Donald E. Wass was a fellow that you should not have known. Mr. Wass was humorless in the extreme. He was a low-level supervisor in AT&T’s Engineering Department in St. Louis. His responsibility caused him to have frequent conversations with other engineers in New York. Those conversations were so loud that work in the rest of the office was pretty much arrested until he completed his conversations. In point of fact, Mr. Wass was severely hearing-impaired.
His deficiency in the ability to hear caused him also to send TWX messages to New York on a frequent basis. TWX is similar to today’s facsimile. The TWX operators in St. Louis had a card cut for the return address because of the frequency of messages that Mr. Wass originated. Unfortunately, they made a small mistake in that they spelled his name as “Donalde” and they assumed that “W” was his middle initial and of course his last name became “Ass.” So it read “Donalde W. Ass.” The rest of the engineering office thought that this was a matter of great hilarity, including me. But that was not true in the case of Mr. Wass. He threatened to have the operator caught and fired, which never happened.
In any event, Donald Wass was often summoned to the head office in New York. A clerk would come to his desk and he would tell the clerk that he wished to have a “roomette” on the five o’clock Pennsylvania Railroad (known as the Pennsy) to New York, so the matters could be discussed in person in New York on the following day. As a young man of 19, I could envision Mr. Wass sitting down at the starched table cloth in the dining car on the train and eating a large steak followed by a cigar. Little did I know that before my career was finished, it would be my duty to visit major cities in this country as well as all of the principal capitols in the civilized world. But however you cut it, Mr. Wass was as humorless as a hornet.
All of these thoughts about Don Wass and visiting foreign cities came into focus when, in one of our Saturday night concerts, my wife played a CD from “On the Town,” a Broadway play by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. For many years Comden and Green were the prominent producers of lyrics and librettos for Broadway shows. Their use of the English language was inspiring. One of the songs from “On the Town” is “Lonely Town.” Listening to the Comden-Green lyrics to that song, with the music by Leonard Bernstein, is about as good as it gets in a Broadway show. If I may impose, here are the lyrics to “Lonely Town.”
“A town’s a lonely town,
When you pass through
And there is no one waiting there for you,
Then it’s a lonely town.
You wander up and down,
The crowds rush by,
A million faces pass before your eyes,
Still it’s a lonely town.
Unless there’s love,
A love that’s shining like a harbor light,
You’re lost in the night;
Unless there’s love,
The world’s an empty place
And every town’s a lonely town.”
I have traveled enough to know that every town, no matter how big or small, has the potential for being a very lonely town. London was no exception. And so it was that I found myself at Heathrow Airport outside of England’s capitol at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. I felt I had no real choice in the matter because when an American is asked or required to attend a meeting in the United Kingdom or on the continent of Europe on a Monday morning, he is obliged to leave home on Saturday evening, and travel overnight to his destination. No matter how much the spouses protest or the children throw tantrums, there is no choice but to get to London or whatever city is involved on Sunday to avoid yawning all the way through the meeting on Monday. One other drawback. Hotel keepers believe that their patrons tend to sleep in on Sunday morning and as a result they do not ask the housemaids to start to work until later in the day. As a result when early arrivals appear at the hotels, they are told that “Your room is not yet ready. Please have a seat in the lobby.” The seat in the lobby will be occupied until 11 or 11:30 or noon time until the housemaids do their work.
And so it was when I alighted from my flight from New York to London, that I was in an inferior mood knowing that I would have two or three hours to kill in the lobby of The Grovener Hotel until the housemaids had vacuumed the rugs and tucked my pillows in properly. As I walked out of Heathrow’s airport terminal, I saw a group of four or five taxi cab drivers waiting for passengers. As I strode to the head of the line, a driver stepped out and said, “Good morning, Yank. How are things in the colonies?” Fortunately I had my wits about me and I replied to him, “Good morning, mate. Things in the colonies are looking up now that we have learned to drive on the right side of the road.” He and the rest of the cab drivers knew that they had a soul mate. The ride to the hotel was inspiring. The driver and I talked of American and English politics, and of our days in the armies of the US and the UK. And suddenly London was no longer a lonely town. I had been welcomed by a new friend. I smiled as I sat on the couch in the Grovener Hotel until my room was ready, somewhere after 11 o’clock that morning. But the point is that London was no longer a lonely town, even on a Sunday morning.
Lonely towns become friendly towns when one finds a good companion. When I began to travel to the Scandinavian countries, I soon met Sven Lernevall in Stockholm, who remains my friend until this day. Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen are not winter vacation destinations. The sun makes an appearance for only a short time each day. But people in the Scandinavian countries are welcoming, and in spite of the weather, somehow Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo are no longer lonely because, as the song says, friends “were waiting there for me.”
Sven Lernevall is well into his 80s now, as I am. But he has not lost an ounce of his sense of humor. Donald Wass could have taken a lesson or two from Sven Lernevall. Recently I inquired of Sven about the proper form of address when one speaks to a stranger in Sweden. It appears that the Swedes use the term “Herr” as do the Germans when they wish to address a stranger. But that is not the end of it. Here is an email message from Sven explaining to me the various forms of address in Sweden.
“Yes, the equivalent of mister is herr. But we seldom use the word herr (or fru, mrs) anymore. When, for instance, they refer to someone in the parliament they do not say herr statsministern (mr prime minister), only statsministern. And they do not say herr Reinfeldt (our prime minister) but Fredrik Reinfeldt. We more or less abolished titles 40-50 years ago. Nowadays we address everyone by the familiar word “du” (you). Formerly we could say Ni to someone, even in singular, if we wanted to show courtesy (like the Germans use Sie or the French use vous). But in Swedish du is only singular i e when you talk to one person, ni is plural i e when you address yourself to several persons. We have not reached that far as you have in English where the word you covers both du and ni.”
“If you understood anything of the linguistic lesson above, just tell me.”
So you can see that Sven has lost none of his sense of humor, which makes him a good companion and which makes Stockholm anything but a lonely town.
In response to Sven’s exercise in the Swedish language, I could only reply that here in New Jersey, when two people are involved, the term “youse” appears often. The bartender would say to a couple, “What would youse two like to drink today?” That is not as good as Sven’s explanation, but it might serve him well the next time he comes to Newark or Camden.
For many years after World War II, I had avoided going to Germany. One way or another, I found myself in Munich with Howard Davis, another former American soldier. Howard was a Vice President of the N.W. Ayer Advertising Company, which had been retained by AT&T for many years. Howard Davis likes a beer now and then. I have no love of beer or any cravings for it. Nonetheless we wandered into a saloon where the tables were placed at about waist level or higher. It was obvious that the tables were supposed to accommodate six to eight standup drinkers of beer. Howard and I were by ourselves until we were joined by a German man dressed in workingman’s clothes. After a swig or two of beer, he looked at me and said in German, “Amerikanischer Soldat? (American soldier?)” I answered in perfect German, “Ja.” He then inquired as to whether I had ever been a POW and I said again, “Ja.” As it turned out he spoke reasonably good English because he had been a prisoner of the British for a large part of the war. After a few more beers the three of us were boon companions and Munich was no longer a lonely town.
Finally there is a town called Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is straight out of a movie set. The streets, as I recall them, were unpaved. Every shopkeeper was friendly and I expected to meet Billy the Kid at every intersection. Alice Springs at that time, in 1980 or thereabouts, had a population of less than 10,000. I am at home with Australians but on this occasion we were warned that we were going to Alice Springs in February, the height of the hot season. Temperatures of more than 100 degrees are quite common in that part of Australia. I was told by the know-nothings in Sydney that I would soon run away from Alice Springs because of the heat and the provincial nature of its offerings. That was not the case. There was a woman who ran a small shop where I wandered in, and by the time I finished my shopping she had sold me a didgeridoo, a great felt hat with the insignia of the Australian Mounted Police, and a necklace of shells strung on a string made by aborigines. I suppose I have trumpeted the virtues of Alice Springs ever since that visit and I regret that I have not been back there since 1982 or 1983. But nonetheless, while there are many lonely towns in this world, I am here to tell you that Alice Springs is not one of them. For those of you who are interested, a didgeridoo is allegedly a musical instrument played by the native Aboriginals.
In the final analysis, it is not hard to become lonely when one is far from home and without companions. Arab cities provide very little warmth for foreigners who are suspected of being Christians. Of all of the Arab capitols that I have visited, only Cairo is really welcoming. All the others are in fact “lonely towns.” But in the rest of the world, the difference is friends. When you are visiting a place, and “there is no one there to meet you,” that is a prescription for a lonely town.
When Don Wass ordered his roomettes on the Pennsy Railroad to go to New York back in 1941, I wondered if I would ever get to Gotham. But in those years, I have lived and worked in New York, and have made many friends there. It is clearly not a lonely town. It seems to me that a large part of avoiding loneliness and lonely towns has to do with your making an effort to call people by their names or shake their hands. I understand loneliness and I understand lonely towns. But with a little bit of luck, that loneliness and the lonely towns can be turned into friendly places. The key is friendship, which is what Sven Lernevall and the London cab driver and the Munich beer drinker and the people of Alice Springs showed to me.
Donald Waas, nee Donalde W. Ass, is now a largely deaf angel. Betty Comden and Adolph Green died within the past three years. We will hear no more of their lyrics or their librettos. What a shame!
E. E. CARR
November 29, 2007
Essay 272
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Kevin’s commentary: An instant favorite. This one really hit home for me. It was striking for me how much different Beijing — a city I love — felt the second time I was there, when I didn’t have a circle of fifty friends with me. I wrote the following blog post soon after arrival: https://kevin.thecagematch.org/archives/604
Pop is damn good at making friends, though, and I’d imagine that in his heyday not many towns wound up being lonely for him. I’ll have to work a little more on that talent.