Linda Gasparello: ‘Smart City’ on the Athens Riviera
Mural across the street from the Wyndham Grand in Athens. The mural’s title is “So many books, so little time.’’
In the Hellenistic age, which began with the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 B.C. and ended with Rome’s conquest of Egypt, in 30 B.C., Greek architects went colossal. The ruined Temple of Olympian Zeus, which stands in the center of Athens, exemplifies the temples, theaters and stadia that were the main features of the towns and cities of the age.
Today, just a half hour’s drive southeast of Athens, on the Athens Riviera, a mega-city is under construction, harkening back to the Hellenistic age cities.
The $8.2 billion Ellinikon project is underway on the site of Hellinikon International Airport, which closed in 2001. The site also housed facilities for the 2004 summer Olympics.
The Ellinikon is supposed to be a “smart city,” with high-end shopping, restaurants, housing, an athletic club, hotels and a sprawling public park.
Now open: the Experience Center, in the largest of the three airport hangars, and Park, where visitors can get an idea of what will be built via a series of virtual exhibitions.
One of the interactive models at the center’s ‘‘Living a New Era’’ exhibition uses more than 25,000 individual pieces to highlight the Ellinikon’s green spaces, next-generation designs and infrastructure projects. Visitors can also cruise the coastline aboard a simulated speedboat at the ‘‘Living by the Sea’’ exhibition or check out the Botanical Library. You can even take a virtual stroll through the ‘‘Night Garden Dome,’’ which emulates the park at night with a series of light strips, sounds and scents, according to the Robb Report, the luxury lifestyle magazine.
The Ellinikon will open in phases. The first phase, including Marina Tower — Greece’s first residential high-rise, designed by Britain’s Foster + Partners — and a retail and dining galleria, is expected to open in 2025. This will be followed by the launch of a sporting complex, marina and next-generation transportation system.
A number of international architectural firms are involved with the Ellinikon. From what I have seen of Foster + Partners’ work in the capital cities of Astana, Kazakhstan and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, they will do the Hellenistic age proud.
Down to the Sea in Ships
Cape Sounion, on the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula, was an emotionally important place for the ancient Athenians.
According to the myth, Aegeus, king of Athens, threw himself from a cliff into the sea because of a misunderstanding: Aegeus had told his son, Theseus, that upon returning to Athens, he was to fly a white sail if he had triumphed over the Minotaur, and to instruct the crew to raise a black sail if he had been killed. Theseus, forgetting his father’s direction, flew a black sail as he returned. The grieving king fatally jumped from a cliff into the sea, giving the sea its name, Aegean, and his son the kingdom.
The Temple of Poseidon
The ancient Athenians decided to build a temple there, dedicated to Poseidon, the god of the sea, to ensure fair winds and following seas for their seafarers and warriors. The temple was rebuilt three times, the last by Pericles, the Athenian statesman, probably around 440 B.C., but only some of the Doric columns stand today.
During a visit in 1810, poet, Grecophile and graffitist Lord Byron engraved “Byron” on one of the columns.
At a Temple of Poseidon overlook, I watched a sailboat in irons — the sails were luffing, it was drifting. The captain and crew were struggling to resume forward motion.
The scene was poignant — a reminder that the ancient Greeks feared ships and the sea. But most of all, they feared disappearing without a trace at sea. Death by drowning meant you gained no fame — no one to tell the tale of how you died — and no closure for yourself and your loved ones.
Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer’s epic poem, yearned to stop grieving and get on with his life.
In the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey, Telemachus — now a 20-year-old, but just a babe when his father set sail for Troy — says bitterly, “I would never have grieved so much about his death if he had gone down with comrades off Troy or died in the arms of loved ones, once he had wound down the long coil of war.
“Then all united Achaea would have raised his tomb and he would have won his son great fame for years to come.
“But now the whirlwinds have ripped him away, no fame for him! He is lost and gone now — out of sight, out of mind — and he has left me tears and grief.”
On June 14, a fishing vessel carrying hundreds of refugees, the Adriana, sank off the Greek port city of Pylos. About 600 people, including children, drowned. Investigations by numerous organizations are close to concluding that the Adriana was towed by the Greek coast guard towards Italian waters and then, when this was unsuccessful, capsized.
Hundreds from Africa and the Middle East — mostly from Pakistan — are lost and gone, and their loved ones have been left with tears,
From Dereliction to Destination
The Metaxourgeio neighborhood around the Wyndham Grand in Athens, where my husband and I and a friend stayed for a week, is tumbledown.
It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Athens. The upper class lived there until the opening of the Athanasios Douroutis silk factory, which gave the neighborhood its name (metaxourgeio means “silk mill”) and brought in the working class.
When the silk factory closed down in 1875 (it now houses the Municipal Art Gallery), the neighborhood started its long slide into dereliction.
Some tourism Web sites describe it gently as a “transition neighborhood” in the city center, which is gaining a reputation as an artistic neighborhood, due to the opening of art galleries, theaters and cafes. Others say is known for its large number of cheap brothels, drug addicts, transsexuals and Middle Eastern immigrants.
One cab driver fumed about the ticky-tacky tourist shops on a street near the Wyndham Grand.
“They are owned by the migrant criminals from Pakistan. Their gangs rob people on the streets and in the metro,” he said, referring to the Metaxourgeio Metro Station.
Such anti-migrant sentiment has been growing in Greece, and lead to the biggest surprise in the country’s parliamentary elections on June 25: The little-known, far-right Spartans party, which campaigned strongly on the idea that Greece was threatened by uncontrolled migration, won 4.7 percent of the vote, becoming the fifth biggest group in the 300-seat parliament, according to newspaper reports.
I must report that I had an encounter with a criminal in Athens: A Greek cabbie whose preposterous fare from the National Archaeological Museum to the Wyndham Grand gave new meaning to the Golden Fleece.
Metaxourgeio Murals
Athens has some of the finest street art in the world — and it has brightened up the blighted Metaxourgeio.
On the side of a building across the street from the Wyndham Grand, there is a mural of a young woman sitting on a window seat, reading a book and revealing a knee. There are books piled up behind her. The title of the mural, painted by SimpleG, is “So many books, so little time.”
Across the circle in front of the hotel, there is a mural, painted by Leonidas Giannakopoulos, that will stop you in your tracks. It depicts a fish disgorging a woman, upon whose wavy hair a twin-masted ship is sailing.
As noted on a bottom corner, the mural was painted during the Petit Paris d’Athene, 2021 — the eighth year of a 10-day art and culture festival in underserved areas of the city, co-organized by the Athenian Art Network and the Cultural, Arts and Youth Organization of the Municipality of Athens, and supported by the French press and the French Institute in Greece.
Alexander the Great
There are great restaurants all over Athens. And there is the Alexander the Great: a restaurant where performance art meets culinary art.
While the owner, Alexander, greets and gabs with the customers, applause-worthy traditional food — taramosalata, grilled fish, moussaka, pork souvlaki and lamb chops — comes out of the kitchen. Dinner theater — and so reasonably priced.
On the day we arrived in Athens, we ate there for convenience — the restaurant is across the street from the Wyndham Grand and has tented, sidewalk seating on the same side of the street as the hotel. But we kept returning for what was some of the best food — and often just for Alexander’s great coffee — and fun on our trip. Bravo, Alexander!
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. She is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello: Painting in solidarity with Ukraine
“Ukraine Wheat and Sky,’’ by Lloyd Kelly.
When war, such as the one in Ukraine, breaks out, writers and artists are never impotent. Writers have the power of the pen and artists have the power of the brush.
Through the centuries to today, they have used their creative talents as war propagandists or protestors. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has inspired works in protest worldwide.
In Louisville, Ky., renowned artist Lloyd Kelly has painted in solidarity with Ukraine.
“When I saw Ukrainian children being bombed by the Russians, I felt I had to do something that shows support for the Ukrainian people,” Kelly said.
His picture titled “Ukraine Wheat and Sky” is small, but not its message.
From a distance, it depicts the flag of Ukraine. But moving closer, you can see what Kelly called “its tension and motion.”
“I underpainted it with complimentary colors — blue on orange and yellow on violet — to create a tension. And the diagonal lines [from the blue sky to the golden yellow wheat of the flag’s colors] show a motion, a fluidity, like the wind blowing the fabric of the flag,” he explained.
Kelly said that he didn’t want the flag to be sentimental — a dreamy, wispy image. “I underpainted it because I wanted it to be substantial.” A painting of solidarity.
He has felt so strongly about the suffering in Ukraine that he couldn’t sell it. “Selling it just didn’t feel right. So I gifted it to people who support Ukraine in a very concrete way.”
Kelly’s painting captures on canvas what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said so poignantly in a television interview with David Letterman, “This blue color is a color of life; a color of the sky, space and freedom. The flag doesn’t have any images of planes or missiles in the sky, any traces of gunshots.
“These two colors are the country of where I was born, the country we are fighting for.”
Kelly exhibits at The Christina Gallery, in Edgartown, Mass. His studio address is www.lloydkelly.com.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, a weekly news and public affairs program that airs nationwide on PBS and elsewhere.
Linda Gasparello: Postcards from Greece -- joyous and tragic
Distomo, Greece — site of great beauty and great barbarity
I know -- through my education and experience -- the Latin phrase, “In vino veritas.” But until recently, I didn’t know the Latins lifted it from Alceus of Mytilene, a 6th-Century BC lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, who said, “Wine, window into a man.”
Alceus was a contemporary of Sappho, known as the “Tenth Muse” and “The Poetess.” Scholars believe they exchanged poems and ideas – and, as both were Lesbian aristocrats, quite possibly they shared many amphorae of wine.
According to scholars, Alceus was involved in politics and frequented the fine wine-tasting events of the time: orgies.
In late October, as my husband Llewellyn King and I traveled north by bus from Athens International Airport to Eretria, a port town on the island of Evia, I tried to decode the some of the technicolored tags on the wall of the suburban railway that runs alongside the highway. There was one repeated tag in all caps that I, or anyone, could decipher: ORGY.
We were enroute to the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) annual congress, and the tag reminded me of Nora Ephron’s quip, “Working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallflower at an orgy.”
Greek Wine: It Is Drinking Better
Retsina, retsina, everywhere, but I didn’t drink a drop of it in Evia, which is one of the three major production centers of the resin-infused wine.
Isaia Tsaousidou, AEJ international president, and president of the Greek section, who organized this year’s congress, wanted to acquaint us with some of the excellent single-varietal and blended wines from Evia. She arranged a tour and lunch (an al fresco, typical Greek lunch of salad, pasta, grilled meats, French fries and very drinkable red and white wines) at the family owned Lykos Winery.
Enologist Vicky Avramidou Vassiliki told journalists that Lykos wines are made with Greek and international varietals, grown on Evia and the mainland. “Our Kratistos, a red wine made from 100 percent Agiorgitko grapes, and Malagousia, a white wine made from 100 percent Malagousia grapes, are very popular,” she said, adding that the bottling of Malagousia vintage 2022 has started.
In the Lycos Winery
The winery is decorated with wine barrels brightly painted with the wisdom of ancient and other sages.
Lykos means “wolf” in Greek, and the winery’s logo depicts the silhouette of a wolf howling at the full moon. One decorative barrel has the image of Little Red Riding Hood cuddling a wolf.
The winery, which is medium-sized, exports 50 percent of its production to the European Union, China, Japan, some U.S. states (North Carolina and New York are two) and Canada. Its wines range in price from 7 euros to “premium.”
There is a Greek saying that “Wine pleases the heart.” It also pleases the face: The winery now has a cosmetic line made from grape seed oil, which contains polyphenols. These plant compounds have been known to not just slow the aging process, but reverse signs of aging, like sun spots, fine lines, and wrinkles. Pip pip hooray!
All You Need Is Love
On the grounds of the Miramare, the seaside hotel in Eretria where the AEJ was holding its congress, I noticed an elderly man who I thought was headed to a local bocce match. He sported a white fedora trimmed with a black-and-white ribbon, a white shirt, and white pants.
Turns out, Nicos Papapostolou is a philanthropist and honorary member of the association’s Greek section.
At the opening session of the congress, he spoke about the Kaith Papapostolou Foundation, a charity which he founded in memory of his late wife. The foundation’s work is based on “charitable love” and supporting others in need, whether emotionally or materially.
The group’s latest effort is a 2022 calendar card, which asks, “Did I offer love today?” Every seventh day of a month is highlighted in red. On those days, “Double the happy, the one who offers!”
As translated, Papapostolou told the congress, “Our organization is imagining a society that feels its need for the right to be happy. … We want to remind people of the need of the government that people should be happy.”
Interestingly, the ancient Greeks didn’t believe that the purpose of life was to be happy but to achieve. Eudaimonia, a word used by Aristotle and Plato, is best translated as “fulfillment.” And Aristotle believed that citizens must actively participate in politics if they are to be happy — i.e., fulfilled — and virtuous.
At the Distomo Museum
Those attending this year’s AEJ congress in Central Greece had the chance to visit both the glorious museum at Delphi, the site of The Oracle, and the grim one at nearby Distomo, where the whole village was slaughtered by the Nazis in a few hours on a June.
The Distomo Museum of the Nazi Victims of June 10, 1944, contains a photos of the victims and paintings of the massacre — a large, Guernica-like one hangs in one of the rooms.
At the museum entrance, there is a blown-up photo of Maria Padiska, who has come to be known as the "Woman of Distomo,” and who died in March 2009 at the age of 84.
Her image became a world symbol of grief since the publication of an article in LIFE magazine, “What the Germans did to Greece,” on Nov. 27, 1944. The photo caption reads, "Maria Padiska still weeps, four months after the Germans killed her mother in a massacre at the Greek town of Distomo.”
Our visit to this museum was as gut-wrenching, as the documentary on Ukraine, filmed by Greek journalist Lena Kyropoulos, that we were to watch later at the congress.
The visit to the Distomo museum and the viewing of the documentary proved Winston Churchill’s point movingly, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. She’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Exit of late-night radio royalty
Graphic by Burgundavia (PNG); Ysangkok (SVG)
James Bohannon
—Photo by 1anthonyherrera
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A great voice is stilled. James “Jimbo” Bohannon died of cancer of the esophagus on Nov. 12. Only weeks earlier, he had to resign from his Jim Bohannon Show, the overnight broadcast that aired on 500 radio stations, largely AM, weeknights from 11 p.m.- 2 a.m. ET.
Jim was a big man with a big voice, a big curiosity and a big heart. Over most of the 29 years his show was on the air, I had the pleasure of being a guest from time to time.
At first my wife, Linda Gasparello, a writer, broadcaster and also an occasional guest on the show, and I would journey to a studio in suburban Virginia – the building always looked forbidding in the dark of night. Later, the show moved to the CBS studios on M Street in Washington. But in recent years, Bohannon broadcasted from his home in Westminster, South Carolina.
As with most of us in the trade, I believe “in studio” trumps virtual. But one of the pleasures of radio is that it is portable and can be done with a phone anywhere.
Before Jim took over the show, it was the springboard for Larry King, who once interviewed me in a bedroom in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. That was odd, but I was used to guesting on radio from odd spots, like sitting in a parked car in a hotel lot overlooking the River Moy in Ballina, Ireland.
Jim’s show was a mixture of guests, whom he interviewed with genuine curiosity and gruff respect for views other than his own, and call-ins. He also was kind. I asked him to interview a friend of mine, Ryan Prior, who was establishing a charity to support Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research and medical education. Bohannon asked informed and perceptive questions, and elicited an interesting hour of broadcasting with his skill as an interviewer.
He was less indulgent of crazy folks. If you do call-in radio, you get crazies. When their rants began, Jim simply cut them off. No apology but no indulgence either. Some were regulars and went to lengths to circumvent the security provisions of Westwood One, the show’s syndicator.
One technique was to use a different phone for each attempt, say a wife’s phone or a neighbor’s phone. I once said, “George, in St. Louis, did you take your medicine today?” Jim chuckled, but I doubt he would have addressed a caller that way. Jim had a superficial toughness – he was a Vietnam veteran -- but his kindness always broke through.
Unlike many in a star business, Jim didn’t yearn, that I could discern, to emulate his predecessor Larry King, becoming a television star. Like many, if not most, broadcasters he loved radio. It is flexible, mobile, and not slaved to technology and big crews.
That isn’t to say that Jim didn’t enjoy doing television, but he was a radio man, having started in it, like many, when he was in high school -- in his case, in his native Missouri. He found his footing in Washington, where he did some television and a lot of radio before taking over the late-night slot which uniquely fitted him.
Jim seemed supremely happy in the wee hours. So were his listeners from coast to coast who enjoyed his camaraderie, humor, wisdom and masterful interviewing.
The one talent that great commercial broadcasters all must have is skill in “hitting time” to accommodate syndicated radio advertising. Jim seamlessly guided his interviews to a full stop without the interviewees knowing that they had been diverted to silence. It takes skill to do that. It also takes skill -- and love of craft -- to be fresh night after night; and skill to elicit gems of truth and wisdom from reluctant subjects.
Jim had those talents, but I shall remember especially his talent for friendship. He has signed off but won’t be forgotten by those who knew him and shared the time of stars in the sky with a true star of the microphone.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello: Letter from Bonny and eerie Edinburgh
A woman waiting for a bus on Princes Street in Edinburgh on a moonless October night.
— Photos by Linda Gasparello
I play a silly game of characterizing cities as things. Here’s how it goes: If London were a holiday, which one would it be? My answer -- no doubt influenced by Charles Dickens -- is Christmas. Paris is New Year’s, because I’ve spent a few memorable ones there, feasting, drinking bubbly and giving cheek kisses.
Halloween? New Orleans, with its haunted French Quarter houses, voodoo and vampire lore, is my pick. But Edinburgh can give The Big Easy a run for its money as I noted when my husband and I visited the Scottish earlier this month.
In fact, Edinburgh has just been named one of the top three creepiest cities in the United Kingdom by Skiddle, an events-discovery platform, based on the combined number of reported hauntings and Halloween-themed events. According to Skiddle, bookings of ghost tours are way up in London and Brighton, which take the top two places in its survey, and Edinburgh.
Greyfriars Kirkyard
A terror-tour favorite in Edinburgh, Greyfriars Kirkyard, a church cemetery established in the mid-16th Century, is a one-stop shop of horrors, replete with ghosts, ghouls and bodysnatching.
I would’ve thought that the British tourists would’ve been spooked enough by the economic ghosts of 1979 -- a stagnant economy, surging inflation and waves of industrial unrest, trounced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-market policies in the following years.
A couple with Halloween-colored hair celebrating at The Deacon Brodie's Tavern in the Lawnmarket.
Prime Minister Liz Truss, who resigned amid the Tory turmoil, was no ghostbuster.
Yes! We Have No Newspapers
There is a newsagent on Princes Street, near the Apex Waterloo Place Hotel. Above the door hangs a sign for The Scotsman, the Edinburgh daily, flanked by two smaller signs for other city newspapers: The Evening News, and the Daily Record and Sunday Mail.
My husband and I stopped in to buy some newspapers, keen to read the coverage of the Scottish National Party Conference. But we found none there.
Yes, they had Fyffes bananas, and the shelves were stacked nearly to the ceiling with boxes of “sweet biscuits” and shortbread, especially the shiny red tartan boxes of Walkers Shortbread, advertised on the shelf as the “Walkers Pure Butter Luxury Shortbread Top Quality All Size Box 3.99 p.”
I walked up to the cashier, a young man of South Asian origin, and asked if he sold newspapers. He said he gave up selling them because he didn’t want to deal with the “all the paperwork and returns for a few pence on a sale.”
Anyway, he adamantly said, “Nobody ever needs to read newspapers. They have nothing in them, only opinions.”
Surely, I said, there’s a newsagent in the vicinity that sells newspapers. Somewhat grudgingly, he told me to go to the WHSmith shop in the train station.
I left the no-news newsagent and walked to the station. I bought 15 pounds (about $17) worth of newspapers at the WHSmith because I’m a big-spending nobody
Sir Jim, ‘The Bonnie Baker’
I read in The Herald that Walkers Shortbread’s profits had more than doubled to 62 million pounds (about $69.2 million) this year, boosted by strong demand in key markets.
In the late 1980s, when I was the editor of a global food-industry paper, I interviewed Jim Walker, head of the family-owned baking company, which was founded by Joseph Walker in 1898. In my story about Walkers, I dubbed him “The Bonnie Baker.” He is now Sir Jim, having received his knighthood in the late Queen’s Birthday Honors earlier this year.
Walker told The Herald that it had been “a very, very difficult couple of years” due to COVID and supply problems. “Butter has virtually doubled (in price), and the price of flour has gone up as well,” he said.
Butter was a problem for Walker in the late 1980s, but for quite a different reason.
In the U.S. cookies market, where Walkers wanted more penetration, it was a bad time for butter. Spurred by food activists, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, consumers were demanding that cookie makers eliminate highly saturated fats, from butter to palm oil, in their products.
On a visit to the company’s headquarters, in Abelour, in The Highlands, during that saturated fat-cutting time, I offered Walker this advice: Find a healthy butter substitute.
“No, we can’t,” he said firmly. “Butter is one of four shortbread ingredients.”
I offered him another pat of advice: Extend the brand’s product line with chocolate-chip shortbread.
This was probably already in the works, but I’d like to think that I was responsible for Walkers adding another ingredient -- and going on to become the largest British exporter of shortbread and cookies to the U.S. market.
Buchanan Fish Fight
The Buchanan clan has its first new chief in more than 340 years.
“The last Buchanan chief, John Buchanan, died in 1681 without a male heir. Identifying the new chief required decades of genealogical research conducted by renowned genealogist, the late Hugh Peskett,” according to History Scotland, a Scottish heritage Web site.
John Michael Ballie-Hamilton Buchanan was inaugurated Oct. 8 in a ceremony in Cambusmore, Callander, the modern seat of Clan Buchanan and the chief’s ancestral home. International representatives of the clan’s diaspora – from North America (count conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan) to New Zealand -- celebrated alongside the chiefs and other representatives of 10 ancient Scottish clans, History Scotland reported.
“Speaking before the inauguration, Lady Buchanan said they expected many neighboring clans to attend – despite, in some cases, a long history of rancor,” The Daily Telegraph’s Olivia Rudgard wrote.
“ ‘Spats’’ involving the Buchanan clan include a 15th Century feud with Clan MacLaren, apparently started at a fair when a Buchanan man slapped a member of the MacLaren clan with a salmon and knocked his hat off his head.
“It ended in a bloody skirmish which killed, among others, one of the sons of the MacLaren chief,” Rudgard wrote.
With apologies to Robert Burns, a Scot’s a Scot, for a’ that -- and Scotland is a bonny place to visit.
Linda Gasparello, based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., is producer and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS
Llewellyn King: Fighting wildfires with fires
Prescribed burn at the Tall Timbers research site, in Thomasville, Ga.
— Photo by Linda Gasparello
(See New England note below.)
Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie Bambi prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so.
The United States Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company AccuWeather, was grim.
Now that prognosis is being borne out as terrible fires again scorch those regions. Fire is now a year-round danger.
Enter forest scientists, who believe the solution to rampant wildfires is scientifically managed, preemptive burning.
But this fire-management practice isn’t without controversy. The memory of Bambi and his father, trapped by a raging forest fire, can spill into politics, with fierce advocates for prescribed burning often at odds with activists who believe fire should be suppressed.
The epicenter of the science of forest management with fire isn’t in the West but in the East – in the Red Hills, stretching from Tallahassee, Fla., to Thomasville, Ga. This is the home to the research stations of the Tall Timbers Institute, which studies and practices prescribed burning to save the long-leaf pine forests and their abundant populations of game birds and other wildlife.
It can be argued that a small game bird, the Northern bobwhite quail, has been responsible for preserving a huge acreage of forest land in the Red Hills. The name Red Hills is more poetic than accurate as the land is undulating rather than hilly. However, the name is enshrined in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
The area is home to some of the largest private estates -- still called plantations -- in the nation. They have been preserved and lovingly tended for hunting since the 19th Century.
Conservation began in the 1920s to preserve the habitat of the quail, fell off in the 1930s, and came roaring back in the 1950s when philanthropist Henry Beadel gave 2,200 acres to establish five ecological-research stations. This has grown to 4,000 acres.
The theory of deliberate burning is that it keeps down the forest-floor “fuel” that makes wildfires so deadly and unmanageable. The prescribed burns are carefully organized, considering the weather, the vegetation and the escape routes for the fauna.
During these burns, the fires sweep through without damaging the soil. The trees are left standing -- because the fires are fast and very hot -- but the forest floor is cleared.
Tall Timbers researchers showed me and a small group of visitors the product of a new burn on the previous day, where there was lingering smoke, and the revived, flourishing areas that were burned one, two, and three years earlier.
These researchers have a passion for their work and their conservation with fire.
The institute is active on more than 500,000 acres in Georgia and Florida and leads the country in remedial burning. California is now tentatively trying to burn on a limited scale, learning from Tall Timbers.
But Tall Timers conservation extends well beyond fire.
They explained the real threat to forests is urban sprawl and they are active, vigorously so, in persuading Red Hills area landowners to write easements into their deeds to preserve what the Nature Conservancy has called one of America’s “Last Great Places.”
And the movement is growing. “We have been working with nonprofits in the West,'' said Morgan Varner, fire research director at Tall Timbers.
Varner said Florida leads the country in preservation of great tracts of untrammeled forest and savannah managed with prescribed burning.
As we toured through Tall Timbers, one could marvel at the resiliency of both the flora and fauna. Animals and birds, which naturally flee fire, also enthusiastically return after the fires have done their work. Bambi went back.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Prescribed burning in the White Mountain National Forest.
Linda Gasparello: Millennials can be pioneers in cities with cheap houses
In Danville, Va., home of tobacco entrepreneur William T. Sutherlin, called by locals the "Last Capitol of the Confederacy.’’ But most houses there don’t look like this!
WEST WARWICK
Millennials are supercharging the U.S. housing market. They have lots of cash, and they’re making a dash for cities like Boise, Idaho, Raleigh, North Carolina, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas.
As home-mortgage rates rise and inventory shrinks in those and other A-list cities, Millennials, particularly those who can work remotely, might want to consider C-list – C for cheap -- cities.
Hey, Millennial. Don’t be bummed about being outbid for that pricey “adorable vintage house within walking distance to entertainment” in Austin (actually, a teardown with a honky-tonk a few yards from the back porch). Be cheered that Wall Street 24/7, a news and financial site, has just released a special report entitled “The Cheapest City to Buy a Home in Every State.”
If you’re a pioneering Millennial, here are a few cities in the report:
Gary, Ind., could be “your home sweet home” -- just like the line from the song in The Music Man, which was a hit on stage and screen long before you were born. The median home value is $66,000. Cheap homes abound in this not-so-cheerful city.
Flint, Mich., The fact that you can’t drink the water is no problem for you because you’ve only ever drunk bottled water. The median home value is $29,000. If you decide to buy a home there, keep buying bottled water from fresh municipal springs -- in other states.
Camden, N.J. There is great news for home buyers. Trenton has taken the “Murder Capital of New Jersey” title away from Camden, a perennial titleholder. The median home value in Camden is a bargain $84,000 versus $335,600 for New Jersey as a whole. Camden is downriver from Trenton, so mind the floating corpse risk.
Minot, N.D. It’s a hot market: the median home value is $208,700 versus $193,900 for the state. As for temperature, it’s not. I had a school friend from Minot who told me the saying there was, “Why not Minot? Because freezing is the reason.” Look at those months of frigid temperatures as being the reason to get more wear out of your chichi Canada Goose Expedition Parka.
East St. Louis, Mo. One resident, in a review on the Niche site, wrote, “I didn't like all of the abandoned homes and buildings. It looked like the area isn't livable and then two houses down, it is livable.” The Niche reviewers give the city bad marks for violence, but great ones for the high school football team and the diners. The median house value is $54,000.
The city that really caught my eye in the report was Danville, Va. – in a state where I lived for most of my life.
For years, because I’m interested in architecture, I’ve pored through listings on historic house sites. Recently on one site, there were many dilapidated Victorian houses listed in Danville’s Old West End, priced from $15,000 to $55,000.
For much of its history, Danville was a D-list city – D for disreputable. This tobacco-processing and textile-manufacturing city’s reputation rolled downhill for a century, from the Civil War (where it was major center of Confederate activity and was the “Last Capital of the Confederacy” from April 3-7, 1865) to “Bloody Monday,” the name given to a series of arrests and brutal attacks that took place during a nonviolent protest by Blacks against segregation laws and racial inequality on June 10, 1963. Of the protests, leading up to the March on Washington on Aug. 28, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “As long as the Negro is not free in Danville, Virginia, the Negro is not free anywhere in the United States of America.”
Danville’s work in recent decades to create a new identity is paying off. The median home value is $90,500. The city is attracting high-tech companies and Millennial workers – new residents who will continue its transformation from disreputable to desirable.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com, and she’s hased in West Warwick, R.I. and Washington, D.C.
Our feathered friends await orders for 2022
Getting our Canada geese in a row for 2022 on the South Branch of the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint, in West Warwick, R.I.
— Photo by Linda Gasparello of White House Chronicle
The Canada Geese on this branch of the river are like the swallows of San Juan Capistrano. They return in the winter. Their summer gorging ground is the north branch.
Linda Gasparello: What’s good for us can be very bad for wildlife
Remains of an albatross killed by ingesting plastic pollution.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When I lived in Manhattan, I pursued an unusual pastime. I started it to avoid eye contact with Unification Church members who peddled flowers and their faith on many street corners in the 1970s. If a Moonie (as a church member was derisively known) were to approach me, I’d cast my eyes down to the sidewalk, where I’d see things that would set my mind wandering.
In the winter, I’d see lone gloves and mittens. On the curb in front of La Cote Basque on East 55th Street, the luxe French restaurant where Truman Capote dined with the doyennes of New York’s social scene, before dishing on them in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, I saw a black leather glove with a gold metal “F” sewn on the cuff. I coveted such a Fendi pair, eyeing them at the glove counter at Bergdorf Goodman, but not buying them – they cost about a third of my Greenwich Village studio apartment’s monthly rent in the late 1970s. On the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in front of an FAO Schwartz window, I saw a child’s mitten, expertly knit in a red-and-white Norwegian pattern that I never had the patience to follow. I wondered whether the child dropped the mitten after removing it to point excitedly to a toy in the window.
In the summer, I’d see pairs of sunglasses and single sneakers on the sidewalks, things that had fallen out of weekenders’ pockets and bags. It wasn’t unusual for me to see pantyhose. Working women in Manhattan, in my time there, could wear a short-sleeved wrap dress – the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg was the working woman’s boilersuit -- in the summer, but they’d better have put on pantyhose, or packed a pair in their pocketbooks or tote bags. The pantyhose would fall out of them and roll like tumbleweed along the avenues.
One summer morning on Perry Street, near where I lived, I saw a long, black zipper. It looked like a black snake had slithered out of a drain grate on the street and was warming itself on the asphalt, its white belly gleaming in the sun.
Now when I walk on a city sidewalk, I still look down, not to pursue my pastime but to preserve myself from tripping and falling on stuff. I sometimes see interesting litter, but mostly I see single-use and reusable face masks.
This fall, as I walked on the waterfront promenade along Rondout Creek in Kingston, N.Y., I saw a single-use mask swirling in the wind with the fallen leaves. I grabbed the mask and deposited it in a trash can, worried that it would fall into the creek, ensnarling the waterfowl and the fish.
In the COVID-19 crisis, masks have been lifesavers. But masks, especially single-use, polypropylene surgical masks, have been killing marine wildlife and devastating ecosystems.
Billions of masks have been entering our oceans and washing onto our beaches when they are tossed aside, where waste-management systems are inadequate or nonexistent, or when these systems become overwhelmed because of increased volumes of waste.
A new report from OceansAsia, a Hong Kong-based marine conservation organization, estimates that 1.56 billion masks will have entered the oceans in 2020. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tons of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.”
Single-use masks are made from a variety of meltdown plastics and are difficult to recycle, due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection, the report points out. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into microplastics ingested by wildlife.
“Marine plastic pollution is devastating our oceans. Plastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion per year,” according to Gary Stokes, operations director of OceansAsia.
The report recommends that people wear reusable masks, and to dispose of all masks properly.
I hope that everyone will wear them for the sake of their own and others’ health, and that I won’t see them lying on sidewalks on my strolls, or on beaches, where they are a sorry sight.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com and she’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello: Ice cream anti-socials in America's angry COVID-19 summer
— Photo by Xnatedawgx
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
You’ve heard of an ice cream social — an event in a home or elsewhere, using ice cream as its central theme, dating back to the 18th Century in America.
Thomas Jefferson became the first president to serve ice cream at the White House, in 1802. An epicure, Jefferson had his own personal recipe for vanilla ice cream.
Now, in the time of COVID-19 and President Trump, there are ice cream anti-socials.
These events feature meltdowns by customers in ice cream shops over having to wear face masks, having to stand six feet apart waiting in line — or even having fewer flavor choices on the menu. No Peanut Butter Caramel Cookie Dough? What’s America coming to? As Trump might tweet, “So terrible!”
The latest reported ice cream anti-socials in New England happened at Brickley’s, an ice cream shop with locations in Narragansett and Wakefield, R.I. In early May, one at Polar Cave Ice Cream Parlour in Mashpee, Mass., described by its owner as “insane,” made national news.
The Brickley’s events mirrored the one in Cape Cod in the rude, crude and socially unacceptable behavior of some customers.
Steve Brophy, who owns and operates Brickley’s with his wife, said in a June 22 Facebook post, “Over the last two weeks at both our locations, we have experienced on multiple occasions customers who will not wear their mask (asking us to show them the law) or are angry they can’t get exactly what they want due to the reduced menu. I, personally, had one man yell at me, ‘What’s your f—ing problem?’ because I had told him he needed to move his car which was blocking traffic. A few more expletives hurled toward me and I (for the first time in 26 years) told him to take his business elsewhere.
“Some of these customers are being verbally abusive to our young staff. That is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I cannot ask our high school and college (age) staff to police the behavior of some who choose to ignore our rules.”
As if what these boors said wasn’t enough, Brophy also said in the post: “Another customer, who could not get exactly what he wanted, told our staff member, ‘You are babies. Are you going to let Gina hold your hand all summer?’ and ‘I hope you go out of f—ing business.’ ”
By “Gina,” the customer was referring to Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s Democratic governor, who issued an order on May 8 requiring all residents over the age of two to wear face coverings or masks while in public settings, whether indoors or outdoors. It’s the law.
The simple pleasure of going out for an ice cream, an all-American summer activity, is being taken away from adults and children, who’ve been holed up during the pandemic, by foul-mouthed people, partisan or not.
If they want to signal their vileness, maybe an enterprising one of their lot should open an ice cream shop: no masks, flavors like COVID-19 Cookies and Cream, and all abuse-spewing patrons welcome.
These ice cream anti-social events are likely to happen all over the country, especially as the summer and the 2020 presidential campaigns heat up.
July is National Ice Cream Month. I propose, a chilling out, a time for Americans to reflect on the nice tradition of ice cream socials and going out for an ice cream.
Don’t be a jerk. Stop hurling expletives and politics at shop owners and staff, the latter who include high school and college students who are trying to make a buck by scooping your ice cream, making your life a little sweeter.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.
Copyright © 2020 White House Chronicle, All rights reserved.
Keep updated on the White House Chronicle's latest hot-button issues at whchronicle.com
Linda Gasparello: Some soothing Southern cuisine for stressed Rhode Islanders in the COVID-19 crisis
Shrimp gumbo with pieces of okra: industrial-strength Southern cooking
Watergate Salad!
As I surveyed what remained on the shelves at the supermarket I frequent in Rhode Island, I was reminded of the saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Hurricane or coronavirus pandemic, Rhode Islanders — as befits the Italian heritage and food preference of many of them — had cleared the shelves and frozen food cases of pasta (except that made with chickpeas), canned and jarred tomato sauce, and frozen pizza.
Expectedly all the standard frozen and canned foods (except the dreaded whole and sliced beets), milk, butter, eggs, tuna, soup, bread, cookies and snack food had been cleared out, too.
What to buy? I viewed the rejected food not as Italian-American Rhode Islander, but rather as a Virginia transplant to the state. And I found heaps to buy.
Many of the ingredients for classic Southern dishes were still on the shelves and the frozen food cases. Here are some ingredients I saw and some ideas for what to do with them:
— Shrimp and grits: Buy frozen wild or farmed shrimp and grits (look on the bottom shelves in the breakfast cereal aisle). Yo, Italian-Americans up North! If you like polenta, you’ll love grits. “I ga-ron-tee!” as the late Cajun chef and humorist Justin Wilson used to say.
— Okra: If you live in the North, it will be the only vegetable left in your supermarket’s frozen-food case. Dip it in buttermilk, dredge it in a seasoned cornmeal-flour mixture and fry it until it reaches that beautiful golden brown. Okra tastes like eggplant: In fact, you can make parmigiana with it.
— Jarred pimentos: When life gives you pimentos, make pimento cheese. Southerners call it “pate du Sud” (Southern pate). It’s a dip, a spread, but mostly it’s chopped pimentos mixed with mayonnaise and cheddar cheese. As Jeremy, the bigger and funnier of the two Jeremys who used to fix things around our house in Virginia, said of pimento cheese, “Put that on top of your head and your tongue would beat your brains out trying to get to it.”
— Stone-ground cornmeal: Cornbread. Nuff said.
— Instant pistachio pudding: You could make Shut the Gate Salad, also known as Watergate Salad. I first ate this salad in college in Washington in the mid-1970s. This salad was never served at the Watergate complex, site of the June 17, 1972, break-in of Democratic Party headquarters during the Nixon administration; the origin of its name remains obscure.
“But the particular mix of ingredients that became the standard Watergate Salad likely originated with the Jell-O brand, which introduced a line of pistachio pudding mix in 1976. This was two years after President Richard Nixon resigned, and the Watergate scandal was still fresh in Americans’ minds. (A spokesperson for Kraft, which now owns Jell-O, once said that pistachio mix was introduced in 1975),” NPR said in a Weekend Edition Sunday broadcast.
Salad in the South is often devoid of leafy green vegetables. The green food coloring in the pudding legitimizes eating this pudding, Cool Whip, crushed pineapple, toasted pecan and mini marshmallow concoction as a vegetable serving. (Sound of incredulous gasping in the North.)
The supermarket checkout lines were long, so I only picked a few items off the shelves, including the despised and rejected canned beets and chickpea pasta. And, yes, I was tempted to grab the makings for Watergate Salad: A little Southern comfort food in the time of COVID-19.
My husband says we should try barbecue sauce on the chickpea pasta.
Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. This first ran on InsideSources.com.
Linda Gasparello: Uzbeks transforming Old Silk Road cities into smart cities
Design for Tashkent City
Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, is undergoing a transformation at a pace and scale almost comparable to Samarkand in 1370, when the Turco-Mongol ruler Timur, or, Tamerlane, as he is known in the West, made it his capital.
On the one hand, Tamerlane was a brutal conqueror who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. The empire he founded in 1370 and ruled until his death in 1405 (probably of a mid-winter cold, caught while on his way to change the Ming Dynasty in China) stretched from Russia to India and from the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia.
But on the other hand, Tamerlane was a brilliant constructor. One of his signature achievements was Samarkand, which he strove to make the most splendid city in Asia.
“It’s not hard to see why the author of the 1001 Nights had Scheherazade spin her tales from a palace in Samarkand: The city was on the Silk Road, alive with people from different lands; it was a wonderland of Islamic architecture and a great center of learning,” Srinath Perur wrote in The Guardian newspaper.
The Registan, in Samarkand
But no place in Samarkand represents all three aspects as well as the Registan, the main square, three sides of which stand a blur-of-blue-tiled madrasas (Islamic colleges). In 1888 George Curzon, world traveler and future viceroy of India, called it “the noblest public square in the world.”
While most of the edifices seen around the square were built after Tamerlane’s death, they couldn’t have been built without his sacking Islamic brother cities (including Baghdad, Damascus and Khiva) and his sparing their artisans and craftsmen, who he brought back to Samarkand.
In 1399, just a year after reducing Delhi to rubble because he thought the Muslim sultan was too tolerant of his Hindu subjects, Tamerlane was back to building his sumptuous capital. A caravan of 90 captured elephants was employed to carry stones from quarries to erect a great mosque, according to Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, an envoy the Spanish kingdom of Castile dispatched to Samarkand. The Europeans rather liked Tamerlane because he roughed up their neighborhood bully, the Ottoman Turks
Tamerlane returned from his military conquests -- estimated to have wiped out 5 percent of the world’s population -- with architectural inspiration and plunder that could finance his appetite for building in Samarkand and other cities.
One of his monuments bears the proverb, “If you want to know about us, examine our cities.’’
That proverb could be driving Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who succeeded Islam Karimov as Uzbek president in 2016. His smart city projects in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, so it seems, are aimed at rebranding Uzbekistan as a country interested in political reform, economic investment and good relations with the rest of the world.
Javlon Vakhabov, Uzbekistan’s youthful new ambassador in Washington, discussed one smart city project, Tashkent City, in some depth at a summit on smart cities and communities organized by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm.
Construction of Tashkent City, a $1.7-billion international business and financial hub in the heart of the capital, started in 2018. The design includes an industrial park, eight business centers, a shopping mall, restaurants and a cultural center, as well as residential apartments on a 173-acre site
“The aim of this project,” according to the government, “is to create an architectural complex in the center of Tashkent, implemented by embedding the latest trends in world architecture and the application of environmentally friendly and energy-saving, smart technologies.”
Vakhabov enthused that Tashkent City projects have already received millions of dollars in loans from the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank.
But he added, “Uzbekistan is a 3,000-year-old country. We have four UNESCO World Heritage cities. We have 4,000 sites that are highly protected by UNESCO. We need to be sensitive to these historical sites and adapt them to smart cities.”
“A mass movement of people from the countryside to the cities has created stresses on the environment and infrastructure,” he said. Ultimately smart cities can alleviate those stresses, using information and communication technology to improve efficiency, sustainability and citizen welfare.
Meantime, smart city projects have been stressing out people. There have been news reports about protests and court cases in Tashkent over traditional housing demolitions and evictions.
“As for the resettlement of people living in houses built by their forefathers, we need to create more favorable conditions for people persuaded to move to other communities,” Vakhabov said reassuringly.
Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com.
\
Llewellyn King: A Christmas cake for the Bakers' Year
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Christmas is coming. I know this because of indelible evidence in my own home. My wife, Linda Gasparello, has just baked a Christmas cake. If I doubt that this is the month of Christmas, I just have to look at it, cooling on the kitchen counter, declaring itself, in its way, the harbinger of the holidays.
The cake can’t be eaten yet. No, no. Linda, who’s a phenomenon at the range, explains when she sees me circling with a knife, the cake needs to “cure” for at least a week. Rum must infuse the cornucopia of fruit which has bonded with flour and eggs and whatever else makes a cake a cake. I don’t know all the fruits and nuts that go into The Great Christmas Cake, but I do know there are dried apricots. Linda gave me some as a bribe to get out of the kitchen while she was baking the cake.
All year we eat very little cake in our home. Desserts are avoided for the usual reason: keeping down the calorie count. But recently, for a party, Linda made a carrot cake. Not because she’s my wife, but because I adore carrot cake, I can say that hers is the best-ever.
How come I indulge in carrot cake when I eschew sponge, hide from German chocolate and, with a heavy heart, have even shaken my head at Sachertorte (chocolate cake covered with apricot jam and chocolate icing) in Vienna -- a crime against Austria, practically an act of war? (I must confess, though, that I once ate the cake in the Hotel Sacher in Vienna where it was invented.) The answer is carrots sound so healthy. “Good for you,” my mother used to say. She was a frightful cook and so raw carrots were better than anything she tried to do to them, which was mostly boil the life out of them until they were soft and spongy, most of the nutrients gone.
This year I read Hotel Sacher, a novel by Rodica Doehnert which traces the role of the great hotel at the end of the 19th Century -- how it was a kind of headquarters for the events that led to the end of Austro-Hungarian Empire and to World War I. If you want to research this in chilling detail, read Max Hastings’s book Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War.
Back to cakes and Christmas. Linda’s cake has so many things in it I wonder it doesn’t cause a criticality incident or spontaneously ignite.
There seems to be boom in cooking and baking in particular. It all goes back to Julia Child, “The French Chef” starting on television in the 1960s, who whet the nation’s palate for cooking. Julia showed that cooking could be fun (especially if you cook with wine and imbibe as you go) and challenging -- so much so that today we have an abundance of cooking shows.
The ones I hate are those which weaponize cooking — with contestant chefs who are sent home in tears because their sauce separated or, horror of horrors, their soufflé collapsed.
Anyway, it seems 2018 is the Bakers’ Year. Linda is an exception because she bakes and tames meat. She can make a delectable osso buco as easily the tiramisu which follows. Mostly, there’s a divide between the flour people and meat people. Pretty much in the same the way, when I worked at The Washington Post, there was a divide between the pot smokers and the drinkers. Me, the latter.
I can tell baking is in by the number of recipes I find people exchanging, and I put it all down to The Great British Baking Show, on PBS, which entertains and makes baking exciting. Here contestant chefs also are sent home, but with such teary reluctance that if you want a hug from the whole cast and the other amazing chefs, you deliberately add a cup of salt instead of sugar to the cake. Tears and hugs all round.
We’re planning a Great British Christmas Tea at our house with Devonshire clotted cream and jam on scones, little sandwiches and – play the drums and trumpets fortissimo -- the fruited cake, which is curing very nicely, thank you.
And for Christmas itself? We’re going out to a restaurant. Happy holidays!
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello: As in 1986, president has tainted Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was usually a happy time for the elegant British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke, whose “Letter from America” series on BBC Radio 4 captivated his millions of listeners for over half a century.
Cooke summed up his talent as “associating something quite tiny with something big. In other words, just looking at the way humans behave.” Every week, in a calming and confiding tone, he would discuss topics ranging from intrigue in the corridors of power in Washington to the significance to Americans of serving cranberry sauce with turkey on Thanksgiving.
But Cooke, in his Nov. 28, 1986 broadcast, had an unhappy story to tell “on the most American of American festivals and the one least tarnished with marketing tinsel.”
Thanksgiving that year, for Cooke, was tarnished by the Iran-Contra Affair, a secret U.S. arms deal that traded missiles and other arms to free some Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua. The deal and the ensuing political scandal threatened to bring down the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
“Really the events of the past week have come at us – come at him – with such a tumbling clatter that it would be pointless of me at this stage to try and arrange their chronology. When I first heard about the incredible – every other senator and congressman has been working the word ‘incredible’ overtime – transfer of $30 million by Israel through a Swiss bank to be passed on to the motley band of Nicaraguan democrats, mercenaries and the relics of dictator Somoza’s bully boys, whom the president insists on calling freedom fighters, I found myself verbally paralyzed – a very rare condition with me – and falling back time and again on ‘incredible,’ spoken like a tolling bell,” he said in his broadcast.
Cooke, who was admired for taking the hysteria out of heated subjects, was outspoken on “Irangate,” just as he had been in the McCarthy era, which resulted in his telephone being tapped for two years.
“Two questions come up now, the answers to which will decide if the United States is to regain any credibility with its allies, with the Arab world, not to mention with any Soviet missions they have to deal with. One is the function and the respectability of the National Security Council – an institution set up only after the Second World War, which too often has quarreled with the secretaries of state and defense and, under this administration, evaded and deceived them, and possibly the president, himself.
“The other, more pressing, grave question turns on the honesty of the president, himself. How much did he really know and sanction of these incredible goings-on? It’s the same question whose stony answer brought down President Nixon and we shan’t know the truth until the congressional hearings get underway. They have great powers to subpoena the highest officers of the administration and get at the truth, as we saw with the Ervin Senate committee that probed into Watergate,” he said.
Reagan was hounded by the press, and there were three investigations into the scandal – one by the Tower Commission (led by Texas Senator John Tower), which Reagan himself appointed; congressional hearings in 1987, which were televised nationally; and an eight-year investigation, launched by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, in which 14 people were charged, including National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and Vice Adm. John Poindexter, his successor in that position, and Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council.
Ending his broadcast, Cooke said “the sauce that really soured our appetite” for the turkey that Thanksgiving was “the knowledge that, for the moment, the United States has no declared foreign policy that either friends or enemies can believe in.”
If Cooke were alive – he died in March 2004, less than a month after he filed his last “Letter” -- he would’ve been outspoken about what amounts to President Trump’s pardoning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This Thanksgiving, we would’ve heard him say gently and mellifluously that in Trump’s America, the incredible is true.
Linda Gasparello is producer and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com. She is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello: The mysterious mound builders; New England grits? Southern hockey
-- Photos of the Great Temple Mound by Linda Gasparello
The Mound Builders of Georgia
On a January day at the Ocmulgee National Monument, in Macon, Ga., a hiker ambles up the Great Temple Mound, a flat-topped, earthen ceremonial structure built by the Mississippians around 900-1100 A.D. Just as the Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson described Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1887, the mound is “entirely suggestive of solidity and repose, of serene majesty asleep.”
Macon lawyer Christopher Smith, a tall mound of a man, guided my husband Llewellyn King and I through the national park, which preserves an area that has been inhabited by humans since the Ice Age (before 9,000 B.C).
From the Visitors Center, we walked across a wooden bridge over a stream flanked by spindly Georgia pines and up a hill path to the Earth Lodge, which was probably a meeting place for the town's political and religious leaders.
Crouching, we entered the grass-covered lodge through an opening buttressed with thick wooden planks. Bent at our waists, we walked through a narrow hall with woven reed walls into the reconstructed council chamber of the Mississippians.
The circular chamber incorporates and protects the original clay floor, which is about 1,000 years old. There is a round fire pit and a raised platform in the shape of a large bird, where the chiefs or high priests sat. The chamber's wood-beamed ceiling and clay walls give it the look and feel of a Tudor chapel.
“The site of Ocmulgee is synonymous with Georgia and Southeastern archeology. During the 1930s, it was a training ground for a whole generation of American archeologists, some of whom later became the 'fathers' of modern American archeology,” according to the National Park Service.
The history of the park, from its inception as a Depression-era works project through to World War II, is intertwined with archaeological-project management on a grand scale by the Smithsonian Institution, various federal relief agencies (the Works Project Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and the National Park Service.
From 1933 to 1942 as many as 1,200 people excavated the site under the direction of Arthur R. Kelly, a Harvard-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian, and built the Visitors Center, which contains beautifully crafted dioramas of human habitation of the area from 10,000 BCE to the early 1700s. The 702-acre site was designated a National Monument in 1936; it is now a national park.
We toured Ocmulgee a day before its closure on Jan. 20, due to the government shutdown. That day, the national park posted a message on its Facebook page that the Visitors Center and Earth Lodge would be closed during the shutdown, but the roads, trails and outside grounds would be open as usual, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Dee Shannon Garrison left this comment on the page, “Stupid congress critters. Ain't happy unless they putting somebody out of work.”
True Grits
Recently, I read in Yankee magazine that the Algonquin Indians of New England, not Southerners, invented grits. That may very well be true, but I don't trust New Englanders -- not even Rhode Islanders who make a corny cousin, johnny cakes -- to cook grits.
Northerners just don't get grits. In 1980, when I was living in Manhattan, I watched Stan Woodward's hilarious and insightful documentary about grits on PBS's WNET. Using a hand-held camera, the South Carolina filmmaker went from the streets of New York to the grist mills of the South asking people a simple question, “Do you eat grits?” A New York City construction worker replied, “Grits? Ain't that the stuff on my collar?” New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in Indianola, Miss., replied by making a grits souffle.
True grits are cooked in the “Grits Belt,'' which stretches from Virginia to Texas. Kevin Whitener, who was our neighbor for nearly 30 years in The Plains, Va., and cooks at the Old Salem Cafe, in nearby Marshall, makes the grits of my dreams.
Georgia is the middle hole of the Grits Belt: the one that's comfy for someone with a grits belly. Grits became the state's official prepared food in 2002.
Chris Smith, host of our Georgia trip, treated us to dinner at the Grits Cafe in Forsyth, near Macon. I ordered the fried catfish, remoulade and cheddar soft grits. I left the restaurant full as a tick.
High Sticking, Tripping and Roughing in Macon
I grew up in Massachusetts: a hotbed of ice-hockey rest. So I just can't get my head around professional ice hockey teams in the South. Sure, you can build a rink and import players from Boston. But how do you build a fan base in a region where people only like ice when it's in Coke or sweet tea?
Yet there are five National Hockey League teams in the South. The Southern Professional Hockey League has 10 teams, including the Macon Mayhems, who were the 2017 President's Cup champions.
Southern ice hockey teams have crazy good names, like the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. But hands down, the best-ever professional hockey team name is the Macon Whoopees. The defunct team played in Southern Hockey League during 1973-74. A Macon reporter told me, “The first game the Whoopees played, folks left during halftime because they thought the game was over.” Poor attendance led the team to disband mid-season.
The Macon Whoopees rose again in 1996, renamed the Whoopee. After several owners endured seasons of poor attendance and financial losses, the team went belly up in 2001.
An East Coast Hockey League team, the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, relocated to Macon in 2001. They became known as the Macon Whoopee and played just one season. The Macon Trax, a later effort to continue professional hockey in Macon, got stopped short.
I hop that the Macon Mayhem, a relocation of the former Augusta River Hawks, will play in the city for a spell.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.
A letter from death row
Lethal-injection room at San Quentin State Prison, in California.
An extraordinary episode of White House Chronicle, the long-running program on PBS, will blaze across television screens this weekend. The program airs a letter from Timothy J. Hoffner, a death row inmate in Ohio. He has been on death row since 1995 and is scheduled for execution by lethal injection on May 29, 2019.
Frederic “Rick” Reamer, a guest on the program who served on the Rhode Island Parole Board for more than 20 years, commented, “The majority of prisoners I've dealt with are reflective, but Hoffner is very articulate and atypical.”
Hoffner wrote to Reamer after watching him discuss prison reform on a previous episode of White House Chronicle. Reamer said the letter was unusual because Hoffner didn't ask for clemency or a pardon for the gruesome murder he committed with an accomplice.
Llewellyn King, program host and executive producer, said, “Hoffner makes an articulate plea for the humanity of prisoners, even those who are guilty of major crimes. He also makes a plea for more education, and for educational programs to be available to long-term prisoners as well as those serving shorter sentences.”
In an excerpt of his letter, read on the program by Rhode Island-based actor David Catanzaro, Hoffner said, “What you [Reamer] said about inmates in prison being uneducated and/or having mental health issues of some kind is something I completely understand, because I see it, even in this isolated environment I’m trapped in.”
Reamer, who is a professor at Rhode Island College's School of Social Work, said on the program that he is not soft on prisoners, and has turned down more parole applications than he has approved. However, he has dealt with prisoners who have expressed remorse and Hoffner, in his letter, “was willing to reflect on what he did.”
As for rehabilitation, Reamer mentioned two of his parole cases: a crack dealer who rose from prisoner to become assistant solicitor for Providence, and another who serves as associate director of juvenile corrections for Rhode Island. Both had a thirst for knowledge.
In his many years in prison, Hoffner has educated himself and is the author of books and screenplays, which are available on Amazon or through Lulu.com. His pen name is Tim Lee.
“Over the years I have been locked up, I have educated myself about a variety of things, which is good. I like to learn about various things. The more we know, the better we are able to go through life. You never know when something you have learned will be helpful to you,” Hoffner said in his letter.
Linda Gasparello, co-host of White House Chronicle, said, “This program is so timely because the Justice Department is under a directive from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions to take a harder line with prosecutions and sentencing. Eric Holder, the previous attorney general, worked for years to reform the justice system; and there was a move in Congress to get rid of mandatory sentencing, But that has now ended.”
White House Chronicle airs nationwide on PBS and public, educational and government access stations, and on the commercial AMG TV network. It airs worldwide on Voice of America Television and Radio. An audio version airs three times weekends on SiriusXM Radio's P.O.T.U.S., Channel 124. An interactive list of stations which carry the program can be found at whchronicle.com.
For further information, contact Llewellyn King at llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Linda Gasparello: Cruising and learning on the Baltic and beyond
Photos by Linda Gasparello
Photo taken from under one of St. Petersburg's 400 bridges. There are four rearing horses in the bridge.
To take or not to take shore excursions. That is the question for cruisers.
Having cruised on five continents, my answer is to take them. The guides are competent — mostly moonlighting high school teachers and college professors — and often they’re characters.
The first cruise my husband, Llewellyn King, and I took, on the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas in the early 1990s with the now-defunct Royal Cruise Line, introduced us to shore tour theater.
In Constanta, Romania’s largest and most important port city on the Black Sea, our shore excursion guide was a droll fellow named Mikhail. We visited the city not long after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried by a hastily arranged military tribunal that was set up on Dec. 25, 1989, put up against a wall and shot, all within an hour. It was a city still in shock from 24-years of their mismanagement that brought food shortages in a country with dark, rich soil; torture and executions, and, most famously, state neglect of orphans and disabled children.
During our tour of the city, we stopped at a Belle Epoque hotel, where, Mikhail told us, “Nazi leaders lodged comfortably in the early years of World War II.” The hotel manager made us feel welcome by setting out trays with tiny fruit tarts and small glasses of tuica (Romanian “white lighting” made from plums) on a large table in a paneled, ground-floor reception room. As we entered the room, the staff, who stood at the opposite end, watched as most of us sampled the tarts and tuica. As the last person in our group walked out of the room, I looked back and saw the staff make a dash for the table, grabbing whatever was left.
We traveled north to the Greco-Roman city of Histria. Mikhail gave us a detailed tour of the city, which was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BC and thrived for seven centuries. He interspersed his commentary about Histria, which became the richest city in Ionia (Asia Minor), with sarcastic comparisons to Romania’s “golden age under the Ceausescus.”
We returned to Constanta on a coastal road. Nearing the city, we saw thick pipes that seemed to stretch for miles along a beach. “That would be a beautiful beach, but the pipes lead to a chemical plant that Mrs. Ceausescu built. She had a doctorate in chemistry, but she did not even graduate from high school. Fancy that!”
Mikhail said Mrs. Ceausescu was nicknamed “Codoi,” referring to her mispronunciation of the chemical compound CO2 ( “C” for carbon, “O” for oxygen, and “doi” which is Romanian for “two”). He added that “codoi” was a word in Romanian, too, meaning “big tail.”
“Her big tail was her nose. She would kill anyone who took her picture in profile,” he said.
Pastel colored buildings on the Neva River embankment, St. Petersburg.
For nine days this month, Llewellyn and I cruised the Baltic Sea on the Getaway, a Norwegian Cruise Line megaship. Anna, our guide on a day cruise along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, was a notable shore tour entertainer.
On the bus, as we drove from the cruise ship to the river boat, Anna told us that men in Russia were “as precious as diamonds. So ladies, hold onto your husbands. Do not lose them. And please send us your sons, nephews, brothers, uncles.”
Anna teaches Russian history in a St. Petersburg high school, and she wrangled us as though we were her students on a field trip. She taught us how to say “I love you” in Russian. “Ya lyublui vas. Just say, ‘yellow blue bus.’ We Russians are so emotional.”
The sunny day brought out what Anna called her “Russian emotions.” Pointing to the buildings decorated like wedding cakes along the river, many designed by the 18th-century Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi, she said, “Rastrelli, who built the Winter Palace, which you can see along the embankment, liked pale blues and greens, and Rossi liked pale yellow. These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.”
So, too, is vodka. Anna said, “When you have a cold, you drink vodka with lemon. When you have a headache, you drink vodka with pepper. And when you are depressed, you drink vodka.”
But the funny lady was serious about showing us St. Petersburg’s historical sights: no significant edifice on the banks of the Neva or ship moored on it (including the great, gray cruiser Aurora which fired the blank round at 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1917 that started the Bolshevik Revolution) escaped her commentary.
“Just look at the taste and temperament of Peter the Great. Here is his small, elegant Summer Palace. But across the river, on Vasilyevsky Island, is the Peter and Paul Fortress, which he designed. It was the Bastille of the tsars,” Anna said.
Across from the fortress, she pointed to the Soviet-era KGB (now FSB) headquarters. “That’s the ‘Big House,’ ” she said.
Those of us seated on the upper deck were grateful that Anna was serious about reminding us to duck when we approached one of the many low bridges across the Neva.
“Please keep seated,” she said. “But if you want to be like Catherine the Great and get rid of your husband, have him stand up.”
How emotional, how Russian.
While I prefer to go to souvenir shops of my own volition, I’ve stopped resenting being shanghaied into them on cruise shore excursions. Sometimes, they’re sights that shouldn’t be missed, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: a maze of souvenir shops.
After our Neva River day cruise, we were bussed to a cavernous souvenir store. Norwegian Cruise Line billed it as a “bathroom stop.”
It was just that, for some on our bus. But busloads of tourists, including many on ours, were just raring to hit the mirrored shelves laden with fur hats, amber jewelry, Faberge-style Easter eggs and matroyshka dolls — especially after getting emotional on complimentary cranberry vodka, served at the entrance by young women wearing traditional, red jumper dresses.
Against a wall, near one of the store’s side exit doors, stood colossal Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump matroyshka dolls. As I took a picture of them, I heard one shopper say, “Same size as their egos.”
The store occupies part of what was once a movie theater in St. Petersburg. The theater’s architecture is Stalinist big box. The huge concrete-slab marquee over the entrance advertised four movies or other events. Riveted onto cement columns near the entrance are metal sheets imprinted with scenes of bears frolicking in a forest, peasants threshing wheat, and people going about their business on a wintry day in St. Petersburg. There is one of Russian troops tending their wounded in the Crimean War – a war that stirs up sacred memories, leading to actions even unto this day.
More is more. That was the approach of the two greats, Peter and Catherine, and Empress Elizabeth asked their European architects to take in St. Petersburg.
The city’s historic center is a feast — a grand bouffe — of Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, including the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, and the Marble Palace. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site in 1990, noting, “The unique urban landscape of the port and capital city of Saint Petersburg, rising out of the Neva estuary where it meets the Gulf of Finland, was the greatest urban creation of the 18th century.”
Lahkta Center.
The more-is-more approach is operating today with the construction of the Lahkta Center, which includes a twisting glass-and-steel tower that will serve as the headquarters of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The project, which was proposed in 2005, has changed its name (as many times as St. Petersburg) and location, due to criticism from preservationists and residents that its 1,515-foot tower — which will be the tallest in Russia — would destroy the city’s horizontal harmony and violate a law prohibiting new buildings higher than 157 feet in the historic center.
In 2010, the project moved to a site northwest of Vasilyevsky Island, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.
Designed by the architectural firm RMJM London, the center’s website says “the tower bears more than a passing resemblance to a ship’s mast, while the building that lean against its base represent the hull. This theme continues through the wave-like bearing structures and the overall organic form of the building, both of which symbolize the power of the sea.”
The project already holds a Guinness World Record. Between Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015, it set a new record for largest continuous concrete pour, with 25,667 cubic yards poured over a period of 49 hours.
Some of the Lakhta Center’s remarkable innovations include:
- It will be the first skyscraper in St. Petersburg to employ an ice formation-control system. To prevent ice accumulations and help maintain good visibility, the glass on the highest floors will be heated; and to prevent ice formation, the tower’s spire will be made of metal gauze.
- The center’s lighting will be designed to make it bird-safe during migration in the fall and winter months, complying with the World Wide Fund for Nature and FLAP’s (Fatal Light Awareness Program) bird-friendly building program.
This project has Petrine boldness. While it could suit a man who would be a great, Putin, he has yet to weigh in on it.
Linda Gasparello is a veteran journalist and co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Linda Gasparello: Portuguese culture thrives in a Rhode Island village
-- Photos by Linda Gasparello
Journal:
I live in the Riverpoint section of West Warwick, R.I., which I call “Portugal on the Pawtuxet River.” Riverpoint has a Portuguese American Citizens Club; the Jerry's supermarket stocks Portuguese food brands, such as Gonsalves, and there is a Portuguese bakery, Matos, in nearby Arctic Village – I recommend their three-bite, egg custard tarts, pasteis de nata. {There are heavily Portuguese-American neighborhoods in many southeastern New England communities.}
All around the circle at Riverpoint, but especially as you go up Providence Street to Arctic Village, you'll see modest houses, each with baroque front yard landscaping: flowering cherry trees shaped like umbrellas, espaliered shrubs and statuary – especially Virgin Mary statues, either brightly painted or stark white.
Most of the Virgin Mary statues are adorned with plantings – often with perennials, like hostas, and sometimes with plastic flowers or small American and Portuguese flags.
In the backyard of a house near the Bradford Soap Works, there is an Our Lady of Grace statue: a Virgin Mary with outstretched arms, standing on the serpent Satan. The blue paint has largely peeled off her robe, but the snake hasn't lost any of its black paint. It looks lifelike -- and like it is headed into the poison ivy that is creeping closer to the statue.
Just off Riverpoint circle, there is a house where another Our Lady of Grace statue stands among well-tended hostas in a tiny plot along the driveway. I call her “Our Lady of the Hostas.”
I have a chit-chat friendship with the Portuguese-American woman who lives there. Recently, when she saw me admiring the lush plants, she said, “I think Our Lady is smiling because the Pope has made saints of two Portuguese children.” She was referring to Pope Francis's canonization of siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto who, with their cousin Lucia Santos, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made the first of six appearances to them while they grazed their sheep in Fatima, Portugal.
My favorite religious statuary in Riverpoint is on East Main Street. It occupies the entire side yard of a house, where you'd expect to see a picnic table and benches or a circle of lawn chairs.
It's is a tableau of brightly painted statues: A statue of Jesus is flanked by one of St. Anthony holding Baby Jesus and another of the Virgin Mary. Fourteen winged cherubs, hands clasped in prayer, stand at their feet. The boys are dressed in blue, and the girls in pink.
Bygones Worth Remembering
My first encounter with the Portuguese wasn't in Portugal. It was on a train from Paris to Dax in June 1968. I was 13 years old and I was headed to this spa town in southwestern France, whose thermal springs and mud baths have been noted for the cure of rheumatism since Roman times, when it was known as Aquae Tarbellicae. There I was to Monsieur and Mme. Albert Barrieu, with whose family I would spend a few life-expanding summers.
The afternoon before I was to take the train to Dax, Madame Berri, who owned the suburban Paris agency that paired me with the Barrieus, warned me to get to the Gare d'Austerlitz early. “The trains to the southwest are crowded on Saturdays,” she said, handing me my ticket. It was going to be a long trip, over six hours, and I couldn't wait to take it.
I was staying at a youth hostel at 11 rue du Fauconnier in the Marais – and 49 years later, the Hotel Fauconnier is one of three youth hostels in Paris. After a week in Paris, I was a Metro master; I knew that it was about a 10-minute ride from the St. Paul station to the Gare d'Austerlitz. Even so, I packed my suitcase, showered and slept in my dress that Friday night. As I remember, I wanted to have more time to eat the breakfast the hostel laid out for the always-hungry youth: croissants, bread rolls, butter, apricot jam, and small bowls of coffee with hot milk.
Eating that breakfast turned out to be one of the smarter things I did that day.
I got to the station with a lot of time to spare. When my train was announced, I noticed that people where running down the platform and pushing into the cars, and shouting to each other in a language I couldn't identify. I had a second-class ticket, and all those people seemed to be headed to second-class cars.
I couldn't run fast because I was wearing wooden-soled clogs. By the time I climbed into one, all the seats in the compartments were taken – and all were taken in the other second-class cars.
As the train pulled out of the station, I placed my hard-sided, American Tourister suitcase in the aisle of one of the cars, and looked out the window. An unsympathetic conductor took my ticket and told me that I might have to stand a long time because “the train is filled with Portuguese, who are going back home for their national holiday.”
Clogs were the right shoes for standing for hours. I was alternately standing and looking out the window, or sitting on my suitcase looking at the Portuguese family across the aisle in a compartment.
About two hours into the trip, the father pulled down a couple of suitcases from the overhead racks. Out came the bread, the sausage, the cheese, the fruit and the wine.
A girl about my age asked her mother something. Then, through the open compartment door, she asked me in French if I wanted some of their lunch. I thanked her and helped myself to some bread and cheese. It was the first time that I had eaten a papa seco – a soft, baby bottom-shaped roll. Poof went my memory of the hostel's petits pains.
The train arrived in Dax in the late afternoon. I got off and waited for M. and Mme. Barrieu on the platform, as Mme. Berri had told me to do. A blonde woman accompanied by a teenaged girl looked at me for a while. They spoke with each other, shook their heads and walked away. No one was left on the platform but me, so I took a seat – and I was happy to do so.
After a couple of hours, the station manager approached me. “Are you still waiting for someone?” he asked.
I told him that I was supposed to be picked up by M. and Mme. Albert Barrieu who live in Pouillon. “It is a village not far from here. Do you have a telephone number?”
Just as I was reaching into my dress pocket to get it, I saw the blonde woman with the teenager walking toward us.
“Are you Linda?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Mme. Barrieu's blue eyes filled with tears of relief. “We are so sorry. We saw you, but we thought you were Dutch,” she said.
They were confused by the tag on my American Tourister suitcase, which looked like the flag of the Netherlands, and by my clogs.
Linda Gasparello (lgasparello@kingpublishing.com) is co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Linda Gasparello: I know cities by their bread
I've always associated cities with bread. Boston, southeast of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread -- the Wonder kind.
New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I'd think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight that my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.
My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don't yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.
What's really curious is that many restaurants in Providence and around the Ocean State don't routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your main food.
Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.
When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-Century lovers were alive today, they'd be sitting in a Persian restaurant, reading their menus and eatingnan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.
I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It's not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.
It's Comedy and a Concert Tonight!
Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart's “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.
Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg's young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.
Tovey's lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra's musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.
For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.
Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.
The performance of the second piece that he chose, Joseph Canteloube's “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist's – his wife, Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the {music} librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”
His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.
Cry Me a River
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci. (See pictures below.)
For nearly a week recently, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you'd touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.
From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor's porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.
I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state's Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department's Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.
My husband has praised Rhode Island's beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, White House Chronicle, and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
Linda Gasparello: In transit, seeing signs of times, modern and ancient
French bulldog on the Danube River wall.
-- Photo by Linda Gasparello
I take the train a lot from Providence to Washington, D.C. For a long time, it passes through what people would call the most beautiful scenery of the trip: the Connecticut shoreline. And for a short time, it passes through what they would call the most blighted scenery of the trip: the walls along the railroad tracks between North Philadelphia and 30th Street Station.
But I look forward to the beauty in the blight along that stretch of the trip. I've seen some of the most stunning artwork on those walls and buildings along the tracks, one commissioned, like contemporary German artist Katharina Grosse's “psychylustro” -- a warehouse with windows that look as though they were blown out in a blaze of orange and white – but most done by anonymous artists. Whether their frenetic art is benign or malign, I don't care. It transforms my trip.
I work the graffiti on the walls the way people do the difficult crosswords in London's Sunday Times. There is meaning, sometimes clear, in the words on the walls. On the walls, I read, “ZeroSmyle,” and I sympathize with the graffitist. Skrew, a loud graffitist, spray-painted a message -- maybe for China -- on a wall, “Drama, Tibet.”
I think about what master graffitist Banksy said in “Wall and Piece” about these artists, “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”
One person's defacement is another's decoration. I've enjoyed grafitti on walls or buildings all over the world. Vienna has some of the most magnificent graffiti. I like to take the hydrofoil between Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia, so that I can see the museum of temporary art along the Danube River walls.
While living and traveling in the Middle East, I've seen graffiti galore -- and one of the best on a trip to the Greco-Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. Carved on a pillar near the city's brothel – the “Love House,” as it was called by the ancients – a guide said there is some advice to lovers and other strangers: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury was the ancient treatment for syphilis.
The ancients were always kissing and telling on prostitutes. “Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Verses of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome,” Thornton Wilder wrote in his epistolary novel The Ides of March.
Now, back to the future. Donald Trump's presidency has revived the art of the protest sign and placard, not seen since the nation's hippie days. Gitta Hasing, whom I've known since she was a child, participated in January's Women's March and the March for Science in Washington. She and her husband are biological scientists.
Photo by Gitta Hasing
-- Photo by Gitta Hasing
Neither wind nor rain could keep Gitta, her toddler son and her parents from marching on the Mall. She is a talented photographer and took pictures of protesters and their signs in both marches in the same exacting way she photographed parts of North and Central Florida trees for a book, published by the University of Florida.
If Paris is The City of Light, Washington is The City of Sayings. They are carved on government building walls, museum and monument walls, and plazas. The one that always makes me cry is part of the last verse of Walt Whitman's Civil War-era poem “The Wound-Dresser,” carved in the granite around the Dupont South Metro entrance:
Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad.
Two days before the March for Science, as I was sitting on a wall at the Watergate, waiting for Gita's mother to arrive for a performance of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. I looked up at two signs hanging from a street light near the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The blue sign read “The Kennedy Center, JFKC: A Centennial Celebration of John F. Kennedy” with his picture – his 100th birthday would have been May 29, 2017. The orange one read, “Courage, Freedom, Justice, Service, Gratitude.”
-- Photo by Linda Gasparello
Trump can't take those words away from me. They're carved in my memory and the memories of millions of Americans. And a sign with bold hand lettering, posted on a pillar at Cafe La France in the Providence Amtrak Station, proves that so well:
-- Photo by Linda Gasparello
Linda Gasparello, a veteran international journalist, is co-host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.