HERALDRY | Posts

Coats of arms of the Oxford colleges.

My posts on heraldry may be linked to through this hub.

Recent posts include:

November 22 | Sinister Questions, reply to Hugo Saurny (Harvard '69)

November 5 | Linacre College, reply to Pia Jolliffe (Linacre 2006)

November 2 | Harris Manchester College, reply to David Harrison (Univ. 1960)

October 25 | Coat of Arms v. Crest, reply to Robert Parker (Trinity 1967)

October | What's Your Blazon?, article in Oxford Today, Michaelmas Issue, pp. 45-50

OBITS | By date of death

2015 - Dan Topolski (New College), Last
of the Great Amateur Rowing Coaches.

This is a list of obituaries I have written, or good ones that I have referenced, by year of death. The parenthetical references are to university affiliations, usually Oxford colleges, since this post originated as a list of Oxford obits.

2015 - Sheila Kitzinger (St. Hugh's)

I once had a half-time job at the Harvard News Office writing stories about my fellow students for their hometown newspapers.

Since then I never got out of the habit of hunting for highlights in the time people spend on earth.

If you have obits to suggest or a link to an interesting obit already published, please email me - jtmarlin[at]post[dot]harvard[dot]edu.

2015 | Dan Topolski (New) | Sheila Kitzinger (St. Hugh's) | Francis Fleetwood (MIT)
2014 | George Goodman, "Adam Smith" (BNC)
2013 | Denis Woodfield (Lincoln) | Peter Darrow (Trinity)
2006 | Frank Schiff (Columbia)

2014 - George "Jerry" Goodman
(BNC), a.k.a. "Adam Smith".

1984 | Basil "Gaffer" Blackwell (Merton)
1973 | J.R.R. Tolkien (Exeter)
1966 | Evelyn Waugh (Hertford)
1963 | C. S. Lewis (Univ.)
1956 | E. Clerihew Bentley (Merton)
1944 | Arthur Quiller-Couch, "Q" (Trinity)
1935 | T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) (Trinity)
1922 | James Viscount Bryce (Trinity)
1917 | Noel Godfrey Chavasse (Trinity)
1898 | Charles Dodgson, "Lewis Carroll" (Ch.Ch.)
1890 | John Henry Cardinal Newman (Trinity)

1778 - William Pitt the Elder

1792 | Frederick Lord North (Trinity)
1791 | John Wesley (Ch.Ch.)
1790 | Adam Smith (Balliol)
1788 | Charles Wesley (Ch.Ch.)
1785 | James Oglethorpe (Corpus), 1st Gov. of Georgia
1778 | William Pitt the Elder, Lord Chatham (Trinity)
1653 | Rev. Lawrence Washington (BNC), GW's gggrandfather
1675 | Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore (Trinity)
1647 | Leonard Calvert (Trinity), 1st Gov. of Maryland
1632 | George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore (Trinity)

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POPE | Arrival in NYC

Pope Francis after Being Allowed on His Way

EXCLUSIVE

POPE’S PLANE LANDS EARLY

Pope Francis arrived early today from Washington, D.C. and his welcoming party had not yet assembled. 

He decided to avoid the ceremonies and looked for a taxi. He found one with a rosary hanging down from the rear view mirror and got in. The driver, a faithful Catholic, was so unnerved by having the pope in the back that he was driving out of the airport at a snail's pace. 

Pope Francis, relishing the chance to be behind the wheel, ushered the driver into the back and got into the front. However, he was having so much fun driving that he exceeded the speed limit.

A New York State trooper pulled him over. He looked into the cab and the blood drained from his face.  He reached for his phone and called the supervising lieutenant.

“Lieutenant, sir, I pulled someone over. Ten miles over the limit. We have a VIP situation here.”

“Sergeant, this is a busy day. No time for games. Who is it? Mayor de Blasio?” 

“More important than him, sir.”

“C’mon, Governor Cuomo?”

“More important, sir.”

“President Obama?”

“More important, sir.”

“Sergeant... who could be more important than the Commander-in-Chief of the Free World?”

“I don’t know, sir, but the Pope is his driver.”

BIRTH | July 28–John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities Medal from
President Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Garrison Keillor in 2014 describes Ashbery in a brief bio (in his Writer's Almanac - from which Keillor retired this year) as growing up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. Ashbery went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer's anthology Modern American and British Poetry. He didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them - poems by W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

A generous neighbor, seeing how bright Ashbery was, paid to send him to a good academy for his last two years of high school, and he started writing poetry more seriously. He went on to Harvard, and he published his first book, Some Trees (1956), when he was 29 and since then Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Comment

Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. Ashbery and David Kermani are neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and they have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks - he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" - incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

SPRINGS | Citizens Advisory Committee (Updated August 1, 2015)

Plan to Upgrade Parking at the Springs School Defeated 56%-44% in May.

July 27, 2015–The Springs Advisory Committee is appointed by the East Hampton Town Board and meets about once a month.

Ineffective?

It has been judged ineffective by the East Hampton Star editors, but against what standard?

The Committee's job is to provide information to citizens and get their input, and it does that.

Based on my having just sat through a two-plus-hours meeting of the Committee as well as having attended earlier meetings, I would say it is a useful source of information.

It helps Springs residents keep up to date on taxes, schools, zoning, environmental and other issues. From the attendance of various Town Board members it is serving its purpose of giving them feedback on citizens' views.

Report on July 27 Meeting

Here's my subjective report on the information at the meeting that interested me enough to write down:

• On August 6 the Town Board is having a public hearing on issue relating to public beaches - access, beach fires and so forth. It is encouraging people to express their views, but wants them to inform themselves first about the laws and proposals. 
• The Springs Invitational art show will be coming up in August and is a two-week art show. Most of the other shows are just for a few days.
• The Fisherman's Fair is Saturday, August 8 (earlier on the same day as the Author's Night at the East Hampton Library).
• Trucks parked on residential property continue to be an issue, and a maximum size of 12,000 pounds is proposed, with a 12,500-pound size being advocated. The option of renting parking space was proposed. Screening will be required for trucks on residential sites.
• Creation of a Registry for Rental Properties is moving along.
• A proposal is afoot to prohibit bedrooms in basements unless an existing permit was issued.
• After a recent heavy rain, 67 beaches were closed on Long Island because of the runoff water.
• Although the meeting was advertised as being focused on water quality, the water quality report was a brief complaint about spraying over Accabonac Harbor, with discussion held over to the next meeting in September.

Springs School

The biggest single topic was facilities issues at the Springs School. The Spring School District Board of Education created a facilities committee that met May 27 at Springs School and again in June. A third meeting in July was postponed (I showed up for it, not being on the mailing list and therefore not understanding the cancellation).

The Springs School facilities committee was appointed to "collaborate" with architect Roger Smith of BBS Architects of Patchogue, N.Y. on plans to upgrade the aging and overcrowded Springs School, i.e., to review and analyze the recommendations of Mr. Smith’s firm. The plans were presented originally in December in a slide show.

The recommendations review existing instructional and other space and consider other infrastructure needs outlined in the district’s state-mandated five-year building conditions survey and staff reports. Board of Education President Liz Mendelman said at the time of the committee's formation in May:

The architects have outlined a substantial amount of work for the school. We felt it was important to involve our community in shaping whatever plan may come forward. This process needs to be open and inclusive.

Roger Smith, the architect, said that the committee members will:

tour the building, read the reports, ask questions, and help us understand what to ultimately bring to the Board of Education as best meeting the aspirations of the community. We will be talking about the big picture items, like how to address current space deficiency and inadequacy, down to the more basic infrastructure items like the needs of mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other systems. 

The 13 members of the committee are composed as follows:

• School staff (6) - Principal Eric Casale, Chief Business Officer Tom Primiano, teachers John Gibbons, Jodie Hallman and Colleen McGowan, and Library Aide Linda Kernell.
• The Board of Education (1) - Jeffrey Miller, Trustee.
• Springs residents who are parents of current students (3) - Scott Faulkner, Susan Gentile Hackett, and Dave Conlon. 
• Springs residents without children in the Springs School (3) - Susan Harder, Carol Campolo and Pamela Bicket.

At the Springs Advisory Committee meeting, the three public members reported on what they had found from the first two meetings, and others chimed in:

• There are 700 students at the school. Between 400 and 500 students are driven to and from the school each day.
• The facilities plan calls for $20 million to be spent, financed by a bond. (The voters in Springs approved a $27.4 million budget, but voted 232-184 (56%-44%) against using a $2 million reserve fund for a new parking lot, a reconfigured drop-off/pickup loop, and other changes.
• Several people questioned the construction of new facilities when schools in the neighboring school districts are underutilized. The Springs School population has been stabilizing and will reach its maximum in the next two years, and then fall. It is already too late to build for the next two years.
• What might happen is that the School Districts on the East End could cooperate in creating a new Middle School. A group called SCORE has been created to look at possibilities for cooperation.
• Someone complained about the NY State Wicks Law, which requires that HVAC work be bid separately instead of being subcontracted by a general contractor. This forces up the cost of public projects.
• The NY State school aid formula is not designed to be very helpful for Springs, which is much more needy than Amagansett but receives less than two percentage points more in aid.
• The RFP relating to the construction of the facility was announced on June 25, with a closing date of July 2 - an unheard-of deadline of one week. Usually there is a Bidders' Meeting in the first week, to answer questions. Furthermore, the RFP does not seem to have been widely announced. There was a call for a repeat of the RFP with a wider notification and a longer period for response.

Comment

If someone was attending their first meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee, the proceedings must have been a bit bewildering. 

The chair rules with a gentle hand, pleading rather than demanding order. The chair, secretary and third person at the front table are not identified. Speakers are rarely identified. No agenda is distributed, posted, or methodically referred to. The announced main purpose of the meeting, water quality, focused on a single chemical and was brought up only in the last few minutes after two hours of discursive reports. These problems don't vitiate the value of the meeting, but they are so unnecessary - and so easy to fix...

Meanwhile, what did come through loud and clear was that the operation of the Springs School is worthy of our attention. If the RFP for facilities construction was fairly presented, the process was nothing short of bizarre. 

I spoke up and noted that the New York State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, monitors the finances of municipalities in New York State (he has recently taken on the Public Service Commission for its LIPA reform in 2013 - with the endorsement of many local officials) and if the Springs School does not voluntarily reopen the RFP of June 25, I suggested that DiNapoli be notified and asked to invalidate the first RFP on the basis of improper procedures.

My suggestion did not meet with enthusiasm from the facilities committee member who brought up the question. Why would we want to bring the State Comptroller into our affairs?

Why? Because what was described is unconscionable - professionally, legally, ethically.

If the concerns presented at the Citizens Advisory Committee are valid and are not addressed, I am determined to follow up with a letter to DiNapoli.

1947 | Washington, D.C.

L to R: Sheila, Eddy, John.

We lived in Washington, D.C. at 3728 Northampton Street, a couple of blocks south of Chevy Chase Circle on the Maryland border.

I remember playing in the front yard a lot. It was raised up from the sidewalk.

There were garden hoses lying around for the Victory Garden during World War II, as described in The Mitchells.

I remember that these hoses got me into trouble if the water from them reached the people passing by on the sidewalk.

That year, 1947, was the first year we all went to Europe. We visited Holland during the summer. Many of my mother's relatives were killed during the Nazi Occupation, because of illegal Resistance activities or because of the lack of food snd good health care.

CSRNYC Blog Passes 40K Page Views

CSRNYC.blogspot.com just logged 40K of your page views. Thank you for reading.

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Thank you for reading and have a good month.

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WRITERS4KIDS | Blog Passes 40K Page Views

THANK YOU FOR READING

Please comment below any of the blogposts.

Or send an email to the blogger, i.e., John Tepper Marlin - jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.

Children's Books Birthdays by Month 
June
May
April
March - February - January - December - November - October - September - August - July

Most-Viewed Recent Posts
June 29 - Birthday of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, posted May 14, 2015.
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OBIT | Francis Fleetwood, R.I.P.

Francis Fleetwood.

I've known Francis Fleetwood for three decades. We served on a board and executive committee together.

I've sailed on his boat Bendigo with him many times and we even won a big race together.

In East Hampton he is well known as a sought-after architect.

He was paragliding a couple of years ago and survived a fall on rocks that would have killed most people. He went through a long period of recuperation and therapy.

Keep calm. Carry on.

He sent me a photo of him being treated. I have cropped out the scaffolding around his legs. You can see in his eyes the pride of spirit: "Keep Calm. Carry On."

Blake Fleetwood notified us today that Francis died yesterday after having passed his recent physical exam with a clean bill of health.

He had been to Cuba recently taking pictures of historic homes. They can be seen here:

http://huff.to/1KV2KoA

Francis had just returned from a photo trek in Patagonia. The Fleetwood family believes that a 24-hour delay in the flight back contributed to creating a blood clot that killed him.

Our sympathies go to his wife Stephanie and to other members of the Fleetwood family.

Great architect.
Good friend.
Thoughtful companion.

MARLIN | Blogs and Projects 2015 (Updated October 28, 2015)

William H. Woodin, FDR's First Treasury Secretary

My top projects as of fall 2015:

1. Will Woodin, FDR's First Treasury Secretary - biography.

2. The Boissevain and van Hall Families in the Dutch Resistance - family biography of 1940-45.

3. Biographies of Eugen Boissevain, Hilda van Stockum, Alice Tepper Marlin.

I would love it if anyone who reads this could look at the chapters I have posted above under 1 and 2 and comment. My email address is John[at]CityEconomist[dot]com.

Meanwhile, I post regularly on the following nine blogsites, listed in order of cumulative number of PageViews, which now approach one million.

1. CityEconomist.blogspot.com (Regional, Economic History) 
2. Ox-Cam NYC (Oxford, Cambridge Themes)
3. Writers4Kids.blogspot.com (Children's Books, Birthdays)
4. CSRNYC (Corporate Social Responsibility)
5. NYCTimeTraveler.blogspot.com (History)
6. Warriors-Families (Military History, Economics)
7. Hilda van Stockum (Her Books, Art, Life, Family)
8. Inez Milholland (Her Life, Husband Eugen Boissevain, His second wife Edna St. Vincent Millay) 
9. Boissevain Books (Children's Books, Memoirs, Bios, SciFi)

PHISHER? | Or Just a Spoofer?

Spoofer. Smaller eyes, shorter teeth. Darker fur.
Often less dangerous than a Phisher, but...

It may help to look at the attached photos to appreciate the differences between Spoofers and Phishers.

They have some things in common - like two long teeth on both the upper and lower jaws with which they can rip your throat out and then proceed on a more leisurely basis to the rest of what's left of you.

Both spoofers and phishers are e-thieves.

It pays, therefore, to learn their M.O.'s and take the steps recommended below to prevent yourself being damaged by either of them.

They say good judgment comes from experience... Experience comes from bad judgment. But let's move on.

Spoofers

Spoofers change the apparent sender details on an e-mail and fool you into thinking they are someone they are not. This could just be for fun, or more likely it could have an ulterior motive of getting you to believe that the person they are pretending to be is in trouble. So you may get an email that looks like it is from your classmate Fred, who explains he is in Paris and he lost his wallet and could you please wire cash immediately to Western Union to be picked up by Fred's friend Maham Xuru. Anyone asking you to send money to Western Union is immediately suspicious, because that is a favorite way of getting money.

Phisher. Longer teeth, wider eyes. Longer fur, lighter shade
of color. Does not have your interest at heart.

Phishers

Phishers design emails to try to get you give up sensitive information.

They are more dangerous because if their design works, you may not realize you are giving them access to sensitive information.

Sensitive means passwords that enable e-thieves to remove money from your bank account directly... or charge something to your credit card.

Spoofers and Phishers Work in Teams

The two predators can work together.

You may get an email that looks like it's from someone you know, and then gets emails designed to coax you to give access to passwords to opening your accounts.

Spotting Spoofers

Spoofers are clever at hiding, but there are ways to spot them.

One technique they are using is to include the logos of the companies they are pretending to be. Once upon a time, they would just send an email saying "This is the AOL E-mail Memory Department - you have exceeded your 2 Gigabyte limit - click on the link below to expand your memory or we will close your account." Now spoofer is more likely to include the AOL logo and other indications that this is a genuine warning.

One of the cleverest techniques is to have the e-mail come from the Fraud Prevention Department, or include a link marked "Unsubscribe".  It would be cute or funny if their purpose wasn't so deadly.

Return e-mail addressed may include slightly altered names that substitute a different domain ending or a different letter in the name of the organization - a zero instead of an O, for example.

AOL and other ISPs have been showing headers in e-mails, or allowing this as an option, which makes it easier to spot spoofers.

The worst case is when a spoofer manages to take over a computer. That happened to me. I basically had to buy another computer. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

Spotting Phishers

Phishers are easy to identify through the trail that they lay out for you. They want you to come to a place where they can jump up at you and finish you off with a lunge at your throat.

Essentially, phishers want to make money by charging a thing, or things, to your account that you will never see, or by simply taking money out of an account.  Spoofing is a stop on the way to achieving their purpose.

They want the phishee to provide personal information through a reply to an e-mail or through filling out a fork on a website.

Protecting Yourself

Before following a link, hover your cursor over it and check that the address matches the one you think you are going to or sending to. Here are the questions that should be going through your mind:

• What Are They Asking for? Be careful about any email that asks for your social security number or tax identification number, your bank account information, credit card number, PIN number, credit card security code, your mother's maiden name, your birthplace or your favorite pet's name.
• Is the English Grammatical? Poor grammar or typographical errors may mean the e-mail is being tranlasted automatically from another language or is sent by people for whom English is not their first language.
• Does the Return Address Look Genuine? If the "received from"or "reply to"  for the e-mail looks strange, start worrying. Most e-mail programs let you look at the source of the e-mail. 
• Does the Website Look Real? Some phishers set up spoof websites. When in doubt, reply directly to a known e-mail address.  
• Does the E-mail Address Look Real? Some phishing e-mails include a link that looks as though it will take you to a real account, but it is really a shortened link to a completely different website. If you hover over the link with your mouse when viewing the message in your e-mail client, you often can see the underlying false website, as a pop-up or in the browser status bar.
• Do They Offer a Chance to "Unsubscribe"? Spammers often use the "Unsubscribe" button to  create a list of valid e-mail addresses for nefarious purposes.

To fight phishing, go here: http://www.antiphishing.org. American Express is dedicated to fighting spoofing and phishing - their security site seems to be open.                             

WW2 | Boissevain Family in the Resistance

The Dutch Resistance Museum opens with questions.
What would you do if the Nazis occupied your country?

AMSTERDAM, Feb 14, 2015–Visited Het Verzetsmuseum (The Dutch Resistance Museum) yesterday.

I am researching for a book what the Boissevain and van Hall families  did during the Nazi occupation of Holland, 1940-1945. The outline is posted here.

One of the chilling features of the Verzetsmuseum is its diary of the increasing pressure on the Dutch as the Occupation, which lasted five years, became increasingly confrontational. The Nazis expected the same cooperation in Holland from their Dutch cousins as they got in Austria.

After the German army moved into Holland, the Verzetsmuseum  handbook (English version), quotes from the diary of a housewife living in the Hague about the dread that overtook them all:

Especially for the Jews. Oh, that tormented race. The arrival of the Germans filled them with fear, fear about the fate that was now awaiting them. Many of them preferred suicide to awaiting their fate. Entire families together. (Het Verzetsmuseum, 24, emphasis added.)

For the next few months, however, the occupying Nazis played a clever game, trying to reassure non-Jewish Dutch people that they were benign rulers.

The occupiers behaved properly, hoping to win over the Dutch, as part of the “Germanic brotherhood”, to National Socialism. As a gesture of goodwill, after the Dutch army was disbanded, they released the Dutch prisoners of war. … Many Dutch people thought they ought to reconcile themselves to the situation. (Het Verzetsmuseum, 24.)

That all changed with the General Strike in 1941.

Clever New Phishing Scam

Inside a spamming email from a phisher is the link "Report as Spam."

It is clever because it is unexpected.

When I realized what I had done, I immediately shut down the laptop and rebooted. Now I am more wary.

CityEconomist Blog Passes 140,000 Page Views

Thank you for reading. The following are the most-read CityEconomist posts for the past month.

During the next three weeks I will be in Oxford, UK; Amsterdam, Holland; and Pamplona, Spain. 

- John Tepper Marlin

The Dutch Resistance and Its Financing, 1940-1945 ... Oct 27, 2014

How FDR's Team Calmed the Panic and Created 70 Yea... Oct 16, 2014 (Glass-Steagall)

The Dutch Boissevains in WW2 - Outline Jan 26, 2015

The Rise of the Nazis and the Invasion of Holland Jan 29, 2015

Visiting Orlando - The Disney Engine that Could Feb 4, 2015

NYC More Catholic, Jewish, Muslim Feb 15, 2008

Immigration Reform of Rising Importance Jan 13, 2015

Good Job News - U-6 Down Nearly 2 Percentage Point... Jan 9, 2015

How Many Funerals Should Presidents Attend? Jan 21, 2015