Dear Birthday Brothers T.H. and Michael, Birthday Girls Sybille and Amy, and Grandson and Nephew Baby Culhane:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SONS!
YOUR MOTHER AND I HAVE HAD JOY IN YOUR MATURING, AND WE HAVE BEEN HAPPY THIS WEEK DISCUSSING HOW IT CAME ABOUT – A STAIRWAY TO PARADISE THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE STEP ON WHICH MICHAEL MARRIED AMY WEINGARTNER AND T.H. MARRIED SYBILLE FRUETEL. TO WIT:
APRIL 12, 1961: ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS, USA: TELEGRAM TO NOEL AND SOPHIE BAKHAZY RASSAM IN BAGHDAD, IRAQ: “Russians put man in space. Culhanes bring man to earth.”
BEST FRIENDS ADELE AND CHARLIE GREGORY CLEAN OUR APARTMENT AND FILL IT WITH FLOWERS SO THAT HIND AND I CAN BRING OUT NEW BABY HOME TO A PLEASANT PLACE.
MARCH 20, 1962. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. John distracts Hind from her labor pains by reading her movie book articles about an American singer (Bobby Darin of “Beyond the Sea” and “Mack the Knife”) and an American Beauty (“Look at me,” sang Stockard Channing in “Grease”, “I’m Sandra Dee.”). Songs will continue to influence the development of both our sons throughout their lives. T.H., in fact, will dance so vigorously in high school to the music from “Saturday Night Fever” that he will split his pure white trousers and they will have to be sewed before he can go on dancing. And now he and Sybille are singing (using Konami's Karaoke Revolution and Singstar) and dancing (and playing Guitar Hero) and soon Baby will make THREE!
1963:
THE EXPLORATION OF SPACE HAS AN IMPORTANT INFLUENCE ON BOTH OUR BOYS.
MICHAEL AND T.H. MEET JOHN GLENN AT THE "MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND INTERESTING": On April 9, 1963, I got an assignment to interview John Glenn at his appearance at the Museum of Science and Industry, one year and 50 days after he became the first American to orbit the earth. Glenn’s three-orbital flight on February 20, 1962, “got the U.S. space program moving with a vengeance,” said Walter Cronkite, native of our family’s St. Joseph, Missouri. I had to show my sons the human being who did this, so I showed up to interview Glenn carrying Michael on my shoulders and T.H. in my arms. Naturally, Glenn noticed us immediately. “Mister Astronaut,” I began, I’m John Culhane, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News.” “Yes, John.” “These are my sons. Michael is three days short of his Second birthday and T.H. is a solid 20 days past his First birthday, just as you are one year and 50 days beyond your great moment in American history.” “Hello, boys,” said Glenn, and my sons said hello back. “Knowledge begets knowledge,” you told Congress after you orbited the earth three time in the Friendship 7.” We all smiled at my mention of the Mercury space capsule in which Glenn traveled 80,428 miles and saw the sun set four times in four hours and fifty-six minutes of his life. “So, what knowledge did you get from orbiting the earth?” “Well, John – and Michael and – is it T.H?” “Yes, for Thomas Henry, his great-grandfather.” “Well, as I said at the time,” Glenn said, “the more I see, the more impressed I am not with how much we know but with how tremendous the areas are that are yet unexplored.” He smiled at my sons. “That’s for you boys to do.”
In JUNE, POPE JOHN XXIII DIED. BECAUSE I HAD SEEN CARDINAL ANGELO RONCALLI, WHO SAVED ANN BIRO’S LIFE, CROWNED AS POPE JOHN XXIII, AND TOLD MICHAEL ABOUT IT, THE GOOD POPE JOHN WAS AN HISTORICAL FIGURE WHO FIGURED IN MICHAEL’S IMAGINATION. And then, on NOVEMBER 22, 1963, MICHAEL FOURTH HISTORICAL FIGURE WAS ASSASSINATED. He said: “Oh, no! First Pope John, now President Kennedy!’ The next month, as Christmas approached, we bought the record album of Walt’s next feature animation, his film of T.H. White’s novel, “The Sword in the Stone”. We put the paper cutouts from the album of the characters: Wart, Merlin, Sir Hector, and so forth, all around the Christmas tree, and played the album continually. MERLIN THE MAGICIAN AND KING ARTHUR WERE IMPORTANT PEOPLE ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF 5496 SOUTH HYDE PARK BLVD. (I didn’t know then that storyman Bill Peet had based Merlin on Walt.)
1964: TWO STORIES OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, DISNEY’S “THE SWORD IN THE STONE” AND LERNER AND LOWE’S “CAMELOT” HAVE A TREMENDOUS INFLUENCE ON MICHAEL AND T.H.
On my 30th birthday, February 7, I take Hind to Disney’s “Fantasia” In New York that day, the Beatles arrive in the United States and will have a great influence on my family’s life and times from then on. .” About February 10, Hind and I take Michael to Walt Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone.” On February 11, T.H. and Michael see T.H.’s first feature film, “THE SWORD IN THE STONE (Michael for the second time.) We go to see Arthurian armor at an Armor museum, and to a restaurant with a knight in shining armor (maybe empty) standing near the maitre d’. I teach them: “The knight’s bones are dust, his poor sword is rust; his soul is with the saints, I trust.” We are teaching them to be chivalrous. One February 24, our family plus Shameem, who is living with us now, gets an invitation from Mother: “YOU ARE INVITED TO AN EASTER EGG HUNT (ON THE LAWN) AND A DINNER (IN THE HOUSE) AT THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (MONTAGUE ROAD). (I wrote Mother for her 86th birthday, June 2, 1998, a copy of her Easter invitation and added: “This invitation expresses my idea of happiness. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not Happiness.” “
APRIL 12. Around Michael’s third birthday, we took him to his first play, CAMELOT, by Lerner and Lowe, with Kathryn Grayson as Guenevere and Louis Hayward as King Årthur. “He was still wearing winter clothes,” remembered Hind. “Woolen knee socks. It was mild out.” When T.H. saw that he was leaving, he began to cry. Michael went back to comfort him: “Don’t cry, Tia. I’ll take you to ‘Camelot’ when you’re older.” And, of course, when Michael went to look at ITHACA COLLEGE to make his early decision to go there, Ithaca was putting on a student production of “Camelot” for Parent’s Weekend, and Michael did take T.H. It has been important to Michael since he realized, watching his first stage production, who the old man on the stage was, and shouted out in delight, to the laughter of the audience, “MERLIN!”
On October 3, your cheerful as Mickey Mouse (in earlier years, anyway) Grandfather Culhane, married to one woman for 32 years, father of six children, died, at age 54, from open heart surgery which failed. After a wake, at which over 300 people signed the book (Mayor Bob McGaw wrote: “I have been to my own Mother’s wake tonight, but I had to say goodbye to my old friend Jack”) Dad was buried on October 7 while Mark said the prayers in an Irish brogue. Two days later, I took Michael to “Winnie the Pooh” at the Goodman Children’s Theatre. He particularly enjoyed Piglet, played by the Oscar-winning actress, Linda Hunt. He later married a woman who always loved Piglet and keeps a Piglet in their apartment. Michael and T.H. also have an aunt who is identified with Eeyore.
1964-65
NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY: BOYS ADMIRE THEIR MOTHER, GORGEOUS IN A TIGHT BLACK DRESS, AS HIND AND I LEAVE FOR TOM AND MOLLIE LYMAN’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY WITH SAUL BELLOW, FUTURE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN LITERATURE. BOB LOMBARDO PLAYED THE PIANO AND WE SANG GERSHWIN TUNES.
JANUARY 2: “I took the boys to the castle on the Point that juts into Lake Michigan in the afternoon to kill a witch and rescue a princess while Mommy took a nap.” Later in the year, Auntie Mima and Hind take Michael, 3, to the Goodman Theatre with tickets supplied by Chicago Daily News columnist Tony Weitzel and his wife-secretary, Carmen to see a play of ALADDIN. We are acquainting him with “The Arabian Nights.”
July 24. Interviewed Al Raby and Dr. Martin Luther King at 46th and Ellis: I consider Dr. King the greatest human being since Gandhi. My sister Pat’s husband, Chuck Munat, took part in his March on Washington; I had to stay in Chicago and write about the marcher’s return. But King is still my hero because his life was devoted to the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.
Every time I heard his marchers chant, “What do we want?” “Freedom!” “When do we want it?” “Now!!!” I thought of the great German thinker Hegel, who is quoted in The Great Books as writing, “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom,” which does not reach its climax until freedom is universally achieved.” However, Hegel did not see history as a work of freedom, but as involving “an absolute necessity.” For Jesuit-trained me, human beings have free will. Augustine said that we use our freedom properly when we act virtuously; we misuse it when we choose to spend $80,000 of somebody’s money (what our father left us, what campaign contributors gave us to run for New York Governor, maybe even what we taxpayers were forced to contribute) to screw prostitutes to the shame of his wife and three daughters –St. Augustine didn’t say that; he didn’t know about Spitzer, who just resigned and whose place was taken by a legally blind black Lt. Governor named Patterson – so everything works out for the best. “The will is then truly free,” said Augustine, ‘when it is not the slave of vices and sins.”
1965 AUG 27: HIND IS REUNITED WITH HER FATHER FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TEN YEARS ON OUR FIFTH ANNIVERSARY. WE RENTED A NEW WHITE DODGE FROM AVIS (“WE TRY HARDER”) AND I DROVE HIND, MAMA, SHEMEEM, MICHAEL, T.H. AND GHASSAN TO O’HARE TO MEET HIS PLANE. THE NEXT DAY, WE DROVE TO ROCKFORD TO SEE MOTHER AND MARK; THE NEXT DAY WE VISITED ATWOODS AND MRS. DAME.
Columbia University in the City of New York. I am a Ford Fellow in Advanced International Reporting. Michael and T.H. play around Thomas Jefferson’s statue (We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) next to the Journalism building while I study. We walk to the Cloisters a lot and I try to give them a sense of what what their Great-Grandfather, Dr. T.H. Culhane, M.D. Dean of Rockford Physicians, called “The Thirteenth: Greatest of Centuries”: Thomas Aquinas, philosopher; St. Francis of Assisi, good male human being;); St. Claire of Assisi, good female human being; Giotto, good graphic artist; tk, good musician; King Louis IX of France (good leader), etc
1965 SEP11: NEW HAVEN, CONN. MICHAEL, T.H., SU-SU AND NINA PLAY “SNOW WHITE" IN A NEW HAVEN PARK AND HAVE A PICNIC LUNCH WITH BABA, MAMA, HIND, SERGE, AMAL AND MR. HAFEZ OF IRAQ.
1965: OCTOBER 8: T.H., 3, MICHAEL, 4, HIND AND I WENT TO THE NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR AND RODE ON THE “UP-COLORED TRAIN” (SWISS SKY RIDE), AND SAW AND HEARD WALT DISNEY’S AUDIO-ANIMATRONIC ABE LINCOLN, AND HIS “IT’S A SMALL WORLD, AFTER ALL” – WHICH WE DO, INDEED, BELIEVE. .
ON NOV. 23, 1965, I TOOK MY SONS AND THEIR GIRL COUSINS TO “HELP” AND “HARD DAYS NIGHT” STARRING VICTOR SPINETTI AND FOUR LIVERPOOL LADS WHOSE NAMES MY 74-YEAR-OLD BRAIN CAN’T RECALL AT THE MOMENT.
WE SAW DON QUIXOTE, “MAN OF LA MANCHA” and afterward met Richard Kiley, the Don; Irving Jacobson, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea (Joan Deiner of “Kismet” fame, who dazzled T.H.)
THIS PLAY HAD AN IMPORTANT INFLUENCE ON BOTH OUR SONS.
AT Christmas we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I showed you guys George Caleb Bingham’s great oil painting, “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri”, of two men who could be our relatives, then took you on the subway to Astor Place, named for the American capitalist who sent Joseph Robidoux a-fur trading. I showed you the tiles showing a beaver knawing at a tree, and told you, “
You are direct descendants of a fur trader who, when beaver hats were suddenly replaced with silk hats, turned his Blacksnake Hills Indian trading post into an American city named for his patron saint: Saint Joseph, Missouri. I hope you both will be similarly inspired to do something/ Each of us should carry in our brains a little model of an ideal society, and should figure out ways to help it come about. It could be a song (“We can work it out”) or a thesis (How to work it out)."
1966 MICHAEL, 4, TEACHES T.H., 3, ABOUT GREAT PERSONALITIES:
MICHAEL: “Mickey…”
T.H.: “MOUSE!”
MICHAEL: “Don…
T.H.: “QUIXOTE!”
MiCHAEL: ‘No. Donald Duck. Now guess this one…”
WALKING to the Cloisters.
SLEDDING from HENRY HUDSON (statue) to the bottom
of the park next to our 735 Kappock St. apartment building.
RUNNING FROM THOMAS JEFFERSON (statue) in front of Columbia School of Journalism to stairway leading to Columbia’s Library – and UP!
1966, JAN 27: 735 Kapock St., Riverdale, The Bronx. Today, T.H. is an imaginary character named PINEDEXTER, whose weapon is his Excalibur stuck hilt-in into the scabbard to make a double-sized sword (a “shooter sword,” he calls it, in advance of the Star Wars light sword), and he goes around shouting “BAM! POW! ZOCK! SLAM!: from the BATMAN TV show.
1966, FEB17: THE CAPED CRUSADER AND THE BOY WONDER again tonight. “Holy Entanglements!” The dynamic duo are still a hit with Michael and T.H. but Hind and I have bailed out. I have been watching V.S. Pritchett on “Open Mind”. Pritchett will get an honorary degree from Harvard when T.H. gets his bachelor’s degree from there, but right now, he and Michael both would give the honorary degree to Adam West.
The Justice Department reports only seven executions last year – perhaps the lowest number in history; but that doesn’t solve the problem of death. After seeing “Willie the Whale”, T.H. plays as follows: “Tetti-Tatti shot me and I got dead, so I went to Heaven. So I jumped out of Heaven, and I waked up, so the birdy didn’t be sad.”
(That same play day, , January 31, 1966, President Johnson resumed the bombing of North Vietnam. “MADNESS!” I wrote in my journal.
On February 26, Michael, T.H. and I watched the first Apollo Moon Ship go into space. The next day, we went sledding again from Henry Hudson down the hill to t he fence.
On April 23, Uncle Bill, Shakespeare and Shirley Temple’s birthday, Hind and I took Michael and T.H. to the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Gardens. Animals and plants and flowers, that’s what they love.
April 29: “He’s a very sick boy,” said the doctor we called to look at T.H. “Sicker than he looks. Very bad tonsillitis. We give him three baby aspirin and bicilin every four hours. This is one of the hardest things about being parents who love their children. But T.H. rallies fast. “I want to be Don Quixote,” says Michael on April 30. “I’ll be Athene, Goddess of Love.” From bed, sick T.H. has an idea: “Nina can be Dulcinea.”
On March 20, T.H. turned four, but on July 24, I could still toss him out of bed every time he tried to wrestle me in the morning.
But he already understood the workings of TIME.
“WHEN I’M A DADDY,” HE TOLD ME, “YOU’ll BE A GRANDPA. AND YOU WON’T BE TOO TOUGH!” OH, MY!
But 1966 was one of the most important years of our lives thus far in our belief that the complete understanding of emotions and of their causation deprives them of their overmastering quality. This year, I saw Martin Luther King hit by a brick in Gage Park(violence) ON DEC 15 I heard that WALT DISNEY had just died, and walked by the Mississippi River alone for hours (SORROW, until the Mighty River helped me restore my perspective); and on DEC, 28. At IGOR STRAVINSKY’S FAREWELL CONCERT, I realized that art reminds of who we are, where we come from, where we’re going, and what we should do while we’re here. JANUARY Hind, boys and I go to Salvador Dali exhibit at Gallery of Modern Art Feb 7: I am 32 years old MAR: GERMANY WITH FORD FELLOWS: YEHUDI AND HEPZIBAH MENUHIN CONCERT Jewish masters play in Germany for the first time since the Holocaust for a grateful audience. (o.c. Twenty Modern Americans) March 23: Cologne: Verdi’s “Othello”; March 20: Berlin: “Der Rosenkavalier” on T.H.’s 4th birthday/March 13: Munich: “The Magic Flute’ Bayerische Statsoper APRIL: GOOD FRIDAY: RETURNED FROM EUROPE; WENT TO CONFESSION ON APRIL 9; EASTER IN BOSTON: MASS AND COMMUNION; MICHAEL WAS 5 ON APRIL 12. May 15: At the University of Chicago, hundreds of student seized the administation building and held it for three days. JUNE When did Richard Speck kill Filipino student nurses while I wrote: “When a Boy from Waukegan Marries” JULY: Reading Catch-22 (Heller) Royko recommended it. AUGUST: August 6, 1966. In New York, work on the World Trade Center began. It was going to be the world’s tallest building. And here I was in Chicago. Reminded me of when my Aunt Ella gave my brother Dick his day alone with her in Chicago, as she had done for me (we went to see Humphrey Bogart in “The Two Mrs. Carrolls”) and Patty (they went shopping at Marshall Fields). “Well, Dick,” she said, “What do you want to see?” “Statue of Liberty!” said Dick enthusiastically. “Oh, sorry, honey, that’s in New York. What else?” “Empire State Building!” “Oh, sorry, that’s in New York, too. Something else?” “I can’t think of anything else.” So they went to the movies. Probably “Naked City.” WHEN WAS THE ACTUAL DATE THAT I SAW MARTIN LUTHER KING HIT BY A BRICK IN GAGE PARK? SEPT. 1: I JOINED NEWSWEEK’S CHICAGO BUREAU AS A CORRESPONDENT. OCT. CHICAGO SYMPHONY OPENING NIGHT WITH DON AND LITA HOLT? NOVEMBER: DEC. 15 I AM AT THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. NEWSWEEK WANTS ME TO CONTINUE MY INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING. I AM INVESTIGATING SENATOR LONG OF MISSOUI. WALT DISNEY DIES. I GO WALKING ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI ALONE. I CALL TERRY. CHRISTMAS PANORAMA: WALT AND ME: CHAPTER ONE 28: IGOR STRAVINSKY’S FAREWELL CONCERT (came out for last curtain call with his coat on. 1967 MAR 20: “JUNGLE BOOK” YEAR. I missed T.H.’s 5th birthday because I was in Peoria covering the murder trial of Richard Speck, “THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY,” who killed eight Filipino Student Nurses in one night of terror. I tried to understand the environment he was raised in. As the gang kids sang in “West Side Story”, was he “depraved on accounta he’s deprived”? At EASTER , March 26, I missed Mass on purpose. I still believed in God but decided I no longer wanted to be a Roman Catholic because some high-ranking clergy were supporting the Vietnam War, which I considered a terrible violation of the commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” – as well as a massive contribution to an environment that deprives. On April 12, Michael was six. On April 21 I interviewed Bucky Fuller in Evanston, who told me, “Either man is obsolete or war is.” Bucky believed in Design Revolution: “Change the environment, do not try to change man.” I TOOK THE BOYS TO WALT DISNEY’S LAST ANIMATED FEATURE, “JUNGLE BOOK”, AND T.H. FELL IN LOVE WITH THE JUNGLE, WITH BALOO THE BEAR, AND PARTICULARLY WITH KING LOUIS THE ORANGUTAN. FROM THEN ON, T.H. Would sing KING LOUIS’ T“I WANNA BE LIKE YOU” (LOUIS PRIMA) AND “THE BARE NECESSITIES” (PHIL HARRIS) THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE THUS FAR – AND WILL PROBABLY TEACH THEM TO HIS SON.
On June 24, I began the Brothers Culhane’s education in German culture by taking them, for the first time, to “Schneewittchen”, the tale from German oral tradition that the Brothers Grimm wrote down, in its animated version by Walt Disney, called “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. I GO TO MONTREAL, CANADA, TO COVER THE FIRST WORLD RETROSPECTIVE OF ANIMATION CINEMA, held in conjunction with Expo 67, with Bill Tytla, Art Babbitt, and Shamus Culhane. On my last day, I visit the American Pavilion, held in one of Bucky Fuller’s geodesic domes. Half of it is devoted to the U.S.A.’s efforts in Space; the other half to the U.S.A.’s efforts in Film. Many screens show many scenes from many great American movies. The only animated scene is Shamus Culhane’s “Heigh-Ho” sequence from “Snow White.” Going home is indeed the main theme of the human race, which is trying, as George and Ira Gershwin expressed it, ‘TO BUILD A STAIRWAY TO PARADISE, WITH A NEW STEP EVERY DAY.’
1968. IN JANUARY, WINTER WEEKEND WITH DR. AL KLINGER, OUR CHICAGO FAMILY DOCTOR AND HIS FAMILY, AT LAKE GENEVA, WISCONSIN, WHERE HIND AND I SPENT OUT HONEYMOON. Janis Ian sings “At 17” and “Society’s Child” on the jukebox as we get a treat before starting home. I did not go to Mass on Easter Sunday, April 14, 1968, but stayed home in Hyde Park to finish my negative review of Richard Schickel’s anti-Walt biography of Walt, “The Disney Version, while my famly went out to Grammie’s to celebrate Michael’s 7th birthday and Easter. Low point of my life. Bucky said: “Don’t fight forces; use them.” I was fighting the forces that don’t like Disney. I decided to get help from the forces that love Walt. On September 11, I rode to Marceline, Missouri, with John Shedd, president of the Santa Fe Railroad, and the Disney family, to do a story for Newsweek on the first day of issue of the new Walt Disney Postage Stamp. Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, asked me to eat with family; Roy O. Disney, Walt’s brother, connected with me as fellow Irish-Americans.
MEANWHILE, MICHAEL AND T.H. HEAR BOBBY KENNEDY AT THE HYDE PARK CO-OP. On my shoulders, they were, when Robert F. Kennedy campaigned that morning and quoted George Bernard Shaw, from his 1921 play, ‘Back to Methusalah”: ‘YOU SEE THINGS, AND YOU SAY, ‘WHY?’ BUT I DREAM THING THAT NEVER WERE, AND I SAY, ‘WHY NOT?” But my big stories that year were reaction stories: Reaction to the assassination of Bobby, opponent of the Vietnam war; reaction to the assassination of Dr. King (RIOTS), who opposed not only racism and poverty but the Vietnam War; reaction to the suffering of the weaker (Palestinians) by the stronger (Israelis): I realized that human beings are continually corrupted by absolute power: When white men in the Rock River Valley continually took over the Sauk Indians’ fertile field and tribal villages along Rock River – now part of Rockford,Indians made desperate by hunger looked to Black Hwk for leadership. Though already driven to Iowa, he came back across the Mississippi to plant crops and try to resist further encroachment. That the band of l,000 included old men, women and children shows that the move was not warlike. But the U.S. Government dispatched troops. Even Abraham Lincoln joined up – though he didn’t kill anybody. In the massacre at the Bad Ax River in Wisconson, most of the Indians were slaughtered. Old men, women and children were mostly drowned. White folks erected a huge statue by Lorado Taft of Black Hawk looking sadly over Rock River near Oregon, Illinois. We took you boys there as my father took his kids. But as the theme song from “Exodus,” the great Paul Newman anti-sharing film goes, “This Land Is Mine!” Well, what did Bucky say? “Don’t oppose forces; use them!” Martin Luther King’s nonviolence did take him and his people to the mountaintop: Barack Obama is running for President of the United States today. Air Supremacy got us a nuclear weapon that we could deliver to a city to kill everyone man, woman and child in one blow. But Barack knows that soon such weapons can be delivered in suitcases – and he has small kids. Black, but innocent. Bucky’s right again: “Either war in obsolete, or we are.” For the sake of Baby Culhane, I want us to start singing, “We’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.” 1969 LEADING IMAGE: MICHAEL AND T.H. WATCHING THE MOVIE OF MARK TWAIN’S “TOM SAWYER” SITTING ON JENNIE’S LAP. SAN FRANCISCO AND DISNEYLAND – WHERE I SAVE T.H. FROM DROWNING BY GETTING MY SUIT AND MY WALLET ALL WET. On April 30, Hind, Michael, T.H. and I made our first trip to Disneyland. “It’s a Small World After There” was there by now. On April 6, Easter, the children hunted candy Easter Eggs and chocolate bunnies in the bushes and branches and even under leaves in Grammie’s backyard at the House That Jack Built. In May, I took a leave of absence from Newsweek to finish a novel, and went to the Middle East to visit Baba and Mama in Baghdad and to interview Yasir Arafat at a secret location in Jordan. That month, the Arab World printed my “ An Open Letter to a United States Congressman Concerning the Final Solution to the Indian Problem in the State of Illinois and the Palestinian Problem in the State of Israel.” I was still fighting forces: I didn’t know how to use them to bring freedom to Palestinians. It is hard to learn non-violence. I ovehear a conversation between the boys: “Some people say Walt Disney’s a sissy, you know.” “He ain’t,” Michael answered. “What if he was alive? I”ll bet he’d bash their heads in.” On July 20, the first human beings walk on the moon, just as President John Kennedy promised we would. I pray God we can continue to explore space without bashing each other’s heads in. In August, I moved my family to Dobbs Ferry, New York, when Newsweek brought me to the home office to write. On December 13, we took the boys to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” with Henry Fonda as the stage manager, and after the play, we went backstage and met Fonda and Denise Nickerson, who was in Michael’s favorite TV series, “Dark Shadows.” Fonda had been an acting hero of mine since my Dad took me to see him play in John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” when I was five. Lincoln was the great hero of my Grandfather, Dr. T.H. Culhane, M.D.
1970 I READ ALOUD ROALD DAHL’S ‘CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY’ TO MICHAEL AND T.H. CULHANE AND MUHAMMAD ALI AND ALIYAH KHALIDI. When I was nine, I got Dahl’s first book, “The Gremlins”, for Christmas. I loved all his stories about my knights of the new Round Table, the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Now my oldest son is nine and he and his brother T.H. and friends and next-door neighbors, Muhammad Ali and Aliyah, are hearing me read Dahl’s latest book. Years from now, Michael will speak to the actress who played Veruca Salt in the first movie version, in Grand Central Terminal.
DARK SHADOWS TV SHOW ENTHRALS MICHAEL NOEL CULHANE Newsweek Magazine reports on our “Creepy Boppers” – youngsters who follow Jonathan Frid, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and all the other stars of the Creature Feature. Forrest J. Ackerman becomes a celebrity in our household. Elaborate Halloween makeup Is de rigeur. Super Eight horror movies made by Michael, T.H. and their friends are a favorite activity. Their friends include the Favata boys, sons of a designer of animated cartoons, Raymond J. Favata. Our families meet to screen rented Disney animation – or to play with Ronnie’s pythons. Michael Favata will become a fine artist. We will hire him to paint Michael a Beatles jacket. Matt Favata will get into rock and roll. Danny Macko, the ultimate “latch key kid” will be an interesting member of the group. I hope that T.H. and Sybille’s son will be read such interesting books, and will have such interesting and creative friends. Another early book I read our boys and their cousins, Nina and Soph, was “The Tin Woodman of Oz.” Other interesting friends were the guy who’s a lighting designer on Broadway now; Tom St. George, who writes for network television, the Alter brothers, and Mayor Reed’s son.
1971 GRAMMIE BEGINS GRANDCHILDREN’S CAMPS. GOOD EXAMPLE FOR SONS OF THE FRUITS OF A FATHER’S CREATIVITY: ON SEPTEMBER 1, SHAMUS AND JUANA TOOK HIS SONS, BRIAN AND KEVIN, AND HIND AND I TOOK OURS, MICHAEL AND T.H., TO A GREAT WORK OF ART, THE DISNEY MASTERPIECE “PINOCCHIO”, 31 YEARS OLD, REISSUED.
By 2008, it is well known that Shamus animated the Fox selling Pinocchio to Pleasure Island, but Walt did not give Shamus any screen credit on “Pinocchio”, because he left Disney’s because of poor health after doing the scene. We could all see the worth of what Shamus had done in 1971, and now the world knows.
At Christmas, I wrote an article for The Chicago Daily News Panorama Magazine on Dick Williams. I knew how important he was earlier in the year when I took the boys to his “LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME.” Our relationship would have important implications for Michael and T.H. as well as for me.
1972 A DEATH IN THE FAMILY ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. JULY 19. Michael and T.H. were at my Mother’s Grandchildren’s Camp when my sister Patty was killed in a car crash. At the ages of 10 and 11, they both saw up close the effects of sudden death of a loved person. That fall, at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, I began teaching the first class for college credit in the world in the history of animation. The class was structured around Walt telling me, when I was 17, that “the primary object of any of the Fine Arts is to get a purely emotional response from the beholder.” When our sister, friend, aunt died, it was like the death of Bambi’s Mother, when, suddenly, someone we love is GONE.
1973 STEAMBOAT MICHAEL; STEAMBOAT T.H.; STEAMBOAT SOPHIE; STEAMBOAT NINA; STEAMBOAT JOHN AND HIND:’ MICHAEL, T.H., SOPH AND NINA WHITEWASH THE FENCE IN HANNIBAL, MO., SAM CLEMENS’ HOME TOWN” They learn from this fun that “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and PLAY consists of whatever a body is not oblighed to do.” --Mark Twain, “Tom Sawyer”, 1876.
T.H., on seeing the first snowfall of 1973-74: GLORY BE TO GOD FOR THE FLURRIES.” I went to London in January to write dialogue for Vincent Price in Dick Williams’ “The Thief and the Cobbler”, and brought Michael back a Yellow Submarine. Dick came to stay with us and played his horn with Michael and T.H. on guitars and the next morning at breakfast the boys told me: ‘He’s not your run-of-the-mill adult.”
At the Academy Awards on March 27, Dick got the Oscar for his animated version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as best animated short.
JUST LIKE TOM SAWYER’S FRIENDS, MICHAEL, T.H., SOPH AND NINA WHITEWASH THE FENCE IN HANNIBAL, MISSOURI, BIRTHPLACE OF MARK TWAINT ST. LOUIS:
Palm Sunday, April 15: I show the family Saint Louis University, we climb the Gateway Arch and gave over the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and I tell them that their Grammie was born in St. Louis; that the plans for Missouri as a State were hatched in the living room of their great-great-great-grandfather, St. Louis pioneer Joseph Robidoux II, father of JOE III, who founded St. Joseph on the Missouri and named it for his patron saint, the Foster Father of God.
At the Gateway Arch, we board the Paddlewheel Steamboat Delta Queen and speed down the Mississippi as Old Man River reaches its highest levels in recorded history (which only meas about 200 years). Michael celebrates his 12th birthday aboard that vessel.
WASHINGTON, D.C. EASTER SUNDAY. I took Yasmeen, Soph, Nina, Michael and T.H. to “Cinderella.” EASTER MONDAY we went to the annual Easter Egg roll on the White House Lawn. I cover the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College for another NYTM cover story in November; Aunt Rose comes from Baghdad to visit and we take her to Radio City Music Hall to see Disney’s “ROBIN HOOD”. THIS TIME, PHIL HARRIS WAS “LITTLE JOHN.” Then we drove Aunt Rose and Teta back to Dobbs Ferry for Midnight Mass at Sacred Heart.
IN JANUARY, MY CLOWN COLLEGE STORY IS MY SECOND NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE COVER. I am MC and jury chairman (I put Isabella Rosselini on my jury) for the Second New York International Film Festival, and the boys come to see cartoons with their makers. Donald Duck in “Self Control”, originally released in 1938, is re-released in a time that desperately needs self-control. We celebrate the boys’ 13th and 12th birthdays with Circus Opening Night, riding Anne Mae, the elephant of the Woodcock family, on Hind’s birthday, for our Christmas Card picture, at Circus World, and Walt Disney World.
Cary Grant told me that the circus is an international organization of cooperation between all kinds of people, and we see that again and again. BOSTON: On July 26, Hind and I deliver Michael and T.H. Culhane, Matthew Keating, and Michael Stone to the Beatles Convention in the Bradford Hotel. On July 28, Culhanes and Keatings walk around Walden Pond, and think thoughts of Thoreau, and “marching to a different drummer.” On July 29, we all swim in the Atlantic Ocean in Maine. Ever since I fell in love with Bucky Fuller’s “CHANGE THE ENVIRONMENT; DO NOT TRY TO CHANGE MAN,” I have been trying to teach my sons to change the environment. NOW I am watching a television series and reading a book that helps me: THE ASCENT OF MAN’ By Jacob Bronowski. “Nature – that is, biological evolution – has not fitted man to any specific environment…” he say. “Among the multitude of animals who scamper, fly, burrow, and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. HIS IMAGINATION, HIS REASON, HIS EMOTIONAL SUBTLETY AND TOUGHNESS, MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR HIM NOT TO ACCEPT THE ENVIRONMENT BUT TO CHANGE IT. And that series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution – not biological, but cultural evolu tion. I call that brilliant series of cultural peaks THE ASCENT OF MAN.”
1974 In August, Michael hit his head on the bottom of a swimming pool in a deep, hard dive; he was put in the hospital for observation, where he watched the result the next night, October 8, of a deep, hard dive that was moral, not physical: NIXON RESIGNED. Also, that month, we watched the opposite – and understood the cost of marching to a different drummer when most people are passive: SADDAM PUT BABA, PREVIOUSLY IMPRSIONED BY BRITISH MONARCHISTS, IN PRISON. (“Monarchies are bad,” Baba always said. “Representative democracy is the best form of government.j”)
I think that that day, Michael and T.H. both got inoculated with a lifelong hatred of dictatorships—a hatred on unreasonable limitations on human freedom. But in December, always hopeful, we all hold up lighted matchsticks at George Harrison’s rock concert.
1975 T.H. PLAYS DON QUIXOTE, THE MAN OF LA MANCHA 1975 T.H. IS “GEORGE M.” On May 21, we went to the PICKWICK to see Sean Connery play Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn play Maid Marion in “Robin and Marion”; met Lisa and Susie Lloyd-Jones and their Mother and Ann;
On May 22 1975, I clowned with my sons at Madison Square Garden with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and their friends came to see us. On Sunday, May 23, Hind, T.H. and I played tennis at Mercy College court; on Sunday, May 24, Michael, T.H., Hind and I went to the Bronx Zoo. June 30 (on the eve of going with the circus) Michael, 15, “In America, the whole thing is where you get, right?”
JULY 4, 1976: WE SEE THE TALL SHIPS ON TV AND ON THE HUDSON RIVER AND THEN DRIVE TO CAPE COD, WHERE WE ALL TAKE AN EIGHT MILE BIKE RIDE ON JULY 5 AND GO SWIMMING IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN (Raleigh bikes, rented from the Nelson’s Riding Stable) Whole family: Agatha Christie’s “MURDER BY DEATH.”
1977 Michael and T.H. get electric guitars and amp. On Hind’s birthday, February 20, we go SLEDDING with John Avildsen and his sons, Anthony and Rufus.
On March 18, President Carter calls the ENERGY CRISIS “the moral equivalent of war.”
Two days later, T.H. is 15, and THE CULHANE FAMILY’S ITALIAN JOURNEY starts immediately. WE GO TO ITALY TO SEE ‘A BRILLIANT SERIES OF CULTURAL PEAKS’ RECOGNIZED BY BRONOWKI IN ‘THE ASCENT OF MAN”, BY KENNETH CLARK IN HIS “CIVILIZATION” TV SERIES. On Good Friday, at the Duomo in Florence, I return to the Roman Catholic Church, which I left because of the support of high-ranking members of the Catholic hierarchy for the Vietnam War.
But I decide that if Catholics of good will don’t support the Church, how can it improve? We are the Church. In Rome, talking animatedly to Shamus after the Orfei Circus, Michael understands that all wine and no food make Mike a sick boy. On their return, they boys are in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. In September, I begin teaching Michael to drive.
In December I go to Ringling winter quarters in Venice to researdh my Quadruple story. At Christmas , Michael begins his first romance, with the worthy Lydia Kavanaugh. Father Hickey asks me and Michael and T.H. to play St. Nicholas and an angel and Black Peter (an old German custom, we’re told) at Sacred Heart Church – but remember that Soph, in the Christmas Tree ornaments she made, cast T.H., in a white robe, as the angel, and Michael, in a red jump suit with forked tail and horns, as the devil. As Aunt Libby would say, “Go figure.”
1978: OUR FAMILY SEES BERMUDA WITH KEATINGS’ FAMILY. T.H. gets his YMCA and PADI scuba-diving cards there. In January, Michael and T.H. play the Dromio brothers in Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors.” In June, Michael and T.H. win the Dobbs Ferry High School Talent Show.
T.H. talks me into writing a story about the dangers of PCB’s in the Lordly Hudson after he arranges for Hind and me to take a cruise on the Clearwater at which I talk to a scientist about those dangers. In December, Jack Holly directs Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” at DFHS: Michael is stage manager; T.H. is George Gibbs. T.H. is inducted into the National Honor Society, and I am chosen to give them my “ONLY CONNECT” speech. Hind gives me THE GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD for Christmas, but the whole family can read them.
1979 On New Year’s Eve, Michael and T.H. played at Arthur and Carol Kornhaber’s house. Teta, Lydia, Hind and I are among the guests. On January 2, Michael is accepted by Ithaca College. For my 45th birthday, we give a party for Bruno Bozzetto (“Life in a Box”) and Sophie Rassam. In April, the boys are in HAIR. On GOOD FRIDAY, Michael celebates his 18th birthday hearing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at Grace Episcopal Church with Lydia, T.H., Hind and I. In May, the boys play Beatles and Michael has his senior prom. In June, Michael graduates from Dobbs Ferry High School as my New York Times Magazine cover on Jim Henson and the Muppets is my seventh NYTM cover. In September, Michael starts Ithaca and has a radio show. In December T.H. plays in Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner.” T.H. has been going steady with the worthy Miriam Samuels for one month. For Christmas, the family gives me a phone answering machine.
1980 NEW YEAR’S EVE: MICHAEL AND T.H. PLAY AT TULIO AND BLANCA FERISIN’S. Lydia Cavanaugh, Miriam Samuels, Olympia and Jerry Cosentino are there. Around his 18th March 20 birthday, T.H. was accepted by Cornell, won the Seroptomists and Regents Scholarships, and then was accepted by Duke. In April, he played Fagin in “Oliver”, and while Hind was in Iraq as an educational consultant, he was ACCEPTED BY HARVARD.
“I know why I didn’t want to go to Harvard before is because I han’t been accepted,” T.H. told me, “and I was preparing myself for a let-down…They sent me a beautiful certificate.” All three colleges offered T.H. scholarships. On T.H.’s actual birthday, we went to Ringling Bros. opening night and took Soph. On Easter Sunday, T.H. and I helped plant a tree at Adma and Francois d’Heurle’s.
In September, T.H. began Harvard and I wrote him a long letter about the family hopes that Uncle Harry had been unable to carry through on because his will became the slave of vices and sins. In October, Hind and I attended Harvard and Ithaca Parents’ Weekends. But the never-ending battle between GOOD AND EVIL continued. The charming, guitar-playing friend that T.H. made in his preparation week for Harvard, the aspiring actress Caroline Isenberg, would be murdered in her New York City building by the lustful son of the janitor. I would be inspired by Maura Clarke preaching at Mass at Sacred Heart Church one Sunday before she and three other churchwomen went down to El Salvador to help the poor: all four would be raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard a few days after I talked to Maura. At Christmas, we were visited by Isabel Munat, daughter of my sister Patty, who helped us pick out and decorate our Christmas tree (as always, we carried it home through the streets of Dobbs Ferry singing).
1980 FEB. WHAT A WAY TO CELEBRATE A 46TH BIRTHDAY! T.H. SINGS “FIRE’ FOR HIS FATHER WITH THE HASTY PUDDING SHOW, “SERF’S UP” – IN WHICH HE PLAYS DOC AGES ON HIS UNICYCLE.
FOR THE NEXT MONTH, I’M FLYING AROUND THE U.S. IN WALT DISNEY’S PRIVATE PLANE, ACTING AS M.C. FOR YOUNG DISNEY ANIMATORS AND WALT’S “NINE OLD MEN”, AND SPECIAL EFFECTS WIZARDS IN “DISNEY ON FILM: A FORUM ON ANMATION AND FANTASY FILM MAKING.” WHEN I GET HOME, MICHAEL IS WORKING AS A PRODUCTION ASSISTANT ON JOHN AVILDSEN’S ‘NEIGHBORS”, AND PLAYING HIS GUITAR WITH ITS STARS, JOHN BELUSHI AND DAN ACKROYD, IN THEIR CLUB WHERE THE BARTENDER THAT NIGHT IS FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA.
In July, we go to Cape Cod with Keatings. In August, the family takes BABA to Cleveland, Rockford, Ann Arbor, Niagra Falls and beautiful Olana, mansion of painter Frederic Church. At Christmas, the boys play a round of holiday parties: Amal and Nina are frequently with us, as are Jerry and OLYMPIA.
1981
1982; NEW YEAR’S PARTIES AT KORNHABERS AND NEMECS: ;MICHAEL AND T.H. PLAY. HIND BREAKS HER WRIST IN JANUARY; BRAHIM ARRIVES FROM EGYPT IN SNOWSTORM. IN APRIL, MICHAEL IS A MAN. HIS TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY ARRIVES ON APRIL 12. T.H. PLAYS RICHARD RICH IN “A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS” AT HARVARD. In the play, St. Thomas More says one of drama’s great lines to T.H.’s character –when the King gives Richard Rich a big post in Wales for lying – something like: “The Bible says, ‘What does it profit a man who giveth the whole world for his soul --- but for Wales, Richard! For Wales!” (Half- Welshwoman Amy gets a big kick out of that line!) On September 24, I get the Alumni Merit Award for Saint Louis University as “writer and film historian.” My brother Dick comes to see me receive it. I pray that my sons will get similar recognition from Ithaca (like Iger) and Harvard (like William James).
1983 Andrew Bevins Culhane is born to Uncle Mark and Aunt Çher on January 22. On April 12, Michael is 22 about the time that Magician David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear on network TV and says the speech I wrote for him about how we must guard against the disappearance of liberty.
In June, neice Sophia Vinogradov graduates from Medical School.
We again end the year with Michael, T.H. and I playing an Angel, Black Peter and St. Nicholas at Sacred Heart, giving out Christmas presents to children, Confession for me at Our Lady of Pompeii, and Hind and I dancing to Michael and T.H. (and Kornhaber’s son’s) music at Kornhaber”s New Year’s Eve Party. “Welcome home,” says Hind to me, as we dance to the boy’s beat.
1984 I celebrated half a century of life in this year. My sons played for a surprise birthday party for me at Shamus and Juana’s. How neat that Michael’s band included John Sharples, the grandson of Winston Sharples, Shamus’s old friend who wrote the music for so many of his cartoons. On April 23, we saw Miquel Vazquez throw a quadruple somersault to the hands of the catcher on the Flying Trapeze – a feat so long considered “impossible” until I started writing about Tito Gaona’s determination to do it.
MICHAEL GRADUATED FROM ITHACA COLLEGE IN MAY.
Hind and I bought the apartment in Dobbs Ferry in which we raised the boys.
T.H. was home from Harvard on October 13-14. He was busy planning his future. I remembered Walt’s mood as he approached 50. What have I really accomplished? You ask yourself. And, of course, one of the most important things is, have I set a good example for those who follow behind me in time.
IT WAS A GREAT GIFT OF MY 50TH YEAR WHEN MICHAEL’S SONG, “THE MAIN THING”, WAS NUMBER ONE AT ITHACA.
IT WAS A GREAT GIFT FOR MY 50TH YEAR WHEN T.H. WAS AWARDED A ROCKEFELLER TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP TO GO TO BORNEO AND GET TO KNOW THE ORANG UTANS HE DANCED WITH SO LONG AGO WHEN KING LOUIE SANG, “I WANTA BE LIKE YOU” AT THE CORONADO.
1985
In 1985, T.H. and I collaborated on an article for the December issue of Science Digest on Dr. Roberto Guatelli, who had built the models that Leonardo da Vinci had designed but never built, and had gone on to build models of the computers produced by IBM. It was a wonderful, father-son study of the creative process, from the Renaissance to the Computer Era.
ON MAY 3, CAROL GIVES T.H. “EARTH, INC.” BY R. BUCKMINISTER FULLER, AUTHOR OF “UTOPIA OR OBLIVION,” WRITING IN “EARTH, INC.”: “Every time I see one of his books, I remember your voice and words as you passionately described him to me this year. I believe that someday you will do as much good for the world as this man, whom you so admire, has done.”
Fuller predicts that “Tomorrow’s youth will employ the video cassette resources to bring in the scenario documents of all of humanity’s most capable thinkers and conceivers.” My family gave me a video player capable of copying television programs and other video cassettes for my 50th birthday last year, and I am already at work taping humanity’s most capable thinkers and conceivers, or their disciples, including Bucky Fuller.
1986. EASTER. JIMMY CAGNEY, WHO PLAYED GEORGE M. COHAN IN “YANKEE DOODLE DANDY”, DIED TODAY. T.H. CULHANE PLAYED GEORGE M. COHAN IN HIS SCHOOL’S PRODUCTION OF “GEORGE M” IN 19TK. TWO STIRRING PERFORMANCES OF A MAN WHO EMBODIED THE AMERICAN DREAM.
JANUARY: HIND AND I SEE HALEY'S COMET FROM THE TOP OF BEAR MOUNTAIN. MARK TWAIN WAS BORN WHEN IT CAME IN 1835. MARK TWAIN DIED AND JOHN WILLIAM CULHANE THE FIRST WAS BORN WHEN IT RETURNED IN 1910.
THE READER'S DIGEST BUYS MY "LIVING SEAS." THE BOYS HELPED ME WITH THE RESEARCH
FEBRUARY: WE MEET JACKIE O., JOHN-JOHN, AND HELENA BONHAM CARTER AT THE OPENING OF FILM OF E.M. FORSTER'S "ROOM WITH A VIEW". FORSTER WAS AN EARLY ADMIRER OF MICKEY MOUSE.
APRIL:
APRIL 24: EASTER AT LA QUINTA WITH JOHN AND TRACY AVILDSEN, FRANK CAPRA, JR., AND T.H. T.H. AND TRACY TAP DANCE.
AUG: DIGEST SAYS MY SEAN CONNERY STORY "OUTSTANDING", GIVES ME $5,000 BONUS.
AUG. 19: JESUIT HELPS BILLY AND MARRY FISSINGER WALSH RENEW THEIR WEDDING VOW: 20: AMY WEINGARTNER MAKES HER SPECIAL PIZZA FOR ME.
JUNE 14. MICHAEL'S "CIRCUS GUY" OPENS FOR DAVID BOWIE
JULY 20: TETA SOPHIE RASSAM DIES IN BAGHDAD.
AUGUST 8: I TAKE ANGELA GILANIAN TO PREVIEW OF "THE LITTLE MERMAID" 27: HIND RETURNS FROM HER MOTHER'S FUNERAL ON OUR 29TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY
SEPTEMBER:4: MICHAEL AND AMY SEE AUDREY HEPBURN AND ALBERT FINNEY IN 'TWO FOR THE ROAD' IN OUR BED WHILE HIND AND I GO TO DIANA ROSS CONCERT AS GUEST OF THE INTREPID'S ZACHARY FISHER.
OCTOBER 11: MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR TETA.
NOV. 9 "FALL" OF THE BERLIN WALL. I AM AT SYON HOUSE OUTSIDE LONDON WITH MICHAEL CAINE AND ROGER MOORE. SEAN CONNERY COMES TO VISIT.
DECEMBER 11. I HAVE DINNER WITH GENERAL WESTMORELAND, WHO LOST THE VIETNAM WAR, AT CHRIST CELLA RESTAURANT. IN GERMANY, THE BRANDENBURG GATE IS OPEN AGAIN!
1987 JANUARY: MY "KEEP A HAPPINESS CALENDAR" IS IN THE READER'S DIGEST-- INCLUDES TALES OF OUR SONS.
FEBRUARY: HIND AND I HEAR T.H. PLAY WITH JOE ROONEY'S BAND, GO TO WINDHAM WITH HIM TO SKI
MARCH MY OSCAR STORY IN RD; T.H. GETS CLELL BRYANT AS EDITOR; "LES MISERABLES"
APRIL I SPEAK AT ADC CONVENTION. MILK KAHL DIES.EASTER 19: WITH RICHARD FRAENKEL IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
MAY: MOTHER'S DAY PICNIC IN CROTON POINT; MAY WINE PARTY WITH JOHN, JOSIE, MICHAEL (WE DON'T DRINK)
JUNE WITH JOHN HUSTON FOR TWO DAYS IN CALIFORNIA: I PHONE HIM ON JUNE 14 TO WISH HIM A "HAPPY BLOOMSDAY":"Why, thnk you, my friend, thank you," Houston purred in his dark honey voice. "I think of our interview -- our conversation -- as one of the best conversations I've had in recent years.' Espinosa wedding.
JULY 12: MY New York Times front page arts and leisure piece: "SNOW WHITE AT 50: THE MAGIC IS UNDIMMED."
HIND AND I GO BERRY PICKING OUT BACK
AUG. 27: ROBIN AND MARSHA WILLIAMS GIVE US A DINNER FOR OUR 27TH WEDDDING ANNIVERSARY; JOHN HUSTON DIES THE NEXT DAY; WE MOURN HIM WITH LILLIAN ROSS, AUTHOR OF "PICTURE", FINE BOOK ABOUT THE FILMING OF HIS "THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE." I GO TO CALIFORNIA TO SPEAK AT READER'S DIGEST INTERNATIONAL EDITOR'S IN CHIEF CONFERENCE ON HOW I OPERATE AS A ROVING EDITOR.
SEPTEMBER: HENRY KISSINGER LUNCH AT FOUR SEASONS WITH FRIEND BEN CHEEVER, JOHN'S SON.
OCTOBER; BORNEO; IN INTERVIEW FORMER CANNIBALS. THEY WON'T TALK ABOUT EATING PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY HAVE CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY. BUT THEY WILL TALK ABOUT EATING JAPANESE SOLDIERS DURING WORLD WAR II BECAUSE "THAT WAS WAR." I AM MORE THAN EVER SOURED ON WAR. NICK NOLTE ENJOYS HIS BABY SON (HE STILL ENJOYS THE GROWN SON TODAY)
NOVEMBER: MY 'UNFORGETTABLE JOHN HUSTON'" IN RD -- ONE OF MY HEROES. AT THE MEMORIAL SERVICE AT THE PLAYERS CLUB AFTER THE PREMIERE OF HIS LAST FILM, JAMES JOYCE'S "THE DEAD", I SPEAK WITH ANGELICA ABOUT HER FATHER, AND HIND AND I LISTEN TO FRANK PATTISON SING "THE LASS OF AUGHRAM" AS HE DID IN THE FILM. ALWAYS A SONG FOR OUR FAMILY!
DEC: PUERTO RICO: HYATT REGENCY; I SWIM IN THE LONGEST POOL IN THE WORLD: : I SPEAK AT INTERNATIONAL EDITOR'S CONFERENCE To SALES FORDE ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A ROVING EDITOR OF THE READER'S DIGEST. EDITOR IN CHIEF KEN GILMORE SAYS OF EDITORS, 'THEY'RE STANDING IN LINE TO WORK WITH YOU.' BUT I WANT CLELL BRYANT.
1988
CLELL AND JILL BRYANT FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE. MICHAEL TO ROBIN WILLIAMS' SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE FEST. WALT DISNEY WORLD.
FEBRUARY: HIND'S TIFFANY LAMP BIRTHDAY AT THE NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. LA FOR OSCAR NMINATIONS. INTERVIEW KIRK DOUGLAS AND HIS SON. HE SAYS OF THE FINAL SPEECH I WROTE FOR RAY BRADBURY'S 'SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES" ("HE HAD CREATED A MEMORY THAT WOULD LAST AS LONG AS SONS TELL SONS ABOUT FATHERS THEY LOVED") "THAT WAS A GOOD SPEECH."
APRIL: I GOT A JOB AT DISNEY FOR BROTHER DICK'S DAUGHTER, CATHY. '
MAY: LYMAN PARTY. 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT PARTY. AS KEN GILMORE DECLINES FROM PARKINSON'S DISEASE, KEN TOMLINSON, WHO WILL SUCCEED HIM, TELLS ME: "YOU'RE A REAL FORCE AT THIS MAGAZINE"
[HE WILL LATER FIRE ME.]
JUNE 25. CLAMBAKE ON BEACH AT GRAND FLORIDIAN OPENING AT WALT DISNEY WORRLD. AT THE BALL FOR ALL THE MERCURY ASTRONAUTS. I SEE JOHN GLENN FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MICHAEL AND T.H. WERE BOTH UNDER FIVE., I DANCE WITH DICK'S CATHY CULHANE, WHO IS VALUED BY DISNEY. SHE GIVES ME A 1988 MICKEY MOUSE MIRROR TO THANK ME.
JULY: MICKEY MOUSE IS 60.
MY "SEVEN SECRETS OF DISNEY SUCCESS" RUNS IN READER'S DIGEST. ON JULY 31, HIND AND I HAVE AN EARLY CELEBRATION OF OUR 28TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY AT PROCOPE, WHERE VOLTAIRE AND BALZAC USED TO GO. Chuck Maryan and I went there in 1958 just before he returned to the U.S. We tore a dollar bill in half and said we would meet again in America and put the dollar together again for a couple of beers. One dollar won't do that anymore.
AUGUST: MICHAEL'S BAND IN "TOP 10 UNSIGNED BANDS"
WE GO TO FLAVIGNY TO VISIT VIRGIL AND ANNE. ANNE TAKES US TO DINNER IN PARIS ON OUR ACTUAL ANNIVERSARY.
NOVEMBER" UTAH: I AM HIRED TO WRITE THE MISSION STATEMENT FOR ROBERT REDFORD'S "SUNDANCE INSTITUTE" BY
A RELATIVE OF ANOTHER FAMOUS MOUNTAIN MEN, AS WERE THE ROBIDOUXS. REDFORD AND I HAVE LUNCH IN NEW YORK: I TELL HIM IT WAS MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER THAT HE ASKED, AS 'JEREMIAH JOHNSON".: "WHERE CAN I FIND BEAR, BEAVER, AND OTHER CRITTERS WORTH CASH MONEY WHEN SKINNED?" AND TRIPLE-GREAT-GRANDFATHER REPLIED: "RIDE DUE EAST OF THE SUN, AND TURN LEFT AT THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS."
SEP; "LA LAW" TRIP TO LA.
OCT; PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN APPROVES ME "GOD BLESS IRVING BERLIN' BY RONALD REAGAN." WE WISH SHAMUS HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY FOR ALL THE HAPPINESS HE HAS BROUGHT TO OTHERS. FATHER BUSH IS ELECTED. WE GO TO "OLIVER AND COMPANY" PREMIERE. I WRITE ABOUT IT IN NEW YORK TIMES.
1989
1990 HALF A MILLION EAST AND WEST GERMANS CELEBRATE NEW YEAR’S EVE WHERE THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN! FREEDOM IS ON THE MARCH! NAMIBIA ACHIEVES INDEPENDENCE ON T.H.’S 28TH BIRTHDAY.
When T.H. finishes his thesis and becomes the second Dr. T.H., he will achieve independence.
One Jan 11, President Ronald Reagan saluted me when I cried out, “THE ROCK RIVER VALLEY!” as he drove past at Disneyland. Then Hind and I partied across the country in a plane with Michael Eisner. On my birthday in 1990, Hind and I sent Michael and Amy to hear the Metropolitan Opera sing “Samson and Dalilah”: the first suicide bomber, that Samson. That same month, in a lunch I arranged for Amy with Guy Flatley, he introduced her to ARUGULA!!! IN APRIL, HIND GAVE ME A BOOK SIGNING Party AT RUTH ROSENBLATT’S BOOKSTORE, FOR MY “THE AMERICAN CIRCUS; AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY,” AND WE GAVE A DINNER FOR THOSE WHO CAME ACROSS THE STREET AT SAM’S ITALIAN RESTAURANT.
There was a great review of my circus book by Richard F. Shephard in the New York Times, and another one in the Smithsonian Magazine. Leonard Maltin featured it on “Entertainment Tonight.” Then off I went on assignment to the USSR with Sam Waterston, and I managed to see the Moscow Circus and meet the leading Russian circus historian. While I was gone, Jim Henson, one of the most creative people I have known, died, and I wrote “Unforgettable Jim Henson” for the Digest on my return. Also, on my return, Hind and I arranged a Walt Disney World family reunion: BABA, NEVEEN, HISHAM, MICHAEL, AMY, NINA, HIND. And for he Los Angeles Times on wrote about “how a 73-year-old filmmaker, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, trekked to Siberai and made a movie with American and Soviet money.” Shucks, that’s nothing: I celebrated the 100th birthday this year of Grim Natwick, creator of Betty Boop, animator of more than half of the Princess Snow White.
1991 THE SOVIET UNION DISSOLVED PEACEFULLY THIS YEAR! GOD BLESS POPE JOHN PAUL II, PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN, AND ALL MEN AND WOMEN OF GOOD WILL EVERYWHERE. Michael and I entertained with circus history in song and story at the Rockford Art Insitute, then we ballooned over Hind’s and my honeymoon spot at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in Chuck Thomas’s balloon while Grammie and Sue Thomas followed below in Sue’s dar. I interviewed rock legend Mick Jagger about his lyrics that have made the Bartlett’s Book of Quotations – hoping that Michael will be in there sooner or later – and that T.H. will get the Nobel Prize for solar-powered peace. Soph and Terry were married in California. Michael and Amy moved to LA. I got the Washington Irving award for my circus history. Frank Capra died on Sept. 3. I went to his Funeral Mass with John and Tracy Avildsen at St. Francis of Assisi church in La Quinta, then I ghost wrote “’FRANK CAPRA’S MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL’ BY JIMMY STEWART
1992 - MAY 13: BABA SEES HIS DAUGHTER HIND GET HER DOCTORATE FROM COLUMBIA UNIVERITY AFTER “THE THESIS EASTER,” APRIL 19: “Hind and I drove T.H. to the 8:20 a.m. plane from JFK. He had very kindly flown home for An Egg at Easter and to pick out the MAC laptap computer he, Michael and Hind gave me for Easter, to give me a day’s instruction on it, and to help with the editing and typing of HIND’S DOCTORAL THESIS on the concept of the family in Egyptian films. After he took off, I took Hind to Brooklyn, to Our Lady of Lebanon for Easter Mass, and we both wept, remembering Sophie, her Mother. We had breakfast in the Arab style on Atlantic Avenue, Brookly, then returned home to work on THE THESIS, which is due Tuesday, April 21. Jerry and Olympia Cosentino treated us to dinner at Sam’s. We toasted Hind’s thesis and my ‘Aladdin’ book! Good friend Tom Lyman died on February 6: I will never forget when I carried Michael and T.H. on my shoulders, and Tom carried his Michael and Marya on his, and we went to see sailing ships in Lake Michigan. His daugher Francesca (CHI-CHA) was their baby-sitter, and brought her guitar to 5491 S. Hyde Park (the Lymans lived next door) and played and sang “Lemon Tree.” On September 22, Hind, Grammie and I went to hear Bobby Kennedy Jr. defend the Hudson River. (Adma D’Heurle gave Michael a book on a singing river-defender, Pete Seeger.) We got burglarized on Halloween night while we were visiting the Breslows in Canada: Michael, Amy, and T.H. all called to sympathize with us. Fortunately, they did not talk my figurine of Pedro the Baby Airplane. (“Does Pedro like me?” I wrote Walt in 1943, and included “Pedro’s Answer Sheet. [Check one] Yes? No?” I got just the answer sheet back in a long envelope with Mickey Mouse in the corner. Across it was written, in green ink: “Si, si, Senor.”
1993 JUNE 5: Hind and I walked 1993 JUNE 5: Hind and I walked eight miles with Robert Kennedy, Jr., on behalf of keeping the water clean in the New York State Reservoir. IN APRIL, I was a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Visiting National Fellow at Mercy College, giving lectures on animation illustrated with film. Kenneth Clark came to the cocktail party Hind’s boss Frances Mahoney gave to honor me, and it was one of the great nights of my life. KENNETH CLARK! There was a great American! When the National Asociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its legal offspring, the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, got the U.S. Supreme Court to test the U.S. doctrine of “separate but equal”, a big factor in their decision that separate was unequal was Dr. Kenneth Clark’s “DOLL TEST.” Dr. Clark and his wife Mamie used four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed the dolls to black children between the ages of three and seven and asked thm questions to determine racial perception and preference. Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation’ caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.” The Supreme Court agreed with that conclusion, and school segregaton ended. I had already learned that black could be better than white, because Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s “Song of the South” was black but better than any of the white folks – and Johnny, Toby and Ginny could see and play with Brer Rabbit while the white folks couldn’t.
ON NOVEMBER 3, HOWARD DICKMAN OF THE READERS DIGEST FIRED ME ON BEHALF OF KENNETH TOMLINSON, EDITOR-IN CHIEF. That was one of the worst nights of my life. Howard Dickman went to Kent State to college, and at an Independence Day picnic in 19tk, given by Kenneth Gilmore, then editor in chief of the Reader’s Digest, I asked Dickman, who was at my table, how he reacted on May 4, 1970, when four of his fellow students demonstrated on campus against the United States invading Cambodia, and the National Guard shot four of them to death. Dickman told me that he went back to his room and shut the door, disgusted with the student’s behavior. Dickman asked me if I considered the 1968 Democratic Convention, at which he knew I was beaten by Chicago police, if I thought it was a “Police Riot.” “Mike Royko says it wasn’t,” I answered. “What do you think?” he asked. “I think I don’t know as much as Royko does about Chicago,” he answered, leaving us both unsatisfied, on Kent State and Chicago ’68. Noq Dickman fired me on behalf of the Digest under the Bush Right-Winger Ken Tomlinson, supposedly because I took the time to write a book on the making of Disney’s “Aladdin.” I told him that I wrote it on my vacation and that I had made me quota of four articles for the year. A short time before, Ken Gilmore, Tomlinson’s predecessor, told me that Digest editors “are standing in line, hoping to be your sponsoring editor.” I asked for Clell Bryant, a good journalist who wrote Time’s cover on Yasser Arafat. When Ken Gilmore resigned because he had Parkinson’s disease, Ken Tomlinson was appointed to take his place.
Tomlinson became worried about me when I wrote a very positive Oprah Winfrey profile. Then Tomlinson left the Digest and became chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for President George W. Bush. As CPB head, Tomlinson began trying to get rid of Bill Moyers. “I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House,” said Moyers.
I had admired Moyers since 1965, when he briefed me as President Johnson’s press secretary when I was a Ford Fellow in Advanced International Reporting. Bush finally got rid of his lackey Tomlinson after the New York Times ran an editorial against Tomlinson in August, 2006, after proving that he used his White House office to run a “horse racing operation” and improperly put a friend on the payroll.
But the Digest never gave me my job back, and it killed my articles on Billy Crystal (needs rewriting) and Natalie Cole (“a bitch who used drugs” they said). The next time I heard Natalie, she was singing before Pope John Paul II’s Mass in Central Park. Then the Pope got us all to singing that old German hymn, “Silent Night”, with him. Singing helps heal at lot of wounds. Also: Art Zich phoned: “You’re really good, John. You’re really fucking good.” Mary Ella and David sent me a telegram: “Talent is a lift that outlasts change. We love you.”
Then both of our sons came home for Christmas. We took Amy to meet and watch “Snow White” with Shamus.They played at John and Josie May’s on New Year’s Eve. Love is a lift that outlasts loss of a job.
1994: I was 60 on February 7. Hind made Associate Professor at Mercy. Shameem was granted asylum by the United States of America: Yasmeen, Hind and I and Amal all helped in that effort.
Friends helped. Virgil visited. Michael went to Carnegie Hall with me in March to hear the Vienna Philharmonic. George and Daryl Alexander invited Hind and me to have Easter with them in Santa Fe and we went to the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. With Michael and Amy, we watched the Oscars (I wanted Canadian Frederick Back to win animating “The Mighty River”, a Robidoux story, and Debra Winger for “Shadowlands”, as C.S. Lewis’s wife. Your losses tell as much about you as your wins) and we heard Hoagy Carmichael songs for Michael’s birthday. We went to Ray Favata’s 70th, had Shamus and Juana for a dinner party, and took them to the Bill Tytla exhibit at the Katonah Art Museum, where we mingled with Peter Tytla, his son, who was the model for Dumbo when he was a baby; and Marge Champion, who modeled for Snow White. Michael and Amy went with us to Max Breslow’s Bar Mitzvah in Canada. Diane Disney wrote praise of my FANTASIA book. At the DC Comics Christmas Party at Bar Bat. I told my family that seeing my “Aladdin” book being sold in English at Euro Disney and in French on the Champs-Elysee when we went to France in June made up for the fact that my Digest articles on Natalie Cole and Billy Crystal would never run.
1995 EASTER SUNDAY. Hind said she wanted to hear good music at Easter Mass so we drove to Manhatan for 11 a.m. Mass at the Jesuit St. Ignatius of Loyola church on Park Avenue. The choir sang and their music director and his assistant played selections on their new organ. We offered our Holy Communions for Michael and Amy, who are in Rochester with Amy’s family, and T.H., who is out in California. We went to visit Jerry Cosentino, friend, neighbor and survivor of SAIPAN, who is dying.
My 47-year friend Chuck Gregory and his wife Adele called an invited me to stay overnight with them when I go to Chicago to visit James Levine, conductor of he Metropolitan Opera, record the new selections for FANTASIA 2000 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Chicago’s Shrine Auditorium. Roy E. Disney is producing the film and I am writing a book on its production, (NOTE: It was published as FANTASIA 2000: VISIONS OF HOPE.) I wrote Virgil for Easter and now we are talking to Shameem and I will call Shamus and Mother around our lamb feast tonight. Hind and I had coffee and carrot cake at the Met and saw photographs by trendant caricaturist NADAR, who became a photographer of such great 19th century French creative personalities as Delacroix, Dore, Gautier and Baudelaire.
My hero Daumier satirized him with a lithograph of Nadar photographing Paris from a balloon titled “Nadar Raising Photography to the Height of Art.” But he did, because he studied the personalities that he photographed with the eye for the essence of a caricaturist.
1996 SEPT 21: THE AMERICAN POET ROBERT WEINGARTNER, THOUGH ILL, WALKS HIS DAUGHTER, AMY, UP THE AISLE TO THE ALTAR OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, U.S.A., TO OUR SON, MICHAEL. “WHAT GOD HAS JOINED TOGETHER, LET NO MAN PUT ASUNDER.” The wedding reception is held in a library – how appropriate for the son of a man who created a great part of himself out of the books in the library Andrew Carnegie gave to Rockford, Illinois, and a graduate of Rockford College, which received one of the first sets of the Great Books of the Western World. T.H., Hind and I spoke for our family, but it was Betty Jones Weingartner who revealed that her daughter knew the names of the Beatles as early as she knew the name of the Pope. Thus did our family first link up with the people of the Faustian poet Goethe, and the people of the lyric poet, Dylan Thomas.
T.H., Hind and I went horseback riding in the Arizona mountains on Feb. 19, the day after visiting BIOSPHERE II, and I compared my creative accomplishments on my 62nd birthday, Feb. 7, with those of Shamus Culhane, who died at 87 on February 2. I went to the Disney Institute to teach, in March, and to Disney World to celebrate its 25th anniversary and to sing “When You Wish Upon a Star” along with Hillary Clinton on October 1. (Michael and Amy got to meet the great Disney animator Marc Davis in Dobbs Ferry five days later. Hind and I helped Michael and Amy move to their NEW HOUSE in Hastings-on-Hudson in November, and on December 7, they came to dinner here and we discussed Amy at Disney.
1997 February: I am 63—the year at which Paul Cleveland Fissinger, my maternal grandfather, died: I celebrate my advanced age by going to hear Michael’s “Circus Guy” rock band at the Mercury Lounge. Hind and I celebrate Easter in Portugal at a , then return for Michael’s 36th birthday celebration at Amal’s. Michael also played his own music at our Memorial Day picnic where it was enjoyed by three-time Oscar winner Faith Hubley and her daughter and son-in-law, Emily and Will Rosenthal, creators of the animated “BLAKE BALL” (understanding baseball through the poetry of William Blake). Nicholas Henry Dobbs flew his first kite that day, as Michael and T.H. flew kites off the deck of the Paddlewheel Steamboat Delta Queen.
T.H. spoke at the backyard meal after the 85th Birthday Mass for his Grammie on the porch of the House That Jack Built. The priest who gave Patty the Last Rites of the Church after her car crash was there. Later that afternoon, the son of Rick Culhane, Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara’s adopted son, was killed in a car crash, reminding us that in life we are always in the midst of deaths.
On November 3, Michael’s “Circus Guy” presents an acoustic concert at the Mercury Lounge. On Christmas Eve, our family attended Midnight Mass at a Greek Orthodox Church near Nina and Jeff’s, in tribute to Teta’s original Greek Orthodox faith. The priest gave me communion, but said to T.H., “Are you Greek Orthodox?” “No, Catholic,” replied T. “Then you can’t receive communion,” said the priest.
No matter. My real Christmas Mass happened on December 2 when I stopped in at St. Patrick’s at my way to Dreamworks’ Christmas Party (at which I saw Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams in Spielberg’s great father and son movie, ‘Amistad’_). There was an exhibit on the life of St. Therese of Liseux, with a tribute from the grown up Brigitte Fossey, who played the little girl whose parents are killed by a Nazi plane in “Forbidden Games”, and, most of all, from Georges Bernanos, who wrote “The Diary of a Country Priest,” which Robert Coles, father of T.H.’s Harvard friend, lovest so much. “The world,” says Bernanos, “is killing itself for want of childlikeness.” Take that, old Greek Orthodox Priest.
1998 EASTER SUNDAY. APRIL 12; MICHAEL’S 37TH BIRTHDAY. MET MICHAEL AND AMY FOR 10:15 A.M., MASS SAID BY THE MALTESE FALCON, FATHER CARMELLO GLAVINA, AT OUR LADY OF POMPEII CHURCH.
1999 JAN 1: MICHAEL, T.H., AMY, HIND AND I HARMONIZING WITH JON HENDRICKS ON “BYE-BYE, BLACKBIRD” AT KENNETH AND DIANE MILLER’S NEW YEAR’S DAY PARTY. Jan. 19: Wendy Lefkon calls: “We’re in good shape on the FANTASIA 2000 book…Money in a few weeks.” Jan. 26: Paul Sagawa and wife, Kenneth and Diane Miller, Hind, T.H and I…
2000” January 22: MERCURY LOUNGE: Record Release Party for Michael’s CD, THE LOVELY LUNA!
FEB/ 7: MICHAEL GIVES BIRTHDAY LUNCH FOR ME AT SAM’S: Michael’s cool TOAST: “To my Father – accepted everywhere as the coolest Dad in town.” I LOVED THAT TOAST, BECAUSE, AS MARSHALL MCLUHAN USED TO SAY, “COOL IS INVOLVING; HOT IS NOT.” John Taylor introduces his bride to the luncheon.
Mercy College Book Signing for my “FANTASIA 2000: VISIONS OF HOPE. EASTER SUNDAY IN EASTHAMPTON, MARCH 23: HIND HAS BEEN AWARDED A FULLBRIGHT TO DAMASCUS. On Good Friday, she and I drove to Easthampton in pouring rain. Holy Saturday, Kate Pennebaker, our hostess, took Hind, Kate’s daughter, Chelsea; Chelsea’s friend, Michael nd me to visit George Balanchine’s grave. It said; “George Balanchine 1904-1983. Ballet Master.” Balanchine once visited Bill Tytla at his home, and they had a good conversation about Ukrainian creativity (Mussorgsky) and Russian (Tchaikovsky) in “Fantasia”. I have been to California this week to film my mefmories of meeting Walt Disney for Walt’s biopic, being produced by his daughter, Diane. T.H. TALKED WITH MARTY SKLAR ABOUT UTOPIAS AT WALT’S BIO-SHOOT. LAST SATURDAY, WE HEARD MICHAEL’S CIRCUS GUY PLAY AT THE “ALL THINGS MUST PASS-A-THON.
SEP. 3: MICHAEL AND AMY WENT WITH US TO SEE LESLIE CARON PLAY COLETTE
2001 New Year’s Eve: Dinner with T.H., home from Mozambique.
We sing with our Black Neighbors, Bert, Robin, and Julian Caldwell, in the spirit of John Hendricks. NEW YEAR’S DAY: Year’s Day, playing for Baba. Jan. 16: Hind flies New York-Istanbul-Damascus. Jan. 24: Michael writes new song for BROWNIE’S CONCERT. JANUARY 25: MICHAEL AND I GO TO BABA’S NURSING HOME AND MICHAEL PLAYS A CONCERT FOR HIM: BABA CLAPS ALONG. “And Hind?” he asks. “She has arrived safely in Damascus, Baba – thanks be to God,” I answered. “GOOD,” said Baba. “I love you, Baba,” I said. “I love you, too!”
At 5 p.m. Sunday, Janurary 28, 2001, Noel Michael Rassam died peacefully in his sleep at Morningsid House at Ninety Years Old. At his funeral, I heard his voice from long ago in Baghdad as he showed me Hind’s picture as a girl: “JOHN – LOOK AT HIND – FROM THE BEGINNING, HER HEAD WAS ALWAYS UP!”
September 11: The World Trade Center is destroyed by hatred of the United States of America. December 5: Walt Disney, dead 35 years, would be 100 years old today. His “Bambi” philosophy, “Love is a song that never ends”; the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” philosophy: “All you need is love”, could prevent a terrible outcome from September 11.
2002: New Year’s Eve: Hind and I toast 2002 with Kenneth and Diane Miller in our living room wihh Veuve Cliquot, the same champagne Rick and Ilse drank in “Casablanca.” : I get Roy E. Disney an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Mercy College. Sunday, Oct. 26: Hind and I and Francois d’Heurle demonstrate in Central Park with Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and big crowd against war with Iraq; August 27: Hind and I are given a dinner to celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary in New York City by Servane Pierre, our Pope John Paul II Mass in Damascus friend, who is staying with us while she and her brother run the New York Marathon. DEC. 14: MICHAEL AND AMY, HIND AND I, GO TO BROADWAY TO SEE THORNTON WILDER’S “OUR TOWN” WITH PAUL NEWMAN AS THE STAGE MANAGER.
2003 I TAKE HIND TO PARIS TO CELEBRATE HER BIRTHDAY, AND WE DEMONSTRATE IN PARIS AGAINST A WAR WITH IRAQ WITH OUR HOSTESS, SERVANE PIERRE, WHO SHARES HER APARTMENT WITH US, AND THOUSANDS OF FRENCH MAY 24: SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY SINGS “BACK IN THE USSR” IN RED SQUARE: Bucky Fuller: “Don’t oppose forces; use them.”
On November 25, I have a STROKE while visiting Mother in Rockford and staying with Mark and Cher. Hind rushes to my side from the MIDDLE EAST, bringing me a biography of Samuel Pepys, the diarest, to divert me during my recovery. Father’s Day: June 15. Michael gives me “ONE SWELL DAD”, inscribed: “You are one swell Dad, indeed. You used to carry me on your shoulder like this [illustration], and T., too, but only a Dad as swell as you would put down his writing, and cross the Hudson River to appear in the video for ‘Lovely Luna.’ Bless you! I love you! Michael.”
AUG 6: HIROSHIMA: 58th anniversary: “Sixth graders (12 Year Olds) listen to a one-hour lesson on the Bomb, but don’t ask questions – except one: “Why must there be WAR?” On “HIROSHIMA JOURNAL”, NYT MAY 29, 2003, Teacher Keiko Tokunaga answers: “This is the age when children are just beginning to think about the world, and I think it is the best time to introduce ideas like this. But this is just a start.” For me, 1945, when I was 11, I was hit with the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a polio epidemic, and I began to think seriously about Wendell Wilkie’s concept of “One World.” “Freedom is an indivisible world. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether the agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin…” FDR beat Willkie for President decisively when I was six, but I taught my sons his ideas against any Imperialism, including United States Imperialism, when they were 11 or 12, and I hope to teach these ideas to any grandchildren of mine when they get interested in “the world.”
2004: “MICHAEL AND T.H.: GREAT IN KUWAIT!” THEY GET A CERTIFICATE FOR BRINGING THE ESSENCE OF THE GOOD ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO THE MIDDLE EAST THROUGH ROCK AND ROLL CONCERTS SPONSORED BY THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT, THROUGH THE ACTIONS OF THEIR MOTHER AND U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT WISE MAN, MARK SCHAPIRO.
On my 70th Birthday, I arranged to take Michael and Amy to the Museum of Broadcasting to see their exhibit of the Beatles on radio and TV through the years. M&A took me the a Birthday Lunch. April 2: I saw Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ” on Ash Wednesday, on April 2 with Michael and Amy for Lent, and on Good Friday.
28 APRIL: EGYPT with T.H.: Cairo, Aswan, Luxor, Valley of the Kings, NEW LIBRARY and great Fish Restaurant in Alexandria. (Hind would met Sybille for the first time after I left. JUNE: IRELAND WITH T.H., MICHAEL, AMY, ANDREW, MARK, CHER: Michael, T.H. and Andrew busked in Galway; AMY’S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATED ON JUNE 17-- JULY 12: GRAMMIE DIES. At her funeral Mass, the music is by FISSINGER, UNCLE AL; FISSINGER, UNCEL EDDIE; FRANCK, AND SCHUBERT (the “Ave Maria” from Disney’s “Fantasia”, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. At her burial, a saxophonist played “Who Stole My Heart Away” by Jerom Kern, as Dad used to play it for her on his saxophone. I called Joan Fontaine on her birthday: she said to me of Hitchcock, “He felt like a loving God.” She won her Oscar for Hitchcock’s “Suspicion.” Michael and Amy are watching all of Hitchcock now. MICHAEL AND AMY FOR CHRISTMAS MASS AND CHRISTMAS DINNER; T.H. STILL IN EGYPT.
2005, In January, Hind and I went to Italy with Mercy College, and T.H. and his German love, Sybille Fruetel, joined us, and we drank hot chocolate at many world-famous places, including the Café Greco at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, where Germany’s world class poet Johann von Goethe (author of “Faust” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”) and Buffalo Bill Cody (remember Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun”) had hot chocolate before us, and the Piazza San Marco in Venice (celebrated in Maurice Prendergast’s colorful painting in the Met, and the Technicolor movies “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Summertime”), and the legendary hot chocolate shop near the Uffizi in Florence, home of the Birth of Venus by good old Boticelli, whom T.H. isn’t crazy about yet.
MAR 19: EDUARDO ESPINOSA DE LOS MONTEROS CARVER OF SUNSHINE CANYON, COLORADO, MARRIED MONICA RUIZ OF GRENADA, ANDALUCIA. T.H. and Sybille Fruetel are among the guests, and Hind and I celebrate Sybille’s birthday on May 24 by taking her (and Carlos Espinosa, now married) to dinner at a Grenada Restaurant – Moroccan, Sybille just said on the long-distance phone. (Hyperlink to pix of us standing outside.) We have another meal with all the Espinosas in a restaurant decorated to Manolete, the greatest bullfighter. T.H. and Hind and Sybille and I tour the Parque de las Sciencias together, and I buy a cup so that I will meditate on my youngest son’s true love at home when I have my morning coffee.
DECEMBER 25: ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, T.H. PROPOSES MARRIAGE TO SYBILLE FRUETEL IN OUR APARTMENT (HOORAY!): “I want to wake up seeing you every morning for the rest of my life. Will you marry, marry, Merry Christmas me?” AND SYBILLE SAYS YES! (YAY!) WE ALL GO TO MASS AT OUR LADY OF POMPEII, WHERE DEACON TONY BLESSES THE YOUNG COUPLE, AND THEN VISIT THE DOBBS FERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY, TO SHOW HER THE CULHANE FAMILY PLAQUE IN THE LIBRARY’S VESTIBULE FLOOR AMONG THE OTHER DOBBS FERRY BELIEVERS IN BOOKS!
2006 T.H. CULHANE MARRIES SYBILLE FRUETEL IN ESSEN, GERMANY, AND THEN THEY RUN THE HURDLES SET UP OUTSIDE BY HER FORMER TRACK MATES – IN HER BEAUTIFUL CAIRO MADE WEDDING DRESS!
In January, Hind and I went to the Yucatan as Disney buys PIXAR for 7.6 billion. For Hind’s birthday, we get a Honda Civic HYBRID and T.H. persuades us to buy A GPS – which we love, and pray that he will invent a diaper with a GPS attachment.
JUNE 10: WE CELEBRATE AMY’S JUNE 17 BIRTHDAY BY GOING TO “THE HISTORY BOYS” BY ALAN BENNETT. (Alec Guinness had suggested to Hind and me when I was writing a Reader’s Digest profile of him that we skip seeing him as Shylock in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” (“it’s no very good”) and see Bennett’s “FORTY YEARS ON” instead. We did both.) After the play, we ate at Tavern on the Green, where we relished a photograph of restaurant owner Werner Leroy as a child with Judy Garland, who was playing Dorothy in his father, Mervyn Leroy’s production of “The Wizard of Oz” – which he partly directed. How often we watched that film as a family when the boys were small. T.H. would run and hide in the closet when the witch came on, crying “THE WUTCH! THE WUTCH!” When Dorothy’s house landed on her, Michael would knock on the closet door and say, “You can come out now, Tia. The witch is dead.” Actually, T.H. started running when her musical theme began.
IN AUGUST, WE WENT TO GERMANY FOR THE WEDDING. HELMUT AND BRIGITTE SHOWED OUR WHOLE FAMILY A WONDERFUL TIME. WE KEEP THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE BOYS CLIMBING A TREE ON THE KRUPP ESTATE ON THE INSIDE OF OUR FRONT DOOR. Michael’s introduction to T.H. singing their “To Love and Hold” to Sybille at the wedding reception was a highlight. Also rowing on the River Lippe with some of her best friends. THE YEAR ENDED GRANDLY WITH MICHAEL AND AMY’S FIRST PARTY IN THEIR NEW HOUSE IN NORTHAMPTON ON NEW YEAR’S EVE.
The beating, rape and murder in Vermont of Yasmeen and Paul Noel’s sister, Michelle Gardner Quinn, on October 13 in an outburst of unreasoning hate by we a man who was a stranger to her was mitigated the only way hate is ever mitigated – by love.
2007; JUN 7-12: VIRGIL’S HOUSE IN CANADA: CELEBRATION OF 50 YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP: VIRGIL BURNETT, JOHN CULHANE, MAURY BRESLOW.
FATHER’S DAY: MICHAEL AND AMY TAKE HIND AND ME TO “MARY POPPINS” ON BROADWAY.
JUNE 29 to JULY 4: MICHAEL ORGANIZES A FAMILY REUNION IN LAS VEGAS FOR THE CIRQUE DE SOLEIL BEATLES LOVE CIRCUS AND THE FIRST LAS VEGAS BEATLEFEST AND WE HAVE MANY SWIMS IN OUR HOTEL’S BIG WATERFALL POOL WITH NINA, CAMILLE, HIND, MICHAEL, AMY, T.H., SYBILLE, AND NICHOLAS HENRY DOBBS.
JULY: T.H. AND SYBILLE MEET HIND AND ME IN THE ITALIAN DOLOMITE MOUNTAINS WITH GIOVANNA AND VITTORIO CARLI AFTER OUR SARDINIAN VACATION WITH MICHAEL AND AMY, MAURY AND MEG BRESLOW, AND THE CARLIS. (Maury loaned me a delightful long short story by Alan Bennet in which Queen Elizabeth II becomes a great reader – to begin with, to recognize the Windsor Castle Bookmobile.)
Reconciliation: Libby and Joe invite us to celebrate our 47th wedding anniversary and their 45th with dinner at their Canoe Brook Country Club in New Jersey and Overnight.
THE MOST JOYOUS CHRISTMAS SINCE 1961 AND 1962: SYBILLE IS PREGNANT WITH BABY CULHANE!!!
2008 Michael, as his 47th birthday approaches, has written and recorded “GITMO JOE’ AND IS PLANNING TO PERFORM IT TO HELP BARACK OBAMA IN HIS PLANS TO CHANGE THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
IN FEBRUARY (the month on the T.H. and Sybille 2008 Christmas Gift Calendar showing them in front of the pool in from of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.). the New Yorker ran a cover showing Humpty Dumpty perched on the top of the Stock Exchange. Among our first gifts to the baby will be the MOTHER GOOSE BUILDING BLOCKS (“Build to Learn, Learn to Build”), made in China by WJ Fantasy, Inc. (1-800-ABC-PLAY) that we bought in 1994 for our first grandchild.
There are ten sturdy blocks ) that we bought in 1994 for our first grandchild.
There are ten sturdy blocks that stand on top of each other almost three feet high, and that teach FIRST NUMBERS (1/2 BUCKLE MY SHOE), THE ALPHABET (), RHYMES (Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall, Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall, All the King’s Horses, and All the King’s Men, Couldn’ Put Humpty Together Again”) and ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLANCHE FISHER WRIGHT.
Grammie taught me my nursery rhymes, and in teaching me Humpty Dumpty, prepared me philosophically for the Fall of the Totalitarian Nazis and Athiestic Communist Imperialism; Robert Penn Warren’s novel and Broderick Crawford’s and then Sean Penn’s movie, “All The King’s Men”, about corrupt Louisiana state politics in the U.S.A., and then “All The President’s Men”, my friend Alan Pakula’s fine film about the fall of Richard Nixon, President of the United States.
See what Baby can learn from Mother Goose? You never thought that Peter Brueghel or Walt Disney were just playing Children’s Games.
FOR EASTER, 2008, MARY ELLA AND DAVE SENT HIND AND ME A MUSICAL CARD: It shows my friend Bill Tytla’s great classic scene of Dumbo’s Mother (read: Sybille) rocking Dumbo (read: Baby Culhane) in her trunk. It says: “Let there be wonder, endless surprise. Let there be snuggles, soft lullabies. Let there be sweet dreams, moonglow above – Let there be Baby, let there be love. Congratulations on Your Little One.” And Mary Ella writes: “John and Hind: Grandbabies are so much joy! We are so happy for you & wish for a healthy and happy birth for T.H. and Sybille and their SON! Love, Great Aunt ME and Great Uncle David.”
GRANDFATHERS should always live long enough to dramatize their old age for their grandchildren in lovable and understandable form. Children so favored receive an impression that does not desert them soon.” Francis Lester Warner, “The Unintentional Charm of Men,” 1928, from “One Swell Dad”, which Michael gave me for the Fathers Day after my stroke. He recalled how I used to carry him and T. on my shoulders, and I remembered the photograph of me with my boys on my shoulders, and Tom Lyman, with his Michael and Marya on his, when we took them to Lake Michigan to see the great sailing ships that had made their way down from the sea. At least Tom lived long enough to see Francesca’s Gavin.
2008 MAR HIND SENDS T.H. AND SYBILLE “WHAT SHAMU TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE, LOVE AND MARRIAGE: lessons for people fom animals and their trainers” by Amy Sutherland, author of “KICKED, BITTEN, AND SCRATCHED.”
While observing exotic animal trainers for that book, Amy had an Epiphany. I had the same Epiphany when I was writing my New York Times cover story on ‘THE LORD OF THE RING”, GUNTHER GEBEL WILLIAMS. What if we used those training techniques with their human animals in our own lives – specifically “Her dear husband, Scott”, “my dear wife, Hind, and our dear sons, Michael and T.H .?
SO: what does it all add up to? It adds up to me humbling asking that the first BABY CULHANE be named for me. I want the heritage that Hind and John worked so hard to give to Michael and T.H. to be commemorated in the name of a new, better human being. How about John Helmut?
AND REMEMBER SALVADOR DALI’S BEST PAINTING, “CHRIST OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS.”
3 comments:
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This is lovely! I have always wanted to do something like this for my kids. I stumbled upon it looking for info on Jack Holly, who was, as you know, the drama teacher at DFHS for many years.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Saul Shapiro
DFHS '74
(Guys and Dolls, Damn Yankees, Skin of Our Teeth)
Thanks for that comment, Saul. Nice to hear. I'm now so glad that Dad did that for us. Priceless and irreplaceable p.o.v. Do it if you can. Did you find anything else on Mr. Holly? Great English teacher and vital to the students in getting us onstage, or behind the scenes, involved in bringing drama and musical pieces to life for ourselves and our own community. He made that happen for many of us, and then for those of us who stayed with it, the whole DFHS experience became so much more for me than it might otherwise have been. Good to remember him, remember them, remember that. Thanks again.
Best,
MC
(Edward Albee's The Interview, Annie Get Your Gun, Comedy Of Errors, Hair, OUR TOWN)
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