FLASHBACK: Beach Combing In Montauk (1983)

I've loved beach combing since my grandmother took me to dig for sand dollars at Daytona Beach.  But it wasn't until I made my first trip to the eastern tip of Long Island's South Fork that I realized it could be so bountiful.

I drove the Montauk Highway in Herr Cucaracha to get there. 

Sarah, a pal from the library, joined me in the Karmann Ghia she had purchased from my father, a Type III model never sold in America.  Ken had it shipped from Germany to Houston in 1965.  I blew the engine driving it too fast over Trans Mountain Highway in El Paso and nearly totaled it in a drunken New Year's Eve crash in 1971, but these mishaps didn't dissuade Sarah.  She loved the idea of owning a one-of-a-kind automobile.  But when I flew home to deliver the Karmann Ghia to her, the cursed vehicle broke down in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Ken towed it back to El Paso for repairs and then drove it to her doorstep in the East Village.  What a saga! 

After checking into the East Deck Motel, a favorite with surfers which finally was demolished in 2016, we drove to the light house, the first to operate in New York State.

Cliffs and rocks below deterred beach goers.

We found a sandier spot and let our dogs out.  Smokey, never much of a water dog, braved the surf to retrieve a stick.

I collected everything interesting in sight.

Sarah's dog Lene sniffed my catch-of-the-sea after I laid it out to dry in the sun.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves so early in the season.

My Montauk treasures were on display for many years at 47 Pianos.  I eventually brought them to the Folly, a boxed memorial to a passion for natural history that began in childhood.

More Sarah

Between The Lions (1978-1983)

New Toy (1986)

FLASHBACK: New Toy (1986)

Sarah and I worked together at the New York Public Library, where she was the resident graphic designer.  She lived on the Lower East Side and "New Toy" OBSESSED us.  She loved Lene Lovich so much that she named her dog after the New Wave singer.  

Did I ask you for your love?

Did I ask you for your dedication?

I don't want, I don't want your love

I don't want, I don't want your affection

But I've got to have the car

(I need it for the weekend)

I've got to have the stereo

(And a couple of deletions)

I've got to have the freezer

(Put some fun back in my eating)

I've got to have it all until I'm complete

I want a new toy (oh ay oh), to keep my head expanding (ta)

I want a new toy (oh ay oh), nothing too demanding (ta)

Then when everything is in roses everything is static (ta)

Yeah, my new toy (oh ay oh), you'll find us in the attic

You

Sometimes you make me feel

I feel so insecure

Sometimes you make me feel nothing at all

I'm sick of the TV

(Well look at the news)

I'm sick of the radio

(But what can you do?)…

Shortly before moving back to Minnesota, Sarah bought my father's Type III Karman Ghia for the same reason he imported it from Germany in 1965:  nobody else in America had one. Probably not her smartest move.  Still, our friendship survived her purchase and she invited me to visit as soon as she got settled.  Herr Cucaracha get me there in two days.

Sarah and Lene lived in Minneapolis.

But her family also had a cabin on a lake where she tried to teach me how to windsurf.

Mostly I learned that wetsuits flatter a girl's figure!

Don't let this picture fool you.  It's one of the few minutes I actually maintained a standing position.

En route back to New York, I picked up David and Smokey in Newton Falls where the Amish had helped his parents rebuild their home after a tornado destroyed it.  David is holding the model he built as a housewarming gift.  He could be super sweet when he wanted to be.

More Sarah

More Sarah

Between The Lions (1978-1983)

Beach Combing In Montauk (1983)

FLASHBACK: Between The Lions (1978 - 1983)

After being sickened by the dreck of commercial publishing, working at the New York Public Library turned out to be the perfect job for a dilettante in training.  I was responsible for publicizing exhibits in the esteemed building at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

This photo, from 1978, looks as if it might have been taken two decades earlier.

The 70s hadn't been kind to the library.  Budgets had been slashed to the bare minimum for the research libraries--a fundraising ad depicted the landmark Carrere and Hastings building sinking into a parking lot--and Bryant Park, its back yard, was overrun with people who needed social services, not books.  Fortunately, the board hired Vartan Gregorian, an academic powerhouse who had something to prove after being passed over by the University of Pennsylvania for the chancellorship.  With his public relations and fundraising skills, he restored the institution to its proper place as one of the city's crown jewels and I got to go along for the ride.

Part of my responsibilities as the junior member of PR team was changing the exhibit posters which were rudimentary until the development office hired Sarah (below, middle), a graphic designer.  

By the time Lauren (left) arrived, our team was complete.  My portfolio had been widened to include both the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  I thrived at the library because the exhibitions were part of a never-ending, continuing education that introduced me an enormous variety of literary and cultural figures.  

One chain-smoking curator, especially, acted as an adviser:  Dr. Lola Szladits, a childless Hungarian emigre who protected the Berg Collection of English and American Literature as fiercely as a lioness defends her cubs.  Lola enjoyed what she called my "grasshopper intelligence" and direct access to Dr. Gregorian's office after my boss resigned.  The New Yorker profiled her not long after I left the library to tour Australia, a move she endorsed when the new vice president for development and public affairs, a gay man who casually mentioned he had the keys to Brooke Astor's pool house in his possession, declined to appoint me chief of the public relations office.

Sarah, Lauren and I bonded with the junior curatorial staff, too--Julia Van Haaften (hat), Bernard McTigue (center) and Bobby Rainwater (far right)--who often had toiled in the shadow of people who weren't going anywhere.  

I feared becoming a "lifer" at the library, too, an irony in the context of a much older gay colleague who, according to a 1994 exhibit that marked the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, was one of the first 20 documented HIV-related deaths.   We called it "Spencer's disease" after the New York Times broke the story in July 1981.  Spencer worked as a senior writer, a job so undemanding that he could spend many of his nights cruising the backroom bars in the West Village.  He was dead within six months, but not before he gave us an up-close preview of the physical horrors that would decimate so many of my contemporaries, including pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma.

My colleagues gave me a nice, if impotent, send off:  "We Want Jeffrey."  It probably was hubris to expect to have gotten the job I wanted.

Even nicer memories of the library include the Literary Lions reception that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended.  I overheard her introduce Charles Addams to Issac Bashevis Singer in her breathy voice:  "He's the man who draws all those awful cartoons for The New Yorker!" she teased with her incandescent smile, the same one that graces the autographed photo hanging in my bathroom, a keepsake from the 4th grade when my class wrote to the First Lady.