Billsbooksblog

How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?

2011-11-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

carlaulbrich.com,
http://www.carlau.com/bio.html

Carla Ulbrich was a guest last week (Nov. 13, 2011) on Gene Shay's Folk Show radio program on WZXL, and proved to be quite good, and funny.

Having come down with some medical problems that were hard to diagnose, and once they were thinking she was doomed to die, she took on a comical persona that continues to make people laught. Her new book is titled: How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?

Her strong suit is her playing guitar, singing and song writing, as she often performs in hospitials and nursing homes, and has written a number of truly great, funny songs.

And best of all, she recently moved to New Jersey, alas North Jersey, but she's now a Jersey Girl, and should be performing more in these parts.

Here's her bio:

Carla Ulbrich is a comical singer-songwriter and guitarist from Clemson, South Carolina and currently living in New Jersey. Insert your own punchline here.

Carla has a love of wordplay and a keen observational eye. She is primarily known for her humorous songs about such topics as wedgies, Waffle House, Klingons, and how rich she would be if she had the copyright on the 'F' Word. She also dabbles in fingerstyle guitar. Something of a mix between Phoebe and Jeff Foxworthy, she cites her biggest musical influences as Sesame Street, camp songs, and commercial jingles for beer and breakfast cereal.

The Professional Smart Aleck has toured all over the US and England, and has appeared on USA TV, the BBC, Dr. Demento, Sirius XM Radio, and The Bob and Sherrie Show and venues such as the Falcon Ridge and Kerrville Folk Festivals, Club Med, Eddie's Attic, and the Bluebird Cafe.

Carla started out on guitar at age 8, taking lessons from a nice lady down the street who only taught beginners. At age 12, she was told the teacher had nothing left to teach her, so Carla joined the school band, playing the flute. The band was particularly - well, bad, and they played the same music every year, so Carla switched instruments every year to prevent boredom: flute to clarinet to piccolo to tuba to xylophone, finally becoming the drum major her senior year. Had the band been anything worth bragging about, Carla may have ended up being a band director, but hey, we'll always have the memories of "this one time at band camp..."

Instead, she went to college to major in music in performance, where she frequently got in trouble with her professors for wasting time writing her own songs when she should have been practicing scales and listening to 12-tone "music." So, she wrote songs about her professors as well. Those approximately 18 minute and 20 second tapes, much like the Watergate tapes, have been conveniently erased.

College, however, was not a total waste. It was where Carla overcame crippling stage fright. "I used to sign up for open mics and then literally run away before my name was called. One of my friends threatened to never speak to me again if I did not get over myself and perform. If it weren't for her, I'd probably still be working in the mall selling suitcases and dancing flowers. Do they still make dancing flowers?"

Carla's first CD, Her Fabulous Debut, was released in 1999, the same year she won the South Florida Folk Festival Song Competition. In 2002, Carla fell very ill with kidney failure and a stroke. As part of her recovery, she wrote a bunch of humorous medical songs lampooning her frustrating experience with the US health care system, resulting in the CD "Sick Humor."

In 2009, Carla released her 5th CD, “Live From Outer Space,” recorded at Sirius XM Radio's Performance Theater. The CD was chosen as a "Top 10 CD of 2009" by George Graham (WVIA), Festival Radio, and the Serious Comedy Website. The track "Duet with a Klingon" was the #5 most requested song of 2009 on Dr. Demento.

Feb. 1, 2011 saw the release of Carla's book of humorous essays about her medical adventures as "The Singing Patient": "How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?" (pub: Tell Me Press). This book has received the Lupus Foundation Seal of Approval.

Ulbrich, President of the Difficult Last Name Club and former member of the defunct trio Girls Gone Funny, has shared the bill with such luminaries as Cheryl Wheeler, Vance Gilbert, Modern Man, the Bobs, Chuck Brodsky, Bob Malone, Bill Staines, Greg Greenway, David Massengill, Steve Forbert, Bob Malone, Lou and Peter Berryman, the Austin Lounge Lizards, Rev. Billy C Wirtz, The Boomers, and Twiggy the Water Skiing Squirrel.

Scroll down for the egregious list of awards and venues played.

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SICK HUMOR:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
In 2002, Carla suffered two strokes and kidney failure. Undeterred, she re-learned the guitar from scratch that year.

Under the stress of constant "care," Carla finally snapped and became "The Singing Patient," resulting in her third CD, "Sick Humor."

This collection features songs such as "Prednisone," "Sittin' in the Waiting Room," "On the Commode Again," and "What If Your Butt Was Gone" (a parody of one of Carla's own songs, also featured on Dr. Demento's 2005 "Basement Tapes" collection). Most of the lyrics were written during her many hours in doctors' waiting rooms. (Caution: contains some poop humor. Hey, write what you know. Sorry guys, she's taken.).

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SPEAKING PROGRAM:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla now shares her story of how humor, friendship, alternative therapies, occasional stubbornness, and hanging onto hope helped her beat the odds. Her speaking/ singing program is called "How Can You *Not* Laugh at a Time Like This." She has presented the program for various medical gatherings and company parties, as well as Unitarian fellowships and the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humor.

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GUITAR INSTRUCTION:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla has taught guitar at Lander University, North Greenville Baptist College, Hummingbird Music Camp, the National Guitar Workshop and her own private studio.

She is currently on teaching staff at Golden Age Fretted Instruments in Westfield, NJ.

She also has written a music instruction book ("Theory for Young Musicians: Notespeller") published with Alfred.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MORE INFO THAN YOU NEED:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you are planning to feed her, she likes gluten-free bread, hummus, dark chocolate, beans, cashews, tofu, green tea, carrots, and salad (gluten free, no artificial sweeteners or MSG, no iceberg lettuce). As proof that all her success has not gone to her head (her butt, maybe), Carla does not drink alcohol, eat red meat or shellfish, but M&Ms are fine - even the brown ones.

Carla uses up excess brain cells watching Wheel of Fortune (which you can view in less than 10 minutes using Tivo), playing Words With Friends, listening to the original Van Halen, and collecting US stamps and bottle caps.

Reclaim Your Health with Humor, Creativity, and Grit
by Carla Ulbrich, The Singing Patient
Tell Me Press, February 2011

Chronic or life threatening illness is no laughing matter, but folk singer songwriter comedian Carla Ulbrich's new book, How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This?: Reclaim Your Health with Humor, Creativity, and Grit, published by Tell Me Press, February 2011, brings a much needed dose of levity to this tough subject with some serious comedy and some sick humor. This book will make you laugh as it inspires and brings hope.

'While writing a great book on how to recover from illness, Carla Ulbrich wrote an even better book on how to live a healthy and fulfilling life. No doubt, you have a good doctor if you see How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This? in their waiting room.''

Michael Stock, "Folk & Acoustic Music," WLRN Radio, South Florida

''How Can You NOT Laugh at a Time Like This? is outstanding....Carla is your guide to navigate the emotionally and technically confusing world of illness with heart, humor, and bite-size chapters. Everyone needs a patient advocate-and now you have one, with this book.''

Robert Aubrey Davis & Mary Sue Twohy, ''The Village,'' Sirius/XM Radio

''As a doctor, Patch Adams brought to mainstream America the concept of a caring, compassionate, and fun medical staff making a profound difference in the healing of their patients. Now we've been given the gift to hear about it from the patient's perspective. Carla Ulbrich is living proof that bringing fun, play, creativity, and laughter to the healing process does wonders for the mind, body, and spirit. Carla's uncanny wit is infectious-and that's an infection we can all benefit from!'

Danny Donuts, CPA (Comic Performance Artist) and member of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor

''I was completely taken with [Carla Ulbrich's] amazing outlook on life, her tenacity, and her passion.... Carla talks to you honestly, on every level, in her book. She also does it with a fantastic sense of humor.''
LuckyYogini.com

You Only Rock Once

2011-11-10T07:39:00.000-08:00

You Only Rock Once: My Life in Music [Hardcover]
Jerry Blavat (Author)

The long-awaited autobiography of entertainment icon Jerry Blavat, You Only Rock Once is the wildly entertaining and unfiltered story of the man whose career began at the age of 13 on the TV dance show Bandstand and became a music legend. Lifelong friendships with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, a controversial relationship with Philadelphia Mafia boss Angelo Bruno that resulted in a decade-long FBI investigation, and much more colors this amazing journey from the early 60s through today.

Now, some 50 years after his first radio gig, Blavat puts it all in perspective in this uniquely American tale of a “little cockroach kid” borne out of the immigrant experience who lived the American Dream.

Jerry Interviewed: http://www.trn1.com/amn-jerry-blavat

Blavat was one of the early rock-and-roll deejays who revolutionized the profession and invented the "Oldies" format. He had national success in the ’60s as host of the popular CBS-TV dance show The Discophonic Scene, but is best known as a high-energy oldies deejay on the air and at live events throughout the Middle Atlantic region. With a successful nightclub outside Atlantic City, NJ (Memories); regular radio shows on 88.5 FM WXPN in Philadelphia, 92.1 FM WVLT in South Jersey, and 98.3 FM WTKU in Atlantic City; and scores of sold-out live dance events every year, Blavat is as popular as ever. He lives in Philadelphia, PA. Please visit him at jerryblavat.com. BOOK: The long-awaited autobiography of entertainment icon Jerry Blavat, You Only Rock Once is the wildly entertaining and unfiltered story of the man whose career began at the age of 13 on the TV dance show Bandstand and became a music legend. Lifelong friendships with the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, a controversial relationship with Philadelphia Mafia boss Angelo Bruno that resulted in a decade-long FBI investigation, and much more colors this amazing journey from the early 60s through today. Now, some 50 years after his first radio gig, Blavat puts it all in perspective in this uniquely American tale of a "little cockroach kid" borne out of the immigrant experience who lived the American Dream.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7624-4215-7

Writing a narrative that teems with zest and hipness, Blavat invites readers to accompany him on the inside track through the early days of doo wop and R&B to his national stature as an influential figure on the pop scene. Bandstand icon Dick Clark, in his foreword, spells out how much clout Blavat wielded in the heyday of the top acts of the '60s and '70s, rising from a teen "committee member" of the popular TV show to a powerhouse DJ on the East Coast from his studio built in his garage in Philadelphia, and later a top-rated TV stint. He discusses his ground-breaking Alan Freed–sponsored shows at the famed Paramount, his friendships with black doo wop and soul groups before the Jim Crow barrier came down, and his hobnobbing with Hollywood royalty including Sinatra, Frankie Avalon, Tony Curtis, and Sammy Davis Jr. He doesn't shy from talking about his wild ways with the ladies and the run-ins with the law concerning his mobbed-up pals. This soulful memoir by a "little cockroach kid from South Philadelphia" offers readers an insider's view into the golden era of rock and roll and pop music and entertainment. (Aug.)

Jerry Blavat
Broadcast Pioneers Banquet
Bala Golf Club, Philadelphia
November 22, 2002
http://www.broadcastpioneers.com/jerryblavat.html

He's the Geator with the Heator; the Boss with the Hot Sauce; the King of Philly Rock & Roll. He's as much a part of Philadelphia as cheese steaks, Tastykakes, soft pretzels, and the Liberty Bell. He has been entertaining the Delaware Valley for over 40 years. He's Broadcast Pioneers member Jerry Blavat.

As a dancer, radio and television disc jockey, performer, entertainer, producer, and nightclub owner, Jerry was born Gerald Joseph Blavat on July 3, 1940. He was raised in South Philadelphia and began his show business career at the age of 13 when he debuted as a dancer on the Original Bandstand hosted by Bob Horn. Two years later, at the age of 16, he became the road manager for Danny and the Juniors, a top Doo Wop group of the late fifties. At the same time, he met Sammy Davis Jr. They became life long friends and when Sammy married his third wife, Altovese Gore, Jerry was his best man. Blavat became Don Rickles' personal valet in his early years and they remain friends until this day.

In 1960, he started his own radio talk show on WCAM (AM), in Camden, New Jersey. In September of that year, the South Philadelphia Review reported that a new radio show would be broadcast live from the Venus Lounge at Broad and Reed Streets in South Philly. The paper said, "The name of the new venture is called the Jerry Blavat Show and features a South Philadelphia personality by the same name." Then on a snowy night in mid January, pulling out a stack of records, he began entertaining listeners throughout the night, and the legend of "The Geator" was born.

In the mid-sixties, reports had his audience at a half million teenagers per month. Much of Jerry's broadcasts in the early days were done on reel to reel tape. Recording the program in his garage studio, the tapes played while Blavat made personal appearances. In the mid-sixties, Jerry's broadcasts were also added for a time to the program schedule of WHAT. On that station, Blavat stated that he only made $18 a week ($1.50 per hour). Most of his audience didn't buy it, but it was true. The real money was at the hops, not on the air. However, Blavat knew he needed the airwaves to promote the appearances.

In 1965, he produced and hosted his own TV show "The Discophonic Scene" on CBS' Philadelphia outlet WCAU-TV. From 1967-70, the show aired on WFIL-TV, Channel Six and was syndicated through Triangle Publications coast-to-coast in 40 markets.

When the British Invasion came along, Jerry never became part of it. He didn't like format radio, never participated in it and has always been his own man. In 1966, Jerry said: "It had been hell during the Beatles reign, when there had been much pressure to get on the bandwagon. But I sensed that it just didn't have enough soul for my kids... So I finally gave in and played a few, and I got bombarded by phone calls saying 'Geator, what you doing, man?'"

In April of 1972 he became one of the first on-air personalities on WCAU-FM, an oldies station. He was on Sunday nights from 7 to 10 pm. He went on WFIL as a regular in the fall of 1983, hosting Sunday nights and quite often weeknights, when WFIL returned as an oldie station with Harvey Holiday as Program Director. In 1987, Blavat moved to "Philly Gold Radio," WPGR. It became "Geator Gold Radio" in April of 1992 when Blavat purchased the station.

Until this day, Jerry is seen on many local and national TV shows. He currently is involved with PBS on their Doo Wop specials working with the show's producer, T. J. Lubinsky. When the shows aired locally over WHYY-TV, Jerry Blavat was the area's host.

Broadcast Pioneers member Gerry Wilkinson, who produced "The Legends of Rock and Roll" featuring Jerry Blavat at WHYY, along with some of the WHYY-TV Doo Wop events said: "One day I stopped down at Jerry's studio while he was on the air. The broadcast still had 15 minutes to go when "Mama Geator" (Jerry's mother) showed up. That was the only time I ever saw his show ever take a back burner. He immediately went into a record (yes, he still plays those old 45's) and ran out to greet her pulling me with him. It was something special to see a 60-year-old man being that devoted to his mom. He's a good guy. He worshipped his mom. To me that was a good trait to see in my friend." His mother passed away in December of 2001.

May 2011
Throughout his career, Jerry has appeared on "The Tonight Show," "The Mike Douglas Show," "The Joey Bishop Show," "The Mod Squad," and "The Monkees." Jerry Blavat has appeared in feature films including "Desperately Seeking Susan," "Baby, It's You," and "Cookie."

After WPGR, the Geator then built studios in Center City and currently broadcasts over five different radio stations throughout the Tri-State area as the Geator Gold Radio Network.

In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in April of 1998 and was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's "Hall of Fame" on Friday, November 22, 2002. On Monday, May 1, 2000 Jerry was interviewed by Broadcast Pioneers member Ed Sciaky on our webcast, PIONEERS IN BROADCASTING. You can view it in our video section.

He still owns his own nightclub called "Memories" in Margate, which has celebrated its 30th Anniversary a few years ago. Besides broadcasting five days a week, he works at various clubs most nights. While many refer to James Brown as "the hardest working man in show business," the title should belong to Jerry Blavat.

Jerry Blavat's pages on this website are some of our most popular ones. We are always getting e-mails from people wanting us to put them in touch with whomever sells VHS/DVD copies of the old Blavat TV vehicles. Unfortunately, none of this material exists today. Many of the shows were live and never recorded. Others that were on tape, were broadcast and the tapes re-used. Remember that only television stations used videotape and the cost of a half-hour of tape was almost $500 (in 1965 dollars). They were re-cycled and used over and over.

Do you have audio recordings of any of Jerry Blavat's TV shows? If so, the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia would love to have a donated copy for our archives. Have recordings of Jerry's radio broadcasts before 1990 (especially WHAT shows and early WCAM programs)? Again, we would love to receive a donated copy.

Jerry Blavat said many years ago: "I may not be the best jock in the world, but I've got my own built-in excitement meter." Like the Geator says: "Keep on rockin' 'cause you only rock once."

From the official archives of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia
Written, compiled and researched by Broadcast Pioneers member Gerry Wilkinson
Top photo by Broadcast Pioneers member Gerry Wilkinson
Bottom photo by Barbara Farley-Stone, wife of member Frank Stone

He's the Geator with the Heator; the Boss with the Hot Sauce; the King of Philly Rock & Roll. He's as much a part of Philadelphia as cheese steaks, Tastykakes, soft pretzels, and the Liberty Bell. He has been entertaining the Delaware Valley for over 40 years. He's Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT's Jerry Blavat.

http://www.wvlt.com/blavat.html

As a dancer, radio and television disc jockey, performer, entertainer, producer, and nightclub owner, Jerry was born Gerald Joseph Blavat on July 3, 1940. He was raised in South Philadelphia and began his show business career at the age of 13 when he debuted as a dancer on the Original Bandstand hosted by Bob Horn. Two years later, at the age of 16, he became the road manager for Danny and the Juniors, a top Doo Wop group of the late fifties. Danny & the Juniors is just one of many groups that you can listen to here on Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT. At the same time, he met Sammy Davis Jr. They became life long friends and when Sammy married his third wife, Altovese Gore, Jerry was his best man. Blavat became Don Rickles' personal valet in his early years and they remain friends until this day.

In 1960, he started his own radio talk show on WCAM (AM), in Camden, New Jersey. (He won the show in a crap game). In September of that year, the South Philadelphia Reviewreported that a new radio show would be broadcast live from the Venus Lounge at Broad and Reed Streets in South Philly. The paper said, "The name of the new venture is called the Jerry Blavat Show and features a South Philadelphia personality by the same name." Then on a snowy night in mid January, pulling out a stack of records, he began entertaining listeners throughout the night, and the legend of "The Geator" was born.

In the mid-sixties, reports had his audience at a half million teenagers per month. Much of Jerry's broadcasts in the early days were done on reel to reel tape. Recording the program in his garage studio, the tapes played while Blavat made personal appearances. In the mid-sixties, Jerry's broadcasts were also added for a time to the program schedule of WHAT. On that station, Blavat stated that he only made $18 a week ($1.50 per hour). Most of his audience didn't buy it, but it was true. The real money was at the hops, not on the air. However, Blavat knew he needed the airwaves to promote the appearances.

In 1965, he produced and hosted his own TV show "The Discophonic Scene" on CBS' Philadelphia outlet WCAU-TV. From 1967-70, the show aired on WFIL-TV, Channel Six and was syndicated through Triangle Publications coast-to-coast in 40 markets.

When the British Invasion came along, Jerry never became part of it. He didn't like format radio, never participated in it and has always been his own man. In 1966, Jerry said: "It had been hell during the Beatles reign, when there had been much pressure to get on the bandwagon. But I sensed that it just didn't have enough soul for my kids... So I finally gave in and played a few, and I got bombarded by phone calls saying 'Geator, what you doing, man?'"

In April of 1972 he became one of the first on-air personalities on WCAU-FM, an oldies station. He was on Sunday nights from 7 to 10 pm. He went on WFIL as a regular in the fall of 1983, hosting Sunday nights and quite often weeknights, when WFIL returned as an oldie station with Harvey Holiday as Program Director. In 1987, Blavat moved to "Philly Gold Radio," WPGR. It became "Geator Gold Radio" in April of 1992 when Blavat purchased the station.

Until this day, Jerry is seen on many local and national TV shows. He currently is involved with PBS on their Doo Wop specials working with the show's producer, T. J. Lubinsky. When the shows aired locally over WHYY-TV, Jerry Blavat was the area's host.

Broadcast Pioneers Vice-President Gerry Wilkinson (a consultant for WVLT), who produced "The Legends of Rock and Roll" featuring Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT's Jerry Blavat at Channel 12, along with some of the WHYY-TV Doo Wop events said: "One day I stopped down at Jerry's studio while he was on the air. The broadcast still had 15 minutes to go when "Mama Geator" (Jerry's mother) showed up. That was the only time I ever saw his show ever take a back burner. He immediately went into a record (yes, he still plays those old 45's) and ran out to greet her pulling me with him. It was something special to see a 60-year-old man being that devoted to his mom. He's a good guy. He worshipped his mom. To me that was a good trait to see in my friend." His mother passed away in December of 2001.

Throughout his career, Jerry has appeared on "The Tonight Show," "The Mike Douglas Show," "The Joey Bishop Show," "The Mod Squad," and "The Monkees." Jerry Blavat has appeared in feature films including "Desperately Seeking Susan," "Baby, It's You," and "Cookie."

After WPGR, the Geator then built studios in Center City (rebuilt in the Fall of 2002) and currently broadcasts his Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT daily show from that location. On Thursdays, our own Jerry Blavat originates live from the Trump in Atlantic City exclusively only on your favorite station, Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT, South Jersey's #1 Oldies Powerhouse!

In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in April of 1998 and was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's "Hall of Fame" on Friday, November 22, 2002. On Monday, May 1, 2000 Jerry was interviewed on the Broadcast Pioneers' webcast, PIONEERS IN BROADCASTING. You can view it in the Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT video section of this website, WVLT.com!

He still owns his own nightclub called Memories in Margate, which has celebrated its 30th Anniversary. Besides broadcasting five days a week, he works at various clubs most nights. While many refer to James Brown as "the hardest working man in show business," the title should belong to Jerry Blavat, who said many years ago: "I may not be the best jock in the world, but I've got my own built-in excitement meter."

Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT is proud to present Jerry Blavat to the people of the Delaware Valley daily from 5 pm to 7 pm. He's a legend and Cruisin' 92.1, WVLT has him. We have the legends. Like the Geator says: "Keep on rockin' 'cause you only rock once."

CRUISIN' 92.1 - WVLT

IN PERSON; His Patter and Platters Still Rock the Shore
By ROBERT STRAUSS

Published: August 19, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/nyregion/in-person-his-patter-and-platters-still-rock-the-shore.html

GO, Baby! Go, Baby! Go, Baby! Go!''

The crowd at La Costa Cocktail Lounge is going-baby like it is 1965, when Jerry Blavat, the Geator with the Heator, the Boss with the Hot Sauce first played ''Can't Help Myself,'' by the Four Tops.
Though it is 36 years later and teenage denim and litheness may have given way to late-middle-age gray and arthritic joints, there are still multitudes dancing to Mr. Blavat's patter and platters every weekend of the summer at the Jersey Shore.

''They used to be my Yon Teenagers,'' said Mr. Blavat, who started his own career as a 13-year-old dancer on ''American Bandstand.'' ''Now they are Beyond Teenagers.'' Mr. Blavat has been a record promoter, radio personality, road manager and movie and television performer. But mostly, he's been the Geator, a popular D.J. from Philadelphia to the shore for four decades.

''I've known him for 40 years, since I was one of those Yon Teens,'' said Robert Brady, a Democratic Congressman from Philadelphia. ''He's been a friend of all the teens, and now all of us who like the oldies. He never has a down night. He's made a lot of people happy.''

In the summers, most of those people are down the shore, as Philadelphians put it, often following him night after night. On Thursdays at 5 p.m., he is does a two-hour stint at Resorts International casino hotel in Atlantic City. By 9 p.m., he is 30 miles down the Garden State Parkway at Lighthouse Pointe, a club in Wildwood, where he doesn't stop spinning records until 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, he is at his own club, Memories, in Margate, from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. He wraps up the weekend Sundays from 4 to 8 p.m. here at La Costa. Then it's back to Philadelphia where every weekday from 5 to 7 p.m., and sometimes from 2 to 4 p.m. as well, he does his syndicated radio show on the Geator Gold Radio Network, a half-dozen stations from Vineland to Ocean City to the Philadelphia suburbs.

''I don't know about slowing down,'' said Mr. Blavat, clad in his Sunday D.J. best -- a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt, khaki shorts, dusty New Balance sneakers and an un-logoed baseball cap. He is short and thin and taut-faced, looking much younger than his professed 61.

JERRY BLAVAT
Inducted 1993

Philadelphia radio listeners know him as "The Geator with the Heater" and "The Boss with the Hot Sauce." His mile-a-minute patter still reverberates in the countless dance halls and the radio and TV air waves where he's played the hits for "Yon Teens" everywhere.

Jerry Blavat, a South Philadelphia native, began his show biz career as a dancer on the original Bandstand. At age 16, he became the road manager for Danny and the Juniors. Then, in 1959, Blavat embarked on a career in radio, at WCAM in Camden. Over the years, he's complemented his illustrious radio career with numerous TV projects, including The Discophonic Scene in 1965, which featured live musical performances by some of the biggest stars of the day.

That success led to numerous network television appearances including The Mod Squad (with lifelong friend Sammy Davis, Jr.), The Monkees (where, playing himself, he fell for Davy Jones who was dressed as a girl in order to qualify the band for a mixed-group talent contest), The Tonight Show and The Joey Bishop Show. He's also been seen in several movies such as "Desperately Seeking Susan", "Baby It's You" and "Cookie."

Blavat continues to spin gold and wax nostalgic with shows on several Philadelphia area radio stations and at many club appearances.

Who is Jerry Blavat.... and What is The Geator With The Heator?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080329015535/http://www.mystreamingserver.com/geatorgold/htmldossier.html

Many disc jockeys over the years have claimed a love for the music they play. A few of them have meant it. A fewer still have put their money where their mouths were. And of those, only one (to our knowledge) has been wildly successful in the process: Jerry Blavat.

When rock and roll began to emerge in the early '50s, and with it a rise in the popularity of the rhythm and blues records which led to its sound, radio personalities were successful because of their ears. They had the freedom to pick the music they played and their fans flocked to them because of their knowledge and taste. By the '60s, for a variety of reasons from the payola scandal to a desire for a more uniform sounding station, the radio personality truly became a disc-jockey-- playing songs from an approved list. The disc-jockey's personality came through between the records, not because of them. The 70s brought an approved order of approved songs which were selected largely through research --and liner cards. Liners were pre-written phrases to be parroted directly by the on air host. In other words, most disc jockeys were not only being told what to play, but what to say. But many were being handsomely compensated in the process.

Jerry Blavat took a different route. He was attracted to the business because of his love for the music and it was a relationship he wasn't willing to sever. His first exposure to "fame" came as a dancer on the original Bandstand television program, hosted by Bob Horn. In 1953, less than a year after the show's inception, a 13 year old Jerry Blavat perfected his first scam-- impersonating a 14 year old to get on the program. He became a favorite with the viewers and rose to the head of the coveted "Committee", the group of teens responsible for aiding Horn in the direction of the show. When Bob Horn was fired over very questionable circumstances a few years later, the rest of the teens welcomed new host Dick Clark. Belying his youth, Blavat displayed an early sense of the loyalty that would become his most prized character trait and left the program rather than tacitly approving Horn's ousting. (The two remained close until Horn's passing in Houston in 1966.)

By the time he graduated from high school in 1958, Jerry Blavat was hooked not only on the music, but on performing as well. And he was working on a healthy resume to prove it. Promoting records (for Cameo-Parkway), working with performers (serving as Don Rickles' valet), and traveling with top recording stars (as road manager for Danny & The Juniors) gave him a front row seat for the roots of rock and roll. Living as a "roadie," Blavat amassed a wealth of knowledge and a bank account of contacts. Artists like Jerry Butler, Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gladys Knight and many more became friends and confidantes. The stories they told coupled with the first hand experiences he had, unwittingly prepared Blavat for a career move he never knew he'd make.

Jerry got into radio in 1962, the result of a bet. Given the state of radio today, some might believe he was on the losing end of that wager. But what actually happened was Jerry, full of bravado, bet that he could do a radio show from a nightclub. It wasn't whether it would be technically possible, rather whether Blavat would be able to convince a radio station to go along with it, that the owner of the Venus Lounge bet against. He didn't know Jerry, who promptly went to WCAM in Camden, New Jersey and purchased an hour of radio time (reimbursing himself in part from the proceeds of the bet, no doubt). For most people, an ensuing "act of God" would have ended this story. But for Jerry it was simply a fortuitous beginning.

Since Jerry acquired the radio time, he was allowed to resell commercials within it, which he promptly did. He had this all figured out. And for a while it worked just like he thought it would. What he hadn't counted on was the snowstorm. The one that closed the nightclub. And the city. But nothing could close Jerry. He had sold the time and he was going to air those commercials. (Loyalty may be the trait Jerry prizes most in himself, but onlookers will attest that tenacity by far is the key to his staying power. Nothing will stop this guy. And everything has tried.) So doing the only unreasonable thing, Jerry ignored the 'stay off the road' warnings and made it to WCAM's studios where he, his records (the ones he used to dance to on bandstand, the ones he promoted on Cameo-Parkway, and the ones he just plain liked that no one had ever heard-- the flops and flipsides) and his commercial announcements, set up shop.

If you want to light a radio audience on fire, there is no better propellant that a blizzard. When snow immobilizes a city, kids tune in to find out if schools are closed, adults listen to hear if they've got to report to work, and everyone stays glued to the disc jockey's every word, in part because there's nothing else to do when you're housebound. The only way Jerry Blavat could have had a more captive audience would have been to broadcast to prisons. Captive or not, what they heard was captivating. They'd never heard anything like it. And they'd never heard so much of it. The storm that immobilized the listeners also immobilized Jerry's replacements, so his one hour of evening radio time turned into all night. He continued his frenetic pace until the morning guy showed up at 6 a.m. Listeners didn't know which was better-- his patter or his platters-- but they did know the number of the station and they called.

Just as an exhausted Jerry was ready to fall asleep, the general manager of WCAM phoned and wanted to know what the hell he did. (Usually when this kind of a call comes, it's the end of your career, not the beginning.) After finding out, the GM informed a bemused Jerry that he was a smash. Blavat's club gig turned into a radio gig, and Jerry turned into "The Geator With The Heator".

Just exactly what that meant has been the subject of much discussion. Even long time fans aren't precisely sure. But there is logic behind the seemingly illogical but appropriately rhyming handle (every jock with soul spoke in rhymed couplets back then-- today the records rap... back then the rap came from the disc jockey between the records which contained something now nostalgic-- a melody).

Geator came from alligator-- gator, or geator, depending on your Florida accent. To hear Jerry tell it, 'a geator would lay in the mud and bother no one unless you came close. Then it would snatch you up.' That's how it was with Blavat. Once you dialed by 1310 and caught his act, he snatched you up like an alligator. He was hot, almost too hot. Like a car heater in the dead of winter, he started out warming you but quickly heated you up to the point that you broke out in a sweat. Some felt it was what he said, others claimed it was the way he said it, but for most it was the music, that mesmerizing sound they weren't hearing on the popular stations.

...But make no mistake about it, while Jerry Blavat may well be the best known disc jockey in Philadelphia, he's never worked on a highly rated station. His chosen approach of buying the time outright (and later in his career, an entire station), allows him to remain free to program the sound as he sees fit, answering to no one but his audience. Fortunately, Blavat has a business sense. Because the only way this approach can be viable in the long term is by knowing how to market the airtime-- and yourself. Jerry is a master at both.

The Geator coupled his growing popularity on the air (which by 1963 resulted in regional syndication of his program on small stations throughout the Delaware Valley from Atlantic City to Allentown) with appearances off the air at dances, clubs and events. It was not unusual for Blavat to see 5,000 kids a week in person in the mid '60s, nor too much of a stretch to say he'd remember 3,000 of their names the following week. His appearances became so frequent that for a time he needed to use a helicopter just to make it on time from one gig to the next. (Today the helicopter is gone, but the frantic schedule is still in place. Throughout the year, he can be found somewhere on virtually any night, and in the summer months he's in weekend residence at Memories At Margate, the New Jersey Shore's hottest night spot which he's owned and operated since 1972.)
But Blavat's entrepreneurial spirit didn't stop there. He formed record labels (most notably Lost Nite which issued countless oldies compilation albums treasured by collectors to this day, but also Crimson which had the Soul Survivors'; "Expressway To Your Heart"), opened record stores (the Record Museum chain was his), and arguably began the "oldies" format. A number of people claim that distinction, but to our recollection, no one else in 1962 was playing the music of rock and roll's past. And for top 40 music in the early '60s, there wasn't all that much of a past-- if you were relying on hits, that is. Jerry was relying on a sound. Even before the term was widely used, Blavat and oldies became synonymous to his audience. Then, and to this day, he lived by the phrase, 'where we don't only play the oldies, we create them'. The year didn't matter, the artist didn't matter, the label didn't matter, A side, B side, anything on vinyl qualified if it had the sound. (If we have to describe that sound, you're at the wrong site.)

In 1965 Jerry made a quantum career leap, combining his on air demeanor with his in person style by launching The Discophonic Scene, a television show which took him to a new level of mass appeal respectability. Unlike his radio career, where his show was always the standout segment on otherwise comparatively obscure radio stations, The Discophonic Scene aired on VHF network affiliated television outlets. First on WCAU-TV 10, and later on WFIL-TV 6, the Discophonic Scene was ultimately syndicated through Triangle Publications, seen across the country every weekday in over 40 markets.

Differing from most television shows where behind the scenes the host is but a small part of the action, The Discophonic Scene was in all ways an extension of Jerry Blavat. Relying on the contacts he made earlier in his career, Blavat rose early to personally book the likes of Fats Domino, Wilson Pickett, James Brown, The Supremes, Martha & The Vandellas and many many more. Being a fan himself, the rule was live performances, not the badly mouthed lip-syncing identified with similar offerings. In front of the camera, there was also a difference-- Jerry was more like the kids than their parents. He not only resembled the "Yon Teens" as he referred to his fans, but he danced like them too. After all, it wasn't that long ago that he was in their place on Bandstand.

That success led to numerous network television appearances including The Mod Squad (with lifelong friend Sammy Davis, Jr.), The Monkees (where, playing himself, he fell for Davy Jones who was dressed as a girl in order to qualify the band for a mixed-group talent contest), The Tonight Show and The Joey Bishop Show. He's also been seen in several movies such as "Desperately Seeking Susan", "Baby It's You" and "Cookie".

But the real legacy that belongs to Jerry Blavat is the one he created on the radio. The one that endures to this day. The one where "The Geator With The Heator" jumps out of your dashboard blaring a heart stopping song that you've got to hear. The one where "The Boss With The Hot Sauce" brings back the past. In 1970, Jerry returned fulltime to his radio roots and he hasn't been off the air since --or out of the clubs. It hasn't always been an easy road, but it's the only one he'd choose to travel. As for those of us who consider ourselves fans of that special sound-- the one that takes you where you want to go-- we're just grateful to be invited along for the ride.
Rollye Jamesrollye.net

HEAR THE GEATOR -

MONDAY THRU FRIDAY 5-7 PM:
WVLT Cruisin' 92.1 FM &
http://www.wvlt.com
(click on LISTEN LIVE)
MONDAY THRU FRIDAY 7-9 PM:
WTKU KOOL 98.3 FM &
http://www.kool983.com
(click on LISTEN LIVE)
THURSDAYS, 9-11 PM (July 4 weekend thru Labor Day):
WFNE FUN 106.7 in Wildwood & N. Cape May
http://www.fun1067.com
(click on LISTEN LIVE)
SATURDAYS 6-7 PM - GEATOR'S ROCK & ROLL, RHYTHM & BLUES EXPRESS ON WXPN:
- Philly & South Jersey 88.5 FM
- Lehigh Valley 104.9 FM
- Harrisburg 88.1 FM
- Baltimore 90.5 FM
and worldwide at xpn.org (click on LISTEN LIVE!)
For archived shows:
Go to xpn.org - click on PROGRAMS, then GEATOR R&R, then LISTEN TO RECENT SHOWS

FRIDAY & SATURDAY NIGHTS Memorial Day thru Labor Day:
WTKU KOOL 98.3 FM and kool983.com LIVE FROM MEMORIES IN MARGATE Fridays starting at 8

JERRY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY - "YOU ONLY ROCK ONCE: MY LIFE IN MUSIC"
PUBLISHED BY RUNNING PRESS JULY 2011
ISBN # 978-0-7624-4215-7
YOU ONLY ROCK ONCE: MY LIFE IN MUSIC - available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble bookstores and bn.com, Walmart.com, other websites, and many local bookstores, including:
PHILADELPHIA: Joseph Fox Booksellers and the Penn Book Center
WEST CHESTER: Chester County Book & Music Co.
WILMINGTON: Ninth Street Book Shop
REHOBOTH BEACH: Browseabout Books
AVALON, OCEAN CITY, & STONE HARBOR: Hoy's Five & Ten

For upcoming interviews, readings, and signings in your area, check the CALENDAR link at left and also the Facebook page for YOU ONLY ROCK ONCE.
Currently the book is #1 on amazon.com in the broadcasting category!

Next book signings:
FRIDAY, NOV. 18, 8 pm at CAFE MADISON in Riverside, NJ
TUESDAY, DEC. 6, 6 pm at BLACK TIE FORMAL WEAR, 1120 Walnut St in Philadelphia (before JERSEY BOYS performance @ Forrest Theater)

NOTE: Books will be available for purchase at all book signings.
WATCH THIS SPOT FOR UPDATES AND ADDITIONS --
also, click on "LIKE" the Facebook page YOU ONLY ROCK ONCE: MY LIFE IN MUSIC –

and join the online Geator Fans group on Yahoo --
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GeatorFans

NEXT KIMMEL CENTER CONCERT: Saturday, Januray 28, 8 pm kimmelcenter.org

Jerry returns from the Malt Shop Memories cruise on Monday and will be at SugarHouse on Wednesday and the Buck Hotel Thursday . . .
Please join him at the following fundraising events:

SUN NOV 27: HARRAH'S, BRIGANTINE - ANIMAL RESCUE BENEFIT
(click CALENDAR OF APPEARANCES at left for locations & details)
REGULAR WEEKLY APPEARANCES - LABOR DAY THROUGH MAY:

WEDNESDAYS 5-7 pm - SUGARHOUSE CASINO, 1001 N. Delaware Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19123 - broadcast live on WVLT Cruisin' 92.1 FM and wvlt.com. For more info: sugarhousecasino.com or 877.477.3715

THURSDAYS, 8 pm - BUCK HOTEL, 1200 Buck Road, Feasterville, PA, 215/396-2002, thebuckhotel.com

REGULAR WEEKLY APPEARANCES - MEMORIAL DAY THRU LABOR DAY

WEDNESDAYS 5-7 pm - SUGARHOUSE CASINO, 1001 N. Delaware Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19123 - broadcast live on WVLT Cruisin' 92.1 FM and wvlt.com. For more info@sugarhousecasino.com or 877.477.3715

THURSDAYS 8 pm (starting the Thursday before July 4 weekend) - LIGHTHOUSE POINTE, 5100 Shawcrest Rd, Wildwood Crest, 609/522-SHIP - live on WFNE Fun 106.7 FM and fun1067.com

FRIDAYS, 5-7 pm (mid-May thru Labor Day weekendt) - CHICKIE'S & PETE'S, 6055 Black Horse Pike, Egg Harbor Township, NJ, 609/272-1930 - live on WVLT Cruisin' 92.1 and wvlt.com

FRIDAYS 8-11 pm MEMORIES IN MARGATE, Madisot & Amherst Ave., 609.823.2196 - with FREE FOOD BUFFET from Barrels and Chickie's & Pete's. Jerry is followed at 11 pm by Joey Marini's Back in the Day dance party at Memories - all live on WTKU KOOL 98.3 and kool983.com.

SATURDAYS 9 pm to 4 am MEMORIES IN MARGATE, broadcast live on WTKU KOOL 98.3 FM and kool983.com till 2 am

SUNDAYS 4-7:30 pm - afternoon jam sessions at LA COSTA LOUNGE, 4000 Landis Ave., Sea Isle City, 609.263.3756

For Jerry's complete schedule of personal appearances, click CALENDAR link at left. Once you're in the calendar, click on any event for more info about it, including location, how to get tickets, directions (click on MAP next to event's location), and more.

IMPORTANT: If you have a QUESTION about an item on the CALENDAR, you will get a faster answer if you post it in the Geator Fans group rather than in the calendar notes. To join Geator Fans, click on this link:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GeatorFans/
and then click JOIN THIS GROUP. The Geator Fans group is very active and you will almost always receive a prompt answer to your question there.

JOIN THE GEATOR ON-LINE FAN CLUB AND MESSAGE BOARD AT
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GeatorFans

LINKS & MORE:
The easy-to-remember link for this website is always geator.net
Join Yahoo's online Geator Fan Club & discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GeatorFans/
Look for Geator's columns -- "ASK THE GEATOR" in the Atlantic City Weekly (acweekly.com - click on 'News & Views,' then 'Ask the Geator')
Want to learn the dance steps? See link at left on this page for tips (sorry, no instructions on line yet)
Check out Bill Smith's Geator tribute at thegeator.com (not up to date but chock full of Geator history & info)
Hear Jerry as Al Bacore, the Tuneful Tuna, narrator of SpongeBob SquarePants' fabulous CD "The Best Day Ever" !!
Check out the brand new Facebook page for Jerry's autobiography, "You Only Rock Once: My Life In Music" - go to Facebook, search for YOU ONLY ROCK ONCE, and click on "LIKE"
and keep on rockin' -- 'cause you only rock once!

For info not listed here, send an email to geatorella@yahoo.com

To buy rare & out of print vinyl recordings, contact:
Jim at Forever Records, Rt 13 South, Levittown Shopping Center, Levittown, PA,215-945-9423 OR
Val Shively's R&B Records,49 Garrett Road, Upper Darby, PA 19082,610/352-2320 Fax: (610) 352-8199 OR Bobby at Pat's Music, 4516 Frankford Ave, Philly, 215/708-0444

Jerry Blavat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jerry Blavat
Birth name Gerald Joseph Blavat
Born July 3, 1940 (age 71)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,United States
Show Geator Gold Radio
Station(s) WVLT (FM), WTKU (FM), andWXPN
Style Oldies
Country United States
Website Official website
http://geatorgigs.webs.com/index.htm

Jerry Blavat (born July 3, 1940), also known as "The Geator with The Heator", is an Americandisc jockey who is known for promoting oldies music on the radio in the Philadelphia area. Blavat was born in South Philadelphia to a Jewish father and Italian mother.

Career
In 1953, Blavat debuted on the original Bandstand on WFIL-TV with Bob Horn and Lee Stewart. In 1956 he managed a national tour for Danny and the Juniors, and he worked as Don Rickles' valet in 1958-59. He got his start in radio in 1960. By 1963, his show was syndicated in Camden, Atlantic City, Trenton, Pottstown, Wilmingtonand Allentown. During the 1960s, Blavat was a partner in the Lost Nite and Crimson record labels, along with Jared Weinstein and Collectables Records' founder Jerry Greene. Together, the three also owned Record Museum, a now-defunct chain of record stores based in Philadelphia.

From 1965-1967, Blavat produced and hosted a weekly television show called The Discophonic Scene. He also guest-starred on television shows including The Mod Squad, The Monkees, The Tonight Show and The Joey Bishop Show. He has also appeared in the moviesDesperately Seeking Susan, Baby It's You and Cookie.In the early 1970s, Blavat purchased a nightclub in Margate, New Jersey, and named it "Memories."

Mafia connections
In 1981, Blavat was having dinner at a South Philadelphia restaurant with Greek mob boss Chelsais "Steve" Bouras and several other guests when Bouras was shot dead in a contract killing.

In the early 1990s, an investigation by the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation into organized crime's influence in the liquor business made public Blavat's association with the Bruno-Scarfo crime family. During the investigation, Thomas A. DelGiorno, a former Scarfo crime family Capo, testified that Blavat had regularly paid a "street tax" to the crime family, had purchased a $40,000 yacht for crime boss Nicodemo Scarfo and was one of several individuals who purchased a condominium in Florida for Scarfo. In exchange, the criminal organization secured employment for Blavat throughout the state and also kept union organizers out of Blavat's nightclub. Del Giorno also testified that Blavat regularly served as a driver for crime boss Angelo Bruno. Blavat pled the fifth.

Recent activity
In 1993, Blavat was inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance's Hall of Fame.[6] In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fameas part of a permanent exhibit in its Museum of Radio and Records. In 2002, he was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's "Hall of Fame." In 2011, Blavat is a DJ for oldies radio station WVLT FM 92.1 in the South Jersey area, for the University of Pennsylvania's public radio station WXPN in Philadelphia, and for radio station WTKU 98.3 FM in Atlantic City. He owns the nightclub "Memories in Margate". Blavat is a regular columnist for the Atlantic City Weekly.

On July 23, 2011, Blavat's autobiography, "You Only Rock Once: My Life In Music," was published by Running Press.

References
"Lost Nite Album Discography". Archived from the original on 2008-08-02. Retrieved 2008-06-22.
"Jerry Blavat - Dossier". Archived from the original on 2008-03-29. Retrieved 2008-06-22.
"CRUISIN' 92.1, WVLT - Jerry Blavat Bio". Retrieved 2008-06-22.
Strauss, Robert (August 19, 2001). "IN PERSON; His Patter and Platters Still Rock the Shore". New York Times.
Sullivan, Joseph F. (January 19, 1992). "Mob Sway Over Bars Called Strong". New York Times.
"Philadelphia Music Alliance Hall of Fame Bio". Retrieved 2008-06-22.

Chris Mathews new book on JFK

2011-10-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

Chris Matthews Plays Loveball With JFK In New Biography

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/chris-matthews-jfk-biography_n_1033273.html

Chris Matthews -- current host of MSNBC's "Hardball" -- was a 15-year-old working as a paperboy for the Philadelphia Bulletin when he found his political loyalties shifting.

Like the rest of his immediate family, he considered himself a Republican, but something about John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign had inspired him, made him question what he stood for. Not only did he find himself suddenly rooting for a Democrat, but he had grown enamored with the entire Kennedy dynasty, and momentarily cheered the possibility of a two-term JFK presidency, and a Lyndon Johnson presidency to follow.

Thus began a lifelong fascination that hasn't ever let up. In 1996, while still the D.C. bureau chief for theSan Francisco Chronicle, Matthews published "Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America," and on Nov. 1 he'll release "Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero," a wide-ranging biography that focuses on the life and dual natures of the 35th president.

Jackie Kennedy famously called her husband both "elusive" and "unforgettable," and in this new work, Matthews seeks to elucidate the conflicting shades of Kennedy's character, while also celebrating a leader who he believes united the American people more than any other president since the 1960s.

In an interview with HuffPost, Matthews reveals the Kennedy traits that caught him off guard, why he made everyone feel "included," and a few essential qualities he thinks Obama -- and other American politicians -- could pick up from Kennedy.

Was there any significance to releasing this book now, or did it just work out that way?
I've been working on it for years. I started back in the 80s, looking at the Nixon/Kennedy rivalry, but since then I've been working on this for a long time. I guess I was thinking about the 50th anniversary [of the assassination], sure, and I didn't know what the current zeitgeist would be. But I think it's the perfect time for it. The country wants to be reminded what a leader is. A hero. We haven't had a hero since Kennedy, really -- a guy who proved himself in battle, a hero in war who had a rite of passage like that. This guy was the guy. He was it.

What surprised you most to learn about him?

How sick he was. I say in the book how he was a greater hero than he wanted us to know. He was sick all the time, had a terrible stomach injury, blood counts all through high school, it went on and on and on. He was always in a hospital. He must have had a record in Choate for the number of days he was in the infirmary. Also, he was always reading. Always. He was a reader, and a hero worshipper, and he became who he became because he was incessantly studying King Arthur, Churchill, the history of World War I, the Times every day in high school. I got this from his classmates.

You repeatedly discuss how much Kennedy loved politics, in general, and how he was proud to be a politician. What about politics appealed to him most?

He loved meeting people, loved campaigning, loved the competition, loved the zest of it. He loved building a party and punishing his rivals. It's all there, what a politician has to be. Even the day he was killed, he was going to the airport in Fort Worth, asking people what the difference was between Dallas and Fort Worth politically. He was always asking questions, always trying to learn more about it.

Was Kennedy feared?

You can't be loved for long if you're not feared. Kennedy did not hold grudges, but he dealt politically with people. I think he'd make Eric Cantor fear him a little if he were [president today]. He was tough on his enemies, he always was. Look at everything he did: He beat Nixon, he beat Johnson, he beat them all. He didn't join those guys, he beat them. You think Johnson wanted to be his running mate? He had this stick, this ability to enforce. He wasn't moved by those emotions around him and he could stand up to people.

You write in the book that Kennedy knew, more than anyone, "that nations die or thrive on the ability and judgment of their leaders to stir them at perilous times." How was Kennedy able to stir people?

Everyone was part of his mission. There was always this inclusion of bringing people in and making everybody participate. It was never, "Let's see how smart he is," it was always him bringing other people in, making people a part of it all. Ask anybody from that generation, they felt included. I think the big Kennedy distinction was the ability to make everybody part of the effort. "We're all in this together."

How did he do that, specifically?

He was all about relationship politics. It wasn't about transactions -- "Once you're with me, you're with me." He stuck with them. Obama's sort of like, "You elect me now, I'll do the job, and watch me do it." The Clintons were all about relationships, too, but the entire Kennedy party -- that was everything. He was always building a team around him, and people trusted him. He had 12 kids in the mud, 12 guys in the military, he saved his crew. When you go out and you carry your 42-year-old engineer on your back for four hours, the strap of his life jacket in your teeth, it creates a certain competence. Those guys loved him.

Because he was strong on the battlefield.

He was a leader! It's not about the ability to give a good speech or to be smart, it's about a talent to really lead people. I don't know if Romney or Obama have showed that kind of leadership, someone who men and women want to follow into battle. "We want to go with him. I want to go with that guy." Kennedy could walk into a room and men and women both would just melt. He was very impressive in terms of personal chemistry.

Have any politicians since Kennedy possessed similar qualities?

Scott Brown got a bit of it in Massachusetts, he connected with that anti-establishment thing in Boston. But that's more parochial. Jimmy Carter in '75, '76, he picked up on the country's mood for a while. I think Reagan picked up on some of it in his time.

Does Obama possess some of those qualities?

Obama hasn't clicked into the zeitgeist the way Kennedy did. Does [Obama] feel what we feel the way Kennedy felt what we felt? Does he get us right now? I hope he does, but I don't know. Kennedy connected with the country. We were losing the Cold War, the world's global map was changing from red and pink and we could see it. He said, "Let's get this country moving again." He knew exactly how to brace us for what was [to come] -- that sense of when to strike something. [Kennedy] always had this fear of complacency, and he knew the times, he knew us. Obama hasn't clicked into the zeitgeist. Is there an Obama party? I don't know.

BK: CHRIS MATTHEWS - WHO USE TO SPEND SUMMERS IN OCEAN CITY NJ DURING HIS COLLEGE DAYS, AND WORKED AT THE CHATTERBOX - MAY HAVE ADMIRED JFK - HE CERTAINLY GETS HIS DEATH WRONG.

Here’s partial transcript of Chris Mathews putting his foot in his mouth again, and Jerry Policoff’s response.

'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Friday, April 15th, 2011
Read the transcript to the Friday show

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/

…MATTHEWS: “Let Me Finish” tonight with the grassy knoll. That was the place in Dallas—near the Texas Book Depository—that the crazies believe people shot at President Kennedy from.

Well, to the conspiracist mind, it‘s important to always have a grassy knoll. It‘s their grotto of denial, a place to travel mentally and find deliverance from reality. Those who don‘t like reality need a grassy knoll to get through the night.

I do not wish to do injustice to these desperados. I know exactly why people need grassy knolls. They need them because they cannot bear the suffering that truth brings to the heart and to the mind.

How could some loser—some misfit who went to the Soviet Union because he thought he liked communism and believed he could find a happy life there, then came home and fall hard for Fidel Castro on the rebound, how could this squirt kill the regal Jack Kennedy? It doesn‘t balance out, does it? How could a nobody kill such a great somebody?

Well, worst yet, how could a man of a hard left—a communist—kill Jack Kennedy. Why wasn‘t it a right-winger who killed him? Then we could blame it on them?

I‘ve got it. We‘ll come up with a conspiracy theory—don‘t actually have to prove anything, of course, that says—just say it. Just say it. It really was a right winger. It‘s that guy - oh, those guys over in the grassy knoll. Don‘t you get it? It was the right wing that killed our hero.

Well, a half century later, we‘ve got a new grassy knoll, another place for retreat for those who can‘t stand a hard truth. The truth is that Barack Obama is the president of the United States. Got it! President of the United States, duly elected leader of the country living right there in the White House.

And they can‘t stand it. They can‘t stand that it is, in fact, a fact. No way around it. No way.

Just look at the history books. Look at the newspaper. Dang it! This guy is president. He was elected president. A majority of the people wanted him president and went out and voted for him.

How do we change that? How do we change that reality?

I got it, with this—it didn‘t happen. You see, he wasn‘t born here. He‘s not eligible to be president.
I read it somewhere that he‘s from somewhere else. Can‘t put my finger on it but he‘s not really an American, you see? Not natural born anyway. He‘s from out there somewhere.

So, last night, the boobs in the Arizona legislature voted to require the candidates for president henceforth approved other documents besides the official document that the state of Hawaii issues as a birth certificate. They want circumcision, baptismal records. They want something that nobody‘s ever wanted before from any candidate before.

What they really want is the same thing grassy knoll people want even now—deliverance from the truth they cannot handle.

Donald Trump—take a bow for giving new hope to grassy knollers everywhere. Wow!
That‘s HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42647474/ns/msnbc_tv-hardball_with_chris_matthews/

Dear Chris,

I was not surprised by your arrogant and ignorant denunciation of conspiracy theorists who believe JFK was fired upon from the "Grassy Knoll." Of course the last official investigation of the assassination came to that same conclusion, based in part on scientific acoustics tests that virtually proved it (despite claims to the contrary those tests have never been refuted).

I find myself wondering, however, if you ever read your former boss and mentor's book "Man of the House," in which Tip O’Neillwrites:

I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the President’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination. I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence. "That’s not what you told the Warren Commission," I said. "You’re right," he replied. "I told the FBI what I had heard but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family." "I can’t believe it," I said. "I wouldn’t have done that in a million years. I would have told the truth." "Tip, you have to understand. The family—everybody wanted this thing behind them." Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s.

So I guess O'Donnell and Powers can be counted among the "crazies," as can Tip O'Neill for passing on what they told him without attempting to refute it."

You are entitled to believe what you want about the Kennedy assassination, but branding people who believe something else based upon eyewitness testimony and scientific evidence as "crazies" says a lot more about you than it says about them.

Jerry Policoff

The Big Year - the Book & the now Movie

2011-10-25T00:53:00.000-07:00

The Big Year, a book about birders, has been made into a movie.

http://www.markobmascik.com/the-big-year

Every year on January 1, a handful of people abandon their day-to-day lives to join one of the world’s quirkiest sporting contests. With few rules and no referees, there is one goal: to see and identify the most species of birds in a single year. The few who commit to the full year – known to its participants as a Big Year – will spend a grueling, exhaustive year traveling hundreds of thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars. In a good year, the contest offers passion and deceit, fear and courage, a fundamental craving to see and conquer mixed with an unstoppable yearning for victory. In a bad year, it drains savings accounts and leaves people raw.

In THE BIG YEAR: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (Free Press; publication date: February 4, 2004; $25.00), prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik chronicles the 1998 North American Big Year, the greatest – or perhaps the worst – birding competition of all time. With engaging humor and a sharp wit, Obmascik captures the enthusiasm of the birders themselves, taking readers on a rollicking 275,000-mile odyssey, as each of the three main competitors fight for the title of champion.

The three contestants were perhaps the unlikeliest set of competitors ever to meet. A wise-cracking industrial contractor from New Jersey, a newly-retired executive vice-president of a multi-million dollar company from Aspen, and a painfully divorced software engineer who continued to work full time at a nuclear power plant in Maryland while pursuing his Big Year; they were all passionate about birds.

As they traveled on the grueling, 365-day potholed road to glory, they faced broiling deserts, roiling oceans, bug-infested swamps, rising debt, and a disgruntled mountain lion. From the island of Attu in Alaska to the Florida Keys, from the deserts of Arizona to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of northern California, they crossed time zones and, occasionally, paths on their quests to see once-in-a-lifetime rarities that could mean the difference between winner and second place. Perhaps the most intense birding competition ever, by December 31, one of the contenders had set a record so gigantic – identifying an extraordinary 745 different species by official year-end count – it is unlikely ever to be bested.

Mark Obmascik is the bestselling author of Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled — and Knuckleheaded — Quest for the Rocky Mountain High, winner of the 2009 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Literature, and The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, which received five Best of 2004 citations by major media. The Big Year movie, starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, is being released in October 2011 by 20th Century Fox. Obmascik was lead writer for the Denver Post team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the 2003 National Press Club award for environmental journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Merrill Schwerin, and their three sons, Cass, Max, and Wesley.

Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can’t resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the cloud and try scaling all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners – and to finish them in less than one year.
The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik’s rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is now walk in the park, although sometimes it’s A Walk in the Woods – but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only 1,200 have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?

With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife’s orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito.

Though danger is always present – the Colorado Fourteeners have killed as many climbers as Mount Everest – Mark knows his aging scalp can’t afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik’s summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation’s most famed religious shrines.) As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things – the summit of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age – like summit height – is just a number.

The author

Wexler and Hancock write "Awful Grace" on MLK Assassination

2011-10-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

On SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 at his Justice for JFK blog
http://justiceforkennedy.blogspot.com/2011/10/stuart-wexler-and-mlk-assassination.html

Joe Backes gave us a head's-up on a new MLK book when he posted:

Stuart Wexler and the MLK assassination

FYI, about Stuart Wexler and the MLK assassination. Stu is working on a book with Larry Hancock which is going to say that yes, James Earl Ray shot Dr. King all on his own because he heard about some scheme the KKK had. The KKK was offering a big sum of money, $100,000, if only someone would kill Dr. King for them. Ray heard this in prison and that's why he broke out, to kill King, and to collect the bounty. The book was previously going to be called "Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr." Now it's got a new title "The Awful Grace of God: Racial Terrorism and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr."

It should be called, "Aw For Fuck's Sake: Two Buffoons Promote a Lone Nut Story That Even Posner Wouldn't Peddle."

POSTED BY JOSEPH BACKES

Don't believe me? Check these out:

"Could James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., have made contact with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi? Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, co-authors of the upcoming book, Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr, are investigating that possibility."

"Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, authors of an upcoming book, "Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr.," are exploring evidence that members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi were involved. FBI records show fingerprints found after King’s killing were checked against thousands of people, but Wexler said he has yet to find documents that show the FBI checked to see if these fingerprints matched any members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, which reportedly had a $100,000 bounty on King."

"Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, authors of an upcoming book, Seeking Armageddon: The Effort to Kill Martin Luther King Jr., are exploring evidence related to the White Knights".

Larry Hancock responds: “We really won't be able to say anything further until the book is out, other than it is a conspiracy book, not a lone nut book and is based in a series of facts that simply have not been explored before. Arguing its content with anyone who has not reviewed those facts and our analysis would be fruitless. It is a bit upsetting to face what Oliver Stone faced (even in a minor way) which is a total condemnation of your work before its even out, but appaently when you are seen to or even suspected of "breaking rank" in any fashion that's the way it goes.”

In a joint statement in response to Joe Backe’s blog notce Larry and Stu say:

“It is always interesting to find people who tell you what your book is about before they read it. Judging by the number of factual errors, and errors of nuance, in the above posting, I think Joe is someone who has made up his mind, facts be damned. It would be nice if Joe were to bother to write us and ask us-- he does know how to contact both of us-- before he wrote this. He would have realized the following: (1) We don't commit to Ray as a shooter (2) We don't say Ray broke out of prison to pursue a King bounty (3) We don't say Ray was a lone nut.”

“Kind of kills the entire essence of his post. Do we favor Joe's pet theory, informed perhaps by the uncritical acceptance of work done by people who support his preconceived political agenda? I guess we will have to wait for the book to come out. What we will say is that anyone who bases their view of the King assassination on the reliability of James Earl Ray is displaying the same degree of critical skepticism as those who believe David Phillips testimony before the HSCA. We will be more than happy to engage in a serious debate once the actual book is out.” -Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock

The Awful Grace of God; Racial Terrorism and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.by: Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock

ISBN: 9781582438306 | 1582438307
Format: Trade Book
Publisher: Counterpoint
Pub. Date: 4/10/2012

Summary

Awful Grace chronicles a multi-year effort to kill Martin Luther King Jr. by a group of the nation’s most violent right-wing extremists. Impeccably researched and thoroughly documented, this examines figures like Sam Bowers, head of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, responsible for more than three hundred separate acts of violence in Mississippi alone; J.B. Stoner, who ran an organization that the California attorney general said was more active and dangerous than any other ultra-right organization; and Reverend Wesley Swift, a religious demagogue who inspired two generations of violent extremists. United in a holy cause to kill King, this network of racist militants were the likely culprits behind James Earl Ray and King’s assassination in Memphis on April 4th, 1968. King would be their ultimate prize a symbolic figure whose assassination could foment an apocalypse that would usher in their Kingdom of God, a racially “pure” white world. Hancock and Wexler have sifted through thousands of pages of declassified and never-before-released law enforcement files on the King murder, conducted dozens of interviews with figures of the period, and re-examined information from several recent cold case investigations. Their study reveals a terrorist network never before described in contemporary history. They have unearthed data that was unavailable to congressional investigators and used new data-mining techniques to extend the investigation begun by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Awful Grace offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date study of the King assassination and presents a roadmap for future investigation.

T. Carter of COPA has also come out with a new book about the MLK assassination, published by Trinday, who had previously considered Larry and Stu's book, but they couldn't publish competing books. I will review T. Carter's book as soon as I read it.

Since Larry Hancock is one of the main organizers of the annual JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, which competes with the annual regional COPA conference, there is bad blood between these two organizations. Nevertheless, these two books should present new and valuable information about the assassination of MLK and such petty bickering should not prevent each of them from being read and given a proper hearing and honest review.

Larry Hancock has earned his stripes in researching and writing Someone Would Have Talked (JFKLancer, 2010), one of the best and most important books on the assassination of President Kennedy, which has been updated and will be re-released again this year.

Foreign Burial of American War Dead

2011-09-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

The Foreign Burial of American War Dead – A History by Chris Dickon (McFarland, 2011) [http://theforeignburialofamericanwardead.com/]

As Chris Dickon so vividly demonstrates in his new book The Foreign Burial of American War Dead – A History, it wasn’t always the policy of the US government and military to not leave anyone behind, to account for all combat casualties and provide an honorable burial for those who have given their lives for their country

Rather it is a tradition that was only slowly and painfully realized and a policy that must be continually explained to each new generation so those who sacrificed their lives for the benefit of the living are not forgotten

This long neglected subject caught the interest of Chris Dickon and he has done a masterful job of researching the facts and presenting them in an interesting and readable way. Well documented with extensive footnotes, a reliable index, appendix and many photos, Dickon’s book will certainly be the primary reference work on this subject for many years to come.

While this book chronicles the changes in attitudes about the care for the graves of those killed in combat, it is also timely and pertinent in regards to the graves of the first known combat casualties abroad – the remains of the 13 officers and men of the USS Intrepid who were buried in Tripoli in 1804 and remain there today.

As Dickon explains in his recent OpEd article Bring U.S. naval hero home to America [http://hamptonroads.com/2011/09/bring-us-naval-hero-home-america], “The right of return for American war dead wasn't fully implemented until after the Civil War, and it excluded those who had died in earlier years. Until that time, there had been just two apparent official attempts to bring home military members buried abroad.”

That would be John Paul Jones, who Teddy Roosevelt had repatriated from his grave in Paris and reburied at Annapolis, and Richard Somers and the men of the Intrepid, who still remain buried in Tripoli today, five in marked graves at a walled cemetery and eight buried under a Martyr’s Square outside the walls of the old castle fort.

From the Shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma, Flanders Field and Normandy, Dickon’s book chronicles the fascinating story of the burial of American war dead, and describes how the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) owns and oversees the maintenance of the foreign cemeteries, though not the graves in Tripoli.

As Dickon returns to the status of the situation in Tripoli at various times in the chronology, it is a recurring theme that brings the history into the realm of current events that are still happening in revolutionary Libya.

As explained in the first of a number of fact-filled Appendix on various sites around the world, he notes the names of the three officers buried in Tripoli – Richard Somers, Henry Wadsworth [Longfellow’s uncle] and Joseph Israel, and names the ten seamen and their ships. He explains: “It is believed that ten seamen were buried on the beach, and three officers buried together on land above the beach. Known and possible reburials since 1804 have resulted in five unnamed Intrepid crew being [re]buried in a Protestant cemetery near the beach and the belief that five crewmen are buried at one location under Green Park [now Martyr’s Square]. Richard Somers and two other officers are believed to be buried in another location beneath [the Square], approximately 500 feet from the west gate of the Old Castle Fort.”

While Dickon’s subject is brought up on Veteran’s and Memorial Day every year, when flags are placed on the graves and those veterans who have died are remembered, their sacrifices are also recalled whenever our traditions and values are threatened, or when taken for granted.

As expressed in Archibald MacLeish’s poem “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak,” – “They have a silence that speaks for them at night,...They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us…We have done what we could, but until it is finished it is not done…Our deaths are not ours, they are yours, they will mean what you make of them…Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say, it is you who must say this. We leave you our deaths. Give them some meaning. We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.”

It is up to us to speak, and as Dickon concludes, this fascinating story must be taken to the children, so the living remembers the dead and what they died for.

[William Kelly is the author of “300 Years at the Point – A History of Somers Point, NJ” and “Birth of the Birdie,” a history of golf. He can be reached at billkelly3@gmail.com]

David Talbot's Pulp History - Devil Dog - The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America

2011-09-09T10:04:00.001-07:00

Pulp History

Devil Dog – The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America (Simon & Schuster, 2011) by David Talbot, Illustrated by Spain Rodriguez and Shadow Nights

After founding Salon.com, one of the first successful and influential internet magazines, David Talbot has started what may become a new literary genre – Pulp History – which combines classic comics and the novelized pulp paperback adventure story with real biography and history, thus opening up a whole new world of opportunities for bringing fresh topics to a new audience.

Best known for his critically acclaimed Brothers – The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2007), Talbot and his sister Margaret thought of the Pulp History idea as “a way to bring untold history stories to life, working with comics artists and illustrators and designers to fully exploit the lush possibilities of the printed pages.” They then convinced the Simon & Schuster publishers of its validity and potential.

It’s hard to say whether the audience for Pulp History will be young people who are just waiting to be inspired by such works, or older adults who were themselves inspired by comics and paperback adventures and who find these books almost nostalgic.

For starters, Talbot tells the story of US Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who fought his way through China’s Imperial City, the Panama Canal and the trenches of World War I in establishing a reputation for bravery and integrity that was admired by all Americans, especially veterans.

In the course of his fighting wars, Butler came to understand the financial and industrial forces that instigate and fuel most wars, and eventually came to conclude that “war is a racket.”

“As a youngster, I loved the excitement of battle,” Butler said. “It’s a lot of fun, you know, and it’s nice to strut around in front of your wife, or someone else’s wife – and display your medals and your uniform. But there’s another side to it.” As Talbot notes, because of this other side, “he devoted the rest of his life to stopping war – and to exposing those who grew as fat as ticks off the endless blood.”

So in the early 1930s, during the course of the Great Depression, when a group of men decided President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic reforms were too radical and leading America towards socialism, they decided to stage a coup. They thought they could strip the power of the presidency from Roosevelt if an army of veterans would march on Washington and call for the resignation of the president, setting the stage for a coup.

First they went to Douglas MacArthur, who would later have his own run-ins with Presidents, but he declined to lead the charge, and instead suggested Smedley Butler.

When the men in suits visited Butler and made the pitch, Butler was certainly disenchanted with the state of affairs, but he was more suspicious of the men who were plotting against the president and played along in order to learn who was behind this conspiracy. Eventually he learned their identities, but instead of leading the veteran’s march on Washington, Butler instead testified before a Congressional committee and told them everything he knew.

Rather than investigate the sensational charges however, the committee didn’t do anything, and the mainstream media of the day, especially Time Magazine, the Washington Post and New York Times ridiculed Butler as a paranoid conspiracy theorists. Independent reporters however, confirmed much of what Butler had to say, including the identities of those bankers and industrialists he mentioned, as well as their plans, which Roosevelt took security measures against.

Few people today have ever heard of Smedley Butler, but David Talbot hopes to change that with his first Pulp History book Devil Dog -“the amazing true story of the man who saved America.”

In order to help establish more than a new genre, but a series of books, they published a second volume in the same vein - Shadow Knights – The Secret War Against Hitler by Gary Kamiya, with illustrations by Jeffrey Smith. Kamiya was Talbot’s partner in creating Salon, and Jeffrey Smith’s illustrations are a bit more realistic than those by Rodriguez in Devil Dog, though they both do the job of graphically portraying the riveting action of the text.

Shadow Knights concerns the secret and daring World War II exploits of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) – the Baker Street Irregulars, who were ordered to engage in covert operations behind the enemy lines and commit sabotage against the Nazis in Europe before D-Day.

While Devil Dog is a colorful, biographical portrait of one man – Smedley Butler, Shadow Knights scans the exploits of a number of interesting characters, including Colin McVeigh Gubbins, Jens Poulsson, Gus March-Phillips, Harry Ree, as well as vivacious women like Pearl Witherington, Christine Granville and Noor Inayat Khan, some of whom were caught, tortured and died in Nazi concentration camps.

There still might be a place for dry, academic history and biographies, but Pulp History is here, and whether its audience is old comic book patrons or a new, young audience ready to be inspired, there are certainly a lot of historical that could lend themselves to the pulp history treatment.

characters and topics

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2010/10/05/devil_dog_slide_show

[William Kelly is the author of 300 Years at the Point and Birth of the Birdie – a history of golf. He can be reached at billkelly3@gmail.com ]

David Talbot

2011-09-02T05:56:00.001-07:00

The Eleventh Day by Tony Summers and Robbyn Swan

2011-08-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

If a clear and concise report on any subject, however complicated, is needed, I would trust Tony and Robbyn Summers to research, analyze, write a report that I would believe to be as complete and accurate as any that could be produced.

They are pretty much the most thoughtful and meticulous researchers and writers I know. When that topic is bin Laden and 9/11, then what they have to say is truly important as I know they will focus on the important issues, determine what happened as best they can, answer what questions they can and point to those issues that remain outstanding.

Of course there are going to be those who claim that no planes hit the WTC or Pentagon, that it wasn’t terrorists who hijacked those planes but they were remotely controlled by the White House, an inside job to bring about wars, a national security state and decades of repression.

And all those who disagree with this perspective are government minions and disinformation agents, like me, Tony and Robbyn Summers and other reasonable people who actually have studied the events of 9/11 in more than just an offhand manner.

Perhaps there is a forum where this book can be rationally discussed by those who get to sit down and read it, but I can see the storm a comin’, and those who know that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bush White House, MI6 and the Jews will make sure it doesn’t get a fair hearing, as they already know what really happened.

But it is getting a fair hearing in other, more reasonable quarters.

BK

Tony and Robbyn Summers' new book - The Eleventh Day - The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden will be out on July 19, and excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

Synopsis

September 11 2001 is a date no-one can forget. On that day, the largest terrorist attack the world had ever seen sent two passenger aircraft crashing into New York's famous twin towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed to be headed for the White House, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Three thousand people lost their lives that day. And the world changed forever. The consequences of those attacks have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century. The world is a less safe place because of them. War in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. Thousands more have now died. But what exactly happened on that day ten years ago? Reports have been written and dismissed. Conspiracy theories abound. This book has been four years in the writing. Leading investigative writer, Anthony Summers has pored through thousands of documents, hundreds of hours of interviews, and examined all possible testimony and evidence to produce this definitive history of what really happened on that tragic day.

Writing with access to thousands of recently released official documents, fresh interviews, and the perspective that can come only from a decade of research and reflection, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan deliver the first panoramic, authoritative look back at 9/11.For most living Americans, September 11, 2001, is the darkest date in the nation's history. What exactly happened? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved? What is certain: Discord and dissent continue to this day.

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and introduces the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the ground. Drawing on previously classified records and raw transcripts, Summers and Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, as a counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 truth" movement. With meticulous research, they examine the personalities of the men behind the onslaught, analyze the motives that drove them, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward—without good evidence—the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the question the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in another foreign nation—one the U.S. had long viewed as a friend?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal event in our history.

September 11, 2001 is the darkest date in the memory of most people alive in the West today. The day ten years on when Osama bin Laden was killed was one of jublilation in the United States, yet uncertainty about what may come in the future.

What exactly happened on 9/11? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved?

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and follows the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the gound. Drawing on previously unreleased records and raw transcripts, Anthony Summers and his co-author Robbyn Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, by counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 Truth" movement. They analyze the motives that drove the men behind the onslaught, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward - without good evidence - the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the questions the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in other foreign nations - including some that have long been treated as friends?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal episode in our history.

Anthony Summers - Home

Best selling biographer and journalist Anthony Summers has covered the pivotal stories of the past hundred years, and in many cases forced a rethink.

He has reported on the conflict in the Middle East; the Vietnam War; the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; Watergate; the rise and fall of the American Mafia; the Hiss and Profumo espionage cases. He has explored the lives and deaths of the powerful and the famous: from Tsar Nicholas II to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Now in 2011 he brings the sharpest focus yet to a full account of 9/11, the events that led up to it, and the troubling questions that remain.

Posted on Wed, Sep. 07, 2011
Link to 9/11 hijackers found in Sarasota
By Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen
Special to The Miami Herald

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/07/v-print/2395698/link-to-911-hijackers-found-in.html

Just two weeks before the 9/11 hijackers slammed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, members of a Saudi family abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter — and an open safe in a master bedroom.

In the weeks to follow, law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights — including leader Mohamed Atta — in discoveries never before revealed to the public.

Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil, new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who co-chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, said he should have been told about the findings, saying it “opens the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11. ... No information relative to the named people in Sarasota was disclosed.”

The U.S. Justice Department, the lead agency that investigated the attacks, refused to comment, saying it will discuss only information already released.

The Saudi residents then living at the stylish home, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife Anoud, could not be reached, nor could the then-owner of the house, Esam Ghazzawi, who is Anoud’s father. The house was sold in 2003, records show.

For Graham, the connections between the hijackers and residents raise questions about whether other Saudi nationals in Florida knew of the impending attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The FBI investigation began the month after 9/11 when Larry Berberich, senior administrator and security officer of the gated community known as Prestancia, reported a bizarre event that took place two weeks before the hijackings of four passenger jets that originated in Boston, Newark and Washington.

The couple, living with their small children at the three-bedroom home at 4224 Escondito Circle, had left in a hurry in a white van, probably on Aug. 30.

They abandoned three recently registered vehicles, including a brand-new Chrysler PT Cruiser, in the garage and driveway.

After 9/11, Berberich said he had “a gut feeling” the people at the home may have had something to do with the attacks, prompting the FBI’s probe that would eventually link the hijackers to the house.

As an advisor to the Sarasota County sheriff — Berberich was with the group that received President Bush during his aborted visit to a Sarasota school on the morning of 9/11 — he alerted sheriff’s deputies. Patrick Gallagher, one of the Saudis’ neighbors, had become suspicious even earlier, and had fired off an email to the FBI on the day of the attacks.

Gallagher said law enforcement officers arrived and began an investigation, with agents swarming “all over the place, in their blue jackets,” he recalled.

Jone Weist, president of the group that managed Prestancia, confirmed the arrival of the FBI, which requested copies of the Saudis’ financial transactions involving the house.

Berberich and a senior counterterrorism agent said they were able to get into the abandoned house, ultimately finding “there was mail on the table, dirty diapers in one of the bathrooms … all the toiletries still in place … all their clothes hanging in the closet … opulent furniture, equal or greater in value than the house … the pool running, with toys in it.”

“The beds were made … fruit on the counter … the refrigerator full of food. … It was like they went grocery shopping. Like they went out to a movie ... [But] the safe was open in the master bedroom, with nothing in it, not a paper clip. ... A computer was still there. A computer plug in another room, and the line still there. Looked like they’d taken [another] computer and left the cord.”

The counterterrorism officer, who requested his name not be disclosed, said agents went on to make troubling discoveries: Phone records and the Prestancia gate records linked the house on Escondito Circle to the hijackers.

In addition, three of the four future hijackers had lived in Venice — just 10 miles from the house — for much of the year before 9/11. Atta, the leader, and his companion Marwan al-Shehhi, had been learning to fly small airplanes at Huffman Aviation, a flight school on the edge of the runway at Venice Municipal Airport.

A block away, at Florida Flight Training, accomplice Ziad Jarrah was also taking flying lessons. All three obtained their pilot licenses and afterwards, in the months that led to 9/11, spent much of their time traveling the state, including stints in Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale and Delray Beach, among other areas.

The counterterrorism agent said records of incoming and outgoing calls made at the Escondito house were obtained from the phone company under subpoena.

Agents were able to conduct a link analysis, a system of tracking calls based on dates, times and length of conversations — finding the Escondito calls dating back more than a year, “lined up with the known suspects.”

The links were not only to Atta and his hijack pilots, the agent said, but to 11 other terrorist suspects, including Walid al-Shehhri, one of the men who flew with Atta on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.

Another was Adnan Shukrijumah, a former Miramar resident identified as having been with Atta in the spring of 2001. Shukrijumah is still at large and is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

But it was the gate records at the Prestancia development that produced the most telltale information.

People who arrived by car had to give their names and the address they were visiting. Gate staff would sometimes ask to see a driver’s license and note the name, Berberich said. License plates were photographed.

Atta is known to have used variations of his name, but the license plate of the car he owned was on record.

The vehicle and name information on Atta and Jarrah fit that of drivers entering Prestancia on their way to visit the home at 4224 Escondito Circle, said Berberich and the counterterrorism officer.

Sarasota County property records identify the owners of the house at the time as Ghazzawi and his American-born wife Deborah, both with a post office box in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and the capital, Riyadh.

Ghazzawi was described as a middle-aged financier and interior designer, the owner of many properties, including several in the United States, said the counterterrorism agent.

While Ghazzawi visited the house, the people living there were his daughter Anoud and her husband al-Hiijjii, who appeared to be in his 30s and once identified himself as a college student, said Berberich, who met the son-in-law.

The couple’s sudden departure two weeks before 9/11 was tracked in detail by the FBI after the attacks, the agent said.

First, they traveled to a Ghazzawi property in Arlington, Va., then — with Esam Ghazzawi — via Dulles airport and London’s Heathrow, to Riyadh.

The counterterrorism agent said Ghazzawi and al-Hiijjii had been on a watch list at the FBI and that a U.S. agency tracking terrorist funds was interested in both men even before 9/11.

“464 was Ghazzawi’s number,” the officer said. “I don’t remember the other man’s number.”

About a year after the family abandoned the home, the FBI made an attempt to lure the owner back.
Scott McKay, a Sarasota lawyer for the Prestancia homeowners’ association in its claim for unpaid dues, said the FBI tried to get him to bring the Saudis back for the transaction.

McKay said he tried to get the Ghazzawis to sign the necessary documents in person, but the ploy failed because the documents could legally be signed elsewhere using a notary. Records show Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized by the vice consul of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in September 2003. Deborah Ghazzawi’s signature was notarized in Riverside County, Calif.

During an interview on Sunday, Graham said he was surprised he wasn’t told about the probe when he was co-chair of Congress’ Joint Inquiry into 9/11 — even though he was especially alert to terrorist information relating to Florida.

“At the beginning of the investigation,” he said, “each of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was asked to provide all information that agency possessed in relation to 9/11.”

The fact that the FBI did not tell the Inquiry about the Florida discoveries, Graham says, is similar to the agency’s failure to provide information linking members of the 9/11 terrorist team to other Saudis in California until congressional investigators discovered it themselves.

The Inquiry did nevertheless accumulate a “very large” file on the hijackers in the United States, and later turned it over to the 9/11 Commission. “They did very little with it,” Graham said, “and their reference to Saudi Arabia is almost cryptic sometimes. … I never got a good answer as to why they did not pursue that.”

The final 28-page section of the Inquiry’s report, which deals with “sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers,” was entirely blanked out. It was kept secret from the public on the orders of former President George W. Bush and is still withheld to this day, Graham said.
This in spite of the fact that Graham and his Republican counterpart, U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, both concluded the release of the pages would not endanger national security.

The grounds for suppressing the material, Graham believes, were “protection of the Saudis from embarrassment, protection of the administration from political embarrassment … some of the unknowns, some of the secrets of 9/11.”

Anthony Summers is co-author of The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 & Osama bin Laden. Dan Christensen is the editor of the Broward Bulldog, a not-for-profit online only newspaper created to provide local reporting in the public interest. www.BrowardBulldog.org

The Disappeared

2011-08-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

Photographs of detainees rescued from a secret-police building in Benhazi. Matar’s father’s fate remains unknown. Photo: T. Dworzak/Magnum.

BK Notes: Truth is stranger than fiction, as this novelist illustrates.

The Disappeared

Hisham Matar’s new novel takes on a very personal subject: a father’s abduction by a brutal regime and a son’s unsettling sense of loss.

As Hisham Matar was finishing his latest novel, about a young man so grief-stricken by a father’s absence that he stalks his lovers and wears his suits, word reached Matar that his own father might still be alive. Jaballa Matar was a leading Libyan dissident who vanished without trial in 1990 into Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s dungeons. Over 20 years, the family received only two letters from him, smuggled out of his cell. They feared he was among more than 1,000 political detainees shot dead in a prison riot in the mid-’90s. Then came this sliver of hope, that he had been seen alive in a jail in the capital, Tripoli.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/14/hisham-matar-s-anatomy-of-a-disappearance.html

For his son, a successful writer living in England, the vague message was “tremendous but unsettling. I felt I’d provoked it, by spending three years on a book taking me into dark places of the soul,” he told NEWSWEEK in his West London apartment. The unverifiable news was “like a voice in my head. Writing this book took me a little too close to the flame.”

Anatomy of a Disappearance is out in the U.S. on Aug. 23. By coincidence, it came out in London on the heels of the Libyan uprising in February that could yet bring a resolution to the author’s torturous uncertainty. On Feb. 3, when Gaddafi still hoped to head off protests, two of Matar’s uncles and two cousins were released after 21 years of wrongful imprisonment, along with eight other political prisoners. His father was not among them.

Matar, 40, with ink-black curls, has a gentle air of detachment and a haunting past. He was born in New York, where his father was a U.N. diplomat, the year after Gaddafi’s bloodless coup. He was raised in Tripoli until he was 9, when his family fled to Egypt. At boarding school in England, he lived under a false identity as “Bob,” a Christian from Cairo, because Libyan agents were picking off political exiles and their families. He was 19, an architecture student in London, when his father was abducted from their Cairo home by Hosni Mubarak’s security forces. They handed him over to be tortured in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison.

Matar’s 2006 debut, In the Country of Men, revealed a Libya of public executions and private betrayals through the eyes of a boy in the late ’70s whose dissident father is incarcerated by the “Guide.” After that novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, Matar campaigned openly for his father. Desmond Tutu and Salman Rushdie were among his supporters.

The brutal disappearance of a loved one lacks the finality of bereavement. Matar finds it devastating that “their experience continues at the expense of your intimacy. If my father is alive, he’s formed strong friendships in another place. There’s a jealousy.”
Anatomy of a Disappearance moves between Egypt, Switzerland, and London to trace a corrosive love triangle. After fleeing an unnamed dictatorship, 12-year-old Nuri and his widowed father become rivals for a young Egyptian-English woman. When the father is brutally abducted from the bed of a Swiss woman, Nuri’s guilt grows at having lost the father he once wished to banish. It is a haunting tale of a man suspended in the past, his identity fixed by loss.

Matar’s imagination was awakened by his family’s need for subterfuge. When he was 8, his father was listed for interrogation and hid in Europe. His mother, desperate to join him, lied to the authorities that he had abandoned her to start another family. Curious more than upset, Matar pictured a blond half-sibling, and his father with a Swiss wife. When his mother weakened and telephoned her husband, he told her never to call again, and hung up. “It was difficult for both of them,” Matar says. “They had to pretend they were divorced, so they could be together.”

The novel’s dictatorship is 1950s Iraq, not Libya. But Matar, who will teach the fiction of “estrangement and exile” at Barnard College in New York in the fall, knows political exile to be a common Arab predicament. He writes of fathers and sons, but also about history: “My father’s generation were the audacious radicals, drunk on idealism and republican revolutions. My generation is one of disappointment. Exile has made us pessimists.”

Before the Arab Spring, he feared his father’s sacrifice had been futile. Now, seeing Libyan protesters carry pictures of Jaballa Matar and early dissidents who were killed, he believes such people “carved with their bare hands the first steps to this revolution.” When the uprising began, Matar and his wife, Diana, a California-born photographer, channeled information to the media from a makeshift “newsroom” in their London home, making up to 100 calls a day to Libya.

Speaking to his freed uncles gave him joy. “I realized how much you can take from a man, but you can only take so much. My uncle missed 21 years—his children are fully grown—but he still has his humor, intelligence, and resistance.” With Benghazi secured, Matar’s elder brother, Ziad, went searching, “but it yielded nothing. I would be surprised if my father’s alive, but there’s a very reasonable possibility. When the regime falls, we’ll have access to the prisons.”

He views it as scandalous that Western powers were “laughing at Gaddafi privately while doing business” with him and prolonging the regime. Though he is certain it will fall, he worries more about what comes next. After six months of fighting, the rebel coalition “risks being fractured. It’s Gaddafi’s last legacy—to leave us armed and fraught. How will the different factions construct something together where no one is asking for a louder voice or privileges because of how hard they fought or how much they lost?”

Loss has left Matar thirsty for justice, not revenge. The “robust and fair trials” he craves could also yield clues to end his personal anguish.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jaggi is an award-winning cultural journalist and critic in London who writes for British national newspapers and contributes to BBC radio.

Tony & Robby on Clarke's Controversy

2011-08-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

A CIA 9/11 Cover-Up?

Did the CIA keep mum about two 9/11 hijackers because it tried and failed to recruit them? Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, authors of 'The Eleventh Day,' on whether there’s any truth behind ex-Bush official Richard Clarke’s claim.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/12/richard-clarke-9-11-interview-was-there-a-cia-coverup.html

By Anthony Summers & Robbyn Swan

Former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke has reignited controversy by speculating, in an interview cited in Thursday’s Daily Beast, that the CIA intentionally withheld advance knowledge of two of the 9/11 hijackers from the White House and the FBI, in an attempt to cover up the agency’s failed effort to recruit the two men as assets.

Clarke’s comments—and immediate, emphatic denials from former CIA director George Tenet and two senior CIA officials involved—go to the core of one of the enduring enigmas about 9/11.

Things began to unravel for the CIA on the day of the attacks, just four hours after the Qaeda strikes, according to research we conducted for our new book,The Eleventh Day. Soon after 1 p.m. that day, at agency headquarters in Langley, an aide handed Director Tenet the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where the director could see it, “these two we know.”

Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus ...”

There on the manifest for Flight 77, listed as traveling in first class, were the names of Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother, Salem. Also on the manifest, near the front of the coach section, was passenger Khalid al-Mihdhar.

The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has said, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States. According to the director’s version of events, the CIA had known of Mihdhar since as early as 1999, identified him as a terrorist suspect by December that year, had him followed, learned he had a valid multiple-entry visa for the United States, and placed him and comrades—including Hazmi—under surveillance for a few days in Southeast Asia. Later, in the spring of 2000, the agency had learned that Hazmi, who also had a multiple-entry visa, had arrived in California.

The director said after 9/11, though, that—in spite of having gained such dynamite information—the CIA had done absolutely nothing about it. The agency had not asked the State Department to place the two terrorists on watch lists at border points, nor asked the FBI to track them down if they were in the United States—not until 19 days before 9/11. The omission, according to the CIA, was simply the result of multiple mistakes.

Historical puzzles are as often explained by screw-ups as by darker truths. What is known of the evidence on Hazmi and Mihdhar, however, makes the screw-up version hard to swallow. Not least because the CIA version of events suggests its officials blew chances to grab the two future hijackers time and time and time again.

At the heart of the suggestion that the agency intentionally withheld information was the discovery by the Justice Department’s inspector-general of a draft cable—one that was prepared but never sent—by an FBI agent on attachment to the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

In January 2000, having had sight of a CIA cable noting that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, agent Doug Miller had swiftly drafted a memo on the matter addressed to the bureau’s own bin Laden unit and its New York field office. Had that memo been sent, the FBI would have learned right then of Mihdhar’s entry visa. The report was blocked, however, on the order of then-deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Tom Wilshire.

Why did he block it? Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the CIA want to monitor the pair’s activity itself, even though its mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States? Or did it, as some bureau agents suspected—and Clarke has surmised—even hope to turn the two terrorists, to recruit them as informants?

Clarke’s speculation may not be idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that in early December 1999, before Mihdhar’s U.S. visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the agency had as yet not penetrated Al Qaeda:

Winnipge Free Press Review of Eleventh Day

2011-08-14T07:11:00.001-07:00

FYI
Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/fyi/a-convincing-argument--4-127648388.html

Conspiracies and catastrophe
British co-authors contend that Bush administration incompetence and cover-ups, combined with America's illogical Middle East position, lit the fuse for 9/11 attacks

Reviewed by: Michael Dudley
Posted: 08/13/2011 1:00 AM
The Eleventh Day

The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan

Ballantine, 624 pages, $34

For those readers who find it difficult to believe that Bush administration insiders could have engineered the 9/11 attacks -- and more important, for those who don't -- this ambitious book would have you consider what its authors believe is a more plausible and politically charged set of 9/11 conspiracies.

With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, The Eleventh Day forges a coherent narrative out of this horrific, momentous yet poorly understood tragedy, and emerges as a cogent portrait of governmental incompetence, intransigence and deception.

British investigative journalists Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan are the husband and wife co-authors of previous books on Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover, while Summers previously wrote on the conspiracy to assassinate JFK, the murder of the Romanovs and the arrogant will to power of Richard Nixon.

Here they offer what they claim is the "full" account of 9/11, from the origins of Osama bin Laden's radicalism right up to his assassination by the Obama administration this past spring.

In what must have been a painstaking effort over five years, the authors sifted through conflicting testimonies and competing versions of events (including tens of thousands of documents released by the 9/11 Commission) to piece together the catastrophe and the history that preceded it. The result is meticulous, gripping journalism, told with moral conviction.

The book begins with a harrowing retelling of the attack, followed by the authors' assessment of efforts to understand it through popular speculation and official investigations. In the second half, Summers and Swan reconstruct their own thorough account of the plot led by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the misbegotten efforts to track bin Laden through the '90s and beyond.

They demonstrate convincingly that, even as preparations for the attack escalated and warnings grew more frantic from both foreign intelligence agencies and George W. Bush's own counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, the U.S. president's administration assiduously ignored the threat and, indeed, became impatient with any attempt to raise it.

According to Summers and Swan, Bush and his administration not only covered up their own blinkered inattention to al-Qaida prior to the attacks -- and incompetence and dysfunction on the day itself -- but stonewalled investigations into the attack to downplay the hijackers' real motivations and protect the foreign government that funded them.

In this effort Bush was aided in no small way by the phenomenally widespread but often science-fictional claims of the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement," which, in the authors' view, drew attention away from actual official omissions, distortions and malfeasance. Where Summers' earlier work on JFK articulated the case for conspiracy, here he and Swan find no merit in the arguments of the Truthers, which the authors methodically demolish.

In contrast with most mainstream efforts to debunk 9/11 skepticism (such as Toronto journalist Jonathan Kay's recentAmong the Truthers, which lumped 9/11 conspirators in with all manner of paranoid beliefs) Summers and Swan do not rely on ad hominem characterizations to debunk these ideas.

Instead they consider each major theory in light of the available evidence. They find that the unconventional collapses of the Twin Towers have been convincingly explained as the result of the laws of physics rather than of planted demolition charges, and the notion that no plane hit the Pentagon is simply offensive, given the personal and emotionally wrenching testimony they provide of those who had to sift through the wreckage there.

The real cover-up, they argue, concerned not just the actions of the government, the FBI and the CIA in advance of the attacks, but more significantly the financial and material support provided by the Saudi royal family for the 19 hijackers.

Steeped in fundamentalist Wahhabism -- a severely austere, rigid and conservative branch of Islam -- elite Saudi society including the royal family sympathized with bin Laden's ideology, particularly with regards to his desire to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation and punish the U.S. for its support of the Jewish state.

Very little of this information would be revealed by the 9/11 Commission. Between misleading the commission, redacting key documents implicating Saudi Arabia and selling the American public on the completely fabricated role of Iraq in the attacks, the Bush administration managed to divert public attention away from the political realities that underlay 9/11.

Ultimately, argue Summers and Swan, it was America's untenable position in the Middle East -- dependence on Saudi oil while incurring Saudi hostility over its unwavering support for Israel - that doomed nearly 2,800 people on that day, as well as more than 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis killed in wars cynically justified by 9/11.

Committed Truthers and partisans of the former president alike will probably object to a great deal of the authors' analysis, but open-minded readers will find The Eleventh Daya thoughtful and sobering reassessment of the most pivotal event of our times.

Michael Dudley is a research associate and library co-ordinator in the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 13, 2011 J5

Tony Summers on Charlie Rose TV

2011-08-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

Tony Summers was interviewed on the Charlie Rose show on PBS TV.

Anthony Summers – Charlie Rose -
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11800
with Anthony Summers in Current Affairs, Books, History
Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Charlie Rose: This fall marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The recent killing of Osama Bin Laden marked the defining moment in the fight against al Qaeda. Conspiracy theories still linger about the events of September 11th.

A new book by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan explores some of the questions. An excerpt exploring the connection between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 hijackers, appears in this months Vanity Fair Magazine. The Kingdom and the Towers

Here’s the book’s co-author Anthony Summers. I’m pleased to have you back. He’s an old friend from a long time ago, welcome. Robby is your coauthor and your wife.

Summers: Both. For twenty years wife.

CR: And five years working together on this project. You began to realize all these conspiracy theories had to do with 9/11, and so you wanted to what?

Summers: When I came to see my publisher at Random House in New York, I found my own publisher, a very senior publisher herself, didn’t believe all the conspiracy theories but felt that in some way the public has been cheated, and there was some secret there.

CR: So your publisher put you on the trail as you say, “there is a lingering sense the nation and the world had been let down.”

Summers: And the other tenant of the conspiracy theories - the Skeptics as they prefer to be called, thought in some way the Bush administration had either had some warning or knew something was coming but allowed it to happen to further their plans to invade the Middle East – as it turned out in Iraq. Or at the extreme ends of conspiracy theories in which they actually provoked the attacks themselves. Here and now it seems daft, but there were enough straws in the wind to say - go look at this.

CR: So now you have a book. So what is it you think happened that we don’t know?

Summers: I hope to successfully dispatch, for a sane America, most of the conspiracy theory ideas.

CR: Send them away.

Summers: Exactly, but I think what happened is those ideas and the lingering thoughts about them have distorted the facts and blurred the things that one should really be concerned about, and there are a lot of things one should still be concerned about this puzzle…

CR: And they are?

Summers: The first of them I think is what US Intelligence actually knew and what it did about it in advance. The first two terrorists who arrived on US soil had been identified by the CIA, they knew that they were al Qaeda, they knew their names, they knew they had US visas, and in once case they learned quite quickly one had arrived in the United States, and yet they did not tell the FBI.

CR: What do you believe was the relationship between the Saudi government or the leading figures in Saudi Arabia and the men who were on those planes on 9/11?

Summers: There are two areas. The first of the areas, in the period - in the years leading up to 9/11 there is good evidence - and we name two of the princes involved in the book Prince Naef, who had been for a long time the head of the interior, the internal intelligence, and Prince Sultan, who was the defense chief in Saudi Arabia, and is now second highest to the throne, it is said - as recorded in the Wall Street Journal, that they raised a lot of money over the years to pay off Bin Laden not to attack Saudi Arabia. He was outside he was in Afghanistan - not to attack Saudi Arabia. In this country if you and I were talking about the Mafia, we would call it protection money. That is one area, and the people who investigated 9/11 and earlier at the CIA, concluded that the Saudis had been paid protection money for a long time.

The second area that I think is especially interesting, that both the joint inquires – and 9/11 Commission delved into it. When the men on the ground in California arrived, they arrived, and the evidence suggests than an Imam, the religious man at the Saudi consulate first gave them a tour of the area in Los Angeles. And that then after that the two of them connected with another Saudi, who was paid from official sources but apparently not for doing any known work, and had been thought of for a long time as a Saudi agent, they connected with him in a meeting that was odd. He said he heard Arabic being talked in a restaurant and the meeting was by pure chance, it doesn’t sound like it. In fact it sounds like a vary bad spy novel; it doesn’t sound like pure chance. He then dropped a newspaper and talked to them as they picked it up. He then gave them help….They didn’t speak English, they were pretty much lost in California, and they were pioneers if you will of the 9/11operation, the guys who arrived first. There were other Saudis who helped them one way or another, - all either left immediately on 9/11 or had left two or three weeks before.

CR: We have the distinguished investigative reporter from Ireland , who I used to know from the BBC, what is it did he discover that ought to draw our attention, and what should be the consequences of that discovery is what I’m asking?

Summers: Back to the beginning of our conversation and you asked me why I was doing the book and I said I wanted to look at the conspiracy stuff, which certainly had elements of it that convinced huge numbers of Americans and equally important huge numbers of people around the world. The last poll I saw suggests that 46% of people abroad, which is what the poll was mostly referring to - people in the middle east, believe that someone other than al Qaeda were responsible. Rubbish, of course al Qaeda was behind it. I wanted to deal with the conspiracy theories but get as close as possible to that elusive thing we call the truth and then……

CR: Of all those conspiracies, which one do you think has merit?

Summers: If you are referring to conspiracy theories, I don’t think any of them have merit.

CR: Okay, so none of the conspiracy theories have any merit, good.

Summers: No. I don’t think so. At the same time, I think that with this book we hope to get closer to clarity to the issues that do seem to matter, and one of the big ones is - were elements of a foreign government involved? And I think we are closer to the idea that elements of the Saudi government were involved.

CR: And the nature of their involvement was what?

Summers: Collaboration with Bin Lade through protection money.

CR: (Did they have) knowledge of what Bin Laden was doing?

Summers: Well, we do have first confirmation, from a former serving CIA officer who was involved in the capture of a bin Laden aide called Abu Zubaydah. And he says that he learned afterwards that when Abu Zubaydah was being questioned, he was intensely questioned over weeks, that at one point he was conned into thinking he was being transferred to Saudi custody, with the idea that he would be terrified to tell what he knew because the Saudis are famous for torture and worse - killing prisoners and so on. And far from that, he instead said, well, let me give you the name and a phone number, which he knew from memory, of a Saudi Prince, not one of the senior ministers, and said he’ll know, and he said tell him I’m here and he’ll know what do to. And he subsequently named two other Saudi princes. All three of those Saudi Princes, and this is a fact, all died within a week of each other shortly thereafter. There is the thought, and of course all things can be explained by chance, but it is extremely interesting and full of implications that all three of them died by chance within a week of each other, and the thought is that maybe it was time to shut them up.

CR: The book is called The Eleventh Day, the True Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, written by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.

Dion DiMucci - The Wanderer Checks In

2011-07-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

Dion DiMucci – The Wanderer Checks In

The Wanderer – Dion’s Story (Beech Tree Books, William Morrow Press, NY, 1988)

If you remember the Sixties they say, then you weren’t there. It’s a cliché that holds true, at least in part for Dion DiMucci.

The Wanderer, who is still married to his high school sweetheart, Runaround Sue, is still wandering and playing rock & roll, but the wonder years are a thing of the past, and mostly a blur in his memory banks that were shortcircuited by booze and drugs.

Dion, who had ten songs in the top ten charts in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, hasn’t had a drink or a taste of drugs since April 1, 1968, and hasn’t had a hit song since then either. He’s a survivor however, and he’s lived to tell the story of the heydays of rock & roll, at least what he remembers of them.

I caught up with Dion at the Island Highroller longe, just off the Sands casino floor, shortly after a Labor Day weekend performance. Most people didn’t recognize him since he was wearing a baseball hat instead of his trademark floppy Andy cap. The Papparazi Queen noticed him though, tugged my arm and said, “There’s Dion over by the jukebox.”

Dion and the Belmonts – Dion’s original group of singers included Freddie Milano, Angelo D’Aleo and Carlo Mastrangelo, all kids from the hood – which in his case was centered around the corner of Crotona Avenue and 187th Street, near Belmont Avenue in the Bronx.
They fused a motley conglamoration of R&B, country, side walk acapella and doo-wop into a new stream of rock & roll. While most of the Belmonts drifted off into a jazzy acapella realm, Dion stuck with rock & roll.

Since I had him cornered I went up to the Juke Box and put some more money in and he looked at me as if to see if I wanted to fight, and then smiled. I introduced myself and he asked us to join them at his table.

Asked how it differs today from touring in the early days of rock & roll Dion said, “I think it’s difficult, sometimes for the later generations of rockers to appreciate a time when there were no rules, no expectations, no luxury busses, no stage monitors. We were just a bunch of street singers who were regarded by society as degenerate infidels, one small step away from jail or the gutter, you know? But it was a lot of fun because it was a very creative time. Rock & roll didn’t exist, since we were making it up as we went along. And it was very cool traveling with guys like Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly.”

He’s been on the road since he was 14 years old, playing honkeytonks, roadhouses, school auditoriums, arenas, concert halls and casinos. He was Bobby Daren’s roommate on one tour, and was with Buddy Holly, Frankie Vallens and the Big Bopper when they decided to get off the bus and rent a plane, but Dion didn’t have the $38 a seat.

“It was sub-zero degree weather and we didn’t have those beautiful luxury converted touring buses that we have today,” he recalls. “It was just a school bus, and we slept in the luggage racks, and it kept breaking down. I was supposed to be on the plane, we were recruiting people, the more people the less the fare would be, and when I found out it was $38, I bowed out. My parents were paying $38 a month rent in New York City at the time, and it was a lot of money.”

“I was baffeled. I was 19 at the tiem, Februray 1959, and we were riding on top of the world at the time, and the rug was pulled out from under me.”

Like Runaround Sue, there really was a Wanderer, a guy by the name of Jackie Burns. “He was a real character,” Dion explained, “a real guy with a lot of swagger. He had Flo tattooed on his left arm. When he broke up with Flo, he had it covered with a panther,” and he kept going until he had to cover them all with a battleship. “I like writing about strong characters,” Dion quipped.

Besides a 1987 tribute concert at Madison Square Garden that featured Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Bruce, and a tribute album that features Brian Adams, Phil Spector and Patti Smyth, getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was his biggest thrill. “That meant a lot to me. It was a great night. I was inducted with Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, the Temps and Otis Redding.”

“And to look out into the audience and see Sprigsteen, Bob Seeger, Paul Simon – they came there to honor me. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Does he ever get tired of the old songs? “Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. You’d think I’d be tired of them, but those particular songs, those hit records have become more valuable to me as time moves on. They mean more to mean, and I think they mean more to the people that come and see our shows. I see the response. We hold these songs in a very fond place in our hearts and I enjoy singing them today.”

I had bought a copy of his book at the concert, so I asked him if he would sign my copy of his book, and he was happy to oblige.

After telling him that “Runaround Sue” was one of the most popular songs on the Anchorage Tavern jukebox he looked up at me and smiled before writing, “To Bill Kelly and the gang at the Anchorage – Dion,”

He then wrote down September, and looked up and asked, “What year is this again?”

The Wanderer – Dion’s Story (Beech Tree Books, William Morrow Press, NY, 1988)

[Bill Kelly – billkelly3@gmail.com]

Tony Summers' The Eleventh Day

2011-07-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

Tony and Robbyn Summers' new book - The Eleventh Day - The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden will be out on July 19, and excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair.

Synopsis

September 11 2001 is a date no-one can forget. On that day, the largest terrorist attack the world had ever seen sent two passenger aircraft crashing into New York's famous twin towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed to be headed for the White House, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Three thousand people lost their lives that day. And the world changed forever. The consequences of those attacks have shaped the first years of the twenty-first century. The world is a less safe place because of them. War in Afghanistan and Iraq followed. Thousands more have now died. But what exactly happened on that day ten years ago? Reports have been written and dismissed. Conspiracy theories abound. This book has been four years in the writing. Leading investigative writer, Anthony Summers has pored through thousands of documents, hundreds of hours of interviews, and examined all possible testimony and evidence to produce this definitive history of what really happened on that tragic day.

On Sale: July 19, 2011

Writing with access to thousands of recently released official documents, fresh interviews, and the perspective that can come only from a decade of research and reflection, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan deliver the first panoramic, authoritative look back at 9/11.For most living Americans, September 11, 2001, is the darkest date in the nation's history. What exactly happened? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved? What is certain: Discord and dissent continue to this day.

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and introduces the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the ground. Drawing on previously classified records and raw transcripts, Summers and Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, as a counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 truth" movement. With meticulous research, they examine the personalities of the men behind the onslaught, analyze the motives that drove them, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward—without good evidence—the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the question the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in another foreign nation—one the U.S. had long viewed as a friend?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal event in our history.

September 11, 2001 is the darkest date in the memory of most people alive in the West today. The day ten years on when Osama bin Laden was killed was one of jublilation in the United States, yet uncertainty about what may come in the future.

What exactly happened on 9/11? Could it have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and bad information arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what remains unresolved?

Beginning with the first brutal actions of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, The Eleventh Day tracks the precise sequence of events and follows the players: pilots, terrorists, the airliners' passengers, and the innocents who died on the gound. Drawing on previously unreleased records and raw transcripts, Anthony Summers and his co-author Robbyn Swan investigate the response of President Bush and the U.S. military that day, and the failure to intercept the hijacked airliners. They document the untruths told afterward by U.S. officials and, by counterpoint, thoroughly consider the contentions of the "9/11 Truth" movement. They analyze the motives that drove the men behind the onslaught, and expose the U.S. intelligence blunders that preceded the attacks. They note how afterward - without good evidence - the Bush administration persisted in trying to link 9/11 to Iraq. And they confront, finally, the questions the 9/11 Commission's report blurred: Were the terrorists backed by powerful figures in other foreign nations - including some that have long been treated as friends?

Riveting, revelatory, and unforgettable, thoroughly sourced and complete with extensive endnotes, The Eleventh Day is the essential one-volume work on a pivotal episode in our history.

Anthony Summers - Home

Bestselling biographer and journalist Anthony Summers has covered the pivotal stories of the past hundred years, and in many cases forced a rethink.

He has reported onthe conflict in the Middle East; the Vietnam War; the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; Watergate; the rise and fall of the American Mafia; the Hiss and Profumo espionage cases. He has explored the lives and deaths of the powerful and the famous: from Tsar Nicholas II to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Now in 2011 he brings the sharpest focus yet to a full account of 9/11, the events that led up to it, and the troubling questions that remain.

Somers Point Ghost House

2011-07-03T04:26:00.000-07:00

Somers Avenue, Somers Point (NJ) Ghost House

Gregory Young and other people who have lived in the old house thought they were going crazy, or at least some crazy things were happening to them.

The house on Somers Avenue in Somers Point doesn’t stand out among the other quaint bayside cottages, but what happens inside has spooked residents and visitors alike.

When the current residents began to experience some unlikely events, and began to think the house was haunted, they learned that a previous owner thought so to, and even wrote a book about it, that’s now a series of books.

Gregory Young’s “A Father, A Son and A House Full of Ghosts” was first published a few years ago, but since that was published, he’s also written, Book II, “the continuation of a true story of the paranormal events that a father and son experienced after purchasing a house which was occupied by ghosts.”

And now we have book III to complete the trilogy, and compliment his other books, “Kindred Emotions: Quotes of Wisdom,” “10 Holiday Plays for 4th,5th and th Graders” and “Over 100 Reasons Why Men Should Never Marry,” all privately published and available from Jetty Books (http://www.jettybooks.com/events.htm) or Infinity Publishers (http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/peek.aspx?id=3329).

The strange events began when he first bought the house in 2000 and began renovating it. As the bizarre occurrences began to add up, he investigated, and learned more of the history of the 100 year old house and who had previously lived there. Giving the accounts of others as well as his own experiences and those of his son, his books document the events while he speculates on the possibility of reincarnation and of angels watching over us.

As Gregory Young puts it, “The unexplainable occurrences in this house were happening more and more frequently. I couldn’t go on living like this. No matter where I was, I would be thinking about it. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. None of it made sense. I would tell these stories to people and they would look at me like I was crazy. I Must Be Crazy. They thought something was wrong with me. I began to think it myself. Was I losing my mind? Was this all in my head? Or, was I going through something extraordinary, something so rare and unbelievable that there just isn’t anyone to talk about it with. I was becoming more and more confused. I constantly though about it and I never knew what was going to happen next or when. I needed some answers.”

“The stories were adding up,” says Young. “There was certainly something in this house. There had to be. Both my ten year old son and I were becoming increasingly convinced. This is nothing that I would have ever wanted to expose him to, but he was here a lot of the times when these strange occurrences occurred. He witnessed them too. He could see the fear in my face and hear the panic in my voice. He and I would talk about it and try to come up with explanations, but just couldn’t.”

Lucky for them, the ghosts appear to be friendly, and only play with the electric, appliances and moving inanimate objects about. “With the many strange occurrences that have happened in this house, I don’t remember a time when either one of us were truly scared. It was more a case of being shocked, shocked at what we saw or what had happened. I didn’t have any answers, but I had a lot of questions, and the most formidable question was, is there something living in this house with us?”

Young says he eventually figured out, with the help of psychics, there are at least four ghosts, including Danielle, a fifteen year old African American slave from the 1700s and two mischievous children, Sarah, a four year old girl from the 1920s, and Jonathan, a ten year old boy who died of measles, and is dressed as a Boardwalk Empire extra.

Young has actually seen Agnes, and who hangs out primarily in the kitchen, and based on her behavior, wasn’t too keen on the recent renovations.

“Actually, I’m flattered,” noted Young. “I feel blessed to have such an extraordinary experience happen to me. It was nothing I was looking for, nothing I had planned. I guess I can say I enjoy it. It’s very friendly, nothing mean going on. It’s very good natured.”

“I was documenting all of the occurrences,” said Young. “I just kind of kept quiet and kept moving forward. Then I thought the best way to get this out would just be to write it all. I realized I had a great story here and I decided to publish it.”
With the complaints of strange events by the current occupants of the house and the publication of the latest edition of his book, Young has embarked on a local book tour of the area that includes the Cape May Farmer’s Market (July 12, 19, 26, Aug. 2, 9, 19), Cape May Tomato Festival (Sept. 3) and Jackson St. Fair (Oct. 1), Absecon Historical Society (Oct. 3), the Cape May Lima Bean Festival (Oct. 8) and Atlantic City Teacher’s Convention (Nov. 10-11).

Somers Ave Ghost House - Somers Point NJ

2011-06-30T02:52:00.000-07:00

John Barry - An American Hero in the Age of Sail

2011-06-30T02:42:00.000-07:00

John Barry - An American Hero in the Age of Sail - By Tim McGrath.

A New Bio of Commodore John Barry – America’s Forgotten Hero

By William Kelly

There is a monument to John Barry at his birthplace in Wexford, Ireland, a suspension bridge named after him and a statute at his grave in the cemetery behind Independence Hall in Philadelphia, not far from where he lived for most of his life. There have also been a number of US Navy warships and a bar in Qatar named in his honor.

There’s been a concerted effort to honor his memory, but John Barry is one of America’s forgotten heroes. As the author of a new biography, Tim McGrath notes, “Visit that statue on a bright sunny day, as the tourists leave Independence Hall and invariably one sightseer will ask, ‘Who was Barry?’”

As most school children know, John Barry was an American Revolutionary War hero who is generally recognized as the “Father of the US Navy,” but after that, the details get fuzzy.

A serious biography of John Barry is a once in a lifetime occurrence so we are lucky to be able to get Tim McGrath’s John Barry – An American Hero in the Age of Sail (Westholme/Yardly, 2010), which gloriously details what the school texts leave out.

It’s been 75 years since the last real biography of Barry, William Bell Clark’s Gallant John Barry – the Story of a Naval Hero of Two Wars (MacMillan, 1938), which rekindled the debate over whether or not John Barry actually deserves the title of “Father of the US Navy,” but McGrath decisively answers that question without really outright saying so.

Barry’s presence is still felt as he is buried in the graveyard behind Independence Hall, where a larger than life statute guards the back door of where they signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, though few of the tourists actually know who he is or what he did.

Since Philadelphia is Barry’s adopted hometown, many if not most of the significant events in his life took place in or around Philadelphia, which is also Tim McGrath’s hometown, and McGrath paints an interesting and accurate portrait of the man and the revolutionary times in which he lived there.

The Commodore Barry Bridge spans the Delaware River – the same river that Barry sailed from to fight the British, the same river Washington crossed to surprise the Hessians at Trenton, using artillery from Barry’s ship, and it’s the same river forged by the cattle drive Barry helped lead to Valley Forge to supply Washington’s army. It’s the same river overlooked from the porch of Barry’s once famous home - Strawberry Hill, four miles north of center city.

Besides the bridge and the statute of Barry that stands over his grave behind Independence Hall, the local Hibernians named their clubhouse after him. Among the many ships named USS Barry, there’s a destroyer on active duty today and one full of treasure that was sunk by a Nazi U-boat during WWII. The treasure ship was salvaged by treasure hunters who opened the John Barry Bar in Muscat Oman. There too, they want to know, who is John Barry?

President John Kennedy knew who Barry was, and when he visited Ireland, stopped to pay his respects and lay a wreath at the monument to Barry in Wexford, which is where Kennedy’s family also hailed from. JFK also owned Barry’s sword, which was close at hand during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, and now resides at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.

The library describes it as: “John Barry’s Sword. Date made: Late 18th century
Dimensions: 33 inches. Steel sword said to have belonged to Commodore John Barry, father of the American Navy. The cutlass has a single curved full blade, split knuckle guard, and turned wooden hilt. The blade is inscribed "Pro Gloria Et Patria" (for glory and country). The handle has a gilt, gargoyle head pommel from whose mouth extends the guard. The blade has numerous nicks indicating it saw battle. The sword hung in President John F. Kennedy's Oval Office.”

Barry’s sword was also previously owned by John Paul Jones, the only pretender to the title of “Father of the US Navy,” and who McGrath berates as a braggart who exaggerated his exploits. Some have also argued for John Adams, the lawyer who defended the British troops responsible for the Boston Massacre, but they all have strikes against their names. Jones was accused of killing one of his own sailors for insubordination, dodged one controversy after another, and pales in comparison to the exemplary and modest manner in which John Barry conducted himself. Yet, McGrath doesn’t come right out and say it – that John Barry is the Father of the US Navy, which he most certainly is.

Besides Barry’s Revolutionary War exploits at sea, capturing the first and last British ships of the war and defeating two British warships at once, he also distinguished himself on land during the British occupation of Philadelphia. Without a ship to sail, Barry conducted hit and run missions against British ships all along the Delaware and helped lead a vital cattle drive from the South Jersey to Valley Forge to help supply the rebel army at their winter quarters.

But John Barry isn’t the Father of the Navy because of his exemplary Revolutionary War record, which compares favorably to that of Jones, nor because President Washington named Barry the first flag officer of the reconstituted US Navy, which alone should be enough to lay claim to the title.

John Barry is the “Father of the US Navy” because he followed Washington’s order to raise a class of midshipmen to serve as the first officers of the US Navy, and they went on to distinguish themselves and establish style and traditions that are upheld by the US Navy today.

When he first met them Charles Stewart, Stephen Decatur and Richard Somers were mischievous young school kids who engaged in fisticuffs in the cemetery where Barry is now buried. They were selected and mentored by Barry, and often visited him at Strawberry Hill and the shipyard in South Philly where Barry oversaw the construction of the USS United States, one of the first frigates of the new US Navy. The building of a frigate was a fascinating spectacle and the launching of the battleship was a major civic and social occasion that drew most of the population of the city to witness it.

As the first Flag officer in the Navy, appointed by Washington, Barry chose Stewart his first officer and Somers and Decatur as midshipmen, and they went on to become navy heroes in their own right, with ships, streets and towns also named after them.

Aside from all that, Barry can be credited with expediting the approval of the Constitution of the United States, which some delegates kept from being passed by their absence, preventing a quorum and ratification. Barry led a group of ruffians they called the “Compellers,” who went out and rounded up the missing men and escorted them to the proceedings so their presence could be counted and the Constitution approved.

While McGrath’s academic biography of Barry may not reach those who want to know, perhaps someday Hollywood will make a swashbuckling movie about Barry, and those who visit his birthplace or his grave, transit his bridge and drink at the John Barry bar, will no longer have to wonder who he was.

William Kelly, Jr. is a freelance journalist from Browns Mills, New Jersey, and author of “300 Years at the Point” – a history of Somers Point, NJ, and “Birth of the Birdie” – the first hundred years of golf at the Atlantic City Country Club. He can be reached at Billkelly3@gmail.com (609) 425-6297

Recently, some members of the Wisconsin Legislature left the state so as they would prevent their congress from having a quorum and enact legislation they were against, a tactic similar to that used by those members of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia who were against the adoption of the constitution. John Barry however, saw to it that they made the meeting.

John Barry and the Compellers – An exerpt (I believe I can get McGrath’s permission)
From: Tim McGrath’s John Barry - An American Hero in the Age of Sail (Westholme/Yardly 2010) p. 358-361:

“Around four, Barry rejoined the crowd in the gallery to witness the Federalists’ victory. The representatives ambled in – only not nearly as many as had left earlier. The clock stuck four. All nineteen anti-Federalists were missing. Their absence was their trump card: now, there was no quorum. There could be no vote.”

“The sergeant-at-arms was ordered to search for them. Before long he returned, having found seventeen representatives at Major Boyd’s boarding house, he reminded them of their duty, only to be told that ‘there is no House.” Mifflin, reviewing the Assembly’s by-laws, found no clause that forced members to attend, only a fine for their absence. The Federalists had been outfoxed…”

“A collective grown came from the gallery as the forty-three Federalists cast dismayed eyes at Mifflin…Barry and the crowd stomped down the steps and out into the Indian summer weather. Everyone knew what would happen the next morning: another no-show by the anti-Federalists. Without a quorum, there would be no convention, perhaps no ratification for a year. How may absent assemblymen were needed to have a quorum? Barry knew the answer: two.”

“Having celebrated their victory with a fine meal, spirits and a good night’s sleep, most of McCalmont’s anti-Federalist allies had already left town. Only two were still tarrying at Boyd’s: McCalmont and his roommate Jacob Miley of Dauphin County (Pa.), another tough frontiersman. When accosted by the sergeant-at-arms, they simply ignored him and refused to return. Everyone in the room looked to Mifflin. Now what?”

“With a nod to his companions, Barry and his men elbowed their way out of the gallery, jogged down the steps of the State House and out to Chestnut Street. Whether Mifflin was in on Barry’s plan is not known – but as Barry’s band exited, Mifflin ‘left the chair.’ By doing so, he delayed adjourning the assembly. Others in the gallery also followed Barry, but at a distance.”

“Barry’s companions strode up Chestnut to Sixth, then turned and headed right to Major Boyd’s. They forced their way in the front door, and then stomped upstairs to find McCalmont and Miley. The crowd trailing Barry turned into a mob, shouting curses and thowing stones through the boardinghouse windows. Barry and company did not bother to knock before entering.”

“As Barry’s toughs circled the two assemblymen, he gave the a choice: they could walk to the State House under their own power, or be carried there. Other politicians might have been struck with fear, but McCalmont and Miley were made of sterner stuff. They responded with their own profanity-laced declaration; they were not coming to the State House, despite the escort service confronting them. There was a second of silence. Then, ‘Take’em!’ Barry commanded, and the ‘compelling’ began.”

“The two ex-militiamen put up a fight. Fists were thrown, clothes were torn, and fingers were bitten or pried off the banisters. The representatives from Dauphin and Franklin counties punched and kicked in every direction, but to no avail. Messrs. McCalmont and Miley bid adieu to Major Boyd’s, without settling their bill.”

“Once outside, the two men were hoisted up and carried, as one newspaperman reported, with ‘their clothes torn and after much abuse and insult.’ Slowly but surely, ‘they were finally dragged’ down Chestnut Street. By now the clamor could be heard on the second floor of the State House. Peering out of one of the windows, Mifflin saw his two colleagues being assisted back to work, and then quietly excused himself from the chamber. Barry’s gang reached the State House doors. Moving to and fro, sideways, backward, sideways, forward, his toughs got to the stairway. They scuffled up the first five steps to the landing while McCalmont and Miley squirmed to free themselves, lashing out at their bearers, whose fingernails dug into their necks and hands, drawing blood. Their clothes torn in proportion to resistance became shredded rags.”

“The next two flights of stairs were sixteen steps each. A five-foot wide stairway is more than broad enough for a crowd to use – the prisoners easily negotiated Franklin’s sedan-chair daily – but his band, carrying two thrashing public servants, found it a narrow passage. The last flight of five stairs took the longest. To their credit, neither McCalmont nor Miley stopped fighting. When they could, they dug their feet into the stairs and flailed their arms. Finally, Barry and his men got through the doorway, literally throwing the two men over the rail that divided the gallery from the austere chamber of official government business. Thanks to Barry there was bedlam, but also a quorum.”

“The other assemblymen returned to their seats, Miffling, ‘assuming the chair, and the roll was called.’ The two manhandled legislators, bloodied, bruised, and half-naked, glared at him. Panting heavily, they felt for cracked ribs and broken fingers. When their names were called by the clerk, they were still out of breath – but their colleagues happily responded for them. ‘HERE!’ they cried. Mifflin acknowledged, to laughter and cheers, that a quorum was present. The session, delayed but not adjourned, began at last.”

The Sundance Kid - The Man & the Myth

2011-06-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

The Sundance Kid & the Sting’s Atlantic City Connections

Robert Redford and Paul Newman made two memorial movies together – Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and the Sting.

Redford played Butch Cassidy’s sidekick the Sundance Kid while Newman was Charlie Gondorf in The Sting, both historical characters with Atlantic City connections.

Gondorf, the King of the Big Con confidence men of the early part of the last century, was an Atlantic City bartender when he wasn’t playing the inside man in big time swindles as portrayed in the movie The Sting.

Then there’s the legend that Harry Longabaugh – the Sundance Kid, was from Atlantic City, which turns out to be partially true.

In the movie Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid, there’s a scene where they get off a train in a desolate place in South America, and Butch Cassidy, whose idea it was to go there, says, “It could be worse. You get a lot more for your money in Bolivia, I know, I checked it out.”

The Sundance Kid then responds, “This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we’re standing now. This might be the Atlantic City of all Bolivia for all we know.”

Cassidy says, “Look, now I know a lot more about Bolivia than you know about Atlantic City, New Jersey, I can tell you that.”

“Ah, ha! you do, huh?” says the Kid. “I was born there. I was born in New Jersey. Brought up there.”

Incredulously, Butch Cassidy looks up, “You’re from the east? I didn’t know that.”

Donna and Paul Ernst, who lived in Ocean City, NJ, saw the movie and didn’t think anything about it, but were startled when they read a National Geographic Magazine article “The Outlaw Trail,” by Robert Redford, in which he mentions that the Sundance Kid’s real name was Harry Alonzo Longabaugh. And there is a town in Wyoming near the Hole in the Wall canyon where they hung out called Atlantic City.

“Well, Longabaugh isn’t exactly Smith,” said Donna Ernest, who wrote to the magazine, whose historian sent her a detailed Longabaugh family history that showed that the Sundance Kid was the brother of Paul Ernst’s great-grandfather.

Paul then remembered his “grandpop” at a holiday dinner if the family was interested in hearing the story of his “uncle Harry, who had a sidekick, and were like Jesse James. They robbed banks and gave it to poor people, and died in South America.”

But then he said, “Na, isn’t anyone’s business, forget it.”

His grandfather repeated the story a number of times over the years, but the family just thought he was out of his head, and he was senile when he died in March, 1976.

Unfortunately, Grandpop went to his grave with the details of the story of his “Uncle Henry,” the Sundance Kid. “He never told anyone all he knew,” said Donna, “and he died in silence, taking his memories with him.”

Once intrigued however, Paul and Donna took up the trail of the outlaws and learned a lot over the following twenty years.
Harry Alonzo Longabaugh – aka the Sundance Kid, was not actually born in Atlantic City, as the movie attests, but rather in Mont Clare, on the Schuylkill Canal in Pennsylvania.

According to Donna Ernst, “Because Mont Clare, Pennsylvania is extremely small, historians thought it was actually Mont Clare, New Jersey, and that assumption eventually caused the line in the movie where Redford, as the Sundance Kid, claims he was born in Atlantic City.”

Harry – the Sundance Kid, had a brother Harvey, who did live in Atlantic City, and is credited with helping to build the first boardwalk. Since his brother had a place at the Shore, Harry frequently visited him, and thus the Atlantic City connection was firmly established.

Becoming entranced with the subject, Donna and Paul began an intense search of family history in order to learn as much about Harry Longabaugh as they could, digging through old family and official records. According to Donna, “We discovered a Conrad Longabaugh had immigrated to Philadelphia on December 24, 1772, aboard the brig Morning Star. He fought in the Revolutionary War and then raised his family in Eastern Pennsylvania. His descendants eventually settled in Mont Clare, where during the spring of 1867, Harry Alongzo Longabaugh was born.”

On August 30, 1882 the restless fourteen year old Harry left to go West with some cousins in a covered wagon, eventually settling in Cortez, Colorado, where they lived for four years. After working a cattle drive to Montana in 1886, he went to the Black Hills area, where at Sundance, Wyoming, on February 27, 1887, he allegedly stole a light grey horse, a gun and a saddle form an employee of the VVV Ranch. After being caught, the 20 year old attempted to escape by jumping off a train, but was recaptured. The local Yellowstone Journal newspaper compared him to Jesse James and attributed some other local crimes to him. In response, from the Sundance jail, he wrote a letter to the editor.

“In your issue of the 7t, I read a very sensational and partly untrue article, which places me before the public not even second to the notorious Jesse James. Admitting that I have done nothing wrong and expecting to be dealt with according to the law and not by false reports from parties who should blush with shame to make them, I ask a little of your space to set my case before the public in a true light. In the first place, I have always worked for an honest living…and was arrested…and charged with having stolen a horse at Sundance, where I was being taken by Sheriff Ryan, whom I escaped from by jumping from the cars, which I judged were running at the rate of 100 miles an hour. After this my course of outlawry commenced, and I suffered terribly for the want of food in the hope of getting back south without being detected, where I would be looked upon as I always have been, and not as a criminal. Contrary to the statement in the Journal, I deny having stolen any horses in Canada, or anyplace else, up to the time I was captured, at which time I was riding a horse which I bought and paid for. Nor had I the slightest idea of stealing any horses. I am aware that some of your readers will say my statement should be taken or what it is worth, on account of the hard name which has been forced upon me, nevertheless it is true. As for my recapture by Deputy Sheriff Davis, all I can say is that he did his work well and were it not for him ‘playing possum’ I would now be on my way south, where I had hoped to go and live a better life.” Signed Harry Lonabaugh.

When Harry Lonabaugh got out of jail the newspaper reported, “the kid has been released from Sundance,” and the Sundance Kid was born.

As Donna Ernst relates, “Stealing horses soon became robbing banks and holding up trains. Sundance and his pal Butch Cassidy were the leaders of a loose-knit group of thieves better known as the Wild Bunch. And together these men were so skilled at escaping the law that the American Bankers Association and the Union Pacific Railroad hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to capture them – at any cost.”

In the course of their two decades long quest to learn as much as possible about their renegade relation, Donna and Paul spent their summer vacations traveling the West’s “Outlaw Trails,” where they visited banks their great-uncle once robbed and the cabins in the mountains where they hid out from the law.

They also found another Atlantic City connection – Atlantic City, Wyoming, one of the ghost towns near Hole-in-the-Wall Wyoming.

They trailed the Wild Bunch to Fort Worth, Texas, where the gang regrouped and had the famous photograph taken. “Sundance and Butch saw their way of life changing before their eyes,” Donna relates. “Their fellow outlaws were all being killed or caught and jailed. It was time to move on, to take a trip to South America, and to start a new life. So the Wild Bunch met in Fort Worth for a good-bye celebration. One of the things they did was have their picture taken together, but unknown to them, the photographer placed the picture on display in his window, where it was seen by a Wells Fargo detective who recognized one of the men.”

With the heat hot on their tail, says Donna, “the Sundance Kid returned home with his wife, Ethel Place, to see his family, brother Harvey and his sisters Samanna and Emma, and meet his nieces and nephews, some born in his absence. Then he explained his decision to move to South America and told his family he was going to settle down, buy a ranch and go straight.”

According to the reports of the Pinkerton Detectives who were after him, Sundance and Ethel were seen “frolicking” at the beach in Atlantic City, where the Sundance Kid’s brother Harvey lived at the time. “We suspect they visited Harvey’s family at the beach,” says Donna, “and at that time Grandpop was about eleven years old.”

According to the legend, and the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to South America and were the two American bandits killed in a shootout in San Vicente, Bolivia on November 8, 1908.

But Lula Parker Betenson, Butch Cassidy’s sister, wrote a book Butch Cassidy, My Brother (Bringham Young Press, 1975) in which she claims her brother returned home years after he was reported killed in South America, and told the family that he last saw the Sundance Kid and Ethel Place at a bullfight in Mexico City.

In 1991, research historian Dan Buck and Anthropologist Dr. Clyde Snow exhumed the bodies of the “bandito Yankees,” killed an buried in San Vicente, Bolivia, and conducted DNA tests to match genetic material with descendants of Cassidy and Longabaugh. The negative results left the case open to historical debate as to whether Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in South America or merely encouraged the rumors of their death in order to get the Pinkertons off their trail and to start a new life outside of crime.

As a result of their research and travels, Donna Ernst wrote a book, Sundance – My Uncle (Creative Publishing Co, Box 9292, College Station, Tx., 77842, 1992), which chronicles the full story of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, at least what could be learned today.

At a meeting of Western Outlaw-Lawmen History Association, Donna Ernst said, “While I am not a professional writer, I don’t mind doing a lot of research. I have mixed my desire for accuracy and my access to private family information together with the historical details of Sundance’s life. In the process I have found some new information, and have tried to correct a few inaccuracies.”

Next: CHARLIE GONDORF – THE STING’S ATLANTIC CITY CONNCTION

Me and Rod Serling - Enter The Twilight Zone

2011-06-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

Rod Serling

Witness one Rod Serling – Standing alone, flesh, blood, muscle and mind. A frustrated actor turned writer, he stands forever in the nightmare of his own creation, pressed into service in the role of narrator for a weekly television drama – The Twilight Zone.

For those who watched and listened, he showed how thin a line separates that which we assume to be real and that which is a product of our own minds.

There is that hauntingly repetitious four-beat score that opens the show, as Serling, dressed conservatively in dark suit and tie, steps out of the shadows and stands in the starry night. With his hands clasped in front of him, he says in his distinctive voice, talking out of the side of his mouth:

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is also an area we call the Twilight Zone.”

Marc Scott Zicree, in his book The Twilight Zone Companion (Bantam, 1982) tells us that the original music for the show was composed by Bernard Herman, who also did such classic film scores as Citizen Kane, Psycho and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Zicree describes it as, “a subtle and lonely piece scored for strings, harp, flute and brass,” but that was replaced after on season “by the more familiar rhythmic theme by French avant-guarde composer Marius Consant.”

As for the name of the show, Serling said, “I thought I’d made it up, but I’ve since heard that there is an Air Force term relating to a moment when a plane is coming down on approach and the pilot cannot see the horizon, it’s called the twilight zone, but it’s an obscure term which I had not heard before.”

Since then the lexicon should show that the CIA psychologists used the term to denote the state of mind of subjects to whom they administered LSD.

But from now on the term “Twilight Zone” will forever be associated with Serling, who conceived the idea for the TV show and wrote many if not most of the scripts. He made the show unique, parlaying an award wining TV drama into the half-hour weekly program that didn’t have the continuity that plots and characters give sit-coms and soap operas.

When word got out that the show would be scary, Serling rejected the advances of agents representing various monster and robot actors who monopolized other sci-fi shows, politely telling them he had something else “in mind.”

And indeed, the Twilight Zone would stimulate endless nightmares, portraying ordinary people in frightening predicaments. But it made people think, and come back for more.

Serling’s contract only called for him to write 80% of the shows, and for Orson Wells to do the narration, but when Orson Wells required more money than they were allocated, and others just didn’t seem right, Serling volunteered to do the narration himself. While it turned out to be the most familiar and endearing part of the series, it was also Serling’s own personal nightmare, as he had stage fright.

The producers and director were at first skeptical of Serling himself doing the opening dialog, but then, as Serling put it, “They looked at me and said, ‘Hell, at least he’s articulate and speaks English, so let’s use him.’ Only my laundress knows how frightened I was.”

According to Zicree, “Serling had more problems adjusting to his on screen role than just stumbling over the occasional word.”

Director Lamont Johnson said, “Rod was a very nervous man before the camera. When he had to do lead in time he would go through absolute hell. He would sweat and sputter and go pale. He was terribly ill at ease in front of a camera.”

Like all successful TV programs, they last only as long as the scripts maintain a certain quality, and writing is what Serling did best.

Born Rodman Edward Serling on Christmas day 1924 in Syracuse, New York, Serling was the second son of Ester and Samuel Serling, his father a wholesale meat dealer.

Popular, outspoken and confident, Serling read pulp paperback novels and mimicked movie actors as a kid. He went in for dramatics in high school, and served as a paratrooper in the Philippines during World War II. After the service he attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and started writing radio scripts and bad poetry.

His wife Carol, who published a Twilight Zone magazine that featured original short fiction, recalls that Rod’s writing habits got him up at dawn. After grabbing a cup of coffee, he would “dictate his scripts into a tape machine.” Often, if the weather was nice, he’d take the machine outside with him and sit by the pool.”

One friend noted, “He is the only person I knew who could get a tan and make money at the same time.”

After five seasons of the Twilight Zone, Serling hosted another TV weekly, The Night Gallery, which also developed short story themes.

Then, years after Serling’s death, they made The Twilight Zone movie, which adapted a few of the original shows to film. It partially succeeded, but the death of actor Vic Morrow and two children in its making put a stigma on the production.

While Serling wrote most of the Twilight Zone TV segments, only “It’s a Grand Life,” about a spoiled boy with supernatural powers, was written by Serling that is included in the film. “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which originally stared William Shatner, was written by Richard Matheson, and first published in the Anthology “Alone By Night” (Ballentine, 1961), while “Kick the Can” was written by George Clayton Johnson.

Johnson once said, “On the Twilight Zone, there was an attempt to keep it literary, to keep it bright, to keep it good. No one in the show ever suggested that something would be good enough – although that’s common today in commercial television. Just to do it good enough. Quality control counted in the Twilight Zone.”

In his last published interview several months before his death, Serling said, “I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote a single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer,’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

In May, 1975, Serling suffered a mild heart attack while scheduled to give a lecture at a college in upstate New York, and had to have a coronary bypass operation.

When I read in the news papers that he was in the hospital, I sent him a small note, mentioning that I too had attended classes at Antioch College while a student at the University of Dayton, Ohio, and included a poem by William Bulter Yeats, from Supernatural Songs – The Four Ages of Man.

“He with body waged a fight, but body won, it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart, innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind, his proud heart he left behind.
Now his war on God begins; at stroke of midnight, God shall win.”

A few days later, on June 28, 1975, after ten hours of open heart surgery, complications arose and Rod Serling died. I heard about it on television at home in Ocean City, and wondered if he ever got my note.

The next day I went out on the porch and took the mail from the mail box and was surprised to see one postmarked from upstate New York. The corner of the envelope said it was from Rod Serling.

I could hear the music from the Twilight Zone as I opened the envelop – Da da, da da, da, da, da da....

It was brief and to the point, typewritten, apparently dictated and signed, thanking me for the poem, and saying that he was really worse off than what the newspapers had let it out to be, and that he wouldn’t be working on any projects for awhile.

And now he’s stuck in that middle ground between light and shadow, and is remembered not as a writer, but as our host in his personal nightmare – the Twilight Zone.
Now whenever anything strange or unexpected happens, we hear the faint strains of that music, and quickly turn around, half-expecting to see him standing there, in dark suit and tie, hands clasped in front of him, welcoming us.

Somers and Decatur

2011-06-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

Richard Somers and Stephen Decatur board the USS United States as Midshipmen - 1798.

Somers and Decatur

On Memorial Day, when President Obama honored two US Marines, Lt. Travis Manion and Lt. Brendan Looney, who were roommates at Annapolis, became best friends, died in combat and are buried together at Arlington National Cemetery, it is reminiscent of two other young men who were best friends, enlisted in the Navy together and fought beside each other in battles against the Barbary pirates – Richard Somers and Stephen Decatur.

"Behind the Dream"

2011-06-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

Clarence Jones' "Behind the Dream"

2011-06-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Clarence Jones takes notes behind Martin Luther King, Jr.

Clarence Jones, an influential civil rights lawyer and close aide and associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., has written a book “Behind the Dream,” the story of King’s famous March on Washington speech at Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963.

Besides preparing the notes for the speech, and ensuring it was copyrighted, Jones stood by King when the speech was delivered, and his book tells the story of how it all came about.

Now a scholar in residence at the MLK Center at Stanford University, Jones has recently done some radio interviews with BBC and National Public Radio in which he recounts some of what is in the book.

Most interesting is the background of Clarence Jones himself.

Born in Philadelphia, Jones’ parents were live-in domestic servants in an apparently well to do Philadelphia home, so young Jones was sent off to a Catholic boarding school where most of the students were orphans, educated by Irish nuns who Jones credits with teaching him how to write well.

One summer however, while visiting his parents at the summer home of their employer in Longport, at the Jersey Shore, he went for a bike ride, only to be intercepted by some young white boys who harassed him, calling him “nigger,” “honkey,” “boogaloo,” “monkey,” and things that he had never been confronted with before.

When his mother found him crying, and he told her why, she made him look in a mirror and asked what he saw – telling him “you are the most beautiful thing in God’s creation,” and such taunting no longer affected him as it did that day in Longport.

Having been educated so well by the Irish nuns, Jones attended Columbia University and after being drafted and given an undesirable discharge for refusing to sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath, he studied law and became a lawyer.

Moving to California, one day in 1960 Martin Luther King visited him at home, and tried to persuade him to assist him in defending against a trumped up tax evasion case, but Jones turned him down because his wife was pregnant and he didn’t want to move back east.

After being berated by his wife however, Jones attended the church service where King gave the sermon on the subject of the responsibilities of black professionals to assist other less fortunate blacks, after which Jones joined King’s legal team.

To hear the NPR interview with Clarence Jones, or read the transcript:

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132905796/dream-speech-writer-jones-reflects-on-king-jr

Clarence Jones is now in residence at Stanford MLK Center:

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php

Steel Pier Showplace of the Nation

2009-12-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

xxxx

Steel Pier – Showplace of the Nation – Atlantic City by Steve Leibowitz (Down the Shore, 2009)

There’s a new and important book out on the history of the Steel Pier.

So many great things happened at the Steel Pier in Old Atlantic City you know there had to be a good book about it, and Steve Liebowitz has written it.

This new, coffee table book, chock with plenty of pictures, takes you back to the Glory Days of Atlantic City, a place that many people would prefer to go to than the glitzy casinos today.

As explained by Liebowitz, after the boardwalk lined the beach, they started extending it out over the ocean, creating piers, that competed with each other by offering entertainment rides and shows, but the Steel Pier stood out above the rest after Frank Gravatt bought it in 1925 and began to book vaudeville acts.

Gravatt was a local, who started out delivering newspapers and married a Somers, Flora Somers, from English Creek, and although uneducated, he had a savvy business sense. By the time he was through, Gravatt would own the local Buick dealership, Indian motorcycles franchise, the Golden Gate Motel, the Shelburne, Traymore and Lafayette Hotels, WFPG radio and was director of Chelsea Bank, as well as owning the Steel Pier. But he did it by working hard and even after successful he wasn’t above climbing a latter to replace a burnt out light bulb.

Besides Gravatt, the other big name behind the Steel Pier was Hamid, George Hamid, Sr. and George Hamid, Jr. who took over the Pier after the Storm of ’44, and brought the Showcase of the Nation into the modern era.

While Gravatt was an entrepreneur, Hamid was a showman, actually from a circus family from Lebanon, a troupe of tumblers and acrobats who traveled the world circuit with Buffalo Bill Cody.

The first time Hamid, Sr. came to Atlantic City he entertained on the beach for tips, doing acrobats and sleeping under the boardwalk.

After buying Million Dollar Pier and moving into John Young’s famous house #1 Atlantic Ocean, he worked with Gravatt at the Steel Pier but they had a falling out and after the Storm of ’44, Hamid had to get a straw buyer to purchase it because he didn’t think Gravatt would sell it to him at any price.

From Vaudeville to Hollywood, the diving horse to the diving bell and dolphins, from Big Bands to Rock & Roll, it’s all there, and while Liebowitz’s story is an easy read and full of historical tidbits, the pictures really make the book special. As Liebowitz notes, it wasn’t a matter of which photos to use, there were so many it was hard to pick the ones to leave out, and maybe someday they will put them all on a web site.

Although grandmom might be more interested in the exciting things that went on at Steel Pier in the 30s and 40s - the Glory Years, when the Steel Pier was the number one entertainment attraction on the East Coast, and really was the “Showplace of the Nation,” the Rock & Roll era has more appeal to younger readers, and me.

It doesn’t seem that long ago when the Rolling Stones came to Atlantic City for the second time, in the l980s, for their Steel Wheels Tour, and I went over to George Hamid’s office which was then on Tilton Road in Northfield.

Did he remember the Stone’s show at Steel Pier in the 60s? Sure, Hamid, Jr. said, digging into one of a dozen filing cabinets and coming out with a bill of acts for the day the Stones played Atlantic City, along with the McCoys and Rick Derringer.

Hamid, Jr. explained to me then that their family were circus people, who had also taken over the New Jersey State Fair and the Aquarium in Philadelphia and ran other major attractions around the country as well.

The Steel Pier always had good music as part of their entertainment package but when rock & roll came along, they booked Bill Haley & the Comets shortly after their hit “Rock Around the Clock” became an international sensation, and then had Ed Hurst and Dick Clark feature rock and roll acts all summer long throughout the late fifties and sixties.

Hamid said his biggest mistake wasn’t paying the $12, 500 Elvis wanted, after one hit song, so Elvis went on to forever bypass Atlantic City, never playing there in his entire career.

But practically everybody else played the Steel Pier, either on the way up or as super stars in their own time – with Ricky Nelson holding the one day records of over 44,000 paying customers in one day – August 31, 1958, said to be the first rock concert. It was also his debut solo show, and he was introduced by an opening act, the standup Henny Youngman, whose one-liners didn’t go over well with the young crowd, and was “a theatrical mismatch if there ever was one,” quipped Hamid.

Nelson’s record would have been surpassed by the Beatles, who were booked to play Steel Pier for $25,000, a new record pay out for any band, but Hamid realized that they were too big for even the pier’s biggest room, so they were moved down to the boardwalk to the old Convention Hall, just days after the Democratic National Convention in August, 1964.

Although the Beatles’ small sound equipment was drowned out by the huge hall and the screaming girls, so nobody could actually hear them, it was a cultural phenomenon that’s still being recycled.

The Beatles stayed at Gravatt’s Lafayette Hotel, which was surrounded by thousands of adoring fans, but John Lennon was intent on seeing Steel Pier, which he had heard so much about but didn’t get a chance to play, so he dressed in disguise, slipped out of the hotel through the kitchen and sneaked up to the boardwalk just to see the Steel Pier.

The British Invasion of the United States landed at Atlantic City first, with Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Animals, all hitting the Atlantic City beach before they went anywhere else in the country.

Liebowitz was fortunate to get through to many important people who performed there, and got first hand quotes from most of them, recalling their time well spent there, including Frankie Valli, Smokey Robinson, Joey Bishop, Al Martino, Chubby Checker and Alan King.

While this book will be popular with those who collect Atlantic City memorabilia, those who like old photos and everything to do with show business, Hollywood, the Big Band era and rock & roll, it is also a new and important historical resource, and my only complaint is that it’s index is incomplete and such a book should have a good index.

If Atlantic is to look to its past in order to forge a new future, it would be good to start with this book, not only for the ideas and forces that once brought it out of the depression and the Storm of ’44 to make it the “Showplace of the Nation,” but to see the kind of men that it will take - like Gravatt and the Hamids, to turn things around.

From sleeping under the boardwalk to owning it, they showed how it can be done.

You can read other books of local interest by William Kelly at http://billsbooksblog.blogspot.com
He can be reached at billykelly3@yahoo.com

Photo:
http://billsbooksblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/steel-pier-showplace-of-nation.html

Murder at Mile Marker 36 - Thriller Novel

2009-08-05T00:59:00.000-07:00

Murder at Mile Marker 36 - Another thriller novel based on the Garden State Parkway murders of Memorial Day weekend 1969.

This one is a conspiracy thriller, with a campaign strategy developed for a candidate for governor to blame the murders on Ted Bundy in order to get the law and order vote and win the election.

Can you stand it?

http://www.milemarker36.com/index.html

Vulnerability on the critical law and order issue is the main obstacle in the way of silver-tongued Matt Moran's quest to become governor of New Jersey. His campaign team attempts to solve the problem by blaming the infamous 1969 Coed murders on Ted Bundy.

Pursuit of closure and clues connecting Ted Bundy to the 32-year old cold case are chilling. A love affair involving protagonist Sebstian Kenyon, an ex-journalist, and hotshot political consultant Geena Fallon seasons the story without removing focus from the ghost of the notorious serial killer.

"Murder at Mile Marker 36," set mainly along the Jersey shore, including the famed Pine Barrens, and takes the reader to Wyoming, Arizona, Harrisburg, Newark and Alexandria, Virginia. It runs roughly 240 pages.

In addition to Bundy's ghostly presence, major characters include dashing Matt Moran; Matt's wife Maggie, using the family fortune to finance the gubernatorial campaign; Lucious Harvey, a New Jersey State Trooper on leave to help his friend and confidante with the election so he can become the first "real" African-American to lead the state police: Nick Mastricola, old school Atlantic City pol and Moran campaign advisor, and savvy pollster Jack Remington.

Also, Yocontalie Wolf, a sensual Native-American psychiatrist who heard the serial killer's confession years earlier; Melvin "Catfish" Sadler, burned-out black trooper who helps Kenyon connect the dots; Sandra Steele, now 42, kid sister of one of the 1969 murder victims; George Butler, greedy former FBI agent who helped pioneer the concept of criminal profiling, and Reyneso "Popo" Vasquez, the mysterious Miami detective who taped details of the killer's horrific confession of the Coed murders.

And of course, Kenyon and Geena and their black lab retriever "Killer".

Ken Shuttleworth is an award-winning journalist with several newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Cherry Hill based Courier Post, the leading newspaper in South Jersey. He has also been a street reporter for top ranked KYW News Radio in Philadelphia. He made a career switch from journalism in 1989 and became a political/public policy media tactician. He played a key role in shapiung the Camden County Democratic Committee into one of the best political organizaitons of its kind in the nation.

A life-long fan of mysteries, Ken Shuttleworth finally sat down to begin writing his first novel, "Murder at Mile Marker 36", at age 50. The native Philadelphian and 1965 graduate of Temple University has lived in New Jersey since 1971 and currently resides in Haddon Heights.

Ken Shuttleworth's work typiflies what critic/editor George Plimpton meant when he told a New York Times reporter that powerful forces cohere in New Jersey Literary history, adding: "Its habitues are so extraordnary - more than any other state in the East. The mob, great prizefighters, the prisons, the world of Far Hills, the gamblers, the shore, the corridor between Philadelphia and New York - there is the extraordinary framework that the state's writers have had throughout American history."

Parkway Murders - Cold Case Gets Hot?

2009-07-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

After 40 Years the Parkway Murders Cold Case Gets Hot

By William Kelly

It was a cold case from the start when the bodies of Elizabeth Davis and Susan Perry were found three days after they were murdered over the Memorial Day weekend, 1969.

The college coeds had spent a few days in Ocean City before the holiday weekend and left their 9th street rooming house early on Friday morning, ate breakfast at the Point Diner and then disappeared down the Parkway north, heading home to Pennsylvania.

By Monday, when it was realized that an abandoned convertible towed off the Parkway Friday morning was the car belonging to the missing girls, the bodies were found in the woods nearby.

There were many leads followed and many suspects checked out over the years, including two mass murders in Florida prisons who confessed to having killed the girls, but closing the case remained elusive for the Atlantic County Prosecutor and the lead investigators – the New Jersey State Police.

Now, 40 years later, there’s a new book about the murders, a new State Police investigator has been assigned the case, and a new lead may develop additional suspects.

Christian Barth, a lawyer from Cherry Hill, N.J., has recently published a book, The Origins of Infamy, which describes how serial killer Ted Bundy may have committed the crime. The book, which is available on line at Amazon [http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Infamy-Christian-E-Barth/dp/1440138931], is also available at Sun Rose Books in Ocean City, where Barth will be selling and signing copies of his book on Wednesday, July 22, from 5 to 8 pm.

According to the publisher’s synopsis, “Based on a true story, The Origins of Infamy tells of Ted Bundy's alleged involvement in the murder of two coeds at the Jersey Shore on Memorial Day 1969.”

“Speaking to his biographer on the eve of his execution, Bundy is offered the chance of clemency in exchange for a confession to his involvement in the unsolved deaths. Before learning what transpired that weekend two decades earlier, journalist Richard Larsen, author of The Deliberate Stranger, is led on a psychological journey through the condemned murderer's past. From Bundy's own voice, Larsen learns the root causes motivating him to become America's most notorious serial killer. Beginning on Death Row at Florida State Penitentiary, then traveling back in time to Seattle, Philadelphia, New York City, and Ocean City, New Jersey, The Origins of Infamy vividly recreates a historical account of New Jersey's most famous cold case.”

Ocean City historian Fred Miller has said, "Barth's novel is a spellbinding reimagination of one of the more disturbing unsolved cold cases in local history. With hope, perhaps his work shall bring closure to this troubling mystery."
Drawing on details of the crime, Barth develops a plausible scenario as to what really happened.

But did Bundy do it?

The investigation never really tried to find out, as they never checked Bundy’s gas credit cards from when he was a student at Temple, or compared his fingerprints to the prints found on the car, or attended the Bund Conference at Quantico after he was executed to see if he could have been responsible for other crimes.

Now however, there is a new lead in the investigation, as a local insurance man has said that on the day before they were murdered the two girls were in a fender bender accident with two young men in a Volkswagen Van. The insurance man handled the claim and after the murders informed the New Jersey State Police about the incident, but was never contacted. Did that lead get lost in the shuffle of leads at the time of the murders?

With a new State Police investigator responsible for the case, both Bundy and the boys in the VW Van will probably be checked out, as well as other leads that failed to pan out before.

Two things are for certain however, whoever is responsible for the murders, committed other crimes, and may still be committing them, and the details make for stimulating reading on the beach this summer.

Bill Kelly can be reached at Billykelly3@yahoo.com

Bill Kelly One on One with Tom Doak

2009-06-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Interview with Tom Doak.

April 1, 2000

Bill Kelly: What sparked your interest in the game of golf, and when did you know that you wanted to be a golf course architect?

Tom Doak: I started playing golf when I was ten – my dad started taking us to his business conventions, which were often at golf resorts. Harbour Town, Pinehurst, and Pebble Beach were some of the first courses I saw, and they were so different than the little public courses near my home, that I became interested in why.

BK: You worked at St. Andrews. What did you learn there?

TD: I had a scholarship the year I graduated from Cornell to spend a year studying the golf courses in the British Isles, and spent the first two months of it in St. Andrews, caddying on the Old Course. I learned a ton there. The Old Course is the most interesting I’ve seen, probably because no one designed it.

You can’t just aim for the middle of the fairway – there’s a lot of short grass, but there are bunkers strewn all through it, so you have to learn the course and decide where it is best for you to aim. On some holes, your ideal spot will be totally different than your partner’s, who hits it 30 yards further.

BK: What is the basic difference between British Isle links courses and the basic American course?

TD: The main difference between British and American courses is attitude. British links are natural in origin, so their scruffiness is accepted as part of the game; if you get a bad bounce, you have to take it in stride. Most golf is played between friends or fellow club-members, in match play. Americans take their medal scores much more seriously – and, as a result, our golfers want their courses to be designed “fair” and maintained perfectly so they never get a bad break.

BK: When you came back you worked for Pete Dye; what did you learn then?

TD: I was lucky enough to hang around Pete Dye [note: not “Peter”; his actual name is Paul, but everyone calls him Pete] for three years after I got back from overseas, working on the construction of courses from Hilton Head to Palm Springs. Pete doesn’t just draw his courses and let someone else build them – he gets out there with the crew and redesigns them in the field. He spends a lot more time thinking about each contour and each bunker than most other architects do; and he can try our new ideas in the dirt, knowing that he can always soften them if he’s worried that they are too difficult. Most architects are afraid to take those sorts of chances, because they don’t know how their drawings will come out. That’s why Pete’s designs are more original, and more interesting.

BK: You seem to have some radical opinions on different aspects of the game. Could you comment briefly on what you think about a few of them?

TD: A lot of architects think I’m a radical, and yet Ben Crenshaw calls me a preservationist. Is it possible to be both?

I think it is, because golf architecture has changed so much over the past fifty years. It’s so competitive in the current boom, and it’s easy to move earth today, and the average client has so much ego tied up in his project, that it’s just very easy to get carried away with your design and bui9ld a course that’s too difficult and too expensive for the average golfer.

The old courses are much simpler – and they used what the land offered. That doesn’t mean they were easy; the great architects build challenge into their designs, because a course has to be challenging to be interesting.

But they did it by building three feet of slope into a green, not by building a three-acre lake in front of it.

BK: What makes a great course great?

TD: Great courses have a great variety of holes, a beautiful setting, and a style of their own.

BK: What about the restoration efforts on historic courses?

TD: I believe that the best courses of the master designers should be preserved; but I found out when traveling around this country that few are left intact. We have participated in the restoration of a few prominent courses, like Garden City and Pasatiempo. But restoration is a tricky thing – it’s still up to the present-day architect to determine what needs to be done, and different designers can produce very different results. I’m afraid the main reason for its current popularity is that it’s easier to sell the membershi8p on “restoration” than it would be to “change” their beloved old course.

BK: What is the role of the greens committee?

TD: The role of the greens committee should be to respond to the membership’s concerns about the course and to educate the membership on the design and maintenance of the course. Too many greens committee have it backwards – they’re so concerned with leaving the course better than they found it, that they try to tell the superintendent (and sometimes the architect) how to do their jobs.

BK: What is the biggest threat to the game of golf today?

TD: I think the biggest threat to the game is the rising cost of play. Of all the new courses being built, probably 90% are intended to be “high-end” courses with green fees between $50 and $100. That’s pretty steep for a beginning golfer, and it’s out of the question for juniors. When I started playing, it cost $1 per round for me to play our hometown municipal course, and $40 to play Pebble Beach. Most golf courses are too busy trying to make every last dollar to worry about who’s going to pay them ten years from now.

BK: Can groundskeepers succeed without using excessive chemicals?

TD: The best golf course superintendents keep their grass healthy. If they know how to do that, they won’t need much in the way of chemical input. The best managers will become ever more valuable as environmental regulations limit their alternatives.

BK: You call your company “Renaissance Golf.” Is there a real golf renaissance going on and what’s it all about, more money, or a return to the roots of the game?

TD: When I named the company ten years ago, I didn’t expect the boom that was coming. The name was more of a play on the “Renaissance man” ideal that we were involved in every aspect of the business, from designing new courses to restoring old ones, from project management to running the bulldozers, and even to golf writing and photography. There has unquestionably been a great boom of interest in golf course architecture in the past few years, and not just because there are so many Tour pros moonlighting as designers. There are a lot of talented people out there building courses in all sorts of different styles. If I’ve accomplished anything, it’s been to remind people that great courses are first and foremost a product of a great site. The most influential courses of this decade – Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes – weren’t built because of a market study; they were built because the land was ideally suited to golf, just like the original links of Scotland were.

BK: How did you hook up with the Atlantic City Country Club?

TD: We were one of several firms interviewed by Hilton after they acquired the course. I think we were on their list because of our reputation for restoration work in the New York area; but I think we got the job because we listened to what they wanted, and we understood that this was more than a simple restoration.

They wanted to make the course more secluded from the homes around it, but open up with the views to the marsh and to Atlantic City. They wanted to eliminate the road crossings in the old layout as much as possible, for privacy and safety concerns. And they wanted to preserve the history of a 100 year-old golf course, but do it while rebuilding the course from the ground up. Every sprinkler head, every bunker, pretty much every blade of grass out there today is new, in total. Atlantic City cost more to rebuild than any of the ten brand-new courses I’ve designed.

The challenge was in treading the line between restoration and new design. This project had elements of both, and the client wanted us to keep a perfect balance.

TD: The new course isn’t supposed to be a “Tom Doak design.” It borrows a lot of its style from past incarnations – from pictures taken in the 1920’s, when there was a lot of open sand between the holes down by the shore. Several great architects had worked there before us, from Willie Park to William Flynn, and we tried to preserve something from each of them – from Park’s small elevated greens to Flynn’s “white faced” bunkering.

BK: What attributes of the course were kept the same, preserved and/or restored?

TD: The general flow of the routing is the same, although many of the greens have been repositioned slightly. Four of the greens were rebuilt with the same contours as before – the third, eighth, and eleventh [which used to be #12]. And, as I described above, the seaside and “classic” character of the course has been preserved and expanded upon.

BK: What major changes were made and why?

TD: There are a host of changes: An irrigation pond had to be added on high ground, to prevent saltwater intrusion; it’s right up by the pro shop, at the foot of the first tee.

The second green was relocated north of the road, shortening that hole considerably, and the fifth hole was lengthened by moving the green back to where the old second green sat.

A large expanse of sand was restored between the third and fifth fairways.

The fourth green was relocated to bring the marsh into play on the right.

The sixth green was moved back about 40 yards, creating a very long three-shot par 5.

The seventh green was moved forward to make a very long par 4 into the wind.

The old eleventh hole was eliminated, and the holes on either side of it were lengthened. The tenth now plays as a dogleg par 5, with the green on the far side of the pond which used to be behind it; and the new eleventh is a very long par-4, with dramatic cross-bunkers about 100 yards short of the green.

The par-3 12th [formerly the 13th] green was elevated and the left side cut away, creating the deepest bunker on the course.

The par-5 13th was lengthened by moving the green back to the left.

The 14th and 15th are now new holes, built around a new section of tidal marsh which we created. This was our most significant change; previously, the 15th and 16th were both medium-short par-4s playing downwind, and neither made very dramatic use of the marsh. The new 14th starts from a tee out on a dramatic point in the marsh, heading to a narrow fairway which dog legs to the right – long hitters can try to cut the corner and drive the green, but it’s a big carry. Then, the par-3 15th plays back into the wind to a green on another point, with marsh around three sides.

The 16th and 17th holes are similar in length to what was there originally, but the greens on both holes are now guarded by large sand-dune features, to further the seaside character of the course.

The 18th has been reduced to a 400 yard par-4 by shifting the fairway to the right and shortening the tee. Before, most golfers were playing a half-blind lay-up second shot; now they’ll need a good drive to get to the corner, and then they’ll face a more challenging approach to the green with its great setting in front of the old clubhouse.

BK: What kinds of grass were used, and why?

TD: Tees, greens and fairways are all bentgrass; the mowed rough is bluegrass, but there are also several large areas of un-mowed fescue rough in the open spaces. A new bentgrass called A-4 has been used for the greens – it’s much finer and more dense than any variety I’ve seen before, and it was selected in hopes of keeping poa anue in check. They’ll have to keep the greens fast, or this grass will get too thick.

BK: What’s the new length, overall, and what’s the par for the course?

TD: You’ll have to check with the pro shop for the exact length; I think it’s slightly shorter than before, actually. But par has been reduced from 72 to 70 so it will play harder for low handicappers.

BK: What’s the new signature hole?

TD: The third hole was Leo Frazer’s favorite, and it might still be, since we preserved it intact. The short par-4 14th is the biggest change – the tee on the point is so dramatic, nobody would believe that it had always been there, overgrown with trees. It’s a gambler’s hole – you could make an eagle if you drive the green, but you could also lose a sleeve of balls trying to make the carry. But I think our biggest success is that we’ve made several holes more dramatic, so that different people will have different favorites. The seventh and eleventh are killer par-4’s: in the southeasterly summer winds, they’ll be two of the hardest holes in New Jersey. At the other end of the spectrum, the fourth, twelfth and seventeenth are all within the average golfer’s reach, but when you miss one of those greens, it’s going to get interesting.

BK: What are the short holes and the ones most likely for someone to ace?

TD: The fourth and twelfth are both under 150 yards – I think the fourth is a bit shoorter. But both are downwind, so you may need some help from the flagstick if you’re going to make a one. You might have more luck at the 17th – the cup will usually be hidden by the dune on the right, so your caddie might kick one in for you.

BK: Was the course designed for tournament play?

TD: We really didn’t think much about tournament play in the changes we made to the design. Obviously, it has been a popular sight for the U.S. Women’s Open, and the new course would be more challenging than ever for them – but I don’t know if that’s in the cards. The one drawback is the lack of acreage – for galleries, corporate tents, parking, and the circus that accompanies major tournaments nowadays.

BK: What are the prospects of encouraging players to walk the course and maintain the caddy tradition?

TD: Because play will be limited, we didn’t build any cart paths for the new course. Players will be able to take a caddie, or drive on the fairways if they choose a cart. The caddy experience is exactly the blend of personal service and golfing tradition which the new course is supposed to represent.

BK: In your book “Anatomy of a Golf Course” you mention “grow in” time as a factor. How long will the “grow in” time be at ACCC, and when do you anticipate the course being open for play?

TD: The eighteenth fairway was the last to be planted, just after Labor Day of 1999; but the last three or four holes were set back a bit by washouts at the start of the hurricane season. They’ll sill need a bit of growth this spring to mature. I’d be happy to play the course as it stands today, but the standard today is so much higher – everybody wants it to be perfect before they open the door. I suspect that will be sometime in May (2000).

BK: What were some of the special problems presented by the ACCC job and how did you overcome them?

TD: From a design standpoint, the challenge was keeping that balance between restoration and new design. Fortunately, my “signature” as a designer isn’t a particular style of bunkering or greens, but in making the most of the land with whatever style suites it best; so I inherited a lot from the old course, instead of butting heads with it.

From a logistical standpoint, it was just difficult to do that much construction on a tight acreage. The only place to stockpile topsoil or park equipment was on another fairway; it got to be like a big shell game. And the irrigation system is the most complicated I’ve ever seen, so after it was trenched in, we pretty much had to shape all the bunkers and greens over again to restore what we intended.

BK: What is the future of the clubhouse?

TD: As I understand it, the design of the clubhouse will be thoughtfully preserved; like the golf course, it will be refitted completely, but from the outside, it’s supposed to look the same as it does today.

BK: You are pretty young, and golf is pretty old. What do you see is the near future of the game, what role to you want to play, and what’s the future of the ACCC?

TD: As a student of architecture, I’ve seen first-hand how much the game has changed over the past 100 years, by seeing how courses have evolved. Every new generation of golf courses has been longer and harder than the last, to preserve the challenge of the game in response to improvements in equipment, in course conditioning, and in the general level of play.

The problem is, all of our best old courses are on limited acreage, and they were lengthened as much as they could be a generation ago. So we have to de-emphasize length as the benchmark of design, and re-emphasize all the other attributes of classic design – bunkers which force the golfer to choose his line of play carefully, greens with enough character to make the short game as challenging as the long game, and maximizing the natural beauty and vistas of each property.

We also have to recognize that the best players in the world will continue to improve, and if we don’t want the great courses of the past to become obsolete for championship play, sooner or later we will have to change the specifications of the golf ball to counteract all the other advances in golfing equipment.

Thirty or forty years down the road, Atlantic City Country Club will need work again, to upgrade its irrigation system if nothing else. But if my design work and my writings have made an impact, I hope that this course and many others like it will still be appreciated for what they are, a test of golf that is far more than a long-driving contest.

Interview with Gay Talese

2009-06-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

Gay Talese Interview – August 1986

Thy Neighbor’s Life
From Books to Blue Laws
Gay Talese Explains It All

By William Kelly

Gay Talese is right at home in Ocean City. He’s just finished his last set of tennis for the day and now – to relax awhile – sits back in a white wicker coach on the big, breezy porch of his traditional Jersey Shore, cedar-shingle house.

Talese is the author of a half-dozen books, the last three of which were best sellers. He’s considered by some to be the archetypical “new journalist,” along with writers Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.

Born in Ocean City, New Jersey in 1932, Talese started writing sports stories while still in high school. He later attended the University of Alabama, which he graduated from in 1953, then served two years in the Army before getting a job as a reporter for the New York Times.

He threw off the veil of objectivity journalism demanded in the Kingdom and the Power, exposed the real-life adventures of a Mafia don before The Godfather, and went on to study the sexual habits of Americans long before President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Pornography made the subject newsworthy.

Now, after spending four years researching his family roots from Ocean City to Italy, Talese recently retired to his study once again for the arduous task of writing a new book. The first installment of this latest effort appears in the August issue of Esquire magazine.

After working at the typewriter every morning, Talese plays tennis for a few hours, then works some more. His wife, Nan, is a publisher in Boston. His daughters live out of town – one in New York City and the other in Paris. So, the writer has the house to himself a lot these days.

Dressed neat but casual, Talese takes time from his busy schedule to answer some questions about his life, Ocean City, the blue laws, the art of writing, his new book and why he’s returned home to write it.

William Kelly: The first installment of your new book appears in Esquire this month. Is it finished or is it still a work in progress?

Gay Talese: It’s still in progress, and will be in progress for probably another six months. But, the other installments will be published in Esquire’s next few issues.

WK: Does it have a title?

GT: No, the title of a book is the last thing you do. It’s the easy part.

WK: You have been researching and writing the book for the past four or five years?

GT: Yes. That’s not a long time for me to be working on a book. “They Neighbor’s Wife” took eight years. “The Kingdom and the Power,” my first book of any length took five years. “Honor Thy Father” took four. I do a lot of research, and the writing part is very difficult.

WK: In several of your books you sign off with the dateline, “Ocean City.” Do you do a lot of writing here?

GT: I think I’ve written parts of every book I’ve ever done right here in this very house. The first book I did on New York was done here. I think I usually start books here in the spring.

WK: You begin the first installment of the new book in Ocean City. Why?

GT: I ended my last boo, “They Neighbor’s Wife,” at the Mays Landing nudist camp with people on a boat from Ocean City looking through binoculars at the nudist camp, where I am. This book begins with me near the water, as a child, and picks up pretty much where the last one left off, except it’s more personal than the others, exploring the world that produced me, rather than the world outside of me. It’s something different. But every one of the books I’ve done is connected; every one of the books has something to do with me personally.

The New York Times book is about the only time I’ve had a job – it’s the story of my employment there. “Honor They Father” is the study of an archetypical American embarrassment, the Mafia. Italian-Americans from Mario Cuomo to Frank Sinatra to Lee Iacocca are, and have always been, particularly sensitive to that.

“Thy Neighbor’s Wife” explores the very rigid morality of my past – my family past, my Ocean City past, and exploring that which I am curious about.

WK: Did you get a lot of flack from your neighbors about that book?

GT: I got a lot of flack from every book, especially the last three best sellers in a row. Every one of them has caused me a lot of flack.

“The Kingdom and the Power,” for example, was attacked for exposing the New York Times, for exposing journalism as not being objective, but very subjective, very personal. Anyone who is an editor, publisher or reporter brings his own personal viewpoints into the way he reports, edits, what he chooses to report, what he chooses not to publish, how much space they give to something. That’s what “The Kingdom and the Power” is all about. It was very controversial when it came out but, of course, it was reviewed by newspapers.

My next book, “Honor Thy Father,” was attacked because they said I was glamorizing gangsters, getting too close to the Mafia. That’s a fair criticism because I was close to them. I was living with them.

“Thy Neighbor’s Wife” was criticized on many levels – for being scandalous and for humanizing merchants of sexual freedom, as in books, films and magazines.

But, what I like to do in my work, and I’m doing it now, too, is to explore what I think is relevant but hasn’t been explored fully before. I think of myself as a sort of social historian who deals with the history that historians and society have ignored or overlooked. I deal with people who are in the shadows, who are obscure.

There’s a scene in what I am working on now, during World War II, of myself helping my father in a tailor shop, when clothes hangers were impossible to get because of rationing. So now, I’m doing a history of clothes hangers. It’ll only be about a sentence in the book, maybe two, but I’m curious to find out who invented the first coat hanger. You won’t find it in the encyclopedia, and I’ve been calling all over the country to find out. And what’s it worth? But, it’s nice to try to get it right.

WK: Wouldn’t it be safer to write fiction?

GT: It would be safer to write fiction, in a way, but it wouldn’t be so adventuresome. You can get close to the truth – not that anybody can get to the truth. You see whatever your eyes allow you to see, and sometimes we have flawed vision. But, I’ve always been interested in exploring the world of literary realism. I think the reality of people’s lives is astounding, it’s fantastic, it’s unbelievable. I try to get close enough to people’s lives to describe them with certain fullness. It sounds like fiction, but it isn’t.

WK: You read a lot of fiction though?

GT: Yes. My wife, Nan, is publishing the book I’m reading right now, “The Prince of Tides,” by Pat Conroy.

WK: Is that to pick up on certain techniques you can use?

GT: No, it’s not the techniques, it’s just good writing. I read fiction just to get into the mood of the writing, because the best writing is done by fiction writers. They don’t let facts get into the way. What I try to do is to write well, and not let the facts get in the way, either. But I also want to be right, and accurate. That’s why I go through such detail.

WK: You read “Roots” by Alex Haley before starting your current research?

GT: “Roots” was a great idea, and the country was swept up by it. But my taste runs more along the lines of John Updike’s books. They have a great sense of history in the period after World War II – the time in which I’m alive.

WK: Was Ocean City a dreary place in the winter, when you lived here fulltime?

GT: Living in Ocean City was dreary, particularly in the past. Now, it’s not as lonely, there’s more people here.

I’m living in both Ocean City and New York now, but I’m not only here in the summertime. I come here in the winter a lot. I’m not a gambler, but I’m not one to say casinos did nothing for Atlantic City.

One thing they did is, they’ve made it easier to get from Ocean City to New York. It’s only 48 minutes by helicopter, so now I go back and forth a lot. I like to come down here in the winter. It’s dreary in a way, but it contrasts beautifully with New York, and what the city represents.

I have a big house in the center of New York City, surrounded by glamour, glitz, tension, terrorism, and the symbols of opulence – with limousines going around the block. It’s middle Manhattan. It’s very exciting to live in such an ambiance, but I find getting away from the place very beneficial.

Ocean City – its’ closer to what America is, right here. I think by keeping in touch with Ocean City, as I have throughout my life, and recognizing my roots here, I am more able to deal with the reality of other people’s lives. More so, than if I were just gauging my life, through New York, which doesn’t represent anything except New York. It’s a nice balance.

Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again” – he was half right. I’ve gone home again. I never left in a sense, though I’ve been all over the world.

WK: You’ve helped raise the level of money that a freelance writer can get for quality work. Do you feel you’ve brought it into the same realm as superstar athletes and network anchors?

GT: Well, you know writers, by and large, don’t make enough money considering the amount of difficulty there is in doing what they do.

I make a lot of money, that’s true enough, but I take an awful lot of time to do a book. Five or six years of my life somehow disappears almost every time.

WK: Are you working under any deadline pressure now?

GT: Oh, I have deadline pressure, but I think there’s a greater pressure, the pressure to do your work well. My last book was three or four years late.

WK: You were an average student who succeeded. What advice do you have for struggling students and journalists?

GT: I think it’s important for people who are struggling as students to realize whatever grade they are given in their schoolwork is not a continuing evaluation of their own worth as a person. I believe the educational system, in giving a grade to a student, is really giving grades for conformity.

Too often, an “A” student is one who conforms, memorizing a textbook or a lecture, and forgetting to incorporate the thought behind it into their own mind. A person who isn’t an excellent student could still be an explorer, a person who is learning what is not part of the curriculum. Who is growing, but not in the area limited to student activities.

As for writers, a writer has to be an explorer. You can’t teach writing in an English class because everyone has a different approach to writing. The only thing writers have in common is their curiosity. You can’t teach curiosity, people either are curious or they’re not. A writer must also have the patience to pursue the lives of other people.

WK: Let’s talk about Ocean City.

GT: I’m amazed at what’s going on. On the surface people think Ocean City is a quiet, plain, predictable community of people that do not have bizarre edges, but they do. Mayor Roy Gillian is a terrific character because he’s exposing the hypocrisy of the town.

Look at the drama on the boardwalk. You have the sense of the Sabbath, of going back to the Old Testament – Thou Shalt Not Do Certain Things On Sunday because it’s a day of rest, because God willed it.

One Sunday, I was on the boardwalk when the Ferris wheel lights were out, the ride was quiet, the electricity turned off. That’s the will of the administration, but Gillian is raising the issue of why are we closing this, and this, and this and not this and this. Why are the tennis courts closed? They’re not doing it now, but they closed them a couple of weeks ago.

I play tennis, and it certainly was not in my best interest to have them closed. On the one hand, I’m irritated, but on the other, I’m amused. I think it’s terrific Gillian is pointing fingers at the pious people around here.

Personally, I’m glad there is a blue law in this town. I don’t want bars. I don’t want to have “Joe’s Grill” across the street, and teenagers keeping me awake until five in the morning. I don’t mind them having bars in Somers Point, where they can stay up ‘till seven in the morning if they want to, and throw Molotov cocktails at someone else. Whatever they do over there is all right, but I don’t want to hear it in Ocean City.

Ever since the town was founded by the Lake Brothers, we in Ocean City have been re-examining the cravings of the flesh balanced against the will of the spirit.

WK: What else?

GT: I regret there’s not more restoration in Ocean City, so that it can capture the character Cape May has. Cape May is nice, but a little too far south or I’d spend more time there. Ocean City and Cape May were quite alike at one time, in the 1800s and early 1900s. I don’t know when Ocean City started to change while Cape May stayed pretty much the same as it was.

Ocean City has allowed some sloppy architecture to get mixed up with the Victorian qualities of the town. All across America we’ve seen the rise of the junk culture – shopping malls, where you can’t tell if you’re in San Jose, California or Tombstone, Arizona.

WK: Do you go to the beach?

GT: Infrequently. I go a few times a year, when my wife is down, and I want to read. I spend my days mostly on the tennis court, which is where I was today, where I was yesterday, and where I will be tomorrow.

WK: Do you set any particular time of the day to write?

GT: I work from about 8:30 a.m. ‘till about 1 o’clock, then I go back around 6 p.m. and work ‘till 8:30 p.m. I go out about 9, and get home around 12, even if I go out to dinner, whether I’m here or in New York. I drink wine, have a martini before dinner, but I don’t sit at the bar and listen to the piano player until 2 in the morning and get bombed. That’s not the way to get work done.

On the other hand, I’m not a rigid abstainer in any sense of the word. I love to eat and relax, but during the daytime, I don’t even have a beer for lunch. I usually smoke cigarettes when I’m working, and a cigar in the evening.

WK: As one who has dug into his roots, what have you found?

GT: Not just one thing. There is the recognition that you don’t have to take a boat to China. It’s very nice to have been to the Orient, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe these past few years. But, with that perspective, it’s nice to come back to a relatively tranquil town like Ocean City and find, easily, there is as much worth exploring here as there is in some of the great cities of the world.

Gay Talese Wins Polk Award

2009-03-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

New York (AP) Author Gay Talese, who influenced a generation of writers with books such as "Thy Neighbor's Wife" and "Honor Thy Father," was named the winner of a George Polk Award for career achievement.

Other winners of the 2008 Polk Awards include New York Times reporters Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger, who risked their lives exposing violence in Zimbabwe, and Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune, who reported on pre-emptive U.S. tactics in combating terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

The Polk Awards, presented by Long Island University, are considered among the top prizes in U.S. journalism. They were created in 1949 in honor of CBS reporter George W. Polk, who was killed while covering the Greek civil war, and will be awarded at an April 16 luncheon oin Manhattan. The awards will be announced today. (Tuesday, February 17, 2009).

More to come on this

Technology killing journalism, says American author

Nonfiction author Gay Talese (Mainichi)American author Gay Talese has gained prominence throughout his journalistic writing career, winning the George Polk Career Award in 2008. In a recent interview with the Mainichi, Talese highlighted the importance of on-the-street reporting and the threat to journalism posed by technology.

Talese, who became a full-time reporter for the New York Times in the 1950s, agrees that the newspaper industry is facing difficulties as the skills of journalists decline.

"It started with technology," he says. "Technology is killing journalism. Journalism is not supposed to be technology. Journalism is supposed to be like a foot soldier. You're supposed to do it yourself. You're supposed to walk and talk to people, see faces, and examine these people who are giving you information.

"The journalists now -- they don't go outside, they stay inside. They look at a laptop ... They are living behind the laptop. "

Talese, who says he has an active social life, going out to restaurants every night, avoids certain forms of technology in journalism himself, saying he never uses the Internet.

"I type on the computer. That's it. I don't have a cell phone, I don't e-mail."

He says big newspapers make the mistake of competing with television or the Internet, wanting to be the first.

"The technology is the real toxic agent right now," he says. "Newspapers had the world to themselves as long as they did a good job. When you sell a newspaper, it should be selling the truth as best you can find the truth. You should be selling the honor, you should be selling integrity. You are not supposed to be selling being the first."

Talese, 77, says the worst journalism in his life came after 2001 -- the year of the World Trade Center attacks.

"Look at the way the government corrupted the newspapers in the Iraq War ... Three-hundred-thousand troops died in this war. Why? Because the newspapers have been lying to the public, lying to the politicians, and politicians lied, the president lied. The vice president lied.

"The problem was the journalists failed in Washington to challenge the government and these unacknowledged sources, these private sources, in the paper every day, these lies. The worst journalism in my lifetime was after 2001."

Talese says he writes real stories, using real names.

"I never change names. I put everybody's name in the book, even if it's a sex book. Everybody has a real name. It's very difficult to do that. That's why it takes me so long to get the people to trust me, to allow me, to put a real name in a book."

Talese's writings include "The Bridge," a book published in the 1960s about the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. He says that in 2005 and 2006 when he went back to interview the men who worked on the bridge, they told him they weren't surprised about what happened to the World Trade Center.

"They told me the engineers were terrible. The design was terrible. They said if the two terrorist planes had hit the Empire State Building, the building wouldn't be knocked down. If those planes hit the Verrazono Bridge, the planes would break up and nothing would happen because it's so strong."

Looking back on recent politics, Talese criticizes the previous administration of George W. Bush for trying to force its way upon the world.

"It didn't listen to other people. It believed that it had a right to impose upon other people what the American government thought was the best for other people. Absolutely wrong," he says. "I say the United States is filled with human rights violations -- the whole government -- I say it should be up for war crimes. The President, the Vice President, Secretary of Defense (Donald) Rumsfeld, some of the members of Cabinet, who killed all those people in Iraq. We just think about 3,000 plus Americans. But there are triple that amount of Iraqis, ordinary people, killed."

But Talese holds hope that the United States will be able to prove itself to the world in the future.

"I'm thrilled that Barack Obama is the president. I am very hopeful that America will get the second chance to the world to prove its democracy, fair-minded ... I think there is hope." (Interviewed by Takayasu Ogura, New York Bureau, Mainichi Shimbun)

(Mainichi Japan) April 6, 2009

Lynn Spencer's Touching History

2008-10-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

Touching History – The Untold Story of the Drama that Unfolded in the Skies over America on 9/11 by Lynn Spencer (Free Press, 2008)

Lynn Spencer’s Touching History is an important new book about 9/11 for a number of reasons, the least of which is the speculation on the fate of United Airlines Flight 93, and whether the military could have prevented it from reaching a target in Washington D.C.

Spencer takes a different approach to the subject, writing from a pilot’s perspective and concentrating on the reactions to the hijackings, rather than the hijackings themselves. She also obtained the cooperation of both the military brass and the FAA administrators, and interviewed many of the participants in the day’s action, giving names, faces, dialog and a little character to what was previously only names in footnotes to the 9/11 Commission Report.

This book does not deal with Osama Bin Laden, al Quada, the FBI, NYFD, World Trade Center Seven, Iraq or Afghanistan, but concentrates entirely on a minute by minute review of what transpired on 9/11 as experienced by the air traffic controllers, military officers and pilots who were in the sky.

Beginning early in the morning with FAA administrator Ben Sliney arriving for his first day at work at the FAA Command Center, Herndon, Virginia, the story follows a chronological timeline that ends at 3:30 pm when the last of the inbound flights to the United States landed and the skies were clear except for the military.

You know this book is written by a women when the first footnote is a reference to Sliney’s “striking blue eyes,” but she is a serious pilot who knows the standard procedures, protocols and the lingo, and both the military and the FAA apparently cooperated with her as the book includes a foreword by the FAA’s Ben Sliney and an afterword by Larry Arnold, Maj. Gen. USAF, Retired.

From Sliney, meeting his new coworkers at FAA HQ, the situation shifts to the NEADS command base at Rome, New York, where they are beginning a ten day “test prepardness” exercise called Vigilant Guardian, an annual simulated exercise (SIMEX) that includes a hijacking.

Their day is set, even though they don’t know it, as others go about their daily routine, counter clerks checking the tickets of the terrorist, security checking their baggage, stewards seating them and serving them coffee, and pilots about to fly them to their mutual destination.

The terrorists already know what the military response will be, and the military defenses of the United States are not set up to stop them.

The air force chain of command for the defense of North America goes from the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), Peterson AFB, California, to CONAR, Continental Air Defense which is responsible for Alaska, Canada, Continental USA, and CONAR Sectors, are the Westeran Air Defense Sector (WADS), Southeast Air Defense Sector SEADS, and NEADS, the Northeast Air Defense Sector, where most of the action will take place that day.

At one time the 1st Air Force had 175 planes armed and ready on alert at all times, but on 9/11 there were 14 for the whole country, which Lynn Spencer explains was “due to post-cold war budget cuts,” as some (no names are mentioned) argued they were “unnecessary baby sitters.”

As 9/11 Commissioner and former Navy Sec. John Lehman pointed out during a 9/111 Commission public hearing, there were hundreds of military jets sitting on runways up and down the east coast of the United States on 9/11. How much does it cost to keep them fueled, armed and ready to fly?

Many, if not most of the former Cold War alert bases, like the 177 New Jersey Air National Guard, (and Andrews), were taken off that status (circa 1997) when their Air Sovereignty Alert Mission was changed, and there was a national realignment of air defenses throughout the United States. This was a strategic decision that would have profound consequences, and few seem interested in the details.

Of the hundreds of available fighter jets that were alluded to by Commissioner Lehman, on September 11, 2001 there were only 14 that were fueled, armed and ready on alert status in the whole country.

Those 14 alert jets were stationed at seven bases, two in NEADS territory – under Bob Marr’s jurisdiction – F-16s at Langley AFB Virginia and F-15s at Otis, ANG Cape Cod.

In his Afterword, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold writes: “… In some cases the facts published in this book, as told to her in interviews with airmen and airline pilots who were involved, differ markedly from the account in the 9/11 Commission Report, as well as from the depiction in the movie United 93. The corrections to the record are important, and I’m glad our people in the military were able to tell her their stories of the events of that tragic day. Lynn does not have a political agenda, as the 9/11 Commission clearly did….”

The 9/11 Commission did have a political agenda, as all commissions do by their very nature. It was purposely set up as a Bi-Partisan Commission, which means it was composed of half Democrats and half Republicans, who despite party differences, committed themselves to producing a unanimous report, which they did. One of the political agendas of the 9/11 Commission was to avoid assigning individual responsibility for what happened that day.

Neither the military nor the FAA cooperated fully with the Commission, as the military gave false and misleading information and the FAA administrators destroyed records and had to be subpoenaed to produce records they didn’t want released. The breakdown in communications between the FAA and the military on 9/11 cannot be adequately explained, and simple negligence is not an excuse.

The military blames the FAA for not telling them in time, the FAA says we called, you didn’t answer the phone.

But here both the FAA and the military come together behind Lynn Spencer, who has access to the air traffic controllers and pilots that had previously only been mentioned in the Commission reports and monographs. And she gets the two top hotshots to write the first and last word.

Maj. Gen. Arnold, who used to be a commander at the 177 NJANG before being promoted, wrote in the Afterward that: “The terrorist attack came without warning and in a way that we had not imagined. It was an asymmetric attack, by which the terrorists exploited the weaknesses within the United States’ air surveillance and air defense system; a system that was designed to look outward, away from our shores, to detect aircraft or missiles approaching our borders. Nonetheless, our outstanding weapons controllers at the Northeast Air Defense Sector and the pilots in the F-15s, F-16s, AWACs, and tanker aircraft quickly adapted to the situation. We believe we could have shot down the last of the hijacked aircraft, United 93, had it continued toward Washington, D.C., the 9/11 Commission said we could not have done so. After reading this book, you decide.”

Although Spencer, in a radio interview, said that there was more than one line of defense against United 93 reaching a target in Washington, the first was Billy Hutchison, a DC Air National Guard F-16 pilot who was in the air at the time of the hijackings, on a practice bombing mission.

Hutchison refueled in the air, then flew a vector west towards United 93, intending to shoot his tracer rounds into the planes engines to bring it down, or, if necessary, ram it, but it disappeared off the radar screen before he could reach it.

According to Spencer, there were other DC ANG F-16s, alert F-16s from Langley, and eventually, F-16s from Atlantic City’s 177th in line to defend DC from U93, had the passengers not brought the plane down and had it got past Billy Hutchison.

The idea that the military could have possibly defended Washington against the fourth hijacked plane seems to rankle the former 9/11 Commission, some of whom took exception to this possibility and wrote a scathing attack on Hutchison, calling him a braggart rather than a hero, and saying they have radar records that show Hutchison landed and refueled and didn’t take off again until a half hour after United 93 had crashed.

[See: NYT OpEd: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14farmer.html?n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Contributors ]

Resorting to records not yet available and seen by Lynn Spencer or any other independent reporter, the 9/11 Commission staffers call attention to their own records, which unlike the Warren Commission records, are still secret and will remain classified until the Bush administration is out of office. When the 9/11 Commission records are finally released, a lot of these conflicts will be settled. [See: Billy Hutch v. 9/11 Staffers – braggart or hero?]

While siding with the military on the issue of United 93 and the defense of Washington, Spencer does run down some rather embarrassing breakdowns in the chain of Command, Control and Communications that day. She details how standard operating procedures didn’t work, back channel communications over rode official circuits, and middle managers and officers at both the FAA and the military made decisions and gave orders they weren’t authorized to give, and they were obeyed.

As Spencer puts it, “The standard hijacking protocol calls for the air traffic facility that first becomes aware of the incident to pass the information up the FAA chain of command, from the facility to the Command Center to FAA headquarters. There, a hijack coordinator contacts the National Military Command Center, or NMCC, to officially request fighter assistance. Once the NMCC receives authorization from the secretary of defense, orders are transmitted down the military command chain, in this instance to NORAD, then CONR, and then to NEADS, to issue a scramble order, getting fighter jets in the air to intercept the hijacked plane and follow it. The nearest alert aircraft in this instance are at Otis Air National Guard base on Cape Cod.”

Getting to the heart of the matter, Spencer zooms in on some of the footnotes that I tried to run down, and she gets to the guys who were previously only known to me by their last names in the footnote to the 9/11 Commission Final Report as Bueno, Scoggins, et al.

Spencer takes us to Boston Center, which is actually in Nashau, New Hampshire, and introduces us to Dan Bueno, also going through the routine of a normal Tuesday morning at work as an FAA supervisor.

“Boston Center, Nashau, New Hampshire, 8:30 a.m. Back at Boston Center, supervisor Dan Bueno has just hung up with the FAA Command Center in Herndon. His next move is to request military assistance from the 102nd Fighter Wing at Otis ANGB on Cape Cod. He knows it’s not standard operating procedure to call the military directly – that’s suppose to be done by FAA headquarters – but he’s checked the FAA regulation manual, and in the back under section FAAO 7610.4J. Appendix 16, it states that fighters can be launched directly at FAA request, so he is going to make that happen. He may not be FAA headquarters, but he is FAA!”

“When he reaches tower control at Otis, though, the controller tells him to contact NEADS, under Bob Marr’s command. That’s the protocol.

While he is suppose to call the FAA Command Center to report the hijacking, he also calls the military, but the military can’t move until they hear from the FAA Command Center. Besides doing his job and notifying his superiors, Bueno also notifies the military at NEADS, Ottis and Atlantic City.

As Spencer reports, the breakdown in lines of communications, command and control ruled the day, yet back channel communications were successful to some degree, and many middle managers made the right calls in giving orders they were unauthorized to give, yet they were obeyed.

Excerpts from Touching History, with a special emphasis on the Atlantic City NJANG, here is the way Lynn Spencer describes some of the more significant incidents:

“Meanwhile, per Supervisor Dan Bueno’s instructions, Boston controller Joseph Cooper has gotten through to the NEADS facility in Upstate New York to request fighter assistance.”

“At 8:37, Tech Sgt. Jeremy Powell, who works on the Ops floor in support of the senior director in charge of the Weapons section, receives the phone call from the FAA’s Boston Center controller, Joseph Cooper.”

“ ‘Hey Huntress,’ Cooper says, using the NEADS call sign, ‘we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft heading toward New York, and we need you guys to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.”

“Is this real-world or exercise?” Powell asks.

“No, this is not an exercise, not a test,” Cooper responds urgently…..

“In the battle cab overlooking the Ops floor, Marr and his staff make note of a huddle of people gathering. Sergeant Powell, who took the call from Boston Center, is up on his feet mouthing something to Marr that Marr can’t make out. Since only the MCC has a hotline into the battle cab, Powell doesn’t have any other way of communicating directly with the commander. It’s not his job.”

. “….A direct call from a regional FAA facility is not the customary means for requesting military assistance with a hijacking…Proper request or not, Marr decides to act first and ask questions later. At 8:37 he directs Mission Crew Commander Nasypany to order two F-15 alert aircraft at Otis ANGB to battle stations. A battle stations order requires the pilots to suit up into their full flight gear and get into their jets. There, they’re ready to start their engines and taxi out should a scramble order follow.”

“Though the Otis tower controller had directed Dan Bueno from the FAA’s Boston Center to call NEADS, he decides he should also go ahead and alert the Otis Operations Center that a call from NEADS might be coming. If the information Bueno was giving about a hijacked flight was accurate, he figures a call will be coming from NEADS soon and a scramble order is likely. He knows the fighter pilots will appreciate the heads up.”

“MSgt. Mark Rose is on duty at the Operations desk when the phone rings. As the superintendent of aviation management, he is in charge of flight records and currency for the Wing’s pilots. He’s not sure what to make of the call.”

“…The director of operations for the fighter squadron, Lt. Col. Timothy “Duff” Duffy, is standing next to him, chatting with some pilots who are getting ready to depart for a routine training flight….”

“…He and Nasty are way ahead of the game, and Duff is glad he made the decision to suit up right after getting that call from the control tower. It has saved precious time….”

“NEADS, Rome, NY, 8:38 am. Although Bob Marr took the initiative and ordered the Otis alert aircraft to battle stations within a minute of learning about the hijacking, he does not have the authority to scramble fighters to intercept a hijacked airliner. That approval must come from the secretary of defense. He reports up the chain of command to his boss, Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, at Tyndall AFB in Florida, who will then seek the higher authorization through the rest of the chain of command…”

“At approximately 8:38, another call comes in from Boston Center, this time from controller Colin Scoggins, who has just arrived at work. A large, jolly man, with thick head of light brown wavy hair, a full mustache, and smiling brown eyes, Scoggin’s huge size hints at his 22 year as a power lifter, where his efforts earned him state records for the squat and bench presses. An experienced controller, he specializes in airspace, procedures, and military operations, and is currently working in Boston Center’s airspace section. He manages operating agreements between Boston Center and other air traffic control facilities, and also the military. His responsibilities include generating the military schedules that keep the FAA facilities in sync with military airspace requirements, and because of this, he has personal relationships with most military units in the region.”

“Since NEADS has no information for him, Scoggins hangs up fast. He doesn’t want to waste their time. A few minutes later, when he sees that the Otis fighters aren’t yet airborne, he calls back to suggest that they try to scramble Atlantic City. He knows that Atlantic City is no longer an alert facility, but he also knows that they launch F-16s for training flights every morning at nine. He figures that the pilots are probably already in their planes and ready to go. They’re unarmed, but they’re a lot closer to New York City than the Otis fighters on Cape Cod, and the military serves only a monitoring purpose in hijacking anyway. Unarmed fighters are better than no fighters, he thinks. The NEADS tech takes his advice and dials the only number he has for Atlantic City, the one they used to scramble Atlantic City’s F-16s before the unit was removed from the shrinking Air Defense Mission in 1997. The number connects him directly to the highly secured Command Post. But these days, the Command Post is more of a highly secured storage area, opened just once a month for drill weekends. The phone rings and rings.”

“CONR Headquarters, Florida/ NEADS, Rome, New York, 8:42 a.m. As CONR Commander General Arnold finishes us his teleconference, his assistant hands him the urgent message from Bob Marr. Given that a hijacking is part of the day’s simulated exercise, he asks the obvious question on the way to his office: ‘Is this part of the exercise?’ Even as NORAD’s commander for the continental United States, Arnold is not privy to everything concerning the exercise. The simex is meant to test commanders also, to make sure tht their war machine is operating as it should.”

“His assistant tells him it’s real world, and the thought occurs to Arnold that it’s been many years since NORAD has handled a hijacking. He’s relieved that he recently reviewed the protocol.”

….After talking to Marr…..“….This is a lot less information than Arnold would like, a call from Boston Center hardly constitutes the standard protocol to request military assistance. Such requests customarily come from FAA headquarters. But he knows that the protocol is based on assumptions: that the hijacked aircraft is readily identifiable and trackable and that there is time to coordinate an appropriate military response. Most important, perhaps, it assumes that the hijacking is taking the ‘traditional’ form.”

“But today they have nothing more than a call from an air traffic control facility. American 11 is not easily identifiable. It’s already in U.S. airspace, and the hijackers have made no demands. Especially disturbing is the lack of communications from the cockpit crew.”

“The bottom line is that one of his battle commanders has asked for assistance in getting the authorization he feels he needs. Arnold’s instincts tell him to act first and seek authorization later. He’ll give Marr what he’s asking for.”

“ ‘Go ahead and scramble and I’ll take care of the authorities,’ Arnold assures Marr. Such a command should be coming from the secretary of defense, but Arnold isn’t going to wait on that.”

“…Arnold hangs up and immediately puts through a call to the NORAD Command Post deep inside Cheyene Mountain in Colorado Springs. The operations commander, Major General Rick Findlay, concurs with Arnold’s assessment and decision to scramble the fighers.”

“ ‘I’ll call the Pentagon for the clearances,’ he promises Arnold. Rather than waiting on directives from the top, the commanders are working in reverse. The situation seems to require it.”

“At NEADS, Bob Marr is directing his mission crew commander, Kevin Nasypany, to issue the scramble order. Marr is taking decisive action, but he isn’t actually anticipating much military participation. He figures that by the time the fighters are airborne, the plane will have already landed at JFK or Newark…..”

“Otis Air National Guard Base, Cape Cod, 8:46 a.m. Lt. Col. Duff Duffy is strapping into his ejection seat when the scramble siren blares. He and Nasty Nash start their engines and taxi out of the hanger….”

“177th Fighter Wing. Atlantic City, New Jersey, 9:10 a.m. In Somers Point, New Jersey, Lt. Col. Brian Webster, who is the acting wing commander for the 177th Fighter Wing in Atlantic City because his higher-ups are out of town, was enjoying a lazy morning at home on his day off. Then his wife called to him while he was in the shower to let him know that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center.”

“He got out of the shower immediately and made a quick check of the television coverage. His full-time job is as a Boeing 767 captain for American Airlines, and he knew right away that only a big plane could cause such a large explosion. Then he saw United 175 make impact.”

“He grabbed his flight suit and dressed in a rush, and when his wife asked him why he had to go to the base, he called out simply, ‘That was a 767! That’s why I have to go to work!’”

“Now screeching out of his driveway, he grabs his cell phone and calls the base to instruct the SOF to hold the launch of a scheduled training mission, a routine practice bombing run over Fort Drum in Central New York.”

“ ‘Done that, sir!’ Lt. Col. James Haye, the SOF, answers. The F-16s, which had been taxiing out for takeoff, have already been brought back to the hanger. Haye had seen the coverage too, and had ordered the planes back right away.”

“ ‘Shut down the practice mission altogether and I’ll be at the base within five minutes,’ Webster barks before hanging up. Next he calls the Command Post and orders, ‘Raise the base’s threat protection level to Charlie!’”

“Military threat conditions range from ‘A’ (peacetime) to “D” (base lockdown and under attack). Thread condition “C,” or Charlie, is a wartime posture. It activates a whole slew of security measures to prepare for a possible attack. Webster knows that these ‘accidents’ have terrorism written all over them, and if America is at war he’s determined that Atlantic City is going to be ready to respond.”

“In the years since the base was pulled off the Air Sovereignty Alert Mission, the base’s highly secured Command Post had gradually reverted to a highly secured storage closet, used just once a month for duty weekends, when the troops would train. Personnel are now quickly bringing the Command Post to life, turning on all te lights and bringing the various computers and monitors online. When the loudspeakers announce the transition to Threat Con Charlie, the pace becomes frenzied.”

”Arriving at Operations a short time later, Webster finds one of his master sergeants busy calling up staff and ordering them to report to base. Nobody has told him to do so; nobody had to. The base is rapidly transitioning from a nonalert peacetime setting to full war status.”

“Webster instructs the Operations Support Flight commander to offload the practice missiles and munitions from the fighter jets and replace them with live ones. This will take some time, as the missiles are not stored near the aircraft. A convoy will have to transport them to the flight line, where the fighters are parked, with security escort as a safeguard.”

“‘Get me authenticators,’ he orders next, turning to Haye. He knows that if he is uploading missiles, he is going to need these. Each pilot is given an authenticator – a peace of paper with code in a series of letters – which is valid for only one 24-hour period. When a pilot receives an order to fire, he must follow a strict protocol. He asks for an authentication code, and the code is given must match the one on his authenticator. If they don’t match, he cannot legally comply. The highly classified authenticators are issued to all alert sites, as well as each controlling authority, in this case NEADS, by courier each month. Unfortunately, Atlantic City is no longer an alert site, so they don’t have any authenticators.”

“They’re going to have to get some – fast! Today Webster wants live missiles and he wants authenticators.”

“These orders at a nonalert fighter wing of the Air National Guard are unprecedented. Air National Guard jets don’t simply fly around the United States with live missiles. Guardsmen train to fight wars overseas, not fly armed combat over the United States. There aren’t rules of engagement for war at home, and certainly not for fighters that aren’t even part of the Air Defense Mission. Live missiles? Authenticators? The weapons chief is less than enthusiastic about these orders and he asks to have a word with the colonel.”

“‘Just do it!’ Webster responds, and turns abruptly to walk away. The matter is not up for discussion.”

“….After Garvey announces that United 93 is closing in on the capitol, the decision is made to evacuate the White House and institute COG for the first time in history. Mineta and other senior government officials are quickly relocated to more secure locations, remaining in contact via their cell phones in the interim.”

“….Unknown to NEADS, their lead F-16 pilot over Washington is being given the shoot-down authority directly from the Secret Service, bypassing the military chain of command….”

“…When the DCANG asserts its authority over the operation, however, it causes some tension. Dog, the SOF at the D.C. Guard, gets on the phone to the SOF of the 177th Fighter Wing in Atlantic City, Lt. Col. James Haye. ‘We’ve got airplanes running all over the place!” Dog Snaps. ‘We’ve got to coordinate here or someone is going to end up shooting someone down!’”

“Haye is not pleased with what he’s hearing. ‘Wait a minute,’ he objects, ‘no one should be shooting at anyone. This is getting way out of control!’”

“A spirited discussion follows. Dog repeatedly asks for the radio frequency that the Atlantic City jets are on and the details of their mission over the capitol. Being there in Washington, one of the Capital Guardians, he feels a natural inclination to take the lead in bringing order to the situation, but Heye is agitated. He is not even sure of all the answers to the questions Dog is asking, and it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to understand that the D.C. Guard pilots are operating under different rules of engagement than are his own fighters. Those rules of engagement – flying weapons-free- are not sitting too well with Haye. Firing weapons is a very serious matter, and the insinuation that ‘someone is going to get shot down’ unless something changes is simply unacceptable.”

“ ‘Listen, I have airplanes down there, and you have airplanes down there,’ Haye growls, ‘and nobody is talking on the same frequency! If you guys have a target, I strongly suggest that you be sure to make visual identification before shooting!’”

“Tensions between the D.C. Guard and Atlantic City will run strong for days to come….”

“…Finally, at 3:30, Sliney is relieved to be able to announce that the last of the flights inbound to the United States has landed. From his post, he watches a new, military-directed air traffic control system emerge under NORAD’s ESCAT order…...”

Trashing Grace

2008-01-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

BOOKS OF LOCAL INTEREST

TRASHING GRACE

True Grace – The Life and Times of an American Princess

– (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin, March, 2007, 307 pgs.) by Wendy Leigh.

We could have expected an indignent media blitz on the 25^{th anniversary of the death of Grace Kelly, but instead we got some refined retrospectives, among them - Life photographs by Howell Conant (Remembering Grace 25 Years Later), a book by Tommy Hilfinger - Grace Kelly – A Life in Pictures (Pavillion, 2007), and public shows in New York in conjunction with the Princess Grace Foundation Awards.}

The only real exception to these refined retrospectives is Wendy Leigh’s True Grace The Life and Times of an American Princess," which is described as "a haunting celebration of a life that ended far too soon, starring a heroine whose dramatic, star-crossed story is both tragic and inspiring."

While Grace Kelly’s life and times were certainly dramatic and star-crossed, tragic and inspiring, it’s a shame that this generation is left with such a lame portrait of America’s true princess. Grace Kelly is a featured character in a story that should be told like it is - a unique, incomparable and outrageous family dynasty; instead we get a tabloid tattler.

As the tie that binds the Kelly and Grimaldi families, Grace is the most visible of the lot, at least to Americans, and though she has been dead for twenty-five years now, her influence is still widely felt throughout the world, in film, fashion, dance and especially in Monaco itself, her adopted home.

Of course Grace Kelly’s real hometown is the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia and Ocean City, New Jersey, where she spent part of every summer of her life except her last one.

Though Leigh's book may be targeted to the gossop mongers of the world, there’s really very little she can tell us, other than who Grace slept with after she left the hood, and the dark side that you really have to look for, but neighbors and friends politely ignore. Although a dozen bios have already been written, it was surprisingly easy for Leigh to come up with 100 new sources, each with a little tidbit to paint her black.

Leigh even warns you in the preface to stop reading if you don’t want to know what would "preclude her from being nominated to sainthood."

Give us a break. Nobody’s ever suggested she was a saint, so Leigh, before sticking pins into her Grace Kelly doll, starts out insulting a non-existent constituency, as nobody believes she was a saint. Rather than write the real biography of Grace Kelly that’s still yet to be written, Leigh warns us going in that she’s writing with a Black Ink 40.

Having already made the best seller lists with some of her eleven books on Prince Charming – JFK, Jr. and The Secret Love Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, Leigh seems to focus on celebrities who will provide a ready market for whatever she writes. She comes from the sensationalist school of literature that professes that if it’s not shocking it’s not newsworthy.

So it’s not surprising that Grace Kelly’s local living relatives, Grace’s sister Lizanne LeVine and cousin John Lehman, would have nothing to do with Wendy Leigh.

Leigh did come poking around Ocean City though, and got Bob Harbough and Dick Boccelli to talk, as they certainly wanted Grace's story accurate, and didn’t know of the families’ brush off of sensationalist writers like Leigh.

Harbough’s Bob’s Grill, on the boardwalk at 14th street, was a popular place for all the kids to hang out, and Dick Boccelli dated Grace when they were teenagers. Boccelli, who went on to become a drummer with Bill Haley’s Original Comets, met Leigh at the Four Seasons in Philly and gave her a drive-by of Kelly’s East Falls home.

Harbough has a letter Grace wrote to Lizanne, which he offered to Leigh to use but it wasn’t because of copyright issues.

Leigh writes that, "Grace dated a succession of boys from Penn Charter – all jocks, none alienating her father in any way. She was winning his approval and having a good time in the bargain. Not surprisingly – given her background, her father, and her brother – she had a taste for sportsmen, and one of her more serious teen romances was with Dick Boccelli, starting guard for the West Chester State Teacher’s College, whom she met on the beach in Ocean City."

"Boccelli, who later became the drummer for Bill Haley and the Comets – had a six-month relationship with Grace after one of her ex-boyfriends introduced them with the words, ‘I just broke up with a great gal, and I’d like you to meet her.’"

"Grace really was a lovely girl. I used to play basketball with her brother, Kell. I took her out in my father’s Lincoln, so her father thought I had money,’ he said. ‘Grace knew I didn’t, but it didn’t matter to her. I took her to shows in Atlantic City, to Vaughan’s Comfort Club, where the waiters sang to us and we sang along. She had a great personality, a good sense of humor, was bright, sharp and fun to be with.’"

"’Grace didn’t have any pretensions. Although she grew up with a silver spoon, she wasn’t in the least bit spoiled. I could have fallen in love with her, but luckily I didn’t because just after my graduation I took her up to West Chester College and introduced her to a football player friend of mine, Joe Mustin. He was the most handsome man ever and could have been a movie star. He took over from me.’"

"Grace’s relationship with Joe Mustin also would be short-lived, not because she rejected him but because, as he puts it today, ‘She was too rich for my blood.’ Joe took her to a restaurant in Summers Point, Ocean City. ‘Then she said she had to go home and asked if I would like to go with her, so I did. When we got there, her father put me through the third degree, asking what I did and what my father did. I wasn’t welcome with open arms because I was clearly below Grace’s class. She didn’t think so, but her family obviously did. We dated a few more times, but I was out of her league, and after a few dates, I broke it off.’"

"Summers Point, Ocean City"?

If she gets one tidbit wrong, how accurate is the rest of the book?

Then Leigh gets into the obligatory connections between Grace, her father, John B. Kelly, and Skinny D’Amato, the 500 Club and the Atlantic City Race Track.

It’s a shame she didn’t know that Sinatra, said to be one of Grace’s later paramours, tried out for a job as a singing waiter at Vaughn Comforts in Somers Point, where she dated Boccelli, but Sinatra didn’t get the job because he couldn’t sing loud enough.

In the last chapter, "About the Book," Leigh writes, "During my research for the book, following in Grace’s footsteps, I traveled to Philadelphia, where I stayed at the Bellevue Stratford, and was delighted to celebrate the birthday of Grace’s still beautiful bridesmaid Maree Frisby Rambo with her. Richard Boccelli, who dated Grace when she was in her late teens, had tea with me at Philadelphia’s Four Seasons and drove me to Henry Avenue, where I was able to view the exterior of the Kelly home…..

In Ocean City, Bob and Sally Harbaugh were most hospitable and gave me a guided tour of Ocean City and showed me the letter Grace’s sister Lizanne wrote to Bob when she was with Grace in Hollywood during the making of High Noon, kindly granting me permission to quote the context in full in this book. However, copyright laws have precluded me from doing so."

Well it's a shame that we can't get a more clear picture of Grace Kelly, as she really was, instead of the trash that's been written, and maybe someday we will.

[For a portrait of Grace Kelly at the Jersey Shore read Bill Kelly’s The Princess Next Door, originally published in Atlantic City Magazine. ]

Beyond the Palace - Asbury Park Music Scene

2007-12-30T15:25:00.000-08:00

Beyond the Palace. By Gary Wien. (Trafford Publishing, 2006, 400 pages, $26). Asburymusic.com. “The Struggling City along the Jersey Shore music history unlike any other.” A Jersey guy and publisher of Backstreets Magazine writes about the vibrant Asbury Park music scene. And not just the Stone Pony and the Boss, but he also gets in hip scenes like the Upstage, Fastlane, Student Prince, Sunshine In, Jim’s, Harry’s Roadhouse, the Casino, the Palace, and the bands that played there - South Side, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, Jody Joseph & the Average Joes, John Eddie, the Bongos, David Sancious, Well of Soul, the Whirling Derrishes and Everlounge, Fran Smith, the Shakes, James Deeley & the Valiants, Dramarama, Red House and the T Birds Café & the Saint. Billy Hector, who you will hear from again, gets a whole chapter. With 70 classic pix by Debra L. Rothenberg.

Six Frigates - The Epic History of the Founding of the Navy

2007-12-30T15:24:00.002-08:00

Six Frigates – The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. By Ian W. Toll. (W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2006, 561 pages, $28 hardbound). Toll examines the early history of the Navy and the country, through six battleships ordered built by President Washington in 1794. Three of the first officers to be commissioned to man them were Charles Stewart, Richard Somers and Stephen Decatur, three midshipmen would become bodacious, swashbuckling pirate fighters who would set the tone and style for all special op warriors.

A Call to the Sea - Captain Charles Stewart

2007-12-30T15:24:00.001-08:00

A Call to the Sea – Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution. By Claude G. Berube and John A. Rodgaard (Potomac Books, Inc. DC, 2005, 299 pages, $35 hardbound). This highly regarded biography of Charles Stewart, the neglected musketeer of the Somers/Decatur/Stewart schoolmate triage who laid swath to the Pirates of the Barbary Coast, ay Matey, Arrrrgggggg!!!!

New Jersey Firsts

2007-12-30T15:23:00.002-08:00

New Jersey Firsts – The Famous, Infamous, and the Quirky of the Garden State. By Harry Armstrong and Tom Wilk. (Camino Books, Inc., Phila., 1999, 157 pages, $10.) These seasonsed newmen, Harry of Golden Times and Tom of Courier Post, lay it all out, detailing why New Jersey’s slogan should be just Jersey First. First tar pit, first toxic dump, first tourist trap, etc.

It Happened In New Jersey

2007-12-30T15:23:00.001-08:00

It Happened In New Jersey – Fascinating Stories that helped make New Jersey what it is today. By Fran Capo. (Twodot, Globe Pequot Press, Connecticut, 2004, 211 pages, $10). This New York comic plays it straight, thinks New Jersey has a characterizable identity, gets lost in North Jersey and even had to go out of state to get published.

Revolutionary War Trail

2007-12-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

Revolutionary War Trail – A Guide for Families and History Buffs. By Mark Di Ionno.

(Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2003, 224 pages, $20 paperbound). This day trip guide to New Jersey’s revolutionary past cuts through the crossroads of the war for independence, with directions, photos and descriptions of some of this region’s unique historical attributes like the Indian King Tavern, the Battle of Chestnut Neck and little known places of historical renown.

Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassinatoin of JFK

2007-12-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of JFK and the Conspiracy to Mislead History (JFK Lancer Pub., 2006, 620 pages, $35). By Larry Hancock. Someone did talk: Atlantic City Ducktown native John Martino, an electronics casino security specialist in Havana, did hard time as spy in Castro’s prisons before being feed to participate in anti-Castro operations. Consorting with his friends, like John Rosselli, allowed Martino to predict the time and place of the assignation of the President. Now Martino’s son Dr. Edward Martino says its time to come clean, and Larry Hancock’s book takes us closer to the truth about the JFK’s murder than ever before.

The Last Good Time - Skinny D'Amato & the 500 Club

2007-12-30T15:19:00.000-08:00

The Last Good Time – Skinny D’Amato, the Notorious 500 Club, and the Rise & Fall of Atlantic City. By Jonathan Van Meter (Three Rivers Press, NY, NY, 2003, 296 pages, $15, paperbound). JVM’s puts you in a booth at the Five in its prime, and uses the famed club as mirror of the city in decline in old Atlantic City. With photos.

Grace Kelly - A Life In Pictures By Tommy Hilfiger

2007-12-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

Grace Kelly – A Life In Pictures – With an Introduction By Tommy Hilfiger. (Pavillion Books, 2007). This coffee table book is full of pix of the former Ocean City Chatterbox waitress, Academy Award winning actress and iconic princess we remember as the girl next door. Fashion Tommy Hilfinger picked the cover shot from a 1954 Life Magazine, and the other photos capture Grace in her prime. With the 25^{th anniversary of her death, get ready for a media bliz on Grace Kelly.}

Winning Right - Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies by Ed Gillespie

2007-12-30T15:14:00.000-08:00

Winning Right – Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies – By Ed Gillespie (Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, NY, 2006; 287 pages, $26). The story and advice of a national Republican power player, hardball regular and political strategist who grew up in South Jersey (Browns Mills, Pemberton HS). Starting out parking cars in the Senate lot Gillespie worked his way up the political power chain as one of Karl Rove’s young protégés, to become the linchpin - Chairman of the Republican Party. Now a West Wing troubleshooter, special counsel to the President, Gillespie is still in the game, and his book lays out how to play the Conservative Republican way. [Read more…..]

Gay Talese's A Writers's Life Revisited

2007-12-30T09:47:00.000-08:00

Gay Talese's A Writer's Life Revisited.

It was hard to get a make on Gay Talese's A Writer’s Life (Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2006, 430 pages, $26 Random House Audio Books) when it first came out a few years ago, but now, in contemplative retrospect, it finds it literary niche.

(It must be) now available in paperback, and while the Chinese soccer heroine seemed a bit out of place a few years ago, the Bejing Olympics bring the topic back to the table, and in this perspective, it comes across much more appealing.

After exposing the Mafia in "Honor thy Father," mainstream media in "The Kingdom and the Power," American sexual morals in "Thy Neighbor's Wife" and his own family in "Unto the Sons," Ocean City’s native son purges his culinary soul in this literary moveable feast.

Talese didn't know if his next book should be a continuation of his reflection on his family history, the restaurant industry or Olympic soccer, about which he admits little interest. So this book is about all three. In searching for the spirit of a young Chinese soccer player, Talese is sidetracked into musing over fine wine and dinners at a succession of NYC restaurants, some of which occupied the same location.

Liu Ying is the young girl, a Chinese soccer player who misses a crucial overtime kick in a sudden death World Cup play off game, an event that Talese witnessed on TV while pondering his next assignment at his home in the Ocean City Gardens.

Talese was struck by the fact Liu Ying missed, and wondered what the repercussions would be at home, and what it was like to live and play soccer in China, questions that Talese carried back with him to his New York City apartment, and while dining out at various culinary establishments.

As Talese admits in this semi-tell-all auto-biography, his mother was all business when it came to the dress and tailor shop they operated on Asbury Avenue, where they lived upstairs but seldom ate at home. Unlike your traditional Italian kitchen with sauces on the stove all the time, Gay and his father often went out to eat at restaurants, which gave Gay a taste for such places.

Over the years, while he was dodging mobsters, reporting for the New York Times, stalking but failing to interview Frank Sinatra, hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner and driving around in his classic fire engine red TR-3 convertable, Talese was thinking about writing a book about the restaurant industry, and kept dubious notes in a special file, but never got around doing it. Well this is it, at least part of it is.

While he also spends time at "21," Elaines, Sardi's and other well known city joints, Talese seemed to always come back to 206 East 63rd Street. The Uptown scene must be located somewhat convenient to Talese's New York pad, because he patronized the place over a period of decades as it went through changes in ownership and styles - Le Premier, Gnolo, The Bisro Pascal, and giving him a place to hang his hat and draw on the evolution of one place.

Of course the owners of these semi-permenant places, Elaine Kaufman, Henri Soale, Sirio Maccioni, are all interesting people, as are the lesser known personalities who own and operate (not always the same person) seemingly popular restaurants, but evenually failed businesses.

While writing a book on the restaurant industry was a long-range project, he did take a six-figure advance for a follow up to his family history "Unto the Sons," but that was years overdue and he had taken up other interests, including the tragic Chinese soccer heroine Liu Ying. Talese wrote querries to some editors he thought would be interested in his perspective, but when there were no takers, he decided on a whim to fly to China and find out what became of Liu Ying.

Restaurants come and go, change names, motifs and menus, so what I want to know is what new restaurant now occupies the 206 E. 63rd St. where Talese often dined, and is it any good?

"Without contradictions, nothing would exist." - Mao

David Talbot's Brothers - The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

2007-12-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

David Talbot's Brothers - the Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Gallant John Barry

2007-12-27T11:33:00.000-08:00

Gallant John Barry by William Clark Bell (Macmillan, NY, 1938).

This was a very elusive book, but I finally got a copy from my usual source for rare publications, Bob Rufalo at Princeton Antique Books in Atlantic City. He found one on the internet that was going for $200 and so I traded him some copies of my 300 Years at the Point. What a deal.

The book, complete with dust jacket, is a fine bio that Macmillan should republish, given the continued interest in Barry, him having been the subject of a recent Congressional resolution honoring his birthday.

Clark provides a great rundown of Barry's career, and his exploits, not only on the high seas, but on land as an aide de camp to General Washington before the battle of Trenton, and in assisting in the roundup of the Salem cattle drive that helped feed the Revolutionary army at Valley Forge.

For me, this book is extremely important in detailing Barry's relationship to Richard Somers, as well as the other kids on the block - Decatur, Stewart and Russ. It positively seals their prior association before the Navy commissions, but doesn't answer the ultimate question of whether the Commodore was also John Barry the school master.

Clark establishes Barry's assocation with the Irish Hibernian society, and Joshua Humphries, the shipbuilder.

It also establishes the fact that while Barry married money, the estate was tied up in court, and that Barry's revolutionary war salary was slow in being paid, so he was in need of an independent salary that the school could have arranged. Since Barry was friends with the school's owner Bishop White and those Federalists pushing for a new Navy, perhaps it was set up for Barry to work part time at the school as a teacher of young men until the Congress approved the budget for the new Navy? This "Free Academy" was, after all, free because tuition and salaries were paid by donations from the pulpet and wealthy parishioners, some of whom were supporters of the new Navy.

Knowing Barry was number one on the list to be made an officer once the Navy was approved, they could have taken him on as a teacher until the USS United States was launched and made sea worthy.

That this would take years was a matter of politics and fate, as there was a rider in the Congressional approval of the new Navy, which cut off funds if a treaty was established with the Barbary Pirate states - whose activites in the Med provided the pretext for the Barbary War. When the treaty was established, the money from Congress was cut off, and not reestablished until the French started commandeering US ships. Our former friend continued hostilities with England after the US won independence, so the French started picking on us too. Forcing Congess to continue building the new frigates and finally establishing the Navy Department.

Once Captain John Barry's salary from the Navy began, the schoolmaster John Barry suddenly ceased receiving his pay and disapears.

In addition, Clark makes mention of a center city residence maintained by Barry, besides his home Strawberry Hill - three miles north of center city. This residence, between third and fourth streets, is exactly where the Free Academy was located, and where a small residence was maintained for John Barry, school master.

So if my thesis, that Captain John Barry served as a Philadelphia Academy school master after Revolution and leaving the maritime trade, and before he was commissioned the first flag officer and took command of the USS United States.

If so, then his being school master of Somers, Stewart, Decatur and Russ before he became their senior officer in the Navy, firmly esablishes Commodore John Barry, as others have unofficially refered to him as, "the father of the U.S. Navy."