Hughes & Harte, Booksellers

                                                       Where some things happen.
                                                          


Paperbacks Unlimited
(29 April 2011 - Massive additions & corrections)

Recently I received an email from my longtime friend Fred Hughes who with the late Charles Harte was an owner of Paperbacks Unlimited in Ferndale, Michigan. Fred reminded me that Kenny Cockrel (see my previous blog-post), his former law partners Justin Ravits (R.I.P.) and Ted Spearman, and General Gordon Baker, Jr (see links below) were frequent visitors and customers of Paperbacks Unlimited. Charles Bukowski read from his work on October 31, 1974. Elmore Leonard and Joyce Carol Oates (among others) had book signings there. There is a photograph of Oates’ late, (first) husband Raymond Smith in front of the Ferndale store (see the The New Yorker link below).

   I began shopping at Paperbacks Unlimited when I was in grade school in Highland Park, Michigan. The store was then located in a small house on the corners of Woodward and Davidson avenues. I remember the first book that I bought there in 1953/54; it was the The Official Rule Book of the National Stock Car Racing Association. I wanted to be a race car driver then; I had become captivated by the stock car races that were shown on television at that time - Fred Wolf announced the proceedings from The Motor City Speedway.

   Mr Martin Fern, his wife Rose, and his sister Rose Beckerman owned Paperbacks Unlimited then. Mrs Rose Beckerman ran the cash register from 1942, commencing with the death of her husband, until she was 89 years. She died in retirement at the age of 92. Their business began under the trade style "Highland Park News" as a corner newsstand located at Woodward and Manchester streets in 1918. The Beckerman/Fern families were of Russian Jewish origin. Emma Goldman was once a house guest of the Beckerman's. Sometime later the store moved next door to a commercial building next to its previous location. Upstairs above the new location in Highland Park was the famous jazz society, The New World Stage, that was founded by jazz greats Donald Byrd and Kenny Burrell. When I was in high school at Highland Park, some friends and I peeked in on The New World Stage one night and heard a bit of Bird’s tune, the wonderful "Blues for Alice". The store soon moved further north on Woodward avenue to a much larger space near Sears on the diagonal from the historic Ford Motor Company’s Model T plant.

   Fred Hughes and Charles Harte purchased the bookstore from Mrs Beckman in 1973. The store had moved again further north on Woodward ave. south of Nine Mile Rd. to Ferndale, Michigan. I didn’t really know Fred or Charles then - I did have a big crush on Fred’s sister in high school though. My involvement with Fred and Charles began like this.

   One very warm Sunday in 1968/9, I decided to walk from the Jefferies Projects (student housing) near the Wayne State Universty campus to Paperbacks Unlimited in Highland Park (8.3 miles one way). On my way I ran into Lawrence Powers on Cass Ave. Powers had just joined the philosophy faculty at Wayne State U., having just left Cornell University’s graduate program. That hot Sunday morning Larry was faced with a dilemma: whether to use the limited electrical power available to him to use his fan or whether to employ his reading lamp instead. I don’t know which way he went in this but I feel I need to relate a couple of items about this very smart man.

   The first item is related directly to my walk that morning and to Paperbacks Unlimited. That Sunday in 1968/69 I walked to Paperbacks and found on the store’s shelf E. D. Klemke’s collection of papers by various hands, Essays on Frege. At that time the Gottlob Frege industry was just getting started. I had studied Frege in Prof Richard L. Cartwright’s renowned three quarter course: Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. So I was very excited about getting my hands on the Frege essays that had just been published.

   (i) I had taken Larry Powers’ Wittgenstein course. Wittgenstein was a big item at Cornell and Powers had studied with the Wittgensteinians Norman Malcolm and Max Black. In Powers’ class we were discussing Gustav Bergmann’s Fregean notions of subject and predicate (function-like notions) and Powers said something like ”It’s ludicrous to reckon a predicate (function) as a kind of hook, hooking itself onto its subject, as it were. Max Black writes in his “Frege on Functions” (included in Klemke), “There is no good use for the idea of a function as a kind of ghostly grappling hook.” [240] I had underlined Black’s sentence in my Klemke.

   (ii) Powers has become well known for his comments on Robert Stalnaker’s 1972 paper, “Propositions”, published in the 1976 Oberlin Colloquium volume, Issues in the Philosophy of Language. Powers suggests that Stalnaker’s theory of possible- worlds and “the whole idea of possible worlds (perhaps distributed in space, like raisins in a pudding) seems ludicrous.” [p. 95] So it seems that Arguments from Ludicrousness were highly regarded by at least one Cornell professor and his student.

   In 1973 I had a front desk job with City National Bank near Wayne State University, on Woodward Ave. and Alexandrine St. I knew Charles Harte by sight, since he and Fred were employees of the bookstore; he was a tall Irishman with a beard, Irish tongue and wit, and known to take a drink now and then. Charles came into the bank one afternoon. Sat down at my desk. He handed me a check for $5,000 and insisted that I cash it for him. Since he didn’t have an account with the bank, I refused to cash the check. I received an ear-full of his insults from Irish tongue and he left the bank.

   I should mention that one of Kenny Cockrel’s clients, Haywood Brown, attempted to rob my branch office. This was the Shaft/Superfly period in which long outer coats and high heeled shoes were the thing. One afternoon Mr Brown came into the branch in the get-up that I have described, but with a rifle hidden under his long outer coat. He made the mistake of going directly to our head teller who directed him to get in line. This rebuff caused Mr Brown to deviate from his robbery plan; he panicked and fled the premises. A gun fight with the police ensued outside the branch. Mr Brown and his partner in crime had been robbing dope houses in Detroit, an occupation perhaps more dangerous, at the time, than robbing banks.

   I was told later by Charles that on that day he and Fred were purchasing Paperbacks Unlimited from the Fern/Beckerman family and the un-cashed check represented an integral financial part of the transaction.

   My friends, Bill Bush and Jim Murphy come directly to mind, and I spent many hours in the back room of Fred’s and Charles’ bookstore discussing literature, politics, women, horse racing, while 'disgusting' each other. Refreshments were available in copious quantities. Wednesday nights were officially set aside for our meetings, but a quorum seemed to be present on most nights. Paperbacks Unlimited was our City Lights, our Shakespeare and Company, and much else besides. This way of life is to be missed and is something that Amazon.com doesn’t provide.

   Charles Harte died in 1993 at the age of 51. Charles' wife, Marguerite, requested that Fred Hughes fly to Dublin and lead a small service attended by Charles' closest Irish friends. Fred Hughes writes:

I was the only participant from 'across the drink'. We went up into the hills, what the locals referred to as mountains, to scatter Charles' ashes at the source of the Liffy, the river that bisects Dublin. Charles' wife, Marguerite, had pointed out to me a passage from Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy that Charles wanted read at his ceremony. The assembled mourners listened as I read the Behan passage and I added a few words of my own. Marguerite scattered the ashes of our dear and sorely missed friend into the rivulets that would form the river. In a moment they vanished downstream to fulfill their destiny and we said goodbye.

Our friend Fred Hughes remains with us.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rbwstudy.html

http://www.speakersforanewamerica.com/gen.html

http://www.speakersforanewamerica.com/gendraft.html

http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2005/08/war-of-attrition.html

 http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/12/13/101213_slideshow_oates#slide=1