Economics is Everywhere

Economics is Everywhere. No. I didn’t invent the phrase. Daniel Hamermesh, a labor economist who I wish I had had as a colleague instead of the one I suffered with, is responsible for the useful observation (and accompanying textbook, which I assume, in a fifth edition, is doing very well). Actually, for years now, this has been my problem. I learned just enough mainstream econ to see the world as the econ do–the real econ, not the dogmatic, the minimum wage must be abolished because demand curves slope down types (again, a colleague I wish I had never laid eyes on). But that ain’t what this post is about.

On the road to Damascus, once more, I had a revelation. This came at the HEB. In Texas, pretty much, there is no other grocery store, although some other chains have been foolish enough to contest its dominance. HEB in Texas is like Yahweh. There is no other, so get over it. But if, God forbid, the Cowboys are America’s Team (check), HEB is America’s grocer. Even the closet socialists at Consumer Reports bestow their blessing on the HEB. All bow at the HEB’s corporate feet H-E-B took the top spot in Dunnhumby’s Retailer Preference Index for 2024 for the third year in a row, continuing the Texas retailer’s dominance of the annual predictive rankings of grocery chains based on their financial performance and shopper perceptions (this is from a grocery industry site, btw). So, you know you are at the Alamo of Grocery Stores. Gentlemen, remove yore hats.

Well, some other time we can talk about the HEB, but what we have here is merely an insight provided by economics at the expense of HEB. It is not, I confess, entirely original.

Years ago, when I lived in Philadelphia enjoying the charms of graduate school and trying to figure out my dissertation (I still am), my best friend was the radio, cause it never went to sleep either. There was–and is–an all-news station called KYW. It was dull then and awful now, but it did help pass the time. One of its features was a guy called “The Greengrocer: Joe Carcione.” (cue ethnic stereotypes). Joe passed on in 1988, but back in the late 1970s, he was a big deal, syndicated on over 80 television stations nationwide, and who knows how many radio stations. I loved Joe. He could tell you how to cook spaghetti squash, and how to properly ripen even mediocre tomatoes. And, having spent his life in the produce business, he knew what he was talking about. He took great pride in his work and in his industry. So, naturally, I was intrigued one day he hosted a call-in in which listeners could ask deep questions about grapes and stuff.

Joe was genial as Hell, right. He knew how to keep customers happy. So it was really cool to hear him lose his temper on the air when some insolent caller chose to teach him some supermarket econ. I think this guy was some kind of libertarian or neocon avant la lettre. Either that or an economist. Anyway, Joe had been explaining why presentation mattered so much, and that he was sometimes disappointed by what he was seeing at then contemporary grocery stores, especially where fruits and vegetables were concerned. You know, wilted lettuce, bruised pears, anemic endive–stuff like that. That, Joe said, should never be allowed to happen. Well, because it shouldn’t, and not just because it pissed customers off. You know, have some pride, right? I dug the ethic because that was how any good Italian boy was raised.

Well, what happened next was memorable. Some guy, very self-assured and patronizing, told Joe, basically, “It costs too much to assign a babysitter to keep the fruitsies and veggies happy all day, so that’s why it doesn’t happen. And it costs too much because of nasty things like the Retail Clerks Union.” Heh, heh. Optimizing economist, meet The Greengrocer. An epic exchange ensued. Joe, avuncular, paternal even, lost his cool. He didn’t swear or anything, but he raised his voice considerably and basically started shouting at this Neanderthal. Said caller just kept insisting this was all costs and benefits, you know? It cost too much to keep the stuff looking fresh all day. What you would lose in sales, goodwill and the rest hardly justified the attention, especially when the nasty unions were rent-seeking (he didn’t say that, but he was thinking it). Well, I distinctly recall a sudden station break and an announcer straight-voicedly intoning “We’ll get back to Greengrocer Joe in the next hour. So be sure to stay tuned.” I wish I had an aircheck. I think Joe had a stroke.

But even as I was laughing at this novel intrusion of market fundamentalism into the world of Joe Carcione, I was thinking “Dude–econ wannabe–has a point you know. There must be an optimal amount of funky veggies which, as we say, is determined at the relevant margin. I mean, this guy is a bit much, but I don’t think he’s completely wrong. Just a bit…..narrow minded.” Ho, boy. After spending 30 years around the Econ South of the Mason-Dixon line, I had no idea how much homo economicus I was going to contend with. Every. Damn. Day. Normally I tried to be a honest broker, but, you know, doing “on the one hand…..on the other” with some of these narrow-minded Philistines is an errand into the wilderness. Had I known that this was what was in store for America 35 years ago from the Econ 101 crowd maybe I would have gone somewhere else. Like anywhere. And that coming from a guy who thinks the Congestion Charge in London, UK, must be suboptimal because it took an Uber an hour to go 8 miles from Central London to Kew Gardens. So it’s not as if I’m not sympathetic to the idea that the price mechanism has some role to play in the efficient allocation of resources.

Well, ok. How does the prove that economics are (is) everywhere, especially in Texas at the HEB. You got a minute?

Today Linda and I made one of our frequent journeys to the HEB to stock up on crudites and comestibles, as Dr Oz says. It was, 40 degrees aside, like any other dreary trip to the HEB. Not fun. So while we’re there, wouldn’t you know Linda buys….blueberries, which are a part of her breakfast routine (mine is coffee and whatever is leftover from desert). Ok, big deal. So why is this earth-shaking? Well, we get to one of the check-out stations (one as yet staffed by a human being rather than some damn do-it-yourself scanner) and start the ritual of getting our stuff on the conveyor to get scanned out. All proceeds smoothly until Linda picks up the plastic carton of blueberries. Then disaster strikes. The carton really wasn’t secured properly shut. And you know what happens. Like a cartoon, right? With blueberries cascading all over the counter, the floor, to the next aisle, oh boy, don’t we look like the idiotic elderly couple exclaiming like Custer at Little Big Horn. Where did all those blueberries come from?

Not to worry! Da-da-da-dah!!! Front end manager-dude gets on the horn. As quickly as you can say “freakin’ blueberries” (that would be me), an employee appears in full HEB kit. He is armed with a broom, a kind of bin with a handle, and some other stuff to mop up the berries that have already gotten underfoot. It literally takes less than a minute. No fuss, no bother. And no charge either, as someone else is dispatched to get more blueberries–which we don’t get to spill. We apologize profusely, but you think HEB were at fault. Grin. Whaddya know? “Y’all have a blessed day!” I grin. “Damn right!” Manager-guy frowns at oath. This is a Christian store. Texas.

Since you must be running out of patience, you are wondering what the Hell this has to do with Economics, Joe Carcione, optimizing, anything? Well, I gotta tell you, I would guess a great deal. You want to know? Ready or not, Dr Science has an explanation: Economics is everywhere. Especially in Texas.

Since 1947, Texas has been a right-to-work state. I am not a lawyer, let alone a labor lawyer, so exactly how right-to-work laws work here is a bit above my pat grade. I can tell you that unions aren’t exactly welcome down here. I can tell you that the HEB is not unionized–as far as I know. Nor have I ever heard any suggestion that anyone wants to organize it (which would be amusing, if possible). But I can tell you one thing. Labor here (Bexar County) is cheaper on average than it is in the United States overall. See here. Now this is a complicated question for sure, but I’d guess that supermarket employees are not exactly minimum wage ($7.25/ hour), but, whatever Gov. Greg Abbott says (he is a congenital liar), it surely is no $29.00/ hour which Abbott trots out every time someone says how cheap labor is in Texas, especially the less skilled variety. You think baby-sitting asparagus takes much skill?

Ok. So what does this have to do with our blueberries on the floor? Linda observed on the way out that the HEB has a nasty habit of not securing their plastic containers, even with a bit of tape. We’ve spilled salads, olives and other stuff, so it isn’t just blueberries. Their shopping bags (paper) are cheap and spill all over the place too. Hmmm……Why not just get better bags, or just get someone to secure the plastic cartons more carefully? Tell you what? Even with relatively cheap labor, having someone working to seal up all those fresh-to-you containers for everything from blueberries to cherry tomatoes would be a shagload of work. And, it would have to be supervised, right? Isn’t it possible–even likely–that it’s easier to say “To Hell with it. Not worth it.” So what if you lose a few loads of blueberies a week? So what if the asparagus sits in a tub of ice water instead of ice? You can clean up something for a marginal cost of basically zero–the guy is already hanging around. And if customers don’t like soggy asparagus, well, tough. Where else you gonna go? HEB is, for all intents and purposes, a monopolist in a cheap labor state. The blueberries can spill and the asparagus can wilt. And Joe Carcione can spin in his leafy grave. You lose less by not providing the fancy package when the clean-up service that you do provide costs next to nothing. You know. Like the Italians say (in a very different context): Why buy the grapes when the wine is free? And believe me, nothing happens at the HEB by accident. The electronic surveillance in that particular store is Orwellian.

I ain’t saying this is some airtight explanation, but watching those blueberries hit the deck reminded me of Joe Carcione and his optimizing interlocutor from so many years ago. Actually, you might expect even better care of the veggies and fruits given labor costs here, but, ironically, it appears that cheap clean up is even more attractive. One thing I do know. Texas never ceases to amaze me. And, believe me, at bottom, economics is everywhere. Y’all don’t like it? Stay home. Like in California, if it’s still there.

From 84 Charing Cross to Mickey D’s: It’s Worse than Spengler Thought

This is London. I am seated in the cafetería at Marks and Spencer. My life is not at risk. I expect no sympathy. I expect even fewer readers. Vox clamans in deserto or no, it is Christmas season in a world capital. And not just any world capital. As Ed Murrow would say, “This is London.” His circumstances in 1940 and 1941 were considerably more fraught. Murrow risked his life at the hands of Goering’s bombers during the Blitz. I risk only getting chewed out by waitstaff who think my seat could be put to more productive use. They are, in fact, from their perspective, correct. My situation is, in fact, quite pleasant.

But the world is a mess. And even though all dressed up for Christmas, London is basically a tart. There is so much Russian money here that London has been called Londongrad. Money laundering run by Russians is a huge business. Property ownership in the UK by Russians has been conservatively estimated at over a billion pounds sterling. Some courier got busted with over 250 thousand pounds in cash in his car the other day, for God’s sake. And the evidence is everywhere. Westminster and the shopping districts are literally gleaming from rehab. There is construction activity all over London—it looks like Austin, Texas during the boom. New tunnels. New terminals. Consumer stores—top of the line—crowd the major streets—Oxford, Bond, Regent. And full of merchandise at eye-watering prices, jammed with polyglot crowds of tourists. Glitz galore. Walking through Westminster at night is an almost unending sensory overload of lights, displays, Christmas trees, shimmering blondes in designer clothes. I have been in uber rides in Teslas, Mercedes and, for God’s sake, a black Jaguar. And yet, you know beauty is only skin deep, and much of Britain is in trouble. Something like a quarter of London families cannot make ends meet. The National Health Service is in deep trouble, moribund if you like. 84 Charing Cross, already a loss to bibliophiles a half century ago, is now ignominiously reduced to a Mickey D’s. The World According to Donald Trump.

The reason why London seems like so much of the problem is because London is so much of the problem. The Financial Times’s chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch, recently highlighted how the UK compares on per-capita economic performance once London is removed. The answer? Worse than Mississippi, the US’s worst-performing state, because “removing London’s output and headcount would shave 14% off British living standards”. A Mickey-Mouse number? Sure. But it does give an outsider some sense of the God-awful in-your-facedness of at least parts of London. Basically, it had been 20 years since I last saw this place. It might as well have been a century. Talk about “rebranding.” The characteristic reserve of the British is well and truly gone. Brutish? Maybe. British? Not quite.

And the cause of all this? Well, I haven’t really been paying close attention for the intervening decades. Simon Wren-Lewis dates the decline part of things to not simply to Brexit in 2016, but more importantly, to the Tory government/’s reliance on austerity beginning in 2010. https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2022/05/how-austerity-created-brexit-and.html. In a sense, this ought to be a warning to USAmericans, because this little drama is coming your way courtesy of Trump, Musk and the rest of the idiots that my compatriots have chosen to entrust their fate to. We are headed down the same road, eyes wide shut, so check your pulse now if you are in the USA. You may not be able (or want to) in 18 to 24 months. Of course, Brexit itself was simply stupidity on steroids, particularly in light of Britain’s never adopting the Euro. I am still trying to figure out the logic behind what the Brits did in 2016, but I am also fully occupied trying to figure out what the Hell we have done in 2024. So knock yourself out. The next few years may be better experienced in a state of diminished consciousness anyway.

Of course, the thing I have mostly noticed is the transformation of (at least parts) of London into something that must be Donald Trump’s wet dream, a Palace of Laundered Money and Oligarchs, and that is not Brexit. It is my impression that the Tories decided that whoring out Britain was the most sensible way to profit from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a democratic transition to stick under Boris Yeltsin in Russia. I only know what I can read about this, but there is plenty. Get a hold of Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World (2022) if you have a strong stomach and start there. Again, maybe, just maybe, you’re in for a sneak peek on what’s going to happen in the Homeland under Trump and Tulsi, God forbid. Yeah, we have “guardrails.” (personally, I think of them as third rails, but that’s just me). In any event, the penetration of Russian influence and the looting of the former Soviet economy have transformed London. I can’t say that I much like it, but, Hell, it’s not my country and certainly not my favorite city anymore. Tant Pis. Anyway, if you like gauche, over-the-top commercial, and tasteless, you’ll like what some of London has become. Sorry, it isn’t for me. I preferred the old post-imperial sort of vaguely Cool Britannia version that people like Roy Jenkins and Ken Clarke presided over. No accounting for taste, I guess.

Ah, yes, one other thing. London’s traffic, congestion charge or no, is dreadful. Because the Tube was loused up (not unusual), an Uber out to Kew from our hotel on the West End (another experience, to be sure) took the better part of an hour in late morning. This was to get out to what I still call the PRO, but which the Brits insist on calling the National Archive. It was a very fruitful trip and the staff at the PRO are wonderfully helpful and blissfully reasonable about using cantankerous old Chancery Court rolls, stuff that I suspect would now require an armed guard in the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico (and gloves–and a mask–and….and….and….). But now I know I had damn well better look for lodging a lot closer to Kew for when I go back–and I will go back, since I know that further treasures of the Lizardi Boys will turn up (hint, hint–the firm’s books taken in bankruptcy?).

The people at the National Portrait Gallery archive were similarly helpful, so maybe in all this mess, the fellowship of the book and scholarship will see us through. Pretty to think so, right?

Memo to whoever is running London. Better raise the congestion charge. If what you got is equilibrium, I’d hate to see what happens on a bad day. Talk about excess demand.

And I am no longer sitting at M&S. But if I close with “This is San Antonio,” no one is likely to give a damn.

Gimme A Break, Muskrat

Originally published 11/17/2024. I told you so. Now try listening

We’re not even into Agent Orange’s Real-Life Redux, and already I’m sick of him. And, frankly, I know I’m not alone. While his cabinet choices of vile pigs, equally dubious semi-babes and other assorted deplorables may be truly disgusting, his Feckless Friends Without Portfolio are really a trip. Good, so many to choose from. But there is one whom I find truly entertaining.

Elon Musk.

Now, I’m not aware that Muskrat actually has or will have a formal position. I guess even that pasty-faced “First Lady” would have to submit to some kind of vetting and disclosure. Why do I think ole Elon don’t want to be subjected to Discovery? You know, sunlight is the best disinfectant and vermin somehow always seem to know that. So I guess we’re gonna have to be subject to this jackass who is and is not there, The Schroedinger’s cat of Trumpland. Oh, joy.

Now, Elon is a disruptor, you know. Ordinarily, disruptors are not exactly welcome because they tend not to play well with others. Muskrat, however, has turned his winning personality into big bucks. And, well, this is America. What else matters, right? Character? Ethics? Social Awareness? Common Decency? Nah. For that you’d have to find some cloistered nuns, assuming the Catholic Church has many or any left. And even….. well, forget it. The Church is not on my mind. For once. Although did you hear the one about the Archbishop of Canterbury?

No, we’re gonna stick to Elon and his Very Big Plans.

Elon is one of those Chainsaw Al kind of disrupters, you know. Let’s cut everything (except my compensation, of course). He’s also notoriously airy about keeping his promises–ask Mexico, for one, where he was saying until he was gonna build a great automobile slingshot into the US market, until he apparently lost interest. I suspect you could profitably look at some of his other commitments too, but it’s you dime, so do what you want. Personally, I want to talk about something much more interesting.

A two trillion dollar Federal budget cut. Let me make it clear from the outset. I am not gonna use some fancy budget simulation a la Wharton or CBO. Sufficient to them is the techno-wizardry thereto. Nor am I gonna muck around in the actual details of how this mighty deed of the Big Chopper might actually be carried out in the Real World. I mean, this is all some mouth-breather phantasy right? So let’s just play along using some very elementary textbook economics. Y’all remember Mr Circular Flow? That diagram you dismissed as just too silly to be of any use when some poor schlub who was trying to get you to think like a Econ put up a slide (there, even I can be modern, although I was a chalk and blackboard kind of guy myself). Yeah, you little snots from Engineering, Math and real subjects who wanted Differential Equations. Knock Yourself out. Waste of brain power, I fear. Overkill. Besides, trying to explain some brutal system of difference equations to a Trump Voter is really like try to teach the proverbial pig to sing. Really. You get frustrated and annoy the pig. Literally. Go try it on your neighbor……

Yup. Heh. Bring on the magic mushrooms, cause psilocybin is the least you’re gonna need to get through this exercise. Now, if you INSIST on some semblance of the real thing, use this. and don’t bother me further. This tells you right off the bat the old Elon is living in Muskrat world. It don’t work like, Muskrat walks into a room, and says “Out, damned budget.” But, Hell, let’s pretend it did. What do you’ll think would happen? Lol. Get ready.

(https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/#:~:text=Spending%20Trends%20Over%20Time%20and,the%20United%20States%20that%20year_

You know, that circular flow that you were daydreaming through (admit it: he or she across from you was hot) says one Big Thing. And that would be, perfesser? Well, My spending is your income. Period. Really? Swear to God? Yup. Where did you think it came from. Your Mommies and Daddies? Where did THEY get it, assuming they didn’t work for Enron and just sort of make it up as they went along. It’s gotta come from somewhere? Right? I know. The government!!!! Well, yeah, but if the government just creates money to spend and doesn’t create nothing to spend it on, well, it won’t be worth much very long. Like a microsecond, Ace. See, money is basically debt, a claim on something. A claim on nothing is worth nothing. Even in Texas. So you’re out of luck.

Try again. When you come down to it, money is basically a claim to productive activity–stuff, wizard–and the nice part of it is Uncle Sam (or Tio Huitzilopochtli) has fixed things so that these claims on stuff you produced can be exchanged for other stuff without your name being on it( dah, dah, legal tender). Cool, huh? So I make stuff, and then (use magic here) I get claims that I can use to get other stuff. Maybe, you know, you are making the other stuff in your garden. Grin. Nasty. I was thinking of tomatoes, not cannabis. But no matter. My claims become your income (and your stuff my stuff) and your income becomes….my income….and so on….and so on….Without limit? Well no, but we want to leave savings out of it, which, if you are an American, is close enough for government work. More or less, that it. Really. Well, yeah. Sorry to disappoint all you propeller heads who want unending complexity, but that’s basically it. Now go do you homework in someone else’s class.

But What About Muskrat and His Big Chopper? Ok. Why not. Federal spending is maybe a fifth of our Circular Flow. So, maybe, a two trillion dollar cut would actually cut about a third of annual Federal Spending. A third of a fifth is about 1/15, or 6 to 7 percent. No big deal right. Ah, wrong. Wrong on several levels. See that first cut, well, think hard. Suppose your BFF works for a grocer who sells to military dudes (make it simple–not really necessary). Now, those military dudes are, soon or later, gonna have less to spend when the cut affects them–and suppose Musk the Chopper decrees all must sweat equally (except Elon and his multiple offspring). So the grocer sells less, right, but then, hey, the grocer buys less, right. Ahhhhh…..I get the picture. A ripple effect. Right. Well, how much? It depends, friend, but even ” multiplying” 7 percent by small number, say 2…..well that sums to 14 percent of the Circular Flow once things settle down. Assuming nothing else happens. Which I guarantee you is wrong. You’re about to go over the cliff, but that’s ok, You ARE MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! MAGA!!!!

Dude. It’s been tried. It’s called Austerity, Big Time (Another name for a Depression if you are included). The British have tried it. Lolz. Why you think the UK is so screwed up? Because Mick Jagger is mortal? Well, that too. Don’t believe me. Here is something for you to chew. Simon Wren-Lewis, Lies We Were Told. It’s a book, yeah, but if you’re unemployed, the opportunity cost of your time is zero. So all you pay is the price of Wren-Lewis’ book, and once that’s done, it sunk cost.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/lies-we-were-told/preface/19162B8AE9D1948872089026631A4546

Like you. Sunk by the Muskrat, Trump, and his revolting Minions.

Enjoy.

Morta Sotto Il Carro

Maybe she slipped and fell. Or maybe, in the early evening, just around sunset, she just didn’t see it coming. You know, little kids are always running around, playing, especially in groups. A group of children playing in a city street. Nothing unusual about that. Maybe tag. Maybe something else. It’s not as if it mattered. You can imagine, in your minds eye, a squealing group of little people tearing around a corner, maybe behind a parked wagon or something, yelling their heads off, not paying much attention other than to the moment. Kids are like that. In the moment. It’s not as if they have much else to think about–assuming they were a little lucky. Their awareness is is, not so much reflection. It’s why most of us remember being kids with some fondness. All we had to do was be a kid, and, especially in those days, there were no rules.

I imagine this little group of wild people was shouting in some amusing mixture of English and Italian. Some of them had been born over there. Some here. They probably all spoke Italian, somehow mutually intelligible, especially if their parents came from the South. Dialect you know, and barely comprehensible to us now. “Vieni qui!” Get over here! That much we would have understood. It is the categorical imperative of childhood. Works in church, school, at home, or playing. Anywhere a few were gathered. Laughter and love. And energy. Lots of it. Like small car, big engines.

Anyway, one of those kids was named Concetta Delia. She was eight years old (or maybe six, or maybe five), or so the newspaper said. And she would forever be. She, Concetta, was of another time. The Great War had not yet begun, so she was still part of the nineteenth century. Literally. Italy was still ruled by a King, Victor Emmanuel III. Italy, the nation-state, was barely half a century old. If Concetta knew anything about this stuff, she was in one of those odd moments when Kings and Presidents (and the occasional Emperor) decided the fate of some abstract nation, while little kids, as usual, played in the streets. But, now, increasingly city streets, which too were also an artifact of two centuries: a country lane meeting paving for the first time. A place for horses and manure now yielding quickly to automobiles, “power wagons” and grease stains. It happened slowly and then all at once. The race into the contemporary world had begun. And it claimed its casualties, as any race would. Concetta Delia was one of them.

Concetta’s parents were Pietro and Maddalena, then in their early thirties. I have no photos of them. I wish I did. They were my maternal great grandparents. I was fortunate to know them as an elderly couple when my Grandmother, Francis Villari, would take me to visit them at 809 Cross Street, “down the house,” as we always said, in South Philly.They were always very sweet to me–I was about 5 or 6 years old. Little did I know that Francis, my Grandmom, had a little sister, Concetta because, very confusingly, there was in the 1950s another Concetta, the only one I ever knew. She too was my Grandmom’s younger sister. There were two Concettas: one survived childhood. The other did not. Until this year, I had absolutely no idea. It’s funny. Italian families are inveterate talkers–communicative as songbirds–but they hide their secrets well. I learned that lesson as a kid. When to talk, and when to shut up. I don’t think I ever learned it well enough, but I got the idea. Some stuff you didn’t talk about. Concetta was obviously one of the things you never talked about. Never tell anyone outside the family, that sort of thing…….

It’s funny, you know. Because my Grandmother, Frances Villari, did sometimes let drop details about her childhood. I remember her telling me she had had scarlet fever. And I’m pretty sure she mentioned typhoid too. In Philly, that would have been during an outbreak in 1911 when the city’s water got polluted by a broken main in a pumping station and the city drew on the Schuylkill River, in which, upstream, God only knew what you toxic waste you got. Not for nothing did we call Philly Water “Schuylkill Punch” when I was a kid. . Anyway, Grandmom told me about this stuff, but of a dead little sister. Nothing. Maybe because I was just a little kid myself, and she didn’t want to frighten me. Hell, I was then no older than Concetta had been.

Concetta Delia

Article from May 9, 1914 Harrisburg Daily Independent (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) <!— –>
https://www.newspapers.com/nextstatic/embed.js

And if that wouldn’t frighten the Hell out of a little kid, what would. Especially one who had a trolley line running in front his West Philly home. Trolleys, albeit horse drawn, had been in that area since the 1870. In South Philly,electrified street cars had come in by the late 1890s. My guess is that they still probably looked something like this, maybe a little smaller.

You have to have some sense of what kind of neighborhood this part of South Philly was. It was sort of at the southern fringe of civilization. That doesn’t mean it was bad, but it was not exactly Parkside either. If you went about 3 miles South of 8th and Kimball, you would have hit an undeveloped part of the city known as The Neck. It was marshy, kind of ramshackle and home to Philadelphia’s resident colony of pig farmers, who made a living supplying the city’s 9th Street market with pork producer, including offal. It was not exactly a source of civic pride, even in 1914. It had the reputation as a place you went and got your ass kicked. So I’d guess Concetta lived in a place which was the bottom of the ladder of upward mobility for Italian immigrants, which her sister Frances certainly saw in her lifetime. Suburban Penfield, where Frances died at 94, was another world from pig farmers and The Neck. So these guys were one step up from The Neck. They were lucky to be there. Remember, they left Italy behind.

The Neck, a somewhat optimistic view

10th and Kimball, looking East. No, it isn’t a Hopper painting, but you see where he got the inspiration

Since the accident virtually happened on their doorstep, they would have known immediately. Probably a banging on the door, followed by screaming and shouting, in Italian, the neighbors. I can imagine Maddalena and Pietro running out into the street. And oh Lord, what did they see, Their child, Concetta, beneath the wheels of a trolley. It is almost obscene to try to imagine with a gathering crowd, people shouting, the driver frantic, my Great Grandmother and Grandfather in some frozen state of hysteria and shock. What do you do? I’m sure the trolley driver was petrified and would not move the car, because, as the story says, they called for a jack to raise the car off Concetta. God only knows how long it took for the jack to get there, to raise the car, and to extract the child’s lifeless, broken body. She was taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, at 8th and Spruce. That’s less than a mile, but it must have seemed like another planet. My guess is by motorized ambulance, but, really who knows? It could have been horse and wagon. My Lord, they may have physically carried her there, frantic. Only God knows now. I imagine the scene in different ways, each progressively more ghastly. Concetta was pronounced dead at Pennsylvania Hospital.

And now, I know almost nothing more. What I do know, from looking at the parish death register, is that little children died this way. Another three year old in February (1915?) “morto sotto un carro di transporto all’Ospedale Pennsylvania.” (dead under a transport cart, Pennsylvania Hospital) You can imagine the WASP doctors’ heads shaking. Why don’t they watch their children more carefully? Italians. What can you expect? You can fill in the mental blanks. They never change, do they? What can you expect from immigrants?

So a million questions run through my mind? Did anyone sleep for days after? Was there any kind of wake (did that even figure in death rituals in Italy then)? When was the funeral mass? There must have been one, no? How on Earth did they pay for it? How did they get the little girl to Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon? As the crow flies, it must be 6 or 7 miles, but you’d have to get across the Schuylkill River–in 1914, how or where where? There were ferries, true enough, and at least one bridge, but that was to West Philadelphia. Was there a procession, which even then was a tradition among Italians in America? Who bought the grave? Was there some kind of mutual aid among Immigrants there? You can see what Baldi Funeral Home looked like in 1908. I can’t imagine the child got that treatment, you know? High-end Edwardian. Probably a little more like the photo at the very bottom. How did they get out to Yeadon to visit the grave, because they must have. You know, Italians are not allergic to graves. How long did they mourn? She died on May 8 and was buried on May 11, which seems remarkably hurried. Or maybe it wasn’t.

My God, I know nothing about my own people. I don’t even know if I am asking sensible questions. I do know I have been thinking about this almost since I first ran across it. The story haunts me. My ignorance haunts me. The world as it was before I was haunts me. Draw your own conclusions. Who am I?

And speaking of haunting, the Delia ultimately moved to 913 Cross Street (https://thisgameisovercom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1090&action=edit), again, nearby, less than a mile walking today. It was a bigger house and the family was growing. Another daughter, born in 1917, was again named Concetta, whom I knew as my Aunt Connie. And I am told by a church archivist in Philadelphia, Elissa Torre-Lewis, who has been of great help to me, that the practice of preserving the name this way was not uncommon. Another cousin, a Delia, told me she heard stories that Concetta lived upstairs on Cross Street, and occasionally came down to the first floor to make her ghostly presence known.

I never did see the second floor of that house in all the time I went down to South Philly to visit. Not once. Now I know why. But the next time I get out to Holy Cross, I’m going to find Concetta and leave a flower. Because I now know where she resides. In aeternum, amen.

Convergence, Big Time (with apologies to Lant Pritchett)

I have been trying to write this damn thing for a long time. I’ve started. Discarded. Started. Discarded. Started again. Ah, I say. What’s the use? This is above my pay grade. There is no sense publicly demonstrating you don’t know what you’re talking about. But then, like the Hound of Heaven, maybe the Hound of Hell, this damn thing keeps chasing me. And it really isn’t very profound. Things change. Whether it’s for the better or the worse is a matter of perspective, right? Where you started (or think you started) versus where you are (or think you are). And, face it. History is a measuring stick, but, alas, the measuring stick tends to change as well. And we change it, no? What was once acceptable no longer is, or vice versa–or we realize with the passage of time, that seemingly small changes may actually end up having big effects. Or seemingly big changes end up not meaning much in the long run, whatever the long run is. The older I get, the less certain I become. I thought it worked the other way, you know? All in know now is the smartest people I can read–people like Lampedusa, Newman, Keynes, Darwin, Emerson–they all say it’s about change and figuring out how to navigate it. Who am I to disagree? Only American politicians associate changing your view with something they call “flip flopping.” Which is bad, I gather. That’s not the company I want to keep. Sorry. So stop right here if you disagree. I won’t convince you anyway. And am not going to try.

I have the twin curse of being interested in both history and economics. I’m pretty sure I don’t know enough about either and understand even less. And that isn’t false modesty. In my business, you write something, and then your friendly fellow scholars tear you apart. Their motives may be honorable. Or they just may be miserable people. It doesn’t matter. “That’s how we learn,” you tell yourself. History is some great dialectical process, or some impressive-sounding crap you learned at the age of nineteen. One way or another, you try to learn something even from the evil mother******** in your midst. Or you end up being part of some sect that basically has members who tell themselves how smart they all are. Some of them may actually be just that. And some, well, not so much. Whatever gets you through the night.

In any event, history is complicated, and economics may affect the trappings of a science, but I’m not sure how many people–even economists–believe that. The sources of error, by omission or commission, are so numerous that it doesn’t bear much thinking about the fact they exist. I guess if you are certain, you are finally in the right church. I’m not. And that’s that.

Of course, since it’s the season of the witch, it stands to reason some of us are obsessing about this. You know, the lying bastards running for office trying to convince us of some thing or other, maybe true, maybe a total fabrication. Catch 22, right? The most gullible may well be the most persuadable, as PT Barnum well understood. You got to be crazy to believe it, but you got to be crazy to survive. Like Yosssarian said, that’s some Catch, that Catch 22. Yup. Sure is. Especially where history and economics are concerned.

Now one of the people running around trying to persuade us to elect him (or re-elect him, God forbid), wants us to believe that in some golden past, Things (whatever they are) were better. You know, Archie Bunker stuff: Boy the way Glenn Miller played….guys like us, we had it made….Girls were girls and men were men…Didn’t need no Welfare States…Gee our old LaSalle ran great.” Right. Whatever. Like Artie Shaw (no kin to Archie Bunker) once said, yeah, the Good Old Days of World War II, you know, that killed upwards of 40 million people? Them good old days.

Well, within the limits of very fallible theory and even more fallible statistics, I got to wondering about certain aspects of that theory. Nothing heavy duty, cause it’s not like I’m capable of that anyway. But I did want to go back a few years and see how much more unequal we have become in the United States, because, one way or another, the trope of unfairness is a pretty big one in this election. And not unreasonably. You can argue the merits of the case on way or another, but, please, if you happen to be my age (73), stuff sure feels different. Yeah, we could start with the climate, but then someone will be yelling that it was cooler in Hell (San Antonio, Texas) this Summer than last, so take that. Well, yeah. If your world is San Antonio, Texas, go for it. Mine is slightly broader. Oh, yeah. And stay away from western North Carolina.

Statisticians and economists, take my word for it (please) have always been trying to figure out how to measure this stuff in a way for even the least able among us to wrap their minds around it. Take my word for it, there is no uncontroversial, unambiguous, transparent, universally acceptable way of measuring the phenomenon. However, there has been plenty of interest in the idea. This little illustration I got here shows a nearly exponential increase in interest in the subject (inequality) as measured by published references in English to the subject since 2010. Hell, the rate of increase in interest in the subject exceeds even the rate of increase in interest in sex, analogously measured. See for yourself. It’s science. (Calm down, ok?)

If there is anything that will compete with someone’s interest in “How much sex am I getting relative to someone else?” it is “How much money am I getting relative to someone else?”

So, of course, there you have it. And no need to ask why? Is there?

Now, whatever I think my comparative advantage is, we’re not gonna assume it’s sex. Yeah, in my dreams. So let’s talk a little about income inequality. Yawn….. Believe me, if anything is more complicated than sex, it’s income inequality. One very crude summary measure that’s subject to about a zillion qualifications is something called a Gini Coefficient (named after it’s originator, Corrado Gini, not some other curvaceous Italian, like Gina Lollobrigida).

Corrado Gini, not Gina

To oversimplify it–like I oversimplify everything (I said it before you), The Gini Coefficient is a summary statistic that can be calculated. Conventionally, it ranges from 0 (perfectly even distribution: everybody gets the same everything) to 1 (perfectly unequal: everything goes to one claimant and to Hell with the rest). Sometimes you’ll see this in decimal form, sometimes someone will invert the significance of 0 to 1 (they better tell you first), but that’s basically it. Numbers closer to 0 mean more equal. Numbers closer to 1 mean less equal. A perfectly Orwellian Number. Yeah, I know, there are a zillion caveats. I’m just trying to make a point–eventually. There are other summary statistics, like the Theil Index https://utip.gov.utexas.edu but you rarely if ever see it.

Ok, here I’ve posted World Bank data for the Gini for Mexico and the United States. The World Bank stuff for Mexico only goes back to 1989, whereas the US goes back to the 1960s. I want to warn you again, don’t just be making unqualified pronouncements on the basis of this data–again for about zillion reasons, but if you just step back for a moment and admire the general drift of things, you notice One Big Thing: convergence. In plain English, the two series approach each other. Or to put it differently, inequality has increased in the US and decreased in Mexico. Big Time. Avoid the temptation to say anything other than there’s something going on here, because neither one of these findings is uncontroversial. And if you try some MAGA nonsense about this is what happens when you let “them” into “our wonderful country,” I will take the time out from my busy schedule to straighten you out. WHY this is happening is one thing. THAT it is happening is something else. And an awful lot of Ugly America these days can be usefully regarded as an artifact of this convergence: Mexico is not the enemy. How could it be? We are more like them in some respects than we have ever been. We have met the enemy, as Pogo said, and it is us. Pogo don’t ring a bell? Look it up. No. There are not 35,000 murderous illegals or whatever that idiot said.

See, my basic feeling–it isn’t a thought because it’s not developed enough–is that we’ve been doing a lot of really stupid things in the United States for a now not insignificant amount time. Admittedly, some of them are in reaction to changes in the world we have little control over–since the 1960s, at least–but we do have at least some choice in how we respond to things. And, sorry, by our own choices, I think we may have things a lot worse. For sure, no one was trying (at least as far as I am concerned) was deliberately trying to make stuff worse. Quite the contrary. At least in terms of economic theory, a lot (not all) of the stuff was going to make us better off, or so we thought. And so the Econ told us, or at least a lot of the “mainstream” Econ, to which, I must admit my guilt, I largely subscribed. But even I had started to notice stuff going sideways as early as the late 1970s. And I, as they said of the Virgin Mary, considered these things in my heart, even if I didn’t walk around talking about them. You know, if you have your doubts, you probably don’t advertise them. Unless you are a principled truth-teller, and pretty damn smart.

I’ll give you a sort of silly example, although it made a big impression on my at the time. When I got back home from living in Mexico in 1978, I had an urgent need to make a living–and thanks to an old teacher, Ed Mathis, was lucky enough to end up teaching principles of Economics at Villanova. And there I should have stayed, but that’s another story. Anyway, I was buying a car because I now had a job, and very alert then to the influx of foreign cars into the US, because, naturally enough, I had been living in a country where they were assembling Volkswagens (in Puebla, Mexico). I got to drive a Beetle in Mexico too, which was cool, so I knew they didn’t bite. But I also saw a lot of other foreign makes, some glamorous, some not. Living in the Philly suburbs I saw a certain amount of my folks who resided in Penn Wynne, just over City Line Avenue outside West Philly. It was–and is–a modest 1920s suburb. Living there when I did, I got to see what my neighbors drove. It was pretty standard US, you know, the Big Three. Yeah, there were some oddballs who drove a VW or an MG, but really, it was an Oldsmobile, Buick, Chevy kind of neighborhood. And not a fancy model sort of place either. One neighbor drove a Chevy Nova, which was hardly a hot car. Hell, his was even black. Talk about basic. My Dad drove Buicks and his move up in life was from a Century to a Skylark with AC and a leather (vinyl?) roof. That, my friend, was living.

But around 1978, I started to see foreign cars in Penn Wynne. Ok. Big deal. Everyone started seeing the impact of Japanese automobiles in the US market. But I noticed something else. There were a couple–maybe two, maybe three–BMWs. I barely knew what a BMW was other than a hopped-up VW. But I knew they cost a pretty penny and typically were out of reach for someone in Penn Wynne, assuming they’d even want one if they could afford it. Well, I was struck but the portentous appearance of the foreign invader in the hood, so I looked into it. Well, they were a bit expensive, to say the least. Hell. New, even a base model then cost more than what my Dad had paid for our home in 1960. Yeah.

Bingo.

Do you see where this is leading? The price of housing was starting to rise to the point that if you qualified for a mortgage in Penn Wynne, for God’s sake, you could afford a BMW. I will long think that a rise in the relative price of housing was inevitable given the size of the Baby Boom generation, which was, at that point, I’m certain, making its initial forays into the market. To some extent, it’s no one’s “fault”. But to deal with inflation, which was rising at least in part due rising oil prices–which were a consequence of a sustained fall in the dollar, which was at least in part a consequence of the Vietnam War, which was never properly financed, let alone declared (even the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been repealed) and the deterioration of the United States external financial position……and so on and so forth, interest rates started to soar in 1979. By 1981, well, forget it. For want of a nail, you know. As early as 1964, there were people in Washington who saw Vietnam as a catastrophe in the making. Don’t think so? Read the Pentagon Papers. It’s all there. None of that stuff had to happen. But happen it did. Look in the index under “Ball, George.”

And it gets worse. Productivity growth in the US (called somewhat mysteriously, TFP or Total Factor Productivity) had risen from 1950 to 1973 at about 2 percent. From 1973 to 1990, it rose at less than 1 percent. Basically, the standard of living, which had been doubling every generation (35 years) would now require a lifetime (70 years more or less) to double. You don’t think that makes a Hell of a difference in people’s life chances, or their attitudes to their fellow human. Give me a break. You doubt it? There’s a nice little book called The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin (NOT MILTON) Friedman. It’s quite an eye-opener, especially when you’re accustomed to dealing with historians who have made a point of denying any such thing (in my experience, all of them, if they don’t think economkic growth is simply bad).

What’s particularly disturbing about the United States as we’ve become more unequal, our growth has stagnated. To be sure, economic growth in Mexico under President Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has been terrible–the worst sexenio performance since Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), when growth was basically zero. Still, a lot of people will tell you that, if nothing else, the growth of the Mexican economy under Lopez Obrador has been terrible, but at least inequality has diminished. Now I have openly expressed skepticism about whether this was smoke and mirrors, let alone sustainable, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that AMLO has done what he set out to do. I can hear my former colleagues muttering some stuff about equal impoverishment–the standard Southern Economic Association line about, for instance, Cuba. And with Cuba, that would appear to be true. But while Mexico is still extremely unequal, it would, in the eyes of some, appear that at least some people are better off. Mybe quite a few. Maybe. Who the Hell is better off in the United States? Some infinitesimal share of all households, while the rest of us square off for a possible civil war? What an accomplishment. Forgive me if I say I’m not impressed. Chicago Booth Review reports (not exactly a left wing outlet) we could be talking fewer than a thousand families, the tenth of the top one percent. Yeah, you read that right. My Lord, there was a time when we talked about Nicaragua under Somoza that way, but the US of A? Welcome to the Third World. And you wonder why we have Third World problems?

I don’t know what you think, but I have a feeling we have made a very bad bargain in the United States. Really? With whom? Who do you think? Who yells tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, even when it is not obvious that we can afford the ones we have had? Who still insists that tax cuts can pay for themselves? Who says tariffs and a weak dollar will make America Great Again? C’mon man. The Democrats are hardly blameless for the fix we find ourselves in, but can you say Ronald Reagan? It’s a measure of how far that benighted party has travelled since the days when Reagan called for tearing down a wall, while his political grandchildren will stake everything for the chance to build an even bigger one on the Southern Border.

I need to be sick. Hypocrisy of that magnitude does it all the time.

The End.

Haddington, revisited

Normally, I would not revisit a prior post, unless I had made a horrendous error (possible), needed to apologize (always possible, but most of this stuff is innocuous), or learned something new (an everyday thing, so it better be good). Well in https://thisgameisovercom.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=1374&action=edit (Called 66th and Haverford), I went over some childhood ground, trying to figure out what was where I lived in West Philly before I lived in West Philly (before 1951 CE). My faithful readers may recall I grew up in a neighborhood technically called Haddington, on Haverford Avenue, which, as a kid, I assumed had been there forever, sort of like a Roman Road. Well, obviously it hadn’t been, but I was still stumbling around trying to get a fix on exactly where I was when I wasn’t. Now, thinks to the miracles of serendipity, persistence, and the University of Pennsylvania (seriously), I think I have a much firmer idea. So who cares? Well, I care.

Ok. Now isn’t that a beautiful map? It dates from 1911, more or less. You’re gonna say what’s so beautiful about it? It’s mostly empty. BINGO. It is indeed mostly empty. And that’s where the story begins. It’s also wrong, from what I can tell. OK, I won’t swear to it, but I’m gonna let you play historian with me for a bit to get a feel for what it’s like to try to tease something out of primary sources like maps, newspapers, censuses, and maybe even an archive or two if the City of Philadelphia helps me out. I’m not holding my breath, but hey, even the Phillies can surprise. The bigger point, friend, is why I melt down so often when some politician–of any stripe–tosses off some cliche as an explanation for an extremely complex set of outcomes. These days, it’s a daily occurence and, yes, it really irritates me. Because it is hard to establish a fact. Some enthusiastic positivists will say you can’t really prove anything–only falsify. That’s for another time.

Quick review. In West Philly, my first home was at 66th and Haverford (6613, to be exact). When you’re a kid, you’re surroundings are, uh, exogenous. In plain English, they are there, so are you, and that’s that. You do little or nothing to shape them. So I figured my beloved West Philly neighborhood had been there since time immemorial. Of course, it hadn’t. Silly Kid.

This is the block that was my world in the 1950s. It looked a bit different (photo is from 2009). The house dead center with the blue SUV sitting in front was my home. You see the gray, fake brick facade on the second floor. My grandparents put that up in about 1956 or 1957. I was there. But there was no dogwood tree in the front to obscure our view. And the yard looked nicer because Grandpop had planted rose bushes (rosabushels, in Joe Villari- speak) at the top, yellow, red, and pink. They were lovely because he could grow almost anything. Otherwise, aside from the “awning” over the front door, it more or less looked the same. So did the block, without trees and retaining walls. There were PTC trolley lines there until about 1956 or 1957, when GM brought us the miracle of busses. That line, called the 31 in my time, had actually been there since about 1876–first horse drawn, and then electrified. It was called, naturally enough, Haddington.

Before 1854, this area, and a whole lot more was called Blockley Township https://westphillyhistory.archives.upenn.edu/maps/1849-map-rea-miller. After that, it was pulled into the City of Philadelphia. I lived about here, about dead center, give or take a few acres. Before that, as far back as the 1750s, the land had been the estate of a certain Edward Williams, assuming I found the right spot on UPenn’s map of landowners. If I turn up anything about the gentleman, I’ll let you know, but I’m really more interested in getting back to the early 20th century now. Too bad I’m not in Philadelphia, because I have the feeling if you’re willing to get your hands dirty in the archives, there’s a lot more to say.

The feeling I always had as a kid was that there was a lot of green around me, and there was. It was urban, but in measure, you know. I really didn’t realize I was still feeling the rural roots of the place, which in 1950, was much less than a century removed. Only now do I realize that the area under went the same kind of development that I saw in Drexel Hill, Broomall, Springfield and a lot of Delaware Country dotted by real estate signs that said “Spano” “Facciolo” or “Yentis”. Except the postwar development was really replicating something that had gone on in West Philly from the 1890s through the 1920s. Today I see it as all part of the same process. I had no perspective as a kid. Who does? It took a lot of years for Philadelphia to grow West past the Schuyllkill River, but one it did cross, the rest was sort of inevitable, and continues even now. I look at development in Chester or Delaware County and think it’s hideous. I wonder what the old-timers–the people who had been farming in West Philly since the 1700s thought when the saw the Italians coming for their lovely fields and streams. I can guess.

I’ve pointed out the my Mom’s family started on Tree Street in South Philadelphia in a modest row house. But thinking it over and looking a little more closely, I realize how much stuff has changed here in the late century. In the 1930s, my Grandmother and Grandfather earned today what would be the equivalent of $70,000–she as a seamstress and he working as a cabinet maker at RCA Camden. They raised three girls there and moved to West Philly and Haddington, sort of, in 1941, I think. The place on Haverford Avenue was a distinct upgrade.

Joe Villari and Frances were not the first owners of the home. In 1940, a gentleman named Balzano was listed as the head of household, but he apparently married or remarried the following year and–I assume–left the home. In June of 1941, my grandfather, Joseph Villari, was recorded as having gotten a $4000 loan (oddly, from the FDIC, which didn’t make mortgage loans, as far as I know) for 6613 Haverford. In terms of wealth (the proper way to value a home loan), that is about $351,000 today (I use the Measuring Value website, which conceptually is a good deal better than the usual divide by the CPI stuff) which I find staggering. So forgive me, if you will, while I chew this over in print.

For one thing, I’m not sure I could qualify for a similarly sized loan today, let alone see a factory worker and a seamstress qualify. I’m pretty sure they got a loan from the FHA, not the FDIC. The FHA had something called Title II, Section 203 home mortgages. So guess what I have to figure out next. The loans started in 1935, as nearly as I can make out. Was this part of the New Deal? I’m guessing it was, but I have to look into it.

How the Hell did they do it? With three children too. Part of the answer is that the structure of the immigrant family made a lot of things possible, including child care for a working couple. My Great Grandmother and Grandfather (Mom’s side) lived on Cross Street above Ninth. That was probably, tops, a walk of half an hour, maybe less. Very doable for kids and adolescents, especially when you didn’t worry much about random acts of terror against children in that neighborhood. Believe me, they took care of business. I know my Mom always talked about the place on Cross Street like a second home, and the Delias–Johnny, Connie, Pete were the young ones –more like siblings than cousins. And even when they moved to West Philly, South Philly was our home away from home. Boy I spent a lot of time there as a kid, right up until high school, when my life really began to change. But I could almost tell you the ride we took on public transportation: trollies, two subways, a short walk. And back home the same way. I was sort of bi-neighborhood in those days. So you figure the Villari kids hung with the Delia family on Cross Street. And they did. I have the pictures, man. My wife, Linda, guessed that you’d spend $5,000 a month today on that kind of child care for 3 children,assuming you could even find it. Guess what? Life in the ghetto was better than you thought. Privileged, even.

I don’t want to start with all that good old days stuff, because I know it was plenty tough. I know where the bodies are buried. I know who got hurt. Who carried crosses. Who jumped out windows. Who got rejected by their birth parents. How many ways the Church made life hard for people with failed marriages. The problem in America is that in the 1960s, we pretty much figured out all the costs of the kind of lives that my grandparents and parents lived. And they were real enough. But, here’s the problem: there were benefits too, and those we simply ignored. And they were substantial: think of the Cross Street–Tree Street–Haverford Avenue extended kin network. Who’s to say if the average American didn’t lose more than he or she gained? Doesn’t the answer depend on a lot of things: race, class, ethnicity? And even those aren’t terribly simple. You really going to tell me that calling our Black citizens “equal” makes up for abandoning urban public education, which is what clearly happened in Philadelphia? That’s cheap social justice, to put it nicely. And rank hypocrisy, to be blunt. And then we bitch that Tyrone can’t read or do math. Tell me about it. “Benign neglect” is still neglect, brother. It was in 1970, and it is now.

When I think about growing up in those circumstances, I have to tell you, I never felt deprived. We weren’t in clover, by any means, but by today’s income standards, whatever any smart-ass academic says, we were comfortable. You could be union, blue collar, and ok, something that always baffled my teachers at Fancy Ass U, aka, Princeton. It was also obviously a consequential issue at Berkeley, where you think some of them might have figured it out, sage observers of the American scene they are. No chance. “What do those young people want?” I don’t know. Matching BMWs, I guess.

I do not do American economic history, obviously, but when I look at my lifetime, I’m afraid I understand all too well how some menace like Donald Trump can be on the verge of becoming President again. Horrifying, yes. Incomprehensible. Sadly, no. When I read Deaton and Case( Philly is the New Ciudad Juárez), a light when on. Well, you can’t do what the working class–the white working class, at least–did what it did in 1940 today. The social capital is gone. The family structure is gone. The Churches are gone. And I don’t intend this in some reactionary way. But anyone who tells me that Haddington 1940 and Haddington 2024 aren’t two very different sets of possibilities and life chances has got to be kidding. Yeah, we worked hard. All of us. But we had help too, and not all of it came from the government, although at least some of it did. You think the New Deal didn’t make difference? As Brandon says, malarkey. Unions made a huge difference, and it wasn’t all just about rent-seeking. Some of it, of course, but all of it? Uh uh. I saw how it affected people in my family. For some of them, the union was family too. These guys socialized, intermarried, did favors for each other, and kept an eye on each other. It mattered. It wasn’t all good, but what is? Costs and benefits, huh? The Econ are fond of measuring costs. They aren’t as keen on talking about benefits.

I now see Haddington, my family, the Church, the Italian-American stuff in a very different way. Some of it was, yes, not so hot. But on balance, I wouldn’t hesitate to go back to that world. If there is a Heaven, I’ll wake up back in West Philly, ca. 1955. That’s me. Your mileage (and preferences) may vary.

Peace

His name was Tommy Sims. He played trumpet. You never heard of him.

Ok, this one is strictly for jazz nuts–and a subset of them, known as trumpet players and aficionados. Not every one who likes jazz necessarily digs trumpet players. And those who do like jazz don’t necessarily agree on what constitutes a good trumpet player. Believe me, the sectarian difference would make an Anabaptist tremble with something, because this is a religion. To understand, you have to have had carnal relations with the Brass Beast, preferably over many years and at least 4 or 5 octaves. But, if not, that’s ok. Not all of us are as dim witted as to aspire to the ownership of a Martin Committee (Old Style). That’s a classic horn from the 1940s and 1950s. Just sort of wants to play jazz, a Mephisto horn. Well, let’s leave eroticism out of it–although, to be honest, it’s never really far from the surface with a trumpet.

This little piece is less about the trumpet itself (an inexhaustible subject from just about every angle from technique to mouthpieces and tongue position(!!)). It is about a guy who played trumpet about whom I know very little, but about which I wish I knew an awful lot more. His name was Enoch Thomas Sims, Jr., but I think everyone called him Tommy. He was clearly the best player I almost never heard. So gather ’round, friends, I’ll tell you what I know and why I think it matters.

Right off the bat, I’ll clue you into a problem. This is about the best shot of Tommy Simms I have. Yes, he is the Black gentleman on trumpet, playing with a terrific Philadelphia clarinet player named Billy Krechmer. If you want to know more about Billy Krechmer, go to https://www.allaboutjazz.com/billy-krechmer-a-philadelphia-story-billy-krechmer-by-richard-j-salvucci. Yup. Yours truly wrote this, and yours truly is atypically proud of it. But this is not about me, or even about Billy. It is about Tommy Sims, and if this is the only decent picture I have of him, you’ll know I’m not exactly drowning in sources.

Sims (and first problem, it is sometimes spelled Simms, making tracking him an adventure) was born in 1922 in Washington, Georgia. By 1930, his family had moved to South Carolina and then, by 1935, to North Carolina. In 1940, young Tommie was living in Philadelphia. South Philadelphia on Reed Street. It looks to have been a typically South Philly brick row house, and not all that far from where the Delia branch of my Mom’s family lived on Cross Street. While that part of Reed Street was–in 1940–largely populated by Black families that had migrated North, Tommie’s neighbors two door away were a few of the Italian holdouts that remained as that part of South Philadelphia segregated along racial lines between the 1920s and 1940s. In any event, Tommie was already out of school and was working by 1942 when he registered for the draft. He did not, as some of his contemporaries were wont, give his occupation as musician.

I was about fourteen or so (ca. 1965) when I first heard the name Tommy Sims. As an aspiring trumpet player, I was pretty serious about practice. God knows I did enough of it and everyone in the neighborhood was a critic (my favorite evaluation: “Not much improvement is there?”), but most were encouraging and one or two were very supportive. A women down the street, a blowzy, frowzy type who enjoyed sunbathing in her backyard (not your typical Penn Wynne, PTA or Sodality of the BVM militant) stopped me one day while she was sunning herself (and probably drinking an adult beverage) to talk about music. Turns out she was a Harry James fan and had heard me blasting “You’re My Thrill” in the back room while I struggled with copying a solo that was hopelessly beyond me. She loved the tune–well, God only knows what was going on, but Mrs Robinson chastely left me alone and we talked about jazz and horn players. Here, just so you get into the right frame of mind. Do listen. I loved James and his band even more than I loved Woody Herman, which means I spent all my spare time trying to copy internal section parts (probably 4th trumpet) which I couldn’t handle either and this along with “Shiny Stockings” were generally enough to put me into some kind of trance.

Meanwhile, Tommy Sims’ long-running gig with Billy Krechmer was drawing to a closein 1966. I know Sims had been with Jimmy Lunceford’s band after Lunceford died (maybe poisoned by some racist, long-running speculation says) while it was being led by Eddie Wilcox. Fortunately for us, we have some idea of how Sims sounded because Krechmer did some recording and while the stuff is scarcer than Hen’s Teeth, God Bless Spotify. Billy has about 28 listeners a month and Sims has a bunch of solos on the album of his that they have (which may be Krechmer’s only album, on the Ranstead label). So if you have Spotify, spend a little time listening to this. And even if you don’t, you can sample it and know that the trumpet is Tommy Sims. He sounds great everywhere–not a bopper, but playing Dixieland. He had joined Krechmer in 1952. I suspect he was in Philly for another gig at something called the Web Cafe (not that web) and may have come over to Krechmer’s to sit in, maybe at Billy’s invitation. Billy obviously liked what he heard (and he had a tart tongue, from what I can tell, and not much tolerance for mediocrity), so Krechmer probably made Sims an offer he could not refuse. Or something like that. Remember, Tommy’s family was in Philadelphia and Sims had been “touring” as they call it previously. Man, show me a player who doesn’t want to get off the road, especially if he can live at home. My guess is that was that.

If you have access to Spotify you an heard Tommy play here

Anyway, Tommy is on display on this recording, and his playing is awesome. He’s obviously in another league from everyone other than Krechmer, but the problem is, he doesn’t get much space. Sometimes 8 bars, at most 16. You can tell he is awesome, but Geez, why on Earth didn’t someone get him a vehicle where he could stretch out some. I am on the trail of another recording he appears on, but we’ll have to see if it shows up before I “finish” this. Or maybe I won’t finish until I get it. You can’t always do what you want, but sometimes, you do what you can do. And Sims deserved this.

Now, sometime around 1956 or 1957, Mr. Sims made a big splash. I know this because I am about to show you the results of the Downbeat polls for those years. Downbeat was–and remains–the premier jazz magazine (they’ve never required my services, sniff) and back in the 1950s, it really seemed to be an outsized presence in the world of the music. Part of it was fanboy/fangirl stuff; some of it was pure publicists’ hype; some of it was companies pushing their horns (we made them in the US of A in those days in Elkhart, Indiana), and some of it–a very small part–was useful information, interviews, reviews (and these had to be read carefully, not least for the agendas), and, of course, polls. You know, who’s up and who’s down. Who has captured some nonrandom part of the public’s fancy? Who has made a record (vinyl) that reveals a hitherto unknown talent (sometimes for real). Who should you listen to so as to be part of the hip crowd? Hey, don’t laugh? You do want to be cool, don’t you? Why do you listen to jazz? See, said magazine, much altered, still exists, but notice “Critics Poll”. Some bad ideas never go away.

Now, if you know ANYTHING about trumpet players (if you don’t , I do), you will recognize this as a kind of Who’s Who of jazz players of various sorts in the 1950s and 1960s. Ok, with one or two exceptions. But CLIFFORD BROWN? Whoa. Hold on. We’re talking about a guy whom many considered the best improvisor of all time–maybe, had he lived–of any player since Louis Armstrong.

We are not talking small time players here. We are like talking gods. And there, in their midst, is Tommie Sims. WHO? Yeah, that Tommie Sims? The same one? Are you sure? Oh yeah, I am sure. I am sure because one Downbeat critic called him “a Philadelphia player” who was much better than any number of players with national reputations. Really? Yeah, really. Like up there with cats like Buck Clayton and Roy Eldridge. Trumpet royalty, dude. No exaggeration. And several critics said the same–you may not know who he is, but he is something else. Clearly one guy had dropped into Krechmer’s club and heard him there, because he raved about pianist at the club as well. So some people thought he was worth a trip to Philadelphia to see. Martin Williams, for one. Check out Martin Williams, jazz critic. As in the Martin Williams who wrote The Jazz Tradition, a canonical US book on the music. Yup. We’re not talking some anonymous guy in Texas raving. We’re talking Martin Williams. Good Lord. What was going on here?

Before I speculate much and tell you what I don’t know, I’ll show you a few other photos I dug up. My guess is that the one in the middle captures Sims at an intermediate point. The one on the bottom captures Sims and an older Krechmer after Billy had begun to play again. He didn’t have a club any longer, but he did give some performances around Philly, and, well, yeah, Tommy Sims was always there. Sims was always there because Sims was the best player and the only one really in Krechmer’s class–and Billy knew it. So if a=b and b=c, then a=c, right? The other guys in Billy’s house band were good, especially pianist Eddie Evans. But, like one politician once said to another, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Well, Tommy was.

Like other guys in Krechmer’s orbit–the famous Philly DJ Jack Pyle, most notoriously– Simms was a baseball fan. But Pyle lived and died with the Phillies (mostly died, since I think he was around for the Great Collapse of 1964). But I ran across this little snippet as well. Tommy was no fool. The 1950 Phillies had gotten into (and promptly lost) the World Series. Tommy, bless his heart, was a loyal Philadelphian. Aren’t we all?

But loyalty has its limits. Tommy was betting on the then New York Giants–sentiment only gets you so far in this world, my friend. Boy do I wonder who his friends on the then Brooklyn Dodgers were. My Philly imagination wonders if it wasn’t catcher Roy Campanella, the perennial All Star, who was the son of an Italian immigrant father and a black American mother–and, of course, from Philadelphia, but not South Philly. Still, Sims lived pretty close by Italians in South Philly, was married to a white woman (about whom I know nothing right now) and lived in Powelton Village, which was kind of an experiment in integration in West Philly for a long time. Believe me, I have no idea if any of this is so, but as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises,”Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Of course, it could have been Carl Furillo or Duke Snider on the Dodgers, but I somehow think that was less likely.

Anyway, what more do I really know about Sims? Well. He never quit his day job, because he worked for the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board , which we fondly called The State Store. That’s a whole ‘nother story, best left for a different post. After Krechmer closed his club in 1966, Tommy did not want for work. In fact, I’d have to say he probably could have worked as much as he wanted in Philly. Because he did. In the 1970s alone, and limiting my search to Philadelphia, I found well over 100 mentions of Simms, typically in club adverts, usually saying “Featuring Tommy Simms.” I’m sure he had a rhythm section with him, but people clearly were coming out to hear Sims. That corresponds to exactly what I heard. “Go hear Tommy Sims, kid.” Problem is I was typically underage, and by the time I was in college, I knew I wasn’t playing for a living. THat was not a mistake, but missing Sims was, believe me.

Now, as far as I know, these weren’t glamour jobs–a working musician gets to play a lot of crap, you see. A wry sense of humor helps, and Sims had one. As a practical joke, I was told he was heading home from a gig in South Jersey with a few other guys. Ft. Dix–the land of basic training for so many unfortunates–was on the way. Fun loving musicians stopped their car at 3AM somewhere outside the base. And, Tommy Sims proceeded to blow Reveille at the top of his formidable lungs, thereupon waking up a large part of the base. They did not stick around to sample the results of their experiment, but, believe me, the story is believable and pure trumpet player humor, I’m sure I will eventually pick up other stories, because jazz history is oral history–I come from the generation where you still didn’t likely go to school to play, but learned on the job. Anytime anyone said anything nice about my playing, it was because I was doing it wrong. Truth. Originality is largely a mistake.

Tommy did record another record with the Ed Ashley Jazz Band, with whom he gigged a lot. It is Dixieland, and the band is, well, ok. Tommy, on the other hand, is superb. In A couple of places, he got to cut loose, so you could hear what he could do. You won’t find this stuff on the internet, but believe me, it’s just another indication of what he could do. Trust me. He was well beyond a solid player. Or a journeyman, a term one jazz writer is infatuated with. He never got bigger because he never left Philadelphia. That was his choice, because he could play.

You also got to remember that being a Black free lancer in those days presented plenty of problems. Don’t kid yourself. Being in the North helped, for sure, but Miles Davis gottbeat up in New York City and Roy Eldridge got jumped in York, Pennsylvania. Philly was not conspicuously progressive, believe me. Ask anyone about Dick Allen’s first years with the Phillies. Not a pretty story.

Tommy Sims passed away in 1986 in Philadelphia. I never heard him live. I’d have to say that aside from never hearing Coltrane live, it is the biggest regret of my experience with music. For real. Sims is buried out near West Chester, PA, and one of these days, I’ll go pay my respects. The least I can do.

I Had A Flight to Catch, So I Killed Him

I’d tell you the names have been changed to protect the innocent. But there are no innocent parties. So I name names. And I’d tell you that the following is a true story. And it is, although some of it hasn’t happened yet. But just wait. As sure as my name is Richard Joseph Salvucci, story is bound to happen. And remember. I always say you can’t make this stuff up.

Any event, we flew to Philly via United Airlines. It was uneventful, thank God. At the behest of United, we rented a car from Avis, from whom I had sworn forty years ago that I would never rent a car again after they refused to abide by a contract. And until now, I had kept that promise. Now I have new reasons to avoid Avis entirely. I will, in due course, treat you to some of them.

I recent took a flying trip back to home. Home, as my faithful readers know, is Philadelphia. Linda and I went to help a friend celebrate her fiftieth wedding anniversary. This was very pleasant. Linda saw some of her old friends. We did the old-fashioned Catholic thing and tended our parents and relatives graves in Sts Peter and Paul Cemetary (known to the locals as “Two Guys” after a a defunct discount chain). We hit Murray’s Deli which is, as they say, Old School. We went to Termini’s bakery on our way out of town (it is in South Philly) to get real Eyetalian cookies and stuff. And we visited some parts of neighborhoods where we thought we might be able to escape if Felonius Punk (aka Agent Orange), God forbid, gets reelected. You never know. Never bet against the stupidity of the American people. There are friends and relatives we both wish we had seen, but time was short and we just had to make choices. No offense to anyone, if anyone is offended. I can’t imagine why anyone would be, but people seem to get offended a lot nowadays.

So we have this reservation for what passes as a modest vehicle. It was not the model I wanted, but I know you can’t expect to get that, especially if you are traveling peasant class. So we get to the office here and we have to sweat a line–not too bad, really. None of this run out to the lot, choose your car, and go! That’s only for dudes like Joe Buck.

When we are attended, I pull out all the required documents, including proof of insurance! I decline all the crap they want to add on. Then I wait. And wait. And wait. It takes like fifteen minutes to get my card approved. I wonder why, since this is one bill that gets paid religiously. They say, well, this happens when we have a lot of people renting cars. I thought that sounded odd, but what the Hell. Another customer was fighting with them over why she had to have a credit card, so why make things worse? So we wait, and wait, and finally, we get approved with the usual caveat about how much Avis will block on the card. Like I have a choice? Fine.

So now we get to go to our car, right? Wrong?

“They will bring your car to the door.” So we wait. And wait. And wait. And there is another couple waiting. And waiting. And waiting. After at least half an hour, the Avis types bring the other folks their car. Still dripping wet because it was just washed–because it was apparently just returned. Because they don’t have any cars available. Oh. Yeah, they cut their fleets back during Covid, Linda says. Oh. Blame Biden. Sure. Why not? But he wasn’t President then, was he? No, Trump was. But people blame Biden. They think Trump will do a better job of handling the economy. On what grounds? Who knows? Cause some bot on FB told them so. Makes sense.

In the meantime, the other couple–also Golden Agers–are getting out of their freshly washed car because they say it is dirty. So they want another car. Picky. Picky. So as they wait and hold up the works, we continue to wait. And wait. And wait.

Finally, these guys get something they can live with. So we are told to wait for a gray Mazda. Ok. I have no idea what a gray Mazda looks like other than it is gray. Finally–and it is now going on an hour since we hit Avis–someone pulls up in some low slung gray thing that is also dripping wet. Because it was just returned. Last in, first out. We double check with an employee. This one? Grunts affirmatively.

Then we try to figure out how to open trunk because we have luggage. God knows. No indication so I shanghai another Avis type and nicely ask how to get the #$%^& trunk open. Dude obliges. Not very roomy, but there you go. After my usual trying to figure out how the damn car operates, we try pushing off. But there is this persistent low frequency kerchunk noise. And it ain’t stopping. I pull over in the lot and listen under the hood. Nothing. Linda looks at me and says something like I bet it’s the radio. So then we go through the “which button, slider, dial, icon, whatever” do we manipulate to turn off the radio, if it is the radio making the noise. Random search finally shuts off the noise. See. Logic, right? This has consumed another fifteen minutes, so when we finally get through the exit security, we are free. Just like the old commercials. Smiling, tanned and beautiful, we hit the open road.

Right.

Actually, we try to figure out where the Hell to go because the signage out of PHL is about as helpful as the signage out of SAT, which I swear is useful only if you already know where you are headed. We sort of do, but you know, I am never sure to go North or South on I95 because we are headed out to Radnor Township and then Chester County. My sense of direction is that of a hopeless left-hander, which means I always head the wrong way. I assume if I think it is the right way, it is wrong; and viceversa. So we have an amicable difference about where the Hell we are going. We head South, and just as I am certain we’re gonna end up in Maryland, we hit I476 (known as the Blue Route over the nimby battle that occurred half a century ago about where to site the evil concrete beast, which actually sat only partially completed for years as a drag strip) and went North. Lost??? Don’t worry. We were headed out to Villanova, and as graduates of that illustrious house of studies, we know the way, eventually. You can always find ‘Nova. Look for the Wildcat holding a beer.

Any event, we get to our destination, which is where our friend’s wedding anniversary party was held. Man, I do not know many–if any couples–who have made it that far, because our generation pioneered the “divorce is good for everyone” stuff. At our table, alas, were two of Linda’s friends who were widows, already. They didn’t get to make the Big 5-0. So you feel good for the ones you can, empathy for the others, and vaguely guilty about yourself. Here I am, happily married 50 years, in apparent (save for few glitches) good health. And the rest of the American Dream. After our Happy Daze at Euphoric State, I should be grateful. Texas may not be anyone’s idea of a dream destination, by after learning the ropes at Whattsamatta U, well, I know there’s worse.

We did spend some time looking at real estate, in case we have to apply for asylum in the event that Felonius Punk gets reelected. Linda’s friend Eileen lives in a hilltop home with a No Fascism banner in front of it. Coolest damn thing I have ever seen. In Texas, it would invite a Christian RPG squad to take your libtard ass out. There are certainly reactionaries in that part of the world, but at least along the Main Line, they appear to be part of what people in Latin America used to call the “civilized right.” They don’t drool over dinner.

We saw some nice places and made it down to Bala Cynwyd PA and Murray’s Delicatessen and drove by Flat Rock Park for old times sake. It is still by the Schuylkill, and unspoiled. Remarkably even by Philly standards. And safe. Linda was feeling not so good, and we stopped there for her to take a COVID test. She still felt dreadful, but tested negative, so off we went. The one really disconcerting moment was when we were on Montgomery Avenue out by Bryn Mawr, Baldwin, and Shipley–real high dollar educational venues for the young and privileged (of any ethnicity, thank you. This is a Liberowl Paradise.).Some dork pulled up in a, well, pickup with a cut-out of Trump riding shotgun. Man, we hadn’t even seen that in Texas, so it threw us into the grass is always greener mode. Literally, cause it still rains around Philly. The sheer shock of seeing Agent Orange around Bryn Mawr instead of New Braunfels sort of brought us back to reality. He’s everywhere. Sort of Like the Anti-God.

Paradise Regained: Where the Brisket is Good, but the Corned Beef is Better

So, missions accomplished. We both knew we can’t go home again. Home no longer exists. We left in 1981 and 43 years is long stroll. Lots of ghosts of Christmas past, but what feels good also feels bad. Make any sense? You see your friends after 43 years and wonder if you look as awful to them as some of them do to you. Life just beats people down, and some of these guys have had a difficult ride–so the there that’s there really isn’t there other than in memory. Well, that’s abput as deep as I get. Not very.

Time to take our car back to Avis. Now it really gets, well, surreal. When we figure out the directions to rental car return, we get to Fortress Avis. You know, tire-piercing spikes greet you if you back up and there ia a security wall that would do the White House proud. But wait. There’s more. As you ease into the facility you realize that there are at fifty or more equally anxious returnees jammed up in a long, chaotic line. We weren’t cutting it close, so just sitting in an ever-growing cue didn’t so much upset us as astound us. WTF? Not only could you not get a car, but you couldn’t return one? Even for modern America, this seemed sort of dysfunctional, not to say dangerous. Cause sure enough, the cars behind us are spilling out into the airport highway loaded with a lot of ticked off, increasingly frantic travellers. Hey. I got a plane to catch. And I can’t do it from here, right? Right.

Linda tells me that something similar happened in Austin, Texas a few weeks ago and people just abandoned their rentals by the side of the road. Avis, of course, has neither a sense of humor or responsibility, so they have been apparently been sending out letters with humongous fines to the derelict owners who just wanted to make a plane, even if they had to waalk with baggage to a distant terminal. I admit, this is a new one to me. I know nothing really works correctly in America these days, but this one was kind of astounding–not to mention scary. Well, why scary?

You know damn right well that in this situation, it’s every customer for him or herself. Sort of logical. You want to get out of a burning building, everyone heads for the door. No one gets through. And people die in heaps at the exits. Hell, you want to be first. It’s rational. It’s also deadly. And since Avis had seen fit to send no one out to the line to reassure the ansty folk that someone would assist them shortly, well, folks start to take matters into their own hands. You see people get out of cars, looking around, pulling out luggage, kids and stuff, and then craning to see someone, anyone. Or no one. No one really talks it over, right. Hell, no one makes eye contact. You think, oh my God, this is Philly, and this will get ugly very quickly. Sort of like the crowd at an Iggles’ game. You realize some people are trying to edge their rentals in front of you even if they came in later. Your first instinct, right, yo! what you think you’re doing bruh? I was here first. And then you say, wait, do, road rage. Or Rent Rage. Damn, some of these people are probably carrying. And the only way to find out is to encourage confrontation, which is definitely a bad idea. So what do you do? Welcome to Trump’s America.

So as you begin to contemplate how to protect your spouse from some nut from a Red State, an Avis employee finally shows up. It’s been about 25 minutes and people are leaving in droves. Ms Avis don’t care. “Leave the key in the car. Leave the motor running. And thank you for renting from Avis.” Dude, we got baggage. Tough. Cars are blocking the way. Tough. Where the Hell is the bus to the terminal. Go find it.

So you watch people jostling past each other and struggle to somehow get to a terminal to make a flight. You think, oh Lord, is this like Texas or Florida? Do I stand my ground? And because I am unarmed, risk getting shot over a car rental? You think this stuff, and then push it out of your mind. Today is not a good day to die, to quote Worf, and damned if it’s gonna be over a car rental.

Well, we got out in one piece. We were shaking our heads all the way home. And once we landed in San Antonio, we had to wait for over an hour before United Airlies retrieved our bags. Hell, we didn’t make it home until 2AM. But that would be a whole ‘nother story. And you really don’t want to hear it, right? No you don’t.

So, look, bring food and a sleeping bag the next time you plan a short trip to a domestic destination. It beats carrying a gun right? You remember all them great rental commercials from the 1960s? God almighty. Let Hertz put you in the Driver’s Seat? This one would be more like an episode from the Twilight Zone. You remember? “Willoughby, this stop is Willoughby?”

Yeah, God help me, I feel like getting off here.

Night

PD As a student, I remember reading a short story by Julio Cortazar called “El Autopista del Sur.” If memory serves, a huge traffic tie up somewhere in the fantasy wilds of Argentina becomes the occasion for the local populace to come out and attack the idled motorists. Why does this story come to mind after going through this idiocy?

Qvam Pinus, Father

No. That’s not what you think it means, if you think it means anything at all. And this otherwise adolescent recollection has a serious point, especially with the way political life in the United States is evolving. I suppose I’m going to come across as a complete reactionary, but it’s not as if I care any longer. I am in the process of accepting my fate.

You must remember that the events I am recounting stretch back to the Dark Ages, AD (ok, CE if you feel better) 1967 or so. They involve the sensibilities and humor of adolescent males at an exclusively male Catholic school. In case you haven’t guessed, sensibilities change. While I still find some of this deeply amusing, you had to be there, I suppose. And the point I want to make is, again, serious. You may disagree. That is your privilege.

I had started one of these “bare, ruined choirs” things, but dropped it. I figures no one really cares what happened to the Church I grew up in unless they are at least 70, and maybe 80. And even then, I don’t know many who actually care. So instead I will simply say that love of the Latin language, amor linguae latinae, has been one of the apparent casualties. Oh, yeah. There are some schools where it is still taught–I insisted my son study Latin in high school, which I am sure did a great deal for male bonding, especially when some of his friends insisted on telling him it was “a dead language.” That is not only facile, but incorrect, as any educated person knows. The common figure is that 60 percent of words in English are derived from a Latin root by borrowing, if not direct descent. Which explains why we tended to crush the English SATs back then in a way that the publics (US version) did not. Their loss. And that is trivial. But education is in a bad way in USAmerica, so to Hell with it.

I would have studied Latin no matter where I went to high school, cause my Mother wasn’t about to see me run wild with the heathen (not to mention heathen women) at Lower Merion HS. So it was Catholic one way or another. And in those days, that pretty much meant Latin. The only questions I think was how much and at what level.

Now may Dad, God rest his soul, graduated from West Catholic High School in Philly in 1937. That was no some fancy ass place, and he had his Latin war stories for me. His favorite was “E et noli reddire.” This was to put me in my place when failing to translate “Go and do not return” satisfactorily, as he once did. Yes, imperatives, negative imperative, weird irregular verb form, all that stuff. I’m sure he never said that to anyone flying a B-17 in 1941, but it was what it was. I remembered how obnoxious quoting Latin could be when Robert Oppenheimer apparently said to Lewis Strauss before his security clearance hearing, “Nos morituri te salutamus.” which Strauss supposedly didn’t understand. Supposedly the Roman gladiators addressed the Emperor (really, te?) before the fun and games in the Colosseum (artist’s conception, below) If you haven’t read the transcript of the security committee or seen the Sam Waterstone TV series (I haven’t bothered with the recent movie) you’ll have to look it up. Heh. Maybe it’s apocryphal (more Latin). Anyway, Strauss didn’t much like Oppie, and this, if it happened, didn’t improve things.

Latin was the lingua franca of the Pre-Vatican II Council (1962-1965) church and even if you spoke it badly, you were expected to get by on formal occasions. I heard amusing stories about whitebread Philly types getting around in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s by using some Latin with a priest (Habes-ne uxorem? Olim, sed non nunc: roughly, “Are you married. Not any more.”), and I know until quite recently you could still go to Rome and study Latin with an American priest in “boot camp” form (he has since passed on). There is still a Pontifical Academy for Latin (https://www.pontificiaacademialatinitatis.org/) although, hah, hah, its text is in Tuscan (Italian). But in those days, even as the Roman Catholic Church was losing its Roman Imperial soul, you could still expect to do Latin in a Catholic high school. I knew people who did it in college at Villanova, but I opted for Castillian (Spanish) as, perhaps, a shade more practical. Or, as we said, “relevant.” As an Anglo doing Mexican history, “cultural appropriation” is now more fashionable than “relevance.”

So, here we were, fourteen years old for the most part, and beginning our journey in Latin with the Piarist Fathers at Devon Prep. I doubt any of them were trained classicists and we never got the reconstituted Classical Pronunciation. It was, well, ecclesiastical pronunciation, of which which I thought Keewees Romanus Sum (Civis Romanus Sum) was some sort of put on. So, for the real toffs (I didn’t know any Harrovians then, thank God), we weren’t for real. And, to an extent, our first two years were sort of watered down. Oh, we learned the basic grammar and all that, which was quite enough, cause Latin is, like modern German, an inflected language–the form of the word would change with case, number, gender, that sort of thing. And of course the damned adjectives had to agree, so the possibilities for screwing up even basic stuff were numerous. My first sentence: “Livia puella est.” Followed by (I think) “Livia pulchra est.” Ok: Livia is a girl. Livia is a pretty girl. Hey man, it was 1965. What do you expect? This was an all boys’ school and the priests figured they had to hook us one way or another. The life and adventures (chaste) of pulchritidinous Livia beat talking about Roman plumbing. Cause we all were immediately trying to figure out how to hit on Livia. In Latin. Use your imagination and pretend you are a fourteen year old guy. And so it went. Until Year III.

You didn’t have to go on after Second Year, but I think maybe between 5 and 10 of us did. And all of a sudden, Livia the Hot was gone. In her place was some guy named Cicero and another one inauspiciously dubbed Cataline. Very bad news. We had gotten watered down Caesar in our Second year (“Gallia omnia divisa est in partes tres?), but not in the original. All of that suddenly changed.

My first two Latin teachers were Piarist fathers nicknamed Stubby and Dizzy. The nicknames were quite appropriate, Stubby was a Polish priest with an unpronounceable name (to us) who was short, squat, and gentle. I never saw him get angry–and it wasn’t as if he had no provocation from us. I think it was because all of us realized–even the idiots–that he was something special and endearing. His name was Fr Soczowka, Sch. P. He was followed directly Second Year by Dizzy. Stubby, then Dizzy.

Diz, of course, was another matter. He came by his moniker honestly.

He seemed distracted, addled, occasionally made no sense when he spoke, and was kind of crazy. By name, Fr Julius Olszewski, Sch. P. he was generally placid enough other than for his enigmatic sayings (“Make round on 29”–I have no idea) and occasional eruptions when we were screwing around (always) (“I will give you such a kick that your head will turn around and you will never suppose”). He also took great exception to being called Dizzy, which is understandable. We did get as far as De Bello Gallico, at least a watered-down version. It proved useful in providing names of various barbarian tribes into which we divided as teams playing pick-up basketball (I never got beyond the Suevi, who stunk), so there was that. Also, iacta alea est and crossing the Rubicon and, well, that kind of literary thing. No one got hurt and we learned ablative absolute and subjunctive verb forms Besides, we were reading both volumes of Brinton, Christopher and Wolff in two years of Western Civ, so we had some idea of what was going on. Two years. Literally Plato to NATO. I’m still working off some of that from half a century ago. No regrets, by the way. In any event, there was once a jock strap war in his class. Yup. I’ll leave it to your imagination.

Latin II with Diz

In Latin III, the fun came to a halt, for a while at least. First, we got a stone serious teacher. His name was Stanislaus Swiatek, Sch.P. He didn’t screw around. He was genial enough, but nobody messed with him. He was, colloquially, Stan, although no one dared call him that to his face. He was wiry, medium height, curly hair but balding, fingers stained by nicotine, and a raspy smoker’s voice to accompany it. He radiated “no bullshit”, and lots of stories circulated about his exploits in 1956 when he may have eaten a few Russians alive in Hungary. I could–and can–see it. He was a tough central European customer down to the soles of his feet. And then came Cicero and Cataline.

We got a serious text, none of this schola bona est crap. Uh uh.

“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?”

A colloquial modern informal translation of this might be: “Dude. Cataline. How long do you plan to torque us around?” That’s not strictly accurate, of course. “How long will you abuse our patience, Cataline. How long will this madness of yours continue to make fools of us? And to what end will your unbridled arrogance be on display?” That’s a little better, probably not for purists, but you get the idea. Cicero (106-43 BCE), a famous Roman statesman, consul, and source of adolescent nightmares second only to Calculus, was here denouncing his rival, Cataline, whom Cicero claimed was part of a plot to overthrow him as consul. And Cicero (Kickero to the toffs) saw Cataline off, as in put to death. I think that appealed to Stan, cause he grinned wickedly when he worked through the speech with us. And he emphasized (I realized in retrospect), that Cicero was going for the kill by insisting that “nos eludet” should be rendered as “make sport of us”. For a guy whose native language wasn’t English like Stan, that was something, because the root of the Latin verb “eludere” was “ludus” or game. So if you wanted to be coarse about it, there was a sense in which Cicero was accusing Cataline of “screwing around” with a central Roman institution of governance–disrespectfully–, you know, playing cat and mouse with the Roman Senate. I remember venturing (as if it were yesterday) that “mock” would be a better choice. Stan wasn’t having it. “Salvucci. He is brigand (yeah, Stan used that kind of vocabulary and diction).” As if to say, “Kid, you may may mock me, but Cataline was toying with someone well above him. He had it coming.”

See, what you got, even as a dense kid, was some idea of the power of language to shape reality. In a way, to create reality. While your Mother may have crassly seen Latin as a means to a 730 in the English SAT (yeah, our class had an 800, but it DC, not me) you were getting a far more subtle lesson. And, yeah, the idea that a traitor was going to be held responsible for his actions–big time–rubbed off too. You may not have gotten all the details, but slowly, there was an accretion of the notion of responsibility, especially public responsibility. You know: “Salus populii suprema est lex.” The Highest Law is the Good of the People. Oh, yeah. Lessons from a dead language. You think Trump or his henchpeople (there, better?) ever learned them? I doubt it. And then there was subjunctive mood (now largely lost to English), tense sequence, periphrastic, deponent and, mirabile dictu, other horrors. And don’t tell me this stuff didn’t stick. It did. It has

Oh man, you are too serious, as one of my less beloved classmates informed me a few years ago. Yeah, well, that’s life. Some are. And some aren’t. But if you think all it was was Sallust, Livy, Nepos, and Pliny the Elder (and, on my own, with assistance from the Assistant Head, Fr Magyar, or “Wheels” as he was fondly known, for part of senior year, Tacitus, Germania, guess again. This was high school and we were, well, never lost for creative ways of messing around. You had to let off steam somehow, because in those days, it was all steam. A different world, believe me. Everything was punishable by expulsion. And our Head, an austere Hungarian we called “Nose” (guess why), didn’t mess around. And we knew it.

Well, Stan was not in the best of health (he died from heart problems in 1971), and at some point in the year, he was replaced by Father Kalman Miskolczy, Sch.P., a tall, lean, red haired guy with a distinct bump on his forhead which produced the cruel but universally held (even among the lay faculty) nickname, “Ripple.” (Dizzy got similar deference: the then current pop-song saw to that.) There was also a cheap sparkling wine of that name in those days, so I guess that helped, although most of us looked for beer. Oh boy. Ripple was something else, and he was comic relief (inadvertant) to Stan’s intensity.

********

Some of this is hard to explain, and we certainly didn’t sound very serious. But you try reading Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis. If I’m not mistaken, Pliny the Elder met his end investigating the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 73 AD, so he is regarded as a serious classical scholar. The work is one of the largest surviving extant classical texts. In a way, it was a bit odd. Pliny the Younger (his nephew) actually provided extrabiblical evidence for the existence of Christians (and historical existence of Jesus Christ) in his Epistulae (as did Tacitus, Suetonius, and quite a few others) , but I guess the textbook got his uncle, the Elder and the natural history, and so did we. On very rough inspection–now years removed–it looks a little easier to construe than some of the stuff we were doing. But, I mean, having teenage boys reading long passages on Roman flora and fauna, or, for God’s sake, clouds, was almost certain to result in wandering minds. Wandering minds, then, led to mischief. And mischief, with Ripple, usually led to catastrophe.

“Pinaster nihil est aliud quam pinus silvestris minor altitudine et a medio ramosa, sicut pinus in vertice. Copiosiorem dat haec resinam quo dicemus modo. Gignitur et in planis. easdem arbores alio nomine esse per oram Italiae quas tibulos vocant, plerique arbitrantur, sed graciles succinctioresque et enodes liburnicarum ad usus, paene sine resina.”

Ok, I thought I’d take an honest pass at this without looking at a translation to figure out why this particularly passage set off the wildest convulsion (there were several) in Latin III under Ripple. I’m not going to do this literally, but basically, it is a description of a type of pine tree. Y’all remember, The Pines of Rome, and justly celebrated they are. Older Philadelphians may remember that Respighi’s theme was the sign-off music that WFIL-TV used in the 1950s back in Philly, back when television was “a vast wasteland,” unlike now, unending font of cultural metaphors it has become. But that obviously wasn’t what flipped us.

Qvam Pinus!!!

“Pinaster is nothing other than a variety of wild pine, somewhat less bushy than usual in the middle than at the tip top. Let us say, it gives off a copious resin.”

Oh, oh. I’d say use your imagination, but since you’re well beyond juvenile sniggering, I guess I better help out, because I am not well beyond juvenile sniggering. “Pinus”, of course, bears a deadly homonymic resemblance to the English word “penis.” (NOT in Latin, of course). And if you want to start a riot in an all male Catholic school of the 1960s you might think of a discussion of the penis led by a sort of out-of-it-Hungarian who was a figure of fun anyway. Add to that “bushy” (Oh my God) followed by, do you believe it, “copious resin.” Surely, you don’t require any more assistance? Oh man, we were, and I remember this vividly, off to the races.

I can still hear the voice of one of my classmates (initials RH) shouting out, “Aw, father, quam pinus.” And Ripple smilingly obliging with “Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by another, shouted somewhat more brazen (initials JS), “Hey, Father, heh heh, are you quam pinus?” “Yes, Yes, qvam pinus!” Followed by an explosion of laughter, grinning and shouting of “quam pinus?) directed at each other, inevitably followed by–you knew this was coming–“copious resin.” I do think Ripple lost control of us for at least ten minutes, as we accused each other of being “quam pinus” “sine resina”. You had to be there, believe me. This was a class which ended up with several National Merit Scholars of various degrees, all of whom were dissolved in laughter, with poor bewildered, befuddled Ripple trying to figure out what the Hell was so funny. And finally losing it too, realizing something was going on , and he had to put a stop to it. “Quam Pinus, Father!” Yup. Devon Preparatory School. Pietas et Litteras. Anno Domini 1967. Laudetur Iesus Christus.

It’s a shame, really. At that point, at least some of us could pretty much read medieval Latin texts on sight. You know, descriptions of kids skating, festivals, which was nothing in comparison to what we had been basically compelled to do. We might have been able, but we were silly kids and did silly kid stuff. I didn’t know–how could I–that there was a huge body of Latin literature–mostly of a religious nature, such as sermons from the Spanish Empire in later centuries, that nobody, to my knowledge, had really worked through for any reason. Then.

But wait, let it never be said that while on I was on right track, I followed the wrong train. Or maybe that’s just what my career about. Check this brand new volume out. OUP, no less. Like Marlon Brando, I followed the Econ, my Rod Steiger, a one way train to Palookaville. Had I followed Stan, I could have been a contender. Congratulations Professor Laird. You wrote the book I should have written, not something about debt, woolens, or–God forbid–the importance of factor endowments in Mexican economic history.

Quam pinus, Salvucci. Better, as they said on the walls of Pompeii, Magister spado es.

All Politics is Local (and History, too)

The nice thing about a blog is you can do what you want. No pain-in-the-ass referees or editors. No academic brownie points, but no mindless annual reviews, H-indexes, or gruesome get-togethers that academics call “conferences,” “congresses,” or some such either.

What brought this entry on was an acute attack of thought. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often, but there you have it. While cooling my heels to see how a cake in the oven turns out, I entertain myself reading. Some is work-related. Some of it is the grim state of our world. When one genre starts to depress, I switch to the other. This is what the Econ call maximizing at relevant margins.

I’m back to Mexico again, which never depresses for long because it is too damn interesting. So right now I’m reading into the local history of the state of Veracruz, but I’ve also read a couple of interesting academic biographies too. It all connects up, at least in my aging brain.

Two of the biographies I’ve read have famous anthropologists/archeologists as their subject: Tatiana Proskouriakoff is one and Zelia Nuttall is the other.

So who were these characters, and why should anyone care? Actually, you don’t have to care, because both were interested in relatively esoteric matters. Proskouriakoff was a pioneer in the study of the Maya in Mexico. Nuttall worked in Mesoamerican studies more broadly and was present at the creation. They were vastly different personalities: one, Proskouriakoff, very attractive, the other, Ms Nuttall, not so much. Both were very smart, a fact of which Ms Nuttall seemed intent on reminding her audience regularly. Proskouriakoff, a Russian emigre, grew up in Lansdowne, PA, a streetcar suburb of Philadelphia, more genteel a century ago than it is now. She was secure enough to let those surrounding her come to terms with her brilliance, which they inevitably did.

Nuttall was a product of considerable wealth in Northern California and determined to make a mark in Mesoamerican studies, which she did. She played for DH Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent (1926) what Ottoline Morrell did for Aldous Huxley in Chrome Yellow (1921) We are not always lucky in our memorialists, but we get the ones we deserve. To be sure, Nuttall made pioneering contributions to understanding the Mesoamerican sidereal calendar and its monumental artefacts. But she also pioneered linking the Phoenicians to the cultural base of the Americas, a substantial assertion–quite mistaken–of which her biographer conveniently makes no mention. As a result, her biography has a sort of ‘you go girl’ quality that makes it less convincing and amateurish in its way. Such are the joys of contemporary scholarship.

Proskouriakoff’s biography, a product of a more restrained time just twenty years ago, is considerably different in tone, just as its subject was in her approach to life and professional development. She trained as an architect at Penn State (talk about being alone in the world) and eventually turned an encounter with the Maya into pathbreaking work that lead directly to decoding Mayan glyphs. She had an uncanny ability to examine ruins and– by dint of hard work, her savvy, and her training–envision a reconstruction of the form and appearance the original must have taken. She also had to put up with some of her colleagues in the field hitting on her incessantly, in case you wondered. They were different times and female professionals dealt with the harassment as their background and temperament permitted. You end up admiring her rather than wondering how anyone could have tolerated her. I never met her, unfortunately. We were both cigarette smokers.

Even though Proskouriakoff’s biography was brought out by a far less prestigious press, it is a much more compelling (and better edited) book. A variety of factors are at play. For one thing, Proskouriakoff was a contemporary figure (1909-1985) and basically familiar. Nuttall seems Edwardian, if not Victorian (1857-1933), and just oddly remote and unsympathetic, even though she had a tougher time in life than Proskouriakoff. I suspect, historicism apart, the ability of the authors to evoke a life in some sense reflects their familiarity with the subject. Nuttall emerges from documents, basically. That is always a heavy lift, dependent on the historical imagination, and even deep familiarity with the peculiarities of time, place and mores. Proskouriakoff, whose life was sketched out by a long-time assistant, might have been a figure out of the Bolshevik Revolution, but she only returned to Russia once. She was, all told, a slightly exotic kid from Lansdowne, (where her family settled) a Philly suburb not unlike mine–and honestly, I went to a sort of cosmopolitan secondary school that had its share of people not far different from her. I never heard Russian on my school bus, but Hungarian, Spanish, and even the occasional Italian. So, part of the reaction is, well, yeah, I surely knew people like her.

Nuttall, unfortunately, however remote she may seem, reminds me of any number of academics, both male and female, thank you very much. Maybe it was just my sojourn in Northern California as a “Latin Americanist” that did it, but it is a personality type, perhaps more acceptable to men in men, but I found it insufferable in either gender. And in a 1955 essay on originality in Economics, George Stigler nailed virtually every aspect of it, starting with “Read my work because I am a genius.” Quite. Nuttall may have had few rivals, but, alas, she has many peers, and gender is the least of it. Proskouriakoff may not have had much time for Linda Schele’s controversial work on the Maya, but she never seems to have taken a personal dislike to her, much less try to do her down. No comment.

From personal experience, it’s tougher to write about a person who scholarship involves an unfamiliar field, either through lack of training or experience. Writing about someone who did heavy lifting in Mesoamerican studies demands any number of linguistic and technical skills that you don’t pick up casually. I never learned Nahautl because I was too intent on learning economics. That was my choice, and it does put limits on what I will try to do. I learned enough paleography to get proficient at reading documents from New Spain 40 years ago. I’d have to relearn now, and I have neither the time nor the patience to do so. You can’t read every book, and you can’t be proficient in every discipline, even though we encourage undergraduates to double (or triple) major, therefore displaying impressive ignorance in more than one field.

Which, at last, bring us to back to Veracruz. I’ve long had a side interest working on a family firm based there, a group of people known collectively as The Lizardi. Part of what got me interested in these people was their little known ascent in international business and finance in the nineteenth century. I always wondered why these guys and not so many others, since Mexico was full of entrepreneurial merchants in the late colonial period who could have just as easily moved their assets abroad (and some, for sure, did).

My naive hypothesis was that the elder members of the Lizardi group were just prescient, you know. One of them said, in the 1820s, “God forbid we get into a war with the United States,” which I took to be pretty, if not uniquely, clear sighted. I figured that the family was spooked by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, which brought the boundary of the United States via Louisiana cheek-by-jowl with Texas, which was still a Mexican colony. Well, we know how that turned out. The Lizardi could read the handwriting on the wall and decided to get out. Seems reasonable. And probably is.

But it’s the kind of gross kind of Anglocentrism that someone who really doesn’t understand what was going on in the Mexican countryside, particularly around Veracruz, that was perhaps of more immediate concern to them. Stay with me briefly: this has both an end and a point.

A lot of us, out of sheer habit or laziness, focus on the Insurgency in the Bajio. That was where the action was, and where Hidalgo was. And that’s not incorrect. In fact, the Lizardi did a lot of business with a big merchant named Cayetano Rubio based in Queretaro. We know their ability to sell, remit payment and vice versa was heavily impacted by the fighting there. Merchandise, if it could move at all, moved under convoy, and it was slow, insecure and expensive. But that was hardly the end of it. Hidalgo’s successor, Jose Maria Morelos, was already active in Veracruz (around Orizaba) in 1812. The Lizardi did nothing but complain about the guerilla bands in Veracruz, probably loosely associated with Morelos, who were active in Veracruz well into the late 1810s, if not later. They were violent, bloody, and also tended to bring internal trade to a halt. If you were import-export merchants, as were the Lizardi, this regional turmoil was probably as bad, if not worse, than what transpired in the Bajio, which simply compounded their misery. I’ve read the letters–it’s there. And frankly more of an issue than what went on elsewhere. The Lizardi were a Veracruz-based operation. As long as they couldn’t count on functioning normally in their home base, they might as well go looking elsewhere. Previous business in Louisiana and Great Britain suggested this was where opportunity lay–and they seized it. Manuel Julian Lizardi became an American citizen in his quest to find a future: money has no smell, right? God forbid there should be a war……God forbid. I’ll become a citizen.

So I’m beginning to understand why the family was anxious to get out of Veracruz–and Mexico–for greener pastures. Yeah, Manifest Destiny was on their mind. But their money was in Veracruz. We care about Manifest Destiny. The Lizardi didn’t.

Long story short: it’s taken years of poking around in lots of local documentation and historiography to begin to figure this out. How on Earth are you supposed to divine the complexities of pre-Conquest Mesoamnerican history and its earliest practitioners if your motivation for doing is basically sisterhood. That may be a necessary condition for getting the story straight. But, take it from me, it will never be sufficient, however well intentioned.