PEMcast 37: Conjuring the Spirit World

MUSIC

Dinah Cardin: Do you have one?

Chip Van Dyke: Ummmm. Are you eager to fulfill your purpose in this exhibition?

Spirit Hand: [knocks twice]

Dinah:No. [laughs]

Dinah: Are you looking forward to talking with all the people who come through the gallery and ask you important questions that could change the trajectory of their lives?

Spirit Hand: [knocks twice]

Dinah: No.

Chip: No, not interested. [laughs]

Dinah: This is Chip Van Dyke, Associate Director of Media Production here at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Chip: Like, the more you ask it questions, it feels a little bit like…

Dinah: There’s something in there.

Chip: You want to ask it why, that's not going to be possible, right?

Dinah: Like why?

Chip: Yeah, as an interviewer, you’re like, ‘can we do a follow up?’

Dinah: Chip has made nearly 20 digital and interactive media experiences for our latest exhibition here at PEM. Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums opened, incidentally, on Friday the 13th. This thing that Chip created works like a magic eightball. The visitor asks a yes/no question into an intercom hooked up to a sort of old fashioned looking TV and the answer comes in the form of a hand knocking on the screen. One for yes and two for no.

Chip: Are you eager to be put back into storage?

Spirit Hand: [knocks once]

Dinah: Yes.

Chip: Yes.

Dinah: While building this fun, seemingly harmless experience for our guests, Chip noticed something odd.

Chip: When it finally came together, when I had the intercom in place, when I had it working the way it was supposed to be working…I noticed that when you really use it the way it's intended, so pressing the intercom button, asking a question, releasing the button, and waiting for an answer, [laughs] it really felt like the thing came to life, like it finally had a personality.

Dinah tape: Would you like to be released from the place you're in now?

Spirit Hand: [knocks twice]

Chip: He does not want to be released.

Dinah tape: He doesn't want to be released. He likes where he is. OK. Would you like to have a friend in the place where you are now?

Spirit Hand: [knocks once]

Dinah tape: Yes.

Chip: Something in my brain has a hard time believing that this isn't from another world. Like something about this experience feels now conjured.

Dinah: Let me just interrupt to say here that Chip and I have worked together a long time and he’s pretty much a straight up skeptic.

Chip: I was the only one in the office, so it was just me and the thing, right. I also had it on a motion trigger, so I'd walk to the back of my office and it would trigger I'd start hearing this knocking coming from behind. I was just like, I can't handle this, this is too much.

KNOCKING

Dinah: For Chip to get the heebie jeebies, well, let’s just say it’s kinda perfect for an exhibition all about the heebie jeebies.

Chip: It’s definitely math, right. It's probability, but for some reason, when it comes to a dice roll, or a magic eight ball, like give that probability a little bit of liquid to sit in or electricity to run through and it just starts to feel like something's really there.

PEMcast THEME SONG

Dinah: Welcome to the PEMcast, conversations and stories for the culturally curious. From the Peabody Essex Museum, I’m your host, Dinah Cardin. Here in Salem, especially during the Fall – when the veil between the natural and the supernatural is especially thin – we get visitors who BELIEVE…in magic, in mediums. And they drag their skeptic friends and family here to see what it’s all about.

Anton Andresen: Dinah, real quick. Have we ever met before?

Dinah: I don’t know.

Anton: I don’t believe we ever have. So, I have something for you. Here we go.

Dinah: Woah, it's on fire. [laughs]

Anton: There you go. That's just my card. It says you've officially met me.

Dinah: And now YOU too have officially met Anton Andresen, the Official Magician of Salem, Massachusetts.

Dinah: This just came out of Anton's wallet aflame. [laughs] OK, that was amazing. Thank you so much.

Anton: You’re welcome.

Dinah: Anton and I met up on a beautiful summer day in the middle of downtown Salem, near the iconic Old Town Hall. A master of showmanship, Anton is one of two magicians, who has been performing, wowing audiences, every Saturday in the gallery. And he arrived with, literally, a bag of tricks.

Anton: I want you to imagine that you are back in the early 1900s in a Victorian house, in the parlor room, getting ready to enjoy a séance, and the spirit medium or the psychic brings out one of their divination tools.

Dinah: OK, here we go.

Anton: In this case, this is a pack of cards, and each card has a different letter of the alphabet on it. There's over 50 of them here. Some letters repeat, but Dinah, you can see it's exactly as I'm saying it is, yes? This is not going to be about me doing anything. This is going to be about you being guided by your intuition, OK?

Dinah: I love this.

Anton: [laughs] The first thing I'm going to ask you do is I'm going to ask you to deal some cards in a pile like that right here. Whenever you'd like to stop, you can stop. Whenever your intuition tells you. Shuffle those up a little bit. Shuffle the cards in your hands.

Dinah: Beautiful cards.

Anton: Thank you. Perfect. Here, we'll get rid of the ones you haven't dealt, and we'll square these up. What I'm going to have you do now is go ahead, and I'm going to have you deal the cards out into five piles.

Dinah: I just want to say, this is on a black, piece of velvet that you've put down. This is like you were so prepared.

Anton: So this is the kind of cloth a tarot reader would use. Dinah, just to recap, you dealt into a spot where you felt your intuition told you to stop. You mixed the cards. We used cards from all different parts of the pack. I'm going to turn the cards over one at a time, and we're going to see where that's led us to today.

Dinah: Sounds great. [laughs] Oh, my God. It says my name. It says Dinah, and that's incredible. I'm going to take a picture of that. That is amazing.

Anton: Now, if you were to imagine that you were back in the 1900s, and a spirit medium used that same technique I just did, but instead of your name, it was maybe the name of somebody who had passed on. You could see very easily how these techniques could convert skeptics into believers very easily. I wanted to share that with you today.

Dinah: Amazing. Thank you so much. Wow.

Anton: Of course.

Dinah: Why is everyone around here at the Peabody Essex Museum so excited about magic? For one, it was PEM’s Curator at Large George Schwartz that got us into it. As organizing curator, George became enthralled with the mystical and magical a long time ago. Growing up, George was an ardent Sherlock Holmes fan and lived in New York City, just down the road from the grave of famed escapologist Harry Houdini.

George Schwartz: Born in Hungary, came to America and when the family moved to New York City, he started to learn magic and reinvented himself into the figure we know today, an almost superhero-like figure.

Dinah: George and his brother would visit Houdini’s grave with their father and the boys would perform magic for the family. An expert on PEM’s history, George has been on staff for more than 20 years, working with objects related to Houdini in a city where Houdini routinely performed.

George: In putting together this exhibition it was very clear that spiritualism was a popular interest. It started in the mid 1800’s, and its followers believe that spirits exist in the natural world, and can be communicated with through the aid of a person with special abilities known as a medium.

Dinah: Prior to the spiritualism movement, wars and disease caused a lot of death and a lot of DEALING with death.

George: In the years before spiritualism took off, people mourned the dead in a different way than we do today. They used objects that were central to this ritual practice, whether they'd be death masks, mourning jewelry, or posthumous portraiture.

Dinah: In this exhibition, look for 19th century post mortem photographs and for PEM’s amazing collection of mourning jewelry. Rings and brooches made in black stones or containing the hair of the deceased.

George: When spiritualism took off, objects became central to spiritualist mediums and magicians performing conjuring acts on the stage.

Dinah: The Spiritualism movement tapped into the human desire to connect with the departed. Conjuring the Spirit World -- Art, Magic, and Mediums, focuses on the objects and artwork that both spiritualist mediums and stage magicians used to conjure forth spirits for the public. Mostly from PEM’s collection with major loans from private lenders and institutions.

George: The Greater Boston area was an early spiritualist center, and Salem was host to mediums and magicians that came through the town and performed.

Dinah: Psychics, mediums, magicians. Many of them traveling to Salem to appear at places like Lyceum Hall. Seekers and those being sought. In the stylish, sepia, turn of the century times. Capes, top hats, sequins and heavy eyeliner. George says these people attracted multitudes – willing believers, hard skeptics, and those in between to their séances or stage performances. Performers like:

George: Anna Eva Fay, an internationally known medium who lived out her life in Melrose, Massachusetts, came to Salem. She was known as the indescribable phenomenon, and influenced many generations of magicians and mediums to come.

Dinah: George says by the 1900’s, spiritualism had become a real movement. With many many followers.

George: People are drawn to magic shows and to séances through many reasons, belief, curiosity, and the desire to be astounded. In the case of séances, some people are coming to it for comfort and closure. The exhibition is designed to bring visitors into the spaces where conjuring acts took place, whether it be the séance parlor or the stage.

Dinah: I got to interview George in the exhibition, as the final components were being put in place. (To George) How long have you been working on this and how does it feel to see it coming together?

George: From an idea to this reality has been about two and a half years, and the installation of an exhibition is probably the most exciting time for curators. You've looked at these objects in different institutions, but for many months, you've been working with digital images of them and then to see the pieces come together, it's a wonderful team moment. You have everything installed, and then a wonderful lighting designer comes through and starts to light the show, and then it pops even more.

Scott Benson: A lot of the objects are light sensitive, so the trick is to make the objects appear to be lit more than they are. Our own trick is to keep light off areas that don't need to be lit and concentrate the light on the objects.

Dinah: This is light technician Scott Benson.

Scott: Right here, is actually three foot-candles, which is extremely low, because the surrounding areas were painted with dark colors. You can make the objects sort of pop, while protecting them with a low light.

Dinah: Do you want to remind us what a foot-candle is?

Scott: Oh, Yes. A foot-candle is the amount of light that shows on a wall from a candle one foot away. It's an old-school, kind of archaic example.

Dinah: It's very fitting.

Scott: It's what the industry uses as a guide.

George: When the lighting comes in, when Scott comes in, it gets bumped up higher and everything is really, you know, it's magic.

Scott: The other challenge, you want to keep the objects clear of any annoying shadows. That’s one of the more annoying things with lighting.

Dinah: And while discussing shadows, Scott points to what we refer to as the Houdini handcuffs.

George: Handcuffs that Houdini saw when he came to visit the Peabody Academy of Science, which is what the Peabody Essex Museum was called in 1906 when Houdini was performing in Salem for three nights.

Dinah: The story goes that someone said the handcuffs were from an exploring expedition in the mid 1800s. But famed escapologist Houdini insisted these handcuffs were actually from later, in the 1880s.

George: During his performance that night at the Salem Theater, he issued one of his famous challenges where he'd give a $1,000 to any charity if he was wrong. The next day, a reporter from the Salem Evening News came to the museum.

Dinah: It seems Houdini was right.

George: Probably by the time that was published, Houdini was on to the next town. I don't think any reward was issued or any money donated. In the 1990s, so decades and decades later, the handcuffs were brought by the museum staff to the Hawthorne Hotel, because that was the site of the annual official Houdini séance, the séance that was started after his death that his wife, Bess, attended at least for 10 years to try to communicate with Houdini's spirit. Before he died, Houdini had a special code that only she knew. That would be a way of telling that there was some spirit communication.

Dinah: George stops at a very large and evocative poster, depicting the magician Thurston, a contemporary of Houdini’s. Thurston’s catchy line was “ I wouldn't deceive you for the world.”

George: This poster for Thurston really encapsulates this whole world that people will explore in the exhibition, both visually and textually. It has Thurston in the center of the poster, holding a skull in a pose reminiscent of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Out of the eye sockets of the skull is an ethereal green mist that hovers up, and spirit entities and musical instruments, and little devilish imps abound all around Thurston's head.

Dinah: Thurston kicks off the exhibition, getting at a central question that these performers often asked and we want visitors to think about. Do spirits return?

George: Right below this scene are statements asking that question, enticing someone to the show. It really entices you to want to buy a ticket.

Dinah: George takes me to a section that includes paintings created by a mix of artists who did believe. Works by mediums, channeling spirits. And by artists who had attended a seance and were inspired to paint what they witnessed.

George: Either they saw a spirit entity emerge before them, or they were painting a spirit under guidance of that spirit telling them to create an artwork.

Dinah: Just to show you how old this is, this person died in 1902. This work was made in 1885. This shows really how long people have been thinking about this.

George: Yes. The Spiritualist Movement, as a movement, started in the mid-19th century in western New York State. It's quickly spread across the United States and to Europe.

Dinah: But skeptics abounded. Houdini himself changed his tune during his lifetime and told audiences that spirits do NOT come back. After a lifetime of tricking people, he no longer wanted to deceive them.

George: This poster advertises one of Houdini's performances in the last year of his life. The poster itself has Houdini in this wonderfully graphic treatment with blues and oranges. These shows, which were, I think, considered some of the best shows of his career, were centered on his movement to debug fraudulent mediums.

Dinah: In 1922, the rivalry between mediums and magicians came to a head in Boston.

George: The idea for this exhibition is rooted in an episode which I consider the apex of public interest in spiritualism. A century ago, three figures came together over a contest. A prize that the magazine Scientific American established for anyone who could offer physical evidence of spirits. Internationally known medium Mina Crandon, aka Marjorie, was the focus of this prize. She conducted séances in her home filled with ringing bells, a Victrola that played without explanation, and the voice of her departed brother that spoke forth.

Dinah:Margery had been convincing that she held genuine abilities. But Harry Houdini stepped in, exposing the secrets behind Margery’s feats.

George: Marjorie did not get the prize, but her supporters were unswayed, most notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who was also the most high profile advocate of the spiritualist movement at the time.

Dinah: Houdini’s aggressive debunking came from years of continually trying to make contact with his late mother. The failure to conjure her spirit caused Houdini to turn against mediums who he believed took advantage of people when they were feeling most vulnerable after the passing of a loved one.

MUSIC

George: Also at this time, there are technological advances that are bringing forth specters for the public. Magic lantern slide performances, other techniques like the Pepper's ghost made people question what was science and what was supernatural.

Dinah: Remember the knocking hand interactive at the beginning of this episode? Chip, our media production guy, also created a Pepper’s Ghost of a World War I soldier, fitting for the time period we’re examining here. While this contraption is way more technical than I can explain, there is a ghostly looking soldier walking back and forth in front of a bombed out landscape. The funny part is that person is Chip. He saved time and money on casting and filmed himself, and comes across, helmeted and uniformed, in an otherworldly, almost sepia hue. It’s a lifelong dream to create this effect, said Chip. You can look for it in the gallery. As well as moments spaced throughout the exhibition that provide visitors with a neuroscientific perspective on the nature of belief from PEM’s resident neuroscientist.

Anton: The subject matter of spiritualism and magicians that were involved in it at the time really blurred the line of reality and entertainment.

Dinah: Back to Anton, the Official Magician of Salem. (To Anton) So, what got you interested in magic in the first place as a kid? Were you a magical child?

Anton: I actually was. One of my very early memories is with my father sitting on the couch in the house that I grew up in. And we were reading "The Mickey Mouse Book of Magic." We would put together the tricks and perform them for each other and friends of the family, and that sort of thing. He taught me the idea of how to manifest things. That if you have an idea in your mind and you can tell yourself very, very clearly what that idea is, you can bring it into reality. That was a very powerful thing to learn at a young age.

Dinah: But how does one describe the experience of wielding this power?

Anton: Magic is like a doorway. When you pass through that door, you enter a world where the impossible becomes possible. There is something really special about that, when somebody sees something that challenges the very basic idea of the reality that we live in. Magic does that in a way that I don't think any other art form really does. When you accomplish that, you get a reaction people often refer to as astonishment, which is that WOW moment where you see people's mouths drop open and they scream with excitement. People are lucky to get a handful of minutes of astonishment, I think, in their life. As a magician, being able to turn that on for people at a moment's notice is a very rewarding thing to see those reactions. Once I got good enough that I started seeing good reactions, I was completely hooked. For me, there's literally nothing else like that experience.

Dinah: How did you become official?

Anton: It's a bit of a long story. I did my very first public performance for the city here when I was 13 years old, and I've done 20 years' worth of performances similar to that since then.

Dinah: Anton goes on to tell me a story that led to his official delegation. It begins when a magician was needed to fill in and child magician Anton took over.

Anton: Leo was looking for a magician, and he found me.

Dinah: Leo was from Salem’s local cable access channel.

Anton: He was just such a believer in me and such an advocate for me. Everybody should have somebody like Leo in their life. Unfortunately, we lost him this past year. When I said goodbye to Leo, I had a wand just like this one.

Dinah: Wow. It's a wand. A real magic wand.

Anton: It is the real deal. The wand that I left with Leo was one that I’d used for about five years, since getting the title. So, the wand had put a lot of smiles on a lot of people's faces. I will say, Leo, if you're listening, you are one of the people I would love to connect with during my time at the Peabody Essex Museum. If there's some way you can come through to me, I would love to hear from you.

Dinah: What is our big question in this exhibition? Do spirits come back, I think we keep asking. What do you think of that?

Anton: The spiritualism movement is very interesting to me because it speaks to one of the greatest human desires, which is to understand what happens once we're gone. And One of the things that I'm really excited about this exhibit is that there's never been a collection of art and spirit objects like this that I've ever heard of being altogether in one place. The things that you're going to see in this exhibit are very profound, very meaningful, and the people at the time, they truly believed in what they were seeing and experiencing. I hope that when people come to the exhibit, it gives them an opportunity to challenge their own personal beliefs in regards to what they feel about the spirit world. Hopefully, when they leave, they appreciate being in this world just a little bit more than when they went in.

MUSIC

Dinah: Just how would Anton describe magic to a skeptic?

Anton: Personally, I think magic is an invisible force. It's like love. You can't see it, but you know it's there. More importantly, you know it when you feel it. Whether that's having a special moment with a loved one or being out in nature at the right moment watching the sunset, or a really good magic trick, you can feel that feeling of magic.

Dinah: What feels magical to you about living in Salem?

Anton: For me, Salem was a perfect place to grow up. It was incredible to be here and be exposed to so many different ideas about what magic is or what magic could be. I've always been fascinated with the city's history and when we think of Salem, we think of it as a place where these really hard to imagine things happened. Yet it's become a place where instead of killing people out of fear, we now celebrate people for their differences and what makes them an individual. To me, it doesn't get much more magical than that.

[Chisel banging]

Dinah: Now we talk with another Salem native who grew up in a beautiful historic house and found himself wandering Salem’s cemeteries at night.

Andrew Carr: My name is Andrew Carr. My background is in oil painting. I would go around Salem at night just painting the architecture under moonlight or the artificial light at night. There is something about night light that I’m very drawn to.

Dinah: Now, Andrew is a professional stone cutter.

Andrew: I can remember moments where I've been in a cemetery when the fall colors are around. And just being like, "This is like heaven," just wandering around in all these old gravestones.

[Chisel banging]

Dinah: What's this letter? What are you making?

Andrew: This is the B. This is the letter B.

Dinah: In what word?

Andrew: It says, "Here lies buried the body of Mrs. Anstiss Crowninshield." This particular grave, let's see if I can read it backwards. "Here lies buried the body of Mrs. Anstiss Crowninshield, widow to Mr. John Crowninshield, who..." I can't read this backwards here. "...who departed this life September the 10th, 1774 in ye 73rd year of her age."

Dinah: If we are going to look at objects in this episode that bring people closer to death, it’s hard to imagine anything more fitting than a gravestone. I got to watch Andrew hand chisel two new replicas for a married couple long dead. From the prominent Crowninshield family of Salem.

Andrew: We are in a barn, an old carriage house that was built in 1891. I realized as I was cutting these replicas, that this studio space is very similar to what the stone cutters would have been working in in the 18th century.

Dinah: Andrew got into carving gravestones in the middle of the pandemic.

Andrew: The whole reason I got into carving is because of Covid. Everybody was dying. It made me realize that death was on our minds on a daily basis, and it was probably how the colonists felt back in the 16, 1700s. It was the ever‑present fear of death, infant mortality, smallpox. I think people in the past were far more aware of death looking over their shoulder. Looking back, clearly I was athinkin about death. I think that was a way to cope with it. That was a way to turn something scary into something beautiful.

Dinah: When I caught up with Andrew in his studio, he showed me gravestones that had been commissioned for loved ones and pets. But the project he was working on at that moment was so perfectly Salem.

[Chisel banging]

Andrew: To give you a brief history of this project, the story begins in 1761, which is when Captain John Crowninshield dies. 1774, his wife Anstiss dies, and these two graves are placed or carved and set in the Burying Point Cemetery in the eastern most half.

Dinah: What we know today as the Charter Street Cemetery, one of the oldest in the country. It’s right behind the Peabody Essex Museum.

Andrew: These two graves stood in those locations up until the Great Salem Fire of 1914, at which point, I assume, a tree branch fell on them and shattered them. They were damaged enough, where the descendants of the Crowninshields got together and they encased these two headstones in a slate casing. The fragments of the broken grave stayed in those casings up until 2010.

Dinah: Andrew is remaking the stones using historic photographs taken by Frank Cousins, who photographed Salem in the early 1900s. Cousins perfectly documented Salem streetscapes and buildings. The collection is available online through PEM’s Phillips Library.

Andrew: To look at high‑quality, high‑resolution photographs of Salem in the early 1900s was just so cool. I realized that Frank Cousins was a taphophile. He loved photographing Salem cemeteries.

Dinah: Andrew proposed the idea to Salem’s Cemetery Commission in 2022 and got a grant from the Salem Cultural Council to source the slate.

Andrew: I'm doing this as a labor of love. I'm insane. [laughs] The amount of hours I've put in this is a lot.

Dinah: One of the challenges is learning multiple styles. The couple’s gravestones were carved by two different stonecutters.

Andrew: I'm fairly certain if I walked into William Codner's studio in Boston in 1761, he would have been carving this. If I walked into the workshop of the Lamson brothers in 1774, this would've been in their shop.

[Chisel banging]

Dinah: In order to find just the right slate, Andrew has paddled a kayak out to an island to find the right slate. He has taken his Youtube viewers to a blacksmith to talk about forging good chisels. And from his Stones over Bones studio, he makes videos that show him carving in candlelight just as historic cutters would have done. And he’s led carving workshops in the Charter Street cemetery.

Andrew: To have work in the Charter Street burying ground is an absolute honor, to be part of not just stone cutting history but also the Crowninshield history. It was such a prominent Salem family. There's a deeper side to gravestones. A lot of people come to Salem and they want the gothic imagery and see a spooky side to gravestones. To me, it's far more nerdy and archaeological. I see these way more as historical artifacts. To me, they're sculpture gardens.

Dinah: All of this love of the nocturnal, of magic of wonder has heavily influenced our pop culture. Certainly psychics and mediums are featured in all sorts of TV shows and movies. Like in this 1960 classic 13 Ghosts.

Clip from 13 Ghosts

Dinah: Of all the objects born in the age of Spiritualism, the Ouija board, with its iconic planchette, remains the most popular and enduring. For anyone who has been to a slumber party, you’ve not doubt watched scary movies that featured seances or someone actually brought out a ouija board. It was made by Parker Brothers here in Salem and outsold Monopoly. Connecting to the spirit world is really about people wanting to be wowed, astounded. We want to be in awe.

George: Whether you believe you could communicate with the departed or not, belief is something integral to humanity and drives the way we think about the world, the way that we think about ourselves.

Dinah: At the end of the day, magic offers us comfort, says George. We’re seeking closure. We’re looking for connection.

MUSIC

Dinah: And people recently found connection at PEM’s Gala. With Conjuring as the theme, we sold a record number of tickets. People showed up dressed as mediums, magicians, dripping in glamor and mystery. The attendees were indeed wowed by roving magicians, a mentalist performance and tarot card readers.

SOUND FROM GALA

Dinah: They also toured the galleries, where they discovered our ghost in the machine.

Dinah: Have you been making friends in the gallery at night?

Spirit Hand: [knocks twice]

Chip: [laughs]

Chip: OK, that's cool. Have other spirits been conjured?

Spirit Hand: [knocks once]

Dinah: Yes. Are those spirits kind spirits?

Spirit Hand: [knocks twice]

Dinah: No.

Chip: No. Oh, boy. Should we be leaving now?

The spirit hands makes an ongoing static sound

Dinah: OK, the hand is like having a little...

Chip: It's having a freak out.

FADE to THEME SONG

Dinah: That’s our show. Thanks for listening. Discover the unseen at Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums through February 2, 2025 when the exhibition will travel to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Thank you to organizing curator George Schwartz, PEM’s Curator-at-Large, with support from Lan Morgan, Associate Curator at PEM. Thank you to Andrew Carr and Anton Andresen. You can catch Anton as one of two magicians performing in the gallery on Saturdays throughout the exhibition. The PEMcast is produced by me, Dinah Cardin. And edited and mixed by Erika Sutter. Our theme song is by Forest James. The PEMcast is generously supported by the George S. Parker Fund.