I do a weekly blog which nobody reads. Blogs are like awards: There are too many of them. Anyway, last week’s blog had a hard time getting past one of our young editors simply because I wrote that my first election was the JFK-Nixon 1960 race and that President Kennedy was later murdered by the United States intelligence community. Notice I didn’t say CIA because it took more than one agency to pull off the crime of the century. There was just too much coordination (including altering the autopsy of the president’s body) to have been the work of one group, much less one man. There had to be assistance from the Secret Service and very likely the Dallas police. The actual shooters will probably never be known; but who covered up the crime has become clear.
The young editor suggested I use a modifier, such as “likely,” because, she said, a conspiracy has never been proved. In response I gave her a copy of Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, which appeared originally in Gold Coast in 1980. The book version did not come out until 1994, and two years ago it was republished with a foreword written by yours truly. Now, I am not an authority on the JFK murder, but I sure am an authority on the authority – Fonzi. I was with him the day in Wildwood, N.J., when a lawyer named Vince Salandria walked us through crucial evidence and convinced us both that the idea of a lone assassin was absurd. Not long after I heard the tape of Fonzi’s interview with Arlen Specter, the soon-to-be ex-senator from Pennsylvania and the man who came up with the “single-bullet theory.” Specter, who was surprised by Fonzi’s detailed knowledge of the president’s wounds, stumbled all over the place trying to explain the unexplainable.
Subsequently, for five years (1975-1980) I was looking over Fonzi’s shoulder when he was an investigator for the federal government when the assassination investigation was reopened by two government committees. I say again – federal government. He had access to documents and people that no outside investigator saw. He was also the man who discovered, through a Cuban exile who worked for the CIA for years, that Lee Harvey Oswald – the man who took the blame for the crime and then took a bullet to silence him – was a CIA operative himself. Fonzi also saw firsthand the disinformation campaign with CIA operatives, such as Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, sending him on wild goose chases. Fonzi also saw the CIA pretending to cooperate by assigning a man to facilitate communication who, it was later learned, may have been deeply involved in the assassination coverup. It all struck Fonzi as a cover up of a cover up. So, he wrote the book.
His information has since been reinforced by other investigators who built on Fonzi’s work. Among other things, they have discovered that Robert Kennedy almost immediately sensed the nature of his brother’s killing. One of his first calls was to the CIA, and contrary to his public posture of accepting the Warren Commission, he got word through private sources to the Russians that he knew they were not involved. He wanted to defuse the tensions which followed when a disinformation campaign portrayed Oswald as a communist sympathizer. That was part of the game: Blame Castro (and by extension Russia) and possibly provoke a war.
I have written about this subject often, partly because it has been so close to this magazine for years, but mostly because the rest of the media continues to fail in its role. Just recently there was Chris Matthews on CNBC talking about the dangers of hate in this country and reminding us of 1963 and Lee Harvey Oswald. He has used such allusions before, reinforcing the great lie that a lone nut murdered a president. It is infuriating that someone who seems so well informed on political history – or at least pretends to be – does not seem to understand what happened that day in Dallas. Matthews is right in that there was hatred in the country in 1963; but it was not Oswald doing the hating. He was just a dupe. The real haters were highly placed people in what President Eisenhower called “the military industrial establishment.” In this case they were military and intelligence people who regarded JFK as a traitor who had sold out on Cuba – first at the Bay of Pigs, and secondly (and more importantly) the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The other thing annoying is the silence of the Kennedys. Last month marked the first anniversary of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death. I had long been confident that Sen. Kennedy would have left behind some indication of what he thought about his brother’s murder. If Robert Kennedy knew what happened, Ted Kennedy had to know the same. But he died, long after the tragedy and after most of those involved are not around, without confronting the findings of the Warren Commission. Writers who tried to contact him late in life found him unwilling to even talk about the event. It was too painful, for him and the rest of the Kennedys.
So back to our young editor. Her mother was 2 days old when Kennedy died, and it bothers me that people like Matthews can influence new generations. I knew she would not read Fonzi’s book, at least not quickly for it is long and complex. So, I just told her to read my introduction, which is just a few pages, but makes the case. I am not sure if she has read it yet. But I am sure if Chris Matthews took the time to read the book, and a few of the books more recently published, he would not be so inclined to make a fool of himself on television.
I just voted, but I can’t tell you for whom because that might swing the election toward one of the lesser crooks on the ballot. Before I get into scandal, I am reminded of my first election. It was 1960, and a fellow named Kennedy who talked funny – but well – and was later murdered in a conspiracy orchestrated by United States intelligence community was running against Richard Nixon. I actually worked the polls that day, on behalf of a Republican named Dave Maxwell. He was running against a powerful Democratic machine in Philadelphia and got slaughtered. But he was a good man, and I would work for him again. The good news was that JFK carried our precinct by something like 148-10. And this wasn’t your classic Irish neighborhood. It wasn’t even overwhelmingly Catholic. The section was called Germantown. You won’t find too many Germans there today. There was a big battle in the Revolutionary War there in 1777, and you were safer between the lines of the two armies than you are walking those streets today.
Fast forward to the present, and the contrast between the 1960 election and today is depressing. In 1960 I voted for two good men from different parties. Today, I voted for the lesser of evils. I wish I could be registered in both parties so I could have voted against both of those rich guys, who are insulting our statewide intelligence. Thank God that we still have newspapers, which exposed them both. Television, being bought by the pair, would never have had the guts or the talent to do the job.
With a few exceptions, those running on the state and national level strike me as running because they believe in the nine commandments, with the one about stealing exempt. The local elections were not quite as bad, but the judge situation is awful. Lawyers with Jewish names, most of whom can’t make a living practicing law, have been running against black and Hispanic judges. This is because the Jewish condo vote tends to be a homer. There is nothing new about this. My mother, when she voted, usually went with the Irish names, and in so doing helped elect a lot of black people. What is bad is that candidates, including one putz who does not even live in Broward County, take advantage of this natural phenomenon to vote out of office some fine judges whose names suggest skin color or ethnic background other than their own.
On top of these trials, the ballot is ridiculous. We keep changing the system every election. In 1960, I was one of the rare ones who did not just pull a single lever. Now we have a new paper ballot which you can hardly see and fill in ovals which you can’t see. I thought I was back taking the freaking college boards. I left the polling place feeling down and diminished. But then, I dropped by to see Francis the broker, whose office was next to the polling place, and bought some of Wayne’s new stock.
I feel better already, and I haven’t even had lunch.
The big news today is that the annual U.S. News & World Report (or something like that) just released its list of the top colleges. Nobody reads this except everybody who reads this. Our computer has not worked for the last year, so we can only pick up snatches of the report. But we can say, based on past experience, that these ratings are stupid and meaningless. We can only guess the usual suspects are up there. They don’t change much from year to year, and when they do it is usually because the football team had a good year, or the basketball team made the Final Four.
However, just for the record, the papers have scooped us, reporting that the University of Miami has gone ahead of The University of Florida as the best school in the state. Both are rated in the top 1,000 schools. This is no great surprise. Growing up in the North, we thought Kutztown University was far superior to both of these Florida schools, which had reputations for offering courses in esoteric disciplines such as basket weaving and floral arrangements. The good news is that no athletes from either school have been indicted today –– but the day if only half over.
On the other hand, some say there are four great schools in the south. Tulane, Vanderbilt, Duke and, alas, Miami. Miami makes it because of its famous logo, the “U” on its football helmets. Lore has it that Howard Schnellenberger himself came up with that idea. Now, back to business, here are the unofficial Gold Coast ratings of the best schools. We only listed 10, so don’t be offended if your alma mater is ignored. It would surely be in the top thousand.
- London School of Economics. Purists might say this does not count because it is not a U.S. school. But JFK went there, and besides, we are talking about London, Ky. This school is located off I-75, or maybe I-65, but it’s up there in the hills, located in a small cave. It has only three students, but they are doing wall carvings, which when discovered 10,000 years from now, will explain how Howard Schnellenberger got the idea for the “U” on the Miami helmets.
- La Salle University. My late uncle, Brother Francis McCormick, F.S.C., used to say “somebody has to educate the sons of the truck drivers.” I am one of them. In retirement, after a career in insurance, my dad drove a flower truck during the holidays. I will put the sons of the truck drivers in there with Harvard any day.
- Harvard. It is only on this list because my nephew, Mike McCormick, was the winning pitcher for Columbia (c. 1985) against Harvard.
- Columbia. See number 3. It jumped four places on the list because of little Mike’s great day, and also because my brother (big Mike) taught there for 40 years.
- Notre Dame. The golden dome makes this list because my old school and Notre Dame are quite close. La Salle means Notre Dame in French. Also there are 10,000 advertisers in this magazine who are Fighting Irish.
- Nova Southeastern. Now known as NSU, it makes the list because half the litigators in town went to law school there. We don't need legal trouble. Also, they buy ads.
- Florida Atlantic. No ads lately, but as long as Howard runs the football program, it demands respect.
- Villanova. This is only listed because U.S. News usually ranks the Wildcats as a top "regional" university. This is B.S. Villanova is a national school, loaded with kids from Florida, and instead of No. 1 regionally, it would be in the top 1,000 if competing with the Ivies and ND. It cannot be a very good school. Two of my brothers got in there.
- Northwood University. Rollie Massimino, famous for coaching at the great Villanova University, and winning the NCAA Tournament, is now at the helm of a good little college program in West Palm Beach.
- University of Florida. We had to do this or the managing editor and half our Gator infested company would resign. Or kill the whole freaking blog. Don’t know which is better.
The newspaper carrier made a mistake this morning and dropped off a copy of The New York Times instead of one of our indigenous papers. We have decided not to sue because without that error, we would not have seen the front page piece on Portugal’s five year conversion from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. The statistics are impressive. This year almost 45 percent of that country’s energy will come from a combination of renewable sources. That compares with 17 percent just five years ago. More to the point, it compares with just 4.3 percent in the U.S. That excludes large hydropower, which we guess means the Hoover Dam and such modern marvels.
Now, we have not been to Portugal, but never thought of it and other small European countries as models of modern marvels. And yet this reduction of dependence on coal and oil is a creative combination of several renewable energy sources, including solar, wind and hydro – the latter even involving ocean waves. They even developed a combination of wind and hydropower, using windmills to pump water uphill at night and then it rush down to generate electricity by day, when demand is greatest.
The Times reported that it just isn’t Portugal making us look third worldly. It quoted a report which said by 2025, Great Britain, Denmark and Ireland will also generate 40 percent of their power through renewable sources. With its usual thoroughness, the Times got into the economics of these energy efforts, pointing out that most of the countries leading the way are forced to by lack of fossil fuels such as oil and coal. These developments take on even greater importance with the advent of electric cars, which would have a renewable source of juice and eventually greatly reduce the use of oil for transportation, at the same time providing an urgent environmental benefit.
This story might not have made such an impression a year ago, but after the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the damage to the environment, which will only be known in coming years, coupled with the near panic as oil spread to our Panhandle beaches and threatened to reach the Gulf Stream, the urgency to alter our energy course seems compelling. Portugal speeds ahead; the U.S. moves glacially. Brazil got off the dime during the first oil crisis in the 1970s when it began to develop its ethanol industry. Today it leads the world in biofuels. It is one the most energy self-sufficient countries, with enough left over to be an important exporter of that nature-made fuel.
Last year Gulfstream Media’s Treasure Coast magazines, in a story on the Everglades restoration through the U.S. Sugar Corp. purchase, noted a report that a company specializing in ethanol technology was talking to U.S. Sugar about a major facility in the Okeechobee area. A la Brazil, it would use sugar cane to produce the fuel more cheaply than from other crops. We envisioned an “ethanol prairie” of plants creating good-paying technology jobs in an area that could use them, at the same time providing a very convenient source of fuel for Florida. Not long ago, we made some calls to see how the idea was progressing. A spokesman said there was nothing new to report. That sounds as if nothing is happening.
Maybe the country that put a man on the moon needs to import a few good men from Portugal.
What started out as separate neighborhood protests over Fort Lauderdale development appears to be coalescing into a movement that could change the political dynamic of the city. The three battles are in Colee Hammock, Idlewyld and Coral Ridge are quite different, but community leaders in the three neighborhoods are supporting each other in efforts to protect their quality of life.
The Colee Hammock dispute, which we coined “Civil War on Las Olas” is over the First Presbyterian Church’s plan to use a PUD to greatly expand the church along Las Olas Boulevard and the neighborhood just to the south. The plan includes a “family center” which, despite the church's repeated assurances, sounds suspiciously like a school and a five-story parking garage on Las Olas. Idlewyld’s mission is to stop the proposed Bahia Mar Marina redevelopment, which it contends is grossly out of scale and will greatly impact traffic in the area and destroy quality of life on the beach and the exclusive just across the Intracoastal.
Quite different is the situation in Coral Ridge, where neighbors of Cardinal Gibbons High School object to tall lights at the football field.
Jackie Scott, a Colee Hammock resident who has been active in community affairs for almost 30 years, calls the current situation unprecedented. She says:
“I don’t remember since the early 1980s any time that we had three different neighborhoods under pressure from development at the same time, with what appears to be very weak support from the commissioners to protect them.”
Scott has been a leader in rallying neighborhoods to oppose the Planned Unit Development concept (PUD), which is being used in both the First Presbyterian Church and the Bahia Mar projects. Neighbors view PUDs as a way for developers to circumvent existing zoning to build inappropriately large projects. To date, 17 civic associations are on board in the effort to have the city declare a moratorium on PUDS until the impact of such developments can be studied.
Mary Fertig, president of the Idlewyld Improvement Association, which initiated the moratorium movement, has joined Scott and others in the effort to bring the various groups together.
“We’ve received a wonderful reception,” Fertig says. “People have concerns about over development and preserving the environment, their tree canopy and quality of life. The response shows that everybody has the same concerns. They’re all worried about too much saturation. How much more can we handle and still maintain the quality of life that we came here for? I can’t remember anything like this happening. It’s not like all of Las Olas got together, it’s the whole city.”
“The culture of the city has drastically changed, and people are waking up and saying how did this happen," Jackie Scott adds. “When you look at the history of successful elected officials, people like Jim Naugle and Rob Dressler, they came from grassroots. Now we have a commission that’s totally different.”
One of the things the community activists are pushing is an unbiased study of the traffic implications of new developments.
“We’re asking that the city do its own traffic studies from scratch, not just accept the developer’s study,” Fertig says. “In the long run that can only benefit the city.”
The Bahia Mar and First Presbyterian Church matters have not yet reached the city commission, but neighbors opposed to the projects have an ominous sense that both have been orchestrated from the beginning. In the church vote, the Planning and Zoning Board had four members forced to recuse themselves on the grounds of possible conflicts of interest. Only five of the nine members voted last month. All five got religion, all voting for the church. Curiously, a similar proposal was voted down unanimously several years ago.
Although civic leaders are cautious in saying so before the final commission votes, they are clearly implying that they can vote too, against commissioners who run on platforms of supporting neighborhoods, and forget those pledges once in office. There is ample precedent for such political activity. Cindi Hutchinson, who served on the commission for nine years before dropping out of the mayor’s race in the last election, first came to office to oust a commissioner viewed as too close to developers. Ditto Christine Teel, who ran as a community preservation champion in the Coral Ridge area and served two terms before losing to former police chief Bruce Roberts.
The emerging alliance of civic groups transcends other factors. The Coral Ridge-Cardinal Gibbons fight is an example. According to published reports, the Coral Ridge community is divided on the lights. Those living near the football field are leading the fight. Others support the school. Many people in other civic associations are friends of the school, and sympathetic to Gibbons, which moved to its location in the early 1961 and has played football almost as long, but not at night under lights. At the time Coral Ridge was a developing neighborhood and many of those opposing the school had not arrived. But the attitude that neighborhood folks should stick together appears to be growing.
That’s especially true when voices as energetic as Scott’s and Fertig’s explain that if Fort Lauderdale’s beach becomes impassable near Las Olas Boulevard and the church’s expansion clogs up the boulevard at the other end, all the people living on the beach, the Las Olas Isles and Victoria Park are going to feel the impact.
The community leaders sense that public opinion is on their side. So is much of the press. Dan Christensen, whose Broward Bulldog blogs have been picked up by the newspapers, has covered the zoning struggles and the Cardinal Gibbons story in a balanced way. Other bloggers, such as Buddy Nevins’ Broward Beat and Bob Norman’s Daily Pulp in New Times Broward, have stridently condemned both the Bahia Mar and First Presbyterian Church projects. The neighbors in both instances wonder if city hall is listening.
Says Mary Fertig: “I don’t know how a city planner can approve that parking garage at an intersection that’s already so congested. You don’t even have to talk about neighborhood compatibility. It’s a question if we can even get in and out of our homes.”
The Sun Sentinel, in one of its bolder public stands in memory, wrote Monday that we should do a better job of teaching drivers not to get run over by trains. It was reacting to a federal demand that Florida improve its safety record at railroad grade crossings. The editorial said too many Floridians are reckless drivers. We agree with this profound statement. What do you expect with so many people driving without licenses, some of them people who are illegally in this country to begin with?
The paper’s editorial page writer ignored the real problem, which is the existence of grade crossings. Florida, particularly the old Florida East Coast Railroad, has far too many such crossings. We are happy to report that building new ones is getting harder. The CSX tracks used by Tri-Rail are owned by the state and will have no more grade crossings. The FEC is increasingly resistant to growing communities wanting to expand roads to cross the tracks.
However, the problem grew for over 100 years, and the result is serious in cities where the FEC has crossings every few blocks. Cumbersome freight trains can barely slow down, much less stop in emergency situations. And residents near the tracks complain that blaring train horns drive them crazy. It could become a much more serious problem when the FEC starts running passenger trains again. That event seems inevitable because Amtrak wants to use its tracks, the FEC seems to want them used and Tri-Rail absolutely needs to switch some trains to the FEC to make that commuter service truly useful. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it.
In assessing the impact of Florida losing $7 million in federal dollars, the Sun Sentinel observed that “New overpasses are out of the question because of expense.” There’s the problem. Expense doesn’t seem to matter when we build interstates or improve busy streets. Then the highways go up and down like roller coasters, jumping over roads, railroad tracks and waterways – expenses be damned. The irony is that such lavish expenditures for highways only fuel the growth along those roads, leading to more traffic and more confrontations between the iron rails and asphalt roads. The danger is self-fulfilling.
Today there are sections of northern Palm Beach County and the three Treasure Coast counties where there is considerable distance between grade crossings. Passenger trains could move at a good clip much of the way. But as those communities develop, it is likely that new crossings will appear, making higher train speeds less feasible.
The obvious solution, Sun Sentinel, is to rebuild the FEC, at least in the busy communities. In so doing, elevated stations in center cities could generate commercial development on all sides. Northern railroads faced that reality a century ago. There are commuter lines all over Philadelphia and New York, but you will be hard pressed to find a grade crossing within those cities. Visitors to Philadelphia would not even know there is a network of connecting rails buried beneath the big buildings of its downtown.
It would not be possible to run the popular Acela train at high speeds between Boston and Washington had not the railroads years ago either elevated or depressed the tracks for most of that route.
Expensive? Of course. But it had to be done and needs to be done now in Florida. The proposed costly high-speed train between Miami and Orlando would be nice, but the money could be better spent – much better spent – on rebuilding the FEC, largely by bridging the tracks (ditches won’t work in Florida) and closing grade crossings to make fast commuter service possible along the densely populated Gold Coast corridor. In the long run, economic growth along that track would offset the coast. The danger would take care of itself. So would the noise.
How could a good idea and a terrible idea be the same idea? It is when the idea is red light cameras. The idea of catching people who bust red lights is a good idea. It is one of the most dangerous traffic violations, often compounded by the fact that the driver busting the light is also accelerating to do so. That is the reason so many red light collisions are serious, too often fatal. The driver in violation never gets on the brake if an accident looms; the victim (usually the innocent driver) doesn’t expect a speeding car bearing down at an intersection after the light turns green.
These cameras are already in use in some South Florida cities and more are scheduled. Critics say they are just a way for cities to make money in hard times. They also say the cameras cause accidents; when a car makes a sudden stop that the driver behind it doesn’t expect. Well, the second driver should expect it; if not, that driver is probably planning to bust the light as well. We think most of those critics are just irresponsible people who want to break the law and get away with it, not once in awhile, but every time they see a light turn yellow.
That good idea turns terrible, however, when the use of the cameras is expanded to award tickets to people making legal right turns, except they don’t come to a complete stop. It is called “rolling through,” and most do it. You arrive at a light, come almost a complete stop, see the way is clear and roll into the turn. The same happens all the time at stop signs. In many cases, there is no other safe way to handle the situation. Anyone who drives a small car knows that many intersections have high foliage right at the corner, so you have to move at least a few feet past the stop sign just to see if anything is coming. It is hardly dangerous. Your car may be rolling, but barely, and it is easy to stop if necessary.
The papers have been picking up this story lately, with interesting illustrations of the unfairness in some cities. One driver got a ticket for a rolling right turn and the citation clocked his speed at zero. Probably because the technology doesn’t distinguish between one mile an hour and zero.
Many stop signs are unnecessary, especially those four-way stops at locations where the street at 90 degrees forms a “T” – it doesn’t go through. Those stop signs only exist because neighborhoods complain about speeding traffic. Their purpose, like speed bumps, is to slow traffic, and somebody almost stopping and then rolling through has clearly been slowed.
Using cameras to penalize people only using common sense is not primarily a safety device; its purpose is to generate revenue. It says here that this is organized crime approved by a municipality, much as those notorious speed traps in north Florida towns. I got caught once, 15 years ago, and am still angry. We were coming back from a funeral in the north and when we entered Florida, I had a bright idea. Why not drive the back roads, avoid the crazies on I-95? Just take our time. Relax. See some country. Route 301 was the first choice. All went well for an hour. I had the van on cruise control, exactly 55, the speed limit. It was a wonderful, relaxed, safe ride. I congratulated myself on the back roads choice.
Then I saw a stop light up the road. Seemed odd, for there was no reason to stop in this rural area. But I knocked off the speed control and glided to the light, where I got a ticket that cost $130. The speed limit had gone from 55 to 45 to 30 in a few blocks. People were getting tickets left and right. One guy was screaming in the police station. I complained to Attorney General Bob Butterworth at the time. I called it organized crime run by the cops. I wrote about it, too. Apparently, according to the Internet, nothing has changed. I was angry then and am angry now. I would like to blow up the cars of every cop who ever wrote a ticket in that despicable burg. Unfortunately, blowing up cars may be illegal up there, and they might have cameras to catch you.
Alternatively, I rant.
When Theresa Castro threw a party, you knew it. We would go up on a weekend in Ocala, and she set us up in a little cottage. The kids went nuts when they saw the basket of fruit, and the old man did not mind that there was a bottle of something disguised in the arrangement.
Theresa’s parties were memorable in every respect, not the least of which was the presence of important people. Former Gov. Claude Kirk was a regular attendee. Notable horse types, who were often important in other meadows, were also there (Ocala is horse country). There were always a dozen folks from Fort Lauderdale, the usual suspects, who enjoyed mingling with the surprise guests. The big house opened on a horse farm, and the view from the large terrace was out of “Gatsby.” With a few cocktails, we between the rich and famous, watching the horses play in the fields below. One of them, a guest, not a horse, was George Steinbrenner. He owned the Yankees.
I met him. I don’t recall what we discussed. He was young into his Yankee ownership (this was the late ‘70s), but his name was already household. Tough guy to work for. The man I met so casually seemed nothing like a tyrant. He was pleasant and easygoing, only there as a neighbor. He was into horses and had a nearby farm. That was the charm of Theresa and Bernard Castro’s Ocala: Almost everybody counted, but nobody kept count.
Not much later, we did some stories on the Yankees minor league team in Fort Lauderdale. I traveled around the state with the young players; this was Class A, the bottom rung of pro baseball. They trained at Little Yankee Stadium, and their locker rooms were big-time. If you have never gone through Marine boot camp (or any boot camp, for that matter), try minor league baseball in that era. The coaches screamed at the players; they screamed at the bus driver if the poor fool was a minute late. You cannot invent the multiple obscenities they screamed routinely, day after day, trip after trip. I recall one incident over in the Tampa Bay area, when this young assistant coach, a rangy blond kid, not much older than his players, blew out a bus driver so violently that I thought the driver was going to break into tears, get off the bus and commit suicide.
This was George Steinbrenner’s minor league team, the first step toward Yankee Stadium. I wondered if he knew what went on at this level, or cared. But for sure, the kids knew. There was one young fellow just out of the University of Miami who was touted to go all the way. His batting average in college was off the charts, but in Class A he was struggling, maybe hitting .270. He was a mild mannered fellow, and I asked him what he thought of the atmosphere, this boot camp mentality, this abuse of bus drivers, taking these constant negatives from a franchise premier among the legends of baseball.
This kid did not make it, by the way, but I recall his words today, upon hearing the news of George Steinbrenner’s death today.
“Mister Steinbrenner takes a lot of pride in this organization,” the kid said. “And I’m not going to be the one to screw it up.”
It’s called the pride of the Yankees.
In this week of patriotic fervor, step back some 65 years to the deck of a battleship. The men on the ship, those who weren’t busy firing shell after shell, could see their little spotter plane circling over the beach. The plane had been up there for hours, directing fire of the battleship’s guns in support of the Marines on the beach below. Suddenly, at 10:50 a.m., the plane was seen to break in two and dive into the ocean. Thus it was reported in the log of the battleship U.S.S. Tennessee on Feb. 19, 1945, the first day of the epic battle for Iwo Jima.
Nobody escaped from that plane, and the Navy knew it right away, although for a year the two men aboard were officially listed as missing in action. One of them was my cousin, Lt. Thomas F. McCormick. I was not yet 9 when he died, but I remember him well. He had movie star looks and been home on leave at Christmas just a few weeks before. When I first read the log of the ship, some 25 years ago, I wondered what brought Tommy’s plane down. It seems there were no Japanese planes in the air that day. There was no explosion, no fire and smoke, which usually marks the death of a combat aircraft – just two pieces of a plane falling separately.
In gathering details of that day over the years, I wondered about friendly fire. It has killed men since war began. Imagine back when warriors used spears and arrows in close combat; they must have killed their own friends left and right. History has its famous victims. Stonewell Jackson at Chancellorsville, more recently NFL football player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan.
I thought of friendly fire because I trained in artillery. Fortunately for our nation, I was never called upon to do it in battle. But at Fort Sill our instruction included a ride in a chopper, looking down as shells landed on mock targets. The pilot warned of the danger of getting too low and getting hit by the very guns you were directing. A long shot, sure, but possible. An aerial spotter had to stay above the trajectory of the shells. The day Tommy McCormick went down, the Marines had landed on the beach almost unopposed, at least by artillery. The Japanese let men and equipment pile up at the water's edge before they opened up with artillery from caves on Mount Suribachi, whose summit was to be the scene of the iconic flag raising photo.
When the Japanese starting firing from the high ground, our ships immediately responded, elevating their guns from direct fire at the beach to lob shells much higher at a more distant target. Obviously, the aerial spotters would get orders to fly toward the new target. It was just about the time that fire direction was altered that something hit Tommy’s plane. Could he have been flying from a low altitude to higher and found himself in the path of large shells? Tommy’s plane, the OS2U Kingfisher, was a sturdy machine, designed to take hard pontoon landings on water. But a ship’s 14-inch guns could have gone through a small plane like tissue paper, not even exploding. It could easily knock the tail off a plane and never stop for apologies.
That scenario was mere conjecture on my part, until last month. I got a message from Paul Dawson, who runs the U.S.S. Tennessee Museum in Huntsville, Tenn. He sent me pictures a few years ago of my cousin, shots we never knew existed. His father had been the ship’s photographer, and he knew the handful of pilots and had identified them in volumes of photos he had saved. I was amazed to get this stuff, but not as amazed as I was by what Paul Dawson sent last month. He had been looking over documents from the Tennessee and found a post-Iwo Jima battle report – in which the ship’s commanders figured out what they did right and wrong.
At the end of the report comes a statement that it was “possible” the Tennessee’s spotter plane was hit by guns from fire sector 6 – which could have been one of the Tennessee’s big guns or any of the numerous ships which were firing at the same time. The report recommended that pilots be advised of minimum safety altitudes during such circumstances.
It is called the “fog of battle,” and it took 65 years for the fog to begin to lift over fire sector 6 and Mount Suribachi.
The great thing about vacationing in North Carolina this time of year is that you get to see the World Cup. Four years ago this great event was seen in Boston, during the annual City/Regional Magazine Association Convention, when seminars on how to make money on the web were routinely outdrawn by all the bored editors crowding into the hotel bar to watch Camaroon vs. Bigwalia. Bigwalia, of course, is the former Shumbaba, which changed its name after the last revolution. The name comes from General Big Walia, who led the 2009 coup, the first overthrow of government since 2007 when the colonial province of Lower Sud Rothstein was thrown out by General Rhumba Shumbaba. This was all before the tradition of blowing horns at games, sounding like the approach of a high-level B-17 bombardment group, became the fashion of the World Cup.
Anyway, Big Walia’s little brother, Little Walia, the First Minister For Larceny, is a big football fan. He put together an All-Star team to represent the country at the World Cup. They are an excellent side, but they look like Americans. They probably aren’t, but so many things are suspicious in this event that one cannot be faulted for doubt. For instance, in the game between our side and Al Qaeda, several American former student athletes were mugged right there on television, and the referee disallowed the goal which was clearly legal, on the understandable grounds that if allowed to stand, the U.S. would have won the game, which would have been terrible for our national image as the most picked-upon country in the universe.
“By the way,” we happened to say to our son-in-law, a former footballer himself, “is this game fixed? If not, why do all the sides look like Americans? The North Koreans look like Americans. The Ghanians look like Americans. The Japanese look like Americans, especially Red Yamamoto and Whitey Saburo. The British, Dutch, Germans and Slovenians all look like Americans. Look at this guy, Landon Donovan. Even he looks like an American.”
“He is an American,” said the son-in-law.
“Hah,” we said, “that explains everything. They’re trying to confuse us by throwing in a random ringer.”
This essay was interrupted to find out where Mali is, for that is the home country of the referee who just made the call in favor of Al Qaeda. It turns out it is in part of what was once known as French Sudan, part of the Sahara Desert, one of the poorest places on earth. Which explains a lot. After exhaustive research for the last 45 minutes, any reasonable man should conclude that if soccer is not fixed, it should be. Thanks to Forbes magazine and other sleuths on the Internet, it has been reported that in the annual survey of corrupt nations, the countries in Africa dominate, and there appear to be thousands of African nations in the World Cup. Not too far behind are the Central and South American countries, which are historically prominent, and often dominant, in the sport. For the record, Iceland is the most honest country, followed by almost all the Scandanavian countries. They have a freeze on thievery. The U.S. ranks about 17th, not too far ahead of Ireland, but way ahead of the most honest South American country, which happens to be Uruguay.
Knowing our own sordid history of point-shaving scandals in college basketball, and even professional refs playing their own games within the game, we can affirm that gambling exists within our borders. And if this can happen in a wonderful, moral place where all the children are above normal, is it not tempting to suspect it goes on in poorer nations where half the people can’t pronounce the name of the bounder who led the latest coup? Of course, these vile thoughts would not have occurred had it not been for the job in the Al Qaeda game, and also the fact that every time a un-American player collides with another, he falls to the ground writhing and puts his hands in front of his face, to hide the fact that he is giggling at having put one over on the refs.
You see how a diseased mind works. One little scandalous call in a soccer game and we are ready to send drones to wipe out half the world. Before that, however, we took a quick survey, asking people if it bothered them that soccer could be fixed. It is admittedly not a scientific study, having been concluded in 15 minutes, but the results are interesting. Sixty percent said they disapproved of fixing soccer games; 20 percent said they approved; the balance were undecided, and went back to blowing their horns.
