Paul Revere, Silversmith
Posted: December 28, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
The ports also brimmed with silversmiths. We think of silversmithing as a classic “ye olde” profession; Paul Revere was a silversmith, and, generally, they outnumbered lawyers in Colonial America. But why were any there at all, given that the land had little by way of silver mines? The answer, Mark Hanna explains, is that silversmiths worked as fences, transmuting “pirate metal” into respectable wealth. The first mint in the thirteen colonies was established in 1652 by John Hull, who made Massachusetts pine-tree shillings from Spanish bullion. Hull was a silversmith; his brother Edward was a pirate.
source, “Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order – Or Its Secret Sharers?” by Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker. That article is partly pegged to a book, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press) by Mark G. Hanna.
The role of the silversmith in early America, as in medieval Europe, was complex, combining artisanship with the roles of banker, lender, hoarder, and smuggler. Silversmiths in England traditionally took the brunt of the blame for currency debasement because of the large volume of bullion that passed through their hands. In the colonies, silversmiths were highly respected and powerful men. As mintmaster and owner of trading vessels, Hull understood better than most the intricacies of the piratical market, making him one of the wealthiest men in New England.
…
Pirate metal was transfused into the colonial economy by fences, the most common being silversmiths. This helps explain the disproportionate number of silversmiths in regions allegedly suffering from a monetary crisis: metallic scarcity actually created a positive labor market for these artisans. At a time when pirate booty was welcome and alleged pirates rarely faced trial, there were more silversmiths than lawyers in the colonies. Scholars have identified at least 178 silversmiths who were active before 1740. As the currency problem grew into a perceived epidemic, following Gresham’s Law, individuals held on to full-weight Spanish specie and traded in clipped coins or commodities. Making matters worse, bullion in the form of cobs or bits was easy to counterfeit, fueling unease in the currency market.…
Colonial leaders like John Winthrop did not actively foster sea marauding but still considered the Spanish loot that arrived in Boston Harbor a sign of God’s providence.
Though like every Boston schoolchild I knew Paul Revere was a silversmith, it never occurred to me to wonder where he got any silver, since there weren’t really major silver deposits in the British Empire or New England.
One point Hanna makes is that pirating wasn’t necessarily a lifelong career, you might pirate for awhile and then become respectable:
Swashbuckling yarns about attacks in the Indian Ocean must be tempered by the fact that some of these men bought land in the Delaware Bay, married local Quaker women, took to farming, and won political positions.
Immerwahr tells us the sad fate of Captain Kidd, who got caught on the wrong side of a shift:
London also found that pirates interfered with the East India Company, the chartered trading firm that would become the bridge to Britain’s conquest of India. This was Kidd’s great crime. His theft of the Quedagh Merchant, which had been transporting goods owned by a high-ranking Mughal official, provoked fury on the subcontinent. The Mughal emperor insisted that, if the English wanted to continue operating there, justice must be served. Lord Bellomont’s arrest of Kidd, in 1699, was a sacrifice made on the altar of English trade.
The Crown’s crackdown meant that William Kidd faced a jury in London, not one in pirate-coddling New England. “I am the innocentest person of them all,” Kidd protested. He made much of the French pass that the Quedagh Merchant had carried, which in his view made it fair game. This defense might have worked a generation ago. But now? Kidd’s acts had been “the most mischievous and prejudicial to trade that can happen,” the judge told the jury. Kidd was convicted and sent to Execution Dock in Wapping.
Correction
Posted: December 15, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentI strive for a high editorial standard here at Helytimes. I’m the writer, editor and publisher, and the occasional typo will slip through, but all factual information should be correct.
In a recent post, Todd Graves/ Raising Cane’s and Staying Craveable, I fell beneath that standard, incorrectly claiming that the Box Combo is the largest combo offered at Raising Cane’s. The largest combo (outside of the tailgate platters) is of course the Caniac.
This was a careless error, I just didn’t study the menu enough. The post has been corrected. Thank you.
Early California Reconsidered by Sandos and Sandos
Posted: November 23, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Up in Santa Barbara, we rode hotel bikes up carless State Street, past the beautiful US Bankruptcy Court, turned right on Mission, and one last uphill to the rose garden, and the Old Mission.
Queen of the Missions. We didn’t even go inside, just to the gift shop.
When I saw this book I had to have it. These guys on the cover! I had to know everything about them.
Turns out an entire opening page of dense print is devoted to the origin of this drawing.
This much reproduced image of Indians at Mission San José in 1806 has been encrusted with misinformation and half-truths that need correction.
It begins.
It is frequently described as being done by Georg H. von Langsdorff, a German physician who sailed with the expedition lead by a founder of the Russian American Company, Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov that ventured into Alta California in 1806. The painting has been attributed to Wilhelm Gortlief Tilesius von Tilenau, and appears to have been done in a studio in Europe based upon field sketches as the geographic setting is European romantic and nothing at all like California.
Satisfied.
This is interesting:
When the Spanish arrived in California in 1769, the grasslands and oak savannah that comprised much of Mission San José’s outreach area “were already supporting presumably at carrying capacity levels, great herds of elk, pronghorn, deer, and bighorn sheep.”‘ To this abundance were added cattle, sheep, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, and chickens. The ensuing competition for sweet native grasses favored the newly arrived animals. They, in turn, replaced native plants with introduced coarse grasses and seeds from Europe.
Moreover, the Spanish forbade Indians the annual burning by which they managed local seeds and grasses. The San José plain (also called a valley) lay thirteen miles north of the mission. It was eight miles in diameter and by 1828 the mission grazed nine thousand head of cattle and ten thousand sheep during the summer then moved the herds and flocks to Mount Diablo for winter care.? Mission cattle and sheep contributed to “overgrazing that eliminated native plant populations, favored alien annuals, and caused erosion.” Hunting and fur trapping by outsiders added to mammalian decline.
Together, these environmental changes altered intra-tribal relations in the interior. The dwindling food supplies, coupled with ensuing cultural decline, contributed to ranchería collapse. In this climate, mission entry emerged as a serious alternative to remaining in place. When the American Jedediah Smith traversed the San Joaquín River (he called it the Peticutry) in early March 1827, he wrote, “Since I struck the Peticutry I had seen but few Indians. The greater part of those that once resided here (as Ihave… been told) gone into the Missions of St Joseph [San José] and Santa Clara.”* Smith was travelling through Yokuts territory to the east of Mission San José, yet according to his diary, many of the Indians he encountered were Plains Miwok-speaking Muquelemes from the north who were poaching food and material resources from the vacated lands. The poaching created further tensions and animosities when neophyte Yokuts returned to their former tribal areas in the employ of the missions while on paseos (priestly approved passes) or as fugitives.
Furthermore, the California Mission chain faced an uncertain future as the uneven transition from Spanish to Mexican political control during the 182os brought with it a new demand for secularization, the abolition of the mission system. Soldiers and settlers favored secularization as it would open mission lands to them, providing the opportunity to carve great estates tended by newly freed Indian labor. Franciscans opposed secularization.
Well yeah they would wouldn’t they?
The diseases we know about, and human violence, but I hadn’t really thought of other invasive species like the cow, co-genociders even if they had no ill intent and were prisoners themselves. .
Despite the uncertain future of the mission system, Franciscans, Mission Indians, and Mexican troops continued to press the Spiritual Conquest, combining forces to send out groups to proselytize gentiles and return mission runaways. These expeditions were led by Mexican soldiers using armed neophyte auxiliaries to aid in the task of finding and returning the fugitives.
Gentiles who did not surrender runaway neophytes were frequently severely punished. In some instances, gentiles were rounded up and brought back to the mission by force along with the runaways.
Yikes. Five hundred years after Saint Francis,
(active c. 1260-1280 in Umbria)
people are violently rounding up other people in his name.
The California missions were once considered romantic. I wonder if they’ll someday be considered something more like antebellum plantations. On the other hand the architecture is appealing, and seems to suit California. History: mixed bag!
Vegas
Posted: November 21, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
(source)
What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
A Dave Hickey quote from this Hedgehog Review piece about Las Vegas by Isaac Ariail Reed. Intellectuals writing about Las Vegas tend to crack a little bit. It’s unsayable. Michael Herr’s The Big Room is my favorite.
Previous coverage of Las Vegas
This looks like a boring job
Posted: October 11, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
although who knows, maybe it was hypnotic. from Lewis Hine’s photographs for the WPA
Bill Burr on mid
Posted: July 31, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentI like sitting in the crowd. Like when I go to a sporting event, I want to get good seats, but the closer you sit, the quieter it gets and the less fun it gets. It’s the most fucked-up thing. Unless it’s like an NBA game where before they had a DJ play the whole time. I remember I saw the Lakers play the Knicks, and Comedy Central had courtside seats; I sat there, and you could hear the shit they were talking to each other. That was fucking amazing. But everything else, the closer you get, the more money people have, the less fun it gets. So I was always, like, mezzanine level. I don’t want to be up there with binoculars and super-fucking-shit-faced people, but I like the mid — when the alcohol intake, the view, everything looks like mid. Whatever the second-color-row seats are, that’s what I like.
from this Vulture interview.
Good map of France
Posted: July 12, 2025 Filed under: France, Uncategorized Leave a comment
At Trois Mec here in LA. 1789 boundaries, you can see that Savoy is still part of Italy here.
Islands In The Stream, (Hemingway, 1970) x Islands In The Stream, (B. Gibb, M. Gibb, R. Gibb, 1983)
Posted: June 21, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
A man named Thomas Hudson, who was a good painter, lived there in that house and worked there and on the island the greater part of the year. After one has lived in those latitudes long enough the changes of the seasons become as important there as anywhere else and Thomas Hudson, who loved the island, did not want to miss any spring, nor summer, nor any fall or winter.
Sometimes the summers were too hot when the wind dropped in August or when the trade winds sometimes failed in June and July. Hurricanes, too, might come in September and October and even in early November and there could be freak tropical storms any time from June on. But the true hurricane months have fine weather when there are no storms.
Thomas Hudson had studied tropical storms for many years and he could tell from the sky when there was a tropical disturbance long before his barometer showed its presence. He knew how to plot storms and the precautions that should be taken against them. He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane with the other people of the island and the bond that the hurricane made between all people who had been through it. He also knew that hurricanes could be so bad that nothing could live through them. He always thought, though, that if there was ever one that bad he would like to be there for it and go with the house if she went.
The house felt almost as much like a ship as a house. Placed there to ride out storms, it was built into the island as though it were a part of it; but you saw the sea from all the windows and there was good cross ventilation so that you slept cool on the hottest nights. The house was painted white to be cool in the summer and it could be seen from a long way out in the Gulf Stream. It was the highest thing on the island except for the long planting of tall casuarina trees that were the first thing you saw as you raised the island out of the sea. Soon after you saw the dark blur of casuarina trees above the line of the sea, you would see the white bulk of the house. Then, as you came closer, you raised the whole length of the island with the coconut palms, the clapboarded houses, the white line of the beach, and the of the South Island stretching beyond it. Thomas Hudson never saw the house, there on that island, but that the sight of her made him happy. He always thought of the house as her exactly as he would have thought of a ship. In the winter, when the northers blew and it was really cold, the house was warm and comfortable because it had the only fireplace on the island.
It was a big open fireplace and Thomas Hudson burned driftwood in it.
He had a big pile of driftwood stacked against the south wall of the house. It was whitened by the sun and sand-scoured by the wind and he would become fond of different pieces so that he would hate to burn them. But there was always more driftwood along the beach after the big storms and he found it was fun to burn even the pieces he was fond of. He knew the sea would sculpt more, and on a cold night he would sit in the big chair in front of the fire, reading by the lamp that stood on the heavy plank table and look up while he was reading to hear the northwester blowing outside and the crashing of the surf and watch the great, bleached pieces of driftwood burning.
Sometimes he would put the lamp out and lie on the rug on the floor and watch the edges of color that the sea salt and the sand in the wood made in the flame as they burned. On the floor his eyes were even with the line of the burning wood and he could see the line of the flame when it left the wood and it made him both sad and happy. All wood that burned affected him in this way. But burning driftwood did something to him that he could not define. He thought that it was probably wrong to burn it when he was so fond of it; but he felt no guilt about it.
(Bold mine.)
This book knocked me sideways.
After enjoying Across The River and Into the Trees, I wondered if I should try this. It doesn’t get discussed much. It was published posthumously, ten years after Hemingway’s death. Apparently Mary Hemingway found it and brought it to Scribner’s. For a craftsman like Hemingway you’ve got to be suspicious of anything he himself didn’t consider finished.
This post by a Redditor was all I needed to push me into ordering a good UK edition with an appealing cover.
Hemingway began the novel–as Carlos Baker relates in his excellent biography–at a low point of fortune. It was 1950 and “Across the River and Into the Trees” had just taken a critical beating. In December he began something new; it was to be a series of three books called “The Sea When Young,” “The Sea When Absent” and “The Sea in Being.” The work gathered momentum during the first half of 1951–Hemingway was writing enthusiastically and well–but an odd thing happened to his general scheme. It was conceived as a linked series of three independent novellas concerned with three different eras in the life of Thomas Hudson, an American marine painter. The first takes place on the island of Bimini, the second in wartime Cuba and the third follows Hudson through to his death at sea in an isolated action of World War II. But another concept intruded, and Hemingway added a fourth part, only to find that it had taken on an independent life of its own quite unrelated to Hudson. In 1952, he published this story as “The Old Man and the Sea,” and it was apparently this diversion, plus various travels in the following years, that kept him from a return to the final polishing he had intended for the novel now titled “Islands in the Stream.”
That’s from the Oct. 1970 New York Times review by Robie McCauley. I won’t link to it and I’d encourage you not to read it because it gives away several turns of plot that hit this reader in surprising and unexpected ways.
The book can be pretty shaggy. Many pages of conversations in bars, about forty pages about trying to catch a swordfish, etc. There’s a fight scene where Roger, Thomas Hudson’s friend, who is a writer, beats the hell out of a yacht guy. The yacht guy had a pretty reasonable complaint is this reader’s opinion, and the beating is unpleasant. Even Roger comes to view it as an ugly event. But when the boys arrive, Thomas Hudson’s mood improves, and the book becomes warm and loving in a way unusual in a Hemingway book.
It’s about a father. Most Hemingway main character/stand ins are pointedly unattached. In the short stories we get a father, but through the eyes of Nick, the son, a boy.
In this book we’re seeing the world through a father who is getting a visit from his kids. Two from one mother, one from another. Thomas has all kinds of feelings and regrets about the situation.
Most of the book (drinking, fishing) really tells a story of avoiding, masking, remembering, processing.
The drinking is preposterous. Regularly Thomas is like “a drink? It’s breakfast. I’ll just have a bottle of beer.” (Heineken)
The kids, who are like twelve-sixteen years old, say stuff like
My friend Mr. Joyce has words and expressions I’d never even heard of. I’ll bet nobody could outswear him in any language.
maybe just as setup for Dad to tell stories about Mr. (James) Joyce. But… don’t you want to hear those?
Well, so what? Maybe Hemingway’s kids talked like that.
Hemingway’s whole fictional project is a kind of exaggerated autobiography. He really got somewhere with Islands In The Stream, a new level of vulnerability couched in braggadocio. His fourth wife published it, even though the main character’s worst regret might be losing his first wife.
-—
The song Islands in the Stream was written by The Bee-Gees. They had it in mind for Diana Ross. Barry Gibb says that in this interview. Many places, including Wikipedia, say the title of the song came from the Hemingway novel published thirteen years previous. I can find no firsthand source where Barry Gibb states that or makes that connection. But the phrase “islands in the stream” doesn’t seem to have existed before Hemingway’s book was published. Some sources link it to the John Donne poem from which EH got another title: “for whom the bell tolls.”
The song ended up with Dolly Parton and Kenny Rodgers, and was released on Kenny Rogers’ album Eyes That See In The Dark.
Baby when I met you it was peace I know
I set out to get you with a fine tooth comb
Wow.
Be careful, the song sticks. It knocked “Total Eclipse of the Heart” out of number one on the Billboard Hot 100. 1983 was quite a year on the Billboard Hot 100: “Islands In The Stream” was knocked off by Lionel Ritchie, “All Night Long.”
Which Islands in the Stream the greater work of art with this title?
Talk about apples and oranges. Or, better, limes and coconuts.
There’s a cocktail recipe contained in the novel: Gordon’s gin, coconut water, lime juice, a dash of Angostura bitters for color. I made a few last night. Jess’s review: “I could drink this all day.”
(source)
Signs and wonders
Posted: May 23, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized 1 Comment
It is a wonder to me that a human less than a year and a half old can identify all of these as “doggie.”
“Doggie.”
“Doggie!”
It’s enough to make me want to get a degree in semiotics from Brown University, or at least re-read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
Can any other animal understand such abstract signs? The work on this veers towards ridiculous:
The monkeys chose between ‘tokens’ that represent actual foods. After choosing one of the two token options, monkeys could exchange their token with the corresponding food. What they saw was that the capuchin monkeys assigned a value for each token and food item. Capuchins were indifferent between one Cheerio and two pieces of parmesan cheese, indicating that the value of one Cheerio is equal to two times the value of one piece of parmesan cheese. When choosing between tokens that represented the same foods, the relative value increased – for example, capuchins were indifferent between one Cheerio-token and four parmesan-tokens.
More Conversations with Walker Percy
Posted: March 5, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Vauthier: Mr. Percy, could we return to the question of time, and could you address the general problem of time in The Moviegoer?
Percy: Time? Well, at the end of the Mardi Gras season, the last scene and the last day of The Moviegoer is Ash Wednesday, so there’s a certain relevance here of the time of the action. The celebration of Mardi Gras is in New Orleans the biggest festival of the year with six weeks of parades and six weeks of parties. It ends with Ash Wednesday which is generally more or less ignored by most people who take part in Mardi Gras.
The role of the writer:
E.O.: Considering this very complicated contemporary scene, what is, to you, the role of a writer today?
W.P.: The role of a writer. Well, it seems to be, for me anyway, to affirm people, to affirm the reader. The general culture of the time is very scientific, one might call it “scientistic” on the one hand, and simply aesthetically oriented, on the other. This does not satisfy a certain reader. So, the reader is left in the state of confusion. The contemporary state of a young American man or woman is that he or she has more of the world’s affluence than any other people on this earth and yet he is more dissatisfied, more restless. He experiences some sense of loss which he cannot understand. For him, the traditional religion does not have the answer. So the role of my kind of writer is to speak to this person about this whole area of experience that he’s at or she’s at. This is what you feel, this is how you feel now. My original example in “The Message in the Bottle” is that you take a commuter, the man on the train. He has everything, he succeeded. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He’s making a hundred thousand dollars a year, and he comes into New York every day. He’s moved into a better house, to a better country club, has a very nice wife and nice kids. He is riding on this train and he wonders: what am I doing? He can open a newspaper, and he can see a column which says something about the mid-life crisis. He can read some popular advice from a popular psychologist who would say why you have your mid-life crisis. But this doesn’t satisfy him. He picks up a book by an American writer, John Marquand, which is about a man like himself, a commuter on the train who has the same sense of loss. So, I say that there is a tremendous difference between a man on the train who is in a certain predicament and the same man on the same train with the same predicament who is reading a book about a man on the train. The role of a writer is very modest. It’s to identify the predicament. The letters I get are from people who say: I didn’t know anybody who talked like that, I know what you mean, you have described my predicament. I get letters from the businessmen (the men on the train), from young men, and from young women, and they’re excited because I’ve named the predicament.
That doesn’t sound like much, that’s a very modest contribution but it’s very important. You see, I agree with Kierkegaard. He said: “I’m not an apostle, it’s not for me to bring the good news. Even if I brought the good news, nobody would believe it.” But the role of a novelist, or an artist, for that matter, is to tell the truth, and to convey a kind of knowledge which cannot be conveyed by science, or psychology, or newspapers.
E.O.: Is this edifying?
W.P.: Edifying. You’ve picked up all the bad words. Well, “edify-ing” is a perfectly good word, but it has very bad connotations in English. Well, in the largest sense, it is edifying, because it’s helpful, it creates hope. At its best it’s affirming, it affirms the reader in the way he or she is. It offers an openness and some hope. And that’s about all a novelist can do.
How about this:
Interviewer: It is clear that once we are dealing with a “post-religious technological society,” transcendence is possible for the self by science or art but not by religion. Where does this leave the heroes of your novels with their metaphysical yearnings-Binx, Barrett, More, Lance?
Percy: I would have to question your premise, i.e., the death of relig-ion. The word itself, religion, is all but moribund, true, smelling of dust and wax-though of course in its denotative sense it is accurate enough.
I have referred to the age as “post-Christian” but it does not follow from this that there are not Christians or that they are wrong. Possibly the age is wrong. Catholics —who are the only Christians I can speak for-still believe that God entered history as a man, founded a church and will come again. This is not the best of times for the Catholic Church, but it has seen and survived worse. I see the religious “transcendence” you speak of as curiously paradoxical. Thus it is only by a movement, “transcendence,” toward God that these characters, Binx et al., become themselves, not abstracted like scientists but fully incarnate beings in the world. Kierkegaard put it more succinctly: the self only becomes itself when it becomes itself transparently before God.
From a profile:
He spent most of a decade writing two never-published novels, though now he swears he never felt discouraged “There was never a moment when I doubted what I wanted to do. It was always writing.” In the mid-1950’s, he began The Moviegoer. “I can remember sitting on that back porch of that little shotgun cottage in New Orleans with a little rank patio grown up behind it, after two failed novels. I didn’t feel bad. I felt all right.
“And it crossed my mind, what if I did something that American writers never do, which seems to be the custom in France: Namely, that when someone writes about ideas, they can translate the same ideas to fiction and plays, like Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre. So it just occurred to me, why not take these ideas I’d been trying to write about, in psychiatry and philosophy, and translate them into a fictional setting in New Orleans, where I was living. So I was just sitting out there, and I started writing.
How he starts:
“My novels start off, almost naturally, with somebody in a predicament and somebody trying to get out of it or embark on some sort of search, some sort of wanderings,” Percy says.
Permission to fail:
Visitor: Some people would rather not face their ordeals. What then?
Percy: I have a theory that what terrifies people most of all is failing to live up to something or other. This terror is the result of television shows, movies, and bad books where things always work out. Even in tragic movies, things are rounded off pretty well; people suffer nervous breakdowns in style and form. But, after all, whenever a movie is filmed, serious moviemakers collect 40 or 50 outtakes or failures, scenes that didn’t work, before they get one that works. So what the audience sees is the one that works. We should approach life that way.
We should give ourselves permission to fail.
My opinion? More Conversations with Walker Percy is even better than Conversations with Walker Percy!
New Common Side Effects ep drops tonight
Posted: February 16, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentSome stills:
Art on this show is so good
Team is so talented
A Copano study from last week by Nove Escobedo:
11:30pm on Adult Swim, streaming next day on Max. Spread the word!
Carter’s, congealed electricity, AI and Needham
Posted: January 30, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, business, children, New England, Uncategorized Leave a comment
If you have a little kid in the US you will have some clothes from Carter’s. They sell them at Target and Wal-Mart as well as 1,000 or so Carter’s stores, and they cost $8.
Before I had a kid it didn’t occur to me that kids outgrow their clothes so fast they can’t cost too much.
When I see the Carter’s label, I think of my home town.
William Carter founded Carter’s in Needham, Massachusetts in 1865. Textiles were a big business in New England. Two inputs, labor and electricity, were cheap. Labor from excess farm children, and electricity from running streams? That would’ve been the earliest mode, what were they using by 1865? Coal?
One of the biggest buildings in Needham, certainly the longest, is the former Carter’s headquarters, which stretches itself along Highland Avenue. A prominent landmark, it took a long time to walk past.
The story of Carter’s is a global economic story in miniature.
Old Carter mill #2, found here.
The Carter family sold the company in the 1990s. It went public in 2003. In 2005, Carter’s acquired OshKosh B’gosh, a company famous for making children’s overalls. This company started in 1895 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (the name comes from an Ojibwe word, “The Claw,” that was the name of a local chief).
The term “B’gosh” began being used in 1911, after general manager William Pollock heard the tagline “Oshkosh B’Gosh” in a vaudeville routine in New York.[4] The company formally adopted the name OshKosh B’gosh in 1937.
OshKosh B’Gosh’s Wisconsin plant was closed in 1997. Downsizing of domestic operations and massive outsourcing and manufacturing at Mexican and Honduran subsidiaries saw the domestic manufacturing share drop below 10 percent by the year 2000.
OshKosh B’Gosh was sold to Carter’s, another clothing manufacturer for $312 million
The headquarters of Carter’s moved to Atlanta. Labor and electricity were cheaper in Georgia, Carter’s had been opening mills in the South for awhile. Now the clothes are made overseas. I look at the labels on Carter’s clothes: Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Vietnam. If you factor in the shipping and the markup how much of that $8 is going to your garment maker in Bangladesh? Then again maybe it’s the best job around, raising Bangladeshis out of poverty, and soon Chittagong will look like Needham.
The former Carter’s headquarters, now vacant, became a facility for elder living. My mom worked there, briefly. Carter’s today is headquarted in the Phipps Tower in Buckhead, Atlanta, which I happened to pass by the other day.
The loss of the mill and the company headquarters was not a crisis for Needham. Needham is very close to Boston, an easy train ride away, and along of the 128 Corridor. There are growth businesses in the area, hospitals, biotech companies, universities. TripAdvisor is based in Needham. Needham is a pleasant town, there are ongoing talks to turn the former Carter’s building into housing. It would be close to public transport and walkable to the library and the Trader Joe’s. That seems to be stalled.
Needham has brain jobs, attached to a dense brain network, while brawn jobs are being shipped overseas. There are many other towns in Massachusetts where the old run down mill is a sad derelict as production moved first south and then overseas. These towns are bleak. Oshkosh, Wisconsin seems ok, but the shipping of steady jobs overseas is of course a major factor in our politics, Ross Perot was talking about it in 1992 and no one did anything about it and now Trump is the president.
A similar story lies in the history of Berkshire Hathaway – the original New Bedford textile mill, not the conglomerate Warren Buffett built on top of it using the same name. Buffett talks about this, I believe this is from the 2022 annual meeting:
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I remember when you had a textile mill —
WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, god.
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and it couldn’t —
WARREN BUFFETT: I try to forget it. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: — and the textiles are really just congealed electricity, the way modern technology works.
And the TVA rates were 60% lower than the rates in New England. It was an absolutely hopeless hand, and you had the sense to fold it.
WARREN BUFFETT: Twenty-five years later, yeah. (Laughs)
CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, you didn’t pour more money into it.
WARREN BUFFETT: No, that’s right.
CHARLIE MUNGER: And, no — recognizing reality, when it’s really awful, and taking appropriate action, just involves, often, just the most elementary good sense.
How in the hell can you run a textile mill in New England when your competitors are paying way lower power rates?
WARREN BUFFETT: And I’ll tell you another problem with it, too. I mean, the fellow that I put in to run it was a really good guy. I mean, he was 100% honest with me in every way. And he was a decent human being, and he knew textiles.
And if he’d been a jerk, it would have been a lot easier. I would have probably thought differently about it.
But we just stumbled along for a while. And then, you know, we got lucky that Jack Ringwalt decided to sell his insurance company [National Indemnity] and we did this and that.
But I even bought a second textile company in New Hampshire, I mean, I don’t know how many — seven or eight years later.
I’m going to talk some about dumb decisions, maybe after lunch we’ll do it a little.
Congealed electricity, what a phrase. In the 1985 annual letter, Buffett discusses the other input, labor, which was cheaper in the South, and why he kept Berkshire Hathaway running in Massachusetts anyway:
At the time we made our purchase, southern textile plants – largely non-union – were believed to have an important competitive advantage. Most northern textile operations had closed and many people thought we would liquidate our business as well.
We felt, however, that the business would be run much betterby a long-time employee whom. we immediately selected to be president, Ken Chace. In this respect we were 100% correct: Ken
and his recent successor, Garry Morrison, have been excellent managers, every bit the equal of managers at our more profitable businesses.… the domestic textile industry operates in a commodity business, competing in a world market in which substantial excess capacity exists. Much of the trouble we experienced was attributable, both directly and indirectly, to competition from foreign countries whose workers are paid a small fraction of the U.S. minimum wage. But that in no way means that our labor force deserves any blame for our closing. In fact, in comparison with employees of American industry generally, our workers were poorly paid, as has been the case throughout the textile business. In contract negotiations, union leaders and members were sensitive to our disadvantageous cost position and did not push for unrealistic wage increases or unproductive work practices. To the contrary, they tried just as hard as we did to keep us competitive. Even during our liquidation period they performed superbly. (Ironically, we would have been better off financially if our union had behaved unreasonably some years ago; we then would have recognized the impossible future that we faced, promptly closed down, and avoided significant future losses.)
Buffett goes on, if you care to read it, to discuss the dismal spiral faced by another New England textile company, Burlington.
Charlie Munger, in his 1994 USC talk, spoke on the paradoxes here:
For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, ‘They’ve invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones.’
And Warren said, ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t work because if it does, I’m going to close the mill.’ And he meant it.
What was he thinking? He was thinking, ‘It’s a lousy business. We’re earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we’re not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business.’
And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.
That’s such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy. The money still won’t come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.”
Is something similar happening with AI? Who will it make rich, and at what cost? To whose ribs will the profits stick?
I’m not sure we could call AI congealed but it is more or less just more and more electricity run through expensive processors. Who will win from that? So far it’s been the makers of the processors, but if DeepSeek shows you don’t need as many of those the game is changed. Personally I’m unimpressed with DeepSeek – try asking it what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
How does Carter’s itself continue to survive? Target’s own brand, Cat & Jack, is right next door on the shelves. Could another company shove Carter’s aside if they can cut the margins even thinner, get the price down to $7? Here’s what Carter’s CEO Michael Casey has to say in their most recent annual letter:
Hard to build the operational network Carter’s has over 150+ years. There will be a challenge awaiting the next CEO of Carter’s as Michael Casey is retiring. Carter’s stock ($CRI) is pretty beaten up over the past year, down 30%. A possible macro problem for Carter’s is that the number of births in the United States appears to be declining.
It is powerful, when I’m changing my daughter, to contemplate my home town, and global commerce, and the people in Cambodia who made these clothes, and the ways of the world.
Norms
Posted: November 30, 2024 Filed under: the California Condition, Uncategorized Leave a commentI read that Norms on La Cienega, a classic LA diner, may be replaced by a Raising Cane’s.
This Norm’s is the subject of a famous painting by Ed Ruscha:
I asked different AIs to generate some versions of this painting if it were a Cane’s instead of a Norm’s.
From The LA Times:
June 25-26
Posted: June 26, 2024 Filed under: America, the American West, Uncategorized 3 CommentsLt. James Bradley led a detachment of Crow Indian scouts up the Bighorn Valley during the summer of 1876. In his journal he records that early Monday morning, June 26, they saw the tracks of four ponies. Assuming the riders must be Sioux, they followed these tracks to the river and came upon one of the ponies, along with some equipment which evidently had been thrown away. An examination of the equipment disclosed, much to his surprise, that it belonged to some Crows from his own command who had been assigned to General Custer’s regiment a few days earlier.
While puzzling over this circumstance, Bradley discovered three men on the opposite side of the river. They were about two miles away and appeared to be watching. He instructed his scouts to signal with blankets that he was friendly, which they did, but for a long time there was no response. Then the distant men built a fire, messages were exchanged by smoke signal, and they were persuaded to come closer.
They were indeed Crow scouts: Hairy Moccasin, Goes Ahead, White Man Runs Him. They would not cross the river, but they were willing to talk.
Bradley did not want to believe the story they told, yet he had a feeling it was true. In his journal he states that he could only hope they were exaggerating, “that in the terror of the three fugitives from the fatal field their account of the disaster was somewhat overdrawn.”
The news deeply affected his own scouts. One by one they went aside and sat down, rocking to and fro, weeping and chanting. Apart from relatives and friends of the slain soldiers, he later wrote, “there were none in this whole horrified nation of forty millions of people to whom the tidings brought greater grief.”
There were no literate survivors to the “last stand” event of June 25, 1876, so we have no firsthand written accounts. What happened was pieced together first from a sort of crime scene investigation. Later, interviews with participants were done, but cultural and linguistic gaps remained. Thomas Marquis, who lived among the Northern Cheyenne and knew many of them, wrote a book whose conclusions were so shocking it couldn’t be published in his lifetime.
Later, art, illustrations, apparently by eyewitnesses emerged, much of it quite vivid.
How about this:
or this:
Those found in:
What was this war about, anyway?:
Swisstory (Part One)
Posted: April 13, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWe’ll be at the Annecy Animation Festival in June to present the world premiere of COMMON SIDE EFFECTS, hope to see you there! Although Annecy is of course in France, this trip will bring me for the first time to the nation of Switzerland, so I’ve been reading up on her history.
I took Tyler Cowen’s advice and bought a picture book:
The map in there is really good:
Here’s Google:
Here’s another map:
As you can see we have the Alps, some tough to traverse terrain, to the south, another gentler spine of mountains, the Jura, running along the northwest, and a juicy plateau in the middle, where you’ll find Geneva, Bern, and on up to Zurich.
Remember Otzi, the Ice Man? Here’s a reconstruction of the withered ice-mummy:
(source)
Otzi was found in the Italian Alps near Austria, and he lived around 3000 BC. Presumably there were wandering ice men and women all over what’s now Switzerland in wayback times. Now you can see Otzi in a special refrigerated chamber in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano. His murderer has yet to be identified. Boy, talk about a cold case!
A lucky or industrious iceman might’ve built himself and his family a pile-dwelling. The various alpine pile-dwellings are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A reach, in my opinion. There’s apparently one in Bourg I may get to check out. Do the people of Bourg live any better now?
In looking into that I found this cool picture of nearby Versoix, taken in 1925 by aviator Walter Mittelhozer.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Fast forward from the iceman and the pile houses a couple thousand years. Herbert Kubly, writing the Time Life text, does a great job:
Switzerland was brought into history by Julius Caesar.
Backing up a bit:
During the Iron Age several tribes of barbaric Celts overran the area and one of them, the Helvetii, stayed. By 500 B.C. these Helvetians seem to have shared the land with a wild tribe called the Raeti, from northern Italy. They were not destined to share the land in peace.
Soon restless and powerful Germanic tribes from north of the Rhine began to press relentlessly southward.
Driven westish by these invaders, the proto-Swiss met the Romans in what’s now France. There they scored a win at Agen, in what’s now France.
According to Caesar, the captured Roman soldiers were ordered to pass under a yoke set up by the triumphant Gauls, a dishonour that called for both public as well as private vengeance. Caesar is the only narrative source for this episode, as the corresponding books of Livy’s histories are preserved only in the Periochae, short summarising lists of contents, in which hostages given by the Romans, but no yoke, are mentioned.
This episode was painted by Swiss artist Charles Gleyre:
Gleyre also did a nice portrait of Sappho:
That’s now in the Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, I hope I have a chance to view it.
In any case the Helvitii victory was short lived. Caesar went after the bad boys of the plateau. Says Kubly:
In 58 B.C., a great column of men, women and children, with their cattle and provisions, started westward toward what is today southern France, their goal the mouth of the Garonne River and the Atlantic coast.
It was this attempted tribal relocation that ushered Switzerland onto the stage of world 25 history. Southern France was a Roman province and Caesar was understandably reluctant to have this disrupting human tide cross his territory. He rushed 700 miles from Rome to Geneva in eight days, marshaled six legions and defeated the Alpine tribesmen in a battle near the present-day French city of Autun. After the defeat, Caesar ordered the Helvetii to stay home.
Another version:
In 58 BC, Julius Caesar prevented the Helvetians from leaving the Swiss plateau when they wanted to avoid the Germanic incursion from the west by migrating to the south of France. They were stopped by Julius Caesar at Bibracte (Montmort near present-day Autun, Burgundy, F). He sent the Helvetians back and settled them as a “buffer people” under the control of the Roman army. After Caesar’s death, the Romans, now under Emperor Augustus, increased their influence over Swiss territory.
so says the Swiss tourist board, which has a great website. Here’s a nice Roman arena at Aventicum/Avenches:
(source: Ludovic Péron for Wiki)
There were some Roman outposts in Switzerland:
and it seems like it was mostly a good time:
The hundreds of villae found in Switzerland, some very luxurious, attest to the existence of a wealthy and cultured upper class of landowners. Many villae belonged not to Roman immigrants, but to members of the Celtic aristocracy who continued to hold their lands and their rank after the Roman conquest. Of the lower classes, much less is known, although there are inscriptions attesting to the existence of guilds (collegia) of boat skippers, doctors, teachers and traders, as well as to the existence of a trade in slaves.
A Roman era arch on Lake Geneva, thanks Hapax.
Says Kubly:
Over the succeeding centuries the troops and the Roman governors established Roman law and built towns with palaces, temples and amphitheaters. They introduced cherries and chickens to Helvetian agriculture and improved cattle breeds and the cultivation of vineyards.
Their most enduring enterprise was the construction of roads with which they crisscrossed the country, including a road over the Great St. Bernard Pass which assured permanent communication between Italy and the north.
Then it all went to hell. The “catastrophe of 260” led to the place being overrun by warlike German tribes, the Romans retreated, they were gone completely by 454 AD.
There’s a small little nook of Switzerland where people still speak Romansh, which is something like Vulgar Latin.
(source)
But mostly the Germanic / Frankish peoples would be running the show in what’s now Switzerland from now on.
Now we enter a period where like four or five hundred years goes by and very little is recorded, aside from the occasional mention of a monastery or something. What the hell was happening? “I’m in the dark here” as Al Pacino says in Scent of a Woman. It’s unfashionable to call it the Dark Ages, but… it was dark! Like literally, there was probably very little light. World Lit Only By Fire as William Manchester titled his fascinating and bizarre book. People livin, dyin, lovin. All vanished.
Says Kubly, deftly summarizing a few centuries of what must’ve been intense struggle times:
With the Romans gone, two Germanic tribes gradually took over Switzerland. The Burgundians moved in from the west. The Alemanni, invading from the north, gradually pushed the Burgundians to the Sarine River, which became the border between the two and established permanently the division which still exists today between Switzerland’s French- and German speaking peoples.
In the Sixth Century both tribes came under Frankish rule, and the country eventually became a part of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. After Charlemagne died in 814, his descendants fell to bickering among themselves and Switzerland was once again divided, this time between two of Charlemagne’s grandsons who ruled upper Burgundy and Germany. In 888, a minor despot named Rudolf seized part of the old Burgundian territories and had himself crowned ruler.
When we come back: oaths, Eidgenossenschaft, and the Bern Book.
Santa Anita Derby
Posted: April 5, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Tomorrow at Santa Anita an interesting Derby is shaping up.
Sort of a good vs evil thing against Bob Baffert’s Imagination
Plus we can’t rule out Wynstock.
Scale
Posted: March 19, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Sometimes I’m struck by how jarring a transition in scale has occurred in human life in the last few hundred years. Sure, there’ve been all kinds of massive changes in information speed, travel speed, etc. But don’t ignore simple scale of size. What was considered a big, grand, monumental building in 1776 is now dwarfed by even a mundane office building. Or take the Rainier Club in Seattle:
A good list to review:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_built_before_the_20th_century
Texas
Posted: March 12, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
Can you name these major rivers of Texas? from this excellent book my wife got at the thrift store:
I’ve been reading it to my daughter (she finds it somnolent).
Pretty map:
The importance of bird hunting in American politics
Posted: January 14, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, birds, Uncategorized Leave a comment
JAB III used to turkey hunt with Lawton Chiles despite being in opposing parties. According to JAB that paid off during the 2000 Florida recount:
BAKER:
Jeb ran against Lawton Chiles in a very divisive and semidirty race. I had become a good friend of Lawton because I was Treasury Secretary and he was Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. We did a lot of work together. He was an adversarial Democrat and I was an adversarial Republican, but we both liked to turkey hunt. He would invite me to Florida to hunt turkeys and I would invite him to Texas to hunt turkeys. I would call the turkeys for him and he would shoot them, and he would call them for me and I would shoot them.
One thing that really paid dividends with respect to the Florida recount—I know I’m jumping ahead of you here—Before I’d gotten over there, but it was reinforced after I’d gotten over there, I remembered the types of people that Lawton had appointed to the Florida Supreme Court. I’d probably met some of them. There was a guy named Dexter Douglass—You may remember who that was.
RILEY
He shows up in your book.
BAKER
In my book, yes. He was an advisor to Lawton. He was the guy who told Lawton whom to put on the Florida Supreme Court. He gave him advice about which lawyers to put on. They were all liberal trial lawyers. So when I got to Florida I was of the view, pretty much right off the bat, that if we weren’t able to get this into federal court we had a really tough row to hoe. As it turned out, that was very true. The Florida Supreme Court pulled us out twice, once in the face of a direct order from the United States Supreme Court to review their opinion—They reversed an earlier opinion. So that relationship I had with Lawton Chiles really paid dividends when it was time to go to do the recount.
There was a significant moment in George W. Bush’s governor campaign in Texas that turned on how he handled accidentally killing a killdeer, the wrong kind of bird, during a publicity event on the first day of bird hunting season. Here’s Karl Rove:
Then also, the famous killdeer incident had a big impact, because it showed—Her attitude toward good old boys was condescending. She felt she needed to placate “Bubba” by every September first going dove hunting in East Texas, outside of Dallas. Of course, she was not a hunter, she could care less, but it was a nice show and she’d get a nice picture for the newspapers. Bush went dove hunting and shot a protected bird, a killdeer, and when he discovered that he had done so, after a sharp-eyed television sports reporter noticed that the white markings on the bird meant that it was a killdeer, Bush’s response was not to deny it, but to dispatch a young aide to the game warden’s office to pay the fine immediately.
Then there was the incident where Cheney shot his buddy in the face by accident. Rove:
Rove
On my lease, and that was my lawyer. I was shocked that fact never came out. If you go back to incorporation papers of Rove and Company in 1981, my lawyer, the secretary/treasurer of my corporation, and my landlord is Harry M. Whittington Jr., and that’s the guy Cheney shot. The press corps never figured it out, but could you imagine the headline in the Washington Post? “Cheney Shoots Rove’s Lawyer in Sign of West Wing Tension.”
Riley
Did you get a funny feeling in your stomach when you got that news?
Rove
We could not get Cheney to make it public, and we needed to. It took until the next morning, before Cheney allowed Katharine Armstrong to feed the news to a reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The White House press corps was furious with us for having hid this fact from the afternoon and to the next morning.
Why did Cheney’s team bungle releasing that news? Dan Bartlett, W. communications director, explains:
The second one is when he shot Harry Whittington and he shut down all internal communication. We couldn’t get hold of him, couldn’t get hold of his staff. Only learned later that there were some back channel communications with Karl, but they decided that no one in the world would understand or have context for him accidentally shooting somebody while hunting except for one reporter at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times who they couldn’t find because she was on a drunk bender for 12 hours. It took that long to find her.
in good news
Posted: October 8, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentIn good news, we saw Reba McEntire at Terroni
Helytimes 
