Beneath the Temple of Romulus

"While there is little evidence of the historical existence of twins called Romulus and Remus who founded Rome, the discovery of the palace offers tantalizing indications the legend had roots in fact."

Americana

salimondo has made the valuable suggestion that we begin our exploration of what this America is all about by looking at the art in our home towns.

New York is my home town now; I have lived over half my life here. But that's not quite what is required.

In the four year home of my youth, there is a museum in the making in the abandoned factory at the bottom of the gorge where I walked at night, but the art it celebrates is not visual. Nevertheless it says something about this odd country of ours.

So does the Hiram Blauvelt Museum in the town where I grew up, with its collection of paintings of taxidermist turned wildlife artist Charles Livingston Bull, who is perhaps best known for his illustrations of townsman J. Irving Crump's cave boy series, originally published, if I am not sadly mistaken, in Boy's Life.

Ah, the Boy Scouts. The original Indian wannabees, as AIM lately called the hapless Churchill. Who by the 1920s had become Neanderthal wannabees. Nothing like the paramilitary types the Brits had in mind, though the scoutmaster emeritus, father to the middle aged incumbent, liked to dress up in his dooughby outfit. Then again we liked to dress up, the oldest volunteer fireman with the long white beard driving the old horsepowered engine on the Fourth of July, not to mention the Knights of Columbus with their capes and swords making the marching Masons look dull indeed, or the Lions with the man in the lion suit.

I never made it out of the Cub Scouts, myself. I recall a serious disagreement with my den mother, who insisted we put penguins in an Eskimo scene we were constructing. I wasn't being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic. I sullenly resented being required to play with dolls: I saw more of nature in my back yard and the woods across the street. The pastor of my mother's church, which sponsored the troop, had a wonderful way with words, ghost stories in particular (being Catholic, I never heard him preach), and is still warmly remembered by the Welsh community. (I didn't even know there was a Welsh community until many years later.) Though I never made it into big kids' scouting, I was there in the high school marching band when a classmate (who much later sold his law practice to buy a semi) presented Commander Wally Schirrah with the world's first Astronaut merit badge.

My town was, by the way, the summer home of Hugh Grant. Not that one. The mayor of New York, back in the days of steamboats up the Hackensack. (An earlier mayor, shipbuilder Jacob Westervelt, came from somewhere in Bergen County, and there were Westervelts in Oradell when I was growing up, and there probably still are.)

The last townsfolk I encountered were a pair of Irish sisters, one a lawyer with a most remarkable voice, doing an Oriental dance act at the Lafayette Grill and Bar, where a certain clergyman on my list likes the hamburgers, without, I hasten to add, having seen the place after dark.