Manhattan Reflections

Last Monday I walked from 53^rd and Sixth (where the Limoliner from Boston lets passengers off) across town to 53^rd and Third Avenue.  It was a beautiful day and after I passed the Museum of Modern Art I became fascinated with the reflections in the glass-sided skyscrapers.

 It was like a hall of mirrors in a carnival.  You couldn’t tell where the reflections left off and the real buildings began.

 I’ve said it before—when you’re in Manhattan, you have to keep looking up, or you’ll miss a lot…  stone gargoyles, trompe l’oeil walls leading nowhere, kamikaze pigeons.

 When I got to Park and 53^rd, I encountered this skinny fellow in the middle of the avenue, where public art is often on display.

Here’s what he was looking up at.

 

Here’s a view of him from the other side of Park.  Behind him is Lever House, one of the first famous glass-sided skyscrapers. That’s where, fresh out of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, I had my first real job (in public relations) fifty-two years ago. I had to be at my desk at 8:00 a.m., carrying five New York newspapers that I would read and summarize for the Lever executives—anything that related to the company. Then I would type the news-sheet, mimeograph it, and circulate it within the building. I was on the 21^st floor.  When the subway went through underground, you could feel the building sway. I quit after six months.

Now Lever House has details of masterpiece paintings on its façade.  One of those things you’d miss if you didn’t look up.

When I got back to the apartment, I googled and learned that the statue at 53^rd and Park is a 33.3-feet-tall stainless-steel sculpture by American artist Tom Friedman.  It will be there until mid-July.  The name of it is “Looking Up.”

 

The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and My Generation

Everyone who was older than, say, five, on November 22, 1963 has a story that begins, “On the day that Kennedy was shot, I…”   Those too young to remember it have filed away Kennedy’s murder in their minds along with other national tragedies: the assassination of President Lincoln, the Hindenburg disaster, Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake.

But the Kennedy assassination was different.  And the effect of that weekend in 1963 on the baby boomer generation is still being measured.

When President Lincoln was assassinated, some Americans in the far West didn’t learn the news until months later.  In 1963, Americans turned en masse for the first time to their television for breaking news of a national tragedy, and that news was very slow in coming—it seemed like hours of agonized waiting before the official announcement was made that the President was indeed dead, (although the back of his head had been blown off by the second shot, and his wife and his bodyguard knew instantly there was no hope.)

The entire nation gathered in front of their television sets, sat down, and didn’t move from Friday through Sunday as they watched the drama play out in real time, from the shots in Dallas, through the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby, through the funeral procession, with the rider-less horse and three-year-old John John saluting his father’s casket.

Imagine if the Kennedy shooting happened today—hundreds of people in Dallas would have captured it on video via their cell phones—not just Abraham Zapruder, with his 8 millimeter Bell & Howell movie camera and the shaky 486 frames of film that would ultimately ruin his life.  The nation did not see the entire 26.6 seconds of the Zapruder film until 1975, and Life Magazine, which bought the rights to it for $150,000, did not show frame #313— Kennedy’s head exploding—out of deference to the family and its readers and because Zapruder insisted it be withheld.

Today (remember the Boston Marathon bombing?) the entire event would be on Facebook and Twitter from dozens of different angles, with all the gore, along with all kinds of crazy theories and misinformation—within seconds of the gunfire.

There was nothing instantaneous about the news in those days.   Here’s my Nov. 22, 1963 story:  Two months earlier I had moved to Manhattan from California to enter Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.  Among the 80 grad students who sat in front of their heavy manual typewriters at desks in the J School’s newsroom was Nick Gage, the man I would marry seven years later, but on that Friday I had a date with another young man, who worked for The New York Times, to attend a ball given by the Newswomen’s Club of New York to collect my Anne O’Hare McCormick scholarship, which would help pay for my tuition.

I had left the newsroom early and gone to my dorm room in Johnson Hall to start getting ready, when I heard on the radio “Shots have been fired in the vicinity of the President in Dallas.” 

Like many of my fellow J School students I immediately went back to the school, hoping to get more information from the teletype machines in the newsroom—the only way to get breaking news in those days before it was read over the radio.  The teletype machines, standing about three feet high, would clatter into life as news bulletins from the Associated Press, UPI and Reuters (they each had a different machine) would be typed on a continuous roll of paper.

We stood around, grim-faced, waiting to learn Kennedy’s fate, tearing off bulletins as they came through (I still have a couple, one of them pictured above.) Not until 2:33 p.m. Eastern Standard Time did the teletype machine make it official.  The president was dead.

We all took this as a personal loss.  Nick, who has been my husband now for 43 years, had met President Kennedy only three months earlier at the White House, when Kennedy presented him with the top Hearst Award for college journalism—which was how Nick managed to afford grad school.

After the official news, we were all depressed and at a loss for what to do next. Everything had been cancelled.  Earlier I had tried to call my date at The New York Times to tell him the ball was cancelled and got screamed at by the man who answered the phone, who yelled, “My god, woman.  Don’t you know what has happened?  Hang up!”

Finally, as a group, we walked over to a movie theater on Broadway and sat silently through a film.  It was “The Haunting of Hill House” starring Julie Harris.

We all went out to the West End Bar after that, and Nick and I spent the rest of the weekend together, devouring the newspapers as succeeding editions came out. Unlike the rest of the nation, we did not have access to a television set (although there must have been one at the J-School.)  Nowadays, the students sit down to their computers.  The manual typewriters and teletype machines are long gone.

Over the years, when anyone asks us, “How did you two meet?” we take turns telling the story, beginning, “It was the day President Kennedy was shot.”

Three weekends ago, Nick and I were in San Francisco, attending the Elios Foundation’s Hellenic Charity Ball when we started chatting with California Congressman John Garamendi and his wife Patti, who have been married even longer than we have.  Turns out that they met the same day we did. 

They were both attending the University of California at Berkeley (where I had graduated five months earlier.)  He was on the California Golden Bears football team (and an All-America offensive guard), but the game scheduled for that night was cancelled, so John walked over to visit a girl he knew in a sorority house, and she introduced him to a pretty blonde named Patricia. 

Like so many of our generation, John and Patti had been inspired by Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps. They spent their two-year honeymoon serving in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, teaching local school children that if they could work together, they could achieve anything (including building a bridge). John has devoted his life to legislature creating a pathway to the middle class for poor Americans.  Patti has served as the Associate Director of the Peace Corps and arranges the distribution of American food and aid to famine and refugee centers in war zones and developing countries.

Everyone in my generation has a story about how Kennedy’s life and death affected them, and in many cases, the ripple effect is still being felt.  For my generation, it was the first time the nation pulled together and mourned together as a family, while the now-outdated medium of television made us participants in the drama.   

The Last Surviving Grouchy Grammar Nut

You know how, in World War II, the Marines employed Navajo code talkers to transmit radio messages because no one but another Navajo could understand the language?  Now there is fear that some of these obscure Native American languages will disappear when the last of the elderly code speakers passes on.

Well I’m 72 and I suspect that I’m the last person on earth who knows the proper usage of “lie” and “lay.”  Not that I would dream of correcting anyone, such as my fabulously flexible and toned Pilates teachers who say about a dozen times an hour, “Now everyone lay down on your mat with your head facing the mirror.”

I’ve also given up on “its” and “it’s”.  And of course there’s “two, to and too,” all of which are texted as “2”.  In fact, now that texting is ubiquitous, I suspect that all language will soon be written phonetically using numbers, symbols, emoticons and perhaps bar codes.

It’s always an error in The New York Times that sends me off on a grammar rant—and there was another one today (Thursday, March 28.)  In the Style Section, in a large, bold pull-quote from an article about photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith taken in the 1960’s, I read:  “After laying dormant for decades, a second life for photographs taken of a pair of artists on the cusp of fame.”  Of course, it’s supposed to be: “after lying dormant…”

This “laying” was the last straw after last week, when I saw in The Times a large headline about the economic troubles of Cypress(!) even though, throughout the text of the piece, the economic troubles were ascribed to the island of Cyprus, rather than a species of tree.

In the olden days, when I was being trained in New York Times style at  Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, these errors would have been caught by people called copy editors, but I can only imagine that, in this very difficult period for all print media, The Times has been forced to fire all its copy editors for economic reasons. 

That thumping noise you hear is the late, lamented Times editor Ted Bernstein spinning in his grave.  Once upon a time, Theodore M. Bernstein was the watchman of the venerable Great Gray Lady as well as a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, “Theodore M. Bernstein, 74…served as the paper‘s prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism…In a witty Times house organ called ‘Winners and Sinners’, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act.”

At Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein’s “Winners and Sinners” newsletter. Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the NYT and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses.  The “Cypress” debacle would probably have sent him into overdrive.

Three years ago, on April 14, 2010, in a post called “Michelle Obama, the Grammar Police and a Cranky Crone”, I gently chided the First Lady for a lapse in grammar.  Although I think I did it in a friendly way, it almost got me expelled from a women’s group I belonged to, as one particularly vehement member insisted it was heartless and morally wrong to criticize the First Lady for anything except her political actions.  (That blog post was also reprinted in a book called “Grammar Rants”—and they did not mean that in a good way.)

The funny thing is, I am a huge admirer of Michelle Obama.  Her photograph stands on the top of my desk. And the same day I published that post, I e-mailed it to her office.  Evidently no one there who read it was offended, because ever since, nearly every week, I get an e-mail from the office of the First Lady, or from the President himself asking my opinion of something, or sometimes it’s just from “The White House”.  If the White House had been as offended as my fellow club members by my post, certainly they wouldn’t have put me on their mailing list?

Anyway, I’ll reprint below some of what I said about the First Lady and grammar and let you decide whether I was being  “heartless.”  And thanks for sticking with me through this current grammar rant.  I feel a lot better now.

Today [April 14, 2010] I read in all the news media about Michelle Obama’s surprise visit to Haiti during her first official solo trip abroad.

I applaud her for her compassion and for bringing public attention to the devastating needs that still have to be met, especially for the Haitian children.

I’m a huge fan of Michelle’s and admire her more than any first lady since, say, Eleanor Roosevelt. But I did wince when I read the statement that she made to the press about her trip. Her insight was perfect but her grammar was not.

“I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we’re at the point where the relief efforts are under way but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit, ” she said.

What’s wrong with that? Take out Jill and you have “I think it’s important for I to come now.” It’s supposed to be: “It was important for Jill and ME.”….

…You don’t expect perfect grammar from a baseball player (or from Bob Dylan…writer of “Lay, Lady, Lay”),  but maybe you do from a First Lady who’s a lawyer, educated at Princeton and Harvard.

Kids acquire an ear for correct grammar by hearing it spoken by the adults around them; their parents and their role models. But now that young people mainly communicate by texting in a phonetic code, both spelling and grammar are becoming as antiquated as the Model T.

It’s great that Michelle Obama is encouraging kids to eat smart and get out there and exercise, but let’s encourage them to mind their P’s and Q’s and their prepositions, nouns, verbs and grammar as well.