Cabin Lamp When Pete Seeger Sang ... People loved to sing with Pete when he raised his voice in song, and he changed their minds about things in ways that changed their lives. So when Pete's long, intensely creative life ended at age 94 on 27 January this year, No rma and I sang "W e Shall Overcome," around the dinner table-and went on to the heroic ode, "Guan tanamera," and that paean to the m any-ga ted openness of urban life, "O , What a Beautiful City." These songs had added such m eaning to our lives, we fel t that al though the long life was over, its purposes were alive and had become part of our lives. One incident stands out in my mind concerning how his open, generous, radical poli tics helped South Street Seaport raise m oney it really needed to bring in its great ship "1/avertree. It was on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1967 that Pete first cam e to join the South Street crew where Norma and I worked in those days . We had opened the Seaport Museum to the public just three months earlier, and we were happy that 300 people had turned out fo r the occasion. But when the wo rd got out that Pete wo uld be joining us, a milling crowd filled the cobbled Seaport streets to sing with him. And sing they did, all 1,500 of them, arms linked as they m ade the heavens ring wirh songs of protest and of liberation, a nd- in a city and nation bitterly divided over recent crises of the 1960s-Pete called, as always, fo r "love between my bro thers and my sisters, all over this la nd." So it wasn't just numbers of people Pete brought us, but people dedicated to common affections, hopes and purposes in life, different as they might be in ethnic origin, background, or politics. Kent Barwick, a fo under of the Seaport Museum, noted in a conference on what the Seaport contributed to New Yo rk a few yea rs later, that the Seaporr's apppeal included the "the old right and the new left, hard hats and hippies, and rich m en and poor men." And he noted that "both Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley Jr. tie up their boats here." Indeed , when the Sloop Clearwater came to N ew York C ity in 1969, fresh from her builder's ya rd in M aine, with Pete at the helm, he was very much at home in the revived Seaport, to which he had contri buted so much. A few yea rs before joining us he had launched his proj ect to build the Clearwater, a traditional Hudson river sloop, a bi g, broad-beamed wooden vessel whose mission would be to educate young and old New Yorkers in the magnificent natural heritage of the Hudson River, a nd specifically to clean up its banks and waterways, befouled by generations of abuse as a sewer a nd general dumping ground. Clearwater's visit to South Street attracted attention to Pete's interest in our work in history along with his in the environment and wo rld peace. W hen one of our museum's supporters called m e to question the w isdom of Pete's participation in our affa irs-in view of h is radical political views- I said that while I disagreed with some of those views, I, like m any others in the Seaport, felt th at these disagreements stre ngthened rather than vitiated our Am erican democracy. Early the fo llowing year, I had a nother call fro m our supporter. H e invited me to a luncheon at his brewery across the rive r- a luncheon to ra ise the funds we needed to bring in our ship Wavertree! That campaign was a success, as were most things Rudie Schaefer undertook. I don't think he forgot our earlier conversation ; he was not the sort to forget that kind of thing. Indeed , I think he felt he owed us one for sticking to principles on a point we disagreed on. But the real debt was to Pete Seeger, from whom we'd learned to do just that. - Peter Stanford, Editor at Large
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Pete's hand-written letters often included a little sketch of a banjo and of C learwater on the H udson River.
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