RIP Mary Travers

We lost Mary Travers yesterday. (If the name doesn't ring a bell, she was the "Mary" of Peter, Paul & Mary.) She was diagnosed with leukemia several years ago, and underwent chemotherapy which allowed her to have a life-saving bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, it was the side effects of the chemotherapy that killed her.

I saw PP&M several times—although only after they'd split up and then got back together again. Every concert was memorable.

They came in for a lot of criticism from "real" folk singers for having homogenized harmonies and too precise tempos, but their voices blended beautifully and their political and social beliefs literally resonated in their music.

They also came in for some criticism, especially after they got back together in 1978, for being anachronistic, part of a long-ago faded fad. But as Mary said during one concert, "Folk music is not a fad because you [the audience] are not a fad."

But they helped make history. They were invited by Martin Luther King Jr. to sing at the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech and they sang "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer."

Probably the most memorable PP&M concert I attended was in the early 1980s at the old Ontario Place Forum. The Forum was an outdoor venue with seating under its roof for about 3,000, and surrounding grassy hillsides that comfortably accommodated another 8,000 (although some rock concerts drew audiences of more than 20,000). The stage was 20.4 metres in diameter and rotated the full 360° every hour. Rain was forecast for this night, and many people sat on the hills in the drizzle. But then it really began to pour, and the masses moved down to try to at least stand under the roof. Instead, Mary invited as many as would fit to sit on the stage. I don't know how many people wound up sitting on the stage, but it looked pretty cozy. I don't know how the Ontario Place management felt about it, but it was a generous thing to do.

photo credit: Sally Farr


So hammer on, Mary. Keep an eye on us — we still need you.



photo credit: Barry Feinstein


One of my favourite PP&M songs is "Day is Done," which this clips shows them singing for a not-terribly enthusiastic Japanese audience in 1990:




One other note: this Sunday is the 25th anniversary of the death of Steve Goodman, the Chicago folkie who wrote "The City of New Orleans," among other songs you've almost certainly heard. He died of leukemia in 1984. Below is a picture I took of Steve—funnily enough, at the Ontario Place Forum in 1978—which my friend Clay Eals used in Facing the Music, his 2007 biography of Goodman.

Calgary Herald

These figures—from the cast of characters of newspaper newsrooms of old (i.e., even before I started my career)—were cast from the originals on the Calgary Herald Building that was demolished in 1972.

This trio is now located on the Alberta Hotel building on Stephen Avenue, but originally the Southams (then owners of the Herald) commissioned Royal Doulton in the U.K. to design and make 44 figures and masks for the exterior of the newspaper building.

According to information on a Calgary Public Library website, the gargoyles were the work of sculptor Mark Villars Marshall (1879 - 1912), who died shortly after the gargoyles were installed in 1912. Marshall had been a stone carver working on Victorian Gothic Revival churches before he went to work at Royal Doulton's Lambeth Studios in the late 1870s.

At the time of demolition, the Herald building was known as the Greyhound Building, and the gargoyles were scattered, including to other buildings including the Calgary Convention Centre and the University of Calgary.

Maclean-Hunter Ltd. (RIP)

These aren't from a newspaper office, but from the building that used to be the head office of Maclean-Hunter Ltd. on University Avenue here in Toronto. It was built in 1961 for MH which published Maclean’s and Chatelaine magazines as well as a large stable of trade publications.

Maclean-Hunter had been on this site long before that — the company, including its printing plant, had been on the corner of University and Dundas since 1911. The printing plant moved — when? — to Yonge Street and Highway 401, and later to Aurora, Ont.; Maclean-Hunter moved to College Park (the former Eaton's College Street store) in 1983, and ceased to exist when it was bought by Rogers Communications Inc. in 1995. Rogers now publishes Maclean's, Chatelaine and a much smaller (and shrinking) stable of trade and professional publications (including the Medical Post, where I do my Day Job).

So this building was never actually a newspaper office, but it was the hub of a considerable proportion of Canadian periodical publishing. As I describe in Faces on Places, it features an incised naked woman floating in front of a long ribbon on one side of a building, and a naked man floating and holding a ribbon on the other.

When she won the commission for “exterior decorations” on the new MH building, Elizabeth Wyn Wood apparently thought the company had something more sculptural in mind.

“Symptomatic of the diminishing role and significance of sculptural decoration in modern Canadian architecture, Maclean officials agreed to only two simplified entrance panels on ‘Communications,’” said Virginia Baker in her examination of Wood’s life and work.

“Wood interpreted this theme in the form of female and male nude figures symbolizing ‘Sending’ [above] and ‘Receiving,’ [below] respectively.”

Chicago Tribune

I'm still experiencing re-entry to the Day Job, after four weeks off, so forgive me (again) if I don't expound on the future of publishing just yet. However, I wanted to continue the series of newspaper office faces. These two are from Tribune Tower in Chicago.

"Souvenir of Tribune Tower," an undated booklet (looks as though it might be from the 1920s or 1930s) that gives the story of the building and the newspaper (and that I scored on eBay earlier this year), also describes the sculptures in and on the building.

It says that the "whispering man" (above) typifies "insidious rumour," while the "shouting man" (below) is the "spirit of open rumour or news."

Hmmm ... not sure I ever thought of news as "open rumour."

San Antonio Express-News

This is the second in a series of pictures of sculpture on old newspaper buildings. This is the San Antonio Express-News building. While a star marks Iowa City on the map on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, one of the figures here is merely pointing to San Antonio's location on this map. (See detail below, and click for larger)

The frieze, titled "Enlightening of the Press" and designed by sculptor Pompeo Coppini, allegorically describes the mission of a newspaper. The globe is connected to phone and telegraph wires representing news being communicated around the world. The six figures surrounding the globe represent Labour, Education, Knowledge (he's the one whose finger points to Texas on the globe), Enlightenment, Truth and Justice.

I'm still on vacation, so speculation on the future of journalism in general or newspapers in particular will have to wait for another day. It's too damned hot for serious thinking anyway.

Iowa City Press-Citizen

I'm just back from four days in Iowa City at my sister's wedding. I took more than 340 pictures at the wedding, rehearsal dinner, reception, visit to the county recorder's office, etc., so forgive me if I post some pictures I took from 2002. (That was the year she moved to the Midwest. She had fibromyalgia or something like it at the time and wasn't able to drive. So being the outstanding big sister that I am, I drove her (and her two cats and dog) from Blacksburg, Va., where she had been a math professor at Virginia Tech, to Iowa City where she was about to become a student again, in the University of Iowa's creative non-fiction programme. Yay me! I deserve a medal but will get one only if I bestow it upon myself.)

I shot these pictures on that trip — the sculptures on the former Iowa City Press-Citizen building, which include methods of newsgathering (above; there's a star on the map of the U.S. where Iowa City is), and these symbols of what goes on in Iowa City and environs:


This time I had other things to do in Iowa City than to contemplate the future of newspapers in particular and journalism in general, but as I post pictures of the sculpture on the buildings of other cities' current (and defunct) newspapers, I may do some musing on those subjects as well.

STOP! Don't click away from this site!

This is still Terry Murray's blog, featuring gargoyles and other architectural sculpture from Faces on Places and elsewhere.

I just felt the need for a change.

What do you think?