As she was talking, Susan kept glancing at her dog Fortuna, whom she had brought with her from Alaska to donate to the Women’s Sports Foundation for a benefit auction. Fortuna is six years old and raced in the 1984 Iditarod, but now, according to Susan, she wants to be a pet. To us she didn’t seem to like being in New York any more than Susan did, but she looked happier once she’d discovered the nice sled dog living in the Plaza Baroque Room’s mirrored columns. “She misses her friends,” Susan told us. “She thinks she’s finally found another dog.” She leaned over. “Hey, For
tuna,
good girl,” she cooed. “
Good
girl!”
Susan is thirty-two and has a long black braid and very pale blue eyes. For a normal day of mushing, she wears polypropylene underwear, layers of Thinsulate and GoreTex outer garments, a beaver hat, a wolverine muff, wolfskin gloves, and sealskin mukluks. For the press conference, she wore jeans and a cotton T-shirt that said “Purina ProPlan,” which is a type of dog food put out by one of her sponsors. For the foundation’s evening black-tie cocktail party, she said, she was going to wear a long gingham skirt, a black satin shirt, and an ivory miniature-dogsled-and-team necklace. “I do own long skirts—I need them for the Iditarod awards banquet in Nome, for one thing,” she explained, and then said, “Oh,
shoot!
I wish I’d brought my qiviut dress.” She was wearing that dress—qiviut is the underwool of the musk ox—last March when she received first prize for the 1987 race, and also the year before when she picked up the trophy for the 1986 Iditarod. That was the race in which she set the world record (eleven days, fifteen hours, and six minutes), and it made up for the previous year, when a rogue moose attacked her team, killing three of her dogs and forcing her to drop out. “No one was going to beat me in 1986,” she told us. “I was really determined.”
Susan said that her first dog, Cabee, was a Labrador mix, and her second dog was an Alaskan Husky, and all her dogs since have been Huskies. She first mushed dogs in Massachusetts, where she was born, and she kept at it when she moved to Colorado and shared a house with a woman who had fifty Huskies. By the age of nineteen, she was sure enough of herself to know that she wanted to live in the wilderness with a lot of dogs, and that there was nowhere in the Lower Forty-eight that would satisfy her. “At first, I wanted to build wooden boats,” she went on. “I really loved carpentry, and I wanted to sail around the world, because at the time I thought the ocean was the only place I could go to get away from people. But then I tried to figure out what I’d do with twenty or thirty dogs on a small boat.” When she moved to Alaska, in 1975, she lived in a “fly-in”—an area accessible only by plane. Then her work as a dog breeder, trainer, and racer made living near a road necessary, so she and her husband (they were married in 1985) and the dogs moved to a slightly less remote spot, a hundred and fifty miles north of Fairbanks and twenty-five miles from the closest village (Manley, pop. 62). She still hunts moose for food, but now there’s a gravel road to her cabin. “Where we’re living is very downtown to me,” she said. “We chose it because it’s good for mushing. There are very strong winds and it’s stormy, and that’s good, because it’s the kind of weather you get during races. I just don’t like city living. We do have a radio, and David likes to listen to it, but I don’t. He likes to read newspapers. I like to burn them for firewood.”
Someone passed out auction brochures—Fortuna was listed under the heading “Luxurious Fun”—and then a man who was wearing a World Boxing Hall of Fame tie clip and belt buckle, and who had the cauliflower ears of a boxer, grabbed Susan by the elbow and said, “Are you the girl that did that thing on the dogsled?”
She nodded and said, “Eleven days on a sled in the Alaskan wilderness.”
The man turned to someone walking past and exclaimed, “I couldn’t do the thing she did! I can go into the ring and get bashed up, but I couldn’t do that thing she did!”
F
ANS
ONE OF THESE DAYS
, Leo Herschman is going to clean up his shop, the Modern Supply Company, which is on the third floor of a narrow building near City Hall. In the meantime, Modern Supply, where Mr. Herschman has been selling nothing but ceiling fans for more than thirty years, has the look of a Swiss village all but obliterated by an Alpine rockslide. “We’re jammed to hell in here,” Mr. Herschman was complaining the other day as he extracted an order form from a pile of boxes, flyers, fan catalogs, newspapers, and stationery on his desk. “I keep planning to get this place organized. When my late wife and I opened Modern Supply, in 1932, we had a beautiful store on Fulton Street. We sold all manner of appliances—refrigerators, ovens, everything. But the Fulton Street building was torn down for the World Trade Center, and we moved to this lousy place. We brought what I would call the minimum from Fulton Street—fans and motors. Now all I sell is ceiling fans. It’s still too crowded in here. A designer was here once buying a fan, and he said to me, ‘Sir, would you care to retain me to redesign your store?’ I said, ‘What are you planning to do, set fire to it?’ ”
Mr. Herschman likes to say that he became an adult at the age of eight, which means that he has been an adult for eighty-one years. He is short and wiry, with strong cheekbones, a certain amount of smooth gray hair, and a voice that is very easily heard. He wears black-rimmed eyeglasses on his forehead or at the conventional angle, depending. His eyebrows are in a constant state of arch. He is fitter and livelier than many people his age, but he likes to punctuate his workday with moments of private reflection. This means that people who come to Modern Supply hoping to have a consultation about fans with Mr. Herschman, who is described in his advertisements as “Leo Herschman, Famous Expert,” are sometimes disappointed. Interest in fan consultations usually increases with the onset of hot weather, but so does the number of Mr. Herschman’s private moments. “That’s fine with me,” Mr. Herschman said, shrugging. “I can’t stand the general public. I make no effort to be courteous to them. I also don’t stand for any undue familiarity. We get a lot of me-generation people in here, and I try to get rid of them as fast as possible. My assistants can take care of most issues that people come to have us resolve. There’s not that much to know about fans, but I suppose I am the famous expert. I know that makes me sound like a big ham. When a guy comes in and says, ‘Hey, are you the famous expert?’ I say, ‘Well, big boy, I’m lying. I don’t know a fan from a bucket of mud.’ ”
Before becoming big in ceiling fans, Mr. Herschman excelled in a few other careers. “When I do something, I do it all the way,” he told us. “I had a lot of pep in the old days. I was a boxer and a runner. I went to sea. I was a tough guy. I was a real musician—a jazzman, not one of these drug-laden psycho-rocker types. When I was fourteen, I spent time in the printing and advertising business. The boss was a hand shaker, a Babbitt, tight as the devil—he didn’t give me a raise in ages. Then he fired the production man—he was an idiot—and I moved up in the business. I tried to enlist during the First World War. Boom! Then came the Armistice. I worked as a rivet heater on a ship after the war, with a crew of tough little brats who taunted me. I said to them, ‘Excuse me, I know you don’t mean any harm even if you are bums. If you bother me any more, I’ll knock your skulls together.’ Then I knocked their skulls together, and they said, ‘Hey, this fellow’s all right!’ Then I wangled a transfer to the pipe-fitting crew. After that, I went to sea.”
Just then, three apparently athletic men wearing T-shirts cut off above their navels walked in and eyed the fans hanging from the ceiling: There were twenty-one of them—white, brown, black, bright brass, and antique brass, with blade spans of thirty-six, forty-two, forty-eight, and fifty-two inches—and half were on, filling Modern Supply with what Mr. Herschman calls horizontal thrust. One of the athletes said, “Hey, do you sell ceiling fans, or what?” Mr. Herschman ignored them.
“Then I had my own printing outfit,” he went on. “That’s when I met my future wife. She was a little hundred-pound girl from Philadelphia. I helped her set up her own business, because she had been working for a terrible guy. I said to her, ‘Jean, you’re working for a terrible guy. He’s got an obsequious manner. You should go into business for yourself.’ She was going to be selling all discount goods—refrigerators, ovens, everything. I suggested the name Modern Supply, because we would be anticipating future needs. I’m good at anticipating booms. For instance, I anticipated the lawn mower boom on Long Island. Eventually, I was doing so much work for Jean that I said to her, ‘You can’t afford to pay me what all this is worth, so let’s get married.’ I didn’t have any silly romantic notions. We were absolutely the same kind of people, my wife and I. We both loved to work. It was almost an obsession.”
In the early sixties, Mr. Herschman said to himself that there was going to be a boom in ceiling fans. “We had been selling fans occasionally, and then I realized that we would be having a boom. When the price of electricity went up and air-conditioning became expensive, the whole thing skyrocketed. We now sell fans to a variety of, shall I say,
characters,
but I do not pay attention to anyone who comes in who is of a weird or unusual nature. In the old days, the men bought the fans, and they’d choose brown. Now women do most of the choosing, and four times out of five they pick white. They like white fans to go against their white ceilings, because it has less of a discordant effect. Some people come in here thinking a ceiling fan is the do-all and be-all of everything. It is not. It is a
cir
-cu-la-tor. It will
cir
-cu-late air and cool an object, including a person. People have asked me to build them noisy fans to drown out noisy streets. A psychologist who had, shall we call them,
patients
once asked me to build a device to block sound from traveling into his waiting room. We had a fellow named Slater, a hypnotist, who had me build one that made a sound that helped get people hypnotized. He didn’t want them to think there was anything unnatural going on, even though quite obviously there was.”
It is Mr. Herschman’s opinion that the world is going down the drain and that the ceiling fan business has been a reasonably good position from which to observe its downward direction over the last six decades. From time to time, he issues updates on the finer points of this opinion. That afternoon, among the matters he addressed were brands of ceiling fans besides the brands he sells (“Let us not concern ourselves with the fact that three-quarters of the fans out there are trash”), his career at present (“I prefer building and fixing things, which I used to do. I could still build things if I were compelled to, and sometimes I get sentimental”), most space shuttle experiments (“Very disappointing”), lawyers (“Robots”), accountants (“Robots”), and academe (“Maybe there are a few professors who know something, but that’s only because they had a job before they went to school. We are often approached by professors about ceiling fans, and they do not grasp the reality or realistic attitudes of the problem—that’s the fault of their college training”).
Mr. Herschman’s assistants, Theresa Carriman and Lindsay Noel, waited on the athletes, and then they told Leo that they were leaving for the day, and turned off the fans. The shop instantly became stuffy. “I don’t have any fans at home,” Mr. Herschman said, pushing his glasses up and squeegeeing the bridge of his nose. “I live in the Village, in a concrete building, and it’s as cool as can be.”
F
ISH
W
INDOW
SOME OF THE PEOPLE
who admire Fernando Lara’s window displays at the Citarella Fish Company, at Broadway and Seventy-fifth, think the prehistoric-monster tableau he made one day last week was among his finest efforts. A plastic Godzilla clutching a real boiled lobster reared up on a slab of swordfish that had a face of black-olive eyes and a mushroom nose and was resting on a field of finnan haddie and jumbo shrimp. About half a dozen people stopped by to photograph the window that day. Others—purists, probably—prefer Mr. Lara’s nonrepresentational displays, which might feature a rosette of gray sole over a cascade of scallops; or concentric circles of brook trout, red snapper, sea squab, and stone-crab claws; or an elaborate mosaic of lobsters and clams and haddock. Mr. Lara’s windows—a spectacle of color and texture and fish forms—have become one of the most popular art exhibits on upper Broadway, and there is usually a school of appreciators trolling outside Citarella in the morning as soon as he finishes preparing the day’s display. Mr. Lara, who makes up a new window every day but Sunday, doesn’t publicly favor one of his styles over another, but he admits to liking to deploy a plastic prehistoric creature along with the fish whenever possible, especially if he can get dry ice for a smoke-pouring-out-of-nostrils effect.
“Sometimes, before I come to work, I sit and think of my design,” Mr. Lara said the other day. “I want the window to be nice every time. I just wish I had more time to do it.” As he was talking, he put two pails—one full of salmon steaks and one of halibut—on a shelf at the back of the window, smoothed the shaved ice in front, and calculated where to begin. He planned to edge the window with fish steaks, layer sea squabs and scallops beside them, put a pile of shrimp in the center, and poise melon boats on either side of it. He was also preparing a few mackerel for the next day, when he intended to prop three of them up like miniature porpoises leaping out of a sea of other seafood and balance a rubber ball between their noses. “Sometimes I’ll ride my train in from Astoria and I’ll have the design in my head, but they won’t have the fish I planned on,” he said. “Then I have to change my ideas really fast. I get ideas from watching television, and sometimes I see a picture in a magazine that I like, and I come to work and make it out of fish. Sometimes I can’t believe I can make all this just out of fish.”
Mr. Lara, who is thirty-two years old and came here from Mexico in 1979, had never done any artwork or arranged fish in any manner until eight months ago. He was working as an icebox man at Citarella then, and started getting ideas about the window display, so he asked Ricky Oviedo, the manager, if he could give it a try. His only relevant prior experience was a childhood habit of playing with his food. “We had a different sort of window before Fernando started doing it,” Ricky Oviedo told us. “We just sort of threw everything in.”