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.
It was the summer of 1971. South Florida was hot, but nobody was there to know it. I had, of course, known that people came to Florida in the winter. But nobody told me they left in the summer. Although I sensed that the magazine business was seasonal, I assumed that the readers of what was then called Pictorial Life were mostly people who lived in Florida year round. I did not realize that many of those readers fled Florida in the summer, and when I noticed that nobody was home that first year, I asked veteran observers where they had gone.
“North Carolina,” came the reply. “Why North Carolina?” I asked. “The mountains,” came the reply.
I must have known there were was some uneven terrain in North Carolina – I had once visited Thomas Wolfe’s home in Asheville, where I learned there was an “e” in Asheville. But that had been in winter, years before, and I did not realize the mountains stayed year round and were actually cooler than Florida.
Those illusions disappeared with my first visit to the mountains. I hit the Blowing Rock-Boone area and Highlands-Cashiers in the same trip. My first guide was introduced to me by the late Betty Mann, at the time fashion coordinator for Saks Fifth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale. Her friend Helen Tellekamp was in real estate in Blowing Rock, and knew the territory about as well as anyone who first came there at the age of two in 1928. She was not the only one. Many people from Miami clustered annually in the same area. The same was true of Highlands-Cashiers, although most of those people came up from Broward and Palm Beach by way of Atlanta.
Helen Tellekamp over the years introduced me to many people, most who had Florida connections. It was a two-way street. Dianne Davant grew up in Blowing Rock, where her father was chief of staff of the local hospital. However, her interior design business flourished in Florida. She has an office in Stuart and her clients include the biggest of the big. Her work has been featured in our design magazines. She currently has a serious program going with Fort Lauderdale-based City Furniture.
Another Helen Tellekamp contact was Hanse Kohler, a personable, good-looking fellow who came from Pensacola and had just graduated from the University of Georgia in the early '70s. He joined Helen in her business and later started his own real estate firm. Helen has since retired, but Hanse Kohler is still going strong. That is, if you can use the word strong to describe a business that is so historically tied to Florida that the economies of the Carolina mountains and Florida might as well be one. That relationship varies from market to market. Up in Kohler’s territory the growth of North Carolina cities within an easier drive have opened up new markets for Blowing Rock.
“This is my 39th year in business,” he says. “In the first years we sold a huge amount of property to Floridians. That market still exists, and we love to see lots and lots of Florida license tags and have them buy. But the problems in Florida have slowed that business. But in the last 25 years, Charlotte, with a lot of bankers and so forth, has opened up a new market. It’s a perfect driving time for those people. It’s easy for them to come up for a weekend.“
Elsewhere, especially in the southwest corner of the state, where this is being written, Florida’s real estate problems are felt more strongly. Realtors say many people need to sell something in Florida to buy in the mountains. Some attractive properties here have been sitting on the market for two years. Stores are slow. Fishing equipment outlets in Highlands have closed.
That’s the bad news. The good news is the flip side. The weather has been magnificent, especially with reports of oppressive heat in Florida. Traffic on roads that sometimes are jammed, with cars lined up behind creeping cement trucks growling up serpentine roads, is remarkably light. With fewer customers, store personnel have never been more accommodating. Our in-laws out fly fishing spent two early morning hours on a pristine river without seeing another angler.
In that sense, Florida’s favorite summer escape has never been better. You might say a recession is a terrible thing to waste.
The Miami Herald’s Carl Hiaasen on Sunday took on the Tea Party with an amusing muse on what federal programs would these people cut. Social Security? No, not those who rail against government spending while getting their checks, or looking forward to them in a few years. The FDIC? No, not when their life savings are protected when their local bank fails, as hundreds are doing right now. Medicare. Not if they get it. Those who regulate banks? Well, not right now. How about the FBI and CIA, and let the terrorists blow us to damnation? You get the point.
In fairness to the Tea Partisans, a lot of their problems are with new initiatives that put an increasing burden on taxpayers to benefit the considerable number of people who pay little or no taxes. We do not speak of the unemployed. We speak of people who earn salaries, but have no taxes because of their low income coupled with deductions. But I recall from my first withholding job at 16, making $28 a week during the summer and being annoyed at the amount of money that was deducted. That still bothered me when I got up to the glorious sum of $84 on my first full-time newspaper job.
Another complaint is government waste. People who never should be in this country rip off medicare for millions and head south before the sluggish government can catch up with them. And all the government perks those in Washington enjoy, which the average citizen does not. Ah, there we’re getting close, and if the TPs think about it, a lot that is wrong with this country is closer to home than they know. It is not just big government that oppresses them; it is also the local government they purport to embrace.
We speak of the cause which features former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and countless other government figures and economists. Namely, the runaway costs of salaries and benefits to public service employees. Because of their power to influence elections, for years politicians have catered to them – with increasing salaries, reversing the historic trend of private sector workers making more than public employees. On top of that are generous benefits – health insurance and early and absurdly generous retirement benefits.
Federal employees, starting with Congress and moving down to the lowest rung, have been getting those benefits for years, but only because there is no federal requirement to balance the budget. Locally, it is a different story. California has been much in the news with its public employee packages putting the state on the verge of bankruptcy. But the problem exists all over the country, and we are at the stage in a tough economy where people are losing jobs because there is not the money to pay them and maintain the bloated salaries and benefits for others.
How bloated? I am looking at the list of Fort Lauderdale employees. It starts with three pages of people making more than or close to $100,000 a year, followed by page after page of salaries that exceed $75,000. I don’t care what these people do; they aren’t worth that kind of money, with the exception of the police, whose danger quotient deserves consideration. But in terms of fundamental skills, are these people more intrinsically valuable than, say, a private school teacher or a very good advertising sales person, or a good newspaper reporter – people who are lucky to make half the amount I see on these charts. And their retirement – if they ever retire – is money they put away in private pension plans.
On top of their big salaries, Fort Lauderdale city employees enjoy twice the health benefits of the private sector. Illustration: City lifeguards average $50,000 in total compensation. Hell, they should pay for a job where you meet all those chicks, unless of course they are chicks themselves. Lifeguards at luxury hotels make $12 an hour. The lawn maintenance people, few of whom hold Ph.D.’s, make up to $35,000 a year, plus health and benefits. And the city commission, in the worst recession in 50 years, recently increased salaries.
This is just not wrong, it is immoral. Efforts to correct these abuses are going on throughout the republic. Locally, the Broward Workshop, composed of business leaders, is leading the campaign to heighten public awareness of government gone wild. But it is very hard to take back from people something they never should have gotten in the first place. They have the vote and will use it. Only when those who are being screwed over with high taxes learn to vote will this change. The average working stiff has to be motivated to outvote the freeloaders.
Otherwise, it is taxation without representation.
Keep in mind that your correspondent has a major conflict of interest in this report. I live in Colee Hammock. So does Fred Grimm, the talented Broward columnist for the Miami Herald, from whom we hear nothing.
There has been an armistice of sorts in the battle between the Colee Hammock Homeowners Association and the First Presbyterian Church on the church's plan to build big on Las Olas Boulevard. Wednesday's hearing at the Fort Lauderdale Planning and Zoning board will not vote on the issue. Reason: There is no quorum. The board has nine members and four recused themselves last month. That leaves five, and one member can't make the meeting. No vote possible.
This works for the benefit of the neighborhood, and is a backfire of the church's effort to force members to recuse last month. The tactics were crude. There was pressure on the city attorney to demand the recusals. The city, of course, denies this. But too many people of strong character will stand up to argue that point. Four board members did recuse; three would have voted against the church. One of those who recused felt pressure from his employer. Word of this is all over town, and the people in adjoining communities – the Las Olas Isles, Victoria Park, Sailboat Bend, even Rio Vista – are realizing that this Planned Unit Development (PUD) can be used on their own turf to permit developers to destroy zoning codes.
It is one hell of a political battle. Dan Christensen, whose Broward Bulldog blog broke the story and is keeping it alive, has lined up people at least as powerful as the church and the developer, Stiles Corporation. That story will break in a timely fashion. Christensen's sources include important members of the church, who are furious at their leadership, and are coming out of the closet, one by one. This is a civil war amid a civil war, much as the real one some 150 years ago. The story has been slow breaking, but breaking it is, and the month's delay before final arguments at P & Z only works to strengthen the numbers of green shirts in the audience.
The green shirts are not Notre Dame's big game jerseys. They say "Colee Hammock 1916," and that says a lot.
The man was riding high. It was 1967 and he had just come back from what appeared to be a career-advancing period in Washington working for the Warren Commission. He was key to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald alone had murdered an American president. He was already high profile as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, and he saw a career in politics. But first, he decided to switch from Democrat to Republican. The Democrats, after a reform period lasting more than a decade, had mired into machine politics. And the Republicans had some rising stars. Arlen Specter decided to be one of them. You could call it political expediency.
It worked. He became district attorney and later ran successfully for the U.S. Senate. This was despite the fact that some people thought a terrible cloud had enveloped the Kansas-born man with a midwestern twang. The cloud was also over the Warren Commission as people actually began to read its report and realize it made no sense. Specter himself had stumbled when he was interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and at the time an investigative reporter in Philadelphia. Fonzi had been briefed on all the contradictions in the Warren Commission Report, especially the details of President John F. Kennedy's wounds. To explain them, Specter had come up with the "magic bullet" – that the same bullet had danced a ballet through the bodies of JFK and Texas Gov. John Connally. But when confronted by Fonzi, he could not explain his own theory. Nobody could. It was impossible.
As has been written here before, students of the assassination have concluded that Specter was too good a prosecutor and too smart not to realize his theory was nonsense. But he was under pressure. We know now more important men than himself wanted the case solved, the blame placed on one nut, to discredit those who were murmuring "conspiracy." Three of the commission members, notably Georgia Sen. Richard B. Russell Jr., had serious doubts about the lone gunmen. They did not want to sign the report, and only did so after they thought their doubts, on the record, would be included in the final draft. They were not. That Specter went along with the game, in fact starred in it, could be chalked up to his wish not to be a foul ball at a time when his career was taking off. You might call it political expediency.
Over the years as the Warren Commission has been discredited by many writers, including Fonzi, who wrote in our pages what later became an iconic book on the subject, Arlen Specter continued to get re-elected in Pennsylvania. His reputation suffered surprisingly little damage from the increasing belief that the government had covered up a president's murder. There were a few bad moments, especially Oliver Stone's riveting film "JFK," but for the most part he seemed to be the perpetual survivor. But recently, in a wave of anti-Washington sentiment, he sensed he could not win as a Republican. So he switched back to the Democrats. You could call it political expediency.Or you could simply say he was always more of a Democrat in the first place. Everything seemed fine. He was way ahead in the polls, although his opponent, Rep. Joe Sestak, had impressed people. He was a career Navy man who wound up an admiral. But most voters did not know that.
Then Specter, perhaps thinking it politically expedient, attacked Sestak's military background, which was really pretty impressive. It backfired big time. At a time when young men and women are dying for our country, people did not like it, and many voters suddenly realized this little known had pretty good credentials. Looking closer, they saw a younger candidate they liked, especially in contrast with the crusty old Specter. In one of the great poll reversals of our times, Sestak began closing the gap, and just this week appeared to be five points ahead. With the election a week off, that seemed an insurmountable momentum swing.
Barring something unforeseen, and that would be unforeseen squared, Arlen Specter seems to have run out of expediency.
Last week I was honored by the St. Anthony School Foundation for Education at its annual Gentlemen’s Cigar Dinner. As Broward’s oldest Catholic school, St. Anthony has produced, or been associated with, many influential names in town. You can start with Mayor Jack Seiler. There was a lot of clout in that record turnout at the Lauderdale Yacht Club. They contributed a nice piece of change to an endowment that was started in the 1980s and has grown steadily since.
Alas, not all schools are in the same boat as St. Anthony. Located on the east side of town, it serves affluent neighborhoods which have avoided the decline of so many older sections of cities where the original parishes are located. I noted that my old town, Philadelphia, has seen many closings of Catholic schools. As a kid I could have walked to four Catholic schools – the longest walk about 25 minutes – and the one I walked to once had about 1,400 kids. It is closed, as are the other three. They were once free, but with the decline (almost elimination) of religious teachers who worked for God’s wages, tuitions have risen steadily. As neighborhoods went down, costs went up. Mission impossible.
The high schools have followed the grade schools. Some were just too small to justify their existence, but this year a school that once had 5,000 boys is now down to hundreds and is scheduled to close after this year. So is another school that had 6,000 boys and girls, a school that was new when I was a senior in high school.
Broward and Dade counties have also seen school closings in recent months. Monsignor Vincent Kelly introduced the foundation concept at St. Thomas Aquinas almost 30 years ago, and it spread to all diocesan schools. But some inner city schools never had a chance. The foundation concept came too late.
Preoccupied as I was last week, I missed a story roaring by in the opposite direction. It took a Wall Street Journal piece, emailed by my brother in California, to get my attention. And what a story it potentially could be. While test scores and merit pay for teachers dominated the news, Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law a scholarship program that could transform Florida education, and as a by-product save many of the old Catholic schools.
It dramatically increases the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which uses money donated by businesses to fund vouchers for low-income families to attend private schools. According to writer Adam B. Schaeffer, it now includes almost 28,000 kids. The program isn’t total altruism. Businesses get tax credits for their donations. Schaeffer, an educational policy analyst, observes that this concept was not popular when introduced in 2001, but received overwhelming support from both Florida houses. The reason: It works in a twofold way. The state can save millions in tax payer money while improving the overall educational level. It is established that poorer kids do better in private schools.
The reasons are obvious. Lower overall administrative expense. Discipline and a tradition of respect. Kids who want to learn can learn without the distraction of peers who don’t give a damn. A sociologist might argue that those who opt for private schools have a built-in advantage – even if they don't live with both parents, somebody in their family cares enough to put them there.
Now here’s the drama. Schaeffer estimates that if this program grows as planned, “a girl born in Florida today might find that a third or more of her peers are being educated in private schools by the time she sets foot in high school.”
And many of those private schools don’t need to be built. They are here, and more than a few are struggling to survive. Florida’s legislature may just have done more than save our children. It could also have saved a school system that has long proved its right to exist.
