Always Special

Jean on vacation in Michigan, 1957

My mother was born in Detroit on the brink of the Great Depression. Her parents, Frank and Lily Sharley, met in the United States after emigrating from England. Jean and her elder brother, George, grew up in a house their father had built but couldn’t afford to finish once the darkness fell. You could see the tarpaper instead of siding. Frank found work as a hospital handyman. They had enough, but just barely.

You probably understand after hearing from Tom Johnson, my mom’s favorite boss ever, that Jean had a reporter’s ear for good stories and revealing details. She loved to tell people that her father, as a boy, once delivered a prescription to Buckingham Palace in the latter few years of Queen Victoria. Her mother’s family, from Lancashire, was about to sail for New York on the Titanic when the steamship company revoked their half-price tickets and resold them at full price to someone almost infinitely less lucky.

In her father’s case, a brush with greatness. In her mother’s, the touch of Providence. She loved her parents dearly, and their stories helped her understand, when life seemed grey, when poverty embarrassed her, that her life would always glitter in bright colors, that she would always be special.

With her mother, Lily

As a little girl, she went to church with her family and fell in love with the elegant language and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.” It can’t really be said of Jean! She couldn’t afford to go to college, but the prayer book, her natural gifts as a writer, and her compassion and curiosity amounted to a graduate degree in journalism.

Her vocation, which is now undergoing sometimes heartbreaking change, provides its practitioners with constant brushes with greatness in the form of the events and people journalists cover. As for Providence, the church and prayer book worked their more customary magic with Jean as well. She never doubted the loving, saving grace of heaven -- not once. I have a million things to thank my mother for, none more important than an eternal if sometimes reckless optimism and an innate trust in God.

Greatness eluded her, however, at Redford Union High School in Detroit. As a freshman, she entered a contest to pick the new school fight song. The judges told her she would’ve won if she’d written the three verses they asked for instead of just two. As dementia overtook her at 89 or 90, this injustice, this outrage was one of the last things she forgot.

A 1950s fashion assignment

As a fashion writer for the Detroit Free Press, she traveled to New York for the fall shows. Audrey Hepburn, Renoir, the novelist Colette, and all beautiful people and things captivated her. Soon her editors wanted her working as a general assignment reporter. At the Free Press, the newsroom was male-only territory -- until Jean got there. One old-timer muttered that lace curtains on the windows would be next.

Her victories for women came before feminism had a name. Sometimes it was just a matter of making do. Covering a Tigers-Yankees game during 1961’s AL pennant race, she was barred from the Yankee Stadium press box. She put her portable typewriter on top of an overturned trashcan, found a chair, and made her deadline.

Jean’s writing was economical and lively, whimsical, smart, and fresh, occasionally sentimental but never mawkish – always the right word, never a word out of place. In 1965, Detroit civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a member of the Ku Klux Klan after the march from Selma to Montgomery. Jean visited the apartment Viola shared with her husband and children and described their small, neat bedroom and the family pictures, school books, and white-covered gold-leaf Bible that were arranged carefully on Viola’s desk. At the funeral in Detroit, Jean asked an African-American woman who didn’t know Viola why she was standing on the street in the rain, hoping to get into the church. “Because she died for me,” the woman said. These words ended Jean’s account of her city’s sad day in the next day’s paper.

She was a single working mother of a ten year old. Imagine how she felt when we received death threats after the Viola Liuzzo stories appeared. These callers deplored my mother’s sympathetic coverage of Viola’s murder and warned that they knew where I went to school. One evening, I noticed a police car by the curb outside our apartment. It came back the next night, and the next. My mother didn’t say why, because the last thing she ever wanted me or anyone to do was worry.

Harvey and Jean

But it was inevitable that I would worry, especially when my mother seemed lonely or sad. My father, Harvey, another brilliant newspaperperson, was the first love of Jean’s life. The only picture I have of them together, taken in the early 1950s, shows him in a blazer and tie, looking mischievously at the camera. Jean is sitting on the floor wearing a black cocktail dress and pearls, leaning on his knee and holding a drink, her happy face in profile, turned toward him.

While Harvey was an alcoholic, I don’t believe Jean ever uttered that word and his name in the same paragraph. The marriage essentially ended when I was two, though for the next ten years, Harvey came over for dinner almost every Saturday night. He sat at the end of the couch, drank martinis, smoked Chesterfields, laughed quietly at the conversation, and occasionally got up and went to the piano to massacre Beethoven sonatas.

In her office in Phoenix

In 1967, Jean and 12-year-old John headed to Phoenix so she could go to work on the Arizona Republic as women’s editor. Her brilliance as a journalist and her courage persisted. Her editor in Arizona was J. Edward Murray. Their publisher was Eugene Pulliam, uncle of a future vice president, Dan Quayle. One day, Mr. Pulliam told Mr. Murray that he had written an editorial in support of President Nixon’s actions in Vietnam and wanted it published on the front page. When Ed Murray told the owner of the newspaper that editorials went on the editorial page, Pulliam fired him. Learning of this during a meeting, Jean stood up and said, “A paper that has no room for Ed Murray has no room for me!” and walked out into 110 degrees of Phoenix unemployment – which didn’t last long, thanks to offers from the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles.

Tom has spoken beautifully of Jean’s years at the Los Angeles Times, Christle equally so about their adventures. Christle and my mother’s other close friends – Bobbie and Ed Justice, Bette Gillespie, George Mair, Miv and Alfred Schaaf, Frank Wylie and Judy Babcock, Sister Jenny, so many others – were all gifts to her.

In 1978, Jean married that gracious gentleman Dick Lescoe, who lent her his three daughters, Linda, Donna, and Debbie. In retirement, with Tomasa’s help, Jean helped Debbie with her children, Stephanie and Ricky, and was a devoted grandmother to my children, Valerie and Lindsay, and to my wife Kathy’s children, Dan and Meaghan.

Jean at the LA Times

The most important thing to know about my mother is that she believed she was called to reflect God’s grace, make the world better, see ways forward that others couldn’t, and never stop striving, even unto exhaustion. She took in tenants for free and took Thanksgiving turkeys and green beans to Union Station here in Pasadena. She helped build the columbarium in this beautiful church where she and Dick will cohabitate. She sacrificed her comfort and security to take care of those she loved, especially her parents and then Dick when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. If you had a problem, she had an answer or an idea, and always an encouraging smile.

It made these gestures no less worthy or holy that Jean, even as she acted in love and justice, was observing and chronicling herself in the process. She was, after all, a reporter. She could have invented Facebook. I don’t know whether I’m curious or terrified about what might have happened if she had been healthy enough to establish an account. If my family and friends ever wonder why her son is a selfie junkie, now you know.

Jean could be stubborn. Tom has mentioned my time as an aide to Mr. Nixon. Jean and he were a formidable combination. They first met in Washington in 1985. She was in town to hear his talk to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and he asked me to invite her up to his suite so he could say hello.

She told him that she had covered a stop he had made in upper Michigan during his reelection campaign in 1972. The record is abundantly clear that neither my mother nor the 37th president got anywhere near upper Michigan in 1972. But Jean held her ground. Looking around frantically, Nixon saw a large box of Godiva chocolates that the hotel had given him. Pat Nixon preferred See’s. So he had suggested I take them home to the mother of my children. In the face of Jean’s intransigence, he grabbed Marcia’s chocolates, handed them to my mother, and bolted from the room. Nixon was less flummoxed by Mao and Khrushchev.

With Elizabeth, May 2015

Jean’s willfulness and my immature frustration sometimes made our relationship difficult. But not so our last two years. Dementia is terrible. But for my mother, it was also a kind of gift. It took away her need to try so hard to help. For the first time in the 60 years I’d know her, she was content. In the home in Yorba Linda where Elizabeth and Linda took such good care of her, Jean sat in the garden with the sun on her face and arms without feeling that she should be doing something historic instead.

I told her the stories, since she’d forgotten it all. I told her about Harvey and Dick and her grandchildren and about my godfather, Louis Cook, another handsome newspaperman who had loved her desperately. Hearing it all again, brand new each time, she’d always smile, and her blue eyes would gleam. And on a sunny Saturday morning last October – because she loved Saturday mornings best of all – she slipped peacefully into glory.

A Celebration of the Life of Jean Taylor Lescoe was held on April 16, 2016 at my mother's home parish, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. My fellow eulogists were Jean's friends Christle Balvin and former LA Times publisher Tom Johnson.

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.

Bending Notes And The Constitution

Before I was a frustrated pianist, I came to George Gershwin's thrilling jazz concerto, "Rhapsody in Blue," as an underachieving 11-year-old clarinetist. The piece begins with an almost impossible to believe two and a half-octave clarinet glissando blasting off from the F below middle C and bending slowly, in an aching blue note, toward a high B-flat. I can bend notes on an harmonica, but I never developed the embouchure of iron required to do it on the clarinet. I wish I'd practiced more.

I also wish I could say I'd heard it performed by my teacher, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's first-chair clarinetist, Vincent Melidon, a buddy of my father the music critic. I still have the old B-flat Selmer Mr. Melidon sold my mother, but unfortunately the only thing that rubbed off on me was cork grease. Besides, if he ever played the Gershwin run during his DSO years, it probably wasn't on my instrument, since he would've used an A clarinet for his orchestral work.

Instead, I listened over and over again to the 1959 recording by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who also played piano. And of course "Rhapsody" is all about the ivories, not the licorice stick. The story goes that Gershwin hadn't finished writing portions of the piece for its first performance, with a jazz band, in Boston in 1924, so he improvised. It's now a staple of the classical repertoire.

While the Bernstein performance will be in my head forever, I also love the two associated with Woody Allen's 1979 film "Manhattan," Gary Graffman's on the soundtrack album and Paul Jacobs' in the film itself. The movie's titles, featuring Jacobs' and conductor Zubin Mehta's "Rhapsody" plus black and white images of the streets of the city, Central Park, Yankee Stadium, and fireworks over the East River, are exquisite; pretty much the high point of the movie. You can also get performances of the piece for solo piano, including this one by French pianist Vera Tsybakov.

Gershwin said the work's rhythms were inspired by the clickety-clack of New York's subways and ELs. Thanks to a church friend, I had the chance to rhapsodize about "Rhapsody" to my Bronx-born wife, Kathy, before, during, and after a June performance by Orange County's Pacific Symphony and pianist Orion Weiss, whose rendering was as lyrical and modern as Bernstein's was muscularly classical.

Thumbing through the program before the concert, I was startled by another contrast, not between an old pianist and a young one but an old Nixon hand and his younger self. The program contained an interview with Nixon operative Larry Higby (above), now chairman of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, which includes the Pacific Symphony's home, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The article, which didn't mention Higby's Nixon service, contained this statement by the impresario:

The arts are for all of us. They enrich our lives and add meaning and dimension to our daily experiences.

True enough, now and in 1971, when Higby was adjutant to Richard Nixon's soon-to-be-disgraced chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. But back then, in the midst of the Vietnam war, the only artistic meaning and dimension the White House cared about was whether the artist in question was pro or con. As documented in the Nixon library's new Watergate gallery and the on-line background available at the library's web site, Higby asked the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to provide dirt about CBS's Daniel Schorr, participated in the notorious Jew-counting scandal, and facilitated the process by which counsel John Dean's enemies list made its way to a desk within a few feet of the Oval Office. Among other great and decent Americans enriching and adding meaning to our lives in that era and yet ending up on the enemies list assembled for the president of the United States was none other than Leonard Bernstein.

In a thoughtful post earlier this summer at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten reflected on Nixon and Haldeman's practice of hiring young men as aides. It was true that they were energetic and eager to please, and they looked good. Haldeman's acolytes have often made a fetish of looking well-dressed and clean cut (though the last time I met the desperately ailing Haldeman, on the streets of Santa Barbara, he told me cheerfully that he'd never wear a tie again). But as Krusten relates, they lacked wisdom, as younger people sometimes do. That was probably the way Nixon and Haldeman wanted it. You tell an ambitious young man in a free nation to sic a federal police agency on a journalist, and he may actually do it. Nixon knew that older advisers were more likely to push back. Nixon's advocates often say that the enemies list was de minimis because no one on the list had his taxes audited, as Nixon vowed to do. That may be because when Nixon's boys tried to line up the IRS to harass his enemies, they encountered a man, Treasury secretary George Shultz (shown with Nixon), who told them to pound sand.

I served former President Nixon and, at his direction, his estate and presidential library for nearly 30 years; Kathy equaled that, for a total of 60 between us. I was his chief of staff from 1984-90. I admired him for his peacemaking achievements and relentless diligence as an elder statesman. But even in those quieter years, he had his weaker moments. One morning, sitting opposite me in his office in 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, he ordered a little dirty trick. Angry at a prominent journalist, he told me to send the person an anonymous note saying that "we" knew something embarrassing. I didn't do it, and I hoped he wouldn't mention it again, which he didn't. If he had, I pray that I would've done the right thing.

Kathy, who succeeded me as Nixon's chief aide and was holding his hand when he died in 1994, also saved him from a humiliating crisis or two by saying no. It wasn't easy. Once, she reports, he was speechless with anger. She was afraid he was about to fire her. She's tougher than I am, and she held her ground. I can imagine it was a lot harder when Nixon was powerful and his young men wanted to keep their West Wing offices.

My apologies to Vincent Melidon for calling him "the late" in an earlier iteration of this post, and my thanks to his nurse, who corrected my error in a gracious comment.

My Parents' Hands

When I think of my mother Jean's strong fingers, she's typing 75 wpm on a Royal manual in a newsroom or the stylish Olivetti in the blue case that she carried to Jerusalem on a reporting trip after the Six-Day War. I think of my father Harvey's slim hands massacring Beethoven piano sonatas or squaring off his cigarette lighter on top of a pack of Chesterfields next to his martini on the coffee table.

I've been thinking today about hands and handing over. Fifty years ago -- yes, on an April Fool's Saturday; it probably explains a lot -- they hand-wrote inscriptions in the King James Bible they presented on the occasion of my baptism by the Rev. Canon Howard McClintock at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

I was six, which is old for an infant baptism. My genial but abstracted father, also a journalist, moved out when I was two, and even before then, as I understand it, it was never dull, because of the music and martinis. My mother worked long hours as a pioneering general assignment reporter for the Detroit Free Press to support us and finally pay my father's attorney to divorce her, since otherwise that might never have happened, either. I was lucky to have received the sacrament as early as I did.

Harvey died in 1975. My mother doesn't type as much as she used to, though she can still write an eloquent and whimsical e-mail. I type like crazy, when my fingers aren't itching to play the guitar. On my father's beloved piano, I only got as far as massacring Mozart sonatas. After decades of air guitar I bought my first dreadnought on my 40th birthday and have learned to play well enough to accompany myself singing folks songs. I play with church friends and for St. John's School students during chapel. Last weekend in the mountains, friends sat politely as I struggled through two Tom Russell songs and one by John Prine. When I'm playing guitar a lot, I'm blogging less, and then the other way around. Kathy definitely prefers the blogging, but I love them both, because I was anointed by my parents' hands and blessed by the things they loved.

Accustoming Boys To Obey

From 1837 until his death in 1871, my seminary-trained great-great-grandfather, Samuel Harvey Taylor, was principal of Phillips Academy, a boys prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. In later years, it had a headmaster; these days, it has a head of school, Barbara Landis Chase. These successors of Dr. Taylor are lucky that Andover, which Humphrey Bogart, Jack Lemmon, and the Presidents Bush all attended, survived him. While a lot about secondary education changed between the Presidential administrations of Gens. Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel Harvey Taylor did not. He discouraged the study and even reading of literary fiction, for instance, preferring a curriculum focused on Latin and Greek and maybe a little mathematics.

He died of a massive stroke one Sunday on the chapel steps. His massive gravestone says that students and faculty "made great lamentations" as a result. His son and grandson taught at or attended Andover, but my late father, Harvey Hileman Taylor, could not. He always dreamed that John Harvey Taylor would attend, and even after they had divorced, my mother struggled to make it possible. I probably wouldn't have gotten in without the family connection (I lived for three years in the shadow of Taylor Hall). Like Flounder in "Animal House," they had to take me. An indication of the quality of my academic work is that when I wrote a paper for Dr. Frederick Allis's History of Andover class about my own relative Dr. Taylor, I could only manage a C.

Ironic, then, that I should begin full-time work this week as the vicar of an Episcopal school in south Orange County. The blessing is that my work is primarily pastoral. We have a visionary headmaster with a third of a century's experience in independent and Episcopal education, Jim Lusby, who skillfully runs St. John's. While Mr. Lusby considers values education as important as academic success, we can be grateful he doesn't adhere to Dr. Taylor's specific doctrines, described by Professor Edward A. Park in an address contained in a memorial volume which was published by the principal's last class in 1871:

[Dr. Taylor] believed that one of the dangers to which this democratic land lies exposed is a disrespect for law: he therefore believed that he was performing an act of kindness to his pupils when he was accustoming them to obey. He believed that, if they would yield their wills to the authority of a school, they would more easily yield their individual interests to the civil government, and would be more apt to prostrate themselves before the Infinite Ruler and Sovereign.

Less so by the time I arrived in 1969, which turned out to be the last year of coats and ties and mandatory chapel. That same autumn, students successfully pressured the administration to cancel classes for a day so we could learn more about the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. The following year, "Time" magazine wrote about students smoking dope in the on-campus bird sanctuary and having sex with girls they had smuggled into the dorms. These were the last years of headmaster John Mason Kemper (who colorfully describes Uncle Sam's reign of fear here) and the first years of Theodore Sizer, a leading independent educator. Especially after it became coeducational in the fall of 1973, the year I was graduated, Dr. Taylor probably wouldn't have recognized the place, and yet it turned out to be a blessed experience for his great-great-grandson. I discovered my love of my parents' vocation of journalism and began to learn to live on my own. Thank you, Uncle Sam!

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.