News of the Week: Hurt Hands, Hot Dogs, and Halloween

Jimmy Fallon Is Now Officially Out of Hands

Maybe it would be a good idea if Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon simply didn’t leave the studio.

Back in July, Fallon badly hurt his left hand after falling in his kitchen. This week, Fallon injured his right hand after tripping over a woman who was kneeling down at an event put on by The Harvard Lampoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fallon was in town to accept the Lampoon’s Elmer Award. He was carrying a bottle of Jägermeister at the time, fell, and his hand landed on the broken glass. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital and luckily the injury wasn’t nearly as bad as last time.

He really puts the fall in Fallon, doesn’t he?

Breaking News: Nobody Knows What’s in Hot Dogs

Hot Dog Vintage advertisment
(Shutterstock)

This wasn’t a good week for meat lovers. Just when we heard that the Worldshut Health Organization is now going to classify the bacon, beef, and processed meats we’ve been eating as carcinogens — even if some of the reports have been misleading — we also got word that the hot dogs we’ve been eating all these years might have some things in them that we, well, don’t want to eat.

Clear Food, a testing lab, tested 75 brands of hot dogs and sausages and found that 14.4 percent had problems, some “hygienic” and “substitution” issues. Hygienic means that a non-harmful element was introduced to the hot dog, such as human DNA, which was found in 2 percent of the hot dogs tested. Now, I don’t know how finding human DNA in hot dogs can be considered “non-harmful,” but that’s how it’s classified. Substitution means that there’s something in the hot dogs that isn’t listed on the label.

And those vegetarian hot dogs you’re eating to be healthier? Ten percent of those tested contained meat.

Janet Riley, president of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (yes, there’s a National Hot Dog and Sausage Council) says that she has questions about how the tests were conducted, and that any hygiene or ingredient issues could have been introduced to the hot dogs by the staff of Clear Food or by the way the tests were performed and how the samples were handled. She also calls the scary report “silly” and accuses Clear Food of looking for publicity.

Four brands did get a passing grade: Butterball, McCormick, Eckrich, and Hebrew National. Expect a run on those brands at your local supermarket.

RIP, Maureen O’Hara

Maureen O'Hara
Maureen O’Hara in Miracle on 34th Street (20th Century Fox)

If I were to pick my two favorite movies, they just might be two Christmas movies: 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life (yes, a common choice but it really is a terrific film) and 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. The latter starred the beautiful Maureen O’Hara, who passed away at her home in Boise, Idaho this week at the age of 95.

Turner Classic Movies will be running a 24-hour tribute to O’Hara on November 20, with such movies as McClintock!, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Jake, and The Quiet Man.

Sherlock Returns on January 1

There’s a great Sherlock Holmes television series, but it’s not the one on CBS. Elementary is … fine, I guess, a passable entertainment, but it’s not great. That would describe the other Holmes and Watson show on television, PBS’s Sherlock. Filming doesn’t begin on the fourth season (or “series” as they say in England) until the spring, but they did film a 90-minute special that will air on both the BBC and PBS on January 1. That’s a first for the show (it usually airs first on BBC and then later on PBS). Here’s the trailer. The show is set in modern times but this episode, “The Abominable Bride,” is set in Victorian England for some reason. It would be great if they don’t even explain why:

Also for the first time, the episode will be shown in select theaters, with 20 minutes of additional footage.

Vintage Words Are Making a Comeback

Dictonary entry for language
(Shutterstock)

Have you noticed that there are a lot of words from decades ago that we don’t use anymore? Language evolves, and some words just vanish as the decades go by, replaced by whatever words we’re all using at the time.

Using Google’s Ngram, which tracks the number of times words are used in print, a researcher discovered that many older words are making a comeback. People are actually using words like “fortnight” and “smitten” and “amidst” and “dapper” again. There’s a chance some hipsters are using these words ironically, but hey at least they’re being used.

There are many words and phrases I’d love to see come back. “Cockamamie.” “Old hat.” “Aces.” “Cahoots.” “Scram.” “Geezer.” “Hoosegow.” Those words are better than any Internet slang or LOL, and if some of them returned it would really be the bee’s knees.

Is Saying “You’re Welcome” Rude?

20151030-be-polite
(Shutterstock)

Crazy question, isn’t it? In what world would saying “you’re welcome” after someone says “thank you” be considered rude? Not to sound like an old man, but it’s coming from you meddlesome kids!

In this Boston Globe essay, Murray McClellan reveals that he recently learned from his son and the son’s girlfriend that saying “you’re welcome” is something you just shouldn’t do. Apparently, saying “you’re welcome” is now looked upon as the equivalent of saying “you owe me one,” an “acknowledgement of an uneven balance of power,” and it’s just plain rude.

Maybe some people don’t want to use the phrase for some reason, but calling it rude?

Now, I’ve noticed that in some situations people actually don’t say “you’re welcome,” Like after the NPR interviews that McClellan mentions (or any interview) where the interviewer says “thank you for being here,” the interviewee won’t say “you’re welcome,” they’ll instead say “my pleasure” or “thanks for having me.” But certainly the phrase “you’re welcome” can and should be used in other, traditional situations we all have, right?

I really do think this is an age thing, a generational thing, and specifically pushed by the tech/business world. In the same way I’ve noticed people start off their answer to a question by saying “So …” which is one of the oddest language things I’ve ever heard.

At this rate, it won’t be long before “thank you” disappears too, and all manners will be gone. We’ll just grunt at one another or stay home so we don’t have to interact with anyone anymore. It’s easier to just type “thx” or “k” in an email (because typing the “o” is too labor-intensive) than to communicate normally. What a cockamamie world this has become.

The Return of the Phone Booth

Phone booth
(Shutterstock)

I miss phone booths, or maybe I miss the idea of phone booths. I’ve gotten sick of hearing other people’s cell phone conversations while at the supermarket, the bank, the movie theater, the street corner. Nobody seems to understand that everyone around can hear what they’re saying. I know what people are having for dinner, what problems they’re having, and even what medical procedures they’re going to be having soon.

But maybe the phone booth is coming back. Or at least a certain kind of phone booth. The new ones don’t have phones in them (unless they’re decorative — a retro touch), they’re more like little rooms so people can have some privacy when they’re on their cells. Several companies are beginning to install the booths in their offices.

This is a fine idea. Now Superman and Supergirl will have some place to change again.

Boo!

Ghosts pops
(Shutterstock)

This year for Halloween I’m going as the same thing I’ve dressed as for the past several years: Guy Who Doesn’t Get Any Trick-or-Treaters So He Eats All the Candy Himself.

Assuming the planet isn’t destroyed by an asteroid and you’re planning a party, how about trying some of these Ghouly Cupcakes from Food Network? Or how about these Tarantula Tacos? You can even top off the evening with a Jack-o’-Lantern Cake.

Now, if you want a really scary recipe, how about this creepy Frankfurter Macaroni Salad Loaf thing? Oh God, it includes … hot dogs!

Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Don’t forget to “fall back” this weekend
Before you go to bed on Halloween night, turn your clocks back an hour (and here are some things that might be smart to check after the clocks are changed).

Flight of the Spruce Goose (November 2, 1947)
Howard Hughes’s giant wooden plane only made one flight and is now housed at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

Laika the Dog launched into space (November 3, 1957)
The three-year-old female was the first animal to orbit the Earth.

King Tut’s tomb discovered (November 4, 1922)
Was a curse unleashed when Howard Carter and his crew entered the tomb?

Will Rogers born (November 4, 1879)
Everybody has a Facebook page these days, including the acclaimed American humorist.

John Philip Sousa born (November 6, 1854)
He wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the music that’s played during every Fourth of July fireworks display.

Deadly Signals

20151030-deadly-signals

As we sped through the heartland night, the car’s crackling radio kept all our minds on the war in Manhattan:

“Enemy now in sight above the Palisades,” said the radio newsman, the fear penetrating his professional veneer. “Five … Five great machines. First one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook … A bulletin’s handed to me … Cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis …”

“Doozer of a news flash,” sighed Judith, shivering in the passenger seat. “Who could be behind it, Henry?”

“Bet them cylinders are German. Hitler’s got the scientists to pull this off.”

“Germany’s too far,” said Bill leaning in from the backseat. “Gotta be closer, Canada or Mexico.”

“Yeah, it could be the Canucks, couldn’t it? Bastards.”

“Poisonous smoke drifting over the city,” continued the reporter, a cough in his throat. “People in the streets see it now. They’re running towards the East River, thousands of them dropping in like rats …” His words suddenly cut away.

I fiddled with the volume knob, growing more annoyed. Annoyed because we’d missed the beginning of the broadcast, because we didn’t know who was attacking our sovereign nation, because the radio was cutting out in these backwoods; and most personally annoyed because the whole thing distracted us from our plans. Murder isn’t an undertaking you try half-focused. I know. I’d done it before.

I looked over at Judith, my only fem three years now. So innocent-looking with her farm-girl hair and doe-eyed baby blues. I’d told Bill she was cheating, though, dynamiting Rob Fingers when I was away. I’d said I couldn’t be no cuckold, and we had to do something about it. Now! Bill, unthinking ape that he is, went along.

Hope it worked.

Electric lights came through the trees. I pulled into one of the last roadside stores that sold booze before we crossed into the dry counties of Missouri. The place was a worn-out dump, single gas pump in the mud, undersized jack-o’-lanterns by the door.

I said I’d be a minute, then exited the Roadmaster and went inside. At the counter the clerk and another fellow listened attentively to their radio, another news flash coming in:

“… Washington for a special broadcast on the national emergency …”

I shuffled to the back, ignoring the cardboard ghosts and adverts for candy, and found what I wanted: duct tape and beers. Returning to the counter, the clerk rang me up without a glance.

“Sounds pretty bad,” I said.

He shrugged, “Not so bad.”

From the radio came a stately, familiar voice begging the people to remain steadfast, to have faith in the military, to pray to God for America.

Roosevelt? Futz, it had to be him. Who else spoke like that?

“Yeah, not so bad,” I said sarcastically and left.

I put my goods in the trunk, next to my shotgun and spade, then went around and got inside. Judith and Bill had the radio off.

Good. No distractions.

Work time.

**

We arrived in the bleak, post-harvest cornfield. I turned off the engine, shut down the lights.

“What are we doing here?” asked Judith innocently.

“It’s a party. Everyone out.”

A minute later, I was at the opened trunk while the others stood on the bare ground nearby. I’d just loaded the gun when Bill grabbed Judith’s arm.

“Got any last messages for Rob Fingers, Judy baby?” he shouted.

I raised the gun. “Step away from her Bill.”

His face drained of color, but Bill did as he was told.

“What’s this about, Henry?”

“I told you she mighta been cheatin’. Not that I believed.” With my free hand I tossed a roll of tape to Judith. “You been set up, Billy-Boy.”

She bound his hands from behind, then fastened tape across his mouth. All the time I kept my sights squarely on him. We led Bill to the hole Judith and I had dug yesterday, told him to sit. She tied his ankles, then kicked him into the ditch with a giggle.

“You see, Bill, Prohibition’s long over, but we ain’t pardoned for those crimes. You been chirping to the coppers.” I stood at the edge, barrel aimed at his forehead. “Nobody cuts a deal at my expense.”

Judith laughed. Then a masculine voice shouted: “What are you doing here, son?”

I glanced over my shoulder. Back by the car stood a man in overalls, a farmer by the look of him, pointing a rifle right at me. Behind him were another three men similarly dressed and armed.

I dropped my shotgun. “Just a party, fellah. Why you here?”

“Hunting little green men,” he said, glancing down in the ditch. His eyes turned colder. “But you don’t look like Martians.”

“We’re from Cleveland.”

“Just as bad.”

**

They used my own duct tape to bind me, threw me in the backseat of their car while two more followed with Judith and Bill in mine. It was a long, uncomfortable trip into town. Despite having interrupted a murder, all their thoughts were on the radio. The Martians had taken America’s cities and were expanding into the countryside, our armies destroyed in a matter of minutes.

It seemed impossible, yet perversely gave me hope. The government would need men to fight the invaders. My record showed I was good with a gun, a natural leader, a big macher — they’d want me in the resistance. I might get out of this a hero …

But then Mr. Orson Welles came on, told us the broadcast was over. That it had all been a Halloween production. The newsmen, Roosevelt, were actors. No Martians, no invasion of any sort. All faked. The farmers laughed with embarrassment and relief. It became a joke even as they felt ridiculous for hunting radio extraterrestrials.

Not me. I sat silently the chump and remained so as we pulled up to the Hannibal police station.

All excerpts from the radio play of The War of the Worlds by Howard Koch have been used with the permission of Peter Koch.

Butterball Turkey Talk-Line Memorable Calls

Throughout its 34 years, Butterball has had many memorable moments (and nearly 3 million calls) — from a woman who set her stove on fire to the men who put fires out for a living. The following are a few favorites from the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line:

Courtesy of Butterball
Although most calls come from people needing help, the Talk-Line operators get several callbacks from people simply thanking the staff for their help on previous calls; even ones that took place years earlier. (Courtesy of Butterball)

Fiddling with the Clock but Leaving the Calendar Alone

Daylight saving time ad
(Library of Congress)

This weekend, as we set our clocks back to Daylight Standard Time, many of us may ask ourselves, “Why, exactly, do we do this?”

Or, “Who decides when we change our clocks?”

Or, “Why is it called ‘Standard Time’ when it’s only in effect for four months out of twelve?”

The official reason for setting clocks back one hour is to save energy. By moving our daily activity toward the hours of maximum sunlight, we use less energy for lighting. Or so the argument goes. But one study has found energy savings are far lower than expected. And another found energy consumption actually increased with Daylight Saving Time.

Despite the questionable benefits of Daylight Saving Time (DST), America seems resigned to disrupting its daily schedule twice a year.

Certainly Congress appears to like the idea. Since making DST a permanent, nationwide standard in 1966, legislators have steadily expanded its yearly length from 27 weeks to 34 weeks.

Given Congress’ enthusiasm for fiddling with the clock, it’s surprising that legislators haven’t tried reforming the calendar. Congress has already reassigned two presidential birthdays to a more convenient time. Perhaps they might want to consider bringing order to our 263-year-old Gregorian calendar with the 13-month calendar.

At present, our year is divided into irregular months or 30, 31, and 28 days. In contrast, the international fixed calendar would neatly divide the year into 13 months, all beginning on a Sunday and ending on a Saturday, and all having 28 days. The extra month, called Sol, would be sandwiched between June and July. The only variations would be December 29, a holiday at the end of the year called not, as logic would have it, Sunday, but instead Year Day and a June 29, known as Leap Day, every four years.

Congress passes daylight saving bill
(Library of Congress)

Back in the 1920s, the idea drew the support of George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company. Having made a fortune in the early photographic industry, Eastman was hardly an impractical dreamer. He strongly supported the 13-month calendar and believed, as he wrote in a 1928 Post article, it would soon become the international standard “because the world moves inevitably toward the practical.”

The reformed calendar had several benefits, he claimed:

This last benefit shows how dated the idea is. Most employees in 1928 worked six-day weeks. The 40-hour workweek only became a standard practice with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Technology has achieved some of the other benefits. Computers enable businesses to set schedules and manipulate data between months of uneven length.

The 13-month calendar was part of a trend toward efficiency that arose in the 1910s, the same trend that brought standardized time to the country. But 20th-century Americans didn’t want too much efficiency. They balked at losing variety and spontaneity. Which is probably why they never embraced the highly uniform 13-month calendar. Among other things, it would set their birthday to the same day of the week every year. It was, perhaps, too predictable. We seem to like some variation in out time keeping.

Which, perhaps, is why we willingly change our clocks twice every year.

World Series

Whether a Mets fan, a Royals fan, or a disheartened Cubs fan — let’s face it. No one is completely immune to the lure of the October jamboree.

Serious Business

When the Series is on, pretty much everything stops.

<p><em>Baseball in the Boardroom</em><br />Lonie Bee<br />October 8, 1960</p>
Baseball in the Boardroom
Lonie Bee
October 8, 1960

 

World Series in TV DepartmentBenjamin Kimberly PrinsOctober 4, 1958
World Series in TV Department
Benjamin Kimberly Prins
October 4, 1958

 

America’s Fall Tonic

by Bozeman Bulger

The Saturday Evening Post, October 3, 1931—This October tonic, sipped for a week or 10 days, helps to locate old friends and create new ones, loosens the vocal cords, and causes excessive though pleasant loss of sleep.

The greater the business depression, the better this tonic seems to taste. Your American sports lover, or just plain American, may tighten up on some expenditures, but when it comes to settling his baseball championship and seeing it well done, he simply cuts the strap on his bank roll and lets go. Even those who cannot attend to the matter in person suffer bites from the germ. They huddle around radio sets, telegraph offices, and bulletin boards.

In the World War, soldiers in far-off France were able to forgo immediate interest in battles while taking a sip of the Series by telegraph and airplane bulletins. High-ranking generals who provided this tonic are said to have enjoyed a liberal sip themselves.

What Matters

Family’s important, and romance is great—but right now there’s a game on.

Baseball in the HospitalAmos SewellApril 29, 1961
Baseball in the Hospital
Amos Sewell
April 29, 1961

 

Linemen Listen to World SeriesStevan DohanosOctober 4, 1952
Linemen Listen to World Series
Stevan Dohanos
October 4, 1952

 

World Series Poison

by Stanley Frank

The Saturday Evening Post, October 3, 1942—Considering the caliber of players involved, the World Series has produced a great deal of shockingly bad baseball. Ridiculous boners are committed in World Series competition for a thoroughly understandable reason. The players are under enormous pressure. The greatest stars blow apart at the seams. There is something terrifying in the realization that every move is a focal point for second guessing, that every gesture is under critical scrutiny. How severe is this pressure?

“Greater than the fan will ever know or a ballplayer will ever admit,” the Yankees’ [manager] Joe McCarthy declares. “Every man responds differently to the World Series and there’s no way of telling in advance how he will react. He doesn’t know, himself. It’s like being held up by a guy with a gun for the first time. No man knows what he’ll do until he goes through the experience.

“The simple truth is that no ballplayer takes the World Series in stride. You hear — I’ve told it to teams myself — that the World Series is just another ball game. That’s nonsense. There is nothing in baseball to compare with the tension of the World Series and nothing can prepare a man for it. Some stars curl up under the pressure and others are stimulated.”

Precarious Perch

What risks will a young boy take to get a good view of the game?

Baseball FansEugene IverdOctober 1, 1927
Baseball Fans
Eugene Iverd
October 1, 1927

 

Catch and Release

For a few years during WWII, civic duty trumped self-interest. Fans lucky enough to catch a ball were encouraged to throw it back, so it could be given to those in the armed services.

Grandma Catches Fly-ballRichard SargentApril 23, 1960
Grandma Catches Fly-ball
Richard Sargent
April 23, 1960

 

Field of Vision

Sometimes it’s worth fighting for a reasonable line of sight.

Boys Peering Through Fence at Baseball GameWorth BrehmJune 6, 1908
Boys Peering Through Fence at Baseball Game
Worth Brehm
June 6, 1908

 

Memoirs of a Monster

In 1962 the world’s most famous bogeyman, Boris Karloff, looked back at his 30-year career in horror.

Boris Karloff and his monster
Boris Karloff (left), who first played in Frankenstein in 1931, hasn’t been able to shed the monster image.

It is not true that I was born a monster. Hollywood made me one. That was 31 years ago, and I have lived menacingly ever after. While some potential victims have eluded my fangs, claws, and other assorted horrors, I myself have found it almost impossible to escape monster roles.

Take the memorable time in 1947 when I was offered the part of the gentle Professor Linden in a forthcoming Broadway production of The Linden Tree. I was delighted — but the playwright, J.B. Priestley, was not. “Good Lord, not Karloff!” he told producer Maurice Evans. “Put his name up on the marquee and people will think my play is about an ax murder.”

I cabled Priestley in London:

I PROMISE YOU I WOULD NOT HAVE EATEN THE BABY IN THE LAST ACT.

Upon that solemn assurance, he withdrew his objections. The part was mine. But The Linden Tree folded in less than a week, and I’ve always been haunted by the thought that possibly Priestley was right after all.

On rare occasions I have managed to step out of character: As jovial Father Knickerbocker in a Shirley Temple Storybook television show; as a wise Seneca chief in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Unconquered, and in my favorite role of the kindly Gramps in On Borrowed Time in stock. But even then I felt that the audience was waiting for me to unmask and exterminate the rest of the cast.

An Ordinary Childhood

Such morbid expectations also appear to shadow my offstage life. If I stroll into the garden, spade in hand, the postman is almost certain to quip, “Disposing of another body, Mr. Karloff?” Groucho Marx’s standard greeting to me is, “How much do you charge to haunt a house?” Bright young advertising men are forever soliciting testimonials from me for such things as devil’s-food cake.

Actually I am assured that I was a quiet infant, and a gentle boy. No whippings by cruel stepparents scarred my childhood. No sadistic governesses read me horror stories by flickering candlelight. My childhood as William Henry Pratt in the serene London suburb of Enfield was extraordinarily tame. Both my parents died during my childhood. I was reared by one amiable stepsister and seven stern older brothers, who knew exactly what I was going to be — a government servant in the family tradition. But my scholarship, or lack of it, during four years at Uppingham, a boarding school that I attended in 1902–06, bespoke my disinterest in any profession based upon higher learning.

Actually my macabre career was already settled. At the age of nine, I had appeared in a Christmas-play version of Cinderella. Instead of playing the handsome prince, I donned black tights and a skullcap with horns and rallied the forces of evil as the Demon King. From then on I resolved to be an actor.

At Kings College, London, years later, the first-term reports amply reflected the fact that I had attended more plays than classes. I was, in fact, fast becoming a disgrace to the family name. In those days black sheep were exported to Canada or Australia. When I blithely flipped a coin in the family solicitor’’s office, the unfortunate losers were the Canadians.

At 4:30 one morning, a month or so later, I found myself in a Canadian pasture, halter in hand, wondering how to round up four reluctant horses.

A week or so later, at Vancouver, British Columbia, I landed a pick-and-shovel job with the B.C. Electric Company — $2.80 for a 10-hour day — digging drainage ditches and clearing land.

Mumbling and Bumbling

Then one day in an old copy of Billboard, I came across the advertisement of a theatrical agent in nearby Seattle. His name was Kelly. I went to him and shamelessly told him I’d been in all the plays I’d ever seen, that I was forced to retire to Canada temporarily for my health, and was now hale and ready for a comeback. Two months later, while chopping trees, I received a brief note, “Join Jean Russell Stock Company in Kamloops, B. C.—KELLY.” I left my ax sticking in a tree.

On the train I concocted my stage name. Karloff came from relatives on my mother’s side. The Boris I plucked out of the cold Canadian air. I had finally become an actor, but I mumbled, bumbled, missed cues, rammed into furniture, and sent the director’s blood pressure soaring. When the curtain went up, I was getting $30 a week. When it descended, I was down to $15. The play, significantly now, happened to be Molnár’s The Devil.

I learned the acting trade during the next six or seven years, playing vintage pieces like East Lynne and Charlie’s Aunt all over western Canada and the United States, and living on eggs fried on inverted pressing irons in “no cooking” boardinghouses. Then I wandered into movies, via a $5-a-day extra role as a swarthy Mexican soldier in a Doug Fairbanks Sr. film, His Majesty, The American. For the next eight or nine years, I played extra and small featured roles when things were good, loaded cement sacks in warehouses when they weren’t. At 42 I was an obscure actor playing obscure parts. I quit writing home — for I had nothing to write about.

My big break came while I was downing a sandwich-and-tea lunch in the Universal commissary. After a string of sweet-and-kindly roles, I had played the diabolical Galloway, the convict-killer in The Criminal Code. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Mr. Whale would like to see you at his table.” Jimmy Whale was the most important director on the lot. “We’re getting ready to shoot the Mary Shelley classic, Frankenstein,” Whale said, “and I’d like you to test — for the part of the monster.”

It was a bit shattering, but I felt that any part was better than no part at all. The studio’s head makeup man, Jack Pierce, spent evenings experimenting with me. Slowly, under his skillful touch, the monster’s double-domed forehead, sloping brow, flattened Neanderthal eyelids, and surgical scars materialized. A week later I was ready for the test. I readily passed as a monster.

To fill out the monster costume, I had to wear a doubly quilted suit beneath it. We shot Frankenstein in midsummer. After an hour’s work I would be sopping wet. I’d have to change into a spare undersuit, often still damp from the previous round. So I felt, most of the time, as if I were wearing a clammy shroud myself. No doubt it added to the realism.

The scene where the monster was created, amid booming thunder and flashing lightning, made me as uneasy as anyone. For while I lay half-naked and strapped to Doctor Frankenstein’s table, I could see directly above me the special effects men brandishing the white-hot scissorslike carbons that made the lightning. I hoped that no one up there had butterfingers.

Frankenstein was the first monster film of any consequence ever attempted. That, plus the sensitive theme of a man, Doctor Frankenstein, playing at God, made the then-powerful Hayes office hesitate to release it. But director Whale had filmed it with restraint and delicacy. It finally was released for its premiere on December 6, 1931, at Santa Barbara. I was not even invited and had never seen it. I was just an unimportant freelance actor, the animation for the monster costume.

Then my agent called one morning and said, “Boris, Universal wants you under contract.” I thought, Maybe for once I’ll know where my breakfast is coming from, after more than 20 years of acting. I soon found myself mildly famous — although not by name. On a motoring holiday in France, for example, I lost my way. In the dreadful remains of my schoolboy French, I inquired in a tiny village butcher shop. The proprietor looked me in the face and exclaimed, “Frankenstein’s Monster!” That sort of thing has lasted for 30 years.

A Ghoul Gains Followers

In a Hollywood studio baseball game, Leading Men versus Comedians — my category escapes me at the moment — everyone fled in mock horror when I batted, allowing me to lumber around the bases for a home run. At radio-show rehearsals the orchestra hissed me realistically, and I leered back. Columnists imaginatively concocted the Karloff cocktail — one sip sent the drinker into shock. Monster fans mailed me such birthday gifts as voodoo dolls.

Not everyone, however, felt enthusiasm for monsterism. Some parent and civic groups felt Frankenstein was too horrifying for children to see and should be limited to “adults only.” The children thought otherwise. On the very first Halloween after the film’s release, a crowd of laughing pint-sized ghosts and goblins rang my doorbell and invited me to join in their trick-or-treat rounds. As I wasn’t appropriately costumed, I had to decline. Over the years thousands of children wrote, expressing compassion for the great, weird creature who was so abused by its sadistic keeper that it could only respond to violence with violence. Those children saw beyond the makeup and really understood.

Frankenstein transformed not only my life but also the film industry. It grossed something like $12 million on a $250,000 investment, started a cycle of so-called boy-meets-ghoul horror films and quickly made its producers realize they’d made a dreadful mistake. They let the monster die in the burning mill. In one brief script conference, however, they brought him back alive. Actually, it seems, he had only fallen through the flaming floor into the millpond beneath and could now go on for reels and reels.

The watery opening scene of the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, was filmed with me wearing a rubber suit under my costume to ward off chill. But air got into the suit. When I was launched into the pond, my legs flew up in the air, and I floated there like some sort of obscene water lily while I, and everyone else, hooted with laughter. They finally fished me out with a boat hook and deflated me.

In March 1933, I returned to England. My two eldest brothers, Ted and Fred, had retired from Indian Civil Service and were living in London. Jack had been transferred from China to take charge of Far East affairs in the Foreign Office.

A little later I got a surprising reaction from my staid and proper British brothers. Some friends from Hollywood were in London, and before they left for home we gave a sort of joint cocktail party. All went well until a newspaper photographer approached me. “I understand you’ve some brothers here,” he said. “Could we get a photograph or two?”

I was appalled. I thought, How am I going to break this to them? They won’t approve at all. I got them off in a corner and mumbled, “Awfully sorry about this but, you know, publicity and all that. I swear I’m not responsible for the photographer being here. But, well, to cut it short, they want to take pictures of us. They want us in the next room, lined up against the mantelpiece.”

Jockeying for Position

Well, you never saw such a stampede. The three reserved, distinguished elderlies — Ted, who’d been judge of the High Court in Bombay; Fred, who’d administered an entire province in India; and Jack, who’d been chief magistrate of the Consular Court in Shanghai — all but got stuck in the door getting through. And there was quite a to-do about who was to stand where. I fought to keep my composure, but inwardly I was laughing.

Returning to Hollywood, I played the monster in Son of Frankenstein — my third and last such role. Others perpetuated him in later films. In a switch, I twice took the part of Doctor Frankenstein myself and found it comfortable to be less loaded with makeup.

Next I became a succession of crazed scientists. The formula was successful, if not original. The scientist would set out to save mankind. His project would sour and he with it. In the end he’d have to be destroyed regretfully, like a faithful old dog gone mad. The scriptwriters had the insane scientist transplant brains, hearts, lungs, and other vital organs. The cycle ended when they ran out of parts of anatomy that could be photographed decently. While it lasted I:

I also:

I must confess that I didn’t accept this constant and continual madness quite placidly myself. Once, during the crazed scientist cycle, I said wearily to the producer: “These things are all right, but don’t you think we should perhaps spend a little more in the writing, or change the format?” He was in an expansive mood. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a great chart. “Here,” he said, “here’s your record. We know exactly how much these pictures are going to make. They cost so much. They earn so much. Even if we spent more on them, they wouldn’t make a cent more. So why change them?”

During my most monstrous years, I naturally associated with such aristocrats of Hollywood villainy as Bela Lugosi[LINK?], Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Lorre, and John Carradine. Offscreen I found them to be the gentlest of men.

One of my own most terrified moments came in 1940, when the noted playwrights Lindsay and Crouse offered me the part of Jonathan in the Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Keep in mind, I’d never acted on Broadway, but only in the sticks, or in films. What really sold me on taking the part was a line of Jonathan’s in his first scene. He’d just murdered a kindly motorist. Another character says, “He was a nice chap, that man who gave us a lift. You shouldn’t have killed him. Why did you do it?” And Jonathan replies, “He said I looked like Boris Karloff.”

I expected that a line like that, spoofing me so early in the play, would disarm any New York audience. Then I began wondering: Would it? Could I put over a big stage role? By the time I arrived in New York, I was almost shaking from sheer fright. I’d rushed through a hard week at Columbia studios, then taken an all-night flight East. At the theater they handed me a script, and we did something I’d never done in stock or repertory — we sat down, cast and director together, and read cold turkey. I was so tired, and so frightened of my New York role, that I began to stutter — something that always besets me when I’m tired. I rehearsed in stutters for three days, continually thinking that it would cure itself. But instead it grew worse. The third night I wandered the streets of Manhattan wondering what to do. I thought I’d have to walk up to the management and say, “I’m very sorry. I’ve made a mistake, and so have you. I’ve got to get out of your play. Do I owe you anything?”

I walked some more and thought, If I do that, honest though it is, I’ve certainly had it in New York and haven’t done myself an awful lot of good in Hollywood either. Somehow I’ve got to go through with the play.

At 5:30 a.m. I returned to my hotel, catnapped briefly, then went to rehearse. I’d always stuck on the word “Come” in my first line. Now I walked on, took a deep breath and said, “Come in, doctor.” Not a stutter. By that evening all was okay. The show’s reviews were better than okay. It was a big, beautiful hit, and we settled down for a long, happy run of about 1,400 Broadway performances.

Later I played Captain Hook, the villain with the wicked, steel-hooked arm, to Jean Arthur’s Peter Pan on Broadway. At the end of the first act at matinees, we’d peek from behind the curtain and watch the kiddies leaping hopefully off their seats, trying to fly like Peter Pan. After the show I’d corral as many as my dressing room would hold and ask, “Would you like to try on my hook?” Even little blond angels would reply, “Yes, sir.”

They’d turn to the mirror, put on the most terrible face they could make and, without fail, take a terrific swipe at themselves in the glass. Far from being frightened by the villainous Captain Hook, they had caught on to his fun and pomposity. For it is a fundamental instinct of kids to play games, and they knew very well that the swordplay, the ominous crocodile, the poisoning of Peter Pan, and all the assorted stage violence was just a game just good, scary fun.

Villain by profession though I may be, however, I must say that my approval of good scary fun does not extend to shows where blood and guts are sloshed about wholesale, simply to create nightmares.

A Black Sheep No More

Nowadays I find time to play occasional light comedy in Milquetoast roles, to give syndicated radio advice to parents on child rearing and even to make phonograph recordings of childhood favorites such as Mother Goose and The Reluctant Dragon. Occasionally someone asks me if I regret my years as a monster, if the role hasn’t been like an albatross around my neck.

Rubbish! Thanks to the monster, I’ve worked steadily at the work I love best. And I’ve been well paid — in more ways than with money. Here I am, 75 years old this month, no longer the black sheep of the Pratt family, still hard at work, still enjoying life to the fullest. With my wife Evie I commute some 12,000 miles between my old stamping grounds in England and this country. But I must admit one unfulfilled longing. I would love to be in a play in London.

The only time I ever trod the boards there was in a benefit for the Actors’ Orphanage, doing a comedy sketch with Hermione Gingold. Even at that, I was absolutely thrilled. But if I never get to do the “real” thing in London, it would be indecent for me to grumble.

After all, I’ve always been a very happy monster.


“Memoirs of a Monster” by Boris Karloff, as told to Arlene and Howard Eisenberg, The Saturday Evening Post, November 3, 1962

Healthy Indulgences

Blueberry Muffins
Better Blueberry Muffins: “The secret ingredient is applesauce, which allows you to use less fat,” Krieger says. (Photo by Quentin Bacon)

Holidays are about celebrating what’s most important in life, and at the top of my list is the health and happiness of my friends and family. I always treat them to “good for you” gifts that also feel decadent and indulgent. Here are a few of my favorite healthy holiday gift baskets that are sure to get raves.

Healthy Indulgences: Put together a collection of luscious treats packed with nutritious perks. My favorites: toasted or spiced almonds; sweet, tart dried cherries; top-quality extra-virgin olive oil; local honey; bottle of red wine; selection of dark chocolate.

Tea for Two: A cup of hot tea is one of life’s simple pleasures, and to top it off you even get a healthy dose of antioxidants. For a simple but thoughtful gift, gather an assortment of tasty teas that will help your loved ones stay warm and relax during the holiday season.

Breakfast Basket: One of the things I enjoy the most about holidays is having the time to lounge around in the morning with my family, relaxing in our pajamas. A breakfast basket is a great way to share some of the things that help make those holiday mornings. Try homemade muffins, like my Better Blueberry Muffins; a jar of apple butter; bottle of pure maple syrup; fresh oranges or clementines; and package of exotic coffee.

Dark Chocolate Pretzel Clusters: Chocolate is one of the first things that come to my mind when I think of indulgences. For a decadent, homemade chocolate treat, try my Dark Chocolate Pretzel Cluster. They look gorgeous packed in a little gift box.

Click here for Ellie Krieger’s Pumpkin Bread with Cranberries recipe.

For Ellie Krieger’s Better Blueberry Muffins and her Dark Chocolate Pretzel Clusters recipes, pick up the November/December 2015 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

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Opening the Door to Happiness

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For the first time in its long and often notorious history, psychiatry now offers scientific, humane, and effective treatments to those suffering from mental illness, says the former president of the American Psychiatric Association. (Shutterstock)

Psychiatry is at a historic turning point. The profession is finally taking its rightful place in the medical community after a long sojourn in the scientific wilderness. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that one in four persons will suffer from mental illness in their lifetime. You are more likely to need services from psychiatry than any other medical specialty. Yet far too many people consciously avoid the very treatments now proven to relieve their symptoms.

A few short generations ago, the greatest obstacles to the treatment of mental illness were the lack of effective treatments, unreliable diagnostic criteria, and an ossified theory of the basic nature of the disease. Today the single greatest hindrance to treatment is not any gap in scientific knowledge or shortcoming in medical capability but the social stigma.

Though we live in a time of unprecedented tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual orientations, mental illness — an involuntary medical condition that affects one out of four people — is still regarded as a mark of shame, a scarlet letter C for “crazy,” P for “psycho,” or M for “mental.” Imagine you were invited to a friend’s wedding but unexpectedly came down with an illness. Would you prefer to say that you had to cancel because of a kidney stone … or a manic episode? Would you rather offer as your excuse that you threw out your back … or suffered a panic attack? Would you rather explain that you were having a migraine … or were hungover from having gone on a bender?

A few years ago, I gave a talk at a luncheon in midtown Manhattan about mental illness to raise funds for psychiatry research. Afterwards, I circulated among the attendees — smart, successful, and outgoing people who had all been personally invited to the event by Sarah Foster, a prominent socialite whose schizophrenic son had committed suicide some years ago while a senior in high school. They chatted over poached salmon and Chablis, openly praising Sarah’s selfless efforts to raise awareness about mental illness — though none of them admitted any direct experience with mental illness themselves. Instead, mental illness was treated like the genocide in Sudan or the tsunami in Indonesia: an issue highly deserving of public attention, but one quite distant and removed from the patrons’ own lives.

Several days later, I received a call at my office. One of the attendees, an editor at a publishing company, asked if I could help her. It seemed that she had lost interest in her job, had trouble sleeping, and frequently become very emotional, even tearful. Was she having a midlife crisis? I agreed to see her, and eventually diagnosed her as suffering from depression. But before she made the appointment with me, she insisted I keep it completely confidential — and added, “Please don’t say anything to Sarah!”

From the book Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry by Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., with Ogi Ogas. Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, New York. All rights reserved.

To read the entire article, pick up the November/December 2015 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands or …

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Help Unwanted

George Hodgman
Dogged determination: New York transplant George Hodgman went home to Paris, Missouri, to care for his mother, Betty.
(Photo by Mark Kauzlarich)

My mother is standing with her purse open, clutching one strap and staring at a framed watercolor of a field of flowers as if it were a window, as if it were her window. She looks as if she were home, surveying the yard and the roses, monitoring her sister Alice’s comings and goings, worrying that Alice has been invited someplace she has not.

But this is not her window. This is just a picture in a frame; the flowers are not pink, not her roses, and this is not her home. This is something else to her; this place for old people to come to is giving up, whatever words I use. This is the stop where everything she knows is left behind and she won’t go quietly. She won’t let go of home. It is her most sentimental quality, one we share, our attachment to our place. She has not lost this longing: Her mind has not altered radically or broken in two; it’s more that the surface, the coating, has been rubbed away a bit. You can see more of what is there, the hard and soft, but she is still my mother and she still does not surrender. Or maybe this is how I need to think about her — unconquerable.

I rush up to retrieve her purse, which is full of dirty Kleenexes, loose charge cards, and an old Vuitton billfold I bought her in the city when she came to see The Lion King and I left the tickets in a suit I spilled syrup all over and sent to the dry cleaners. We have argued for hours about this trip to Tiger Place, which I have characterized — to her and myself — as simply an outing for information’s sake.

As she sits on the couch outside the administrator’s office, she glares at me as if being sold into white slavery, gearing up for a battle I don’t have in me. She knows that if she fusses enough, I will fold and give up this whole idea.

Waiting for our tour, Betty rummages in her purse, pretending to disregard the passersby, little ladies in groups, little birds in running shoes, who squint at her, assessing the new recruit. Betty just stares down at her old sandals, slowly pulls her feet back under the chair.

Betty Hodgman
Betty Baker Hodgman, pictured above in her college years, passed away in July.
Photo courtesy George Hodgman

Everyone thinks Tiger Place is Betty’s best option. At the very least, even if she remains at home for a while longer or even permanently, we need a safety net, a plan in case she is suddenly beyond my care. The good places have waiting lists, and she needs to be on one, to be prepared. She has always dreaded the idea of winding up at Monroe Manor, the senior citizens’ home in Paris, Missouri, where Mammy, my grandma, lived before her death.

Tiger Place is a cutting-edge facility that attracts retired professors or the parents of professors. For my mother, who does not see how lucky she would be to get admitted here, this cast is not a selling point. When Jackie, our guide, mentions the lectures by visiting scholars, Betty looks pained, bored in advance. She is not the type to sit and listen. At church, a few ministers back, she developed the habit of holding up her wristwatch when the old man got long-winded.

“What is that?” she asks as I gaze at the lecture schedule. When I explain she asks if she will be able to get a gin and tonic.

She may not even be accepted for admission. Residents must show that they are able to care for themselves and become part of the community. There is a list of criteria that people admitted here must meet. Betty, inclined to fall inside herself, to just not register the goings-on around her, to refuse to do what she is asked, may be beyond assisted living here. But I don’t want her to fail further and wind up somewhere dismal. Dementia or Alzheimer’s facilities would be the end of her.

Without the stimulation of active people, she would fall fast and fade. But I can’t say these things to her, and she won’t see that I am just trying to take care, to be the strong one now. For her.

At Tiger Place, there are chairs upholstered in cheerful shades that make Betty grimace, and carpet that, unlike our own, shows no spills. The residents are mostly younger and in better shape than my mother. Would she mix well, I wonder, try to socialize or hide in her room? Would she dress in the morning or just stay in her robe, as she does if I do not force the issue? Would the ladies, gathered in cliques, understand or shun her because of her eccentricities? I just don’t want to see her hurt.

Dragging her feet down the hall, Betty looks a little sad, like the kind of old lady she has never let herself become. But she steels herself, trying to get through this day, to cooperate a little. My cousin Lucinda has joined us to help out, and Betty is more docile with her on hand.

No matter how I try to position Tiger Place as a fun-filled new lifestyle, as a relaxing relief from burdens, Betty will not participate in these fictions. She will not speak or comment as we are shown the studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units that, empty for display, are okay but not especially inviting. “These rooms are empty,” she tells Jackie, who says that of course she would bring her furniture from home. “I would never bring my furniture here,” Betty exclaims. She doesn’t want to break up the house. Maybe because there is no place for most of her things to go.

Our basement is piled with stuff. Late at night, I inspect everything as I listen for Betty to call out. I see what is ahead, picture the furniture lined up in the yard, all for sale — the antiques, chests with marble tops and tables, the candleholders, cups and saucers, the cloisonné, the brass tea set, the row of Japanese ladies from the top of the piano.

“Remember,” Betty always says, “those are hand-painted.”

Everything is for sale. Off to others. Someday soon. All the old things that witnessed everything, all the days and nights of our lives. I don’t have a place for them; this is a regret I have. The life that I’ve carved out is not equipped with extra rooms or empty cabinets. If Betty moves to Tiger Place, we may have to sell the house for financial reasons, depending on how long she lives.

I glance at Cinda, who has been the major reason for my maintaining a hint of sanity in the last few months. She looks at Betty and then at me as if to say, “What were you expecting?” I don’t know. The Golden Girls?

“Is she a craftsperson?” Jackie asks, but Betty, who rolls her eyes at this, does not knit or embroider.

George Hodgman
George Hodgman (Photo by Mark Kauzlarich)

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She does not tat or sew and is not the type to linger over the creation of a lap robe. She cannot see well enough, nor does she have the patience. She is irritable, and now sometimes a challenge. Though she tries her best, she cannot always remember names. How can she make friends if she cannot call their names out? Who will come and sit by her? She has no hobbies; she once had friends instead. But now the country club in Moberly, where the couples of her generation once gathered for dinners, is gone, torn down. Moberly is no longer a place where many people can afford a country club. My mother grieved for months.

I try to smile at Betty, but she looks away. I try to walk with her, but she won’t let me be The Son.

“Please let me do for you,” I want to say. “Please let me help you. Maybe I can surprise you, make this all a little easier.” But she has to do everything on her own or it is cheating, breaking a rule. She suddenly looks tired and whispers to me that she just wants to go home, but Cinda and I guide her toward the exercise area. Betty eyes an exercise bicycle as if it were a guillotine. Staring at me, perturbed, she shakes her head. Nor does the prospect of yoga in a chair arouse her enthusiasm. “What kind of thing is that to do?” she asks.

“I want to go home,” she whispers to Cinda. “I want to go home.” So do I, but we can’t. We have to forge ahead. I have to lead; it’s my responsibility. Braving her resistance to public endearment, I kiss her head, but she pulls it away. “You won’t let him leave me here, will you?” she asks Cinda. I realize that she believes I have brought her here to abandon her. This is actually what she thinks. She believes I want to run away and leave her. Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of eldercare.

“Tonight,” I tell her, “we’ll buy peaches; we’ll go to the Junction for prime rib. We’ll do whatever you want.” But she will not listen. Perhaps because she feels I hold power over her, I am the enemy. When I turn to face her, she still refuses to look at me at all. She smiles at Cinda, her new ally, the one she considers persuadable, as I resist the urge to fold into the yoga chair and begin a round of chanting.

Watching Betty at Tiger Place, Cinda looks at me and seems for the most part amused. Again and again, she saves us: She knows the right questions to ask, makes a note or two as Jackie explains the walking tests administered each month, the bus for church pickups and shopping trips, the stages of care: Stage One, Stage Two. There are four stages. I think I may be a Seven.

When I manage to come up with an inquiry that actually seems on point — “Is there anyone to make sure she takes all her pills in the morning?” — Betty interjects, “I can take my own medicine.” But she doesn’t, and every time I hold them out she asks the same question: “What are these? Who said I had to take so many?” She acts like taking pills is some sort of hard labor.

Jackie introduces my mother to a woman with a fancy blouse passing by. “Do you play bridge?” Betty asks. When the woman, who looks a little startled, shakes her head, Betty turns away from her, stares at me coldly. I have promised cards.

“Older people eat small meals,” says Jackie as we head into the dining room for lunch. “They don’t get hungry like we do.” Cinda is a little taken aback, as am I. My mother eats enough for a camp of lumberjacks in the Maine woods. Betty asks of the lunch, “Are they going to charge us for this?”

Jackie overhears and assures us that the meal is complimentary. “Well,” Betty says moments later, staring down at what seems only the suggestion of a hamburger, “it better be.

“Don’t you offer to pay,” she whispers to me.

After lunch, we sit for a while in a courtyard filled with flowers. It’s a lovely place and some of the apartments have screened-in porches that look out onto this area. Sitting by the flowers, Betty rests, focusing on the blossoms. For years she has taken flowers to people from church who are sick and alone. Hour after hour, I have watched her standing by the kitchen table, arranging the stems.

“Who tends to these?” she asks Jackie. “It looks like they do a pretty good job.” It is her one concession.

The trek through these halls has worn her down and lunch has certainly not satisfied. “Did you get a look at that hamburger?” she asks me. I say nothing. “No bigger than a half dollar,” she adds.

Maybe I should just give up and let her be, I think, stay here in Paris, Missouri, see her through for as long as it takes. Then I tell myself I am an idiot for always going soft. That is not what the real Betty, who would have run me back to New York with a pitchfork, would have wanted me to do. She would have ordered me to live my life. Of all the changes that have transpired in my mother, it is her new belief that I should give everything up to stay with her that is the most surprising. This tells me just how worried she is, how much she cannot bear to leave her home.

Betty looks so woebegone when I explain to Jackie that I want us to go on the waiting list that I cannot look back at her. It is just a backup — I keep repeating this, trying to make myself believe this, to make Betty understand, but she just shakes her head as Cinda and I follow Jackie into the office to get the form to fill out and write a check. We have to do this. We have to make sure she has a pleasant place if she must leave home.

Betty will be number eight on the list; she can waive entry three times before she is taken off the list. Before she actually enters, she will have to undergo an assessment designed to test her level of self-sufficiency and “cognitive functioning.” The application fee is a nonrefundable $1,000, which I do not tell my mother about.

When I return to her side, she says again, “I want to go home.” She rests her hand on mine just for a second. “Please, George,” she says. “Please.”

I think Betty will never live at Tiger Place. She is falling too fast. Soon, I am afraid, she will be beyond movies with popcorn or exercise bicycles, though maybe she will remember flowers. Maybe she will find herself, on some future morning, running her finger along the glass of a painting in a hall she does not recognize, recalling in some corner of her mind the fat buds of her mother’s roses growing in her old front yard. On Facebook, a lady wrote that the days she gets to be with those she loves are “gold-star days.” I often tell Betty that these are our gold-star days. I have tried to make them special so she can carry pieces of these times in her memory. I am trying to pack her bag with things that might draw her back to herself someday.

I wonder if she will remember the cinnamon toast I make on Friday mornings. I wonder if she will recall Mammy washing her hair in rain — water from an old tin pan.

All the way home from Columbia, I break the speed limit. I want to check on the dog. I want to put an end to this day. My mother is mostly silent. She can no longer deny what is happening, and she is plotting, planning her attack. As we travel, Betty’s mood shifts. Suddenly, she is nice, so nice, too nice. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She asks me if I need money. I turn the radio up. It is Reverend Lucius Love’s gospel hour. I need some lifting up.

When I was in high school, a man named Harold Long preached at the AME church, across the tracks from the white part of town, even then. One of his sisters, whose first name I wish I could remember, was in my mixed chorus class. She was big; her feet bulged out below the straps of her shoes. Stepping up on the bleachers winded her. But I always listened for her. There were all our voices singing together, and there was her voice, full of church, and the people she had come from, and feeling. Her emotion changed the face of an ordinary day, and I was drawn by it. If there was ever a time when I was convinced there was a God in the universe holding out his hand to me, it was when the Long sisters performed “I Believe.”

“If you stayed in Paris, you could keep that dog,” Betty declares suddenly, eyes glinting as if she has just been dealt a winning hand at the bridge table. She is playing for freedom. I have always enjoyed watching my mother in action. There is love and there is survival. At the moment, the latter can be her only concern. She will do whatever is necessary. Her independence is at stake. Her everything. Home.

I don’t want to take away her home.

“Can’t we just go on the way we are, just a little while longer?” she asks. “It won’t be forever.”

“You look pretty healthy.”

“I could die tomorrow.”

“I told you to get a flu shot.”

The ensuing moments do not fly by.

“Mother, can’t you see that I am trying to do everything I can to make you happy? Trust me, please. I’ll take care of you. I will do right by you.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.” And I think she actually believes it, that I can do it, that I can make it, somehow, okay. Outside it is so hot that steam is rising from the highway.

When I was in high school, I brought Mammy, very old then and not far from her death, home from the doctor in Columbia on an old country road. Her eyes never left the window; it seemed as though she was watching something, though she could barely see. Whatever it was, it pleased her. Finally, she spoke. “Look at all those pretty cows,” said my grandmother, the old woman who still remembered the farm. The blades of the windmills still turned slowly in the breeze off the fields in her mind’s eye.

“Look at those little calves,” she said, directing my attention to the window. But the pastures we were passing were empty. There was nothing there but the strip of highway running toward Paris and the room at Monroe Manor where she lived by then.

From Bettyville: A Memoir by George Hodgman. Published by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by George Hodgman.

White Child, Black Nanny

Gee-Gee
True devotion: “I loved Gee-Gee the way other people love their parents, and no matter how many historical demons stalked that relationship, I know that Gee-Gee loved me back.”
(Photo courtesy Sally Mann)

Down here, in the South, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them. This reflects one side of the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private. Could the feelings exchanged between two individuals so hypocritically divided ever have been honest, untainted by guilt or resentment?

I think so. Cat-whacked and earnest, I am one of those who insist that such a relationship existed for me. I know that my mother tried to raise me properly, but I made her cross as two sticks, so she turned the day-to-day care of her stroppy, unruly child over to Virginia, known to everyone as Gee-Gee, a name given her by my eldest brother, Bob.

I loved Gee-Gee the way other people love their parents, and no matter how many historical demons stalked that relationship, I know that Gee-Gee loved me back. Gee-Gee’s love was unconditional, a concept I might never have believed in had I not experienced it. When the dogs and I came in panting and filthy from our adventures, Gee-Gee sent the cringing hounds away and made sure I had what I needed: food, a story, or a bath. And when I was teased to tears by my brothers and father, or scared, or hurt, I never wondered if I would be protected or comforted. I always was — by Gee-Gee.

No one ever doubted who really ran the household, and my mother used to joke about her own dispensability. Gee-Gee had long ago mastered what William Carlos Williams called “the customs of necessity,” and to her devolved almost all the intimate aspects of our family life, the cooking, laundry, and sheet changing. After my brothers went away to school, I think she was mostly tasked with raising a lonely child in a household that cared very little for children. In 1958, three days before my seventh birthday, my parents went to France for six weeks to visit friends. It was my first year at school and since Gee-Gee didn’t drive, Clayton Campbell, the local taxi operator, would arrive every morning at 7:30. I would climb into the backseat, where my feet didn’t touch the floorboards, and Mr. Campbell would drive me to the whites-only public school, a tall-windowed, white-columned dump of a place.

Gee-Gee worked for my family until her early 90s. At age 100, with her hands curled into gentle claws, she died on Christmas Day, 1994. She was with us for almost 50 years, but to calculate by any form of numeric reckoning the moment-by-moment care and fidelity she tendered our family would be impossible. Yes, I know that she was paid to care for us, and that the notion of equality and reciprocity in an employer-servant relationship is inherently compromised. And I may get my ass kicked by those who think I am perpetuating the trope of the loyal housekeeper Uncle-Tomming her way to the unmarked grave. But Gee-Gee was not a caricature or a type; she was a very real and emotionally complicated person, who devoted a large amount of her time to raising an ungrateful and impertinent scalawag, the same one who now pauses to examine this relationship. I am reasonably sure Gee-Gee was as enriched, and occasionally appalled, by the experience of participating in our family as the rest of us were. And while our home may have been in some ways a replacement for her own, which was rent by racism and death, we did not take her for granted and we knew, even then, that her love was the real stuff that held our family together.

Gee-Gee and Sally Mann as a baby
Nanny and me: “Gee-Gee was not a caricature or a type; she was a very real and emotionally complicated person who devoted a large amount of her time to raising an ungrateful and impertinent scalawag.”
(Photo courtesy Sally Mann)

Gee-Gee had a problem with her feet, with finding shoes that didn’t hurt. I remember standing in the women’s shoe section of Leggett’s department store in Lexington, Virginia, and watching the tiny, hunchbacked saleswoman gaping up at my mother’s gestured descriptions of Gee-Gee’s feet. I’m guessing that my mother was doing this because she thought Gee-Gee might not feel comfortable shopping at Leggett’s, where Colored and White signs on the stairway pointed to bathrooms in opposite directions. I have imprinted in my knavish memory an image of the hunchback kneeling over the barbaric-looking foot measurer clamped to Gee-Gee’s metatarsal expanse, but this wasn’t likely to have actually happened for the reason just mentioned, and also because there was no point in Gee-Gee’s shopping, with her size 13 feet, in a ladies’ shoe department.

So, where did she get her shoes, ill-fitting though they were? Only now am I wondering about these things. What about those uniforms? Who bought them? My mother? Gee-Gee? And from where? Was washing and ironing the uniforms part of her noble washerwomanly chores? When? At night, or on Sunday? And how did she get something as simple as her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from 8 in the morning until 8 at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill.

I remember an ancient wooden building on the way down Diamond Hill that had a few shelves of extortionately priced canned goods, but no real grocery store until the upper part of Main Street, almost a mile away. This small store, unironically named the White Front, had excellent meat, gave out S&H Green Stamps, and it also allowed its customers, even black people, to charge food and be billed at the end of the month. I know that Gee-Gee had an account and must have shopped there, but then what? Did she haul all her week’s groceries to the top of that hill in one of those woven metal carts the way I saw so many black women doing? But, wait; were stores even open on Sundays back then?

All these questions. The simplest, most elemental things.

During the day, she wore my father’s discarded shoes, razor-sliced to accommodate the corns on her toes. But she arrived at work with her feet painfully crammed into whatever golden lily shoes she had found, wherever on earth she found them. She yanked them off as soon as things quieted down in the mornings and it was just the two of us. After wiggling her toes to restore the feeling, she would sit down on the stepstool and gratefully sink her feet into my father’s laceless shoes, her stockinged toes protruding from the side slits.

Women wore stockings all the time then, even in the middle of the summer, and Gee-Gee would try to beat the heat by wearing hers rolled down to just above her knees instead of hooked to the dangling ends of a garter belt like my mother’s. She often wore my mother’s old silk stockings, whose gossamer runs enlarged into ladder-rungs as the day went on, the seams wobbling crazily. Stocking seams were a particular misery back then, but more for my mother than for Gee-Gee.

It was important for my mother’s seams to run straight up her legs, two apparently converging lines that had the unintended effect of guiding the eye to their dark vanishing point. When my mother was going to town, she would close the bedroom door and twist her head around to examine her seams in the mirror. Then, a ritual familiar to almost any well-off southern white child of the 1950s would play out: powdered, lavender-scented, as cool and white as Lot’s wife, my mother would emerge from her bedroom, grab up her purse and white gloves, and try to make her getaway.

Apparently both parties knew their roles in this drama, but to my observing eyes it seemed new each time it played out on the asphalt bib next to the black sedan beetled under the pine boughs.

“Mrs. Munger! Mrs. Munger!!” urgently issued from the slid-open kitchen windows.

My mother would stop, her expectant face belying the startled look she would try to put on it.

A beat.

“Mrs. Munger, you cannot go to town with your slip showing like that! And those seams! What would they think of me?”pullquote

For Gee-Gee, this was not a rhetorical question. She had reason for concern. Working for a Yankee, albeit one with a Dallas-born husband, was a problem for Gee-Gee, and my parents’ oddball, liberal, atheist, country-club-shunning ways further complicated the picture. Curiously, that my mother insisted on exceeding the normal pay scale for her help, five dollars a week in the ’40s when they first arrived in Lexington, was no comfort for Gee-Gee. The anonymous, threatening letters my mother received as a consequence of this profligacy and the talk around town brought Gee-Gee to the attention of the community, which was not a good thing. Any black person could tell you: the less noticeable you were, the better.

Gee-Gee learned the rules of living in white society early on, though she revealed little to us about her childhood. What we knew was this: She was born to the very young daughter of a former slave in a part of the county where freed slaves had settled, known to this day as Buck Hill. Although Gee-Gee’s mother was black, the man who raped her (or so it is logically presumed by her family) was white. It is likely that her mother died in childbirth because as an infant, Gee-Gee, born Virginia Cornelia Franklin, was brought to Lexington and raised by her mother’s sister, Mary Franklin.

In her late teens, Gee-Gee married Wesley Carter and bore him six children, the youngest of whom was 12 when my mother, new in town and eight months pregnant with her first child, saw her coming down the post office steps. Struck by the image of this powerful, proud, and composed woman, my mother described her to my father in detail at dinner that night. By a twist of fate that to the end of her life still delighted and amazed my mother, the next day she answered a knock at the door to find the unforgettable stranger again. Virginia Carter stood tall and confident on the threshold, wearing a tweed Peck and Peck suit with a velvet collar so worn it appeared to be suede. Her broad cheekbones bespoke some Indian blood, her light eyes and almost straight hair something unspeakable. She asked if my mother needed help and was hired on the spot.

Gee-Gee’s husband, Wesley McDowell Carter, worked as a presser in the laundry room of the nearby Virginia Military Institute. He had problems with alcohol, and more than once Gee-Gee came to work troubled, her face blotchy. One night in the back room of the store on Diamond Street he rose from the card table, headed down the basement stairs, and fell, breaking his neck. Apparently, no one noticed right away, and it was more than a day before Gee-Gee was taken to his body.

Left with six children and a public education system for which she paid taxes but which forbade classes for black children beyond the seventh grade, Gee-Gee managed somehow to send each of them to out-of-state boarding schools and, ultimately, to college.

How did a widowed black woman pay for the housing, the food, the travel, and the tuition to educate six children?

By working 12 hours a day and by taking in linens to iron at night, linens stuffed into white sacks crowding her front door when my father took her home after all day on her feet at our house. What did he think when he saw those bags? What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions? That’s the mystery of it — our blindness and our silence.

Saturday lunches were important to Gee-Gee, and she went all-out on the menu. With unlikely balletic grace, she lowered the silver serving dishes to our left, two passes at each meal, a third if biscuits were involved, which she always made when we had fried apples and bacon. The apples came from an old orchard above the house and were small, green ones, Pippin or Northern Spy, and difficult to peel. Difficult for me, that is, but not for Gee-Gee. She would sit on the stepstool, the large bowl of apples beside her on the chest freezer, and, with a paring knife, unfurl a spiral of continuous peel, the whitening apple rotating in her pink palm.

When she was done, catching up the loopy tangle of peels in her apron, she would dump them in the compost bucket and carry the apples to the counter by the stove. Sinking a wooden spoon into the bacon grease stored in a sawed-off tin can, she would put the skillet on the burner and start the biscuits. Assuming the warm top step of the stool she had vacated, I would watch her from behind as she rolled out the dough and twisted the rim of a jelly glass into it, trapping the circle of dough in it long enough for her to shake it out onto the cookie sheet.

As far as I could tell, Gee-Gee herself never ate anything, save occasionally when she checked the seasoning from a pot on the stove. Otherwise, the only thing I ever saw pass her lips was ice water from a tin measuring cup that sweated on the counter. Maybe it was a good thing that she never needed to eat, because when we traveled together, as we did for vacations on the Eastern Shore, she could not enter the restaurants. When we stopped to eat at the Howard Johnson’s, gratefully throwing open the doors of the hot car, Gee-Gee stayed behind.

Looking out from the big windows of the air-conditioned dining room, we could see her cooling herself with a First Baptist Church fan, Jesus’ white face serenely waving in the backseat. Emerging from the restaurant with a tin-foil-wrapped cheese sandwich for Gee-Gee, which she would demurely place in her lap, and a Dixie Cup of water, which she would drink, we would resume our trip as if this were perfectly normal.

It’s that obliviousness, the unexamined assumption, that so pains me now: Nothing about it seemed strange, nothing seemed wrong. I never wondered where she peed on the trips to visit my brothers and me at our boarding school in Vermont. Could she hold it until we crossed the Pennsylvania border and the restrooms were integrated? Did any of us, besides her, wonder about that, about what would happen if she just had to go? How could I not have thought it strange that Gee-Gee not only never ate anything but also never had to go, never even got out of the car? How could I not have wondered, not have asked?

My graduation in 1969 was held on a weekend in early June. My parents and Gee-Gee arrived Friday, and I could tell that Gee-Gee was not pleased with what she was seeing. The children of the wealthy were dressed like field hands, with dreadlocked hair and dirt between their toes. Gee-Gee glared at a black kid from my algebra class, and when he flashed the peace sign at her, his arm around a bell-bottom-wearing blond girl, she turned from him with a snort of disgust.

Oh, Gee-Gee, I thought despairingly: This is the future. Up here, we’re all one.

Gee-Gee was having none of it.

On graduation morning I was late getting to the dining hall for breakfast, and all the tables were gone. Benches for the graduates and chairs for the visitors had been arranged at the eastern end of the room, with a processional aisle in the middle. The hall appeared to be empty, but squinting against the sun I saw a lone figure substantially anchoring the first row of the audience seating. Staring straight ahead, white-gloved hands folded in her lap and her back not even touching the back of the chair, sat Gee-Gee, wearing a perfectly pressed linen dress. It was a pale yellow, and centered above her bun was a pillbox hat made of the same fabric. A necklace of white plastic orbs, resembling the South Sea pearls that you now see oppressing the thin collarbones of ladies who lunch, complemented Gee-Gee’s powerfully muscled neck. The skin swelled out above her too-small white pumps and her stockings had compression puckers where the toes were mashed in. No one had stocking seams anymore, but in every other respect she was as elegant and imposing as a dowager queen.

When my parents arrived, my father stood to the side while my mother, in a prim little hat, slipped into the seat next to Gee-Gee. Directly behind them sat Ethel Kennedy, wearing white patent-leather boots, her brood sprawling around her, their shirts unpressed and hanging out of their khakis.

My mother and father leaned toward each other occasionally to exchange some whispered observation, but Gee-Gee remained straight-backed, staring ahead. I knew the warning signs. Her distress, even her occasional anger, was always accompanied by an ineffable and profound sadness: always the pursed lips, the closing of the eyes, perhaps onto visions of injustice and outrage, and the slow, tired shaking of her head, usually accompanied by an “umnh, umnh,” which conveyed wordlessly the extremity of her disgust and sorrow.

Then it started, the eyes closing, the head slowly, almost imperceptibly moving from side to side. As if she could bear it no more, she reached out her immaculate white-gloved hand and with her forefinger tapped my mother on the arm.

The pillboxes came together and Gee-Gee put her lips to my mother’s ear, whispering indignantly: “Mrs. Kennedy is chewing GUM!


From the book Hold Sill by Sally Mann. Copyright © 2015 by Sally Mann, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Hold Still is a 2015 National Book Award finalist.

Ellie Krieger’s Pumpkin Bread with Cranberries

Pumpkin Bread with Cranberries

pumpkin bread with cranberries
Ellie Krieger’s Pumpkin Bread with Cranberries (Photo by Quentin Bacon)

(Makes 8 servings)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a 9×5-inch loaf pan with cooking spray.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, cinnamon, baking powder, nutmeg, allspice, and salt. In another large bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, honey, oil, eggs, and egg white until well combined. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, mixing just enough to combine evenly. Gently stir in the cranberries.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until the top is browned and a wooden skewer inserted into the center comes out clean, 50 to 60 minutes. Allow to cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then transfer the bread to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Nutritional Information Per Serving (1-inch thick slice)


Copyright 2011 Ellie Krieger. All rights reserved

News of the Week: Darth Vader, Distraction, and the Diet of Tom Brady

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I can’t believe it’s the end of October already. Christmas will be here before you know it. And that’s when the new Star Wars sequel opens, on December 18. Here’s the official trailer:

Fans already have their theories about the trailer. People are examining it more than the Zapruder film. There’s Darth Vader’s helmet! Why is Leia crying? Hey, why does that character have that light saber? The big question is: where’s Luke? He doesn’t seem to be on the poster, and he might not even be in the trailer, though that might be him at 1:40, his repaired hand on R2D2. There must a reason for the secrecy involving the character. Does he look different? Is he in hiding? Has he (gulp) gone over to the dark side and is now the bad guy?

Io9 has a shot-by-shot breakdown of the trailer, which debuted during Monday Night Football, which made some fans unhappy. If you’re the type who likes to argue about things, you can read why some people want you to boycott the film because it’s “anti-white”.

If you plan to see it on opening day, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, fans are already buying tickets. May the Fandango be with them.

man using a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone at once
Shutterstock

The Age of Distraction

Many people are under the impression that because of all of the technological advances we …

I’m sorry, I had to check my e-mail. What was I saying?

Oh yes, distraction. Sure, we’ve always found things to help us kill our attention spans, but not at the level we do now. We’ve been programmed to believe that multi-tasking is actually a good thing, and we can do everything everywhere now because we carry our phones, our mail, our files, our TVs, our music, and our computers around with us in our pockets 24/7. There’s no downtime anymore. We’re always “on” and there’s always something new to distract us.

The new book The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford, argues that, as The Los Angeles Review of Books says, “we are living through an unprecedented crisis of attention.” And as a simple test, see if you can get through that entire review without getting antsy or skimming it or clicking away. A lot of people are having trouble reading anything longform now, because we’ve gotten so used to short social media posts and texts and smartphones and other forms of quick gratification.

The Typewriter Revolution by Richard Polt
The Typewriter Revolution by Richard Polt

The Typewriter Revolution

One thing you can do if you find yourself easily distracted is … buy a typewriter! This is a particularly good idea if you’re a writer and you don’t want to be distracted by email and Facebook and the latest news and games and various alerts and just want to concentrate on the words on the page. Sure, you can’t surf the Web on a Smith Corona — and the only “app” you might use is Wite-Out — but that’s kinda the point.

The Typewriter Revolution is a new book by typewriter expert and historian Richard Polt. In it, Polt not only explains how to choose the best typewriter and care for it, but he delves into the history of the machines, the famous people who used them in the past and the people who use them now, from novel writers to people who have typewriter blogs and host Type-In social events.

There’s a typewriter renaissance that’s been happening the past few years. Younger people are starting to love the machines because it’s not another screen they have to look at, and many people are discovering that unlike computers, they don’t get obsolete or break down or become disposable. Also, typewriters are works of art with different personalities.

Maybe we should thank Tom Hanks for the renewed interest in typewriters. He collects them and even created the Hanx Writer iPad app to bring the machines into the 21st century.

The Tom Brady Diet


A great philosopher, I think it was Aristotle, once said, “Don’t trust anyone who eats kale for breakfast.” And I guess that would include New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who has let us know exactly what he eats and doesn’t eat to keep in shape.

What does he like? Kale for breakfast, raw macaroons, and avocado-based ice cream. What does he avoid? Coca-Cola, which he calls “poison,” and Frosted Flakes, which he implies isn’t food (30:07). Let’s hope Coca-Cola and Kellogg’s don’t advertise at Gillette Stadium.

Doesn’t he know Frosted Flakes are grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat?

October 21, 2015

Universal Studios
Universal Studios


While the Star Wars movies are set in the past (a long time ago…), Back to the Future II was set, at least partly, in the future. October 21, 2015, to be exact. Well, it was the future in the movie. For us, the future is this week.

What did the movie get right in its depiction of 2015 life? Well, we have video-phone calls but still no hoverboards. We have video games that we can play without our hands, like Kinect, but no Jaws 19 (though Universal did create a trailer for it) We have video glasses in the form of Google Glass and virtual reality headsets (though they’re not mainstream yet), but no double neckties (thank God). The Washington Post has a good rundown of what the film got right and got wrong. The movie didn’t predict the Web either, but you can still get a print USA Today.

In the movie, the Chicago Cubs win the 2015 World Series, but … well, sorry, Cubs fans.

If you can’t get enough of all things Back to the Future, there’s a new documentary called Back in Time that includes interviews with the cast and crew and goes behind the scenes of all three movies.

Die Hard 6: An Idea That Should Die Hard


Contrary to popular belief, a movie sequel isn’t always a bad idea. After all, From Russia, With Love was a sequel to Dr. No, and we’ve had several more James Bond sequels since then, and we don’t have a problem with them, right? And everyone loves when there’s a new Avengers or Mission: Impossible, so if they’re well-made, sequels can be really great. Prequels, on the other hand … well, just look at the three Star Wars prequels. Prequels are often bad because they try to act as both prequel and sequel at the same time. If it’s done well, it’s fantastic. If it’s done poorly, then it can put a bad taste in your mouth about the films that came before (after?) it.

But that’s not stopping people from giving us Die Hard 6, which is in the works. What a terrible idea.

The plot? It’s an origin story! We’ll get to see young John McClane (hopefully played by another actor and not Bruce Willis in a bad wig) and the adventures he got into as a young cop in ’70s New York City. Besides the fact the last couple of Die Hard flicks weren’t that great and should have been a sign the series should just go away quietly, the plot goes against what happened in the original. McClane was a Joe Everybody, a non-hero suddenly finding himself in an incredible situation. And now we’re going to go back and see him battling bad guys and saving the day when he was in his 20s? If Willis is in it he might be in scenes in the beginning and end of the film, as an older McClane looking back.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Also: no.

Shutterstock
Shutterstock

October Is National Cookie Month

In honor of the new Star Wars film, how about some cookie recipes centered around characters from the film? Here’s a how-to video on how to make Darth Vader cookies, and here’s a page that shows you how to make R2D2 and light saber cookies. If you want to be really accurate with your cookies, get the Star Wars cookie cutters. You can make a Back to the Future cookie too.

Sorry, I couldn’t find any recipes for Die Hard cookies. If you do, let me know.

Upcoming Events and Anniversaries

Pablo Picasso born (October 25, 1881)
This site says that when it comes to art, Picasso was “probably the most important person of the 20th century.”

Opening of NYC subway (October 27, 1904)
If you don’t live in New York City, its subway system can seem awfully confusing. NYCSubway.org has a lot of great info to make it a little clearer, along with some great historical photos.

Theodore Roosevelt born (October 27, 1858)
After President McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt became the 26th president of the United States.

Stock market crash (October 28, 1929)
Known as Black Monday, the dark day led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast (October 30, 1938)
Here’s the complete audio of the broadcast that many thought was a real newscast and that we were actually being invaded.

Halloween (October 31)
The once fun day has been hijacked by grown-ups and just isn’t the same.

Feathers

The key was so cold his first instinct was to drop it. He held on, afraid to make a noise. All day, he’d kept to the edges as though watched, as though judgment could be passed.

He studied the key. It was heavy, large and ornate as though it might unlock a pirate’s treasure chest. Why was it under the carpet, not in the kitchen? When he was a child the keys, dangling on the line of brass hooks, held possibilities he’d never dared voice. His grandmother locked everything: her brass and glass; the tea and sugar; even his toys. He’d had to ask permission to play.

Thinking of her, his unease threatened to curdle into fear. His chest constricted. To ward off terror he thought of Danielle. ‘What’s up, love?’ he made her say.

‘I can’t get my breath.’

‘Did you bring your inhaler?’

He shook his head. She tutted and walked away. Ever practical, even in his daydream, she sorted the pile of bedding he’d bunched in a corner of the room. He allowed her to fade, and the empty room returned: floating motes of sparkling dust; a crumpled mess of sheets and a feather duvet.

The constriction of his chest was his old allergy flaring up, that’s all. He couldn’t possibly be afraid of his grandmother after all this time. Besides, she’d never hit him, only locked him in his room until he was itchy with packed-down fear. He’d run away when he was 16. Just like his mother. But he didn’t leave a sickly, asthmatic baby behind to grow in the shadows. Over the years he’d tried to find her. The Internet offered nothing but false leads.

He put the key in his pocket, rolled up the last section of the carpet and stood. Unhooking the nets covering the windows, he saw the grass was thick and spotted with white daisies. With his grandmother dead, the garden had forgotten its place.

Clearing the outbuildings had been a very clear stipulation in the old woman’s will. Once that was done, once the house was sold, he would be free. He was unclear about how his life would be different from the last 30 years, but it would change. Cheered by the thought, he ran downstairs, allowing noise to echo in the hall. He let himself out. A sappy green smell hung heavy in the warm air. He walked towards the brick-built shed at the very end of the garden.

As a child, this place had been out of bounds. At the door he felt his eyes sting, the same itch he’d felt in the bedroom. Feathers. He listened, but there was no sound of birds. He stepped back to look at the roof for a nest, when he noticed the large keyhole. Aha! He fished the key out of his pocket. It fitted the lock. The door swung open. The shed had a scattering of white downy feathers on the floor and a single large chest in the middle. Was it a treasure chest? Could be. The old woman was rumored to be rich but he hadn’t unearthed a single trinket, no stack of unused banknotes beneath her lonely bed.

On top of the chest was an envelope addressed to Tom in his grandmother’s hand. He tore open the envelope but couldn’t read. His eyes were smarting.

‘Be more careful. You’ll have an attack.’ Danielle. Calm, reassuring.

He retreated and sat on the grass. He waited until his chest was less tight and his heart had stopped fluttering. He read the letter.

 

Tom,

I’m surprised you got this far. I hid the key away from those nurses. They were always stealing, prying, lying. I didn’t have much hope that you would know what the key was for. You are as stupid and sickly as your mother. Open the trunk if you want to know more about her.

Grandmother

 

This was better than any treasure. Finally there was an answer, a clue. It was stupid to go back in the poisonous shed for too long, but perhaps he could drag the trunk into the clear air.

‘Don’t be silly, Tom,’ said Danielle. ‘Wait. I’ll do it later.’

‘No,’ he said, mouthing the word, surprised to find himself saying it. Even in his imagination he rarely defied Danielle.

‘It’ll wait.’

‘No!’

‘At least until you fetch your inhaler.’

He shook his head to rid her voice. He was alive with urgency. He strode into the shed. His chest constricted but he ignored it, holding his breath. He gripped the handles on the side of the trunk and pulled. It was too heavy.

‘Please stop,’ Danielle said.

His determination was fiercer than thoughts of his wife. What he needed to do was to grab whatever was in the trunk and run. He lifted the lid.

Feathers.

The old witch. She always used his allergy against him. A memory came, clear and sharp, of a single small feather pushed underneath the locked door of his room. Were feathers his punishment now as they had been then? Or was there really something of his mother in here, cradled in soft down?

He took a gasp of poisonous air, pushed Danielle from his mind, and pulled his sleeve as low over his hand as he could. He plunged it into the chest.

Beneath the soft down was something solid and round. He knew what it was before he pulled it out. A skull. In his hand was a skull of a girl. Sixteen. His mother.

‘Leave now!’ said Danielle.

The door, the fresh air, the garden with new life, was only a step away. He didn’t move. He was a little boy again, afraid, gasping. His face burned, eyes smarted. The last 30 years, Danielle, his house and job, were lost as though they’d never been. He stared at the skull. Overlaid across the bone was the sharp image of a single feather, white as death, pushed beneath his bedroom door.

Happy Halloween!

Long before the Great Pumpkin, Scream Queens, or Marvel Universe costumes, The Saturday Evening Post cover artists were entertaining Americans with the spooky, ghoulish, and adorable tricks and treats of Halloween.

Witches’ Night Out—Eugene Iverd

Duck and cover, trick-or-treaters. This coven flies with an arsenal of bats and jack-o’-lantern-bearing ghouls.

Eugene Iverd October 29, 1927
Eugene Iverd
October 29, 1927


Lighting the Pumpkin—Eugene Iverd

This classic cover captures the joy stemming from the first pumpkin lighting. Our only concern? The flammability of his costume.

Eugene Iverd November 3, 1934
Eugene Iverd
November 3, 1934


Witch’s Mask—Charles Kaiser

“Boo!” No one would ever guess there’s a curly-haired, doe-eyed girl behind the mask.

Charles Kaiser October 31, 1942
Charles Kaiser
October 31, 1942


Witches’ Night Out—J.C. Leyendecker

No need to fear this warty witch—looks like the chilly October air may put an end to her Halloween plans.

J.C. Leyendecker October 27, 1923
J.C. Leyendecker
October 27, 1923


Jester with Pumpkin—E.M. Jackson

A jack-o’-lantern fit for a king—served only on the finest silver platter, of course.

E.M. Jackson October 28, 1922
E.M. Jackson
October 28, 1922


Pumpkin in Wheelbarrow—J.C. Leyendecker

Bringing home the biggest pumpkin seems like a good idea, but the work of slugging it home might prove too much for this orange-cheeked young man.

J.C. Leyendecker November 29, 1913
J.C. Leyendecker
November 29, 1913


Trick-or-Treat—Ellen Pyle

The young lady on this Ellen Pyle cover can’t help but wonder why these two are always clownin’ around.

Ellen Pyle October 25, 1930
Ellen Pyle
October 25, 1930


Tricking Trick-or-Treat—Amos Sewell

There’s always one neighbor who emphasizes the trick in trick-or-treating.

Amos Sewell November 3, 1951
Amos Sewell
November 3, 1951


Trick-or-Treating in the Burbs—John Falter

Halloween lesson no. 1: A bathrobe, baggy sport coat, or pillowcase is suitable costume wear when coupled with a homemade mask.

John Falter November 1, 1958
John Falter
November 1, 1958

What’s Happened to Halloween

Call me hopelessly nostalgic, but Halloween was once the stuff of a Norman Rockwell illustration: wide-eyed, giggling children appearing out of the late October night to amuse and amaze their neighbors with their costumes — mummies, pirates, hobos, baseball players, cowgirls, Indians, ballerinas — which had been cobbled together by their parents from items found in the attic or basement. A glowing jack-o’-lantern in the window or on the front steps signaled that there were treats to be had for little ghosts and goblins. Imaginations afire, the tiny tricksters might even spy a witch astride her broomstick, floating across the darkening sky.

No more. Over time, Halloween has been hijacked by grown-ups who have transformed a sweet, homespun holiday into a $7 billion retail monster that, to my way of thinking, isn’t much fun anymore.

Instead of hand-carved pumpkins and a jolly skeleton hanging on the lamppost for decoration, “Halloweeniacs” now compete to assemble the most elaborate front-yard House of Horrors imaginable, complete with ghoulish soundtracks, dry-ice machines, animatronics, and blinding LED displays that can be seen from orbiting satellites. And what is with those hideous inflatable spiders?

Kiddie costumes are no longer clever and original, but banal and predictable: Disney or Marvel movie characters cranked out by the millions in China and purchased by time-challenged parents at Wal-Mart or Target. (According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent an estimated $1 billion on kids’ costumes and $1.2 billion on adult costumes in 2013. In another NRF poll, only 18.9 percent of respondents said that they would make their own costumes.) I don’t know about you, but it’s getting darned hard to ooh and aah over yet another Spider-Man or Princess Ariel.
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And forget dropping a tangerine or an apple — or, God forbid, a home-baked chocolate chip cookie — into little Ethan’s or Emma’s goody bag. Unwrapped treats are now verboten, thanks to spooked parents who buy into urban myths of poisoned candies and razor blades and needles hidden in fruit. These legends have been repeatedly debunked (in several isolated instances, it turned out that older kids or family members put the razors or needles in the fruit themselves in order to attract attention), but they endure nevertheless. In any event, it’s all rather insulting and paranoid. What do my neighbors think I am?

Which leaves you with doling out packaged candy from mass-market chocolatiers like Mars or Hershey, which is not only expensive but also a balancing act. On the one hand, you don’t want to load the kids up with too much sugar; on the other, you do want to give them what they came for. Yes, you could opt for boxes of raisins or packages of trail mix. But have you ever seen the look on little faces when you hand them a crunchy granola bar? Frightening.

Of course, this matters only if trick-or-treaters actually appear at your door. Nowadays, smothering parents keep the kids on a tight leash. Instead of happily roaming the neighborhood in chattering clusters, they are accompanied by a team of adults who assess the situation (could a pedophile or a mean dog be lurking in this house?) and give the kids permission to approach. And more and more, I’ve noticed, kids are carted off to Halloween parties where they mingle with cousins and other “safe” folks. Where’s the adventure in that?

But despite my gripes about modern Halloween, I’ll stock up on goodies and array a couple of pumpkins on the porch every year, hoping that enough little ones — and even a couple of not-so-little ones — will arrive to haul off the entire proffered holiday booty. (With my burgeoning waistline, the last thing I need are bags of leftover Reese’s Cups or Almond Joys haunting my fruit bowl.)

Then again, this year I may just turn off the lights and binge-watch The Living Dead. After all, the Christmas retail season begins the next day. Now that’s scary.

Something You Can Do For the Kids

Do you ever wonder if there is something you can do now to help ensure a richer life for your children (or grandchildren)? Here is a powerful suggestion.

The Roth IRA is a remarkable vehicle for saving and legitimate tax avoidance — arguably one of the greatest retirement tax breaks ever created. It works like this: Investments made inside a Roth IRA are free to grow and are not taxed when they are taken out of the Roth account (subject to some rules and restrictions, the main one being that you not take the money out until age 59 1/2 or later).

That all growth on the original investment is tax free sounds almost too good to be true. Some members of Congress thought so as well, and the law includes significant limits on how much of this good deal each person may take advantage of annually. For year 2015, an individual may contribute no more than $5,500 ($6,500 if over 50 years old). Furthermore, there are limitations designed to deny this wildly generous arrangement to high earners. An individual whose adjusted gross income for 2015 is over $131,000 is not eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA this year. (For a married couple, that AGI number is $193,000.)

One more limitation on Roth-IRA eligibility must be mentioned. This retirement account is about “earned income” and nobody is allowed to contribute more than they made from work in any given year. Thus, even a person with significant income from investments, social security, pensions, etc. could not contribute unless he had W-2 forms (or equivalent) showing earnings.
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How is all this relevant to helping your children or grandchildren? If a kid has 2015 earnings from work (such as a summer job), he or she may be eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA this year. The problem, of course, is that no teenager we have ever met is going to sink those earnings into a retirement account. Their motivation for summer or part-time work is to meet a hundred more immediate uses for the money. And they intend to spend it on exactly those desires.

This is where you come in. By offering to effectively “match” the kid’s earnings by funding their Roth IRA at least partly out of your own pocket, you can create the best of all possible worlds. The summer earnings are available for spending and the Roth IRA gets funded to the maximum amount allowable. As an added bonus, you may begin to instill the world’s most important financial habits: saving and investing regularly and intelligently.
To say that “someday he will thank you” is an understatement. The very long time frame between now and your teenager’s retirement allows for two amazing things to happen. Money within the account can be invested in the asset class expected to bring the highest return over long periods. And the magic of compounding is free to do its remarkable thing.

Here is an example that I hope will motivate you: Your 19-year-old granddaughter makes a one-time contribution of $5,000 into a Roth IRA, half from her own money and half contributed by you. The investment, on average, earns 9 percent per year. At age 71, she finds that the account has a value of $441,720.85. Make this investment for three years in a row and the value at age 71 would exceed a million dollars. And because it is in a Roth IRA, the money is not taxed upon withdrawal.

It is hard to believe that such a straightforward action in the present could have such a big impact on the financial future of the children and grandchildren you love so much. Believe it. And do it.