Before she achieved fame on the nationally-televised "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," country singer Patsy Cline made a crucial start to her career in D.C.'s "Nashville North" music scene in the 1950s. #DCHistory https://t.co/V25c08iTXj Before she achieved fame on the natio…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 5, 2022
With just two Steinway pianos, both Roosevelt presidents helped establish the White House as a hub for music in the 20th century. #DCHistory https://t.co/OiaSA8kRPl With just two Steinway pianos, both Roosevelt presidents helped establish the White House as a hub for music i…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 5, 2022
“They don’t care anything for the colored people and they don’t care about me.” For 20 years, Minnie Keyes, would fight federal and local officials over the future of housing in Washington, D.C. #DCHistory https://t.co/804oMQR3IU “They don’t care anything for the colored peo…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 5, 2022
In 1927, Greek immigrants George Roushakes (1891-1981) and Peter G. Boinis (1899-1972) opened the Irving Food Shoppe at 3070 Mt. Pleasant St NW. Nick P. Michos (1912-1962) was a later owner of the long-running eatery and food store. Currently Ercilia's Restaurant. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 5, 2022
Known for her hit songs "Walkin' After Midnight," "I Fall to Pieces" and "Crazy," Patsy Cline began her career as a country music star in D.C.'s "Nashville North" music scene. #DCHistory #VAHistory https://t.co/V25c08iTXj Known for her hit songs "Walkin' After Midnight," "I …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 5, 2022
Here are five stories that moved us this week, and the reasons why.
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Annie Hylton | The Walrus | February 28th, 2022 | 8,160 words
While trying to flee persecution in China, Ayoob Mohammed, an Uyghur man, found himself in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded the country in response to 9/11. Mohammed was among more than a dozen Uyghur men who were caught and sold to the U.S. for bounty as an alleged terrorist, held for four years at Guantánamo Bay, and finally exonerated. Still, 16 years after being released, he is still trying to prove he’s innocent. This story is exceptionally reported and told with nuance and empathy by Hylton, who traces Mohammed’s journey from his Uyghur homeland in northwest China to Guantánamo to Albania, where he has since resettled — and continues to be a victim “of politics among nations, a sacrifice to their interests.” Hylton examines the “invisible geopolitical forces” that “have bent his story to their will” and have kept him from reuniting with his wife Mailikaimu and their kids in Canada, and also shows the challenges of long-term family separation through their story. —CLR
Justin Ling | Maclean’s | February 15th, 2022 | 3,959 words
Ten years ago, Winnipeg microbiologist Dr. Xiangguo Qiu discovered a way to combine three monoclonal antibodies in a cocktail that saved people near death after contracting Ebola. What’s more? The therapy had promise far beyond Ebola: “Others have also built on the breakthrough. Monoclonal antibodies used to treat COVID-19 have cut the risk of death by as much as 70 per cent, while the first monoclonal antibody therapy was recently approved to treat and prevent HIV infection. The possibilities are endless.” Mysteriously, in July 2019, Dr. Qiu was removed from her lab and put under investigation by her employer and the RCMP. CSIS, Canada’s national security intelligence agency, was said to be involved too. She was finally fired in January, 2021. But why? Some allege there was a paperwork issue that would prevent Canada from claiming credit for breakthroughs from research done on the virus samples she shared with China. Some say that paperwork was deemed unnecessary. Did she hand over Canadian intellectual property to China as some claim? Nearly three years after being removed from her lab — one in which she made scientific breakthroughs that will save countless lives — Dr. Qiu has yet to be formally charged. However, as Justin Ling reports at Maclean’s: “It remains an open question: what happened to Dr. Qiu?” —KS
Jonathan Tjarks | The Ringer | March 3rd, 2022 | 2,738 words
The Ringer has always refused to stick to sports; its spiritual predecessor, Grantland, was the same way. But Tjarks, one of the site’s most prolific basketball journalists, rarely veers from his usual beat. In May of last year, he did so to write about his cancer diagnosis; now, he does so again to reckon with how the disease has changed his experience as a young father, and what he learned from his own father’s struggle with Parkinson’s. “I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did,” he writes. I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.” It’s an unblinking and plainspoken piece, no less affecting for its lack of affect — and yet another reminder that regardless of where one’s passions or expertise or faith may lie, the messiness of being human has a way of spilling over any edges that may otherwise divide us. —PR
Nicole Shawan Junior | Guernica | February 24th, 2022 | 6,300 words
I had never heard of dermatillomania, an obsessive disorder in which the afflicted person picks at their skin so often and so hard that it leaves permanent damage, until I read this wrenching essay. Yet it somehow felt familiar. Nicole Shawan Junior’s words will resonate with anyone who’s struggled with — or loves someone who’s struggled with — OCD, cutting, an eating disorder, or another physical manifestation of mental illness. Organized around instructions for applying foundation, concealer, and other parts of a makeup regimen, this piece is about the harm we do to ourselves and the ways we try to hide our scars. It is as raw and honest as essays come. —SD
Lauren Hough | Texas Highways | March 1st, 2022 | 3,135 words
Initially, I thought this beautiful essay would be about Bonnie and Clyde, but it turns out they are just a side note. Hough resists any temptation to glamorize her story with the famous crime gang — instead, it is the small yet compelling details about her grandpa and the community of Shamrock that drew me in. I could envision the scene as Hough describes chatting to her grandpa on the porch, smelling his pipe tobacco as he blew “smoke rings for me to slap apart before they floated to the ceiling.” The stories her grandpa relays are pulled from the haze of the Alzheimer’s that is gradually consuming his thoughts. He is particularly animated telling his childhood tale of Bonnie and Clyde hiding in the family barn and giving him a box of chocolate bars. It could be true. Hough visits the scene in Shamrock and finds out the gang was indeed there at one point. Hough vividly paints the characters she meets in the community, who question her doubting her grandpa’s story: “‘Why wouldn’t it be true?’ Hazel responds. ‘It’s his story.’” And so is this essay — it is a touching homage to her grandpa, no one else. —CW
Elizabeth Keckley rose from slave to the Lincoln White House thanks to her supreme skill as a dressmaker. Her autobiography provides one of the most powerful accounts of the First Family's personal lives. #DCHistory #ElizabethKeckley https://t.co/SQsRh31nAg Elizabeth Keckley…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 4, 2022
There’s an almost ethereal feeling captured in this 1848 map of St. Louis, Missouri. The two white horses seen gallivanting in the foreground particularly give off this vibe. Get a better look: https://t.co/hwX6wW0FLt https://t.co/KCgOwgt8l8 There’s an almost ethereal feeling…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 4, 2022
Nancy Grace Roman: First Chief Astronomer via NASA https://t.co/LRkcUvejgB https://t.co/jvUkRIYyDG
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 4, 2022
#OTD, James Buchanan was inaugurated as the 15th president. But before he entered the White House, Buchanan, and hundreds of others, fell victim to a mysterious ailment at the luxurious National Hotel. #DCHistory https://t.co/JzmyZF81AJ #OTD, James Buchanan was inaugurated a…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 4, 2022
1950s postcard of the National Housing Center at 1625 L St NW. Designed by Aubinoe, Edwards and Beery, this granite-skinned structure was built in 1955 by the National Association of Home Builders as a showroom for homebuilding techniques. Now headquarters for the AFSCME uni…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 4, 2022
Georgetown University is known for its prestigious professors. But there was also a time when it was known to house an imperial prince: Don Agustin de Iturbide y Green. #DCHistory https://t.co/YCF3wWn5dP Georgetown University is known for its prestigious professors. But ther…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
This 1926 map of Tallahassee, FL depicts the city as it would be seen from above. Zoom in to see the extensive detail depicted. Check it out: https://t.co/5wxGi0qgIF https://t.co/BGIZD5Io92 This 1926 map of Tallahassee, FL depicts the city as it would be seen from above. Zoom…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
A View of the Red Planet (in Blue) via NASA https://t.co/1KhuLIpxmf https://t.co/tFEUoXpti3
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
In the dregs of the dismal winter of 2021, approaching the anniversary of the first COVID lockdown, I had the idea to start a podcast about Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ belatedly acclaimed 1966 orchestral-pop record. At my family’s vehement recommendation, I’d just seen the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy, part of which mythologizes the album’s genesis; I was also listening to the album itself a lot, because I’ve done that since becoming a Serious Music Critic at age 13, specifically a Serious Critic of Any Music Tangential to the Beatles. But the album was a fixture in my life before then — watching the film, I realized I could sing every note, vocal and instrumental. And the pandemic had supplied me with the time and energy to create the kind of podcast I’d spent the last couple of years fantasizing about.
Thence was born Pod Sounds. Confident as I was in my ability to perform a season’s worth of compositional and lyrical analysis, I knew I would need to research to fill in my understanding of the band’s peculiar dynamic and of its mixed-up maestro, Brian Wilson, with whom Pet Sounds is synonymous. What I unearthed over the course of that first season gave me the sense, as a good education does, that there was more to know than I could ever learn. And the more I learned about how much there was left to learn, the more worthwhile the whole undertaking became.
Even after wrapping the season, I keep happening upon more writing. It turns out almost everybody has an opinion on Wilson’s supposed genius, or on Pet Sounds as evidence of it, or both. That people have not stopped generating literature and ancillary art in response to Wilson and his masterstroke speaks to the sustained relevance of his contributions to pop music and its environs. With the artist’s 80th birthday approaching in June, here is a sampling of such reflections.
Wong, occasioned by the release of the 2021 documentary Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, parses the myth shrouding the bandmates’ creative partnership, of which he feels Wilson is generally assigned too large a percentage. He not only provides context for many of the band’s best-known and least-known works (“Caroline, No” from Pet Sounds, was released on Capitol Records under “Brian Wilson” rather than “The Beach Boys”) but also assesses the often distorting effect that the cumulative story has on our impressions of Wilson versus the rest of the family.
The Beach Boys were always a vocal group at heart, a rock ’n’ roll choir. The very core of their sound was built upon complex harmonies that required a great deal of coordination and mutual understanding. Brian Wilson’s falsetto was but one part of the band’s vocal blend; every member was needed to unlock the potential of their collective sound.
As part of the HBR’s “Life’s Work” interview series, Beard talked with Wilson to commemorate the release of his autobiography I Am Brian Wilson. The conversation ranges from the unique pros and cons of a family-band relationship to the lessons Wilson has learned from the various lyricists with whom he’s collaborated over a decades-long career. Wilson also reflects on various health challenges, including the deafness in his right ear and his ongoing battle with symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. At the end, he still circles back to being proudest of Pet Sounds.
“I wanted to grow musically, so I experimented. I wasn’t the type to sit around and be satisfied with an accomplishment, especially not in the studio. And I had ideas coming into my head all the time. Many had to do with using instruments as voices and voices as instruments. I would put sounds together to create something new. Some ideas didn’t work, because they were too difficult to achieve at the time. But most did. And then I immediately moved to the next thing.”
Peck, of the band Kestrels, reports on attending the Pet Sounds 50th-anniversary tour, including a meet-and-greet with Wilson himself. He might once have been a “lazy Beach Boys fan,” lavishing all attention on the Pet Sounds era at the expense of the long periods preceding and succeeding it. But he’s since repented: this series of vignettes evokes a nation still able to be united by music even in a moment as polarizing as late 2016. What shines through is his unreserved affection for the artist: for his songwriting technique, for his refusal to self-aggrandize. It’s almost as if, when referring to “I Know There’s an Answer” by its first provisional title — “Let Go of Your Ego” — Brian was trying to say something about himself. Again.
Popular music is inherently narcissistic; the theater was full because of Brian Wilson, and his self-negation on a night (and tour) that celebrated his highest achievement was entirely endearing.
Friedberg centers Pet Sounds as he explores how “rock ‘n’ roll” became “rock” — or, how it drifted away from its Black American roots to be co-opted by white men. The Beach Boys, and Wilson as their composer, were complicit in this evolution even prior to Pet Sounds: think of the “Johnny B. Goode” riff interpolated into “Fun, Fun, Fun.” But Friedberg isn’t here to condemn the band or the album. Instead, he contextualizes their ascent within a pop sphere that was becoming increasingly autonomous and posits their seminal record as the inevitable zenith of a creative period marked by both considerable talent and considerable privilege. The examination embraces literature, economics, geography, and more. It’s a reminder that art cannot exist in a vacuum, and cannot be a vacuum in itself, despite its best intentions.
Wilson claimed that he was searching for a “white spiritual sound” with the album, but Pet Sounds is viewed as a timeless, immaterial piece of art separate from the social conditions of its creation. In that sense, the album and its later canonization show how rock music became white, because the moment that rock became white was the moment that it became immaterial, timeless, and difficult—to be listened to repeatedly in solitude, rather than for dancing. This music is no less great because of its racial implications, but it’s essential to reexamine various “timeless” texts in relation to the material conditions of their production and reception.
For a fanatic, the only thing more inconceivable than the layered brilliance of Pet Sounds is the idea that it appeared contemporaneously with Bob Dylan’s double opus Blonde on Blonde, twin stars to illuminate the whole of the sky. Therein ends the comparison — or does it? (That I began an immediate and passionate romance with Blonde on Blonde as a teenager, while continuing to regard Pet Sounds as an important yet platonic friend, speaks to the indefinable space they both occupy between similarity and dissimilarity. And speaks to my lack of control.) Leibovitz juxtaposes the timelines with cinematic flair: Dylan is in a Nashville studio laying the foundation for “Visions of Johanna” at the same time a Los Angeles ad man named Tony Asher gets what he thinks is a prank call from Brian Wilson. These albums, the author argues, encapsulate a mercurial brand of mid-‘60s magic that could never have lasted, and stand in eternal testament to that fleeting magic. For as often as our subject is mentioned in the same breath as its Beatles counterparts (Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper), Leibovitz calls to our attention another record — and artist, and atmosphere, and sensibility — to which Pet Sounds owes not a little.
Listening to Blonde on Blonde or Pet Sounds today is like strolling through the ruins of a formerly great civilization: never without a tinge of regret for seeing the great pursuits of our ancestors reduced to polite plaques commemorating dates and names half-forgotten, but also never without a spark of hope that great things can be built, done, and recorded once again.
A personal turn amid the music-crit hullabaloo that heralded the album’s 50th birthday, Sommer’s essay mulls over his experience — almost too on the nose to be true — of experimenting with the album and LSD concurrently one night at 23 (incidentally, or not, Wilson’s age when the album was released). He’s the first to admit that “[his] one ride had been too perfect,” but his subsequent abstinence from psychedelics has made his description of the album’s lingering effect no less flowery. He terms it a “God Album,” a harmonic convergence of divine aspiration and mortal perception. And he welcomes “Good Vibrations” under its umbrella, too, the so-called pocket symphony that bears Pet Sounds’ sonic stamp even if it never made it onto the track listing.
I sat in a giant puppy-soft chair of unknown but likely ironic origin and watched the tie-dyed purple midnight sky turn the color of a roseate diamond. I observed the ducks in a thrift-store painting fly out of their frame, and I was gently remanded for attempting to step out of the open window and test the blur between life and death. But mostly, for hours that had no minutes, I lived inside the exotic Dixieland ta-das, Summer Place sad strings, turn-signal-tic guitars, angel-glow harmony stacks, Loving Feeling heart-beat bass and chiming radio-century vibes of Pet Sounds, a life-changing piece of music that became a friend for life and said you are home now, you have found the Mother of All Records.
Guriel’s classification of Wilson as the “author” of Pet Sounds, and of the album as “Wilson’s Bildungsroman,” tells you all you need to know about just how embedded the aforementioned creation myth is. He meditates on successive bands and artists who are indebted to Wilson and the Beach Boys, from Guns N’ Roses to R.E.M. to Beyoncé, and credits Wilson with cementing the notion of both the seminal album and its hermetic gestation period, shrouded in mystery — the product and the hype, or lack thereof, surrounding it.
Swap out the Hollywood studio peopled with unionized musicians for a laptop loaded with sound files, and the author of Pet Sounds looks a lot like the godfather of the current age—the first to assemble hits from fragments, the first to turn an album into an occasion. His approach was especially impressive when you consider that what he was splicing together was tape.
When Bell calls Pet Sounds “for all intents and purposes…the first Brian Wilson solo album,” he is speaking to the intensely personal nature of its lyrical contents, which, as devotees know, were written largely by Tony Asher, a collaborator Wilson had recruited from the outside, an interloper in the familial structure of the band. Bell constructs Wilson’s mindset as he conceived the skeletons of the songs on his own, brought Asher in for fleshing out and refining, and enlisted the help of L.A.’s finest session musicians while waiting on the crucial, sound-making piece — his bandmates — to return from a Japanese tour and enter the studio. Through the steady piling-on of hands, though, Wilson remains the central figure, armed with a vision and an inscrutable but ultimately effective means of communication.
Wilson explains that the Pet Sounds sessions were the first time he really tried to use the studio as an extra instrument: most of it was recorded on 4-track by necessity, but Wilson—inspired by Phil Spector among others—incorporated a vast array of peculiar sounds among the album’s incredibly complex and meticulous arrangements, including water jugs, bicycle horns, barking dogs, vibraphones and even soft drink cans.
Butler’s paper, coming on the heels of the then-newly-completed Smile project, traces record companies’ seismic shift in priorities from a cultivated clientele of artists to “an entrepreneurial mode of production.” By the late ‘60s the album-as-work-of-art became gospel for producers and consumers alike, due to efforts by the Beatles and the Beach Boys — more to the point, Wilson singularly — to prove the inherent conceptual merit of the album. This portrait of Wilson is of a pioneer among pioneers, a frontiersman who appeared fearless in the studio even as he crafted an LP that reckoned with deep-seated fears.
Brian Wilson was one of the first recording artists also to become an entrepreneur producer, dutifully recording three albums and at least four singles every year from 1962 for Capitol, most of which at least charted in the top ten. The influence on Wilson of his label-mates the Beatles peaked in 1965 with the release of Rubber Soul…With Capitol’s confidence stemming from his past hits, Wilson could work unencumbered in the studio, using the latest technology to create new sounds as he wished. From this point, the so-called production race was on, and the result was Pet Sounds.
This long-form conversation between Wilson collaborator Tony Asher and an unidentified interviewer gives fans as comprehensive a sense as we’ll ever get of the forces that led Wilson to seek Asher out and subsequently led Asher to pen some of the most essential lyrics in the Beach Boys catalog. Asher, London-born and Los Angeles-raised, had met Wilson through a friend and received a surprise call from Wilson in late 1965 with a request to work together on a few songs. As with all art, the process of hammering out the final material had very little of the romance that is projected onto it — owing perhaps in part to Wilson’s temperament — but the way their paths crossed has a satisfying stuff-of-legend ring to it.
“The reason that I thought [Brian’s call] was a joke, of course, was because it was such an absurd notion. He didn’t really know anything about my writing abilities except that I had—we had exchanged some ideas on songs when I was in the studio with him. He was playing a song, and then I played a couple of things that I was working on. Apparently he had some input from some mutual friends about my abilities as a ‘wordsmith,’ as a copywriter and as a lyricist, so it wasn’t all that absurd. But for me, it seemed like it was out of the blue and it was just quite hard to imagine.”
The cover photograph, taken at the San Diego Zoo, is a famously divisive one — the band members chalk it up to their being a group of young guys with no better idea than to feed apples to goats, and everybody beyond them thinks there must be something else to it but disagrees as to what that something else is. Though not a “long read,” it’s an enduring image Rothman and Ronk paint of the day that culminated in the image’s capture, a slice of pop-culture history that manages to stand out in an oversaturated pop-culture era.
Was it a reference to “pet,” meaning “favorite,” musical sounds? Was it a tribute to the PS in Phil Spector? Was it a dig at the idea that only a dog would hear the pitches the band played? Regardless, the album’s famous cover art takes the title completely literally…
***
Cecilia Gigliotti is a New England-born writer, podcaster, musician, and photographer based in Berlin, Germany. She holds an MA in English Literature from Central Connecticut State University and a BA in Creative Writing from the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Women* Writing Berlin Lab Magazine (wearewwbl.com) and has published short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art in numerous collections, anthologies, journals, and newspapers, both print and digital. Her projects can be found at https://linktr.ee/ceciliagigliotti.
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“We march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.” On March 3, 1913, 5,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue demanding the right to vote. #DCHistory #WomensHistoryMonth https://t.co/fRXyR0ovaI “We marc…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
Aircraft designers once imagined a future where everyone would pilot their own airplane. One pioneer in this movement was Henry Berliner, who was at the center of America's post-war airplane craze. #MDHistory https://t.co/WL029JgXYN Aircraft designers once imagined a future …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 3, 2022
The brown patches scattered across this 1867 map of the midwestern and western United States depict the locations of Native American reservations west of the Mississippi River. Take a look: https://t.co/VM8Ma8HXQ5 https://t.co/ZslHRwAFHw The brown patches scattered across thi…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
#OTD in 1899, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill creating the the National Zoo. Before then, the Smithsonian held pens and cages for animals on the National Mall, where Buffalo could be seen grazing! #DCHistory https://t.co/yKOxq44WSx #OTD in 1899, President Grover Cle…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Detail from a circa 1890 stereoview photo of a very busy Pennsylvania Avenue as seen from the grounds of the Treasury. Before the automobile era, the streets were much more active with foot traffic. Note the old Willard Hotel decorated with bunting on the left. …
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Overlooking the University of Virginia is a house that has spawned a number of local legends. One of them is that the house was the inspiration behind his famous children’s book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. #VAHistory https://t.co/gqTOPXOHrJ Overlooking the University of…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-T Soars After Launch via NASA https://t.co/2Mcav7gJxw https://t.co/E2zE09fMXp
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-T Soars After Launch via NASA https://t.co/2Mcav7gJxw https://t.co/XUxpSLaAzG
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Think animosity between Republicans and Democrats is bad now? On April 13, 1832, Sam Houston, a former Congressmen and Governor of Tennessee, beat a member of Congress with a wooden cane on Pennsylvania Avenue. #DCHistory https://t.co/Jkm4dZVsCY Think animosity between Repub…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 2, 2022
Bill Donahue | The Atavist Magazine | February 2022 | 7 minutes (2,029 words)
This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 124, “The Voyagers.”
The Atavist, our sister publication, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a member.
At 4 a.m. on June 23, 1945, beneath the bright Arctic sun, Valeri Minakov picked his way down to a beach on the cold, treeless coast of Chukotka, near the easternmost point of Russian Siberia. There, near the Cape Chaplino military weather station, Valeri climbed into a motorized kayak that he’d built himself, using walrus hide, a section of bicycle frame, and a small three-horsepower engine. The seawater in which his kayak bobbed was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit that morning, and clotted with blocks of ice the size of school buses. In the kayak’s bow, Valeri had a few five-liter cans of gasoline, some tinned food, a milk jug filled with drinking water, and a single passenger—a little boy.
Valeri’s son, Oleg, was six years old, black haired, and scrawny, with tentative brown eyes. He’d already been through much in his short life. When Oleg was three, his infant sister died of starvation, one of the Soviet Union’s 25 million war-era casualties. Oleg watched as his father placed the baby’s corpse on the metal kitchen table before it was taken away for burial. Soon after, in 1942, Oleg’s mother, Anna Yakovlev Kireyeva, ran off with a Red Army officer. For the next three years, Oleg was raised by his father, a naval mechanic, on a succession of military bases. Eventually, they wound up in the spartan reaches of Chukotka.
It was a lonely existence. Oleg didn’t have friends with whom he could play fox and geese—a game of chase—out in the snow. His father, Oleg later said, was “like a shadow. He was there, and then he wasn’t.” At 35, Valeri was erratic. He’d been traumatized, certainly, and was possibly mentally ill. When he went out at night to drink in bars, he left Oleg alone in the barracks where they lived. Valeri often got into fistfights while drunk. He was a muscular slice of a man—six-foot-one and 164 pounds—and Oleg was in awe of his physical prowess. Once, when a car jack wasn’t working, Valeri lifted the vehicle up by the bumper, slid the jack underneath, and continued his labors. Valeri’s strength, however, was tightly coiled. He was anxious, a chain smoker. He paced. He habitually clenched his jaw, grinding his teeth, and at times he raged at Oleg. When the boy caused a stir in a military dining hall by catapulting a spoonful of borscht into the face of a high-ranking officer, Valeri beat him.
But while Valeri was far from a model father, he and Oleg were a team out on the tundra. Oleg’s favorite moment each week came when his father got paid—Valeri would entrust the boy with a few kopecks and send him out on an errand. In a blacksmith’s forge where Valeri sometimes worked, he had Oleg work the bellows to keep the fire going. If father and son were outside and the wind got strong, Oleg would clench Valeri’s hand and curl in toward his dad’s long sealskin coat, lest he “get blown away to nowhere.”
Now Oleg sat in a 14-foot-long homemade kayak as his father prepared to row it into the Bering Strait, one of the earth’s most dangerous sea passages. The strait’s shallow floor, just 150 feet or so beneath the surface of the Bering Sea, is prone to kicking up monstrous waves. When the strait freezes, usually in October, it becomes a heaving jumble of ice floes that groan in the cold and crash into one another with immense force. The ice begins melting in June, which is why Valeri chose that month for their crossing.
Valeri began oaring away from the beach, hewing to the ice shelves along the cliff-lined shore. He kept the engine off. Valeri headed north, toward a group of islands where naval officers liked to hunt. If it came to it, he could always claim that he was taking his son out to shoot ducks.
Once they were far enough away from their launch point and hidden behind high blocks of ice, Valeri pulled the starter cord on the engine. It didn’t turn over. Valeri panicked. For three minutes he kept pulling. Then Oleg pointed out that the spark plug wasn’t connected. Valeri fixed it. The engine rumbled.
“Where are we going?” Oleg asked.
“America,” Valeri said.
Oleg had never heard of the place, so he said nothing. He sat in the front of the kayak, watching his papa guide the rudder. A cigarette hung loose between Valeri’s lips, and smoke plumed around his stubbled chin. America, Oleg figured, was probably far away. He laid his head on the side of the kayak and gathered a tarp around his torso for warmth. Then he drifted off to sleep.
When the strait freezes, usually in October, it becomes a heaving jumble of ice floes that groan in the cold and crash into one another with immense force.
Oleg was a sweet and susceptible child. When he was four, he became enchanted with a bombastic tune that was played on the radio every morning. It was a paean to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that reveled, “He gave us happiness and freedom, the great wise leader of the people.” Oleg liked to hum along. In time, he decided that he wanted to be a paratrooper in Stalin’s military.
It was a dream he carried through his rough childhood. He was hungry much of the time; at one base where he and Valeri lived, Oleg snuck into a Red Cross tent and stole Velveeta cheese and powdered cocoa. Valeri worked long days, leaving Oleg to fend for himself. One day, Oleg wandered across a frozen lake and broke through the ice up to his shins. He found his way to a stranger’s cabin, several miles from home, and shivered by the fire until somehow his father arrived to retrieve him. There were times, though, when Valeri wasn’t there for Oleg, because he was away on ships or stationed in distant parts of the Soviet Union building diesel power plants. During those periods, Oleg was parked at an orphanage.
At one of those orphanages, Oleg learned that Stalin himself was coming for a visit. The staff spent several days painstakingly sewing Oleg a little wool paratrooper’s uniform, then brought Oleg, dressed in the suit, to Stalin. “I can see Stalin sitting back in a big easy chair, smiling,” Oleg later recalled, “and me climbing up onto his knee, then jumping off like a paratrooper.”
Much of Oleg’s life was less festive. He was surrounded by brutality. Near the base on Cape Chaplino, gulag labor crews were constructing a new city, Provideniya. Once while out walking, Oleg crested a hill and looked down into a valley where scores of Soviet prisoners were moving dirt in buckets as guards armed with pistols watched over them.
Valeri feared becoming one of those prisoners, or worse. He had arrived in Chukotka tortured by history. He was born in 1909, in a small Ukrainian farming village called Orlianske. His father, Tihon, fought in World War I and was captured by the Germans. Tihon escaped, but upon returning home he suffered from shell shock, or what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. In 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Tihon and his family faced a new threat. That year, Vladimir Lenin stressed that he viewed Ukraine as a pantry for the entire Soviet Union. In a missive to Bolshevik leaders in Ukraine, he called for “grain, grain, grain,” demanding that it be shipped out daily to less agrarian sectors of his domain.
The policy amounted to an attack on Valeri’s parents. The Minakovs owned about 110 acres, planted with grapes and wheat, and Lenin was intent on seizing their crops—indeed, the crops of all well-off, landowning peasants, or kulaks. Throughout Ukraine’s agrarian steppes, kulaks protested wildly. They got nowhere, though, and the Soviet requisition policy remained in place. It would prove fatal for many people. In 1921 and 1922, when Valeri turned 12, Ukraine suffered a drought and then a famine that devastated the Zaporizhia Oblast, the Vermont-size province where the Minakovs lived. When Norwegian diplomat Vidkun Quisling toured Zaporizhia in February 1922, on behalf of the League of Nations, he wrote, “The situation is terrible. Local official statistics show that of the province’s 1,288,000 inhabitants, 900,000 are without food. Sixty percent of the famished are children.”
As Stalin rose to power, he proved worse than Lenin. He launched a campaign to collectivize all kulak land, promised the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” and ultimately killed off 30,000 of them. In the fall of 1929, the Bolsheviks moved to confiscate the Minakovs’ property, and the family was forced to hide in a neighboring village.
In 1932, Valeri was drafted into the Soviet military. He hated Stalin but had no choice except to serve. He became a ship’s mechanic. Aboard one boat, Valeri watched as 50 political prisoners—all fellow kulaks—were pushed off the deck to their deaths, with weights tied around their necks.
When the Nazis occupied Ukraine in 1941, they seized grain even more zealously than Stalin had. By the time they were chased out in 1944, the population of Orlianske had plummeted from 2,000 to 78, according to one report. Valeri’s parents survived to see the Soviets return, but the effects of war and deprivation took their toll: In the summer of 1944, they both died of starvation.
The same year, thousands of miles away in Chukotka, Valeri was caught writing an anti-Stalin inscription in a library book. “I was surrounded by agents and spies,” he would later relate. Paranoia crept into his life. He came to believe that his superiors were plotting to have one of his eyes surgically removed, to use his cornea in a transplant intended to restore a general’s lost vision. Valeri may have imagined the threat, but it wasn’t unfathomable. Stalin was well on his way to killing off as many as 20 million political opponents over the course of his rule. If the Soviets wanted Valeri’s cornea, they would get it.
By 1945, Valeri’s parents were dead. His wife was gone. There was nothing left for him or for Oleg in the Soviet Union. Just past the horizon, America beckoned.
In early May 1945, Valeri began squirreling away wood to build the skeleton of a kayak. He found a bicycle frame that could be used as a bracket for an outboard rudder. He took a broken down single-cylinder, water-cooled engine, once used to generate power at a radio station, and rebuilt it. He bought walrus skins from Chukchi Natives, who used the hides to cover their hunting boats. While a wooden craft might splinter on rocks or ice, “the native skin boat is semi-rigid and warps with the motion of the water,” a Jesuit missionary told The New York Times, after traveling 700 miles along the Alaskan coast in 1938.
Valeri kept his project secret from Oleg, and he was canny about the boat’s construction. He rigged the steering system so it seemed broken—the boat went left when the rudder was pulled right, and vice versa. He lashed inner tubes to either side of the hull. These aided flotation, and also enhanced the boat’s salvage-heap appearance. Valeri wanted it to seem incapable of withstanding the Bering Sea’s heaving waves; he wanted it to look like a death trap. That way, if anyone questioned him about it, he could say it was just for puttering around Cape Chaplino.
When the boat was finished, Valeri took Oleg out for a test run. They went duck hunting. “My job,” Oleg said, “was to sit in the bow and be very quiet until we got right near the ducks. Then I’d yell so the ducks would fly up and he could shoot them. If I made noise too early, my papa got mad.” Oleg frequently flubbed the timing.
At one point Valeri let Oleg steer, and the boy ran the stern of the boat into an ice floe, bending the engine’s propeller. Back home, Valeri fixed the damage. Then he began packing up their belongings. More than 20,000 Soviets would attempt to defect to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. Valeri and Oleg were about to become the first—and only—Soviet defectors to seek freedom in the West by crossing the Bering Strait.
Read the full story at The Atavist.
Enjoy this map of Mexico, published in 1911 by National Geographic. It shows elevation, states, and larger cities. Zoom in here: https://t.co/PWt553kOdU https://t.co/GxDCM8nv8y Enjoy this map of Mexico, published in 1911 by National Geographic. It shows elevation, states, and…
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 1, 2022
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On December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed and booze could once again legally flow across the country. Except for one location: Washington, D.C. #DCHistory #Prohibition https://t.co/HeWDXpnqGk On December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed and booze could once again legall…
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 1, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 1, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 1, 2022
Get $120 worth of free delivered meals, no obligation! https://t.co/IO7CpGv3Gk
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Mar 1, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 28, 2022
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Take a look at this road map of an early turnpike in New Jersey. This 19th century map depicts a stretch of road between Trenton and New Brunswick. Check it out: https://t.co/1E8JOiXi0D https://t.co/w7p5sn0eGI Take a look at this road map of an early turnpike in New Jersey. T…
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 28, 2022
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Quote of the Day: "You can never plan the future by the past." - Edmund Burke
— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 28, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 27, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 27, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 27, 2022
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— Kenneth Samson (@PangurBanC) Feb 27, 2022