NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Oct. 19, 2017) — One of the great privileges of child-rearing is what I call the Transportation Effect, whereby adults — in playing or otherwise communing with their kids in an appropriately committed fashion — are transported back to a time in their own lives when, say, erecting the most efficient Hot Wheels match-race scheme was about the most engrossing thing imaginable. Halloween, with its attendant masquerading and confectionary trappings, transports like few other phenomena. Because candy nostalgia trumps Hot Wheels nostalgia all day long.
A couple years back my fully transported mother actually demonstrated apple-bobbing to my children, full dunk and all — something she never did for my benefit during the umpteen Halloweens of my own childhood. But the point is taken: Hayrides, costumes, haunted houses, pumpkin carving… They’re all transcendentally nostalgic acts.
But they’re all secondary to the hoarding of candy.
I re-entered the Halloween scene in the late 1990s, on account of my young children (Silas and Clara, who are 21 and 19 today). Walking the neighborhood, my own well spring of candy knowledge took me aback. For example, I couldn’t help but notice the surprising re-emergence of the Clark bar — that peanutty, soft-but-crunchy Butterfinger forebear.
After plucking one from a neighbor’s bowl, I stood there on the street and stared wistfully at the little red packaging. I nearly shed a tear. Not because it was so very fun sized. [There is nothing “fun” about small candy bars.] But rather because I remembered a time when Clarks were “right there,” a legitimate option in the full-sized, 10-cent category at J&A News Agents in downtown Wellesley, Mass., circa 1974.
“What’s this Clark thing?” Silas asked me, without a scintilla of guile. Poor lad. He had no idea.
Candy Nostalgia: Charleston Chew Edition
It’s this sort of benign, ignorant prompt that sends me winging back in time. Indeed, my kids’ questions serve as able catalysts. We were in Cloutier’s, a local convenience story, the other day when Silas, the more adventurous eater of the two, pointed to the Charleston Chews and expressed curiosity.
What’s this? Never had a Charleston Chew? Well, that won’t do.
No childhood is complete, after all, without a working knowledge of the Charleston Chew’s stupendous, metabolic duality. I bought all three (chocolate, strawberry and the ever-underrated Vanilla) and we shared a third of each. Then we went home, froze the remainders and, 40 minutes later (any sooner and the effect isn’t complete — the stuff you remember!), we all experienced the crackling-hard but ultimately chewy, half-eaten Charleston Chew. Their first time! And I was there to witness this tri-lateral genius.
I related this story to a group of late-30/early-40somethings at a cocktail party shortly thereafter. A woman interrupted me halfway through. “Wait,” she said urgently, “where did you find Charleston Chews?”
“They have ‘em up at Cloutier’s.”
“Get OUT! I thought they were gone forever!”
I bought three more that week and figured I’d leave them on her doorstep, but my kids and I ate them instead.
Candy-Related Recall
Thanks to me, I suppose, my children have developed a healthy appreciation, not just for candy, but for candy history. They really want to know what I enjoyed as a kid; I am duly transported and we’re all amazed at the volumes of my candy-related recall.
Bubble Yum was the source of mass hysteria among the pre-teen set upon its introduction in the mid-1970s.
Silas and Clara could not believe, for example, that Starburst haven’t been around since time immemorial. Indeed, I remember their introduction some time during the mid-1970s. Skittles came later, I tell them.
The Great Bubble Yum Run of 1974 left them equally fascinated. This vast improvement in bubble gum technology, this new state of the art, sent 9- and 10-year-old boys scrambling all over town to buy up the few available test packs. With no real knowledge of inflation, the kids go goggle-eyed at the idea that candy bars used to cost just a quarter. “That’s nothing,” I tell them. “I remember paying 7 cents for a Baby Ruth at Bernie’s, Montclair, New Jersey, as late as 1971.”
“What’s Bernie’s?”
“That was the candy story your Aunt Janet and I used to walk to when we lived in New Jersey.”
“You walked to the candy store? It was that close?”
“Well, yeah. It was on the way to school.”
“WOW!!!”
I don’t have war stories. This is all I’ve got to pass on to later generations.
An Era of Innovation: Right Now!
Another example of limited edition candy marketing, and a good one. Dark beats milk in almost every case.
Keeping it all in perspective , I tell them they’re fortunate to live in a time of unprecedented candy innovation. Here’s an era where most everything that was any good still lives — save the superb Milk Shake bar I coveted as a 6- and 7-year-old but haven’t seen since. What’s more, we live in an era when candy purveyors, in search of gimmicky limited-edition sales, apparently, have dreamed up some ne, genuinely exciting twists on old favorites. Some fall flat, of course (the craven “Inside Out” Reese’s Cup), but have you checked out the dark-chocolate Kit Kat? Stunning.
If you haven’t seen or dared try the Pina Colada Almond Joy (with white chocolate), please take my advice and get thee to a participating convenience store post haste.
The irony here is that I’ve become, in my advanced age, something of a candy snob. Most mass-produced American milk chocolate tastes waxy to me. The relative unpopularity of dark chocolate continuall disappoints me. In my view, dark is vastly superior on its own and would, if substituted for its milky cousin, improve almost any candy product you can name. Moreover, my mother passed on to me a love and appreciation for fine, pectin jelly beans. As a result I look down my nose at these newfangled “jelly bellies” with their foppish, speckled shells and their contrived flavors. Buttered popcorn indeed. What complete and utter dross!
The inimitable Chocolate Babies: One has to wonder what Project Rescue would have to say about this, erm… confection.
But my candy past, especially as it rushes back to me in middle age, is almost completely middlebrow and unashamedly so. If I ate it as a kid, I’ll eat it now, with nearly the same abandon and ardor — though I draw the line at Jujubees and Chocolate Babies, the two candies my paternal grandfather always had on hand. Jujubees, you’ll recall, are horrible things, the concoction of some perverse confectioner whose sole contribution to the genre, it would appear, was an item that never gets stale because it starts out that way. Chocolate Babies? Does anyone even remember these things beside me and my siblings? They were vaguely Tootsie Rollish in taste and texture — and shaped like small, brown, human fetuses! Possibly the most grotesque candy product this side of Crunchy Frog.
Late One Halloween Night…
With little prompting, I think you’ll find that most adults have candy histories as wide-ranging as my own. Late on Halloween night one year, Silas and I arrived at our neighbor’s place for one final stop. Field and Suze had company but they kindly invited us in, promptly served Silas a piece of apple pie (to go along with the Snickers, Milky Ways and Three Musketeers they had on hand for the occasion), and poured me a glass of wine. We sat by the fire and conversation soon turned to the candy, as we all agreed that Three Musketeers was the most overrated candy bar on the planet. So boring. Salvageable only when frozen. The new limited edition mint version is actually an improvement.
I offered that Milky Ways were only slightly more interesting, and isn’t it funny that the mere addition of peanuts can turn a worthless bar like Milky Way into the sublime tour de force that is a Snickers?
Well, Field rejected my whole premise, maintaining there were great differences between the Milky Way and Snickers. No, I countered, a Snickers is merely a Milky Way with peanuts. He couldn’t accept this, and so proposed the only reasonable course of action: a side-by-side surgical procedure and examination of the candies in question. With great solemnity he proceeded to the front door, snagged both items from the bowl, unwrapped them, sliced them open and studied the evidence. Eventually I was proved correct. Never underestimate the transformative power of a peanut.
Sky Bar, a New England Candy Co. (or NECCO) product and probably its finest. Not hard to best the execrable NECCO wafer, however.
Back in front of the fire we moved to other subjects of interest: The relatively recent introduction of the Snickers Ice Cream Bar, which reproduces the Snickers taste and integrates an ice cream element with genuine aplomb; the superb new Milky Way Dark, the answer to my prayers; and even the quirky, four-compartment Sky Bar, which has somehow survived into modern times. We agreed those Sky Bars now on shelves may well be the same ones we spurned as 10-year-olds.
“Field tells me you’re a writer,” one of his guests remarked at one point.
Click photo to hear The Feelies pay homage to Jimi Hendrix during their encore at The Sinclair in Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 14, 2017.
Nerd rockers The Feelies played The Sinclair in Cambridge over the weekend. For all the band’s laudable work churning out two solid sets, the encore left the greater impression. This is perhaps by design, from a band that does encores like no one else and whose 21st century incarnation just happens to have played out like one long, extended encore.
Formed in 1976, this Hoboken 5-piece achieved a modest commercial success and sizeable cult following comprising not insignificant numbers of Velvet Underground devotees. The 1980s would produce four superb studio albums. Eventually they’d break up (1992), re-form (2008), go out on limited tour (trademark diffidence in tow) and eventually release two new discs, including this year’s In Between.
And yet, I come before you not to reflexively extoll the virtues of The Feelies sound, which I love, but about which reasonable people can disagree. I’d rather applaud the remarkable structure of their shows. We’re all familiar with the two-sets-plus-appended-encore format of most club dates. Here The Feelies do not break any molds.
When it comes to the content of those encores, however, they deviate from the norm to stirring effect.
I’ve long maintained that any band — even one whose original music I can’t get enough of — should be obligated, by law, to play at least one cover during a live show. Covering someone else’s material exhibits range; it provides insight into a band’s outside influences, tastes and admirations. It is at once self-effacing and evidence of a certain kind of bravado.
A Window on The Feelies Soul
In this respect, The Feelies consistently hit it out of the park and they do so with an emotional intensity they don’t always apply to their originals. After playing not a single cover during the first two sets at The Sinclair, they re-emerged to produce their specialty: the rare all-cover encore, a half dozen tunes that, taken together, provide a veritable window on the band’s soul:
Astral Plane, The Modern Lovers
Paint It Black, Rolling Stones
I Can’t Stand It, Velvet Underground
Got to Get You Into My Life, The Beatles
Real Cool Time, The Stooges
Damaged by Love, Tom Petty
See No Evil, Television
Are You Experienced?, Jimi Hendrix
I watched this show with a couple certifiable Feelies Freaks who admitted afterward that both formal sets had come off as a bit labored. The band played a bunch of new material from InBetween, i.e. songs still to be polished in the live setting. While they nailed plenty of oldies from Time For a Witness, Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth, there wasn’t exactly a surfeit of energy up there. Of course, with The Feelies, stage histrionics are not what they’re selling.
In any case, once the encore kicked off, they summoned reservoirs of new life. Even Glenn Mercer, the famously cadaverous and impassive lead singer/guitarist, perked up. Mid-Stooges, after two sets of studied catatonia, he could be seen bouncing about the stage and rubbing his guitar against the mic stand.
All-Cover Encores: Rare Stuff
I don’t know of any other bands that deliver all-cover encores, aside from those who do nothing but covers. In some small way, The Feelies are innovating here — which is ironic, for in most every other respect, they have stubbornly refused to evolve.
When Yo La Tengo debuted with Ride the Tiger in 1985, these two Jersey-derived bands could easily have been mistaken for one another. Here was a pair of similarly skilled, post-punk, Velvet-obsessed, art-house darlings. Yo La Tengo actually has a thing for covers, too. But while YLT moved on — issuing a dozen increasingly expansive, sonically adventurous albums — The Feelies never abandoned their own specific brand of jangly, guitar-driven avant-pop, proving just how much there is to mine from such a seemingly constrictive niche.
And you know what? Their encore habits further demonstrate their desire to cling just as tightly to their earliest influences. Today, of course, there are websites devoted entirely to the fan-chronicling of set lists, even those performed by obscure bands from the 1980s. The Sinclair show has not yet been logged for all time, but here we gather from www.setlist.fm a further sampling of encore tunes from The Feelies’ Detroit show at The El, in July:
Dancing Barefoot, Patti Smith
White Light, White Heat, Velvet Underground
I’m a Believer, Neil Diamond (The Monkees didn’t write this, silly)
Everyone’s Got Something but Me and My Monkey, The Beatles (or this one)
Child of the Moon, Rolling Stones
Take It As It Comes, The Doors
Seven Days, Bob Dylan
Alt Audience Engagement
I’ve seen The Feelies three times now, all post 2008, and I just love the way these guys deploy their encore/cover strategy to paint for the audience (and re-experience for themselves) a rich picture of their collective musical tastes circa 1978, when the band was just getting going, young and impressionable.
This gambit functions additionally as an ingenious audience-engagement strategy. Everyone at The Sinclair was at least as old as I am (53). Who in their 50s doesn’t want to hear one of their favorite bands cover Television, or Patti Smith? And I find this sorta touching: The Feelies rarely leave out the Beatles and Stones — because, honestly, how could anyone, even the most overly curated latent punk aesthete, come of age in the early 1970s and completely resist their many, many charms? After all, when The Feelies were coming up, 1969 just wasn’t that long ago.
What sort of new music are The Feelies into these days? The Lord only knows. If the contents of their encores are any guide, the answer is “not much”. They knew Tom Petty has recently passed away —evidence of a basic musical awareness. Otherwise, the course of modern rock these last 25 years would appear to have made little to no impression on their song choices.
They’re a band whose predilections and influences, like their own sound (even today), remain frozen in amber. It’s hard not to love them for it.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (Sept. 27, 2017) — Can we please stop talking about Bernie Sanders’ policy suggestions as if he were by some kind of unhinged fantasist? Sanders recently introduced to the Senate a bill that would expand Medicare to include citizens under 65 years of age — and you’d have thought he proposed the changing of water into wine. Hey, obstinate right-wingers: What Bernie said, what he has proposed, is more or less the working model for the existing healthcare systems now operating in every industrialized nation on earth — that is, every one but the United States. And if believe we have innovated our way out of that obligation, or will, YOU are thje fantasist.
What’s more, as the facts relay — in spite of reflexive carping from actual fantasists, those of the Randian variety — nearly every one of those socialized systems delivers health care for less cost per citizen than the system we Americans currently deploy (the ACA) and the largely private one it has partially replaced.
Sanders’ call for “free public college tuition for all” during the 2016 campaign also elicited no small amount of tittering from observers on both the right and left. Hey, morons: As recently as the late 1970s, the U.S. itself offered public higher education for close to nothing.
What Bernie Said: Free PUBLIC college tuition
Let’s first examine what Bernie actually said: free PUBLIC college tuition. No one, including Sanders, is suggesting we subsidize anyone’s matriculation at private institutions. Second, we already offer free primary and secondary education as a matter of course; in terms of prepping workers and citizens for lifelong utility (to the culture, to the economy) why should college be any different?
Last, check the stats: The average annual in-state public university room, board and tuition in 1977 — $2,067. That’s not “free”, but even when inflation is accounted for, that is highly affordable. The average price of a new car in 1977 was $5,813. More to the point, that was a four-year education debt load of some $8,200, a sum any college-educated student could expect to chip away at quite substantially — over their summers! It’s certainly nothing like the crushing debt load graduates encounter today.
When it comes to higher education, it’s fair to ask, “Why the discrepancy?” Answer: Because we subsidized (read: socialized the cost of) public colleges to a far greater extent, not just in the 1970s but throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. This was not some government decision, mind you; we THE PEOPLE decided it was worthwhile to make higher education attainable and affordable.
Starting with the Reagan administration, fewer and fewer people saw the value in socializing the cost of higher education. Bit by bit over the ensuing four decades, that socialization was dismantled and/or reduced, to the point where today the average annual room, board and tuition cost for the public, in-state college student is $20,090.
Bernie’s Not Some Oracle
I’ll be honest: I have never felt the Bern to any great extent. At 76, he remains too old to have been a viable two-term president. He fixates on certain issues to the exclusion of others — which is what senators do, a role that suits him. I’m not sure he plays particularly well with others, a presidential trait we can see the value of today.
He looks and sounds way too much like Larry David.
What’s more, his carping at the Democratic National Committee seemed to me churlish and misplaced. Of course the DNC favored Hilary Clinton; she maintains membership in the Democratic Party, after all, and Bernie does not. Lest we forget, political parties in this country are private organizations. I don’t see why the DNC is obliged allow anyone who isn’t registered with the party to seek that party’s nomination. If an independent candidate like Bernie is allowed to compete for delegates, he should not be surprised when establishment Dems bend the rules to favor one of their own.
Demystifying Socialist Principles
But I’ll say this: God bless the man. For the entirety of my life — for the entire post-WWII era — the mere mention of anything nominally socialist here in America produced howls of derision and irrational fear-mongering (thanks, Russia). The mere existence of Bernie and his sensible policy proposals have gone a long way toward demystifying the term and curing our nation of this impractical, hypocritical phobia.
Hysteria helps no one, but let’s be honest with ourselves. We already socialize all sorts of costs and risks in this country: schools, highway construction/upkeep, libraries, congressional and veterans’ health care, Social Security, all branches of the military, police and fire departments, the court system, the Centers for Disease Control, public transportation and yes, even PBS. Socialized medicine and low-cost, subsidized public higher education are not fantasies. Variations on these specific themes are functioning to great effect in the real world, all around the world, even here in America once upon a time.
Which is more than we can say for trickle-down economics and its fanciful enabler, The Laffer Curve.
Ed. — This story appeared in March/April 2003 issue Golf Journal magazine.
The Swift River started rising in the rural Massachusetts town of Greenwich on Aug. 14, 1939. Soon enough the fairways at Dugmar Golf Club had become unseasonably soggy. After a time the bunkers and teeing grounds were completely submerged. Had the pins not been removed years before, their flags would have been some of the last things visible before this 9-hole track and the rest of Greenwich were lost for good.
It’s been 68 years since Greenwich and three neighboring bergs were systematically condemned and flooded, all in the name of Metropolitan Boston’s chronic thirst. This massive, Depression-Era public works project, on whose ass the loss of Dugmar GC was but a pimple, created the Quabbin Reservoir, then the largest man-made, fresh-water reserve on earth.
The Lost Towns, as they’re known today, were literally erased by the Quabbin’s introduction; every tree, every man-made structure in the Swift River Valley was burned or bulldozed to make way for it. The river itself having been dammed — in Belchertown, to the south — some 412 billion gallons of water gradually rose behind the Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike. Not until 1946 did they first lap over the reservoir’s massive spillways.
By then Dugmar GC had been largely forgotten — but not erased, for memories are made of stronger stuff.
The First Disposable Golf Course
Other layouts have been lost to history, of course. Some have simply been abandoned; others were sold off to make way for post-war suburbia. But so far as we know, Dugmar GC — opened for play in 1928, hard by Curtis Hill — was the only golf course to meet its end in a purposeful deluge, sacrificed along with four 200-year-old communities to supply tens of millions of faucets in larger communities some 60 miles east.
Hundreds of golf clubs were built, as Dugmar had been, during the heroic age of Jones and Ruth as the moneyed classes sought to bring the same sort of bravado to their own lives (not to mention a place to drink hooch in a country gone dry). More than a few of these establishments “went under” during the ensuing Depression, but none quite so purposely or literally as Dugmar Golf Club. You see, Dugmar’s developers KNEW the club’s fate before the course was ever built — before the bentgrass was imported from southern Germany, before the elegant stone patio was laid beside the farmhouse-turned-clubhouse, before the first crate of Canadian Club was hidden from view.
Dugmars creation was, in short, a set up: a crafty land deal with golf at its core; a trifle built to amuse its backers, for a time, before enriching them at the public’s expense. “Those guys knew what they were doing; they made out,” recalls a chuckling, 85-year-old Stanley Mega, who caddied at Dugmar GC and still lives close by Quabbin’s shores, in Bondsville. “Those guys knew the reservoir was going in and they made a killing.”
In essence, Dugmar GC was conceived and ultimately proved to be the world’s first and only disposable golf course.
This aerial of Dugmar GC was taken in 1931
Canny Chapman Valve Co. Executives
“Those guys,” the men behind Dugmar Golf Club, were a pair of canny executives from the Chapman Valve Co. in Springfield, then and still today the hub of Western Massachusetts. In 1924, Chapman President Thomas F. Mahar and Treasurer John J. Duggan together purchased a pleasant chunk of property some 30 miles northeast of their corporate offices — in the tiny hamlet of Greenwich (pronounced green-witch), conveniently located on the Athol branch of the Boston-Albany Railroad.
The towns of Greenwich, Dana, Enfield and Prescott were poor farming communities and had been for centuries, but their lakes and myriad points of river access were popular with holiday-makers from the big city. It was common for Springfielders to own summer camps and cottages up there.
Duggan and Mahar had far grander plans. After paying $6,850 for 147 acres of abandoned agricultural land, they immediately set to work refurbishing the property’s existing farmhouse. In 1925 its value was assessed at $2,000; two years later this homestead was valued at $7,000. Next, Duggan and Mahar built a striking fieldstone lodge on the south-facing slope of Curtis Hill. Completed in 1926, it was assessed a year later at $12,000.
Once an additional 15 acres had been purchased, they commissioned Orrin Smith to design and build Dugmar’s golf course. Opened in 1928, the nine-hole layout occupied ground southeast of Curtis Hill, in full and magnificent view of the lodge with its distinctive stone-pillared porch.
The layout at Dugmar — a moniker created by combining the surnames Duggan and Mahar — was not some bit of amateur course design. Smith had been a respected and quite prolific New England architect, one who had apprenticed with Willie Park Jr. and Donald Ross before starting his own Hartford, Conn.-based practice in 1925. Dugmar GC measured a stout 3,160 yards from the back tees, boasted state-of-the-art putting surfaces of South German bentgrass, and featured 8,000 feet of underground irrigation pipe, something only the better courses could afford in those days.
An unforgettable place
“It was an unbelievably beautiful place right there in the valley. I’ll never forget it,” says Mega. “It was a very nice golf course, but I was too young to play back then. We caddied. I used to travel up there with Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. We spent a lot of time up there. If I made 35 cents a round, well, that was great!”
Mega and his older brother Alec would often rise in Bondsville, their tiny home town just south and west of the Swift River Valley, and take the train up to Greenwich. Or they’d hitch a ride via Belchertown on Route 21, the only paved road that ran north/south through the watershed. “It was quite a place up there. A few of the holes I forget, but I remember everything else. Between the 1st and 2nd there was a big stand of pine, sort of squared off. There were more woodlands guarding the 3rd, on the right. That’s where I found all my golf balls, you know. Now that was a nice hole, a great dogleg par-5.
“The greens were what always impressed me,” Mega continues, gathering steam. “Tiny things. You had to be accurate! And boy were they in great shape. Beautiful. Imported! People were always bragging about how they were imported. In fact, before they flooded the place, someone came in, picked up those greens and took them away! … I just caddied up there but my brother, he was a good golfer. He played Dugmar quite a bit. So did another good player, Whitey Wisnewski, who was almost like a pro. He used to play with [Henry] Bontempo here in Springfield. He played the best around. Good golfers played up at Dugmar. I still remember.”
A Raucous Close to Phase I
The 1928 opening of Dugmar’s 9-hole course fulfilled the “Phase I” vision of its founders. This was now a fully fledged country club, complete with a golf course, a clubhouse featuring several guest rooms and a lively social calendar — because, lest we forget, this was the decade of Prohibition.
“There were raucous parties up there; they certainly took advantage of the remoteness of the place,” explains J.R. Greene, an historian who’s been researching Quabbin and the Lost Towns since 1975.
“The Greenwich Village train stop was very close to the golf course, a short walk. So it was very convenient for these ‘bit city outlanders’ to travel there from Springfield. And I have it on very good authority that Dugmar members brought plenty of liquor up there — and women who weren’t necessarily their wives. This was a heavily Yankee, Protestant region; there were no bars or taverns there, even before Prohibition. So that sort of behavior was duly noted.”
“It was a wild place,” Mega concurs. “To be served drinks, well, you had to know the right people. There was a lot of drinking. Those guys were really something; they knew what they were doing.”
The fieldstone lodge serving Dugmar used to sit on Curtis Hill. Today, it’s Curtis Island.
Phase II? Depends on Whom You Ask
Duggan and Mahar’s Phase II vision for Dugmar GC remains, to this day, the subject of some speculation. The idea of creating Quabbin Reservoir, you see, was put forward as early as 1919; the state Legislature formally proposed the measure three years later. In 1927, the Massachusetts State Legislature legally impounded the mighty Swift River, thereby clearly declaring its intention to take the towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich by eminent domain — an act that would eventually displace some 2,500 residents.
In other words, by 1929, when Dugmar Golf Club’s curious, boisterous run was just beginning, many residents of The Lost Towns had already sold their condemned properties to the state and moved their lives elsewhere. Others had sold out and rented their own homes, buying time to determine where and how exactly their lives might continue.
“This area was dying unless you raised livestock or fowl. For the younger generation it was an obvious opportunity to get out and start fresh,” says Greene, whose history, The Creation of Quabbin Reservoir, was reissued by Performance Press in 2001. “But for people in their 40s and up, their lives were torn apart – during the Depression no less! This was a tragedy. And of course, these folks didn’t want some peckerwood from the state telling them to move out. You have to remember, this was a very wrenching thing. There was no job-relocation assistance. Nothing like that. They had to find a new house, a new job, a new life — in the heart of the Depression.”
So why build a remote country club here, on land legally destined to sit under 40 feet of drinking water?
“It was an investment,” Greene says flatly, fighting a wry smile. “Just a part of the game Duggan and Mahar played. I believe they knew the reservoir was going to happen and this golf project was pure speculation on their part. I’ve had older residents say as much to me. It’s received wisdom, if you will.”
Claiming Qualified Ignorance
Of course, Duggan and Mahar claimed no such wisdom, not publicly anyway. They didn’t claim ignorance of the proposed reservoir project; when pressed in court, they claimed to have considered the Quabbin in the same way many Commonwealth residents still view certain state-funded, public works initiatives: I’ll believe it when I see it.
In any case, by the time the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had formally taken the Dugmar property — on Sept., 15, 1933, by eminent domain — Duggan and Mahar had naively or shrewdly (take your pick) drawn up an 800-lot subdivision plan for their property. A “gentlemen’s estate,” they called it — with “beach access,” for they had secured access to Curtis Pond and harbored visions, on paper at least, of selling these lake-front lots to Springfield swells in search of a holiday home.
As the creation of Quabbin Reservoir was going to happen after all, Duggan and Mahar sought “fair” compensation from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — to the tune of $436,500, or some $11.2 million in 2026 dollars.
For the record, the town of Greenwich in its entirety had last been assessed, in 1932, at $640,000.
The state, which valued the golf property at no more than $56,000 — basically, a sum of the club’s biggest assets, plus maintenance equipment and whatnot — immediately balked at Duggan and Mahar’s asking price. The matter was referred to a Board of Referees, a body specially appointed by Quabbin’s administrative entity, the Metropolitan District Water Commission, to arbitrate disputes such as this. At first the Referees awarded Duggan and Mahar a split-the-difference sum of $221,000, pending approval by the state Supreme Court. The court would offer no such approval; it remanded the matter to the Referees.
Determining fair market value for Dugmar Golf Club — at the time of its “taking” in 1933 — would prove an arduous task. The legal process took nearly four years and produced some gloriously arcane golf course-related testimony. An endless parade of real estate experts took the stand, but so did an assembly of New England golf luminaries, all of whom offered their varying opinions on the quality (read: ultimate monetary value) of Dugmar.
Golfing Luminaries Take the Stand
Appearing for the state, among others, were Walter Hatch, longtime construction superintendent in the employ of Donald Ross; Fred Wright, a 1923 Walker Cupper and 7-time Massachusetts Amateur champion; and Dr. Lawrence S. Dickinson, distinguished agronomist and longtime member of the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in nearby Amherst. Produced by the Commonwealth to argue for Dugmar’s lower valuation, Dickinson was particularly critical of the property’s soil — several samples of which he brought to the Springfield District Courthouse in masonry jars.
Appearing for Duggan and Mahar were Orrin Smith and fellow course architect Wayne Stiles, both of whom offered testimony well ahead of their times. For instance, while the nine holes themselves were built for $18,000, the architects testified, Dugmar’s golf course actually increased the value of the property around it, including these would-be housing units. Similar arguments would be trotted out for several decades to come, only to be shorn of currency and credence following the Great Recession of 2008, from which golf-related real estate values have never fully recovered.
Assistant Attorney General John S. Derham, a bombastic figure of the non-golfing variety, wasn’t buying any of this conjecture. At one stage, he pointedly asked Stiles whether it was “good architecture” to place larger greens on holes requiring a long approach and smaller greens where only a short carry is necessary. “Any fool knows that,” snapped Mr. Stiles — or so reported the Springfield Evening Republican, which doggedly covered the hearings from start to finish.
Long story short, the state’s witnesses agreed that Dugmar was worth anywhere between $52,000 and $56,000. Duggan and Mahar’s cadre of specialists all agreed the property was worth between $340,000 and $360,000, mainly on account of all the house lots they might have sold.
In the end, on June 11, 1937, the Board of Referees ruled that Duggan and Mahar be awarded $150,000 for their condemned property, plus 4 percent interest accrued from the land-taking in September 1933. That brought the total payout, including legal and court fees, to $179,042.
Not bad return for a disposable item.
Ultimately, Duggan and Mahar received more than $1,100 per acre for Dugmar GC. On average, Greene asserts, other landowners in the Swift River Valley towns of Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich were compensated at approximately $100 per acre. Contemporary press accounts in the Athol Transcript described Duggan and Mahar as “aggressive, up-to-date businessmen”, and so they were. It took a while, but eventually they beat the state at its own game — in its own eminent backyard.
One Step Ahead of the Flood
Once the June 1937 judgment was handed down, Dugmar GC beat a hasty retreat into the deeper recesses of public consciousness. Our Chapman Valve executives had up and left Greenwich in 1933, content to pursue their Dugmar concerns in court. The putting greens, if Stanley Mega is to be believed, were uprooted and sold, perhaps to some long-admiring greenkeeper at a nearby course. “When did the course close for good?” Greene asks rhetorically. “We have reports of people playing there well after it had been abandoned, in 1933. But other than that, we don’t really know.”
One thing’s for sure: the water started rising on Aug. 14, 1939. By that time Dugmar GC had been thoroughly disposed of.
Mahar didn’t long enjoy his share of the $179,042. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage just six weeks after the judgment came down. He was 52 years old. Duggan lived a while longer, became a member of Longmeadow and Springfield country clubs, succeeded Mahar as president of Chapman Valve, and made a name for himself as a philanthropist and Democratic Party bigwig, though he never stood for office. He too suffered a debilitating cerebral hemorrhage, in 1953, and died a year later at the age of 65.
The Quabbin Reservoir project was originally budgeted at $65 million and, amazing though it may seem to educated observers of Massachusetts’ infamous public works scene, the job was completed under budget. A mere $54 million was spent, thanks to depressed labor costs and federal grants.
“So, paying Duggan and Mahar was a drop in the bucket,” Greene notes. “Even so, that was taxpayer money. Their attitude was, ‘We’ll do this, have a good time and if things work out, we’ll make some money on it.’ ”
And so they did. Duggan and Mahar even managed to fashion a lasting, relatively dry testament to themselves and their anomalous, dually eponymous endeavor: The fieldstone lodge on Curtis Hill still stands — on the south-facing shore of what became Curtis Island. It remains the only man-made structure, the only above-water evidence of The Lost Towns in the entire 89-square-mile Quabbin reserve.
“I find that extremely ironic,” says Greene, “because here’s something that was built by outsiders — and it was one of the very last things ever built in the valley. It’s really quite a monument.”
To what exactly?
“To the cupidity of Duggan and Mahar.”
Chasing Pre-Pollution Fauna
Biologist and scuba enthusiast Dr. Ed Klekowski is way into pre-pollution fauna, which explains why, for years, he had tried to get a close, forensic look at the Quabbin’s floor — to study the organic legacies of lakes and streams long ago overwhelmed by 412 billion gallons of river water. Several years ago, he succeeded. Klekowski led a dive of the area during the 2001 filming of “Under Quabbin”, a Massachusetts public television documentary which chronicled the lives of humans (and pre-pollution fauna) in the Lost Towns. This makes Klekowski, his cameramen, and their guides in the Massachusetts State Police Underwater Recovery Team the last people to see Dugmar Golf Club up close.
“Diving the golf course was much more interesting to think about than actually do,” reports Klekowski, a professor of biology at UMass Amherst. “Flooded fairways are probably the planet’s most monotonous dive sites: endless vistas of algae-covered flatness! We spent most of our time searching for something, anything, to film. Golf will never be an underwater sport.”
Klekowski’s team did find several of Dugmar’s irrigation pipes protruding from what is now the reservoir floor, in addition to the stone patio Duggan and Mahar had built beside the old farmhouse where, six decades earlier, martinis had been served (despite federal law) and beknickered sportsmen (despite their marital status) had flirted with flappers.
“Our goal,” Klekowski says, “was to find and video the remains of the buildings associated with the course. When we finally found the old foundations, you couldn’t but feel a bit nostalgic. It was actually sort of creepy being down there, where there had been so much life at one time.”
Lunch on Curtis Island
It’s illegal to set foot on Curtis Island today, but Bradley Gage has done it. Twenty years ago, as a member of the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board, he and his fellow board members lunched there. It was an odd homecoming for Gage who was born in nearby Enfield — some 40 feet below the reservoir’s surface and two miles north. He spent the first 8 years of his life there before his father, Roy, moved the family to Amherst in 1932.
“My dad played Dugmar,” Gage says. “He talked about it with pride and interest, that he and his friends had played it.” Gage had been too young to have experienced the course himself, to remember much of anything about the place. But he grew up to become a golfer and the state official wishes he had talked more of Dugmar with his dad, while they could have. It’s a false memory he might have cultivated further — because some memories are worth having, even if they’re not your own.
They are complicated things, these memories. Stanley Mega retains many of his own, but they can prove a burden. It had been 30 years since Mega had spoken or thought of Dugmar Golf Club, he says, and one could see the act — exhilarating for a time — eventually led him back to the realities of an 85-year-old life. Mega doesn’t play much golf anymore. After 20 minutes of animated recollections, his voice trailed off in that way an older man’s sometimes does. His brother is gone now. So are Dave Belisle and Jimmy Fitzgerald. Whitey Wisniewski, too.
Dugmar GC may as well be gone. It exists only in the suspended, dreamy netherworld of algae, pre-pollution fauna and would-be tap water — utterly hidden from all those lacking scuba gear and a state police escort. The train doesn’t stop in Bondsville or Greenwich any longer. Route 21 survives, but only in part. The road terminates outside Belchertown, its asphalt ribbon slowly descending toward, then disappearing beneath the Quabbin with an eerie, incongruous finality.
The stone patio beside the converted farmhouse is the only underwater evidence that Dugmar GC was ever there…
I’ve got work to do, but here I am getting misty writing about Gene Michael — a New York Yankee no less! But his passing last week jolted me back to a time when my baseball allegiances were new and muddled thanks to the insistent, dulcet tones of Lindsay Nelson, Ralph Kiner and Bob Murphy.
I was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts in 1964. Soon enough my father’s corporate work life moved our family to New Jersey, then to California, and then, in 1969, back to the northern Jersey suburb of Upper Montclair. It was there, in the mammoth penumbra cast by the New York City sporting scene, that I first took a shine to baseball. Yeah, I played it in the streets of Waterbury Road, and I collected baseball cards, but this is when I first started watching games en masse, in the early 1970s, via WPIX Channel 11 (Yankees) and WOR Channel 9, where Mets broadcasters Nelson, Kiner and Murphy plied their trade.
My family would move to suburban Boston in 1973, and there my dad would chuck his corporate odyssey for some stability in a town my parents were loath to leave. That move meant I could, from that point forward, seamlessly pass myself off as a legitimately rabid Sox fan with impeccable historic and geographic credentials.
But that would be a lie.
The first teams I truly learned and observed closely were the Yankees and Mets of the early 1970s, and that’s why I was moved by thoughts of Gene Michael, the Yanks’ light-hitting glove man at shortstop. (He and Baltimore’s Mark Belanger were pretty good comps.) Not every game was televised back then but many were and I watched the man called Stick play dozens and dozens of them beside second baseman Horace Clarke, behind pitchers Doc Medich, Fritz Peterson and Steve Kline, taking cut-offs from Bobby Murcer and Roy White. New York was a terrible team at this time. It confused my 7-year-old brain that the Yankees had, apparently, been so dominant once — but had nevertheless come to suck so bad.
Convenient to my eventual Sox fandom, I much preferred Bud Harrelson’s Mets to Michael’s Yankees. I don’t remember the Miracle Mets of 1969. But I did enjoy those NYM teams of the early 1970s, and any mention of Gene Michael, or Dave Schneck, or Thurman Munson or Tommy Agee summons the memory of just how hard and quickly a 7-year-old boy can fall for the game.
I watched those shitty Yankee teams because they were the only thing on.
But I developed a real attachment to those Amazin’ Mets.
Let me say right here that no Google has been deployed in the writing of this blog item. As such, here’s the whole Met team from 1973, the guys who nipped St. Louis and a great Pirates team (World Series champs in ‘71) to win the old Eastern Division (with just 82 wins!) before handling the 99-win Big Red Machine to capture the NL pennant: Jerry Grote and Duffy Dyer at catcher; the inimitable and original Met Ed Kranepool at first; Felix Milan and Ken Boswell platooning at second; feisty Bud Harrelson at short; Wayne Garrett at third; John Milner, Don Hanh and my favorite Met of all, Cleon Jones, patrolling the Shea Stadium outfield.
Everywhere but the mound, this was a pretty darned different team from the shock World Series champions of ’69. Only Harrelson, Kranepool and maybe Grote held over from Miracle Mets. But the pitching was a constant. It was Seaver, Matlack and Koosman who made the Mets of this entire era so very formidable. Just to shore things up, a young Tug McGraw closed. And who did the Mets pick up late in 1973 to give them a bit o’ pop? Only a 40-year-old Willie Mays and Le Grande Orange, Rusty Staub.
Still, come October, those Mets were not expected to trouble the Oakland A’s, a dynasty at its peak. But what a series I watched from my new home in Boston during the fall of 1973, surrounded by people who could not have cared less. The Mets went down valiantly, in 7 games, after having led the series 3-2. Lefthander Kenny Holtzman didn’t just win the finale; he got the big hit off opposing starter Jon Matlack to turn the tide. Bert Campaneris hit a home run to seal it. I was mighty disappointed.
The ’73 Series would prove the end of contention for this generation of Mets; the club would fall into disarray before regrouping in time to put a stake through my heart in October 1986. Gene Michael would retire in 1975 (right before the Yankees got good again), manage the Cubs, and eventually serve in the thankless role of Yankees GM under George Steinbrenner. Stick would hold his nose long enough to build the great Yankee teams of the late 1990s.
And now he is gone, another withered petal on my fading flower of youth…
The stunning clubhouse serving Siam CC’s Plantation Course.
Strolling down the main drag in Pattaya, Thailand, the local clocks ticking toward 11 p.m., I am reminded of the golf destinations we North Americans regard as desirable.
Front and center is the golf component, of course. Normally this is the primary factor in determining quality or desirability. But there’s no denying that packs of (primarily) male golfers generally prize golfing locales for their nightlife, too. Any gaggle of 8-12 golfing buddies will include a few lads determined to rip it up each night, their desires perhaps offset by a few compatriots who’d just as soon play poker in the condo. And so there is equilibrium. Still, it seems the destination must offer some degree of lascivious attraction — if only to get the hard-partying faction on the plane. Think Myrtle Beach and its strip of nightclubs and bars. Think Vegas and its many diversions.
Black Mountain Golf Club in Hua Hin.
I consider the different buddy trips I’ve experienced, in these very locales, and I laugh to myself as another sultry Thai evening obliges me to wipe the beads from my perspiring brow. The Walking Street in Pattaya, ground zero for the city’s famously over-the-top nightlife, frankly makes an evening in Vegas feel like a night in Amish Country.
Blocked to vehicular traffic (save a series of small open-air trucks that continuously circle the downtown area, picking up patrons and dropping them off, for a dollar), Pattaya’s Walking Street stretches several kilometers along the beachfront on the Gulf of Siam. Either side of this thoroughfare is fairly well riddled with some of the craziest nightclub scenes you can possibly imagine. If you’ve never been to Thailand, you will have to imagine it — because you’ve surely never seen anything like it.
This is the primary take-away from my 10 days golfing across Thailand: There is such a breadth of experiences to be had that, after a point, all comparisons tend to pale.
This August 2002 essay appeared in the Portland Press-Herald, to which I contributed op-ed columns from 2000-2003. It should have made me famous: The next season, my theory having been realized, Boston took the Yankees to 7 games before falling in the 2003 American League Championship Series; in 2004, the Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit to slay those same Yankees and defeat their other cosmic nemesis, the St. Louis Cardinals, to win the 2004 World Series… While it’s plenty clear the Sox were not destined to win a World Series while The Kid still walked the earth, it’s not clear that Sox fortunes depended entirely on him being properly laid to rest, as is posited here. Indeed, it’s not clear that Ted Williams has ever been afforded the opportunity to rest in peace. That said, his son, John Henry, whose fault that limbo is, certainly got his. He died in March 2004, from leukemia.
By Hal Phillips
I never saw Ted Williams play; late thirtysomethings like myself never had the chance. All we got were gilt-edged glimpses: the triumphant but out-of-context film clip, the seemingly staged black-and-white photo, the hyper-reverent musings of our elders. Yet the shadow Teddy cast over New England was so large that it hardly mattered. Heroic figures like The Kid transcend generation gaps.
Indeed, for as long as I can remember, I’ve coveted a Red Sox away jersey — not the ‘70s-era pajama tops of my youth, but the genuine flannel article from well before my time. From Ted’s time. When my darling wife delivered on this wish last Christmas, the number choice was a no-brainer: 9.
Ted Williams touched all of us New Englanders, regardless of age.
Yet perhaps my lack of first-hand exposure allows me to examine his recent passing with a more clear, spiritually acute eye. As his children fight over the fate of his remains, and the corporal Kid remains in limbo, I think it’s important that we ask ourselves this question: Are the Sox better off now that Ted Williams is gone?
You may find my premise obsequious in its optimism, or perversely macabre, perhaps a tad heretical. But hear me out.
The numbers don’t lie. The seminal digits which should be flashing across the beleaguered eyes of Red Sox Nation this summer are “1918-2002”. Those are the years The Kid bestrode the Earth. However, these same dates also measure with excruciating accuracy the span of Boston’s World Series drought… Coincidence? If so, it’s a real doozie — even by the wacky standards of numerology.
Is it possible that Harry Frazee’s selling of Babe Ruth has been a mere front, a convenient explanation of Boston’s sad championship void thereafter? Shouldn’t we at least consider possible corollaries — namely, that until Ted Williams and his outsized, symbolically fraught persona joined the hereafter, his beloved Sox were cosmically doomed to underachieve?
In this, The Age of Irony, it’s worth exploring. If on some agnostic level we accept as valid The Curse of the Bambino — wherein The Sox cosmically endure pain on account of Frazee’s salary dump — we should also ponder the possibility that those same Sox will prosper now that the Splinter has been removed from our collective foot (or soon will be, if his offspring get with the program).
The inimitable Bob Barker, flanked by “Price is Right” eye candy Janice Pennington (left) and Anitra Ford.
As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan faculty had received The Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. While this particular tidbit proved interesting enough to peruse, I’m only now addressing the nostalgia it prompted — immersed as I am, third party, in the college experience of both my kids.
The first thing to say is that my cohort and I attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., alongside an actual Binswanger — Benjamin Pennypacker Binswanger to be exact. Never knew him but my housemates and I made note of his titanically pretentious name the first week of school freshman year and never forgot it. Never tired of mocking it, either. Always wondered if he was related to Princeton’s Jay Binswanger, winner of the first Heisman Trophy…
Wesleyan Professor Nat Greene
More to the point, Nat Greene was one of these recent Binswanger honorees. I took a couple classes with him but the first was a survey of European history 1815-1945, and I remember it best because it was the only class I ever took with my housemate Dennis Carboni, an art history major whose course load never again overlapped with mine (classical history/modern American lit).
Greene didn’t necessarily tilt the material toward “social” history, an approach then sweeping uber-liberal bastions like Wesleyan. His hewed more to the traditional “Great Men, Great Events” approach. I remember the syllabus included a book of his own scholarship, “From Versailles to Vichy: The Third French Republic, 1919–1940”, which a) struck me at the time as being pretty awesome, that this guy was teaching from his own work; and b) still resides in a bookcase somewhere here in my house, for reasons completely bewildering to my wife. An entertaining lecturer and no-nonsense grader of essays (all testing was conducted via manic, long-hand scribbling in those little blue booklets), Greene was a fine professor, the sort I hope Silas and Clara will experience at some point in their academic careers.
But here’s what I remember most from my class with Nat Greene: It ran from 10 to 10:50 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings in the old PAC building — a few steps from the manhole where we often plunged down into Wesleyan’s famous tunnel system, the subject of another remembrance perhaps. If Dennis and I didn’t dawdle after class, we could race home to my off-campus apartment and catch The Price Is Right at 11 a.m.
Yes, The Price Is Right. It became a sort of ironic obsession for me but something more than that for Dennis, as many things did. It gave me great pleasure to watch him obsessively game this once-seminal game show.
I’m not sure that college kids go in for this sort of thing today, awash as they are in video content and on-demand entertainment delivery choices. However, during the early 1980s, TV was a sort of novel diversion for college kids. We had grown up with it, of course, but had virtually no access to it at school. And so, great delight was taken in the ironic devotion to retrograde programming like soap operas in dorm lounges and late-night reruns of shows like the Rockford Files and Star Trek — things we would never bother watching when home with our families. My sophomore year, my housemate and I came by a tiny black-and-white TV that I’m pretty sure we carried with us the next three years, to three different houses, deploying along the way a staggering array of make-shift aerials including one that involved a pumpkin wrapped in aluminum foil.
Neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator and fascist Giovanni Gentile. It was he, not Mussolini, who explained, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
Hey, Kids! Time to play a fun and revealing new game we’re calling, “You Might Be a Fascist!” Follow along and respond. If you’re not careful, you may learn something about yourself before we’re done (!).
Here we go. Complete this statement with candor: When Hillary Clinton conceded the election on Nov. 9, 2016, did you think her speech and the tone of that speech…
Displayed respect for our country’s centuries-old traditions re. the peaceful, orderly succession of power?
Stood in contrast to the concession speech her opponent would not commit to making had the tables been turned (“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.”)?
Didn’t impress me one way or another?
Revealed her to be weak?
If you answered 4, you MIGHT be a fascist!
Here’s another one: When then president-elect Trump claimed on Twitter that, contrary to all demonstrable evidence, he actually won the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally for his opponent, your gut reaction was:
Authoritarians typically exaggerate their popular support to increase the perception of their legitimacy, for the deeper objective is to weaken democratic institutions that invariably limit their power.
Actively eroding confidence in voting and elections (to say nothing of representative bodies and establishment media) gives would-be authoritarians a freer hand to wield power.
Hell yeah! And that bitch was clearly behind all that voter fraud — and the child sex ring, plus all those murders. Lock her up before she kills again.
That’s right, if you answered 3, you’re almost certainly a fascist. (You’re getting really good at this! To think that only 15 months ago, you fancied yourself a mere Libertarian!)
Harold Gardner Phillips Jr. and Lucy Dickinson Phillips at a Manhattan terrace soirée, circa 1969.
I try to write about my dad each August because it was at the end of that month, six years ago, that he left this mortal coil, all too soon. For most of his 74 years, my dad recognized himself as a Tweener, someone who didn’t belong to a specific or at least any commonly recognizable American generation. For example, consider the Baby Boomers, who comprise the cohort that took shape once World War II had concluded, when my dad was already 9 years old. The parents of Boomers were, of course, the folks who fought The Big One as young men. So my dad arrived on this mortal coil between these two sharp-elbowed generations. So did my mother. So did all the parents I knew growing up. Their kids (my own cohort, Generation X) were similarly “tweened” by our Boomer elders — the largest, most consumptive, coddled and self-indulgent generation the U.S. has yet produced — and their children, known as Millennials. In many ways, these hyper-populou, -impetuous Boomers drowned out my dad and his generation, while his son (i.e., me) has lived all his days in their voracious, over-bearing shadow.
William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of “Generations: A History of America’s Future, 1584-2069”, would quibble with the term “Tweener”. They do classify my dad as a member of a distinct cohort, the Silent Generation, or those born 1923 to 1942. These Americans, unlike members of the preceding G.I. Generation (1901-1924), were born too late to participate in WWII. Yet most Silent citizens came into sentience during the war, were hugely affected by it, as children, and developed a lasting respect for the way theirG.I. elders rose to that occasion and subsequently shaped the post-war world. All this influenced the way my dad, mom and other Silents saw the world, their country, their child-rearing and educational habits, their roles in the public square. Silents were again buffeted by forces outside their own generation when Boomers, the sons and daughters of G.I. folk, overturned then rerouted the culture in the 1960s, by which time my parents were married with three kids.
They didn’t invent it but Strauss and Howe were the first to map this generational theory onto American history. It’s complicated but fascinating stuff (see a more thorough summary of its tenets here). S&H postulate that there are four distinct types of generations: Civic (the WWII G.I. generation, for example), Adaptive (Silent), Idealist (Boom), Reactive (Thirteenth/GenX, my own cohort). They cycle in the same order throughout U.S. History, going back to the Puritans, who, if you allows yourself to think about it, are the offspring of additional, separate, ongoing English generational cycles. Before reading this book, I’d never encountered history told quite this way. It feels a bit pop-psychological at times but the patterns do fit together with remarkable logic, precision and predictability.
My dad in the mid-1970s.
Though “Generations” was published in the early 1990s, my dad never read it. Didn’t know about it all, though it’s exactly the sort of thing he liked to read the last 20-30 years of his life, then pass to me when he was done. In the six years he’s been gone now, I’ve had the urge to discuss with him hundreds, maybe thousands of things. This seems to me the most striking and unchanging aspect of his death — the fact that I still instinctively think of matters to discuss with him but cannot.
The work of Strauss and Howe is one such subject. It struck a chord because if there are four distinct generations of Americans alive at any one time (they refer to these groupings as “constellations”), then my longtime complaints about being sandwiched between Boomers and their Millennial children are not outlying but grounded in a kind of understandable framework. What’s more, this sandwiching has been going on forever. My mom and dad dealt with a variation on this theme: They led their Adaptive/Silent lives between one highly successful Civic generation — which won us the biggest war ever and presided over the largest economic expansion in the history of mankind — and their Idealist offspring, the Boomers.
This dynamic has not changed the way I think of Boomers, ultimately a feckless lot of shallow, navel-gazing spiritualists. But it did change the way I think of modern U.S. history, my dad and the 1970s.
