Over History: So Many Calls to Truth

A podcast in which I’d been interviewed was finally published last weekend. Hearing it for the first time, I was surprised by what I said about the coronavirus back on Feb. 27, three days after President Trump announced:  "The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

“The issue is facts,” I said on the podcast. “One of the facts you’ve been hearing in the last couple of days is that we really need facts to be able to deal with [the virus] because if you aren’t out there with the facts, the medical community, the schools, government and anybody who is involved is not going to be able to handle things well. So maybe we have a little call-to-truth coming.”

It wasn’t because I was prescient that Covid-19 would strike us hard, though I had just returned from Europe where already airport workers were doing temperature screenings. My focus on facts stemmed from having recently edited a book written by fellow members of my Columbia University Journalism School Class of 1969.

The idea behind the project –  Inside the Upheaval of Journalism: Reporters Look Back on 50 Years of Covering the News –  was just that. To relate, through our experiences as well as data,  how new coverage  had changed over a half-century.

Running through the book like a strong current through the river of history was the way the revelation of facts had changed our society, whether in politics, medicine, criminal justice, or such social issues as economic, racial and gender inequality.

Once facts are published, they can no longer be ignored. Sooner or later they result in change.

For instance, in 1975, Richard Knox, medical writer for the Boston Globe, broke a story about a surprising cluster of heart surgery deaths at two Boston area hospitals, both served by the same cardiac surgery team. That certain surgical teams routinely had poor outcomes was “a hidden national problem,” Knox wrote in his chapter in Inside the Upheaval. Soon after, states, including Pennsylvania, began requiring public reporting of cardiac surgery deaths, a practice that has resulted in more informed choices for patients and the likelihood of better outcomes.

Or look at the impact that the Kerner Commission report had on minority hiring in the media. Marquita Pool-Eckert was a newbie minority journalist in 1968 when the report was published after race riots shocked and devastated many US cities.

“Diversity in newsrooms was virtually non-existent back then,” Pool-Eckert, wrote. With African Americans accounting for fewer than five percent of editorial staff at the mainstream press, according to the Kerner findings, it had failed to cover conditions in poor communities, contributing to the riots that killed 200 people and wounded 10,000.

Prodded by the report and its prize-winning black reporter Acel Moore, The Inquirer, among other media organizations, accelerated minority hiring and set up training programs. The Acel Moore Journalism Workshop, in its 36^th year, has taught journalism skills to hundreds of Philadelphia high school students.

Not all revelations lead to quick results. In 1976, Mary Bralove, the third woman to be hired by the Wall St. Journal, wrote a landmark story with the headline: “A Cold Shoulder: Career Women Decry Sexual Harassment By Bosses and Clients.” The next day, calls poured in from secretaries thanking her for the exposé.

Bralove is dismayed that it took nearly 40 years for the #metoo movement to hold accountable the likes of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.

Facts have also contributed to the widening chasm between politicians and the press, a distancing that began with the Watergate scandal and later press reports of presidential aspirant Gary Hart’s alleged extramarital affair. (I say "alleged" because a death-bed confession says it may have all been set up to embarrass him).

Alan Ehrenhalt, former editor of Governing magazine, over his long career covering politics experienced the change in political coverage. “On Capitol Hill in the old days, a quiet bargain existed between members of Congress and the reporters representing the major newspapers: The bargain was that the members talked freely to the press in the secure belief that nothing negative about them would appear in print.”

With that bargain broken, politicians “have learned to use social media to communicate directly with voters, bypassing the reporters and editors” and their fact-checking function.

In a world of tweets and posts and distrust of the media, we have yet to see how the facts about Covid-19 play out.  But inevitably they will.

Never Knew They Cared So Much

It's one of those things that usually happens at funerals.  There's an outpouring of love from the adult children but the recipient of such affection is no longer there to hear it.
Well, the coronavirus has brought some of that outpouring in advance. My children, and those of my friends are all suddenly worried and protective.
"I'll do the shopping," son-in-law, Brendan, offered this week.
The next  morning, another son-in-law, Michael, who lives five hours away, called saying, "Let Brendan do the shopping!."
They're ganging up on us, and while we may be a bit prickly taking orders, we are mostly obeying. After all, it's because they love us. (Didn't we do some of that tough love with them when they were kids?)
A neighbor who had planned to host a small gathering last Friday canceled in the last minute. "We wanted to do it but our children wouldn't let us," she said.
A friend with tickets to return to Pennsylvania from a vacation in Florida, is told by her kids, "Stay there. You can't come near your grandkids anyway."
And on a walk a few days ago, we stopped by the home of a friend who is going through chemo. His 20-year-old son held him tightly around his shoulders as he stood about 25 feet away from us in his yard, not letting him venture a step closer. The son planned to be there at his side, restraining him, for the duration.

Grandparent time on Facebook

As a number of newspapers are now writing (as in today's Wall St. Journal ), we are suddenly "elderly". Or as someone said, "60 is not the new 40. It's the new 80." No matter that 3 weeks ago, I was skiing, or last night lifting weights.
For the first time in my life I am feeling like I do fit in that "old" category and must take the required precautions if I'm going to see my grandchildren grow up.
What's hard is not hugging the grandkids right now,  though I've been seeing them.  I've been doing fun things on Facetime with them: Spanish lessons with the 7 and 9 year olds; reading books to the 2 and 4 year olds (or rather, them trying to read books to us). One teen showed us her latest drawings, though it's harder to get the teens' attention.

Friends are calling, too. We may "get together" with them soon on one of the many video conferencing platforms that we're now engaged in. Maybe drinks and chat on Saturday night?

A new skill: video conference

Learning new skills, bridging the Great Divide, is just one of those things that is keeping us "young."

Hospitals & Colleges: The Gender Gap of Their Boards

Just months before  Happy Fernandez died in 2013, she had pulled together a group of prominent women in the nonprofit world (and a journalist, me) to figure out her next great thing.  Happy, a former Philadelphia city councilperson, had just retired from her position as president of the Moore College of Art and wanted to put her energy and skills into advancing women in non-profits.
Her sudden death might have ended her quest. But the women she had assembled felt they should continue what she had started.

Happy Fernandez, Philadelphia Inquirer 

A major moment in that effort  was announced today, with the first in-depth analysis of the boards of the Philadelphia area's 25 largest hospitals and 25 largest universities -- "meds and eds" as these influential institutions are called.
Among the findings: that the boards of only 4 of  the 25 colleges have 50 percent or more women members. Not surprisingly, those are schools with historically female roots, such as Bryn Mawr College. The same was true of hospitals, with those founded by Catholic sisters giving more equitable representation to women.
The study was conducted by the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University's School of Business at the request of our group, which for six years has quietly been working behind the scenes to coax  and cajole area universities and hospitals to put more women on their boards. We have now given ourselves a name–  the  Women's Nonprofit Leadership Initiative. And a website www.wnli.org, where you can learn about the members and find research proving the benefits of board diversity.
Reams of research should put to rest any disputing the value of diversified boards, from guiding institutions to better decision making to recognizing and preventing fraud. What's still too often missing today is the will to make it happen.
The full report shows that many of the region's  largest and most important institutions could do much better.
Here are a couple charts from the report -- read the full report here.
And see a story by the Philadelphia Inquirer here.

New Ways to Play: Cathy Topal

One of the delights of new friendships is what you can learn, especially from people who have already enjoyed a lifetime of experiences. Artist and educator Cathy Topal this week opened my eyes to a new world of exploration to share with young children.

Cathy Topal with a flower that could be a "J"

Cathy, a long time teacher at the Smith College Campus School in Northampton, Mass. has just published her 8th book, Beautiful Stuff from Nature, More Learning with Found Materials. It's co-authored with Lella Gandini, whom Cathy met during her first "mindblowing" visit to the town of Reggio Emilia in the late 1970s.

I had never heard of the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy which have pioneered a movement across the world to change the interaction of children and their teachers, in part by the use of "found materials" and teachers taking note of the child's  reactions as part of a shared learning.
I was intrigued by the idea, and in particular by Cathy's book on using found objects in play and wanted to learn more about how to  start substituting rocks and acorns and old faucets and ribbons for some of the Legos and toy trucks in the toy chest I keep for my grandchildren.

Cathy says she was first inspired to write a book after experimenting with clay in an eighth grade class. "I wanted them to explore," she said, but before she knew it "clay balls were flying all over the classroom. I resolved that if I'm going to do this I'd better learn what it means to explore."
Eight years later, she published her first book, Children, Clay and Sculpture.
Later, while working at the Campus School, she traveled to Reggio Emilia and was overwhelmed by what she saw.  "First of all, it's not a lot of plastic, primary colors, store-bought posters and materials. It's pretty much natural materials. and children's interactions with those materials. Importantly, it's also documenting the children's interactions – really looking at what the children are doing, transcribing what they say, photographing the process of creating, looking and talking about what you've noticed in those interactions and asking questions. Teachers are part of the process [as could be parents and grandparents] and are learning, too. It's not just  giving children something to learn. It's constructing learning together."

Learning from seeing

Returning home, she began to put this method into practice. "We gathered materials, we sorted materials, we organized spaces. We had the children explore. We had piles of materials.  Bottle caps and all kinds of things.  I was envisioning sorting the materials. But the children just wanted to explore it: what is this? where did it come from? The tone in the room blew me away,"

Some examples: "One little girl, I remember,  had this container of

Arranging nature as she sees it 

ribbons, old ribbons, and had spent a long time touching them, playing with them, mixing them up. Finally, she holds up her work and we see she has made a little marionette, a little dancing girl out of these ribbons. It was so perfect and unexpected. She was four. Another little girl had brought in an old faucet to contribute to the classroom's materials. She says,  'I'm going to make a horse.' She takes the faucet and attaches two beads for eyes and it looks amazingly like a horse!"
If a parent or a grandparent wanted to change the nature of play in their house, what should they think about, I asked?

Cathy recommends collecting with children natural materials–stones, seedpods bark, shells– or having them look through objects in your recycling bin such as bottle caps, things that are broken. Start out by laying them all out and just looking, and then grouping objects in some way– by color, by size, number, etc. "There are all kinds of ways to sort. By talking with the children about how things fit together that brings out descriptive language that touches on math, science, technology–all the  STEM subjects. It's a great way to explore and play with your kids. Once you can see what you have gathered and organized, designing a way to display the discoveries or create something with them seems to emerge naturally."

Some types of activities which she and her collaborator Gandini describe in their Beautiful Stuff from Nature book, are on a video, and include incorporating drawing, building in three dimensions, constructing portraits,  and, frankly, wherever a child's imagination and love of exploration might send them.

Limbering up on logs 

Cathy Topal and  Lella Gandini, are doing a workshop on Beautiful Stuff from Nature on Oct 21 at the Eric Carle museum in Amherst, Mass. Their book is available here or at online booksellers.

Ken Parker—Of Granary Building Fame and More

Ken Parker, one of the early design gurus of Philadelphia and a pioneer in transforming the Fairmount neighborhood, was back in town today for a big birthday celebration.   What should be celebrated are some of his Philadelphia milestones. For one, he bought an old, unused cement Granary Building and put his design studio, KPA (Kenneth Parker Associates), on the ground floor and a spectacular penthouse for himself on the top.

His innovative firm, with a bit of sleight of hand (keep reading) landed such jobs in the 1970s as the interior of the then-new FMC building and a then-new building at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, among others. His visionary ideas were written up in Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Architectural Digest.
My husband and I met Ken in 1972 when we bought a house he had designed at 1 Pigs Alley in Fairmount, two doors down from where he was then living.  (Pigs Alley was a tiny lane behind our house and his, off of 24th and Perot Streets where there had once been an abbatoir.)

In foreground, the Granary building

We never knew until hearing Ken speak today that he had brought in the neighbors to make the office look busy the day the president of FMC, Ray Tower, came in to seal a deal for KPA to design the interior of the  225,000-square-foot building.
"It's called 'papering the house,'" Ken said. FMC thought they were contracting with a successful, established, "mid-sized" firm when instead it was tiny and just getting going.

Among the neighborhood characters he had brought in that day was Tony Rappa, a rotund, aging Italian who spent most of his days stoop-sitting on Perot street. 

Fortunately, the FMC president didn't stop to ask Tony questions, but also sitting at a drawing board, looking busy was a medical technician and chef, Ray Moderski. "At the bottom of the steps, Mr. Tower took a left instead of a right and he walks back to Moderski," Ken recalled, "And he says, 'What are you working on?'" Ray, who had been drawing a stick-figure version of a house,  says, "Here is my dream house. Here is the living room...."

Kitchen at the Granary

We were fortunate enough to get invited to Ken's penthouse at the Granary a few times, with its lush rooftop conservatory, it’s all-white kitchen in the round, and its luxurious hot tub with its extraordinary view of Philadelphia's skyline (at a time when City Hall was still the tallest building). He threw fabulous parties there. It had a "Gatsby kind of image," Ken recalled, a scene often written up by the press.

Ken's hot tub with city view

"I’ve had a wonderful life," Ken said to the crowd gathered for his 80th birthday. “I’ve loved and I’ve been loved....   "I'm proud to say I lived a respectable life as a gay man when it was not as accepted as it is, thankfully. ...
"I see today as caramelized walnuts on top of a multi-tiered cake which has been my happy life."
Ken continues his design work now in California. You can see it here.

Unretiring in Swaziland

In Swaziland, recently renamed eSwatini, there’s a magistrate of sorts known as the “induna” who settles community disputes.  It’s unpaid but an honor that generally is not refused. And so on a trip to South Africa, with a day over the border to the independent state of eSwatini, we sat with the induna of the Mahlanya community to hear about his work, his life and his family.

The Swazi induna with guide Nana Sambo

This induna, age 77, has been asked to do the job for the last 20 years and you’d think by now he might want to retire. After all, it’s a 24-hour job when anyone can drop in on him at any time of day or night, we were told by our guide Nana Sambo (seated next to him in photo) He runs a farm so the vegetables help support his household, and the king of Swatira sends an occasional gift. It also helps that, unlike the king,  he has only one wife.
Polygamy is fine here, if you can afford it, which the king, age 50, apparently can. He currently has some 10 wives and about 40 kids. (He had 12 wives but two  died recently.  We’re told being one of many wives can be a lonely proposition.)
We walked down a dirt road for about 15 minutes to get to the home of the induna.  It is a walk  that anyone who wants a problem resolved must take, perhaps walking even further. The induna does not settle disputes by phone or email, only in person. Nor does he generally meet with tour groups but this was a special opportunity set up by our group, Overseas Adventure Travel.
Most of the problems that come before him, he told us, have to do with disputes over land, for instance, a neighbor building a fence that encroaches on your property.  Some crimes he must turn over to the judicial system. As he explained, doing his job is a challenge sometimes because he never studied law.
Asked if he plans to retire any time soon, he answered that working “keeps his soul young.”
See a video of him here https://youtu.be/1lyBaoem6pMe,

The wife of the induna

Musings on Risk at a Certain Age

Today, during lunch with a group of former colleagues, one of them made an observation about risk that resonated with me.  As someone who skis, hikes, bikes, drives, flies and loves to travel, risk has not been high on my list of worries. Or, subconsciously, has it?

"As I get older," he said, "the risks seem riskier." That put into perspective feelings of anxiety I've been having.   I recently told my Montreal relatives that it was unlikely we'd drive up from Philadelphia for the holidays, a tradition of several years. Last year, on our way home, we skidded off the road. I don't relish tempting slick highways again. I nag at my husband to drive more slowly. (He, in return, accuses me of driving "like an old lady.")

Are our growing concerns about risk because we realize that there is so much more to lose? For one,  our bodies are less able to bounce back from injury. For another, if we're lucky and now have grandchildren, we'd like to see them grow up.

My friend tied his thoughts about risk to his increasing unwillingness to move out of his large, longtime house in order to downsize.  Why, he said, should he take the risk of moving from a community he has nurtured for the last 36 years to one where he would have to start all over? "The longer I'm here, the harder it is to move,"  he said.

Hmm... We've been in our house 40 years, the last decade of which we have thought about moving.

At the same time that cocooning seems to be working to envelope me, I know I must keep fighting to break free and take  risks that bring excitement, diversion, and adventure. Risks that keep me engaged, indeed, young. 

Perhaps that's why we've begun to thread the risk/reward needle. 
For one, we don't travel independently as often as we once did, driving on unfamiliar roads in unfamiliar countries where people speak unfamiliar languages. Instead, we go with organized groups and let a guide and driver  lead our explorations 
We caved after many decades of skiing in knitted hats and invested in helmets, though we told ourselves it was to set an example for the grandkids.
And last year I bought Yaktraks to clip on our boots so we don't slip in winter -- though we have yet to put them on.
Over Thanksgiving, with 10 grandkids and grand nieces and nephews in the house, I was careful to watch for toys underfoot. (A close friend recently broke her wrist in multiple places after stepping on a toy truck while kissing her grandson goodnight.)

But there is reward in confronting  such risk in our big old house:  having the place and space to bring a large and loving family together. I would risk everything for that.

F.I.R.E. ; Very Very Early Retirement

This trend reminds me a bit of the 1960s and ‘70s when my generation, then young, sought to move to Vermont and raise our own food, cut our own firewood and live independently off the grid.
This time, though, it’s Millennials burned out at jobs they hate, calculating with advanced math skills, that if they had $1 million and lived really really frugally, and prayed that the stock market kept going up, they could move out of their expensive urban apartments, move to an inexpensive community and enjoy their lives.
The trend is called FIRE – financial independence, retire early. I learned all this from a story in the New York Times. Read it here.
But all this is too late for me. Besides, I loved my job and felt that I was  helping others lead better lives as a result of the explanatory journalism I was doing. I wouldn’t have traded that in for retirement at 35. And like those people we met who had gone to Vermont to be self-sufficient, we saw them burn out after they realized how hard it is.
I wonder if these folks embracing FIRE will find it too boring. Or maybe just not meaningful enough

To Philly Seniors: A Chance to Volunteer

Penn's Village is a Center City Philadelphia  non-profit that offers interesting educational programs while also providing, via member volunteers, services to others in the community.

It's a dynamic group. Upcoming talks include a session on how to organize your personal information, , a lecture on the history of North Korea by a University of Penn professor, and an afternoon with poet and author  George Economou. (Sorry, you missed my talk on Boathouse Row some time back!)

The group also offers, via member volunteers, support to others in the downtown Philly community.

Here's their recent announcement seeking administrative volunteers :

Hello members, volunteers and friends, Penn's Village is looking for a couple of administrative volunteers to assist with daily operations of the village.  This is not your usual office volunteer opportunity!   It is a chance to facilitate volunteer-delivered services in the community, to help with registration for workshops, outings and social events and to respond to inquiries about the organization.   Administrative volunteers work from their own homes to provide office "coverage" via our information management system and remote access to our phone.  We have a dedicated group of such volunteers who each "cover" their specific day(s), but we need to expand the group.  We will train you and support you all the way! If you are interested in learning more, please respond to this email or call the office at 215-925-7333.  You will be contacted either by one of the current administrative volunteers or by me. Thank you for considering this request! Jane Eleey Executive Director 215-925-7333 www.pennsvillage.org

Requiem to a Retiring Museum

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

Despite several years prowling through Philadelphia's great repositories of history to research my book Boathouse Row,  I had never visited the Philadelphia History Museum, formerly known as the Atwater Kent. But hearing that the museum was immediately closing after the failure of a  possible merger with Temple University, I ran out today to check it out.
The collection is odd: a little of this and a little of that. There's a gallery of oil paintings of famous and not so famous Philadelphians, highlighted by a portrait of William Penn by an unknown artist and one of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart.

William Penn

There's a room of Norman Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post, published in Philadelphia. One, from 1960, asks the question "Is there a Woman's Vote?"  Fifty-eight years later, we're still wondering

An entire room was dedicated to Octavius Catto, a noted African American educator of the 19th century whose story was brought to light by my former Inquirer colleagues Murray Dubin and Dan Biddle in their book, Tasting Freedom. Since its publication in 2010,  Philadelphia has celebrated Catto with numerous events, readings, and most recently a statue, the first memorial to an African American in the city.

To my disappointment, there was little to amplify my knowledge of Boathouse Row but for a James Peale portrait of Frederick Graff, the engineer who in 1821 built the Water Works, which used a hydraulic system to pump water to the city. Another result was that its dam, which flattened a turbulent river, allowed rowing to emerge as a great Philadelphia sport. Also, there were a few photographs by Frederick Gutekunst, a noted photographer of the mid to late 19th century who, I discovered, was also a rower.

Photo by Frederick Gutekunst

A few other items resonated with me. I loved seeing an old Bulletin newspaper "honor box" as it was called, because once you put in your  quarter, you could lift out as many newspapers as you wanted. I've got one in my house, which we obtained after the paper folded in 1982!

Other quirky things: George Washington's pocket watch, William Penn's shaving bowl and snuff box and a shell and leather wampum belt, dating from about 1682 . It's supposedly the one given by a Lenape chief to William Penn in a gesture of good will.
There was also a gorgeous silver and gold "presentation sword"  inlaid with diamonds and amethysts given by "grateful Philadelphians" to General George C. Meade for his victory at Gettysburg.

Let this brief report be a requiem to the Philadelphia History Museum. May it reopen some day,  hopefully with more stuff in it!

Sword given to Gen. George C. Meade