Novel Based on Nikola Tesla

UVM graduate, Samantha Hunt, has become an expert on Nikola Tesla.
She has written The Invention of Everything Else, a novel based on the life of the 'mad genius.'

Seven Days had a piece on her visit to the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne.

Hunt was mentioned in a recent New Yorker magazine article about the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla spent the last years of his long life.

I didn't get to Hunt's talk, but I did get to pick up a copy of her book later.

Public Radio's Studio 360 did a show on Tesla. There is a segment with Samantha Hunt reading from her book.

There is much interesting stuff at the Studio 360 page. For instance, Tesla invented radio well before Marconi built one that worked.

MetaFilter also has links to Tesla information.

Here is a transcription of a booklet and autobiography.

David Bonner's Revolutionizing Children's Music

I noted earlier that somewhat over a year ago I got an email from David Bonner, who was writing a history of children's records based around Horace Grenell. The book has been published by Scarecrow Press. I got a copy and it is well-written. It fills in a bunch of the details about the record business that I was not really aware of.

"About the same time (1951-1952), Grenell entered into the pressing plant business. In partnership with David Foxman (affiliated with the New York-based Raleigh pressing plant) and Norman Jacobowitz (engineer at Carnegie Hall Recording), he co-owned and managed the Abbey Record Manufacturing Company. Under the Abbey umbrella, Desto Music, Inc., existed as a music production company, with another Abbey-related company, Arco Music, Inc., operating as the official producer of Desto Records. Located in East Newark, New Jersey (and later moving to nearby Kearney), the plant pressed records for an eclectic assortment of independent labels, including Audio Fidelity, Elektra, Riverside, Roulette, and Westminster. Abbey, along with the RCA Victor Custom Record Division, pressed records also for CRG."
Bonner, 2007, Page 129


My memory of Abbey was that it existed in Jersey City well before Grenell got involved. Norm had two partners, Jascha Zayde, a staff pianist with WQXR (who died in 1999), and Joe Brodie, a dentist who did my dental work. I would take the bus into Manhattan to his office on Broadway above 180th. Norm chose the name Abbey because it came early in the alphabet. Someone looking for pressing services would call him first.

Norm always had playful business names. Sound Plastics was a triple pun -- a sound business on Long Island Sound that made plastic for the sound recording industry.

Martha Jacobowitz

I was looking for my cousin Martha Jacobowitz.
So I Googled the name. I got a list of people murdered on Kristallnacht:
http://www.kristalnacht.org/list/j.html
Lots of Jacobowitzes

Movin' Blues

The very first thing that happened in the new office was that I flushed my keys down the highly efficient toilet. They are already in Lake Champlain I have been informed.

Lost: Honda key, Kryptonite lock key (recently replaced due to recall), and new UHC door key. These are all replaceable.

Update: . The folks at Kryptonite have a replacement program for lost keys. You tell them the number, and they send you a duplicate key. It doesn't always work. Although these two keys have the same number, their configuration is different.

FAHC got me a replacement office key right away.

The Straw Market Rediscovered

Saul sent me a link to notes from the world premiere of The Straw Market, a play by William Jay Smith, the Writer in Residence at Hollins College in Roanoke, where I was pursuing a masters' degree in psychology. http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v5n1/gallery/smith_wj/synopsis.htm

The award winning poet Henry Taylor was a grad student in the creative writing program. He wrote the program notes.

David Jacobowitz, from Psychology, grew astonishingly from his initial uncertainty—“I don’t think I sing very well,” he said at an early meeting with Bill Smith—to the great energy with which he sold the songs he sang.

Saul & Eli will remember these lyrics:

Florence in the spring

Is such a lovely thing

It makes you want to sing—

Florence in the spring:

This is a great find. I'm going to play with it.

........

Bridges on the Arno—

In all the world there are no

Other rivers like the Arno!

Florence in the spring!

The play begins with the Cowboy singing a voice-over before the curtain opens. On opening night the microphone failed. I had to sing the introductory song way too loud for the mood.
If I had known that Stephen Spender and Catherine Ann Porter were in the audience I would have plotzed.

Moving Back to UHC

Another full circle is about to come around.

When I came to UVM in 1989, we were housed on the 6th floor of the Arnold Wing of the UHC campus.

Then we moved to the Trinity College campus after Trinity closed. We lived in the basement of Mann Hall, just below where Linda had had her office for years. We were there on 9/11/2001.

When UVM purchased Trinity in (date), we were moved to Delehanty Hall.

When we were moving in, the University decided that the asbestos deeply embedded in the floors needed to be removed. We think illegal aliens working for a Massachusetts company were responsible for cutting through a heating pipe and spilling propylene glycol on the floor above us. It ran down and ruined a couple of computers, including ones in our server room.

The most recent move was in February of 2004, to 80 Colchester Ave.










Now we are moving back to UHC, this time to the Joseph Wing of Degoesbriand on the third floor. On Friday we packed up everything and I went home.

Toddy Remembered

Paula Zelda Jacobowitz Rosenstein -- (1916 - 2007)

I spoke with Beth again today about how she and Judy were doing a week after their mom died.




Beth said they were completely busy with family stuff and projects that they had put off while taking care of Toddy. She had wanted to be with George ever since he died 12 years before:


I wanted to get information for my genealogy records. And I wanted to keep scanning in the photos in the unorganized box. Beth has three boxes. Let's get scanning.

I think this is Buddy, Toddy, and Norman at our wedding in 1976 in Burlington.