Word: chautauquas
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...safety is an illusion, and so is paradise. Speaking before another Chautauqua audience this day, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant, says that it is inhuman and arrogant for doctors to prolong life artificially if nothing but pain or coma lies ahead for the patient. His predominantly gray-haired audience cheers. A moment later, one of his listeners falls ill. As he is carried out by ambulance attendants, he gives a V sign to the crowd...
...stroller through Chautauqua heads toward the lakefront. He wanders among white Victorian frame houses, all cooled by one or several levels of spacious front porches. Spaciousness was an easeful 19th century preoccupation, at least among the prosperous middle-class citizens who could afford to come here (by lake steamer in those days) and enjoy the broad verandas and 20-ft. ceilings of the Hotel Athenaeum, a splendid old yellow-and-green ark that did and still does offer two desserts with each meal. And it was a spaciousness of mind that made a summer of music, lectures and dramatic readings...
...Besides Chautauqua's lake, on which a splendid paddle-wheel steamer still chugs to and fro, a literal-minded divine long ago built a grassy, 60-ft.-long scale model of the Holy Land. It is now much joked about, and years ago, according to Novelist Theodore Morrison, Rudyard Kipling toured Palestine Park and tripped over a boulder labeled "Jericho." He went away muttering that there was "something wrong" with Chautauqua, though he could not figure out just what...
...drinks, old Chautauquans love to startle visitors with the information that deeds to property within the gate of the institution still give the management the right (never enforced) to buy back houses in which liquor has been detected. Self-satisfaction is not unknown here, and the degree to which Chautauqua is Waspy, churchy and arty recalls an era when culture in the U.S. was a conspiracy between the pastors and the women, and manly men sulked as they were dragged to concerts...
...daily newspaper warns culture vultures to prepare for Victor Borge, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, discussions of abortion and contraception, and an address by the president of the National Council of Churches. It is not a great surprise to learn that a new course has just been added to the Chautauqua curriculum. Its title is "Battling Burn...