AMIE HILL: THROWBACK THURSDAYS & OTHER ADVENTURES

Photo by Laura Goldman

Welcome to my past.

I was born the year before WWII ended, and have since led what many people seem to consider a varied and colorful life.

I can’t remember when friends first started telling me that I should write my memoirs, but in 2015, I began posting brief chapters of reminiscence each week as “Throwback Thursday” essays on Facebook.

Before long, readers started telling me that I should compile these essays into a book. While a nice idea, this was impractical because of the sheer number of photos, many in color, involved in over 200 (and counting) essays.

I next considered a website, but upon inquiry, discovered that setting one up would be a very expensive proposition, and I’d still have to do most of the work anyway.

Since I’ve long been familiar with the elements of the free online tool Blogger™, I decided to turn the memoir essays into linked sections, each containing 20 stories. (Apologies for any disparity in type size as a result of importing material from other sources)

These tales are not in any kind of autobiographical order. Many of them are about fascinating people I’ve known, including members of my family. Some are based on my own artwork. They're all just the tiniest bit outrageous.

Welcome to my past.

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1. SECOND-GRADE PHOTO

2. BUDDHABERRY BOOHARVEST, or, CIRCLING BACK

3. WHO’S YOUR BIG SISTER?, or, SEND IN THE CLOWNS

4. JUDGING THE MEN’S BEST OVERALL, or, ME AND THE GUY FROM PLAYBOY

5. DOWN ON THE COMMUNE (Part One)/QUESTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE, AN ORIGIN

6. O YOU NAUGHTY BARD, or, MRS. BRENNAN IS NOT AMUSED

7. AN EASTER TALE

8. THE CRADLE DAYS (PHOTO)

9. A VISIT FROM WU-TAI-TAI

10. THE GREAT VAMPIRE KIT MYSTERY

11. THE MONK AND THE PUSSYCAT, or, SAVING CIVILIZATION, ONE MOUSE AT A TIME

12. MY NEW YORK MINUTE

13. TWO IRISHMEN WENT INTO A BAR; THE SONG OF JOE HEANEY

14. D IS FOR DYLAN

15. GRANDMA’S BAKELITE CHERRIES, or, EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

16. SHE’S AHEAD OF HER TIME; SHE MUST BE A WITCH, or, WHO WAS MAMMY MORGAN, AND WHY DOES SHE HAVE A HILL NAMED AFTER HER?

17. THE FAMILY THAT SKATES TOGETHER…

18. HOLD ONTO YOUR PANTALETS

19. THE LAND OF IMPROBABLE NAMES

20. REMEMBERING WOODSTOCK (KIND OF)

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1. THROWBACK THURSDAY; Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1950: Things Found Between the Pages of Old Books #4

SECOND GRADE

Not sure whether to smile or not

Cedarville School (square brick building with a bell on the top, one room, two grades, slate blackboards, noisy indoor plumbing. They smashed it all down later to make room for a freeway).

Haircut by my dad, who has a slightly shaky relationship with bangs.

The dress is by my mother (who is not that fond of sewing but does it on her treadle machine with love); it's pale blue dotted Swiss with tucks and ribbon trim.

I’m just about to outgrow it, which is OK because my sister Susan is about to outgrow the same frock in navy blue, and I’ll inherit it. We wear our dresses three days in a row to save on washing, (Mother has to put everything through a wringer by hand). This is not unusual; some of our classmates seldom change their clothes at all.

Here I am on the left, with class rival Lesley Salisbury and best friend Sandy Benner.

They said my first-grade teacher Mrs. Grey died during the summer. Her heart attacked herMy new teacher is Mrs. Wirebach. Her name fits her.

I’m writing this in the year 2025 on a machine called a computer, and my friends can read it, wherever in the world they are.

Everybody tells me I have a good imagination, but that’s just silly.

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THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, 1940s; Santa Rosa, California, 2010

THE BUDDHABERRY GRANNIES OF NARNIA

OR,

THIS BUD’S FOR YOU

When I was a preschooler growing up on Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Thursday afternoons would often find me at the house of an elderly neighbor, Grammy Helm, where the local elderly ladies of the neighborhood—the Grammies, Grannies, Gammies, and Mammies—gathered weekly to quilt and visit.

Grammy Helm's house

Although I was too small to ply a needle, the ladies seemed to enjoy having me around. I would watch, fascinated, as they patiently hand-stitched the top layer of a quilt to its batting and lining, following the outlines of clusters and wheels of florals and checks snipped from outworn shirts and housedresses.

I also remember dreamy hours of lying underneath the quilting frame, surrounded by elderly-lady lace-up shoes, half-hypnotized by the appearance and disappearance of hands, needles and loops of thread against the emerging pattern, and enjoying the gentle murmur of gossip, conversation and commentary.

As I grew older, I never quite regained that feeling. Although I took up sewing and embroidery, my friends were not into gathering-while-stitching, and the closest I came to that cozy circle sensation for years was the occasional theatrical-costuming session or bulk-mailing group.

Until 2010, that is, shortly after my good friend Lorraine decided to retire and close the store where we’d worked together for 18 years. It was relatively hard times, and nobody was hiring anybody, especially not those of retirement age.

With Lorraine (at right)

Then one day Lorraine mentioned that her (also newly retired) horticulturist friend Linda had obtained a license for growing medical marijuana—the plant was at that point still otherwise illegal—and had produced a bumper crop.

Not only that, but Linda was willing to pay the two of us handsomely to trim the buds from leafy tangles into tidy Christmas-tree shapes. Needless to say, we jumped at the chance.

And so for the next several weeks, my friend and I carpooled to Santa Rosa and entered an alternate reality. (No, not that kind; neither Lorraine nor I was into using pot in any form, at least by then.)

Linda’s house, you see, existed in a time-warp. It was entered by negotiating a steep driveway down from a busy Santa Rosa street into a three-block-long wooded valley complete with babbling stream, abundant wildlife, and a cluster of tiny non-code cabins that time (and the SR Housing Commission) had forgotten.

The surrounding streets up above were filled with traffic, traffic signals, lane-changes, coffee shops, and retail strips, but there down below, it was Narnia.

Linda's cabin in downtown Santa Rosa

Outside the front door

Linda’s place was ideally situated on the edge of the woods next to the creek, with plenty of sun. All of her crops that year—tomatoes, squash, beans, figs, marijuana—were full to bursting. Because the fall rains had set in as the last of the pot crop was maturing, we were at first forced to negotiate a maze of drying herb strung everywhere in the low-ceilinged structure.

Linda on her back porch

As we settled down with trimming shears, trays of buds, and bowls of salted alcohol (to clean off the gooey crystalized resin that tended to adhere to blades), and surgical gloves (easier to de-gunk than fingers), I soon discovered an OCD-like talent for turning out fat tidy tree-like buds anywhere from one to six inches long.

(The larger leaves, which apparently nobody smokes anymore, went into Linda’s kitchen hashish-making operation, a process involving ice cubes, a drill-mounted paint-stirrer and a succession of hanging Gore-tex™ baskets.)

And so, for the next few weeks, rain or shine, we met amid the heady skunkadelic scent of quasi-legal herb, sometimes with the addition of one or two other women, trimming, listening to music, snacking, chatting, and totally forgetting that we were in the heart of a busy city.

Linda's cabin

(Case in point: One day during a break, I wandered out onto the back porch to encounter a ten-point buck with a backside like a horse’s, calmly munching on fallen figs, and not the least bit perturbed by my appearance.)

During that time we went methodically, one by one, through the dozen or so varieties Linda had chosen to grow. Each had different properties, and each was carefully stored and labeled, as the physicians licensed to prescribe medical MJ needed to know exactly what they were recommending. They all had wonderful names, stemming from appearance or smell or psychoactive effect (Purple Pyramid, BuddhaBerry, Sour Diesel, Layback Kush).

At some point it all began to feel oddly familiar, a kind of sensory flashback (sorry) to those cozy days at Grammy Helm’s.

A pagoda of BuddhaBerry

We were not alone in this endeavor; for a short window of time, I was tickled to learn later, the grandmothers and aunties of large Hispanic families also provided a good bit of the Sonoma County bud-trimming task-force.

Nowadays marijuana is all legal and big business. Trimming is paid by weight, not by the hour, creating a sweatshop-like ambiance, and is often done, not by human hands, but by increasingly sophisticated machines.

Still, what goes around comes around. After all, quilting and stitch-and-bitch circles have made a cozy comeback. And once all the craziness and confusion about pot legalization clears, I someday expect to come upon a label that reads:

MADE WITH ARTISANAL BUDDHABERRY

LOVINGLY HAND-TRIMMED BY SONOMA COUNTY GRANNIES.

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3. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill and Allentown, Pennsylvania, c. 1949

WHO’S YOUR BIG SISTER?/SEND IN THE CLOWNS

Susan and me. Our light-brown/blonde hair and blue/green eyes are transformed here by the wonders of Kodachrome™.

This photo of me and my sister Susan was taken just before we left with my dad to see the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, then in its heyday.

My dad engineered our most vivid memory of the occasion by somehow getting us in backstage before the show. We met two nice clowns named Emmett and Lou, and watched as they painted their faces and put on their silly hats.

Emmett Kelly putting on makeup in front of a poster of his clown character “Weary Willie.” When he premiered this “sad hobo” character in 1931, it was seen as a revolutionary departure from the traditional whiteface clown persona.

Later, after the show had started, we saw with delight the great Emmett Kelly performing his beloved and iconic “Sweeping Up the Spotlight” routine (simply astounding because astoundingly simple), which later became a staple on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FJoslG1QzI

(Emmett Kelly “The Spotlight” c. 1967)

And somehow my dad had worked it out with the celebrated Lou Jacobs to wave to Susan and me personally as he passed our seats in the Clown Parade. (Lou was also the driver of the midget car from which “a thousand clowns” appeared, and the first clown to appear on a US postage stamp.)

Lou Jacobs is credited with the invention of the red rubber clown nose

It was all completely thrilling, but very crowded and noisy and a little scary for a country kid, so I was very glad to have my big sister’s hand to hold.

Still am.

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4. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Reno, Nevada, Summer of
1976

JUDGING THE MEN’S BEST OVERALL
Or
ME AND THE GUY FROM PLAYBOY

OK, this all took place in the long-ago days before even nice girls got tattooed.

In 1976, I went on a road trip with tattooist Lyle Tuttle and his kids and apprentices to the International Tattoo Artists’ Association Convention, held in a sprawling Holiday Inn in Reno, Nevada.

My ostensible purpose for being there was to produce an article (which I did) for CALIFORNIA LIVING magazine, to which I was then a regular, if somewhat oddball, contributor.

As it turned out, a lot of media outlets had the same idea: writers and photographers from mags like TIME, NEWSWEEK, PLAYBOY, and for heaven’s sake, PENTHOUSE, were out in force (all of us identified by prominent badges), not to mention local newspapers and network TV stations clamoring for photo ops and interviews.

And what a show: hundreds of tattooed people; thousands of images; a fringe of tattooists set up around the main showroom, busily plying their trade; tables of tattoo-related merchandise for sale; gawkers galore.

The guys with the really serious tattoos, the spectacular “back pieces,” have given up trying to keep their shirts on; the women’s clothes are designed with clever peekaboo features. The click-and-flash of cameras is everywhere.

At one point I notice that the guy from PLAYBOY seems to be in a state of overwhelm. He says he thought he was here to see hot tattooed chicks, but every time he turns around, someone’s coming at him with a new dimension of tattooing—historical, sociological, mechanical, thematic, aesthetic. It’s obvious he’s not in Hef’s Bunnyland anymore.

I steer him over to where Lyle Tuttle (magnificently shirtless) is holding court, enthralling a rapt circle of fans and media with witty and colorful tattoo lore, and watch as Mr. PLAYBOY gets sucked in along with everybody else.

In addition to the personal showing and comparing of tattoos, there’s some serious formal competition here. One of the most fiercely contested categories is the unofficial top award, “the “Men’s Best Overall.”

Lyle Tuttle, in his best overall.

Competition is actually so intense for this one that a number of people have raised objections to the judging panel of top tattooists, as it’s feared that many of them are likely to be prejudiced in favor of their own or their friends’ work.

What to do? The judges huddle and decide that this one should be judged by a group of the journalists present. Since most of these are male, and the panel is apparently in need of a female presence, I get tapped.

So there we are, me and the guys from TIME, NEWSWEEK, PLAYBOY, and, I think, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, judging the International Men’s Best Overall Tattoo Competition.

To me (the only one who knows from tattooing), the clear winner is the Japanese-influenced swimming-carp design by Don Nolan, but I’m overruled by the guys, who go for the elaborate Bicentennial design sported by tattooist Dean Dennis (photos of both below)

Their rationale? “Hey, it’s pretty good, and this year is his only shot at it.”
After the awards, more photo shoots, etc., I notice that the guy from PLAYBOY is again looking somewhat uneasy, and ask him what’s on his mind.

“I don’t know…” he says, wistfully eyeing the line of working tattoists “I’ve got more clothes on than most of the people here, but I feel kind of…naked.”

Tit for tat?

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5. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Occidental, California, 1978

DOWN ON THE COMMUNE (Part One)
Or
QUESTIONS OF THE UNIVERSE, AN ORIGIN

Toting that bale: Augie, Jesse, Plum, Nan, Susan (very pregnant) and me.

Around 1978, after a decade of living and working in San Francisco, I was getting a little desperate for a change of scene. Thus, when I was invited by a former housemate to hire on as his secretarial assistant as he built a large house in Sonoma County, I jumped at the chance.

The location, surprisingly, was a commune called “Rainbow’s End,” centered around a home-birthing clinic and practice run by Dr. Don, an obstetrician, and his wife Nan, a nurse-midwife.

Rainbow’s End covered the many sprawling acres of an old farm on top of Vinegar Ridge, near the village of Occidental. (The Ridge was baptized during Prohibition, when a sudden mass descent by “revenuers” ruptured and spilled dozens of hidden illicit wine tanks, causing the distinctive and long-lived odor from which the area got its name.)

Besides the converted-barn clinic, the land held an old farmhouse, a number of scattered cottages, a communal kitchen, a stable/schoolhouse, and assorted garden, goat, donkey and chicken sheds (inhabited). There were also two lovely little guest cottages to house visiting teachers for assorted workshops and events.

By the time I arrived, the full-on communal life had begun to devolve into family groups, with only one formal communal meal each week, just-monthly group meetings, and Don and Nan in the act of further distancing themselves with the isolated large house my friend was building.

Still, chores were communal, food from the garden, henhouse, goat pens and abundant fruit trees was shared, preserved, dried, etc., and workshops still took place. I remember especially a visit by Don Jose, a 101-year-old one-armed Huichol shaman, and his apprentice, who led us in the hypnotic and trance-inducing “Dance of the Deer” for an entire afternoon.

Don José and Brant Secunda

My secretarial employment, however, was less than successful, as my builder friend (we lived on opposite ends of the farmhouse attic) began expecting me to do his laundry, wash his dishes, empty his chamber pot, and, ultimately, to get into bed with him.

I was rescued from this situation by Don and Nan, who offered me a spot in one of the guest cabins in exchange for a weekly rent of five perfectly ironed oxford-cloth shirts (for Don to wear to his off-site obstetrics practice), and a job as Nan’s assistant.

I recall clearly the first home birth I attended. Also present (the mother-in-progress was surprisingly agreeable) was Nan’s visiting brother, Kai, a poker-faced physicist obviously way out of his element.

“So what did you think of that?” I asked the silent Kai, after we witnessed the marvelously uncomplicated arrival of an eight-pound girl named Mercedes.

“Well,” Kai began soberly, “When the baby came out…” (his sourpuss suddenly transforming into an exuberant grin) “…it was just like the University of Nebraska scoring a touchdown!!"

Needless to say, the children on the property were many and precocious, with Don-and-Nan alone accounting for six. (Here appears a memory of three-year-old Jesse suddenly appearing on my deck during my outdoor shower, and demanding “How come a boy got a beenus and a girl got a baginus?”)

L to R: me, holding onto Coriander Plum (boy); Amarina Kealoaha; Anna; Jubilee Seventy-Five; Joshua Spirit; Juanita holding Jesse; Ethan; John August; Nan (kneeling): Luz Maria.

Most of the kiddies also had highly original names (see caption). I would occasionally substitute-teach at the little homeschool run by motherly Juanita, and one rainy winter day, out of desperation, I improvised a game called “Questions of the Universe,” which I carried in later years to the Interlocken International Summer Camp, where it became a long-lived institution of sorts (rules below).

I spent a lovely summer and fall and a long rainy winter at Rainbow's End, then left (on good terms) for another east-coast venture; “live on a commune” neatly checked off of my list of lifestyle possibilities.

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6. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Thousand Oaks, California, Spring, 1967

O YOU NAUGHTY BARD
Or
MRS. BRENNAN IS NOT AMUSED

Kevin Patterson came into the world only a few years before the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires were invented by his parents in Southern California. He was flipping through old clippings as research for the 50th Anniversary of the Faire’s Northern edition, and recently sent me this little slice of history.

For those unable to read the fine print: at this point the Faire had been held successfully for four years at Paramount Ranch in Los Angeles County, with attendance of up to 25,000 revelers per weekend.

In the spring of 1967, it was moved to a site near the Westlake Village development in Thousand Oaks (Ventura County) in search of more appropriately English-like surroundings, such as the many picturesque oaks for which the town was named.

Unfortunately, one of the residents of Westlake was Mrs. Walter Brennan, wife of the actor of that name. Mrs. B., hearing of the prospective descending hordes of no doubt long-haired, unwashed and immoral hippie types upon the outskirts of their tidy little town, freaked.

Walter and Ruth Brennen

She and her husband actually had the pull to close down the Faire, occasioning enormous inconvenience and expense. They achieved this by filing a charge of “lewd content” in one of the theatrical presentations offered during the first weekend.

The lewdness in question? According to Fair Co-Director Phyllis Patterson (described by the reporter here as “an attractive brunette”) the legal documents cited lines from THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, written by a reprobate named William Shakespeare.

Ruth Brennan’s viewpoint was, almost unbelievably, upheld by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, causing the Faire to close on its second weekend.

The Pattersons, preferring not to become embroiled in a protracted legal battle, packed up their tents and moved on to the more welcoming outskirts of Agoura Hills, never returning the event (and its future enormous revenues) to Ventura County.

Commedia del'Arte: as lewd as it got

Today, all manner of Renaissance Faires and living-history re-enactments continue to exert an international influence in the fields of arts, crafts, theater, music, dance, dress, design, historical education and celebration.

Mrs. B. lived to see all this, passing on in 1997 at the age of 99. It is to be hoped that she never encountered Mr. Shakespeare at her ultimate destination.

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7. THROWBACK THURSDAY : Mammy Morgan’s Hill & Wilson Borough, Pennsylvania, 1948

AN EASTER TALE

I suspect that this photo of me with a papier-mâché bunny was taken on the first Easter Sunday that I participated in the annual egg hunt held by the Dixie Cup Company, where my father worked.

Since my sister Susan and I had, earlier in the day, had our own private little pre-church living-room egg hunt, I was a bit confused by the scale of the event, which was held in a large open field near the Dixie plant.

Adults and kids milled around somewhat chaotically. Sue and I were handed little baskets and herded into a straggling line of other children, most of them older than I, along one side of the field. Somebody blew a whistle and yelled: “GO!”

So off we all went, with me apparently under the erroneous impression that it was a footrace. It wasn’t until I had almost reached the other side of the field that I realized I was all alone out there.

Turning around, I saw kids way behind me scurrying about, picking things up off the ground and putting them in their baskets. (I also vaguely saw my dad waving his arms at me and yelling something like “Come back!”)

But I liked it out there away from all the noise and fuss. I drifted back in the right direction, but got distracted by dandelions to pick, pebbles to overturn, wormholes to investigate. I also found a single egg, which I put into my basket.

When the whistle blew again, and all the kids headed back towards the grown-ups, I followed them, observing as they ran up to their parents, proudly showing off all the eggs they’d found.

Then prizes were announced, for the bronze-colored third-place egg, and for the silver second-place egg.

But where was the Grand Prize First-place Gold Egg?

Oh, wait. In my basket, shining among the dandelions.

I won a “Tracing & Drawing Set” intended for a much older child, though I would have much preferred the second-place pink stuffed bunny.

That was, I think, my first experience of zen irony: winning without trying, then being dissatisfied with the prize.

I eventually learned to trace and to draw, and to maintain an unusual relationship with my Inner Bunny.

(Collage: Up the Rabbit Hole, 2011)

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8. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, early 1945

THE CRADLE DAYS

Because finances were careful in my family's early years, much of the furniture in our house (though not the chintzy studio couch) came from farm auctions (and eventually turned into valuable antiques). This cradle was one such piece.

I’m inside it, marveling at the studio lights my dad used for indoor photography. Sister Susan, being used to such goings-on, is obligingly posing in her pinafore.

I still own the chest under the window to the right. It was lovingly made by my dad out of pine and cherrywood to hold our toys, and is now an antique in its own right.

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9. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Chinatown, San Francisco; Late 1970s; Graton, California, 2012.

A Visit From Wu Tai-Tai

With Wu Tai-Tai in 2012

In 2012,while living in the Sonoma County town of Graton, I had a surprise visit from the inimitable and indomitable Dr. Wu Chie Mei-Chuen, aka Wu Tai-Tai (Tai-tai is a Chinese honorific for first wife or Important Lady). Then 90 years old, she wanted to reminisce about times gone by.

Back in the 1970s, you see, I worked in Dr. Wu’s acupuncture office in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Shortly after I went there as a reluctant patient, dragged by a friend, she decided for some reason that, out of the growing number of her American patients/friends (many from the T’ai Chi and zen communities), I was to be her first acupuncture student, a complete surprise to me.

It soon became evident, however, that I had no talent whatsoever for the needles, but instead a much-needed facility for understanding/intuiting Wu Tai-Tai’s extremely creative broken English.

Although my Chinese was almost non-existent, I found myself serving as “translator” between her and those patients who, as her reputation soared among the non-Chinese population of the City, began to include the wealthy and decidedly non-hippie.

Her office was a little slice of China, or at least Chinatown, with its Buddhist altar, stacks of old newspapers, sacks of culinary supplies, and random gifts (stuffed animals, “fashion” dolls, food delicacies, a color TV), from grateful patients, all presided over by a poster-sized photo of her youngest daughter Amy, in full regalia as Miss Chinatown San Francisco.

I “translated” to new patients the fact that that strange herbal smell was not marijuana, but Chinese mugwort burned for certain treatments; that the actual time of an appointment actually meant very little; that they might easily be sat down to wait while Wu Tai-Tai bustled into her tiny curtained-off kitchen to fix everybody in sight a meal (which might or might not contain chicken feet, squid parts, and/or unrecognizable vegetables, but was invariably delicious.

Most people got with the program, relaxing into the out-of-time cross-cultural experience; those who did remained patients, and often friends, for years; those who couldn’t, left. Either way was OK with Wu Tai-Tai. She knew she had serious healing mojo, and would never lack for patients.

As her amanuensis, I got to accompany Wu Tai-Tai to interesting places: the Miss Chinatown San Francisco Pageant (an amazing cross-cultural event where she looked on proudly as her daughter Amy was chosen out of a bevy of budding beauties); to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery, where she once hoped to retire as a nun; on shopping/haggling expeditions in the sidewalk markets and herbal pharmacies of Chinatown.

We went to services in a Chinatown temple with a neon-haloed Buddha; to Merrill Lynch in the nearby Financial District to help her open an account; to City Hall for her citizenship exam (for which I also helped her study); to nearby Portsmouth Square for T’ai Chi practice with Chinatown elders—in short, to places I never would have got to on my own.

I always enjoyed her company and her often-pithy commentaries on life, especially when current events were explained to her. (On Ronald Reagan’s election: “Crazy country!! How can movie star do President?”)

I also loved going through her English-language mail with her; she had three categories: “Put there!” (into a paper bag, for items she considered important); “Too old; Throw out!” (For anything over a week old, no matter how important-looking); and “Stupid! Throw out!" (Self-evident.)

During her 2012 visit, the last of several after I moved north in the late 1970s, I certainly had to hand it to this amazing nonagenarian: she was born into a China where girls’ feet were routinely bound (only saved from the fate of her older sisters by her mother, who said “Not this one! This one is special!”).

She escaped the Cultural Revolution, was married, widowed, then drafted into another marriage with the truly obnoxious—I met him—Dr. Wu Wei-Ping (acupuncturist to Asian heads of state), in order to unite two Chinese acupuncture dynasties.

She moved to Taiwan, presumably to escape the Maoist regime, then to Hawaii and to San Francisco, each time reinventing herself on her own terms. At unpredictable intervals she would bustle back to Taiwan on her own mysterious business, and just as suddenly re-appear to resume her practice. We all got used to it.

Around the mid-2000s she began to retire slowly, beloved and surrounded by friends, family, and, as one friend only half-jokingly put it: “ all those admirers who come to sit at her lotus feet”).

Pushing 100, she now lives in San Francisco’s Sunset District with her son and daughter-in-law, whom she brought from China with their two children. I get news of her from her granddaughter Judy, with whom I’ve been pen- and email-pals since Judy first arrived here as a bewildered 14-year-old in the late 1970s (she’s now a CPA, married, and a mother).

From all reports, Wu Tai-Tai is delighted to be a great-grandmother, still hale and hearty (if a tad forgetful), and loves to go for walks (though not alone, as she retains her lifelong tendency to strike out on new adventures).

Coda: Wu Tai-Tai passed away peacefully in 2021. She was 103 years old.

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10. THROWBACK THURSDAY; 19th-Century Transylvania/Europe/USA; Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1980s

THE GREAT VAMPIRE KIT MYSTERY

My dad loved road trips to odd destinations, and sometime in the 1980s he coaxed my mother and me into a visit to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Talk about your odd destination: the Mercer, housed in a looming six-story gothic-inspired reinforced-concrete castle, was designed and built in 1916 by a gentleman anthropologist and selective hoarder named Henry Chapman Mercer.

As the Industrial Revolution began gearing up for real in the late 19th century, Mercer was suddenly struck by the realization that an entire handcrafted way of life was disappearing before his eyes, and forthwith dedicated himself to preservation of artifacts of the just-pre-industrial working world.

Not content with collecting hand tools, kitchenware, farm implements and medical instruments, Mercer stockpiled carts, wagons, sleighs, fire engines and whaleboats, and accumulated thousands of smaller miscellaneous items, from birthing-stools to buttonhooks.

All of these somehow got stuffed and layered into the castle. When the inspired collector ran out of space, he hung exhibits from the balconies and ceilings, creating a surreal and slightly dizzying steampunk funhouse effect.

I found all of it quite fascinating, but the item that has stuck in my mind to this day was the Vampire Kit.

Now, Google Images will serve you up a mess of vampire kits (who knew?), but I know that the one pictured below is the actual one I saw, unusual for its silver ingot and mold for casting more silver bullets, in case one had used up those already provided. (I also remember admiring the economy of the cross doubling as a pointed stake.)

At the time, I was utterly intrigued by the idea of earnest Victorian/Edwardian travelers en route to Eastern European countries duly equipping themselves with vampire kits, much as one would acquire a snakebite kit if traveling to areas with poisonous reptiles.

But the really interesting thing about vampire kits is that nobody, not even the wonks at the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, seems to know for certain whether they were:

1) Manufactured, sold, and bought by sincere people who really believed in and feared the predations of vampires.

2) Manufactured by hucksters to sell to gullible travelers headed for vampire country, or by Eastern European hucksters as souvenirs for those same gullible travelers.

3) Manufactured as expensive novelty items following the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

4) Manufactured as part of the 19th-century Gothic craze and vampire mystique.

Or (5) all of the above.

On the one hand, most of the kits began to show up in public just following the publication of Dracula and most follow its particulars to the letter: mirror for ascertaining vampirehood: check.

Gun with silver bullets: check. Sharpened stakes, Bible, magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays: check.

Vials of garlic and holy water (and in the many kits sold by one Professor Blomberg, a “secret ingredient” touted to be more effective than either): check.

However, there are no contemporary endorsements or accounts of anyone’s life being saved by the possession of a vampire kit.

On the other hand, the kits are no cheap gimmick; most contain expensively crafted components, nestled in padded niches in beautiful custom-made carrying cases.

To further confuse the issue, tests on the items in various kits often reveal them to be a mix of 19th- and 20th-Century objects, genuine antiques and spookily convincing reproductions.

Dr. Jonathan Ferguson, Curator of the British National Museum of Arms and Armour, says they exhibit their Vampire Kit because it’s “hyperrealistic,” a tangible manifestation of a protective device, whatever its origin, inspired by a combination of myth, literature, superstition, Gothic mystique, and/or simply overactive imagination.

And oh, yes, if you want to buy your very own vampire kit, or just read some strange origin stories and variations on the theme, just google "Vampire Kits"

Talk about your odd destination.

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11. THROW(WAY)BACK THURSDAY: St. Paul’s Church, Reichenau Island, Germany in the 9th Century; Occidental, California in the 1990s

THE MONK AND THE PUSSYCAT
Or
SAVING CIVILIZATION, ONE MOUSE AT A TIME

Photo by Emir O. Filipovic
Sometime near the end of the 20th Century, I came upon a book called How the Irish Saved Civilization. “Oh, really?” I said, and set to reading.

Well, it turns out that, yeah, they kind of did.

OK, picture this: it’s the 9th century A.D.; the Roman Empire has comprehensively declined and fallen, and the European mainland is being overrun with successive waves of Huns, Vandals, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths.

Year after year, these heathen lowlifes raped, looted, pillaged and sacked their way through farms, villages, and towns. Monasteries received special attention, as they were likely to contain items made of, or decorated with, precious metals and gems.

Unfortunately, these monasteries were also the sole repositories of painstakingly hand-written manuscripts containing works of scripture, mathematical treatises, astronomical observations, linguistic records, history, and learned commentaries in multiple languages on all of the above. Which the barbarians, being largely illiterate, tended to use for kindling campfires, stuffing into footwear for insulation, and/or bum-wiping.

The monasteries of Ireland, tucked away on their isolated isle, were also cradles of light and learning (remarkably so). Although they did have to contend with yearly Viking raids, these were for many years predictably seasonal and confined to coastal areas, giving inland abbeys the opportunity to hone their fortification-building and treasure-hiding skills and more or less keep up with business as usual.

When the Irish brothers began to receive word of what was happening to their mainland counterparts, they apparently felt that they had no choice but to sally forth and rescue the written word. So they did.

Remarkably, this was not an official or coordinated decision, but just a kind of spontaneous hundredth-monkey impulse that sent a variety-pack of Irish scholar-monks, singly or in groups, off on uncomfortable and perilous journeys into the fulminating danger zone of the Continent.

There they took up residence in or near the devastated monasteries, and set about making copies of all remaining manuscripts and fragments to shuttle back to Ireland for safekeeping.

Fast-forward to 1903, and the public reappearance of what’s now known as the “Richenau Primer” (after the small island off the coast of Southern Germany where it was rediscovered in a Benedictine monastery).

The Reichenau Primer, with "Pangur Bán."

The primer consists of eight folia (16 pages) written in the same hand, and is a collection of Latin hymns and grammatical texts; Greek declination tables; astronomical records; glosses in Old High German; and, tucked down in the corner of one page, quite a remarkable little poem in Gaelic (here in a translation by the charmingly named Robin Flowers):

Pangur Bán

I and Pangur Bán, my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our task how glad are we,
When at home we bide and find
Entertainment to our mind.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I in mine, and he in his.

Reading these verses in the Irish/Civilization book, I was charmed by them—words written centuries ago by a scholarly Hibernian monk, probably quite homesick, no doubt working in a crumbling, chilly, rodent-ridden scriptorium, taking comfort from his work and his kitty-cat, and stealing a few minutes to celebrate them both in verse.

At the time, I was trying to get a handle on the classical Irish script known as Uncial, and decided to write out the poem and illustrate it. My Uncial at that point was a bit clumsy, and I used too thick a nib, but I’m fond of the drawing, although it contains two egregious errors: I put my monk in a modern (16th-century) version of a Cistercian robe instead of the appropriate 9th-century dirty off-white; and, not realizing that “Bán” means “white” in Gaelic, I gave my kitty late-Cistercian markings.

I’m far from the only person to be inspired by these verses. They were translated by W. H. Auden and set by Samuel Barber as the eighth of his ten Hermit Songs (1952–53). Fay Sampson wrote a series of fantasy books based on them. They inspired characters in the 2009 animated movie, The Secret of Kells.

Irish-language singer Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin recorded the poem in her 2011 studio album “Songs of the Scribe,” featuring both the original text and a translation by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. And, as recently as 2016, Jo Ellen Bogart and Sydney Smith published a picture book called “The White Cat and the Monk,” based on the poem.

That dear lovely Irishman, patiently toiling to save civilization (as Pangur Bán kept the rodents at bay), could never have imagined that his moment of rhymed whimsy would one day be celebrated in song, story, and in something called cyberspace.

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12. THROWBACK THURSDAY: New York City, 1968-69

MY NEW YORK MINUTE
Or
LUCKY-DUCK SITCOM INTERLUDE

In the early fall of 1968, for a number of good reasons, I decided to take a semester off from grad school in San Francisco, and go backpacking through Europe with friends. (Remember those days?)

Moi. at about that time

Alas, when we reached New York City, our jumping-off place, I promptly came down with a nasty flu, and it soon became obvious that I was going nowhere for awhile. Fortunately, friends in the city offered me a spare room in which to recuperate, and so I sadly waved my erstwhile traveling companions off on their adventure.

Luckily for me, Manhattan in 1968 was a relatively gentler and more affordable place than it is today, and absolutely bursting with Sixties-era color and creativity. Soon I was feeling better, footloose and at loose ends, and began to explore a city I’d only occasionally visited before as a kid on family and school trips.

One golden afternoon at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, I found myself part of a crowd straight out of GODSPELL, all of us dancing ecstatically to the just-released irresistible Beatlebounce of “Obla-Di, Obla-Da” bubbling from a boombox, and I suddenly realized that, corny as it seemed, I was actually falling for the sixties version of Autumn in New York.


The Bethesda Fountain hippie scene

http://www.budgetfilms.com/clip/18260/

(Four very brief film-clips of Bethesda Fountain hippie revels in the early 1970s, with astute commentary by Margaret Mead)

Just about then, as if in a sitcom script, I was offered both a job and the opportunity to rent the room I’d been staying in. (About 10’ X 10’, with resident cockroaches and a window looking out into a dismal airshaft? Sure, love to.)

The job was, conveniently, only for six months, a fill-in for someone on leave, and was an absolute plum: receptionist for the grandly (and somewhat vaguely) named United States Research & Development Corporation. The USR&D offices were located not only in the Art Deco splendor of the Chrysler Building, but on its 61st floor, the one with paired eagle gargoyles the size of Buicks guarding the four corners of its wraparound balcony.

As the in-house upfront faceperson for the Corp., I got to function as a sort of miniskirted nerve center (especially in those pre-office-computer/cellphone days), dealing with just about every phone call, piece of mail, delivery and visitor that came through. It was a busy job, but not that difficult to master, and I enjoyed the straightforward and sociable nature of the work, as well as its occasional surprises.

For instance, in my capacity as receptionist, I was stationed at a desk in an elegantly paneled room in the center of the building, with offices on three sides and two busy elevators on the fourth.

One amusing wild-card factor of this arrangement was that, due to the height and convection of the building, the opening of either elevator door produced an updraft strong enough to paste any unweighted papers to the ceiling and blow full skirts up into the air Marilyn Monroe-style. (I learned to explain this to first-time visitors in several languages.)

The Chrysler Building's Art Deco beauty illuminated at night.

It was the people who emerged from those elevators, however, who first clued me into the fact that this was no ordinary business enterprise: leaders of the Black community; bright-eyed political interns; wild-haired computer pioneers; avant-garde filmmakers; NEW YORK TIMES writers; well-known members of the intelligentsia. Interesting.

But, wait! Otto Preminger? The CBS camera crew? The Middleweight Champion of the World? The Mayor of New York? What was going on here?

I slowly realized that the founders and prime movers of USR&D, people who showed up every day, rolled up their sleeves, worked hard, networked like champs and asked me to call them Bill, Bob, Esther, Bev, and Jonathan, were some truly heavy hitters in international education, human rights and philanthropy circles (one of them co-founded the Peace Corps with Bobby Kennedy, for heaven’s sake).

USR&D Chairman, Pulitzer Prize nominee and Peace Corps co-founder Bill Haddad

USR&D’s name was vague for good reason: it served as an umbrella organization, both for dozens of inventive individuals and for many smaller outreach programs with names like the New York Industrial Education Center, and the Committee for Public Education and Religious Freedom.

As my six months passed, I wrote some articles for the company’s street-smart MANHATTAN TRIBUNE and a tongue-in-cheek-though-practical Receptionist’s Manual (“Please refrain from chewing gum while answering the phone, as it sounds like a dog is licking the receiver.”)

Mostly, however, I just enjoyed being a small but useful cog in the machinery of righteous enterprise and honing my proficiency at dealing with the unexpected (llama poop in the elevator? No problem; entertain the Senator’s kids? On it). I also got to make nice at interesting social functions with remarkable people, and generally enjoyed what was to be my only (sort of) real-life experience as a (non-down-trodden) 9-to-5-type working gal.

In short, this job was the perfect vehicle to support an encapsulated New York Experience—living, eating, and going to museums and shows on the cheap; writing poetry on the subway; exploring the Central Park and Greenwich Village scenes; experiencing a city-wide blackout and a traffic-halting blizzard; marveling at all the holiday glitz; and then, just as the cold and gritty city streets were starting to feel a bit grim, I got to go back to springtime in San Francisco, a new semester, and a whole other life.

Roll the credits.

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13. THROWBACK THURSDAY: 885 Clayton St., San Francisco, California, 1960s-1970s & Elsewhere

TWO IRISHMEN WENT INTO A BAR
Or
THE SONG OF JOE HEANEY

Joe Heaney

One of the more interesting aspects of living in a rooming house that doubled as headquarters for the San Francisco Folk Music Club was that you never knew who would be around when you woke up in the morning.

One might, for example, encounter the New Lost City Ramblers cleaning up the kitchen; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott waiting in line for a shower; Holly Near popping in to see her brother Fred (a resident of the house); Tom Waits noodling on the front-room piano; the Boys of the Lough bouncing off the walls like Celtic Marx Brothers; or U. Utah Phillips enlivening the breakfast table with his pun-laced one-liners.

Some of these folks were there in conjunction with the SFFMC’s bimonthly house-concert series; others were visiting the resident musicians, of which there were many over the years. Some were passing through while playing gigs in the city, and just preferred a spare bed and the good company in the house to a lonely hotel room.

One of our favorite guests (and occasional resident) was the marvelous Rosalie Sorrels, singer, songwriter, cook, and storyteller extraordinaire. (a sample:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtwHpp42NrI (Rosalie Sorrels/Rock me to sleep/3:37)

Rosalie Sorrells

It was Rosalie who brought legends like Ramblin’ Jack, Jerry Jeff Walker, Terry Garthwaite, Dave Van Ronk and Utah Phillips back from mutual gigs to sing and play and drink far into the wee hours. Let’s just say that we occasionally found some interesting bodies passed out on the living-room couch.

Another great friend and drinking buddy of Rosalie’s was a tall craggy-faced, silver-maned Irishman named Joe Heaney, then often referred to as Ireland’s Greatest Living Traditional Singer (when people said it, you could actually hear the capitals), a title he bore gracefully, even after his odd brush with fame in 1965.

That was the year that then-wildly-popular talk-show host Merv Griffin decided to do a special on Ireland and its traditions. In the course of filming, he duly visited O’Donaghue’s Pub in Dublin, a frequent gathering place for great Irish musicians.

While waiting for his crew to set up, Griffin spotted a portrait photo prominently displayed over the mantelpiece and draped with bunting. It gave him an odd tingle of familiarity.

“Who IS that?” he asked the proprietor.

“That, sir, is Joe Heaney from County Galway, Ireland’s Greatest Living Traditional Singer.”

B-b-but,” sputtered Griffin. “That’s my DOORMAN!”

When Merv got back to his fancy New York City apartment house, he walked up to the imposing uniformed figure out front, and asked: “Joe? Are you Ireland’s Greatest Living Traditional Singer?”

“Some are kind enough to say so,” replied Joe.

“Do you have any idea what people will do to get on my show?” demanded Merv, “How come you never told me you were a great singer?

“Well,” said Joe, after a moment’s thought, “I suppose it just never came up.”

After Joe appeared on the Merv Griffin Show, he was able to make more of a living with his music, but for Joe, that seemed to be hardly the point. He was a bard, not an act. He didn’t deal much in catchy sing-alongs—no “Mother Machree,” or “Danny Boy” or “Wearin’ O’ the Green.”

Merv Griffin

His songs were pre-showbiz; some of them had gone unchanged for a century or more. Many of them were in impenetrable Gaelic. He sang in a manner known as sean-nós, meaning “old style,” unaccompanied and highly ornamented. His repertoire exceeded 500 songs, and he was the winner of a number of singing competitions in Ireland.

There are a few YouTube clips around, but they only dimly echo the reality of Joe Heaney, say, in a pub like the Lion’s Head in NYC, surrounded by fellow enthusiastic Celts, rising to his full height, glass of whiskey in hand, throwing his head back and sweetly and powerfully invoking the music of a lost era, songs at once rough and smooth, weighted with both tragedy and humor, and the sense that if Ireland itself had a voice at that moment, it would sound a lot like Joe Heaney’s.

The Lion's Head

Joe performed several times at the Newport Folk Festival, and other distinguished folk venues, and appeared on Griffin's Show for St. Patrick’s Day to perform a full 20-minute set and incidentally dis what he called “the whole leprechaun/shamrock nonsense.”

He was also an unparalleled storyteller, and to listen to him and Rosalie swapping tales was an exercise in enchantment. He became an adjunct professor of folklore at Wesleyan University, and in 1982 was presented with the NEA’s National Heritage Award for Excellence in Folk Arts.

In spite of all this Joe was modest about his prowess and achievements:

“Where I come from,” he said, “we all sing like that.”

(And though Joe liked his drink well enough, we never found him passed out on the living room couch.)

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14. THROWBACK THURSDAY: New York City, Early 1990s

D IS FOR DYLAN

Twenty-odd years ago, when baby Dylan Kai was born to my friends Karen Thorsen and Doug Dempsey (documentary filmmakers extraordinaire), I wanted to give them a unique baby gift. As I happened to be going through an illuminated-alphabets phase, I decided to illustrate the letter D
.
I have no idea whether this drawing had any effect on Dylan’s current budding career, but it probably didn’t hurt that he grew up with a pair of sly watchdragons guarding his dreams.

(This accompanying verse just kind of wrote itself and was intended for the amusement of Dylan’s parents.)

D is for Dragons,
Drowsing and Dozing,
Deep in the Darkness of Dungeon or Den,

Dreaming of Damsels
In Damp Dishabille
Deliciously Dimpling in Darling Disdain,

Dreaming of Dybbuks
Dull, Dim and Doleful
In Damp Deliquescence of Desolate Drains,

Of Denizens Droll
In Depths Dionysian
Demigods, Demagogues, Demimondaines,

Dreaming of Dido
Decked in her Diadem,
Dauntless Diana, Demure in Divinity

Diminutive Duchesses
Delightful in Damask
Dazzlingly Draped in Diamonds and Dimity,

Of Dread Disembowlings
And Dire Disenchantments
Dull Destinations and Dingy Disguises,

Deeds Disconcerting,
Dukes Dis-anointed,
Deviant Dastards and Dirty devices,

Dreaming of Dryads,
Dancing in Dew-fall,
Dainty as Dill-seeds, Diaphanous as Down,

Of Decorous Druids
In Drab Dusty Duffle
Dyspeptic as Dishrags, Disputing till Dawn,

D is for Dylan
Dawdling in Dreamland,
Drowsing and Dozing and Drifting Downstream,

Dreaming of Dragons
Who all Dream of Dylan
Who Dreams of Discovering just what Dragons Dream.

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15. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1940s; The Fashion Industry, New York City. 2017

GRANDMA’S BAKELITE CHERRIES
Or
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Niece Morgan (who 's an up-and-coming NYC designer), in a dress she invented to show off her grandmother's pin.

When I was a small girl, I don’t recall my mother wearing much jewelry, outside of her wedding ring. The pieces she did have were mainly of the costume variety, and she kept them in a remarkable box, 18th-or-19th-century and sweetly dovetailed, with barely a nail or screw except for those attaching the enamel drawer-pulls (photo and more description below)

In those pre-TV country-bound days, as an entertainment (and possible diversionary tactic), my sister Sue and I were allowed to tiptoe into my parents’ bedroom, carefully slide open those drawers, reverently remove the pieces of jewelry, wonder at them, try them on, entertain ourselves by making up stories about them, and then meticulously replace them.

Some were more memorable than others: an elegant enameled heart-shape pierced by a dagger; a silver toe-ring with bells (brought back by my Uncle Dus from his WWII tour of duty in India); an expanding bracelet set with a gold stone (I got to wear it when I had chicken pox); and, most distinctive of all, a bar pin to which were attached a bunch of life-sized cherries rendered in gloriously extravagantly red Bakelite protoplastic.

In time, I came to own and treasure the box, and Sue its contents, which I hadn’t thought of for many years until the other day when, checking out Niece Morgan’s always-entertaining Instagram site, I once more encountered a vivid cluster from the past, as improbably red and juicy-looking as ever, cheekily adorning one of Morgan’s original designs) with the caption “Grandma’s Bakelite cherries + and nails to match.” (Rediscovering them in my mother’s old collection, Sue knew just who would appreciate them.)

Life is just a bowl of memories...

For more of Morgan’s designs and stylings, check out

https://www.instagram.com/morganfhill/?hl=en

This miniature chest of drawers is probably 19th-century, possibly 18th-century. It’s made of cherrywood, dovetailed without nails or screws, and has no manufacturer’s mark. I think I remember someone saying that it had come from a pharmacy in Philadelphia.

The bottom drawer is pierced for a keyhole, and there are spaces in both front and back for some kind of locking mechanism (long gone). The top drawer (which may have once been the bottom drawer, as they’re interchangeable ) is just a drawer, solid bottom from front to back and no space for a lock, although a mock “keyhole” has been carved on the front.

The drawers don’t move on runners, but just slide smoothly in and out of their spaces. On the top, mysteriously, there’s a ¼-inch round hole centered about 3” from the back, possibly as a way to secure another set of drawers on top of this one.

Anyone have a clue?
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16. THROWBACK THURSDAY (BY REQUEST): Philadelphia and Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, 1761-1841

SHE’S AHEAD OF HER TIME; SHE MUST BE A WITCH

Or

WHO WAS MAMMY MORGAN, AND WHY DOES SHE HAVE A HILL NAMED AFTER HER?

Born in 1761, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bell apparently knew her own mind from the get-go. Even as a child, she was quite a handful, a beloved trial to her rich and prominent Philadelphia Tory Quaker parents.

As the American Revolution was rumbling to a full boil, 15-year-old Lizzie outraged the entire Friends community by openly declaring her love for Hugh Bay, a Colonial artilleryman and son of a decidedly NON-Quaker army chaplain.

When the British advanced on Philadelphia and the Colonial army put out a call for ammunition, Lizzie, predictably on the opposite side from her parents, stole the lead weights from their expensive imported clock and had them melted down into bullets for her soldier sweetheart.

This was the last straw for the elder Bells, who promptly packed their darling problem child off to relatives in England to “continue her education.” It’s not recorded what hijinks she got up to there, but upon her return four years later in 1781, she immediately eloped with Hugh Bay.

Her exasperated parents washed their hands of her, and she was formally “read out” of the Quaker congregation. However, when the Bays’ daughter Anna was born, the Bells relented, and upon Lizzie’s father’s death soon after, she received the bulk of his sizeable estate.

After three happy years of marriage, Hugh Bay died in 1784, and for some time thereafter Lizzie lived quietly with her daughter and tended her aging mother. Shortly before Mrs. Bell’s death, the erstwhile wild child married Dr. Abel Morgan, a prominent Philadelphia physician and former army surgeon. A second daughter, Hannah, was born.

Then, in 1793, a virulent yellow-fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia. Wanting to keep his family safe, Dr. Morgan transported them 50 miles north to a house in the “Lehigh Hills,” on a high ridge-top south of the prosperous town of Easton, PA. He then returned to Philadelphia to tend to victims of the yellow fever.

After months passed with no word, Lizzie journeyed to Philadelphia, only to discover that her husband had died of the fever and been buried in a mass grave, and their home ransacked by looters.

Desolate, the Widow Morgan sold all of her Philadelphia properties (and, it seems, invested the proceeds wisely). She returned to buy land in the Lehigh Hills, and, with her daughters, opened an inn and general store catering to stagecoach travelers on the Philadelphia Road that ran along the ridge-top.

An avid reader, and a highly intelligent and educated woman, Elizabeth Morgan had brought to her new home her growing collection of law books and her husband’s entire medical library. Before long, she was, by request, dispensing informal medical and legal advice to the mostly illiterate farmers and laborers who populated the isolated ridge.

As her fame as a healer and wise woman spread, she found herself nursing the sick, stitching injuries, performing minor surgeries, delivering babies, and learning to compound folk and herbal remedies to supplement her medical knowledge.

She also, in time, presided over an informal court in the public room of the inn, arbitrating disputes and delivering judgments so astute that they were seldom challenged or taken to a higher court. What’s more, since she was well off financially, she did all this for free.

As can be imagined, the doctors and lawyers of Easton resented the considerable loss of business that Elizabeth Morgan’s activities represented. They reacted by circulating scurrilous rhymes, starting rumors that her inn was actually a brothel, and maintaining that she was a witch, casting evil spells on those who visited her.

To give credence to the rumors, these detractors even corrupted the nickname given to her by grateful patients, turning “Die (pronounced Dee) Mommy”—an affectionate term of respect meaning “Granny”—into the witch-like “Mammy.”

These tactics, however, mostly backfired. Mammy Morgan’s fame, integrity and philanthropy insured that her popularity as a healer and wise woman continued until her death in 1841. She was mourned throughout three counties, and her funeral procession along the Philadelphia Road (now Morgan Hill Road) was well over two miles long.

Hopewell School

As a third- and fourth-grader growing up on Mammy Morgan’s Hill, I could stand on the porch of Hopewell School (built in 1820 on land donated by Elizabeth Morgan) and look down the road to the former location of the inn, since demolished, but with the old well-head still intact.

Later on, when visiting the Easton Library (built on a former cemetery), I would often pick flowers to place in the elegant hollow of the only remaining grave marker, a 550-pound Indian grinding stone that indicates the final resting place of an extraordinary woman who knew her own mind.

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17. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, c. 1960

THE FAMILY THAT SKATES TOGETHER…

A typical winter day; the Pond House is on the left.

My sister Sue recently sent me the photo below, in which my dad, brother David, my mother, and I are lined up camera-ready for an afternoon of figure skating on our pond. As I’ve written before, my dad constructed the pond in the 1940s out of a handy bog below our house. For winter use, he erected floodlights on poles for night skating, and single-handedly built a little stone cabin that we called the Pond House.

The lineup: my dad, brother David, my mother and me.

While useful in summer for changing into swimsuits, in winter this mini-lodge really came into its own, with skate-friendly floor matting, a fireplace to toast frozen toes, a hotplate for brewing cocoa, a sofa on which to lounge and watch the action outside through a large-paned window, and a record player and PA system with which to blast out Glenn Miller 78s and Viennese waltzes for ice dancing, one of my parents’ enthusiasms.

This was, by the way, not the glitzy acrobatic showoffery of today, but staid, yet somehow exhilarating, waltzes, foxtrots and tangos. A number of my parents’ friends were skaters, and they all belonged to a nearby skating club. All of us ladies wore tights and silly little skirts, even when just skating on the pond.

Each winter, we and our friends and neighbors would wait patiently for the ice to freeze solid. “First you send out a dog,” my dad would joke, “then a small boy.” Before long, on a good skating winter, it would be thick enough to hold his little Gravely tractor with home-built snowplow.

It was a given that everyone who skated took turns with snow shovels and brooms. If the ice got too rough or dinged, never fear; Dad had invented an ingenious system of pipes and pumps to flood the surface with water from a nearby stream for smooth skating the next day.

A skating party; David (in the tiny skates) and I are on the right

We kids all started young, each of us in turn wearing a tiny pair of figure skates (baby two-runner skates and hockey skates were scorned in our family), and achieved enough proficiency to make skating enjoyable without nurturing Olympic aspirations.

Folding chairs were provided for neophytes to push around the ice until they found their feet. We all grew into each others’ skates, and hosted skating parties for our friends. A lot of people had a lot of fun, and we all had rosy cheeks.

Not to mention rosy memories. Thanks, Dad.

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18.THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Great Dickens Christmas Fair; San Francisco, California, 1970

HANG ONTO YOUR PANTALETS

This publicity photo for the first Great Dickens Christmas Fair appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday “Datebook” entertainment guide (aka “the Pink Section,” which explains its peculiar hue). The caption is a cautionary tale on Not Getting Your Facts Straight.

Granted, the gentleman admiring my charms and talents while simultaneously posing in tight trousers and paying slightly kinky attentions to the sole of my boot, was, in fact, Ron Patterson, co-founder of the Dickens Fair and the original Renaissance Pleasure Faires.

I, however, have been misidentified as Phyllis Patterson (Ron’s spouse and beloved co-founder of both events), apparently playing the part of someone calling herself “Amie Hill,” supposedly a music-hall dancer (which I was not, being the bell-ringer/wrangler for the Father Christmas Parade). At least they nailed the location, a chilly, drafty, leaky and cavernous warehouse complex at Hyde and Jefferson Streets.

I remember clearly the day I assembled that outfit, in about 15 minutes, from a rack of costumes recently purchased from the dissolution of the fabled MGM Studios earlier that year. Many of the pieces still bore name-tags identifying who had worn them and no doubt containing the sweated DNA of Judy Garland, Tyrone Power, Leslie Caron, Frank Sinatra, etc.

It became kind of a minor Fair sport to identify the MGM films in which one’s costume parts had originally appeared (My red cocked hat came from the dream sequence in “An American in Paris”), and there is still argument about whether or not the uniforms of the Queen’s Guard at the Renaissance Faire were those originally worn by the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.”

The knee-length pantalets peeping out from under my skirt, by the way, were either a genuine Victorian undergarment or an exact copy of one, right down to the numerous hand-sewn tucks and the characteristic strategic split-up-the-middle that allowed ladies of the time to take easy potty breaks without the hassle of removing countless layers or hiking up hoopskirts.

(Because of the aforementioned chill in the warehouse, I wore them over several layers of warm tights, and was, alas, unable to avail myself of this feature.)

This costume was also a grand illustration of one of the charmed qualities of the Fair(e)s: the power granted its participants to create their own characters—essentially, if you stayed in period and in character and resonated positively with audiences, you had the heady freedom to invent and re-invent yourself each Fair or year as inspired.

When I assembled this saucy faux-military getup (pantalets? Come on), I had no clue as to what this character would be or do. The fantasy nature of the outfit carried me naturally into the imagined world of Father Christmas and pantomimes involving toys and fairy tales, where I found a home that first year.

For a costume thrown together in 15 minutes, this little number had a remarkable longevity, even being reproduced at least once when the original wore out.

I would go on to different roles and even more elaborate costuming, but the Datebook clipping, wonky caption and all, still reminds me of all those heady moments of self-invention.

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19. THROWBACK THURSDAY: Mammy Morgan’s Hill, Pennsylvania, Early 1950s; OCCIDENTAL, CALIFORNIA, 2008

THE LAND OF IMPROBABLE NAMES

One day in 2008, a customer came into the little store in Occidental, California where I was working, made a purchase and paid for it with a check. The address printed on the check was in California, but the name “Riehl” brought a smile to my face.

“I bet I can tell you where you or your parents were born,” I said, “in or somewhere near Northampton County in Pennsylvania.”

The man was amazed. “How did you know that?” he asked. It turned out he’d grown up within 12 miles of where I’d been raised, gone to a rival high school, and knew a number of my friends and classmates.

How DID I know where he came from? By his name, which is one of those you barely ever encounter anywhere else. I, like Mr. Riehl, grew up in a small region where people were called extraordinary things.

I'm at upper left, next to Judy Dornblaser. Dorothy Schruntz is at upper right.The boys are Dougie Hendricks, Billy Schippers, Georgie Brotzman, and one of the Lakey twins.

The Pennsylvania Dutch who populated this area just north of Amish Country were not members of picturesque German religious groups like the Amish, Mennonites or Moravians. They were simply small farmers, craftspeople or shopkeepers who had been caught up, with or without their families, in various waves of immigration triggered by religious persecution or poor economic conditions back in Germany.

Mammy Morgan’s Hill, the area to which my parents had moved in the 1940s, had originally been settled by poor, hard-working and mainly illiterate German peasants. Established years before the American Revolution on their isolated ridge-top, these hardy immigrants generally came from the same small region of Germany and spoke an obscure version of Plattdeutsch (low German) that became more cryptic with each generation.

Their names tended to be either unusual dialect approximations of German or vivid descriptive terms reminiscent of Native American or Early Anglo-Saxon naming traditions.

Brucie Hagenbach, Bobby Unangst, Chester Frindt, and someone I don't remember.

So it was that, along with trade-related names like Kichlein or Kachlein (Little Cook), Ruschman (Cutter or Seller of Rushes), Sherer (Sheep-shearer), and Brotzman (Baker), I grew up with playmates whose surnames were even more picturesque and evocative: Dornblaser (Thornblister), Unangst (Fearless or Unafraid), Dreisbach, Schwarzbach, Trittenbach and Hagenbach (Third Brook, Dark Brook, Running Brook, Acorn Brook), Bonstein (Polishing Stone), Hirschtritt (Deer Step) Pickel, (Pimple), Gutekunst (Good Artist), and Trumbauer (Bad Farmer).

And then there were those classmates whose last names were odd monosyllables that bore little or no correspondence to their German originals, having devolved to more basic versions—Kutz and Butz and Dutt and Geek, Scheck and Schruntz and Schrindt and Schroll and Schramm and Schnorr, Fluck and Frindt, Koose and Foose, Diehl and Riehl—even today, hearing one of them evokes vivid childhood memories of rural Pennsylvania, one-room schoolhouses, and sharing desks and playgrounds with kids with improbable names.

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20. THROWBACK THURSDAY (By Request); Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, Bethel, NY, July 14-18, 1969

REMEMBERING WOODSTOCK (KIND OF)

In the summer of 1969, I was living in San Francisco and working part-time at KSAN, one of the first “alternative” radio stations in the country. One day, KSAN DJs excitedly began announcing a new promotional contest: Win a ticket and travel with your favorite radio voices to a cool music festival in upstate NY! Featuring a lineup of folk and rock legends! Three whole days!

My actual tickets to Woodstock, preserved for a half-century by Ben Fong-Torres. They became irrelevant once the fences came down. I can't explain the blotches.

Since discounts on the cheap charter flight were also offered to employees, I thought I’d combine the festival experience with a trip to visit my parents in Pennsylvania. My 19-year-old brother David, hearing this, decided to drive up from PA to attend the event. “I’ll see you there,” he said.

With David after Woodstock

After a very hairy (in every sense of the word) and smoky ride in a rickety chartered plane filled with KSAN DJs and lucky winners, and after casually freaking out commuters at Port Authority Terminal in NYC with our colorfully stoned California vibes, we found ourselves heading upstate on a chartered bus.

As our ride approached the festival site around sunset, its forward progress wound down to a dead stop, mired in stalled traffic as far as the eye could see. The driver, consulting his two-way radio, finally announced that if we wanted to get to the damn festival, we’d have to get out and walk.

So we did, trudging passed miles of jolly spontaneous thruway encampments centered on trapped vehicles, until our leader, DJ Tony Pigg, the guy who had remembered to bring a flashlight, led us into the dark.

Clinging onto each other, we stumbled through fencerows, into trees and through cowpies, losing most of our companions in the dark along the way, until about a dozen of us found a level spot to pitch a communal tent and fall into an exhausted pigpile of sleeping bags.

The next morning, I peered out of the tent to be met with a wild scene of relentless activity and hippie encampments as far as the eye could see, in what had spontaneously become a free-for-all event. Giving up on ever finding David in this scrum of thousands, I looked up to see him walking toward me, grinning at the impossibility of it all.

As luck would have it, our campsite was right next to that of the Hog Farm Commune, who, in addition to passing out free granola and providing festival security, had erected both a first-aid station and a roomy tie-dyed tipi ( dubbed the “Please Station”) to deal with inevitable drug complications.

It hadn’t yet started to rain, and before the official festival start late Friday afternoon, we spent the day just taking in the magnitude and grand-scale theater of the event.

I had a backstage pass, but everyone there, festival promoters and performers alike, seemed to be freaking out unpleasantly, so David and I found places to sit at a perfect vantage point on the natural hillside amphitheater, and settled back to enjoy some music.

MC Wavy Gravy

However, at the first resounding chord played by Richie Havens, a lovely teenage flower child seated just down the row from us leaped to her feet and began showing signs of extreme distress.

Her young companions were clearly too out of it to deal with the situation, so, familiar with the experience (from working with the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic’s Rock Medicine team), I got up, asked David to save my seat, and went to check it out.

Peace and Love, man.

Determining that the girl was terrified and very much in need of much less stimulation, I began talking her down, all the while gently dancing her through the crowd to the “Please Station,” By the time we arrived there, she was clinging to me like a baby monkey to its mama, convinced she’d die if I left her.

So I stayed.

And by the time she was calmed down and ready to rejoin her friends, it had become evident that there were many more freakouts than counselors, so I stayed some more, for about 72 hours of reeling in tripped-out and frightened festival-goers, settling them down and helping them ride out the strangeness.

The Hog Farm tipi was actually one of the best places to be at Woodstock. It was equipped with lots of comfy mattresses, dry and cozy in the midst of the unrelenting rain and mud. We had our own dedicated porta-potti , and solicitous Hog Farmers supplied food and drink on demand.

Hog Farmers gamely cooking for thousands.

Guitar- and flute-players came in to supply soft music as a counterpoint to the din from the stage and the roar of helicopters flying performers in and out. And if the company was a little strange—wall-to-wall visits to the psychedelic zoo—well, I’d been there before and knew what to do, and did it. And yes, it was a mind-altering experience.

David, meanwhile, would check in periodically, with brief reports on the outside situation. Oddly enough, neither he nor I has ever been able to recall more than brief flashbacks of our time there, or exactly how we managed to get ourselves out of the mud, locate his car, and drive to Pennsylvania.

But to paraphrase dear Robin Williams, if we remembered it, we wouldn’t have really been there.

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ALL MY BLOGS TO DATE

MEMOIRS (This is not as daunting as it looks. Each section contains 20 short essays, ranging in length from a few paragraphs to a few pages. Great bathroom reading.

They’re not in sequential order, so one can start anywhere.)

NOTE: If you prefer to read these on paper, you can highlight/copy/paste into a Word doc and print them out, (preferably two-sided or on the unused side of standard-sized paper).