Doc Cuddy, Editor First music, then words. That's my life. Born in Foxboro, Massachusetts, I fortunately have no memory of the place. My father, a restless veteran of WW2, moved us west when I was 3. In Covington, Kentucky, across from Cincinnati, he worked as a pharmacist in a Rexall drugstore. When the owner died, he bought it. There we stayed. My life was defined by the river (the Ohio), and the city across it, where my hungry ears found music, at the symphony and the conservatory. You can go back generations in my family and find no hint of interest in or talent for the arts. And there I was, as a teenager, with a dollar in my pocket, taking the bus across the river every weekend for piano lessons or to hear the symphony. My parents didn't understand. And they didn't get in the way. Until I was 14. One night they sat me down in the kitchen and basically told me they would support me in any profession I might choose, except music. Oh, they were reasonable and loving ("You'll starve. You can't make a good living..."); they just didn't know they were dowsing the hotly burning fire of the only passion in my young life. I stopped piano lessons. I stopped going to the symphony. But I kept my record collection. How could I live without Bruno Walter and Dmitri Metropolous? Which is why you will hear so many midi's in Magellan's Log. A silent Web is a pre-historic Web. As for the rest--how I got from that night when my heart died to this life of words-words-words, well, it's the usual concatenation of luck, chance, and the occasional good friend. Antioch College. Bum around Europe. Bum around Asia. The occasional travel piece in the Times, which led to a staff position on one of the newsmagazines (I'd rather not say which). Management with its salaries beckoned. Then upper management. Then management in the conglomerate that bought the magazine. Enough money to retire my still-empty heart and do whatever. Which I did. Bought a farm outside Covington, house on a hill. Now, when I'm not at the computer dealing with the vagaries of Magellan's Log, I make my way through Handel's "Aylesford Pieces" on my Steinway D, with the river in the middle distance and the city just over the horizon. |