In this old photo I’m getting a hug from my brother Joel at a reception celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, circa May 26, 1964, which would’ve been Joel’s 13th birthday. I’m about 9 here. Looking at the image, I can almost remember the day.
Joel died suddenly in December 2009. A few years later, on what would’ve been his 61st birthday, I posted this remembrance of him here on The Great Gray Bridge. Obits also ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness.
Thinking about him, as I do often, because Joel was a gregarious, social person, I know he would’ve enjoyed and thrived amid the advance of social media the past seven years. He had started on Facebook at the time of his death, but none of us, including him, was so aware yet, of how our lives would be influenced by this new media. Joel had early in his adulthood worked as a reporter, and always retained a prodigious appetite for knowing about what was happening in society; he really enjoyed talking with people, asking them questions, hearing what they thought, and offering his views on the matters at hand. He and I didn’t share all the same politics, but the ways we thought about things was were still alike in many ways. He was a kind of social philosopher, and in 2000 ran for Congress on the Libertarian line in a Cleveland-area district. Growing up 3-4 years apart, we encountered many events as a pair in our five-person family—along with our sister Pamela, the eldest + our folks, Earl and Sylvia. We experienced events together, like the JFK and RFK assassinations. I recall be awoken the morning after Bobby Kennedy had been shot, our mom telling us as she woke us that day. The summer of 1970, Joel and I drove from Ohio out to California and spent six weeks camping in a redwood forest. During that trip we adopted our dog Noah. I relate much of that personal history on this Great Gray Bridge webpage. Joel is much missed by all who knew him.
https://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Joel-13-PT-9.jpg14841036Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2016-02-18 16:53:032017-12-08 19:50:34#TBT—Remembering Joel C. Turner, All the Way Back to May 1964
Editor at Raw Story David Ferguson, known as @TRexstasy on Twitter, has a fascinating post up covering a new study of animal behavior by scientists in the Czech Republic and Germany demonstrating that dogs–when off-leash and left to their own devices–show a decided preference for finding a position to defecate so that they’re in line with the Earth’s magnetic field, along a North-South axis, and actually avoid doing their business on an East-West axis. Ferguson summarizes the findings of the research, published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology:
“The study examined the daily habits of 70 dogs during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years. Consistently, during times of calm electromagnetic ‘weather,’ the dogs chose to eliminate while facing north or south. Dogs are not the only animals that are sensitive to the Earth’s magnetism. When it comes time for them to mate, salmon use their sense of the Earth’s magnetism to find their way back to the spawning grounds where they were born. Birds, similarly, migrate along magnetic lines. Even ants have been proven to have a sense of the Earth’s alignment and to distinguish between north, south, east and west. As to why the dogs prefer to poop facing north or south rather than east or west, that’s still a mystery. ‘It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it ‘consciously’ (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs ‘see,’ ‘hear’ or ‘smell’ the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they ‘feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable’ in a certain direction),’ wrote researchers, ‘Our analysis of the raw data…indicates that dogs not only prefer N-S direction, but at the same time they also avoid E-W direction.’”
This helps me understand why my old black Lab Noah–who was very obedient and with whom I often walked leash-less in the wilds of Franconia, New Hampshire, and suburban Cleveland–may have been so choosy about where he wanted to poop, and even once he had found his spot, sometimes moved around quickly in a narrowing circle, until stopping at what was evidently always just the right spot for him. I got Noah on a cross-country road trip with my brother Joel. We rescued him from a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the summer of 1970, a day or two before his three-week stay there was going to end with him being put down. We enjoyed his companionship until 1982. I tell Noah’s story in greater detail at a post on this blog called How I Came to Have as a Companion a Black Lab Named Noah.
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May 4, 2018—On this date forty years ago, I opened Undercover Books in Cleveland with my sister Pamela, brother Joel, and our parents Earl and Sylvia. Below is one of my favorite posts I’ve ever written and shared from this blog about this date in my life.
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I published a version of this post on May 4, 2012, and have now updated it for 2013-14 with additional material, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” as you’ll see below. The comments below are from the 2012-13 posting–you’re welcome to add your own.
— May 4, a big date on my personal calendar
On this date in 1970 I was fifteen. That afternoon, around 4:30, I was standing on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland, waiting for my sister Pamela to get off her job at Halle Bros., a local department store. Nearby, a delivery van pulled up, with the name of the evening paper, Cleveland Press, emblazoned across its side. The back door of the van rolled up and a worker began tossing bundles of that afternoon’s edition off the truck. It was a real “Front Page” moment, as in old movies when a swirl of numbered calendar pages and newspaper print resolves in to a splashy headline of bold, readable type and a brash reporter rushes off to get the rest of the story. Only this time, it was not a funny, Capraesque moment. In weirdly unfolding slow-motion I watched a particular bundle roll toward me until it landed above the fold, headline up. Like seeing a license plate in front of one’s eyes during a car accident—and remembering the combo of digits and letters forever—I read the inches-high black type: Four Students Shot Dead On Kent Campus. For several days prior, I had been following the antiwar demonstrations at Kent State, about thirty miles from Cleveland, and I knew that Ohio Governor James Rhodes had deployed armed troops to the campus. Pam soon joined me on the sidewalk and I told her the disturbing news. We shared our shock and dismay and probably dropped whatever we had been planning to do, though I have no memory after telling her about the newspaper headline. I recall that little more than a week later I heard on local radio Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s recording of “Ohio.” It was as if Neil had written a musical version of an instant book, as is still done in the book world after a terrible catastrophe. In fact, in Neil’s recent memoir Heavy Peace he recalls quickly writing the song and the alacrity with which they recorded it, pushing the acetate copies of the song out to radio stations, before the vinyl 45s had even been pressed. Here’s a youtube version of the song from the Neil Young online archive. Thanks to Neil for making this sharable, as other versions of the song are not.
Eight years later, May 4, 1978
Pamela, our brother Joel, our parents Earl and Sylvia, and I all opened Undercover Books, the bookstore that would define our lives for many years. When I was graduated from Franconia College a year earlier, with a BA in Philosophy of Education and History of Religion, I had imagined I might work for the Anti-Defamation League or some similar organization. I certainly hadn’t thought of working in a bookstore, but my siblings—with Pam having worked in department stores, and Joel at Kay’s Bookstore in downtown Cleveland–had the idea of opening a bookstore in our home suburb of Shaker Heights, where despite it being an affluent and well-educated community, no bookstore had ever been located. We were fortunate in our timing, for in Cleveland, as in several other midwestern cities, book retailing was migrating from the downtown core to the suburbs. Undercover Books caught on right away, and I got what amounted to a graduate education, provided by bookselling. As buyer for adult books for what would become our three-store indie chain, I met every day with bookbuying customers and browsers. We were regularly called upon by publishers’ sales reps, and became a go-to store for houses eager to break out books on the national scene. Notable authors who launched books at the store included Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale), Richard North Patterson (The Lasko Tangent), and Walter Tevis (Queen’s Gambit). I was with the bookstores for seven years before moving to New York City, and have written more about the transition here on this site. The bookstore proved to be a gateway to my career in the book business and it all began on this date thirty-six years ago today.
Another nine years, May 4, 1987
Now working as an editor at Walker & Company, my first full-time position with a publishing house, I was in the happy position of telling my author Ellen Hunnicutt that her novel, Suite For Calliope: A Music and the Circus—the first book I signed up on arriving at the company, and which was to be published that summer—had just received a starred review in Kirkus. Ellen was very excited as I read her the whole review with lines like these, “An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. . . . A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.” Note I read it to her, and didn’t fax it, probably because neither one of us had one. What added to the special quality of the occasion however was that this day, May 4, was also Ellen’s birthday. You can read more about how I came to discover Suite for Calliope in this essay elsewhere on this blog.
Nowadays, when May 4 rolls around again, even if nothing so deeply tragic or personally historic is occurring in that given year, I marvel at it all. For now, I’m just really glad I created this site over the past couple years, so that this year, I have a proper venue to share my memories of May 4, from 44 years ago, from 36 years ago, and from 27 years ago.
The pictures seen here were taken in what we called “the middle room” at Undercover Books, where we placed a comfortable rattan couch. The black Labrador is our dog Noah, whose ear Joel is massaging. I am wearing the same style of pink eyeglass frames as I wear nowadays. I’ve told the story of how Joel and I came to get Noah at a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 1970, on a biographical blog post I tweeted out it a few months ago, with a picture of Noah and me that I cherish. I miss them both, Noah who passed in 1982, and Joel in 2009.
https://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-04-at-11.50.14-AM.png1003786Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2013-05-03 23:58:152021-05-04 20:38:32May 4th, a Key Date in My Life at 3 Critical Junctures
I’m pleased to have a new consulting client, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), a non-profit organization that acts as the voice that independent booksellers and the book community raise in opposition to censorship and book banning. I’ll be working with them on fundraising and marketing, and over time, I hope their social networking. The funds ABFFE raises support programs promoting free expression, like their signature initiative, Banned Books Week. ABFFE also advocates for bookstore customer privacy. This has become a flashpoint several times over the past couple decades.
In the 1990s, Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr subpoenaed the bookstore purchase records of Monica Lewinsky. Kramer Books & Afterwords in Washington D.C., was the target of Starr’s efforts. At a Book Expo America during the 1990s I recall picking up a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “Subpoenaed for Bookselling” that I wore for several years afterward. Then, after 9/11 the Bush administration, in enforcing the Patriot Act, demanded that Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore and several public libraries hand over the purchase records and circulation history of some of their customers and patrons. ABFFE was in the trenches throughout these instances, helping booksellers and librarians resist the demands.
The first assignment I’m working on with ABFFE is the expansion of their affiliate program. Under this banner, companies that sell sidelines to bookstores, such as their newest partner Filofax, contribute to ABFFE a percentage of the sales they make to American Booksellers Association (ABA) member bookstores. Sidelines from Filofax include journals, and planners, as well as Lamy pens and pencils and diaries from Letts of London. Other affiliate partners supply bookstores with such items as reading glasses and bookmarks. I’ve drafted a press release announcing ABFFE’s new partnership with Filofax, which also mentions my new work with the foundation. The release, posted on the news portion of ABFFE’s website, is being circulated to book industry news outlets and bookstores around the country. I will be reaching out to sideline companies to recruit them for the program, and to booksellers, asking them who their best sideline suppliers are. If you’re interested in ABFFE’s work, I encourage you to follow them on Twitter where their handle is @freadom, or to like their Facebook page.
This is a particularly welcome assignment for me, having started out in the book business as a retail bookseller. Undercover Books, which I ran with my sibling and our parents, was an active member store in the ABA. My late brother Joel served as an ABA board member. We were activist booksellers, and Joel especially relished working on issues like those that ABFFE often confronts. In 2000 he ran for Congress as a Libertarian party candidate, placing reader privacy high on the list of issues he campaigned on. When Joel died in 2009, my sister Pamela and I made ABFFE one of the organizations that friends of the family and longtime Undercover customers were encouraged to donate to in his memory.
Happily, yet another personal connection pertains here. Readers of this blog may recall my longtime association with author and notable diarist Edward Robb Ellis (1911-98), who stands still as the writer remembered for having kept a diary longer than anyone else in American history, from 1927 until the year of his death. Between 1995-98, I edited and published four of Ellis’s books, including A Diary of the Century: Tales From America’s Greatest Diarist, with an Introduction by Pete Hamill, and The Epic of New York City, both of which are still in print today.
Eddie, as all his friends called him, was a passionate advocate and ambassador of diary-keeping, so much so that after the Guinness Book of World Records recognized him and his diary in their 1981 edition for his achievement in American letters, the aforementioned Letts of London, in the business of making diaries since 1796, arranged with Eddie to publish “The Ellis Diary,” a handsome red leatherette bound, gold-ribbon bookmarked blank diary. You can imagine then how tickled I was when as part of this new assignment I scanned the catalogs and materials ABFFE director Chris Finan gave me to read up on Filofax’s business, happily discovering their association with the venerable Letts of London. Moreover, when I called and introduced myself to Filofax USA’s Paul Brusser, I learned that Letts of London is actually now Filofax’s parent company–it’s clear this long-living British company is still going strong. I wonder if anyone with Letts of London today remembers Eddie Ellis and “The Ellis Diary.” One of the nice things about this new gig is it may offer me the chance to find out! Below you’ll find some artifacts illustrating my work with Eddie Ellis, and his relationship with Letts of London. Click here to see photos.
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.png00Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2013-02-08 23:13:302013-02-10 21:11:39Excited with a New Assignment–Helping Protect the Freedom to Read
Now well past my twenty-fifth year of living in New York City, I’m still a fan of going out to hear live music in Gotham. Last week, for instance, I attended two great shows, blogging about them here and here. Tonight, finding the video I’m coupling with this post I was reminded that I was keen on hearing live music here even before I thought about moving to the metropolis.
In 1983, then living in Cleveland and running Undercover Books and Records with my sister Pamela and brother Joel and our parents Earl and Sylvia, Joel and I drove to NYC one summer weekend for a record release party. The band with the new album was The Drongos, an ebullient New Zealand quartet. We were already fans of the outfit, and making it even better was that they were managed by book biz friends Mike Shatzkin and Martha Moran. Their debut album was feted, I think, somewhere around Irving Place, though I could be mistaken about the location. I do remember it was a great night, because the album was not only on hand to be celebrated, but of course the band too. The friendly foursome–Jean McAllister, guitar and keyboards; Stanley John Mitchell, drums; Richard Kennedy, guitar; and Tony McMaster, bass–wrote their own songs and played several of the ten tunes from their self-titled LP during the evening. Looking at the album sleeve today, I recall such great songs as “Eye of the Hurricane” and “Life of Crime.” “Non Citizen,” written by Mitchell, typified the uneasy world of a visitor living in a country’s shadows:
Living life as a non-citizen Living under the table, keep your profile low. Leaving friends landed in another time, Came looking hoping to find the stages set.
Stony faces sleeping in the subway And in the nights hiding in the clubs, they let it show. Swim or sink, winning or losing, No one said the city had to play a good clean game, I say: Deep down, where we live Life seems so absurd But we keep on making the best of the western world.
Today those lyrics read like an 80s rock ‘n roll version of Tom McCarthy’s splendid 2008 movie “The Visitor.” Even while singing sensitive lyrics like those, The Drongos were a damn fine rock band, superbly professional musicians, entertaining, and tons of fun to hear live.
That whole trip with my brother, and that summer night in particular, was a great time. I remember it all fondly, not least because Joel died suddenly in 2008. Soon after moving to NYC in ’85 I looked up Jean McAlister and Tony McMaster, who were married and by then had a young daughter, Carmen. I remember a golden day I shared with them and baby Carmen in Riverside Park. As is wont to happen with so many bands, circumstances spun them out of their collective orbit, which doesn’t diminish the great band they were for a good stretch of time.
I was reminded of all this tonight when I saw that Richard Kennedy is still playing music, living in the UK–has a terrific new video on Facebook of him playing guitar, pasted in above. H/t to Ira Nonkin who posted it on Facebook, and to Martha Moran, who brought it to my attention. So glad I still have my LP, so I could shoot the sleeve for this blog essay. The original album pictures were shot by photographer Leslie Fratkin, another old friend of Mike and Martha. For his part, Mike has also blogged about working with The Drongos. // more …. [Click ‘Continue Reading’ to see detail of album photo]
http://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.png00Philip Turnerhttp://philipsturner.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/GGB_Logo.pngPhilip Turner2012-03-22 19:10:082013-10-07 21:43:57My Love of Live Music in NYC–It All Began w/The Drongos in 1983
In this old photo I’m getting a hug from my brother Joel at a reception celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, circa May 26, 1964, which would’ve been Joel’s 13th birthday. I’m about 9 here. Looking at the image, I can almost remember the day.
Obits also ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Publishers Weekly, and Shelf Awareness.
