My history of bvank robberies

I have been in two bank holdups in my life. In San Francisco, the guy in front of me in line was acting strangely. I remembered his face because he looked just like a co-worker, though it wasn’t him. Just after he got to the teller window, he put a wad of bills in his back pocket and the teller became hysterical.

 

Apparently, he gave her a threatening note. She couldn’t tell the police what happened. I was the only person who could identify him. A week or so later, an FBI agent came to my house and asked me to look at some pictures. When I selected the guy, the agent gave me a knowing look. “He has held up about 10 banks,” he said.

 

Is bank robbery really that easy?

 

In the other, I was cashing a paycheck at a bank in Arlington, when several masked men with guns came into the bank, one jumped over the door for the tellers and demanded money.

 

The teller in front of me again was hysterical. I wasn’t. Why? Because she could see the man behind me pointing a gun and I couldn’t. Also, there were no choices to be made.

 

What could I do? Run away? Confront the gunman? No. All I could do was stand and wait. And so I was not afraid. (Maybe it just hadn’t sunk in.) In fact, I even insisted on cashing my check before I talked to the police. I get more stressed over selecting an entrée at a restaurant or a route to take in the car.  I know: It doesn’t make sense.

 

 

 

Not quite a veteran

 

The Richmond organist asked those who had been in the military to stand when their service’s theme song was called. As a former Army reservist, I never stand when this happens. A veteran is considered anyone who served 180 days or more on active duty, which I did not.

 

But this time, at the reenactment of Patrick Henry’s famous speech, reservists were asked to stand as well. I got up reluctantly and found that only about five men, all of them old, stood in an audience of 150 to 200. Then there was one Marine, two from the Navy and no one from the Air Force or Coast Guard.

 

So was the organist scraping the bottom of the barreL? Maybe things have changed. With the draft dormant, the military doesn’t reach as deeply into society as it used to.

 

 I was never called up for active duty after my six months in 1964, but many reservists today are. In fact, it was amazing that I wasn’t pulled into the Army full time. In the next six years. The Vietnam war was raging, but I don’t believe most of my fellow reservists and I were in any shape for battle. I think we were mostly a paper force to deter the Communists.

 

Many two and three-year soldiers served abroad or in useful duties in this country. I never did. I had two months of basic training at Fort Gordon in Georgia and four months of advance training as a supply clerk at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. Then I was sent home for weekly meetings and yearly summer camps for 5 ½ years. (I got pretty impatient as a thriving journalist when I had to clean out stoves and wash pots on weekends.)

 

I was certainly not eligible for veterans’ benefits. I never saw the Army move so fast as when I got up to about 177 days on active duty. They rushed to get me out before the 180-day trigger for the Gi Bill and VA hospital eligibility took hold.

 

At the final physical exam, the doctor asked me, “With your asthma, how did you get into the Army anyway?”  Well, I probably could have gotten out of it, but I did not want to skirt my patriotic duty in that way. I might have felt differently a few years later. For one thing, the Vietnam jungle probably would have finished me off before any bullets did. The Florida Everglades were bad enough!

 

So maybe I was right in standing up at that ceremony, though I probably won’t do that again. I entered the military voluntarily, and I appreciate the recognition given me. But I still admire the people who risked their lives and whose routines were disrupted even more than mine

 

Happy Veterans Day!

 

 

Kennedy's Derth 60 Yeaes Ago

 

When I covered President Kennedy’s dedication of the Delaware Turnpike on Nov. 14, 1963, I had no idea he would give one of his last speeches.

 

Eight days later I was returning to the Delaware State News office from a lunch with the staff in Dover, when a shock went through the newsroom.

 

“President Kennedy has been shot,” shouted a lady who had been typing copy on a teletype machine. “I just heard it on the radio.!”

 

The Associated Press was slightly behind on the story, and our AP machine for small newspapers was a little slow. But we kept reading more, and news editor Joe Smyth, the publisher’s son, decided to put out a special edition, even though the daily run had already been delivered.

 

 He made the decisions, but I put the front page together (with help from linotype and other backroom operators).  I remember that the headline typesetter, who did everything by hand, came in and shouted: “We don’t have enough s’s for assassinated.” Smyth said to make a mirror image.  The newspaper carriers, working by car, took the new edition and made their second delivery of the day.

 

The next day I drove to Washington, just to be immersed in the whole scene. A gloomier day you will never find. Besides the rain, there were mourners in front of the White House, and deep grief across the city.

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It was on TV that I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, on Sunday. And at Smyth’s house I watched the sad Kennedy funeral procession the following Monday.

 

If a tragic assassination were to happen, I was convinced it would have happened at UC Berkeley, when Kennedy spoke on March 23, 1962. “Some crazy will try to take a shot at him,” the city editor of the Daily Californian student newspaper told me. She left me to run the office and coordinate coverage while the rest of the staff went to the stadium to cover the speech. When all was quiet, she told me to come and watch the speech too, and I did.

 

The assassination led to the discovery of an incredible gaffe by the Delaware State News publisher, Jack Smyth, uncovered by the Wilmington New Journal. The paper quoted an editorial Smyth had written critical of Kennedy’s spending just a few weeks before Kennedy’s death. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and his name is Jack Kennedy, and he should be shot literally before Christmas,” he wrote. In defense, he said he meant “figuratively,” but the damage was done.

 

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The weekend that shocked Washington

 Fifty yers ago, all of Washington was obsessed with the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s efforts to wiggle out of it. The Associated Press assembled a team just to cover this history-making event.

 

Though I was not part of that team, I was at the helm of the main Washington news desk on Oct. 20, 1973, when I plunged into this story. Margaret Gentry, the Justice Department reporter, told me: “The Attorney General just left the building. I have a hunch he is going to quit.”

 

Mike Sniffen and I called in staffers on overtime, preparing for a big story. And sure enough, Elliot Richardson and his assistant, William Ruckelshaus resigned, refusing Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was finally given the heave-ho by Solicitor General Robert Bork. The White House correspondenrt dictated the story to us.

 

This “Saturday Night Massacre” could not have happened at a worse time for Nixon. The popular show “All in the Family,” was interrupted by reporters running out of breath on the White House lawn to report this shocker on camera. The firing of Cox was a turning point in Nixon’s downfall.

 

The next day there was going to be so much reaction that the assistant bureau chief, Walter Mears, made me manage the desk again on Sunday, the day my beloved Oakland A’s were playing in the seventh game of the World Series on TV.

 

 To make up for it, Mears sold me his tickets to a Washington Redskins game (a real privilege when tickets were hard to come by). It was a great game, won by Washington, with injured quarterbacks Billy Kilmer and Sonny Jurgensen taking turns hobbling off and on the field to fill in for each other. (The A’s and the Redskins both won!)

 

The Washington news media, even the New York Times, felt blindsided by the Washington Post, which came up with scoop after scoop on the scandal. Almost in retaliation, the media piled on Nixon every chance it could get, even though it may have been merited. 

 

Somehow Watergate seems tame today compared to controversies erupting more recently. There was a complete consensus to get rid of Nixon, even in his own party. That wouldn’t happen now.

 

I still think he could have survived the mess if he had somehow destroyed the White House tapes, which were so incriminating.

 

Footnote: I just looked it up. Nearly three-quarters of the people in this country were not born yet when all of this happened. To them, it is just like me hearing about World War I or the Spanish-American War when I was growing up.

 

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Another October, 29 years later, is still stuck in my mind. That’s when two men, called the “D.C. Sniper,” killed most of their 17 victims in the Washington-Richmond corridor in 2002. Sara’s soccer games were called off, and people were frantic.

 

On a trip from South Boston, we stopped at a Wendy’s in Ashland for dinner one night. When I took the dog to relieve herself in the woods behind the restaurant, I thought it would be a great place for a sniper to hang out. I looked carefully before stepping in.

 

In the restaurant, a server warned, “There has been a sniper attack in Richmond. Be careful out there!” Actually, the snipers fired from a car and killed a patron at the Home Depot far away in Arlington, where we were headed.

 

Several weeks later, the sniper killed someone outside the Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, next door to the Wendy’s where we got the warning. The snipers had hung out in the same woods where I had taken the dog on our previous visit.

 

So scary! The snipers were finally caught at a rest stop in Maryland. One was executed and the other is  still in prison.

 

 

 

 

Chairman of the board? No thanks!

I have a lot of trouble managing people or serving on boards f directors. Am I the only one?

 

Maybe it started when the guys in my college fraternity elected me president because I was the oldest.

 

One of them threw a beer bottle onto the driveway of the Mormon church next door, just missing one of the worshipers. They called the police, who came to our door. Nobody would confess.

 

“If no one will admit it, we will just have to arrest your president,” the cop said. Nobody came forward. No law student was there to say, “That’s impossible.” But the officer left and I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

Or in the Army, when I began basic training as a squad leader. When the sergeant told me at lights-out that I had to find someone to clean stoves all night, I selected the closest guy, my bunk mate, lying above me, and then went to sleep.

 

When he came back the next morning, he was furious. Fortunately, I was relieved of the job in a week after getting a hairline fracture in my leg from marching. He got the job. I’ll give him credit: He never retaliated against a cripple.

 

I enjoy serving on some committees where we exchange ideas. But I made the mistake of joining boards of directors of four Washington area choruses at different times. The longest I could last was two years. A new person would always come and say “Hey, let’s try this!” And I didn’t want to say, “What a stupid idea! Been there, done that.”

 

When I complained about one board’s website, the executive director told me, “Websites don’t matter!” Really? I never heard that before.

 

On one board, I was the only person to question the new budget. Why doesn’t it compare the new figures to last year’s? “What? Oh, we never include that!”

 

Then there was the time I was an administrator for the Facebook pages of two choruses. One was raising money and I accidentally put the other chorus’s email address on it to make contributions. I eventually fixed it, but a manager of the contributing chorus was furious with me. Hmm, maybe she had a point.

 

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Sports: A few times I was in the Oakland Raiders’ press box to help the Associated Press sports reporter cover the game. I was sent to the visiting team’s locker room to get comments from the players.

 

Since the Raiders played so well in the late 1960s, I usually ended up talking to really big linemen who were miserable and angry after a terrible defeat. A common quote would be “They just scored more points than we did.” I was too afraid of these violent brutes to ask them anything more substantial.

 

Of course we never published such a quote, but I’ll bet it would get printed today. TheWashington Post is now focusing on locker room chatter to go beyond facts of the game, which presumably everyone saw on TV.

 

Typical was last Sunday after college games. “I’m just so happy that we won,” said a quote from one incisive article. “This is a huge moment for this team,” said another. Still more: “It’s a great feeling, like nothing I have ever felt before.”

 

Ah, I now have more knowledge and wisdom about this vital sport!

 

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Don’t miss “The Wizard of Oz” by the Halifax County Little Theatre Thursday through Sunday.  At the show last Sunday, I loved the good acting, music and scenery of this musical, based on the famous movie.

 

I could hear the actors clearly. The filmed graphics made you feel like you were in a real tornado. I can see why they scheduled the show at the high school. The Prizery stage couldn’t have held all of those munchkins!

 

Best actor award (drum roll) goes to: Toto, the dog. How can they get a real dog to behave like that? The credits after Toto’s name say Matilda LaMonica. Best supporting actor: The real live pony!