1911 Mercedes in front of Melton home

1911 Mercedes in Woodstock, Vermont

1911 Mercedes

A few days ago, Tim Martin of Rutland, Vermont alerted me to an antique car meet in Woodstock, Vermont.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get over there.  He sent me photos of two cars previously owned by my father, a 1911 Mercedes and a 1908 Packard. I found a photo of the Mercedes parked in front of my parents' house in Weston, Connecticut (no date on the photo). My father noted in his book about car collecting, Bright Wheels Rolling, that the 1911 Mercedes had water-cooled brakes as well as a water-cooled engine.

Thanks to Tim for the current photos.  I'm looking for an archival photo of the Packard, and will post it when I find it.  Tim is a member of the Packard Club (www.packardsonline.com)

Cuban Adventure

With all the recent talk about Congress planning to lift travel restrictions to Cuba, I got to thinking about my own trip there in February 1957, when I was eleven. My father was engaged to sing for a month at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. My mother and I joined him for the last week of his stay there.

 

Built in 1930, the hotel looked like a Spanish castle, with gleaming tile floors, high ceilings and pots of tropical plants in the corridors. (I learned just this week that it was designed by McKim, Mead & White to look like The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.) It stood on a hill at the center of the curving shore.  To the left, the severely modern U.S. Embassy building thrust its gleaming glass and steel toward the sky.  To the right, toward the city, stood the ancient fortress, Moro Castle. Cuba was under a dictatorship. Order and prosperity seemed in place, but communist insurgents were even then organizing in the Sierra Maestra hills for the revolution that would bring Fidel Castro to power. I have several vivid memories about our 1957 trip. Here’s one of them:

 

One day my family decided to go for a ride in the country.  As we were driving through what was obviously one of the more prosperous neighborhoods outside Havana, the car started to make a knocking noise. My father, being a collector of antique cars, was very sensitive to the slightest strange sound emanating from any internal combustion engine.  He pulled over and stopped the car.  We were immediately surrounded by half a dozen militiamen with automatic rifles pointing in our direction.  Always cool in moments of crisis, my father tried joking with the men – then he started to put up the hood to indicate that we had car trouble.  He was stopped by the barrel of a gun.  Switching to Spanish, which he had learned easily for this trip (given his opera-cultivated facility for languages) he got serious, asking what was wrong, what had we done, what they wanted us do.  One of the men jerked his head in the direction of a house, hidden behind typically Spanish ornate wrought-iron gates and masses of bougainvilla.  "Batista mama!"  he spat out.  So that was it!  We had chosen to check our engine noise directly in front of the home of the mother of dictator Fulgencio Batista.  My father decided to take a chance with the engine noise, rather than with the armed guards, and they let us drive away.  This was two years before the Cuban Revolution, but believe me, the undercurrents were there, and even I, as an eleven year old, could feel them.

Interestingly, in my extensive archives there are no photographs from my father's engagement in Cuba ...

James Melton as Lt. Pinkerton (1938)

My Love of Opera

I was too young to have heard my father in opera at the Met, or any other opera house for that matter.  But he frequently included operatic selections in his concerts and broadcasts, and over the years I acquired a taste for opera.  He always set the scene vividly before singing.  I could feel Mimi’s cold little hand as she searches for her key in “La Boheme,” or see Cavardossi’s shaking hand as he writes his farewell letter to Tosca. I could visualize the faithless Pinkerton bidding “Adio” to his Japanese bride in Madama Butterfly. 

Attending my first Metropolitan opera, at seventeen, two years after my father’s death, was a little like going to a Shakespeare play.  Suddenly I could see how all those familiar quotes (or in this case arias) fit into the whole story. My father’s close friend and head of the Met’s press office, Francis Robinson, invited my mother and me to be his guests for lunch at the Grand Tier restaurant and for a performance of Madama Butterfly.  During the intermission, we were invited backstage to Francis’s office, where we were welcomed like celebrities ourselves, and shared a glass of champagne with Mrs. Douglas MacArthur.  What a day!  I was well and truly hooked on opera from then on.

Whenever I Pick Blueberries I Think of Helen Keller

It's blueberry season in Vermont and whenever I pick blueberries I think of Helen Keller.

The Meltons lived on a 40-acre hilltop gentleman's farm in Weston, Connecticut for the first eight years of my life. We had an apple orchard, grape arbor, and a variety of fruit trees and bushes -- blueberries amongst them--as well as a large vegetable garden. We considered Helen Keller and her companion, Polly Thompson, our neighbors, although their home in Easton was about 15 miles from ours in Weston. Helen and Polly came annually in mid-summer for a day of blueberry picking.

Helen's magnetism radiated so that even our dignified German shepherd, Caesar, usually slow to make friends, sat at her feet accepting loving pats. It had somehow been explained to me, age three, that Helen would "see" me through her hands -- not to be afraid, but just to stand still and quiet while Helen touched my face, my hands, my hair. I remember standing there awed while this large shadow in slacks with a huge sun hat bent down to meet me. Afterwards she said through Polly: "Beautiful! Slender, pretty, lovely hair."

Then she and Polly and our dog would go off for the berries, while my mother prepared a lunch of freshly picked corn on the cob and hamburgers cooked to order on the outdoor stone grill. Someone would ring the big old Navy bell on the back porch to call everyone to chow. Afterwards, Helen loved to wander through the vegetable garden, gently touching the sun-warmed tomatoes, bell peppers, squash. They resumed their berry picking in the afternoon.

My logical mind now wonders: How did she know which ones were ripe? Was her touch so delicate that only the ripes ones fell into the bucket on a string around her neck? Or did she simply pick everything for someone else to sort out later? Or didn't it matter? Was it the sun and activity and a meal with friends that were the only important thing?

More about the Meltons and Helen Keller in a later post.