Category Archives: Over the Transom

V.S. Pritchett ’83 (Part 1)

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I’m not one to drop names. One reason is I don’t have many to drop. There was that time I was pretty sure I saw Neil Young having lunch at the International Market in Nashville, ca. 1985, or at least someone who was a dead ringer for the musician. I let the man eat his food in peace.

And of course there was the other time (spring 1980) two friends and I saw Gregg Allman and his entourage enter the same Nashville restaurant we were having lunch, making a bee line back to a private room. If one of my friends hadn’t pointed them out, I wouldn’t have known.

The same with Larry David. A colleague and I were passing through the lobby of the Boca Raton Resort & Club in 2004 and he (my colleague) made a startled announcement: “That’s Larry David,” referring to a fellow we’d just passed whom I’d scarcely noticed in the crowd. That was the first I’d ever heard of him. Later I discovered that his brand of humor isn’t really for me.

Which brings me to Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-97), a British writer best known for his short stories. V.S. Pritchett, his byline is usually styled. I expect many (many) more people, Americans anyway, have heard of the other notables I’ve mentioned than him.

Still, I not only saw Pritchett, I met him, since I took a class he taught as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt in the spring of ’83. I’ve mentioned him precisely once in 21 years, so I can’t call knowing him earth-shaking or otherwise consequential to the course of my life. Even so, I’m dropping his name now.

Besides sorting postcards, I’m opening up old files – physical files, of which there are many – with a mind toward sorting them as well. One I opened this week was labeled “Clips Before 1984.” Most of them are items I wrote for The Vanderbilt Hustler, the VU student newspaper. I was its news editor in the spring of ’83, and one of the items I did was a longish interview with V.S. Pritchett.

I’d completely forgotten about it. But there it was in black and white, to use the cliché. A front-page interview, but below the fold.

The first part ran on February 8, 1983. 

The second part was published on February 11. Not a bad interview for a college kid. But why – why – why didn’t I ask him about George Orwell? He knew Orwell. At least I know my degree of separation from Orwell is exactly two, a thought that pleases me for some reason.

Because of the nation’s absurd copyright laws, I suppose the article technically still belongs to Vanderbilt Student Communications, but I doubt they’d begrudge me posting it nonprofessionally after more than 40 years. If they do object, I’ll take it down. Until then, it represents an interview with Pritchett that probably isn’t posted anywhere else, a thought that also pleases me, though it surely doesn’t add or change anything about the record of his life.

RIP, Sir Victor.

Frozen K-Food

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We’ve all heard of K-Pop, even if we pay it no mind. Go to a Korean grocery store here in the northwest suburbs, and you’ll be aware of K-Food. Frozen K-Food, too.

Convenient and delicious for any occasion, it seems. I didn’t do a comprehensive look-see at the Frozen K-Food aisles, but did notice a few things. Such as a version of K-corn dogs: mozzarella and fish cake on a stick.k-food

The marvels of globalization never cease. People worry that globalization = homogenization, but I don’t think so.

Korean breakfast links, or anytime sausage? The taste you always wanted? In any case, true to the tradition of cartoon mascots gleeful about the human consumption of their own kind.

This is diversity.

But maybe not quite as much as at first glance, since the maker of Red Baron, Schwan’s, was acquired by South Korean food conglomerate CJ CheilJedang a few years ago. So there you have it: a popular North American convenience food named for a German flying ace owned by a South Korean operation. All there in a frozen food bin.

Durians and jackfruit!

Once only available in Southeast Asia, now in your frozen food aisle. Must be popular in Korea these days, too. Why not? For me, jackfruit brings back fond memories of Thailand. As for durian, that is a fond memory from Malaysia.

Not long after I wandered away from the frozen food, I encountered fresh jackfruit. jackfruit 2024
jackfruit 2024

A Hindenburg-class fruit, it is. More than 20 lbs. of jackfruit for less than $20. I’ll assume that’s a good deal.

Robot on Aisle 7

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When I took Ann back to Normal yesterday, I didn’t stop anywhere else in that town. But the last time I was there, we went to a grocery store just off I-55. And who should we meet in one of the aisles? I’d say it was strolling around, but I don’t think inventory robots stroll. Wheel along, maybe. It was puttering along.

That’s Tally, which isn’t precisely new tech, considering that you can easily find an article about the machine from 2016. Then again, maybe the one we saw is a more advanced version or, for all I know, it’s an older one still perfectly fine for its job. Never mind what the tech industry says, tech still has value as long as you find it useful.

“[Tally] can traverse a shop’s aisles for eight to 12 hours on a single charge, counting and checking up to 20,000 individual stock keeping units (SKUs) with greater than 96 percent accuracy,” the PC magazine article reported then.

A robot replacing a human. A human going up and down the aisles for hours holding a electronic wand of some kind. That sounds like the kind of really boring job that robots were going to take in the future, as it was once more optimistically imagined. Were supposed to take.

On the other hand, I asked the check-out clerk about the robot. How long had the store had the robot? She didn’t know, a while. We hate it anyway, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

Good Old French Know-How

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No shortage of odd press releases lately. The first few lines of one that came recently read:

Bonjour à tous,

Voici notre catalogue Le Luxe Artisan pour ceux qui n’ont pas pu venir à Paris.

15 artisans d’art français venant des 4 coins de France étaient présents pour expliquer leur savoir-faire. Une très belle aventure humaine et un travail d’équipe. Scénographie de la talentueuse Julia Bancilhon, créatrice de papiers peints – studio Made of Matter.

I couldn’t let that go untranslated, since the machine now offers that service. So by machine translation, I got:

Hello everyone,

Here is our Le Luxe Artisan catalog for those who were unable to come to Paris.

15 French artisans from all over France were present to explain their know-how. A great human adventure and teamwork. Scenography by the talented Julia Bancilhon, wallpaper designer – Made of Matter studio.

Interesting that savoir-faire is translated know-how, which suggests a more workaday meaning in French for a term that acquired some social graces when it drifted into English.

So That’s Miffy

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Another press release that isn’t for me came today. Actually, I get a fair number of those, but in this case I took a look. Its first two paragraphs were as follows:

Miffy, the internationally loved bunny created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, enters the new season of fashion with an exciting update. Miffy is partnering for the first time with Dumbgood – the legendary pop-culture-inspired clothing brand. The new collection is available at Dumbgood/Miffy for Miffy fans located in the US.

Born of a beloved bedtime story tradition between Bruna and his son, Miffy has been a child-favorite character for 68 years for her positivity, adventurous nature, and innocence. Dumbgood blends 90s-2000s nostalgia and iconic pop culture brands to create apparel collections that feel new and relevant for today’s streetwear customer….

90s-2000s nostalgia? Really? No, let’s leave that aside. When Happy Days premiered 50 years ago this month, it was cast successfully as nostalgia, for no more than 20 years earlier.

I was pretty sure I’d never heard of Miffy, 68 years of positivity notwithstanding (or Dumbgood either, legend notwithstanding). Miffy didn’t happen to be in the mix when I was a child reader, or at any other time. But then I did an image search.

I do know Miffy, by sight anyway. I saw Miffy a lot in Japan. Miffy is very popular there. I showed the pictures to Yuriko, who knew the bunny instantly, and by name.

Somehow I never got around to thinking much about the character I’d seen in Japan, and until today would have assumed – had I simply been shown the pictures – that it was a Japanese character. But no, a Dutch artist created it, perhaps with a keen unconscious notion of what would be big in Japan. Odd the things you learn, even from misdirected press releases.

Kentucky Flea Market Finds

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Many of my postcard agglomeration are blank, of course. Couldn’t say a percentage, but it would be substantial. I add to it regularly, so I expect the agglomeration will outlast me, if only by a little.

One of the places we went on our last full day in Louisville recently was a flea market. Not just any flea market, but the Kentucky Flea Market New Year’s Spectacular at the Kentucky Expo Center. A sea of tables in a vast structure and – wait, there’s another sea of tables in another, connected vast structure. Safe to say it was big.

One of the first tables we encountered offered postcards for sale, which didn’t turn out to be that common at the Spectacular. I spotted what turned out to be promotional cards for a radio show called Breakfast in Hollywood, hosted by one Tom Breneman. I wasn’t familiar with it.

The man at the table made me feel a youthful spring in my step by comparison: gnarled, he was, as they used to call old men. Full head of white hair and a shaggy white beard and wrinkles that often come from a lifetime of hard work just to get by.

“Do you know that show?” I asked.

“No, it was a long time ago.”

The old man was right – a long time ago, longer even than his lifetime, or possibly he was a small child when the show was on, and it was nothing a child would listen to. Fifty cents each, that’s not bad. Not particularly rare or valuable as a collectible, as far as I can tell. I bought a handful.

Breneman pictured with the famous.

And the less famous. They weren’t even in the same room, these two.

Uncle Corny, huh? I’d look further into him, but for now I’d rather wonder about him. A character brought to the show by its actor from years of honing in vaudeville?

Breakfast in Hollywood was a chat show, with host Breneman an experienced radio hand by the time he started the show in 1941. In the waning days of World War II he opened a restaurant in Hollywood from which to broadcast. The show had a large and loyal following among listeners, but in 1948 Breneman died suddenly.

Or, as a headline at the time put it, Tom Breneman, Famous Radio Star, Drops Dead

Later I read about the show, its high fame long evaporated. Got me into a mild counterfactual frame of mind. Breneman wasn’t that old when he dropped, only 46. Wife and youngish children. Television wasn’t far off – would he have made the transition successfully (many did), hosted a show or run of shows into the ’60s or even a little later, and be remembered among my cohort for some last semi-retirement gig like a regular square in the Peter Marshall Hollywood Squares?

It wasn’t to be. Sure, that isn’t one of the ponderous issues that counterfactuals usually spend their time with: What if Lincoln had lived longer, what if Germany won the Great War, what if Ronald Reagan had played Rick Blaine, that sort of thing. So what?

A man calling himself Korla Pandit (d. 1998) appeared regularly on Breakfast in Hollywood. If this article is even half accurate, he was one of the hardest working men in U.S. show business in the mid-century and later, and a lot else surprising besides. He’s had a documentary made about him. You can listen to his organ recordings, right now. There’s a biopic about this guy just waiting to be made.

Huthian Postcards Bookended By Time

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Geof Huth has been a most prolific postcard sender to me over the years, and I like to think I’ve returned the favor. He asserted once that I send him a card every four days or so, but I don’t believe it has been quite that often, though there have been occasions when I send him a card each day from some trip or other. That’s something that usually lasts only a week or less.

I got a card from Geof yesterday. For the moment, it is the newest in a very long line.

Nice. Made from found cardboard, hand drawn, imparting some information, and most likely unique in the history of humanity. Some of his cards have much more elaborate drawings, which he calls glyphs — if I remember right — though I’ve never asked for a precise definition of the term, and probably don’t need to. Some things exist beyond the boundaries of precision, and are no worse for it.

One of these days, maybe, I will post a collection of Huthian postcard glyphs, since they are quite remarkable graphic expressions. I’ve posted cards sporting a few over the years, including a particularly colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed one with a collection of letters and letter-like entities, but I don’t have the energy for kind of project right now. Sorting postcards is it.

During my postcard sorting, I came across what may be the first card he ever sent me. Geof’s father was in the Foreign Service, so he (Geof) would spend time in far-off locations during our college years, at least during the summers, and this came to me from Switzerland during the fantastic plastic summer of ’82.

I checked, pulling at the edge of one of the stickers, and after more than 40 years it would still be possible to remove them and stick them on something else. An example of Swiss adhesive prowess, I suppose. But I have no intention of doing so.

It’s possible I received something from him earlier, but I’m not sure how likely. I wouldn’t have known him well enough, or at all, the previous summer, since we probably met at some point that year (ca. 1981, let’s say) because of our mutual loose affiliation with the VU student magazine Versus.

I was in summer school at VU in ’82. I made no note of receiving the card in the diary I kept that summer, which presumably would have been toward the end of the month. I didn’t make many specific entries attached to specific days that month anyway – I was out to smash the diary paradigm or something. So that summer mostly exists beyond the boundaries of precision, but that doesn’t keep me from smiling when I think about it.

Stamp Selection & Bonus Postmark

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Probably the best reason to sort my postcards is I get to look at them again, and be reminded of the sender and the places depicted, and whatever was going on when that person thought of me for a moment, took the time to write something down, and entrust the object to a worldwide system that moves such objects from one place to another. That can be a lot to pleasantly unpack. I don’t know why people have mostly given up on postcards (except for the price, see below).

The cards Ed sent were particularly varied in all those regards. Just leafing through the stack, I find cards from Alaska – a lot of those – Hawaii, American Samoa and other parts of the United States and the Pacific, Canada, Iceland, the UK, various other European countries, Jordan, Turkey, Mongolia, South Korea, parts of Africa and so on.

Also the British Antarctic Territory, where he went in ’07 to be pecked at by a penguin. The postcard itself isn’t that great – an unimaginative picture of the cruise ship and some penguins, and probably the only one available to him – but the stamp is the real treasure, along with the postmark.

I like these Jordanian stamps too, found on a 2003 card depicting Petra.

From Iceland in 2002, before everyone and his moose discovered the place (not that that would keep me away). Ed and Lynn were early adopters when it came to visiting Iceland.

Better than any of the stamps is a domestic postmark from 2010. One I’ve noted before.

From the incredibly remote Pribilof Islands for only 28 cents (and why is it 53 cents only 14 years later? Explain that one, Mr. Joy).

“One card depicts Saint Paul Island, one of the group, and the other card sports Wrangell, which is on the mainland,” I wrote at the time. “Both postmarks depict Saint Paul Island, home of Aleuts, seals and sea birds.”

First Box of Cards

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Nearly above freezing today, and icy rain this evening. A slushy week is ahead, more like late February or early March than late January, but each winter has its own rhythms. A relatively warm week this time of year is entirely welcome, except for the possibility of ice patches.

I’ve undertaken to sort my postcards, sometimes on the weekends, sometimes in the evenings, in short bursts. Note the choice of verb. Not organize. My goal isn’t so grand. I just want to separate the cards by who sent them, and store them in roughly chronological order, but not down to the granularity of an exact order – even if such a thing were possible, since not everyone dates every card, and USPS postmarks are often a smear of ink daring you to make sense of them.

Why bother? They’ll all be lost to time, of course. So what? It’s one of those things you do for your own satisfaction.

I’ve made my way through the first box out of 10 or so, but some other cards are stashed in folders and I’m not sure where else, down in the laundry room. This is going to take a while.

Most cards in this particular box are from the early to mid-2010s, though some as early as 2003 and as late as 2019. The tallest pile so far is from Ed Henderson, but I expect him to be overtaken eventually by cards from my brother Jay and Geof Huth, both of whom have known me longer, and both of whom have the advantage of being alive.

One from Jay, dated July 3, 2011. 

No printed text on the reverse. “I can’t say that I have any idea what this card is about,” Jay wrote. Me either.

City of Champions?

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The air was chilly, but still above freezing when Ann and I arrived in Joliet on Sunday just after noon. Not bad for December.Joliet, Illinois

I’d never heard Joliet called the City of Champions, but there it was in a new-looking mural facing one of downtown’s parking lots. The city’s web site says, unhelpfully, that “[Joliet] is known as the ‘City of Champions’ for it’s [sic] world class bands. Music, art, theatre and history are found throughout the city.”

A line vague enough that could have been AI generated, except that a robot writer probably wouldn’t use it’s for its. That’s a human-style mistake. Just a hunch.

Champions or not, Joliet was a prosperous place once upon a time, and its downtown reflects that. The city could well be a growth hub again someday, once the Sunbelt gets just a little too sunny, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Rather than put it in a park, Joliet situated this sizable tree on the edge of a parking lot, near a dry fountain that I hope runs in the warm months. The tree does make the spot look a little less forlorn.Joliet, Illinois

Downtown Joliet sports some interesting buildings, and we spent a few minutes taking a look. Such as a bank building from a pre-FDIC time when banks dwelt in sturdy-looking edifices with Corinthian columns.Joliet, Illinois

Dating from 1909 with a design by Mundie & Jensen of Chicago, most of whose work wasn’t far from the metro area. It’s still a bank, incidentally.

Nearby are other works of similar vintage. Joliet, Illinois Joliet, Illinois

Even older: the Murray Building, 1886.Joliet, Illinois

A giant guitar marks the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum. I didn’t know Illinois had one of those.Joliet, Illinois

That is because it’s new. So new, in fact, that the galleries aren’t open yet, according to its web site, but the gift shop is. Next time I’m in Joliet, if it is all open, I might drop in.

A look at Google Street View tells me that the guitar was fixed to the exterior sometime after November 2022. There have been museum promotional materials in windows since 2018 at the earliest. Before that, a pinball/video game arcade called The Game Show, of all things, occupied the ground floor (in 2017). Back in 2007, the earliest image available, the building was occupied by Phalen’s Fine Furniture. Guess the Great Recession proved to be the end for that business, as Phalen’s was gone by ’13.

The Illinois Rock & Roll Museum has been inducting artists since 2021, with an inaugural roll that year that included Chicago, Cheap Trick, Ides of March, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, REO Speedwagon and the Buckinghams. Most of those I could see, but Cheap Trick and REO Speedwagon had an Illinois connection? Cheap Trick was from Rockford and REO Speedwagon from Champaign. Shows you what I know.

The connection doesn’t have to be that strong, apparently. As long as the performer was either born in Illinois; started a musical career in Illinois; was based in Illinois; or recorded in Illinois, then he, she or they can be inducted. Note that as of this year, there’s no “she.” That is, not a single female inductee. Better get on that, IR&RM, before someone more vocal than me calls you out on it.

Next to the museum is the former Ottawa Street Methodist Episcopal Church, a structure dating from 1903.

“The Ottawa Street Methodist Church is a two-story, Neoclassical Revival style structure built by George Julian Barnes in 1909 on a Joliet limestone foundation,” says the city. “The structure is a wonderful and bold interpretation of the Triumphant Arch motif as applied to a Neoclassical Revival institutional building.”

These days, the building serves as part of the Joliet Area Historical Museum.

My fingers were getting a little cold, so we didn’t linger for a picture of the former church, as grand as it is. Except for this detail.Joliet, Illinois

For The Good Of Man is inscribed under the side pediment. The church didn’t realize it in 1903, of course, but it’s a good thing it didn’t read To Serve Man.

A block away is another former church building.Joliet, Illinois

Old St. Mary’s Carmelite, which hasn’t been an active religious structure in 30 years. New owners are currently rehabbing the property and by next summer it will be an event venue for “weddings, corporate events, fund-raisers, proms and more,” Patch reports. Good to know. I’d say that’s a good re-use for a neglected church, much better than destroying its unique beauty.

One more pic from our short Joliet walkabout: Joliet himself in bronze, beside the local library.Joliet, Illinois

Seen him before, and I probably will again.