Tuesday, October 11, 2011
As I Remember Him: An Appreciation of Lou Brennan
BIOGRAPHY
Editor's Note: These pages previously recorded the bare bones of Lou
Brennan's biography. It was replete with facts any competent researcher could
uncover in the public record. But no mere biography, however detailed, can
capture the man. This is an attempt to flesh out a portrait of him.
After several
years of living in Turkey ,
my family and I arrived in Croton. Turkey is one vast
archaeological treasure trove whose prehistory had fascinated me. I determined
to find out more about Westchester 's
past.
I
met Lou Brennan through a book, one he had written. It was No Stone Unturned: An Almanac of
American Pre-history, and it was breathtakingly fascinating.
Here
was scientific information written in prose honed to a dry, hard brilliance.
His style was clear, reasonable, free from flamboyance and unobtrusively
studded with appropriate scientific references.
When
I learned from the book that the author was also a Croton journalist who lived
in Ossining ,
I made a point of introducing myself to him at a village meeting.
"You
can't miss him," someone told me. ""Lit or unlit, a pipe is
always in his mouth."
As
in his book, he was in person every bit as delighted to impart his excitement
with prehistory in the same effortless way and to express his sense of wonder
about uncovering the past.
An Arrowhead
Not long afterwards, on Croton Point my son found an Indian
arrowhead, symmetrically beautiful and surprisingly wide--almost an equilateral
triangle. We took it to Lou for his identification."That's a 'Manlius
broad,'" he said. "It's not originally from this area." He went
on to explain how it had been fashioned in the Mohawk Valley and had probably
been traded to the Kitchawanck Indians in our area.
Magically,
he created for us a vibrant picture of Indian life as it must have been along
the Hudson before the white man
came, peopling the landscape with Stone Age flesh-and-blood human beings. His
breadth of knowledge was awe-inspiring.
Lou
Brennan was a born teacher who almost missed his calling. I think his proudest
days came when Briarcliff College ,
and later Pace University ,
added him to the faculty as Professor of Archaeology.
Unburdened
by the doctrinaire training and authoritarianism of the professional
archaeologist, Lou Brennan was at liberty to speculate and comment in admirably
lucid fashion about the fascinating subject of archaeology.
Lou, the Writer
Lou's writing style had a disarming quality, couched as it was in
simple, clear, everyday English. Yet the subtlety of thought was such that
readers would find themselves reading slowly and luxuriatingly--savoring the
pleasure of a work whose style was polished and whose insights were deep.
In
1975, as a book publisher, I brought out a collection of nonfiction articles about
angling and commissioned Lou Brennan to write a contribution for the volume, The Angler’s Bible.
He titled the piece "How Primitive Man Fished" and began it this way:
"No
human aim or endeavor has so stimulated the mind of man, since man had a mind,
to the heights, and depths, of its cunning as the capture of fish, lots of
fish, a particular species of fish, or even, as with Moby Dick, a special fish.
"Of
course, Moby Dick was a whale, and whales are mammals--but that is a
biologist's point of view. Whatever lives in the waters of the earth and gets
about them by means of fin and tails falls under the jurisdiction of the Guild
of St. Peter, the oldest profession--masculine, that is."
He
went on to introduce a favorite thesis: "The first men to arrive in
American from Asia 40,000 years ago, give or take
10,000 years, had to have been fishermen, perhaps of no great skill but
certainly of long experience. In lifestyle they were beachcombers, drifting
slowly southward along the Pacific shoreline from where Asia and Alaska were
once connected by land to, eventually, South America, sustaining themselves
almost entirely on the fruits of the sea."
It
was vintage Lou Brennan, calling into play his skills as a writer. He captured
the reader's attention with an intriguing “lede”(in the spelling of
journalists) and then tinctured the piece with delightful tidbits from his vast
store of arcane knowledge. He later wrote other pieces for me on how primitive
man hunted and used the atlatl, an ingenious spear-throwing device for a
companion volume on the shooting sports.
Lou, the Archaeologist
Entire books have been written describing the aims and objectives
of archaeology. Lou Brennan dug, of course, as other archaeologists do, because
he was a dedicated scientist. But he also dug out of pity and humility, that
the past might live again and be understood, giving meaning to the present and
offering hope for the future.
Thanks
to Lou Brennan's industry and astute interpretative powers, much that would
have been lost to us in this fast-developing corner of Westchester has been salvaged from
oblivion. With his uncanny knowledge of Indian habits, his eagle eye could spot
with unerring accuracy aboriginal village sites and their rubble pits--the
"Croton Dumps" of prehistory.
Archaeology
was his way of settling the debt that we of the present owe to the unknown
peoples of the past who have gone before and who, by the very fact of being
here, have imperceptibly changed the way of life and environment we know today.
We
of today draw our conclusions from accidentally encountered
artifacts--curiously touching evidence of their presence: a perfectly crafted
arrowhead, pristine as the day it was lost; a child's treasured bright garnet
bead; a well-worn needle of deer bone. We study these and learn much from them;
still we can only wonder about the hopes and dreams of those whose hands
touched them long ago..
Once
there were Indians all over this place. Yet the northeastern United
States presents
special problems for archaeologists in deducing its complex history. The ice
sheets of the last glaciation, with changes in sea and river levels, and highly
acidic soils, have destroyed the kinds of artifacts that survive in other
areas. The resulting archaeological record is often fragmentary and always
complicated.
Thanks
to the largely unsung detective work of the Lou Brennans of archaeology, these
shadowy peoples of the past have been given a measure of form and substance for
us. If we glean anything from archaeological research, it is that we are all in
this together.
Lou's
interests were not confined to prehistoric archaeology. At the suggestion of
the Tarrytown Historical Society, he excavated the ruins of the gambrel-roofed
Requa cottage. Located on the property of the General Foods Technical Center in Tarrytown, it was the
only intact tenant farm of the early colonial period to be excavated in the
lower Hudson Valley .
Lou
managed to bridge the gap between professional, academically trained
archaeologists and avocational archaeologists, and deplored the alienation that
sometimes permeated their relationships. He often pointed out that trained
nonprofessionals did much of the work of digging and made up most of the
membership of state archaeological societies.
Always
questioning and speculating, Lou's enthusiasm to unravel the secrets of the
past were infectious. For his Saturday "digs," he assembled a devoted
band of acolytes of diverse backgrounds to whom he taught the painstaking
techniques of digging, sifting, sorting and interpreting finds. One improbable
but dedicated digger was a steelworker who spent weekdays perilously teetering
on the skeletons of Manhattan skyscrapers.
Lou, the Person
Lou was an exceedingly modest human being who considered all human
beings absurd, including himself. As a journalist, he was not above having his
little joke. News items--or even gossip--too hot to handle in traditional
fashion made their way into a highly individualistic column bylined
"Audax." Many readers assumed the name had its roots in audire, the Latin verb
"to hear" or "to listen."
Lou
never explained its derivation, but anyone familiar with Latin would recognize audax as the third declension adjective
meaning "bold, daring, courageous--even reckless or rash." From it,
we get the English words "audacious" and "audacity." And
bold, daring and courageous the column was, often treading on local corns.
It
is interesting to trace the growing presence of Audax on the Croton-Cortlandt News.
A June 20, 1957, article entitled "Factional Fights" was signed with
the cryptic word "Audax," presumably to show that it was opinion and
not reportage. In November, an article was headed, "Audax Explains
All." The next month articles titled "Audax Speaking" appeared.
The last issue in 1957 carried greetings to Audax's sources: "Happy New
Year from Audax to the boys on the corner, the boys in the backroom and the
girls on the backyard fence."
Once
the weekly Croton-Cortlandt News was put to bed, Lou could relax.
Wednesday nights were given over to bridge. Lou and wife Peg and Hamilton Avenue
neighbors Realtor Albert Schatz and his wife, Liz, would alternate in hosting
games at their respective homes. The Brennans had introduced Al, then a TV
producer, to Liz in 1954. Additional bridge games were also held Saturday
nights following dinner together.
Lou
was a lover of the works of the Bard of Avon and actively promoted Croton's
annual Shakespeare Festival directed each summer by teacher Fred Blais. That
familiarity with the Bard was once demonstrated for Liz Schatz. Searching for
the source of a Shakespeare quotation, she mentioned a couple of the key words.
"Lou
identified the quotation as being in Act Two Scene One of As You Like It," she told me. "Off the top of his
head, Lou proceeded to recite the entire scene, leading up to the quotation I
was seeking:
"Sweet
are the uses of diversity,
Which, like
the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a
precious jewel in his head;
And this
our life, exempt from pubic haunt,
Finds
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in
stones, and good in every thing.
I would not
change it."
Lou
not only named the players and the background of the action, he identified the
setting as the Forest of Arden--in reality the same Ardennes forest through
which German troops and tanks came crashing in 1944's Battle of the Bulge.
In
his newspaper editorials and in person, Lou was a fierce, emotional champion of
the causes in which he believed, one of which was education reform. The late
Perry Crawford recalled for me that when he was the head of Croton's Board of
Education, Lou was a frequent visitor to his home to discuss issues.
"He
would always sit in the same armchair in our living room. Occasionally, to make
a point he would vehemently pound on both arms of the chair with clenched
fists. My wife became so concerned about the ability of the chair to withstand
such onslaughts she quietly substituted another chair before his next
visit."
Sally
West, on the staff of the Croton Free Library, recalled Lou's empathy with
children. When she was a Cub Scout den mother, her cub pack became interested
in local Indian lore. A friend suggested Lou Brennan as a source.
"He
was wonderful," Ms. West recollected. He had a vast knowledge and
suggested many sources. The resulting report on Indian sign language was a
great success."
When
Crotonite Evelyn Frankel's son Paul expressed an interest in archaeology, his
father, Robert, arranged for Paul to accompany Lou on a dig in Montrose. The
first Saturday went swimmingly. Paul found some squirrel bones among the refuse
in an Indian kitchen midden and was allowed to keep them.
Now
bitten by the archeology bug, the eager ten-year-old Paul turned up again a
week later. This time he made another find, but Lou had to explain to him that
the objects were valuable.
"They
have to go to the MALFA museum collection."
Paul's
response was final. "Well, if I can't keep what I find," he said, putting
down his trowel, "I'm not going to dig anymore."
I
would occasionally join Lou on a dig--more as an observer than as a participant. One Saturday, hoping to stimulate my
son's interest in archaeology, I brought him to a dig at Twombly's Landing, the
site of the present-day Eagle Bay condominiums. By
mid-morning, son Jeff's interest had flagged.
Lou
had made an interesting find: tiny flakes of flint no bigger than fingernail
clippings. Apparently these were the byproducts of the making of small arrow
points for shooting birds. He had painstakingly arranged them in a line on a
long two-by-six plank. Just at this moment, my son jumped on the end of the
plank like a circus acrobat. The tiny flakes of sharp stone flew up in the air
in all directions.
I
would have forgiven Lou had he exploded. Instead, he just bit down harder on
his pipe. With a pained expression on his face, he began to look for the tiny
flakes all over again.
Final Years
After Croton-Cortlandt News publisher Albert Granovsky fell and
broke a thighbone in 1972, he sold the paper to John Mullen, publisher of the Putnam County Courier.
Lou continued on as editor.
Lou's
last journalistic hurrah, however, came on November 15, 1973. In a note on the
editorial page of the paper, now tabloid sized, at which he had so long
labored, he said farewell "after seventeen tumultuous, eventful, historic
and satisfying years."
He
wrote: "The temptation to grow maudlin about this long association with a
fascinating, unique, attractive and genuinely lovable community should be
resisted. As a reporter and editor I have never been maudlin, because I really
don't know how to be.
"Let
this be said in parting: I never had an enemy I didn't like, and I never had a
friend with whom I did not, on occasion, differ. I have been enormously
enriched by my intimate contacts with a variegated and vital population.
"Memories
will not dim as I go on to what, as everyone must know by now is my first love,
archaeology." Then he added, "But I'll be seeing you."
The Croton-Cortlandt News continued publication until 1984, when
it gave up the ghost. After a two-year gap in locally reported news,
Croton's Charles Nelson began publishing The
Gazette in October of 1986.
A Last Goodbye
I can still see him as he was at our last meeting just before he
died: alive, lusty, vibrant and excited about his teaching career at Pace University .
It was just before St.
Patrick's Day. He had dropped in at my home on Ridge Road to report on his progress on
the next book he was writing. It was to be an account of how mankind had spread
around the globe from early beginnings
in East
Africa . I had convinced him to write a book proposal for
such a book, and Macmillan had snapped it up.
We
drank beer and nibbled cheese together while he described his recent
activities. He was excited about the coming of spring, for it meant that
archaeological digging could resume. The book was going well. And he had just
planted peas in his backyard, an annual rite performed by gardeners in the
Northeast around St. Patrick's Day.
As
we talked, I reflected that he was an anachronism in modern garb. His sinewy
frame and Celtic visage called for leather and buckles, a basket-hilted
broadsword at his belt, and a pair of dragoon pistols in his jackboots.
The
board at which we sat was properly bare and brown. But it was a Victorian
cottage pine table in our modest kitchen. It should have been a stout oaken
tavern table washed by the slops from heavy pewter tankards and worn smooth by
muscular sword hands.
There
would have been a huge fireplace and fire over which a dripping roast turned on
a spit. To match his always-spirited conversation, Rabelais and Villon would
have been our tablemates.
Although
neither of us knew it, it would mark our last goodbye. In the final week of his
life, he addressed two historical society meetings in Tarrytown and Ossining on successive nights. At the
Ossining meeting, he became particularly nostalgic, harking back in his
anecdotes to his years in Ohio .
After returning home, he complained of indigestion but attributed it to a
hurried dinner of a sandwich and a beer.
Charon,
the aged boatman, came for Lou and ferried him across the Stygian river while
he slept that night of March 17, 1983--St. Patrick's Day, of all days. I am
sure Lou was at the bow of the vessel looking for a promontory on which earlier
arrivals must have camped.
A
week after his death a memorial was held at the Briarcliff campus of Pace University in the very
building where he had begun his teaching career. Friends, former students,
archaeologists--both professional and amateur--and those who knew him only from
his writings came from as far as Maine and the Carolinas in a touching tribute.
No Grave Marker
L. Scott Bailey, publisher and editor of the hard-cover magazine Automobile Quarterly, for whom I once worked, used to call
me "Tombstone ."
The attribution came from my habit of beginning research about a historical
figure by visiting that person's grave. The editor thought it peculiar of me to
be "communing with the dead," but he misunderstood my motive.
Gravestones are an ideal starting point, for they often contain information not
available from other sources.
Had
I wanted to begin these reminiscences with a pilgrimage to the grave of Lou
Brennan, however, I would have been disappointed. There is no grave, no marker,
no stone monument. A dedicated scientist and educator to the end, he willed his
body to medical science. It was a characteristic Lou Brennan gesture, and says
almost everything there is to know about this wonderful guy.
It
is now nearly 30 years since Lou Brennan left us, the voice of reason that was
his stilled forever. The sentient humanism of his writing has been sorely
missed, lo these many years. His like will not pass this way again.
I
append a bibliography of Lou Brennan's books. It is my sad duty to report that
although his nonfiction works are widely available, not a single Lou Brennan
novel is to be found in any library in Westchester .
The
manuscripts of his novels were donated to the library of Ohio University at its Portsmouth campus. His archaeological
manuscripts were given to Seton Hall University ,
whose Museum and Department of Archaeology have long specialized in the early
inhabitants of the Hudson and Delaware rivers.
It
has not been easy to grow accustomed to Lou Brennan's absence. No synthesizer
has come along in the book world to take his place in communicating the oneness
and uniqueness of human history. It is as if a mighty tree has gone down with a
great shout upon the hills, leaving a lonesome and empty place against the sky.
A Louis A. Brennan Bibliography
NOVELS
Hardcover
These Items of Desire. New
York : Random House, 1953.
Masque of Virtue. New
York : Random House, 1955.
Tree of Arrows. New
York : Macmillan, 1964.
Original paperbacks
An Affair of Dishonor. New
York : Dell Publishing Co., 1955.
More Than Flesh. New
York : Dell Publishing Co., 1957.
Death at Flood Tide. New
York :
Dell Publishing Co., 1958.
The Long Knife. New
York :
Dell Publishing Co., 1960.
NONFICTION
Hardcover
No Stone Unturned: An Almanac of American
Pre-history. New
York : Random House, 1959
The Buried Treasure of Archaeology. New
York : Random House, 1964.
American Dawn: A New Model of American
Prehistory. New
York :
Macmillan, 1970.
Beginner's Guide to Archaeology. Harrisburg , Pa. : Stackpole Books, 1973.
Artifacts of Prehistoric America . Harrisburg , Pa. : Stackpole Books, 1975.
Labels: Louis A. Brennan
Monday, October 10, 2011
Louis A. Brennan: A Life in Full Color
BIOGRAPHY
How does one begin to recreate the life of a polymath
and many-sided friend? Once his was a household name recognized by newspaper
readers in Ossining , Croton and
Cortlandt. Today he lives on in the memories of those who knew and loved him.
But our numbers are legion.
There were several Lou Brennans. One was the author
who could create stories that laid bare the secrets of small town life or
explore the culture patterns of the Iroquois in novels.
Another was the self-taught archaeologist and teacher
who could make the past come alive for a classroom of students, for readers of
his nonfiction books or for an enraptured audience at a Rotary meeting.
Still another was the dedicated journalist who
reported on local affairs and activities without fear or favor, a fierce
fighter for principle no matter whose ox was gored. Louis Arthur Brennan, the
oldest of the five children of Edward Brennan and Gertrude Sherer Brennan was
born in Portsmouth , Ohio , on February 15, 1911.
It would have been difficult for a youth growing up in
the valleys of the Ohio and Scioto
rivers to remain unaware of abundant reminders of Ohio 's first inhabitants.
Known as mound builders, and generally agreed among
archaeologists to have been early American Indians, they left behind countless
earthworks as forts and mounds.
Young Louis became fascinated with the mysterious
mound builders and with their descendants, the Miamis , Shawnees , Wyandottes and
Mingos. Doomed from the start, Ohio 's
Indians had no defense against the land-hungry whites who swarmed into their
lush valleys. By the mid-19th century, their bones, tools and weapons were all
that was left in the bottom lands where they had lived and raised corn, beans,
squash and pumpkins for centuries. His interest in archaeology was to remain
with Lou Brennan for the rest of his life.
After attending Holy Redeemer elementary school and
high school, he left for South Bend , Indiana , and Notre Dame University on
an academic scholarship. Majoring in English, he graduated magna cum laude in
1932.
Another honor came his way that same year. Anthologist
Edward J. O'Brien selected Lou's short story "Poisoner in Motley" for
inclusion in his annual short story collection, Best Short Stories of
1932.
Twenty-one-year-old Louis Brennan was now in
distinguished company. Among the works of the 25 authors represented was
William Faulkner's "Smoke" and Morley Callaghan's "The Red
Hat." Other well-known names included in that year's collection were Whit
Burnett, Erskine Caldwell and Manuel Komroff.
In 1932, the country was in the throes of the Great
Depression, and work of any kind was hard to find especially for an English
major. Bread lines were common, and homeless veterans sold apples for five
cents on street corners. Evictions were an everyday occurrence that left
families huddled forlornly on the street amid their possessions. Lou took what
jobs he could find. InCincinnati , Ohio , he became assistant area director for the National
Youth Administration (NYA), a New Deal "alphabet agency" providing
jobs for young people. Later he was a projects manager for a Cincinnati firm of
architects and engineers, Grunkmeyer and Sullivan Associates.
Lou Brennan married his childhood sweetheart, Margaret
Pirron of Portsmouth , in the chapel
of Notre Dame University in 1936.
In the early 20th century, the river that had brought
commerce to Portsmouth became
a menace with its floods. Portsmouth constructed
a mammoth floodwall of reinforced concrete extending three miles along
the Ohio River and raised it in
stages to control a 62-foot stage of the river.
This should have been high enough--but the flood that
inundated the Ohio and Mississippi valleys
in January of 1937 broke all previous records and reached a height of 71 feet.
Flood waters surged through the city causing extensive loss of life and
property. The Brennans' daughter Ann was born in that year. That epic flood and
the floodwall would later play a role in a Lou Brennan novel.
A War Intervenes
When this country entered World War II, he joined the Navy, rising to
the rank of lieutenant and commanding a gunboat in the Pacific. After the
costly 1943 landings at Tarawa showed
the need for close fire support for troops on beachheads, the Navy designed the
LCS(L)-class gunboat. In Navy parlance, the letters stood for Landing
Craft-Support (Large).
Displacing 383 tons, with a length of 158 feet and
draft of about six feet of water, these ships provided close fire support
during assault landings. They bristled with weapons--naval guns, rockets and
machine guns. The most heavily armed vessels in the war, they boasted more
firepower per ton than any ship in the U.S. Navy.
Leading all other landing craft in an assault, they
attacked the beach in a line, firing rocket barrages at 1,000, 800 and 500
yards. Next they opened up with their 3-inch bow guns. A few hundred yards off
the beach, they turned and ran broadside, remaining close to the shore to give
withering fire support to the troops pouring ashore from infantry and tank
landing craft.
At Okinawa they
had additional duties, screening vessels at anchor from suicide boat attacks
and intercepting kamikaze planes targeting ships on radar picket duty. Because
they carried excellent fire fighting equipment, these highly maneuverable
gunboats could aid other ships damaged by enemy action.
Separated from the Navy after the war with a Bronze
Star for valor, Lou Brennan returned to the Portsmouth area and bought a small farm.
His intention was to combine farming with income from his writing. He soon
discovered there was comparatively little time for anything else after he
completed the farm's chores.
Unsuccessful at getting his work published, he took
the advice of his literary agent who suggested that he "get off the farm
and do some serious writing." At the urging of his brother-in-law, Frank
Nulty, who lived in Ossining and
with whom he had roomed at Notre Dame, he headed east with wife and daughter.
To be near the New York publishing
scene, the family bought a house on Hamilton Avenue in Ossining in
1948.
Journalism and a Literary Career
Lou became editor of the New Castle News, published in Chappaqua,
the following year. Only one copy of that tabloid-size weekly survives in the
archives of the Chappaqua Historical Society: Volume 6, Number 6, dated
December 1, 1950. Leverett S. Gleason, a highly successful publisher of comic
books, was the publisher of the newspaper. This issue contains 20 pages and
sold for five cents. The front and back pages are on heavier glossy stock and
the inside pages are on ordinary newsprint.
Lou Brennan desperately wanted to become a published
author, continuing to write in his spare time. In 1953, Random House published
his first novel. Titled These Items of Desire, its setting was
the small city of Riverside , Ohio --a thinly disguised Portsmouth .
Reviewer M.P. McKay in Library Journal
identified it as a first novel, calling the characters "well drawn"
and the story "well told," thus assuring that the book would be
bought by librarians.
In the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, F.H.
Bullock remarked, "The materials of These Items of Desire, if
generally on the sordid side, are unfailingly interesting and human."
Writing in The New York Times Book
Review, reviewer James Kelly was unstinting in his praise: "Lavish is
the word for Louis A. Brennan's first novel. He has ransacked a full cupboard
to bring us this high-fidelity tale of love and life in a medium sized Ohio town. As a
sweeping, sprawling reportage of civic divertissements and interior pitched
battles between the sexes, These Items of Desire joins
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg , Ohio and John O'Hara's A
Rage to Live in a growing American tradition. Call it a sermon on love
or a handbook on man-woman behavior, it adds up to a big important novel. Mr.
Brennan would be hard put to make his second a better one."
After the New Castle News folded in
late 1952, Lou Brennan occupied himself with writing, and completed three
novels. The 1953 reviewer's prediction about a second novel proved true in 1955
with Masque of Virtue, also set in mythical Riverside , Ohio .
Reviewers were not quite so loud in their praise; Lou always attributed this to
the severe cuts the publisher insisted be made in the manuscript.
Two other novels followed More Than Flesh in
1957 and Death at Flood Tide in 1958. The latter was a murder
mystery in which the Portsmouth floodwall
and a massive flood play a role.
In 1957, he landed a job as a reporter on the Croton-Cortlandt
News. Founded in 1894 as the Croton Journal and later
named the Croton-Harmon News, the paper was purchased
impulsively in 1952 by Albert Granovsky, a successful manufacturer of furniture
and bedding. Mr. Granovsky, who immediately listed himself on the masthead as
editor and publisher, was a person of impressive accomplishments.
Born in Fall
River , Massachusetts ,
in 1896, he graduated from Harvard in three years. After receiving his degree
in 1918, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and became an aviator. He later admitted
that--in the air or on the ground--he had a terrible sense of direction. After
the war, he became a buyer at Macy's in New York City .
In 1923, he started his own bedding and furniture
factory, and developed and gave the name to the studio couch and sofa bed. Joan
Yanowitch, one of Mr. Granovsky's two daughters, now living in Scarsdale , recalls the
day that her father announced the news. "It was on the patio of the family
home onTeatown Road in Ossining .
He called the family together and said, 'I just sold my business and bought a
newspaper!'" The paper's name was soon changed to the Croton-Cortlandt
News to reflect its broader news coverage.
In Lou Brennan, the fledgling publisher had found a
seasoned professional journalist who put his stamp on the paper and made it
lively. His reportorial beat was the village of Croton and the town of Cortlandt , with occasional forays into the affairs
of Ossining when journalistically
appropriate. He was tireless in his coverage of town and village
meetings, including those of the often-overlooked planning boards and zoning
boards. Nothing happened locally that escaped his notice.
Although Lou Brennan was nominally a reporter, his
name did not appear on the masthead for many years. Bylines were not used, yet
his vast contributions to each issue are evident in news stories and editorials
written in his characteristic style.
He had many admirers among newspaper readers for his
relentless coverage of local affairs and pursuit of the truth. These same
qualities annoyed others who preferred to remain outside the harsh spotlight of
a Lou Brennan story. During his tenure, the Croton-Cortlandt News won
many awards in various categories from the New York Press Association.
The paper sold for ten cents and appeared every
Thursday. Of a page-size called "broadsheet," it was printed on a
flatbed press at the County Press in Croton. The building and
many others, including those along one side of Riverside Avenue , were later demolished to make way for the
divided-lane Route 9 expressway.
The change turned out to be a mixed blessing. Although
through traffic bypassed Croton, the new highway effectively gutted and
destroyed Croton's commercial center known as the "Lower Village ."
Archaeology
Besides his work as a journalist and novelist, Lou Brennan continued
his interest in archaeology, conducting "digs" at local Indian sites
his practiced eye spotted easily. In 1956, he published his first
archaeological report, "Two Possible Coeval Lamokoid Sites near Ossining ." Over the next 26 years, 53 other
meticulous articles of professional quality would be published.
His first popular book about archaeology, No
Stone Unturned: An Almanac of American Pre-history, appeared in 1959.
In it, Lou Brennan undertook to demolish the once-standard belief that man was
a very late comer to the Americas --Mongolian
offshoots who traveled via the Aleutians and
arrived here in much the same condition in which the first European arrivals
found them.
Supported by new carbon-dating techniques, the Brennan
thesis was that man indeed had crossed by the Aleutian chain, but early enough
to hunt mammoths and avoid the short-faced bear. Any accomplishments in
weapons, pottery and weaving were of local invention and occurred on this
continent as early as anywhere else.
Writing in The New York Times Book
Review, George Gaylord Simpson, a respected paleontologist, recorded,
"Brennan's book on prehistoric man in America is not another
popularization of the romance of archaeological discovery. It is a
popularization, and it is romantic, but its romance is that of prehistoric man
himself, and its theme is a polemic more than an exposition. He conveys to the
reader an exciting sense of the humanity of the ancestors of our Indian
neighbors. This is the great value of his book, and it deserves high
praise."
British archaeologist Ronald Jessup's review in The
Saturday Review of Literature commented, "It is far from easy
reading despite touches of dry humor, but it is well worth the effort.
Brennan's theories are carefully presented, though the diffusion-by-migration
experts will not like him at all. But, as the author rightly says, archaeology
is not a case of mere argument. We dig to look and learn."
In 1959, Lou Brennan assumed the unpaid editorship of
the New York State Archaeological Bulletin, transforming
it from a mimeographed newsletter into a respected scientific journal. He would
continue as editor until the day he died. In those 24 years, he produced three
issues a year without missing a single deadline.
Teaching
In 1962, Lou Brennan began teaching archaeology at Briarcliff College , where he founded the Center for
Archaeology and Hudson River Prehistory. It later was accorded academic status
and became a department of the college. Lou Brennan's title was Research
Director and Adjunct Professor of Archaeology, a post he retained after Pace University bought
ailing Briarcliff Collegein 1977.
Later renamed the Museum and Laboratory for
Archaeology (MALFA), the Center moved to the restored Hopkins mansion
at Muscoot Park . For administrative reasons, the
name was changed to Material Archives and Laboratory for Archaeology without
affecting the acronym. It is now headquartered at Croton Point in the Nature Center --the former park superintendent's
residence at the northern tip.
To fill a gap in the literature of archaeology for
young adults, Lou Brennan wrote The Buried Treasure of
Archaeology, which appeared in 1964. Praising it in The New
York Times Book Review, E.B. Garside wrote, "Though designed
mainly for young people this book can be read with enjoyment and profit by
adults." Enthusiastic' best describes Mr. Brennan's evocations. The
author, having a genuine passion for his subject, is able, to a considerable
degree, to humanize his remote peoples. A book of solid quality." He
called it "a survey of the key historic finds written with a force and
assurance out of a fund of knowledge."
Lou Brennan was named editorial chairman of the Bulletin
of the Eastern States Archaeological Federation in 1969. It bothered
him that the organization had no professional journal to match the quality
of American Antiquity. Published by the Society for American
Archaeology, the publication tended to favor the American Southwest, Mexico and Central
America . Four years later, the first issue of Archaeology
of Eastern North America, or AENA, appeared
under his editorship. He was working on the eleventh annual issue when he died
in his sleep during the night of March 17, 1983, at the age of 72.
He was survived by his wife, Margaret
("Peg," to her friends), a daughter, Ann Calam, of Cortlandt, two
sons, Edward, of Gardiner, N.Y., and Matthew, of Ridgefield , Conn. ,
and three grandchildren. Peg Brennan died on December 16, 2006, at the age of
91.
Archaeological societies have not forgotten him. In
1984, the Lower Hudson Chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association
honored him by changing its name to the Louis A. Brennan Lower Hudson Chapter.
In 1998, the Eastern States Archaeological Federation created the Louis A.
Brennan Publications Award, a monetary grant for publishing special reports,
monographs or journals in archaeology. When the award program was announced,
one member remarked, "Lou really saved ESAF by setting up AENA."
Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series
on Lou Brennan.
Labels: Louis A. Brennan