 Sightings & SigningsThanks for the Memories
Memoir-writing workshop Wednesday, July 1, 3 p.m. Leisure Village West Route 70W Manchester ******************************** Pike Plays Convention Hall 3 p.m. reading at Asbury Galleria's new Boardwalk location. Come check us out! ******************************** Asbury Park: RIP or Rebirth? Montvale Public Library Thursday, July 9, 7 p.m. *************************** BRAND NEW PRESENTATION!!! Ideal for film and media buffs: Rebels with Reels: The Life and Times of Walter Reade A ppt. that examines the father-son team who brought movies to the 'burbs! ***************************** More TK |
My Back StoryIn 1976 I followed in my father's footsteps as a writer and photographer, starting with a newspaper job for the Asbury Park Press . In the years that followed I received a master's degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York; lived among the remaining potato farmers and fishermen on Long Island's North Fork, and then covered the dazzling highs and lows of the technology industry from Route 128 in Boston. In 1991, I started a freelance career, becoming an international travel writer and photographer, principally for The Boston Herald.
My work has since appeared in a wide variety of publications from the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post to such magazines as Vermont Life, Northern Woodlands and New Jersey Monthly. I currently write a monthly column on architecture and urban issues for the triCity News, an alternative weeekly newspaper that covers the north Atlantic shore of New Jersey. Digital versions of my articles and editorials for a variety of print publications can be found below and elsewhere around this site. In the mid-1990s, my keen interest in history and photography led me to produce four illustrated books about the north Atlantic shore of my home state. For more about my newest volume in this series, please click Titles above. After my father died in 1997, The Countryman Press, a division of W.W. Norton, negotiated for a new edition of his North Woods classic Spiked Boots. I wrote the foreword and supplied never-before-published photos from the Pike Archives, including a family snapshot of my dad, his uncle who raised him, and me in the parlor of the Rabbit Hill Inn in Lower Waterford, Vt. Please click the title at right to discover more. Want to know about Tall Trees, Tough Men, my father's defining book on the logging industry in New England as the 19th century turned into the 20th? The link at the right will take you there. When the 21st century began, I expanded my career in books by taking 46 travel essays and 400 postcards culled from a now 6,000-plus personal collection to write Greetings From New Jersey, my first book for Rutgers University Press. Published in the fall of 2001, a second printing took place in the spring of 2005. In 2006 I produced a companion volume for children growing up in the Garden State subtitled A Workbook for Young Adventurers. It is an ideal instructional aid, especially for fourth-grade teachers who now make their home here. I am grateful for the New Jersey experts who offered to endorse the workbook. It can be ordered from Amazon.com from the link on that page. My next book returned me to the start of my writing career in Asbury Park where I wanted to examine the changing fortunes of a once-popular residential resort. With 200 rare images identified publicly for the first time and 60 time-capsule memories from those who lived, worked, worshipped, and were educated in this coastal city, Asbury Park's Glory Days bowed April 29, 2005. The paperback edition arrived in April 2007. New Jersey: Crossroads of Commerce was commissioned by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce and came out in October 2008. This historical survey tracks how key industries that began with Dutch trading companies evolved into dot.coms over a 300-year span. Chapter 6 takes a look at 21st century trends as the state takes a lead role in the worldwide green movement from health care to transit villages. The Spirited Ladies of Liberty Street is my ninth book and my first collaboration with retired New Jersey State Senator Frank "Pat" Dodd. This narrative history is equal parts mystery and moxie as it uncovers family secrets and long-hidden pieces of state history from the Prohibition era. Its pub date is June 2009. We'll leave it to our readers to decide if the contents should be stirred or shaken. As a result of my work with Pat, I am now negotiating other memoir-based projects with political and business leaders. In 2007 I began work on a memoir about my dad ~ My Father's Only Daughter: A Memoir of Loggers and Writers ~ and I'm spending part of 2009 in New England's north country that sweeps from Bethel, Me., west through Berlin, NH, to St. Johnsbury, Vt. Two literary non-fiction projects in development are Sand In Our Shorts and Sleeping with George. In what seems to be my only spare time (commuting Route 18), I mull the possibility of turning my not-for-attribution interviews and pop-culture research of Asbury Park into a mystery novel. In the meantime, I lecture in mass media at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, teaching Intro to Media Systems Processes for the '09 June summer session and the Development of Mass Media for the first time on-line in July. I'll be posting more about that adventure in the weeks to come! As a writing coach with private students who meet weekly in my home, I also edit the manuscripts of those who aspire to get published. My civic responsibilities currently include my appointment to the Eatontown Economic Development Advisory Committee of which I am secretary. My latest civic contribution may be found on my Projects page. A graduate of both public and private schools, I received a B.A. degree in English and French from Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, and a language certificate from La Sorbonne in Paris. In the tug-of-war between my French mother and Yankee father to name me, a hyphenated first name resulted: Helen-Chantal. Prose & Pix, Part I, starts here with what's fresh:
 You say Fielder. I say Pryor. TriCity News, TBA He was the most charismatic bandleader of his generation. In the early part of the 20th century he brought popular American music to the waterfront by inaugurating a summer’s worth of outdoor concerts initially underwritten by the city and free to the public. A handsome band shell was eventually built, its presence providing the venue for public performances of all types on other week nights. The long hairs of classic music let their hair down and joyfully played toe-tapping tunes from hit Broadway shows and Saturday-morning cartoons that would be recorded by RCA and Victor Records. His annual Independence Day concerts became legendary thanks to his over-the-top arrangement for Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture". Cannons boom. Church bells ring. Fireworks blaze into the night sky. Listening to Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops on the banks of the Charles River in Boston evolved into such a spectacularly feel-good event about all that is right with America that the band’s July Fourth extravaganza made its way to television to be broadcast live, across the nation. For the five years I lived in Brookline, friends and I hopped the Washington Street trolley with our blankets, lawn chairs, and backpacks filled with food to join the throng converging on the river esplanade just off Beacon Hill. We staked out our party area, made friends with our neighbors, and were set for the evening. It was always a great night. After all, Fiedler’s successor at that time was uber movie composer John Williams. Free summer entertainment in the city didn’t get much better than that. Which is why I’m wondering what ever happened to Asbury Park’s own legendary composer ~ the popular music world’s other Arthur ~ Arthur Pryor? One hundred years ago in1909 Pryor made the executive decision to stop touring and play exclusively in Asbury Park. Not Atlantic City. Not Coney Island. Not Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Here. Asbury Park. And there’s not a promotional peep from anyone about this historic, centennial decision. The only time Pryor’s name gets dragged out of Glenwood Cemetery in West Long Branch where he’s buried is when someone wants to complain about the uniquely designed top of the Fifth Avenue Pavilion. You know, the band shell named after him long after his death when the public’s musical tastes and habits started changing. But his music? No one is talking. Worse, few understand the tradition Pryor created for talented high school and elementary school music teachers who each summer get to perform publicly. We, the people, get to hear them for free as the town halls in Asbury Park, Belmar and Avon fund the band’s local performance costs. You see, it wasn’t just Pryor who wanted to stop touring. His band members wanted to put down roots and start families and be a part of a community, instead of just passing through. Much like the E Street band wanted to, and did, during those long years when Springsteen toured acoustically. Last year, I hauled a chair, a blanket and food in my backpack to a July Fourth party at the Fifth Avenue beach. Predictably, there was Springsteen on tape with that song and a spectacular fireworks display thanks to the Serpico family of Allenhurst. But Pryor was nowhere to be found. About the closest you could come to listening to America’s songbook was to show up on Thursday nights to hear the Asbury Park Concert Band perform on the Boardwalk near the First Avenue Pavilion. You see, that’s where the Pryor tradition was located last year. This year? Who can say? And what of Pryor’s musical legacy? Well, here’s a brief run-down of the communities that are going to hear Pryor tunes this summer: Springfield, Ohio, Machais, Maine, Tallequah, Oklahoma. That’s thanks to musical director Richard Benjamin who a number of years ago happened on a dumpster outside the Casino and noticed DPM employees heaving sheet music out of some glory hole. Taking a look at a couple of loose pages, Benjamin immediately recognized Pryor’s arrangements and original compositions. So Rick did what many of us do when we see Asbury Park’s history getting tossed in the can: he saved it. And, like those of us who want to share what we’ve saved from the landfill, he created the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra to perform Pryor’s music and that of other period composers. The last time anyone at the Shore had the chance to hear Pryor played was in 2007 during Asbury Park’s 110th anniversary at a special commemoration in Convention Hall. Anyone out there want to bring Paragon and Pryor back to Asbury Park during this historic summer? Here’s the 4-1-1: 570-524-9511. And the e-mail: info@paragonragtime.com. After all, we’re the Tri City News and we’re here to help.  What happens if the Eisner Memorial Library closes its doors? triCity New April 30, 2009 Growing up with a father who spent a lot of time writing books, going to libraries was as natural for me as going to the beach or the local athletic field was for other kids. I can remember being five and playing hide-and-seek with him in the rare books collection of the Firestone Library at Princeton University as he took a break from his search for 19th century lumber sources. Closer to the tri cities and to his teaching job at then-Monmouth College was the magnificent Guggenheim Library. In those days, the Guggenheim still felt like a private home because it wasn’t too far removed from its previous use as a summer cottage for wealthy New Yorkers. When I helped my dad look for titles or cozied up in nook by a French window and flipped the pages of a picture book, I daydreamed that this is how the rich lived who were well-read. Over the years, I’ve been in libraries as small as the one-room, wood-frame building that serves Lower Waterford, Vt., where taking out books is on the honor system, to the original Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris where the initial collection dates from 1368. The study rooms there vibrate with the intensity of scholars bent over requested volumes, narrowing their eyes as they pluck facts lost to progress or furiously scribble a new idea as they consult the wisdom of the ages. Our equivalent is the Library of Congress. In sharp contrast to the dark woods and brass table lamps that contributed to the Old World feel in Paris, our national storehouse is light and airy, always welcoming to new works of literature. My father’s original books are located there. Mine are out in Maryland. That’s what happens when a country’s depository surpasses the original footprint it was given as the cosmopolitan Washington, D.C., continues to build up around Thomas Jefferson’s original building. Since the days of illuminated manuscripts, books have been the record of civilizations and libraries the repositories of culture and community. Beloved libraries earn our affection because of how we were encouraged to read. Libraries that are cherished by teens and adults, alike, are the facilities which expanded their civic roles by offering performance spaces, art galleries, documentary rentals, author events, and computer access to even more information. Librarians have led the crusade against censorship since the dark days of that self-righteous moralizer Anthony Comstock. They continue to be the only profession to protect our 1st amendment right to free speech with an annual event held every September. So when the borough of Red Bank asks the Eisner Memorial Library to cut its hours in order to save taxpayers money, I have to ask: just how democratic is Red Bank? Is information only going to be for the wealthy who can afford access? Where will residents go so they can make informed decisions about public policies that affect them? Will children and teens wind up loitering in the downtown and along waterfront? How ironic that in 1937, at the height of the Great Depression, the three Eisner brothers donated their parents’ 14-room mansion to the borough so that Red Bank could finally have a proper library space. But maybe they knew the Red Bank community better than we do now. The Eisners put in a clause that if the borough closes the library doors, the property must be sold and the proceeds donated to their alma mater, Harvard University. If that happens ~ and all those volumes go up for auction ~ it will be just one more example of the prophetic words from Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics in My Hometown: "they ain’t coming back."  Now for something different: a blog riffed in 30 minutes for the Monmouth County Arts Council and the performance of this acclaimed musician. To boot, he had turned another iteration from when I was an avid devotee to expand his artistic range by going into the stylings of New Orleans jazz and Hawaiian slide guitar. He had progressed while I was stuck in an era with memories attached to recognizable passages that recalled my days of living in New England and ultimately staying at the Windham Hill B&B in New Hampshire. I'll confess the challenge in listening to an artist be himself on stage after years of hearing him only on magnetic tape and digital recordings. Did I prefer the pristine performance, honed and edited in a recording studio? Was I annoyed by the unexpected passages produced as inspiration found its ways to the keys in those spontaneous passages Thursday night? What enabled me to go with George was being able to watch him create: whether it was what he did to the Steinway's three peddles to sustain or amplify sound or what he did to pluck the grand's strings, the evening out of my house and out of my SUV was worth it. Why? Because you can't watch genius as you sit in commuter traffic on the Mass Pike or make love in your third-floor apartment. You have to go live to be there. Helen Chantal Pike is the author of nine books; her newest The Spirited Ladies of Liberty Street: A Story of Liquor, Liberation and Prohibition launches June 6 at The Showroom in Asbury Park.  triCItyNews March 19, 2009 The March winds are blowing and just about the only one talking about this energy source is Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens. Click your remote and see him on sardonic comic Bill Maher’s cable talk show. Click again, and he’s on CBS’s “60 Minutes”. A third time, and Boone’s in a ‘green’ TV add running on NBC. You know, that broadcast network owned by General Electric, who’s making the wind turbines he’s buying. Missed it? Click on YouTube. Yep, he’s there, too. Pickens’ vision is spread across five counties in the Texas Panhandle, some 400,000 leased acres. By his own projection, a veritable herd of soaring, three-bladed turbines could roam across that land, supplying electricity for 300,000 homes. Enough to match the output of one nuclear power plant. If successful, the modern whirly gigs could rove in grid-like formation as far north as Canada. Of course, he needs our help. He’s been asking Congress for money. And he’s been asking for a public policy that would support the Pickens Plan. It’s fascinating to watch him line up the chess pieces to get what he wants. Already he’s got the backing of the Sierra Club. Long Branch doesn’t have 400,000 acres. But it does have five miles of coastline, four more than Asbury Park. [Red Bank only has the Navesink River and has to share it with Middletown.] Since elected officials are dreaming about resurrecting the 19th century iron pier that once jutted out into the sea, why not also blueprint a plan for a metallic wind farm? That’s not the only open space to find an airstream to tap like a spigot. Long Branch also has Route 36, a four-lane traffic corridor that chokes down to two-lane Joline Avenue before ending at Monmouth County’s Park of the Seven Presidents. Trenton punched through that tourist route in the 1950s. It goes through West Long Branch and Eatontown to Garden State Parkway Exit 105. Voila! Our own panhandle. Use eminent domain (just like the state did back in the ‘50s to convert farmland to asphalt) and we’ve got a handy regional wind farm to power homes to Long Branch and its suburbs. Still not digging the idea? It’s a NIMBY thing, right? Maybe you’d prefer to see the wind farm on the old parking lots of Monmouth racetrack in Oceanport. One lot has already gone residential. It’s just a matter of time until the village’s Zoning Board of Adjustment is petitioned for a change of use for those pitted blacktops as a piece of racing history is gradually erased from the landscape. One of those petitions could be for a wind farm. If it is, more than likely it will be from a T. Boone Pickens look-a-like who comes in here from outside the Tri Cities. Because when it comes to within Long Branch, having an energy czar doesn’t appear to be on the political agenda. And when it comes to wind power, no one is talking. Apparently, the political power is all about hydroplanes not wind turbines. But at least Trenton is talking. In 2012 the plan approved two years ago is slated to come on line. Garden State Offshore Energy is a joint venture between the state’s largest utility company, PSEG Renewable Energy of Newark, and a company from nearby Hoboken, Deepwater Wind. The plan? To build a 96-turbine wind farm 16 to 20 miles off the coast. The South Jersey coast. Where gamblers spend all day inside. Not here, on the North Jersey coast, where we have a nearly 100 percent build-out of residential properties lining our beaches. Residential properties that required electricity. Only the Long Branch Housing Authority has accomplished anything remotely green in the city. And it’s for people who live in affordable housing. Presumably the wealthy can afford to guzzle non-renewable energy. LBHA has supervised the HUD-financed re-construction of Garfield Court, a 67-unit townhouse project that meets LEED-certified standards for energy and water efficiency. But there are no modest wind generators, like the kind you can see in Poughkeepsie, NY, the subject of December’s column. They resemble a kind of satellite dish, which already can be seen atop a lot of private homes in Long Branch. But don’t take my word for it. I’ve asked the Tri City news staff to run a photo of one design so you will have an idea of one a wind generator looks like. And how different it is from a turbine. However slowly the winds of change may move for some of us, there is a county-wide program going on in Freehold on Saturday, March 21, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. With unintended irony, it’s being held in the Agricultural Building on Kozloski Road: Energy is the new farming initiative in the Garden State. It’s free. And while there’s no T. Boone Pickens to listen to, there is a coalition of agencies running the morning workshops that includes the Urban Coast Institute of Monmouth University in that triCity burb of West Long Branch. So go. Tell them the triCity News sent you. After all, we’re here to help. Want more? Go to the Prose&Pix page. Thanks! |
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