Tillie Goes Biking

A Migrant from Brooklyn Finds His Legs

Who knew? Tillie has legs! And now he's riding a bike!

Frankly, I hadn't known that Tillie existed below the collar and that oh-so-stylish necktie. At least, stylish for its time.

There he was on a penny-farthing bicycle, which is in fact age appropriate - Tillie is well over 100 years old. (The name penny-farthing comes from old British coins - the penny, or front wheel, being rather large, and the farthing, or rear wheel, being quite small.)

This new version of Tillie - Tillie 2.0? - showed up just before the pandemic, and briefly graced a number of the bicycles that were available in Asbury's bike share program. Sadly, the bike share did not survive the pandemic. The scooter share also went on hiatus for a while, but it's back, and there are scooter-share scooters everywhere. We can only hope Tillie 2.0 and his bike-share bikes will come back as well, some day soon.

It's hard to explain how important Tillie has been for Asbury Park. For many years, through thick and thin, the good times and the bad, Tillie has been our icon. He does have some competition from various references to Bruce Springsteen, usually involving the words Greetings From Asbury Park. Our parade of identity might actually profit from some new recruits - I'm fond of the dolphins who swim on various facades of Convention Hall - but for now Tillie is the smiling face of Asbury Park. 

And so it's probably even harder to explain that Tillie is actually a migrant from Brooklyn - Coney Island, to be precise.

His older cousin, Funny Face, graced Coney Island's Steeplechase Park for many years. George C. Tilyou, owner of the Coney Island park, opened another steeplechase in Asbury Park and decorated it with Tillie, a kinder, gentler version of Funny Face, whom I frankly find a bit scary. 

A large mural rendition of Tillie currently graces the Wonder Bar, where he kindly presides over Yappy Hour, a Happy Hour for dogs and humans (only the humans get alcoholic beverages). The Wonder Bar mural is actually the third incarnation of Tillie as a mural. Tilyou's was the first, and then came the famous mural on Palace Amusements, which was removed from its site when Palace Amusements was demolished; it then spent nearly two decades hanging out at the city's sewage treatment plant, and in 2021 was transferred to a storage site just north of Convention Hall.

Here's a picture of Wonder Bar Tillie.

Presiding over Yappy Hour at the Wonder Bar.

Yappy Hour explained.

Commerce in Convention Hall.

Tillie, king of souvenirs.

Tillie at Palace Amusements. Note the utility wires.

Tillie as a towel, with a t-shirt thrown in.

Iconographic options on Convention Hall. There are more.

Tillie everywhere: The side of the bike basket.

See also What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, The Pavements of Asbury Park, Liberate Cookman Avenue!

What a Cold Civil War Feels Like

A War

An American soldier escorts prisoners in the rain during World War II. From Bill Mauldin, Up Front (1945) p. 21. 

Years ago a friend sent me a list of aphorisms from World War II that she, in turn, had received from her father. I haven't been able to find the list in quite a while, but a number of the entries keep coming back to me when I'm facing certain situations.

The one I've been thinking about recently goes like this: "When both sides think they're losing, that's when you know you're fully engaged."

Right now, many friends of democracy are quite worried about the future. I'm one of them. But I also know that this is what it feels like when you're in the middle of a fight. 

I was taught in school that the turning points in World War II were in 1942 - the battle of El Alamein in Egypt, the battle of Midway in the Pacific, and the battle of Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, which began in 1942 and lasted into 1943. 

However, if you look at 1943, it seems that people were feeling much as we are today - tired and anxious. 

And they had good reason. The Allied march up the boot of Italy was excruciating and frequently stalled by German tactical brilliance and Allied command mistakes. 

The crucial battle of the Atlantic - German U-boats v. Allied supply convoys - had its turning point in the middle of 1943, but, as with the events of 1942, this was not clear at the time, and the Germans continued to fight with great skill and determination. In fact, despite enormous casualties, discipline held in the German armed forces until a few weeks before the surrender in 1945.  

I could go through the parallel history in the Pacific, but I'll spare you. Oh, well. Let me just mention Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. And I'll airlift us over China-Burma-India. Stop, Bill.

As we look back on all this, there is a warm glow of historical inevitability. It's misleading. First, yes, we had turning points as early as 1942, but the war wasn't over until it was over. Remember the Battle of the Bulge. Second, people were very uncertain of the future, and morale was not excellent always and everywhere.

What did happen, during the course of the war, was that people just kept showing up and doing their jobs. And in the end they got the job done.

What will our turning points be? I don't know. I'd nominate Charlottesville in 2017 as an early one. I think the idea that we were dealing with fascism, rather than Republicanism, reached a large audience only at that point. The November 2020 election and the January 6 sack of the Capitol may prove to be other turning points.

It's worth noting that the fascists lost all three of these battles.

The forces of sanity have been fighting a cold civil war, leaving violence to the Trumpies, who fortunately aren't very good at it. Our asymmetrical response involves reform throughout the government and the society, and prosecution of people who have committed criminal acts.

The big difference between a cold war and a shooting war is the amount of shooting. Death from violence has so far been very rare in our current struggle, although the coronavirus pandemic, which has been going along in parallel with the war for the last two years, has certainly produced a lot of fatalities.

Another reason to feel tired and anxious.

Interestingly, Donald Trump, when faced with a pandemic, made the same mistake that Woodrow Wilson made during World War I, when the great influenza epidemic broke out in 1918. Trump and Wilson both chose to concentrate on the prosecution of the war they were fighting. In Trump's case, of course, he was fighting mainly on Twitter, but in both cases, the death toll in the pandemic was certainly higher because of the failure to take sensible public health measures.

A lot of people are concerned about the slow march of justice. I am one of them. The January 6  committee has been doing very encouraging work, but there is a long path from here to actual indictments based on the committee's findings.

I am a bit surprised that nobody has yet indicted the Former Guy. What's going on in Georgia? What's going on in New York? 

But I think there are positive signs. Every once in a while, I check in on a fellow Pennsylvanian, Riley June Williams, who may or may not have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop. One of the small fry, certainly. But we need to be thorough in our follow-up to January 6. I had doubted the staying power of the Justice Department in dealing with such a mass act of criminality, but now I do see encouraging signs that most of the small-fry perpetrators will have to answer for their crimes.

I hadn't checked up on Riley Williams in a while. I did late last year, in December. It turned out that, in October, news had arrived that she had been indicted on a laundry list of charges. Apparently the prosecutors got tired of negotiations for a plea deal that weren't going anywhere. The charges include theft of government property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers. 

However slowly, the wheels of justice are turning. In other words, democracy is alive, if not necessarily very healthy.

It often happens that things do not end well for demagogues.

See also Hope Hicks Is Sick, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office. The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along, On Demagogues.

Of Planters and Whimsy

Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn

My friend and son-in-law, Chris Murtha, sent me this picture of Willoughby Avenue, an open street near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, which I wrote about in a blog post last year. The picture shows a recently installed planter that creates two chicanes, one for motor vehicles and one for bicycles. I think this is a brilliant design - simple, effective, inexpensive, attractive, and even a bit whimsical. I like whimsy.

See also South Portland Avenue, Brooklyn.

Humboldt on Education

Teaching People to Think for Themselves

Casino on the boardwalk, Asbury Park.

In my leisure reading I try to strike out in new directions. Odd how the diversions have a habit of gently guiding me back to my central concerns. 

Here's a passage about Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German educator from the early nineteenth century. It's worth remembering how long these ideas have been around, even though so many of us seem never to have made their acquaintance. 

"In 1806, Humboldt was living with his family in Rome, hard at work on a translation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Only after the collapse of Prussia and the plundering by French troops of the Humboldt family residence in Tegel to the north of Berlin did he resolve to return to his beleaguered homeland. It was only with great reluctance that he agreed to accept a post in the new administration. 

"Once installed, however, Humboldt unfolded a profoundly liberal reform programme that transformed education in Prussia. For the first time, the kingdom acquired a single, standardized system of public instruction attuned to the latest trends in progressive European pedagogy. Education as such, Humboldt declared, was henceforth to be decoupled from the idea of technical or vocational training. Its purpose was not to turn cobblers' boys into cobblers, but to turn 'children into people.' The reformed schools were not merely to induct pupils into a specific subject matter, but to instil in them the capacity to think and learn for themselves. 'The pupil is mature,' he wrote, 'when he has learned enough from others to be in a position to learn for himself.'" 

This is from pages 331-332 of Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Fall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (2006). (Footnotes omitted.) 

I'd heard the Humboldt name before - there is, after all, the Humboldt Current in the Pacific - but it turns out the current is named for Wilhelm's younger brother, Alexander, so it's entirely possible that I had never heard of Wilhelm before delving into Professor Clark's book. 

The elder Humboldt was effectively the Prussian minister of education during a time known as the Prussian Reform, which took place after the catastrophic defeat of the Prussian army by French forces under the command Napoleon Bonaparte, at Jena in 1806. 

Politics in Prussia took a conservative turn from 1819, but Humboldt's edifice proved durable. "In the 1840s, when the American educational reformer Horace Mann visited Berlin, he was surprised to observe that school children in Prussia were taught to exercise their mental faculties for themselves by teachers whose techniques were anything but authoritarian. 'Though I saw hundreds of schools and [...] tens of thousands of pupils' Mann wrote, 'I never saw one child undergoing punishment for misconduct. I never saw one child in tears from having been punished, or from fear of being punished.' Liberal visitors from Britain frequently expressed their surprise that such a 'despotic' political arrangement should have produced such a progressive and open-minded educational system." (Clark, p. 407.) 

The summit of Humboldt's achievement was the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, founded in Berlin in 1810 and renamed Humboldt-Universitat in 1949. "The Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, with its powerful commitment to the freedom of research, became a model admired across Europe and widely emulated in the United States, where Humboldt's prescriptions helped to establish the idea of a modern academy." (Clark, p. 341.) 

I've given this matter some thought, and I think that I personally owe quite a lot to Wilhelm von Humboldt. I'm glad to have gotten to know him a little better.

Also at the casino.

See also The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, A Teacher's Dilemma.