Anthony Brandt: 1936-2024

Some of the books my father wrote or edited over his lifetime.

My father Anthony Scott Brandt, author, historian, journalist and poet, died quietly in his sleep last night just before midnight at the Kanas Hospice Center in Quogue in eastern Long Island. It was seven days before his 88th birthday.

My father, left, and his brother Charles with their dog 

King, with some fish they caught in Brant Beach

Son of Grace Scott and Axel Hjalmar Brandt, he was raised in Westfield, NJ and spent his summers with his brother, the late Charles Brandt, on Long Beach Island in the section, appropriately called, Brant Beach (named after a type of duck, not our family, but who's complaining?) 

There, he learned to sail and often waxed nostalgic about being alone all day on the bay in his "sneak box" sailboat, which had a dagger board center keel you could pull up so it could go up onto the ice when duck hunting in the winter, which he never did to my knowledge.

A graduate of Westfield High School and Princeton University, in 1958 he married my mother Barbara (Rescorla) in Cranford, NJ and two years later, my sister Katherine Grace Brandt was born. I followed four years after that.

He was enrolled in the ROTC in college and afterward, he and my mother spent several very hot and uncomfortable months in Oklahoma where he was assigned to be trained as a forward observer, directing artillery fire. He became, to hear him tell it, quite good at it and the howitzer sight he gave me years ago remains one of my most cherished mementos of his life, primarily because of what it meant to him.

The young father at Christmas at his brothers' in Westfield.

After he was discharged, the young family lived first in Manhattan while my father attended Columbia and my mother attended nursing school.

They soon moved to Hunter Brook Road in Yorktown, Westchester County, NY. There he met his best friend, the late photographer Carter Jones, who, my dad said, lived more fully in the moment than anyone he had ever known. Jones died tragically in a plane crash and decades later my dad dedicated a memorial poem to him in his 2020 book of poetry, "The Only Available Word."

He got a job working for Fairchild Aircraft where he was commissioned to write history of the company and a biography of its founder, the late Sherman Fairchild, who died before the book was written. Shortly afterword, the company board of directors decided the biography was not worth the cost.

Then we moved to the hamlet of Shrub Oak into a large, rambling farmhouse built during the Civil War, and which, at one point, was a hotel, as evidenced by the numbers on the door of the three third-floor bedrooms.

In every house he lived, the walls were lined with books.

Dad worked in an office on the first floor with its own door out to the front porch, filled floor to ceiling with books. It had once been a doctor's or dentist's office. Just getting to the desk required some deft maneuvering among the stacks of books and magazines on the floor and other furniture.

He often demanded quiet of the children playing outside, myself among them, and ultimately moved his office to one of the third-floor bedrooms to get better distance from childhood mayhem.

It was in Shrub Oak that he wrote and published his first Book, "Reality Police, The Experience of Insanity in America."

To do research, he had himself committed to a mental hospital, relying on my mother to get him released when the time came, which she dutifully did.

For his efforts, he was rewarded with a lawsuit by the psychologists whose questionable methods he had exposed. It was a financial burden that hung over him for years, due in large part to the publishers' failure to give the book a "libel reading" before publication.

On the back deck of their High Street home with friends.

And although the book did not exactly fly off the shelves, it did attract enough attention that he was called to testify before Congress, which he did wearing his favorite blue denim jacket, an act of quiet defiance that I have always admired.

After 15 years of marriage, my parents divorced. My sister being away at private school, a educational path not of her own choosing, my mother and I moved to Pleasantville, NY and my father moved to an apartment in nearby Ossining, where he was living with the woman he had left my mother for.

Thankfully, that relationship did not last and soon enough, my father met and married, in 1981, a much better match -- my stepmother Lorraine Dusky, an indominable and accomplished journalist in her own right who was more than a match for my dad's tendency to assume he was always right about everything.

At his favorite table at The American Hotel with his kids.

(It was Lorraine, who had broken the newsroom glass ceiling out of the "women's pages" and into the hard news section at a now defunct Albany newspaper called "The Knickerbocker News," who confirmed my growing desire to become a newspaperman with her tales of daring do in service to her readers.)

Subsequently, dad became a well-known and well-regarded magazine writer, writing for such publications as The Atlantic, Connoisseur, Esquire, Psychology Today and American Heritage.

When last we spoke last week, he recalled pieces he wrote for Psychology Today titled 'Selves,' "it was the longest piece they ever published," he told me; and "Rite of Passage" for The Atlantic, about his mother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, as being among his most memorable articles.

The National Geographic explorer series

For several years, he was the "Ethics" columnist for Esquire and then a book reviewer for Men's Journal. As such, he received dozens of free books in the mail every day and every visit meant coming home with free books selected from the piles in his front office.

He and Lorraine even had a he said/she said column for a time which I found to be quite amusing, mostly because of how honest they were.

My father also edited a book of Thomas Jefferson's letters from the time he spent in Paris. I had just read David McCullough's biography of John Adams and dad and I spent an enjoyable few months debating who was the greater founding father.

(My dad admired Jefferson's endless curiosity, his obvious genius and, for obvious reasons, his way with words. I insisted that while Jefferson wrote beautifully about freedom and offered advice about being frugal and self-reliant, as a slave-holder who lived his life in debt, he was a hypocrite. Adams, although boastful and a bit full-of-himself, also tended to look inward and be much more critical and honest about his own faults. He was, I argued, much more genuine in his self and in his passion for other people's rights.)

Dad then became an expert on Lewis and Clark when he edited their journals for an explorers' series published by National Geographic. He wrote the introductions for the other books in the series on subjects ranging from the Incas, to the discovery of Tutankhamun's Tomb, the Oregon Trail and Amelia Earhart.

He also edited a book called "The Tragic History of the Sea, Shipwrecks from The Bible to the Titanic," which he kindly dedicated to his grandsons, Eli Gunther and Dylan Brandt.

That interest in explorers and his never-ending fascination with man's relationship with the sea, eventually wound up filling the pages of "The Man Who Ate his Boots, The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage," a very readable history focusing on the doomed efforts of Sir John Franklin, who famously led several failed missions to find the passage and win glory for the British empire.

(One can't help but notice how often the word tragic" turns up in his works.)

During his many years in Sag Harbor, an authentic sailing town on the north shore of the south fork of Long Island, dad was also a public official, serving as the chairman of the Architectural Review Board.

Dad loved living in Sag Harbor.

Lorraine served for several years on the village zoning board and talk of local politics and local issues was always high on the agenda around the dinner table.

As such, dad also wrote regular newspaper columns for the local papers, The Sag Harbor Express and The Southampton Press (although never about anything on which his board would rule, at least not while in office). He even won an award for one of his columns from the New York Press Association.

In later years, dad turned to subjects closer to home.

Dad during a reading of his poems at Canio's bookstore.

He wrote a book of short stories, which included a short memoir about his boyhood days on Long Beach Island, titled "The People Along the Shore."

In the end, he came full circle, back to where he started.

He returned to poetry.

He wrote two books of poetry, "The Fast," and "The Only Available Word."

Those who were his friends on Facebook had the opportunity to read the many poems he posted there as well as the spirit moved him.

For as long as I can remember, even after his first book came out, my father talked about writing a book about the American Dream, a subject he found endlessly fascinating. He spent a lifetime collecting books on the subject.

No Sag Harbor reading was complete without the

celebration that followed. Here is dad with Harris Yulin.

I was so happy to hear that in the last year, he finally finished it, a labor of love which had become more difficult as it became evident that over the past year he had been suffering a series of mini-strokes.

Hopefully, we will soon see it published and enjoy, for one last time, his insights on the human and American condition.

We had recently discovered that his body was riddled with prostate cancer that had spread and he refused all treatment.

He said he did not want to be drawn into the medical-industrial complex and spend thousands of dollars to stay alive for a few more days or months.

I am thankful that my sister and I were able to say our goodbyes to him and that he was at peace with the coming end. I am also thankful for his wife Lorraine who handled what needed to be handled and stayed with him as much as possible so he was not alone. That was not easy.

He was ready to go, and told us so, particularly after the most recent election results.

When I fulfilled one of his last requests and gave him a summary of the headlines in that day's New York Times, all of which were about the Trump victory and transition, and climate change-driven disasters, he smiled thinly and said "looks like I am getting out of here just in time."