ECCE URSUS

ECCE URSUS: Behold the Bear! Here you can find out as much about me as interests you and I choose to reveal. Don't feel you are forced to take it all in during one visit. Feel free to come as often as you wish and stay as long as you like. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day! An entity as complex and varied as myself is rather more than one can - or should - attempt to comprehend in one visit. Festina lente! [Hasten slowly!], as the Divine Augustus constantly admonished.


"Why don't you have a picture and use your real name?"

... well, you see that is my picture and "Ursus Major" is my "real name"! No, it's not the same picture as on my driver's license or passport, and I don't sign checks "Ursus Major"; but here were talking about spiritual realities, not physical ones. A few centuries ago, I was a freshman at UCLA with a major in astronomy and a minor in classics (you know, Latin and Greek). There was a Rugby Club at UCLA. (The letters didn't stand for "Unqualified Caucasians Lost [among] Asians," as they do now.) It was a "club," because the school didn't want the liability associated with a rough game. I joined to work off adolescent energy, and because I liked "civilized combat"! As I'd show up for meets with, say, Dr. Popper's book on stellar evolution under one arm and Cicero's Orationes under the other, the guys named me "Ursus Major" (after the constellation ... and because I gave good back-cracks). A name that's bestowed on one, stemming from cameraderie and good fellowship, is preferable to one inflicted when a squalling whelp: it's a tribal name. It's also quite pagan - there used to be a "St. Ursula" until Vat-II, but there was never a "St. Ursus" - so it is my name, the same way that "John Wayne" was Marion Morrison's or "Judy Garland" Frances Gumm's.

As for a "picture," much better a totum - a Spiritiual Portrait - than a unfamilar, face which conveys no message. In heraldry, "the bear" stands for a brave, but foolish warrior. If "too trusting" equals "foolish," then that's a very apt description.
(No, I don't wear a beard. In fact, I dislike them: at most, a neatly trimmed moustache for male Euro-stock - with close-cropped hair, for a clean appearance.)


SORRY, I'm supposed to be introducing myself to you. (I'll skip the physical, as this the realm of the mind. Suffice it to say, I'm at the "awkward stage": between parental support and Medicare.) But as for other attributes:

Pointer Roots: the history of my blood-ties to the sacred soil of Europa, which remains my "Holy Land."
Pointer Philosophy: my personal, as best I am able to describe it.
Pointer Quirks: things I like and dislike, and - in so far as I am able to describe them - the reasons for my Pride and Prejudice.
Pointer Ma Cuisine: Being a bachelor & a good cook, I'll share my secrets with you, on how to feed a crowd without abandoning your guests.


[Being new resident of "Cyberia," any suggestion on how I might improve my site are most welcome]


Vale, nunc et semper!
Totus tuus, "Ursus Major"

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My Blood Roots

The Blood: what is it and why should we care? It is symbolically all that came before, that makes us what we are and what we respond to. It is the Collective Unconscious in fluid form. It is the The Past, upon which we build The Present, to pass on to The Future. It is the agency that infuses us with awe, when we see The Eagle Rampant. It is the The Tears of Oedipus, The Stain upon the fields at Châlon, The Volga as it flows by Stalingrad. It washes as we grow from zygote to fetus; at birth we are covered with It. It is what Ancient Rites commanded we commingle, to bond more closely than comrades. It is that which is borne in The Holy Grail, which is Life Itself. This is mine, so far as I understand It, as It has spoken to me.


PATERNAL SIDE


My father's family was Austro-German in origin. During the Revolution of 1848, the founder was an avid supporter of the Liberals. As the Croat troops crashed through one gate, he fled out another and didn't stop until he reached St. Louis, MO. In the 19th century, indeed until "The Archangel Woodrow" (as H.L. Mencken called him) tricked the U.S. into WWI, St. Louis was a very German city. The schools were bi-lingual, and the street signs were in both languages. (Now, it is almost exclusively Negro.) I really know very little about him. My paternal great- grandfather was born during the War Between the States. He lived to be 90 - indeed driving a car until near the end - so I was able to get some data from him. (My grandfather died in the 1940s, so I never really knew him; but I did know about him. It seems the famous soprano, Lille Lehmann, was a cousin of the refugee.)
My grandfather was a high school teacher. He taught Latin, Greek, and German. In 1917, the plotting and scheming of Wilson - aided by the downfall of the Czar: the cant about "Making the world safe for democracy" would have been ridiculous with The Autocrat of All the Russias as an alley - succeeded in getting the U.S. into the war (to make the world safe for the loans J.P. Morgan, et al. had made to Britain and France). A result was anti-German hysteria that rose to the level of anti-Jewish hysteria in Germany under Hitler. A mob attacked my grandfather's house and burned it - his books, his piano, everything. He had been an ardent supporter of Neutrality and had given several speeches denouncing Wilson's obvious anti- German bias. Now it's publically known that the Lusitania wasn't sunk by a German torpedo. It sank in fifteen minutes, because the hold was filled with high-explosives - contrary to both International and U.S. Law.
After losing everything, he fled with his wife and three small children - my father to be was two - to California, where the anti-German insanity wasn't as severe, and resumed his career as a school teacher. His eldest child, a daughter, died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1919. I met my grandmother, who never lost that God-awful "Missourah" accent when speaking English, but spoke German accent-free. She was also from a German-Catholic family, Bavarian not Austrian. Her one brother, whom I never met, became a Jesuit.
My father grew up in Los Angeles and planned on becoming a musician. (There's a German proverb that runs, Die Deutschen und Italiener lieben es, wenn Musik gemacht wird - und die Französen haben Nichts dagegen [The Germans and Italians love having music performed - and the French have nothing against it.]) The Great Depression changed everything. My grandfather lost everything, when the bank where his savings were kept folded and the stock market crashed. He still had his job; however, teachers had to take a 20% pay cut, as the tax revenues totally dried up. My 14-year-old father-to-be had to settle for instruction at (then) the Los Angeles Normal School. (Now L.A. City College and nary a Euro-face to be seen on campus.) This was hardly the USC School of Music he'd dreamed. (His sensitive younger brother was so traumatized by the Depression, he became a Roman Catholic priest.)
The era of silent movies had created a great demand of musicians, as the major movie "palaces" had a resident, Mozart-sized orchestra. Originally, movies had been shown in combination with live performers. Then the big epics, like The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, were distributed with the musical scores, accompanied by a live orchestra. (In the medium-sized houses, a mammoth organ - the fabled "Theater Organ" - was used. In the rink-dink ones, it was a piano!) The advent of "the Talkies" spelled an end to that, but Los Angeles became a Mecca for qualified musicians. Every studio and radio network had its own resident orchestra of Wagnerian proportions. When I was a child in L.A., there were eight full symphony orchestras going. The vicious anti-Semitism in Germany resulted in an exodus of extremely talented musicians. The Anschluss of 1938 and the take- over of Bohemia in 1939 swelled the ranks with refugees from Austria and Czechoslovakia. Los Angeles was awash with the greatest musicians of the age.
My father took to playing in "Big Bands," as this was the era when "ballrooms" dominated the scene. He performed on a number of bass instruments: double bass, tuba, and Sousaphone. He also played the piano. He was in the orchestra at the Hollywood Palladium, one of the larger and tonier of the ballrooms, when he spotted a really beautiful girl about twenty-one, who appeared to be accompanied only by another girl, rather mousey, a couple years older. During break, he went and introduced himself. The girl was, of course, my mother. He was twenty-six, she twenty-one. The courtship lasted about a year. In 1937, they were (despite grumblings from my maternal grandfather) married at St. Agnes's Church in Los Angeles. My mother's "dowry" consisted of a trousseau: the furnishings for their apartment. In lieu of an extended Honeymoon, which is supposed to be funded by the groom's parents, they received a new car: a 1938 Hudson Terraplane. It cost a whopping $800! ($25 per week was a respectable income in 1937. Most people lived on $15 per week, or less.)
Both my mother and father worked. She had a steady income of $12 per week as a nurse, but his was sporadic. According to my mother, the long periods "between engagement" started his drinking, which resulted in a divorce in 1941. I'd been born in 1939, nearly killing my mother and myself in the process. My mother remarried in 1943: another bass-player of Austro-German ancestry, despite the no-no of the Church. Like most Italians, my mother never let religious dicta stand between her and practical solutions, even though she maintained a devout posture through most of her life. One result being my education in parochial schools until I reached the university level. But that's a different story: mine, not my ancestry. In concluding the Paternal Side, I might mention that the name "Lehmann" is a very old German name, indigenous to region west of the Elbe and south of the Danube. It means, in effect, "share-cropper": a free farmer, who worked the lord's land, paying rent-in-kind. The English equivalent would be "yeoman."























































































































































MATERNAL SIDE

My mother's family came to the U.S. much later than my father's; however, politics was the also the aegis. My mother's family was Tuscan. In Roman times, it was called Gallia Cisalpina: "Gaul this side of the Alps." The Celts were the predominating ethnic stock, apart from the Etruscans, whose origins are in dispute. (Some scholars assign them to modern Albania, others give the Levant as the region where these people, who provided the Kings of Rome, originated.) The name "Tuscany" [Toscana in Italian] comes from the Etruscans.) The Arno and the tiny Rubicon rivers separated Gallia Cisalpina from Italia. When Julius Caesar, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, crossed the tiny Rubicon (after the Tribunes had fled to him for protection) he committed one of the three acts that were classified as "treason" under Sulla's revision of the Roman code: a commander taking his troops out of his province, without permission of the Senate. "To cross the Rubicon" means an act which cannot be reversed. Crossing the Atlantic was no different for my mother's family.
Her father belonged to the Civil Service. His family had been in the Tuscan Civil Service since Dante's time, or not long afterwards. The collapse of the Roman Empire had brought a multitude of Germans into Italy, especially from Rome north. The population of Northern Italy is a mixture of the Roman, Celtic, and Germanic. The population of Southern Italy has a strong Semitic element, from Carthaginian and later Saracen inroads. A common expression among Northern Italians is that Africa starts forty kilometers south of Rome!
Tuscany had been part of The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The Peace of Utrecht had awarded Tuscany to the House of Habsburg - more properly Habsburg-Lorraine - as compensation for the King of France grabbing Lorraine (and Alsace) from its Duke, when Duke Charles had joined the pan-European army in driving the Turks from the gates of Vienna. Habsburg rule in Tuscany proved beneficent. When the Kingdom of Italy was formed in 1868, Florence became the capital. Rome was still under Papal rule. The end of the Second Empire in France meant the end of the Papal States. The Pope ordered his troops not to offer any resistance, but he refused to recognize the incorporation of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy. The King offered the Church a huge compensation. The Pope refused it and became "The [Infallible] Prisoner of the Vatican": a stalemate that was ended in 1930 by Mussolini, when Vatican City - all 92 acres of it - became a "sovereign state."
The abdication of Grand Duke Leopold meant the end of the Tuscan civil service, qua Tuscan. It was absorbed into the Italian civil service. Unlike the German Empire created by Bismarck, the Kingdom of Italy was not federated. To "homogenize" it, the central government began posting Southerners in the north and Northerners in the south. A practice as popular among the Northerners as roast pork at a Bar Mitzvah. In 1903 my grandfather, then a young man, married and with two small children, was transferred from Pistola (where his grandfather had been sent, because of unflinching loyalty to il Gran-Duca Leopoldo and the Habsburgs) to Nicastro on the slopes of the mountains of Calabria: Africa! He'd been born the same year as Benito Mussolini (his later hero!), and not more than 100 kilometers away. (In fact, he looked a lot like il Duce, save for a full head of hair that remained with him until he died in 1954.) Of course, it was an impossible situation - akin to someone from Boston being transferred to Fargo, ND - except that Tuscany is vastly more civilized than Boston. If one was born into the civil-servant class, he was a civil-servant; as much as a samurai was a samurai. One couldn't "quit"! His two choices were to stay among "the goatherders" or emigrate. The question was whether to Argentina or gli Stati Uniti. In Argentina, he'd have the benefit of speaking a nearly identical language (Argentine Spanish is heavily influenced by the large Italian element in the population). The Italians in Argentina were almost all from "the South." That's the last thing he wanted. Besides, there were some distant relatives in Philadelphia. In the Italian psyche, distant or not, a relative is still a relative. (The Italian word parenti means "relatives"; the word for "parents" is genatori.) So, God's Own Funny Farm was chosen. Not Philadelphia, of course. There were two many "Africans" in the East. He'd studied his geography and decided upon a city which cultivated European traditions, grew superb wines in the area, and - most importantly - boasted a first-rate opera house. They would stay with i parenti until he'd mastered Anglo-Sassone - his French was perfect and his German quite good - and then move on ... to San Francisco.
In the spring of 1905, they left Italy after turning everything (except family memorabilia) into gold coin and departed from Naples. His wife (my maternal grandmother) was actually from the petty nobility - a "di" in the same is still a "di" - a cast-off daughter, whose choice was to marry beneath her station or take the veil. The di Sensis had also been loyal to the House of Habsburg. As a result, they too were non grata among the Italian aristocrats. (To the end of his days, my grandfather always spoke respectfully of the House of Habsburg, especially as the last Empress was the Italian Zita of Bourbon-Parma. He always referred to Franz-Josef as il Imperatore. How ironic that my youth should be spent among Habsburg- praising Jews and a Habsburg-praising grandfather. That I had the same birthday as Franz-Josef made me his favorite grandchild. What a pity that he died penniless.) They'd left Italy with three children: two boys and an infant daughter. Upon arriving in the U.S., they "abstained," until circumstances would permit additions to the family. As a result, there was an eight-year gap between child number three and number four. My mother was the last: Septima. Having studied English intensely for a year, they were about ready to move on; when my grandfather picked up a copy of the Enquirer with banner headlines: "San Francisco DESTROYED in Earthquake / Hundreds killed! Thousands homeless! The city a mass of charred ruins!!" If there is anything Italians fear more than impotency, it's earthquakes! Back to geography books! Hmm... there was another city, 500 kilometers to the south, a climate like Naples, La Bohème had been given its American premiere there, and there was an established Franco-Italian community. They changed trains in Omaha and arrived at the Union Pacific station in Los Angeles.
Initially, Los Angeles grew as the street-car lines were laid. (Later, it was to be freeways; but that was much later.) Henry Huntington would buy up huge tracts of land, and then run his inter-urban Pacific Electric "Red Cars" out to his fiefs. The Pacific Electric had been given to him by his uncle, Colis P., the principal builder of the Central (then Southern) Pacific Railroad. After the death of his only child, a daughter, his nephew Henry stood to inherit the whole empire, which was extensive. The Huntington Library, his former home in San Marino, CA (the Pattons were neighbors) boasts one of the finest collections of 18th century furniture and paintings - including the famous "Blue Boy" and "Pinky"- to be found, along with a treasure of inculnabulae. My grandfather decided to go into the grocery business. (A grocer's family never goes hungry!) The building in the Franco-Italian North Broadway district had a grocery store in front, with a spacious house built atop and around it. At that time, a good-sized market was about as big as a larger 7-11. Customers ran up accounts, which were billed on a monthly basis. Cash-&-Carry got a 5% discount. As my grandfather had been a paymaster in the civil service, he was used to bookkeeping. The business did o.k. It was time to produce more souls for the Church (which he never went into) to save. He probably would have stopped earlier, but he kept hoping for another son, while all his wife produced were girls. My mother was the penultimate child, born at the French hospital in July, 1916.When the last child, a boy, died within weeks of his birth (from influenza), he regarded it as a sign from heaven that he was not going to sire another son.(One should be advised that the Italian equivalent of "Bless you!" after a sneeze is Figli maschi!: Many sons!)
Both my uncles volunteered for the services, which garnered them speedy naturalization. I don't think my grandfather ever bothered. After WWI, Los Angeles again became a boom-town. While his eldest son suggested they think about selling the store and buying an orange grove, my grandfather scoffed that he was not a contradino [peasant]. His customer's called him "Don Tomaso," and he liked it. What he was interested in was a larger store. His sons could work the produce and meat departments. He was getting on. Going to the Central Market at 05:00 to select produce was a burden. He was stunned, when his younger returned from France with a war-bride. Even more non-plussed that she was "in a family way." After the birth of a daughter and two year's of being treated like a serf (it turned out his wife was epileptic; an affliction which their younger daughter inherited), the son and his family returned to Bordeaux, not returning to the U.S. until 1938, as war clouds were once again gathering in Europe.
Unknown to my mother, her father had decided she was not going to marry. She was to be trained as a nurse, to take care of her parents in their dotage. (A venerable Italian custom: that or a convent.) When his older son decided he didn't want anything to do with the grocery business and struck out on his own, my grandfather decided that his only course was to get a much larger store and concession it out: a butcher, a green-grocer, and a staples man. He would be the Padrone and collect a commission on sales, doing the bookkeeping. What appeared to him to be an astonishing offer was submitted by a realtor in 1925: a handsome store in South Central Los Angeles. The eldest daughter had been married off, so it was my grandparents and the "second family," four girls, who moved in 1926.
Too bad he wasn't a Sicilian; he'd have qualified for membership in the Mafia. The deal in South Central L.A. was too good to be true, because unknown to him, the "Caucasians Only" covenant expired in 1928. After another aunt had been married with the pomp and circumstance befitting a Signore, "Diversity" struck fifty years ahead of other locales. The innundation was a first a trickle, then a deluge. The primary difference was that his older clientele was punctual about paying their statements. The dusky new one was not infused with bourgeoises values. As he was factoring, he had to absorb the losses. He put in cash registers and cut 'way back on credit. Then he was stricken with diabetes. The Depression hit with all its fury: those who in the past wouldn't pay, now couldn't pay. The women did all the physical labor. In 1932, his wife (my grandmother) died from pneumonia, overwork - or both. My mother graduated from high school. A year later, the Long Beach earthquake seriously damaged the store. The large, framed portrait of il Duce didn't endear him to a number of customers. He had a "respect" for Hitler - mainly because the German dictator openly acknowledged what a great leader Benito was - but he couldn't forgive der Führer for insulting the Habsburgs. (Unknown to him, the FBI began assembling files on those who expressed admiration for the fascist leaders. When the U.S. entered WWII, he had to suffer the twin indignities of registering as an "enemy alien" and having his radio, which could receive short-wave broadcasts, seized by the government.) When the young bass-player began to pay court to my mother, he became outraged: an Emigrant Petty-Bourgeois Lear. Her fiancé didn't ask for her hand; she told her father she was getting married - preferably with his blessing - but with or without it, she was getting married! Now only two girls remained. Within a year, both of them were married. The one a year older than my mother, the last to leave, offered him shelter. He sold the store for a quarter of what he'd paid for it a dozen years before. Just prior to Pearl Harbor, he stepped on a piece of broken glass. Because of the diabetes, the wound would not heal. He had to have a leg amputated. Then came the "alien" business. One day, he picked up the paper, to see Benito and Clara, hanging like sides of beef from the rafters of a burned-out gas station. He never looked at another paper.
He spent his last years in a dream-world, listening to old Caruso recordings, and mumbling to me - a small child - about Fransisco-Giuseppi, l'ultimo Imperatore. (Although he spoke perfect English, he preferred Italian when speaking from the heart.) When he died, they should have covered his casket with the Double Eagle. They didn't. I was a freshman at Loyola High, developing a friendship with a Jewish classmate, who was an excellent cellist. Funny, but when I met his family, all his grandmother talked about was Kaiser Franz-Josef. The Double Eagle still flies. I have given it to others, to tend and shelter. Someday, I hope they come to realize what a magnificent talisman has been entrusted to their care.


This then is my blood, my roots that find expression in the most enduring of all pan-European symbols: the Latin tongue and the Double Eagle. No one understood il Nono, because they could not listen to his eyes. I was only a small child, but I could hear his eyes. How proud he was of my birthday! He came to realize that a spiritual son can be more of a son than one begotten of the loins. He had two of those, and they proved to be great disappointments. Nature, however, sometimes skips a generation. From my maternal grandfather and Peter's Jewish grandmother I have received an awareness of my Euro-spirituality. It has two heads, but only one body.

... more about me: