Jonathan Schwartz and WKCS

1949: Jonathan Schwartz, eleven years old, lived with his parents in a penthouse at Ninety-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. There he created a radio station:

A radio station was born from the newly invented Electronic Baby-Sitter, a device that, when placed by a crib, would transmit any disturbance to a radio in another room at 600 on the dial, where there was no New York station. I used the Electronic Baby-Sitter as a microphone, placing it in front of my record player. The result in the living room and in my mother’s room and in my father’s study was nothing short of what my mother called “a miracle.” The music that I was playing in my room was as clear as a chime on every radio in the house. My father’s battery portable, which rested on a bed table by the brown couch, gave me the big idea.

I took it, one morning, down the back stairs of the building, all twelve floors, to the street.

The reception remained clear as my father changed the recordings in my room. Absolutely clear, even on the street, even across Ninety-fourth and down Lexington toward Ninety-third.

I lost the signal a block from home, but it returned and became its powerful self in the lobby of our building.

A real opportunity here. A real station, WKCS, in honor of my mother.

Jonathan Schwartz, All in Good Time: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2004).

As Schwartz explains, the station’s call letters “had the W for the eastern stations, the K for western stations, and the KCS for my mother’s initials, Katherine Carrington Schwartz.” (His father was the composer Arthur Schwartz.) The schedule, distributed to every apartment in the building:

Monday–Friday, 7:00–7:30 A.M., The Sunrise Salute
Saturday and Sunday, 7:00–8:00 A.M., The Weekend Salute

Jonathan Schwartz, disc jockey, grew up to be Jonathan Schwartz, disc jockey, writer, Sinatra maven. You can still hear Schwartz on the weekends: The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show run from noon to four (Eastern Time) on WNYC-FM, 93.9, streaming at wnyc.org. Some jazz, some pop, some show tunes, some familiar, some rare and out of the way. It’s difficult to stop listening.

Tenuously related posts
Call Letter Origins
96th and Lexington

Cutting libraries

[Design by Daniel Solis, from an observation by Eleanor Crumblehulme. Licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Found at Boing Boing.]

The OED siphon

“We would all have an issue if the dictionary defined a koala as a species of bear, or a rose as a tulip”: physicist Stephen Hughes is asking that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of siphon be changed.

Dictionary mistake goes unnoticed for 99 years (Sydney Morning Herald)

Viriginia Heffernan on datebooks

Virginia Heffernan misses her Filofax:

It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs. The quality of the paper stock, the slot for the pen, the blank but substantial cover, the hints of grand possibilities that came with the inserts — all of these inspired not just introspection but also the joining of history: the mapping of an individual life onto the grand old Gregorian-calendar template.

Google Calendar, she says, cannot compare.

The Demise of Datebooks (New York Times)

(Found via Submitted for Your Perusal)

In defense of the telephone book

Patrick McGeehan, writer of the recent New York Times article on the possible disappearance of New York City’s White Pages, follows up with a summary of readers’ responses. Most of those readers professed no use for phonebooks. But —

Quite a few readers argued that the White Pages still serve a useful purpose — other than as doorstops or booster seats — particularly for the elderly, people who live in rural areas and others who have a hard time accessing computers.

I’d add that the sheer ease of looking up a number in print makes the phonebook preferable to an online search. Then again, I live in a “rural area.”

A bonus: McGeehan’s follow-up has a photograph of a 1951 Manhattan phonebook page with J.D. Salinger’s listing. Exchange name: SAcramento.

Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper

From a 2005 interview:

Do you use any special kind of paper or pencil?

I use Blackwing pencils. Blackwings. They don’t make ’em any more, and luckily, I bought a lot of boxes of ’em. They’re very soft lead. They’re not round, so they don’t fall off the table, and they have removable erasers, which unfortunately dry out.

And paper?

Yes. Yellow lined pads. I used to have them so it was, I think 26 lines to a page, and my friend, Burt Shevelove, who was a stationery freak, said, “Buy cartons of them!” I said, “Oh Burt, come on. I’ll buy 12 pads. That will be enough.” God, was he ever right, because they discontinued making them about 20 years ago. I’m used to the other pads now. You get used to the exact amount of space between lines, because you write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can’t be too close. But if they’re too far apart, you don’t get enough lines on the paper. I could go on. I’m sure many writers have these tiny little habits. All over the United States there are people who only use Blackwings. I sometimes get letters, “Do you have any source for the Blackwings?”

And they’re extinct?

Yeah, they’re extinct. Adam Green, Adolph Green’s son, has written an article for The New Yorker, which I think will be published next year. Quite a long article on the Blackwing pencil and the fanatics who go crazy when they don’t have a Blackwing in their hand. You just get habituated. Of course you can still write. If there were no yellow pads in the world, I’d find a way of writing on white paper or on non-lined pads. It’s the lined pads that make it. Yellow is just good because the contrast of the yellow and the black lead is just easier on the eyes than white.

If you’ve never seen a Blackwing, here are photographs. And here is a photograph of Sondheim with a Blackwing. For the Blackwing slogan, stamped into each pencil, see the blog description above.

A search for blackwing at the New Yorker shows no trace of Adam Green’s article.

[The slogan, no longer appearing above: “Half the pressure, twice the speed.”]

Other Blackwing posts
Blackwing 2: The Return
The new Blackwing pencil (a review)
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil

Happy Mother’s Day

[Photograph by James Leddy, July 21, 1957.]

I think that this photograph is from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Yes, it’s my mom, Louise Leddy, and me, smiling at my dad. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Goodbye, White Pages?

The New York Times reports that the White Pages may be on their way out in New York City:

When residential directories were delivered this year to the Ivy Tower, an apartment building on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, Ramon Almanzar, a concierge, kept 28 copies in case residents wanted them. Not a single occupant of the 320-unit building claimed one, Mr. Almanzar said.

“We end up throwing them away,” he said, as he greeted residents and opened a glass door. “Everyone goes online anyways.”

Customers who prefer to look up phone numbers the old-fashioned way or, like Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, get a thrill from seeing their names in print, would still be able to have the White Pages delivered to them in book form or on compact disc.

Read more:

White Pages May Go Way of Rotary-Dialed Phone (New York Times)

Student incivility

From the Chronicle:

When it comes to being rude, disrespectful, or abusive to their professors, students appear most likely to take aim at women, the young, and the inexperienced, a new study has found. . . .

The study looked beyond the classroom, asking faculty members about their experiences with student incivility in the course of any class-related activities. The types of student incivility it covered included passive behavior, such as sleeping or texting in class; more actively disruptive behavior, such as coming to class late or talking on cellphones in the classroom; and behaviors that appeared directed at the instructor, such as open expressions of anger, impatience, or derision.

Read more:

Chief Targets of Student Incivility Are Female and Young Professors (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Domestic comedy

It was late in the evening:

“Do you realize that this is the one thing that unites the country — people going between The Golden Girls and The Nanny?”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts