TED STERN FLIES AWAY

     hallelujah bye and bye

Three hours ago the news came to me by email that my friend of 40+ years, Ted Stern, left the body this morning. The email came from Robert Macdonald who is writing his biography. He was hoping Ted would live long enough to see it. He's projecting to be finished with the writing around April. This morning I found an email from Macdonald telling me Ted was not feeling well. I responded by email and then his return email was to tell me Ted had gone on. All morning I'd been thinking about calling Ted. I thought I'd wait until 11:30, before lunch and plenty of time to be alert after getting up. Macdonald's email came through at a quarter to eleven. I set out to send Stern's grandson Eric an email. I'd started to put down his address, had written "eric" and the phone rang. It was Eric to tell me he'd had a call from Uncle Sandy. I sit here looking out the windows at the birds picking up sunflower seeds on the surface of the snow. When I gaze back at the monitor it turns pink and aqua from snow blindness, followed by a moment unable to see at all, then I can see ok. Caterpillar is on her window seat watching the slate-gray snowbirds hopping about and flying against the white background. From time to time she'll squeak and her whiskers will twitch in the Maine Coon way. It excites her so much to watch the birds that it triggers this involuntary twitch of the upper lip.

I find myself reminding self from time to time that this is the day Ted Stern left the body. I've only seen him a few times in the last years. I knew he was in comfortable circumstances at the very expensive assisted-living facility nursing home where they're paid to pay attention to you, not just to clean up after you. He had his own apartment with his own decorations on the walls, furniture from home, and people of his society for neighbors. His peers. He had his books he read during the daytime and football, basketball and baseball to watch in the evenings after the news and a drink. He was a master of self-discipline. It gave the appearance of a neurosis, but I felt like I knew him well enough to see that it was learned. He didn't operate by reaction. Unless somebody really pist him off. It wasn't then that the other would suffer the consequences, but later when it counted. Hitting was not a solution for him. He learned a very great deal of his public service acumen from his cousin in New York, where Ted is from, Robert Moses, the man who could be said to have designed modern Manhattan. I'd met him a few times in his 90s and found most notable Ted's visible respect for him. Ted regarded everyone with respect, so it appeared no more than with anyone else, but his respect for Moses had a golden glow about it. Reverence for the Master. Robert Moses was his teacher, sensei, his spiritual master, guru, cousin and close friend, confident. Moses was the only of Ted's relatives who went to Ted's wedding when he married outside the family religion.

My respect for Ted Stern is that kind of high. He has been my teacher in many ways since we first became acquainted. He was hired to be president at the College of Charleston when I was in my last year. Straight out of the Navy, which I'd been in too and had no love for. I had a hard time respecting a lifer from the military. It was the time of campus activism, not that anything political was going on at College of Charleston. Charleston is not a place for a demonstration. It's like, suppose you gave a demonstration and nobody came. There were half dozen of us that played the anti-war role in our minds. I went to DC in 68 for the march on Washington concerning Vietnam. I'm glad I went, only because it killed my interest in politics except to look at from afar and never commit to. I was a bit insolent after that time. A week or more later my thinking from what I'd seen educated me with new data I needed to know. Stay out of all of it. I hold Johnson down there with Reagan as the very lowest. My regard for Johnson took a nose dive and crashed. Not from what happened at the rally, but from learning afterward the lie he told the press to report in a press conference before the event. The press reported as told, like the good soldiers they're paid well to be, all of them knowing that if they reported what actually happened they'd be shut out of journalism as a career, or any other corporate job. I saw it first reported by Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice, the only journalist brave enough to tell it. Then it turned up in Norman Mailer's book Armies Of The Night. He was at the press conference too.

I pained under the disillusionment that was also a dissolution, beliefs falling away. I didn't know it then, but learned later that disillusionment equals enlightenment. So enlightenment must be the result of being disillusioned. I can't say that Ted Stern saw through the illusion, because I don't know, but he saw through an awful lot of illusion. He spoke in favor of government decisions at the time, respected Westmoreland, and I took it he bought the package. Did I ever find out different. Some years later I saw him in the hospital after an operation; I don't remember what was removed. He was sailing on some pain medication. He spoke freely and conversationally like he was largely unable to do otherwise. He wasn't much for talking unless it had to do with some sort of action, like relating to a mind full of decisions to make every day. He told me his vision of what he sees civilization coming to in the near future. It was darker than my own. Mine has a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit down to like f22. His tunnel was a long cave. I never heard any of that kind of talk again. In his fully conscious mind he saw the illusion of taking care of business, but also saw we need something to keep us going or we revert to shoot-outs, no law enforcement, heavily armed bandits plundering until the ammunition runs out. His desire to make the world a better place as a result of him having been in it transformed the College of Charleston, a little Southern college going under the third time like somebody drowning, into a nationally respected South Carolina state university inside ten years.

He was instrumental in getting the Spoleto Festival to happen in Charleston. He became a friend and confident to Jean Carlo Menotti, the self-centered composer nearly no one could get along with for any period of time. Arbitration was Stern's talent, his learned talent from Robert Moses and possibly an admiral or two along the way. Menotti needed an arbitrator at his side like he would need a translator if he didn't know English. For Menotti, Ted Stern was his harbor pilot who guided Menotti through the minefield of troubles he created for himself. I think Ted took Menotti for somebody who needed help, the kind of help Ted had to give. The way a big kid will sometimes take care of a little kid. He respected Menotti and liked him. He gave him the Ted Stern treatment that he does for everyone close to him, if they'll allow it. Respect is what the Ted Stern treatment amounts to, an encouraging pat-on-the-back respect. The middle class has lost respect for just about all but money and things associated with money. The Ted Stern kind of respect, respect for your humanity first, stands out. In the mountains he was respected by the people that knew him because he respected them first. Respect is very important in the mountains. He was respected here for his respect.

He has told me his life over the years I've known him. I've also learned in conversations with Robert Macdonald writing the biography that I know very little of his early life. I knew upper West Side New York, Jewish, somewhat privileged, the very definition of Capricorn, Johns Hopkins, Navy 27 years, Charleston. At the same time he transformed the College, he did the same with Charleston, transforming it into the ultimate tourist town that is gracious and beautiful, rewarding to visitors. It's odd how a New York Jew's parachute landed him in the quadrangle of a Southern college going under, a truly Southern place in the latter days of the Old South, and it wasn't very long before he was received like the latest thing from Goodwill Planet. The spirit of friendliness that runs through Charleston now is a part of Ted Stern's making, too. His is the optimistic can-do spirit that supports and encourages. The new Charleston was built in that spirit. There was a time in the early 1970s he told me he was president of 35 civic organizations besides the College. The business community paid close attention to him. He became a friend to the black community because he didn't bullshit them. I suppose he would best be called a visionary in that he visioned the new College of Charleston and the new Charleston into existence, step by step. He has been a loyal and true friend to me all the time I've known him. He was instrumental in getting me to the mountains, my home sweet home, before I knew Air Bellows Mountain was the home of my soul. I know he is being received happily today on the other side of the veil.

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TED STERN INTERVIEW IN CofC MAGAZINE

ted stern by jack alterman

charleston magazine

The present edition of the College of Charleston magazine appeared in the mailbox a week or so ago. I flipped through it back to front briefly and put it down. On the cover is a blonde in pink boxing gloves, an '00 graduate. Inside, a picture of a sniper caught my eye, thinking, What? Of course. Snipers go to school someplace. It brought mental images from Tom Berringer's movies, Sniper one and two, and the third one literally son-of Sniper, though not cliched. I enjoyed every one of those movies. I like Tom Berringer as an actor, and saw the films as fictional documentaries giving an unrealistic movie version of an experience that I'm sure is not exactly the same, but enough to give a movie watcher a sense of that world, living in dense jungle with the grace of a wild animal. Having these three views of what it's like in the forest hunting and being hunted at the same time, I felt a profound respect for him. Though my initial response to the picture in the magazine was, What's a Guns N Ammo article doing in there? But a second or two of images from the films running through a slideshow in my head punched my awe button. I saw him for a moment reading the wind, figuring the distance in yards, the pull of gravity and force of the wind in relation to the particular gun he's using. It's impressive. It's impressive like driving in a nascar race at 200mph bumper to bumper, side to side in the pack.

I put the magazine down and left it, thinking about picking it up later to read the sniper article. A few hours ago I went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. Returning to the chair I saw the babe in pink boxing gloves and picked up the magazine, thinking I'd read about her too. It's a cold, windy, overcast day, a good day for reading. I'd been in the first pages of a 1987 Chinese novel by Jia Pingwa, TURBULENCE. Howard Goldblatt translated it. It's so beautifully written that I foresee 500 pages of all-out good reading. He doesn't write like James Joyce, but has a quality that brings Joyce to mind. I can read a page from Turbulence and see it visually, feel like I understood an insight into a character, easy flow in the reading. I go back and read the page again; it's the same information, but it's so much more clear it's like I completely missed it the first reading, even when I got it, almost like I had never read it. I love that quality. I may reread frequently through it. Though it's translated into English, the writing is some of the very finest that characterizes contemporary Chinese writing in attention to detail, appreciation for subtleties, so visually written it's like watching a film.

I'd applied two colors to the new canvas earlier and was feeling good about getting a few things done and slowing down enough to read for awhile. Opened the magazine and there was Ted Stern's almost full-sized face looking exactly like he looks in this time of his life, which is not a great deal different from before. Under the picture it said, Wisdom Of The Century. I thought: somebody has been paying attention. I used to wonder if I'm the only one to see it. I only know a few people in his world, so I really have  nothing to go by, having no idea how other people see him, except that each one is uniquely itself. I looked at the next couple pages and saw him doing pushups on the wall, as he would do, the photo of the dedication of the Stern Center piece of what struck me very respectable architecture in a very functional occupation of its given space. I thought it a beautiful building. It carries the integrity of the campus's older architecture translated into the latter 20th Century. Inside, it feels spacious everywhere, plenty of room for a lot of people to flow in opposite directions at the same time. I was there for the christening and felt good for him; it was a major big day in his life, a monument to his devotion and his ability to get things done.

I'm remembering the day on his farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Air Bellows in Whitehead Township, where I worked as caretaker for seven years, '76-'83. He said, "I don't understand my successes and the money that has come to me. I don't know how to do anything." He was watching me sharpen the chainsaw during a break cutting firewood toward a long winter. I understood his meaning, because operating a riding lawn mower and a weed-eater were the apex of his mechanical abilities. I said to him something on the order of, Your work is of the mind. It pays better than making a chainsaw buzz. On the page opposite the dedication photo, a b&w of the Captain of the Ocean Sea, four gold bands on his sleeve, a studio portrait. Turn the page and there is the Ted Stern I know, sitting back holding a vodka and tonic with a quarter of a lime, the welcoming smile, the paper on the SPORTS section. I started reading a few sentences in the list of questions followed by an answer. Straight-ahead questions and straight-ahead answers. I read the columns of questions and answers backwards, not by intent, but the one at the top of the third column caught my eye and attention, then the one under it, then the one under it. It became amazing right away. I was hearing the Ted Stern I know answering these questions that by the end, in my case the beginning, gave a broad range of insight into the man most people know of making speeches, fund raising, talking on tv, in an office. This interview brought forward who the man is behind his decision-making that transformed the college and the city together.

Soon into it I couldn't stop reading. I was seeing the Ted Stern I've known over 40 years as I know the man. Question: Most critical item in a man's wardrobe. Answer: "I'm not a materialist. I don't think a man of honor or integrity, or a man of force needs physical attributes. He needs moral, social attributes to be successful." That is the Ted Stern I know. Another Question: Best lesson from the playground. Answer: "Be fair. Don't cheat." Reading over his answers on the pages, it sounds like him talking, like him thinking. I liked this form of interview better than the talkative kind. This interview covered a great deal of who Ted Stern is, better than an article about him. I felt like the content from this interview made a good preview to the biography Robert Macdonald is working on with what I believe is an integrity equal to Ted Stern's integrity. It tells me the biography will be the true story of a man whose ethics and attitude toward life have been good examples for me through the greater part of my adult life. The interview is online, can be found at: http://magazine.cofc.edu/2012/10/25/ted-stern-2/


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TED STERN AND THE NEW SOUTH

        american zeus by tj worthington, 1991, 30"x30"

A week ago today I had an appointment to meet with the biographer of Ted Stern, owner of the farm I once worked, the farmwork that brought me to the mountains. He had come into the College of Charleston as the new President in my last year there. The president before him who served one year was more of a problem than the solution he was hired to be. The board of directors hired Ted Stern, recently retired Navy Captain for damage control. Every semester it was a question of it being the last one. A lot of people transferred anticipating the end of the College. When the board hired Ted Stern, they were looking for action after a year of less than inaction in a time of crisis. They found action in abundance. Nobody saw coming what started on the day they hired Ted Stern, sailor of the dense marine. That was the day they cranked the smaller engine on a bulldozer that cranks the big engine. They didn't have a clue what they'd started. Even their hopes didn't go as far as what took place over the next ten years.



In short, he transformed a small municipal college about to go under into a state university with a population that was approx 450 when he arrived and 5,000 when he retired after ten years. He transformed the main building, which was the building where all the classrooms and offices were when I was there, into offices eventually when the classroom buildings and the new library were built. They went up in a hurry, too. With the contractor's bid he also was given a date it would be finished. Each day after that would have a fine of some sort. He was strict with it, too. It was enough to make them finish on time. He didn't fool with any dilly-dallying. He kept his finger on every construction activity, individually, as well as the faculty, student body and administration. He knew everything that was going on, and he, personally, was in charge of every aspect of making the college into a state university physically after getting it on paper. He was the captain of the ship.



Parallel his work with the College of Charleston, he quickly became at one time president of 35 different business organizations in the city. Charleston was still in the Old South in that time. The New South was starting up in Atlanta, but hadn't yet reached Charleston. Ted Stern worked with the businessmen of the city inspiring them to get going, teaching them how to maintain what he helped them set in motion, then he stepped out and went on to assist another. Individually, he went around Charleston teaching conscientious altruism. He taught that it works out better for self to work toward the good of the whole; then self gets his own reward and everyone around self benefits too, making self's world all the better to live in. I saw the change in Charleston, gradual in the beginnings as nobody wanted change, and once it started rolling it was overnight a new city, self-sustaining, flourishing new businesses, law offices, brokerages, etc.  Restoration of the whole city from its low place after a century long Depression following the Civil War, until it has become certainly the most beautiful and perhaps most prosperous the city has ever been.



I believe the rule is that to put in one thing, another thing has to go. It was the city's diversity of population that had to go. Every income level lived on the Charleston peninsula, and every educational level. The well off and the poor often lived next door to each other. Corner grocery stores here and there. By now, the poor and the black have been squeezed out to North Charleston, the middle class and upper middle class have taken over, run real estate prices so high no one else can live there. The city, like the college, was going under. Shopping centers out in the suburbs across the rivers, a short drive, kept business out of the old part of the city. As real estate went up and Spoleto Festival put Charleston on the international map, upper middle class moved in, a white tsunami, as happened in the mountains with the white middle class moving in. Joe Riley, Jr, the mayor from then to now, orchestrated the changes with conscience, in the same manner as Ted Stern orchestrated the changes at the College. Both the College and the City of Charleston were transformed into their new styles with integrity. Anyway, that's been my observation, the integrity. The integrity is what I've learned to respect in Ted Stern.



The biographer, Robert Macdonald, looks as Irish as his name. Black haired Irish. Before our appointment, I googled his name to see what he'd been up to. Retired curator of the Museum of the City of New York. Evidently, he raised it from a minor museum to a museum of note. Ted Stern is from New York. It tells me Macdonald knows New York, which I'd think would be essential for Stern's biographer. Stern grew up there. WW2 put him in the Navy and 27 years later he retired from the Navy and went straight into the College. I thought it funny how close to my case it was. I was out of the Navy on a Friday and started at the College on Monday. Both of us came to the College from the sea. While Macdonald was here, I found he knew all the fact information about his life. He has a good bead on what Ted Stern is. He was looking for who Ted Stern is, talking with people in Sparta who knew him in the part of his life here. I was struck by the blank I drew when it came to looking for some experiences that would have bearing on defining his character. Though I could think of hundreds hypnotized, but with my atrophied left brain, I have to seek, and when I seek, it all goes away. I have to not think about it and let it come in on its own. I call it the white hair disease.



All week I've looked for samples of who Ted Stern is, the man himself. That is, the Ted Stern I've known for the last 40 years, and I have a hard time finding samples of who he is. That's because I'm thinking about it. I'll close my eyes and wait. One thing came up. He was a bit awkward at social behavior, always, though he handled it. He handled it going way overboard, so much so it reeked of bogus, "HI, I'm SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!!! so loud and so over zealous it's like you're inside the house next door and the windows are closed. It's kind of overwhelming and drips of the appearance of phony, but it's real. It's who he is. He is glad. And next time he sees you he'll remember. On the telephone it's like phone service in some place like Albania, talking loud like it's a bad connection and he can barely hear. He sounds distant and far away, yelling to span the distance. But he's not. He was a man with a mission, no time or room for the extraneous. In one of our conversations on the highway, we were talking about our individual approaches to living on earth. I said I'm like in a canoe, I let things happen. He said he's like in a bulldozer, he makes things happen. That's why he'll have an obituary in the NYTimes and I won't.



Kindness is a word that comes to mind. I believe his kindness was so innate as to be in the nature of his soul. It's automatic and there's never a lapse because it's not directed by mental command. It may have been early in his life, but by late in the life kindness was the same as breathing. His years as an officer in the Navy gave him the charisma of someone to salute. He walks into a room and the people in the room feel in the presence of a leader. A leader he indeed was. I don't mean past tense like he's not living now, but his time of active involvement in the big decisions in Charleston are in the past. He has told me several times he has outlived himself and become a has-been, a once-was. He accepted it, but I can't say he has ever been comfortable with once-was for his self-identity. He's noted for his past achievements, not what he's involved in now. It's difficult for him not to be involved. I remember in the years of working Stern's mountain farm, old man Tom Pruitt in his 80s, when I'd be splitting wood, he couldn't watch me work without helping. He wasn't able to help, so he couldn't watch, had to go to the house where he stared at the wall and thought about whatever crossed the screen of his mind. Ted Stern, now 97, watches tv sports and thinks about whatever is crossing the screen of his mind.



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