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(*) Fav~ for Him =x
** Mây i* ăn nhìu chóng lớn cấm lấy zk =)) **
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♥ 15days left ♥
- Happy 4th Anniversary me n him ♥ 080511 ~ 080911 ♥
- My b-daiz =x ♥ 080994 ~ 080911 ♥
*I wrote a lot: but the first comment below has more photos from the shoot if you want to skip my gushing.*
This might just be the perfect couple: Mike and Netty.
Mike and I met 18 years ago, we have now been in each other's lives longer than not. His mom worked with my dad and we were introduced at a company picnic right before 7th grade started. Mike was a *dork* with glasses, braces, a bowl hair cut...I wasn't too cute, either. But I was cool. The first day of 7th grade when he stumbled into me I told him, "Get out of my way, nerd!" By the end of 7th grade we were excellent friends. By high school, we were practically inseparable. I spent more of my high school life in Mike's basement than anywhere else, his mom would make home made pizza for all of us, I grew so close to Mike's family that I called his parents Mumsy and Daddy, and they called me Babs; Mike was an only child and they loved our group of girl-friends and having us over. Mike and I even briefly dated during the period we refer to as "the ugly pupa stage" when neither of us were particularly attractive. We didn't click quite well enough to pull off the long term high school relationship, but we never strayed far from each other's company. We even agreed that if by our mid 20s nothing serious was going on for either of us that we would throw in the towel and marry each other, at least we'd always have fun. We even agreed to get a dog and name it "Rod" so that we could giggle every time one of us yelled, "Come, Rod!" We were dorks, did I mention that?
Luckily for Mike, the amazing Annette came into his life. While in college he was working at a grocery store and helped out a high school senior with something. Wound up dating her. Netty was the best friend. Mike took the girl to prom, Mike's best friend Steve took Netty. Mike and Girl A did not work out, but Netty...there was something about Netty.
One night they were watching a movie at his place and she said, "I wish it was me who had gone to the grocery store that night," and Mike looked at her and knew right then she was it for him and declared, "And I see no reason why I don't love you." They kissed...and are literally living happily ever after.
They own a house, just bought it last summer, in Troy, NH. They have good jobs. They have a gross old lovable cat named Keith. And on a vacation to Puerto Rico in February, Mike realized he couldn't stand not being married to her and proposed. They were married last weekend at their home in NH, with close family and friends. They walked down the aisle together to the song Rumble by Link Wray. Netty danced to The Humpty Dance at the reception.
And then they flew into Seattle, rented a car, and started their honeymoon: a drive down the left coast, from Seattle to San Francisco. Of course, they stopped in Portland to see me.
We fit more into 36 hours than should have been humanly possible: we ate at Henry's and had Young's Double Chocolate Stout on tap, bbq beef sliders, fresh hot bbq potato chips, beer and cheese soup. We did a brief driving tour of the Portland skyline from 405. We had breakfast at Pine State, then ventured into the Gorge for what I dubbed "The Gorge Light" tour. A stop at the Vista House, then to Latourelle (the first big waterfall they'd ever seen), a stop at Shepperd's Dell to pick wild blackberries, Multnomah, and then I hiked them up to Ponytail so they could go behind a waterfall. Netty promptly threw off her shirt and scrambled down to the pool to feel the spray and falls. Every turn their mouths hung slack, Mike kept looking up at waterfalls and stepping backwards he was so blown away. They noticed how green our woods are, and were stunned we were only 30 miles outside of Portland. They also enjoyed the lack of mosquitoes and ticks.
I dragged the reluctant duo back into the city, where we picked up a "youCANhascheeseburger" sandwich at the Brunchbox at 5th and Stark: an amazing cheeseburger between 2 grilled cheese sandwiches, for $5. We ate in Pioneer Courthouse Square and people watched. We took Mike to Apple Music, where he was enthralled by the collection (including a classic Gretsch that he has in his own collection), and he nerded out for almost 2 hours in the place. I remember when Mike started to play guitar! We ate maple bacon bars and tang doughnuts at Voodoo, and then saw the one-armed guitarist.
But the highlight of the day was Patrick and I taking them back to the hotel where they threw on what they'd worn on their wedding day, and we took them to the Rose Garden and Pittock Mansion for their official wedding portraits. Over two hours later, we were all pooped, but happy, and concluded the whirlwind visit with a lovely meal at Bridgeport. As an aside, Patrick was also fascinated when comparing all our tattoos, they were all done by the same artist. Seeing three people and countless pieces all in one place by the same hand was pretty interesting to all of us, actually. Dorks always, I suppose.
I was heartbroken to say goodbye to them, I had cried when I found out I couldn't go to NH to actually be at the wedding, but this was such a lovely concession. Next summer they are returning to Oregon for a full week, we might camp at Crater Lake for a couple of nights, they will stay with us in our place with our crazy Pugs, we'll have more amazing food and beer, and I'm going to take them back into the Gorge for more amazing sights. I am already counting the days till we see them again.
Mike and Netty are that couple that you just want to hate...they're just that perfect together. If they don't spend the rest of their lives together...well let's just say I can't see anything else happening. This is it for them, one of the few couples I've shot who I just think have that *something* you need to work. After 18 years of knowing Mike, I cannot see him with anyone other than Netty, and that's saying something. They can't see it any other way, either.
SebGorka: joaniefla jameshuskin God Bless him and his family! (via Twitter twitter.com/Luandrew169/status/768478077106159620)
Many know him as Alley Kat, but he also goes by Mark. Mark has been creating music and playing music in the OKC area for years. Always worth a listen to his original songs and covers. Seen here with a new wardrobe.
Taken at the 25th Plazafest celebration
September 2024
Please don't post your photos here nor GLITTERY IMAGES. They will be removed. Don't invite me to any group. I will not accept ;-)
a rare, quiet and calm moment captured of caesar just a few moments ago..usually during the day he's so full of energy and just wants to play fetch with his soccer ball and while i got a bunch of shots of him trying to catch a ball in the backyard, those looked boring and plain to me. they show off his physical abilities but i wanted to show his softer, more gentle side.
it took a few minutes to get him to lay like this..the treat i had in my one hand initially made him even more excited but i waited it out and it paid off...if there's one thing this dog teaches me, it's patience. i do love him for that as well as the incredible companionship he provides us all.
technically, someone had asked me about my indoor shots and while i'm not really great at using my (external) flash..i have figured out that bouncing it over and behind my head works best..i shoot with the camera on manual as well as the flash, that way i can take a few test shots then adjust +/- a few stops if need be.
Jorge wanted some help folding this, and I said I'd give him help, so here it is!
I hope this helps, Jorge!
I saw him practically floating down the sidewalk on a side street of downtown Toronto on a warm, sunny spring day. He was listening to music through his headphones and had a relaxed, far-away look as he walked. Bliss is the word that comes to mind. I almost hated to break into his world, but thought he would be an interesting person to meet and would make a good portrait subject. He listened to my introduction, gave it a moment’s thought, and said “Sure.” Meet Mo.
I had just taken a photo of my bicycle against a painted laneway wall I had not seen before. We were just a block or two from the building I had worked in before I retired. We were slightly off the beaten path despite being downtown and I felt a bit funny inviting Mo into an even more out-of-the-way alley but he understood my photo idea as I explained it to him. I asked about his shirt which featured the Australian flag. “I lived there for two years” he said. “Oh, cool” I said. “What took you to Australia?” He replied “I was just travelling and worked there for a couple of years as a bartender.” I commented that having bartending skills must be handy in that you can find employment anywhere.
As we reached the wall in question my travails began. I discovered that the shade I was counting on was such a narrow sliver (it was just after noon) that I had to squeeze Mo up tight against the wall to get him out of the direct sun. Then there were the abundant vines that were in our way and which I had to hold up out of the way with one hand while taking the portraits with the other hand. I was pretty open about how my photo concept had been somewhat flawed and that anyone walking past would wonder if we were nuts. Mo did not seem as stressed by the situation as I was feeling and we did manage the photos, followed by one full-length photo a bit further toward the end of the alley with more shade (and fewer vines). That area had been occupied by a delivery truck while I was struggling with the vines but it had become available when I thought to do the full-length photo.
Mo is 27 and was born and raised in Toronto. He works as a yoga instructor and he is a painter. I asked how his friends would describe him he smiled and said “Loud.” I said that surprised me because he seemed so quiet and laid-back to me. He smiled and said “That’s because I just taught a yoga class and it’s a beautiful spring day!” Good point. When I asked what the best thing is about teaching yoga he said “Making people happy. I really enjoy that.” His advice to the project is “Stay positive and be kind.” His final comment was “Everyone should smile more.” Another excellent point.
Thank you Mo for letting me interrupt your relaxation with my photo project request. I enjoyed meeting you and it’s a pleasure having you included in my Human Family project.
This is my 246th submission to The Human Family Group on Flickr.
You can view more street portraits and stories by visiting The Human Family.
As I was strolling on the beach, as part of my daily routine, I was attracted by this big camera and went to inquire about it.
I saw two men and a woman so I asked the woman what they were shooting. She told me that the Dutch TV is making a program about Iran and the threats of nuclear war, while not too many miles away from there, the people here in Israel, like myself on the Tel Aviv beach, are going about life as usual.
Ankie is a writer for the Dutch TV, she lives in Ramat HaSharon, north-east of Tel Aviv.
She was born in Holland...
(See more in the comments below.)
Ankie Spitzer recalled her husband's idealism and attitude towards the Olympics:
(While strolling in the Olympic Village)... he spotted members of the Lebanese team, and told (me) he was going to go and say hello to them... I said to him, "Are you out of your mind? They're from Lebanon!" Israel was in a state of war with Lebanon at the time. "Ankie," Andre said calmly, "that's exactly what the Olympics are all about. Here I can go to them, I can talk to them, I can ask them how they are. That's exactly what the Olympics are all about." So he went... towards this Lebanese team, and... he asked them "How were your results? I'm from Israel and how did it go?" And to my amazement, I saw that the (Lebanese) responded and they shook hands with him and they talked to him and they asked him about his results. I'll never forget, when he turned around and came back towards me with this huge smile on his face. "You see!" said Andre excitedly. "This is what I was dreaming about. I knew it was going to happen!" (Reeve 2001, pgs. 52-53)
Darren is a thatcher, I met him on a recent trip to The Cotswolds, where he was replacing a thatched roof. He told me that there is a five year apprenticeship to become a thatcher but even then they are learning on the job. A job can take anything from weeks to months to complete. Darren was a very interesting man who is clearly passionate about his work, I was pleased he agreed to take part in the stranger project.
This picture is #40 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page
My beloved student : Fikri zulhafiz ( delay development category )
p/s : Let us pray 4 his safety coz he just involved in accident..hopefully he will getting better..May Allah Bless u Fikri...come back soon my boy!!
5/14/10 I attended Gadsden's Relay For Life. Very moving as I walked around with my husband who is a cancer surviver of nearly five years. If you have time, please look at all the wonderful people from Doctor's Care in Gadsden who allowed us to visit their booth
[Intro]
She fucked him
She fucked her
Why the fuck did she not fuck me?
Is it because I'm too ugly?
Maybe I'm too fat
Maybe she's not into black guys
With big cocks
Wait. What am I saying.
We're in the third grade
I don't have a big cock
Haven't even had an erection
But she made them
Get harder than Hart
Get it?
Kevin Hart?
Get Hard?
No well okay then
[Hook]
Third Grade Slut
She did it in the butt
Didn't wanna get pregnant
But she did.
That fucking slut
[Verse 1]
She fucked him
She fucked her
Why the fuck did she not fuck me?
I'm fucking pissed
Mother fucking shit.
I want her to taste my dick
Eat that shit like a slim Jim stick
Lick her cunt like a big dog
Fuck that face like a big dog?
Couldn't find nothing to rhyme that made sense
Shit can find anything that rhyme with sense
Nice little titties that haven't even formed
Cause she's only 8 and so am I
But she fucks guy that are over 25
I don't know why
I have not been fucked yet
The teacher even tried to help me fuck that
[Hook]
Third Grade Slut
She did it in the butt
Didn't wanna get pregnant
But she did.
That fucking slut
[Verse 2]
Tryna expose her clit like Berlin
Eat her ass like it's din din
Take a trip to an island
And fuck her silly with my hand
Man I'm getting hella litty
Suck on the nipple and titty
Oh wait oh no hold up girl
Shit I think I'm finna twirl
Around to that asshole
Fuck that shit till it's raw
Pull out and see my dick is gone!
Oh no!
Damn it!
My dick fell off
Into her asshole
What the fuck do I do
Man I'm such a fucking shoe
Shit shit shit shit
Welp at least got to taste the clit
Of the
[Hook]
Third Grade Slut
We did it in the butt
Didn't wanna get pregnant
But she did.
That fucking slut
[Verse 3]
This song is getting pretty long so Im gonna end it here
Losing my dick in an anus is actually one of my biggest fears
You know what I'll stop now and let you people go
Never mess with a girl who's clearly a slut ass ho
If you don't like my music.....Then kiss the tip
Fuck you you piece of shit
[Hook]
Third Grade Slut
She did it in the butt
Didn't wanna get pregnant
But she did.
That fucking slut
Third Grade Slut
We did it in the butt
Didn't wanna get pregnant
But she did.
That fucking slut
More than 3100 people turned out for the No Kings 2.0 Rally in Vero Beach, Florida on October 18th, 2025. One of over 2,700 demonstrations that were held, with at least one protest in every state, and several taking place in other countries in support. This widespread participation highlighted the collective sentiment against fascism and the Trump Administration. Resist!
Pescadero State Beach
From the asphalt arteries of the San Francisco Peninsula, to the very edge of America, a narrow ribbon of road runs. Over the coast range and through redwood groves we ride the hairpin turns of a shoulderless, muddy path to find the salt-crusted and sea-battered granite boundary of the country. We ride with baby in tow, bringing him to open his infant eyes for the first time upon that rolling tempest we call the Pacific. Melville's Ishmael called gazing upon this ocean the answer to the long supplication of his youth; how wonderful it would be to live as a child within spitting distance of the waves. So we came upon Pescadero (the place to fish in Spanish) to spend a few moments on its mussel-tiled rock garden of a beach to watch the waves.
I am captivated by the idea of the coasts as a visible boundary to the United States. Northern and southern borders are marked by shabby fences and congested customs stations, one can pass from state to state with little more than a colorful road sign, yet here on the strand the whole edifice of a nation ends. I say "ends" with special reference to the West coast. This coast feels like a period on the end of the American sentence. Hawai'i rides the waves some few thousand miles over the surf, but it is these few feet of sand and stone between Pacific Coast Highway 1 and the briny lip of the rising tide that most dramatically mark the end of the country for me.
Make no mistake, on the Central California Coast (and just about every point north and south), our great country ends with a bang, not a whisper. To crest the coast range and come into late afternoon sunlight bathing cows grazing in strawberry- and mustard-painted pastures, to see the tempest send massive breakers onto the outer shoals of Pescadero is an experience to which I always look forward.
Beautiful in all light.
When first I moved here and began to photograph the coast, I headed out hoping for clear skies and sunsets. I've come now to hope for thick marine layers moving on shore at low tide. I've come to expect overcast skies and great heaving walls of brine. Learning to make stunning images in what some might call "ordinary" light is a topic for a coming essay, but for now let us suffice it to say that the Pacific seems anything but to me. Serene, amber, brilliant sunsets are not associative with the sea for me. Instead I think of the Pacific as the Kraken disembodied. Clawing, biting, gnawing it comes with tendrils, tearing at stone, gasping for the dry Earth. Even at low tide it salivates in foaming breakers upon the land. To create a photograph of an idillic ocean, rolling beneath a crimson sunset just wouldn't be as fun.
I climbed around outcroppings and scuttled over the stones, buried in the sand, to make a few images of the tide pools. The surf has ground at these few stone shelves over the eons, removing the softer rock and leaving irregular domes of granite studding the beach behind. In the brooding light, covered as they are by slick, black matts of seaweeds and anemone, they look like the cobbles of some submarine street revealed for a moment by the low tide.
Further north along the beach and there's a break from the cliffs, where the large outcroppings that lie further into the surf protect the shore. Here the rolling waves barely stir the sand. I stood along this peaceful stretch for some time, letting the occasional surge soak me from the knees down, so as to get an image of a harbor seal, enjoying a late-afternoon nap on his perch amongst the storm.
North of that serene bit of beach, the gray, rocky shoulder blades of California push back out from the sand and into the sea. A bit of scrambling affords some wonderful views of gulls and other foal scouring the landscape for food. Occasionally, if one is still, he can observe the birds wrestle mussels from the rocks and climb into the sea-spray on sorties to dash them upon the razor-like shoreline, the sharp staccato of shellfish on the granite and the hiss of the listing waves upon the shore the only sounds to break the silence. The place to fish indeed.
I saw him yesterday
as he rode into the arena
on a big bay roping horse
His hat pulled forward just a tad
rope in his hand
He sat tall in the saddle
I could tell he was a very proud
man.
Women were adoring him with
each breath he took.
His horse backed into the chute
ready to work.
When the gate open the steer
came out strong
Old bay came out fast
The cowboy was ready with rope in hand.
steer was running as hard as he could,
Old bay stumbled and fell,
And laid very still.
The cowboy got up but old bay didnt move.
Tears came to the cowboys eyes
When he looked at old bay
He took off his hat and kneeled to pray
Place: Trechadairo ( London ) !
Model : Meeee =P
Taken by : Free Spirit My cuzn and best friend ~~
Edited by me ~~ MOtion Blur effect ;P
We stayed in Trechadairo from 9 to 1 at night =P !! lo0o0ol
ma 5laina shay fe 5a6rna hahahaha
I stayed on the Bull for 55 Seconds !!!!!!! YEeeeeeeeeeeeha ^_^ !!
Statue of Sir Adam Beck on University Avenue at Queen Street West. Toronto, Canada. Spring afternoon, 2021. Pentax K1 II.
A biography of Sir Adam Beck: www.biographi.ca/en/bio/beck_adam_15E.html
BECK, Sir ADAM, manufacturer, horseman, politician, office holder, and philanthropist; b. 20 June 1857 in Baden, Upper Canada, son of Jacob Friedrich Beck and Charlotte Josephine Hespeler; m. 7 Sept. 1898 Lillian Ottaway in Hamilton, Ont., and they had a daughter; d. 15 Aug. 1925 in London, Ont.
The Prometheus of Canadian politics during the first quarter of the 20th century, Sir Adam Beck brought the inestimable benefit of cheap electric light and power to the citizens of Ontario through a publicly owned utility, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. He had to fight continuously to build Hydro, as it came to be called, but supported by municipal allies he succeeded in creating one of the largest publicly owned integrated electric systems in the world. Brusque and overbearing, he made many enemies in the process, even amongst his friends, as he rammed his projects forward, frequently over the objections of the governments he notionally served. His ruthless determination to expand Hydro, with little regard to the cost, led eventually to a movement to rein him in. He spent his last years pinned down before three public inquiries as lawyers, accountants, and political adversaries picked over every Hydro expenditure. These public humiliations broke his spirit but failed to diminish his enormous popularity. Adam Beck more than any other public figure in Ontario reshaped the institutional life of the province by making electricity a public utility and legitimizing, through his accomplishments, public ownership as an effective instrument of policy throughout Canada.
Beck came from an enterprising immigrant family of builders and makers. In 1829 Frederick and Barbara Beck had emigrated from the Grand Duchy of Baden (Germany) to upstate New York, and then had moved to the Pennsylvania Dutch community of Doon (Kitchener) in Upper Canada, where they settled on a farm and built a sawmill. Their son Jacob, who had stayed behind to work first as a doctor’s apprentice and later in the mills and locomotive works of Schenectady, joined them in 1837. A few miles from his parents, in Preston (Cambridge), he opened a foundry. When fire destroyed it, his friends rallied and he was able to rebuild bigger than before. His first wife, Caroline Logus, whom he married in January 1843, died soon after the birth of a son, Charles. In 1843 Beck had recruited a skilled iron moulder from Buffalo, John Clare (Klarr), to join him; Clare would cement the alliance by marrying his sister in September 1845. With Clare and another partner (Valentine Wahn) running the business, Beck returned to tour his homeland, where he met Charlotte Hespeler, the sister of his Preston neighbour, merchant-manufacturer Jacob Hespeler. When Charlotte came out to Canada, she and Beck were wed, in October 1845; a daughter, Louisa, was born in 1847, followed by two sons, George and William. In a move typical of his venturing spirit, Jacob suggested relocating his company closer to the projected line of the Grand Trunk Railway, but Clare refused. So in 1854 Beck dissolved the partnership and bought 190 acres on the route of the railway ten miles west of Berlin (Kitchener). There he laid out a town-site, which he named Baden, and built a foundry, a grist mill, and a large brick house. Beck’s businesses flourished on the strength of iron orders from the railway, and a brickyard and machine shop were eventually added. It was in this thriving hamlet that Adam Beck was born in 1857.
Adam passed a bucolic childhood exploring the edges of the millpond with his brothers, poking about the sooty recesses of the foundry with the workmen, and horseback-riding with his sister. He was sent off to attend William Tassie*’s boarding school in Galt (Cambridge), where he showed no particular distinction; a slow and indifferent student, he preferred riding to reading. His formal education ended at Rockwood Academy, near Guelph. On his return to Baden, his father, who abhorred idleness, set him to work as a groundhog (a moulder’s apprentice) in the foundry. It was said by those who knew Adam that he inherited his enterprising spirit, his determination and visionary ability, and some of his sternness from his father, and a love of public service from his mother. Adam’s career as a moulder came to an end with the failure of his father’s businesses in 1879. At age 63 Jacob Beck, unbowed, started afresh once again, this time as a grain merchant in Detroit. Louisa and the youngest members of the family, Jacob Fritz and Adam, accompanied their parents; one of the older boys, William, stayed in Baden to run the cigar-box manufactory he had started in 1878. Adam returned to work briefly in Toronto as a clerk in a foundry and then as an employee in a cigar factory. With $500 in borrowed money, he joined William and their cousin William Hespeler in a cigar-box factory in Galt in 1881. Hespeler eventually left the partnership, but the two Becks persisted and built a modestly successful business. In 1884, with the inducement of a five-year tax exemption and free water, they moved their works to London, Ont., to be closer to the centre of the province’s cigar-making industry. William left soon afterwards to open a branch in Montreal and for a time Adam worked in partnership with his brother George; from 1 Jan. 1888 Adam was the sole proprietor of William Beck and Company, which later became the Beck Manufacturing Company Limited.
Cigar boxes would appear to be a fragile basis on which to build a fortune or a political career. The smoking of cigars, however, was a major rite of male sociability during the Victorian era. Earlier in the century cigars consumed in Canada had originated in Germany and later they came from the United States. The imposition of the National Policy tariff of 25 per cent on rolled cigars but not on tobacco leaf led to the migration of the industry to Canada. London was one of the first major centres where the leaf grown in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin entered the dominion, and it was there and in Montreal [see Samuel Davis*] that the domestic cigar-making business took root. In London the industry would reach its peak around 1912, when 22 companies, employing 1,980 workers, produced more than 20 million cigars. Situated on Albert Street, the Beck factory was essentially a veneer plant. Cedar logs and specialty woods from Spain and Mexico arrived by rail, were stored in the yard for seasoning, and then were peeled into strips to make not only cigar boxes but also cheese boxes and veneer for furniture and pianos. Toiling side by side with his workers (25 in 1889, rising to 125 in 1919), Beck built a thriving business, taking orders, setting up equipment, manhandling logs, and wheeling the finished boxes to customers. (He himself was a non-smoker, an enduring fatherly influence.) Eventually the company supplied all of the main cigar makers with the boxes, labels, and bands in which their products were shipped. Until he was 40, business was Adam Beck’s main preoccupation.
In the years after 1897 he emerged much more prominently in public life. He got out more, married, offered himself for public office, and turned the management of his firm over to his brother Jacob. An avid sportsman, he had played baseball as a boy; in London he played tennis and lacrosse and, with a group of bachelors, organized a toboggan club. On the advice of his doctor he took up riding again for relaxation. But nothing with Adam Beck could ever be just a recreation – he quickly became a breeder of racehorses and a competitive jumper. His social life revolved around the London Hunt Club where, in 1897, he became master of the hounds, a post he would hold until 1922. A mutual love of horses and riding brought the muscular Beck and the slim, strikingly beautiful Lillian Ottaway together at a jumping meet; she was 23 years his junior. After a whirlwind courtship they were married in 1898 at Christ’s Church Anglican Cathedral in Hamilton. Lillian, who had been raised in Britain, spoke with a slight English accent, had a lovely soprano voice, rode with gusto, and carried herself regally. Her mother, Marion Elizabeth Stinson*, from a wealthy Hamilton family, had married an English barrister, who died before Lillian was born. At 18 Lillian returned to Canada when her mother married a prominent Hamilton lawyer. After a honeymoon tour of Europe, Beck triumphantly brought his bride to London, Ont., where they promptly acquired the most ostentatious house in the city, Elliston, the estate of Ellis Walton Hyman*, and proceeded to make it even grander, with his and hers stables, under a new name, Headley. From being a sporting, business-possessed bachelor, Beck, with his young wife on his arm, moved effortlessly into the very centre of London society. She sang in the cathedral choir, their house and grounds were the envy of the city, and they made a romantic and devoted couple at dinners and hunt club affairs. Winston Churchill stayed with them on his lecture tour of 1900-1, as did Governor General Lord Minto [Elliot*] and Lady Minto in 1903.
As Adam Beck came out into society, he developed an interest in public life. In provincial politics London had long been a Conservative fief – William Ralph Meredith held the seat from 1872 to 1894. The Liberals captured it in a by-election when Meredith was appointed to the bench. At the next general election, in March 1898, Beck entered the lists for the Conservatives, ultimately falling 301 votes short of beating the Liberal Francis Baxter Leys. Although he perhaps should not have expected a better result, having no previous political experience or strong organization, he left the field feeling slightly wounded. Nevertheless, his political energies were channelled into the Victoria Hospital Trust, to which he was appointed by the city in 1901. Here he scandalized supporters with his aggressive approach towards patients’ rights, his attacks on hospital inefficiency, and his hands-on way of managing repairs economically. It is said that Beck, realizing that he was not likely to be reappointed, ran for mayor to outflank his opposition. In any case, he offered himself and was elected in January 1902. Making few promises, preferring instead to be judged by his works, he plunged into the first of what would be three one-year terms. His administration was marked by a vigorous, reforming tone that discomfited the aldermanic coterie. He promoted civic beautification by offering a prize from his own purse for a garden competition. He persuaded the city to take over the operation of the London and Port Stanley Railway when the private operator’s lease expired. He cleaned out the fire department, promoted public health, and became involved in the leadership of the Union of Canadian Municipalities, whose annual convention he brought to London in 1904. Beck thus learned the political craft at the top of local politics, as a mayor without a long apprenticeship. He entered public life as an oppositionist, a critic who used his personal popularity to drive his reluctant colleagues forward and to cleanse the municipal stables. Despite his class position as a manufacturer, in politics he developed the style of a populist champion of the ordinary citizen against the establishment. Although one might have glimpsed intimations of his future in these London years, it would have required an extremely vivid imagination to see in this maverick local politician the system-building Napoleon of provincial politics that history would know as Sir Adam Beck.
In the election of May 1902 the leader of the Conservative party, James Pliny Whitney*, encouraged Beck to run again, with the offer of a cabinet post. Although the party as a whole was unsuccessful, the popular Beck beat Francis Leys by 131 votes and thus, for the next two and a half years, he would serve as both mayor and mpp of London. It was in his capacity as mayor of a southwestern Ontario industrial city that he came in contact with a group of activists from his home district of Waterloo County who had become agitated by the hydroelectric power question. Led by the manufacturer Elias Weber Bingeman Snider and the enthusiast Daniel Bechtel Detweiler, the anxious businessmen and municipal politicians of the industrial centres of the Grand River valley had begun to organize themselves to obtain Niagara power that they believed would otherwise go to Toronto and Buffalo. They had met in 1902 to study the situation, and then formed common cause with the politicians of Toronto concerned about private monopoly. At first they hoped the provincial government could be persuaded to undertake the distribution of cheap power to the municipalities. Talks with the Liberal premier, George William Ross*, who refused to take on the inevitable debt, convinced them that if they wanted control over electrical distribution they would have to do the job themselves. Beck went as an observer to the first meeting of this group, the Berlin Convention of February 1903, a gathering of 67 delegates representing all of the main towns and cities in southwestern Ontario; he came away an active convert to municipal intervention. In response to this public pressure, in June the Ross government passed legislation (drafted by Snider) authorizing a commission of investigation to explore the possibilities of cooperative municipal action and a statutory framework within which the municipalities could create a permanent commission to operate a distribution system. Snider was the obvious choice as chair of this Ontario Power Commission, which more frequently went by his name. Beck along with Philip William Ellis, a Toronto jewellery manufacturer and wholesaler, and William Foster Cockshutt, a Brantford farm-implements manufacturer, were chosen by the municipal delegates to serve with Snider as commissioners. Thus, in the fall of 1903, Beck began a crash course on the power question. It was a subject ideally suited to his developing temperament, and he could readily identify with the professed goals: economic electrical light and power, equity between the different manufacturing regions, and the welfare of the common people. The vision of sensible, non-partisan, and public-spirited businessmen and municipal leaders (such as himself) appealed to Beck. He could also subscribe to the implicit attack on monopoly, social privilege, and finance capitalism. This was a moral universe in which he felt right at home.
As the Snider commission began working out the details of a municipally owned hydroelectric distribution system in 1904, Beck sensed the weakness of the voluntary, cooperative structure. It lacked the authority to order the power companies to surrender sensitive information vital to the enterprise, and the municipalities could not agree on much for long. Financing a collective municipal enterprise without provincial backing would be fraught with difficulties. The more he studied the question the more he became convinced that the province would have to play a major role, not just facilitate municipal activity. This growing conviction coincided with a major shift in the political landscape. The Liberal party was losing its hold over the electorate. Rooted in rural Ontario, it had trouble coming to grips with issues important to the rapidly growing urban constituencies. The Conservatives had crept to within three seats of upsetting the Liberals in 1902. In January 1905 Whitney’s Conservatives swept to a landslide victory, capturing 69 of the 98 seats. In London, the increasingly popular Adam Beck won with a plurality of 566 votes.
The hydroelectric question had not figured prominently in the campaign. The change in government, however, catapulted Beck into a position of some influence provincially. On 8 February he was made a minister without portfolio in the new administration. After the election, Whitney grandly promised that the water-power of Niagara “should be as free as air” and be developed for the public good. “It is the duty of the Government,” Beck insisted in his populist fashion, “to see that development is not hindered by permitting a handful of people to enrich themselves out of these treasures at the expense of the general public.” To that end Whitney cancelled an eleventh-hour water-power concession granted by the Ross government and on 5 July he appointed Beck to head a hydroelectric commission of inquiry. It was empowered to take an inventory of available water-power sites, gather information on existing companies in terms of their capital costs, their operating expenses, and the prices they charged, and recommend an appropriate provincial policy with respect to the generation and distribution of hydroelectricity. Beck continued to be a member of the Snider commission but clearly he had moved on to a broader conception of the power question; he now wielded a much more powerful regulatory and investigative instrument and could act with the authority of the province. Henceforth he would be the undisputed leader of the hydro movement.
The Snider commission, which reported first, in March 1906, recommended the construction of a cooperatively owned hydroelectric system linking the major municipal utilities to generating facilities at Niagara under the control of a permanent power commission financed and managed by the subscribing municipalities. In the weeks that followed, the Beck commission, in the first of its five regional reports, and more particularly the activities of Beck himself, superseded the Snider notion of a municipal cooperative. Beck’s initial report, on Niagara and southwest Ontario, prepared the way instead for provincial action by pointing out the excessive rates charged by private power companies, and the inherent difficulties of government regulation. He gave an important speech in Guelph urging direct provincial intervention. He inspired a mass meeting of municipal representatives at Toronto city hall and, on 11 April, a demonstration on the lawn of the legislature demanding that the province empower a commission to generate, transmit, and sell power to the municipalities at the lowest possible cost, and regulate the prices charged by the private providers. Beck also orchestrated a deluge of petitions from the municipal councils. All of this effort was intended to soften up his colleagues in cabinet, most of whom harboured deep suspicions about public ownership in general and Beck’s movement in particular. The strategy worked. The Whitney government hesitantly introduced legislation on 7 May (Act to provide for the transmission of electrical power to municipalities) which, in effect, created a three-member provincial crown corporation (though it was not called that), the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. Operating outside the usual civil service constraints and with extensive powers of expropriation, this body would have full powers to purchase, lease, or build transmission facilities financed by provincial bonds. Local utilities could buy power from the commission only after municipal voters had approved the contract and the enabling financial by-law. Astonishingly, Beck’s extraparliamentary organization cowed even the opposition: the bill passed unanimously in less than a week.
In organizational terms Beck had pushed on beyond an unwieldy municipal cooperative to a provincial crown agency. In doing so he had alienated some of his friends, especially in the way he had shoved Snider aside and unilaterally appropriated studies done by the Snider commission for his own investigation. Nonetheless he had created a broad coalition of municipal activists behind his determination to build a publicly owned, provincial system. But there were many possible forms, involving different degrees of state intervention, that the organization might take. The government remained ambivalent, guarded, and internally divided. What eventually emerged as Ontario Hydro, however, was Beck’s creation over the opposition of his cabinet colleagues. On 7 June 1906 Whitney appointed Beck chairman of the new commission, as expected. Needed engineering expertise would come from Cecil Brunswick Smith. And to balance Beck’s populism and rein in his enthusiasms, Whitney also persuaded a reluctant John Strathearn Hendrie of Hamilton to serve, Beck’s peer as a horseman, a man of his wife’s class, and a known supporter of the private power companies, among them the Hamilton Electric Light and Cataract Power Company Limited [see John Patterson*].
The private interests, especially the group promoting the only Canadian firm at Niagara, the Electrical Development Company of Ontario Limited from Toronto, having failed in their first attempts to derail Beck, now bent their minds to seeking some reasonable accommodation with the government. There were many in the cabinet, the premier included, who were sympathetic to this point of view. The Electrical Development Company was in a precarious financial position; a collapse would be a costly blot on the province. Whitney insisted that every consideration be given the company in negotiating the contract for power in early 1907 with the winning bidder, the American-based Ontario Power Company, and then with respect to the construction of the transmission line. In each case negotiations failed. The premier did not conceive of his policy as a guerre à outrance against the private interests. He believed in talking tough, but in the end was willing to come to terms. Unlike Beck, Whitney was a practitioner of brokerage politics. Beck, a newly formed ideologue, was not prepared to bargain away what had formed in his mind as a just alternative to private control. It was possible that neither of them knew the truth about themselves, though in time they came to a realization of their honest differences. For his part Beck had to manoeuvre against the wishes of his premier and colleagues in cabinet. From their point of view he could be unpleasant, ruthless, even unprincipled. He would change his mind without notice, withhold information, go back on deals, and alternately retreat in a sulk or play the rude bully.
Beck proved a formidable champion. The Toronto market was a key element in his grand scheme. Without access, which the city wanted, he could not deliver cheap electricity to southwestern towns, but Toronto’s system was controlled by the Electrical Development Company. In the resulting contest over a proposed by-law to fund a municipal network powered by Hydro, Beck’s emotional, simplistic rhetoric was a telling factor. He also profited from the ineptitude and arrogance of his corporate opponents in Electrical Development, Frederic Nicholls, Sir Henry Mill Pellatt*, and William Mackenzie, whose financial reputations had already taken a beating from the royal commission on life insurance in 1906. During the winter of 1907-8 by-laws endorsing the contracts with Ontario Hydro were approved by municipal ratepayers with huge majorities in Toronto and elsewhere. Hydro policy also proved extremely popular in the election of June 1908, in which the government increased both its popular vote and its number of seats. Beck now had a dual mandate from the municipal and provincial electorates. When a desperate Mackenzie amalgamated several enterprises into one utility in 1908 and then belatedly attempted to forestall provincial ownership with a counterproposal to build the system and distribute power under government regulation, the offer came too late. The government had gone so far it could not safely turn back; a publicly owned transmission company would have to be created. Mackenzie and his colleagues had played the game badly and when they lost, after having been given every possible consideration, they turned viciously on Beck and the government. Their quixotic campaign to undermine provincial credit in British financial circles, and then to seek disallowance in Ottawa of key Hydro legislation, served only to bring Whitney and Beck closer together and solidify the political foundations of Ontario Hydro.
Using electricity generated by the Ontario Power Company, the Hydro-Electric Power Commission became an operating entity in a series of theatrical turning-on ceremonies that began in the fall of 1910 and continued into 1911 as successive towns and cities were wired into the grid. Each of these civic festivals became an opportunity for Beck to recount the triumph of public power over private greed. His hostility towards the private power companies, who were now his competitors, and his shameless self-promotion as the champion of “The People’s Power,” deeply troubled his colleagues. Moreover, his independent conduct raised awkward questions about the precise relationship between the management of Hydro and the government. Before the election of December 1911 Whitney floated a trial balloon, suggesting that the time had come to make Hydro a department of government, under the full control of the cabinet. Beck did not openly attack the proposal, but once he was acclaimed in his own seat and the government was re-elected, his municipal allies, acting through the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, formed in early 1912, launched an aggressive campaign on his behalf; it not only supported Beck as chairman of a quasi-independent commission, but also (in February) brought him a handsome $6,000 salary, without requiring his resignation from the legislature.
With this vote of confidence from the people and somewhat more reluctantly from the premier, Beck struggled within a competitive environment to build Hydro through dramatic price cutting and political showmanship. In his campaign to expand consumption Beck became an electrical Messiah: in speeches and publicity he extolled the power of abundant cheap light to brighten the homes of working people; cheap electricity would create more jobs in the factories of the province; hydro would lighten the drudgery of the barn and the household; and electric railways radiating out from the cities into the countryside would create more prosperous, progressive farms even as light and power made brighter, cleaner cities. With his famous travelling exhibits of the latest electrical appliances (popularly called circuses), rural tests, and local Hydro stores (where household appliances were on display), and in parade floats, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and a host of speeches, Beck presented public hydro as an elixir, but he was no snake-oil salesman. He understood the economics of the electric industry better than his competitors or his critics. Along with utilities magnate Samuel Insull of Chicago, Beck realized that the more electricity he could sell, the cheaper it would cost to acquire. It was a difficult lesson to teach. He even had to browbeat some of the more fiscally conservative municipal utilities, most notably the Toronto Hydro-Electric Power Commission, to pass the lower rates on to consumers. In the process he continued to expand his publicly owned system at the expense of his private competitors.
In Toronto and across the province, Beck acquired a more ardent following than the government itself. At home he and his family continued to rise in public esteem. London’s municipal electric utility, which received its first hydro from Niagara in 1910, became a model for progressive business promotion and Beck loyalism. Personally Beck maintained an active interest in civic politics. When the water commissioners proposed a treatment facility to take more water from the tainted Thames River, he boldly promised to find enough clean fresh water in artesian wells. The city took him up on this offer, voting $10,000 for the purpose. In 1910 Beck drilled the wells, installed electrical pumps, and brought the project in on time and on budget, or rather, he absorbed the excess costs himself. In two grand gestures Beck brought light and water to the growing city in the same year.
However, it was in the field of public health that the Becks made their greatest contribution. Sometime in l907 or 1908 the Becks’ young daughter, Marion Auria, contracted tuberculosis. Her worried parents sought out the best specialists in America and in Europe. Mercifully her case responded to treatment. But the Becks became concerned for those families in their community who lacked the means to provide their children with medical care. Everyone, they believed, ought to have close access to first-class tuberculosis facilities. Accordingly, in 1909 Adam and Lillian Beck organized the London Health Association to provide a sanatorium. From local individuals and organizations they raised $10,000 (led by their own donation of $1,200), the city contributed $5,000, and the province added $4,000. On 5 April 1910 Governor General Lord Grey* opened the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in the village of Byron, west of the city. For the rest of their lives the Becks remained deeply attached to this sanatorium and made its maintenance and expansion their passion. As president from its inception to his death in 1925 and a sometimes overbearing physical presence on the weekends, Adam Beck personally oversaw all major and even many minor renovations.
A society beauty, Lillian Beck also continued to be a fiercely competitive horsewoman. The Beck stables produced a string of outstanding hunter-class horses that won Adam and Lillian international recognition. In 1907 they competed in the Olympia Horse Show in London, England, where Lillian’s horse My Fellow won its class. To remain competitive, the Becks leased an estate in England in 1913 to maintain their equestrian operation at the highest international standards. From that time onward Lillian and Marion lived about half the year in England; Adam paid extended visits when his schedule permitted. In 1914 their prize-winning horses Melrose, Sir Edward, and Sir James were counted among the finest middleweight and heavyweight hunters in the world. The Becks also competed regularly at the National Horse Show in New York City where, in 1915, Lillian was named a judge over chauvinist protests, famously breaking down the barriers of this once exclusively male domain.
Adam Beck’s contribution to London had been publicly recognized in an unprecedented dinner given in his honour on 25 Nov. 1913. At this glittering affair, attended by 500 in the Masonic Temple, Anglican bishop David Williams* proclaimed him “incorrupt and incorruptible”; Roman Catholic bishop Michael Francis Fallon* eulogized his vision, character, and charitable works; and the mayor and city council gave him a silver candelabra and tray. While the ladies looked on from the galleries, the head-table guests were served their dinners from a small electric railway. According to the London Free Press, this banquet was “the most remarkable and spontaneous demonstration of affection and regard ever tendered a public man in London.” Visibly moved, Beck spoke briefly of his satisfaction at lightening the load of the poor, the housewife, the farmer, the merchant, and afflicted children, and pledged to carry on the fight to create a renewed citizenship based upon “service, progress and righteousness.” These local honours were crowned the following year when he received a knighthood in the king’s June honours list. He was now Sir Adam, the Power Knight, and Lillian formally became what she had long been in style, Lady Beck. Charging at fences on horseback, or driving the rapidly growing Hydro system forward, Sir Adam Beck was at the height of his power in 1914.
Re-elected by a large majority in the general election of 29 June 1914, Beck directed a major structural transformation of Hydro during his next term with fewer constraints than in the past. Whitney, who died in September, was replaced by a less adept premier, William Howard Hearst*. Beck’s nemesis, John Hendrie, resigned from the Hydro-Electric Power Commission to become lieutenant governor. Beck thus had a much freer rein, though Hearst did not include him in his cabinet. Hydro’s head set about expanding his organization with a powerful lobby, the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, zealously behind him. Beck and the regional municipalities fixed upon electric radial railways as a major force for modernization and rural reconstruction. In 1913 the Hydro Electric Railway Act and amendments to the Ontario Railway Act had prepared the way legislatively. A web of light lines that connected farms, towns, and cities and delivered transportation at cost under a public authority had enormous appeal and Beck became its most ardent hot gospeller. He managed to have the abject London and Port Stanley Railway electrified as a glowing prototype. Coincidentally the baseload of the proposed railways would greatly increase electric consumption and drive Hydro to a new stage of development as a fully integrated regional monopoly that provided hydroelectric generation, transmission, and distribution services as well as high-speed transportation. This grandiose vision of electrical modernization had commensurate costs, which Beck somewhat disingenuously managed to minimize.
In 1914 Hydro and the municipalities received legislative permission, subject to ratepayer approval, to enter into the inter-city electric railway business. By stages Hydro acquired the legal authority to generate power as well as distribute it through the purchase of a utility (Big Chute) on the Severn River and the construction of regional power stations in 1914-15 at Wasdell Falls, also on the Severn, and Eugenia Falls, near Flesherton. These were sideshows, however; the centrepiece of the proposed integrated system remained Niagara. In 1914 Hydro quietly began planning for a massive hydroelectric station there, but there was precious little water left at Niagara to turn the turbines. A treaty negotiated with the United States in 1908 limited the amount that might be diverted for power purposes; the three existing private companies at Niagara had already acquired, between them, the rights to most of the Canadian quota. Beck had made the development of the hydroelectric system into the central issue on the Ontario political agenda when conflict broke out in Europe in August 1914.
The Becks threw themselves wholeheartedly into the war effort. In 1912 the military authorities had cleverly put Adam’s organizing talents and his knowledge of horses together by naming him to a remount committee. At the outset of the war he took charge of acquiring horses for the Canadian army in the territory from Halifax to the Lakehead. In June 1915 he assumed this responsibility for the British army as well, an appointment that brought him an honorary colonelcy. Inevitably, allegations arose that his agency either paid too much for horses or acquired unsuitable remounts, but the claims were not substantiated upon investigation. Together Adam and Lillian Beck also made personal contributions to the war effort, donating all of their champion horses to the cause. General Edwin Alfred Hervey Alderson, for example, rode Sir James, Adam’s most famous horse. Lady Beck, in England for most of the war, working with the Canadian Red Cross Society, devoted herself particularly to ensuring that wounded veterans were welcomed into British country homes for their convalescence. The Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in Ontario was expanded in 1917-18 to accommodate the rehabilitation of wounded returnees. The arrangement worked well, but in the later stages of the war battle-hardened veterans began to complain about the hospital’s stern regimen, much of which was attributed to Sir Adam’s “Germanic” direction. In 1916, for his local and patriotic help, Beck had received an lld from the Western University of London, which he served as a director and later as chancellor.
At first the war had relatively little impact on Beck’s plans for Hydro. The municipal elections of January 1917, for example, revolved around the approval of by-laws for Hydro radials and vague authorization for the future generation of power at Niagara. Then the rapidly increasing power demands of wartime industrialization provided the overriding urgency, later in 1917, to overcome opposition to the purchase of one of the power companies at Niagara (Ontario Power) and forge ahead with the construction of a large diversion canal and a world-scale plant at Queenston, which would make much more efficient use of the available water. Shamelessly using the moral purpose of the war, Beck hemmed in his private competitors even more, setting the stage for their eventual acquisition, though the negotiations would be unduly drawn out, litigious, and embittered. However, war, inflation, railway nationalization, and the demands of automotive technology for better roads combined to damp enthusiasm for the radial railway project. Moreover, the problem for the Hydro-Electric Commission now was not finding ways of selling surplus power, but rather keeping up with galloping industrial, commercial, municipal, and domestic demand. When the war ended, Hydro’s transformation into an integrated utility producing as well as transmitting its own power was much closer to realization. Its corresponding administrative growth had been grandly marked by the ornate office building begun on University Avenue in Toronto in 1914 and occupied in 1916. Sir Adam had a good war, but he emerged from it a wounded politician.
From the very beginning there had been critics of the Hydro project and Beck’s management of it. Canadian private producers and British investors placed obstacles in the way during the early stages. As Hydro advanced, it attracted new critics: private power advocates from the United States, who viewed the progress of public ownership in Ontario with alarm. In 1912 a New York State committee of investigation, the Ferris committee, issued a sharply critical report. A year later a prominent American hydroelectric expert, Reginald Pelham Bolton, denounced the unorthodox financing of Hydro in An expensive experiment . . . (New York). Between 15 July and 23 Dec. 1916 James Mavor, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, published a devastating critique of Hydro’s lack of accountability, dictatorial methods, and tendency to subvert democracy in a series of articles in the Financial Post (Toronto), later reprinted as Niagara in politics . . . (New York, 1925).
In the final analysis Beck was his own worst enemy. His authoritarian management style invited criticism. In 1916 the provincial auditor, James Clancy, threw up his hands at Hydro’s accounting practices. Beck embarrassed his premier and government with surprises. He was not one to compromise, even with his friends. A scrapper and sometimes a bully, he intimidated his staff and his municipal allies, and regarded the government and the legislature with disdain. He was more popular and more powerful than the premier, and he acted as if he knew it. Hydro, in his mind, was bigger than any government and he was the personal embodiment of Hydro. Cautious people who wanted to know in advance how much projects would cost were battered into submission and put on his list of enemies; when the bills added up to two or three times the initial estimates, there were always convoluted exculpatory explanations. Dismissing his censors, Beck stormed ahead, fuming with rage at the conspiracies mounted against him and bristling with indignation at the slightest criticism. Even Beck’s defenders tired of his haughty, domineering ways. A frustrated Hearst, when accused by Beck of hindering Hydro’s development in the spring of 1919, rebuked Sir Adam for never taking him into his confidence, for his presumptuous attitude towards parliament, and for saddling others with responsibility for Hydro’s mounting debt. Beck responded by withdrawing his support from the government and by announcing his intention to run independently in the upcoming election.
The election of October 1919 came as a devastating blow to Beck and, potentially, to his project. As an independent in London, he was defeated by his sole opponent, Dr Hugh Allan Stevenson, the Labour candidate, who benefited from disaffected Tory votes, some nastiness about Beck’s ethnic background, and a vocal uprising amongst the returned soldiers in the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium. The timing could not have been worse. Beck’s massive Queenston hydroelectric station lay only half completed and the radial railway scheme had stalled; however, Beck’s enormous popularity, which transcended party lines, saved him. The victorious but leaderless United Farmers of Ontario initially sounded him out as a possible premier, but both sides quickly thought better of it. Although Labour strongly supported Hydro, the UFO were much more reserved, especially about Beck’s radial-railway enthusiasms; they preferred improved roads. As chairman of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, Beck had also been an mpp and, for much of the time, a minister without portfolio. The election broke that political connection with the government in power. The eventual premier, Ernest Charles Drury*, had little choice but to keep Beck on as chairman, but he appointed a tough ex-soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel Dougall Carmichael, to the commission to keep him in line.
Over the next four years the new government and the tempestuous Power Knight remained locked in combat. For much of the time William Rothwell Plewman, a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, acted as unofficial mediator between Hydro and the premier, who was determined that Hydro do the government’s bidding and not the other way around. On 6 July 1920 the government announced a royal commission to reconsider Beck’s radial program in light of the rising costs, disappointing experience in other jurisdictions, and technological change. Beck immediately orchestrated a campaign of resistance. In emergency meetings on the 8th at Toronto city hall and the Hydro building, for instance, the Hydro-Electric Radial Association registered its “strong disapproval” of the commission. Provincial treasurer Peter Smith responded for the government that it would not be stampeded. In July 1921 the commission, chaired by Robert Franklin Sutherland, produced a report that was highly critical of radials and recommended construction of only a much reduced system. Meanwhile, Beck had wasted valuable political capital in an acrimonious takeover of Sir William Mackenzie’s Toronto Power Company Limited and its related electric and radial companies and in fighting the City of Toronto over an eight-track entry corridor for a mammoth radial system. Characteristically, he condemned the Sutherland report in an intemperate pamphlet and urged the municipalities not to let up in their campaign. The adverse report, a hostile provincial government, and defeats for radial by-laws (particularly in Toronto) in the municipal elections of January 1922 effectively put an end to Beck’s radial dream.
Drury, concerned at the spiralling costs of the Queenston hydroelectric plant, wanted an inquiry into this project as well. At first Beck agreed. However, when his hand-picked expert, Hugh L. Cooper, questioned the design, recalculated the costs upward, and insisted upon changes in the power canal to enhance capacity, Beck rejected his advice and appointed another consulting engineer. The turbines had begun to turn on the first phase of this huge project on 29 Dec. 1921, but there seemed to be no relation between the estimates Beck presented and the mounting bills; in one year the difference amounted to $20 million. Unable to explain the situation, Colonel Carmichael offered his resignation, which the premier refused. The cost of the undertaking, now much larger, had ballooned from the initial $20 million to $84 million and counting. Drury, who had to guarantee the bonds for the over-budget project and take political responsibility for it, insisted upon a commission of inquiry with a sweeping mandate to examine the overall operations of Hydro, not just Queenston. This commission, appointed in April 1922 and chaired by Liberal lawyer Walter Dymond Gregory, became in effect an adversarial audit of Beck’s management that involved scores of witnesses, produced thousands of pages of testimony, and ran into the middle of 1923.
These political setbacks were, in some respects, the least of his problems. On 17 Oct. 1921 his beloved wife had died from complications following surgery for pancreatitis. Sir Adam and Lady Beck had been a deeply devoted couple despite their often long absences from one another. Living in the Alexandra apartments next to the Hydro building, they had only just begun to settle into life together in Toronto society. Moreover, she had been the one mellowing influence in his life. He was devastated by the loss. A widower, he was now also the single parent of a fiercely independent teenager. With the check upon his temper in a Hamilton grave, he became more difficult and erratic in the face of his daughter’s defiance and the ascendancy of those he considered to be his political enemies. These were the years of Beck’s towering, black rages.
Beck had run Hydro as a private corporation. Honest and incorruptible personally, he nevertheless paid scant attention to the niceties of accounting. He would routinely spend funds authorized for one purpose on any project he deemed in the interests of Hydro, including local by-law campaigns. For Beck the ends justified the means. Meanwhile, his vision of a provincial, publicly owned hydroelectric monopoly that served the municipal utilities and provided power at the lowest possible cost had been largely realized. In 1923 Hydro served 393 municipalities and distributed 685,000 horsepower using facilities in which over $170 million had been invested. Beck was a magnificent builder. There could be no denying his accomplishments, though, as the hearings of the Gregory commission showed, his management style, planning, political methods, and accountability to the legislature could be questioned.
The vexations suffered at the hands of the UFO government eventually drew Beck back to the bosom of the Conservative party in self-defence. In the election of June 1923 he stood as a Conservative in his old London riding. The irony of a civil servant running as a candidate in opposition to the government was not lost on Drury or the Farmers’ Sun (Toronto), but Beck managed to get away with it. This time he won with a plurality of more than 7,000 votes – a wonderful personal vindication. George Howard Ferguson*’s Conservatives swept the province, and Beck returned to cabinet in July as a minister without portfolio. Ferguson brought the Gregory inquiry to an abrupt conclusion and made much of the fact that Sir Adam’s general stewardship of Hydro had been supported in the commission’s voluminous evidence and summary reports. Beck’s probity could be stressed while quietly the government used the critical aspects of Gregory’s reports to bring Hydro more fully within the framework of financial and political accountability.
Then, just when it seemed these clouds had passed over, Beck’s personal integrity came under attack from an unexpected source. Hydro secretary E. Clarence Settell absconded with $30,000 in Hydro funds and left a blackmailing letter itemizing Sir Adam’s alleged misdeeds. When he was apprehended in October 1924 heading for the border with his mistress, he added further charges to the indictment. Wounded by Settell’s treachery, and by now a very sick man, Beck had to endure yet another inquiry as judge Colin George Snider conducted an investigation of more than 40 specific allegations having to do with the private use of automobiles, misappropriation of public money, unauthorized expenditures, conflicts of interest in tendering, and irregularities in expense records. Issued in December, Snider’s report condemned Isaac Benson Lucas’s management of Hydro’s legal department and Frederick Arthur Gaby’s conflict of interest in a dredging contract within the engineering department, but it found no evidence of serious wrongdoing by Beck. Save for a few petty mistakes in his expense accounts, the commission exonerated him. Settell went to jail for three years. Although another attempt “to get” Sir Adam, in the words of the Toronto Globe, had failed, the critics continued the battle of the books against Hydro. Beck thundered back with vigorous refutations in pamphlets that put his fighting spirit on full display. Returning to London one night by train, he gestured in some excitement to his travelling companion and long-time ally Edward Victor Buchanan, head of London’s utilities: “Look out there! The lights in the farms. That’s what I’ve been fighting for.”
The political struggle and quarrels with his daughter over her determination to marry Strathearn Hay, whom he deemed unsuitable in part because he was related to the Hendrie family, exhausted Beck, whose health and mental outlook deteriorated. It took Howard Ferguson’s intervention to persuade him to attend Marion’s wedding in January 1925. Ordered to rest by his doctors, who had diagnosed his illness as pernicious anaemia, Beck went to South Carolina for a holiday in February, and then he underwent transfusion treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. There he brooded about his beloved Hydro, strategies for the hydroelectric development of the St Lawrence River, and the continuing machinations of the private power interests, and he grumbled that the premier and his colleagues in government were neglecting him. He was a broken man by his own admission.
In May, Beck quietly slipped back to his home in London, where he attempted to conduct Hydro business by telephone from his bedroom. He weakened rapidly over the summer and died on 15 Aug. 1925 in his 69th year. Beck’s passing shocked the province; the seriousness of his condition had not been widely understood. The death announcement occasioned a spontaneous outpouring of grief, with eulogies pouring in from every quarter. His obituaries filled pages in the newspapers. “Canada has not produced a greater man than the late Sir Adam Beck,” declared Saturday Night (Toronto) as it enshrined him in the national pantheon along with Sir John A. Macdonald*, Lord Mount Stephen [Stephen], and Sir William Cornelius Van Horne*. Ontario city halls were draped in black, the Hydro shops and offices closed in tribute, and in London business ceased for an hour. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral cortège. The ceremony at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, attended by all the major political figures of the province, was also broadcast over the radio. As his funeral train mournfully passed from London across Beck’s political heartland to Hamilton, where he was to be interred in Greenwood Cemetery under a granite cross beside his wife, farmers and their families paused from their toil and men swept their hats from their heads. The entire Toronto City Council attended his burial. It is a small irony that Beck lies in what he would have considered enemy ground, Hamilton, the last bastion of private power. But for once his wish to be beside his wife overcame his prejudices.
Sir Adam Beck’s death marked the end of an unusual period in Ontario politics, one in which the chairman of Hydro had exercised greater power and influence than the premier and commanded a broad-based, populist political following much stronger than any political party. In building Hydro, Beck almost succeeded in creating an institution that was a law unto itself and for a long time it would continue to demonstrate some of the characteristics of independence. He died a wealthy man with an estate valued at more than $627,000, although his manufacturing business had been in decline for some years. His salary from his chairmanship of Hydro over 20 years totalled $197,000. Some of his wealth may have come to him from his wife. After making numerous small bequests to relatives and charities, he left a trust fund of approximately half a million dollars to his daughter and her heirs.
Beck’s memory was kept alive by the Ontario Municipal Electric Association, Hydro, and the citizens of London. In 1934 Toronto and the Hydro municipalities raised a splendid monument to him that still commands University Avenue. This brooding statue, by Emanuel Otto Hahn*, and Beck’s grave in Hamilton became sites of regular pilgrimages and wreath-laying ceremonies by the heirs and successors to the OMEA as they struggled to perpetuate the notion of Hydro as a municipal cooperative. Hydro publications regularly stressed the vision and legacy of Beck during the era of growth after World War I; eventually the much enlarged power stations at Queenston were renamed Beck No.1 and Beck No.2 in his honour. In London a new collegiate was named after him and a nearby public school was named after Lady Beck. The Women’s Sanatorium Aid Society of London built a charming chapel, St Luke’s in the Garden, across from the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in memory of the Becks in 1932. The sanatorium itself became the Beck Memorial Sanatorium in 1948. In print, W. R. Plewman’s vivid 1947 biography captured the greatness of Beck and the tempestuous nature of his personality. Merrill Denison*’s commissioned history of Hydro in 1960 established continuity between the transcendent hero figure at the beginning and the transforming, province-girdling corporation Hydro had become in the postwar era.
As the obituaries noted, Hydro itself was Beck’s greatest monument. He worried on his deathbed that political partisanship would overcome it and that Hydro as an independent entity would not survive. But in his absence it continued to flourish, firmly rooted in the towns and cities, along the back concessions, and amongst the merchants, workers, farmers, and homemakers of the province. Hydroelectricity generated and delivered by a crown corporation to municipally owned utilities at the lowest cost had become an Ontario institution that would outlive changing governments and passing ideologies. That had largely been Sir Adam Beck’s doing.
He seemed very expressive. I found him oblivious about my presence…rather, engaged in preparing a fire to do some ritualistic practices probably!!! In between he completely belonged to his own world. This provoked me to stick to my study of his portraiture with a hope to get some nice candid shots…
Every year hundreds of Sadhus gather in the city of Kolkata before they set their pilgrimage to Sagar Island for a holy dip. Our state Government takes a rigorous step every year towards security, shelter, food, and hygiene for hundreds of them assembling from all over the country. Many common people gather to see them; many with a hope for getting their blessings. My notion was different. I always get fascinated by their ritualistic practices, faith, and portrayal of facial expressions! They are excellent subjects to study portraiture. I seldom miss this opportunity. This year was no exception!
Hereby I share a few interesting portraits with you…hope will like them.
Gangasagar pilgrimage and fair – A brief note.
Gangasagar pilgrimage and fair, held annually, is the second largest congregation of mankind after the holy Kumbha Mela. Almost a million of Hindu devotees from all over India gather at Gangasagar for a holy dip.
Besides the devotees, hundreds of sadhus, priests and alms-seekers come to Gangasagar every year for a unique spiritual experience!
The river Ganga (Ganges) which originates in the Gangotri glacier in the snow clad high Himalayas, descends down the mountains, reaches the plains, flows through ancient pilgrimage sites, and drains into the Bay of Bengal. A dip in the ocean, where the Ganga meets the sea is considered to be of great religious significance particularly on the Makara Sankranti day (January 14/15), when the sun makes a transition to Capricorn from Sagittarius.
My own experience of Gangasagar fair...a couple of years ago:
The Gangasagar fair (mela) exhibited a colorful ceremonial display of ritualistic acts, all being driven by deep faith in Hindu religion, directed for the sake of wealth and peace for self and for the dearest and nearest ones, for new generations to come, and of course in deep regards for the ancestors. I wondered by how for generations , the faith, devotion, endurance and love directed the people of my country in their continuous journey for eternal peace with all poverty acclaimed, other wise .I wondered by the gleaming faces of my country people who had no affluence of the west. I wondered by their enormous life forces with very ordinary food. I wondered by their grace with very ordinary cloths, and simplicity out of ignorance of the complex world. I found my religious India at a glance there. And I believe that my India isn’t a “Lost Paradise” even today, where humanity flourished forever.
A photo of my son pitching on his little league baseball team. He doesn't like posing for the camera, so I love it when I can get a good photo of him on the field!
20190620-BP4A2592
Photo taken by Herwart Schneider and kindly provided by him for inclusion on this page.
München-Riem
1979-07-21 (21 July 1979)
G-ARVJ
Vickers VC10 Srs1101
812
Gulf Air/State of Qatar Amiri Flight
A very rare sight at Riem and reportedly an emergency landing due to problems with the right inner starboard engine.
Information from flickr - thanks to heathrow junkie:
G-ARVJ c/n 812 - Vickers VC-10-1101 - delivered new to BOAC in April 1964, incorporated into the British Airways fleet ten years later. Leased to the Ruler of Qatar, from 1975 to 1981, the aircraft was then sold to the RAF where it became ZD493 and was used as a source of spare parts for the RAF's VC-10 fleet at Brize Norton.
Detailed history of this airframe:
www.vc10.net/Airframes/cn_812__garvj.html
This airframe as G-ARVJ with BOAC (earlier colours):
www.vc10.net/Airframes/Images/G-ARVJ_2.jpg
This airframe as G-ARVJ with BOAC in July 1973 at LHR:
www.flickr.com/photos/52467480@N08/6431807147
This airframe as G-ARVJ in BOAC colours with British Airways titles:
www.flickr.com/photos/126917003@N05/16743021504
This airframe as G-ARVJ in its last British Airways colours:
www.flickr.com/photos/markp51/36523446702
This airframe as G-ARVJ (ZD493) at RAF Brize Norton in September 1991:
www.flickr.com/photos/60580721@N06/32427175237
Scan from Kodachrome slide.
King Ashurnasirpal appears twice, dressed in the ritual robes and holding the mace symbolising authority. In front of him (centre) a sacred tree, possibly symbolising life, he makes a gestureof worship to a god on a winged disc. The god, who may be the god Shamash, has a ring in one hand; this is an ancient Mesopotamian symbol of god-given kingship. There are protective spirits on either side behind the king.
This symmetrical scene, heavy with symbolism, was placed behind the throne. There was another, opposite the main door of the throne room, and similar scenes occupied promient positions in some other Assyrian palaces; they were also embroided on the royal clothes.
“Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness...Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned."
― James Joyce, Ulysses
I chose a non-traditional shot of not singing. I think everyone posted a singing shot... I like him just looking at me. He's very handsome.
How cool to see so many different wrens recently. Getting better shots of wrens I have already seen, Rock Wren, Canyon Wren and Marsh Wren. Then, finally seeing the tiny Pacific Wren (finally) for the first time!
For fun, I looked online to see what a group of wrens were called and it said 'herd' or 'chime'. While they obviously aren't flocking together, I am just calling them a chime for the purpose of this series.
Just another crazy concept of mine!
What ever your beliefs, some of the Adam & Eve sentiments still hold value today!
I particularly like this quote:
''Eve was not taken out of Adam‘s head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him''. ~ Matthew Henry
Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Russian: Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий, IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr sʲɪˈmʲɵnəvʲɪtɕ vɨˈsotskʲɪj]; 25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980), was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often humorous street-jargon. He was also a prominent stage- and screen-actor. Though the official Soviet cultural establishment largely ignored his work, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's musicians and actors.
Vysotsky was born in Moscow at the 3rd Meshchanskaya St. (61/2) maternity hospital. His father, Semyon Volfovich (Vladimirovich) (1915–1997), was a colonel in the Soviet army, originally from Kiev. Vladimir's mother, Nina Maksimovna, (née Seryogina, 1912–2003) was Russian, and worked as a German language translator.[3] Vysotsky's family lived in a Moscow communal flat in harsh conditions, and had serious financial difficulties. When Vladimir was 10 months old, Nina had to return to her office in the Transcript bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Geodesy and Cartography (engaged in making German maps available for the Soviet military) so as to help her husband earn their family's living.
Vladimir's theatrical inclinations became obvious at an early age, and were supported by his paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn, a theater fan. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet," often using in his public speeches expressions he could hardly have heard at home. Once, at the age of two, when he had tired of the family's guests' poetry requests, he, according to his mother, sat himself under the New-year tree with a frustrated air about him and sighed: "You silly tossers! Give a child some respite!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. A three-year-old could jeer his father in a bathroom with unexpected poetic improvisation ("Now look what's here before us / Our goat's to shave himself!") or appall unwanted guests with some street folk song, promptly steering them away. Vysotsky remembered those first three years of his life in the autobiographical Ballad of Childhood (Баллада о детстве, 1975), one of his best-known songs.
As World War II broke out, Semyon Vysotsky, a military reserve officer, joined the Soviet army and went to fight the Nazis. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka, in Orenburg Oblast where the boy had to spend six days a week in a kindergarten and his mother worked for twelve hours a day in a chemical factory. In 1943, both returned to their Moscow apartment at 1st Meschanskaya St., 126. In September 1945, Vladimir joined the 1st class of the 273rd Moscow Rostokino region School.
In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced. From 1947 to 1949, Vladimir lived with Semyon Vladimirovich (then an army Major) and his Armenian wife, Yevgenya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "aunt Zhenya", at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany (later East Germany). "We decided that our son would stay with me. Vladimir came to stay with me in January 1947, and my second wife, Yevgenia, became Vladimir's second mother for many years to come. They had much in common and liked each other, which made me really happy," Semyon Vysotsky later remembered. Here living conditions, compared to those of Nina's communal Moscow flat, were infinitely better; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-storeyed house, and the boy had a room to himself for the first time in his life. In 1949 along with his stepmother Vladimir returned to Moscow. There he joined the 5th class of the Moscow 128th School and settled at Bolshoy Karetny [ru], 15 (where they had to themselves two rooms of a four-roomed flat), with "auntie Zhenya" (who was just 28 at the time), a woman of great kindness and warmth whom he later remembered as his second mother. In 1953 Vysotsky, now much interested in theater and cinema, joined the Drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov.[7] "No one in my family has had anything to do with arts, no actors or directors were there among them. But my mother admired theater and from the earliest age... each and every Saturday I've been taken up with her to watch one play or the other. And all of this, it probably stayed with me," he later reminisced. The same year he received his first ever guitar, a birthday present from Nina Maksimovna; a close friend, bard and a future well-known Soviet pop lyricist Igor Kokhanovsky taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir re-settled into his mother's new home at 1st Meshchanskaya, 76. In June of the same year he graduated from school with five A's.
In 1955, Vladimir enrolled into the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering, but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In June 1956 he joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio-Institute. It was there that he met the 3rd course student Iza Zhukova who four years later became his wife; soon the two lovers settled at the 1st Meschanskaya flat, in a common room, shielded off by a folding screen. It was also in the Studio that Vysotsky met Bulat Okudzhava for the first time, an already popular underground bard. He was even more impressed by his Russian literature teacher Andrey Sinyavsky who along with his wife often invited students to his home to stage improvised disputes and concerts. In 1958 Vysotsky's got his first Moscow Art Theatre role: that of Porfiry Petrovich in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In 1959 he was cast in his first cinema role, that of student Petya in Vasily Ordynsky's The Yearlings (Сверстницы). On 20 June 1960, Vysotsky graduated from the MAT theater institute and joined the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre (led by Boris Ravenskikh at the time) where he spent (with intervals) almost three troubled years. These were marred by numerous administrative sanctions, due to "lack of discipline" and occasional drunken sprees which were a reaction, mainly, to the lack of serious roles and his inability to realise his artistic potential. A short stint in 1962 at the Moscow Theater of Miniatures (administered at the time by Vladimir Polyakov) ended with him being fired, officially "for a total lack of sense of humour."
Vysotsky's second and third films, Dima Gorin's Career and 713 Requests Permission to Land, were interesting only for the fact that in both he had to be beaten up (in the first case by Aleksandr Demyanenko). "That was the way cinema greeted me," he later jokingly remarked. In 1961, Vysotsky wrote his first ever proper song, called "Tattoo" (Татуировка), which started a long and colourful cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld romantic stories, full of undercurrents and witty social comments. In June 1963, while shooting Penalty Kick (directed by Veniamin Dorman and starring Mikhail Pugovkin), Vysotsky used the Gorky Film Studio to record an hour-long reel-to-reel cassette of his own songs; copies of it quickly spread and the author's name became known in Moscow and elsewhere (although many of these songs were often being referred to as either "traditional" or "anonymous"). Just several months later Riga-based chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny" (Большой Каретный) and Anna Akhmatova (in a conversation with Joseph Brodsky) was quoting Vysotsky's number "I was the soul of a bad company..." taking it apparently for some brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore. In October 1964 Vysotsky recorded in chronological order 48 of his own songs, his first self-made Complete works of... compilation, which boosted his popularity as a new Moscow folk underground star.
In 1964, director Yuri Lyubimov invited Vysotsky to join the newly created Taganka Theatre. "'I've written some songs of my own. Won't you listen?' – he asked. I agreed to listen to just one of them, expecting our meeting to last for no more than five minutes. Instead I ended up listening to him for an entire 1.5 hours," Lyubimov remembered years later of this first audition. On 19 September 1964, Vysotsky debuted in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan as the Second God (not to count two minor roles). A month later he came on stage as a dragoon captain (Bela's father) in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. It was in Taganka that Vysotsky started to sing on stage; the War theme becoming prominent in his musical repertoire. In 1965 Vysotsky appeared in the experimental Poet and Theater (Поэт и Театр, February) show, based on Andrey Voznesensky's work and then Ten Days that Shook the World (after John Reed's book, April) and was commissioned by Lyubimov to write songs exclusively for Taganka's new World War II play. The Fallen and the Living (Павшие и Живые), premiered in October 1965, featured Vysotsky's "Stars" (Звёзды), "The Soldiers of Heeresgruppe Mitte" (Солдаты группы "Центр") and "Penal Battalions" (Штрафные батальоны), the striking examples of a completely new kind of a war song, never heard in his country before. As veteran screenwriter Nikolay Erdman put it (in conversation with Lyubimov), "Professionally, I can well understand how Mayakovsky or Seryozha Yesenin were doing it. How Volodya Vysotsky does it is totally beyond me." With his songs – in effect, miniature theatrical dramatizations (usually with a protagonist and full of dialogues), Vysotsky instantly achieved such level of credibility that real life former prisoners, war veterans, boxers, footballers refused to believe that the author himself had never served his time in prisons and labor camps, or fought in the War, or been a boxing/football professional. After the second of the two concerts at the Leningrad Molecular Physics institute (that was his actual debut as a solo musical performer) Vysotsky left a note for his fans in a journal which ended with words: "Now that you've heard all these songs, please, don't you make a mistake of mixing me with my characters, I am not like them at all. With love, Vysotsky, 20 April 1965, XX c." Excuses of this kind he had to make throughout his performing career. At least one of Vysotsky's song themes – that of alcoholic abuse – was worryingly autobiographical, though. By the time his breakthrough came in 1967, he'd suffered several physical breakdowns and once was sent (by Taganka's boss) to a rehabilitation clinic, a visit he on several occasions repeated since.
Brecht's Life of Galileo (premiered on 17 May 1966), transformed by Lyubimov into a powerful allegory of Soviet intelligentsia's set of moral and intellectual dilemmas, brought Vysotsky his first leading theater role (along with some fitness lessons: he had to perform numerous acrobatic tricks on stage). Press reaction was mixed, some reviewers disliked the actor's overt emotionalism, but it was for the first time ever that Vysotsky's name appeared in Soviet papers. Film directors now were treating him with respect. Viktor Turov's war film I Come from the Childhood where Vysotsky got his first ever "serious" (neither comical, nor villainous) role in cinema, featured two of his songs: a spontaneous piece called "When It's Cold" (Холода) and a dark, Unknown soldier theme-inspired classic "Common Graves" (На братских могилах), sung behind the screen by the legendary Mark Bernes.
Stanislav Govorukhin and Boris Durov's The Vertical (1967), a mountain climbing drama, starring Vysotsky (as Volodya the radioman), brought him all-round recognition and fame. Four of the numbers used in the film (including "Song of a Friend [fi]" (Песня о друге), released in 1968 by the Soviet recording industry monopolist Melodiya disc to become an unofficial hit) were written literally on the spot, nearby Elbrus, inspired by professional climbers' tales and one curious hotel bar conversation with a German guest who 25 years ago happened to climb these very mountains in a capacity of an Edelweiss division fighter. Another 1967 film, Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters featured Vysotsky as the geologist Maxim (paste-bearded again) with a now trademark off-the-cuff musical piece, a melancholy improvisation called "Things to Do" (Дела). All the while Vysotsky continued working hard at Taganka, with another important role under his belt (that of Mayakovsky or, rather one of the latter character's five different versions) in the experimental piece called Listen! (Послушайте!), and now regularly gave semi-official concerts where audiences greeted him as a cult hero.
In the end of 1967 Vysotsky got another pivotal theater role, that of Khlopusha [ru] in Pugachov (a play based on a poem by Sergei Yesenin), often described as one of Taganka's finest. "He put into his performance all the things that he excelled at and, on the other hand, it was Pugachyov that made him discover his own potential," – Soviet critic Natalya Krymova wrote years later. Several weeks after the premiere, infuriated by the actor's increasing unreliability triggered by worsening drinking problems, Lyubimov fired him – only to let him back again several months later (and thus begin the humiliating sacked-then-pardoned routine which continued for years). In June 1968 a Vysotsky-slagging campaign was launched in the Soviet press. First Sovetskaya Rossiya commented on the "epidemic spread of immoral, smutty songs," allegedly promoting "criminal world values, alcoholism, vice and immorality" and condemned their author for "sowing seeds of evil." Then Komsomolskaya Pravda linked Vysotsky with black market dealers selling his tapes somewhere in Siberia. Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky speaking from the Union of Soviet Composers' Committee tribune criticised the Soviet radio for giving an ideologically dubious, "low-life product" like "Song of a Friend" (Песня о друге) an unwarranted airplay. Playwright Alexander Stein who in his Last Parade play used several of Vysotsky's songs, was chastised by a Ministry of Culture official for "providing a tribune for this anti-Soviet scum." The phraseology prompted commentators in the West to make parallels between Vysotsky and Mikhail Zoschenko, another Soviet author who'd been officially labeled "scum" some 20 years ago.
Two of Vysotsky's 1968 films, Gennady Poloka's Intervention (premiered in May 1987) where he was cast as Brodsky, a dodgy even if highly artistic character, and Yevgeny Karelov's Two Comrades Were Serving (a gun-toting White Army officer Brusentsov who in the course of the film shoots his friend, his horse, Oleg Yankovsky's good guy character and, finally himself) – were severely censored, first of them shelved for twenty years. At least four of Vysotsky's 1968 songs, "Save Our Souls" (Спасите наши души), "The Wolfhunt" (Охота на волков), "Gypsy Variations" (Моя цыганская) and "The Steam-bath in White" (Банька по-белому), were hailed later as masterpieces. It was at this point that 'proper' love songs started to appear in Vysotsky's repertoire, documenting the beginning of his passionate love affair with French actress Marina Vlady.
In 1969 Vysotsky starred in two films: The Master of Taiga where he played a villainous Siberian timber-floating brigadier, and more entertaining Dangerous Tour. The latter was criticized in the Soviet press for taking a farcical approach to the subject of the Bolshevik underground activities but for a wider Soviet audience this was an important opportunity to enjoy the charismatic actor's presence on big screen. In 1970, after visiting the dislodged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha and having a lengthy conversation with him, Vysotsky embarked on a massive and by Soviet standards dangerously commercial concert tour in Soviet Central Asia and then brought Marina Vlady to director Viktor Turov's place so as to investigate her Belarusian roots. The pair finally wed on 1 December 1970 (causing furore among the Moscow cultural and political elite) and spent a honeymoon in Georgia. This was the highly productive period for Vysotsky, resulting in numerous new songs, including the anthemic "I Hate" (Я не люблю), sentimental "Lyricale" (Лирическая) and dramatic war epics "He Didn't Return from the Battle" (Он не вернулся из боя) and "The Earth Song" (Песня о Земле) among many others.
In 1971 a drinking spree-related nervous breakdown brought Vysotsky to the Moscow Kashchenko clinic [ru]. By this time he has been suffering from alcoholism. Many of his songs from this period deal, either directly or metaphorically, with alcoholism and insanity. Partially recovered (due to the encouraging presence of Marina Vladi), Vysotsky embarked on a successful Ukrainian concert tour and wrote a cluster of new songs. On 29 November 1971 Taganka's Hamlet premiered, a groundbreaking Lyubimov's production with Vysotsky in the leading role, that of a lone intellectual rebel, rising to fight the cruel state machine.
Also in 1971 Vysotsky was invited to play the lead in The Sannikov Land, the screen adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev's science fiction,[47] which he wrote several songs for, but was suddenly dropped for the reason of his face "being too scandalously recognisable" as a state official put it. One of the songs written for the film, a doom-laden epic allegory "Capricious Horses" (Кони привередливые), became one of the singer's signature tunes. Two of Vysotsky's 1972 film roles were somewhat meditative: an anonymous American journalist in The Fourth One and the "righteous guy" von Koren in The Bad Good Man (based on Anton Chekov's Duel). The latter brought Vysotsky the Best Male Role prize at the V Taormina Film Fest. This philosophical slant rubbed off onto some of his new works of the time: "A Singer at the Microphone" (Певец у микрофона), "The Tightrope Walker" (Канатоходец), two new war songs ("We Spin the Earth", "Black Pea-Coats") and "The Grief" (Беда), a folkish girl's lament, later recorded by Marina Vladi and subsequently covered by several female performers. Popular proved to be his 1972 humorous songs: "Mishka Shifman" (Мишка Шифман), satirizing the leaving-for-Israel routine, "Victim of the Television" which ridiculed the concept of "political consciousness," and "The Honour of the Chess Crown" (Честь шахматной короны) about an ever-fearless "simple Soviet man" challenging the much feared American champion Bobby Fischer to a match.
In 1972 he stepped up in Soviet Estonian TV where he presented his songs and gave an interview. The name of the show was "Young Man from Taganka" (Noormees Tagankalt).
In April 1973 Vysotsky visited Poland and France. Predictable problems concerning the official permission were sorted after the French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais made a personal phone call to Leonid Brezhnev who, according to Marina Vlady's memoirs, rather sympathized with the stellar couple. Having found on return a potentially dangerous lawsuit brought against him (concerning some unsanctioned concerts in Siberia the year before), Vysotsky wrote a defiant letter to the Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev. As a result, he was granted the status of a philharmonic artist, 11.5 roubles per concert now guaranteed. Still the 900 rubles fine had to be paid according to the court verdict, which was a substantial sum, considering his monthly salary at the theater was 110 rubles. That year Vysotsky wrote some thirty songs for "Alice in Wonderland," an audioplay where he himself has been given several minor roles. His best known songs of 1973 included "The Others' Track" (Чужая колея), "The Flight Interrupted" (Прерванный полёт) and "The Monument", all pondering on his achievements and legacy.
In 1974 Melodiya released the 7" EP, featuring four of Vysotsky's war songs ("He Never Returned From the Battle", "The New Times Song", "Common Graves", and "The Earth Song") which represented a tiny portion of his creative work, owned by millions on tape. In September of that year Vysotsky received his first state award, the Honorary Diploma of the Uzbek SSR following a tour with fellow actors from the Taganka Theatre in Uzbekistan. A year later he was granted the USSR Union of Cinematographers' membership. This meant he was not an "anti-Soviet scum" now, rather an unlikely link between the official Soviet cinema elite and the "progressive-thinking artists of the West." More films followed, among them The Only Road (a Soviet-Yugoslav joint venture, premiered on 10 January 1975 in Belgrade) and a science fiction movie The Flight of Mr. McKinley (1975). Out of nine ballads that he wrote for the latter only two have made it into the soundtrack. This was the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vysotsky's recognizable voice coming literally from every open window. Among the songs written at the time, were humorous "The Instruction before the Trip Abroad", lyrical "Of the Dead Pilot" and philosophical "The Strange House". In 1975 Vysotsky made his third trip to France where he rather riskily visited his former tutor (and now a celebrated dissident emigre) Andrey Sinyavsky. Artist Mikhail Shemyakin, his new Paris friend (or a "bottle-sharer", in Vladi's terms), recorded Vysotsky in his home studio. After a brief stay in England Vysotsky crossed the ocean and made his first Mexican concerts in April. Back in Moscow, there were changes at Taganka: Lyubimov went to Milan's La Scala on a contract and Anatoly Efros has been brought in, a director of radically different approach. His project, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, caused a sensation. Critics praised Alla Demidova (as Ranevskaya) and Vysotsky (as Lopakhin) powerful interplay, some describing it as one of the most dazzling in the history of the Soviet theater. Lyubimov, who disliked the piece, accused Efros of giving his actors "the stardom malaise." The 1976 Taganka's visit to Bulgaria resulted in Vysotskys's interview there being filmed and 15 songs recorded by Balkanton record label. On return Lyubimov made a move which many thought outrageous: declaring himself "unable to work with this Mr. Vysotsky anymore" he gave the role of Hamlet to Valery Zolotukhin, the latter's best friend. That was the time, reportedly, when stressed out Vysotsky started taking amphetamines.
Another Belorussian voyage completed, Marina and Vladimir went for France and from there (without any official permission given, or asked for) flew to the North America. In New York Vysotsky met, among other people, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Joseph Brodsky. In a televised one-hour interview with Dan Rather he stressed he was "not a dissident, just an artist, who's never had any intentions to leave his country where people loved him and his songs." At home this unauthorized venture into the Western world bore no repercussions: by this time Soviet authorities were divided as regards the "Vysotsky controversy" up to the highest level; while Mikhail Suslov detested the bard, Brezhnev loved him to such an extent that once, while in hospital, asked him to perform live in his daughter Galina's home, listening to this concert on the telephone. In 1976 appeared "The Domes", "The Rope" and the "Medieval" cycle, including "The Ballad of Love".
In September Vysotsky with Taganka made a trip to Yugoslavia where Hamlet won the annual BITEF festival's first prize, and then to Hungary for a two-week concert tour. Back in Moscow Lyubimov's production of The Master & Margarita featured Vysotsky as Ivan Bezdomny; a modest role, somewhat recompensed by an important Svidrigailov slot in Yury Karyakin's take on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Vysotsky's new songs of this period include "The History of Illness" cycle concerning his health problems, humorous "Why Did the Savages Eat Captain Cook", the metaphorical "Ballad of the Truth and the Lie", as well as "Two Fates", the chilling story of a self-absorbed alcoholic hunted by two malevolent witches, his two-faced destiny. In 1977 Vysotsky's health deteriorated (heart, kidneys, liver failures, jaw infection and nervous breakdown) to such an extent that in April he found himself in Moscow clinic's reanimation center in the state of physical and mental collapse.
In 1977 Vysotsky made an unlikely appearance in New York City on the American television show 60 Minutes, which falsely stated that Vysotsky had spent time in the Soviet prison system, the Gulag. That year saw the release of three Vysotsky's LPs in France (including the one that had been recorded by RCA in Canada the previous year); arranged and accompanied by guitarist Kostya Kazansky, the singer for the first time ever enjoyed the relatively sophisticated musical background. In August he performed in Hollywood before members of New York City film cast and (according to Vladi) was greeted warmly by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro. Some more concerts in Los Angeles were followed by the appearance at the French Communist paper L’Humanité annual event. In December Taganka left for France, its Hamlet (Vysotsky back in the lead) gaining fine reviews.
1978 started with the March–April series of concerts in Moscow and Ukraine. In May Vysotsky embarked upon a new major film project: The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя) about two detectives fighting crime in late 1940s Russia, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin. The film (premiered on 11 November 1978 on the Soviet Central TV) presented Vysotsky as Zheglov, a ruthless and charismatic cop teaching his milder partner Sharapov (actor Vladimir Konkin) his art of crime-solving. Vysotsky also became engaged in Taganka's Genre-seeking show (performing some of his own songs) and played Aleksander Blok in Anatoly Efros' The Lady Stranger (Незнакомка) radio play (premiered on air on 10 July 1979 and later released as a double LP).
In November 1978 Vysotsky took part in the underground censorship-defying literary project Metropolis, inspired and organized by Vasily Aksenov. In January 1979 Vysotsky again visited America with highly successful series of concerts. That was the point (according to biographer Vladimir Novikov) when a glimpse of new, clean life of a respectable international actor and performer all but made Vysotsky seriously reconsider his priorities. What followed though, was a return to the self-destructive theater and concert tours schedule, personal doctor Anatoly Fedotov now not only his companion, but part of Taganka's crew. "Who was this Anatoly? Just a man who in every possible situation would try to provide drugs. And he did provide. In such moments Volodya trusted him totally," Oksana Afanasyeva, Vysotsky's Moscow girlfriend (who was near him for most of the last year of his life and, on occasion, herself served as a drug courier) remembered. In July 1979, after a series of Central Asia concerts, Vysotsky collapsed, experienced clinical death and was resuscitated by Fedotov (who injected caffeine into the heart directly), colleague and close friend Vsevolod Abdulov helping with heart massage. In January 1980 Vysotsky asked Lyubimov for a year's leave. "Up to you, but on condition that Hamlet is yours," was the answer. The songwriting showed signs of slowing down, as Vysotsky began switching from songs to more conventional poetry. Still, of nearly 800 poems by Vysotsky only one has been published in the Soviet Union while he was alive. Not a single performance or interview was broadcast by the Soviet television in his lifetime.
In May 1979, being in a practice studio of the MSU Faculty of Journalism, Vysotsky recorded a video letter to American actor and film producer Warren Beatty, looking for both a personal meeting with Beatty and an opportunity to get a role in Reds film, to be produced and directed by the latter. While recording, Vysotsky made a few attempts to speak English, trying to overcome the language barrier. This video letter never reached Beatty. It was broadcast for the first time more than three decades later, on the night of 24 January 2013 (local time) by Rossiya 1 channel, along with records of TV channels of Italy, Mexico, Poland, USA and from private collections, in Vladimir Vysotsky. A letter to Warren Beatty film by Alexander Kovanovsky and Igor Rakhmanov. While recording this video, Vysotsky had a rare opportunity to perform for a camera, being still unable to do it with Soviet television.
On 22 January 1980, Vysotsky entered the Moscow Ostankino TV Center to record his one and only studio concert for the Soviet television. What proved to be an exhausting affair (his concentration lacking, he had to plod through several takes for each song) was premiered on the Soviet TV eight years later. The last six months of his life saw Vysotsky appearing on stage sporadically, fueled by heavy dosages of drugs and alcohol. His performances were often erratic. Occasionally Vysotsky paid visits to Sklifosofsky [ru] institute's ER unit, but would not hear of Marina Vlady's suggestions for him to take long-term rehabilitation course in a Western clinic. Yet he kept writing, mostly poetry and even prose, but songs as well. The last song he performed was the agonizing "My Sorrow, My Anguish" and his final poem, written one week prior to his death was "A Letter to Marina": "I'm less than fifty, but the time is short / By you and God protected, life and limb / I have a song or two to sing before the Lord / I have a way to make my peace with him."
Although several theories of the ultimate cause of the singer's death persist to this day, given what is now known about cardiovascular disease, it seems likely that by the time of his death Vysotsky had an advanced coronary condition brought about by years of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as his grueling work schedule and the stress of the constant harassment by the government. Towards the end, most of Vysotsky's closest friends had become aware of the ominous signs and were convinced that his demise was only a matter of time. Clear evidence of this can be seen in a video ostensibly shot by the Japanese NHK channel only months before Vysotsky's death, where he appears visibly unwell, breathing heavily and slurring his speech. Accounts by Vysotsky's close friends and colleagues concerning his last hours were compiled in the book by V. Perevozchikov.
Vysotsky suffered from alcoholism for most of his life. Sometime around 1977, he started using amphetamines and other prescription narcotics in an attempt to counteract the debilitating hangovers and eventually to rid himself of alcohol addiction. While these attempts were partially successful, he ended up trading alcoholism for a severe drug dependency that was fast spiralling out of control. He was reduced to begging some of his close friends in the medical profession for supplies of drugs, often using his acting skills to collapse in a medical office and imitate a seizure or some other condition requiring a painkiller injection. On 25 July 1979 (a year to the day before his death) he suffered a cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for several minutes during a concert tour of Soviet Uzbekistan, after injecting himself with a wrong kind of painkiller he had previously obtained from a dentist's office.
Fully aware of the dangers of his condition, Vysotsky made several attempts to cure himself of his addiction. He underwent an experimental (and ultimately discredited) blood purification procedure offered by a leading drug rehabilitation specialist in Moscow. He also went to an isolated retreat in France with his wife Marina in the spring of 1980 as a way of forcefully depriving himself of any access to drugs. After these attempts failed, Vysotsky returned to Moscow to find his life in an increasingly stressful state of disarray. He had been a defendant in two criminal trials, one for a car wreck he had caused some months earlier, and one for an alleged conspiracy to sell unauthorized concert tickets (he eventually received a suspended sentence and a probation in the first case, and the charges in the second were dismissed, although several of his co-defendants were found guilty). He also unsuccessfully fought the film studio authorities for the rights to direct a movie called The Green Phaeton. Relations with his wife Marina were deteriorating, and he was torn between his loyalty to her and his love for his mistress Oksana Afanasyeva. He had also developed severe inflammation in one of his legs, making his concert performances extremely challenging.
In a final desperate attempt to overcome his drug addiction, partially prompted by his inability to obtain drugs through his usual channels (the authorities had imposed a strict monitoring of the medical institutions to prevent illicit drug distribution during the 1980 Olympics), he relapsed into alcohol and went on a prolonged drinking binge (apparently consuming copious amounts of champagne due to a prevalent misconception at the time that it was better than vodka at countering the effects of drug withdrawal).
On 3 July 1980, Vysotsky gave a performance at a suburban Moscow concert hall. One of the stage managers recalls that he looked visibly unhealthy ("gray-faced", as she puts it) and complained of not feeling too good, while another says she was surprised by his request for champagne before the start of the show, as he had always been known for completely abstaining from drink before his concerts. On 16 July Vysotsky gave his last public concert in Kaliningrad. On 18 July, Vysotsky played Hamlet for the last time at the Taganka Theatre. From around 21 July, several of his close friends were on a round-the-clock watch at his apartment, carefully monitoring his alcohol intake and hoping against all odds that his drug dependency would soon be overcome and they would then be able to bring him back from the brink. The effects of drug withdrawal were clearly getting the better of him, as he got increasingly restless, moaned and screamed in pain, and at times fell into memory lapses, failing to recognize at first some of his visitors, including his son Arkadiy. At one point, Vysotsky's personal physician A. Fedotov (the same doctor who had brought him back from clinical death a year earlier in Uzbekistan) attempted to sedate him, inadvertently causing asphyxiation from which he was barely saved. On 24 July, Vysotsky told his mother that he thought he was going to die that day, and then made similar remarks to a few of the friends present at the apartment, who begged him to stop such talk and keep his spirits up. But soon thereafter, Oksana Afanasyeva saw him clench his chest several times, which led her to suspect that he was genuinely suffering from a cardiovascular condition. She informed Fedotov of this but was told not to worry, as he was going to monitor Vysotsky's condition all night. In the evening, after drinking relatively small amounts of alcohol, the moaning and groaning Vysotsky was sedated by Fedotov, who then sat down on the couch next to him but fell asleep. Fedotov awoke in the early hours of 25 July to an unusual silence and found Vysotsky dead in his bed with his eyes wide open, apparently of a myocardial infarction, as he later certified. This was contradicted by Fedotov's colleagues, Sklifosovsky Emergency Medical Institute physicians L. Sul'povar and S. Scherbakov (who had demanded the actor's immediate hospitalization on 23 July but were allegedly rebuffed by Fedotov), who insisted that Fedotov's incompetent sedation combined with alcohol was what killed Vysotsky. An autopsy was prevented by Vysotsky's parents (who were eager to have their son's drug addiction remain secret), so the true cause of death remains unknown.
No official announcement of the actor's death was made, only a brief obituary appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, and a note informing of Vysotsky's death and cancellation of the Hamlet performance was put out at the entrance to the Taganka Theatre (the story goes that not a single ticket holder took advantage of the refund offer). Despite this, by the end of the day, millions had learned of Vysotsky's death. On 28 July, he lay in state at the Taganka Theatre. After a mourning ceremony involving an unauthorized mass gathering of unprecedented scale, Vysotsky was buried at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. The attendance at the Olympic events dropped noticeably on that day, as scores of spectators left to attend the funeral. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of his coffin.
According to author Valery Perevozchikov part of the blame for his death lay with the group of associates who surrounded him in the last years of his life. This inner circle were all people under the influence of his strong character, combined with a material interest in the large sums of money his concerts earned. This list included Valerii Yankelovich, manager of the Taganka Theatre and prime organiser of his non-sanctioned concerts; Anatoly Fedotov, his personal doctor; Vadim Tumanov, gold prospector (and personal friend) from Siberia; Oksana Afanasyeva (later Yarmolnik), his mistress the last three years of his life; Ivan Bortnik, a fellow actor; and Leonid Sul'povar, a department head at the Sklifosovski hospital who was responsible for much of the supply of drugs.
Vysotsky's associates had all put in efforts to supply his drug habit, which kept him going in the last years of his life. Under their influence, he was able to continue to perform all over the country, up to a week before his death. Due to illegal (i.e. non-state-sanctioned) sales of tickets and other underground methods, these concerts pulled in sums of money unimaginable in Soviet times, when almost everyone received nearly the same small salary. The payouts and gathering of money were a constant source of danger, and Yankelovich and others were needed to organise them.
Some money went to Vysotsky, the rest was distributed amongst this circle. At first this was a reasonable return on their efforts; however, as his addiction progressed and his body developed resistance, the frequency and amount of drugs needed to keep Vysotsky going became unmanageable. This culminated at the time of the Moscow Olympics which coincided with the last days of his life, when supplies of drugs were monitored more strictly than usual, and some of the doctors involved in supplying Vysotsky were already behind bars (normally the doctors had to account for every ampule, thus drugs were transferred to an empty container, while the patients received a substitute or placebo instead). In the last few days Vysotsky became uncontrollable, his shouting could be heard all over the apartment building on Malaya Gruzinskaya St. where he lived amongst VIP's. Several days before his death, in a state of stupor he went on a high speed drive around Moscow in an attempt to obtain drugs and alcohol – when many high-ranking people saw him. This increased the likelihood of him being forcibly admitted to the hospital, and the consequent danger to the circle supplying his habit. As his state of health declined, and it became obvious that he might die, his associates gathered to decide what to do with him. They came up with no firm decision. They did not want him admitted officially, as his drug addiction would become public and they would fall under suspicion, although some of them admitted that any ordinary person in his condition would have been admitted immediately.
On Vysotsky's death his associates and relatives put in much effort to prevent a post-mortem being carried out. This despite the fairly unusual circumstances: he died aged 42 under heavy sedation with an improvised cocktail of sedatives and stimulants, including the toxic chloral hydrate, provided by his personal doctor who had been supplying him with narcotics the previous three years. This doctor, being the only one present at his side when death occurred, had a few days earlier been seen to display elementary negligence in treating the sedated Vysotsky. On the night of his death, Arkadii Vysotsky (his son), who tried to visit his father in his apartment, was rudely refused entry by Yankelovich, even though there was a lack of people able to care for him. Subsequently, the Soviet police commenced a manslaughter investigation which was dropped due to the absence of evidence taken at the time of death.
Vysotsky's first wife was Iza Zhukova. They met in 1956, being both MAT theater institute students, lived for some time at Vysotsky's mother's flat in Moscow, after her graduation (Iza was 2 years older) spent months in different cities (her – in Kiev, then Rostov) and finally married on 25 April 1960.
He met his second wife Lyudmila Abramova in 1961, while shooting the film 713 Requests Permission to Land. They married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady (born 1962) and Nikita (born 1964).
While still married to Lyudmila Abramova, Vysotsky began a romantic relationship with Tatyana Ivanenko, a Taganka actress, then, in 1967 fell in love with Marina Vlady, a French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had three children, while Vladimir had two. They were married in 1969. For 10 years the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career in France to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vladimir with some immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.
In the autumn of 1981 Vysotsky's first collection of poetry was officially published in the USSR, called The Nerve (Нерв). Its first edition (25,000 copies) was sold out instantly. In 1982 the second one followed (100,000), then the 3rd (1988, 200,000), followed in the 1990s by several more. The material for it was compiled by Robert Rozhdestvensky, an officially laurelled Soviet poet. Also in 1981 Yuri Lyubimov staged at Taganka a new music and poetry production called Vladimir Vysotsky which was promptly banned and officially premiered on 25 January 1989.
In 1982 the motion picture The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe was produced in the Soviet Union and in 1983 the movie was released to the public. Four songs by Vysotsky were featured in the film.
In 1986 the official Vysotsky poetic heritage committee was formed (with Robert Rozhdestvensky at the helm, theater critic Natalya Krymova being both the instigator and the organizer). Despite some opposition from the conservatives (Yegor Ligachev was the latter's political leader, Stanislav Kunyaev of Nash Sovremennik represented its literary flank) Vysotsky was rewarded posthumously with the USSR State Prize. The official formula – "for creating the character of Zheglov and artistic achievements as a singer-songwriter" was much derided from both the left and the right. In 1988 the Selected Works of... (edited by N. Krymova) compilation was published, preceded by I Will Surely Return... (Я, конечно, вернусь...) book of fellow actors' memoirs and Vysotsky's verses, some published for the first time. In 1990 two volumes of extensive The Works of... were published, financed by the late poet's father Semyon Vysotsky. Even more ambitious publication series, self-proclaimed "the first ever academical edition" (the latter assertion being dismissed by sceptics) compiled and edited by Sergey Zhiltsov, were published in Tula (1994–1998, 5 volumes), Germany (1994, 7 volumes) and Moscow (1997, 4 volumes).
In 1989 the official Vysotsky Museum opened in Moscow, with the magazine of its own called Vagant (edited by Sergey Zaitsev) devoted entirely to Vysotsky's legacy. In 1996 it became an independent publication and was closed in 2002.
In the years to come, Vysotsky's grave became a site of pilgrimage for several generations of his fans, the youngest of whom were born after his death. His tombstone also became the subject of controversy, as his widow had wished for a simple abstract slab, while his parents insisted on a realistic gilded statue. Although probably too solemn to have inspired Vysotsky himself, the statue is believed by some to be full of metaphors and symbols reminiscent of the singer's life.
In 1995 in Moscow the Vysotsky monument was officially opened at Strastnoy Boulevard, by the Petrovsky Gates. Among those present were the bard's parents, two of his sons, first wife Iza, renown poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. "Vysotsky had always been telling the truth. Only once he was wrong when he sang in one of his songs: 'They will never erect me a monument in a square like that by Petrovskye Vorota'", Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov said in his speech.[95] A further monument to Vysotsky was erected in 2014 at Rostov-on-Don.
In October 2004, a monument to Vysotsky was erected in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, near the Millennium Bridge. His son, Nikita Vysotsky, attended the unveiling. The statue was designed by Russian sculptor Alexander Taratinov, who also designed a monument to Alexander Pushkin in Podgorica. The bronze statue shows Vysotsky standing on a pedestal, with his one hand raised and the other holding a guitar. Next to the figure lies a bronze skull – a reference to Vysotsky's monumental lead performances in Shakespeare's Hamlet. On the pedestal the last lines from a poem of Vysotsky's, dedicated to Montenegro, are carved.
The Vysotsky business center & semi-skyscraper was officially opened in Yekaterinburg, in 2011. It is the tallest building in Russia outside of Moscow, has 54 floors, total height: 188.3 m (618 ft). On the third floor of the business center is the Vysotsky Museum. Behind the building is a bronze sculpture of Vladimir Vysotsky and his third wife, a French actress Marina Vlady.
In 2011 a controversial movie Vysotsky. Thank You For Being Alive was released, script written by his son, Nikita Vysotsky. The actor Sergey Bezrukov portrayed Vysotsky, using a combination of a mask and CGI effects. The film tells about Vysotsky's illegal underground performances, problems with KGB and drugs, and subsequent clinical death in 1979.
Shortly after Vysotsky's death, many Russian bards started writing songs and poems about his life and death. The best known are Yuri Vizbor's "Letter to Vysotsky" (1982) and Bulat Okudzhava's "About Volodya Vysotsky" (1980). In Poland, Jacek Kaczmarski based some of his songs on those of Vysotsky, such as his first song (1977) was based on "The Wolfhunt", and dedicated to his memory the song "Epitafium dla Włodzimierza Wysockiego" ("Epitaph for Vladimir Vysotsky").
Every year on Vysotsky's birthday festivals are held throughout Russia and in many communities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Vysotsky's impact in Russia is often compared to that of Wolf Biermann in Germany, Bob Dylan in America, or Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel in France.
The asteroid 2374 Vladvysotskij, discovered by Lyudmila Zhuravleva, was named after Vysotsky.
During the Annual Q&A Event Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, Alexey Venediktov asked Putin to name a street in Moscow after the singer Vladimir Vysotsky, who, though considered one of the greatest Russian artists, has no street named after him in Moscow almost 30 years after his death. Venediktov stated a Russian law that allowed the President to do so and promote a law suggestion to name a street by decree. Putin answered that he would talk to Mayor of Moscow and would solve this problem. In July 2015 former Upper and Lower Tagansky Dead-ends (Верхний и Нижний Таганские тупики) in Moscow were reorganized into Vladimir Vysotsky Street.
The Sata Kieli Cultural Association, [Finland], organizes the annual International Vladimir Vysotsky Festival (Vysotski Fest), where Vysotsky's singers from different countries perform in Helsinki and other Finnish cities. They sing Vysotsky in different languages and in different arrangements.
Two brothers and singers from Finland, Mika and Turkka Mali, over the course of their more than 30-year musical career, have translated into Finnish, recorded and on numerous occasions publicly performed songs of Vladimir Vysotsky.
Throughout his lengthy musical career, Jaromír Nohavica, a famed Czech singer, translated and performed numerous songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, most notably Песня о друге (Píseň o příteli – Song about a friend).
The Museum of Vladimir Vysotsky in Koszalin dedicated to Vladimir Vysotsky was founded by Marlena Zimna (1969–2016) in May 1994, in her apartment, in the city of Koszalin, in Poland. Since then the museum has collected over 19,500 exhibits from different countries and currently holds Vladimir Vysotsky' personal items, autographs, drawings, letters, photographs and a large library containing unique film footage, vinyl records, CDs and DVDs. A special place in the collection holds a Vladimir Vysotsky's guitar, on which he played at a concert in Casablanca in April 1976. Vladimir Vysotsky presented this guitar to Moroccan journalist Hassan El-Sayed together with an autograph (an extract from Vladimir Vysotsky's song "What Happened in Africa"), written in Russian right on the guitar.
In January 2023, a monument to the outstanding actor, singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky was unveiled in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in the square near the Rodina House of Culture. Author Vladimir Chebotarev.
After her husband's death, urged by her friend Simone Signoret, Marina Vlady wrote a book called The Aborted Flight about her years together with Vysotsky. The book paid tribute to Vladimir's talent and rich persona, yet was uncompromising in its depiction of his addictions and the problems that they caused in their marriage. Written in French (and published in France in 1987), it was translated into Russian in tandem by Vlady and a professional translator and came out in 1989 in the USSR. Totally credible from the specialists' point of view, the book caused controversy, among other things, by shocking revelations about the difficult father-and-son relationship (or rather, the lack of any), implying that Vysotsky-senior (while his son was alive) was deeply ashamed of him and his songs which he deemed "anti-Soviet" and reported his own son to the KGB. Also in 1989 another important book of memoirs was published in the USSR, providing a bulk of priceless material for the host of future biographers, Alla Demidova's Vladimir Vysotsky, the One I Know and Love. Among other publications of note were Valery Zolotukhin's Vysotsky's Secret (2000), a series of Valery Perevozchikov's books (His Dying Hour, The Unknown Vysotsky and others) containing detailed accounts and interviews dealing with the bard's life's major controversies (the mystery surrounding his death, the truth behind Vysotsky Sr.'s alleged KGB reports, the true nature of Vladimir Vysotsky's relations with his mother Nina's second husband Georgy Bartosh etc.), Iza Zhukova's Short Happiness for a Lifetime and the late bard's sister-in-law Irena Vysotskaya's My Brother Vysotsky. The Beginnings (both 2005).
A group of enthusiasts has created a non-profit project – the mobile application "Vysotsky"
The multifaceted talent of Vysotsky is often described by the term "bard" (бард) that Vysotsky has never been enthusiastic about. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and poet rather than a singer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." With the advent of portable tape-recorders in the Soviet Union, Vysotsky's music became available to the masses in the form of home-made reel-to-reel audio tape recordings (later on cassette tapes).
Vysotsky accompanied himself on a Russian seven-string guitar, with a raspy voice singing ballads of love, peace, war, everyday Soviet life and of the human condition. He was largely perceived as the voice of honesty, at times sarcastically jabbing at the Soviet government, which made him a target for surveillance and threats. In France, he has been compared with Georges Brassens; in Russia, however, he was more frequently compared with Joe Dassin, partly because they were the same age and died in the same year, although their ideologies, biographies, and musical styles are very different. Vysotsky's lyrics and style greatly influenced Jacek Kaczmarski, a Polish songwriter and singer who touched on similar themes.
The songs – over 600 of them – were written about almost any imaginable theme. The earliest were blatnaya pesnya ("outlaw songs"). These songs were based either on the life of the common people in Moscow or on life in the crime people, sometimes in Gulag. Vysotsky slowly grew out of this phase and started singing more serious, though often satirical, songs. Many of these songs were about war. These war songs were not written to glorify war, but rather to expose the listener to the emotions of those in extreme, life-threatening situations. Most Soviet veterans would say that Vysotsky's war songs described the truth of war far more accurately than more official "patriotic" songs.
Nearly all of Vysotsky's songs are in the first person, although he is almost never the narrator. When singing his criminal songs, he would adopt the accent and intonation of a Moscow thief, and when singing war songs, he would sing from the point of view of a soldier. In many of his philosophical songs, he adopted the role of inanimate objects. This created some confusion about Vysotsky's background, especially during the early years when information could not be passed around very easily. Using his acting talent, the poet played his role so well that until told otherwise, many of his fans believed that he was, indeed, a criminal or war veteran. Vysotsky's father said that "War veterans thought the author of the songs to be one of them, as if he had participated in the war together with them." The same could be said about mountain climbers; on multiple occasions, Vysotsky was sent pictures of mountain climbers' graves with quotes from his lyrics etched on the tombstones.
Not being officially recognized as a poet and singer, Vysotsky performed wherever and whenever he could – in the theater (where he worked), at universities, in private apartments, village clubs, and in the open air. It was not unusual for him to give several concerts in one day. He used to sleep little, using the night hours to write. With few exceptions, he wasn't allowed to publish his recordings with "Melodiya", which held a monopoly on the Soviet music industry. His songs were passed on through amateur, fairly low quality recordings on vinyl discs and magnetic tape, resulting in his immense popularity. Cosmonauts even took his music on cassette into orbit.
Musically, virtually all of Vysotsky's songs were written in a minor key, and tended to employ from three to seven chords. Vysotsky composed his songs and played them exclusively on the Russian seven string guitar, often tuned a tone or a tone-and-a-half below the traditional Russian "Open G major" tuning. This guitar, with its specific Russian tuning, makes a slight yet notable difference in chord voicings than the standard tuned six string Spanish (classical) guitar, and it became a staple of his sound. Because Vysotsky tuned down a tone and a half, his strings had less tension, which also colored the sound.
His earliest songs were usually written in C minor (with the guitar tuned a tone down from DGBDGBD to CFACFAC)
Songs written in this key include "Stars" (Zvyozdy), "My friend left for Magadan" (Moy drug uyekhal v Magadan), and most of his "outlaw songs".
At around 1970, Vysotsky began writing and playing exclusively in A minor (guitar tuned to CFACFAC), which he continued doing until his death.
Vysotsky used his fingers instead of a pick to pluck and strum, as was the tradition with Russian guitar playing. He used a variety of finger picking and strumming techniques. One of his favorite was to play an alternating bass with his thumb as he plucked or strummed with his other fingers.
Often, Vysotsky would neglect to check the tuning of his guitar, which is particularly noticeable on earlier recordings. According to some accounts, Vysotsky would get upset when friends would attempt to tune his guitar, leading some to believe that he preferred to play slightly out of tune as a stylistic choice. Much of this is also attributable to the fact that a guitar that is tuned down more than 1 whole step (Vysotsky would sometimes tune as much as 2 and a half steps down) is prone to intonation problems.
Vysotsky had a unique singing style. He had an unusual habit of elongating consonants instead of vowels in his songs. So when a syllable is sung for a prolonged period of time, he would elongate the consonant instead of the vowel in that syllable.
The Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky Statue is a prominent monument located in Voronezh, Russian Federation, dedicated to the legendary Russian singer-songwriter, actor, and poet Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky. This statue stands as a tribute to Vysotsky's immense contributions to Russian culture and his enduring legacy.
Vladimir Vysotsky was born on January 25, 1938, in Moscow, Russia. He quickly gained recognition for his unique artistic style, characterized by his powerful voice, poetic lyrics, and charismatic stage presence. Vysotsky's songs captured the essence of the Soviet era, addressing social issues, human emotions, and political satire. His music resonated deeply with the masses, and he became an iconic figure in Russian popular culture.
The idea of erecting a statue in Voronezh to honor Vladimir Vysotsky was conceived to commemorate his connection to the city. Vysotsky had a special relationship with Voronezh, as he spent a significant portion of his early career performing in local theaters and interacting with the local artistic community. The statue serves as a reminder of this bond and celebrates his artistic contributions.
The Vysotsky Statue was unveiled on November 18, 2009, in front of the Voronezh Academic Drama Theater, where Vysotsky performed numerous times. The monument was created by renowned Russian sculptor Grigory Pototsky. Standing at approximately 5 meters tall, the bronze statue captures Vysotsky in a dynamic pose, holding a guitar and singing passionately.
The sculpture depicts Vysotsky in mid-performance, capturing his energy and intensity on stage. The attention to detail in the statue is remarkable, with intricate facial features, flowing hair, and realistic clothing. The sculptor aimed to convey Vysotsky's passion and charisma through the artwork, and the statue successfully embodies these qualities.
The location of the statue, in front of the Voronezh Academic Drama Theater, is significant. It symbolizes Vysotsky's strong ties to the theater and his impact on the performing arts. The statue serves as a meeting point for admirers of Vysotsky's work, attracting locals and tourists alike. It has become an iconic landmark in Voronezh, attracting visitors who come to pay their respects and celebrate Vysotsky's artistic legacy.
The statue's unveiling was accompanied by a grand ceremony, attended by government officials, artists, and Vysotsky's fans. The event highlighted the significance of Vysotsky's artistic contributions and celebrated his enduring influen