Photographs by Jim Schafer, text by Mike Sajna; Pennsylvania State University Press; 304 pages.
The Nile, we learned in grade school, was the cradle of civilization. It took this reader some years to understand that each river is indeed the cradle of its own civilization—ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in every corner. All American rivers sweep their voyagers to new places, all of them, it seems, claim title to “highway to the West,” all nurtured Indian tribes along their banks, all saw the rise of “civilization” —towns and cities and industries that eventually turned their backs to the rivers and blotted them from sight. These days we have to get to know our rivers all over again, and The Allegheny River is a good place to start.
The author, Mike Sajna, writes, “If the story of the United States were to be told by river, one could hardly imagine any waterway filling the role better than the Allegheny.” He dismisses for this role the Mississippi, the Hudson, and the Ohio, all of which surely have their propagandists, and he sets out to show us his Allegheny, traveling it in many seasons on dozens of trips, “by canoe, by towboat, by pleasure boat, by excursion boat, on foot, by car, and by plane.”
On Sajna’s sojourn upriver from Pittsburgh to the Allegheny headwaters in Potter County, he summons up the shades of all manner of people who played out their destinies along these waters: Rachel Carson, who on walks with her mother along the riverbanks learned to cherish what she later fought to save; the renegade Simon Girty, who led Indian war parties against frontier folk in Revolutionary days; Edwin Drake, whose oil strikes transformed American industry; and Ida Tarbell, born in a riverside oil town, who became the journalistic scourge of monopolies and trusts. There were riches to be made from mining salt deposits along the river (in fact, it was a salt-well driller who first struck oil in Natrona), and there was wealth in the thick stands of timber, which gave mid-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania temporary title as the nation’s greatest lumber producer. “As beautiful and wild as the forests surrounding the upper Allegheny River appear to be,” Sajna writes, “it must be pointed out that they are only about one hundred years old, mere shadows of the primeval woodlands that once blanketed the mountains.”
One of the delights of this ambitious volume is the author’s ability to shift easily from tour guide to historian (we lack only an index). The photographer who accompanied him along the river, Jim Schafer, has a keen eye for the presence of man and industry as they have shaped the Allegheny. In other of his photos we are simply left to enjoy the play of light against water and the gauzy mist as it clings to the hills.
From This Moment On
The Songs of Cole Porter
Smithsonian Collection of Recordings; 84 songs on 4 CDs or cassettes; 800-927-7377.
You’re the Top
Cole Porter in the 1930s
Indiana Historical Society; 69 songs.
To mark the hundredth birthday of Cole Porter, two historical institutions have put out lavish collections of classic performances of his songs, in handsome LP-size boxes with copiously illustrated books containing essays on Porter and mini-essays on each song and performer.
Unsurprisingly there’s a fair amount of overlap in the wonderful material the two sets offer—neither could have imaginably left out Ethel Merman singing “I Get a Kick out of You” or Mary Martin doing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” or Fred Astaire’s “Night and Day”—and both sets are no less than compendiums of America’s most sophisticated popular music. But there are big differences too.
The Indiana set not only focuses on “Porter’s greatest, most productive decade,” of which “he became one of its indispensable voices,” it also presents the songs of that decade in the order in which they were written, show by show, from 1930’s The New Yorkers (“1 Happen to Like New York” and “Love for Sale,” among others) to 1939’s Du Barry Was a Lady (“Friendship,” “Do 1 Love You?”), and in so doing, strings together renditions from across the decades. The Smithsonian takes an opposite tack, presenting its seven dozen songs almost exactly in the order they were recorded, from “Let’s Misbehave,” played in classic jaunty 1920s style by Irving Aaronson and His Commanders in 1928, to “After You, Who?” by Dorothy Loudon, modern intimate-cabaret style, 1986.
The Indiana approach undoubtedly has some historical merit, but the Smithsonian’s is more enjoyable. Hearing, on the Indiana, Ethel Merman’s piercing “I Get a Kick out of You” (1934) followed by Barbara Lea’s almost whispered modern stereo “All Through the Night” (1989) followed by Merman’s “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (1947) is almost disorienting, a succession of clashes of mood, era, and sound. The Smithsonian set, as the editor writes, “allows the listener to hear the evolution in stylistic approaches to Porter songs and provides greater consistency in recording quality from one song to the next.” So the Smithsonian’s first disk contains a lot of Broadway, movie soundtrack, and crooner records from the thirties; the subsequent disks traverse the big-band era and the hits of Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, then the work of fifties voices such as Nat Cole and Peggy Lee and Vie Damone and Ella Fitzgerald, and finally the likes of Barbra Streisand and Kaye Ballard and Bobby Short.
Each set contains gems the other missed, but the Smithsonian has more of them—to name a few, an upbeat yet truly steamy “Love for Sale” by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, 1930; Alberta Hunter’s ravishing “Miss Otis Regrets,” 1934; and Marlene Dietrich’s arch “The Laziest Gal in Town,” from her solo cabaret act, 1964.
Finally, there is an inescapable difference in sound quality. The songs from old 78s on the Indiana set sound like old 78s—scratchy and thin. The Smithsonian has beautifully cleaned up all its selections, removed hiss and other noises, and left them full and fresh. The Indiana collection is far from de trop, but the Smithsonian’s is … the top.
Ticket to Paradise
by John Margolies and Emily Gwathmey
Bulfinch Press; 144 pages.
Not long ago The New York Times took note of the increasing number of American workers whose unemployment benefits were running out. For these people, the reporter commented, “a $7.50 film is a luxury.” Quite likely the newly unemployed have more on their minds than missing a movie. Perhaps almost as irritating is the notion that for everyone else a $7.50 movie isn’t a luxury. Those of us whose years stretch back to the twenty-five-cent, Saturday-morning show now have in Ticket to Paradise the perfect book to engage our memories of a kinder, gentler world of moviegoing.
Emily Gwathmey and John Margolies are demon collectors. For their book they have ferreted out a wealth of movie memorabilia—tickets, programs, an usher’s uniform from New York’s Paramount Theater, and countless old postcards featuring the grandest or the plainest of the movie houses that populated every city and town in America. Since Margolies is also a photographer known for his ability to capture the vernacular and bring it to life in stingingly bright colors, the book is filled with his own quirky photos of surviving theaters.
The authors have stitched together their high-colored visuals with engaging text blocks that hold the testimony of avid picture-goers, most of whom achieved their filmic coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. An administrator at Washington University in St. Louis recalls movie-obsessed days spent at the West Theater in Northfield, Minnesota: “The building didn’t matter, nor the sticky floors, nor the unruly company we kept. We were there to make cosmic leaps through that screen into a universe of the imagined life that was the only contentment a ten-year-old boy knew in 1951: ray guns and six-guns, good guys and bad guys, purity and evil … life was so simple and normal…”
