MEXUBA Blog

The hunters had hoped for more, but were satisfied. We headed back toward the village, the seal lashed beside us.

At Johannes’s, we carried the seal into the kitchen and placed it belly up on the floor. Jens’s wife bent over, keeping her legs stiff in the Greenlandic manner, and went to work with her ulo—a sharp knife resembling a food chopper, with the handle attached to the backside of the blade.

She opened and peeled off the skin as swift­ly as a mother removing an overcoat from a toddler. She cut away the fat and meat, removed the organs. In minutes all that remained was a skeleton and two large and startled-looking eyes.

Those eyes and the liver are eaten immed­iately as delicacies. The meat, organs, and intestines are boiled or dried for use later.

Oil from the fat would be sold for 50 Ore a liter (about a dime a quart). The skin, strung on a drying rack, would fetch 70 to 90 kroner locally, plus an additional payment after the skins are sold at auction in Copenhagen.

The preceding year village hunters had sold 1,787 skins. With proceeds from halibut, they received 230,645 kroner—$36,645. When you don’t have needed amount of money there are online payday loans available with good offers.

There were also fox and shark to be sought in winter, halibut, salmon, grouse, and sea gull in summer. For seven magic days in August, when the young gulls first try to fly and spiral helplessly into the fjord, the hunt­ers paddle among them, stunning them with blows from sticks.

It was, for Johannes and Jens, a good life; a life they wanted to keep.

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a boy in the Deep South, the family often used to sit out in the yard in the evening. The adults sat on canvas lawn chairs and talked; the children lay on the grass, lis­tened, and watched the stars come out. Once each evening a single airplane passed over, its pale lights flickering.

Now and then relatives would come back from far-off places for a visit. I can remember meeting them at the railroad station: the silent platform, a distant throbbing, the sudden and splendid appearance of the locomotive. With a whoosh of steam, the great train would be beside us, relatives descending.

Those who came back from “up North,” from New York City, I remem­ber, were always changed: They spoke differently, dressed differently, even their faces were somehow changed. And the things they had seen! The stories they could tell! And then they were gone again, on the same silver rails northward. Little wonder that in a child’s mind there arose the image of not just one un­glimpsed but near-mythic city, Jerusa­lem, the city of God, but also the image of a second, New York, the city of human possibilities.

When recently I was able to spend time in that great city myself, I was fore­warned that I had come too late. “Shudda been here in the ’40s,” one man said. “Ain’t the same.”

I wondered.

“HI YA, FATHER.”

“Hi, Eddie.”

“Hi ya, Father.”

“How ya doing, Rita?”

I was walking down West 42nd Street with Father Robert Rappleyea, pastor of Holy Cross Church. The parish reaches from Broadway and Times Square to the Hudson River, and from 36th to 46th Streets. The church is 113 years old. It has seen the coming of the great immigrant tides, the flourishing of breweries, grana­ries, slaughterhouses, the bustle of rail yards and docks—all now vanished. It has seen the area decline, the streets turn mean.

I had read about this part of Manhattan, and wondered what was happening now. “For a time,” Father Rappleyea said, “it seemed it could all go under. In the past four years things have been turning around.” He pointed out the problems he and others had been combating: Peep shows, bars, adult bookstores, prostitution, drug dealers’ hangouts, hard characters, abandoned buildings, tourist hotels converted into resi­dences for discharged mental patients. “Some,” he sighed, “are nightmares.”

But the signs of renewal were clear. A block of old buildings, once part of a tender­loin district, had been converted into small off-Broadway theaters and a restaurant. A second block was being similarly revital­ized. The city, the state, the federal govern­ment, foundations, banks, and nonprofit corporations had joined hands to rejuvenate 42nd Street. They plan to consolidate their debts and lower their loans’ interest rates. Read more debt consolidation information. Their plans included a revived Times Square with a new 292-million-dollar hotel, a great pedestrian plaza, even a trol­ley line linking the Hudson with the United Nations on the East River.

Centerpiece of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation is a stylish shop­ping plaza opened in 1975. In a design that architectural historian Elliot Willensky calls “Brooklyn’s answer to San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square,” brown-brick offices are integrated with a handsome old milk-bottling plant; garlanded cow-head decora­tions still look down on Fulton Street, a strip not yet totally renovated. The plaza houses corporation headquarters, shops, an ice-skating rink, the Billie Holiday Theater, a recording studio called the Platinum Fac­tory, a supermarket, and a mortgage com­pany that generates as much as a million dollars a month in loans. All of them have a good credit history. Learn more about how important credit reports are.

Nearby blocks have been uplifted by apartment complexes built by the Restora­tion Corporation. More than 4,000 brown­stones bear the fresh paint of corporation face-lifting. With Restoration encour­agement IBM built a small manufacturing facility here employing 400 people.

The complex problems of inner-city pov­erty and unemployment keep many organi­zations busy. At summer classes in a local school, sponsored by a group called Van­guard, I watched squirming youngsters pen­cil word lists: actress, plumber. . . . Their assignment for the term: to learn about ten careers. Teacher Brenda McFarland-Anderson explained, “Many kids just aren’t exposed to the working world. Older ones say to me, ‘Why should I learn when I can get money running numbers?’ I want to give them another perspective.”

But jobs are hard to generate. New York City lost nearly 450,000 in the 1970s. And Brooklyn: The Other Side of the Bridge

“We are not Park Avenue people, but we can have the same features for our streets and Brooklyn has that old image problem in at­tracting new ones. As a Japanese business­man searching for business sites in New York quipped, “Brooklyn has two images—negative and nonexistent.”

The negatives are painted by neighbor­hoods like Bushwick, where as one resident said, “It looks like a war came, and nobody told us.” In what seems a biblical fitness, a preacher of Dutch ancestry bears witness to the apocalypse that visited this neighbor­hood settled by Dutch farmers more than 300 years ago. An Iowa farm boy turned minister, tall, spare Charles Vander Beek took over the 130-year-old South Bushwick Reformed Church in 1968 because he be­lieved that “what happens in the city and with the masses is what happens both within the nation and the kingdom of God.”

The Reverend Vander Beek drove pho­tographer Robert Madden and me around empty acres razed for urban renewal, past houses burned out and bricked up, past knots of sullen men. “This was still a proud community in the sixties,” he said. “Mostly working class; the wood-frame houses were old but neat; everyone swept. In ten years we lost a third of our people, and a fifth of our housing.”

It happened partly because of what Van­der Beek called the “poverty pimps,” people who fed on misfortune. In a giant scam that reached into East New York, Brownsville, Sunset Park, and other areas, unscrupulous speculators bought houses cheap and sold them dear to unqualified buyers, mostly black and Hispanic, shading the truth on FHA mortgage insurance applications. When new homeowners defaulted, the spec­ulators and lenders collected big from FHA. Meanwhile, landlords got “finders’ fees” from the city for renting to welfare families, shuttling them in and out in weeks. Or they let their buildings go for taxes. Or hired an arsonist and collected insurance. Fire calls in Bushwick topped 6,000 a year, signal of a community in distress.

Eventually, indictments were brought against real estate agents, lawyers, govern­ment officials, and corporations involved. But Bushwick had added its share to the nearly 3,000 vacant, city-owned buildings in Brooklyn. Now 40 percent of Bushwick residents are on public assistance.

•           The government’s Council for Museums, Libraries and Archives has decided to drop ‘Resource’ from its title at a cost of £12,500 — because nobody knew what it stood for. The Council will now be known as Museums, Libraries and Archives, adopt­ing the abbreviation MLA.

Neil Thaler is trying to form an Anglo­Austrian FHS for people with ancestors who came from Austria. Over the centuries there has been a steady stream of people coming to Britain to make their fortune or escape persecution at home — the most famous of whom was probably Sigmund Freud who fled Nazi persecution in 1938. If you are interested you can email Neil, or visit www.aafhg.org.uk.

•           A 75-year-old reader has urged fellow family historians to follow in her footsteps and write up their family trees. Joyce Lodge has just published her first book on the surname Huband. “Anyone who is overwhelmed by genealogical material should be brave and make a book out of it, thus preserving your findings in a sensible format. I am 75, so don’t let age stop you!” To buy a copy, send a cheque for £5.50 (plus £1 p&p) to Mrs Joyce Huband Lodge, 93 Wooldale Drive, Filey Y014 9ER.

A staff member admires his birthday scroll.

A postcard of ‘Old Vienna’ from before the First World War when it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

•           An unusual birthday present could be a scroll with famous and unusual events which happened on that date. A new company, All the Best Days, produces gifts that might be ideal for a historical or trivia obsessed friend or relation. Fully framed plaques cost as little as £13, with a personal message included. Call (01926) 498825.

•           In a special episode of The Simpsons, to be shown on 1st April, Homer traces his ancestors back to Jeremiah Simpson, an English village idiot, who mistakenly boards the Mayflower in search of `doughnuttes’ and is carried across the Atlantic where he falls over Plymouth Rock.