If you, as I do, spend too much time on social media, you’ll see a lot of really depressing videos and posts — tradwives with their eight children telling us all to stay home and rely completely on a man (hello, 1950s!), porn bots who jump on every post within seconds, women making the most terrible emotional choices with the men they date, marry and have kids with.
It’s easy to despair.
So the women I bump into on-line who inspire me are a breath of badly needed bravery and sass.
For me, bravery shows up in many ways: political, spiritual, intellectual, physical.
A few of them:
Elizabeth Tucker and Cole Brauer, sailing from Spain to Australia, sending plenty of videos of themselves as they dance, exercise, keep the rig safe and strong and deal with broken and malfunctioning machinery like the boat’s autopilot (!), recovering from a middle of the night BOOM up against something… a whale? a floating container? that sent them back to land on Cape Verde to make repairs. I’ve been sailing since I was 12, but never had the guts to go offshore, let alone into the most difficult seas on the planet, the Southern Ocean. The women deal with intense winds — 48 knots — reefing the mainsail as needed to reduce sail area. They thrive on it all, and I love their bright bright red nail polish and the small teddy bear on Cole’s bunk.
Their joy is so much fun! On New Year’s (how????) they hung a disco ball from the boom, sprayed one another with champagne — dancing on deck in (!) gorgeous dresses. And yet…there’s a video of Cole giving herself an IV after a week with a stomach bug. BADASS.
You’ll gain a totally new appreciation of the ocean and its challenges and surprises — like the red dust that settled into the folds of their sails — from the Sahara desert!
Sailing is not a sport for the nervous or ill-prepared and these two women are so inspiring to watch and to listen to. Maneuvering on slippery decks in strong winds or rain makes it an even more intensely physical sport, one very male dominated, so their voyage is well worth watching if you’re seeking some inspo! As Tucker said in one of their videos: “I’m both excited and nervous to experience the huge waves. I’m sure there’s days I’m going to be absolutely terrified…in the Southern Ocean we’re facing five weeks of endurance.”
Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell, formerly of The New York Times (where she worked with my husband), is a fiery, feisty rarity among the pathetically craven mainstream press. She’s a regular on Abby Phillips’ CNN show and doesn’t hesitate to bite back fast and hard on the absolute right-wing bullshit spewed at that table.
I love love love the wit and humor of Elle Cordova, 36, whose erudition is deep yet playful. Whether she’s singing or talking or just being her lovely self, I enjoy everything she posts.
The bishop of the National Cathedral, called out with utter hatred on social media for daring to challenge Trump, for being a woman, for being a preacher, for being a woman preacher — Mariann Edgar Budde.
The late Cecile Richards, who very recently died, and who for years ran Planned Parenthood, struck down far too young with the worst brain tumor one can get. Her mother, Anne Richards, was a legendary political leader as well.
Mel Robbins, 56, whose candor I find a refreshing change from a lot of woo-woo advice.
American legislator Jasmine Crockett, who is ferocious.
Gymnast Simone Biles, who changed gymnastics forever.
Greta Thunberg.
Malala Yousafzai.
I asked friends for their suggestions and got:
Beyonce
Jane Goodall
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
Two legendary BBC reporters, Orla Guerin and Lyse Doucet
Then there are so many cool women of the past, like:
Oh, you know, Elizabeth I.
Marie Curie, winner of two Nobel prizes.
Joan of Arc, of course.
Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Frances Perkins, the first U.S. secretary of labor
So often, we hear the word “leader” in a religious or political context, usually someone in authority with lots of power over lots of people, often an older white man.
I think of a leader very differently, someone like the late Martin Luther King, who we all know led a social justice movement or Cesar Chavez, working to better the life of farmworkers. Someone who inspires others to follow their lead and urges others to do so as well — for the greater good.
To me, the most compelling leaders see a formerly invisible or unfilled need and step up to help others with it.
One of my journalism idols is Nobel winner Maria Ressa, co-winner of the 2021 Peace Prize. I find her courage and commitment to journalism so inspiring.
I belong to several online writers’ groups, some of which are mutually helpful, generous and supportive — and some which have torn apart in rage and bitterness. Such is social media, sometimes not so social!
But one member of one group has created an online meeting twice a month where we gather to talk about money: how to make more, how to save more, how to ask for more, how to invest. We’re all freelancers, so we also have precarity in common when it comes to incomes that often arrive later than wanted and needed. I’ve been struck by the fact only women show up, even though it’s open to anyone in that larger group. Men have no money issues? Or maybe no one dares admit to having any.
I’m so grateful to her for thinking this up and making it a welcoming hour we all look forward to. By doing so, she has also created community, something so lacking for many of us now.
That’s leadership in my book!
Selfishly, I also took the lead last year in creating a new $1,000 annual award at my Toronto high school for creativity. That’s a big number for me to commit to, but it’s also a good chunk of change for many teenagers. What happened next moved me and surprised me; four others from my graduating class immediately stepped up and offered to share that cost, made easy thanks to a well-designed website by the Toronto District School Board, and the help of the school’s guidance counselor and teachers, who nominate the finalists.
I wrote about it for my old newspaper, called it microphilanthropy, and it prompted others to think of doing the same.
Like every immigrant, I moved to the U.S., at 30, filled with hope and optimism for my new future in a country that spends a lot of energy telling the world — and its citizens — that it’s a “city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom with “liberty for all.”
As if.
In the decades since I chose the U.S. — and especially since the election of Donald Trump, unleashing a hatred and racism and ignorance that stuns many worldwide — I’ve become less and less enamored of the shiny rhetoric. The current mood towards immigrants (always a recurring theme here), towards women (back to the kitchen!) and, always, towards non-white Amerians, is becoming more hateful and louder every day.
State after state is moving to restrict access to abortion, trying to criminalize every effort a woman — or teenage girl — makes to control her own body. How dare she! How dare we!
Then there are “tradwives”, a wildly popular genre on social media — women, often white, thin, affluent — who pride themselves on having a lot of children and relying solely on their husbands for economic support.
Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.
The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.
Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.
I came of age during second-wave feminism, Ms. magazine and Helen Reddy chanting “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers to be ignore!” I grew up in Canada, where abortion has long been readily available legally. I was stunned when I moved to New York and began job hunting in Manhattan in media, what sexist bullshit women were putting up with! I had lunch with a married very senior editor at Newsweek — then a dream job for me — who leaned close and said “I can’t smell your perfume.”
Gross.
I was lucky enough to have parents who never once suggested marriage and motherhood were the only proper uses of my body and intelligence. I was out of the family home at 19, living alone in a tiny apartment, and managing all my own money. As readers here know, I’m ferociously independent in many ways.
I also learned the hard way the real price of deliberate ignorance when my first husband walked out the door for good after barely two years of marriage and quickly married a colleague. I didn’t even know when the mortgage was due — he walked on June 15th…now I know!
She sits in a weirdly expensive all-beige kitchen with costly appliances, insisting she’s just a mom like every other decent American, and talks in a breathy little voice — fundi baby — that, apparently, is a powerful dog whistle to any girl or woman raised in an evangelical Christian household — taught to model submission and docility to men.
An explanation, from a Substack by Jess Piper:
I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.
I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.
Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.
It’s hard for me to fathom women who willingly make this choice and keep making it. Call me judgmental and I’m fine with it. Relying solely on a man’s benevolence can leave women abused, homeless and broke. And it does.
No, thanks.
I’m weary of this country’s relentless push to keep women submissive to male power and influence.
This, just as France enshrines abortion in its Constitution.
I fell in love with the city on my first visit, solo, in my mid-20s and was even interviewed for a job there, which I decided I didn’t want. I’ve been there four times, most recently in June 2022. It has such elegance.
A good friend and much respected fellow Canadian journalist in the States has just published “Oldest San Francisco,” a fascinating dive into the city and its history. He lists 68 cool spots, and admits it was hard to choose.
Three of my favorite are Levi Strauss and Co. (1879), Tadich Grill (1849), where I’ve eaten and the oldest Recording Studio (1969) where legendary musicians — CCR! — came and laid down tracks.
If you love the city, or are just curious about it, this is a fun book, and nice holiday gift!
Here’s my Q and A with the author, Alec Scott.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am, like Caitlin, a Canadian. Take One, career-wise, was the law. I practised litigation in Toronto for a few years, libel and slander, freedom of expression. One of our clients was the Globe and Mail (Canada’s national newspaper.) I edited my high school paper, and worked on my university’s daily ands was a stringer for the other Globe, the Boston Globe. I realized I wasn’t happy giving legal advice to journalists, but wanted to be back in the fray, writing and reporting. My journalist friends said I was crazy — some of them wanted to go the other direction. I did not think I’d have kids, so I decided to try the riskier business of journalism. I didn’t realize quite how that industry was circling the drain, but still, I never looked back. The people in my first media job, fact-checking at the city magazine Toronto Life, were so categorically my people, story-tellers, rakish, clever people who tried to enrich the cityscape with good, sometimes riveting, sometimes amusing stories. Arts and culture, my core interest as a writer, was central to the magazine’s mission.
How did you end up in San Francisco/area? How long have you been there?
My then boyfriend, now husband, David, a tech-savvy guy, got a job offer down here in 2008, and I left the CBC to come down here, trying to cobble together enough good work. I’ve since written for the Guardian, LA Times, Sunset, the Smithsonian Magazine, and taught writing at Stanford. In COVID, I completed a project I’d long slaved over, a first novel — I’d taken chapters of it to Banff and Bread Loaf, worried over it, and work hard on it for years. This book, phew, was a nice break from the intensity of that slightly autobiographical piece, and built on my training at Toronto Life, trying to tell stories that speak to a city’s DNA. A different city, but same idea.
What do you enjoy most about living there — especially since San Francisco’s woes have been much in the news (homelessness, high rents, etc)?
I’ve loved SF since I first visited it, coming to see a college friend. She had a family crisis and left me on my own with the use of a powder-blue Volkswagen bug. It didn’t have great brakes, but still, to be alone with this city … I went to the Japanese Tea Garden. It was so permissive relative to where I grew up, (a small town in Southern Ontario). I went to a nude beach. Though straight-laced, I knew I wasn’t straight, and some time in the Castro, the rainbow flag waving above it, helped convince me the time had come to come out. I love that the city is sui generis, its own thing. If blindfolded, you could be dropped in SF, and know that was where you’d landed. I like the old and deep civil rights tradition here. The book speaks of the city’s longtime innovation in social services, focusing on things introduced here, then spread across the U.S. and abroad: the nation’s first senior center and non-sectarian free health clinic, (the Haight-Ashbury clinic, introduced to help care for the collateral damange of the so-called Summer of Love), the world’s first community-run suicide hotline. The latter was introduced by this personal hero of mine, Bernard Mayes, an English transplant who reported on out-there San Francisco for the BBC, was a priest, helped found NPR. And also, worried about the city’s draw for the suicidal, the Golden Gate Bridge a magnet. He couldn’t find a home for the fledgline org, until he found a landlord who’d once tried to take his life, showing Mayes the scars on his wrists.
What do you like least?
The expense is really prohibitive for creatives, and the cost of living here has gutted many old, storied communities. I wanted to write about some of the old black-owned businesses in the Fillmore. But none have remained here — none of the storied barbershops or jazz clubs. As I wrote this, the oldest African-American bookstore in the US, Marcus Books, moved from its longtime home in SF across the Bay to Oakland.
SF has this amazing old art school, the oldest West of the Mississippi, the Art Institute.It is one of the world’s great schools, graduating generations of top-tier talents — Annie Liebowitz learned to photograph here, Diego Rivera covered a wall with an extraordinary mural, meditating on artist and the city. Anyway, they stopped offering classes this year, because they were out of money — also students how could they afford to live in this city while they learned? Some potential good news is that a group of investors, lead by Laurene Jobs (widow of Steve), are in talks to potentially save the storied old school. In a city built on creativity, I hope they don’t let this school fail. (Also a beautiful building, one half brutalist, the other half with a campanile like an Italian cloister — the combination, somehow working.)
What was the most challenging part of writing the book? What did you (reluctantly) have to leave out?
COVID was tough, and also trying to keep my own COVID-augmented craziness in control! There were so many things I didn’t have space for — the oldest Italian restaurant (Fior D’Italia), oldest fishing club (the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club), oldest public children’s playground (the Sharon Quarters in Golden Gate Park).
What most surprised you?
People think of San Francisco as progressive, and, in an American context, they’re often right to do so. But so many of the city’s old clubs and institutions only recently started admitting women. The old rowing and swimming club, the South End had to be threatened with litigation before it would do so — with typical SF perversity, it’s located at the northern tip of the city. The oldest German beerhall didn’t want to let ladies lunch there — and refused to serve a woman who then helped run the civil liberties association out here. Big mistake. The proprietor felt he’d have to change the menu for women! The country’s oldest athletic club, the Olympic, also balked at including women as full members. It surprised me that these changes were so recent — and so acrimonious.
What will most surprise readers?
I don’t know. One thing I liked was the story of how Levi Strauss jeans conquered the world. Many people wrongly believe the German-Jewish immigrant made the first prototype jeans from ship sails, many of them having sailed here during the Gold Rush, abandoned on the docks by frenzied fortune seekers. The truth is a miner kept wearing out his trousers and his tailor put some metal studs in them — they proved more durable — and the tailor asked SF-based merchant to go into partnership on them. The jeans got popuar in the East, when some New York society people went to dude ranches in the West — a thing in the 20s and 30s. What interested me was the historian’s observation that it was one of the rare instances in fashion where the trends went from the working class up, from the West East, not from Paris, Milan and New York, not from fancy folk down, but the other direction. She also had a good story about the introduction of bell bottoms, the de rigueur concert wear in the 1960s.
Also, speaking of bell bottomss, I loved hearing about certain artists laying down the soundtrack of the 1960s and 70s in a small studio in the Tenderloin. Grace Slick asking, musically, with power, Don’t You Want Somebody to Love? Crosby Stills Nash and Young recording Teach Your Children Well. Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Carlos Santana and the Pointer Sisters recording songs I listened to on my AM radio in Canada — “Fire, your kisses are like fire.” I am a down-to-earth guy, but I had chills in those rooms.
If I haven’t fled the computer and apartment and town every three or four months, I get restless!
So a quick and easy choice was the 3-4 hour drive northeast to Newport, RI, a town I hadn’t been to in decades, since a friend in a town near it loaned us her house while she was away for a week. She has long since moved away, but at a writing conference last year I met a fun young woman, a fellow writer, who spoke on a panel and with whom I later had coffee when she came to NY from Newport.
I found a very cheap and funky B and B right in town, and she and I hung out. Perfect weekend!
I was also very lucky to be there in the off season so I was able to park my car for three full days, at no cost, a block away on the street and enjoyed uncrowded tourism as the place is truly mobbed in the summer, especially with the jazz festival and folk festival.
Friday night we splurged on dinner at The White Horse, the oldest restaurant (1673) continuously operating in the U.S., and a building of tremendous history. The meal was great and the surroundings lovely.
This interactive game was amazing! It even uses a real wooden tiller to “steer.”
It can happen!
Saturday I went to the new sailing museum, which — as a sailor from childhood — I loved! It has fantastic interactive exhibits I completely enjoyed, a cut-open J24, a classic boat, examples of sail materials, great action videos, trophies, fab photos. I had a great pizza across the street and wandered Thames Street, (there pronounced to rhyme with James), lined with all sorts of shops. I bought two small lovely vases by a local potter and that evening sat at the bar at the Red Parrot, watching the busiest bartender ever manage his job with grace and calm.
Newport, as some of you know, has some extraordinary mansions — known as “cottages”, built by the country’s wealthiest. People love to tour them, but I was more intrigued, literally walking around the block from my lodgings, by row after row of elegant 18th c houses. I love history and architecture and the late 1700s is one of my favorite periods of design, so this was heaven!
I’m usually not easily moved emotionally by many official sights and monuments, but I was so struck by the humanity and intimacy of seeing the church where her new life began — and gave her barely a decade of joy and marriage and young children before being brutally widowed in 1963. Like everyone who has married in a church (as I have twice), there’s such a moment of excitement and nerves and anticipation as you stand at that front door and walk down the aisle to take your vows and begin a wholly new life. I could really feel it there.
That’s the spire of St. Mary’s in the background
Sunday morning I loved breakfast, again, around the corner, at Franklin Spa — opening hours 6 am to 1pm — and watched it filling up with locals and regulars. My friend picked me up and we drove to Tiverton Four Corners, to see a glamorous new cafe and two adjacent shops, Groundswell. So fun! On offer were glorious teas from French maker Mariage Freres and some of the yummiest pastries ever — including this astounding thing we had never seen before and LOVED. Basically a brioche full of whipped cream, called a maritozzi.
Soooooooo good!
The spring sun was warm but the wind bitter; my friend very thoughtfully brought two thick blankets which we wrapped around our legs as we sat in Adirondack chairs around a propane firepit.
We looked at the gorgeous tableware and aprons and condiments for sale but I only bought some tea and a jar of ginger and jam.
We dined at The Clark Cooke House, which was wonderful — more oysters! My friends were very generous and used a gift certificate so it was free. I was so grateful to be so welcomed and hosted and shown around.
Monday morning was a visit to a place I’ve been buying from for many years, Fabric Connection, mostly to say hello to the staff. They have an amazing array of gorgeous fabrics and pillows.
I made a final quick stop at the beach — to sniff the ocean and grab a shell! — but the wind was sooooo bitterly cold.
It’s an amazing story — and now a new book that took 14 years to produce: The Angel Makers tells the incredible and unlikely story of a tiny, remote Hungarian village where, in the early 1920s, a lot of men (and some babies) kept dying, even if previously young and healthy.
It was the work of Aunt Suzy, the village midwife, and her potion — arsenic derived from soaking flypaper — delivered to local women who wanted freedom from their drunk, abusive, unfaithful husbands or from trying to sustain an infant with no money to do so.
Patti, a much admired and highly adventurous friend of many years, and a career journalist, re-discovered the story and has written a terrific book.
“From seed to fruit, this book took 14 years,” she told me. “Eight of those years were full-on research and writing. It was just me and the story—just the two of us —and that was a somewhat lonely relationship. To finally have it completed and have others be able to read it is a thrill beyond measure.”
Tell us a bit about you and why/where/how you first became a journalist? What about it appealed to you?
I started at 19 as an obit writer at the St Pete Times (now Tampa Bay Times).
I got the bug much earlier than that, though. My older brother was an illustrator at the Virginian Pilot, and for my 13th birthday he gave me a tour of the paper— the newsroom, the pressroom—we went all over that building and I was enthralled with every square inch of it. I can still hear the teletype, the typewriters, the ringing telephones. I can still see the enormous vats of ink. From then on, I was hooked. When I think back, it really was life changing, even at such a young age. It had a profound effect on me. Thanks, Steve!
After working in the States, how and why did you end up living in an Austrian village?
A few years before I moved to Europe, I had gotten a Knight International Press Fellowship, which sends reporters to struggling or so-called emerging democracies to help fellow reporters improve their skills, working conditions, etc. It was like a journalism Peace Corps. My assignment was for Central and Eastern Europe. I loved the work and ended up moving abroad to do it full time in January 2000. I first lived in Bratislava, Slovakia, then moved across the border into Austria.
For how long?
I came back to the USA in 2016.
What sort of work were you doing then?
It was a range of duties, and after the Fellowship it was mostly contracted assignments with non-profits. I worked inside newsrooms with journalists, I taught university courses, I lead workshops. I did a lot of visual journalism, which included a lot of newspaper and magazine redesigns. I worked on free press issues in places like Ukraine and Moldova, and on occasion, worked with ambassadors, as well (one such meeting was with the ambassador to Macedonia: “Let’s put our heads together and figure out how to repair the tv tower that has been shot out by Albanian rebels”).
When I wasn’t doing such media training work, I was freelancing.
Tell us how you stumbled across this amazing story in the first place.
I was bumbling down the backroads of the Internet one afternoon and bumped into a short piece about this strange village in Hungary…
Did you know right away this was a good book topic? Why? How?
I had no intention of writing a book about it. I thought it would just be an article and I’d move on to the next article. But something stayed with me. I kept bringing it up to friends, and in my spare time rooting around for ever more info. After a few years, I thought, hmmm, maybe there is a book here…
Tell us about finding your agent/selling the book
In my case, it all came down to kismet.
Out of the blue, I got an email from an old colleague from my Washingon, DC days. We hadn’t been in contact in at least a dozen years. I was delighted to hear from him. We chatted back and forth (email), catching up, and I told him about the book idea—at that point I was putting finishing touches on the proposal. He took a look at my website and came back to me to ask why, in God’s name, had I not included any info about the book! Seemed like a no brainer to him, and of course he was right. I went straight to the site and added it. Not four hours later, what popped into my Inbox? An email from an agent. It turns out, he had just read a piece I had written for the Smithsonian—my first for them—which had come out the day before. He had gone to my website to find out more about me and saw the info about the book. “I’d love to take a look at your proposal.”
He turned out to be absolutely the right agent for me.
That 24 hours—It was an inexplicable alignment of stars.
What was the first step in getting started on it?
There were many steps being taken at the same time, but the most critical was to find an assistant. I found a fantastic man—a historian specializing in the region who was fluent in English. There were a few fails before I found him.
What were the most difficult/challenging things about researching it?
This wasn’t challenging, per se, but it took some time and work to understand Hungary. To fully learn, for example, about Hungary’s part in WWI and the disastrous aftermath—the Communist takeover and the Romanian war. That’s not something that can be skimmed over. You have to dig deep. In the book, the war, et. al., are just a backdrop, but that doesn’t mean you can cheat and get by with the minimum. The story will suffer.
It also took time, and patience, and study, and feet on Magyar ground to really understand—as best I could—and appreciate—as best I could—the soul of the Hungarian people. At least to the extent that I could as a non-Hungarian, and as someone who does not speak the language. My historian assistant helped me tremendously. And I also moved to Szolnok, the town where the trials took place, for several months. Having lived for so long in a small Austrian village (not far from the Hungarian border), and having spent so much time in other East European villages, also helped, I think.
About writing it?
Independent journalists —particularly those who report from abroad–are paid very poorly, and we get a lot of deadbeat clients who try not to pay at all. That’s hard on a person. I’m single. There is no secondary income to rely on. So I’d say the hardest thing about writing it was to always be scrambling. Always counting pennies. It’s difficult to work under those conditions. And hard on your health.
That final Canadian angle is a hoot! How did you find it?
After the original article came out, the victim contacted me!
Was there any resistance among Hungarians or locals to your dredging up a story that is pretty horrific?
There was, understandably, some resistance. Many are descended from either a victim or a perpetrator—in many cases both—and they would prefer to leave the past in the past, as you might imagine. They are also very protective of the women, compassionate about the circumstances that drove them to do what they did.
How were you able to recreate such specific details — Aunt Suzy’s love of brandy or her pipe or hobnail boots?
The archive was a trove of information. And the events were widely covered, not just by the press at the time, but also by well-known Hungarian writers, who went into more detail than the average reporter. There were sociologists who had gone before me, village monographs, village elders. And of course my historian assistant was amazing.
What is Szolnok like these days? Is there anything anywhere that’s still reminiscent of the period you wrote about? Or the town where it happened?
Szolnok is a bustling town, and still quite pretty. Sadly, the Communists destroyed a lot of the fabulous architecture, but much still remains. The artist colony is still there, and there are a lot of delightful cafes and eateries. It has a nice vibe.
Nagyrev did pretty well under Communism, and has struggled ever since its collapse. It is a tight-knit community. They host things like yoga classes, and the like. In a certain sense, it is not unlike other villages in that region of the country–or even hamlets in neighboring countries–in that there is not a lot of opportunity for folks. The difference is its utter remoteness. It still takes nearly as long to get there from Szolnok—a distance of 25 miles—as it did a hundred years ago.
Are there any local memorials, plaques, public formal recognition of this event?
A couple of years ago, the Szolnok newspaper ran a feature/commemoration of Kronberg on the 90th anniversary of “The Arsenic Trials.” But to my knowledge, there is no formal recognition.
Tell us/me anything you want to….
Finally, I’ll add that although this is a true crime story, there’s much more to it than that. That the Angel Makers happened at all has everything to do with women’s place in society. These were not deranged, bloodthirsty women out for the kill. In most cases, they were desperate to escape tortorous situations. They did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do.
In the hundred years since these crimes occurred, not a lot has changed for women. Sorry to say, but it’s true.
This little bear used to sit deep in my uniform shirt pocket during my years at boarding school. Invisible comfort and companionship.
By Caitlin Kelly
I read very few newsletters — already inundated by Twitter, two daily newspapers, a dozen monthly magazines and, when I have an ounce of attention left, books.
But I really enjoyed the latest one from an American journalist, Anne Helen Peterson, on the boxes her mother kept for her from her teens — a time, she writes, so much more memorable to her than her 20s and 30s.
She writes beautifully about what it felt like to go through those boxes and reconnect with her much younger self; I’d guess she’s in her mid to late 30s.
An excerpt:
That big plastic storage bin was allowed to sit undisturbed because my mom lives in a small town in Idaho with a basement approximately the size of my current house — as is the Idaho way. But now she is moving to a place with NO BASEMENT, and some tough decisions have to be made. By me.
I spent the day after Christmas pouring out the contents of these envelopes, taking pictures with my camera and, as an old friend of mine used to say, with my heart, and allowing that heart to be towed in so many unanticipated directions. Because turns out: I was an excellent archivist of my teen self.
The corsages, sure, but that’s classic memory book stuff. I’m talking about movie stubs and campaign pins, about 9th grade English notebooks and printed-out (and pencil-edited) drafts of college admissions essays.…
All archives are, to some extent, narratives: edited stories of the self or others. What I kept then was a story of myself that felt precious and still, at that point, untold. I wasn’t saving in the hopes of someone else discovering who I was. I think it was much more a case of ensuring my future self’s attention. The artifacts were the grammar that made the story readable.
I envy her terribly!
I lived with my father and his girlfriend (later wife) ages 14 to 19. I have very few artifacts of those years: my high school graduation yearbook, some photos. I struggle to think of much else.
My family of origin was never one to keep stuff for others…my father sold the house we lived in and went to live on a boat in the Mediterranean when I was 19 and in my second year of university. I took my wooden trundle bed and wooden desk to the studio apartment I moved it with me. And my stereo!
I really treasure the photo below.
I was maybe six or seven and sitting in the backyard of the last house I shared with my parents before they divorced. It was a big house on a beautiful, quiet street — Castlefrank — in one of Toronto’s nicest neighborhoods, Rosedale. I never lived anywhere like that again.
Luckily, my husband Jose (a photo archivist for the USGA) was able to take this one precious very faded color photo and bring it back for me.
My mother left behind several thick photo albums, but, typical of our relationship, I know very few of the people in them. She never spoke much about her life to me. I do have images of her — slim, gorgeous — modeling for the Vancouver Sun, and a spectacular photo of her that I love.
Cynthia being glamorous.
My stuff? Not much. I moved a few times and only years later found a set of excellent encyclopedias that had been in storage while I was boarding school and camp.
I still fondly remember some items from my teenage-dom — a thick caribou skin rug my father brought back from the Arctic which shed horribly, a poster and a fantastic embroidered sheepskin coat, wildly bohemian and wholly out of place in my white, suburban-ish high school. But I own none of these.
Oddly, a little embarrassedly, I still own and treasure a few stuffed animals from my childhood — like the elephant I found in my London hospital bed after my tonsils were removed. Faded but much beloved, she sits in our bedroom still.
Baby Elephant!
Because I moved around a fair bit and neither parent even had a basement — let alone the willingness to store any of my stuff in it — I’ve definitely lost some very precious teenage things, like a green and white Marimekko notebook in which I wrote my prize-winning poetry and some songs. That one really hurts. I had a storage locker here in New York, but I lost track of the payments for it — and they sold everything in it.
Do you still own treasured items from your early years?
Who, if anyone, will want or value them later do you think?
I may have raved previously about this series — the most expensive German TV production ever made (2016) — “with a budget of €40 million that increased to €55 million due to reshoots” says Wikipedia — but am now re-watching it for the fourth time, both savoring the smallest details I missed or misunderstood before and the comfort of favorite scenes and moments.
It’s a neo-noir detective series that starts in Berlin in 1929, during the Weimar Republic, a period of incredible tumult and change.
And Season Four is finally here!
It’s available through a German streaming service Mhz, which is not expensive and which has a huge array of European shows, including all the Scandi noirs like Bordertown, Trapped, Deadwind.
I am so happy to have it back — and have been reading a book about Hitler’s rise to power which helps me better understand some of the plot and characters.
The show is being released with only two episodes each week — there are 12 in this latest season. There will be a 5th season, but likely no more. The fourth season is set in 1930-31, after the crash of 1929. Squalor and poverty are hitting Berlin, and the country, hard. Gang leaders are ruling the city. And the historic clashes between the SA and the growing Nazy party are also part of the story.
The many characters are indelible, including:
Charlotte Ritter, young, broke, working her way into becoming the city’s first homicide detective but working at night as a prostitute because she’s supporting an older sister and her deadbeat husband and their two infants, a younger sister, a mother and grandfather — all sharing the same squalid flat.
Antonie Ritter, Charlotte’s younger sister, by Season Four living on the streets as a thief.
Ernst Gennat, aka the Buddha, the head of Berlin’s police department.
The Nyssens: a madman with a huge castle and a lot of money ruled by his mother, who he hates. His grandiose visions include getting to the moon.
Gereon Rath, a cop who comes to Berlin from Cologne, both innocent and hardened by his WWI PTSD. He’s a “trembler”, much mocked by a colleague for his ongoing post-war trauma.
Helga Rath, his sister-in-law, with whom he has an affair for a decade, with his soldier brother MIA.
Moritz Rath, her teenage son.
Detective Chief Inspector Bruno Walter, whose heart harbors both compassion and terrible, deadly ambition. (gone after Season Three,)
If you’ve never seen it, 10 reasons why it’s worth your time:
To understand the many currents of Weimar Germany — intense nostalgia for The Fatherland, humiliated and broke after WWI, terrible poverty, unemployment, major new cultural changes like cinema and women joining the workforce.
2) To watch Gereon’s face as he takes his first airplane flight, moving from terror and disbelief to wonder. Magic!
3) To appreciate Charlotte’s blend of innocence and optimism in the face of relentless poverty and odds against her, and her toughness and determination.
4) To enjoy the long slow simmer of love between Gereon and Charlotte.
6) If you’ve never been to Berlin, to get to know it a bit through location shooting.
7) To feel as though you’re living their life with them, in all its complexity and fear and small joys — like a sunny afternoon swimming in a local lake (Berlin has more than 50! I spent an idyllic afternoon at Schlactensee.)
8) To travel to Berlin vicariously — without a mask or jet lag!
9) To keep unraveling so many layers of deceit and betrayal — and surprising loyalty and generosity.
Our apartment building in Cuernavaca, Mexico where I lived at 14
By Caitlin Kelly
At a certain point in your life — after a few decades on earth, and especially if you know a specific location really well — you still see, and fondly remember, so many things that “used to” be there, hence usetaville.
In our Hudson Valley town, this includes long-gone antique stores, including the just-closed E-bike shop that used to be an antique store, the art gallery that used to be Alma Snape flowers and the photo studio that was once Mrs. Reali’s dry cleaners.
There’s a growing tree across our street I’ll never like as much as the towering weeping willow that once stood there, also long gone.
Of course, change is inevitable!
Businesses come and go — so many killed by the loss of customers in this pandemic — and in cities where every inch of real estate has commercial value, almost everything is up for grabs…the former three-chair hair salon I loved for many years is now part of the growing empire of two very successful local restaurateurs and the lovely cafe across Grove Street, formerly Cafe Angelique, has been a Scotch & Soda (a Dutch owned clothing chain) for a long time now. Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village of New York City, once a treasure trove of cool indie shops, is legendary for its rapid store turnover.
A childhood home — if we lived in one house or apartment long enough and especially if our family has since moved out — may enclose a nearly undimmed set of early memories, as if its walls formed a time capsule we sealed behind us as we left. And if the possibility of retracing my flight from this Pittsfield house has both troubled and fascinated me for many years — if it’s what recently compelled me to write “Imagine a City,” a memoir and travelogue, and if even now I can’t decide whether to climb this darned staircase — well, my favorite stories remind me that I’m not alone as I grapple with the meaning of return.
I recall a scene from Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Home,” a modern rendition of the parable of the prodigal son, in which Jack — like me, the son of a clergyman — writes a letter: “Dear Father, I will be coming to Gilead in a week or two. I will stay for a while if that is not inconvenient.” After Jack walks into the kitchen for the first time in 20 years, his sister tells him, “The cups are where they always were, and the spoons.” I think, too, of Henry James’s Spencer Brydon in “The Jolly Corner,” who after 33 years abroad returns to his childhood home in New York and an encounter with a ghostly self who never left.
I haven’t been back to my earliest childhood home — on Castlefrank Road in Toronto — in many, many years. It was very big house with a long deep backyard and I still remember well my playmates who lived on either side of us. But I left it when my parents split up when I was six or seven and we moved into an apartment downtown. As a teenager I lived with my father for four years in a white house on a corner, easily visible when driving in Toronto, but have never asked to see it again inside.
So many changes!
I suspect these sorts of memories are very powerful if you spent a decade or more in the same home and if you liked living there. When we visit Montreal, our hotel windows overlook Peel and Sherbrooke — my home for a year at 3432 Peel Street in a brownstone — gone! My visits to Ben’s delicatessen a few blocks south — gone! But — hah! — the glorious Ritz Carlton is still there; we used to have Friday night dinners there when my mother hosted a TV talk show.
I lived for all off four months in an apartment in Cuernavaca, Mexico with my mother — and decades later went back to see how much it had changed, including the empty field next to it.
Not at all!
I had some difficult moments living there, but it was very good to revisit the place and see it again.
I’ve been back to my high school and university campus, both in my hometown of Toronto, and even once revisited my former summer camp, the one I attended every year ages 12-16 and loved.
I admit — we were in the middle of a restaurant lunch yesterday when we learned that Queen Elizabeth had died.
I burst into tears.
I know for many people the monarchy is something hated and archaic. I get it.
For a Canadian who grew up, initially, with photos of Her Majesty on our classroom walls, then later on our stamps and currency, the Queen was a daily part of our lives, even if only her image.
As a young reporter for the national daily Globe and Mail, she became a part of my daily life in person when I was chosen to cover a Royal Tour of the Queen and Prince Philip.
It was the oddest sort of high profile assignment as it meant my stories would run on the front page most days — yet there would be little to say beyond what she wore, what she might say and who she met. It was both thrilling to be chosen and terrifying, especially as this was long before cellphones or the Internet or light, quick laptops. I would have to file for up to five daily editions, racing to meet each deadline with no easy access to a telephone or even a place from which to send my story or even to sit down and write it.
This made for some seriously weird moments — like the big old house in small-town New Brunswick where I begged to use their kitchen table to write, and, when an older gentlemen entered his own kitchen, muttered “Globe and Mail, on deadline!” Then I had to kick the lady of the house off her own telephone to commandeer the line, unscrew the handset, attach alligator clips, and transmit my story in time. The gentleman was a judge who would be attending a formal dinner with her that evening.
Or the hotel lobby gift shop whose pay phone I needed to use.
Or the small-town rural home whose front door I banged on in desperation…scaring the hell out of its poor owners as I begged yet more strangers for their help and to use their phone.
Each day was long and tiring, often with multiple events, and I think we were working 12-15 hour days, whipped.
We must have eaten, but I don’t remember when or how or what.
We traveled in a huge press pack, with Time and Newsweek and BBC and CBC all jammed into press planes or buses. Sometimes we flew in a Lear jet (a first!) and observed the “purple corridor” — the elapsed time between when Her Majesty’s plane took off and ours was allowed to.
We were all technically competing with one another for…no real news!
It was very odd to watch her turn her charm on and off like a spigot on walkabouts — we’re so used to politicians and celebrities who crave our attention, admiration, votes and money that to observe someone with multiple castles, the wealthiest woman (at least then) in the world up close — becoming cool/distant when she felt like it, was quite disorienting.
A dapper Glaswegian security man in a tweed jacket followed behind the Royal entourage, holding out his hands to keep us at bay like wild animals.
“You need a whip and a chair!” I joked.
“I could use the whip,” he replied, with a flirtatious twinkle in his eye. (I later bought one and gave it to him as a joke at our final party.)
I broke a few controversial stories and ended up being the brunt of some serious bullshit from competitors who had not matched my reporting. At a crowded mess hall somewhere in Manitoba, the legendary BBC TV reporter, Kate Adie, saw my distress and whispered in my ear: “The higher your profile, the better target you make.” She later mentioned me and that event in one of her memoirs.
A few specific memories:
— The stunning jewels of a tiara she wore to a dinner
— a brooch with an emerald the size of a baby’s fist
— a small suitcase in the back of a car, with a large red cardboard tag: The Queen
— being given a small piece of paper each morning with the official language we were to use to describe her clothing; eau-de-nil, not “light green.”
At the end of it all, we were invited aboard the royal yacht Britannia for drinks. That was amazing enough, and then we were each presented to Her Majesty.
Broadside 
