Thank you! A little joy in my day!
It also shows if you search just the word “pride”.
~Max
I just see it as more abstract. Perhaps he was a painter who didn’t get stuck in a rut like so many do. I believe there was more than Alzheimer’s at work there.
My father died from Alzheimer’s complications. While it was terrible to see my dad become someone else. I also met much of who he was before he became my dad.
I did a right click/search Google for image and found this. It has portraits not in the other article I cited.
“In these pictures we see with heart-breaking intensity William’s efforts to explain his altered self, his fears and his sadness,” Utermohlen’s widow, Patricia, wrote in a 2006 essay on her husband’s work. After his death in 2007, Patricia recalled, “Even the time he was beginning to be ill, he was always always drawing, every minute of the day. I say he died in 2000, because he died when he couldn’t draw any more. He actually died in 2007, but it wasn’t him by then.”
My father also had Alzheimer’s, and was an artist. I’m very grateful that he didn’t do any late self-portraits.
After my neurologist looked at a BIG Picasso retrospective, she came back and said – nah, that ‘blue period’ isn’t just an artistic choice.
I explained myself badly. I chose to not be depressed by my father’s disease, but be fascinated by the regressing selves he displayed. Was he frustrated by his lessening ability to communicate? Most certainly - he once hit a nurse who kept insisting that he put his false teeth in when he didn’t want to. He was never a hitter before. But I chose to be fascinated by the person who did appear to me. And, I’m certain he was grateful that I did so.
In these self portraits, I see a man who is stripping away his shell and becoming his most essential being. Even with Alzheimer’s, he had more artistic ability in his little finger than I’ll ever have.
And the answer is… “Afternoon Delight.”
Dishonorable mentions go to: “Playground in my Mind,” aka “The Nickel Song.”
Or “Torn Between Two Lovers” or “I’ve Never Been to Me.” Don’t make me go “Having My Baby” on your ass!
No love/hatred for “MacArthur Park?”
Three related facts and a turn of phrase to make you catch your breath.
Back in the day I used to live not far - ten minutes walk, say - from the Royal Earlswood Hospital. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the first institution of its type:
The hospital became briefly famous when it became known that two of the Queen’s close relatives were housed there:
In 1987, it was revealed that, despite the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage listing Nerissa and Katherine as having died in 1940 and 1961, respectively, the sisters were alive, and had been placed in Earlswood Hospital for mentally disabled people in 1941. In the terminology of the era, both were classified as “imbeciles”, and neither learned to talk. Nerissa died in 1986, aged 66, with only hospital staff attending the funeral, while Katherine died in 2014, aged 86. The sisters received no money from the family other than £125 paid to Earlswood each year. Earlswood closed in 1997.
What I only just found out was that a further three members of the extended family were also patients there.
Three mentally disabled cousins of the girls also lived in Earlswood Hospital. Harriet Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis (1887–1958), sister of Nerissa and Katherine’s mother Fenella, married Major Henry Nevile Fane, and 3 of their 7 children lived in Earlswood Hospital: Idonea Elizabeth Fane (1912–2002), Rosemary Jean Fane (1914–1972), and Etheldreda Flavia Fane (1922–1996). David Danks, then director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, thought that a genetic disease in the Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis family may have killed male members of the family in early childhood and caused learning disabilities in females. In 1996, the surviving cousins were moved to Ketwin House care home in Surrey. When it closed in 2001, they were moved to another care home in Surrey.
Finally, a truly random piece of history and a remarkable turn of phrase.
Anne Tennant, Baroness Glenconner was, as a young woman and 1950’s debutante of the year, engaged to Johnnie Althorp, later father to Princess Diana; his father objected to the match on the grounds of “mad blood”, as one of her grandmothers was a Trefusis, and the engagement was broken off.
(A debutante being a young woman making her debut in refined Society).
One assumes that mad blood was a thing, and presumably a fairly well known thing in those circles. I guess we’re talking about people with a decent working knowledge of breeding racehorses.
j
Many people like red pepper flakes on their pizza, and that’s not much different.
Wasn’t it preceded by Bedlam?
Written by Willis Alan Ramsey, first recorded as “Muskrat Candlelight” on the album Ramsey released in 1972. Although the album is somewhat obscure, it led the way for the “Outlaw Country” that came out of Austin a few years later and is considered a great album by fans of such music. He’s admitted that it was simply a “filler song” used to round out the album, and never thought it was particularly good. However, the royalties from that song have made Mr. Ramsey very comfortable.
The interesting random fact (IRF), however, comes from another song off that album, “Northeast Texas Women”, the final cut on the album. In that song, Ramsey takes a geographical trip that starts “South of Oklahoma, East of New Mexico, West of Louisiana…” He further narrows down the geography as “North of Amarillo, East of Old Dime Box” (a bit of artistic license, as Dallas, the heart of Northeast Texas, is actually East of Amarillo, North of Old Dime Box, but that doesn’t flow well).
[Old] Dime Box, Texas, is an unincorporated community in central Texas whose name reportedly comes from a box at the center of town where people would leave letters and other items that horseback riders would take to nearby Giddings (where the nearest post office was). Tradition was that if you left a dime in the box, the rider would bring back a newspaper (a Houston or Dallas paper, supposedly). Many years later, the Southern Pacific Railroad ran a line some three miles south of [Old] Dime Box, so the locals began getting their mail and supplies at the railroad, calling the new town Dime Box and referring to the previous settlement as Old Dime Box, which still exists, as a community, on Texas Highway 21, about halfway between College Station, Texas and Austin.
Now, all of that is interesting (to me, anyway, having listened to the song in my teens and living in the area as an adult), but the kicker is that there is a road (a Farm-to-Market road, FM141) that runs from Dime Box, northwest to Hwy 21. This road has been renamed “Ramsey St” by the good folks of Dime Box. I should note that the song “Northeast Texas Women” did not “put Old Dime Box on the map” as I remember, back in 1973 or 74, looking up in an Atlas and finding Old Dime Box, but not the much larger, and vibrant, town of Dime Box. My guess is, though, that there has been many a visitor to Dime Box as a result of that song.
Now, the people who listened to “Muskrat Love” in the late 1970’s are approaching their retirement years. Those who knew it as “Muskrat Candlelight” are likely already there (or have passed on). It won’t be long that the song will be forgotten, as will Mr. Ramsey. However, Ramsey Street is likely to remain.
I lived in Japan forever, and it’s common.
Sundown Sirens
I thought these were a thing of the (unfortunately not-so-distant) past. Not so.
i first learned about them from James Loewen’s book Sundown Towns, a truly eye-opening book that I highly recommend. You might have thought that Sundown Towns - towns where non-whites were supposed to be outside the town borders before the sun set – were mainly in the South. But it’s not so. Most of them were in the “border” states like Indiana and Illinois, between the North and the South. But a great many more towns and cities that effectively eliminated most non-whites without the explicit signs telling them to stay out of town after dark existed all across the country. Your town might be one, or might have been one until recently. Have a look at Loewen’s website – https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/
In any event, Loewen talks about the sundown sirens – audible signals that warned non-whites that sundown was coming, and they should get out of town now . But surely even the most racist of towns has gotten rid of such things long ago, right?
Nope – it turns out that the town of Minden, Nevada still had theirs. They tried to get rid of it, but the residents insisted that it keep sounding – in 2006. The siren was finally shut down by a Nevada law just now.
The Minden siren wasn’t directed at blacks, but at Washoe Indians, apparently.
Does no-one remember the commercial?
Amherst Ohio still had a Sundown Siren. At least it did when James Loewen was compiling his webpage:
Another possible Sundown Siren, this time in Oregon
A local noon siren was heard Monday through Saturday when I was growing up in Pennsylvania. It was loud enough to be heard over a mile away. I understand this was once a widespread small town practice in the past and it makes sense to mark the midday. Is there any good reason for a 6PM siren? People would be done working by then, probably at home eating supper. Sundown approaching is quite easy to tell without a siren.
We had a lively discussion about the noon whistle here some years ago.
My local childhood noon whistle still sounds off to this day