A Porsche 356A, 1959, of fond memory

Superbug at the Autocross on a Sunday

July 1968, South Eugene, Sunday autocross on an new strip mall's empty parking lot

As the Wikipedia article on the 356s points out, their beautiful unibody construction  almost guaranteed rust and made restoration nearly impossible.  In the Pacific Northwest, by the time my aesthetic soul made the affordable acquisition of the last of the 356A model, a 1959, possible, the signs of rust were already apparent, though it could have been worse if its underside had not been protectively sealed (standard where there were salted highways with slushy snow and perpetual damp besides).  It was not only aesthetics.  My friends, most of them younger, owned sportscars or minicoopers or at least cars that could be autocrossed and rallyed.  After three years of being licensed to drive and listening to all their conversation, I was eager to learn to drive properly.  The VW had accustomed me to the rear engine and taught me the clutch (even if need be without synchromesh in first gear), and the 356A had a built-in roll bar (and was not prone to roll anyway).  On Interstate 5 it cruised, at optimum rpm, at 80mph, perfectly legal at that time, its gears were like cutting butter, it purred.  It got excellent mileage.  Yet no one could say it was too hot a car for a thrity-something lady to drive.

I usually had it serviced in Berkeley where I visited twice a year; the garage there was manned by two German-Americans trained at Wolfsburg itself.  I think it was in 1972 that they told me that the axles had rust such that it was unsafe at sustained highway speeds, and so I gave it (or sold it for $1) to a young friend who would only enjoy displaying a red Porsche at the supermarket or driving it to San Francisco.  He promised, and he kept the promise.  I told him that its engine and transmission in any case could be sold.  I, too, am physically risk-averse, always was, and I never have felt secure driving lesser engineering as I drove the 356A.

From the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club I learned about good and bad shock absorbers, the importance of checking psi in the tires,  the utility of having a tachometer, and the importance of a shoulder harness as well as a lap belt.  And lots more, if one wanted to brake and accelerate so as to feel the car's hold on the road surface and manage the car on curves.  All the stuff that they never show you in advertisements for cars.

I don't know if amateur clubs do weekend autocrosses anymore.  You just need to rent a bunch of rubber pylons and have some guys who know how to lay it out and a large empty parking lot, which is why we did it on Sunday afternoons, as seen above.  I don't recall whether we didn't call it, rather, a race when we went out to the desert over the Cascade mountains in eastern Oregon.  Is it a 'race' when there's no pavement or other prepared surface?

Although as a female driving a 356A I was often alone in my Class, it's not as if I ever won a trophy, anymore than today I win any for blog design, but every time I participated I got a metallic sticker for my dashboard, and by the time that I had to give up driving the car one of my Berkeley friends asked if I'd really won all that jock stuff.  Well, sort of.

Now, does anyone wonder why an old Californian finds it necessary to keep track of her continuous identity by hoarding a few objects?
(P.S., yes, that's me in the car) 

The House with the Weeping Willow on East 32nd St.: Part II

Josette and her Son with Isis under Willow Tree

Myself at Dinette Table from my Grandparents with Curtain in Kabuki colors

Farewell luncheon at the Langs' on 18 June 1973

Some of my students at my house in Eugene

To return to the period of my tenure as Associate Professor and at the house on East 32nd, without rehearsing all the difficulties (shared, I'm sure, by everyone who taught in the late 1960s and early 1970s) of the few students who came stoned to take examinations and who had to plead with one professor to give a grade unearned to balance an unsatisfactory one in another's, on account of the draft, to avoid Viet Nam, and also leaving to history books and memoirs the horrendous events of that time from Los Angeles to Newark and everywhere in between, I shall try to put together some particulars of everyday life of my own. Above is an evening with some of my students in that house. I have shown the orange painting and the arm-rest of the black japalac'd oaken chair in my present house more than 30 years later, and the eye of their owner can recognize some of the books, too, that I still have. In Oregon, serving even beer to one's students some of whom were under 21 was unthinkable, and these parties were largely conversational.
MDR, my department head, spoiled me in many ways. I got an office made over from a passage way, rather spacious, with two full walls of cork board and two long 'retired' library tables and the oak chairs that went with them. A short wall was painted white for projecting slides, and I taught graduate courses in the office with all the books and photo files close at hand, besides having all the pictures I loved and all those currently related to the graduate course of the term on the walls where I could dwell on them all the time.

For the house, my grandparents repaired and refinished a Victorian walnut table (it had suffered a severe cigarette burn where my grandfather set in a patch of old walnut) and fixed, in some cases supplying a missing leg or part of the seat, four mixed-wood, early 20th-century, common chairs (one is at right in the photo above), which completed my little dinette. I still have those things and even the old bookcase that filled the wall: the dinette had windows on the east, opposite that wall. They even repaired and refinished a spool bed, for which new slats had to be made, for me. I gave that away when I entered the convent. The house had oak flooring, though not of very high grade.

I got from Goodwill Industries a metal-tube, formica top table, and two of the chairs that go with such post-WW II kitchen tables, for the kitchen. Student friends twice came over and we made taffy, pulling it over that forgiving surface. Also, for a seminar in sculpture we made copy photos from books for seminar reports, on Panatomic-X Kodak film and using a bakelite ElKay developing tank, which was useful because it drained quickly enough to get the next chemical into it promptly, we used Kodak's chemical kit for direct reversal of the negative film to positive. Deftness and timing and temperature were critical, but the slides were very good. A few dozen still survive. When such work was being done, I'd call Chicken Delight which delivered as much fried chicken and cole slaw as was needed. Surely, it was in Oregon that I acquired the habit of doing myself everything I needed for teaching. When lecturers came to our Eugene Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, I took wedge tipped felt markers and hand-lettered the small posters for bulletin boards in our building and those of other departments that might be interested.
When I think back I find it remarkable that the students both socialized with me and respected my scholarly authority. Equally remarkable, I do not recall much gossip or any backbiting either among my colleagues or the students (that cannot be quite true, but when I look back I can think of nothing to call it all but 'very Oregonian'). On the other hand, as time passed and my grand affair, as I thought of it, ended as it had to, I sobered up, I read more, and what with lots of Augustine and Karl Jaspers and reflecting on the ruin of the lives of my mother and brother, from whom I could hardly keep my own identity really separate, I found myself thinking that all the great traditions of Greco-Roman, of Medieval, of 19th-century thought and belief could hardly be foolish (Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" suited me perfectly, and I had the Barbirolli recording of it). Not suddenly but in the space of a couple of years I became an Anglican. Rome was too hard for me to accept, and the Greek church (like Buddhism) was, one had to admit, not of my own culture. I loved Greeks, but I couldn't pretend to be one. So I also attended other churches' services, learned all the liturgies, and, once Episcopalian, rather yearned to be a priest. Partly to atone in some way (not rationally) for my brother, I also taught at the state penitentiary at Salem for a year. In all this I was indulged and cherished by all my friends, including many whom I haven't mentioned here, and not least by St. Mary's Episcopal church in Eugene. Even then I sensed the spiritual and psychological mismatch of superior knowledge of theology and of church history with the green state of the new convert but decided to let it be. And at church I met persons whom I had to respect purely for themselves, a rare privilege for someone who had been trying to become Something—artist, scholar, academic—all her life. Some of my colleagues, though, who were themselves devout, had contacts with the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York. Eventually, after visiting the convent, after keeping a lay person's Rule for a year, I gave a year's notice to the university and gradually broke up housekeeping (all my friends helped me pack). Even then, no one rebuked me, though some, certainly, were appalled and saddened, either in Berkeley or in Eugene. It was true, just a further complication, that the likelihood of my having to live in Eugene forever, as I was approaching another academic promotion that would put me out of competition for mobility, and as the economy and the society were souring, besides, seemed like something I needed to break away from. I had enjoyed Eugene so very much, but it had never become real. I never had become part of it. CHS was glad to receive me as a postulant, and I was glad to try a vocation (and in NYC), but neither of us knew what we were getting. The vocation would fail, and eventually the raison d'être for my fervent belief would fail, without rancour, too. In 1981 I was very fortunate to get a tenure-track position, and I have been in Louisiana ever since.
Here, at the top of this post, is a picture of the going-away party at my dear friends' house on June 18, 1973. In two days, in my VW beetle, I'd be on my way to New York.

A new town, a new university, a new state

I must have gone up to Oregon first to secure an apartment within walking distance of campus and a grocery. I was perfectly content for a while to eat at the cafeteria or at one of the student eateries on the west margin of campus. The apartment was in a two-storey block, on the upper floor, behind a single house, I'm almost sure; opposite this block (with gravel between) was a row of garages for the apartments (but I didn't yet drive or own a car). At 975 (as I recall) Hilyard Street, it was just north of the Mill Race (which no longer raced, but served for canoeing). Between the Mill Race and our apartments was a red-brick sorority house; "Greek" houses, in fact, dominated the neighborhood. Sigma Phi Epsilon owned and ran an old fire engine. I think that Hilyard Street ended at Franklin Blvd, which was US Hwy 99. Then the Willamette River. The lower-lying neighborhoods north of the river were said to flood, but never did in the eleven years that I lived in Eugene. I lived in this apartment so long as I had no car.
Running west of campus, 13th Avenue had some student eateries, a drug store or two, a movie theater, I think. The requisite grocery was on 11th Avenue and not much farther, on the north side of the street, was a former steepled church, painted lavender, a sort of art spot. And then you were nearing downtown, Willamette Street, soon to be made pedestrian. The railway followed the river and determined the orientation of the town. While Eugene, Berkeley, and San Luis Obispo all three still had railway stations, I had the joy of using the Cascade train and the dear old Daylight (but no longer with 100% red and orange cars) for every holiday. Having a salary now, I could even use the diner, which, so long as it lasted, had double-rib lamb chops on the menu, perfectly cooked and with frills on them. And when the days were long, the landscape on the Cascade was glorious, on the Daylight it was every inch of it home to me and lovely in every light. Once I came down from the mountains toward Eugene in a rosy dawn. A hour or so before Berkeley, on the Cascade, one woke up when the train stopped at Davis, where the pre-dawn odor of the fields was delectable, and there were huge, old palm trees at the station, very un-Oregonian. Sometimes I have thought that one reason, not the only one, for my loving Edward Weston's photographs so much more than Ansel Adams' was my preference for the Coast Range over the Sierra Nevada, and for agricultural land over either glaciers or deserts. Much later, I decided I could love Louisiana simply because it had live oaks. Here is a picture taken near San Luis Obispo the summer just before I went to Oregon.

My grandfather and I had gone out the Los Osos Road and to Morro Bay with no object but to find good pictures to take. These horses reminded me of a drawing by Pisanello. Both Gramps and I were motivated by purely Camera Club objectives, not caring whose fences or horses or barns we were recording. I'd post a picture of a lovely waterfall in the Cascades up east of Eugene, but I never took any. Not only did I not have my grandfather for company, but I was generally among people who sneared at cameras and were snobbish about those who carried them. It was as if photography meant less treasuring of memories in one's heart. I think that the whole experience, which I cannot here find words for, and the search for pictures, photographic pictures, as well, are two different pleasures.

I remember that my brother and a friend of his brought up a U-Haul with a few pieces of my own furniture (the apartment had basic furniture). I remember my turntable set on top of the 1929 Electrola cabinet (gutted of its electronic parts, though with the turntable itself and the 8-ounce tone arm still under the lid on top). It was a very good choice of apartment but for the one problem with all apartments: I learned to tolerate the television set directly below, but soon had to endure my neighbors complaints about the kind of music that I played, all classical and none of it very large: no huge organ music, for instance. So I looked forward to four walls and a floor of my own from the outset.

I had lived in Eugene not much more than a month when a freak Pacific typhoon came and hit the west coast, not least Eugene, Oregon, on Columbus Day. Douglas fir trees, without tap roots, toppled everywhere, on campus fortunately falling northwards and generally missing buildings. We were without power for nearly a week (always make sure that your utilities are not all gas or all electricity). My apartment block, however, was too well surrounded to be damaged, but that lavender church lost its storybook steeple and there was a lot of damage to roofs and cars—just like an Atlantic hurricane, I'd say now, but I'd never yet seen one myself. A couple of days later I saw a striped cat on a neighbor's lawn, on Alder Street, I think, and asked the woman who was raking up leaves whether there were kittens. Informed that it was a tom cat, I did feel silly, but she said that the back house did have a litter of kittens. I inquired and found an orange mother with six orange kittens, all boys, the lady said, and old enough to be adopted. I chose the largest one and had him almost all the time that I lived in Eugene. I called him Croesus. He wasn't quite a marmalade cat, not so red as that and without emerald eyes, but he was beautiful and affectionate. I think he might have been left another week or two with his mother, because he wanted to suckle on anything cuddly, especially sweatshirts, all of his life.

The following autumn, of course, was marked by President Kennedy's assassination. I had a lecture at noon, Pacific time, and I called the students from the lobby into the lecture room and announced that I thought that Kennedy would prefer we devote ourselves to the history of architecture rather than just mill around those with portable radios. And they came and I did lecture. Immediately thereafter classes were cancelled for the rest of the day. Well, that was proper, of course (only not for an assistant professor to decide spontaneously). The "Greeks" spent the rest of the afternoon on the Mill Race, and perhaps that was proper, too, for the very young. Though I knew of McKinley's assassination and remembered when someone had taken a shot at Truman, it had never occurred to me that the young president with children could be killed. And, of course, the aftermath, even without today's 24/7 news, was a shocking travesty of order and propriety. By the end of that decade, assassinations were only tragic, not unthinkable.

That is enough blog for one evening.