Fire

From "Multitudes: The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith"

When the smog lifted -- especially, it seemed, on Sundays when automobile traffic was light -- you could rediscover Washington the beautiful. The white office buildings leapt out from the brilliant blue backdrop of the sky. If it was springtime, tens of thousands of tulips planted by the National Park Service provided a pointillist ground cover to downtown squares and circles. Along Rock Creek Parkway, daffodils proclaimed the beginning of Washington's favorite season. The city lived for spring and fall, periods separated by muggy summer and by an unpredictable yet dull winter. In the fall, the gauze of noxious gas that stretched over DC all summer was peeled away, permitting the sun a rare chance to lounge unimpeded against the sides of buildings or ricochet off spires. The air conditioner's monotone was finally silenced and the hint of chill repulsed by a friendly jacket. But the spring was even better; you quickly forgot the snow that didn't come, or that did come but all in one blizzard, and you luxuriated in a few months of unadulterated color and life. Summer was awful and in winter it was best to heed the words of Mark Twain:

When you arrived it was snowing. When you reached the hotel it was sleeting. When you went to bed it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o'clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all pervading. You will like the climate-when you get used to it. . . . Take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and so forth.

Would that all critiques of the city had been as valid. No other American city had so much written and spoken about it by people who had no organic connection with it and who expended so little effort on its behalf. From presidents to Time reporters, the city was what they wished (or had time) to see, and the resulting reported veered from descriptions of a Grossinger's for megalomaniacs to a Tolkien-like netherworld inhabited by orcs, goblins, brigands, and things that go bump in the night and take all your money. The Washingtonian found few friends among those who passed through. Jack Kennedy called it a place of 'northern charm and southern efficiency.' Senate District Committee chairman Thomas Eagleton, responded to a complaint that a proposed home rule bill would leave Congress with a veto over all local actions by saying, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Congressmen with impeccable liberal credentials curried favor with their conservative constituents and financial backers by supporting freeways, developers, and 'law and order' schemes for the District. Such were our friends.

Then there was the legion of race-baiters, demagogues, and legislators using the District to make deals, political and business, that would have been a scandal if they had occurred in their home districts, and others who used their power over the city to make sure they got cheap liquor and cheap taxi rides.

The denigration of Washington as a place followed other paths as well. Washingtonians, told that their town was a federal city, grew up believing that this somehow prohibited the District from seeking political equality or even other sources of income such as a commuter tax. Washingtonians were taught to rely on the national government until they had lost much of their will for self-initiative. One of the hardest problems faced by anyone seeking change in Washington was what became known as the colonial mentality, a fatalistic acceptance of powerlessness in political and social life. Washington, thus, was a hick town devoid of cultural dents that merit operated as a self-fulfilling description. But then, in the sixties and early seventies, Washington went into cultural therapy, shticked its inferiority complex, turned away from New York-promulgated cultural values, and struck out on its own.

Washington was a city of dichotomies, contrasts, and striking inequalities. It was the capital of a major democracy that lacked local democracy. It was a citadel of power whose residents lacked power. It was a city with an excess of multimillion dollar office buildings and a shortage of housing. It was a city that was wealthier than most in which a sizable minority lives in great poverty. It had a 70 percent black population but the major decisions were still made by whites. It was a city in which the American dream and the American tragedy passed each other on the street and did not speak. It was, finally, a city that had suffered a form of deprivation known primarily to the poor and the imprisoned, a psychological deprivation born of the constant suppression and denial of one's identity, worth, or purpose by those in control. Washington to those in power was not a place but a hall to rent. The people of Washington were the custodian staff. And the renters were as likely to visit the world in which this staff lived as a parishioner is to inspect the boiler room of the church. The purpose of Washington's community was to serve not to be. Its school children were not taught the history of their city; they were told little of its significant men and women. There was no city festival or parade. In fact, this repository of national history didn't even have a local history museum. The city's present was suppressed, its future was a hostage, and its past was ignored.

This was the city that civil rights activists and other reformers determined to - and did - change. This change was cultural as well as political and increasingly the old ways and the new found themselves in conflict. For example, having discovered that there were more African-American books in the libraries in the white parts of town than in the black city, I decided I better check out the meetings of the library board of trustees. There I found not only an all-white board but a chair in his 90s serving his colleagues tea and cookies.

Leaders of a reform movement at the Edmunds-Peabody Elementary School parent body also ran up against the old ways at a meeting so heated and controversial that the citywide PTA sent its president and two vice presidents to serve as monitors. The organization's vice president, Bessie Turner, repeatedly interrupted the proceedings with instructions such as "Madame Chairman, the names of the nominated slate must be on the left had side of the board." During a break, I attempted to engage the formidable Turner in conversation. She told me, "I'm not interested in reporters. I defy you to write anything I don't want in."

In the end, Ted Jones won the heated election for president by a vote of 28 to 26. Mrs. Turner called the new officers forward. Ramrod straight, she read from the PTA's encomium to itself as contained in its manual and instructed the audience to rise as she recited the "objects" of the organization,. Asked whether they intended to help the new officers attend to their duties, the parents obediently responded, "I do." Mrs. Turner then told the officers that "I sincerely hope you will follow your manual. If you follow its provisions you will not get into any difficulty." She handed Jones his gavel but said he couldn't have the official PTA president's pin because he wasn't a woman and that the pin would be held in escrow until the election of the next woman president. And she promised to send all the new officers their own manual.

It could be funny and it could be maddening. In 1967 I expressed my frustration in a piece for a local paper written as a letter to a friend moving into my neighborhood:

Don't complain if Deborah comes home from elementary school with dirty hands. There are not enough wash basins to go around and she's just being considerate to the other kids.

Don't complain if John's junior high history text stops with the League of Nations. . .

Don't call a cab after sundown. It won't come.

Look at the underside of produce in the supermarket. If it is less than 25% spoiled. Buy it. You won't do better.

Don't call policemen "boy." That's a special phrase they reserve for their own use.

Train your dog to use the first spot of grass he finds. A choosy canine around here can be very tiring.

That scrawny tree behind your house is not dead. It is called a tree of heaven and it meant to have just three leaves on each branch. It only grows in blocks with a median income of less than $3,000 a year.

It is all right to call the Post Office after the third missed mail delivery. But don't quote them that line about "neither snow nor rain not heat." They are not familiar with it. They will think you're some sort of hippy poet and will seize and burn all your mail."

Yet there was another side I attempted to describe in an article I wrote in the 1980s:

Twenty years ago this town was, in many ways, a more exciting and appealing place than it is today. I'm not talking economics here -- obviously the economic status of many Washingtonians is far better then it was two decades ago, in part because of real advances and in part be-cause the less economically successful (including many teachers, cops, and firefighters, for example) can't afford to live here anymore. And I'm not talking about changes that were national in scope, such the dramatic improvements for minorities and women.

I'm talking about the culture and spirit of the place, factors that can be quite independent of economic and social indices. I'm talking about a city where people were doing things, not just buying them and showing them off. The nouveau slick with their nouveau clich-es, being consumers and parasites rather than creators and participants, wouldn't have liked it, because to enjoy the Washington of the 1960s you had to be a part of it -- you couldn't merely shop or strut in it. Its fertilizer came from a characteristic that Henry James had noted 60 years earlier an "extraordinarily easy and pleasant" quality of life. It was the unassuming aspect of Washington so hospitable to people of ideas, to artists , to dissidents of varied stripe, and to those who sought a place from which to discover or change the world.

Washington had a social elite, but it kept out of the way of the generic culture; the leading members of this elite, after all, hod long ago been accurately dubbed "cave dwellers." The government loomed large, but its turf and its hours of influence: were also circumscribed. To a young person coming to Washington in the 1960s it was a frontier offering both space and opportunity. Outside of what James called the "imperial part" of Washington, if there was an elite it was well-described by E.M. Forster an aristocracy of the "sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky." The very nature of Washington as an ill-defined culture spread a welcome mat to the new. With its natural charm and physical modesty, its gentleness and lack of urban hysteria, it was a perfect place for trying what hadn't been tried before.

It worked for artists. It worked for young black activists who succeeded in changing so many political relationships in a way that their parents and grandparents could only dream about. It worked for those who believed, as one still could, that power should have some moral end. It worked for those who wanted to try out new definitions of community that would have meaning to themselves and their children It even worked for those who sought nothing more than a satisfying adulthood in a comfortable place.

o

The issues the Gazette covered and the causes it pressed ran the gamut. We campaigned for the then novel idea of packer sanitation trucks to replace the high sided open trash trucks. And we warned readers not put dog and cat dirt in their trash cans, quoting a trashman as saying, "How would you like to stand up in that truck in that stuff all day?'

We also quickly became a leading voice of the anti-freeway movement, and a precocious supporter of light rail and bikeways years before such phenomena became popular. Kathy would later recall going to an anti-freeway meeting and being astounded at the thought that we thought we were actually going to stop a highway. In fact, we didn't stop the one we were fighting; it sliced through Southeast Washington, dividing public housing from the rest of the community. The Gazette ran a photo two young boys looking wistfully up at "Southeast's Berlin Wall." But before it was all over, people like us all over DC had stopped hundred of lane-miles of planned road that would have made the city look like an east-coast Los Angeles.

There was always something to save - such as the 200-old trees in Lincoln Park - and something to promote -- such as a new swimming pool - and something to cover - such as activists Janie Boyd and Marguerite Kelly, who were taking on the local supermarket chains. They challenged quality disparities between outlets in different parts of town and campaigned for the open dating of meat. Meat at that time was dated with a code known only to supermarket employees. The Gazette took the bold position that "an understandable date on each package of meat would be of considerable value to the shopper," noting that "we have shared with other consumers the experience of having meat go bad soon after it has been brought home and put in the refrigerator."

The consumer activists also went comparison shopping, coming up with prices at inner city Safeways up to a third higher than those in a white section of town. Further they demonstrated that prices were hiked when welfare checks came out.

During congressional hearings, Rep. Henry Reuss double-checked the figures at lunch time, returning to the hearing room with bags of groceries that he place on the podium. When a Safeway official blamed some of the price differences on human error, Reuss responded, "In an hour and half I found quite bit of human error."

We also ran a feature on Jane Hardin who had opened a combination laundromat and legal services office on Pennsylvania Ave., where on the first day someone stuck a quilt into a washer, jamming up the pipes. And we wrote about community police officer Ike Fulwood who, as we drove past some grim public housing, remarked, "There's trouble. They never ask the police their opinion when they build public housing." Fulwood would eventually become the city's chief of police.

But things were already well beyond the capacity of any one community to solve. America's cities were starting to burn and you could feel the heat even in Capitol East. In September 1967, anti-poverty activist Lola Singletary convinced the white businessmen of H Street to form a organization dedicated to involvement in community problems The group, the Gazette reported, "intends to deal with such issues as employment, welfare, safety, health, housing, recreation and urban planning."

In late 1967 I came up with the idea of pulling together the various leaders of Capitol East into an informal leadership council with the possibility of forming a major neighborhood coalition. Fourteen people attended a meeting on January 31: 7 white and 7 black.

Among our purposes:

To share our group differences so we can increase our knowledge of one another's group positions, plans and needs.

To increase opportunities to share our group concerns so that we can better support one another's group efforts.

To obtain full representation for our community in civic and governmental affairs.

To unite in common action where we have agreement.

Your participation in the Council does not commit your organization to any position or organizational arrangement.

In February 1968, I wrote in the Gazette:

As contrary as the thought is to our national self-image, it is entirely possible that we are giving up the struggle to solve the deepest problems of our cities. ~ National Guard troops are undergoing special training. Hotlines are being established. Armored trucks are being purchased. Police riot equipment is being beefed up. ~ Ramsey Clark, the Attorney General, was probably correct when he told a group of police chiefs and city officials recently that the nation's power to deal with urban riots is increasing faster "than the underlying layers of frustration that cause them."

On March 6, I wrote a prospective member

Although the Leadership Council has yet to establish a formal structure, the present trend appears to be in favor of a loose federation of leaders, relatively unstructured, and designed so we can act effectively when we have agreement but not get hung up when we don't.

In the issue that appeared in late March, I wrote:

It seems like a lot of people, both the militants and the extremist moderates, are putting down Martin Luther King. I share some of the doubts that have been expressed as to whether his efforts this spring will make any difference. On the other hand, I wonder whether anything will. MLK does have one big factor in his favor. He is doing something. Congress isn't. The White House isn't. The District isn't. The Urban League isn't. Stokely isn't. Possible or impossible, King's show is the best we have in town this spring and it behooves all who would like to see some changes made to lend a hand.

That same month, the US Court of Appeals ordered the city to halt construction on four major sections of the city's freeway system. For a change, it looked as if we might be winning.

o

On the evening of April 4, 1968, I was up on T Street with a group of anti-freeway protesters picketing the mayor's house, when word came of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. We went home as the police cars poured by filled with shotgun-armed and helmeted police.

The next morning things were quiet enough that we went about our business as usual. But I came home that afternoon from the office to find a slow stream of people walking down the street with liberated articles: hangers full of clothes, a naugahyde hassock, a television set. Somewhere in our neighborhood a woman walked off with a case of whiskey from a liquor store. When she got home she realized she didn't have any soda to go with it. She went back and was arrested as she tried to liberate her chaser.

There were only a few whites living in the block; but I felt little tension or hostility. I mainly noted the black smoke drifting down from H Street, four blocks away. Kathy was out back working in our foot-wide strip of garden, listening to reports of looting and arson on a portable radio as a black fog settled in. We decided to go up on the roof for a better look. H Street was burning. Others areas had gone first and the radio reported a lack of fire equipment to deal with the situation a few blocks to the north. I tried to count the fires but they congealed under the curtain of smoke.

We decided to pack just in case. For about ten minutes we gathered an instinctive selection of nostalgic items, favorite photos, the non-valuable but irreplaceable. Then we looked at what we had done and laughed. Like loyal children of our generation, we settled down in our smoky living room to watch on television what was happening to us.

At six-thirty the next morning, a white friend from around the corner rang our doorbell. He wasn't in trouble; he just wanted company on a tour of the area. We got into his car and drove to H, Seventh and 14th Streets. As I looked at the smoldering carcass of Washington and observed the troops marching down the street past storefronts that no longer had any brakes, I thought, so this is what war is like. As we drove past a gutted store on 14th Street it suddenly reignited itself and flames leaped towards the pavement.

That day and for several days thereafter, we stuck to home. The trouble had flared again. We received anxious calls from friends and relatives in another parts of town and in other towns. We assured them we were all right; they seemed more upset about our physical safety than we were and I did not want t alarm them by speaking what was in my mind.

For a year and a half of running a neighborhood newspaper, I had observed, and tried to report, a part of the community seething with emotions much of the other part refused to recognize. Now it was worse than even I had thought and anger, frustration, and helplessness washed up on my mind's shore.

I subconsciously prepared myself for it to get worse. In the middle of one of the riot nights, I awakened to a rumbling noise in the street and ran to the window expecting to see tanks rolling past our house. There were no tanks. In fact, the physical threat of the riots barely touched us.

The strange ambivalence of the riots -- the slashes of violence mixed indiscriminately with the sparkle of carnival, the sounds of racial war penetrating the tranquillity of a white couple's home four blocks from disaster, our strangely ordinary experiences in an extraordinary situation, -- made the disorder a crazy amalgam that took weeks to sort out. For months after, when sporadic violence hit stores in our neighborhood, I expected to find our newspaper office smashed and looted. It wasn't, despite the inviting glass storefront. I was inclined, with normal self delusion, to attributed this to having paid my dues. It was more likely that our second hand electric typewriters weren't worth the candle when there was a whole Safeway up the street and a cleaners right on the corner.

Some people seemed to think I had something to do with it all. One of my advertisers, the photo dealer Harry Lunn, told me late one night that if anyone firebombed his store he was going to come and personally burn my house down. He had been or was still with the CIA so I tended to take him seriously.

Len Kirsten, an advertiser and owner of the Emporium, was more blasé. A lady walked into the store one day and, spotting the pile of Gazettes on the floor, said, "Isn't that a Communist paper?"

"Oh no," Len replied cheerfully. "The editor's a communist but the paper isn't."

On the other hand, Lee, of Helen & Lee's Chinese carryout was totally indifferent to politics. Lee and his wife ran a regular ad bragging that the carryout had been recommended by their four doctor sons. One of the items on the menu was a pork chop sandwich -- the chop still on a bone slapped between two pieces of Wonder Bread. After Helen died, the sign over the door was changed to read: & Lee's Carryout.

Another favorite advertiser was Harry Spack, owner of. Spack's Chicken on the Hill, which had a storefront windows filled with an 1883 Swiss music box, an airplane propeller, opera glasses, statuettes and drug store jewelry. There are Arabic sabers hanging over the restroom doors and travel posters on the wall. Also "the world's smallest bar" -- a few shelves filled with miniature liquor bottles.

"Now someday this place is going to have class," Spack told our reporter, Greg Lawrence. "You know -- cosmopolitan, relaxing, with fine music from the past. For instance," he said as he reached for an object under the counter, "this vase from Europe has been dyed by its creators in pigeon blood. Now I ask you, what other cafe on Capitol Hill features decorations dyed in pigeon blood?"

The riot did more than $3 million worth of property damage. In the vicinity of H Street and some 124 commercial establishments and 52 homes were damaged. Another 21 businesses were damaged on or near 8th street. I wrote:

The destruction did not end with the quelling of the riot and the removal of federal troops who had guarded the area after being called in by city officials. Sporadic arson occurred, primarily along H Street, doing hundreds of thousand of dollars additional damage. . . Reaction varied from the intense anger of many white merchants at the failure of police to shoot looters to the feeling on the part of some community leaders that a new opportunity had been created to correct old economic and social wrongs.

During the riots, Mayor Walter Washington had been called to the office of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, where he was told to start shooting looters. Washington refused, saying that "you can replace material goods, but you can't replace human beings." Hoover then said, "Well, this conversation is over." Replied Washington, "That all right, I was leaving anyway."

One white businessman, Milton Hoffman of Art Young's clothing store, which had been burned in the riot, proposed a one percent of gross sales contribution by businesses to be used for community projects. Black businesses posted large "soul brother" signs on windows and walls. Private social agencies and anti-poverty centers were left alone. A laundry near the US Marine Barracks received special attention; guards with fixed bayonets protected the troop's clothing inside. The riots had created their own rules.

At the time of the riot early 25% of the labor force in Capitol East was either unemployed, earning less than $3000 a year or employed only part-time. Over half of all adults living in the east part of the neighborhood had eight years or less schooling. Over a quarter of the housing units in this same area were listed by the census as dilapidated or deteriorating.

Not long after the riots it was Easter and three local ministers, Tom Torosian, Jesse Anderson and Ralph Dwan held a sunrise service on 8th Street, refusing what Camus called the sin of despair.

The riots weren't the end of it. Even where there was a building to come back to, business on H Street wouldn't really return for decades. A real estate dealer's home was fire bombed as was a local settlement house. White and black friends no longer saw each other. And one day, in the dingy basement offices of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael said that whites were no longer welcome in the civil rights movement. Black nationalism had arrived and people like me were out.

The dream of a functioning bi-racial community was in pieces. H Street, with its jagged free standing walls and piles of rubble, looked like photos from a World War II retrospective. For me, hope had lost its virginity. There was no work for a white editor in a black neighborhood anymore. If I was to talk to anyone now, they would have look a lot more like me.

To be sure, a bi-racial slate of reform Democrats was elected in early May as convention delegates and central committee members. The slate included both Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy supporters, united in a desire to defeat the locally popular Hubert Humphrey. I won one of McCarthy's slots on the party central committee. McCarthy had stated that he wanted no part of a coalition but some of his supporters, including myself, disagreed and so worked out a deal. On March 31, the anti-war Democrats for Peace and Progress held a neighborhood convention in Capitol East. Five persons -- a community organizer, a minister , a physicist, a school lunch clerk, and myself -- were nominated. To my surprise, the Kennedy organization accepted us as well as other McCarthites from around the city.

It was an unprecedented relinquishment of political power to mere party members and it produced an unusual slate that include community organizers and college professors, mothers on welfare and lawyers, black militants and a white philanthropist. Possibly no slate in America has ever been so varied.

For example, the slate included Sophie Reuther, wife of Victor Reuther. A former union organizer, she had once jumped out of a second story window to escape armed KKKers who had been set upon the union at the urging of management. Recalled Victor later, "She went underground and it took me three days to find her." It was not a singular incident. On her 25th birthday, the party had been interrupted by two gun-wielding company thugs who forced their way in and began pistol-whipping Walter Reuther, her brother-in-law.

Our campaign was short, lasting about month and for some of us election day began to close rapidly before we had any notion of what we were supposed to be doing. Typical of our appearances was a "debate on Vietnam" before a group of 12 persons. Since my opponent was also opposed to the war, our confrontation was rather turgid. We were preceded by a couple of 14th Precinct cops who promised to get an abandoned car towed away and to take action on other matters less cosmic than withdrawal from Southeast Asia. I was glad the policemen were not running for office. Still we knew we had support. A poll taken by a community group found that 44% already favored an end to the war's escalation and to the bombing of North Vietnam.

I was second from the end of the ballot which hardly boded well for my political career. I contemplated the slogan, "Roses are red, violets are blue; you'll find me listed at the end of page 2." Another more Stevensonian phrase briefly crossed my mind: "Vote for the penultimate candidates." I eventually settled on a flyer which proclaimed that "The District's Friend is Second from the End," which was never circulated because a fellow candidate pointed out that it violated a cardinal political rule against "single-shooting" on a slate.

Another political lesson came from a friend who upbraided me for having passively accepted my full name on the ballot. He said I should have gone immediately into court. The publicity alone would have been worth 1,000 votes.

Eventually I did most of what a good candidate should. Kathy and I even participated in one and a half parades. We didn't quite make through the second one owing to our VW's weak battery,

On election day I stood outside my precinct distributing sample ballots. The Humphrey people were there too, but our main competition came from a man who accosted as many voters as he could and read them a two-page polemic against the police department for having stolen his watch three years earlier.

Inside my wife served as a Kennedy poll watcher. Early in the morning the precinct election official had hung some political powers to decorate the drab voting area. Kathy indicated that the posters were nice but illegal. She also met a lady whose name she could not find on the voter list and who told her, "Oh, you won't find me. I'm just here from Philadelphia visiting my aunt and I thought I'd come by." Kathy thanked her and suggested that her vote might better be cast in Philadelphia.

Late in the afternoon, I moved to a corner with my card file of known favorable voters who had yet to cast a ballot, dispatching a small squadron of volunteer kids to remind them. We won and the next day, the Evening Star offered this editorial comment on the new Democratic Central Committee:

They are likely to me more militant, more aggressive and more insistent on direct participation in local affairs. What this bodes for the community remains to be seen.

With such unbridled enthusiasm from the establishment, we were off to a good start. One month later, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. On June 7, I wrote:

The nation had watched John Kennedy die and had not changed. It had watched Martin Luther King die and had not changed. And it had watched Robert Kennedy die. . . .The central point of these tragedies was not their proximate cause but rather that we, as a nation, had assigned so much of the burden of hope, progress, decency and faith to so few men.

Tomorrow I shall go down to see the funeral cortege arrive at Union Station. I shall go not just out of sorrow and respect, but also to try to find some small sign that we collectively -- without waiting for someone else to do it for us -- are willing and able to have a dream, or seek a newer world. Then, perhaps, we can become young again.

In June I wrote:

To a large extent, a community such as Capitol East is limited in its ability to respond with justice and adequacy to the current situation. Even if we had the will to change, we would remain hostage to the larger inertia of the nation and the city.

In September I wrote:

The Republicans have nominated Richard Nixon for president. The Democrats have nominated Hubert Humphrey for president. The reading scores of Capitol East schools are lower than ever. Some 9th Precinct patrolmen don't want to ride in integrated scout cars. Some white DC fireman don't want to use the same breathing apparatus as black firemen. Congress has passed, and the President has signed a bill ordering the District to complete a freeway program overwhelmingly opposed by the people of the city. DC Transit wants another fare hike and the transit commission says there's nothing it can do about it. . . We could write an editorial on each of these items, but they'd all be pretty much the same. From the mundane to the cosmic, it's been a busy month. We think we'll just wait until October and hope things get better.

About six months later, I folded the Capitol East Gazette into the DC Gazette, a publication more like the many underground papers sprouting throughout America. I wrote:

We have decided to suspend publication of the Capitol East Gazette. Our reason for this change is that we have been unable to develop either the advertising base or the paid circulation within Capitol East to support a separate community paper. For more than three years, we have tried very hard to make the Capitol East Gazette a self-sustaining paper. We feel Capitol East needs and deserves its own paper, but our attempt to publish a hard-hitting, crusading community journal has not been received well by local businesses, and we can no longer pour the money and time into the publication that is necessary to keep it going on a subsidized basis.

This was a sad and difficult decision to make. We believe, however, that the DC Gazette which shows considerable potential, is a logical extension of the type of reporting and commentary we have been doing in the Capitol East community. The most serious problems of our neighborhood in the areas of schools, housing, transportation, police, racism and the like, are citywide. We hope that the DC Gazette can help the many neighborhoods that make up the District tackle these problems together.

Later I would explain it by saying that it seemed like too many of my readers wanted to burn down too many of my advertisers, but it wasn't really funny. And it still hurts.

How the trouble began

From "Multitudes: An Unauthorized Memoir"By Sam Smith

The trouble really began at the wedding. I didn't know it, however, until a few months later when I received a letter from an MIT student thanking me for the summer job offer. I didn't actually remember offering him a job. In fact, only two things about the wedding remained clear. One was my younger sister -- who leveled any playing field she happened to cross -- introducing me to her "good friend Billy." I blinked and realized that my sister's new-found friend Billy was in fact William McChesney Martin, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He had the happy look of someone remembering what it was like to be called Billy again.

The other thing I recalled was purchasing a wedding present for Charlie and his new wife Cornelia. The present was a bull calf bought during libational negotiations with Charlie's farmer neighbor. It seemed a suitable present for about your oldest friend and Charlie and Cornelia apparently thought so, too. They named the calf Sam. It was eventually converted into a steer and eaten.

I did not, however, recall hiring an MIT student for the summer. Still, I could hardly -- according to the not unreasonable code of the day -- wriggle out of an obligation simply because of consumption-induced impairment.

Which is how Jim Smith came to work for me, how that summer 1966 I started The Capitol East Gazette, and in many ways how I ended up where, however shakily, I find myself today. How, in brief, the real trouble began.

Jim Smith -- no relative but our families were friends -- had started his own publication at MIT and already possessed the energy, enthusiasm and chutzpah that would eventually lead to his publishing a short-lived daily newspaper in Brooklyn, running as an independent for mayor of New York City and virtually inventing the modern trade of broadcast transcripts. The latter enterprise began one night when Jim sat down with a videotape of a national TV news show, typed out the entire dialogue and delivered it to the show's headquarters the next day as a sample of what he could do. From this grew Journal Transcripts, a name that would become commonplace on the closing credits of years of TV talk shows.

At the time, of course, Jim had no more idea of where it all might lead than I did. I was still editing the Idler out of my apartment on Capitol Hill, a neighborhood that was racially mixed but becoming less so with the growing success of a restoration movement led by a vigorous herd of real estate dealers. The community's black residents were not happy with what was going on, but neither were many white residents, more than a few of whom had moved there to live in an integrated neighborhood.

Living there, I found it hard to ignore both the simmering tension and the hope of something better. Besides, I soon met Bob Smith -- no relative but a Presbyterian minister -- an Alinsky-trained organizer who was methodically laying the foundation for a major community coalition. Bob and I had some long talks into which I would occasionally slip my dream of starting a neighborhood newspaper to compete with one that was deeply in the service of the restoration movement. Since I barely had time for putting out the Idler, however, these talks were mostly just that.

Until, that is, I got the letter from Jim Smith. Why not, I thought, start a neighborhood newspaper over the summer with the extra help? If it worked out, fine; if not, at least I could stop imagining it. Bob Smith gave his blessing and his support, but urged me strongly not to use the term "Capitol Hill." "The Hill" consisted of the blocks closest to the Capitol, which were rapidly turning white. Bob proposed that I use "Capitol East," a phrase then only found on the maps and in the reports of city planners. It included an area deep into black Washington, with only about a quarter of its residents white.

Which is how I came not only to start The Capitol East Gazette but tried to rename the whole neighborhood at the same time.

o

There would come to be the notion that the sixties were the product of immaculate conception. In fact, they were more an act of conversion, conversion of the isolated, unfocussed, dispersed and inarticulate alienation of the 1950s into a mass movement with common language, direction, and rules. One of those rules was that nothing good and pure had ever happened before.

So if you had come of age in the fifties you were something of an anomaly, especially if you were a big guy and white and easily mistaken for a cop. Under a tree by the Lincoln Memorial's reflecting pool during a big peace march in 1967, the tie-died, pony-tailed protester next to me was quiet for a long time. Then he turned and asked softly, "CIA?"

I puffed on my pipe. "Nope"

"FBI?"

"Nope."

"Smoke?"

I took the pipe out of my mouth. "Half & Half, all day long."

"Cool," he said and gave me his love beads.

I did not get off as easily at later demonstrations. At an early environmental protest, an alternative video squad from upstate New York found me taking notes in a dark blue T-shirt and baseball hat. With camera rolling, they quizzed me at length as to my law enforcement affiliation, finding my answers profoundly unconvincing. Later, I sent them some copies of the Gazette along with a note saying that even 220-pound iron-pumpers might want to save the environment. I never heard from them.

Once, a demonstration against a proposed Potomac River bridge was joined by New York City radicals in town for another, more macro-political protest. There was no more ostentatiously radical activists than those nurtured on the polemics and politics of New York City. They were, as Oscar Wilde put it, more certain of everything than I was of anything. Even today, reading the Village Voice or the Nation, I occasionally sense someone staring disapprovingly at me from between the lines.

In this case, the New Yorkers' tactics included throwing rocks at the police. There had not been much of that sort of thing in Washington. As I wandered down Georgetown's M Street -- turned into a sort of free fire zone with helmeted cops on one side and protesters on the other -- the prop wash of a rock lapped my face and I decided it was time to leave the scene.

Others did likewise, propelled by the constabulary. The whole protest reformed on the campus of Georgetown University where I was soon accosted by several screaming, camera-grabbing, visiting radicals absolutely convinced that I was an undercover cop. This misapprehension annoyed me, since I was actually one of the few anti-freeway journalists in town. I was about to express my annoyance more firmly when a local demonstration leader stepped in and vouched for my bona fides.

o

In truth, undercover agents were all around. Throughout America, police were spying on, infiltrating and disrupting movement groups. Even outside America, students took notes on other students for the CIA. You knew it was a problem, you saw it, it had names on it. I tried to be pragmatic. After all, I had spent summers in a house in Maine with a crank telephone and a 10-party line. Anyone on the line could listen in on anyone else and the operators could listen in on everyone in town. If you asked the operator to dial Joe, it would not have been surprising for her to tell you that Joe was currently at the barbershop or that she had just seen him walking down Main Street.

I thus had never thought of the phone much as a device for private conversation. Further, I figured that one of the best ways to handle the problem was not to overload one's life with secrets and conspiracies. I told friends that the worse thing that could happen if my phone were tapped was that the intruder might actually learn something. I considered myself something of a missionary and who better to convert than a member of the intelligence community?

I therefore found it interesting but not unduly alarming when a subscriber I suspected was with the CIA bought two subscriptions year after year. I was somewhat flattered when this subscriber introduced himself and invited my wife and me to dinner and then was somewhat disappointed when nothing more was heard from him after the dinner except for his annual renewals. Apparently my policy of non-conspiratorial openness was too boring to pursue.

Similarly, I enjoyed my conversations with a 9th Precinct police officer who would drop by the Gazette office with his dour squad car partner. I may have been the only underground newspaper editor in the country who was periodically visited by a uniformed cop to discuss politics, both of us on company time.

To be sure, I had known the officer over the years, mainly as his sister's brother. He had first come around to my office shortly after graduating from Harvard to discuss what he was going to do with his life. One of the options had been to join the police department. I attempted to discourage him but to no avail. He took the job and ended up in my own precinct and with my own office on his beat. Officer Don Graham would continue to ignore my advice in his later employment as publisher of the Washington Post.

I assumed Graham was filing reports about me with someone, just as someone had filed a report on another alternative paper in town, the Colonial Times, when it ran a cover showing a fat lady protesting a local revenue proposal with a button reading, Fuck the food tax! A Postal inspector, apparently assuming that our papers were locked in mortal commercial combat, came by my office one day to suggest I file an obscenity complaint against the Colonial Times. Instead, I gave the man a lecture on the First Amendment and called my friends at the Times to warn them of the danger afoot.

It was a time of hidden agendas and multiple agendas. The police had found a few black militants willing to disrupt white peace groups and a few white radicals willing to do the same. On May Day in 1971 when the police arrested 12,000 people in DC -- including reporters and bystanders -- in what was probably the largest mass arrest in American history, I noticed a prominent black militant trapped in one of the corrals the cops had improvised. About a half hour later, he was out of the corral and talking to a top department official. Then, not long after, he was back inside the roped off area. You learned to look for things like that just as I had learned to keep looking behind me at demonstrations so I could see where the cops were moving. Which is how I didn't get arrested on May Day 1971.

Some of those trapped were detained in an old sports arena; others were herded onto the playing field of RFK Stadium. That night the temperature dropped to the thirties.

I went to the courthouse -- crowded as a Thanksgiving weekend airport -- sometime after midnight to bail out Gren Whitman on personal recognizance. I wore a coat and tie and when the judge asked if I were a DC resident, I stood at parade rest and replied, "A native, your honor." My friend was released.

A while later, Gren called from Baltimore to borrow my office "as place for the press to meet before an action." I asked what was up. "Don't ask," he instructed. "I don't want you to know. That way you won't be liable." I agreed to help. The reporters and the activists arrived at my office at the scheduled time and within minutes departed on their still-unidentified mission. Later that day I learned that nine protesters had broken into the offices of the Dow Chemical Company and spilled blood over the files in an anti-war protest.

The next morning Kathy woke me saying that I'd better look at what was in the Post. In the upper left corner of the front page was a story describing the attack. In the lead it said that reporters had been told to meet at the offices of the DC Gazette and gave the address, 109 8th Street NE.

I was upset and angry. The Post, it appeared, was setting me up for retaliation -- legal and otherwise. My only role in the affair had been to provide a gathering place for my news colleagues and now the Great Prude of 15th Street was out to punish me for having done their reporter a favor. I called a lawyer friend who came over and calmed me down. Nothing more came of it. Which, however, is how I came not to trust the Post.

In my neighborhood, the Age of Aquarius often looked more like a war zone. Many of the people there were not part of a counter-culture but of an abandoned one. Even the jukebox at the Stanton Grill -- purveyors of Greek and American food to white Appalachian boarding house residents -- played the Supremes and the Temptations, not Bob Dylan.

The grill, open from 6 am to 10 pm, was run by two Greek brothers, Pete & Sam, who split the shift. They never took a vacation and put at least one boy through collage through their unflagging provision of braised short-ribs, chicken Greek style, and "I Hear a Symphony" calling from the juke box. They fed the old Capitol Hill roomers, the guys from the union hall down the street, and a few young singles like myself with good plain food that varied no more over the yeas than the shade of brick on the school across the street. One of their sons now owns a restaurant on Capitol Hill.

We lived in one of the toughest sections of town but experienced relatively few problems. Which is to say that two cars of friends were stolen from our block. Our house was broken into several times. Once, a half gallon of vodka was returned to us by the police, complete with blood stains and evidence tag. I kept it like that in my bar. Some months later, the house was broken into and the bottle stolen again.

There were also a few break-ins that were less than routine. One afternoon I came home and found my front door busted open. Through the void, two friends were pushing an ugly old mantle piece they thought would look nice around my fireplace.

I had bought the traditional Washington row house on 6th Street NE after becoming engaged, but before getting married. I assured Kathy that the neighborhood was safe. It was, after all, only about four blocks away from where I was already living. The neighborhood kids who helped me move weren't so sure. Over lunch at my new abode, one observed that he "wouldn't come over here with the whole US Marines."

"But," replied another, "it's better than Death Alley."

"Death Alley?"

"You know, Sam, that alley behind your apartment." I had never thought about it from a kid's point of view, but he was right: the dead end of Death Alley would not be a pleasant place to be trapped.


When I returned to my new house the next morning, I found that one of my prized possessions was gone already, an eight-foot styrofoam sailing dinghy precisely named the One Iota. It was barely more than a beer cooler with canvas, rudder and a dagger board, but at forty pounds, it was easy to flip on top of Gloria and drive down to Roach's Run at the end of the National Airport runway for a late afternoon sail. Gloria was my ten year-old Chrysler New Yorker. It was also precisely named. I called it Gloria because it was sick transit.

Sailing on the Potomac was something of an exercise in maritime masochism. The down draft of a landing plane could flip a small sailboat using the end of the runway for home port. On one occasion I beached the boat and took refuge during a thunderstorm in my swimming suit under an Anacostia freeway overpass. There wasn't much wind in summer and it was said that if you fell overboard you should get a tetanus shot. I tried, however, to provide some elegance to the experience: I placed a jack staff on the transom from which I flew a tiny yacht ensign and added two cocktail glass holders mounted on gimbal rings.

One day, Jerry Cabel, press secretary to Senator Phil Hart, joined me for a late afternoon sail. We were lolling about the Potomac drinking Myer's rum when Jerry proposed that we have dinner at Hogates, a waterfront restaurant,.

"I don't think we're dressed for it," I demurred.

"Leave it to me."

And so two slightly damp sailors in t-shirts and jeans walked up to the maitre d' and as he crinkled his nose, Jerry announced haughtily, "A table for two, please. We came by sea."

Now my beloved yacht had been stolen from the backyard. The window in the basement was broken and mast, oars, rudder, daggerboard, lifejackets and sails were all gone. Nothing else in the house had been touched. Clearly a ruthless gang of cheap sailing dinghy thieves had been at work.

I walked down to the 9th Precinct -- then claiming the city's worst crime rate -- and reported a stolen boat. The desk officer looked intently at the Polaroid I had brought along. "Would you like to keep it?" I asked. "No, I wouldn't know where to file it."

Later that same day, Thomas Glasgow Smith, attorney at law, part Cherokee, all alcoholic, and about the foulest-mouthed, craziest paragon of decency I ever met, called to say that he had borrowed the One Iota and would soon be returning it. It seems he had been on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay the previous evening and had decided at about two in the morning to go for a sail and thought I wouldn't mind.

Which is one of the reasons I was less than totally surprised by the subsequent forced entry by mantelpiece. One of the perps, after all, was Tom Smith. Tom was beloved in the neighborhood until about the third drink after which almost anything was possible. He had, as chair of the local recreation council, once called a 6:30 am emergency meeting to deal with the just discovered gross misplacement of several pieces of play equipment in an unprotected corner of a park only a few feet from a freeway entrance ramp. We quickly gathered in a nearby home as Tom awakened the recreation director with a torrent of obscenities. The equipment was moved later that day.

Kathy hadn't really bargained for all this. Less than a year earlier we had met at what was for both of us the atypical locale of a Georgetown cocktail party. Kathy, after several years as head of public relations for the Wisconsin State Historical Society, had recently arrived in a city that was still the sort of place where, when she went for an interview with a liberal Democratic congressman, she found him wondering aloud to his aide what they would "do with her" and the aide responding, "Well, Gaylord's got a girl and they like her." Kathy went to see Senator Gaylord Nelson and ended up as his assistant press secretary.

Kathy, although she didn't completely understand it at first, had not only married me but had joined, for better or for worse, my friends and relations. It could be puzzling. A long afternoon with several of them, for example, deteriorated into a loud and unforgiving argument about Vietnam. When the last of my buddies left, Kathy said how sad it was that we would probably never see them again. "What do you mean?" I asked. She told me that our words had seemed irreparable. I assured her they would soon be back. And they were.

Among our mutual enterprises was yet another urban sailing craft, this one co-purchased with my friends Terry Murphy and Gerry Bunker. The boat was a 19-foot Shark-class cruising sloop with triple keels. It was basically a Lightning with a cabin, but it had a double bunk far larger and more comfortable (once you were in it for the night) than that of much grander vessels.

The boat was supposed to be delivered to us at Don Williams' Back Creek Marina in Annapolis. I faithfully logged the event:

Kathy, Sam, and Terry waited at Back Creek for four hours but no boat. As it turned out, the cradle had collapsed en route and Little's henchmen had spent two hours repairing it by the side of the highway. We launched the boat without problem and proceeded in a stiff northwest breeze towards Don Williams' dock. Disaster quickly overtook us as the main sheet became entangled with the motor, yanking it out of its bracket and dumping it overboard. Shortly thereafter, the mainsheet jammed between the outboard bracket and the transom causing us to lose full control of the boat. There was a minor collision with an anchored craft and considerable difficulty coming into the dock -- rounding out an active afternoon. On Sunday, April 23, Sam and Terry procured the assistance of two Navy divers who searched vainly for the motor.

Not an auspicious start for former officers of the Navy and Coast Guard. Still, I was chosen mess treasurer and reported regularly to my ship mates. In October I wrote:

The main noteworthy event of late has been a general consensus on the name October for the boat. There is somewhat less consensus as to whether the figure 2 or Two should be added, being the sum of the digits of all our wedding dates, and it is expected that we shall continue to have a meaningful dialogue on the subject .

March was slow:

No cruise. No news. No dues. Faithfully submitted, Sam

April 1968:

Although extensive scraping and sand-papering has taken place at this point, the boat remains on dry land into the navigation season. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary reasons for this, including civil disorders, inclement weather etc. The boat also remains unnamed. Recently some grassroots support has been developing for Quandary. Not too much should be made of this since it has happened before.

June:

The boat is launched but at the present time lacks a main halyard which slows it down somewhat.

The following year it took us five weekends to get the boat ready -- thanks to a series of late afternoon thunderstorms that caused wet paint to bubble and buckle. We sailed the boat only three weekends and sold it the following season.

ooo

My circulation staff came from the neighborhood -- when they weren't in jail. At one point, about half of them were. I found needles behind stacks of papers in the office, had a few checks stolen and was even tipped to a kidnap threat credible enough that my wife and son left town while the police staked out my house for a day. But most of the time things went pretty well.

With ten to fifteen thousand papers to distribute, I needed some help and there were plenty of youths in the neighborhood who wanted work. I could fit myself, ten thousand copies, and three kids into Kathy's roof-rack equipped red Volkswagen.

One day I came home to find several of the neighborhood youths watching another run out in front of cars that were forced to swerve or brake suddenly. I asked what was going on. "Oh, Bo, he crazy," I was told. "He try kill hisself."

When Bo returned to the sidewalk I introduced myself and suggested some alternative activities for the afternoon, none of which seemed to interest him much. Bo was 16, somewhat older than the others, and seemed considerably more sophisticated when he wasn't doing dumb things like trying to kill himself. Talking some more, I discovered that Bo actually knew how to type. Bo, in fact, was quite bright.

Which is how Bo became a part-time member of the Gazette staff. There were good days and bad ones, but I was an editor and not a therapist and so when Bo told me one day he was going to kill himself all I knew how to do was to sit with him and talk and talk and talk. Or when he called me up one night with the same intent, to talk and talk and talk again.

He didn't commit suicide but he didn't really get better. I tried to get him help but he had been raised on the idea that you were either crazy or you weren't and he, as he made sure I agreed, wasn't crazy. I finally persuaded him to go with me to the Area C Mental Health Clinic but that didn't take either.

Matters deteriorated and with the deterioration, Bo became more manipulative and less dependable and more frequently clearly on drugs. I finally reached the end of what I could do and told him so.

That didn't work, either. One night around eleven-thirty he showed up at our front door, high and scared, begging for sanctuary from his pusher who was on his tail. As I looked out the window, I saw a two-tone brown Cadillac drive slowly by several times.

I wasn't going to get into the middle of Bo's failed deals. I finally figured that the safest place for Bo that night might be jail. So I called the local precinct, explained the situation and suggested they just take him down to the station house until the problem subsided.

A white cop arrived and Bo left with him. As they walked down the street, something went wrong and the two started fighting, with Bo eventually losing and being forcibly taken off. A neighbor, a popular black singer at the nearby Mr. Henry's bar, looked out his window, saw a white cop assaulting a black man and went down to the precinct and bailed Bo out. One hour later, Bo was at my door again begging to be let in. This time I called the precinct and asked them to send a black cop and just take Bo home. They did and the evening ended.

But Bo continued his slide and was eventually arrested for robbery. While in prison, he wrote me a letter blaming me for his troubles. I wrote back in considerable heat telling him to stop blaming others and to get some help so he wouldn't be so screwed up when he got out. This time he listened.

When his sentence was over, he came to see me, rational and sell-possessed. He wanted a job but I told him that it was time for him to move on. I saw him once again and he seemed all right.
There were several times I might have followed my own advice and gone straight. But I declined a job offer from a Post editor and when James Reston called and asked if I would like to be his assistant, I also turned him down. Reston asked me if I had any suggestions. I gave him the name of my friend and ex-roommate, Jim Sterba, then with the Washington Star. Sterba went on to cover Vietnam for the New York Times and become foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal. Neither fate would have pleased me much. Not long after, Reston called again and invited me to lunch at the Metropolitan Club. There, he proposed another job: editor of the Vineyard Gazette, a paper on Martha's Vineyard he had recently acquired.

I politely told him I felt I was too young to retire and I never heard from him again. The way I saw it was that I had enough money to risk doing something different and still had time to recover if I failed.

It was a time for trying things. I even seriously considered working for the National Enquirer. A friend at Congressional Quarterly called with news that a mutual acquaintance -- a deputy editor at the tabloid -- was looking for a Washington column. The Enquirer was willing to pay $800 a week -- an enormous sum at the time albeit some of it intended for loosening lips.

My friend's scheme was brilliant. Four of us would write under a single pseudonym. Thus we could all keep our day jobs while writing one quarter of a column for a fee greater than my salary as a Coast Guard lieutenant.

For five hours, we sat in the dark, dignified dining hall of the Mayflower Hotel discussing the project with the tabloid's chief editor, a small, dapper Englishman who moved from national politics to the importance of dog stories in perfect segué. We sold each other on ourselves and the three other conspirators -- all of whom worked for Congressional Quarterly -- returned to broach the subject with their publisher, Nelson Pointer. Pointer pointedly responded that they could either work for CQ or for the Enquirer but not for both. The scheme disintegrated. I did get paid $100 for a one paragraph item the Enquirer published, but afterwards I felt a little tawdry and never submitted anything else.

After that, the establishment press pretty much left me alone, except that quite a few years later Jack Limpert, editor of the Washingtonian, came up to me at a party and said, "Sam, if we were to name you a Washingtonian of the year, would you say anything outrageous?" I sort of smiled and he excused himself and I never heard from him again either.

Not accepting two job offers from Scotty Reston was far from my only apostasy of the era. I also let my name drop from the Social Register and never returned the form when I was invited to be listed in Washington's similar Green Book. I don't recall having any particularly noble thoughts about this although perhaps a clue exists in an article I wrote in 1966 on the city's society pages: "a place where cliches and commercials hang from paragraphs like Spanish moss and where implicit values and attitudes have the twisted character of a cypress root; a place inhabited mainly reporters and publicity gluttons."

I also noted:

The society section acts as though Negroes never got married, gave to charity, or held parties. This stems in part from the general attitude of newspapers towards Negroes. Then tend to report them as an issue or a problem, but pay little attention to them as individuals. The average Negro can only hope to attract the notice of his local daily by robbing a liquor store, playing football, or dying.

More important, however, Negroes are not part of the society page because they are not part of society. Society is an institution strongly based on the ugly foundation of discrimination. Its premises are similar to those of Sheriff Jim Clark, filled with spurious ideas about people's "worth" and "place" . . . We have enough problems in this country caused by false emphasis on status, hoked-up values and worthless discriminations without such a healthy assist from the press.

ooo

At the time that I talked to James Reston, I was in the breakfast nook of our pullman kitchen on 6th Street NE, the first editorial office of the Gazette. A Yield House, pseudo-general store, cubby-holed, pine desk filled the opening between the kitchen and nook. An electric frying pan sat atop the desk, which is how some of the galleys went back to the printer with chicken grease all over them.

Paste-up and layout were done on the dining room table. Kathy, who had been in charge of publications for the Wisconsin State Historical Society, taught me the intricacies of making words look good on a page.

At first we used a letterpress printer, then we went offset with rub-on letters for headlines, and later used a complex, malodorous and malfunctioning machine that required each headline be typed on film using an alphabet mounted on the circumference of a disc that was a foot in diameter. The results were routed on movie projector-type ratchets through three small containers to be developed, fixed and washed.

Our typesetter was an IBM Executive typewriter (later a pair of IBM Selectrics). Each mistake was retyped, the corrections excised from the paper with a razor blade and then affixed with rubber cement. At the end of an issue our dining room floor was covered with confetti.

Kathy fell comfortably into the questionable notion that one should publish a newspaper from one's house. She was listed on the masthead as 'Editor's Wife' and wrote a column of the same name. I thought it described her ubiquitous role pretty well while also providing a hint of Thurberesque menace. When the women's movement arrived, however, I would be informed by several staffers that what I thought was wrong. By this time, Kathy and I had decided that putting out a publication together and staying married wasn't all that easy. We opted for the latter. Kathy became an historian and we thereafter followed the rule that I would take care of everything from the 1960s on and she would take care of everything before. It's worked pretty well as the anniversary of our marital and publishing adventures have marched hand in hand down the decades.

Sally Crowell became the Gazette's first regular staff me mber, and her new son, Ted, became the first client of the paper's day care center (AKA the living room floor) It soon became clear, however, that the paper needed its own quarters. We moved into a storefront on 8th Street NE. I splurged on a big sign with The Capitol East Gazette in gold P.T. Barnum type on a black background. It made me feel that now I was running a real newspaper.

The Gazette was part of a explosion of underground, alternative and community journals of the period. Only a few of this era, such as the Bay Guardian which started the same year as the Gazette, remain. The explosion had political roots, but also technological ones. The 1960s happened along just as conventional newspapers were switching from hot type to offset printing. The new machinery was expensive and, because of its efficiency, idle much of the time, especially at weekly publications. Printers were scrambling for any work they could get. The result was that a tabloid press run of 10,000 to 15,000 could cost less than $400.

There were other economies as well. The Underground Press Syndicate, started in 1967, eventually included several hundred papers willing to share stories and graphics without charge. The resulting journalistic synergy was remarkable. These were papers unhampered by the ambivalence that would come to afflict later independent media -- publications unable to decide whether they were an alternative to conventional journalism or merely its farm team. In the underground press, we knew which side we were on.

The Gazette was also blessed by a steady stream of talented folk who provided copy, let us use their columns or otherwise looked kindly upon us, among them Chuck Stone, Charlie McDowell, Erbin Crowell, Jim Ridgeway, Larry Cuban, Tuli Kupferberg, Paul Krassner, Anton Wood, Anne Chase, Marcia Feldman, Jim Ramsey, Carl Bergman, and Mitch Ratner. Long before Tony Auth won a Pulitzer, the Gazette ran his cartoons. Zippy the Pinhead and Dave Barry were also introduced to Washington readers through the Gazette. And the paper featured Archihorse, the only urban planning comic strip in the country (by John Wiebenson) and the only regular column written by a jail inmate.


Then there were the critics. Kathy kept saying that the Gazette ought to have an arts section. Though I played jazz, I had flunked Fine Arts 13, seldom read cultural criticism and regarded myself pretty much a philistine. I finally told Kathy that if she really wanted an arts section she'd have to find one. She shortly came back with Joel Siegel to cover movies and Tom Shales to write about drama. Siegel went on to be a local cinematic guru and Shales was hired by the Washington Post's Style section, becoming its famed syndicated television critic.

When Style began, Tom wrote a Gazette column in which he quoted someone as saying, "What the Post needs now is a section called Substance." After he went to work for the Post, Shales continued to write for the Gazette under the pseudonym of Egbert Sousé, a W.C. Fields character. A Post editor, however, discovered the disguise, which is how the Gazette lost its drama critic. Nonetheless there was no shortage of fine cultural criticism thanks to Andrea Dean, Cris Wittenberg, Jean Lewton, Val Lewton, Sally Crowell, Ed Merritt, Patti Griffith, and Richard King.

There was also an elusive corespondent named Josiah Swampoodle who described himself as "purveyor of split infinitives for more than 30 years." Swampoodle covered the news that others didn't:

Well, here it is fall again, that time of year when the leaves drop gently from those trees that haven't already died of air pollution and pesticides. It's just too bad the Highway Dept. doesn't plant more trees. The fallen leaves hide the trash the Sanitation Dept. doesn't pick up. . . .

Keep your powder dry, remember to call your ambulance early, and tell them you're going to the airport. Then they'll be sure to come. . . .

Then there was Roland Freeman. Roland had introduced himself by screaming at me over the phone. We had run a striking front page shot of two karate students sent us by the Southeast Enrichment Center. When I answered Roland's call, I quickly learned that the photo had been his, that we should have given him credit, that he was a poor black drop-out who was working at a car wash trying to break into photography and how could we have been so cruel and so forth. Normally, I would have felt chastened, but Roland's aggressiveness sparked an uncharacteristic response: I started yelling back at him.

"Listen, you say you want to be a photographer?" I shouted.

"Yeah."

"And you want credit for your work?"

"That's right."

"Well, I'm gonna to tell you how to become a photographer and get full credit for your work."

"OK. I'm listening."

"What you do is you go and get yourself a fucking rubber stamp that reads 'Credit Roland Freeman, Photographer, all rights reserved' and you stamp every photo you take with that stamp and then you'll be a real photographer and I won't print anymore of your frigging photos without giving you credit."

We both quieted down and the next thing I knew Roland was the Gazette's photo editor. Later he would win the first photographic grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and become a nationally known photographer and an expert on African-America quilting.

Roland had been on his own a long time. By the time the Baltimore-born Freeman was 12 he had already been a newspaper delivery boy, shoe-shine boy, and a helper on junk and watermelon horse-and-wagons driven by men called "arabers." A biography Roland prepared for one of his exhibitions continued his story:

In the next two or three years he traveled with a small carnival, worked as a migrant laborer in the Southwest and rode the, rails for a short time, after which he settled on a small tobacco farm in Southern Maryland until the age of eighteen. Several months later, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force for four years, much of which time he spent in Paris, France. The complete renaissance which he underwent in Europe influenced his outlook on life from that time on. Upon his return to this country, he worked at a variety of jobs to support himself while he dabbled in art and folk music and he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. Then he worked for a while as a hospital attendant manager of a car wash and filling station while he returned to school at night to further his education.

On the face of it, his history follows a not uncommon pattern for a black child born into an environment which assured poor formal education, backbreaking work, often inadequate diet, constant economic, and sometimes legal insecurity, and. a future that has to be fought for without letup.

Years later he would return to Baltimore for an exhibit of his work on the arabers as well as a presentation from the mayor. When Kathy and I arrived at the Baltimore Museum of Art auditorium, Roland was running up and down the aisles personally making sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. He just couldn't get it through his head that he was the guest of honor.

Everything excited Roland. Once, as Kathy was driving him on a photo mission, he started barking orders, "Slow down! See that man on the park bench, I want to get him. . . Take a right . . . Okay, now grab a left. . ."

It was, however, a no-left turn and a cop pulled Kathy over. As Kathy and the officer discussed her malfeasance, she heard a repeated click and whir. Glancing to the right she saw that Roland had his camera resting on the seat and pointed at the cop as he wrote the ticket. Fortunately the officer didn't notice and we ran the photos.

ooo

The meat and potatoes of our coverage were the endless meetings taking place in the community, not a few of them spurred by questions as to what to do and who should do it with the money coming from the war on poverty. Everyone knew Robert's Rules of Order and its locally sanctioned addenda: "Mr. Chairman, I have an unreadiness." Sometimes meetings broke up in pandemonium. One was literally turned around after the chair declared it illegal. The vice chair, a minister and cab driver who wore a clerical collar around his neck and a coin holder on his belt, stood up in the back of the room and announced that the meeting would go on and requested everyone to turn their chairs around. Most did, leaving the chairman speechless in what was now the rear.

On another occasion this same preacher-cabbie urged the audience to "Calm the tempest, bridle tongues, and govern our thoughts." It didn't work. The minutes of the group bring back the flavor, if not the purpose, of the dispute:

The meeting was held on the above date with Mr. Swaim presiding. As a background he reviewed the Annual Assembly of Delegates which was not held because there was no quorum, and questions concerning the By-Laws, missing minutes and the fact that the Executive Committee minutes were not available . . .

Mrs. Mayo felt that all people should be allowed to speak. Mr. Geathers stated that it was not legal for non-members to participate. Mrs. Mayo then asked, "Who are the members?" Mr. Geathers stated that we were going to establish definitely the answer to this question . . .

The meetings may have seemed chaotic but they were actually part of a community coming alive, of power being transferred to better places, and of the anarchistic results of discovering hope. And you met some wonderful people covering the story, people like the Reverend Imogene Stewart of the Revolutionary Church of What's Happening Now.

And public housing activist Lucille Goodwin. Ms. Goodwin, it seemed, spent all day on the phone. A long-time resident of Langston Terrace public housing in Near Northeast, constantly cropping up on anti-poverty boards and committees, ever-present at the big fights, chairwoman of the citizen's advisory arm of the Neighborhood Legal Services program, she had plenty to talk about. A memo had come in the mail that she wanted to read, someone was putting something over on someone else, or perhaps she just had to report that at some local meeting "those folks messed themselves up good last night." She carried out her civic functions with an energy more typical of one half her age, and she did so despite an ill and old husband who had to be helped in and out of rooms and who would sit quietly in a corner fiddling with a little plastic soldier while his wife took on the accumulated offenses of the system. It was her intensity and concern more than her language that carried her through, and she would toss around transliterated multisyllabic words like confetti. Everyone knew just what Lucille Goodwin meant even if they hadn't understood what she said. One day, though, she ended her call with a message that hung around. "You know how you got to treat them people downtown?" she asked, and then without waiting offered the solution: "You gotta technique 'em."

ooo

It is one thing to use political power; it is another thing to be denied political power and still produce change. It was the latter talent that a number of exceptional and unexceptional Washingtonians developed following the awakening of a local civil rights movement. The old-line groups, like the white liberals on the Home Rule Committee, the local NAACP, and the black ministers would plod along with traditional lobbying, petitions, and failure and increasingly they would be estranged from agitators, troublemakers, and radicals like Julius Hobson, Sammie Abbott, and Marion Barry. The newer activists realized that without the vote, policymakers would be influenced only by techniques and strategies that surprised, confounded, aggravated, delayed, or just plain scared them.

The biggest manifestation of this new spirit in our neighborhood came in 1969 when Bob Smith created a large Alinsky-like umbrella group called the Capitol East Community Organiation. At its first convention, representatives from more than 70 groups showed up to form what the Washington Post called a "broadly based, citizen-run community coalition."

Not everyone was impressed, though. Regina Cobb, chair of the DC Family Rights Organization, took one look at the proposed slate of officers and demanded, "Why are there so many well-to-do people on the committee? Why aren't there more poor people?"

Before long, seven new names had been added to the slate of 13 vice presidential candidates, among them Mrs. Cobb. Again she was not impressed: "I didn't ask to be nominated as a board member, I asked to be president." She lost.

Mrs. James Morrison of the League of Women Voters also had an objection; she wanted to know what the body's condemnation of the Vietnam War had to do with Capitol East: "Let's deal with Capitol East and not worry about the rest of the world at this assembly."

CECO would be short lived, one of its most noticeable achievement being window signs that warned gentrifiers, "I love Capitol East and will fight to STAY!" The organization's demise was speeded by the financial misdeeds of the director that led to a court trial notable for the appearance of two nuns as character witnesses. He may have been a sinner, but he was our sinner and not the courts. Saul Alinksy would have smiled.

Only a few national figures gave more than passing attention to the city. The most striking exceptions were Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. When Congress wouldn't act on home rule, LBJ gave the city its own de facto government through the expediency of a bureaucratic reorganization, his appointees instructed personally by the big man to "act as if they had been elected." And Ladybird personally directed a beautification program for our neighborhood. This was no publicity shot, rather a carefully designed program in which she enlisted the efforts of premier landscape architect Larry Halperin who produced one of the few urban plans I've seen that didn't involve the probable displacement of currently resident citizens. Further, she assigned a White House staffer to work with neighborhood leaders -- using skill instead of spin -- in carrying out the project. There would be periodic reports of a White House limousine arriving in our neighborhood as Mrs. Johnson quietly checked on how things were going.


Mrs. Johnson is one of the most underrated of president's wives, ignored, for example, by the boomer women who fawned over Hillary Clinton. In fact, Mrs. Johnson had certain similarities with HRC. She was fiercely independent, she struck out on her own, she was a professional, she made her own money, and she had to deal with a husband who was abusive and a sexual predator. The difference was that Lady Bird took on these challenges with skill, wisdom and integrity. Add in the far greater prejudice against women of her time and this becomes truly impressive. For example, Lady Bird had the nerve to major in journalism long before the days of ubiquitous blow-dried blonde anchorwomen. There weren't glass ceilings back then but heavy, locked doors. She was the first woman in the White House to earn a million dollars on her own. And she ran her own television operation.

Instead of heavily contrived "listening tours," Mrs. Johnson took a four-day 1,628 mile trip through the south to sell the 1964 Civil Rights Act to towns, writes one biographer, that "were in such racial turmoil it was not considered safe for Johnson to go. Her message was that the Civil War should at long last come to an end which could only happen if the South shed its racist past and moved into the modern world." As the Washington Post noted years later, she faced "bomb threats, snubs from local governors, rumors of riots, and heckling from crowds." When key Johnson aide Walter Jenkins was spotted in homosexual activity at the local Y, Lady Bird urged LBJ to let her give him a job at her television station so it wouldn't look at though they were deserting the Jenkins in their time of need. Said LBJ, "You won't have your license five minutes." Replied his wife: "I'd just rather offer it to them and let the license go down the drain." Being that her husband was LBJ and the time was the 1960s, Lady Bird eventually capitulated.

ooo

Techniquing them was made considerably harder by the fact that Washington was, without a trace of rhetoric, a colony. Washingtonians reacted to the city's political status in varied ways. Some resigned themselves to it; some ignored it; some were not aware of it; some capitalized upon it and some fought to change it. To the poor of the city the matter often seemed quite irrelevant compared to their more immediate problems. To the businessman with contacts on the Hill and at the District Building (and to those he contacted), the situation was in many ways quite satisfactory. To long-time residents, the District's status appeared as sadly inevitable as the summer humidity. And among those oriented towards the federal government -- the powerful and the wealthy -- the city was seldom mentioned except as an impediment to automobile travel, a threat to their personal safety, or a dwindling source of reliable maids.

But there are still many people who threw themselves into the problems of Washington with vigor, if not always with wisdom, They became accustomed to failure and to having their efforts ignored by the government, by the federal and suburban oriented press, and by their friends. Many of them adopted the city. Commissioner Walter Washington came to DC from Georgia. Marion Barry moved from Tennessee, and activist Julius Hobson was born in Alabama. The lack of a powerful native elite -- with the exception of the Dunbar High School alumni crowd in the school system -- made it easy for concerned, impatient, or ambitious outsiders to make a mark on the city. In fact, the newcomers often provided a counter-force to the feeling of futility, that often gripped the city.

ooo

Sammie Abbott had been in the Washington area since 1940 but he was still on the outside. By all rights, though, Abbott should have been disqualified as a DC leader on at least three grounds: he was too white, he was too old, and he lived in the suburbs. Instead, this short man with a nail-file voice became the nemesis of public officials for years. Abbott, the grandson of Arab Christians who fled Turkish persecution in Syria, had been a labor organizer, a bricklayer and a World War II veteran with a Bronze Star. He had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was arrested about 40 times for his labor, peace, civil rights, and anti-freeway protests. His wife's father had introduced him to her while the both men were in jail.

Abbott worked high in an office building on Connecticut Avenue as a commercial artist. Between dabs of rubber cement, he kept on the phone tracking down witnesses for the next freeway hearing, plotting strategy against the Highway Department, always mad as hell about something. Occasionally his eyes would break into an elfish twinkle, but most of the time Abbott was an angry middle-aged man showing angry young men and women how to be angry. The Post once described him as "strident, confrontational, acerbic, cantankerous, even abusive." Abbott himself said,, "I'm perpetually mad person. I hate injustice. As far as I'm concerned, I'm living to fight injustice. I'm living to fight the goddamned thing. I'm too mad to sleep." Once he got so mad that he threw a bottle of India ink out of the window ruining the clothes of a passer-by below.

One of Sammie's advantages was his voice. His hoarse fury roared through a room like coal crashing down a chute "The people of the District," he told a group at the proposed site of the Three Sisters Bridge, "are fighting not only the highway department, the Congress of the U.S., but the media -- particularly the Star and the Post -- which are not only the handmaidens [of the highway interests] but the prostitutes." Abbott said he was prepared to die in the fight. The Post reported :

Abbott seemed to warm to the crowd as the crowd warmed to him. A physically small man, he seemed to grow as he almost yelled, "Before another inch of these damn freeways gets laid down in the District there's gonna be flames, there's gonna be fighting, there's gonna be rebellion! And I for one--" He was drowned out by cheers and clapping, raised his fist in salute to the crowd.

Sammie never stopped his agitation, in his seventies serving as mayor of a nearby suburb affectionately known as the People's Republic of Takoma Park. After five years in office he lost by seven votes to a lawyer more in tune with the young, non-political professionals moving into a town that had been once been among the first to refuse to do business with companies making nuclear weapons.

By the middle of the sixties I was fast approaching the age of thirty which -- according to contemporary mythology -- was about to render me totally untrustworthy. Having only recently signed up for social change, I found the prospect of such early forced retirement from righteousness annoying and depressing. Then I noticed a curious thing. In the peace, civil rights and anti-freeway movements, some of the people who were making the most sense -- and the most difference -- were even older than I. People like Abe Bloom, David and Selma Rein, Julius Hobson and Sammie Abbott.

These were the sort of people who, to a degree not widely recognized, held things together in the sixties, often old leftists who actually knew how to organize marches and rallies and fight in court and keep offices going even when overfilled with people who were just passing through or trying out a new direction for a little while or using that moment in history as a crash pad for their souls.

As a product of the fifties in which cynicism and disengagement were the highest forms of political activity, I had found myself unable to identify with the Aquarian optimism of those just a few years younger than myself. Aquarius was not an age, I thought, but brief happy fireworks in the long night before human understanding. I came to believe that Bobby Seale's appeal to "seize the time" best summarized the transitory nature of the success that social and political change were then enjoying. In a literal sense, narrow in focus, I was not off the mark. But because I came to know a few people like Sammie Abbott -- it came not to matter.

Sammie, after all, had been a union organizer before I had even been born. He had been protesting against the bomb while I was still in elementary school. He had been black-listed while I was in high school. That he had remained so committed, creative and indefatigable for so long was a truly remarkable discovery. That he had done so during times not only without the support of mass demonstrations, mass media, and the cheers of a whole generation, but in times when such activities were considered akin to treason was inspiring. Above all, the constancy of it, the steadfastness, made me comprehend for the first time the existential concept of personal witness that had eluded me even during my years of Quaker education.

Of course I could not have thus described Sammie's effect on me back then. Nor, I regret, did I ever mention it to him. There was about Sammie the compelling aura of a job to be done as soon as possible and the day to sit back and reflect on it all never came. In fact, I wondered what Sammie would have said about his memorial service, at which hundreds of activists gathered for two and a half hours of eulogy, music and anecdotes. Looking at the energy, talent and faith in the room, I suspect he might have been annoyed that at a time so hostage to puerile apocalyptic visions, we were wasting the afternoon with mere memories instead of action. I would not have been surprised if he had arisen in mist from the middle of the room and in that voice and with that pointing finger so reminiscent of an old testament prophet interrupted our proceedings and demanded that we get back to business.

For my part on the program, I remembered for my friends that voice and that finger pointing at Thomas Airis, director of highways, or Gilbert Hahn, chair of the city council. Through that voice flowed the aggregated anger of a city abused, of justice ignored, of dreams dismantled.

But I also remember that the anger was only the beginning. Always there was a plan, an idea, a way of doing it. Drive down U Street, through Brookland or up the Potomac River by the islands of the Three Sisters and you will find no freeway there, in part because Sammie knew how to move from anger to productive action.

Like the time someone discovered an internal DC government map showing a proposed freeway right through the heart of Shaw. Sammie immediately sat down and created a 3 by 4 foot poster with a blow-up of the section in question, with the freeway overlaid in red and identifying exactly which buildings -- such as Pride headquarters and the Howard Theatre -- would be torn down. The headline: "White Men's Roads Through Black Men's Homes." The posters were tacked up all over Shaw and within a few days the DC government was disingenuously denying it had even thought of a freeway there. It may have been the first and only freeway stopped after less than a month of protest.

Sammie built his entire life around truth and justice. A cause was not a career move, not on option purchased on a political future, nor a flirtation of conscience. It was simply the just life's work of a just human.

Copyright 1997 Sam Smith

Hooligan days

By Sam Smith

The Greyhound rolled the 180 miles towards Yorktown, passing weathered, weary places where nothing seemed new, nothing shone, nothing smiled. As I sat alone in the dark of tidewater Virginia in the winter of 1961, my own past seemed to fade as irretrievably as the deep, distant line of shadows where the fields and the woods met. When I stepped off the bus, I would, for the first time in my life, be without a story. The only thing that would matter would be what I did next. For four hours I felt empty, stripped and scared.

Thus I arrived at the Coast Guard Reserve Training Center completely unprepared for its normalcy and even subdued hospitality. The classroom and dormitory buildings were standard Coast Guard architecture -- antiseptic white clapboards topped by dull green or red shingles, a sight that has meant home, progress, or security to generations of mariners. Our rooms were basic gray without brutality: a couple of government-issue gray desks, a gray bunk bed and two gray metal wardrobes. My one hundred classmates were either much like myself, apprehensive young college graduates, or somewhat less apprehensive enlisted men attempting to become officers. Unthreatened confidence was restricted to our instructors and to a small group of warrant officers attempting to leave the purgatory of that specialized rank in which they were considered officers but not quite gentlemen and in which they lacked the prospect of promotion. The warrant officers would attend our classes but were not subjected to demerits, marching in formation and other such annoyances. And if they failed, they were still warrant officers, which in the Coast Guard wasn't bad.

My roommate was a journalist mate first class, also surnamed Smith. I called him Bill and he called me Smitty. Some years older than I, Bill was married, had been in the Guard for some ten years and took a avuncular interest in his seaman apprentice roomie. Bill, it turned out, was of what I would soon learn was a familiar Coastie prototype, a competent, enjoyable and decent man without a trace of guile. He showed me the proper mix of spit and polish to make the toes of my black shoes glisten; he instructed me in how to make hospital corners on my bunk and how to clean the white piping on my seaman's uniform with a toothbrush and then suck the dirt and water out with my lips and teeth. In return I helped Bill with his math and together we quizzed each other for the endless multiple choice exams that popped up almost daily.

o

Because of the massive amount of information the Guard intended to pour into our brains within thirteen weeks, there was little time for harassment or pointless exercises. Between reveille at 6 am and the first class at eight, we did calisthenics, ate breakfast, cleaned our rooms, and were inspected in our fresh-never-sat-down-in whites. The rest of the day was mostly filled with classes and studying, with a little pro forma drilling thrown in. Our training vessel was a 125' patrol vessel, the Cuyahoga, which had been built in 1927 to catch rum runners. Not too many years later, she would sink in minutes following a collision with a freighter in Chesapeake Bay. Like many of the Coast Guard vessels of the era, the Cuyahoga would never have passed Coast Guard inspection. Every major Coast Guard vessel of that time had seen service during World War II. On a few vessels it was said that the crews wore lifejackets to bed and wagered on whether the ship would make it back to port.

The Coastguardsman's Manual we were given included this description of our training vessel:

These 125-footers were built between 1927 and 1929, primarily as anti-smuggling vessels . . .By the end of [WW2] they were commencing to show their age. . . the survivors are presently assigned to district patrol work where they are still frequently in the news for small boat rescue work. But their slow speed is a disadvantage, ant they eventually will be replaced by larger faster craft.

At the time we trained on the Cuyahoga the manual was fourteen years old.

o

Both the discipline and the yelling to encourage it differed only in degree from what I had experienced growing up. At the end of the third week I wrote home:

When we're not marching, in class, studying, or cleaning up, we're dressing and undressing. Nine changes was the score for one day. My present demerit score is ten, one of the lowest in the class. I got through five days with none which was a minor feat.

I had also learned at home that rules were made to be circumvented. Thus, I quickly discovered that if one slept on top of one's sheets, rather than under them, they were easier to prepare for inspection. And I took illegal naps under my minimal GI gray desk during lunch breaks, positioning the door of my wardrobe so I would not be seen by a passing instructor.

Not only did I survive the regimen, I seemed to thrive on it. I didn't even mind the two score hour exams we took to reinforce the instruction. I found myself becoming a real Coast Guard officer. It was no longer something I was doing to avoid the draft, but an effort of pride and satisfaction.

I especially liked all the new things I was learning: the difference between carvel and clinker hull; that you mark a lead line with a red rag at seven fathoms; what the strongback (with puddings) is used for; that the safe working load for manila line is the circumference squared times 150; why a two fold purchase can lift more than a gun tackle purchase but is slower; why a single screw walks the stern to starboard (or is it port?) when reversed; the proper lights and signals to use in international and inland waters; international regulations for preventing collisions at sea; that on the radio my name was spelled Sierra Alpha Mike; that signal hoists are read top-down; outboard-in and fore-aft; how to help a plane ditch in the ocean; techniques of anti-submarine warfare; how to use an M1, .45, and a Springfield line throwing rifle; the operation of a 3"/50 gun; how to plot a course using the sun, stars, shore objects, radar, and loran; the history of the US Coast Guard; the duties of the US Coast Guard including icebreaking; aids to navigation, enforcement of the Sockeye Salmon Treaty, customs laws, the Refuse Act, the Loadline Acts, and immigration laws; laws against gambling devices at sea; how to arrest someone and use search warrants; why killing a Coast Guard officer was a federal crime; how to maintain watertight integrity on a ship; the use of a ship's casualty power system; dewatering a damaged ship; the difference between hogging and sagging; how to keep a ship from capsizing; fire party organization and operation; dealing with biological; chemical and atomic warfare; when to use a parallel track, creeping line, or expanding square search during rescue missions; and 48 USC 248a providing for the protection of walruses.

o

The service I had joined was formed in 1790 by Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, to put teeth into his program of protective tariffs and to help create financial stability in a shaky new nation burdened by some $70 million in war debts. The Revenue Marine, as it was then called, was organized as a small fleet of ten cutters and in the 1790s proved encouragingly capable of accomplishing Hamilton's goal of arresting smuggling along our coast. When I joined it was still an agency of the Treasury and I swore to uphold not only the Constitution but the US customs laws as well.

For eight years the Revenue Marine was the only navy the country had. Once a regular Navy was established, the Coast Guard would be seconded to it during wartime while being under the Treasury in times of peace. In World War I it suffered the highest percentage of casualties of the any of the services and in World War II engaged in convoy and anti-submarine duty as well as manning landing craft. Coast Guard vessels saved 1,500 lives on D-Day.

On September 11, 2001, Coast Guard Admiral Richard Bennis, captain of the port of New York City, directed the evacuation of over 300,000 people by water from Manhattan following the attack on the World Trade Center. Bennis, suffering from cancer, had had staples removed from his brain just the day before the disaster, yet managed to coordinate the largest maritime evacuation since Dunkirk.

Five years later, the Coast Guard rescued some 33,000 people on the Gulf coast in the wake of Hurrican Katrina.

The peacetime history of the Coast Guard is filled with such stories - like that of Ida Lewis who, as her father before her, was keeper of the lighthouse on Lime rock in Newport RI harbor. During her half-century career, she saved 23 persons from drowning. Once she rescued three men whose boat had been swamped as they tried to pull a sheep from the water; then she went back and rescued the sheep. Her activities brought President Grant to the rock in 1869. Upon landing Grant got his feet wet. He remarked, "I have come to see Ida Lewis and to see her I'd get wet up to my armpits if necessary." When she died, every ship in Newport Harbor tolled its bells in honor of the woman who had lived so long in the tradition of the lifesaving service: "You have to go out; you don't have to come back."

Here's how the Regulations of the Life-Saving Service of 1899, Article VI ("Action at Wrecks"), section 252, page 58, put it:

The statement of the keeper that he did not try to use the boat because the sea or surf was too heavy will not be accepted unless attempts to launch it were actually made and failed, or unless the conformation of the coast -- as bluffs, precipitous banks, etc. -- is such as to unquestionable preclude the use of a boat.

These instructions remain in the instructions for Coast Guard life stations as late as 1934.

The sea seems determined to force men to fight it with their bare hands. It is a teacher of humility, an enforcer of respect, a revealer of fraud. It is indifferent to paper distinctions between men, without regard for fine words, and contemptuous of the niceties of society. Those who live with the sea will probably always be a bit different and those who go to sea in ships and boats as small as the Coast Guard's especially so. As Joseph Conrad put it, "Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses."

In matters of military etiquette and discipline, the coast guardsman often fell short of the requirements of the book. It was the sea and the jobs to be performed upon it that enforced the real discipline. This was tacitly recognized by many in command.

Besides, many of the units were manned solely by enlisted personnel operated with only sporadic direction from their commissioned superiors. When things went awry (particularly when they occur on liberty and did not effect the work of the service) there was a tendency towards leniency. The Coast Guard had the lowest court martial rate of any of the services. But the more relaxed attitude towards matters of military discipline resulted not in operational laxness but rather in a clear refutation of the theory that the military must kill the spirit and independence of a man in order to get the most out of him.

And the legends helped. Such as the story of the cutter Bear which, during a 41 year career in Alaskan waters, served as a floating court, hospital, and rescue vessel. Her most dramatic rescue occurred during the winter of 1897-98 when she went to the aid of whaling ships frozen near Point Barrow. After sailing as far as possible, a party from the ship mushed 1,500 miles across the ice, driving a herd of 400 reindeer ahead of it for food. Not a single life was lost.

Lieutenant D. H. Jarvis in his report said of the whalers: "They were stunned and it was some time before they could believe that we were flesh and blood. Some looked off to the south to see if there was not a ship in sight, and others wanted to know if we had come in on a balloon."

Reaching the stranded whalers in late March, the Bear's crew maintained health and order until the cutter reached them four months later.

o

In the last weeks of OCS, our status dramatically changed. Up to then liberty had consisted of going to Nick's seafood restaurant in Yorktown and drinking 3.2% beer or driving to Williamsburg for a meal and champagne cocktails (the region was on the conservative side of local option drinking laws). But now we were nearing the time when we would be transformed from our instructors' students to their colleagues, a transition smoothed by inviting us to the Officer's Club.

Also in the last weeks we were asked to fill out a form requesting our first assignments. I applied for three ocean-going tugs -- two on the west coast and one in North Carolina. I wrote: "Beyond the above I would prefer a small floating unit near a city." I had high hopes that my wishes would be fulfilled. After all, among the reserve officer candidates, I ranked second in the class.

My orders finally arrived: It seemed that Ida Lewis and the Coast Guard Cutter Bear and all their heirs would have to wait. I was to report to Second District Headquarters, St. Louis, Missouri, as public information officer and aide to the district commander. Nothing like this had happened to Ensign Hornblower.

As it turned out, the Coast Guard had selected me for OCS not because of my knowledge of the sea but because it was looking to beef up its public relations. I was one of several in our class sent to PIO billets in district officers. The Guard had finally decided to forsake its informal motto, "In our obscurity lies our security."

o

Before leaving on this odd and somewhat embarrassing assignment, I returned to Washington for visit friends and to attend a party that promised to be out of the ordinary. The party was to be given at a farm in Middleburg, Virginia for Liza Lloyd Mellon. Prior to the ball, I was invited to the farm of Phil and Katherine Graham, whose daughter Lallie I knew. Also, Phil Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, employed as managing editor the father of my friend, Alfred Friendly Jr., who had gone to elementary school with me.

Arriving at the Grahams about an hour before sunset, I found drinks being served on a lawn overlooking dark green hills as three horses wandered as near the guests as the bush border would permit, watched skeptically for a few moments, and then moved on. There were only a few debutantes around but there were Mr. And Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Bobby Kennedy, the William Paleys and Joseph Alsop. In a letter later I noted that "Mrs. Paley looked like the eleventh best dressed woman in the United States trying to make the list of the ten best dressed women in the United States. This was quite unnecessary since she is already on it."

On a hill near the Mellon's home were brightly colored tents of medieval design, sleeping quarters for the male guests. Each tent had a wooden raised floor, 15 cots, and an ashtray for every occupant. Several of the tents had been made into heads with showers and electric outlets for shavers included. Another tent housed two separate catering operations. There was room in this canvas city for 268 male souls. The local Episcopal rectory had been renovated for the women.

The main house contained not only the Mellons but an art gallery whose properties ranged from Renoir to Pissarro to Picasso. A large society orchestra alternated with Count Basie's band until six a.m. The fastest omelet maker in France, flown in for the evening, was equally indefatigable. A half-hour of fireworks and a brief visit by Jacqueline Kennedy (who seemed more interested in Rousseau, Pissarro and Picasso than in the other names present) gave a redundant gloss to the evening.

Towards six am we wandered towards a large yellow tent to rest. Al Friendly crawled onto a cot still in his white dinner jacket, pulling the covers up as if he bedded down in this fashion every night, and went to sleep.

By eight I was up for breakfast: a bottle of beer and scrambled eggs. One of the caterers told me he had never seen anything like this either. As our minute Agincourt came to life and spirits returned, we took off again for the Grahams and a swim in their pond. Upon arriving on the second floor to change into a swimming suit, I found Joseph Alsop crawling on his knees searching for something in the hall. He got up, mumbled, "I can't seem to find his shoes" and returned to his bedroom.

After a morning in the sun, we returned to the Mellons for lunch. A hefty buffet had been laid out and twin pianos played for the benefit of those still strong enough to dance. As I left at three-thirty, the omelet maker was still hard at work.

o

For the next year or so, it would be my job to explain what the hell the Coast Guard was doing in St. Louis. The official spiel I developed went like this:

The Second Coast Guard District covers all or part of 21 states from western Pennsylvania to the Rockies, from the upper part of Alabama to the Canadian border. Within its borders are more than 5,000 miles of navigable water, mainly the Mississippi and its tributaries. There was are also 103 lakes of more than ten miles in length that fall under USCG jurisdiction. There are more than a quarter of all the aids to navigation in the country to be found in the 2nd District. We board 25,000 small craft for safety inspections each year. . . .

My unofficial spiel went like this: The Mississippi River is much harder to guard than, say, Massachusetts, since it has two coasts. Well, how do you guard the coast of the Mississippi, Ensign Smith? Listen, wise ass, you don't see any of it missing, do you?

Still, there were some definite pecularities to the post. For example, we lost over 100% of our buoys every year thanks to ice and the huge tows. And we probably had the only search & rescue center whose territorial chart showed the location of bars and restaurants. When a distraught wife would call up looking for her missing husband, invariably last seen in a "small white boat with an outboard," the first order of business would be to check with the bartenders and restaurant managers near the last known location.

Although my own search & rescue activities were limited to patrolling a few regattas on the river, I once almost caused a serious maritime disaster. I had gotten a local TV station down to do a piece on the St. Louis Coast Guard base. As we were talking and filming, we were hailed by a small white boat with an outboard that was drifting helplessly in the stiff river current. The base sent out a crew who quickly hauled in the two couples and their boat. They were clearly relieved until, that is, one of the men noticed the TV camera. "You're not going to use this on TV are you?" he asked with considerable despair. "You can't. These aren't our wives." The film was canned.

o

If you were to think of a city in terms of color, St. Louis would have been that of dirty, smoke-smudged brick. Back in the 19th century a severe fire burned down many dwellings, leading to a city ordnance against wood structures. The rest of the city lacked brightness as well. I moved in with the son of a St. Louis-Dispatch editor who worked for an advertising agency. He and his friends, and the friends I would make, often spoke of St. Louis as a place to leave. It was the early 1960s and while nobody knew it yet there was a restlessness among the young, particularly in places where everything had been decided and judged, where life consisted of fulfilling a role without surprise, risk, discovery, or mystery.

I was not impressed by St. Louis society, describing its members as buzzing "around frantically like flies trapped in a lampshade." There seemed a singular inability to enjoy status once it had been achieved. Life was taken in dead earnestness and woe to those seen enjoying it. The spirit was reflected in the society pages of the local papers where no one in the photographs appeared to be having a very good time. Most serious of all events was the Veiled Prophet Queen Ball. The Veiled Prophet was a carefully disguised prominent male social leader charged with crowning the leading debutante of the year. This was done in the largest gathering place in town to which 10,000 general admission seats were sold. The papers treated the matter as it would a major league pennant victory -- complete with features such as the one about J. C. Jones who for seventeen years had arrived around midnight in order to be the first in line when the ticket window opened the next morning. The ball was even televised.

Nor did more staid and less prominent St. Louis enthrall me. I wrote that "St Louis is the center of a large German Catholic population that likes Prophet Queens as much as they like Martin Luther. It is perhaps testimony to the universality of the Roman Catholic church that a Boston Irishman would feel completely uncomfortable in such somber surroundings. One gets an almost irrepressible desire to set off noisemakers or play bawdy songs from a loudspeaker while driving through this part of town."

On the other hand, St. Louis did have Gaslight Square, a whole neighborhood devoted to bars and entertainment including Irish bagpipes, operatic jam sessions, Dixieland and modern jazz, quiet trios, comedians, stage shows, twist clubs, and even silent movies shown on a parking lot wall. The common practice was to have one drink at a club and then move on, a practice that not only kept the bars busy but the streets as well.

There was also the Fox Theater. This building on Grand Avenue was built during the days when the screen was still small but the theatres were large. Walk inside and you found yourself in a cathedral for pagans, where a benevolent celluloid god was worshipped continuously from noon on. A guide to St. Louis described its lobby as a "towering space, its encircling colonnade topped by capitals of golden vultures. A staircase, flanked by seated lions with flashing electric eyes, rises to a landing furnished with four high-backed red velvet throne chairs, each with armrests in the form of camels."

The climax came at intermission between the double features. As the first film faded from the screen a spotlight shone on the center of the orchestra pit and a $70,000 organ slowly rose into view. Played by Stan Kahn (who collected vacuum cleaners as a hobby) the organ was one of the most powerful in the world and, in fact, could not be played at full intensity for fear of bringing the entire citadel down upon the audience.

But that never happened nor did much else. I moved into an apartment on Lake Avenue where the nearby movie theatre was playing "Never on Sunday." It still was when I left town.

Then there was the river. It was dirty and smudged and mundane as well and most of the time like everything else in town it just kept right on rolling along. I felt upon seeing it that one more childhood myth, like Santa Claus and fairy godmothers, had been destroyed. Yet I soon would learn that this modest, muddy stream could rise thirty feet about her current height and carry anything with her in a vengeful dash towards the sea; she could freeze, turning into a mass of ice flows that jammed themselves against each other like ice-carved rugby players, laying against the piers of bridges until the first thaw of spring released their awesome energy. In quieter times, tows - with each barge carrying the equivalent of ten freight car loads - would plough quietly along, some carrying more cargo than all the steamboats of Mark Twain's day put together.

o

I threw myself into the job of information officer and aide with a gusto that quickly distracted me from disappointment over the assignment. My desk was in the reception room of the District Commander where I sat across from his secretary and next to the office of the Chief of Staff. Both men were captains with long sea experience, possessing competence that was as unselfconscious as it was deep. The chief of staff, Captain Gene Coffin treated me with in the manner of a fun-loving, knowledgeable and gentle uncle. The District Commander, Oliver Peterson, while genial enough, didn't seem quite certain of what a public information officer was meant to do or why he had one. Captain Peterson was a man of action not of words. He had once taken the Coast Guard cutter Eastwind to within 442 nautical miles of the North Pole, a record for a surface ship at the time.

Captain Peterson had also in 1952 directed the rescue of 70 tanker crew members by several Coast Guard ships during a violent winter storm. When the first call came, a CG plane flew to the location to guide the rescue ships in. The Eastwind, arriving on the scene, spotted part of a tanker and called the plane on the radio. We see the ship, the radioman said, but we don't see you. The plane's crew replied that they could see the tanker but not the Eastwind. It took some time before ship and plane realized they were looking at two different tankers -- identical in class and identical in fate -- both having broken in two in the gale.

In my office, liberated from the District headquarters photo lab, is a large photo taken from the plane that shows the Eastwind bow towards half of a tanker and if you look closely you can see a life raft on a line being pulled between the two vessels. Sometime after this photo was taken, the waves increased and the transfer of crew by life raft was no longer possible, Captain Peterson ordered his own crew to bring up their mattresses and stack them on the fantail of the Eastwind. He then backed the vessel precariously near the stern of the tanker and had the remaining crew leap to safety.

Captain Peterson didn't tell me this. In the Coast Guard you let other people tell stories about you, so I learned the tale from my photographer's mate first class, my mentor and co-conspirator for the greater glory of the public information office, Billy Keys. It was Keys who also told me about a journalist's mate had developed a small trade aboard one of the ocean station vessels that stood search and rescue duty for 30 days at a time in midst of the North Atlantic: he had composed love letters for less literate crew members. With this talent, Alex Haley became a legend in the Guard years before his writing reached a larger audience.

I had one thin gold stripe that circumnavigated my sleeve; Billy had several short white ones. Although Billy called me sir, he also knew that in knowledge of Guard practice and tradition and knowledge, he outranked me.

Together we threw ourselves into creating the district's first real public information office. The first essential was to enlarge the staff. In no time, a journalist's mate appeared, a fine addition save his desire to save my soul. Rollin Hill had been born again, a concept with which I had only the vaguest acquaintance, but I quickly accept the notion that attempted conversion was not a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and thus exposed myself to endless discussions of the matter. By the time I left, the office would have a staff of five -- including the District Commander's driver, carefully selected for his typing rather than his driving skills. Not bad for my first year and a half in a government bureaucracy.

Not long after I got there, Captain Peterson was transferred and the district got as commander its first honest-to-god admiral. To be an Coast Guard ensign in St. Louis was odd, to be an admiral there was truly exotic.

Admiral O. C. Rohnke had commanded six vessels, and had helped to create the Atlantic Merchant Vessel Report Program that used computers to keep track of merchant ship positions. This not only made rescue of troubled merchant ships far easier, it put the ships at the Coast Guard's disposal to help whenever an emergency arose near their position.

Admiral Rohnke absolutely fit the role: tall, gray hair and erect -- yet with a mild manner that never once erupted into misplaced ego during our time together. My job as aide was to do anything the admiral needed. People such as myself were sometimes called dog robbers, dating back to the days when aides got the leftovers from their boss's dining table, thereby depriving the dogs of the scraps. With an aiglette (gold loop) on my shoulder, however, wherever I went in the 2nd District the shadow of a flag officer followed. With Admiral Rohnke's arrival I had received a de facto promotion.

I also knew that Admiral Rohnke and Billy Keys had much more in common than either had with me. Yet in one way Rohnke and I were in the same situation: the gold on our arms only told part of the story.

I learned that in Peoria. Having an admiral in the office was a godsend for public relations and I quickly started using Admiral Rohnke (although never hinting at such crassness) as a sort of roving logo for the Second District. He willingly submitted to whatever scheme I devised. For an inspection trip to the Coast Guard station in Peoria, I pulled out all the stops. Swede Johnson, a huge red-haired warrant officer who commanded the Coast Guard buoy tender Goldenrod, was delighted to cooperate, getting the local liquor wholesaler to throw a big party for the visiting flag officer. Swede also wanted Rohnke piped aboard his vessel.

The Goldenrod, for good reasons, had never before piped anyone aboard. It was, after all, only a tugboat that pushed -- or "towed ahead" in river parlance -- a barge with a crane for doing the buoy work. Nonetheless, with several reporters and television cameras watching, a chief boatswain's mate blew his pipe and his crew saluted as the admiral stepped sharply aboard the barge. I stood looking pleased with myself until I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was one of the cameramen: "Was that it?" he asked.

"Yep," I said.

"Well I wasn't ready, he has to do it again."

I approached my boss. "Er, Admiral, the TV guy says he didn't get the shot. Would you mind being piped aboard again?"

"Sure," Rohnke replied and stepped gamely off the barge and back on the dock.

This time the camera was ready and the admiral marched smartly aboard. As I was beginning to relax, the chief boatswain mate turned to me and said, "Mr. Smith, they didn't shoot that did they?" "Yeah, Chief, they did."

"Well, he's got to go back and do it again. My men weren't ready."

If you were to list three jobs whose practitioners are not generally known for their tolerance, admirals, chief boatswain mates and TV cameramen would be near the top. And near the top of their list of people not to be tolerant towards would be freshly-minted ensigns.

There was, however, nothing to do but to ask. With only a shrug, the admiral stepped ashore once more. This time we got it right.

It was only one of Admiral Rohnke's remarkable performances that day. An hour or so later we were underway on an inspection voyage down the Illinois River. The Goldenrod had a tiny wardroom and around the table sat just the four of us: the skipper, the chief, Admiral Rohnke and myself. A white linen cloth and glassware had been laid on and no sooner had lunch been served than an enlisted man appeared with a bottle of wine.

If we had been in the Italian or French navy no one would have blinked. But drinking alcohol aboard an American naval vessel was verbotim. That's one thing I remembered from OCS. As I was trying to figure out how to handle the situation, the admiral leaned over to me and said very softy, "I won't say anything, Sam, if you don't" "Yes, sir" I replied, immensely relieve as I silently pledged my undying loyalty to the admiral.

For an admiral, it must have been all a bit trying being there in the epicenter of America trying to maintain the appearance of a man of the sea. The official car didn't help, either. The Coast Guard in those days was an orphan of the Treasury Department. Thus it was not that surprising that the admiral's car was a Chrysler Imperial seized by Treasury's alcohol and tax unit during a raid on Chicago mob operations.

It was an asset the mob must have been glad to forfeit. The car was regularly in the shop. On one occasion, I was forced to commandeer my own 1941 Oldsmobile Hydromatic to get the admiral to the airport. I was tempted to mount the admiral's flag on the front bumper but settled for having the driver, Gary Smith, salute sharply and never crack a smile as Rohnke entered the back seat of the ancient beast. On another occasion, I stood along a suburban highway in dress uniform and aiglette hitching a ride back for the admiral and the driver, the former being too distinguished to do the thumbing and the latter unlikely to provoke response by a passing car.

Which is not to say that Admiral Rohnke didn't have his limits. On one occasion, the 2nd District sent a boarding crew into Oklahoma to do safety inspections on a lake that was considered a federal waterway. The crew returned to St. Louis early, reporting that they had been stopped by the Oklahoma state police who told them that the next time they came into the state they had better wear their authority on their hip. Rohnke didn't like that at all and immediately flew to Oklahoma to straighten out the governor, leaving me to bring his Ford Thunderbird to the state capital, a task I accomplished at speeds of up to 100 mph on the straightest, longest and most empty roads I had ever seen. (Senator Robert Kerr once asked Eugene McCarthy to support an exemption for his state from the anti-billboard provisions of the interstate highway legislation. McCarthy not only agreed but offered to deliver a speech on the subject. To Kerr's dismay, the gist of McCarthy's plea was that billboards would actually improved the Oklahoma scenery ).

In between planning and executing the various adventures of my boss, I churned out news releases, set up displays at river-related conventions and gave talks to high schools and civic groups. On one occasion, during a conference for the warrant officers who commanded the various buoy tenders in the district, I enlisted the tough and salty gentlemen to the greater cause of public relations. My technique was simple. First, I had them all over to a party at my apartment and got them good and drunk, which weakened their wariness. The next morning, we met in a conference room and I asked them only one favor: that they call up the local daily paper and suggest that they send a reporter and a photographer on a day long trip down the river to view the exciting business of tending buoys. Several stories resulted, including a full two-page spread in the Des Moines Register. A number of the COs became first-rate flacks for the Coast Guard.

o

Not only did the Coast Guard tend to run low and poor on ships and cars, but it didn't have enough officers for all the things it was meant to do. One was constantly shifting roles to fulfill the collateral duties thrust upon the lesser ranked. Further, the new president, John F. Kennedy, added to the work load. He had noted during his inauguration parade the lack of any blacks in the Coast Guard Academy contingent and called the Treasury Department the next day to seek a remedy. And so the word went forth, even to the federal building in St. Louis, to do something about it and I found myself, although the name hadn't been invented in 1961, serving as the district's affirmative action officer. I was totally unsuccessful. St. Louisians of any ethnicity were disinclined to think that going out on any of the major oceans was a good idea for either themselves or their sons. The black businessmen and civic leaders I addressed agreed and seemed to regard me as an agent of the devil when I described what a Coast Guard officer actually did and under what circumstances he often did it.

Kennedy had also declare the nation unfit and wanted the military to set an example for everyone else. And so I found myself assigned to run a physical fitness program for the hundred officers and men of the district headquarters. It all went somewhat better than the affirmative action effort, but in the end those who started out fit tended to stay fit while similar trends prevailed among the flabby. Being in charge of all this inertia did, however, inspire my own efforts and I pumped iron regularly in the dingy YMCA gym with that marvelous assortment (including in this instance a professional wrestler) one found in such places before fitness was defined by silly people in spandex jumping up and down and yelling faux encouragement at their bedraggled wards to the sounds of excessively loud rock.

But though there was enough to do, I never doubted that I wanted to be part of the real Guard. So when Admiral Rohnke was assigned to Washington and he asked me, "Is there anything I can do for you while, I'm there, Sam?" I said, "Yes sir, get me on a ship."

Once again he came through. On my next trip to DC, I stopped by the assignment office at Coast Guard headquarters. "My name is Smith and I came by to see how my transfer was coming." The lieutenant commander looked at me, pondered a moment, and without referring to any document, replied, "Smith, Smith, Sam Smith, you want to go to sea, right?"

There were only three thousand officers in the whole service and at that moment I knew I had joined the right branch of the military, in contrast with my friends who wore the same bars in the Army or Navy but were still a number to be shuffled about.

In the Coast Guard if you didn't know someone, you knew someone who did. This after all, was the service in which just one family, the Midgetts of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, provided over two centuries literally hundreds of its members to the Coast Guard and its predecessors, the Revenue Cutter Sevice and the US Lifesaving Service. Seven Midgetts earned the Gold Lifesaving Medal and three the Silver for rescues. I never met a Midgett, but I met those who had served with them, all of us members of an even larger family called the Coast Guard.

o

My assignment came through: Bristol Rhode Island, operations officer and navigator aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Spar. Bristol sat in the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay, whose huge bite out of the mainland gives Rhode Island its jagged border. It has also provided cover for centuries of illegal activity from slave to rum to drug running to illegal quahogs. Narrow channels led tankers, freighters, and smaller craft to Providence and Fall River. A large island divided the bay into an east and west passage. At the entrance to the East Passage, with its ornate homes posing above the unimpressed sea and sky, was Newport. A little further up the bay was the Navy base with its herd of destroyers waiting impatiently to be released to the blue pasture beyond Brenton Tower. Still further, coming to course 035 degrees true at Castle Island Light, was Bristol.

When I got there, the small town of Bristol -- population 5,000 -- was giving the world rubber soled shoes, golf balls and fiberglass sailboats. For many years prior to that, though, its mark had been more impressive as the magnificent craft of Hereshoff slid down the ways of his Bristol yard to sail to a hundred different ports.

Shortly before I arrived Bristol had tried to restore a bit of its honor by purchasing the second cherry-picker style hook and ladder truck to be sold in the country (the first had gone to Chicago). The proximate cause of the purchase had been a serious fire in the tallest apartment building in town (five stories), but there weren't any more tall apartment buildings and hence considerably less need for a cherry picker.

The fire engine arrived in early spring and was displayed on the town green. Unfortunately, when it was finally time to take the engine to the firehouse, it had sunk into the soggy town green and had to be towed off. When it arrived at the firehouse another problem developed: the building wasn't deep enough. Eventually a deal was worked out with the local trash hauler: the fire engine could be stored in his garage - but behind his trash truck and he would keep the key.

The Spar, one of the newer ships in the Guard, had made Bristol its home for most of its 19 years. The people of Bristol considered the ship their navy. When it was learned that she was to be in the Coast Guard's yard over the town's vaunted July 4th celebration, several Bristolites wrote their congressmen asking that the yard work be rescheduled.

As one of the five officers on the ship, I was invited to make myself at home at the Elk's Club, and otherwise quickly integrated into Bristol's social life. Further evidence of the Spar's status came on a Memorial Day weekend. Two men from the ship went on liberty at ten AM. At eleven PM they were in the local jail having been involved in a roaring fracas that included among its casualties a policeman who had tried to stop the fight and was slugged for his efforts.

I went to the court the next morning in full uniform to bring the two back to the ship. Before the judge passed his sentence, I promised the magistrate that Bristol would not see much of the pair for the next few weeks. He gave them a minimum fine and a minimum lecture and released them into my custody. Everything went smoothly until the judge asked the sailors whether they wanted to say anything. Gilbert, standing at attention in a bloodied tee-shirt and with a black eye, replied, "Well sir, it was like I was telling Mr. Smith here, I was just minding my own fucking business when this fucking guy come up starts giving me shit and so. . . " I gave Gilbert a sharp nudge, the judge smiled indulgently and closed the court for the day.

I was concerned that the town might think unkindly towards the ship as a result of the incident. Far from it, as the tale was told to me several times later in various places, Gilbert was right -- our boys hadn't thrown the first punch. That they had been drinking steadily for twelve hours and had decked a cop didn't seem to matter -- in fact the latter act seemed to inspire a certain amount of awe.

In 1957, the Spar circumnavigated the North American continent, making the first deep draft voyage through the Northwest Passage in the company of two Canadian Coast Guard cutters. Not since Raoul Amundssen crossed the top of Canada aboard his vessel Gjoa had any ship succeeded in this venture.

The voyage had gone without mishap, but two years before I stepped aboard the Spar experienced its worst luck just a few miles from home. On the way back from replacing ice-driven buoys in the bay, she had struck a rock and might have been a total loss had not the crew lowered away her two power boats and used them to tow the stricken ship, in sub-freezing temperatures, to a sand bar, where she settle to the level of the main deck.

One of my men had just that day reported aboard out of boot camp. I asked him what happened. "Well," he said, "I was sitting on the mess deck and someone told me the ship was sinking. I thought it was some sort of drill or something."

The Spar was 180 feet long. Unlike most Coast Guard cutters that were painted barn siding white, the buoy tenders had black hulls and white superstructures. We sometimes sardonically referred to them as The Great Black Fleet. The Spar was equipped to break ice and her rugged construction and towing ability made her an excellent heavy weather search and rescue craft. She was also used to bring fuel, water and crews to the Nantucket Light Vessel and to the several of the nearby lighthouses. But her main task was to maintain 170 buoys from Block Island to Buzzard's Bay. My main task, other than to make sure the ship got where it was going, was to put the buoys where the charts said they were.

For every buoy we knew the correct angles of three fixed shore objects such as a tower or building. On each wing of the bridge a quartermaster would take hold a sextant horizontally and read off the the bearings between two of the objects. A single screw ship, the Spar was not easy to maneuver and we approached the buoy location dead slow, the quartermasters calling out their angles: "76 degrees, 13 minutes on the left -- correcting." From the other wing: "82 degrees, 52 minutes on the right -- uncorrecting." I would stand on a wing of the bridge with a chart and three-arm protractor keeping up with the position of the ship. As the position plotted over the right black dot on the chart I would tell the captain, "She's on." He would cry to the chief on the buoy deck below, "Let her go." A seaman swung a mallet to the chain stopper. Fifteen tons of sinker and buoy were released and as she settled into her position, a final check on the angles was made we backed away.

But other things affected buoys besides wanderlust. The pockets that hold the light batteries might leak water, shorting the electrical system. The batteres might discharge sooner than expected. The flashing device might be defective. All four bulbs in the automatic lamp changer might be burned out. A clapper might be off a bell. A light might be burning steadily instead of flashing its proper characteristic. Bird droppings might obscure the lens. Or the buoy might simply be scheduled for replacement or servicing.

Brenton Point Lighted Whistle Buoy S2 was a large buoy in Rhode Island Sound near the entrance to Narragansett Bay, in plenty of deep warter. On a Friday in February, she was scheduled to be serviced. It was a good day for tending buoys. Not too cold and not too rough. If your specialty was repairing lanterns you appreciated this. You could remember a night deep in that same winter when you had climbed aboard an ice-covered buoy that was careening carelessly against the side of the ship. You could remember mounting fifteen feet of slippery cage to the lantern, almost losing your grip every time you inched higher. And you could remember sitting atop that rocking pinnacle trying to rewire a lamp-changer in the winter wind. Your memories made you glad for a day like this.

o

The officer on the port wing of the bridge could see the buoy a hundred yards ahead. "God damn current's setting me down too fast." The buoy approached almost imperceptibly as the ship edged forward. It rolled gently in the slight swell and every four seconds a weak red flash came from its light. The officer shoved the stick beside him forward and called to the helmsman inside the wheelhouse, "Increase to right full." The helmsman spun the wheel. There was a groan from somewhere deep inside the ship as the diesel engines responded to the thrust of the throttle and released their full energy. The officer returned the stick to a vertical position and the groan ceased.

There was no surge of speed when the lever moved forward. The ship continued to creep towards the buoy, but the engines and the rudder had combined to turn her bow to starboard. The buoy was off the port bow now. "Shift your rudder. " The turning of the bow was checked. Down on the buoy deck, below and forward of the bridge, a small group of men in safety helmets and dungarees watched the buoy. Over their heads a large buff-painted boom hung in wait.

"Ease your rudder.'' The buoy was close and the officer shoved the lever aft.

This time there was the groan and more. The whole ship shook in protest as the engines tried to stop the forward momentum of 1000 tons of steel moving through the water. The buoy struck the side of the ship and started scraping its way aft. Before it had traveled more than half the way down the buoy port its motion was checked. The officer returned the lever. The roll of the ship and the roll of the buoy didn't coincide, but the men on the buoy deck anticipated the erratic movement. A wire strap was led through the cage of the buoy and back to the hook that hung from the boom. The chief in charge on the buoy deck held up his hand.

The electric boom motor started to spin, the boom cable became taut, pulling at the strap. Up on the bridge a second officer was plotting the position of the buoy. "She's two hundred yards north of station, Captain."

"Very well,'' the captain replied, without lifting his eyes from the operation below. A half-dozen men were trying to bring a twelve ton buoy aboard a rolling deck and there were a half-dozen things that could go wrong.

Only last week the nylon cross-deck had suddenly snapped with the crack of a rifle. The men tending the lines were thrown to the deck. Others nearby ducked and headed for what protection they could find. The buoy had swept a path across the deck. "Drop it," the chief had yelled and the boom operator had let the buoy crash to the steel surface. Fortunately it had been a calm day and no one was injured. But it had been a sharp reminder that things can go wrong without warning. This day, however, the buoy came aboard smoothly. As it arose from the water a large cylindrical body was revealed, coated with mussels and green slime. And extending down from the body there was a long tube that counterbalanced the upper portion of the buoy when it sat in the water. Light, cage, body, and tube were dragged aboard, restrained by the boom and the cross-deck line. For a few seconds the huge buoy hung suspended, but the moment the chief could see that the chock was properly placed underneath the giant it was quickly lowered to the deck and secured. The helmeted men set about the familiar routine, scraping the body and tube of its marine growth. checking the lantern, replacing the long black batteries that rested in two pockets in the body, The buoy chain rested with one of its links securely slipped into a chain stopper on the edge of the buoy deck. Now the chain would be hauled and checked and then the whole buoy would be replaced, refreshed and properly positioned on its station in Rhode Island Sound.

o

By their nature, buoys are frequently near bad water. The Aids to Navigation Manual blandly stated that a buoy tender skipper is often called to go "where no ordinarily prudent navigator would take his ship." A prudent navigator, for example, doesn't let his ship get within a hundred feet of a rock that could slice his hull, but marking that rock for other mariners might require that one do just that.

Captain Jimmie H. Hobaugh, who had commanded the Woodrush, a 180-footer in the Great Lakes, , told an interviewer, "I used to put her aground all the time - that's the only way you can set some of the buoys that you work. . . If you work Sand Point Bouy in Munising there is the actual imprint of the bow of a 180 in the sand. When you go aground, you drop the bouy and you know it's on station."

We ran aground three times when I was aboard, a fact that amazed my Navy buddies. In the Navy running aground tends to end one's career. But the Navy doesn't set buoys in the Cape Canal entrance channel where the charts call for a string of markers at the precise edge of a dredge path or right next to a dangerous ledge off Block Island. Only one of the groundings was without excuse. Leaving an unfamiliar Coast Guard station in Miami early one morning, the captain insisted that he could reverse despite the sand bar I had pointed out to him. Within seconds we were aground but within another minute or two we had lines back on the dock and had warped ourselves off. The only damage was to a lamp post at the corner of the dock which had been bent ninety degrees. Like miscreant adolescents, we pulled in our lines and took off without apology or report, the only nautical hit-and-run in which I was ever involved.

The reason we were in Miami was because we had carried two 40 foot patrol boats to be used to guard John F. Kennedy when he was vacationing near there. At a flank speed of 15 knots it had taken us days to get down there and days to get back. I had the conn as we finally pulled up to the dock at Bristol. We weren't more than a hundred feet off when a crew member came out on the buoy deck below and called up to the bridge, "President Kennedy's been shot." I thought: what a stupid thing to say. I edged the ship up gently to the pier, got the lines properly secured and went below. Only then did I realize that it was true. Despite days away from homeport, no one left the ship for three hours as we huddled around the mess deck television.

o

As in St. Louis, I had more than my share of collateral duties. My official assignments included being operations division officer, navigator, CIC officer, senior deck officer, morale and recreation officer, electronic material officer, education officer, photography officer, public information officer, exchange officer and drug control officer. These duties ranged from the titular to the trying. For example, the ship's PX was run out of a closet. One month's inventory included 437 cartons of cigarettes, 226 assorted chewing gums, 6 cans of Dr. Lyons tooth powder, 31 normal tubes of toothpaste, four decks of regular cards and eleven for pinochle as well as 48 X Cellos and 41 Sultans for a total cost value of $766.04. To reconcile our massive inventory and sales would sometimes take a couple of hours a month. Not even a penny could be unaccounted for and some fiend at headquarters had designed the reports so that throwing one of your own pennies into the pot wouldn't help.

The drug inventory I performed with the deck officer, Bob Sanderson. Each month, Sanderson and I would retire to the captain's cabin with all the bottles of drugs and the brandy that we carried on board. We would take a drug bottle and dump its contents into a cigar box and then count each pill, confirming to each other what we had seen. Should someone actually need to consume the pill, its strength would presumably overcome any residue left by our monthly mauling.

The bottle of brandy was a little harder to assess, although both Bob and I had seen its contents diminish in the wake of sea rescues. If a crew went off in a lifeboat as part of the operation, they would be welcomed back with an order to report to the captain's cabin. There Captain Flynn would have laid out as many glasses of brandy as there were lifeboat crew members. These young men were, as Flynn well knew, almost all beer drinkers with little interest in the more effete liquors. They would take a few sips and then put their glass back on the green felt table in the center of the captain's cabin. After an appropriate moments of good cheer, everyone would depart leaving Flynn to finish the job.

The nickname for the Coast Guard was the hooligan Navy. It was not without merit. In military manners and matters, the typical coastguardsman left much to be desired. But in return you got someone willing to jump a bobbing buoy in a 30-knot breeze or take a life boat into a black, storm-driven sea. The enlisted coast guardsman expected to be treated as an individual. It was, after all, he and not that one and a half striper on the bridge who jumped the buoy, secured the cross-deck to it, replaced all the burn-out bulbs as the buoy careened crazily against the side of the ship. It was, after all, his Coast Guard, too. It was, after all, his ship.

Most officers, from admiral down, understood this, and behind the formal hierarchy of rank lay the equally important hierarchy of competence and experience. By the time I got to the Spar, I understood this. I was coming aboard a ship as navigator with only sailing experience and 13 weeks in OCS behind me. I was to lead men who knew much more than I did.

My first test was on the bridge. The captain suggested I take a navigational fix. For piloting fixes, one sighted three shore based (and charted) objects using the peloruses on either wing of the bridge. These were compasses on a stand with telescopes mounted on top so one could read the bearing and see the object at the same time. Once having read the bearings, you stepped into the pilot house and with a parallel rule transferred the data to the chart. If all went well, your three bearings met in a point or tiny triangle at the exact position of the ship. If all did not go well, such as one of the bearings being off, you were left with a bloated triangle and a far vaguer idea as to where you were.

My triangle was considerably larger than desired. Beside me was my first class quartermaster, Bill Miller, a QM2, and a seaman assigned to my department. I couldn't really see, but I felt the executive officer and the captain looking over my shoulder as well. I kept my eyes glued on the chart without saying a word, thinking desperately what to do next. The holy spirit put the right words in my mouth. I turned to Miller, shrugged, and said, "Not bad for a fucking reserve, huh?" I could tell from the reaction that I had passed the test -- which was not, after all, to prove how good I was, but to admit that I wasn't.

After that it was easy. I told my crew that I was happy to run a laid-back department as long as what we were meant to do -- navigation, communications, electronics -- got done and got done right. I had only two chickenshit demands. First, regardless of what anyone else did on the ship, I wanted the operations department to salute the captain on first meeting of the day. This was a naval tradition that fell by the wayside on smaller ships, but I had sized up my boss and knew this little nicety would be worth it. The second thing was that the brass on the bridge was to be kept polished. I didn't have to size up my boss on that one; he had already given me the keep-the-brass-shined lecture.

Captain Jack Flynn was a mustang, which is to say he had formerly been an enlisted man and had applied to the Coast Guard Academy while serving in the Army. He was short, Irish and in amazing shape given his drinking habits. I got along with him well, even to the point of earning the right to wear a totally non-regulation LL Bean one-piece hunting outfit and Sears thermal boots on the bridge in winter. The executive officer didn't think it was such a great idea, but Flynn called it my bunny suit and never objected. Under normal circumstances, Flynn was reasonable, funny and enjoyable to be around. During Lent, when he gave up booze, he was hell. Nearly everyone on the ship drank, so Flynn only stood out because he was the head drinker. On more than one occasion, the Spar was called out late at night on a heavy weather search and rescue mission with up to two-thirds of the crew having just been pulled from bars. One night, Captain Flynn stumbled aboard as the winds made up to gale force. He stepped up to the radar and pretended he was in an old-fashioned shoe shop checking the x-ray machine. Staring intently at the screen, he mumbled that he needed the next larger size. The exec, Bob Overton, came over to me and said quietly, "Sam, you take it out. I'll keep the skipper busy." And he did, conning the captain out to the outboard wing of the bridge where they traded sea stories as I got the ship underway and headed for sea.

Besides liking to drink, Flynn and I shared a similarly loose attitude towards military matters. Overton had never lost his academy-installed rigidity. Once we were standing on the bridge discussing flag etiquette. At point I said, "Hey Bob, what do you fly from the starboard yardarm during a general court martial?" Without hesitation, he replied, "The accused."

And so Bob wasn't too pleased when Gordon Tuck (Gilbert's partner in the aforementioned bar fracas) went AWOL overnight with the base pickup truck. This is the sort of thing that one went to the brig for in the Navy. I, however, was the officer on duty and when Tuck showed up back at the ship I sat him down in the wardroom and told him he had a choice: either face a court-martial or perform umpteen extra hours of work on the ship. There was nothing in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that permitted me to hand down such a plenary punishment, but extra duty was such a firm Guard tradition that while Overton was incensed at my having cheated him out of a court martial, he could do nothing about it. Tuck, naturally, had taken the extra duty without hesitation.

The exec was predictably furious at me, but he recognized that I had played by the tacit rules of the game. Besides, Captain Flynn, I knew, would understand. His attitude was that Tuck was the best helmsman on the ship and that if he wanted to go off from time to time and do stupid-ass stuff then that just meant another compartment on the Spar would be subsequently painted out.

Not only was Tuck a fine helmsmen, he didn't get sea sick. This, despite his other failings, put him in the top one and a half percent of the ship's complement, at least whenever it was blowing over thirty. Both the captain and I fondly remembered occasions when, as we were flashing our hash over the side, Tuck was standing blissfully at the wheel occasionally muttering things like, "Hey, I really like this shit."

The scariest few moments I ever spent with Flynn he was cold sober. We were coming back from a day of working buoys. The ferry that ran from Bristol to Prudence Island was coming down the channel the other way -- on the wrong side. I blew one blast of the horn, indicating hat I wanted to pass like cars on a street, port to port. The ferry blew two blasts -- an illegal cross-signal. She wanted to stick to her side of the channel. I turned to Flynn. "Should we let her go on. . .?" But the captain was mad. "I'll take the conn,' he said. "I stand relieved, sir," I said, and I was.

Flynn blew a series of warning blasts and stuck to the right side of the channel; the ferry kept coming straight at us. Then the captain blew one extremely long blast as if to say, "I really mean it, you fucker" and the ferry eased over. We passed but a few feet apart with Captain Jack Flynn and Captain Mannie dePino standing on the wings of their respective bridges, screaming obscenities at each other.

Because of her heavy weather abilities and because of the growing unseaworthiness of the Coast Guard's older search and rescue vessels, the Spar had been assigned responsibility for heavy weather rescue missions. In fact the 125 foot search and rescue patrol boat at Woods Hole, the General Greene, was a sister ship of the Cuyahoga, built during Prohibition and now considered of such dubious seaworthiness that she was not permitted out in anything more blustery than small craft warnings. This humiliating restriction for a ship intended for rescue was instituted after the captain sailed halfway to Bermuda during a storm because he did not dare turn the General Greene around.

o

The storms become one given enough time. It's a Friday evening. The crew has been granted early liberty. The wind is making up to forty knots out of the Northeast. The ship is on Bravo-2 status meaning it must be ready to leave on two hours notice. The Office of the Deck has the number of every bar and restaurant in Bristol handy.

I had cancelled plans to go to a party in Providence and instead was having dinner at the Lobster Pot in Bristol, first leaving the phone number with the quartermaster of the watch. About 10:30, a message, operational immediate, arrives at the Spar from Commander, First Coast Guard District, telling of a fishing vessel in distress 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod. There is a description, a loran fix and orders to "proceed and assist."

A waitress at the Lobster Pot comes over and tells me that the crew is being recalled. I pay the check and returned to the ship. Bill Miller, Quartermaster First Class, is already up in the chart room plotting a course. "It's going to take 18 hours to get to her," he says.

The special sea detail is set and the ship gets underway. After an hour's cruise down the Bay we take departure of the well protected East Passage and enter Rhode Island Sound. At first, the Spar only nods gently at the sea. Soon, however, she is rolling and pitching relentlessly. The ship has been secured throughout with the exception of the bridge and it has already become stuffy below.

Lying in my bunk, waiting to go on watch, the ship seems determined to throw me to the deck. I hang on and feel the internal organs of my body trying to do the same. I wonder whether that was my liver or my spleen that took a sudden lunge in the direction of my throat. Placing my laundry bag next to the bulkhead and my life vest next to the bunk guard rail, I construct a make-shift straitjacket to keep me from sliding from side to side. Now I just roll with the ship.

To survive a North Atlantic winter gale the Spar will have to keep punching like cocky little fighter, always on her toes, always moving. She will alternate rolls of up to forty-five degrees while leaning way back and then plunging into the sea. Sailors call the motion corkscrewing. And don't like it much.

It seems better to be on watch. At least there is something to do other than just think. The red glow of the darkened wheel house is deceptively restful. Outside the wind chips at the skin, the high bow strikes out at each wave, sometimes slapping it down, sometimes ducking under.

It isn't going to be as bad as that time we had patrolled in hurricane strength winds the radar tower the Air Force had abandoned because of the storm and then had asked the Coast Guard to keep an eye on it. It might not even be as bad as the night I found myself on the bridge with the conn, supposedly 45 feet above sea level, but looking up at the crests as we dipped into each trough and then one even higher wave had suddenly stopped and shook the Spar's 180 feet, bringing a call from below, "What the fuck you doing up there? You just knocked two guys out of their bunks." This one is just an ordinary storm.

If you feel ill, you have only the marginal solace of companionship. The bridge, being the only access to the outside during bad weather, is host to crew members seeking the leeward wing from which to relieve themselves. Later I will drink Coke and eat plain white bread to calm the internal insurrection, but for the time being there is nothing to do but go about one's business feeling awful.

Free of the protection of the land, the wind is blowing stronger. I grasp the handles of the radar set and try to find my balance. I try to amuse myself by plotting the course of a large blip that has appeared on the scope. I am reminded of the even larger blip I had once spotted in the fog that kept closing on our stern. I called the captain and by the time he had come to the bridge a large Russian fishing and surveillance vessel had broken through the shroud 100 years away. The captain went to wire Washington.

As the ship takes a heavy roll, the quartermaster slides past me and hits his shoulder hard against the starboard bulkhead. On the radio I hear a freighter tell the Narragansett Bay pilot he'll be at the entrance in two hours. The blip on the scope is the freighter. Its crew will be pulling liberty in Providence tonight.

During a normal watch there are three men on the bridge: the officer of the deck, the quartermaster of the watch and the helmsman. The rest of the ship is tending to its business or asleep. During the lonely hours of the mid-watch, those on the bridge are a trio of adventurers on an empty planet. They are the only ones who will known what took place that night. They will become acquainted with the thousand voices of the sea.

A few curt bits of information are exchanged when the watch is relieved: "This black beast is on a course of 136 degrees true, making good eleven knots, 0330 position is on the chart, the radar scope is empty. , . ." But aside from that no one will ask them about the watch. And the log will read simply: "Underway as before."

Throughout the next day the Spar pounds along towards the object of her search - a 69-foot green fishing vesel with a white superstructure, orange dory, 7 persons aboard, and engine failure. Towards mid-afternoon we approach the area and make radio contact with the trawler as we have several times during our trip out. The skipper speaks on 2182 kilocycles with a thick Scandinavian accent. He says that all on board are well, that his vessel comes from New Bedford, Mass., and is owned by a man whose name had an unmistakably Portuguese round. Leif Erickson, Prince Henry the Navigator and Captain Ahab have found a common heir 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod. The Spar's only radioman, who has brought his mattress to the radio shack so he can grab a few moments sleep between messages that flow in and out around the clock, asks the trawler for a long count. The skipper counts slowly, the Spar's radio direction finder searches for the direction of his voice, the needle finally coming to rest five points off the starboard bow. The ship alters course and heads for the disabled craft.

A mast is sighted ahead. The Spar approaches the trawler wallowing in the heavy sea. Our gunner's mate, wearing a bright red vest, aims his line-throwing gun across the bow of the other ship. There is a report and a thin line soars over the water. In less than ten minutes the fishing vessel is in tow and the Spar headed back towards New Bedford.

Now the seas begin to abate. I start to feel like eating good food again. Early in the trip I had given my lobster saute to Neptune as a peace offering and thereafter had subsisted on dry bread and Coca Cola. But now the smell of the cooks preparing cream of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches wafts through the passageways, a sure sign that good weather was back.

Finally, we are in Rhode Island Sound and then Buzzards Bay. The fishing craft is turned over to the commercial towboat Captain Leroy at the entrance to New Bedford harbor. We haul in the towline and where once had been a fishing vessel find a sack of deep sea lobsters, secured there by the trawler crew. The Spar turns back down Buzzards Bay towards Bristol. Steaming up Narragansett Bay in the morning light, the sun causes a million reflections on the water to play tag with one another. Rose Island, Buoy 17TTR, Poppasquash Point and Bristol Harbor draw closer at a steady 12.1 knots. It is neither hot nor cold and the wind does not bite. There are no disabled fishing vessels, no gales, no Vietnam, no Dallas, no Birmingham, no hunger, no fear, no weariness, no pain, nothing but a world in which all is well.

The Spar approaches the dock.

"Put out all lines when you can."

A gentle nudge and the Spar is home again.

Copyright 1998 Sam Smith