RIP Pete Seeger

I got word today that Pete Seeger is no longer with us. He was 94.

The sad thing isn't that he died. He had a life that was far longer and richer than most of us have any right to expect, and he was active right up to the end. The sad thing is that he will never get the Nobel Peace Prize that he richly deserved, for showing us how music can bind the peoples of the world together, and demonstrating how humanity's common traits overshadow our differences.

After his blacklisting in the fifties and sixties cut him off from earning a living in the United States, he traveled around the world, sharing the richness of American song and harvesting the richness of the songs of other cultures and bringing them to us. In particular, he brought home a song written by a Russian child, and a marching tune of the Red Chinese army, and included them in his concerts. For him, there were no important national boundaries. He was not the first musician to cast himself as a good-will ambassador, but he was arguably one of the most effective ones, and the one most willing to cross hard political boundaries. Who else could bring to a concert audience the feeling that people all over the world were just like them in most respects, loving their children and worrying about tomorrow and ready to repay goodwill with goodwill?

Another thing about his concerts come to me. He wanted people of all ages to come to them, from toddlers to grandparents, and he made sure that there were children's songs to round out his repertoire. That was a part of his vision of music as a unifying force. “Young and old” was just another meaningless distinction to be erased, like “black and white” or “American or Russian” or “male and female.”

He changed American popular music in more ways than people realized. He was responsible for the resurgence of the twelve-string guitar after World War II, he pretty much invented the long-necked banjo, he changed one word of the Baptist hymn "We Will Overcome" to "We Shall Overcome" and converted it from a hymn to an anthem, he wrote or co-wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had A Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn" ... and the list goes on.

I wonder if his kind will ever come again. His champions, who include Arlo Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen, are themselves getting older and less relevant to the musical community. Are there young people now willing to take up the torch, and use music and love as a way of bringing people together, fighting social ills, and celebrating our common humanity? I won't say that we need them more than ever, because we have always needed them and we will always need them. But when we see these young talents coming forth again, it will be like seeing the first flowers after a long winter. And it wouldn't be soon enough for me.

Pete was intensely political, but he wasn't dogmatic, and wished for dialogue between people who disagreed with each other. Asked if he read the Communist Daily Worker, he said, "Yes, I do. And I also read the Wall Street Journal. And what I'd really like to do is get the writers of both newspapers together in the same room." At the end of his life, he had plenty of adversaries, but no enemies. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, that.

A Picture of My Father

©2013 by John LaTorre

A few years ago, I built a wooden trailer that had a canvas top supported by a latticework of wooden and aluminum poles. The canvas has been replaced twice since then, killed by the fierce sun of several Sacramento valley summers. When I removed what was left of the most recent cover, I noticed some dry rot in some of the wooden members, and replaced those components with new wood and plywood. And then I waited for fair weather to paint the new members. That day came in mid-December, with a clear blue sky and light winds. I put on an old sweater and some ragged jeans, and set to work putting a coat of primer on the bare wood of the cover’s skeleton. 

 

As I painted, a picture came to mind of my father performing a similar job on his boat. He’d retired to Florida after a career as an intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency and bought a twenty-five-foot wooden boat in need of a bit of restoration. He had it pulled out of the water, and paid some young men with strong backs to scrape the barnacles off and prep it for painting. He saw no reason to pay somebody else to apply the paint, though. He could do that himself.

A local photographer named Jim Stem had gone out to the marina to take some pictures of local residents doing the sort of things that local residents do there, and he took a fine picture of my dad, in the sweater and golf cap he used to wear during the winter, applying paint to the hull of his boat. The camera caught him in profile, from about his waist to his head, framed against a robin’s-egg sky – the very picture of a man enjoying his golden years on Florida’s Sun Coast, exemplifying the retirees who comprised much of the paper’s readership. Jim Stem knew his audience. The picture ran in the Pasco Times that month.

I saw the picture when I visited him one Christmas. It was hard to miss, actually, because either he or my mother had had it framed and displayed in the family room. It continued to hang there for at least ten years, until my father decided to move back to his hometown of Syracuse, New York. I asked him why he was moving back there, and he told me that now that he was over eighty, he no longer felt the need to shovel snow; he could let younger men with stronger backs do that, too.

 

I found it odd that Dad displayed it so proudly, since he was quite camera-shy. This reticence was the result of twenty-some years of working for the CIA in the field or, in other words, twenty-some years of being a person whose job it was not to be noticed. Some documentation of his life was unavoidable, of course, since his name would be published in things like marriage announcements and the like. But the policy of the Agency was, quite reasonably, that the less of this information that was around, the better.

I remember a time he came home from one “TDY” – Army-speak for “Temporary Duty.” He would go on such things from time to time, staying a few days or even a few weeks. I didn't ask him where he’d been. I tried for a while, but he would only smile and shake his head. He knew that I was far too young and garrulous and guileless to keep a secret. (I am still garrulous and guileless, but now my beard is gray.) The only hints of his destination would be the things he brought back as presents: two small stuffed alligators from some place that had alligators, some “Mexican jumping beans” which didn't jump, a couple of transistor radios at a time when these things were just starting to hit the market. On this particular occasion, the only thing he brought home was a Polaroid snapshot of him sitting on a seat of an airliner, looking startled. He told us that free-lance photographers would take these pictures and offer to sell them to the subjects as souvenirs of their travel. Dad bought it, of course, since it was more than a simple souvenir to him. It was documentary evidence that he’d been someplace where he perhaps shouldn’t have been. It may not even have been the only photograph that the photographer shot of him, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. But it was necessary to do what he could, and if that involved buying a picture that he didn’t want in order to take it out of circulation, then so be it.

Such discretion paid off in the long run. In 1968, the East Germans published a book called Who’s Who in the CIA, which blew the covers of hundreds of government agents. The idea was to embarrass the Agency by demonstrating how much the East Germans knew about our operations in Europe. At the dinner table that night, Dad did something he never did before or since, in his entire career with the CIA: he broke his habit of never discussing his job. He said, with visible relief, “They got a lot of us, but they didn’t get me.” I was twenty by then, and I guess he felt he could trust me to keep my mouth shut. I’d known by then that he worked for the CIA, but still didn’t know exactly what he did for them. It would be another fifteen years before he told me.

Dad lived in Florida for over twenty years, but made no deep friendships there. So when my mother passed away in 1993, he decided to move back to Syracuse, his hometown. He wanted to be around what remained of his own family, which at that point consisted of a brother, a sister, and a few in-laws, all of them living in in the Syracuse area. As these people died in their turn (only one of my father's six siblings survived him), their places in his life would be filled in some measure by those of their children and grandchildren who had decided to stay there. My brother and I tried to persuade him to come to California, but he would have none of that. He bought another boat, a smaller aluminum vessel, to sail on Otisco Lake, the scene of many of his most treasured boyhood memories. He would take it out regularly until a stroke robbed him of most of his sense of balance.

But back to the picture. Once my father started working for the CIA, I don’t remember him having his picture taken at all, except by family members on holidays and reunions. This is why the picture in the Pasco Times was so remarkable: ten years before, my father would have been very unhappy about having his picture taken, and would probably have asked the photographer not to publish it. But now things were different. Displaying that picture proudly in the family room was his declaration of independence. He didn’t have to hide now. It was all right to let the world know where Joe LaTorre could be found, and what he was up to these days. Nobody cared anymore.

At the time when the picture was taken as he painted his boat, he must have been at about the age I am now, in my oldest sweater, painting my trailer under a clear blue Sacramento winter sky. We become our fathers and our mothers, by and by, even when we aren’t watching.

I Cut Myself Today

I cut myself today.

I was chopping up some carrots, and the French kitchen knife slipped and grazed the side my right thumb. (I'm left-handed, which is why it was not the left thumb that was damaged.) The knife didn't cut very far, though. It took almost a minute to start bleeding, and the wound was dressed without a lot of fuss, once I got the bandage unwrapped with only one hand.

I should add at this point that I have a reputation for hurting myself in several small ways (and a few large ones). I have cut myself so often that the instructions on a Johnson & Johnson Band-aid -- "Tear off end, pull string down"--are now imprinted on my memory like a mantra. My hands bear numerous scars whose provenance I can no longer recall. So this sort of experience was nothing new to me. Indeed, the most remarkable thing is that this one showed every sign of healing up with no permanent damage at all.

So if I had been anybody else, this little incident would have been shrugged off. But I'm different. I was raised on the stories I read in the Reader's Digest and the Ladies Home Journal and the Redbook magazines that my mother subscribed to.

(Full disclosure here: I talked my mother into subscribing to them. The subscriptions were part of my high school's fundraising drives for the stadium lights that would illuminate our team's night-time games, many of which we actually won. The school administration also probably hoped that the increased illumination would cut down on the hanky-panky that pubescent students performed under the bleachers. They were mistaken; if anything, it made the darkness down there even darker and more inviting by comparison. When not studying, performing on the field, cheering from the bleachers, and fornicating under the stands, we students were expected to go door to door, selling subscriptions to neighbors, but appealing to Mom's maternal instincts was usually good for at least six magazines even before I left the house. The trick was to get to her before my brother -- who went to the same high school -- did.)

These stories in these magazines usually started with something like "As the knife/nail/glass went into my thumb/forefinger/toe, I had no inkling that my life would change forever." They would go on to detail the diseases the narrator had caught and the nerve damage inflicted, with the inevitable descent into sepsis, amputation, near death, and possibly an iron lung or something of the sort. This is not the sort of narrative that you feed to an impressionable high school freshman who had already been exposed to an Irish Catholic mother. Irish Catholics are convinced that disaster is already around the corner, waiting to pounce. If it's sunny today, it will be sure to rain tomorrow. (In Ireland, it always rains tomorrow.) If things seem to be going smoothly, it's only because the Fates have somehow overlooked you, having been momentarily distracted by their glee in visiting misfortune on somebody else. Sooner or later, they're sure to remember their appointment with you.

I dosed the cut with an antibiotic cream, but I'm not counting on that very much. That's what everybody in those stories did. It never helped. Sure, everything feels fine for a day or two, but disaster is sure to strike. That usually happens by the seventh paragraph, after they've described in detail their happy family in a wonderful neighborhood where all the dads are employed in meaningful jobs and all the moms are home cooking up all the recipes that are found elsewhere in the magazine (most of them apparently having something to do with the artful application of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup). This happy interlude sets up the part where, when the wound doesn't seem to be healing on schedule, the family decides to take the victim to the doctor. The doctor expresses concern. He (and in 1962, it's always a he) says comfortingly, "I'm sure that it's nothing serious, but I'm going to order a few tests anyway. Now just keep that wound clean and dry and everything will be fine."

Little does he know. A week later, the victim is back in the doctor's office, where he unwraps the wound. he examines it. He scowls. More tests are given. There are injections. The patient is comforted by the fact that the doctor looks like Doctor Kildare or Ben Casey or Marcus Welby, and that no doctor who looks like that can possibly find himself out of his depth. Modern viewers are not so easily reassured. They were raised on House, and know that even the most brilliant diagnostician will make three or four wrong diagnoses as the patient hovers between life and death. But these were simpler times.

Anyway, The story inevitably concludes with a hospitalization, usually accompanied by the aforesaid amputation or a collapse of the immune system or both. Weeks pass as a grueling re-adjustment is made to the patient's life-style. Because the magazine is a family publication, the patient can be counted on to make some sort of recovery, or at least an adaptation to new circumstances and a renewed appreciation of the Value of Life. He or she credits doctors, nurses, family members and friends for their unfailing support and skill. The reader then turns the page with newfound respect for the medical profession, and finds an advertisement about the many ways that Heinz ketchup can enliven your next meat loaf.

I'd better go change that bandage now. Not that that will help.