Lifestyle – Page 6 – Writing New Jersey Life

Category: Lifestyle

“Fidelity: Captain Emilio Carranza”

On November 7, 2017

Captain Carranza Monument

As Amelia Earhart’s disputed fate resurfaces in the news, another hero of the Golden Age of Aviation, Captain Emilio Carranza, is forever entwined with New Jersey history. Captain Emilio Carranza, 1905-1928, despite having died as a young man, has an extraordinary public and personal narrative. The captain, nephew of the great Mexican aviator Alberto Salinas Carranza, was known as “The Lone Eagle of Mexico” in his native country, and in the United States as the “Lindbergh of Mexico”. By 22, the ace who grew up in Ramos Arizpe, Coahuila, was an experienced soldier and a survivor of a serious crash which required painful facial reconstruction. Flying in the advent of newsreels, he set the record for the third longest non-stop solo flight, San Diego to Mexico City, which was also the longest flight by a Mexican pilot at the time. He became internationally famous.

Young and personable, his countrymen admired him. On his next flight, Captain Carranza launched “The Mexican Excelsior,” a Ryan Brougham in the style of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh’s “The Spirit of St. Louis”. Newly married, Captain Carranza did not decline duty and flew on a good will mission to the US in June of 1928. Among his numerous honors were having lunch with the president and receiving the key to New York City. In July at West Point, he had the rare privilege for one of his rank, a review of the troops, which conveyed a mutual respect.

While still in upstate New York, summer storms repeatedly delayed his attempted returns to Mexico. Yet again, when he planned to depart, another violent thunderstorm erupted. Historical rumor has it that during this particular storm, the grand-nephew of former President Carranza, received a telegram from a rival, a cabinet member of the current government, who ordered his immediate return. Another rumor notes that he was trying to get ahead of the weather. The sweet, sad truth is that despite the accolades, he missed his bride and wished to return to her. Several people, including fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh, who would later marry Englewood’s Anne Morrow, an accomplished pilot and navigator, warned him not to go. Despite Captain Carranza’s skill, while flying over the Pine Barrens to land on the New Jersey coast, his single engine plane could not pass through the worsening storm. He tried to land, ultimately crashing to his death at age 23 in Wharton State Forest, part of the town of Tabernacle…

…After the crash, the American Legionnaires of Mount Holly Post 11, along with local volunteers, retrieved his body by hacking through the woods and underbrush of the Pinelands, making a clearing around the plane where this [the monument] stands, marking the area to protect the crash site. They took his body, first to Chatsworth, then to their post, to ensure his dignity and a return with honor to Mexico. As Post 11 notes, their own US flag that draped Captain Carranza’s coffin now hangs in Mexico’s School of Aviation. A national hero, Mexico still commemorates the captain.

Captain Carranza photo and Post 11 Memorial Wreath

Reflecting the loyalty of Captain Carranza, the American Legion members made a promise to keep alive the young hero’s mission of good will and peace, carried on through the generations in an annual ceremony in Tabernacle. Each year on the Saturday nearest July 12^th, the beautiful ceremony in Captain Carranza’s honor takes place with some of his relatives, the Legionnaires, Mexican officials, the Girl and Boy Scouts, the Ballet Folklorico Mexicano de Nueva York, the Civil Air Patrol Color Guard, and Medford’s American Legion Post 526 and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7677. On special anniversaries, the U.S. Air Force flies over in the missing man formation. The ceremony includes the Post members reenacting the search for the captain and his return accompanied with the hymn “Going Home” by Antonin Dvorak. This year marks the 89th ceremony.

The public is welcome at the ceremony this Saturday, July 9th, at 1:00 p.m. as they are daily at Carranza Park, the monument site. Heading down Carranza Way into the Wharton State Forest, though it is scenic country with wavering GPS upon entering 115,000 acres of woodlands, it is helpful to have a print out of directions. American Legion of Mount Holly 11 kindly provides the best ones: www.post11.org/carranza/carranza8e.html

The Carranza Monument, poignantly, is the heartfelt gift of Mexican schoolchildren, saddened by the loss of their hero in what seemed like the most lonesome place. They pooled coin donations nationwide…the monument’s engraving is of a downward eagle in the Aztec style, signifying the great loss of the young hero, addressed as the “Messenger of Peace” in English and Spanish. His ability and courage inspired many young Mexicans and others around the world to become aviators.

Post 11 periodically shows the documentary “Good Will: The Flight of Emilio Carranza” by Robert Emmons and offers commemorative items like the video “Flying with Emilio”. For comprehensive information on Captain Carranza, including an account by his cousin, visit the Mount Holly Post 11 website, www.post11.org, in English and Spanish. The website also contains information on other events like the Post’s observances for 9/11, Veterans’ Day, and Memorial Day.

American Legion Mount Holly Post 11 conducts the annual ceremony and helps oversee the preservation of Captain Carranza’s Memorial. Donations for the ceremony, the memorial preservation, or both, go directly to these as do the purchase of commemorative items, and would be greatly appreciated. Checks may be sent to: Mount Holly Post 11, PO Box 711, Mount Holly NJ 08060.

American Legionnaires of Mt. Holly and Medford

Space Shuttle Cake

By Kathleen Helen Levey

On November 6, 2017

In Baking, Culture, Family, Lifestyle

If this rainy start to the holiday weekend has changed your plans, have some fun making this Space Shuttle Cake together. The recipe is via Party Pieces, the party company of the family of Catherine, Princess of Wales.* A hit on Instagram @kathleenhelenlevey last summer, in the US pound cake can serve as a substitute for Madeira cake. You did not read it here, but if you only have an hour to prepare this vs. the several you had planned, rumor has it that defrosted pound cake held together by canned icing, decorated with Skittles, licorice, and some tinfoil improvisation will make children celebrating the Fourth of July just as happy :).

Ingredients:

-1 x 4 egg quantity Madeira cake
-1 x 450g quantity of Buttercream icing
-4 or 5 shop-bought mini sponge rolls
-Red and blue Smarties, silver balls and liquorice to decorate
-orange or yellow sugar paste
-6 ice cream cones

Method:

Cook the Madeira cake mixture in a greased 1.2 litre ovenproof bowl for 50-55 minutes. Turn out and let cool. Trim the crust from the cake and slice the top flat. This will create the base of the spaceship.

To assemble:

Using buttercream, stick together the sponge rolls. This will form the middle part of the ship. Place them on top of the base, then stick an upturned ice-cream cone on top of them to form the nose cone. Cover the whole cake with the remaining buttercream icing.
3. Place the cake on a round cake board and stick five ice-cream cones around the base to form the space shuttle “legs”. Decorate the spaceship using blue and red Smarties, silver balls and liquorice wheels for portholes.
4. Roll out the orange sugar paste and cut into little triangles. Stick these around the base of the rocket and up around the sides to create a flame effect.

Sources: PartyPieces.co.uk blog (“The Party Times”) by Pippa Middleton Matthews and Children’s Parties by Ryland and Small.

*The Middletons sold Party Pieces in 2023. We thank them for the fun and wish them the best of luck!

“Ray Seery, Comedy Writer”

By Kathleen Helen Levey

On November 6, 2017

In Comedy, Culture, Family, Lifestyle

Ray Seery at work in Randolph, New Jersey

“I believe that one of the things the world needs now is a good laugh.”

Jokes were to our uncle what fireworks are to Fourth of July, a way to celebrate life and spread joy. Long-term Morris County residents may recognize the name Ray Seery, a Randolph resident and “gag writer” interviewed in the 1970’s and 1980’s in The Randolph Reporter and New Jersey Monthly. Highlights for him also included interviews with The Star-Ledger and Parade magazine.

His Newark childhood in the 1930’s was an overall happy one, though in any retelling by his nieces and nephew, it may have begun like a set up to one of the jokes he would later write: “Our mother had two brothers. One was Sonny Boy, as his father’s love shone upon him. The other was Ray. He became a comedian.”

Smart and attention-seeking, he was a classic class cut-up and made the rounds of most of the Newark public schools in the 1940’s. Having finally landed at Seton Hall Prep, his patient parents were called in one day to speak about the jokester. Told to wait outside the archbishop’s office with his partner-in-crime, Ray and his friend spotted the clergyman’s shiny Studebaker, parked in front of the school. This proved too tempting for the boys to resist, a big mistake on steep South Orange Avenue when they did not know how to work a clutch. They promptly crashed the car at the bottom of the street. Miraculously, it was still intact.

On another school-aged adventure in the days when Hollywood stars appeared on Newark stages, Ray, 13, waited outside his first stage door for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy who were performing in vaudeville, a family story he shared in an early interview with The Star-Ledger. He had opportunity to speak with the talented Mr. Laurel, who was kind and took the time to talk with Ray and encourage him with his interest in comedy. Stan Laurel corresponded personally with fans, and they wrote to each other until Mr. Laurel’s death in 1965.

Uncle Ray’s Navy hi-jinks were numerous, more material for the comedian-in-training and a story for another day, but it was in his return home to the US that he found direction for his talent – comedy. He funded initial work as a comedian with a day job as a bank teller. When he read in the papers that Bob Hope and Babe Ruth, two of his idols, would be playing golf at Forest Hill Field Club in Bloomfield, he could not resist a young man’s impulse to play hooky. Charming, Ray worked his way through the crowd, managed to meet both men and formed a lifelong professional connection with Mr. Hope. The next day, a front page photo of Bob Hope and Babe Ruth featured Uncle Ray behind the rope line. This delighted Ray, but not his boss, which led to Ray’s cabbie career in New York City, a great way for the young comedian to try his material out with test audiences on wheels.

For the ultimate appraisal of his material, Ray would take fares from Broadway, sometimes coming upon the stars themselves whether they were seeing other shows or appearing in them. Navigating the cab to the curb on a rainy night, before looking at his fare, Uncle Ray heard a man say, “The Waldorf Hotel.” Without turning around, avid movie fan Ray said, “Claude Rains.”

Pleased, Mr. Rains, the brilliant Warner Brothers character actor probably best known today for his role as French Captain Louis Renault in “Casablanca,” replied, “Thank you.”

Young Raymond from his New York City taxi’s driver’s license

On forays when he ventured outside the cab and into the theater, Ray sought out his look-a-like, as Orson Welles was in his younger days, when he was on Broadway. The two hit it off creatively and maintained a lifelong friendship, exchanging ideas and jokes whenever they saw each other at events or corresponded. Regardless of how the press described the young genius, who married his first wife in New Jersey, Orson was always warm and gracious.

Orson Welles, just 23, Howard Koch, and John Houseman of the Mercury Theater created panic on October 30, 1938 when they broadcast a dramatization of H. G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” with a news-like format much like the 1937 Hindenburg real-life newscast asserting that a Martian invasion had begun in Grovers Mill, New Jersey about 30 miles from Lakehurst. (Sources: The Asbury Park Press, SmithsonianMagazine.com) Upon hearing that his in-laws were among those who had fled their homes, our grandfather quipped, “That’s what they get for not listening to Charlie McCarthy.”

Serene Grovers Mill, now part of West Windsor

Monument for “War of the Worlds in Van Nest Park,” where historical markers, an Eagle Scout project, take visitors along a timeline of the broadcast. A nearby water tower was thought to be a Martian spaceship. Of an approximate 6 million listeners, it is estimated that in a jittery pre-WWII US, an estimated one million thought that there was an invasion.

As soon as he started working, Ray, the big brother, brought along his younger siblings to share his adventures from trips to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier to Coney Island to movie premieres. At a presidential debate shortly before the 1948 election, Uncle Ray brought our mother to snap photos while he greeted the candidates. As President Truman stepped off the elevator and our teen-aged mother tried to take a photo, Ray, a Democrat, called over, “Forget him, he’s going to lose!” The snaps of Governor Dewey were wonderful, though.

Comedy was difficult to break into, and kindhearted Ray soon saw that he was better suited to writing material than jousting with hecklers. Bob Hope bought some of his material, giving him his first paycheck as a comedy writer, which he had enlarged and framed. Once one comedian’s name was on the resume, doors opened with others: Phyllis Diller, Billy Rose, Rodney Dangerfield, and occasionally, people as varied as Daily News columnist Liz Smith and Bishop Fulton Sheen. For Bishop Sheen, Uncle Ray coined the phrase “Uncle Fultie” like “Uncle Miltie” for Milton Berle, both on television at the time, stories which he enjoyed sharing in interviews. Demand for jokes ran hot and cold, however, and aside from these noted professionals, paychecks from others sometimes got lost in the mail, so Ray was wise to have a full-time job.

Whenever Bob Hope came to the Garden State, Uncle Ray would meet him and have the backstage thrill of listening to the veteran comedian deliver his jokes to great laughter at places like the Garden State Arts Center. Even at White House events during two respectively different administrations, Ray and our aunt had the same pleasure. Committed to the USO and humanitarian causes, Bob Hope often hosted fundraising events in New Jersey and New York City. On one celebrated occasion, Uncle Ray and our mother met Grace Kelly. Princess Grace, who grew up in Philadelphia and spent summers in Ocean City, New Jersey, was as warm and beautiful in person as they had anticipated.

Steve Allen, comedian, author, musician, composer, and first host of “The Tonight Show,” encouraged Uncle Ray when he was starting out. Mr. Allen not only paid Uncle Ray for his material, but credited him publicly and treated him like a friend. Public taste in comedy changed over the years, but Steve Allen kept his material clever, clean, and not mean, which sounds like an Uncle Ray quip. This is one of the many reasons why they got along so well for decades. One of Uncle Ray’s favorite stories about Mr. Allen was how, after getting Mr. Allen to read his jokes by placing them under his car windshield, Ray enlisted the aid of a cousin to fly a banner over the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner on which Steve and his lovely wife Jayne Meadows, equally kind, were departing. Unbeknownst to Ray, Steve had wanted a low-key departure without press. The banner read: “Bon Voyage Steverino! Ray Seery”. The actual punchline was that Ray’s father (with the same name) and brother were fishing off Sandy Hook and, knowing Ray, nonchalantly took in the sight of the banner as Ray carried on a Jersey Shore summer tradition.

An all-round creative person, Uncle Ray was a talented cartoonist and artist. The Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Newark-born Jerry Lewis, Cary Grant, and Babe Ruth paintings throughout @kathleenhelen15 on Instagram are by him. He is the “uncle” of #uncleart, which when spoken, sounds much more aptly like, “Uncle Heart”.

Bob Hope and Princess Grace of Monaco

“Ray Seery, Comedy Writer”: Adapted from “The Music Box” from Proverbs All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kathleen Helen Levey and Instagram @kathleenhelen15 Published June 26, 2017 “Writing New Jersey Life” All Rights Reserved © 2017

“The Two Graces: Grace Hartigan and Grandma Moses”

By Kathleen Helen Levey

On November 6, 2017

In Art, Culture, Lifestyle, Travel

Grace Hartigan

“I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers, only to hope that it keeps asking the right questions.”

An Abstract Expressionist who started life in Newark, Grace Hartigan (1922-2008) grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. Having little formal training as an artist beyond some lessons with Newark-based Abstract Expressionist Issac Lane Muse, she saw works of Henri Matisse in a book and felt inspired to paint. In the circle of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, who started the US chapter of his life as a house painter in Hoboken, Grace might have resided comfortably in their sphere, but ultimately chose to make her own path.

Grace’s art was immediately successful, giving her the self-assurance to carry on in the primarily male, star-laden New York City art scene of the late 1940’s-1950’s. A New York Times article described her as “brash,” a quality she would have needed to prevail. Consistent in the Times of NY and LA on Grace’s life is that she did not look primarily to her inner life for inspiration like the other Abstract Expressionists in that era, but responded to, and was inspired by, the world around her. This world connection was reflected in her paintings in which she gradually added images, an influence of poet and friend Frank O’Hara who combined “high art” and “low art”. The LA Times reported that, endearingly, he wrote several poems for her.

Ironically, by including these images, she became known as the founder of “Pop Art,” a title which she disdained. Nevertheless, as an independent spirit, she appreciated, “I’d much rather be a pioneer of a movement that I hate than the second generation than the second generation of a movement that I love,” noted in The Washington Post. The one “most celebrated of American woman painters,” Life, 1957, her work fell into disfavor by the 1960’s with fellow Abstract Expressionists and art critics and sales of her paintings fell off.

Grace was resilient and, having become more appreciative of art history in the 1950’s, another factor separating her from her Abstract Expressionist peers, became part of the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. She taught and ultimately became director of the Hoffberger School of Painting, created to showcase her talent, and she in turn, worked to raise its cachet as an art school. Of her life as an artist, she reflected in a “World Artist” interview via NY Times, “Now as before it is the vulgar and the vital and the possibility of its transformation into the beautiful which continues to challenge and fascinate me…Or perhaps the subject of my art is life the definition of humor – emotional pain remembered in tranquility.”

In the 1980’s, Grace had the resolve to paint again, expanding her talents to include different mediums that she came to appreciate through art history, printmaking, watercolor, and pointillism. She had the foresight and generosity to set aside paintings created during her tenure at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The donated paintings, worth more than $1 million dollars, were to benefit her students when she was no longer able to teach them as described in a MICA article worth visiting via mica.edu.

Many bold quotes are ascribed to this artist who experienced life to the fullest, perhaps most famously, “I didn’t choose painting….It chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius.” Beyond the sound bites, perhaps the epitaph of her friend Frank O’Hara best reveals Grace, “Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible.”

Her works are online at Artsy.com and there is a great overview of her development as an artist with highlighted works on theartstory.org, which credits her as an influence on Neo-Expressionist artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

The paintings of Grace’s peer Helen Frankenthaler are having a new appreciation this summer as an exhibit at The Clark in Massachusetts and in a Grandma Moses exhibit at the Bennington Museum in Vermont. Periodically, Grace’s work appears in galleries in New York City and on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

A few weeks ago, Artsy.com noted that Grace was a New Jerseyan as well as a New Yorker, which led to more reading about her life.

Wildflowers, Bennington Museum

Grandma Moses, Anna Mary Robertson Moses

“Life is what we make it, always has been and always will be.”

Like Grace Hartigan, folk artist Grandma Moses, her artistic contemporary for a time, was a fellow Modernist who found inspiration in life. Born as Anna Mary Robertson (1860-1961), she grew up on a farm in Greenwich in Upstate New York, but attended classes in a one-room schoolhouse in nearby Bennington, Vermont. From a large family, economics required that she spend her teen years with another family as a live-in housekeeper, a “hired girl” as noted by Time. Ultimately, in an extraordinary life path, that schoolhouse became the Bennington Museum which houses the largest collection of her paintings today.

Throughout her life, Anna revealed artistic talent, but her days revolved around taking care of her family and their farm. She and her husband were first tenant farmers in Virginia, worked hard, and then became farm owners in Eagles Nest, New York, not far from where Anna spent her childhood. After her husband died, Anna took up embroidery until her arthritis made it difficult. Her sister suggested painting, which Anna took up at the age of 76, sometimes switching hands, and it was one of these paintings spotted in a drugstore window by art collector Louis J. Caldor that led her to notoriety. Considered a “folk artist,” a fluid term a self-taught artist who carries on a tradition (JSTOR.org from University of Chicago archive), Anna became known publicly by her family address, “Grandma Moses”.

Both the American public and the media were taken with Grandma Moses, embraced like a national grandmother, and she was an incredibly popular figure in the 1940’s and ’50’s. Favorite winter scenes that she painted were everywhere across the US, most notably on Christmas cards with sales of an estimated 48 million. Her illustrated version of Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas is still in print, a perennial favorite, its paintings created, inspiringly, at the age of 100. Those paintings are on exhibit at the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont, which is home to the largest collection of her paintings.

Grandma Moses’s charming winter scenes look like happiness defined and are even more delightful viewed in their original form. As the Bennington Museum curators note, Grandma Moses added sugar to the white paint to create snow that sparkled, which initially unmoored art critics. Nonplussed, she carried on with a brilliant result. Her joyful nature is clear in her observations, “Christmas is not just one day” as well as her art, which she described as “daydreams” both in a Time revisiting of her work.

Seeing her art with “fresh eyes” is how the dedicated museum staff will be presenting Grandma Moses’ work as part of “American Modern” from July 1st through November 5th. The exhibit will place her work alongside that of other Modernists, also peers of Grace Hartigan: Helen Frankenthaler, Andy Warhol, Fernand Leger, Joseph Cornell, Helen Frankenthaler, and folk artists Edward Hicks and Joseph Pickett to appreciate Anna’s talent anew.

The museum, founded by the Bennington Historical Society, 1852, has an array of exhibits to appeal to everyone. For history buffs, there are vibrant exhibits like the “Battle of Bennington” (the monument is nearby), “Grandma Moses Schoolhouse,” and “Gilded Age Vermont” to renowned Bennington stoneware to fashion & style to photography. The museum cooperates with nearby Bennington College, and you will also find beautiful works from artists both in the college and local community.

Allow time for the upstairs Church Gallery of Bennington and Vermont history, which was indeed a church and looks like a marvelous attic filled with furniture, inventions, paintings, sculpture, awards, remembrances, and more. These may not be the “marquee” pieces in the extensive museum collection like paintings by William Morris Hunt, born in Brattleboro, but they comprise a treasure trove as the town unfolds in such a moving, wonderful way.

We had a whirlwind visit, having just missed museum hours (open daily 10-5, June through October) on a first try, and look forward to returning. The grounds are beautiful and include trails. The cemetery behind the former schoolhouse leads to the modest grave of Robert Frost, more to come on the poet in another, “Symmetry,” a series of blogs that will feature New Jersey cultural and historical connections outside the state. For more information on the Bennington Museum, visit: benningtonmuseum.org.

North American Reciprocal Museum memberships (NARM) with entrée to 924 museums and cultural centers around the world can be purchased in the museum shop or at participating New Jersey museums:

Battleship New Jersey Museum & Memorial
Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton
Macculloch Hall, Morristown
The Monmouth Art Museum, Lincroft
Monmouth County Historical Association, Freehold
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair
Morris Museum, Morristown
The Newark Museum, Newark
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farm, Morris Plains
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit
Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville

For more information on NARM, visit: https://narmassociation.org/

Bennington Museum

“Fashion: Joyce Kilmer”

By Kathleen Helen Levey

On November 6, 2017

In Culture, History, Lifestyle, Travel, US History

Campgaw Mountain, Mahwah, New Jersey

A New Brunswick native and world-renowned poet, Joyce Kilmer, 1886-1918, was married to fellow writer and Rutgers University graduate, Aline Murray, and lived happily and sociably with their five children in leafy Mahwah, the “meeting place” in Algonquin. They knew heartache with the grievous illness of one child, which led to their conversion to Roman Catholicism. A family man, he was exempt from duty in World War I, but enlisted, serving in military intelligence. Loyal, he turned down a commission to stay with his regiment, bravely volunteering to scout ahead on behalf of his men in No Man’s Land where he died from a sniper’s bullet at 31.

…critics sometimes dismiss Joyce Kilmer’s work as being too simple or sentimental, but he was a gifted intellectual, a Columbia University graduate who wrote in structured verse at the end of the Romantic Era. He died before modern poetry had found its voice — and he chose joy, which is not always fashionable. A one-time Latin teacher at Morristown High School and a contributor to The New York Times, both his intelligence and work ethic made him highly employable until his poetry became a success. His poems, many replete with New Jersey references, reflected a love of nature and God. Inspired by looking in his own backyard, the lyric poem “Trees” from Trees and Other Poems (1914) became to American life what the birthday song was to the world, a legacy of celebration:

“Trees”

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who ultimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The poem was so popular that it was set to music, first by his mother Annie, a composer, and more popularly, in 1922 by another composer and pianist Oscar Rosbach. Princeton native and distinguished Rutgers University graduate, Paul Robeson, using his wonderful phrasing, recorded a popular version in 1938-9.

As we observe the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I, we remember the sacrifices of those who served like Joyce Kilmer and their families. Some were fortunate like our grandfather, a Newark native who was stationed stateside, others returned from overseas irretrievably changed emotionally and physically from trench warfare. The WWI postcard is from our great-uncle who like Joyce Kilmer was stationed on the Western Front. Our uncle, a beloved brother and son, wrote to his family with great affection on these lifeline postcards. He suffered from “gas and shell shock” meaning that he inhaled the poisonous gas thrown by enemy forces into the trenches and also suffered the “shock,” what we call PTSD “post traumatic stress disorder” today. Unlike Joyce Kilmer, our uncle came back home. He was still a gentle, kind man, but returned to a redefined life, fortunate in that he had family who loved him.

Incredibly, Joyce Kilmer still wrote poetry on the battlefront. Though most was in draft form, ‘A Blue Valentine,” dedicated to his wife Aline, blends faith and romance with the speaker addressing “Right Reverend Bishop Valentinus”:

…It seems appropriate for me to state
According to a venerable and agreeable custom,
That I love a beautiful lady.
Her eyes, Monsignore,
Are so blue that they put lovely little blue reflections
On everything she looks at…
It is like the light coming through blue stained glass,
Yet not quite like it,
For the blueness is not transparent,
Only translucent.
Her soul’s light shines through,
But her soul cannot be seen.

Joyce Kilmer’s legacy was not only his family and his works, but namesake New Jersey schools, the Joyce Kilmer House and a park, both in his New Brunswick hometown, a Bronx park at the Grand Concourse, and a memorial forest in North Carolina. Worldwide celebrations for Arbor Day, the last Friday in April in the United States, often include the reading or singing of his poem.

As for the critics of Joyce Kilmer’s work, one might say never out of step, just sometimes out of fashion.

Our uncle’s postcard from Vals-Les-Bains, France, a spa town before World War I

Quotes from the works of Joyce Kilmer. Published in ‘Writing New Jersey Life” blog at kathleenhelenlevey.com, June 21, 2017 Adapted text from “The Moral Quandary of Heels” All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kathleen Helen Levey

“Faith: Dr. James Still”

By Kathleen Helen Levey

On November 3, 2017

In Homeopathy, Lifestyle, Medicine, US History

The New Jersey Pinelands were the source of Dr. James Still’s inspiration, where his ingenuity led him to flourish as a homeopathic physician. Known in South Jersey and the Philadelphia area as the “Black Doctor of the Pinelands,” Dr. Still, 1812-1882, became an admired healer and one of the wealthiest men in South Jersey at a time when a formal medical education was not available to him. Early Recollections and Life of James Still, his 1877 autobiography, written during evenings after he treated patients, is still in print.

“Inspiring” is often overused, but his autobiography is, in the form of hard-won wisdom shared with the utmost generosity. As a deeply religious man, Dr. Still knew the Bible well. Though he wrote with modesty about his lack of formal education, his writing has a biblical eloquence: “I can only account for success by endeavoring always to be honest in all things, – in medical treatment and in business operations, – and in a reliance upon that Divine Being who cares for the sparrow in its flight, and who uses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. These principles I have endeavored to instil in the minds of my sons.”

As a child, Dr. Still felt a calling to medicine, “From that day on I did not want any knowledge save that of the healing art” and dedicated himself to it with a remarkable self-discipline, “…I would commit my life to Nature’s God, hoping all things that ended well would be well. I formed a habit of doing anything at the time appointed for it to be done. If I promised to do a thing, I did it. If I had to go anywhere, I was always on time. There was nothing like present time to me, and if I commenced to do a thing, I would finish it.”

Having recognized his calling in youth, Dr. Still learned from nature and sought out other opportunities in Indian Mills, now part of Shamong Township, when formal education was not available. He observed Native Americans’ use of medicinal herbs and apprenticed with a Caucasian doctor. Dr. Still’s fortune came from selling his homeopathic remedies, which he invested in farmland and rental properties in Medford, New Jersey and the surrounding Pinelands area. He was generous in lending money to help others get their start in life.

Conscious of being a role model, at times in his autobiography, Dr. Still directly addresses readers: “Rise in the morning with a cheerful spirit, and try to retain it during the day” and “Merit alone will promote you to respect.” More specifically, he encouraged, “…I would like to be an example to my sons, and all other poor young men who shall be so unfortunate as I was to have to commence the battle of life without education or pecuniary means.” Dr. Still’s son James, Jr., became the second African-American man to graduate from Harvard Medical School, doing so with honors.

In his accomplished family, James was brother to William, a Philadelphia abolitionist and author of The Underground Railroad, 1872, unprecedented as the narratives were from the point-of-view of escaped slaves. Recording the narratives provided not only records, but the means for family members, some traveling under assumed names as fugitives, to find each other. In helping others, William Still discovered their lost brother Peter, for whom he had searched for years. William had shared in this longing with their mother after she had to leave Peter and another brother behind when she escaped from slavery. Of his brothers’ reunion, James wrote: “He served in slavery forty-five years, and by saving and industry was enabled to buy his freedom from his master whilst living in Alabama…. He came to Philadelphia…and found his own brother clerk in the Anti-Slavery office there, and from him learned the whereabouts of his mother and brothers.”

As for Dr. Still’s own path, saving lives and alleviating the suffering of his patients, he shared, “To me it has been a source of much pleasure to know that I have been a benefactor to mankind.”

The woods pictured are behind Dr. Still’s former Medford home, considered a mansion despite his modest description. The Still family, working with the Medford Historical Society members, were instrumental in saving Dr. Still’s office. All volunteer regularly to support its restoration through the Dr. Still Historic Office Site and Center for Education. Updates on his family’s devotion to Dr. Still’s legacy through historic and literary projects are led by his great-great-grandnephew, who preserves the Still family history, as noted in South Jersey News.

For more information on visiting, scheduling a group tour, or supporting the restoration of Dr. Still’s medical office and education center by volunteering or donating, please visit Dr. Still Historic Office Site and Education Center and the Medford Historical Society. Donations may also be mailed to:

Dr. Still Education Center
PO Box 362
Medford, NJ 08055

If you are visiting Medford, there are many wonderful historical sites in addition to the elegant charm from its galleries, shops, and restaurants. At its heart you will also find a park, lively with children playing, newly dedicated to Dr. Still.

Quotes from Dr. Still’s “Early Recollections and Life of Dr. James Still”. Adapted text from “The Moral Quandary of Heels. All Rights Reserved © 2013 Kathleen Helen Levey. Published on “Writing New Jersey Life” on 6/21/17

Writing New Jersey Life

People and places of New Jersey…with some travels.

Category: Lifestyle

“Fidelity: Captain Emilio Carranza”

Space Shuttle Cake

“Ray Seery, Comedy Writer”

“The Two Graces: Grace Hartigan and Grandma Moses”

“Fashion: Joyce Kilmer”

“Faith: Dr. James Still”

All Posts