A Photo Tribute to Two Dads and Two Grandpa's

I first posted this on Father's day in 2011, then updated it in 2015, when granddaughter Amalia was 3 1/2 and grandson Nicolas only 11 weeks old.  By then, I wrote, my husband Nick had proved himself a super Papou (Grandfather), even to changing the occasional grandchild's diaper, something he never did with his own kids.

                                                                  Nick &; Christos 1972 
When our three children were born in the 1970’s, my husband Nick was not the kind of dad who'd change diapers, take a kid to the park or coach them in sports. But as these photos suggest, he was always an important presence in their lives, ready to offer support, advice and unconditional love when they needed it.

1. 

                                                               Nick & Eleni circa 1976

This past week, President Obama launched the “Year of Strong Families” to do something about father absence, which he experienced growing up without a father.  Nick experienced it too, because, as he wrote in “A Place for Us”, he never knew his father, a short-order cook in Worcester, MA, until he and his sisters arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1949 after their mother was executed during the Greek civil war.  Nick was nine years old.  His father, Christos, was 58.

                                                         Nick & Marina, circa  1979

My father, Robert O. Paulson, was born in 1906 and died in 1986.  Because my parents lived far away, he was not a real presence in our children’s lives, but when we visited California in 1973 I took these photos of him showing our son, Christos, his first view of the ocean, and reading to him at bedtime.

I only met my paternal grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was stern and completely deaf and the only way to communicate with him was by writing on a blackboard in chalk. But my step-grandfather, John Erickson, my grandmother’s second husband, had a special relationship with me during the years I lived near their small town of Monticello, Minnesota. 

 I still have a small garnet ring that once belonged to his mother. I remember vividly how he taught me to shoot his rifle across the wide Mississippi river, and in the spring, when it was time to get new baby chicks for the chicken yard, he would take me down to the hatchery, pull open drawers of chirping chicks and let me pick out the ones I liked.

                                                                                                   Ida & John Erickson circa1952

 In the current "People" magazine President Obama wrote, “I grew up without a father around. I have certain memories of him taking me to my first jazz concert and giving me my first basketball as a Christmas present, But he left when I was two years old.”

 As he knows, even a one-time memory—choosing chicks at a hatchery, showing a grandson the ocean, reading a bedtime story or unwrapping a first basketball can be a gift that a child will cherish for a lifetime.

Now that we're celebrating Father's Day 2019, I have to add  one more Dad to my tribute:  Emilio Baltodano, the father of our grandkids Amalia, now 7 and Nico, 4.  Emilio is definitely a SuperDad, like many young fathers today.   He attends every school performance, and takes his kids somewhere virtually every weekend--fishing in Central Park at the Harlem Meer, the Brooklyn Zoo, Governor's Island, the Natural History Museum, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.  Of course every SuperDad has a SuperMom beside him, and the photo above shows Emilio and Amalia at the Father's Day Brunch Eleni put together today to honor  Emilio and her dad, Nick Gage, complete with goat cheese and zucchini frittata, lox, bagels and cream cheese, mimosas, and her famous Strawberry Cake. Papou Nick loved it!

World Laughter Day and the Birth of the Smiley Face

Because today is World Laughter Day and we all could use a little help cheering up,  I'm re-posting the story of Harvey Ball, the artist from Worcester, MA who created the original Smiley Face fifty five years ago and never made more than $45 from his creation.  Then, in 1999, disturbed by the crass commercialization of the Smiley, Harvey created World Smile Day--the first Friday in October every year--to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  So like World Smile Day in October, today--the first Sunday in May-- is a good day to do a random act of kindness as Harvey put it--improving the world "one smile at a time."

When three of Harvey Ball’s comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him in Okinawa during World War II, he did not ponder if fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  Harvey, a tall, lanky, laconic Yankee from Worcester, Massachusetts, was not much given to introspection, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001 at the age of 79, Harvey had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told  People Magazine in 1998, “I taught the whole world how to smile.”

Harvey Ball, born and raised in Worcester, was the creator of the Smiley Face--that round yellow image that now beams out from Wal-Mart ads, Joe Boxer shorts and internet icons.  When, in December of 1963, he picked up a black pen and a yellow piece of paper and drew the world’s first Smiley Face, Harvey, a self-employed commercial artist, was working on an assignment from a Worcester insurance company suffering from employee discontent after a merger.  They wanted a campaign and buttons to raise company morale. They ordered 100 yellow Smiley Face buttons and then, when those disappeared almost over night, they ordered 10,000 more.

Harvey later figured out that his compensation for creating the Smiley Face button for the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company added up to about $45.   When the lawyers for the company tried to copyright the image eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was in the public domain.  By the mid-seventies, according to the curators of the Worcester Historical Museum, the image had fallen out of favor.

But Smiley made a significant comeback in the late 1980’s when interest in acid and other psychedelic drugs became a major cultural phenomenon. The icon was embraced by trendy downtown club kids.  Those who grew up in the 1970’s—today’s most desirable consumer demographic —view the image with nostalgia. (Some of them also think it was created by Forrest Gump, the fictional movie character.)  When votes were taken by the U.S. Post Office for icons to represent the decade of the 1970’s, the most popular image by far was Smiley, whose stamp was issued in 1999.

Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia added the phrase “Have a Happy Day” and took in a reported one million dollars in sales of Smiley products in the first six months of 1971 alone.  In 1998, French Businessman Franklin Loufrani claimed that HE had created the image in 1971, and he proceeded to trademark the face in 80 countries.  When faced with Harvey Ball’s earlier creation, Loufrani replied with a Gallic shrug:  “I  don’t care if he designed the Smiley face.  We promote, we own, we market.” 

Riled up by “the France guy” as he put it,  Harvey in 1999 created World Smile Day—the first Friday in October-- to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  And he trademarked it. Harvey said, “World Smile Day® is open to every person on the planet.  No matter what color they are, or who they might pray to, no matter what country they live in.  World Smile Day® simply asks each person to live the day with a generous heart, do one kind act, to help one person smile.  Acts of kindness and smiles are contagious."

Every reporter who interviewed Harvey Ball asked him the same question: was he angry that he never made more than $45 from the creation that could have made him very, very rich?  To every reporter he patiently gave pretty much the same reply: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.  I’m not ticked off about it.  I don’t mind getting up in the morning and going to work. They ask me why I’m not upset.  I just get satisfaction from it being so widely used and that it has given so many people pleasure.”

Even though he didn’t want to profit from it, Harvey Ball did want recognition for creating the image whose smile has been called more famous than the Mona Lisa’s.   He said  “Smiley is one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, as simple as it is.  It’s got a very, very positive message. Anybody can use it and reproduce it and it reaches everybody regardless of language, religion, nationality, all those things--as compared to some of the art you get today which you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re looking at…I’m glad Smiley came from Worcester.  The city should make more of it.  Because no other city has this.”

After Harvey died in 2001 in Worcester, his son, Charles, said : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on northh and never wavered."

And he left us the legacy of a smile.

Valentines in the U.S.--It All Started Here!

Time to re-post my annual Valentine's Day essay. I see that in today's New York Times there is a long article about Valentines, including two photographs of Esther Howland valentines--but no mention that she was living, and began making, Valentines in Worcester, MA!

 (I recently bought these English and German-made valentines at an auction--sadly, they are not from Howland or Taft.)

Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45 minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon (starring in a soon-to-be-published tell-all book “The Saga of Smiley”, printed by the Worcester Historical Museum and written by me.)

And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine.”

Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could assemble her own.  She then convinced her brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales rounds.

The initial demand was overwhelming and Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating them around a long table on the third floor of her home.  The company was eventually earning $100,000—a phenomenal success.

Esther is considered significant because, according to historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying the local women “liberally”.

She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.

In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage proposal.

On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes.  Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles…”

In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker.  Together they formed the New England Valentine Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)

This is where Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.

It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did,  but he didn’t like to talk about it, because the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton, about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)

In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.  But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate with grief.  Jotham decided to take his wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.

When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.)  But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or “N.E.V.” for “New England Village”.  Some believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she opened her own factory

Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co. in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business to care for him.  After he died, she moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.

Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine” never married.

In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co,  which dominated valentine production for many years.  Instead of cards laboriously made by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards in the 1890’s.  The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular, although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.

Today is World Smile Day!--The Harvey Ball Story

I think all of us could use a reason to smile about now, so I'm reminding you that today--the first Friday in October--is World Smile Day, started right here in Worcester by the man who invented the Smiley Face icon.   I'm re-posting the story of Harvey Ball, the artist who created the original Smiley Face fifty-three years ago and never made more than $45 from his creation.  Then, in 1999, disturbed by the crass commercialization of the Smiley, Harvey began World Smile Day--the first Friday in October every year--to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  So today, let's all try to do a random act of kindness--improving the world "one smile at a time." 

When three of Harvey Ball’s comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him in Okinawa during World War II, he did not ponder if fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  Harvey, a tall, lanky, laconic Yankee from Worcester, Massachusetts, was not much given to introspection, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001 at the age of 79, Harvey had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told  People Magazine in 1998, “I taught the whole world how to smile.”

Harvey Ball, born and raised in Worcester, was the creator of the Smiley Face--that round yellow image that now beams out from Wal-Mart ads, Joe Boxer shorts and internet icons.  When, in December of 1963, he picked up a black pen and a yellow piece of paper and drew the world’s first Smiley Face, Harvey, a self-employed commercial artist, was working on an assignment from a Worcester insurance company suffering from employee discontent after a merger.  They wanted a campaign and buttons to raise company morale. They ordered 100 yellow Smiley Face buttons and then, when those disappeared almost over night, they ordered 10,000 more.

Harvey later figured out that his compensation for creating the Smiley Face button for the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company added up to about $45.   When the lawyers for the company tried to copyright the image eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was in the public domain.  By the mid-seventies, according to the curators of the Worcester Historical Museum, the image had fallen out of favor.

But Smiley made a significant comeback in the late 1980’s when interest in acid and other psychedelic drugs became a major cultural phenomenon. The icon was embraced by trendy downtown club kids.  Those who grew up in the 1970’s—today’s most desirable consumer demographic —view the image with nostalgia. (Some of them also think it was created by Forrest Gump, the fictional movie character.)  When votes were taken by the U.S. Post Office for icons to represent the decade of the 1970’s, the most popular image by far was Smiley, whose stamp was issued in 1999.

Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain of Philadelphia added the phrase “Have a Happy Day” and took in a reported one million dollars in sales of Smiley products in the first six months of 1971 alone.  In 1998, French Businessman Franklin Loufrani claimed that HE had created the image in 1971, and he proceeded to trademark the face in 80 countries.  When faced with Harvey Ball’s earlier creation, Loufrani replied with a Gallic shrug:  “I  don’t care if he designed the Smiley face.  We promote, we own, we market.” 

Riled up by “the France guy” as he put it,  Harvey in 1999 created World Smile Day—the first Friday in October-- to promote the true meaning of the Smiley Face.  And he trademarked it. Harvey said, “World Smile Day® is open to every person on the planet.  No matter what color they are, or who they might pray to, no matter what country they live in.  World Smile Day® simply asks each person to live the day with a generous heart, do one kind act, to help one person smile.  Acts of kindness and smiles are contagious."

Every reporter who interviewed Harvey Ball asked him the same question: was he angry that he never made more than $45 from the creation that could have made him very, very rich?  To every reporter he patiently gave pretty much the same reply: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.  I’m not ticked off about it.  I don’t mind getting up in the morning and going to work. They ask me why I’m not upset.  I just get satisfaction from it being so widely used and that it has given so many people pleasure.”

Even though he didn’t want to profit from it, Harvey Ball did want recognition for creating the image whose smile has been called more famous than the Mona Lisa’s.   He said  “Smiley is one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, as simple as it is.  It’s got a very, very positive message. Anybody can use it and reproduce it and it reaches everybody regardless of language, religion, nationality, all those things--as compared to some of the art you get today which you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re looking at…I’m glad Smiley came from Worcester.  The city should make more of it.  Because no other city has this.”

After Harvey died in 2001 in Worcester, his son, Charles, said : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on northh and never wavered."

And he left us the legacy of a smile.

Valentines in the U.S. --It all started here

It's time to re-post  my Valentine photo-essay from several years ago, pointing out that all those Valentines that you are sending to loved ones in a few days began right here in Worcester, MA, and, to be even more specific, in North Grafton, right at the end of the street that I live on now!  I think Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday, because it's all about LOVE, not eating or wrapping presents. (All the valentines here are from my collection.)

(I posted this last year but have been collecting new antique Valentines since then-- I LOVE the Victorian German-made ones  because they're  so elaborate and fragile and full of romance.  Why can't some modern card company reproduce them in all their three-dimensional glory? ) 

    Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45 minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon.

And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine.”

    Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could assemble her own.  She then convinced her brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales rounds.

    The initial demand was overwhelming and Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating them around a long table on the third floor of her home.  The company was eventually earning $100,000—a phenomenal success.

    Esther is considered significant because, according to historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying the local women “liberally”.  She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.

    In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage proposal.

    On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst; notes have flown around like snowflakes.  Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles…”

    In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker.  Together they formed the New England Valentine Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)

     This is where Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.

It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did,  but he didn’t like to talk about it, because the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton, about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)

     In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.  But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate with grief.  Jotham decided to take his wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.

     When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.)  But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or “N.E.V.” for “New England Village”.  Some believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she opened her own factory.

     Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co. in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business to care for him.  After he died, she moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine” never married.

     In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co,  which dominated valentine production for many years.  Instead of cards laboriously made by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards in the 1890’s.  The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular, although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.

Worst Taste Christmas Decorations Ever?

 Today we awoke to discover a winter wonderland outside and the cars blanketed in snow.  It's past time to assemble the lighted deer for the front yard.  At least the candles are in every window and the main Christmas tree is up and decorated in the living room, thanks to the kids and grand-kids who did it on the day after Thanksgiving.  I still want to put up my "shoe tree" in the library; the cookies, candy and kitchen-stuff tree on the porch, and the antique ornaments tree in the dining room.  Last year I also had a tree with Mexican tin ornaments and lacquered ornaments from India, but I'll skip it this year because it would never survive the attacks from two toddlers coming for Christmas.  But I'm contemplating a "forest creatures" display on the mantle over the fireplace.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I'm re-posting the article below from five years ago.  And when the snow stops I'll drive over to see whether the peeing Santa is atop this house yet again. I'm constantly amazed at what people do to decorate during the holiday season.

The first time I drove by the decorations on the roof of this house in Shrewsbury, MA, I thought--"Nahh!  That's not what I thought it is."  The next time I drove by, I took a good look and realized it WAS!  Santa peeing a lighted stream across the roof into a puddle of lights.

I went back in the daytime to make sure--but without the lights, I'll bet no one noticed anything odd about this Santa standing next to a chimney.

I just read last week that a homeowner in nearby Westborough MA., who got carried away with filling his front yard with lights, was receiving warning letters from an anonymous neighbor who threatened to tear down the display if he didn't winnow it out to make it more "tasteful."  But at least the guy in Westborough didn't have Santa peeing on his front lawn!

Meanwhile, daughter Eleni, who's spending Christmas with her husband Emilio in his native Nicaragua, says that touring the  Christmas displays in Managua means going from one creche scene to another.  She's got photos of the Nacimientos on her latest blog post "Away, In A Manger."  Every home has a Nativity scene, I gather, and in public spaces the figures are life-sized.  But the Christ Child, which is the centerpiece of the scene, cannot be placed in the manger until Christmas day, when he is born.  Before he's placed in the manger, the children touch the Christ Child for a blessing.

Here in Worcester, MA and its suburbs, there are a lot of giant inflatable Santas and Snowmen in front yards, but there is nary a Christ Child or manger scene around.  I think I read that it is now illegal to have a representation of the Nativity in a public place.

But I'll bet there are no laws on the books in Massachusetts against having a peeing Santa on your roof.

Mezcal & My Favorite Mexican Photos

 I keep reading articles about how mezcal is becoming the trendy drink, for instance "Mezcal Sunrise" by Dana Goodyear in the current New Yorker.  That inspired me to look up and re-post this photo essay from five years ago.  I really miss my annual cooking tours to Mexico with Susana Trilling and her "Seasons of the Heart" and the painting and photography classes in Oaxaca with my friend Mari Seder, but nowadays my travel lust takes me just to Manhattan and my grandkids.  When I turned 75, Nick said to me, "What do you want for your birthday?  A trip to Mexico?" and I instantly replied, "No, a trip to Disney World in Orlando with Amalia and Nicolas!"  So that's happening during the last week in April.  And of course I'll blog about it.

 Back in 2008, when Michael Covino and the Niche Hospitality Group opened Mezcal Restaurant on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, Mike commissioned me to  print, mat and frame nearly 40 photos of the Mezcal-making process—photos I took on a trip to Oaxaca.

In the town of Mitla  I photographed many family-owned Mezcal “fabricas”. Mezcal is made from the heart of the Agave cactus–called a piña because of its resemblance to a pineapple. I got great photos, all related to the Mezcal-making process, but I convinced Mike to let me frame as well some non-Mezcal portraits of people I had encountered in Mexico.  He hung six of my portraits of women in the ladies’ room and six hombres in the men’s.  These “bathroom” portraits proved to be so popular that people kept stealing them, which I took as a compliment.

Mezcal Restaurant in Worcester turned out to be a huge success.  It was voted best Mexican Restaurant in the city. Every time I drove by, I saw people waiting to get in.

Last spring Mike asked me to print out a new set of photos for a new Mezcal Restaurant that the Niche group was opening in Leominster, MA.  It’s just now officially open, and my favorite portraits of Mexican men and women are again in the restrooms.  I hope they don’t get stolen!  But if they do, I’ll just re-print them and take it as a compliment.  Here’s the story behind the dozen photos:

1. Guelaguetza Girls. These lovely young women were practicing for the ceremony called Guelaguetza that takes place in Oaxaca during late July.  Originally meant to worship the corn god, it was celebrated by the indigenous people long before the Spanish came.  The trajes (costumes) these women are wearing and their lace headpieces are so stunning! No wonder Frieda Kahlo adopted the fashion for herself.

2. Fiesta tot. This adorable child was photographed some years ago at a Candelaria Festival on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.  The Zapotec Indians of the Isthmus have their own language and traditions, and it’s a strong matriarchal society—the women rule.

3. At the Candelaria Festival, most of the dancers were women dancing with each other. (The men mainly watched from the sidelines)  But this young couple was the focus of all eyes, because they were so beautiful and so clearly in love.  I hope by now they’re married and bringing their own fiesta tots to the Candelaria festival.

4. The Tortilla Lady.  She’s cooking (with helpers) in her courtyard in preparation for the Candelaria feast.  She is one of the many local cooks I was introduced to by Susana Trilling in the course of one of Susana’s culinary tours.  Those tours are always full of adventure and  take you far, far off the beaten track, because Susana knows the culinary secrets of Mexico better than anyone.  Info about  her tours is at www.SeasonsOfMyHeart.com.

5. Candelaria Parade.  These beauties were tossing favors, just as people do in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Candelaria happens on Feb. 2 (same as Groundhog Day).  Because it’s 40 days after Christmas, it marks the day when the Virgin Mary took Jesus to be presented at the temple.  In Mexico, every family buys a new outfit for the Christ Child doll on the family’s home altar and takes him to church to be blessed.

6. You’ve seen this urchin on my blog before--cheerfully carrying her little brother on her back.  When I was walking around San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico in 2009, also on one of Susana’s culinary tours (this one was “Chiapas & Chocolate & Tabasco”), I encountered this girl and lots of her friends, all selling cheap jewelry. The first day I ran into her, she was unencumbered by her sibling, but she was always smiling. Of course I bought some of her bracelets.

7. This blind musician was also someone I encountered on the streets of San Cristobal.  It’s a wrenching portrait.  For some reason, almost all the photos I’ve taken of old men in Mexico bring tears to my eyes.  I think because they make me think of my father, who died about 25 years ago.

8. This old man, holding his bottle of beer and staring thoughtfully into space, was at a Day of the Dead celebration, which is usually a rollicking event in this village outside of Oaxaca, with bands playing and people dancing.  But I suspect he’s pensive because he’s remembering friends who have passed away.

9. This man who entered the church in Tlacalula, immediately knelt down and continued to pray for a long time.  I suspect he’d come a long way on this pilgrimage.

10.  The Red Devil.  He’s one of many devils that delighted in harassing us at Carnival time in the village of San Martine Telcajete.  I was there while taking a class in collage, shadow box & photography with photographer Mari Seder.  Every year the class visits the Carnival celebrations in this small town, which include a hilarious mock wedding featuring trans-dressers and much mischief. (See more about Mari’s  classes at www.artworkshopsinoaxaca.com. )

11. This photograph was taken at the ancient ruins of El Tajin on another one of Susana’s culinary tours—“Veracruz & Vanilla”. At the Spring Equinox, the indigenous people come to the ruined pyramids of El Tajin, everyone dressed in white, to absorb the power of the sun god and to  have  a cuerandero (healer)  perform a cleansing ceremony.  At night there were native dancers and children handing out clay images of the gods and the next day everyone came back to see the Vanilla Queen, the Voladores (flying dancers) with their dangerous rituals, and of course, to be cleansed.

12. The young man above is happy because he’s off to the Candelaria parade which is followed by the fiesta.  As I recall, the price of admission was a case of beer.  The Mexicans of the state of Oaxaca, like the  customers at the old and new Mezcal Restaurants, know how to have a good time.

Smile--It's World Smile Day!

The world's most recognized  and beloved icon, the beaming yellow Smiley Face, was created in December of 1963 in Worcester, MA by a commercial artist named Harvey Ball who never made more than the $45 he was paid for creating it.  Swiftly Smiley "went viral" in an age before computers and became the most recognizable symbol of good will and good cheer on the planet.

As the years passed Harvey Ball, a decorated WWII vet,  became concerned about the over-commercialization of his symbol, and how its original meaning had become lost in the marketplace.  The Smiley Face knows no politics, no geography and no religion and Harvey wanted to make that clear.  So he declared that the first Friday in October each year would become World Smile Day® with the slogan "Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile."

That's your assignment for  Friday, Oct. 2, 2015, as Harvey and his creation are remembered and celebrated in his hometown of Worcester and around the world.  Below  is part of Harvey's story from the forthcoming book "The Saga of Smiley--How a Cheerful Icon Changed the World."

         Ask the man on the street who invented the Smiley Face and he might reply that it was created by Forrest Gump in the eponymous 1994 film, when Forrest wiped his muddy face on a yellow T-shirt.  Or he might suggest that Smiley has been with us ever since the first bored schoolboy doodled on his algebra notebook.

         But Smiley came into being at a particular time—December of 1963—in a particular place—Worcester, Massachusetts, once a booming industrial metropolis of factories spewing out textiles and abrasives, but by the early sixties, a sleepy city that its 170,000 citizens affectionately called “Wormtown.”

        In December of 1963, the United States was reeling from the traumas of the Kennedy assassination and growing opposition to the Viet Nam war.  And in Worcester, MA, the executives of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester (now Hanover Insurance), detecting a critical drop in employee morale in the wake of an unpopular merger, asked Harvey Ball, a self-employed graphic artist and decorated World War II veteran, to design a button that would cheer up their cranky employees and improve customer relations.

         In his studio, Harvey thought about the project for a while.  Then he drew a circle with a grin.  “I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright”, he told a reporter for the Associated Press some years later. He studied the image but then realized that if you turned it upside down, it became a frown.  That wouldn’t do at all!  What if the company’s employees wore the button upside down?   So Harvey added two eyes and the Smiley Face greeted a waiting world.

         Harvey drew the circle and the two non-matching eyes by hand because, as he explained later, “You can take a compass and draw a perfect circle and make two perfect eyes as neat as can be.  Or you can do it freehand and have some fun with it.  Like I did.  Give it character.“ (An authentic Harvey Ball Smiley has a hand-drawn circle, a crooked grin and one eye—the right—larger than the other.  Beware of too symmetrical imitations!)

         Worcester Mutual made 100 buttons for employees to wear and give to customers.  They disappeared overnight.  Then the company ordered 10,000 more.  Smiley was launched into the stratosphere and quickly circled the globe.

         Harvey Ball never received more than the $45 he was paid for his design, and by the time the insurance company tried to register Smiley eight years later, they learned that it was impossible, because, the image, reproduced 50 million times in the year 1971 alone, was by then in the public domain.

         Smiley instantly became a symbol of his times.  The baby boomer generation adopted and adapted him to represent their worldviews as they evolved through the years. When, in 1998, the US Postal Service asked the public to vote on which image best represented the decade of the1970’s, Smiley won by a landslide.

         The cheery Smiley Face postage stamp was issued by the post office on the first World Smile Day®, October 1,1999, in Smiley’s home town of Worcester, MA. The USPS issued a special cancellation for the event.  During the ceremony, Harvey Ball said that he believed Smiley “reflects what is inside every one of us – a smile is what we want to see when we look at another human being….We start to believe that we are too small to make a difference. But… the truth is that every one of us has the ability to make a difference every day.” 

         The USPS’s stamp supply sold out as quickly as the original Smiley buttons.

         Harvey Ross Ball, creator of the most famous American icon after the Stars and Stripes, was a true American hero, a decorated World War II vet awarded the Bronze Star for heroism during the Battle of Okinawa.  In the spring of 1945, during the deadly battle, which lasted for 82 days, when three of Ball’s  comrades were killed by a wayward shell as they stood next to him, he did not ponder whether fate had saved him for a greater destiny.  (But neither did he ever forget his fallen buddies. He painted their portraits in uniform from memory years later.)

         Harvey, a tall, laconic Yankee, born in 1921, was a solitary soul, not much given to, socializing, talking, or even smiling.  But when he died in 2001, he had figured out his purpose in life.  As he told People Magazine in 1998: “I taught the whole world how to smile.”  

          After Harvey died on April 12, 2001, at the age of 79, his son Charles told the media : “He was proud and pleased to have served his country and raise a family…He died with no apologies and no regrets.  His moral compass stayed on north and never wavered.”

        And he left us the legacy of a smile.

(Next:  The other guys who made millions from the Smiley Face.)

World Largest Crustacean Means Summer in Worcester

(Click on Buster to make him bigger.)

( It's July again and once again I'm frantically writing toward a deadline on a magazine article,  so I'm running this post over again. It's a tribute to Worcester, MA ,which is still as quirky and full of surprises as ever, and to Buster, who is back once again, telling us to eat crab.)
We who live in (or near) Worcester MA, population 170,000, are fiercely loyal, even though big city papers like The New York Times tend to refer to Worcester as a “sleepy industrial backwater”.

Worcesterites fondly refer to their town as “Wormtown” and “The Paris of the Eighties”. The Worcester Historical Museum even sells a T-shirt (below) that makes fun of the way people always mispronounce the city’s name . (The correct pronunciation in the local accent is: ”Wusta.” If you call it “Wor-chester” everyone here will think you are wicked lame.)



With its rows of three-deckers and its mostly deserted brick factories, Worcester is like a time capsule that was sealed in the 1950s or ‘60’s. (It’s also a great place to shoot a movie—and several have been filmed here.) We have at the moment an airport with no scheduled commercial flights (well, I think there’s one to Florida), an auditorium,a courthouse and a vocational high school that stand empty (making great movie sets) and a central downtown discount fashion mall that has been deserted for years awaiting the wrecking ball.

Worcester has a quirky history full of rebels-- from Isaiah Thomas, who took his printing press and exited Boston ahead of the Tories (the Declaration of Independence was first read in public on our courthouse steps) to Abbie Hoffman who grew up in one of Worcester’s three-deckers (they were built for the families of the factory workers.)

We still have Coney Island Hotdogs with its famous neon sign, and the Boulevard Diner where Madonna ate spaghetti after a concert at the Centrum, Table Talk Pies and Sir Morgan’s Cove (now Lucky Dog, I think) where the Rolling Stones in 1981 gave an impromptu free concert. Worcester boasts seven colleges and universities including Holy Cross, WPI and Clark (where, in 1909 Freud gave his only American lectures.)

Luminaries who came from Worcester are a motley bunch including S. N. Berman, Emma Goldman, Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Dennis Leary and Marcia Cross--the red-headed desperate housewife. Also the Coors twins, Diane and Elaine Klimaszewski.

Worcester is especially proud of its “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the first commercial Valentines, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball and, most famous of all, the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon.

In Worcester, the perennial sign of summer, as sure as the fireworks and concert in Christopher Colombo Park on the Fourth, is the arrival of the gigantic figure of Buster the Crab, lying on the roof and hanging over the Sole Proprietor Restaurant on Highland Street.

My husband and I ate there last week. There was a special menu of crab dishes, in addition to the regular Sole offerings. From the menu, I learned the following fascinating facts: This is Buster’s 17th year at the Sole Proprietor. Buster is the world’s largest inflatable crustacean. It takes 45,000 cubic feet of air to inflate him. He has a 75-foot claw spam. Buster could feed 200,000 people if he were real. That would require 35,116 pounds of butter and 45,447 lemons.

The crab dishes on the special menu ranged from fried tomato and crab Napoleon with smoky tomato dressing , Spyder Maki with soft-shelled crab, masago, cucumber and asparagus, to crab, mango and pickled cucumber cocktail and Crabmeat Casserole au gratin. I had crab and shrimp salad, which included avocado and tomatoes and sweet lemon herb vinaigrette. My husband had the soft-shelled crabs (sautéed, not fried). It was delicious. On the way out, I even wangled a copy of the Buster the Crab coloring book, usually meant only for kids. When we left, the wind was blowing and Buster’s giant claws waved good-bye.