Amid A Crowd Of Stars

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

With my mother at Easter

W.B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old” appears in A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, published in 1952 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. My copy has an inscription on the endpaper: “To Harvey on Christmas 1955 with deepest affection from Louis.” Harvey Taylor was my father, Louis Cook my godfather. Handsome Detroit newspapermen, for years they competed for the affections of my lovely newspaperwoman mother, Jean.

I was 14 months old that Christmas. Louis’s inscription expresses magnanimity in defeat. Still, he had probably guessed that alcoholism would destroy my parents’ marriage. Louis told me years later that he’d driven my father to more than one AA meeting. Six-foot-five in his stocking feet, gentle and strong, winner of the Bronze Star in World War II, Louis was biding his time.

In November, my mother moved to Yorba Linda, leaving behind the Pasadena house she bought half a lifetime ago when she got a job editing the old “View” section of the Los Angeles Times. A few years later, she became associate editor and one of the nation’s top female journalists. Kathy and I have been cleaning out her house, the work of many middle-aged children. There isn’t much left. Needing homes are the wrought-iron coffee table she loved and a long, Ponderosa-style dining room table and chairs she had made for the dinner parties she loved to throw.

All I really care about are the things she wrote. A commencement address she delivered at Mount St. Mary’s College. An article entitled “What Is An Episcopalian?”, which she wrote for the Detroit Free Press in 1961, when our General Convention was called in Motown. Her elegiac features about the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo. Diary entries, including one on the date of my birth saying I weighed eight pounds, and it hadn’t gone easily. About a year ago, her advancing dementia robbed her of the pleasure of reading these aloud to visitors.

And then there are the letters. Especially Louis’s.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

My mother wouldn’t marry Louis, which I always wanted her to do, since he was my father for all intents and purposes. She never really explained why, and now, she can’t. Her eyes sometimes glimmer when I mention him or my father. She doesn’t remember her devoted second husband, Richard Lescoe, at all.

The surpassing gift is that she saved about twenty of Louis’s love letters. They’re all written on old-fashioned newspaper copy paper. He never dated them. He wrote one, addressed “Dearest,” during his first visit to New York City, where it appears he was attending the famed Al Smith politicians’ dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria as a member of a Free Press delegation. It must’ve been about 1966, when he and Jean were in their forties.

“I have at last found the milieu for which I was born,” he wrote. “Nowhere in Manhattan can be found a gayer, more suave, more sophisticated man of the world than I. Especially since I stumbled out of a bar taking with me somebody’s Kuppenheimer overcoat. Unfortunately my victim’s gloves don’t fit me but they are Sak’s gray suede and I cut quite a figure dangling them carelessly in my left hand as I saunter down Park Ave.”

My mother loved John F. Kennedy, and at the black tie dinner at the Waldorf, lifelong labor organizer Louis encountered JFK’s nemesis and my future boss. He wrote, “I hesitate to mention this, darling, but Nixon is a fairly engaging character at close range.” Later, my mother managed to convince herself, but not me, that she had voted for Nixon, which made it easier to accept that her son was helping write his books. Her willfulness and my immature frustration made our relationship difficult. The dementia has taken all that away, too. I don’t think she’s ever been happier, nor have we ever been so close. And that is Easter.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

This post appeared originally in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church.

Wooden You Know It

My St. John's friend Tom Tierney, formerly of Detroit and the U.S. Air Force, forwarded a compendium of Bernard Zee's photos from the 2009 air show and open house at Edwards Air Force Base. This is a Lockheed YO-3 Quiet Star, used for battlefield reconnaissance during the Vietnam war. Elements of its design, especially the wooden propeller, enabled it to fly at altitudes as low as 200 feet without being heard by the enemy.

Don't Write The Things The Reader Skips

While Kathy and I were in Detroit, Metro Times, its alternative weekly, published a great Q&A with crime novelist and Detroiter Elmore Leonard. The on-line version doesn't include his "ten (plus one) rules for writing in brief":

1. Never open a book with the weather. 2. Avoid prologues: They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreward. 3. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"...he admonished gravely. 4. Never use a very other than "said" to carry dialogue. 5. Keep your exclamation marks under control. 6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose." 7. Use regional dialogue, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. 9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. 10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

My post important rule is one that sums up the ten: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

How Do You Shrink A City?

With Detroit's population 25% smaller than than ten years ago, city planners are considering ways to compress the city geographically, including by gradually diminishing service levels in the most sparsely populated neighborhoods. Some are worried, as Monica Davey reports:

Would this simply amount to another chapter of “urban renewal” in which the poorest, least educated and unluckiest would be forced to move?

And what exactly would become of the neighborhoods with diminished services, likely to be places already plagued in some cases by what residents described as new, audacious brands of crimes? (Stores in some neighborhoods here have taken to placing cement blocks outside their glass entryways, residents said, to prevent thieves from crashing their cars through the doors for break-ins.)

“I’m hopeful, but I don’t know what it all would mean,” said Bayard Kurth, a screen printer from the West Village, another established neighborhood. “Big greenbelts in the city? Unmonitored places where people do whatever they want? All-day parties there?”

Photo: Lagoon and skating pavilion, Belle Isle, Detroit

April Fools For Christ

On an Easter Sunday about 45 years ago, our little family was a little late for services at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit. We found seats in a pew near the back, on the right near the aisle. The congregation was half a verse into "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today." As we reached for our hymnals, my English-born grandmother, Lily Sharley, sighed with pleasure and said, "I'm so glad we got here in time to sing this." It was a powerful moment for me, fixed in my memory and dreams; and this pew looks about right.

Kathy and I visited the cathedral Tuesday afternoon after I'd given a speech in nearby Dearborn to 300 funeral home managers. I received the invitation thanks to my musical buddy Gary "Boom" Baker, whom I've known since he assisted with President and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw in 1994 and 1993 as director of the Nixon library. Gary's now an executive of SCI, owner of over 2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries.

The funeral business is worried about losing customers, the mainline church about losing congregants. One brand-new solution we fixed on is good, old pastorship. The two keynoters at the SCI conference, celebrant trainer Glenda Stansbury and I, found ourselves in a degree of friendly opposition. She travels around the country training laypeople and the occasional atheist to celebrate and preach at funerals because, these days, many family member of decedents distrust the church, don't believe in God, or just assume we'll do a poor job. In my remarks, I said the church had better not be too willing to cede that ground.

Our hosts asked me to tell Kathy's and my Nixon funeral stories (you try getting Henry Kissinger to stay within five minutes for a eulogy sometime, plus there was that moment with G. Gordon Liddy) before talking about funeral ministry. It was a chance to really unwind, since they gave me an hour and 15 minutes (which will alarm the people of St. John's). As Episcopalians will, I mentioned the priesthood conferred on all Christians by baptism. Arriving at St. Paul's on Woodward Ave. a few hours later (not far from the Fox Theater, where my homey Eminem arrived in that fine new Chrysler in his Super Bowl ad), Kathy and I were warmly greeted by a genial man on his way to the parking lot. I announced a little boisterously that on April 1 I'd celebrated the 50th anniversary of my baptism at St. Paul's. He replied that he was the Very Rev. Scott Hunter, installed as dean of St. Paul's four years ago, also on April 1. Couple of April Fools for Christ, the dean and I.

My City In Ruins

Detroit's population has declined by nearly a quarter million since 2000:

Laying bare the country’s most startling example of modern urban collapse, census data on Tuesday showed that Detroit’s population had plunged by 25 percent over the last decade. It was dramatic testimony to the crumbling industrial base of the Midwest, black flight to the suburbs and the tenuous future of what was once a thriving metropolis.

Hat tip to Tom Tierney

Ashes To Ashes, Finally

I kept them in my old 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Five crosses from Palm Sunday services I attended when I was a boy in Detroit during the 1960s.

My mother, Jean, gave me the leather-bound book, with its golf-leaf, onionskin pages, when I was confirmed in 1967. The crosses were pressed in the front, where she’d written her dedication. I’d finger them when I got the book down from the shelf to check an old prayer or service. They were dry but not as brittle as you might think, as though I’d put them there last year rather than during the Johnson administration.

Seeing them always made me think of going with my mother and grandparents to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave. On the way, we’d drive by the Vernor's ginger ale plant. Afterward we’d go to a diner for silver-dollar pancakes or the Art Institute for an egg salad sandwich and a peek at the famed Diego Rivera murals and an Egyptian mummy that was on display.

Every year at St. John’s Church, repeating the Altar Guild’s call to bring in last year’s crosses so we could burn them for Ash Wednesday, I’d feel a little guilty about my hoard of keepsakes.

But this year, driving to church on the morning of the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I thought about an Altar Guild member who was so eager to light the mighty pyre that she was coming to church in the throes of her recovery from surgery. I thought of my children or grandchildren finding the crosses on some occasion (far in the future, I trust) and wondering what to do with them. I realized that my memories were alive in my heart and spirit and that in any event my precious crosses, lent but not given, were a half-century overdue.

So I added my ancient crosses to our congregants' newer ones, to be formed into fateful black marks on a thousand foreheads Wednesday during four services at our Orange County Episcopal church and school. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

If anyone says he's thirsty after Ash Wednesday service, I'll recommend he try a Vernor's.

Best Detroit Super Bowl Ad Ever

This glimpse of my battered, proud home town was almost too good to be true. I was sure that Eminem was going to jump up on the stage of the old Fox Theater with the choir and bust out a chorus of "Lose Yourself." But it was great to see and hear Woodward Ave. pulsing with the beat.

My City In Ruins

From The Ruins Of Detroit (Steidl, 2010) by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. I remember my parents talking about Cass Tech High School as the pinnacle of public education in our proud city. This photo was taken in the school laboratory. More here.

They Forgot. Mary Remembered.

Featuring artwork by Brenna Hayden, daughter of Bob and Kathe, here's my annual Christmas letter to the people of God at St. John's Church:

In the adult Christian formation hour during Advent at St. John’s, we’ve been taking a new look at the greatest and most treasured stories in the world: The accounts of Jesus Christ’s birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

In the middle of our series, I remembered something I had wondered about in Sunday School all those years ago in Detroit. If everyone knew Jesus’s birth was such a big deal – if angelic hosts proclaimed it, if great men came from the East, if mighty King Herod himself tried to hunt Jesus down – why did they seem to forget all about it until his adult ministry began 30 years later?

Fr. Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic scholar, has an answer. It’s the difference between amazement and faith. Luke writes that the people in Bethlehem “were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (NRSV 2:18-19).

Amazement comes easy. Think of all the times we say, “That’s amazing” or “That’s incredible.” Soon the world’s demands and distractions muffle our amazement. We go searching for the next big thing so we can be amazed again. So it was with the superstitious people of Jesus’s time. They were amazed, and they forgot. But Mary, in the depth of her faith and destiny, understood everything. Mary, whom the Church called God-Bearer, was memory-bearer as well.

May she be an example to us this Christmas as we are again amazed by the children’s voices, the beauty of the music and prayers and candlelight, the small miracle of reconnection with family and friends. We don’t really need the next big thing, because we have the biggest thing of all. So join us at St. John’s this Christmas – and bring a friend to church!

On Christmas Eve, we worship at 4 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. The second service concludes about midnight. We offer a spoken service at 10 a.m. on Christmas Day. Directions and other details here.

"Detroit" In Arabic

When we St. John's pilgrims visit the Holy Land in January, one of the questions we'll explore is where all the Arab Christians have gone, since they now comprise under 2% of the population of Israel and the West Bank. One of the answers: Southeastern Michigan, where, in my home town of Detroit and its suburbs and beyond, at least 200,000 Arab-Americans live, according to "Time." But rest easy, Newt -- they're not all Muslims!

The story of Arab Detroit is more complex than the caricatures. Middle Eastern immigrants didn't arrive just yesterday, or from just one place. The community has been a long time coming into its own version of the promised land. Henry Ford recruited thousands of Lebanese, Yemenis and others from the splinters of the Ottoman empire to Dearborn to work in his giant River Rouge complex, giving Middle Easterners their first foothold in the area. Not all were Arab. And in contrast to the stereotype, the majority of local Middle Easterners are not Muslim but Christian, led by an early wave of Iraqi Catholics known as Chaldeans, some of whom fled Muslim persecution. Others were Christians and Druze from Lebanon. More recent times have brought an increase in Muslim immigrants displaced by war and seeking education and economic opportunity.

Who Weeps For Detroit?

My St. John's friend and fellow Detroiter Tom Tierney sent some amazing photos of the Motor City in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, then vibrant, now decayed almost beyond imagining. This one was taken downtown at the corner of Woodward and Fort St. in 1952, two years before my birth. That could be my dad in front of the bus, eying my mother in the flowered skirt. Not really, but you know what I mean.

At a luncheon on Thursday, I met another Michigander, Justin McCusker, who handles governmental relations for South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa and is writing a doctoral dissertation for USC about imaginative ways to promote Detroit's recovery. As much as 40% of the land within the city limits is vacant. Bringing it back from decades of economic dislocation and abysmal management, Justin said, will take the best ideas we have (including his; he's incredibly passionate about the subject).

To underscore how the city's trauma has slipped into the shadows, Justin asked how many of us had even heard about the Sept. 7 firestorm that destroyed 71 widely spaced Detroit homes before firefighters could even arrive. None had.

Detroit Songs: "Mustang Sally" (1965)

Sir Mack Rice in Detroit, July 2009, performing the song he recorded in 1965 (the year the Ford Motor Co. unveiled the Mustang) and Wilson Pickett released the year after.

Hat tip to mydamnchannel.com

My Home Town

In "Time," two French photographers document the heartbreaking decline of the city founded as Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit.

Hat tip to David Stokes

Detroit Songs: "Lose Yourself" (2002)

Eminem. (That's my town!)

I'd Rather Be A Ball Park Wiener

I posted this at The New Nixon on July 3, 2008. Since it was recently exhumed by my cousin and fellow Episcopalian Caroline Taylor Webb, I thought I'd re-post it here.

One of our tiny family's big stories is that my late father, Harvey Hileman Taylor (shown above), named the Ball Park Frank. Enfolded today and yesterday in my wife Kathy's much larger family of voluble New Yorkers as they bade farewell to her dad, Jim Hannigan, who died Monday at 83, I tossed my tale on the griddle again to see if it would plump up. It's the sort of story you tell during wakes and at long, leisurely dinners after funerals. To paraphrase Dr. Kissinger, the exploits of picturesque loved ones don't necessarily have to have the additional advantage of being true.

The story goes that my dad, who in the 1940s and '50s was a music critic and columnist and eventually the entertainment editor of the Detroit Times, was hired by a local ad firm during one of that Big Labor city's legendary newspaper strikes. Harvey Taylor wasn't a company man. He was a drink martinis with a twist at the Detroit Press Club until last call man. You would not have found him at his desk at 9:30 writing ad copy nor in the building much before after lunch. Nor would he have been great in a meeting, since, although charming and funny, he had a debilitating stutter.

And yet my newspapering mother, Jean, has always insisted that -- as a conference room discussion swirled ineffectually about what to name a new line of hot dogs being launched by one of the firm's clients -- my father piped up, "It c-c-couldn't p-p-possibly b-b-be more o-o-obvious. If you're naming a hot d-d-dog, you should name it the B-B-Ball P-P-Park F-F-Frank."

There's also the one about my father standing in the threshold of the reading room of the Detroit Athletic Club after lunch and startling members dozing in red patent leather chairs by calling out, "Gentlemen, K-K-Khartoum has fallen."

Only tonight did it occur to me that this is just the kind of project for which President Nixon invented the Internet.

First things first. You bet there's a Wikipedia entry for Ball Park Franks, which, sure enough, discloses:

A Detroit, MI meat-packing company called Hygrade Food Products won a competition in 1959 to be the exclusive supplier of hot dogs to the Detroit Tigers stadium. It was from this venue that Ball Park Franks gained notoriety and became a mainstay in American pop-culture.

Whoever dubbed the dog, it happened in Motown, and for the greater glory of old Briggs Field, the House Al Kaline Built.

But was there a newspaper strike in Detroit in 1959? Hot dog: "Time" helpfully reproduces this 1964 article:

Until 1955, Detroit had never had a newspaper strike. Since then, the city's papers have been struck so regularly that by 1959 newspaper readers were dryly referring to "Detroit's Fourth Annual Newspaper Strike." That year, in fact, there were two walkouts—after which Hearst's morning Times, weakened by the high cost of labor warfare, sold out to the evening News, and was discontinued.

So maybe my favorite shaggy hot dog story is at least in the ballpark. Our great American wiener, by the way, is now cooked up by Sara Lee.

Calling some of those strikes (and thus maybe sending my dad into the hot dog-naming business) was his friend and my beloved late godfather, Louis Cook, a critic and columnist who served for many years as president of Detroit's chapter of the Newspaper Guild, the union representing reporters and photographers. Ironically enough, as "Time" noted, the 1959 walkouts spelled the end of my dad's paper. He worked at my mother's and Louis's paper, the Detroit Free Press, until his death in 1975.

I didn't know him especially well -- my parents separated when I was two -- but I'll always remember him as the gentlest of souls. And yet he evidently could be a tough critic. In 1949, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was going through a rough patch creatively. Again, "Time" (all blessings to its on-line archivist for preserving all this Great Lakes arcana) reported,

Wrote the Detroit Times after a concert last week: "A morass of spotty mediocrity . . . the low point of the season."...Seven [musicians] called Times Critic Harvey Taylor and told him, he reported, that they had signed a paper under virtual coercion demanding that Taylor himself be barred from all future concerts. The Times front-paged the whole story.

There's also a family story about DSO members getting harmonious revenge. Someone persuaded my father to perform a piano recital as orchestra members sat in the audience and then collaborated on a review published the next day that was none too flattering. I'll research that one at the next family funeral, I guess -- and may that sad day be far, far away.

Detroit Skips Tampa

Cool "Forever Young" commercial for Pepsi featuring Bob Dylan and Will.i.am during the Super Bowl -- which reminds me of a CBS radio piece earlier in the day saying that U.S. automakers won't be advertising during the game for fear of offending taxpayers who are funding Detroit's bailout.

I'm offended they're not advertising and instead leaving the field to Hyundai, Audi, and Toyota. While I well understand the vein of American Puritanism demanding sackcloth on the dashes of our subsidized automakers, how do you sell pickups if you're not on the Super Bowl?