It Takes a Committee – Our Movie Magicians

Muriel Fox

What is our favorite activity in the evening? At Kendal on Hudson, without doubt, a favorite is watching movies. Our KoH Movie Committee works continuously – often magically – to provide us with the right films at the right time. It isn’t easy to schedule movies that suit all our widely varied tastes; the committee has been doing this for more than 17 years.

The Committee provides us with movies that we watch over Channel 970 in our apartments Tuesday through Sunday evenings at 8 p.m. If KoH has no lecture on a Monday evening, the committee shows a movie then, too. In addition, movies are provided in the Gathering Room at least one Sunday a month at 3 p.m., enhanced by freshly made popcorn prepared through the good graces of Fred Coppola.

From 2008 to 2021 the Movie Committee was chaired by Leonore Meyer. Today its cochairs, Roberta Poupon and Annette Leyden, have been joined by Jo Cameron, Sara Cook, Lailani Moody, David Shover and Richard Schneeman. Netflix remains the source of most of our movies, with payment by the Residents Council. We’re grandfathered to hold eight films at the Movie Committee at a time. Since the Covid pandemic struck, Netflix and the Post Office have been less reliable than in past years. Therefore, we’re grateful for other film resources. These include the movie collections of Leonore Meyer and her family, other resident collections, the KoH Library, and the entire Westchester County Library System, through the very accommodating Warner Library. How does this all come together?

Our Movie Committee meets for one hour every two weeks in Roberta’s apartment to plan the schedule two weeks ahead. All decide together on the choice of movies. They adjust the schedule to ensure a balance of different genres such as comedy, drama, romance, nature, thrillers, Westerns, International, music, dance, and occasionally animation (Shrek was a recent hit). You’re very welcome to recommend titles to the Movie Committee. A dozen residents do this regularly, but other people occasionally propose films they’ve enjoyed elsewhere.

Here are examples of the magic created by the Movie Committee to fulfill our special needs: A film that will be mentioned in a KoH course or lecture. (For example, Kate Farrington’s popular course on Irish dramatists required one movie from Netflix, two from the Westchester Library System, and one from Kate’s private collection.) When a famous movie star dies or appears prominently in the news, they search for one of the star’s movies. When a lecture or performance is suddenly canceled, they provide a substitute movie to keep us entertained.

You may wonder why the Movie Committee uses DVDs and not streaming. An abundance of good films, old and new, are available only on DVD. A few recent examples: Minari, Coda, The Tender Bar, The Duke, Downton Abbey (A New Era). One can hope that in the near future our KoH network will find a way to transmit movies obtained by streaming.

By that time many more residents will have smart TVs or Roku devices to accommodate streaming. But the imminent death of DVDs has been somewhat exaggerated, and DVDs will probably remain our bread and butter for a long time to come. Remember to look at the front page of Spotlight every Friday and on the News Corner of CATIE or on the Residents Website for the coming week’s movies, so you can mark your calendar in advance.

Survey Results

Residents gave the committee a resounding vote of confidence when 140 responded to its September survey. Seventy-five residents say they watch a movie at 8 p.m. on Channel 970 at least once or twice a week, and 60 watch them on Sunday afternoons in the Gathering Room. Our favorite genres are drama, documentaries, and mystery. The 55 residents who called for more Gathering Room movies on weekday evenings are already finding their wishes fulfilled. The committee has begun to offer movies in the Gathering Room on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. With more volunteers to assist, we can have more evening showings in the GR.

My Great-Grandfather the Dentist

Hubert B. Herring

When, as a child, I heard grandiose tales of my great-grandfather the dentist, I could have been forgiven for thinking that before he came along, dentistry was like something out of a sepia-toned comic skit, with mallet as sedative and crude pliers for extraction. And his arrival, in my imagination, instantly brought the modern dental office.

But in this case, I was to learn, hyperbole and fact were surprisingly close cousins. For when I mention that fabled ancestor, G. V. Black, to dentists, roles are reversed and their jaws drop (though this has yet to translate into a free root canal). His statue stands in Lincoln Park in

Chicago. And the reproduced office of the man considered “the father of modern dentistry” is a central feature of the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore.

The museum, a Smithsonian affiliate, had been open for a decade, but having seen Black’s office years ago when it was at the Smithsonian in Washington, I had not ventured to Baltimore. But a sizable gift from the family of a cousin (a fellow descendant, of course) went to spiff up the Black exhibit, prompting me to make that long-overdue visit. (Naturally, in deference to the occasion, I first brushed my teeth thoroughly at our hotel.)

After making our way through a gaggle of preschool children who had yet to know the dentist’s drill, and walking past an intriguing variety of exhibits – George Washington’s dentures, film stars’ smiles, a poster for the 1938 Our Gang short “The Awful Tooth,” fearsome 17th-century instruments, 7th-century Mayan shell implants – we spied a life-size Greene Vardiman Black, in all his bearded, buttoned-up glory, surrounded by his leather dental chair and desk, cabinets of tools (most of which he invented) and elaborate pedaloperated drill (also his creation).

In one display were the bare bones of a remarkable life: Born in 1836 on an Illinois farm. A mere 20 months of formal schooling. (“The boy with his dog and gun learned more in a day than a teacher taught in a month,” as one biographer put it.) Apprenticed to his brother, a doctor, at 17. Learned all he needed to know – probably just about all there was to know – of dentistry in a few months. Served briefly in the Civil War. Set up shop in Jacksonville, Ill., doing tireless research into all things tooth. (A daughter born there, vintage 1876, became the fearsome grandmother of my youth.) Invention after invention: 102 “cutting instruments,” by one count; silver amalgam for fillings with just the right chemical balance. Joined the faculty of the Northwestern University Dental School in 1891, and in 1897 became its dean.

In one striking photograph, Black is shown in a classroom, with tooth models, three feet tall, arrayed in front of him as teaching tools.

In the mid-19th century, dentistry was all about mending inevitable damage from an eating lifestyle, and it was practiced by pretty much anyone who hung up a shingle. A great part of Black’s legacy was helping to elevate dentistry to a profession and, as he put it in 1896, to shift to “preventive rather than reparative dentistry.” In 1908, two volumes of his Operative Dentistry appeared, followed by a third in 1915, the year he died. “For their clarity, illustrations and exhaustive investigation,” a dental journal declared in 1974, “they contain the backbone of dentistry.”

So, yes, he wrenched dentistry into the modern age, but he was far from a modern man in, say, his views on equality of the sexes. Among my artifacts is a pair of elaborate silver candlesticks given to the venerable G. V. at a 1910 banquet at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. A photograph shows a grand ballroom packed with perhaps 400 tuxedo-clad men and not one woman. And in an 1899 letter to my grandmother, then a young bride, he wrote: “A woman’s chief glory is the glory of her husband. Any action of hers that sets him ahead in the world advances her.”

But that’s a quibble. He is an imposing, white-bearded figure in my circa 1913 family photograph, with my 6-year-old mother at his feet. At one point, I’ve read, his beard reached his waist (now that would be an imposing sight from a dental chair). And he was far from one-dimensional — he was said to be an accomplished violinist, cellist, and singer, he once built his own boat, he learned French and German to study medical texts, and he taught himself to be ambidextrous by writing two letters simultaneously.

So with all those inventions so widely used for decades, we descendants must be fabulously wealthy, right? Well, no. Black was, by all accounts, mostly indifferent to money and had little interest in patents. Instead of commercializing his alloy for fillings, for instance, he gathered manufacturers, charged a nominal fee to teach them to make the alloy, and left the business details to them. How un-American! Yet it deepens my respect for this tirelessly inventive man.

Every Second Counts

Jack Miller

Many citizens of “the Great State of Texas” may now regret that Texas still refuses, evidently for political reasons, to participate in either of the two huge power grids, each serving about half of the rest of the nation. This reluctance persists even after February 2021, when millions of Texans lacked heat and running water for over a week because a huge Texas ice storm caused massive power failures. Texas could access no wider grid for its power: hundreds of Texans died as a result!

On a seemingly unrelated topic, a month after beginning Daylight Savings Time, my watch trailed our new Sony clock radio by 60 seconds! “Time.gov” revealed that the Sony clock radio had gained a full minute; my watch was quite accurate. In our modest residence we found twenty “clocks.” The five “Internet clocks” – in computers, cell phones and the cable TV box – are surely the most accurate.

We used “Time.gov” to check the accuracy of our remaining clocks: three on desks, three in kitchen appliances, three in house phones, two alarm clocks, two wrist watches and two clock-radios. A daily spreadsheet eventually showed that our fifteen non-Internet clocks display two conspicuously distinct timekeeping behaviors.

Ten are now “Thoreau clocks” in tribute to Henry David Thoreau, who anticipated their behavior in 1845 when he wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Our ten “Thoreau clocks” hear decidedly “different drummers.” Their speeds are presumably controlled by ten microchip-based oscillators. Three rely solely on batteries and are each accurate to within less than a quarter of a second per day. The ancient battery-powered RadioShack clock radio is – over any single month – the most accurate of all fifteen non-Internet clocks! The other seven Thoreau clocks have power cords. Each consistently either gains or loses more than a quarter of a second daily. The least accurate by far, the Sony clock radio, gains two seconds daily and would have been eight minutes fast when Daylight Savings ended in November; we now reset it regularly. Our “lock-step clocks” –the remaining five – have power cords. Each typically gains at least twenty seconds over a period of four to eight days, then loses as much within the next two or three days. Barring power failures, none ever requires resetting except for Daylight Savings, although each is rarely exactly “correct.” They all undoubtedly remain in lock step with our 60 cycle-persecond power frequency.

Seventy years ago, my father materially assisted in my Junior High School science project on clock accuracy with his short-wave radio receiver, his cathode-ray oscilloscope and his considerable expertise! Our 1950s wall-outlet clocks were all “lock-step” clocks, since “microchip-based oscillators” did not yet exist. However, they were more accurate than even our current lock-step clocks! Once set correctly, and absent power failures, they rarely deviated by more than fifteen seconds, and usually self-corrected within hours or even minutes, not days or weeks. In particular, they predictably accelerated – briefly – on weekdays when our huge local General Motors factory shut down for lunch. This, Dad explained, was because his employer, our local private power company, relied on a single huge generator beneath Niagara Falls just 15 miles away. The company monitored and promptly corrected its rotation speed, and thus its power frequency, whenever it accelerated briefly due to reduced demand. This must be vastly more difficult today for power drawn from either of the nation’s two electric grids, each combining the output of hundreds of widely dispersed generators and each presumably rotating at its own independently varying speed. Now that we understand their idiosyncrasies, the saner among us – unlike Texans –can surely appreciate our much more reliable large electric grids and accommodate to our therefore only slightly less accurate electric clocks.