"R" -- a Story about Sal Salasin

Frontispiece of a book of poems by
Salasin, published in 1988

In January 1969, about 400 students at my alma mater occupied the administration building and staged a two-week sit-in. The students were protesting the denial of tenure to an assistant sociology professor named Marlene Dixon.

Ultimately, whether Dixon had been turned down because she was a feminist and / or a Marxist (or unworthy of tenure) became part of the larger issue of student participation in decisions by the university. Often cited were the lack of student representation on advisory committees, the necessity of more women professors, and the effect of the university’s urban renewal initiative on poor blacks.

Of course student occupations and strikes occurred all over North America and Europe during the 1960s. But since I was a student at Chicago, this sit-in was particularly interesting.

Besides, my friend Andrew and I were in the habit of flipping through old issues of the college newspaper and came upon the 1969 story about six months before its ten-year anniversary. We thought that our student paper should run a retrospective and I would write it.

Outside the administration building
during the 1969 sit-in

How long ago this seems now. The sit-in had occurred just a decade earlier. The past was nearer then.

In 1979, plenty of people on both sides of the sit-in still lived in the neighborhood. As I started to contact them, each led to another and then many others. Someone referred me to a former student who had been expelled and I wrote to him at an address in Asia. The letter was forwarded two or three times.

Finally a reply from “R,” as Andrew and I came to refer to him, arrived from Japan. R never gave us his first name. The letter was hand-written in cramped script on six onion skin pages. We eagerly deciphered it together.

    

Now, thanks to the internet, I know who he was. But at the time, Robert Alan Salasin desperately wished to remain anonymous. He believed that at least two federal agencies would love to get their hands on him. However, he could not resist telling us about the sit-in, his two expulsions from the university, and how it was better to work around an FBI plant than to out him and have to figure out the identity of the new guy.

Immersed in ideology, R reflected on the failure of student movements:

The problem was that we were terrible Marxists—we didn’t practice the logical implications of our own analysis. What we should have done was organize slowly and carefully to enter into struggles of the university workers and local black community, an effort of several years at least . . .

R also expressed acute paranoia that Andrew and I had trouble comprehending. But his “ultra-Leftist adventures,” as he described them, had continued after he left Chicago and went on to Drake University where he earned 23 court injunctions. So it made sense that the U.S. government kept an eye on him.

Poem by Sal Salasin

What we did not know, though, is that R was a poet whose work appeared regularly in San Francisco Poetry Journal, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and other alternative reviews. A founder of RealPoetik Magazine, he published several collections of poetry under the name Sal Salasin.

One of his poems, “Radio City,” begins:

When I was six my parents took me to Radio City to see Esther Williams

in Dangerous When Wet

and I thought that’s a funny name for a girl,

Wenwette.  .  .

Andrew and I never would have guessed that R might have a sense of humor.

In the mid-1980s, R came back to live in the United States. He returned to Chicago and other places where he had been young and angry.

Some of that anger persisted in the poems which he continued to write and publish until his death in Berkeley in 2009, at the age of 61.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/10/r-story-about-sal-salasin.html?m=1

 

A Dress Shop in Chicago

North Michigan Avenue 
(Illustration from Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1916)

Mme. Marguerite always said that she arrived in Chicago as an understudy to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. When the theater company returned to Europe, Marguerite decided to part ways with the Divine Sarah.

Ta-ta!

It was 1910. She stayed in Chicago and became a modiste – that’s a word you don’t hear anymore. It means a designer and purveyor of fashionable women’s clothing. Between 1912 and 1948, Mme. Marguerite reigned over the wardrobes of the city’s wealthiest women.

Her first shop, House of Marguerite, opened on North Michigan Avenue to the delight of Mrs. Armour, Mrs. McCormick and other ladies who wanted custom-made gowns.

Their husbands and fathers were industrialists, bankers, entrepreneurs; perhaps the heirs to great fortunes. But when it came to fashion, Marguerite was the authority:

“I’m pleased to say, not a chi chi dress in sight!”

                                                          and

“There was white satin at all of the important French collections last spring.”

Wedding gown by Mme. Marguerite, 1916

Except during wartime, Mme. Marguerite traveled to Europe twice yearly to see the shows in Paris. She became very successful. By the early twenties, she had three shops, three cars, a chauffeur, and a country home in Michigan.

Around that time, Marguerite married for the first time. Henri Farre also was French, although it’s not clear whether they met in France or Chicago.  

A painter and aviator, he had held an unusual position during World War I. Just after Farre enlisted, the Governor of Les Invalides (also director of the Army Museum) asked him to serve as a military artist.*

Farre would “paint certain phases of action, so as to immortalize on canvas true pictures of fighting in the field,” the governor told him.

When Farre explained that he was an aviator as well as a painter, the governor said:

Eh bien, c’est parfait; I had not thought of the fifth weapon. Would you like to be a painter of aviation?

He immediately appointed Farre to the first group of French bombing squadrons: 1^er  Groupe des Escadrilles de Bombardement.    

And so Farre flew through the war, capturing the shattered landscapes and bursting bombs in pencil and paint. He watched and sketched over Metz, Verdun, Zeebrugge, the Somme, and the North Sea. He also painted many officers’ portraits.

In 1918, Henri toured the United States with a collection of his war paintings entitled “Sky Fighters of France.” The Art Institute of Chicago presented a major exhibition of his work. His visit was said to be a propaganda mission because Farre and other officers asked for more American planes and ships. But the tour also raised money for the American Fund for French Wounded.

After the war, Farre received the Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre from the French government. He and Marguerite married in 1922. Settling in Chicago, Farre continued to paint – the Chicago River Bridge, football games at Soldier Field. The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum owns 75 of his World War I paintings. He died in 1934.

An Aviation Fight at 12,000 Feet, painting by
Henri Farre that was exhibited in New York, 1918

One year later, Marguerite married Dr. John F. Pick. Born in Austria, he would become a leading plastic surgeon in the United States. He studied at Rush Medical College in Chicago and at the University of Prague, where he became an assistant to Professor Frantisek Burian. This was a great honor, for Burian is considered one of the founders of plastic surgery. 

Back in the U.S., Dr. Pick developed a theory about recidivism. He believed that performing plastic surgery on the faces of prisoners, to correct features that were deemed irregular or unattractive, would give them the confidence to reinvent (to borrow a twenty-first century word) themselves upon release.

Between 1937 and 1947, Pick worked at Stateville Prison in Illinois, where he performed 663 surgeries on 1,376 inmates. Of those discharged, 1.7% became recidivists. Pick published his results in medical journals, insisting that “the correction of physical defects would mentally straighten out many inmates.” The theory never caught on.

In 1949, Dr. Pick’s interest swayed from plastic surgery to cancer when he and several colleagues became obsessed with an anti-cancer drug called Krebiozen. A Yugoslavian doctor, Stevan Durovic, created it and brought it to the U.S. that year.

A prominent physician and vice president of the University of Illinois, Dr. Andrew Ivy, became convinced of the drug’s effectiveness. Others, including Dr. Pick and the eminent Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, joined him.

There were clinical trials, and hundreds of physicians nationwide tried the medication for their patients. But the claims proved unsubstantiated and Krebiozen was discredited. The Krebiozen Research Foundation, led by Dr. Ivy, later accused the American Medical Association and American Cancer Society of subverting data. Lawsuits and trials would follow into the mid-1960s.

Brochure promoting Krebiozen, 1950s

In 1952, John F. Pick announced that he had treated his wife, Marguerite, with Krebiozen during the last 15 months of her life as she fought breast cancer. She had died one year earlier with four society dames at her bedside.

1951

*The details of Henri Farre’s experience appear in his book, Sky Fighters of France, Aerial Warfare, 1914-1918.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/10/a-dress-shop-in-chicago.html?m=1

Going Back to Mount Vernon, N.Y.

This is the house where I grew up;
sketch from a 1920s architectural journal

During the 1970s, A Separate Peace by John Knowles became a mainstay of the U.S. high school English curriculum. It is a tale of male adolescence, namely the complicated relationship between two boys who attend a New England college preparatory school. All of the action occurs on campus between the summers of 1942 and 1943.

A Separate Peace is sad and introspective. The death of one of the boys creates moral uncertainty against the backdrop of World War II. That probably explains the book’s continuing presence in the syllabus, although whether it merits that place is debatable. 

Regardless, its first sentence always had, for me, a singular resonance.

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before.

With this opening John Knowles performs the work of any good writer, which is to say he puts his arm around the reader and invites her in.

Of course the book isn’t about the school looking newer than the grown man recalled. It’s about the experience of revisiting the past. 

It reminds me of the late 1980s, returning to the area where I grew up, now with a husband and children.

The boys were a toddler and a baby. They would spend their childhood, and a bit more, in a place infinitely recognizable to me. They went to nursery school at the Mt. Vernon Y and children’s hour at the Mt. Vernon Public Library. Their favorite cookies came from a Mt. Vernon bakeshop. They ate their first pizza in Mt. Vernon.

Mt. Vernon Public Library, 1920s

Many times I showed them the house where I grew up and the houses where my friends had lived and the streets along which we walked everywhere.

They came to watch out for the gazebo in Hartley Park, which looks like an illustration in a children’s book, and the turret of the Victorian house where E.B. White kept a mouse when he was growing up in Mt. Vernon. They saw the sights!

Childhood home of author E. B. White,
Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

When the children were young, every tale I told would elicit enthusiasm. One of their favorites involved driving home from a friend’s house during the 1977 blackout.  

When the lights went out, my friend and I were sitting on a flat part of the roof of his house, having crawled out a window into the hot night. It’s actually more of a shock to be outside than inside at the moment when the lights go out. We made our way back into the house and down the stairs and I got in the car to drive home.

I followed the familiar streets, now pitch-black like country roads. Within ten minutes, I pulled up in front of our house where my father stood on the front lawn, waiting.

It’s a simple story that the boys found exciting and comforting at the same time. They were transported to a place where their mother was young and faced something slightly daunting that worked out happily in the end.  

Nearly 40 years later, I remember a feeling of absolute calm riding through the dark streets.

Sometimes, not always, that’s what you get for going back.

Gazebo in Hartley Park,
Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/going-back-to-mount-vernon-ny.html?m=1

Discovery Publishers & Edward Dwight Walker

PLEASE NOTE: DISCOVERY PUBLISHERS, WHICH IS AFFILIATED WITH THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT, HAS STOLEN MY WORK, BELOW, AND POSTED IT ON ITS OWN WEBSITE. BUT IT IS MY WORK. -- CLAUDIA KEENAN

Edward Dwight Walker, 1880s

He may, in fact, have tipped out of the canoe and become entangled in the fishing line. After two men found his body floating in the Roanoke River, a coroner examined it right there on the shore and ruled the death accidental. 

But a few people who saw him after he arrived at Weldon, N.C., told a reporter that Mr. Walker “acted rather strangely and as if partly insane.”

A 30-year old magazine writer and editor, Edward Dwight Walker had left Brooklyn, where he lived with his mother, and headed South in March 189o. His colleagues at The Cosmopolitan said that he sought rest from a grueling schedule. He also may have been collecting material for a story about fishing.

If so, he came to the right place. The town of Weldon is known as the “Rockfish Capital of the World” during early spring when striped bass swarm the Roanoke River to spawn. As the stripers run the river, anglers flock to the beautiful mid-Atlantic wilderness and its blue waters.

In those days, the opening of the season didn’t cause traffic jams on I-95. Besides, Mr. Walker would have arrived by train, possibly with fishing paraphernalia. He stopped overnight at the Coast Line Hotel. The next morning, he brushed off the offer of a guide and walked away with his stuff.

He set off on the river in a log canoe.

 

Roanoke River, around 1900

Born in New Haven in 1859, Walker graduated from Williams College in 1880 and went to work at Harper’s Weekly, an influential political magazine whose editors subtitled it A Journal of Civilization. After the Civil War, Harper’s became widely known for publishing cartoons of Tammany Hall boss William Tweed by Thomas Nast.

Although it is hard to believe, by the 1880s the U.S. had a self-reported literacy rate of 90%. Therefore it makes sense that the country experienced a magazine boom during this decade. Among the many periodicals that came into being, The Cosmopolitan started publishing in 1886 as a “family magazine.”

Edward Walker joined the staff soon after, working as a writer and editor. The magazine survived bankruptcy and reinvented itself twice before the dynamo entrepreneur and inventor John Brisben Walker became editor in 1889. (The two men were not related.)

The arrival of John Brisben Walker may have caused some stress for Edward, who had served as editor in 1888 and clearly was passed over.  

You have to hand it to Brisben Walker. He increased The Cosmopolitan’s circulation to 400,000 from 16,000 between 1890 and 1905, when he sold the magazine to William Randolph Hearst for $1 million.

First issue of The Cosmopolitan, March 1886

To build circulation, the magazine sought more attention-grabbing stories. That left less room for the type of stories that Edward wrote; for example, a feature about the New England Conservatory of Music which The Cosmopolitan published posthumously.

Several days before he drowned, Edward Walker sent an inquiry to Jefferson Davis.

Cosmopolitan planned a series of articles “to form a complete history of the contest about slavery which preceded the war,” Edward wrote to the former president of the Confederacy. He offered $150 for Davis’s “pro-slavery side of the struggle.”

Along with the letter to Davis, Edward wrote rapturously about the Roanoke River to several friends while traveling in North Carolina during the last month of his life.

And as a Theosophist, Edward probably spent a lot of time reflecting on life and death. Theosophy (derived from “wisdom-religion”) is a kind of spiritualism. Its believers reach for divinity by learning the hidden truths that lie in the past and in the world of nature. Theosophy became very popular during the Victorian Era, and Brooklyn had a large, active community of Theosophists.   

In 1888, Edward had published Reincarnation, a study of forgotten truth, a 325-page study with an exhaustive bibliography. The book started as a lecture to a group of Theosophists.

“Reincarnation illuminates the darkest passages in the murky road of life,” Edward wrote. He argued that materialism is the cause of all the evils in modern society: “Reincarnation combats that foe by a subtle and deadly warfare.”      

***

In Mrs. Walker’s crowded parlor, the Reverend John Malcolm of the Park Congregational Church conducted a brief service and led an Episcopal prayer. Then everyone went to Green-Wood Cemetery, which is famous as the resting place of Samuel Morse, Horace Greeley, the aforementioned Boss Tweed, and many others.

There, a friend read a sentimental poem.

Lone youth: to lay thy weary thought upon the river’s tide,

Thou camest in a southern clime

A stranger to its side;

The pine tree put its finger forth

And beckoned to thee there. . .

What last imploring words went out

When the rude billow broke, -

Though wilt not tell, save to the

Sea, O heartless Roanoke,

O cruel Roanoke.

This is one of those impossibly opaque stories.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/o-cruel-roanoke.html?m=1

Kansas: a 9/11 story

Sky over Kansas, 9/11

A clear blue sky arched over Kansas on the morning of September 11, 2001. I know that, can still see it, because driving home from an early trip to the grocery I glanced up at the white paths of exhaust left by planes curving back toward the airport.

We were expatriate New Yorkers living with our two sons in suburban Johnson County, where fields of hay bales and meandering horses lay incongruously across the road from supermarkets, high schools, and corporate headquarters with their vast parking lots.    

Leaving New York had made us unhappy. But in my memory Kansas is always becoming a fonder place. I am trying to say that I am glad we lived there, especially on 9/11.

At first we were shocked by the streetscape, juxtaposed with the quiet village of tall green trees and winding streets from which we had arrived about a year earlier. Here, busy streets bound by sprawling church complexes and condominium developments headed south in four lanes, dwindled to two and then one skinny road ending finally in a little town with dust kicking up around the edges.

And circling perpetually overhead, the hawks and turkey vultures in the astonishing sky where wind and light shifted constantly, patterned intricately with clouds; sunrise or sunset always visible at the end of the flat land beyond the next shopping center.

By September 11, 2001, these things had become very familiar yet I did not feel an affinity with this place. Uneasily, I compared my life to that of a young bride in mid-nineteenth century Kansas Territory, waiting for the minister to pay a visit. Certainly I was still waiting that morning at 8:15 Central Time, pulling into the garage to find the television uncharacteristically on and the telephone ringing.  

For many New Yorkers who had boarded early morning flights to the West Coast, Kansas City would be where the planes set down. There were so many that the airport became entirely compacted.

Among the passengers on these planes was a good friend whose twin brother had called, panicking, to say that Chris had been able to reach him and thought they would be landing in a few minutes. My husband immediately left for the airport to get him. Then another friend got through – her husband and two associates had also landed in Kansas City and here was his information. I called my husband and he connected with Tom.

The car filled with passengers, Jeffrey drove everyone to our home in Kansas. Tumbling out, bewildered and frightened, we hugged and shivered in the noon sun.

One of the passengers had no personal or professional connection to the others in the group. An executive in the construction business, the mother of two little girls, Denise lacked even a carry-on because she would have returned on the red-eye.

Sitting beside Chris on the descending plane, she couldn’t place a call on her cell phone and had anxiously borrowed his to call her husband. As they disembarked, Chris asked where she would stay in Kansas City and persuaded her to come with him.

Several years later Denise reflected, “Getting off a plane with a strange man in a strange city, climbing into a car driven by a strange man with other strange people to a strange house…”

Sky over Chicago, 1994

She needed some clothing. We tried a few stores before finding Wal-Mart open. Denise had never before shopped in a big-box store and initially thought that one of the salesladies was my friend because of her sweetness. Some of that was Kansas style, but also surely reflected the catastrophic events of the day.

Enabled by our hi-tech household – a phone system fitted for conference calls, plenty of computers, a fax machine – the group conducted business and tried to figure out how to get back to New York.

We watched the horror unfold, shared meals and talked about the world and ourselves, reflecting in a way that must be unique to people who are brought together randomly in the midst of fearsome events.

Nearly a week after Tuesday, the five of them drove east in what was surely the last available rental minivan for miles around. After they left, I went outside and looked up at the sky. Everything around me was my home.

Sky collage

Collage + photos by Claudia Keenan

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/kansas-911-story.html?m=1

James D. Corrothers, Happy at Last?

James D. Corrothers, around 1910

In 1898  . . .  “a sunburst fell upon my being.”

James D. Corrothers later recalled the moment when he decided to enter the ministry of the AME Church. Upon learning his first assignment would be in New York, however, he and his wife agreed they would rather return to Michigan.

Turning back the clock, Corrothers found work unloading barrels of salt and flour from freight barges. The wet salt made the skin on his hands crack open and bleed. He switched to work on a fruit farm.

Eventually James came around to the idea of taking the offer in New York. He dropped his wife and sons with her family near Baltimore and hustled to the upstate town of Bath, where he received news that his wife and younger son had died.

Corrothers had no time to grieve. He brought his older son to Bath and worked for a pittance, supplementing his income by publishing Negro dialect verse in The Century, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Sunday Herald, and other papers.

Occasionally, Corrothers contributed to The Crisis, 
newspaper of the NAACP. His poem, "A Song of May and June,"
appeared in the June 1914 issue.

Moving on, he earned success and a good living as a pastor in the New Jersey towns of Red Bank and Hackensack, and prepared to answer the call of another congregation. But then:

The black tragedy of my life fell upon me; and I staggered and groaned, like a bludgeoned traveler in the dark. I was a stranger and nearly penniless. I had sacrificed all to do good, when, suddenly, I was accused of plotting to ruin my bishop’s good name – a thing of which I was as innocent as Heaven itself!  

The bishop brought a lawsuit against Corrothers, who was acquitted. It didn’t matter. He faced the wrath of the influential leaders of the AME church. James never recovered from their viciousness. He became an outcast immediately; no home, no congregation. He could not get another job and writing opportunities dried up. Thankfully, friends took in his son.  

Shall I tell of days of hunger, and wandering; of nights spent under the open, wintry sky? Shall I tell of rebuffs and buffetings; of “friends” who forgot or who “passed by on the other side”?

Many years later, Corrothers reflected on the Black church’s domination of African-American society and culture.

No other Negro institution is so powerful; so influential. All Negro life in American centres about the church. Coloured professional and business men, as a class, find it wise and profitable to remain in the good graces of the church. Even successful race leaders, like Dunbar, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, have not disdained a hearing through the Negro church.

Sabotaged at every turn, Corrothers gave up on being a minister ever again. He returned to New York where he found a job in Brooklyn as a janitor’s assistant, working from 5am until midnight. He loved the toil, he later wrote, and relished being able to send small gifts to his son.

Then one day it came to him that he should leave AME and join the Baptist Church, which welcomed him warmly.

Eventually, Corrothers remarried; with his second wife, Rosina, he had another son. He moved his family back to South Haven, Michigan, and built a brick church with his own hands. As the area developed as a resort for whites, however, Blacks felt unwelcome and left the area; so did he. 

View of the Black River, South Haven, Michigan; Corrothers
had a lifelong affinity with the area where he spent time as a child
and started a congregation around 1910.

Landing next in Lexington, Virginia, he renounced the Baptists for the Presbyterian Church over “a matter of conscience.”

In 1916, James Corrothers was ensconced as pastor of a church in Westchester, Pennsylvania. He died one year later.

While Corrothers figures in African-American history, his story does not resemble those of his peers who traveled a neat trajectory toward success. He moved often between triumph and despair, which may have reflected his own personality (at least in part). 

The hideous treatment of Corrothers by the elders of the AME Church is shocking, but so was Corrothers' candid denouncement of its abuse of power. While he never achieved the renown of Booker T. Washington, his clear-eyed perspective on race in America sets him apart even today. 

*This post is the last of three about James D. Corrothers; see August 17 + 24.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/james-d-corrothers-happy-at-last.html?m=1

Lillian Gish on 53rd Street

Lillian Gish, 1919
Portrait by Hamilton King 

One summer during the mid-1970s, I had a job working for a literary publicist who was a hard-driving woman. The imperious Alice started barking orders at 8:30 in the morning, flounced out to expense account lunches, and harassed us till quittin’ time. But she deserved her excellent reputation. Her clients included the top New York publishers.

The office, located at 515 Madison Avenue, was messy and drab with old furniture. It didn’t have to look nice because no one ever saw it except for the few employees. We spent a lot of time moving around cartons of books in order to clear work space that continued to elude us.      

The agency’s tip of the hat to modernity, an enormous photo-copier, occupied center stage. It’s a dim memory now, but in those days office machines broke down often. There would be a paper jam of egregious proportions, and perhaps one employee had the magic touch, and if she failed, and we had pried open all of the wings and doors and pressed reset a thousand times, and perhaps inflicted a few whacks, it would be necessary to call a repair man who always took his own sweet time.

The books that Alice promoted tended to be how-to’s and tell-all’s; unfortunately, I can’t remember any except for Dorothy and Lillian Gish by Lillian Gish, the gorgeous actress whose first big film was D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. Its other title was The Clansman, but no one blamed Miss Gish for that. (However, she had been a member of the America First Committee before World War II; that ended when Hollywood blacklisted her.)

Lillian and her younger sister, Dorothy, started as child actors during the silent film era and became stars of early cinema. After Dorothy died at age 70 in 1968, Lillian decided to write a book about the two of them, more scrapbook than biography. Scribner’s published it in 1973. The book must have faded fast, because a few years later Alice was hired to get the lot sold.

Her idea was to throw a big party for Miss Gish. She invited reporters who covered culture and fashion, all kinds of book people and famous New Yorkers, and somehow this did the trick. The former star – who would live to be 99 – sat on a loveseat all evening and charmed everyone. Really, she had remained so exquisite that you couldn’t stop looking at her.   

All of this floated back earlier this month when public radio’s “Writer’s Almanac” noted that the American poet Louise Bogan was born on August 11, 1897.

There’s a connection.

The office was located about a block away from the old Doubleday Bookstore at Fifth Avenue and 53^rd Street. It’s “old” because the space has been occupied by all kinds of stores since its demise about 25 years ago.

I found Bogan’s collection of poems, The Blue Estuaries, in Doubleday during that summer of 1975. The book had been published in 1968 yet still could be found in a bookstore seven years later. That’s how things used to be.

In order to reach the poetry section, you had to go upstairs. That meant climbing Doubleday’s spiral staircase. It was solidly built, but the ascent felt slightly disconcerting because the treads were wide and the steps were open.

But it was worth it for Bogan’s poems, some of which appealed to an emotional young woman, me.

              Back through smoke

              Back through noon

              Back along love

              Back through moonlight

That was my summer on 53^rd Street.

Doubleday Bookstore staircase, 2016;
now sheathed in white plaster

*Louise Bogan never became as well-known as Lillian Gish. The poet won Guggenheim Fellowships in 1933 and 1937; edited fiction at The New Yorker; joined the likes of Du Bois and Faulkner in condemning Franco’s bombardment of Madrid in 1936, and became U.S. Poet Laureate in 1945. Lillian Gish rode a wave of mass culture and celebrity. Generally, critics acclaimed her work. She wielded unprecedented influence as a Hollywood actress. Playwright Tennessee Williams wrote the part of Blanche DuBois for her but she turned it down because her ailing mother required attention.  

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/summer-on-53rd-street.html?m=1