Postscripts

Lincoln "Linc" Diamant, 86, died Tuesday, October 20, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was news we all dreaded. In 2006, he and his wife, Joan, sold their home on Spring Valley Road near the Teatown Lake Reservation and moved to a comfortable apartment in the delightful college town that is home to Williams College. Here, despite being blind and suffering the palsy of Parkinsonism, he maintained his interest in history by auditing classes at the college and writing for the local paper, the Berkshire Eagle. His health had been failing lately.

At the mention of Lincoln Diamant's name, the term "Renaissance man" immediately springs to mind. The dictionary defines a Renaissance man or woman as someone with broad intellectual interests, who is accomplished in both the arts and the sciences. No one fits that description better than Lincoln Diamant. In writing about him, I am reminded of the folk story of the five blind men and an elephant. Each perceived the pachyderm differently, touching the trunk, tusk, body, leg and tail--and interpreting it as a serpent, a spear, a wall, a tree and a rope. So it was with the remarkably modest Lincoln Diamant.

A many-sided polymath
Some readers may know him as an avid student of local history with an especial interest in the American Revolution. Many attended his illuminating lectures on that conflict at the Ossining Public Library and the Croton Free Library. Others may recall him as the first president of Teatown Lake Reservation, and a prime mover in the creation of the lovely recent volume about that environmental gem. But he is also the author of many trail-breaking books on the television industry. And, writing under the pseudonym of Stan McDougal, his World's Greatest Golf Jokes contain some of the best and worst jokes about golf ever memorialized in permanent form.

As pitchmen say on late night TV, "Wait, folks, that's not all!" He was also a relentless hiker and backpacker to the sites of Hudson Valley history, exploring ruined forts and temporary bivouacs to gain a feel for the military geography. Explaining his curiosity, he once told me, "One cannot roam through the Hudson Highlands without becoming interested in the American Revolution."

Similarly, relentlessly roaming the stacks of libraries and archival repositories, exploring forgotten sources for information about our war of independence, he found in their dusty tomes not only elusive facts but a sense of the spirit of the times. The fruit of these twin labors--hiking and history, started as hobbies and evolved into near obsessions--is a succession of remarkable books that truly make history come alive. During the Revolution, signal fires flared from mountain top to mountain top, communicating to the beleaguered American forces intelligence about British troop movements. In the company of his wife, Joan, Lincoln Diamant assiduously traced the signal-fire network, carefully noting locations on topographic maps, even scrabbling in the soil for remnants of ancient ashes. At these forgotten sites, like some latter-day Kilroy (the mythical World War II American G.I. who scribbled the legend "Kilroy was here" on walls all across Europe), Lincoln Diamant was quietly there, recording details that immensely enriched our store of knowledge.

And he had hidden talents as a cartographer. His map of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, lovingly hand-drawn on antique parchment paper, is still sold at the park's Visitor Center. The Diamants were such indefatigable explorers of this delightful nature preserve that he came to know it, as the French say, "comme ma poche" ("like my pocket"). A Lincoln Diamant map for the use of others was the inevitable result. Later he also mapped Teatown Lake Reservation and the Rockefeller State Park Preserve.

I almost forgot to mention his interest in old-fashioned hand-set type and flat-bed printing. In the hallway of his home stands a horizontal-platen printing press taking up a desk top. Nearby is a cabinet containing trays of type in various fonts. Assembling individual characters into lines for printing in what is called a "stick" of type is now almost a lost art. Until his eyesight began to fail, Lincoln Diamant would painstakingly set type and print books of poems, invitations and announcements for friends. His imprint, Pondside Press, took its name from the pond near his modest home on Spring Valley Road--an "imitation colonial," in his own description.

Lincoln Diamant was born January 25, 1923, in New York City--at "a private lying-in hospital" on 91st Street at Central Park West. Interestingly, Croton resident Lloyd Moss was born in the same small hospital. At the tender age of four, young Lincoln suffered the cruel loss of his father. In the early 1920s, while vacationing at the New Jersey seashore, Rudolph Diamant, an insurance bond analyst, contracted viral encephalitis, a painful and wasting disease with progressive impairment and symptoms not unlike Parkinsonism. Saturday night, April 16, 1927, the Diamants went to the home of his wife's mother on Lenox Avenue in Harlem for Passover services. Moments after the family arrived, his father, ill and distraught, walked into the front room of the eighth-floor apartment and threw himself from a balcony, narrowly missing several pedestrians. An ambulance from Harlem Hospital responded, but Rudolph Diamant was dead on arrival.

A fatherless Lincoln Diamant attended New York City public schools and eventually entered Townsend Harris High School and then Stuyvesant High School, the prestigious academic schools for superior students to which admission was gained by competitive examination.But young Lincoln was unhappy and became rebellious. By his own admission, he got in the habit of playing hooky and was adept at avoiding truant officers bent on finding and bringing in wayward students.

Discovering a city
Those who have not known a city childhood often express sympathy for the narrow existence of those who have. But young Lincoln experienced no stifled boyhood. For recreation, he could roam the 840-acre expanse of Central Park, exploring its rocks, rills and rambles. For education, the American Museum of Natural History, the Hayden Planetarium and the New-York Historical Society were close at hand. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was a short hike across Central Park. And there was that quiet haven of the self-educated skeptic, the public library.

Always fascinating to the young, the Horn & Hardart Automats displayed their foods behind little glass-fronted doors. Depositing a series of nickels caused a door to open and the food compartment to yield up its delights. But a resourceful boy lacking spare nickels could always make a passable tomato soup by adding ketchup from the bottle on every table to the cup of hot water available for tea drinkers who bought a tea bag.

Times Square, then as now, was the entertainment center of the city. If you got there before 10 a.m., admission to a double-feature movie was a dime. At Nedick's, a hot dog and an "orange drink" (it certainly wasn't orange juice) each cost a nickel. If an uptown boy walked to and from Times Square--and New York boys were great walkers--a marvelous time could be had for only twenty cents.

Times Square also held other attractions: on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th avenues were burlesque theatres, forbidden to youth, and the carnival-like Hubert's Flea Circus. In the latter, a boy could catch a brief glimpse of the bearded lady or the double-jointed contortionist--teasers to induce the gawking crowd to part with the 25-cent admission.

Ranging farther afield, a nickel subway ride downtown would bring a boy to Francis Bannerman's so-called "War Museum" on Broadway at Prince Street, a fascinating surplus store that opened the new world of militariato him and where he could run his finger along a Revolutionary War bayonet that may have tasted blood or try on a World War I steel helmet. Prices were modest; for a young collector on a limited budget, historical military tunic buttons could be bought for as little as five cents.

About this time the Independent subway system was being built to fill gaps in neighborhoods not served by the IRT and BMT lines. Rails in the new subway tunnel under Central Park West stretching from 59th Street to 110th Street had not yet been laid. It was a mysterious and forbidden concrete grotto for young Lincoln Diamant to explore. He had discovered ingress to this underground world of adventure.

His rescue from truancy came in the form of a scholarship to the Walden School, on 88th Street at Central Park West. Designed by architect Louis Korn and originally the home of the Progress Club, its 1904 building had an almost postmodern look, with hefty columns supporting thin air. Established in 1914, this pioneer in progressive education offered classes from nursery to high school.

The venerable school building, its interior decorated with friezes and murals by students, was demolished in 1974 and replaced by a structure that included both the school and apartments. The Walden School closed in the 1980s. In Lincoln Diamant's words, "The Walden School straightened me out and gave me a purpose in life."

Another factor in his education was the city's rich theatre tradition, particularly the Federal Theatre Project. Conceived in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, this was part of the New Deal attempt to jump-start an economy reeling from the Depression by providing work for unemployed theatre professionals. The program was fought tooth and nail by J. Parnell Thomas, a member of the House of Representatives from New Jersey.

Fourteen-year-old Lincoln Diamant was present at a history-making event on June 16, 1937--the opening night performance of Marc Blitzstein's musical, The Cradle Will Rock. With his mother, he showed up at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on West 39th Street, only to find the doors chained and locked. A politically inspired directive from Washington had ordered the Federal Theatre production not to go on.

Directors Orson Welles and John Houseman somehow located an empty theatre, the Venice, on Seventh Avenue at 58th Street. (Formerly the Al Jolson Theatre, it had been briefly renamed the Shakespeare Theatre before unsuccessfully switching to films and being shuttered.)

Cast and audience defiantly marched a mile uptown to the new venue. By curtain time at 9 p.m., every one of the theatre's 1,742 seats was filled. But Actors Equity and the musicians' union had forbidden members to participate. The elaborate sets designed by Orson Welles remained behind locked doors on 39th Street.

The composer, Marc Blitzstein, sat at a battered, out-of-tune upright piano on the bare stage and began to play and sing the score. On hearing her cue, cast member Olive Newton stood up in the audience and tentatively began to sing her part along with Blitzstein. Recognizing what was happening, he dropped away, letting her carry the song. An electrician with a hand-held spotlight focused it on her. Then another and another cast member stood and joined in until the entire show had been presented in this unusual fashion.

It was a night to remember. Theatre history was made, and young Lincoln Diamant was present at the creation. As the curtain came down, the theatre went wild. Each cast member in the audience took a curtain call by standing. Actor Howard Da Silva, a former steel worker from Cleveland, played the role of Larry Foreman; years later he would become a resident of Ossining's Glendale Road.

Critics' reviews the next morning were mixed. Brooks Atkinson described the musical production as "written with extraordinary versatility and played with enormous gusto, the best thing militant labor has put into the theatre yet. It raises the theatregoer's metabolism and blows him out of the theatre on the thunder of the grand finale." Always hard to please, George Jean Nathan dismissed it as "little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if, God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale."

In all, 19 performances were given at the Venice. On January 3, 1938, the show reopened at the Windsor Theatre on West 48th Street, where 108 performances were played on a bare stage. The 1999 Tim Robbins movie, The Cradle Will Rock, captured the spirit of the times and recounted the events of the play's exciting premiere.

Representative J. Parnell Thomas finally succeeded in getting the Federal Theatre Project closed down in 1939 and became one of the most vociferous hunters of radicals in the movie industry. Later convicted of defrauding Uncle Sam, for years he had padded his office payroll with the names of nonexistent employees and then cashed their government paychecks. Ironically, he found himself in the same federal slammer as some of the "Hollywood Ten"--directors and screenwriters whose sole crime had been to refuse to answer the felonious legislator's questions.

College days
Precociously gifted, at the age of 16, Lincoln Diamante graduated from the Walden School in 1939. Late that summer he sailed for Europe aboard the Cunard liner Samaria, the second of three sister ships (the others were the Scythia and the Laconia). After World War I, Cunard had decided to build a series of smaller, slower and more economical steamers for the North Atlantic run, equipped with the same amenities as their larger and speedier pre-war ships.

When the enterprising young passenger discovered that the Samaria had a print shop to print news bulletins and menus, he introduced himself and mentioned that he was familiar with hand typesetting. The print shop immediately put him to work, and he spent the balance of the voyage happily setting type. While Lincoln was visiting relatives in Holland, Hitler made his famous pact with Stalin and attacked Poland. Heeding his mother's frantic trans-Atlantic pleas, young Diamant booked passage home sooner than intended.

That autumn, he entered Columbia College, the all-male undergraduate school of a rapidly growing Columbia University. For every student enrolled in 1902 when Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler became president of Columbia, there were seven in 1939 as a result of his ambitious expansion programs. In the winter of 1941, young Diamant helped found the University's radio station. Its call letters were CURC (standing for the Columbia University Radio Club). The station was unusual in that it had no outside antenna. Instead, its signal was fed into the campus central heating system that sent steam heat to all university buildings and dormitories. Any radio within ten or fifteen feet of a radiator and tuned to the station's AM frequency could receive its broadcasts. (At about this time, inventor Edward Armstrong was perfecting FM broadcasting at Columbia with the cooperation of the radio club.)

Programs included music--both classical and popular--football games and even election results. He recalls that the first piece of music broadcast over CURC was a record from his own collection, "From Oakland to Burbank," an instrumental swing number composed and played by Ray Noble and his orchestra. Its cryptic title recalls the itinerary of travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles by air. Passengers boarded a plane at Oakland, the airport across the bay that served San Francisco, and landed at Burbank, the airport north of Los Angeles.

Although Ray Noble is remembered for his smooth "big band" style, he also excelled at "swing," the popular dance music that evolved in the 1930s. Based on jazz, swing employed a large band and simpler harmonic and rhythmic patterns. One of his compositions, "Cherokee," became the signature song of the Charlie Barnett orchestra. For years, "Cherokee" was also the rousing marching song of the Ossining High School band. In 2000, it was banned and forbidden to be played--an unfortunate act of musical censorship and an overzealous display of political correctness.

A triple-threat British musician who excelled as a composer, arranger and conductor, Ray Noble came to the United States with a few musicians in 1934, formed a "big band" orchestra, becoming a fixture at the Rainbow Room, on the 65th floor of the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Moving on to Hollywood, he formed another big band, and soon was a regular on radio comedy programs and in movies.

The flip side of the first record played over CURC was another instrumental piece titled "Harlem Nocturne," inspired by Duke Ellington's music. Composed by Earle Hagen, an arranger for the Ray Noble orchestra, it so captured Ellington's style that listeners were surprised to learn that the composer was white. Hagen went on to become an award-winning arranger of music for Hollywood films. Years later, Lincoln Diamant would give the original 78 rpm shellac record, Columbia Record Company catalog number 35708, to his alma mater for its Columbiana Collection of mementos of with historical significance to the University.

The world of radio In 1943, he graduated cum laude, with a major in American history. Thanks to his practical experience in operating the University's radio station, he quickly found a job with the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System, comprising a group of eastern universities in the U.S. and one university in South America. He remained there for about a year before joining CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and its radio station, WABC. The other big New York stations were WOR, a Mutual Broadcasting affiliate, and WEAF and WJZ--the latter two owned by the National Broadcasting Company.

Young Lincoln started as an apprentice. Because of wartime manpower shortages, in three months he became a senior sound effects man. Most programs using sound effects were radio serials, and one of his principal sound effects was to imitate the rattling of teacups. "I became the best teacup rattler in the business," he recalled. "You do it by tinkling a teaspoon against the cup. Do it once, then do it again and stop--otherwise it can sound almost like a hash house." Later, largely at the insistence of CBS president William S. Paley, dramatic programming focused on the realities of a nation at war, and sound effects included the noises of ship sinkings, explosions and the clash of battle.

Next, he was put in charge of editing the overnight shortwave news distributed by Elmer Davis's OWI (Office of War Information). His office was in the old CBS building on East 52nd Street off Madison Avenue. At that time he was living in Washington Heights near Riverside Drive. Fondly remembered by Lincoln Diamant, respected editor Paul White, a predecessor of Fred Friendly, headed the newsroom.

His most vivid recollection from that period dates from the time when Soviet armies were closing in on Berlin. The practice of the three big news agencies, Associated Press (AP), United Press (UP) and International News Service (INS) was to sound the bell on their Teletype machines once to signal an important story and twice for an especially big story. TV today calls attention to such stories by labeling them "breaking news."

"That night, just as Berlin fell," he recalled, "there was a veritable cacophony of ringing bells that lasted most of the night."

Historical coup
Long before I ever met Lincoln Diamant, our interests converged in the same small piece of real estate--the village of Manhattanville, where I was born. In the 19th century, Manhattan's West Side was dotted with a series of small communities fronting the Hudson. These included Harsenville, Bloomingdale, Manhattanville, Carmansville and Tubby Hook. Today, Manhattanville alone remains as a distinct neighborhood and a recognizable name.

Located between the elevations of Hamilton Heights on the north and Harlem Heights (now called Morningside Heights) on the south, Manhattanville occupied the swale known during the Revolution as "the Hollow Way." Even into the early 20th century the bustling, gritty little community more nearly resembled a New England mill town than a New York City neighborhood. My interest stemmed from curiosity about the social and architectural history of my birthplace; Lincoln Diamant was primarily interested in its military history and geography, and in solving a puzzle.

Before he reached the age of thirty, his dogged research definitively settled a bitter controversy that had raged for years over the exact location of the Battle of Harlem Heights. Some authorities placed the site a mile and a half to the north, near 155th Street. Wherever it had occurred, the crucial engagement marked a turning point in the Revolution and boosted the Americans' sagging morale.

On September 15, 1776, green American troops retreated ignominiously when a formidable British force landed on the East River shore at Turtle Bay. American General Israel Putnam's garrison in lower Manhattan barely escaped being trapped. The next day, near what is now 108th Street and West End Avenue, a scouting party of Connecticut Rangers clashed with an advance force of redcoats probing Patriot defenses. The Americans withdrew down the slopes of Harlem Heights to the Hollow Way. As they retreated, trumpeters of the Light Infantry and the 33rd Regiment taunted them, by sounding the foxhunting call, followed by the cry of "Yoicks, Yoicks," traditional encouragement to the foxhounds that had flushed the quarry.

"I never felt such a sensation before," Joseph Reed, Washington's adjutant, wrote. "It seemed to crown our disgrace." Hurrying down from his headquarters at the home of Roger Morris (now known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion) at 160th Street, Washington summoned reinforcements and skillfully counterattacked, driving the British back through a grain field near the present Barnard College campus (south of 120th Street, west of Broadway). It was the first time since Lexington and Concord that troops under Washington's command had beaten the British in close combat.

Lincoln Diamant's discovery in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan of a previously overlooked map of the battle was the key to the puzzle. It enabled him to trace the movements of the opposing forces on that fateful day and to plot them on a present-day map of the area. From this, he confirmed that the site of the decisive battle was the present Columbia University campus. The prestigious journal Military Affairs reported his findings in 1951.

Publishing, then advertising
Around 1950, for some reason now forgotten by him, he decided to leave broadcasting. He found a job in book publishing in the New York office of the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, with the title "Advertising and Promotion Manager."

The job was challenging and the book world congenial, but he still felt unfulfilled. When legendary Ben Sackheim, head of World Publishing's advertising agency, suggested, "Why not come over to the advertising game?" he jumped at the chance. The Sackheim agency's offices were in a penthouse on the 21st floor of the Plaza Hotel at Central Park South and Fifth Avenue. In idle moments, the agency staff would fold paper airplanes and sail them from the hotel roof down on the streets below.

Growing restless after a year, he joined the ranks of the advertising gypsies who move from agency to agency. His next job was a giant step up in the agency hierarchy to prestigious McCann Erickson. Here he remained for three or four years, writing print advertising for such accounts as John Hancock, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, Buick and Chrysler. Following this came a jump to the Ogilvy & Mather agency, described by him as perhaps his greatest challenge. Hired as a writer, he eventually became a producer of radio and TV commercials. Exposure to the founder of the agency, David Ogilvy, was an education in itself.

The traditional team that conceived and produced commercials was a triumvirate consisting of a writer, director and producer. At a meeting following the sudden departure of the head of the production department, David Ogilvy announced to Lincoln Diamant that he would now report to the copy people. Lincoln Diamant demurred. As fellow Ogilvy employees present at the meeting listened incredulously, he told the imperious agency head, "I am sorry, but those are not the terms under which I was hired." Ogilvy's face reddened. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the meeting. "I was sure I had just fired myself." Ogilvy was famous for not brooking any challenge to his authority. "Yet to my amazement, I stayed on for another two years."

Following Ogilvy & Mather, he went to Grey Advertising. Grey was different. He reminisced, "Some of the craziest things I ever did in the advertising business I did there. It was an agency with an entirely different approach and cast of characters--more like a hometown, composed of various ethnic groups, a huge think tank unlike anything in the advertising business of the Thirties and Forties." Recalling some of the agencies at which he worked, he noted, "McCann-Erickson was the waspiest; Ogilvy & Mather was the most professional; and Grey was perhaps the most fun.”

Country living beckons
Lincoln Diamant and his wife, the former Celia Nash, a New York City schoolteacher whom he had met at an Adirondack summer camp at Loon Lake, were married in 1945. Six years later, they moved to Tarrytown and became seriously interested in nature. Two children were born in Westchester.

Son Rolf Diamant, 58, is today the superintendent of Vermont's first national park, the 643-acre Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. Located near the village of Woodstock, it memorializes persons closely associated with it: George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), the first modern discussion of ecology; Frederick Billings, lawyer and railroad entrepreneur; and Mary French Rockefeller, Frederick Billings's granddaughter and her husband, Laurance Rockefeller, the donors of the park. As the only national park that focuses on conservation history and land stewardship in America, the park is unique.

Lincoln Diamant's wife, Celia, died in 1967. Their daughter, Julia, died in 1982. He later married Joan Champion, also a former Walden student, whose mother had been a teacher at the school. Joan Diamant is every bit as creative as her husband and achieved fame locally for her landscape paintings. She studied at the Art Students' League in New York City under Reginald Marsh and Robert Brachman and later independently with Jack Levine. A painter in the realistic tradition of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Eakins, Levine is a rebel against pomposity in art.. Her work was handled by Images in Briarcliff Manor and by the Framing Gallery in Hawthorne. Until she became hampered by tendinitis, she also did fine bookbinding.

Lincoln Diamant closed out his working life with a new career: cost control. Because of his broad experience in radio and TV advertising, he was unusually well fitted to determine the fairness of suppliers' invoices. Between 1981 and 1992, he provided monitored billings for big advertisers, including publisher Condé Nast, food processor Nestlé and Bristol-Myers, manufacturers of over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Such consulting work gave him an opportunity to increase the tempo of his historical research, and he would spend his afternoons in the New York Public Library. An impressive series of books about the American Revolution followed in quick succession.

But one book idea nagged at him for many years. In 1909, his father, 23-year-old Rudolph Diamant, a freelance journalist newly arrived in America, had cabled a series of dispatches to the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, a leading European financial daily. Lincoln Diamant recognized that these accounts of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration as seen through the eyes of his inquisitive and sensitive father offered a fresh new take on the almost forgotten events. Yet the 23,000 words of detailed reportage in the Dutch language were inaccessible to American readers.

With the centennial of the 1909 celebration fast approaching, he determined to see them translated and published. This has been done in a fascinating volume entitled Hoopla on the Hudson, published in 2003 by the Purple Mountain Press. Practicing his own brand of alchemy for our pleasure, he transmuted the images of his father's words into a clear picture of this forgotten celebration. He also annotated this unusual work with explanatory notes and richly illustrated it with rare photographs, many no longer available. (Most were destroyed in the disastrous 1911 fire that consumed the New York State Library in Albany.) In this opus, Lincoln Diamant was brilliantly successful, mining lodes rich in both style and subject to show that he is an incomparable virtuoso on the keyboard of language.

It was my privilege to enjoy the friendship of Lincoln Diamant for many years. His vast knowledge and quiet erudition never ceased to amaze. He was both a gentleman in the finest sense of the word and a gentle man. In all that time, I never heard him say an unkind word about a fellow human being, saintliness we might all aspire to. The incomparable and many-sided Lincoln Diamant not only was a remarkable local natural resource, he was a veritable national treasure.

Appendix:
A Lincoln Diamant Bibliography

Posted by Notorc @ 10/31/2009 11:00:00 AM