War and Peace Part 1
When my father Leon was a boy he had rheumatic fever. They sent him upstate to a rest home called Valhalla. It’s a good thing he didn’t know what “Valhalla” meant! They fed him nothing but boiled fish. That was the treatment for rheumatic fever and other heart ailments in the 20’s and 30’s. He […]
The PAPER and the Poets
I (We) published one of the two underground newspapers in the 1960’s in Miami. I did this while working full time on the research team in the Everglades. My next post will tell the story of how it came to be. We lasted something longer than a year, and I recollect four issues (I believe […]
Building the Shark River Station 2
That same day I saw my first bald eagle, perched many tens of feet above the forest at the top of a very tall dead tree. We stopped, drifted, looked. Eventually we shook ourselves out of our reverie, started the motor and continued on our journey into the Heart of Darkness (apologies to Joseph Conrad). […]
Frank Sinatra and My Mother
While I was growing up there was a family lore that my Grandma Julia knew Frank Sinatra. When he became famous he asked her for the pictures she had taken of him as a young man back so they could not be used against him. I always had the sense he wanted them back so […]
A Good Woman
Grandpa Sam’s wife was Julia. I loved this woman. I left home at 18 (under the circumstances in the precious post). After six months I could not continue living in hippie crash pads in Coconut Grove because by then I had been hired by the research team in the Everglades, and let’s just say when […]
Building the Shark River Station – Chapter 1
Some well meaning folks, when I was still on Facebook, said my posts were too long, people wouldn’t read them. Well, I write them as much if not more for myself than my “audience”. And the origination of the ones I am finally sharing here was that they were kind of intended as a book. […]
Miami Herald Womens’ Section for Earth Day Featuring A Naked Philip Spitzer
From the post about oil drilling in the Everglades you know I was friends with reporters at our local newspaper. Margaria Fichtner was the section editor and came up with a fun idea for the Sunday paper. I WAS wearing a bathing suit, but that’s not disclosed in the article! The next week one of the students […]
Patrick Geddes
I was a scholar. Some of my work did contribute to what we knew. But due to my academic career being cut short (as much my responsibility as others), much never saw the light of day. So I will be offering some of that work here. This was a 20-page holographic manuscript, and I thought […]
Gary Snyder and the Four Changes
Gary Snyder was an important Beat poet. He drafted and distributed this manifesto during the budding environmental movement of the late sixties. I have had it in my files since then. I have not seen it anywhere else since. I looked online to find it and could only find reference and availability of his expansion […]
The New England Summer and Carl Sagan
I hitched north in July 1973, to get my place to live for graduate school which I was starting in the fall. My first stop was to stay with my friend the park ranger in the Smokies (she was one of my nightly visitors to the mission dig sites, tune in for that story!). Then […]