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.

Halling Off To Washington

During the 1980s one of the joys of going to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena along with my mother, Jean Taylor Lescoe, a longtime congregant and former vestry member, was the preaching and teaching of its senior associate rector, the Rev. Canon Gary Hall, who's just been called as dean of Washington National Cathedral. (The Washington Post's coverage is here.)

In this video, he discusses his Hollywood roots, progress of ministry, and most recent work as rector of Christ Church Cranbrook in the Romney family's home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

The Remembrance Of Them Is Grievous Unto Us

The Huffington Post (which has the best and most coverage of spirituality and religion of any mainstream publication) on the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, which was yesterday. They used to say a properly educated newspaperman knew Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. My newspaperwoman mother would add the prayer book, which she said taught her the glorious cadences of the English language (making May 2 the birthday of her composition professor). This bit of the General Confession is from the 1928 edition, which she gave me when I was confirmed on April 30, 1967 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

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.

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.

One Size Serves All The People

OC Weekly's web site is clunky and confusing, and it's not the only one. It was evidently designed by someone at parental unit company Village Voice Media, since the New Times site in Phoenix (a sister paper to the Weekly that broke Sheriff Joe Arpaio's endorsement of Richard Nixon) uses the same template. Reminds me of MLB teams sharing the same basic web design, which is also appalling. You'd expect lefties, at least, to struggle against corporate conformity.

Among the early editors of the Valley of the Sun's venerable alternative rag was a family friend named Daniel Ben-Horin (shown here), referred to in a comment under this 2007 post. Ben-Horin and my mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, worked together at the Arizona Republic in the late 1960s until conservative publisher Eugene Pulliam, Dan Quayle's celebrated relation, pitched a series of fits over the paper's centerward drift during the Nixon era. Daniel was fired, and my mother quit when Pulliam fired her editor, J. Edward Murray, who'd balked when Pulliam requisitioned the front page for a pro-Nixon editorial.

Daniel later founded CompuMentor, a Bay Area organization that distributes software to non-profits. My mother and I moved to LA, where she went to work for the LA Times -- and I ended up going to work for Richard Nixon in San Clemente.

Kill Order

Did the LA Times buckle to CIA pressure? That's what former Times reporter Murray Seeger asks in this article at "Washington Decoded" about notorious agency defector Philip Agee (shown here), who died in Havana in 2008.

In January 1976, Seeger filed a story alleging that Agee had given the Russians the name of an agent in Warsaw, enabling the Polish communist government to shut down a whole network and make 120 arrests.

That would've been big news. The year before, Agee had published a book naming 250 U.S. agents and contacts. Former CIA director and president George H.W. Bush called him a traitor, and some alleged that his actions resulted in the death of the CIA's Athens station chief, Richard Welch, who was assassinated less than two months before Seeger filed his copy. Agee denied having done anything to bring about Welch's killing.

In any event, Seeger's story never made it into the pages of the Times, but thanks to the British Guardian, Agee got to deny it anyway. Strange as a spy novel! The two Timesmen Seeger mentions were colleagues of my mother during that era, associate editor Jean Sharley Taylor:

I am convinced that Bill Thomas, the LAT editor, had issued a “kill” order on my story after talking to CIA headquarters. I had known Bill a long time and liked him, but I also felt he was gutless. In 1974, he acceded to an agency request to hold his reporter’s story about the CIA effort to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean until other newspapers discovered the story.

Earlier this year, I asked Thomas, now in retirement, if he remembered talking to the agency about my story, and he answered he did not remember the Agee story and had no access to his office records. Bob Gibson, the foreign editor, never responded to my e-mail questions.