I think, not infrequently, about the subject of rooms--the effect certain rooms can have on one's life. (I have thought in particular about rooms from childhood.)
In
my book about early television, for example, I wrote about our family's
den, in suburban Boston. It was a fairly small room, and I spent a lot
of time there, while growing up.
As I noted in the book, there were a number of family photographs on one of the room's walls--which included photos of my mother, from her years in early TV--pictures of her with bandleader Kay Kyser, and other performers from his TV show; photos of her and her fellow singers on Your Hit Parade; and pictures from other shows on which she sang during the era.
My mother had a desk, in the room, and at some point in childhood I discovered, in one of the desk's drawers, more memorabilia from her years in early TV--newspaper and magazine articles, scripts, additional photographs, and the like. There were further items--such as magazines, and records (78s that she recorded with Kay Kyser's orchestra), stored in the room's closet.
Looking at the photos on the wall, and then finding the many other out-of-view artifacts, during childhood, set off something in my young and evidently susceptible mind, that stayed with me from then on.
Another photograph on the wall drew my attention. It was a picture of my uncle, Philip Benjamin. He was my mother's older brother, her only sibling (and my sole Uncle; my father was an only child).
In the 1950s and 1960s, Philip was a reporter for The New York Times, and the photograph on the wall of the den showed him interviewing Fidel Castro in April of 1959, during a visit Castro made to New York City.
In January of 1959, Castro's revolution in Cuba had overthrown the rule of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista had seized power, via a military coup. in 1952.
On April 15th of that year, Castro made an eleven-day trip to America. The trip began in Washington DC, during which Castro visited The Lincoln Memorial, and George Washington's Mt. Vernon home, in nearby Virginia.
He also met with Vice President Nixon, and appeared on Meet the Press.
He spoke English, during the television appearance. His English, at
the time, was reasonably good, yet watching the video of his appearance, today, one at times strains to understand some of his words. He was
accompanied, on-camera, by an interpreter, to whom he turned
periodically.
From April 20 to April 25, Castro visited New
York City. While there he went to Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo, and
spoke before the Council on Foreign Relations. He also gave a speech to some 16,000 people in Central Park.
During his American visit, he also traveled to Boston, Houston, and Princeton, New Jersey (where he spoke at Princeton University).
Philip interviewed Castro, at the hotel where he and his entourage stayed, during the New York visit.
Here is the image I saw, growing up:
I
was, as a child, very much taken by the photograph, looked at it often.
There is, I think, a sense of drama to the picture. Looking at it
today, I am interested in the construction of the photo, the different
elements contained within. There is a crowded, bustling feeling to
it--a sense of motion (yet at the same time the absence of motion).
Castro is facing my Uncle, looking somewhat impassive; my Uncle, leaning
slightly forward--his hand on Castro's arm. The two men behind my
Uncle--also leaning forward, almost as though joining a huddle (perhaps
the man at the far left is a translator). There is also a man behind and to the right of Castro, who, I only noticed recently, is holding a cigar. There is also the woman seated behind Castro, looking elsewhere, and
the backdrop of the painting on the wall of the room.
I have seen other, similar images of the interview. One of them, below, appeared in an April of 2019 Times story, shortly before the fiftieth anniversary of the start of Castro's New York visit. In the picture below--my Uncle and the photographer, I will note, were not identified, in the 2019 caption--the man who is holding the cigar, in the above picture, is now standing near the center of the picture, to the side of my Uncle. Perhaps he, too, was a translator.
In early January, of 1959, shortly after Castro took power, Ed Sullivan went to Cuba to film an interview with him; the interview aired on Sullivan's Sunday night program a few days later. During the interview, Castro denied that he and his revolution had any connections to Communism. He repeated this during his April, 1959 appearance on Meet the Press. In an April 26, 1959 Times story about his departure from New York, my Uncle wrote that Castro again denied, to assembled reporters, any linkage between his revolution, and Communism.
Castro said, in the article: "Why are you worried about Communists? There are no Communists in my Government. You should worry about our success as a nation. We are a democracy." It wasn't until December of 1961, in a Havana television and radio speech--several months after the Bay of Pigs invasion--that Castro declared, publicly, his Marxism-Leninism.
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Though my Uncle Philip died when I was ten years old, I remember looking up to him, as a child, and remember how warm and quietly funny he was.
In 1956, the year I was born, he wrote a piece for the Times Sunday magazine, about New York City's mounted police. The accompanying biographical note (which I am sure Phil wrote) said this:
Philip Benjamin, of The Times staff, interviewed a number of New York mounted police and their horses for this article.
In 1964, while working for the Times, a comic novel he wrote, Quick, Before it Melts, inspired by reporting trips he had made to the Antarctic for the Times, was published by Random House, and became a best seller.
(The novel was later made into a film, starring Robert Morse and George Maharis. The film was not a success--despite being directed by the very talented Delbert Mann, who had been well-known as a director in early television; Mann was also one of the film's producers. In the 1950s he had, notably, directed both the live television version and the subsequent film version of Marty.)
Philip's atypical biography, on the back flap of the novel's dust jacket, began this way: "Philip Benjamin was born in Stamford, Conn., but spent the next ten bleak years of his life in Indianapolis..."
The biography also noted that as a reporter for the Times
"he has made two trips to the Antarctic, covered school integration in
Little Rock, interviewed Fidel Castro, and taken innumerable walks with
former President Truman. On a trip to Hong Kong he once was fitted for
and received nine suits in seventy-two hours, but subsequently the
threads came out."
In Philip's obituary, written by a friend at the Times, the beginning of one of his news stories was cited. The story was from 1955, and concerned a flood in Danbury, CT.
In normal times in Danbury, they say you can toss a match into the little Still River in the morning and find it floating in the same place in the evening.
But over the weekend the river for the second time in two months washed out this maxim, along with the industrial and business center of the town.
In 1996, Richard F. Shepard, a longtime Times reporter, wrote a book about the newspaper's private archives, The Paper's Papers (Times Books), In the book, Mr. Shepard wrote that Phil "was counted among the best writers on staff."
In City Room, a memoir about his many years at the Times
(G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003), Arthur Gelb, a prominent editor at the
paper--who in the 1980s became its Managing Editor--wrote this: "Phil
Benjamin was a mild-mannered man with a humorous outlook and had the
potential for a literary career that was tragically cut short."
Philip left the Times in 1965, after the success of Quick, Before it Melts, and was at work on a second novel.
In 1966, he was diagnosed with
melanoma, and underwent surgery for it. A few weeks later, he went for
additional surgery, to determine if the cancer had spread to his lymph
nodes. (The cancer, it would turn out, was not found in the lymph nodes.)
At the start of the second surgery, however, there was a rare and catastrophic complication. He went into a coma on the operating table, after the anesthesia was administered. He never emerged from the coma, and died two weeks later. He was 43.
This past Saturday was
the sixtieth anniversary of his April 18, 1966 death. He left behind his
wife. my Aunt Lois, who at the time was a senior editor and columnist
at The Ladies Home Journal, and their two young sons, my cousins. The entire family, it will not be a surprise, was heartbroken, shattered. My mother was thirty-eight years old at the time. She adored her brother; I think it is fair to say that she carried the loss with her, for the rest of her life.
Let me mention, briefly, something that occurred years after Philip's death. In 1999, when she was 70, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, which had already, at the time of the diagnosis, metastasized. She would die in May of 2001, twenty-five years ago next month. I was living in Virginia at the time of her diagnosis, and my brother, Chicago-based, and I both began making regular trips to Boston.
After she became ill, my mother and I spoke often on the phone. We talked, on a number of occasions, about Phil, who had died more than thirty years before, and about her parents, my grandparents (Victor, who died in 1970, and Dorothy, in 1983). We reminisced about them, told stories about them, spoke about how much we each loved them. She told me at one point that the conversations about her parents, and her brother, meant a great deal to her, Hearing this meant a great deal to me, in a way that I cannot adequately describe.
(Above photographs, 1959, © The New York Times)
