calimac

The composer (not the redwoods state park guy) whose chamber music concerts I went to a couple months ago. It is only the success and satisfaction of that which reconciles me at not being at this tonight.

I thought about it, I actually did. But it's a considerable distance away from here, and that kind of a trip is a bit beyond me at this point. I'll just have to hope the American Symphony records some of this some day, a question they waffled on when I called them up and asked about it.

Besides liking his music, I feel a personal affinity to Cowell on the grounds of geographical proximity. As all reference sources will tell you, Cowell was born in 1897 in Menlo Park, California, a town very near here, which I often visit, and where I lived myself for a couple of years. And while he moved around a lot, spending part of his childhood in the Midwest and using San Francisco and New York City as alternating bases in his active years of concertizing in the 1920s and early 30s, he maintained ties to Menlo Park, and was living there at the time of his infamous arrest for homosexuality in 1936. After his release from prison in 1940, he moved to the Hudson River Valley and never lived in California again.

But where, exactly, in Menlo Park did he live? As a local, I was curious. It's a long, stringy town, from oak-festooned grass hills to soggy baylands. Biographical sources didn't say, though they did refer to him walking in those hills, so I presumed it was near that end of town. I checked city directories from the 1930s, which didn't give a street address for him, only a rural postal delivery code.

The author of a forthcoming biography spoke at the festival in November, and I was planning on asking him, but it turned out I didn't have to. The program (now online at the infamous Scribd) gave the answer. Pages 24-25 are on Cowell's life in the Bay Area, and it gives an address, 2156 Harkins Avenue. That's just off Alameda de las Pulgas, right near the famous Flea Street Cafe, at the top of the alluvial plain just below the hills.

Later on I went by. That address is now occupied by a brown shingle house that looks old enough; is it true, as the book said, that the original home no longer exists? More recently I visited the town historical society. The elderly man volunteering there said that as a boy he'd known Cowell, who came by his home in that area to play the piano. He showed me photographs that demonstrated that the house was a different, smaller building, and we found maps confirming the street pattern of the time.

So that's one minor historical question answered. But I still will miss being at that concert.