JOHN H. McFADDEN AND HIS AGE: PROMOTIONAL PRESENTATION

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EIGHT DECADES OF CAMPUS JOURNALISM (See Gallery Above)

         Student Journalism 

 at

 New York University

1894-1970

By Richard D. Carreño

I

LATE IN AUGUST 1968, The New York Times reported that John F. Hatchett, New York University’s Black student center head, had made remarks construed as antisemitic. The ensuing controversy over the interpretation of Hatchett’s views threw the University into turmoil. Many Black students, some of whom had nominated Hatchett as director of the Martin Luther King Student Center, resented "outside"—and even, it was contended—racially-motivated second-guessing of their choice. The Times, in an editorial, had furthermore suggested that Hatchett should consider resigning, or be removed.

Tempers were already emotionally charged. In Chicago, the Democratic National Convention nominated Hubert H. Humphrey, an apologist for the Vietnam War, over peace candidate Eugene McCarthy as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate. In a Los Angeles hotel kitchen a month earlier, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered. A few months before, Martin Luther King had been killed in Memphis. That spring, at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, radical students went on strike, effectively closing the university. Police intervention assured the strike's bloody end.

With the University’s autumn semester soon underway, many students at NYU’s Washington Square campus sensed that a strike of their own was in the wind—largely powered by anger and frustration bred by the Vietnam War. A galvanizing catalyst for protest had become the swirling hostility surrounding John F. Hatchett.

***

The Washington Square Journal had reported the student strike at Columbia. Two reporters had covered, earlier in August, the Democratic National Convention—and subsequent rioting—in Chicago. For now, at NYU, the possible spill-over from the Hatchett Affair had become the story.

In mid-September 1968, as the new semester began, the Washington Square Journal went missing in an official listing of student-run publications at the Greenwich Village campus, in the then-current, new edition of "On the Square," the campus’ activities directory. "On the Square" editors knew, unlike the 17,000 returning undergraduate and graduate students that fall, that the Journal was riven by internal strife over editorial direction and management that might prevent publication for the first time in its thirteen-year history. Out of caution, “On the Square” spiked the Journal entry.

***

THE PAPER’S WOES began in the spring. Co-editors-in-chief Andrew Cagen (later, in the fall, a reporter for The Record in Hackensack, New Jersey) and Richard Prince (later a reporter for The Washington Post), had planned to upgrade the tabloid's twice-weekly publication to three times a week. This latter schedule had been the rule until 1963. Despite some misgivings by the business staff, reporters and editors largely greeted the proposed change with enthusiasm. The Managing Board agreed the increased frequency would revitalize the paper. But Cagen and Prince also argued that the revised schedule would not be financially feasible. For one thing, they said, the paper's printers, All-Set Printers in Chelsea, would not print the Journal within the paper's current, or anticipated fall budget.

Moreover, they added, the paper's editorial freedom could be compromised if the University continued to underwrite the paper's operating budget and staff stipends. Financial independence, a model at other university papers, was recommended. Some editors stressed potential Administration censorship. Others noted a growing rift between the paper’s editorial and business-advertising divisions.

"The business staff was always appointing Phi Eps to new positions on its staff," Prince remembered. "They tended to be—they were—more conservative, and they didn't go along with the paper's semi-New Left editorial policy."

Highlighting the estrangement was the prospective endorsement in the 1968 presidential contest. Editorial had supported Kennedy. Shortly before his assassination, Barry Newman, The Times' NYU correspondent reported the Journal’s endorsement of Kennedy. The business staff—despite its depiction as "conservative"—endorsed former Wisconsin Senator Eugene McCarthy, an anti-Vietnam War candidate viewed to be even to the left of Kennedy. Outraged by the published Kennedy endorsement, the business staff (including future editor-in-chief Madeline Weisberger) wrote to The Times "correcting" Newman's endorsement story.

Their letter to the editor was ignored. Friction between the two staffs heated up. Prince complained that the sports and business staffs operated like "fiefdoms." "The editor-in-chief [was] really only the editor of the news columns," he said. Joining editors Cagen and Prince in their critique were Nancy McKeon, another former editor-in-chief, and the Journal's executive editor, Robert Oppedisano, who had been elected incoming editor-in-chief.

Their solution was expanded publication frequency. The plan was risky, given the paper’s known budget constraints. Still, the editors believed that it would be almost certain that the Administration would fund any forthcoming shortfall. They also knew that their expansion plan would meet with resistance from Business Manager Louis Capozzi, a fiscal watchdog who believed that the paper should publish within budget.

As for potential censorship, that point theoretically was correct. The University, as Journal's publisher, could attempt to influence the paper. This had never been done, and there was no reason, nor, evidence, to believe that the liberal-minded Administration of President James M. Hester would so going forward. In the 1967-1968 school year, the only "intimidation" had been a few letters from Dr. Harold B. Whiteman, Jr., the mild-mannered assistant chancellor for student affairs, requesting that the paper revise its policy of freely printing vulgarities. The letters were dismissed. Moreover, the Journal's faculty advisor, M.L. “Mike” Stein, the journalism department's chairman, had little interaction with daily activities.

Finally, plans for the Journal’s expanded frequency were scrapped. Cagen, Prince, and Oppedisano had an unstated agenda in mind. "So we decided to form a new paper," Prince recalled.

We also hoped to take several reporters and associate board members with us, which we did. We wondered at first what would happen to Journal. But after a while, it didn't really matter what happened because, we felt, we would have the superior paper. We would be aggressive in getting ads, while Journal was lethargic. We had all the experienced editors, while Journal's would be new.

THE INVENTIVE LIFE of GEORGE H. McFADDEN: Now at pre-pub discount. See PhilabooksBooksellers.blogspot.com for details

PUBLICATION DATE: SEPTEMBER 10

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THE INVENTIVE LIFE OF GEORGE McFADDEN

FEAR AND LOATHING

Experiencing a buttoned-up, early 20th century childhood in Philadelphia, a hot-house of professional rivalries in  pre-war Cyprus, and the deadly uncertainties of WW II spy craft in the Middle East, George H. McFadden navigated a life that was always on the line.

The Inventive Life of George H. McFadden by Richard Carreño traces McFadden’s rocky journey from  an awkward beginning as the gay scion of wealth and prominence; to Cyprus as a famed University of Pennsylvania archaeologist of ancient Greek treasures; from war-time Germany to France, Greece, and, lastly, from Egypt where he faced down the Nazi war machine as an American spy. McFadden also found time in his abbreviated, multi-faceted life for work as an accomplished poet, a pioneering translator of Homer, and as a scholar of ancient Greece and German literature.

JOHN H. McFADDEN AND HIS AGE By Richard Carreño JUNE 6 PUBLICATION

https://www.caminobooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/john-h-mcfadden-and-his-age

The PJ depends on reader support. Please help us by contributing financially or by contributing editorial content via PhiladelphiaJunto@ymail.com. Empowered by WritersClearinghouse | S.P.Q.R. 1976 Richard Carreño, Editor Copyright MMXXI. All Rights Reserved.

Carreño de Miranda

 

COURTING CONTROVERSY

By Richard Carreño

[WC News Service]

MADRID -- I have two great painters in the family.

One was my grandfather, Toribio Carreño, an early 20th-century immigrant from Cuba, who was house painter in New York.

 

The other is Juan Carreño de Miranda, a 17th-century Spanish court painter.

 

They both worked in oils.

 

That's pretty much where their artistic similarities begin and end. Toribio went on to have his ephemeral masterpieces take pride of place on several residential blocks in Brooklyn. Juan's works have proven to be more timeless, taking pride of place in the Museo Nacional del Prado here. 

 

Family legends are often dodgy, more fun to playfully indulge in than rigorously inspect, and thus it's often best not to scratch too deeply into genealogical details.

 

Still, it's more than just amusing to associate one's own DNA with a historical figure, especially a personage who can link a family's roots to a glamorous, regal past. True, Carreño de Miranda (1614-1685) wasn't as skilled, prominent, nor as well-connected as his contemporary Diego Valázquez (1599-1660). Valázquez painted kings. Carreño, for the most part, painted dukes and lesser royalty. (Though, as a royal painter, he still did get a few cracks at depicting Mad King Charles II in a few unflattering portraits). 

 

 

Franco's Monument

El Caudillo

NO PASARÁN

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]

MADRID

Part I

There are few memorials to tyrants. Consider the dictators of the World War II era.

 

Imagine the unthinkable -- a monument to Hitler; another, to Mussolini.

On the other hand, Stalin, the Soviet Union's villainous Communist dictator, still gets venerated in a Red Square, Moscow, crypt.

And, remarkably, memorialized in this country is the lesser-known, fourth butcher of that war period -- Francisco Franco, who in the wake of Spain's Civil War claimed the nation as his own as the victorious Caudillo, or Leader.

Unlike Stalin's resting place, Franco's grave site is off the tourist grid, in the Guadarrama mountain range, high above, and to the northwest, of Madrid. It's big, creepy, and chilling.

 

Franco's tomb is inside

Down Memory Lane, Dreaming of Empire

The Greater Reich, including Austria, shown in map at Vienna's war museum.

Photo: WC News Service

In many European countries, Jews are facing growing anti-Semitism, particularly as Islamic terrorism spreads widely over the continent. In Vienna, Richard Carreño, finds that Jews and their war-time persecution are just pretty much ignored.

 

VIENNA'S WORLD WAR II MEMORY LAPSE

VIENNA — The parade of jack-booted troops was greeted by thousands. Packed into Vienna's Heldenplatz, they listened in awe as he ranted about the wonders of Lebensraum. Not far away, he and his mistress, Eva Braun, shared separate apartments at the Imperial Hotel. He, in the presidential suite, with an out-door balcony overlooking Vienna's Ringstrasse, its centre-city inner loop. There, he ranted some more.

In early 1938, Adolph Hitler was at the top of his game. And the Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria, was a key piece in expanding the 'living space' (Lebensraum) of Nazi Germany. Berlin was the capital of National Socialism. Munich, its spiritual seat. Vienna, thanks to Hitler's Austrian birth, schooling, and work there, its incubator. Vienna, Hitler was fond in saying, was 'the jewel in the crown.'

Today, in a city known more for its opera and waltzes, Secessionist artists (Gustav Klimt amongst them) cappuccino mit schlag (strudel on the side), Spanish riding horses, and the Blue Danube (now, more a murky, industrial grey), there's little physical evidence that this was Adolph Hitler's 'hometown. Or, of the triumphal return of the once-disgraced, failed local art student and draft-dodger as this city's prodigal son -- homeboy, according to Viennese at the time, made 'good.'

Vienna's memory stream runs thin. Its memory lapse, deep.

EXCLUSIVE PJ PHOTOS!

*** This year is the 450th anniversary of the Spanish Riding School, to be celebrated by a gala scheduled for 7 pm at the nearby Heldenplatz on 26 June and subsequently at the 6th Fete Imperiale. In attendance will be the Royal Andalusian Riding School from Jerez, Spain. ***
THE PJ VISITS THE SPANISH RIDING SCHOOL


Me
Photos: WC News Service

VIENNA -- By the time we arrived at Michaelerplatz, during our visit last week, it was already late in the day. We suspected that our visit would be rescheduled for another day.

'No, you're just in time for the last English-language tour,' we were told.

'Where shall we meet?'

'Right here. You're it.'

Not surprisingly that we were only English-speakers really. During our week-long stay in Vienna, we encountered few, if any, other Americans. Few, if any, native English-speaking tourists. Time of the year?

But what especially was a happy result was that we were permitted to take photos, normally banned on public tours. -- Richard Carreño

 

Thanks to Wikipedia for the following:

         

The Spanish Riding School (German: Spanische Hofreitschule) of Vienna, Austria, is a traditional riding school for Lipizzan horses, which perform in the Winter Riding School (Winterreitschule) in the Hofburg. Not only is it a centre for classical dressage, the headquarters is a tourist attraction in Vienna that offers public performances as well as permitting public viewing of some training sessions. The presentation builds on four centuries of experience and tradition in classical dressage. The leading horses and riders of the school also periodically tour and perform worldwide.

More Photos Follow

LGA: US' Oldest Airport

LGA's Marine Terminal/A
Oldest Operating Air Terminal
Photos: WritersClearhouse News Service

Richard Carreno

SHIPS IN THE SKY

New York [WC News Service] | I visited another era in air travel yesterday. When planes where known as 'flying boats' and as 'airships,' and, as the old legacy American Airlines used to call them, 'flagships.' Welcome to LaGuardia Airport, America's oldest operating air/water field.

 

You mean that hodge-podge of buildings known as Terminals B and C? No, those are LGA's newcomers. Thanks to Delta, the real LGA, known as Marine Terminal (Terminal A) is still functioning. More, or less.

 

That's what I learned yesterday on my mission to discover more about the Marine Terminal, opened in 1939 by then-New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The extent of Delta's in-coming and out-going seemed dodgy, at best. Yes, there's a counter. Even TSA agents. As for passengers, not so much.

 

BE SURE TO SEE THE PHOTO GALLERY THAT FOLLOWS BELOW!

And Now the 'Women's' Page....

Judith Martin 

Richard Carreno
CAROLYN FOISY AND STYLE
Judith Martin's memory of 'For and About Women,' published in last week in The Washington Post Magazine, reminds me of my stint, in the early-to-mid-1970s, as a staff reporter and fashion columnist (the first of my gender) on 'Women,' the so-called society page at the Worcester Telegram and its sister weekend paper, the Sunday Telegram in Worcester, Massachusetts. Like Martin, I was young, but my background was somewhat different. I had been a political reporter. Thanks to The Post's 'Style' section, and seeing a kind of interpretative writing I wanted to adopt (difficult under the strictures imposed on 'straight' reporting at the time), I was able to build up the nerve to jump from 'hard' news to 'soft.'

Brown Out

BROWN BROTHERS BEARISH ON WALNUT ST.

The only person I've 'known' to have an account at Brown Brothers Harriman was a long-forgotten character in a John O'Hara novel. You get the idea. But the Main Line was derailed long ago, and it's not surprising that this vestige of that past Wasp elite is downsizing.

 -- Richard Carreño

 

The following is excerpted from the Philadelphia Business Journal:

Pearl Properties has plans to convert offices that now house Brown Brothers Harriman Co. at 1529 Walnut St. in Center City into retail space, giving that retail corridor a much needed boost. Space is tight along Walnut Street.

RICHARD CARREÑO

Frederick Wiseman
Photo/Richard Carreño

NATIONAL GALLERY DOCUMENTARY INFORMS, DESPITE MUDDLED, PLODDING EDITING

Philadelphia |WritersClearinghouse News Service

Here are the things you don't learn in National Gallery, a new documentary by the esteemed American director Frederick Wiseman: that the museum was established in 1824; it's opened 361 days a year; it houses Western art from the 13th to 19th centuries; admission is free; and that it's been located on Trafalgar Square since 1838.

     Here is what you do learn: that the museum's director, Nicholas Penny, is a scholarly, amiable chap, whose hunched over-bespectacled look suggests a character actor from Central Casting. Penny, who has been director since 2008, seems far less impervious and imperial than the Gallery's legendary war-time director, the late Lord Clark, the prolific art historian who became wildly famous for his BBC-PBS television series Civilisation.

John O'Hara UnFriends Brendan Gill

LOA Befriends Pal Joey

By JAMES MacDONALD

Exeter, England

The Library of America has just published John O'Hara's libretto for Pal Joey in a two-volume collection called American Musicals, edited by Laurence Maslon.

 

I'm delighted, having waited for it for more than fifty years. I was afraid Wilie O'Hara Dalaney, O'Hara's daughter, was going to give the rights to the Richard Greenberg rewrite; but it's the real thing, all right. It also marks O'Hara's first appearance in LOA.

Incidentally, I read John Updike's New Yorker review of The Art of Burning Bridges. A terrific corrective of O'Hara's taciturn image, as well as of his feud with Brendan Gill. Apparently the break with the magazine had little to do with Gill's A Rage to Live review; O'Hara asked to be paid for stories the magazine rejected.

 

Mr. New Yorker

Brendan Gill

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

Brendan Gill was ten years younger than O'Hara, but his level of production -- sheer wattage in words contributed to The New Yorker -- probably exceeded John O'Hara's output. Gill wrote fiction, drama, film, and architecture reviews, comment, and profiles. Short of Harold Ross and William Shawn, Gill was 'Mr. New Yorker.' That distinction wasn't lost on O'Hara; it was probably enough to put him on O'Hara's very long enemies list.

Putting O'Hara's enmity over the top was Gill's negative of review in The New Yorker of O'Hara's blockbuster, A Rage to Live. Their relationship was already testy. Gill wore his Irish gently. O'Hara did not. Gill's Yale education and Scull & Bones membership came to him naturally. O'Hara was always striving for Ivy-covered totems and Establishment acceptance.

A Novel Look

The author, Paris, 1967

MY LITERARY ME

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

Not many get to see themselves up close and personal in the pages of a novel.

 

Or, more precisely, who they were -- at twenty.

 

I did recently.

That view of me, at least, beyond what I saw, or imagined what I saw, more than forty years ago in a bygone looking glass, came in the form of a literary time-machine, a very long novel called French Lessons by popular chicklit-author Peg Craig. At times, the appraisal seems superficial. Also, penetrating. Except, of course, for a violent streak that she attributes to my literary me. Ouch!

I knew Peg Craig, in Paris in 1967. Not well. But evidently she was paying attention. A lot more than I was.

A friend recommended her e-book not long ago, noting that the Kindle-ready, down-loadable text (Amazon.com; $10) was well received when Craig published the book in 2012. Part fiction, part autobiography, the book is all girly-girly, told by a seventeen-year-old narrator who studies in 60s Paris. Gee, Pierre, I wonder how I missed that one.

Whistlejacket: George Stubbs' Masterpiece

The author and Whistlejacket

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

By Richard Carreño

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

London

There's no lack of works by George Stubbs, the gifted 18th-century English animal and sporting painter, in museums around the world, particulary those in the United States and here in Britain. The largest number, with hundreds of oils, etchings, engravings, and other works on paper, is located at the Yale Center for British Art, thanks to the museum's founder and benefactor, the late, great philanthropist Paul Mellon. Mellon's keen interest in Stubbs (1724-1806) is also on generous display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Even the Philadelphia Museum of Art has several examples of his work. Over here, the Tate Britain easily fills a few gallery walls with the master's pictures.

 

Here and elsewhere, we see Stubbs as he almost single-handedly launched the figurative animal genre, in portraits and in landscapes that burst with the kind of real-life energy that invested many of the greenswards of country homes and stables manicured by Capability Brown's verdant hand.

Aristocratic horsemen, their grooms, and jockeys may often populate these scenes. But despite their presence, it's always the horse we care about most. Even in paintings in which horses don't figure, the setting is always sufficiently pastoral that, at any given minute, the viewer wouldn't be surprised if a foal or two trotted on to the canvass. Stubbs' marvelous dog pictures can stand alone. But they also summon up a country life wherein a mounted gentleman or two would never be out of place.

Francisco Goya

 Whimsy with Bite

By RICHARD CARREÑO Bio
[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 16 September 2014

Philadelphia

Tony Auth's recent death got me thinking about an exhibit of cartoons by Goya I visited about a fortnight ago at the Allentown Art Museum.

 

Auth, a former editorial cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Francisco Goya, Spain's great 19th century court painter, in the same breath?

 

Yes, because Goya (1764-1828), though often best known for such full-figure portraits such as the Duchess of Alba and the Nude Maja and Clothed Maja, was also an early social realist and Spain's first, yes, first, modern painter. It's hard not to to think of the horror of war depicted in Picasso's Guernica when viewing Goya's equally horrific scene of bloodshed in his Third of May, 1808. Goya's spirit imbued a new form of political and societal criticism that flowed in subsequent centuries from the sharpened quills of such penny-press English sharpshooters as William Hogarth,  George Cruikshank, James Gilray, Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman, and Steve Bell.

 

Nashville's Parthenon

 

After
Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service

IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME.

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WritersClearinghouse News Service] Posted 9 September 2014

Nashville

Yes, Nashville is a whole lot of country. And, yes, a whole lot of Greek.

 

Move over Greek frats, Greek coffee cups, and Greek yogurt, Nashville also has its own version of what is indisputably the most important and most widely recognized monument to embody that other Greek culture, the 5th century BCE Parthenon temple.

 

Nashville's Parthenon is a little-known, life-sized replica, and it's the kind of iconic symbol that puts the Western (that is, Western as in Classical Greek) in this otherwise country tunes mecca of 600,000.  Legendary chapeau-wearing songstress Minnie Pearl might still be more widely worshipped in that other 'temple' of culture here, the Grand Ol' Opry. But just minutes from downtown, near the Vanderbilt University campus, another godly figure, Athena, yes, even a more powerful yet than Minnie, is given tribute in her Parthenon temple.

 

Still surprisingly, Nashville's Athena, ancient Greece's goddess of wisdom, hardly gets her due. Just as recently as in last Sunday's New York Times' travel section, a '36 Hour in Nashville's' feature ignored what's surely the second-most important house of worship here. Just after, of course, Dolly's 'Partonon,' as the Opry's original venue at the Ryman Auditorium is referred to by some more classically-trained fans of the country-western megastar Dolly Parton.

 

This, too, in a nation that likes to 'import' Europe to her shores (Randolph Heart's castle in California is Exhibit A) to just recreating it (Venice and Paris venues in Las Vegas).

Before

Frist Center for the Visual Arts

Main Hall, interior
Photo: WritersClearinghouse News Service

 Frist First

Nashville

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts embodies one of the best examples of architectural repurposing that I've ever witnessed. Thankfully, Americans in the last decade or so have come realize, after the annum horribli debacles of the '60s, '70s, and the even into the '80s, that architectural preservation is preferable to the wholesale destruction of the urban vernacular that was rampant in those decades. Witness the destruction of Centre City Philadelphia by Edward Bacon as Exhibit A.  I suspect, given the boom in recent highrises monsters in downtown Nashville, that this city also has undergone its share of urban gutting.

Fortunately that urban 'renewal,' as it may have occurred, did not extend to several city jewels, including Nashville's old downtown high school (now the city's main branch library), its main Victorian-styled railroad station (now a fancy hotel), and adjacent on Broadway, the old main U.S. Post Office (now the Frist).

The conversion of the post office, constructed in 1934 as an Art Deco gem, was completed in 2001, when the Frist occupied the premises. (The building is similar to Philadelphia's Art Deco post office branch on Market East. But more decorative and pristine). The conversion was undertaken with loving detail. It's a marvel.