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Sunday, February 28, 2016

WELLESLEY '66 | Get-Together in Runup to the 50th

L to R: Curry Rinzler, Cinnamon Rinzler, Alice Tepper Marlin, John
Tepper Marlin. Photo by Cin Rinzler. In Vero Beach, Fla., Feb. 2016.
February 28, 2016–The Class of 1966 at Wellesley will celebrate its 50th Reunion in about three months, June 3-5.

I plan to be there with Alice. Purple, yay!

As they did last year Anne (Cinnamon) Liggett Rinzler '66 visited Alice Tepper Marlin '66 in Vero Beach, Fla. They both also prepared for college at Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

Richard (Curry) Rinzler was with Cinnamon. Last year at about this time they had third classmate in the visit, Karen Ahern Boeschenstein.

I am holding a flamingo, the classy bird of Wellesley '66. Cinnamon and Alice are wearing flamingo shirts as they did in the photo last year, when I explained the story of how the flamingo became the class(y) bird.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

HERALDRY | Wilfred Bayne, OSB, Heraldist, Portsmouth Abbey

Portsmouth Shield
Feb. 2, 2016–Sometimes I have been astonished at the moments of exhilaration when making some new heraldic discovery. I have been wondering why. Four reasons, from different parts of my childhood, occur to me:
  • Heraldry was of great interest to my mother, who early explained her mother's family's coat of arms with its motto Ni regret du passé, ni per de l'avenir (no regret for the past, no fear of the future).
  • At Blackrock College in Ireland there was a coat of arms for the school that was on my cap and blazer. Its motto was Fides et Robur (faith and strength).
  • At Ampleforth I was introduced to the Abbey coat of arms, which is also the coat of arms of St Benet's Hall at Oxford.
  • At Portsmouth Abbey, we again deployed a coat of arms and there was a monk who did exquisite heraldry work, Dom Wilfred Bayne (1893-1974), about whom Fr. Damian Kearney wrote a biography for the Portsmouth Bulletin, Winter 2004. Apparently Fr. Wilfred was a convert to Catholicism; he had attended a military academy and from there joined a ballet company in Russia headed by the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. Fr. Wilfred kept himself busy in his later years doing the coats of arms of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, among others.
Recently, at the suggestion of Dom Damian of Portsmouth, whom I saw earlier this week when he was visiting Vero Beach, Fla., I have been looking up what I could find about Dom Wilfred. In 1967 the Heraldry Society published a monograph by Dom [William] Wilfred Bayne with 39 pages of coats of arms and illustrations, and a comment on ecclesiastical heraldry by Dom Wilfred. He has prepared coats of arms for many Benedictine institutions.

He has also written an article on the Benedictine Armorial that can be consulted here.

In addition, he prepared the coat of arms for Bishop Ansgar Nelson, OSB (1906-1990), Roman Catholic Bishop of Stockholm, 1957-1962.

Nelson was an interesting subject for Dom Wilfred to work on. Here is a summary of his unusual life:
Born in 1906 in Frederiksværk, Denmark, Knut Ansgar Nelson came to the United States in 1925, converted to Roman Catholicism while working in Salem, Mass. and studying medieval art. In May 1931 he entered Portsmouth Priory, making his solemn profession in 1935 and becoming ordained a priest on May 22, 1937. During his early years in the monastery he taught classics. After his retirement he provided philosophy seminars in the novitiate and for the more advanced students in the school. On August 11, 1947 he was appointed coadjutor Vicar Apostolic of Sweden, as titular bishop of Bilta (Tunisia), and consecrated bishop by Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, Apostolic Delegate to the United States, on Sept. 8 at a ceremony in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Providence. When Stockholm became an independent diocese in 1953, Nelson became coadjutor bishop. He succeeded to the bishopric on Oct. 1, 1957, resigning on July 2, 1962. After his retirement he served as a chaplain to nuns in Switzerland for five years before returning to what had now become Portsmouth Abbey. Nelson died in Newport Hospital on March 31, 1990.
Comment

I sent the above to Dom Damian and he commented that he studied Homer with Dom Ansgar, who was also his housemaster, during 1944-45, the year before Ansgar left to become Bishop of Stockholm.

Other Portsmouth Stories


Wednesday, February 17, 2016

WOODINp | Ancestors, Descendants, Will Woodin, FDR's First Treasury Secretary (Update April 18, 2020)

April 18, 2020—These chapters of a book on Will Woodin have been transferred to a private blog, in anticipation of publication of a biography of Will Woodin. Woodin was Secretary of the Treasury in the depth of the Great Depression. He was highly successful. Your blogger is actively working on this bio in May 2020. To obtain access to this blog, or to contact the author for any other reason, send an email to jtmarlin at post.harvard.edu.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

BIRTH | Jan. 31–Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
This day was born in 1923 in Long Branch, N.J., Norman Kingsley Mailer. (Long Branch is the small resort town on the Jersey Shore where I was married in 1971.)

He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Harvard, got drafted during World War II and served in the Philippines. He came home and when he was 25, in 1948, he had his first novel published, The Naked and the Dead.

His most famous book may be The Executioner's Song (1979) which along with Armies of the Night was awarded a Pulitzer. He was a prominent pioneer in the "New Journalism", combining factual reporting with the format and techniques of fiction–along with Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote. In 1955, Mailer and four others founded The Village Voice.

Mailer wrote daily from 9 to 5 till his death at 84. He said:
Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material.
But he never wrote the great American novel, although he tried. The New Yorker thinks he should have written about his childhood in Brooklyn. But Mailer said:
It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way– just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, "I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel." The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love. 
He died on November 10, 2007.