In Memoriam: William August Selke

We are saddened by the death of our member, William A. Selke of Lenox, Mass. Bill had been a faithful member of the Club since 1969. Our condolences go to Martha Selke and all members of Bill's family.

A memorial service for Bill is scheduled for Monday, March 25, at 2:00 p.m. at Trinity Episcopal Church, 88 Walker Street, Lenox.

The following is Bill's obituary:

William August Selke, of 235 Walker Street in Lenox, died Tuesday morning at The Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, as a result of injuries from a fall on the ice, on Main Street in Lee, on February 25th.

The son of August F. and Catherine MacAree Selke, he was born on June 16, 1922 in Newburgh, N.Y. As a young child he moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he lived until going off to college.

It's a crying shame: Reflections on next steps after the Sandy Hook massacre

Illustration by Patrick Feller,
used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by James Lumsden on Monday evening, March 11, 2013

Introduction

For most of my sixty years I have consciously and intentionally wrestled with what it means to be a patriotic person of peace within our American culture of violence.  As a straight, middle class, white man I know I have benefited from – and been entertained by – my culture’s various violent obsessions.  I have been overtly and covertly wounded and corrupted by them, too.  At times I have protested and railed against some of our more vicious habits, spent time in therapy as a consequence of family rage and experienced in my core the blinding fury that so easily erupts into acts of deadly destruction.  As a husband, father and pastor I have also wept while keeping silent vigil with those who have survived acts of murder and suicide.

“Life is hard – and agony accompanies joy.” That’s how I have sometimes made sense of the sorrow born of our uniquely violent culture.  “Now we see as through a glass darkly,” St. Paul wrote, “later we shall see face to face… for all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.”  This is the theological gap between comprehension and mystery I generally accept as another way of enduring the heart ache of real life – always, however, with the caveat that, “when we do get to see face to face, God damn it, I want some answers, Lord because this pain is some-times intolerable.”  As a servant of the Crucified but Risen Christ, I trust that God’s presence is with us all in the agony of living as well as in the sublime pleasures – and I believe by faith that this present darkness will one day be redeemed, too.

But after the massacre of twenty first grade and kindergarten children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – as well eight other adults including the shooter and his mother – it is clear to me that my grasp of what it means to wait upon the Lord has been too passive.  Now is the time for decisive and sustained action to limit and prohibit the spread of certain semi-automatic weapons in America.  Military-grade hardware and access to massive amounts of ammunition is neither necessary to protect the Second Amendment nor to advance the joy of hunting and sport shooting.  Indeed, I would argue that this is the hour to turn our public conversation away from real or manufactured Constitutional debates and find ways for a broad section of Americans to break bread together in patient and civil explorations of the common good.  To be sure, we don’t have much practice or experience with such gatherings these days – and that is a crying shame.

The Club's seal: a historic restoration

The graphically degenerated seal
on our current wallet cards

One of the Monday Evening Club's longstanding traditions is that the Secretary (currently Rabbi Harold Saltzmann) orders for members, in a very small press run, small folding wallet cards listing the Club's members and the schedule of meetings for the season. The format of this card has changed little since the Club's early days.

The front of the card has always included a small reproduction of the Club's seal. As can be seen at the right, the seal has gone through multiple generations of reproduction, losing details each time, so that in recent years, the words of the motto have been barely readable and the rest of the image is kind of a murky mess.

The seal as it appeared on an
 1899 Club publication

So we recently located an early imprint of the seal, on the cover of a booklet printed on the occasion of the Club's 30th anniversary in 1899. That seal, printed in blue ink slightly under one inch in diameter, is much sharper, as you can see at the left, than the degenerated one on our cards.

We had the 1899 seal scanned at high resolution, and commissioned a graphic designer, Erika Elder of Brattleboro, Vermont, to do a historic restoration — sharpening all the details of the lettering and images.

The scan revealed quite a bit of detail: the seal has a border of alternating open books and scrolls; the obscure X above "RATIONE" turns out to be a crossed carving knife and fork; the other image is an inkpot and quill pen; the date 1869 is at the bottom of the border, and there are some decorative leaves (perhaps acanthus) here and there.

Once Erika completed the restoration, the seal can now be seen in all its glory:

We also did a bit of research on the Latin motto, which turns out to mean, "Impulse shall obey reason." Or as some translators render it, "Let reason govern your desires." The phrase comes from this passage by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC):

In omni autem actione suscipienda tria sunt tenenda: primum, ut appetitus rationi pareat; quo nihil est ad officia conservanda accommodatius; deinde, ut animadvertatur, quanta illa res sit, quam efficere velimus; ut never major, neve minor cura et opera suscipiatur, quam caussa postulet: tertium est, ut caveamus, ut ea, quae pertinent ad liberalem speciem et dignitatem, moderata sint. Modus autem est optimus, decus ipsum tenere, de quo ante diximus, nec progredi longius. Horem tamen trium praestantissimum est, appetitum obtemperare rationi.

This is from Book I of Cicero's De Officiis (On Duties), written in 44 BC.  In case your Latin is rusty, as translated by Harvard's Walter Miller in 1913, it means:

In entering upon any course of action, then, we must hold fast to three principles: first, that impulse shall obey reason; for there is no better way than this to secure the observance of duties; second, that we estimate carefully the importance of the object that we wish to accomplish, so that neither more nor less care and attention may be expended upon it than the case requires; the third principle is that we be careful to observe moderation in all that is essential to the outward appearance and dignity of a gentleman. Moreover, the best rule for securing this is strictly to observe that propriety which we have discussed above, and not to overstep it. Yet of these three principles, the one of prime importance is to keep impulse subservient to reason.

And, yes, the seal contains a typo: it should say RATIONI, not RATIONE. But we are not about to fix a 144-year-old typo.

Not pity but respect: Thomas Nelson Baker

Presented to the Club on Monday Evening, January 14, 2013 by Robert G. Anderson

We are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s Presidential declaration that all slaves were no longer property but free. Lincoln shifted the justification for the civil war from preserving the union to liberating those enslaved. The proclamation began to undo the entanglement of the 1850’s when it was federal law to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners while abolitionists were extending the underground railroad and taking up arms to promote civil freedom in new territories. The contentious adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution by Congress in the final months of the Civil War and the subsequent confirmation by the States, rendered the intent of the emancipation proclamation federal law.

I want to tell you about a person whose life as a 2 year old was dramatically altered by Lincoln’s proclamation, enacted January 1, 1863. His name was Thomas Nelson Baker, born a slave on August 11, 1860. His significance for us is that, at age 71, Baker was voted into membership of the Monday Evening Club, the first African American. The 1863 proclamation declared that he and his family were free. Since we each likely have tracked genealogy back to 1860, whether in the US or abroad, we might consider what impact the proclamation had on our ancestors, whether soldiers, slaveholders, merchants in the cotton trade, conductors in the underground railroad, victims of collateral war damage, or even those entrapped in oppressive countries where freedom from bondage was a dream.

Two sets of notes for papers by Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell was a member of the Monday Evening Club from 1961 until his death in 1978. Previously, we have posted two papers for which standard manuscript drafts survive: "The bed of Procrustes" and "Which way?" The recollection of members who were Rockwell's contemporaries in the Club is, however, that normally Rockwell spoke extemporaneously about a painting or drawing he would bring to the meeting, with at most a few scribbled notes. We reproduce here transcriptions of two such sets of notes, taken from undated manuscripts in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. In these transcriptions,  spelling and punctuation is generally left as it is in the original. While we can not gather the full impact of Rockwell's storytelling from these notes, there is enough to get the gist of the talk and perhaps to glean a few of the opinions he expressed.

The Club is grateful for the assistance of Corry Kanzenburg and Jessika Drmacich of the collections staff at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. for providing access to the manuscript of this and other papers Rockwell presented to the Club, to the museum's director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, for alerting us to their existence (via a Facebook comment!) and to the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company for permission to publish the papers. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

The first paper is entitled "Extra Ordinary Men," in which Rockwell recalls his experiences creating portraits of some of the leading political figures of his time. Rockwell appears to have incorporated bits from another speech about these subjects into this presentation.

[Addendum:] According to a Club invitation card in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, this paper was delivered on Monday evening, January 18, 1971 at the home of Harry E. Judson on Tor Court in Pittsfield.  


[Envelope:] Monday Evening Club
To Albert Silverman
Silverman [a Berkshire County attorney; not a club member]

[handwritten notes]
After Roger’s wonderful paper two weeks ago [Roger Linscott], which was so well done and thorough.  I feel this may be quite trivial, disjointed and perhaps even frivolous and overpersonal.

Why are you laughing? — an exploration of the nature of humor

Photo by eliastar, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by David T. Noyes on Monday evening, Oct. 22, 2012

A new pastor was visiting the homes of his parishioners.

At one house it seemed obvious that someone was at home, but no answer came to his repeated knocks at the door. Therefore, he took out a card and wrote "Revelation 3:20" on the back of it and stuck it in the door. 

When the offering was processed the following Sunday, he found that his card had been returned. Added to it was this cryptic message: “Genesis 3:10." 

Reaching for his Bible to check out the citation, he found that Revelation 3:20 begins "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." Genesis 3:10 reads, "I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid, for I was naked.

Humor. What makes us laugh? I have come to the conclusion in the process of writing this paper that it’s terribly hard to define. And unlike Justice Potter Stewart’s comment about pornography, I don’t always “know it when I see it.” Something I might find hilarious may not even bring a smirk to your face. And vice versa! 

Under the green canopy: Hiking the Appalachian Trail the the Berkshires

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 12, 2012 by Richard L. Floyd

When I told Harold* my title for tonight’s paper he suggested it might be about a wedding! A great guess, but no, the paper is actually about my experiences of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires. “Under the Green Canopy” refers to the lush green foliage overhead when you are on the trail. The AT is also sometimes called the “Green Tunnel” by thru-hikers.

I first encountered the Appalachian Trail over fifty years ago in western New Jersey as a Boy Scout at camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. The camp, which is still going strong, sits alongside Kittatinny Ridge, near the Delaware Water Gap.

I went to camp there for several summers and we scouts hiked sections of the nearby AT. The trail skirts the opposite shore of Sand Pond. I have many memories of that lake; I came to camp as a beginner and learned to swim there, eventually earning my lifesaving merit badge, and when I was fourteen swam the Mile Swim there. I didn’t appreciate that the nearby trail was so special.

It was as a Boy Scout that I first learned to love hiking and camping. I know that when one thinks of New Jersey it does not conjure up pictures of beautiful forests and hills, but that is just what that part of northwestern New Jersey is like. If you don’t believe me you can visit. The camp is private, but years ago it ceded hundreds of acres to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Park and one can hike the trails there, including a portion of the AT.

Eventually one of the Scout leaders at camp must have told me that the trail went all the way from Georgia to Maine, and that some people hiked the whole thing in one season. From then on it was a dream of mine to thru-hike the trail, a dream I long deferred and have finally abandoned now that I’ve reached the age where one likes to sleep in one’s own bed.