This piece was first published by the USGA’s monthly magazine, Golf Journal, in May, 1993.

When Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago, on a sojourn of the west, left Portland, Oregon’s Union Station for San Francisco at the turn of the last century, she could not have imagined that a delay several hundred miles later would contribute, in a curiously roundabout way, to the building of Portland’s first municipal golf course on a nondescript piece of land adjacent to the tracks her coach had passed by on its way south. Mrs. Palmer was held up for a day in Medford, a small town near the Rogue River, and was so taken with the scenic beauty of the Klamath Mountains and the economic prospects of the Rogue River Valley’s orchard industry that she inspired a migration of wealthy young Chicagoans to southwestern Oregon. Among them was H. Chandler Egan.

Not long after she left office, Thatcher wrote a memoir, which I reviewed in 1993 for Willamette Week.   As I reflected on the praise for Thatcher throbbing over the airwaves, I saw a clear line of descent between her devotion to the “marketplace” and the recent collapse of the world economy.   In both the UK and the USA, the gap between rich and poor has steadily widened over the last three decades.  The politics of conviction attached to absolutist principles lead to the kind of intransigence that fuels of the Tea Party, which, like Thatcher, despises compromise.   We’re living with the consequences of this anti-politics dominating the legislative process.

Rather than examining real data about how the economy works, as someone like the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Times’ columnist Paul Krugman does, the free market ideologues insist that we have a “deficit” crisis, and should provide even more tax breaks to the rich and eliminate government support for people in need.  We need to act more like Thatcher, in other words, than like Roosevelt.  More Hayekian that Keynesian. But Krugman observes that “the extraordinary rewards to the upper 0.01% played a role in causing excessive speculation and risk-taking, leading to the crash.”  In addition, he notes that “both rising inequality and the Great Recession were due, in large part, to Reaganism – to the belief that the unrestrained market is always right.”

And the British version of Reaganism is Thatcherism, which led one wag to propose that instead of spending $15,000,000 on her state funeral, the British government should privitize it–as, say, the “Margaret Thatcher Memorial Service Brought to You by British Airways”©.

It’s worth noting, too, that the decline in the golf industry parallels the shift away from income equality in the US.  Like the false prosperity of the real estate bubble and the toxic derivatives associated with it, the short-term boom in golf development from 1994 to 2007 disguised a deeper trend–the long-term decline in the number of golfers and the number of rounds played, which peaked in 1999.  The number of golfers in the USA has dropped by another 13% just over the last five years.  The National Golf Foundation has reported that the net number of American courses has declined by about 150 annually over the last five years.  Golf participation rates surged in the USA from the end of WWII into the 80s, as the middle class grew and working people had not only more money to spend but leisure time to enjoy.  The Reagan reforms reversed that trend, with ironic consequences for the golf industry, whose leaders (and the top touring professionals, who in a straw poll three years ago overwhelmingly said they’d vote for Sarah Palin over Barack Obama) tend to echo the political thoughts, such as they are, of John Boehner.  I am happy that Boehner, like Obama, plays golf, but I wish he’d concede a political putt once in a while.

(This review appeared in Willamette Week in the December 30, 1993-January 5, 1994 issue.)

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years.  HarperCollins, NY, 1993.

Courtesy Thatcher Foundation, WikiCommons

Tory Prime Ministers did not merely dominate British politics in the 20th century, they also set a high literary standard. Winston Churchill, described by one of his successors, Harold Macmillan, as “the greatest Englishman of all time,” stocked the language with memorable phrases, both as statesman and historian. Churchill’s metaphor of the Iron Curtain—an image of ferric inflexibility the Soviets tried to parry a generation later when they labeled Mrs. Thatcher the Iron Lady, proving the Marxian dictum that history does repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce—is a permanent part of the world lexicon. Churchillian phrases–”The awful ruin of Europe with all its vanished glories,” he said in 1946, “glares into our eyes”–can still summon a sense of ravage and loss, the melancholic epilogue to Britain’s finest hour.

The six candid and thoughtful volumes of memoirs written by Macmillan, scion of the great publishing house—Rudyard Kipling, Margaret Thatcher’s favorite poet, and Thomas Hardy were among the writers whose affairs the young Macmillan personally handled for the firm—are a banquet compared to Mrs. Thatcher’s 900-page memo, with its flavorless, self-serving dollops of hash. Mrs. Thatcher covers only her Downing Street years, so she stands before us fully blown, the imperious eponym for an era and a political style even the British had seen enough of by 1990, though its effects persist. Every political memoir acquits its author, but Mrs. Thatcher’s auto-hagiography gushes with certainty. What, its subtext asks, makes a great prime minister? Watch me, it answers, as I tell you—a trick that can only work if the reader’s faith matches the author’s, and Maggie Thatcher’s belief in her own rectitude is, by her own admission, matchless. The lady’s not for turning.

Only two prime ministers in Britain’s long history of parliamentary rule served longer than the Dame de Fer, a totally unexpected choice to lead the Opposition in the aftermath of PM Ted Heath’s fall from grace in 1975. First elected to Parliament in 1958 from a safely Tory constituency, Mrs. Thatcher moved from the shadow government into the cabinet when Heath’s Tories were returned to power in 1970, but she was little known outside the circle of Tory ministers.

Hugo Young, whose sympathetically critical biography, The Iron Lady, published on the eve of her departure from power, is a useful adjunct to The Downing Street Years, argues that Thatcher’s very position on the margins of Tory power guaranteed her success. No Heath insider was prepared to stand against him. Mrs. Thatcher, known then and forevermore for hard work and extraordinary preparation but with no known affinity for political theory or innovative ideas nor blessed with the eloquence of her predecessors, plodded to the fore. Only in retrospect was she able to cloak her ascendancy in ideological colors, repudiating the despised “consensual” politics of Macmillan and Heath. She surveys her Downing Street years from behind the ramparts of Thatcherism, the British version of Ronald Reagan’s drive to liberate the free market from the government’s malevolent clutches.

Like the Reaganites, who roared in from the Sunbelt and despised the Eastern Establishment, the Tory rebels Margaret Thatcher came to lead were outsiders, parvenus, self-made exemplars of the middle class. She was a child of middle England, and intractably middle-brow. Her credo was of hard work and good deeds rewarded, and she flouted the indulgent insouciance of the toffs, arraying against it her own remarkable diligence. “I can never,” she writes, “be defeated by attrition.”

By White House Photographic Office via Wikimedia Commons

Macmillan read Jane Austen, Mrs. Thatcher enjoyed Frederick Forsyth. Giscard d’Estaing, a French conservative aristocrat, witheringly called her “la fille d’epicier,” the grocer’s daughter, and she despised him as she did his Tory counterparts across the channel. She got on well with the socialist Francois Mitterand, as she later would with Mikhail Gorbachev. With socialists she could hate the politics and like the politician—with her Tory colleagues it was just the opposite. Mitterand, among the many who saw her power as sexy, also said, “She has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.”

Though educated at Oxford—she earned a degree in chemistry and frequently refers to herself as a scientist, though after her felicitous marriage to the extremely wealthy Denis Thatcher, she studied law and worked not as a chemist but as a barrister—she was the only PM in this century upon whom the
dons refused to confer an honorary degree. Her budget cuts in higher education, they contended, had decimated British academe. The scientists, in particular, voted against her. “If they do not wish to confer the honor,” she said, “I am the last person who would wish to receive it.” No mention of this slight is made in The Downing Street Years.

She does dilate, however, in one of its few tellingly personal passages, on the “political type” who “dominated” and “damaged the postwar Tory Party.  I call such figures ‘the false squire.’  They have all the outward show of John Bull-ruddy face, white hair, bluff manner-but inwardly they are political calculators who see the task of Conservatives as one of retreating gracefully before the Left’s inevitable advance.”

Anthony Eden, Macmillan, Heath—these were the vile compromisers, the consensus builders. Mrs. Thatcher saw politics in terms of good and evil and was confident that good would triumph. Mrs. Thatcher saw nothing inevitable about socialism, though as a political and economic scheme it had certainly been much further advanced in Britain than in the United States. Both Reagan and Thatcher were deregulators, especially in the interests of Wall Street and the City of London, but Thatcher also broke the power or abolished the left-leaning municipal governing councils, and privatized the state’s great industrial enterprises-British Leyland, British Steel, British Airways and, not least, the collieries of the Coal Board. There were no American equivalents for these nationalized companies. She not only laid waste to Britain’s trade unions, whose “monopoly” she abhorred, she pulverized the Labor Party, who graced her governing years with astonishingly inept leadership.

Another of her Tory predecessors as prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, once said, “There were three forces in conflict with which it was very unwise for a British politician to engage. These were the Vatican, the Treasury and the National Union of Miners.” Mrs. Thatcher confounded Baldwin’s dictum. She ignored the Vatican. Pope John Paul II, visiting Britain during the Falklands War but not wanting to alienate the Argentines, did not meet Mrs. Thatcher, the only foreign visit the Pope has ever made without meeting the local head of state. Mrs. Thatcher’s antipathy to the Civil Service in general—Whitehall, in British parlance—equipped her to bully the Treasury and impose her Friedmanite monetarist views on the British economy. In the long coal strike of 1984-85, Mrs. Thatcher thoroughly mastered the National Union of Miners, for whom she had only slightly less contempt than for the Irish Republican Army, who once came very near to assassinating her. One need not guess at her views on John Major’s talks with Sein Finn, the IRA’s political wing. Consensualism redivivus.

Mrs. Thatcher found her perfect definition of consensus in an offhand comment by a fellow Commonwealth leader, who called it “something you have when you cannot get agreement.”

To me consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner, “I stand for consensus”?

How about the Second World War? Would Lady Thatcher really contend that the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire had identically principled interests in that great struggle? Of course not. Her loathing of consensus is really an exhaustion with the notion of democracy, of the tedium of reconciling interests that sits at the heart of parliamentary governments. She preferred to rule, not lead. Her denunciation of consensus is sophistry, a veiled condemnation of anyone whose views she doesn’t like asking for a place at the table—the Irish, the West Indian, the Asian. Why did she refuse British passports to the citizens of Hong Kong?

The Downing Street Years was produced in the manner of Mrs. Thatcher’s speeches—drafted by aides and invigilated by herself-and has a tone of voiceless didacticism. According to a report in The Spectator, “The Sunday Times sent back the book’s first draft to be livened up before they could find extracts worth serializing.” Perhaps this passage from her trip to the Soviet Union was extracted by the Times:

There was an official welcoming ceremony that began at Moscow Airport, where I was presented with a large bouquet of red roses which proved remarkably photogenic against my plain black coat and fox-fur hat.. .. I cannot deny that I enjoyed the splendor of these occasions, but I sometimes reflected that the traditional formalities were intended to clothe in the trappings of legitimacy regimes that had neither historical nor democratic credentials.

This was a voice I had heard before, one brilliantly summoned by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. “It is sometimes said,” the butler Stevens remarks, “that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of.”

There is no better guide to understanding Margaret Thatcher, in all her unctuous piety, than Stevens, who sees everywhere but into his own heart.

The best golf writing maneuvers along a treacherous ridgeline separating the chasm of sentimentality from the gorge of self-indulgence.  There’s something about golf that gets the sap rising.  In Ancestral Links, John Garrity had to tread with special care, because his themes normally come pre-slathered with schmaltz, to wit: a dear departed but occasionally impecunious and complicated father; the illness and death of an older brother; and memories of his parent’s divorce when he was a boy.

"Shivas Garrity"

This rich emotional material is squeezed into the narrative of a long, reflective golf-rich sojourn to the Irish town of Belmullet.  The nearby “bleak, lonely Mullet Peninsula,” was the point from which his great-grandfather, Michael Garrity, had paddled out to sea on his way to board a ship for America.  (On arrival, he somehow flushed all the way inland to western Wisconsin.)   That Garrity negotiates this terrain with modesty and good humor, gathering a feast of delightful stories, is a testament to his reporting skills and to his courage, which is what it takes to face the past without inventing a narcissistic, self-justifying present.

The subtitle to Ancestral Links is “a golfing obsession spanning generations,” and among Garrity’s discoveries is that his mother, who he never saw hit a shot, had been an excellent golfer in her youth.  He was already well-acquainted with his dad’s golfing passion, which was handed down to all of his three children.  The oldest, Tom, was good enough to play on the PGA Tour, but, burdened by a stubborn perfectionism, didn’t stick it out. He was good enough to beat Jim Colbert to win the Kansas Amateur.  Dan Sikes, who won six times on the PGA Tour, said that there were a hundred guys on tour who’d pay to have Tommy Garrity’s swing, but while Tommy was stuck “trying to perfect his swing while he’s playing,” the successful pros he was competing against focused on getting “the ball in the hole any way you can.”

Garrity always assumed that his golfing gene came down to him from his Scottish, Stuart ancestors, not from the Irish refugees launched on their journey by famine and despair.   He knew nothing of County Mayo or the wonderful golf course there until his good friend, the American golf course architect Jim Engh, mentioned in passing that while Ballybunion, which every golfer knows, was his favorite course, a “close second” was Carne, in Belmullet.

Garrity had been to Belmullet in 1989, but remembered only a “rudimentary” 9-hole inland course, not a classic links.  That’s because Carne’s first 9 didn’t open until 1992, and the full 18 wasn’t ready to play until the next year.  One of the pleasures of Ancestral Links is Garrity’s account of Carne’s creation, a shoe-string enterprise that depended largely on the support of the local tourism authority, the dedication of a committee of local golfers, and perhaps above all to the generosity of Carne’s designer, Eddie Hackett, referred to by the American golf writer, Richard Goodale, as “the godfather of Irish golf course architecture.”  (In addition to Carne, Hackett designed Ballyliffin, Rosapenna, Donegal, Enniscrone, Connemara, Ceann Sibeal and Waterville.  Goodale’s appreciation of Hackett, “Desperately Seeking Eddie Hackett,” appeared in Issue 13 of Golf Course Architecture, July, 2008.)  Most of his work has been modified, but Hackett’s courses form the backbone of Ireland’s best modern links.

Tom Garrity was able to visit and play Carne with John, and felt a particular affection for the 17^th hole, a treacherous and demanding par 4 of 436 yards.  “You drive over a gully to a fairway that rides a ridge and bends to the right around a plateau of shaggy moguls,” Garrity says of 17.  “The green hides behind these mounds, the only hint of its existence being a solitary sand bunker set into a distant hillside.”  It was Tommy’s idea to play an entire “round” on 17, hitting three tee shots in each sequence, then play them out and return to the tee five more times, thus playing 18 holes.   Garrity writes that “the idea grabbed me the moment I heard it,” thus providing a leitmotif that sounds throughout Ancestral Links and supplied its narrative glue.  Tommy, who imagined the 17^thhole quest but never got to try it, thought 80 would be a good score, but after all, he had been a touring professional.  John, who plays to a 12, set as his goal breaking 90.

The 17th at Carne. Used with Permission

Introducing us to the locals, who note that his height (Garrity’s 6’7”) and “good looks” are common among Garrity men (who spell the name “Geraghty” in Belmullet), Garrity paints a convincing and enlightening portrait of the small Irish town where he’s taking his sabbatical.    He also demonstrates what an important role Carne has played in resurrecting the local economy—something similar in character if not in scale to what Mike Kaiser did with Bandon Dunes in southern Oregon.  Garrity finished the book before Ireland’s property collapse summoned the ghost of gloom from the graveyard where contemporary Irishmen had hoped to inter it permanently.   Still, Carne has been an enduring success, and later this year a third nine, designed by none other than Garrity’s American friend, Jim Engh, one of the best in the business, will open.  You can see photos on Carne’s website, and if you love links golf, you will surely salivate at the prospect of playing all 27 holes.  In the meanwhile, spend a few hours in the pleasurable company of Ancestral Links, a perfect companion for anyone contemplating a trip to golf’s most enthralling province, the west coast of Ireland.

********

Ancestral Links deserves a spot on the shelf of the best golf books ever written, next to Garrity’s Sports Illustrated colleague Michael Bamberger’s To the Linksland, and James Dodson’s Final Rounds.

To learn more about John Garrity, go to http://www.johngarrityonline.com/.    For more on Carne, http://www.carnegolflinks.com/index.html

But lurking about on the showroom floor, announced by the modest display of samples at the new products showcase, are the not always obvious wares of the innovators, the imaginative and risk-taking bunch that pushes the golf industry forward, year by year and inch by inch.  The first time I saw a Soft-spike, for example, the company’s booth wasn’t much bigger than a card-table, and no one would have predicted that fifteen years later, the old nails-in-boots style of golf shoe would have gone the way of hickory shafts, much to the relief of every bunion-footed golfer on the planet.

So it’s the new stuff I enjoy looking at, even if it’s not earth-shattering, but just offers some improvement over what we mostly use or do now, or shows us a new way to think about some ancillary activity, like cleaning clubs while we’re playing (when we don’t have a caddy, of course.)

Mark Gonzalez of South Carolina played golf with an older friend who used to lay the face of his club against the front wheel of his “trolley” (as the Brits would say) as he walked to his ball, letting the moisture from the grass help clean the dirt off his club.  Mark thought of a better way to use the same available energy, designing a brush that would attach to the wheel of the push-cart, sort of like a hub-cap with a bottle-brush extension.  The brush would rotate as the wheel moved, and a player could put the club on the brush to clean the face.   When the cart was stopped, a player could run his shoe over it to clean his (soft) spikes.   He called his product the Cadet, had it made in China, and started selling it this year.  It attaches to any brand of push cart—you will probably use the wheel on the side you swing from—and attaches easily.

Ready for the Geese

The company’s website calls the “CADET a revolutionary golf club and shoe cleaning tool that lets you get your clubs ready on the way to the next shot.”   That’s a modest sort of revolution, but one I can support.  First, it encourages walking, which is essential to the long-term health of the game; and two, it should help keep the goose poop from gumming up your shoes.   This may not be a big deal to you, but if you play most of your rounds in Portland, Oregon, as I do, keeping goose droppings from accumulating on your shoes like wet clay on a rainy Georgia day means a lot.  In the interest of full disclosure, I want to say that Mark and his dad, Luis, who were manning their booth, gaveme a Cadet to try, so I am predisposed to like it, and hope it works as well as it looks as if it will.  I promise to update this report after I have had a chance to attach it to my Clicgear cart and try it out for a round or two this spring.  I know the courses will be wet and well saturated with goose gunk, so it will be a fair test.  And thanks, Mark, for the free sample.

I also saw a very small booth that had a pair of trousers draped over a washboard with a nozzle spraying water on them.  The trousers shed the water and seemed not wet at all, which Driwalk Director of Global Advertising Steve Treisman, an Aussie who also has his products made in China, says is an absolutely true representation of how his trousers and shirts perform in the real world.  The polyester fabric is very light weight and soft to the touch, and has the advantage over normal rain gear of looking like regular clothes—so you’re good to go if it’s dry, but you don’t have to start adding layers if a squall comes up.  I liked the look and feel of the fabrics, which Steve says he wears all the time.  The other advantage his clothes have, he says, is that they can withstand many more washing cycles—up to 100—than other fabrics claiming similar water-proof performance.  I really liked these “Driwalk Hybrid Performance” outfits and hope Steve finds a US distributor because I would buy and use them, assuming they’re made in big gringo sizes and not just the small-boy samples I saw.

Another product I saw kind of stretches the boundaries of true golf innovation, but I liked Pykamo for its optimism about the future of the game.  Created by Maurice Duhamel in Quebec, Pykamo is a light-weight, plastic molded set of children’s golf clubs that are designed to be used with a soft foam ball. He calls it “golf for everybody.”  It’s a way for kids to swing a club in the proper way but not to hit a ball through grandma’s front window.  It has a molded tee box and “hole,” and should be at least as fun as croquet.  Maurice also thinks it could be a great indoor recess activity in the schools, one of the few reasonable proposals I have ever heard for getting some version of golf into the PE curriculum.

Finally, there’s Tin Cup, a beautifully engineered device that lets you mark your ball with either a symbol already available from the company’s offerings, like the “big apple” or “hocus pocus” or “nine lives” or a hundred other options, or something of your own design cut into the stainless steel cup, with a rim that makes it look from above like a miniature conquistador’s helmet.  With a colored Sharpie, you take a few seconds on the first tee to imprint your ball with a unique signature, and hope that you don’t seed your course with too many examples of errant drives.  But for sure you’ll know which ball is yours when you find it in the rough.  An excellent product.

Tin Cup's "Buffalo Roamin'"

And as a post-script, I want to say a word about the custom shoe company, Tauer & Johnson.  Last year I bought two pairs of shoes from Tauer & Johnson, and I loved the fit.  But after I’d worn them with great satisfaction for several months, I had a problem with the sole.  I went to the company’s booth today (#3715) and told Lupita and Seth about what had happened, and without a moment’s hesitation they offered to give me a new pair.  I am a very happy customer, and am pleased to recommend Tauer and Johnson to anyone looking for a custom-built shoe with excellent design and manufacture.  They stand behind their work.

The Wednesday during PGA Show week in Orlando every year is Demo Day, the gigantic al fresco exhibition of the latest equipment from the big brands, along with novel teaching devices, innovative tees, ingeniously shaped putters and an array of clever inventions that you will soon realize you can’t do without.   Held at the Orange County National Golf Center, which features an enormous teaching range with concentric tiered tees, Demo Day promises to provide the cure for—or at the very least, diagnose–whatever ails your golf game.  On this day, it’s the most exciting venue in golf.

Orange County National's Circular Range--Demo Day Venue

On a splendidly sunny but cool morning, the vendors set up booths around the perimeter, with Nike and Callaway and TaylorMade and Cobra more or less anchoring the cardinal points on the compass, while the aspiring companies and hopeful inventors occupied fill-in spots among and between the grand pooh-bahs.   Color is a big theme among clubs these days, from Cobra’s orange to TaylorMade’s iconic white to Nike’s cool black.  Now I have no doubt, as Graeme McDowell shrewdly pointed out when Rory McIlroy’s defection to Nike was announced to great fanfare in Abu Dhabi, that all of the leading club manufacturers make great equipment, and a player’s choice of what equipment to use is as fickle at the end of the day as his choice of what car to drive.  The PGA Touring pros have an entirely different relationship to their clubs than you or I, not least because their talent and experience yields feedback at a level incomprehensible to us.  A great NBA player once came out for a pre-game shoot-around and after one shot called for maintenance, because to him the rim was clearly off.  The crew came out with tape measures and a level and sure enough, the front of the rim was 1/8 of an inch lower than it was supposed to be.  He was one of maybe forty people on the planet who could have noticed that—and the PGA Tour players have the same finely calibrated sense of their equipment.

That being said, there is also no doubt that if it needed to, Nike’s crack engineering and equipment development team could reverse-engineer any clubs Rory likes, tweak their appearance and put the swoosh on them.  I am not saying that is what happened, I am just pointing out the a golf club is not a particularly complicated piece of equipment, and if a Chinese car company could reverse engineer a BMW, Nike could do the same for a golf club.  But Nike’s staff can also work with Rory, as they have with Tiger, to produce clubs exactly to his liking, which may in turn influence what you or I may want to buy, without changing our skill level or results over the course of a summer much if at all.

But the hope that we can get better is what drives us.  David Jacobson, Peter’s brother, provides the best illustration I’ve heard about how hope animates every golfer’s quest to improve.  When his dad was ill and only a month or so away from dying, David’s dad called and said he needed to meet him at the range right away.  “I think I’ve got it figured out,” he said, and wanted to share his discovery.   That’s the chi of golf.

The Golf Swing Shirt

And it’s that same spirit that moves someone like Ray Rapcavage, otherwise occupied making a living in commercial real estate in New Jersey, to invent the Golf Swing Shirt, a cross between a crossing guard’s bib and a strait-jacket that earned the endorsement of none other than Jimmy Ballard, the guru of “connection.”   Ray says that he was practicing in his yard one late winter’s day, getting ready for his first round of the season, when he shanked three balls in a row off the side of his house.  In frustration, he jerked his wool sweater over his head, and in trying to put it back on somehow got all entangled and the next thing he knew he had both arms down one sleeve.  He grabbed his wedge and hit a shot anyway, and lo and behold, it was good.  He hit another, with an equally satisfying result.  He had a friend in the garment business, and between them they stitched up a prototype, which Ray wore to his course, where he shot 72.  Eureka.

Padraig Harrington Endorses Swing Shirt

With a little more tweaking, he developed a version for the market, and began showing it to PGA pros in New Jersey.  It starts with a basic sleeveless tee-shirt-like body (made of stretchable nylon fabric) with what Ray calls the “center trunk sleeve”—the funnel of fabric that holds your arms against your side while aiming your hands toward the grip position–attached to the front.  Most of the local pros liked it, Ray says, because getting amateurs to take their hands out of the swing and move in the connected way Ballard likes is one of the toughest skills to teach.   The Golf Swing Shirt made it impossible not to swing connected.  Only one pro said he didn’t like it—he loved it, he told Ray, but he didn’t want to sell it because he thought it would make his instruction obsolete.

I slipped one on and took a few swings on Demo Day.  At first I felt like I was on my way to an arraignment just hoping to make bail, but once I got over how tight my hands felt when I first gripped the club, I was thrilled with the results—every shot high and straight (the test club was a forged wedge), although Ray says most players hit the ball a little thin the first few passes.

The shirt now is designed with a pocket you can slip the center trunk sleeve into, so if you buy it in black or white rather than orange (the three color choices available), you could play a practice round without looking as if there are bloodhounds on your trail.  I bought one and look forward to trying it out on the range and even on the course when I get home.  I won’t shoot 72—Ray, after all, is a 3 handicap, so a 72 is always within range—but I would hope to break 80, and if I do the Golf Swing Shirt will not only have Padraig Harrington’s endorsement, it will have mine.

Orange Whip

Not far from the Golf Swing Shirt booth, and in keeping with the orange theme, is a training aide called the Orange Whip and no, it’s not an energy drink.  It’s a whippy-shafted instrument with an orange-colored weighted ball on the business end and a smaller white ball above the grip that is designed to help players feel the “lag” that’s absent from most high-handicappers’ swings, and to get them into the kind of tempo and rhythm that marks the effortless arc of the good player’s move through the ball.  Jeff Herberger, a tall transplanted North Dakotan who now gives demonstrations and clinics showing how players can benefit from incorporating the Orange Whip in their training routines, showed me how you’re supposed to use the device.  He swung it beautifully, of course—he’s a PGA professional!  But after a few slow half swings, as Jeff suggested, I swung the club in the repeated motion he had demonstrated—when you finish your swing, you reverse to your backswing, and get a rhythm over a minute or so that helps lock in both the tempo and the swing plane—and could feel exactly how practice with the Orange Whip could help my game.  I would not try it, however, wearing the Golf Swing Shirt, because I would not want my brain to experience the curse of perfection.

Innovative Tees

Two new tees caught my attention: the Kiwi three-pronged plastic tee, and the Totem tiny tube tee that you push into the ground with a plastic implement that looks like it might be banned on airliners by Homeland Security.

The Totem Tee Inserter

The other is the Totem tee, which is basically a hollow tube roughly the size of a cigarette.  You slip the tube over the implanting device, then push it into the ground just like with a regular tee.  There is one extra step, however—you now have to set you ball on the tee, rather than holding tee and ball in your palm as per current practice.   But the ball sits up nice on the tee, and once again I watched players use it, mostly with driver (although the inserting instrument has two prongs, one for driver height and one for fairway woods or irons).  Durability may be an issue, but as it is made of recycled fibers it’s biodegradable, and shouldn’t leave much debris after a mowing or two.  On its web page, Totem calls them “Game-enhancing eco-neutral golf tees,” which covers plenty of hot buttons, and as with all the innovative tees, also claims “legendary distance due to significantly reduced spin rate”—introducing the new concept of “legendary” distance, which must be measured in “feats” rather than yards; “unparalleled accuracy as a result of a tighter dispersion pattern…even in strong winds”; “less club head deflection, more accurate ball strike” and last but not least, “a better angle of attack.”  If the tee can do all this, maybe I can sell the Golf Swing Shirt back to Ray.  But teasing aside, I really commend Totem for taking seriously the importance of sustainable practices in all areas of golf.

Tomorrow the full PGA Show in all its hat, ball, gloves and clubs’ glory starts at the Orange County Convention Center.  We hope to see even more innovative products there.  Hope reigns eternal.

This review appeared in The Oregonian, January 20, 2013.

In 2009, Robert Utley called Geronimo the “best-known Indian in the whole world and perhaps the least deserving.”   That he had come to this conclusion before completing the biography now published by Yale University Press reflects Utley’s hostility to what he derides as the sentimental, “’Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’ syndrome”—a approach Utley called “more polemic than history,” treating native peoples solely as “victims.”  

You may remember Utley as a talking head on documentaries about the West, with his high-pitched voice, smooth round face and string-tie.  He’s affable, avuncular, and good at story-telling—as you would expect from the former chief historian of the National Park Service.  Unquestionably authoritative, given the range of subjects he’s written about, from Billy the Kid to Sitting Bull to Custer, Utley nonetheless makes an odd narrative choice in Geronimo.

“I have tried to present various episodes from both the Apache and the white perspective,” he writes, ‘instead of…the usual historian’s ‘omniscient overview.’”   Utley relates first in each chapter what “the Indians perceived…without including information that they did not know,” followed by “the white perspective.” (The very notion of a “white perspective” is non-historical, especially given that some of the participants in these events were black soldiers.  But I think Utley just means what was reported by non-Indians.)

This Rashomon strategy puts a lot of demands on the reader, especially given that the bulk of the book covers Geronimo and his fellow Apaches’ twenty-odd year running battle with the US Army.  It can be hard to keep track of the characters in this shifting series of encounters.   This partly reflects his overall view that the portrayal of Geronimo “as the valiant Apache fighting for his homeland” is “plainly false.”   Because he regards Geronimo as a cantankerous, duplicitous, manipulative, drunken, ruthless “raider” with no tribal loyalties, no veracity, and little honor, he contends that Geronimo was motivated primarily by personal ambition and operated somehow independently of his Apache identity.

Though his knows the official military history well, Utley’s appreciation of Apache life and culture seem shallow.  (A clue to his prejudice is an off-hand remark about the Chiricahua descendents of Geronimo and his comrades “leading a decent life” today on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico—as if the previous ways of living were somehow not “decent.”)

While he provides very little sense of Apache history before the brief era of the Indian wars, Utley does convey well the complexity of the alliances, shifting loyalties, and confused aims of all the combatants during the years that Geronimo lived on reservations or, on occasion, bolted for Mexico.  The Sierra Madres of Sonora and Chhuahua provided a relatively secure base for Geronimo’s raids against both US territories and the ranches and villages of the Mexicans, who, as Utley repeatedly notes, Geronimo reviled.   And with good reason—when Geronimo, then a young man in the band of the great Apache chief, Mangas Coloradas, was off with other warriors on “a peace mission” in Chihuahua, the Mexican Army attacked their encampment, and either killed all of Geronimo’s family or carried them off into slavery.

In one of the great ironies of American military history, when he had at long last surrendered to American troops who had pursued him into Mexico, Geronimo and his tiny band of followers were heading back to the US when a Mexican force confronted them.  Before they persuaded the Mexicans to stand aside, the US soldiers and Geronimo had “united and prepared to battle.”   The US Army had long depended on its own Apache scouts to track “renegades,” but now they were prepared to fight alongside their prisoners of war.   Perhaps the saddest element of Utley’s tale is the betrayal of the scouts, who were also treated as prisoners of war, despite their loyal service, and shipped off with “the hostiles” to Florida, then Alabama, and finally Oklahoma’s Ft. Sill, where Geronimo would spend his last days.

Geronimo’s legend grew during his exile, an almost Zelig-like sojourn to world’s fairs in Omaha, Buffalo and St Louis (where my grandfather, as an eight-year old boy, saw him playing the role of a “wild Indian,” a fact which I find more astonishing as the years go by).   He attended Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration, riding in a parade alongside Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who was also his neighbor in Oklahoma.   According to S. C. Gwynne’s brilliant biography, “Empire of the Summer Moon,” Parker was in fact the person Geronimo was assumed to be as his legend grew.  Even though his mother was a white woman captured as a child, Parker was the undisputed chief of his people, and a man admired for his personal strength of character.

Gwynn shares Utley’s view of Geronimo, calling him both “a genius at self-advertising” and a drunk who “was not well-liked in Indian Country.”  Parker in turn was described by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs as a man “stamped by nature” with “the seal of headship.”    But while Gwynn’s account of Parker’s life illuminates the lost, little-known world of the Comanches, the “lords of the Plains,” Utley’s narrow focus leaves Geronimo and his people largely in the shadows.

What the “Walkable City” Means for Golf.

Jeff Speck, Walkable City.  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov 13, 2012.  $27.00.

Where Does Golf Fit in the Walkable City?

Urban planner Jeff Speck’s Walkable City is both a forceful analysis of what’s wrong with most cities and a ten step program for fixing them.  Given that 80% of Americans now live in urban areas, anyone interested in improving the quality of city life should read this book and heed its lessons.  Walking provides health benefits, too, and people who walk to work (or to public transit as part of their commute), and to shop and visit friends get health benefits in addition to saving money.  But the benefits flow from a city or urban area already organized to encourage walking .

Part of the reason suburban property values continue to languish, in Portland and elsewhere, while inner city housing prices have largely recovered from the 2008 real estate collapse, is a function of the benefits inherent in living within walking distance of shops, services and public transportation.  (If you don’t know your neighborhood’s “walk score,” I suggest you find it—it may have more impact on your long-term financial health than your 401K.)  http://www.walkscore.com/

Christopher B. Leinberger, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, is the source of much of Speck’s information about these shifts in real estate values, whose effects were accelerated by the Great Recession.  Leinberger, who writes regularly for the OpEd pages of the NY Times, reported some remarkable findings in May, 2012.

“Our research,” he wrote, “shows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable…. There is a five-step “ladder” of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values.

“As a neighborhood moves up each step of the five-step walkability ladder, the average household income of those who live there increases some $10,000. People who live in more walkable places tend to earn more, but they also tend to pay a higher percentage of their income for housing.”

The enemy of the livable city, the destroyer of worlds, was the car.  The enormous apparatus of freeways, highways and parking lots built over the last one hundred years, Speck demonstrates with disturbing clarity, destroyed what made city life attractive in the first place to serve the needs of the automobile.  The tradeoffs were transient.

Planners succumbed to the car so completely that master-planned suburbs dispensed with sidewalks altogether, and engineered streets for cars alone.  (One of the saddest facts Speck adduces is that only 15% of children now walk to school.  Walking to school isn’t just good exercise, it’s a powerful socializing instrument, too.)  Wherever walking is dangerous, property values fall, commerce ceases, and the quality of life ebbs.   To reverse that process, you have to figure out how to get people back on their feet.   Speck’s ten step manifesto points the way forward, with humor and grace and just a soupcon of urban elitist zeal.

Many of the suburban “communities” suffering from the real estate collapse were built around golf courses, and the golf industry has suffered hugely from the recession (although it’s arguable that the industry’s decline reflects a longer trend).   Although the National Golf Foundation reported recently that rounds played are up 7.4% this year over last year nationwide, overall participation rates and rounds played have not come close to approaching the peak year of 1999 (the last year of the Clinton expansion, and the preamble to the dot.com bust and the recession of 2001).  564 million rounds were played in 1999; last year, it was 463 million.  In 1999 there were roughly 14,200 “18 hole equivalent” courses in the US; in 2011, there were about 14,800 courses, which means more courses were chasing fewer rounds.  If you were the CEO of a business with this profile, you’d be canned.  The collapse of suburban real estate values is tightly yoked to the collapse in golf course evaluations as well.

Traffic congestion, in a perverse way, has helped restore the walkable urban core.  Speck summons convincing evidence that building more freeways exacerbates rather than solves the traffic problem, and pushes affordable housing further away from the city center.  Bubble suburbs turned into ghost towns, and golf courses far from city centers were neglected and even abandoned.   Roughly 1,100 golf courses disappeared from the industry census between 2010 and 2011.  If the average cost to build those courses was $5,000,000 (a conservative estimate), then the loss was at least 5.5 billion dollars.
Eric Larsen, who for years designed world-class golf courses as a lead designer and business development executive at Arnold Palmer Design, has been thinking about how to reposition golf courses over the last several years as it became dreadfully clear that the field of dreams strategy the development industry had been following was not yielding dividends.   Two years ago, Larsen left Palmer Design to start his own consultancy in order to test some ideas he’s been germinating as he watched the golf economy stagnate.

Was it possible, he wondered, to steer a course somehow between the Scylla of reduced demand and lowered revenues and the Charybdis of plowing under the golf course?  Larsen’s first thought was simply to reduce the number of holes, from 18 to 9, but rather than simply abandoning the golf course—which may have been zoned as open or green space—he recommended converting the sixty to eighty acre parcels to mixed use parks.  Most of the expensive infrastructure for the golf course—the clubhouse, the pump station, most of the irrigation system—could be preserved, but the remaining land could be soccer pitches, baseball or softball fields, beach volleyball courts, and so on.  Dog parks and walking trails could also easily be incorporated, and users of the facilities charged fees, which might also give them access to workout facilities of the clubhouse, if any existed.  In other words, create a hybrid mixed-use park system on the footprint of a portion of the golf course.

The difficulty with this scenario from the golf operations side is that 9-hole courses are regarded as the inferior cousins to full-18 hole courses, even if the individual holes are excellent, as they presumably would be in most cases where qualified golf course design firms did the original layouts.   Operators typically cannot charge the equivalent of half of an 18-hole green fee for a 9-hole round, or for an 18-hole round that involves two trips around the same 9.  The perception that 9-hole courses are not “real” courses persists, even though the very existence of 9-hole course addresses one of the central issues the golf industry faces as rounds decline: that golf is a time bandit, taking five or six hours for an 18-hole round, especially in you factor in travel to and from the course.  A 9-hole round makes more sense for most people in the prime of life, when work and families are higher priorities than recreation, even though golf is an excellent form of exercise if players walk.

Courses that now seem quite urban at one time were in the far distant streetcar suburbs .  Portland Golf Club, for example, which hosted the first post-WWII Ryder Cup and is still one of the best private courses in the Pacific Northwest, built dormitories in its clubhouse because members could ride the trolley right to the course, play a round of golf after work during the long days of summer, then spend the night at the clubhouse before heading off to work and then eventually home.  That sort of arrangement was common, but the ease of driving and the spread of automobile culture eliminated the need for overnight rooms in a golf course clubhouse.

New York and San Francisco are the only cities I know of where golfers routinely take public transportation to the golf course, although some of Chicago’s munis encourage golfers to take the bus. New York is the beau ideal of the walkable city in America, according to Speck.  Only 45% of New Yorkers own cars, and only 30% of those car owners use them to commute to work.   Portland is trying to emulate New York, but without the public transportation infrastructure.  Still, it would be possible to take public transportation to at least two of Portland’s munis, Eastmoreland and Heron Lakes.  Portland’s light rail Max line has a station next to the Expo Center, which is just under a mile and a half from the Heron Lakes clubhouse.  A free shuttle during peak hours might encourage golfers to at least consider taking the train to the links.  Binding the city’s golf courses more tightly to public transportation might reintegrate golf into Portland’s civic life, where it was once firmly entrenched.

The accidental experiment in freeway removal conducted in San Francisco when the Embarcadero Freeway collapsed in the 1989 earthquake showed that getting rid of the freeway enhanced San Francisco’s already appealing urban texture in numerous measurable ways, such as attracting shops and apartments and providing higher tax revenues.   People found safer ways to travel on “surface streets,” but they also used public transportation and sought housing closer to work.   Cities in the East Bay suffered the most in the financial meltdown

Portland is a paragon among American cities, Speck argues, because its politicians, planners and citizens understand the broader benefits of policies that encourage walking.   Portlanders pay attention to trees, to bike lanes, and to public transit.   It’s relatively easy to live comfortably here and not own a car.  Portland’s not New York, but its ambiance is closer to Copenhagen’s or Amsterdam’s than it is to Detroit’s or, heaven forbid, Beijing’s.  Mayor-elect Charlie Hales is among the enlightened walking advocates quoted by Speck.  There are also numerous tips of the hat in Walkable City to The Oregonian’s Jeff Mapes, author of Pedaling Revolution, which Speck calls “the seminal book on urban cycling.”   Biking works best in tandem (so-to-speak) with walking, not as a separate realm.

Walmart may get blamed for destroying the commercial cores of small towns, but Speck’s analysis suggests that the enthusiasm of traffic engineers for speeding motorists through downtowns was the real killer.  Thoroughfares that once welcomed shoppers with curbside parking and pleasant sidewalks under a shaded canopy were converted, in Speck’s stinging phrase, into “automotive sewers.”   They welcomed cars, not shoppers.  Restoring walkability is the antidote to the dull, eviscerated cores left over from failed experiments with pedestrian malls, one-way grids, and elevated freeways.

The crucial insight into what makes a city safe to drive, cycle and walk in at the same time came from a counter-intuitive Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman.   We’ve all experienced the effect of a power-outage on traffic.  During blackouts drivers creep towards intersections, and watch other cars carefully before proceeding.   Monderman built this into a theory based, as Speck notes, on two “interrelated concepts: naked streets and shared space.”  The naked street has no stop signs, signals or stripes—it announces to every driver, pedestrian and cyclist: watch out.  “Shared space” is a complement of the “naked street”—it eliminates all curbs, sidewalks, and barriers.   “The goal,” Speck writes, “is to create an environment of such utter ambiguity that cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians all come together in one big mixing bowl of humanity.”

A Review

Exactly eighty-five years ago this week, Seattle’s “most famous citizen,” returning from a successful summer of field work in Alaska undertaken for the final volume of his monumental photographic and ethnographic survey of the “vanishing” native peoples of western North America, was arrested by King County deputies for his alleged failure to make alimony payments.  Timothy Egan’s heartbreaking account of the trial that followed illuminates both Edward Curtis’ extraordinary life and the limitations of Egan’s biographical method.

Drawing heavily on Curtis’ unpublished autobiography, as well as on archival research (including in the records of Portland’s legendary climbing club, the Mazamas), Egan’s account of Curtis’ thirty-year quest to memorialize native life at the turn of the 20th century in The North American Indian seems reliable, thorough and, as one would expect from a writer who’s won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, well-written, if occasionally straining for the mot juste.   Writing that newly rich Seattle residents would “pay handsomely to have the name Curtis etched below their hagiographic mugs,” for example, is showy.   Egan also strains for effect when he writes that “coming from the maritime Northwest, where rain fell as soft and persistent mist, Curtis was not used to such muscular meteorological mood changes” as he encountered in the southwest.   On the other hand, writing that the Dakota plains “were a ghost prairie in 1907—an empty pantry,” or that “vandals and thieves were actively chiseling away the centuries of life left behind in the cliffs” of Anasazi dwellings, get it just right.

Still, until the final pages, when his account of Curtis’ humiliation and collapse brings him alive in ways the chronicle of his years of struggle and triumph never quite do, the tone of Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is restrained, as if Egan is reluctant to evaluate as well as narrate.  Because his heart is on his sleeve in the alimony trail, Curtis comes alive, and that highlights what’s missing from most of the book—access to Curtis’ inner life, as opposed to a chronicle of his business dilemmas, or the tribulations of accomplishing his life’s work.   Simply chronicling a life is not the same as biography.  Roger Porter of Reed College asks “what else does a biographer do but uncover documentary evidence, determine its importance, and use it to interpret the subject under study?’  Egan performs the first two tasks successfully, but does little to “interpret” Curtis in the way that, to use one example, Edmund Morris does for his subject in his splendid biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

It is, nonetheless, a remarkable story that Egan tells.  Entirely self-made as an artist and self-taught as an anthropologist, Curtis discovered his métier when his photographic skills intersected with the public’s curiosity about the fate of the last “wild Indians.”  A vigorous and avid outdoorsman and already a successful studio photographer, Curtis rescued a climbing party on Mt. Rainier in 1898 which just happened to include George Grinnell, “the world’s foremost expert on Plains Indians,” and C. Hart Merriam, cofounder of the National Geographic Society and chief of the U. S. Biological Survey (predecessor to the US Fish and Wildlife Service). They liked this “resourceful fellow,” Egan writes.  “He was fast on his feet, quick with a joke, full of practical knowledge, physically heroic.”    So impressed was Merriam that he asked Curtis to join the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, “the last great exploratory expedition of its kind in North America, dating to the Lewis and Clark journey a hundred years earlier.”

John Muir was also a member of the Harriman Expedition. He’s the only person I can think of who reminds me of Curtis.  (Although Harriman and Curtis were both sons of preachers who dropped out of school, they had little else in common.)  Muir and Curtis shared extraordinary physical stamina, self-confidence, and in the final analysis, an enduring influence.  They also had domineering fathers and extraordinary repositories of self-reliance. Did Curtis talk with Muir during their two months together?  Muir was much older, but they’d both grown up in Wisconsin and could climb mountains as easily as a normal person could amble down a level trail.   Curtis must have seen something of himself in Muir.   Did they stay in touch?  Muir lived until 1914.

Through Merriam and Grinnell, Curtis would also meet Gifford Pinchot (a key character in an earlier Egan book, The Big Burn), Theodore Roosevelt (who liked him well enough to have him as a house guest and to photograph his daughter’s wedding), and America’s richest man, J. P. Morgan, who would finance The North American Indian in a deal that would have given Faust pause.  At his alimony trial in 1927, Curtis confessed that while Morgan  and his estate had invested $2.5 million in the project—“an amount equal to about $50 million today,” Egan notes—Curtis himself had worked for “nothing.” (He also struggled to pay his loyal and mostly uncomplaining staff.  But apart from his Crow interpreter, Alexander Upshaw, none of Curtis’ colleagues ever quite come to life here either.)  And while he made nothing, Curtis told the judge, composing the twenty volumes of The North American Indian was “the only thing I could do that was worth doing.”

No one doubts now the value of what Curtis accomplished, and not just in monetary terms, although Egan notes that a “single photogravure of Chief Joseph…sold for $160,000 in 2010,” and a complete set sold in 2005 “for $1.4 million.”  (Only 222 sets were completed.)  Curtis’ real contribution was to recognize the inherent value and the religious significance of tribal cultures, and to work with a maniacal intensity to film and record them, fearing that if he did not, they would be lost entirely.  He intended, he said at the outset, to “a complete publication…of all tribes yet in a primitive condition.”   The peoples and cultures he was recording, of course, had already been transformed by centuries of contact, directly or indirectly, with the post-Columbian world.  Horses, introduced by the Spaniards, transformed life on the Plains.  Sheep were indispensible to Navajo life.  Kit Carson had tried to obliterate the Navajo by destroying their flocks.  Curtis had an intuitive appreciation of this history.

He learned native languages, compiled dictionaries, and made wax recordings of songs, which he then transcribed.  Those recordings can still be heard, and the originals collected between 1907-1913 are at Indiana University.   Curtis was never patronizing to his subjects, even when he staged their poses, and he always acknowledged the contributions of his native collaborators.  Trusting his informants, Egan writes, Curtis challenged the prevailing narrative of Custer’s last stand, adding eye-witness reports of Crow scouts that disputed the myth of Custer’s heroism.  (And these were the scouts on Custer’s side.)   Curtis despised the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the meddling hostility of Christian missionaries to “pagan practices.”  He admired the religious practices of native peoples.  His point of view seems very modern.

After the Morgan interests acquired all of his copyrights, both Curtis and his work disappeared from public view.  Despite his ex-wife’s hostility, Curtis retained the love and affection of his four children.  Marianne Wiggins’ novel, The Shadow Catcher, includes a photo she took of Curtis’ headstone in a Los Angeles cemetary.   “Beloved Father,” it reads, and Wiggins notes that his children chose to be buried on either side of him.  She makes that discovery the central insight of her fictional enquiry in Curtis’s life and loves.

Nearly twenty years after his death, a new generation, attracted by myths of native righteousness and wisdom, rediscovered Curtis.   Academics alone study Curtis’ written accounts now, but the pictures are universally admired.  “Curtis mastered the art of making his subject so dimensional, so present, so complete,” writes Louis Erdrich, “that it is to me as though I am looking at the women through a window, as though they are really there in the print and in the paper, looking back at me. This is the genius and the gift of the work. The women photographed by Curtis are so alive that it seems any minute they will change their expression: the hint of a smile will turn into a hoot or laugh, the frown into exasperation.”

You can see Curtis’ photos on-line at the Library of Congress website.  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html

Although Egan includes some plates, looking at the images while reading the book will add to the pleasure.   Taschen also published a paperback edition of the photos that you can get online for $5.00, and I would recommend that as a supplement to the Egan biography.

A slightly different version of this review appeared in The Oregonian.

Jonathan Kozol’s first book, Death at an Early Age, echoed the engaged intensity of the muckraking journalism of the early 20th century.  Published in 1967, it recounted Kozol’s abbreviated tenure teaching in the Boston public schools.   Fired for introducing students to an “unauthorized” poem by Langston Hughes, Kozol retaliated with a searing indictment of the racism and incompetence he had witnessed in the classroom.   Kozol’s compassion and empathy for his students animated every page, expressed in  counterpoint to the contempt he felt for most of his colleagues, who were white, unrepentantly if sometimes unconsciously racist, and indifferent to the aspirations of their pupils.

Jonathan Kozol's First Book

Reflecting the hopes for reform animating the politics of the 60s, Death at an Early Age was a huge commercial success.   But did it have the effect Kozol was surely hoping for?   Judging by Kozol’s latest book, Fire in the Ashes, his thirteenth report from the social margins, not only do poor people continue to face almost overwhelming obstacles to improving their lot in life, in many respects their condition is worse than it was fifty years ago.   At exactly the moment Kozol’s latest jeremiad reached bookstores, the NY Times reported that the “homeless population in New York City has jumped sharply over the last year, causing a record number of people to enter the shelter system.”

Fire in the Ashes chronicles the lives of people whose childhoods were spent largely in the custody of New York’s so-called “shelter system,” treated more like convicts than people down on their luck.  Kozol first visits the Martinique Hotel in 1985, astonished to discover “sickness, squalor, and immiseration” on a scale he’d never seen before.   The Martinique “was not merely a despairing place, diseased and dangerous for those who had no choice but to remain there; it was also a place of flagrant and straightforward criminality on the part of management and ownership.”

He befriends the children (and their parents) whose lives he is chronicling.   In a series of often heart-breaking vignettes, Kozol demonstrates the enduring effects of fear, poor nutrition, and lousy schools on children raised in the shelter system.   But what’s perhaps even more astonishing in these stories is the persistence of hope and the resilience in so many of the children as they fight their way toward adulthood.

Kozol is active in their lives, too, helping financially and emotionally when he can.  The children he calls Jeremy and Pineapple (all the names in the book are pseudonyms) persist despite the odds against them, graduating from college.   But other children end up in jail or worse, unable to find a lifeline.  The story of the woman Kozol calls Antsy and her son, Leonardo, must have been agony for him to write, loaded as it is with such sadness.

There are heroes here, too, among them Martha Overall, a priest at St Ann’s Episcopal Church, who not only provides spiritual guidance to many of Kozol’s subjects but informally adopts one of the children, too.   The woman Kozol calls Alice Washington remains loving and optimistic despite the odds.  Kozol writes that what attracted him to Alice was “her irreverent sense of humor and her absolute refusal to succumb to the passivity that was induced in many of the others who were living in the Martinique.”  Although her life was difficult, Kozol writes that Alice “rejected victimhood.”    Kozol cloaks her with a well-deserved dignity.

As I read Fire in the Ashes and thought about Kozol’s admirably principled commitment to chronicling the lives of the urban poor, I marveled at his staying power.  His tone, too, has been consistent for almost fifty years—cool, smart, empathetic and, despite all the evidence to rebut his convictions, full of hope.  Listening to it—and Kozol has a wonderfully conversational style—reminded me of another powerful prophetic writer who appeared on the scene at the same moment as Kozol.

Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed indicted Detroit for willingly selling dangerous cars, while Death at an Early Ageaccused the schools of willfully neglecting the educational needs of poor children.    And while Nader has continued to rail against consumerism and political corruption, the cars we drive today are better in every way than the cars of the sixties—safer, more dependable, longer-lasting.

Reporting from the Margins

But our treatment of poor children and our commitment to improving our schools?   In many ways, it’s worse than ever.  We don’t even pay lip service to any plans to improve the lives of the poor.   Mitt Romney proudly announces his contempt for people fallen on hard times, faulting them for not being rich like him, which he implies is merely a matter of hard work, ignoring the priviliges coveyed by wealthy parents and access to great schools and universities.  We’ve acquiesced in equating poverty with crime—we’re better at blaming people for their failings than at finding ways to help.

We seem to care more for our cars than our kids.  This is not a legacy to celebrate.  Jonathan Kozol’s brilliant body of work shines a light not merely on the lives of the poor, but into the dark night of the American soul.

Now that he’s won his second major with what can only be called Tigeresque domination, it’s clear that Rory McIlroy has taken total control emotionally of his game, just as he has continued to refine its physical, technical genius.   Tiger always looked angry winning, and in his press conference after the final round of the PGA Championship, said he had erred in trying to enjoy himself on Sunday.  He described himself as an “all systems go” kind of player, not the sort of competitor who can relax and relish what he’s doing.   That sounded like a rationalization, but given that Tiger has always been open to experiments with his swing, perhaps he’s taking that approach to his psychic equipment as well.

But Rory, his smile on the 18th green radiating the joy he clearly felt, never mistook the concentration he was required to bring to every shot with a martial attitude toward the game or his fellow competitors.  He executed brilliantly, and then walked on with a jaunty stride.  The galleries enjoyed singing his name, the lilting strains confirming that he’s famous enough now to be known only by a single name.  The handshakes and congratulations from Bo Van Pelt and Carl Petterson to Rory, whatever disappointment they surely felt, also seemed genuine.   Superstars build audiences, as Tiger proved, and Rory’s popularity eventually means money in the pockets of the touring pros, but I don’t think that is what motivated their pats on the back.

Rory seems, as he appeared to in the wonderful interviews David Feherty did with him in Ireland last year, a genuinely nice person.  The people I know who also know Rory are unanimous in praising his intelligence, his generosity, and his loyalty.   Winning one major by eight shots might have been a fluke, but winning a second by the same record-margin was the result of superior skill and execution.   Rory is now one for the ages, and it will be all of our great pleasure and privilege to sit back and enjoy what will surely be a career trajectory arcing across the stars.