Monday 9_16_24. The weather in yesterday’s news: Unprecedented ocean temperatures make this hurricane season especially dangerous.
Explanation: “Hotter oceans and sea surface temperatures are like an octane boost for hurricane season, cranking up the fuel that drives the formation and intensity of the hurricane.” Mother Nature’s talking to us.
Hotter oceans. Not warmer, hotter. wow.
Before I get started, I went to a most extraordinary dinner last Thursday night at the Metropolitan Club. It was a birthday celebration for John Loeb, Jr. who will be 94 somewhere around now.
The dinner was held in the main dining room overlooking Fifth Avenue at 61st Street. The clubhouse, which was built by J.P. Morgan in the beginning of the 20th century, is a magnificent structure of classical architectural design grandeur.
I knew it was a birthday dinner for John. Our friendship is centered around heritage and the histories of family, a subject which intrigues us both. John’s family was very prominent as members of those individuals written in a biography about many prominent New York Jewish families in the early 20th century in the book called Our Crowd by Steven Birmingham. The term (of the title) incidentally, according to John, was never used by anyone of that group that he was born into and grew up with.
The dinner was hosted by his wife Sharon and no doubt her creation. She put together a birthday garden in the grand hall gallery with large black and white photographs of John at different stages of his life from childhood to last week. The dining room, every aspect, from the tables to the walls to the ceilings were decorated with a kind of quiet grandeur, something you may have last seen in a film about 18th century English gentry as only Mother Nature can provide.
The room itself is a classic, but Sharon Loeb created an intimate environment, more closely resembling the grounds of the birthday boy’s beloved home Ridgeleigh that have been in his family for more than century. And countryside beautiful it is.
The guests were in black tie, with the women all looking as glamorous and grandly and classically dressed as if the director of the film chose the classic couture to match the splendor of the room.
It was impossible for me to take it all in with my little camera but the memories will last forever.
In the meantime. I’ve been around people of notable accomplishment all my adult life; and adventures that acquired something memorable among the famous. Money does change people, yet the Self is always the same, the good news, and the bad of course.
Everybody needs it now more than ever these days. Except of course for those thousands of millionaires and billionaires among the (billions of the) rest of us. They are always fascinating story to the rest of us — generally speaking — because they don’t have to worry about the rent.
But this is America. Among my reading this past weekend was an article by Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management, an investment company based in Stamford. Mr. Peter’s article was about Andrew Carnegie in 1901.
The article starts about Carnegie’s childhood. Born in Scotland in 1835, son of an impoverished weaver who was losing business to the machines, he moved to the new world (the US) near Pittsburgh. At age 13 in 1878, Carnegie the son went to work in a cotton mill, wage: $1.20 for a 12 hour day. Ten years later now a young man was on his way to tycoon-dom in the steel business in Pittsburgh.
In 1901, at age 66, his steel business was sold to J.P.Morgan, the banker behind “merging various industrial firms into U.S. Steel.” Carnegie’s takeaway was $492 million. He’d already made a vast personal fortune over the years.
The new firm was capitalized at $1.4 billion and became the world’s most valuable company (the US government budget in 1901 was $517 million for comparison).
Mr. Carnegie spent the last 20 years of his life giving away 90% of his fortune. Beginning in 1880, he built 2,500 libraries in the US, Canada, Britain — feeding hungry young minds.
The 1st library he built was in his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. At the time of his death in 1919 age 84, half the US public libraries had been built by Carnegie.
As a working boy his employer allowed Carnegie to borrow books from his personal collection. “To him I owe a taste for literature which I would not exchange for all the millions that were ever amassed by man,” he recalled.
Coincidentally, the other subject I wanted to share was about another Scotsman, and quite a prominent and famous and talented man a bit more than a century later in the modern world of technology, a man of our times and even now some fabled times. Harry Benson.
Harry first came to this country, to New York, with The Beatles who were making their American debut which became a hallmark debut of profound effect on our world culture.
They were a novelty at first, but only briefly. And Harry had been assigned by a London daily to follow their debut in America — where they soon became American but British, and wise but canny too. And introduced to the world by Harry’s photo of them having a pillow fight at Hotel George V in Paris before their arrival to New York.
The result of that photographic assignment brought Harry an enormous prominence also. He soon became a resident covering the postwar world of entertainment, the arts, politics and the people, and some of the most famous news photographs of our time. He’s photographed the last seven decades of life on our planet.
And it all began with the trip across the Atlantic with these four musicians going by the name The Beatles. They already had a hit record in America which created American interest. Their arrival at what is now Kennedy International Airport was a huge outpouring of (mostly girl) fans. And national publicity. Oh, they all had long hair. That was a first back then. Over the ears and to the shoulders. Nothing now; far out then.
All America watched the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night network television at 8 o’clock, families all sitting around the captivating review of entertainment talent of all performable categories.
The Beatles were the apex of young performing talent in our world. And time. Much of Harry’s photography is a record of that moment as well as their first American tour. This Scotsman caught the trip and what followed was this book:
Harry himself obviously liked that first trip enough that he married a little Texas girl who caught his sharp eye when he was on assignment Deep In the Heart of it all.
And Harry is still at it. On October 23rd, a new exhibit will arrive in downtown Washington, when Harry Benson: Washington DC Iconic Photographs for the Nation’s Capital opens its doors. The exhibit will showcase over 150 of Harry’s photographs, chronicling iconic moments in culture, politics, music, movies, television and sports through the 20th and 21st centuries. Harry is the only photographer to have photographed the last 13 U.S. presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Think on that!
The exhibit will be free and open to the public.
