FxTeam Economic Calendar will keep you informed with the markets economy events. Thanks to FxTeam, people more than ten years are getting fresh financial news. Using our new application for iOS you will be well informed with the most fresh macroeconomic statistics data including stock index futures, commodities and goods.
We are updating actual values of Forex indicators in real time right after their release. There are different filters you can use to see only interesting information. You can remove or add displaying of news from the different countries; also you can customize importance of news. Tap on calendar event to see more information: description and chart based on the latest news on the event.
In the Quotes section you can customize displaying of the symbols to be informed with the latest price levels and to be able to see a chart of the price changes from the beginning of a day. It is easy and handy to add/remove the whole sections and separate symbols from displaying list. We hope that mobile version of FxTeam Economic Calendar will be a good Forex market road map for you.
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I hardly write reviews but I had to in this case. This app does everything it's supposed to. Covers the most important news I need. Sends notifications when it should (if you tell it to) etc. You don't really appreciate the efficient functionality of a free app like this till you've used some "better looking apps" and you find out they're just not it. An important reminder to not judge a book by its cover. I think the developer could work on the interface - make it a little more attractive and customizable e.g. Font size of the main page. And just to clear up any doubts, I have no complaints at all.
Great app. Keep me updated with all important economic events. Thanks!
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Promoting Maternal and Child Health in Kosovo
Policies to Address the Overuse of Cesarean Sections
PRS Policy Brief 1718-14
Weckstein
kosovo_final_report_final.pdf
The 1999 conflict in Kosovo left the country with some of the worst maternal and infant health outcomes in all of Europe. Although many maternal and infant health indicators have since improved, the fragmented system has allowed other health outcomes to worsen, including dramatically increasing cesarean rates. The overall cesarean section (CS) rate grew from 7.5 percent to 27.3 percent between 2000 and 2015, exceeding international guidelines. Given the country's resource constraints and history of poor maternal and infant health, the potential health risks and excessive financial burdens associated with medically unnecessary CS represent a serious concern for Kosovo. In 2016, the Kosovar Ministry of Health identified the dramatic rise in the CS rate as a principal target for policy interventions to improve child and maternal health.
In partnership with AMC, the Dartmouth Global Health Policy Lab sought to investigate possible causes of rising cesarean rates in order to develop policy interventions. Following extensive preparation and desk review, the Dartmouth team commenced fieldwork in Kosovo, conducting a mixed methods study consisting of semi-structured interviews with various healthcare actors and analysis of existing data and literature sources. From June 21 through August 18, 2017, the Dartmouth Global Policy Health Policy Lab team conducted more than 40 interviews with health workers, government officials, health administrators, NGO leaders, and other healthcare experts in Kosovo. Additional literature review and data analysis supplemented interview findings.
Through these methods, the Dartmouth team identified six major factors linked with rising rates and overprovision of CS in Kosovo that may be susceptible to policy interventions. These major factors included: maternal misconceptions surrounding birth, underutilization of antenatal care at the primary level, diminished midwife autonomy, absence of established national cesarean guidelines, financial and informal incentives, and legal and media pressures. Although many other health system and economic factors contribute to cesarean overuse, these six areas of interest emerged as the most feasible targets for policy intervention. A detailed outline of key findings and associated policy options can be found in Section 3 of this report.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Emailcommunications@beckman.illinois.edu
Websitehttps://beckman.illinois.edu/
Research Output (21264)
Honors (28)
256 Editorial
204 Comment/debate
57 Short survey
18 Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary
2 Technical report
Surfactant-induced lysis of lipid-modified microgels
Kraft, M. L. & Moore, J. S., Dec 26 2001, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 123, 51, p. 12921-12922 2 p.
Cell Membrane Permeability
Time-domain finite-element modeling of dispersive media
Jiao, D. & Jin, J., May 1 2001, In : IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters. 11, 5, p. 220-222 3 p.
Wave equations
A highly sensitive and selective catalytic DNA biosensor for lead ions [9]
Li, J. & Lu, Y., Oct 25 2000, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 122, 42, p. 10466-10467 2 p.
Catalytic DNA
Hexagonal packing of oligo(m-phenylene ethynylene)s in the solid state: Helical nanotubules [15]
Mio, M. J., Prince, R. B., Moore, J. S., Kuebel, C. & Martin, D. C., Jun 28 2000, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 122, 25, p. 6134-6135 2 p.
Transition from exponential to nonexponential kinetics during formation of a nonbiological helix [17]
Yang, W. Y., Prince, R. B., Sabelko, J., Moore, J. S. & Gruebele, M., Apr 5 2000, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 122, 13, p. 3248-3249 2 p.
Ageing, fitness and neurocognitive function [7]
Kramer, A. F., Hahn, S., Cohen, N. J., Banich, M. T., McAuley, E., Harrison, C. R., Chason, J., Vakil, E., Bardell, L., Boileau, R. A. & Colcombe, A., Jul 29 1999, In : Nature. 400, 6743, p. 418-419 2 p.
Neurologic Examination
Design and creation of a Cu(II)-binding site in cytochrome c peroxidase that mimics the Cu(B)-heme center in terminal oxidases [5]
Sigman, J. A., Kwok, B. C., Gengenbach, A. & Lu, Y., Sep 29 1999, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 121, 38, p. 8949-8950 2 p.
Cytochrome-c Peroxidase
Heme
Oxidoreductases
Helical bias in solvophobically folded oligo(phenylene ethynylene)s [24]
Gin, M. S., Yokozawa, T., Prince, R. B. & Moore, J. S., Mar 24 1999, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 121, 11, p. 2643-2644 2 p.
poly(phenylene ethynylene)
Pathogenesis of syringomyelia [4]
Olivero, W. C., Fischbein, N. J. & Dillon, W. P., Jan 1 1999, In : American Journal of Neuroradiology. 20, 10, p. 2024-2025 2 p.
Arnold-Chiari Malformation
Foramen Magnum
Cerebrospinal Fluid Pressure
Subarachnoid Space
Rapid two-dimensional inverse detected heteronuclear correlation experiments with <100 nmol samples with solenoidal microcoil NMR probes [14]
Subramanian, R., Sweedler, J. V. & Webb, A. G., Mar 17 1999, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 121, 10, p. 2333-2334 2 p.
The role of histidine ligands in the structure of purple Cu(A) azurin [23]
Wang, X., Berry, S. M., Xia, Y. & Lu, Y., Aug 18 1999, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 121, 32, p. 7449-7450 2 p.
Azurin
Analysis of amidinium guest complexation by comparison of two classes of dendrimer hosts containing a hydrogen bonding unit at the core [1]
Zimmerman, S. C., Wang, Y., Bharathi, P. & Moore, J. S., Mar 11 1998, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 120, 9, p. 2172-2173 2 p.
Dendrimers
Hydrogen Bonding
Hydrogen bonds
In-plane resistivity of ultrathin gold films: A high sensitivity, molecularly differentiated probe of mercaptan chemisorption at the liquid- metal interface [15]
Zhang, Y., Terrill, R. H. & Bohn, P. W., Sep 30 1998, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 120, 38, p. 9969-9970 2 p.
Liquid metals
Sulfhydryl Compounds
Ozonolysis is the primary cause of UV photooxidation of alkanethiolate monolayers at low irradiance [3]
Zhang, Y., Terrill, R. H., Tanzer, T. A. & Bohn, P. W., Mar 25 1998, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 120, 11, p. 2654-2655 2 p.
Photooxidation
Spectroscopic evidence for inner-sphere coordination of metal ions to the active site of a hammerhead ribozyme
Cunningham, L. A., Li, J. & Lu, Y., May 13 1998, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 120, 18, p. 4518-4519 2 p.
Metal ions
Catalytic Domain
hammerhead ribozyme
Spontaneous assembly of a hinged coordination network
Gardner, G. B., Venkataraman, D., Moore, J. S. & Lee, S., Apr 27 1995, In : Nature. 374, 6525, p. 792-795 4 p.
Supramolecular chemistry
The hippocampal memory system and its functional comments: Further explication and clarification
Eichenbaum, H., Otto, T. & Cohen, N. J., Sep 1994, In : Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 17, 3, p. 500-517 18 p.
Traumatic neonatal intracranial bleeding and stroke
Hanigan, W. C., Olivero, W. C. & Miller, T. C., Jan 1 1993, In : Archives of Disease in Childhood. 68, 3 SPEC NO, 1 p.
Pseudotumor Cerebri
Cerebral Hemorrhage
Aggregation of Hexa(phenylacetylene) Macrocycles in Solution: A Model System for Studying π-π Interactions
Zhang, J. & Moore, J. S., Nov 1 1992, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 114, 24, p. 9701-9702 2 p.
phenylacetylene
Redesign of a Type 2 into a Type 1 Copper Protein: Construction and Characterization of Yeast Copper-Zinc Superoxide Dismutase Mutants
Lu, Y. I., Gralla, E. B., Roe, J. A. & Valentine, J. S., Apr 1 1992, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 114, 9, p. 3560-3562 3 p.
Near-infrared Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy in human lens research
Nie, S., Bergbauer, K. L., Kuck, J. F. R. & Yu, N. T., Nov 1990, In : Experimental Eye Research. 51, 5, p. 619-623 5 p.
Crystallins
Raman Spectrum Analysis
Nepotism in the honey bee [16]
Page, R. E. & Robinson, G. E., Jan 1 1990, In : Nature. 346, 6286, 1 p.
Synthesis and Characterization of Actinide Mono- and Bis(porphyrin) Complexes
Girolami, G. S., Milam, S. N. & Suslick, K. S., Feb 1 1987, In : Inorganic Chemistry. 26, 3, p. 343-344 2 p.
Actinoid Series Elements
Alkyl, Hydride, and Dinitrogen l,2-Bis(dimethylphosphino)ethane Complexes of Chromium. Crystal Structures of Cr(CH3)2(dmpe)2, CrH4(dmpe)2, and Cr(N2)2(dmpe)2
Girolami, G. S., Salt, J. E., Wilkinson, G., Thornton-Pett, M. & Hursthouse, M. B., Sep 1983, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 105, 18, p. 5954-5956 3 p.
Hydrides
Determination of masking-level differences in a reverberant environment
Koenig, A. H., Allen, J. B., Curtis, T. H. & Berkley, D. A., May 1977, In : Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 61, 5, p. 1374-1376 3 p.
Hard sphere diffusion model and the velocity autocorrelation function for the Lennard-Jones fluid
Kim, K. & Chandler, D., Dec 1 1973, In : The Journal of Chemical Physics. 59, 9, p. 5217-5218 2 p.
Autocorrelation


Android mini collectibles not enough Android for you? Each MEGA Android towers almost 10" tall! These massive fellows feature a rotating and removable head, expressive ball jointed arms, and a special double wall internal liner. Unlock the head to reveal an internal chamber big enough to hold a can of your favorite tasty beverage...or anything else you might want to hide in there!
Available in the iconic Android Green, or ready for your own artistic touch in a blank Do It Yourself edition.
Box: 7 7/8" x 7 7/8" x 11 1/8"


Application availability has changed how applications are hosted in today's data centers. Evolutionary changes have occurred throughout the various elements of the data center, starting with server and storage virtualization and also network virtualization.
A set of guidelines from which a solution can be derived as per the requirements of an organization is established. Additionally, the design architecture will emphasize criteria which are standard-based without compromising critical functionality.
Data center LANs are continually evolving. Business necessities are forcing IT organizations to adopt new application delivery models. Edge computing models are transitioning from applications at the edge to virtualized desktops in the data center. The evolution of the data center from centralized servers to a private cloud is well underway and will be improved by hybrid and public cloud computing services.
With data center traffic becoming less client-server and more server-server centric, new data center topologies are emerging. Yesterday's heavily segmented data center is becoming less physically segmented and more virtually segmented. Virtual segmentation allows for the reduction of physical equipment, leading to both capital and operational expense savings.
Connectivity solutions provide the ability to compress the traditional 3-tier network into a physical 2-tier network by virtualizing the routing and switching functions into a single tier. Virtualized routing provides for greater resiliency and fewer switches dedicated to just connecting switches. Reducing the number of uplinks (switch hops) in the data center improves application performance as it reduces latency throughout the fabric.
Servers deployed in the data center today are either full featured and equipped rack-mount servers or blade servers. A blade server is a stripped down server with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Whereas a standard server can function with (at least) a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. A blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, provides services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management. Together, blades and the blade enclosure form the blade system. There are pros and cons for each server type. Virtualization has introduced the ability to create dynamic data centers and with the added benefit of "green IT." Server virtualization can provide better reliability and higher availability in the event of hardware failure. Server virtualization also allows higher utilization of hardware resources while improving administration by having a single management interface for all virtual servers.
Storage requirements vary by server type. Application servers require much less storage than database servers. There are several storage options – Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), or Storage Area Network (SAN). Applications that require large amounts of storage should be SAN attached using Fibre Channel or iSCSI. In the past, Fibre Channel offered better reliability and performance but needed highly-skilled SAN administrators. Dynamic data centers, leveraging server virtualization with Fibre Channel attached storage, will require the introduction of a new standard, Fibre Channel over Ethernet. FCoE, requires LAN switch upgrades due to the nature of the underlying requirements, as well as not yet ratified Data Center Bridging Ethernet standards. FCoE is also non-routable, so it could cause issues when it comes to the implementation of disaster recovery/ large geographical redundancy that L2 connectivity cannot yet achieve. On the other hand, with iSCSI, support for faster speeds and improved reliability is making it more attractive. iSCSI offers more flexibility and a more cost effective solution by leveraging existing network components (NICs, switches, etc.). On top of that, Fibre Channel switches typically cost 50% more than Ethernet switches. Overall, iSCSI is easier to manage than Fibre Channel with most IT personnel very familiar with management of IP networks.
The networking component provides connectivity to the data center, for example, L2/L3 switches and WAN routers. Motivated by server virtualization, data center connectivity design is moving towards network virtualization.


text:
/* eslint-disable import/prefer-default-export */

import Server from './Server';

export function createServer() {
    return new Server();
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Despite an early exit from the PIAA playoffs, Forbes Road's senior Kiersten Cline will have the opportunity to continue her field hockey career past high school.
But with a bit more competition.
She will leave the comfort of her Forbes Road family to join the 41,000 students at Kent State University, where Cline has officially signed to play at the Division I program on a partial athletic scholarship.
"I'm definitely glad that I got to play my four years of high school at Forbes Road," Cline said. "One good thing about coming out of a school is that it's so small, you're like a family."
Cline said Kent State had a similar "family atmosphere" surrounding its field hockey program, which enticed her to join the Golden Eagles.
"When I went for my unofficial visit everyone was really funny, and I liked the mentality of the coaches," Cline said. "Their hockey team is like a family; that's what made me want to go there."
As a four-year varsity starter for the Cardinals, Cline as racked up 58 goals and 75 assists, despite missing a majority of the season her junior year. With 27 goals and 23 assists just in her senior season, Cline is ranked second in the area leaders with 77 points.
Cline came across Kent State's radar while playing for East Coast Field Hockey, and again during Forbes Road's appearance in the PIAA Class AA quarterfinals against Oley Valley last year.
"I love when the kid's passion for the sport takes them there," Forbes Road coach Carol Cline said. "I'm so glad she could do that and kept her thumb on everything and made herself better so she could play at that level."
Kiersten said Cline has offered advice on the transition to college field hockey, especially having to be a little fish in a big pond.
"Coach has given me a lot of perspective as to how its going to be," Kiersten said. "I'm really looking forward to it, it's going to be a little nerve wracking moving out there, but I think I will adjust well."
Kiersten joins a list of Forbes Road field hockey alumni, coached under Cline, who moved on to play at college. There have been so many, in fact, that after 38 years, Cline can't remember them all.
"Kent State is not that big, and they're still Division I," Cline said. "They have a respectable team, and it is a good fit for her."
Mercersburg sends three to Division I >> A trio of Mercersburg Academy student-athletes committed to play at the NCAA's highest level.
Jake Artz committed to St. Joseph's to play baseball, Molly Taylor has committed to Loyola University (Md.) to play women's basketball, and Kate Hastings signed with the rowing team at the University of Virginia.
Hastings is currently the No. 1-ranked triathlete nationally in the 17-18 age group.


Testing for MTHFR is easy and can be done right from your home or office. MTHFR Gene Health provides an online service for those wanting to know. But they have the gene mutation and what they can do about it. They should test positive to one or more of the genes.
Because of the complexity of the MTHFR gene mutation after you are diagnosed positive with one or more of the genes. There are further customized tests available to help with finding the best available treatments for the condition.
Below the test has been broken up into their relevant areas. But depending on what stage you are at personally with the disorder. Please feel free to contact us. Further, you need help or have any questions about these tests.
NOTE: Please note that MTHFR testing at your local GP or doctor in Australia is NOT covered by Medicare. Unless you have been diagnosed with Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) or Pulmonary Embolism (PE). Second, you have first degree relatives with proven MTHFR gene mutations.
The MTHFR home blood test kit for Australian residents.
The MTHFR home saliva test kit for Australian residents.
People who have the MTHFR gene mutation need all the help they can get. Often people with the gene mutation have gone through life with the disorder without knowing. This has caused them serious health problems. More often than not people with MTHFR gene problems have over time had trouble with nutrition. But in general and so this has caused several problems such as detoxification problems & metabolism problems. Further, these are the following tests are a great way to find out about specific nutritional problems. As well as that is common in those with the gene alterations.
Did you have any questions about the tests related to MTHFR? Contact us here.


text:
Posted inBangor, Maine Focus, News, State
They lived in a tent in the snow until he began to die
by Callie Ferguson December 19, 2018 April 19, 2019
Carolyn Fish helps her partner, Larry Noyes, eat his dinner on Nov. 13, 2017, while they stayed in a homeless encampment along the Penobscot River in Bangor. Credit: Gabor Degre
Carolyn Fish was still living in a tent along the bank of the Penobscot River during the first November snowfall of 2017. When a trio of Bangor police officers stopped by her campsite to ask if she needed help finding a place inside for the winter, she greeted them by name.
In the roughly four years since the fallout from an abusive relationship left her without a job or home in Bangor, Fish had developed a familiar rapport with the various police and homeless outreach workers she'd met as she cycled through apartments, shelters, campsites, motel rooms and, a few times, jail.
Even though many of these same people repeatedly tried to help her find housing, she returned to living outside. Homeless year after year, Fish was the kind of client that shelter workers in Bangor described as the most difficult to help.
Credit: Gabor Degre
"I hated living in the woods," Fish, 54, said in a recent interview. But an addiction to alcohol, among other setbacks, made it difficult for her and her wheelchair-bound boyfriend, Larry Noyes, to find an apartment and keep it without being evicted.
"I'm going to be honest with you," she said. "When we started drinking in the morning, nothing [got] done."
Only a small percentage of people who are homeless in Maine go without a roof over their heads for months and months, as Fish did.
But the small number of people who are homeless for prolonged periods means it's possible for social service workers to know where they are and focus their attention on them. This is what has been happening in Maine, showing what is possible when the right people decide to collectively tackle a problem that had previously seemed insurmountable.
Historically, homeless shelters were designed to meet the needs of those experiencing a temporary emergency resulting from circumstances of poverty. In the last five years, Maine officials have changed their approach to better serve people like Fish, who require a deeper intervention.
As a result, since 2013, the number of adults tallied by shelters as spending more than half the year outside has shrunk from 262 to 68, as of July.
"I don't want you to leave with the impression that we are somehow close to ending homelessness. We have a long way to go," said Cullen Ryan, chairman of Maine's Statewide Homeless Council, a policy advisory group established by the Maine Legislature in 2005. "But we've figured out a way to actually house and keep housed one very challenged population, and that is our longest stayers. And that's going to make it easier to house everybody else."
While the changes stemmed from a desire to better serve people, officials like Ryan also realized how this small group absorbed an outsize portion of the already limited resources devoted to assisting Maine's homeless.
Likewise, studies have shown it costs Maine taxpayers more to help those who are homeless than to pay for their housing and social services.
It remains to be seen whether Maine's new strategy will end long-term homelessness. The already ambitious effort will be even harder to achieve amid a statewide affordable housing crunch, and given limited state and federal funding for rental assistance programs, experts said.
But for Fish, the new approach — which prioritized people like her who seemed to be perpetually homeless — was essential to breaking the cycle of vagrancy. When she and Noyes arrived at the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter a year ago, on Feb. 2, 2018, there was not only a bed, but a plan waiting for her.
'We were recruiting them hard'
Growing up poor in St. Petersburg, Florida, taught Fish how to fend for herself at an early age. Scrappy and charismatic, she worked for 17 years at Governor's Restaurant and Bakery in Bangor as a cook and waitress.
Her life fell apart about five years ago when her abusive boyfriend imperiled her job and housing. Police frequently showed up at her apartment because of their fighting, and Fish's boss warned that she could lose her job if he didn't stop showing up at the restaurant.
Every time she broke up with him, he won her back. "He ruined my life," said Fish, who has a scar from the time he threw a malt liquor bottle at her face.
By the time they split up for good about four years ago, Fish had lost her job, was unable to find permanent housing and started drinking heavily.
She came to rely on people caught in the same cycle, many of them also struggling with substance use, mental health issues and the law.
"I had friends everywhere. I could take a bath, take a shower," she said. "But they were drinkers, that same addiction we had," Fish said.
One of them was Noyes. From the time they started dating three years ago, Fish and Noyes were inseparable, in part because Noyes required hourly care for the health problems caused by his drinking.
He was the first man she dated who did not physically abuse her, she said, although she knew he had an extensive criminal history that included convictions for domestic violence. He was also one of two suspects in the unsolved disappearance of his wife more than two decades ago, in 1993, though he was never charged.
Noyes denied any involvement in his wife going missing, to the police and to Fish, who said she was never afraid of him. Rather, she feared that he would die if she didn't stay by his side. She helped feed and dress him when his motor functions began to deteriorate. Using a Sharpie pen, she wrote "Take me to the shelter or the hospital" on the back of his blue backpack in case they ever became separated.
Even so, they slept outside in the warm months, mostly at a secluded campsite behind the horse racing track in Bass Park. Fish built a wooden wheelchair ramp over a grassy culvert along the path leading to their tent.
In the winter of 2017, Noyes' health worsened, and Fish stayed by his bedside for 170 days when he was hospitalized for an alcohol-induced stroke, she said. When he was released, he continued to drink despite a diagnosis of advanced liver cirrhosis, Fish said.
Fish did not want to go back to Bass Park, which was too far from city services if Noyes needed an ambulance. Instead, she and Noyes joined a sprawling encampment on the bank of the Penobscot River, or so-called "Tent City," where they stayed until police broke it up around Thanksgiving.
One night, not long after the police paid them a visit, Noyes became violently ill. He stayed in the hospital for 10 days with double pneumonia and sepsis from an infected leg wound.
"That was the end of it," she said. After years of choosing to live outside, she told Noyes she wanted to check into the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter. They did so on Dec. 11, 2017.
It was a breaking point for Fish, but, for the shelter staff, it was more of a breakthrough. For years, they had worked to build trust with Fish and Noyes in anticipation of the moment they would be ready to accept help.
"We were recruiting them hard," said Boyd Kronholm, the shelter's director. "Part of [homeless outreach] is meeting the person where they're at. And sometimes they're not ready to change." That could be due to addiction, mental illness or having had a negative experience with social workers in the past.
In Bangor, police officers do the bulk of the outreach, but they frequently arrest the same people they are trying to help — a dynamic that doesn't help build trust.
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At first, Fish and Noyes were resistant to living at the shelter where they had to abide by rules they found tedious, Fish said. They left after only three days, on Dec. 13, 2017. They cashed some of Noyes' Social Security checks, and spent the money on alcohol and motel rooms until February, she said.
It was the dead of winter when they ran out of money, and Fish knew they couldn't keep living day to day. Noyes' eyes had turned a sickly yellow from drinking. They checked back into the shelter on Feb. 2, 2018, and didn't leave until they had signed a lease on an apartment, 118 days later.
'Everybody knows them by name'
Local service providers see the same small group of people, those like Fish and Noyes, over and over again. But even though there aren't many people who are homeless long-term — they accounted for 1.3 percent of the 6,450 people at shelters last year — they often stay at the shelters for a disproportionately long time.
The pattern, policy experts realized several years ago, illuminated a weak spot in Maine's homeless services that was both inefficient and costly.
For instance, 116 of the 2,050 people who stayed at the 130-bed Oxford Street Shelter in Portland in 2013 were there for more than half the year, staying night after night because of a debilitating condition, according to Community Housing of Maine, the state's largest housing provider for the formerly homeless.
That meant just 6 percent of the shelter's yearly clientele were taking up most of its beds, forcing staff to roll out overflow cots or turn others away. Meanwhile, 54 percent of the people who passed through the shelter stayed fewer than two weeks and 33 percent for fewer than three days.
In addition to taking up shelter beds, people experiencing long-term homelessness regularly rely on other emergency services. It's expensive.
In 2007, a study in Portland found that it's cheaper by nearly $950 in the first year to pay for someone's rent and supportive living services — such as a case manager, mental health care and substance use treatment — than to cover the costs of being homeless.
That's because, when the study participants found housing, they needed 60 percent fewer ambulance rides, required 52 percent fewer emergency room visits, had 68 percent fewer interactions with police and spent 62 percent fewer days in jail. Plus, shelter usage plummeted 98 percent.
Not surprisingly, getting people off the streets and into housing also improved their physical and emotional well-being.
These findings align with a national trend toward a "Housing First" model to address chronic homelessness. Housing First programs prioritize the placement of people into housing before meeting their other needs. Housing alone removes the stressful conditions that exacerbate the symptoms of their crisis, said Ryan, who is also the executive director of Community Housing of Maine.
This model convinced people like Ryan that it made sense to shift Maine's resources toward finding permanent, supportive housing for the state's most challenging homeless population. In theory, this approach to helping the minority would free up room for more people at shelters and save taxpayer money.
In July 2013, when Ryan and other homeless policy leaders sorted through the state's shelter data to determine who was staying in shelters or outside for more than half the year — a group they call "long-term stayers" — the list was only 262 people long.
"It suddenly seemed feasible to house this group of people," he said. "If you do it locally, everybody knows them by name."
Beginning in 2013 at the direction of the Statewide Homeless Council, state and local homeless services providers have pinpointed specific long-term stayers and then prioritized them for outreach and housing.
Most of these people were easy to find. In Bangor, a group of emergency service providers, shelter staff and the Penobscot County Jail social worker meet monthly to go over a confidential list containing the names of people cycling through the area's emergency services.
"Someone from the Hope House [shelter] might say, 'We haven't seen this guy in a while. Do you know where he is?'" said Kronholm, with the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter. "Because these long-term stayers are folks using services all the time, we know where they are and who's working with them."
In 2015, another major change occurred: MaineHousing, the quasi-state agency that administers state and federal dollars to Maine's 38 publicly funded homeless shelters, changed its funding formula to one that rewards shelters based on how well they place people into housing.
Part of that change shifted money away from the number of beds in a facility and toward funding housing navigators, who help clients with the daunting, bureaucratic process of applying for rental vouchers and maneuvering the housing market. They also work with clients after they've moved in to make sure they're getting the services they need to avoid becoming homeless again.
"That's a game changer right there," said Joshua D'Alessio, manager of homeless initiatives at the Hope House Health and Living Center. "That's a shelter without walls."
'Being brand new'
Nick St. Louis has worked on and off at the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter since 2011. In 2016, he was hired as the shelter's first navigator.
He's known Fish for seven years, and when she and Noyes arrived at the shelter last December he fought to reserve them a place in a new affordable housing apartment complex that was under construction on Court Street, to be operated by Community Housing of Maine. Eligible tenants are required to continue using services provided by the shelter.
Fish and Noyes needed to wait until construction wrapped up in June.
The waiting was a struggle for Noyes, Fish said. He didn't like the rules of shelter life — waking up at 6 a.m., having to put on shoes to go to the bathroom.
But they managed. St. Louis would take them to visit the construction site every few weeks, "just to say, we are getting a place, Larry," Fish said. In the meantime neither of them were drinking, and Noyes started seeing a doctor and eating healthier food. His health improved so dramatically he was able to walk using a cane.
After five months in the shelter, they moved into their new apartment on June 1.
"Nick worked so hard to get us in here," Fish said, sitting in her living room, a short distance from the Kenduskeag Stream. Even though it was summertime when they moved in, neither she nor Noyes wanted to spend time outside, she said.
But Noyes started drinking as soon as he left the shelter, despite warnings from the doctor that his liver would fail, Fish said.
His relapse felt inevitable, she said, especially when people from their life on the streets kept stopping by the apartment, asking for a place to stay. It was hard to tell them no because so many of them had taken her in when she was homeless, said Fish, who was drinking again, too.
Within two months, the couple had violated their lease four times because of loud parties and unsanitary living conditions, Fish said. By July, the shade of Noyes' light brown eyes had returned to yellow.
"Getting people into housing isn't the end of it," St. Louis said. In many ways, helping Noyes and Fish find an apartment was only the first, and perhaps easiest, step to keeping them out of homelessness.
That's because the root causes that trigger a person's homelessness still remain when they have a home. For Noyes, that was alcoholism.
One night in late July, his liver failed, and he vomited blood. He died in the hospital the next day, on July 25, Fish said. He was 51. He'd had a home for two months.
'More homeless than housing'
Noyes' death reflects the extreme challenges social services providers face as they seek to reduce the number of Mainers who are homeless for prolonged periods. But despite those difficulties the Statewide Homeless Council Long Term Stayer Initiative has shown promising results, with a 76 percent drop in long-term stayers since 2013.
The decline likely would have happened faster if Maine had more affordable housing options and a greater number of rental subsidies, Ryan said.
"It's hard to provide services to people that don't want them. But it's also hard to provide services that aren't available," St. Louis said.
Experts were also quick to say that this achievement reflects the state's ability to help people in crisis, not curb the rate of homelessness in Maine. While the reduction of long-term stayers has freed up more beds in Maine shelters, they are still perpetually full.
"Society is creating more homeless than housing. It's kind of a losing battle sometimes," Kronholm said.
In the meantime, Fish is tracking her progress day by day.
This fall, St. Louis helped her enroll in a new program offered by the Hope House, which provided her with a case manager.
"Like, Social Security papers. I don't know how to fill them out," Fish said. "[My case manager] Brandy will sit down and whiz right through it."
Fish said she still struggles with alcohol, but is seeing a doctor and a grief counselor. She credited St. Louis with keeping a close watch on her.
"He doesn't want to see me fail," she said.
Her home is decorated with the key chains and drawings she spends hours making. It is tidier with Noyes gone, but she feels his absence every day. An urn containing his ashes sits on a table by the kitchen, and Fish has placed little mementos to him around it — his old driver's license, a pouch containing trimmings from his beard, a pack of Winston cigarettes.
Toward the final days of his life, Noyes was ornery and hopeless, and Fish felt trapped by his illness, she said. But since he died, Fish mostly remembers how funny he was and how carefree he could make her feel, even living in a tent.
The last time she saw his face was at the funeral home, before he was cremated. She said he looked more peaceful in death than he had in a long time.
Maine Focus is a journalism and community engagement initiative at the Bangor Daily News. Questions? Write to mainefocus@bangordailynews.com.
Tagged: Bangor homelessness, chronically homeless, homeless, homelessness, long term stayers
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Home Music Music News
August 30, 1973 12:00PM ET
Enigmas on Thin Ice: Dan Hicks Breaks Up His Hot Licks
Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks finally score a hit album, 'Last Train to Hicksville' — just as Hicks dissolves the band
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Photo of Dan Hicks. Circa 1970
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
"I was born in 1947. I got my first guitar when I was ten. I toured with Chuck Berry for a year. I was with Herbie Hancock for a good count. I've paid my dues. They were, ah, $13 an hour, I believe." —Dan Hicks, The Famous Musical Cowboy
What sort of man is Dan Hicks?
Only Jimmie the Talking Dummy knows for sure. Jimmie's had his opportunities to tell. He had half a dozen words on the first Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks album. There were two photos of him on the second album, Where's The Money? and a part in the "Dan Hicks Look-Alike Contest—Look Just Like Dan Hicks" coupon that was included in Striking It Rich.
There was a time when Dan would bring Jimmie to gigs in his own little hatbox, but only on one occasion did he ever get up the nerve to bring him out onstage. Finally Jimmie's body started to rot and in a fit of pique Dan tore him up. The Hot Licks remember being greeted as they came to one rehearsal at Dan's old Sausalito houseboat by the sight of an armless Jimmie sitting on the deck.
Today, though, Jimmy is nothing but a dummy's head, sporting a golden moustache and granny glasses, on the wall in Dan's living room.
What we're dealing with, Jimmie might have said if he chose to, is a rare talent and a mysterious temperament. A talent that has created a unique body of music and laboriously assembled an equally unique group of musicians to play it; and a temperament that decided to hang the whole thing up just before the release of his most successful album. Now Last Train to Hicksville is around No. 65 on the LP charts and the band's sitting around collecting unemployment. What sort of man is Dan Hicks, anyway?
About the talent there's no doubt. For five years he's been violating the heavy-electric and wispy-folk pop clichés alike with a band that has always featured two girl singers, the Lickettes, and at least one violin, usually no drums and never any electrified instruments. The music reflects most of the American pop tradition before the rock era: ragtime, C&W, Hoagy Carmichael ballads, Hawaiian music, mellow swing. But many people have been discovering lately, there's more to it than a nostalgia turn. "I'm not trying to write old songs," as Dan says.
One of the things Dan has done is take the occasionally arbitrary stylization of old standard pop tunes and turn it into a motif. So whether the melodies are melancholy or exuberant, whether the lyrics are of wistful romance, frustration and dismay, crazy jiving, mental expansiveness or ironic anecdote, the rhythms are extremely tight—so light, stylish and jaunty that a certain dissonance is set up with the lyrics and melodies. Music to keep on troupin' by.
The band has always looked like troupers in the noblest showbiz tradition, dressing as they do in the stagestruck duds of several other eras. In fact, they have acted like troupers, too, in spending most of the last two years on the road. Their Salvation Army vamp gowns and Hawaiian shirts not only underline the sense of tradition they work out of, they add to that stylistic complexity, that vibrating high note of sophistication that marked the Hot Licks as a band apart.
The mysterious Dan Hicks temperament is hard to separate—unfortunately, some might say—from the music. It also comes out in such things as Dan's stage patter between numbers, which can wander for minutes on end exploring the edgy no-man's-land between joke and insult. On at least one tour the Hot Licks made a deal with the lighting man to kill the stage lights if Dan's rap went on too long. That tended to hold it down, when Dan found himself singled out in a pin spot on a dark stage.
It all started, what it is now—the music, the style, even, God knows, probably the temperament—back in the earliest days of the San Francisco scene. There was a band with a funky, turn-of-the-century style called the Charlatans who had the distinction of being about the first of the city's psychedelic-era rock bands. In their Wild Bill Hickok hairdos and Mississippi Queen gambler vests they crystallized the ambience of art nouveau and Victorian stained glass that was the cultural heritage of San Francisco hippies—back in the days when the youth bohemia was in the Fillmore District, before the flowering of the Haight-Ashbury.
Their drummer was a kid in his early 20s who was getting his degree in Radio and Television Communication at San Francisco State College. He'd been drumming since the age of 11—drums as a second choice instrument when his mother vetoed the marimba—and since Santa Rosa High School had played corny dance gigs in waltz and foxtrot bars all over Sonoma County. The Charlatans were mainstays of the San Francisco scene, but Dan wasn't satisfied. "Everything you brought into the Charlatans," he says, "ended up just as a loud rock tune. It lost my kind of floating … of a floating, linear feeling."
Toward the end of 1967, when the Airplane, Big Brother, the Dead and the rest of the San Francisco bands had become national figures, the Charlatans had been going essentially nowhere for almost three years. Dan made his own plans.
Jaime Leopold
Here. Take a look at this. It might interest you."
Jaime (he pronounces it "Jamie") got up from his Olde California chair in the Marin County Big Time Dealer's Pad where he was crashing and handed over a crude early-psychedelic poster in black and white: THE ORKUSTRA ELECTRIFIED.
"The Orkustra was the Digger band," Jaime said, popping a prescription cold pill. " 'Light Shows for the Blind' was our motto—we played the old Avalon, the Panhandle on New Year's, 1967. There's Emmett Grogan in the crowd right there. Here's me"—he pointed to a group of three heavily overcoated young men—"and here's David LaFlamme, he started It's a Beautiful Day later on, and the guy in the top hat is Bobby Beausoleil."
Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson family? Associated with a happy hippie-type like you?
"Yeah. He played electric guitar and bouzouki with the band. Bobby has a natural gift, you know, but he was an incredible sort of egotist. He learned guitar all by himself, for instance. He drew this poster, in fact. He's about two years younger than me, so he was about 18 when he was in the Orkustra—it went from '65 to '67—and about 19 when the Manson business went down. I still hear from him once in a while. Got a letter from San Quentin a year or so ago.
"I went to San Francisco State in French and Russian from '64 to '66, see. It was the heyday of the Haight, and it was really hard to avoid getting swept up in it. So I played bass with the Orkustra and … oh, I was in the film Kenneth Anger made starring Bobby, Lucifer Rising. I walked down a staircase wearing a crow's head. An Anger trip, you know, everybody parading around in costumes. A raven's head, it was. That's the film that disappeared—Bobby told me he took it from Anger in retribution because Anger had broken his bouzouki." Jaime chuckled and thumbed his lip beard.
"By the time the Orkustra riff ended I was definitely out of State, so I sold newspapers and dope in the Haight. Got busted for both, too.
"But before that, LaFlamme had introduced me to Dan. I played bass with the two of them at about ten gigs at little places around town in '67—the Matrix, the Straight Theater, places that don't even exist anymore. I made up the name 'the Hot Licks' in late '67. At least, I think I made it up—we were standing outside the Matrix before going on one night and it got made up.
"But then I spent the first six months of '68 in jail for sales. Dan was trying to get something together as usual, and when I got out he had a bassist. So I went to Portland, where my family lives, to do a bit part in Paint Your Wagon, and with that money I was going to go to Europe. I got as far as New York and lived on the street for a while—literally, sleeping on rooftops.
"Then one day I called Dan and he needed a bassist. Both the bassist and his wife, who was a singer with Dan at the time, had quit in order to get heavier into Gurdjieff. People are always quitting Dan for religious reasons, you know. Sherri Snow, one of the Lickettes who sang on the first album, quit to join Subud; her name's Halima now. And Jon Weber, the first guitarist, left for macrobiotic reasons.
"So Dan needed a bassist. I flew back to Portland to get my bass and then to San Francisco and stayed with him and his girlfriend while they were breaking up."
Thus, Jaime Leopold began five years of creative ferment and marginal living as a Hot Lick. The bland psychedelic kiddo of the Orkustra poster sprouted a moustache and started wearing Hawaiian shirts, ice cream suits and seedy panama hats. He now stood revealed in his true identity as Skippy Sanchez, a squawking auctioneer/DJ stream-of-consciousness rapper who can be heard signing off the Striking It Rich album.
"Dan's always wanted a good dummy," says Jaime/Skippy, "and while Jimmie's been deteriorating he and I've wanted to do a comedy routine, because I can always counter his riffs. He digs it if you can come back with something when he lays down that sarcasm of his."
On account of the cold pills, Jaime refused a glass of wine—uncharacteristic for a Hot Lick, since a rider to the band's contracts always stipulated that local promoters provide beer and white wine for backstage use—and fingered his cold pill bottle. "I think the group'll probably get together again," he said with a shade of doubt in his voice. "If it doesn't, I guess I don't know for sure what I'll do. There's some talk about forming an independent Hot Licks without Dan, that's one possibility. I might publish my songs, I've been writing for a year and a half. I might easily get into other things—I'd like to direct movies.
"Or I might travel … or travel and write … or retire on my laurels … or fade away … I'll probably end up pumping gas."
Sid Page
As Skippy Sanchez says on Striking It Rich, Symphony Sid was a child prodigy. He started violin in kindergarten, got to winning contests and by the time he was 13 he'd played with the Santa Rosa Symphony. But The Great Conductor in the Sky had not called him to be a conservatory teacher.
Dan met his former violinist in a bar in Santa Rosa, a provincial city 50 miles north of San Francisco. "He didn't look like a future employer," Sid Page recalls. At the time Dan hired him, Sid was working as a shoe salesman.
"I quit college after a year and a half when I figured out I didn't want to be a teacher," Sid recalled in a former manager's living room. "I got married and started working at the Emporium as a janitor. I was going for the big bucks.
"I was writing at the same time and branching out of classical music into pop. When Dan met me I had a little bebop-businessman's bounce group at that bar, the El Rancho. December, 1969, when he hired me, I'd made my way up to shoe salesman at the Emporium. They were sad to see me go—I was a pretty good salesman, and besides, it was Christmas week—and they told me I could come back any time if it didn't work out."
It worked out, but there were some changes along the way: dropping his wife, for one thing, and developing a great golden mane of hair and beard. His serious, classically trained manner remained, however. "In the early days," he recalls, "there were lots of 'slow down, we gotta regroup' things. There were lots of personnel changes and lots of no gigs. We were all real poor. Once I even considered working as a street musician, but … when I got down to Union Square, I looked around and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't just fiddle on street corners. I got a job delivering telephone books instead."
Later on, his serious, dedicated approach had several consequences. It provided a high-minded background to the at least surface frivolity of the Hot Licks, and it also at times seemed to irk Dan, who referred to his music on one album cover as "the soporific strains of Sid 'When – Does – This – Stuff – Take – Effect' Page," and once fired him onstage. The clash of temperaments worked both ways, too. "Some feeling of sincere dedication has to come from a band's leader," said Sid. "When you don't get that, you lose direction. And Dan, you know, tends to sabotage his own projects. I'm not letting any cats out of the bag here—you've met him, you know when he meets people he's not exactly looking to make friends.
"For instance, the road was hard on Dan. Myself, I never mind touring; I figure it's part of the business. And maybe a problem is that very young kids can't always dig our music, but I feel that it's the musician's responsibility to set a groove. But at a concert Dan would look out and see a lot of young teenagers and say, 'They're not going to dig us,' you know, in a half-kidding way. But when he's half kidding he's three-quarters serious. And that wasn't the best kind of note to strike before we're going out on the stage."
The Hot Licks may be in limbo, pending Dan's decision whether to resurrect them or not, but that's neither here nor there to Sid, who left before the group was put on the shelf. In fact, he says, "If it hadn't been for 'I Scare Myself,' and one or two other tunes, I might not have stayed on as long as I did. That was always the freest, least structured number the band played and I could stretch out on it. A modal, serious, sober, soul-searching tune, which is what I get off on.
"It's a little difficult to leave a band that's turned you on for so long. Jaime and I roomed together for a while, you know, we were close. But money's the least important thing about my gig. I feel better leaving now during a breakup than if I left after making a bundle.
"Dan's band was a great learning band, because there was lots of variety— C&W, country swing, jazz, rock. But I don't want to play old-fashioned styles anymore. I want to play something where you know something's being created right now.
"I want an instrumental band where I can use my classical intensity. I want to break the stigma that there's only certain kinds of music for the violin. I like music like Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, anything with space in it—I'm spaced myself. I'd just like to say publicly—Come on, try me. Throw anything you want at me."
Maryann Price and John Girton
Maryann Price, one of the current duo of glamorous Lickettes (she has been known to freshen her makeup in the recording studio), lives with Mr. John "Johnny Guitar" Girton, the original Kellogg's Kid, in a drydocked houseboat on the shore of an unbearably picturesque cove of San Francisco Bay.
Shuddering and creaking with every footstep, the converted boat shares the same view as a couple of pretty posh homes and, in fact, has a better stand of foxtail and wild fennel. At the sound of a visitor's footsteps, across the resounding soundboard of the deck, Maryann trilled in an earthy contralto, "Come on in, it's nice to see somebody.
"We've been living in an iron lung, for three years. You know what being on the road is like? It's like being in the Army—you go all sorts of places on a tight schedule and you don't know anybody except the same people you've been seeing every day."
John slipped quietly into the musical instruments room and reappeared with a musician's liquor case—a Prohibition relic that looks like a miniature violin case and has a nicely padded cavity just the size of a bottle. The bottle in this case was some champagne he'd picked up at a bar mitzvah gig two years before.
Both are long-time music pros. John may have started in acting—as a kid he ate Kellogg's Corn Flakes in ads while Tony the Tiger freaked around behind him in cartoon form—but in high school in Glendale, California, he heard the sax break in Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" and became an aspiring saxophonist at once. At the age of 18, under the influence of surf music, he took up guitar and spent a couple of years playing L.A. bars and giving guitar lessons. He joined the Hot Licks two and a half years ago, right after Where's The Money? had been recorded and just in time for the band's first national tour.
Maryann's cameo features, controlled contralto and strong will carried her from Baltimore, where she was singing in bars and making radio commercials at the age of 16, to the Las Vegas lounges. Basically a jazz singer, she played Vegas and Tahoe with Dante Varela's jazz band before coming to San Francisco looking for the musical creativity the city was becoming known for. "I thought I'd have to learn to sing rock & roll," she recalls, "to scream and develop nodes on my vocal cords."
Her tough Vegas training in professionalism and John's ten years of random gigging must have stood them in good stead, to judge from the stories about the band's first national tour. It was nine six-day weeks of gigging under intense psychological pressure. Dan's manager of the time, Gretchen Sherman, remembers that there was a "rotating psycho room" in the hotel arrangements, so any band member who needed to room alone for a night could do so—if he'd reserved it far enough in advance. It was Gretchen's first tour as a manager on her own without her former boss Bill Graham to back her up; it was Dan's first tour under his own name—and both parties, as Gretchen points out, were 30 years old at the time and under terrible pressure to make a success.
The tour was, as they say, "marred by incidents." Dan's guitar neck broke the second night out. The first night the Lickettes' purses were stolen. They say they were screwed by club owners all along the line. Dan had just switched from Epic Records to Blue Thumb, and Blue Thumb had just switched its distribution arrangements from Capitol to Paramount's Famous Music, with the result that promotion for the tour was confused and the crowds were small. Usually when they played a town the record wasn't in the stores. After that tour, the group broke up for three weeks.
Tours since have been smoother, although to get in on last year's tour with Elton John the band once had to accept a gig where they preceded Steppenwolf. The teens were definitely not into listening to sophisticated acoustic jazz and it was one of the band's shortest performances. Gretchen Sherman remembers that Naomi Eisenberg, with a great deal of panache, caught some of the ice cubes they were being pelted with and did a juggling act.
But mostly they were easier from a technical standpoint. The band's contract stipulated that the local promoter provide a palm tree for the stage, and mostly the promoters went for it. The group was developing a word-of-mouth audience who'd put up with any amount of sarcastic stage talk from Dan. On last December's tour the band played mostly sold-out halls and clubs.
John and Maryann lounged on their bed in the gypsy tent that is their room—wall hangings, puppy prints, ornamented fans, a photo of John with a big lipstick kiss on his bald forehead, one of Maryann en flamenco with a rose in her hair taken backstage at their Flip Wilson Show gig. They were speculating about the future, which may or may not feature a Hot Licks band.
"We're professionals," said Maryann, eyes flashing. "Why are we sitting around? How come the band isn't performing, touring behind an album that's No. 65? If you're a musician, you're a musician, right?" John nodded.
"It's a drag that the band got stereotyped as a nostalgia or novelty group," Maryann said. "I think Dan's written some very valid tunes. But I've been talking to people about going out as an act on my own and for that I'd only want to do contemporary-type material, no nostalgia reference. Some Latin jazz party music, throw in a little piano. And John on guitar. I want him to come along wherever I go." She beamed at him and gave him a squeeze in an inconspicuous place.
"I don't consider myself a writer," Maryann continued, "but a singer and arranger. I want to use contemporary composers, like John's got material he's written, like 'Flight of the Fly' and 'Vivando' that we recorded with Dan, and there are others I'd like to use. But one thing's sure. We don't want to go touring five weeks out of six anymore. Do we, honey?" John nodded with a quiet smile.
Maryann has a message for everybody: "Straight ahead and strive for tone."
Naomi Ruth Eisenberg
On Naomi Eisenberg's left forearm, there is a tattoo of a rose. On her right, a tattooed champagne glass with four bubbles and two quarter notes floating above it. She's the kind of girl who sings in the recording studio with her eyes closed and a smile on her face.
"Come September, who knows what may happen. But I feel in my mind that the group's over. I think of this interview as my last obligation to the idea of the group."
That's after two and a half years as a Lickette. Singing with Dan satisfied two of her earliest interests, acting and music. As a child she was interested in a theatrical career, and she comes from a musical family: Her sister is a classical pianist. Naomi picked up violin from her, by ear.
"I was born in Brooklyn," she said, flaunting the words like a true star and curling her fingers around a glass of white wine. "We lived in Flushing and then moved to Manhattan, where I went to Blackboard Jungle High School. I got enough school there to last me—I don't even know whether I graduated." She "dropped out and West" in the summer of '66.
"In Berkeley I was in a group called Dancing, Food and Entertainment. Dancing, Food played stuff kind of like Dan's, far-out ditties with zappy images, and we did a demo, all psychedelic with all the tracks blending into each other. They kicked me out after a while and then broke up."
She auditioned for Dan once after Dancing, Food and a year after that he still needed a singer and she answered an ad on an FM rock station. This time she was accepted the day she came in, and she soon blossomed into one of the great visual attractions of the band, with her fiddle, her Forties glamour and the ever-changing tint and cut of her hair. She turned out to be a composer as well. "Presently in the Past," the unexpectedly torchy ballad on Striking It Rich, is a song she wrote at age 14.
Like the majority of the group, she eventually found herself at odds with Stephen Pilster, the group's former manager. Steve is the charming, affable proprietor of Deadly Earnest Productions (before that of Barely Managing Co.), who started working with Dan at the same time as John Girton—on the first national tour in spring of 1971. When Gretchen Sherman quit as manager at the end of 1971 —after "too many fights and too many times Dan had embarrassed me"—Pilster stayed on as road manager, later promoted to the manager's gig the following January. Steve confesses he might have been "a little over my head" in the year and a quarter he was managing Dan, but others have harsher words for it.
Part of the complaint is that he was spending too much, thereby cutting into profits and forcing the band to spend most of their time touring. "I agree the band was spending too much on the road," Steve says in his defense. "The way I figured it, this band had to tour if it was going to survive, so I had to make it attractive to tour. And to me this meant making it lucrative and comfortable. I didn't think people really wanted to live cheaper on the road. I think I was gettin' it right from Dan on this." The expenses were things like $30 hotel rooms, unnecessary phone calls and flights to Los Angeles, chartering private planes (three times), not things that would necessarily bulk large to your average superstar electric blues band, but irritants to the Hicks band back in the days when they rarely grossed over $3,000 a night and made $100 a week in salaries.
He's also faulted for not riding herd on the booking agent more to get better-paying gigs and arrange them so that transportation between them wouldn't be a backbreaker. Everyone agrees the tours were bad for morale. One band member defends Pilster on this count: "Maybe he could have gotten better gigs. Maybe it would have been possible. You know. Tune in next week." It's also true that Steve was on the same salary as a band member, rather than being given a percentage of the income for incentive, as most managers are.
But in his leap from road manager to manager, as Gretchen Sherman points out, the very young Pilster "aligned himself with Dan in internal band politics and got caught in that." At this point the business complaints against him start blending imperceptibly into matters of lack of communication and personal differences: Steve's philosophy was, "Dan is the focus of the group, the one who originated the concept and organized it." To the band, by and large, this merely puts a plausible face on habitual ass-kissing. As Naomi explains, the band finally refused to work with Pilster:
"We had been disillusioned with him and complaining to Dan for a year but Dan would rather talk to one person than six people so he kept him on. Finally last winter we gave him an ultimatum, he'd have to get rid of Pilster. But Dan doesn't have any business head and didn't have the guts to fire him. Firing somebody's a big trauma with Dan; he's a softie at heart."
Pilster finally left the first week in April. Dan had announced in February after leaving the stage at a gig in Columbus, Ohio, that he didn't want to have the band anymore. "So I said OK," says Steve Pilster. "And I sat down and worked out a schedule of gigs that would pay off the band's outstanding debts—the band is a partnership, and the debts are common to all of them.
"Then one day, just before a gig, two of the musicians announced they weren't going to play unless they got a 300% raise in pay for the rest of the tour. I considered this very unprofessional behavior, but Dan gave in to them and said he'd stand the debts himself. I felt—I was his manager, and I was giving him the advice he was paying me for and he wasn't hearing it, so I felt I couldn't get into the same bus with him. I quit right then."
The band's version of the same events is more or less as Naomi tells it: "Dan was getting very schizzy. He told everybody he wanted to disband the group, but one day he'd be talking about the ending date as April 30th and the next he'd be full of plans to be on TV in the fall. It was like he was playing with our minds. When you're in a situation like that, when you don't know whether there's a tomorrow, you ask where's the money. As for the debts, we didn't feel they were our debts because we didn't have any say in how the money was spent. They were Pilster's debts.
"The thing that really did it was the Elliot Abbott number. Elliot is an agent with BNB Associates—he manages Randy Newman. He could work well with our record company. He was interested in the group. So after what was supposed to be our last gig—Sid took it seriously, and it was the last gig he played with us—I called a meeting at my house, the first or second of May, to ask what was happening. Dan said he wanted to keep it together and we should take some time off and he'd talk to Elliot.
"We took a couple of weeks off and then gigged some more and then took two more weeks off, this time without pay. Then Elliot flew up to tell us his plan. He had it all worked out for us to tour, possibly with Sha Na Na, hitting the main cities. And at this meeting after he had rapped all this out, Dan came out and said, 'I just wanta say one thing, I want to end this group.' Elliot was really surprised.
"I think Dan's blown the organization and lost everybody's respect. It's a survival trip now. I put in so much energy organizing the group in the last year—we all did. I wouldn't go back without a firm-handed manager behind him when he goes through his agonies, so there'd be no threats from his personality changes.
"The business side was always dragging me. The band never got into full boogie on account of it. We all loved the idea of the group, the material, the audience reactions and all that—we put up with the business side for that. The negative side. Many of the musicians could have made more money if they'd wanted to take less rewarding jobs.
"Dan was tired of being on the road all the time. Maybe he was tired of the people. Maybe he was just tired. He didn't want to be responsible for six people. I don't know what he's going to do. Maybe he'll get the group back together—but by fall he might be a DJ, or in movies, or on Skid Row."
Naomi's been gigging a little with Kathi MacDonald and a group of ex-Cockettes, but she has her eyes set on new horizons. "I want to go out on my own with my fiddle and my material and do a more theatrical thing with more dance. Throw in some James Brown, some Alice Cooper. Just write down, 'Superstar Available: Have Material, Body, Head, Fiddle.'
"I want to be the female David Bowie."
Bob Scott, the first full-time drummer the band ever had, joined it on the eve of destruction. "When I came in last December," he says, "the lines were already drawn. Just about everybody was down on Pilster. The thing was, Pilster had no respect from the group as a human being or as a businessman, and that's a very bad situation for a group.
"To me, he seemed like a good guy. A novice, but not a bad guy. He didn't seem to have much business sense, because he didn't seem to bargain for gigs. And I think it was playing lame gigs that might have burned everyone out."
Bob lives in a comfortable house in the Berkeley hills, in the sort of settled grooviness that befits the young computer programmer he was until last October when he chucked it to play music full time. John Girton, a jam-session acquaintance of his, brought him into the group in time for the latest album.
"Dan is a drummer, you know," he said in a quiet, reasonable Omaha-on-top-of-Ozarks cadence. "You can tell from how rhythmic and subtle the music is. He leaves lots of holes for drum parts in the music. I got to write the parts myself, and that was a real challenge for a drummer: The music is fast, soft and intricate, so you've got to play light and still cook." He picked up that challenge in a matter of hours. After a couple of afternoons' rehearsal he was not only playing with the band but recording with them.
"It's a good performing band. I was impressed with the musicality of the group. There's more going on musically than most people will ever notice. The material kept on being interesting every night, it kept on growing and getting more and more together. And regardless of what happened before the performance, no matter how drunk or hostile or whatever everybody was, they'd go onstage and play their asses off."
How coincidental you should call. I was just throwing pins at a little doll I'd made of you," Dan is answering into the phone. His home is finely furnished by blessed St. Vincent de Paul: old sofas, a print of Shirley Temple, sheet music for minstrel numbers, a flamenco dancer marionette with accordion-pleat knees hanging from the ceiling. Jimmy the Talking Dummy rests in a circular Art Deco bric-a-brac shelf, next to an MD's waiting room sign that reads in large letters A NOTE TO ALL MY PATIENTS. Dan's guitar with the gooseneck mike curving down toward the soundhole rests on the floor amid a small pile of instrument cases.
What sort of man is Dan Hicks? "He's a nice guy," Stephen Pilster had said, "basically a nice guy. I keep telling myself." "Dan is like a 45-year-old guy," said Gretchen Sherman; "hysterically funny, dry, sarcastic. He has a lot of charm he's unaware of. I mean, the guy's looking for love all his life, like all of us. Eventually, anybody who's around him starts falling into his style, talking like him and like that. And everybody falls in love with that loser pose of his." "I feel for the guy," Maryann said, "because I know something about his family. His father was the kind of Army man who had Dan put his shirts in the closet all facing the same way and exactly so and so far apart." "The real Dan," opined Bob Scott, "is his music."
In a way, what difference does it make what sort of man he is? His personality, like the old-timey musical traditions he uses, are merely the raw material of his idiosyncratic art. There's a direct line that runs between his wearing his Campion Champions jacket around North Beach coffee houses in the early years of the folk era—the name refers to Santa Rosa High School's world champion drill team, '56-'57—and his sardonic insistence, to the discomfort of an SRO audience that has just given him a thunderous ovation, "Boy, it's great to be popular. I sure wasn't popular when I was in high school, though. I was a nobody. I was shit on the wall," and so on for a couple of minutes until the stage lights go down and Dan finds himself picked out by a pin spot.
Dan hangs up the phone. It was actually a friendly conversation—he was no more throwing pins at a doll than he was born in 1947 or toured with Chuck Berry. At the moment, Dan's expression is puzzled and reproachful, like an elderly beagle unexpectedly thrust on an escalator—an expression his audiences have often seen. But he melts just perceptibly and heaves a sigh.
"Maybe in a couple of months I'll have eyes to re-form the band. I don't know. I just got tired of touring, of waitin' in airports and goin' to hotels, seein' the same people all the time. It'd got to the point I was just goin' through the motions onstage. The idea was in my head for a year, a year and a half.
"I don't think of the group as broken up. It's still a group; it's just not a performing group at the moment." In similar terms he pooh-poohs the notorious Elliot Abbott bombshell: "I didn't say I wanted to end the group, what I said was, 'I don't care if this group ever works again.' " Likewise his original decision this February to end the group: "I just got off the stage in Columbus one day feeling really drug and I said, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' It'd become a big business trip; it wasn't a fun music trip anymore. I wasn't in love with it the way I used to be. So then everybody started runnin' around acting like I meant the end of the group. That wasn't my idea."
But if things are uncertain, they're definitely down. "I'm gonna be makin' a slow comeback, because I'm just blown out. Because I don't think I have the confidence to even get back up on the stage.
"Can you comprehend a human mind, a state of mind, where everything bothers you? Yeah, there were pressures of touring and hassles in the band. But that ain't it. It's also, ah, the inner demons that possess me. Small, miniscule aliens from another planet."
He leans forward with a frown and says in a gruff, mock-rueful voice, "It's all that Pilster's fault. When he was my manager, that year I would just hear from him about what the members of the band wanted … I just kind of drifted away from it.
"I'm still signed to do another album for Blue Thumb. I might do some ads, or voice work. Acting maybe. I want to write. I'm the kind of guy that most of the time my guitar stays in its case between gigs. I want to do something more independent, more responsible for myself, and give up the bandleader gig which I wasn't too good at.
"There are a couple of tentative gigs in August. Possibly I might do them with Jaime and some kind of lead instrumentalist. I don't feel I owe it to anybody, though, to say I'm gonna do anything."
It's a bad time to ask; everything's up in the air. His eyes are starting to dart back and forth a little.
"I'm not currently that ambitious. I need some space. I might wake up tomorrow ready to go to Hollywood and be a movie star."
A little later he says, "I couldn't handle success … the modicum I had." Then changing his tack, he suggests that he should be quoted as saying, "The tin-eared, asshole American public can shove it, 'cause they didn't believe in what I was doin'."
But what's the story? What title does it have?—"Is This the Last Train to Hot Licksville?," "Has Moderate Success Spoiled Dan Hicks?" or "Crouching on the Springboard to Stardom"?
"You could call it . . . 'Enigmas on Thin Ice.' "
In This Article: Coverwall,	Dan Hicks


Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) and his wife released a beautiful letter to his newly born daughter, Max. Their letter inspired me to write to you.
Today, I am nearly 54 years old. I have seen a lot of change in my lifetime for both the good and the bad, but mostly good.
We live in a world that is full of mostly good people. Unfortunately, it's the bad stuff in our world that gets the most attention. In a world filled with so much good and so much money, you would think that the leadership of countries could fix some of the really bad things like, access to healthcare, hunger, and homelessness.
At the same time, you would think that humans, especially Americans, would all step up and do their part to make things better.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where this doesn't happen to the extent that it needs to.
I grew up in a very Catholic family. My mom died of a very rare form of liver cancer at the age of 29, when I was just seven years old. Losing my mom at such a young age was devastating. I couldn't believe that any God could be so cruel.
I was a lucky child because two years later, my dad re-married and I grew up with a very loving stepmother and my dad was one of the kindest men I have ever known.
I spent 21+ years in the Navy. Most of those years as a bomb disposal expert and most of those years deployed away from your grandma, your mom, and your aunt Rhian. I wasn't even home when your mom was born. I was on an extended deployment onboard the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67 in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya because we had just shot two Libyan fighter jets down and the nation thought we were going to war.
After my Navy career, I was fed up with bad leadership and wanted to be my own leader and started a small business based around my bomb disposal experience. The company did very well and we ultimately sold the company and made more money than we ever thought we would have and I hope that some of it is still around for you after I am gone.
I wanted to share a few of the things that have helped me along the way, and the core values that guided me through my imperfect life.
1. Humanity will never agree on a single God, but most do agree that Jesus was a good man and did great things while he was here on earth. Jesus established the "Golden Rule". Treat others the way you want to be treated. Whether you grow up religious or not, if this is your guiding principle, you will be successful. Kindness and compassion are contagious.
2. By the time you are old enough to understand, the world will be moving much faster than it is today. I have seen life with no internet and I have seen life with the internet. I have no idea how much misinformation will exist by the time you are adults. Don't forget our very rich history and reference factual data before making opinions and airing them on Facebook or whatever else is open for public consumption.
3. Set a vision for yourself and your families. Know what is most important to keep you all together. Today, 50% of folks that get married get divorced. Most of the reasoning is because people can't agree on so many of the simplest issues in life.
4. Learn how to listen. Be present with your family and friends. This is a skill that will get you somewhere. Most people listen with their mouths. They form opinions before they even hear and understand what is said. Be careful of folks that offer advice and have never experienced what they are talking about. This is how non-listeners operate. Listen, experience, and share!
5. Work hard and always work. Don't be a freeloader. This won't happen with any money you are left from us. We have structured your trusts so that you can only take annually what you make. I have no desire to leave behind a legacy of snot nosed, ungrateful rich kids. You will surely have a better start in life than most, but you need to work to earn your place in life.
6. You will become the sum of the 3-5 people that you spend the most time with. Whether this is online or face-to-face, surround yourself with people that care and live your core values. Most friendships don't last forever, and the ones that do are the ones that you will share the most common experiences with. Relationships need to be mutual in all accounts. If you find that you are giving much more than receiving, you are probably with the wrong group. Every group needs a leader and I hope that is you, but be careful of those who always seem to take!
7. Be accountable for your actions. My experience is that everybody wants increased responsibility, but no one wants to be held accountable. Yesterday on Facebook, a "friend" of mine was complaining about a parking ticket that he got in Washington, DC. He even took a picture of it and posted it on Facebook. The ticket was for $30 and he was illegally parked. He was complaining that it was raining and what type of "lazy meter-maid" would be out in the rain to catch him? You break the law, you will need to be accountable. Don't blame others for your mistakes. John Wayne said "if you are going to be dumb, be strong".
8. Don't be afraid to take risks. Just be a safe as you can. I made over 1000 parachute jumps, about the same number of underwater dives and am now on my fourth company as an entrepreneur. Risk taking is ok and can be very rewarding. Just balance things out. My best advice is to dive in, just ensure you know how deep the water is!
9. Give back. Mr. Zuckerberg and his beautiful wife and daughter have committed to give away 99% of their wealth, which today is worth $45 billon. That is a lot of money and I really hope that it goes to good use. Money in this world is often more of a problem that it is good. Unfortunately everything costs and I am sure in your adult years, these costs will be greater than today. But lets talk about giving back.
a. First, assuming you are working, you will be paying your fair share of taxes. Do it. Pay them. This is the first step in your Philanthropy. Our government charges us for many great programs and you need to pay your fair share.
b. Volunteer! If you have downtime, it should be spent helping others. This is a balance that only you will achieve, but I see NO reason that you shouldn't be doing this often. An hour a day feeding folks at a homeless shelter or reading to children at a library is as good for you as it is for them.
c. Donate money. I can't tell you how much, because I don't know how much you will have. If I had $46 billion, I would surely give away $45 billion, but here's the bottom line. 1) Look at every penny you donate as an investment. 2) Understand the organization's leadership and mission and their sustainability plan. Organizations that rely on handouts as their primary sustainment plan will never succeed. Do not perpetuate mediocrity. 3) Treat your nonprofit investments as serious as you treat your nonprofit efforts.
d. Donate money now. Don't wait until you make a lot of money some day to decide to start giving back and helping those who are deserving in your community. No matter how little or much money you have, share some. It will be worth the investment.
10. Take care of your children. 99% of the entire lifelong trauma we live with comes from our childhood. You must take care of your children. When I look back at the loss of my mom, if my dad wouldn't have remarried and I would have grown up in a single parent house, I would have surely gotten more off track than I did. There are very successful single parent families, but only because those parents care, work hard, and have great core values. Child development and love is so very important to our long-term success.
I'll finish this by saying two more things.
The first is that I hope that I am a better grandfather than I was a father. I know that my deployments and travel away from my family have left a mark. My goal is to be here for you more than I was for your mom and aunt and your grandma. You grandma is a tough lady and has always been the stability of our family. The love that we have for each other is amazing and I never could have done what I have done without her.
The second thing and something that Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife left out of their plans is something that you can never forget: the men and women of our country's military and our first responders. Today we have an all-volunteer force - which was not always the case - and in your lifetime, I wouldn't be surprised to see the draft to military service reinstated.
Everyday, men and women don a uniform to defend the Constitution of the United States and our communities. This comes at a great price, from long separations, to catastrophic injuries, to death. These men and women fight and protect us so that we can live a life of freedom and liberty. Yes they volunteer and yes they get paid, and yes there are government programs to support them, but none of the benefits are enough for the efforts and sacrifices these men and women make.
But know this. Less than 1% of Americans will do these jobs and that is the 1% that deserves our daily support, thoughts, and prayers. In addition, think about and support their family members who hold down the home front when those serving are at work and deployed, and live every day not knowing if their warrior will return or what atrocities they will see while performing their duties.
Our country needs the strongest military and police and fire departments that money can buy. Why? Because no matter what we do, there will always be bad guys and unfortunate circumstances to deal with. Our great nation was built on the values that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed and the men and women in these uniforms work tirelessly for this to happen.
You, my lovelies are getting a better start than most and in addition to your great grandparents, your grandma, your mom and dad and aunt Rhian, you have the US Navy to thank for that.


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