Six Degrees of Separation

When I was young, my father told me a story that seemed straight out of a folk tale. It concerned The Sugar Refinery (as our family called it) on the Hudson River waterfront, where he was Chief Engineer through the World War II years.

When I was just two, my family moved north to  paper mill country so I had no memory of this place, but the memory of his story is golden -- or copper. As he explained, the refinery process depended on copper vats, in which the raw cane syrup was boiled down.

Wearing thin from the constant intense heat,the vats had to be routinely inspected and almost annually patched and reenforced. And the people best equipped to do this painstaking specialized repair were a father and son team of gypsies -- authentic Rom -- who travelled the country and reliably reported in at The Sugar Refinery every spring.

At that time, gypsies were figures of great fascination to me, thanks to the operetta that was always performed at the YWCA camp I attended for three summer sessions. (Surely this operetta would now be deemed politically incorrect, but the libretto is still going strong on Amazon.com)

The father and son at work in The Sugar Refinery were just as described (it seemed to me) in the opening chorus of "Little Gypsy Gay":

Mending tins and mending pots,
busy all day long.
While the brazier's burning hot,
sing this happy song!

But I wasn't able to verify this. I was born too late. I had just missed seeing real gypsies in action!

But lately, I discovered a currently more meaningful link, via The Sugar Refinery, that I have with one of my favourite artists, Degas.

Degas' route to fame in North America had been through the early and abundant purchases of his work by New York multi-millionaire Henry O. Havemeyer, urged by his wife Louisine, as advised by her best friend, the artist Mary Cassatt, a close friend and colleague of Degas. The eventual outcome was Havemeyer's stunning 1920s bequest of Degas' and other Impressionists' paintings to NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

All this I knew, but only recently I happened on the fact that Havemeyer's fortune derived from his vast sugar empire, centred on The American Sugar Refinery. SUGAR REFINERY?!?!!  I went straight to Google maps, and there was The American Sugar Refinery, on the banks of the Hudson in "our" New York City suburb. The Sugar Refinery.

It's true that by the time my father came along, a Havemeyer son was running the business -- but it was a classic Six Degrees of Separation.

1) Degas
2) Mary Cassatt
3) H.O. and Louisine Havemeyer
4) Havemeyer Son -- the one who might have walked the plant in my father's day
5) My father
6) Me

I was pretty excited -- until, tracking down these old pictures, I found reference to Havemeyer's American Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn. Wrong suburb! A little fact-checking revealed the casualties of industry in the 20th century United States. My father's sugar refinery had actually survived and snagged the American Sugar name, after buying out Havemeyer's and many other refineries.

So I'm no more connected to Degas than to the father-son gypsies -- nor they to each other. But I still count Degas as one of my favorite artists, I still know more politically incorrect lyrics from "Little Gypsy Gay" than I'd ever sing out loud, and The Sugar Refinery still prevails on the Yonkers NY waterfront.