The Shipwreck Spectacle

The Vasa Museum, Stockholm (photo by Sally Reeder)

The Vasa Museum, Stockholm (photo by Sally Reeder)

If I had been a parent in Stockholm back then, I would have taken my kids down to the harbor to see the big event of August 10, 1628.  As a parent, though, I’m not sure how I would have explained to my kids what actually happened that day.

The Vasa had been commissioned by King Gustav II Adolph of Sweden to be a mighty war machine of a ship with not one but two gun decks and a high-above-the-water profile.  Presumably the heavily-decorated hull was intended to inspire awe among allies, and to intimidate enemies.

It had been under construction for a couple of years, and the king was eager to rush it into service.  The Vasa had been moved from the shipyard and anchored at a dock directly below the Royal Palace.  After all of the ceremonial blah-blah that day, it was finally time for the ship to take its maiden voyage.  For the occasion, the crew was allowed to bring their wives and children aboard.  A band probably played; thousands cheered and waved from shore.

Dock workers used cables to tow the ship to the place where the current would then take Vasa east.  They finally released her, the crew set four sails… and within minutes, a gust of wind pushed the ship over onto its port side.  Water gushed in through the gun ports and the ship began to sink, right there in Stockholm Harbor.  People on deck were hurled into the water, while others clung desperately to the masts.

There was a lot of confusion and panic, as you might imagine, but since there was a substantial spectator fleet of small boats surrounding Vasa, most of its crew and guests were saved.  The exact number who lost their lives is not known for certain, but is believed to be about thirty.

A subsequent inquest confirmed what several of the king’s subordinates had privately feared:  The “improvements” to the ship’s design, insisted on by the king, had made it dangerously top-heavy.  The ship remained at the bottom of the harbor, taking on mud for centuries.

Then, in 1956, a Swedish naval engineer named Anders Franzén located the sunken ship.  He’d been searching for it a long time, and when he finally found it, he had a big idea:  Let’s try to raise it and turn it into a museum!  To its credit, the Swedish government said “Ja.”

Stockholm residents and their children crowded around the site as crews successfully brought Vasa back to the surface on April 24, 1961 — it was a much happier outcome than what had transpired there 333 years earlier.

The ship was in good condition, considering that it had been underwater for three centuries, but painstaking restoration began immediately and is still going on.  The Vasa is now the centerpiece of a museum that has been built around it.

There are wonderful exhibits in the museum: facial reconstructions of some of the victims, based on skeletal remains, a meticulous 1:10 scale model of Vasa adorned as it was in 1628, cannons and tools that demonstrate how war at sea was waged back then.

There’s also an exhibit called “Life at Sea”, which in the case of Vasa is sort of hypothetical.  No one lived aboard her; the ship had traveled less than a mile of horizontal distance before it headed straight down.

Save the Last Dance for Me

A song starting to hatch

A song starting to hatch

If someone mentions the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, what is the first name that pops into your head:  Elvis Presley?  the Beatles?  Chuck Berry?  ABBA?  OK, not ABBA — and probably not Doc Pomus, either.

My guess is that there are a lot of devoted rock fans who have never heard of Doc Pomus.  He’s not exactly famous, but he is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 1992 along with The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, The Yardbirds and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, among others.

So who was Doc Pomus?  He was actually named Jerome Felder; he adopted the pseudonym when he was trying to become a rhythm-and-blues singer, and thought Doc Pomus sounded more authentic.

His career as a performer never took off, perhaps partly for a reason we’ll get to shortly.  He did, however, find success as a songwriter.  Collaborating with composer Mort Shuman, he wrote hits for Elvis (“Marie’s the Name of His Latest Flame”, “Surrender”, “Little Sister”, “Viva Las Vegas”).  Unless you’re currently on Social Security, you may not remember other songs they wrote, like “A Teenager in Love” (Dion and the Belmonts), “Hushabye” (the Mystics), or “Can’t Get Used to Losing You” (Andy Williams).

The best-known songs by Doc Pomus were performed by The Drifters, though, and one in particular has been recorded by many other artists in the decades since it was a number-one hit in 1960.

There are different versions of the story about how “Save the Last Dance for Me” came to be written, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland has evidence that Pomus jotted down some preliminary ideas for lyrics on the printed invitation to his wedding reception (see photo).

One account has him making those notes while at the party, but that seems unlikely for several reasons, not least of which is the three-year gap between the wedding reception and the release of the record.  Other sources state that he came across the invitation while going through some old stuff in a hatbox, and that finding the invitation triggered a bittersweet memory of that night years earlier, causing him to jot down some phrases on it.

In any event, this fact isn’t in dispute:  As a child, Jerome Felder had contracted polio.  He couldn’t walk without the aid of crutches, let alone dance.  His bride was a Broadway actress and dancer named Willi Burke.

At the post-wedding party, she danced with Doc’s brother Raoul Felder, and perhaps other guests as well.  Because of his disability, Doc could only sit and watch.  It’s not difficult to see how that melancholy recollection could have inspired him to write:

You can dance/Every dance with the guy/Who gave you the eye/Let him hold you tight.  You can smile/Every smile for the man who held your hand/’Neath the pale moonlight.  But don’t forget who’s taking you home/And in whose arms you’re gonna be/ So darlin’/Save the last dance for me.

By the way, the invitation with those lyric fragments scrawled on it is just one of thousands of keepsakes in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum.  It’s sort of like exploring the contents of your grandmother’s attic, if Grandma was best friends with Mick Jagger, the Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson… and Doc Pomus, too.


Pencil Pusher

Tools of the Trade

Tools of the Trade

Back in January of 1988 I purchased my first computer.  It had a 10-megabyte hard drive; the salesman assured me, “That’s all you’ll ever need.”  It was not inexpensive, and neither was the printer that I got that day, but I was able to rationalize the extravagance because as a professional writer, I needed to upgrade my tools.

As I soon learned, though, it was very difficult for me to do the actual writing of scripts on a computer.  While I stared at the screen, hoping to get an idea for repartee among characters, the cursor just kept blinking at me, as if to say “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.”

So I went back to writing the way I’d been doing it for over a decade at that point, with a lined yellow tablet and a pencil.  That allowed me to work through a scene as the words came to me — sometimes quickly, and at other times glacially.  There are inevitably those periods when inspiration is elusive, so while trying to come up with the next amusing bit of dialogue, I’d stare at the ceiling, or glance out the window, or study my pencil.

Before long I’d be wondering why pencils have that hexagon shape, and why are so many of them yellow… and how the heck do they get the lead to stay inside there!?  In other words, the writer part of my brain would be given a little time off by the lobe that generates idle speculation.

I have since learned that the six-sided pencil has a couple of virtues:  supposedly it is easier to grip than a round pencil, and it won’t roll off your desk.  Round pencils are more common as souvenirs because, according to, they are easier to print on.

The majority of them are yellow because the premium pencil of the late 19th century, called the Koh-I-Noor, was yellow.  Other manufacturers followed suit to convey that their products were high-quality, too.

The precursors of the pencils we use today go back to the 1500s, but it was a man named Joseph Dixon (along with his son-in-law) who mechanized pencil manufacturing in the middle of the nineteenth century.  So, you’re wondering, how did they get the lead to stay in there?

OK, as you probably know, even though we call it lead, it really isn’t — it’s graphite mixed with clay.  Anyway, while workers in one part of the pencil factory are making those skinny rods of graphite, other workers are cutting cedar blocks into slats, and grooves are then carved into the slats.

The graphite rods (called “writing cores” by pencil professionals) are glued into the grooves.  Another grooved slat is glued onto the slat that has the writing cores, creating a pencil sandwich.  That sandwich is sliced into individual strips, which are sanded and painted.  The ferrule — that’s what the metal ring is called — is crimped into place on the end of the pencil, and an eraser is glued into it.

This process is repeated with impressive frequency:  Around fourteen billion pencils are made worldwide every year.  That suggests I’m not the only person on the planet staring at my pencil and hoping for inspiration to strike.

Before the Parade Passed By














Sometimes You Get Lucky

Mapamundi (1526), Hispanic Society of America, New York

Mapamundi (1526), Hispanic Society of America

“Did you come to see the map?”













On the Other Hand…

Evidence that birds of a feather do flock together -- Barcelona

Evidence that birds of a feather do flock together — Barcelona













The College Paper That Changed the U.S. Constitution












