Thistle September 2017 Magazine of the residents of the ... · Thistle -September 2017, page 2 and...

Thistle Volume 33, Number 5

September 2017 Magazine of the residents of the

Duncaster lifecare community,

Bloomfield, Connecticut

Ice Cream: A Love Story Susan Aller My love affair with ice cream began in Nebraska when I was three and my par-ents bought me my first cone. I can still remember trying to bite the ice cream scoop and ending up with my nose buried in it. My father’s laughter when he wiped the melting streaks of chocolate from my face and pink dress signaled that ice cream is worth any mess and any excess. Soon I learned to lick carefully, catching the melts before they became drips, and later I mastered the timing of finishing an ice cream bar on a stick just before the last hunk slipped off onto the ground. In my childhood most people had only small ice cube compartments in their re-frigerators, not large enough or cold enough to store cartons of ice cream. So on sultry August evenings, nothing cheered like an invitation to “go for a ride out to Irvington and get some ice cream.” This usually meant a cone apiece, chosen from the three or four basic flavors in the frosty tubs at the dairy store. When I discovered butter brickle on one of those excursions, a door to food paradise opened. Sometimes we decided to have root beer floats. Then we would carry a carton of hand-packed vanilla home, wrapped in newspapers to keep it frozen, and share it around the kitchen table with a quart of root beer and the tallest glasses in the house. My parents would smack their lips and tell us about the hot summer nights of their childhood when ice cream was made in hand-cranked freezers (with

cream from cows they knew!) and the root beer was brewed at home and stored in cellars where some bottles exploded before they could be consumed. Not all ice cream was the same. There was one brand from the grocery store that re-tained its shape on the plate long after it was scooped and thawed. When the manufacturer was bought by a conglom-erate some years later, I wondered if they re-named the product and found an-other use for it. It certainly was not ice cream. When I was fifteen and could get a sum-mer job, my only wish was to work at Reed's Ice Cream on the corner near our house. Neighbors lined up outside the little white stand and I sold them 5-cent, 10-cent or 15-cent sizes of ice cream that I sliced from paper-wrapped logs of ice cream, peeled, and pressed into pointed cones. Mosquitoes buzzed around the lights, heat lightning flashed in the sky,

IN THIS ISSUE

Ice Cream: Love Story-Susan Aller.. .. ..1

I Am “Moi”-Elaine Wintjen ................ ..2

Between Book Covers-Dean Daniels ... ..3

Electronic Challenge-L. Hudson .......... .5

Extrapolations-Jim Yaeger ................. .5

The Hubbard Awards-Valerie Santos ... .6

The Arts-Larry Rothfield .................... .7

The Luckiest Generation-David Clark .. 10

Sailing to Antarctica-Boyce Batey ....... 11

The Big House (Part 2)-Jean Peelle ..... 12

The Spotlight is On-Valerie Santos...... 15

New Residents ................................. 15

Thistle - September 2017, page 2

and the only relief from Omaha's sultry night was when I dipped into the freezer to pull out another roll of ice cream. It was the best summer job ever. Until...the sum-mer I worked with other students at George Williams College Camp in Wiscon-sin. As a soda-jerk, I was allowed to make myself one free treat at the end of each day’s work. Eating that glorious Wisconsin ice cream -- with its state-required butter-fat content -- packed ten pounds onto my thin frame. My father's laughter met me when I returned home at the end of Au-gust and he saw my moon face. The American ice cream industry was shift-ing into high gear when my husband and I moved to Europe in 1966. Hundreds of flavors – some ridiculous, some inspired – abounded in the U.S. But when we landed in Barcelona that summer we discovered that, in terms of ice cream, we had re-gressed to the era of our childhood thirty years earlier. “Helado” generally came in just three flavors: chocolate, vanilla and fresone. And even though we had a brand new Spanish refrigerator, the freezer com-partment was too unreliable to keep ice cream for long. Restaurants served small paper cups of bisque tortoni, adopted from the Italians; and there was a flavor called nata that appeared to be pure frozen whip-ping cream. On the street we patronized carts that sold fruit ices packed into hol-lowed-out orange and lemon shells. It wasn’t until we moved to France in 1974 that the culinary possibilities of ice cream surpassed our American expectations, with flavors like sorbet de cassis, richly crimson in color and perfumed with black currant liqueur, tangy tomato frappè to clear the palate between dinner courses. And, oh, the elegant vacherins: nests of meringue heaped with creamy glace, chantilly and fresh berries. Once, at a restaurant in Normandy, we de-cided on sherbet for a light dessert. “What kinds do you have,” we asked. “Whatever

you want,” the waiter offered. When we seemed confused about making a choice, he disappeared into the kitchen and re-turned with a two-tiered trolley. On it was arranged a collection of frosty cop-per bowls, filled with sherbets of all col-ors. We slid from gourmet to gourmand to glutton as we chose from thirteen dif-ferent varieties, made from fresh fruits and fruit liqueurs. One night not long ago somebody in our family made the time-honored sugges-tion to “go get some ice cream,” and it was an invitation not to be declined. There were three generations of us at the counter savoring special combina-tions and toppings. And making memo-ries. Families together on a hot summer night eating ice cream. Uh oh. I dripped chocolate ice cream on my pink shirt. The cycle never ends. I could almost hear my father laughing -- and loving me.

I AM "MOI" Elaine Wintjen

The renowned English novelist George Eliot (nom de plume of Mary Anne Ev-ans) once said, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." Well, George (or Mary Anne), that might have inspired you, but it sends me into fits of frustration. Why? Well, I've just never been able to determine who I might have been! A sex symbol? Hardly! A Rhodes Scholar? Not likely! A coloratura sopra-no? Only in the shower! Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? Not with my big mouth! And besides, George (or Mary Anne), it would appear that you were in the throes of an identity crisis. In which persona did you try to succeed? Throughout my life, I've spent a lot of therapy time (and money) reviewing a lengthy list of regrets. Why am I not a size 6? Has my consumption of chocolate


really compromised my calorie count? Why don't I like fish? Of course, it's odor-ous, but everyone I know salivates over their salmon. I know fame is fleeting, but why haven't I had at least "one moment in the sun"? (Okay, okay, I did have one moment. In public school I was voted "Most Likely to Succeed". They just never told me at what.) Though it is not yet an Olympic sport, I am a champion chair-changer. Most of my more arduous activities - reading, writing and noshing - are performed in a sitting position. When it comes to being sedentary, I have no equal. So, where is my gold medal? And finally, and this hurts the most, my wondrous words have never made it onto The New York Times Best Seller List. My list of laments seems endless, much to my chagrin and that of my former therapist. I've no doubt she was often tempted to send me to a "higher authori-ty", the nearest psychiatric facility. But perhaps Anonymous, a most prolific phi-losopher, had it right when he (or she) said, "If you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow… you're going to be cockeyed today." It may be as senseless to reconstruct the past as it is impossible to preview the fu-ture, and I certainly have no wish to be "cockeyed". Perhaps, I should start think-ing of myself as being defined by the peo-ple in my life, rather than by my accom-plishments, or lack thereof. After all, I was my husband's go-to-gal. I'm "Mom" to three, "Granny" to five, a sister, an aunt and friend to many. Why then do I torture myself with all this introspection and lamentation? I haven't a clue. Per-haps the great Oscar Wilde spoke for both of us when he said, "I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know some-thing about."

BETWEEN THE BOOK COVERS Dean Daniels

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (2016) by Anne Trubek is a dandy little book about a human ac-tivity some 5,000 years-old. The author attributes the first known handwriting to the Sumerians who lived in what is now southern Iraq. Called cuneiform, very small wedge-shaped marks were made on clay tablets perhaps a little larger than a domino. Many of these tablets have survived until this day. Initially the tablets were most likely used for ac-counting purposes, for example to record the price of a sheep. But by 3,000 BCE, cuneiform had evolved into symbols for words and the elites’ children were taught the language in schools. The Egyptians were the first to use a reed-like pen to write hieroglyphics on papyrus, a quite durable plant found in abundance along the Nile River. Only a very few children were taught the lan-guage and only assigned scribes record-ed. Unfortunately, many early Egyptian documents stored in the Library of Alex-andria were lost in the historic fire of 30 BCE. The Greeks gave us the alphabet and broadly educated their children. But the Romans were the most prolific writ-ers among the ancients and we owe them our thanks for putting words and sentences into book form. They also re-fined the Greek alphabet into the format that we use today. In the Middle Ages, monks were respon-sible for transcribing Latin manuscripts, primarily of a religious nature, for the Catholic hierarchy. Then, in the Fifteenth Century two Germans, Martin Luther and Johannes Gutenberg, came along to pro-vide a new direction in communicating words. Without the printing press the Protestant Reformation would not have blossomed as it soon did across the Eu-ropean continent. But the printed word


also brought concern for the future of handwriting. Skipping to the Nineteenth Century, two Americans, P. R. Spencer and A. N. Palm-er, brought their cursive skills to the pub-lic which fostered the beautiful penman-ship of our immediate ancestors. And, many of us here at Duncaster were taught the Palmer method in early grade school which has been replaced with our elec-tronic inventions. The last part of Trubek's book looks at, as she says, the uncertain future of hand-writing. Even our signatures may become obsolete with electronic recording and voice recognition. However, as I was writing this review an article appeared in the Hartford Courant entitled “Schools Begin Writing New Chapter on Cursive.” There are now fourteen states that require cursive be taught in public schools. Propo-nents say that cursive is important for fu-ture generations to understand handwrit-ten documents and to “enjoy letters from Grandma.” How about exploring the uncharted jun-gles of Honduras with Douglas Preston in The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017)? Or, perhaps after reading the first few pages, you'll decide that La Mos-quitia isn't the place for you. It's 32,000 sq. miles of rain forests, swamps, la-goons, rivers and mile-high mountains. It is also a jungle full of screaming monkeys, jaguars, sand fleas, six-foot poisonous snakes and drenching rainstorms. Once it was called Portal del Infierno or Gates of Hell because it was so forbidding. Un-touched by humans since pre-Columbian times, Preston calls it the most beautiful place on earth. The Lost City of the Monkey God tracks the experiences of a number of scientists and the author during a short period in 2015 in a quest to discover the Ciudao Blanca or the White City. The expedition

had the blessings of the Honduran gov-ernment and the protection from poach-ers and drug smugglers by the country's army. Before physically attacking the on-ground elements, they used state-of-the-art laser equipment such as lidar to chart, through some of the thickest veg-etation known to man, the topography from the air. Lidar had been previously used for mapping the surface of the moon. Using a rented small helicopter to reach the penetration point, boots hit the ground for two weeks of fascinating dis-covery. The explorers, and that's what they were, carried machetes to partially clear the undergrowth so they could rec-ord their findings. It took much physical effort and intestinal fortitude to do the work. Preston first reported the story for National Geographic. In addition to be-ing a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History, he co-authors novels with Lincoln Child. The Girl from Venice (2016) is a de-lightful novel by Martin Cruz Smith that, as the author says, is part fiction and part fact. It's late 1944 and the British and Americans are driving the Germans northward, in the air and on the ground. The war is waning but Northern Italy, particularly Venice and its environs are still occupied. Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, is still in power and hoarding gold bars. He also is very attentive to his mistress, Claretta. That's the facts part. The fiction involves a young fisherman, Cenzo, who, as the story opens, finds a young girl's body floating in the Venice lagoon. At first she appears to be dead, but after Cenzo wrestles her body into his boat, he finds that she is dehydrated but very much alive. Her name is Giulia. She is eighteen and the daughter of an affluent Jewish family who have been ar-rested, and subsequently murdered, by the Nazis.


In addition to the Nazis involved in this tale, there are also Fascists and Com-munists, partisans and collaborators, So-cialists and Blackshirts. As in any good mystery, some of Smith's characters are not who they seem to be. For instance, Cenzo's older brother, Giorgio, an icon in the Italian movie industry, has lured Cen-zo's beautiful wife to Milan to become an actress. Then there's Russo, Cenzo's friend, who is a smuggler; and there's Maria who is caring for her sick husband, the Argentine consul. And, there's the German-built Stork, a small reconnais-sance plane, that figures prominently in the story. This is Smith's first book since 2013 when Tatiana was published. He is best known for his novels about Russian intrigue (do the words sound familiar?) such as Gorky Park (1981) and Stalin's Ghost (2006).

ELECTRONIC CHALLENGE Leigh Hudson

There it is,

The blue screen of death. Reboot! Reboot! Nothing is left.

If I knew then

What I now know My computer would

Never lay me so low.

Computer! Computer! Don't darken my door. My fingers just tingle.

My thumbs are still sore.

Computer! Computer! Up there in the cloud.

Rain down information, For crying out loud.

EXTRAPOLATIONS Jim Yaeger

In 2015 a statistician analyzing the millen-nial-long increase in human longevity esti-mated that our lifespan will level off at 115 years. Good! I may have 25 years to compensate for the errors committed in my past. On the other hand, perhaps I am overly op-timistic. It would be far more accurate to calculate a specific lifespan for an individu-al, rather than a group average. Since most of us have declining heights as we age, I thought perhaps I could extrapolate the rate at which my height decreases until it reaches zero. At that point, I assume, I have reached my endpoint. Since 1980, my height has dropped from its earlier 74 inches to 69 inches, a rate of 1/8th inch per year as shown in the Figure. Since I will vanish in 2527, I could have 510 years to modify my legacy. However, it is probably overly optimistic to assume that I will exceed the average lifespan by a fac-tor of 20. Another bit of data which could provide some useful information is the rate of loss of clothing into the lint trap when I do my laundry. Every two weeks I lose about 1/8th ounce from 10 pounds of laundry. Us-ing this rate of loss of 3 1/4 ounces per year, I can estimate the lifespan of my washable clothing as shown in the Figure. Note that I will run out of clothing in the year 2317, some 200 years before vanish-ing. My nakedness should provide ample warning that the end is near. Finally, I can estimate my declining mobili-ty. In 2010, the length of my stride meas-ured 2.26 feet. In 2012, it had declined to 2.13 feet, a decline of 0.13 foot or about 0.6 foot/year. At that rate, it will reach 0 in year 2393. My immobility that year will


serve as a warning that I will need to re-place some washable clothing. Isn’t math amazing?

Figure Legend. The horizontal axis displays time in years, indicating the significant dates in this analysis. The vertical axis dis-plays two quantities, the percent of my washable clothing remaining (left) and my height (right).

THE HUBBARD AWARDS FOR 2017 Valerie Santos

Vice President, Human Resources The Hubbard Awards are given each year to an employee from the clinical and the non-clinical staff who best exemplifies the qualities of kindness, thoughtfulness, and consideration for others. The awards were established in recognition of Peggy and David Hubbard, past residents of Duncaster. The winners for this year are Wanda Carrier, Certified Nursing Assis-tant working in Assisted Living, and An-thony (Tony) Henry, Heavy Duty Cleaner working at Caleb Hitchcock Health Center in Environmental Services. Wanda joined Duncaster in 2008. Her residents think the world of her. Even if she is sick she has no call-outs and is

always putting residents first. Her smile is warm and friendly. Being on the Diver-sity & Inclusion Council is her passion. Her number one asset is her ability to keep smiling even while dealing with a challenge she is always positive. A few comments from those who recom-mended her: “She is a gem. She has a way of knowing our needs and is amaz-ing. She responds in a rapid, courte-ous way. She cares deeply for all the residents she works with. Her beautiful smile lights up the hallway as she speaks to every-one.” Wanda is consistently cheerful and up-beat. Always smiling and never in a bad mood. She clearly loves the residents and will go out of her way to help them. She is able to take criticism and still smile. She is special at making every resident feel special. Anthony began at Duncaster in 2004. Anthony always comes to work happy, joyful and smiling, embracing his job with passion and enthusiasm. I have never seen him grumpy, sad, or upset. Anthony’s positive demeanor should be an example to all. He is always willing to take on new tasks and help out. He works well with both the staff and residents. He is dependable, friendly and hardworking. He works well under pres-sure and never com-plains when asked to do extra work. Wanda and Anthony each received a gen-erous gift of $500 and a plaque through the fund established by the Hubbard fam-ily.


THE ARTS Larry Rothfield

Two remarkable exhibitions – Art lovers take notice! Two exceptional exhibitions are drawing to a close, one in the Not-To-Be-Missed category and one in the Visit-If-Possible class. The blockbuster is the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on May 21 and runs until September 17, and the second consists of a pair of Helen Frankenthaler shows at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mas-sachusetts that close on September 24 and October 9. Both artists were important figures in the worldwide revolution in contemporary art that began in the mid-1940s with the Jackson Pollock drip and spatter paintings. These revolutionized the Western world’s view of art by demonstrating the potential power of completely abstract and nonrep-resentational painting. The new New York-based school was named Abstract Expres-sionism by art critic Clement Greenberg. The impact of Abstract Expressionist art on the viewer depends solely on the aes-thetics of the paintings themselves, that is, the artist’s use of color, line and space, without being influenced by the viewer’s predetermined responses to familiar ob-jects within the painting. The use of strong colors and often powerful lines and shapes gave a strongly expressionistic feeling to the works of the group of tal-ented artists who rapidly adopted and ex-tended the new style. Frankenthaler and Rauschenberg arrived on the New York art scene in the late 1940’s at the tail end of the first wave of this flood, at the tender ages of 21 and 24. From then until their deaths they played important roles in extending the frontiers of Abstract Expressionism and, in the case of Rauschenberg, transforming it into a new art form.

“Among Friends” – The MOMA exhibition is the most important Rauschenberg ex-hibition since the major retrospective that completely filled New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1997. For me, the 1997 Gug-genheim show was a revelation. Before attending the exhibition I knew a bit about Rauschenberg’s work and was fair-ly certain I didn’t like it because of the reintroduction of figurative and topical el-ements into his paintings. At the time, I thought this was hokey and not real art but by the time I left the museum I was shaken to the core by the sheer power of the work. Nothing since has changed my opinion that Rauschenberg is a truly great artist, both in the power of his own work and in the transformative effects he had upon contemporary art. As indicated by its title, the MOMA exhibi-tion emphasizes the many close interac-tions and collaborations that existed be-tween the artist and now well-known fig-ures in the worlds of art, music, dance and theater. These include, for example, the artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, the musician John Cage, and the dancers Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor. The exhibition includes many letters and other testimony to the im-portance of these interactions and also includes many examples of actual collab-orations, including videos of collaborative dance projects with all three choreogra-phers. (I found these the least interesting part of the exhibition, with little feeling they had any lasting influence on his painting or their own creative endeav-ors.) Rauschenberg’s life as an artist began at the now-legendary Black Mountain Col-lege near Asheville, NC, which he attend-ed in 1948-49 and 1951-52 under the GI Bill of Rights. Black Mountain in the late 1940s and early Fifties was an incredible artistic crucible, a place where creativity and independent development were stressed. It was there that he first met


Twombly, Johns, Cage, Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller and probably Willem De Kooning. It was clear from the outset that Rausch-enberg was a rare talent, combining a prodigious innate painting ability with an irrepressible drive to change the rules and the way in which art is created. Amongst the most interesting parts of the exhibi-tion are the examples of his early work at Black Mountain. Then and throughout the remainder of his career he was fascinated by photography. The examples include standard photography, at which he ex-celled, as well as new ways of using basic photographic techniques to create art. For example, at Black Mountain he and his then companion and soon-to-be wife Su-san Weil created fascinating “photo-grams”, several of which are in the show. In these, naked or clothed bodies or com-binations of human or other objects were placed in various arrangements on the surface of large expanses of photographic emulsion and then exposed to intense light for 15 or 20 minutes. The results were eerie blueprint-like prints that retain their interest today. He tried similar tricks with any number of techniques during his painting career. Those that didn’t work he immediately discarded but some opened new directions in his work. For example, instead of being limited to painting on canvas or paper surfaces he tried painting on old newspapers glued to the surface of window screens. Unexpectedly, the results are fascinating. The hazy newsprint be-neath areas of thin paint and the patches of clearer newsprint in others became parts of the painting and gave a poorly defined sense of linkage to real life that added another dimension to the work. He continued to use similar approaches throughout his career. His most lasting contributions were his ex-tension of painting beyond the simple ap-plication of flat paint to a flat surface that

had dominated Western art for millenia. Most strikingly, he began to incorporate new materials into his paintings, often derived from ordinary life. He began with newspapers as part of the substra-tum (above), and then moved to pasting or attaching fragments of newspapers or other materials or photographs or other objects to the surface of his paintings. He called these works “combines”. Be-cause of his powerful sense of color and form in the painted parts of the pictures, the results are stunning, with vibrant reds and blues giving an added emotion-al intensity to the work [Figure 1]. Final-ly, in 1962 Rauschenberg learned how to apply photographs to canvas surfaces by silk-screening, the technique that Andy Warhol made famous. This led to his most iconic works in which the emotional overtones of real-life events were com-bined with the painting-based emotional content that was the major contribution of the abstract expressionists. These in-clude well-known works that included photographs of John Kennedy’s face jux-taposed with other images of contempo-rary events. The MOMA exhibition includes many ex-amples of his very best work in all of these genres. If viewed with a receptive and open mind, it provides a fascinating insight into the lifetime output of a unique creative talent and exposes the viewer to a large collection of moving and exciting work that transformed con-temporary art. The presence of his fail-ures (some of which are plain silly in my view, and others brave but misguided) together with his successes makes this exhibition even more interesting. There are a few major talents amongst the art-ists of the past century that stand out above the herd and Rauschenberg is one of these. Helen Frankenthaler- – There are two Frankenthaler exhibitions currently at the Clark museum. “As In Nature”


(closes Oct. 9) includes a segment of Frankenthaler’s extensive painting out-put. It looked interesting and well worth seeing but we didn’t have time to trudge up the hill for a visit before returning to Tanglewood. However, the second exhi-bition, “Helen Frankenthaler’s Wood-cuts” (closes Sept. 24), proved to be an unexpected delight. Frankenthaler was a contemporary of Rauschenberg but emerged from an en-tirely different background. Whereas Rauschenberg came from a poor family in Port Arthur, Texas, Frankenthaler was the product of a well-to-do upper middle class New York family. Frankenthaler’s career as an artist began when she en-countered inspiring teachers at a privi-leged girl’s private school and Benning-ton College, whereas Rauschenberg de-pended on the GI Bill of Rights to attend Black Mountain College. Nevertheless, both were true innovators and Franken-thaler made important contributions that, while not as revolutionary as Rauschen-berg’s, significantly extended the genre of abstract expressionist painting, pri-marily in changing the ways in which col-or and shape are used. The Clark exhibition concerns her use of the woodcut print technique, and espe-cially her highly innovative changes that produced works that combined the unique qualities of the woodprint and painting techniques. The changes espe-cially involved the fabrication of special paper and dyed paper pulp that was used as part of the creative process. The re-sults are always interesting and often stunning (see Figure 2). Space does not permit more discussion but the show is fascinating and includes a large number of outstanding works.

Figure 1. Rauschenberg - Rebus, 1955

Figure 2. Frankenthaler - All About Blue


(National Response Team) at White Sands. The pilots did not consider these duties favorably and did not linger long over our ranges, though I never did hear of a plane being hit. Probably the most noteworthy incident while I was working at White Sands was a request by the “brass” for volunteers to witness an atomic explosion at or near “Trinity”, the site where the first atomic detonations occurred in 1945. We were to be entrenched in ditches at a “safe” dis-tance from the explosion. The old Army admonition to “never volunteer” came to mind, so I decided to decline the invita-tion. I had the idea that the “witnessing” was to test the effects of blast and radia-tion on nearby ground troops. I heard lat-er, indirectly, that some soldiers I knew who had accepted the invitation had later developed medical problems consistent with radiation exposure. This all took place before my discharge from active service. I got married soon after getting home and went back to college to get my bach-elor’s degree. During this two-year time period, it was always on my mind as the Vietnam War heated up that I might get recalled for active duty in the Army. My family status – married with two children – kept me from going to Vietnam. This is why I consider myself to be a member of “The Luckiest Generation”. It’s all a matter of timing.

One goal of the Luckiest Generation

THE LUCKIEST GENERATION David Clark

My parents were born in the early 1900s, as part of what was later dubbed “The Greatest Generation”. I have no doubt about the correctness of that designa-tion. By the same reasoning, I’m quite sure that those of us born in the 1930s were members of “The Luckiest Genera-tion”. I was ten-years-old at the end of WWII; the life of a teenager in the next decade could almost be considered carefree in America. We, of course, worried about the Korean War, but most of us were too young to participate. All male citizens of eighteen years of age were expected to register for the draft and most realized we would someday have to serve our country for at least two years in one form or another. The choices – branch of ser-vice, schooling, length of term, etc. – were numerous. My decision was to enlist in the U.S. Army for two years and get the obligation over with. After basic training at Fort Dix, NJ, I was sent to radio school for eight weeks and then ordered to Fort Bliss, TX. I had hoped to be sent to Germany or the Pa-cific area but that was not to be. As it turned out I was assigned to the range radio network at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, just north of Fort Bliss. It turned out to be an interesting year-and-a-half. In the mid-1950s Nike anti-aircraft mis-sile batteries were being built around the major cities throughout the United States. The battalions of missile-men as-signed to the batteries were sent for a week each year to the firing range in the northern end of White Sands near Ala-mogordo to practice live firing a few mis-siles at target sleeves being towed across the range by Air Force C-47s from Biggs Air Force Base in El Paso. These planes were under the control of our Radio NRT


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THE BIG HOUSE - Part 2 Jean Peelle

Part 1 ended with my father having given permission to my sisters to find a summer house. I have a picture of the departure of my sisters and their close friend as their car left the driveway of our New Jersey home firmly planted in my brain be-cause I heard my father’s rendition of it so many times. I think it delighted him that the trip relieved him and our mother of making such a search them-selves. But he gained extra pleasure in the daring audacity of his offer: three late teenage, early twenties girls, en-trusted with a mission. And too, I could look on it as a gentleman’s hon-est acknowledgement of defeat for the bitter fact of his children’s preference for vacation at the beach over sum-mertime on the European continent and I bless him with an award for his gallantry. This tale of the “Northern Expedition” had conditions, or rules, much like those of a board game which govern the actual play and in this game/trip, there were two “conditions” or points-of-view which determined New England as the preferred region in which a fam-ily could enjoy summer at its fullest. The first was the girls’ rejection of the New Jersey shore, never mind its mag-nificent beaches and its rolling surf or that one of their boyfriends referred to it as “Heaven”. In their minds it was cast aside as a long-ago destination which had been done and finished and in the culture of that day’s racy, roar-ing Twenties could not compete against the glamour and excitement that lay in wait for their exploration of those northern states. And there was the obvious fact of New England’s natural beauty, its lush countryside, and, for Connecticut, there was Long Island

Sound. My sisters’ discard of New Jersey’s shore was similar to their treatment of Eu-rope’s historic sites and cathedrals, which in their system of demotion, they shelved under “Seen-It-and Been-There”. New Jersey’s seashore could not hold out against the allure of this untried, untrav-eled territory, which, in their minds lay in impatient expectation for their arrival. I didn’t witness the departure, or the “send-off” of the three explorers, but I know that our father and mother waved them off from the driveway of our New Jersey house, he feeling the same rush of excite-ment and energy that comes with the start of a new and daring voyage, maybe just as he must have felt that rush of excite-ment when he set forth with his class-mates on their tramp of discovery through Europe. Of course, there must have been volumes of road maps packed in the bags and stuffed in the car’s seats and last minute advice and support showered on them from the driveway goodbye party. From our mother, “Beware of that strange man lurking behind the soda fountain”, and from our father, a fistful of cash for emer-gencies (e.g., the flat tire, a common oc-currence that came with every car). But there was no time left for dawdling over farewells, only time to turn the key in the ignition and “their car shot from the drive-way like a ball from a cannon” was my fa-ther’s account of the departure. Their plot-ted course for this exploration of Northern Territory was on a path somewhere be-yond New York City and the Hudson River. Oh, they could speak with assurance on the circumnavigation of New York City which somehow would dutifully lead them to leafy, green Connecticut, which it did, partly to their surprise but chiefly to their faith in the inevitable pleasures that this expedition would hold for them. They were a triumvirate, under the rule of no one but themselves. What a bonanza opportunity this trip could be; to be hand-


dutiful sales pitch, of “one more offering,” and he brought his car to a halt. “There,” he said with a twist of his head toward the driver’s window and where he rapped his fingers against the glass to point to the scene beyond his car and instructed his passengers to view it; a stretch of land overgrown with small trees and vines where in an opening in the landscape like a sudden interruption in the roadside line of summer-cottages, there stood a giant brown-shingled house. Surrounded by leafy trees and hints of lawn, the white bordered windows on its front gave the house its voice as though declaring its privilege to occupy that open space. Giv-ing the house one more nod, the realtor turned to his clients and delivered his deathless message, “This house can sleep twenty” he declared flatly without elabo-ration. Did the house speak to my sisters, I’ve sometimes wondered, did it say “Take me, Rent me, Buy me,” for that is what our father did…. eventually. It’s the vicissitudes of life which happen and of which we have no control in choos-ing them or their time of arrival, episodes which shake up the patterns of our life-styles and the path we’d chosen to take. We found this to be true when our father died, stricken by a sudden heart attack at age sixty-four. Some said that they felt the ground shudder beneath their feet, or was it that Earth veered off its course for a split second as it rocked from the blow of his departure? But it was the post-death rituals of the fu-neral and the legal transactions designat-ed in his will, which set us on an even course and gave our mother the owner-ship of the Big House, a decision which assured us that the Big House was here to stay and our future summers were here to stay, in safekeeping. It was many years after that when on a bright summer day we stood on the front

ed the task to find a house for rent for the summer on the New England sea-shore! With the map spread out across their laps and their fingers pressed on the area where the words,” Long Island Sound”, were, they found themselves in the town of Greenwich where the two-lane Boston Post Road began the trail of early Ameri-can towns, each with its requisite town green, its white pillared Congregational church and its Main Street lined with stately elm trees. But the historic allure of Connecticut’s early settlements re-mained undiscovered and unappreciated on the roadside as they pressed ahead on byroads which the map promised would lead them to the promised land of sea-shores on Long Island Sound. The year was 1931, the second year of the Great Depression and the impact of the country’s economic downfall was evi-dent even in New England’s treasured historic villages where my sisters report-ed there were hundreds of houses for rent and sale and that half of New Eng-land’s real estate could be bought at bar-gain prices.

Exploring their way up the Connecticut shoreline, town by town, each with its requisite village green, its white church and a main street row of 17th and late 18th century clapboard houses, they pushed on until at the fourth, fifth or sixth village of historic charm, they de-clared a rest period from all this Early American culture and parking their car on a side road, they disembarked to investi-gate the new found country on foot. In-quiries were made, a real estate agent was found and a tour of possible houses for rent or sale was arranged. There were houses on side roads, houses with “access to the beach” and houses squeezed next to the Public Beach. Then the realtor announced with what seemed to the girls to be an unenthusiastic but


porch of the Big House and watched in silent anguish as attendants from the New Haven Hospital carried our mother on a stretcher across the lawn to an am-bulance. As the stretcher was wheeled between us I remember her lifting her hand to signal to us that she had some-thing that she wanted to tell us and I knew what it was. It was that proper adieu and goodbye which she had given so many times for so many years to de-parting guests and family when she stood in the outer doorway of our New Jersey house. One last goodbye or good-night was her parting message and with it, always, her gentle admonition, “Come again”. Then, as the stretcher moved her off the porch, she looked back at us gathered behind her and in a clear voice she gave us her adieu and goodbye. “Do keep the Big House,” she said as she was carried across the lawn. The supposition that we not keep the Big House was such a wild and unimaginable idea that we cast it aside like a meddle-some interruption and put our faith in the belief that events and happenings in the future would endow the house with perpetuity, simply because we couldn’t imagine it otherwise. And faith obliged us over the next twenty years or so with marriages and births that increased our family’s headcount and, in turn, heralded the entrance of our third generation. Whether we paused then to assess the continuing increase in family member-ship, I don’t know, but looking ahead to the summers yet to come we could see that even the Big House realtor’s boast of sleeping accommodations for twenty could not handle the possible overload of family vacationers numbers rising to a count close to thirty. So it was a sorting out of the summer visiting schedules of all of us who in-stinctively chose the Big House as the site for our vacations and from a juggl-ing of visits there came a pattern of

combining our vacation weeks with one or two siblings and their spouses and children, except for my older brother’s family who resided safely in the cottage at the back of the driveway. It was this comingling of grandchildren that planted the seeds of what might be called a “cousins’ club” though it was not. But it was this close-knit group whose bonding grew from their shared summers in the Big House that became the undeniable connection between them. It was spurred by their awareness of the fortunate gifts of their similar birthrights and their love for the giant house which holds the memories of their glorious summers spent inside it and around it and for their familial attachment to each other which persists in its unspoken allegiance to each other right up to today. There was a continuity about those sum-mers where one slipped into the next with picnics and parties and celebrations of birthdays and always the hallowed recognition of the Fourth of July, a day of bangs and booms from the firecracker set and roman candles and sparklers doled out among the youngest, the unini-tiated. And always too, there was the home-show display of one uncle’s enthusiastic reverence for this all-out free day to light up the neighborhood without police or parental restriction. With his display of pinwheels tacked on tree trunks spilling shimmering trails of color in the fading evening light, it was all in preparation for the nine o’clock town-sponsored fire-works show in the night sky, high over the beach and the Sound. Brilliant ex-plosions in showers of sparkling designs in circles and spirals of gold and silver and green and red bursting out on the dark sky, and a spellbound audience of aunts, uncles, cousins and our mother seated on the top of the seawall, watch-ing in astonishment and awe.


Those Fourth-of-July nights of astonish-ment and awe got locked in the memo-ries of the seawall audience and, like my father’s memories of his first visit to Eu-rope, they stayed to be re-told to the “untraveled” and to the newcomers on our family tree and like the beams and the pillars which hold the Big House to-gether, so will the tales and the stories of our eighty-six summers in and around that “giant shingled cottage” keep the Big House alive in our hearts and in everlast-ing posterity.

THE BIG HOUSE

NEW RESIDENTS Dr. Martin and Irene Berman, P121, x2019. When Martin and Irene Berman built their dream home on High Hill Road in Bloomfield 29 years ago, they didn't im-agine that one day they would join many friends and neighbors at Duncaster, just a short distance away. It wasn't easy to leave their unique house, designed with materials and concepts to reflect modern Norwegian architecture. Yet, "we are so glad we made this decision," they say, even though they are temporarily living in a snug unit (P-121) while awaiting a larger one where they can unpack and relax with a sigh of relief. Martin is a retired pathologist associated with Hartford Hospital. He graduated from Princeton and took his medical training at Johns Hop-kins. After completing his residency in Baltimore, he accepted a call to Hart-ford, where he worked with--and admired--Dr. Robert Tennant, Mary Sargent's fa-ther, and where he continued until his re-tirement. Irene is a native of Oslo, Norway, whose family's experiences as targets of the Hol-ocaust are memorably recorded in two books she has published: We Are Going to Pick Potatoes, and Norway Wasn't Too Small. She came to America in 1960--with a business degree from the Univer-sity of Oslo, and following her marriage to Martin devoted the ensuing years to rear-ing their three daughters: Carrie Beth, Adrienne, and Roseanne. Today she and

THE SPOTLIGHT IS ON… Valerie Santos

Vice President, Human Resources

The Employee Spotlight is a new initia-tive inspired by feedback from residents and staff to recognize employees who provide extraordinary service to residents and others. Christina (Tina) Vail, As-sistant Dining Room Su-pervisor was recognized at the President’s Chat on Tuesday, July 18th by Michael O’Brien for her service and actions to-wards providing support to residents in need by administering the Heimlich Ma-neuver on several occasions. Tina has been with Duncaster since 2002.


Martin are proud grandparents to six grandchildren, three of whom live close by in West Hartford. (The others are in Greenwich and New York City.) Multi-talented Irene launched an educa-tional business in the '80s, along with another Duncaster resident, Frances Blu-menthal. Ac'cent, Inc. had offices at Bishop's Corner in West Hartford and of-fered training in several foreign lan-guages as well as translation services. In addition, Irene has been the translator and adapter of Henrik Ibsen's plays at the Hartford Stage Co. Martin joins a number of his friends from The Old Guard here at Duncaster, and he is hoping to renew his interest in opera, now that there is more free time on his calendar. Irene continues her involve-ment with the Town and County Club, and her book presentations to a number of civic and Jewish groups. Those of us who already know the Bermans are ea-ger to welcome them into activities here; and we especially look forward to hearing Irene tell us about her books and the re-markable events of her childhood and family in Norway…Susan Aller Robert Adams, P106, x2016. After

graduating from Temple University Den-

tal School, Bob served in the United

States Air Force achieving the rank of

Captain. He was stationed at the Strate-

gic Air Command base in Limestone,

Maine (coincidentally, the birthplace of

Carol Ann McCormick, our VP of Market-

ing and Sales). This base houses B-52

bombers, which have a worldwide range.

After leaving the Air Force, he opened a dental practice in Newington which he maintained until he retired in 2004. He and his family lived in West Hartford until he and his wife moved to Gillette Ridge in 2006. He moved to Duncas-

ter last June, several months after his wife died. He has two children: Howard, who lives in Newtown, and Phyllis, who lives in Greenwich. Howard works for Behringer, an audio equipment manufacturer, and is the father of twins. Phyllis has three chil-dren and is a stay-at-home mom. Because of chronic back pain Bob is no longer able to pursue his former hobbies of golf, fishing in Long Island Sound and gardening. He is the fourth dentist now living in Duncaster. Can you name the other three? …Jim Yaeger

Thistle is the bimonthly magazine of

the Duncaster Residents Association.

Contributions are welcome. Some

editing may be necessary and decisions

of the Editorial Board are final. Editorial

office: DRA Office, 40 Loeffler Road,

Bloomfield, CT 06002 or

[email protected].

Editorial Board: Al DeVito (Editor),

Jim Yaeger, Susan Aller, Dean Daniels,

Louise Hine, Helen Lehmann, Mary Os-

born, Jean Peelle, Larry Rothfield.

An online color version of the Thistle can

be accessed at duncasteremail.com.

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