Monday, April 27, 2020

Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s Widow and Collaborator, Dies at 98 - The New York Times

Betsy Wyeth was the model for her husband’s 1966 painting “Maga’s Daughter.” Maga was a nickname for her mother. She played a major role in his career, saying, “It’s like I’m a director and I had the greatest actor in the world.”

Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s Widow and Collaborator, Dies at 98 - The New York Times 

by 

  • Betsy James Wyeth, the indomitable widow, collaborator and muse of the painter Andrew Wyeth, died on April 21 at her home in Chadds Ford, Pa. She was 98.


    She had been in declining health for years, her son Jamie Wyeth said in confirming the death.

    The couple met in 1939 in Cushing, Maine, when she was 17 and he was 22. As the oft-told story goes, Ms. Wyeth’s father invited the handsome young painter to meet his three daughters.


    He was taken with Betsy, the youngest, and she with him, and she tested her new beau by inviting him to meet the Olsons, a brother and sister who lived in a squalid but atmospheric farmhouse.


    Christina Olson was paralyzed from the waist down, and it was Ms. Wyeth’s intention to see if Mr. Wyeth would be shocked by the Olsons’ grim existence. As he said afterward, he was too focused on his future wife to pay much attention.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

An old friend remembers his Dad, born 100 years ago


Richard Harvey is an old friend.  A  barrister, son of a Tory, active in the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers; counsel to Sinn Fein, member of the British commission reporting on the Bloody Sunday murders; Green Party lawyer now. He remembers his father John - born 100 years ago today.  A merchant mariner in WWII John Harvey was the same age as my Dad - a sub chaser commander. - GWC

100 years ago today in Derry my father drew first breath. Though he and his family left at the height of the 1920s Troubles, he took lasting memories with him; of walking the City Walls with his parents and of outings on the River Foyle with the Sea Cadets his father ran. In 2000 I moved to Derry for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. One day I called him just as the Guildhall clock bonged at noon. “Hah, haven’t heard that for 80 years,” he said.
His Scottish father was in the first wave sent to Flanders in 1914. He survived the Somme but was invalided back to London after Mons. He was nursed by an East End girl from Poplar, whom he married. They ran Missions to Seamen hostels, first in Wales, then Derry, then a travel agency sent my grandfather back to Belgium to give English families tours of the beautiful city of Bruges, the beaches of Ostend and the battlefields of the Great War.
In Bruges, my father was taught by French-speaking nuns. His first day, being an inquisitive child, he found a small porcelain pot on his desk, filled with a mysterious dark substance. His hands covered in indelible ink, he was banished to the school chapel to repent his wicked ways. Still curious, he saw a rope dangling from the ceiling. A tug, and the school bell pealed out. The priest in charge drummed into him the urgency of learning French.
With the Great Crash, the family moved back to England and ran the Workers’ Travel Association’s trade union holiday home in Dorset. At Lyme Regis grammar school he met Joyce Lane. When he became Head Boy and she Head Girl, she refused to let him take himself too seriously; when he pinned announcements on the school notice-board she drew stick men on them, to the amusement of the headmaster, if not the head boy.
He won a place at university but, as so often in those days, his parents couldn’t afford the fees. So, when war came, he remembered the visits to the WWI battlefields with his father: the grisly detritus still sticking out of the ground – helmets, even bones. He enlisted in the Merchant Navy so he could play his part against fascism without having to carry a gun. He took a crash course to become a radio officer. What he saw of the world, from New York to Durban, from Calcutta to Sidney, left him with a profound concern for equality and human dignity and an interest in international affairs that lasted until his final days.
Asked later how he dealt with the risk of being torpedoed, he said: “if we were carrying iron ore, we slept fully clothed and in our life jackets. If the hold was full of explosives, we put on our pyjamas. No point in worrying.” Fortunately, when his ship was torpedoed in 1942 it was not carrying explosives and, after three days clinging to an overcrowded raft in the Indian ocean, he and his fellow seamen were rescued.
He was demobbed on 15th November 1945. Two days later he and Joyce married in Lyme Regis. He had no job, no university degree and his work experience was limited to just five years at sea. But he never doubted his own abilities and he had a remarkable way of persuading others to trust them too. If he’d been a lawyer, he would never have lost a case!
Starting as a trainee in a company supplying lubricants to shipping lines, he became its general manager in a few years. Living in Churchill’s constituency, he threw himself into Conservative Party politics. He was never afraid to disagree with party leadership or even with Churchill the first time they met. “Come on, Harvey, we must have a talk,” said Churchill and steered him into his library to discuss foreign policy. The 27 year-old must have made an impression on the 73 year-old because when someone attempted to introduce them again weeks later, Churchill said: “You don’t have to introduce me to Harvey, we’re old friends, aren’t we Harvey?”
As Chairman of Churchill’s constituency party, Harvey was summoned to 10 Downing Street on April 6, 1955. Churchill took his customary seat in the Cabinet Office, beckoning my father to sit on his left. He showed him a of his letter of resignation to the Queen. Signing it, he said: “There are only two people to whom I have written such a letter; to my Sovereign as representing the Nation and to you as representing my constituents.”
The following month, John Harvey was elected MP for Walthamstow East, a seat he held through the elections of 1959 and, by the tiniest of margins, in 1964. He refused offers of junior ministry posts, preferring the security of his day job in the oil industry. In 1966, when Labour won Walthamstow, he left the business of politics and continued in the politics of business, serving as public affairs director on the board of Burmah Castrol, together with Dennis Thatcher – of whom he was much fonder than he was of Mrs T.
His own political philosophy was perhaps best summed up on the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister. “There is no handbook of Conservative dogma,” he said: “The fundamental aim of conservatism is to conserve all that is best out of the past and to use it constructively in the present for the benefit of the future.”
He cared passionately about conserving Epping Forest, which he served as a verderer for 28 years, determined to maintain its original acreage against the encroachments of developer and road builder. After 51 years of their very loving marriage, Joyce died in 2007. He followed a year later.
He managed every little detail of his life and tried hard to manage mine. He needed to be sure I could work the ancient Amstrad which he used to write his carefully crafted letters and keep meticulous accounts. He was a very public man but very private too; he shared the secrets of his filing cabinet but never told me of his poems or his young man’s dreams, shut in a dusty briefcase for me to find when he had gone. He kept his feelings close. We shook hands awkwardly until his last decade, when suddenly he opened to embrace and we would kiss each other’s weekend-stubbled cheeks and say those strange words: I love you.




Friday, April 24, 2020

Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Betsy Wyeth - 1921 - 2020 Her world

We received this morning from the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center - Rockland's world class  institution - a page devoted to Betsy Wyeth, Andrews's wife who has died at 98.
Watch the video Betsy's World which features her sons Nicky and James, and family friend and legendary Maine photographer Peter Ralston.
In recent years she has lived in the summer at Georges Harbor on Benner Island.  It is a magic spot where she built a house, commuted on her boat Home Run, and composed the fishing village of dreams across the narrow cut - the  Allen Island Sea Station - where in 1907 Maine marked its tercentennial with the granite Weymouth Cross on a bluff.  You can see that spot below and in this post which I put up to mark Andrew's death and attempted to capture the light for which he is famous.  I often saw James visiting Mommy, arriving via his black 40 footer Dreadnought.
In 1993, recovering from a flu, and needing a refuge we saw an ad in the Times for a house in Friendship, Maine.  I remembered sailing in Hempstead Harbor with my Dad on his friend Lou Perretti's Friendship sloop as a boy.  We rented the house and sailed aboard Gladiator (below). Fifteen years later we bought our house across the creek from the Zubers who are still sailing Gladiator - now 120 years old!
But I digress...what I didn't know is that we were entering Wyeth World.  Betsy's world, its light and sounds captured in the (now familiar) shots taken in Cushing - where we drive past their house on the way to the supermarket - the Olsen House now a museum where Andrew is buried in the local family graveyard across the road, and Southern Island which Betsy restored for James and his late wife Phyllis, remembered HERE.  Watch the video! - gwc
Maine Sloop Boat - Friendship Sloop Gladiator at Sea · Southwest ...


Betsy Wyeth (1921 - 2020)
Her Room
Her room

Betsy's World from Farnsworth Art Museum on Vimeo.

Costello

I received these photos this morning from Ancestry.com.  They probably got them from Martin Robillard.  
It is the Costello family grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. Placed by my great grandfather Thomas Costello in memory of his wife Bridget Slattery (1919 - Spanish flu?), himself (1938 - at 85 - the last arrival from Ireland i/a 1863)  Dad was 18 at the time of hisdeath and Thomas lived with them in Gerritsen Beach.
Agnes, his sister, I faintly remember or maybe just talk of her, Nana, Grandaddy, and Josephine's son Paul who died at 1 y.o.

The deed is signed by Bishop (later Archbishop) for whom the highs school in Queens was named when school moved from St. Ann's parish in Brooklyn to Jamaica.  that's why the name of their teams long a powerhouse - is the Stanners.

- GWC


Saturday, April 18, 2020

Haunts of Ancient Peace - Van Morrison

Live in Berkeley - 1986

World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter



World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter:

by Jason Berry

The news on April 1 that Ellis Marsalis Jr., 85, had died of COVID-19-related pneumonia opened a river of national tributes for New Orleans' premier jazz pianist, professor and the patriarch of a musical family with remarkable aesthetic reach. Government shutdown orders prohibited the pageantry of a jazz funeral, the second line of street dancers parading to brass band melodies. Churches were closed, parading banned. 

Orleans Parish, which includes the city, ranked in the top 10 U.S. counties for per capita deaths from the coronavirus. Along Rampart Street's grassy median opposite St. Jude shrine at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, people with rosary beads stood apart, murmuring prayers to the saint for hopeless cases. 

 Marsalis had begun teaching in the 1960s at Xavier University, the nation's only historically black Roman Catholic college, founded in 1925 by St. Katharine Drexel. Stirred by the city's gloom, Xavier President C. Reynold Verret, a chemist by training, wrote a poem, "Tolling the Bell," published here with permission: 

Last night, Ellis Marsalis went away,Piano keys tug at their locks and rend their robes,And each in their seclusion weeps so silently.No second line,No coming home of acolytes,The many musician daughters and sons,Emissaries of the old man to many places,To share the gift.None may returnTo ring the bell,To celebrate,To mourn.In the emptiness of St. Peter's SquareA lonely Pope stood before GodAnd called me from afar, 9That I too may join with him in prayer, Make my return, give thanksAs thanks we must.In solitude, we remember.In cells of marble ormade of simpler things,We weep.
 Ellis Marsalis carried the spiritual imagination of the city in his music. Pianists, however, have no role in burial parades — the work of marching brass bands. When Dolores, his wife and soulmate of more than 57 years died in 2017, Ellis stood outside Mater Dolorosa Catholic Church as his musician sons — Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, Jason — raised their horns in tribute to their mother with a large brass band assemblage playing "I'll Fly Away." All six sons had grown up going to the church. As Ellis' life ended, the brothers faced the task of burial under emergency conditions.

KEEP READING

Sunday, April 12, 2020

This War Effort— - Free Press Online

from an old man in Waldoboro, Maine, the small town next to our small town. (but they have a supermarket).

This War Effort— - Free Press Online

I’ve been here before. I recognize this waking to unease and surfacing to realize our known world is topsy-turvy. I remember: weird years in a town with the men gone; the worried faces of mothers counting out ration stamps as they laughed off another meatless, butterless, sugarless meal; the stabbing “What if this is real?” feeling...

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

John Prine peeled back the mysteries of ordinariness for Chicago fans - Chicago Tribune

Commentary: John Prine peeled back the mysteries of ordinariness for Chicago fans - Chicago Tribune: Commentary: News of John Prine's coronavirus diagnosis prompted tributes from across the country. The singer died Tuesday of complications of COVID-19.

John Prine And Stephen Colbert: "That's the Way the World goes Round" - YouTube

(11) John Prine And Stephen Colbert: "That's the Way the World goes Round" - YouTube: Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.



Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Da

This movie is why I have decided I would like Cassius Costello to call me Da. It's a favorite of mine with Martin Sheen and my former acting teacher Bill Hickey. - Da