Flying

"Look mom and dad, I can fly!"

The Ninety-nines

My aunt, Beulah Stark (second from the right), was one of the first women aviators in the state of West Virginia. She was a member of the women's flying club know as the Ninety-nines (or 99s). This photo was taken in Parkersburg, WV on April 15, 1945. The photo was donated to the West Virginia State Archives by her estate.

The 99s air club was founded by Amelia Mary Earhart (photo on right), and is still active today and known as the International Organization of Women Pilots, Inc. It is important to remember how Amelia Earthart inspired everyone during the Great Depression. My aunt had met her, and was inspired as well.

In May 1932 Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (from Newfoundland to Ireland). She later set several flight records.

My aunt Beaulah must have been flying by the mid-1930s, since Earhart and her navigator disappeared in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world.

I've heard that the location of what is now called the Chuck Yeager Airport (CRW) in Charleston, West Virginia was selected with the advice of my uncle and aunt who were both aviators. The original Kanawha Airport opened in 1947. It is located at an elevation of nearly 1000 feet on a small mountain top near the city where the peaks were shaved off to create some level ground and a VERY short runway. Even in modern days, landing in Charleston has always been an adventure. Aside from the jagged mountains, dense fog is often a factor.

Links:

http://www.ninety-nines.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeager_Airport

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Power Lunch

I just returned from a nice "power lunch" down the street at Panera Bread. I was meeting with an old friend who I hadn't seen for years. Eric and I go back to my first days in Boston in 1973, when he was studying composition as an undergraduate with our mutual teacher Don Martino at the New England Conservatory. I wasn't at NEC myself at that point, but I knew him tangentially from compositions that were regularly performed at student concerts. He always wore a black turtleneck, thick glasses, and a big smile.



Here is a photo of Eric at a party at my house in 1991. It was a reunion of sorts, since he, myself, and our teacher Martino had a chance to meet again and catch up.

Flash ahead 35 years... the turtleneck is gone, but he has kept the glasses and smile. Eric and I are slightly out of phase with regard to our age. He is a bit older, and served in Vietnam in the mid-1960's. That's where he took up computer programming, and was assigned to an administrative function where he punched cards to program mainframe computers in assembly language.

One day after a night of guard duty, he was called into the office of the General and asked "Have your ever heard of Robert Tucker?"

Eric replied "No Sir."

The General looked at the memo on his desk again "...err, I mean Richard Tucker."

"Yes sir! I've heard of Richard Tucker. Sir."

"Well, he needs a piano player" replied the General.

Richard Tucker (1913-1975)

Tenor at the Metropolitan Opera

In short order Eric was whisked off to travel the war-torn country as Richard Tucker's accompanist. The State Department was not real keen on Tucker making the trip, and tried to talk him out of it, but he persisted and finally got permission. It was not an officially sanctioned USO tour - not even a sideshow for Bob Hope and his troupe of dancing girls. Tucker had to pay his own way, and was not allowed to take his own accompanist to Vietnam with him. That's how Eric got the gig.

I asked Eric how many troupes attended the concerts, and he said it ranged from a dozen to a few thousand. Fortunately, they avoided getting shot at in their travels.





But the most hair-raising experience was flying to the US aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard on a jet fighter plane to give a concert. The take-offs and landings were particularly exciting given the short runway.

Tucker's repertory for the Vietnam tour included Italian arias and some show tunes.

The following blurb in Time Magazine describes Tucker's trip...

He looks nothing like a dame, and the U.S.O. thought so little of the idea that he had to pay his own way. Even so, Metropolitan Opera Tenor Richard Tucker, 52, insists that he made almost as big a hit as a lot of the Hollywood starlets who have gone to Viet Nam to entertain the troops. Back in Manhattan after a two-week singing tour that took him from Saigon to Danang and included presiding over a couple of Passover Seders, Tucker said the boys thoroughly enjoyed the arias from Pagliacci and Tosca. "They're a very, very intelligent caliber of boys," he said—and very, very early risers too. Aboard the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard, he wailed, "they told me my first show would be at 8 a.m. Eight in the morning! A singer like me doesn't even spit before midday." (Time Magazine May 12th, 1967)

Tucker died in 1975 from a heart attack just before a performance (an interesting bit of trivia is that he is the only person whose funeral has been held right on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera).

Here he Tucker acting the role of Canio in Pagliacci in 1970. The tenor was approaching 60 years old at the time!

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After the Vietnam war, Eric came to Boston to study music at NEC during the exciting Gunther Schuller years. He accompanied the chorus for "Cookie" and managed the new music concert series (composer Lee Hyla wanted to mount a work calling for 12 percussionists playing on 12 timpini - each tuned to a different note of the chromatic scale. It proved impossible to find that many timpini). Eric is also known for making the piano reduction for Donald Martino's monumental operatic work Paradiso Choruses. This mammoth orchestral score was reduced to a piano-vocal edition for rehearsal purposes, and Eric could play through the thickly notated score with ease.

Strangely enough, I knew Eric better from the business world in the mid-1980's. We worked together on an electronic funds transfer application when he was a senior programmer/project manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and I was working at NEACH.

But Eric has many talents aside from being a talented musician, composer, computer programmer, and fabulous pianist/sight-reader. He use to be a hardcore crossword-puzzle competitor (winning third place at Stamford) and is a former New England champion. But he hasn't competed in the crossword-puzzle circuit for more than twenty years. His current serious activity is tournament bridge, where he holds the rank of "Gold Life Master" and travels in circles that include the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

It was a very pleasant lunch, and we caught up with a lot of distant and recent history before heading off again into the cold, ice, and snow.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tucker

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Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet

An excerpt from the Salzburg Festival 2003

The composer explains...

(bandwidth permitted, you can view both videos simultaneously)

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN (1928-2007)

Helicopter String Quartet

Performed by the Arditti Quartet

A film by Frank Scheffer

NAXOS Video June 2008

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Veterans Day

Today a Black Hawk US Army helicopter landed on the baseball field of the local High School...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UH-60_Black_Hawk

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Birdman

It's a bird....

It's a plane...

No, it's Birdman!

The news organizations seem to have missed this item. This past week while most Americans were distracted with the Presidential debate and the financial crisis, Leonardo's dream was realized in Europe.

A model of

Leonardo da Vinci's

flying machine

On September 25th, 50-year old Swiss pilot Yves Rossy flew solo across the English Channel like Buzz Lightyear with a $285,000 jet-powered carbon fiber wing strapped to his back. The historic trip from Calais France to Dover England was captured live by National Geographic for a future TV program.

I'm sure we will hear more about it eventually, but I've got to hand it to Mr. Rossy, he certainly knows how to have fun and put on a good show. There are parallels between creating a piece of experimental art and his breathtaking aeronautic adventure. Both are risky ventures born of a creative mind aimed to inspire the public. Although Rossy's chosen from of expression - which could easily qualify as Performance Art - comes with inherent physical risks, the fundamental goals and objectives of any artist are the essentially the same. We are all actors on the big stage, vying for your attention, praise, and applause.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwEMbjnKeBs

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