W2QKU

  Those were the call letters of my amateur radio station almost seventy years ago.  It was a modest affair, operated only by using Morse code—I  couldn't afford to build a voice transmitter, and in any event my mother and sister wouldn't have appreciated hearing my voice until the wee hours during which I usually operated the station.  I don't know how many thousands of times I tapped out those call letters over the two years that I was an active ham:  . _{- -}    . . _{- - -   - -} . _{-    -} . _-   . . _-

  My fascination with radio technology started when I was about 10 years old.  It was the equivalent then, I think, of falling in love with computer technology as a youngster today.  I started studying radio theory and building radio after radio as I learned new details.  I soon found out about ham radio, but by that time, late 1941, the U.S. had entered World War II, and amateur radio was shut down for the duration as a precaution against its use for espionage.

  By the end of the war, I was fully prepared both to take the test to get a ham license and to build my own station—actually a series of stations whose transmitters had ever more power.  I remember climbing to the top of the water tower on the roof of my ten-story apartment building to install one end of the most well-sited antenna I could—not a small feat considering my quaking knees and the length of the antenna, some 60 feet.

  Then came many late nights—after I had done my homework, but more importantly when transmission at the frequencies I used would be best.  At first, with my initial low-power transmitters, I was able to contact other hams only in surrounding areas.  Later—what excitement!—I was able to contact stations throughout all of the then 48 states and, mirabile dictu!, amateurs throughout the world.  In these days of the Internet, making international one-on-one contacts is so commonplace that it may be hard for young people to understand that then each new one was an accomplishment of some magnitude.

  It was a tedious procedure, especially given the slowness of Morse code: twenty words per minute was an excellent speed.  I would start by repeatedly tapping out "CQ de W2QKU" (CQ being international code derived from the English "seek you").  Then I would tune my receiver through neighboring frequencies to try to find a response—someone sending my call letters back to me followed by his or her own call letters—amidst the chatter of other stations and omnipresent static.  Or, of course, I would start by listening for others seeking a contact and respond to them.  After making contact, a Morse-code conversation would ensue, full of abbreviations like those used today in texting except that they were established by international agreement (the so-called "Q" codes).  Then both parties would confirm the contact by sending to the other their own custom-designed postcards; I soon had postcards from all over the world with resplendent stamps on them.

  At times I would deliver messages to neighbors—a free, custom radio-telegraph service in those days when long-distance telephone calls and telegrams, particularly international  ones, were very expensive.  In one case, I repeatedly relayed messages back and forth between a father in the pre-Castro Cuba of that time and his two daughters who lived but a few blocks from me in New York City.

  During the seven years of my radio hobby, until I went off to college, my cousins often made fun of me for having my head stuck in radio equipment all the time—the complete 1940s nerd.  But immersing myself in radios turned out to have been a worthwhile effort, for it was an introduction to a broad field of engineering that occupied all of my professional career. 

  Viva il nerdismo!

A Bum Rap

  Richard III may have gotten a bum rap.  Since his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, he has been almost universally vilified as a monstrous king—murderous, Machiavellian, deformed in mind and body.  Most of us have absorbed this judgment from Shakespeare's eponymous play, itself largely based on an earlier book attributed to Sir Thomas More.  The trouble is that history is written by the victors.  Richard was the last Plantagenet king, while More and Shakespeare wrote their politically correct accounts under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of the usurping Tudor line.

  So what?  Why in the world would I be interested in the rivalries of English royalty more than five centuries ago?  Two reasons.  First, the recent discovery and exhumation of Richard's remains created a splash in the newspapers (see New York Times article) and a fresh discussion of history's verdict on him.  Second, in a desperate search to find a good mystery novel to read, I found citations of Josephine Tey's 1951 book The Daughter of Time as first and fourth, respectively, on lists of the best 100 mystery books of all time by the British Crime Writers' Association and the Mystery Writers of America.  Tey was a writer of British police procedurals, not my favorite mystery genre, but such acclaim was hard to ignore.  So I bought the book after reading its synopsis on Amazon.com and finding to my surprise that the mystery it investigates is Richard III's bum rap.

  A little dynastic history is needed here.  When King Edward IV died in 1483, he left his two sons under the Protectorship of his brother, Richard.  The elder prince, 12-year-old Edward, ascended the throne as Edward V, but that was soon challenged.  Edward IV's marriage to Prince Edward's mother was declared by an act of Parliament to be invalid, as records showed that he was already married at the time to another woman.  The two princes were therefore illegitimate and not eligible for the throne.  Richard III—next in line—was anointed king.  He reigned for only two years until dying at Bosworth at the hands of forces under the Earl of Richmond.

  Richmond assumed the throne as Henry VII, the first Tudor king.  He had everything to gain from defaming the defeated Richard in order to shore up his own legitimacy as king, which was weak from the viewpoint of bloodlines.  (The closest he came was as the great-grandson of an illegitimate son of a younger son of a king.)  Aspersions were therefore retroactively cast at Richard, the most odious being the alleged murder of the two princes.  That is the crime indelibly etched in all our minds by Shakespeare's play.

  Tey uses the detective Alan Grant of a number of her mysteries as the protagonist in her book, who tries to unveil the truth about Richard.  I can do no better than quote from the Amazon.com synopsis:

"Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history.  Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world's most heinous villains—a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure?  Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England's throne?  Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes ..."

    In mulling over the evidence he acquires, Grant asks a bevy of trenchant questions.  Among them:

• If Richard was the fiend he was later portrayed to be, why do contemporary, pre-Tudor accounts paint him as a gentle noble, in touch with the people, a good administrator and a "good lord" with a "great heart," who often forgave his enemies.  Why was his great villainy discovered only after Henry VII's accession?

  • Why did the most vicious attacks on Richard occur even later, by those who had no first-hand knowledge of him—e.g., Thomas More, who was just five when Richard ascended the throne and seven when he died?

• The Little Princes disappeared from view only some time after they had been delegitimized and Richard III crowned.  Since they were by then no threat to his ascension to the throne, what motive could Richard have had in having them murdered, especially since he forgave so many actual enemies and maintained an ongoing friendly association with their mother?

• Why would Henry VII, in drawing up a Bill of Attainder against Richard III immediately after being crowned in 1485, list in it any number of Richard's purported crimes, but not mention the most heinous, the murder of the Little Princes, which he only later alleged?  Does this mean that he knew they were still alive at the time he started impugning Richard's reputation?

• Soon afterward, Henry VII married the Little Princes' sister.  He had the delegitimizing act of Parliament rescinded, presumably in order to re-legitimize her and strengthen his own claim to the throne.  But that also re-legitimized the Princes and restored their succession to the throne, thus challenging Henry's own hold on it. Did Henry therefore know that they were by that later date dead, and therefore posed no threat?  In fact, did he have a hand in their death? 

• Why was Sir James Tyrrel—who was said to confess in 1502 to the Princes' murder—given a general pardon by Henry VII in June 1486 and then an unheard-of second general pardon a month later?  For what crimes?  Had he been Henry VII's agent in the Princes' deaths?

  Grant, using the police procedures of Scotland Yard, makes a case that (1) Richard III was scapegoated by the Tudors and their supporters for all sorts of malefactions in order to strengthen the weak Tudor title to the throne, and (2) the disappearance and presumed murder of the Princes was likely Henry VII's doing.  In my mind, it is a strong case.  But the pall over Richard III was heavily laid by More and Shakespeare, and only after the Stuarts replaced the Tudors as monarchs of England in the early 17^th century did some historians dare try to remove the stain, not very successfully.  The controversy continues to this day.  Tey, although not a historian, did much to tilt the balance more in Richard III's favor.  

  Interesting history.  I myself wouldn't list The Daughter of Time among the top 100 mystery novels, but it was certainly a captivating read.

Pan's Pipes

  For some weeks, writing this blog has steered me into remembrances of times long past.  I guess that's what happens when old geezers get even older—they frequently fall into sepia-toned memories, if they are lucky enough to have memories at all. 

  For example, while writing in [1] about heirloom fruits and vegetables, I found myself in a sentimental reverie about picking wild berries in a summer camp I went to in the 1930s—and wrote about that in [2].  Again, when pondering last week the transition from mythology to historicity in [3], I was nostalgically transported back to the summer of 1962, leading me to describe my stunning experience when I came upon the palace of Agamemnon, where mythology and history intersect.  In turn, describing that brush with antiquity reminded me of a mystical contact I had the same summer with Pan, the ancient Greek god of the wild, of shepherds and of rustic music.  Here's how it happened. 

  For the first time, that summer over fifty years ago, I had both the opportunity and money to travel widely, without any immediate objective.  I was at the beginning of my professorial career at UC Berkeley and still a bachelor—I hadn't yet met Helen.  Since I was to attend a technical conference in Brussels at the end of the summer, I decided to roam Europe and the Near East for two months before it, with no particular itinerary in mind.

  I started in Paris, wanting to renew my two brief stops there ten years previously, en route to and from a summer job in Britain [4].  From Paris, I wandered by car south-easterly in France almost at random, stopping where the spirit took me.  One of those places was Annecy, where I won about $500 at a casino.  Flush with that windfall, I headed to the Côte d'Azur, where I parted with much of my loot by staying at the Hotel Negresco in Nice, a Belle Époque watering spot that was then still singular in its luxury.

  After that touch of indolence, I resumed wandering, crossing northern Italy to Venice, then taking a boat down the Adriatic and through the Corinth Canal to Piraeus, the port of Athens.  The smog and bustle of Athens offended me, so I struck out by car for the Peleponnesus, where I had the startling encounter with the ghost of Agamemnon mentioned above.  Now besotted with antiquity, I decided to go to Rhodes, an island in the Aegean just off the coast of Turkey where most of the cultures of the ancient world intersected.  It is filled with relics of successive invaders, and once was the site of the Colossus, a 100-foot-tall bronze statue that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world until it was destroyed by an earthquake in the third century BCE.  

  The pull of antiquity led me to drive to the ancient acropolis at Lindos, taking me across a good part of the island.  It was a very hot day, so I stopped at an isolated, rustic taverna to have a bite to eat and a carafe of wine.  That's when it happened.  After eating, I lay down under a tree for a brief doze before driving on.  The combination of the wine and the sun flashing on the fluttering leaves above me must have been hypnotic, for I went into an other-worldly state.  I will swear to this day that I heard the pipes of Pan; I could almost see him.  For the only time in my life I completely knew—at the level of my soul, not in some intellectual rationalization—what it felt like to be possessed by a god.  I understood why the ancients invented so many gods to enrich their existence.  It was mind-bending.  

  That all seems so silly and romantic now, a half century later, that I hesitate to write about it.  Yet it happened, and it brought me infinitely closer to the antiquity on which I was feasting.  I might even say that it is the one truly religious experience I've ever had, although in retrospect I suppose that it was merely psychedelic.  The rest of my summer—further eastward to Israel and then a return to Western Europe and my conference—was anticlimactic.

The Cusp of History

  I've always been fascinated by the intersection of mythology and history—the transition from fables having little relationship with reality to narratives having some reasonable foundation in fact.  The crossover from one regime to the other seems to be related to the technology of writing.  Primitive cuneiform writing on clay and stone goes back more than 5000 years.  From its remnants we have gained insight into very ancient civilizations, particularly their gods and monarchs, but not into many historical events.  I believe that true historicity, at least in the West, came about during a blurry era spanning the year 1000 BCE, as alphabetic writing on scrolls gained currency.  At the beginning of that era, folk lore and bardic tales, still largely mythic, were mostly passed down orally, but soon were being committed to scrolls.  By the era's end, contemporaneous historical accounts began to appear in scroll writing, and the proportion of myth dropped to an acceptable level.  Two epic stories illustrate the transition: one from 12^th-century BCE Greece, the other from 10^th century BCE Israel.

***

The Trojan War

  The early part of the transition period encompassed the Trojan War of Greek lore.  You may remember the story: Eris, the goddess of strife, brought a golden apple to a banquet of the gods, inscribed "to the fairest."  It was claimed by the goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite.  Zeus, married to Hera, wisely recused himself from deciding among them, asking Paris, Prince of Troy, to do so.  Each offered Paris a bribe; he accepted Aphrodite's, who offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus and a daughter of Zeus.  Paris claimed his prize by abducting Helen, whom Aphrodite had arranged to be struck with an arrow from Eros just before seeing him, so that she would fall in love with him.  Paris brought Helen to Troy.

  Menelaus enlisted his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, to retrieve Helen.  Agamemnon gathered a fleet of 1200 ships from all over Greece to invade Troy.  In order to overcome being becalmed by an angry goddess, he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.  The flotilla's army subsequently laid siege to Troy and a ten-year war ensued, ending with the complete destruction of the city.

  Most of the story is pure myth.  Still, ancient Greeks believed that the war actually happened, dating it to around 1200 BCE.  A place in northwestern Turkey that archaeologists have explored for over a century has been shown to be the site of a large city destroyed by fire around 1190 BCE; it is conjectured to be Troy. 

  Homer's epic poem, the Iliad, pivots on the final weeks of the war.  It was composed by him in the eighth century BCE from bardic tradition and soon thereafter committed to writing.  So here is an epic in Western lore that is enmeshed early in the transition from mythology to history, containing more of the former than the latter.

  I was forcefully reminded of this particular intersection of the mythic with reality when I was driving in the Peleponnesus in 1962.  Quite unexpectedly, I came across the remains of the palace of Agamemnon, his queen Clytemnestra, and their children Iphigenia, Electra, Orestes and Chrysothemis—all characters in ancient Greek drama whom I had theretofore taken to be purely mythological.  The immediacy of being in the presence of such a mélange of myth and history took my breath away.

King David

  At about the same time, Israel's folk lore also passed from the mist of myth to something like fact-based fiction.  The segue occurs gradually in the Old Testament.  By the end of the Pentateuch, when Moses has delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to within sight of the Promised Land, the mythical tales of the Creation and the Patriarchs have been succeeded by something resembling history.  Moses probably lived around 1300 BCE, not more than a century or so before the Trojan War.  The setting down of the Pentateuch into an early written Hebrew might have begun a century or two afterwards, but it was redacted into its present form by the so-called Deuteronomists in the late 7^th century BCE.  

  Later in the Bible, we come across King David, who purportedly lived in the late 11^th and early 10^th century BCE.  (Some scholars deny that he was a real figure, likening him more to King Arthur.  No contemporary remnants of his reign, like Agamemnon's palace, exist.)  His story is such a compelling example of early historical fiction that Robert Alter—a professor at the University of California (Berkeley)—has published a heavily-annotated, beautiful new translation of it from the Hebrew, representing it as an early novel.  Called simply The David Story, it starts at I Samuel with the birth of Samuel and ends with the death of David at the beginning of I Kings.  The original text was probably written during the late 10^th century BCE and was later edited by the Deuteronomists, who inserted "theologically correct" detritus into it.

  The David Story grippingly follows the arc of David's life from the musically talented youth who slew Goliath; through his rise to the command of King Saul's armies, succession to Saul's throne, unification of Judah with Israel, and establishment of its united capital in Jerusalem; to his gradual deterioration from a hero of the people to a Machiavellian figure; and finally to his embittered death after giving his son Solomon what Alter calls a "last will and testament worthy of a dying Mafia capo."  While the story is still replete with mythology—mostly conversations with and edicts from God—it indeed has all the hallmarks of a good novel, a book centered on a single character who is transformed by life's vicissitudes from an admirable youth to a flawed, even contemptible old man.  Here is a late transition-era chronicle, mostly history with an overlay of myth.

***

 

  Why have I called this posting "The Cusp of History"?  After all, a cusp is normally a discrete point separating two very different regimes, not a blurry, many-centuries-long transition.  I have taken a very long view.  During the 200,000-year epoch of Homo sapiens, the period in which anything like civilization existed is only 10,000 years, and the transition to historicity took only a few hundred of them.   That's a mere blip in time,  a cusp of amazingly short duration.    It was coincident with the burgeoning use of writing using the then-new technology of sheepskin or papyrus scrolls.  In that sense, it was akin to the decades-long cusp of the digital-writing explosion of our own Information Age. 

Mooween

  As I was writing about berries in last week's posting on heirloom fruits and vegetables, I was thrown back three quarters of a century.  During the latter part of the 1930s, I spent five summers at Camp Mooween in Connecticut.  ("Mooween" was said to be a Mohegan word meaning "bear.")  It was a boys' camp sited on a large lake.  Often on Sunday mornings we campers were allowed to paddle canoes along the lakeshore, picking berries from overhanging bushes.  I don't remember whether they were blueberries or huckleberries, but they came from wild bushes and thus qualified as heirlooms.  We would get empty #10 cans from the kitchen and fill them with berries, each full can containing 4-5 pounds of plump fruit—what hadn't gotten into our bellies first.  If we returned to the kitchen by noon, we would have scrumptious berry pies for dessert at dinner.

  Thinking of berry picking at Camp Mooween opened a floodgate of memories.  I was fortunate to escape New York City during July and August for all those years.  Remember, almost no one had air conditioning then, so the summer months could convert dwellings into infernos.  The only relief could be to go to an air-conditioned movie theater, public swimming pool or a beach, all of which were forbidden to me during the polio season, which peaked in the summer months—indeed they were often closed by the authorities for that reason.

  Leaving home for two months was not an easy thing for a child younger than ten; I remember crying each time in the earlier years as I was delivered to the camp counselors at the railroad station.  We boarded a train to Norwich, CT, and there transferred to buses to the camp, which was near the hamlet of Gilman, about 20 miles north of New London.  The facilities were rustic—open-air cabins with outhouses behind them—but embedded in countryside that even a city boy knew was spectacularly beautiful.  We often carried our cots onto the central campus around which the cabins were arrayed and slept outdoors entirely, under a canopy of stars unlike any a city boy would ever normally see.  On one such occasion in 1937, there was a huge auroral display, which I remember (I think correctly) as white "searchlights" emanating from a point in the north, from which alternating bright red and green arcs swept upward.

  Many more memories of those idyllic summers have stuck with me:

• The camp's owner and director, "Cap" Girden, had a rare rapport with children that made us all adore him.  His dog, a Doberman pinscher—normally an attack dog—had been trained not to attack a child who might seem to threaten Cap, but to push Cap away from the child; it was thus a worthy mascot for a children's camp.  Cap had an old truck of 1920s vintage, named Bedelia, with wooden benches mounted on its flatbed (no seat belts then!), using which he would sometimes drive a group of campers to Gilman for an ice-cream treat.  We never saw gasoline being put into it, and Cap had us convinced that it ran on water.

• Each summer, there was a week-long "war" in which the camp was divided into two factions, the Brown and the Tan.  It would be fought over some nonsensical question like whether toilet paper should spool from the top or bottom of the roll, or whether the left or right shoe should be laced first.  The battles were athletic contests.  Not being very athletic, I didn't fare well in them, often being the last picked when teams were chosen.  In softball, I was usually placed in right field, to which the ball was seldom hit.  When it was, my attention was usually far away, so I would miss it.

• There was a mandatory swimming test consisting of twenty laps to the raft and back—about a mile.  I remember that each camper attempting it (including scrawny me) would be cheered by his friends during the last few laps with screams of "S. A. T. F.!"—"Strong at the finish!"  To this day, I find myself chanting that mantra to myself when engaged in a tiring task.

• We frequently had campfires at night, complete with ghost stories and songs.  Some of the songs were camp staples ("When the day is done/There's a setting sun/And the tribe of Mooween meets …").  Others were introduced each year by camp counselors, who were mostly college students.  I still remember many of those, particularly "Waltzing Matilda," full of Aussie argot like swagman, billabong, coolibah tree, jumbuck, etc.  Another was a socialist song of the day, "Bandiera Rossa" ("Red Flag").  Despite its being in a foreign language, I remember bellowing out lines containing such stridencies as "Avanti popolo!", "Bandiera rossa trionferà!", and "Viva il socialismo e la libertà!"  ("Onward people!", "The red flag will triumph!", "Long live socialism and liberty!").  I had no idea what the words meant, but thoroughly enjoyed singing them.  The counselors must have reveled in teaching them to us middle-class children.  I do hope that none of them was caught—as were so many unfortunates—in the hysterics of McCarthyism a decade and a half later because of whatever socialist/communist enthusiasms they might have had during their college years.

  At the last night's campfire, I would silently weep at the thought of leaving camp at the end of another lovely summer.  I weep a bit now to find that only remnants of Mooween still exist—foundations of some of the cabins and the dining hall—but am glad that they and the lake are part of Mooween State Park, rather than having become just another housing development.  If I am ever again in that part of Connecticut, I will visit it, cherishing my memories.