Trail Mix: A Writing Life Enhanced by Attention Deficit Disorder

By David B. Bowes and Brian B. Doyle M.D.

Along the trail in Trail Mix we’ll witness a night launch of Navy jets from a nuclear aircraft carrier….. boogie with an integrated throng at a James Brown concert…..chase President Lyndon Johnson around the world in five days…..spike a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with expensive French wine….. hang with preservationists as they save an architectural jewel from demolition…..celebrate a Glorious Fourth with Italian-American fireworks families…..visit terminally ill patients and their pets at the world’s first hospice…..trace the life of a mushroom from incubation in chicken shit to doom on a dinner plate…..stalk Elizabethan accents among the watermen on Chesapeake Bay’s Tangier Island….. barnstorm on Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign plane with twistmeister Chubby Checker….. perch on a rail in the St. Louis Zoo’s bird house with ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson…..eat tear gas in Chicago with war protestors at the Democratic National Convention…..savor tea and gossip on Embassy Row with GOP doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth…..play tennis with comedienne Phyllis Diller and her shiny, new orthodontics…..judge a BBQ festival with good ole boys in North Carolina’s mountains…..share beans and a unisex bucket with co-ed strangers on an Outward Bound voyage…..ponder King Henry VIII’s “girlfriends” with a cardinal of the Catholic church…..strip naked for volleyball and Robert’s Rules of Order in a nudist colony. And as our stuff-driven culture chants without ceasing, much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 30, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467054775

David B. Bowes

David B. Bowes is a freelance journalist, speechwriter and communications consultant. A Navy veteran and lifelong boater, he is a contributing writer to Chesapeake Bay magazine. Prior to retirement, and in addition to other communications jobs, he was a general assignment reporter for The Blade of Toledo, Ohio; a reporter, editorial writer, Washington correspondent and roving national correspondent of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, and urban affairs columnist, editorial page editor and associate editor of the Cincinnati Post. He is a recipient of the Con Lee Kelliher Award of the Society of Professional Journalists “…for excellence in general news reporting.” The American Political Science Association cited him “…for distinguished reporting of public affairs.” The Scripps-Howard Foundation presented him with the Walker Stone Distinguished Citation “… for outstanding editorials that produced results.” David Bowes lives on a farm near the Antietam National Battlefield in western Maryland with his wife, the psychologist Rosemary Tofalo Bowes.

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© 2009 David B. Bowes. All rights reserved.

An Imprint of Ideaphoria Press

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher

make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book

and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/22/2021

ISBN: 978-1-4389-2575-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4389-2576-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-5477-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009907583

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Summary: Mixed bag of news dispatches, feature stories, news maker profi les, editorials,

Washington correspondence and roving national commentary by an award-winning

journalist. Foreword by a psychiatrist explaining how traits associated with attention defi

cit disorder can be a good if counterintuitive fi t with the demands of a career in journalism.

1. American studies—20th Century. 2. Popular culture. 3. Attention Defi cit

Hyperactivity Disorder. 4 Urban Aff airs. 5. Politics. 6. Memoir.

814—dc22

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Also by David B. Bowes

Creating the Globally Competitive Community

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

David Bowes retains the rare gift of wonderment, finding fascination in people, places and things that many of us fail to notice. Whether traveling with the President on Air Force One or savoring a can of beef stew, he approaches life and love as adventures, inviting us to join as his companion, Trail Mix is a gourmet treat.

—David Yount, author of How the Quakers Invented America

Bowes admits in his very title that this book is a pudding without a theme. Thank goodness. Instead, we find serendipity. In these timeless, beautifully written pieces, we wander with him through the last half-century, from national political conventions to a hippie commune in Oregon, across an America that is already fading into nostalgia. Bowes’ work discloses a crisp, quirky mind, an open heart and a contagious affection for this country we sometimes forget to love.

—Ernest B. Furgurson, author of Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War

In Trail Mix, David Bowes combines a jeweler’s eye, a poet’s soul, a reporter’s restlessness and a professor’s love of language to paint a unique portrait of late Twentieth Century America. From vintage amusement parks to the Vietnam War to celebrity couturier Oleg Cassini, it’s all here, limned in Bowes’ own blend of of wonder, respect and exuberance. A meditation on Antietam…..the death of his own father…..an assessment of Thoreau…..Bowes gives us the many fruits of a writer’s long life as only a first-rate journalist can. And, in the process, he gives us ourselves.

—Polk Laffoon, author of Tornado! and General Hospital

Of all the writers I’ve worked with over the years, only David Bowes has become both a friend and an adjective. My staff knows exactly what I mean when I say a story needs to be more Bowesian. I mean that it needs that wonderful mix of intellect, literacy and eye-twinkle that David squeezes into every paragraph. As writers go, he is really quite …Bowesian.

—T.F. Sayles, editor, Chesapeake Bay Magazine

This is a dare: try reading Trail Mix—and refrain from smiling. With cheery wit, insight and grace, Dave Bowes takes readers on an odyssey through both geography and time. Savor the journey.

—Mike Johnson, author of Fate of the Warriors

In Search of Cincinnati is the candid, tri-weekly appraisal of his adopted home by David Bowes, an award-winning journalist who has traveled with Presidents, monitored Congress, walked America’s cities and pondered her people’s dreams. An incorrigible sidewalk philosopher, he sees kinship between disparate pairs of citizens, such as the construction worker poised on a girder 1500 feet high and the financier juggling his stocks. Bowes shows us our city as we have never seen it— opening new doors on old issues, leading us up overlooked alleys, taking off the blindfolds, sharing his feelings so we can think more clearly about our own. Good preparation, we think, for taking a fresh look at a venerable city.

—Cincinnati Post

David B. Bowes is the versatile reporter who told you about the taming of a wild gas well in St. Louis County. He was our correspondent at the first International Arms Control Symposium. Last year he received the Con Lee Kelliher Award from Sigma Delta Chi for excellence in general reporting. He has a B.A. in English with distinction from the University of Virginia. He also received a master’s degree from the University of Michigan where he was named outstanding graduate journalism student in 1961. Dave is a reason why readers of the Post-Dispatch are as well informed as any newspaper readers on earth.

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Bowes writes with the assured eloquence of someone who has seen a lot of the world with his eyes open.

—Mid-Atlantic Country Magazine

We always look forward to David Bowes’ easy-going way with words.

—Cincinnati Magazine

In memory of my sister

Margery Bowes Dakin

Growing up in Ohio, I wakened every morning to the sound of

her piano practice. I hear it still.

Cover photograph: The author jabbing his battered Smith Corona — index fingers, right thumb for the space bar — at the Honolulu airport in 1968.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

UNCOMMON CARRIERS

Sweet Summer of ‘54

Flying Low

Aboard the War Machine

Greyhound 3723

A New York State of Mind

Lame Ducks Aloft

Water Music

IN SEARCH OF AMERICA

Dublin in the USA

When Textiles Unraveled

Patriotism by the Pacific

Gambling with a Family Farm

El Barrio Primo

Nudism vs. Nudity

Alabama Gets a Dose of Soul

Enduring the White Man

A Peace Mass Cut Short

IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR

ONCE UPON A CITY

Welcomes

Living Twice

Down the Chute

Home of the Last Laugh

At Harold’s Bar

Watergate I

Photography Man

Watergate II

Confessing the Mildew

A Sense of Place

Hill Town Sliding

Preservation Bedfellows

Cutting the Cord

ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ

BUSINESS DISTRICT

Limburger at the S&L

Pot Luck off Biddeford Pool

Gambling with Education

The Vines of Cawarra

Big Medicine

Waiting for Horses

Doing the Public’s Business

From Rot to Rapture

Containing the Cost of Dying

A Paucity of Eggs

A Booming Business

Pawtucket to Palo Alto

Cargoes

SCENIC OVERLOOKS

A Welcome to Water

Roads that Divide

Cooler with Scattered Showers

A Special Place

Gemini’s Magic Casement

A Green Land Reeling

Paying the Mountain

In Erie Marsh

Last Stand at Monterey

Trunk Bay, St. John

Convention Hotel

We’re Fishes

Walking Antietam

Bagpipes in Town

DIVERSIONS AHEAD

Fire at the Highlands

Art for a Summer of Disbelief

Dream Parks

Of Creeks and Time Warps

Confessions of a BBQ Judge

England’s Vietnam

A New Zoo Review

Hamlet to Go

Sex on the Screen

MENTIONED IN DISPATCHES

A Designing Man

Sister Joann is Sprung

Ode to an Element

Everybody’s Cardinal

Taming the Blowout

Tea for Three

When Humphrey Almost Won

Remembering the Warhorse

The ‘Perfect’ Poem

The Perils of Genealogy

American Names

On Monticello Mountain

The Seeds of Terrorism

No Diet of Worms

The Meaning of Gentleman

Christmas Down Under

Purple Martins and Socialism

So Proudly He Hailed

Parallel Universe

The Counterintuitive Thoreau

Andes Mountain High

Sojourn with the Bird Man

Never Mentioned

Dust to Dust

UNDER WAY

The Clam Tides

Old Ironsides’ Constitutional

Misty Mantras of Coastal Maine

Time, Tide, Tangier

Strangers in a Whaleboat

Be True to Your Stew

Getting a Head

Lucid Interval

Barrier Reef Bound

Long Live the Skipjack!

Just Passing Through

A Star Among Navigators

True Solitude

READING THROUGH CAROLINA

IN PROCESSION

Wallace Invades the North

Led by a Masked Man

Running with Yippies

Brothers at Arlington

Turning the Corner

Marching with Danes

Hearts in the Highlands

Monarchs on Parade

TO HEARTLAND

The Buckeye State

A Modest Proposal

Perrysburg Memories

The ‘Terracey’ Girl

Perfect Pitch

Mining an Obituary

Small Ohio Towns

OUR LADY OF THE MICROCHIP

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A FOOTNOTE ON TYPE

FOREWORD

I was a writer before I became a psychiatrist and long before I specialized in the diagnosis and treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in adults. Thus I pay close attention to the craft of writing, and to the descriptive power of notable writing, well before I think about what a collection of written words might reveal about the author.

Fine writing jumps off the page at us. We react. Not just intellectually, as in This makes sense, but viscerally, as in Wow! Fine writing is original and vibrant. It pushes us to see the world with new eyes. Verbs sizzle. Adjectives soar. Sentences pulse with vitality. They build to paragraphs, and paragraphs to chapters, and the whole is far greater than its parts. Fine writing propels us forward. When I react this way to the work of an author I already know, like Jane Austen or Annie Proulx, I sigh with contentment. When I react this way to a writer who is new to me, like David Bowes, I rejoice.

David’s skills are apparent in every sentence. They have energy; no, not just energy, verve. His writer’s eye finds just the right—the revelatory—detail, and he conveys it just…so. A distinctive sense of humor marks his work. The result? Prepare to chuckle unexpectedly or even laugh out loud. David is more than funny, though. He plumbs human emotion just as effectively as he evokes a smile.

His range is extraordinary, his reach into people and places memorable. Who else would be able to write heartfelt peans to zoos? Or repeated love letters about the city of Cincinnati? David’s writings about his family are tender and true. For me, most affecting is an essay about his wife Rosemary. I am lucky to know Rosemary, and you will know her once you have read David’s essay. You will also know much more about that extraordinary, quintessentially human and (potential) miracle, marital love.

A chapter that particularly delights me is All the Way with LBJ, David’s account of circumnavigating the globe with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Here David is zooming along at full throttle, and we enjoy the wild ride with him. Just the right word. Just the telling detail. Just the relevant phrase. All in all, a hilarious, moving portrait of a complex, extraordinary man who was a great president. I finished reading about the trip exhausted but exhilarated.

Mind you, all of this creativity and achievement comes from a David Bowes who asserts explicitly that he has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. We mental health professionals used to think that only unruly little boys had ADHD—or ADD, as most people simply call it. Now we know that adult men and women have the disorder, as well as boys and girls. Members of my profession have only recently begun admitting this and treating patients for it, as I point out in my book, Understanding and Treating Adults with ADHD.

My adult patients who have ADHD have taught me that their symptoms can interfere with their progress in life. For some patients, that interference can cripple them. The successful ones, though, find a supportive venue that focuses their original, distinctive intelligence in productive ways—a venue that rewards the unconventional value in their output. As ADHD becomes more widely recognized and understood, young people with this condition ideally should be exploring careers in which the characteristics of ADHD can actually give them a competitive edge. What David Bowes has identified in retrospect suggests a course that others might well chart for themselves much earlier in their employable years. David is not my patient, but the output of his lifetime in journalism demonstrates the accuracy of my clinical observation: Persons with ADHD can put their off-beat viewpoint—their creative differences and unexpected analogies—to good use. Look no further than the pages of this book.

As readers, we don’t really care whether an author does or does not have ADHD. What we care about is whether he or she produces prose which informs and delights us. David Bowes does so with élan. Enjoy such prose for yourself as you read Trail Mix: A Writing Life Enhanced by ADD.

Brian B. Doyle, MD, CM, FAC Pysch

Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Fellow, American College of Psychiatrists

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and of Family and Community Medicine

Georgetown University School of Medicine

INTRODUCTION

"I like the way you take a simple idea and

make it complicated."

W hy this book? Why resurrect random outbursts of journalism so old they’re no longer even suitable to line a parrot cage or wrap fish? Because the thought of shredding or burning them is like throwing myself off a bridge. Please keep this in mind when, if you read ahead, you find yourself becalmed in some tale that simply doesn’t float your boat. You’re not obliged to read every word or even every page. In some cases I’ve included a certain piece for my own ego’s sake and not, truth to tell, with a reader’s betterment in mind. Moreover, I’m also reaching one last time for a means to preserve a few sights, sounds and recollections that heretofore haven’t yet found their way into print. And getting things into print is the point of every writer’s life.

For example, you don’t really need to know that back in 1968 I relished an unforgettable green chili omelet in Yreka, California. But then again, you may want to hunt for one there if you, too, find yourself driving near Mount Shasta at breakfast time.

And you don’t really need to learn that in Wyoming, in 1983, I witnessed an impromptu slalom of sorts on an Interstate highway entry ramp. A horse was dropping turds from the back of a towed van and a tailgating motorcyclist was tracing a serpentine path around and between them. Yet I can’t resist remarking that such grace in motion is wherever we find it.

You don’t really need to hear that when, in 1965, I asked a District of Columbia police officer if he knew which foreign dignitary was in an approaching motorcade, he muttered: Prob’ly some nigger king. Still, I’m compelled to fix in time that spontaneous and sobering measure of race relations in America. (Today, mere weeks before Barak Hussein Obama will be sworn in as the nation’s 44th President, race relations are much improved.)

Why should I recall for you the church congregation in rural Tennessee that truly feared the arrival of sushi-eating Japanese workers at a new auto assembly plant? Because of the wisdom their clever young pastor revealed. He remarked from the pulpit: "This is our chance to explain to new neighbors why we eat blackeye peas on New Year’s Day!"

And what are you actually going to do with this bit of intelligence? In Pennsylvania, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, there’s a seamstress who sells clothes for Amish Barbie dolls. Modest high necklines, full length skirts, starched muslin caps, the whole nine yards. And Ken? No pacifist he. Camouflaged fatigues and combat boots.

Finally, you don’t need to know that a senior state senator in Michigan once explained to me the status of a piece of legislation as follows: Don’t quote me, Dave, but that bill is as dead as my dick. Still, how can one resist sharing this glimpse of a heretofore uncharted intersection between political science and vascular medicine?

If you’re still with me, my task as a writer is to catch your attention, to set the hook in your lip or fail trying. To repeat, however, and to blatantly mix metaphors, you’re under no more obligation to rise to the ersatz insects I lay before you than you are to swerve into a car wash on a rainy day because some guy out front is waving his chamois and pointing toward a brush-lined tunnel. And this is the place to acknowledge the foreword by the distinguished psychiatrist and author, Brian Doyle. Dr. Doyle doesn’t shrink my head, which is not to say I don’t get shrunk at least weekly. I wander about in a rat maze of psychoanalysis that is traffic-copped by my spouse. Decades have passed since first she called me a sophisticated consumer of therapeutic services. I still wear that comment like a badge of pride. I urge you to at least jump to the final chapter and meet Our Lady of the Microchip—the brilliant, beautiful Rosemary Tofalo Bowes, PhD.

There is no ideal way to organize the stuff I’ve rounded up and driven between these covers. Plucked from work that appeared in a handful of newspapers and magazines since the 1950s, the contents of this book don’t even begin to cohere around some central theme unless it is life in the years I lived it. We journalists, in Bill Moyers’s felicitous phrase, are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people’s knowledge, other people’s experience, and other people’s wisdom. We tell their stories. And such disparate tales struggle into the light in their own season and at their own pace.

Merely reprinting a dog’s breakfast of news stories, editorials, commentary pieces and occasional poems in chronological order—from stem to stern to stem, as it were—might have revealed an evolving measure of creative maturity in the author. Surely one can hope to grow up as a writer instead of just growing in girth. Yet such a serial procession of diverse material, careening in and out of life’s line of march like go-karts at a Shriners’ parade, would condemn even the most patient reader to mental whiplash. Three reasons for this come to mind:

Generalists Winging It

First, the random nature of assignments had me producing hard and soft copy all over the map, both topically and geographically speaking. You’ll see what I mean in the following chapters—each one titled to convey a writing life on the road, and each containing pieces under headlines that I’ve tweaked or rewritten these many years hence. When I started in journalism its natural habitat still was cavernous city rooms (studded with brass spittoons) atop old downtown printing plants where newspapers were manufactured daily. Whiffs of molten Linotype lead battered the senses as did clattering Teletype machines. We were such ink-stained wretches that we washed our hands before going to the bathroom instead of after.

Daily journalism was the last refuge of generalists. There stands Assistant City Editor Sam Shelton shouting across some 50 littered desks: Anyone left who hasn’t had a murder this week? There sits writer Stuart Saunders in the clutches of deadline fever, yelling into thin air: In ‘First Church of Christ Scientist’ is there a comma after Christ? Here comes reporter Manny Chait, chuckling at the sneaky way he ended a police item about robbery from a sausage truck: ….The missing links were valued at $96. In what other line of endeavor, moreover, is one paid to plumb the financial mysteries of the Immaculate Conception Credit Union? And what other cadre of young professionals paid 75 hard-earned cents for haircuts at Mohler Barber College, risking the tonsorial incompetence of Missouri farm boys learning a trade?

Offbeat Ideas Galore

The second reason this collection may sew thematic confusion is that I augmented workaday stories about fires, floods, explosions, robberies, elections and coroners’ inquests with original ideas pitched to editors at the Toledo Blade, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and later to the editor-in-chief of the Cincinnati Post. For a short while I pitched ideas to myself as editor-in-chief of Cincinnati Queen City magazine. In due course I was lobbing suggestions to magazine editors at Mid-Atlantic Country, Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore, the quarterly Potomac Review and myself again when editing the economic policy journal Enterprise. The capers and coverage I proposed could be more off the wall by half than what editors directed me to do. Nor were all of the suggestions spun off by my torrent of unfocused ideas appreciated.

City Editor Joe Knack spiked my recommendation that we use a looming national election to see if the fortune teller down the street in Toledo could predict winners or anything at all. It’s a can’a tomatoes, Dave, he snarled. Just another can’a tomatoes. Later, some phantom editor in St. Louis scuttled the sociological essay I filed from a Florida nudist colony in the same summer that bare-naked Oh, Calcutta! was the toast of the Broadway stage. And my last words to my Washington boss, Bureau Chief Richard Dudman, before covering President Johnson’s state visit to Australia, were: I promise not to write about the kangaroos. (Dick looked skeptical despite that assurance, and with good reason.) I once reprinted in Enterprise a glimpse of supply and demand from a nature book called Bumblebee Economics by biologist Bernd Heinrich. Free Market in a Meadow was the headline I gave to the reprint, to the likely confusion of that policy journal’s right-brained readers.

All the more appreciated, therefore, was a compliment paid to me by magazine editor Ramsey Flynn. Bowes, he said, I like the way you take a simple idea and make it complicated.

Slippery Thinking

Ramsey Flynn should have thanked my nervous system as well as my brain. Why? Because I’ve only recently realized that for all these years my readers had to cope with the fact that I’ve been a walking victim of undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Or rather, have I in fact been blessed with ADD? Since I can’t run the movie of my life in reverse—out of the water and onto the diving board—and start again in some other career, I choose on balance to be an unabashed beneficiary of ADD. Left to their own devices, the thoughts in my noggin elicit almost no coefficient of friction until looming and finally drop-dead writing deadlines snap me into focus. Put another way, my thoughts skid about like hogs on ice. Though I consider myself to be a traditionalist in many respects, and thus an essentially conventional thinker, I’m bored by numbing repetition and addicted to free-floating novelty. For instance, have you ever invited a brace of Mormon missionaries in from the doorstep in order to ask them what they they believe and why? I have. I also chased a car for miles through Los Angeles because its bumper sticker said Ask Me About Scientology! No such knowledge, scooped up like a hot grounder, ever goes to waste in the life of a journalist. My fund of random knowledge, gleaned through the restless scanning that is a characteristic of ADD, explains why I’m so comfortable with World War I correspondent Richard Harding Davis’s definition of good writing: Saying something old in a new way or saying something new in an old way.

Can you grant, therefore, that being a loose mental cannon isn’t always all bad? As Dr. Doyle observes in his foreword, high-functioning persons with ADD can use their distinctive viewpoint, their creative differences, to good use. Look no further than the pages of this book. Readers who do wish to look further can consult www.add.org about ADD or track down three readable books by Hallowell and Ratey: Driven to Distraction, Answers to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction. To lay down a baseline before delving into that medical literature, consider the career aptitude testing that the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (www.jocrf.org) has been conducting and compiling since 1922. Though Johnson O’Connor doesn’t test for ADHD, its findings can identify career options that harness ADHD traits to productive, satisfying ends.

In 2004, by way of concluding a Potomac Review essay about time travel after three solo days behind the wheel, I posed and sought to answer this core question:

What is it about drifting I need in the way that Brahma bulls need trace minerals and Dharma Bums need yet another turn in the road? Visual acuity is part of it. If something can be seen I must see it in high resolution and ponder it in extenso. Then there’s my tolerance for ambiguity which, when hardwired to a mind that’s like an unmade bed, gives elaborate meaning to facts that otherwise barely cast shadows. At bottom, I suspect my type of travel is behavioral. Whether I’m bound for Mecklenburg or Manchu Picchu, travel allows me to pretend I really can stop time, put life on hold and maybe live forever. Live forever? From some back file in my cranium comes the thought that Allah does not subtract from the allotted span of man the time he spends at fishing. In my case I’m trolling for stories. Or perhaps such travel has its own entry in the DSM IV, psychiatry’s official menu of mental maladies. Remind me not to ask…

As much as I enjoy quoting myself, I’m eager to give new currency (block that redundancy!) to the selected adventures published here. I’m eager to bolt from this book project, hit the road, see what I’ve been missing lately, and think about what it means. As the lead baritone asks in the 1930s musical At Long Last Love: Is this Grenada I see or only Asbury Park? Whether anyone in succeeding generations will enjoy or even endure this volume of encounters is out of my hands. I surely hope that my fine young grandsons, David Albright Bowes and Daniel Korbel Bowes, will remember Grampa David through these pages and then pass the book along to their own sons and daughters. Likewise for my late sister and brother-in-law Bill Dakin’s fetching grandchildren, Maxwell and Victoria Dakin. Immortality, after all, still amounts to writing things down, though typing onto a computer screen is changing that dramatically. Still, as long as ink on paper can have a half-life as long as the Dead Sea Scrolls are old, there’s hope.

38970002.jpg

Singles with comedienne

Phyllis Diller

When you turn the page and sidle down this memory lane, don’t expect tales torn from current headlines. Remember instead that there isn’t much truly new beneath the sun. Barbara Kingsolver has recalled that all stories begin in one of two ways: A stranger came to town, or else, I set out upon a journey. Henry David Thoreau once sniffed at the significance of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, contending that all the New World could learn from listening to Europe was that Princess Eugenie has the whooping cough. And the human condition remains remarkably consistent, though the behavior of our species usually is more nuanced than the media acknowledge. To George Bernard Shaw, after all, the problem with journalists on both sides of the ocean was that they don’t know the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization.

Along the trail in Trail Mix, we’ll witness a night launch of Navy jets from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Independence…..boogie with a black and white throng as James Brown gives Alabama a dose of Soul…..chase compulsive President Lyndon B. Johnson around the world in five surreal days…..spike a can of cheap Dinty Moore beef stew with a soupcon of 1983 Chateau Lynch Bages and Laird’s applejack…..hang with a polyglot troupe of feisty preservationists as they save an Art Deco rail terminal from the wrecking ball…..celebrate an exuberant Fourth with the Italian-Americans who own America’s biggest fireworks companies…..visit terminally ill patients and their pets in England at the world’s first contemporary hospice…..trace the life of a mushroom from incubation in chicken shit to doom on a dinner plate at Joe’s mushroom restaurant…..stalk Elizabethan accents among the watermen of remote Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay…..barnstorm on Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s campaign plane with film star Inger Stevens, Olympic decathalete Rafer Johnson and twistmeister Chubby Checker…..perch on an ornate rail in the St. Louis Zoo’s landmark bird house with iconic, hawk-nosed ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson…..eat tear gas in Chicago with shaggy Vietnam war protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention …..savor tea and Republican gossip on Embassy Row—Alice Roosevelt Longworth will pour…..play tennis with comedienne Phyllis Diller and her shiny new orthodontics…..judge a calorific BBQ festival with good ole boys deep in North Carolina’s mountains…..share beans and a unisex bucket with co-ed strangers on an Outward Bound wilderness voyage…..ponder King Henry VIII’s girlfriends with a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church…..strip naked for volley ball and Robert’s Rules of Order in a Florida nudist colony. And as our stuff-driven culture chants without ceasing: much, much more.

But enough preview, eh? Let’s suit up in short attention spans and get started!

David B. Bowes, 2009

UNCOMMON CARRIERS

Most of my writing life has been lived in motion. Sometimes I traversed the same ground twice over, as when tiny Canajoharie, N.Y., first spotted fleetingly from Greyhound 3723 in 1973, revealed a dazzling cache of fine art when entered by rental car 23 years later. This chapter’s trip on America’s first bullet train, the night aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier, the flights with the White House press corps and a whitewater raft ride were all in the line of duty. In contrast, the intermodal Sweet Summer of ‘54 is a sentimental opener, pure and simple.

Sweet Summer of ‘54

27 June — Aboard the Pacemaker: Toledo, Port Clinton and Sandusky now lie west of this New York Central passenger train. Manhattan Island waits ahead tomorrow.

[So did a Cunard student ship to France, I add in 2008, and a train to and through Switzerland, tour buses and a Vespa scooter in Italy, and an American Export liner from Naples back to these United States. The mixed bag of conveyances carried this collegian—20 years old at the time— through a truncated Grand Tour of the sort that introduced a zillion self-absorbed collegians of the Silent Fifties to the culture and dissipation of the Old World.]

From Cleveland to Rochester I talk with a high-school teacher from Benton Harbor, Michigan. We discuss baseball and the Boy Scouts for three hours, reminding me that I know virtually nothing about either topic. A Russian Orthodox clergyman with skull cap, black boots, and beard snores just enough to make sure I watch the sun come up over the hills and canals of Upstate New York. Among others who can’t sleep on the New York Central’s Water Level Route are a Scottish-American carpenter and his family on their way to Aberdeen, Scotland, for the summer. I have breakfast with a woman who once cooked for Otto Graham, the Cleveland Browns professional football star. Students from Wellesley, Wisconsin, Ohio University, Miami, Iowa, and Toledo’s DeVilbiss High School are all on the train. My upcoming trip to France, Switzerland, and Italy is in no way novel; almost every fellow traveler is going abroad.

28 June — New York City

Down the Hudson River Valley past Bannerman’s Arsenal, under Sing-Sing Penitentiary, and — better two hours late than never — Grand Central Station, about noon.

It takes me nearly forty-five minutes to get a cab. While waiting I help several girls with their luggage. (They are sailing on the same ship; no harm in making a few points ahead of the crowd.) I spend almost all afternoon shopping. It is raining hard and I’m glad to have Dad’s raincoat. Every store front is lined with soggy, disgruntled people, and I have the sidewalks virtually to myself. A hot shower at the Chemists’ Club, where Dad is a member and I’m staying, makes me feel human again. Stouffer’s puts excellent American cooking in my stomach.

After dinner I stroll to Times Square. The rain has stopped, and the evening is cool and pleasant. I join a crowd watching a group of black boys performing calypso-fashion at the curb. They play four sets of tom-toms and bongo drums; several little guys who can’t be more than six or eight years old accompany them on gourds and cowbells. They take turns passing the hat. The Sidewalk Commodores, as they call themselves, appeared with Louis Armstrong on television’s Toast of the Town, and it is easy to see why.

Tomorrow I board the 27,000-ton M. V. (for Motor Vessel) Georgic, the world’s largest diesel powered ship. She carries about 80 percent college students, features one class only, and austerity reportedly is the watchword. It is rumored that the ship was used to haul British soldiers to Korea, and this is quite possible, because the Cunard White Star Line is leasing her from the Royal Navy. I don’t really care how austere it gets, because it’ll be my first and thus most luxurious liner to date.

5 July — North Atlantic

We have been at sea for five days, and this is my first opportunity to record the highlights of passage. Upon boarding at North River Pier 90, I was ushered to a cabin deep in the bowels of the ship. It proved to be no larger than my room at home and had ten bunks! Only six of us are living there, however: three men from Connecticut Wesleyan, two from Yale, and me.

There are more older people among the 1,600 passengers than I had expected, but college kids are in the majority. Yale, Princeton, Smith, Vassar, Chicago, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Sweet Briar, Randolph-Macon, Centenary, Radcliffe, Wellesley, Washington and Lee, and my alma mater, the University of Virginia, are only some of the schools represented. Everyone has the run of the ship, and I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.

Last evening when the west-bound Queen Mary passed about a mile to starboard, her white profile was reflecting the glow of the setting sun as she approached. Both ships signaled back and forth with their whistles. When the Queen switched on the lamps along her promenade deck, a great gasp of delight went up from our crowded starboard deck. We were making about eighteen knots, and the Queen — traveling half again as fast — was soon far astern. When she passed, I thought of Stephen Spender’s words about the luminous self-possession of ships on ocean. She looked warm and busy, and she twinkled like a great city.

6 July — North Atlantic

I’ve noticed some small birds. They are rather like swallows and are called — strangely enough — Mother Carey’s chickens. It is amazing how birds of this size can exist in the middle of the ocean. They don’t appear to be a true gull or tern, and I have never seen one actually on the surface of the sea. They comb the waves carefully for food, however, and dip down into each trough as it develops. It is almost as if they anticipate the action of the ever-changing wave formations.

Several passengers sighted a whale yesterday. It was blowing its geyser into the air about 200 yards from the ship. I wish I had seen it, but I was involved in a game of gin rummy with some of my closer friends aboard. It has been cold and windy for several days now. As a result, we attend the cinema and hold court in the bar each afternoon over large drafts of ale. We play every card game known to man, I think, and singing is taking over this worthless but wonderful existence. Frank and Bryan, our faithful waiters, hover continually. They are quick to explain English currency, offer a light, or interject their delightfully dry humor into amusing situations, of which there are many.

I caught up with King Harrison, a Chi Phi at Virginia, the first day out. He has reserved an Austin Devon sedan for a trip through Europe with three friends — George Scragg, Dan Rebhun, and Jerv Janney — all Princetonians. Tom Kohn (a friend of George Smith’s from Indianapolis) and Bomber Wade of Oshkosh add much to the group, and we have many mutual friends and classmates. King, George, and Jerv form a trio on piano, bass, and drums. They play progressive cool stuff, approaching professional quality. Each evening in the main saloon they hold jam sessions during orchestra intermissions; then we end up in the B-deck lounge until the sun is nearly up. The girls on this trip outnumber us almost ten to one. A ship’s officer convened a meeting of tour group leaders to complain that there is entirely too much wenching on this voyage.

We have sighted the rocky, green coast of South Ireland. Seeing land after a week at sea is thrilling, and doubly so when it proves to be wild and windswept, dotted with white farms shining against green hillsides. The ship’s orchestra has struck up The Wearing of the Green. Many Irish who are returning to visit—they land at Cobh tomorrow—stand at the rail and weep for joy. I could almost join them.

9 July — English Channel

Breakfast for those of us disembarking at Le Havre is set for 6:00 a.m., so we decide to stay up all night. It is really sad leaving the Georgic. I stand outside the train shed and look the ship over one last time as she pulls away. These have been eight unforgettable days, and from the quay I return the farewells of new friends who will land at Southampton this evening. They are too high on the now-distant ship to recognize. We enter coach compartments on the boat train and settle down for the three-hour trip to Paris.

11 July — Paris

Paris has more variety and color than any other city I have ever visited. To sit in a sidewalk cafe, nurse a Pernod, and watch the passers-by seems to be a national custom. It gained two new adherents before Bob Carter of Washington and Lee — also on my tour — and I had been here very long. The people of Paris, from cradle to cane, seem to possess a marvelous knack for taking things easy.

The nightlife at places like the Lido, the Follies, and La Nouvelle Eve is expensive, beautiful, and half nude. It is also quite worthless when one considers intrinsic value. It is not hard to see why French international power is almost a bygone, and why the nation itself is so politically unstable. I’ll sip and stroll with the French, but, much as I enjoy all this, I could never think of living here.

In particular there’s Montparnasse. It is the home of every bistro specializing in le jazz hot. I have heard Claude Luter several times at Club le Vieux Columbier. Luter is probably the most celebrated jazz clarinetist in France, and is accompanied by sidemen equal to the best Manhattan has to offer. This music is a straight import from the States, as are the jitterbug and the Charleston, which French students dance until three and four in the morning.

Advocates of jazz in Europe are purists. The clarinet solos are full of the old Sidney Bechet style. Bechet now lives in Cannes and, at eighty-six, is worshipped by millions. The trumpet smacks of Louis Armstrong. Out of sheer love for the stuff the band plays almost nonstop all night long.

My journal was silent on Switzerland. I can’t say what happened to the writing impulse during our few days there. A journal entry in Italy, which follows, refers to the way I still missed Switzerland during the first several days in Italy. But I also recall vividly a comment by Seymour Slive, a Harvard University art historian who was one of the professors leading our tour. Stretching out on a boat-shaped swimming float in Italy’s Lake Maggiore, Slive exclaimed, God, but it’s wonderful to be home again!

[I soon learned what prompted his comment. I, too, would warm up to Italy. But Switzerland lingered. In retrospect I understand why. The little republic is orderly and squeaky clean — two traits I was brought up to respect. But, above all, Switzerland was a respite from the heavyweight cathedrals and museums of Europe — and apparently from taking notes. Put another way, glacier-bright Switzerland cleared my palate between the more complex, more intellectual flavors of France and Italy.

[A lunch of bread, cheese, and beer in a waterfront park… spotless white passenger steamers threading their way to Interlaken … German girls among the passengers singing boisterously as our train descended an inclined railroad from the Jungfrau … an outdoor breakfast tablecloth so dazzling I couldn’t look directly at it … a wristwatch salesman pronouncing Le Coultre as if he were clearing his throat … the decidedly un-French reaction of hotel management when a friend of mine was caught sneaking a girl in through a window after midnight … how a loden-green Tyrolean hat went so well with my grey flannel Bermuda shorts and tan Shetland sweater … the Lion of Lucerne, a cenotaph to war dead so noble and moving that I still prize the etching of it that I brought home.]

19 July — Stresa

We reach sunny Italy in exactly fifteen minutes. The train trip is longer than that, but the dividing line is the famous Simplon Tunnel, where we take fifteen minutes to travel its thirteen miles! No sooner do we emerge from the tunnel at Domodossola than the temperature soars, and the scrubby mountain trees become full-sized cypress and olive. We have also left behind the rose-cheeked Swiss children with their long blonde hair. People here look fairly healthy but darker and possibly not so well scrubbed.

Perhaps I am not giving Italy a fair chance, but I feel nothing can ever compare with Switzerland. The houses here are interesting but faded and dirty. I later learn that lumber has always been at a premium, so the people build with stone and rubble, which they smooth over with plaster. The plaster is then painted with cheap watercolor tempera paint. No wonder it fades after years and years of that hot sun!

20 July — Gardone

Each bustling little town is flanked by several beautiful villas. Many villas have been deserted, and their window shutters are closed for good. The grounds surrounding some of these homes are almost a dream world. In fact, the whole countryside is like those old paintings in which a satyr chases a nymph through temple ruins while the sunset glows behind a happy scene of nature.

I must confess we have been roughing it very little in Italy. Our hotels are beautiful and the food is good. Several other tour members and I chipped in to rent a speedboat, driver, and water skis at Stresa on Lago Maggiore. The sun was warm, the lake was calm and sparkling, and the snow-capped Alps were rising to the north. Palm trees lined the shore, and the green hillsides were dotted with white and yellow villas. It was a travel-poster scene — and I was not only in it, but I skied until I thought my legs would fall off. It went better than ever before, zooming in and out of the waves until dinnertime. After dinner I had one drink and was so tired that I went straight to bed. What a great life this is!

23 July — Venezia

Venice is unique. As Tennyson once wrote, Venice held the gorgeous East in fee and was the daughter of democracy. Through the Crusades and until Portugal discovered new water routes to India, Venice was the hub of all world commerce. The power is gone, as is most of the trade, but the signs of wealth and influence remain.

Our hotel is situated on the Grand Canal. From my window I can see almost all the main water traffic of the city. A glance to the right shows the gondolas, motoscafe, and vaporettis, or water buses, cruising along past marble palaces. My view goes almost to the Rialto Bridge. To my left the Grand Canal widens considerably into a sort of bay. This is where old and new meet face to face. The rising sun produces a brilliant haze that reflects off the golden domes of the great Byzantine and baroque churches. The still air is cut by the blast of a steamer whistle as the ship is towed out to the Adriatic by tugs. Several Italian corvettes and the attack transport Stromboli are getting up steam for the day’s maneuvers near Trieste. The picturesque gondolas look like toys beside the larger craft; the gondoliers seem to be part of the boats they command. They stand with the poise of a ballet dancer on the precarious stern of the long, narrow skiff and control it with amazing accuracy, using only one long oar.

All the gondolas are painted black. This regulation continues, I believe, from the day a decree was passed to keep the gaily colored boats from competing with the royal gondolas for the public eye. Occasionally, however, I see privately owned gondolas. These are fitted with shining brass work and striped canopies and glow from the Venetian counterpart of our Simonize. Two liveried oarsmen complete the picture. What a hard way to live!

Despite the city’s aquatic location, Venetians can go anywhere on foot. There are 348 small bridges. There is one time, however, when every Venetian must depend upon a boat. This time is when he dies. On our way to explore several outlying islands, we pass a funeral procession as it nears the large walled island which serves the city as a burial ground. The hearse is a large curtained gondola propelled by four oarsmen dressed in black. It is covered with flowers from stem to stern. The surviving relatives ride behind, in a conventional gondola, and others follow single file. It is not unlike a scene in the Morte d’Arthur when three maidens clothed in black take the battered body of the king from Sir Bedivere and put it aboard a barge.

Katherine Hepburn is on location here for the filming of a movie called Summertime. A notice posted on a lobby pillar reminded one and all that tomorrow’s shooting required geraniums in pots—and a cat. Our hotel lobby abounds in script writers, cameramen, and other unattractive Americans. But I spend very little time there, so I don’t have to claim them. I stopped at the American Express office the other day just as an experiment. I might just as well have stayed in New York and gone to the Biltmore. It was the same old social game. I left as quickly as possible.

28 July — Firenze

Florence is quite like an American city in appearance. It is about the size of Toledo, and has a normal checkerboard pattern of regularly spaced avenues and cross streets. One has only to look and listen, however, to remember that this is Italy. The motor scooters and motorcycles are as thick as flies.

Italy’s two most popular types of scooter are the Vespa and the Lambretta. They are fast, well built, and make any American variety look like a Tinker Toy. Bob Carter, Hector Quesada (son of the president of the Philippines), and I rent scooters and do some exploring on our own. We grope our way through traffic until we reach the Arno River, then swing onto a parkway and parallel the river. The Ponte Vecchio passes on our right along with several temporary foot bridges constructed to replace bridges blown up in the last war.

We dodge trolleys, cross a flower-lined bridge, and soon are climbing a long hill. The roadway is covered over with trees, and lines of lovely villas stand on each side.

Our gradual climb opens into the Piazza Michelangelo, which commands a magnificent view of the city. In the center of the square is a full-size bronze replica of Michelangelo’s David. After locating landmarks below us and taking pictures, we return to our transportation. In ignorance we had forgotten to shut off the fuel lines; the scooters are hopelessly flooded.