Mayday! Mayday!
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]
Today is Mayday.
As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”
That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.
But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.
Ah, the maypole. As children, who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?
The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.
They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made in the 1920s, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Manhattan Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.
The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.
Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.
I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I visited the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.
That’s how I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.
Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:
And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.
The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s.
I once had no awareness about the linking of Mayday with International Workers Day. After all, there were never any big workers’ parades on Mayday in my rural hometown. The first day of fishing season in mid April was a bigger event in my hometown than Mayday. 🙂
I found out about the labor-Mayday link when my job landed me in Bolivia on May 1. I was surprised to find everything shut down for the holiday. Even under the military junta, May 1 was a big holiday in Bolivia. At least I could retrieve my luggage and find a taxi to go to a hotel.
May Day used to mean RIOT DAY in Seattle but now every day can be riot day in Seattle so it’s lost the extra special feel.
But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.
neo:
We had that at the Catholic elementary school I attended in 7th and 8th grade. I had never seen it before. Since the nuns and priests of the diocese were all from Ireland, I wondered if it was an Irish custom.
It meant that we lost recess for two weeks, maybe a month, to practice intricate dances with big ribbons, then lose a Saturday afternoon performing for the parents.
I rather resented the intrusion on my free time and it was the most unpleasant school I ever attended — right out of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist” in terms of corporal punishment and routine humiliation.
So my sister and I blew off the May Day celebration that Saturday. Our mother didn’t care. The following Monday after Mass the principal assembled the 7th and 8th grades on the playground, brought my sister and I out in front, then berated us for ten minutes.
Another day in paradise.
Huxley,
Reprimand in private, praise in public. Had my father been your father and he’d learned of the lengthy public humiliation and abuse to which that principal subjected you and your sister, he’d have marched right down to that school and given that principal a beating to within an inch of his life. (WWII hand to hand combat training)
When he was a young boy, a nun acting as a ‘teacher’ routinely beat student’s hands with her stout ruler as a reprimand. She subjected my father to that and when she did, he just silently smiled at her, which infuriated her so much that she beat his hands bloody. He never uttered a sound and kept smiling at her, until she struck him so hard that the ruler broke. The next day, my grandfather marched my Dad into the principal’s office and gave him an earful, including telling him that if that excuse for a teacher were a man, he’d have given him a sound whipping. Grandpa pulled Dad out of that Catholic school that very day.
Perhaps that’s why he never allowed his children to be physically disciplined by teachers but he warmed our butts plenty of times. Warning us that he’d better not get a note from school or we wouldn’t be sitting down for a week.
Back then, people weren’t afraid to use violence, when righteous violence was called for…
Reprimand in private, praise in public.
Geoffrey Britain:
Yes. However, that school was so weird and the principal was some kind of sick person. She would eavesdrop on the classes through the intercom, then show up in class and humiliate the teachers until their ears turned red or, in one nun’s case, broke down and cried in front of the students.
Even as a kid I knew that couldn’t be right.
Ten years later I met with my godmother. We talked about the old days and at one point, she mentioned, wistfully, “It was a shame that Mother Clare turned out to be, you know, mentally ill.” The PTA finally got the nerve up to force Mother Clare to retire.
May 1 is also commemorated by Roman Catholics as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker; the date was chosen by Pope Pius XII in 1955 as a counterpoint to Communist celebrations of International Workers’ Day. How do I know this? My dad’s WWII Army buddy was a devout Roman Catholic who had a picture of St. Joseph in the family living room (St. Joseph is also the patron saint of fathers), and always went to Mass on May 1 in honor of the workingman’s saint.
Neo’s post jogged my memory about a May Day song that I first heard in high school; I finally found “May-Day Carol” on YouTube. It’s an English folk song from Essex that was arranged by Deems Taylor some time in the 1940s. Here it is, sung by Leslie Guinn, baritone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMIwmvUfgqw&ab_channel=gwenaus
Meanwhile, I’m surprised that Neo didn’t link to the Bee Gees’ “The First of May”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMICiiaf4V4&ab_channel=Jos%C3%A9Luiz53
Here in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, we have a long history with the Maypole. In the 1620s a man named John Morton established a colony, Merrymount, in what is Quincy MA today. He had contempt for the Puritans and set up a community that was considerably more tolerant than they were. One of its features was an annual Mayday party including an 80′ Maypole and a celebration that mixed the English and the Indians. This drove the Puritans crazy and they tried to banish him back to England and destroyed the new colony. If he were smart he would have gone further south out of their reach like Roger Williams who established Rhode Island as sanctuary for any and all religions.
https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/maypole-infuriated-puritans/
To this day there is a Merrymount Park just off Wollaston Beach on Quincy Shore Drive. One of the best clam shacks in Boston, The Clam Box, is there. It’s fun on a nice summer night to sit at one of the picnic tables with your dinner and look out over the ocean. If you squint, you can see Spain if the weather is really clear.
When I was in the 4th grade our elementary school principle killed his family and then himself after he got caught spanking little girls a little to often and with much enjoyment.
There is the investor’s aphorism: Sell in May and go away. Perhaps because the successful hedge fund operators want the summer free to play on their yachts?
Years ago I almost skipped a conference in St. Louis. Turns out my hotel was a couple blocks from the St. Louis Gateway Arch. I was going to take a stroll past it and ended up spending about three hours there. Maybe it’s my appreciation of mathematics (though I never really loved math like some) but I found it incredible. It’s like looking at a stupendously huge perfect realization of an equation. I couldn’t see the welds in the stainless steel until I was a foot or two from touching them. 630 ft. x 630 ft.
The French m’aidez, pronounced the same way, literally means Help Me. But I wouldn’t think it became an English usage until the advent of radio on ships.