Blog Archives

SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

10/30/2018

Hallowe’en is a big deal at InfoAge.

Director Fred Carl and his band of enthusiastic volunteers have made great progress in taming and refurbishing the interior spaces, including some truly stunning exhibits - space exploration, of course, but also World Wars I and II, vintage computers, shipwrecks, model railroads, and military technology, to name a few.

The grounds, however, are still largely frozen in time, dotted with an assortment of mobile radar units, jeeps, and outbuildings ranging from the merely quirky to the downright bizarre.

Making a virtue of necessity, InfoAge has embraced its own spookiness by turning the run-up to Hallowe’en into a month-long fear-fest. Every Friday and Saturday of October, from 7-11pm, Camp Evans Base of Terror (CEBOT) is open for business. It’s the major fund-raiser of the year.

* * * * *

When my husband and I traveled to New Jersey in August of 2017 to celebrate my father’s election to the InfoAge Wall of Fame, we devoted an afternoon to an unofficial self-guided tour of the grounds. Fortunately the campus is open to the public whenever nothing else is going on, and no one seemed to mind if we wandered around staring and taking photographs .

All around us were the ghosts of Hallowe’ens past - both the mysterious ruined structures and props created for CEBOT events.

Top billing in the annual Hallowe'en extravaganzas deservedly goes to Camp Evans' unique collection of Dymaxion Deployment Units or DDU's, small yurt-like structures designed by Buckminster Fuller.

Along with the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Marshall McLuhan, Woodstock, and psychedelia, Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was part of the interior landscape of my generation. It was he who popularized the geodesic dome, a distinctive hemispherical shape composed of triangular surfaces that distribute structural stress to maximize strength and stability. The geodesic dome was the darling of not one but two World's Fairs, in New York in 1964 and Montreal in 1967.

Not until I wrote a blog post on Buckminster Fulle r, however, did I learn about his earlier work, before the geodesic dome catapulted him to fame, and about the dymaxion concept - dynamic, maximum, and tension - which Fuller applied to a whole spectrum of creations ranging from dwellings to maps to sleep-wake cycles, all sharing the goal of achieving “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."

The DDU was the only Dymaxion concept that ever came close to being mass-produced - if double or low-triple digits can be called mass-produced. Yet ironically it was in some ways more Dymaxion in name than in fact, having as much in common with the corrugated sheet metal grain bins it was modeled on as with the much more elaborate and sophisticated Dymaxion house. Still, it filled a wartime need for cheap, sturdy, easily assembled portable structures that could be used as houses, emergency shelters, and specialized work spaces, and it might have enjoyed even greater success had not the wartime demand for steel brought production to a halt. Between 1941 and 1943, around 28 DDU’s were ordered and installed on circular concrete pads at Camp Evans where they were used for conducting hazardous procedures or for storage.

I have no idea what Fred actually said when he first encountered these odd yurt-like structures in the early 1990s, but it must have been something along the lines of “What the heck are these?” It wasn’t till 1996 that the mystery was finally solved, with the completion of an historic resources study conducted by the Department of Defense.

When the campus was divided between InfoAge and the Wall branch of Brookdale Community College, the DDUs that were on the Brookdale property were disposed of. At this point only a fraction of the original structures remain, but the InfoAge collection is still probably the largest assemblage of DDUs anywhere in the world. A 2013 NYTimes article spoke of twelve, but I only counted eleven during our visit.

Unfortunately, most of the survivors are in serious disrepair. One can only hope that funds will be found to preserve and restore these historic treasures.

* * * * *

Hallowe'en is also a big deal for the history of Project Diana and for this blog because it's the 104th anniversary of the birth of E. King Stodola. Here he is with his little brother Quentin; I'm not sure it was actually Hallowe'en but both boys are in costume so - close enough. Happy birthday, Dad, I miss you!

0 Comments

MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

10/2/2018

0 Comments

Shortly before my uncle Quentin was born in 1918, when my father was around 4 years old, his family left Brooklyn and moved to the Boston area, where they lived for several years in a series of apartments in a cluster of Boston suburbs - Milton, Wellesley, Brookline, Auburndale.

My dad's maternal grandparents, Arthur and Vergetta Sayers King, joined them in Wellesley sometime between 1920, when the census showed them as living in Lakewood, New Jersey, and 1924, when they were ensconced in a flat at 5 Waban Street. According to my father, they actually lived with the Stodolas for awhile, and my father and his grandfather bonded over a shared passion for butterfly-collecting. One of their neighbors, a Mr Denton, sold them cocoons for a nickel apiece.

5 Waban Street, where my great grandparents lived in Wellesley, shown today

674 Washington St, Brookline, MA, a onetime Stodola address, as it looks now

The Massachusetts years were apparently happy times for my father. For a man who claimed to remember little of his childhood, he came up with quite a few touching or amusing anecdotes. His earliest memories were of a St Bernard-Newfoundland mix named Sandy that they adopted in Milton. Later the family moved to the larger and more urban town of Wellesley, where after attending the Hunnewell Elementary school, my father was transferred to a rapid-promotion class in a Wellesley Hills school that enabled him to complete three years' work in two. Sandy's Wellesley career was less distinguished - he was jailed for fighting with the town clerk's dog.

My dad and Sandy, playing in the snow.

The Hunnewell school as it looked when my dad was enrolled; it is in a different location today.

Mr Denton the butterfly collector was also an avid fisherman and took my father fishing in his canoe. Another neighbor, Thomas Reed, was a craftsman who fashioned a washing machine from a butter tub and encouraged my father's interest in learning how things worked - which he pursued by walking several miles to the Waltham Woolworth's to buy electrical gadgets. His well-to-do friends the Wentworths invited him to their summer home near Lake Massapoag in Sharon, where he and the Wentworth children made ice cream in a hand-operated freezer and enjoyed songfests at a nearby Salvation Army camp. The Wentworths' maid once scolded the children for too much rough-housing - only to discover there had been an earthquake!

* * * * *

As I noted in an earlier post, my grandmother was a professional elocutionist who also painted, acted, and wrote poetry and plays; my grandfather was a concert pianist, and the pair often gave joint performances. My father described them, especially his mother, as "pursuers of causes" who entertained a succession of artists and intellectuals - in some instances people who for political or personal reasons might not have been so warmly welcomed elsewhere.

Because of this, and because Wellesley College was the center of a yeasty intellectual community, my father and his two younger brothers must have been exposed to a number of minor and perhaps even major literary lights. Two in particular were singled out in our oral history interview:

* * * * *

The first was Katharine Lee Bates. Although she is best known as the author of “America the Beautiful,” some of her admirers may be surprised to learn about the breadth of her activities and interests, as well as about her long and productive academic career.

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1859. Her father, a Congregationalist pastor, died a few weeks after she was born, and she was raised mainly by her mother, a graduate of the Mt Holyoke Seminary for women. She herself attended Wellesley College and subsequently studied at Oxford University. After teaching for several years at the secondary school level, she joined the Wellesley faculty, starting as an instructor and ultimately reaching the rank of full professor of English Literature. In addition to being a popular teacher and mentor, she was a scholar, a prolific poet and novelist, a journalist, and an activist who supported the rights of women, people of color, workers, immigrants, the poor, and oppressed populations in general. She was an advocate for the League of Nations and opposed the American policy of isolationism. She has been credited with helping to found the field of American literature by creating a new college course and writing one of the first textbooks on the subject. She died in 1929.

She was courted seriously by at least two men and appears to have reciprocated their feelings, but in the end she somehow couldn't find a way to remain in the same place with them long enough to cement the relationships. By contrast, she managed to live for 25 years with her beloved friend and fellow scholar Katharine Coman, until Coman's death from breast cancer in 1915, in an arrangement commonly referred to as a "Boston marriage" (or sometimes a "Wellesley marriage"). The exact nature of these close and intense relationships has been much debated, but further speculation about the two Katharines is beyond the scope of this essay.

Bates began writing "America the Beautiful" in 1893, while on a train trip to Colorado ending at Pike's Peak, and published it as a poem two years later. She reworked the words many times, though the basic bones of the piece remained mostly the same. It has been set to music at least 75 times; the one with which we're most familiar was written by Samuel A. Ward in 1882 for his hymn "Materna." I count myself among the many who believe this joyous paean to the multifaceted beauty of our land would make a far more appropriate national anthem than the warlike text of the "Star-Spangled Banner," penned by a slave-owning lawyer and set to the almost unsingable tune of a rowdy English drinking song.

According to my father, Bates was one of my grandmother's elocution students. Since she retired from Wellesley in 1925 at the age of 66, after decades of lecturing, one might well wonder why she would want or need elocution lessons. In fact, Katharine did study elocution in 1885 (before my grandmother was born!) when she was preparing to teach at Wellesley, but Melinda Ponder, author of a fascinating biography of Bates published in 2017, told me she had never come across any indication in Bates's notes or diaries of her ever having done so again. We do know, however, that Bates "abominated" lecturing and all her life considered herself to be a poor public speaker.

Two possibilities, then: 1) She may have anticipated (correctly) being in great demand as a lecturer to wider and more varied audiences after retirement and wished to hone her public speaking skills further. 2) She was part of my grandparents' social circle and visited their home, but my father (who was only a boy at the time) was mistaken about her having studied elocution with his mother. We will likely never know.

* * * * *

Another visitor to the Stodola home was Mary Antin, an immigrant writer and activist best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land.

Antin was born in 1881 to a Jewish family living in present day Belarus. Her father emigrated to Boston in 1891; his wife and six children joined him three years later. Mary completed her elementary school education and attended the Girls' Latin School, now the Boston Latin Academy.

In 1901, she married Amadeus William Grabaum, a German geologist at Columbia University, and moved to New York, where she attended Barnard and Columbia Teachers' College.

Among her new friends in New York was Josephine Lazarus, sister of the poet Emma Lazarus, author of the sonnet “The New Colossus," once mounted on the Statue of Liberty. (Its most famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ the wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”) Josephine Lazarus urged Antin to write her autobiography; after Lazarus' death in 1910, she pushed forward with the project as a tribute to her friend. In The Promised Land, she gave an account of the treatment of Jews in Czarist Russia and described her own education and assimilation in her adopted homeland. No other narrative has improved upon the discernment and authenticity with which she captured the Jewish immigrant experience.

In 1914, she published her last full-length work,They Who Knock at our Gates, protesting the movement to restrict immigration. The book was well-received but failed to achieve the popularity of The Promised Land.

Antin must have been near 40, and at a very sad moment in her life, when she encountered the young King Stodola. During World War I, while she campaigned on behalf of the Allies, her husband threw his support to his native Germany. The resulting rift led to their separation. At the end of the War, her husband was forced to leave Columbia and went to China to rebuild his career - in fact, he is known as the "father of Chinese geology." Although they continued to correspond, Antin and her husband never saw each other again. She never fully recovered from this devastating blow.

After the War, with scant hope of ever being reunited with her husband, she moved from New York to the Boston area, where her family still resided, and this is when she was presumably drawn into my grandparents' orbit.

Antin died of cancer in 1949.

* * * * *

Sadly, Arthur King died in Wellesley in 1925. Around the same time, my grandfather was offered a position as training director for the Kingsport Press in Kingsport, Tennessee. The whole family, including Sandy the dog, piled into their Model T touring car and laborously plowed their way south along potholed roads coated with Kentucky red mud. A year later Vergetta died in Kingsport, either during a visit or perhaps more likely because she accompanied her only daughter when the family moved. Vergie's remains were returned to Wellesley for burial alongside her husband.

My grandmother, Beatrice King Stodola, in Tennessee with her sons King, Sid, and Quentin

Kingsport in the 1920s was something of a boom town, boasting the Eastman Chemical Company and a large paper mill in addition to the Kingsport Press. After gaining a foothold there, my grandfather was able to set up his own multigraph business, where my father helped him with printing, typography, and composition.

But as my father told it, Kingsport also had a darker side: The Ku Klux Klan was active, and the men carried revolvers in their coat pockets. My grandmother attended a small Episcopal church in a YMCA that was regarded with suspicion because it was considered to be just short of Roman Catholicism.

And so the family's Boston idyl came to an end - and along with it, my father's carefree childhood. His immediate future held a move to junior high school and the turbulent days of preadolescence, compounded by a fair dose of culture shock. For him and his younger brothers, there would be no more rubbing elbows with the literati.

The family remained in Kingsport though my father's junior high school years, then returned to New York in time for him to attend Brooklyn Technical High School.

The rest, as they say, is history.

0 Comments

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

CONNECT WITH CINDY
Facebook: @cynthia.s.pomerleau
Twitter: @Cindy_Pomerleau

EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION
Send me your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive email notifications of new posts.

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories

TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)