Have you ever spent a night in a haunted
bed-and-breakfast? Having stayed in several
inns that pride themselves on their resident
ghosts, I know that stories about these
ghosts’ appearances can be the best part
of overnight stays. Introduced at breakfast
along with blueberry pancakes, waffles, or omelettes, such stories add a dimension
of wonder to what might otherwise be a
humdrum stay.
Americans
How the FBI Proved that My Father Wore Overalls:
My late father, Samuel Margolis, was
unwittingly caught in the anti-Communist
hysteria of the early 1950s. His troubles
began when he was accused of being a
Communist by coworkers who disliked him.
He was investigated by the FBI and other
federal agencies and lost his livelihood for
several years, but he was eventually able to
clear his name.
Foodways
At Yankee Stadium, béisbol is as American
as alcapurrias—those plump, golden-brown
plantain patties stuffed with seasoned beef.
It’s so from the sunken rye and bluegrass
sod field to the breeziest bleacher top.
With roughly thirty percent of United
States baseball players now of foreign-born
Hispanic heritage and the House that
Ruth Built smack dab in one of the most
established Puerto Rican communities in
the nation, large, hungry, thirsty crowds
have directed the market toward foods
that reflect fans’ cultural heritage.
Set in Stone
Stonework must surely rank as one of
the oldest of folk arts, if only for the
longevity of the material used—hence its
presence in the historical record. While an
immense but finite supply of wood drew
Europeans to the shores of North America,
once they had exhausted local forest stands
through clearing, burning, ship building,
and construction, stone became the material
of choice. The ensuing works in stone
have been the longest lasting remnants of
vernacular architecture.
Reviews
(1) Girsa—pronounced geer-sha
and meaning “young girls ” in Gaelic—is
a group of eight Irish American teenagers,
two generations removed from the Emerald
Isle, who live in and around Pearl River in
Rockland County. Their new, eponymous
compact disc is as refreshing as a cool drink
of spring water on a sweltering summer day. (2) “Seeking out a region’s folk tales and
legends offers more than entertaining reading,”
Melanie Zimmer explains in Central
New York and the Finger Lakes: Myths, Legends,
and Lore. “It offers a piece of ourselves.” This book is a celebration of the
regional identity of central New York as
developed and preserved through folktales.
Play
Abner Cartwright, Alexander Doubleday. . .
these composite names stand for an exceedingly
odd couple whose identities have been
stolen, accomplishments merged, and stories
intertwined for more than a century now. What
both men share is that their lives were hijacked
after their deaths, and as a result, each was
credited with something he did not do—that
is, invent baseball.
Still Going Strong
Images of jugglers appeared on the
walls of Egyptian tombs more than four
thousand years ago. They are the first known
representations of an ancient craft that
continues to entertain and fascinate. The
English word “juggler” derives from the Old
French jongleur, and these performers have
been common at public events, carnivals, and
on the streets since time immemorial. These
days, jugglers appear at circuses and variety
shows, as well as in public places.
Good Spirits
Two years ago, while preparing to teach
my fall Folklore of the Supernatural class, I
looked up “haunted dolls” on eBay. A folklorist
friend of mine had warned me never
to order a haunted doll, even at a good
price. “I’d never have one of those things
in my house!” my friend had told me. Like
the central character of the Grimms’ tale
“The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What
Fear Is,” I could not resist the temptation
to order a haunted doll. What harm could
possibly come from this simple transaction?
From Wild Man to Monster:
When the first European settlers
entered what is now New York
State and its environs, they brought with
them not only their material culture, but also
an array of beliefs in mythical beings. Such
creatures had been part of the European
psyche for centuries. A central character in
this pantheon was the “wild man” thought
to inhabit the darker parts of the European
countryside. Also known as the woodwose,
wooser, or “wild man of the woods,” it
was conspicuous in folklore between the
thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and holds a
prominent place in later medieval European
artwork and literature.
Song
The upcoming 150th anniversary provides
an incentive for those of us who sing, teach,
or write to conduct some research into Civil
War songs. Because the Civil War years coincide
with the rise of the American song
publishing industry, there is a large vault
through which to sort. Song artifacts relating
to New York are particularly easy to find, in
large part because the national broadside ballad
press was centered close to New York’s
City Hall and was at its zenith between 1861
and 1865.
Books-to-Note
(1) Pauline Adema draws us into her world of
culinary superlatives, localism, and celebrations…By means of a comprehensive case study
of Gilroy, California—the self-proclaimed
garlic capital of the world—the author skillfully
guides the reader to consideration of
competing perspectives: resident/tourist,
exotic/classic, commodification/production,
personal/communal, global/local, dynamic/
stable, self/other, everyday/special,
contemporary/traditional. (2) Although it is well known that Kurt
Schwitters (1887–1948) created collages,
poems, and artistic installations in the 1920s,
1930s, and 1940s, his darkly satirical fairy
tales have been less accessible to scholars
and general readers. Lucky Hans and Other
Merz Fairy Tales not only gives us the tales,
but also provides a wonderful selection of
illustrations and helpful notes. (3) Sightings of large, elusive, hair-covered
bipeds in remote parts of the Northeast go
back to colonial times. Bigfoot: Encounters in
New York and New England is a useful and
well-researched collection of reports, from
both written and oral sources, of those
sightings.
Play
Fleischmanns, New York, is an appealingly
forlorn spot thirty minutes from Woodstock
and fifty, if not one hundred years, from the
rest of America. Its old-fashioned Catskills
summers—fresh air, cool mountain nights,
porch sitting, ball playing, swimming, and
dozing off in lawn chairs…
Good Spirits
Since “seeing is believing” in our culture, visual evidence of a supernatural presence seems especially compelling. Ghosts in photographs and on videos get more attention than ghosts that whisper in the night. It should not surprise us, then, that orbs—bright spheres of light in photographs—…Some people believe that orbs represent ghosts; others believe that orbs come from glitches in the photographic process.
Still Going Strong
Garrett Oliver, 47, is the brewmaster for the
Brooklyn Brewery, a regional brewery in the
Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that turns
out 310,000 gallons of beer annually. A native
of Queens, Garrett became interested in the
finer points of beer consumption when he
lived in London in the early 1980s. There he
discovered pub-brewed beers that were very
different from the “industrial-style” brews
that he’d known in the United States.
Saint Rip
Patron saint of the Catskills, Rip Van Winkle has belonged to all America, coast to coast, almost from the moment he was born, by passage through Washington Irving’s pen, in 1819. Only seven years later there was a Rip Van Winkle House along the road from Palenville to the nation’s first resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House; in 1850 there was another Rip Van Winkle House on the corner of Pacific Wharf and Battery Street in San Francisco. Rip’s real-life presence was attested by nonagenarians who claimed to have known him and his hectoring dame.