Alan Ternes
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
During one of my most recent trips to visit my mom (and the NIH) in Washington DC, we were treated to a visit from my mom’s brother, Alan Ternes. The Editor Emeritus at Natural History Magazine, and former Director of the Natural History Museum on the upper west side of Manhattan, Alan was an author and editor of books, and the guide and inspiration to the authors of many others, most notably the paleontologist and nature writer Stephen Jay Gould, one of Alan’s closest friends. In the early 1960s he was also friends with a penurious actor and director, Davey Marlin-Jones (my father), whom he introduced to his sister (my mother).
I am grateful for that introduction, and that gratitude extends throughout my relationship with Alan and his family. Alan and his wife Barbara invited me to live with them for a few weeks in their apartment overlooking Central Park (333 Central Park West). While still a high school student, I worked an internship with Barbara at the Children’s Aid Society in Greenwich Village, and explored Manhattan during my extensive lunch breaks. Over family meals in their large but Spartan apartment, Alan and Barbara’s essentialist practices taught me lessons that wouldn’t sink in for decades later: those people are richest who require the fewest things, who have shed the needless ballast of our lives.
Running New York’s most famous museum (thanks to Ben Stiller), and working with the authors whose books we teach at UC Davis, Alan did so much with his life, including after he left New York, when he became a Justice of the Peace and environmental education enthusiast in Bellows Falls, VT, and a sailor of the Atlantic, voyaging solo from a port in New England to a port in Morocco. As impressed as we all were with Alan Ternes, I most appreciated his generosity with me during our many casual conversations, and for the way that he cared for his nuclear and extended family.
About 35 years ago, I was hiking back down Shade Mountain to my grandmother’s cabin in Beavertown, Pennsylvania. During the last leg of the hike, and starting what seemed like a mile or so as we wended our way back to our Snyder County home, I had heard the slow and methodical sound of someone chopping wood. It grew louder as we approached the cabin, and then I found the source of all this industry. Wielding the longest-handled axe I had ever seen, Uncle Alan had been splitting logs for more than an hour. Imposingly tall, bearded, and shirtless, Alan stacked log after log upon the chopping stump, and then fragmented them powerfully and precisely, like a 19th century woodsman.
Bearded, portly, manly, strong, generous, and intellectually and geographically curious, Alan Ternes has always made me think of another hero of mine, Walt Whitman, whom he resembled. Recently I have been thinking again of Alan chopping all that wood, and the way that he provided for the family as men like him have done for thousands of years. The image reminded me of a section of one of Whitman’s rare California poems: “Song of the Redwood-Tree.”
Part 2 of this section of Leaves of Grass begins this way:
Along the northern coast,
Just back from the rock-bound shore, and the caves,
In the saline air from the sea, in the Mendocino country,
With the surge for bass and accompaniment low and hoarse,
With crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms,
Riven deep b the sharp tongues of the axes—there in the Redwood forest dense,
I heard the mighty tree its death-chanting.
I use these words from our great American poet to commend the life and mourn the death this past weekend of another great American. Rest in peace, Alan Ternes.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on natural history, bonded words, rebel mutt prints (seems like an anagram), social media, specious celebrities, presidents in San Francisco (where I spent all day yesterday), people who were born and who died in the same, anticipated dates, multi-Grammy winners, UK acronyms, Santa’s little helpers, Africa, words that start with the letter O, obsessive tweeters, celestial hierarchies, IKEA, enlightened fools, full sweep of the South, crime novelists, islands with rich histories, big companies, biotic diversity, villains that can’t spell their own names, karate masters, missing persons, Basil, world capitals, banana crabs, the heart, words that follow happy, New Jersey, exchanges, and Shakespeare.
Tonight will be busy at the Irish Pub. Vacation is approaching for may, and here for some. I invite you to come early to claim a table.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. In the 1980s, which of the big three American car companies used the slogan “Everything we do is driven by you”?
- Internet Culture. According to Mashable, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s Connectivity Lab in March, unveiling plans to use BLANKS and lasers to “beam” Internet to the world in an effort to get the last 15% of the population, who aren’t connected, online. Fill in the blank with a monosyllabic word.
- Newspaper Headlines. On Saturday, a judge threw out all charges against a deposed president of what country?
- Disney Productions. What 2014 American musical comedy caper film produced by Walt Disney Pictures features Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey and others?
- Pop Culture – Music. Musicologist Mickey Hart played what instrument for the Grateful Dead?