A Walk Toward Oregon: A Memoir - Hardcover

Josephy, Alvin M.

 
9780375409103: A Walk Toward Oregon: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375409106 ISBN 13: 9780375409103
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Josephy, author of books on Native American culture and history and founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, offers an account of his richly varied journey through the major events of the 20th century, culminating in his ongoing involvement with Native American and environmental causes. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., is the author of many award-winning books, including <b>The Patriot Chiefs, The Indian Heritage of America, Now That the Buffalo's Gone</b>, and <b>The Civil War in the American West</b>. He has been a vice president and editor of <i>American Heritage</i> magazine, the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and president of the Western History Association. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on his ranch in Joseph, Oregon, with his wife, Betty.

Aus dem Klappentext

tinguished historian -- celebrated for his writings about the American West and American Indians -- an account of his journey across the twentieth century.<br><br>Impassioned participant in and acute observer of the life of his times, Alvin Josephy takes us from the New York of the teens and twenties to the 1990s on the Oregon ranch where he has found his heart's home. His "walk" leads him to Harvard during the hopeful days of the New Deal; to scriptwriting for MGM in Hollywood and menial work on Wall Street in the Depression; through a job with the Herald Tribune (for which he interviewed Leon Trotsky); to the wartime landings on Iwo Jima and Guam, which he covered as a Marine Corps combat correspondent; to an antiwar march with Martin Luther King, Jr.; to his profound involvement in Native American and environmental causes.<br><br>Josephy tells how it was that he found his true calling -- becoming an advocate for American Indians and the land they once called their own. In a wo

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The little red lighthouse

During the early 1920s, my brother, Warren, and I would sometimes be taken to play with friends around a little red lighthouse that stood (and at the present writing, still stands) on the Hudson River shore of upper Manhattan Island. It was a magical spot of sand, rocks, trees, and weeds, all bathed by the gently lapping tidal swells of the river's edge and smelling pungently of the sea and of spilled oil. The small size of the lighthouse, around whose base we raced, playing hide-and-seek and other games, gave it the scale of belonging to us as a part of our child's world, luring to our playground the gulls that wheeled and screeched above our heads and seeming to watch, with the glare of its guardian light, the occasional tankers and cargo ships that glided silently by on their way up or down the river.

At the time, we lived above the Hudson and the lighthouse in northern Manhattan's Washington Heights, having moved there into the third floor of a relatively new apartment building in the winter of 1918-19. Before that, we had lived in our own private homes in suburbs of New York City, first in Woodmere, on Long Island's southern shore, where I had been born in mid-May 1915, and then for a little more than a year completely on the other side of New York, in Westfield, New Jersey. Our new apartment home in Manhattan was on the fringe of undeveloped, rural-like parkland that descended all the way to the lighthouse and the river's edge and embraced both the site of the Revolutionary War's Fort Washington and an area in which a well-known American sculptor, George Grey Barnard, was busy helping to build a resplendent uptown museum of medieval art known as the Cloisters.

The river was the mystical border of my world, and I loved to be taken there by my mother or by a maid or a daughter of one of our neighbors whom my mother paid to look after Warren and me. From the little lighthouse, I could gaze westward across the water to the basalt walls of the Palisades. Like fluted ramparts protecting mysterious heights, they became compelling objects of my wonder, and I imagined that beyond the cliffs the wooded highland was inhabited by Rain-in-the-Face and other war-whooping Indians in paint and feathers, and by wolves and grizzly bears that chased people up trees, by little men in big hats who made thunder by rolling balls with Rip Van Winkle, and by all sorts of other wild and adventurous peoples and goings-on of the kind that my father made come alive in suspenseful stories that he told to my brother and me. Even my viewing site at the little lighthouse on my safe side of the Hudson River became a place of enchantment, and at night, as I lay in the darkness of our bedroom in the apartment building, waiting to fall asleep, I imagined myself miraculously crossing the river from the lighthouse to the New Jersey shore and encountering exciting perils and adventures in a wilderness of forests and mountains on top of the cliffs.

Meanwhile, my real world was one of middle-class security on Manhattan Island. The fount of the security was my mother's father, an imperious-looking man of erudition and authority named Samuel Knopf, who, despite my father's ability to provide for us, gave my mother a large monthly allowance that permitted a lot of major and minor extravagances and let us live not only comfortably but well in a seven-room apartment with tall ceilings, a playroom for Warren and me, a living room with a working fireplace, and one or two full-time servants who had their own bedroom and bath off the kitchen and slept in.

S.K., as my grandfather was known to friends, had his hands in a number of different businesses, including banking, real estate, financial consulting, and advertising. He was also the chief source of start-up and occasional cash-flow funds for the book publishing firm of his son, my mother's older brother, Alfred A. Knopf, and served as business manager of the celebrated green-covered magazine of the 1920s the American Mercury, which Alfred published and H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan edited.

I loved my grandfather very deeply and was proud of him and proud to be linked with him in front of the important people whom he knew. In the 1920s, he was in his sixties, a conservative, meticulously groomed and dressed man who carried a silver-headed cane, wore spats and a high silk hat on Sundays, and owned a top-heavy-looking Rolls-Royce sedan driven by a uniformed French chauffeur named Paul, who could scarcely speak a word of understandable English but dressed colorfully in leather puttees and a visored cap which he set at a rakish angle that made him look like a surviving aviation ace from the Great War.

My grandfather, in turn, looked like a squarely built, no-nonsense Prussian, although he had been born in a kicked-around part of Eastern Europe that sometimes belonged to Poland and sometimes to Russia. He had gotten out of there early, however, and as a little boy in the 1860s, he had accompanied his family first to England and then to the United States, where he was raised in New York and Texas. Somehow, he received a good education, became well read and widely traveled in the South and Midwest as a drummer, or salesman, and by the 1890s was a cultured and successful businessman in Cincinnati, where my mother was born. Soon afterward, the family moved to a house on a wooded hill above the Hudson River near 181st Street in New York City, just about where the George Washington Bridge was built in later years. My mother told me that Alfred had had a pet monkey there when she was a little girl, but she didn't know what had happened to it and didn't care to know. When I was ten, the house with a long white porch overlooking the river was still there, but it was demolished during the building of the bridge.



My grandfather doted on and spoiled my mother, his only daughter, whom he had named Sophia for some long-forgotten actress he had admired. During my mother's youth, he gave her everything she wanted, and she kind of expected it to go on forever. In her school days, she had been full of fun and had relished unabashedly her teenage reputation as a flirt. My father was eight years older than she, and on their first meeting, when they had been playing tennis on adjoining courts and she had continued to disrupt his game by running onto his court to retrieve a ball, he had raised her dander by calling her a brat. A little while later, they had a chance meeting in a restaurant, where she decided she would make him change his mind about her. She succeeded, and in April 1914 they were married in a large formal wedding at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City and went off on a honeymoon at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and then into the suburban house in Woodmere.

In the 1920s, my mother was still young, dark-eyed, and pretty, given to wearing sporty clothes, playing tennis, and dancing, giving and going to Jazz Age parties, and enjoying life as if she were without a care. A lot of it was deceptive, for she ran our home (and later a business) efficiently and effectively, was emotional and capable of explosions of temper, and enfolded Warren and me with motherly love and attention that, along with a wonderful comradeship with our father, reinforced our sense of security and built up our self-confidence.

As his first grandchild, I became, like my mother, adored by my grandfather. We were pals, and it came to me as a shock years later to learn that his stern and demanding looks and manner had put off a lot of people and even frightened them. Not me. He parted his hair in the middle, wore pince-nez glasses and a rich mustache with somewhat tapered ends, and it was true that at times he could look awfully fierce, especially when he clenched a long cigar between his front teeth and glowered at you. But all I saw and felt was a deep, protective love and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375409106
ISBN 13 
9780375409103
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
333
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780806133713: A Walk Toward Oregon: A Memoir

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0806133716 ISBN 13:  9780806133713
Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001
Softcover