We sometimes wonder if people know why they vote for the people they vote for. But during the recent debt crisis debate, we wondered even more wonderfully if people who get elected to go to Washington know why they got elected.
The phrase “doing what the people back home sent me here to do” was repeated so many times in the last few weeks we wanted to scream at the TV, “How do you know what the people back home think?”
Case in point, starting at the top. President Obama got elected in 2008 when he made eloquent speeches talking up “change.” But did he understand what the people who voted for him understood him to mean by that vague inspiration? Especially when so many people who never voted before voted for him, and when black voters appeared at the polls in record numbers and voted overwhelmingly for him. Were they voting for change in the color of the man at the top, to be part of a historic social event, or were they voting to change the health care and insurance systems and promise everything to everybody and not worry about paying for it?
It reminded one of the 1960 election when an Irish-Catholic ran on a platform that he wasn’t satisfied that the Russians had beaten us into space and we needed to catch up in an arms race with those who would wish us harm. Did people ask if that arms gap claim were true (it turns out it wasn’t) or did they vote for JFK because he was an Irish-Catholic who had a gifted speech writer? We worked the polls that day, and our precinct in Philadelphia, which had a large Catholic population, the faithful voted early and often. Something like 75 percent voted for the Irish-Catholic. Astute observers did not think the arms gap carried the day.
Back to the future. President Obama clearly thought his victory was a mandate for change. But change to what? Did it occur to him that many of his constituents wanted change back to the past, before 9/11, before the housing bubble when real estate only went up, when everybody had a job, before the Wall Street scares, before media images of young soliders coming home with cold, jarring metal rods where their legs used to be?
If it did not, then last year’s election should have. In that mid-term contest, as usually happens, the opposition party made a comeback, partly because that is the way of politics, but also because many of those those first-time voters who supported him in 2008 did not turn out. Maybe they were disappointed that their idea of change, which actually meant better times, had not been realized. Or maybe they just didn’t bother to vote.
Whatever, the result was a bunch of new people in Congress, and we suspect the cycle repeated itself. The Tea Party winners thought they had been sent to Washington with a mandate to change government. But did those who voted for them know what kind of change they wanted? Maybe they just were against expanding entitlements, or giving jobs to illegal immigrants. But did they want the kind of mania that obsessed the country for the last few months, with possible long-term consequences for the economy that could hurt everybody? Did they want to stop their social security checks, kill Medicare, drive their stock portfolios down, deny soldiers pay, deny Depends for grandma?
Some may have wanted all these things, but probably most only wanted to rein in big government, at least fake at balancing the budget, get people working again, ban red light cameras, fly the Confederate flag on Memorial Day. The danger is that you don’t always get what you thought you voted for, if you knew in the first place.
Bottom line: Get rid of the word “mandate.” Unless you speak of Mandate the Magician. And even he was not tricky enough for these political times.
The Decline and Possible Fall of the Rupert Murdoch British Empire may seem unbelievable to some. How could a leading newspaper commit the acts it did, hacking people’s messages, bribing law enforcement at the highest level, at the same time becoming so influential that the most powerful people in the country treated its owner as uncrowned royalty? People knew this was going on. Why no complaints for so long? Did the newspaper staffers who did these things believe they had the sanction of their employer?
Well, by way of understanding, if not explanation, it isn’t the first time. You may chalk it up to corporate culture, for want of a better term. We were reminded of this last month, when going through old files at Philadelphia Magazine, where we started out in the magazine business and in the process played a bit role in the invention of city/regional magazines. Such magazines are everywhere today, but this was not the case in the 1960s when Philadelphia showed the rest of the country what a fringe media could do for a city. A book is under way on the subject, and Philadelphia Magazine is a big part of the story.
That magazine goes way back, almost 100 years now, as a chamber of commerce publication that nobody read. That changed, however, in the 1960s, when the editor and publisher realized that a publication directed to a small business audience had the potential to grow into a new media form that in some ways was more influential than the local newspapers. It was so influential that today some people give the magazine credit for driving out of the city a man who at the time was one of the most powerful figures in the newspaper world. He was Walter Annenberg, whose name today is recognized as a major figure in education philanthropy. That is a worthy distinction, but quite different from Annenberg's reputation as a newspaper publisher.
In that time he owned two of Philadelphia’s three daily papers, along with magazines including Seventeen and TV Guide. Like Rupert Murdoch, he was an intense competitor. Like Rupert Murdoch, he was feared and befriended by the most powerful people in his city. He could also be petty and vicious. He was known to have people he did not like airbrushed out of photos, even when they posed with the president of the United States. He all but boycotted the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team in its early years. His Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story with a headline reading that a candidate for governor had denied being in a mental institution – even though no one had said he was.
In that culture an enterprising and long-term Inquirer reporter named Harry Karafin saw opportunity. Karafin was known as Walter Annenberg’s hatchet man. When Annenberg wanted to get somebody, Harry Karafin was his hit man. Karafin figured out a way to live well on a newspaper reporter’s salary. And that was to write stories in The Inquirer suggesting that an investigation of some business was under way, then send a crony into the business and suggest public relations might be in order. Over several years Karafin got himself on the payroll of a number of businesses. Among his victims was the largest bank in that part of Pennsylvania, which paid his PR company more than $60,000 over five years. Serious money in those days. People paid off because they assumed that if Harry Karafin were on a story, Walter Annenberg was behind it. In fairness, nobody in Philadelphia thought Annenberg knew what Karafin was up to. But anyone close to the newspaper business knew that Karafin could never operate as he did if a sense of ethics came down from the top.
A lot of people in Philadelphia thought Karafin was a bad actor, but nobody did anything about it. The leading rival newspaper, the stodgy (and long defunct) Evening Bulletin, did not want a feud with Walter Annenberg. Then along came Philadelphia Magazine. Gaeton Fonzi, later a founding partner in Gold Coast magazine, and the author of an iconic book on the Kennedy assassination, quietly tracked Karafin for several years. Fonzi noticed that stories about corruption that he worked on were also rumored to be investigated by Karafin, but nothing appeared in the Inquirer. Fonzi sensed that Karafin was on the take, using the threat of investigations to blackmail businesses.
As Philadelphia Magazine grew in stature, so did the nerve of its management, which permitted Fonz and another Philadelphia Magazine writer, Greg Walter, to work full time on the Karafin story for months. When the story broke, it created a sensation. The whole town was buzzing, but The Philadelphia Inquirer remained silent. Silent, until the story began appearing in the national media, including Time Magazine. Then The Inquirer ran a big story, not mentioning Philadelphia Magazine, suggesting it had uncovered the corruption within its own organization. Karafin was fired, convicted of blackmail and extortion, and died in jail. After that, Philadelphia Magazine grew rapidly. It became a must read for anyone who gave a damn about their city.
Fonzi then went on to write a two-part magazine series, which became a book, on Walter Annenberg and the way he ran his publishing business, explaining how the Karafin scandal was only possible in the culture Annenberg created. It was devastating stuff and within months Annenberg sold his papers to Knight Ridder. Today people who hear the incredible Karafin story wonder how it could have happened at The Philadelphia Inquirer, which won numerous Pulitizer Prizes in the years after Knight Ridder took over. They need to be reminded that it was before that fine organization came to Philadelphia, when Walter Annenberg ruled in fear.
Not too different from the Rupert Murdoch story.
Money can't buy happiness, but it does a pretty good job on elections.
We know this because the media is filled with stories, not about what candidates stand for, but how much money they raised this week. Thus we know well before the next presidential election that Newt Gingrich is not serious about running because he hasn't raised enough money. In fact, none of the candidates have, except those who are going to win because everybody loves a winner, and gives them money. The Supreme Court, in a decision last year, agreed that money can buy elections and voted to permit the richest people and richest corporations to give all they want to candidates of their choice, so that those candidates can then appoint Supreme Court justices who will give even more money to the candidates.
That decision, oddly enough, was reportedly based on the preservation of free speech. If one wonders about the logic there, just remember the old adage: Money talks, so the more money you have, the more talk you can afford.
Which gets us closer to the elusive point, which is that if money buys elections, we should know pretty well in advance who is going to win by simply counting up each candidate's bank account. And if we are pretty sure who is going to win, what’s the point of having an election?
Obviously, no point. And here is where what is now simply an innovative idea crosses the gold bar toward brilliance. Let’s set up the deal so that a month or two before the election, whichever comes first, there be a deadline to determine who has raised the most money, and therefore is the likely winner in November. But, this is key to the scam, at this point none of the money can be actually spent, except for loopholes in the law which permit money to be spent to raise even more money, even if some of that money goes to magazine advertising. With such loopholes – inevitable in any endeavor in which humans participate – there should still be a ton of money left, unspent, untainted, pure as an election in Hialeah.
At this point, much if not all the money should be unspent, except in cases in which candidates spend all their money to get more money, in which much if not all the money will be unspent. That’s a problem, but we can tweak that later. For today’s purposes, let’s assume most of the money has not been spent. So we can then return all the money to the original contributors.
So we have a new president without the hassle of an actual election. The people who contributed money get it back, so instead of going to political consultants and TV ads, it will go to the stock market and taverns, where it should have gone in the first place.
We ran the idea by a constitutional scholar, whose name, oddly enough, is Supreme Kort, and she said the idea made total sense, and was therefore likely unconstitutional. But she said the constitution can be changed, and often is, depending on whose money rules the court.
“Law is about change,” she said. “Nothing is written in stone. It’s written in money, and you can always keep the change.”
It was either late 1959 or early 1960, and, coming off active duty, I was working a temporary job for RCA. We had a traveling program promoting RCA’s stereophonic sound system, which had come late to the game. The presentation included a history of recorded sound, in which RCA had played a dominant role. We traveled with an example of a cylinder record, which preceded the platter style, and an old wind-up horn player and a recording by the great tenor John McCormack, no relation. When we got to the modern stereo portion of the show we played tapes (a novelty at the time) of a variety of recordings, including some first-class orchestral bits, some stuff from Richard Rodgers’ “Victory at Sea.” Then, presumably, we thrilled our listeners with the roar of a race car zooming past, from one side of the room to the other, and the thunderous decibels of a rocket being launched. I added a silly sight gag to the rocket action, a little spring-loaded plastic rocket that I hid behind the lectern and shot off when the sound of a rocket launch was played. They loved it in Bluefield, W.Va., and Tocoa, Ga.
The presentation was baby talk to sound engineers, for whom we occasionally and uncomfortably performed. But most of our audiences were fairly unsophisticated – service club luncheons, church groups and schools, mostly in small towns where stereo was a novelty, and the history of recorded sound was educational. It came to pass that one of those towns was Titusville, across the broad expanse of water from Cape Canaveral. It was a noon show for Kiwanis or some such group and all went well until we got into the stereo portion. As I prepared to launch our rocket, the audience of men, maybe 75 guys, all jumped up as if escaping electrified chairs and raced to the picture window of the restaurant. I wondered what was going on until the room began to tremble, and then across the river we could see the flames of a rocket being launched. I had witnessed military rockets fired, but this was awesome by comparison. This was before manned vehicles, and was hardly a daily occurrence at the space center. My audience could be excused for abandoning the RCA show for a live performance. When things calmed down, our rocket sound demonstration paled by comparison, but the amusing coincidence was not lost on the audience.
That memory returned this weekend when watching the last launching of the Atlantis program, and listening to the description of the historic event by NBC’s Jay Barbree. In the past I have written about notable people who contributed to our magazines over a four-decade history. Larry King, when he was out of work between his popular radio show in Miami and his debut as a long-time talk show host on CNN, wrote a few gossipy pieces when we had Miami Magazine. They were not bad for what we paid him, which was almost nothing. And Bill O’Reilly, at the time a graduate student and teacher in Miami, had a brief, equally poorly paid stint as a film reviewer for the same magazine.
This weekend was a reminder of another, soon-to-be nationally known broadcast figure whose byline appeared in our books some 30 years ago. Actually, Jay Barbree was already a familiar name, at least to NBC viewers. He had been covering the space program almost from its beginning. In fact, he was already at the Cape that day when my spiel was interrupted by the launch. Years later we published Indian River Life, a magazine whose northern circulation limits bordered on the space coast. Some of our readers lived close enough to Cape Canaveral to eyeball the space shot launches. I recall that Jay’s work at NBC was not a full-time job, and he had time to write a few pieces for our books, and was a most valuable contact in the exciting new world of space exploration. He was also a great guy to be around, a class act from go.
Jay was close enough to our operation that it cost him some money. A financial advisor came up with a scheme to take our company public, and Jay bought some stock. It was, in retrospect, a harebrained idea, although had all our shareholders been as honorable as Jay, it might have actually worked. It turned out to be the beginning of legal turmoil that lasted almost a decade.
Under the circumstances, one would think Jay would have nothing further to do with anyone in our company. But several years later he went out of his way to help me reach important sources on a freelance story I wrote for the Sun-Sentinel’s Sunday magazine. Thanks to Jay’s contacts with the aviation community, it was a pretty good piece. I needed the money.
Thus, a rich dose of nostalgia Saturday as I listened to Jay Barbree's NBC colleagues close an era in space exploration, and affectionately salute what may also be the end of a career of a man whose credentials are also outer space. He covered 135 launches, going back to 1957. He was part of an Emmy Award-winning team. He wrote seven books. He was there, close to the pad, a voice of history, in triumph and tragedy, from beginning to end.
Well done.
Sapphire Valley, N.C. – I don’t remember the name of the Fort Lauderdale company that was involved up here in the early 1970s. Was it Real something or Cen something, or something like that? Anyway, the public relations woman representing the developer was Patty Doyle, one of the best, and she set us up in the Fairfield Inn, which was one of the early hotels in the mountains when people from Atlanta began coming up to escape the sultry summers. Later, Florida took over, and it is now hard to go to church or the supermarket without running into somebody from home. Just yesterday, while crossing the main drag in nearby Brevard, somebody in a car shouted my name. I couldn’t make out the greeter, who was crossing with the light and could not hesitate, but the voice sounded familiar. Hello, whoever you are.
That first trip, and subsequent visits over the next several years, were largely working vacations. The Fairfield Inn, sitting above the lake by the same name, with famous Bald Rock looming high above, had all the charm and handicaps of an old building. The virtue of a cozy wooden bar was offset by the fact that it was a fire trap, for starters. The outside fire escapes told the story. The inn is long gone, not deemed historic enough to overcome its aging liabilities. And long gone are the petty ordeals of having to ride up and down muddy, bumpy mountain trails, dodging yellow monsters mauling rock and soil, listening to developers in grimy boots rave about the beauty and uniqueness of their site. It was almost as tedious an exercise as visiting countless newly finished condos on the Gold Coast, each more like the next, pretending to appreciate a salesman’s rave reviews of their own product.
The difference is that some of those Florida condominiums newly completed 40 years ago are considered as obsolete as biwinged airplanes, their small balconies no match for modern buildings with as much outdoor terrace space as interior room, and elevators that open directly into units. For the most part those condos, despite what their authors claimed four decades ago, are architecturally indistinguishable from their neighbors, as look alike as brick row houses in an old city.
The mountains are different. Those developments active in the 1970s have long been finished. Those builders respected nature; all trees which could be saved have been. Now the landscaping, invariably including native mountain laurel and man-sown perennials, is mature. Route 64, out of Cashiers, is lined with such developments, and you wouldn’t turn many of them down. In fact, there are people up here who originally bought places as summer escapes, but now spend at least part of winters here. Those well up the mountains stock up with firewood and food, and on those occasional days when snow blocks the roads, they are content to hole up by the fire, until the roads clear. That is rarely more than a day or two.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of life in the Carolina Mountains this Fourth of July is, despite the growth, how uncrowded the place seems. The roads, which have undergone some welcome improvements, are hardly busier than they were 40 years ago. Maybe that has to do with the fact that half the vehicles in the 1970s were construction-related, slow-moving beasts, concrete mixers dripping water, or flat beds filled with logs or bearing earth-moving machines, which created their own traffic jams. Surely there are many more visitors here, but you hardly feel it, except for the busiest times at supermarkets – none of which existed four decades ago. One has to have left South Florida, where roads nonexistent in the '70s are now clogged, often maddeningly so, to appreciate the relative tranquility of a place that physically could hardly be different from flat Florida. Part of the reason – a big part, according to locals – is that water treatment facilities have lagged behind population growth; new developments are being rejected until the situation is remedied. One hopes it never will be. In South Florida, nobody cares about such petty concerns as no water. Buy a politician and the problem doesn’t exist. Leave it to the next generation to work it out.
That is just one reason people from Florida who originally came to the mountains to escape summer heat now tend to stay here to escape everything else. Just about everybody we meet in business here has a Florida connection. The house the family is living in, this fine morning as the birds salute the dawn, was marketed by a man who in the 1970s called Stuart home. The fellow we called on to de-winterize the house moved up from Pensacola. For those seeking to make a living in the hills of North Carolina, the fact that traffic remains little different from a generation ago may suggest stagnation. But that has an unpleasant sound, suggesting decay, the farthest thing from what, to a visiting flatlander, is better counted as a blessing.
On the other hand, there is water leaking under the fridge, and the nearest handy relative is 700 miles away. A perfect world incessantly recedes before us.
Pete Dexter, today an award-winning novelist, once worked in South Florida. But nobody knew it. Dexter put in time with both the Fort Lauderdale News and The Palm Beach Post. Mary Kloubec, an associate editor of Gold Coast magazine in the 1970s, knew Dexter in Fort Lauderdale.
“He was a terrific writer,” she said years ago, “but nobody saw it.”
Eventually somebody saw it and that somebody was Gil Spencer, former editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. He gave Dexter a column, a break that Dexter says changed his life. He quickly became recognized as one of the best in the business and the rest is history. Dexter was just one of many newspaper people who were influenced by Spencer, who died Friday in Manhattan at age 85.
Spencer was a semi-blue blood by birth. His full name was Frederick Gilman Spencer III, which smacks of the Philadelphia Main Line, but nobody ever called him anything but Gil. A colleague once described him as that rare delight, “a fallen aristocrat.” He went to good high schools, but never went to college. Instead, after serving in the Navy in World War II, he started his career at the Delaware County Daily Times, at the time in Chester, Pa. You will never mix up Chester with Bryn Mawr. He left that paper shortly before I started there as a sports writer. But I did get to know the girl he married, who sat next to me in the newsroom.
Before my time in Chester, Spencer had worked with Gaeton Fonzi, who later got me into the magazine business in Philadelphia and was a partner in our company when we came to Florida in 1970. Gil Spencer moved up to editor of an influential Philadelphia suburban weekly, the Main Line Times, which is where I first met him. There he turned a sedate paper into a lively read. He worked briefly in TV, and then, in 1974, won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at The Trentonian. That was for exposing New Jersey political corruption, something he specialized in throughout his 50-year career.
His success led to the editor’s job at the Philadelphia Daily News, where he made Pete Dexter the star of a star-studded staff. The Daily News always had a great sports page, and Spencer extended that free-swinging style to the whole paper. From there it was on to editorship of the New York Daily News, where he inherited a columnist named Jimmy Breslin.
This was in the mid-1980s and back in Florida Gaeton Fonzi was working on an interesting story that began with Gold Coast in the 1970s. Margaret Walker, an editor here, was upset her friend Adelaide Stiles, a former Fort Lauderdale News staffer, had disappeared after having been romanced by a fellow who turned out to be a notorious con man. He used the names Michael Raymond and Michael Burnett. At Maggie’s urging, I included Mike Raymond and the Stiles disappearance in a piece on Florida con artists.
Stiles disappearance was never solved, although there was strong evidence that Raymond had murdered her after posing as a financial advisor to steal her modest savings. The poor woman made the mistake of acting as if she had more money than she really had. Raymond was also connected to two other Florida murders, both involving financial scams in which he was adept. In 1985, Gaeton Fonzi, at the time freelancing for Miami magazine, decided to look into Raymond, who was supposed to be in jail on fraud charges. He wasn’t. Fonzi, fresh off five years working for the government in which he connected President Kennedy’s death to highly placed CIA officials, learned that Raymond had a history of avoiding jail by helping the feds catch other crooks. Fonzi discovered that the Department of Justice was using Raymond in Chicago in an attempt to sting public figures in a parking collections scandal. The gig was bribing highly placed officials to get lucrative contracts to collect delinquent parking tickets.
Although the story was breaking in Florida, Fonzi wanted to export it to the Chicago market. He called Gil Spencer at the New York Daily News to see if he could recommend a good Chicago media contact. It was a mark of Spencer’s respect for Fonzi’s investigative record, as well as his own highly competitive nose for a good story, that he asked Fonzi what it was about.
“I didn’t know that Gil and Jimmy Breslin already had some background on the same thing going on in New York,” Fonzi said this weekend. “But they didn’t have anything on Raymond’s involvement with the U.S. attorney in Illinois. When I told Gil what I had and why I wanted a contact in Chicago, he said, ‘The hell with them; we’ll do it ourselves.’”
Gil Spencer broke the story big in New York. Jimmy Breslin jumped all over it. Soon important public figures were implicated, and one of them, Donald Manes, the powerful borough president of Queens, committed suicide. Jimmy Breslin later called it one of the biggest scandals to hit New York during his long career as a columnist.
Gil Spencer left the New York Daily News in 1989 when he disagreed with his publisher over an endorsement for the city’s mayor. But he wasn’t finished. Just a kid at nearly 64, he moved to Denver to become editor of The Denver Post which was in a ferocious battle with a rival paper. Initially suspected as an effete Easterner, Spencer’s profane humor and support for talented writers quickly earned the trust and respect of his younger staffers. Memorial tributes over the weekend on the internet bore datelines from all over the country.
I last spoke to Gil Spencer a few months ago. Although he never worked for a magazine, he was close to us at Philadelphia Magazine. He visited the office often, and everybody enjoyed his humor and advice. He even sent us a few good writers. With that background, I hoped he might write something for the book I am doing on the history of regional magazines. His son, also Gil Spencer and a columnist for the same Delaware County Daily Times where his father started, warned me that the man’s memory was poor. He was right. Gil knew who I was and remembered Fonzi as a great reporter, but quickly added, “I just can’t remember details of those days. I wish I could help, but I can’t.”
At the end he probably did not recall the extraordinary career which influenced so many people. No matter. Those people will remember him as long as their faculties are intact.
In the great past we have written several times about a train called the Downeaster, which runs from Portland, Maine to Boston, where they play hockey. We had the advantage, limited to journalists, of writing about the subject without having actually taken this train. This claim can no longer be made.
Last week, with a purpose to be in Boston relating to the book we are writing on the history of city/regional magazines, we rode the Downeaster from Wells, Maine to Boston, where they play hockey. The ride is a bit more than 80 miles, about the distance from Jensen Beach to Fort Lauderdale, and we only bring that up because a train like this should exist in Florida. The Downeaster has been around since 2001, and in recent years it has been one of the fastest-growing Amtrak trains. It is a cooperative effort between Amtrak and the states of Massachusetts and Maine; it is run by Amtrak, with the familiar patriotic colors we all see, but the tab goes to the states.
The train is so popular that all seats are reserved. We did it by phone and picked up our tickets at the station, a 20-minute drive from where we were staying in Ogunquit. It is the same system used by airlines and is pretty easy, as long as your credit card is good. The train was on time at Wells, and got to Boston about seven minutes late, not bad for a trip that takes an hour and 20 minutes. The train moves along, often hitting Amtrak’s maximum speed of 79 miles an hour. There are a fair number of grade crossings, but many of the crossings are bridged. The track it uses goes back to the old Boston & Maine Railroad, which began operations in the 1840s, before they played hockey in Boston.
This is important because the Boston & Maine was built about 50 years before the first railroads reached South Florida. And yet, like most northeast railroads, grade crossings over the years have been eliminated by either building bridges over the tracks, or putting the trains in ditches (impractical in most of Florida), greatly reducing the hazard of speeding trains crashing into foolish drivers who chance a crossing when the lights are flashing.
We have said before, but it bears repeating, that Florida does not need bullet trains. It needs to rebuild its archaic rail system, eliminating thousands of grade crossings, and making possible the kinds of speeds Amtrak reaches all over the country. We also need to move Tri-Rail, or at least portions of it, from the CSX tracks to the more useful FEC, the track that goes through all the downtowns on Florida’s east coast. It is, in fact, the track that is responsible for those downtowns being where they are.
Back to Boston. The train ends at Boston’s North Station, and the new Boston Garden is built above it. Celtics and Bruins fans make up a fair number of the record ridership. Essentially though, the Downeaster is a commuter train. The attendant at the Wells station said there are about 35 people who every morning board the early train, headed to jobs in Boston. Keep in mind, that’s an 80-mile trip. The entire route from end to end is 116 miles. On our return trip, which left Boston at the rush hour peak of 5 p.m., we chatted with a young fellow, a software marketer, who commuted every day from Woburn, near Boston, to Dover, the last stop before the train leaves Massachusetts.
The train was a half-hour late, a delay caused by an effort at the North Station to repair an electrical failure which deprived the train of air conditioning. The fellow said that kind of thing was unusual; the train usually ran on time. We also had communication with a senior lady who had come up from Miami Shores, making the leg to Boston on the high-speed Acela. She was headed to Maine to visit family, and said she planned to stay as long as possible. She found the lack of air conditioning disconcerting. She kept using the Amtrak magazine to fan us both. Actually it wasn’t that bad. Not for a Floridian. The conductors had the doors open and some breeze came through. She wondered why all our trains were not like the Acela, which had obviously spoiled her. We patiently told her Florida was lucky to have any commuter trains at all, and gave her our usual lecture on how Tri-Rail had the potential to be another Downeaster.
Indeed, Amtrak has been setting up inter-city trains all over the country, and there has been talk of Amtrak coming down the FEC tracks with a train such as the Downeaster, which would make a commute from the Treasure Coast to Fort Lauderdale and Miami practical for some people. But that could not be possible with the present speed restrictions caused by all the grade crossings. Rebuilding that railroad to modern standards is the kind of job where stimulus funds could be wisely used, much more so than high-speed rail that isn’t really needed. Not long ago we asked a man deeply involved in transit planning why such an obvious need, which is now supported by the FEC, was not being served. He smiled and answered in one word: “Government.”
But things change, and in about an hour we will see it. Since leaving New England, this has been a sentimental journey, crossing New York state to the little town along the Chemung River where our family lived from 1939 to 1942. I wanted to prove to the bride that I could still find the two houses where we lived. And now, in Pennsylvania, we are going over to Pottsville, better known to readers as Gibbsville, the town John O’Hara made famous in novels and dozens of short stories. Pottsville does not have a pro hockey team, but it actually had a team called the Pottsville Maroons that played football in what became the NFL. Legend has it that Notre Dame would play in Philadelphia on Saturday, and the next day some of its players suited up for the Maroons. That story probably isn’t true, but it should be.
A lot of people forgtet O’Hara, dead since 1970, but he remains one of the masters of short fiction, and much of it set in Pottsville. There is hardly a house or bar or brothel that O’Hara mentioned that does not have a real model in this place. We wrote about this for Philadelphia Magazine in 1969. At the time many people here hated O’Hara for his depiction of the town. At the time we wrote that Pottsville should thank O’Hara for making such an ordinary and somewhat depressed town sound pretty exciting. We even suggested they make him a tourist attraction, with a statue and all.
Forty years ago that idea seemed absurd, and we meant it so. Attitudes change. Today there are John O’Hara tours of the city. And, yes, there is a statue. Like the Downeaster, we will see it live.
Then, yesterday, it began to change. Here and there the sun broke through, and although the sky was generally leaden, the ocean was tame. The weather news said the storm, a remnant of the great rain which came from the west, was moving out and in a few days it would be the kind of Maine that brings people up from the hot cities. This little place is one of the more popular getaways on this stretch of the Atlantic Coast, long famous for its jagged inlets and coves, dangerous for the seaman, inspiring to the poet on land. It makes one conscious of the uncaused cause, which philosophers call God.
We tend to forget where things are, if we ever knew in the first place. Florida’s peninsula juts out from the rest of the south, but Maine juts out even farther, which is why one awakens to light, thinking it's about 6:30, when in fact it’s closer to 5 a.m. And being about as far north as one can go short of Canada, it tends toward cool, especially along the coast, when the rest of the land is in an oven. The messy weather of the last two days is normal to the natives. But that weather is leaving. We can see streaks of blue in the sky this morning, threatening to break through as the day goes on. Thus Ogunquit.
We are staying in a big old place on Perkins Cove, which is a cooperative between nature and man. The entrance to the cove is pure nature – juts of massive rock, formidable jabbing fists dark at the base where the tide has dropped. Down a few hundred yards the natural rock gives way to mounds of smaller pieces placed by man, here and there a stretch of vertical concrete as if for a bridge. It was put there not so many years ago when man decided this cove had the makings of a resort within a resort. Most of the houses rising above the cove are new, at least compared to the pictures you see in the local restaurants, showing what the place looked like 70 years ago. There you see a rough looking inlet, with little of residences to be seen, one of those spots still common in Maine where the outgoing tide leaves boats stranded on mud, only to be raised twice a day by the incoming tide. The old lobster men had to time their departures and arrivals to assure water. It was this way once, for two small streams (here they flatter them as rivers) came down from high ground with not enough water to prevent a tidal barren much of the day.
That changed at Perkins Cove in the 1940s when the inlet was dredged to permit 24-hour ingress and egress, and in the process building a picturesque little harbor which today is crammed with boats, most of them small working craft, a few with masts denoting pleasure vessels. And that harbor brought development on all sides, beautiful homes sitting above the water, artfully situated on the great rocks, below them and across the small inlet a shopping district with narrow lanes and a collection of stores and restaurants. Last night we had dinner at MC Perkins Cove, a James Beard-recognized restaurant. We never heard of Ogunquit before this trip, but that is not unusual. Old friends who live just an hour away in Massachusetts have never been here. But this is a big country. How many people living in Florida for years have never been to Cedar Key?
Ogunquit might be more famous except for its proximity to a place that politics promoted. Kennebunkport is only a half hour up the coast – a sea bird could make it in minutes – and it's mandatory for visitors to check out the home of the former president, which of course the ladies insisted we do. It is hard to miss. You can smell the secret service. We are happy to report the Bushes are not starving.
This is, of course, a seasonal pleasure. The season is shorter by half than a Florida winter. Some stores in Kennebunkport were not yet open, undergoing remodeling for a new marketing concept to replace a venture which did not survive the recession. We asked a young man how many of these quaint stores stayed open year round.
“They almost all leave,” he said. “I stay open because I do a Christmas business.”
“Where do they go?” he was asked.
“Most go to Florida. A lot of them go to Fort Lauderdale.”
Now it is morning. This is being written on a train, which is just passing through Fredericksburg, Va. Robert E. Lee once courted his wife in this place and three decades later Lee’s boys slaughtered the Irish Brigade in a hopeless attack against Confederates on Marye’s Heights, a hilltop protected by a stone wall. Only a practiced eye from the train window can spot that hill, identified in the distance by a monument or two, but from the elevated tracks there is a great view of the town and the brown and tranquil Rappahannock River just beyond it. The railroad actually figured in the fight. On one flank the Southern and Northern forces faced each other across the railroad embankment, just before the tracks took a sharp right turn through the town and across the river. These tracks were a major railroad in the Civil War, and still are. Inevitably much of the battlefield has been lost to industrial and residential development. One sees no hint of former violence from the train.
The train is running early, almost 90 minutes ahead of schedule, and the reason is that this is the one and only Amtrak Auto Train, which leaves central Florida as soon as everybody is aboard. In this case we jump-started by 15 minutes. The train makes only one stop, to change crews in the middle of the night, so if it runs ahead of schedule there is no fixed timetable to slow it down. In the short time we have been laptopping, the train has rolled through fresh spring-green forests and is now running within sight of the broad Potomac and is approaching the Marine Corps base at Quantico.
We cross rivers, all flowing toward the Potomac, and beneath us there are marinas of pleasure craft gleaming white in the morning sun. The train is arriving at Lorton, the northern terminus, so far ahead of schedule that the crew that unloads the train is not yet at work. But shortly it will be, unloading 251 vehicles, including 18 motorcycles. The train seems crowded, with snowbirds heading north, along with Florida families with young kids fresh out of school and off on vacation. Busy as it seems this day, in fact the train could accommodate another 80 vehicles.
So instead of driving this mad stretch of I-95 leading to Washington, D.C., tired after 1,000 miles behind the wheel, likely bitching up a storm with the bride, we sit, sipping coffee and casually composing this little essay. And wondering why people all over the country can’t do this. The Auto Train has been around since the 1970s, first as a private company that was actually making money when a mound of debt forced it into bankruptcy. A few years later Amtrak recognized a good idea and took over the equipment and service. Among all Amtrak trains, it is one of the few that is generally profitable. The service from northern Virginia to Florida is a natural, with so many snowbirds and vacationers traveling the route year after year. But one would think by now a Midwest train to Florida would be equally successful. The original Auto Train actually tried that idea, but the expansion was not well planned. It only went as far as Louisville, Ky. Another 100 miles closer to Chicago would have helped. Then the management ignored warnings of overweight engines, and a derailment (and lawsuits) followed. As a stockholder in the original private corporation, we are convinced the Midwest train would have eventually worked as well as the east coast train, but what seemed a good idea never had a chance. It lasted only seven months, and helped bring down the train that had already proved successful. End of the private venture. Enter Uncle Sam.
In the last decade Amtrak has launched, with 15 states, highly successful partnerships for intercity travel along busy corridors. These trains, some using the tracks we ride on right now from Richmond to Washington, and on such routes as Philadelphia to Harrisburg and Portland to Boston, are practically long-range commuter trains. They take cars off crowded interstates. So does the Auto Train, with the great added value that people can get back in their cars at the end of an overnight ride. People we have met on this trip are driving on to upstate New York, Long Island and Cleveland.
Thinking globally, imagine the money saved in fuel, and the pollution that doesn’t occur. With the present administration less hostile to rail service than previous shortsighted Republicans in Washington, it would seem the right time to take this good idea and run with it to other busy long-distance routes. One can envision four Auto Trains operating south of Chicago, all from the same large terminal, able to handle more than one train at a time, and directing iron horses bearing cars along lines that Amtrak now serves – toward New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There currently is no long-distance service from Chicago to Florida. There should be, and it should be a train bearing cars.
Just recently, it has happened twice. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC went out of his way to be controversial, with stuff like the “Worst Person in the World" segment and liberal vitriolic criticism of the enemy political camp. And then he’s off the air, for whatever reason, whether it was for contributing to political campaigns or maybe his boss just didn’t like him. Even more recently, Ed Schultz, whose “The Ed Show” has both a stupid name and an often stupid format, got suspended for calling some right-wing lady a “right-wing slut.”
That is disgusting, of course, especially if it were true, which it probably isn’t, because right-wing folks are fundamentally fundamentalist, and therefore incapable of being sluts. But it is not as disgusting as this trend to compete for TV ratings by sending out personalities whose personality consists of interminable and angry rants against the party or politician on the other side of the fence.
It probably started with Rush Limbaugh, who got rich with the gig, but now everybody is trying to do it. This is different from the casual errors which have threatened other careers, such as Jimmy the Greek, who should learn never say anything for the record while partying, or Howard Cosell, who learned never say anything on the air {“Look at that little monkey run!”) until the bar has closed in the press box.
We speak, rather, of contrived sensationalism. Which is what modern TV is about. One can imagine the producer warming up the star personality.
“Ratings suck. Go out and offend somebody.”
“Like who. Or is it whom?”
“Don’t worry about it. Call somebody a slut. Just get the audience up. Get some publicity. O’Reilly is killing us.”
So the bum goes out and remembers a name and calls a broad a slut. Ten minutes later all hell breaks loose.
“Why did you do that?” screams the producer. “Are you crazy?”
“You told me to,” says the on-air personality.
“I did? I never said that. And if I did, I was only kidding. You’re fired.”
“You can’t fire me. I have three years left on my contract. You owe me $2 million.”
“Good point. Let’s talk about it.”
“Usual place?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Do you mind if O’Reilly joins us?”
