A St. Patrick's Day Countdown - Day 6

Bring my pipe and fill its bowl,

That I may puff to sooth my soul.

For it is sure to clear my brain,

And bring old memories back again.

About Irish clay pipe traditions

Our music for the day comes from the Irish Rovers. For the last fifty years they toured the world with their ballads. In 2015-16 they will carry out their last world tour. The members live in both Canada and Ireland and intend to keep the Rover sound alive by attending music festivals and special events. 

And now it's time for an excerpt from the rich tradition of Irish literature. If you know the author and book title you can have an extra pint of Guinness next Tuesday.

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 

A St. Patrick's Day Countdown - Day 7

In one week St. Patrick's Day will be upon us. In preparation for a day when everyone is just a little bit Irish I thought it would be fitting to visit the family's postcard archives and share pieces of Irish culture with readers.

About the Celtic harp

About the shamrock

About Erin go Bragh

Here is the Song of Ireland written by the English singer-songwriter, Phil Colclough, and his wife, June. The performance is by The Dubliners featuring one of its founding members, Luke Kelly. Although his career was cut short by an early death in 1984, he is credited with saving much of Ireland's traditional music. His Wikipedia biography notes the "[he] remains an Irish icon and his music is widely regarded as one of Ireland's cultural treasures."

Walking all the day, near tall towers where falcons build their nests

Silver winged they fly, they know the call of freedom in their breasts

Soar Black Head against the sky, between the rocks that run down to the sea

Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets, asked for more 

I stood by your Atlantic sea, and sang a song for Ireland

Talking all the day with true friends, who try to make you stay

Telling jokes and news, singing songs to pass the night away

Watched the Galway salmon run like silver dancing darting in the sun

Living on your western shore saw summer sunsets, asked for more

I stood by your Atlantic sea, and sang a song for Ireland

Drinking all the day in old pubs, where fiddlers love to play

Someone touched the bow, he played a reel, it seemed so fine and gay

Stood on Dingle beach and cast - in wild foam we found Atlantic Bass

Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more

I stood by your Atlantic sea, and sang a song for Ireland

Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no man had to fight

Waking in your dawn, I saw you crying in the morning light

Lying where the Falcons fly, they twist and turn all in you e'er blue sky

Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more

I stood by your Atlantic sea, and I sang a song for Ireland

From Bloody Sunday To The Selma To Montgomery National Historic Trail

Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama, March 7, 1965 

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. That event was a tipping point in the movement to improve civil rights for black Americans in the South. In the watershed weeks that followed there were two more marches, the second one a 54 mile march from Selma to the State Capitol steps in Montgomery. The national press coverage of these events and the violence that accompanied them increased support for additional protections. The result was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed by President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965. Thirty-one years later, the route of the march was designated a National Historic Trail:

The 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march has been identified by historians and movement participants as one of the last great protests of the modern civil rights movement. In many ways marking the end of an era, the fight for voting rights represents the peak of the non-violent, interracial movements that characterized the civil rights struggle during the mid- twentieth century.   

Soon after its creation I began work with a team of National Park Service employees, civil rights principals, and march participants to develop the trail for public use. It was a long, difficult, but rewarding assignment involving several hundred individual stakeholders and scores of organizations. It was an honor to help preserve this teachable moment in our history and present its story to future generations.

Your site visit will focus on the following themes:

Start your visit at the National Park Service's visitor center in Selma at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

Sources:

Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail Alternatives Summary, Comprehensive Management Plan, National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office, Fall 1999 

Department Of The Interior Turns 165 Years Old Today

When Congress established the Department of the Interior on this date in 1849, the nation had celebrated a mere sixty years of operation under the Constitution. By mid-century settlement expanded well beyond the Mississippi River across the Great Plains and the Rockies to the Pacific. Virtually all Indians had been resettled in the west. The discovery of gold in California heightened interest in mineral wealth and the expansion of mining. Manifest destiny, the idea that all of North America should be part of the United States, was active in the Pacific Northwest and by 1848 had already achieved victory over Mexico from California to Texas. Indeed the interior had become a busy and diversified aspect of the American experience and one that demanded some form of federal oversight. Is it any wonder that the organization was referred to as "the department of everything else" in its early years?

We've come a long way from "everything else" to a rather awesome department for someone who enjoys history, science, and geography and their applications to a national experience. The department's current interests are expressed quite well in its organization chart:

I feel very fortunate to have worked almost 37 years for Interior in that little box on the lower left that bears the label, "National Park Service."  The Service has a noble mission carrying out what has been described as "the best idea America ever had." It was a wonder- filled experience that took me to the far corners of the country in terms of both geography and history. It's one I'd do over without hesitation. So here's a big thank you to Interior for giving me such an opportunity, and a happy birthday wish for continued careful stewardship of everything else. 

Tom Wolfe At 84

His earlier works seem written as much for entertainment as for traditional reportorial honesty and often involve not only the writer's observation but also his participation. And there are those long daydream passages of vivid description that end with a quick snap back to reality. As he worked more and more in fiction his style retained muted elements of the "wildness" that made his early "journalism" amazingly popular into the 1990's.  Today the first wave of Gonzos - a term coined around 1970 by Hunter S. Thompson to describe a wing of New Journalism advocates - is all but gone, save for Tom Wolfe who turns 84 today. Wolfe remains it's most famous surviving member in the U.S. It's been a long way from The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby to tackling the Great American Novel for Wolfe. He's always been quite happy interpreting the American experience as an outsider looking into other worlds and he's certainly surpassed Thompson and others in his school with a matured Gonzo style.

Wolfe's novel latest, Back to Blood [2012], was only marginally successful and may lead us to speculate on what the future holds for a successful writer whose life has entered the twilight years. Most of us would like to think there is more compelling reading to come from such a wise observer. Let's hope so, but better we should leave prediction to heaven and immerse ourselves in the great wealth of observation of the American experience Tom Wolfe assembled for us.

These days Wolfe's novels still make news but I believe we should always remember his entertaining journalism, especially the work that chronicled our cultural history in the critical years from early 1960's to the mid-1970's. In those years he wrote the following titles:

The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
The Pump House Gang (1968)
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)
The New Journalism (1974) edited with E.W. Johnson
The Painted Word (1975)
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976)

He capped the 1970's with, The Right Stuff, his fascinating look at the nation's first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, and program that put most of them into space. Although he had already achieved fame as a writer the publication of The Right Stuff  and the film by the same name that followed in 1983 ensured his place in American literature. 

Marian Anderson: "A Voice Heard Once In A Hundred Years"

1940 Portrait of Marian Anderson by Carl Van Vechten

When Marian Anderson passed away in 1993 at the age of 96 the world lost one of the finest voices of the 20th century. She swept to international fame in 1939 with a public performance at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) had denied her the opportunity to perform in their venue, Constitution Hall, because she was black. The decision didn't sit well with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who sat on the national board of directors of the DAR. Mrs.Roosevelt intervened and helped arrange one of the iconic events of our time.

In commemoration of Anderson's birthday on this day in 1897, here is a documentary, Portrait of Marian Anderson, produced for the Greater Washington Telecommunications Association and first aired on public television on May 8, 1991. I normally don't post lengthy audiovisuals but this one affords viewers a flexible opportunity to learn about her life, listen to her singing, and hear her personal observations on an extraordinary life that included seven decades on the stage. 

Sources:

Title quote is attributed to the noted conductor, Arturo Toscanini 

Anderson portrait, Carl Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress

John Steinbeck: "What Good Is The Warmth Of Summer Without The Cold Of Winter To Give It Sweetness."

John Steinbeck, the renowned 20th century American writer, was born on this day in 1902 in the coastal agricultural city of Salinas, California. He had a long, varied, and controversial career as an American writer, but is best known for his Great Depression era novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Most baby boomers know the film and story line very well. As a cultural historian and geographer, it's odd I never managed to read the book from cover to cover. In high school, Of Mice and Men was required reading, and I found great pleasure in reading Travels With Charley: In Search of America on my own shortly after its publication in 1962.

Steinbeck was among the best of participant-observers of 20th century America in general and the California experience in particular. His work earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. These days, I don't think students - and teachers - of American history and culture give him the credit and attention he deserves. Perhaps I should be satisfied knowing that history is still taught in the public schools, but that's another essay for another day.


If you don't know Steinbeck or want to know more about him and his world start with an electronic visit to the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Better yet, plan a visit next time you find yourself in the San Francisco area. From Salinas it's a short drive to Monterey Bay and the world-class Monterey Bay Aquarium. Located on a site made famous in Steinbeck's novel, Cannery Row, it's a "must see" exposure to the marine biology the author enjoyed and studied. 

Cannery Row, Monterey, California, 1945

Sources:

Steinbeck portrait, Nobel Foundation