Nature's Classroom
It is undoubtedly challenging, if not unfathomable, for today’s youth to imagine a world (or even an hour) without smart “phones,” which now double (or triple) as televisions, photo albums, and jukeboxes. Until the advent of broadcast television, radio was the mainstay of most Ardsley homes (such as depicted in the Huntley Estates brochure below for the houses built west of Ardsley High School on Huntley Drive and Overlook and Oakhill Roads, which were primarily constructed after World War II under the mortgage and lending benefits provided by the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill) [1] for returning veterans.
Whether or not to buy a television was fertile ground for arguably one of the funniest episodes of Jackie Gleason’s 1950s groundbreaking sitcom, “The Honeymooners.” [2]
Televisions (which have also become “smart”) [3] were not mounted to walls. For significant events, such as watching the funeral procession after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, political conventions, or the Apollo space flights, including 1969’s lunar landing, the portable black and white television would be ceremoniously moved to the dining room table. However, if there was an electrical blackout, as there was in the Northeast on November 9, 1965, radio again took center stage.
As a 2015 Smithsonian Magazine article entitled “When New York City Lost Power in 1965, Radio Saved the Day” explained,
Battery-powered transistor radios could still pick up the news, as long as stations had back-up generators to transmit it. One prominent magazine would later refer to the blackout as “the day of the transistor” and radio’s “greatest hour since D-Day.” [4]
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When the first person in a neighborhood bought a color television [5], it was analogous to the below-linked scene from the 1971 movie version of 1964’s [6] hit Broadway show, Fiddler on the Roof, when Motel, a poor tailor, acquires a used sewing machine [7]. The entire tight-knit but poverty-stricken shtetl community is desperate to see it, especially his father-in-law Tevye (played by Israeli actor Topol), [8] who doubted his son-in-law would amount to much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB0o3Rq9Vyo
The below newspaper clipping concerning the Congressional electoral contest between challenger George Brenner and incumbent Ralph Waldo Gwinn appeared in the October 21, 1950, edition of The Herald Statesman (the predecessor to the Journal News). Gwinn [9] (1884-1962) was born in Noblesville, Hamilton County, Indiana., and was a member and later president of the Board of Education in Bronxville, New York, from 1920 to 1930, and was subsequently elected as a Republican to the Seventy-ninth and to the six succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1945 - January 3, 1959) representing the 27th Congressional District (which included the Towns of Greenburgh and Eastchester). As the article recounts, the politically hard right-wing Gwinn and the politically far left-wing Vito Marcantonio (1902-1954), whose 1949 campaign for Mayor of New York City on the American Labor Party ticket was immortalized by Ardsley artist Ralph Fasanella (who ran for City Council on the same slate) in his stunning “Lucky Corner” painting created in his Ardsley studio in 1972, discussed in the June 17, 2021, Timepiece entitled “Zingarella de Ardsley), both voted against an appropriation to stockpile war materials. Even earlier, both had become odd political bedfellows by voting against the Marshall Plan, an American initiative to rebuild Western Europe after its devastation as a consequence of World War II. Following Brenner’s unsuccessful 1952 rechallenge of Gwinn, he was appointed County Judge and later in 1957, as Surrogate of Westchester County by then-Governor W. Averell Harriman. Harriman (1891-1986), running on the Democratic and Liberal party lines, was soundly defeated in 1958 by Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979), who headed the statewide Republican ticket.
The name of Rockefeller’s Lieutenant Governor, Malcolm Wilson (1914-2000), was affixed in 1994 to the original Tappan Zee Bridge (1955-2017), which, as of 2018, is named for former Governor Mario M. Cuomo (1932-2015). Ardsley’s current New York State Assemblyman has introduced legislation to restore Wilson’s name to the new bridge’s Welcome Center. After Rockefeller resigned in 1973, Wilson became New York’s 50th Governor only to be swept out of office in 1974’s Post-Watergate Democratic landslide, in which Hugh Carey (1919-2011) was elected New York’s Governor. Although often derided as “Governor What’s His Name,” Wilson’s fifteen years as Rockefeller’s understudy taught him to have a distaste for political oversimplification. However, while Wilson knew “The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity” (Obituary, The New York Times, March 14, 2000), he was unable to prevent Rockefeller from enacting a set of draconian anti-drug laws which, as initially proposed by Rockefeller, punished drug dealing more harshly than the crimes of rape, kidnapping, and murder. Inevitably this “get tough” approach, which was motivated by the misguided belief that a strategy of “lock them up for life” would be an effective tool to stop narcotics trafficking or that a polity could arrest its way out of the problem of drug abuse, led to the immeasurable financial and social costs of mass incarceration. [10] As critics had predicted, Rockefeller’s widely imitated “War on Drugs” policies of extreme deterrence failed. In 2009, then-New York State Governor David Patterson remarked he could not think of a criminal justice strategy that had been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
Local and national political campaigns were waged over local radio stations such as WFAS on Secor Road in Hartsdale (which is within the borders of the Ardsley School District), as seen in the above notice from George Brenner and the below advertisement for the 1952 Eisenhower-Nixon Presidential campaign. [11}
As the below image shows, the former 27th Congressional District encompassed the western half of Westchester County (including Ardsley) from the Yonkers/Bronx border to all of Putnam County.
In the 1952 campaign rematch between Brenner and Gwinn, the following article appeared in the New York Herald Tribune (11/2/52) about Ardsley residents Lawrence Graham and Mrs. Theodore F. Berland (ostensible members of the anomalous “Republicans for Brenner”), disavowing the use by the Democrats of their names in an anti-Gwinn pamphlet. Gwinn reported the allegedly improper appropriation of their names and the purported smears about him in the pamphlet to the FBI, the Postal Inspector, and the District Attorney, confirming that today’s acrimonious and banefully corrosive political culture is old hat.
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Radio station WFAS, named for the founder’s father, Frank A. Seitz, Sr., applied for its broadcasting license in 1926. Its initial location was at the Fort Hill Road and Jackson Avenue intersection on the Greenburgh/Yonkers border [12]. Now owned by Cumulus Media, it airs a mix of syndicated conservative talk show hosts during the week and CBS Sports on weekends. It is one of only three all-digital AM stations in the United States. [13]
Curiously, the sign on Secor Road makes no mention of the nearly century-old station’s call letters WFAS. As explained in a series of emails (slightly edited for clarity) to the author from Conrad Trautmann, Cumulus’s Chief Technology Officer:
“It is still licensed by the FCC and is identified on the air as WFAS. The re-branding was intentional to draw attention to it being the first entirely digital AM station in the NY metropolitan area. The HD in the logo is the official logo of HD radio and means the signal can be hybrid [i.e., analog or digital], but this is why the station is special. [14] We chose to broadcast only in digital (not hybrid, no analog), extending the high-quality stereo signal further and improving reception within the coverage area. More than half of the cars on the road in NY have HD-compatible radios. Some newer car radios will automatically switch to an internet stream if the listener drives outside the signal area.”
The studio on the site (which is the location where George Washington had his headquarters in 1781 at Joseph Appleby’s house during the War of Independence when the Continental Army was billeted in present-day Ardsley) is an assemblage of somewhat weathered buildings next to a gleaming 432-foot guyed stainless steel radio tower installed in 1986 (which replaced the original 1946 tower). [15] According to Trautmann, the antenna (shown below with the guyed wire supports and the stone boulders from the property walls surrounding the Appleby farmhouse in front) transmits the new all-digital signal.
Ninety years ago, in an article by Ardsley historian James Owen, published posthumously in the Quarterly Journal of the Westchester County Historical Journal, Owen suggested that a marker be placed at what became the WFAS site as follows:
“Near this site was the home of Joseph Appleby, which was occupied in the summer of 1781 by General George Washington while cooperating with the French allies under Rochambeau and while maturing plans for the capture of Cornwallis in Virginia, etc., etc.” [16]
As for the studio buildings, which were built in the 1950s and once had a local news staff of nine reporters and anchors, Trautmann added:
“Since our programming originates from many places, we do not use the studios in the building, so the only thing that changed is the installation of the new transmitter.”
Perhaps there is something unusual about this tract, as it is not only an important historic site of the American Revolutionary War, but it is now where a revolution in radio technology is occurring.
Across the street from WFAS’s property is Ferncliff Cemetery. Former Beatle John Lennon was cremated there after being murdered outside his Dakota home at 1 West 72nd Street in Manhattan forty-one years ago on December 8, 1980. It is perhaps preternatural that Lennon’s final hours on earth were spent near a radio tower, the medium through which the world first heard his music. [17]
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One of today’s most popular and enduring radio programs is “Fresh Air,” an interview-based radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed nationally by National Public Radio (NPR). Terry Gross, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015 by then-President Barack Obama, has hosted the show for almost a half-century.
Of course, seeking "fresh air" is one of the main reasons people move to the suburbs from cities. [18]
The appeal of having a country home to, of course, enjoy the fresh country air was a staple of real estate ads as contained in this 1950s era brochure for Huntley Estates at Ardsley.
Over half a century earlier, in the 1890s, prospective homeowners in Bronxville’s Lawrence Park development were solicited with promises of “pure air.”
As noted in the below contention made by Herbert Hoover cited in a chapter heading in Crabgrass Frontier, [19] the seminal book by historian Kenneth T. Jackson on the suburbanization of the United States, Americans have always been magnetically drawn toward if not obsessed with the idea of homeownership:
Generations of Ardsley High School students having read John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men” know of Lenny and George’s impossible dream of liberating themselves from their fated life as migrant workers:
“O.K. Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and—”
The American desire for “fresh air” and the slower pace of country living was satirized in the long-running lighthearted but inane sitcom “Green Acres,” starring Eddie Albert, as a lawyer (“Oliver Wendell”) who tires of city life and seeks simpler living in the country to the chagrin of his socialite wife, played by Eva Gabor (“Lisa Douglas”). The show’s theme song contains these stanzas sung by each character:
Oliver :
Green acres is the place to be
Farm livin is the life for me
Land spreading out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside
Lisa:
New York is where I’d rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Darling I love you but give me Park Avenue
Oliver: Thc chores
Lisa: The stores
Oliver: Fresh air
Lisa: Times Square
Oliver: You are my wife
Lisa: Goodbye city life
Together: Green Acres we are here.
Green Acres was adapted for television in 1950 from a short-lived radio show called “Granby’s Green Acres.” Grandby’s itself was adapted from S. J. Perelman’s 1947 novel “Acres and Pains.'' One reviewer described “Acres and Pains” as a “Hilarious, rueful account of a city slicker who moves to Bucks County, PA to jump into rural life.”
Coincidentally, Ralph Waldo Gwinn, who practiced law in New York City, had a farm in Pawling, New York (in Dutchess Country), where Bronxville students traveled to explore agricultural life. In 1938, with another New York City attorney, he co-wrote a manifesto entitled “From 5th Avenue to Farm: A Biological Approach to the Problem of the Survival of our Civilization,” exalting the virtues of farm life. [20]
The idea that the outdoors has both restorative powers and the ability to unleash the potential of children is a deep-seated American belief. [21]. This view manifested itself in Ardsley as seen in the below tribute to pioneering educator and Ardsley Renaissance man Arthur W. Silliman in the 1958 Ardsleyan (the high school yearbook), the year of his retirement after 36 years of service to the Ardsley School District.[22]
Silliman’s advocacy of outdoor education garnered national attention first in The New York Times in an article on his innovative camp-in-school education initiative [23] and when the April 4, 1955, edition of Look magazine applauded his efforts for introducing American students to “nature’s classroom.”
Not surprisingly, Silliman’s educational philosophy of promoting outdoor education can be traced to a speech given in Cambridge, Massachusetts a century earlier by another Ralph Waldo in 1837 before the Harvard University Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson posited: “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. . . The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him?” This section of Emerson’s address concludes: “[I]n fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” [24]
Regrettably, the annual trips to Washington, D.C. no longer occur. However, Silliman’s vision of Ardsley students encountering the outdoors is flourishing in the High School’s Mountain and the Middle School’s Hiking clubs.
Photo appearing in Silliman’s article “Try the Outdoor Approach” in the New York State Education Journal (March 1952)
Endnotes:
[1] In Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream, author Edward Humes maintains, “the G.I. Bill made homeowners, college graduates, professionals, rocket scientists, and a booming middle class out of a Depression-era generation that never expected such opportunity.” (Harcourt 2006). Background on the term “GI” can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I. On December 24, 2021, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s Newshour program approvingly called the Child Tax Credit contained in the Biden Administration’s now stalled “Build Back Better” legislative proposal, “the GI Bill for babies.”
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0604647/characters/nm0575031
[3] Sixty years ago, on May 9, 1961, Federal Communications Chair Newton N. Minow invited television executives gathered in Washington for his first official speech as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to spend a day watching their own broadcasts. He told his select audience: “Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off,” he said. “I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.” As the below Chicago Tribune article relates, television executives extracted their “revenge'' by naming the marooned ship on the somewhat mindless television sitcom Gilligan’s Island, the S.S. Minow, which debuted in 1964 and survived for three seasons. However, the show has enjoyed vast popularity in reruns and has never been off the air. One of the show’s characters, Tina Louise (b. 1934), who played “Ginger, the movie star,” briefly lived in Ardsley in the 1940s at the Ardsley Heights Country School for Girls, a boarding school. Preternaturally, Ardsley-based River’s Edge Theater Company co-founders Meghan and David Covington live in the old bunkhouse for the school with their three daughters. https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-newton-minow-television-vast-wasteland-20210507-ccciyjjp2vhvlddbfoiakdydly-story.html
[4] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-york-city-lost-power-radio-saved-day-180957194/
[5] Although color television technology was possible as early as the 1920s, most television programs were, due to cost, not broadcast in color until the mid-1960s. “The relatively small amount of network color programming, combined with the high cost of color television sets, meant that as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the US had a color set.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television
[6] 1n 1964, the Hasbro toy company released a widely popular action figure known as “G.I. Joe.” The toy is still being produced, and the concept has expanded to print (comics), films (both animation and live-action), and video games. G.I. Joe has been inducted into the National Toy and Pop Culture Hall of Fames.
[7] For a history of the sewing machine possibly available in Russia where the film takes place see, https://jasonhurwitz.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/motelmonday-42114/
[8] Topol is the Chairman of Jordan River Village, Israel's only free, year-round, overnight camp for children living with life-limiting conditions (serious illnesses, chronic illnesses, genetic diseases, special needs) serving all sectors of Israeli society: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Bedouins; wealthy and poor; religious and secular.
[9] Gwinn’s obituary in The New York Times (2/28/62) described him as a “fiery exponent of right-of-center philosophy” and contained the following: “He backed “free economy” all the way.” Declaring there was no middle road, he opposed “setting up Robin Hoods to confiscate our properties and liberties for a communal state.” Nevertheless, when it came to local education and long before his tenure in Congress, Gwinn fully supported the progressive ideas of John Dewey. As independent education scholar and cultural historian Claudia Keenan (www.throughthehourglass) wrote in her history of public education in Bronxville, New York: “... Gwinn, the trustee [beginning in 1921] chiefly responsible for pursuing progressive education, was himself a progressive paradox: a man of action for a new age who happened to bear a remarkable capacity for pompous obfuscation. He would use both aspects of his character to further the Bronxville School. The father of five school-aged children, Gwinn was said to have been deeply impressed by the fact that Winnetka [an affluent Chicago suburb larger than Bronxville but with similar demographics and political outlook] students happily looked forward to school each day. He also paved the way for the active participation of parents, one of the school’s most traditional strengths. Before the advent of progressivism in Bronxville, a parent’s arrival at school prompted teachers to spread the bad news with a coded warning, “the cat is on the mat!“ Keenan, Claudia, Portrait of a Lighthouse School: Public Education in Bronxville, New York (The Bronxville School History Committee, 1997) p. 17.
[10] Mass Incarceration in America, Then and Now
[11] “Listen to Ike” advertisement published in the Herald Statesman (November 3, 1952)
[12] The station’s peripatetic licensing history can be viewed at this fascinating link:https://licensing.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/prod/cdbs/forms/prod/getimportletter_exh.cgi?import_letter_id=52256 The entries for the 1930s and 1940s are replete with reports of broadcasts of political rallies.
[13] https://www.am1230digital.com
[14] “HD Radio” is the brand name for the digital radio broadcast technology developed by iBiquity Digital Corporation. It does not stand for “high definition” or “hybrid digital.”
[15] A guyed tower is a tall thin vertical structure that depends on guy lines for stability to resist lateral forces such as wind loads.
[16] "Location of Washington's headquarters in 1781 at Appleby's in the Town of Greenburgh." The Quarterly Bulletin of the Westchester County Historical Society vol. 8 no. 3, (July 1932), pp. 101-108. Owen’s article is found in the Maps section of the Ardsley Historical Society’s website.
[17] Beatle wives Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney were (pre-Beatle Westchester residents whose families likely listened to WFAS for weather reports and school closing notices.
[18] Suburbia and those who aspire to a home in the country have always had their detractors. A review of “The Crack in the Picture Window,” published in 1957 by John Keats, called it a “lacerating (and very funny) indictment of postwar suburbs as ‘fresh-air slums.’” Similarly, Sinclair Lewis’s most acclaimed novel, Main Street (1920), revolves around the struggles of a young but sophisticated woman with the narrow-mindedness, mediocrity, and conformity of small-town America she found in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, where her doctor-husband grew up and returned to start his practice. In skewering the rural life she found there, the doctor’s wife laments: “It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.” As noted above, as WFAS is all talk and no music, Westchester fans of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the little-known but influential American psychedelic rock band, will only find their 1970 single, Fresh Air, on either Spotify or YouTube. Fresh Air was written by Dino Valenti, who also penned their other best-known song (“What About Me”) and who also wrote “the quintessential 1960s peace and love anthem ‘Get Together’” for the Youngbloods (reaching No. 5 on the charts in 1969), as well as purloining the songwriting credit for the classic rock standard “Hey Joe,” artfully covered by Jimi Hendrix and The Byrds, the last two musical compositions considered as songs that defined the 1960s. https://pleasekillme.com/dino-valenti/
[19] Oxford University Press (1985)
[20] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/218091.
[21] Guarneri, Julia. “Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877—1926.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 11, no. 1, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, 2012, pp. 27–70, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23249057 Dr. Guarneri is now a lecturer of American history at Fitzwilliam College, which is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England.
[22] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED040791.pdf p. 123-4. 1958’s Ardsleyan, under Silliman’s then title of Supervising Principal, identifies him as the head of Outdoor Education. Ardsley High School 1954-1960
[23] May 29, 1952, p. 29
[24] http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar
Copyright Gary S. Rappaport (12/27/21)