Showing posts with label American Dream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Dream. Show all posts

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Of Mice and Men -- Dramaworks' Bold Production



Robert Burns: The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often awry

I say "bold" in the subject heading but I could have easily said "daring."  It's not the type of drama which some people seek out.  It is delivered with such intensity that some moments land on the audience like a sledgehammer.  But if any play suits Dramaworks to a tee, it's Of Mice and Men, a play about simple dreams dashed by chance and circumstances, the inherent vulnerability of characters who are striving for the basic things in life, a place to live and some security. Dramaworks knows how to pick great dramas of this nature and breathe life into them.

Of Mice and Men is among one of Steinbeck's greatest works, not as famous as Grapes and Wrath or East of Eden of course, but it's a novella consisting almost entirely of dialogue.  It reads like a play and it sweeps the reader along into its inevitable, tragic conclusions.  Steinbeck designed it as such --- to convert it to a play. Reading stories such as Of Mice and Men, where the characters are "acting out" the themes of the work through dialog and their actions, gives it that unique momentum, unlike more descriptive literary works.  Seeing it live on stage pushes you to deeply empathize with real people, as if you are transported to their time, place, and circumstance.

There are not many plays more painful to watch in my opinion, because nearly every character is so seriously flawed, and so on his / her road to ruin.  Alas, "the best laid schemes....often go awry."  On a macro level, the setting of the dust bowl migration leaves them even more at risk.  These are migratory workers in the field, set in a ranch in California not far from Steinbeck's home town.  Here is society's most vulnerable stratum, and it is their inherent loneliness as migrant workers and their unreachable dreams that are laid threadbare in this production

It takes a certain ear to capture real dialogue, and as Steinbeck himself grew up in Salinas, California during those times, and spent some time on ranches with migrant workers, he is a master, and if you see this play and/or read the novella, this is something to be appreciated, savored, as it is a language that almost manifests the hardship, the loneliness, and the ill-fated destiny of the characters. Ironically, the language itself catapulted the book onto censorship lists, especially when first published, but probably in some sections of the country, it is still not taught.

It is also a work about friendship and trust, a unique, almost symbiotic relationship between two men.  They rely on one another, George the orchestrator of their lives (or whatever modicum of control he has) and Lennie, a quiet innocent giant of limited mental capacity dependent on what George says and the dreams that George spins to keep them both going.

George: Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no fambly. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go into town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.

Lennie:. That’s it—that’s it. Now tell how it is with us.

George: With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit-in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.

Lennie: But not us! An’ why? Because . . . . because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.

In trying to explain their relationship to Slim, the mule driver, perhaps the most "normal" person on the ranch, George says the following, indicating to Lennie with this thumb: He ain’t bright. Hell of a good worker, though. Hell of a nice fella, but he ain’t bright. I’ve knew him for a long time.

To which Slim replies, Ain’t many guys travel around together.  I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

George and Lennie's dreams are just that simple:  "Jus livin offa the fatta the lan" with Lennie tending to the rabbits. It is the American Dream at its most basic.  A place to live, a little happiness? This a leitmotif in the play.

Crooks, the black stable hand, knows a thing or two about being lonely and ostracized, and recognizes in Lennie a somewhat kindred spirit.  More foreshadowing as he says to Lennie: I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.

One of the catalysts in bringing the play towards its dark conclusion is the one truly unlikeable character, Curley, the "The Bossman's" son, constantly needing to prove himself, incredibly possessive of but inattentive to his new wife (unnamed in the play, an interesting subliminal message about Steinbeck's attitude towards women - or at least their place in the play).  Candy, the aging worker who is now confined to the most menial tasks around the ranch warns George and Lennie: Curley’s like alot of little guys. He hates big guys. He’s alla time picking scraps with big guys. Kind of like he’s mad at ‘em because he ain’t a big guy. You seen little guys like that, ain’t you? Always scrappy?

George: I seen plenty tough little guys. But this Curley better not make no mistakes about Lennie. Lennie ain’t handy, but this Curley punk is gonna get hurt if he messes around with Lennie.

Candy: Well, Curley’s pretty handy. “Never did seem right to me. S’pose Curley jumps a big guy an’ licks him. Ever’body says what a game guy Curley is. And s’pose he does the same thing and gets licked. Then ever’body says the big guy oughtta pick somebody his own size, and maybe they gang up on the big guy. Never did seem right to me. Seems like Curley ain’t givin’ nobody a chance.”

There are no chances for Lennie and George's simple dream to become a reality (and for Candy as well, who wants to be included).  The final catalyst is Curley's wife, who is generally regarded as a slut by the ranch hands, but nevertheless dreams of becoming a movie star, and is the ideal magnet to draw Lennie (and herself) into the play's inevitable conclusion.  I'll not quote it here but in the second act, Curly's wife and Lennie "talk" to each other, expressing their hopeless dreams, but neither are capable of listening to the other.  It is a conversation entirely in counterpoint.

This was an absolutely perfect script for J. Barry Lewis, the veteran, knowledgeable, Resident Director of Dramaworks, to bring out the themes of this play by maximizing the superb talents of his actors and utilizing the 'state of the art' stage now available in their new space.  It is truly the ideal designed theatre for both sides of the fourth wall, bringing the audience into the performance.

Here is the information from the Dramaworks' web site, just so I get all the names right:
Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production is directed by J. Barry Lewis and features John Leonard Thompson (George), Brendan Titley (Lennie), Paul Bodie, Cliff Burgess, Frank Converse, Dennis Creaghan, Betsy Graver, Christopher Halladay, Wayne Steadman, and Ricky Waugh. Scenic design is by Michael Amico, costume design by Leslye Menshouse, lighting design by John Hall, and sound design by Matt Corey.

Many of these artists are veteran Dramaworks' actors or technical people.  All are at the top of their game in this production so it is hard to single out comments on one each, but I'll make a few points.

First and foremost John Leonard Thompson carries a heavy load in the play, being on stage most of the time, playing George with a focused intensity, trying to manage Lennie and keep him out of trouble, keep the dream intact and attempt to fit into the ranch and keep their jobs and at the same time keep their plans secret (unsuccessfully as Candy becomes part of the hopeless scheme and even Crooks tries to join in).  And of course trying to avoid the inevitable conclusion of the play, so shocking, even though most in the audience (I hope at least) knew how it would end.  It is a part demanding such energy (and ability to memorize massive regional dialogue) so hats off to him.

Brendan Titley is one of the newcomers to Dramaworks, a young but experienced Shakespearean actor who does a heartfelt job portraying Lennie -- a difficult part to play but he always manages to secure the empathy of the audience

An award-winning supporting performance is given by Dennis Creaghan, an absolutely perfect depiction of the old rancher, Candy, whose beloved old dog has just been shot to put him out of his misery.  He fears that he too has become too old and useless and knows that his time at the ranch will be at an end sooner than later.  He is irresistibly drawn to the scheme of sharing in George and Lennie's dream of owning a small ranch which he can help them realize (he was given a small amount of money as compensation from an accident that severed his hand). 

I loved Cliff Burgess's characterization of Slim, the one person who seems to have reconciled himself to his job on the ranch, goes about his business in an upbeat way -- a fair-minded person.  His presence on the stage and the way Burgess comports himself in the part was always a relief, lessening the heavy tension on stage for a moment or two.

W. Paul Bodie is ideal as Crooks, the stable hand, who actually has his own room -- he's not allowed to play cards with the other boys or even enter the bunk house because he is black.  He's resentful about that, but ironically, he has something none of the other workers have, his own place.  Crooks accepts his lot in life on the one hand and is angry on the other, Bodie expressing that contradiction perfectly.

Curley's wife is admirably played by Betsy Graver and while she is not on stage that often, she creates a contrast to the bland monolithic "colors" of the workers.  Simply, she lights up the stage with her seductive looks and dress, a femme fatale in every sense of the term.

The remaining cast members give professional performances in every way, but one last comment on the acting, and that is the brief, but powerful role of "The Boss" by one of the stage's (and movie and TV) most experienced actors, Frank Converse.  He is larger than life while on stage.  Coincidentally we have a geographic connection as he lives in Weston, CT (where we lived for some 25 years) and were fortunate to see him in some productions at the Westport Country Playhouse over the years. 

Michael Amico uses representative design, with one major set -- sort of a Tabula rasa with added extras to effectively portray a sandy bank on the Salinas River, the ranch bunkhouse, the barn, and the stable hand's room.  There is actually a hatch that opens on the stage floor filled with water to represent a river and along with the sound effects and lighting, the audience is drawn into the image and supplies the "rest" allowing the characters to do the storytelling.  His designs always seem to be exactly the right one for the play, difficult to construct after being properly imagined.

Leslye Menshouse's costumes were designed right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogues for the times -- probably where the characters would have bought their clothing, and then underwent serious "distressing" to reflect the years of hard labor and the few clothing changes men of the fields wore.  They had the look of the WPA photographs from the dust bowl migration.

Lighting shifts are numerous and dramatically effective, using the stage design to its greatest advantage and well coordinated with myriad sound effects, of wildlife, dogs howling in the distance, of men outside the barn, horseshoes thudding and making ringers.

This is a major production, and in the intimate Dramaworks' surroundings, the audience becomes part of the tragic events that unfold, but also -- hopefully -- with the sense that we all share, as human beings -- the same feelings, wanting to be connected (and I don't mean Facebook) with others.  Nonetheless, some will see this production as dark, very dark, and in many ways it is that too, but Steinbeck (and Dramaworks) are striving for a more empathetic appreciation of universal human needs.  A play not to be missed.  



Monday, July 15, 2013

We Live Too Shallowly in Too Many Places



That is an indirect quote from Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, Angle of Repose, but more on that later.

I thought of those few words as we headed north on I95 last week, fortified by yet another “book” – actually the 13 hour audio book version of Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, a novel that has some things in common with Stegner’s.  I had read Walter’s Financial Lives of the Poets on the maiden voyage of the cruise ship Marina, finding a copy in the ship’s pristine library.  It is a very funny but tragic story, reminding me a little of the writing of Joseph Heller and I made a note to read his next work.  Perhaps it was providential that Amazon had a sale on the audio book edition of his most recent novel, Beautiful Ruins, right before we departed Florida for Connecticut.  While it is very professionally narrated, somehow I think the book might be better read than listened to.  I can’t really explain why that might be; perhaps having it read to you makes you focus on plot rather than character, or the interruptions while being on the road forces one to stop listening when rest stops dictate.

The story begins with Pasquale Tursi, who, after his father dies in 1962, returns from his partially completed college education to run the family’s small hotel in the out of the way Italian coastal town of Porto Vergogna There he has a chance meeting with a minor American actress, Dee Moray (she is in Italy to film Cleopatra with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor). The story is a CD page turner (making the drive that much easier), moving back and forth from 1962 to the near present, with the introduction of a number of characters (including Richard Burton).  It is like so many good novels the tale of choices and consequences. Walter’s characters interact with one another over time, changing the outcome of each others’ lives, “beautiful ruins” as some of the Italian landscape.  Their stories devolve into their own “angles of repose.” Jess Walter continues his journey as a young ascending American novelist.

As the novel moved around, so did we, first visiting friends Suzanne and George in Savannah, sharing a July 4 dinner with them and then the following night we made a long overdue visit to the relatively new home of our friends Barbara and Ron (and their particularly smart Border Collie, Coco) in Apex, NC.  Ron was a colleague in my publishing days (and Barbara as well, but Ron and I worked at the same firm) and over the years we’ve become close friends in spite of our geographic estrangement.  It was wonderful seeing them after all these years.  Then, back on the road.
 
The drive up I95 is emblematic of living too shallowly in too many places.  As a nation we’ve become anchorless, a nomadic nation addicted to the so called “pleasures” of travel.  Even with gas at $4 plus a gallon the roads were packed, the “rest stops” jammed with those seeking burgers, fries, ice cream, pizza, and sodas. We’ve learned over the years to pack our own food, and to confine our rest room visits to visitors’ centers, usually the first rest stop as you enter the next state.   

With the NJ Turnpike, though, one has to do battle with the Burger King crowd and the downtrodden, overused bathrooms.  I have no business wondering the where’s or why’s of this moving mass of humanity, as I am one of the rootless, but, in our case, trying to “go home” again, to where we spent most of our lives in Connecticut.  However, with each passing year, the ties to the past unravel more, and we are more strangers than natives, in spite of our love of the area.  One does not put down roots in Florida to offset this loss it seems, as one’s neighbors are from someplace else, and they are wanderers as are you.  Indeed, we live too shallowly in too many places, bringing me to this great American novel, certainly one of the best of the 20th century, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

The novel was published in 1972.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature that year.  That fact begs the question of where have I been during those many years since its publication, particularly as I consider myself fairly well read when it comes to contemporary American literature.  In my defense, and it’s a weak one, perhaps it was a form of cultural snobbism -- not unlike Susan Burling Ward’s, the main character in the novel -- that is more East coast focused. When Stegner was writing, I was reading Updike, Cheever, Yates and Roth.  Those who wrote about the West, the frontier, did not reach a deep chord in me.  But, now, my own sense of place has become diluted.  It took this blog to lead me to Stegner’s masterpiece.  A few months ago, via the email address listed in the profile, I received the following (this is the truncated version):

Something made me think of you today, so I Googled your name, and Google led me to your blog. I wonder if you'll even remember me. My memories of you are no doubt washed by the passage of time, but how nice that I get to share some of this with you.

In 1969, you hired me as your secretary at Johnson Reprint. I was 20 years old, my typing was pathetic, my shorthand practically non-existent, I had no real secretarial experience, and I had just moved to New York from Meadville, Pennsylvania. Yet for some reason I will never understand you saw potential and offered me the job. It wasn't long after that you left Johnson for greener pastures, and I cut my hair short in protest. Though of course, no one but me cared how long my hair was.

And now, 44 years later, I get to thank you. You were really my first mentor, and you encouraged me to think analytically and take my silly attempts at writing poems to a deeper level. You also taught me a great deal about being a professional--although there was certainly a lot more to learn, you got me over the threshold. And the position itself provided me with skills that served me well throughout my career. A position for which I was completely unqualified. I have always felt that you played a brief but seminal role in my life.

Have you read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose? He talks about a Doppler effect (nothing to do with weather) that I couldn't possibly do justice to, so in brief, it is a sort of predestination view but not really. If you are curious and haven't read it, you will just have to do so! Anyhow, I mention it because it has become more and more of an intriguing concept for me over time. When I think back on 1969 as a fragment of my life, I marvel at where my path was to take me. And that at the time, of course, it was unwritten. …. This probably makes no sense whatsoever to you! But it does to me, and it's beginning to feel like I'm writing this more for myself than you. My apologies if it feels that way to you too!

Well, what I started out wanting to say is thank you. For being who you were at a juncture in my life and providing me with a chance, though you didn't know it any more than I did at the time, to build a springboard for myself to carry me into a fascinating and sweet journey. I am truly happy to know that your own life has been, and continues to be, so full of love and friends and success. You earned all that a long time ago just by being your intuitive and generous self.

Naturally, I was moved by this, responding, “As you didn't type well or take shorthand, I must have hired you for your intelligence which has obviously taken you to an education and a career of many accomplishments.”  I also said, “I haven't read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, but have ordered it from Amazon on your recommendation.  I get to read a lot during the summers when we live on our boat in Norwalk; sounds like an ideal summer read.”  Since then Mary and I have struck up an email relationship, two small characters on the world stage whose lives once intersected and, now, thanks to technology, intersect virtually.

But, there you have it, a bend in time, perhaps the Doppler Effect, leading me to one of the more significant literary works of our time. 

Stegner’s story is multigenerational; a tale told by Lyman Ward, a 58 year-old former history professor who is now confined to a wheelchair, taken care of by friend and neighbor Ada Hawkes and her daughter Shelly in the home of Ward’s grandparents, Susan and Oliver Ward.  It was in this California home his grandparents finally settled after living in a number of frontier outposts during the formative years of their marriage.  Lyman Ward’s father, Ollie, was the oldest of their three children. 

Part of Stegner’s novel is devoted to present-day Lyman, who is trying to stay independent in spite of his being wheelchair bound, while his only son, Rodman, is trying to place him in an assisted living home.  But Lyman is fiercely opposed to the idea.  He is now also divorced from his wife, Ellen.

But the majority of the story is the one that Lyman Ward is trying to write about his grandmother, an extraordinary women of letters and an artist as well, who marries a young engineer, reluctantly leaving her best friend Augusta, and the Northeast, to join Oliver (she thinks for only a few years before a planned return to the East) in his quest to pursue a career as a mining engineer in the West.

Actually, the character of Susan Burling Ward is based on the real life of Mary Hallock Foote, and Stegner makes liberal use of Foote’s writings in the novel, which led to some controversy although Stegner acknowledges that use saying that he did not hesitate “to warp personalities and events to fictional needs.”  At times it almost feels like an epistolary novel, although all letters are one sided, from Susan to Augusta.  Augusta’s life is firmly within the gravitational pull of the eastern intelligentsia, a life that Susan pines for, for herself and for her children. 

So, it is Lyman’s objective to write this history, to remain independent while doing so, living in the home he used to visit as a child.  He thinks of “Angle of Repose” as being an appropriate title, and considers the Doppler Effect as an alternative, “saying” to his grandmother:

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you - a train, say, or the future - has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne…. You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.

In recounting the life of his grandparents, Lyman hopes to find something about his own “angle of repose:”
 
Yet do you remember the letters you used to get from isolated miners and geologists and surveyors who had come across a copy of Century or Atlantic and seen their lives there, and wrote to ask how a lady of obvious refinement knew so much about drifts, stopes, tipples, pumps, ores, assays, mining law, claim jumpers, underground surveying, and other matters? Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like "angle of repose"? I suppose you replied, "By living with an engineer." But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest….As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don't mean the rigid angle which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it….

Wheelchair bound, and distraught and cynical about the present (the 1970s), by exploring (and glorifying) her life, Lyman temporarily finds a way out of his: Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don't completely comprehend. I'd like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don't have to live in my own…. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. I had a wife who after twenty-five years of marriage took on the coloration of the 1960s. I have a son who, though we are affectionate with each other, is no more my true son than if he breathed through gills. That is no 'gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents' world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. ….My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.

While plot and character development are outstanding strengths of the novel, the sense of place (or displacement) permeates the entire work, the East vs. West, civilization vs. the frontier, and a miscarriage of the American Dream:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of Rodman's generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she could have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home.

When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother.  So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers.  Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home.  How marvelously free they are!  How unutterably deprived!

And, indeed, the “place” of frontier and its bearing on his Grandfather’s failings, hangs heavily in the novel.  Lyman feels empathy for this man who perhaps unwisely trusted others in his pursuit of colossal dreams:

As a practitioner of hindsight I know what Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

I’ve liberally quoted from Angle of Repose as the writing is extraordinary.  These passages are typical.  Susan’s letters to Augusta are equally remarkable.  There is not one page, not one word in this novel that is superfluous.  It’s 500 plus pages are filled with energy, beauty, and philosophical contemplation.  And I think it so ironic – or is it prophetic – that while this novel was in the process of being published I was hiring Mary who, 44 years later, finds me in the brave new virtual world, and asks me a simple question, “have you read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose?”






Monday, May 6, 2013

Driving Through Diversity



My former high school teacher, a mentor to me at the time, Roger Brickner, took an ambitious trip this Spring, negotiating the old "Lincoln Highway" in his quest to discover the "real America."  This was our the first interstate highway system, fostered by the automobile industry before our entry into WWI.

Imagine making such a 3,000 mile journey back then in this powerful 66 HP 1911 Pierce-Arrow?  Not every part of the "highway" was paved.  Expect mud after a heavy rain.

Roger and friend, however, had a BMW which took them to many out of the way places.  I've been to some, especially along the iconic Route 66, but most were new to me and as a "member" of his email distribution list, I received reports along his journey, which began in Times Square, the official start of the Lincoln Highway, on March 16, but unfortunately abruptly ended on April 17 with the missive: "Just want to let all of you know that we had a crash with the BMW in Utah on Sunday.   Both Lou and I are fine... not even a scratch... but the BMW was totalled.  I am back in NYC.... All's well that ends well. Roger" 

But his final report on the trip shows his continuing deep love of this country, our political system, and our diversity -- just as I remembered his passion from my now very distant high school years. One gets a real sense of the nation just from his few paragraphs.   I asked him whether I might include in here as a "guest piece" and he replied affirmatively, adding, "my views of America have not changed in fifty years, but the party of my heritage has."

Friends:

    My final report on the trip.   We left NYC, the nation's largest, one of the most Democratic voting cities in the country, the safest among the fifty largest cities in the USA, and the most diversive city IN THE WORLD.  (name another more diverse in significant numbers, if you wish to disagree).  It is indeed a special place to start on our transcontinental trip.  New Jersey, with its large Italian, Black and Hispanic groups showed the decided end to our industrial era as we traveled down the old routes of the Lincoln Hwy.  We drove through areas of  derelict abandoned factories, deteriorating homes and could just feel the poverty of the minority inhabitants of this once blue collar prosperous area. In Philadelphia in the near inner neighborhoods as well as on the old west side the same minorities lived in poverty and bleakness where once factories  provided a good working class life.   More proof that America's old 19th century industrial epoch is behind us.  After leaving along the old MAIN  LINE we entered the western suburbs which is the start of the vast German swarth which reaches across the northern part of the country clear to the Pacific Coast. Beginning in 1682 the "Pennsylvania Dutch" (the translation of the English speakers of  Deutsch) came to this country.  Even today some of the Amish still speak a form of German within their own communities. Here they remain farmers, but as you cross Pennsylvania more "secular" Germans can be seen as far west as Pittsburgh along the Lincoln Hwy (Route 30).  These are the "Eastern" Germans, but after Pittsburgh you sense you are in the Mid West where after the Revolution these Germans kept moving west in their Conestoga Wagons.  Now, the landscape flattens out and so does the mind set and attitudes of the people.  Here there is cheerfulness, but less imagination, it seems.  It is a BURGER KING, MC DONALDS and MOTEL 6 world here. It is hamburgers and HUGE servings of everything.  Only in the urban areas is there much sophistication.  Chicago is the great  exception. Just out of Chicago and to perhaps 50 miles out of St. Louis we are back to the German Mid West.  Subtly we sense a change in the inhabitants.  More and more and then dominantly we enter the region of the migrating Appalachian Scots-Irish heritage. This is the area, just south of the German swarth, where the Appalachian folk moved west out of their mountain strongholds after the Revolutionary War ended. These folk are even more insular, but with greater Hoop De La in their attitudes than with the Germans.  Cowboy talk increases , but the food remains the same... too much for too little cost and too many calories.  The proportion of Obese people increases. By Oklahoma the Native Americans and Mexicans are seen in large numbers, Their influence is cultural, but surely not political in this state. Politically, from mid-Missouri to all of Oklahoma the white population is about 80% Republican.  My Obama car sticker was not approved of by many.

    By the time we crossed the New Mexico border, the Hispanic and Native American population was even greater.  In Tucumcari it was still dominated by "Anglos"  most Appalachia folk and some Germans.  But by Santa Rosa and Santa Fe it was decidedly more Mexican, Spanish (the earliest settlers on what is now American soil) and Native American.  Here there seems to be a guarded acceptance of each other's culture. This was especially true in the Santa Fe area. Here Caucasian non- Spanish seem still to be the intruders in this Spanish Missionary culture.  Here it is easy to understand the great diversity of the country and the challenge it poses for our future.  Once in Northern Arizona Native Americans take firm hold and are the Majority,  Here few "Anglos" live anywhere but in the larger towns.

    In California we return to the sophisticated areas of the East and some Mid Western urban areas.  It is a nation sharply divided, and yet, it is a nation which prospers because of its diversity since the idea of ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE is accepted by the vast majority.  Our nationalism is not, as in Europe and Asia, based on one ethnic group based on their own language, but a nation based on an idea not an ethnicity.

    Comments most welcome.  I hope I have not bored you with my thoughts

                                                                    Roger