This season, we cast an eye on adolescence and the rise and fall (and rise) of a design icon
By Elisabeth Crean
Brett McCarthy loves soccer. She loves her gooey-brownie-baking and backyard-bazooka-making grandma. But she really loves words: learning new ones, chewing over the definitions and applying them to the parade of people and situations that march through her bustling eighth-grade life in small town Maine.
The debut novel from Maria Padian ’83, Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), targets the teen reader. But adults will also enjoy immersing themselves in Brett’s delightfully quirky world, if only to remind themselves why even a large Powerball jackpot couldn’t persuade them to go through adolescence again. Padian’s characters come to life in teen Technicolor through Brett’s eyes. Small spats unleash junior high tempests. Meanwhile, the 14-year-old is suddenly forced to face the possibility of losing her beloved grandmother, Nonna. And Brett’s new definition of what really matters begins to emerge fitfully, like the reluctant Maine spring.
A childish prank initiates a chain of events that turns Brett from confident athlete into certified juvenile delinquent. An interloper named Jeanne Anne comes between Brett and her best friend, Diane, and eggs them on to reenact a favorite childhood phone stunt. When it goes horribly wrong, Brett takes the fall, and Jeanne Anne and Diane wind up as new best buddies. Jeanne Anne’s whisper campaign at school leads to Brett’s social ostracism. Bad enough, but the mean girl’s public dig about Nonna pushes Brett over the edge. Brett’s fist connects with Jeanne Anne’s nose, getting her benched from soccer and seated at a daily detention lunch date with the principal.
The fight “set off an earthquake in the eighth grade,” Brett explains. “Shifted the tectonic plates of our little world, so now there was this big rift, the Mescataqua Grand Canyon, with some kids on one bank and some on the other.” One friend who remains on Brett’s side is Michael, “the school genius” who she’s known “since forever.” Brett predicts confidently that he’ll wind up as either “another Ken Jennings—that guy who won more than two million dollars on Jeopardy!—or as the next Steve Jobs, and invent something as cool as the iPod.”
Brett ends up joining Michael in the “brainiac” class for a special project when her grandmother gets sick. Nonna has dreamed of bringing the 19th-century lighthouse back to life on Spruce Island, her family’s small summer retreat. Brett finds new friends in Fifth Period, as she wrestles with the chance that Nonna might not be around to see the fruits of their labors.
Meanwhile, Brett helps plan her grandmother’s Bazooka Birthday party. Nonna doesn’t want to accumulate “more stuff” by getting gifts, so she asks guests to bring something they want to rid themselves of—actual junk or symbols of emotional baggage. Partygoers celebrate by blasting the unwanted items into oblivion in Nonna’s famous backyard potato cannon, a favorite of neighborhood children.
The island and Nonna’s lighthouse quest provide a fitting climax to Padian’s touching story. For Brett, eighth grade becomes an accelerated year of redefining herself. Padian’s technique of beginning each chapter with one of Brett’s vocabulary words works effectively to emphasize this. The teen loses and gains friends, and faces the mortality of the family member she cherishes the most. But she emerges with a greater sense of confidence, a better definition of Brett. Not a bad graduation present for a junior high girl to give herself.
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Writing a book about your father is tricky, especially when the subject encompasses his most spectacular business failure in an otherwise successful career. Author Nina Munk, M.A. French ’89, confronts paternal faults honestly, but frames her frankness with filial understanding. In The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon (McClelland & Stewart, 2008), co-written with Rachel Gotlieb, the lavish visual language of the photographs and illustrations creates a celebratory tone. The coffee-table volume resurrects the landmark Canadian stereo manufacturer’s remarkable artistic legacy, which long outlasted its meteoric rise and fall as a business enterprise.
Publication commemorates the 50th anniversary of Clairtone Sound Corporation’s humble origins as a four-person Toronto company. Its initial aim was “to merge contemporary Scandinavian furniture design with the latest in high-fidelity equipment.” Both Peter Munk, an electrical engineer, and his partner, David Gilmour, a designer, were young, confident and artistically brash. But their immediate success seemed to surprise even them. They had stumbled into two major trends converging as the 1950s came to a close: demand for improved home sound quality and more streamlined furniture tastes.
Clairtone won a major design award just four months into production of its first model, and initial customers included Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie. Sinatra became an early endorser, with the tag line: “Listen to Sinatra on a Clairtone stereo. Sinatra does.” Major accounts blossomed south of the border, rare at the time for a Canadian consumer products firm.
Creative marketing soon became as much a corporate signature as innovative design. Ads consciously tried to project an image of cool, from sexy graphic design to hip celebrity connections. Clairtone’s aggressive admen often employed techniques that were far ahead of their time. Munk and Gilmour became lead characters in print campaigns playing up their “youth and bravado.” Nina Munk points out that today, self-promotion is a marketing norm. “But 50 years ago, when understatement was still considered a virtue in Canada, my father’s and David’s showmanship was electrifying, and shameless.”
Clairtone actively sought product placement in movies. Stereos eventually landed in scenes with high-wattage stars such as Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, Sean Connery, Frankie Avalon, and Tuesday Weld. The highest profile role: Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) puts seduction music on a Clairtone for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.
In the company’s short history, the iconic product was 1964’s Project G, a sleek seven-foot model that cost as much as a small car. The tapered rectangular rosewood cabinet, flanked by two black aluminum spherical speakers, “was originally conceived as an elaborate promotion, a kind of concept car . . . intended to give Clairtone an aura of futuristic cool.” Slick, widely distributed brochures, shot by top fashion photographer Irving Penn, were meant to up the brand’s cachet, and stimulate overall demand for Clairtone products.
Only a few hundred Project Gs were manufactured, but the target market—wealthy trendsetters—eagerly plunked down the $1850. Hugh Hefner got one for the Playboy Mansion and featured it in his magazine’s pages. The slightly slimmed-down G2 maintained Clairtone’s reputation for cutting-edge design.
At the same time, financial troubles rumbled beneath the glittering surface. Munk and company gambled on massive expansion, including what turned out to be a premature foray into making high-end color televisions. The government of Nova Scotia financed a new factory in a remote, economically depressed town, but the relocation proved disastrous. Rutted roads damaged merchandise as it left the factory. Unemployed former coal miners made poor electronics workers. The province took control from Munk and Gilmour in 1967; Clairtone’s doors officially closed five years later.
Nina Munk’s opening essay vibrantly captures the company’s brief history. But the engaging assemblage of historical photographs and archival documents brings Clairtone’s aura of effervescence and insouciance back to life. Brochures, blueprints, memos, and sketches complement George Whiteside’s elegant new photos of lovingly restored Clairtones. And the book becomes a festive paean to the era’s intense, unbridled, sheer sense of fun.
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