Bureaucracy vs. creativity

This print ad for the "Masterpieces in Little" exhibition at VMFA never ran, but it sure did get a lot of laughs. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Life was fun -- and creatively satisfying -- at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for the first half of my career.

I went to work in the VMFA public relations department in 1978. There were two of us, plus an excellent secretary who had been there since dirt was clean. My immediate supervisor's background was with a for-profit PR consulting firm. My background was in commercial TV and print, primarily journalism. My boss was mostly focused on advancing his career in management. My focus was on writing. The advertising work for the museum sort of fell into my lap, since my boss somehow missed out on the creativity gene. That was fine by me.

Before the late 1970s, no arts organizations in Richmond had explored the use of TV, radio and print advertising to any great extent. That empty playing field, plus the elite reputation that VMFA enjoyed, made it fairly easy in those days for us to rise above the noise and clutter of the for-profit ads and commercials that people in Richmond were accustomed to seeing.

It was also a time before bureaucracy reared its hydra-like head and before committees made decisions. In other words, I was fairly free to create an ad campaign without much interference from above. I created a couple of award-winning radio campaigns for Virginia Museum Theatre productions, another that won a first-place award for an exhibition, and other print and broadcast campaigns that woke Richmond up to the presence in their city of one of the nation's foremost art museums.

One of my favorite print campaigns was for an exhibition in the 1990s titled "Masterpieces in Little." It presented portrait miniatures from Queen Elizabeth II's collection. The portraits -- smaller than the palm of your hand -- depicted faces that went with some of the memorable names from British royalty's past, names very familiar to Americans, including King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and King George III.

On a slow day about a month before the show opened, I went to the VMFA library and began doing some research. I was looking for attention-getting facts about the lives of some of those whose portraits we'd be showing. I wanted little nuggets that would grab attention in a headline. I found a wealth of information to work with.

For an ad featuring a portrait of George III, who was king during the American Revolution, my headline was "If not for him, we'd still curtsy to the Queen." For one with a portrait of Elizabeth I, the big, bold type at the top proclaimed "She ruled a nation, but no man ruled her heart."

Jean Kane, who worked in the museum's graphic design department, agreed to make some mock-ups of the ads for me to show to my boss and to the exhibition's curator.

When you're pitching copy, it can sometimes be important to throw in a loser or two -- ideas that you know will never fly. It gives those with approval authority something to toss out, and they feel like they've been a valuable part of the process. There were two ringers in the eight print ads I offered up for approval. For one, with a portrait miniature of Henry VIII -- he who had the many wives -- my headline was "He solved his problems with an axe." I had some minor hope for that one, but deep down I knew it was too harsh.

The other loser, which featured a portrait of James I -- for whom Jamestown and the James River were named -- is the one you see in the image above. Everybody who saw it laughed long and hard, but as I fully expected, it got a thumbs-down. However, for months, the whole series of mock-ups hung on my boss's office wall. He bragged about them, and told his visitors that this was the kind of creativity VMFA needed to nurture.

The other half-dozen ads did run frequently in the Times-Dispatch, Style Weekly and the Free Press. It was great fun to create that campaign and see it succeed.

The fun went out of creativity at VMFA a few years later. Committees began to make creative decisions. Any fresh ideas that might draw an objection from anybody in the increasingly bureaucratic world we functioned in were quickly shot down. Nobody wanted their name on a decision to which somehow, somebody, somewhere might object for any absurd reason at all. Decision-making became part of what some of us began to call the blame game, a top-down management style that emanated from the museum director's office.

That director is long gone, but the fear persists. The blame-game approach lingered until earlier this year when I retired and still does as far as I know. The result was that most of us who had original, fresh ideas simply gave up working hard to be creative. The game was no longer worth the candle.

Coconut palms and banyan trees and coral sands and Tonkinese

This conch shell has traveled a long way. It made its journey 65 years ago. My father brought it -- and many other souvenirs -- back from the island of Bougainville in the South Pacific after World War II. It now sits on a railing on my deck. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

My connection to "South Pacific" is personal.

Last week I watched the "Live from Lincoln Center" telecast on PBS of the first New York revival of the beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It was first staged on Broadway in 1949 -- just 4 years after the end of World War II.

For those who haven't seen it, here's a little background. The story unfolds in 1943, as the U.S. Navy has established bases in the New Hebrides islands in preparation for a move north through the Slot that runs up through the center of the Solomon Islands.

If you watched the Lincoln Center telecast closely, you might have seen an enormous map in several scenes. At the top of that map is the northernmost of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville, just east of New Guinea. That's where my dad went ashore with the Navy's Seabees in the attack at Empress Augusta Bay on November 1, 1943. The Marines were first to land on the island, and the Seabees followed closely behind to rebuild the Japanese airstrip for U.S. use. The island wasn't completely cleared when the Seabees landed, and there were enough Japanese left in the early days to make the operation tricky and dangerous.

My dad, of course, survived the war, and when I was little, before "South Pacific" debuted in 1949 (when I was 8), there were lots of reminders of his time in the Solomons all around me. He talked about it, but usually in a light-hearted manner with other men in the family who were veterans. Most of the conversations I overheard as a child were between my dad and my Uncle Joe, who was a young Army troop on Corregidor when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor -- and the Philippines. He was captured and spent the duration in a POW camp in Japan under grueling, inhuman conditions. I say "overheard," because if I made any noise or tried to ask questions, the conversation would stop: The subject was considered too rough for kids. But I could listen if I kept quiet.

I grew up knowing about the Coast Watchers, who figured into "South Pacific," and The Slot, and malaria, and pineapple plantations, and bare-chested native women, and Americans flushing Japanese out of caves with flame throwers (the very thought of which terrified me more than the idea of bullets flying).

After my parents died, I kept many of my dad's souvenirs of the Solomons, including a wicked Japanese dagger and sheath, a necklace made of a cat's eye shell, a handful of tiny cowry shells, a pair of mahogany bookends, a couple of big conch shells, and picture frames made from Bougainville mahogany with screws and Perspex from the windshields of planes that were shot down over the island. (The frames enclose images of me and my mom that she sent him during the war.)

"South Pacific" debuted in 1949. The Rodgers and Hammerstein songs were all over the radio.

My dad was never big on musicals, but when the road-show version came to the Mosque in, I believe, 1950 or 51, my mom and her best friend, Edith Waldbauer, bought tickets early. I found the yellowing playbill for the road show among my mom's things after she died.

The 45-rpm Broadway cast recording of "South Pacific" also came out in 1949. My Uncle Joe -- the ex-POW -- was a commercial- and short-wave-radio zealot. He had his own short-wave station in his basement. When TV took off, he had the first set I ever saw, which he built from a Heathkit, I think. I remember watching "Toast of the Town" (the predecessor to the "Ed Sullivan Show") at his house one Sunday evening.

To bring this back on point, Uncle Joe bought one of those early stand-alone RCA 45 turntables, and when he later moved up to the newest version, he gave me that 45 player for Christmas. It must have been about 1952. He also gave me some 45s, including "Some Enchanted Evening," one of the hit "South Pacific" songs, by Perry Como. I still had it in 1958, when the "South Pacific" movie was released. I was 16.

The movie played as a road show (reserved seating and tickets) at the Loews Theater downtown. My mom and dad had bought our house in Lakeside about 18 months earlier, so money was tight. They didn't go to see the movie in its first run. But I was working part-time at Miller & Rhoads as a stock boy, and I used my own money to order a single ticket through the mail. I rode the bus downtown to see the movie by myself. I loved it.

That was my first real exposure to a story I had always associated with my dad. Right afterwards, I went to Miller & Rhoads and spent, if I recall correctly, about 5 bucks for the 45 rpm EP boxed soundtrack of the movie, which I played endlessly in my room.

I have watched the movie on TV many, many times since, and it always holds up. I never really tire of it.

In 2001, I watched the "South Pacific" made-for-TV movie with Glenn Close as nurse Nellie Forbush and Harry Connick Jr. as Lt. Joe Cable, a Coast Watcher. Glenn Close was far too old for the part, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. Many of the scenes were rearranged, and some of the songs were dropped, but it was still a chance to see a different take on an old favorite.

In 2006, I watched the PBS telecast of the concert version of the musical from Carnegie Hall, which included the full score. It starred Reba McEntire as Nellie Forbush, the young nurse so far away from her home in Arkansas. Reba made an excellent Nellie, especially with her natural Southern accent.

And there you have it -- my personal "South Pacific" connections. Did I mention that I also read the book that the musical was based on, James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific?" No? Well, I should have. The book, of course, is nothing like the Broadway show or the movie. The seeds are there, but the narrative is not.

So forgive me if I come across sounding like a teenage drama queen when I talk about "South Pacific." Perhaps I am. But there's a good reason. The story is meaningful to me. On a very personal level.

UPDATED 12-8-2012: I received the note below via email today, Dec. 8, 2012, more than two years following my original post above. It was written by a woman in Colorado, who wanted to share her memories of coconut palms and banyan trees and coral sands and Tonkinese. I am grateful to her for emailing me.

Really enjoyed your story. I found it by googling" coconut palms and banyan trees. I did that because I just got home from Hawaii and also fell in love with South Pacific (the movie musical first) when I was a teenager.
The line from the song has been circling my brain now for days, and I couldn't for the life of me remember what came between “banyan trees” and “Tonkinese.” And there it was in your story: “coral sands.”
As a 17-year-old I played one of the nurses in “South Pacific” in a production put on by the Denver Post newspaper. It was the first of three Post musicals I was in that led me to getting a voice scholarship to college. These were big productions, put on in front of a large pavilion in Cheesman Park in Denver for a week every summer. Thousands of people came every night to see the shows, which always featured Broadway talent in the lead roles.
I also had a kind of personal connection to the musical later in my life (when I was 23). I met my then-husband in Hawaii for his R&R while he was a forward air controller serving in Viet Nam. Part of our visit was spent on Kauai at the Hanalei Plantation, which was a gorgeous hotel on the north shore. I was told that the terrace at that hotel that looked out on the Na Pali cliffs was used in the movie as the location for Emile DeBeque's terrace where he and Nellie had their one enchanted evening.
My marriage did not survive the Viet Nam war, but my memory of that lovely terrace never faded. Last week, my husband of 27 years found the Hanalei Plantation for me when we were touring Kauai. The only thing left of that beautiful place after 44 years is concrete foundations. The property is now wild and overgrown. If you walk down to the edge of the cliff you can still see the Na Pali cliffs, and there is a huge Ritz Carlton Hotel nearby. However there is nothing left of the beautiful and graceful Hanalei Plantation but memories and the promise of some developers who want to do something with the property someday soon. A security guard we met was very nice and seemed used to people coming down to see the location.
It's funny. I've been wanting to tell the story of that terrace and my own connection to it. Stumbling upon your story gave me a way to do that. I know it has been a while since your wrote it, but I wanted you to know it touched me and put another layer of meaning to my own experiences. Thank you.
 

The view from the top

The last time I climbed to the top of a cathedral was in 1995, at Strasbourg, France. (Walter Foery photo, 1995)

"From the belfry, the view is wonderful. Strasbourg lays at your feet, the old city of tiled triangular roof tops and gable windows, interrupted by towers and churches as picturesque as those of any city in Flanders. Personally, I would go from one turret to another, admiring one by one, the view of France, Switzerland and Germany via one ray of sunshine."

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Three hundred and thirty-two steps -- the equivalent of the number you'd find in a 25-story modern building if it had a continuous stairwell from bottom to top.

Three hundred and thirty-two tightly wound steps, each just wide enough for two people to pass if they turn sideways, back to back or face to face. And even then, it's a squeeze. The steps wind around a center pole and are narrower near the center than they are at the exterior wall of the stairwell. The person closest to the center barely has a step to stand on.

Three hundred and thirty-two steps up. Three hundred and thirty-two steps down. Three hundred and thirty-two steps to the viewing platform near the top of the cathedral at Strasbourg, France. I climbed those 332 steps in 1995 and vowed, "Never again."

Few medieval cathedrals have been retrofitted with elevators -- very few. The problem is, where would you put them? So if you want to get to the top, it's all legwork. I've climbed my share, but Strasbourg was the last for me.

Three hundred and thirty-two steps.

The view from the top of a Medieval cathedral is invariably spectacular -- akin to the view in this country from the top, say, of the Washington Monument (555 feet, and, yes, I climbed it). Today, the Strasbourg Cathedral is the 6th-tallest church in the world. It's highest spire soars 466 feet toward the sky.

From the viewing platform atop Our Lady of Strasbourg, you can see all the way to Germany's Black Forest. The view must have been even more spectacular in 1439 when the north tower was completed, before the modern world cluttered the landscape and before the age of pollution intervened. (Construction on the church was begun in the late 1100s.)

But Strasbourg was the last climb for me. If there's no elevator, I admire these magnificent buildings now from the ground. Even from a low vantage point, they're still amazingly spectacular.

Mea culpa

This page is from the exercise manual we used in USAF basic training.

For the major portion of my life, I despised organized sports and exercise. A lot of my distaste had to do with a lack of coordination. Okay, maybe some of it had to do with always being picked last in junior high school PE class. Is there anything more humiliating? Maybe losing your swimsuit in a packed pool, but not by much.

In high school, my PE instructor was the school's football coach. A great bear of a man, he was an excellent coach. My school, Hermitage High in Henrico, won the state football championship when I was a junior, if memory serves. But in gym class, he was benign. When the class went outside, he turned a blind eye as a few of us retreated under the bleachers and watched the rest of the class haul their butts around the track.

Why, I wondered, did they do that so enthusiastically? Where was the joy in getting all sweaty and then going to algebra class?

PE was a required course for two years in college, too. The track coach, who taught my freshman class, was a stickler for group participation. No more retreating to a safe spot under the bleachers. He actually expected all of us to run around the track in good weather and -- dear god -- climb ropes in the gym in the winter. My ineptitude made the whole experience downright embarrassing.

So I stopped going to gym class. My theory was that I'd take it later ... maybe. When I was a senior? When -- if there indeed was a god -- I magically became more coordinated?

When I was a junior in college, I woke up one night with intense pain in my gut. After two days in Stuart Circle Hospital, filled with X-rays and much poking, prodding and muttering, my doctor decided it was my gall bladder. The muttering centered on the fact that nothing showed up on the X-rays.

So they trucked me off to surgery on the third day and cut a hole of major proportions in my gut. Sure enough, there were no stones in my gall bladder, but the damned thing had died due to a congenitally deficient blood supply.

The upshot was that I missed the next semester of college. Which, in turn, led to the loss of my draft deferment. Which, in turn, led to my being ordered to report for an Army physical. Which, in turn, led to my being drafted.

At first I panicked. Me? In the Army? Just as the Vietnam War was building up? Uh-oh. This was not good. So I rushed down to the Air Force recruiting center and joined up. I was no fool: There was no Air Force specialty called "infantry." If I wound up in Vietnam in the Air Force, I wouldn't be plodding through rice paddies with Viet Cong trying to kill me.

But to bring this back to exercise, basic training was a breeze -- except for the daily exercising. At first, it was grueling. Then, much to my surprise, after about four weeks of drilling, pushups and running, I was keeping up with my peers. I wasn't leading the pack, mind you, but neither was I lagging behind. TSgt. Dunlop stopped yelling at me. I lost 25 pounds and dropped three inches in my waist.

Four years later, I was discharged honorably and came home looking reasonably fit. I finished college, and, bless him, the dean said he'd waive the rest of my PE requirements because of my Air Force service.

For the next 40 years, I did nothing voluntarily that would make me sweat.

When I retired this year, I knew I had to find some sort of exercise program if I wanted to live long enough to really enjoy retirement. I wrote about my solution in June. In the process, I maligned a perfectly decent man. I called him "Herr Instructor." I accused him of wanting to assemble a road-show version of "A Chorus Line." I took out on him a lifetime of distaste for exercise.

So this is my apology.

I'm now taking that fitness class four times a week -- twice as often as when I started. The exercises that seemed tough three months ago are actually fun now. I enjoy the people I work out with, and, more important, I like "Herr Instructor" because he IS tough. He makes us work. He pushes us to improve.

So I offer my thanks to you, "Herr Instructor." I'll audition for your production of "A Chorus Line" whenever you want. Just don't pick me last.

And it might be better if you put me in the back row. I'm not ready for my close-up yet.

Everything old is new again

19th-century map of Richmond, Virginia

"The state capital was a mecca of sin, a town overrun with racetracks, gamblers, prostitutes, con men, embezzlers, horse thieves, and counterfeiters. So much beer was consumed nightly at the wild taverns that Richmond even had its own city brewery to produce an endless supply of it.

"In two decades, Richmond had become one of the most violent cities in the country, with an army of nighttime burglars, dozens of murders, soaring assault convictions, and, it seemed, thieves lurking around every corner."

The description is of Richmond 200 years ago. It sounds almost like it could be the first block of a 6 o'clock Richmond TV newscast today. The more things change ....

The passage is from a book by Bruce Chadwick titled "I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing that Shocked a New Nation." It's a non-fiction work about the death in Richmond in 1806 of the revered Virginian George Wythe -- lawyer, judge, law professor, classical scholar and signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

The book posits that Wythe's grand-nephew, George Wythe Sweeney, poisoned him, his servant and a young man Wythe had been mentoring in his Richmond home at 5th and Grace streets. Wythe lingered for days before he died, long enough to change his will and disinherit his grand-nephew. Sweeney was acquitted of murder, mainly because of a law that forbade the testimony of black witnesses, a law Wythe himself had written.

Unfortunately, it takes Chadwick 239 pages to tell a simple murder story. It reads like a history student's bloated doctoral dissertation. But it is fascinating to read the description of Richmond in 1806.

Touching incunabula

Members of the 1999 University of Virginia summer class at Oxford University were allowed to examine copies of texts including an early version of "The Canterbury Tales," at the Bodleian Library. (Don Dale photo, 1999)

I was shocked.

Others in the class didn't seem to be bothered in the least.

But we were all fascinated.

Our Medieval cathedrals class at Oxford had received a special invitation from the university's Bodleian Library to examine -- and handle -- books from the library's special collection of incunabula, early books generally printed before 1501.

The Bodleian is the primary research library at Oxford University and is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. The first library at Oxford was founded in the 1300s. In 1598, the library was revitalized when Thomas Bodley, a former fellow of Merton College at Oxford, began to support its development.

The Bodleian's many treasures include four copies of the Magna Carta, a Gutenberg Bible from about 1455, and an early version of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" printed in 1477 by William Caxton. It also houses a Shakespeare First Folio from 1623.

What shocked me was that my classmates and I were given permission to examine the books, touch them, pick them up, and turn their pages -- all with our bare hands. My experience at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for three decades was that only a select few staff members were allowed to touch such rare objects. Those who were allowed to do so had to wear white cotton gloves. At VMFA, no object from the collection was touched at all without a clearly defined purpose. Satisfying curiosity didn't qualify as a purpose.

But in a private room at the Bodleian, the 20 of us in the class crowded around a table and -- very carefully and reverently -- looked at, touched, picked up, and turned the pages of some of the most ancient, rare and valuable English-language books extant today.

For a group of people with immense respect for the English language and its origins, the written word, and the Medieval era, it was a thrilling experience.

The Oxford Don

This is a detail of buildings just outside my centuries-old dorm-room door on the Trinity College quad at Oxford University in England. (Don Dale photo, 1999)

They took to calling me the Oxford Don almost immediately.

The play on words was too hard to resist. We were a small group who had signed up for a course on Medieval cathedrals through the University of Virginia's continuing education program. It met for a week in April 1999 at Trinity College at Oxford University in England.

During the day we studied and traveled. Classes focused on Medieval history, church history and the Norman and Gothic architectural styles. Oxford professors -- called "dons" -- taught the classes alongside UVa professors. With no note-taking or tests required, it was a relaxed and enjoyable learning experience. One of the Oxford dons spent a morning unlocking the secrets of how the massive cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, a time when the only source of energy was the human being and his rudimentary mechanical devices -- chisels, hammers, ropes, pulleys and levers.

The course was fascinating, but so was the experience of living, eating and studying at Trinity College, founded in 1555 by Thomas Pope, who rose to prominence under Henry VIII and served as privy counsellor to Mary Tudor, Henry's elder daughter, when she became queen. Trinity is one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford. It was especially lovely in April with dogwoods and the first spring flowers in bloom. We were each assigned to single rooms in a 350-year-old student dorm, complete with gas fireplaces, which we needed to ward off April's chill nights.

We had a classic Medieval church at hand for a study aid. A short walk from our classroom was Oxford's Christ Church Cathedral, which once held the distinction of being the smallest in England, although that is no longer true. The Late-Norman cathedral stands on the site of an 8th-century Saxon church. The present church was constructed in the 12th century.

Some of our days were spent in classes taught on a tour bus, as we traveled to study famed English cathedrals and abbeys built in the Middle Ages -- Gloucester, St. Albans, Salisbury, Winchester, Tewkesbury and Romsey, to name but a few.

I also arrived at Trinity a day early and left a day late so that I could make two side-trips on my own. I re-visited London's Westminster Abbey, England's coronation church since 1066, which traces its origins to the mid 900s and is the final resting place of 17 monarchs. I also journeyed to St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, which was founded in the 14th century. St George's is where King Henry VIII, King George III, King George VI, Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother are interred. Like so many other European churches, St. George's was purported to house a fragment of the True Cross.

Our evenings in Oxford were spent in pub-crawling in the ancient city. The highlight was a night spent in the centuries-old student beer cellar in a vaulted basement at Trinity College.

My interest in Medieval cathedrals preceded the course I took at Oxford by three decades. But at the end of our intensive studies, I understood so much more about the glories of what I was looking at.

My friend Walter and I are both blogging about cathedrals. You can read about his adventures at http://asacynicseesit.blogspot.com.

A must-see in Paris

Sainte-Chapelle is in Paris on the Île de la Cité in the Seine.

I knew I would have only one free afternoon in Paris before leaving for Normandy the next morning. So I asked my friend Walter, who knows Paris much better than I do, what I should see.

He suggested Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité near the royal palace.

It was excellent advice.

Not all things Gothic are cathedrals. Sainte-Chapelle -- or "Holy Chapel"-- was built during the 13th-century reign of Louis IX (he was later canonized as Saint Louis). It is a prime example of the Gothic style known as Rayonnant, from the French for "to radiate." The Rayonnant style provided for grand windows for interior illumination. Lace-like stone screens were employed on exteriors to hide the bulk of load-bearing walls and buttresses.

When I visited Sainte-Chapelle on my one free afternoon, I was enveloped by soaring windows and nearly 6,500 square feet of magnificent stained glass. Sunlight streamed in, creating a shimmering display of projected color that bathed visitors, walls and floors in vivid, glowing reds and blues. Although full of tourists, the chapel was quiet. We were struck dumb by the feeling of being encircled by such majestic light and color. It was a most impressive sight.

Sainte-Chapelle was built to house one of Christianity's most precious relics, Christ's Crown Of Thorns. Louis IX bought the artifact of the Passion and other relics in 1239 from the Latin emperor at Constantinople. In 1241, he added a piece of the True Cross to his collection, and Sainte-Chapelle was consecrated on April 26, 1248.

The chapel was effectively destroyed in the late 18th century during the French Revolution, although nearly two-thirds of the windows visitors see today are authentic. The relics were dispersed, although some, including the Crown of Thorns, survive at Notre Dame Cathedral. An 1855 restoration returned Sainte-Chapelle to its former glory, and the chapel has been a French national historic monument since 1862.

If there's a trip to Paris in your future, I suggest that you put Sainte-Chapelle at the top of your must-see list.

Paying the bills

Legend has it that this is a Holy Nail, used in the crucifixion of Christ. The iron spike and its reliquary are displayed in the treasury at St. Peter Cathedral in Trier, Germany.

You gotta have a gimmick
If you wanna have a chance!
("Gypsy")

In the Broadway musical "Gypsy," the gimmick that the beautiful young Louise adopts for her flagging vaudeville song-and-dance routine is dropping a single shoulder strap on her gown, a precursor to what later becomes a full-blown striptease act. Audiences start turning out in droves.

What does this have to do with Medieval cathedrals?

Once they're built, at enormous cost, cathedrals have to be maintained -- also at enormous cost. Priests and monks have to be fed. Candles have to be purchased. Roofs need to be repaired. Crumbling stones and rotting wooden beams must be replaced.

Even in the 12th century, archbishops recognized the need for a revenue-generating gimmick to lure "customers." Often the gimmick centered on relics.

St. Peter Cathedral in Trier is a good example. Trier Cathedral was one of the first Medieval cathedrals I visited. Trier, which is the oldest city in Germany (founded about 16 BC), was the closest city of any size to Bitburg Air Base, where I was stationed beginning in late 1966.

Trier Cathedral's gimmick was powerful: Pilgrims flocked to see and worship what were said to be Christ's robe and one of the four nails used in his crucifixion.

St. Peter Cathedral traces its history to Roman times. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was celebrating the 20th year of his reign when a church was built at the site of his mother's palace in Trier in 326 AD. Constantine began construction simultaneously on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. A major addition to the Trier church in the Romanesque style was begun in 1035. Gothic and Baroque additions came later.

Constantine's mother, the Empress Helena, also a Christian, traveled to Jerusalem and returned to Trier with the Holy Robe of Christ, the seamless garment said to have been worn by Jesus during the crucifixion. Helena gave the relic to her son's church at Trier.

The Holy Robe was first mentioned in documents written in the 12th century. Some 400 years later, in the 16th century, the high altar of Trier Cathedral was opened, and the robe was found inside. It was displayed for 23 days. More than 100,000 pilgrims came to venerate it. The robe was last shown in 1933 for 21 days. Two million pilgrims flocked to Trier. In 1959, the garment was sealed in a reliquary in its own chapel at the church, where it remains today.

The Trier Cathedral is also home to what is said to be a Holy Nail, one of four used to affix Christ to the cross at Golgotha. The reliquary for the nail was made in Trier in about 980 AD. The Holy Nail was used for processions and for swearing oaths and is even said to have healed blind believers.

Other relics in the cathedral's treasury include a sandal from St. Andrew and a tooth from St. Peter.

It's immaterial whether Christ ever wore Trier's Holy Robe or whether the Holy Nail is authentic. What is important -- and what has sustained and maintained the Trier Cathedral's existence -- is that they lure pilgrims.

The Medieval Trier churchmen knew well -- as did Louise in "Gypsy" -- that if you give the people a good enough reason, they will come. And they'll bring money.

The mists of time

The Cologne Cathedral is seen from across the Rhine River near the Hohenzollern Bridge.

I had seen the cathedral at Cologne (Köln) before, but never like this -- at night, bathed in a ghostly green light, its towering spires disappearing mysteriously into the dense fog that covered the city.

My friend Walter and I had arrived in Cologne too late in the day to do much more than seek out a place for dinner and a beer. While we were indoors, night had fallen, and fog had crept quietly up from the Rhine and shrouded the city.

As we left the crowded bierstube and emerged into the thick mist, I was thinking about our planned visit to the cathedral the next day, and then we looked up and saw it: the magnificent Cathedral of Saint Peter and the Blessed Virgin disappearing into the fog above, a timeless apparition that transported us -- just for a moment -- back to the Middle Ages. We were stopped in our tracks, stunned by what we beheld. Speechless. Awestruck. Never before nor since have I seen something both so moving and so beautiful.

I first saw the Cologne Cathedral in 1967 when I was in the Air Force, on the day of the funeral of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. We had come not so much in reverence as because we wanted to see the city and be a part of the throng that gathered outside the church. The next year, I saw it for the first time at night when a group of us from Bitburg Air Base spent New Year's Eve bar-hopping in Cologne. We celebrated the birth of a new year by making our way to the middle of the Hohenzollern Bridge and relieving ourselves into the Rhine. (We were not alone as we enacted what seemed to be an odd Kölnischer New Year's Eve ritual.)

But on this visit, in 1995, for the first time I toured the interior of the church, which was built on a site where Christians worshiped in Roman times. It is the largest Gothic church in Northern Europe, and for four years (1880-84), it was the tallest structure in the world (until the completion of the Washington Monument).

Construction of the present cathedral was begun in 1248 and not completely finished until 1880. Its most celebrated work of art is the Shrine of the Three Kings, a massive, gilded, 13th-century sarcophagus -- the largest reliquary in the Western world -- believed to contain the remains of the Three Wise Men. (Bones and 2,000-year-old clothing were discovered when it was opened in 1864.) Brought to Cologne in 1164, the relics made the cathedral one of the most important pilgrimage churches in Europe. Thirty thousand people still visit each day.

But it was the view of the cathedral's twin spires disappearing into the thick mist that left me with a lasting impression. It made me think of what it must have been like to live in the Middle Ages when the cathedral's first stones were set. For Cologne's people, life then must have been harder than we can imagine. The filth, disease, cold, poverty, starvation, brutality, stench, and ignorance that molded their lives were inescapable.

Yet, amidst all of this, the people of that long-ago Cologne labored to build a monument for the ages and to the glory of their religion.

They surpassed even their loftiest expectations.

An inspiration in stone

Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral in England is breathtakingly beautiful.

I'm not alone in that view. Salisbury Cathedral -- whose full name is the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary -- has inspired visitors with its contrast of delicate beauty and magnificent medieval stonework for nearly 800 years.

Art and architectural historians call it one of the finest medieval cathedrals in Britain. At 404 feet, the cathedral spire is the tallest in the United Kingdom and is the tallest surviving pre-1400 spire in the world.

The church is also home to Europe's oldest working clock, which dates to 1386 and is said to have ticked more than 5 million times.

The Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary replaced a Norman church constructed between 1075 and 1092 at what was then known as Old Sarum. In 1220, construction on a new cathedral began, and the church as it stands today was completed in 1258. Because it was begun and finished in merely 38 years, its architectural style is a consistent, unified whole, dramatically serving as an example of the Early English Gothic style.

Work on the cathedral started just 5 years after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Today the church is home of the best preserved of the four original exemplars of that historic document, which mandated that the king explicitly accept that no freeman be punished except by law.

The English landscape painter John Constable was also inspired by Salisbury. In 1831 he exhibited "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" at the Royal Academy. The painting is the culmination of his numerous treatments of Salisbury Cathedral.

I visited Salisbury 10 years ago, and the memory of its grandeur stays with me today. I've told friends that if there is a God, he lives at Salisbury.

Salisbury's magnificence also inspired Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the director of "The Pillars of the Earth," an eight-part miniseries now in its first run on the Starz cable network. He visited Salisbury in 2008 and took detailed notes about the building, consulting with Salisbury's archaeologist. Special-effects artists who worked on the miniseries visited the next year, and elements of the real Salisbury Cathedral are shown standing in for the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral that is the centerpiece of "Pillars."

Writer Ken Follett, who is the author of the 1989 book on which the miniseries is based, also spent time at Salisbury. You can see an interview with him in front of the cathedral by clicking here. (Follett was also cast in a bit part in the TV production, as an Anglo-French merchant.)

Salisbury Cathedral is among nearly two dozen English and European cathedrals and abbeys I have visited as a result of reading Follett's book 20 years ago. Each is unique in its splendor and majesty. (And, no, I won't be writing lengthy posts on each of them.)

Salisbury is one of the finest.