'Twas the Season, Part 4

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as Santaphobia. And it looks like this kid might be a victim of the irrational fear of Santa Claus.

Some kids are really scared of Jolly Old Saint Nicolas. For starters, he’s a lot bigger than a little kid. And after all, “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good.”

Yikes. And if that’s not enough to induce some deep-seated adult neuroses, there's also the fact that you can’t keep him out of your house.

Martha Holmes shot this photo for Life magazine in 1948. I’m guessing it’s related to her other photos of the Santa Claus training session that was held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I posted a couple of shots from that a few days ago.

So it looks like this Santa had a public relations problem to deal with -- a little kid who did not like being picked up by a big hairy guy who knew his every thought and action and could come into his house at will.

How did he handle it? Check back tomorrow.

'Twas the Season, Part 3

This photo could be subtitled "The Creepy Side of Christmas." It shows an infamous and immediately recognizable dictator at his 1941 Christmas party, when he was approaching the peak of his power.

The photo was shot by Hugo Jaeger for Life magazine.

I'm posting old Christmas photos from the Web. Stay tuned for more.

'Twas the Season, Part 2

Here's a followup to yesterday's photo of the Santa seminar at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. This Santa is taking the seminar's final exam. Looks like he's working on an essay question.

The photo was made by Martha Holmes for Life magazine in 1948.

I'll be posting old Christmas photos as I come across them on the Web during the next few days.

'Twas the Season, Part 1

I’m scanning the Web for old Christmas photos and posting the ones I like.

This 1948 photo by Martha Holmes shows a training seminar for Santas at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. The Santa Claus in charge is delivering a lecture to the student Santas. Note the ash trays in front of the students. It was a different era.

This photo is from Life magazine.

I’ll be posting these for the next few days as I come across them.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Season’s Greetings.

2009 hurricane season was quiet, but 2010 season may be more active

The 2009 hurricane season, which ended yesterday, was very quiet thanks to an El Niño that created storm-suppressing wind shear over much of the Atlantic Basin. The Atlantic season produced nine named storms, three hurricanes, and two major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph.

An El Niño is a weather phenomenon produced by unusually warm waters off the northwest coast of South America. The event causes prevailing upper level winds – known as the jet stream – to shift southward over the Atlantic. The winds disrupt hurricane formation.

But meteorologists think next summer could be more active than this year because the El Niño effect probably is going to dissipate before next spring. And while the El Niño kept the lid on the Atlantic season, it was a major factor in a very active hurricane season in the Pacific. The central and eastern Pacific saw 20 named storms, including powerful Hurricane Rick, the second-most-powerful hurricane on record for the Pacific.

Meteorologists at Colorado State University also noted a few other characteristics of the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, including:

• A late-starting season. Tropical Storm Ana – the season’s first named storm – did not form until August 15. That’s the latest that the first storm formed since 1992. That year’s first storm was memorable, however, because it was Hurricane Andrew.

• The nine named storms that occurred during 2009 are the fewest since 1997 when eight named storms formed.

• There were 27.25 days during which a named storm was active. That’s the lowest number since 1991, when only 24.25 named storm days were recorded.

• Three hurricanes occurred in 2009 - the fewest hurricanes since 1997 when there were also three hurricanes.

• There were only 11.25 days during which a hurricane was active, the fewest hurricane days since 2002 when 10.75 hurricane days were reported.

• Only two major hurricanes formed during the 2009 hurricane season. The last time that fewer than two major hurricanes occurred in a season was in 1997 when only one major hurricane (Erika) formed.

• No Category 5 hurricanes developed in the Atlantic in 2009. This is the second consecutive year with no Category 5 hurricanes. The last time that two or more years occurred in a row with no Category 5 hurricanes was 1999-2002.

• No named storms formed in June or July. The last time that no storm activity occurred in June or July was 2004 (Alex formed that year on August 1). This is the 18th year of the past 66 years with no storm formations in June or July.

Gehrig, Jeter and the Age of Context-Free Sportscasters

I don’t like Tim McCarver. But if I’m going to watch any of the World Series that starts tonight, I’m going to have to put up with him.

McCarver, who was a catcher for four Major League teams from 1959 to 1980, is now a baseball broadcaster for Fox Network Sports. He’s won Emmy Awards as a sports analyst.

I don’t care. In my opinion, he’s a shallow huckster who, like so many sportscasters today, sees his job as selling a product rather than giving an accurate description of what’s happening on the field.

Last week during one of the American League Championship Series games between the Los Angeles Angels and the New York Yankees, McCarver glibly stated that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ star shortstop, has more “postseason” hits than Lou Gehrig, the Yankees’ legendary first baseman from 1923 to 1939.

That was one of those smoke-and-mirrors statistics that broadcasters today love to recite. I think they throw those kinds of stats out there to make you think that the athletes you’re seeing today are the greatest in history, and those old guys who played the game back in the prehistoric days before 1980 can’t compare to the jocks of today.

Now, Derek Jeter is a fine baseball player who will be remembered as one of the best shortstops for a team that already has two shortstops – Tony Lazzeri and Phil Rizzuto – in the Hall of Fame. Jeter almost certainly will enter the Hall the moment he becomes eligible.

And technically, Jeter does have more “postseason” hits than Gehrig. But the operative word in McCarver’s statement is “postseason.”

Jeter joined the Yankees in 1995. Since then he’s played in 132 “postseason” games, which include the elongated league playoffs as well as the World Series. To get to the World Series, a team can play in as many as 12 postseason games. The World Series could add as many as seven more games to the modern “postseason.”

Jeter has collected 164 hits in those “postseason” games. By comparison, Gehrig had only 43 “postseason” hits during his career. So if you lump all of Jeter’s postseason games together, he has more hits than Gehrig by a wide margin.

What McCarver didn’t bother to mention, however, is that Gehrig’s “postseason” games only included the World Series. When Gehrig played, there were no league playoffs preceding the World Series. The first place team in the American League played the first place team in the National League in the World Series.

Gehrig played in 34 World Series games. When you compare Jeter’s and Gehrig’s performances in World Series games – that is, when you compare apples to apples – the outcome is different. In 32 World Series games, Jeter has 39 hits – four fewer than Gehrig.

But McCarver will never provide that kind of background. He will merely spout context-free statistics that create misleading impressions about the game you’re watching. He'll tell you that Jeter has more "postseason" hits than Gehrig, but he won't tell you that Jeter has played in about four times as many "postseason" games as Gehrig did.

So if McCarver starts reciting statistics during the 2009 World Series trying to tell you that today's players are breaking longstanding records, don’t take his word for it. Look it up.

55 years ago, wailing sirens warned of Hurricane Hazel

From their small house in Cherry Grove Beach, South Carolina, a block or so from the Atlantic Ocean, Bessie Mauney and her four friends heard the sirens wailing throughout the day on Thursday, October 14, 1954. But it never occurred to them that they were in any danger.

The women were from Stanly and Rowan counties in the heart of North Carolina’s piedmont, far inland from the coast. There was not a television in the modest cottage, and they were enjoying each other’s company too much to turn on the radio or even glance at a newspaper. They were unplugged from the rest of the world.

Fifty-five years ago this morning, Mauney and her friends realized why the sirens had been blowing. In those days before The Weather Channel and satellites provided continuous coverage of hurricanes, the sirens had been a warning that Hurricane Hazel, one of the worst hurricanes in history, was headed their way. The storm’s eye came ashore on Friday, October 15, 1954 with peak winds of at least 140 mph and a storm surge that reached 18 feet in some places.

“She said they were doing a lot of talking, and they weren’t paying any attention,” recalled Bessie Mauney’s son, James Mauney, of New London, North Carolina. “They heard the sirens but they didn’t know what it meant.”

The cottage was built on stilts high enough to allow Bessie to park her 1952 Chevrolet beneath the house. But the storm surge quickly put the car underwater and sent seawater rising into the cottage. The women were trapped.

The U.S. Weather Bureau started tracking the storm that would become Hurricane Hazel on October 5, 1954. The Weather Bureau’s office in San Juan, Puerto Rico said a “small hurricane” had formed in the Atlantic about 30 miles east of the Caribbean island of Grenada.

As the storm moved westward across the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, it quickly intensified into a deadly Category 4 hurricane with winds exceeding 130 mph. By October 9, Hazel had turned sharply to the north. In Miami, Weather Bureau meteorologist Grady Norton was so worried about the powerful hurricane that he was working long hours despite a serious heart condition that had prompted his doctor to order him to take it easy. But Norton suffered a stroke while on the job and died.

On October 13, Hurricane Hazel moved through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. The storm lost some of its intensity as it crossed Haiti and the Bahamas, but quickly regained strength when it got back over open waters.

The U.S. Air Force sent a hurricane hunter flight from Bermuda to monitor Hazel on October 14. Captain William E. Harrell, who’d flown into other hurricanes, had never seen anything like what he saw that day in Hazel’s eye.

“Usually the ocean is blue or green with little cotton-white patches,” Harrell told reporters after his flight. “But the ocean on each side of the hurricane was like a sheer white sheet as far as I could see. To me, this was a phenomenal sea.”

As Hurricane Hazel moved northward paralleling the coast, the storm picked up speed and soon was racing along at almost 30 mph. Around 8 a.m. on October 15, the hurricane’s outer fringe reached North Island, South Carolina, just south of Myrtle Beach. An hour or so later, Hazel’s eye came ashore near the North Carolina-South Carolina border. Its huge storm surge was made worse because it happened to make landfall at exactly the time of the highest tide of the year along that part of the coast.

At Cherry Grove Beach, winds reached an estimated 130 mph, and seawater was three feet deep in Bessie Mauney’s cottage. Afraid that the building wouldn’t stand up to the storm, Bessie and a cousin climbed into a nearby tree. With the hurricane roaring around them, they clung to the tree for hours. Inside the house, their terrified friends climbed atop a bar to escape the water.

The storm surge lifted the cottage off its foundation and carried it away. The building held together, however, and finally came to rest in a marsh about a half-mile away. “It was well-built,” James Mauney said. “A carpenter here from New London, James Eudy, built the house in the late 1940s.”

As fierce as Hazel was at Cherry Grove Beach, the hurricane was even worse a few miles away in North Carolina. The hurricane’s eye came ashore at Oak Island around 9:30 a.m. The Coast Guard station at Oak Island estimated Hazel’s winds at 140 mph.

Bessie Mauney and her friends survived their ordeal, but it was two days before she was reunited with her family back in Richfield. Eventually, the cottage was returned to its lot at Cherry Grove Beach, and James Mauney said it’s still there today.

Hurricane Hazel is still the worst hurricane to strike North Carolina.

"All traces of civilization on that portion of the immediate waterfront between the state line and Cape Fear were practically annihilated,” the U.S. Weather Bureau later reported. The storm killed more than 600 people from Haiti to Canada, and caused more than $2.6 billion in damages in today’s dollars.

Bessie Mauney’s ordeal during Hurricane Hazel had a powerful effect on her, and she and her husband sold their interest in the cottage.

“My mom said she didn’t want to go to the beach anymore,” James Mauney said. “I don’t think she ever went back to the beach. It really shook her up.”

Photo of historical marker by J.J. Prats, from The Historical Marker Database

UVa 16, UNC 3 (dammit)

To my niece Patty at the University of Virginia

Dear Patty:

Here’s the photo of me wearing a UVa T-shirt to pay off the bet we made a couple weeks ago during the trip to Richmond. I have a bag over my head because I was frankly embarrassed by the Tar Heels’ performance yesterday, or, rather, their lack of performance.

I don’t know who the geniuses were that ranked UNC in the Top 25 at the start of the season, but they clearly don’t know beans about football. Carolina did win their first three games, but they weren’t exactly playing powerhouses – The Citadel, Connecticut, and ECU. And when the real season starts, they lose to Georgia Tech and then UVa.

So I think the Tar Heels were very overrated. They can’t even beat a team that lost to William & Mary, for chrissakes.

Oh well, basketball practice starts in a few weeks.

Hope to see you soon,
Willie

Looking for Captain Q-Tip

I lived briefly in Richmond, Virginia after I got out of the Army, and I’ve had a deep affection for the city ever since.

It’s got problems – some of them identical to other larger cities, some of them unique to Richmond. But it’s also a colorful, quirky old city with deep history and some fascinating neighborhoods.

I lived in a neighborhood known as The Fan, a residential district that was started soon after the Civil War ended in 1865 and much of Richmond was rebuilt. The neighborhood gets its name from the fact that it’s shaped roughly like the old-fashioned fans that were used in churches on hot days before air conditioning.

Richmond is full of statues, and when I lived there, one of the neighborhood landmarks was a statue of a Civil War soldier that was nicknamed Captain Q-Tip. The statue actually was a memorial to a Confederate artillery company known as the Richmond Howitzers. But you can tell at a glance how Captain Q-Tip got his name. An often-heard phrase when I lived in The Fan was “Meet me at Captain Q-Tip.”

I went looking for the Captain on a recent weekend trip to Richmond with my wife, my mother-in-law Shirley Morrow, and our niece Patty Morrow, who’s a junior at the University of Virginia. But it’s been many years since I was in the old neighborhood, and I couldn’t find the statue. I also discovered that new construction by Virginia Commonwealth University has dramatically changed the landscape of several city blocks in The Fan.

So I started wondering if perhaps Captain Q-Tip had become a victim of VCU’s progress. Finally, I saw a man and a woman that were old enough to have lived in Richmond for a while.

I interrupted their conversation and asked if they knew of a nearby statue of a Civil War soldier holding an artillery swab. They looked puzzled. “We used to call him Captain Q-Tip,” I said.

They smiled. “I’ve never heard it called that, but I can see where the name came from,” the woman said.

Turned out I was less than two blocks from the Captain. Patty shot the above photo of my reunion with my old friend.

Dairy farmer recalls working while Hurricane Hugo howled

Twenty years ago, an old friend in Richfield, North Carolina was trying to get his dairy herd milked while Hurricane Hugo roared around him.

I’ve known Butch Brooks since we were in the first grade together. He’s now running his family’s dairy farm near Richfield, which is 186 miles inland from Charleston, South Carolina. Hugo made landfall at Charleston around midnight on September 21, 1989 with peak winds exceeding 135 mph and a storm surge of about 20 feet.

The people in Richfield and other towns in the rolling hills of North Carolina’s southwestern Piedmont don’t usually concern themselves with hurricane warnings. But Hugo was a very unusual hurricane in many ways. The storm was what is sometimes called a “bulldozer” hurricane – a storm that retains much of its power after making landfall and causes unusually severe damage as it moves inland.

Butch had been following news reports of Hugo’s landfall in Charleston. Forecasters said the storm would pass over the area around Richfield – about 40 miles northeast of Charlotte – around daybreak on September 22. So Butch and his crew started work around 2:30 a.m. to try to get the herd of 180 dairy cows milked before Hugo arrived.

It seemed like a good plan, but the storm moved faster than forecasters expected. Butch and his workers had just started the milking process when Hugo reached them. They’d been working for about an hour when the electricity went out, shutting down the milking machines.

Hugo’s winds were still blowing at around 85 mph when it reached North Carolina, and some residents recalled later that the air smelled like they were at the beach.

The milking crew hooked a portable electric generator to the power takeoff of a tractor and kept the milking machines going. Trees and a few small buildings were going down around them as they worked in the dairy barn. “Debris was flying around through the air,” Butch said.

Postponing the milking until the storm passed wasn’t an option. If cows aren’t milked, it can cause serious health problems or perhaps even kill them, Brooks said.

But Butch’s wife Wanda wasn’t happy about her husband being out in the middle of a howling hurricane. She and their kids rode out Hugo in their basement. Wanda later told me that, as the storm roared outside, she thought to herself, half joking and half seriously, “If (Butch) lives through this, I’ll kill him.”

It took about four hours to get the herd milked. They finished about 6:30 a.m. just as Hugo was finishing its destructive work in Stanly County and moving into the North Carolina mountains. Trees had been blown down across his pasture fences and a couple of small buildings had been destroyed, but no people or animals had been hurt.

Hurricane Hugo cut a path of devastation through the Carolinas and was the most expensive hurricane on record at the time. The storm killed seven people and did about $1 billion worth of damage in North Carolina alone. The total death toll from Hugo in the U.S. and Caribbean was 76, and damages totaled about $10 billion.

Butch said Wanda hasn’t forgotten that September morning 20 years ago. “She reminds me of it rather often, her idiot husband who went out in the middle of a hurricane,” he said.

Hurricane Floyd brought epic flooding to North Carolina

Ten years ago, Hurricane Floyd came ashore at Cape Fear, North Carolina, bringing flooding of epic proportions. Before the waters receded, the little town of Princeville and parts of several other towns would be underwater, and rescuers in boats and helicopters would pluck 1,500 people from roofs across eastern North Carolina.

Hurricane Floyd became one of the most expensive disasters in the state’s history. But the stage was set for Floyd’s devastation by a nearly forgotten storm that lingered over the state a couple of weeks earlier. Hurricane Dennis soaked the Outer Banks and eastern North Carolina, moved offshore, then looped around and gave the same area a second dousing. The ground was saturated with at least 10 inches of rain from Dennis when Floyd came ashore.

Hurricane Floyd formed from a tropical wave that moved off the west coast of Africa on September 2, 1999. Floyd got its start in the infamous spawning grounds of monster hurricanes near the Cape Verde Islands. “Floyd was a classic Cape Verde storm, very large, one of the largest I can remember,” recalled Rusty Pfost, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Miami.

By September 12, Floyd had developed into a major hurricane. I was in the Florida Keys working on research with historian Jerry Wilkinson. Around 6 a.m. on the morning of Monday, September 13, 1999, Jerry and I checked The Weather Channel. Floyd’s peak winds were approaching 150 mph, and it had turned toward the Bahamas and the Keys.

Jerry and I stared at each other for a moment. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said.

I helped Jerry and Mary board up their house on Key Largo. Around 9:30 a.m. I started one of the eeriest journeys of my life.

As I drove northward from the Keys up the Florida peninsula, Floyd was ripping into the Bahamas with winds of around 155 mph. It seemed that I was just ahead of a rippling wave of fear. When I stopped for gas, lines were starting to form at the pumps. Interstate 95 was gradually getting more crowded. I got the feeling that if I stopped for even a few minutes, I’d be engulfed by traffic. So I kept moving.

I stopped for the night in Darien, Georgia, about 60 miles south of Savannah. I was back on the road early the next morning. Behind me, Floyd had turned and was menacing the southeast coast from Jacksonville north. What would become the largest peacetime evacuation in U.S. history was starting. During the next two days, more than 2.3 million people from Florida to Maryland would move inland. In South Carolina, Interstate 26 from Charleston to Columbia was gridlocked.

Rain was falling steadily when I reached eastern North Carolina, and in some places secondary roads were already underwater because the ground couldn’t absorb any more water. That seemed ominous.

The hurricane’s eye passed over Plymouth around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, September 16. By that time, the storm’s winds had diminished dramatically. Around 9:30 a.m. we lost power, but it was back on by 3 p.m. Other than the brief power outage and a few tree limbs down, we saw little effects from Hurricane Floyd in Plymouth.

Still, the storm dumped around 20 inches of rain on ground still saturated from Dennis. The results were devastating. Everything around us seemed to be underwater. But we were high and dry in Plymouth.

I heard later that we’d stayed above water here because the Roanoke River’s floodplain has not been altered by development. When Floyd’s floodwaters came downstream, the water spread out into the Roanoke’s natural wetlands. So we were untouched in Plymouth. But if we’d wanted to go to Raleigh, about 120 miles west on U.S. 64, we’d have had to drive north into Virginia and then turn back into North Carolina to get around the swollen rivers and flooded roads.

It was weeks before the waters receded and the cleanup could begin.

The Wilmington (N.C) Star-News reported Hurricane Floyd’s grim stats:

· 35 people killed in North Carolina, most of them drowning in freshwater. A total of 57 people died during Hurricane Floyd in the U.S. and Bahamas.

· Spectacular livestock losses in North Carolina, including 2.1 million chickens, 753,000 turkeys, and 21,500 hogs.

· $6 billion in damages in North Carolina.

· 7,000 North Carolina homes destroyed, 17,000 homes uninhabitable, and 56,000 homes damaged.

Photo: NOAA satellite photo shows Hurricane Floyd approaching U.S.

1935 flight of first hurricane hunter has been forgotten

Seventy-four years ago today, Leonard Povey climbed into the cockpit of a tiny fighter plane and went in search of one of the most powerful forces ever to roam the Atlantic Ocean.

Povey found his quarry in the Straits of Florida – the storm that became the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, still the most powerful to make landfall in the United States. It was almost certainly the first time that an airplane was used to track a hurricane. But Povey’s historic flight has been forgotten.

Povey was an American who was a flight instructor for the Cuban army air force. He was based in Havana. Cuban authorities decided to send Povey in search of the hurricane because there were conflicting predictions about its position and forecast track. The U.S. Weather Bureau – the predecessor to today’s National Weather Service – said the storm’s center was just off Cuba’s northern coast and would make landfall at or near Havana. But barometers in Havana were rising, an indication that the hurricane was moving away from that city.

“Conflicting reports of Havana observers kept the capital in jitters most of the day,” the Havana Post, an English-language newspaper in the city, reported in its edition of September 3, 1935. “One of the reports said that the hurricane would strike here at 6 p.m.”

So on the afternoon of Monday, September 2, 1935, Povey was dispatched to locate the storm.

The Post said that Povey made his flight in an “army pursuit plane.” He confirmed that the hurricane had turned to the north and was moving away from Cuba and toward the Florida Keys.

The Associated Press wrote about Povey’s flight a few weeks later, and the story was published by newspapers in Florida, including the Miami Herald. The story, published in the Herald on September 23, 1935, included a few quotes from Povey about his flight.

“I was unable to fly close to the disturbance, visible to me for miles,” Povey said. “It appeared to be a cone-shaped body of clouds, inverted, rising to an altitude of 12,000 feet. The waves in the sea below broke against each other like striking a sea wall.”

Povey didn’t try to fly into the hurricane’s eye, as hurricane-hunters do today.

The storm’s eye made landfall a few hours later at Long Key, Florida. Its lowest recorded barometric pressure reading at landfall was 26.35 inches, or 892 millibars, making it the most intense hurricane on record for the U.S. The storm’s winds – thought to have been around 200 mph – and its storm surge of 18 feet or more devastated a 40-mile section of the Keys from Tavernier to Marathon and killed more than 400 people. The death toll included about 260 World War I veterans who were working on a New Deal construction project building a highway between Miami and Key West.

Povey suggested that airplanes be used to monitor hurricanes. But there’s no indication that anyone followed up on his suggestion. In 1944, however, military pilots based in Texas flew into a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. By that time, Povey’s pioneering flight had been forgotten, and the 1944 flight is regarded as the first time an airplane was used to track a tropical storm.

Quiet summers can produce a monster hurricane

The forecast for the 2009 hurricane season predicts a calmer summer than we’ve usually had in the past decade or so. But very powerful storms have formed in summers that have been otherwise very quiet.

The forecast for this summer from William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University predicts 11 named tropical storms forming by November 30, when hurricane season ends. Five or so of those storms are expected to strengthen into hurricanes with winds of at least 74 miles an hour. And two of the hurricanes are expected to intensify into major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 miles an hour.

That’s slightly above the average for hurricane seasons since 1851. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website says that an average of nine tropical storms, five hurricanes and two major hurricanes have formed each summer for the past 158 years.

But a quick look at NOAA’s hurricane archives reveals some worrisome statistics about below-average hurricane seasons.

First, two of the three most powerful hurricanes to strike the United States formed in seasons when there was very little activity otherwise. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the United States, formed in a summer that saw only six total tropical systems – far below the 158-year average. That’s the same number of tropical storms that formed in 1992. But 1992 also produced Hurricane Andrew, the third-most powerful hurricane at landfall.

Only Hurricane Camille, which became the second-most intense storm to make landfall in 1969, came out of a very active season. That year, 18 tropical storms formed.

There’s more unsettling info among the list of other very intense hurricanes that have made landfall in the United States.

· The summer of 1900 produced only seven tropical storms. But one of those storms became the Category 4 killer hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas and killed 6,000 or more people.
· In the summer of 1915, only six tropical storms formed. But one of them intensified into a Category 4 hurricane that struck New Orleans and Galveston.
· Only five tropical storms formed in 1919. But one of them was a Category 4 bruiser that devastated Key West and crossed the Gulf Coast to strike Texas.
· In 1928, six tropical storms formed. But among them was another infamous Category 4 killer, the so-called “Okeechobee hurricane” that came ashore at Palm Beach, roared across the Everglades, and shoved a deadly flood out of Lake Okeechobee. That storm killed perhaps 3,000 in the small lakeside towns.
· In 1960, Category 4 Hurricane Donna followed a track very similar to the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, making landfall in the Florida Keys. Only seven tropical storms formed that summer.

Powerful and deadly hurricanes also formed in seasons that saw exactly the same activity as is predicted for this year.

Hurricane Hazel, the most intense hurricane on record for North Carolina, formed in 1954. Eleven tropical storms formed that year. And Hurricane Hugo, a devastating Category 4 hurricane that made landfall near Charleston, South Carolina, formed in 1989, a summer that also saw 11 total tropical storms.

I don’t know that there’s a correlation between quiet hurricane seasons and very intense storms. But this list of murderous monsters that blew away otherwise quiet summers is a pretty clear indication that residents on the Southeast and Gulf coasts should keep a wary eye on the Atlantic for the next few months.

Facing the realities of war

The United States had been involved in World War II for about 18 months when Life magazine published an issue focusing on American casualties. In its edition of July 5, 1943, Life reported that 12,987 Americans had been killed since the United States entered the war in December 1941.

The magazine’s cover showed Army Air Corps soldiers carrying the flag-draped coffin of a fallen comrade to a grave in Tunisia. The photo was seen by millions of Life readers. Life also devoted 23 pages of that issue to listing the name of every armed forces member who’d been killed in combat.

“As a nation, the U.S. is not accustomed to big war casualties,” an accompanying story said. “Not since the Civil War has its manpower been seriously weakened by battle losses.”

Yet Life’s editors thought that Americans were strong enough to see a photo of a dead soldier’s coffin and 23 pages of names and hometowns of those killed in action. And the magazine’s editors also noted that combat deaths were going to rapidly increase. “During most of that time, it has been on the defensive, fighting only when necessary, building up its strength,” the editors wrote. “When the great, offensive battles come, its casualties will mount.”

They were right. When World War II ended in 1945, more than 416,000 American soldiers and sailors had been killed.

In other issues throughout the war, Life also published photos of American combat dead on the battlefield. And newspapers across the nation published a daily list of war deaths.

That’s a stark contrast to the policy put in place when United States troops invaded Iraq in 2003. Photos of flag-draped coffins of the Iraq war dead have been prohibited.

That’s a bad policy, one that is intended to sanitize the war and hide its grim realities from the American public. And instead of protecting the privacy of families who have lost someone in the war, it’s an insult to them. Their loss and sacrifice goes unnoticed.

But that may be about to change.

The New York Times reported yesterday that 69 percent of respondents to a recent poll want the photo ban lifted. And in his speech to a joint session of Congress last night, President Obama noted that the United States has been at war for seven years. “No longer will we hide its price,” he said.

Maybe that statement is an advance notice that the ban will be lifted. It’s time to face the realities of war. We were strong enough to face it during World War II, and we need to know that we’re still strong enough for it.

You're never too old to have some fun

Our cat, Beau, isn't as agile and lively as he was in 1993, when we got him as a kitten from the animal shelter in Fort Pierce, Florida. He'll be 16 in a month or so, and that's roughly equivalent to age 80 for humans.

But like the grandfather who still enjoys a couple of stiff vodka martinis from time to time, our old pal still knows how to catch a buzz once in a while. He's always had a decided fondness for catnip, and Jane brought in a couple of fresh bags last night.

I seriously doubt that I'll be able to lie down and rabbit-kick like this if I live to be 80, but I do hope to still be enjoying my vodka martinis.

Site where racial barrier was broken is now blocked by a wall

Jackie Robinson had quite a day when his Montreal Royals went to New Jersey to open the 1946 International League season against the Jersey City Giants before a sellout crowd of 25,000 fans in Roosevelt Stadium.

Robinson, playing his first game as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class AAA farm team, banged out four hits in five trips to the plate, including a three-run home run in the third inning. Montreal, the Dodgers’ Class AAA farm team in the International League, pounded Jersey City 14-1.

Robinson’s debut with the Royals had a much greater significance than his impressive performance on the field, however. Roosevelt Stadium became the site of the first regular-season game in which an African-American player took the field as a member of a previously all-white professional baseball team. That was huge news in 1946, when the U.S. was essentially a segregated society.

Robinson became the first black player in the Major Leagues the following year when he was promoted to Brooklyn. He was named the National League Rookie of the Year in 1947 and played 10 seasons with the Dodgers. Robinson was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1962.

But Robinson made a contribution to our nation that went far beyond the statistics he compiled as a player. His Major League career broke through the wall of segregation and became a milestone in the civil rights movement. So Robinson’s presence in that nearly forgotten game 63 years ago makes Roosevelt Stadium a legitimate historical landmark just as much as the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina became a landmark after the 1960 sit-ins protesting the store’s refusal to serve black customers.


That Woolworth’s lunch counter is now in the Smithsonian Institution. But Roosevelt Stadium is long gone and all but forgotten. When my brother-in-law Bob Morrow, my nephew John Morrow and I went on our third annual post-Christmas search for ballparks of yesteryear, we found only a few scant reminders of the old stadium.

During the past two Decembers, John, Bob and I have visited the sites of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The Ebbets Field trek was posted on Jeff Houck’s lively blog, SideSalad, and can be seen at http://sidesalad.net/archives/003056.html.

You can see the story of last year's visit to the Polo Grounds in the Drye Goods entry of January 5, 2008. Each time, I shot a photo of John standing in front of a marker denoting the sites of the stadiums.

I think we’ve discovered a definite trend about what happens to old baseball parks. Like Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, Roosevelt Stadium is now multi-family housing. Unlike the sites of the old New York ballparks, however, there’s no public marker designating the spot where Jackie Robinson started changing the world. Or if there is, the public can’t see it. What once was Roosevelt Stadium is now a gated community called Society Hill.

The guard at the Society Hill gatehouse told us that a stadium had once been there but we couldn’t enter. So instead of the usual picture of John standing in front of a marker, I got a shot of him standing in front of the wall that separates Society Hill from the rest of the world. As near as I can figure, the stadium’s centerfield wall would have been maybe 300 feet behind John, and home plate would have been 700 feet or so from where he’s standing.

The Associated Press photo at the top of this entry shows teammate George Shuba greeting Robinson as he touches home plate after his home run. In those days before high-fives and fist bumps, a handshake was the standard post-home-run greeting of congratulation.

Sixty years after that handshake, New York Times writer George Anderson wrote about the importance of the moment when, for the first time, a white player congratulated a black teammate for hitting a home run. For Shuba, the gesture was automatic.

“Our teammate hit a home run so I shook his hand,” Shuba told Anderson in the 2006 Times story. “It didn’t make any difference to me that Jack was black. I was glad to have him on our team.”

Anderson also reported that Shuba had had a framed copy of that photo hanging in his living room for 40 years.

We found a copy of that AP photo in a Capital One Bank at the Stadium Plaza shopping center near Society Hill. The photo is one of several large pictures of Roosevelt Stadium displayed in the bank’s lobby. But the bank manager wouldn’t let me take shots of those photos without getting permission from her boss, and we didn’t have time to wait for that.

The only other reminder of the ballpark we found was Stadium Pizza, a restaurant in the shopping center.

Roosevelt Stadium was built on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula known as Droyer’s Point that juts into Newark Bay. The ballpark was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration program that was intended to put Americans back to work during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was designed by architect Christian Ziegler and was considered a prime example of Depression-era Art Deco architecture.

When the stadium opened in 1937, Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the law” Hague decreed that it would be named Roosevelt Stadium in honor of the president. John P. Gallagher, who was a boy at the time, wrote in a 1984 letter to the editor of the New York Times that “Roosevelt Stadium was our sports palace, playground and pride.” It became one of minor league baseball’s premier ballparks. In addition to hosting the game in which Robinson broke baseball’s racial barrier, the stadium was the site of 14 Brooklyn Dodgers’ home games in 1956 and 1957.

After the 1957 season, the Dodgers announced they were moving to Los Angeles. Jersey City officials scrambled to keep Major League baseball in Roosevelt Stadium, trying to persuade the Pittsburgh Pirates, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds to play some of their home games there. But all three teams refused the offer.

The New York Giants of the National Football League played a few exhibition games at the stadium in the early 1960s, and it was used for minor league baseball off and on until 1978, when it was abandoned. By the mid-1980s, Roosevelt Stadium had fallen into serious disrepair.

In 1984, the decaying ballpark was torn down. In his Times letter, John P. Gallagher lamented the destruction of his boyhood memory and had strong criticism for the forces that allowed the stadium to be demolished.

“Yet in our hearts we'll wonder what kind of a society we live in that has so little respect for tradition and destroys the structures that house them . . . .,” Gallagher wrote.

Shumaker saw newspapers' current problems coming decades ago

The Chicago Tribune and its affiliate publications are in bankruptcy, and somewhere in the Great Newsroom in the Sky, Jim Shumaker is shaking his head and muttering a few profanities.

At least, that’s what I want to believe, because the Tribune has long been known as a hard-nosed newspaper, and Shumaker was the epitome of the hard-nosed journalist. But if he were still alive, he wouldn’t let the above lede see the light of publication unless I’d confirmed that not only had he been shaking his head, but I could also quote in exact detail the profanities he’d used.

There’s deep trouble among newspapers across the U.S. Besides the Trib’s bankruptcy, the New York Times is essentially mortgaging its mid-town Manhattan home to keep afloat. And the Miami Herald, once a bastion of journalism excellence, reportedly is up for sale because its owner, the McClatchy Company, also is having cash-flow problems.

Newspapers are suffering from a steep decline in advertising revenue caused by both the emergence of the Internet and the current economic crisis. But there are other reasons, including dramatic changes in the national psyche and our sense of priorities. And Shumaker saw at least part of the change coming decades ago.

As a reporter and editor from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, Shumaker was fearless, stubborn, and driven to find the truth and report it accurately. He hated pomposity and pretense. And he had little use for reporters who avoided the vital nuts-and-bolts news stories and cherry-picked high-profile glamour stories with an eye toward winning awards.

Shumaker was a legend at the University of North Carolina when I was in school there. I wanted badly to get into his news reporting class, but it always filled up.

But I was lucky enough to become friends with him in the mid-1980s when I was managing editor of the News of Orange County, a county seat weekly in nearby Hillsborough. I’d drop by his office on the UNC campus every week or so. By that time, Shumaker had achieved an odd form of celebrity thanks to cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, one of Shumaker’s former students. MacNelly was the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip “Shoe,” which starred an ill-tempered, quick-witted, sneaker-wearing bird named P. Martin Shoemaker, who was editor of the Treetops Tattler-Tribune.

Everyone around the UNC J-school knew that Shumaker had been the inspiration for MacNelly’s irascible bird/editor. But for the first few years of the strip’s life, the quickest way to get cussed out and booted from Shumaker’s office was to mention the comic strip in his presence.

By the time I started hanging out in Shumaker’s office, he’d accepted the link between himself and the cartoon bird. MacNelly had given Shumaker one of the original drawings for a Sunday “Shoe” strip, and Shumaker had framed it and hung it in his office in Howell Hall. Still, he referred to the strip’s main character as “the buzzard.”

During one of my visits, the subject of journalism awards came up, and Shumaker snorted. Awards mean nothing, he said. He told me about the time he’d been asked by the Florida Press Association to pick three winners from among dozens of news stories submitted by Florida newspapers. “Like a damn fool, I agreed to do it,” he said.

Soon, a big box of newspaper clips arrived. Shumaker opened the box, glanced at the contents, and shoved the box into a corner of his office.

Time passed. The Florida Press Association sent a polite letter gently reminding Shumaker of his obligation to pick three winners from among the entries. He ignored the letter. A second letter, not quite so polite, came to his office. He ignored that one as well.

Finally, a letter that was blunt enough to impress even Shumaker arrived. But it also made him angry. He hauled the box from the corner and dumped the contents into a pile on the floor. “I reached into the pile and started pulling out clips,” he said. “I said, ‘This is first place, this is second place, and this is third place.’ They never asked me to be a judge again.”

Shumaker also was bothered by the students he was seeing in his classes in the mid-‘80s. They weren’t taking his reporting classes to become news hounds. They wanted to learn to manipulate the news, and they wanted to be paid more than they could earn as reporters.

“They all want to go into (bleeping) public relations,” Shumaker said.

Shumaker was still a member of the UNC faculty when he died of cancer in 2000. By that time, what had been the School of Journalism had been reconfigured and re-named the School of Journalism and Mass Communication – a concession, I assume, to the growing trend of managing the news instead of reporting it.

A couple of years ago, I had lunch in Chapel Hill with Phil Meyer, whose advanced reporting class I’d taken at UNC. Before joining the UNC faculty, Meyer was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in the old Knight Ridder chain. Meyer isn’t as earthy and profane as Shumaker was, but he is every bit the old-school journalist that Shumaker had been.

Our conversation eventually came around to Shumaker. Meyer said that Shumaker had been upset by the changes in the J-School and what he perceived as the dwindling number of old-fashioned journalists on the faculty.

The reasons why newspapers are struggling are complex and varied. But as Shumaker had noted, the roots of the current mess go back at least 25 years, when newspapers began turning away from substantial, in-depth journalism and started focusing more on bottom lines and superficial reporting.

The photo of Jim Shumaker is from the web page http://parklibrary.jomc.unc.edu/shuendow.html

Fort Laramie was a crossroads of the Old West

For much of the 19th century, Fort Laramie, Wyoming was, depending on your point of view, an island of civilization and safety in the trackless prairie or a persistent reminder that your world was steadily being taken away from you.

If you were headed west on the Oregon Trail on a five-month journey to the California gold fields in 1850, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. You could get a brief rest, have a blacksmith make repairs to your wagon, and stock up on canned goods and other necessities for the rest of your journey.

But if you belonged to one of the Plains tribes of Native Americans, Fort Laramie was a major source of trouble.

The old Army post is now Fort Laramie National Historic Site. I visited there with my sister and brother-in-law a few weeks ago, and was fascinated by the place.

The vista of the surrounding prairie can’t have changed much since the days when troops were stationed there. You’re still in the middle of nowhere, with only brown prairie grass and the trees that line the banks of the Laramie River for scenery. Despite the isolation, however, Fort Laramie was a crossroads of history. Mark Twain, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Wyatt Earp, “Calamity Jane” Cannary, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody were among the thousands who visited the fort or passed through on stagecoaches.

I expected to see the Hollywood version of an Old West fort – the rustic timber palisade with blockhouses at each corner. But Fort Laramie never had a palisade.

Only walls remain of many of the old buildings, but several have been restored to their approximate 19th century appearances.


The barracks, above, housed a company of soldiers.


The sleeping quarters were on the second floor . . .


. . . and mess hall was on the ground floor.



A couple of the officers’ residences also have been restored. This is the entrance to one of them. The house was built in 1884, only a few years before the fort was closed.


This shows the dining room table as it might have appeared for Sunday dinner around 1887.


It was a warm day when we visited Fort Laramie, and I came across this juvenile rattlesnake sunning himself on the graveled walking path. He looks bigger in the photo than he actually was because there’s nothing else to provide perspective. But he was too young to even have his rattle, which the snakes don’t acquire until they start shedding their skins.

There were small signs warning visitors to watch out for rattlers if they ventured off the walking path. I’m sure the soldiers at Fort Laramie had to keep constant watch for them.

The photo at the top of this entry shows soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie in the late 19th century.

Did you vote?

This rustic little community building is a polling place in Martin County, North Carolina. It's just off U.S. 64 a few miles east of Williamston.

Everything I've read says the turnout today is going to be phenomenal. The small parking area was crowded, and people were coming and going while I stopped to shoot these photos around 2 p.m.

Thank God, it'll be over soon

(Saturday Evening Post cover, "Undecided," by Norman Rockwell, November 4, 1944)

Cold, Wet World Series

Today’s weather forecast for Philadelphia predicts a high of 47 degrees and a 100 percent likelihood of rain. Or there could be some snow mixed in there.

So forget about the Philadelphia Phillies and Tampa Bay Rays completing game five of the World Series today. After playing most of last night’s game in a steady and undoubtedly chilling rain, the contest was suspended in the sixth inning with the score tied 2-2.

Major League baseball officials hope to resume the game tomorrow night. There’s a 20 percent chance of precipitation Wednesday, but even if it’s bone dry, the forecast high is only 49 degrees. If the thermometer does get that high, it’ll be sometime during the day. So that means the temperature at game time undoubtedly will be lower than that, and rapidly falling toward the forecast low of 34.

But the game will have to be completed somehow, even if it means playing it in below-freezing conditions.

Major League baseball’s expanded postseason is partly to blame for presenting the ridiculous sight of players wearing caps with earflaps in near-freezing weather. The two teams that meet in the World Series after winning division and league playoffs could be playing as many as 19 postseason games spread over three weeks after the regular season ends, usually around October 1.

The expanded playoffs undoubtedly have stimulated fan interest in Major League baseball because there are now eight teams chasing a World Series berth. But the expanded playoff has meant that the postseason has been extended to Halloween, and huge TV revenues have dictated that most of the games be played at night. And playing night baseball in late autumn means that there’s a very good chance that the conditions are going to be wretched.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If Major League teams played more doubleheaders during the regular season, the expanded postseason playoffs could begin earlier and be completed by mid-October at the latest.

Doubleheaders once were a fan’s delight and a manager’s headache. The fans loved them because they got two games for the price of one, and the managers hated them because having to play two games in one day caused havoc with their pitching rotations. But it was just part of the game. The good managers figured out a way to accommodate the problem and still win more games than they lost.

In 1958, the Philadelphia Phillies played 18 doubleheaders. Those twin bills accounted for 36 games – about 23 percent – of the 154-game schedule that MLB teams played at the time. The Phillies’ 1958 schedule included two dates when they played doubleheaders two days in a row.

On July 27, 1958, the Phils played two games in Los Angeles against the Dodgers. The following day, they were in San Francisco for a pair of games against the Giants. On August 31, the Phillies went to Cincinnati for a doubleheader against the Reds, and the next day they traveled to Pittsburgh for another doubleheader against the Pirates.

Some teams played even more doubleheaders in 1958. The New York Yankees, for example, played 21.

By contrast, the Phillies played only two doubleheaders during the season just completed – on September 7 in New York against the Mets, and on September 15 in Philadelphia against the Milwaukee Brewers.

If today’s teams played only 12 doubleheaders, that presumably would eliminate 12 playing dates and allow the regular season to be finished by mid-September. The playoffs could then start around September 18, and even if the World Series went seven games, it would be over before mid-October and the inevitable cold, chilly rains.

But, of course, that’s not likely to happen. MLB isn’t going to give up the revenue from 12 dates that would be lost to doubleheaders, and the Major League Players Association probably wouldn’t go along with it either.

So we’re stuck with the sight of players wearing caps with earflaps in the World Series and seeing their breath as they try to warm their hands between pitches. It’s an odd way for the so-called boys of summer to finish the season. (AP Photo: Philadelphia ground crew rolls out the tarp after umpires suspended the game.)

The kid quarterback with the cool name

Any time Notre Dame comes to town to play football, it’s a big game for the home team. The Fighting Irish will be in Chapel Hill tomorrow, October 11, to take on UNC, so, ipso facto, it’s one of the biggest games on the Tar Heels’ schedule in years.

I was in the stands at Kenan Stadium when Notre Dame played Carolina exactly 33 years ago tomorrow, and it was a game I’ll never forget. The Irish had a young sophomore quarterback with one of the most colorful names I’ve ever heard. More about that guy in a moment.

Carolina came into the game with a record of 2-2, but the wins had come against the likes of William & Mary – not exactly a football powerhouse – and Virginia, which was the doormat of the ACC in those days. UNC would finish the season at 3-7-1. The Irish came into the game ranked 15th in the nation, and they’d finish the season 8-3. So the Heels really had no business being on the same field with Notre Dame.

But something strange and inexplicable happened that day. The game was scoreless at halftime. Notre Dame – the school of “wake up the echoes” where the so-called “Touchdown Jesus” mural overlooks the football stadium – had been held scoreless by a North Carolina defense that had allowed lowly Virginia to score four touchdowns a week earlier.

In the third quarter, what had been merely strange became truly bizarre. UNC scored twice. And somehow, the Tar Heel defense still held deep into the fourth quarter. With eight minutes left in the game, the 50,000 or so fans who’d crammed into a stadium with 48,000 seats were staring in disbelief at the scoreboard. It said, “North Carolina 14, Notre Dame 0.”

Then Notre Dame quarterback Rick Slagger threw a short touchdown pass to Ted Burgmeier. The Irish tried a two-point conversion but failed. So now it was 14-6.

Later, I realized that what happened next probably was inevitable. In addition to players and coaches, Notre Dame had priests patrolling their sideline. And they had nuns cheering them on behind the end zone. And they had a coach whose last name was “Devine,” for God’s sake.

I’m sure it would be improper to use the phrase “praying their asses off” in reference to priests and nuns, but I have no doubt that something like that was going on among Notre Dame’s sizable contingent of clerical supporters during the game’s final minutes. How are you going to beat a team that has that kind of pull?

Then Devine put in that quarterback who had the world’s most perfect name for a football hero. When his name was announced over the PA system, I remember thinking, No, that can’t really be that guy’s name. And then, in the blink of 100,000 eyes, the kid led the Irish to two scores, including a game-winning 80-yard touchdown pass with one minute showing on the clock.

Final score: Notre Dame 21, North Carolina 14.

It wasn’t until years later when that quarterback had become a household name among even casual sports fans that I realized that maybe Divine Intervention hadn’t been entirely responsible for Notre Dame’s last-minute game winning comeback. See, that Notre Dame kid with the perfect name for a football player was Joe Montana. And after that game in Chapel Hill, Montana made a specialty of pulling out games in the last minute during an NFL career that led him to the Hall of Fame.

So as I said, it was a memorable game – so memorable that I still have the ticket stub.

Football Saturday

A fall Saturday. Across the country, fans are gathering to watch football. Today’s matchups feature such fierce traditional rivalries as Michigan State vs. Indiana, Purdue vs. Notre Dame, Georgia vs. Alabama, and Edenton vs. Plymouth.

I shot this photo earlier today at a county recreation department football field that’s a short walk from where we live. The kids in the blue T-shirts are from Edenton, which is on the other side of the Albemarle Sound from Plymouth. The Plymouth team is wearing the white T-shirts.

The youngster with the ball picked up a nice gain on this run. And in case you’re wondering what the grownup is doing on the field, the rules allow coaches to be on the field to position their young players before each play.

The teams are playing flag football. A defender stops a ball carrier by grabbing one of the streamers on the other player’s belt.

Plymouth was leading 8-0 when I had to leave.

Eighty years ago, a night of terror

Eighty years ago tonight, thousands of people around Lake Okeechobee were dying horrible deaths. The most powerful hurricane on record up to that time was shoving water out of the giant, shallow saucer of a lake and inundating several small lakeside towns. Most of the deaths occurred in Pahokee, Belle Glade and South Bay.

Thousands were killed – so many that it took almost 80 years to count them all. For years, the official U.S. death toll was placed at 1,833. But in his 2002 book, Black Cloud: The Great Florida Hurricane of 1928, author Eliot Kleinberg says that as many as 4,000 may have been killed in the U.S. – most of them during that awful night of September 16, 1928.

The death toll rises to a staggering 7,000 when you add those killed during the hurricane’s earlier rampage through the Caribbean Sea.

The hurricane made its U.S. landfall at Palm Beach around 6 p.m. on September 16, 1928 and moved westward across the Everglades to Lake Okeechobee. Most of the victims who were killed by lake flooding were black migrant workers who were harvesting fall crops at the productive vegetable farms near the lake. They were buried in an unmarked mass grave in West Palm Beach and promptly forgotten. In his book, Kleinberg discusses the racial aspects of the tragedy.

I asked Kleinberg – who also writes for the Palm Beach Post – to respond by e-mail to a few questions about his book. Here are his comments.

What prompted you to start digging into this story?

“I wrote my first story about the 1928 hurricane during the 60th anniversary in 1988. As a South Florida native and a hurricane history buff, I thought I knew all about the '28 storm. I knew hardly anything. Over the years, the more I learned – especially about the outrage of the unmarked grave – the more amazed I was that more hadn't been written about this. As the 75th anniversary approached, I began thinking about a huge special section in the Palm Beach Post. The more I thought about it, the more I realized: this is the most historic event in the history of my home, and it was a hurricane, and I'm the newspaper's chief writer for local history, and hurricanes, and hurricane history. This needs to be a book.”

Was there anything you discovered in your research that surprised you?

“There were two big surprises.

“One was the major role played by the American Red Cross and the irony that that agency was accused of racism, when it was just about the only entity that didn't practice it. (Editor’s note: the ARC mounted a massive relief drive to help storm survivors.)

“The tragic story of Coot Simpson (sorry, no spoilers; you'll have to read the book) was not a surprise, which is a tragedy by itself. (Editor’s note: Without revealing too much information, Simpson was a black laborer who was killed by a National Guard soldier after the hurricane.)

“I was surprised that my editor was surprised that Florida in 1928 was part of the Deep South and practiced institutional racism.”

Given reports about the structural integrity of the Herbert Hoover Dike (a 150-mile long dike that was built around Lake Okeechobee after the 1928 hurricane), do you think a repeat of the 1928 tragedy is possible today?

“There cannot be a repeat of the 1928 disaster. The dike might breach in spots but it would have to completely wash out, which is not going to happen with a massive 50-foot pyramidical berm. Also, this time around, many of those in the Glades will have been able to flee, which they couldn't do in 1928, because of lack of roads and, for most, lack of any kind of transportation out.”

Any other important or interesting points?

“Two important points:

“First, it is amazing that this is the second deadliest natural disaster of any kind in U.S. history and most Americans – heck, most Floridians – never heard of it. I say in the introduction that one has to wonder how it would be remembered had it drowned 3,000 white businessmen in downtown West Palm Beach or smashed a black tie affair on Palm Beach, instead of drowning thousands of poor black migrant workers.

“Second, when I do talks about the book, people ask, ‘Have we learned the lessons of the 1928 storm?’ I say, ‘We haven't learned the lesson of the last storm.’ People still do nothing to prepare for hurricane season, and the approach of a storm finds them scrambling for plywood and canned soup and water and, for the first time, mulling whether they need to evacuate and, if so, where they need to go. Hurricanes are just about the only weather event we can see coming and for which we can prepare. Failing to do so seems inexcusable.”

The photo shows a dramatic statue on the grounds of the Palm Beach County Public Library in Belle Glade, Florida. It depicts a family trying to flee the floodwaters that are about to overtake them.

Chasing hurricanes, back soon

The hurricane season has really heated up, and since late August I've scarcely stopped writing about them for National Geographic News. All this hasn't left much time and focus for even occasional blogging. I'll be back with more regular postings as soon as the tropics quiet down.

Meanwhile, you can visit the NG News website at http://news.nationalgeographic.com. And if you can endure my shameless self-promotion, take a look at a profile NG News Director David Braun did on me a couple of weeks ago. It's at http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2008/08/hurricane.html


The photo shows Hurricane Ivan, the monster storm of 2004, as seen from space.

Labor Day greetings

Wishing you a relaxing Labor Day weekend from Drye Goods.

Hurricane Rita: The anatomy of a perfect storm

I dug up this NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Rita while going through some old files on my PC. It shows the rapid development of a perfect hurricane and the storm's equally rapid deterioration.

Rita formed during the horrific summer of 2005, a hurricane season unlike anything on record that produced 28 named storms. That was the summer of Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed New Orleans, and Hurricane Wilma, which intensified from a tropical storm to the most powerful hurricane on record for the Atlantic Basin in barely 24 hours.

Rita became the fourth-most powerful storm on record for the Atlantic, surpassed only by Hurricane Wilma, Hurricane Gilbert (which formed in 1988) and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.

Rita somehow didn’t get quite the same attention as the other powerful hurricanes that formed in 2005. The hurricane lost a lot of its strength before it made landfall at the Louisiana-Texas border on September 24. But it was still a very powerful Category 3 hurricane that inflicted severe damage. Paul Trotter, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Slidell, Louisiana, told me that for a few days, Rita turned southwestern Louisiana into “a third-world country.”

It’s fascinating to watch the storm form as it crosses the Straits of Florida and then get organized and crank up as it barrels westward across the Gulf of Mexico. (You'll probably need to play the video a couple of times to see it completely.) You can see the eye just starting to form as it passes the Florida Keys on September 20. The eye is becoming distinct somewhere around the Dry Tortugas later the same day.

By September 22, when the Rita is roughly due south of Mobile Bay, the hurricane is at full roar, with sustained winds of 180 miles an hour. At this point, Hurricane Rita is pretty much a perfect storm. Its eye is tiny and well-defined, the unmistakable characteristic of a hurricane at the apex of its strength.

Had Hurricane Rita made landfall at this intensity, it would have leveled everything in its path.

But luckily, these extremely powerful storms can’t hold on to that kind of intensity very long. In fact, the mechanism of their weakening is sort of built in to their mechanics when they become this powerful. At this peak intensity, hurricanes often start going through a process known as an eye-wall replacement cycle. This means that a new eye wall starts forming around the old one. It’s sort of like Mother Nature putting a noose around the hurricane’s neck and choking it down. While this cycle is taking place, the hurricane weakens. But once the cycle is completed and the new eye wall is in place, the storm can start re-intensifying until the next replacement cycle.

As Rita takes aim at Louisiana, you can see its eye starting to cloud over and become less distinct. By the time the center of the storm touches the coast, the eye is no longer visible, an indication that the hurricane has weakened considerably from its peak intensity.

Still, there were winds of about 120 miles an hour around that indistinct eye when it came ashore.

An active hurricane season has been predicted for the rest of this summer and fall. Tropical Storm Fay – the season’s sixth named storm – has been plaguing Florida with heavy rains for a week.

September 10, considered the peak of the season, is still several weeks away.

New Jersey, um, State Fair?

Someone says “New Jersey.” What comes to mind?

· Bruce (as in Springsteen).
· Tony (as in Soprano).
· Political corruption (as in, well, lots of it).
· Toll roads (as in New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, and thank God for EZPass).
· The City (as in, going over to).

Urban images, all of them. I’d bet more money than I can afford to lose that one phrase that would not come to mind would be this one: New Jersey State Fair. State fairs are for places like Iowa, and North Carolina, and Nebraska, and Georgia, and other states in the South and Midwest with largely rural populations and lots of dairy farms and people who are sincere and have no idea how to be sarcastic or world-weary or why an EZPass is so useful.

New Jersey State Fair? The state that gave us Frank Sinatra (from Hoboken) and Lou Costello (from Paterson), two thoroughly urban guys who probably couldn’t tell a bull from a steer (there is a small but critical difference, you can look it up), has a state fair?

Yes, they do. In Sussex County, well away from the smog and pavement and elbow-rubbing, NJ-Transit-riding, daily grind that is life as they know it from about Exit 9 northward on the Turnpike.

And as you’ve probably figured out, we discovered the New Jersey State Fair a few weeks ago. The video shows a brief parade of antique tractors. You can hear, over the putter of the engines, my brother-in-law Bob and I commenting as they pass by.

It was fun and totally unexpected, not the kind of thing you’d expect to do during a visit to Jersey. Gotta say, though, it was not nearly as big as the North Carolina State Fair.

I (heart) NY, mostly

I’ve never figured out how to deal with New York. I’m always a little edgy about going there, dreading the trip until I actually get there. Then, once I get settled in, I don’t want to leave.

I love the place. An hour just walking the streets in that city is one of the most stimulating experiences that’s available to me. In the space of a few blocks you’re likely to see more examples of extreme contrasts than you can comfortably assimilate in one day: examples of great art and crass kitsch, astonishing wealth and depressing poverty, stunning beauty and shocking ugliness, acts of touching and unnoticed generosity and blatant and infuriating selfishness.

I’ve always wished that I’d gotten my life together a little sooner and taken a shot at making it there. I wonder how my life might have been different. Of course, there’s the possibility -- or maybe the likelihood -- that I might have been a total failure and ended up much worse off than I am now.

I’m scared of New York. One of my worst fears is somehow getting totally lost in the city, alone, at night, with only change in my pocket and a dead battery in my cell phone. This fear coexists with the fascination and affection I feel for the place. It’s too big, too overwhelming, too over-stimulating, especially for a guy whose idea of a big city until he was 20 years old was Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve got to add, however, that I’ve always intensely disliked Charlotte and can't imagine ever feeling the affection for that city that I feel for New York.

Anyway, we were in New York/New Jersey a couple of weeks ago. Went to a Bruce Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium, and my brother-in-law came up with great tickets for a Yankees game at Yankee Stadium.

I’m still learning how to use a new Nikon camera that has a digital video recorder, and my inexperience is obvious in the above video, which I shot while riding the NYC subway. The drummers hopped on the subway at one stop, banged out this little concert, took up a collection, and jumped off at the next stop to, I presume, repeat the performance on another train.

I got a kick out of the impromptu little concert but my niece, who lives in Brooklyn and rides the subway every day, says they happen too often as far as she's concerned and she’s pretty tired of them, especially when she’s had a rough day at the office and just wants to be left alone during the ride home. She says these kinds of things always impress the tourists, and I guess that’s why it impressed me.

Reasons for a busy hurricane season

We’re heading into the heart of the hurricane season, and the long-range forecasters at Colorado State University think the rest of the summer and early fall is going to be busy.

CSU forecasters Phil Klotzbach and William Gray upped their earlier predictions for the 2008 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30. A news release sent out Tuesday by CSU predicts that the rest of the season will be “much more active … than the typical season between 1950 and 2000.” The revised CSU forecast says 17 named tropical storms will form, with nine of those storms developing into hurricanes.

Of those nine hurricanes, five will become major storms with winds exceeding 110 miles an hour. So far this year, five named storms have formed. Two of those storms have become hurricanes, including the mysterious Hurricane Bertha, which unexpectedly intensified into a major storm.

From 1950 to 2000, there was an average of about 10 named storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes.

Gray – a pioneer in long-range hurricane season forecasting – and his colleague Klotzbach base their revised estimate on several factors: Unusually warm sea surface temperatures – which could provide energy for developing hurricanes – low pressures at sea level over the tropical Atlantic in June and July, and a lot of activity in the so-called “deep tropics” east of Puerto Rico.

In an interview last month for National Geographic News, Klotzbach told me that when storms start forming east of Puerto Rico early in the summer, it’s a strong indicator that an active hurricane season is likely.

Hurricane Bertha formed off the west coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands, a notorious breeding ground for powerful hurricanes. But usually, the Cape Verde monsters don’t start forming until much later in the season. Bertha became a named storm on July 3 – the earliest Cape Verde storm on record.

On July 7, Bertha became a category 1 hurricane when its strongest winds reached 75 miles an hour. The storm wasn’t expected to strengthen much beyond that, but it astonished scientists when its winds cranked up to 115 miles an hour only 12 hours later.

Meteorologists couldn’t explain why Bertha underwent that burst of intensification. But the storm was far out at sea and not threatening any coastline, so hurricane hunter aircraft were not sent out to monitor the storm. Had the hurricane hunters flown into Bertha and gathered more data than was available from satellite monitoring, they may have discovered the reason for its sudden strengthening.

Klotzbach and Gray also think there’s a 67 percent probability that an intense hurricane is likely to make landfall somewhere on the U.S. coast before the season ends in November. That stretch of coastline includes Washington County, North Carolina. And that's, um, where Jane and I live.

The last hurricane to strike Washington County was Hurricane Isabel in September 2003. Although Isabel was a category 2 hurricane when it came ashore, it still packed quite a wallop. The Washington County Emergency Management Department clocked one of Isabel’s gusts at 120 miles an hour in downtown Plymouth when the eye of the storm arrived here.

The photo at the top shows Isabel’s handiwork on Washington Street in Plymouth. I shot it after the winds finally diminished some. That’s an oak tree that was snapped like a stick about seven feet above the ground.

I’m afraid we’re about due for a hurricane here. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.

More information about the Colorado State forecasts is at http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/.

A lost art form

During a trip home last week to Stanly County, North Carolina, I came across these reminders of the days when soft drink advertisements covered the walls of many stores.

The first sign with the demonic-looking Coca-Cola mascot is on the side of the building that housed the Cornwallis Service Station just outside Carthage, North Carolina. Someone has sprayed grafitti on the sign, so I don't know if the Coke mascot's demonic eyes were done by the original artist or the vandal.

The other signs are all in Salisbury, North Carolina.

When I was growing up, Coca-Cola was usually referred to as "Co-Cola." This Co-Cola sign is on the back of what was once a grain and provisions store near the train station in downtown Salisbury. It's been a long, long time since the soft drink was sold for five cents a bottle.

This sign is so well-preserved that I'm thinking it may have been restored not too long ago. It's on one side of another downtown building that once housed the W.A. Roseman Grocery, Grain and Feed Store.


Here's the reason I think the Coke sign was restored. This is the other side of W.A. Roseman Grocery building. It's an advertisement for Cheerwine, a cherry-flavored soft drink that is bottled in Salisbury and sold mostly in the piedmont of North Carolina. As you can see, the Cheerwine sign shows its age.

I won't miss Billy Packer

I wonder if Billy Packer annoyed his teammates 50 years ago when he played basketball at Wake Forest College, as it was known at the time. He’s so skilled at annoying people that he must have been doing it for a long time.

Maybe it started on December 7, 1959, when Sports Illustrated, in its annual college basketball preseason edition, referred to Packer as a “brilliant newcomer” on the Wake Forest team. That would be heady stuff for a college kid to read about himself – the kind of stuff that might contribute to some ego management problems in later life.

Still, Packer lived up to his billing during his college career. In 1962, with Packer starring at point guard, Wake Forest reached the NCAA Final Four. They lost to Ohio State, 84-68, in the semi-final game. Cincinnati edged UCLA, 72-70 in the other semi-final game and earned the right to play Ohio State for the NCAA championship.

In those days, the semi-finals losers played each other in a so-called consolation game before the championship matchup. Packer and Wake Forest beat UCLA, 82-80, in that contest. It was UCLA’s first trip to the Final Four under Coach John Wooden, a legend in the making in 1962. And it would be a long time before UCLA lost again in the Final Four. Starting in 1965, Wooden’s UCLA teams won nine straight NCAA basketball titles.

After listening for so many years to Packer’s know-it-all commentary as a college basketball analyst for CBS Sports, I’m surprised he hasn’t claimed that he offered some advice to Wooden after that 1962 consolation game that started him on the path to greatness.

For 27 years, Packer has been telling us all about his brilliance. But he won’t be doing it next season. A few days ago, CBS announced that his contract is not being renewed for the coming season.

That’s fine with me. I certainly won’t miss him.

There are several sportscasters – such as college basketball commentators Len Elmore and Bill Raftery and Major League baseball commentator Joe Morgan – whose broadcasts I enjoy. These guys convey their knowledge and passion for the game without trying to convince viewers of their omnipotent brilliance.

During his tenure with CBS, however, Packer epitomized the type of sportscaster that, in my opinion, has taken much of the pleasure out of watching a sports event. Packer and some of his loquacious, second-guessing colleagues seem obsessed with getting inside the heads of everybody within earshot. Every movement by every player, every decision by every coach or manager, every close call by every referee or umpire is thrashed out and analyzed and ultimately criticized ad infinitum. As far as these guys are concerned, the games aren’t played to decide who is going to win. The games are played so you, the viewer, will be awed by the sportscasters’ dazzling intellect.

Five minutes of listening to Packer’s pontifications will convince you that he always believes he’s the smartest guy in the building. Tim McCarver, a broadcaster for Fox’s Major League Baseball telecasts, is another motor-mouthed know-it-all who is in love with the sound of his own voice. And don’t get me started about ESPN’s Dick Vitale, whose loud witless enthusiasm and constant braying of his uniquely weird and awful basketball patois – “Dipsy-do dunkeroo, bay-bee, he’s a true diaper dandy!” and “The emotion, bay-bee, the emotion!” – can send me lunging for the mute button on my remote.

The remarkable thing about Packer is that, for such a smart guy, he makes an awful lot of mistakes. And he never, ever admits it, even if his mistake is ludicrously obvious to a few million TV viewers. I could give you many examples, but I’ll confine myself to one: the closing minutes of the Duke-North Carolina basketball game in March 2007.

Like all Duke-Carolina games, this one was fiercely fought to the end. After a missed free throw, UNC’s Tyler Hansbrough and Duke’s Gerald Henderson went up after the rebound. The ball came Hansbrough’s way. Henderson broke Hansbrough’s nose with a vicious forearm blow.

Only Henderson knows what was in his mind when he landed that stunning blow on Hansbrough’s face. But after carefully reviewing the tape, the referees decided that Henderson had committed a flagrant foul and ejected him from the game.

Repeated replays of the video showed that Henderson made his violent lunge toward Hansbrough after the ball had caromed away from him. Maybe Henderson had no intention of striking Hansbrough and his lunge was only adrenaline-fueled frustration. But the basketball was beyond Henderson’s reach, and he had no reason other than frustration to make such a powerful forearm swipe in Hansbrough’s direction. It was an emotional, out-of-control action and he broke a guy’s nose. And that’s a flagrant foul.

But from the moment blood spurted from Hansbrough’s broken nose, Packer defended Henderson. It was an amazing denial of reality in the face of clearly contradictory evidence. Yet Packer insisted for the rest of the game that he was right and the referees were wrong. I’m sure CBS officials got some outraged phone calls and e-mails after that game.

Caulton Tudor, one of my favorite sports columnists who writes for the News and Observer of Raleigh, wrote a recent column about Packer’s departure from CBS in which he recalled a quote by the late Al McGuire.

In some ways, McGuire was everything that Packer is not. He was personable and funny, he didn’t take himself too seriously, and he’d won an NCAA championship. McGuire’s quote about Packer was this: “The poor guy is so serious about basketball that he can't have any fun with it. He's like a Catholic nun with her rosary and all these Baptists down here are about the Lord's Prayer. It's all life or death. There's no in-between with Billy. If it's on his mind, it jumps out of his mouth. But, bless his heart, his mind is just as fast as his mouth.”

Tudor, a smart, insightful and experienced columnist, praised Packer’s work at CBS. But as I said, it’ll be a relief to me not to have to listen to him this coming winter.

Florida firefighters relieving North Carolina crews

After almost six weeks of fighting the wildfire at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, firefighters with the North Carolina Division of Forest Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be relieved by firefighters from Florida.

A news release from North Carolina officials announced that the Florida crew arrived today and will take charge of the firefighting effort tomorrow. Firefighters from seven states, plus federal and local firefighters have been battling the blaze since June 1, when a lightning strike started the fire. About 41,500 acres have been burned.

More information is at http://www.fws.gov/pocosinlakes.

(Photo: Tom Crews)

Fire update: Still burning

We've gotten some rain here in eastern North Carolina during the past week or so, and that's dampened things down some. But the fire at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge is still burning, and no one expects it to be extinguished anytime soon.

The problem is that the fire, which started June 1 from a lightning strike, is still burning peat. In some places it's actually burning underground. Firefighters are using helicopters and heat-sensitive infrared spotting equipment to detect underground fires that aren't visible to the naked eye. They're also now having to deal with some of the secondary damage caused by the fire. The secondary roads and state highways that they've used to bring in dozens of heavy firetrucks and heavy earthmoving equipment to fight the fire are starting to deteriorate after more than a month of this traffic. So now road graders are working to repair some of the damage.

The fire isn't going to be extinguished until we get a downpour from a tropical storm or hurricane.

More information about the fire is at http://www.fws.gov/pocosinlakes.

Remembering Jesse

I grew up in North Carolina not far from the hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms, and I’ve long wondered if I might be distantly related to him. My mother was from Union County, where Helms was from, and I have many cousins there whose last name is Helms. I know that I have many of the small-town values that Helms revered – including the belief that it’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead.

Still, Jesse was never reticent about speaking his mind. Maybe it’s a family trait that I feel compelled to speak my mind about him.

I never understood the tenacious grip that Helms had on North Carolina politics during his 30 years in the Senate. He represented a brand of angry, reactionary Old South conservatism that isn’t usually associated with this state. And yet, while North Carolina chose progressives and moderates, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans for its other elected offices, there was always Jesse, the ultimate unyielding ultra-conservative demagogue, towering over everyone.

Helms affected the lives of North Carolinians before he became a Senator. I have an old friend named Mike who remembers the anguish Jesse caused his family in 1968 when Helms was editorial director of WRAL-TV in Raleigh.

Mike’s father, a Methodist minister, was moving the family from Raleigh to Charlotte. But he was having trouble selling their house. One day he got a call from a black man who said the real estate agent wouldn’t show him the house. My friend’s father made his own deal to sell to this man.

When word got out that a black family was moving into this previously all-white neighborhood, Helms was apoplectic. He went on the air with a scathing editorial denouncing the minister and accusing him of “blockbusting.”

Jesse even broadcast the address of their home. Cars with license plates from Deep South states showed up at all hours of the day and night and parked on their street. Agents from the State Bureau of Investigation moved in with my friend’s family to protect them until they moved to Charlotte.

Still, there were times when Helms’s unyielding resentment of those who annoyed him was funny, almost charming, in a weird way. When I was working at the Raleigh News and Observer (which Jesse detested) I was told to get in touch with Helms to get a comment about a breaking news story.

“Hello,” I said, “am I speaking with Mr. Helms?”

“Ah, who's calling?” Jesse asked.

“My name's Willie Drye, Mr. Helms, and I'm a reporter for the News and Observer. I was wondering if ...”

Click.

“Mr. Helms? Mr. Helms?”

I dialed the number again. This time it rang unanswered. Finally, after a couple of minutes, someone – I assume it was Jesse – picked up the phone and dropped it back onto the hook.

“Have we done something lately to piss off Jesse Helms?” I asked the editor who'd told me to call Helms.

“What happened?” he asked.

“He hung up on me twice,” I said.

“Oh, don't worry about that. He always hangs up on us. Just say he couldn't be reached for comment.”

For all of Jesse’s peevishness and outright nastiness, however, he did have a well-deserved reputation for helping his constituents. Sometimes he’d help even if he knew they’d never vote for him. He did a huge favor for a friend in Chapel Hill when my friend’s wife was trapped in Poland when martial law was declared there in December 1981.

My friend said he'd tried to contact North Carolina's congressional delegation for help, but they'd all ignored him. I suggested that he contact Helms's office. He did, but after his earlier experiences, he wasn't expecting any response.

But Helms's office gave my friend access to the U.S. diplomatic pouch to Poland, which allowed him to send his wife the documents she needed to leave.

There are lots of people in North Carolina who loved Jesse Helms and the way he forced his will on state and national politics. I guess you could say that he was loved by about 50.1 percent of the people in this state.

I can’t say that I was grief-stricken when I heard a few days ago that Jesse died. Still, one of the things I learned growing up in that small town near Helms's home is that it's just not a good thing to rejoice at anyone's death. One of my favorite works by the 17th-century poet John Donne is “For Whom the Bells Toll”, his meditation on the universality and ultimate tragedy of death.

Donne says that we are all diminished a little when anyone dies, and every death is a reminder that our own time will come sooner or later. And I guess that means that we’re all diminished a little by the passing of Jesse Helms.

So goodbye, Jesse, and may God have mercy on your soul. I’d love listen in on the conversation when you stand at the Pearly Gates and talk to Saint Peter about where you’ll spend Eternity.

The 232nd anniversary of 202 stirring words

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

(Photo: Independence Day celebration, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, July 4, 1939; by Marion Post Wolcott, from The Library of Congress American Memory Collection, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html)

Wildfire burning deep into peat

We got a little rain here in Washington County last night and today, but not enough to dampen the stubborn wildfire that’s been burning on the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge since June 1. And the daily report on the fire that came out at 6 p.m. had some startling information in it. The North Carolina Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that the fire hasn’t spread beyond the 41,000 acres that have been burning for most of the time since it started, but it’s burning down into the peat. In some places, it’s burned four feet of peat.

The depth of the peat ranges from two feet to six feet in most of the burning area, but in a few places it’s as deep as 10 feet. Today’s report also included this explanation about how water is being moved around to fight the fire:

“Water pumping operations continue to reinforce fire lines. Up to 50 pumps of various types may be working at any one time to move water around the fire. High volume lift pumps are used to pump water from lakes into canals, and to pump water from one canal to another. Smaller pumps are used to deliver water from canals to the fire through irrigation systems. Sprinkling water on top of the ground prevents flare-ups near the containment lines, but it does not completely extinguish the fire burning below ground.

“Forty-four wildland fire engines are assigned to the fire today. They carry from 200 to 1,200 gallons of water, and can move to strategic locations around the perimeter of the fire to suppress hot spots and flare-ups.”

Firefighters are expecting the fire to become “more active” later this week when hot, dry weather returns. And the drought is prompting people to cut back on or cancel fireworks shows for the upcoming July 4 holiday weekend.

The photo at the top of this entry is from the website Firehouse.com and shows firefighters from the Southern Shores Volunteer Fire Department in Dare County battling the blaze. The website reported that as of June 27, the cost of fighting the fire has exceeded $4 million.

Windy weekend adds to fire problems

It’s been a windy weekend here, and the wind has caused some problems for firefighters trying to control the nearby wildfires. This photo provided by the North Carolina Forestry Service shows how the winds fanned the flames of the fire burning in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

The fire hasn’t extended beyond the 41,000 acres where it’s been burning in peat for several weeks. The local weather radar shows some thunderstorms moving our way, and the weather is expected to reach here late tonight or early Monday morning. I don’t think anyone expects the storms to put out the fires, but maybe they will at least dampen things a bit and help the firefighters contain the blaze. Today’s report says the fire is about 75 percent contained.
More info at http://www.fws.gov/pocosinlakes.

Smoky morning

The wildfire at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge near here is still burning. This is what Washington Street looked like when I went outside around six o'clock this morning. We’re about three blocks from the Roanoke River and Plymouth’s downtown business district on Water Street. Normally I can see all the way to Water Street. But the wind shifted sometime last night, and smoke from the fire had settled over the town this morning.

The fire was started by a lightning strike on June 1. The official update from the state Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is that the fire has not increased from the 41,000 acres that have been burning for several weeks. About 330 firefighters are battling the blaze.

The fire is about 75 percent contained, but won’t be extinguished until we get a tropical weather system that dumps a lot of rain in a very short time. It’s burning peat, so all they can do at the moment is try to keep the fire from spreading. A joint news release today from the Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service says the firefighters are pumping water from nearby lakes and canals to dampen the peat, and they're also going to dig a test well near the fire in hopes that that will provide more water for firefighters.

More information about the fire is at http://inciweb.org/state/34.

So we’re in for a long, smoky summer.

"A giant charcoal briquette"

The wind shifted here in Washington County late this afternoon, and when I went outside around 5:15 p.m. to go to a meeting, a thin blue haze and the strong odor of smoke hung in the air. It’s smoke from a sizable wildfire that’s been burning in the nearby Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife refuge since June 1. The fire was caused by a lightning strike.

It’s probably going to be burning for quite a while. The fire is burning in about 40,000 acres of peat, which is partially decomposed vegetation. If you had time to wait a few million years, that peat could become coal. As the above photo from NASA shows, the fire has sent a plume of smoke more than 45,000 feet into the atmosphere.

I did a story about the fire for National Geographic News last week (see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080613-wildfire-peat.html). Gary Mease, a firefighter I talked to for the story, came up with one of the best news quotes I’ve heard in a while. He told me the area where the fire is burning is like “a giant charcoal briquette.”

Mease has had a busy spring, and he and hundreds of other firefighters probably will be staying busy until a tropical weather system of some sort brings enough rainfall our way to give the Pocosin Lakes and the rest of the state a good soaking. That could be months from now, if at all. We got a bit of relief a month or so ago from the drought that’s gripped this area since last fall, but rain has become scarce again and the woods and swamps are dry.

Mease, who’s with the state Division of Forest Resources, had been fighting a fire in Texas for 18 days. He returned to his home in Hayesville deep in the North Carolina mountains around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 8. And by Tuesday, he was almost 500 miles away and fighting another fire here in eastern North Carolina.

And if the firefighters didn’t already have enough to do, a second fire broke out last week in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which straddles the North Carolina-Virginia border about 80 miles from here. That fire started when logging equipment caught fire as loggers were removing cedar trees that were knocked down by Hurricane Isabel in 2003. The fire was burning in about 1,000 acres by Friday afternoon. As of today, the blaze has grown to cover about 2,400 acres, and firefighters say it’s about 20 percent contained.

There’s no telling how many thousands of trees Isabel took down when it came through here. A few miles north of Plymouth near the mouth of the Roanoke River, there were hundreds of trees swirled and toppled like matchsticks. Because they were fanned out in all directions, I’m guessing that they were taken down by a tornado that spun off from the hurricane. And now they’ve been lying on the ground for five years drying out, and I’m getting uneasy just writing about it.

So now we have to hope that a weak, wet tropical storm blows through here soon and dumps a foot or so of rain. And in the meantime, we’re living next to a giant charcoal briquette.

Indestructible Bicycle Man pedals across Florida

Alan Snel, an old friend of mine in Tampa, has accomplished something remarkable. He’s ridden a bicycle across Florida from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. That’s about 170 miles, and he did it in a dawn-to-dusk trek Sunday from Vero Beach on the Atlantic side to Clearwater on the Gulf Coast.

Pedal-powered marathons are nothing new to Al. He’s biked across the U.S. and makes an annual circumnavigation of Lake Okeechobee on his bicycle. He does the trip around the giant lake on the 140-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike. A few years ago, he also dared to take on New York City traffic when he commuted by bicycle to a job in Manhattan.

Al made the trip Sunday to honor the memory of his friend Bill Fox, who was killed in a bicycling accident in upstate New York in 2002. Al was accompanied on his trip by a road crew that included friends and fellow bicycle enthusiasts.

Al’s account of his trip can be viewed on his blog, “Alan Snel’s Bicycle Stories and other Misadventures on the Road of Life” (

http://alansnel.blogspot.com/).

The photo above shows Al cooling his feet in the Gulf of Mexico after he completed his trip. Al didn’t say who shot the picture.

I’ve known Al since the early 1990s, when we covered the same local politics beat for intensively competing newspapers in Florida. We’d spend our days trying to beat each other’s brains out on the news front, and then meet for beers and baseball at Thomas J. White Stadium (aka “The Tommy”), home of the Florida State League’s St. Lucie Mets in Port St. Lucie. Al didn’t bother taking a car to the stadium. He’d ride his bike.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is when you stop for a minute and acknowledge the soldiers and sailors who died while serving our nation. It’s not uncommon for local veterans to decorate the graves of vets in cemeteries across the country. And in small towns, there’s often a vet who keeps a bundle of small flags in a closet for 364 days every year, and then on Memorial Day pulls them out of storage and spends the early morning putting the flags on the graves of vets.

From sometime in the early 1950s until 2002, my father was the vet who was responsible for putting out the flags at the cemetery of Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church in Misenheimer, North Carolina. For more than 50 years, the man didn’t miss a Memorial Day doing this small but important honor. He did it until his health failed him and he simply couldn’t do it any longer.

These photos of Memorial Day observances are from one of my favorite websites, the Library of Congress American Memory Project at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.
The photo at the top of this entry shows black cavalrymen at a Memorial Day parade in Washington, D.C. in 1942. The photo is by Roydan Dixon.

The photo above by Fenno Jacobs shows a parade in Hartford, Connecticut, also in 1942.
1942 was a bad year for the United States. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had happened barely six months earlier, and the outcome of the war in the Pacific was still very much in doubt. So Memorial Day of 1942 undoubtedly had a special poignancy.

Regardless of how you feel about the legitimacy of the present war in Iraq, it would be appropriate to pause for a moment and acknowledge the more than 4,000 American service personnel who have died in combat there.

Lieutenant McDaniel's fatal mistake

On June 8, 1944, a local wartime tragedy distracted the folks back home in Stanly County, North Carolina from the huge news that the Allies had invaded France two days earlier. Marine Lieutenant Charles M. McDaniel, 21, was killed when he crashed his twin-engine Navy bomber into Badin Lake, which is formed by one of the dams on the Yadkin River.

McDaniel’s family and his young bride in the lakeside village of Palmerville reportedly heard the crash, knew it was McDaniel’s plane, and were devastated. McDaniel’s co-pilot, Navy Ensign John P. Withrow of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, also died in the crash.

Charlie McDaniel probably was a lot like the guys I grew up with a generation later in the Stanly County hills. I’m guessing he was a fun-loving country boy who couldn’t pass up an opportunity to impress his high school sweetheart, who also happened to be his wife.

November 1943 was a big month for McDaniel. On the 10th he finished his flight training and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Three days later, he got married.

He was assigned to fly new warplanes from the factories where they’d been built to military airfields. In early June 1944, he and Ensign Withrow were ordered to move a Navy PBJ-1 bomber from a factory in Columbus, Ohio to the Marine Corps air base at Cherry Point, North Carolina.

McDaniel got permission from his Marine Corps superiors to land the bomber at an airfield in Charlotte – about 45 miles from Palmerville. The details of why he was allowed the stopover aren’t clear. It may have been mechanical problems, or it could have been weather that made flying too dangerous. Whatever the reason, he rode a bus from Charlotte to Albemarle and from there caught a ride to nearby Palmerville to spend the night with his wife. The following morning he had to catch the bus to return to the Charlotte airfield where he’d left the bomber.

He left home around 8:20 a.m. on Thursday, June 8, 1944. On that day, the front pages of newspapers around the world were crammed with headlines and stories about the Allies getting a foothold at Normandy and pushing the Germans back into France.

Around 12:40 p.m. that afternoon, the staff at the Stanly News and Press, the local newspaper in Albemarle, heard McDaniel’s low-flying airplane as it roared over their building. Someone muttered that they’d soon have to get a new roof if that kept up.

A few minutes later, McDaniel’s family watched his big blue bomber descend and skim along only a few feet above the surface of Badin Lake. Moments later, Jean Perry, an elderly woman from the town of Badin who was fishing at the lake, saw the PBJ-1 as it thundered past. She later told the News and Press that the plane banked slightly to the right. The tip of the right wing dipped into the water, and the plane crashed instantly into the lake.

McDaniel’s family heard the impact and knew instantly what had happened.

Navy salvors found the plane on the bottom of the lake about 10 days later, but they didn’t find any corpses. They salvaged some of the equipment but left the plane where they’d found it about 150 feet below the lake’s surface. Sixty-four years later, what’s left of McDaniel’s bomber is still on the muddy, craggy bottom of Badin Lake.

McDaniel’s fatal crash was an odd wartime tragedy, but the Marine Corps was not the least bit sentimental about the young pilot’s death. The Marine officer who investigated and filed a report on the crash made several terse notations about McDaniel’s behavior. The investigator noted that the lieutenant disobeyed his orders, was 15 miles off his authorized flight route, and crashed because he was “flathatting,” which is a scornful term that military pilots use to describe showing off.

The painting at the beginning of this post, which was done by Stanly County artist Roger Thomas, shows McDaniel’s PBJ-1 moments before it crashed into Badin Lake.

Divvying up Cuba

After five decades under the thumb of Fidel Castro, it looks like Cuba is about to undergo some dramatic changes now that his brother, Raul, is in charge.

Raul is relaxing some of the dire restrictions that Fidel imposed on Cuba. So residents who were making do with 50-year-old technology are getting their first DVD players, cell phones, personal computers and other late-20th century technology that the rest of the world has taken for granted for decades. And there’s talk that Raul’s rise to power will be a boon to Cuba’s tourism industry, which has been hobbled since Fidel took power in 1959.

All the speculation about what might happen in Cuba brought to mind a couple of thoughts. First, it reminded me of a conversation I overheard in Key West, Florida in October 1996. A friend and I were visiting the Key West Wreckers Museum, which tells the story of the Keys’ colorful salvaging industry. After touring the museum, we went outside and climbed a reproduction of a wrecker’s tower like those used by salvagers to spot ships that had run aground on the offshore reefs that parallel much of the Keys.

Three other people made the climb with us – two men and a woman. As we stood atop the tower, the men started discussing Cuba. They were only a few feet away from me, so I couldn’t avoid overhearing their conversation.

They talked about what would happen when Fidel Castro was gone. They were especially interested in Cuban tourism, and they seemed quite knowledgeable about it. What I recall most clearly is their descriptions of Cuba’s unspoiled, undeveloped beaches. When Castro was gone, those beaches would make someone very wealthy, they said, and it was clear that they’d very much like to get their hands on the beaches and the property that overlooked them.

And that made me think of the scene in the movie "Godfather 2" in which Michael Corleone goes to Havana in 1958 to meet with Hyman Roth, who is both his business partner and deadly enemy.

Corleone, Roth and other mob bosses gather at a Havana hotel to divvy up portions of Cuba’s lucrative gambling and tourism business. They also celebrate Roth’s 67th birthday. A cake with a map of Cuba is wheeled out with much fanfare. As the cake is sliced and handed out to the mobsters, Roth explains how the businesses will be distributed among the crime families. Then, he holds his slice of cake aloft and says, “I want everyone to enjoy the cake. So, enjoy!”

The symbolism of slicing up Cuba like a piece of birthday cake is obvious.

The fact that Fidel Castro avoided plunging Cuba into political chaos by handing over power to his brother instead of dying in office may head off a land rush to claim the unspoiled beaches and other opportunities that those guys in Key West were lusting after in 1996.

But there are doubtless thousands of eager, aggressive entrepreneurs who have been planning and waiting for Castro to leave power. And for better or worse, those unspoiled beaches in Cuba may not stay that way much longer.

A makeover for the dear old DAP

I hear that an old friend is getting a badly needed facelift. The venerable Durham Athletic Park in downtown Durham, North Carolina is being restored to something resembling its appearance when it was built in the late 1930s.

From what I saw the last time I visited the park a few years ago with my old pal, Alan Snel, it really needed work. I’d been telling Al for years what a great place the DAP was, so cozy and picturesque and the perfect place to watch a baseball game. (By the way, visit Al’s Blog, “Bike Stories,” at http://alansnel.blogspot.com/.)

I was astonished and dismayed by what I saw. Huge bare spots in the outfield grass. Outfield fences in disrepair. Peeling paint. A general air of neglect and abandonment.

But back in the day, when I was going to the DAP as often as two or three times a week, it was maintained meticulously. I spent many summer evenings at the DAP between 1980 and 1991 when I was living in nearby Chapel Hill. In those days, the Durham Bulls played their home games there against their Class A Carolina League opponents.

The Bulls were a farm team of the Atlanta Braves, and I saw players who, in the 1990s, would form the heart of the Braves starting lineup. Ron Gant, Ryan Klesko, Javy Lopez, Jeff Blauser, Mark Lemke, Andruw Jones, Dave Justice, Steve Avery, and possible Hall of Famer Chipper Jones spent a summer in Durham on their way to the big time.

Some of the earliest dates I had with Jane, who is now my wife, were going to Bulls’ games. It was there during one game that Jane told me that her mom had gone to high school with “some guy” who’d later become a famous baseball player. I remembered that her mom grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. A light went off in my head. “Your mom knew Roger Maris?” I asked in astonishment. “Yeah, that name sounds right,” Jane said.

Durham and the nearby cities – Chapel Hill, Cary, Hillsborough and Raleigh – loved the Bulls and kept the turnstiles spinning. The Bulls always were at or near the top in minor league attendance.

And the DAP was every bit as beloved as such baseball icons as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field or the lost and lamented Ebbets Field. It was well-worn but cozy, tucked into downtown Durham amid redbrick tobacco warehouses. It was the perfection of Depression-era minimalism, built as a WPA project in 1939 for $100,000.

The beer was cheap, cold and plentiful, you could make a meal out of a Bull City burrito, and life was good. Then, in 1988, Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and That Damned Movie came along.

The movie was “Bull Durham,” a tale about minor league baseball that was filmed in Durham. Costner plays a cynical, wizened catcher brought to Durham to prepare Robbins’ character – supposedly a flame-throwing pitcher – for the Major Leagues. Sarandon plays the love interest for both men.

Durham Athletic Park became like another character in the movie. And the DAP became a star.

The movie was a huge hit, something of a cultural phenomenon. Durham Bulls baseball caps started appearing everywhere. I remember seeing a close-up of some celebrity wearing a Bulls cap at the Major League All Star game in July 1988, about a month after the movie was released.

And the tourists started pouring into Durham. They were coming from everywhere – software salesmen from Silicon Valley pitching their goods at nearby Research Triangle Park, families from places like Toledo and Rochester visiting relatives in the area, more Duke students than anyone should have to put up with, even businessmen simply passing through or near Durham on their way to somewhere else. All of them stopping to catch a game at the DAP because they’d seen That Damned Movie.

The beer lines got longer and the crowds became ruder. Those of us who’d been coming to games for years felt like something had been taken away from us. And to top it off, many of the tourists didn’t know anything about baseball. One night I actually heard a woman ask her companion, “Which one is first base?”

But all of this put Durham on the map and added some new life – and cash – to the city’s downtown. And all the attention stirred the city’s ambitions. City leaders decided they needed a spiffy designer stadium. They brought in HOK Sport, the same firm that designed Baltimore’s Camden Yards, to draw up plans for the new ballpark.

The Bulls played their last season at Durham Athletic Park in 1994, and moved into their shiny new cross-town pasture the following summer. The city, undoubtedly trying to push every brand-familiarity button it could find, gave the new stadium the cumbersome name of Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

I have to admit, I liked the new stadium more than I wanted to. The park is handsome, and it’s a nice setting for a baseball game, with a nice vista of downtown Durham. But the Bulls have gone upscale corporate since former owner Miles Wolfe sold the team to Jim Goodmon, owner of Capitol Broadcasting Company of Raleigh. New condos priced well out of reach of most of the people who faithfully attended Bulls’ games at Durham Athletic Park are going up around the new stadium. The Bulls are now a Class AAA team playing in the International League, one notch below the Major Leagues.

The new stadium even has that ultimate appeal to contemporary snobbery – skyboxes.

The old DAP fell into shameful disrepair after the Bulls left. Al must have thought I was nuts when I brought him to the ballpark he’d heard me raving about for years, and he sees this tumbledown old dump.

So I’m glad Durham Athletic Park is being restored. Latest word is that Minor League Baseball will use the DAP as a training academy where baseball executives can learn the business of running a team. A company that specializes in maintaining sports stadiums will take care of groundskeeping and use the DAP to train its employees. There’s talk of opening a museum of minor league baseball at or near the ballpark. And North Carolina Central University’s baseball team will play its home games there.

So the DAP will go back to its origins as a baseball training ground, and a landmark will be preserved. Everybody happy, right?

Well, not exactly. Call me a curmudgeon, but I think it was better in the old days before the influence of money, fame and Hollywood changed the face of Durham baseball.

And by the way, I shot the photo at the top of this entry at the DAP in 1993. The photo of Kevin Costner with a baseball bat is from That Damned Movie.

The irony of smoking

I have a mostly joking theory that we won World War II because we had better cigarettes than the Axis. Stay with me here and I’ll explain that. But first, some background.

I grew up in North Carolina in the 1950s and ‘60s. By the time I was a teenager, the egregious sins of the tobacco companies and the serious health threats caused by smoking were just starting to come to light. So during my formative years I was steeped in a pro-tobacco culture before the anti-smoking movement really got underway.

When I was a kid, I could tell you the brand names of all the cigarettes that were made in North Carolina as well as the companies that produced them and the cities where they were manufactured.

I knew that tobacco had been a dominant part of the state’s economy since Reconstruction, and was a major factor in the growth of the state’s largest cities – especially Durham and Winston-Salem, which basically were built from the ground up by tobacco. Tobacco also put new shoes on kids’ feet and food on families’ tables. It helped pay for schools, hospitals, county courthouses, some outstanding universities and a state road system that is one of the nation’s best.

I smoked for about 15 years. I especially enjoyed it when I went through Army basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, when I was 23. When we were out in the field, the drill sergeants would give us a 10-minute break every hour or so. During that break, I could go off by myself, sit down against a pine tree, take off that heavy steel helmet, lay my M-16 rifle across my lap, and light up a cigarette. I could kick my mind into neutral, stare into the woods, and watch the smoke slowly dissipate when I exhaled.

That smoke break gave me a few idle moments alone. No screaming drill sergeants. No lugging a rifle and sweating beneath a field pack and that damned helmet. It was a small island of tranquility in the swirling sea of tedious aggravation and exertion that is Army basic training.

There were a few guys in my company that didn’t smoke, but they were a minority. I have no idea if they enjoyed those breaks as much as I did. But they could not possibly have enjoyed them any more than I.

I was never a heavy smoker. A pack of 20 cigarettes usually lasted me several days. I quit smoking in 1982 after a bout with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. I didn’t know I could be that ill and still be alive when it was all over. I was sick in bed for about two weeks, and it was a month before I started really getting back on my feet. During that time, the last thing I wanted was a cigarette. So when I finally did recover, I decided that since I’d been so long without smoking, I might as well quit.

So I did. No nicotine patches, no tapering off, no belief that I was fighting an addiction, no backsliding. I just quit. I got a little antsy a few times during the first month, but after that it became easier.

I don’t know how many people were smoking when I quit, but I do know that not nearly as many people smoke today as they did even 25 years ago, when the anti-smoking movement was becoming imbedded in American popular culture. As my wife – a lifelong non-smoker – pointed out recently, the pleasure that can come from smoking is no longer common knowledge among most people.

Today, smokers exist at the fringes of American society. You see them huddled outside buildings grabbing a quick smoke, looking around guiltily as they puff away. They are today’s lepers and considered fair game for the contempt of non-smokers. And some non-smokers do seem to enjoy the self-righteous satisfaction that they get from heaping scorn upon smokers.

I’ve never cared much for self-righteousness, and so I’ve found that being in the presence of zealous anti-smokers is often more unpleasant than being in the presence of someone who’s smoking. They say second-hand smoke is bad for you, but doesn’t sanctimoniousness give off some kind of toxin as well? And recalling the moments of relaxation and contemplation during those smoke breaks in Army basic training, I’m wondering if, in the old days, tobacco didn’t provide some kind of subtle social lubricant and mild tranquilizer that helped us get through life’s daily aggravations and frustrations. How many outbursts of anger were avoided because someone walked away from a tense moment and had a smoke? How many friendships were started because someone asked a stranger for a light? And how many knotty problems were solved during a smoke break? After all, Sherlock Holmes did smoke a pipe and sometimes calculated the difficulty of a problem by the number of pipes he'd smoke while pondering a solution.

Of course, lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema are a steep price to pay for a few moments of relaxation, but life is full of contradictions and ironies. We’re undoubtedly healthier for not smoking, but sometimes I think the world has become a bitchier place as a result.

And speaking of ironies, that brings me back to that opening comment about World War II. The ad at the top of this entry is from January 1942, America’s darkest days of the war. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor less than a month earlier and were dominating the Pacific. Adolph Hitler had conquered most of Europe and seemed on the verge of taking Great Britain.

Hitler and the Nazis were ardently opposed to smoking, and smoking was banned in all Nazi office buildings. Hitler’s fascist partner, Benito Mussolini, didn’t like smoking or smokers either.

By contrast, Franklin Roosevelt smoked heavily despite his doctor’s repeated warnings. Winston Churchill also was a heavy smoker.

So my point is sort of like that old joke about the guy sitting in Central Park, banging two sticks together to keep the tigers away. On the one hand, his claim that he’s keeping tigers away is nuts. On the other hand, well, there certainly are no tigers in Central Park.

So who’s to say that the strategies and tactics that won World War II didn’t come from the Allies’ planning sessions in smoke-filled rooms, where tensions were eased and focus was sharpened because the participants were smoking? Yes, I know, it’s a screwy theory. But then, the smokers did win, and the anti-smokers lost.

Once, it was "quite the thing" to go to the Polo Grounds

Fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have had any difficulty finding the Polo Grounds. It was New York City’s oldest and most historic sports venue and had been tucked beneath Coogan’s Bluff overlooking the Harlem River since 1891. Any cabbie in the city could have driven straight to the ballpark, and many 12-year-old kids in Manhattan probably could have given you directions. And the elevated railway had a stop near the stadium’s entrance at 155th Street.

But a lot of water has gone under the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge since the Polo Grounds was demolished in 1964, and the city’s collective memory of the birthplace of New York professional sports has faded. So when we went on our second annual pre-New Year’s trek to the sites of the city’s vanished stadiums last Sunday, we had to do some searching.

Turns out the Polo Grounds hasn’t been remembered any better than Ebbets Field. A year ago, we found New York’s obscure monument to Brooklyn’s “Boys of Summer” nearly hidden by a bush at the massive public housing complex that was built on the site of that storied ballpark. That adventure was posted on SideSalad, a lively and entertaining blog produced by my old pal Jeff Houck in Tampa. You can see the Ebbets Field story at http://sidesalad.net/archives/003056.html.

After scouring the Washington Heights neighborhood, my brother-in-law, Bob Morrow, finally found Polo Grounds Towers, another huge public housing complex that was built on the land where Willie Mays once patrolled the outfield. But it took a knowledgeable baseball fan named Ricardo Miranda, who works at the complex, to steer us to a couple of markers commemorating the long-ago stadium.


We found this faded, weathered sign on one of the towers. It reads “Welcome to the Polo Grounds Towers. This development was built on the location that Willie Mays and the Giants made famous. Let’s keep it beautiful.”

Not far away, we found this battered plaque marking the spot where home place once was.

My wife Jane shot this pic of our nephew, John Morrow, and me at the site. Presumably, this is the approximate spot where one of sports’ most dramatic moments occurred on October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to defeat the hated Brooklyn Dodgers 5-4 and win a pennant-deciding playoff game. You can see a YouTube video of that legendary homer at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrI7dVj90zs.

We’d heard that somewhere in the complex is a stairway that once descended to a stadium ticket booth, and I read later that there’s supposedly a plaque marking the spot where Willie Mays made what many fans consider the greatest play of all time during the first game of the 1954 World Series. But it was a raw and bitterly cold day, not conducive to tramping around the site looking for ghosts of summers past, so I can’t verify that the Mays plaque exists.

You can, however, see Mays’ astonishing catch at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dK6zPbkFnE&feature=related.

At one time, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field formed the axis of one of the great rivalries of sports. The rivalry between the Giants and the Dodgers reached its apex after World War II, when New York was home to three Major League teams and was the center of the baseball universe. In the 11 seasons between 1947 and 1957, a New York team played in the World Series 10 times. And seven of those Series were between New York teams.

Polo was never actually played at the Polo Grounds. The stadium’s name was derived from an earlier, nearby arena that was used for polo. When a new wooden stadium was built at a different location in 1891, it was christened the Polo Grounds.

This sketch from Historic Ballparks: A Panoramic Vision, by John Pastier, shows the stadium as it appeared at the turn of the 19th century.

In its heyday, the fans and reporters who came to sporting events at the Polo Grounds didn’t gush about the stadium’s architectural beauty or wax lyrically about the nostalgia it evoked. But it was a New York social center. On April 18, 1910, The New York Times reported that the Giants would open the season that day at the Polo Grounds.

“Weather permitting, it will be a great gathering of townsfolk, including Mayor Gaynor and a number of invited guests,” the Times said. “The opening day at the Polo Grounds has become a fixed institution, and it is quite the thing to be there, for most everybody else will be.”

The wooden ballpark burned about a year later, but the Giants soon were back in business on the same spot in a new concrete-and-steel structure.

The new Polo Grounds was a utilitarian washtub of a stadium that was noteworthy more for its bizarre baseball configuration than for graceful lines and inspiring vistas. The postcard at the top of this entry is from the early 1920s. Home runs were cheap for pull hitters. The left field foul pole was only 279 feet from home plate, and it was only 258 feet to the right field foul pole. But the distance to dead center field was 485 feet – out of reach for most mortals.

In 1913, the New York Yankees joined the Giants as tenants of the Polo Grounds. Later, the Yankees acquired a promising young slugger named Babe Ruth. Ruth drew so many fans to see him hit home runs in the Polo Grounds that the Yankees soon built their own stadium in the Bronx, just across the Harlem from the Giants’ home.

Yankee Stadium is shown at the bottom of this photo, and the Polo Grounds is at the top.

The Polo Grounds seating capacity was expanded to about 55,000 in 1923, and the stadium started hosting important college football games.

This postcard, probably from the late 1940s or early 1950s, shows the stadium as it appeared after the expansion.

In October 1924, Notre Dame came to town to play Army, and the game was considered so important that it was played at the Polo Grounds. Grantland Rice, a sportswriter for the New York Herald-Tribune, was greatly impressed with Notre Dame’s backfield. In his story about the game, Rice referred to the four backs as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and said they “formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone” that swept the Irish to victory over Army.

In 1925, New York’s professional football team, also named the Giants, started playing their home games in the infant National Football League at the Polo Grounds. The stadium also hosted boxing matches and other events, making it New York’s most important gathering place.

But despite playing in two World Series and winning one of them between 1951 and 1954, attendance at the Polo Grounds was in a nosedive in the late 1950s. The stadium fell into disrepair, and the Yankees – with future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford – were consistently drawing twice the number of fans that the Giants attracted. In 1956, the Giants’ attendance was only about 629,000, and in 1957 it was only about 654,000.

Meanwhile, the football Giants had moved across the river to Yankee Stadium.

On September 19, 1957, the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Giants 9-1 in their last baseball game in the Polo Grounds. A few months later, the Giants joined their rivals, the Dodgers, in moving to California.

Ebbets Field was torn down in 1960, but the Polo Grounds got a brief stay of execution thanks to the expansion of Major League baseball and the creation of the American Football League. The New York Mets joined the National League and became tenants of the Polo Grounds. And the New York Titans played their home games against AFL opponents there.

But the end came in 1963. On September 29, 3,899 fans showed up at the Polo Grounds to watch the last baseball game at the stadium. The Mets were pounded by Houston, 13-4. And on December 13, the Buffalo Bills beat New York’s AFL team, now called the Jets, 19-10. The final football game drew only 5,826 fans.

The Mets and the Jets moved to the new Shea Stadium in Queens in 1964. The new ballpark was one of the round, cookie-cutter-style all-purpose arenas that began appearing in the 1960s. These new mega-stadiums were symmetrical, devoid of character, cleansed of all architectural quirks, and nearly identical. In a word, they were soulless.

In April 1964, demolition workers started tearing down the Polo Grounds with the same wrecking ball that had been used to demolish Ebbets Field. That same month, writer and baseball fan Roger Angell commented on the destruction of the Polo Grounds in an elegant essay for the April 25 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

“What does depress us about the demise of the bony, misshapen old playground,” Angell wrote, “is the attendant, irrevocable deprivation of habit – the amputation of so many private, repeated and easily renewable small familiarities. … All these we mourn, for their loss constitutes the death of still another neighborhood – a small landscape of distinctive and reassuring familiarity. Demolition and loss are a painful city commonplace, but as our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable, we sense, at last, that our environs are being replaced by mere events, and we are stabbed by the realization that we may not possess the score cards and record books to help us remember who we are and what we have seen and loved.”

Remembering my father

My father, Claude Dry, died earlier this year, a few months shy of his 89th birthday. He was a good provider and a pillar of his community, and a full-fledged member of the so-called “Greatest Generation.” He served in the Navy during World War II and during the 1950s and ‘60s he provided a small-town Southern version of the now-classic Boomer childhood for my two younger sisters and me.

The last time I saw him was two days before Christmas last year.

His funeral service was held at Wesley Chapel Methodist Church in Misenheimer, North Carolina. His grandparents helped establish that church in 1858. The sanctuary was full.

He was buried in the cemetery across the road from the church and the place where he raised his family, and a hundred yards or so from the house where he was born in 1918. A contingent of local vets rendered military honors, presenting the colors, firing a salute, and playing “Taps.” The military does know how to do a moving sendoff.

Afterwards, people talked about what a wonderful man he was, and how much the community loved him, and that was good to hear. He was a kind and decent man.

I have some good memories of my father, such as family vacation trips, building furniture together, a trip to Atlanta in 1966 to see Sandy Koufax pitch against the Braves, watching countless college basketball games on TV together, including when UNC beat Michigan for the NCAA championship in 1993 when we were living in Florida. But my father didn’t talk much about himself or anything else, and aside from a few superficial things, I don’t know much about his life. That’s given me something to ponder over the years.

A few years ago, we found several boxes of old photos when we were cleaning out my parents’ house after they’d moved into an assisted living home in nearby Albemarle. Some of the photos I’d seen; a lot of them I hadn’t. They fill in a few details of my father’s life.

The photo at the top of this entry is something of a family classic. It shows my father around 1959 or 1960 in front of the grocery store/service station he operated for 25 years in Misenheimer.

Having the photo shot was a big deal for him at the time. The photographer made it into a postcard. I don’t know what kind of sales pitch the photographer used on my dad, or how much he paid for them. But there were still dozens of the cards in unwrapped packs when he finally closed the store in 1978.

He did well at the store until the late 1960s, and then Food Lion opened a large grocery store in Rockwell, a little town about 10 miles from Misenheimer. After that, he didn’t do as well.
One thing my father did talk about some was his time in the service. He made chief petty officer, the Navy’s highest enlisted rank.

This photo shows him sometime after he made chief.


He also apparently enjoyed himself during shore leaves. I’m guessing this photo was made in 1943 or 1944, in Norfolk or perhaps New York City. I have no idea who the women are, but I do know that neither of them is my mother.

He served aboard a tanker during the Allied invasion of North Africa and later aboard a repair ship, the USS Numitor, which sailed from Norfolk on May 12, 1945. The Numitor reached Okinawa on August 10, one day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The Numitor became part of the U.S. occupation force after Japan surrendered in September. Dad occasionally mentioned that he’d been in Sasebo, and that he’d also seen the destruction in nearby Nagasaki. But he never went into even superficial details about his experiences there.

This photo shows my father after the war with a friend of his. I’m guessing it was made around 1947.


I'm guessing this photo of my parents and me was made in late 1950 or early 1951. And the last picture shows my dad with members of the Misenheimer Lions Club, which he helped establish around 1956. He’s fifth from the left.

I don’t think he missed a single Lions Club meeting until it was disbanded more than 40 years later.

Plymouth High ends perfect season with state football championship

Plymouth High School completed an undefeated season yesterday by beating North Duplin High 20-13 in Raleigh to win the state Division 1A football championship. The Vikings won 16 straight games this season, and they beat a very good team to win the title. Plymouth's win over North Duplin snapped that team's 14-game win streak.

The above photo from The News and Observer of Raleigh shows Plymouth lineman Markeith Stratton overcome with joy after his team's win. The N&O reported that Plymouth dominated the game despite the narrow one-touchdown difference in the score. The Vikings had 15 first downs to North Duplin's 8, ran 56 plays from scrimmage compared to North Duplin's 35, and had possession of the ball for almost 32 minutes of the 48-minute game.

Perfect seasons such as this don't come around too often. Congratulations to Plymouth High School Coach Robert Cody and his history-making team.

More self-promotion

I was profiled in the November-December issue of the Carolina Alumni Review, which is published by the University of North Carolina Alumni Association. The story is by CAR writer Susan Simone. You can read the story by clicking on the picture above.

Barry Bonds: An enigma wrapped in an ego

Every time I see Barry Bonds on TV I’m amazed – not by what he’s done during his Major League baseball career, but by the remarkable personality and gigantic ego that are on display.

Bonds is one of the oddest – and saddest – professional sports celebrities of our era. He’s a man who has reached the top of his profession and attained great fame and wealth in the process. But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying his successes.

During the 2007 baseball season, he surpassed Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs and ended the season with 762, making him the most prolific slugger in the game’s history. His accomplishment should have been the crowning achievement of his life and a cause for baseball fans to celebrate his career.

Instead, that record that Bonds devoted himself to achieving with such single-minded focus might be wiped off the books. On November 15, Bonds was charged with five counts of lying to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. The charges resulted from Bonds’s December 2003 testimony to a federal attorney investigating allegations of steroid use by some Major League players.

Bonds denied using steroids. But if the feds prove that he did, that could void his home run record. More about that in a moment.

The perjury charges weren’t exactly greeted with shock and indignation by the press and fans. When fashion designer Marc Ecko, who paid more than $700,000 for the ball Bonds hit to set the record, asked fans to vote online to determine what to do with the ball, they voted to mark it with a big asterisk and give it to the Hall of Fame.

Ecko said he’d comply with the vote. That infuriated Bonds, who complained about the asterisk during a recent interview on MSNBC.

Bonds’s public behavior hasn’t helped his image. He has shown unrestrained contempt for anyone who questions his behavior or the legitimacy of the home run records he’s established. (He also set the single season record for home runs in 2001 when he hit 73.)

Bonds has made it clear that he sincerely believes that he is the most important person in the universe and no one has the right to interfere with his personal quest for glory and riches.

Now, I know that Barry Bonds is not unique among human beings who think they're pretty important people. Self-effacement doesn’t come easily for anyone. But I don’t think there are many people out there who take their self-aggrandizement as seriously as Bonds does.

Other accomplished athletes managed to project a likeable public persona despite the fact that they obviously were quite impressed with their own abilities. During his prime, boxer Muhammad Ali didn’t pass up any opportunities to tell the world how great he was. But Ali also made the world laugh and turned his boasting into poetry. And there were never any rumors that he’d done anything illegal to enhance his accomplishments in the ring.

Bonds, by comparison, is sullen and angry at the world when he’s in public. There’s no law that says he has to be pleasant and agreeable, but for Bonds, his surliness seems to be a matter of personal pride.

Bonds also apparently has only contempt for the federal justice system. As I mentioned earlier, he recently was charged with lying under oath and obstruction of justice by a federal attorney investigating the alleged illegal use of steroids among some Major League Baseball players.

Here’s the astonishing part: Bonds was told before his statements that he would be immune from prosecution – that is, even if he admitted taking steroids, he wouldn’t be charged with anything. All he had to do was tell the truth.

But apparently Bonds couldn’t bear to admit that his records are tainted.

So now the public may get a glimpse of this man’s inner workings when he and his giant ego have to respond to whatever evidence federal prosecutors have that he cheated.

Practical uses for a tail

If you've ever wondered why cats have tails, well, here's one reason. If you're trying to take a nap during the day, you can use your tail as a sort of sleep mask.

Or if someone with a camera catches you in an embarrassing moment, you can use your tail to disguise your identity, like they do in those old black-and-white photos where they put a black bar across people's eyes so you supposedly can't tell who they are.

These practical uses of the tail are demonstrated by Beaucat, our 14-year-old tomcat.

The dark side of Darrin and Samantha

A couple of months ago I got hooked on “Mad Men,” the highly hyped drama on American Movie Classics that meticulously recreates the Madison Avenue of 1960.

I didn’t find out about the show until it was about halfway through its first season, but I’ve gone out of my way to see all of the remaining episodes.

“Mad Men” centers on Don and Betty Draper (above). Don is a hotshot advertising executive at the peak of his career with the firm of Sterling Cooper. Betty is a former model who gave up her career to marry Don and raise a family.

On the surface, the darkly handsome Draper seems to have everything you were supposed to want 47 years ago. He has the high-powered and high paying job, the chic, gorgeous blonde wife, the comfortable home in suburban Westchester County, and the two adorable kids.

He’s also a man’s man who can drink his office pals under the table after work -- or during work, for that matter -- and the following day deliver an irresistible proposal for an ad campaign to land a lucrative account for the firm.

From the moment I started watching the show, however, I realized that there was something very familiar about Don Draper and “Mad Men.” It reminded me of another young TV couple on a hit show of the early 1960s. The husband – dark haired, hard working, very creative – had a gorgeous blonde wife and worked for the high-powered advertising firm of McMahon and Tate. He and his wife lived in a pricey, comfortable suburb and were raising a family. They drank quite a bit and had quirky neighbors named Gladys and Abner Kravitz.

That couple was Darrin and Samantha Stevens (above), the central characters of “Bewitched,” the romantic sitcom that premiered in 1964. The more I watched “Mad Men,” the more it seemed to be a show about the darker side of Darrin and Samantha.

Like Samantha, Betty Draper is blonde and beautiful, compassionate and caring, a loving wife and trusted friend. But where Samantha can solve problems with a twitch of her nose, Betty is struggling with the ugly realities of her life.

Samantha (above) gave up witchcraft to marry Darrin and raise a family. Her sunny disposition never deserts her. She tolerates the constant meddling of her mother Endora and the incessant snooping of Gladys Kravitz.

The biggest challenge to Samantha’s relationship with her husband is Endora’s continuing effort to break up their marriage by constantly provoking Darrin.

By comparison, Betty Draper (above) is seeing a psychiatrist because she feels overwhelmed and inadequate. Beneath her sunny blonde beauty is a simmering anger. She slaps a neighbor who provokes her, and she uses her son’s BB gun to shoot at another neighbor’s pigeons when that neighbor threatens her children’s dog.

Her neighbor Francine Hanson confesses to Betty that she wants to poison her husband because he’s having an affair.

Like Don Draper, Darrin Stevens (below left) is the creative force at his firm, McMahon and Tate. He’s as devoted to Samantha as she is to him, and he believes firmly in honesty and following the rules.

Don Draper (right), on the other hand, is having affairs with two women. And his entire life is a lie. His real name is Dick Whitman, and during the Korean War he stole the identity of Lieutenant Don Draper, who was killed in the same explosion that put Whitman in the hospital.

Samantha Stevens also is trying to hide her true identity from the world. Samantha’s secret is that she’s a witch. But she’s not hiding it because she’s ashamed. She’s hiding it because her husband has an over-developed sense of fair play and doesn’t want the advantages of his wife’s witchcraft.

I haven’t seen any acknowledgement by the creators of “Mad Men” that they had Darrin and Samantha Stevens in mind when they came up with the characters of Don and Betty Draper. But it’s hard to believe that the similarities between the Stevens and the Drapers – and the darker juxtaposed comparisons between them – are purely coincidental.

Painful memories of The War

I watched all but a few hours of the Ken Burns documentary on World War II, and I thought the most compelling moments were when the elderly vets talked about the difficulties they’d had in trying to tell other people about their worst experiences in the war. It reminded me of a brief but poignant encounter I had with an aging World War II veteran in Florida more than 10 years ago.

I shot the above photo in 1996 at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola. My intent was to get a shot of the airplane, which is a World War II-vintage Grumman TBF “Avenger” torpedo bomber. As I was about to snap the shot, the elderly gentleman on crutches stepped into the frame and started studying the display. He added something to the photo, so I shot it.

I went up to the display cabinet to take a look at the photos. The gentleman was still there, totally absorbed. A few moments passed. The man turned to me and said something, I don’t remember what. But we struck up a conversation.

I believe he said he lived in upstate New York. He told me he’d served in the Navy’s Construction Battalion during the war. Those men were known as Seabees, a play on words based on the battalion’s initials, “CB.” Said he’d served in the Pacific, driving a dump truck with the Seabee crews that built airfields and did other construction work.

He said the reason he was walking with crutches was because of an accident he’d had during the war.

The dump truck he drove was designed for combat zones, which meant that the driver had to be able to get out of the truck very quickly if someone started shooting at him. So that meant the truck had no seat belts and no doors. If bullets are whizzing past you, you don’t want to have to take time to unbuckle a seatbelt and open a door. Basically, you want to instantly dive from the seat out of the truck and find cover.

The vet said he’d been driving his truck on one of the islands late in the war when he ran over something – a big piece of coral, a log, something – that had caused his truck to bounce and swerve. The jolt threw him out of the cab. He landed on his back, seriously and permanently injuring his spine.

As he got older, the old injury caused his spine to deteriorate rapidly until he could no longer walk without crutches.

That was a touching story, to say the least. But what he told me next was sad beyond belief. I don’t know why he decided to tell me, unless it was simply because he needed to tell someone.

I believe he said he was on Saipan, before his debilitating injury. Saipan was taken by American troops in 1944.

The Japanese civilian residents of Saipan were caught between two armies locked in fierce combat. Spurred by Japanese propaganda that said Americans would brutalize them, many committed suicide rather than surrender.

The old vet said that one night he and all other truck drivers were ordered to the airfield immediately. Once there, they were told to turn their headlights onto the landing strip.

The lights revealed dozens of Japanese teenagers and children, armed with grenades, running across the field. They apparently intended to detonate the grenades among American soldiers, killing themselves and everyone around them.

The Americans were ordered to open fire. The old vet said they had no choice. It was kill the children or be killed by them.

The memories of shooting children – even though they were carrying grenades – had tortured the old man for more than 50 years.

I didn't know what to say when the old man finished his tale. “I’ve never told anyone that story before,” he said.

We talked for a few more minutes. I wrote down his name and address. Sometime before I left Florida in 1997 I called the phone number he'd given me, but there was no answer and no answering machine.

After the last episode of Burns’s documentary that included the vets' comments about their painful memories of the war, I started digging for the contact info and brief notes I'd jotted down after my conversation with the old vet in Pensacola. But that was 11 years, two states and two major moves ago. I couldn’t find them. Perhaps that’s just as well. But I did find the photo.

Wipeout

Less than a year ago, I spent quite a bit of money for what was then the top-of-the-line Dell PC -- the XPS 700.

It may be the last Dell I buy.

I can't complain about Dell's customer service. As far as I can tell, they've done all they can and should do to try to make it right. But a crappy PC is, well, a crappy PC, and magnanimous gestures can't change that.

The first problem was that the new PC was slow. And the last thing this PC should have been was slow. It's supposed to be the ultimate speed and power PC, so fast that it practically does what you want it to do before you even know what you want.

Still, it was slow and stumbling and constantly locked up, and I complained to Dell so much that they replaced it. Wow, I thought, you can't argue with that.

But the replacement PC they sent in May crashed spectacularly about a week ago. The techs decided that the motherboard was flawed. Almost instantly, Dell sent a new motherboard and a tech to install it, all without charge.

Nice try. Didn't work. Maybe it was another bad motherboard. Maybe the video cards were bad. Whatever it was, the tech spent four hours and still couldn't get it to boot up. So now yet another motherboard is en route, along with new video cards. But it's looking like all the data on that big old hard drive is gone, although I did back up a lot of it. And while I appreciate Dell's effort to make it right, that's not going to bring back the data I may lose because Dell sent me a lousy PC. Actually, make that two lousy PCs, plus, it appears, a bad motherboard.

So I don't know when this will be resolved, nor do I know what I'll have to work with when I'm finally back up again. And this experience -- two bad PCs, bad replacement parts -- doesn't exactly make me confident that my PC problems will be over when all this is finished. FYI, I'm making this blog update on my wife's PC, which is -- yikes -- also a Dell.

One thing I am certain of -- I sure wish I'd gone back for a long second look at that iMac in the Apple store in Norfolk.

On the road, back soon

Drye Goods is on the road doing research in Washington, D.C. Please check back by in a week or so for new entries.

In the meantime, drop by some friends' blogs for some entertaining reading. Super Bicyclist Alan Snel at Bike Stories (http://alansnel.com/blog/) is pedaling around Tampa Bay publicizing the annual Bicycle Bash by the Bay on November 4. More info about the Bash is also at http://www.bicyclebash.com/.

Jeff Houck's SideSalad (http://www.sidesalad.net/) is always worth a look. His entry of September 12 ("A strong indication that life as we know it is improving greatly") is Houck at his best. He derives this conclusion from a close examination of a 1978 comic book ad. It's subtle, funny and very perceptive.

Loss of innocence in a more innocent era

September 11, 2001 was only the latest of several times that America supposedly has lost its innocence. An argument could be made that American naiveté was lost when we entered World War I in 1917, or when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, or when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, or when President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974.

Still, what happened six years ago today in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania was a uniquely chilling moment in our history. And I think that something in our national psyche did indeed change profoundly on that frightful day.

It seems appropriate to show the flag in a respectful way on today's somber anniversary. But I think we've lost much of the respect we once had for displaying the flag. Today, the American flag seems to be more of a sign that says "Open for business" at gas stations and used car lots or a demand that says "Look at me, I insist that I'm patriotic."

So I dug up these poignant photos of patriotic observances at the Library of Congress website. They were shot in the early 1940s, another era when America was shedding its innocence and undergoing profound changes with our entry into World War II.

The first photo shows a color guard of black soldiers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The exact date of the photo and the name of the photographer are unknown, but it was shot sometime between 1941 and 1945. In those days, the U.S. military, like the rest of the country, was strictly segregated.

These Boy Scouts were photographed in front of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in July 1941. The poster they're holding shows the flags of the nations supporting the United Nations Fight for Freedom. The photographer was John Rous.

In May 1943, photographer John Collier got this shot of a sailor and his girlfriend visiting the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. At that time, there was only one tomb that held an unidentified American soldier who was killed in World War I. Later, they added unidentified American servicemen from World War II and the Korean War and changed the name to the Tomb of the Unknowns.

The woman standing beneath the American flag and the state flag of Georgia was photgraphed by Jack Delano in 1941.

This last photo was shot in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1942 by photographer John Vachon. The exact date isn't known, but it looks like it may have been July 4th.

These photos can be viewed at the Library of Congress website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html.

I, um, won an award of some sort

I used to speak disparagingly of journalism awards. Real reporters don’t worry about winning awards, I’d say. Real reporters, I'd say, are focused on covering their beats, not cherry-picking the stories that will get the attention of journalism award judges.

Of course, my attitude about awards may have been influenced by the fact that I’d never won an award other than in-house recognition at newspapers where I’ve worked.

So now I have to change my attitude, because a couple of weeks ago, I won a first place public service award from the Florida Magazine Association. The award -- known as a Charlie Award -- was for a package of stories I wrote called “The Rescuers” that was published in the June/July 2006 edition of Key West Magazine.

The stories examined Key West’s vulnerability to hurricanes and how emergency management, fire and police personnel would respond if a Category 5 hurricane struck Key West. The stories also discussed previous powerful hurricanes that have made landfall in Key West and the Florida Keys.

The stories can be viewed online at http://www.kwmag.com/2006JuneJuly/index.html.

This year’s Charlie Awards competition drew more than 900 entries from 70 magazines published in Florida. The entries were judged by magazine publishers and journalists across the U.S. First, second and third place winners were chosen in each category.

The Charlie Award is named after the late Charles G. Welborn Jr., a long-time professor of journalism and communications at the University of Florida.

The award arrived from Tallahassee today. See above.

Final issue of "World's most reliable newspaper" hits the stands

The dreaded moment has arrived. The final issue of the Weekly World News hit the supermarket checkout lanes last week.

Readers – that means my wife when I remind her that I have a blog and maybe my mother-in-law, my sister in Wyoming, my cousin in South Carolina and a couple of pals in Florida – will recall that I lamented the passing of the WWN a few weeks ago. I noted that I’d miss the tabloid’s total indifference to celebrity journalism and its devotion to chronicling the, um, far-fetched events of our world.

Well, the WWN went out in style in its final issue. A sampling of the stories included these:

The capture of a hairy lobster as big as a Buick. Global warming is thought to have had something to do with the creature’s immense size.

An infant born in Iowa with fragmented eyes like those of a fly. Doctors say that, in this age of iPods, PCs, cell phones, HDTV and “every other light source today’s generation stares into for hours at a stretch,” it was inevitable that this phenomenon would happen sooner or later.

Live puppies found living in the sunken wreck of the HMS Titanic. The puppies are descendants of two dogs that found a large air bubble when the ship went down in 1912.

A half-man, half-alligator creature found in the Florida Everglades. The creature apparently was biologically engineered by a rogue geneticist who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

WWN editors billed the final issue as a “collector’s item” and suggested that readers “Buy now, sell on eBay tomorrow!”

Go Tar Heels -- I think

My alma mater, the University of North Carolina, plays its first football game of the 2007 season today, and there’s talk around Chapel Hill of a “new culture” being established thanks to the Tar Heels’ new coach, Butch Davis.

Davis comes to Carolina after coaching stellar teams at the University of Miami and mediocre Cleveland Browns teams in the NFL. UNC football fans are hoping he can repeat the success he had at Miami.

I’m hoping the same thing. At least, I think I am. More on that in a moment.

It’s been a long, loooong time since football in Chapel Hill was something other than a way to pass the time until basketball season. And while the basketball team’s success has been constant for 50 years, the football program has had its ups and downs.

The first great era of Carolina football was the late 1940s, when legendary running back Charley “Choo-Choo” Justice led the Tar Heels to a place among the college football elite.

Choo-Choo was such a spectacular player that he made the covers of that day’s large-circulation magazines, such as Life and Sport. He even inspired a swing-era popular song, “All the way, Choo-Choo,” that was recorded by Benny Goodman and his band.

Carolina’s football success was sporadic after Choo-Choo chugged out of Chapel Hill. In 1978, Dick Crum took over the program and led it back to prominence. Crum won more games during his tenure than any other Carolina coach, but he was not well-liked by some of the school’s powerful athletic boosters and was fired after the 1987 season.

It appeared that Crum’s successor, Mack Brown, was about to return UNC football to the glories of the Justice era. But in 1997 Brown accepted an offer from the University of Texas almost immediately after saying he’d never leave Chapel Hill.

After Brown’s departure, Tar Heel football teams had little success on the field under Carl Torbush and John Bunting. Off the field, however, Torbush and Bunting would not tolerate players who ignored team rules or their studies. Transgressors were shown the door, regardless of their importance to the football team’s success.

And that brings me back to Butch Davis and the so-called “new culture” of the North Carolina football program.

UNC’s academic reputation is among the best in the nation. That’s important to me and a lot of other alumni. The basketball team’s success – five national championships – has been achieved entirely within the rules. The team’s success is only enhanced by the fact that Carolina basketball coaches insist that their players go to class, stay out of trouble, and work toward graduation.

Davis’s last stint as a college football coach at Miami was at a school whose reputation has been tarnished by players’ behavior problems on and off the field. None of that happened, however, when Davis coached there from 1995 to 2000; in fact, the UM football program was recognized for players’ graduation rates.

So maybe Davis is the guy to lead Carolina back to gridiron prominence without turning it into a football factory that happens to have a university attached to it. Here’s hoping, anyway. The moment of truth will come if one of his star players is arrested or stops going to class. If he kicks that player off the team – as he should – then we’ll know Davis respects the tradition of academic excellence and playing within the rules that has always been a part of North Carolina athletics.

Congratulations to an old friend

Just learned that Alan Snel, an old pal of mine down in Tampa who also is undoubtedly the world’s most intense bicyclist, has won a significant professional award.

Al organized last fall’s first “Bicycle Bash by the Bay,” a celebration of bicycling that attracted dozens of experienced cyclists and cycling newcomers. This week, the Florida Bicycle Association named the Bash the Event of the Year.

Al already is hard at work putting together the second annual Bash, which will take place November 4 at Vinoy Park on the waterfront in downtown St. Petersburg.

A decade ago, Al was a pioneer in the genre of sports business reporting. He worked for newspapers in Denver, Seattle and elsewhere, and was the producer of a sports business website for one of the networks. A couple of years ago, he created his own job as marketing director for a group of bicycle shops around Tampa Bay. He usually starts his days with a quick 40- or 50-mile bike ride, and he’s made two cross-country bicycle trips.

Al’s blog, “Bike Stories,” can be seen at http://alansnel.com/blog/.

I’ve known Al since the early 1990s, when we covered the same political beat in South Florida for competing newspapers fighting like cats and dogs for the same readers. We’d spend our days trying to beat each other’s brains out on the beat, then often meet at the local ballpark after work for beers and minor league baseball.

So, hey Al, congratulations. This is an impressive achievement.

By the way, the screen grab of Al on his bike is lifted from a blog called SideSalad, produced by Jeff Houck, another old pal from my days in the Florida journalism wars. Jeff’s lively and very hip blog is always worth a visit at http://www.sidesalad.net/.

Young love cut short by hurricane

On this date 77 years ago, Rosalind Grooms Palmer sat down at her typewriter in Key West, Florida and banged out a teasing, affectionate note to her 12-year-old kid brother, Bascom Grooms, who was visiting friends up the islands in the village of Tavernier.

She apologized for the brevity of the note and, perhaps to ease the guilt she felt at not writing more, enclosed 50 cents so Bascom could buy an ice cream sundae for himself and a young friend named Elizabeth. She told her brother that she’d like to be with him on Key Largo “enjoying the ‘squitoes and other varmints such as sand fleas,” but added that she wouldn’t be taking any trips for a while.

That wasn’t entirely true, but her travel plans weren’t exactly the kind she wanted to reveal to her little brother or to the family he was visiting. She would be joining her boyfriend, 19-year-old George Pepper, at the Matecumbe Hotel in Islamorada for the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

That note from Rosalind was the last communication Bascom would ever have with his sister. Five days later, she and George were killed when the most powerful hurricane in U.S. history came ashore in the Upper Keys.

In December 2002, I interviewed Bascom at his home in Key West. He allowed me to copy photos of him, Rosalind and George from his family album. The sepia-toned old photographs tell a poignant story of a long-ago romance that was tragically ended just as it was about to blossom.

Rosalind was only 21 in August 1935, but she had already been through a brief, unhappy marriage to George Palmer, a U.S. Navy officer she’d met when Palmer’s ship docked in Key West. Rosalind – young, impulsive, fun-loving and beautiful – had fallen for the Navy officer, and they were married in Key West in 1933. They moved to San Diego, where Palmer’s ship, the destroyer USS Perry, was based.

But less than two years later, Rosalind suddenly appeared in Key West and said her marriage was over. Bascom recalled that she didn’t say much about her reasons for leaving her husband and filing for divorce.

Rosalind got her old job back as a court clerk. Rosalind was considered one of Key West’s most beautiful young women, and as soon as word got out that she was no longer married, lots of eager young men sought her attention.

Rosalind didn’t take her looks too seriously, however. She thought her legs were too skinny for her to be really attractive. She loved to dress well, and white high-heel pumps became a trademark of her wardrobe.

In early 1935, she met George Pepper, and soon she was again in love. Her new boyfriend was the nephew of Claude Pepper, who was just beginning his legendary career in Florida politics.

George had gotten a job as a mess hall steward at one of the work camps that housed World War I veterans working on a New Deal construction project in the Keys. The vets were building a highway from Miami to Key West.

Rosalind and George were gaa-gaa over each other. In July they went to a photographer’s studio in Miami and posed with various props for charmingly cheesy photos.

They planned to get married as soon as Rosalind’s divorce was final.



A day or so after Rosalind wrote the note to her brother she went up to Islamorada to meet George. They shot more pictures of each other on a pier, Rosalind in a knit dress and her ubiquitous white high-heel pumps, George in a white shirt and tie and summer slacks.

On Labor Day weekend 1935, a tropical storm crossed the Bahamas into the deep warm water of the Florida Straits. It began rapidly intensifying, and by September 2 – Labor Day Monday – it had mushroomed into a seagoing monster with sustained winds of more than 165 miles an hour. By late Monday afternoon, the worst of the storm’s winds were starting to claw at the Upper Keys.

At a veterans’ labor camp at the foot of Lower Matecumbe Key, George Pepper was instructed to use his boss’s car – a big, heavy 1934 Dodge – to take some of the veterans’ wives to safety in Miami. Sometime around 5 p.m., George and Rosalind climbed into the big automobile and set out for the Matecumbe Hotel to pick up the women.

They never made it. For weeks, survivors and rescue workers wondered what had become of them.

They finally got a clue to the grim fates of Rosalind and George on September 18, when rescue workers found the 1934 Dodge submerged in Florida Bay, about 100 feet from shore. A diver found a pair of white high-heel pumps in the car, but no sign of the young couple.

They found Rosalind’s body the following day. The storm had hurled her onto Raccoon Key, one of the small, soggy little islands that dot Florida Bay.

George’s body was found several weeks later. The storm’s ferocious winds had carried him across more than 30 miles of water to Cape Sable at the foot of the Florida peninsula.

Hurricane Andrew changed my life

Fifteen years ago this weekend, my life changed.

My wife and I were living in South Florida. On Saturday, August 22, 1992, we were having lunch with a friend at a small café in Stuart. Someone mentioned that the first tropical storm of the summer had formed and was somewhere around the Bahamas. Since it was the first storm of the 1992 hurricane season, it was given the “A” name – Andrew.

I didn’t think much about it. I made a wisecrack of some sort. We moved on to another topic of conversation.

But out in the Atlantic, Andrew was undergoing dramatic and profound changes. We didn’t know it at the time, but Andrew had already strengthened from a tropical storm to a minimal hurricane.

Hurricanes draw their strength from warm ocean water, and Andrew had found a banquet. And as it sucked up the energy from the warm water, there were no upper level winds to impede its development.

So Andrew underwent what meteorologists call rapid intensification, more colorfully known as “bombing out.” In only about 30 hours, Andrew mushroomed from a minimal hurricane with winds of 75 miles an hour to a city-leveling monster with winds of 165 miles an hour.

By Sunday afternoon – 24 hours after our leisurely, untroubled little lunch in Stuart – I was as close to panic as I ever remember being. We were totally unprepared for anything like this, and as Miami TV anchors continued their sonorous predictions of inevitable doom, we were trying to figure out what the hell to do.

At some point on that bizarre Sunday afternoon, I made a run to the ATM machine to get cash and then to a gas station to fill the tank of my car. All around me were thousands of other people also trying to make hasty preparations for probable catastrophe. I paid the clerk for my gas. As he handed me my receipt, he said, “Have a nice weekend.” I just stared at him open-mouthed and speechless for a moment. In the background, the TV was blaring about the coming doomsday, and this guy was wishing me a pleasant weekend. I couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say, and left, shaking my head.

We spent the night with a friend whose house was equipped with hurricane shutters. About 120 miles south of us, Andrew made landfall in southern Dade County.

Andrew has been described as more of a large tornado than a hurricane. Very intense hurricanes have very small eyes, and as Andrew roared ashore early on Monday, August 24, its eye was only about 12 miles wide.

Up the coast in St. Lucie County, however, we were in Andrew’s fringes. We received some intense rainfall and wind gusts that took down a few tree limbs, and that was pretty much it.

But about a week later, I was in southern Dade where Andrew had come ashore. At one point from Florida’s Turnpike, all I could see from horizon to horizon was total destruction. Nothing was standing. Everything was a jumble of debris, shards of lumber, broken trees.

At Florida City, where the turnpike ended, it looked like the town had been used for artillery practice. People with dazed expressions on their faces were driving around in cars with smashed-in roofs and broken windows. A blue haze of smoke from burning debris hung in the air. Military helicopters buzzed about overhead. Crowds of people were gathered around large, military tents to receive food and first aid.

I could have been in a Third World nation instead of the U.S.

I’m still sorting through the effect that that experience had on me. It may be the closest thing to a religious experience that I’ll ever have, because for the first time in my life, I fully realized that there are forces in this world whose power I cannot begin to comprehend and against which I am powerless.

For a couple of years, I became obsessed with powerful hurricanes. I decided that if I was going to live in a part of the world where these things might visit, I had to learn everything I could about them. So I read everything I could find about hurricanes.

At some point, I read about the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. I was astonished to learn that this storm had been even more powerful than Hurricane Andrew. In fact, the Labor Day hurricane is still the most powerful storm to make landfall in the U.S.

I dug up more information about this hurricane, and became fascinated with the story of hundreds of World War I veterans being left in harm’s way when this storm came ashore in the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935. It was a complex story with many layers. And it became Storm of the Century: The Labor Day hurricane of 1935, which was published by National Geographic in August 2002 – ten years after I’d witnessed the devastation of Hurricane Andrew.

Dean was third-most powerful hurricane at landfall

Meteorologists will be sorting through data from Hurricane Dean for months analyzing this incredibly powerful storm, but a few facts are already clear.

Hurricane Dean is the ninth-most powerful hurricane on record for the Atlantic Basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Dean’s lowest recorded barometric pressure was 906 millibars, which was recorded on August 21 at around 4 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. At that time, its sustained winds were clocked at 165 miles and hour, with gusts to 201 miles an hour.

A hurricane’s intensity is measured by its lowest barometric pressure reading and its peak sustained winds. A sustained wind is one that is measured continuously for at least one minute.

A very low barometric pressure reading is an indicator of very powerful winds.

The Saffir-Simpson Scale, which was devised by engineer Herbert Saffir and meteorologist Robert Simpson in the late 1960s, classifies hurricanes according to their destructive potential. Hurricane Dean became a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. Category 5 storms are capable of causing catastrophic damage if they make landfall. These are the storms that level nearly everything in their path. The energy a Category 5 storm releases can only be measured by comparing it to the detonation of multiple atomic bombs.

Hurricane Wilma, which roared across the Caribbean Sea in October 2005, is the most powerful storm in the Atlantic. As Wilma approached a landfall at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, its barometric pressure bottomed out at 882 millibars. At that point, its peak sustained winds were 170 miles an hour.

But luckily, Wilma weakened before it reached the Yucatan and made a right-angle turn toward the Florida Keys.

Although there are eight storms that reached greater intensity than Dean, only two other storms were stronger than Dean when they made landfall. The Labor Day hurricane of 1935 – which struck the Florida Keys on September 2, 1935 – is still the most powerful hurricane to strike the United States. The official low for this storm was 892 millibars when it came ashore at Long Key.

Hurricane Gilbert, which came ashore in 1988 at very near the same spot as Wilma, had a barometric pressure of 888 millibars.

Eagles return to lower Roanoke River

Sam Styons, a friend of mine who spent a lot of time on the Roanoke River when he was growing up here in Plymouth in the 1950s and 1960s, told me that he never saw bald eagles on the river in those days.

Things have changed for the better since then. During a trip upriver with Sam and some other friends earlier this week, we saw seven -- that's right, seven -- bald eagles during the 30-mile round trip.

This photo was shot by Bill Ehrenbeck, who is Plymouth's public works director. The bird held this pose for so long that I thought he was going to demand a tip after Bill got the shot.

So long, Weekly World News, it was fun

As Ed Anger might say, I’m madder than a blind man in a nudist colony. My favorite tabloid, the Weekly World News, is closing up shop. The tabloid newspaper will cease publication this month, apparently because of declining circulation.

For those of you who aren’t regular readers of the WWN, Ed Anger is, I assume, the nom de plume of the tab’s perpetually ranting columnist who vents his rage every week about the constant frustrations of modern life. He always begins his rant with a colorful variation of the phrase “I’m madder than …..”

The closing of WWN means I’ll no longer be able to read about such important news as Satan’s face appearing in storm clouds, and in dark smoke billowing from gigantic fires. Only in WWN could you read about Satan’s face being seen in a satellite shot of Hurricane Andrew.

Nor will I be informed of the computer viruses that are spreading to humans (see above), or the next sighting of Elvis. And I won’t know who The Alien will endorse in next year’s presidential election.

FYI, The Alien, a tall, slender extraterrestrial who neither wears clothes nor has external gonads, backed Clinton during his two campaigns.

The so-called Mainstream Media just isn’t going to report that kind of news.

I started reading WWN in the early 1990s, when I was a reporter in Florida. If you’ve never chased news in that part of the world, you have to understand something: Florida – especially South Florida – is a strange place that seems to compel people to do strange things, usually in public.

A reporter goes to work in the morning knowing that, before the day ends, he or she could be writing about Cuban or Haitian refugees coming ashore at a nearby beach, or a Space Shuttle crash, or a man finding a coral snake in his swimming pool and being bitten when he tries to put it in his freezer, or an alligator attacking a senior citizen on a golf course.

And it’s not just bizarre local news. I have a theory that every major news story that breaks in the U.S. at some point takes a turn through Florida. From the hanging ballot chads that ensnarled the 2000 presidential election, to the September 11 terrorist bombers learning to fly in Vero Beach, to the Florida congressman whose suggestive e-mails to young pages in the House of Representatives probably cost the Republicans the 2006 elections – if you can imagine it, it’s probably already happened in Florida.

I think that’s why South Florida is home to supermarket tabloids such as WWN, the National Enquirer, the Star, and others. I think the tabloid editors realize that just being in the midst of the South Florida looniness is a great stimulant to their writers.

I never paid attention to WWN until I lived there. Then, one day in the Publix checkout line, my eye fell on the WWN rack. I don’t remember what the headline was, but I do recall thinking that, after having lived in the land of surreal news events for a while, the stories in WWN seemed less absurd and more appealing to me.

Note that I did not say that I believed the stories; I just suddenly found them more appealing.

So I started buying a copy occasionally. My wife, a very bright woman who earned a PhD from one of the nation’s top three graduate sociology programs, was surprised and maybe a little embarrassed that her husband would bring home such a lowbrow publication. You don’t take that stuff seriously, she said. Nah, I said, I just read it like a comic book.

After a year or so, I learned to think a little like a WWN editor. I learned to take several contemporary fears and a few scraps of news and mold them into WWN-style headlines such as this one: “Alien pit-bulls spreading AIDS.”

Why did I like the WWN? Because it was unashamedly outrageous and hugely imaginative. Because its editors and writers didn’t give a flip about chasing half-true celebrity gossip that is the staple of other tabs. Because WWN was always printed in honest, down-to-earth, good old black and white.

Soon it will be gone from the supermakets, and life in the checkout line, alas, will be even duller.

The past is the present in eastern North Carolina

Reminders of the past are abundant in eastern North Carolina. Explore some of the region’s secondary roads and you’ll get the impression that the present has been a little slower to arrive here than in the rest of the state.

Driving through the region's off-the-beaten-path towns is like stepping into the past.

This fading sign on a brick wall in the little town of Everetts recalls the days when tobacco was the region’s primary cash crop. Tobacco fields still dot the landscape, but cotton fields are becoming more predominant.

This building in downtown Robersonville once housed a bank. It's a miniaturized version of classic early 20th-century skyscrapers designed by architect Louis H. Sullivan.

I've been fascinated by earth moving equipment since I was a little kid. Here's a road grader that may date back to the 1920s. It was pulled by a tractor. The grader operator rode on the back of the machine, using the big wheels to position the grading blade. Now, the grader sits by the road near a farm.

This simple, handsome wood-frame building in Hamilton housed the local Masonic Lodge. I'm guessing that it's late 19th or early 20th century.

Small family cemeteries are a common sight. Some of them are well-kept; others show the effects of time.

Some of the buildings have been renovated and put to new uses. This building in downtown Plymouth was built around 1850 and housed the Hampton Academy. Now, it's being used as a spa.

Other buildings, however, are slowly being overtaken by time and the elements. These buildings once housed a thriving rural business district. Now, they're abandoned.

Greetings from the Summer of Love

I was digging through a storage trunk the other day when I came across this odd little booklet – The Hippy’s Handbook: How to Live on Love, by Ruth Bronsteen. I bought it for a buck or so in a thrift store in downtown Durham, North Carolina around 1990.

The book was published in 1967, when “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear a Flower in Your Hair)”, a haunting pop song by singer Scott McKenzie, was floating across the radio airwaves and thousands of young people were pouring into that city. John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas wrote the lyrics that included these lines:

“For those who come to San Francisco/Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco/Gentle people with flowers in their hair”.

The song was popular during the Summer of Love, which was launched June 21, 1967 with a celebration of the summer solstice on a hillside overlooking San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Harvard University professor Timothy Leary was there. With flowers dangling from his curly, tousled hair, he told the crowd to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

Leary’s preferred method of achieving this total unplugging from the mundane daily grind and tuning in to the elegance of creation was by taking lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD or acid.

LSD is a powerful hallucinogenic drug that can, according to medical literature, cause “profound distortions in a person’s perception of reality.”

Whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have your perception of reality profoundly distorted is an individual choice. It seems likely, however, that there was some widespread voluntary distortion of individual realities going on when young people from all over the U.S. were pouring into San Francisco to absorb the Summer of Love.

As many as 100,000 kids were there 40 years ago this month. In a recent documentary about the Summer of Love on PBS’s American Experience, writer Theodore Roszak noted that the kids were seeking “a simpler way of life, less consumption-oriented.”

These were kids who grew up, as Roszak observed, in a time of rigid roles, when dad was the breadwinner and mom was the homemaker and everything seemed safe and stable – except that when the kids were at school they regularly practiced what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

So somehow, I guess, those conflicting seeds sewn in 1950s childhoods – rigid but comfortable affluence at home and duck-and-cover drills in elementary schools – produced some strange fruit in the 1960s.

“You had a generation of kids who arrived in high school and college trying to make some sense of a world they’d been told is just and grand and wonderful and there’s nothing to complain about anymore,” Roszak said. “And on the other hand, (when) you look a little deeper into it, (the world) is just awful and scary.”

Roszak said the combination of “affluence and anxiety” was “a crazy-making combination” that deeply affected the postwar Baby Boom Generation.

That might explain the outlandishness of those who took part in the Summer of Love. Here’s an illustration of hippy haute couture from The Hippy’s Handbook.

Bronsteen says in her book that she likes the hippies because they are “sym-pathetic, bright, aware, unpretentious, naïve, direct, open and unrealistic.”

But she also notes that they are “clannish and provincial in their hippydom,” and “concerned with postures and appearances and they like to keep their turf for ‘their own kind.’”

They're also “completely self-absorbed,” she writes.

The only printing of The Hippy’s Handbook was in September 1967, when the Summer of Love was winding down. By the time it ended, the summer dream had turned sour. The latecomers to San Francisco were more interested in buying and selling drugs and getting laid than achieving any kind of spiritual awakening.

And although the concerts at Woodstock and its evil twin at Altamont were still two years away, some participants thought the Summer of Love was the last gasp of the Flower Children.

“A Utopian moment had been and gone,” Mary Ellen Kaspar noted in the American Experience documentary.

As for Bronsteen’s book, it’s apparently become a highly collectible memento from that colorful period. Amazon.com is selling it for $50 a copy.

Dear Jane Austen: Good luck with your project

I have hopes of getting a second book published, but it’s been an, um, interesting process so far.

After my first book was published, I thought that it would be a little easier to get the second one out there. Actually, that's an understatement. I thought it would be a slam-dunk to get my second book published – especially since Storm of the Century: The Labor Day hurricane of 1935 received very good reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and other well-respected publications.

And Storm also became the basis for a History Channel documentary. How many first-time authors get that kind of recognition? Not a bad debut, I thought.

Well, long story short, I’m still pushing that second book. A couple of highly regarded agents gave my proposal a very long look, but they eventually declined.

I think I’ll place it sooner or later. In the meantime, the task is to keep the proposal fresh and not get discouraged. Re. that last task – avoid discouragement – I came across a story in England’s The Guardian today that helps a bit with that.

The Guardian’s Stephen Morris reports that would-be author David Lassman has had his novel repeatedly turned down by a series of publishers. Lassman modestly describes his novel as not a masterpiece, but publishable.

So Lassman devised a plan – some would say it was clever, some would say devious – to test publishers’ judgment of manuscripts. He made a few changes to chapters of three novels by Jane Austen and sent them out under the author’s name of Alison Laydee. Among his submissions was an excerpt from Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, widely regarded as one of the finest novels in the English language.

The results? All of the publishers rejected the manuscript, and only one of them told Lassman that they recognized the similarity to Austen’s work.

“I was staggered,” Lassman told The Guardian. “Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the English canon and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen’s work.”

The publishers sending rejection letters included some of the big ones. The Guardian contacted some of them for comment. The gist of their responses was that they had sent out form letters of rejection. One publisher told The Guardian that “internal notes did recognise similarities with existing published works and indeed there were even discussions about possible plagiarism.”

Still, anybody who’s ever had a manuscript returned with the terse and maddeningly familiar phrasing of a rejection letter – “read with interest” and “regret to inform you” and “doesn’t meet our needs” and “good luck with your project” – had to feel that some of their worst suspicions are justified about the people who write publishers’ rejection letters.

Since I am, as I said, trying to find a publisher, I'll pass on inserting my personal worst suspicions. I know there's at least one publisher out there who is above suspicion.

Do Brazilian summers predict Atlantic hurricane season?

It’s too early to tell whether predictions for an active 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will come to pass, but if the summer in Brazil is any indication, things may be quieter than expected.

What does the summer in Brazil – more specifically, the Brazilian state of Amazonas – have to do with the Atlantic hurricane season? Probably not much. But on the other hand, a friend in the Florida Keys and his friend in Brazil are making some interesting comparisons.

Amazonas is Brazil’s largest state and home to a huge rain forest. Amazonas also gets about 20 percent of the earth’s rainfall, says Jeff Pinkus, a friend of mine in Marathon, Florida.

Since Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, its summers are from late December to late March.

Pinkus, who has visited Brazil a few times, says he and his friend in the town of Novo Airao compared recent summer thunderstorms in Amazonas to the Atlantic hurricane seasons that followed.

The Brazilian summers of 2004 and 2005 were very stormy, and “the ferocity of the summer season in Amazonas was as intense as could be recalled,” Pinkus said in a recent e-mail.

And the hurricane seasons that followed those summers of frequent violent thunderstorms in Amazonas were astonishing. In 2004, 15 named storms formed in the Atlantic Basin. Those storms included Hurricane Charley, a Category 4 storm that struck Florida’s west coast; Hurricane Ivan, a true monster storm that shredded Grand Cayman as a Category 5, lost some strength crossing the Gulf of Mexico, but still pounded Pensacola; and hurricanes Frances and Jeanne, two powerful storms that also struck Florida.

The summer of 2005 was one for the ages, producing a record 27 named storms that included four storms that reached Category 5 status. Luckily, all of these killers lost some strength before making landfall, but one of them was the infamous Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed New Orleans.

In 2006, the summer in Amazonas “was as mild as could be remembered in recent history,” Pinkus says. “Nobody remembers the notable storms of 2006 here in Florida because there were none.”

Forecasters had predicted that as many as 17 named storms and five major hurricanes would form in 2006. But only nine named storms formed, and those storms spawned only two major hurricanes with winds exceeding 111 mph.

Meteorologists said the unexpected formation of a Pacific weather phenomenon known as El Niño kept the lid on the 2006 season. The El Niño has dissipated, however, and the 2007 prediction is for 17 named storms and five major hurricanes.

But the summer that ended a few months ago in Amazonas was another mild one. Does that mean we’ll have a corresponding quiet summer on the Atlantic?

“I do not think that 3 years of comparing summer weather patterns from the Southern to Northern Hemispheres is enough to draw a direct correlation,” Pinkus says, “but it certainly deserves more research.”

Stay tuned.

A decade of blogging

In its July 14 edition, The Wall Street Journal comments on the approaching 10th anniversary of the creation of the web log – a.k.a. the blog.

“We are approaching a decade since the first blogger – regarded by many to be Jorn Barger – began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary,” writes Journal reporter Tunku Varadarajan.

Barger’s first blog entry was December 23, 1997, Varadarajan says.

Since that date, The Journal notes, blogs have “roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox.”

Varadarajan includes comments about blogs from a dozen luminaries representing a variety of professions. My favorite is by novelist Tom Wolfe, a writer I’ve long admired for his keen perceptions of human nature and current events and his remarkable ability to communicate his observations with razor-sharp wit and insight.

Wolfe isn’t very impressed with blogs. He has the following to say:

“One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective ‘news’ reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.

“And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.

“Blogs are an advance guard to the rear. For example, only a primitive would believe a word of Wikipedia (which, though not strictly a blog, shares the characteristics of the genre). The entry under my name says that in 2003 ‘major news media’ broadcast reports of my death and that I telephoned Larry King and said, ‘I ain't dead yet, give me a little more time and no doubt it will become true.’

“Oddly, this news supposedly broadcast never reached my ears in any form whatsoever prior to the Wikipedia entry, and I wouldn't have a clue as to how to telephone Larry King. I wouldn't have called him, in any case. I would have called my internist. I don't so much mind Wikipedia's recording of news that nobody ever disseminated in the first place as I do the lame comment attributed to me. I wouldn't say ‘I ain't’ even if I were singing a country music song. In fact, I have posted a $5,000 reward for anyone who can write a song containing the verb forms ‘am not,’ ‘doesn't,’ or ‘isn't’ that makes the Billboard Top Twenty.”

Wolfe no longer reads blogs because he has become “weary of narcissistic shrieks,” The Journal reports.

Selling Boomer nostalgia

I’ve been buying baseball cards since I was old enough to have a few pennies in my pocket. As I’m writing this I have a small stack of cards on my desk. In fact, that stack is what prompted this entry. More about that shortly.

I still remember when, as a little kid in 1957, I unwrapped a one-cent Topps baseball card package and discovered that I possessed my first Mickey Mantle card. I know this may sound screwy, but it was an electric moment, one that I vividly remember decades later.

I managed to acquire a Mantle card every summer from 1957 to 1961. That’s his 1958 card that’s pictured below.

It was because of Mantle that I became a New York Yankees fan. Somehow, he could kindle the dreams and stir the admiration of thousands of little kids in thousands of little towns across the U.S. He became an icon for the post-war Baby Boom generation.

But New York may as well have been a million miles from the small town in North Carolina where I grew up. I had no hope of ever seeing Mantle in person. What connected me to Mantle and the Yankees were words and pictures that fed my imagination: daily baseball box scores in the Salisbury Post and Charlotte Observer; Street and Smith’s Baseball Yearbook; the CBS Game of the Week on TV and, of course, the baseball cards that I bought during the summers.

In those days, baseball cards were basically just another toy for kids, and when my pals and I shared our collections, the cards that were exchanged showed signs of wear and tear.

All of that would change, however, when the oldest Boomers reached serious middle age. They wanted to recover those lost accessories of their childhoods, and they were willing to pay top dollar for them. And that’s when we Boomers, with our focus on status, image and money, pretty well ruined the simple pleasure of collecting baseball cards.

Starting in the late 1980s, buying baseball cards became like playing the stock market. A flurry of new companies such as Upper Deck began issuing cards that used slick action photos and designer graphics to appeal to the now-sophisticated Boomer tastes and fondness for expensive trinkets.

A futures market emerged. The cards of promising rookies became highly sought and highly priced because buyers thought these first cards would be worth small fortunes if and when the players were voted into the Hall of Fame.

Boomers who remembered frugal mothers scolding them for wasting money on baseball cards had erased that lingering guilt. You could actually believe you were making a smart investment when you bought $5 worth of cards because you might turn up, say, a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card that supposedly was worth $120 at one point.

The surviving Topps cards from the 1950s and 1960s became like reliable blue chip stocks or prime real estate. You couldn’t go wrong buying those cards because it was like buying land – they weren’t making any more.

A highly detailed system evolved to grade the condition and set the prices of these older cards. A corner that had become slightly rounded from being handled could dramatically lower the value of a card.

But the baseball card market peaked in the mid-1990s and then declined. I stopped buying cards about 10 years ago. Apparently, a lot of other Boomers also stopped. And, apparently, the Topps marketers noticed that.

A few days ago I was browsing through a store in Norfolk and I noticed a box of Topps Heritage baseball cards with a throwback look. The box and wrappers were more or less duplicates of the Topps 1958 cards – the cards I eagerly paid a penny apiece for when I was a kid.

So I bought a couple of packs – $3.50 for a pack of eight – and discovered that the design is identical to those 1958 cards I fondly remembered. But as you can see from the Andy Pettitt card here, they were cards of today’s players. Pettitt's card is in that small stack that I mentioned at the top of this post.

It was fascinating. I was looking at contemporary players through the eyes of a kid. In my head at least, the guys on these throwback-design cards looked like the “real” baseball players of my childhood instead of the overpaid steroid-soaked prima donnas inhabiting the rosters of today’s Major League Baseball teams.

It was clever marketing by the Topps designers. I know I’m being manipulated, but it’s got me interested in baseball cards again. And that, no doubt, was the intent.

Bill Pinkney, 1925-2007

The world of rhythm and blues music lost one of its finest voices yesterday when singer Bill Pinkney died in Daytona Beach, Florida at the age of 81.

The Associated Press reported that Pinkney, who was in Daytona Beach for a July 4th performance, was found dead in his hotel room, apparently of natural causes.

Pinkney’s resonant bass voice underpinned the soaring vocals of Clyde McPhatter in The Drifters’ first R&B recordings in the mid-1950s. He sang lead in The Drifters’ 1954 recording of Irving Berlin’s classic, “White Christmas.”



Cartoonist Joshua Held has done a wonderful animation of The Drifters' version of "White Christmas." The animation features Pinkney, portrayed as Santa Claus, singing lead and McPhatter as the solo-singing reindeer.

Pinkney also was a talented athlete and played professional baseball in the old Negro League. He served in the segregated U.S. Army during World War II, receiving several commendations for his service.

I interviewed Pinkney on April 17 for an as-yet unpublished travel story about beach music clubs on South Carolina’s Grand Strand. It took me several days to catch up with him by phone at his home in Sumter, South Carolina, and it was clear that he wasn’t letting advancing age slow him down too much.

We talked for 30 minutes or so about Pinkney’s time with The Drifters and his memories of performing across the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s in shows that included stars such as Buddy Holly and the Crickets, J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, Peggy Lee, The Clovers, Fats Domino, and others.

Pinkney toured the South as a performer in the days of segregation, and he recalled that at that time, the typical seating arrangement had white kids watching from the balcony and black kids on the floor.

At other places, barricades were erected to separate whites and blacks.

By the early 1960s, Pinkney had known nothing but segregation as an athlete, soldier and performer. But as he looked out at his segregated audiences from the stage, he saw a profound change taking place.

“I think music, like The Drifters, brought people together more than anything in the world, as far as ending segregation,” he said.

I think Pinkney was proud of the part that he and The Drifters had played in bringing down the barriers that separated the races. He earned acclaim as an accomplished musician, but he also deserves recognition as someone who brought people together.

He’ll be missed in both of those roles.

2004 Hurricane Ivan a reminder -- or a precursor -- to Category 5 storm in Florida Keys

It’s been more than 70 years since the last Category 5 hurricane struck the Florida Keys, and the collective memory of that event has all but faded among island residents.

When the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 battered the Upper Keys on September 2, 1935, it brought 200 mph wind gusts and a storm surge powerful enough to shove 120-ton steel train cars off the railroad track at Islamorada, Florida.

But the islands were dramatically different in those days. Perhaps 1,000 people lived on the islands outside Key West.

Now, about 80,000 people live in the Keys, and on any given day, another 40,000 or so tourists are on the islands. And with all those people crammed onto low-lying, narrow islands with only one highway out, emergency management officials worry about what might happen if a powerful hurricane crosses the Keys.

Some public officials in the Keys wanted to get a realistic idea of what a Category 5 hurricane – that is, one with winds exceeding 155 mph and a storm surge exceeding 18 feet – would do to the Keys. So in October 2004, they went to Grand Cayman Island only one month after monster Hurricane Ivan had battered the island with catastrophic winds and flooding.

Although no two hurricanes are exactly alike, Ivan had much in common with its 1935 ancestor when it roared past Grand Cayman on September 11 and 12, 2004. It raked the island with sustained winds exceeding 165 mph and gusts of perhaps 200 mph. That was nearly identical to the power thought to have been unleashed on the Keys on Labor Day Monday, 1935.

There were other factors that were important to the visiting Keys officials. Like the Keys, Grand Cayman is composed of coral outcroppings. And the construction is similar to the Keys, including steel-reinforced concrete buildings meant to withstand high winds.

Randy Mearns has lived in the Keys since 1968 and is a former fire chief and former mayor of Marathon. He made the trip to inspect damage from Ivan.

In March 2006, Mearns told me that what he saw had a dramatic effect on him.

“I’ve been here a long, long time and I’ve been through a number of storms,” Mearns said. “And I was saying, 'I’m going to stay for anything.'”

Now, Mearns has doubts about staying if a reincarnation of the Labor Day hurricane is headed his way. “What I learned is you better take whatever you want to have when this is over and go,” he said.

Mearns brought back some remarkable photos of Ivan’s damage on Grand Cayman. The shots are reminiscent of descriptions and photos of the damage in the Keys after the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.

This photo . . .

. . . of the ruined interior of a beachfront condo on Grand Cayman is a reminder of what Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to a friend after he saw Indian Key a few days after the 1935 hurricane: “The whole bottom of the sea blew over it.”

This photo . . .

. . . shows the top floor nearly sheared off a residence. It's a reminder of this photo . . .

. . . of the Hotel Matecumbe in Islamorada after the Labor Day hurricane.

Finally, this photo . . .

. . . shows what's left of a utility pole on Grand Cayman -- a concrete, steel-reinforced pole designed to stand up to vey high winds.

Jeffrey Pinkus, a Marathon city council member, said Mearns's photos "really proved how vulnerable (the Keys) are."

"If we have a Category 4 or 5 hurricane hit here directly, any part of the islands, life as we know it will change," Pinkus said. "I'm sure of it."

Caught up in the moment

Perhaps you’ve read that Mike Nifong, the former district attorney in Durham County, North Carolina, who brought improper charges against some lacrosse players at Duke University, has resigned from his job and been disbarred by the North Carolina Bar Association for ethical misconduct.

The story of the accusation flamed across the news wires when it broke last year because it was loaded with emotional hot buttons. White student-athletes at upscale Duke were accused of sexually assaulting a black stripper they’d hired to perform at a party at the off-campus house they rented on Buchannan Street, which is near Duke.

It's good that the charges were dropped. I feel I should repeat that statement about every third or fourth sentence because any comments about the behavior of the Duke lacrosse players seems to provoke outrage from those who apparently want Nifong to be jailed at Gitmo for his ethical lapse.

But when this story broke, Duke officials certainly behaved as though something had happened. The lacrosse coach was quickly fired and the team’s season was halted.

I spent many years in Chapel Hill and worked for a few years in downtown Durham. I read news stories and heard residents talk about the behavior of Duke students on Buchannan Street. What angered neighbors wasn't merely that college students were throwing loud parties. They've been doing that since the Stone Age. When I was a student, it wasn't considered a successful party unless the cops showed up twice -- once to warn you, and the second time to send everyone home.

What made the Buchannan Street parties different was the persistent behavior of Duke students toward residents, who complained about vandalism, students relieving themselves on neighbors’ lawns, porches and shrubbery, beer cans and other trash left in their yards, and a general attitude among the students that they needn’t trouble themselves with acknowledging their neighbors' complaints.

The News and Observer of Raleigh wrote about the Buchannan Street problems. So years of this boorish behavior as a background had to have been an influence on early public opinion about the charges against the lacrosse players. If Duke officials weren't already on edge because of the earlier problems on Buchannan Street, wouldn’t they have instantly and vigorously defended the players and the coach?

But now that the rape charges have been dropped – and I repeat, they should have been dropped – and Nifong's unethical conduct has been revealed and punished, public opinion is rushing to the other side of the boat and behaving as though the cops interrupted choir practice to arrest the lacrosse players.

It seems that all we do these days as a society is to become obsessed with the events of the moment. There is no context to anything, no reflection of what came before the Big Event that has grabbed everyone’s attention until the next Big Event breaks. No one bothers to link past events to present ones.

So, as I said, it’s good that the charges against the Duke students were dropped. But to paraphrase Judge Walton's comments about the recent brief filed by a group of famous attorneys on behalf of Scooter Libby after he’d been convicted of perjury, I hope we'll be this eager to jump to the defense of the next innocent defendant who's hauled in to face false charges – especially if he’s too poor to hire top-shelf legal talent to defend him.

The Wreck of the Mayflower

Hi. Thanks for stopping by Drye Goods.

The photo above shows the Roanoke River and downtown Plymouth. It'll give you some idea of the setting for the story that follows this intro.

One of my goals for this blog is to post stories about the fascinating history of Washington County and northeastern North Carolina.

I'm going to lead off with a story I dug up for the Roanoke River Lighthouse and Maritime Museum here in Plymouth. It's based on documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina, and microfilm of the Roanoke Beacon. It took place at this time of year more than a century ago . . .


It was early summer 1899 in Plymouth, and when people got together in the warm, humid evenings for homemade ice cream, two topics dominated the conversations – mosquitoes and barbecue. The mosquitoes were especially bad that summer. But people were still raving about the barbecue that Enoch Weaver had cooked a couple of weeks earlier at the Washington County centennial celebration.

Some of the town’s young men were hard at work converting a vacant lot into a baseball diamond at the corner of Water and Adams streets. And with a new century on the horizon, the editor of Plymouth’s newspaper, the Roanoke Beacon, was insisting that the time had come for the town to install electric lights.

The town’s waterfront on the Roanoke River was bustling with activity as steamers and schooners came and went. Dockworkers also loaded canal barges with goods, and the barges were towed down the Roanoke, across the Albemarle Sound, and up the Dismal Swamp Canal to the deepwater harbor at Norfolk, Virginia.

The raspy moan of the steamer Mayflower’s whistle was a familiar sound down at the docks. The steamboat was a fixture on the Roanoke and Cashie rivers, and had been hauling passengers, mail and freight between Plymouth and Windsor for five years.

Around four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, June 30, 1899, the Mayflower’s eight deckhands hauled in the lines that had held the riverboat to the Plymouth docks, and the steamer eased away from the wharf and nosed into the current of the Roanoke.

On that long-ago summer afternoon, the riverboat was hauling hay bales and plaster to Windsor. There also were nine passengers making the trip, including a young couple named Russell and their infant child.

The Mayflower’s captain signed his name “H. Davenport,” and he’d been at the steamer’s helm for a little more than a year. But this was his last run. A man named Hayes, who was in the pilothouse with him as the Mayflower chugged up the muddy, brown Roanoke, was replacing him.

Davenport took the steamer about five miles upriver until he reached a narrow, deep creek that snaked through a mile or so of cypress swamp and linked the Roanoke and Cashie rivers. The creek was known as The Thoroughfare.

Davenport would have to execute a series of back-and-forth turns to guide the riverboat through the twisting waterway to the Cashie River. There, he would make a left turn into the Cashie’s darker, tannin-stained waters for the rest of the trip to Windsor.

Getting a steamboat through The Thoroughfare was tricky. The stream is one of the most crooked stretches of water in the area, and any riverboat captain would tell you that any turn in a stream is dangerous.

A riverboat couldn’t be stopped on a dime, so you could collide with another boat coming the other way that you didn’t see until it rounded the bend. Or your cargo could shift during the turn, causing the boat to list or, if you were really unlucky, capsize.

Davenport also had to make a transistion from steaming into the current in the Roanoke to having the current suddenly behind him in The Thoroughfare. That would make it more difficult to control the speed of the Mayflower, and too much speed could cause problems going around a bend.

The Mayflower made the first turn with no problem, but something happened as the steamboat went into the second turn. Davenport and Hayes could feel the deck tilting beneath their feet. Davenport called for more power from the engine room and tried to steer the Mayflower into shallow water to ground it before it capsized.

But he didn’t make it. The top-heavy, round-bottomed steamboat rolled over and sank in 20 feet of water.

There were 17 people on the Mayflower when it went down. But only 16 escaped. Somehow, the infant was torn from Mrs. Russell’s arms as the steamer overturned. The child’s body was found a week later when salvagers raised the Mayflower.

Davenport said later that he thought the plaster in the Mayflower’s hold had shifted during the turn and caused the steamboat to capsize. It’s possible that having the current behind the Mayflower caused it to go into the turn too fast and that could have caused the plaster to shift.

Maybe a swell lifted one side of the steamboat as it rounded the bend and started the plaster rolling toward the other side of the hull. Or maybe Davenport just misjudged his steamer's speed.

The Mayflower was towed to nearby Edenton for repairs, and was again making the Plymouth-to-Windsor run by July 21.

The Mayflower’s former captain, however, took longer to recover. The July 7, 1899 edition of the Roanoke Beacon reported that Davenport had gone to a hospital in Norfolk for “medical treatment,” and would spend some time in the Virginia mountains.

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