Docs and musings

The Italian verb sentire means not only “to feel/sense” but also to smell, to taste, and even to hear. It covers the full sensorium of eating good food in Italy.  Add vedere, to see, for the art of presentation on i piatti. Back home, we have a big book on Italian food that a friend bought for us from the gift shop of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. Why shouldn’t a book on Italian food be beautiful, and sold in an art museum?

Preparing the table on the terrace atop our dorm, where we like to gather with food contributions from all the faculty, as swifts dart around.

Even drinks and snacks you have around 6 or 7 p.m. as the day cools down, il aperitivo, can deliver the whole range to the senses.  Yesterday, at the top of steep Via Raffaello we enjoyed an aperitivo at one of the outdoor tables of Caffé dell’Accademia: Campari and prosecco for me, white wine for Libby, and little inch-wide sandwiches with cheese and meats.

Last week, Barbara Buttarini invited us to an aperitivo at her farm. She lives alone there with 10 goats, the church-like rooms that were her father’s art-restoring classroom and workshop before he died, and a hectare of land with stunning views of mountains, prim pasture slopes, and a tiny blue hem of the Adriatic. We each had our turn milking Bella, but the yield was ruined by a swift hoof that went splat into the milk. We moved into the cool empty space of the workshop. Barbara pulled out goat cheese she had made, salami, a chilled bottle of white wine and fresh warm crescia di Urbino, the circular flat bread she had just fried on a small one-burner gas stove.

I met Barbara on visits to the outdoor preschool two of my students are featuring in their multimedia work here. The school, Maestro Natura, rents Barbara’s farm for its campus. Another way that Barbara is making ends meet is by working at a restaurant on a remote mountaintop outside Fermignano called Ca’ Maddalena. She encouraged us to try the restaurant, and last night, we did.

Barbara Buttarini and her uncle

Ca’ Maddalena is an agritourism farm and inn, with horses, cattle, wooded paths, a vista of several mountain ranges, and a restaurant with about 20 tables for couples and families who somehow know about this place. It was good to see every table filled (we made reservations days earlier). How they all got there is a miracle. You drive about four kilometers up dirt roads so steep and narrow you pray no one is coming down (no one did) and switchbacks so extreme the two legs merge into one on Google Map.

Antipasta

We had a friendly wait with a couple who came from their home toward Bologna (more than an hour away, I’m sure), limited to about 12 words that made a conversation in our Italian and their English. Understanding the Italian menu was made easier by the outgoing manager, who made sure everyone was well served. Libby’s gluten-intolerance would not be a problem.

My iPhone scanned the names of the things we ordered. For drinks, l’acqua naurale and Vercicchio dei Castelli di Jesi DOC Classico, a local white wine. (DOC is the highest certification, Italy’s version of France’s appellation d’origine contrôlée.) For antipasto, we shared a platter of spicy salami, thin slices of ham and beef, grilled vegetables, a lintel dish, mild peppers mix, all prepared by la casa, and crescia sfoglita and a kind of hummus in small pastries for me. Libby’s secondo: Grigliata mista di maiale (mix of grilled pork) and carciofi ripassati in padella (pan-fried artichoke). And mine: fegato di vitelline con cipolla bianca stufata (calf liver with stewed white onion) and pomodori “Cuore di Bue” con cipolla fresca di Tropea e basilico (“Heart of Ox” tomatoes with fresh Tropea onions and basil).

Night fell gently and a nearly full moon rose over the mountains. A Lab and a cat picked certain tables to wait for donations. The friendly manager came out to check on us for about the fourth time, and we asked his story. He had been trained in art restoration by Barbara Buttarini’s father. And Barbara, meanwhile, was back in the kitchen, working on a dessert (we ordered no dessert, only a cup of café to get me back down the mountain), like a work of art.

The panarama from Ca’Maddalena

Friends and other characters who are making this time in the Marche especially memorable.

Fillippo Venturini, who led us through the museum in Fossombrone and then through the excavated Roman town of Forum Semprone. The archeological site is between the old Via Fluminia, or Roman road to Fano, and the Metaura river. Good pagans lived there until the 6th century C.E. The mosaic he is explaining here he helped move in three slabs from the site. It depicts centaurs (too drunk and ill-mannered to come into the party), Europa on Jupiter-bull’s back and Bacchus and wine, for those who knew how to drink at the party.

A monkish fellow and harpist atop one of the four towers of il Rocco at Senigallia. He’s reading from Dante’s Commedia, part of the time-trippy visions we ran into when we happened to hit that seaside town during its Solenne ingresso reenactment of glory days from the 15th and 16th centuries.

Students on stories I’m editing (and driving them to in my rented Fiat 500).

Kelsey Robertson, JMU, at L’albero Maestro, the outdoor preschool.

Allison Baxter, JMU, in the Duke’s Palace

Emilio Spada, the 36-year-old shepherd, being interviewed by Liza Moore, of W&L, and Alli Baxter, of JMU, with interpreter (red-head) Lisa Oliva.

Egidio Maccantoni, proprietor of Il Conventino di Montecicardo, the vast vineyard and olive oil refinery we toured and tasted June 7. A successful businessman whose easy-chair motors are made in China now, Egidio and his children run this beautiful farm with precision machinery, like this olive oil extractor.

The maremmani sheep dogs and some of the shorn sheep they protect from wolves, at Cau & Spada farm near Sassocavara.

Duke Frederico di Montefeltro

Emperor Hadrian

St. Sebastian Bunny

Urbino is a thick exhibition of hills shared by walkers, Italian-talkers and residential Fiats. Surrounding the two grand piazzas is a hive of narrow cobblestone paths steeped in the shade of ancient buildings. This is my fourth four-week residence, and still I discover new nooks in this city no bigger than Lexington, Va. (inside Urbino’s high, ancient walls at least).

The layers of Time did crazy things to the design, as did the slopes of hills upon a hill.

But somewhere deep in its soul, Urbino had an idea, a pitch-perfect ideal based on mathematics and a hallucination of perfect civic design. There is a painting of this, a long, narrow work called “Città Ideale,” the ideal city. The painting (there are other versions in Berlin and Baltimore) is mounted in the museum of the duke’s palace. No one is sure who painted it. But we were told, in the Palazzo Ducale tour the class got last Thursday, that art critics are sure it’s an important depiction of the Renaissance idea of utopia, the perfect city.

But these were Humanists. Where are the people? Ah, we’re told, this is not Man but the Work of Man. But, wait. They were great observers of Nature. What about nature – why not a single geranium or shrub in all this marble? Nature is represented, they say, in that little plant puffed from a window ledge, and two hints of mountains in the background.

But what about politics, the new realism of power that made the cunning Caesare Borga (after he conquered Urbino for his father Pope Alexander VI) the model of Machiavelli’s Prince? Well, there’s no constitutional “balance of power.” But the painting is. . .in “dialogue.”

We’re supposed to talk back to it, the Enlightenment vs. the Renaissance. Now vs. then.

I don’t know. The older sights of Urbino leave me sort of speechless (especially in my Italian). The iPhone panorama I took inside the Palazzo courtyard looks like “Città Ideale,” without people, nature or the politics of Mitch McConnell. There’s no dialog with the present.

But there are clues to the past. Another painting in the museum is an obscure work of Pietro della Francesca that is like the “Città Ideale” in look, shape, and. . . obscurity.  It’s called “The Flagellation of Christ.” (Both might be by the same painter.) In an oddly serene moment in a Renaissance setting, an un-bloodied, un-bent Christ is being scourged in the background while three figures in the foreground could be discussing silk prices on the Rialto. Our guide says there are something like 46 official interpretations of what the painting means (and another 63 unofficial, he jokes).

I am told that a loggia near our classroom was the basis for the setting where Christ is being whipped. And I wonder if a column nearby is the model for the column Christ is tied to. The one in Urbino is topped by St. George slaying his dragon; in the painting, it looks like a Roman emperor. One of the interpretations is that this is about the tension between Christian and pagan cultures. Another is that it is about Christendom threatened by the Islamic conquest of Byzantium in the East, which happened at the time of the painting. Another, that it is about the new geometry of perspective, with various implied circles intersecting at the crown of Christ’s head.

What I notice in the painting and in the ideal Città is that there are no ads. No cars, and no ads. That seems ideal enough to me right now, thinking of America from over here. Italy seems closer to these paintings than to any five minutes off I-75 outside Atlanta or a shopping mall in McLean, Va.

Six of us drove the winding road out of Urbino toward the Adriatic, halfway to Pesaro, for a memorable dinner in the sun-splashed dusk. Locanda Montelippo is a country inn that features its locally sourced dishes and regional wines. A TV crew was there filming a feature when we arrived. The cannon boom every minute to scare birds from the cherry orchard was unfortunate. But otherwise, a perfect evening out.

If you want to find the place, you need to know where to turn off the highway onto a tiny road over a one-lane bridge. Apparently, enough people know this. There’s a healthy business going on here. On June 16, we’ll be back for a concert and buffet, L’agricoltura e musica. This is the sort of vision our son William has for the farm he and his fiancee are establishing on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Fancy Gap, Va.

The American students in this four-week multimedia class are taught to look for their “story” within their assigned “leads.” Lurking underneath their reporting, there’s a compelling story to tell in words, in photos and in video. But how do they know what bits and pieces of their reporting, photography and video – the facts – will be useful in their final (creative) storytelling?

My little talk, squeezed between the more practical lessons by my colleagues on reporting, photojournalism and video, was about what makes a story. The basic elements to look for: People, people solving problems, a sense of place, action, a process. And then there’s eye candy: cute kids and cute animals. According to market research, children and pets are at the top of the list of reader appeal.

Luckily, the students I’m editing have stories with very young adorable Italian children and adorable Italian dogs and sheep. . .and even a Big Bad Wolf.

Kelsey and Eliza-Morgan have twice visited a pre-school where the children learn from being outdoors, in woods and fields. L’Albero Maestro, the school of nature, is on the ridge opposite Urbino going out toward Mt. Cesane.

Liza and Alli are venturing further afield, to the vast high pasture lands of a shepherd named Emilio Spado, whose exquisite pecorino cheese is sold in Urbino’s specialty shops under the names of his parents’ families, Cau e Spada. His farm, about 30 km west of here into the Apennines, has some 2,500 sheep and 25 maremmani, a special breed of Sicilian sheep dog his family brought to the Marche from Sardinia in 1971. Maremane are bred to protect sheep from wolves, which are a growing presence in this part of Italy.

Before I’m their editor, I’m merely these students’ driver. Visiting these two places – so that they can produce four to six stories in various media – has been pure poetry for me. In fact, there is actual poetry connected to each place.

The name L’Albero Maestro is itself a play on words. It means “mast” in Italian – which makes me wonder if the English word is short of “master tree” – but can also mean “the teaching tree.” There’s an Italian translation from Walt Whitman on the little gate to the grassy field where the children hold their “sharing circle” and have lunch under a little pavilion. The original from Whitman is from “Song of the Open Road” (I discovered in the thin paperback of Whitman I brought here from home, for some reason): “Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” One of the co-directors identifies a lovely yellow flower we see all over the hillside – Ginestra – and tells me there’s a famous poem about it by a 19^th century Italian poet we learned about staying in his little hometown in this region – Giacomo Leopardi. His “ginestra” grows on the cinder-bleak side of Mt. Vesuvius, symbol of re-birth and the human spirit. Yet this flower, tanto meno inferma dell’uom (so much less weak than man), will be crushed again by the volcano, unable to believe, like the friars, in its bloodlines, fate and immortality. Or something like that. In English, the flower is simply “broom.”

I sent Kelsey and Eliza-Morgan a poem I think fits the school’s philosophy just right: Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations on Immortality.”

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended. . .

Then out to the green pastures of Cau and Spada, where Emilio Spada proudly serves us fresh, frothy sheep’s milk in wine goblets, still warm from the udder. With that taste commended to our tongue’s memory, he brought out five kinds of pecorino. Out of a rolled leather sleeve he drew several different kinds of knives, each one specially made for the cutting of each type of cheese, from softest to hardest. When I emailed retired professor Bob Youngblood, my Italian tutor back in Virginia, about this experience, he sent me . . . a poem. Something by Gabriele D’Annunzio. It seems to drip with sweet sadness, in golden-light September (Settembre, andiamo. È tempo di migrare.), seeing shepherds lead their flocks down from the mountains to the Adriatic.

Ah perché non son io cò miei pastori?

Ah, why am I not with my shepherds?

We’ve all seen ruins that look ruined – the wobbly low lines of old stone that a Park Service guide or historical sign tells us are the original foundations of a 17^th century church or fort. Picture broken low walls like that on about six levels of the steep crest of a mountain about 40 km from the Italian Adriatic. The higher we climbed between these stone walls, along paths freshly weed-whacked (for us? – eight American journalism instructors who bring out several solicitous local dignitaries), the more ancient the history.

The top two levels are maybe 10^th or 11^th century – the Dark Ages. Darker still: a cave here behind a locked gate is said to have held evidence of Neandertal Man, bones and stone weapons. Of course. Life between the fall of Rome and about 1400 was Dangerous – like pre-historical life before Rome. And this rocky promontory, Monte Copiolo, was a rare Safety. Our guide calls it the Helm’s Deep of Lord of the Rings. Or at least it became Safe when a few strong military leaders in the Carpegna family (circa 10^th-11^th C.) and then the Montefeltro family (12^th-14^th C.) built this defensible Castello (“castle” in this Italian sense means walled city).

A cave near the top of Il Castello di Monte Copiolo nel Montefeltro where Neadertal remains were found.

It’s hard to imagine this as a “city.” But all the pieces are here. A church and hospital on the lowest level, for pilgrims sojourning to or from Spain’s Santiago or the Holy Land, or victims of the Black Plague. A huge cistern under Count Montefeltro’s control. A quarry (the whole mountaintop is a quarry turned into a castello). A Rocca (fort) with space for knights (Cavalieri) to assemble and drill before suffering the kind of sword-piercing we saw in skulls in the museum in the village of Montecopiolo.

As we stand on the breathtaking summit, Rusty Greene, the JMU professor with theatrical poise (he was originally a theater director and professor), holds forth with a theory. Is it possible, he asks, that the spark that lit the Renaissance began right here? Here on this patch of grass, Montefeltro could imagine the Piazza Ducale of Urbino? Here were Urbino’s walls against enemies and the houses of artisans, the Duomo and Palazzo, all in miniature. It seems a plausible theory, since our guide, University of Urbino archeology professor Daniele Sacco, had just told us that this mountaintop did serve as a prototype for Urbino, where the 15^th century Frederico Montefeltro conjured up the Renaissance with painters Raphael and Piero di Francesco and philosophers and mathematicians extemporizing in the palace of Castiglione’s The Courtier.

Professor Daniele Sacco and the skull of a head-bashed knight.

But Professor Sacco, who looks like a young courtier in a Zeffirelli movie, says no. There was nothing on this mountain to prefigure the Renaissance (although plenty of lovely pottery shards in the museum below). It was all about power, he says. The Montefeltros were military overlords. What they developed at Montecopiolo was confidence in their power, their military might. So when they took over Urbino, 30 km to the southeast, they built it into a showcase for their power. The philosophers and mathematicians were summoned from Northern Europe. And the art grew from there.

I gaze at the mountains and the sea from this height. San Marino. San Leo. Gorgeous clouds and the green spring land “plotted and pierced—fold, fallow, and plow” (from Hopkins’ poem). Maybe the Renaissance, the re-birth of light out of Darkness, came from so much gazing at such beauty from such a height for two or three hundred years. In relative safety.

Urbino Jazz Club, Urbino, Italy. May 28, 2019.

“Bravi! Bravi!” someone from the Japanese opera company added over the applause. The 11-piece improv ensemble had finished about 40 minutes of playing a mostly unstructured experiment in free jazz after quick rehearsal that afternoon. The ensemble had never played together before: Two percussionists (a trap set and a conga set), three guitars (one taking the bass line), two accordionists (of course; this is Italy), and four saxes (three altos and the soprano of my ieiMedia colleague Michael Gold, now playing jazz in San Francisco almost full time since retiring as a magazine consultant).

Michael Gold, at the Urbino Jazz Club

The conductor  was a famous jazz accordion player, ad-libber and showman, Simone Zanchini.

Zanchini is a triple maestro – a phenomenal technician of the accordion, a master of the classical repertoire with orchestras, and a wild showman who puts together a kind of performance art with jazz musicians of various skill levels. The performance I saw was of this sort. Zanchini didn’t play, but he kicked off the acoustical experiment – the opening section that was constructed of scratches and squeaks and rattles that each instrument could make outside its conventional musical design, each member intently listening to the others for cues that might be matched or countered. Before it began, the maestro spoke in Italian for about 10 minutes. The word I picked up on was ascoltare, or ascolti. . .to listen. They must listen to one another.

The Japanese opera company, scheduled to perform the next day in the courtyard below the Urbino Jazz Club, arrived in time to hear this introduction. About halfway through it, one of them, I think it was the wife of the Italian potter known to us, stood up confidently and began translating during a pause. Zanchini did not seem to appreciate or accommodate this. I think he told her to sit down, because that’s what she did, with calm Japanese aplomb.

After about 15 minutes of what I recognized as the kind of crazy nonsense we created under Bill Dixon at Bennington – what my mother would’ve laughed at and called “just noise” – Zanchini leaped up to the front and signaled a cue. Suddenly, in complete unison, the ensemble was blasting a half-familiar jazz tune. (I later learn: It’s Miles Davis’s “Jean Pierre,” which he based on a French lullaby.) That led to much more rhythmic improvisation, and to an original section of a couple of fast-paced ascending lines in 7/4 time, and I think 5/4. Zanchini would melt back into the dark, then rise again with wild directions, hand signals and arm-crossings, occasionally glancing down at one page of notation.

It ended with a splendid volcanic note that shook the 500-year-old wood beams overhead for at least a minute. Quite a show!

There are other names for Lexington, Virginia, and environs, names fashioned in the minds of creative folk who lived here. A French exchange student who somehow landed at Washington and Lee University in the mid-1950s, Philippe Labro, called it Genoa, Shenandoah Valley, in a nostalgic novel he wrote later, L’Étudiant étranger. Another writer, a native son who fled to New York, wrote a 2009 book of eleven short stories about “a Southern town” he called Concord, Virginia. And the textbook I assign in my news-writing class at W&L calls it Valleydale, in “Blue Ridge County,” a theater of incredible news events dreamed up by the former head of this department, where “professional education for journalism” first began in 1870 thanks to Robert E. Lee (according to the plaque just inside the door of Reid Hall).

But these are gossamer veils that barely hide the real Lexington and Rockbridge County. If you’re looking for the real thing around here, you might start by looking down.

In the sidewalks of Lexington (named in 1778; chartered as a city in 1966), you’ll find among the double-bullseye patterns of Lexington paving bricks nearly 60 granite pavers that note the “Righteous and Rascals of Rockbridge.” Patsy Cline lived here, for instance. So did Admiral Byrd and General George Patton, as cadets, before they transferred out of Virginia Military Institute. But I try not to stop and read these snippets underfoot, these footnotes, as if I hadn’t heard all the stories after 16 years of living here. As if this were all reliable history.

I peer down in the ditch that construction crews are digging along East Washington Street, between the briefly controversial little cottage restaurant called The Red Hen and the Stonewall Jackson House.

I open an unlocked door, mount an unimproved stairway, and drop in on the last living 19^th-century-style newspaper editor, Doug Harwood. His office is a beautiful mess, bunkered around with remaindered issues of his elegantly mischievous monthly, The Rockbridge Advocate. A scruffy, thin figure around town, he’s here at his computer, transcribing scans of handwritten Rockbridge chancery court records from the late 19^th century.

Harwood is on the case again, another lode from that foggy realm of undiscovered history that he likes to publish in the back pages of his news magazine each month. “I wish I knew what I had here,” he says. It’s about a vineyard south of town in the Brushy Hills area, and to Harwood’s delight, the story involves three or four nasty lawsuits and a French winegrower, Gaspard, with a local mistress and a family back in France. Gaspard eventually acquired the vineyard from the wealthy local lawyer Elisha F. Paxton II, got tangled in the lawsuits, died and was buried in “St. Patrick’s” Catholic cemetery. That surprises Harwood because St. Pat’s, the only Catholic church in a county with about 85 Protestant churches, doesn’t have a cemetery. (There are no mosques or synagogues, and that itself is the presence of history.)

A few years ago, I researched old letters-to-the-editor in the musty back office of another local  newspaper for a book I put together with the help of student researchers, The Lexington Letters: 200 Years of Water Under the Bridge (published in Buena Vista). Another professor and I dedicated that book to Pam Simpson, then in the last weeks of her life, with cancer. Pam Simpson was a deeply knowledgeable art-history professor at W&L whose research exhumed the history of so many structures around Lexington. The W&L house of the Dean of the College, formerly called the Lee-Jackson House because both Jackson and Lee had lived there at different times, is now called the Simpson House, for Pam.

In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves.

So goes a Wendell Berry poem, “The Wild Geese.” Although he was writing about his farm in Kentucky, the poem ends with the best line for Rockbridge County: “What we need is here.”

This is from the cutting floor. It is material that Kurt Rheiheimer, editor-in-chief at Leisure Media 360, cut from a 1,500-word article I sent him. Cuts were entirely made to get the thing down to 900 words. That was the assignment.

George Pryde, a retired ad man who lives in Lexington, introduced my March 10 talk on Tom Wolfe to the local branch of the English Speaking Union. I told him to leave in the flattering error of saying Wolfe and I formed a lasting “friendship,” because correcting that was my lead anecdote. Actually, Wolfe gave me several clever run-arounds when I tried to get his permission to see his W&L transcripts (unlike Trump, he had nothing to hide about his academic record; he was on the dean’s list every year, turns out), and then he declined to write the intro to my book The Southern Press. Unabashed by “pryde,” I post George’s intro here. – DC

Our program topic today is the late Tom Wolfe and the “New Journalism” with which he is so closely associated.

No one is better qualified to speak about Tom Wolfe than Doug Cumming. In many ways their lives and careers have followed parallel and often intersecting paths.

Like his Richmond-born subject, Doug too is a Southern lad, a 6^th generation Georgian, born in Augusta and raised in Atlanta.

Their educational backgrounds were similar – Wolfe’s undergraduate degree was in English, at Washington and Lee. Doug’s B.A. was in Literature, at Bennington College in Vermont.

George Pryde, in front of the R.E. Lee Hotel. (His Facebook page)

Both went on to advanced degrees in American Studies at Ivy League schools – Tom Wolfe at Yale, Doug at Brown. Doug also earned a Ph.D. In Mass Communication, at UNC-Chapel Hill.

After college both men spent several years as newspaper and magazine journalists.

Their lives intersected at W&L when Tom Wolfe made one of his frequent returns to his alma mater, where Doug had joined the Journalism Department in 2003. There the two men found they had shared interests and formed a friendship that lasted until Wolfe’s death last May.

Of course, these two men had their differences. Doug Cumming as far as I know has never appeared in white suits and spats. And Tom Wolfe, to the best of my knowledge, was not an accomplished saxophonist, equally comfortable with jazz and bluegrass traditions. By the way, you can hear Doug play most Wednesday mornings 8 to 10 am with the jam session at the undercroft of Grace Episcopal Church.

Dr. Cumming is Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at W&L. He currently teaches reporting, literary journalism and media history.

We are indeed fortunate to have Doug speak to us today, and to have his charming wife Libby join us.

So please welcome Doug Cumming!

I was working for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, stuck in a little bureau in Johnston, R.I., when I typed out a two-page proposal for why a maniacal editor named Joel Rawson should send me to Atlanta to do a story on the missing and murdered children. It was early 1981, and national newspapers, magazines and television networks were all covering what was emerging as a pattern of serial kidnappings and murders. Poor black children, mostly boys, seemed to be the victims, once police recognized a pattern. Atlanta was my hometown. It was also the hometown of a terrific staff photographer on the paper named Rachel Ritchie. I proposed that Joel send us down for a week. He did.

I finally was able to introduce myself to one of the mothers of the missing children. She had become enough of a celebrity to have a black club in Cambridge, Mass., pay for her round trip to a disco marathon to raise money for the search for the killer. But other than that pending trip, she was still mired in poverty and grief. In fact, her welfare check was reduced from $221 to $193 a month. One less mouth to feed. That’s the only note she got from her caseworker, instead of a sympathy card.

Looking back, I see Tom Wolfe’s influence all over this story. Instead of the beginning being a tight little anecdotal lead, it’s a cinemagraphic setup, much longer than usual for a newspaper story. I start with a bumpy verité lens on Mrs. Catherine Leach taking a MARTA bus from her raggedy home, Building 947, Apartment 497 in Bowen Homes to downtown for sales at Zayre’s or Sunshine department stores, or her hopeless search for menial work at the big hotels. My literary camera pans back to show Atlanta as a city for conventioneers, with a sugar-coat of Southern spring in the air.

This past week the city was alive with spring. Dogwoods and cherry trees bloom like puffs of musketry in the wooded neighborhoods. There is a softness in the air. The weather is perfect for the searches that go on every Saturday now, like the ones for Mrs. Leach’s son.

 Wolfe taught us, by the mere gossamer influence of his marvelous pieces, to set scenes and have dialog, even if it’s just remembered and we come to the over-heated foul-smelling site later.

The screen door slammed as she reached the edge of her tenement.

At that moment she heard a distant voice say, “Momma, help.” She whirled and headed back to see which one of the boys was complaining.

Opening the door, she yelled, “What do y’all want. I’m trying to find your brother.”

One of them answered, with words that froze Mrs. Leach’s insides, “Momma, we ain’t call you.”

Dear Jesus. It was a premonition she had heard. Her ears “were blazing like a ton of fire,” she recalled. It was then that she knew, even though she spent the next hour checking McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Thriftown, everywhere.

 I also see now the influence of Wolfe’s eye for radical chic and Mau-Mauing, the leveraging of white guilt and liberal status-preening  — although the Atlanta version was not like New York’s. I was struck by the sad comedy of a black elite that had lost touch with the vision of Martin Luther King and with Atlanta’s underclass. And I was captivated by Wolfe’s amusement with media mayhem.

At a press conference where I lurked behind TV crews who had no idea why they were there, a California woman in white cowboy boots and a velvet jacket took the stage to explain why “Another Mother for Peace” had come to help. She was on the verge of tears.

“I’ve been so emotional since I’ve been here,” she said apologetically. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s menopause.”

Mrs. Avedon, and an older woman with her, mentioned several causes they support: ending all wars, withdrawing support from El Salvador, letting children build a beautiful world, shifting federal dollars from MX missiles to hot lunches.

As for the missing and murdered children: “If everybody would just keep silent and just let the police think clearly,” Mrs. Avedon offered.

Later in the press conference, the black writer James Baldwin appeared. Heads turned. Reporters murmured.

“James Baldwin,” Mrs. Avedon called gleefully from her chair. “I saw you across a crowded room in a restaurant in the south of France and I said out loud, ‘That’s James Baldwin.’”

Baldwin smiled at her.

The writer of “The Fire Next Time” said he didn’t have anything specific to offer regarding the missing and murdered children. He had come to cover the event for Playboy. Still, he stood at the podium. “It has,” he said, “something to do with the end of the dream of white supremacy.”

 It only took a little patience to hang out with Mrs. Leach enough to feel more a part of her life than with the mad carnival that had formed around the idea of sympathy for the missing and murdered children. No one had thought to arrange to get her to the airport for the disco fundraising trip, so Rachel and I took her to meet someone at the airport. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be with her at the airport. It was like Tom Wolfe had written the scene. This was obviously the end of my story.

When she walked into Atlanta’s Hartfield International Airport, the long space lined with ticket counters and baggage check-in scales spread before her. She shook her head. “Hoo-wee. This floor must take about two days to mop.”

Mrs. Leach was scared – she’d never been on an airplane before – so she had loaded herself up with tranquilizers. Through a mix-up, she and a volunteer traveling companion could not get on the 3:20 p.m. flight as planned and had to wait for a 5 p.m. flight.

Sitting on a chrome and leather bench, leaning against a Plexiglas wall, Mrs. Leach folder her arms and fell asleep. Her breathing was deep and steady.

Businessmen and mothers with baby carriages and security guards and stewardesses – some wearing the symbolic green ribbons – passed by. A black man with a familiar boyish face swept by in a tailored suit, his ticket in hand. It was Julian Bond, the former Georgia state senator who made his name as a draft resister and a symbolic nominee for vice president in 1968.

No one passing by glanced at the tired black woman sitting on the bench with her head nodding downward.

 The story ran on the front page of the Sunday paper, March 29, 1981, under the headline, “Atlanta in search of its children: A tragedy, feeding on itself, becomes a media event and tragicome.”