Update 6-26-07

Hi,

An opportunity, three announcements, a humorous interlude, and some edification.

First, the opportunity, from Ira Pearlstein ‘69:  I was wondering if you could forward to the alumni information about a film called Misconceptions, which I've written and for which I'm currently raising funds for an expected January 2008 shoot over twenty-five days in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Director Ron Satlof and I are seeking investors for our Florida-based limited liability corporation.  The film's projected budget is $400,000, and we've raised about half of that to date.
        About the film:  Misconceptions is the story of Miranda Bliss, a forty-year-old evangelical Christian in Georgia, who receives a message from God while she's praying, giving her the okay to act as a surrogate and carry a child for two gay Boston men who were legally married in Massachusetts on the Fourth of July, 2004, and who she's seen in a TV documentary.  The recipients of Miranda's unsolicited, generous online offer of her uterus are Terry Price-Owens, a 33 year old African American dance choreographer/costume designer, and Terry's Jewish husband, Sandy Price-Owens, 45, a research physician.  All hell breaks loose when Terry Price-Owens comes to Miranda's home in Georgia and tries to micromanage her pregnancy.
        My partner, director Ron Satlof, currently lives, works, and teaches in St. Petersburg, Florida, where we will shoot the film.  Ron is an Academy Award nominated, longtime director of TV movies and TV series.  Please feel free to look at his credits at:  http://www.imdb.com. ; Ron has arranged with Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, where he teaches, to build sets on campus and shoot interiors in the Theater Department there, and the college will supply many other services and equipment which will enable us to produce a film of the quality of other films made with much larger budgets.  We will have fifteen student interns to serve as production assistants for a class for which they will receive college credit, when we shoot in January 2008 at the college.  The Pinellas County Film Commission has been very helpful in finding us locations for exterior scenes.  We have a choreographer from the Sarasota Ballet who is creating a five-minute dance piece for the climactic modern dance sequence.  When you read the script, you'll know what I'm talking about.
        Please circulate this message and let me know if anyone would like to read the script and perhaps see the private placement memo for our investment.  At South High, I was active in theater and was vice president of the Student Council, in addition to being a mediocre and truly ungifted member of both the junior high baseball and varsity tennis teams.  Thanks in advance for your help.   Contact information for me:  28 Sterling Place, Brooklyn, New York, 11217.  Home phone:  718-857-3514.  Cell phone:  917-755-1659.
   
    Three announcements, the first from Emily Kleinman Schreiber:  A quick note to remind everyone that the next Alumni Association meeting will be on Thursday, June 28th, at 7:15 PM in the South High School library.
   
    The 40th reunion of the class of '67 will be held on Saturday, July 28, 2007, at the Huntington Hilton Hotel in Melville, New York.  Everyone is welcome.  For further information, please contact Andrea Schwartz Neenan at:  aneenan@tampabay.rr.com
   
    The Evening with Booker Gibson at the Irish Coffee Pub in East Islip, New York, will be on Wednesday, August 1, 2007.  It will start around 6:15 though Booker does not begin to play until 7:00.  To make a reservation, please contact Claire Brush Reinhardt at:  reino@optonline.net
   
    The humor, forwarded by Henry Gabbay.  This may be a piece we've seen before or seen in parts, but it might be fun to read again:
        To all the kids who survived growing up in the 1930s through 70s:  We survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.  They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.  Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored, lead-based paints.  We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.  As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts, or air bags.  Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.  We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.  We shared one soft drink with four friends, all of us drinking from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.  We ate cupcakes, white bread, and real butter, and drank Kool-Aid made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because we were always playing outside.  We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.  No one was able to reach us all day, and we were okay.  We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps, and then ride down the hill, only to find out we had forgotten to install brakes.  After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.  We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes,  video games, 150 cable channels, video movies, DVDs, surround-sound, CD's, cell phones, personal computers, Internet, or chat rooms.  We had friends, and we went outside and found them.  We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.  We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.  We were given BB guns for our birthdays, we made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.  We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.  Little League had tryouts, and not everyone made the team.  Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.  The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.  They actually sided with the law.  These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers, and inventors.  The past fifty years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.  We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
        To which Jay Leno added:  "With hurricanes, tornados, fires, mud slides, flooding, and severe thunderstorms tearing up the country, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"
   
    Finally, an article noted by Donald Faber called "Fifty, Finned, and Fabulous."  It was written by Jerry Garrett and first published in The New York Times on May 20, 2007:
        Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth,” the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy wrote. The year 1957 was just such a time.  Humphrey Bogart, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Joseph P. McCarthy, Eliot Ness, and Louis B. Mayer died that year.  Significant 1957 births included Donny Osmond, Katie Couric, Scott Adams, Bill Ford, and Osama bin Laden.  The future seemed limitless for the United States.  Postwar prosperity seemed as though it could go on forever, and Detroit automakers introduced a lineup of new models that seemed as invincible as America.
        “I think 1957 was a high-water mark for Ford design; Chrysler as well,” said Greg Wallace, manager of General Motors’ Heritage Center in Sterling Heights, Michigan.  "The enduring popularity, not to mention collectibility, of Chevrolet’s 1957 cars speaks for itself,” he said, adding, “The ’57 Chevy was quite simply the best-looking car of the entire postwar era."  It was a Golden Era, but a fleeting one.  It would end before the year was out.
        Fifty years ago, things were very different for the now-beleaguered Ford Motor Company.  Ford’s 1957 lineup was all new for the first time in five years.  The twenty-one models included a restyled Thunderbird sports car, a new generation of F-100 pickups, the car-based Ranchero pickup truck, and the Fairlane 500 Skyliner -- the first American convertible with a retractable hardtop.  Sales were way up, so much that Ford outsold Chevrolet for the first time since 1935.  Together, Ford and Chevrolet accounted for fully half of American car production.
        The public viewed the Chevys and their General Motors siblings as somewhat dowdy compared with competing 1957 cars.  Critics derided the GM designs as passé because they were essentially makeovers of the 1955-56 models, with high rooflines, voluptuous fenders, short wheelbases, and stubby overall lengths -- the shoebox look favored by GM’s styling czar, Harley J. Earl.
        The future had already arrived at Chrysler.  “Suddenly it’s 1960!” declared ads for Plymouth, which displaced Buick as America’s third-best-selling line of cars.  New models advertised in Chrysler’s Forward Look campaign that were designed by Virgil Exner, the automaker’s chief designer, were trumpeted as “three years ahead of their time.”  They essentially were.
        Chrysler’s president, Tex Colbert, was smarting from poor sales of the company’s 1956 lineup when he came across the futuristic advance designs for 1959 and ’60 models that Exner was working on.  Eager for a fresh start, Colbert reportedly told Exner, “Let’s build those” for 1957.  The ’57 models that had been in the works were scrapped.
        The 1957 Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto, and Chrysler models trumped everything else on the market.  For starters, they were five inches lower than the previous year’s models.  They were also wider.  Advertising claims (“longer, lower, wider”) notwithstanding, they weren’t really longer than the ’56s, but the sleek models looked as if they were.  Credit the fins.  Exner’s ’57 designs featured massive steel wings that seemed ready to propel these two-ton creations into the stratosphere.  But of greater importance were landmark mechanical innovations like torsion-bar front suspensions, highly reliable three-speed Torqueflite automatic transmissions, and Hemi V-8 engines that were power-rich yet fairly economical.
        “But the real feature of Chrysler’s ’57 cars was that these cars embodied the future, an optimistic, Eisenhower-prosperity future where people wanted to go, and go quickly,” Jeffrey I. Godshall, a Chrysler designer, author and automotive historian, wrote in an e-mail message.  “The Forward Look cars indeed looked forward to a futuristic Jetsons’ world of high technology and increased leisure time.  The perfect world Americans felt entitled to.”
        And what was speeding them to that idyllic Tomorrowland?  Vehicles like the Chrysler 300C, with its 375-horsepower, 392-cubic-inch Hemi, the industry’s most powerful engine at the time.  Horsepower was calculated more liberally back then.  By comparison, Ford’s 312-cubic-inch V-8 made only 245 horsepower, although an optional supercharged version produced 300.  The small-block Chevrolet V-8 had its displacement increased to 283 cubic inches, but base horsepower was just 185.  However, for the first time on an American production car, fuel injection was offered.  That helped to raise horsepower to 283 -- the first time an American manufacturer had been able to achieve one horsepower for each cubic inch of displacement, the company said.
        But the fuel injection system was touchy, and dealers didn’t know how to work on it. Many dealers replaced the system with a carburetor.  The supercharged Ford 312 was gone after just one year.  The Forward Look cars were also unreliable.  They tended to rust quickly and completely.  Tire wear could be extreme.  The most desirable models were also relatively expensive.  The 300C’s price was $4,929 ($5,359 for the convertible) -- about $2,000 more than Ford’s top-line Skyliner.  Even the Skyliner would prove too expensive.  In its debut year, it was not a huge seller, and it would struggle through two more years of ever-declining sales before being discontinued.  The ’57 Ranchero -- I have one in my garage -- would prove far more enduring, helped by its $1,920 price tag.  In excellent condition, a ’57 Ranchero today is worth ten times its original price.
        Though the 1957 Chevrolets lost the sales battle, they would win the war.  "Chevys were so well built they literally outlasted the ’57 Fords and Plymouths,” Mr. Godshall wrote.  The longevity of the Chevrolets means that more of them have survived -- by some estimates, up to 10 percent of the 1.5 million sold -- but their values continue to rise despite their numbers.  Kelley Blue Book reports that a pristine Bel Air convertible valued at $82,600 is still going up nearly 30 percent a year.
        But the scarcity of Chryslers, of which possibly less than one percent of the 122,273 sold survive, has helped increase values: a 300C convertible jumped from $92,400 in 2006 to $154,580 this year.  Ford values, with a few exceptions, have remained flat.  A ’57 Skyliner is worth about $53,700, close to its value a year ago.
        Given the longer perspective of history, the designs of 1957 seem to have never gone out of style.  Never before had form so completely triumphed over function.  Still, by the end of the ’57 model year, their novelty had worn off, and a deep recession depressed sales of 1958 models.  “Indeed, part of the reason 1957 looks so good to us now, is because 1958 was so bad” Dan Lyons wrote in his book Cars of 1957 (Publications International, 1997).  Not insignificantly, in the final weeks of 1957 at least three major world events would shake American confidence:  The Russians successfully launched Sputnik; an American effort to put a satellite in orbit blew up on national television as it left the launch pad; and President Eisenhower had a mild stroke.  “Suddenly the future wasn’t what it used to be,” Mr. Godshall wrote.  “Fins became first passé, then an embarrassment.”
        Small, economical cars were making a statement; the Volkswagen Beetle and Renault Dauphine were selling well.  In 1957, sales of foreign makes in the United States topped one million for the first time.  Within three years Detroit would counter with small cars of its own: the Chevrolet Corvair, Plymouth Valiant and Ford Falcon.  Function began to throttle form.  Also that year, a little-noticed Japanese automaker struggled to survive its inauspicious debut in the United States.  The company’s premier model was an unreliable little sedan called the Toyopet.  Just 288 were sold.  The company’s name: Toyota.