take him biscuits and would play with him. He’d give him his hand to sniff, and the familiar smell would drive Romeo mad with joy. He would think he was going to be taken home; all was forgiven.

Dad also made it a point to take Romeo a special ball that made a rumbling sound when it rolled. Ears cocked, Romeo would tear after it, trip over it, paw it, and refuse to let go, forgetting, for a few moments, that he was blind.

That was Dad; that was his trip: heart in the right place, eyes wide open!

Physically, Dad was a picture of affability. He was frail, soft, and tranquil. He had brown eyes, deep, searching, and sensitive. He spoke less, was interested, always, in knowing more about the other person: his problems, his achievements, his goals, beliefs. Dad believed in the concept of an alert humanity. If there was a problem, as in poor rainfall in the villages, or a famine brought to light by the morning paper, he’d be sure to write out a check. The amount would go from his pension, meager as it were, and which came as a reward for 40 years of service in a nationalized bank. No question of leaving the bank, he had said, in years when offers had come his way. The bank is coming up well. Do you know what the deposit base is? And how many customers have opened second accounts? And how many branches we now have, compared to when I joined?

“Oh, Dad!” I would say, and give up. I was in college then and missed not having a father’s car to drive. It wasn’t as if the girls I dated minded. They were simple enough, and at that age these things didn’t matter. It was the girls’ fathers who looked at me disdainfully when I said I wasn’t mobile. “What does your father do?” they would ask, and lose interest.

The Oh, Dads became frequent after I started working. When I started receiving cash payments that weren’t accounted for in my books. Most people I knew did that, transactions in cash, to spite the caretakers of the nation for not giving us good roads, good water, and good air. Dad was an exception. He paid every bit of his taxes — more, never less, to ensure a good night’s sleep for himself and his family.

He stole mine, though, I can tell you that. A few times over, my Oh, Dads became agitated. What to do? He’d write out thank-you notes to people who’d send me cash payments. “Received in cash, a sum of 25,000 rupees. Signed on behalf of Mr. X by Mr. Y” In brackets, Father.

It was all there in black and white, my suicide note, should it fall into the hands of the tax officers waiting for a kill. Always waiting, even if it took years.

And though wide was the gap between father and son, and disparate our approach to life, not so the bond. We were close, immensely close. Dad would speak to me, confide in me, should something nag at his curly white head.

That morning, after the call, he spoke about Satguru. He had met the officer when he realized that he, as a senior citizen, was due for a tax rebate on certain counts. He had gone to the ward office and submitted his appeal, full disclosures of his accounts, his tax returns spotlessly clean and detailed. Satguru had studied the papers and seen the stamp of honesty. He also saw a frail little man, gentle and amenable, unable to say no or to differ. He filed that away and then phoned a few days later. “I can help you,” he told Dad. “But you will, of course, tell no one.”

“He wants a bribe,” Dad said to me, his eyes wide with fear. “He says he will arrange a refund every year. I have nothing to worry about. But I have to give him a cut, some chai pani.”

I could understand Dad’s fear of bribes. He had kept away from them all through his working life. I had seen him reject copious bundles of cash that came with a warm handshake on Diwali. He was gracious in his refusal. “I am looking forward to the sweetmeats, but this, please, no. So sorry, but I have a problem with it. The problem is entirely mine.” He’d move to other topics of conversation to reassure the offender that it was but an aberration, no judgment had been made. It was easy to see why they liked Dad. He was inexpensive as a banker, and gracious, and forgiving.

But now he was worried. Satguru wouldn’t be so forgiving if Dad refused his offer. I had no doubts that Satguru liked Dad. He genuinely wanted to help him. At the same time, he wanted his pound of flesh. What to do? Bribes and corruption were the order of the day.

“What do I do? What do I say?” Dad asked me. “I wish I had left matters to your accountant.” Then wistfully and sadly he said, “Who would have thought … ? I thought he was genuine, honest, somebody who would help me, because it is right to do so.”

“Dad,” I was tempted to say. “No one is honest these days. No one does things free, out of goodness. It’s like searching for a toothpick in a haystack. It’s the day of the great smash and crawl. You remember that, don’t you? The game you taught me as a kid. You hide a coin in one hand and smash both palms on the table and your opponent is supposed to guess which hand has the coin. Today the rules have changed. You better have a coin in both hands, one over the table, one under. And you better let your opponent guess which hand it is in and reward him accordingly.”

But I didn’t say that, because I didn’t think Dad would understand. Besides, it wasn’t fair to cast swine before pearl. Wrong example, unfair analogy.

I advised Dad in the only way I knew: cleverly and deviously. “Lie, Dad, lie!” I said to him. “Tell Satguru just about anything. Say that you stay with a son who doesn’t give you any money. Say you have to pay for your keep. Your food, your medicines, your recreation, your clothes are all your own responsibility. Your son expects you to pay for everything: electricity, water, phone bills. Play on Satguru’s sympathy, his liking of you. Do it, Dad. For once in your life, lie!”

He listened. He struggled. I could see he hated the idea. Besides, he knew I was a good son. He hated putting forth these distortions. Why reduce the image of our home, why denigrate the family? was the thought in his mind. It swam transparently in his eyes, in his facial expressions, adding to his discomfort. All the same he relented. It was better than paying a bribe, better than succumbing to a practice he had shunned all his life.

The next day he went to meet Satguru. It was lunchtime by the time he returned. I knew by his face that all was well. He looked at me gratefully, sheepishly, and said, “He believed it all, hook, line, and sinker. He just asked me a few questions about you, and that was it! Gave me the refund quietly, like it was my birthright. He said I was to come to him anytime I was in a spot.” Dad’s voice lowered. “He even offered to buy me lunch. When I protested, he insisted that I drop in next week for lunch. He is quite a decent fellow. I felt quite guilty at the end of it. I just wish he was honest. I know he has got a good heart. Deep down, there is great good in him.”

“In all, Dad, in all!” I said. “I would rather believe that human beings are congenitally good than bad. It’s just that money does to you what you allow it to. It takes over your life, rules it, makes a feverish child out of you. It’s a question of being too long in the toy shop, or never being there at all.”

Dad wasn’t listening. “Quite a decent fellow, I tell you, quite decent, huh. If only he would see it’s not necessary: all this hustling, all this sponging, this under-the-table stuff, not important at all.”

We had just sat for lunch when the phone rang. Mom answered. I could see she was annoyed. Mom hated interruptions when she was putting forth a meal that she had nurtured. Once a week she made something special, and this was chicken vindaloo day, a celebration of sorts, for what, we joked, was Dad’s incipient corruption. The fact that he had lied, he had eased up on an old ethic.

It was Satguru asking for Dad. There was silence as Dad heard him.

“What is with him?” said Mom impatiently. “Can’t leave us alone or what.”

“Let’s be generous, Mom,” I said. “The man seems to be quite decent. It’s just that he likes Dad. Maybe Dad will change him, after all.”

But there was no chance of that, we surely knew, as Dad returned to the table, his face white, his eyes wide with despair. In a trembling voice he said to me, “He wants your file now. He wants to open it. He says he wants to teach you a lesson you won’t forget.”

Although inwardly I shivered, and my heart began to pound, thinking of the endless trips to the department, the waiting, the humiliation, and the slow grating investigation that would burden my memory, eroding both, my patience and my pride, despite that, I said in my calmest voice, “How can that be, Dad? The only lessons I learn are from you.”

 

Lessons in Hype from P.T. Barnum

We’ve become so familiar with media campaigns full of hype, spin, and image, we tend to think of them as modern inventions. But you can find people running media campaigns well back into the 1800s. P.T. Barnum, founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, launched one of America’s biggest media campaigns in 1850.

He made a fortune using the media to draw the public to his American Museum. But in 1850, Barnum outdid himself when he arranged and promoted a concert tour for the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.

In his promotion, he presented her impending tour as not only an artistic, but also a moral spectacle. “A visit from such a woman who regards her artistic powers as a gift from Heaven and who helps the afflicted and distressed will be a blessing to America.”

Barnum’s campaign was so successful that when Lind sailed into New York Harbor, over 30,000 people lined the wharf and crowded the decks on nearby ships just to see Lind arrive. As she rode off to her hotel, she was nearly buried beneath the flowers admirers threw through her carriage window. At her hotel, the street was choked with another 20,000 waiting to catch a glimpse of the singer.

But almost no one in the crowd, much less in all of America, had heard Jenny Lind sing. Although she had been a sensation in Europe, where she had sung in major opera houses, few had even heard her name before Barnum made her a national media sensation. Yet when she set foot on American soil, she was already famous for being well known, and vice versa.

Newspapers stoked the “Lind Mania” fire, printing any story they could find about the singer. When they exhausted the promotional materials from Barnum, they produced their own Lind stories, even if they had to make them up.

Jenny Lind cigars.
Jenny Lind Cigars

Adding to the frenzy, businesses began selling Jenny Lind coats, gloves, baby cribs, cigars, and sausages.

As Lind’s fame grew, Barnum hit on the idea of auctioning the first concert tickets, and charging the public 25 cents to watch the bidding. After the winning bid of $250, the rest of the tickets were swiftly sold out.

It was easy enough to sell tickets in cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. But Barnum had planned a tour that would take Lind into the cultural hinterlands, Natchez, Louisville, and Pittsburgh.

Barnum knew there was little demand in those cities for opera singing. But he wasn’t selling Jenny Lind on musical talent alone. He was presenting her as an exhibit of charm, modesty, and sincerity, packaged with an exceptional voice. Many audience members were more interested in her character than her singing. They were particularly attracted by reports of her generous giving.

Always eager to satirize Americans and their vulgarity, London’s Punch magazine mocked Lind’s exuberant reception in the states.
Always eager to satirize Americans and their vulgarity, London’s Punch magazine mocked Lind’s exuberant reception in the states.

At her first concert, for example, she captivated the New York audience with her pure tone and vocal control. But then Barnum stepped on stage to announce that Lind was donating her share of the evening’s proceeds — $10,000 — to charities and asylums in the city. Well, that did it. The theater exploded with applause all over again. Men wept with emotion at her generosity. Journalists broke out their choicest superlatives to rave about the enchanting singer.

The Post’s editor, on September 21, 1850, wrote that he’d heard she’d been wonderful in the concert. He wrote far more in describing her as “a very noble and generous woman.”

Jenny Lind kept her promise to donate her earnings that night. She had already given vast amounts to establish free schools in Sweden and Norway, and she contributed to American charities throughout her tour.

So ultimately, Barnum wasn’t taking a great risk with the Lind tour. He knew the American public and its interests. And he knew that Americans liked thinking about themselves as lovers of art, respectability, and generosity. When they applauded Jenny Lind, they were, in a way, applauding themselves. Playing to the American ideal is still an essential part of a successful media campaign.

Post cover girl Jenny Lind, from the April 20, 1850 edition.
Post cover girl Jenny Lind, from the April 20, 1850 edition.

Vintage Auto Ads: Oldsmobile

Like David Buick and Louis Chevrolet, Ransom Olds was fated to launch a car company that left him behind on its way to becoming a leading brand.

Olds was one of the originals, starting his company in 1897. The first automaker to use mass production, he produced 425 vehicles in 1901, which made him the country’s leading car manufacturer. But in 1904, the company’s board of directors wanted to move the line toward larger, more expensive cars. Olds wanted to continue producing his small, affordable models. In the end, he left Olds Motor Vehicle company to start over. Unable to use his name on a new brand, he chose his initials instead, and Ransom Eli Olds launched the REO Motor Car Company. (For more on the auto industry’s early years, check out Post‘s new special collector’s edition, Automobiles in America!)

His old company was acquired by General Motors in 1908, which positioned the Oldsmobile as a mid-priced brand.
In the decades that followed, the company introduced several innovations in its engine and transmission design. By the 1970s, it was producing America’s best-selling car. Yet within a few years, the Oldsmobile brand had lost its popularity, and in 2004 General Motors closed the Oldsmobile line.


The Olds Motor Works’ first model was its successful Curved Dash Runabout. It ran so well, the company claimed, that it wouldn’t frighten horses — an important consideration in the early days of the auto.

March 7, 1903
March 7, 1903



The seven-passenger Limited offered a six-cylinder engine. Oldsmobile was so confident of its performance that the car’s speedometer was capable of registering up to 100 mph. But such performance came at a cost. The $4,600 price tag would be the equivalent of $115,000 today.

October 8, 1910
October 8, 1910



Oldsmobile began manufacturing the slightly upscale Viking in 1929. The short-lived line was part of General Motors’ “companion make” strategy, intended to attract buyers who wanted to buy a little more car than an Olds but less than Buick.

November 9, 1929
November 9, 1929



The 1937 models introduced a four-speed semi-automatic transmission. A clutch pedal allowed drivers to operate in low range, shifting automatically between first and second gear, or operate in high-range, shifting between third and fourth gear speeds.

April 17, 1937
April 17, 1937



Three years later, Oldsmobile introduced its fully automatic Hydramatic transmission in its 1940 models.

December 14, 1940
December 14, 1940



Oldsmobile produced its last automobile for the duration of the war on February 5, 1942. (Four years later, it resumed production with a car that looked little changed from its pre-war styling.)

November 22, 1941
November 22, 1941



The 1948 Olds introduced the Rocket engine, a powerful V-8 that proved so popular the company kept it in production with limited changes for well over a decade.

May 28, 1949
May 28, 1949



The 1958 model was big, powerful, and generously decked with chrome.

April 5, 1958
April 5, 1958



The Toronado introduced in 1966 featured distinctive front-end styling and the first front-wheel drive on an American car in almost 30 years.

October 8, 1966
October 8, 1966



The same year the Toronado was introduced, Oldsmobile produced its Vista Cruiser with distinctive skylights above the backseats and rear compartment.

November 5, 1966
November 5, 1966



Beginning in 1961, Oldsmobile offered its mid-size Cutlass line. Though not particularly popular in its early years, later versions became best-sellers in the 1970s and ’80s.

September 1, 1971
September 1, 1971



The Post had a long association with Oldsmobile. We published some of its very first ads in 1902. In 1999, the magazine ran its last ad for the automaker, just five years before the division was shut down.

November 1, 1999
November 1, 1999


The Sharing Economy

A hand holding a smartphone over a city grid
Shutterstock

David Fabiani, 59, a retired Navy vet in suburban Chicago, boards dogs in his home through Rover.com. Susan Jones, a baby boomer from the Midwest, rents out spare rooms for short stays through Airbnb. Harry Campbell, a 28-year-old former aerospace engineer in Orange County, California, uses his car to earn money through the ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft. All three are participants in the “sharing economy.” From business pages to social media, the phrase seems to be everywhere, a focal point of both utopian praise and dystopian criticism. But what exactly do these companies and an army of whimsically named startups — Instacart, Fluc, Vayable — have in common?

It comes down to a smartphone app. Each company offers its own, but the principle is the same: You, the customer, need a delivery, a place to stay, a place for your pet to stay, some carpentry work. Somebody is interested in supplying it. You connect through the app — or through your home computer. While customers potentially save time and money, the people who provide the various services get to set their own hours, working as little or as much as their schedule allows and their budget demands. For both customer and service provider, it is argued, there is also an intangible benefit: When ordinary people open previously private spheres of their lives to the public — homes, cars, skiing equipment — they connect with others in a different, more intimate way than conventional business relationships allow.

For a customer, the biggest selling point is the on-demand convenience. Need a ride? A taxi usually requires a call to a dispatcher, an uncertain wait, and tip calculation plus an awkward fumble with cash at the end. But with Uber and Lyft, you simply tap a button on your phone and a driver shows up in minutes. When your request for a ride is accepted, you see the driver’s picture, name, and rating, up to five stars (the driver sees yours, too, a safeguard). While you’re waiting, you can trace the progress of the car on a map. The cars are clean, the drivers are friendly, and everything is paid automatically through your credit card. The whole experience is seamless, and — when the companies’ notorious “surge pricing” is not in effect — substantially cheaper than a cab. It’s a boon for the car-less. In my home city of Los Angeles, “Uber” has become a well-established verb — not just for non-drivers, but also for those who expect to spend the night drinking. Getting home is no longer a worry.

The model has proved so appealing that new services are routinely pitched as “the Uber of X.” Uber itself is now an international phenomenon, available in American towns from Akron to Yuma — and in 58 countries overall. Lyft, the closest competitor, is in more than 60 locations nationwide. While Uber and Lyft are shaking up transportation, Airbnb (in more than 34,000 cities and 190 countries) is transforming the hospitality business. To a lesser extent, TaskRabbit (19 cities) and Handy (37 locations) are doing the same for home repair and house cleaning.

The road has not always been smooth, though. Despite the often idealistic marketing language — and the promise of something fundamentally new — the commercial vanguard of the sharing economy has familiar capitalist features: vast infusions of venture funding, ferocious competition, and rapid expansion amid an ongoing struggle to keep regulators at bay. For customers, questions may arise about reliability and even safety. For service providers, flexibility can be a double-edged sword: You can work whenever you want — but without benefits or a guaranteed paycheck. And if you continually need to chase down the next gig to make ends meet, you may find yourself “on call” for more hours than the traditional workweek, with less truly free time than ever. “The sharing economy is more a symptom of the economic strain that the middle class is experiencing than an effective long-term strategy for relieving it,” argues Professor Maurie Cohen of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, whose critique will appear in The Future of Consumer Society: Prospects for Sustainability in the New Economy, due out next year from Oxford University Press. The risk of a widening class division between the assigners and performers of chores such as grocery shopping and laundry has even led some to rebrand the new labor model as the “servant economy.”

Yet it’s clear that for some people — like David Fabiani, the Navy vet — a sharing-economy gig can provide all the things that boosters tout: flexibility, extra income, and personal satisfaction. Fabiani’s experience began in the summer of 2012, when, scanning Craigslist for a way to supplement his pension, he came upon Rover.com — a company that links dog owners with providers of in-home pet boarding. Though business was slow for the first half-year, it picked up when the Seattle-based company boosted its advertising budget in the Chicago area. Now, charging between $25 and $30 a day per dog, and taking in seven dogs per week, he makes roughly $700 a month — though he says that, if he pushed himself, he could stretch that to $1,500 or $2,000. Rover.com takes a 15 percent commission, but Fabiani points out that the advertising and brand name have brought him business that he wouldn’t have been able to get on his own. Without the Rover.com platform, he notes, people might ask, “Who is this guy?”

“It’s not just about the money,” adds Fabiani, who describes himself as “a big dog lover, who knows how to take care of them.” He appreciates the opportunity to work at home, set his own hours, and do something he enjoys. (Aside from his customers’ dogs, he has two golden retrievers of his own.) His wife and two sons, ages 31 and 33, who live with him, have full-time jobs but help out with walking and feeding the dogs on weekends, often Fabiani’s busiest time. To develop return clientele, on which his current business depends, he says, “You have to have patience, credibility, honesty.”

Can someone earn a living as a Rover.com dog-sitter? “You’re not going to get rich,” Fabiani says. “But you could support yourself.”

Many find that money is not the only attraction of the sharing economy. “Part of the draw is that people want to have genuine connections,” says Susan Jones, the Midwestern baby boomer who rents rooms in her home through Airbnb. “There’s a meaningful and personal experience on both sides.” (Living in a suburb of a midsize Midwestern city that does not permit bed-and-breakfasts, she asked not to be identified by her real name.) Some of her guests are looking for a home in the area, and she likes “getting them excited about living here.” She recalls with particular fondness a Japanese family who stayed with her for a month while looking for a place to rent. The husband spoke English, but the wife knew only a few words. “Even though it wasn’t easy to communicate, somehow we became friends,” Jones says. The family ended up moving nearby, and the wife made a habit of biking over with Japanese dishes she had cooked. Now that the family is back in Japan, the women stay in touch, exchanging pictures of the seasons. For Airbnb hosting, it helps to be a people person. “I’m an extrovert,” Jones says, “so I find the experience very enjoyable. My guests are the nicest people.”

David Fabiani and his sons pose with their dogs
Woof! David Fabiani, center, boards dogs in his home with help from his two sons.
Courtesy David Fabiani

Renting out a room through Airbnb is not simply a pleasant social experience, however. “It’s not just like free money; it’s a business,” Jones notes. “It takes your attention like a business. When the guests are here, there’s setting up and cleaning up, and interaction time. We like it when we don’t have guests, too.”

Once Jones discovered, in a Google search, that a would-be guest was under indictment on drug charges. The visitor claimed in her application that she was a grandmother and did research for a law firm — but she was evidently coming to town to prepare for her trial. “We found a way not to accept her,” Jones wryly notes.

Though she does not think Airbnb would ever work as a full-time job (“unless you’re renting six places”), Jones points out that it can make home ownership, or continued home ownership, possible. The service has also benefited a friend of hers with extra space, who “makes so much more than she would with a traditional roommate.” Thanks to Airbnb, the friend, who had been temporarily laid off, was able to get out of debt and keep paying her mortgage. Retired people who find themselves house-rich and cash poor, or simply with an abundance of space, offer another natural constituency for the Airbnb platform.

The human element is a key selling point for Campbell, the former aerospace engineer in Orange County, California. Before leaving his engineering job in March, he found driving for Uber and Lyft to be a great use of his spare time — something, he says with a laugh, that he’s had a lot of since his wife entered medical school. “I like talking to people, and I love to drive my car,” he says. “It’s almost like being paid for something I would do anyway.”

Campbell also appreciates the flexibility. As he puts it, “There’s no 9-to-5 schedule. When I want to work, I can work. And when I don’t want to work, I don’t. The nice thing is that you can take off months at a time, and as soon as you’re ready to come back, your job is still right there waiting for you.” Having learned the ins and outs of driving for Uber and others, Campbell decided to turn his insights — and sometimes critical thoughts about the companies — into a blog and a podcast at TheRideShareGuy.com, a clearinghouse of information to help drivers make more money and have a better overall experience amid the vicissitudes of pricing and policy.

Before his recent career transition, Campbell fit a common sharing-economy profile: a person with a full-time job who wants to make a little extra money on the side. In a survey of 250 ride sharers, released in December 2013, 41 percent said they had a separate full-time job for the whole year, another 28 percent for part of the year. In the survey, undertaken by Sherpa — a company whose analytics tool helps individual contractors in the sharing economy gain insight into earnings and expenses — 44 percent of respondents said they drive fewer than 20 hours a week. “We’re seeing people who work three to four hours each evening to get an extra bump,” says Sherpa co-founder Ryder Pearce. They do it, he explains, to pay off loans or, generally, gain more financial security. The flexibility is what makes this sort of work an option for people with day jobs, and as a temporary measure it can do much good — though, as a new normal, a 55- or 60-hour week raises concerns. As labor researcher Veena Dubal said, speaking of sharing-economy companies at the Share conference in San Francisco in May 2014, “They advertise that you can earn ‘extra cash’ — but the underlying issue is, why do you have to do this?”

Harry Campbell in his car.
Courtesy Harry Campbell

To an extent, the companies of the sharing economy benefit from the idealism associated with the phrase — and the genuine movement behind it. The Peers Foundation, a recent spin-off of an advocacy group co-founded in 2013 by Douglas Atkin, Airbnb’s head of community, declares that the sharing economy “is helping us pay the bills, work flexible hours, meet new people and spend more time with our families.” Moreover, it’s not just a social good; “it’s how the 21st-century economy should work.”

The companies have made effective use of this idealistic framing, as well as the upbeat experiences of some of their users. Lyft is not just a business but “your friend with a car.” In a promotional video for Airbnb, we hear guests leave with “a new sense of self.” One young man proclaims that the Airbnb experience has done nothing less than give him “a new faith in humanity.” Even Uber — with the most service-oriented self-presentation (“Your ride, on demand”) — portrays itself as a revolutionary force. It’s the underdog battling “big taxi” on behalf of passengers while creating economic opportunity for anyone with a post-2000 car.

At the same time, nobody enjoys becoming obsolete —whether it’s a taxi driver, a hotel worker, or the proprietor of a long-established, fully licensed bed-and-breakfast. From February to April this year, the number of taxi cab trips reported to the Los Angeles Department of Transportation was down nearly 28 percent from a comparable period in 2013; in San Francisco the drop was 65 percent between March 2012 and July 2014, according to the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency. As for the general public, neighbors of Airbnb hosts may be less than enthusiastic about the pop-up B&B across the street — or even down the hall.

State and local governments, like Jones’ suburban town, have been skeptical, too, taking action to stop or at least regulate the new companies. Last fall, the New York state attorney general reported that nearly three-quarters of Airbnb listings in New York City were illegal — and that more than a third of the units were run by commercial operators, not individual residents. In December 2014, district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco counties sued Uber for illegally operating at airports and “making untrue or misleading representations regarding the quality of background checks it performs on drivers.”

Despite the legal wrangling and occasional, well-publicized horror story, it is up for debate whether the services provided by these companies are less safe than what traditional competitors offer. The two-way rating system is, arguably, a powerful tool for keeping bad actors out of the system — and may explain why my dozens of rides on Uber and Lyft have been more pleasant than the taxi rides I’ve taken through the years in Los Angeles. Fingerprinting drivers may be an important screen for a criminal background, but it does not prevent them from being rude or driving recklessly — behavior I have encountered on occasion with the city’s licensed taxi drivers. At the same time, the combination of government prodding and public concern has led the major companies to shore up their safety profiles — Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Lyft all offer insurance amounting to $1 million in protection for their service providers. Lyft’s procedures include background and DMV checks, vehicle inspections, and zero tolerance for alcohol and drugs.

The vetting and insurance policies signal a fundamental tension in the sharing economy over the status of its service providers — whether they are independent contractors (as the companies wish to see them) or, in fact, employees. The distinction — far from being just semantic — is the basis of ongoing litigation: If service providers are classified as employees (as the law requires when a certain level of corporate rule-making is found to govern their activities), they are entitled to protections and benefits that would otherwise be unavailable and that would make their labor far more costly. In June, the California Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled that one Uber driver was in fact an employee. Though Uber appealed, and the decision was limited to a single person, it cast considerable doubt on whether, in the long term, Uber would be able to continue classifying its drivers as independent contractors.

The dispute over employee status occurs against the backdrop of an extended price war between Uber and Lyft that has forced drivers to work longer hours to maintain a steady income. In October last year, there were coordinated protests against Uber in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and several other American cities. Though the discontent is by no means universal — Sherpa’s survey showed a robust 61 percent satisfaction rate among ride-sharing drivers — the rumblings of discontent may well grow louder if competition leads to ever lower fares.

Those without a car or a rentable living space may have an even tougher time in the sharing economy, since their income is based on an accumulation of individually gathered assignments. While exhorting the aspiring handyman, house cleaner, shopper, or deliverer to “become an entrepreneur on our platform,” TaskRabbit tacitly confirms the challenge for “Taskers” on its own website. Quoting Bloomberg BusinessWeek, a blurb notes that the company is “betting on a future where employment will seem much more like a series of small-scale agreements between businesses and labor than jobs in the traditional sense.” Putting together all those “small-scale” agreements can be difficult. As Cohen observes, service providers may “need to spend several hours each day searching out their next gig in order to make ends meet.”

In the sharing economy, a bargain for consumers is likely to mean less money for service providers. Low pay as well as insecurity for the people who are making life so much easier for others may be seen as part of a growing class divide captured in the notion of the “hourglass society.” Cohen explains this as the idea that “a relatively modest number of affluent households at the top call upon the labor of a largely disempowered working class on terms that are extremely unfavorable to workers with respect to compensation, benefits, and working conditions.”

For service providers, the great divide — the difference between satisfaction and brewing rebellion — may well be between those for whom gigs provide supplementary income and those who are forced to seek a living wage from the sharing economy alone.

Though champions and critics of the sharing economy may differ on the balance of benefits and harm, there is widespread agreement that “stagnating wages and reduced working hours for employees in the conventional economy,” as Cohen puts it, have caused middle-class comforts once taken for granted to drift out of reach for many. As a supplement, a filler of gaps, the sharing economy is clearly helpful — the ability to earn money from cars, homes, and otherwise untapped possessions and labor can be a blessing, bringing increased financial security, and an improved quality of life — and all this while consumers enjoy better, more affordable services.

Yet the question remains: Could the sharing economy end up aggravating in the long term the problems that it seems to be relieving in the short term? Could it in fact be, as Cohen suggests, “contributing to a shift away from jobs that offer some measure of protection against employer abuses”? If conventional jobs are replaced by ad hoc agreements, then the freedom to work whenever and as much as you want may prove a decidedly mixed blessing. In the midst of a growing concentration of wealth, the idealists, at least, hope that this new paradigm will somehow remain tethered to its lofty rhetoric, creating enriching opportunities and rewarding connections instead of leaving just a few people with an even larger share than they had before.

A Ph.D. candidate in classics at UCLA, Alex Press is a non-driving Angeleno who gets around town by public transportation as well as by Uber and Lyft.

News of the Week: New Celebrity Apprentice, New Mary Poppins, and New Fall Books

Goodbye Donald, Hello Arnold

Earlier this year Donald Trump and NBC parted ways (he’s running for president, if you haven’t turned on your television the past two months. So they needed a new host for The Celebrity Apprentice. Would it be someone like Mark Cuban or Richard Branson? Nope, they went with the ex-governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They might need a new tagline to replace Trump’s “You’re fired.” Conan O’Brien has a few suggestions:

Too bad Carly Fiorina is busy. She would have been great.

Supercalifragilisticexpialatrocious

Eventually, Hollywood will remake/reboot/sequel-ize every single movie and TV show that has ever been made. The latest is Mary Poppins. Disney has announced that they’re making a sequel to the beloved movie, which will take place 20 years after the original. It will be directed by Rob Marshall, who directed Chicago.

This is where I would put in the obligatory “I wish Hollywood would stop doing this!” line, but at this point it’s too late. Everything is up for grabs. A screenwriter is even thinking about doing a new version of Columbo.

RIP, Dickie Moore

Last week we got the news that Our Gang actress Jean Darling had passed away. Now comes word that fellow Our Gang actor Dickie Moore has passed away. He was 89.

Besides the 1930s comedy shorts, he also appeared in many movies, including Out of the Past, where he played Robert Mitchum’s mute employee at the gas station; Miss Annie Rooney, where he gave Shirley Temple her first on-screen kiss; and films like Oliver Twist, Sergeant York, and The Bride Wore Red. Moore served in World War II and left the movie business in the early 1950s and eventually opened up his own PR firm, Dick Moore & Associates. He had been married to actress Jane Powell since 1988.

I Now Pronounce You…

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

In some places, fake weddings are really popular.

I don’t mean fake weddings as in whatever the heck happened with Kim Kardashian and basketball player Kris Humphries a few years ago, I’m talking about weddings that are actually fake. The Atlantic has a piece about marriages in Argentina that aren’t really marriages at all. They’re parties where fake grooms and brides and others get together to party. Guests pay between $43 and $65 for tickets, and that includes a video of the event and “some drama.” So it sounds like a reality show you pay to attend. I can’t imagine that this won’t be popular in the U.S. at some point.

Recent statistics show that 50 percent of all fake marriages end in fake divorce.

New Fall Books

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

Finally, fall is in our sights. Soon the rancid heat and humidity will be replaced with crisp, cool air, pumpkin-spice everything, and new TV shows. And books! Books are released throughout the year, of course, but fall seems to be when a lot of the eagerly awaited books are released. Here are seven that sound like fun:

September Is National Breakfast Month

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

I have not eaten breakfast in years. Sure, I’ll have tea in the morning and throughout the day (oh so many, many cups of tea throughout the day), but I never, ever actually have any breakfast. They say it’s the most important meal of the day, but I’ve heard that line for so long who knows if it’s actually true or just one of those medical wives’ tales.

But if you do eat breakfast, it’s National Breakfast Month. RecipeGirl has a great breakfast section on her site (actually, the entire site is great), and you might want to try some Pumpkin Spice Muffins or an Onion, Bacon, and Spinach Fritatta, or the Two-Ingredient Pancakes.

As we mentioned last week, McDonald’s will start to serve breakfast all day long on October 6. They should have bumped it up a month.

Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Tolkien Week (September 20-26)
And September 22 is Hobbit Day, the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins! The Saturday Evening Post Archives Director Jeff Nilsson on the concerns parents had when The Hobbit became popular in the 1960s.

Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs (September 20, 1973)
There were actually three Battle of the Sexes tennis matches. One had Riggs against Margaret Court (which he won) and a later match against King (which he lost). The third was played between Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova.

H. G. Wells born (September 21, 1866)
ABC has announced that they’re making a TV series based on the sci-fi film Time After Time, about writer H.G. Wells battling Jack the Ripper through time.

Neptune discovered (September 23, 1846)
Who should get credit for discovering the eighth planet?

William Faulkner born (September 25, 1897)
The Southern writer published 22 short stories in the Post and was recipient of both the Nobel Prize in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize.

First televised presidential debate (September 26, 1960)
The common wisdom is that people who watched the debate on television thought John F. Kennedy won (Richard Nixon sweated a lot) and those who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon won.

Cowpoke Covers

Our cover artists saddle up to capture the elusive cowpoke of the Wild West. Whether you played rodeo as a child or are a real-life bronco rider, this week’s cover collection is sure to please.

Boy on Horse — John Clymer
A good cowboy is a resourceful cowboy. And a good horse knows when to stand still.

John Clymer July 30, 1949
John Clymer
July 30, 1949


Woman at Dude Ranch — Fred Ludekens
Saddle up, partner! This cowgirl looks like she can hold her own.

Fred Ludekens June 20, 1942
Fred Ludekens
June 20, 1942


Playing Cowboy — Amos Sewell
These three little gunslingers may be the fastest hands in the neighborhood, but any make-believe cowboy worth his weight in cap guns knows that true grit is determined by how long you can play dead without opening an eye.

Amos Sewell March 11, 1950
Amos Sewell
March 11, 1950


Gary Cooper as ‘The Texan’ — Norman Rockwell
Lights, camera, action! To play a cowboy, not only is it important to act the part, you have to look it, too. Bring on the lipstick.

Norman Rockwell May 24, 1930
Norman Rockwell
May 24, 1930


Spring Styles — Tom Webb
Who doesn’t adore a good old-fashioned cowboy? Clearly, this cowpoke knows his duds will never go out of style.

Tom Webb March 25, 1922
Tom Webb
March 25, 1922


Workhorse — Leslie Thrasher
Working hard or hardly working? Judging by that pool of water and the boy’s flushed face, we’re going with the former.

Leslie Thrasher September 6, 1913
Leslie Thrasher
September 6, 1913


Little Cowboy Takes a Licking — J.C. Leyendecker
That little cowboy must taste as sweet as he looks — prior to the tears, of course.

J.C. Leyendecker August 20, 1938
J.C. Leyendecker
August 20, 1938

ck out the September/October 2015 issue for a look at works of Howard Terpning, one of the today’s masters of Western art.

Falling from the Middle Class

The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways.

Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

I have some personal experience here. Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me — and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education.

Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor.

My income consists of a Social Security check and a miserable pension from the Washington Post, where I worked intermittently for a total of about 25 years, interrupted by a stint at a publishing house in New York just before my profit-sharing would have taken effect. I returned to the Post, won a Pulitzer Prize, continued working for another eight years, with a leave of absence now and then. As the last leave rolled on, the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was 53 at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion — perhaps delusion is the more accurate word — that I could make a living as a writer, and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap.

The pension would start 12 years later when I was 65. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones.
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I was never remotely rich by what counts for rich today. (That requires a lot of zeroes after the first two or three digits.) But I look through my checkbooks from 25 and 30 years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid. As my older brother, who to keep me off the streets invited me to live with him after his wife died, said, shaking his head in warning, “Don’t spend your capital.” His advice was right, but his timing was wrong. I’d already spent it. He sounded like the ghost of my father. Capital produces income. If you want to have an income, don’t dip into your capital. I’d always been a bit of a contrarian, even as a child.

My money wasn’t working hard enough to finance my adventures, which did, after all, come with a price. I wanted to explore and write about eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall, which I did for several years. It was truly a great adventure, it changed my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost, which was a lot. There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would be. (I think this is called denial.) So another dip into the well. In my checkbook, I listed these deposits as draws. That sounded very businesslike, almost as if I knew what I was doing. Sometimes I did. (It’s hard to resist a little self-justification.)

Against the advice of people who thought they knew better, I bought shares in AOL before it really took off and in Apple when it was near its bottom. I figured Apple’s real estate must be worth more than the value the market gave the company. I was right. Shares in both companies soared. If I’d shut up and stayed home … but I didn’t. On the advice of these same people who advised me against AOL and Apple, I turned my brokerage account into a margin account for someone else to handle, and I left the country again. A few more dips into the well, a few turns in the market, a few margin calls, and when I went back for another dip, the well was empty. The old proverb drifts back to me on a wisp of memory. A fool and his money are soon parted. My adventures were over.

The story is, of course, more complicated than that — whose story isn’t? — but these are the essentials. It’s unlikely, and it’s not intended, to evoke sympathy. I’d acted like one of those people who win the lottery and squander it on houses, cars, family, and Caribbean cruises. But I hadn’t won the lottery; I’d fallen under the spell of magical thinking. In my opinion, I didn’t squander the money, either; I just spent it a little too enthusiastically — not on Caribbean cruises but on exploring the aftermath of the fall of Communism in eastern Europe. I don’t regret it. When my writing was bringing in a little money I had a Keogh plan, and when I was at the Post a 401(k) account. I’d made a little money in real estate and received a couple of modest but nice inheritances, which together, and with Social Security and the pension, would have given me enough income to live on, had I not felt I’d lost the ability to continue writing and had I forgone, or at least spent more modestly on, my work in Europe and related activities, avoided the margin account, and so on. The “so on,” I should add, included a major heart attack that led to congestive heart failure, a condition that greatly reduced my physical resilience and taxed my already-limited income.

There are a lot of people like me, exiles from the middle class who suddenly find themselves on Grub Street. Unless something truly awful has happened, they are not standing at the corner with a cup like my friend Kenny, whom I pass every Wednesday afternoon when I’m entering the farmers’ market at Foggy Bottom in downtown Washington, D.C. We chat. He’s bent over a cane but always clean and nicely dressed. He tells me not to stay long, that it’s too hot. Kenny is a genuinely compassionate man. I tell him I am writing an article on poverty, my own poverty, but I’d like to know about how he got where he is. Would he talk to me? Yes, he would, but our conversation hasn’t happened yet. I feel guilty that I am shopping at this upscale market when I am wondering which medical bill I can postpone this month and, which, if any, I can pay. Meanwhile, Kenny stands at the corner with his cup. On my way out, I bring him a gelato. It’s too hot to stand and talk.

Kenny looks poor. He looks weary. After it had been pointed out to me by a friend who has a brain in his head but once had no money in his pocket, I noticed that the truly poor often look weary. Dealing with the system — “the Man” — is frustrating, exhausting, and takes many hours of waiting for bus and subway, of shuffling back and forth from one office to the next, one building to the next, one bureau to the next, filling out forms and generating a growing stream of paper along the way. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with government agencies very often, but once I took an addict, who was in dire straits, to an agency that might give him a referral for psychiatric treatment at a much reduced rate or even to a well-regarded clinic in another part of the city for free.

He’d need Medicaid, of course. It took the entire day, from eight in the morning to five at night. The waiting room was jammed. There must have been 75 people there, and for most of them it was not their first visit. When my friend was called to see a member of the staff who could pass him to another, and so on, I was the only white person in the room. But I was not the only poor person in the room. The only people who weren’t were the two women behind the desk, probably hanging on by their teeth to the lowest rung on the middle-class ladder. Nice women, actually, patient and polite.

Poverty is a great leveler. There was camaraderie among those men and women in the waiting room. My awkwardness soon slipped away and I, too, became part of the group. I heard stories; I laughed; and we talked. It was interesting, an experience, as they say, like working on a freighter, which I did for a time. Only my experience as an able-bodied seaman in my youth was one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me. This waiting room in a part of the District of Columbia’s government most middle-class people never see was not an escape from the “real world”; it was the real world. All of us there had two things in common: None of us had any money, and all of us had time. That was good because, as I said, I was there all day.

Poverty, my mother used to say, is a state of mind. She never stood in line to apply for welfare, or Medicaid, or food stamps. Then she would have learned, as I did, that it may be a state of mind — and to some degree I believe it is — but it is also a harsh daily reality for millions of her fellow citizens of this country and on this planet. And now for her son.

I am not trying to exaggerate my own particular plight. I’ve never had to apply for welfare, or Medicaid, or food stamps. I have asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to subsidize my rent and a District office to subsidize my medical insurance payments. That involved a lot of paperwork but not a lot of lines, and I am very glad to live in subsidized housing with a number of people who really run the gamut. One of them is the great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy. Another fled Bulgaria as the Communists were taking over, eventually came to the United States, speaks several languages, and worked for the Library of Congress. There are refugees from one regime or another, from all parts of the world. They come in all colors. Some were trained as lawyers, some have doctoral degrees, some were teachers. There are journalists and writers. What we have in common is we are all older, we are all poor, and each of us has, to a greater or lesser degree, the ailments that come with age. As everybody knows, if you don’t have good insurance, medical bills can be catastrophic and have been for some of us here. But I think all of us would agree that living here beats living in a homeless shelter.

Compared with most poor people, I am fortunate. If you’ve got to be poor, finding yourself at the upper edge of poverty with a roof over your head and a wardrobe that doesn’t look as if it came from the Salvation Army is as good as it gets. It also helps to be white.

An African-American trainer at a gym I used to go to before the well went dry had a lot of clients and must have made decent money, enough to support himself and his son, anyway. He was walking down Connecticut Avenue one day when he saw one of his female clients approaching.

“I don’t have any,” she exclaimed and turned abruptly away as he was opening his mouth to greet her. “I don’t have any money!”

She didn’t see my friend Jeff; she saw a black man in trainers about to ask her for a handout on one of the busier avenues in the city. Jeff doesn’t look like a hustler. He doesn’t look poor. I don’t look poor, either, but I am white. So I never suffered that kind of demeaning slight.

By federal government standards, I’m not poor, but by any rational standard, I am. My income is above $11,670 annually, which, in 2014, puts me above the poverty line for a single person. My Social Security comes to more than that. The federal minimum wage in 2014 is $7.25 an hour, or $15,080 annually. When FICA taxes of 7.65 percent for Social Security and Medicare are deducted, that brings the income of a full-time minimum-wage worker to $13,949. For a family of three, the poverty line is $19,790. This is not a joke. It doesn’t leave much extra for an ice cream cone.

I have a roof over my head, thanks to the aforementioned HUD subsidy, which required hours of paperwork, signed affidavits from doctors, many duplicate copies, and a lot of running around. (The Paperwork Reduction Act was passed in 1980. How many trees, I wonder, has it saved?) The management of the building where I live used to deal directly with HUD. Now a company based in Alabama has been hired as a distant intermediary of sorts between the very capable management and HUD. I don’t believe this was done in an attempt to reduce paperwork.

If you’re poor, what might have been a minor annoyance, or even a major inconvenience, becomes something of a disaster. Your hard drive crashes? Who’s going to pay for the recovery of its data, not to mention the new computer? I’m not playing solitaire on this machine; the hard drive holds my work, virtually my life. It is not a luxury for me but a necessity. I need dental work. Anybody got $10,000? Dentists are not a luxury. Dental disease can make you seriously ill. Lose your cell phone? What may be a luxury to some is a necessity to me. Without that telephone and that computer, my life as I have known it would cease to exist. Not long after, so would I. I am not eager for that to happen. Need to go to a funeral hundreds of miles away? Who pays for the plane ticket? In the case of the funeral, my nephew paid for the plane ticket. My daughter and son-in-law paid for the dental work. Sometimes, I find it deeply humiliating that I am dependent on such kindnesses when I would prefer that the kindnesses flow the other way. Most of the time, though, I am just extremely grateful for the help of family and friends. It’s not so much humiliating as it is humbling, which is a good thing.

I am ashamed to have gotten myself into this situation. Unlike many who are born, live, and die in poverty, I got where I am today through my own efforts. I can’t blame anyone else. Perhaps, it should be humiliating to reveal myself like this to the eyes of any passing stranger or friend; more humiliating to friends, actually, some of whom knew me in another life. Most of my friends probably don’t realize or would rather not realize just how parlous my situation is. Just as well. We’d both be embarrassed.

Although I am embarrassed by my condition, and ashamed of myself for putting myself there, I feel grateful to have had some of these experiences and even more grateful to have survived them.
I am glad that none of my friends has ever found himself sitting on a bench in a park with a quarter in his pocket, as I once did, and nothing in the bank; in fact, no bank account. It’s a very lonely feeling. It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair.

I wallowed in that slough for a bit. It was not, after all, a happy situation, and I am not a dimwitted optimist. But I had two choices, die in the slough or move on. I thought of the last two lines of Milton’s Lycidas,

At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

So I got up, forever grateful to Mr. Barrows, my college English instructor, for teaching me to study Lycidas seriously and realize what a great poem it is and why that matters.

News of the Week: Stephen Colbert, Stonehenge, and the Spud Shake

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Actor George Clooney chats with Stephen on the premiere of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sept. 8, 2015.  (JEFFREY R. STAAB/CBS)
Actor George Clooney chats with Stephen on the premiere of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sept. 8, 2015.
(JEFFREY R. STAAB/CBS)

Only three episodes of Stephen Colbert’s new talk show have aired, so it’s way too early to give a review. Since the show will probably look remarkably different six months from now, it seems unfair to judge a show like this so early. But I can say that while Colbert fans were probably happy to see a lot of his Comedy Central antics make it over to CBS, I’m sure there were a lot of people watching who weren’t familiar with Colbert’s Comedy Central persona and wondered what the hell was going on. Here are the latest episodes.

I like the show so far, don’t love it (boy, did that part with the evil ancient amulet and the Sabra hummus drag on), but as I said we have to give it time. I do wish we saw more of the real Stephen Colbert though. Sure, he’s not wearing his conservative news guy persona anymore, but he’s still playing sort of a character. When he was downing that bag of Oreos while showing news clips of Donald Trump, that was a character he was playing. In those moments it’s like The Colbert Report all over again, and while that was obviously great on the old show, I want to see him play it 100 percent straight. I want to see Stephen Colbert, not “Stephen Colbert.” I want to see, well, a traditional talk show. Right now it’s an odd mix, and I’m not sure Colbert knows who he wants to be.

Whenever a new TV show/film/album/news event happens, publications take the opportunity to do a list to tie into it. Everybody loves lists! But if you needed anymore proof that lists are really overdone now (when everyone is doing a list, then no list can be the authority), take a look at Vulture’s list of the 32 Greatest Talk Show Hosts Ever. Actually, don’t. I can save you the trouble. It will only irritate you. Why? Not only did they put Howard Stern at #1, they didn’t list Steve Allen at all.

That’s like listing the 32 greatest baseball players ever and not including Babe Ruth.

Allen pretty much invented late night television and would be in the top 5 of any normal list. I guess that’s what you get when you have people of a certain age and/or mindset do a pop culture overview. Though oddly they did list Jack Paar.

Stonehenge II

They’ve found a second Stonehenge, just two miles away from the original Stonehenge. Now, you’re probably wondering, how could they miss another Stonehenge that was so close, and after so many years?

Turns out it’s underground. Researchers from the University of Bradford used remote sensor technology to discover 100 stones that make up a monument, near Durrington Walls, under a bank. They think it was built around 4,500 years ago, while Stonehenge was created 3,500 years ago. It’s a major discovery.

They’re calling it “archaeology on steroids.” Oh, sure, it’s fine for archaeologists to use steroids but not baseball players?

RIP, Martin Milner and Judy Carne

Last Sunday night, for some random reason, I was wondering what Adam-12 and Route 66 star Martin Milner was still alive. I found out online that he was, but then came the news the next morning that he had passed away on Sunday. He was 83.

The Los Angeles Police Department tweeted a tribute to Milner and his Adam-12 character, Pete Malloy:

Judy Carne will probably be best remembered as the “Sock it to me!” girl on the wild ’60s variety show Laugh-In. She passed away in Northamptonshire, England, at the age of 76. She was once married to Burt Reynolds.

Milner and Carne weren’t the only celebrities who passed away this month. We also lost actor Dean Jones, Our Gang child actress Jean Darling, and Warren Murphy, creator of The Destroyer (Remo Williams) series and screenwriter of movies like The Eiger Sanction.

It’s Not the Heat, it’s the Humidity … Actually It’s Both

Last year at this time I remember mentioning the tennis players that were dropping out of the U.S. Open because of the humidity and cramping. And it was only a few people. This year’s tournament, currently going on in Flushing Meadow, New York, has seen over a dozen people withdrawing. During some day matches the on-court temperatures can reach 140 degrees! American Jack Sock was so wiped out that he actually had to be helped off the court. And he was ahead in the match.

Eugenie Bouchard, the 25th seed, withdrew because of an injury, but not one she suffered on court. The Canadian fell in the locker room and got a concussion after hitting her head.

September Is National Potato Month

(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

Do you take vegetables for granted? If you do, it’s probably the potato. It’s always there, in its many forms, and while we deeply love it, we take it for granted. Most potatoes aren’t colorful, and they’re certainly not as hip as kale. But name another vegetable that’s as versatile as the potato. Seriously, name one. Think about it and come back to this column in a few hours.

Hello again. Hope you spent the past few hours wisely. Now let’s get to some potato recipes. Country Living has 18 simple ideas for cooking potatoes. Allrecipes has some great potato side dishes. And since it seems like the heat and humidity is never going away, how about you make a Spud Shake? It’s a refreshing milkshake made from (yes) potatoes.

Notice I said you make, because it’s certainly not something I’m going to try.

Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Luna 2 crashes into moon (September 14, 1959)
The Soviet space probe was the first object from Earth to reach another celestial body, and it concerned the U.S. so much that we ramped up our own space program.

Grace Kelly dies (September 14, 1982)
Here is the last interview with the movie star and Princess of Monaco, two months before her death.

First photocopier debuts (September 16, 1959)
It was called the Xerox 914, and its debut aired on live television.

The Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862)
The Saturday Evening Post has been around so long that we had a report from the battle in our September 27, 1862 issue.

The first space shuttle Enterprise debuts (September 17, 1976)
And who was there to mark the occasion? The cast of Star Trek, of course.

President Garfield dies (September 19, 1881)
The 20th President of the United States died from infection and blood poisoning after being shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2. Some historians believe the president would have lived if doctors had treated him better.

Pick Me

The only reason Bob Seldon wore such a flashy watch to the Sixth Annual Evening of Illusion that night — besides it being his birthday — was to have it stolen. He’d never had a watch lifted before, or his pockets picked, or his torn-up blue-backed card found regenerated within a stack of reds. Tonight, as he maneuvered the Camry into a parking space near the sidewalk, he hoped somebody would bring him on stage.

He would be ready for it, too. Earlier in the evening, he made sure to wear several layers of clothing, and each layer had pockets waiting for an uninvited guest. The pockets in his slacks, for instance, were filled with the usual suspects: overstuffed leather wallet (back right); standard-issue, scarcely used checkbook (back left); fully loaded “I Left My Heart in Sonoma” keychain (front right); and six coins, all minted in 1974 for tracking purposes (front left).

His wife bought him a vest that he had worn once, to her sister’s third wedding. It was blue like the deep part of the ocean, and it made him feel slim. It also had a single pocket in the front, which tonight was home to a freshly buffed 1973 JFK 50-cent piece.

His black overcoat had two deep pockets in the front, and a small one on the inside left. Instead of their normal hat- or glove-shaped inhabitants, all three pockets were filled with a variety of small family photos and other pieces of flair he had swiped off the mantel just before they left — any of which could be easily identified if they were taken and showed up, say, in the middle of a Jell-O mold.

Now that the car was parked, he turned off the ignition and swung his door open.

“Hang on, babe, I’ll come around.”

Bob walked around the back of the car and opened her door, reaching for her hand. She loved seeing him so excited. His coat sleeve crept up as he helped her out of her seat, and that’s when she noticed the solid gold 1967“El Presidente” Rolex gently saddled on his left wrist.

“Bob, isn’t that your grandfather’s watch?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you wear that thing since our wedding day.”

“Yeah, I just felt like it was time to break it out again. It’s too nice to keep stuffed in a box, you know?”

“Well I love it. It’s a handsome watch for a handsome birthday boy,” she said as she kissed him on the lips.

“Mmm, thanks babe. Now, let’s head inside so we can get a good seat!”

They went in, and in the lobby they showed their tickets to the guy wearing a Save the Belcourt T-shirt, and he directed them to the smaller theater off to the left (the main screen was showing It’s a Wonderful Life, and that room was packed).

Their theater was small and could fit maybe a hundred people or so. The movie screen had been rolled into the ceiling, which left a stage at the front of the room, framed with ornate sculpted patterns and finished off by the kind of heavy red curtain that seemed to only reside in old arthouse theaters.

“Look, babe, there are a few seats open in the front row. Let’s grab one.”

“In the front row? You never want to sit in the front row.”

“I know. I want to tonight, though. I want to see their hands.”

“I see.” She lowered her voice. “You’re hoping they pick you, don’t you?”

He grinned.

“Thought so,” she laughed. “Well then, you pick the seats.”

They proceeded to the front and sat down next to a younger couple who looked like they might still attend the university across the street. His wife took off her coat, but Bob left his on.

“Don’t you think you’ll get hot?”

“I’ll be okay,” he said.

Bob knew he was probably being watched, too. He looked behind him at the folks in the seats. Not a fully packed house yet, but more people than he expected. Many were already sitting down but a few were still filing in, and several were standing at the rear of the theater as well. He tried to make eye contact with many of them. He figured there were some plants in the audience, and for all he knew the audience could be chock-full of magicians.

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair several times, making sure his newly polished watch shimmered in the overhead lights while they were still nice and bright.

And his timing was perfect, because just then the lights lowered and the stage curtains opened. The folks in the seats erupted in applause as the emcee walked out and greeted the room.

He spoke for several minutes and then gave way to the first magician, who specialized in rope-cutting tricks and bad jokes. The next act was a ball-in-the-cup expert, and the third could escape from a pair of handcuffs without breaking a sweat.

As the evening progressed, more magicians performed, and Bob watched each with delight. He had working ideas on how most of the tricks were done — dealing from the bottom of the deck, slightly bending two cards so they look like a single card, acting like you’re palming a lemon in your left hand while replacing the ball with your right. He loved watching them all just the same, as if he were watching a chef prepare a seven-course meal.

Several of the acts called for assistants. Each time he thrust his hand as high as he could reach, waving El Presidente for all to see, but nobody picked him. Maybe the assistants who had been chosen were planted by the magicians anyway. Or perhaps they were simply better looking and more distracting under the stage lights.

The final performer walked out on stage. The emcee announced him as The Spectacular Russell Tomlinson, a description that Mr. Tomlinson seemed to believe wholeheartedly. His long dark hair flowed perfectly around his slender, pointed face, and when he smiled it was impossible to miss his gold tooth shining like a beacon of hope under the lights. Bob’s watch shined back as he clapped with his arms high in the air, waving back and forth on his wrist like a flag of surrender, begging the man on stage to take it.

The magician performed many illusions, each one more stunning than the last. Mind reading. Levitation. Feats of strength. Along the way he asked members of the audience to help him, and each time Bob was the first person to raise his hand. His wife smiled at his eagerness. He was acting like a kid, and she hadn’t seen that in a long time.

But of course every time Bob raised his hand, the man picked somebody else. And this time, for what he announced would be the final call of the night, the man asked for an assistant. Then another one. And another. Then as the man with the pointed face was choosing his final helper, he looked straight into Bob’s eyes, and for a moment held his gaze. Bob watched him flash his gold tooth as his mouth wrinkled up in an awkward grin, and then his gaze broke away as he chose another man from further back in the theater.

Bob’s arm stayed straight up in the air, even as the other man slowly made his way to the stage. That couldn’t really have been my last chance, could it? Not even on my birthday! The other man, the final pick of the night, was wearing a hat covered in patches, and the words Vietnam Veteran embroidered on the front. Of course, Bob thought.

His wife tugged his coat sleeve and he reluctantly lowered his arm.

The final act played out in front of him, but he could barely watch. He saw shapes of people on the stage, moving from here to there.

Nobody picked me.

And then the magician asked the Vietnam veteran to stand in the center of the stage. That’s when Bob noticed a fire-engine-red watch on the man’s left wrist. It looked cheap, like something out of the quarter machine near the exit at Kmart, but it was ridiculously shiny. And in a place like this, that’s what mattered. Not only was he a damned war veteran, but he was also wearing a bright red corker of a watch. He probably saved a family of kittens on the way to the show, too.

“Sir, please tell everybody your name. Very good, Steve. Very good. Now. Now, you’ve just watched me shuffle these cards several times, correct? Would you like to shuffle them yourself, or are you satisfied? Okay, very well. In that case, as I fan the cards out before you, please take a card from the deck and don’t let me see it, okay? Memorize your card, Steve, this is very important. Now show it to the room, please, but again do not let me see it.”

The Vet showed it to the room. He’d picked the Jack of Diamonds.

“Excellent, excellent, Steve. Now, take this pen and sign your name across the face of the card. This way there can be no dispute about whether or not the card is your card, correct? Good.”

The vet signed his name and then placed the card back into the fanned-out deck. The magician shuffled the cards several times and muttered that Steve never gave the pen back, and the audience chuckled.

He held the deck vertically and waved his hands several inches over the top, and a single card rose out of it. He pulled that card away from the others and returned the deck to his pocket.

“Do you think this is your card, Steve?”

He kind of nodded and shrugged at the same time.

“I see. I mean, it could be yours, right?”

Steve nodded.

“Okay, well whether it is or it isn’t, this card you picked just has to get dealt with.” And the magician took the card and tore it in half, then in half again, and then a third time.

He asked Steve to place his right hand out, and the magician placed the pieces in a pile on his hand, still all face down, and asked him to clench his fist.

“You feel the torn up card in your hand, right? Good, very good. Now make a fist with your other hand, too. That’s right, excellent.” He paused, then said, in a slightly louder voice, “Thank you for your service to our great country, by the way.”

The crowd cheered, and the magician grabbed both wrists, closed his eyes, and stood silently waiting for the applause to soften.

Bob leaned forward. That watch is about to be a goner, he thought.

The magician started waving the man’s arms back and forth — at first like paddles laboring through water, and then faster and faster. The Vietnam vet’s eyes were open wide, bulging out of their sockets, and for a second Bob wondered if they would end up on the floor. The man looked like one of those scary Charlie Chimp monkeys frantically banging its cymbals together. The magician’s stolid mouth shifted slowly into a grin, and his gold tooth seemed to change colors under the stage lights, from gold to blue to red, every bit as red as the vet’s watch that he was deftly unwrapping with his long fingers.

That should be me up there.

Then violà! The magician asked the vet to open his right hand, and of course it was completely empty. He turned his hand over several times in amazement.

Really? What were you expecting, man?

The magician put his finger in front of his pointy nose, as if he were thinking for a moment, then he gestured to the vet’s other hand and asked him to open it.

The vet did, and of course there was a card inside. He unfolded it, and naturally it was the Jack of Diamonds, put back together without so much as a stitch, and complete with his signature in bold black script. The vet smiled and the crowd cheered, and even Bob’s wife whistled, a sound he had never heard before.

Nobody seemed to notice or care that not only did The Spectacular Russell Tomlinson finish out the evening with a trick that wasn’t even that impressive (nobody calls for an encore after a damned card trick), but the holy Vietnam veteran’s left wrist was now completely naked.

Then, the magician motioned for all the assistants to return to their seats (telling the vet he could keep the card to go with the souvenir pen) and then he took center stage and bowed. The emcee appeared and thanked everyone for coming out, and as the lights were raised, the show was over.

The entire room stood simultaneously (even that was more impressive than the final trick), but Bob didn’t move. His eyes were locked on Tomlinson, who was chatting with the emcee. Had he just stolen the vet’s watch in front of a room that didn’t notice? The poor man probably wouldn’t even notice it was missing until he got home.

His wife tugged on his coat and he slowly stood. He looked to the back of the room and spotted the vet walking toward the door, enjoying pats on the back from anybody who passed by him. Bob noticed there was, indeed, no watch on either of the man’s wrists.

“Wasn’t that amazing, honey? Oh, how fun! We should get to the lobby and see if any of the magicians are out there, we could meet some of them!”

Bob looked back onto the stage to get another glimpse of the magician with the pointed face, but the stage was empty.

“Okay sure, babe. Let’s get to the lobby.”

But by the time they got to the lobby, there were no magicians greeting people or shaking hands or doing tricks. It’s a Wonderful Life had let out an hour ago, and except for the few men waiting on their wives to come out of the restroom, the lobby was empty. Bob and his wife exited the building.

“Oh well,” she said. “That was so much fun! I don’t want it to end, we should go dancing!”

“Dancing? We haven’t been dancing in 20 years.”

“Or out for cocktails. We could go to that one place down in the village where we heard that poetry reading that time, remember?”

“Eh, I think I just want to go home. It’s nearly 10. We can have cocktails at home if you want. I’ll fix you that one you like, named after that dancer.”

“All right honey. It’s your night. Didn’t you like the show?”

They approached the Camry and he opened her door.

“Oh, it was great, don’t get me wrong. I just—”

“I know you wanted them to take you up on stage.”

Bob nodded.

“Well. As wonderful as that would have been, I’m glad you were sitting next to me the whole time.”

He smiled and kissed her cheek, and she sat down in her seat. As he closed the door, he looked across the mostly empty parking lot.

That’s when he appeared. The Spectacular Russell Tomlinson exited the building’s side door, carrying two large duffel bags. Bob watched the man walk over to his Escalade. The hatch opened itself, and he set the bags down inside, rubbing his hands over his mouth to get warm. He wasn’t wearing a watch.

The magician noticed Bob looking at him. He smiled, flashing his gold tooth that now seemed dull in the parking lot, and waved at Bob.

Bob felt the urge to walk over and confront him about stealing that guy’s watch, about asking him why he wasn’t chosen when he so obviously wanted to go on stage. It was his damned birthday, after all.

But Bob didn’t budge. He waved back with a quick flick of his hand that was unintentionally theatrical. This amused the magician, who responded by leaning into a long, deep bow, like something out of a cartoon. Then he slipped into the Escalade, started the engine, and disappeared around the rear of the building. The puff of smoke from the exhaust was a nice touch.

Bob opened his car door and got in.

“Did you see Tomlinson bow for me just now? The nerve of that guy.”

His wife nodded and referred to him as the sexy magician.

“Seriously?”

“Well, you know, for a magician.”

“I see.”

“We’ll come back next year, Bob. They’ll pick you eventually, I just know it. They can’t ignore you forever, can they?”

“No, I don’t suppose they can.”

He started the engine.

“After all,” he said, brushing back his coat sleeve, “they can’t ignore El Presidente forev—”

He stopped. He didn’t mean to stop, but his mouth simply stalled. Eyes on his wrist, he couldn’t understand. Because what he saw was definitely not his grandfather’s solid gold 1967 Rolex wedding present.

“Bob? What’s wrong?”

She looked at his wrist and her mouth stalled too. She had to clear her throat. “Oh. I … see. That shiny red watch isn’t yours, is it?”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

She started laughing. She put her hands over her face, trying to hold it in. “He did it, didn’t he? You got picked after all!”

“It would seem so, wouldn’t it?” he said.

He laughed too. Then he sighed and looked back at the red watch. It wasn’t a bad piece. A little cheap thing, but you certainly couldn’t miss it from across the room. He wondered how long before the Vietnam vet realized what had happened.

Then he spoke, and the words scrawled sideways out of his mouth: “But you did get the magician’s wallet, right?”

She grinned and pulled a small leather rectangle from her purse. “Of course I did!”

He smiled and put the car into drive, turning out onto the empty street. She opened the wallet and ran her thumb across the line of credit cards.

“Now where do you think we can get you a new watch at this time of night?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go find out!”

Technology Was Killing Attention Spans 115 Years Ago

Long before technology went digital, devices like this kinetophone (a kinetoscope with a phonograph inside) were presumed to be making people more impatient and less focused.
Long before technology went digital, devices like this kinetophone (a kinetoscope with a phonograph inside) were presumed to be making people more impatient and less focused.

People are too easily distracted. News of a major tragedy will hold their interest for a few days, but boredom quickly sets in and attention drifts away.

That’s what the Post editors concluded after people learned a hurricane had destroyed a major American city on the Gulf Coast. “Money and food were sent,” they wrote. “The heart of the country went out in sympathy. The awful story was eagerly read. But by the third day there was a distinct falling off in interest. … By the [fifth day] even the headlines were not looked at.”

They weren’t describing New Orleans in 2005, but Galveston in 1900.

One of the few Galveston houses still standing — barely— after the 1900 hurricane.
One of the few Galveston houses still standing — barely— after the 1900 hurricane.

In September of that year, a hurricane swept inland to destroy a city and kill some 10,000 people, making it still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. It was, of course, a major news story. Yet two months later, Post editors observed that people had quickly lost interest in the tragedy.

Read the entire editorial: "The Kinetiscope Passing of Events" from the pages of the November 3, 1900 issue of the Post.
Read the entire editorial “The Kinetoscopic Passing of Events” from the November 3, 1900, issue of the Post.

The editorial — published nearly a century before life became enmeshed with the Web and smartphones — blamed technology for the lack of focus. Life was becoming too fast-paced. Rapid communication, made possible by steamships, the telegraph, and the new telephone, was making people impatient with any delay. Even the kinetoscope, Edison’s patented personal hand-cranked movie viewer (pictured above), was contributing to America’s growing inability to stay focused.

We can smile at the thought that steamships were making people more distracted. But it appears that technology does indeed make it harder for us to concentrate. This year, the Microsoft Corporation published a study that showed between the year 2000 and 2013 the average attention span dropped from 12 to 8 seconds. That’s one second less than the attention span of a goldfish.

If true, this fact suggests that people will find it increasingly difficult to remember and learn from tragedy. And if that’s the case, maybe we should heed the editors’ advice from 115 years ago: “But it were well if, with all our increasing swiftness, we should stop and think a while now and then.”

On the Green

Whether you tee off with millions watching or just practice putting into an orange juice tumbler, these golf covers consecrate the bond of anyone who’s ever taken aim at a hole in one.

Golf Trophy – George Brehm
It’s not the size of the trophy that counts, but what you do with it. And from the looks of this winner’s smirk, his silver trinket is going to be the gem of the mantelpiece.

George Brehm June 6, 1925
George Brehm
June 6, 1925


Woman in Sandtrap – Penrhyn Stanlaws
She may have to work on her precision. But after unearthing the fractured remains of her sandtrap shot, this golfer can feel confident in the power behind her drive.

Penrhyn Stanlaws June 9, 1928
Penrhyn Stanlaws
June 9, 1928


Golfer Kept Waiting – John E. Sheridan
Five o’clock means five o’clock! Scrutinizing the ticking hands on his wrist probably isn’t going to deliver his opponents any quicker, but one can still hope.

John E. Sheridan September 12, 1931
John E. Sheridan
September 12, 1931


Portrait of a Lady Golfer – Penrhyn Stanlaws
Becoming one with the green in more ways than one: With gloves on tight and chin held high, this Portrait of a Lady Golfer by Penrhyn Stanlaws inspires the very spirit of the pastime.

Penrhyn Stanlaws April 22, 1933
Penrhyn Stanlaws
April 22, 1933


Gold Driving Range – John Falter
The moon may be out, but you wouldn’t know it from these players determined to improve their swing for tomorrow’s game. It doesn’t hurt that in the dark, no one can see your worst slice.

John Falter July 26, 1952
John Falter
July 26, 1952


This Car Needs Washing – Amos Sewell
Evidently, even some artistically unsubtle smudge craft isn’t enough to get the chores done. All play and no work may keep Jack from getting dull, but it won’t keep his marriage intact.

Amos Sewell October 3, 1953
Amos Sewell
October 3, 1953


Eighteenth Hole – John Falter
Just a blade of grass shy of victory: These weary players on the final hole can study the devastating tally all they want, but it won’t give that ball the nudge it needs.

John Falter August 6, 1955
John Falter
August 6, 1955


No Playing Through – Constantin Alajalov
Anything worth doing is worth doing well, but the conga line of miffed putters waiting to play through might not take that mantra to heart.

Constantin Alajalov August 31, 1957
Constantin Alajalov
August 31, 1957


Distracted Pro Golfer – John Falter
With a championship on the line and every fan’s eye glued to his stroke, this pro is none too pleased with the smoky flirtation going on behind him. If he can’t sink this, there may be cause to call fore over a club instead of a ball.

John Falter July 2, 1960
John Falter
July 2, 1960


Putting Around in the Kitchen – Richard Sargent
Everyone needs a hobby. And this 1960s housewife has discovered hers in those gleaming new clubs, even as her hubby looks on in goggle-eyed bewilderment.

Richard Sargent September 3, 1960
Richard Sargent
September 3, 1960

My Years of Eating Dangerously

Marie Osmond told me on television that she lost 50 pounds eating pre-packaged meals sent to her home, and not too long ago, the nation’s first lady ran off the White House pastry chef. That reminded me of childhood mealtimes and my grandmother’s nutritional malfeasance.

Until well after World War II ended in 1945, I lived on Sixth Street in Corinth, Mississippi, with my grandparents. Two aunts also lived with us. All the men were in the Pacific, leaving my grandfather, called Pop, to provide. My grandmother, Mom, ran the house.

Pop was a superb provider. He worked as a carpenter for the Tennessee Valley Authority and had a green B sticker on his car’s windshield, meaning that we had income and gasoline. He also had a green thumb and grew green vegetables in a huge backyard garden. Pop also fished, and he put fresh bream and crappie on our big dining room table at least twice a week. He also oversaw a backyard chicken house that delivered eggs as well as raw material for the big black frying pan that dominated Mom’s cooking.

Mom was a canner and preserver. We had — in what seemed to be endless quantity — green beans, pickled beets, peaches, strawberry preserves, and goodness knows what else.

Mom supplemented this bounty by going to the tiny Kroger store once a week for meat, which was rationed, and such staples as Luzianne coffee, Domino sugar, Clabber Girl baking powder, and Crisco shortening.

Our main meal, eaten at noon, we called dinner. The evening meal was supper except on Sunday when it became a “snack.” Sunday evenings were Mom’s lone break from cooking.

Many things were served fried: chicken, green tomatoes, the fish caught in Hatchie Bottom, and pork chops. Steak, scarce in wartime, was “chicken-fried.” Meatloaf was baked, of course, as was macaroni and cheese.

Mom always overcooked the steak and pork chops. In those times, the idea of a rare steak or hamburger could disgust entire neighborhoods. A typical summer meal included fried fish, tomatoes, green beans or butterbeans, and turnip greens. Or collard greens. I hated greens more than I hated Tojo or Hitler. If we had salad, it was a wedge of iceberg lettuce doused with French dressing, an orangey liquid unknown in France.

Breakfast might be fried eggs and bacon or cereal. Cold cereals were Nabisco Shredded Wheat, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and Kellogg’s Pep, which came with a nifty airplane cutout inside. Hot cereals included Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, and Hot Ralston, sponsor of radio’s Tom Mix. We ate these instead of grits.
In those times, the idea of a rare steak or hamburger could disgust entire neighborhoods.
Modern nutritionists would hyperventilate just thinking about what we ate in the 1940s. On the healthy side were the vegetables and greens that were available six months of the year. From there, things went nutritionally sideways. It’s a wonder my grandparents were not jailed for child abuse.

Can you imagine a germ-laden henhouse in a backyard of today? How about wringing the neck of a chicken on the back steps and then, for the kids’ amusement, letting the headless victim lurch about the yard for a time? Those activities would have had SWAT teams from PETA and the EPA pouring through our front door.

The Department of Agriculture never inspected Pop’s garden, let alone the henhouse, and Mom adhered to no federal guidelines when it came to canning and cooking and cake making. As for fried food, the only questions were, “Is it crisp enough?” and “May I have some more?”

Our house was heated by coal; we drank non-homogenized milk; and we rarely locked doors. It’s a wonder I wasn’t overcome by fumes, poisoned, or stolen by gypsies. Yet we survived. Pop lived to be 88, Mom to 82. Both aunts made it well past 80, and I was 77 on my last birthday.

That’s what 400 years’ worth of fried chicken and beet pickles can do for you.