Up a Dirt Road

Charity in New York State in 1906

2012-02-10T12:18:00.002-05:00

Most regular readers of this blog are aware that as a retirement business we at Between the Lakes Group have been engaged in finding and republishing history (mainly of the northeastern states of the US, but sometimes elsewhere as well) for over a decade now. When you're engaged in a pursuit, you find that a lot of what you think about is related to the pursuit at hand. Thus, it occurred to us that we would not be out of line if we occasionally commented on the process of selecting the things that we publish, and perhaps even about the process.

So, this post is the first of what will likely become a series on items we've just published. It could even be an easy way to stay on top of what we're working on.

We were fortunate a while ago to happen on an eBay listing for a three volume set that comprised this report about charity in New York State in 1906 (the title of which is actually "Annual Report of the State Board of Charities for the Year 1906"). It was certainly an unusual item; so much so that the seller actually contacted us after the auction to ask what would motivate someone to actually buy such a thing and pay the shipping for it.

When we told them that we felt that this would be a great primary source for those interested in local history and for those who might want to see for themselves just what life was actually like a hundred years ago if you happened to be among society’s unfortunates and lived in New York State. We allowed that given the political attention today’s “safety net” was getting, we thought that there might actually turn out to be quite a bit of interest in the information in these three volumes.

The question was how to make it available, of course. We’re a firm that publishes electronically, so reprinting those volumes was not an option. How to organize the material was, however. It occurred to us that possibly the eBay seller was flummoxed about who would want to buy something like this was that, in its three volume format, this is pretty close to impenetrable. For example, volume III (this material is from volume II) is almost entirely tables of statistics. You’ve got to be more than an ordinary policy wonk to find that worth a second look. Volume I – the “report” per se – is a real mixed bag, with much duplication of material on some of the state facilities discussed in this volume, yet also some that is not found here. Volume I also has a series of transcripts of discussions and papers appended dealing with specific issues that were of particular interest to the Commission at that time.

We decided, since we tend to organize our publications by county, that we would stick to that methodology here, providing a certain amount of information at a state-wide level, but certainly not all that the three volumes include. We recognized from the start that we would be overlooking material in volumes I and III that referenced facilities in the counties, but one must start somewhere.

Accordingly, our plan is to re-publish volume II in county by county segments, and to precede those publications with the summary of state facilities that begins the volume (that is this paper).

We hope that those interested in local history will find this series interesting, and we are confident that very few counties have these reports available to them anymore. Thus, we think that any county historian or local historian will find it of interest. We expect that people working on the genealogy of people who were involved in charitable administration in New York State in 1906 will find this of interest simply because it contains many names of persons in various administrative capacities. Further, although names of inmates of the facilities are not listed, we think that anyone who learns that a genealogical subject was at one time an inmate of a particular institution will want to find out a bit more about where the ancestor or other relative lived and what conditions were like there.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, with the level of political discourse about the “safety net” we now have, that we ought to have, and at some point in the past we actually had, we think that knowing what this portion of the safety net consisted of back in 1906 will be instructive, if not surprising, to most people.

As we like to think that everyone knows, but it also feels like we need to say, we are in the process of publishing more historical information about New York State (and other locales) from a variety of sources, all old, out of copyright, out of print, and much of it very scarce and difficult to locate. We invite you to examine both our material available for download (like this article) and our CD-ROMs – your purchases of which make it possible to continue to collect and republish this material for you.

A full catalog of our offerings can be found at our main website, http://www.betweenthelakes.com. We invite you to visit us there.

Praise for the government

2012-01-21T12:36:00.000-05:00

I figure that with a title like that most readers will decide one of the following:
(1) that senility has finally kicked in bigtime
(2) that I'm being sarcastic
(3) that this is some kind of political polemic

Wrong. It's none of the above.

It's actually praise for the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services (and I can hear the response to THIS -- the author must be truly crazed) for something that they do well, better than the old way, and cheaper for the taxpayer, too.

That something is online filing of sales and use taxes, coupled with a direct debit to my business checking account for tax owed.

In way of background, my business, such as it is, Between the Lakes Group LLC, is a retirement business. It's never made much money, and it never will. However, if you happen to be interested in local history, genealogy, and Americana, principally as it relates to the Northeast, you really do need to have our site bookmarked. What we do is locate and republish materials in these closely related subject areas. The publication part is online (and on CD-ROM) so our "products" are considerably cheaper than you could ever find them in print -- if you ever could find them at all. Anyway, it's worth a look. The link will take you to our website, where you can peruse the catalog.

Okay, that's the end of the commercial message -- now back to the subject of the Connecticut DRS and why I'm praising them

I mentioned that this retirement business of mine, Between the Lakes Group, is a very small business. It's so small that several years ago, the DRS put us on annual filing of sales tax -- that was smart move #1.

Nonetheless, back then, filing had to be done on paper and mailed to Hartford. I foolishly neglected to send some returns return receipt requested -- and each time I omitted that step, the return seemed never to arrive in Hartford (which cost me a $50 penalty per instance -- more than the tax owed on at least one of those occasions -- remember, I said this is a SMALL business).

After it happened twice, I made a rule that all returns going to the DRS would go certified, return receipt. It was a pain, and it was kind of offensive that I had to pay several dollars just to pay a rather small tax, but at least it stopped the $50 penalties coming in.

Then, the DRS implemented online filing. As soon as I found out about it, I started using it. Each year they make small improvements that make the process easier. This year, with a more elaborate sales tax structure, I had not expected the process to go smoothly, but, having just filed my sales tax return, I am very happy to say that I was wrong. They did everything right, they made the process easy, they checked for calculation errors (actually, they did the calculations for me), and I saved the trip to the Post Office, the first class postage, and the certified return receipt fee, not to mention the anxiety that I always felt in the old days until the return receipt came back.

Thank you, Connecticut DRS. Your system works, and I appreciate it. Good job.

Historical Societies and Libraries

2011-11-08T08:19:00.000-05:00

Well, we've had a couple of requests for a summary here of the genealogical sources (historical societies and libraries) we visited on our recent swing south. We had provided a fast play-by-play while we were on the road via Twitter (we'd be happy if you would follow @betweenthelakes, but it's not a requirement!), but it seemed like a list in blog form might be more useful. So, here's where we went and what we did:

--Frederick County (MD) Historical Society: A lovely old building in the historic district of Frederick with a municipal parking garage right across the street (a real convenience). The staff was very helpful (they were training some volunteers from local colleges when we visited, so possibly we were good examples of the kind of visitors the students could expect) and quite knowledgeable without being at all pushy. The collection is pretty comprehensive for Frederick County, and there's an internal catalog that represents a volunteer's life work, and is, as one might expect, quite helpful. The downside is that the library is in the basement, and there's no elevator, and the stairs aren't great, which is really a problem only if you're not terribly agile anymore. The good news there was that we saw volunteers taking material upstairs for a visitor who couldn't cope with the stairs. While you're there, ask the staff to direct you to a Spanish restaurant around the corner where the tapas were absolutely super! We regrettably didn't capture the name of the place or it would be the subject of a blog post all by itself.

--The Albemarle County/Charlottesville Historical Society, in Charlottesville, VA. We had only about two hours here, regrettably, since we were in transit between Frederick MD and Richmond. There was another reason for the brevity of our stay as well, and it's a real problem: no place to park. We found a space on the street, and the staff in the library were kind enough to let us know that the parking time limits are rigorously enforced. I found the visit useful because I was able to access a clipping file on a family I was researching, and I just about got through it in the limited time we had. I wish I had a suggestion for people wanting to research here who come by car (and there doesn't seem to be any alternative to that, either) -- maybe have one person research at a time while another drives the car around the block looking for short-term parking places? If there's a better solution, the staff didn't suggest it to us. Too bad, anyway -- looks like a nice collection!

--Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. We were able to spend a full day here, and the parking concerns of the previous day evaporated as we parked in their spacious, free, private parking lot. The staff were super helpful and took great pains to tell us what they had, and equally important, what they didn't, once we outlined our research needs. They've got a great index of the major periodicals of the area, and you can easily kill a whole day just with it (which I did). Again, plaudits for the staff. They got us started in the right direction, and they checked back with us periodically (but not TOO frequently) to make sure we were coming along well.

--The Amelia County Historical Society, in Amelia Courthouse, VA. One of those great little county historical societies you occasionally find, if your ancestors lived in the right places and if you're lucky. Plenty of free parking right across the street, and very helpful staff. Nice thing about these smaller local operations is that you're likely to discover that you're at least a distant relative of the people who are helping you! Despite the fact that they were setting up for a reception while we were there, we got lots of uninterrupted research time in a pretty comprehensive collection. Unfortunately it's open only two days a week, so this is one that you definitely have to schedule carefully.

--The Library of Virginia, Richmond. Back in Richmond again, for a few hours at this huge facility (which has free parking right in the basement -- you do need to remember to have your ticket validated on the way out for it to be free, however -- and because it was raining, we really appreciated it on this visit). The place is huge and the open shelves for Virginia material were enough to occupy us for the day. In previous visits we had also called material up from the stacks and had used the archival material. Copies are made using a card that you load with $$ before copying, which helps keep copying expense under control. You'll not get the level of personal service here that you get in smaller facilities, but it's still a great library and not to be missed if you have any interest at all in Virginia.

--The State Library of North Carolina, Raleigh. We spent two days here, and found the genealogy collection and archives were closed on one of them, due to the omnipresent budget cuts. There's a parking lot across the street (although the rates are clearly set for the lobbyists who pack the lot when the legislature is in session, not for ordinary people) and you will be well advised to visit here only when the legislature is absent. And don't forget to check to make sure which parts of the library are open, of course! We found the security here to be very tight. Government issued photo ID is required to enter the building and your name, address, license number, and who knows what else are recorded when you enter. Then, after getting a visitor badge, you get to re-identify yourself when you visit the archives. Be sure you check the schematic diagram of the facility, which is on three floors. There's general state information in the library on the first floor (under construction when we visited, but very helpful staff), the genealogy collection is on the mezzanine, and the archives are on the second floor. We initially went to the archives by mistake and were somewhat confounded by the absence of the familiar accoutrements of genealogy libraries, and when I asked at the desk, I learned of our error. They were polite enough; they noted it happens all the time. Once we got to the right room, the collection was very helpful, and it is by no means restricted to North Carolina -- they wisely recognize that a lot of people passed through NC en route elsewhere, and cover both the places from which people come and to whence they went. They even have some good New England material! Too little time here, unfortunately. We'll be back!

--Historical Society of Washington County, VA, Abingdon. This looks like a fine little collection. There's what seems to be a comprehensive online index of it, and most research is directed toward that index. We had only a few hours here (there is parking available, by the way), and the staff was very helpful, perhaps a little more helpful than I would have preferred -- but that's based on a single, short visit. Any inadequacies in their collection probably reflect the area's history as a place where lots of people passed through but left little in the way of footprints.

We also hit a couple of museums on the trip, and I'll cover them in a separate post.

Good food in Raleigh NC!!!!

2011-11-07T19:06:00.000-05:00

As some of you know, we've been on a combined genealogy and local history trip south -- Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina to be specific -- and we succeeded in skipping the Halloween Snowstorm here in Northwestern Connecticut completely. That's good news, especially when you live on a dirt road that might not enjoy the highest priorities with road crews and for power restoration.

We tweeted impressions of some of the libraries and historical societies we visited (feel free to follow us as @betweenthelakes if you're so inclined), but we thought that we should mention two restaurants we found virtually next to each other in Raleigh, NC in a blog post. I think that either of them would be considered a good restaurant if they were located "up north" but down in a locale where it seems like "good eatin" -- i.e. southern cooking -- is the sine qua non, they were both notable.

The first of the two we visited was the Taj Mahal, located in a mini-mall at 4520 North Capital Boulevard (i.e. route 1). The place was (undeservedly) almost empty, but we decided to try it out anyway. I had lamb samosas, garlic naan, lamb saag, and mixed pickle as a condiment. The lamb samosas were light and flavorful -- I used a little of the tamarind sauce they came with, and a bit more of the green chili sauce, but they were nicely done and would have been fine without the sauces. I'd never had garlic naan before!! It was very good, light, soft, and garlicky. We liked it so much we took the remaining pieces back to the motel. The lamb saag was very nice. The spinach didn't have the metallic taste it sometimes does, the lamb pieces were small and tender, and the sauce was really just right. I thought it compared favorably with the lamb saag at the Ganges on Praed Street in London, which had always been my standard. I licked the platter clean on that one! The mixed pickle was the only disappointment of the meal. However, I was able to fish enough lime and chile chunks out of it to make a successful condiment.

Judy had chicken madras and was very pleased with it as well. Her conventional naan (no garlic) was also excellent, and she found the mango chutney sharp and refreshing, something I've never personally found mango chutney to be.

I'd say that the Taj Mahal was worth a detour. We would have had a second dinner there, but there was another restaurant we wanted to try, so we didn't give the Taj a chance to prove that it was not just good but also consistent.

The Casalinga Ristorante Italiano was the second restaurant, and it was so good we went back a second evening -- and thus can say that it was also consistent. It's a Sicilian restaurant, and we were fortunate to be there when they were having a special menu of recipes from their home town in Sicily.

The first night I had the tripe stew as an appetizer, and have to say it was as good as any tripe I have ever eaten in any national cuisine! It was tender, delicate, and perfectly flavored. That evening I had "Mamma Giuseppina's Meat Sauce" which was obviously more than "just" a sauce -- a filet of beef stuffed with mozarella, pine nuts, raisins, and various other items. A meatball and a sausage accompanied the filet, which was over rigatoni (I think). Of course it was more than just a meal -- and again I embarrassed myself by licking the platter clean (actually, with the aid of the bread, which was home made and similarly excellent). No dessert that evening; no room for it! I think that Judy had something more or less conventional -- lasagna, if I remember correctly -- which she was very pleased with.

At any rate, we promised we would be back the next evening (our last in Raleigh) if they would have the Pork Bracioli (they had run out the first evening we were there). They promised, and we came back. That evening I stuck to the special menu and enjoyed cuddruni (stuffed pie: tomato, onions, eggplant, basil, potato) which was light and flavorful. If you've never had pork bracioli (which is pig skin -- no meat, just skin -- stuffed with cheese, raisins, pine nuts and other things) with a tomato sauce -- also served with a meatball and a sausage, again over rigatoni -- you need to be ready to experience some chewiness, and I was expecting some good jaw muscle exercise. They fooled me!! It was extraordinarly tender and also flavorful. It was really, really good.

We had some Sicilian sfingi for dessert - and it, too, was excellent.

The address -- and this place proved itself to be worth more than just a detour, particularly if you want to enjoy real Sicilian (as opposed to Americanized Italian) food, expertly prepared and served -- was at 4538 North Capital Boulevard.

The food on the rest of the trip was undistinguished, but these two restaurants stood out as meriting some praise. I'd return to either in a heartbeat!

Salisbury, CT - The Early Years

2011-10-03T12:18:00.001-04:00

We've just published Salisbury, Connecticut - The Early Years!

Every so often in this e-publishing business we get to actually publish something that has never been published before. Mostly we republish stuff that's old, generally pre-1923, thus avoiding copyright issues, but every so often we dig up something a whole lot newer -- and on rare occasions, even get to be the first publisher of something.

Back in the 1980s, after Judith Sherman (who has several roles in this story, including business partner in Between the Lakes Group and spouse, as well as author, as you will shortly see) found herself no longer working for the Wall Street powerhouse that had employed her before our daughter was born (new moms still don't get much respect on Wall Street, we're told, but it was even worse 30 years ago), she decided to get her MA in history -- a subject that had been a consuming interest of hers almost all her life -- at Hunter College, which both had a great history department on its own and could draw on the even stronger CUNY history department, which happened to be only a few blocks from our apartment in NYC.

Because we already had the house on the dirt road that gave its title to this blog, but only visited it on weekends, once she had completed her required courses and was undertaking original research, one of her research topics was, naturally, the history of Salisbury, Connecticut.

When this paper was subtitled “The Early Years” it indeed meant early. Most of the material is based on the 1719 – 1742 period – the period when Salisbury (which is located in the extreme northwest corner of Connecticut, in case you were wondering just where the dirt road is located) was first laid out and settled. In its 83 pages (yes, it's a serious paper, not a homework assignment), including extensive footnotes, the paper summarizes the township’s early history in a way that had not been done previously.

At the time this paper was written, colonial historiography fell into two broad classifications: first, there were the archivers, the people who collected colonial-era manuscripts, (occasionally) translated them into modern English, sequenced them, and published them in bound volumes for others to search for elusive ancestors but mainly to get dusty on research library shelves. The second category of colonial historians at that time painted in broad strokes. Very broad strokes, usually. They drew from limited documentary history, they extrapolated from more recent and more extensively documented eras, they were happy to include tradition and conjecture, and they theorized about what must have happened in very general terms.

Usually historians in the latter category had an axe to grind – most frequently an ancestor’s reputation to inflate, or an organizational viewpoint to protect and promote.

Around the time this paper was written, a third kind of colonial historian was beginning to emerge. Historians, largely graduate students like the author of this paper, and younger faculty in research universities, were just beginning to apply quantitative techniques to the colonial data available. Instead of writing from within the milieu that rewarded the second variety of colonial historian cited above with social approbation, the new historians tended to write about places where they did not live and where they had no ancestral backgrounds to color their historical interpretation.

It seems strange today to realize that thirty or so years ago colonial history tended to eschew quantitative measurements, and that arms-length critical analysis was the exception rather than the rule, but that was the state of the colonial history field even that recently.

The author’s background, prior to her graduate education in history, had been in analytical work on Wall Street. She had learned early on, in reading annual reports and 10-Ks of companies looking for investment opportunities (and red flags) and in identifying companies as merger and acquisition candidates, that puffery abounded in the text of annual reports, and that only by starting with the footnotes and the numbers themselves and analyzing them critically could rational business decisions be made. A statement like “Land speculation was rampant in early Salisbury” was the sort of generalization that sadly characterized the state of colonial history at the time this paper was written – and exactly the type of statement that Sherman had been trained to detect, question – and frequently demolish.

Along those lines, this paper presented the first not-entirely-laudatory view of a real sacred cow of Salisbury history, the first clergyman in town, the Rev. Jonathan Lee.

Anyway, after opening a long-hidden away box and finding this and another paper about the history of Salisbury, we decided that it was time for a first publication.

Grand Central - gateway

2011-10-01T10:52:00.001-04:00

One of the ways we keep busy out here on the dirt road involves the internet -- probably coming as no surprise to much of anyone -- but our use of the internet involves something besides playing Farmville (no, we don't play Farmville). What we started doing nearly a decade ago was republishing history.

The whole thing was premised on the fact that if you're doing your family history, there's really no substitute for knowing everything you can about the area where your ancestors lived. That requires access to local history, which was (and still is) pretty hard to find, even if you're living in the area you need to research.

It's almost impossible to justify republishing local history in print -- demand is far too thin and cost way, way too high -- but digital republication? Well, possibly that might be cost effective.

Anyway, we started collecting historical and genealogical material and putting it on CD-ROMs. That line of business eventually morphed into an additional delivery mechanism, downloads. We didn't look back. The idea of republishing in print never really came up again for serious discussion.

Until yesterday, when we republished a thin hardback book called "The Gateway to a Continent -- The Grand Central Zone".

Of all the publications in our catalog (and there are several hundred now), this one is the one that most deserved republication in book form.

The quality of the paper, the delicate artwork forming the backgrounds for each page, the overall feel of the document demonstrated its quality – and, at the same time, clearly defines the market to which it was directed. The book was clearly directed at the senior corporate executive, the wealthy socialite, what remained of the upper class as the Great Depression was drawing to an end. It is clearly a marketing piece, yet it is sufficiently subtle about the fact that it lists no publisher or sponsor. The advertising it contains are the articles and photographs themselves. One surmises that it was a cooperative effort of the owners of the buildings mentioned in the text and pictured.

Subtlety pervades the document. There is no publisher or author or printer named and no copyright claimed. We must deduce even the date of publication. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, cited as “ultra modern” in the text, was built in 1931. A mention later of 1934 suggests it was published after that date, and a notation on a map that the World’s Fair would be in Flushing, accessible via the Subway running under Grand Central, would begin in 1939, provides a likely end date. So we date it between 1935 and 1938 – surely not a good time to be marketing expensive office space or high-end hotels or nine room Park Avenue apartments. Yet this is clearly the objective of this book.

It's a beautiful book. My wife, who is not given to expressions of approbation, spontaneously commented "It's wonderful!" (That made me feel good in the sense that my judgement was considered good, and bad in the sense that this was being republished in digital form only.)

I thought a bit more about who might be interested in this download. I could identify students of marketing of luxury goods, those interested in New York City history, and those with an interest in historic railroad stations (not a small group, by the way!), but also those interested in the development of urban planning theory. The introduction to the book suggests that the Grand Central Zone – the first we have encountered this term for the area – will become a paradigm for future American urban development. You'll recognize some of the landmarks: Grand Central, of course, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Biltmore, the Roosevelt, the Graybar Building. Others are gone (think of the grand apartment houses in the style of upper Park Avenue that once lined that street right about Grand Central) or have assumed new identities.

All reasonable, but I'm reminded that whenever we ourselves go back into New York City, we enter via that same Gateway. It's fun to see what's the same now as it was 80 years ago -- and what's different.

Back in the saddle again....

2011-07-01T11:13:00.000-04:00

Well, after leaving this blog alone for a year or so, having decided to heed some pundit or other who had proclaimed that blogging was dead since any fool could plainly see that it had been replaced by some other web 2.0 technology, I'm back.

A brief status report:
--the cellphone reception is still nonexistent here (I think I groused about that back in 2006)
--Citibank does not seem to have gotten its act together yet (but at least it's mostly staying out of the headlines now, which makes me feel better)
--Our military alarums and excursions continue; they ebb and flow and if President Eisenhower is not spinning in his grave, it may be because the bearings he was spinning on are worn out. It's unnecessary to say that the man was 100% right about the military/industrial complex. There's no military draft, of course, so nobody cares from that perspective.
--Between the Lakes Group continues to re-publish (e-publish) history. We've expanded from just CD-ROMs as the publication vehicle to include downloads. That's the commercial message, and of course it would be great if you would take a look at our website and maybe buy something.

Anyway, Up a Dirt Road is back. Hopefully we'll be better at avoiding distraction this time. Talk with you soon!

Military Service options in 1964, redux

2010-05-19T08:38:00.008-04:00

Larry Pressler, whom I don't know and whose writings I'm not familiar with, had an excellent op ed piece in the New York Times this morning. The setting, of course, is the not-uncommon phenomenon of someone, years after the war in question, embellishing their war record -- in this case, the Attorney General and candidate for Senate from my home state, where the Dirt Road is located.

Pressler's point is that draft evasion became a high art during the Vietnam conflict. It indeed was. I personally was against the war, took deferments to finish college and grad school, and then, suddenly, was 1-A -- in other words, all set to go. It occurred to me that people today probably have the illusion that things back then were binary -- either you were in the Army and went to Vietnam and "fought" or else you were a profound slacker.

It was nowhere near that simple. At that time there were lots of options. Here are the ones that occur to me, in considering my own situation. I am sure there were many more for people who were otherwise situated, but this is a start:

--You could keep getting student deferments until you were over 26 (seems to me that once you were past this ripe old age, your draft board would call you only in a dire emergency). I did get invited to continue for a PhD, but by that time I was sick of school and eager to get on with life.

--You could flee to Canada (I did not seriously consider this option, but I did know a few people who did).

--You could join the clergy (one denomination was actively courting me to do this, but I cannot say I seriously considered it) and get a clergy deferment.

--You could qualify as a Conscientious Objector (there were several gradations of this, most of which meant you still had to serve but were not going to be able to tell any war stories later on and would be branded forever as a coward -- up to an ultimate level of conscientious objection that resulted in the decision to spend one's military service time in jail). You had to be pretty credibly against war in all forms and have been so for a long time in order to become a certified CO, and I didn't have the track record -- nor the belief structure -- to claim this, although I knew people who did and did.)

--You could (if you could find a unit that would take you) join the Reserves or National Guard. I did investigate this option, since what it entailed was six months on active duty for training, and then six years of monthly meetings, plus two weeks of training each summer, and virtually no chance of sustained active duty or deployment. Those were the days when the Reserves and the Guard were essentially the militia, not the kinds of outfits that actually served in war overseas. There was the unspoken promise that the only time the Reserves would get activated was if there was a major land war, a la World War II, and while the National Guard might also get activated to help with a natural disaster, they were still pretty much citizen soldiers. There were two downsides here. The first was that you were stuck with monthly meetings for what seemed to be an eternity, and furthermore your summer was shot, so to speak, at training camp. The second was more subtle: you would never get to tell war stories.

--You could be physically or mentally deficient (or you could fake or self-induce a condition that would make you 1-Y (which meant you would be drafted only in a real national emergency) or even 4-F (which meant you could never be drafted). I was superstitious enough that I didn't pursue this -- although, again, there was plenty of advice around about how to do it. Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" is substantially about this route.

--You could let nature take its course. That meant either volunteering for the draft (which put you at the top of your local draft board's list to go the next time they got a levy) or just killing time until they got around to calling you -- or not. Since I had discovered in grad school that nobody was hiring people who were draft-eligible (although all the big companies wanted you to come back to see them once you got out), I killed time initially, and finally, after talking to a whole bunch of people about my options, volunteered for the draft. The draft was a two year active duty commitment followed by four more years in the Reserves -- but generally the inactive Reserves, which meant that you only had to go to meetings or training if you wanted the extra money.

--You could have planned ahead to serve, gone to one of the military academies or been in ROTC, or gone to medical school, and served as an officer. This was a four or six year active duty commitment, often with subsequent time in the Reserves. I knew people who did this, lots of them.

--You could have enlisted in the Regular Army as an enlisted man. This was a minimum three year active duty commitment, with four years if you wanted to enlist for anything attractive. This was a non-starter for me; I simply lacked the dedication that led my father to join the Regular Army in World War I.

--You could have gotten married and bred. (I put this last because as a 22 year old guy just as the sexual revolution was kicking into high gear, this was automatically the least desirable alternative.)

Anyway, that's the list as I can remember it. There were all kinds of subsequent ramifications and alternatives (including enlisting and then deserting -- knew one guy who did that, and going ROTC and becoming a CO when levvied for Vietnam -- and I knew one guy who did that, too).

One last point: because you were drafted or on active military duty via some other door did NOT mean that it was certain that you would ever get anywhere near Vietnam, and even if you got there, that you would ever go on a combat patrol or exchange gunfire with anyone.

The US at the time still maintained a huge force in Europe, and from my basic training company, probably 40% were sent there for the remainder of their hitch. Since civilianization and outsourcing of the military's support functions had not yet begun, there were a huge number of roles for soldiers in the continental United States that had nothing to do with combat. In fact, I remember hearing the statistic (true or false) that only 10% of the active Army in 1965 was really apt to be involved in combat operations in any way.

More later on this, but I thought that this might be interesting information for those tempted to see the whole Blumenthal thing as binary.

2009-06-26T11:11:00.003-04:00

Regulation creates jobs

2009-06-06T13:36:00.002-04:00

It's so obvious that stating it should be unnecessary, but clearly many people do not get this fact: increased regulation itself CREATES JOBS.

This restatement of the obvious was prompted by a CNN announcer who, in discussing whether "green investment" would create jobs a few minutes ago, said that it "would only create more regulations" -- implying that regulations create themselves, publish themselves, and are complied with by themselves.

The fact is that creation and implementation of regulations is a highly labor-intensive process -- sometimes giving rise to whole new regulatory organizations with new jobs at all levels. Once regulations are in place, ongoing compliance with them invariably creates staff positions in the organizations being regulated as well as increased reporting responsibilities in line organizations that increase labor hours.

Furthermore, these new regulatory jobs tend to be stable. You can lay off the third shift if you are not selling as many automobiles as you were, but you can't lay off the people who support the regulatory compliance processes -- or if you do, you had better get ready for big regulatory problems.

Do companies hate to pay for regulatory compliance? Of course they do! Hence business propagandists attempt to deny the societal benefits of increased regulation -- which include new and better jobs.

About Bonuses....

2009-03-27T16:30:00.002-04:00

After a little bit of goading, I finally decided to rise to the bait about making bonus recipients and amounts public for companies that received bailout cash.

Frankly, I started out absolutely bipolar on the subject. One part of me remembers the years at Citibank when, regardless of what I had done for the bank that year, there was no bonus at all. In fact, it seems in retrospect that the more I produced, the less likely I was to get a bonus at all. It occurred to me that I would have been embarrassed to admit that I did NOT get a bonus, never that I had received one. The subject never really came up. We didn't discuss bonuses in those days. However, I also remembered that bonuses in those days were not intended to be part of basic compensation -- as they were for my wife, who worked for an investment banking house, and who always felt that she was under-compensated (probably because of her gender).

The other part of me was filled with righteous populist indignation. I don't need to rehearse all the arguments raised in this camp. They're pretty compelling, too. Furthermore, I'm led to believe that the old scruples about discussing bonus amounts are pretty much gone in most of the financial community.

Finally tipping the balance for me was a post I saw on Facebook, wherein the poster declared that publicizing bonus recipients and amounts would be wrong because it might put spouses and other family members at risk of populist rage. With Lou Dobbs stirring this pot vigorously every evening on CNN, I have to concede that it's possible!

However, where I finally came out on this was here: if a bonus recipient had clearly demonstrated modesty and a great desire for privacy in his/her earlier career (i.e. before 2008), then they ought to be able to continue to have it. On the other hand, those who made no effort to hide the fact that they were obscenely wealthy; in fact, were ostentatiously obscenely wealthy -- have no real claim of a right of privacy now that being ostentatiously obscenely wealthy has lost its cachet.

Did the ostentatiously rich worry that their spouses might be victimized by kidnappers or blackmailers when greed was good? No? Then why should a new-found concern for their spouse trump the public interest today?

Ultimately, we're all accountable for what we've done, even if the wind is coming from another quarter now. It seems to me that it's only fair to let the chips fall where they may.

Quiet on the Dirt Road

2009-03-25T17:58:00.002-04:00

We had a beautiful day today. Temperature was in the 50's, sun was shining, no wind to speak of -- a great day to take William the dog for a walk along Between the Lakes Road (the dirt road of this blog title).

We walked from our patch of lakefront along the road to the bridge that separates the two Twin Lakes -- about a mile, I guess. Walking there, we saw no humans whatsoever. No cars, no one working around houses, nobody biking or walking.

We turned around at the bridge and walked back. About half way, we spotted a man jogging in the other direction. William, who is fond of people as well as dogs, stood on his hinder legs as the man approached, said hello, and jogged on. Then William returned to his role of walk companion, followed by a nice long wade in the lake -- the ice is nearly out now.

The remarkable thing was the absence of other people. In a normal year we would have seen construction workers involved in building or renovating along the lake or on one of the roads leading off it. Probably, on a nice day like today, there would have been a few people out just driving around, and, since the road is also a designated hiking trail in our township, probably a few hikers as well. But just the one jogger ... it seemed strange, at least until I contemplated the economic scene.

Even up a dirt road, people are pulling in their horns. The only construction project I'm aware of on our road is our own, wherein we plan to construct a foundation under an end of the house that lacks one. Even the choice of project is indicative of something -- it's not a new coat of paint, or a gazebo, or a deck -- nothing decorative or frivolous or even fun. It's something utterly utilitarian -- a foundation. It holds the house up. It keep the house warmer.

Yet it is also fundamental to future improvements of that end of the structure.

Let's hope there's a metaphor there!

Paying Taxes

2009-02-03T19:20:00.003-05:00

Today, two people whose political persuasion I share bit the dust, hopefully permanently. In one case, they did not pay taxes on the value of compensation they received. In the other, they did not pay taxes because it was just a household employee -- and because their peers did not pay taxes on theirs either.

I'll cut the person who did not pay taxes on the perks some slack. When no money changes hands, it's hard to place a value on services. It's still not right, but I can see where, absent a 1099, it's easy to overlook compensation.

Regarding taking household help off the books, however, I take no prisoners. It is a despicable, scummy thing to do.

Ironically, I came to realize this because of my wife, who, at the time we actually had household help, was a -- get this -- INVESTMENT BANKER!

It was the late 1970s, and we had a baby at home, and we needed to hire a nanny (actually, she didn't live in, so I guess she was technically a babysitter). None of our friends admitted having their babysitters on the books. At least a few of the women we interviewed expressed a desire to be off the books.

My wife, bless her, said that if one was an investment banker, one, like Caesar's wife, must be above reproach. If you were the underwriter for a respectable corporation, like The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, for instance, and if you were an officer of The First Boston Corporation, your personal character was a reflection on both companies. They TRUSTED you to be totally honest and above board. She felt that one's failure to honor one's personal legal obligations was indefensible.

She made a good case, and she convinced me (I, the skeptic, worked -- where else? -- at Citi). We indeed did have our babysitter on the books. We paid our taxes. We don't know anyone else who did this. Everybody else cheated -- and not just the government or their employer or whatever shambles their own personal morals might have been in, they also shortchanged the employees -- the people to whom they entrusted the care and upbringing of their children.

Frankly, anybody who takes household employees off the books is either an utterly thoughtless and opportunistic conformist or else morally deficient. Both qualities should be disqualifiers for both public and corporate office. I am grateful that this appears to be increasingly the case, and can ask only that the trend continue.

Furthermore, where are the investment bankers of yesteryear?

Last of Citi for a while

2009-01-29T07:51:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me last night that it's likely that Citi management simply does now know some of the things that we used to know when we worked there. There have been so many JDs, so many redundancies, and so forth, that it's no wonder that some of the secrets of Citi's success in the old days have been lost.

I don't mean to trivialize them, but I've remembered four tests that were in fairly common use within Citi a couple of decades ago, and I thought I would write them down. Maybe they would work today.

--Six Words or Less: If you cannot describe a transaction or a project in six words or less, one of two things is happening. Either (1) the transaction or project is too complicated to be executed successfully, or (2) you don't fully understand the transaction. I think I heard this one from Bob White when he was running the Operating Group. (Current situation: "Buy a new corporate jet". No room left to put in the fluff about trading in the old ones. No room for penalty clauses. Just the essence of the deal. Do you do it? No way!)

--The Headline Test: Imagine you are a headline writer for the New York Post. (This is a NYC tabloid that has never been particularly friendly to Citi, for the information of those in other places.) Describe your transaction or project in the most sensationalistic way you can in headline style. I don't know where I heard this, but I used it successfully for more than a decade in the Loss Prevention Unit. (Current situation: "Bankrupt Citi buys new jet". Like it? Think it will sell papers?)

--The Tombstone Test: This is a little esoteric, but imagine that, when deciding to what to put on your tombstone, your heirs decided that this transaction or project was going to be it. Then ask yourself if you would like to be remembered for the ages for this particular transaction or project -- and nothing else. I don't remember the source of this one. Current situation: "He received a $10,000,000 bonus the year Citigroup got government aid".

--The Mother Test: Think of your kindly old mother, in her kitchen in her apron. Explain your transaction or project to her. Once she understands all the nuances of it, does she approve? Or would she send you to your room without your supper? I think I heard this one somewhere in the Marketing department in Citi's Consumer Bank, but I can't say for sure. Current situation: too many instances to mention.

--I'd like to propose an additional test that was prompted by something I recently learned, and I call it the School Test: Determine what kind of academic specialty this project or transaction is closely allied with. Determine what kind of education practitioners of this specialty have. Is this education sufficient that proponents understand and can evaluate all aspects of the transaction or project? Current situation: Did you know that, if you get the degree at Columbia that says you can design derivatives, it will be in "Financial Engineering". Interestingly, you do cannot get it from the Business School or the Department of Economics -- you get it from the Engineering School. No knock on engineers, but you do have to watch them. They get far too focused on how things work, and tend not to consider the bigger picture. Enough said.

Now, I'd like to stop trying to figure out how Citi did what it did and focus instead on more pleasant aspects of life. Best of luck to them in once again becoming a preeminent financial institution.

Still more Citi

2009-01-28T19:37:00.003-05:00

Something that I hoped I would never see happen has occurred: the Government has shown that it is smarter and more astute than Citi! Indeed, the seniors at Citi are so tone-deaf that Citi is better off under the management of the US Government.

In olden days, while Citi senior management was not immune to making the occasion dreadful decision, they were right a lot more often than they were wrong. More important, on matters where public opinion was going to be overridingly important, the seniors tended to listen to their more astute juniors. I think of folks like Paul Kolterjahn and Charlie Long whose opinions/instincts were regularly checked by the most senior folks.

Well, Paul is deceased, and Charlie is long gone. Either no one has risen in the organization and brought their common sense with them to take the place of these two gentlemen, or the most senior types have concluded that if they get paid this much money they MUST be infallible.

Both Charlie and Paul would have immediately internalized the episode of the Big Three automakers flying their corporate jets to DC to ask for a handout. Their counsel would have been for Citi to take the penalties, whether the MEP was approved or not, and regardless of the extent of the financial penalties involved, instead of accepting the luxury corporate jet. They would, in a long-vanished Citi, have saved the institution the humiliation of being overtly managed from Washington, DC.

Further down the ranks at Citi in the old days was the expression "FUMU". This acronym (we always loved our acronyms in the old Citi), of course stood for "Fuck Up, Move Up". While it was usually uttered when grousing about someone who had gotten a seemingly-undeserved promotion despite making errors in his/her old job, there was a good side to FUMU. It meant that, if you were doing an outstanding job, making an occasional goof was part of the learning (i.e. management development) process. And it meant that if you were really good, you could get promoted regardless. BUT you had to be really, really good! And, importantly, you had to have a good ear for cognitive dissonance.

What we have running Citi at present, regrettably, certainly and demonstrably are not good, and recent events bring into question their mere competence. And, furthermore, they are totally and irredeemably tone-deaf.

Thank God for the Government! Possibly, under Governmental management, a new management will develop within Citi, and it can return to some semblance of the Citi of the old days.

More about Citi

2009-01-21T19:34:00.002-05:00

One concern about Citibank's long-term viability that has been simmering the back reaches of my mind for a couple of years now is whether there is still anyone employed there who knows how to run a bank. I don't just mean someone who can posture for the media and talk in code understood best by financial reporters. I mean someone who knows a routing/transit number from a cusip number, which end of a 10-K to start reading from, that a cash letter isn't a plea to the parents for more spending money. That ACH is not just the first three letters of achooo!

As I look around Citi today for familiar names, I find very, very few of them. True, a lot of the people I knew when I worked at Citi were within a decade of my age, and hence conceivably have retired on their own volition, but I also knew a lot of people at Citi who did NOT have any grey in their hair or wrinkles under their chins a decade ago -- the people who, if Citi is going to be viable in its pared down and resurrected form as a BANK, are absolutely essential for day to day operation.

Many or most of these vital folks did not have MBAs, and a good many did not have college degrees. More than a few joined Citibank a couple of decades ago because the Sanitation was not hiring when they got out of high school, but Citibank was. They started in branches as rack clerks. They started at 111 Wall Street as entry-level clericals in departments with esoteric names like returned items. A few (girls, back in the day) started at 399 Park as pages. Some (guys, mostly) started as tape-hangers in the big data centers.

Over the years, knowledge accreted to these folks, like barnacles on a ship's hull. These people, men and women, knew that if CAS was running 20 minutes late, there was a good chance that TTI would not have its network up by 7 AM and that there would be hell to pay in customer service from people who hoped to get money out of a CAT on the way to work. And, they knew what to tell the customers about it. Especially so after Branch 77, and then after Reg CC.

By the way, is CAS still running? You know, it was built in the 1970-1973 timeframe, and all the original flowcharts vanished when the elevator doors they were taped to opened (they weren't supposed to open -- that bank of cars did not stop on that floor) in the middle of the night and took them to the sump at the bottom of the elevator shafts. What wasn't lost then was lost when Bob White decreed that the vault where the CAS documentation was secured didn't need staffing, and immediately CAS was running on source code and a lot of memories.

I was happy to see Richard Parsons named as the new Chairman today. In his past he has the Dime Savings Bank rescue, and at least he knows what a bank does. Let's hope that he finds enough people still working at Citi who know what a bank does that they can have a dialog.

Sad about Citigroup

2008-11-23T16:47:00.004-05:00

Although I've been retired from Citi for nearly a decade, I still view what is happening to that organization with sadness beyond what I feel about the negligible value of my remaining Citi stock.

The sadness, I think, is really about how that bank, whenever it decided that business opportunities were so important that risk can be ignored, has gotten into trouble -- although, in the past, we were generally able to pull things back from the brink. A secondary sadness involves the now-traditional Citi tendency to punish the messenger who brings the bad news, but I don't think that Citi has any claim of exclusivity here.

Happiness about my years at Citi, on the other hand, is definitely still there. I still remember the decade I spent in the Consumer Bank's loss prevention unit, when we (in no particular order) (1) discovered that it was possible to manage operational risk in a near-realtime mode and save the bank literally $ millions in fraud and operating losses already in progress (2) facilitated this knowledge transfer to Citi's credit card division (who said that the Citi silos were totally impervious to good ideas?) -- you can see the evidence of this knowledge transfer each time you receive a call from your credit card issuer asking about a purchase you've made that doesn't fit your profile (3) averted massive fines and penalties for what would have been violations of unusual currency reporting regulations by building technology that tracked such things; it was far more advanced technology than our counterpart banks in the NY Clearing House had (4) turned what could have been the debacle of Regulation CC into a web of new consumer services that helped the customer avoid bouncing checks while still effectively protecting the bank from kites (5) a few other things that I haven't had occasion to think of in nearly 20 years.

Conversely, I still remember the situations where Citi overreached: (1) when, in the early 1990s, there was huge pressure to book new mortgages in the branches just so the origination fees would hit the revenue side of the financials, with no concern for the backlog of nearly 5000 unprocessed mortgage applications that had accumulated in the back office (I helped knock that backlog down). (2) when, back in the 1970s, the Operating Group decided to cut over from a paper-based system for transferring securities to an on-line process with no parallel testing; parallel testing being perceived to be a waste of time -- I mercifully did not have to get involved in that one, but the "rock" of fails and differences was still being worked down a decade later. (3) when, circa 1998, our team of in-house encryption experts were told unequivocally that we were not permitted to have any contact at all with the newly acquired Smith Barney -- not even to include them as copies on policy memoranda (I still have no idea what that was all about). (4) when, again circa 1998, I was running projects converting Citi corporate and financial industry customers off insecure older funds transfer systems onto a modern, secure one, and I noticed that there was one company using the obsolete FICCM system -- a system notable for lack of both audit trails and user accountability -- that originated an order of magnitude more $$ of transfers than any other user of the system -- and I was told unequivocally that I was not to bother this particular customer with suggestions that they convert to a more secure system, that this customer (which happened to be named Enron) was the Way, the Truth, and the Light, a virtually perfect customer, and definitely the future of Citi.

Anyway, I see that the inmates finally succeeded in taking over the asylum. It's too bad. At one time, we at Citibank were really, REALLY good at risk management. Sic transit gloria Citi.

Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip

2008-11-14T07:43:00.004-05:00

One of the real luxuries of living on a dirt road is that in the morning when the puppy needs to be taken out, you can go out with him in considerable solitude and wander around without seeing another person. Nothing against seeing people, but it is nice not to have to make forced conversation sometimes.

This morning, as we -- the dog and I -- were out walking along one of the paths out behind the house, and just after the dog across the swamp sounded off, a song came into my head. Now, when you are really in the boonies, when that happens, you can just go ahead and sing it out loud! In the burbs, in the city, even in the nearby villages, if you did that, you would get lots of strange looks, and, depending on the song, maybe even arrested. But here? No.

"Good morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip
With your hair cut just as short as mine"

Was pretty much all that came to mind, but I sang it anyway.

I thought I remembered my father, who had been in World War I, teaching me at least this fragment of it.

Anyhow, after we finished the walk, and I nearly fell on my butt because the trail was a little slick after the rain last night, I decided to Google the first line of the fragment. After all, Google is pretty remarkable!

I am happy to say that Google is indeed remarkable. It correctly found the song for me, on a website I had been unaware of about World War I.

Here's a link to an MP3 of "Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip".

Enjoy it!

By the way, the website where I found it was http://www.firstworldwar.com -- probably worth checking out!

Been quite a while....

2008-08-26T16:19:00.002-04:00

This comment:

The draft is the best insurance that we don't get into future wars fought for personal gain as this one has been from the very beginning. Even when the wool is pulled over the eyes of the citizenry long enough to get a war for personal gain like this one started, the reality that ANYONE's son, brother, (or daughter, or sister?) can become an infantryman at the whim of the government would have a remarkably edifying effect on everyone.

If we had had a military draft, Bush would have been unlikely to complete his first term, much less be elected to a second term.

which I posted the other day on Rick Green's Blog in the Courant made me start to think about how beneficial compulsory military (and/or civilian) service can be.

Anyhow, I figured, with a real dogfight coming the political arena, it is time to kick this puppy back into life.

Medical care in the Army and afterwards

2007-03-10T11:15:00.000-05:00

Medical care in the Army and afterwards does NOT have to be second rate!

I know this from experience, and I know it as an enlisted man, as an officer, and as a veteran. I also saw how a Republican administration victimizes veterans -- and, as we are currently seeing -- victimizes wounded troops as well.

When I was an E-2 private back in 1965, assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, stationed at that time at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, a routine chest x-ray turned up some lesions in one lung that definitely got the attention of the Medical Corps doctors. Sufficiently so, in fact, that I was sent the next day to Tripler Army Hospital, in Honolulu, despite the fact that I felt fine. (The possible diagnoses I was sent with included "metastatic disease" (meaning cancer that had spread), pisiticossis (or something like that, some peculiar disease caught from poultry), sarcoidosis, and some deviant form of tuberculosis.

Well, Tripler was indeed a first rate military hospital. It was spotlessly clean, very well maintained (generally, if they knew what was wrong with you, and you were allowed out of bed, you helped maintain your ward to the best of your ability), and well staffed. Probably because I had an "interesting" condition (all doctors love interesting cases), I saw a lot of military doctors. But, interestingly enough, so did the other soldiers in my ward, most of whom did not have anything as unusual as I did.

A Brigadier General even flew in from Japan to look at me (okay, as one Captain later advised me, the general had also played some golf while in HI, but still...). They found a lesion on my eye, which was surgically removed, and well done. They performed a liver biopsy (not fun), and, because any hospital of that level is also a teaching hospital, it was done by a Captain, although he was surrounded by Majors and Colonels, all of whom advised him continually. (I would have been nervous as a witch if I had been that doctor!).

They did a definitive diagnosis (sarcoidosis), and they returned me to duty. I was able to compare that hospital stay with one in the private pavillion of Lenox Hill Hospital, on Manhattan's upper east side a few years earlier, and, although the nurses were better looking at Lenox Hill, the care was just as good in the Army.

Subsequently, after I got commissioned, I got a shoulder dislocation, which was dealt with promptly and appropriately by the Medical Corps doctors at the Post Hospital at Fort Belvoir, VA. While there, I also got several teeth filled by the Dental Corps. Those were amalgam (silver) fillings, and I still have most of them more than 40 years later. You can't knock that kind of workmanship!

Later, after I was out of the Army, I decided to see if the Veterans Administration could provide equally good care.

Yes, there was paperwork. First I had to establish that my disabilities were service connected, and this process took about a month from my first inquiry to receipt of rating of disability.

Then I realized that to qualify for actual medical care I needed to get a more than perfunctory disability rating. This took a bit longer, perhaps 3 months. I will admit that I did afford myself of the assistance of a "service officer" -- a veteran employed by the American Legion (or the Disabled American Veterans, actually I forget which) -- who advised me how to fill out the forms.

Two VA doctors saw me during this process, and although they were not as sharp as the Medical Corps doctors I had seen when I was on active duty, they were quite professional.

Then came the Reagan years. At that point things took a decidedly different turn. I got a letter from the VA saying that they wanted to check on my "progress". I showed up for my examination, and expected things to be as they had been before -- I expected that the VA would still care about the Veterans.

Things had changed. When I asked the doctor for ways that I could improve the mobility of the shoulder I had dislocated, he told me that he was unable to provide me with any care, that his job had recently become entirely and strictly that of reducing disability ratings. We talked for a few minutes, and it became clear that he was not really happy to no longer be practicing medicine as a VA doctor, but instead looking for dull-witted veterans who could be induced to say that they no longer had any disabilities so that their disability benefits could be reduced or eliminated.

My rating was not reduced -- in fact, one of the service officers suggested that I probably could get it increased if I wanted to push it -- but the change in the political climate was crystal clear.

It was clear that the relationship between the government and the Veteran was now an adversarial one. From the recent news from Walter Reed Army Hospital it is clear that things have only gotten worse.

A few good things about a military draft....

2007-01-12T15:43:00.000-05:00

In case you think that there is nothing good that can be said about compulsory military service, I happened to note a few on Terry Cowgill's blog recently.

They are in comment #11 on the blog entry that follows:

http://tcextra.com/terrycowgill/2007/01/11/a-grim-little-talk/#comments

I'm glad, as always, to have comments.

Call me "Out of step with the regiment"

Relationships with Iran then -- and now

2007-01-07T19:25:00.000-05:00

In a former life, I was a compliance and loss prevention weenie at Citibank, now Citigroup.

Back then, a couple of decades ago, an entity called Bank Melli had been identified by the Treasury Department as an official bad guy, an agent of a hostile state, namely Iran.

Bank Melli had a fancy office on Park Avenue, accounts with Citi, and a fancy international clientele. I can remember jumping through hoops to close down everything Citi had that even SOUNDED like Bank Melli. We kept them on the "pink list" -- the official paper listing that circulated to all the branches -- as "No Further Dealings" for several years. That list had sufficient weight in the institution that if some poor branch person should happen to process a wire transfer to an entity on the pink list, or, God forbid open an account for such an entity, they could be confident that their job was history and they would have an appointment with the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York.

Yet, from what I heard upstairs, despite all of Citi's efforts at being good guys in this, we still got pretty badly abused for having dealt with Bank Melli BEFORE they made the "big time" -- the Treasury Department list.

Now, I understand that a Chinese firm that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange is the prime mover behind a multi-billion dollar loan to.........wait for this...........IRAN, for the purposes of developing their nuclear industry.

The NYSE, evidently having little sense of history, appears to have decided to stonewall, rather that summarily delist the firm in question. (This sort of action -- cessation of all business relations -- was evidently something that Citi was expected to have done voluntarily back in the old days, even before Bank Melli made the Treasury List).

HOWEVER, the Chinese firm is an oil company.

I could leave this right here right now, and I probably should, once I suggest that the likelihood that the Treasury Department, under the current administration, would put that company on "the list" is very low -- and if, going a step farther, bowing to political pressure, Treasury should happen to do add them to the list, the likelihood that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York would be permitted to discreetly mention this fact to the New York Stock Exchange is remote in the extreme.

Friends of Cheney, you know.

The Whacko Generation....

2007-01-05T10:01:00.000-05:00

All within a fairly short period of time, I've seen: (1) an article about a 12 year old girl, a special education student, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for wetting her pants at school. (2) My daughter came up with some scandal from a high school in Texas where some of the girls were (gasp!) taking pictures of each other holding objects (not penises) with condoms on them and generally being disrespectful of adult authority -- like giving a teacher the finger. (3) And the New York Times had a scare article about the successor community websites to www.myspace.com -- most specifically scary for them was www.stickam.com -- where people as young as 14 might be permitted to exhibit live webcam pictures of themselves on line with no web nanny ensuring that they did not do SOMETHING that would bring the world to a speedy end.

The world of soccer has independently been screaming -- this time with extremely good justification -- about the ADULTS who scream at the kids, the refs, the coaches, and each other during games of kids as young as FIVE (5) years old.

Synthesis:

--I am quite willing to cut special ed students a lot of slack, simply because they have some otherwise-ableness that puts them in that category, and because they universally have to put up with a ton of crap about "riding the short bus" and so forth. Arresting one because she pees in her pants, even if it appears to be a defiant gesture, is a far greater indictment of the adults involved than it is of the kid.

--As my astute daughter points out about the Texas cheerleaders, Newsweek must have been awfully hard up for prurient content to print the article. (It reminds me of the five page spread US News and World Report did a few years ago about the legion of fifth graders who were allegedly fellating every male in sight.) The "cheerleader" tag was probably what made the story even moderatly titillating. Otherwise, it was just a story about kids behaving normally (for adolescents) and adults being completely over the top.

--I took some time and looked at stickam.com and have to say that it is pretty tame and routine stuff. There are a lot of kids from about 13 and up (some no doubt fudge their ages -- when did kids NOT fudge their ages?) of both sexes, a few older people (some older women, but mostly men in their 30s chatting up the teenage girls), and not very much at all in the way of prurient content. Most of the girls have something in their profiles to the effect of "If you ask me to show my boobs I will ban you".

Okay, COULD one of the men strike up an on-line acquaintance with one of these tamales and arrange a meeting? Yeah, sure -- if the girl wants to. And something perhaps is different from my own teenage years, when I saw girls I knew having surreptitious meetings with older guys from the surrounding towns? I'm sorry, but the way kids are instructed today about the perils of the internet, beginning in elementary school, no girl goes with a guy she meets on the web without full knowledge of exactly what she is doing.

I would say that live webcam chatting probably makes things safer for the kids than the previous text-only chatting, in fact! As the cops note, it is easy for them to pretend they are a 13 y.o. girl and by promising sex lure a dirty old man to a bust when using text-based chat room contact. It would be a whole lot harder to do with both parties face to face via webcam.

--With regard to soccer adults, I'll say that the adult behavior is downright appalling. I run a summer soccer program at Trinity Church, in Lime Rock, CT, and I do hear what the kids say about some of the parents/adults they encounter in local recreational soccer, middle school soccer, and travel team soccer. From what the kids report back, it's pretty clear that Goshen, CT, wins the title for the most egregiously offensive adults in my area, but the ongoing commentary in the Youth Soccer world about problem parents -- and problem adults in general -- makes it clear that there are similar whackos elsewhere, probably in even greater numbers.

--What has been going on for the last several years in Washington, DC, in terms of selfish, irresponsible and hypocritical behavior by adults in high level elected positions provides only more evidence that the generation that followed mine is completely bonkers. They are clearly the antithesis of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" -- namely the generation that preceded mine.

Interestingly, the generation that followed the whacko generation -- today's kids, teens, and twenty-somethings -- seem to be a whole lot more sane. Witness the special ed kid peeing in her pants, the Texas cheerleaders, and the www.stickam.com clientele. Their behavior is actually quite age-appropriate. It's a shame that the whacko generation can't deal with it!

An unflattering photo

2006-11-20T19:04:00.000-05:00

I located this one quite by accident when I installed Picasa on my main PC.

You see, it catalogs ALL the pictures, not just the attractive or interesting ones, and, lo and behold, unflattering and even downright unattractive scenes can easily come back to haunt one.

The setting for this one was our back deck, and the occasion was the Trinity Lime Rock choir party during the late summer of 2005. I had been running around taking pictures of everyone else (that's become a preoccupation of mine since discovering digital photography) and suddenly, Courtney, one of the few kids present at this mostly adult gathering said "Hey, let ME take a picture of YOU!"

Well, what was I going to say, especially when the kid who posed the request had been my most faithful attender during the Summer Soccer program we had started that summer at Trinity, and had even gone and gotten me an ice pack when I pulled my hamstring trying to play an air ball like a 16 year old? And especially when the Rector was standing right there when she said it and would no doubt have backed the kid up 100%.

So, what I did say was "Okay, Courtney, you win. Go ahead, but just take one picture" and handed her the camera.

And this was the result. Thanks, Courtney! Even you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as my grandmother used to periodically say in contexts not too much different than this.

Hmmm. That probably works on several levels, as the lady (Grandma, not Courtney nor the Rector) was such a heavy duty member of the WCTU (stands for Women's Christian Temperance Union, for those born since, say, 1970) that she actually attended an international WCTU conference in Germany in the late 1930s as a delegate for New York State. And those were the days when you pretty much had to get on a boat to get to Europe! And that IS an alcoholic beverage in my hand, yes it is.

Well, some folks who knew me back when may recognize the pose, and even the hair length. I should probably have photoshopped the hair to a different color before posting it, but then it would not have been as humiliating.

Cellphones come to Salisbury, CT

2006-10-19T16:46:00.000-04:00

I read this morning in the Lakeville Journal that the chosen few in the center of Salisbury, Connecticut can now use their cellphones! After at least five years of delays of many kinds (including the inexplicable) the long-awaited Salisbury celltower went live last Thursday.

Out here, up a dirt road, in the howling wilderness of Twin Lakes, the situation is not as rosy.

After I read the article in the Journal about the new Salisbury cell tower being live, I grabbed the cellphone I bought a couple of years ago contemplating this great moment and walked up and down Between the Lakes Road seeking a signal. Even though I got no “bars” within a quarter mile of my house in either direction, I did successfully make a call from the junction of Between the Lakes Road and Twin Lakes Road (that's the nearest hard surface road), and was able to continue the call as I walked all the way back to my front door. However, the call dropped as soon as I walked inside. Attempts to re-connect indoors were uniformly unsuccessful.

I decided it was unlikely that the decision-makers would have much interest in us folks out in Twin Lakes, so I called Cingular customer service to see if there was some kind of repeater or signal amplifier I could rig up on a pine tree that might get me cell service in my home. They recommended that I get a newer, more modern phone (why did this not really surprise me very much?), and I took their advice.

After dropping $400 on a very fancy new phone that does everything but eat lunch (and may that too if I can only figure out the right buttons to press), plus all the desirable accessories, I brought it home and tried it out. Unfortunately, the situation was no better, but I am scheduled to receive several rebates sooner or later.

Given the number of years it has taken to get a cell tower in Salisbury, I’ve concluded that there’s no hope at all for officially sanctioned cell service in Twin Lakes in my life time. In considering the private sector as an alternative source, I know that nearby Lime Rock Park provides excellent cell service in their area and beyond, but we sadly do not have a race track up here.

Does anyone have a solution to the problem we have in Twin Lakes?

Gas Chamber

2006-03-03T16:31:00.000-05:00

It's been a little while since I reflected on the beginning days of Army life, back in the mid 1960s, and the combination of very cold weather today with a slightly runny nose reminded me of one reasonably unforgettable part of Basic Training -- the gas chamber.

Although I noted that during the early days of the Second Iraq War there was great concern that poison gas or some other aspect of the CBR (stands for Chemical, Bacteriological, Radiological) weapon set might be used defensively by the Iraqis, and thus we saw figures garbed like spacemen prepared for the retaliation that didn't come, I'm not sure trainees are introduced to the subject of poison gas the way we were.

Actually, I have to admit that I had already had a very limited introduction to poison gas before the Army ever got its hooks in me. That had happened a year or two before, when I had been at a rally for peace, disarmament, civil rights, or some other cause that back then was viewed as disruptive and un-American, and probably criminal. I had not been close to where the police had gassed the demonstrators, and all I had really gotten was a whiff of the stuff as it drifted over toward us. I remembered the smell, but it made only a slight impression on me, really, since back then one expected to get one's lumps from law enforcement if one even looked like one was protesting. (Sometime I'll tell in detail what a nightstick feels like when applied to a shin bone, and how easy it was to have something like this happen to one -- but that was in the pre-Army days, and today we are on the subject of the gas chamber in Basic Training).

Interestingly, there is a strong similarity between the smell of the tear gas known as CN (which I think is now considered obsolete, having been replaced with a gas called CS) and the smell of soft coal that was used to heat the barracks at Fort Gordon. So, when I arrived at Gordon I had a subliminal reminder of smelling tear gas earlier.

We had been issued gas masks when we arrived at Fort Gordon, but we didn't have to wear them around until around week four. Until then, they were just one more item to be out of place or dusty or not properly closed during barracks inspection. However, when CBR training started, that changed too. Suddenly we were wearing the damned things strapped to our legs everywhere we went. When you ran, they flapped. When you crawled, they got hung up on the barbed wire and on anything else you were crawling near. When you did the overhead ladder, they had the tendency to pull your pants down.

We drilled putting them on. Someone would yell "gas" or "spray" (the two ways poison gas was delivered) and we were to immediately hold our breath, get out our gas mask (which we were not permitted to call gas masks; they were only to be referred to as "protective masks" but we called them gas masks anyway) put them on, and, by blowing out, clear the mask of any gas that might have come along when donning the thing.

We had a small joke that involved the litany we were taught -- and which a lot of Army doctrine tends to get into. The litany went: "What do you do when you see that the enemy is launching a poison substance attack?" "Yell gas or spray and put on our protective mask, then see if any of our buddies needs assistance." The small joke we made of it was, instead of yelling either "gas" or "spray" depending on whether we were being gassed or sprayed as the litany intended, we would yell "gas or spray". Those of us with college educations found this kind of literalism highly amusing, but it does appear to have lost a bit of its humor over the decades. Sorry about that.

Finally, after a week of build-up by our platoon sergeants, one day we were marched to the gas chambers. It was a cold day, and nearly everyone had at least the beginnings of a head cold, and the march to the gas chambers didn't help much.

There were two rooms in the "gas chamber" building. By squads, we were first told "gas" and, once we had reacted correctly, we were led into the first room, and a gas grenade was set off in the middle of the floor. Then we were told to remove our gas masks.

That was a shock. Tear gas really does make you feel bad. Your eyes burn like mad and tear heavily. The skin of your face burns. What's almost worse is that your nose starts to run rivers -- real rivers! One guy in my squad had a stream of what is indelicately called snot descending from his nose almost at once. The sergeant yelled "if that snot hits the floor, you're gonna lick it up!" The trainee somehow sucked it all back in and it never hit the floor. That's a pretty good trick while you're crying, by the way.

Then, after we all had a few moments of real discomfort, we were led back out of the room and into the fresh air. Interestingly it took only a couple of moments before our mucus membranes calmed down and we had the enjoyment of watching the other squads go through the process.

The other room, we were told, contained a lethal agent, and, if we did anything wrong in there, we would be dead. One of the other guys in the platoon caught my eye and mouthed "Right!" since we had earlier had a discussion among ourselves about how this gas chamber thing was probably overrated, and in any case the Army did not routinely kill off its trainees.

In any event, room #2 really didn't make enough of an impression on me for me to recall what the sequence of events was. I do have a recollection of the smell of chlorine -- probably meant to simulate chlorine gas -- around the area. It wasn't a very strong smell, and probably could be duplicated by sloshing some Clorox around on the floor.

That was pretty much it for CBR training. We came from a generation that had learned to "duck and cover" in elementary school in the event of an atomic blast, so there wasn't much to teach us there. We got some textbook knowledge of atropine, which we would be issued in the event that a real enemy might gas us at some point the the future, but we never saw the stuff in real life. The bacteriological part was not covered at all, as far as I can remember, or if it was, it was in a brief mention in a training film that I (and nearly everybody else) no doubt slept through.

Actually, now that I think of it, we must have seen something about "germ warfare". One of the guys in my platoon had been a bio-chem major in college, and might even have had an advanced degree in it. Anyway, when we got our post-Basic assignments, he was assigned to Fort Detrick, Maryland. I remember that I, for one, had never heard of the place, and I asked him what it was and what they did there. Well, he HAD heard of Fort Detrick before, probably in grad school, and told me it was where the Army creates germ warfare weapons -- "You know, like in that training film we saw." So I guess we did see a training film about the subject. I had learned pretty early on that I could tip my helmet liner down onto the bridge of my nose and go to sleep -- as long as I didn't drool or snore.

Gas chamber was an interesting adventure, if nothing else. I'm reminded of it whenever I smell soft coal smoke, even today. I'm thinking that it's one more part of Basic Training that one really ought to experience if one is ever going to be in a position where you might order the use of tear gas -- or some other CBR agent -- on someone else in later life.

In view of recent events, maybe I should discuss how the Army introduced us to shooting rifles next without anyone even getting hurt. More useful knowledge.

Why so many people don't like New Yorkers...and why it's not the New Yorkers' fault

2006-02-08T15:51:00.000-05:00

This is a short segue away from the Basic Training chronicles to a topic that I've had occasion to think about since I've been living up a dirt road in the boonies instead of New York City.

My daughter, who has lived in Chicago for more or less the last decade, brought the topic up the other night when she commented that when people in the midwest ask her where she is from, and she tells them, accurately, that she spent her first 12 years in New York City and then moved to Connecticut, they look at her like she has a communicable disease. A very unpleasant communicable disease, in fact. One might almost say a loathsome communicable disease!

A few years ago, up here in Northwest Connecticut, there was considerable hue and cry about how the New Yorkers were ruining the place. How they talk loud, how they aren't polite, how they are willing to spend too much money for a house (as well as for almost anything else), how they try to get ahead in line, how they, well, fail to show proper deference to people who have lived here for years and years.

That talk largely died out -- perhaps as more and more people around here benefitted financially from the influx of New Yorker second homes -- but came to life again a few years ago on the topic of cellphones (which, by the way, don't work in most of our area because there are very, very few cell towers) and how New Yorkers talk too loud on them. At least where they can use them at all.

For many years I had thought of the anti-New Yorker sentiment as anti-semitism. However, having heard the same kinds of antipathy expressed toward newcomers from New York City by locals of all ethnic and religious persuasions, and having seen my co-religionists (Episcopalian, for the information of any who are curious) exhibiting all the same behaviors "locals" have historically considered distasteful, I decided a while ago that anti-semitism was a simplistic explanation and have been reflecting further on it. (In fact, some of the most obnoxious people I have ever met have been, like me, Episcopalian, and some of the most obnoxious of this group have NOT been New Yorkers at all. But I won't go there right now.)

First of all, I do think that there are a set of behaviors that tend to characterize many people who have lived in New York City for much of their life -- or at least for the most recent few years. They don't stand out in New York City, but up here, where there still are occasional dirt roads, they do seem noticeable.

I think that what makes a New Yorker a New Yorker is cultural. Yes, there is a heavy component of self-selection involved (I think that when the few people from the red states who decide to live in New York City make that decision it must be about as earth-shattering as if they were to come out of the closet -- and it does take a certain amount of guts coupled with the feeling that the present situation is intolerable to make either decision, I suspect.) but when you move to New York City you move into an environment that I have not seen elsewhere.

Most places the overwhelming social pressure is to conform to local norms. Social success most places in this great nation comes to those who are beautiful, athletic, and have the ability to parrot the local social, political, religious, and economic viewpoints so inoffensively that, were they not beautiful and athletic, they would be totally invisible.

In New York City, as long you are not striving to be a model or a prostitute or be picked up in bars without wasting time trolling around, nobody much cares if you are beautiful or athletic at all. In fact, nobody really cares at all about what you think unless it directly threatens them.

But what everyone in New York City does care about is what you want from them, or what you have that they want.

In what is fundamentally a rather small and crowded place, there is no time that one lives in New York City that someone else does not want what you have.

If you have a job in a large corporation and sit at a desk in the middle of a sea of desks, there are people who do not have jobs at all, or who do not have jobs that are as well-paid as yours who actively covet your job. If you sit in a cubicle, there are people out there in the bullpen who want more than anything else in the world to sit in a cubicle -- in YOUR cubicle.

If you have an office with walls that reach the ceiling and a door that opens and closes, there are people sitting in cubicles who want your office. If your office has a window, there are people with inside offices who want your office. If your office has a window and is on a high floor, there are myriad people who have offices on lower floors who want to move up.

If you have industrial carpeting on your office floor, there are people with linoleum tile or raised floors who want to sit where you sit. If your office flooring is a cut above industrial carpet, there are many, many people who want what you have.

If you are standing on the subway at rush hour and the door opens, there are people on the platform who want the 48 square inches of floor you are occupying. If you are sitting on the bus, there are people standing right in front of you who want your seat. If you are riding in a taxi, there are the people on the curb who want your cab. If you are in a limo, there are people in all the other modes of transportation who want to be sitting right where you are sitting, even if it is motionless in traffic.

If you live in a 12 room duplex coop on Park Avenue, there are many, many people who want your living place. If you have a rent stabilized two bedroom, ditto. If you have a studio that you can afford, ditto. Furthermore, your landlord is among the population that wants your apartment, and is apt to be among the more vicious of those trying to get it.

If you are reaching for a quart of milk at the grocery store, there is someone else in that store at that very moment that covets that quart of milk.

It translates to intangibles as well. I won't belabor the obvious in terms of competition for recognition at work or for promotion. The competition for the scarce spaces in most Manhattan nursery schools is legendary, as are the spaces in the ongoing schools, both private and public (remember, please, that New York City has a hierarchy of public schools that parallels the private sector, and in which the competition is just as bloodthirsty.)

It's natural, in an environment where the sharks are continuously circling, that people feel a need to celebrate their survival.

This leads to conversations salted with mentions of what a person has, and frequently what they have gotten most recently. My wife still recalls a woman she met 25 years ago at our daughter's nursery school who introduced herself by telling my wife that she and her husband had a 12 room duplex on Park Avenue. Both of us have long since forgotten her name, but we both can still refer to her as "12 room duplex" and know exactly who we are referring to.

"My girl will call your girl" to set up a meeting is such an egregious boast (not only that you actually have a secretary or admin assistant -- a rarity anymore -- but also that you are so important that you do not need to abide by conventions -- and laws -- about sex roles) that one almost never hears it anymore. (If fact, the legal ramifications are such that someone who says it is weakening himself competitively. Thus, it isn't much said.)

It's dangerous for people who work for you to know powerful people, even if the powerful people your people know could actually help you. As it turns out, I met and had lunch one Sunday with Archbiship Desmond Tutu at a time when my employer was having problems not only with opening branches in South Africa, but also was attempting to deal with redlining issues in its New York City business. I was certainly in a position where I could have reached him on the telephone, and possibly have gotten an appointment with him for someone higher up in the corporation. When I mentioned this to the guy I was working for at the time, he reacted with visible horror. He immediately realized that I appeared to have a resource that emphatically trumped any resource he could muster, and he very quickly shifted me to projects where Archbishop Tutu could not be even remotely relevant. He was simply defending what he had.

People in New York City routinely work mind-numbing hours. The reason is not that they have more work to do than people in Peoria, but that any time they are not at their desk, or visibly incurring expenses on behalf of their employer, someone else could be cutting into their game.

Do you currently have a parking space that will permit your car to remain in situ through the next alternate side parking day? Well, don't move it, even for a moment. Someone else wants your parking place, and will take it in a heartbeat.

Got a subscription for a couple of really good seats at the opera or the ballet? Going to be away for the next season? Don't be a fool and let your subscription lapse even if you cannot attend a single performance. You will never, ever get seats as good again.

Got someone to clean your apartment who is honest, a hard worker, and shows up like clockwork? Have a friend who needs someone to clean their apartment? You're a fool if you even let your friend know you have such a resource -- they will find a way to hire that resource away from you.

Eternal vigilance is the price of holding on to what you have in New York City.

Honestly, anyone who can live for an extended period in New York City and not adapt to the cultural mores is either an insensitive fool or a saint -- and actually, most insensitive fools are able to catch on rather quickly.

From here, up a dirt road, I can't really take a particularly critical view of New Yorkers. They have earned their sharp elbows.

Live fire exercises

2006-02-07T08:23:00.000-05:00

It does seem like Basic Training is easier to recall in reverse chronological order.

What I suppose was "the" highlight, at least for some of us, was the live fire exercise, which came in the final few days of basic. The essence of it was that in this one people would actually be shooting at you. Or at least shooting at where you would be if you happened to stop crawling and suddenly stand up.

During the days that preceded it, there was much discussion among the basic trainees about just how close to a standing position you would have to get in order to acquire a machine gun round in the butt or head. Many theories were postulated. Some felt that the bullets would be coming over us at about 18 inches above the ground, and that as long as one stayed under the barbed wire we were crawling under, one would be fine. Others felt the bullets were about 3 feet up, so that if someone panicked and decided to get out on hands and knees, barbed wire notwithstanding, they would be safe. Another school of thought was that the bullets would be about six feet up, so that if someone panicked and decided to try to run out, they would be okay if the ran in a slight crouch.

One thing we all knew was that the live fire exercise was intended to come as close to what one might have found on a World War II battlefield at night (maybe a World War I battlefield, in no man's land, really) as was possible without destroying too much government property (meaning too many recruits).

Actually, by the time we had gotten to the live fire exercise we had already taken a certain amount of physical risk in the live grenade exercise, but I'll talk about that later.

As with many of the components of basic training -- and a good reason why no politician who has not been through it should EVER be permitted to vote on a resolution about war -- the live fire exercise was intended to be both instructive and psychologically supportive, while at the same time putting combat into some kind of perspective.

My recollection of the actual exercise was this:

First, it was night, and it was definitely dark out. They marched us a few miles, in the dark, of course (my father had an amusing anecdote from World War I about one National Guard division in France that carried flashlights while marching at night, and how they acquired the derisive nickname of the "flashlight division" from that episode). Of course this was not our first night march, and they have a beneficial quality all their own.

We arrived in an area of Fort Gordon where none of us could remember having been before -- and we had walked all over (or what seemed to constitute all over) that post in the preceding weeks (I can honestly say that the only times we rode anywhere in basic training was when we were going on or off post). Being in new territory at night, knowing there is going to be something really scary happening soon, has a certain effect on one.

Then, we waited. "Hurry up and wait" is a critical part of the basic training experience, and the way people deal with having to wait is frequently a good indication of whether they have been through basic or not. I attribute some of the decline in civility in America to the huge reduction in the number of American males who have been subjected to the patience-building process of basic training. But let it suffice to say that when you hurry up and wait for something genuinely scary to happen, the overall effect is magnified.

Then, out of the night, what seemed like 50 feet from us, with no warning at all, there was an explosion (actually, probably a 105 simulator, and most likely in a pit surrounded by sandbags for safety reasons). Then, some machine guns opened up with a few bursts, but not in our direction.

Finally, we were directed single-file into a trench -- a fairly deep one, probably reminiscent of a World War I trench. From where we were, we could see machine guns above us, firing tracers ahead of where we were pretty clearly going.

Then, we were told to get moving, to stay down under the wire, and good luck.

I seem to remember being in roughly the second wave that crawled out of the trench and into the field, under the machine gun tracers. That would make sense, since my name was Brown, which put me alphabetically in the third squad of the first platoon of the basic training company.

I was barely out of the trench when a 105 simulator went off considerably closer than the preceding one. It was a good reminder to keep my head down.

There are really two ways to crawl under barbed wire: on your belly (like a snake, as the sergeants used to point out), and on your back. When you low-crawl on your belly, you cradle your rifle in your elbows. When you crawl on your back, you lay your rifle on top of you with the muzzle somewhere near the top of your head. You can crawl much faster on your belly (in fact, the 40 yard low crawl was a timed portion of the Army PT test) than on your back, but you are a bit closer to the ground when you crawl on your back, because you aren't tempted to stick your head or your butt in the air.

I honestly cannot remember which way I crawled the hundred or so yards that the live fire exercise required. Probably a little of both. I do remember that the wire was probably as low to the ground as any we had encountered in basic, and I do remember bumping into a sandbagged area just as a 105 simulator went off in it, and reflexively rolling away from it, while feeling sand kicked up the the explosion falling on me.

I know that as I was reaching the end of the course, I did crawl for a while on my back because I remember watching the tracer rounds going over. My conclusion at that point was that they were about eight feet up -- in other words, the Army was not going to lose any recruits who might panic and stand up.

Finally, we got to another trench, crawled down into it, were told we could stand up now, and went over to the side, tracer rounds continuing to go overhead the whole time, and 105 simulators continuing to explode in the area behind us.

It would have been interesting to see the live fire course in daylight, but I'm sure that the psychological effectiveness of the exercise would have been greatly diminished had we done so.

Interestingly, there was virtually no conversation among us recruits either while marching back to the company area or after we arrived. Even the compulsive talkers had nothing to say.

Maybe I'll talk about gas or grenades next time.

Resuming the thread about Basic Training

2006-01-28T11:35:00.000-05:00

After a few weeks off trying to (1) mentally reconstruct the chronological sequence of events that happened forty years ago and (2) trying to figure out why the Bush administration is trying so hard to create an omnipotent Presidency when it's unlikely the Republicans can keep the White House next time (as long as they actually do permit an honest election to happen), I decided to go back to my reprise of basic training, and my defense of compulsory universal military service.

One of my clearest memories of basic was the very end of it.

We had been at Fort Gordon, GA, for around 11 weeks. We had gotten two weeks to go home for Christmas -- something we all really relished, by the way. Those of us who had been heavy and out of shape when we arrived were not heavy OR out of shape any more. Those of us who had been skinny and out of shape when we arrived likewise were neither. Our uniforms, which fit us reasonably well when they were issued in Reception Station, no longer fit very well.

The fact was that all of us -- including those of us who had played college sports -- were at that point in the best physical shape we had ever been and would ever be.

I'd also suggest that we were generally in pretty good mental shape at that point as well. Those of us who had been sheltered back home had spend a couple of months establishing ourselves as independent individuals. Those of us who had been bullies, macho men, whatever, back on the block had been taken down several pegs, as had the few among us who had come from situations of privilege (the truly privileged, or course, had beaten the draft entirely or had gotten into special units in the National Guard that somehow kept their privileged members out of such inconvenient duty as Basic Training) .

We knew about "special treatment" for the privileged back then, and we all mightily resented it.

Earlier in Basic, there had been some contempt for the RAs (the guys who had enlisted in the Regular Army for a term of three or four years) as losers, and for the NGs and ERs (National Guard and Enlisted Reserve guys, who were doing their six months of active duty and who would then return to their home towns for several years of monthly drills) as pansies. Those of us whose service numbers started with "US" (the designation of a draftee) were generally perceived as neither idiots (the RAs) nor sissies (the NGs and the ERs). But by the end of Basic, these distinctions had for the most part faded.

One memorable morning during the last days of Basic Training, formed up in the Company Area, however, the distinctions were suddenly back. This was the point where the First Sergeant called out the name of each member of F-3-1 (F Company, 3rd Batallion, 1st Training Regiment, if I haven't used that designation before) and told us where we would be going from there.

Sergeant Buza told us how this would work. He would call out a name, or a series of names. When he paused, the soldiers whose names had been called would double time to the barracks steps from which he was reading, pick up copies of our orders, and return to our places. There was to be no groaning, no cheering, no celebrating, and no reading of the orders until we were released from our formation.

First off, as I recall, was a longish list of NGs and ERs who were going to Advanced Infantry Training for eight weeks before going back home to their local units. Then came a list, mostly RAs, who would be going to Airborne School. (Although we had been offered the opportunity to "go Airborne" while we were in Basic, few of the US group had opted for this. Among the RA group, the fact that Airborne soldiers got jump pay had been an important inducement. I don't recall their being any NGs or ERs who came from Airborne outfits; thus none of them were in this group.)

Then things began to get more interesting. Most of the RAs who were going to be infantry soldiers were sent to other posts for their Advanced Infantry Training (AIT). However, the RAs who had enlisted for special schools -- and that was many of them -- were then called, along with the school they would be attending. There were three or four who were sent to the US Army Language School in Monterey, CA, for example. (Parenthetically, that was a formidable institution. A fraternity brother of mine in college had flunked out, with French as one of his multiple Fs. He had enlisted for language school, been taught French there, went on to finish his four year hitch, to return to college, major in French, take a doctorate in it, and eventually to return to the old college to become a full professor of French. That is what the Army Language School was capable of.)

We draftees were among the last to be called. I hope that I have not lost your attention at this point, because this is really the most important part of this article.

In the popular view, draftees are simply cannon fodder. If the popular view were correct, all of us should have been headed directly for Advanced Infantry Training, and then for line outfits where we would have been trigger-pullers. This is the point where the Army, in popular belief, is thought to take PhDs in nuclear physics and make infantry soldiers out of them.

The popular belief is simply untrue. If more than five of the 40 or so draftees in F-3-1 were sent to AIT, it would really surprise me. Let me provide a few individual cases I remember that illustrate the extent to which the Army made good use of the resources it got.

Jack J, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, was sent to a Military Police battalion in Germany. No, he was not sent as an artist, but he was assigned as a sign painter. Not bad.

Jim (can't remember his last name), a political science grad with graduate courses in public administration, was also a big, hulking guy, and was sent off to MP School to become a Military Policeman.

Steve C, who had been an Engineer on the Erie Lackawanna Railroad when he was drafted, was sent TDY (stands for Temporary Duty) to the Transportation Corps training center, with a permanent duty station somewhere doing guess what? Driving trains!

One guy, whose name I don't remember, had been notably religious, although he was not an ordained cleric or seminarian. Sunday mornings, for example, when we got a couple of extra hours to ourselves that most of us used to write letters, sleep in, or generally goof off, this guy had always gone to church. Well, he was sent to Army Chaplain School to become a Chaplain's Assistant.

Another guy who had been a bio-chem major, was sent to Fort Dietrick, Maryland. That was the chemical warfare headquarters back then.

When my name was called, I heard, while double-timing up to Sgt. Buza for my orders, that I would be going directly to the 25th Administration Company at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. While Schofield immediately rang a bell as the site of "From Here to Eternity" the idea that I was going to an Admin Company, and that it would be in Hawaii, had me surfing back to my place in my platoon. It got a laugh out of the rest of the guys, and since nobody was much focused yet on the fact that Hawaii was closer to Vietnam than anywhere else anybody was headed, I actually got some scattered applause for my good luck.

The extent to which the Army was using their resources well was evident only after I found out what the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) on my orders meant. It was 716.30. This stood for Personnel Management Specialist. In other words, the Army had decided that an MBA in Industrial Relations and Human Behavioral Systems belonged in Army personnel (that's pretty good to start with) but also that instead of going directly into personnel as a 716.10 (that's entry level), I would go into a classification two notches up the ladder (no additional money for this, but a job that presupposed both some knowledge of how to "do" personnel and the aptitude to learn the job via OJT instead of Personnel School). To say that this was a far cry from putting the Nuclear Physics PhD in a foxhole is to belabor what must be an obvious point.

Those are the ones that stick in my mind after 40 years.

They reflected an Army that was efficient, well managed, and able to make good use of resources it received.

As a postscript, all of us had originally been pegged with a "combat" MOS (really, a default MOS, probably to be used if they could not find some more specialized use for our talents), based entirely on our scores on the tests we took in Reception Station. My own combat MOS had been Heavy Artillery Crewman -- and I later learned that this assignment had been based on a reasonably high score in the quantitative tests; thus presumably qualifying me to calculate trajectories on heavy artillery (8-inch guns and larger) without significant danger of miscalculation. Significantly, even this was a far cry from the foxhole-bound 111.10, or Light Weapons Infantryman -- aka cannon fodder -- that you might have expected a draftee to carry as a default MOS.

Be careful what you wish for???

2006-01-23T13:16:00.000-05:00

I haven't abandoned my series about the virtues of the military draft and how it was beneficial for me (and for countless others as well) -- I've just been trying to assemble in sequential order the events of basic training back in December 1964 and January 1965 so I can recount them as something other than a stream of consciousness.

I did have a thought this morning that I am sure was more shocking to me than it has been to others who are wiser and who no doubt thought of it years ago.

We hear at length today about government spying on American citizens without a warrant. The administration says it is A Good Thing. Indeed we have a Supreme Court nominee who seems to believe that almost anything the Executive branch does is A Good Thing.

Presumably, however, these folks would feel that these are only Good Things as long as the present administration is running things.

One supposes that if a Democratic administration were in place, spying on American citizens would become an Intrusion by Big Government and would thus become reprehensible. And by extension that anything that a Democratic Executive branch did would become by definition a Bad Thing.

The problem we are dealing with here is that of precedent, or, otherwise stated, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Another well-worn saying involves ownership of the ox that gets gored.

Now, there is no question that the Republican party has some truly brilliant strategists and tacticians, and some very verbally agile pundits as well. Is it possible that all of these smart people have not considered the possibility that someday, somehow, a Democratic administration might be elected that could use the Big Brother apparatus constructed by the present administration against the very people who constructed it?

It seems obvious that they have considered this eventuality. They are simply too smart not to have done so.

But consider the implications if they have, indeed, done so, and understand that eventually they may be the party out of power, and, realizing this, have decided to continue with domestic spying and promoting the notion of the Imperial Presidency.

Am I too cynical when I note that the only people for whom domestic spying and the Imperial Presidency are not ultimately problematical are those in power who do not intend to cede power -- ever?

Military Draft -- part 3 -- Basic Training

2005-12-23T10:24:00.000-05:00

We left off leaving Reception Station at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The month was still November, and the year was still 1964, but some time on that bumpy Army school bus trip to Fort Gordon, Georgia, I realized how far a little over a week had taken me from civilian life. No hair to speak of. My few civilian clothes stuffed in a gym bag in the bottom of my duffel bag. Baggy OD (stands for Olive Drab) fatigues, stiff new combat boots, funny OD baseball cap. Name "BROWN" emblazoned on a white strip of cloth (the color of the strip of cloth changed to OD just about the time I was getting out of the Army -- a concession, evidently, to the fact that the white was visible to snipers) above my right shirt pocket, and "U. S. Army" in a sort of bronzish-gold on a black strip of cloth above my left. Nothing had been laundered yet, so everything we wore was still stiff with sizeing.

We looked, individually and collectively, like a real bunch of sad sacks, losers, green recruits. And, it also occurred to me on that bus ride, nobody back home had a clue where I was, except that I was "in the Army". They probably thought I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where most people from the northeast were sent for Reception Station and Basic Training, but here we were on an Army school bus going from one Godforsaken southern red-dirt state to another, from one set of Army yellow barracks to another. In Reception Station we had not had access to phones (this would continue in basic training as well) and we didn't have an opportunity to write letters home -- further, we were informed that it wouldn't do any good anyway, because people would not be able to write back to us where we were with any expection that the letters would be delivered.

Lest anybody read this and not realize that this represented a fundamental change, it did. I was -- everybody was -- suddenly not anyone's property but Uncle's. Not mom's, not girlfriend's, nobody but Uncle owned our OD asses, Uncle didn't have to tell anyone where he was keeping us, and nobody could do a damned thing about it. (We had heard at Reception Station about what happened to guys who were so foolish as to attempt to get their elected officials to intervene in their behalf -- I don't recall what it was that was supposed to happen, but it was dire beyond belief.)

I have to admit that I have no recollection of any visual difference between Fort Jackson and Fort Gordon. Furthermore, since this was November, there was a strong bond of smell between the two places. In both places the barracks were heated with soft coal furnaces, and both camps smelled strongly of soft coal smoke. The smell was sort of a perverse petit madeline for me, and it took me several days to figure it out, but the odor of the smoke was very reminiscent of tear gas -- and it permeated the places.

I think I will beg forgiveness at this point on the basis both of advancing age and the fact that the events I'm writing about took place more than 40 years ago, I didn't keep a diary while they were occurring (dumb mistake), and I never thought we would reach a point as a nation where more or less universal military service was not an assumed rite of passage, at least for males. An awful lot of my basic training memories really are no longer in the sequence they actually occured in. It's clear that the product of basic training is different from the raw material, and there are stages in the process that are discernible, even after this many years, but the details will occasionally be scrambled.

I do remember that we were assigned to Company F, 3rd Battallion, 1st Training Regiment: F-3-1. We began to learn the phonetic alphabet by being advised that we did not refer to our company as "F Company" but as "Foxtrot" -- the phonetic word for the letter F. Within the company we were sorted into four platoons of four squads each. With the last name of Brown, I was in the first platoon along with around five other guys named Brown, who were with me in the second squad. We met our Drill Instructor, SFC (stands for Sergeant First Class -- a five-striper) named Sergeant Nitzche.

He was actually a surprise. I had been expecting someone more in the drill instructor mold -- in fact the other platoons had sergeants who were more in that mold -- but Sergeant Nitzche was reasonable soft-spoken and aside from occasionally reminding us that we were both the scum of the earth and "American Fighting Men" he was a pretty good guy. I guess he was in his forties or early fifties. In retrospect, I suspect he was a Korean War commissioned officer who had been RIFed (Reduction In Force) who had decided to stay in the Army as a non-commissioned officer while retaining his Reserve commission and continuing to accrue retirement benefits on that basis. There were a few of these guys around, and they lent an air of gentility to an otherwise rough environment.

It occurs to me that I still haven't said anything about what we DID in basic, but this is background, and I guess once you grasp the image of these pitiful, ill-costumed, bald-headed recent-civilians in new Army suits struggling with huge and heavy duffel bags a quarter of a mile from where the bus dumped us to our new barracks, to be greeted by our Sergeants, who would have considerable control over our lives for the next couple of months, it may be time to end this post and come back with more details.

Military Draft -- part 2

2005-12-09T13:47:00.000-05:00

Well, so long Woodstock, hello Nam!

That, I suppose, would be what anyone hearing that I had been drafted back in late 1964 would think the next words out of my mouth would be, but they would be wrong.

First of all, the United States had at best a very limited presence in Vietnam at the time. Second, in a two year draftee hitch, lots actually has to happen before you become cannon fodder -- if you ever do.

Back in Liberty, NY, on the morning of November 18, my parents drove me to Monticello, the county seat, where the local draft board was located. There were a few other males in my age bracket there, perhaps five or six.

I found myself sitting on the Short Line bus with Phil Ardito, a guy from Roscoe or Livingston Manor whom I hadn't met previously. He seemed like a pleasant enough guy, although it was pretty clear that he had not been to college and had never heard of Woodstock as anything except a spot on a map. I seem to recall that he did some kind of work in the manual trades, but I don't remember exactly what. We talked a little bit on the bus ride to NYC about whether we would get passes to go home from Fort Dix (NJ, where we both assumed we were headed) for Christmas, and about factory work, where I now had a little background to talk from.

When we pulled into Port Authority Bus Terminal, I found myself more or less in charge of our little group simply because I had lived in NYC for a couple of years and could find our way down to the Whitehall Street location where draftees were processed. No problems. They had provided us with subway tokens in Monticello, and we used them without mishap.

We each had a little gym bag with us to hold our limited personal effects (mainly toilet articles as we had been encouraged to bring no extra clothes, but which also did include a New Testament we had each been handed (regardless of religious orientation, if any) before we boarded the bus in Monticello. We followed the signs in the Whitehall Street building that directed "inductees" -- our current status -- up the stairs, through some perfunctory paperwork (since they already knew whom to expect) and a physical exam.

Not much excitement yet. It was a second physical exam for all of us, since we had been subjected earlier in our lives to a pre-induction physical at the same location. We noticed that we had become part of a larger group -- perhaps 30 to 50 of us -- as the day went on. Not all of us were draftees. Some had enlisted, and some were reservists or National Guards people who were also signing in at this time for their six months on active duty.

A bored-looking lieutenant swore us all in as a part of a not particularly impressive ceremony, and the first surprise of the day came as they told us that we would be travelling by train that night to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for "Reception Station".

I think we were all expecting to go to Fort Dix, NJ, so this was a little bit unsettling. I remember being somewhat unhappy, since I had met a girl who went to Bard College at my going away party in Woodstock, had hoped to see her on weekends, and clearly would not be able to do so if I was in South Carolina. There was not a lot that could be done about it -- other than walking away from the group while we were enroute to Penn Station, which would not have been particularly difficult to do, really -- so soon we were on a passenger train headed South.

These were pre-Amtrak days, and the train was pretty shabby. No question, it was old enough to have carried troops in World War II and had carried many civilian passengers since those days. Phil Ardito and I had acquired a third guy to hang out with, and I led the three of us into the train car and claimed what used to be called a private room. Not bad: three berths, four seats, evidently a loo under one of the seats through which you could watch the tracks roll by.

The rest of the guys filled the other private room on the train and most of the rest of the car, which later was made up into sleeping car berths. Just like in the movies from the 1930s, except the dining car, such as it was, was not fancy, was not particularly clean, and we got sandwiches for dinner. There were some jokes about Army food, but we all realized that we were being treated just like any other overnight travellers on our nation's railroads, and, in fact, a lot better than some, because we actually had beds to sleep in. Okay, berths.

It seems to me that we sat on the train, going nowhere, for about six hours in Rocky Mount, NC. Then we were hooked to another train, and finally we stopped in Columbia, SC. Here, it became a bit more like the Army and a little less like a recreational train trip in a third world country.

In South Carolina, there were sergeants in fatigues to hurry us off the train and into some military busses (like school busses, except painted olive drab), and, as soon as the roll was called and it was determined that none of us were still on the train, to yell at us a little.

Even this was pretty mild. We had all seen lots of movies about Army life, and were aware that the Army employed sergeants to yell at recruits. Okay, I guess I was a little suprised that the sergeants used "fuck" as a noun, a verb, a participle, an article, an adjective, an adverb and a conjunction when addressing us, but I definitely knew the word and I can't say that I or anybody else was much shocked by it. At that point I realized that I should have brought a pen and notebook so I could record some of the expressions. They were gramatically creative as hell, and I really wish that I remembered some of them.

By the time we assembled at Fort Jackson, I realized that our little band that had left Monticello a couple of days earlier had now grown into a basic training company of around 240 men. We were sorted alphabetically, so Ardito and Brown ended up in the same platoon. Predictably, we were the first platoon. However, there were now at least five guys named Brown -- perhaps more -- and I discovered that our squad included people from Rhode Island, the Florida Panhandle, upstate New York, and a dozen places in between.

We were all still in civilian clothes, and I have to say that we must have smelled pretty bad by this time, since it was now three full days since we had left home wearing them, and no matter how low stress the whole process had been, it was still unfamiliar enough to all of us that there had been a little bit of nervous perspiration.

We were put into barracks -- two story wooden structures left over from World War II, heated by soft coal furnaces -- told to find a bed and sack out. They got us up at 4 AM, not surprisingly, and we were then exposed for the first time to one of the most important lessons in Army life: the fact that we were sufficiently unimportant in the larger scheme of things that we would be expected to hurry up and wait.

We did a lot of that during the four days we were at Fort Jackson. There were tests to take -- very important tests if one was concerned where one was going to end up during one's Army life, but I think I was one of the very few who intuitively realized that it was as important -- maybe more important -- to try hard on these tests than it had been to try hard on the college boards. Most of the guys basically blew the tests off. Some, no doubt, actually died as a result. But that was much later on.

There were uniforms to draw. Four sets of fatigues, two web belts, two pairs of combat boots, one pair of low quarter black shoes, six pairs of boot socks, four pairs of socks for the low quarters, six sets of white boxer shorts, six white tee shirts, a fatigue jacket, two baseball caps, two dress uniforms, what was called a "cunt cap" (in polite conversation, this was to be called an overseas cap but absolutely nobody ever called them that), a flying saucer hat (the round thing like marching bands wear), an overcoat, four white terrycloth towels, two white terrycloth wash cloths, a laundry bag, a duffel bag, an overcoat, a rain coat.

We finally had clean clothes, and I have to say I was very, very happy to be wearing a uniform. I really stunk by that time.

We got military haircuts -- probably before we got the uniforms -- and I found that I, with my longish hair, and a guy named Jack who had gone to the Rhode Island School of Design and had hair that was more than longish -- were sorted out of the unit while the barbers flipped coins to see who would get to shave our heads. I was only the second prize; Jack was the first prize. Still, except for the feeling that these barbers did not expect any tips, it wasn't that unpleasant. Considering that we also had not bathed in several days at this point, I have to admit I wasn't all that sad to be rid of my very greasy hair.

We were also given dog tags. The process worked like this. In a large room, perhaps a dining hall, a sergeant would scream out your name. ("Geoffrey" was not a possible name in an enlisted Army setting in those days, something that actually worked to my advantage, so I got to guess when I was being called. Fortunately we were always called in alphabetic order so I knew who I was.) We would yell our service number (US51550342, in case anybody wonders. You never do forget that number, even thought I don't think they use service numbers any more.) and the sergeant would confirm the number against the paper on his clipboard. Then he would yell "Religion" and you would yell your religious preference back.

The responses were interesting. A large percentage of the guys yelled "Catholic". A good many yelled "Baptist". I had been raised as a Methodist, although I had not had anything to do with organized religion for around seven years at that point, but rather than improvise on what to yell, I yelled "Methodist" when my time came. As the list rolled on, a couple hollered "none" for religion. Heads turned the first couple of times. A couple of guys yelled "Jewish" and heads turned for that response as well.

It turned out to make no difference. When I got my dogtags, the line for religion said "none". I took that as a sign of divine intervention. Anyway, I already had learned not to rock the boat by telling the Army a mistake had been made. I also learned that I had type B blood, and that I was the only white guy in my platoon with type B blood.

We finally got to write a letter home, but we were cautioned not to assume this was where we would be staying, and in fact we did not stay there. There was considerable speculation among us about where we might be going. A few optimists allowed as how we would surely be going to Fort Dix now. The guys from the Florida Panhandle seemed to feel that Fort Polk, LA, was a sure thing. The true pessimists said we were sure to be sent to Korea as a unit, to be stationed on the 38th parallel, especially now that winter was closing in. Nobody mentioned Vietnam.

At any rate, with the tests done and the uniforms acquired, we were done with reception station. We had been soldiers now for around seven days. Somebody pointed out that "we" had only 723 days to go -- and discussion erupted as to who was smarter: the draftees, who had 723 to go, the National Guards and Reservists, who had about 173 days to go, or the Regular Army enlistees who had so long to go that I don't believe they actually even calculated their time left. They just looked really sad at this point.

With that, we staggered under the load of our new duffel bags onto military busses for the trip to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where we would spend basic training.

Now, here is the reading comprehension part of this test. In the preceding material, identify three experiences that would be beneficial for anyone presuming in later life to lead this nation or a portion of it. (Hint: any moron can find at least five.)

Basic Training comes next.....

Military Draft -- part 1

2005-12-08T15:41:00.000-05:00

Geezers are supposed to think about their Army days on some day in their military lives when something dramatic happened, or, lacking (as I did) much dramatic to think about, on nationally sanctioned days such as Memorial Day.

It's kind of interesting. Back in the 1960s, if you were a guy, your life decisions revolved around the draft. Concepts like finishing college on what my daughter refers to as the "five year plan" weren't viable unless you were physically infirm or psychologically deviant because taking a couple of semesters off would blow away your student deferment. So you started college the autumn after you finished high school, and with the exception of summers off, you marched right through and graduated in four years, ready or not.

Then a new set of issues arose. Grad school? Well, that meant the possibility of more student deferments. However, if you did get grad school deferments in something like business, nobody would hire you when you got out until you had "completed your active military obligation" as the corporate recruiters put it. Getting a graduate degree in the humanities was presumably even worse -- and I didn't even investigate that alternative as a consequence.

So, you got your MBA and watched the infirm and elderly among your classmates start work for the hot companies at what in those days passed for inflated salaries. A few got as much as $20,000 a year, I think! I was a little deviant politically (at business school I had done my master's essay on the decline of union singing, performing my presentation on the guitar, wearing a blue work shirt and red tie with my business suit) but was physically in good shape. With no more convenient deferments, I had anticipated that the draft would catch me instantly, so I went to stay in Woodstock, NY to wait with friends for the axe to fall.

I guess I need to put a month and year on this now so that the even-then fast-moving world situation can be correlated to what was happening to me, so this was June 1964.

Expecting the draft board to be in touch with me immediately, I pursued pleasure as my objective for a few weeks. At that point, someone suggested that I contact an Army Reserve unit about joining it "just in case something broke loose somewhere in the world" so I did. They told me that they would be glad to have me but that they didn't know when they would have a vacancy. Imagine that today: an Army Reserve or National Guard outfit at full strength that was actually turning away applicants!

Having done that, I returned to Woodstock and started working short-term jobs. Honestly, this was a real learning period in my life, and I don't begrudge a moment of it. Let's see. I was an expeditor in a machine shop for about a month. (That didn't last because I lacked subject matter knowledge of machine work -- last contact having been 8th grade shop, and business school does not equip you for work "on the floor".) Then I teamed up with a guy to paint a house. Then I washed some dishes at the Cafe Espresso on Tinker Street. Then I got a job assembling injury moulages (I'll write something separately about this experience. It was pretty esoteric) part time. Around the same time I got a night job operating a surface grinder in a small, non-union machine shop.

During my non-working hours I had as much fun as I was physically able to have. That fun would fill several blog articles, and a public discussion of it would likely make quite a number of ladies now in their late fifties and sixties upset. I guess it would anyway.

Around September, the summer crowd began to drift away from Woodstock. The college students went back (for the guys it was to keep their draft deferrments, and for the girls, I guess it was because the college guys were going back) and I found myself drinking with an older crowd.

Honestly, it was a good crew. The abstract expressionist movement had partially colonized Woodstock, and several of the luminaries of that movement were still there. Even if they were too prominent to display at the Woodstock Artists Assn anymore, they were still at the openings, and still participated in the social life of the town. Where there were painters and sculptors there always seemed to be poets, actors, and musicians as well, and frankly, that whole group knew how to raise hell. At some point we got a jug band together, called ourselves "VanWinkle's Rippers" and started playing wherever people might be willing to listen.

It was late September before it occurred to me that time was passing. The Reserve unit had called to say they had a vacancy for a truck driver, and I had declined the offer simply because some young lady whom I can barely remember now had my pretty much undivided attention at the moment and I would have had to leave within a week to do my required six months on active duty had I joined the Reserves. That was a sacrifice I was not prepared to make at the moment.

Finally, in October, more out of curiosity than anything else I called my draft board to see if they had forgotten about me. They said they had not, but that there were a couple of hundred guys ahead of me, and I wasn't likely to be called before March or April the following year. They mentioned as well that I could always volunteer for the draft and get taken within the month, but that sounded a bit, well, immediate. I thanked them, hung up, and decided to think about alternatives to the draft.

I discovered almost immediately that I could become some sort of priest candidate in a small denomination called the Old Catholic Church that had a diocese centered right in Woodstock. The Bishop was a good guy, I thought, and aside from the fact that I had no religious inclinations at all at the time, it sounded like a pretty good deal, especially since it would make the military go away as a prospect permanently. The Bishop noted that the military did not call on his denomination to provide Chaplains.

Around the same time there was talk of going to Canada to avoid the draft entirely. I guess I never pursued that option because I didn't know anybody in Canada, and as Summer ended in Woodstock, it occurred to me that Canada was likely considerably colder. I also was really having fun.

One evening in early October I was sitting with some of my acquaintances, mostly men in or on the periphery of the arts who had been in World War II, in Buckman's, one of Woodstock's two bars at the time, discussing what men who had been soldiers, sailors, and members of the Merchant Marine talked about in those days. (Interestingly, the conversation was no different from conversations I had been involved in at bars in American Legion posts with steamfitters, truck drivers, and house painters.)

The fact that the men in Buckman's were all on the extreme left end of the political spectrum did not distinguish either their recollections of their military days or the way they talked about them from the guys at the American Legion post, who generally fell at the other end of the spectrum is a coincidence I'll talk about later. (Actually, I'm still not sure I understand it.)

Anyway, there were some new faces at the table in Buckman's that night, and I didn't pay much attention to who they were. A girl I was occasionally seeing at the time came in, recognized one of the men, and spoke to him. Later, the girl and I and the man had another drink at the bar and I learned in that conversation that he had been romantically connected with the mother of another girl whom I had found fascinating, perhaps. And the mom definitely gave great parties!

A week or so later I had decided to stop by at Buckman's to see if anything was going on. The older guy from the preceding paragraph was sitting at the bar, and I recognized nobody else, so I sat down to have a drink with him.

It was a quiet evening, and we drank and talked for several hours. We talked about his experiences in World War II as a Marine in the South Pacific (I later was to learn that he had been very, very modest in recounting his own exploits) and the subject of my impending draft call came up. I told him that I was uncommitted and had been thinking about getting out of the draft.

We talked some more. I learned that he had spent a good part of his youth in Woodstock, and was an actor -- when he could find work. I learned that he had not been finding much work of late, and that he felt he was probably drinking a little too much. Maybe a lot too much.

He had plenty bad to say about the military. Most I had heard before. Yet there was a strange sense that as bad as it had been, it was not an experience he would have given up. I do remember asking him what he would do if he were in my situation.

"I'd go." he said. He didn't add any qualifications to the statement.

At some point later in the conversation, I realized that I had made the decision to call my draft board and ask to be drafted as soon as possible.

"I think I probably will." I had said.

Finally we both staggered out of the place and went our separate ways.

The next morning I called my draft board through my hangover and asked them to move me up in the draft. They were very obliging.

A month later I was the guest of honor at a great party hosted by the woman with whom the guy in the bar had been romantically involved. I have to say that for assorted pacifists, anarchists, fellow-travellers, and others on the left end of the political spectrum, they gave me a great send-off to go be a soldier.

The next time I saw the guy in the bar it was on a movie screen. Lee Marvin, decorated Marine war hero of WW II, had made an acting comeback, cut back on his drinking, and married the mother of the girl I had my eye on who was also the woman who had hosted my going away party. If I had ever seen him in person again, I would have had to tell him that he was absolutely right.

Dropping Lee Marvin's name was not the point of this post. What I wanted to do was suggest the place the institution called the draft held in America back before the Vietnam war heated up.
There is nothing like a misguided military adventure to discredit an institution that in itself probably on balance is a benefit to society. I am wondering what institution will suffer from the adventure in Iraq.

Paranoid fantasies and how they change...

2005-11-17T19:29:00.000-05:00

When I lived in New York City and coped with the Lexington Avenue subway twice a day, my paranoia was very immediate.

It was easy to perceive that the sharp pain I had just felt in my kidney had been intentionally caused by the gent who had just pushed past me to get off the train at 14th Street, or that the reason my bag was stuck in the closing doors was somehow connected with the angry-looking woman who had been jockeying for the same precious section of space that I had.

Likewise, when my employer advised me that I would be transferring to the Stamford office for the second time despite the realization I shared with everyone in my division that Stamford was farther from 399 Park Avenue (Head Office, as we called it then) than the Singapore Office was, at least in terms of relevance, it was easy to assume that somehow the grey had shown through the Grecian Formula I had been diligently applying for several years in an effort to survive long enough to qualify for a pension, that my age was suddenly a major factor, and my demise was imminent.

But once I finally did get the pension and moved out to the dirt road in a more or less final way, the paranoia began to change.

There was a geographic change, of course.

Suddenly the issues -- or some of the issues -- began to be connected with rural life in Northwest Connecticut instead of New York City. But also, true to the oft-repeated witticism attributed to a long-term husband who points out that while his wife decides where they should live, and if they should get a new car, he makes the important decisions -- like whether we should withdraw from Iraq -- sometimes the paranoia can become national in scope, if not global.

It occurred to me, shortly after the Hurricane Katrina fiasco, when reading the news on-line, that this natural disaster certainly represented a veritable potential gold mine for the principal constituency of the current ruling part in the United States -- namely the sleazy side of corporate America. I saw the name of a company given that would have a no-bid contract to provide mortuary and forensic services to FEMA during and after this disaster. Some of my years with my career employer were spent in positions related to emergencies of various kinds, so I decided to see just who this company was.

It took a lot of spadework to get to the bottom of this one. After wading through a not-small website looking for ANYTHING to identify just who this company was, finally, at the bottom of a screen several layers deep, I discovered that they were a subsidiary of Service Corporation International. Well, I thought at the time, that's actually good. Service Corporation International owns most of the mortuary establishments in the South, so they should have a good handle on this kind of business. In fact, we had buried most of my wife's late relatives via a Service Corporation International mortuary in Chattanooga, and they seemed to do a pretty good job.

Okay, it was a production line -- that was pretty evident -- but in a disaster, that's just what you want, isn't it? I mean, regardless of who gets paid, efficiency is really important at a time like that, right?

Living on that dirt road, I let my New York City paranoia gradually diminish.

However, for the last couple of weeks, it has become evident that whatever the sub of Service Corporation International had been hired to do, it was NOT to deal with the dead from New Orleans! There are still several hundred of these unfortunates unidentified, not to mention unburied, and the Feds are having a battle with the State about who should pay for DNA testing for them.

So, tonight, my paranoia snapped back into focus. What about this Service Corporation International sub that got the no-bid contract to make this whole problem into a NON-problem? Where are they in this whole mess? Is that decaying people from New Orleans that I smell, or is it a rat? Given the state where Service Corporation International is headquartered (you could look that up, as Casey Stengel used to say), my guess is that I cannot smell decomposing people all the way up in New England, but that I can still smell a rat pretty acutely.

The paranoia, as I promised a few paragraphs above, actually does still work on a local level.

We oldsters, out here in the boonies, make it an annual ritual to get our flu shot when we go to Town Hall to vote in November. The polling is on the third floor -- and it does step right along, so you really need to have your voting pretty well planned before you get in line, if there is a line at all -- and the flu shots are traditionally on the first floor.

Well, last year, there weren't any flu shots. Nobody was much surprised. The news had made it clear that there had been a major screw-up, and that very few of us antiques would be getting flu shots at all. Well, we all sucked in and voted and shuffled back out of Town Hall without our first floor stop-off.

This year, however, I do clearly remember some fresh-faced young spokeswoman of some agency of the executive branch of our Federal government telling all of us that there was enough flu vaccine out there to sink several battleships, and there would be absolutely no problem in getting a flu shot. "Well, at least the Administration has been able to get this right!" I remember thinking.

The first hint that I had been led astray, and that I should have worked harder at retaining my paranoia came when my wife returned from voting (she went in the morning and I planned to make a separate trip into town in the afternoon) and reported that there was no flu shot clinic, that they hadn't been able to get any vaccine. She had later learned at the Post Office that there would be a flu shot clinic in a couple of weeks at the local drugstore, so we both relaxed a bit.

Yesterday was the clinic at the local drugstore. I had noticed that there had been no notice of it in the newspaper, and that the usually-effective word-of-mouth avenue of communication hadn't carried this one either. Thus, I asked her to call the drugstore and find out if the clinic was real or imagined.

She called, and found that the clinic started at 10 AM, and that they had been only able to obtain 100 doses of vaccine so getting there in a timely manner was important. We got there at 9:45 and ended up as numbers 55 and 56, so we were pretty much home free. Interestingly, though, as the line grew, and as I noticed more and more of the public figures in town just in front of me and just behind me, I started to see people from the neighboring towns as well.

People from Sharon, from Cornwall -- these people had come to Salisbury for their flu shots too! A little questioning revealed that these towns had received NO flu vaccine! Furthermore, the little hospital that makes a real effort to serve our needs up here, Sharon Hospital, was -- guess where? Sharon! A town that got no vaccine!

The nurses from the Salisbury Visiting Nurses were friendly and efficient. They really ran us through there, at roughly a shot a minute, which is really pretty good. Okay, not as good as the Army was, but still pretty good.

Only after I left, and after I talked to my daughter in Chicago that evening, and learned that there wasn't any flu vaccine there either, did I begin to re-activate my dependable paranoia. How did the towns of Salisbury, Sharon, and Cornwall vote in the last presidential election? In what way was that similar to the way Chicago voted?

I am assuming that I do not have to draw you a picture.

I am beginning to think that the paranoia that I spent thirty-five years developing in New York City was not entirely a wasted effort. In fact, it seems pretty clear to me, out here on the dirt road, that the Bush administration has allocated flu vaccine on the basis of blue states and red states.

There's a logical conclusion, and, when you are on the north side of sixty, it's not a pleasant one: they want us dead.

As my first wife's elderly aunt used to say: "Happy days!"

2005-11-09T21:49:00.000-05:00

Himself

Behind the curve

2005-11-09T21:30:00.000-05:00

Well, after decades of being well ahead of the technological curve, this afternoon and evening I discovered that, finally, I was comfortably behind it.

First, my daughter advised me that she had created a blog. Then, I got a message that I should read a blog by a genealogist in upstate New York. Well, I'm clearly not on the cutting edge.

Let's see if I can catch up.