Sunday, May 30, 2021

Our Memorial Day

Our Memorial Day, 2021


        It was 1953 when a very young Harvey Kalmenson raised his right hand, took the oath, and joined the military. It happened to be the United States Armyit didn’t matter what branch of the service it was. The flag was up there for me that day when I took the oath of allegiance to our Constitution, I uttered those words. The son of two immigrant parents and grandparents who had managed, bound together, and without words sharing allegiances to a country they had not yet seen but one my grandmother gravitated towards with unbending patriotism for all of her life.
        Some out there may not understand what a thrilling moment it was for me, a nineteen-year-old kid. It's one of those times that often come back in memory, and now especially, as we honor all those who gave their lives for our country. I recognize without them touching our lives, whether we like it or not, whether Democrat or Republican, Christian or Jew, and regardless of the skin color only God may choose for us; we soldiers marched together as one.
        Our military men and women have protected us from all the evils man has, for centuries, fostered and perpetrated upon the United States of America and the world we live in today. And so then, this is a special day for all of us to take a moment to give thanks for what our brethren have sacrificed by giving all they had to give, forever.
Arlington National Cemetery, VA
Google Images
…And one more thing:

On this day, no matter the passage of time, Cathy and I personally express our thanks for what our family members selflessly donated, spiritually and physically.
 
Once more,
We arise from the doldrums
Seemingly an unconquerable disaster
Vague defenses at inception,
Many at odds with each other
 
Today the world again takes notice,
America might have shown some bend
Yet we remain unbroken
Stalwart
Ready for a new game to begin

Strike up the band

-HK-

Sunday, May 23, 2021

73 Years...

73 Years, Hard to Believe
        It’s hard to believe just a quick seventy-three years ago, not yet “da harv” was a mighty fourteen years old and was in the process of making, or having, a monumental occurrence in his young life fostered upon himwhether he liked it or not. The year was 1948, WWII had been over for two years.
        By way of my diligent and concerted efforts, I was able to find some blissful memories of yesteryear still influencing what I began to become.
P.S.233, Brooklyn, New York, along with a photograph of my fellow classmates. You might take note: it was January 29, 1948.
 
What you’re looking at, below, is the autograph album of our eighth-grade grammar school graduation class. Two of the more important pages in the album signified our eighth-grade graduates. The names of our elected officials appear on two of the pages: seven (7) “CLASS LEADERS” and four (4) “CLASS OFFICERS”.
        Some of you will be amused by the fact the kids of that era considered the following seven qualities, or requisite categories, for their school leaders: brightest, wittiest, most popular, most cheerful, best athlete, best looking, and best dresser.
        The brightest guy, as well as my very best friend, was right up at the top, Joe Beberman. Carl Smith was my archrival, we competed in every category grade school had to offer. To this day, I can’t figure out how Carl could have won any of it… I had him beat all the way… it had to be a rigged election. I mean, the class officers election did appear to be honestBarbra Wolf, if she was around today she’d probably have been elected our first woman president. Elain Surgen, for sure, would become secretary of state.
        And why, you wonder, do I return like the Lone Ranger… to a simpler time of life? From out of the west, he and his sidekick, Tonto, came riding back into almost all of our lives… Once a week, each and every week, they rode in and wekids and parents alikegathered around our radios and renewed our pleasant emotions together. It was always the same. There were the good guys and the bad ones. And each week, my dad and I rooted them on. And though dad would fall asleep before the show's climax, it really didn’t matter; we always knew everything would work out for the two of them.
        And as an aside, so many years later, I was stopped in my tracks when the former announcer on “Your Hit Parade”, was there before me as a client awaiting my directions. Andre Baruch was a known commodity for every kid in our neighborhood. (What was going through my mind was: if only my dad was alive and around to see this.) While Andre was known as a feisty Frenchman and a hard guy to work with, at this point of my career, it wasn’t often anything could scare me. And so, when I spoke, Andre did what I suggested he do.
        It turned out in a matter of a week or two, Andre got a job with the help of my direction which would help him earn far more than he ever could in the old days of radio. For those of you who may remember the old Robinson's department stores, it was Andre Baruch who became their commercial spokesperson. Turned out, it was more fun for me recalling what he did on the Lucky Strike commercials. Regarding the "Robinson’s" gig, a simple word of thanks was never heard uttered from his lips.

-At Age Fourteen-

I've given
So much thought
A lot about
Important things
Laughing
Each and every day...always

Wine, women
(Not yet an acquired taste)
And certainly song
Opening my home
Where friends belong...
All people belong

Way back in '48
Even our army
We all learned to desegregate
#42 Jackie Robinson entered my life
Someday soon
I'll be telling you
How we truly learned
To cover each other's back
How we began to bloom

Seventy-three years have gone by
Look, dad, I'm still in bloom.

HK

Sunday, May 16, 2021

Show Biz

Show business is no business!
     Before you get too excited, let me explain. Many years ago, back in 1951, a very prominent guy named Al Hirschfeld decided it was time to put his sarcastic wit into book form. As a matter of fact, in his field of endeavor, Mr. HirschfeldAmerican caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and Broadway starshad become arguably the most celebrated character artist of his era, dating back to 1922; Shubert Alley was his stomping grounds.
     In Al Hirschfeld's era, he was a known commodity to any and all who were dreaming the dream of becoming a Broadway celebrity, as well as all those who had arrived and were already living the dream of dreams of this unreal environment. As S.J. Perelman was known to say, “You’ll know you really arrived when you’ve had your 'punim'* sketched by my friend, Al Hirschfeld”.
*This Yiddish word is more specifically used, most often by grandparents, to endearingly talk about someone's sweet face. Things you might hear at Passover dinner include "What a punim!"
It wasn’t until 1956 that (not yet known as) "da harv" first read:
"da harv" today, 2021
Photo by: da wife, Cathy Kalmenson
     Back home from serving during the “Korean Conflict”, which ended at 9:00 PM, July 27, 1953… And then without warning the year became 1955, without any monumental thoughts of what I was about to grow up and become, the dictates of this book by Al Hirschfeld began my indoctrination. Who, what, where, when, why, nor how, had not yet begun serving personal revelations describing anything the future may be holding for me in forbearance.
     Initially, the book began to feel like a colorful history lesson telling the world about the beginnings of the first theaters of Greece; then without warning the inventive genius of Hirschfeld took hold. His thoughts broke the ice which had been sealed shut by my surroundings. Al said, and I quote: “The Broadway Theatre is a real-estate development in art. The owners of the theatres and the producers of the shows that fill them have nothing in common except a lease. Theaters are unpredictable personalities of the current shows playing in them.”
     In other words, the audience pays the bills, and the audience will tell you what you have creatively succeeded in doingor without mercy telling you what a piece of crap you have delved into. And in the book, the beat goes on. When Al says “Show Business is No Business”, he elaborates in no uncertain terms: you can’t treat it as a business, not if you intend to remain the creative soul God intended you to be in the first place or continue to remain for the balance of the life you weren’t responsible to receive in the beginning.
     Think about what I am about to decree for you to adhere to.
“Show business, and just about any form of creativity touching any part of what we refer to as the biz, is a condition of the heart”. Why not just live with it? Facts are facts. Does any of it make any real sense? Not really. Man or woman, are there any of you out there who hasn’t mentioned how wonderful it would be if only they could catch a break?
     So here I sit re-reading a book that entered my life some sixty-six years ago. Each and every day of my creative life I marvel at the electronic changes taking place in the world we live in. My creative premises have been accepted by more people than I could have ever imagined on the day when I found myself disembarking from that very long trip across the Pacific on my way home from the far east.
     On that day, twenty-five hundred of us not only had the same uniforms in common, each and every man thanked God for the safety he graciously awarded. And again, thinking back, wasn’t that my first real experience with show business? Wasn’t that my first real experience taking part in what I fervently believe to be a true crapshoot.
     I’ve read the works of many men and women I got to know but never met, who each in our own way had similarly asked a very personal question:  
Why was I spared and blessed?
That’s life, I guess
Maybe life is show business
You never know
What you’re about to get
Be creative
For all family and friends
Let them surround you
Help them wave their flag
And yours as well
Tomorrow will be a good day
Just like show business
We’ll throw the masks away

HK
Image(s) Source: Google Images

Sunday, May 9, 2021

A Dream

Oh boy, did I dream a dream I really liked...
 
     The other day I was thinking (now that in itself is a concept). These are my own personal categories of dreams, developed by many years of living, and attempting to be positive at the most trying periods of time. I doubt many of you out there haven't experienced a bad dream now and then.
     Today, more than any other time in my life, I find myself desperately attempting the removal of the average things life keeps offering up. Plainly speaking, at the highest level a human may achieve we all remain in search of goals in what to date remains seemingly out of our reach.
     Before continuing to read, please imbibe a genius’s discriminating words from his glorious observations of life as he alone perceived it to be. I speak of a man; an Irishman I knew but never met, James Joyce.
James Joyce quotes from his novel, Ulysses:
 
“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

 “To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”
Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: “...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

- All from the pen of James Joyce -
     He spoke then, and they all listened to his words of love as he depicted it was, or should be, and he prayed though he had disclaimed himself from his rightful rearing as a Catholic in his country of Ireland. James Joyce knew in his heart he would one day become a Catholic again if only in fact he was the only other to know his heart remained open and truthful influencing the words he so gave the world.
     They say James Joyce was one of the first true modernist writers of his time. His credo was to say yes to life, with or without reservations for what it might or might not deliver. No minor truths were to be kept from his readers' reach. James Joyce the scripter wasn’t a man of algorisms. He was driven by the truth of, and from his heart, and the rich overly and discernable use of alcohol. He died at age fifty-nine.

     Today, that guy, da harv, exists and creates his dreams within what he allows himself. His is an abstract "peace" while at the same time of life bearing a deep mistrust for those who choose to think for him; today for his children and new generations to come. 
     When da harv dreams his wonderful dreams, they come free form, void of mitigation, and free of judgments; never with a political bent driven by spirals, trying desperately to stay aloof from those in my employ or life’s work, in their sacred attempts at telling me what I should or shouldn’t be thinking.
 
…And if you like, a touch more about James Joyce:
     “James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, the oldest of ten children in a Catholic family. He attended Jesuit schools and, in 1904, moved first to Trieste, then Paris, with Nora Barnacle; they married in 1931. After publishing his first novel. In 1916, Joyce developed glaucoma, and his eyesight steadily diminished for the rest of his life. His seminal novel Ulysses was published by his friend Sylvia Beach out of her Paris bookstore.”
Source: https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-dead/
     Often, but not told and understood by, our youth of today is beautifully responsible for the endearing successes of the vibrant constant searching of our American intellectual expatriates of the very late and early years of the nineteen-hundreds.
     Like so many literary strugglers before he arrived, James Joyce was in his own constant search. Paris became truly his city of lights. Sylvia Beach was a glistening tribute to those creatives who had the courage to venture forth from their own beginnings in Ireland. Joyce considered Sylvia Beach not only beneficial as his publisher but his financial backer during his most lean years.

The immigrants he loved dearly
His books treasured sincerely
Taking this poor lad
On trips around worlds
He dreamed of
Alas, he never had
All those places
Above all the people
Not seeing them
Yet seeing them
Come to life
If only when
In his life
He’s living a dream

HK
Image(s) Source: Google Images

Sunday, May 2, 2021

...And I said:
 
        Wow I began almost as usual, for me these days, in the middle of a thought pattern. Always, each and every day seemingly slip by faster and faster for me. Back to business... da harv here caring less and less about formalities. Truth be told, I’ve become more and more of a "blah blah blah" writer. Kinda like shooting from the hip.

        Reporting as usual to people whom I imagine are listening to what I have to say, while most of the time really not caring whether they are or aren’t. I use the term "listening" because I honestly see them right there with me, either asking me a question or seeking my advice. The fact is, imagining is what I have learned to do well in this life of mine. Often I find myself freewheeling along with an associate, friend, actor, or actress, past or present at my side sharing or merely spending their time with me while in the process of imagining together.
 
        In my mind’s eye, I am the world's greatest name-dropper. Actually, let's change it to read: I am the second greatest name-dropper of all time. The late Gary Owens was in reality the number one perpetrator. Gary and I on occasion enjoyed our little private conversations about a variety of people we had known. "You know, Harvey, between the two of us we know everybody." I can see and hear Gary leaning forward and saying to me, “You do know, Harvey, she really wasn’t a good person to work with”.
        …and as I began, "and as I said": It's very late in a very normal workday. The phone rang on my library intercom, my associate, *Newlee, was on the line letting me know she was leaving for the day. “Thank you”, I said, “and God bless you, Tiny Tim.” We both laughed together, and she was gone.

*Editor's Note: When Harvey is immersed in his writing, he disregards spelling... even the spelling of his beloved associate's name, Nulee.
        My dad must have been smiling down at me; I had learned from him the importance of starting and ending each day with a smile. My library and my books always have a way of breathing new breaths into a tiring moment. In "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens, the final lines were usually delivered by Tiny Tim: "God bless us all!"
And one more thing:
        All those books...how important and even sacred these books have become for me during all these years. If there was only some way we could transplant all those books into the minds of all the children who have missed being taught during this horrible downtime.

HK