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From the Editor
My Friend John aka "Birdbrain"
John Freeman Boldt died at age 70 on August 28, 2019.
I first met John when we were sixteen. Richard Springer took me to a concert at Central Catholic High School where John and Doug Setapen played guitars and sang several old blues songs together, including a particularly mournful rendering of "He Was a Friend of Mine."
I got into the habit of getting up super early on Saturday mornings and walking the five miles from East Norwalk to the Boldt house on Orchard Hill Road, where John would play records of old blues masters like Son House and Robert Johnson before heading out birdwatching. I got to know Joe and Peggy Boldt and was amazed at their tremendous library.
When we were eighteen, Howlin' Wolf was playing at Steve Paul's Scene near Times Square. By that time John had use of a black VW bug and along with Springer we headed down there. Steve Paul's Scene was a hole-in-the-wall with a narrow stage and three rows of tables and chairs. We were in the middle of the front row and were swept up with Howlin' Wolf's screaming and stomping when the table to the left of us was suddenly taken over by four long hairs headed up by Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix jumped up on the table, leaped onto the stage, grabbed an electric guitar, and proceeded to jam with Wolf and his band until four in the morning.
In '68 we went to the Newport Folk Festival to see some of the old blues masters. They had an informal church service outside- we were part of fifty people who stood in a circle. We stood directly in back of an aged Son House as he played an old guitar and sang "Lord Have Mercy on Me When I Die". We heard him under his breath mutter "I wished he'd have mercy on me 'fore I die."
Some years after I moved to Sacramento John moved to nearby Davis. Together we would take an inflatable boat out to some of the most remote reservoirs in the Sierra foothills, lakes that twisted on forever through the base of the High Sierras, the kind of places where, on the long length of a perfect summer day, we wouldn't see another person. I would troll for bass while John would be swinging his binoculars around finding one new bird after another. One time the inflatable boat sprung a leak just before dark and we had to haul the boat and all our stuff out through the woods. We got lost, with the song of a loon the only thing leading us back to where we parked our car.
After John moved to New Hampshire I would go visit him in Marlborough. We made a trip to Concord to visit Emerson's house and spent a day in Historic Deerfield touring colonial house museums. Other times I would stay with John in Marlborough while he was working, and we would spend the night going through old books together. I remember showing John a book I found particularly inspiring, Crusader In Crinoline: The Life Of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John telling me that the author, Forrest Wilson and his wife were friends with Joe and Peggy Boldt and had spent evenings at Orchard Hill Road. That night John played me a video, the best video I have ever seen, on Charles Ives, with Michael Tilson Thomas.
The last times I spent the night with John at his cottage in Marlborough we got into discussions about Thoreau. We read the ends of Walden together where Thoreau talks about the beautiful bug that gnaws his way out of a sixty-year-old table. "Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing this?" John pulled out the Annotated Thoreau and found out that the table Thoreau wrote about was owned by Revolutionary war hero Israel Putnam in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Together we read how when John Brown was executed Thoreau gave a speech in Concord and rang the church bells himself to let everyone know he was going to do it. Sitting there in Marlborough the years disappeared and we both heard those bells loud and clear.
No history of Connecticut would be complete without telling the story of how John and I took my dog Moose to a special concert of the Norwalk Symphony at Norwalk High. Moose was a rat terrier-beagle mutt who was never on a leash in his life and who never spent a night inside a house. He was close to the ground, and you could take him anywhere and he would behave with one exception: if anyone tapped a foot, he would try to bite it off. We were in the third row and Moose was behaving himself when suddenly the orchestra broke into something by Strauss and an older fellow at the end of the aisle started to tap his foot. Moose grabbed his ankle and sunk his teeth in. The fellow started screaming and the next thing a janitor showed up swinging a big push-broom over his head. John and I sat still with straight faces. Moose ran out the hall with the janitor swinging the broom at him. John and I left at the Intermission and Moose was waiting for us at the corner outside.
Max H. Peters
Publisher and Editor
Header photo by Skip Broom, HP Broom Housewright, Inc.