June-July 1974: Cool tents and hot days.

Rather than one long disquisition this week, we’ll make a couple of stops, beginning with a subject we touched on last time around.

My post on the Pink Tent Festival, an annual arts festival held in downtown Stamford’s Mill River Park in the ’60s and ’70s, raised but did not answer the question of whether my grandpa ever had his paintings displayed there.

A little more calendar digging suggests he did:

June 24, 1974. Mets win, Yanks lose, Phillies in first (what?)

“Koreen” was a family nickname for my grandma, Corine.

Longtime readers will recognize that June 24, 1974, would have been a birthday ending in five or zero for her … hence the dinner out at Chimney Corners, which longtime readers might also remember hearing about.

But what catches my eye here is the mention of “art delivery” at the Pink Tent trailer at two points during the day. (While I didn’t take a pic, the adjoining calendar entry for June 30 mentions “art pickup.”)

I’m taking that to mean that my grandpa must have had a painting or two on exhibit at a significant local arts festival, since he had art dropoff and pickup marked on his calendar.

That’s pretty cool. My grandfather flew the flag for the enthusiastic (and not unskilled) amateur, and I’m glad to know that an event like Pink Tent had space for the likes of him alongside more commercially successful artists.

I also enjoy the thought of thousands of culture-minded Stamfordites strolling through the festival, taking a look at his work, regardless of what they thought of it.

What’s more, I remember that his year-end roundup of art expenses for 1974 mentions two art sales. I wonder if either of them took place at Pink Tent? Maybe he picked up less than he dropped off.

Cool, anyway.

# # # # #

From there, we’ll make two more stops over the following weeks, just for giggles.

The first will be the Fourth of July, which landed on a Thursday that year (making for a super-convenient, beer-soaked, heat-stroked four-day holiday weekend):

July 4, 1974. Mets win, Yanks split a doubleheader, Phillies already back down to third place.

This is what a Fourth of July is supposed to be. It’s wretchedly hot, there’s fireworks, and there’s a picnic of some sort.

(The “J’s” were my maternal grandparents, who also lived in Stamford. There must have been a big family get-together over there, probably full of corn and burgers and macaroni salad. Indeed, I feel full of corn and burgers and macaroni salad just thinking about it.)

And finally, the end of the vacation:

July 8, 1974. Mets and Yanks win; Phillies in second.

I’m writing this on Father’s Day (I sometimes write these entries a week or two in advance.)

While days like Father’s Day tend to focus on Life-Changing Teachings and Formative Moments, this entry strikes me as one of the thousands of smaller-scale times when fathers (and mothers) earn their stripes.

We’re looking at a more than six-hour interstate road trip in a big hot car with two little kids, one three-and-a-half years old, the other just turned one. I don’t know how gracefully my parents got through it, but they did, and that’s as much a credit to them as any Big Lesson they conveyed.

Perhaps my grandpa watched them leave and remembered when he’d been the boss of similar trips, back in the day … and he wondered how the boy in his back seat had gotten to be thirty-plus years old with two kids of his own.

Or maybe he just went back inside and opened a cold bottle of 7-Up and thought, “Damn, it’s hot.”

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June 28, 1973: In the pink.

If the longtime Stamfordites in the audience want to chip in with personal memories on this entry, I’d welcome it.

Without that, we’re grasping at fragments and guesses — a wisp of wind-blown music here, the sound of thoughtful chatter there, a glimpse of paintings hanging, the feeling of damp grass underfoot, and big tents dyed an improbable hue.

June 28, 1973. Mets and Yanks don’t win. Neither does lottery ticket 60688.

Every community worth its salt needs an annual festival of the arts (if not a couple annual festivals of the arts).

You know, the sort of thing that has bands and paintings and photos and craft booths and maybe food stands. The kind of event that draws both hardcore culture vultures, and everyday people just looking for a nice afternoon out.

Stamfordites of a certain age might remember the Pink Tent Festival as just such an event. It was originally held in Stamford’s downtown Mill River Park from 1968 through 1976.

(The sense I get from the Internet is that the park was on the run-down side, and the event was a way to put it to use and get more people to go there, but I could be wrong about that. Online searches also suggest that the tents that housed the festival were, in fact, pink.)

If you scroll down to the text box at the bottom of this page, you’ll get some idea of what the last original Pink Tent Festival involved.

The newspaper writeup cites four nights and two days of continuous arts performances; movies; crafts; flower art; special Bicentennial exhibits; and a tent with artists from throughout the Tri-State Region selling their work “in the Greenwich Village style.”

That last component makes me wonder whether my grandpa had his own work shown at the Pink Tent Festival — either in 1973, or some other year.  I don’t know how high the bar was set, and how serious an artiste one had to be to be included; it’s possible he didn’t make the grade.

My grandpa’s calendars indicate he also planned to visit the Pink Tent Festival in 1972 and 1974. There’s no mention of it from 1968-71 or in 1975, and his 1976 calendar does not survive.

After 1976, he was out of chances. According to the New York Times, that year’s Pink Tent Festival drew 50,000 people. However, the city Parks Department refused to grant permits for subsequent events unless organizers posted bonds against damage.

Some online searching suggests the name was revived for later events; it doesn’t appear that it’s still in use today.

There’s also been a Stamford Festival of the Arts set up since the end of Pink Tent. (In these municipal minutes from 1983, city officials seem to refer to Pink Tent and the Festival of the Arts more or less interchangeably.)

Mill River Park, meanwhile, has gotten a multimillion-dollar makeover since the last pink tent was struck, including the replacement of 100 cherry trees removed as part of the restoration of the river. It sounds like a nice place now, nicer than it was when my grandpa visited.

More than that I cannot add … but again, if you’re out there, and you remember the Pink Tent Festivals, do consider leaving a comment. They were a short-lived tradition, but it seems they’re not entirely forgotten.

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Summer 1983: Another time, another lake.

Last week, I explored the roots of the Blumenau family’s summer cottage tradition. While I don’t have a calendar entry to go with this post, this seemed like a logical sequel.

A starter cottage, you could definitely call it.

The place on Keuka Lake my parents bought circa 1980-81 was a no-frills spiritual heir to the lake cottage in Becket, Massachusetts, that my dad visited for several summers during his boyhood.

According to lore, the place on Keuka had been built in a week — or was it a weekend? — by a bunch of like-minded, tool-handy amateurs, back in the days before building permits and zoning inspections. Its septic tank, befitting Keuka’s best-known industry, was said to be a repurposed wine barrel.

There was no heat, except for a space heater. Other operating systems were seasonal: The boat rails, the dock and the water pipe went into the lake every cold April and came back out every cold September.

The Blumenau brothers on maintenance duty, 1981, with the bluff of Keuka Lake’s “Y” in the background.

It might not have been quite as shacky as I make it sound. It never fell over, like a house of cards, and had to be rebuilt.

But it lives in my mind as a place of mothballs, must and mice — regular co-tenants that we would occasionally corner, our sneakers in our hands, and beat to death. A place with a secondhand utilitarian funk I’d never experienced and didn’t much like. A place where what was yellow was left to mellow.

(In fairness, it was also a place where I loved to row a rowboat, chill in an inner tube, clamber up hillsides in search of blackberries, burn marshmallows into blackened goo over a fire, and watch Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola call the Game of the Week on staticky Channel 3 from Syracuse.)

Despite the cottage’s isolated funk — or maybe because of it — my folks were glad to invite friends, relatives, and friends of relatives down to share their newfound getaway. They were never eager to get into the rental game, but guests were welcome.

And, in the summer of 1983, my grandparents and great-grandma joined the roster of guests making the trip down.

They were still living on Hope Street in Stamford then. I’m guessing they came to Rochester and then we drove them the rest of the way to Keuka, rather than force them to navigate the backroads of the Finger Lakes.

I didn’t appreciate the significance of their visit at the time. But now that I’ve thought and written about the rented cottage at Becket, it seems cool and appropriate that my dad would invite his folks (and his grandmother) to the lake.

Like a kind of repayment, or a returned favor … with an element of celebration, too.

You guys introduced me to rustic summer getaways, he might have thought. Now I’m fortunate enough to have one of my own, and I’d like you to come share it. Put your feet up and feel the breeze.

It took a little doing to get them there.

Specifically, you had to climb down a steep old set of concrete steps to get from the road to the cottage. My 96-year-old great-grandma was not denied; slowly, with escorts on all sides, she made it down (and up again).

Here, then, a gallery of pix — some my dad’s, some my grandpa’s — from the Hope Street Blumenaus’ trip to that first cottage on Keuka Lake.

Twenty-plus years past Becket, everyone discovered once again that escape from the world is sometimes the only frill you really need.

My great-grandma and grandma on the pitted concrete porch.

Still life with dock.

Grandma gettin’ in deep. (Note the open toolbox next to the boat. This was a frequent sight.)

Me in the rowboat, dressed for the high seas. My brother fishing (illegally — shhh, don’t tell anybody.) Dad in the water.

View from the porch. Looks like a nice day for a sail.

Always looking for painterly inspiration, my grandpa took a bunch of landscape pix around the lake. Some others appeared in this long-ago post, if you want to see more.

Tom and Huck.

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August 1-4, 1962: A place by the lake.

Tired of going to the beach yet?

This week, we’re going to follow the Hope Street Blumenaus on vacation again.

This time, they’re headed inland — on one of a series of trips that, I think, would have a lasting influence on my family’s life.

On the world stage, the first few days of August 1962 are starcrossed.

They will be Nelson Mandela’s last days of freedom for nearly three decades: The South African anti-apartheid activist is arrested Aug. 5 and remains imprisoned until early 1990.

They are also Marilyn Monroe’s last days of life. Sometime on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 4, the screen icon takes a fatal overdose of barbiturates at her home in Los Angeles.

Drugs also prove the undoing of Tusko, a 14-year-old male elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo, who dies a seemingly bizarre and unnecessary death on Aug. 3 after researchers inject him with a megadose of LSD. (The researchers were trying to simulate a state of temporary madness that affects male elephants.)

Other matters that will change the world are simmering this week, but not yet ready to break.

CIA Director John McCone is, presumably, gathering evidence this week and building an argument on an important national security matter. On Friday, Aug. 10, McCone will send President Kennedy a memo raising his suspicion that the Soviet Union is putting missiles in Cuba.

Distinguished meteorologist Harry Wexler is looking ahead this week to an upcoming talk about the possible effects of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer. Unfortunately, he won’t get to deliver it: He dies Saturday, Aug. 11, while vacationing on Cape Cod. It’s later suggested that Wexler’s death is a significant setback to the issue of ozone layer depletion; the first scientific papers on the subject are not published until 1974.

And in England, a young man named Pete Best is approaching his two-year anniversary as drummer with the Beatles, one of the most popular “beat” groups on the Liverpool scene and recent recipients of an EMI recording contract. Best will be sacked on Thursday, Aug. 16; none of the rich and often conflicting lore that has arisen around the Beatles suggests that he saw it coming.

In the midst of all this, the Blumenaus of Hope Street, Stamford, Connecticut, are not on Hope Street. They’re getting away from the increasingly crazy world in a little corner of the Berkshires.

Becket, Massachusetts, is a small town southeast of Pittsfield, near the edge of Berkshire County. (Mapquest puts it at about two hours and 45 minutes from Stamford.)

I’ve not been there that I can recall, but from the sound of things, it’s a nice woodsy place where camps and cottages mingle with artists’ colonies.

In the ’50s and ’60s, a guy with the marvelously euphonious name of Heimo “Hoot” Huhtanen and his wife Olive owned a cottage on Center Lake (a.k.a. Center Pond) in Becket.

My grandmother was an old friend of Olive Huhtanen’s, and through that connection, the Blumenaus of Hope Street sometimes rented the cottage.

From the looks of it, it was no-frills but cozy, with boating, swimming, walking in the woods, and lying in the sun the chief attractions.

Boating.

Swimming. (FWIW, these pix are from a visit in the late ’50s sometime, not August 1962. The place didn’t change too much, I don’t think.)

Walking in the woods. There’s the conical (not comical) sun hat again.

Lying in the sun. (My grandma is enjoying the collected short stories of John Steinbeck.)

My dad recalls the place thusly:

Yes, Becket was pretty basic.  The terlet was essentially a large porta-potty, which we had to take out to a specific site in the woods every day and empty.  And there was no running water; perhaps you’ve seen the picture of Elaine or me pumping the water.  But it was a great vacation cottage; I loved it.  And the old AM radio could get stations all over the eastern U.S. at night; I specifically remember listening to Albany and Troy stations as a portent of things to come.  Great stone fireplace where Drawing Boy would make a fire and make popcorn.

Let a man come in and do the popcorn.

My aunt on pump duty.

I suspect the Huhtanens’ cottage in Becket planted seeds in my dad’s mind regarding the pleasures and relaxing possibilities of a vacation cottage.

In the early 1980s, as a grown man with a family and a corporate job, he bought his own cottage in the Finger Lakes of central New York. He didn’t feel like renting it, so he sought to get as much out of it as he could; and it became a regular part of my family’s summer weekends to spend time at the lake when I was growing up.

(I don’t know if he gave any thought to buying in western Massachusetts. Probably not; it’s too far from Rochester for a relaxing weekend trip.)

A few years later, seeking more comforts and fewer hassles, my folks sold the first cottage and bought a nicer one. And just a year or two ago, they sold up in Rochester and moved to the Finger Lakes full-time.

So, that first week in August 1962 — as well as other, earlier visits to Becket — would shape the next generation of Blumenaus’ routines and experiences.

I didn’t take to roughing it as comfortably as my dad did, and I never enjoyed the place in the Finger Lakes as much as he did. So I don’t have a summer place of my own, either owned or rented.

But my kids have always enjoyed going to see their grandparents at the Finger Lakes. So maybe someday they will get away to a shack on the water, and the tradition of Becket will leap a generation and continue.

The lake in Becket is still there, of course, but the cottage that helped to start all this may be lost to history. My dad, again:

Went back there a few years ago, circled the whole damn lake and couldn’t find the cottage.  Probably just as good; it lives best in my memory!

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Aug. 19, 1958: Back to the beach.

It’s still hotter than heck here in eastern Pennsylvania — forecast to reach 90 degrees all but one day this coming week.

As payback, perhaps, for our record-setting snow of January, we’re now getting plenty of summer. Summer enough for everyone.

Well, it says here that our visit to the beach last time around wasn’t nearly long enough. So, like Frankie and Annette, we’re going back.

Except we’re going back a few years earlier, and to a different beach. Perhaps you’ve been to this one. A lot of people have.

Note the two young ladies in the brochure trying their skill at archery. It is 1958, and Katniss Everdeen has not yet been imagined. Neither have the New York Mets, but the Yanks are sitting pretty in first place.

I’m not sure why the Hope Street Blumenaus went to Jones Beach State Park, on Long Island, when they could have gone to coastal beaches closer to home in Connecticut. (They could also have hitched a ride to Rockaway Beach … though that trip hadn’t been imagined in 1958, either.)

Jones Beach is a draw for people throughout the New York area. According to Wiki, it’s the most-visited beach on the East Coast. To me, that just screams mad crazy hassles with traffic and parking and finding towel-space.

But, sometimes, the biggest tourist spots seem more desirable because they’re so popular. It is only the sourest and most reticent of us (I am looking in the mirror here) who avoid going places because they draw crowds. To many, the place with all the people is the place to be.

Also, a check of the calendar reveals that Aug. 19, 1958, was a Tuesday. My grandpa might not have been quite so thrilled about going to Jones Beach on a summer Saturday. But Tuesday? Sure, that might be a little more manageable and a little less crazy.

So, off went the bridge-and-tunnel Blumenaus to the big city …

See? The big city. (I’m too slack to figure out which bridge this is, but I’m sure it’s some span whose name lives in regional traffic-report infamy.)

Jones Beach’s famous water tower, seen through the windshield of the Ford du jour.

Compare this to what you’d wear to the beach today.

My grandpa looks like Marcel Proust at a Parisian sidewalk cafe, not a dude at the freakin’ beach. My grandma’s conical sun hat (I said “conical,” not “comical”) is also smart and styled for the season, in adspeak.

Once the Blumenaus of Hope Street finished their travel and food, and finally got to the beach, it appears that they chose a pretty good day to go. Sunny and not too crowded at all.

The people at far left are fully dressed; everyone else is in beachwear. Maybe a dressing room sits somewhere between the two sides.

The dude in the barrel is so charming, it’s easy to miss the wave and the “JB” set into the ironwork on the other side of the pole.

A pic to prove that someone from the Blumenau family actually put on suits and went into the water. My aunt is at the center of the photo, in the yellow swim cap, and my dad is to her right.

One of potential historic value: Wiki says there used to be two pools at Jones Beach (east and west). The west one is still in operation but the east one is closed. Wonder which one this is? It’s a little crowded at the right-hand side of the photo but it looks like things aren’t too nuts here either.

One last from the big trip. Of course my grandma and great-grandma stayed clear of the water. My grandma’s smile indicates that she’s perfectly fine with that. They’re sharing a bench with strangers. The family-history buff in me wonders who they are; I wish I could find their grandson or granddaughter on the ‘Net and say, “Hey, you might like to see this picture.”

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