Hurricane Doria

Well, for starters, it was never really a hurricane. It was almost a hurricane, but not quite. Yet, in the 1971 Atlantic hurricane season, it was the costliest tropical storm of the year. Total damage in 2009 dollars was around eight hundred million bucks.

It was the season for political storms as well. In the summer of 1971 the Nixon Administration enacted wage and price controls. Earlier in the year, in April, 175,000 war protesters marched to the steps of the Capital. But worst of all, in the same month, the American table tennis team played in the People’s Republic of China. That would be red China. Godless Communist China.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre was beside himself.

As an employee at his hotel in Cape May, Jersey, I had a ring side seat to the ongoing political brouhahas of the day. Of course he raged about surrendering to communism. But the important thing about McIntyre was that he did more than just rage.

McIntyre did things.

To show his disapproval, McIntyre and a few hundred of the faithful marched on Washington with the intent of playing ping pong in front of the White House. The plan was for Reverend Dr. McIntyre to bat the ball around with a Taiwanese team thereby demonstrating his condemnation of the Nixon Administration pro-Red China foreign policy. When informed by the Capital police that a stationary protest was prohibited, McIntyre had the table slowly carried as they played ping pong. No mere regulation would stand in his way.

When it came to staging ridiculous protests, the man was indefatigable.

I don’t remember having an opinion about Nixon’s China policy. I had my own interests that summer and protesting the Nixon administration was not one of them.

Mostly, I loved just hanging out.

During my time off from washing dishes, I would walk into downtown Cape May and browse a bookstore I had discovered. It sold mostly paperbacks of the beach book variety. But it also sold other, less mainstream, fare. It was there where I picked up a copy of Charles Reich’s Greening of America.

I loved that book. It was the first time I read a political analysis of the United States. Reich first outlined the historical path of America, then detailed its many flaws, and finally provided an answer. In the nutshell, to cure America’s ills all one had to do was to don bell bottoms, smoke weed, and channel Bob Dylan. Of course it was a ridiculous proposition. But the seventies were a time for ridiculous propositions. One more wouldn’t hurt.

On August 27th, Doria was 200 miles off the coast of Daytona Beach, Florida. It gathered strength, and made landfall on the North Carolina coast on the 28th. By the 29th, it was in Virginia, and by the evening of the 29th it was pounding Cape May, New Jersey.

All during the day, preparations were being made at the hotel. I noticed a slight more hustle and bustle around the front desk. As the largest brick structure in city, it was the one place people could seek refuge. As the blankets, towels, food and others supplies were being gathered, I went about my day as if nothing unusual was happening. I was in the middle of a book, after all. I didn’t have time for all this hurricane stuff. And besides, in the whole scheme of things, how bad could it get?

It turns out, it was pretty damn bad.

I was in my eighth floor room the night the storm hit. Bob, a busboy from down the hall, burst into my room. “Are you watching this,” he cried.

“Watching what?”

“The storm, man, the storm! It’s unbelievable.” Bob ran to my window and opened it up. “Come over here and check it out.”

I put down my book and went to the window and looked out. Bob was right. It was unbelievable. The waves were nearly ten feet tall, and crashed over the sea wall. The streets of the town were flooded. Numerous cars had stalled in the water leaving the drivers stranded in a roiling sea of rising water.

“Look at that guy, look at that guy,” Bob screamed. A car drove down the street at high speed virtually hydroplaning across the water in a desperate attempt to reach the hotel. It didn’t make it. The car twisted and turned in the flooded street, stalled and began floating in the opposite direction.

“What an idiot,” Bob declared.

The wind was impressive. As I watched, branches, paper, and miscellaneous flotsam spiraled passed my eighth floor window, circled, and then came back around. I was like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.

“Look there, look there,” Bob yelled. Below, workers from the hotel had formed a human chain, reaching out to rescue people fleeing to the hotel. Not everyone made it to the other side without incident. More than one slipped and fell into the frothy water.

We both found this to be hilarious.

In self defense, I would like to point out two things. First, all humor is based on some form of human pain so, technically, there is something innately funny about seeing someone slipping and falling into the sea even if it is during a raging storm. And secondly, I was nineteen at the time and was both young and stupid. The defense rests.

I suppose we could have remained in my room laughing and screaming insults at the people below for the rest of the evening. But the fun and games came to an abrupt end when the door crashed open. Standing there, drenched from head to foot, was Brazilian John, my fellow dishwasher. He had a facial expression that could freeze water. Apparently he was one of the people in the human chain and had looked up to see us laughing at him.

John was not amused.

The only thing that saved us was the fact that Brazilian John was a devout Christian and he was restrained by the Ten Commandments. He looked at us with disgust.

Then he uttered two choice words that aptly fit the situation. Apparently Brazilian John's tenure as dishwasher had increased his vocabulary in colloquial English to include personal invectives. He tuned and left, slamming the door on the way out.

The next day there was mostly cleanup work at the hotel. Not only was there debris to remove, but the tourist season was ending. Some of the help had already left. It was time to rejoin reality.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

The Reverend Dr. McIntyre had just purchased the Holiday Inn in Cape Canaveral, Florida. He was starting a college. Tuition was low and admission requirements liberal.

Now THAT sounded interesting…

Next: Shelton College.

My Summer of 1971

During the summer of 1971 I worked at The Christian Admiral, a three hundred and thirty-three room hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. The owner and operator was the Reverend Dr. McIntyre, an old school anti-communist fire breather and a fundamentalist minister. He was considered by some to be the “Dean of the Radio Ministers,” a kind of politically bent Presbyterian Oral Roberts minus the faith healing rigmarole.

Of course all of this meant nothing to me. I was nineteen at the time and more interested in escaping home than right wing politics. By nature, I am conservative. I was brought up thinking that people should work for a living and equated welfare with failure. I was a child of the middle class and a holder and defender of the middle values of Middle America. The world seemed pretty much black and white

In other words, I was clueless. If the Reverend Dr. McIntyre was an anti-communist, well, that sounded pretty good to me.

The hotel closely resembled Rev. McIntyre’s anti-communist movement. Both had seen better days. Built at the turn of the century, The Christian Admiral was originally called the Hotel Cape May. It incorporated many of the architectural features that were used on the Titanic: winding staircases, Victorian facades, and skylights. And where the Titanic sank on it’s maiden voyage, the Hotel Cape May’s best day was the first day it opened. After that it was all bankruptcies and sheriff sales until finally the whole complex landed in McIntyre’s lap some six decades later like over-ripe fruit.

I worked that summer in the kitchen as a dishwasher. My job was to run glasses, plates and silverware through an antiquated dishwasher. I never really understood the inner workings of the contraption. There was a conveyor belt of some sort, a valve that controlled the steam, and a pressure gauge whose needle seemed to be perpetually in the red zone. Lacking any mechanical skill, I left the management of the equipment to my fellow worker, John.

John was from Brazil and only knew one word in English: his own name. Whenever he needed help, you would hear him shout “JOHN!” and there he would be, waving and gesticulating trying to make himself understood. I rarely knew what the hell he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The problem generally resolved itself. And if it didn’t no one seemed to care.

We worked all shifts, scraping, cleaning, stacking and occasionally breaking all manner of dishes, saucers, bowls and cups spending most of our workdays totally drenched. At the end of the day I stank like a concoction that was two parts ketchup and one part body odor.

The interesting thing about working in a hotel was that you could see everything from the inside out. There were connecting hallways to all points of the complex, hidden closets that stored all manner of goods, and elevators with access to floors that were not available to the “guests.”

Though technically the Admiral had seven floors, the kitchen help had rooms on the 8th floor. We each had our own room with a sink, but the bathroom and showers were communal.

My room looked like something out of a George Orwell novel. The mattress on the bed was lumpy, the sink facet dripped, paint peeled off the wall. The only personal fixture in my room was a Peter Max poster I taped above the bed. But from my window I could see the Atlantic Ocean, the boardwalk, and the summer cottages eight stories below. In the morning I would breathe in the salt air from the sea and feel as if I had a million dollars.

I had nothing except a few books and some clothes.
But in some ways, I had everything.

As a worker at the Christian Admiral I was required to attend at least one Bible meeting each week. There was always a vast array of speakers at these sessions. Strom Thurmond, I’m certain, spoke there. Most of the speeches and sermons were a combination of old time gospel along with a generous dose of patriotic nationalism. (There was never a loss of topics to expound on. After all, Nixon was president and Vietnam was raging. The world, as always, was a mess.)

Today I probably wouldn’t mind sitting through a good right-wing diatribe. If you are in the right state of mind, they can be fun in their own way. But in 1971 I was still a teenager. My nerves hadn’t settled yet and I needed to be on the move. I would walk in the front door, sign in, and then sneak out the backdoor.

The boardwalk awaited me.

It really wasn’t much of a boardwalk at all. It had a few places to buy hotdogs and pop and a gallery of pinball machines. Usually somebody had a radio playing the Beach Boys. Most evenings I ended up sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening sea breeze.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It was magic.

Then, sometime in the middle of August, Hurricane Doria began her destructive march up the east coast.

Next:
Hurricane Doria

How Grocery Stores Preserved Western Culture

I honestly enjoy shopping for groceries.

I usually shop off a list. True, my accuracy rate isn’t high; I bat around 80%. I’m more than willing to substitute generic chickpeas for garbanzo beans and iceberg lettuce for romaine. I’m also not too particular what kind of toothpaste I buy. I mean, really, how different can Aqua-Fresh be from the Giant Eagle brand?

But I draw the line at generic toilet paper.
With some products, quality matters.

I like looking at how items are displayed on the shelves. Most are heavily marketed and pleasing to the eye. I especially enjoy products with mascots such as Little Debbie, Uncle Ben, Tony the Tiger, Mr. Peanut, Captain Krunch, Charlie the Tuna, and Aunt Jemima. They seem like family. We should, however, have a moment of silence for the Frito Bandito. He last appeared on a package of corn chips in 1971 a few days before the Frito Bureau of Investigation deported him back to stereotypeville.

The price we pay for political correctness is large indeed.

Most of all I enjoy spying on my fellow shoppers despite this being a major breech in shopping etiquette. According to the unwritten rules of crowd behavior, we should all politely ignore each other. But how can you ignore those people who wagon train their carts, or the fastidious shoppers who fuss over each purchase while calling their significant others on their cell phones reporting the latest shopping outrage (‘But dear, they are all out of angel hair spaghetti!”)

Perhaps the most outlandish of all are the scooter people.

I have no idea when grocery stores started letting shoppers drive through the aisles, but it must be a recent phenomenon. The scooter people seemed to just appear one day. I can understand the store’s point of view; they were trying to impress the local community with their humanitarian efforts. Who can argue with attempts to assist the physically disabled?

It turns out that most of the shoppers who use the scooters are not physically disabled at all. They’re just too lazy to walk.

(And while I’m at it, I also have a problem with how the stores are organized. Why are eggs in the dairy department? They have nothing to do with milk or cows or cheese or yogurt or anything dairy. The only thing a hen has in common with a cow is that both live on a farm, and with big agri-business taking over the food industry even that is a question mark.)

My infatuation with grocery stores emerged from my shopping experiences as a kid. Our family shopped almost exclusively at the A&P. Kroger’s would do in a pinch, but my mom insisted that A&P products were more economical. What she did with the pennies we saved, no one knows.

I suspect not much.

(She also collected S & H Green stamps: she would paste them in books and then redeem them for cheap-o household fixtures such as a framed print or an end table lamp. I seem to remember a special store where we went to exchange the stamps for crap. Our house was littered with such items.)

In the late 50’s intense competition among grocery stores forced them to use more and more creative marketing techniques. Some stores sold plates. The idea was that you bought a dish each week, and after eight weeks or so you had a whole set. You couldn’t miss a week or you would miss a plate.

Most grocery stores did stuff like that. In 1960 our local A&P sold the Golden Book Encyclopedia.

I loved the Golden Book Encyclopedia. The sixteen volume set offered information on such diverse topics as aardvarks, parasites, quicksand, volcanoes, and, naturally, dinosaurs. Personally, you can have the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most of it is a pretentious bore. I would much rather read the profusely illustrated article “How Rubber is Made” in my Golden Books any day of the week.

Volume one of the Golden Book sold for two cents. Volume two sold for forty-nine cents. There after successive books cost a buck. Some families dropped out at that point (often capping their children’s knowledge at “Cereal,”) but not my family. Once started we hung in there till we completed the entire set, index included.

My Golden Books were a true treasure. My older brother Allen had his pup tent and pocket knives (which was a pretty scary development in itself.) My younger brother Lowell had his toy garage and his “binkie.” And I had my books o’knowledge. I carried them with me everywhere, cracking one open whenever I wanted to read about the Aztecs, the solar system, the US mint, or the presidency of Millard Fillmore.

I still have them with me today.

Over time grocery stores sold classical records, science books, atlases, American history and high school encyclopedias. I understand why grocery stores took it upon themselves to transmit western culture to its shoppers. It was a business move to insure customer loyalty. But I loved them for it just the same.

Now, in the post grocery store encyclopedia age, there are other channels for cultural information: CNN, Rush Limbaugh and wikipedia come to mind. The grocery store encyclopedia is dead.

And we are the worse for it.

Next
My Summer of 1971

Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past

Lately I’ve been thinking about the past and reworking it in my mind. In one pile are the things I should have done, but didn’t. In the other are the things I did do, but shouldn't have. I wonder if the piles somehow could switch places if things would be a different in my life.

Probably not.

In order to stop the first pile from becoming a bigger mountain of regret than it already is, I gave serious thought to what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. After a few moments of introspection I discovered that I always wanted to as travel.

So now I go places.

In 2005 I visited New York City for the first time. Forget anything you have ever heard about the place. I found the city complex, friendly, endlessly interesting and alive. I visited all the tourist traps: Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Ground Zero. At first it surprised me that Ground Zero was even considered a tourist attraction, but then perhaps that how Americans deal with tragedy- drop by, look around, buy a post card, move on.

(Come to think of it, other sites of man made disasters have become tourist stops: the Alamo, Gettysburg, and Jimmy Carter's birthplace come to mind.)

Most important of all, I visited The American Museum of Natural History. Founded by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., the museum is a gigantic brick structure adorned with columns and rows and rows of steps. Inside were a myriad of exhibits that included polar bears, insects, a blue whale and DINOSAURS.

I love dinosaurs.

(Some of the more traditional religions question the existence of the “thunder lizards.” Why, they ask, would God create such pointless and silly creatures? But then, He also created the platypus, parasitic wasps and conservative republicans. Not everything in this universe, it seems, has a point.)

The dinosaurs that live in my imagination inhabit a world conceived by Rudy Zallinger. A Siberian-born American (1919- 1995), he painted the famous mural THE AGE OF REPTILES that hangs in Yale’s Peabody Museum. Pieces and parts of the mural were used as illustrations for many of the dinosaur books I read as a kid. Life magazine in December 1952, in an article entitled The World We Live In, made liberal use of Zallinger’s paintings. These pictures made a lasting impression on me.

When I think about past, this is what it looks like.

To me, this mural is a surrealistic masterpiece. In the center stands the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, it’s body a walking contradiction of teeth, anger, and impossibly small arms. It’s both fearful and ridiculous.

The Natural History museum displayed the reassembled dinosaur bones in a great hall. All my favorites were there: the gentle Stegosaurus, the well armored and turtle-like Ankylosaurus, and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. I walked silently by, staring at each and taking as many photographs as I could.

I was slightly disappointed; they looked strangely domesticated frozen and nailed to the floor as they were. The dinosaurs that raged in my mind were massive, viscous, crawling, flying, fighting, living and dying. These skeletal displays were more like static x-rays that belonged in, well, a museum.

But that’s the nature of time and memory. The past is frozen in place, immutable and chiseled into the stone of long-ago. It can only be altered through the force of imagination.

Next: How Grocery Stores Preserved Western Civilization

Herb Alpert versus the Catholic Church

Right now I am sitting in my front room drinking coffee and listening to Grant Geissman’s album Say That. There’s only one track I really like and that’s the title piece. It’s overly produced, a bit too slick, and way too commercial, but that’s my taste. It’s in the same class of music as Sadao Watanabe’s Rendezvous and Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good.

Music tells you something about a person’s mind. The fact that my bother Lowell can sit for hours in his room listening to Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanian’s rendition of Inch Worm is proof of that.

A few years ago A&M Records released re-mastered CD’s of Herb Alpert’s early recordings from the 60’s including his Christmas album. The only album excluded was the much-maligned Volume Two, Alpert’s too blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of his first album, Lonely Bull. That’s too bad because I liked that album, too.

I’m a Herb Alpert fan from way back.

Here’s a bit of Alpert trivia; in the movie The Ten Commandments, Herb is the kid who is pounding the drums as the Jews exit Egypt. No joke.

In the spring of 1965 my family moved out of Akron and into the suburb of Majestik Township. From the moment I arrived I experienced the indescribable frisson of freedom.

You see, the section of Akron I moved from was a Catholic neighborhood. And I was not a Catholic. Therefore I stuck out like a sore heretic. All my friends, it seemed, were immersed in Catholic dogma; it was all Father this and Hail Mary that. Despite being a protestant, I soon was thoroughly indoctrinated with the details of the Holy Catholic Church.

As my friends saw things, I was going to hell. That was a given. The nature of hell, as my best friend Mike described it to me, resembled the comic book version of Dante’s Inferno: lots of fire, pain and nudity (much like Woodstock.) If it seemed unfair to be sentenced for all eternity for the crime of going to Methodist Sunday school, well, that’s just the way it was. Convert, or attend a Torquemada weenie roast as the weenie.

My foreordained damnation was bad enough, but worse were the religious barriers between my friends and me. An invisible theological wall separated us. Most of my friends were named after some famous Catholic. Mike was named for St. Michael and his idiot brother Peter was named after Christ’s brother. And me? Was there a St. Carl somewhere that I was unaware of? Nope. I was just plain old, protestant Carl. Named after nobody.

Our schools started at separate times, had different holidays, and in the winter it seemed that the parochial schools had a more lenient closing policy. That January as I trudged past Mike’s house through eight inches of newly fallen snow, I pictured him comfortably watching television, fiddling with his Rosary beads, perhaps lighting a votive candle or two while he awaiting his phone call from the Pope to be blessed.

It seemed that my damnation had already begun.

And then, that spring, we moved away. In Majestik Township no one gave a damn where you went to church. Or, incredibly, if you went to church at all. The theological concerns of my early years evaporated in an instant. I was free.

I may have been a stranger, but I was no longer in a strange land.

Every day during the summer of 1965 I would bike around my new neighborhood. I carried a small notebook and drew maps of the various streets. I made friends with every stray dog that would wander my way. I had stumbled out of hell and into a green suburban heaven.

And while I relished my new situation, Herb Alpert was on the radio playing his trumpet. His upbeat, accessible music was the perfect soundtrack for my life at the moment.

This explains why I never took part in the youth rebellion that was exploding around me. The generational battle over Vietnam, free speech, free love and the rest of it was a war over absolutes. I had had enough of that crap.

Life goes on and points of view change. I’m no longer thirteen. But whenever I hear the clear notes from Alpert’s trumpet, I recall that incredible summer of pure release.

I think I’ll put on Herb Alpert’s Christmas CD. After all, it's almost Labor Day.

Next:
Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past