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May 15, 2006
Two Goodbyes and One Hello
(1) For many of my growing up years, father would take writing trips to a cabin on the south end of Whidbey Island. At first he simply borrowed the place. Then he bought it from Sylvia Wells-Henderson, whose father had built all but the addition with the indoor bathroom. The cabin came with a name: Stone Bank. But no electricity, and the water only ran if you filled the buckets half-way and slopped them down the drive. It had a wonderful old wood stove (the only thing of value vandals didn't steal, in the end), and a cranky, propane-powered refrigerator that was rarely used. There he wrote the 545-page book (Royal Government in Colonial Brazil) which won tenure, on a portable Smith-Carona.
Later I started going up for weekends with him. My older brother was an Eagle Scout, but I was far too picky an eater not to have starved while hiking, nor did I fancy using a tree for a bathroom. Nor, I suppose, did I like the boys in his Troop. So father and I went to the cabin and cut wood, hauled water, read books, played cribbage. Which, by way of shortening a dull story involving general clumsiness and a chainsaw, is how I came to spend the summer of 1973 watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings. PBS offered additional perspective by replaying the Army-McCarthy hearings in between sessions.
It was, in the end, one of our Constitution's finest hours. I can remember almost running (there were stitches across one knee; I didn't run that summer) upstairs to tell my mother that Nixon was cooked when, just before lunch, the country heard testimony from Alexander Butterfield that the White House had taped all its conversation. I was, in the end, right, though it took more than a year (to borrow a once-celebrated phrase) for the dead rat to be tossed from the kitchen. And I can remember doing the math over and over again and calculating that, if all went well, I would run for president in 2004.
I didn't understand about money back then. Still don't, in some ways.
A later encounter with defense attorney John Henry Brown (at a law & justice workshop my junior year of high school) slowly convinced me not to pursue a career in law. Somehow, though we were never a family to attend church, I was imprinted with a rigid sense of right and wrong that would not have flourished amid the rough and tumble of the criminal court system. Later I found, to my surprise, that I lacked the ego and arrogance for politics (or, rather, that I preferred to manage those assets differently, that they were not attributes to be proud of); and, more particularly, that those doors would not open for me.
And so I have come to say goodbye to "The West Wing," farewell to the illusion of government as I wished it to be, government service as I yearned once to do. It speaks to some deep desire within society that the show lasted seven years, and to a kind of giving-up that ratings died this last season. Kerry fatigue, I guess. Still, I will always admire their careful, nimble, touching (and incredibly fast) response to 9/11, and that particular vision of how our government could be. The farewell show was anticlimactic. "Commander In Chief" is no substitute. Perhaps we should rouse ourselves and attend to what our real government is about.
(2) One byproduct of Watergate was that journalism suddenly seemed a whole lot more attractive. In truth I was drawn into my high school newspaper not by Woodward & Bernstein but by the fact that my brother's favorite teacher had quit coaching the debate team and was now newspaper adviser. (And thanks to Mrs. Lemming I'll never type adviser with an o. Among other things.) The Shorecrest Highland Piper was produced at a shop just off Stone Way in Wallingford called SeaGraphics, owned by Stan and Dorothy Stapp, whose son had run around some with my brother. After two years of producing the Piper there, I'd made friends with some of the staff. That, along with a couple cases of Coors beer (don't ask; it was once a luxury item) and the fact that some of the employees had ljust eft to form their own business, explained how I came to be hired as an apprentice typesetter (go-fer) on September 7, 1977.
SeaGraphics occupied a particularly important (if obscure) niche in Seattle publishing. At the same time we and ten other high school newspaper staffs produced our little tabloids there, Maxine Cushing Gray published Northest Arts, Richard T. Jameson published Movietone News, the Seattle Gay News was born, as was the Seattle Sun (which, ultimately, gave birth to The Rocket, where I would come to rest as a rock critic and, still, typesetter; the Sun was the transition newspaper between the hippie Helix and the yuppie Weekly). A lot of us got various kinds of starts at Stan Stapp's business, and though he sold it shortly after I began there (to a company who had no notion of what to do with the property, and closed it about a year later), I remain grateful to him for my entry into this field. He was, in every way that I could know, a good man, and I was much saddened to hear of his passing yesterday.
(3) Finally...though it is the mission of this site to, y'know, sell the magazine we publish, it is also our job to share good music. And good music writing. And so, with a nod to Paul Cantin, who first directed me to its pages, I should like to draw your attention to a relatively new title on the newsstand called waxpoetics: hip-hop, jazz, funk, & soul. It is true that I would be drawn to any magazine with Bill Withers on the cover; it is also true that we have begun slowly exploring soul in ND's pages, which means I have yet more music to learn about and more words to read. But it's a beautiful magazine, well-written, lovingly designed, and indepensible. The issue at hand is their sixteenth. Long may they run.
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