David Hajdu leads a slide show on the comic book scare of the 1950s (photo by Michael Dashkin)

May 11, 2008
It's Mother's Day and we wish a happy one to Rachel London, Freebird's co-founder, who gave birth to a little girl a couple of weeks ago. No pictures yet of little Cali, but we may catch a glimpse of her at the next reading that Rachel set up (Fiona Maazel and Sara Goodyear on Sunday, May 18).

* * *

On Thursday David Hajdu spoke about his new book The Ten-Cent Plague. Using period photographs (for example the staged picture above of a child surreptitiously reading a lurid comic book called "Menace"), David discussed some of the central figures of a forgotten controversy at the birth of the counterculture. You can listen to a podcast of David's talk and flip through a different slide show of vintage comics now on The New Republic's site.

Before legalized porn distracted our attention and got stuffed under the mattress, comic books were an over-the-counter thrill for a generation discovering rebellion and defying their parents' tastes. The Ten-Cent Plague is the story of how the medium evolved from innocuous Sunday funnies to government-investigated contraband. And all on sale for a dime at the check out counter of your local grocery.

We've written previously with a certain sneer about the 1950s as a watershed of paranoia. Conspiracy was in the air and nowhere was it considered more insidious than in the hallowed American home. So it was no shock that the decade took a considered look at what the youth were consuming when unsupervised. After World War II comics turned darker and more sensational. Drawn for children by men and women not necessarily that much older than their audience, the comic book became a rare form of escapism for kids from an adult-controlled society.

By the end of the '40s, comics were already selling in the millions and could no longer escape the notice of parents. The idea of the juvenile delinquent mortified adults and created a cottage industry of experts and books (many on sale at Freebird) attempting to explain the social breakdown behind deviancy. Gang activity, violence, and crime amongst the underaged set off a nationwide witch hunt for causes. Comic books were certainly the most obvious scapegoat. And a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham its most visible critic.

Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent set off a firestorm of controversy and became the bible of sorts for Senate committees probing the effects of comics on an impressionable American public. Though we were not able to get deep into the details of those investigations and the self-imposed "comics code" it led to (much like the Hays code the film industry created in the 1930s), David did show us photos of the central figures and events: from Bill Gaines, the inheritor of EC Comics who revolutionized the industry and later created Mad Magazine, to the comic book burnings around the country that echoed some of the creepy Nazi youth rallies of recent memory. He ended with a slide of the cover of the Hartford Courant, one of the oldest papers in the country, which ran an investigatory series exposing the evils of comics above their masthead. As David pointed out, not even Pearl Harbor earned such a place of honor.

With EC expert Fred von Bernewitz on hand for additional commentary (Fred was not only one of EC's greatest fans, but also the first to recognize its importance culturally--his early interviews with Gaines and his staff are still invaluable resources), David showed a rare "Reefer Madness"-like film clip from the height of the hysteria. The short film matched its subject in sensation, making outrageous claims (illustrated by enactments) that children developed blood lust from exposure to comic books.

Produced as part of an early TV news magazine format called Confidential File (along the same lines as the sleazy "To Catch a Predator" segments on Dateline NBC), the film aired on October 9, 1955 and was narrated by LA columnist, Paul Coates. In a manner less Edward R. Murrow than grade Z Joe Friday, Coates discusses matter-of-factly the slippery slope of comic book consumption as a group of white boys (and it's made clear this is exclusively a male domain) play in the woods. With rolled up comics in their back pockets they stab at trees with pocket knives and mock brain bash each other with large rocks. Coates bemoans that when he was young mischief was about taking expeditions, tipping garbage cans, roasting potatoes, and maybe writing nasty remarks in chalk about the teacher on the sidewalk. He concludes with the punch line, "We never spent an afternoon like this: reading." You can watch a portion of the film caught second hand at a recent lecture David gave on his book tour:

All of this would be laughable if the social commentary from more enlightened news magazine programs today had evolved intellectually. However, one look at Coates's proteges Chris Hansen and John Stossel and it's plain to see that over the last fifty years we have only exchanged one manufactured crisis for another.
--Peter Miller

Fax machine and Clark bars (photo by Michael Dashkin)

May 6, 2008
The faxes went through without a hitch. Around 15 personal messages were tele-transported to Mr. Pynchon around 5:15 pm, Sunday afternoon. Or is that early evening? Either way, it was a beautiful day to hang out in the recently reopened back yard at Freebird. Tony Antoniadis (caught in the photo on the left by Lindsay Beyerstein, fretting in front of our store) helped orchestrate the big birthday shout.

For the first few hours Paul Steiner served up hot dogs, hamburgers, and Italian sausage to the crowds, and Mary Catherine Muir kept the banquet of Slothrop "vomit" food well stocked on a borrowed table from the Greenway. Home fries (made fortunately by local restaurant Mazzat, and not in our kitchens), salted nuts, and Clark bars accompanied the meat. Moxie Soda stayed chilled for most of the day, as most visitors preferred to bypass the acquired taste for a beer or limonatas. We solved that problem later in the evening by successfully experimenting with Moxie cocktails (a dash of bourbon for example) and, better yet, Moxie floats.

Charles Hutchinson rushes out to give Tony Antoniadis an important message from Tom

Milton Puryear spoke for a few minutes about the status of the Greenway project, whose progress we witness on a daily basis from our windows--already a bike path and early landscaping is visible along Columbia Street. And then the big moment. Dragging our Brother Fax-575 out back with the 50-foot telephone cord, Tony offered a few introductory words. Charles rushed up with an urgent message scribbled on the back of a Chinese menu. Confused, Tony began reading off the specials ("Kung Pao Chicken, $5.95?"). Like the vaudeville pro Charles is, he shook his head and turned the page over. It read:

Dear traitors:

I wouldn't come even if Salman and I didn't already have plans to catch the early-bird special at Balthazar. The last time I was on Columbia Street was to oversee the planting of those saplings now beginning to bud. My editors at Penguin were looking for something to do, and I told them I'd be needing reams of paper for my memoir, so...

By the way, try the Kung Pao Chicken. It's a bargain!

Yrs, Tom

We cannot speak to the veracity of said note, but we do have suspicions that Mr. Pynchon was roaming the party in one disguise or another. A chihuahua, who nobody laid claim to, was seen snooping in strange corners and eavesdropping on conversations. I may have caught him lifting his short leg in our military history section (everybody is a critic).

The faxes ranged from worshipful ("Thanks for being born!" "You are a genius") to disgruntled ("You lowered my otherwise average GPA. I'm not inclined to read further") to downright strange ("Balloons and ponies to you, Thomas Pynchon"). We were impressed with the penmanship of the well-wishers, and many included lovely illustrations. We'll hopefully post those soon and display in our back hallway.

Thanks to all who attended, kept their sense of humor and wits about them and, most of all, had a good time. No real word back from Thomas Pynchon or his lawyers, but we hope he enjoyed the joke on the other end of the telephone cord. Perhaps something to add to his Gravity's Scrapbook.
--Peter Miller and Charles Hutchinson

May 3, 2008
The skyline might look atomized from our front stoop today, but the forecast for Sunday's birthday bash/springtime bbq is taking a turn for the better. Weather.com predicts only cloudy skies by the afternoon, with the odds of precipitation shrinking to 20% by our kickoff time of 3 pm. Temperatures should be in the low 60s.

Nothing can dampen our enthusiasm, however, for wishing Thomas Pynchon a happy 71st while chowing on food regurgitated by some of his most memorable characters. Technically his birthday is a few days later, but who is counting? While clips of a rare documentary about the writer run in the front of the store, food and beverage will be served up in our backyard. A station for writing out a personal greeting will be nearby and we will commence with the faxing at 5 pm. Party favors will be available to early arrivals.

At Freebird we take a particular interest in the 1950s, a decade that spawned some of the great paranoid trends of our times. Scratch the surface and you'd see communist infiltration, CIA assassination plots, massive organized crime, nuclear proliferation, alien abductions, and a myriad of secret societies. Our propensity to see cabals everywhere begins at this point (it's practically a national trait now) and Thomas Pynchon has mined that unease to amazing effect ever since.

One of our favorite streams from this conspiracy reservoir is the hysteria over juvenile delinquency. David Hajdu will speak on Thursday, May 8, about his new book The Ten-Cent Plague and the comic book scare of the fifties that mortified American parents. If you think the debate over violent video games is lively, the backlash against comics fifty years ago was downright maniacal. David will discuss the lengths to which the government battled comic book publishers and worried the medium was corrupting our youth. If the counterculture first stirred with the sound of Elvis, it did so with a rolled up comic book in its back pocket. To illustrate the point, David will be showing a rare clip from a "Reefer Madness"-like film that warned of the dangers of reading comics.

Janet Maslin just called The Ten-Cent Plague: "An amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book's imagination." Check out this recent debate about the subject between David Hajdu and Douglas Wolk in The New Republic.

April 29, 2008

Over the last several weeks, the ILA building at the corner of Union and Court streets has been torn apart piece by piece. Built over 30 years ago, it is a remnant of '70s commercial architecture--as generic as a Midwestern bank or insurance office. But its sizable courtyard and stepped back facade was a rare sight in crowded Carroll Gardens. It may not have been beautiful, but it didn't exactly offend either. The plans to maximize the space for upscale housing however have offended, spilling into outright anger at a recent community meeting. According to Brownstoner, the development:

will involve 14 townhouses on Sackett and Union streets, and a large multi-unit building fronting Court Street. Several blogs covered the meeting, and by all accounts the community members gathered last night seemed quite wary of Clarett's plans. The audience booed the rendering of the Court Street building (above), according to Gowanus Lounge, and many vocally objected to its dark color and height. Counting mechanical equipment on the roof, the building could be around 85 feet tall.

Since I walk by the corner every morning I have been snapping pictures of the demolition. Curious to know more, I asked Nathan Ward, local writer and author of the forthcoming book, The War for the Waterfront: Mike Johnson & the Mob, for background on the building, the ILA, and what the demolition says about the passing of a way of life in this neighborhood.

What is the ILA?

The ILA is the International Longshoremen's Association, a union originally founded on the Great Lakes in the 1890s, and which later moved its headquarters East to New York, where it has presided since the time of the First World War.


What was the function of the building? Why was it built here?

In New York, which became the world's largest port, the ILA had two power bases: The main headquarters in Manhattan, where the Irish had control of the lucrative West Side docks and ran the International Union, and Brooklyn, particularly the large longshoring area then called Red Hook, which had the various locals staffed by more newly arrived Italians willing to do less desirable dock work. Anthony ("Tough Tony") Anastasio rose from longshoreman to stevedore and Brooklyn union leader and made the Brooklyn side as powerful as he could. He did this both through consolidating various locals into one big modern local (number 1814) and by virtue of being related to his widely feared Mobster brother, Albert Anastasia (who spelled it differently, he claimed, to avoid tainting his family, which included another brother who was a priest). Neither a saint nor a murderer, Tough Tony sought finally to be remembered for giving his men their own Clinic, as it came to be called. According to the ILA’s semi-official history from 1966, Men Along the Shore, Tony “gave the docks of Brooklyn an organized identity they had never had before” but the “most apparent and tangible achievement of [his] colorful career is, of course, the magnificent Brooklyn Longshoremen’s Medical Center.” If in later years the union welfare fund was cynically raided or the clinic’s blood supplies hawked by Mafia associates, that was off Tough Tony’s watch. He died in 1963, the year his building was praised by Kennedy’s assistant secretary of labor as an example of “the enlightened fruits of good industrial relations.”

Did the local economy revolve solely around the docks?

In Brooklyn there certainly was a network of waterfront businesses, especially along the five mile stretch of shore running south from Brooklyn Bridge to Twentieth Street. But not everyone was a longie, certainly. Even in the late 1940s, when there were some 46,000 dockers (full and part-time) in New York, before the replacement of the odious shape-up system of hiring, day to day employment was not guaranteed and so there were large numbers of “weekend” longshoremen who otherwise worked as cabbies, doormen, bartenders, motormen.

What effect did containerization have on the neighborhood?

The classic picture people have of dock work comes from old movies –guys with hooks moving sacks of flour or stowing crates in the ship’s hold, what’s called the “break-bulk” method of handling cargo. The containers—sealed metal boxes of freight that could be moved from container ships onto trucks or planes or railroad cars--made the job far less back-breaking, since freight was now moved by cranes. After the invention of container shipping in 1956, successful ports eventually needed a lot more room for trucks and for the containers themselves. The lament that you often hear from some old-time Brooklyn guys, that in the sixties ‘New Jersey got shipping and New York got the World Trade Center’ doesn’t explain how Brooklyn could have kept all its shipping without a lot more highway and parking space for the containers. Brooklyn—at least Red Hook--would look more like Port Newark, which was proposed in the sixties but thankfully not implemented.

A crime commission clip from On the Waterfront

Was the union as corrupted as films like On the Waterfront made it out to be? Did the exposes about that corruption lead to a crackdown?

You bet. The thing about On the Waterfront is that its audience in 1954 was very educated on the subject of waterfront gangsterism –the way people knew all the Watergate background when ‘All the President’s Men’ came out. Audiences in 1954 had followed the Kefauver hearings (then the most-watched show ever on Television) and the New York Crime Commission Hearings, whose gritty testimonies provided grist for dozens of lesser crime dramas. It’s only in recent years that critics have viewed the criminal background of On the Waterfront as typical Hollywood melodrama meant to serve the REAL story of the lovers, or worse, have assumed the whole film is just an apologia for Kazan’s and Schulberg’s testifying about communists in the film industry. Kazan’s experience no doubt drove him to change the movie’s ending to something more heroic and hopeful (Terry lives, instead of dying at the bottom of harbor, as most certainly would have been the fate of someone flouting the waterfront code and informing against the racketeers. In Schulberg’s novel, Waterfront, Terry doesn’t get away in one piece.)

As for exposes leading to a crackdown on waterfront crime, since the fifties there have been multiple crackdowns by the feds and your Columbia Street neighbors, the Waterfront Commission, and despite the diminished shipping compared to the old days, the rackets hold on –Peter Gotti was recently put away for extortion on the Brooklyn waterfront, and in 2005 members of the ILA Executive Council were the subject of a RICO lawsuit.

What became of the longshoremen who lost their jobs?

Many moved into other industries; lucky ones, like my old longshoreman-landlord on President Street, bought their buildings in the dog-days of the seventies, sold in the nineties, and moved to Florida.

Are you sad to see this way of life passing?

I love this neighborhood and would give a lot to have seen Red Hook in its longshoring prime.

The proposed project for 340 Court Street

Any opinions on the ILA building as a work of architecture?

Not to speak ill of the recently departed, but to me the Clinic building was symbolically and historically important, but certainly no beauty. It had far more personality, however, than the gutless grayish housing blob that’s going in there soon. Architecturally, the ILA Clinic was on a par with its nearby institutional nemesis, the Waterfront Commission building.