Mill Brook House News

Kagoshima, Mon Amour

My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is personal, for Kagoshima holds a special place in my heart that stretches back to childhood.

It all began in 1957 when my parents took me to see Teahouse of the August Moon, a service comedy about the early days of the American Occupation of Okinawa. I adored it. (That Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, was being played in yellow face by Marlon Brando went by me completely.) I watched my first grown-up movies (Oklahoma!, Tammy and the Bachelor) that summer, but in retrospect I realize that the trip to see Teahouse was meant mainly as a softening up tactic. A few weeks later, my mother confided that we ourselves would move to Okinawa that fall. I was thrilled.

When did I become a Japanophile? Was it pouring over Little Pictures of Japan from the My Book House series (of which we owned every volume) or playing with the clamshell novelties my mother brought back from New York’s Chinatown that opened up into beautiful paper flowers when soaked in a glass of water? Didn’t all children at the time try to dig a hole to China (which, we were told, lay just below us on the opposite side of the earth)? Perhaps we were all incipient orientalists. But in my case, it lay very close to the surface.

Eagerly anticipating a land of pine-covered hills and kimono-clad geishas, I was horribly disappointed six months later to find myself on a sub-tropical island, whose bright sunlight was blindingly intensified by the ubiquitous coral dust. A battle 12 years earlier had scoured the island, leaving much of it treeless. Pampas grass and sugar cane grew where vicious fighting once took place and often covered deadly unexploded ordinance. As ubiquitous as the coral dust were American military vehicles and installations. No pine trees lit by moonlight, no geishas, no soft breezes, no distant mountains. Teahouse, it turned out, had been shot on the Japanese mainland, not on Okinawa. (A recently constructed Teahouse of the August Moon did exist in Okinawa, but it had been inspired by the movie, not vice versa.)      

Although the island abounded in ancient local arts, whose revival the American military government had encouraged (and—as per the movie—cricket cages were for sale in every local tchotchke shop), at nine I had no more ability to appreciate the local pottery and textiles than I had to discern Marlon Brando under his make-up. I longed for the classical arts and picturesque landscapes of “real,” Japan, land of lanterns, ukiyoe and fireflies.

I was ecstatic, therefore, as I embarked with my mother and sister on my first trip to the main islands of Japan. We left on the overnight boat from Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and landed the next day in Kagoshima, the southernmost port city of Japan’s four main islands. This time it was love at first sight. My mother had splurged and booked us into a genuine ryokan [Japanese inn]. Our tatami-mat-covered room opened onto an exquisite garden, and waitresses in kimono served our dinner and made up our beds, futon [thick quilts—the foam rubber kind hadn’t been invented yet] spread on the floor.

The inn sat atop the kind of pine-covered hill I had been waiting a whole year to see and looked down over the city. Houses with black tile roofs lay below, a contrast to the red tile roofs of the more affluent homes in Okinawa, and they had good reason to be black. Sakurajima, sitting majestically in the distance, issued a thin plume of smoke from its conical peak. Smoke billowed, too, from the steam locomotives that pulled the trains that wound around the city in the valley below us.

I had not been on a train since I was three and could only dimly remember the experience. Trains did not even exist in Okinawa, so I could barely contain my excitement, knowing we would soon be on that train, heading north to other cities in Japan.

Watching the train and actually riding on it were two different things, however. These steam-driven vehicles had no air conditioning, and, it being summer, the windows were all open, allowing soot from the smokestack to blow in, covering passengers, seats, and floors alike. Tunnels, of which there were many, particularly on the tracks between Kyoto and Tokyo, proved particularly obnoxious as the smoke had nowhere to go except into the train. Passengers rushed to close the windows, rendering the carriage hot and stuffy. Mostly, though, the long slow journey—Kagoshima to Kyoto required an overnight trip—felt incredibly boring to a ten-year-old.

At stations, hawkers filled the platforms, selling bento [lunch] boxes, constructed from the thinnest of thinly shaved wood, and tiny clay pots of tea, and passengers purchased these refreshments through their open windows. Once their contents had been consumed, the empty boxes and teapots, along with disposable chopsticks, all ended up on the floor of the train. Bored by the journey and  fascinated by the perfectly shaped clay pots, whose covers served as tiny cups and which varied in color, shape, and markings from station to station, I amused myself by crawling underneath the seats on the train’s dirty floor to collect them, much to our fellow passengers’ surprise and my mother’s chagrin. (Incredibly, this saintly woman, at my insistence, carried a very large basket of these discarded vessels back to Okinawa for me.)

The little teapots and many other charms of mainland Japan notwithstanding, the trip was hard on one as young as I. The shrines and temples in Kyoto began to all look alike, and in Tokyo I spent a whole day in bed, possibly sick but probably just exhausted. We broke our return journey in the spa town of Beppu—no one had warned us how tacky spa towns in Japan can be—but the long trip south was as tedious as the trip north, and the inn in Kagoshima beckoned like a long lost friend. (Trains, I decided, were best experienced from that hill above the city.)

 Besides Sakurajima and the beautiful ryokan, Kagoshima featured Satsuma-ware, an elegant white ceramic with a crackled glaze covered by delicately painted bird and flower decorations. Shiny and colorful—in contrast to subtle earth tones of much Japanese pottery, including Okinawan—it captured my ten-year-old heart and has never lost its charm for me.

Satsuma-ware derives its name from the feudal Satsuma Domain, which was ruled by the Shimazu daimyo from Kagoshima. Satsuma,
along with other southern provinces, led the revolt against the moldering Tokugawa Shogunate that produced the Meiji Reformation. Satsuma had, in fact, colonized Okinawa in 1609, making it a vassal state, although the island remained “officially” independent until 1879—one reason its culture remains so distinctive—when it was officially annexed to Meiji Japan.

Two summers after that first rocky trip to mainland Japan, we returned to the U.S. (though not before docking in Tokyo Bay in the midst of the 1960 Anpo riots), but 1964 found us back in Okinawa.  The following summer my mother and I made a three-week trip to Kyushu, Honshu and Shikoku where we visited with family, friends, and an array of Japanese potters. Once again Kagoshima welcomed us and became the first stop on our pottery tour, where my mother hunted down the Korean potters whose ancestors had developed Satsuma-ware. The ryokan had been a one-time extravagance, so we stayed in a modern hotel with a large accommodating garden.

Although the shinkansen [bullet train] now ran between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kagoshima to Tokyo still required an overnight journey, but diesel engines had replaced the steam engines, and, sadly, plastic teapots had replaced the charming clay ones formerly sold on station platforms. (Progress, as we know, is a two-edged sword.) I had looked forward to this trip as keenly as the first one, but, at 17, I was old enough to relish every aspect of it. Mist rising from acres of rice paddies graced by egrets, wooden houses with sliding doors and tile roofs, blocks of traditional wood-framed storefronts with their goods out front for customers to see and living quarters—with a cup of green tea for special guests—behind the store—today these things are mostly relegated to movies, museums and theme parks, but they were my Japan. In Shikoku, emerald green rivers ran down the mountains alongside the road our bus travelled. In Tokyo I joined Hiroko, my father’s former secretary, at her local public bath, and far up in the mountains of Kyushu, we visited potters in Onda, where all day long pestles, fueled by water flowing off the mountains, pounded clay. Thrilling but tiring, our trip ended once more in Kagoshima, where our gracious hotel and our ship home to Okinawa awaited us.  

A year later I went to camp in Tokyo with my Girl Scout troop. We travelled TDY in an Army cargo plane, but when I stayed on after camp to visit Hiroko in Tokyo, I was back to using local transportation. I rode the shinkansen for the first time to visit friends in Kyoto, then, late one night, boarded the overnight train to Kagoshima. The next evening I met a family in the garden of the hotel where my mother and I had stayed the year before, and, seeing I was alone, they scooped me up the next morning and brought me to their home for tea and a visit before my boat departed. This would not be my last encounter with the warm hospitality of Kagoshima.

I returned to the United States, went to college, became an art historian, and spent many years in Europe. Finally, in my mid-30’s I reunited with my Asian past when I began to study the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. (Ironically, in Okinawa Hiroko had taken my father to see Ohayo, one of Ozu’s late films, and he had described the delightful comedy to me in some detail. When, many years later, I finally connected the film he had described, which for a long time was marketed in the U.S. under the title “Good Morning,” to my beloved director, I asked my father if he remembered it. Although his account of the film had imbedded itself in my mind all those many years before, he had no recollection of it at all!)

In 1991, I returned to Japan, having accepted a teaching job at a college near Nagoya. That summer, my husband and I travelled south, visiting friends and tourist destinations and managing to attend memorial ceremonies for the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Nagasaki, we headed, for nostalgia’s sake, to Kagoshima to catch the boat to Okinawa. No overnight sleeper this time, but our destination nevertheless required us to travel all day by bus, ferry, and train. The city had modernized, of course, but its rolling hills and comparative lack of congestion made a soothing contrast to the crowded cities of Honshu. I purchased my own Satsuma-ware, and rediscovered the hospitality I had enjoyed as a teenager when the young host at our minshuku [Japanese-style B&B] insisted on performing a tea ceremony for us.

We took the ferry to Sakurajima, but the majestic volcano seemed less benign than before. A thin layer of ash lay over the city and more thickly on the volcanic island itself. Several volcanoes near Nagasaki had erupted within the previous two years, and the ash around Kagoshima looked ominous.

Sakurajima’s largest eruption in modern times actually occurred in 1914. Thirty-five people on the island died and lava poured into the sea, creating the land bridge to the city of Kagoshima that exists today. The city itself was covered in a thick layer of ash but otherwise remained intact. Subsequently, the volcano lay quiet until 1955 when small eruptions began, hence the smoke I witnessed first in 1957. In 2009 the volcano spewed lava and ash more than a mile above its crater and exploded most recently on Feb. 5, 2016. No one was injured and Kagoshima-jin [people] considered the 2016 eruption “average.”

The threat posed by Sakurajima’s increased activity arises mainly from the fact that the Sendai nuclear plant in Satsumasendai, former capital of the Satsuma Domain, lies only 30 miles away. The first Sendai reactor was built in 1984, the second in 1985. (Japan’s first nuclear reactor was built in 1966.) After all of Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, Sendai was the first to re-open (2015). Why Japan builds reactors close to live volcanos or on tidal plains or builds them at all, given the likelihood of earthquakes, is a mystery beyond solving in this essay.

Mainly, Sakurajima’s 2016 eruption reminded me of a city dear to my heart, which, like so much of Japan, lives on the edge of disaster with calm and dignity and grace.

 

Sakurajima photographs by Steven Sternbach 

 

 

Father Comes Home

World War II left millions of children wounded, homeless, hungry, impoverished and often orphaned in defeated and victorious countries alike, as the V-mail below attests.  In the United States, the kids were, for the most part, all right, although the stress and dislocation of the war years left some homeless, as a youthful Maya Angelou discovers in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  But impoverished or not, universally, across the globe, children waited for their fathers to come home.

My sister Gretel was born within a fortnight of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and for most of her first four years my father was a soldier. 

He was discharged from the Army in the fall of 1945 after spending five months in London interrogating German POWs . He reunited with his tiny family at my grandmother’s house in Buffalo since the Army did not house dependents once soldiers were deployed overseas (which may explain why some kids ended up homeless).  Removing his officer’s hat, he threw it on the floor, emphatically declaring, “I’m done with the Army!”--at which point my sister burst into tears!  In her mind his Army uniform was as much a part of him as his mustache.

V-Mail from London, June, 1945, from my father to my sister, describing a little girl in ragged clothing, hoping for some chewing gum from American soldiers

Children’s parade on V.E. Day (May 8, 1945) in San Antonio, TX.  Gretel is pushing a baby carriage; the boy behind her rides a tricycle, and the child behind him carries a watering can; the boy in front carries the flag.

Introducing Mill Brook House and millbrookhousenews.com!

Kathe and Steve at home with Rocky, Pepper and over a dozen home-grown pumpkins!

Mill Brook House, vacation spot and part-time rental, is now our permanent home!  Nellie Fox, the fierce shiba inu, is no longer with us and neither is lovable Sandy, champion mouser, whom we acquired soon after Nellie’s passing.  Rocky, once half of the Sandy-Rocky show, continues to enjoy the great outdoors as does Pepper, our mini-Australian sheepdog.  In 2016, they were joined by baby Max, another yellow tabby.  (Sadly, Max left us prematurely, and we adopted baby Taz in 2023.)

Mill Brook House, first renovated (2004-2006) to accommodate vacationers, has, more recently, undergone renovations to make our permanent residence possible.  We have extended the loft over our attached, two-part garage, built a staircase to the attic and a large new closet on what was once a spacious landing, completed a new guest room with its own closet (a rare commodity in this house), constructed a massive bookcase in the living room where we once tucked a trundle bed, further improved the downstairs bathroom, ditched the 1920's kitchen sink, and turned the downstairs bedroom into a glorified pantry.  To the swimming-pool-turned-garden from 2004, we added a second garden when Hurricane Irene made re-landscaping necessary, and in 2015 we built a third garden dedicated to gladioli and vegetables.  We have also launched a daylily business (see millbrookhousedaylilies.com). 

Millbrookhousenews.com will continue to offer insights and information on Western Massachusetts, occasional film and relevant book reviews, our photographs of the area, including wildlife, landscapes, and landmarks, and personal essays.  Recipes have been spun off onto their own blog, millbrookhouserecipes.com.  For more of Steve's photographs, see sternbachphoto.com. We hope that you will enjoy all four blogs!  You can comment right on the blogs or email us at [email protected].  

Mill Brook House, summer 2013

 

Max the Cat

Max was like a delicate flower that faded too soon.  He had a water fetish and loved to drink from a running tap, from an unguarded cup or glass or even a watering can; he tracked kitty litter into the bathtub as he examined the droplets that gathered around the drain.  A mischief-maker, he chewed on paper documents and tipped over waste baskets to get attention.

He had a purr like the running engine of a Mac truck and engaged it incessantly, signaling hunger, affection, or pure joy.  He slept on our bed by my feet or cuddled up with companion Rocky for an afternoon snooze. Neither as athletic nor brave as Rocky, he was nevertheless unafraid of Pepper, our well-meaning but over-active mini-Aussie, whom Rocky loathes.  Max was the peace-maker and go-between.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet, petite, and beautiful, he stole our hearts and has not returned them.

"Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

 

 

Gertrude Erlich Sternbach 1922-2000

Gertrude Erlich was born in Rotterdam, New York, not long after her father, Sam Erlich, had immigrated from Poland, possibly at the behest of his sister Betsy and her husband Jake Coplon.  The Coplons settled in Schenectady in upstate New York, where they opened a successful children’s clothing store.  Sam, who immigrated with his second wife and three children from his first marriage, opened his own store in Rotterdam and fathered five more children, including Gertrude, but found the community unsatisfactory, due to either anti-Semitism or a lack of Jewish neighbors or both and relocated the family to Brooklyn.

Gertrude and Sam, 1927

He died soon after, and his widow relocated again, this time to the Jewish enclave in Manhattan’s lower East Side.  A teenager by now, Gertrude joined the Hebrew Educational Society (H.E.S. or the Edgies) where she began keeping company with Abe Sternbach, six years her senior.

His mother’s sole support and suffering from poor eyesight, Abe, a commercial artist, managed to stay out of World War II until 1944, when he was drafted and shipped to the Philippines to paint signs for the Army.  Gertrude met him upon his discharge in North Carolina and suggested it was high time they got married.  They settled in a basement apartment in the Bronx, and, in 1949, Steven, their only child, was born.

Like many couples after World War II and with the help of government-subsidized housing, the Sternbachs merged into the middle class.  They moved to Brooklyn; Abe continued working as a commercial artist, while Gertrude raised Steven and eventually worked part-time for the Brooklyn Public Library.

Gertrude and Steve, Greenwich Village Art Fair, 1954

She never lost touch with her Coplon relatives, and, once they acquired a car, the family made frequent trips to Schenectady.  Abe retired early, and the couple rediscovered the Edgies, joining a Brookline branch of H.E.S.

For Jews everywhere, but especially for those whose families had immigrated to America in the last decade before the U.S. slammed its borders shut in 1924, the grim news of the Holocaust evoked the specter of “there but for the grace of God, go I.”  For that generation, the founding of Israel came as a great triumph and a great relief.  In the late 1970s, Gertrude fulfilled a decades-old dream of visiting the Jewish state.

Gertrude at the New York World's Fair, 1940

 

    

Pyrex vs. Depression Glass

                                                Green Depression Glass (photograph: Steven Sternbach)

I first encountered the fashion for “vintage Pyrex” a decade ago when I discovered that the mother of a Japanese student I was tutoring shopped for it regularly in antique and second hand stores, intending to ship it back to Japan where it sold for a bundle.  Recently I came across an article citing pieces that sell for hundreds even thousands of dollars in this country.  I gag.  This pale milky glass kitchenware with insipid floral designs is the stuff your mother gave you when you got your first apartment.  It goes with olive stoves and yellow refrigerators.  Who wants to remember that unfortunate period of kitchen design?  A lot of people, apparently.

I am reminded of the first time I came across Depression glass in my late teens.  I was fascinated by the colors.  My mother sniffed, “Oh, Depression glass.”  People couldn’t afford quality glass in the 1930s, so manufacturers colored the glass to cover up its imperfections.  My mom didn’t find the Depression and its necessities any more nostalgic than I find the tastes of the 1970s.  Unlike Pyrex, you can’t apply heat to Depression glass, but I still treasure the large emerald green salt and pepper shakers, the pale green reamer and the four-cup measuring cup that I have acquired over the years from flea markets and antique stores, and I use all of them, careful never to put hot water in the measuring cup.  Nostalgia is clearly in the eyes of the nostalgic. 

 

   

Over the River and Through the Woods

Steven Sternbach, Holland Dell, Heath, MA* 

One of our most memorable Thanksgiving dinners took place over a decade ago in New York’s Essex Hotel on Central Park South, where we were guests of our Manhattan relatives.  But through the decades “Over the River and Through the Woods” has conditioned most of us to think of a country Thanksgiving as the ideal.  That song, with words by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, references the author’s early 19^th century childhood in Medford, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb and home to Tufts University.  The river in question is the Mystic, of book and movie fame.  (The first line of the poem is actually "Over the river and through the wood"--no 's'--but most of us sang "woods.")

    Just as the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960’s ushered in a host of liberation movements, the ferment over slavery gave rise to wide-ranging liberal views among reformers, who embraced feminism, environmentalism, vegetarianism, as well as educational and religious reform.  The first female American author to support herself by writing, Maria Child, as she preferred to be called, went beyond passionately advocating for the abolition of slavery, to calling for a just nation which respected Native American rights and condoned interracial marriage.  Who knew?

    Child’s original words to “Over the River,” have the children going to “Grandfather’s house,” whereas Steve and I are quite sure we learned it as “Grandmother’s house.”  Why the shift?  In the mid-20^th century, it seems we referenced everything old-fashioned as belonging to “grandma.”  The John Lennon wire-rimmed glasses, first popularized by the film Dr. Zhivago, were “granny glasses,” and the long, colorful skirts we wore as an alternative to the mini-skirt were “granny dresses.”  Somewhere along the line, grandpa dropped out of consciousness, perhaps because at mid-century grandmas were in far greater abundance than grandpas.  We were well into an era, unknown to Child, in which women lived considerably longer than men, and men had shorter lives than they do today.  Neither Steve nor I, for example, knew any of our four grandfathers, whereas all of our grandmothers survived to see us born, and three of them lived long enough to have influenced our lives.

    Since purchasing Mill Brook House, our every Thanksgiving is a country Thanksgiving, and, although we have no grandchildren to join us, we sometimes host members of Steve’s extended family.  Once an 11-year-old third cousin complained, “This house is stuck in the 19…”--we waited for him to say “19^th century,” but instead heard “1960’s!”  We laughed, not because there were no microwaves, VCRs, DVDs, or even reliable color televisions in the 1960’s--all of which exist at Mill Brook House--but because it had never occurred to us that the 1960’s were something to be stuck in.  But then Maria Child’s own progressive era was refashioned with the notion of quaintness, and her sentimental poem about Thanksgiving near the Mystic River became her best remembered legacy.

 

*Large format C-prints of this photograph are available from Steven Sternbach; please contact  [email protected].   

 

Abe Sternbach 1916-2002

In 2002, my father-in-law passed away after a short illness, leaving us the money with which we purchased Mill Brook House. None of our parents ever saw the house, but it’s no stretch to connect Abe to it. Without him, our life in Charlemont would not exist.  This is his centennial year.

Abe was the oldest son of first generation, Ellis Island, Lower East Side Jewish immigrants. His father, a house painter, died of lead poisoning in his 30’s, leaving Abe’s mother Sophie to raise six children alone. Sophie was a hell-raiser, who paid the rent by marching in demonstrations for the Communist Party, but life was hard and money scarce. As the oldest child, Abe had to step into his father’s shoes and help raise the younger children. Fortunately, both he and kid brother Izzy inherited a drawing and drafting ability, which provided both with a good living as commercial artists later in life.

Despite poor eyesight, Abe was drafted toward the end of World War II and served behind the lines as a sign painter. Deployed to the Philippines in 1945, he caught up with Izzy, who, ten years younger, was stationed there as an infantryman being readied for the invasion of Japan. (After its surrender, Izzy was among the first American troops to land on Japan's main islands.)

Demobilized, Abe returned to Lower Manhattan and married his sweetheart, Gertrude Erlich. Steve was born three years later and would remain their only child. Shortly after Steve’s birth, the couple moved to Brooklyn and never left, although they spent summers at a bungalow colony in the Catskills. (This was still the Borscht-Belt era in which Catskill summer resorts were either Jewish or not.)

A fabulous draftsman, Abe had a passion for painting and filled dozens of canvasses with pictures in oil, pastel, or acrylic, for which he crafted beautiful frames. He refused to consider selling them, hanging and storing the paintings throughout his home, where they created an overwhelming presence.

Abe’s was the archetypal turn-of-the-century immigrant story: child of a generation that sought and struggled to make a better life in a new land, he served in WWII, rose into the middle class buoyed by postwar prosperity, and lived to see anti-Semitic discrimination made illegal, an arc of success that seems more elusive today.

The Sternbach boys, Hymie, Izzy, and Abe, on the roof of their tenement, 1930's.

 

About Screen Doors

In a recent Christian Science Monitor Home Forum essay, Robert Klose recalled the joys and utility of wooden screen doors, which slammed happily all summer long, announcing arrivals and departures. I, too, remember the wooden screen doors of my childhood. There were several on my grandma’s cottage and one on our back door at home in Michigan, although at some point in my youth my parents replaced that one with an aluminum door, which seemed unstable and insubstantial compared to the old one.

At Mill Brook House we replaced that same chintzy aluminum door, now decades old, with today’s solid heavy-duty version, but upstairs—the floor which had never ever been renovated since, at best, the 1890’s—we have a beautiful old wooden screen door. When we bought a new weather-proof fiberglass door to replace the incredibly thin old door to our upstairs balcony, I refused to let the old screen door go, despite its not being entirely insect-proof. It slams with that wonderful bang Robert Klose finds so nostalgic. Our cat uses it to let himself on and off the balcony, and, being a cat, he bangs the door with considerable frequency as soon as I unhook it in the morning. My husband has dubbed him “the waiter.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                              

                                                                                  

The Ancestor

Painting by Ammi Phillips, c. 1820

In 1956 my father drove our comparatively new Ford from Michigan to Phoenicia, New York, a town in the Catskills known today for skiing and tubing, to retrieve furnishings stored in the attic of Grace Longyear, my mother’s first cousin once removed. Among these were a delicately painted knock-off of a Mary Gregory pitcher, a stoneware jug under whose glaze the name “William F. Van Netten Saugerties” was broadly scrawled in blue, a good deal of Eastlake period furniture, and a portrait of a handsome young man in 1820’s costume with red hair and a cowlick. The furniture was deposited in a friend’s colonial-era summer home in New Hampshire while the smaller objects and the portrait came back to Michigan with us.

Eight years old at the time, I loved Phoenica, whose Esopus Creek flowed behind our boarding house, and I delighted in our friends’ 1790’s home in the White Mountains, but I was less than impressed by the primitive ancestor portrait, which my mother hung proudly over our fireplace. To an eight-year-old, adults come in two categories, grown-up or elderly, so neither the man’s vibrant youth nor his good looks registered with me. Handsome was Tab Hunter, not this austere man with his haughty pose and black suit. The painting’s black frame together with the fact it had never been cleaned, despite years spent in the company of wood, oil, and candle smoke, made it downright gloomy. I named it “Jarvis,”* which seemed to capture the man’s antique austerity. My mother was mildly chargrined by my lack of respect for her ancestor, but both my father and sister took secret delight in my cheekiness, and the name stuck.                                              

My mother tended to make us all a little crazy with her "heirlooms."  Decades later I finally understood why people of my grandmother's era thought so highly of “heirlooms” (as opposed to simply “antiques”). Heirlooms separated that generation from the immigrants flooding into the country at the turn of the 20^th century. Heirlooms meant your family had been in America for a long time, had founded the country and its traditions.  My mother grew up under that tutelage, and, although I doubt she thought in exactly those terms, she was proud of her family, its colonial origins, and its heirlooms. The rest of us remained somewhere between bemused and skeptical, however.  My father was the son of those very immigrants my mother’s family wished to distinguish themselves from, and we children were Mid-Westerners with scant regard for coastal mores.  Hence: Jarvis.

Years passed, and Jarvis rotated in and out of his post above the fireplace as my mother acquired additional art she wanted to display there. My sister Gretel and I grew up, left home, and thought little about him until we came upon the painting stashed away in the front room closet when we cleaned out my mother’s house in 2000. Gretel, who still lived in Michigan, claimed it, had room to hang it and the money to have it cleaned and restored. With close to 200 years of dirt removed, the painting glowed, and fifty years gave me a different perspective on this handsome, rather sensuous young man with his flamboyant red hair. We both agreed that Jarvis was a dead ringer for our cousin Ted, my mother’s nephew, who had the same red hair, blue eyes and cowlick. The man was definitely an ancestor; no one had to convince us of that.

 

 

 

                                                                     Theodore Story, Jr. "Cousin Ted"

 

 

 

The art restorer who handled Jarvis judged the painting to be worth around $2000 but suggested it would have greater value if we could find out more of its history. For close to a decade we talked about taking Jarvis back to the Hudson Valley, but I was overwhelmed with work on our newly purchased Mill Brook House, and we kept putting off the research trip. Finally, in 2013, I agreed to go. Studying a genealogy chart Cousin Ted had given me, I determined that the painting had nothing to do with the Longyears, despite having been in Grace’s attic, and suggested we start in Saugerties, where our grandmother Isabel had grown up, a Hudson River town at the mouth of the same Esopus Creek that flows through Phoenicia. An amateur ancestry specialist in Saugerties guided us to the graves of our great-great grandparents on both sides of our grandmother’s family, the Cornwells and the Van Nattens, all born in the late 1820’s or 1830’s, none old enough to be Jarvis, who, judging by his costume, had been born c. 1800.                                                                                                                                                                          

Discovering who had painted Jarvis proved easier, however, than finding out who he was. Observing a photograph of the painting, the ancestry specialist suggested it might be by Ammi Phillips, a highly collectable Hudson Valley folk artist working at the turn of the 19^th century, who never signed his work. A curator at the Albany Institute of History and Art confirmed her suspicion, ushering us into the museum’s storage area and pulling out a panel hung with Ammi Phillips portraits for comparison. Even the frame and texture of the linen on which Jarvis was painted bore a striking resemblance to those in the Institute’s Ammi Phillips collection. A curator at New York’s American Folk Art Museum declined to authenticate the painting on the basis of a photograph but confirmed off the record that Jarvis was indeed by Ammi Phillips. Skinner, the Boston auction house, had no doubts about the authenticity and accepted the painting for its late summer Americana auction. Gretel drove Jarvis to Boston in June, and his face appeared on the cover of the Skinner catalogue. Steve and I attended the August event and watched him sell for over $30,000. The auctioneer gave me a big hug: my 15 minutes of fame.  I telephoned Gretel with the good news.                                                                                                            

Jarvis on the auction block

But who was Jarvis?  And how did he come to be in Grace Longyear’s attic?

The Longyears were related to my mother’s family by marriage, not by blood, so, given the resemblance to Cousin Ted, Jarvis could not have been a Longyear. Grace’s mother, Mary Cornwell, was my great-grandfather’s sister. It’s possible that Mary Cornwell owned the portrait and passed it down to Grace, but why would Grace have passed it on to my mother when she had children of her own who might have inherited it, and why would it have been stored with other things that had apparently belonged to my mother’s family?  

More likely the portrait had belonged to Grace’s uncle, my great-grandfather, and his wife, Ella Van Natten. Ella survived her husband by twelve years and, at some point in those twelve years, moved to Phoenicia, where she died. It’s not clear whether her own family, the Van Nattens, had relatives in Phoenicia, but her husband had two sisters, Mary and Jennie, living there, and letters indicate that both Ella and her daughter, my grandmother Isabel, spent considerable time in Phoenicia even before Ella’s husband, Theodore Cornwell, died.

Isabel May Cornwell, also a red-head, was popular with a lively group of friends who gathered in Phoenicia.

If people in that era were proud of their families’ long tenure in America, those of Dutch descent were especially proud. The Dutch East India Company had explored and settled the Hudson Valley before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth and controlled it until defeated by the English in 1664. Kingston and Saugerties were in the heart of those early Dutch settlements. Even in my own childhood, the significance of being a Van Natten or a descendant was a point of comment if not outright pride. For Ella, being a Van Natten was no doubt immensely important.

Ella’s mother Ervilla Scott, wife of William H. Van Natten, lived with Ella and Theodore Cornwell from 1907 until her death in 1918 and would have brought things she deemed precious along with her.  My guess is that when Ella moved to Phoenicia, she took as much of her family’s legacy with her as she still possessed. That included silver spoons inscribed with “Van Natten” and the “Van Netten” [sic] jug. The Jarvis portrait may well have been part of that same legacy. (The jug is inscribed with the name of Ella’s brother, William F. Van Natten, who pre-deceased her in 1914. He probably commissioned it for his business, though why the name was misspelled is as great a mystery as Jarvis’s identity.)

My mother with her grandmother, Ella Van Natten Cornwell, 1936

Quite likely, Ella knew Jarvis personally or at least knew who he was. Born c. 1800, he belonged to her grandfather’s generation. Ella’s father William H. Van Natten was born in 1832, so Jarvis could have been his father. He could as easily have fathered Ella’s mother Ervilla Scott, who was born in 1837, or Ella’s husband’s father Charles Edwin Cornwell, born 1829, or his wife Jane Williams, also born in 1832. Possibly he was an uncle rather than father to any of these four people. But that he was related to one of them seems certain.

    The Van Natten grave monument in Saugerties. This side bears the names of William H. and Ervilla.

Our failure to identify Jarvis is not the only unfortunate aspect of this otherwise happy story. A year after our trip to Saugerties, Gretel’s health began to fail, and she died in January 2015. The loss was devastating, but I was so very grateful that I had finally agreed to the Jarvis trip two years earlier. We could not know it would be our last trip together, but how appropriate that it connected us to our ancestors from our mother back to our great-great grandparents and to Jarvis himself, whoever he was.

                                                 

*The nickname we gave our painting is not to be confused with the painter John Wesley Jarvis, who lived and worked at approximately the same time as Ammi Phillips.

Good-bye, Fiestaware!

 

Observing my china cabinet, a friend who knew my mother once observed that I had inherited her love of dishes. It’s not as though I never met a dish I didn’t like, but I do like far too many. Sifting through all the dinnerware suddenly available to me at Mill Brook House, it seems sad to give up the “Monticello” Hall China—soft white with a rim of tiny flowers—bought for the house for $5 at a rummage sale and replace it with our elegant Dansk plates from the condo, and, as usual, I wonder how much of my mother’s formal Noritake—white edged with gold (and 12 of everything!)—I will ever use again.

This causes me to reminisce about my mother’s own journey through dishware. Until I was nine, we ate off Fiestaware. Introduced to the market in 1936, it was rapidly becoming outmoded in the course of the 1950’s. Then a miracle happened which would forever alter our lives and our dishes: my father, through Michigan State University, accepted a Defense Department contract to mentor and teach at the University of Ryukyus in Okinawa. Unlike most of the military personnel stationed there, my parents found the island and its culture—Japan’s fused onto an ancient local folk culture—immensely fascinating, so much so that they spent every weekend driving around the island, visiting small villages and combing the beautiful beaches. Because the island remained under American military occupation, it had Japanese goods, sold in local shops, but no Japanese industry or tourism, no hotels or large chain department stores, and only one highway (Highway 1, of course), which petered out somewhere beyond the large air base in Kadena, about 18 miles north of the capital city Naha.

Although the Army generously shipped household goods around the world for its soldiers and civilian employees, my mother was only too happy to leave her outmoded Fiestaware behind. Instead of replacing it with whatever the Post Exchange (PX) had on offer, however, my parents, charmed as they were by the local culture, bought mountains of cheap Japanese dishes, available throughout the island in dozens of small shops dedicated to selling all the varied dishes required for a Japanese meal. Among these were dinner-sized plates, presumably intended as serving dishes, which my mother adopted as our new dinnerware. The plates had a soft, blue-green glaze with cranes and pine, symbols of good fortune and longevity, placed asymmetrically to one side. The only problem? They were not flat, and American cuisine at the time still dwelt primarily in meat-and-potatoes-land. Whenever one tried to use a knife and fork, the food on the far side of the plate was inclined to springboard up and hit one in the face.

Nonetheless, my mother never went back to her Fiestaware, even after returning home to Michigan. We endured those Japanese plates until our next sojourn in Okinawa when she purchased a more suitably designed stoneware, which had recently come into fashion, at the PX. Her Noritake, too, was purchased there during this second tenure. The Fiestaware lived in the basement for many years, but by the time it came back into fashion in the 1980’s those original plates had disappeared, probably donated to a cache reserved for MSU’s foreign student families. But that’s okay. Athough it evokes fond memories, Fiestaware was never really my taste, either.  

 

Gretel Marie Geist Rutledge, 1941-2015

When I asked my father why, when he graduated with his Ph.D. in 1940, he didn’t immediately begin a job search, he answered, “Because I knew we were going to war.”  Apparently that same logic applied in reverse when it came to having a baby.   With war looming, their biological clocks ticking, and the optimism of youth, my parents had a baby.  Gretel Marie was born thirteen days after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

 
Daddy's girl

With the exception of my Uncle Walter and a few older cousins, I have known her longer than anyone living.

  Gretel and Kathe, March 1948

Because of the age difference, we didn’t play together much, except on holidays...

Christmas, 1951

...but with our parents, we explored the Far East...

Okinawa, 1960

...and the Far West together.

Yellowstone National Park, 1960 

After a few false starts, Gretel would pursue a successful career in college theater as a costume designer, marry the love of her life, Frank Rutledge, and have two beautiful children, Jenny and Weldon, both of whom are ensconced today in careers that they love, married, and starting families.

After years of watching her artwork disappear every time a theatrical production closed, Gretel took up printmaking, and, over time, explored other fine and applied arts.  Her prints were shown and sold in shows and galleries throughout Michigan.

 She visited us at Mill Brook House at least once a year, where she and Frank, who died in 2008, made many valuable contributions.  More than that she was our cheerleader, always happy to hear news of our adventures in Charlemont.  In what would be our last conversation, I told her about a bald eagle we had seen a few days before, perched in a tree along Route 2, not far from the house; her face lit up in that trademark smile we have known and loved for so long.

"Woman in the Wilderness," 2013