The Oldest Continuously Running Book Club in Atlanta

  The Story of The Book Club of Roswell 

Imagine it’s 2010.

Martha Wayt is hosting the monthly meeting of the 50-year-old Book Club of Roswell. She has been a member for most of the last four decades. At 10:30 on this morning of the second Friday of the month, cars begin to pull into Martha’s driveway. The small house sits with the elegance of its owner off the side of a bustling road amid a busy commercial section. A path of native flowers leads to a charming rural entrance. Inside, one is instantly greeted with the warm essence of a book lover. Shelves and tables are adorned with the personal library of a lifetime reader. Beyond a row of windows, out back, are the beautiful rewards of a lifetime gardener.

The women arrive in groups with warm hellos and hugs. In 2010 only a few of the original members remain. They are joined by a scattering of legacy daughters. The other members are women who have been invited and approved over time. Today, after attending a few months of meetings as guests when each one reviewed a book, two new members are voted in. One is the daughter of a recently deceased OG; the other is her friend. Once they are officially inducted, the membership limit established in the 1960s is met again: No more than 18.

As always, on this day the dining fare is light and the reading fare is deep.

Each month a different host prepares a table with wine, sweet tea, coffee, and small bites. A designated reviewer leads a discussion on that month’s selection. While socializing for an hour or so, the members wander about catching up with each other’s lives. At some of the homes, there are horses to love on. At other’s there are garden walkways that astound the senses. At Martha’s, there is a meditation labyrinth behind the house in a field of wildflowers, beautiful trees, and stables.

Generally, Martha calls everyone to order and all assume seats in a circle. Minutes from the previous meeting are read, announcements are made, and a calendar is set for future months of hosts, books, and reviewers. Recent

reading selections have included: Patti Smith’s Just Us, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Jill Taylor’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Today, one of the original members, Anne Gowen Spalding, is reviewing Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu. A thoughtful discussion of the general rebelliousness of girls toward their mothers intertwines with the story of a Himalayan girl who must leave her mother’s house.

The meeting follows the traditions set forth early on when The Book Club of Roswell first took shape, casually, among literary friends at the dawn of the 1960s. It formed with a group of people interested not just in reading, but with literature’s influence on culture. The rules were simple: Read the book, think about it, and prepare to discuss your thoughts. The fact that the book club is still around in the 21st century is a tribute to those who gave it birth. Its history matters even further because the current members stand on the shoulders of a curious group of Atlanta intellectuals who contributed to the growth of the city during turbulent times.

This is the story of the early members, how the original four came together more than a half century ago to discuss the ideas within “The Great Books of the Western World,” and how those ideas gave growth to the development of Atlanta into the 21st century.

An accepted fact is that Atlanta arose from her Civil War ashes to find she bore the aesthetic of her past: little more than a railroad stop on the way to bigger cities. In 1920, H.L. Mencken dubbed Atlanta “a cultural Sahara.” Four decades later in 1960, Atlanta had a fine arts home at the High Museum but lacked a home for her symphony, ballet, and theatre arts. Also, the city’s social construct was reeling from the unsolved bombing of the Jewish Temple two years earlier and future Georgia Governor Lester Maddox’s ongoing, racist rants against Blacks.

In the Spring of 1960, peaceful sit-ins with black students inspired by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. disrupted Rich’s lunch counter. Later that year two students who were black challenged the racial admissions’ policies at UGA. The flaws of the city became open wounds. However, there were whispered signs of healing. A young, vibrant John F. Kennedy, as President, promised to

ensure equal opportunities for all Americans, and the segregationist signs that separated Atlanta’s population by race in elevators, at water fountains, in waiting rooms, in restrooms and on buses came down.

However, Atlanta needed revitalization in body as well as soul. Delivering an address on the topic “The Mess We Live in,” Atlanta architect James “Bill” Finch said, “Atlanta is ugly....Ugly in a structural way. And it’s getting uglier all the time.”

Finch wasn’t alone in his thoughts. His friend Leo Lanman, a co-founder of the Georgia Conservancy and an urban environmentalist, agreed. Lanman believed a city chain of green mini-parks and walking trails would soften the urban environment and prevent the destructive push toward suburbia.

Lanman and Finch were friends with Jack Spalding and Jim Childers of the Atlanta Journal; two journalists who felt compelled to improve the lives of all Atlantans. Spalding often declared that one of his “compulsions in life [was] a desire for change.” In 1952, he had won awards for an expose of the horrendous conditions at the mental hospital in Milledgeville, Ga. Spalding’s friend James Saxon Childers, a Rhodes Scholar and former Atlanta Journal Editor, had disclaimed a racist editor from Alabama while receiving applause from the audience at the 1956 American Society of Newspaper Editors convention. Childers was fired from the Journal for his progressive views later that year, and though Jack Spalding replaced him as the Editor of the newspaper, they remained steadfast friends, a tribute to each man’s character.

Jack Spalding, a UGA grad known as “a walking encyclopedia,” had an insatiable thirst for finding out ‘why’ things happened, according to Pat LaHatte Langley of the Journal. His brother, Hughes Spalding, once said, “[Jack] wants to be stimulated by people with different ideas.” During his reign as Editor-in-Chief, Spalding educated Journal readers about ecology, race relations, rezoning, and the power of people working in groups. His editorial pages were written with a theme of “community betterment” and underscored his philosophy to, “Make haste slowly” which guided his editorial leadership amid Atlanta’s chaotic years.

Spalding’s friendship with Lanman and Finch was rooted in a firm commitment to bring art and beauty to their city, and with Childers, each had

long believed racial integration was the key to unlocking Atlanta’s greatest potential. In1960 Spalding’s editorial pages gave strong support to a bond approving the construction of a cultural arts center. Ironically, when the issue got mixed up with the many racial travails of the times, the bond was defeated at the polls.

Jack Spalding opined in the Journal: “Atlanta lost big that day.”

The four friends discussed the static growth of their city often enough for Leo Lanman to suggest they find a new approach. Improving civilizations and environments was a challenge for the ages. Lanman proposed that the friends begin to study the cumulative ideas of Western Civilization through Encyclopedia Britannica’s “The Great Books of the Western World.” Research into the history of ideas could expand their own visions for Atlanta.

In that moment one of Atlanta’s oldest, continuous book clubs was born. *****

In 1960 door to door sales of the 54-book Encyclopedia Britannica series had gained traction. The series came with the optional purchase of appropriate bookshelves, and stately-bound books lined the walls of living rooms and dens throughout America.

Lanman suggested their discussions follow the outline of the series’ creator, Mortimer J. Adler, who believed “philosophy is everybody’s business” and learning is a life-long practice.

The four men met twice a month over “whiskey and peanuts,” the standard cocktail fare at the Spaldings' home off Riverside Drive. They began with Volume 1: The Great Conversation and used Volume 2: The Great Ideas as a springboard for their discussions about social construct, civic duty, and community enrichment.

The readers moved on to explore the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. They unraveled the quandaries of morals and values in Homer, grappled with Sophocles’ ideas about democracy, and waxed on about the women’s sex strike in Aristophones’ Lysistrata. It was apparent

quickly that the enlightenment of a “salon” began to pulse with a powerful fervency in a living room in Atlanta.

Anne Spalding provided the cocktail peanuts and often sat in. Jack and Anne Spalding had met in 1954 when Charles Gowen, Anne’s father, was running for Georgia governor and Jack Spalding was covering the campaign. Before that, Anne had been a poli-sci major, a Phi Beta Kappa grad at UNC Chapel Hill, and an Atlanta Constitution reporter with a courthouse and politics’ beat. An avid reader of the classics, Anne provided her insights at the literary meetings with ease.

“At some point,” Anne said, “the other wives got wind of it” and decided to join their husband’s philosophical pursuits. These new members included Maude Lanman, a Columbia University graduate and member of the Georgia Board of Elections and Bess Finch, an Agnes Scott grad and member of the Ruth Mitchell Dance Company.

Following them came Doris Hinckley Lockerman, the first female associate editor of a US newspaper (the Atlanta Constitution, 1948). In the 1930s, Doris was secretary to Chicago’s famous FBI chief, Mervin Purvis, who took down the infamous with his machine gun squad (of which Doris’ future husband, Allen Lockerman Jr, was a member). Doris was known for reading one book every day. In 1960, renowned Constitution editor Ralph McGill praised her “brilliant, decisive mind.” Doris and Allen were also avid devotees of enriching the cultural life of Atlanta and eagerly joined into the illumination of great reading with a group of friends. The ten of them still covered two books a month, but with a different format. Now, one member led each discussion and others alternated hosting in their homes.

The group continued to expand. Author and noted raconteur, Alex Bealer began to attend with his wife, Helen, a singer and WWII WAVE. Alex was a man famed Atlanta author Celestine Sibley called “the most interesting man in the world because he is the most interested man in the world.” Bealer had lived, played, and hunted with Cherokee Indian friends as a youth. He was a blacksmith and a woodworker. Sibley said “ [Bealer’s] curiosity and enthusiasm were so infectious a lot of us found ourselves looking at things... with interest we never knew we possessed.”

Alex and Helen were active participants in the enlightened conversations that ranged from art and aristocracy to citizenship and government. All were threaded with applications to the future of Atlanta, including the Bealers’ keen interest in preserving Georgia’s Indian mounds, and Maude Lanman’s determination to register all eligible voters in Roswell and beyond.

                                                          ***

The community groups in which the members participated “made haste slowly.” But there were signs Atlanta was awakening. In August of 1961, Atlanta integrated its public schools peacefully while other Southern cities roiled in racial turmoil. A new slogan was born: “Atlanta: The city too busy to hate.”

Sights were set on the future. Alex Bealer told the book group that a cultural arts’ center was back on the table following the bond defeat. To that end in the summer of 1962, his sister and sister-in-law were joining more than 100 Atlanta cultural and cvic leaders on a month long tour of the art treasures of Europe, ending with an AirFrance flight from Paris’ Orly airport.

Word got around the close-knit community of Atlanta journalists, thinkers, and artists about a stimulating group of movers and shakers who were taking on the works of the world’s great philosophers. As a result, more people asked to attend the bi-monthly gatherings. James Barker and his wife, Arletta Peck, attended with friends. Jim Barker, an architect, had a hand in designing some of the most stunning churches in Atlanta. He was also the architect and owner of the famed “Barker House,” a flying-saucer-shaped house erected on top of Forsyth’s Sawnee Mountain in the 60s.

The original members set the limit at 18 to facilitate ease of discussion. They chose to book a meeting room in the library of the Atlanta History Center for every other Friday night. New members included two pyschiatrists, Dr. Tom Malone (on the founding board of the Galloway School) and his wife, Dr. Virginia Grotheer. The Malones were a couple known for their interest in community wellness who were eager to discuss the importance of a liberal arts’ education.

*****

The addition of women to the book club, coupled with the racial conditions of the times, brought the group to the realization that gender and equality were topics Mortimer Adler had left off his list of great ideas.

In 1962, Martha Wayt joined during the reading of Plato. Martha, who worked with Leo Lanman as the first Chair of the Georgia Conservancy Education Committee, was a graduate of Vassar. She proudly claimed the influence of her grandfather, John Huston Finley, the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times in the 1930s, and later, a Professor at Princeton and President of City College of New York. Martha was known to always have a book in her hands with a pen at the ready to take notes. Her greatest interests were people, ideals, and ideas. Discussing Plato’s thoughts on equality, justice, and humanity brought her back to the lively discussions she had experienced as a child in a highly-educated family. Martha, who founded the Atlanta Steeplechase with her husband, John Wayt, made copious notes about her decades’ long, book club membership. Those notes have aided the recording of its history.

Early in 1962, as they reviewed Aristotle’s theory that people needed each other to survive, the group watched their beloved city devolve into further chaos. In an ongoing saga Lester Maddox, the segregationist owner of Atlanta’s Pickrick Restaurant, ( and soon-to be Georgia Governor’67-’71), refused to seat staff members of the Atlanta Journal and the AtlantaConstitution saying they were “trying to cram integration down the throats of [Atlanta] merchants....”

On the other hand at a meeting of the American Society of Newspapers that February, Felix R. McKnight of the Dallas Times-Herald said the U.S. wondered “what happened to just plain Americans...those people who could sanely and soundly debate...without endangering the precious unity of this land?”

The members’ reading continued to sustain them. Repeated cautions to persevere in the face of calamity and to seek truth in the midst of beauty were woven in the next book club volumes with Virgil, Ptolemy, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.The readers explored the dimensions of God within the natural order of civilizations. They labored over Dante’s hell, Chaucer’s

journey, and the power trips of Machiavelli. And when they got to the great British bard, Martha Wayt noted: “Shakespeare is an insightful joy.”

They had read up to the middle of the 54 volumes when crushing news came to the city of Atlanta. Sunday morning June 3, 1962 the AirFrance jet carrying 106 Atlantans home from Orly in France crashed, killing all of them and many others. The list of dead included Alex Bealer’s sister, Mary Louise Humphreys, a young mother and aspiring artist traveling with her sister-in- law, Elizabeth Gloning Bealer, an artist who taught French at The Lovett School.

Nothing the book club read had prepared them or their city for this. The Atlanta Constitution editorial on June 4, 1962 reminded readers: “The select cultural leadership of the whole city has been decimated.” It emphasized that the lives lost left a gap in Atlanta’s “advance toward the goal of greatness.” In the same issue, columnist Eugene Patterson wrote: “...they held in common that divine spark of which Plato wrote and without which there is no art.”

Racial unrest was put aside respectfully, but temporarily, when Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Belafonte cancelled a planned sit-in protest; and though MalcolmX created a stir, little could penetrate the communal grief of a city plunged into mourning.

In the darkest of times, Atlantans found a way to make the loss a catalyst for funding a memorial arts’ center as an endless stream of funerals took place across the city. And then, just over a year later, President John F. Kennedy was killed and a new communal grief swept the entire country.

*****

As time went on, the club continued to accept new members. Roy “Splinter” Wood was in the Kennedy administration’s Interior Department in the US wildlife Service until 1967 when he and his family returned to their Roswell residence from DC. Roy and his wife, Tillie King, were a welcome addition to the book club. “Splinter” was a known storyteller and a persuasive speaker. Tillie held a Masters in Biology, coupled with a fierce love for education. They had contributed to the establishment of the Chattahoochee Nature Center and Tillie had started the first public kindergarten in Roswell. The

Woods were part of the group when the members celebrated the completion of all 54 volumes of the series.

What became known as the couples’ group “went on so long that everybody knew everybody’s opinion about everything, so it folded,” according to Anne Spalding who spoke to the Atlanta Journal in a 1984 article about area book clubs. Noting that 22 years had passed since the club’s first days, Anne went on to say, “The ladies decided to keep on meeting - we grew up when we didn’t work and it was something to do on a Friday morning. We chose to read great books by trivial authors and trivial books by great authors.”

As the women’s group formed, early members were those who had connections to the Atlanta newspapers. Scarlett Blanton Rickenbaker, a former Fashion Editor at the Atlanta Constitution, earned a spot. Scarlett was a St. Simon’s native who had won attendance to NYC’s famed Art Students' League as an oil and watercolors’ artist and sculptor. Her lively, line drawings added flavor to the Constitution’s women’s section. In the future, Scarlett’s artwork would be held by private collections in the US and Europe. She would also be the illustrator beloved author Celestine Sibley chose for her books. However in the 60s, upon entering the book club, Scarlett was a young, housebound mom of three who loved to read and wanted to enjoy time with like-minded women.

Scarlett introduced her friend and fellow artist, Barbara “Candy” Morrow to the group. In addition to her established reading habits, Candy was a well- respected portrait artist, supporter of the Atlanta Symphony, and avid Scrabble player. She fit right in. So Scarlett and Candy introduced another artist, Jo Rudolph, an instructor at the Dunwoody Arts Center and member of the Roswell Arts Alliance. Jo was thrilled to be a “reader among readers” and spoke of the group often throughout her life. Another member brought along Carolyn Crompton, a former Roswell High School English teacher, a renowned grower of day lilies, and a well-appreciated Roswell Library volunteer.

In the 70s one new member, Evelyn Sommerville, began hosting meetings at her historic home in Roswell, “Holly Hill.” Evelyn Hanna Sommerville was an Agnes Scot grad, a WWII journalist in Britain, and a self-professed “book freak.” When she and her husband, Robert, (the President of Atlanta Transit)

bought Holly Hill, the Greek Revival mansion was inhabited by six families, one of which operated a hamburger stand in the front yard. Today their magnificent restoration is a protected “Landmark of Southern Heritage.” But Evelyn was a legend as well. She was the author of the acclaimed novel Blackberry Winter (1938), a contender for the Pulitzer prize which, according to the the AJC in 1971, Sommerville lost by one vote to Marjorie Kennan Rawlings’ The Yearling.

The Sommervilles acquired Holly Hill from the Wing family whose relative, Lucile Wing Hockenhull, became a book club member. Lucile was seven generations removed from the original settlers of Roswell. In the 1830s, they owned the first ferry across the Chattahoochee River and commissioned Roswell King’s firm to build Holly Hill in 1845. Like Sommerville, Lucile was an Agnes Scot grad (1915) and according to member Janet Tiller, Lucile had two loves: “the book club and the Braves.” Hockenhull’s praise for The Book Club of Roswell appeared in a 1979 article in the Roswell Neighbor. “Club meetings,” she said “were a place of such bright and brainy discussions” that to be a member was “very desirable.”

Anne Spalding brought Janet Tiller into the group in the early 80s. Janet Pearson Tiller’s family owns the “Mitchell-Tiller House” in Sandy Springs. Sometimes book club meetings were held in the 19th century, restored cottage where Janet provided stimulating conversations and an elegant spread. Today, as a member-emeritus in her late 90s, Janet recalls, “Anne Spalding and I lived in the same neighborhood and played bridge together. We talked about books. So Anne invited me to join.” Janet added, “I was so blessed to have my life enriched by these women.”

There are several other names listed in the membership records over the years, and each of the women made an important contribution to the staying- power of the book club. Some considered their affiliation so meaningful that their obituaries noted it:

In the late 1980s, the remembrances of Clyde La Fitte and Dorothy Lyons of Roswell mention their memberships, as does the 2013 obit of Norma Lou (Dove) Cannon who was a “30 year member of The Book Club of Roswell.” Imogen Banks Caudell died in 2006 and her obit notes that she was a “founding member of The [women’s] Book Club of Rowell.”

Members in the 1980s and 1990s included Barbara Whittier, Mabel Ritter, Hazel Fields, Pauline Dwiggins, Jaunita Mitchell, Shirley Steele, Jane Wilcox Smith, and Mary Bugge. They are all remembered as highly active members through the years by Darlene Walsh and Cindy Etheridge who came along during that era. Darlene is a member-emeritus who still keeps in touch and helped with this history - as did Cindy, a current member who brings her elegance, (following a career in fashion), to a strong commitment to the women of the book club.

At the dawn of the 21st century, legacy members began to appear at the meetings. Following Tillie Wood’s death, her daughter Mary Jo was inducted with a vote, as members continued the original tradition. Soon Anne and Jack Spalding’s daughters, Elizabeth and Maysie, (a “book club baby” born in 1967), joined their mother at the meetings. In 2010, two years after the death of her mother Scarlett, Ginger Rickenbaker Hamby and Scarlett’s daughter- in-law Jeanne Rickenbaker became a members, followed in the next decade by Rebecca Wayt Buck, daughter of Martha Wayt, an active member until her death in 2021.

The current membership is a reflection of the evolution of thought throughout the length of the book club’s reign. It is still a group of seekers, as it was when couples got together over whiskey and peanuts in the Spaldings' living room. That morphed into a group of women who were educated, employed, and empowered in a way their own mother’s had never been. Those traditions have been passed on to their daughters and the women who read with them today.

Legacy member Mary Jo Wood remembers “the long rows of white leather books with the same spines and different titles in gold” that lined the shelves of her parents’ home. “The Great Books of the Western World” adorned living rooms throughout the US then, and college classes about philosophy and logic were required for a degree. Mortimer J. Adler, editor of the series, called it “a sharpening stone for the mind.” Hence, it is logical to wonder about the book club’s influence on the outcome of the original members’ dreams. The first four were the cultural influencers of their day.

Here are a few facts that may contribute to an answer.

Jim Childers published 19 novels and documentaries, many with themes about racial equality, before his death in 1965. Leo Lanman’s dream of a city chain of walking trails has manifested itself in Atlanta’s “Beltline” today, and Bill Finch’s disdain for the “ugly structures” of Atlanta has given way to a beautiful skyline and softer urban environment which he lived long enough to admire. As for Jack Spalding, he has remained a legend for his brilliant mind and sharp wit as the ultimate “Newsman,” and, most importantly, for his stance on the ecological preservation of the Chattahoochee which earned him the title of “First Friend of the River.”

Overall, Kay Powell summed their influence up in the 2008 AJC obituary for book club member Scarlett Blanton Rickenbaker:

[Rickenbaker] “was a member of what is regarded as the last of a post-war literary and artistic coterie that was a factor in Atlanta’s emergence as the premier Southern city after WWII.”

Those words define the legacy of The Book Club of Roswell.

2023 - Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Wall Phones, Long Cords, and Party Lines

                    Wall Phones, Long Cords, and Party Lines

from:  Manhasset Stories, Vol 2. 2012

by:  Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

The telephone number of my youth was Manhasset 7-5151. 

Area codes didn’t arrive until the mid-60s. Most people only had one line before that, and possibly, a telephone on each floor of their homes.

We had a wall-phone in the finished basement, another on a wall in the kitchen and a third - a black, desk phone - in my parents’ bedroom. The kids weren’t really allowed to use this one. It sat on a mahogany “telephone table” that had a matching chair. Most of the homes I visited had one of these some place.

All had dial phones, of course, and dial we did.

Since there was no “call waiting,” the caller had to dial and redial, then redial, again and again, to get through to a friend with a busy signal.

I was capable of doing this hundreds of times, if the message I needed to convey to a friend was important enough, as all seemed to be.

MA 7-2268.  MA 7-2268. MA 7- 2268. Endlessly my index finger turned that dial.

The girls in that house never got off the phone.

The same was true of my beloved friend, MA 7-4408,  who had three sisters. It was virtually impossible to get through to her, and if one of her older sisters answered, she was likely to say my friend wasn’t allowed to come to the phone.

The father of these four beauties finally succumbed to installing a telephone, with a separate number just for the girls, on the landing at the head of the stairs. He often said the plastic handle was going to wear out in record time because the phone was in perpetual use.

Just as a case in point, in most Baby Boomer homes the telephone was a family item, used in a communal space.

“Don’t you whisper into that phone!” was a common remark cast toward a kid whose phone cord couldn’t be stretched far enough away from an adult.

I resorted to speaking “Double G” with my friends when on the phone in the presence of authority.

I had trouble passing French quizzes, but I knew this language by heart. 

“Whitta-gut ditta-gid yitta-goo gitta-get kitta-galled titta-goo thiitta-ghee itta-goff-itta-giss fitta-gor?” I’d say into the receiver in a clear voice.

This drove my mother insane.

So my 1959 Christmas list included Ma Bell’s new “Princess Phone” for Santa to install in the room my sister and I shared. 

“It’s little...it’s lovely...it lights.” 

Marketed as a bedroom phone, the sleek design allowed it to be placed easily on a nightstand, and it came in pink.

The Princess didn’t appear under our tree, but MA 7- 0146 got one and there was truly nothing like it. I started going to her house just to have the Princess Phone experience.

Back at my house, the favored phone was outside the basement laundry room near our 

brand-new Magnavox TV.  The phone had a long cord, so even if people were watching television, I could snake into the adjacent laundry room to have some privacy.

Sometimes, I could even close the door.

I needed to be alone because my friends and I had discovered, at the age of 12, “party lines.”

I’m sure there was more to the party than the game we created on these open lines which delivered constant static when we connected to them. Somehow, we avoided the complication because we had our own agenda.

Kids hollered over the noise to each other.  

It was like getting in touch with another planet. You’d hear people shouting phone numbers over and over. Then they’d hang up to see who’d call them.

My friends and I quickly realized we could scream anyone’s phone number into that static. 

So we did.

We repeated the numbers of the St. Mary’s convent and Church rectory which we already knew by heart from all the prank calls we’d dialed their way (no *69 then).

“Is your refrigerator running, Sister?”  Ha- ha.

Can kids perform prank calls these days?  I’m not sure.

What a shame. There’s nothing like a harmless prank call that works.

Like calling a number and telling the person you’re from the telephone company and men are working on some extremely important lines close by, so please don’t answer the phone if it rings within the next two minutes. “It’s not likely,” we’d instruct authoritatively, “but picking up the phone could cause an electrocution.” 

So at 1minute 55 seconds we’d call back. We’d let the phone ring and ring. The homeowner wouldn’t pick up. Then at 2:01 we’d call again, the phone would be answered and we’d let out a blood curdling scream.

Ahhhhh.  Good times.

In high school my outgoing calls from home were to girls, mostly. It was a day and age when girls didn’t call boys.

Girls waited by the phone for boys to call us.  It was grueling. I waited often.

We only called a boy to see if his line was busy which might explain why he wasn’t calling us. But a perpetually busy line meant so many things: was a female on the phone in his house, or was he on the phone with MA7 - 2259?.

There was another important rule to this phone etiquette: If the boy’s phone rang and someone answered, we’d hang up.

Since I had an older brother, I knew first-hand how this drove parents crazy.

We’d hear our mother speaking into a void: “Hello...Hello? Oh, not this again. Please either stop calling or speak up...”

The phone was as central to our existence then as it is to teens today; but the phones we used were installed in the walls and the numbers we called had limited availability, imposed by humans as well as technology. 

For instance, each day I called the same circle of girlfriends the minute I got home from being with them at school. 

It was time-consuming to reach one of them 

When I got ‘a busy’ from MA 7- 2268 and MA 7 - 2259, I figured they were talking to each other. I made this deduction because MA 7 - 7132 was grounded, and I’d called MA 7 - 4408, only to be told she wasn’t allowed to come to the phone because it was “homework time.”

See, the main difference with the phones of the Baby Boomer years was, a parent could answer the phone and deliver ultimatums or pick up an extension and say: “I told you to get off the phone and come to dinner.”

I never had a friend whose parents didn’t do that.

Even MA 7- 0146‘s Princess phone and the four beauties with the private number found themselves without instruments from time to time. Their fathers, fed up with the constant jabbering, had each been known to unplug the four-pronged jack from the wall, insuring silence for awhile.

Somewhere along the line, I lost my fascination with spending time on the phone.  It may have started at 40 when I didn’t have my mom to call anymore, but it ended for sure when my sister

was no longer there to share events with.

We got rid of the landline at our house a few years ago. Only telemarketers called that number. 

So I only use my cell phone now.  

I have to say, I don’t find the architecture of my iPhone particularly comfortable for lengthy conversations, and besides, we’re still asking: “Can you hear me now?” no matter the server or instrument.

My kids tell me they use phone calls for business mostly, otherwise they text their friends.  I like texting, too, but it certainly has its limits.

I imagine we’ll all be Skyping and using Face Time more in the future, which in my case requires make up.

At that point, I’ll be longing for the days when we could pull the wall phone’s long cord into the laundry room and get a little privacy.

                                                                H

Hail and Farewell to the Hermit of Miller Place

Hail and Farewell to the Hermit of Miller Place

By Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

“Manhasset Stories,” Vols. 1 and 2.

One of my new-found, Facebook friends - formerly of Manhasset - shared her copy of Monsignor John K. Sharp’s autobiography, An Old Priest Remembers, with me. 

Having just reread the book, my new friend offered this sage advice:  

“Take all the time you need. There’s a lot in it.” 

No kidding. 

The Monsignor’s memoir was first published in 1977* when Sharp was 85 years old. He intended it to be a gift book for 100 of his family members and friends, both laity and clergy. However, demand required a second printing with an extended version and a larger distribution, selling at $10 per copy in 1978.

There’s no doubt Sharp’s life was an interesting one. He was born into the Victorian Era of Brooklyn in 1892, worked for a while at becoming a “captain of high finance,” and ended up as a seminarian whose self-proclaimed “most productive work” was the growth of St. Mary’s Church in Manhasset and his supervision of the 2800 students who attended the three parish schools, including the high schools which he established.

Ironically, he never wanted to be a teacher, but he was always a writer penning “ten books and countless articles...including a monumental three-volume history of the Catholic Church on Long Island” for the Diocese of Rockville Center, an enormous accomplishment on its own.

However it is the Monsignor’s memories of the Brooklyn and Long Island of his youth that are among the most informative and charming in his story. He was called “Kean” by family and friends, for his middle name which was an homage to his mother’s family. The Keans were a large tribe, who lived and vacationed well. They interacted among each generation for decades, with Sharp and other clerical relatives presiding at family weddings, ordinations, and funerals.

Reading Sharp’s story was eye-opening to the child in me who remembers having to face him after committing a few minor offenses that the nuns deemed worthy of the Monsignor’s input. Each instance involved me cutting high school - once to attend the ticker-tape parade for John Glenn with JFK through Wall Street and again, to greet The Beatles at JFK airport. ( As a side note, I came very close to Glenn and JFK, but nowhere near the Beatles).

Whatever! the teenager in my head gives in response to the Monsignor’s indictment today, but then I didn’t have the word. Monsignor Sharp grounded me, if you can believe that. Priests and doctors held sway over my widowed mom.

So, by the order of the holy church, I wasn’t allowed to attend Mission Day at school for the first offense - deemed less serious, perhaps, because JFK was Catholic.

As for idolizing infidels, I was not to be admitted into the boys’ basketball game or sock hop that weekend, a ruling Sharp dictated to my mother whom he charged with keeping me home lest I become a “ne’er-do-well.”

Lo, these many decades since, while reading Sharp’s memoir, I took a certain glee in the spaghetti junction of ADD ramblings that pepper his paragraphs.

He was a clearly a man who kept meticulous records and frequently quotes from letters he wrote to and received from family, parishioners, and various bishops. His approach to telling his story involves the structure of these pieces of correspondence mingled with tales of the times surrounding them related in a Dickensian prose.

I can’t critique Monsignor Sharp.  It’s just not right. I will say, however, it is this very style that weighs his story down with the employment of words likeienic, panegyric,and sacerdotal, as well as obscure allusions to “Medes and the Persians” and Latin idioms: Dominus pars heredidtatis meae(The Lord is the portion of my inheritance). 

I am unclear about the means which afforded Sharp to travel as widely and well as he did, nor about how a priest bought a house 100 feet above LI Sound upon retirement. I can only assume one avows to different levels of poverty in the religious life, and recognize that I really don’t know anything about the mechanics of the priesthood at all.

The Monsignor retired in 1969, a year after the Second Vatican Council, when he began “to experience the headaches and frustrations of a pastor in the new age into which the Church was entering with the laity beginning to participate in its management and strange ideas about authority becoming prevalent.”

In his memoir, Monsignor Sharp is a vocal critic of both Vatican Councils and the Ecumenism brought to the Church into which he’d been ordained.  He expresses disdain for the change from habits to street clothes favored by the nuns and often notes his disagreement with the Second Council’s decision to require retirement for priests at age 75 - even questioning why the “carism of the papacy makes it unnecessary for its incumbent” to retire at the same age as priests.

Sharp’s later years, by his own assessment, were lonely.  “I style myself The Hermit of MIller Place,” he wrote.  “Often days pass in which I speak to no one; hear from no one; neither phone nor doorbell rings.”

I was unable to find the date of Sharp’s death, another lonely fact in consideration of the man’s accomplishments for the Diocese as well as for St. Mary’s.

Consequently, his advice at the book’s end haunts me: ”If you live long enough, you too will want to be wanted.” 

I’m sorry I didn’t know that the Monsignor was pining for visitors in the 70s.  I would have stopped by to tell him I hadn’t become an astronaut, a star stalker, or a ne’er-do-well. In fact, like him, I was going to be a teacher - the last thing I had ever expected myself to be - and a writer - the one thing I’d always planned on.

Now, it is only appropriate that I use the Monsignor’s Latin to pay the man his due, and so I say:  Frater Ave atque Vale, Monsignor. Hail brother and farewell.  

*published by Exposition Press, Hicksville, NY

For Bob Lubbers from Manhasset Stories, Vol 2

  from 2011 interview for Manhasset Stories, Vol. 2 

 by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser http://amzn.to/100iux7 -  available in ebook or paperback

      Bob Lubbers: More than 90 Years of Manhasset Art and Music  

                               “Headlights, Thighs, and Embouchure”

Robert Bartow Lubbers is best known for drawing many of the sexy women who populated comic strips in the mid-20th century.  It is a talent that earned Bob the prestigious “Yellow Kid Award,” presented at the Italian Expo Cartoon Festival in 1998

“I specialize in headlights and thighs,” the nonagenarian tells me as we sit in the Marlboro Road home he shares with his second wife, Siegie.

But this isn’t that story, so much as the one about how a young Manhasset boy became the professional cartoonist he dreamed of being while growing up in his home on Ryder Road.

Lubbers story begins in 1930 at the start of the Great Depression. Bob’s father, Edward, a banker at 40 Wall Street, managed to pull together three mortgages to secure a home in the newly incorporated Village of Munsey Park.

“What a town,” Bob exclaims today. “I was 8 and kids my age were everywhere. There were street games, just like we had in Queens’ Village, but there were also acres and acres of surrounding dense woodlands, some with meandering bridle paths and low lying vales.”

Northern Boulevard was known as North Hempstead Turnpike then, and the defunct tracks of the New York & North Shore Trolley Company were still visible in the pavement a decade after the trolley from Flushing to Roslyn had been replaced by buses.

Groves of ancient hardwoods graced the land east of Manhasset Wood’s Road until they met up with the newly-landscaped, Munsey Park Golf Course, not far from its 14th fairway at Copley Pond.

There were commercial centers appearing along the future boulevard, with the Munsey Center in development and Fifth Avenue stores opening closer to Shelter Rock Road.

Locals shopped on Plandome Road, primarily. They had their choice of grocery stores: Bohack’s, A & P, King Kullen’s, or Andy and Flo’s (A&F Market today).

Jaffee’s Department store had moved from Spinney Hill to the 800 block of Plandome, just across from the Manhasset Cinema and not far from Milo and George’s Ice Cream Shop and Davidoff’s Stationary Store.

Pete’s sold penny candy in his tiny shop which was south of the LIRR station and across from the solid brick, K-12 Plandome Road School.

The Gay Dome bar stood at the corner of Gaynor Avenue and Plandome, hence its name, just a block away from an Esso Station where a gallon of gas sold for pennies. Drivers parked diagonally on all Manhasset streets, sliding in and out of spaces with ease.

Bob started the third grade in 1930. He spent class hours being bored with the 3R’s, and drawing WWI Sopwith Camel, Bi-planes like his dad had flown. He created strips of ferocious, machine gun battles pitting Sopwiths against the three-winged Fokker of Von Richtoven, the Red Baron.

For outdoor fun, Bob and his friends scared each other pretending the Onderdonk House was a haunted mansion or during a winter snow, they’d sled down Park Avenue or clear Copley Pond to ice skate.

 On summer days they’d make rafts, floating upon them in Polliwog Pond while playing “Huck Finn” or cutting liana vines, drinking their water, then swinging like Tarzan through the hardwood trees.

They played pick-up games of baseball in open fields bordering the grand Shelter Rock Road estates and followed paths laden with blackberries, eating their fill.  They discovered Indian arrowheads and looked for red hermatite bowls, then licked them to make “War Paint.”

On rainy Saturdays, they headed to the Cinema’s double feature, where they watched two movies, a Bugs Bunny cartoon, a Pete Smith Novelty,  a Grantland Rice Sports’ Special, plus Fox Movietone World News, a travelogue, and the coming attractions - all for 25 cents.

Bob and his younger brother, Eddie, watched a steady stream of moving vans bring families to new houses within days of their completion. Everyone who lived in the Village remarked how the builders had kept their promise: No two houses looked alike.

This was Munsey Park, a development created when the late newspaper mogul, Frank Munsey, bequeathed his entire estate to the Metroplitan Museum of Art. The museum’s board had sold 100 acres of his Manhasset holdings to William Levitt and kept the remainder, developing elegant homes on tree-lined streets named for fine American artists.

Construction continued at a rapid pace.

In celebration, 1000 people gathered to watch the Village’s fireworks display on July 4th 1931, and that December, Santa Claus made his first appearance at the Abbey Road Circle, a tradition which continues to this very day (Atiyeh, 2).

Finally, however, the stranglehold of the Great Depression began to grip several Munsey homeowners in 1932. They scrambled to save their homes from foreclosure, until Munsey Park drew support from a few hundred residents to form the “Emergency Committee of Munsey Park.” The group “collected funds...for the sole purpose of lending aid, unobtrusively, to Munsey Parkers who were on the edge of mortgage foreclosures (2).” 

Every penny was paid back.

These are the people who embraced and inspired generations of Manhasset kids like Bob Lubbers who was just a pre-teen, absorbing the world of heroes around him, when he knew he wanted to be a cartoonist.

Jack Abbott’s illustrations in the comic strip, “Riders of the Purple Sage” seized Lubbers’ attention.

Each night, Bob waited for his father’s return on the 25 minute “Banker’s Special” from Penn Station. Mr. Lubbers would walk through the door and hand his elder son The Brooklyn Eagle. As Bob recalls:

“The aroma of printer’s ink revved me up to read the latest “Sage” strip. There were beautiful girls in danger and cowboys, with holstered guns slung low, who always came to their rescue.  My fascination with drawing airplanes turned into drawing pretty girls.  It was a life sentence.”

But Bob was still a kid, and he had other fascinations to pursue. One involved a huge oak that had fallen in the woods behind Thayer Road where Les Dittman, the first person to buy a house in Munsey Park, lived.

Bob and his pal, Bud Walters, were enthralled by the tipped stump of tangled roots and clay that remained after the trunk had been cut and hauled away.

In no time they rounded up their 1934 Tootsie Toy Mini-Model Cars, and began carving roads down from the highest level to send their cars on a zig-zag run through the roots. They envisioned a bob-sled-type path, but were having trouble with the curves.

Bob recalls:  “That’s when Bud’s older brother, Phil, appeared, spending a couple of days with us, creating a super fast track, that sent our cars on a perfect run every time. We loved Phil Walters. He was born to run street rods, and we used to take some wild rides with him in his car on the old, two-lane, curvy Shelter Rock Road.”

Little did Bob and Bud know that Thayer Road’s Phil Walters was to become Ted Tappet, who changed his name to prevent his mom from worrying over his days as the hottest midget, race car driver on the east coast. In the 50s, at Le Mans, Tappet drove directly behind a car that left the track for the stands, killing fans on the spot. Phil Walters never got over that, and never drove in a race again. Bob saw him years later back in Manhasset after Walters was presented an award for sailing mastery. “At that point,” Lubbers says, “he still had racing in his blood, but his victories were measured in knots.”

Before all that in the late 1930s, Bob Lubbers was busy being a teenager in Manhasset.

He began his cartooning career as a high school student when his art teacher encouraged him to submit drawings to the school newspaper. Lubbers’ highlighted MHS sports’ heroes in the “Portrait of an Athlete” style of the great New York World Telegram cartoonist, Willard Mullins.

Attracted by the clever illustrations and quips, the editor of the Manhasset Mail coerced Arthur Wright of Wright’s Hardware, to pay the young artist $5 a week to create ads featuring comic interpretations of locals.  Lubbers’ distinct caricatures, of well-known Manhasset folks praising Wright’s, increased subscriptions to the fledgling weekly.

During that time, Bob had found an old violin in his grandfather’s closet and was soon learning how to play it in the high school’s orchestra.

As Bob tells it: “Someone must have heard the sound of music emanating from 189 Ryder because Joe Simmons, a trombonist and MHS junior, called.  He asked me to audition for a group being formed by a local clarinetist (Joe Pavlica). They’d been hired to play at the 1935 MHS Senior Prom and already had a drummer, a piano player and a base fiddler. Joe signed me on. I felt pretty cool - a 13-year old swinging on a fiddle.”

This was when radio was king - and Martin Block’s show “Make Believe Ballroom,” was listened to by every teenager in the metropolitan area. The song of the day was Goodie, Goodie:

         “So ya met someone who set ya back on your heels.  Goodie, goodie. 

          So ya met someone and now ya know how it feels. Goodie, goodie.”

The song had swept the country by storm, but the sheet music wasn’t available yet.

“So, we played it by ear,” Bob remembers. “You know, like Dixieland - right from the heart, with some frisky fiddle harmonics.  ‘Hoo-ray and Hallellujah, you had it comin’ to ya’. Goodie, goodie for you...’  Wow!  That MHS prom was a blast.”

Soon enough however, Bob ditched the fiddle for a trombone and joined the MHS Marching and Concert Bands.  It would turn out to be a wise choice.

“Ever since, that was it,” he says.  “All the good things in my life came to me through two things:  music and art. One would be my long life’s career, the other my lifelong hobby.”

It was in his MHS art class that Bob met Grace Oestreich, who had been

born in town at 30 Summit Drive, but Bob had never seen her before that day in high school.

The two became inseparable. They talked and flirted so much, the teacher sent them to another room where their romance blossomed.

Then came more music as Bob worked on his embouchure.

Hearing a pitch on the Tommy Dorsey Radio Hour for brass musicians to play in an Amateur Hour, Lubbers reported to 30 Rockefeller Center in the city to audition in 1938. He walked down the hall carrying his trombone and a toilet plunger cap, hoping they wouldn’t ask him to read music and hardly noticing Boris Karloff was walking towards him.

Lubbers played “Wabash Canonball” and won $75, which his father matched so Bob could buy a 1934 Ford Phaeton. The car provided transportation to his new gig, playing with a band at the White Horse Tavern on Post Avenue in Westbury. 

Bob was feeling good. He had a car.  His cartoons were a hit. He had a beautiful girlfriend, a regular music gig, and an open invitation to play with the groups who made the MHS GO dances jive. It just didn’t get any better.

Sometimes while playing at those dances, he enjoyed the best of two worlds.  He’d blast a hot Lindy “for the MHS jitter-buggers,” then sit out a slow tune to dance “cheek to cheek with my girl.”

After the GO dances, he and Grace would drive all the way over to Jericho Turnpike’s Howard Johnsons to sample a few of those 28 ice cream flavors.

Or else they’d go to Milo and George’s and get a hand packed pint of vanilla, with two wooden spoons, for 50 cents.  On those nights Bob and Grace would share the treat while “schmoozing in the Phaeton after riding through a secret entry off Plandome down a two-rut, dirt trail to a little beach where the moonlight glistened on Manhasset Bay.”

When he wasn’t with Grace, he was answering the call of the LIRR trestle challenge which seemed to have been heard by all Manhasset boys for a number of decades.

The rite of passage in Bob’s time involved a teen boy walking across the rickety expanse, 100’ above the estuaries of the Bay, to Great Neck -  while a train was coming towards him.

Lubbers recalls flattening himself against the trestle’s fencing, feeling the horrific shake and the long whoosh of the train as it passed. When it was over, with his heart pounding in his chest, he felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.

I asked him if this made him eligible for a fraternity. He quipped, with his 90 year old blue eyes shining: “Not unless it was I Felta Thigh.”

Following high school, Lubbers followed his art teacher’s advice again and was accepted into the prestigious Art Students League on 57th Street in Manhattan. Known for its founding by artists in 1875 to be “run by artists for artists,” the classes provided Lubbers with the fundamentals he needed to launch his career as a cartoonist. He studied for two years with famed instructors like George Bridgman, but one day the time came to leave:

“My pal Stan Drake [also an accomplished cartoonist] and I left Bridgman's life class, marched down to Centaur Comics, and sold the comic mag features we'd created. Before long I was doing features at Fiction House.”

Best known for its pin-up style “good girl art,” Fiction House and Bob’s years of drawing headlights and thighs were a natural blend, until World War II broke out just after Bob had married his girl, Grace.

Bob says what followed was an incredible string of serendipitous events that framed his life.

First, remembering his father’s WWI flights, he signed on with the U.S.  Air Corps, even though Ken Molloy and the rest of Manhasset’s eligible youths were enlisting in the Navy.

Bob trained to be a waist-gunner, but got swit ched from a crew at the last minute to fill in for a radio operator on another run.

Lubbers’ originally scheduled flight went down in a German field where the farmers pitchforked the entire crew to death. He knew he’d drawn a lucky straw on that mission and the rest he flew - unlike the seven Manhasset boys who never made it home from the war.

When it was all finally over Fiction House welcomed Lubbers back, a small stroke of serendipity that was followed a few years later by perfect timing.

In 1950, Lubbers’ mentor - Abbie an’ Slats cartoonist, Raeburn Van Buren - told him the Tarzan artist at United Features was leaving.

Thinking back to his days swinging on Munsey Park liana vines, Lubbers made up a sample book that won him the job and an eventual membership in the National Cartoon Society, “where I met all my heroes,” Lubbers says.

From there, Bob’s life was sheer good fortune.

Soon he and Grace started a family with the birth of their daughter, Wendy, in 1953 which was followed in no time by a huge break.

In 1954, Lubbers met Al Capp, the mega-star creator of L’il  Abner, who asked him to “Come up and see me at Noon tomorrow. I’m at the Waldorf Astoria.”

Lubbers waited in the lobby “forever,” until Capp finally rang for him to come to his suite. On his way in the door, Bob was passed by a very disheveled looking blonde on her way out.

“Capp gave me a great shot to draw with his studio of artists,“ Lubbers recalls, adding that those years put him into a whole new world of driven New York artists.

In time Lubbers became one of them, writing and drawing the story lines of as many as five different strips a day. His work covers an amazing spectrum of images from The Saint to Secret Agent X-9 (as Bob Lewis), and Long Sam - a gorgeous hillbilly imagined by Al Capp, but given life by Bob Lubbers.

The daily newspapers had a six week lead and Sunday editions, only two weeks; Lubbers was always on deadline for something.

As hectic as they were, Lubbers has amazing tales of the those days.

On the dark side, there are yarns about receiving Capp’s “cigar-stinking packets of vulgar ideas that I’d have to clean up every week,” and the insanity of the years Capp hid in a hospital while under investigation for two sodomy charges by college girls.

But there are also bright stories about the fun times.  There was the day Carol Burnett called to say she loved his work or the night he, Grace, Bob Jr. and Wendy had front row seats at Broadway’s production of “L’il Abner“ with Julie Newmar playing Passionata Von Climax.

Back home in Manhasset, Grace gave birth to Robert Winters Lubbers in 1958, and Bob joined North Hempstead Country Club in 1959. There, he played golf twice a week with a foursome that included his dear friend, John Gambling Sr., until the WOR radio host’s death.

The years passed. Bob went to the games at MHS fields, stood on Plandome Road cheering the marchers in all the parades, and couldn’t believe it when his kids graduated from  MHS, as he and Grace had done.

He rode the same train his dad had ridden into the city, and came home to the same town. Manhasset remained static until the 1980s when little changes took away landmarks and big money tore down perfectly fine center-hall, Colonials to build mega-mansions with three-car garages.

But Bob didn’t change; he is still all about art and music.

He has been known to scoop up the mud from a brook to sculpt it into Grace’s profile on the spot.  Once on a whim, he created a crossword puzzle that was not only published in the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine, but which also appears in their bound copy of the 50 greatest puzzles of all time.

He played the trombone well into his 70s, and in his 90s is working on restoring his embouchure.

While I’m visiting with him he shows me a graphic comic book he illustrated tracing the history of his mother’s family.

Isabelle Bartow’s tree dates back to 1683. Bob’s beautifully drawn story tells of the Barteau’s escape from France to a farm in Flushing before settling in Huntington, and later, Brooklyn. That’s all before Isabelle moved to Manhasset in 1930 with her husband and two boys to find a future in the newly incorporated Village of Munsey Park.

Sixty years later, Bob is still here.  He lost “his sweetheart Grace,” in 2000, 62 years after they met and 57 years following their marriage.

But there was another bit of serendipity in store for Lubbers in his 80s when he met Siegie Konrad while taking an art class in Manhasset.

Siegie lived in Manhasset too, but they’d never met before - and just like the first time he met a sweetheart in an art class and married her, Bob hasn’t left Siegie’s side since.

We sit around the dining room table in their Marlboro Road home and enjoy a delightful lunch filled with stories, most of which you’ll have to wait for because this multi-talented artist is currently writing a memoir about his days as a cartoonist. 

This is his Manhasset story -  the one about a boy who loved to draw and play music who was raised in a Village built by an art museum where giving your neighbor a hand up set the tone for the generations who followed.

 *Atiyeh, Phillip. “A History of Munsey Park.” http://www.munseypark.org/village-history

 *from 2011 interview for Manhasset Stories, Vol. 2 

 by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser http://amzn.to/100iux7 -  available in ebook or paperback