May 15, 2013

by James Smart

A naval battle on the Delaware

      It was this time of year in 1776 that the banks of the Delaware River were lined with spectators watching a naval battle.

      About 9 A.M. on May 6, a rider galloped into town from Delaware to report that two of His Majesty's warships were coming up the river. In the lead was HMS Roebuck, a 44-gun ship with a crew of 280. Following  was the HMS Liverpool, 28 guns and 100 men, with some frigates and other smaller vessels,

      All crews of the Pennsylvania Navy were called to their boats, and artillerymen were sent down to Fort Island (a year later to be named Fort Mifflin.). The navy began moving out fire rafts, designed to hit and burn enemy ships. Next morning, oarsmen began rowing 13 one-cannon galleys down the river.

      Pennsylvania's flagship, the 38-gun Montgomery, set sail, accompanied by a floating cannon battery, the Arnold. The fleet assembled off Hog Island.

      The British armada was cruising up the river, capturing small American ships and making stops ashore to seize supplies from inhabitants. Sailors butchered cattle and took the meat on board.

      Anchored off the Christiana River, Capt. Andrew Snape Hamond, in command of the Roebuck, sent  a man with a flag of truce to Philadelphia. He carried a letter from Capt. Henry Bellew of the Liverpool, asking for a safe conduct pass for Mrs. Bellew to travel to New England and visit relatives there.

      The Pennsylvania and British fleets came within sight of each other on the 8th. The American crafts were low in the water, difficult targets for the British guns.

About 2 P. M., cannons from some of the row galleys fired the first shots. The British ships swung around broadside, the Roebuck's bow pointing east and the Liverpool's to the west. The galleys stayed about a mile away.

      There was heavy firing for two hours. Trying to pull within range of the galleys, the Roebuck ran aground on the Jersey side. A sailing ship of that size was built for fighting at sea., not for maneuvering in a river.

      The ship tilted so close to the water that its gun ports had to be closed. The galleys withdrew when ammunition ran short. Neither side suffered much damage or casualties..

      The Roebuck was afloat by dawn, and started toward the Pennsylvania fleet. But Hamond ran into an area with only six inches clearance to the river bottom, and withdrew. The Americans, re-supplied with ammunition, pursued.

      A four hour exchange of fire thundered in the afternoon. Hamond later reported that the Pennsylvanians "fired away seven tons of powder without doing us the least mischief," but most observers said the Roebuck took a beating. Bellew wrote detailed reports of damage on the Liverpool

      Both sides drew back. The British ships lay at anchor for three days, making repairs.

A Pennsylvania officer, under flag of truce, dropped in on the Liverpool to offer to escort Mrs. Bellew as she started her trip to New England. Her husband grumbled that "the inhabitants of America could never be capable of showing civility to any person after this," and refused to let her go.

      The British ships moved down to near Lewes on the 15th, and on the 16th set out to sea. It was Philadelphia's first taste of war.

* * *

May 8, 2013

by James Smart

If your mother says she loves you. . .

     Some of those jolly jokesters called computer hackers oozed out a fake Associated Press news bulletin a few weeks back, claiming that bombs had gone off in the White House. Many of the twits who follow Twitter took it as electronic gospel,

     Even the stock market reacted, though it will react to almost anything. You might think that even stock brokers and other excitable people would check another source before passing along, or acting upon, an announcement that dramatic and important, and unlikely.

     The AARP, the geezers' collective, constantly warns its members about all sorts of proposals that, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The same reasoning might be applied to news reports: If a news flash sounds as spectacular as the plot of a Jason Bourne movie, it probably is.

     Any old time newspaper reporter knows that, even with deadlines and confusion and lack of informants, he must try to find one or two other sources to confirm a report. Don't trust that first piece of information.

     The ancient dictum of the ink-smeared journalist was, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

     The fact that the White House information seemed to be emitted by the Associated Press might be offered as an excuse for accepting it. But another factor is involved. Many an experienced journalist develops a sort of sixth sense, a blend of experience, good memory, skepticism, caution and good luck, that makes him greet some incoming information by muttering, "That doesn't sound right."

     The hacking episode reminded me of a old Philadelphia newspaper yarn. One day in 1918, the telegraph wires hummed with a report that the World War was over. (Unlike today, information then wasn't wireless; it was wiremore.)

     Most of the eight other Philadelphia dailies rushed extra editions onto the street. New York front pages went wild. But some details didn't sound right to William B. Craig, the young city editor who was in charge in the Evening Bulletin newsroom at Juniper and Filbert Sts. Over anguished objections from his staff, Craig didn't publish the dispatch.

     The report was a mistake, possibly a deliberate one. The next day, other newspapers published embarrassed apologies. The Bulletin front page headline smugly announced, "False Armistice Report Stirs Nation."

     There's similar tale from 90 years ago or so. A Philadelphia reporter (I don't remember the newspapers involved) acquired a girl friend who was a switchboard operator at City Hall. Men from rival papers detected that the young woman was listening in on reporters' calls to their offices, and relaying their reports to her boy friend.

     By prearrangement, a reporter called his office just at the suspected poacher's deadline, and relayed fake details of an incident in a vaudeville theater. An acrobat had slipped off his trapeze and crashed into the audience, injuring several people.

     Sure enough, the false story appeared in the newspaper of the thieving reporter. He and his girl friend were in big trouble.

     But there was no Twitter in those days. And the stock market was not affected.

* * *

May 1, 2013

by James Smart

Zipping through the tree tops

      There has been a lot of discussion and ruminating about the proposal to dangle a network of ropes, cables, platforms and zip lines in the Wissahickon treetops near Henry and Wigard Aves. Opinions vary. You can count on opinions to do that.

      The plan wouldn't hurt the environment all that much. There are trees out the wazoo in the thick wooded area at Wigard between Henry and the creek, down at Valley Green. Those acres of  trees would hardly notice a little hardware drooping from the canopy here and there.

      The parks and recreation big shots say that the opportunity to do some arboreal zipping would give teenagers and young adults the opportunity to learn about the natural environment. That's nice, but a bit counterintuitive. In the natural environment, zip lines don't grow on trees.

      The whole idea of Fairmount Park from its beginning was to preserve open space and woodland inside the city. Most of the park land is oozing with nature, but the river drives, the statues, the lawn mowers and the walled river embankments are hardly natural. The Wissahickon's woods, stream and open areas are the closest to being unspoiled of any part of the park system.

      Christopher Morley, Philadelphia's all-time best newspaper columnist, 100 years ago described Fairmount Park as "denatured countryside." He also wrote fondly that "The Wissahickon Drive is the last refuge of the foot and hoof."

      It was in his era that those obnoxious newfangled motor cars began using the old Wissahickon Turnpike. It was also just about the time the word "environmentalist" was coined.

      Lovers of the barely blemished woods protested, and ultimately, automobiles were forbidden from the drive, which is itself an intrusion on the forest. How many people have been introduced to the beauties of the natural environment by Forbidden Drive, I don't know.

      I often walk on the Wissahickon, feeling no need to be whizzing through the canopy on a cable. I prefer the lesser pathways, rather than Forbidden Drive. I often walk for miles on a weekday and never encounter another person, neither among nor up in the trees. That's pretty darn natural.

      One surprise in the zip line situation is that the Friends of the Wissahicon organization seems to have no strong objection to the  project. They are in constant battle to drive invasive non-native trees, bushes and weeds out of the woods. I thought they might find an invasion of zip line paraphernalia invasive.

      If the chance to whiz through the high branches really lures some vegetative kids away from the television set and the video games, and gets them involved in the great outdoors, it can be a good idea. Who knows? A sudden fad for hiking, camping, fishing, hunting and the inhaling of fresh air may break out.

      And it may teach over-civilized city kids the importance, to the birds and animals who live in the valley, of the tree canopy, the lower parts of the trees, and all that vegetation and mineralation on the ground. Has anybody asked for an opinion from the birds and animals?

* * *

April 24, 2013

by James Smart

Got pixture fillum in your camra?

      Articles popped up here and there recently about the Philadelphia accent. It was touched off by a study done by William Labov, a linguist who does his linguing at the University of Pennsylvania, and Joseph Fruehwald, a Ph. D. candidate at Penn.

      The two academics merely checked up on whether Philadelphians still pronounce "water" the same way as their grandfathers, and next thing you know, they were being interviewed on National Public Radio and, obviously more importantly, being written about by Clark DeLeone.

      The media got all excited when the scholars suggested that our accent is changing. Why the rest of the civilized world is so interested in the way we talk, and how we pronounce tawk when we do it, puzzles me. We may have an accent, but we make things clear, unlike some folks' accents.

      Ask a guy from Mississippi to pronounce O-I-L, and he'll say "ohl." Ask him to pronounce A-L-L, and he'll say "ohl." Now, there's an accent that  linguists should worry about.

      Accent doesn't fascinate me that much. I'm a writer, and don't have to go around pronouncing things all the time. But I wonder if the accent authorities have noticed some other changes.

      Dr. Labov is three years older than I am, but he was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, which may be too small to have its own accent. He wandered through Harvard and Columbia before encountering Phillyspeak, at age 40. I was born with it.

      For the first five years of my life I spent most of every day with my grandfather, and learned to talk largely from him. He was born in 1862, so I was instilled with pure old-time Philadelphia language.

      I think he would be annoyed that Philadelphians today call their front steps the stoop. They were the steps. The stairway inside the house was the stair-steps.

      And athletic shoes were called sneaks. Anybody who called them sneakers was obviously from out of town, like people with stoops.

      Both of my grandfathers had a Philadelphia characteristic that seems to be lost. They added syllables to words. In the rain, you needed an umberella. You shopped at those new Acamee markets. You donated to the Salavation Army. When your joints ached, it was the arthuritis.

      The added syllables were often offset by dropping them from other words. Put fillum in your camra and take a pixture of.pleece officers at the Mummers Prade.

      Also, I'm with Grandpop that the word creek is pronounced "crick." Some people say that the use of crick shows a connection of Philadelphia and Southern accents. But back in the Middle Ages, give or take an era, before fussy educators began insisting on consistent spelling, writers often spelled creek as cryk, creke, crike or crick, and didn't leave any recordings of how they pronounced it.

      And please, Dr. Labov, don't let your colleagues and students call the university UPenn. That sounds like some football-happy Midwestern state university. No one ever adds a U to UYale or UPrinceton or any other ivy-infested school, and I pray that they never will. It's Penn.

      In fact, to my grandfather, Penn was simply The University, in the same way that Mr. Stokowski's organization was The Orchestra. This is Philadelphia.

* * *

April 17, 2013

by James Smart

The possible perils of de-extinction

      Should scientists resurrect extinct species by cloning? Several articles discussed the possibility recently in the news media and scientific journals..

      Michael Crichton's novel and Steven Spielberg's movie, "Jurassic Park," gave us a scary demonstration of the idea about 20 years ago. But we can relax. Any remaining DNA or other biological tidbits of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or a Velociraptor are too old and worn out to allow the scientists to produce new copies of any annoying giant 245 million year old Jurassic lizards.

      But move up to merely 2.6 million years ago or so, and ingredients for cloning deceased critters might be viable. We could have a Pleistocene Park, with some reconstituted woolly mammoths galumphing here and there.

      Some biological tinkerers have succeeded in reproducing an extinct ibex, a mountain-goatish sort of animal, from left-over genetic parts and attachments, but it didn't live long. Just as well. We already have non-extinct ibexes hopping up and down the Himalayas.

      I suppose the fascination with restoring ancient ibexes is akin to collecting old furniture. You might like to have an antique chair, even though there are lot of modern chairs around.

      Some articles on the subject suggest that scientists could get hold of some passenger pigeon remnants and use them to bring back that legendary bird. Before the passenger pigeon became officially extinct in 1914, there were times out west, if you can believe the old stories, when flocks of passenger pigeons overhead were so thick and vast that they blotted out the sun. I often wondered what fell besides darkness on observers of those massive flights. You know how pigeons are.

      The story is that hunters wiped out the passenger pigeon. There were no authorized endangered species lists in those days. Another thing I've often wondered (being prone to wondering oftenly) was who was the guy who shot the last passenger pigeon? Did he know it was the last one?

      Was the poor bird swooping around up there, trying its best to blot out the sun, wondering where all the other pigeons were and muttering, "I could use a little help with the blotting here."

      My feeling is that rejuvenators of lost species should start out with something small and controllable, such as a passenger pigeon, before they go throwing a bunch of genes in the blender and producing an baby woolly mammoth.

      When the fuzzy little infant grows up to be mammoth, as well as wooly, and starts stomping around the laboratory, they might have a problem on their hands.

      Most folks know the kind of behavior Dr. Frankenstein had to put up with (or think they know, after watching Hollywood's cautionary versions, though I suspect that few have read Mrs. Shelley's long-winded original version from 1818.)

      And in recent years, alleged entertainment has infused our culture with endless variations of possible trouble with zombies and similar undead citizens making nuisances of themselves.

That's why we should start out by cloning the remains of some small, cute little species and see how that works out. We don't want an apocalypse presided over by herds of undead mammoths.

* * *

April 10, 2013

by James Smart

Digging up dead English kings

      The British have accidentally dug up a lot of old kings and other ancient citizens lately. First, some fellows excavating in a parking lot came upon King Richard III's head.

      Then, workers with big boring machines (as in tunneling, not as in being dull), running a new subway under London, came upon a 14th century cemetery full of deceased victims of the Black Plague. Most recently, what are believed to be the remains of King Alfred the Great were removed from a churchyard in southern England..

      The subway borers also came upon a few 68,000 year old mammoth bones, some remnants of ancient Roman ruins, and vestiges of a 16th century mansion with a moat around it. No royal carcasses were uncovered in the subway, so far.

      I've read a bit about Richard III, but didn't know his head was in a parking lot. When Henry Tudor's troops walloped Richard's cavalry on Bosworth Field in 1486, Richard got knocked off his horse. Shakespeare portrays him as offering to swap his kingdom for another horse, but Henry's boys weren't horse traders. They just did Richard in.

      Somebody found Richard's crown under a gorse bush, and stuck it on their leader, who thus became Henry VII on the spot. They loaded Richard's naked body on a pack horse, and hauled it off for burial at Grey Friars' chapel; in Leicester. I don't think the chapel had a parking lot then.

      I've never been a big fan of Alfred the Great. I heard about him in the third grade. We were fed all sorts of folk-taley stuff about kings.

      We heard that King Canute, in the 11th century, believed he had the power to order the tide not to come in. He got fooled, and very wet. We were told how Robert the Bruce, a 14th century Scottish king, was inspired by watching a spider spin a web. (He had a lot of time on his hands at the moment.)

      And we learned that once, when Alfred the Great was hiding from the Danes (something he did a lot of), he took shelter in a peasant's hut. The woman of the house asked him to watch the cakes she was baking, while she went off to do some peasanting.

      Alfred was preoccupied with making battle plans and sharpening his sword and such, and let the cakes burn. When the woman came back and saw the food ruined, she cussed Alfred up and down  in some old original Anglo-Saxon.

      He meekly accepted the scolding, and never mentioned that he was king of anything. We were told that the story revealed how noble and humble he was, but I always suspected that he was just plain scared of the old broad.

      The truth is that Alfred spent most of the Ninth Century trying to keep the Danes out of England, and/or to convert them to Christianity. He won a few battles, but the pesky Danes kept coming back.

      When Alfred and his troops took London back from the Danes in 886, all concerned finally got tired of constant fighting, and the Danes agree to calm down and only take about one-third of England for themselves.

      That never seemed to me like a very good deal for the Anglo-Saxons. But Alfred was Great and I'm not, so what do I know?

      Having an occasional old British king dug up is good fun, and somewhat educational. Who might be next? Edgar the Peaceful? Ethelred the Unready?

* * *

April 3, 2013

by James Smart

Those sneaky killer drones

      It's wrong for somebody to kill somebody. There are a few cheerfully accepted exceptions, such as war, electric chairs, or when the so-and-so has it coming.         

      Ever since Moses came down the hill carrying his top ten list of no-nos, folks have been looking for loopholes, and arguing over if, when, where, why and how it's all right to kill people. And how many..

      The latest factor in this ancient debate is drones. They are airplanes with nobody on board, which sneak up on bad guys (we decide who they are) and let loose rockets that unexpectedly blast the miscreants into smithereens while they are placidly going about their bad-guy business, riding in their cars, or lolling under their own vine and fig tree.

      Occasionally the wrong person gets pulverized. Also occasionally an innocent, or at least much less bad, person or two\ accidentally get included in the mayhem.

      Even excluding the large number of idealists who insist that all war and killing ares poor form and should be abandoned forthwith, there still remain critics who worry about whether the drones are a proper form of assassination, and some who especially feel that elimination of undesirable individuals should not be performed on American soil.

      Among the many aspects of the debate over dronery are intimations in some quarters that using unmanned, or unwomanned, aircraft is poor sportsmanship. The killing should be decently done with someone in the cockpit, not sitting comfortably at a computer in the Midwest, sipping coffee while pulling the trigger.

      Better yet, troops should battle their way in for the job, the way we got Bin Laden. Some folks historically demand that war include risks and carnage on both sides. It's only fair.

      There was a lot of such thinking in 1945. The United States dropped two atomic bombs on  Japan, killing a few hundred thousand people in two bright flashes.

      Americans, and not just firmly anti-war people, have been wringing their hands over that terrible attack for 63 years. If  instead, shiploads of American servicemen had invaded Japan and fought their way to Tokyo non-atomically, incurring the same number of casualties or more, on both sides, people would have just accepted that as the inevitability of war

      And some people seem to find it offensive that drones sneak up on their targets, and the casualties never know what hit them. Nazi rockets dropping on England  75 years ago were like that. It was nerve-wracking; ask any Londoner over 80.

      While the debate over the use of drone bombers stumbles on, I wonder if there are not engineers, scientists and military geniuses at work on the next logical steps. One would be fighter drones, with pilots in comfy armchairs guiding planes in combat with each other, like a video game.

      Soon to follow will be unmanned tanks, remote controlled and self-propelled howitzers and rocket launchers and what-not, and ultimately, robot soldiers.

      Drones may be heading us in the right direction. Since the human race shows few signs of discontinuing wars, and also insists on creating electronic and mechanical devices, maybe we should reduce the amount of lost time, lost limbs and lost lives by letting our machines do the battling for us.

* * *

March 27, 2013

by James Smart

Police headquarters now and later

         There is talk again of  the Police Department abandoning the precast concrete citadel on Race St., and moving headquarters to the sedate old Provident Mutual edifice in West Philly. The idea goes back for a couple of city administrations. This time it may be serious.

         The curvy white Race St. monster opened  in 1963, in the days when police cars were red, as any old Philadelphian will tell you they should be. In that benighted era, to call the cops, you were instructed to dial not 911, but LO-7-5100.

         I remember stopping in at the new building while the police officers were just settling in. I wanted to see what the new reporters' room was like. The press had been stationed for a century or so in a somewhat grotty, yet beloved, chamber on the sixth floor of City Hall. I found some old colleagues in the new quarters, grumbling about the necessity of placing square desks against round walls.

         The circular wings of the building were the dominant topic of conversation. One officer had me stand in a corner of a room to demonstrated that because of the curve, you could not see the equivalent corner at the opposite end. There was joking about the cylindrical elevator cars being "canned people."

         The nickname "Roundhouse" caught on quickly among reporters and cops. I always disliked the moniker. Early new Police Department stationery included "Franklin Square" in the address, and it would have been colorful if police headquarters had become identified by its location, like Scotland Yard in London.

         The proposed new building is more Philadelphia-ish. It stands on what, at the time of the Revolution, was the 112 acre Thomas Harrison farm, between the lines of today's 42nd and 49th Sts., from the Haverford Rd. to south of the line of Market St. The city ran Market St. through the property in 1790.

         The estate, called Mill Creek Farm, had several owners until, in 1841, it was acquired by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, of Pennsylvania Hospital, a pioneer of modern psychiatry. (The American Psychiatric Association was founded in Kirkbride's house near 44th and Market in 1844.)

Mental hospital facilities were built there through the years. Philadelphians referred to the institution just as "Kirkbride's."

         Times changed, and Kirkbride's no longer needed all that space. A "For Sale" sign went up at 46th and Market in July, 1923. The buyer was the Provident Trust.

         The Provident Life and Trust Co., founded by Quakers in 1865, was at Fourth and Chestnut Sts. for many years. New Pennsylvania laws separated banking from insurance in 1924. Provident Mutual was spun off

         The insurance company built a $3 million, five story building of some 200,000 square feet, with an elegant pillared entrance and a domed clock tower. There were recreation fields for the 1,000 employees.

         Times changed again. Provident moved out in 1983, and donated the property to an educational foundation. It has had its ups and downs, but mostly ups. Parks, recreation facilities, public housing and other service buildings surround the big main building, which, one of these days, may be full of cops.

* * *

March 20, 2013

by James Smart

Pieces of paper and PDFs

      The oldest book I own was printed in 1635. Some pages are a bit foxed and spotted, but every word is readable.

      Columns I wrote 20 years ago were stored on five and a quarter inch floppy computer disks. Any computer that now can allow you to read them is an obsolete antique.

      Fortunately, the columns were printed in this and other newspapers, and I have clippings of them. Like the text of that 378 year old book, they are safely and readably stored on pieces of paper.

      The column that you are reading, written on a computer keyboard, is stored somewhere in that mysterious electronic fairyland where bits and bytes and pixels dwell. But, fear not, fellow aging wanderers in the century of processed words. My computer has a printer.

      I can print copies of my column. And when the next new marvelous technology comes along, that makes it impossible to access these words without investing big bucks in the latest paraphernalia that the Neat New Electronic Stuff industry insists we must buy, I'll be able to read my old work the old fashioned way

      You can clip out this column and save it, if you have the inclination. No special equipment is necessary to access it. Well, maybe a lamp. And your bifocals.

      Some modern libraries are making copies of old books, newspapers and documents, and tossing the originals away. This is nothing new, except for the computer's intrusion into the process.

      The first microfilm was created in the earliest days of photography, in 1839, the same year that the first photograph in America was taken here in Philly. Those first microfilm images had to be read under a microscope.

      Preserving newspapers on microfilm had its tiny beginnings in the 1840s. One reason was the development of newsprint, cheap paper made from wood pulp that doesn't last long. Newsprint's low cost led to a boom in the number of newspapers, but the paper was fragile. Sturdier old fashioned paper that had some rag content held up better. A newspaper from the 1830s is likely to be in good shape, while one from the 1930's may be crumbling.

      Old newspapers in libraries tend to be on rolls of microfilm, or since the1960s on microfiche cards. But optical devices are going the way of reading the actual printed paper itself. Computer sorcery such as PDF now makes copies of printed material. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, although it's the electronic device that's portable (unless it's heavy), not the document.

      Well, it's too late for me. I'm as surrounded by electronic devices as the next guy, but my favorite portable format is still printing on paper.

      I've been accumulating books, and other printed odds and ends, since I was first old enough to shell out a dime for a Big Little Book at Woolworths. And if you are old enough to know what Big Little Books were, and what Woolworth's was, I suspect you feel the same way I do.

      And perhaps, 75 or so years from today, some old timer will be confronting some new-fangled form of communication we can't conceive of, and lamenting those simple days of the 2010's, when folks read PDFs on their iPads and Kindles.

      And whoever has my book from 1635 then, if anybody does, will still be able to read it.

* * *

March 13, 2013

by James Smart

Property tax is ancient history

      The City of Philadelphia's Office of Property Assessment web site includes an inspirational little section on the history of real estate taxes. The historical items are apparently an attempt by the Revenue Bureau to soften the blow of the AVI, which I suspect stands for "Awful Valuation Increase."

      The scholars at City Hall begin their history with ancient Mesopotamia. (I use "City Hall" in a generic sense; the assessors actually hang out in the old Curtis Publishing building at 6th and Walnut, which Cyrus H. K. Curtis built in 1895 to publish The Saturday Evening Post and The Ladies Home Journal, and probably has a hefty assessment.)

      Meanwhile, back in Mesopotamia,, say our assessors:

      "The earliest known tax records, dating from approximately six thousand years B. C., are in the form of clay tablets found in the ancient city-state of Lagash in modern day Iraq."

      Great. As if Iraq hasn't annoyed us enough, it turns out to have invented real estate taxes. The city of Lagash, which is called Telloh these days, was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which just about everything in Iraq seems to be.

      French archaeologists excavated the place on and off from 1877 to 1933, and dug up more than 50,000 clay tablets full of Sumerian cuneiform texts, a lot of them real estate tax records. I don't know how many of the taxes were never collected, but if Lagash was like Philly, you can bet it was a lot.

      A famous monument the French excavators uncovered at Lagash was called the Stele of the Vultures by the Lagashian folks. Whether that name reflects the ancient opinion of tax collectors, I can only surmise.

      The assessor history lesson continues with some undated ancient information:

      "In Egypt, tax assessors were highly valued people because of their skills with hieroglyphics and their ability to collect revenue. Often when a king died, the assessor was the only staff person not killed and buried along with the king, so valued was his service."

      I've read some real estate documents that seemed like hieroglyphics, but that's most likely not why our city assessors chose to report on the subject. They were just trying to cover their ass- essments, and to remind us of their own importance. (I wonder if pyramids were assessed at their actual value?)

      As for staff being buried with the king, that was just the ancient Egyptian version of what happens in our era when a new party takes over a government. Pharaohs didn't have such bothers as elections or Civil Service.

      The tax historians then take a leap through the centuries, right up into the Anno Dominies, with their next chronicle:

      "In the 11th century, Lady Godiva rode naked on a white horse through the streets of Coventry, England, to protest the tax assessment on her husband's property. He received an abatement. (In Philadelphia, we have a form you can fill out for that - no horse required."

      Too bad about that form. A lot of male tax payers might accept the higher tax evaluations more cheerfully if they were delivered by naked women, especially ones with well filled-out forms. In this method, too, the horse could be optional.

* * *

March 6, 2013

by James Smart

Ed Shippen's Philadelphia: Population 200

      In an old book, I came upon the fact that it was Edward Shippen's 374th birthday. He was baptized on March 5, 1639, near Leeds, England.

Shippen is little remembered today, but he was one of the men who helped William Penn create his two square mile city in the Pennsylvania wilderness, when the population was about 200 souls.

      Shippen was a 29 year old British businessman when he decided to seek his fortune in the New World. He sailed to Boston, and established himself in business. Three years later, in 1671, he married Elizabeth Lybrand, a Quaker girl.

      The Boston establishment, loyal to King Charles II and the Church of England, had a dim view of those peculiar Quakers. Shippen was lucky. He was only publicly whipped a couple of times for adopting his wife's religion. Other Quakers were being sent to the gallows.

      Elizabeth died in 1688. She had borne eight children. That was a brutal era of poor health and primitive medical care, and lives were often short. Five of the children died young.

      Shippen married Rebeka Richardson, a widow, in 1689.. They had one child, who died in infancy.

      In 1693, a meteor zoomed over Boston, scaring the religious folks. They were sure that God was threatening them for not hanging enough Quakers. The Shippens decided to move to Philadelphia.

      Rebeka's late husband had thought of relocating to the new Quaker city, and had bought 260 acres around what, according to William Penn's street plan for the rising city, ran roughly east from Second St., south from Spruce St. down to Dock Creek.

      The Shippens moved there, and built the biggest house in town. There was a large orchard out back, and a lawn down to the creek, where they kept a herd of deer.

      They also built a country house, way out in the sticks, at what we would call the southwest corner of Broad and South Sts. They used their coach, the biggest in town, on the road between the two properties. It was called Shippen's Lane until 1870, when it was renamed Bainbridge St.

      Ed Shippen plunged right into local politics, and quickly became a leader. He was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1695, and became Chief Justice in 1699.

      When William Penn issued the first city charter in 1701, he appointed Shippen the new mayor. Shippen also was president of the Governor's Council from 1702 to 1704, and for six months was acting governor.

      Rebeka died in 1704. In 1706, at age 67, Shippen married Elizabeth James, a widow from Bristol, England.. She was not a Quaker, and he lapsed back into orthodoxy, which weakened his position with the Quaker leaders. It was an ironic reverse of his days in Boston. He retired, but continued to put his opinions into the ears of the establishment.

      Edward Shippen died in 1712. He had seen his city grow from a few hundred residents to more than 2,000.

      His descendants were influential in Philadelphia for generations. Perhaps the best remembered Shippen now is Peggy Shippen, who married Benedict Arnold. She was Edward's great-great-granddaughter.

      There are surely some Shippen descendants here and there today. I wonder if they ever celebrate the old guy's birthday?

* * *

February 27, 2013

by James Smart

The first thing to privatize

      Gov. Tom Corbett is all excited by the prospect of running around privatizing things. He wants to privatize the lottery that our fair commonwealth has been peddling for 40 years, and the state liquor emporiums that the state established in the year Prohibition ended and President Roosevelt declared a bank holiday (maybe not entirely coincidentally.)

      The governor sees a lot of economic benefit in privatizing state entities.  And, wouldn't it set a good example if he led the way by privatizing the governor's office?

      A private industry management would probably swoop in there and save the state a lot of money. There are executives who specialize in moving in on a company and firing everybody in sight

      The average salary of our nation's 50 governors is only $128,735 a year. Gov. Corbett's $174,914 salary is sixth on the national list.

      A new CEO would probably raise that salary, and arrange for perks and bonuses for himself. You know how CEO's are.

      But we have a Lt. Governor and a Chief of Staff and four Deputy Governors and a Secretary of the Commonwealth, whatever that is. A privatizer would cut some fat out of that carcass of six-figure salaries.

      Then there are jobs like Energy Executive, and Director of Planning and Policy. The new boss would be calling them in and asking, "Just what exactly is it you do?"

      There is also the Attorney General. A business executive might find it more economical to deal with an outside law firm, and get rid of the Attorney General. This is an idea that, at the moment, might warm Gov. Corbett's heart.

      On a state Web site, I counted 42 state departments, bureaus, offices, commissions, agencies, systems, boards and administrations. One of those corporate hatchetpersons who comes in to rejuvenate a corporation would be going through that bunch like an all-star running back through an Andy Reid defense.

      A private executive would still have to deal with a bunch of politicians who insist on continually making laws. But corporate top guns know how to organize a congenial board of directors to back them up,  and would treat legislation like proxy votes at the annual meeting, and do as they pleased.

      Privatization would leave the governor's office in the capitol empty, with its fine old wood paneling and a great big reception room. It could be leased for use as a fancy liquor store that sold lottery tickets.

      The privatized liquor business seems to make a little sense. The governor claims that auctioning off 1,200 liquor licenses would bring the state about $1 billion. And Harrisburg would still collect about $400 million in taxes, as it does now.

      According to figures I found on line, the governor estimates that the private lottery would bring in $130 million annually over 20 years. Figures elsewhere say that the state lottery now nets $1 billion a year for Senior Citizens. If those facts are correct, I don't understand the deal.

      Many of the Senior Citizens pay back their free bus rides by buying lottery tickets by the gross. But  they know that there's always the chance that they'll win some big bucks. (Well, not always. More like sometimes. Or maybe once in a very great while. Or maybe they should live so long.)

* * *

February 20, 2013

by James Smart

My favorite fat politician

      Television humorists and other public nuisances continually pick on Gov. Christopher J. Christie of New Jersey because of his size. Gov. Christie takes the bad jokes in good humor.

      He tends to keep statistics about his weight close to the vest, but there is no question that it's a voluminous vest.  He is five feet eleven, and 300ish or more. On the subject of whether his corpulence affects his job performance, he responds seriously to critics and jocularly to jokers.

      Christie was a television guest of David Letterman, who almost nightly lampoons the governor's girth, and told Letterman, "I'm the healthiest fat guy you've ever seen in your life."

I have no comparative information on how many fat guys Letterman has seen to date. Letterman measures six feet two, and weighs 190, according to information on the Web.

      If Christie runs for president four years hence, journalists, Democrats and other nosey people will insist on some statistics they can criticize.

      Does weight matter? The late William Howard Taft was a reasonably adequate President of the United States, and he was six feet tall and topped off at about 332 pounds.

      When I reflect on politicians' tubbiness, I think of one of my favorite old time Philadelphia politicians, Sen. Boies Penrose. He was six feet four, and reached a legendary bulk approaching 400 pounds

      Penrose was born in 1860, of an old and wealthy Philadelphia family. He attended Episcopal Academy, and came in second in the class of 1881 at Harvard. (His brother was first.)

      An unlikely entry into the gritty realm of  Philadelphia politics, he wended his electoral way through both houses in Harrisburg, was elected a U. S. Senator in 1897, and by 1909 was undisputed boss of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.

      He was also uncontested eating champion. He was known to order as many as six different lunches from a restaurant menu at one sitting.

      A waiter in Atlantic City, where Penrose kept his yacht, once cited as a typical Penrose dinner: 12 cocktails, 12 raw oysters, a bowl of soup, terrapin stew, two whole canvasback ducks, mashed potatoes, lima beans, macaroni, asparagus, cole slaw, stewed corn, a whole hot mince pie, a quart of coffee, a bottle of sauterne, a quart of champagne, and several brandies.

Penrose's breakfasts were more simple: usually just a dozen fried eggs, a slice of ham, a dozen rolls and a quart of coffee.

      He became ill in 1919. Servants moved his massive bulk about in a specially built wheelchair. In 1920, confined to his reinforced oversized bed in his house at Broad and Spruce Sts., with a direct phone line and a private telegraph line, with operator, he was connected with the Republican National Convention in Chicago, maneuvering the nomination of Warren G. Harding (six feet, 240.) Philadelphia reporters at the Penrose bedside knew of Harding's selection before the press corps in Chicago.

      On the last day of 1921, Boies Penrose died in his massive bed in his apartment in the swank Wardman Park Hotel in Washington. He was only 61, but he may have once been "the healthiest fat guy you've ever seen."

* * *

February 6, 2012

by James Smart

Corbett's Truly Lucky Office?

       The governor of Pennsylvania and his counterpart across the river are anxious to privatize the state lotteries. There's controversy, of course. Lotteries were controversial from the beginning of Pennsylvania.

      The Quaker founders didn't care much for games of chance. The Pennsylvania Assembly in 1705 passed an "Act Against Riotous Sports, Plays and Games," which outlawed lotteries. It also outlawed cards, dice, billiards, quoits, and a few  pastimes I don't think exist anymore, even in Atlantic City, including loggats, shovegroats and rowley-powley.

      That law banned "any other kind of game whatsoever, now invented or hereafter to be invented." Queen Anne repealed the law in 1709 as "unreasonable restraint on the King's subjects from taking innocent diversion."

      Private citizens often made a few bucks by organizing lotteries. A 1730 law forbade them again, but  governors frequently made deals allowing lotteries so long as the proceeds would pay the prescribed fines.

      The city of Philadelphia used lotteries to buy cannons for a "grand battery" to protect the port in 1747, and to finance street surfacing in 1748. The largest buyer of tickets to pay for cannons was James Logan, a Quaker leader.

      Schools and churches used lotteries to raise funds. Benjamin Franklin sponsored three lotteries in 1752 to pay for the steeple of Christ Church.

      The Assembly authorized lotteries for educational funding, and 36 lotteries, by 27 schools, were held from 1754 to 1811. The College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia, which one day would be the University of Pennsylvania, held nine lotteries between 1755 and 1761.

      Lotteries organized by private citizens, for profit, also flourished. The state averaged more than one lottery a month from 1796 to 1808.

Many were fund-raisers. An 1806 game helped pay off the debts of the Bustleton and Smithfield Turnpike Co., for a road from Frankford to Somerton. More than $33 million in prizes were awarded between 1811 and 1833 by lotteries that built the Union Canal that linked the Schuylkill with the Susquehanna.

      The profit-making lotteries weren't always strictly ethical. Sponsors would advertise prizes and a set number of tickets, then keep selling tickets as long as it took to get rid of them all. Lotteries stretched out two or three years.

In 1833, more than 200 lotteries were in progress in Philadelphia. There were hundreds of ticket brokers in town, with names like "Enoch L. Colcord & Son's Lottery and Exchange Bureau," and "Allen's Truly Lucky Office."

      A lawyer who studied the problem reported that a lottery's "deluded victim does not regard it as a tax, but as a road to sudden wealth, dispensing with the necessity of labor." He found that insolvent persons whose bankruptcy petitions blamed lottery losses were as many as 17 a year.

      It was in 1833 that the legislature cracked down on lotteries, setting heavy fines and mandating the "entire abolition of lotteries," calling them "an acknowledged evil of great magnitude."

      Then, 139 years later, Pennsylvania started its current state lottery. Now it may be privatized. Maybe they'll call it Corbett's Truly Lucky Office.

* * *

January 30, 2013

by James Smart

Surgical things left behind

      There was a lot of Googling and Twitterng and texting and other wireless prattling in recent weeks about a study in the medical trade journal "Surgery" that reported that in the last 20 years, 4,857 objects were left behind in patients' innards by surgeons in the United States.

      The study was of data accumulated from records of malpractice cases. It's possible that other gimcracks were left inside patients who didn't sue, and whose doctor somewhere is still wondering what became of that nice shiny hemostat his mother-in-law gave him for his birthday.

      The researchers estimate that as many as 80,000 of these surgical oversights may have taken place in the same period, but escaped notice because the surgeon re-surged when he missed his favorite curette, or because nobody, including the patient, knew that an osteotome had been dropped into his pleural cavity.

      With all the lamentations and wisecracking written about that report on the peccadilloes of butter-fingered practitioners, one question immediately occurred to me that no writer addressed: What were those articles that were abandoned in the interior of unsuspecting patients?

      I wandered electronically around the World Wide Web, where facts about everything can be found, many of them true. There was little enlightenment.

      Apparently small sponges and towels are the most frequently left behind surgical implements sewed up or stapled up amongst the organs. I was hoping for something more dramatic, such as a surgeon closing up a cholecystectomy, and then noticing he was missing his wedding ring, his dentures, his wrist watch, or his Dr. Phillip Syng Physick action figure.

      I thought that the fancy new microsurgery had taken over the practice of old fashioned full sized surgery. There seem to be recurrent news articles about surgeons casually extracting a kidney through a belly button, and of performing what would seem like large-scale poking and slicing of assorted organs through tiny inch-wide incisions.

      It's like those fellows who build elaborate ship models in bottles, working through the neck. But gluing pieces together through a person's neck has limited possibilities for surgeons.

      The first surgery I ever had, more than 30 years ago, was a laparoscopy, a cut that ran south from my navel for a scary  nine inches. The purpose was to identify a strange lump in my abdomen. I was incarcerated in the hospital for a week.

      It turned out to be my appendix. Should the doctor have known that in advance, and not have to cut as much as he did? I don 't know. At least, he didn't leave any unidentified items inside (as far as I know.)

      By contrast, in the last operation I had, a few years ago, the doctor stuffed a hefty wad of netting, to shore up a double hernia, through two little inch-long slits, probably too small to mislay any equipment big enough to have worried her, or me. She sent me home the same day.

      But apparently, the new tiny surgery does not preclude the possibility of a lost and found collection being located in your abdomen.

* * *

January 23 ,2013

by James Smart

Guns in the wrong hands

      Everybody is writing about guns these days. On Jan. 26, 2011, I wrote about the subject. Nothing has changed much, so here is that column again:

      Backwash from the recent maniacal shootings produced all sorts of platitudes, lamentations, explanations, recriminations, denials of responsibility, and every reaction imaginable. Are we about to see politicians of the furthermost Left and the furthermost Right suddenly begin to greet each other with compassionate hugs and play legislative Alphonse and Gaston in the halls of Congress? Somebody better frisk them first; they might be carrying.

      The gun control people and the Second Amendment people seem to agree on one thing: we shouldn’t let guns get into the wrong hands. The most extreme controllers would solve the problem by taking everybody’s guns away, which is like stopping car theft by eliminating automobiles. The right-to-bearers think the answer is personal responsibility, which tends to be in short supply.

      The real question about guns getting into the wrong hands is, how do we keep hands from being wrong in the first place? Gun control advocacy is all very well, but it’s the decent-behavior advocates who don’t seem to be effective.

      Many organizations have always been expected to keep hands from going wrong: churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, what-have-you. Schools, too. And the most basic organization of all, when wrong hands are involved: families.

      There have always been hands (and the attached people) going wrong, no matter what is said in church, school or around the dinner table. But don’t you get the feeling that the old social restraints are getting through to youngsters less and less these days?

      Many years ago, I interviewed a psychologist who was also a Presbyterian minister, and who worked with juvenile lawbreakers. Although he didn't put it just this way, he was in favor of instilling some old-fashioned guilt in kids. What was missing in many lives, he said, was someone to disappoint. Many of us, at any age, restrain ourselves from doing something violent or dishonest or merely bad-mannered by the thought, What would mother think? or What would dad think? or What would grandmom, or the coach, or the pastor, or the rabbi think? Yes, even What would Jesus think?

      It's the role model thing. There are plenty of defective models out there, chugging along in the publicized, glamorized worlds of entertainment, sports and other popular culture. The media never miss the chance to announce celebrity misbehavior. Parents and other positive influencers have a hard time competing for the attention, and emulation, of their own standards vs. the bad influences on their children. And sadly, there are also wrong-handed parents who instill bad attitudes and behaviors in their offspring.

      When it comes to guns, some people think of guns as a way to enforce their opinions, rather than a way to hunt game or shoot targets  American leaders who were unable to resolve their political differences 150 years ago with civil discourse had a civil war instead. They were willing to die for their differences, and a few hundred thousand other men died with them. All the wrong hands don't belong to ruffians or maniacs.

* * *

January 16, 2013

by James Smart

Defining a semi-Philadelphian

      A local music critic recently described an opera tenor as a "semi-Philadelphian." That appellation was applied because the singer, according to the critic, studied here, still works with a voice coach here, and "keeps some possessions in a South Philadelphia storage bin."

      I don't recall ever hearing anyone called a semi-Philadelphian before. Defining who is an entire Philadelphian does have some complications.

      While I confess that I once lived in the suburbs for 20 years, I was born in the city, grew up and went to school here, and have worked here steadily since Barney Samuel was mayor. (Look him up; research is good for the brain.)

      Many Philadelphians take ancestry seriously. That may be true mostly in Chestnut Hill or out on the Main Line, and may have been more true 150  years ago or so, when Mark Twain uttered his oft-quoted line, "In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents.?"

      But the concept was present when I was young. There were old families even in our working class neighborhood.

      The old folks were nonchalant about pedigree, and were no more impressed by it than a Biddle would be about a Cadwallader. A girl in my elementary school class was a descendant of the man who founded our neighborhood, Harrowgate, in 1785, but if anyone knew it, no fuss was made about it.

      My mother's family, the Hartleys, were newcomers. My grandparents didn't move there from Kensington until the beginning of the Civil War. My father was from Frankford, up the road a bit, but was tolerated.

      I moved 57 blocks north when I was 19, and took the Smart name with me. One day when I was in my Thirties, and a well-bylined columnist for the old Evening Bulletin, I was walking along, a block from my birthplace, after visiting my grandmother. An old-timer sitting on his porch looked at me curiously, and hollered, "Say, aren't you Elsie Hartley's boy?" That's an example of the Mark Twain premise.

      There's nothing wrong with being a semi-Philadelphian, though, with or without maintaining a storage bin.  Some of the most Philadelphiaish Philadelphians might be accused of seminess.

      Ben Franklin spent his first 17 years in Boston, and lived overseas for nearly 30 years, dwelling in Philadelphia only 38 of his 85 years. That's somewhat semi, but nobody dares say he was not a Philadelphian.

      Should we designate semi-ism for Vai Sikahema, who is pervasive on Channel 10 but comes from Nuku 'Alofa, the capital of Tonga?  Chef Jose Garces came from Chicago via New York, but he certainly acts like a Philadelphian. David Morse, the actor, grew up in Massachusetts and previously lived in California, but he is a fixture in Chestnut Hill now, and doesn't seem at all semi.

      We've had semi-Philadelphian mayors. Richardson Dilworth was from Pittsburgh, Wilson Goode was from South Carolina, and Ed Rendell was from New York. Sen. Arlen Specter was from Wichita, Kansas.

      Even William Penn spent only four years in Philadelphia. But he built Pennsbury Manor, which is somewhat bigger than a storage bin.

* * *

January 9, 2013

by James Smart

Could secession succeed?

      Just after the election, some citizens in every state drafted petitions proclaiming that they wanted their state to secede from the federal union. The agitation seems to have quieted down, maybe because the holidays interfered, or maybe because of an unlikely outbreak of common sense.

         Poor losers have abounded ever since Cain killed Abel. You find them in everything from presidential elections to chess tournaments. The latter can result in an upset chess board or a poke in the eye. The former can result in profanity, street riots or even firing on Fort Sumter.

         The main idea of democracy is that the losers must cheerfully accept the will of the majority and try to do better next time. It's interesting to see how often people whose party or philosophies were on the short end of an election moan that the result indicates that democracy doesn't work.

         Usually such disappointed players just pick up their political marbles and go home crying. Proposing secession from the union seems a drastic reaction in the 21st century.

         It isn't clear what the secessionists expect to happen if they succeed. Would each state become an independent nation? Would they form assorted alliances? Would all 50 become a new country, with its own capital (Tea Pot Dome, Wyoming, might be a good site) and let the District of Columbia become a quaint geographic anomaly, like Lichtenstein?

         If a state became an independent entity, one of the first things its citizens would have to do is choose leaders. Unless they could devise some better method, they would probably have to hold an election. That would result in creation of winners and losers again, and the same situation that they had rejected in the first place.

         Once the newly liberated state had elected leadership, or had been dominated by a dictator, or whatever kind of governing they prefer to what we've been doing for 227 years or so, the next necessity would be to raise money.

         Maybe they would just pass the tea pot and take a collection. They might have to do it the much-despised old fashioned way, and collect taxes.

         The latest figures I found say that 35 of the 50 states receive more money from the federal government than they pay in taxes. You and I can't be self-righteous about that, because Pennsylvania takes in $1.17 from Washington for every dollar we pay in federal taxes. New Jersey takes only 77 cents per dollar of tax money.

         The state that receives the most money from Washington compared to its tax contributions is Mississippi. The Magnolia State gets $2.73 for every dollar it coughs up for the federal coffers.

Mississippi is just a couple of thousand square miles smaller than Pennsylvania, but has only about a quarter of the number of citizens. It has the highest poverty rate in the nation, 17.4 percent compared to Pennsylvania's 12.6 percent. (New Hampshire has the lowest, 7.6 percent.)

         If the folks down south decide to become the People's Republic of Mississippi, they will need a local way to support themselves. Maybe they should forget secession. It didn't work out too well the last time.

* * *

January 2, 2013

by James Smart

With General Grant in China

      Mayor Nutter's recent trip to China started me thinking of how much China has changed since Ulysses S. Grant visited there in 1879. As a long-time Grant admirer, I'm interested in his relatively little known trip around the globe.

      Grant turned the White House over to Rutherford B. Hayes on March 3, 1877. After 15 years of war and politics, he determined to see the world.

      On May 17, 1877, Grant, his wife and an entourage sailed down the Delaware River aboard the USS Indiana on the start of a two and a half year voyage. They were accompanied to the bay by a flotilla of boats carrying farewell wishers including Mayor William S. Stokley, Gov. John F. Hartranft, 100 or so City Councilmen, and just about every Philadelphia bigwig. Crowds on the wharves cheered.

      Before he was back in Philly on Dec. 16, 1879, Grant visited 25 countries and a good bit of the American west. He was a fanatic tourist, seeing every sight, and was greeted and feted by leaders and royalty from England to Japan.

      Chinese cities that Mayor Nutter saw are astonishing different that those toured by Grant only 133 years ago, a mere blip in the history of China, which started getting organized about 2100 B. C.

      In the 1870s, Tartar militarists from Mongolia and British diplomats and opium providers were busy interfering in Chinese affairs, but the emperor's court in Pekin (now Beijing) went about its ritual business, unperturbed. The emperor didn't confer with Grant, because he was seven years old.

      The Chinese viceroy, a Tartar general and a Chinese-speaking British agent welcomed the Grant party first in Canton, where fancy receptions and many-coursed banquets were given. The Americans saw Shanghai and other cities before going to Pekin.

      There, they were entertained extravagantly. Perhaps the most unusual event was the banquet the women of the emperor's household gave for Julia Grant and six other women.

      Each woman was brought into the dining room and introduced by an interpreter to the viceroy's wife at the head of the table. She was wearing a dark silk jacket and trousers, the latter garment a bit disturbing to the long-skirted westerners. She wore a necklace, bracelets and a hair broach all of jade and pearls.

      The viceroy's daughter, 16, and daughter-in-law, 23, sat at the opposite end of the table, watching the guests intently. They had never seen foreigners before.

      The older girl was dressed in an elegant pants suit. The teenager was in a pink satin jacket and green trousers, heavy with gold embroidery, and was dripping with pendants of jade and pearls which hung from her ears, wrists, inches-long fingernails and the handle of her fan.

      Other Chinese women were at the party. The dinner had alternate courses of Chinese and European food. The windows of the room were open, and Chinese citizens crowded outside each one to watch the curious westerners eat.

      Each upper class Chinese woman had her own servant attending her. The servants helped their mistresses walk, as their feet had been bound in childhood, and were, according to one American there, "scarcely more than two or three inches long."

      Mayor Nutter didn't mention anything like that.

* * *

December 26, 2012

by James Smart

Family holidays a century ago

      My mother would be 110 years old if she were here today. In the holiday season, I often think of the stories she used to tell about Christmas and New Years when she was a child.

      And I realize how many little details I don't know, and never thought to ask about. Life was so different at the beginning of the 20th century from the beginning of the 21st.

      Mother often told about keeping the Christmas tree decorated until Easter. The branch of the family that lived "up the country," as she phrased it, didn't like to travel to the city in winter. They visited at Easter time.

      So, the Philly folks set up the Christmas tree in the parlor, which was heated only when company came. After the holidays, the parlor was closed up most of the time, and the decorated tree was preserved until the Easter visitors arrived.

      When I heard this oft-told tale, I understood the situation. The relatives were probably traveling by horse-drawn vehicles, and the trip would be cold and uncomfortable at Christmas Even if they had a motor vehicle, it would be unheated and drafty in those days.

      Our family lived on a city street, but automobiles were an unusual sight even there,100 years ago. Another of my mother's yarns was that whenever one of those newfangled autos chugged past the house, stirring a cloud of dust, her grandmother would proclaim sarcastically, "Well, now the property's worth another hundred dollars."

      One detail I don't know is how that parlor was heated. There probably were stoves in each room. I've never seen the inside of "the old house," as she called it, though it still stands, somewhat expanded, and surely now with central heating.

      The family moved to the new house when my mother was 19. They replaced its privy with indoor plumbing, the first time they owned such a luxury. I assume that its coal furnace was the first central heating they had.

      Santa Claus brought modest gifts in those days, Mother said; one important item such as a doll, some clothing, and in the stocking an orange, some walnuts, a ball, and always those crystalline sugar-toy candies in the shape of animals, inevitable from a German-raised mother.

      Mother's recollections of New Years celebrating were sparse. The family didn't live near any organized Mummers, although ad hoc New Years Shooters in the neighborhood fired off a few rounds at midnight on New Years Eve.

      But she recalled fondly the first time her father let her and her sister, who was three years older, stay up until midnight and celebrate. She couldn't remember how old she was at the time, but she was very young.

      Her parents thrilled the girls by buying them each a whistle to blow at midnight. I still have the whistles. They are made of terra cotta or clay. They are images of little boys, about two inches high, dressed like school boys of the era., sitting against a stump which ends in the hole the whistler blows into. They produce an ear-splitting screech.

      I can picture my mother and my aunt as little girls, bundled up against the cold, standing on the porch as the neighborhood mill whistles blasted out at midnight, puffing their small contribution to the celebration and hollering "Happy New Year."

* * *

December 19, 20122

by James Smart

Santa's controversial helper

      The Associated Press distributed an article from Amsterdam about controversy over a centuries-old Christmas tradition in the Netherlands. Sinterklaas, as the Dutch call jolly old St. Nicholas, is often accompanied by Zwarte Piet, which the AP translated as "Black Pete."

      Zwarte Piet often appears as Sinterklaas's side-kick, and is usually represented by a white man in black-face make-up. There are complaints from some Dutch citizens and politicians that the old tradition is racist and should be abandoned. Immigrants of color from Dutch-oriented West Antilles and Suriname also don't care for the custom.

      The AP correspondent obvious considered the Zwarte Piet tradition strange and exotic. But I'm sure lots of folks in the Pennsylvania Dutch areas all around Philly chuckled when they read about the situation. So did anyone who saw the Dec. 6 episode of the TV series "The Office," when Dwight portrayed Belsnickel.

      The ancestors of Pennsylvanians in the old-time Mennonite-settled regions originated largely in German areas, not Dutch. It was not Santa Claus who brought good children toys and goodies on Christmas Eve. It was der Belsnickel. And his German companion, with a switch or a whip to acknowledge naughtiness with a few wallops, was Schwarz Peter.

      Sometimes Pennsylvania's Schwarz Peter had a blackened face. In the days of wood stoves and coal stoves, it was easy to whip up some make-up with ashes and water. How racist the intent was, it's hard to say.

      Belsnickel seems to have acquired the name from Pelz Nicholas, meaning "furry Nicholas" in German. In olden times, St. Nicholas made his rounds in fur. Clement Clark Moore's poem describes him as "dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot."

      Fur was easy to come by in the early days of the Pennsylvania Dutch communities. In the 19th century, depictions of Belsnickel show him having progressed, or regressed, into wearing tattered clothes or a patchwork coat.

      Often, sleigh bells were fastened here and there on his clothes. Sleigh bells were a handy item then. When and why he switched to his modern red suit (with a hint of white fur trim and no bells) is his business.

      The shift from der Belsnickel to the modern Santa Claus was gradual. A children's book printed in Lancaster in 1843 was entitled, "Belsnickel's Gift, or a Visit From Saint Nicholas." This may have annoyed many early Mennonites, who were not big fans of medieval, non-biblical sainthood. But in the 20th century, it became hard to avoid acceptance of Santa Claus.

      Belsnickel was often a frightening figure to kids in the old days. He did carry a switch, and often questioned children about their behavior before dumping goodies from his bag.

Schwarz Peter, when he came along for the ride, became the enforcer who scolded, and swatted the behinds, of those who deserved it.

      I suspect that, unlike in the Netherlands, Black Peter has disappeared from the Dutch country, and the department store model of Santa Claus is the norm. Does any Pennsylvania Dutch momma still say to the kids on Heilige Abend (Christmas Eve), "Poch sich op ze eure bett, der Belsnickel kommme" ( "Scram up to bed, Belsnickel is coming.")

* * *

December 12, 2012

by James Smart

Of cats and supermodels

         Stu Bykovsky, who writes a column for some other newspaper, has produced a little book about cats. It's called "Cats are Supermodels," and explores the proposition that sleek, temperamental women and sleek, temperamental felis domesticus are similar.

         (Is there is a Latin name for supermodels? Maybe homo superexemplius or something?)

         The book also investigates the contrast between cats and dogs. Byko addresses the difference succinctly, early in the text, when he writes, "You've heard of service dogs. Have you ever heard of a service cat? Case closed."

         Bykovsky lives with a cat and, unfortunately for him, not with a supermodel. He denies cat ownership. Dogs have owners, he maintains. Cats have staff.

         The book is funny, but nearly raises some serious questions. For all you quantum physics fans, for instance, it asks why Erwin Schrodinger chose a cat to seal up in his theoretical box, and not some other critter. It's a joke that would make only someone like Einstein laugh.

         Byko describes the behavior of house cats with cautious good humor. He promises to do a later book about outdoor cats. There probably are very few outdoor supermodels.

         In the overall, he is kind and mostly understanding about cats. But I'm sure his e-mail and lesser forms of communication will be loaded with venom from irate cat fanatics, who feel that cats should be written about with solemn respect.

         Cat lovers are passionate. I have written articles about cats that I thought would delight cat people, and attracted wrath instead.

         Back in the 1950s, I wrote a news article about a cat that was lost many miles from home, but successfully made the trek back to his owner's house. I did it in the hipster patois of the era. The first sentence was, "This cat named Timothy, man, he played it cool."

         Most readers presumably were amused. But I got an unsigned postal card that grumbled simply, "Cats are God's creatures. I am praying for you!"

         In that same era, cat lovers were threatening physical violence on the writer of letters to the editor of The Evening Bulletin whose dark humor about cats offended them. The letters, signed "J. Darlington McKeester," ranted about neighborhood cats that desecrated his garden, and proposed lethal measures to get rid of them.

         One letter indicated that he had solved his cat disposal problem. Strategically buried, they made excellent fertilizer for his tomato plants. That letter resulted in denunciation of editors and cancellation of subscriptions. In the news room, we knew that McKeester was actually our distinguished city editor, Stanley Thompson, being mischievous.

         Bykovsky's book is more gentle. Among little-known cat facts, Byko divulges that the only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.

         I searched Strong's Concordance of the Bible, which is, I guess, the bible of Bible references, and found that in the Good Book, dogs are mentioned 43 times, horses 46 times, cattle an impressive 158 times, and even caterpillars nine times, but not one cat. I leave the theological implications of that to Bykovsky.

* * *

December 5, 2012

by James Smart

Lincoln films, from facts to vampires

      Steven Spielberg's film about Abraham Lincoln is in the movie houses now. I haven't seen it yet, but I may have seen more films about Lincoln than about any other individual, probably excepting Bugs Bunny, Gene Autry and other dominant figures of boyhood Saturday matinees.

      The first sound movie about Lincoln was done in 1930, one of the only two sound films made by silent movie director D. W. Griffith. I missed that the first time around, busy being a baby, but I've seen it as an adult.

      Griffith's script was mostly about young Abe, with Walter Huston as Lincoln. It was loaded with inaccuracies, and full of stuff that never happened, such as Abe standing up Mary on their wedding day. He also was shown making a speech in the theater before he was shot, featuring highlights of his second inaugural speech and the Gettysburg address.

      Henry Fonda starred in "Young Mr. Lincoln" in 1939, directed by John Ford. I saw that when it was new, and I was in elementary school. We had learned that Lincoln freed the slaves and got shot, but most classroom information was such tales as his walking miles in a rainstorm to return two cents he overcharged a customer when he was a store clerk, and dismounting while on a business trip to rescue a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.

      In 1940, Raymond Massey starred in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois." Massey portrayed Lincoln in assorted other historical films.

      Hollywood forgot about Abe for a while. Then screen writers got interested in the assassination. In 1977, there was "The Lincoln Conspiracy," and in 1998, "The Day Lincoln Was Shot." Recently, Robert Redford made the realistic and accurate "The Conspirators."

      This year came "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter." It has remarkably authentic-looking period backgrounds, against which Abe was busy killing the undead in his spare time.

      Spielberg's film begins in January, 1865, just before Lincoln made his second inaugural address, in which he suggested "malice toward none, charity toward all." It depicts a president's efforts to deal with Congress, a group then as now seeming to be more interested in malice than charity.

      I was hoping Spielberg started a bit earlier, and showed the 1864 presidential election. Lincoln's opponent was Gen. George Brinton McClellan, whom Lincoln had demoted for his lethargic approach toward executing the war.

      McClellan was a privileged Philadelphia aristocrat who couldn't accept the genius of the homely frontier lawyer. In a letter to his wife, McClellan once complained about taking orders "from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually & morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the 'Gorilla'." In 1864, McClellan ran against "the gorilla", and lost badly.

      The Lincoln vs. vampires film ends as Lincoln's carriage heads off to Ford's Theater. Thank goodness. I was afraid the ending might be John Wilkes Booth flying into the president's box and biting him on the neck.

* * *

November 28, 2012

by James Smart

Words from and about elephants

         An elephant in a South Korean zoo has learned to say five Korean words, according to a scholarly biology journal. He is being studied by a group of  international researchers.

         The research task force is led by scientists from the University of Vienna. You might expect those fellows to teach the elephant to waltz; it might be more up their seitenstrasse and just as unlikely.

         The elephant, whose name is Koshik, has learned to stick his trunk in his mouth, in a way that makes up for the lack of some of the equipment we have in our mouths, and produce the Korean words for hello, sit down, lie down, good, and no.

         These are obviously words he has been enduring from the puny humans who boss him around. The researchers say that he does not use the words meaningfully, and doesn't really understand them.

         But they are biologists. They should check with some circus people. They'll hear tales of elephants realistically imitating truck engines when the show starts to pull out of a circus ground, and elephants that bellow loudly, and sway, when the band plays certain tunes.

         I became interested in circuses, particularly in lion and tiger training, when I was a little boy. Becoming a reporter and professional busybody gave me the opportunity to meet some of the great trainers of big cats:  Clyde Beatty, Pat Anthony, Charley Bauman and Gunther Gebel-Williams. Later I did some publicity work for the Big Top. I heard some behind-the-tents tales about elephants, including their language skills.

         An American circus once bought some trained elephants from a German circus. English-speaking trainers taught them new routines. Years went by, and one day a man from the German circus visited his old herd. He gave orders in German, and the elephants responded as though they had never left the old country.

         One of my favorite elephants was Syd, who worked for Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros., one of the last big shows under canvas. When the circus pulled into a town, Syd knew her job.

         Workers put her in a harness with chains dragging. The  main tent poles were laid on the ground, and the expanse of canvas spread over it.. Syd stood, hitched to the rig, quietly swaying.

         When everything was ready, someone yelled, "Okay, Syd!" The elephant ambled forward, and its powerful strain on the chains slowly raised the tall poles and the huge canvas into position.

         Don't tell anybody, but that show, on occasion, "accidentally" left an elephant behind when it moved out. At the location of the next performance, it would announce that an elephant had been mislaid. The result was lots of publicity as the circus folks retrieved the missing pachyderm.

         It was reliable old Syd, of course. She would wait to be picked up, placidly policing the empty circus grounds and trunking up waste paper, spilled popcorn, Popsicle sticks and just about anything.

         ("Just about anything" is a circus elephant's favorite diet. In the old Spectrum's early years, the circus moved in and parked its elephants in a low-ceilinged room. The elephants ate the cellulose ceiling panels.)

         Syd never said a word, in English, German or Korean. So far as I know.

* * *

November 21, 2012

by James Smart

The Roadkill Memorial

      There's a barely consequential controversy out in Irvine, California, because someone wants the city to erect a marker at the site of a fatal traffic accident, to honor the victims. There were hundreds of victims.

      They were fish. Saltwater bass, to be precise. They were barreling along, thinking bassy thoughts all unaware, when at the corner of Walnut and Yale Aves., they were involved in a three-vehicle crash.

      The bass were in one of the vehicles, a big tank truck. They got dumped on the highway, and perished. There was apparently no way for medics to give them mouth to gill resuscitation.

      The young woman who is urging the Irvine city administration to memorialize the deceased bass is a volunteer with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She thinks some memorial is appropriate for the fish "who suffered and died on this spot," she wrote in her letter to the Irvine authorities.

      She implores the trucking industry to be more sensitive to the dangers faced by transported fish.

      "Sparing them from being tossed from a speeding truck and slowly dying from in juries and suffocation seems the least we can do," she pleaded.

      As I read her entreaties, I envisioned the possibility of PETA-sponsored safety belts, or perhaps little car seats, that truckers might install to save their bass. The truth is, of course, that the only way we can prevent fish from getting involved in traffic accidents is to leave them at home in the water, and eat broccoli instead.

      PETA knows that. Its adherents would rather not see any fish, fowl or beast being transported along the highways, unless it has been determined that the critters enjoy the experience.

      The petitioner for the highway memorial goes further, by admonishing, "Research tells us that fish use tools, tell time, sing, and have impressive long-term memories and complex social structures. Yet fish used for food are routinely crushed, impaled, cut open and gutted, all while still conscious."

      This is not a call for anthestheiologists in fish markets. It is an expression of deep sympathy that takes us back to the broccoli again.

      I have resolved to look into the research she refers to. I didn't know that fish use tools. I've never seen one shopping in Stanley's Hardware. Maybe they all go to Holod's.

      Nor have I ever heard a fish sing. Some of the singing I hear on the radio these days may well be by fish; that could explain a lot. The long-term memory could help them remember the lyrics.

      As for fish telling time, I could speculate about how they could wear a wristwatch, or whether they observe daylight saving time, but we don't want to get silly here.

      As for the serious issue at hand, a spokesman for the Irvine government announced, "I do think it's fair to say we have no plans to erect a memorial."  So those deceased  ocean bass will fade into memory.

      Perhaps in some more enlightened age, someone will create a fish cemetery, where fish who meet tragic ends can be decently interred and monuments raised.  For most, it will still be the frying pan.

      Or, perhaps there should be, on the mall in Washington, a marble monument honoring all animal accident victims: The Roadkill Memorial.

* * *

October 31, 2012

by James Smart

Some City Hall nostalgia

      There was a fire in a women's restroom on the fourth floor of City Hall last week, resulting in a brief evacuation, sprinkler systems raining down and other such annoyances. The event stimulated my crumbling memory to recall what the Hall was like 50 or 60 years ago.

      The administration reporters, who covered the mayor, City Council and other municipal tomfoolery, had fairly respectable quarters on the second floor near the mayor's office. Those of us who dealt with crime, fires and other activities of more normal citizens were up on the sixth floor, in room 619.

      That reporters' room and its immediate environs were, to put it delicately, not elegant. I was based there at night, in surroundings dark and lonely.

      The only other activity in that dismal nighttime part of City Hall was across the corridor from the reporters' habitat, where a bunch of fire department operatives kept watch over the complicated Gamewell fire alarm board, responding to its pinball machine-like flashing lights by dispatching equipment here and there.

      The Sheriff's cell room was down the hall. Loved-ones looking for someone recently detained because of some minor nocturnal infraction often stopped in at room 619, the first lighted doorway after the elevator, to ask directions.

      The worried visitor sometimes was clutching a pair of high-heeled shoes. A turnkey once informed me that women frequently lose their shoes in the course of being arrested, and I have no reason to doubt him.

      When the police or fire radio in the office squawked out some activity that required personal attention, I left the cold stone walls and ancient furniture to go out in the real world and represent the Evening Bulletin at the scene of the calamity. Inquirer and Daily News reporters did the same.

      On dull nights, we information-gatherers used the telephone to brighten the evening of cops in their district stations, asking if anything noteworthy was happening. The guys from the other papers were, at least theoretically, a bit more aggressive, because their papers were publishing at the moment. Anything I trolled up was for the next day's Bulletin.

      But the fire in  the rest room last week turned my nostalgic reflection toward the men's room that was a just down the hall from room 619.

      Before renovations spoiled City Hall with modern appliances and tile and such in the late 1950s, that men's room was unchanged from when it first went into service in about 1900. High above each urinal, near the ceiling perhaps 15 foot high, hung a water tank enclosed in a decorative wooden box.

      A water pipe came down from that box to the appliance. A long chain hung down, to be pulled to release the water.

      The room had a massive oak door with shiny brass hinges and a brass doorknob that bore the engraved seal of the City of Philadelphia.

And on the inside of the door, where men exiting the room couldn't miss seeing it, was a two-foot-square wooden plaque on which, in gilded Victorian lettering, was the stern municipal admonition:

      "Gentlemen, please arrange your clothing before leaving the room."

* * *

October 24, 2012

by James Smart

Vote, or sit on your blisters

      The presidential election festivities are in full bellow, surrounding us with debating and advertising and speech-making out the political wazoo. Multitudes of fact checkers follow in the politicians' hot air wake, looking for honesty with about as much luck as Diogenes.

      Does it all really matter? Or is campaigning just a quadrennial annoyance, like the Olympics, solar eclipses, World Cup soccer or a 29th day in February?

      An article in a magazine reported on several studies of American voters. The studiers (universities swarm with them) came to some interesting conclusions. Or were they confusions? Take your pick.

One study asked groups of liberals and conservatives to read an article mentioning George Bush's claim that his tax cuts increased revenues. Then they were told that the claim wasn't true. Questioned later, the liberals accepted the correction, but the conservatives were nearly twice as likely to say the tax cuts had increased revenues, even after being told otherwise.

      Guinea pigs in this study also were given an article saying that John Kerry in 2004 said he would lift Bush's ban on stem cell research. They were informed later that Bush never banned stem cell research.  The correction changed the conservatives' minds, but not the liberals'.

      Those researchers decided that facts that contradict our biases actually have the effect of reinforcing them. I'm not sure what that means to creators of political advertising.

      Another researcher questioned some Democrats and some Republicans to determine their level of political knowledge, then asked them to evaluate the Bill Clinton presidency. Analysis of the results determined that the people who were best informed about government, politics and similar dull stuff were the ones who revealed the most bias in favor of their chosen party, not the uninformed dumbbells like some people we know (but not you and me.)

      Yet another study showed a television news report of political goings-on to different audiences, telling some that it was from Fox News, others that it was from CNN, and still others that it was from an independent television station. The investigators found that the viewers made assumptions about the bias of the identical report based on what they thought was the source.

      The implication is that we could skip all the speeches, debates, travel by the candidates and tricky advertising. Let elections proceed powered by the prejudices of the voters.

      Look back 152 years. All that most folks knew about the candidates, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, they had read in newspapers. Lincoln and Douglas had debated while running against each other for Senate in 1858 (Abe lost,) but in the 1860 presidential proceedings, Lincoln stayed home in Illinois and let other Republicans beat the metaphorical drums. Douglas traveled the country, making speeches everywhere. Lincoln won.

      Yes, the hoopla may matter, but it's the voting that counts, and non-voters may get what they deserve. Abe Lincoln said it once:

      “Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”

* * *

October 17, 2012

by James Smart

Take a letter, please, Ms. Dell

      "Well" as I was saying to my computer this morning, "when you save their computer does every little thing" At least, that's what the computer thought I said.

      Actually, what I had said was, "Well, what do you say there, computer? How's every little thing?" The computer typed out its own version. It was doing its best.

      My wife bought me some software that lets me talk to the computer with a microphone, and the little sucker dutifully types out what I'm saying. Or tries to. A cute blonde stenographer might have been more efficient, and more interesting, but I'm stuck with a laptop named Dell.

      I had never spoken to my computer before, except to mutter imprecations when it did something annoying. I was dictating to it for the first time.

      The computer did mess up that first sentence a little, as you may have noticed. But dictation was new to both of us. So I decided to introduce myself more formally.

      "Good morning, computer," I said. The machine copied my words nicely, but without quotation marks, the comma or the period. So I told it to delete the last three words, which it did, and dictated "Quotation mark How are you this morning question mark I'm the guy who usually bangs on your keyboard period quotation mark."

      As I spoke, everything I said was magically typed out on the computer screen. It was a bit spooky. There were a few mistakes, but I've had  writing students who did worse.

      A couple of times, a little box appeared on the screen, saying, "please say that again." But I'd be darned if I was going to start repeating myself just because some dumb machine insisted on it.

      I passed the electronic time of day with it for a while, and it kept repeating my words on the screen like a typographical parrot. I began to wonder how long it will be before these contraptions start writing columns by themselves, and probably work cheap.

      I decided to give it a test. "Okay, computer," I said. "If you're so smart, where does the Wissahickon Creek empty into the Schuylkill?"

Believe it or not, the smart-alecky computer spelled Wissahickon correctly. When I signed up for this program, it asked for permission to read my files. Pretty darn nosy, but how can you argue with a machine? Apparently, that's how it learned to spell some weird local names.

      But what it typed out was, "If you're so smart, where does the Wissahickon Creek MP into the screw kill?" I can't say that I blame it for that. There are probably people who live in Schuylkill County who can't spell Schuylkill.

      "No, dummy," I said (including the required punctuation.) "Not MP. The word is empty, and screw kill is spelled s-c-h-u-y-l-k-i-l-l. Got that?"

      It nagged me, "Please say that again." I got annoyed. "Why should I say that again?" I muttered. "I told you how to spell Schuylkill." The computer typed, "Why should I say that again? I told you how to spell squiggle."

      I think the computer and I need a little more work with this. Or, as the computer repeated when I grumbled that last sentence, "I think the computer NRA needlework with this."

* * *

October 10, 2012

by James Smart

Mormons from Philly "off to Utah"

      The Mormons building a temple on the Parkway here, and one of their brethren wanting to live on Pennsylvania Ave. down in D.C., brings to mind the slight early history of Mormons in Philadelphia.

      Joseph Smith launched the Mormon faith in 1830 in New York state. In 1839, he was in Philly, and established a Mormon church at 7th and Callowhill. He preached here as late as 1840.

Many early-day Latter-day Saints, converts from abroad, came through Philadelphia. Only 10 years after Smith's apostle, Brigham Young, said "This is the place" about Utah (and many of Young's eventual 27 brides had said "I do" about him) a ship load of folks came here, bound for Salt Lake.

      It attracted attention because at that time, the federal government had decided that the Mormons were rebelling against the United States, although the Mormons didn't seem to think so. President James Buchanan sent troops to Utah, and wanted to replace Brigham Young as governor with somebody with more conventional religious beliefs and fewer wives.

      When the ship "Westmoreland" docked on the Delaware in 1857, it unloaded 552 European Saints, most of them from Norway. A fellow named A. F. Cannon, identified as General Mormon Emigration Agent for United States Shipping Ports, had made arrangements with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to send the group West.

      Shortly afterward, the ship "Tuscarora" arrived with 537 more new Mormons, from England, Scotland, Wales, Denmark and Sweden.

      On June 1, which happened to be Brigham Young's 56th birthday, a local astrologer named Hague got a heads-up from assorted heavenly bodies that the Mormons were doomed (and made sure the newspapers heard about it.) He prophesied that 1857 "will tell the time of Brigham's eclipse, and 1858 will find him in a darker cloud; 1859, I expect the finale at the farthest." Either Hague or the stars got it wrong.

      On May 7, 1860, after the government had eased off  its picking on the Mormons, converts gathered again in Philly to get transportation to Utah. One account said that 700 new Mormons rendezvoused here. About half came from New York. Others were English, and about 50 were Philadelphians.

      On May 8, the Evening Bulletin gave some of them a send-off with a brief article headlined, "Off to Utah." It said:

      "Yesterday afternoon, a party of Mormons, who have been sometime past staying in our city, left for the West, by the way of the Reading Railroad, from the depot at 13th and Callowhill Sts. The party numbered some 100 grown persons, and as many children, the sexes being evenly divided.

      "They were comfortably dressed, and apparently in good health and spirits. Among them were several young women, from 16 to 20 years of age, who appeared to be well pleased at the prospect of a journey to Brigham Young's 'Kingdom'.

      "Some of the men carried guns, and all had a liberal allowance of baggage. As the train moved off, the party joined in singing a hymn. They seemed to be in high spirits at their departure for the Land of Promise."

      William Penn's spirit probably smiled tolerantly as they passed through his town. He knew how it felt to be outside the religious mainstream.

* * *

October 3, 2012

by James Smart

Philly's big show 100 years ago

      In the first week of October 100 years ago, Philadelphia staged The Historical Pageant of 1912, a week-long show in Fairmount Park, with more than 3,000 volunteer performers in elaborate costumes, and an estimated 250,000 spectators.

      The musical and dance extravaganza on Belmont Plateau depicted the history of Philadelphia "from William Penn to the Consolidation."

      Advertisements promised "The Story of Philadelphia in 18 scenes. Realistic Battle of Germantown. Reading of the Declaration of Independence. Picturesque Meschianza. Franklin at the Court of France. Field brilliantly illuminated at night by the most powerful searchlights, spotlights and the largest footlights ever installed."

      There was a chorus of 1,000 voices, two bands, and nearly 5,000 performers, including 500 children in "a fairy dance."

      The show was the brainchild of Dr. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, a editor and author. He organized 13 committees with dozens of members, some with the know-how to stage his spectacle, others prominent Philadelphians.

      After two years of preparation, daily rehearsals began in the park on Thursday, Oct. 1. Workmen erected grandstands. Behind some trees, 70 big tents went up for costumes, scenery, performers and horses. Dr. Oberholtzer and 100 helpers rehearsed the thousands of actors.

      Word of the rehearsals spread, and Park Guards had to deal with hundreds of onlookers as costumed volunteers practiced historical period dances. The director used a megaphone to warn sternly against anyone sneaking in steps of the current ragtime dance, the Turkey Trot.

      By Monday, the show was ready. Performances were scheduled for 2 P. M. Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, and 8 P. M. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Seats cost 50 cents, reserved seats $1, $1.50, $2 and $3.

      Thousands attended. Schools east of Broad St. closed on Monday, and west of Broad on Wednesday, so children could come.

      Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg attended on opening day, with other officials and most of the 174 members of City Council. Dr. Oberholtzer and helpers directed from a tower above the grandstands, communicating by signal flags and telephone lines to field directors on foot and horseback. The show began as 500 little girls in fairy costumes danced across the field.

      There followed scene after scene of musical and dancing portrayals of moments of Philadelphia's history, with William Penn, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and all the historical favorites, surrounded by large casts. in front of replicas of famous buildings.

      The biggest crowd reaction came when stage hands erected a facade of Cliveden mansion, and Continentals and redcoats fought the Battle of Germantown, with a cavalry charge and lots of smoky cannon fire and musketry.

      The pageant ended with a procession of all participants, past a platform where stood 28 young women, each representing one of the former county municipalities that had been consolidated into the city in 1854. They surrounded "Lady Philadelphia," portrayed on day one by Lucretia Blankenburg, the mayor's wife.

      The pageant was so popular, the schedule was extended for the following Monday and Tuesday. Then, the city returned to normal. The fairies were allowed to keep their costumes.

* * *

Sept. 19, 2012

by James Smart

How many nudists per auto?

      Looking through clippings of some columns I wrote in 1969, (a year when Neal Armstrong walked on the moon, I still had hair, and columns were written on typewriters,) I came upon statistics about the number of persons who rode in automobiles.

      In 1940, the column said, each automobile on the road in the United States contained an average of 3.2 persons. Having two-tenths of a person in your car sounds rather gruesome, but averages are like that.

      In 1950, the statistics went on, each car on the road averaged 2.1 persons. In 1960, each car contained only 1.4 persons.

      Those declining numbers, I pointed out then, introduced a disturbing mathematical problem. In what year would each automobile on the road in the United States be entirely empty?

      I next quoted a newsletter report that the average speed of horse-drawn vehicles in Manhattan in 1900 was about 11 miles per hour. The average speed of automobiles in 1969 was about eight miles an hour.

      That caused me to cogitate that possibly in about the same year that each car on the road would contain an average of nobody, someone would have invented a new form of transportation in Manhattan that didn't move at all.

      Here in 2012, working at the keyboard of a device that didn't exist in 1969, I checked on the Internet to see how those statistics shook out after four decades have gone by. I found that in 2009, the freshest figures I located, the average speed of an automobile in Manhattan was 1.7 miles per hour.

      So Manhattan hasn't dropped back to a standstill yet. But it must be fun for New Yorkers to relax in their crawling cars and watch the pedestrians whizzing by. An average marathon runner does about 12 miles an hour. Usain Bolt can run 100 meters at 27 miles an hour.

      And automobile capacity has changed since those simpler days of the 1960s. In 2009, each automobile on the road in the U. S. contained an average of 1.59 persons, a bit higher than the 1969 average. But today, we have assorted sizes of vehicles to complicate the statistics.

Each sport utility vehicle, a conveyance unknown on U. S. roads years ago, contained in '09 an average 1.78 persons. A van averaged 2.07 persons.

      The experts who apparently loiter by the roadside and count the number of folks in passing vehicles also announced that motorcycles were carrying an average of 1.18 persons.

      That same 1969 column told of a police officer in Reading who stopped an automobile in which were three naked girls. He let them drive on when they explained that they were on their way to a nudists' convention.

      I wrote that I decided to save the clipping, as a legal precedent. I would be able to show it to a police officer if I ever got into driving trouble.

      If I were stopped for speeding, I could just say, "That's all right, officer. I'm on my way to a speeders' convention."

      And I envisioned a carload of armed robbers, roaring away from a looted bank, shouting to pursuing patrol cars, "Can't stop now! We're late for the opening session of the annual Grand Larceny convention!"

      I have been unable to find any statistics on the average number of naked people per automobile. Or on motorcycles.

* * *

Sept. 12, 2012

by James Smart

Republicans met first in Philly

      The exhilarating political conventions are behind us now, and we can all breath a sigh of relief. Or was that a yawn?

      But at party convention time, those of us interested in Philadelphia history and other dull subjects think about the first Republican Party Convention, which took place in Philly in 1856. The grand new party had been organized in 1854 by a conglomeration of members of the collapsing Whig Party, anti-slavery Democrats, abolitionists, conservative Know Nothings and other trouble-makers.

      The three-day convention assembled on June 17 in the Musical Fund Hall on Locust St. west of 8th. The old hall still stands, now a condominium building.

      The Musical Fund Society was founded in 1820 by Philadelphia musicians, professional and amateur, for "the cultivation in skill and diffusion of taste in music, and the relief of decayed musicians and their families."

In 1824, the society bought a Presbyterian church building on Locust. It was replaced by a concert hall designed by William Strickland, architect of  such Philadelphia landmarks as the Merchant's Exchange,. the Second Bank of the U. S., the old Naval Home and the tower of Independence Hall.

      Notable musicians and singers appeared at the hall. The most sensational was Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale," who gave concerts there in 1850 and 1851. Popular music fans were buying official Jenny Lind bonnets, gloves and shawls, and singing her big hit, "Birdling, Why Sing in the Forest Wide?"

      The newly-hatched Republican Party hired the hall in 1856. "Our town is again alive with the bustle and excitement of a grand convention," The Evening Bulletin exulted.

      The delegates nominated John C. Fremont, who was military, not political. He was famous for his exploration of the Rocky Mountains, and for being military governor of California as the expanding United States pried that valuable territory away from Mexico.

      Fremont had turned down an offer to be nominated by the pro-slavery Democrats at their convention in Cincinnati a couple of weeks before. They settled on James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, considered soft on the slavery question.

      Fremont won with 530 votes to his only opponent's 37. The real contest was in selection of a running mate, with 15 names put in nomination, including a little-known Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. William L. Dayton, a former New Jersey senator, beat Abe handily.

      Buchanan defeated Fremont for the presidency. Four years later, Lincoln would succeed Buchanan as president, Fremont would be commanding general of Western troops as the Civil War began, and Lincoln would fire Fremont for ignoring his policies.

      The beat went on at Musical Fund Hall, but the newer, larger Academy of Music dominated the concert scene. As the 20th century began, fewer musical performances were held there.       Though the society's musical and charitable activities continued, the hall was sold in 1924 to a labor organization. The society got the hall back in 1937 and leased it to a boxing promoter until 1942, then sold it again to a tobacco company that used it as a warehouse.

      The Redevelopment Authority acquired the hall in 1964.It sat empty for years, still strewn with old cigar boxes. It became condos in 1981, but its place in history is remembered at political convention time.

* * *

September 5, 2012

by James Smart

Dreaming the possible dream

      We've been hearing a lot about "the American dream" lately from politicians, economists, journalists and other annoyances. Discussions of that dream are vague and variable in detailing exactly what the dream is, but most seem to think it's getting harder to make it come true.

      Some commentators and punditaters propose that the American dream is to see our children have a better life than we have. I don't know how that works for dreamers without children. I guess they'll just have to go ahead and have the better life for themselves.

      Some experts bleakly predict that the impending generation will be the first American kids since Virginia Dare was in diapers who won't be better off than their parents. Does that mean that the poor little generation will have smaller houses, less education, smaller salaries, less traveling, fewer dinners in fancy restaurants, cheaper automobiles, or diminished whatever else? And/or does it mean they will consequently laugh less, smile less often, frown more, be less happy, or whatever?

      Or could it mean that the current generation overdid, and now overestimates what the American dream entails? Maybe the upcoming generation will be happier if the future simplifies a bit, and their predecessors' expectations calm down. Maybe they will be more like their grandparents' generation, only with a lot more electronic gadgets.

      From the earliest days, many dreamers of the American dream did their dreaming in other countries. They struggled across borders and oceans to ensure that their children would have that better life that's expected for every next generation.

      It's still that way. A report on census data  from the Pew Philadelphia Research Institute says that immigrants now make up about 20 percent of all U. S. small business owners, although they comprise only about 13 percent of the population. Immigrants are also about 16 percent of the work force.

      American dreams come in varying sizes. An inner city kid can dream of living in a bigger row house in a better neighborhood. The kid in a bigger row house would like to grow up and move to the suburbs.

      Some dreamers dream of making big money. Some even dream of working hard to achieve that goal.

      The American dream has always implied that anybody can be a millionaire. There has been much written about the self-made successful person.

      The philosophies of Ayn Rand have been kicked around. One of her biographers said that the individualistic heroes of her books were "rebellious outsiders."  Maybe we could all be successful that way, but if we all were  rebellious outsiders, what would we be outside of?

      There are more dreams to work toward than ones that involve wealth or possessions. A good life, a good career, activities that bring satisfaction, are all the dreams many folks need.

      A harsh fact is that the bigger the dream, the less likely it is to come true. Every American-born child could become president of the United States, but we've only had  43 of them. (One did it twice, which hardly seems fair.)

      The impossible dream was fine for Don Quixote, but choosing a possible goal and working hard for it is more practical, and usually more fun even if you don't achieve it.

* * *

August 29, 2012

by James Smart

A one-item pen collection

      Looking through a box of old junk (junk being loosely defined as something you keep for 10 years and throw away two weeks before you suddenly need it), I came across my Reynolds Rocket ball point pen. I hadn't thought of it for years.

      The Reynolds Rocket, kiddies, was alleged to be the first ball point pen. It wasn't. But most people had never heard of such a thing before it arrived. It's aluminum, with a pocket clip, and a nose that clicks back to uncover the tip.

      It was advertised that the ink would last two years. It didn't. The ads also claimed that the pen  would write under water, which few people wanted to do, and which led to the joke, "Do you have an under water pen?" "No, but I have an Underwood typewriter."

      If you don't remember the Reynolds pen, you may not know what a typewriter is, either. But when a family friend gave me that pen, they were the latest rage.

      Gimbels in New York introduced them on Oct. 29, 1945, with full page ads proclaiming them the "fantastic, atomic era, miraculous pen." On the first day of the sale, 5,000 customers showed up and Gimbels had to call the cops. Some 30,000 pens were sold the first week, for $12.95 each.

      My pen quit writing about 67 years ago, and it has long been in a box where dead pens and other forlorn objects linger. I searched the web to see if there was anyone eager to buy such an antique for a large amount of money. There wasn't.

      I found all sorts of information, most of it confused and contradictory. Web sites offer to sell newer, more streamlined Reynolds pen models they say are Rockets. They're not.

      Tales of the creation of the pen vary severely. Attempts had been made for decades to improve the traditional fountain pen, which needed to be refilled with liquid ink every so often.

      In 1938, a Hungarian journalist named Laszlo Biro patented a fairly successful ball point pen in England. Milton Reynolds, a wheeler-dealerish American businessman, saw a Biro pen in Chicago or Buenos Aires, depending on which dependable source you depend on. He manufactured that model of his own and made a lot of money.

      With profits from his pen, Reynolds bought a twin engine airplane, set a round-the-world speed record, and the flew over the K-2 mountain in the Himalayas, to prove his theory that it was taller than Mt. Everest. It wasn't.

      He got rich investing in such things as the first birth control pills and Iranian oil, and retired to Mexico, where he died in 1976 at age 84.

      There is material about Reynolds out the proverbial wazoo on the web, but I located only one person who knows what the original Reynolds Rocket was. He is Richard Binder, a fountain pen dealer and expert in Nashua, New Hampshire, which boasts that it is the only city that Money magazine has named the Best Place to Live in America twice (so if you have the impulse to live someplace twice, Nashua would be it.)

      Binder has a personal collection of 400 pens, and says that the Rocket was the first Reynolds pen he bought. (He must be an old guy, like me.) So, I guess I have a one-item antique pen collection.

* * *

August 22, 2012

by James Smart

When vote fraud was an art

      The current hullabaloo about voters needing photo identification would have the Philadelphia politicians of 100 years ago laughing. The incumbent party in those days didn't try to prevent anybody from voting. In those simpler times, they encouraged everyone to vote as often as possible (but not for the opposition party.)

      Most experts say that people voting twice or more in modern elections are pretty rare. That's probably because today's politicians are too wussy to try to get away with that. A goodly number of them engage in activities that get them incarcerated, but not for something so petty as vote tampering.

      Not so, back in the days when Philadelphia was "corrupt and contented." Lincoln Steffans coined that phrase in his study of American cities in 1904. He called Pittsburgh "hell with the lid off," too, so Philly actually came off good by comparison.

      Vote fraud was an art in those days. The early 20th century Republican political machine in Philadelphia produced votes in bulk with apparent ease. Steffans wrote of a reformer who, as a test, sent a registered letter to each voter on the rolls of a selected election division. Of the lot, 63 percent were returned marked "not at," "removed," "deceased," etc.

      He found 44 voters registered in one four-story house, from which 18 letters came back. Many other houses produced similar results. A row of six houses had 127 voters registered.

Steffans was impressed by a politician from the ward that contained Independence Hall, who gave a speech in which he named some of the founders of the nation. "These men, the fathers of American liberty, voted down here once. And," he added with a grin, "they vote here yet."

      Unlike so many American innovations, Philadelphia did not invent voter fraud. An obscure instance comes to mind from 1858, when a small town lawyer in Illinois was running for office against an incumbent famous senator.

      The superintendent of an Illinois railroad backed the senator, and gave him a free pass to use while campaigning. He often lent the senator his personal rail car.

On election day, the railroad executive learned that the rival candidate had chartered a train to ship a cargo of illegal voters to a precinct where his party needed extra votes. The railroad chief gave his workers orders; the locomotive hauling the fraudulent voters mysteriously broke down, and wasn't fixed until the polls closed.

      The sad news here is that the backwoods candidate who tried to export dishonest voters was Honest Abe himself. The railroad superintendent was Gen. George Brinton McClellan, a Philadelphia aristocrat.

      Lincoln lost that one, but two years later (one hopes with no shenanigans) he was elected president, and in the Civil War he became McClellan's commander, and eventually had to fire him. In the middle of the war, McClellan unsuccessfully ran against Lincoln for president. No photo IDs were necessary.

      The first ever photo IDs probably were a Philadelphia invention. They were issued to officials, reporters, exhibitors and vendors at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. No voting was required.

* * *

August 15, 2012

by James Smart

All things being equal

      Gen. Raul Castro Ruz, President of the Council of State and President of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba, told the United States, a few weeks ago, that his government is willing to meet with our government. He said the Cubans are willing to discuss any topic, so long as it is a conversation between equals.

      Ah, equality. All things being equal, there is little that is more important than equality.

Here we have Cuba, a country just a bit smaller in size and population than Pennsylvania, with a gross domestic product of $114 billion, wishing to be considered the equal of the United States of America, with 30 times its population, 90 times its area, and a GDP of  $15 trillion.

      I guess that should be no surprise to us. A mere 236 years ago, we tossed the same audacity at a bunch of blokes who believed that, as George Orwell suggested, some people were born more equal than others.

      Life was simpler for everybody, but harder for most, when most people were destined at birth to a certain level of existence, with a few at the top, some in between, and the rest at a miserable bottom. Then, Tom Jefferson sent the top fellows a note that told them that all men were created equal.

      Tom didn't mention that after we're all created equal, from then on it's every man for himself. It's the opportunity that is equal, not the person, and even some opportunities are rigged to be more equal than others.

      The way equality works, King George III would never have written to Thomas Jefferson that they were equals, and I doubt that Barack Obama would write it to President Castro.

      The late C. S. Lewis, in a context that placed his tongue largely in cheek, wrote: "No man who says 'I'm as good as you are' believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain."

      People in modern times enjoy deriding Jefferson, Washington and a few other of our founding dudes here and there, for hypocrisy in proposing that all men were created equal, but not including the slaves they owned. No one seems to notice that they were also proclaiming "We're as good as you are" to King George, Lord North, and an endless list of princes, dukes, earls, barons and assorted other kinds of titled big-shots.

      Even in their idealistic frenzy to create a truly democratic society, our forefathers were inclined to create hierarchies and entitlements. Revolutionary soldiers' idea of a democratic army was to elect their officers. They didn't seem to consider not having officers, and most guys they elected immediately began acting the self-important way enlisted men through the ages have been familiar with..

      George Washington was being addressed as "Your Excellency" while he was still a general, and I never read of him, or any privates, objecting. In the first session of the U. S. Congress in 1789, John Adams, of all people, proposed that the president of the United States be addressed henceforth as "His Serene Highness." Barack should mention that to Raul.

* * *

August 8, 2012

by James Smart

Should baseball go high-tech?

      Baseball fans have been criticizing umpires ever since the sport was invented. Players, sports writers and broadcasters also moan and grumble about bad calls.

Television has made it worse. When an umpire misjudges a play, cameras aimed from every angle can show what happened, close up and usually unarguable.

      That has prompted suggestions that instant replays replace the time-honored aftermath of a disputed play, which involves an umpire and a manager glowering at each other with jutting jaws, saying rude things.

      The subject came up when Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig  spoke at a Baseball Writers Association gathering. Talking specifically about fair or foul calls and the question of trapped balls, the commissioner said that instant replay would not be applied until "we have the technology to do it."

      Has Bud  never seen a ball game on television? Don't we already have the technology to photograph and record where a baseball goes?

      The report of that opinion made me long for the days of my boyhood, when the baseball commissioner was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. One could accept with admiration, if not awe, the prouncements of a commissioner who was an actual federal judge and was named after a Civil War battlefield. Now we have Allan Huber Selig, who has a degree in political science, was in the automobile leasing business and calls himself Bud.

      Bud apparently hasn't noticed that cameras and sensors are everywhere. Cameras catch you driving through a red light, and photograph the license plate of your car doing about the same speed as a batted ball.

      Cameras in the mall parking lot watch you, and sensors at the doors detect you leaving stores with unpaid-for merchandise. Devices in airports pry into the contents of your luggage, and even can see if you are wearing explosive jockey shorts.

      What would be so hard to aim cameras at bases, or have sensors keep an electronic eye on foul lines? The sport has tested instant replay to judge contested fouls, fan interference or whether a ball has left the park. But the procedure is done solemnly, apologetically, as though it is shameful to doubt the infallibility of those guys in blue suits.

      Baseball happily adopted the measurement of the speed of pitches, which is interesting to know but largely irrelevant. (It's also irrelevant that probably the first device to measure pitch speeds was invented by the late Dr. Israel Monroe Levitt, director of the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute for many years, who had pitched for a sandlot team called the East Phillies when he was young, about 80 years ago.)

      In fact, technology exists to correct the least reliable and most important duty of umpires, calling balls and strikes. Sensors on each edge of home plate could determine whether a pitch is outside. Motion capture technology that movies use to animate fantastic creatures could easily be adapted to clip sensors on the appropriate high and low spots on players' uniforms to monitor that parameter.

      I hear the purists and nostalgiacs groaning.  But wouldn't it be better to light a sensor than to curse the umpires?

* * *

August 1, 2012

by James Smart

Old teachers remembered

      As I look back, and the distance back keeps getting longer, I've been thinking of teachers who influenced me.

      I think of Roland D. Cain, an English teacher at Northeast High School, who would entertain us by reading Chaucer or "Macbeth" aloud in the original accents. He advised the school newspaper staff.

      One of his classroom exercises was to pass out column-long clippings of New York Times news articles, and tell us to condense them to seven paragraphs. I inwardly blessed him regularly 10 years later, as a rewrite man at the Evening Bulletin, when a night editor would hand me a long story from the day's paper and say "Give me this in three 'graphs" for the next day's early editions.

      Upon graduation, when I told Mr. Cain I had applied at The Bulletin, he tried to talk me out of it. He said I would never make much money. He was right, but what fun I had.

      Dr. James D. Gordon became faculty adviser of the newspaper after Mr. Cain, and taught me a lot about being an editor by letting me figure things out for myself. We talked more about writing as a craft than about journalism.

      My first full-fledged journalism teacher, at the old Charles Morris Price School, was Henry Charlton Beck. He had become a newspaperman in the Twenties, after studying a bit at Penn. He played the fiddle in a theater orchestra on the side.

      For a while, he was editor of the Camden Courier-Post. He told of the day he became angry with a reporter, and sarcastically ordered him to go get a story about the leaves in the gutter in a nearby town. Henry intended the ridiculous assignment as punishment, but the guy came back with a headline exposé of a scandal in a municipal street cleaning department.

      In the Thirties and Forties, Henry wrote a series of books about the history and culture of  New Jersey pinelands and old towns, classics published by Rutgers University Press. He was a copy editor at The Bulletin in the early Forties, and active in Episcopal Church activities.

      He wrote mystery novels with newsroom background. But one was entitled "Death at a Church Supper." He liked to say, "It's amazing it doesn't happen more often."

      At age 44, he changed directions and became an Episcopal priest. "Went into the collar business," he used to say. He edited church publications, and in his spare time taught the mechanics of news writing with sharp insight.

      Also at Price School was Don Rose, who taught feature writing. Don came from England in 1908, and mostly taught college courses (including Hebrew) until 1927, when he began his column in the old Evening Ledger.

      I read his "Stuff and Nonsense" column when I was a little boy. He moved to The Bulletin when the Ledger collapsed in 1942, and wrote there until he died in 1964.

      Where Henry Beck had given precise assignments of articles to submit in class, Don was lackadaisical. Our homework was to write anything we wanted, "as long as it's good." He didn't hesitate to tell us when it wasn't, and why.

      And there was Herb Brooks, who taught fiction writing at Price. His criticism was vicious, but usually correct. They're all gone now, but they deserve this small posthumous shout-out.

* * *

July 25, 2012

by James Smart

Accumulated random thoughts

      Here is a collection of some random thoughts I've been collecting recently on scraps of paper, or in scraps of my brain.

      THOUGHT No. One: News media and municipal people have begun calling squares parks, as in "Norris Square Park" and "Franklin Square Park." That sounds stupidly redundant to old-time Philadelphians, but the usage is spreading, here and also in New York.

      I haven't heard anybody yet say "Rittenhouse Square Park," but it could happen any day now. And since people seem confused about whether Logan Square is a square or a circle, we could end up with "Logan Square Circle Park."

      In the traditional Philadelphia lexicon, a city block was a square. When I was a kid, people didn't use the word block.

      My house was two squares from Harrowgate Square, which was a park, but not a Park. My grandfather was on the crew in 1917 that tore down the last houses on that square along Kensington Ave., so that square could become the Square.

      THOUGHT No. Two: The signs sticking up on top of  the Parking Authority's fee-collecting juke boxes say "Kiosk Located Here." That must mean nearly nothing to any strangers to town or other uninformed parkers. If the city hired somebody who could communicate in straightforward English, the signs would say, "Pay for Parking Here."

      THOUGHT No. Three: Articles about Andy Reid, the Eagles impresario, visiting his high school alma mater in Los Angeles, mentioned that the nickname of the school, John Marshall High, is the Barristers. They obviously use that courtroom moniker because John Marshall was one of the more supreme chief justices of the Supreme Court.

      How nice that a school picked a name with meaning. Any school can be tigers or bruins or titans or chargers.

      When I was at Northeast High School, a bunch of decades ago, our teams were called the Archives. Our somewhat arch rivals at Central High were the Mirrors. Those appellations came from the titles of the two schools' literary magazines. Northeast teams have now become Vikings, though Norwegians are scarce around Cottman and Algon, Central teams are Lancers for no apparent reason, and not many high schools have literary magazines.

     THOUGHT No. Four: In a magazine article, a woman suggested a way to solve what she called the duration problem of reading a long book while traveling: "If you download the Kindle app across the iPad and iPhone, you can get about 10 hours," she revealed. Good advice. Or, you could buy the book. You know, the version made out of paper. You could travel with that for years, without recharging anything.

      THOUGHT No. Five: The Hollywood masterminds who put movies on DVDs or Blu-Rays or whatever usually provide subtitles as an option, but sometimes they don't. I suspect that they think English subtitles on American films are mainly for foreign diplomats and illegal immigrants.

      There are many movie viewers with hearing problems, who find those subtitles a blessing. Currently about six million Americans are over 80, that age group is growing four times faster than the general population, and I'm sure that many of those folks appreciate English subtitles.

* * *

July 18, 2012

by James Smart

Consensus and some nonsenses

      When the national aggregation of Occupiers finished improving our lives on July 4 and moved on to other places in need of their ministrations, they ended the day with some meetings. They assembled some fuzzy focus groups, working to compile a list of the things that those gathered in Philly would like to achieve.

      It wasn't easy. It's hard enough for one person to decide what to do in any given circumstance. Add another person, and the possibility for indecision and conflict is immediate.

Get together a group, such as family, church, labor union, sewing circle, Boy Scout troop, burglary ring, corporate board, Rotary Club, kids on a playground, or any other accumulation of people you could name,. The possibility immediately arises of vacillation, dissension, argument, fist fights and most other manifestations of unpleasant behavior.

      The problem the Occupiers has is that they are, or want to be, representative of 99 percent of the population. If you can't agree with your in-laws, or your co-workers, or those annoying people next door, or some other teeny percents of the population, how are you going to get an accumulation of Occupiers, much less their beloved 99 percent, to agree on things?

      I was intrigued by an Occupier quoted in the Inquirer, who felt that it was presumptuous to draft a list of goals for the non-organization.

      "In my opinion as an anarchist," he said, "I'm not going to condone any sort of message stapled to the Occupy movement before we have the consensus of all of the 99 percent, if not 100 percent."

      An anarchist (I now quote the Oxford American Dictionary) is a person who believes that government and laws are undesirable and should be abolished. In that context, it's every person for him or her self, so it would be vital to know what everybody wants.

      How would he go about getting that consensus of the 99 percent the Occupiers want to represent?  (The one percent wouldn't have time to speak to him. They're otherwise occupied.)

      The Census Bureau says that the population of the United States, as of this writing, is 313,890,894 persons. But people keep getting born, dying, immigrating, emigrating and sneaking in, so there's a net gain of 13 people every second. The number will be bigger by the time you read this.

      Children make up much of that population. Most of  them are 99 percenters, not fortunate enough to be born with a silver percent in their mouths.

      The Census Bureau number-manglers seem to feel that about 65 percent of the populations is registered to vote. Let's say there are, therefore, about 205 million adults who vote. About 203 million would be 99 percent of them.

      Our anarchist friend would probably demand that non-voters such as children and adult slackers be included, but I recommend that he get the consensus of the registered voters just for starters.

      I've got an idea for the anarchist. To get a consensus, why don't we have all those 99 percenters go to the polls and elect people to represent them?

      Oops! That sounds as though the result might be laws and a government, and no self-respecting anarchist would want that.

* * *

July 11, 2012

by James Smart

Take them to our leader

      On the day that the news media and the Internet busybodies discharged overwhelming amounts of coverage and verbiage about the Supreme Court sanctifying Obamacare, there seemed to be almost as much written, broadcasted and otherwise inflicted on us about a survey that said Americans think Obama would handle a space alien invasion better than Romney.

      The ruckuses weren't really equal. I typed "Supreme Court Obamacare" into Google and was offered 422 million entries, while "Romney Obama aliens" found only 48 million mentions.

      But that's still a lot, for such nonsense. The survey was taken by the National Geographic people. There is a strong suspicion that it had something to do with a television show about space alien matters that they were ballyhooing.

      Reporters and commentators gleefully leaped on the publicity gimmick, reporting that 65 percent of Americans said that the president would be better than his opponent at repelling an attack from outer space. Most didn't seem to notice that the people surveyed were a randomly selected 1,114 Americans 18 years old and over.

      Now, I admit that I am not a statistician, but, give me a break. This poll did not measure the couple of hundred million Americans it claimed to. What we got was 65 percent of 1,114 people picking Obama as the alien slayer.

      The survey went on, with what would be a straight face if surveys had faces, to say that the poll revealed that nearly half of Americans would volunteer to have their boss be experimented on by space aliens.

      That result supposes not only that the 1,114 responders represent the millions of Americans who have bosses. It begs the question, are aliens from outer space prepared for, or even interested in, performing experiments on selected human beings?

      And that, in turn, begs the question, is there such a thing as an alien from outer space? The survey reports that only 36 percent of those surveyed said they believed in the existence of such aliens in  the first place, so who cares which presidential candidate would be most likely to trounce such critters?

      Non-believers accounted for 17 percent of the vote. The remaining 48 percent said they were not sure. (That comes to 101 percent, but I'm just giving you the figures the pollsters reported. An extra one percent is not my problem.)

      The poll also determined that more of the polees believe in aliens than in superheroes or zombies. That would seem not to concern Obama or Romney. President Lincoln already took care of the zombie problem in that current movie, and the superheroes are on our side.

      If members of that 1,114 bunch encountered an alien, the surveyors reported, 22 percent said they would try to befriend it; 15 percent said they would run away; 13 percent said they would lock the doors; two percent said they would try to fight it, and 55 percent said the government has men in black to handle the situation. (That's more than 100 percent, too, but this is science fiction.)

      Nobody was specific on how Obama or Romney would repel the invaders. Probably Obama would force them to buy health insurance. Romney would make them ride on the roof of his car.

* * *

June 27, 2011

by James Smart

An old-time political scandal

      This month is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate affair, when five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington and touched off a political scandal that ultimately sent 43 people to jail, including some top administration officials, and resulted in Richard M. Nixon resigning from the presidency.

      Curiously, and perhaps particularly American, the brains behind the crime, G. Gordon Liddy, is today a radio host and political celebrity.

      The anniversary reminded me of a political conspiracy in 1874, that I discovered while doing research for my book, "Adonijah Hill's Journal."

      In February, 1874, a group of prominent Washington citizens convinced Congress to create a committee to investigate corruption in the Capitol. Leader of the group was a businessman named Columbus Alexander.

      Gen. Orville Babcock, a White House official, was accused of exaggerating measurements of public works projects so contractors could collect excessive payments. A major contractor was subpoenaed to produce his books. Alexander denounced the books as fakes.

      The conspirators in the fraud concocted an elaborate scheme to discredit Columbus Alexander. Babcock approved it.

      They would stage a burglary of the office of an Assistant U. S. Attorney, who was one of the conspirators, steal the contractor's records from a safe there, and plant them on Alexander to discredit him.

      The whole story of the plot is too complicated to fit in this column. I have 27 single-spaced typed pages of details, from old law publication articles. It culminated in a nearly comic failure.

      On the night of April 23, the Assistant U. S. Attorney told the D. C. police chief (not in on the plot) that he had a tip that his office would be burgled. He suggested they let it happen and follow the burglar. They hid in his office building, and heard the break-in.

      The safe-cracker, who had been highly recommended by the chief of the Secret Service, did his job and sneaked out the back. An associate, who was to be arrested but allowed to "escape" by the Secret Service, carried away a bag of stolen papers.

      The police chief and the federal attorney  followed him from a distance. They were joined by the head of city detectives, whom the chief had stationed outside. As they crept along, a politician who knew them happened by, and joined them.

      At one point, they rounded a corner and bumped into the burglar. He was lost, and politely asked the posse which way was F St. They told him.

      When the burglar got to Columbus Alexander's house, ready to deliver the incriminating papers, he rang the door bell for some 20 minutes. Alexander, who they were sure would be at home, was not.

      The conspiracy collapsed. The Assistant U. S. Attorney was so upset, he vomited. A celebration supper at a Washington club, planned by some of the corrupt politicians, was canceled.

      The police chief became suspicious, and in the subsequent weeks there were investigations and arrests. Those conspirators could have used a man like G. Gordon Liddy.

      Here's the kicker: I found Columbus Alexander's family tree on line. His great-grandson is G. Gordon Liddy.

* * *

June 20, 2012

by James Smart

What fun! It's election year

      If you look at politics as a sport, a tendency among journalists and other public nuisances, the upcoming presidential election is shaping up to be a lot of fun.

      A recent national poll discovered that more Americans claim to be politically independent these days than any time since Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term. Only 32 percent of voting age citizens admitted that they are Democrats, and 24 percent confessed to being Republicans.

      That left 38 present of the adult population wandering in that political wasteland where they are compelled to make up their own minds. Unfortunately, the decision they make might be not to vote at all.

      I have long identified myself as a Middle-of-the-Road Extremist (Our slogan: We Disagree With Everybody.) But I have always dutifully voted, even when it was difficult to decide which candidate was the worst.

      Media pundits who pundified about that poll's indication that folks are abandoning their traditional alliances seem to believe that quitters are quitting the Republican party because it has become too conservative, that Democrats are defecting because the party leans too far left, and that the non-partied are meeting somewhere in the political middle.

      Unfortunately for pundithood, it is possible that Tea Party Republicans have picked up their Tetley bags and walked out because they think the Romney Republicans are too moderate. Democrats on the opposite extreme (who have not yet chosen a symbolic beverage) may have departed because President Obama has not magically established their vision of government.

      Whether there is a shift to the middle, or people are falling off both ends, it will be interesting to see what effect these supposedly uncommitted voters have in November. The effect is particularly unpredictable if the disaffected Tea Party enthusiasts decide not to vote at all.

      Since Lyndon Johnson hung it up in 1968, we have had only three terms of Democrat presidents until Obama. Jimmy Carter lasted one term; Bill Clinton held on for two.

      Both Carter and Clinton are Southern Baptists. It may be unfortunate that religion plays a part in elections in the land of Constitutional freedom of religion, but conservative Christians had a lot to do with those Democrats landing in the White House.

      Obama is an African-American. It may be unfortunate in the land of Constitutional racial equality, but many conservative Christians, and not just in the South, have their doubts about Obama. And now they must choose between the president and a Mormon, whose faith they consider apostate, or at least wrong-thinking.

      When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976, white voters were 89 percent of the electorate. When Barack Obama was elected, the number of white voters was 74 percent. The 2010 Census reported that non-Hispanic white voters are now 77.5 percent of voters

      Does all of the above give you enough fuel to start a good argument? Personally, I'm looking forward to watching those fun-filled results on election night in the fall. It will be more entertaining than watching the World Series, the way the Phillies are going.

* * *

June 13, 2012

by James Smart

Longest may live the Queen

      The British did a lot of whooping and hollering in honor of Queen Elizabeth having endured 60 years of reigning She deserved that national shout-out.

      She has an occupation that takes up most of her time, and attracts devotion and respect, but with some measure of disobedience and disdain. It's a lot like being a parent, except that she's the perceived mama of 63 million people.

      You have to like your job to stick with it for 60 years. But she does have job security. The last time a monarch had his job terminated was 363 years ago, when Elizabeth's 8th great-grand-uncle, King Charles I, lost his job and, not incidentally, his head. Most modern human resources departments probably never consider that procedure.

      The British tried getting along without a king, but their new unroyal CEO was no fun, so about 10 years later, they brought back Charles's son, and once again had a Charles in charge.

      That illustrates the down side of Elizabeth's situation. She didn't have much choice. It's the family business, and she was expected to take over, even if she preferred another line of work.

      It's not a job you can just walk away from. Her uncle Eddie did it, and came off  looking a bit like a jerk. Which he probably was.

      Elizabeth may well break the throne-warming record set by Queen Victoria, her great-great grandmother. In 1896, Victoria passed the 59-year ruling record of her great-grandfather, George III, who died in 1820 at age 81.

      Queen Victoria ruled over an empire much bigger and more British-controlled than Elizabeth does today. Victoria had an additional title, Empress of India, which shows how much Britain had its royal hooks into in those days.

      King George III had a giant empire going for him, too, but he blew it. His administration treated America as though it were a third world country that needed parenting from his little island, and lost a whole continent to a bunch of subjects he found revolting.

Britons didn't have a chance to organize festivities to honor George III's long reign, but gave him a nice funeral. He was buried in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, where most kings and queens of England have been entombed ever since.

I've seen a photograph of a ticket to George III's funeral, issued by the "Office of the Groom of the Stole" (meaning stool.) That title goes back to the 15th century, originally a high ranking royal staff member who helped their majesties with personal matters you may not want to know about.

      Britain did put on a big shin-dig in London in 1897 to celebrate Victoria's 60th year, although not quite as elaborate as Elizabeth's recent frolic. Victoria lived on until January, 1901, and died at age 81.

      Elizabeth II turned 86 on April 21. She looks to be in pretty good shape, riding horseback, going hunting, raising thoroughbred horses, and also doing all the stuff monarchs are expected to do, always with a cool demeanor and spiffy hats.

      Her mother lived to be 100. Elizabeth has a good chance to pass Victoria's record and become the queen of royal longevity. So, mark your calendar for another possible celebration in 2015.

* * *

June 6, 2012

by James Smart

A big year, 100 years ago

      This Year is the 100th anniversary of a lot of interesting things. For instance, 1912 was the year of the invention of the heart attack.

      Well, not exactly. People's hearts had been attacking them for years. But when folks complained of chest pains, and sometimes keeled over, doctors would diagnose the problem as indigestion, or food poisoning, or angina pectoris. "Angina" comes from the Greek word for strangling, and "pectoris" from Latin for chest, so doctors were just telling the patient what he already knew, in two languages.

      The medical industry had noticed in autopsies that there were often clots in coronary arteries, but considered it just an aspect of aging. They called  the blockage "thrombosis," which is Greek for clot, but sounds better when you're describing something you're not sure you understand.

      In 1912, a Chicago doctor named James D. Herrick wrote a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association about his diagnosis of a living heart attack patient, 55 years old. He explained how clots destroy heart muscle, and changed doctors' understanding of heart attacks.

      Another thing invented in 1912 was the fourth down, if a down can be considered a thing. Football previously had only three downs per possession, since 1898. I'm not sure why an extra down seemed desirable, but we still have it, so it must have been a good idea.

      Whoever mandated the football rules also made a touchdown worth six points. It was formerly only five.

      And they allowed a new-fangled piece of business, the forward pass, to count as a touchdown if caught in the end zone. Why they didn't name that a grab-up is not known.

      While football teams were learning the new rules, two separate teams of biochemists, one at the University of Wisconsin and one at Yale, discovered Vitamin A in 1912. It was also the year that Richard Hellmann started making mayonnaise, and the National Biscuit Co. began making Oreos.

      The Girls Scouts of America had their start in 1912; the first troop was in Savannah, Georgia. The concept was adapted from the Girl Guides organization in England. Hadassah, the Jewish women's organization, was also founded.

      Two grocery stores opened in California in 1912 with no clerks waiting on people. They were called self-service markets; one used the name "groceteria." The word supermarket seemed to sprout mysteriously later, about 1930.

      The letters SOS, tapped out as three dots, three dashes and three dots, was adopted as a world-wide distress signal by an international radio-telegraph conference. New Mexico and Arizona became the 47th and 48th states.

      Leon Leonwood Bean started a clothing store up in Maine. His business got big, and is still with us. Frank Woolworth organized five small shops into a chain of five and ten cent stores, which is no longer with us. Now we have dollar stores.

      Born in 1912 were Julia Child, Perry Como, Pat Nixon, Wernher von Braun and Jay Silverheels. Died in 1912: Clara Barton, Bram Stoker, Wilbur Wright, John Jacob Astor and August Strindberg,

      It was an interesting year. Most years are.

* * *

May 30, 2012

by James Smart

Some reflections on Memorial Day

      On this Memorial Day, there is a lot of interest in the Civil War as its 150th anniversary rolls along. For the parents and grandparents who raised folks my age, memories of that war always hung over their households.

      My grandfather would be 150 years old this year. When he was old and I was pre-school age, he told me stories of his father's days in the Union army. There were no tales of battles and heroism. He told mostly of his father marching around, following Gen. McClellan on the Virginia peninsula, subsisting on hard tack and beans as his teeth loosened up and his hair began to fall out because of scurvy.

      Grandpop was gone before I became old enough and interested enough to investigate the facts about the family and the war. It's a kind of story many American families can tell on this sesquicentennial of that lethal conflict.

      My great-grandfather was 27 when the war started. He had been married seven years, had a six-year-old son, and worked in a textile mill. He had no great reason to join the army.

His brother Joe enlisted two months after the war began. He became a private in Co. 1, 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry. Then, kid brother Jake signed up in Co. B, 90th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

      Soon, the oldest brother got the itch to go soldiering, too. My grandfather was born on July 11, 1862. On August 12, his father enlisted in Co. B, 68th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

They weren't the letter-writing type. Joe was a brick maker by trade; Jake was a harness-maker. The family has no collection of battlefield correspondence to tell what the boys were going through.

      In March of 1864, Jake died of disease in Virginia, age 23, On Jan. 11, 1865, Joe, 27, followed him. They were casualties of war, but no medals are given for their kind of sacrifice.

My great-grandfather made it through to the end of the war. Any memories of his adventures have been buried with the old folks.

      To imagine some of his experiences, we have to turn to the history books. His regiment was in big battles: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the last charge at Petersburg. The 68th was one of four Yankee regiments at the Peach Orchard on the second day at Gettysburg, He was one of about 980 men facing nearly 3,000 Confederates.

      At the end of the war, about one man out of eight in the original 68th roll call was dead. My great-grandfather came home with a bad leg, from falling off a wagon. No medals for that, either.

In the early 20th century, on the day before Decoration Day, as they called May 30th then, my grandmother would take the old push lawn mower on the trolley car up to the cemetery, to make sure that my great-grandfather's grave was tidy when the Sons of Union Veterans squad came on the holiday to put a flag on the plot and fire a rifle salute.

      She was the daughter of a German immigrant. He was her father-in-law. She didn't know or care much about war, or history, or politics, but she understood the sacrifices some families made to serve their country. Some still do.

* * *

May 24, 2012

by James Smart

What's in an old-time name?

      The folks at the Social Security Administration have issued their annual list of the most popular names applied to arriving babies last year. They must have a lot of time on their hands, between the days when they shower checks upon grateful codgers.

      Not only does their web site offer the list of favored infant monikers, but it provides much other useful information. There's a section on "Effects on Medicare when in jail," which I haven't yet consulted, but it's comforting to know it exists. One never knows when one might be ill or incarcerated, and possibly simultaneously.

      Another title on the Social Security site is "Speeding up the hearing process." That could be valuable. When you're confronted by a polical speech or a dull lecture, it would be splendid to be able to hear it faster.

      As to the vital news about baby names, which was thoroughly thrashed about by various media lately, the fact that strikes me the most is that, for the 13th year, the most popular name affixed to new male babies is Jacob.

      My family was ahead of the trend. I had a grandfather, a great uncle and a great-great-grandfather named Jacob, and narrowly escaped being a Jacob myself.

It's a Biblical name, of course. The first Jacob, or at least, the first famous one, was the father of the dozen boys who founded the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The meaning of the Hebrew name is usually given as "supplanter," because Jacob sneakily took his brother's place and got his old man's inheritance.

      But in a sort of trickle-down name usage, James got to be the English equivalent of Jacob. In the 17th century, the reign of King James I was called the Jacobean era, and the Highland Scottish troublemakers who supported James Stuart  were called Jacobites.

      Later, the nastiest bunch of head-removers in the French Revolution were the Jacobins, so named because their Paris headquarters was in Rue St. Jacques, the French version of James or Jacob or whatever.

      While assorted speculations have been speculated, nobody seems to know why Jacob is the hot name for American boys. The number one name for girls is Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom. That's better than "supplanter."

      Here are the top 10 boys' names: Jacob, Mason, William, Jayden, Noah, Michael, Ethan, Alexander, Aiden, Daniel.

      Now, the top ten for girls: Sophia, Isabella, Emma, Olivia, Ava, Emily, Abigail, Madison, Mia, Chloe.

      The name that seems most strange to me is Jayden. It first crept into Social Security's top hundred in 1994, but no one has a good explanation for it. Some Star Trek aficionados point out that when Commander Data, the sallow-complected robot on the Second Generation series, got amnesia in one episode, someone who found him wandering gave him the name Jayden.

      That raises two questions. Such a flimsy event makes a name popular? Robots can get amnesia?

      The upshot of the name-popularity announcement is this: If you want your child to have an unusual name, select, for a boy, John, Joseph, Robert or Thomas. For a girl, Jane, Mary, Helen or Joan. Avoid those everyday names like Jayden or Madison.

* * *

May 16, 2012

by James Smart

Why update good old stories?

      The British have shipped us a few more chunks of their alleged Sherlock Holmes television series in which Holmes and Watson are portrayed  by two fellows who look barely out of adolescence, and which is set in modern London with its super-sized Ferris wheel and gherkin-shaped skyscraper and all that, and nary a Hansom cab or gas-lit street in sight.

      It has long been fashionable for stage, screen and tube to shift classic theatrical works to modern locations. Creative types get some sort of ego-goosing thrill from such projects as setting "Hamlet" in Milwaukee, or putting "Carmen" to work in a Starbucks with Escamillio being a quarterback instead of a toreador.

      Everyone to his own taste, but personally, I prefer leaving Hamlet in Denmark where he belongs, and placing Julius Caesar in ancient Rome and not converting him into a modern fascist dictator.

      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stuck Holmes and Watson smack in his own time. If Conan Doyle had wanted them to be in the 21st century, he would have written science fiction. And if some present-day dramatists want to give us a pair of 21st century detectives, they should darn well create their own.

      If this sort of updating of familiar works continues, I suppose the next thing BBC might inflict on us is 21st century tales of Robin Hood. The producers could borrow from the American terminology, and have the Merry Men rob from the one percent to give to the 99 percent.

      I see Daniel Radcliffe as Robin. Pippa Middleton would be a perfect Maid Marian. The Archbishop of Canterbury could do a cameo as Friar Tuck,  and Tony Blair could be an economy-sized Little John.

      The British are good at updating stuff, but we could both modernize and Americanize some well-know tales. How about a 21st century American "Christmas Carol," with a young Scrooge to match the young Sherlock Holmes?

      Scrooge would be a twentyish chap who created an Internet social networking system and became fabulously wealthy. As he sits counting his dollars and gigabytes, he is visited by the ghost of Bernie Madoff or somebody. You know how it goes.

      The old newspaper play, "The Front Page," could become "The Front Web Site." Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" could be moved from the Salem witch trial to a Tea Party committee trying to get Barack Obama to confess that he was born in Hawaii and Kenya simultaneously.

      We could have "My Fair Co-Ed," with a young professor coaching a teen-age Eliza from Queens, New York, on a 21st century college campus:

      Hank Higgins: "The New York girls wear pearls and curl their hair."

      Eliza:  "The Noo Yawk goils wayeh poils an' coil theyeh hayeh."

      Hank: "Try again, Liz."

      Another thought: Will theatrical people in the future produce updated versions of our contemporary plays? Will they put on a "Pygmalion" or "My Fair Lady" with Henry Higgins teaching a robot how to speak like a human?

      In the 23rd century, will somebody be doing an adaptation called "A Spacecraft Named Desire," set in a city on a large asteroid?  Imagine Blanche Du Bois cooing, "I have always depended on the kindness of astronauts."

* *  *

May 9, 2012

by James Smart

Grisly reading for young adults

      In a mail-order book catalogue, on the children's book page, I came across a title, "The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs." It's described as for "young adults" so maybe, being a "not getting any younger adult," my opinion is irrelevant.

      But this work of what I sincerely hope is fiction seems to be an account of a pair of young siblings who discover the instructions and equipment for taxidermy, and use it to stuff and preserve their beloved but deceased mother in an attempt to keep her around for a while.

My reaction, in a word, was "yuck!"

      Perhaps it is wrong to judge the book without reading it. And readers, either young adults or old ones, may disagree with me.

      Young adult is a loose classification at best. It could mean anything between middle school and law school. There are college undergraduates who never read anything they aren't required to, if that. There are grade school kids who read Dickens and Dostoevsky.

      Fiction aimed at all ages these days is loaded with vampires, werewolves, serial killers and other unpleasant individuals, so perhaps I am old-fashioned and oversensitive. But a cheerful account of a couple of kids skinning Momma and preserving her hide for display doesn't strike me as high-class reading for our youth.

      It's possible that any youthful readers mature enough to handle the subject might well be the ones most likely to ignore it.  It might give others bad ideas, or bad dreams.

      Maybe I'm over-reacting. I was an early reader myself, and read material that introduced me to many disagreeable aspects of life. I was reading the newspapers by the second grade, and there is nothing much more scary to an eight-year-old than a daily presentation of crime, war, accidents, sickness, that mysterious s-e-x, and the other regular activities of our planet.

      Being known as a ravenous child reader meant different things to different friends and relatives, depending on their own views of both childhood and the printed word. At Christmas and birthdays, when I was in grade school, some aunts and family friends would present me works with titles like "Buddy Down on the Farm" and  "Baseball Joe at Yale."

      Others, demonstrating their idea of my possibly more grown-up tastes, bestowed such works as "Treasure Island" and "Tom Sawyer." I read them all, of course.

      Meanwhile, after Christmas, I waited until my father was finished with his gift books, so I could pore over the latest Leslie Charteris mystery, or "The Nine Old Men" by Drew Pearson (about the Supreme Court.) I had plowed through much of his Sinclair Lewis novels, Dickens, Mark Twain and such. I didn't always understand everything, but I was reading.

      I don't remember my parents ever forbidding me to read anything. If I asked them to explain something I read and didn't understand, they would do it.

      But I can't help wondering what my mother would have said if I told her that I was reading about a couple of kids whose mother died, and they skinned her, stuffed her and preserved her. Even if I had reached the lofty status of "young adult."

* * *

May 2, 2012

by James Smart

Occupiers in action, 75 years ago

      The fire that wiped out the old Thomas W. Buck hosiery mill, and took two firefighters' lives, recalls the days when knitting mills employed more Philadelphians than any other blue collar occupation, and guys who ran the ladies' high fashion silk stocking looms considered themselves the elite of the trade.

      I know, because my father was one of them. His union, Local No. 1, American Federation of Hosiery Workers, was big and feisty.

      And this is the 75th anniversary of a legendary hosiery sit-in. On May 6, 1937, strikers occupied the Apex Hosiery Mill, where Fifth and Luzerne Sts. and Rising Sun Ave. form a triangle.

      The mill was built in 1901. Robert Meyer and later his son, William, operated the Apex there from 1908 until it closed in 1954. Brown Instrument Co. used it for a while. It then was Roberto Clemente Middle School until 1997.

      The 300,000 square foot, six story brick building is empty, neglected and possibly dangerous, like the Buck building. The School District can't find a buyer.

      The hosiery union was formed in 1913, and by 1918 had bargained the work week down from 54 hours to 45. In the booming 1920s, as both the salaries and hemlines of working girls hit an all-time high, so did silk stocking production.

      A good knitter could bring home $7,000 a year (to compare, the mayor's salary was $18,000.) Philly had 38 percent of the nation's stocking looms; national production in 1929 was 26,900,000 pairs.

      When the Depression hit, some mill owners resisted the union. That's why 5,000 demonstrators gathered outside the non-union Apex mill on that May afternoon. The bosses told the workers inside to go home.

      Strikers invaded the building at 3 P. M. There was some rough stuff. One of 18 men injured was Henry Mackley, whose brother, Carl, had been shot dead during a 1930 strike. The union had built an apartment complex for workers, in Juniata, and named it for Carl.

      For eight weeks, 256 union members occupied the mill. The union delivered cots and other necessities.

      The occupiers established a routine. They got up at 7 A. M, washed, shaved and had calisthenics before breakfast. Men took assigned turns handling breakfast, lunch and dinner, cooked at union headquarters at Frankford Ave. and Orthodox St. and passed in mill windows.

      Strikers also stood watch around the clock at windows and doors. During the day, those with no duties read, listened to the radio, or played cards, checkers, or baseball in the mill yard.

      A strikers' orchestra performed evening concerts, and there were movies after dinner. A few men complained about one hardship: a majority had voted to put up "No Smoking" signs.

      Mayor S. Davis Wilson got a court injunction, and brokered agreements with the union. On June 23, he and union officials entered the Apex, and led out the occupiers. Leaders of the victorious procession carried American flags. An amplifier played march music. Some 15,000 hosiery union men and women on the street cheered.

      They couldn't know that soon, du Pont would create nylon, Japan would send us bombs instead of silk, and silk stockings would fade from the feminine wardrobe.

* * *

April 25, 2012

by James Smart

It's Person Who Assists Day

      April 25 has again been proclaimed Administrative Assistants Day, by whoever is in charge of proclaiming such things. It used to be Secretaries Day, on which bosses bought their secretaries flowers or candy, or took them to lunch.

      Now it has become Administrative Assistants Day, or in some accounts Administrative Professionals Day. It raises some questions, such as: Are the possessors of the fancier title still doing the same work as when they were lowly secretaries? Are bosses patronizingly still rewarding them with flowers or candy? What would Don Draper do?

      The dictionary advises that a secretary is "a person employed to help deal with correspondence, typing, filing, and similar routine work." The dictionary also mentions the Secretary Bird, "a long-legged African bird with a crest likened to quill pens placed behind a writer's ear." Either the dictionary or the bird, or both, hasn't heard that quill pens seem to be on the way out. The bird should now be the Administrative Assistant Bird.

      An assistant, says the dictionary, is "a person who assists." Gee, what are the odds of that?

      The reason for the newer title, I suppose, is to kill the old fashioned image of a secretary as someone who does low level, routine work, and to suggest a job with more important duties.

The old thinking was reflected in a routine years ago by comedian Jackie Mason, who complained that our country had a secretary of the army and a secretary of the navy. What did secretaries know about running armed services, Mason asked. But, he pointed out, the mail was handled by a postmaster general. There, we could use a secretary.

      This day that we pause to honor the secretaries among us was instituted in 1952, by Harry M. Klemfuss, Mary Barrett and C. King Woodbridge.

      Klemfuss was an executive of the Young& Rubicam advertising agency, a firm mentioned in an early episode of the "Mad Med" television series when its employees threw water out their office windows on anti-war demonstrators in the street below. I'm not sure why Klemfuss decided that secretaries should be acknowledged annually.

Barrett was president of the National Secretaries' Association. Her interest in the program is obvious.

      So is the involvement of Woodbridge; he was president of the Dictaphone Corp., whose recording device relieved countless secretaries of the finger-numbing process of taking notes.

      As our civilization matured, the celebration in 1981 became National Professional Secretaries Day, and Administrative Professionals Day in 2001. A full week of related activities are wrapped around the big day.

      The celebration does not include the 14 secretaries in the president's cabinet. I'm sure there is no likelihood of them becoming administrative assistants. Administrative Assistant of State does not have a good ring to it. (The attorney general is the only one who isn't a secretary.)

      The word cabinet, meaning a small meeting room, started with kings of England a few hundred years ago. Their cabinets don't have secretaries. They have ministers, who administrate, so it all works out nicely.

* * *

April 18, 2012

by James Smart

Hot books on Obama and Maya

      Looking through some book catalogues, I noticed two current trends in publishing. There were seven books complaining about President Obama. There were 16 books reporting that the world is coming to an end.

      The Obama books included one that claims to expose his nefarious plans to rewrite the Constitution and replace Judeo-Christian values with failed radical leftist beliefs. Another says that Obama is intent on enriching his Wall Street friends, corporate lobbyists and union bosses.

      Those two activities would seem to cancel each other out. But another book reveals that the stimulus program was to protect the jobs of government workers.

      If you don't like the sound of those, you can buy a book that offers to detail the administration's true plans to remake America, hinting that the plans are not good. Another book promises to explain that Obamacare is worse than most critics suspect.

      Perhaps strangest of all is the book describing Obama's "profound rage that comes from his African father, an anti-colonialist rage against the wealth and power of the nation he now leads."

I though that anti-colonialism was a good thing. Isn't that why our nation got organized in the first place?

      If you feel a need to read those books, I'll provide titles on request. If you don't have the patience, try the seventh one, which probably sums up the whole subject. Its subtitle is: "Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency."

      The good news is that we don't have to worry about Emperor Obama, because the world is going to end this year.

      There were warnings about that last year, too. (For the record, it didn't happen.)

      Last year's predictions were mostly founded on religion, so naturally, nobody paid any attention. We were all too busy ignoring the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule and whatnot to  ignore the coming Apocalypse.

      This year, it's the ancient Maya civilization that informs us of our impending doom, say those new books. Those Pre-Columbian dudes carved their calendars in stone, so you know they must have been right. If you can't trust hieroglyphs, what can you trust?

      The prophets who profit by writing that the end is nigh cite ancient Maya calendars on stone cylinders, which they say divide history into 5,125 year cycles, all the way back to whatever they go all the way back to. The current cycle ends on Dec. 12, which is mystically 12/12/12, and then it's Maya-bar-the-door.

      Experts on ancient Maya say there are no predictions of catastrophe in the Maya calendar. So do modern Maya. There are a whole bunch of them still living down in Meso-America and thereabouts, and even a lot of them up here in regular America (not even including Maya Angelou and Maya Rudolph.)

      The Maya these days use a flat circular calendar that looks like a stone pizza. It has only a 52 year cycle, and it doesn't mention any Judgment Day.

      If the ancient Maya had anything nasty to say about President Obama, they kept it to themselves. That wouldn't stop anybody from writing a book about it.

* * *

April 4, 2012

by James Smart

Who's who of closed schools

      Most of the public schools the reform commission is closing were named to honor once prominent men. It's interesting to consider who they were.

      It's sad to see the Levering name go. There has been a schoolhouse on that site since William L. Levering gave the land for the first one in 1771. He was a descendant of Wigard Levering, the first permanent settler in the area in 1691.

      Of the other schools on the hit list that were named after people, William Henry Harrison and Philip H. Sheridan probably have the names most likely to be recognized. There are 12 Philadelphia schools named for presidents, and eight named for generals.

      William H. Harrison, our ninth president, was 68 when inaugurated, the oldest president. He was in office for a month.

      March 4, 1841, his inauguration day, was cold and stormy, but Harrison insisted on riding a white horse to the capitol, and refused to wear a coat or hat. He delivered an hour and 45 minute inaugural address. Then, he led a parade to the White House. He caught cold, went to bed with pneumonia on March 27, and died in the White House on April 4, the first president to die in office. Vice President John Tyler took over.

      Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan was a West Point graduate, five feet five inches tall, and a 30 year old infantry captain with a desk job when the Civil War started. He agitated for battle duty, and was made a cavalry colonel in 1862. His leadership in the field won him his first star 35 days later, and by 1864 he was a hero and a major general.

      The other schools slated for closing are Drew, Fitzsimons, Pepper and Rhodes.

      Dr. Charles R. Drew was an African American researcher whose developments of blood storage and transfusion methods saved thousands of lives on the battlefields of World War II. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1950, at age 45.

      Thomas Fitzsimmons was born in Ireland in 1741, and came to Philadelphia as a boy. He and his brother became prosperous in colonial trade with the West Indies, and he was one of the founding members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in 1771. He helped organize the Pennsylvania Navy in the Revolution, served in the Continental Congress in the 1780s, and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He died in 1793.

      There have been a peck of Peppers in Philadelphia since Heinrich Pfeffer came over from Germany in 1751. The name on the school belonged to George Wharton Pepper, who died in 1961 at age 94. He was a lawyer, and a Republican senator from Pennsylvania in the 1920s. He was not the George Pepper whose bequest started the Free Library of Philadelphia.

      Eugene Washington Rhodes was a Temple University law graduate. He married Bertha Perry, whose father, Christopher Perry, founded the Philadelphia Tribune, now the oldest African American newspaper, in 1884. Rhodes became editor of the Tribune, but didn't give up law. He was for a time an assistant U. S. Attorney and served in the Pennsylvania legislature. He died in 1970, at age 75.

      An encyclopedia of all the persons whose names are on Philadelphia school buildings. would make interesting reading.

* * *

March 28, 2012

by James Smart

Insuring automobiles and health

      Some people oppose the government requiring everybody to have health insurance. They don't seem to feel that way about other things the government tells us to do.

      There are lot of laws that require everybody to cooperate, for the common good. Take traffic lights. When auto accidents started to become frequent, 80 or 90 years ago, governments put up signals to control intersections.

      Most drivers obey stop lights. And, does anybody ever protest tax money being used to pay for them?

      When cities began getting bigger and more densely built up, 150 years ago or so, it became obvious that volunteers couldn't handle the fire fighting. City governments organized salaried fire departments, with everybody sharing in the cost through taxes.

      Some Philadelphians opposed the creation of the paid fire department when it was started in 1871, but today, it's so accepted that taxpayers protest when the city cuts fire department activity to save money.

      Those who never have a fire chip in, taxingly speaking, for the fire department. All taxpayers also contribute to education, even those with no children. Few people seriously complain about it.

      These laws are a form of sharing. We all pay to provide things that some of us need and others don't. If we do need them, they're there.

      And state governments have mandated that automobile owners buy accident insurance. The idea, as with most insurance, is that it's fair and practical that all drivers share the risk. Everybody pays into it, whether or not they ever need it, so that funds are there to help drivers who do need it.

      Health insurance is the same deal. There is a significant difference, though. If an uninsured automobile owner has an accident, he never takes the car to a repair shop and demands that the mechanics fix it for free.

      People who have no health insurance, when they break a bone or acquire a hole in an inconvenient body area, will go to a hospital and ask for free treatment. Our soft-hearted society doesn't approve of them being told to go away and bleed somewhere else.

      They get repaired, and the rest of us are forced to help pay for it by shelling out higher than necessary medical payments, whether we have insurance or not.

      So, what's wrong with the government requiring everybody to take responsibility to care for their bodies as well as they do their automobiles, by having insurance?

      Some young people say that they don't need health insurance yet. They'll sign up later. But nearly everybody gets sick eventually, and everybody dies once. It's wise to invest in health insurance when you're young, so you can afford to die. Dying can be expensive.

      Requiring universal medical insurance often evokes cries of "Socialism!", a dirty word to all red-blooded Americans. Socialism can often be defined as a government service the definer doesn't want.

      He doesn't mind such good old American institutions as public schools, the postal service, paved highways or trash collection, which governments actually provide. So why is he so upset when the government insists that he take care of health insurance himself?

* * *

.

March 21, 2012

by James Smart

The days when films were film

      There is not much film in films anymore. Hollywood, probably like you and almost everyone else, is using digital cameras.

      Movie theaters are converting to digital projectors. Kodak is bankrupt; the company's founder, George Eastman, made the motion picture industry possible when he invented roll film in 1886.

      Bad enough for Kodak that most photographers no longer buy film. Major income for Kodak came from making tons of film for the many prints of movies that used to be distributed to theaters everywhere.

      Maybe soon, no actors will suffer when the scene they were in ends up on the cutting room floor. Now those cuts will go wherever deleted pixels go.

      This trend made me feel nostalgic (it's not painful, but there's no cure) about a summer job I had at age 15, in the year "The Lost Weekend" won the "best picture" Oscar. (Look it up; research is good for you.)

      I was a stock boy at National Screen Service, on the northwest corner of 12th and Vine Sts. The site was obliterated when Vine St. was widened.

      National Screen's Philadelphia branch had a cutting room, with lots of scraps of 35 mm film on the floor. That was where trailers, those previews of coming attractions, were spliced onto feature films before the Clark Transfer trucks came to pick up the big film cans and distribute them to theaters.

      My job was to fill orders from theaters for posters to adorn their lobbies and facades. There were 30 by 40s, 40 by 60s, high narrow posters called inserts, lobby cards, 8 by 10 glossies (photo stills from the film), and the posters that got pasted up: half sheets, one sheets, three sheets and the 24 sheets that went on full size billboards.

      Every film that was released had a National Screen Service number. The entire movie industry used NSS numbers to identify posters, trailers, and any peripheral item to a film.

The numbers related to the release date of the film. The first feature film of 1945 would be 45/1. The second would be 45/2, and so on.

      National Screen Service began handling trailers in 1920. It was logical that NSS got into distribution of posters and other promotional material, and by the early 1940s, it had a near monopoly on the system.

      In the 12th and Vine building was a huge card file of all movies, going back to the 1930s or further. When a theater ordered posters for a rerun of an old film, the file was needed to get the stock number. I had a good memory, and soon had a head full of film numbers..

      We stock boys dreaded filling orders from the big cheap-ticket 24-hour skid row movie houses around 8th and Vine, seedy former movie palaces such as the New Garden and the 4-Paws (formerly owned by old-time showman Adam Forepaugh.)

      Because most of the patrons were sleeping anyway, they usually ran forgotten old films, three features changed daily, often obscure westerns. They ordered almost every size poster for each film. That sent us digging into the card file, and climbing high shelf racks.

      Posters are distributed differently now. National Screen is gone. The film industry has changed. And soon, there may never be film in films.

* * *

March 14, 2012

by James Smart

Whom do writers write like?

      On his Facebook page, Dan Rubin, who writes for another newspaper, mentioned the existence of a Web site called "I Write Like." Give it a sample of your writing, it analyzes it, and its little electronic brain tells you what well-known writer you write like.

      Naturally, I tried it. I fed it last week's column. It performed its digital cogitation, and told me that I write like H. P. Lovecraft.

      What? My ordinary contemporary prose comes out resembling that of a writer of florid Gothic horror stories in the Depression era? Well, it says so right there on the World Wide Web, so we all know that it must be true.

      That dismaying exercise made me curious about whom other writers write like. I typed in the first 385 words of "Moby Dick." Instantly, "I Write Like" announced that Herman Melville wrote like Robert Louis Stevenson.

      That logically led me to ask the digital smart aleck whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote like. The program responded that Robert Louis Stevenson also wrote like Robert Louis Stevenson. What are the odds of that?

      To ask about somebody a little more modern, I entered the first 223 words of "The Sun Also Rises." The computer said that Ernest Hemingway wrote like Kurt Vonnegut. I was afraid to ask whom Vonnegut wrote like.

      Heading way back in the writing industry, I gave "I Write Like" the first 167 words of Hamlet's favorite soliloquy, from "To be or not to be" all the way to the "bare bodkin." The analysis was that Shakespeare wrote like Shakespeare.

      This made me wonder whether the analysis meant that nobody else could write like old Bill Shakespeare. So I tried some prose from the same era as "Hamlet," the first 10 verses of the 13th chapter of St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, as translated by the crew of scholars King James I put together. The verdict was that it was written like Shakespeare, too.

      The next test produced no surprise. Dickens wrote like Dickens. I concluded that the analyzing machine compares samples of known writers against other samples of known writers, so inevitably it decides that writers write like themselves.

      So I gave it a try with someone not thought of as a writer. I tossed in the first 332 words of George Washington's farewell address when he left the presidency. "I Write Like" claimed that he wrote like Edgar Allen Poe. That was so bizarre that I decided it was time to quit.

      But there were two more writers' names that just had to be analyzed. I handed "I Write Like" the first 160 words of the last column Dan Rubin wrote before going on a recent hiatus. The strange answer was that he writes like Cory Doctorow, a Canadian-born British science fiction writer and advocate of free sharing of digital media. Doctorow is author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction." I'm not aware of Dan Rubin producing anything for idiots, so far.

      Finally, I inserted the first 306 words of "The Dunwich Horror," one of H. P. Lovecraft's better known grotesqueries. The result: he wrote like Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

      Shucks. I was hoping it would say that he wrote like Jim Smart.

* * *

March 7, 2012

by James Smart

Politicians and the Good Book

      Politics and religion have become all tangled up during the presidential primary festivities. It's enough to make one wish for the good old days when the principal thrust of religious folks was to save peoples' souls, which they usually attempted by persuasion, not legislation.

      These days, they're intent on changing people's behavior, with the intended changees' spiritual condition seeming to be immaterial. Making sin illegal didn't eliminate sin in the past, but then, neither did evangelism.

      It's easy to drag religion into political debate because the nice thing about the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, or any other accepted scripture is that politicians, as well as normal people, can always find something in the text to justify just about anything they want to do, or want to stop other people from doing. (The latter is more fun.)

      Seven score and ten years ago, our forefathers brought forth a great Civil War, and both sides could find in the Bible justification for their opinion of slavery. I'm not sure that either could find scriptural justification for bringing forth a war that killed nearly a half million men, but maybe nobody looked.

      In the English translation of the Bible that King James I authorized 400 years ago, the word "slave" appeared once, in the book of Jeremiah, and "slaves" once, in the book of Revelations. That's all, according to Strong's Concordance, the granddaddy of Bible references, which even reports how many times the word "the" is in there (3,588.)

      The 1959 translators of the Revised Standard Version used the word "slave" 19 times. We've come a long way.

      Slave owners in the past cheerfully adopted parts of ancient Old Testament laws, which said it was all right to buy and sell "heathens" as servants. I don't recall any cotton-picking Southerners following any other Mosaic procedures, such as not growing any crops every seventh year, which is also in the Hebrew law books.

      Endorsing selected parts of the Bible they agree with is a handy exercise for politicians and their admirers. Some politicians say that they literally believe every word in the scriptures. They also say that health and welfare programs should not be administered by Washington.

      They must have skipped the place in St. Matthew's gospel in which Jesus describes the last judgment, when those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, cared for the sick, clothed the needy and welcomed strangers (immigrants?) will be rewarded. Those who did not will be punished.

      But, not individuals. He said that "before Him shall be gathered all nations" to be judged. Are our elected leaders properly preparing our nation for Judgment Day?

Also in the charity department, the Bible tells of a first century one-percenter who asked Jesus for advice. Jesus told the guy to sell his possessions and "distribute unto the poor." St. Luke reports that the man "was very sorrowful; for he was very rich."

      Politicians need not worry about such things. They can just cite parts of the Bible they like better.

* * *

February 29, 2012

by James Smart

That other guy's job looks easy

      It's interesting to listen to people on the extreme political right agree on something with those on the extreme left. Many of them mutter the same criticism lately. They're disappointed in the job the president is doing.

      That's natural with Republicans. If a Democrat walked on water, they'd complain that he hadn't wiped his feet first.

      But some of the leftiest Democrats are unhappy with him, too. He hasn't magically brought world peace, economic prosperity, universal equality and all the other neat stuff that they would take care of overnight, if they were in the White House.

      It seems not to occur to some people that there just might be a little more to the task than they could conceive. Just about everybody knows how to run the country.

      You can learn their opinions on the Web, in taprooms, on radio call-in programs, in college dorms and faculty lounges, in corporate board rooms, or any place where folks gather and blather. Fully informed by the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or Time magazine, or the Fox news or Democracy Now channels, they know how to handle that cushy job in Washington.

      Most of us, at one time or another if not always, believe that we could manage businesses and institutions better than the supposed experts assigned to do it.

      We all know what they're doing wrong at hospitals, schools, insurance companies, restaurants, the post office, banks, the telephone company, the cable TV company, all city, state and federal departments, the electric company, the police, labor unions, newspapers . . .

      Whoa! Now we're in familiar territory. It may be different now, with 21st century tools and methods, but I'd guess that many people still don't understand how a newspaper works.

      I once answered the phone on the city desk of a big newspaper, and talked to a man who said he had been robbed, and we didn't report it. When did it happen? "About a month ago." What did the police say? "Oh, I didn't call the police."

      A similar caller asked why we didn't cover a meeting of his organization. Some questioning revealed that nobody had told us there was going to be the meeting, but he didn't consider that a good excuse. "I thought you were supposed to report the news," he grumbled. "I didn't think we had to tell you."

      That's the way we often are about other people's jobs. We expect the businesses and organizations we deal with to perform what we perceive to be their function, and do it the way we think it should be done. How hard could it be to run the school system, or the hospital, or the postal service, or the presidency?

      For all I know, the president thinks it would be easy to have done the work I once did on the staff of a big newspaper. He wouldn't know much about inverted pyramids or second day ledes or cover-backs or brace make-up, or whatever new jargon must be used in today's digitized newsrooms.

      But I have a feeling that he knows how to do a lot of things I don't, things required for presidenting. So, I'll assume that he's trying his best, if he'll assume the same about me..

* * *

February 22, 2012

by James Smart

Prehistoric fun with sticks

      The other day, I stumbled across the fact that three years ago, the National Toy Museum declared that the world's oldest toy was the stick. The museum, part of the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N. Y., is an institution that takes toys seriously. They must have a scholarly basis for sticking up for the stick.

      But I have read claims by anthropologists that ancient dolls that have been dug up here and there are the oldest known toys. That has obvious credence, since dolls must be made deliberately, whereas sticks were likely just lying around the prehistoric landscape, for any ancient kid to pick up and mess with.

      And sticks would seem to have had competition as toys. If we could look back at the days of homo erectus, or of Cain and Able for the non-Darwinians in the audience, I'm reasonably sure we would find children also playing with rocks, another plentiful object.

      I'm trying to imagine myself as a tike about seven million years ago, skittering about outside the family cave. I would think that rock throwing would be an obvious way to the pass the time. I assume that rocks would be easier to come by than sticks. The latter would mostly still be attached to bushes or trees.

      Modern children continue the tradition. Get your average small boy beside a body of water with small rocks nearby, and he will be compelled, presumably by some atavistic force, to start heaving rocks into the water.

      I did a bit of pebble skimming on creeks, lakes and bays in my early youth. I don't remember ever having the impulse to do anything creative with a stick.

      Does throwing a stick for a dog to fetch count in this discussion? The National Toy Museum enshrines only objects used by human players, as far as I know.

Often there is a question as to whether human or dog is doing the fetching. Once, I tried to teach a dog to fetch a stick. I would throw it, and encourage the dog to go get it. He would decline, staying with me and wagging his tail.

      I would then go get the stick. The dog would come with me. I would throw the stick again. We would repeat the process. The dog obviously enjoyed watching me fetch the stick. Prehistoric dogs may have done the same thing.

      As for dolls being the earliest deliberately made toy, possibly the first dolls were made of sticks. Stick arms, torso and legs would be easy to fasten into human form. The head might be a rock. I don't know how they would fasten the things together in those days. I don't recall reading of any anthropologists or archeologists discovering cave glue.

      While early homo sapiens mommies probably didn't like it, the boys would quickly learn to wallop each other with sticks, emulating the behavior of the menfolks. Letting kids play with toy weapons can acclimate them to violence when they get older.

      Cain and Abel probably played rough stuff with sticks when they were little Then, when they grew up and the nasty sibling rivalry set in, Cain became wroth (that's how people got angry in the Old Testament) and slew his brother. The Bible doesn't mention whether he used a stick.

*  *  *

February 15, 2012

by James Smart

Repealing the laws of physics

      Dr. Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday last month got heavy media coverage, because he is perhaps the world's brainiest scientist, mentioned alongside Newton and Einstein, and because he has miraculously kept working nearly 50 years after conventional medical wisdom says he should have died because of Lou Gehrig's Disease.

      He functions laboriously in a hi-tech wheelchair, but his brain, trapped in a contorted body, communicates through a computer and continues to explore physics and the cosmos, and to astonish physicists and cosmologists.

      His birthday inspired me to dig out from my files (read that: boxes of papers and books, in exquisite disorder) a 1975 article by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, the first time I heard of Hawking.

Pournelle went to a lecture by Hawking at California Institute of Technology. Hawking was already in a motorized wheelchair, but could still speak, in a heavily slurred voice.

      The audience was theoretical physicists, graduate students, and assorted possessors of heavy-duty brains. As they sat, straining to hear and understand, Hawking poured out information that essentially told them that much of what they thought they knew could be wrong. And Hawking chuckled and laughed as he bewildered them.

      The announced title of the lecture was on a slide projected on a screen: "The Breakdown of Physics in the Region of Space-time Singularities." That was then replaced by an almost identical slide, except that the word "Physics" was crossed out, and "Physicists" written above it. Hawking laughed quietly.

      Hawking's lecture, if I understand it (which is doubtful) went something like this. Einstein and others established that gravity affects light, and that nothing can travel faster than light. A big enough mass could create gravity that would hold back light. Therefore, the mass could not be observed. Scientists call that a space-time singularity.

      The required conditions must have existed at the beginning of the universe, so there must be a big fat singularity at the Big Bang site. There are other singularities. So-called black holes are caused by collapsed stars, and a singularity lurks inside each one.

But, Hawking told the physicists, singularities cause the laws of physics to break down in nearby regions of space, so that anything unpredictable can happen. Time can reverse. Alternate or duplicate universes can exist.

      "Matter and information can fall into these holes," Hawking said near the end of his lecture, "or, can come out. And what comes out is completely random and uncorrelated."

Hawking paused, and grinned broadly. "Of course, we might have to wait quite a while for it to emit one of the people here this afternoon, or myself. But eventually it must."

      There was a silent moment, and then the theoretical physicists and other huge intellects began to laugh.. They had just been told by the world authority on their science that, in the long run, anything is possible.

      Who knows? Maybe someday that singularity at the point of the Big Bang will spew out another Stephen Hawking.

*  *  *

February 8, 2012

by James Smart

The dart-throwing chimpanzee

      The folks at the Vanguard investment factory in Valley Forge, in the recent edition of the quarterly dose of optimism they mail to uneasy clients, reported on a study of the accuracy of predictions. Perhaps predictably, the study found the record of expert predictions to be somewhat wobbly.

      Economic experts run in great herds through the canyons of Wall Street, bellowing confident truths about the future. Washington, and all places where politics festers, produces a related species of authorities on what lurks just over the informational horizon.

      Such predictors were studied by Philip Tetlock, Ph.D., a professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. According to Vanguard's report, Dr. Tetlock spent 20 years, ending in 2003, keeping an eye on some 30,000 predictions assembled by 300 experts on politics or economics.

      "As a whole," the professor is quoted as saying, "experts were slightly more accurate than the proverbial dart-throwing chimpanzee."

      I'm not sure how he drew that conclusion, because, as far as I know, the chimpanzee has never published. But predicting has always been overdone in the news media, and recently it is more prevalent than ever, and more annoying.

      Newspapers and broadcasters seem to devote more time and space to analyzing political candidates, and predicting which ones will succeed or fail, than they allot to reporting what's happening.

      I would like all that effort devoted to telling me everything the candidates are saying and doing, to let me make my own analysis, and do my own predicting if I feel like wasting my time.

      Sports news is particularly guilty of over predicting and over analyzing. Television stations dispense tiny amounts of information late on Sunday nights about the professional football committed that day. We are barely told which teams won, and maybe the scores.

      Then, instead of covering what happened that day, a couple of athletes and broadcasters spend an hour speculating, cogitating, ruminating and prognosticating.

      We get similar outbursts of unnecessary expertise from announcers before and during games. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're proven wrong. Either way, who cares?

      Before elections, predictions and analysis predominate the journalistic coverage. We often learn things about candidates only when facts intrude in a typical dosage of punditry.

      Predicting offers a collateral benefit to journalists. After their forecast of the outcome of an election or a game or a season proves wrong, they can concoct an analysis of why things didn't work out the way they prophesied.

      We need more people like Dr. Tetlock to keep an eye on the alleged news gatherers, and to embarrass them into giving us more news and less opinion. At least, that's my opinion. But I predict that nothing will change.

      That dart-throwing chimpanzee should have his own television show. It might be more entertaining than watching John Clark and Howard Eskin speculate at each other.

* * *

February 1, 2012

by James Smart

Speed dating for book lovers

        The Free Library of Philadelphia is sponsoring some Literary Speed Dating events next week. I haven't heard the rules, but speed dating usually consists of an occasion at which people who are hoping to meet compatible partners spend a short time, a minute or two, conversing, and then, at a signal, everyone moves on to chat with another person.

       The idea is for folks to have quick auditions with several others, and possibly find someone they might like to get together with again. The library's events are free, but registrations are required.

       The Andorra branch will have a session for singles age 25 to 35 on Thursday, Feb.9, at 6 P. M.  E-mail Marsha at stenderm@freelibrary.org to register.

       The librarians' announcement of the arrangements encourages participants to bring along a book. No, dude, not your little black book. They suggest bringing a book you loved, hated, or just want to talk about. Maybe even read.

       This sounds like a good way to handle speed dating. The books people bring along could tell a lot about their approach to relationships. A guy who brings a book by Leo Buscaglia (nearly all have "love" in the title) would make one kind of quick impression on a girl; a guy toting "The Joy of Sex" would give a different message.

       Certain types of titles would be calculated to make a quick hit. A young woman carrying Ray Didinger's "Eagles Encyclopedia" would get the average guy's attention. A fellow carrying the new biography of Rudolf Nureyev would convey artistic sensitivity to the girl.

       Just to cover other bases, the woman might also bring along a good cook book, suggesting a nonspeedy way to a man's heart, and the man could flaunt "The Essays of Warren Buffet" as a sign of  financial acumen.

Andorra is one of five library branches inviting singles ages 25 to 35 to get literary with each other. The Tacony branch apparently serves a more mature population, and will have an event for ages 35 to 45.

       The Central Library down town will have a session for singles over 50. That's a pretty big over. I'm not sure someone 51 and someone 91 would hit it off, no matter what they were reading or what their speed.

The library at 6th and Lehigh will gather single Latinos from 25 to 35. Gathering at the library on 7th St. next door to where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, perhaps somehow appropriately, will be singles 25 to 35 who are men dating men or women dating women.

       It seems that a gay Mexican on Social Security is out of luck in the library's speed dating program. Maybe he can stand outside a library, reading his date-attracting book of choice, and hope for the best.

       Speed dating, literary or otherwise, is very 21st century. I'm surprised they're not doing it on Twitter. What would the great lovers of the past think about having a time limit? I'm picturing the guy proclaiming;

       "Soft, what light in yonder window breaks. It is the east, and Juliet is the..."

       "Time's up, buddy. Move on to the next balcony."

*  *  *

January 25, 2012

by James Smart

Handling money the old time way

      There was a flap at Christmas time when, because of the three day postal holiday, many Philadelphia public school teachers did not receive their paychecks until after Christmas. Some complained that they couldn't do their Christmas shopping, and the holiday was ruined.

      School authorities suggested that teachers should have their pay electronically deposited into their bank accounts. (That way, if the pay arrives late, they can snarl rude things about the bank instead of the post office.)

      Workers down in the minimum wage trenches might wonder why teachers can't stay a little ahead on the cash, or use credit cards, to prevent such financial emergencies from emerging. Teachers start at about $40,000 a year, and the median salary is about $53,000.

      But nobody knows what troubles other people have seen, and that has long included financially troubled teachers. The late lamented Advanta Corp. started its rise to financial heights 60 years ago by providing short term loans exclusively to teachers.

      I don't know whether the public school curriculum includes any instruction on how to manage  personal finances. When I was in grade school, in days of yore or thereabouts, there was an attempt to explain frugality and such ideals to us kids.

      A local bank had set up a savings plan, so pupils could bring their pennies to school and have them deposited in a savings account. A teacher suggested that we bring in part of our allowances.

      I had never heard of an allowance as a family function. Money at home was dispensed on an as-needed basis at best. If I wanted 12 cents to get into the Saturday matinee at the local movie, and maybe a nickel for a box of Good and Plenty from the lobby candy machine, I raised it by hauling neighbors' discarded newspaper to the junk yard, or similar remunerative tasks.

      Somewhere around sixth or seventh grade, our teachers started to explain to us other useful information about daily life. The teachers never asked us what we already knew, and seemed to have little idea of life in a row house neighborhood.

      They gave us unrealistic instructions about how to use a telephone. This must seem more than quaint to the folks, young and old, who now carry telephones on their persons, and use them to send written messages and take pictures.

      In those pre World War II days, many of my classmates did not have telephones at home. Many of our neighbors used the phone booth in the candy store down the street.

      We had a phone. (My father was extravagant.) Neighbors would drop in to use it, saving a walk to the store. They would offer a nickel to pay for it. My family would say not to bother. Some sneakily left a nickel anyway. We would find coins on a radiator or windowsill.

      Our teachers also taught us about checking accounts. That seemed an annoying waste of time. Working class folks got paid in cash. People talked about pay envelopes, not pay checks. Utility bills and such were paid in cash at the companies' local offices.

      I was paid in cash until I was 25. I had savings, though. In a metal box on my bedroom bureau.

 *   *   *

January 18, 2012

by James Smart

Zombie facts are hard to kill

      When I buy a book on a historical subject that I know something about, I read the bibliography in the back first (unless it doesn't have one because it's fiction or because the author was just fooling around) to see what sources the writer used that I don't know about. I like to see what research professional historians have done.

      I learn a lot that way. Sometimes, unfortunately, I learn that the professionals have done it wrong.

      The other day, I bought a 625 page biography of a famous colonial Philadelphian. It was 30 bucks when it was published in 2010, but I waited until it was remaindered for $6.95.

      Checking the bibliography, I spotted a publication that sounded like a great resource. The citation said it was by a well-know historian, and published in 1875. I suspected a problem and checked up on that author. He was born in 1914.

      That made me suspicious of the whole darn book. But anybody can make a mistake. (I find it regrettably easy.)

      Skimming through the book, looking for parts I knew would interest me, I then found a page on which the author had identified the general of a  late 18th century infantry regiment as commander of a cavalry unit.

      Being an old fashioned guy, the natural result of being an actually old guy, I like to think that I can believe what I read in big fat hardcover history books. There should be something we can trust in this, the age of misinformation.

      That great electronic exercise in free speech and expression, the Internet, allows anybody to provide us with incorrect information. Some people do it deliberately, some accidentally. An untrue "fact"  brought to life in any medium is difficult to kill, a sort of undying zombie fact..

      One danger to the truth is humor, which can be taken seriously. I plead accidental guilt. Once I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about the history of the pretzel, making what I thought were funny and obviously outrageous statements. Pretzels had been found in the tombs of pharaohs; they had been brought here on the Mayflower; what Marie Antoinette famously said was actually, "Let them eat pretzels."

      I didn't think anyone would take the jokes seriously. Months later, some of the ersatz pretzel history turned up as fact in a pretzel industry leaflet.

      In another incident, when an advertisement identified the statue on City Hall tower as Benjamin Franklin, I wrote a column saying that there was suspicion that Ben Franklin and William Penn were actually the same person, giving ridiculous fake evidence that I thought was funny.

      Some time later, the then new president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, who hadn't been in town when that column appeared, told me about a strange phone call he had from a person asking about the Franklin-Penn theory. I confessed that it was my fault.