Anniversaries for Two Other Giants

11/8/2013

The year is full of fiftieth anniversaries, including the March on Washington and the terrible event coming up on Nov. 22.

Two other milestones are worth noting: the publication of a landmark book about Appalachia and the death of a landmark publisher.

I got to meet Harry Caudill and Alicia Patterson, two strong-minded patricians.

As a young sports reporter at Newsday on Long Island, I was aware of the publisher, with the tone of the country club and the vocabulary of a press room. She was descended from the newspaper family of McCormicks and Medills and Pattersons, and in 1939 she had been given a newspaper by her wealthy husband, Captain Harry F. Guggenheim. It was her toy, and she turned it into a great newspaper.

You could hear her down the hall, conducting business with her editors, a presence -- jewelry glittering, glasses perched on her forehead. The boss. Miss P.

I don’t claim to know what she did and said. I only know that all of us took energy from her. At Christmas parties, Stan Brooks – the same whirlwind reporting from the street for WINS radio today – used to don dress, glasses, stockings and high heels for a fantastic takeoff of Miss P, who loved it.

You can read all about Alicia Patterson via her foundation:

http://aliciapatterson.org/alicia-patterson

The final praise for her is from Jack Mann, the irascible sports editor who gave me a career. Jack got himself fired in the summer of 1962 after a dispute with a managing editor while Miss P was out grouse-hunting or something. When she came back, she told Jack she could not countermand her editor. I never heard him badmouth her for that.

A year later Miss P died during surgery for ulcers, at 56. The paper had glory years after her time, including the great run of New York Newsday, but it is now run by the Dolans. Some of us think it would never have slipped this way if Miss P had lived a few more decades.

Harry Caudill’s voice reached the big cities, all the way from Whitesburg, Ky., where he was a lawyer. In 1963, he wrote a lament called Night Comes to the Cumberlands, about the colonization of Appalachia, where coal lay under the surface. His book made me care for Appalachia; seven years later I went to cover it for the New York Times. Things were about as bad as he said, but I was captivated by it.

I got to meet Caudill, who goaded me to spend more time in the mountains. When A.M. Rosenthal, the great editor of the Times, was making a tour of the region in 1971, we had a nice lunch with the Caudills, who had the ear of the paper. The next summer Caudill called the home office to say an entire mountain had shed its coal slag, known as red dog, into a community. I was dispatched from vacation at Jones Beach to a bare-bones motel in Whitesburg, by which time a few families had raked the stuff out of their yards.

Caudill saw disasters large and small, standing up to politicians who served the coal industry. He suffered from a war injury, and came down with Parkinson’s Disease, and committed suicide in 1990 at the age of 68, in his yard, facing Pine Mountain.

http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/23/2452306/chapter-5-harry-caudill-inspired.html

By that time, I had written a book about a radical miner in southwest Virginia called, “One Sunset a Week.” Caudill’s book is still the most important book about Appalachia. Fifty years later.

(Alicia Patterson, reading her paper; Harry Caudill tutoring a visitor, Robert F. Kennedy, who paid attention, who cared.)

Ed Martin

11/9/2013 02:57:15 am

Alicia Patterson captured the changing nature of Long Island. Thousands of families, most veterans in the 1947-50 era, moved from NYC to LI, Levittown was a big draw. I was selling The Nassau Daily Review Star, 13 week subscriptions. Newsday offered me a better job, at 16 a tough decision. I made so much money my father lost his tax deduction. Families would tell me the read "The News" or "The Mirror" or any of the seven dailies, and I would tell them about grocery ads, schools, movies, taxes, etc. News day became ubiquitous and the Review Star shrank into a minor, Southshore presence. The writers were lively, even great investigative stories.
Ms. Patterson and "The Captain" were the present and the future.

Harry Caudill sounds like one for the ages, someone who cared about people and the quality of their lives, in a self-complacent era.
I recall the Kennedy's shining a light on W.VA. And being stunned at the desecration and exploitation. Thanks, George, for keeping these memories alive and for the values you express.

George Vecsey

11/9/2013 05:14:04 am

The Newsday deliverer vanished when Newsday became a morning paper...It was an institution. Our son delivered them in our town.

There are thousands of Caudills in Eastern KY. I think Caudill believed his name originated with the Spanish armada paying little visits to the coast of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The word Caudillo in Spanish means leader, and Caudill knew how to work the system in America.

http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~burchett/i/sambkorigin.html

Charlie Accetta

11/16/2013 05:31:36 am

GV - I don't presume to know anything about the two people in this essay, except what you choose to tell us. That is your prerogative. They both died before their time, one on the operating table and the other from a self-inflicted gunshot. You have effectively conveyed a sense of loss in the telling.

Dick Cavett recently wrote in the NYT about his colleague Tom O'Malley. Cavett described his friend's drinking problem in the manner of an autopsy. It was harder to read than your piece, maybe because the sense of guilt is universal and unavoidable.

You never see a cause of death listed as"a drinking life," but I suspect in many cases of premature demise there is a whiff of spirits somewhere in the room. It's strange how we rarely speak to that in the aftermath. I suppose the eulogy, being the last word spoken in the subject's presence, is no place for a final scolding.

Still, we lose the parts of ourselves that we attach to our friends too often as it is. To allow those friends to wallow and destroy their health, even at the risk of that very friendship, seems to be a foolish case of avoidance. Maybe we should scold the dead when their condition is the result of such poor choices. Or maybe we should be a little more timely in our interventions.

George Vecsey

11/17/2013 05:15:44 am

Charlie, I appreciate your insights. I was just a kid reporter when Miss P died, and I met Caudill only 3-4 times although he monitored me pretty carefully. I have no sense of the backgrounds to the deaths of these two people, except that Caudill was definitely stricken with Parkinson's. The linked article says he did not want to be a burden to his family. A mountain person's solution? I can't judge. I try to be aware of alcohol as a factor in life, from the book I did with Bob Welch 30 years ago, about his drinking while pitching for the Dodgers. He continues to teach me a lot about awareness, day by day. In regard to these two productive lives, I have no clue. Thanks for raising an important issue. GV

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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Anniversaries for Two Other Giants

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