Thursday, May 16, 2013
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
* Dedication
So ends The Anti- Yale.
In Memoriam: JPA
He was a Toscanini of the telephone and a Zeus of the xerox machine. He used both incessantly to build networks, like a spider builds a web.
And to the same end: To ensnare.
And to the same end: To ensnare.
But this ensnaring was a moral act. He was the most effective agent of change I ever met. He would descend upon an explosive situation --- the aftermath of the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State; the occupation at Wounded Knee; the protests at the national conventions at Miami Beach; the Iran Hostage Crisis - - - and simply start to build a network to ensnare the volatile forces of change so they could be slowed down, examined and dealt with calmly rather than impulsively, and given a chance to create rather than destroy.
He was my model for ministry. And indeed he wrote a recommendation for me when I entered his alma mater, Yale Divinity School. He shattered the stereotype of ministry as an Edwardian drawing room activity conducted over coffee on plush carpets and under steeples.
His was the ministry of healing, and sometimes it was necessary to hurt in order to heal: Hurt oneself (satyagraha in Gandhi's term) and others (with the truth).
Sometimes ministry was a cauterizing process - - - burn the wound to oust the infection. His own wounds accumulated over the years of weeks at a time with no rest and one or two hours of sleep a night. I know this first hand from working with him in Ohio and Florida in the midst of his activities at Kent State, the Miami Conventions of 1972, and Wounded Knee.
When he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in the throws of his terminal illness, I thought the Prize too big for him. Not that he didn't deserve it; but that his temperament was really geared to the rewards of the non-material world.
He stayed at my home when he was awarded Yale Divinity School's Distinguished Service Award by his classmates on the 25th anniversary of their graduation. After the ceremony he returned to my apartment and said, "I want to show you something." And he pulled out of his suit pocket a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it and discovered a simple typewritten page with words to the effect:
DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD
PRESENTED TO
(_______________JPA_______________)
BY HIS CLASSMATES
ON
THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY
OF HIS GRADUATION FROM
YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL
He was as proud of that piece of paper as if it had been a solid gold plaque. We didn't have to say anything to each other: We understood immediately that the rewards of the world we had chosen were rewards of the human heart.
Of whom do I speak thusly: The Reverend John P. Adams, a man whose name is etched on my heart and the hearts of innumerable others.
M. Div. '80
NB: This piece was prepared for a planned biography of the late John P. Adams, to be written by David M. Boerner, Associate Editor of the Akron Beacon Journal, April, 1984.
Update, 2013: That biography is being completed by Lawrence Dowler, retired archivist at Harvard University and former Director of Manuscripts and Archives at Yale Universty's Sterling Memorial Library.
Monday, May 13, 2013
* Jeaniegray and the Magical World of Mount Carmel
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| Jeaniegray graduated from the Yale School of Art long before the present Yale Art and Architecture Building was designed. |
Link
* An Offer to Yale University's Manuscripts and Archives Division of Sterling Memorial Library
 |
| Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University |
Christine Weideman, Head, Manuscripts and Archives,
Sterling Memorial Library
Dear Christine and Larry,
I have a collection of papers belonging to Yale University matriculant J. Walter Bassett of Mount Carmel ,
one of the founders of the Sleeping Giant Association, which saved Sleeping
Giant from development.
I offered them to Quinnipiac University Archives a couple of
years ago and they declined them, referring me instead to the Miller Memorial
Library in Hamden, which I know something about since I obtained the Thornton
Wilder study furniture for them while on the Mayor’s Bicentennial Commission
from 1975-1985. http://wilder1985.blogspot.com/
They are not a research institution.
I want these papers in a research institution.
Since my papers are in the Kent State Collection at Yale which Christine oversees and which
you, Larry, helped me create when you had Christine’s position before your move
to Harvard, I wonder if they might find a home in my collection at Yale?
You can view the work I have been doing on them at these two
links
Sincerely,
Paul
Paul D. Keane,
M.A., M.Div., M.Ed.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
* The Mount Carmel Petition My Mother Refused to Sign
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| Robert H. and Barbara W. Keane 50th Wedding Anniversary, 1984 |
The Land of the Sleeping Giant
My parents lived in Mt. Carmel
My mother’s great aunt, Lyda Wilbur, had owned Wilbur’s Hardware Store (later known as Kimler’s
Hardware Store) in Centerville near the Hamden Town
Hall
The inheritance got my parents out of the New Haven ghetto, Star Street to be exact, where both of
them had lived in poverty. My father had graduated from Hillhouse High School and attended one year of college
at the University of Alabama on the insurance money he received when his mother, getting off a trolley in West Haven, was hit and run and killed by a drunk driver. His much older brothers (there was no father in the picture) had told him he had no right to use the money to go to college. They were too poor for pretensions like that.
My mother had never completed high school.
My father’s first job during the Depression was as a Good Humor man, selling ice cream from a three wheeled bicycle with a freezer contraption.
My mother had never completed high school.
My father’s first job during the Depression was as a Good Humor man, selling ice cream from a three wheeled bicycle with a freezer contraption.
By 1960 my father had worked himself up to Executive
Director of Labor Relations at Landers, Frary, and Clarke in New Britain .
That job and the munificent salary of $12,500 a year enabled them to move to a new
house. They bought a lot in Yankee Mount Carmel's fashionable West Woods on Still Hill Road
and built what was then considered a “modern” house, an 8-room, split level,
for the enormous sum of $ 25,000.
It was woods on both sides at first and then someone bought
and cleared the lot above them (it was a hill, after all) and built another split level.
And so we had neighbors. A year later the neighbors sold their split-level to the Assistant Superintendent of Schools inNew
Haven and his family, Kenneth R. Redmonds.
And so we had neighbors. A year later the neighbors sold their split-level to the Assistant Superintendent of Schools in
The Redmonds were African Americans, or, as was the polite term back then, Blacks.
This was 1961 or 1962 and many folks had trouble
understanding that all men are created equal.
My mother, who came from poverty, and had educated herself
(she always had a book at her side in the living room) was not one of them. She knew about inequality.
One night the doorbell rang and my mother opened what was
then considered the stylishly fashionable double door to the entry hall in our
split level. My father avoided most
social interactions such as answering the door and phone. He was a man of deep silences and piercing
intellect (a “Philadelphia lawyer” as the expression goes) but chit-chat was
not part of his repertoire.
My mother on the other hand knew just what to say on all
occasions and never consciously offended a person in her life. She worked as
Assistant Registrar of Vital Statistics in the Hamden Town Hall
By the time she retired she knew everyone in town, living or dead, fishing or barking.
It was a neighbor at the door with a petition which expressed many neighbors' displeasure at having to share the neighborhood with a Black family. Would my
mother like to sign?
My mother was sorry but she would not like to sign.
The doors closed softly but firmly. The neighbor had never got over the threshold, double doors or not.
A few weeks later the Redmonds
moved in.
My mother did what she always did for new neighbors---made a
casserole and brought it over personally to welcome them to the neighborhood, an old Yankee custom.
Over the next 23 years my mother would wave to the Redmonds, and they to my
mother (my father was invisible) and they would shout through the trees about the weather and how the kids were doing and about the seasons and such.
It was good Yankee neighborliness—friendliness without intrusiveness.
Fast forward 23 years to 1985.
My mother then 73 and my father then 71 go on vacation to the West Coast. My mother winds up stranded in an intensive
care unit for 118-days fully conscious but unable to get off the life-support
machinery. My father is stranded
in a motel for the entire 4 months. My
parents home has been empty except for a house sitter who came to feed the dogs
and a friend who cleaned the house weekly.
When my mother died and my father returned to an empty
house, Mrs. Redmonds, who had never before stepped foot in our home, brought down a
casserole, completing the twenty-three year cycle of neighborliness.
My father would live there seven more years. When he died at 78, Mrs.
Redmonds called to tell me that my father and she, long a widow, had exchanged hellos all
those seven years from their separate driveways.
She’d kept an eye on him.
In my father’s library jammed with books I found a slight
volume on his desk after he died.
Its title?
How to Talk to People.
This is how it was in my Mother’s Mount
Carmel in the 1900's.
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| Error: 1934, not 1938 |
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