Let’s Win One for Jessica

Carrie told Emily and me that her friend Jessica Gibney had Lupus. I’ve known Jessica since she was a little girl because her older sister went to school with David, Carrie’s older brother. I know their parents, wonderful people who I saw regularly when David was in school and now haven’t seen since life took us in different directions. Not seeing friends regularly, in this busy world, doesn’t make them less friends. It just means you miss them more and you want to help them more when you find out that they need help.

So I want to help Jessica. Friends who read this, will you help? Please read the below letter from Jessica and give what you can. Your donation—whether in the form of a financial contribution to the Lupus Foundation or an expression of love and prayers to Jessica and her family—matters. Emily and I have been on the receiving end so I’m speaking from experience. Positive expressions only. It’s called “putting it out to the universe.” Jessica is a fighter. Won’t you join her team?

Thanks in advance.

Love,

Ken

* * *

Jessica’s letter:

Hi All,

I would first like to apologize to everyone for my lack of communication with most of you this past year. While I have been very sick, that is no excuse to not keep in touch.

With that being said, some of you may know this year I was diagnosed with Lupus. I have been battling with my health for many years and after several months in bed and several trips to the hospital I was finally diagnosed with Lupus.

At this point you may be wondering what Lupus is. Lupus is a long-term autoimmune disorder that may affect the skin, joints, kidneys, brain, and other organs. Lupus is an autoimmune disease, which means the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue. The underlying cause of autoimmune diseases is not fully known. Since they do not know what causes Lupus, there is no cure for Lupus. They only recently developed a drug that is specifically designed to treat Lupus. Before that, all drugs were used to treat symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The new drug was only approved by the FDA within the last year and most insurance companies still do not cover the treatment because of its astronomical cost. The treatments are between $3,000 and $8,000 and are infused once a month for the course of your life.

With that being said I am obviously not currently taking the treatment. I am currently on low-dose chemotherapy to reduce the effects of the Lupus and slow down my immune system.

I am planning to participate in a Lupus fundraiser walk in connection with the Lupus Foundation of America. I know that times are hard but if you or someone you know might be able to donate even if it’s only $1 to help support the study of the disease and hopefully the cure, I would be grateful. Also if anyone would like to join my family’s walk team (Team Gibney), please feel free. This year’s Walk for Lupus is being held on Sunday, June 3rd at the Detroit Zoo.

Please help me in my efforts to support Lupus Foundation of America – Michigan and Northwest Ohio Chapter. You can do so by visiting my personal web page and donating to this great cause.

If your email system does not support the use of links, you can copy and paste the following into your browser: http://lupusmichigan.kintera.org/faf/r.asp?t=4&i=1010991&u=1010991-351700170&e=5430747492.

Over 600,000 Michigan and Ohio residents battle Lupus every year. Your support will make a significant difference in their lives.

I have faith there is a cure just waiting to be found.

With all my love and hope for the future,

Jessica S. Gibney

Everybody Reads to Celebrate Release of Michael Kindman Bio

Former Lansing resident and veteran of the Vietnam era underground press Ken Wachsberger will lead a celebration of the life of Michael Kindman at EVERYbody Reads, 2019 East Michigan Avenue, Lansing, 7 p.m. Thursday February 2, 2012.

The event marks the release of My Odyssey through the Underground Press, the riveting, at times chilling, ultimately inspirational, and always captivating autobiography of Kindman, one of the local and national legends of the Vietnam era underground press. Kindman’s story is volume 2 of Wachsberger’s classic Voices from the Underground Series (published by Michigan State University Press).

Wachsberger spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at EVERYbody Reads on March 3, 2011 to celebrate publication of volume 1 of Voices from the Underground. Both volumes will be available for purchase.

My Odyssey begins in September 1963, when Kindman entered Michigan State University as one of nearly two hundred students from around the country who had been awarded National Merit Scholarships, underwritten by MSU and usable only there. Together, they represented by far the largest group of Merit Scholars in any school’s freshman class.

They arrived, brilliant minds all, expecting to find a vibrant cultural and academic oasis. They didn’t, not at the nation’s first agricultural land grant college, so they were forced to look elsewhere. The Vietnam War was raging, though it hadn’t yet entered the general public’s consciousness. But the raging inner-city ghettoes already had brought civil rights to the forefront of the country’s imagination. In East Lansing, open housing crystallized a small portion of a latent radical community. Kindman joined that community, first as a reporter for the State News, MSU’s student paper, then  as the founder of The Paper, East Lansing’s first underground newspaper and one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate, this country’s first nationwide network of underground papers.

In early 1968, he was drawn to a paper from Boston, Avatar, that spoke often in poetry, always in spiritual and mystical terms, and he headed east to check it out. Kindman was welcomed by the staff, dug in as a member, and discovered too late that the large, experimental commune that controlled Avatar was a charismatic cult centered on a former-musician-turned-guru named Mel Lyman, whose psychic hold over his followers was being strengthened and intensified by means of various confrontations and loyalty tests.

Five years later, Kindman fled the commune’s rural outpost in Kansas and headed west, where he settled in San Francisco, came out as a gay man, and changed his name to Mica. When Kindman wrote this important journey into self-discovery, he was a key activist in the gay men’s pagan spiritual network Radical Faeries, a student, and a person with AIDS. He died peacefully on November 22, 1991, two months after submitting the final draft of his story.

Forewords are by legendary sixties-era author and satirist Paul Krassner, who is often considered the father of the underground press; and Tommi Avicolli Mecca, author, gay activist, and long-time veteran of the gay press.

Michael Kindman’s revealing memoir … will take you through his adventures and misadventures in the larger context of an evolutionary jump in consciousness, from hippie to the New Age, from a control freak’s cult to individual freedom, from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to a spiritual revolution. Ultimately, this book will serve as a multi-faceted slice of countercultural history.—Paul Krassner

Mica’s recapitulation, as he calls it, is a record of an era long past, a time when idealism wasn’t a bad word and questioning was a rite of passage for many of America’s young people. Recapitulations such as his can only help us better understand the strengths of the struggles of the past and how to avoid the mistakes that were all too often made.—Tommi Avicolli Mecca

The 4-volume Voices from the Underground Series is a collection of histories of underground papers from the Vietnam era as told by key people on each of the papers. The underground press was the independent, antiwar press of the Vietnam era that told the true story, which the corporate papers suppressed, of what our government was doing behind our backs to the Vietnamese people in our name and with our tax dollars, while giving voice to the liberation movements of the period.

Stories in the series represent the gay, lesbian, feminist, Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, military, prisoners’ rights, socialist, new age, rank-and-file, Southern consciousness, psychedelic, and other independent antiwar voices of the era as never before told.

Voices from the Underground was called “the most important book on American journalism published in my lifetime” by In These Times when it appeared in an earlier version in 1993. The Los Angeles Times said it “comes closer than anything I’ve yet read to putting the sights, sounds and texture of the ‘60s on paper.”

Editor Ken Wachsberger is a long-time author, editor, educator, political organizer, public speaker, and consultant who has written, edited, and lectured widely on the Vietnam era, the Holocaust and Jewish resistance during World War II, the First Amendment, writing for self-discovery, and other issues.

Volumes 3 and 4 both are due out in 2012. Ken may be reached at ken@voicesfromtheunderground.com for interviews and speaking invitations.

Occupy Ann Arbor Teach-In Inspires Participants

With the Occupy movement spreading across the nation and around the world, it would be totally out of character if it missed Ann Arbor. Not to worry. It didn’t. Occupy Ann Arbor is in full swing.

I attended a Teach-In on Wednesday November 9 at the 1^st Baptist Church in downtown Ann Arbor. The event was sponsored by Ann Arbor’s Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice. A turnout of about sixty concerned activists representing the Vietnam generation and before as well as the Occupy generation, plus generations in between, watched a slideshow provided by the Rebuild the Dream coalition. ICPJ director Chuck Warpehosky provided the commentary while the crowd participated with the high energy that has come to characterize the Occupy movement as it has gained momentum and fought its way onto the front pages of even the most corporate of media.

The theme of the teach-in was, in effect, how did our country get so screwed up. If you are a banker or a corporate mogul or a lobbyist, you would disagree with the whole premise. The country is doing great. Never been better.

I’m not any of them so I agree with the premise. That’s why I attended.

Picture a wall, because those of us in attendance did throughout the presentation. As we go about the business every day of pursuing our dreams, we are hitting a wall, we were reminded. It’s holding us all back. For the first time in American history, we are hearing, the next generation is unlikely to be better off than their parents.

Why is that? Because the rules of the game are made by the people who brought us the wall: Wall Street, along with the big corporations and the legislators in both parties who are owned by the corporations. In 1996, finance became manufacturing’s most powerful business, not production.

We were loaded with statistics throughout the presentation. Here are a few of them:

• 90% of income goes to the top 10% of Americans.
• 1% control 40% of the wealth.
• 50% of the members of Congress are millionaires, compared to 1% of the general population.
• From 1977 to 2007, income grew 224% for them; it grew 5% for the rest of us.
• The average pay of the average CEO is 342 times that of the average worker.
• Corporate lobbyists spend $2 million every hour that Congress is in session.

We are living in one of the most extreme times of inequality in our country’s history and the key lie that we are being fed is that the economy we see is natural; we must have system inequality; we can’t do anything.

We learned about the clash of values between people who make the rules and people who suffer under them:

• Greed over the common good
• Next quarter over next generation
• Justice for some over justice for all

But we were also reminded that this isn’t the first time that the wall seemed too great to topple. We have replaced their values with ours before and instituted rules that benefited people at the bottom: Social Security, the GI Bill, Housing, Medicare, free education, public libraries.

Then in the early seventies, Wall Street started to rebuild the wall. They did this in part by changing the dialogue, with help from politicians and corporate media. Increasingly we came to learn that

• Rich people know best; trickle-down economics will produce jobs.
• Eliminating taxes and services, and having less government, will increase our well-being.
• The foxes should guard the hen house; corporations can regulate themselves.
• Money = speech; corporations = people.
• Working together never pays off; you’re on your own; it’s every man for himself.
• We should blame the victim; if you don’t succeed, it’s your fault—and if you succeed, you did it on your own.
• Law makers needn’t live by our rules.
• The demands unions make are crashing the economy.
• Anything that helps people is socialism.
• Corporate takeovers are normal.
• Schools and governments should be run like businesses.
• The United States is the policeman of the world.
• If we work hard enough, we can all be in the 1%.
• You can’t have both a clean environment and a good economy.
• Alternative fuels can’t produce 100% of our energy needs; therefore, we should ignore them.

Lobbying money influenced politicians to rewrite the rules:

• Finance rules were gutted.
• Maintaining the budget became the burden of the 99%.
• Industries were deregulated.
• Wages were suppressed.
• Unions were busted.
• Jobs were sent overseas.
• Environmental standards were weakened.
• Work was taxed; wealth was rewarded.
• College became more and more a privilege of the rich.

It almost seems too hard to even try to overcome—but that’s what they want us to think. In the same way that no bank is too big to fail, no financial disaster is too big to overcome.

But it takes work—and “woe is me” despair is no help at all.

To begin to tear down the wall, we have to begin by tearing down the divisions among us based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, immigrant status, and all the other reasons why ignorant minds bicker. There is such a thing as an economy that works for everyone but we need to begin changing the dialogue. The Occupy movement has begun the process. We’re reading more about jobs now than we are about “the deficit.” We can’t stop there.

The Rebuild the Dream coalition presented their 10-point plan to get us moving in the right direction:

1. Invest in infrastructure.
2. Create clean-energy jobs.
3. Invest in public education.
4. Offer Medicare for all.
5. Make work pay.
6. Secure Social Security.
7. Return to fairer tax rates.
8. End the wars and invest at home.
9. Tax Wall Street speculation.
10. Strengthen democracy.

What else can be done? What can you do? Suggestions from the audience:

• Make it personal—change begins with you.
• Move your money to credit unions.
• Take your investments out of toxic corporations.
• Don’t be silent.
• Organize.
• Be a whistle blower.
• Reduce consumerism.
• Be critical of the media.
• Support alternative media.

Some people believe it’s fruitless to vote because politicians are owned by the lobbyists. Others believe that too many people died for the right to vote so voting is necessary if for no other reason than to honor their memory but also because the “lesser of two evils” argument actually can produce an evil that isn’t as bad an another evil. With all the reasons why Obama pisses off progressives, would you rather have had McCain-Palin than Obama-Biden? Also, change is much easier to make on the local level but only if you vote in local elections.

We’ve got our work cut out for us but we just may be moving in the right direction. The recent statewide elections picked up on the positive energy: Ohio voters defeated the anti-union Issue 2. Mississippi voters defeated a “personhood” amendment that would have made a fertilized egg a legal person under the state Constitution (I’m not making this shit up), Maine voters took back the right to register to vote on Election Day, gay and lesbian candidates won big in local elections, an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation won in a landslide in Traverse City, Michigan, and the author of the anti-immigration policy that has prompted boycotts of Arizona lost in a recall election.

This is good. There’s more coming.

VOLUME 2 OF LANDMARK VIETNAM ANTIWAR OPUS HOT OFF THE PRESSES

Volume 2 of Ann Arbor author-editor Ken Wachsberger’s 4-volume Voices from the Underground Series (Michigan State University Press, 2011) is now available for purchase. Learn more about it at www.voicesfromtheunderground.com and see why I encourage you to order your copy now.

Volume 2, My Odyssey through the Underground Press, is the riveting, at times chilling, ultimately inspirational, and always captivating story of Michael “Mica” Kindman, one of the legends of the Vietnam era underground press.

In September 1963, Michael Kindman entered Michigan State University, eager about the possibilities that awaited him as one of nearly two hundred honors students from around the country who had been awarded National Merit Scholarships, underwritten by MSU and usable only there. Together, they represented by far the largest group of Merit Scholars in any school’s freshman class.

At MSU? The nation’s first agricultural land grant college?

They arrived, brilliant minds all, expecting to find a vibrant cultural and academic oasis. It wasn’t there so they were forced to look elsewhere. The Vietnam War was raging, though it hadn’t yet entered the general public’s consciousness. But the burning ghettoes already had brought civil rights to the forefront of the country’s imagination. In East Lansing, open housing crystallized a small portion of a latent radical community. Kindman became part of that community, first as a reporter for the State News, MSU’s student paper, then, two years after arriving at MSU, as the founder of The Paper, East Lansing’s first underground newspaper and one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate, this country’s first nationwide network of underground papers.

In early 1968, he was drawn to a paper from Boston, Avatar, that spoke often in poetry, always in spiritual and mystical terms, and he headed east to check it out. Kindman was welcomed by the staff, dug in as a member, and discovered too late that the large, experimental commune that controlled Avatar was a charismatic cult centered on a former-musician-turned-guru named Mel Lyman, whose psychic hold over his followers was being strengthened and intensified by means of various confrontations and loyalty tests.

Five years later, Kindman fled the commune’s rural outpost in Kansas and headed west, where he eventually settled in San Francisco, came out as a gay man, and changed his name to Mica. When Kindman wrote this important journey into self-discovery, he was working as a home-remodeling contractor, a key activist in the gay men’s pagan spiritual network Radical Faeries, a student, and a person with AIDS. He died peacefully on November 22, 1991, two months after submitting the final draft of his story.

Forewords are by legendary sixties-era author and satirist Paul Krassner, who is often considered the father of the underground press (a charge he disputed by demanding a blood test); and Tommi Avicolli Mecca, author, gay activist, and long-time veteran of the gay press. The preface is by series editor Ken Wachsberger.

Michael Kindman’s revealing memoir … will take you through his adventures and misadventures in the larger context of an evolutionary jump in consciousness, from hippie to the New Age, from a control freak’s cult to individual freedom, from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to a spiritual revolution. Ultimately, this book will serve as a multi-faceted slice of countercultural history.—Paul Krassner

Mica’s recapitulation, as he calls it, is a record of an era long past, a time when idealism wasn’t a bad word and questioning was a rite of passage for many of America’s young people. Recapitulations such as his can only help us better understand the strengths of the struggles of the past and how to avoid the mistakes that were all too often made.—Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Kindman’s story will be of particular interest to veterans of the Vietnam era, their children and grandchildren, alumni of Michigan State University, journalists, historians, teachers of writing for self-discovery, members of the gay and lesbian community, therapists with clients who are cult survivors, and anyone who has lost family members to cults, as well as anyone who is interested in reading a compelling autobiography.

The Voices from the Underground Series is collection of histories of underground papers from the Vietnam era as told by key people on each of the papers. The underground press was the independent, antiwar press of the Vietnam era that told the true story, which the corporate papers suppressed, of what our government was doing behind our backs to the Vietnamese people in our name and with our tax dollars.

Stories in the series represent the gay, lesbian, feminist, Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, military, prisoners’ rights, socialist, new age, rank-and-file, Southern consciousness, psychedelic, and other independent antiwar voices of the era as never before told. Volume 1, Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1, was released earlier this year. Forewords in volume 1 are by Chicago Seed veteran Abe Peck, attorney William Kunstler, and Markos Moulitsas, founder of dailykos.com, one of the most important progressive blog sites of today’s new media.

Voices from the Underground was called “the most important book on American journalism published in my lifetime” by In These Times and was named one of the five most important books in the field of communication for 1993 (Choice) when it appeared in an earlier version in 1993. The Los Angeles Times said it “comes closer than anything I’ve yet read to putting the sights, sounds and texture of the ‘60s on paper.”

Editor Ken Wachsberger is a long-time author, editor, educator, political organizer, public speaker, and consultant who has written, edited, and lectured widely on the Vietnam era, the Holocaust and Jewish resistance during World War II, the First Amendment, writing for self-discovery, and other issues.

To learn more about the Voices from the Underground Series, read many more testimonials, view the entire four-volume table of contents, and get pricing information, go to www.voicesfromtheunderground.com. Then order your copies of volume 1 and 2 today—and spread the word.

Hope to See You Sunday at Kerrytown BookFest 2011

This Sunday, September 11, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Ann Arbor residents and visitors will be treated to the 9^th annual Kerrytown BookFest, a celebration of award-winning authors, book artists, and illustrators that takes place at the Farmers’ Market at 410 N. Fourth Avenue and Kingsley in downtown Ann Arbor.

The theme of the 2011 Kerrytown BookFest is “Michigan Voices” and I’m honored to be one of them this year. For most of the event, I’ll be selling books at booth #119. I hope you’ll come by and say hello.

But during the last hour, from 4 to 5 in the main tent, I’ll be appearing on a panel called “Counterculture Voices.” BookFest promotional literature advertises it as “a broad discussion of the Detroit counterculture, focusing on underground newspapers and music.” That’s pretty accurate but forces of nature will extend the discussion to also include the music scene in Ann Arbor and the underground press scene in Ann Arbor and Lansing-East Lansing.

Appearing with me on the panel are Brett Callwood, a music writer who has written books about two legendary groups, Lincoln Park’s MC5 and Ann Arbor’s The Stooges; and Susan Whitall, former editor of Creem magazine and presently a writer for the Detroit News and author of Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death. Moderator Harvey Ovshinsky was the founder and editor of Detroit’s Fifth Estate, still going strong as the longest-running underground paper to emerge from the Vietnam era. My own four-volume Voices from the Underground Series includes a landmark history of Fifth Estate written by former staffer Bob Hippler with help from interviews with Harvey, Peter Werbe, and other veterans of the paper. Unfortunately, the story will appear in volume 3, which won’t be out until next year. But volume 1, which will be available for sale all day, includes my history of the Lansing-East Lansing underground press and a history of the Black Muslim paper Muhammad Speaks, written by former editor and now Ann Arbor resident John Woodford.

It will be a way-too-short panel discussion. Great entertainment for just before dinner. Harvey already is a friend of mine but I’ve never met Brett or Susan. I look forward to meeting them.

The Kerrytown BookFest is unique according to Gene Alloway, president of the BookFest board and owner of Motte & Bailey Bookshop in Ann Arbor. Kerrytown is a historic neighborhood in the city which includes the Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market where the event is held. “The BookFest is the only festival of the book in the country to celebrate both authors and the artists and crafts people who help create books.” This year the BookFest will feature illustrators, poets, letterpress printers, calligraphers, librarians, publishers, book artists, and storytellers.

As a special attraction, Doug Stanton, New York Times best-selling author of Horse Soldiers and founder of the National Writers Series, will interview Jaimy Gordon, the 2010 National Book Award winner (Lord of Misrule). In addition, Robin Agnew, owner of Aunt Agatha’s mystery bookstore in Ann Arbor, will talk with Canadian Award-Winning Mystery Writer Louise Penny. who has won both Agatha and Anthony Awards for her mystery writing. Special arrangements have been made to present Penny the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association at the BookFest.

In recognition of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the panel “Michigan Civil War Voices” will feature Jack Dempsey, author of Michigan and the Civil War, moderating a discussion with Rick Liblong, author of Answering the Call to Duty: Saving Custer, Heroism at Gettysburg; and Kim Crawford and Martin Bertera, authors of The 4^th Michigan Infantry the Civil War.

The panel “Working Voices” brings together a diverse group of writers who write about the world of the working man and woman. Poet and writer M.L. Liebler, most recently the editor of the literary anthology, Punching the Clock and Kicking out the Jams, will be joined by writer Jeff Vande Zande, recently editor of  On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work, and poet Ken Meisel, poet and the author of Beautiful Rust: Poems, part of Bottom Dog Press. The discussion will be led by author Lolita Hernandez, also a contributor to On the Clock.

“Detroit Voices” features a variety of voices from the changing face of Detroit talking about its future. The speakers will be John Gallagher, author of Re-imagining Detroit and a long-time writer for the Detroit Free Press; Sean Doerr and Dan Austin, author and photographer of the book Lost Detroit; and NPR Changing Gears reporter Kate Davidson. Leading the discussion will be writer and Wayne State Professor Dorene O’Brien.

Other panels will be on “Michigan Voices: A Sense of Place”; “Science Fiction Voices”; “Victorian History Mystery”; and “The Art of the Thriller.” In addition this year’s event will offer more hands-on demonstrations by local craftspeople specializing in the book arts.

Last year more than 5,000 visitors attended the one-day event, which includes more than 100 exhibitors, artists and book sellers.

For more information on the BookFest and for a complete listing of authors, artists and programs visit www.kerrytownbookfest.org.

The BookFest is sponsored by the Michigan Humanities Council¸ WEMU Radio 89.1, Ann Arbor Bank, Kerrytown Market, Zingerman’s, Hollanders, Thomson Shore, Kerrytown Concert House, and Michigan Radio.

A Pollack-Katz-Dratler-Ilyovitz Family Roots Story (in which the Rosenstein connection is explained)

Roots information has been coming at me through Outlook and Facebook. First, my Uncle Norm Pollack (mom’s brother) wrote to me (the family genealogist for my generation) for information about a distant ancestor. Then First-Cousin-Once-Removed Norm Vendeland (Mom’s first cousin; their mothers are sisters) was on TV news and in the papers just yesterday for being given medals of his brother Albert, who died in World War II. In looking through my notes and early correspondence to answer Uncle Norm’s question, I saw information that was relevant to the story of Albert, in the same letter, so I’m sharing it here for anyone who might be interested—especially members of the Pollack-Katz-Dratler-Ilyovitz Family.

As a brief background to the letter, eight years ago, Aunt Elaine (sister to Norm and my mom) wrote to me to ask if I could share some roots information with Brett, son of Cousin Michael Rosenstein (read the letter to learn our double relationship), for a school project. I sent him the below letter. I guess roots projects are popular nowadays because I received the call from other cousins to help their kids. I always sent a variation of the same letter that is posted below.

Shalom,

Ken

* * *

Hi, First-Cousin-Once-Removed and also Second-Cousin-Once-Removed Brett (Ask your dad to explain what I mean by that; if he doesn’t know, read on),

Your grandmother said you were doing some roots work and asked if I could send some information to you. Here it is: I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get it to you before your assignment was due (but I understand you got the answers you needed without me—Lesson: Check more than one source when you have a question). But once I had the momentum going it was hard to stop. Picture Michael Jordan in midair not making the shot. I hope you find it interesting. To me it’s always fascinating. We can talk next time we’re together if you have any additional questions.

On your grandmother’s side of the family, there are 5 children in your grandmother’s generation and you know them all: Ruth, Shirley, Marvin, Elaine, and Norman. My mother is Shirley so, since she and Elaine are sisters, your father and I are first cousins and you and Blake are my first cousins once removed; you are second cousins to David and Carrie. Your grandmother’s parents, your great-grandparents, were Harry Pollack and Yetta Dratler.

HARRY POLLACK

Harry (Hermann) was born on November 28, 1889 in Sziget, a town in the province of Marmorsch, which was then in Austria-Hungary. The famous Holocaust author Elie Wiesel is from Sziget also. Today the area is in the country of Rumania. Situated in the Carpathian Mountains, it was a large industrial town, a melting pot for the area (mostly Polish with a few Hungarian) because it was the home of a cane factory (walking sticks). Outside the factory area, the population was desolate.

Harry was the second oldest of 9 children: Sarah, Harry, Hermine, Frank, Friede, Bessie, Morris, Lew, and Faye. It is possible that you met Faye but she is no longer living. She was the last of her generation. All of them came to this country. In the Old Country Harry was a skilled craftsman, a cabinet maker, who served as the house carpenter in the Kaiser’s army. It was a preferred position because he didn’t have to go on maneuvers and he lived in the servants’ quarters. His brother Frank was also a carpenter. Harry was the first from his family to come to America. He travelled on the S. S. Amerika out of Hamburg, Germany. He left on January 22, 1913, a year after his father died, and arrived at Ellis Island on February 2. In this country, after his brother Frank arrived, they formed a partnership as carpenters and builders. In fact, they built the house in which I grew up in Beachwood. Elaine and Shirley’s brother Marvin followed in Harry’s footsteps as craftsmen, and Marvin’s sons Mark, Gary, and Alan have followed in his.

Harry’s parents, your great-great grandparents, were named Mordechai (Martin) Schmuel Pollak and Chaya (Anna, Hannah) Katz (born 1870, Sipinka [Szaplancza], Austria-Hungary; d. 1936, Cleveland). Note that there was no “c” in “Pollak.” The “c” was added when members of the family came to the United States. Unfortunately Mordechai was not among them. He worked in the Old Country as a butcher. He died in Sziget in 1912 when a knife cut on his finger became infected.

Pollack Family

Mordechai was the second of five children born to your great-great-great grandparents Meyer Pollack and Faiga Ethel (I don’t know her maiden name): Moishe, Mordechai Schmuel, Pesach, Shumoo, and Munish. Meyer and Faiga were both born in the 1820s to 1830s and died in 1910 in Sziget. Meyer also was a butcher.

According to Yetta, she and Harry were related. Here’s what she told me. See if you can follow: “Moishe’s children I knew very well because coincidentally his wife was also related to my mother. They (the wife and her sibling) were Harry’s cousins through his father, to me through my mother. Moishe’s wife (Yitta)’s mother’s mother was my mother (Frieda)’s mother (Feiga Ruchel)’s sister.” That would make Yetta and Harry non-blood second cousins (or second cousins-in-law).

That’s as far back as I go on the Pollack side.

Katz Family

On the Katz side it’s a bit more complicated. Chaya Katz had three brothers, Meyer Chaim, Hascal Hersch, and Schmuel David, and one sister, Reizel. Of the five, only Meyer Chaim (I’m not sure of this) and Chaya came to America. Their parents, your great-great-great grandparents, were Jacob Lieberman and Sara Katz. You know that in this country it is traditional for the wife to take the husband’s name. In their case, Jacob took Sara’s name and became Jacob Lieberman Katz. One story has it that he did it to avoid the draft; Jews were often drafted against their will and treated poorly in the army. According to another story, Sara was a Cohan (Katz is a contraction for Cohan Tzedek, or “Righteous Priest”) and the rabbi told her Lieberman was no name for a Cohan so her husband took her name. One story says the Katzes worked as butchers. Another says that Jacob was a blacksmith.

Sara was one of 5 children born to your great-great-great-great grandparents, Fishel Katz and Chaya (I don’t know her maiden name), who were probably born in the 1780s to 1790s. The 5 children’s names were Mayer, Leah Malka (married David Davis, known as Davidovitz in the Old Country), Yankel, Sara, and Rezzi. I told you that Sara married Jacob Lieberman and they had five children, including Chaya. Then Sara died. Guess what. Jacob married her younger sister Rezzi and had 8 more children: Herzl (I think that’s the name), Heschel, twins Fishel and Sarah (Sarah died young), Feiga, Jenny, Frank, and Rosie. So, because they shared the same father as Jacob and Chaya’s children, they were sisters and brothers to each other. But since their mothers were sisters, they were also first cousins to each other! Herzl and Heschel did not come to America; the others did. Sura and Rezzi’s older sister Leah Malka married David Davis (known as Davidovitz in the Old Country). He came to America at the turn of the century, the first in our family from that side. He settled in Cleveland because other Marmorsch Jews were already there. Everyone else in the Katz Family followed him.

GRANDMA POLLACK

Yetta was the fourth oldest of six children: Maurice, Sam (Lezar), Daniel, Yetta, Rachel, and Zelda. Rachel died in Europe. The other children eventually came to America. None of them are still living. No one is exactly sure when Yetta was born but for years she celebrated her birthday as April 28, 1899. Then, when she had long since settled in Cleveland, in the closing days of World War II, her sister Zelda’s son was killed while in the U.S. army and the date of his death was April 28 (1944). Not wanting to celebrate a birthday on such a sad anniversary, Yetta adopted April 5 as her birthday. She was born in Ruskovce, also in Marmorsch and moved with her family to nearby Sziget five years later. Growing up, Yetta knew of Harry but Harry, who was over nine years older than Yetta, didn’t know her until they met and started dating in Cleveland. According to Yetta, whom your dad and I knew as Grandma Pollack, Harry’s brother Frank also had eyes on her. It’s a good thing Harry—Grandpa Pollack—won out or I wouldn’t be telling you this story.

Yetta’s parents, your great-great grandparents, were named Harry Dratler (according to Grandma Pollack, born 1858; Ruskovce, Austria-Hungary; died 1936, Cleveland; according to headstone at Park Synagogue Cemetery, born 1870; died 1935) and Chaya Friede Ilyovitz (according to Grandma Pollack, born 1875, Sziget; Austria-Hungary; died 1946, Cleveland; according to headstone, born 1875; died 1946). Harry made clay ovens (fireplaces that were built onto sides of houses) in Ruskovce, where Yetta was born. In this country he was a cement contractor.

Dratler Family

Harry was the oldest of six children: Harry, Sruel (Israel), Toyvya, Avraham, Ettel (or Edja), and Schloyma. I believe they all came to this country but Schloyma died in the Holocaust after returning to Sziget from the United States.

Harry’s parents were Nathan Dratler (died Ruskovce, Austria-Hungary, 1908-09) and Rivka (I don’t know her maiden name; died December 1874). According to Grandma Pollack, Nathan had at least two brothers. He was a general store owner in Ruskovce. After Rivka died, he remarried. I suspect all the children were from his first marriage but I don’t know for sure. According to Grandma Pollack, she was named after Rivka’s mother Yitta. “My mother never met her. She was already dead by the time my mother was expecting me,” she told me. “One night, this Yitta came to visit her. When she woke up, she realized it was her mother-in-law’s mother. She realized she had to name me after her. She woke up and realized she never met her. It was all a dream.” Elaine’s sister Ruth was named after Rivka.

Ilyovitz Family

Frieda was the oldest of seven children: Chaya Frieda, Reisa, Yitta, Esther, Devorah, Melkah, and the only brother, Elya. Devorah and her husband Gabriel Ilyovitz, who was a cousin, both died in the Holocaust.

Frieda’s parents were Avram Jacob Ilyovitz (died 1908, Sziget, Austria-Hungary) and Feiga Rachel (Fanny or Rachel; I don’t know her maiden name; died 1939, presumably in a concentration camp). Avram was a bookkeeper.

In Sziget Yetta was denied a Hebrew education because she was a girl but she learned by listening in on her brothers’ lessons. (One time, she told me, she did take Hebrew lessons, which was unheard of for a girl, but she quit because the teacher was flirting with her.) In public school she was denied textbooks because she was Jewish but she was usually able to obtain them by being persistent. I remember that when I used to visit her as a child, she always had a book at her side. Fourteen-year-old Yetta came to America with her younger sister, Zelda, and their mother, Frieda, ten years after their father, Harry, had sailed alone to Montreal, settled briefly, and then resettled in Cleveland. Today there are Dratler families living in Montreal. The few I’ve talked to didn’t know if we were related but I suspect we are. That research remains to be done. Since Yetta was five when she moved to Sziget, her father must already have been in America by that time.

Yetta, Zelda, and Frieda left the port of Bremen, Germany (if I am reading the sloppy handwriting on the Ship Passenger Arrival List correctly) on June 23, 1914, travelling on the S. S. Kronprinz (Crown Prince) Wilhelm. Grandma Pollack later described it as “a real pit,” rats and all. They arrived at Ellis Island on July 1. According to Grandma Pollack, if they had waited two more weeks before deciding to leave they would have been trapped in Marmarosh-Sziget because World War I broke out and all immigrant travel was halted. At the border immigrants were given physical exams and physically unhealthy immigrants were refused admittance. Grandma told me she was afraid she would fail the eye test and be deported because one of her eyes had a dent in the pupil which caused the pupil to be irregularly shaped. Luckily they tested only her good eye. In the Old Country, Grandma Pollack went by the name Ilonca. In America, she told me, she took the name Yetta because a boy she liked in grade school told her it sounded more American.

And in Conclusion

Harry and Yetta’s fourth child, your paternal grandmother Elaine, married Stan Rosenstein, your paternal grandfather. Stan’s mother, your great grandmother Ella Kroshinsky, had a sister, Ida, who married a man named Adolph Wachsberger. They had four children. The youngest, Si, married Elaine’s older sister Shirley and had four sons. Hmm, this sounds familiar; doesn’t it? So, if you figure it out, you can see that Si and Stan are first cousins because their mothers were sisters. Therefore, your father and I, in addition to being first cousins because our mothers are sisters, are second cousins because our fathers are first cousins; and you are my first cousin once removed and second cousin once removed; you and Blake are second cousins and third cousins to David and Carrie.

Best to you in your journey into your past,

Cousin Once-Removed and Twice-Removed Ken

A Day at Jones Beach with Emily

Beautiful day at Jones Beach. Reminds me I could lose 10 pounds. Cool waves, hot lady beside me, clear nasal passages. Only the freckles on my arms keep me from being the whitest man visible for miles. Okay maybe 20 pounds. Waves too mild to body surf so we let them splash across our bodies, then dive into them to get our hair wet.

Lying on our blankets surrounded by white sand. A family next to us is arguing. Emily comments that she misses New York small talk. Slips into New York accent, says she loves the “waw-ta.” Hispanic family taking photographs of each other until little kid says, “Now swimming.” I only know that because Emily eavesdrops in Spanish. We roll over onto our stomachs to dry off our suits before the trip back to Forest Hills. Emily says, “Time to dry the back of our butts.” I say, “What’s the front of our butts?” Emily says, “Actually the front is the back.” We are silent for the next five minutes as a tribute to profundity.

Okay, maybe 30 pounds.

Emily and I Arrive in New York

We arrived in New York yesterday in the middle of heavy traffic after 10 ½ hours on the road. Emily drove like a mad woman, motivated by her upcoming high school reunion. She started the driving at 6:15 a.m. and never relinquished the wheel for the first 450 miles, through two gas stops and three pit stops. I navigated, superbly I might add. I said, “Head east on I-80.” She followed my directions perfectly because they were clear and concise and she grew up in New York and can make the journey blindfolded.

We started the alphabet game eight miles before we reached the Pennsylvania border. Later we played another, and I played two by myself. Our new rule: Typographical errors count as wild cards. We didn’t find one and had to settle for “eXit” four times.

Traffic ground to a near halt less than a mile from the George Washington Bridge. We were greeted by 110 degrees of heat, a condition made harsher by exhaust fumes from the truck that puffed and vibrated next to us as we crawled toward the tollbooth. It took us a half hour to get through. I played three more rounds of the alphabet game, this time allowing letters that appear anywhere in the word to count.

We were surprised to then see ourselves headed to the “RFK Bridge.” What happened to the Triboro Bridge, we wondered. The name made perfect sense because the bridge connects the three boroughs of Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan. The new name has no logic unless they rename the boroughs Rqueens, Fbronx, and Kmanhattan.

That brief stretch through the two tolls cost us $14.50. Assumedly they’ll use the money for new signs.

Coming to New York, Hope to Meet NY Friends 7/25/11

I’m honored to be the guest of the National Writers Union-New York chapter during my upcoming visit to New York. I’ll be in town all week, from Friday to Friday July 22-29, but on Monday July 25, NWU-NY is hosting a reception for me in honor of volume 1 of my 4-volume Voices from the Underground Series, titled Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1.

Many thanks to NWU-NY for your hospitality.

I’ll be talking about the underground press and the significance of alternative media in our nation’s history. The roots of the National Writers Union itself are in the underground press as many of the founders and early members were underground press veterans. Even today, many of the most devoted activists are veterans (myself included).

I’ll also talk for the first time about an exciting digital project that has been occupying a major amount of my time. If you are a veteran of any of the underground papers from the period—including the feminist, lesbian, gay, military, and ethnic papers—I hope to see you. If I haven’t already talked to you about the project, be sure to come so we can talk and I can include your paper in the upcoming digital collection. (And if you aren’t from New York but you’re intrigued, write to me at ken@azenphonypress.com.)

• Date: Monday July 25
• Time: 6-8 p.m.
• Location: 12^th floor, UAW conference room, 256 West 38^th, New York

If you don’t want to hear me talk but you’re feeling hungry, refreshments will be served.

Meanwhile, here’s a recent review of volume 1.

Volume 2 should be out any minute. I’m accepting pre-publication orders.

I hope to see you there.

Goodbye, Dad. You Will Always Be Missed

When you make it into your sixties and you still have your parents you sometimes have thoughts that they will live forever. I wasn’t the only one who thought that about my dad, who died on July 5 and was buried one week ago today. “I can’t believe your dad is gone.” I heard that statement repeatedly during the week I spent with the family in Beachwood, Ohio, the eastern suburb of Cleveland that my pioneer parents helped build during the baby boom years and continued to lead in more ways than most people can remember.

“Shocked” was another word I heard repeatedly. The disbelief of friends and family is just one of many tributes to his life. He was 93, an age most people never attain, but he was clear of mind and healthy. He didn’t seem to age. He was driving the day before he died. He was still visualizing the next way he was going to create order out of the chaos that we know as life, and do it in a way that would help the greatest number of people, as he had done his whole life.

During the forties, Beachwood school children would attend Fairmount School on Fairmount Boulevard until they reached the seventh grade and then transfer to the Shaker Heights school system, where they would remain until they graduated. But the baby boom put pressure on the Shaker Heights school system so in the early fifties they kicked us out. Families on the south side of Beachwood wanted to secede from Beachwood and become part of Shaker. They put a proposal on the next ballot. My dad vehemently opposed the measure so he led the way to put another proposal on the ballot, that Beachwood raise the money to build its own schools including in that part of Beachwood. He knew that both proposals couldn’t win or residents would be building schools for kids who were living in Shaker. He was, of course, right. The proposal to secede was soundly defeated and residents voted to build their own schools. My dad served on the school board throughout the height of the baby boom years, and led the way in developing two new elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. His name appears on plaques on all of them.

But far more important to my friends, he was the co-founder of the Beachwood Little League as well as a regular backer through his menswear store, the Oxford Shop, and a manager/coach. At the drop of a, well, bat, he would call a practice, I would get on the phone and call the members of my team, and we would meet at one of the baseball diamonds in the city for an afternoon practice. He was a mentor to my teammates and so many others, who all knew him never as Mr. Wachsberger but always just as Si. That’s how everyone knew him.

My mom was no slouch during that period either, and still isn’t. She was, among other activities, a regular member and leader of PTA. During my freshman year in high school, my dad was president of the school board, my mom was president of the PTA, and I was president of the junior high school student council. When I graduated, he was president again. At the ceremony, he handed me my diploma, which had his signature on it. I learned at the 90^th birthday party that we threw for him that he was president when my brother Don graduated so he signed his diploma also. He wasn’t taking any chances.

After 14 years, which included three terms as president, my dad retired from the school board, but not serving the community as an elected official must have given him fits so he ran for city council and won. He spent the next 24 years on the city council, including four terms as president. Among his many accomplishments, he created a law that prevented developers from cutting down trees that surrounded the site of new homes if they had reached a certain height. He also mentored the current mayor.

He died suddenly and painlessly in a way that is reserved for mortals who commune with angels during their lives. He had told Bob and my mom early in the day that his vision was blurry so they took him to the hospital. The doctors there were going to keep him a day or two because they thought he might have had pneumonia. He was also dehydrated according to one doctor who wanted him on IV fluids as soon as they got him to his room.

Don, who was there at the end, recalled,

We had been talking to Dad about dinner and other small talk. He didn’t like the dinner, but he had most of the two cookies. We asked him to read something, which he did pretty well, so we knew his eyesight was okay. Then while we were waiting for his hospital room to be prepared so he could be admitted for the night, his eyes rolled up, and he turned his head to the left. No sound. No grimace. Apparently no pain. We didn’t know at that time that he had died, but he never regained consciousness. Soon after the doctors got into the room, they began to talk about not being able to detect a heartbeat, so it was pretty clear that he had passed away when he had turned his head. About 25 minutes later, the two attending doctors came into the family room to tell Mom, Bob, and me that they were unable to revive Dad.

He died at Ahuja Medical Center. It is ironic, I suppose, because that’s where his next volunteer project was going to be. He told me about it on a recent visit home. He was going to create a library there by writing letters to publishers around the country and asking them to donate books, as he had done at one of the inner-city schools in Cleveland where he and my mom tutored children. He already knew the name of the person at the hospital who he needed to talk to in order to bring his idea to life. I don’t know if he ever did talk to him, and I don’t remember the exact details of the plan. I didn’t always hear his words when he spoke to me. Sometimes I just felt his passion and let it feed me. It made me a better person.

In one of the karmic, zen moments that tie together so many parts of my family, he chose—and a part of me does believe he chose it—a special day to move on. His father, my Grandpa Al, or Gramps as we knew him, died on June 21, 1990, the summer solstice. He was buried the next day, the birthday of his oldest grandson, my brother Don. A few years earlier, his wife, my Grandma Ida, died on the birthday of her oldest granddaughter, my cousin Barb. Six years after Gramps’ death, on another June 22, my father’s oldest grandson, my son David, read from the Torah and became a man according to our tradition. My father died on July 5, David’s birthday. I’m not nearly wise enough to tell you what that all means other than that it all comes together, the generations, life. As the family genealogist, I learned that life and death are connected by a line on a chart. It’s also connected by shared anniversaries.

The time in Cleveland following his death was a surreal experience, filled with extreme sadness and extreme joy. Up, down, up, down. It was a testament to Judaism, whatever branch you follow, that every occasion is steeped in tradition and ritual that helps guide you through it. We learned that Jewish funerals begin by focusing on the deceased but end by focusing on the living. The Mourner’s Kaddish never mentions death. It is recited while standing as an affirmation of strength. At the home, during shiva, the period of mourning, the mourners are commanded to eat first to replenish their strength. Judaism always focuses on the positive. Life continues. The show must go on.

And so we buried my dad on Friday afternoon. The mayor, the rabbi, and the cantor all spoke to the 300 or so friends and relatives from Beachwood, Greater Cleveland, and around the country who came to pay their last respects. Their presence made the event a lot easier for all of us, especially my mom. After the funeral, he had a police escort to the cemetery under a sunny sky. Then we came to the house for an initial period of shiva.

Three hours later we all celebrated with my nephew Scott and his fiancé Diana at their rehearsal dinner. The next day was their joyous wedding. Then Sunday and Monday we sat shiva.

Friends wondered how we could celebrate a wedding right after a funeral but Jewish tradition demands no less. Besides, as we all knew, my dad would never have let us postpone it. He so looked forward to it himself. My mom was no less adamant. So we felt grief and we felt joy, as was appropriate and natural for the two occasions. We just felt them out of the usual order.

I have no idea what people are thinking as they are about to die but I know my dad long insisted that he did not ever want to be confined to a rest home or be strung up on tubes. Maybe he thought that if he lived that would be his inevitable fate so he willed himself to go. But I know also that he was a practical person so I wouldn’t be surprised if he figured transportation and lodging are expensive, out-of-towners will be coming in for the wedding anyhow, so if he died when he did he would save them the expense of another trip.

No one knows.

But I know that I want to call him a legend. I believed that for a long time. Perhaps that’s just the perspective of a son. But I think I’m safe in saying he was a great man. An extraordinary man. I just happen to be fortunate to be his son.

He belonged to us—his beloved wife Shirley, who he adored; their four sons, Don, Ken, Jeff, and Bob; their two daughter-in-law, Judi and Emily; their three grandchildren, David, Scott, and Carrie; and now his granddaughter-in-law, Diana. But he belonged to his community also. His imprint is everywhere—in the schools that he helped build, in the trees that beautify the city, in the Little League that he co-founded, the arts council that he and my mom helped co-found and that, my mom maintains, would have given way to age and exhaustion had not my dad almost singlehandedly revived it, at Montefiore where he kept the snack shop display cases full and fresh, with the children he and my mom tutored. And the volunteer hours that he and my mom devoted to more causes than likely any of us will ever be able to name.

Whether he was writing a letter to President Obama to share his views on how to run the country; or sharing financial advice with David, Scott, and Carrie; or playing Rummikub with whoever could fit around the kitchen table, he was so dynamic that, yes, we can be forgiven for not seeing the finish line that he was fast approaching. He saw it, but he was too busy to dwell on it, and if the end of this adventure was near, he wasn’t going to miss a second of it.

We miss him greatly and mourn for our loss but we don’t mourn for him because he went out in style. He was a role model to everyone who knew him, a man of dignity, and we were fortunate for the time we had with him.

As Emily said, the earth is better because of him.

* * *

Friends who wish may contribute to the Si Wachsberger Scholarship Fund, c/o The Beachwood Arts Council, 25325 Fairmount Blvd., Beachwood, OH 44122.