Remembrances and Impressions of an Ancestor I Never Met

Asbury Harpending, Jr.
Born: 14 September 1839, Hopkinsville, Christian County, Kentucky
Died: 1923, Manhattan, New York

Asbury’s Father: Asbury Harpending, Sr.
Born: 10 October 1790, New York State
Died: 7 October 1873, Princeton, Caldwell County, Kentucky

Asbury’s Mother: born 1808 as Nancy Wright Clark. Later, she was known as Nancy Jones; a prior marriage is speculated. She was Asbury’s second wife, of three. Asbury Senior remarried in 1843, so Asbury Junior’s mother died (not divorced) when he was quite young. He was the youngest of three from his mother. He had seven half-siblings from Asbury’s first wife, Mary Prickett Ogden who died in 1833. There were no children from Asbury’s third marriage to Sarah. We don’t know the relationship Asbury had with his step-mother Sarah.

Asbury’s Wife: Ira Anna Thompson
Died: April 26, 1917

Asbury’s Children:

(Gertrude died in infancy)

—

Asbury Harpending, Jr. was my father’s maternal grandfather. Dad remembered being with him in New York when Asbury died. Dad was then nine years old. My memories of Asbury are those of my father and Asbury’s daughter Genevieve, Dad’s aunt, transmuted by time and the nervous systems of the three of us.

Asbury’s official life is well chronicled in his autobiography, The Great Diamond Hoax and Other Stirring Incidents in the Life of Asbury Harpending, in many books and periodicals during and after his days, and in the archives of the Online Archive of California.

In addition I have written a brief biography, Notes for a Memoir: Asbury Harpending, Jr.

What I record in the following is the picture I have of the man and his relationships with his children and their spouses.

He was full of himself, irascible, explosive and difficult to live with. He was driven by ambition and achieved most of what he yearned for as a youth: wealth, influence and some degree of respectability. He fancied himself as a southern gentleman, but he was not.

His memoirs barely mention his wife, about whom my father and Great Aunt knew little; I know next to nothing. Both of his sons left home never to return. He doted on his two daughters, and indulged them to the point of supporting them and their husbands until he died.

He left home in Kentucky at age 16 to the promise of California during and after the Gold Rush, and returned slightly before or after his father’s death in 1874 to present himself to his former community and family as a successful and wealthy man. Another motive was that he suffered public humiliation by his still murky role in the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 and he wanted to start afresh. This was not to be. Although he had built a marvelous house in his home county, after the child Gertrude died (within two years of her birth) he moved to New York City. I speculate he found Kentucky slow and boring and that he was not accepted socially.

It’s not clear to me how he raised a family in Marin County (Mill Valley) and Alameda County (Oakland) while living in New York, but I have heard many stories from Dad about his life in Mill Valley and the “Fruitvale House” (now gone) in Oakland. It seems apparent Asbury relied on his two sons-in-law to manage family affairs. They were business partners with each other, as well as connected through the sisters.

Asbury was a promoter and plunger and, in the end, died with his fortune almost depleted. His sons-in-law spent 12 years after his death trying to recover Asbury’s assets in New York, California, London, and Mexico.

(More Text Follows the Three Images) 

“Old Harpending House”, Princeton, Kentucky

Fruitvale House, Oakland

Lucille Harpending Pavellas at the Mill Valley house.

Harpending’s son-in-law George D. Papageorge-Palladius was also a promoter and in him I believe Asbury saw a natural son. Papageorge died in his fifties from complications of diabetes and other diseases, having depleted all the Harpending assets in the middle of The Great Depression. Papageorge’s son, Nestor Palladius, was also a promoter/salesman but was not successful and, in the long run, died in poverty at age 83 with no natural children.

Harpending’s other son-in-law, Alexander Konstantin Pavellas, was the respectable and professionally educated “son” (lawyer and diplomat) who married the oldest, peculiar, and theretofore unmarriageable daughter, Lucille, several years older than Alexander. He died similarly to his brother-in-law, the same year, 1935.

These two sons were good husbands and did their duties, thereby cementing their access to the Harpending assets (tangible and intangible) which they used to advance their various enterprises together, including especially newspapers and other publications and activities aimed at the Greek-American community and Philhellenes of the West Coast.

Asbury was imperious and prone to impulsive betting on the future.He was a Californian of the 1800s, but his way was not profitable in the 1900s. He died a disappointed man, as did his sons-in-law who were inextricably in his orbit. His daughter Lucille was a mystical and  unhappy soul who died within months of her husband and brother-in-law. His daughter Genevieve was altogether different. She enjoyed life, in whatever manner it presented itself, to the fullest until her death at age 90, then living with a rather punchy ex-boxer, Frank.

Asbury’s legacy is memories, a few mementos, and a great number of descendants, amazingly, through only one grandson, my father.

Diane Pavellas, 1942 – 2011: In Pursuit of Joy and Beauty

Diane’s life is best appreciated through memories and impressions evoked from an album of photographs presented here.

Diane loved to be the hostess for gatherings of family and friends. Here she is hosting a birthday party at her home in San Jose for brother Ron, 6 January 2002

Diane Helen Pavellas was born at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, 27 August, 1942. We were then living in the new Sunnydale Housing Project for war workers at 1822 Sunnydale avenue, San Francisco, near the “Cow Palace” in Daly City. Mother Artemis Pavellas was 23 years old. Father Conrad Pavellas worked at the Kaiser Richmond Shipyards as a rat-proofing foreman in building “Liberty Ships” for the U. S. Navy. Diane, along with her small family, began life in humble circumstances., both in San Francisco and, beginning 1946, Brooklyn, New York.

The Sunnydale Housing Project
(San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

 

Our father, Conrad Pavellas, was (falsely) promised a partnership in a printing firm by his cousin George Pavellas, so the four of us moved to Brooklyn. Dad preceded the rest of the family to arrange housing, and the three of us arrived, by train, on New Year day, 1946.

The area surrounding 3rd Avenue and 48th Street, Brooklyn (click on the image)

We escaped back to California in the summer of 1951 when Diane was age 9.

1948: Diane Pavellas, age six years, in Brooklyn, New York

Perhaps Diane’s natural appreciation and talent for arranging things and events of beauty were doubly encouraged by her memories of the Brooklyn slum we lived in, but it doesn’t matter. Our aunts Angie and Bee in California supported Diane and me (brother Ron) in our taking piano lessons and, for Diane, ballet lessons. She was a good and enthusiastic dancer. She enjoyed entertaining the neighborhood children by dancing in the street, beginning her career as someone who attracted people and who brought them, and herself, joyful experiences.

Diane remained in California for the rest of her life until early 2008, when she moved upon retirement from the real estate business to Rosarito Beach, Mexico. She died there, suddenly and apparently from an acute attack of asthma, on 8 July 2011.

Diane married twice, was blessed with a daughter Victoria and a stepson, Rick, both of whom have children of their own.

As stated at the head of this eulogy, almost 300 pictures from Diane’s life can be seen in chronological order here, each picture accompanied by some descriptive text. At the end of this photo album, there is a short video of Diane giving me a visual tour of the El Descanso housing development in which she lived and worked.

Hail and Farewell, Diane Helen Pavellas: daughter, sister, niece, aunt, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, friend.

Greekness

Eva and I recently attended a presentation of art at Stockholm University which featured a film of the artist’s experience in a village on the Greek island of Samos in the early 1990s. Upon our early entrance to the small auditorium, a man with vivid black hair looked at me and loudly exclaimed something like: “I see a Greek has arrived.”

I don’t go around thinking of myself as Greek, although I easily indentify myself with this ethnicity. Three of my grandparents were born in Greece. The fourth was born in the USA of mixed northern European heritage—Dutch and “Scotch-Irish”, by family names. My sister and I were not raised in the Greek tradition or culture.

I was slightly nonplussed but pleased by this surprising greeting, after which the man and I warmly shook hands. As usual when among Greeks, I had to explain that I never learned the language except to say kala, efcharisto (good, thank you) to the standard greeting ti kaneis (how are you), which is disappointing to the Greeks I meet, whether citizens of Greece or ethnic Greeks from elsewhere.

The man, whose name was given too quickly for me to catch, is the husband of the artist with whom I exchanged greetings immediately thereafter. She is American with a German surname, and a professor of art at UCLA. We swapped cards and have since communicated briefly by email.

The greeting this Greek fellow gave me has stayed with me in a pleasant way, now several weeks since. This feeling and associated thoughts wandered around in me and finally settled on another event, long past, when I was proclaimed “Greek” at the funeral of my Aunt Bee’s husband, my Uncle Tommy.

The parents of Thomas Anthony Thomas were from Greece and had four children born in California. His father’s family surname was Efthemiou; his mother’s was Andritsas.

Bea and Tommy Thomas, Center, surrounded by family at the baptism of Tom, Jr., around 1950

Tommy Thomas and Beatrice Pagonis married in the mid-1940s. Uncle Tommy became a mentor to me, as he was to others.  He was a short and powerful man who, with an 8^th-grade education, rose from worker to foreman and eventually partner in the main business, then, of Newport Beach, the fish cannery. It is now “The Cannery” restaurant.

Tommy was brash, generous, argumentative, loving. He was full of life and good, if biting, humor. He was always a challenge to talk with and to satisfy. I loved him and still do. He was the first of the older generation to die.

When I was not yet nine years old Uncle Tommy took me on a tour of the fish cannery. I saw the boats come in and saw the fishermen unloading the tuna, swordfish, crab and other catches, but mostly the tuna.

I listened as Tommy bantered with the fishermen, immigrants from all over southern Europe: Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Jugoslavs. The comaraderie among these hard-working men was different and more exciting than that of my father and his friends in the Socialist Labor Party of San Francisco.

In all the back-and-forth between Tommy and the others, Tommy was the benevolent leader.

"The Cannery" by Jane Hill of Jane Hill studio

Around twenty-five years later I was living and working in the Los Angeles area and could visit Tommy and Bee more often. By this time the tuna had almost disappeared from California’s waters and the cannery was reduced to canning pet food. Despite Tommy’s deep disappointment in not being able to successfully lobby the state legislature to limit the catches as is now done in Alaska, and in no longer being able to be a man among other men in the fishing business, he continued to be as cheerful as he could be. But I could see that it was a great burden to carry the old times with him and radiate these to the others who were similarly disappointed, even wrecked, from the collapse of the local fishing industry.

He told me of the fishermen with whom he maintained connection. One in particular stands out in my memory, one who Tommy pointed out to me as we were together in town doing some errands. The old fisherman walked with a cane. He lived alone, so Tommy checked up on him every few days to see how he was. One time Tommy was overdue on his self-appointed rounds and found the old man collapsed on his kitchen floor. Tommy got him to the hospital where he recovered. Tommy simply saved the man’s life.

Not long after this telling, Tommy had a massive stroke and was dead within a year. The formerly powerful and dependable man was now a helpless mumbling person, bed-ridden and fully dependent on everyone else. His face was contorted, one half of it fully immobilized from the stroke, as was half his body. It was horrible.

Tommy was a 33^rd-degree Mason and wanted his funeral according the rites of this fraternity. He also had roots in the Greek Orthodox Church. Aunt Bee asked a Greek priest to be present with the family at the rites.

The funeral ceremony was held in large building (I think it may have been the Masonic Lodge in Huntington Beach) where the general public was admitted, but the family was off to the side in a covered area where we could see out and not be seen. We saw Tommy’s many friends and former associates pass by his closed coffin to pay last respects. As I watched this sad and solemn procession, I was electrified to see the old man whose life Tommy had saved. He was, with the help of his cane, walking stiffly and straight as a soldier, slowly toward Tommy’s coffin. He was dressed in a sharp gray suit and held a flower. As he laid the flower on Tommy’s coffin I burst into tears and uttered a loud noise that I tried unsuccessfully to quash—thus making it all the more strange sounding. I was the only one in our family gathering, including the priest, who was crying, as far as I could tell, and I was embarrassed.

Aunt Bee had a reception at her house afterward. It was crowded and noisy, old friends greeting and socializing. I held back, not familiar with everyone and still somewhat embarrassed. The priest came over to me, grabbed my arm tightly and said to me: “you’re a real Greek.”

Give Me That Old Time Religion

No, I am not proselytizing. I am recounting here the memories evoked by my reading of two books by Juan Williams, who recently received some unusual public attention, about which you can read under the preceding link.

The first book I read is This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience, which was made into a six-part series by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Religion and Music are partners in life and in this book. Since I was around six years old I have felt deep stirrings from hearing music referred to in it.

This is a popular song, rooted in gospel singing, that I responded to in my youngest years:

Delta Rhythm Boys sing “Dry Bones,” around 1940

The second book is My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil rights Experience. The thirty-three stories in this book are short interviews of people who were engaged with the struggle for racial justice, some directly, some peripherally. Most are fascinating, and all are uplifting to the spirit. This book, in addition to the first one mentioned, also encourages me to recount memories–not just about music, but about my own experiences and perceptions regarding racial and ethnic prejudice n America.

Please keep in mind that what I present here are tangential thoughts and memories; I do not attempt to capture the historical sweep and depth of these two books.

I never knew a Negro until age 14, at the beginning of my junior year at Lowell High school in San Francisco, just after the family returned from 5½ years in Brooklyn. His name was Grady Hayes and the remarkable thing about him, for me, was that he was not remarkable—he was a regular guy, someone I could easily talk with. I never met his family, but he said that his mother had a West Indian accent.

I felt, at a very young age, sympathy with the position of Negroes in American society. The major reason for this is from hearing my father’s stories about the inhumane treatment of Negroes in the southern United States, and from his deeply felt philosophical positions which led him to be an active member of the Socialist Labor Party (Democratic Socialist, not Communist) while we lived in San Francisco.

Also, my mother had felt the barbs of ethnic discrimination in her youth, as the only “Greek” in the Portland, Oregon neighborhood where she and her two sisters were foster children. (Her parents were born in Greece; her mother died in San Francisco when she and her sisters were quite young). Mom was very sensitive all her long life to ethnic slurs. When I was around age four or five, just after WWII had begun for the USA, I was disrespectful to a neighbor boy who was of Japanese ancestry. My Uncle Harry rescued me from the wild anger of my mother when she learned of this. The Japanese family disappeared soon after, probably to a “relocation camp.”

My extended family loved to listen to songs sung by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.

Marian Anderson sings “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child” (Date Unknown)

When I was around eight years old, just before we moved to Brooklyn, I took piano lessons from a wealthy woman who lived in Pacific Heights of San Francisco. She had a servant, a black woman. My three-year-old sister accompanied me and my mother to one of these lessons and upon seeing, for the first time, a black person, Diane innocently asked her “why is your face black?” My mother was mortified and I became quite alert to her embarrassment. I will never forget the woman’s calm and gracious reply: “it’s because God wanted me this way.”

Our small family lived in Brooklyn from New Year’s Day 1946 until the Summer of 1951. We were isolated from our extended family and all that was familiar to us in San Francisco and California. Mom, my sister Diane and I had only the radio to connect us with the rest of the world.

The radio was almost always on. It was tuned to a station that played “serious” music. I was enthralled when “Negro spirituals” were on the program, especially when Mahalia Jackson sang.

Until I joined the U.S. Navy at age 17, I didn’t even know I was “white.” Until then I was just “Greek,” although our family never spoke Greek at home or attended Greek church. (“Greek-American” seemed awkward, and nobody was saying we weren’t American).

This was in 1954, at the end of the Korean “Conflict.” After general and technical training for over a year, I was assigned to an aircraft carrier as an electronic technician. I became part of team of 35 sailors who repaired and maintained the ship’s radios, radars, and other equipment.

Most of sailors in my division were from the south and southwest USA. Although all of us scored high in intelligence tests in order to qualify for our jobs, I was astounded to hear these young men utter the foulest words against Negroes. Being my father’s son, I mounted strong arguments against their prejudices, but to no avail. For those who even cared to engage with me, my standing was nil because “I had never lived around them.” My appeals to logic and general humanity fell on deaf ears, and I was becoming a nag. I finally swallowed my bile and accepted that I couldn’t make a difference. I had to live in close quarters with these fellows and work beside them.

“Ol’ Man River,” by Jerome Kern in “Showboat,” sung by Paul Robeson. 1936

Upon being discharged from active duty on the cusp of New Year, 1958, I enrolled in the local community college, got married and moved to Berkeley in 1960 to attend University. My wife and I became friends with a couple, John and Inca. John was a student at Berkeley and had also been in the US Navy. Inca had a job and was homemaker for their two children, Michael and Jenny.

John was a light-skinned Negro from a middle class family in the western US. Inca was born in Holland. Berkeley was one of the few places then where a couple in a “mixed marriage” could feel reasonably comfortable. John and Inca were tall people and their children were strikingly beautiful.

As the racial tensions and freedom marches in the South began to take shape leading up to the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, John began to feel “black” for the first time in his life. He dropped out of university and went to the South to participate in civil rights activities there. Upon his return to Berkeley John said his life would take a new direction. But, shortly afterward, in 1965, he was killed in a traffic accident in San Francisco. He was buried, as a military veteran, at Golden Gate National Cemetery, 10 miles south of San Francisco.

Kevin Maynor sings “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech in the summer of 1963, just after I had received my B.S. and started studying toward a graduate degree. I have listened to and read this speech many times, but not recently—until I read these books. In addition to the beauty and aptness of his oration, I see the threads of Negro church music in certain poetic phrases, repeated sonorously:

• “Now is the time.”
• ”We are not satisfied.”
• ”Let freedom Ring.”
• ”Free at last.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I Have a Dream.” Speech given on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C..

From “American Negro Songs ” by J. W. Work:

“Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last…”

… to which Dr. King referred and quoted in the final words of his speech. It remains as thrilling as it first did, 47 years ago.

I have read recently Dr. King’sLetter from Birmingham Jail. This is a great work of literature and scholarship in the ethics of Christianity, in which he was appealing to white ministers for sympathy to the cause he was leading.

I lived in and around the San Francisco Bay Area until 1979, when I took work in Alaska. These were tumultuous years, as persons my age will recall, especially around San Francisco and Berkeley. These were also seminal days for popular music, including the evolution of black church music into the mainstream. I was thrilled to discover I could still hear the essence of the Negro spirituals I enjoyed in my youth by listening to Ray Charles and, especially, Aretha Franklin.

In the beginning of My Soul Looks Back in Wonder is a poem, a variation on the lyrics to this song sung by Mahalia Jackson:

Mahalia Jackson, “How I got Over.”

How I got over
How I got over, my Lord
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord

The tallest tree in Paradise
The Christians call it tree of life
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord

Lord, I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned
And I’ve been talked ‘bout as sure as you’re born
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord

Oh, Jordan’s river is so chilly and cold
It’ll chill your body but not your soul
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord

—

These two books have taken me on a soulful journey
through my memories (enhanced by Youtube.com), and through a reminder of recent history that should be revisited by everyone in the USA.

NOTE: The title for this article comes from my memory of the gospel song Give Me that Old Time Religion as I heard it on the radio in the late 1940s.

It was by way of Charles Davis Tillman that the song had incalculable influence on the confluence of black spiritual and white gospel song traditions in forming the genre now known as southern gospel. Tillman was largely responsible for publishing the song into the repertoire of white audiences. It was first heard sung by African-Americans and written down by Tillman when he attended a camp meeting in Lexington, South Carolina in 1889. (Source)

The Prime Number Immediately Preceding 79

The culture within which I swim likes numbers, and things that can be numbered, to be grouped into fives and tens. As my age has advanced I have taken, instead, to making public note of those birth date anniversaries which are prime numbers: 59, 61, 67, 71 and, pending, 73. I like the idea of “prime,” as in “the prime of one’s life.”

I feel blessed by fortune, fate and circumstance to be relatively free from concern about food, clothing and shelter and, for the higher needs, books, music, the beauties of Nature, and access to the Internet. Of course all this would be quite dry and thin if I were not also enveloped and nourished by the love of family and friends.

Circumstances can change at any time, to any degree, but one gets used to things appearing to remain the same, at least in the short term. My short-term thinking is a few years. The longer-term, which I think about more often, I see as 20 to 25 years, barring accident.

I will pass through the seventy-third anniversary of my birth sometime on 7 January, 2010. Many years ago I aspired to reach age 63, just to experience living beyond the year 1999.

I “retired” at age 65½, exactly, although I prefer to say I have had no boss since then. I need to feel useful and have, therefore, been employed in a number of activities, some even remunerative. All have been of my own choosing and, having completed many, I have moved on to others.

My father lived until age 87, my mother until age 90. Actuarial tables for “white” male persons living currently in the USA tell me that I will probably live until around 84.5 years. By virtue of having moved to Sweden seven years ago, that figure may well increase to 87.5 years. Other than my inherited tendency toward hypertension which is easily controlled, I have no major chronic diseases or disabilities. I think it reasonable, therefore, to expect to live until age 90 or 95.

But, since I like prime numbers, let’s round that up to 97.

See you around.

Ron Pavellas
2 January 2009

Position of Elsewhere

This abstract phrase is the title of an hour-long piece in the repertoire of the Cullberg Ballet troupe, danced to the music of Jean-Louis Huhta. It was my great pleasure to see it performed recently at the Vitabergs Park Theatre, an amphitheatre, in Stockholm (Parkteatern, Vitabergsparken).

One cannot successfully describe (literally, put into writing) the sublimity of the graceful, intricately simple, competent and just plain beautiful movements of dancers who are so fully integrated in their movements they often appear as a single living organism.

There. I tried to put the experience into words, anyway.

Here is a Youtube presentation of a rehearsal of “Position of Elsewhere” by the Cullberg Ballet.

Diane Pavellas, a student of Ephraim Geersh, around age four, Brooklyn, New York

It has been too long since I have seen ballet performed by professionals; that is, dancers who have as a basis for their art the movements and other attributes of classical ballet. Members of my family have appreciated classical ballet since I can remember. My younger sister, Diane, took ballet lessons for eight years in Brooklyn, then in San Francisco (with the Christiansen Ballet) when the Pavellas family moved back to their home town.

A cousin through marriage, Christine Sarry, influenced by Diane’s love of ballet, began lessons also and eventually was a major dancer with at least two ballet troupes in New York: The Eliot Feld Ballet and the American Ballet Theater.

Christine Sarry

Christy was a principal dancer in Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, choreographed by Agnes De Mille.

“…producers were hard-pressed to replicate the skill with which de Mille had portrayed the lead (‘Cowgirl’ in Rodeo). De Mille retained veto power over any casting of the ballet, which often sent companies to extremes in order to find a worthy Cowgirl.” (Source)

Here is Christy dancing as “The Cowgirl.” Agnes de Mille’s will provides Christine Sarry exclusive rights to approve dancers for the role of (or for a certain dance of) “The Cowgirl”.

This reminiscence has value, perhaps, in establishing a small measure of authority in my remarks here about the Cullberg Ballet.

Members of the Cullberg Ballet taking their final bows at the performance of August 24, 2009 at Parkteatern, Vitabergsparken

From the Fall schedule of Dansens Hus (The House of Dance), I see that the Cullberg Ballet will perform “Matter of a Maker” in Stockholm in November, the 21st, 22nd and 24th. The music will be by Owen Belton and Beastie Boys.

They will also perform “Xpectacle” by Crystal Pite November 25-27.

I’ll be sure to get my tickets early.

Tobacco: a Seduction

The first heavy smoker in my family to die was Uncle Tommy, my aunt Bee’s husband. He was around 65 and had a massive stroke which felled him, one side of his body completely disabled. He was confined to a hospital bed for a year before his death.

I started smoking cigarettes at age 11 and smoked two packs per day by age 12. This was an attempt to prove to the guys I hung around with in Brooklyn that I could possibly advance to manhood someday. This was in 1948.

My dad was also smoking heavily then. When my little sister ratted me out to him he said “you’ll be a man before your mother.” Nonetheless, I continued to smoke steadily. We moved back to California in 1951. (I don’t remember when Dad quit smoking, but it was many years before he died at age 87. Mom never smoked and died at age 90).

Smoking a cigarette at age 17, Navy Boot Camp, 1954

I quit cold when I was 19, in the US Navy. I was concerned for my health, having been born with a mild, genetically-inherited anemia, Alpha Thalassemia. I was also, and remain, a bit of a hypochondriac due to having been quite ill as a child and having had a hypersensitive nurse as a loving aunt. So, it was probably easier for me to quit than for other people, including a dear member of my family who still smokes and cannot shake the habit.

I started again at age 27. I had finally got into the graduate curriculum at the School of Public Health of the University of California, Berkeley. This was 1963. The School was housed in Earl Warren Hall at the northwest corner of the campus. Graduate students could smoke in class! My then wife, Patricia, thought a graduate student ought to smoke a pipe. She bought me a nice one and I happily took up the tobacco habit again. The pipe led to cigars and then back to cigarettes. I inhaled them all. At around age 38 or 39 I started to cough up black stuff, so I was scared into quitting again and felt much better, immediately. No more clearing of the throat and bronchi for half an hour every morning, and much more energy. Now, more than 30 years later, I cannot stand the smell of cigarettes, but I do occasionally find the smell of a pipe or a cigar intriguing.

In year 2006 I read The Importance of Living, a book by Lin Yutang which I recommend to anyone wanting a good read.

…Now the moral and spiritual benefits of smoking have never been appreciated by these correct and righteous and unemotional and unpoetic souls. But since we smokers are usually attacked from the moral, and not the artistic side, I must begin by defending the smoker’s morality, which is on the whole higher than that of the non-smokers. The man with a pipe in his mouth is the man after my heart. He is more genial, more sociable, has more intimate indiscretions to reveal, and sometimes he is quite brilliant in conversation, and in any case, I have a feeling that he likes me as much as I like him. I agree entirely with Thackeray, who wrote: The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouths of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.”

Lin Yutang’s essay goes on in this vein at some length before he then explores the virtues of Chinese incense, and it convinced me to try the pipe again. I went to a smoke shop in an upscale neighborhood of Stockholm (Sture Galleria) which had advertised a sale on specially made pipes to commemorate a major anniversary of the store’s business life. I bought one, along with the basic accouterments and the store’s special brand of tobacco. I sat on the balcony of our apartment to light up after more than 30 years, my fingers remembering all the little movements required to fill the pipe properly with tobacco. I felt a jolt when the nicotine got to where it affects the nervous system. It was a bit alarming, my body not remembering this aspect.

Practicing pipe smoking in California, 2006

I was on the verge of a trip to see my California family for an extended period, so I packed the pipe and paraphernalia in my luggage with the intention of practicing proper pipe smoking in the backyard patio. After my arrival in San Jose, I tried my best to achieve the pleasures so wonderfully described by Lin Yutang, but I concluded that the fussing with lighting and relighting and cleaning the pipe, not to speak of the dizziness and borderline nausea, was not worth the professorial image.

John Robinson, third husband to my first wife, Patricia and a heavy smoker, died of complications arising from emphysema at around age 55, having lived connected to an oxygen bottle for the previous several years. Patricia continued to smoke.

Patricia Robinson, former wife, died, age 68, neck and throat cancer. She had a tracheostomy for the last several months.

Nestor Palladius, my cousin, died age 83 of lung cancer.

Len R., old friend, died age 71, lung cancer. On oxygen the last few years.

Brian B., dear friend, died, brain tumor, age 68.

Recquiescas in pace