BAZAARONLINE

June 2014 n No. 39

WHO WE ARE TO SUBMIT MANUSCRIPTS CONTACT ARCHIVES

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This is the final issue of Author’s Bazaar, an online hob-by journal that has appeared monthly for more than three years.

It has enjoyed a great run and has flourished because of a faithful core of gifted writers. I also trust that all of us have looked forward to the layout surprises created by Mike O’Connor, our designer.

Unlike letterpress printed journals, the on-line format made possible the publication of color photographs and manuscripts of several thousand words for little cost. It also afforded amateur journalists who were primarily in-terested in writing an opportunity to have their work pub-lished.

This has been a hobby enterprise, one that has no reason to exist other than the sheer joy and challenge of the mo-

--30--EDITOR’S NOTESBy Dean Rea

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ment. That moment has passed, and it’s time to say good-bye.

Meanwhile, we offer one last look at Author’s Bazaar. Not many of our readers know that Dave Griffin was a

rock musician who pounded on piano keys before he be-gan pounding on typewriter keys. You won’t want to miss reading this humorous adventure story, “My Life as a Mu-sician.”

Delores Miller responded to a photo that appeared in the May issue of Author’s Bazaar by submitting an account of how she and her husband Russell have dealt with rocks during their Wisconsin farming career.

Louise Fusfeld turns from dogs to spiders as the subject of another entertaining account, and Les Gapay shares his experience with researching and writing geneology.

The visual spotlight falls on photographs submitted by Greg McKelvey and Bill Haynes.

I picked a chapter from my recently published memoir, “Confessions of a Professor,” which now appears on Ama-zon and Kindle.

And Author’s Bazaar would not be complete without a poem written by Sheryl Nelms.

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By Sheryl L. Nelmsslnelms@aol.com

floating closeto the ground

zig zagging across the park

up overthe water sprinklers

they laugh to each otheras they fly

like a bunchof teenagerstesting

the limits

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One hundred and thirty-five years ago our ancestors came from overseas to seek their fortune. Settled in Cen-tral Wisconsin, which was a wild land of forests, trees and rocks. 

In their German/Prussian/Poland  homeland, they were peasants working for rich absentee landlords. Houses and barns were built together. The cowherds provided heat for the house. Emigrant tickets were provided by relatives already in America.  Here they decided to become dairy farmers.

By Russell and Delores Millermillerrussell@att.net

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Four feet of frost every winter forced boulders to the ground surface, which had to be picked before the land could be cultivated. A contraption known as a stone boat,

4 feet wide, twelve feet long, looped upwards in front and pulled by a good team of horses. These peasant chil-dren walked over the

120 acres hoisting pebbles, rocks, stones, cobblestones and boulders.    Sometimes the horses spooked and ran away, scattering stones over freshly picked soil.

In the early years of the 20th Century, farmers decided to build barns. The good Lord had provided these rocks:  granite, basalt, quartzite, sandstone. Masons worked for a dollar a day building a stone wall, ten feet high, two feet deep, three feet in the ground. Rocks weighed about thirty pounds, and for a 36x80-foot barn, 4,000 rocks were need-ed for the 272 feet total of rocks. Filled with a sand con-crete mortar, huge boulders made the cornerstones, chis-eled the  year. This took about six weeks, crews slept in tents, housewives cooked and baked each day to feed the crew. No one builds barns like this anymore. Only in our memories the lore and legends do they remain.

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Because the Good Lord again provided forests,  trees to be hacked down, cut into lumber for the upper part of the barn. Tamarack, elm, oak, pine, hemlock. Lumber had to be air dried for a year before building or the green wood warped, twisted and bent. Another crew of carpenters, spe-cialty barn builders, came to frame the barn. Floor joists, boards, beams, rigid rafters, oak wood pegged.  All hand tools, no electricity, no hydraulic lifts. Axes, froes,  saws, adzs, bull work by strong men. Oak pegs, square nails.  Ga-ble-type roof covered with red cedar shingles, which again the Good Lord provided in the swamps.

More rocks and boulders were gathered by the children with a team of horses and stone boat to build a  ramp lead-ing to the upper part of the barn so wagon loads of feed could be hauled right into the barn. Bundles of oats, wheat and timothy hay. Chutes and ladders reached to the stone basement so one did not have to fight the elements during the winter. 

Probably a dance was held to celebrate the new barn and to repay all the workers with kegs of beer, hard liquor, good food.

We Millers, here on our Hortonville farm, had such a barn.  We, too, picked rocks every spring on our 100-acre farm. No stone boats or teams of horses anymore. We used

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the Case loader tractor and dumped the rocks on the fence lines.  All five children remember picking rocks, dirty, hot, dusty.

Although we do not know who built our barn — we have lived here only 35 years — it stood strong for almost 75 years until the Good Lord in his wisdom sent a torna-do and blew away the upper part of the barn, leaving the ground floor and stone walls. Farm insurance paid enough to rebuild a garage. Contractor came with his big equip-ment and buried the barn walls, the two cement silos and all the rocks. Archaeologists in a hundred years, when dig-ging, will wonder why the huge pile of rocks and boulders are buried ten feet deep.  Now only a lawn with green grass. 

Barns in Wisconsin are disappearing at an alarming rate. Upkeep  is expensive, a new roof is expensive. Frost heaves the stonewalls, causing them to crumble.

No one picks stones nor builds dairy barns any more.

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Fading Into HistoryShadows from overgrown vegetation fall lightly on the

once red siding of this abandoned house in Eastern Or-egon. The photograph is one of several that will appear in a show, “Fading Into History: Oregon Rural Structures.” The photograph was taken by William “Bill” Haynes, who lives in Eugene, Oregon. wahaynes3511@comcast.net

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Petey Sardini’s father played the saxophone when he had a glass of wine or two on a Saturday night in the late 1950s. He would stand in the kitchen and lean back against the linoleum-covered counter top while his fingers plod-ded over the round keys and his breath vibrated the reed in the mouthpiece when he held his tongue just right.

Out from the horn came slightly sour notes as his wife stood beside him and sang, “See the Pyramids Along the Nile.” Mr. Sardini’s brother-in-law, Uncle Angie, who lived upstairs in the two-family house, sat against the refrigera-

My Short Lifeas a

By David Griffindave@windsweptpress.com

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tor and played chords that almost matched the music as he strummed an old guitar painted the color of baby poop. Uncle Angie’s wife, Petey’s Aunt Dominica, never came downstairs. She hardly left her bedroom anymore.

I lived next door to the Sardinis in a carbon copy house exactly 22 feet and 5 inches away, each with two flats, one over the other. When Petey and I were younger, the two of us counted the number of balusters across the front porch on each house. They totaled the same. We also counted windowpanes and even the nails in the floor of one room. No matter what we compared, the two houses were exactly alike, except for the color of the exterior paint.

Petey was always obsessed with details and grew up to become an accountant. I began to slack off on the impor-tance of details and eventually became a writer. We each tried our best to master a musical instrument.

Neither of us were very good musicians at the time, but we worked at it in college, trying to earn beer money and hoping to have girls notice us. My musicianship never at-tracted many girls. I played the piano, and Petey played an old set of drums that Aunt Dominica brought home one night without any explanation. For reasons I never under-stood, girls liked drummers better.

The Sardini Kitchen Trio was the only live band I ever

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heard before the afternoon I decided to walk into a bar at Sylvan Beach, NY. I had a lot of nerve at age 15, my brash-ness rooted midway between the privileges of adulthood and the exemptions of childhood.

Inside the dark and cool atmosphere of DiCastro’s Night Club, I found a stool at the end of the bar near the stage. Few patrons sat there during the day, evidently preferring Daiquiri-laden conversation at a greater distance from the loud music of any band that was qualified to play only a day gig. When the bartender came up to me with a dubi-ous look on his face, I ordered a rye and ginger, a drink I’d heard my mother ask for at weddings.

I didn’t have to wait long for the band to come on stage. A tall thirtyish red-headed man wearing a bright white shirt open at the neck and a rumpled blue plaid tux jumped up on the tiny stage and flipped a few switches on the equip-ment surrounding him. The drummer and bass man soon joined him.

Red Rovera swung the guitar strap over his shoulders, gave a little shrug and began to loudly play a riff I recog-nized as the opening notes of Henry Mancini’s “Theme From Peter Gunn.” The drummer and bass man came alive and quickly caught up to what was musically the dumbest piece Mancini ever wrote, but no doubt his most profitable.

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The bass took over the riff when Red began to play what passed for a melody.

It might have been the funniest rendition of the song I’d ever heard, but the band didn’t mean it as humor and I didn’t laugh. Their sheer volume assaulted me. I could feel the bass notes pound against my chest. What absolutely amazed and excited me were three ordinary individuals getting up and playing passable music and becoming the center of attention for everyone in the room, even the Dai-quiri drinkers.

I had heard only John Philip Sousa and Elvis Presley amplified on the tiny speaker of the record player my par-ents had received as a wedding present. But music from Red Rovera and The Rockin’ Pneumonias at DiCastro’s was like a call from another world. The sound had to be magic, I later realized, because I never smelled the stale beer and cigarette butts until the music stopped.

And frankly, the music never did stop for me. I fell to-tally head over heels in love with the fantastic idea of be-coming a rock and roll musician. There is not an iota of difference between believing you can do it and falling com-pletely in love with yourself.

The few songs I had learned by ear on my mother’s pi-ano in our living room would be replaced after some seri-

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ous self teaching with a few riffs, runs and rumbles. The effort was enough to get me into a rock and roll band. I was ready to mount the stage and impress audiences all over the county.

Soon my opportunity arrived. I must admit, however, that I got the job only because a friend needed somebody — anybody — to play keyboard for the group he started when we were 16.

I learned my chords in various keys from a boy who sounded out each note for me on his guitar until I could see their structure and begin to pick them out myself. (Oh, yeah! Two half tones down from the top

makes a seventh!) Then I was lucky enough to meet another kid who was

in a real band and actually knew how to play piano. He taught me a few bass lines. He also told me that absolutely none of his three years of piano lessons helped him to play piano in a rock and roll band. Although that was probably

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untrue, I believed him. Because I’d never taken a single les-son, this knowledge helped bolster my confidence.

An older teen I met at a friend’s house taught me how to invert my chords. Little Richard’s 45 rpm records taught me to bang on the keys way up at the high end of the key-board. The music of the 1950s wasn’t very complicated. Chord progressions for the Top 40 songs were almost al-ways I, IV, V for the fast songs and I, VI, IV, V for the slow tunes. (In the key of C that would be C, F, G and C, Am, F, G7 respectively.)

That’s all I learned about music before I suited up in my bright red tux and gold cummerbund, ready to wow music lovers everywhere. If I’d been a solo act without other band members playing louder than me, I would have been in a lot of trouble. I didn’t continue to deepen my knowledge of the piano at that time because I was in high school and I was busy. Not with studies, but with day-dreaming. I spent a lot of time day-dreaming.

Our first gig provided my initial jolt of that addictive substance known as applause. It occurred at a dance our new band played in South Utica, hosted by a local DJ. I can’t remember the number I sang that first time in public, but the girls swooned and screamed and I was absolute-ly hooked. For all I knew, the girls were screaming at rats

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running across the floor. I didn’t realize at the time that teenage girls would swoon

over President Eisenhower singing” God Bless America,” if he hung a guitar over his shoulder. And maybe wiggled his hips. This first job would spoil us, it turned out. We didn’t know it that night, but things would get worse before they got better.

We played at a gas station grand opening, at a hunting lodge that almost burned down during our second set, in dingy bars where as 16-year-olds we were propositioned by prostitutes, at high school and college proms where the kids often got drunk and threw up on us or wanted to beat us up, like the night in Canajoharie when we needed a po-lice escort out of town.

We played in so many school gyms we should have made sneakers part of our outfits. In fact the extra traction of the rubber soles would have been helpful at all the Beer Bashes we played when the floor would become slippery with spilled beer after a couple of hours. And I still feel the sand in my shoes from all the summer gigs we played on weekends at Sylvan Beach.

I knew enough musical techniques back then to keep from getting fired. I liked the adulation that sometimes came from audiences, and our teenage rock and roll band

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certainly brought me more money than I might earn deliv-ering newspapers. Plus, I never had a paper route customer scream with delight when I came to their door with the newspaper.

And it happened that I could sing, after a fashion. Al-though Brook Benton and even Gene Vincent were surely not worried about competition from me, my golden voice may be why the band didn’t fire me when I flubbed my keyboard solos.

My desire to be noticed by girls as I played in the band didn’t work out quite the way I had planned. The ladies who came up to speak to me between sets were older or drunk, and they always advised me to find a better crowd to hang out with, evidently including themselves in the compari-son. Some were more free with their charms. But the only girl who ever swooned over me also threw up on me.

Still, playing to rowdy young women was a lot of fun. I’m reminded of that when I occasionally sit in church and listen while the music ministry folks sing their hearts out or play the guitar or kazoos at a Folk Mass. I assume they are enjoying themselves, but with no young women screaming when you huff out your low notes, I can’t imagine singing in the choir is as much fun as belting out a song to dozens of beer drinking sorority girls.  

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It is true that I met my wife as a result of my short career of fame in two small towns. She noticed me in the band one night and recognized me from our college. When I approached her some months later, it served as sort of an introduction and we hit it off, something that didn’t always happen to me with many young women who understand-ably had second thoughts about bringing a musician home to meet Mom and Dad. What I needed and found was a very brave girl.

I had toyed with the notion of working seriously on my playing and becoming a career musician, but no one in their right mind would choose a life of wandering around looking for work and playing music in side street pubs for people who expressed their appreciation by sitting there and getting drunk.

I didn’t want to find myself on a Greyhound bus every week touring the worst parts of one town after another as I played out a career in all the cheap dives on the East Coast. Some of my band friends got regular jobs and played evenings and week-ends for extra money.

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That must have cut into their family life.An honest assessment of me as a musician would say I

wasn’t very serious, and I certainly wasn’t very good. My time of being almost famous didn’t last very long, only from my junior year of high school until my second year of college. At age 19, I was done.

One hot and sticky night in July of ’62, after playing in some crummy club at Sylvan Beach, I was odd man out when the management gave us an overnight room that slept only four. I woke up on the sandy beach at about 7 the next morning to a bright sunny day that was giving me a terrific headache. As I rolled over and tried to get comfort-able, sand trickling down the back of my pants that were wet from the dew, I sensed my life as a musician was over.

I sat up on the beach and looked around in the bright sunlight. A young mother some distance away looked at me and instantly called out to her young daughter to come to her. I should have paid for a room somewhere instead of lying out on the sand.

I looked down the beach to DiCastro’s where I had fall-en in love with the whole idea of becoming a rock musi-cian. I wished I had been invited to play there, but it was an upscale bar and never hired us, preferring older bands from the Syracuse area.

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My old friend and neighbor Petey got a great job with a band from Buffalo. Eventually he quit his accounting work and took off for Nashville with them. Today, he is a studio musician and has credits with well known bands. His Aunt Dominica left her bedroom and Uncle Angie and joined Petey down south. I never knew what she was to Petey: aunt or lover. He calls me now and then and asks me if I remember how many window panes were built into each of our houses.

For me, my musical ambition was limited, and I realized there were other adventures in life to pursue and places to go. I wanted a life with interesting work in computers, a terrific girl, kids, a house in the country and money to spend. I’m pretty happy with the way my life turned out, but it’s fun to remember those golden days — some of them — when I was a rock musician.

copyright 2012, David Griffin

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The incident itself was quite innocent. In fact, my inten-tion was to save a life, not to cause misery. As I was the only human witness to this precedent-setting event, I find it my duty to accurately recount what occurred.

As many of you are aware, I am a strong advocate of insect amnesty, whatever the species, and because of this have become skilled at aiding these small refugees to escape from my home into the natural world. In the first chapter of, “Insects I Have Known,” I describe the freeing of an in-ordinately large arachnid from the nutrition-less confines

My Daddy Longlegs

By Louise Fusfeldlfusfeld@pacbell.net

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of my bedroom. In my view, this character, known as “The Huge Spider,” should have been infinitely grateful to me. But, alas, how soon we forget our benefactors once we are back on our feet.

My acquaintance with Daddy L--- began one evening as I was about to prepare dinner. I noticed a large, leggy num-ber flying erratically around the beams of my dining room ceiling. I knew he was of the innocuous Daddy Longlegs race. So, one option could have been to take a laissez faire approach and allow him to beat him-self silly against the walls and then slow-ly starve to death. Looking back, this let George-do-it tact would not have landed me in the situation I am currently in. But there were no Georges around, and as I thought I knew a way to evict Daddy L--- quickly and harmlessly, I had to act. Besides, in his flailings he might have ended up falling into my soup.

I first approached him with a fly swatter, intending to gently guide him toward the sliding glass door and out into the sanctuary of my patio. He misconstrued this act as my

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trying to swat him in cold blood, as if he were a common horsefly. In his outrage, he flapped his lacey wings with demonic fervor and undulated his anorexic legs along the wall. Although I tried to explain my intentions in a sooth-ing voice, he would not listen to reason. I had to up the use of force to the next level.

I carefully selected a Tupperware container and lid that he would easily fit into without causing him undo stress. With this improvised compassion trap I crept up to where Daddy L--- was catching his breath on a knot of wood. I sprang the plastic box over him and smacked it tightly against the beam. He began to scream for help and beat against his prison walls, but I quickly slid the lid under him and clamped it against the box. As I carried him to the door, I noticed that one of his feet seemed to be caught between the lid and the container. But, as I let him go into the night, a free man once again, I figured an injured toe would be the least of his worries.

The very next evening I was finishing the dinner dishes when I heard a light scraping sound coming from the en-tryway. I approached cautiously and saw a folded piece of soiled paper being shoved under the front door. I looked through the peephole but saw no one outside. As the last edge of the paper was popped through, I thought I saw a

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small, brownish claw poke from under the door and then quickly draw back. I opened the door as fast as I could and peered into the night. Nobody was there. I closed the door, locked it securely and picked up the paper. On one side there was a web-generated map from someone’s home to a nearby Burger King, and on the other a message in roughly scrawled print. That message read as follows:

Deer Madamn,

I am riting on behaf of my clyent, Mr. Daddy L---. He clames that he was brootaly assawlted by yorself yester-dae eevning and is bringing sute for medikl expensis, loss of werk and payn and sufering in the amownt of $1.5 mil-lion, Yu Es dollers. A cort dait will be set withyn 5 werking dayz at witch tyme you will bee notifyd.

Sinceerly,

The Huge Spyder, Esq.

As you can well imagine, my life has been quite stressful and busy since I received this notice. I have had to find an attorney that specializes in lawsuits from pests and care-

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fully document what happened. To strengthen my plea of compassionate eviction, I have also had to search my house for spiders, silverfish and moths who may have observed what occurred and would be willing to take the stand as favorable witnesses.

My lawyer is a small but long-legged man who has his office in the refurbished attic of an old house. He seems to know his business and says if worse comes to worst, I can always sue Daddy L--- for attempted burglary and the mental anguish of having to capture him. Of course, Dad-dy L--- could claim that my house constituted an attrac-tive nuisance, there having been a very sexy female of the Daddy Longlegs species seductively clinging to the inside of the screen door in which I had negligently left a hole.

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Florida sunrise

Blue Cyprus Lake, Florida, a bit west of Vero Beach, is renowned for osprey (some 270 breeding pairs). This sun-rise photo was one of several taken by Greg McKelvey, who resides in Pine, Arizona. gempressphotos@gmail.com

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I blame my mother for inspiring me to become a teach-er.

Audrey Beryl Franks was the only child of a wheat farm-ing couple near Glasco, Kansas, in what eventually would become a part of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depres-sion.

My mother would have preferred a name other than Au-drey Beryl, especially Beryl, and was miffed that a Kansas farm girl’s career options were limited to being a housewife or a teacher.

Audrey Beryl, who was born April 16, 1911, soon learned the rigors of farm life on160 acres a mile from Fisher Creek School where she studied as a girl and later taught fresh out of the University of Kansas.

iceBy Dean Rea

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The farm was located six miles northeast of town, which Audrey’s mother Fannie decided was too far for a girl to travel to attend high school. So, Audrey’s father Andy pur-chased a lot and built a two-story house in town. He would do the commuting.

My mother excelled as a student and in sharpening her skills as a pianist, which my grandmother decided quali-fied her daughter to attend college. Audrey Beryl packed a suitcase, boarded a train and traveled to Laurence where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, receiving all A grades ex-cept for a single B in a physical education class. She of-ten recalled this failure, noting that she had demonstrated more athleticism than anyone in the class, including the teacher.

She never mentioned any relationships with men during that era, but shortly after graduating, a personable young man who had just mustered out of the Navy noticed the “Franks’ girl” carrying a handful of mail along a street in Glasco.

“I was smoking on a break outside a café with some other guys when this beautiful blonde walked by,” he later recalled. “The guys said no one could get near the Franks’ girl, who had just finished college and planned to be a teacher.”

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My father, George Evald Rea, who everyone called G.E., took the challenge, betting he could date the Franks’ girl. It took awhile, but my father joined a local musical group where the Franks’ girl played piano. He had trained as a classical violinist, could read music and could play a tune in any key after hearing the melody.

They were married a year later, eventually rented the farm where my mother had been born, and my father be-gan learning how to harness a team of horses and how to play an unfamiliar role as a wheat farmer. My mother taught a few years at Fischer Creek School before devot-ing her time to helping with the farm and rearing me and my younger brother Richard Gail. Several decades later we would disregard our mother’s advice and become teachers.

We had observed her grading papers and preparing lesson plans late into the night and during weekends, at-tending committee meetings, crossing swords with admin-istrators, returning to college each summer to update her teaching skills. She figured that was enough to dissuade anyone from following in her footsteps. She apparently didn’t realize, however, that her sons also observed the love and respect her students showed in myriad ways and how they looked up and visited “Mom Rea” years after they graduated.

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When she became convinced that her sons had ignored her suggestion to steer clear of the classroom, she offered this advice:

Never put your hands on a student.When meeting with a student, make certain your office

door is open and never schedule a student conference after hours.

Never take the blame for a student’s failure or credit for a student’s success. Many people, including parents, are in-volved in the educative process.

You’re a man. So, before entering a classroom, make certain your fly is zipped.

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By Les Gapaylesgapay@gmail.com 

You can find out some interesting things in genealogy research.

Like the story about an unheralded Georgian composer, my Hungarian maternal grand aunt and the Russian secret police during World War I.

I had been doing genealogy research on my family for many years but knew nothing of Margit Barczy (Margaret in English), my grandmother’s sister, who was born in Bu-dapest. As the dogged retired newspaper reporter than I

ADVENTURES IN GENEALOGY:The unsung Georgian composer, my Hungarian grand aunt and the Russian secret police.

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am, I put my skills to use on genealogy. All I knew was that my grandmother, Rozsa Barczy Mayer, had lived and died in Hungary, as had her sister Carmen. My late mother kept no family tree. One I got from relatives in Hungary in 1990 mentioned no Margit but did have a brother Lorand.

With help from internet searches, various genealogy sites, looking up church records from Hungary, getting civil records in France and contacting helpful amateur genealo-gists, I discovered piece by piece a host of information over several months recently. I found that Lorand had been an official in the joint Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry in Vienna during the First World War and that he had a sister Margit who also lived there in the early 1910s.

I discovered her birth certificate in Catholic Church records from Budapest from 1877 and that of her broth-er Lorand in 1876 (microfilmed by the Mormon Church in the USA and available here). I also quickly found my grandmother Rozsa and her sister Carmen’s birth records in Nagyvarad, Hungary, now Oradea, Romania, with the aid of a helpful church archivist for the Catholic diocese, unusual help in genealogy research. I knew of Rozsa and have photos of her and Carmen, who was my godmother when I was born in that same city in 1943.

But who was this mysterious Margit that I never heard

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of while growing up in Montana? Step by fascinating step, I got to know more about her. Margit’s name showed up on the Internet linked to one of the 20th Century’s lesser-known music composers, Heraclius Djabadary, who was born in the country of Georgia and lived in France, Austria and Belgium. Known as Erkele Jabadari in Georgia, he is now known mainly for his Rhapsodie Géorgienne.

I discovered that Margit was his wife and she wrote the text for his 1918 then-famous dramatic opera “Goul-nara” and lyrics for some of his works for piano and for his songs about Hungary, even though he was Georgian. She even translated into German some Georgian operas her husband performed in Berlin. A small handful of his works I found on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet performed by various orchestras. The couple likely met in Vienna where she lived and he studied, making his debut with classical piano works and his own “Georgian Rhap-sody” in 1913 to widespread acclaim.

I and a Hungarian in Hungary also interested in the Bar-czy line then found something unusual. There was men-tion of Heraclius in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., in the files of the feared Okhrana Tsarist Russian secret police office in Paris that spied on anti-Russian agitators throughout Western

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Europe in the years leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolu-tion.

I had a friend retrieve the files and send them to me and then got them translated from the Russian via Hungarians in this country and in Hungary. Hoover received thou-sands of such secret police files after World War I. They show how the Imperialist Russian spy organization oper-ated. The CIA decades later even wrote a report on the files in examining Russian intelligence culture.

I discovered that the files also mentioned Djabadary’s wife Margit Barczy. Several files give details of Heraclius’ music work and the help of his songwriter wife. They say Heraclius and his brother George were involved with anti-Russian groups in France, Switzerland and Germany. Her-aclius met with the German consul in Lausanne in 1916 who urged him to agitate against Russia and the Tsar with Georgian prisoners of war held during the war by Ger-many and to recruit other nationalistic Georgians, the se-cret police reports said. Heraclius and Margit’s address in Lausanne was the headquarters for a Georgian national-istic group. Heraclius tried to do the recruiting, but most European Georgians weren’t interested so he eventually dropped the matter.

Meanwhile, the reports say, Heraclius’ father Alexander

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in Tbilisi, Georgia, a prince and liberal newspaper editor and Georgian nationalist who had sent his wife and six princely sons to Europe after the failed Russian revolu-tion in 1905, discovered that his son Heraclius had “mar-ried a Hungarian” and ended his monthly stipend of 500 rubles. That was a princely sum in those days. Nothing is said what the father had against Hungarians; Margit, like the Djabadary fam-ily, also had nobil-ity ancestry, so that wasn’t an issue.

The secret police reports said Hera-clius Djabadary (Dzhabadari in Russian) and his five brothers (in Belgium and France and later one of them in Germany) weren’t revolution-aries, “but are fierce Georgian nation-alists and want to

This photograph of Heraclius Djabadary was probably taken in the 1920s.

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break away Georgia totally from Russia.” One of their an-cestors, a populist nobleman in Georgia, was imprisoned the late 19th Century in Russia for activities against the Tsar and for favoring liberating workers.

The police reports, mostly from an agent named Skossa, perhaps a code name, speculated that the payment from the father to Heraclius may have been intended to be used partly for “propaganda literature” as well as for living ex-penses and said the money might have come from a “rob-bery” in Tbilisi. The reports didn’t specify the robbery, but a famous 1907 bank robbery involving 500 ruble notes in Georgia was believed to be spearheaded by revolutionar-ies Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. One 1916 Paris Rus-sian secret police report said George Djabadary, brother of Heraclius, in 1915, then living in Lausanne, went to Co-penhagen under a false name and tried to travel to Russia, but wasn’t allowed.

After the war, Margit and Heraclius lived in Vienna from 1918-1923, according to a biography in French of the composer on an old 33-rpm recording jacket. They had wanted to live in Belgium but weren’t allowed as Margit was considered a native of an enemy state during the war, a Djabadary descendant told me.

In 1923, the couple returned to Paris, the record jacket

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stated. They lived in poverty much of the time in Vienna and Paris, according to a relative of Heraclius I tracked down who has notes by one of the Djabadary brothers. The secret police reports also mentioned Heraclius and Margit were impoverished after the 500 rubles a month stipend was cut off. Heraclius’ works were somewhat popular at the time in Europe. Eventually, he had 36 major works for orchestra and piano and songs; a catalog lists 164 of his works, some duplicates.

My late mother once mentioned that she visited Paris and Vienna as a child in the 1920s with her mother; I think now it was likely to see Margit and her prince composer husband. The other five Djabadary brothers besides Hera-clius also were composers, conductors and musicians; one had a ballet company in Paris and another produced stage productions in Berlin. I can envision them all living the musician’s life in the 1920s in Europe, with Heraclius en-joying moderate success.

Some of Heraclius’ songs were about love. His opera had a theme of peace with the words written by my rela-tive Margit. I have a striking photo of a young Heraclius and Margit taken in Paris, likely in the mid- or late- 1910s, given to me recently by a Djabadary descendent in Geor-gia. I also have a photo of a beautiful color painting of Mar-

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git, sitting at a table with roses, recently given to me by a descendant of one of the Djabadary brothers, likely done in the 1920s, with artist unknown. The descendant who still has the painting is a French scientist and retired pro-fessor who inherited it from Heraclius’ brother Chota, an orchestra conductor, who had it hanging on his wall until his death.

In 1930, Margit got very sick from cancer for four years. Her husband stopped writing any music to take care of her, according to the back of a record jacket of some of

his works. Margit is listed on the Nobel Prize web site as being nominated for a peace prize in 1933 for her libretto on peace in her husband’s opera. She was listed as Prin-cess Djabadary. She didn’t get any votes and the nomination likely wasn’t serious, but it was submit-ted by a Nobel board Margit Barczy painting now owned by Henri

Kagan in France

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member in France. In 1934 she died in Paris.Heraclius was sick with tuberculosis much of this time

and moved to Nice, France, on the Mediterranean in 1935 for his health. He died in 1937. Margit was 14 years older than Heraclius, according to her birth records, but the in-formation on her death certificate that came from him had her born 10 years later. Perhaps she fudged her age since he was so much younger.

Besides having music interest in common, they must have been very much in love. In 1936 Heraclius wrote a composition for piano titled, “Remembrances on the Tomb of Margit Barczy.” (“Les moments vécus: Sur la tombe de Barczy Marguit.”) It makes me shiver to imagine him at her grave in sadness.

Eventually, around the late 1970s, Heraclius’ ashes were reburied in Tbilisi in a cemetery for artists. They were taken there by one of his brothers, Ilia, who had a ballet company in Paris featuring Georgian folk dances. When he arrived at customs, Ilia was asked what was in the urn he was carrying. He replied with a smile, according to his relatives: “My brother.”

Heraclius’ conductor brother Chota continued to pro-mote Heraclius’ works for decades after the composer’s death and there was a renewed interest for some years. All

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the while he kept the portrait of Margit in his bedroom. Chota’s stepson, the French scientist, told me, “Chota

sometimes told me about the Hungarian wife of Heraclius” and how she helped him with his work. Chota had married that man’s mother during World War II.

That son and his wife had Heraclius’ decaying tomb-stone in Tbilisi replaced with one with his portrait carved in stone by a local artist. They also sought to have Margit’s ashes sent from France to be buried with her husband but discovered her tomb had disappeared from a Paris cem-etery due to nonpayment for upkeep, as is the custom in much of Europe. The couple still has the portrait of my ancestor Margit in their home outside Paris. I found the scientist on the Internet recently, and he kindly sent me the photo of my grand aunt Margit’s portrait painting. And how grand she looked during the height of her years mar-ried to Heraclius.

Wherever they are now, they’ll always have Vienna and Paris. And, I’ll have the memory of this rewarding family history research — even if it did take several months.

Genealogy research can be very time consuming. Facts have to be confirmed, documents gotten, relatives found. One ancestor’s name leads to another. I am pushing a thou-sand names now in my family tree, albeit many are dis-

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tant relatives, and they go back several centuries in several countries. But the work can also be fulfilling in discovering who all those people were in our family lines and how we are connected.

Once in a while, it results in an unusual story uncov-ered like that of Margit and Heraclius, one that Hollywood could have written.

 (Les Gapay is a writer in Palm Desert, Calif., and a re-tired newspaper reporter.)