Rare Birds: An American Family by Dan Bessie

Description:

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What does a writer do when he's got a family that includes a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, the brains behind Tony the Tiger and the Marlboro Man, a trio of gay puppeteers, the world's leading birdwatcher, 1960s hippies, a Dutch stowaway who served in an all-black regiment during the Civil War, and a convicted murderer? He tells their stories and secrets, illuminating 150 years of American history along the way.

Dan Bessie begins his journey through the Bessie and Burnett family history with his great-grandfather in the cargo hold of a ship bound for New York on the storm-tossed Atlantic. What follows are stories of his grandfather's various entrepreneurial schemes, a grandmother who was voted "New York's Prettiest Shop Girl" (and who resisted the recruitment efforts of various city madams), and his uncle Harry's Turnabout Theater in Los Angeles (a renowned puppet theater drawing patrons as diverse as Shirley Temple, Ray Bradbury, and Albert Einstein).

Through inherited journals and letters, Bessie comes to a new understanding of his father, Alvah, an actor and writer who fought in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Later, as a screenwriter, Alvah was blacklisted for his Communist sympathies and jailed as one of the Hollywood Ten.

Alvah is only one of many colorful relatives who would go on to play key roles in the world. Bessie's research reveals many prominent people, from his grandmother's cousin Sidney Lenz who wrote Lenz on Bridge, a classic guide to the game, to Bessie's brother-in-law Wes Wilson who designed rock-and-roll posters for the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco during the 1960s and lived a counterculture existence vastly different from the bridge-mad Depression Era.

Not to be outdone, Cousin Michael Bessie established his niche in publishing, co-founding Atheneum Press and shaping books by Anwar Sadat, Edward Albee, and Aldous Huxley. With an equally impressive career, Uncle Leo Burnett built the country's fifth largest advertising agency. A passion of a different sort led cousin Phoebe Snetsinger to travel all over the globe; during her lifetime she sighted 8,400 different birds—nearly 85 percent of the species known to exist.

Rare Birds celebrates the colorful diversity of a remarkable and accomplished family. While their choices and professions run the gamut of the American experience in the twentieth century, the history of the nation can be traced in their lives as Bessie's passionate bids of a feather sing their unique songs across the decades and generations.

Excerpt:

Everyone has a skeleton in the closet. While rumor and innuendo add flesh to the bones, opening the closet door lets you see them dance.

Those who followed in Adolphe’s wake were a quirky lot. If they lived less colorful lives than did the Old Gentleman, they nevertheless had their moments. As a collection, they seem rarer still. Albert Sunderhauf’s son Floyd, Pop’s favorite cousin, grew up so handsome that the Marine Corps posed him for a celebrated poster featuring a young blonde recruit in summer uniform sitting atop a low stone wall in the tropics, his rifle across his thighs. Floyd won medals for marksmanship in the Corps, and in teaching Pop to shoot told him that the end of his rifle was “moving so much you could stir cake with it.”

Floyd’s father was another story. Pop met his Uncle Albert only once, in a New York apartment cluttered with trophies from the Gold Rush in California and Alaska (he had been to both): walrus tusks, sealskins, spears, bows and arrows, old guns, pistols, and swords. Pop was visiting his cousin Floyd one day when Albert appeared. “An apparition is the exact word,” said Pop. “Well over six feet tall, erect, wearing a red silk cummerbund…and thigh-high mosquito boots of fine, thin, soft leather. He said, ‘Wer ist das?’ and Floyd said, ‘Dan Bessie’s Sohn,’ and the old man said, ‘So?’ which sounds like Zo, turned on his heel and left the room.”

Here was the same gallant who abandoned his seven motherless kids in a Minnesota hotel. Pop says that his father Dan once called on Albert Sunderhauf in his office with a horsewhip and, because of his ill treatment of Dan’s sister, told him to stand and he would whip him. Albert did so; Dan whipped him “until his arm gave out (a likely story),” and the Prussian never flinched. Albert told Dan that he let him do it “because he liked him.”

Legend has it that Sunderhauf couldn’t sleep on a bed, because he had asthma and started to suffocate the moment he lay down. “This, my parents said, was God’s punishment for his evil life and mistreatment of the sister and many other unfortunate women.”

Adolphe’s second daughter, Helena, had better luck, for when Louis Fligelman, an itinerant Rumanian peddler—and the only eligible Jew in a hundred miles—meandered into town one day, Adolphe saw his opportunity and quickly arranged a match.

Helena, a “dear, good woman, generous to her family,” according to daughter Rosa, took on the job of raising the seven abandoned Sunderhaufs, in addition to her own three daughters, and “kept a wonderfully clean, efficiently managed household at a time of no technological advances.”

Maybe Lou Fligelman had something to do with this, because a flyer issued during his second term (as mayor of Wahpeton, North Dakota) demands, in 120-point type, that the city “CLEAN UP!”

The Children of Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness, yet we have no record of any single death from typhoid nor cholera nor other plagues during that time. Why? Because every day was clean-up day.

With Adolphe as a justice and with Fligelman exhorting them to exterminate flies and “remove all manure, tin cans, paper and other unsightly filth and rubbish,” the good Wahpetoniens had daily reminders of the Children of Israel. But perhaps Lou was no neatness freak. Maybe he was simply ahead of his time, for what city wouldn’t thrill to a mayor who admonishes, “If a city is dirty and suffers from filth and disease, it is not the fault of the laws but of its citizens. A community is like a mirror; it reflects the people. If the people are clean in mind, they will be clean in person and their premises will be clean. Do not wait for your neighbor to start things moving—be the first one yourself.”

If one can believe the funeral oratory, Lou Fligelman, who became Adolphe’s real estate partner, was a saint among men.

When Lou died at age fifty, Grandpa Dan imported Helena, her three daughters, and the Sunderhauf kids to New York (as he had his other widowed sisters). Every Sunday he made the rounds with Pop in tow, bringing to each sister either a box of candy or a dozen American Beauty roses. “It was on one of these Sundays,” said Pop, “which I came to hate, that, when I was sixteen and ‘dating’ Jessie Fligelman” (Helena’s youngest), his father stopped on the corner of 157th and Broadway and demanded, “What’s going on between you and Jessie?”

I said, “What do you mean?” knowing very well what he meant. I was scared because I was afraid she had told her mother Lena [Helena] who had told her brother Daniel that one night she pretended to be asleep on the living room couch and let me feel her up. He then explained what he meant, and I said nothing was going on.

Said he, “brilliant” man and graduate attorney from the University of Michigan, “If I ever hear that anything is going on between you and Jessie, I will kill you both—and then I will kill myself!”