Category Archives: personal reminiscences of Roger W. Smith

Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays.

One great thing about it is that it comes on a Thursday and that normally means a four day weekend for all, with time to travel to and join families.

Another thing I like is that there are no gifts associated with it, and little commercial hoopla.

 

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In New England, where I grew up, Thanksgiving was done right. It was a truly memorable and wonderful day. My family really knew how to celebrate it.

There was an appropriate sense of solemnity about the day — not so much anything piously enforced — just because people cherished the day and knew how to observe it.

It came at the end of fall (a gorgeous season in New England), when the air was crisp and the trees had become bare.

 

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From when I was about twelve years old, we lived in the suburbs. Schools always had a half day on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (which, as far as I know, is not observed by schools elsewhere in the USA).

On Wednesday night, there would be a bonfire and rally for the Thanksgiving Day football game. High school Thanksgiving football games were a big deal in Massachusetts.

Our high school team in Canton, Massachusetts had some memorable games against our hated arch rivals, Stoughton.

I will never forget the 1959 game, which we won 18-8 in a stunning upset. (The Stoughton team had been nearly undefeated up to that point.) I remember that game and the excitement of the buildup to it vividly. It was one of the most memorable sports events I ever witnessed.

 

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Thanksgiving for us always meant a family gathering, at our home or grandparents’. We always had a big sit down dinner with invited guests: mostly relatives; sometimes a friend or acquaintance who was away from home. My parents liked to reach out to others and include people at the dinner table whom they thought would be interesting company. While the family aspect was important, they were “catholic” — broad minded — when it came to invitees. Before we moved from Cambridge to Canton, my parents rented rooms to Harvard graduate students. They would occasionally invite foreign ones to share holiday dinners with us. They liked to invite people who would appreciate being included and had nowhere else to go. They did something similar with my mother’s aunt Etta, an unmarried relative whom they always made sure to invite.

 

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The dinner was truly marvelous. A whole day was spent, it seemed, preparing it (well, all morning), and it took a long time for a team of volunteer dishwashers to do the dishes. (I was never drafted for this duty.) Establishing when the turkey was done was a source of great concern.

My mother would put it in the oven very early in the morning; she would get up especially to do so. It was huge. It had to be done just right, of course, and it always was. My father always carved. I used to think that carving was a great skill, one that I would never learn or possess.

My mother was the main cook, but others contributed. My father used to make scalloped oysters, a side dish he loved and would labor over with enthusiasm. Guests would invariably bring more stuff, mostly pies; we always had about five or six pies to choose from, always homemade.

The number of side dishes was truly outstanding: stuffing, gravy, mashed and sweet potatoes, squash, all sorts of vegetables (including Brussels sprouts and cranberries, neither of which I particularly cared for), and rolls.  Plus, cider and wine and a variety of nuts for appetizers. The turkey was enormous. The amount of effort lavished on the meal was prodigious. Eating it was sheer pleasure.

In the evening, we would have a light snack from a platter of cold turkey.  The next day, my mother would make turkey soup, which seemed to take her forever. The turkey soup would last for several days. I couldn’t get enough of it, it was so nourishing. I would come home from school and ask my mother what was for dinner. “Turkey soup” was the answer. My mother would ask, “Would you like another bowl?” The answer was always yes.

A truly American holiday. Begun in New England and, originally, celebrated only there.

It makes me miss my parents.

 

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Postscript

When I was in my twenties, I was working in a hospital in Connecticut and could not get home for Thanksgiving one year. I went with four or five other hospital workers to a restaurant where we had a Thanksgiving dinner. We tried to be festive, but it was a big letdown.

Not long ago, my wife and I decided to do as a Polish family whom she knew was doing and order a turkey cooked for us by a Polish catering service. It was rather expensive. But, we didn’t feel in the mood for cooking and it seemed like a good idea.

The turkey that we got was inexcusably flavored with garlic that had been rubbed into it everywhere — it was cooked totally wrong. I was so angry over this, I couldn’t eat the turkey, which helped to ruin my Thanksgiving. I thought to myself, they can’t even get a turkey right! All you have to do is put it the oven and baste it a few times.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   November 24, 2016

 

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Addendum:

Re the time of year, I can’t help thinking of the following famous lines of Shakespeare:

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold;
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

—  Sonnet 73

 

Alan W. and Elinor Smith with granddaughter

My parents, Alan W. and Elinor Handy Smith, with granddaughter Alison.

business school anecdote

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This little story is from when I was a graduate student at the New York University School of Business.

In one of the required, non-technical courses, we had to break up into groups, do a project, and then produce a report.

Quite a few of the students were business people getting their MBA’s.

A couple of the students in our group seemed to look down on me, perhaps because I wasn’t (as has always been the case) a good dresser and I wasn’t what one would call prepossessing.

We came up with a report, but it had to be wordsmithed for submission. I said I would do it. I can’t remember whether I was drafted or volunteered.

There was an overbearing, nattily dressed guy in the group, one of the business people pursuing an MBA. We had had no prior relationship, but it was apparent that he didn’t think well of me or trust me.

He kept saying: the report is due next week (next class). Do you understand that? Are you sure you’re going to do it in time for the next class?

I said yeah, yeah.

I wrote the report; it was ready the next week and was duly turned in. Nobody in our group said anything one way or the other.

At the next class on the following week, the report was returned back to us, graded. Our group got the best grade, an A+.

The professor wrote on the front page: “This reads exactly like a professional consultant’s report.”

I hadn’t spent that much time on it.

 

— Roger W. Smith

Roger W. Smith, ‘tribute to Ralph Colp, Jr., MD”

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“Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man. …” — George Eliot, Middlemarch

 

Tribute to Dr. Colp

downloadable Word document above

 

email from Ruth Colp-Haber

October 18, 2008

Dear Mr. Smith,

Thank you so much for your email.  I have read it now five times. I gave it to my husband and we were all moved to tears.  It was incredibly brilliant and moving.  Such keen insight which captured so much of Ralph’s essence, he would have loved this.

I was wondering if it would be all right with you for us to hand this out at the funeral?  It is a truly wonderful work.

 

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In October 2008, I wrote a memorial tribute to Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., with whom I had a longtime doctor-patient relationship.

Dr. Colp’s oldest daughter arranged to have the tribute distributed at his memorial service at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. I attended the service.

What follows is my tribute from then – originally in the form of an email — which I have edited and amplified slightly.

 

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Dear Ms. Colp,

I feel encouraged by your warm response to my email to discuss my relationship with your father, whom I miss greatly, and my thoughts about him.

I started therapy with Dr. Colp, as I always addressed him, in the mid-1970’s when he was on the staff of Columbia University Health Services. I was employed as an administrative assistant in the dean’s office at Columbia then.

We had almost instant rapport and after a few sessions at Columbia, Dr. Colp said he thought he could help me and suggested that I see him privately. The doctor-patient relationship continued, more or less uninterrupted, for over 30 years.

The relationship ended abruptly a few months ago when I got a call from your mother informing me that Dr. Colp would be unavailable to see me at the usual Monday morning time (6:20 a.m.; Dr. Colp was an early riser).

I did not know that Dr. Colp was ill, which seems incredible to me now; he had never told me. I have gleaned some information about his illness by email correspondence with one Darwin scholar whom I contacted and from your mother in a follow up call.

I can hardly think of an illness or death that has affected me so profoundly, with the exception of the death of my mother just prior to my beginning therapy with Dr. Colp.

One of the first things that struck me about Dr. Colp when I met him around 33 years ago was his gaze, which was both gently inquisitive and, at the same time, penetrating. He was intensely curious about people. You sensed that he felt it was a special privilege to have the opportunity to have people tell him about themselves. I also sensed in him another quality which immediately made me like and trust him: a self-deprecating or humble nature, which few doctors seem to exhibit.

Dr. Colp became a surrogate father to me. He was the good father and role model I never had. He was one of the most sincerely empathetic persons you can imagine, yet he never lost his professional bearing or acted inappropriately. How he could have been so effective and professional as a medical specialist and yet at the same time not lose the human touch is something I marveled at. He never seemed jaded or to be going through the motions.

Dr. Colp was one of the warmest, most insightful, most intelligent people I have ever met. He also was a hero to me in his professional capacity.

I have not mentioned my esteem for Dr. Colp the intellectual. He told me that intellectual stimulation, the life of the mind, was for him “like breathing.” He was one of the most well read and intelligent people I ever knew.

His comments during our sessions showed me his depth as a thinker and person. Where did he get the knowledge he had? He knew so much that I either hazily or imperfectly knew or learned entirely from him: that the letters of John Keats were among the greatest in English literature, for example; that not even Flaubert could match Tolstoy as a novelist; that Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist and historical philosopher, whom I admired, was a “quixotic figure”; that the novelist Theodore Dreiser was a clumsy stylist. He told me that the writings of John Dewey were invariably dull and boring. These and many other things I heard from his lips when some current literary or intellectual enthusiasm was broached by me.

I say this while recollecting that he once told that were huge gaps in his knowledge. When he was not knowledgeable about something — such as the work of Djuna Barnes, an avant-garde writer of the 1920’s and 30’s I was telling him about — he would readily confess his ignorance. But he often had bits of knowledge to offer that came from wide reading and culture, such as when he provided me with an obscure and extremely useful (for academic work I was doing) reference to the writings of James T. Farrell, the novelist, whom Dr. Colp had treated as a patient during his pre-psychiatry career as a surgeon.

I similarly benefited from his occasional recommendations of books and of films he had seen, but he did not make such recommendations lightly. He only made them when he thought it was something that I in particular would appreciate or benefit from, e.g., a film or a book. (I recall a book on Stalin, for example, and a film set in Paris that he thought I would like because I had traveled or was about to travel there.)

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of history, which he said was his “first love.”

As Dr. Colp stated in an interview, he had “two identities: one as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist and another as a Darwin scholar.” This was indeed true. He was totally devoted to his work and his scholarship. Yet, in another interview, I read a comment of his that, like his hero and role model, Charles Darwin, he alternated moments of intense work and concentration with periods of relaxation and enjoyment.

I only observed him in the former state.

Dr. Colp was once affectionately described by my then boss, a dean at Columbia (who did not know I was Dr. Colp’s patient), as “looking something like a stork.” He was tall for his generation. He had a distinctive, somewhat high pitched, reassuring voice that I grew to love. He spoke — probably as a result of his training in psychiatry — about as carefully and deliberately as anyone I have ever known, with the result that he hardly ever said anything I could or would find fault with. I listened very carefully to him and treasured what he had to say.

He was in many respects a grave and serious person whose devotion to work and duty was outstanding. Yet he had an amiability about him and a capacity for humor, too. One of the first recollections I have of him is his laughing because the pen handed to him by a secretary to write in an appointment book with would not work. He always seemed to be bedeviled by the vagaries of ballpoint pens. He once described himself as being a Victorian in many respects — this was certainly true of his never having adopted innovations of the computer age; persisting in the use of his beloved manual typewriter; being averse to faxing; and calling Xeroxes “Xerex” copies.

Dr. Colp was careful to keep his personal and family life private from me, but he once said something more or less spontaneously about his younger daughter which I will repeat for what it is worth. He said with evident feeling that “she cares about everything,” proceeding thereupon to list what some of these things were (people, animals, social causes, for example). I think this remark applies equally to Dr. Colp. I have read his two books and many of his articles about Darwin, which bristle with appreciation for the man and curiosity about the minutest details of his life.

Charles Darwin was, obviously, a role model for Dr. Colp, and it is easy to see why, because Dr. Colp embodied so many of the same virtues. (You can see the same sort of understanding and compassion, balanced with a welcome lack of tendentiousness, in articles about Sacco and Vanzetti that Dr. Colp wrote for The Nation in 1958.)

Dr. Colp was an idealist in many respects, in his devotion to his work and to truth, for example, yet he was somewhat of a practical man, a scientist — no, physician is the right term — too. I saw this in the sound, clear-headed judgments he made. He would not, for example, fall for glib self-assessments by me of my own potential and prospects when such self-assessments had no solid foundation.

Yet, he could be warm and supportive.  I was once telling him about my older son Henry’s writing skills, which he seemed to be born with, and how his elementary school teachers effusively praised his writing. “Well, he’s your son,” Dr. Colp said.

Dr. Colp would occasionally tell me things about his childhood, such as about his dog Waggy (named after Mayor Wagner), who died when Dr. Colp was a teenager; he said he was devastated by the dog’s death. About dining at the Oyster Bar with his father, who always stressed the importance of leaving a tip of something like 50 cents. (Noblesse oblige is how Dr. Colp termed it with his characteristic gentle irony.)

Seeing the Disney film Dumbo in the 1940’s with his father. Attending with his younger daughter a marathon reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses at Symphony Space in Manhattan, where, according to Dr. Colp, an Irish narrator reading from a chapter in Ulysses “brought the house down.” The relish with which Dr. Colp told the story reflected both his zest for the event and — I am certain also — the pleasure of attending it with his daughter.

Ralph Colp, Jr. was a Victorian, Darwinian figure, with a broad range of interests and sympathies. He was a representative of the old prewar or perhaps immediate postwar New York described by writers like Joseph Mitchell which is now long gone, and he represents a generation and a type of doctor and psychiatrist whom I do not think will be seen again.

He was a wonderful person.

I feel his loss so keenly — the loss of Dr. Colp as a person, that is. He had already accomplished, both by example and by his medical skills, most of what he could for me as a therapist.

 

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A few more facts about Ralph Colp, Jr.

He was born on October 12, 1924 in, and grew up in, New York City. He was the son of a prominent surgeon.

He received his MD from Columbia in 1948 and was an active surgeon for five years before becoming a Diplomate, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (Psychiatry) in 1965. He became an accomplished intellectual, psychiatrist, psychohistorian, and psychotherapist.

He spent ten years in psychoanalysis with Max Schur, who was Freud’s last physician.

He served as attending psychiatrist at Columbia University Health Services until 1993, was a senior associate in the Program of Human Sexuality and Sex Therapy at the New York University Medical Center, and was a member of the Psychohistory Forum.

He was the author of two books: To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (1977) and Darwin’s Illness (2008).

He published over 100 articles and book reviews on Darwin, William Halsted, medical history, Russian revolutionaries, and many other subjects.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  February 2016

 

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Attached below are several articles by and about Dr. Colp.

Ralph Colp, Jr., ‘Living with Charles Darwin

Paul H. Elowitz, ‘Ralph Colp and Charles Darwin’ – Clio’s Psyche, Sept 2002

Richard Milner, ‘Darwin’s Shrink’ – Natural History, Nov 2005

Ralph Colp, Jr., ‘Charles Darwin; Slavery and the American Civil War’

tributes to Ralph Colp, Jr. – Clio’s Psyche, Dec 2008

James Moore, ‘Eloge; Ralph Colp’ – Isis, Sept 2010

Ralph Colp Jr, ‘Remembering Max Schur’ – American J Psychiatry

‘Sacco’s Struggle for Sanity’ – The Nation 8-16-1958

‘Bitter Christmas’ – The Nation 12-27-1958 FINAL

Rslph Colp, Jr., ‘Psychiatry and the Creative Process’

 

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See also:

“A Jew without a burial site”

by Judith Colp Rubin

The Times of Israel

August 30, 2018

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-jew-without-a-burial-site/

“My Dogs Growing Up”

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me with our Irish setter Rob, eighth grade

My first dog was Sugar, a mongrel, in fifth grade. We had a problem because Sugar was chasing and biting college students on bikes, so my parents took the dog back to the pound. I was very upset. This was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Then we briefly had another dog, Cougar, which could not be housebroken. So we had to get rid of Cougar.

Then we got a wonderful dog, Missy, a shepherd collie, when we were still living in Cambridge. We moved to the suburb of Canton, Massachusetts and Missy had puppies. My mother assisted with the delivery! The puppies were adorable.

Missy died in 1959 when I was in the seventh grade, shortly after we moved to Canton.

This devastated me. My father picked me up at the Eliot School. We were on double sessions then because of overcrowding of the schools, and we got out of school at something like 12:30. The first thing I said was “How’s Missy? When is she coming home?” He said, “She’s never coming home.”

I cried all the way home. For the next few days, I was in pain. I would go outside on the back porch, forget momentarily that Missy was dead, and expect to see her, then would remember.

It was a sudden death on the operating table of the vet, who was very sorry about what happened. Missy had had to have an unexpected operation involving a “female” problem arising post-pregnancy.

Right after, we got Robbie, a pedigreed Irish setter. I still have the pedigree. The price was $75, expensive back then.

Robbie died in the mid to late Sixties. Then we got Bambi, a great dog, loyal and smart. Bambi got hit by a car once on Chapman Street in Canton, but recovered. Bambi used to follow me all around the house and was totally devoted to me, as was I to her.

My parents both liked dogs and pets in general and were good with them.

My father taught Robbie, our big Irish setter, things like not to go onto the living room carpet. Usually, Robbie obeyed. Robbie would creep up to the entrance of the living room at the edge of the dining room and would lie there with his paws outstretched almost touching the living room carpet.

My father conducted choir practice at our house every Thursday night. During one choir practice, Robbie snuck into the living room. He used to like to stand up on his hindquarters and put his paws around my father’s neck. He did something of that sort. Whereupon my father said in a firm, loud voice, “Robbie, sit down!”

One of the choir members was Bob Fish, whose other nickname was Robbie. He was startled because he thought my father was talking to him.

 

— Roger W. Smith

    January 2016

 

Robbie, Smith family dog, Canton, MA
Robbie, Smith family dog, Canton, MA
my sister with Missy, Mellen St., Cambridge, MA, August 1958
my sister with Robbie, Canton, MA
Bambi, Grey Gables, Bourne, MA
Bambi, Canton, MA
Missy, Canton, MA, 1959
Missy, Mellen St., Cambridge, MA, July 1958
“Knucklehead,” one of Missy’s puppies, Canton, MA

International Religious Fellowship (IRF)-Student Religious Liberals (SRL) Conference

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In August 1962, between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I was selected — I do not recall the reason for or process behind my selection — as a delegate to the International Religious Fellowship (IRF)-Student Religious Liberals (SRL) Conference at Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts, a week long conference. I may have been selected to attend by the Norfolk-Suffolk Federation of Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), of which I was a member and by which I had just been chosen as a representative to the New England Regional Committee (NERC).

There were few other members of LRY in attendance. The conference was mostly for college students and slightly older people who were affiliated with the two organizations, namely, IRF and SRL.

I lived in Canton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. The train trip to Springfield took around two hours. I took a train to get to the conference. It seemed like a big trip then, like going far away from home.

I was one of the youngest attendees. I felt a little strange at first, but I learned something valuable. I decided that I had no choice but to take the plunge and get to know people. It worked. I made some very good friends there. There was a fellow from Ghana, J. K. Ohene, a very nice man whom I befriended and who came to visit me in Canton during the 1962-1963 academic year. There was a Scotch guy named Frank. And, a German guy named Joe, who, in retrospect, I thought might have been gay. He was a very nice man.

It was an international conference, and many of the delegates were from abroad.

It was an invaluable experience for me. I was already a tolerant person and an internationalist by nature. (My mother had instilled these types of values in me.) But I learned a lot about relating to people, and I liked them so much. They fully reciprocated my friendship.

 

–– Roger W. Smith

     January 2016

 

Note: J. K. Ohene was author of Handle us with great care (Some religious questions answered) (Accra: The Ghana Society of Religious Liberals, 1965).

Joint IRF-SRL Conference, 1962 (Roger Smith highlighted in 4th row).jpg

Roger W. Smith, My Brief Encounter with Bobby Fischer

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I visited Iceland in July 1972 on the way to Luxembourg and Europe via Icelandic Airlines.

After a brief stay in Reykjavík, when I was about to depart and fly to Luxembourg, I was, for some reason, at the front desk of the main hotel. It had something to do with my airplane ticket, since the bus for the airport departed from the hotel. I wasn’t staying there.

It was early evening.

As I was standing at the front desk (it was small and narrow), about to ask a question — all alone with no one else there but one young woman desk clerk — there was suddenly a commotion and someone burst into the lobby with one or two other men trailing behind.

It was Bobby Fischer, who was quite tall, thin, and gawky and at that time still young looking, thirtyish. I recognized him immediately.

He had just won what turned out to be a crucial game in a very close championship match against Boris Spassky. Fischer was staying at the hotel. The match was being held elsewhere, in some hall in Reykjavík.

Fischer burst into the lobby, strode briskly to the front desk, and kind of thrust himself forward. The young woman clerk said to him politely in good but accented English, “Congratulations on your victory Mr. Fischer.”

He was rude and abrupt, ignored the remark (basically ignored her), and blurted out something like, “where’s my key, is room service available?”

Then, taking his key without any further comment or discussion, he turned and strode off.

The game was on Sunday, July 23, 1972. I remember that it was a Sunday. The headline in The New York Times (then priced at 15 cents) the next day said, “Fischer crushes Spassky, Takes Lead in Title Match.”

I was extremely interested in the Fischer-Spassky match. All the games and the tournament overall were given a great deal of coverage in The New York Times, and I read it all avidly, this despite the fact that I can hardly understand chess and can’t understand analyses of chess games technically.

A big part of my fascination was the seeming connection of the Fischer-Spaasky showdown to the US-USSR superpower confrontation.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   January 2016

Roger W. Smith, “Newspapers, the Red Sox, and Frank Malzone”

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This is a brief piece of writing involving diverse reminisces which, in my mind, are somehow connected.

I guess I will begin with newspapers.

My parents subscribed to the Boston Herald. It was a Republican newspaper. The Boston Globe was the Democratic newspaper.

My parents were originally staunch Republicans. This all changed, totally, during the 1960’s, when they became liberal Democrats.

The Herald was a good newspaper. In editorial stance, it was like the Herald Tribune in New York.

I was an avid reader of the sports pages. I recall, to give just one example, reading about pro basketball games in the 1960’s. I used to marvel at Wilt Chamberlain’s point totals. In those days, he seemed to be averaging fifty points a game.

I was also aware of the tabloids, although I didn’t read them regularly.

One headline that made an enormous impression on me, on June 28, 1955, when I was nine years old, was “Harry Agganis Is Dead” (I believe in the Record American, a tabloid).

Harry Agganis (1929-1955) was an All American football player at Boston University who signed after college with the Boston Red Sox and played briefly for them as their starting first baseman. He died suddenly and unexpectedly.

The Red Sox players wore black armbands afterwards. This somber thing made a big impression on me when I was watching games on TV.

Another headline I distinctly recall had to do with the famous Brinx robbery. This must have been in January 1956, when six of the robbers were arrested just before the statute of limitations was to run out.

I recall one photo in the Herald of Boston Celtics guard Sam Jones making a jump shot with seconds left on the clock. It was the decisive basket in a deciding playoff game. In the photo, Jones was in midair; the shot had just left his hands.

There was a long time cartoonist on the Herald, Francis Dahl, who was very good. Among other things, he did cartoons about sports. After a Red Sox game or series, there would often be a Dahl cartoon. It would summarize the game. There might be a caricature of catcher Sammy White, say, who had just had an impressive day at the plate.

Dahl was not mean. He did not demean or make fun of his subjects. His baseball cartoons, for example, would usually feature a player who had done well. The cartoon would contain several panels that would give you a kind of capsule summary of the game. They were lighthearted and fun.

I remember another photo that was featured in the Herald sports section in 1957. It made a big impression on me. It was third baseman Frank Malzone’s first full season with the Red Sox. It showed Malzone (specifically, his legs and feet) diving into the stands for a foul pop up.

I was a paper boy, briefly, in the sixth grade. The salary was something like two and a half dollars per week. I had an afternoon route at first, and later a morning route.

The canvas bags, which you slung over your shoulder, seemed very heavy. You were supposed to curl the papers up and, somehow, by slapping them against your knee, configure them in such a fashion that you could throw them from the sidewalk onto a porch. Being naturally klutzy and inept, I never quite learned how to do this.

There were a lot of newspapers in Boston in those days, both morning and afternoon ones. I recall that one of the customers on my morning route in Cambridge was John Zimmerman. He was a musician, a bass player, and musical colleague of my dad. (See photo; John Zimmerman is on the right.) He subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor.

I had been told that Zimmerman, who moonlighted as a musician, had an advanced degree (Ph.D.?). So, I regarded him as some sort of egghead, which seemed to explain why he got a different paper from everyone else.

Dad on Boston Belle with Tony Sherbo (guitar) and John Zimmerman (bass) 1950s.jpg

On the deck of the Boston Belle, a Boston-Providence cruise ship, mid-1950s. The musicians are Tony Sherbo, guitar, left; Alan W. Smith (my father), accordion, center; and John Zimmerman, bass, right,

I didn’t last long as a paper boy. Actually, I quit. I told our boss, Mr. Gladden, that I had to quit because of my parents, that I was waking them up when I got up early. “I haven’t heard that one before,” he said, not being for a moment fooled by my excuse.

Which brings me back, in a roundabout way, via newspapers, to Frank Malzone. But first another digression.

In the sixth grade, Miss Nancy Barnard, an attractive member of the North Congregational Church in Cambridge, to which my family belonged, organized a boys’ choir. She was a big Red Sox fan, a season ticket holder. As an inducement, she promised that any boy who joined the choir would get to go to a Red Sox game with her at the end of the school year.

I joined the choir, and, because I was a monotone (as was so determined), I was relegated with the other monotones to the back row. The first hymn that we performed was “Fairest Lord Jesus,” a beautiful hymn.

 

We were duly taken, as promised, to a Red Sox game at the end of the school year — which was also the end of the church year since the parish, inexplicably from my point of view, closed for summer vacation, and were in box seats right behind the Red Sox dugout. We got an autographed ball with the team members’ signatures on it. I believe one of the signatures was Ted Williams’s. (I took the ball out to play with a friend when I was a teenager and ruined it.)

The choir director knew the Red Sox players well, and several came over before the game to talk with us. One was the six foot six inches tall starting pitcher Frank Sullivan. I was very excited to meet an actual ballplayer.

“Frank,” I blurted out, “did you get hurt the other day when you fell into the seats?” He was momentarily confused. “Oh,” he said, laughing, “that was the other Frank [Malzone]!”

I was referring to the play, a photo of which I had seen in the Herald (as noted above), in which Frank Malzone had dived into the stands in the pursuit of a foul ball.

Later, the choir director got Red Sox pitcher Tom Brewer to come and speak at our parish.

Frank Malzone was one of my favorite Red Sox players from that period. He played very briefly for the Red Sox in 1955 (20 at bats). In 1956, he had 103 at bats and batted .165. He blossomed and became a regular in 1957. That was the year I became a fan of his. He was an outstanding fielder and a good hitter with some power.

I recall an outstanding play of Malzone’s that I saw on TV, before instant replay. He made a diving stab of a line drive which killed a rally. It was just one play, but I remember it. Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy (whom I grew up listening to) couldn’t stop raving about the play.

In those days, I was a devoted reader of Sport magazine. They had a feature article about Malzone in 1957. The article discussed Malzone’s disappointing 1956 season. It said that the reason he flopped was because he was despondent and couldn’t concentrate on baseball. His wife and he had lost a child in infancy.

I was wondering if the New York Times would mention this in their obituary of Malzone, who died, sadly, on December 29, 2015, at the age of 85, but they didn’t.

Once at a Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) conference at Star Island in New Hampshire, I was practicing softball in the lawn in front of the hotel. A fellow LRY’er, Tom Linehan, who admired me as an intellectual to be looked up to in that regard, was watching, unbeknownst to me. He said afterwards that I was scooping up grounders effortlessly and “looked like Frank Malzone out there.” The compliment and comparison pleased me greatly. I rarely got compliments on my sports ability.

One further note, George Plimpton’s book Out of My League, a fun read, is based on his experience and observations about baseball from pitching a couple of innings against a lineup of Major League all-stars. Malzone was one of the players in the lineup, which Plimpton pitched to once.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   January 2016

“brief Sunday school recollection”

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We had a wonderful Sunday school program in the Unitarian church in Canton, Massachusetts in around 1959-1960.  The Sunday School curriculum for that year was called the The Church Across the Street.

Dennis Sanford was our Sunday school teacher. Mr. Sanford (we never called adults by their first name in those days) was superb.

We visited a Buddhist temple, a Christian Scientist church, and many other churches which I forget, plus a Catholic church. After mass, we had an audience with the priest, who was very nice.

He asked at length if we had any questions. I raised my hand and said, yes, I did have a question. I wanted to know, if God was good and all powerful, why did He let evil exist (and in fact predominate) in the world?

The priest had a hard time answering me. I was very into rational discourse (I was on the debate team in Canton High School) and found his answers inadequate. I kept persisting.

The priest did his best to answer me and kept his composure, but he seemed a little flustered. It was kind of an awkward standoff.

Our minister, Rev. Alfred Fowlie, was present on this occasion and he told me afterwards, after we had left the church and were going home, that the priest had asked him, had I been coached by anybody to ask this particular question?

Rev. Fowlie told the priest, no, I hadn’t.

Rev. Fowlie then asked me, where do you get such questions from? Don’t you know, he said, that religious thinkers have been struggling to answer this question for centuries? (I learned later that St. Augustine in his writings and preaching gave some of the best answers.)

I did not know this at the time. I told Rev. Fowlie that it had just occurred to me as a natural question to ask based on my own reflections and that I hadn’t intended to be a smart aleck or wise guy.

— Roger W. Smith

  December 2015

Dennis Sanford (2)

Dennis Sanford, our Sunday school teacher

Rev. Alfred Fowlie. A magic man

Rev. Alfred Fowlie

 

Roger W. Smith, “My Career as a Freelancer”

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During the 1980’s, I made my living as a freelancer. I never earned much, but I did manage, which was in itself an achievement, to get steady work. In my best year, I made somewhere between 16 and 17 thousand dollars, which was then a creditable though not great income and was proof that I had a legitimate freelance occupation.

I started out doing occasional writing of articles and proofreading. In fact, my entree into freelancing, and into publishing — I was employed full time as an advertising copywriter for three publishers for four years in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — came about through freelance proofreading work for the publisher Putnam’s, which began in 1977. A friend of mine who worked at Putnam’s recommended me to the in house supervisor of freelancers.

While working full time at Columbia University, I had taken, in 1976, a noncredit course at Hunter College taught by T. O’Connor Sloane, a high ranking editor at Doubleday. It was an outstanding course, very well organized, very well presented, and very thorough. I was greatly interested.

The course was taught once a week in the evenings for two or three hours, and when I was there, I became — despite having worked a full day — fully alert and energized. I learned a great deal; every fundamental of proofreading and copyediting, as well as book production, was covered. I took excellent notes and still have them.

I had always thought of myself as a competent speller, but, like most educated people, I wasn’t. (When I was 15, my high school English teacher, Mr. Tighe, told me that one area of composition I had to work on was spelling.) Mr. Sloane, the instructor in the Hunter College course devoted part of one class to spelling. He said that overcoming spelling difficulties was simply a matter of recognizing and learning how to spell a few commonly misspelled words. He then produced a handout, a list of the 25 or so most commonly misspelled words. Ones I remember: misspell, judgment, acknowledgment, chaise longue, supersede, accommodate. (Supersede, he explained, comes from the Latin, super seder, to sit above. He had helpful explanations like this enabled one to remember the correct spelling.)

Since that lesson, I have always been an excellent speller.

He discussed fees in the last lesson. He said with irony that the class always tended to laugh when he commented on this topic. The freelance fees he mentioned were then in the neighborhood of $3.50 an hour, which seemed okay.

This course greatly helped me. My friend had previously worked at Funk & Wagnalls and through his intercession I got the opportunity (in around 1976) to take a proofreading/copyediting test there. I did not do well and was not hired. (This was just before I took the evening course with the Doubleday editor.)

The guy who gave me the test, a young editor, was sort of condescending. I was very frustrated, because I was very determined to get into publishing and knew that, if given the opportunity, I would overcome any deficiencies I had and would do well. I had the basic skills, I was certain, was very conscientious and very detail oriented. If I was unsure about the spelling of a word, I would look it up.

When (after taking the Hunter College course), I started freelancing as a proofreader for Putnam’s, I did NOT do good work on the whole. I was worried about overcharging them; worked way too fast and carelessly, as it turned out; submitted bills that were unusually low; and missed lots of errors. (I remember 33 or so in one book, I was later told.)

My in house supervisor/contact, Fred Sawyer, was patient with me and told me to work slower. I got some very good books to proofread. One, by a son of RFK, was about a famed Southern civil rights judge. Another was novel by a very popular science fiction writer, Frank Herbert. The sci fi novel was clever but pretty far out. Weird language and concepts.

Later, I became a pretty good proofreader, working for the Random House College Division and a medical publisher, Raven Press, among other places. The work required intense concentration. It’s awfully easy to pass over typos when reading.

For Random House and a couple of other places, a take home test was required to get hired. One would think that a take home test would be easy — after all, you have unlimited time to complete it — but the Random House proofreading test was extremely hard. It was a different story for me from my experience with the Funk & Wagnalls test, thanks to the Hunter College course, and, with the freelance experience I had by now, I was able to ace the test.

I didn’t do copyediting per se (as opposed to proofreading) until late in my freelance career, but I became very good at it. (I had actually become good at catching errors of fact and grammar in my capacity as a proofreader, where you were allowed to query dubious things in the margins of the proofs. I recall one book on African-American history where the author, who one would think would at least know such things, misspelled W. E. Du Bois’s name throughout.) The bulk of the copyediting I did was for an academic who was the head of a foundation. He couldn’t praise my work enough and acknowledged it in his prefaces.  He kept holding out the promise that he would promote and abet my advancement, but nothing came of it.

I developed into a very good copyeditor. It’s something one has to have a background and aptitude for, obviously, but one also has to have experience. It requires broad knowledge and a sixth sense of what to look for.

 

— Roger W. Smith

   August 2015

Roger W. Smith, boyhood postcard from New Hampshire

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“Dear Mom + Dad / I’m having a ball here. We went to Concord. I haven’t spent much yet so I can spend more later. We may go to Benson’s Animal Farm. _____ foods great. I’m learning much more swimming. / Love, Rog”

sent from Northwod Narrow, NH

A very good friend of mine from Cambridge, MA, Francis Donlan, invited me to stay with his uncle and family for a few days on his uncle’s farm in New Hampshire in the summer of 1958.  Among other things, we helped with farm chores. The main crop was potatoes. We spent a  lot of time in the evenings at a roller skating rink.

 

Roger W. Smith, boyhood postcard from New Hampshire, summer 1958
Roger W. Smith, postcard to parents from New Hampshire, summer 1958

— posted by Roger W. Smith