White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Postcards from Chicago: America’s Second City in Poetry and Paint

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Long before my first trip to Chicago by plane, I traveled there by poetry and stories.

Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” took me to the city as a teenager. The poem’s opening verse added to the foundational image of the city which my father, a Boston-based meat broker, built with his stories about the Chicago meatpacking industry:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

In 1914, when the poem was published, Sandburg was working in Chicago for Day Book, a newspaper which fashioned itself as a defender of the common people. In the poem he attacks the city’s immorality, which he wrote about in his newspaper articles:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

Despite its terrible side, Sandburg defends Chicago’s pride and industriousness:

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Like Sandburg, my father loved the vitality of Chicago, especially its laborers. He had some of the best times of his life in the city as a bartender, during a summer break from Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, in one of the landmark hotels.

Some of the worse times in his life involved Chicago — like the time a truck carrying a load of meat byproducts that he sold to a dog food company overturned on an icy highway south of the city, spilling its contents.

In the dead of night, the Illinois state police notified my father about the accident. The next morning, he flew to Chicago and helped with the highway cleanup.

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people.
Laughing!

My father laughed about shoveling frozen animal lungs, spleens, livers and kidneys on that highway as rushing vehicles sprayed him with bloodied snow and ice. But his laughter about that awful work came years later.

A Magnificent Mile of Murals

Artist Marina Zuni’s enchanting mural of kissing deer on the campus of Chicago’s Columbia College.

On a recent trip to Chicago for a television shoot, my husband and I stayed at a hotel on South Michigan Avenue, amid the Columbia College campus. It was a lucky choice because I’m a muralista – a devoted follower of murals – and the campus buildings are resplendent with them.

Along the side of the building across from our hotel, there was a surrealist mural of a black chain-link fence turning into a swarm of bright orange-and-yellow butterflies. There were four fabulous murals on the walls of the building surrounding an outdoor parking lot on South Wabash Street: one, by artist Marina Zuni, depicts a buck and a doe kissing while submerged in an ice-blue lake in an enchanted forest. Another mural pays tribute to the comic strips that were born in Chicago, including “Brenda Star,” “Dick Tracy,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Moon Mullins” and “Little Orphan Annie.”

Columbia College, which specializes in the arts and media, had an interesting birth. It was founded in 1890 as the Columbia School of Oratory by Mary A. Blood and Ida Morey Riley, both graduates of the Monroe Conservatory of Oratory, now Emerson College in Boston.

Anticipating a strong need for public speaking at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, the women were inspired to open their school in the exposition city, Chicago, and adopt the exposition’s name, according to a history of the college.

This Columbia College mural reflects Chicago’s important place in comic strip history.

Blood and Riley, who became the college’s first co-presidents, established a coeducational school that “should stand for high ideals, for the teaching of expression by methods truly educational, for the gospel of good cheer, and for the building of sterling good character.”

In 1904, when it was incorporated in Illinois, the college’s name was changed to the Columbia College of Expression. As radio broadcasting grew in the 1920s and 1930s, the college was advertised under different names, including the Columbia College of Speech and Drama, the Radio Institute of Columbia School of Speech and Drama, and the Columbia College of Speech, Drama, and Radio. It settled on Columbia College in 1944.

Photos: Linda Gasparello

Sanders Deserved What Burton and Taylor Got — Privacy

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Public accommodations can be a thorny matter. Historically, Virginia has had its problems, as have other states and nations.

In Marshall, Va., a little greasy spoon became notorious and its owners served time in prison because they refused to serve people of color. Very soon, the only people who frequented the joint were journalists who hoped to catch the owners in the act of violating the state’s public accommodations law.

In a bar in Baltimore, I watched the owner lie to a black man who wanted service. “This is a private club, but I could sell you something to go,” the owner said. It wasn’t a club; it was racism at work.

At a roadside restaurant in South Africa, before the fall of apartheid, my family and I and our African driver stopped for a bite. I was told that our driver couldn’t enter this humble establishment with me and my family and would have to eat in the car. We all ate in the car.

Obviously, there was no race dimension in the booting of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., but there was the owner’s anger, fury and protest. It was a comment on actions of the administration Sanders defends daily. Lexington, located in the Shenandoah Valley, is a thoroughly Trump town — home to the Virginia Military Institute, Washington and Lee University, flag-bedecked houses, pickup trucks with NRA decals, and Fox on the box.

The restaurant owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, said Sanders didn’t meet the restaurant’s standards of kindness, compassion and cooperation and that’s why she kicked out Sanders. Clearly Wilkinson was vexed, as many are these days, with the profound national division over the treatment of immigrant children at the border and the constant defense of mendacity by Sanders.

While political speech deserves defense, I think one deserves to eat one’s vittles without victimization. Chowing down shouldn’t be an opportunity for others to speak up.

Customers who meet reasonable standards of behavior and dress shouldn’t be denied service or yelled at while exercising their right to patronize public places. I think it was wrong for protesters to attack Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington. Some privacy in public is an entitlement, even if the president behaves in outrageous ways with ad hominem attacks on allied leaders, schoolyard abuse of his detractors and a rabid-dog approach to public life.

There isn’t much for which I can claim the moral high ground, but when it comes to restaurants, I have credentials — top-drawer bona fides, as it were.

Back in 1962, I was employed by one of the London newspapers, notorious for intruding on peoples’ privacy. My assignment was to follow a couple of lovebirds around London. They were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and my job was to spend all day and much of the night at the famous Dorchester Hotel, where love was being committed.

Except that they never entered stage center.

Every day I made my way to the five-star hotel and sat around, had drinks (which the hotel provided free) and hoped to see them coming or leaving or, fond hope, kissing on the backstairs. No joy. Even hopes of asking the chambermaid about the bed were nobbled by hotel security.

Then one Sunday in Dulwich, a green and pleasant oasis in south London, my then wife, a brilliant journalist, Doreen King, and I went for our Sunday lunch, an English tradition, at a very nice pub. And there they were, my prey: Taylor and Burton as large as life having lunch. Not just having lunch, but at the next table.

My wife whispered, “Are you going to call the office and get a photographer? What questions have you got ready?”

I looked at the lovers at the next table. Never have I seen two people so in love, so happy with each other. My wife and I agreed silently to leave them alone.

I’d like to be able to say that Burton winked, but he didn’t. He had eyes only for Taylor.

To my mind, the lovely (Taylor and Burton) and the less so (Nielsen and Sanders) should be able to enjoy a private meal in public. I missed a scoop on this belief.

 

 

Photo Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com

The Husband and Wife Who Founded Memorial Day

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(Channeling Gen. John A. “Black Jack” Logan)

WASHINGTON — It’s Memorial Day. I see you’re walking from Logan Circle to Constitution Avenue to watch the parade honoring all the nation’s veterans.

I’ll be there, too. In spirit.

Do you see the bronze statue in the circle? That’s me: Gen. John A. Logan, sitting erect on my horse, my sword drawn and the ends of my thick mustache flying in the wind. I was nicknamed “Black Jack” for my swarthy complexion, boot-black hair, eyes and that mustache.

At the outset of the Civil War, I won re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat from Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, a region that had partisan and divided loyalties. I tried to take a neutral stance, but I ended up fighting to preserve the union. I rose from colonel to major general, distinguishing myself in eight major campaigns. Many historians consider me to be best of the Union Army’s “political” generals.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant offered me a brigadier generalship in the postwar U.S. Army, but I returned to politics, winning three more U.S. House elections as a Republican from Illinois, and an advocate of African-American civil rights and public education.

Later I won three U.S. Senate elections, which spurred me to run for higher offices. I was a vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket that lost the general election in 1884, and I failed twice to become my party’s presidential nominee.

Enough about my political career. If you can dally, I’d like to tell you about the origin of this national holiday, which involves me and my wife, Mary, an indefatigable Washington hostess and a prodigious writer and public speaker.

In March 1868, when I was a congressman and commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, my wife and I were invited to tour the battlefields of Virginia. Unfortunately, I couldn’t accompany her on what she called a “pilgrimage” in her May 30, 1903, article in The Los Angeles Times, headlined “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth.”

She wrote that on her visit to the oldest church in Petersburg, Va., whose bricks had been brought from England, “as we passed through the rows of graves, I noticed that many of them had been strewn with beautiful blossoms and decorated with small flags of the dead Confederacy.”

When I met her at the train station, she told me about this “sentimental idea” and I said, by her account, “What a splendid thought! We will have it done all over the country, and the Grand Army shall do it! I will issue an order at once for a national Memorial Day for the decoration of the graves of all of these noble fellows who died for their country.”

While I’d known about the Decoration Day observances in the South (and mentioned them in a speech in 1866), my wife’s enrapture with the idea likely got me moving on an annual national day to honor the fallen.

On May 5, 1868, at Grand Army headquarters in Washington, I issued General Order No. 11, designating that May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion. … It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year …”

Now, on your way to the parade. But I hope you’ll take the time, as I said in my order, to visit the graves of our heroic dead and “garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of springtime.”

Tensions and Pretensions at the Correspondents Dinner Table

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The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner got just too celebrity ridden for its own good, as outfits who don’t know where the White House briefing room is lobbied for more and more tables.

It used to be an annual drunk for journalists to visit each other and see and be seen. It was a chance for the Fourth Estate men to wear tuxedos and women to wear evening gowns and to hit the parties in the hotel suites before and after the dinner — the tickets, it is hoped, paid for by the employers.

Then came Vanity Fair, People and Bloomberg and the annual excuse for excess for those engaged in journalism became the Oscars East and another excuse for excess by the excessive from the West Coast.

Journalists, who used to invite spouses and politicians they wanted to cultivate, were relegated to the D List as the aforementioned outfits and the networks demanded tickets for the Hollywood grandees. For years, as a member of the association, I was offered two tables and took one. But the celebrity cramming reduced my allocation to just two tickets; no chance to impress my potential sources or sponsors for my television program.

Along with celebrities from ZIP Code 20190 came small-time news executives, who leaned on their Washington correspondent for tickets for the publisher and spouse.

Ambassadors and lobbyists begged journalists for tickets. I was even offered money. More commonly, lobbyists would offer to pay for the poor scribbler’s ticket as well as their own. They were glad to let it be known that they’d pay for a table, if they could just get in themselves.

Many excluded hacks were soon showing up at the hotel in dinner dress to see and be seen in the hotel bar and in the corridors. Some hospitality tents on the lawn could be penetrated without a ticket: You could get a free drink and go home to watch the rest on TV. You saw your friends, you were seen, and you saved face along with money. Gradually, the hotel — the spacious if unexceptional Washington Hilton — increased security and pretending to be on the inside got harder.

A former Washington gossip columnist, Patrick Gavin, devoted much of a year to a documentary on the spring perennial, complete with interviews seeking to mine its social significance. It was craziness that had become fashionable, like the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

But the Gatsby-like madness couldn’t go on. The New York Times, always the first to take itself seriously, pulled out in 2011. Then, in 2013, the everyday corruption of Washington (the cozy press relations with politicians and lobbyists) was laid bare in “This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking — in America’s Gilded Capital.” The author, Timesman Mark Leibovich, fingered the White House correspondents’ dinner as a celebration of all that stank in Washington.

The respectability of the dinner was teetering before President Donald Trump launched his boycott. But there’s a back story. In 2011, President Barack Obama and “Saturday Night Live” comedian Seth Meyers ridiculed Trump for leading the “birther” movement and hosting a reality TV show. Some say that drubbing led Trump to run for president.

Picking a comedian for the dinner has always been dicey, and the association aims for diversity. He or she must be a political humorist and understand that the audience contains people who’ve been drinking and want to get back to it. Any dinner speaker knows a room full of drunks is tough.

This gig is made even more difficult by the presence of the president as patron and target. He should be roasted but left underdone, enjoying his time on the spit — as did Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, who also poked fun at themselves brilliantly.

Drew Carey, who was the comedian at the 2002 dinner, told me it was the most difficult room he had ever worked. Michelle Wolf turned the tables: she, with her vulgarity and rudeness, was the hardest comedian for the room to swallow.

Mercifully, it may go back to an orgy of journo camaraderie, fun and, yes, liquor — copious quantities of bipartisan spirits.

Photo Gallery: American College of the Building Arts

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Above Photo: The college occupies the 1897 Charleston City Railway Car House.

The American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, S.C. is the seat of a renaissance in education. The college, opened in 2005, is creating “educated artisans” – modern-day Leonardo da Vincis.

“Students complete an integrated liberal arts curriculum, where both academic and artisan courses build upon each other,” a college brochure states.

Already, ACBA students have attracted the attention of master artisans in Europe. The prestigious Fondation de Coubertin in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, France, has awarded two students scholarships to further their artisan and academic training. “It’s the Rhodes scholarship for artisans,” according to President Colby M. Broadwater III, a retired three-star general. Just 30 students a year, from France and foreign countries, are awarded this 11-month scholarship.

Here are some of my pictures of the college and the students’ and professors’ works, which exemplify one of Leonardo’s sayings, “Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.”

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An Authentic Dublin Pub Crawl in Celebration of St. Patrick’s Day

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People who are no more Irish than the King of Siam or the Paramount Chief of the Bumangwato will, come March 17, celebrate an island nation famous for its skill with words and its fondness for drink.

It all began, of course, in the 5th century with a Romano Christian missionary from Britain, Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. As a bonus, he chased the snakes out of Ireland. Where the fondness for something brewed, distilled or fermented came from is not recorded, but it is an intrinsic part of Irish life.

Life in Ireland often revolves around having a drink. It is treated much as we would treat having a cup of coffee. In Dublin once, I ran into a friend who I had not seen in a year: a serious man with a big job in government. He thought, in the Irish way, that we should catch up over a glass of something, although it was just after 10 in the morning. “I think Murphys is open,” he said as naturally as someone in an American city would have said, “There is a Starbucks on the next corner.”

In Ireland St. Patrick’s Day was, until recent years, a somber religious festival. It was in America where the idea that the Irish could have a huge craic, as the Irish call a party, took hold.

Even so, the biggest celebrations, to my mind, are in Boston, Chicago and New York. But there are celebrations everywhere the Irish have set foot from Hanoi, Vietnam to Ushuaia, Argentina, off the tip of South America.

But if you are very lucky, you will celebrate in Dublin. And what better way than with an authentic pub crawl.

I know just a bit about pub crawling in Ireland because I was lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful Dublin pub crawl in 2012. It was not a bunch of celebrants struggling from one pub to another, but rather a work of planning art.

I was in Dublin for an engineering conference which coincided with the 60th birthday of one of our number, Sean O’Neill — by birth an American, but otherwise through and through Irish.

A pub crawl was organized by the engineers with precision: times, distances, and safety procedures.

There was a map and the 12 pubs were selected with fiendish skill. The early ones were fairly far apart. But as the crawl went on, they grew closer together, and the last two were next to each other — in consideration of possible loss of mobility.

We were urged to go with a buddy, eat something about halfway and, in case of pub fatigue, to call a taxi.

If you get to Dublin and want to try the engineers’ crawl, here are the pubs in order: Toners, O’Donoghues and Doheny & Nesbitts on Baggot Street; Dawson Lounge on Dawson Street; Kehoes on St. Anne Street; Davy Byrnes on Duke Street; O’Neills and O’Donoghues on Suffolk Street; The International Bar and Stags Head on Wicklow Street; The Long Hall on Georges Street; McDaids and Bruxelles on Harry Street.

I think I made it as far as The Long Hall, one of Dublin’s most famous bars, before I cried uncle, refused a last drink and hailed a taxi. Others persevered and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale.

You probably know that Ireland is so lush that its flora is supposed to support 40 shades of green.

Well, there is another shade of green not mentioned in the tourist brochures. It is the 41st shade and you see it in the bathroom mirror the day after a pub crawl. Surely, some of you will see it on March 18.

 

Photo: DUBLIN, IRELAND – SEPTEMBER 5, 2016: The Long Hall on September 5, 2016 in Dublin. The Long Hall is a famous landmark in Dublins cultural quarter visited by thousands of tourists every year. Editorial credit: Millionstock / Shutterstock.com

Postcards from Macon, Ga.

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The Mound Builders of Georgia

The Ocmulgee Earth Lodge’s doorway. Credit: Linda Gasparello.

On a January day at the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, Ga., a hiker ambles up the Great Temple Mound, a flat-topped, earthen ceremonial structure built by the Mississippians around 900-1100 AD. Just as the Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson described Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1887, the mound is “entirely suggestive of solidity and repose, of serene majesty asleep.”

Macon lawyer Christopher Smith, a tall mound of a man, guided my husband Llewellyn King and I through the national park, which preserves an area that has been inhabited by humans since the Ice Age (before 9,000 BC).

From the Visitors Center, we walked across a wooden bridge over a stream flanked by spindly Georgia pines and up a hill path to the Earth Lodge, which was probably a meeting place for the town’s political and religious leaders.

Crouching, we entered the grass-covered lodge through an opening buttressed with thick wooden planks. Bent at our waists, we walked through a narrow hall with woven reed walls into the reconstructed council chamber of the Mississippians.

The circular chamber incorporates and protects the original clay floor, which is about 1,000 years old. There is a round fire pit and a raised platform in the shape of a large bird, where the chiefs or high priests sat. The chamber’s wood-beamed ceiling and clay walls give it the look and feel of a Tudor chapel.

The Tudor chapel-like earth lodge chamber. Credit: Linda Gasparello.

“The site of Ocmulgee is synonymous with Georgia and Southeastern archeology. During the 1930s, it was a training ground for a whole generation of American archeologists, some of whom later became the ‘fathers’ of modern American archeology,” according to the National Park Service.

The history of the park, from its inception as a Depression-era works project through to World War II, is intertwined with archaeological project management on a grand scale by the Smithsonian Institution, various federal relief agencies (the Works Project Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and the National Park Service.

From 1933 to 1942 as many as 1,200 people excavated the site under the direction of Arthur R. Kelly, a Harvard-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian, and built the Visitors Center, which contains beautifully crafted dioramas of human habitation of the area from 10,000 BCE to the early 1700s. The 702-acre site was designated a National Monument in 1936; it is now a national park.

We toured Ocmulgee a day before its closure on Jan. 20, due to the government shutdown. That day, the national park posted a message on its Facebook page that the Visitors Center and Earth Lodge would be closed during the shutdown, but the roads, trails and outside grounds would be open as usual, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Dee Shannon Garrison left this comment on the page, “Stupid congress critters. Ain’t happy unless they putting somebody out of work.” 

True Grits

Recently, I read in Yankee magazine that the Algonquin Indians of New England, not Southerners, invented grits. That may very well be true, but I don’t trust New Englanders — not even Rhode Islanders who make a corny cousin, johnny cakes — to cook grits.

Northerners just don’t get grits. In 1980, when I was living in Manhattan, I watched Stan Woodward’s hilarious and insightful documentary about grits on PBS’s WNET. Using a hand-held camera, the South Carolina filmmaker went from the streets of New York to the grist mills of the South asking people a simple question, “Do you eat grits?” A New York City construction worker replied, “Grits? Ain’t that the stuff on my collar?” New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in Indianola, Miss., replied by making a grits souffle.

True grits are cooked in the “grits belt” that stretches from Virginia to Texas. Kevin Whitener, who was our neighbor for nearly 30 years in The Plains, Va., and cooks at the Old Salem Cafe in nearby Marshall, makes the grits of my dreams.

Georgia is the middle hole of the grits belt: the one that’s comfy for someone with a grits belly. Grits became the state’s official prepared food in 2002.

Chris Smith, host of our Georgia trip, treated us to dinner at the Grits Cafe in Forsyth, near Macon. I ordered the fried catfish, remoulade and cheddar soft grits. I left the restaurant full as a tick.

High Sticking, Tripping and Roughing in Macon

I grew up in Massachusetts: a hotbed of ice hockey rest. So I just can’t get my head around professional ice hockey teams in the South. Sure, you can build a rink and import players from Boston. But how do you build a fan base in a region where people only like ice when it’s in Coke or sweet tea?

Yet there are five National Hockey League teams in the South. The Southern Professional Hockey League has 10 teams, including the Macon Mayhems, who were the 2017 President’s Cup champions.

Southern ice hockey teams have crazy good names, like the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. But hands down, the best-ever professional hockey team name is the Macon Whoopees. The defunct team played in Southern Hockey League during 1973-74. A Macon reporter told me, “The first game the Whoopees played, folks left during halftime because they thought the game was over.” Poor attendance led the team to disband mid-season.

The Macon Whoopees rose again in 1996, renamed the Whoopee. After several owners endured seasons of poor attendance and financial losses, the team went belly up in 2001.

An East Coast Hockey League team, the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, relocated to Macon in 2001. They became known as the Macon Whoopee and played just one season. The Macon Trax, a later effort to continue professional hockey in Macon, got stopped short.

I hope the Macon Mayhems, a relocation of the former Augusta River Hawks, will play in the city for a spell.

 

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.

The Truth is on the Walls

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VILNIUS, Lithuania – In May 2016, local artist Mindaugas Bonanu painted U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump locking lips with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall of Keule Ruke, a barbecue restaurant near the city’s Central Station. Painted next to the passionate pair was the phrase “Make everything great again,” a riff on Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Bonanu’s mural took inspiration from one on the east side of the Berlin Wall which depicts East German leader Erich Honecker kissing his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev. That mural, painted by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990, is titled “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.”

Dominykas Ceckauskas, the barbecue restaurant’s owner, said the mural was “predicting that if Russia and the USA would ever make out, it would happen in the Baltic states … with tongues or with tanks,” NBC News reported.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Three months later, vandals whited out the mural, which had become an international sensation.

“The purpose of the attack was to remind us, the people of the free world, that there are still active advocates of authoritarianism in our society,” Ceckauskas said on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

He promised to reinstall the mural, which he called “a world famous symbol of liberty and defiance.”

Delivering on his promise, there is a new mural which depicts Trump and Putin sharing a joint: fellow authoritarians having a puff.

In the restaurant’s garden, there are two murals on the back wall. The first is inspired by “American Gothic,” American artist Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of a farmer and his daughter standing in front of a house with a gothic window. The farmer is holding a pitchfork. But in the mural, their heads are penises and the farmer, holding a trowel, is building a brick wall topped with barbed wire.

Next to that mural, the wall is painted black. At the top of this mural, these words are painted in stark white letters: “Dirty Mexican Wall.”

Eating Crepes with Gusto

I ate my first crepe in Paris, on a solo trip at age 12. I spent a week there in a youth hostel, under the wing of the Didac Agency, which placed teenaged American girls as au pairs in French families. The agency thought I was too young to be an au pair, even though I was already babysitting in Hingham, Mass., where I grew up. So they placed me with a gregarious family in the southwestern Landes province — the Albert Barrieus — as a companion for their children.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

With a limited budget and an unlimited curiosity about French food, a crepe was an easy choice for lunch on the day I checked out the Gare d’Austerlitz, from which I would take a train south to Dax, where I would meet my French family.

At the station’s buffet, I ordered a simple crepe au fromage. The crepe I ate at that buffet (one of Paris’s major train station buffets which the French railway authorities promoted as “gastronomical buffets” in 1960s) is the one by which I have judged all crepes for 50 years.

That delectable experience made me a train station buffet buff. My husband Llewellyn King is one, too. We have eaten very well in train station restaurants in Lyon, Brussels, London and Vilnius.

Vilnius’ Central Station was a short walk across a park from the Panorama Hotel, where we stayed during our recent trip to attend the annual congress of the Association of European Journalists. After taking a look at the old trains in a fenced-in museum park near the platform, we decided to eat at the station’s Gusto blynine. It is basically a Lithuanian IHOP. Lithuanian crepes (lietiniai su varske), American-style pancakes and Lithuanian grated potato pancakes (bulviniai blynai) were listed on seven pages of its 34-page menu.

We ordered spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, made with “traditional” wheat rather than buckwheat (grikiu) batter. They were made near our table in an open kitchen and served folded in a neat square, which kept the batter spongy and the filling oozy.

Photo credit: Linda Gasparello

Although we ate at a few other restaurants in the city, all superb, we returned twice to Gusto blynine. We ate more spinach-and-curd cheese crepes, crusty potato pancakes with fried bacon and hot soup, beetroot with fried ham and tomato with hot paprika.

One evening, we recommended the restaurant to some English and Irish colleagues, who were staying at the Panorama and wanted to dine nearby.

The next day, I asked David Lennon, a former Financial Times correspondent, where they went for dinner. “We found a nice Lithuanian restaurant, which had a lot of little rooms,” he said. “Somehow, I ended up eating a potato sausage. Whoever thought up such a thing?”

And to think that he could have eaten crepes with gusto, as we did at the railway station find.

Postcards from the Baltic Sea: Part I

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Cruise Shore Excursions: Theater off the Sea

By Linda Gasparello

To take or not to take shore excursions. That is the question for cruisers.

Having cruised on five continents, my answer is to take them. The guides are competent — mostly moonlighting high school teachers and college professors — and often they’re characters.

The first cruise my husband, Llewellyn King, and I took, on the Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas in the early 1990s with the now-defunct Royal Cruise Line, introduced us to shore tour theater.

In Constanta, Romania’s largest and most important port city on the Black Sea, our shore excursion guide was a droll fellow named Mikhail. We visited the city not long after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were tried by a hastily arranged military tribunal that was set up on Dec. 25, 1989, put up against a wall and shot, all within an hour. It was a city still in shock from 24-years of their mismanagement that brought food shortages in a country with dark, rich soil; torture and executions; and, most famously, state neglect of orphans and disabled children.

During our tour of the city, we stopped at a Belle Epoque hotel where, Mikhail told us, “Nazi leaders lodged comfortably in the early years of World War II.” The hotel manager made us feel welcome by setting out trays with tiny fruit tarts and small glasses of tuica (Romanian “white lighting” made from plums) on a large table in a paneled, ground-floor reception room. As we entered the room, the staff, who stood at the opposite end, watched as most of us sampled the tarts and tuica. As the last person in our group walked out of the room, I looked back and saw the staff make a dash for the table, grabbing whatever was left.

We traveled north to the Greco-Roman city of Histria. Mikhail gave us a detailed tour of the city, which was founded by Greeks in the 7th century BC and thrived for seven centuries. He interspersed his commentary about Histria, which became the richest city in Ionia (Asia Minor), with sarcastic comparisons to Romania’s “golden age under the Ceausescus.”

We returned to Constanta on a coastal road. Nearing the city, we saw thick pipes that seemed to stretch for miles along a beach. “That would be a beautiful beach, but the pipes lead to a chemical plant that Mrs. Ceausescu built. She had a doctorate in chemistry, but she did not even graduate from high school. Fancy that!”

Mikhail said Mrs. Ceausescu was nicknamed “Codoi,” referring to her mispronunciation of the chemical compound CO2 ( “C” for carbon, “O” for oxygen, and “doi” which is Romanian for “two”). He added that “codoi” was a word in Romanian, too, meaning “big tail.”

“Her big tail was her nose. She would kill anyone who took her picture in profile,” he said.

“These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.” Photo: Linda Gasparello.

For nine days this month, Llewellyn and I cruised the Baltic Sea on the Getaway, a Norwegian Cruise Line megaship. Anna, our guide on a day cruise along the Neva River in St. Petersburg, was a notable shore tour entertainer.

On the bus, as we drove from the cruise ship to the river boat, Anna told us that men in Russia were “as precious as diamonds. So ladies, hold onto your husbands. Do not lose them. And please send us your sons, nephews, brothers, uncles.”

Anna teaches Russian history in a St. Petersburg high school, and she wrangled us as though we were her students on a field trip. She taught us how to say “I love you” in Russian. “Ya lyublui vas. Just say, ‘yellow blue bus.’ We Russians are so emotional.”

The sunny day brought out what Anna called her “Russian emotions.” Pointing to the buildings decorated like wedding cakes along the river, many designed by the 18th-century Italian architects Bartolomeo Rastrelli and Carlo Rossi, she said, “Rastrelli, who built the Winter Palace, which you can see along the embankment, liked pale blues and greens, and Rossi liked pale yellow. These colors make us happy. They are good for our emotions.”

So, too, is vodka. Anna said, “When you have a cold, you drink vodka with lemon. When you have a headache, you drink vodka with pepper. And when you are depressed, you drink vodka.”

But the funny lady was serious about showing us St. Petersburg’s historical sights: no significant edifice on the banks of the Neva or ship moored on it (including the great, gray cruiser Aurora which fired the blank round at 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1917 that started the Bolshevik Revolution) escaped her commentary.

“Just look at the taste and temperament of Peter the Great. Here is his small, elegant Summer Palace. But across the river, on Vasilyevsky Island, is the Peter and Paul Fortress, which he designed. It was the Bastille of the tsars,” Anna said.

Across from the fortress, she pointed to the Soviet-era KGB (now FSB) headquarters. “That’s the ‘Big House,’ ” she said.

Those of us seated on the upper deck were grateful that Anna was serious about reminding us to duck when we approached one of the many low bridges across the Neva.

“Please keep seated,” she said. “But if you want to be like Catherine the Great and get rid of your husband, have him stand up.”

How emotional, how Russian.

Matroyshkas and Movies: A Souvenir Shop in St. Petersburg

You great, big, beautiful dolls. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

While I prefer to go to souvenir shops of my own volition, I’ve stopped resenting being shanghaied into them on cruise shore excursions. Sometimes, they’re sights that shouldn’t be missed, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: a maze of souvenir shops.

After our Neva River day cruise, we were bussed to a cavernous souvenir store. Norwegian Cruise Line billed it as a “bathroom stop.”

It was just that, for some on our bus. But busloads of tourists, including many on ours, were just raring to hit the mirrored shelves laden with fur hats, amber jewelry, Faberge-style Easter eggs and matroyshka dolls — especially after getting emotional on complimentary cranberry vodka, served at the entrance by young women wearing traditional, red jumper dresses.

Against a wall, near one of the store’s side exit doors, stood colossal Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump matroyshka dolls. As I took a picture of them, I heard one shopper say, “Same size as their egos.”

The store occupies part of what was once a movie theater in St. Petersburg. The theater’s architecture is Stalinist big box. The huge concrete-slab marquee over the entrance advertised four movies or other events. Riveted onto cement columns near the entrance are metal sheets imprinted with scenes of bears frolicking in a forest, peasants threshing wheat, and people going about their business on a wintry day in St. Petersburg. There is one of Russian troops tending their wounded in the Crimean War – a war that stirs up sacred memories, leading to actions even unto this day.

Power Tower

More is more. That was the approach of the two greats, Peter and Catherine, and Empress Elizabeth asked their European architects to take in St. Petersburg.

Lahkta Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

The city’s historic center is a feast — a grand bouffe — of Baroque and Neoclassical buildings, including the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, and the Marble Palace. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site in 1990, noting, “The unique urban landscape of the port and capital city of Saint Petersburg, rising out of the Neva estuary where it meets the Gulf of Finland, was the greatest urban creation of the 18th century.”

The more-is-more approach is operating today with the construction of the Lahkta Center, which includes a twisting glass-and-steel tower that will serve as the headquarters of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The project, which was proposed in 2005, has changed its name (as many times as St. Petersburg) and location, due to criticism from preservationists and residents that its 1,515-foot tower — which will be the tallest in Russia — would destroy the city’s horizontal harmony and violate a law prohibiting new buildings higher than 157 feet in the historic center.

In 2010, the project moved to a site northwest of Vasilyevsky Island, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Designed by the architectural firm RMJM London, the center’s website says “the tower bears more than a passing resemblance to a ship’s mast, while the building that lean against its base represent the hull. This theme continues through the wave-like bearing structures and the overall organic form of the building, both of which symbolize the power of the sea.”

The project already holds a Guinness World Record. Between Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015, it set a new record for largest continuous concrete pour, with 25,667 cubic yards poured over a period of 49 hours.

Some of the Lakhta Center’s remarkable innovations include:

  • It will be the first skyscraper in St. Petersburg to employ an ice formation-control system. To prevent ice accumulations and help maintain good visibility, the glass on the highest floors will be heated; and to prevent ice formation, the tower’s spire will be made of metal gauze.
  • The center’s lighting will be designed to make it bird-safe during migration in the fall and winter months, complying with the World Wide Fund for Nature and FLAP’s (Fatal Light Awareness Program) bird-friendly building program.

This project has Petrine boldness. While it could suit a man who would be a great, Putin, he has yet to weigh in on it.

 

Gallery

Neva River Sights

Street Life

Soviet Movie House / Souvenir Shop

Graffiti

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Loving the Gulf Stream; Cruising, the Global Culture; Moving Movie Locations

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COPENHAGEN — Whenever I stray from the East Coast of the United States, I’m reminded of the debt we owe to the Gulf Stream. Malibu, Calif. may be thick with Hollywood stars, but the water is damned cold. Always. I can tell you I’ve tried swimming there often and it is, by the standards of New England’s summers, cold. Really, for all the beauty of the West Coast, you have to travel as far south as San Diego to enjoy a dip, which might remind you of the waters of Cape Cod in July.

Lest you didn’t know, that’s why the number of pleasure boats in Seattle is said to be the highest on a per capita basis in the nation. When it’s too cold to get in the water, get on it.

The Gulf Stream divides as it goes north and sends one branch to Africa and one to Europe, known as the Atlantic Drift. There’s some argument about how much the Atlantic Drift affects the climate of Europe. My empirical, unscientific observation is that it’s a big player and Europe and America would both be devastated with climate change if the Gulf Stream were to cease to flow or change course – a possibility with global warming.

It’s because of this great benevolent current, that there are palm trees on coast of Cornwall and Devon in the west of England and there are even palm trees in Ireland and Scotland. In those locations, they are small stunted things, in no way like their robust relatives in Florida. But they’re palm trees. And I’ve inspected some.

About Cruising, the New International Norm

I looked down my proboscis for years when anyone mentioned cruising. I also had harsh things to say about it.

Well, for a decade and a half, I’ve been dining on my words. I took a cruise with my wife, Linda Gasparello, that changed everything back in the early 1990s. We cruised mostly in the Black and Aegean seas — and it was actually the best cruise we’ve ever taken.

It started our cruise contagion; we’ve cruised far and wide ever since. We’ve even journeyed briefly and enjoyably from Boston to Nova Scotia, but nothing equaled that first cruise. The ship wasn’t too big and the crew — mostly Greeks on the catering side of things — were marvelous.

The thing about cruising is the shore stops and tours. That first cruise took us from Athens to Yalta, Odessa, Constantia, Istanbul, Kusadasi, Mykonos, Patras and set us down in Venice. We learned – and this is the thing about cruising — that it’s wonderful because the hotel goes with you and the shore trips are usually well worth taking. That’s the kernel of what it’s about for us; not the food (too much, but good enough), nor the shows (Las Vegas lite), but the floating accommodation and shore excursions.

In 2015, just before Christmas, we cruised around Cape Horn. Amazing. It astounds me that rounding the Horn, where so many mariners perished, can be accomplished in a luxury liner. The shore trips in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia are worth running the credit cards up to the limit to do.

Linda and I have just been at it again. Capriciously, we decided it was time to cruise the Baltic and see the jewel in its crown, St. Petersburg.

For me, it was a third visit and was Linda’s first. I knew it wouldn’t disappoint and it didn’t. If it isn’t on your bucket list, write it down right now. Then go.

If you get there by water, so much the better because the cruise companies deal with the hassles — and traveling in Russia can be a big hassle, from getting a visa to finding a hotel that doesn’t look like it’s an incubator for social diseases.

So many nationalities now cruise that it’s a new universal cultural norm, like pizza and Coca-Cola.

What’s Wrong with England and Australia for Novel Adaptations?

Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was a great read; an original story with an original kind of heroine: she has a drinking problem. Also, it’s set in England and depends on English train commuting habits, not American. But when it was turned into a movie, it was mysteriously set in New York and the English actress, Emily Blunt, was the heroine.

Now there’s a seven-part miniseries made by HBO and starring Sharon Stone and Reece Witherspoon of the splendid Liane Moriarty novel “Big Little Lies.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the thing is Moriarty is Australian and her novels, excellent writer that she is, are set in suburban Australia. One of the considerable joys of reading Moriarty is that you forget that the novels are Australian: The struggles of school playgrounds and other aspects of middle class suburbia are apparently universal.

The makers of the “Big Little Lies” the miniseries, which has gotten rave reviews, chose to relocate it to Monterey, Calif. Why? Maybe they thought a dash of Oz would be too hard for us to understand.

Oddly, Monterey is not typical of America’s suburbs either. Maybe, also, the series producers forgot star Nicole Kidman is an Australian. Confusing.