Hometown Appetites by Kelly Alexander

Author:Kelly Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

All the Sights and Smells of the Country

Did you hear the one about Clem’s trip to Idlewild? According to the gang who in the early 1950s lunched in the ninth-floor test kitchen at the Herald Tribune, it went like this. Paddleford heard airlines touting the quality of their meals, and was of course interested in learning more. One airline, no one could remember which, invited the influential food writer out to what was then clumsily known as the New York International Airport at Idlewild, Queens, to show her the skillful chefs, the ingenious devices to load the food into the airborne galleys, and to let her learn at first hand how delicious everything was. So the airline sent a limousine to 41st Street to pick up Paddleford, and she was ferried out to what is now J.F.K. Airport to poke into it all.

Sometime in the afternoon there was quite a dust-up—the limo driver could not locate Paddleford. Nervous, he called the Trib and asked where she was, mentioning which hangar he’d be waiting at. The women in the office tittered: Old Clem kidnapped? Lost? Was she stuck on a plane or in a hangar or trapped someplace? Mercifully, no. Paddleford was found, according to legend, sleeping peacefully, propped against a tree at the edge of the tarmac. Word was, she’d had an extra gin and tonic with lunch, and airport security was finally deployed to find her. Reunited with the driver, she boarded the limo for home.

Paddleford was good copy, in print or over coffee. Joan Cook, a ninth-floor reporter on the parent and child beat, said Paddleford told this one on herself. Paddleford had a former lover who lay dying in Bellevue Hospital. “Clem was not made of rock,” Cook reminded her friends, saying that Paddleford went to the formidable old hospital in the afternoons to visit the discarded dear one. According to the story, the guy asked her to bury him at the Redding house, underneath an apple tree where he and she “had spent so many happy hours.” According to Cook, when the man died, Paddleford attended to the cremation, taking the urn of ashes to her country home. In time, she got a shovel and dug a hole under the tree. At that point, Paddleford reported that Claire stepped in to say: “You can’t just go out and dig a hole and bury ashes. You have to have some kind of permit.” Paddleford thought this probably had a ring of truth. So she then took the urn and put it on a shelf “next to the bottle of bourbon,” as Cook explained, where she and her lover “had spent so many happy hours.”

These stories were widely circulated through the Trib staff, and while some of them may have been burnished by time, they show how larger-than-life their subject had become. (Whatever doubts may be raised about the vision of Paddleford with her foot on the shovel under the apple tree, a 1950 death certificate for one Bruno West was preserved among her papers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.