Hugh Bonner’s funeral, St. Patrick’s Day, 1908, NYC

October 26, 2020

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

     I am partly of Bonner heritage, Irish through my grandmother Mary and also Scot as the family was Bonnar there before some went to Donegal. This matters to me mostly, in 2020 especially,  because I am distantly related to Mary’s Great-Uncle Hugh Bonner, the first chief of department of the newly formed Fire Department of New York and later the sixth fire commissioner. It matters because this is a dramatic, pivotal election year, and this is the United States, the nation that has the “welcoming” Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor. It matters because I want to see more Hugh Bonners — white, black, brown, red, yellow, female, transgender, gay, straight in humble service.

     And it matters because Bonner, who passed of pneumonia in March 1908, after working a job — yet another Gotham blaze — was a man of humble service who rose from immigrant roots in the Irish Great Hunger and the poverty of crime-ridden Five Points in Manhattan to help direct the heroism of the fire department and to offer lifesaving tools without claiming patent. He also authored a  treatise on fighting fires in tenements with central light shafts that acted as chimneys when there was a blaze. Those shafts were banned in future construction, saving many lives.

     The New York Times’ report of Bonner’s passing noted that he “owed his position in the department to his high sense of duty.”  A Times editorial read: “In Hugh Bonner this community has lost a man who placed its Fire Department at the head of similar organizations in the service of the world’s great cities. He ran New York’s first self-propelling fire engine and its first chemical engine; he operated the first water tower ever used; he invented the life net and various devices for reaching the heart of a fire more quickly … New York proudly mourns his death.”

     It is the accident of birth that brings this humble man of service to my lineage, but knowing his history makes me more deeply bow to the great possibilities of people rising from hunger and want who grow to serve through stacked odds. That’s my kind of nation, and I tremble that it will disappear in the current indecency of false prophets. 

     Today, so many potential Hugh Bonners  do not survive to achieve; so many are pushed aside, wounded and killed by racism, prejudice, by the greedy who send their jobs away, by the elected who don’t walk the talk of equal opportunity, by the fakers who proclaim rescue while picking the pockets of the gullible.

      Hugh Bonner is why I voted so proudly in this presidential election.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther@yahoo.com

                   –30–

October 19, 2020

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

     In another century, it seems, there were conversations about everything yet nothing of great import. Those two were not going to solve the world’s problems nor were they going to impress each other with pontification. Even the exact words did not matter, for it was the expectation that long drives and long talks would be a Friday and Saturday evening routine that counted most. It was that and the rhythm of it all.

     And the silences between many spoken — and heard — paragraphs were welcome as well, accepted not as moments where either had nothing more to say but as a minute or two or five to savor what already was said, much like you do in a several-course dinner.

     Now all this may seem remote, unimportant and unconnected to the reader, but you have been there. Recall when you were with someone and felt more than comfortable. There was trust, reinforcing habit and a feeling of mutual worthiness. 

     I guess for some in such situations the conversations and their routine might be the stuff of romance, though in that case perhaps fewer words the better. But goose bumps can come from talk alone.

     Even if the romantic is never reached or even proves impractical, it cannot be denied that two people purred in common language for a long moment, once upon a time.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther@yahoo.com

October 12, 2020

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

     There is a road on the South Mountain, a winding, hilly journey that has long defined the lives of farmers and artists. It is the plan of the gods for there is little difference between the two nurturers who plant and harvest that which is from nature.

     In life there is also such a road for us, though the actual route may simply be a metaphor. Windings, hills, downward slopes, fertile ground, seeds sown, watched over, the harvest — all are part of life in degrees. Storms, too. Drought, poor soil, inattention, that “reap what you sow” whisper from off-stage.

     Then there is what some call the divine, or at least intended, meant to be. The road comes into your life. It takes you for a ride. You leave for other byways, but you return in moments of reflection to the original route.

     There is an actual South Mountain Road near me, in New York State, descending from the Concklin Orchards at Pomona to the slopes of High Tor mountain across from Dutch Town in Haverstraw. “The Road” has been home to playwright Maxwell Anderson, artist Henry Varnum Poor, actors and others gifted as those who describe the human void. There is magic in such creation, as there is atop the hill in the 1700s Concklin farm spread.

     My father would drive us along South Mountain, my brother and I rolling side to side in a 1939 Dodge as Dad maneuvered the turns. In high school, I rode a bike there in great effort. In early romance, there were walks and talks and silence and hope and goose bumps of a summer.

     In the working years as a newspaper stiff there were the photographs I took of road celebrities, the writing, the commentary.

     In retirement there have been stylized photos and paintings.

     All in all, quite a few decades of pull from The Road at South Mountain. I thank the gods.

     The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther@yahoo.com

October 5, 2020

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

Curiosity, we are warned, killed the cat, but the naysayers never tell you about the nine lives.

Curiosity was a welcome trait for Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, who thought out of the box, who applied independent, non-conformist learning skills to their journey.

Einstein’s son Hans Albert said that his father was “withdrawn from the world even as a boy.” Had he been the traditionalist, he might have ended up a fine professor instead of spending 10 years daydreaming about gravity and the speed of light and whether a fellow saw himself in a mirror the same way traveling through space as he would moored to earth. His E=MC squared formula might not have been written. And, so, the good, and as Einstein noted, the bad in “progress.”

Thomas Edison tinkered in his lab with a similarly inspired staff, trying this and that out of curiosity much more than straight applied science. Had he followed strict dictum, he and his people might have given up. If they had let curiosity kill the cat the first time out on light bulb filaments, there would have been no ninth life, no pushed curiosity that found carbonized thread as the winner. And then there was light, literally.

Edward Hopper, the famed American realist painter whose works of solitude are so especially defining to the crazy world right now, spent long, non-painting months in utter curiosity, going to 1930s movies, peering out his Washington Square studio window, looking away from the sea at South Truro, Mass., walking Gotham’s streets and reaching into his file cabinet of a mind for human and architectural sketches filed on so many trips of curiosity. He took what he needed, and when the time was right, he brushed in strokes of interpretation that make us shiver.

So, I say to all of you, especially the young yet unspoiled by too many limiting rules: Go for it – be curious, day dream, move to a different, unique place in your mind. Be independent, dare to “go to infinity.” This America, in particular, this nation right now in a time of virus, in this suffering moment of wrongs and inequalities, needs your innovation.

The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther@yahoo.com This essay is adapted from an earlier one.