100 New Yorkers of the 1970s Part 18

A book reviewer since 1967, including a five-year stint as editor of the _Sunday Times Book Review_, Leonard also write a warmly personal, frequently humorous column in the Wednesday _Times_ t.i.tled "Private Lives." A collection of 69 of the columns appeared in book form last year under the t.i.tle _Private Lives in the Imperial City_ (Knopf, $8.95). In addition, he has published four novels and hundreds of free-lance articles for magazines ranging from _Playboy_ to the _New Republic_. For years he wrote TV reviews for _Life_ magazine under the pseudonym "Cyclops." Recalls Leonard: "It was a good way to turn your brain to Spam."

Born in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., he grew up reading the _Congressional Record_ instead of comics, and initially planned a career in law. Booted out of Harvard for neglecting his studies in favor of the campus newspaper, he sharpened his journalistic skills under William F. Buckley Jr. at the _National Review_ before completing college at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Following graduation, he became the program director of a radio station, wrote his first two novels, and worked in an anti-poverty program in Boston. Then he was invited to join the _Times_. "I did my Westside and Village stuff when I was first here and broke," comments Leonard. He has owned his four-story Eastside house since 1971.

Among the most memorable books that Leonard has helped to "discover"

are Joseph h.e.l.ler's _Catch-22_ and Gunter Gra.s.s's _The Tin Drum_. "To be able to sit down one night, as I did, and to realize you're in the presence of an extraordinary talent, with no advance publicity, to be able to have a hole to fill in the paper two days later, to sit down and pull out all your adjectives and get people to buy the book: this is what you live for," he sighs happily. "You only need two or three of those to last a lifetime."

WESTSIDER JOHN LINDSAY International lawyer

7-1-78

It was said of John Kennedy that he was too young and too active a man to retire immediately after the presidency. Had he lived to serve two full terms, he would have been 51 upon leaving office. How he might have spent the remainder of his career is difficult to guess, but it's likely that he would have ended up doing work very similar to what John Lindsay does today.

A comparison between the two men is hard to escape. Both were war heroes. Both rose to power aided by their personal magnetism -- Kennedy to the nation's highest office at 43, Lindsay to the nation's second toughest job at 44. Both gave eloquent speeches, aimed for high ideals, and made controversial decisions that brought plenty of criticism from within their own ranks.

Lindsay, now an international lawyer, has changed little in appearance since he stepped down in 1974 after eight years in City Hall. The brown hair has turned mostly grey, and the lines in the face are slightly more p.r.o.nounced, but when he's behind the desk of his Rockefeller Plaza office, his lean, immaculately dressed, 6-foot-3-inch frame resting comfortably in a huge leather swivel chair, he still looks like a man who is very much in charge.

He is a partner in the corporate law firm of Webster and Sheffield, which he first joined in 1948. "This is a firm of about 75 lawyers," he says in a soft, lyrical voice. "We're general practice. ... I'm back into corporate law, and there's a fair amount of international work which takes me abroad quite a bit -- largely representing American businesses overseas.

A lot of my work is done in French. I'm handling a complicated matter involving imports to this country, and a complex arrangement involving offsh.o.r.e oil exploration and drilling. Real estate transactions. The purchase of oil. A matter in Australia. Munic.i.p.al counseling for a city in Colorado ... "

The international situation is beneficial to New York these days, says Lindsay, because "parts of the Western free world have a bad case of the jitters. Europeans particularly, and also many people in the Middle East, feel that this is a more stable place to invest their capital."

Leaning back, with his feet propped up on another chair, he elaborates on foreign affairs: "I think Carter's plane deal in the Middle East escalated tensions rather than reduced them. It's not a foreign policy to sell arms in the Middle East. I think Americans have an obligation to spell out what our foreign policy is."

Except for a few public speaking engagements, Lindsay has devoted nearly all his attention this year to the practice of law. "I used to spend a little time with _Good Morning America_ on ABC, but I dropped it in January because of the pressures of this office," he says. "Recently I did a pilot for public television. It's a small doc.u.mentary that shows cataclysmic events in world history -- mostly from World War II -- and at the same time, shows what was going on in America. ... It might be turned into a series of doc.u.mentaries."

Because he served four terms as congressman for Manhattan's Silk Stocking district, Lindsay is generally a.s.sociated with the East Side, but actually he was born on the West Side's Riverside Drive in 1921. One month after graduating from Yale in 1943, he enlisted in the Navy and served for the next three years, taking part in the Sicily landing and the invasion of the Philippines on his way to earning five battle stars.

Two years after leaving the service, he received his law degree, and seven years after that, in 1955, his abilities impressed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell so much that he made Lindsay his executive a.s.sistant.

In 1958, Lindsay ran for Congress and won, quickly establis.h.i.+ng himself as a tireless worker for the rights of refugees. Lindsay was an early supporter of the Peace Corps and a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Soon after leaving Gracie Mansion, John and his wife Mary and their children settled down on the West Side near Central Park. "I feel very strongly that the park is for people, and not for special interest groups,"

he says. "We introduced bicycling on weekends, and when I retired from government we had a major plan to restore all of Central Park."

The reason he first got involved in politics, says Lindsay, was because "out in the Pacific on lonely nights, after hearing the news of the death of good friends, I made a determination that one day I was going to try to do something. I was determined that we weren't going to have war again."

In regard to his years as mayor, Lindsay makes the simple statement that "I did my best of a very tough job and I have no regrets about it. I look ahead to the future."

But what will the future bring? Would he consider running for office again?

"That's a tough question, Max," he replies. "I know there's a lot of talk with some of my friends about the Senate in 1980. I don't take that lightly. ... Right now I'm not making any plans to run. ... But you just don't know, because life does funny things, and I also think there's a big vacuum out there now -- second-rate politics everywhere.

WESTSIDER ALAN LOMAX Sending songs into outer s.p.a.ce

9-17-77

On August 20, when the Voyager 2 s.p.a.cecraft blasted off for a trip beyond the solar system, it carried on its side a unique record player and a single phonograph record. Included on that record are 27 musical selections that the _New York Times_ has called "Earth's Greatest Hits."

If, someday, extraterrestrial creatures play the record and enjoy it, they will be most indebted to the man who chose 13 of the songs -- Westsider Alan Lomax.

That Alan's advice should be so highly respected by a committee that spent eight weeks choosing the other 14 songs is a testimonial to his musical reputation. Ever since he became head of the Folk Music Archives of the Library of Congress at age 20, Alan has devoted his life to the preservation and study of international folk music. Following the footsteps of his late father, musicologist John Lomax, Alan has taken his recording equipment to six continents in search of the rapidly disappearing musical treasures of the world.

I finally caught up with Alan and met him for an interview on a Friday evening at his office/apartment on West 98th Street. One room, I observed, was lined wall to wall with tapes and record alb.u.ms. Another was filled with music books, a third with computer readouts, and a fourth with movie films.

Alan's foremost interest right now is cantometrics -- the science of song as a measure of culture. Recently he published a book t.i.tled _Cantometrics: A Method in Musical Anthropology_. Accompanying the volume are seven ca.s.sette tapes. The songs are arranged in an order that will teach the student to interpret their general meaning without knowing the language.

"When you learn the system, you can understand any music," said Alan.

"We a.n.a.lyzed 4000 songs from 400 societies around the world. Out of that study has come a map of world music." He then showed me a musical chart of Europe, the Far East, and Indian North America. Thirty seven aspects of the music, including rhythm, volume and repet.i.tion, had been a.n.a.lyzed by a computer to make a graph.

"Each aspect of the music," said Alan, "stands for a different social style.

It's like the guy who says, 'I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.' It means that kind of music stands for his background and what he believes in."

Alan played a tape for me containing a Spanish folk song, an Irish jig and a song from Nepal, explaining some of the elements as the music was playing. "By the time you've heard two or three tapes," he said, "you get used to the world standards of music. In primitive societies, he added, "everybody knows the same things about everything, so being specific is a bore, and repet.i.tion is what they like. You don't impose your boring accuracy on everyone. By the same token, primitive people find it much easier to sing together than, for example, New Yorkers of different backgrounds. In the latter case," said Alan, "everybody starts singing at a different tempo, like six cats in a bag. But if you take people who live together and work together, it's like clouds rolling out of the sea."

Alan was not impressed with the 1976 movie _Bound for Glory_, about the life of American folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie during the Great Depression. The movie ends with Woody leaving Hollywood for New York to perform in a coast-to-coast radio show. The man who hosted that show was Alan Lomax.

"We collaborated on a number of things," recalled Alan. "It was an enormous pleasure. He was the funniest man that ever talked. And he was so quick. That's what was wrong with the movie. Talking with Woody was like playing a game of jai alai. He was a deeply pa.s.sionate person, and tremendously gifted. He got up in the morning and wrote 25 pages before breakfast just to warm up."

Though Alan can sing and play the guitar, he does not regard himself as a performer but rather as a "funnel" for other musicians. During the 1940s he helped launch the careers of people like Burl Ives and Pete Seeger by providing them with songs and putting them on the radio. "We set out to revive the American folk music in 1938, and by G.o.d we did it," said Alan. "By 1950 it was a national movement."

Alan spent the next 10 years of his life in Europe, where he produced a definitive 14-alb.u.m collection of international folk music. Then he moved back to the U.S. and settled on the Upper West Side, where he has lived for the past 15 years. His residential apartment is located two blocks from his office.

Besides his research in cantometrics, done in cooperation with Columbia University, Alan is now preparing for publication a study on international dance movement and its relations to society. Energetic, jovial, and looking considerably younger than his years, Alan has no doubts about the lasting value of his work.

"I make my living as a very hard-working scientist," he said. "By using scientific methods, I can absolutely refute the ideas of those who say that Oklahoma doesn't matter, or that the Pygmies might as well be exterminated. Each of these people, we have found, has something for the human future, for the human destiny."

The Mighty Lomax

from _The Westsider_, late 1977

It's oldies night on the radio. The d.j. has promised to play nothing but the greatest hits of the '50s and '60s, and sure enough, here they are -- "Irene Goodnight" sung by the Weavers; "Tom Dooley" by the Kingston Trio; "Abilene" by George Hamilton IV; "Midnight Special" by Johnny Rivers; and "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals.

All of these songs reached number one on the charts. And they have something else in common: all are genuine American folk songs of unknown authors.h.i.+p that might have been lost forever if they had not been discovered and preserved by John and Alan Lomax, the famous father-son folklorist team.

The folk music explosion in America that peaked in the early 1960s and continues today owes more of a debt to the Lomaxes than to any performer or songwriter. John Lomax died in 1948 at the age of 80. His son Alan, 62, has been a resident of New York's Upper West Side for the past 15 years. Working seven days a week at his 98th Street office and his 100th Street apartment, Alan has carried on his father's work with a remarkable talent and energy. He has gone far beyond the simple collecting of folk songs, and maintains a dizzying schedule of activities -- writing books, catching planes for Europe or Africa, making movies, producing record alb.u.ms and tapes, and heading a musical research project for the Anthropology Department of Columbia University.

Fathers and Sons

The elder Lomax was primarily a songhunter. His first collection, _Cowboy Songs_, was published in 1910. It contained such gems as "John Henry," "Shenandoah" and "Home on the Range," which he heard for the first time in the back of a saloon in the Negro red light district of San Antonio.

Alan was born in Texas in 1915. When he was 13 years old his father gave him an old-fas.h.i.+oned cylinder recording machine, and the boy was hooked. He became a full-time song scholar at 18. In that same year his father was put in charge of the newly created Archives of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in Was.h.i.+ngton. When Alan was 20 he took over as archives director. The father-son team eventually provided more than half of the 20,000 songs in the collection.

The Lomaxes wrote many books together; they introduced American folk music into the nation's public schools, and through their radio programs in the U.S. and Europe, made celebrities out of such performers as Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.