Saturday, February 13, 2010
On Beyond the Big Five...African game
Guinea fowl in a dead tree at Masai Mara
Zebra, of course,
Beautiful giraffes which are wonderful to watch running
Zebra, of course,
Beautiful giraffes which are wonderful to watch running
The Big Five...
Safaris are really like cruises where pampered tourists are carefully shepherded about by keepers -- called guides -- who give them a taste of the wild and then deliver them back to posh hotels for sumptuous meals served by attentive servants. It disturbs me that I actually like this.The comparison that safari organizers really want you to make, of course, is not to cruises but to 19th and early 20th century wild game hunts. The roads in national parks in eastern Africa are inordinately bumpy and crude; there is no Internet and I think things may be kept this way, at least in part, to better give the flavor of wild adventure. I am overly suspicious, but when our safari truck got mired in a middy trail and our guide had to call for help on his radio, I really had to wonder if it had been staged. This driver has been at the job for more than 20 years and he had only hours before been berating other drivers who didn't know enough to stay out of mud holes. Hmmm.
Lion at Masai Mara
The biggest conceit stolen from the old game hunts is the search to shoot the Big Five of Africa's beautiful animals. Of course, today, all shooting during safaris is by camera. During four days of safari this January, we bagged all five. I've never seen a leopard in the wild before and so, for me, that was the best.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
From the Family Album 1958-59
The highlight of the year was the parade through West Albany Village that began the Feast of the Immaculate Conception every July. We marched in communion dresses carrying gladiolas. I'm the fat kid in the fifth row.
That's my grandmother, Anna Stellato, in the polka dots. She lived two doors down from the IBS hall and worked there every Friday night making pizza. She was the daughter, wife, sister, and mother of members, but could not, of course, belong to the IBS herself.
Outside the hall the members ready to march, led by then president, my great-uncle Oscar Nenni.
My sister and I and all the other little girls enter St. Francis under a gate of flags for the final round around the pews to Ava Maria with our Aunt Mary in her finery watching over the line. We found all of this magnificent.
That's my grandmother, Anna Stellato, in the polka dots. She lived two doors down from the IBS hall and worked there every Friday night making pizza. She was the daughter, wife, sister, and mother of members, but could not, of course, belong to the IBS herself.
Outside the hall the members ready to march, led by then president, my great-uncle Oscar Nenni.
My sister and I and all the other little girls enter St. Francis under a gate of flags for the final round around the pews to Ava Maria with our Aunt Mary in her finery watching over the line. We found all of this magnificent.Friday, October 09, 2009
The West Albany Italian Benevolent Society
It hard now to find even the traces.
The village of West Albany is quiet, paved, just an aging lower-middle class neighborhood into between the highways and the once bustling Tobin First Prize Packing Plant crumbling into ruin on Exchange Street. The smell of hogs going to slaughter has faded, the uproar of train whistles, school bells, church bells and factory horns silenced. The railway shops, the stockyards, the hotel where men yelled over cards at night and the stores where kids got penny candy long gone.
This Italian immigrant ghetto once intimidated ‘Miticans – short for Americanos who were mostly Irish immigrants. It’s been transformed beyond what even those peasant settlers from Naples could have dreamed up while potted on eye-watering homemade wine – the West Albany Elementary School now a Hebrew Academy? St. Francis de Sales Catholic church a worship center for Koreans.
This month 360 members and guests gathered to celebrate the 100th anniversary of one West Albany institution that remains from the old days – the Italian Benevolent Society. IBS leaders also will serve as grand marshals of the Albany’s Columbus Day parade this weekend in honor of the group’s longevity and the role of Italian-Americans building the region. From 1909 the club, which is what we knew it as growing up, or the "Sooge," short for Societa, as our parents called it, was the hub of community social life as surely as spiritual life was grounded in St. Francis and work life in the railyard and Tobin’s.
You got married in St. Francis, had your reception in the IBS club across the street at which tipsy aunts and uncles were certain to dance the tarantella and after a honeymoon you put on a white coat and a hairnet and did your shifts at the packing plants. The kids sure to come soon after would cross the line into the territory of the Miticans to attend West Albany and you’d live in a little house with a big garden in the back on a curving dirt road in the village that shook with the reassuring regularity of the passing New York Central locomotives.
That was pretty much life for generations.
In some ways the IBS remains maddening unmodernized. Women still can’t belong except as kitchen workers who put out the best pizza in the area on Friday nights or as members of an auxiliary belatedly formed 20 years ago. Men whose fathers were not Italian and who, therefore, do not have Italian last names can’t belong at all. Anyone in search of a card game or a round of bocci can find it at the club still and when aged men who were once boys in the village die fellow members come to funerals en masse to salute them.
But the old barriers that kept the village and isolated – and united – don’t exist anymore than do the stockyards and railroads. It’s hard to even find photos of the bridge that ran over the shops and raillines, or the gardens or the trail of people who came out of Tobin’s at shift change times. Photos were rare and special. You posed in family groupings in your best clothes for them and who would pay for a photographer to shoot such everyday stuff as that? It sounds quaint now when my mother describes how Mitigans were afraid to push through the thongs of dark-skinned, dirty men who gesticulated on the corners and outside the stoops of West Albany. She was an adult before she realized how frightening the men she knew as cousins and neighbors must have seemed to outsiders. And the outsiders were not exactly wrong. Hotheaded card players brawled and growled insults with regularity the women joked about and there was scandal when a West Albanian shot the boarder he suspected of fooling around with his wife.
Fresh off the boats and still indentured for the long ride over from the mountains above Naples, Italian peasants flowed into West Albany at the turn of the last century. They worked for $1 a day in the shops and the slaughter house around heavy machines and equipment that could cost them a limb and their livelihood in a wink. Deaths, also common, left widows and children bereft. The immigrants had no insurance, no government aid, no employer benefits. Their dilemma foreshadowed today’s worries about health care for the poor and uninsured.
So 20 men, among them my great-grandfather Anthony Scaringe, all illiterate and unable to understand English came up with this solution: they each put in $1 a month and they formed a society to watch out for the families of workers hurt, killed or in trouble. In days when a doctor came to your house for about $2 that kitty made a huge difference.
The good deeds of the IBS are part of countless family legends in this area. How the members didn’t wait for someone to have to ask for help, they just offered. How they made sure families in a tight spot had food for their kids and how everyone got a proper Catholic burial.
In the early days before there was money for a hall, members met monthly in each other’s houses, their wives responsible for the pasta and wine served that night. That was the start of the group’s more social functions. Eventually the organization moved into the building at 50 Exchange Street where it is still housed which had a bar and a kitchen, because no Italian event would be complete without food and drink.
In mid July of 1924 the IBS staged its first celebration of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, enlisting the church, the businessmen and all the great Italian cooks in the village to show devotion to the mother of God. They put together a band of members and their children, lit the streets with lights and sold Italian ice and cookies in street stands. A statue of Mary was paraded through the village and residents ran to pin dollar bills to her dress. In her house on Richmond Street, my great-grandmother Rosemary Scaringe used to feed the electricians who strung up the streetlights for the Feast, which is what we called this event second only in grandeur to Christmas. My great uncle Paul led the bank rehearsals in the kitchen of his house on Exchange Street.
Through the ‘60s my sisters and I would don our stiff white First Communion dresses and veils, clutch a gladiola that the IBS supplied by the truckload and lined up behind the band with our grandmother for a march through the village that ended with a procession around the pews of St. Francis. The organist always played Ave Maria and the priests set off clouds of incense waving a a silver burner on a chain. There were two nights of games and treats behind the IBS and every friend and cousin we knew was there. We stayed up late to watch fireworks and no event since has ever surpassed the Feast in my mind.
My mother says we never really saw The Feast at its height, which we cannot believe because how could it have been more huge? But World War II killed it, she says. During those years you could not fly the Italian flag. Italian heritage was not something you wanted to advertise.
The end of the war brought more change to the village and to the IBS. Young men fresh from the service swelled the membership ranks and created a generation gap. Antonio Piombino, the first and only president stepped aside in 1945 and it fell to the second president, my grandfather Vito Stellato, to keep the group together.
Grandpa could speak Italian and English and he was an astute businessman. He’d come to New York at 18 with no money but a lot of good lucks and many relatives. He ran an ice business for years, until somehow sensing that this new-fangled refrigeration was going to change things, he sold out at a big profit about 1928. As IBS president he pushed the formation of a Bowling League and inaugurated the first annual clambake – which was almost as grand as the Feast.
The older generation did not fade away unobtrusively. At one point long past his prime Paba was stirring up a trouble and being loud in the middle of a meeting chaired by Uncle Paul – his son – who tried diplomatically to get him to stop, addressing him mildly as "Brother Scaringe," in the club’s fraternal style.
"Brother, my ass!" Paba roared back. This is a story that has been passed down in the family, no less.
As the railway wound down and the vast shops were plowed under to make way for Watervliet Extension, as Tobin’s phased out, as Melucci’s Hotel and Pacella’s store gave way to competitors, as the Italian section blended into the rest of the city, the IBS got rich and kept growing. My father joined, a succession of uncles and cousins too, though they all had insurance through jobs and Social Security too. Eight men in the club now have more than 60 years of membership.
It could be the pizza or bocci that keeps members so numerous and loyal – or it could just be the direct link to ancestors who didn’t leave us photos or letters or inheritances. "You know the sign outside the building?" Tony Biance asked at the anniversary celebration. Of course. Two hands shaking inside a circle pinned into the center of an American and Italian flag. "My dad and I hung that up 35 years ago," he said. Pat Biance, 92, smiled and nodded at the memory.
The village of West Albany is quiet, paved, just an aging lower-middle class neighborhood into between the highways and the once bustling Tobin First Prize Packing Plant crumbling into ruin on Exchange Street. The smell of hogs going to slaughter has faded, the uproar of train whistles, school bells, church bells and factory horns silenced. The railway shops, the stockyards, the hotel where men yelled over cards at night and the stores where kids got penny candy long gone.
This Italian immigrant ghetto once intimidated ‘Miticans – short for Americanos who were mostly Irish immigrants. It’s been transformed beyond what even those peasant settlers from Naples could have dreamed up while potted on eye-watering homemade wine – the West Albany Elementary School now a Hebrew Academy? St. Francis de Sales Catholic church a worship center for Koreans.
This month 360 members and guests gathered to celebrate the 100th anniversary of one West Albany institution that remains from the old days – the Italian Benevolent Society. IBS leaders also will serve as grand marshals of the Albany’s Columbus Day parade this weekend in honor of the group’s longevity and the role of Italian-Americans building the region. From 1909 the club, which is what we knew it as growing up, or the "Sooge," short for Societa, as our parents called it, was the hub of community social life as surely as spiritual life was grounded in St. Francis and work life in the railyard and Tobin’s.
You got married in St. Francis, had your reception in the IBS club across the street at which tipsy aunts and uncles were certain to dance the tarantella and after a honeymoon you put on a white coat and a hairnet and did your shifts at the packing plants. The kids sure to come soon after would cross the line into the territory of the Miticans to attend West Albany and you’d live in a little house with a big garden in the back on a curving dirt road in the village that shook with the reassuring regularity of the passing New York Central locomotives.
That was pretty much life for generations.
In some ways the IBS remains maddening unmodernized. Women still can’t belong except as kitchen workers who put out the best pizza in the area on Friday nights or as members of an auxiliary belatedly formed 20 years ago. Men whose fathers were not Italian and who, therefore, do not have Italian last names can’t belong at all. Anyone in search of a card game or a round of bocci can find it at the club still and when aged men who were once boys in the village die fellow members come to funerals en masse to salute them.
But the old barriers that kept the village and isolated – and united – don’t exist anymore than do the stockyards and railroads. It’s hard to even find photos of the bridge that ran over the shops and raillines, or the gardens or the trail of people who came out of Tobin’s at shift change times. Photos were rare and special. You posed in family groupings in your best clothes for them and who would pay for a photographer to shoot such everyday stuff as that? It sounds quaint now when my mother describes how Mitigans were afraid to push through the thongs of dark-skinned, dirty men who gesticulated on the corners and outside the stoops of West Albany. She was an adult before she realized how frightening the men she knew as cousins and neighbors must have seemed to outsiders. And the outsiders were not exactly wrong. Hotheaded card players brawled and growled insults with regularity the women joked about and there was scandal when a West Albanian shot the boarder he suspected of fooling around with his wife.
Fresh off the boats and still indentured for the long ride over from the mountains above Naples, Italian peasants flowed into West Albany at the turn of the last century. They worked for $1 a day in the shops and the slaughter house around heavy machines and equipment that could cost them a limb and their livelihood in a wink. Deaths, also common, left widows and children bereft. The immigrants had no insurance, no government aid, no employer benefits. Their dilemma foreshadowed today’s worries about health care for the poor and uninsured.
So 20 men, among them my great-grandfather Anthony Scaringe, all illiterate and unable to understand English came up with this solution: they each put in $1 a month and they formed a society to watch out for the families of workers hurt, killed or in trouble. In days when a doctor came to your house for about $2 that kitty made a huge difference.
The good deeds of the IBS are part of countless family legends in this area. How the members didn’t wait for someone to have to ask for help, they just offered. How they made sure families in a tight spot had food for their kids and how everyone got a proper Catholic burial.
In the early days before there was money for a hall, members met monthly in each other’s houses, their wives responsible for the pasta and wine served that night. That was the start of the group’s more social functions. Eventually the organization moved into the building at 50 Exchange Street where it is still housed which had a bar and a kitchen, because no Italian event would be complete without food and drink.
In mid July of 1924 the IBS staged its first celebration of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, enlisting the church, the businessmen and all the great Italian cooks in the village to show devotion to the mother of God. They put together a band of members and their children, lit the streets with lights and sold Italian ice and cookies in street stands. A statue of Mary was paraded through the village and residents ran to pin dollar bills to her dress. In her house on Richmond Street, my great-grandmother Rosemary Scaringe used to feed the electricians who strung up the streetlights for the Feast, which is what we called this event second only in grandeur to Christmas. My great uncle Paul led the bank rehearsals in the kitchen of his house on Exchange Street.
Through the ‘60s my sisters and I would don our stiff white First Communion dresses and veils, clutch a gladiola that the IBS supplied by the truckload and lined up behind the band with our grandmother for a march through the village that ended with a procession around the pews of St. Francis. The organist always played Ave Maria and the priests set off clouds of incense waving a a silver burner on a chain. There were two nights of games and treats behind the IBS and every friend and cousin we knew was there. We stayed up late to watch fireworks and no event since has ever surpassed the Feast in my mind.
My mother says we never really saw The Feast at its height, which we cannot believe because how could it have been more huge? But World War II killed it, she says. During those years you could not fly the Italian flag. Italian heritage was not something you wanted to advertise.
The end of the war brought more change to the village and to the IBS. Young men fresh from the service swelled the membership ranks and created a generation gap. Antonio Piombino, the first and only president stepped aside in 1945 and it fell to the second president, my grandfather Vito Stellato, to keep the group together.
Grandpa could speak Italian and English and he was an astute businessman. He’d come to New York at 18 with no money but a lot of good lucks and many relatives. He ran an ice business for years, until somehow sensing that this new-fangled refrigeration was going to change things, he sold out at a big profit about 1928. As IBS president he pushed the formation of a Bowling League and inaugurated the first annual clambake – which was almost as grand as the Feast.
The older generation did not fade away unobtrusively. At one point long past his prime Paba was stirring up a trouble and being loud in the middle of a meeting chaired by Uncle Paul – his son – who tried diplomatically to get him to stop, addressing him mildly as "Brother Scaringe," in the club’s fraternal style.
"Brother, my ass!" Paba roared back. This is a story that has been passed down in the family, no less.
As the railway wound down and the vast shops were plowed under to make way for Watervliet Extension, as Tobin’s phased out, as Melucci’s Hotel and Pacella’s store gave way to competitors, as the Italian section blended into the rest of the city, the IBS got rich and kept growing. My father joined, a succession of uncles and cousins too, though they all had insurance through jobs and Social Security too. Eight men in the club now have more than 60 years of membership.
It could be the pizza or bocci that keeps members so numerous and loyal – or it could just be the direct link to ancestors who didn’t leave us photos or letters or inheritances. "You know the sign outside the building?" Tony Biance asked at the anniversary celebration. Of course. Two hands shaking inside a circle pinned into the center of an American and Italian flag. "My dad and I hung that up 35 years ago," he said. Pat Biance, 92, smiled and nodded at the memory.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Natalie Merchant shakes it up in Colonie
In the 1770s, the Shakers built a settlement in Albany County that turned the area during the 19th Century into a major tourist attraction. People came from all over to the Shaker meeting house for the music and dancing shows cult members put on, hoping to lure new recruits. Proselytizing was difficult since the major tenets of the group appear to have been celibacy, uncomfortable furniture and lush gardens. All of that is remarkably preserved at the Shaker site out by the airport. The wooden meeting hall with giant 36-pane windows and a floor that works like a drum when dancers or fiddlers stomp on it. Efforts are underway to restore the site and turn it into an entertainment and conference center and singer Natalie Merchant whom I've always loved gave two benefit concerts Sunday. Sister Lisa went to the morning show and I got the evening show, so the Armaos, devotees of all that is the opposite of Shakerdom, are now major contributors to preserving their memory.
Merchant sings poet songs and old folk melodies that could not have fit better into this locale. She said she wanted to perform in this unusual room with acoustics so precise that audience members shifting on the uncomfortable wooden benches or dropping a program made a racket and she used the room well, dancing and strolling up aisles and around the bleachers with guitar, fiddle and banjo player in tow. But she also had to contend with the lack of air conditioning that must have been her want to melt inside a long-sleeved belted dress, boots and a veil of heavy black hair. And brag about acoustics as you want, when she sang at one end of the hall, those at the other could make out few words. A mike might have been nice. Also there are no lights so that by the end of the second show she appeared as little more than a melodic smudge to people sitting in the back of the room. She allowed photos with no flash, but that was the same as not allowing them (see above)
But complaints are out of order. This was a warm, intimate and really special concert.
The Times-Union did a nice writeup and got better photos: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=846845
I violated many of the human rights principles I say I believe in during a stop in Newport, RI.
Rod and Kelly had a few days off from work in Newport, RI, which is less than 3 1/2 hours from Albany due to the weird geography of the northeast US. So I drove over to spend a day with them.
They work aboard a 120-foot yacht owned by a wealthy couple and I am at pains here not to reveal their identity or the name of the vessel since that would be a serious breach of confidentiality. This, however, appears to be the only principle I have upheld this weekend while getting a taste of this rarified, rich lifestyle.
Do you know how much gasoline a 120-foot yacht consumes while cruising around the islands off the coast of NE for fun? Do you know how much "black water" or dunnage -- there're some new words I encountered -- it throws off into the cold waters of the Atlantic? Kelly said a guest on the yacht approached her with an empty water bottle recently and requested the plastic be recycled. Kelly had to laugh at the uselessness of that sweet gesture.Or get this: a lobster dinner at sea for a party of eight? There's $1,000 for an evening. Pop-up TVs, chandeliers, 800-count ironed sheets, marble flooring, all on a vessel used a few weeks at most a year.
No, I don't think that even if it were suddenly possible to do so that I could get used to that kind of luxury. My yacht would end up hauling refugees out of some Third World hellhole, I suspect. I kept thinking: People are starving in Africa.
OK, well honestly I managed to suppress the guilt enough to enjoy a ride across the harbor in the tender and espresso martinis on the patio (under heaters) of sumptuous Castle Hill overlooking the water.
They work aboard a 120-foot yacht owned by a wealthy couple and I am at pains here not to reveal their identity or the name of the vessel since that would be a serious breach of confidentiality. This, however, appears to be the only principle I have upheld this weekend while getting a taste of this rarified, rich lifestyle.
Do you know how much gasoline a 120-foot yacht consumes while cruising around the islands off the coast of NE for fun? Do you know how much "black water" or dunnage -- there're some new words I encountered -- it throws off into the cold waters of the Atlantic? Kelly said a guest on the yacht approached her with an empty water bottle recently and requested the plastic be recycled. Kelly had to laugh at the uselessness of that sweet gesture.Or get this: a lobster dinner at sea for a party of eight? There's $1,000 for an evening. Pop-up TVs, chandeliers, 800-count ironed sheets, marble flooring, all on a vessel used a few weeks at most a year.
No, I don't think that even if it were suddenly possible to do so that I could get used to that kind of luxury. My yacht would end up hauling refugees out of some Third World hellhole, I suspect. I kept thinking: People are starving in Africa.
OK, well honestly I managed to suppress the guilt enough to enjoy a ride across the harbor in the tender and espresso martinis on the patio (under heaters) of sumptuous Castle Hill overlooking the water.
This is an arty shot of a magazine rack and rug for sale in a vintage shop we visited in Newport.
Smiling about the weather or the best New England clam chowder in the world at the Black Pearl.
Tooling around the harbor in the ship's tender on errands, but really sight-seeing.
And here are the harbor sights to be seen on a sunny fall day in Newport.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
George Will is not optimistic about Bosnia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091802145.html
My campus -- SUNY at Albany
The 40-year-old campus in Albany is not your stereotypical US college campus. No ivy-covered walls and picturesque statues here. Edward Durrell Stone designed a modernistic college for then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller that is remarkably similar to designs he did for the US embassy in India and the Pakistani nuclear power institute. The Mogul style arches and multiple domes led to rumors that he'd actually used a design intended for an Arizona desert. Hailed as an architectural wonder, Stone's campus was not universally admired either back in the 1960s when it was new or now. His long walkways turn into wind tunnels during Albany's long, cold winters and Stone didn't really like cars messing up his design, so parking is too far away and inadequate in the mind of many faculty and students. Then there is the whole issue of an architectural wonder being maintained by a state government perpetually short of funds. Sticking doors, leaks and crumbling concrete keep maintenance crews constantly busy. Still, it's home.
How many lobsters do you think you'd have to eat before you got sick of them?
Above see the Clam Lady who just shucked clams for us all day -- not fast enough, we kept telling her! Sister Lisa carries away her lobster dinner and her co-workers above stand over the day-long dice game that goes so well with seafood.
The annual Seafood Fest at the Polish American Community Center in Albany is a place to test that question. For $60 you get all the raw clams, oysters, chowder, shrimp, steamed claims, mussels, scallops wrapped in bacon and beer/soda and wine you can drink. Then they give you this giant lobster with clams casino, crab, sweet potato casserole and stuffed mushrooms. I think I might actually be sick of butter after this repast. One question? What's seafood got to do with Poland? I understand the Baltic Sea touches a small portion of the country, but shouldn't this be a job for the Italian Benevolent Society in town?
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Remaining by popular demand
Doesn't anything interesting happen to you when you are not here? a Bosnian friend asked.
I never thought of that before. Now I will. I'm not completely shutting down the blog this fall. We'll see if anything happens worth blogging about. And if you keep on reading.
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