By Donald H. Harrison
DEL MAR, Calif.— Although I briefly had met Hilda Pierce before, I
actually had the chance last Saturday night to sit down and talk with her and
her husband Herman Slutzky. I had looked forward to the encounter almost
as eagerly as the first time my wife Nancy
had met a pen pal with whom she had been corresponding since both were
pre-teenagers in the Brownies.
Nancy and Gayle Cutler of New Bern, North Carolina, had corresponded year
in and year out through their dating years and Nancy's marriage before finally
meeting face-to-face for the first time in 1971 when Nancy and I visited that
former colonial capital. The two pen pals celebrated July 4th together 11
years later when we took our children, Sandi
and David,
on a cross-country vacation in a motor home and met the since- married
Gayle Midyette, her husband Don, and daughters Elizabeth and
Kathryn. Last summer, for only the third time, Nancy and Gayle met again,
this time here in San Diego County, where they shared the joys of
grandmother-hood. Gayle and Elizabeth brought along grandson Jacob to meet our
grandson Shor. Imagine! Gayle and Nancy have known each other almost
a half century and they'd met only three times!
Nevertheless, throughout those years, Nancy and Gayle have shared an
intimate friendship because in their letters to each other they had told
of their experiences, recounted the news of their families, and
divulged their inner thoughts. There never was any awkwardness when they got
together. In their face-to-face encounters, they simply renewed a
long-running conversation.
The
occasion for meeting Hilda and Herman was a delicious
"beer-in-chicken" dinner at the home of Rocky Smolin and Marsha
Sutton. Herman is the father of Marsha, an award-winning journalist
who writes for The Voice of San Diego and the Carmel Valley
News. Marsha also used to report for the now defunct San
Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, when I was its editor, and it was through that
connection my brief introduction to Hilda had occurred.
As for "beer-in-chicken," you'll have to ask Rocky about the recipe,
but it involves propping a chicken right on a beer can during cooking. Hey, I
liked it.
Hilda Pierce and husband, Herman Slutzky
Recently Hilda reintroduced herself to me by e-mail. She informed me
that she was completing her memoirs, and that she would like some technical help
from an editor.
After we agreed upon a fee, I delved into Hilda's manuscript and knew that
working with her would be a most enjoyable experience. Although she is a
painter by profession, she easily could have pursued a successful literary
career. Hilda has the artist's eye for detail and color. As a reader, you
can picture the events in her remarkable life as she narrates them—so visual
are some of her descriptions.
It turned out that you don't have to be pen pals over 50 years to get to know
someone through correspondence. Nor do you have to start as pre-teens as
Nancy and Gayle did. I am 60 and Hilda is in her 80s. As we went
section-by-section together through the story of her life, exchanging emails as
this or that question arose, I began to feel that I really knew Hilda—and I
liked her immensely.
Assuming Hilda finds a suitable publisher, I think each person who reads her
story will admire her indomitable spirit. She grew up in a middle class
Austrian home and was a teenager at the time of Anschluss. She watched in
horror as Hitler's motorcade came into Vienna, all the while fearing that
if the cheering mob recognized that she was a Jew she might not ever get
home.
Maltreated by the Nazis, avoided by her former friends and neighbors, and
certain that her family would be better off immigrating, she impulsively ran
into the American consulate one rainy day and pleaded for an American
visa. Impossible, there was a quota! But what was possible
was for her to go to England under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee. Hilda went, and was able through British
contacts to obtain visas for her parents too. Their reunion was
short-lived; Hilda soon thereafter traveled through Nazi submarine-infested
waters in a convoy across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. By force of
imagination, personality, and good letter writing, Hilda had
persuaded Americans with her family's name—Harmel—to sponsor her sight
unseen, despite the fact they were not relatives.
In her memoirs, Hilda tells of her life as an immigrant in the United
States. She recaptures the moving scene of her second reunification
with her parents while World War II still was raging. She helps us
comprehend her career as an artist whose works today fills every stateroom and
lobby of the Carnival cruise ship Fantasy and the lobbies of the ship's
sister Imagination. She confides the most personal feelings
of a woman who was widowed twice, divorced once, and who now lives happily
with Herman, her fourth husband, in semi-retirement in the La Jolla
area. Today a typewriter keyboard feels the creative touch known before by
her brushes.
Besides her landscapes and abstract paintings, Hilda also likes to sketch
portraits—and she is able to translate this skill into her writing. One
of the first customers for her paintings was Adlai Stevenson, the two-time
Democratic nominee for president of the United States and former governor of
Illinois. How well she captures the nervousness and anticipation she felt in her
home studio as she waited for him to arrive, and the graciousness Stevenson
extended to all those who flocked to see him. In the 1960s, Hilda returned
to Austria to attend intensive workshops with the artist Oscar Kokoshka—and I
found myself hanging on her descriptions not only of those classes, and
Kokoshka's imperial style, but also her feelings about being back in her native
country.
Hilda describes her meetings with Ted Arison, the legendary cruise ship figure
who built Carnival Cruise into a nautical omnivore that has devoured such other
cruise lines as Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, and Cunard Lines, and
takes us inside the studio where she subsequently worked at a furious pace to
have original art for 1,200 cabins and murals for 16 lobbies completed while Fantasy
was still in the yard in Finland.
Wherever she traveled, Hilda blended the colors of the landscape with the
ironies of certain scenes and painted not just what she saw, but what she felt.
To an amazing degree, she has been able to repeat this feat in her memoirs. By
the time I concluded editing her book, I didn't just feel I knew Hilda, I
felt as if I also knew the many people who were part of her life, and felt
that I had traveled along side on her life's journey.
No wonder when we sat down together on Saturday night, the conversation was so
effortless. I knew then what Nancy and Gayle had discovered in 1971.
Friendships grow in the atmosphere of self-revelation.
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