By KATE SPINNER
kate.spinner@heraldtribune.com
PUNTA GORDA -- The noose that once hung beneath a Confederate flag on Scott Street is gone, after a brave neighbor convinced the property owner to take it down. Johnny Lloyd, an elderly black man, walked into the bar where Michael Whiteaker works and spent an hour there until his neighbor understood how the noose had the potential to divide the community and start a race war.
"Everybody in there wasn't on my side," Lloyd said. "Everybody in there was Southern boys."
Having known Whiteaker for 40 years, Lloyd knew how to reason with him. He mentioned the negative message the noose sent to the black children in the neighborhood and how it was drawing "look here's" to the street who responded in outrage.
"If somebody thinks that's a hate signal, then why not take it down?" Lloyd asked Whiteaker. Whiteaker could not be reached for comment. The noose had been dangling beneath a sun-bleached Confederate flag for about three years until a recent complaint ignited outrage in the community.
For many people in the United States, a noose, especially coupled with the Confederate flag, is a sign of intolerance toward blacks. Among black residents and leaders, the symbol brings back painful memories of lynchings and other violent acts driven by racism. But Lloyd said he believed Whiteaker's use of the noose was a misguided attempt to keep thieves off his property, rather than antagonize people of color.
"That rebel flag and that noose was meant for any crook. Any outlaw knows that he's weird, so don't be messing around his place," Lloyd said. For the same purpose, Lloyd said he sometimes cracked a bull whip, which sounds like a gun shot, "just to make sure somebody knows not to mess around over at my place."
As soon as Lloyd asked Whiteaker to get rid of the noose, he was met with resistance, he said. He said the first thing Whiteaker asked him was, "Who in the hell sent you?" When Lloyd told him Punta Gorda's city manager was behind the visit, he received further resistance.
Patrons at the bar grumbled about the city not having any control over Whiteaker's neighborhood. Whiteaker's home is just a few blocks away from the city limits, but people have been calling the city to complain about the noose, said City Manager Howard Kunik.
"We thought maybe taking a kind of low-key, reason type of approach might work, and it did," Kunik said. Lloyd, whose first job for the city was to take down the "colored" signs on the bathrooms at the Laishley Park fishing pier in 1972, said all it took was patience and "love" to get through to Whiteaker.
"I don't think he would have taken it down for too many other blacks but me," Lloyd said. "He's got a good heart, but he's a redneck."
Friday, October 19, 2007
Sunday, August 5, 2007
With Pasture as His Canvas, an Artist Turns a Purple Heart Green
By PETER APPLEBOME
HAMPTONBURGH, N.Y.
HAMPTONBURGH, N.Y.
First came a chance encounter at the antique store he and his wife run in Ellenville, 90 miles north of New York City, then a trip to the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in nearby Vails Gate, and along the way an idea he could not get out of his head.
So, almost inevitably, there was Roger Baker prowling around an immense, sweltering field of grass and clover here on Thursday in work boots, blue jeans, green plaid shirt and engineers cap, taking swigs from the jug of Leisure Time spring water and contemplating his latest adventure in field carving, lawn mower art and large-form Americana.
By Friday, it was pretty much done, an 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal, more than 1,000 feet long, each detail precise down to the seven 36-foot laurel leaves on each side of the three gold stars above the portrait of George Washington.
“Hi,” he said when he made his pitch to Orange County officials in June. “I’m Roger, and I mow the lawn.”
On one level, that’s pretty much it, though, even including the space aliens who carve mazes in Kansas wheat fields, he may be the greatest lawn mower who’s ever lived. On other levels, well, pick your own job description for a guy who carves titanic portraits, most of them visible just from the air, into summer fields, which within days give way to grass, bugs, dust, butterflies and nature’s heedless currents.
Beginning in 2000, Mr. Baker, now 53, has created field portraits ranging in size from 500,000 square feet to more than a million: the Statue of Liberty, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix. When last seen in these pages, he was contemplating his next act after a portrait of the late custom motorcycle builder, Larry Desmedt, known as Indian Larry.
His instincts this year were pulling him sax-ward — either John Coltrane or Boots Randolph — until May, when he met Bill Bacon, an official with the Military Order of the Purple Heart, who was passing through Ellenville. Mr. Bacon was planning events in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the Purple Heart medal.
The more they talked, the more the idea of a giant Purple Heart took hold. Mr. Baker visited the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, where the director, Anita Pidala, was instantly intrigued. He made a draw- ing, using as his model the Purple Heart of Art Livesey, 88, of Middletown, N.Y, who was a marine who fought on Iwo Jima in World War II.
And when he and Ms. Pidala found the site 16 miles from the Purple Heart Hall of Honor, off State Road 416, at the edge of Thomas Bull Memorial Park, he had to catch his breath: It was a gorgeous sloping field, thick grasses, even gentle strains of purple clover. “I thought,” he said, “that’s one of the nicest fields I’ve ever seen.”
And so, after getting permission from the county, which owns the park, he began work a week ago, walking the field with his Craftsman Hi-Wheel gas-powered push mower.
He did the detail himself, like the 260-foot-long portrait of Washington, while county workers on brushhogs did much of the large-scale mowing. He gets different colors and shades by changing the height of the blade. The piece will be unveiled today at an 11 a.m. ceremony.
EACH piece is different. The biggest new element in this one is that because of the slope of the land you can see it from the ground — “not perfect — it will look like a bad haircut — but it gives you a sense, and then I know from the air it will be something.”
Mr. Baker, a sculptor, artist, cartoonist and whatever comes his way, has no cellphone and no computer. He’s not political and he won’t make any money from the project. He did it because in a visceral way it hit him like a sudden burst of wind — his attempt, at once large and small, to make sense of and to honor the sacrifice people make in battle.
He said when he began, he looked, as usual, for reasons not to do this one. How about, he was asked hypothetically, the notion that many people won’t be able to think of it apart from the passions surrounding the war in Iraq?
“My thought processes never went there,” he said. “Not one time did that enter my mind. I look for things — aesthetic, personal, artistic, technical — that draw me. What I’m concerned with is my craft and doing this as if it’s the last time I’ll ever have a chance to.”
One thing he loved about the Indian Larry project, he said, was how Mr. Desmedt’s friends and family came to the site, and then walked it as if getting to touch his spirit.
Mr. Baker hopes that happens even more this time — no simple answers or message, just a chance for people to silently traverse a country field to pay tribute, to give thanks, to contemplate heroism before his handiwork disappears.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Her Own Bazaar
Henry J. Holcomb
Inquirer Staff Writer
Lilly Feihong Song began her working life here scrubbing toilets, working her way up to washing dishes. Now she's an entrepreneur who, at noon Sunday, will open her third business, the Shanghai Bazaar, in Chinatown.
Her story begins in China, where she was a schoolteacher, and winds its way through her coming to America, getting divorced, and plunging into the hardscrabble life of an immigrant single mother. In the midst of all this, she decided that Chinatown needed an authentic bookstore.
This led to battles with corruption during shopping trips to China, and, with her daughter's help, to navigating bureaucracies and a maze of paperwork and lawyers here. Along the way, she was blessed by helpful Americans, survived a debilitating bout with cancer, worked seven long days a week, and developed a vision for how to help immigrants become entrepreneurs.
Her story is told mostly by her daughter, Nan Zhang, 19, a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in American literature and economics. She learned English sooner than her mother, so she handled early dealings with bureaucracies and lawyers.
"When I was 13, I would go to the Municipal Services Building. I looked up at big men in dark suits and thought, 'I don't know whether they can help us or hurt us,' " Zhang said over tea while home for spring break, in an interview punctuated with bookstore customers' questions.
"I learned to remember faces and names, to memorize phone numbers of people who were helpful. I learned to go back to them, and to keep following up and following up. I grew up very fast," she said.
Fast, indeed, particularly when a lustful Chinese gangster stalked her mother early in their time here. For months, Zhang said, she slept by the door, with a big kitchen knife. Through some amateur detective work, she learned that the man was here illegally and got him deported.
Her mother's first business was a short-lived cafe in South Philadelphia. The next was the New China Bookstore, now at 1010 Race St. The new venture, at 1016 Race St., is a big, authentic Chinese bazaar, 13,000 square feet on two levels, of stalls selling clothing, furniture, gifts, musical instruments, art and other things.
Initially she will own all of the stalls. Later, some will be sold.
With its broad range of merchandise, "the Shanghai Bazaar shows the growth of this community as a residential community, not just a business center and tourist attraction," said John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. Her concept, he said, will "allow new immigrants, who have little money and limited job opportunities, to go into his or her own business."
Going into business was much harder than Song imagined. The bookstore opened in 1999, on the second and third floors of 929 Arch St. She and her daughter, both petite, rented trailers to pick up merchandise, and lugged 75-pound boxes of books up flights of stairs.
"My mother shed blood and tears getting that store started," Zhang said.
"I am just very persistent," her mother said. "I made up my mind that I wanted to have a bookstore."
Her first shopping trips to China were steeped in frustration. "Every item I wanted to sell in my store, I picked myself. Half of what they shipped to me was trash. I picked porcelain and they sent cardboard," Song recalled.
Some wooden musical instruments and picture frames arrived in pieces, said to have been shattered by customs agents searching for termites.
She soon found people and experts she could trust.
Now her bookstore offers among the nation's largest collections of Chinese books, music and videos. Others offer mostly material from Taiwan, which is as different as literature from England is to that of the United States.
The store attracted, among others, Americans with adopted Chinese children.
"I was touched that the Americans wanted their children to hold onto their culture," Song said. So she started teaching classes on Chinese culture at the store, and she provided a place for traditional Chinese birthday parties.
Later, she added more than a dozen computers, equipped to work with many languages, to help immigrants find jobs, do schoolwork, and keep in touch with families overseas.
For now, Song, 49, will operate both the bookstore and the new bazaar, a few doors to the east.
Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has completed a doctorate in art history at the University of Cincinnati and returned to China.
Song has never remarried.
"She's married to the store, but she's a wonderful cook... and very good storyteller. And she knits, she sews, beats me at chess, and is a gifted singer and musician... . She plays the pipa, a Chinese mandolin," her daughter said, pointing to a heart-shaped stringed instrument on the wall.
Her mother, she said, "has built her life around the exchanges at the store. She loves it when kids come in with parents. She loves telling non-Chinese people what things are." She remembers what people have purchased in the past, what they like.
Zhang has fond memories of early childhood in Hangzhou, near Shanghai on China's east coast, and misses her grandfather, Baoluo Song, 88, "a tall man with a big white beard," an artist and opera singer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. She remembers riding on the back of her mother's bicycle, along the banks of the city's beautiful Westlake.
But she thinks in English now, and majors in American literature because "I love it... . It is about more different kinds of people, with different backgrounds and trauma."
Song is called Lilly, her American name. But, her daughter believes, she lives her Chinese name, Feihong, which means "very strong bird."
Inquirer Staff Writer
Lilly Feihong Song began her working life here scrubbing toilets, working her way up to washing dishes. Now she's an entrepreneur who, at noon Sunday, will open her third business, the Shanghai Bazaar, in Chinatown.
Her story begins in China, where she was a schoolteacher, and winds its way through her coming to America, getting divorced, and plunging into the hardscrabble life of an immigrant single mother. In the midst of all this, she decided that Chinatown needed an authentic bookstore.
This led to battles with corruption during shopping trips to China, and, with her daughter's help, to navigating bureaucracies and a maze of paperwork and lawyers here. Along the way, she was blessed by helpful Americans, survived a debilitating bout with cancer, worked seven long days a week, and developed a vision for how to help immigrants become entrepreneurs.
Her story is told mostly by her daughter, Nan Zhang, 19, a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in American literature and economics. She learned English sooner than her mother, so she handled early dealings with bureaucracies and lawyers.
"When I was 13, I would go to the Municipal Services Building. I looked up at big men in dark suits and thought, 'I don't know whether they can help us or hurt us,' " Zhang said over tea while home for spring break, in an interview punctuated with bookstore customers' questions.
"I learned to remember faces and names, to memorize phone numbers of people who were helpful. I learned to go back to them, and to keep following up and following up. I grew up very fast," she said.
Fast, indeed, particularly when a lustful Chinese gangster stalked her mother early in their time here. For months, Zhang said, she slept by the door, with a big kitchen knife. Through some amateur detective work, she learned that the man was here illegally and got him deported.
Her mother's first business was a short-lived cafe in South Philadelphia. The next was the New China Bookstore, now at 1010 Race St. The new venture, at 1016 Race St., is a big, authentic Chinese bazaar, 13,000 square feet on two levels, of stalls selling clothing, furniture, gifts, musical instruments, art and other things.
Initially she will own all of the stalls. Later, some will be sold.
With its broad range of merchandise, "the Shanghai Bazaar shows the growth of this community as a residential community, not just a business center and tourist attraction," said John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. Her concept, he said, will "allow new immigrants, who have little money and limited job opportunities, to go into his or her own business."
Going into business was much harder than Song imagined. The bookstore opened in 1999, on the second and third floors of 929 Arch St. She and her daughter, both petite, rented trailers to pick up merchandise, and lugged 75-pound boxes of books up flights of stairs.
"My mother shed blood and tears getting that store started," Zhang said.
"I am just very persistent," her mother said. "I made up my mind that I wanted to have a bookstore."
Her first shopping trips to China were steeped in frustration. "Every item I wanted to sell in my store, I picked myself. Half of what they shipped to me was trash. I picked porcelain and they sent cardboard," Song recalled.
Some wooden musical instruments and picture frames arrived in pieces, said to have been shattered by customs agents searching for termites.
She soon found people and experts she could trust.
Now her bookstore offers among the nation's largest collections of Chinese books, music and videos. Others offer mostly material from Taiwan, which is as different as literature from England is to that of the United States.
The store attracted, among others, Americans with adopted Chinese children.
"I was touched that the Americans wanted their children to hold onto their culture," Song said. So she started teaching classes on Chinese culture at the store, and she provided a place for traditional Chinese birthday parties.
Later, she added more than a dozen computers, equipped to work with many languages, to help immigrants find jobs, do schoolwork, and keep in touch with families overseas.
For now, Song, 49, will operate both the bookstore and the new bazaar, a few doors to the east.
Her ex-husband, meanwhile, has completed a doctorate in art history at the University of Cincinnati and returned to China.
Song has never remarried.
"She's married to the store, but she's a wonderful cook... and very good storyteller. And she knits, she sews, beats me at chess, and is a gifted singer and musician... . She plays the pipa, a Chinese mandolin," her daughter said, pointing to a heart-shaped stringed instrument on the wall.
Her mother, she said, "has built her life around the exchanges at the store. She loves it when kids come in with parents. She loves telling non-Chinese people what things are." She remembers what people have purchased in the past, what they like.
Zhang has fond memories of early childhood in Hangzhou, near Shanghai on China's east coast, and misses her grandfather, Baoluo Song, 88, "a tall man with a big white beard," an artist and opera singer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. She remembers riding on the back of her mother's bicycle, along the banks of the city's beautiful Westlake.
But she thinks in English now, and majors in American literature because "I love it... . It is about more different kinds of people, with different backgrounds and trauma."
Song is called Lilly, her American name. But, her daughter believes, she lives her Chinese name, Feihong, which means "very strong bird."
My Lai Hero Hugh Thompson Jr. Dies at 62
The Associated Press
Friday 06 January 2006
New Orleans - Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.
Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.
Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and family friend, said Thompson died of cancer.
"These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them," Thompson recalled in a 1998 Associated Press interview.
Early in the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson, door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta came upon U.S. ground troops killing Vietnamese civilians in and around the village of My Lai.
They landed the helicopter in the line of fire between American troops and fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pointed their own guns at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more killings.
Colburn and Andreotta had provided cover for Thompson as he went forward to confront the leader of the U.S. forces. Thompson later coaxed civilians out of a bunker so they could be evacuated, and then landed his helicopter again to pick up a wounded child they transported to a hospital. Their efforts led to the cease-fire order at My Lai.
In 1998, the Army honored the three men with the prestigious Soldier's Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy. It was a posthumous award for Andreotta, who had been killed in battle three weeks after My Lai.
"It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did," Army Maj. Gen. Michael Ackerman said at the 1998 ceremony. The three "set the standard for all soldiers to follow."
Lt. William L. Calley, a platoon leader, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killings, but served just three years under house arrest when then-President Nixon reduced his sentence.
Author Seymour Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his expose of the massacre in 1969 while working as a freelance journalist. The massacre became one of the pivotal events as opposition to the war was growing in the United States.
Hersh called Thompson "one of the good guys."
"You can't imagine what courage it took to do what he did," Hersh said.
Although Thompson's story was a significant part of Hersh's reports, and Thompson testified before Congress, his role in ending My Lai wasn't widely known until the late 1980s, when David Egan, a professor emeritus at Clemson University, saw an interview in a documentary and launched a letter-writing campaign that eventually led to the awarding of the medals in 1998.
"He was the guy who by his heroic actions gave a morality and dignity to the American military effort," Tulane history professor Douglas Brinkley said.
For years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those who considered him unpatriotic. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.
As the years passed, Thompson became an example for future generations of soldiers, said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the U.S. Military Academy's behavioral sciences and leadership department. Thompson went to West Point once a year to give a lecture on his experience, Kolditz said.
"There are so many people today walking around alive because of him, not only in Vietnam, but people who kept their units under control under other circumstances because they had heard his story. We may never know just how many lives he saved."
Friday 06 January 2006
New Orleans - Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.
Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.
Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and family friend, said Thompson died of cancer.
"These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them," Thompson recalled in a 1998 Associated Press interview.
Early in the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson, door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta came upon U.S. ground troops killing Vietnamese civilians in and around the village of My Lai.
They landed the helicopter in the line of fire between American troops and fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pointed their own guns at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more killings.
Colburn and Andreotta had provided cover for Thompson as he went forward to confront the leader of the U.S. forces. Thompson later coaxed civilians out of a bunker so they could be evacuated, and then landed his helicopter again to pick up a wounded child they transported to a hospital. Their efforts led to the cease-fire order at My Lai.
In 1998, the Army honored the three men with the prestigious Soldier's Medal, the highest award for bravery not involving conflict with an enemy. It was a posthumous award for Andreotta, who had been killed in battle three weeks after My Lai.
"It was the ability to do the right thing even at the risk of their personal safety that guided these soldiers to do what they did," Army Maj. Gen. Michael Ackerman said at the 1998 ceremony. The three "set the standard for all soldiers to follow."
Lt. William L. Calley, a platoon leader, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the killings, but served just three years under house arrest when then-President Nixon reduced his sentence.
Author Seymour Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his expose of the massacre in 1969 while working as a freelance journalist. The massacre became one of the pivotal events as opposition to the war was growing in the United States.
Hersh called Thompson "one of the good guys."
"You can't imagine what courage it took to do what he did," Hersh said.
Although Thompson's story was a significant part of Hersh's reports, and Thompson testified before Congress, his role in ending My Lai wasn't widely known until the late 1980s, when David Egan, a professor emeritus at Clemson University, saw an interview in a documentary and launched a letter-writing campaign that eventually led to the awarding of the medals in 1998.
"He was the guy who by his heroic actions gave a morality and dignity to the American military effort," Tulane history professor Douglas Brinkley said.
For years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those who considered him unpatriotic. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.
As the years passed, Thompson became an example for future generations of soldiers, said Col. Tom Kolditz, head of the U.S. Military Academy's behavioral sciences and leadership department. Thompson went to West Point once a year to give a lecture on his experience, Kolditz said.
"There are so many people today walking around alive because of him, not only in Vietnam, but people who kept their units under control under other circumstances because they had heard his story. We may never know just how many lives he saved."
The Post Offfice No One Hears About
Our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month. The day after she died,
my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her She dictated and I wrote:
Dear God,
Will you please take special care of our dog, Abbey? She died
yesterday and is in heaven. We miss her very much. We are happy that you let us have her as our dog even though she got sick. I hope that you will play with her. She liked to play with balls and swim before she got sick. I am sending some pictures of her so that when you see her in heaven you will know she is our special dog. But I really do miss her.
Love, Meredith Claire
P.S. Mommy wrote the words after Meredith told them to her
We put that in an envelope with two pictures of Abbey, and addressed it to God in Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Meredith stuck some stamps on the front (because, as she said, it may take lots of stamps to get a letter all the way to heaven) and that afternoon I let her drop it into the letter box at the post office. For a few days, she would ask if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had.
Yesterday there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch. Curious, I went to look at it. It had a gold star card on the front and said "To Meredith" in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith took it in and opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers, "When a Pet Dies".
Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God, in its opened envelope (which was marked Return to Sender: Insufficient address). On the opposite page, one of the pictures of Abbey was taped under the words "For Meredith" We turned to the back cover, and there was the other picture of Abbey, and this handwritten note on pink paper:
Dear Meredith,
I know that you will be happy to know that Abbey arrived safely and soundly in Heaven! Having the pictures you sent to me was such a big help. I recognized Abbey right away.
You know, Meredith, she isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me -- just like she stays in your heart -- young and running and playing. Abbey loved being your dog, you know.
Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets! so I can't keep your beautiful letter. I am sending it to you with the pictures so that you will have this book to keep and remember Abbey. One of my angels is taking care of this for me. I hope the little book helps. Thank you for the beautiful letter. Thank your mother for sending it. What a wonderful mother you have! I picked her especially for you. I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much. By the way, I am in heaven but wherever there is love, I am there also.
Love,
God and the special angel who wrote this after God told her the words.
As a parent and a pet lover, this is one of the kindest things that I've ever experienced. I have no way to know who sent it, but there is some very kind soul working in the dead letter office. Just wanted to share this act of compassion.
my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her She dictated and I wrote:
Dear God,
Will you please take special care of our dog, Abbey? She died
yesterday and is in heaven. We miss her very much. We are happy that you let us have her as our dog even though she got sick. I hope that you will play with her. She liked to play with balls and swim before she got sick. I am sending some pictures of her so that when you see her in heaven you will know she is our special dog. But I really do miss her.
Love, Meredith Claire
P.S. Mommy wrote the words after Meredith told them to her
We put that in an envelope with two pictures of Abbey, and addressed it to God in Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Meredith stuck some stamps on the front (because, as she said, it may take lots of stamps to get a letter all the way to heaven) and that afternoon I let her drop it into the letter box at the post office. For a few days, she would ask if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had.
Yesterday there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch. Curious, I went to look at it. It had a gold star card on the front and said "To Meredith" in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith took it in and opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers, "When a Pet Dies".
Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God, in its opened envelope (which was marked Return to Sender: Insufficient address). On the opposite page, one of the pictures of Abbey was taped under the words "For Meredith" We turned to the back cover, and there was the other picture of Abbey, and this handwritten note on pink paper:
Dear Meredith,
I know that you will be happy to know that Abbey arrived safely and soundly in Heaven! Having the pictures you sent to me was such a big help. I recognized Abbey right away.
You know, Meredith, she isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me -- just like she stays in your heart -- young and running and playing. Abbey loved being your dog, you know.
Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets! so I can't keep your beautiful letter. I am sending it to you with the pictures so that you will have this book to keep and remember Abbey. One of my angels is taking care of this for me. I hope the little book helps. Thank you for the beautiful letter. Thank your mother for sending it. What a wonderful mother you have! I picked her especially for you. I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much. By the way, I am in heaven but wherever there is love, I am there also.
Love,
God and the special angel who wrote this after God told her the words.
As a parent and a pet lover, this is one of the kindest things that I've ever experienced. I have no way to know who sent it, but there is some very kind soul working in the dead letter office. Just wanted to share this act of compassion.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Cynthia Cooper: the high price of truth
Cynthia Cooper helped expose massive fraud at WorldCom. It lost her money, health, privacy.
By Patricia HornInquirer Staff Writer
Cynthia Cooper knows the price for blowing the whistle on corporate fraud: grief, depression, legal fees, loss of work colleagues, and dealing with intrusive questions from the press.
She knows the price because, as the chief audit executive at WorldCom Inc., she paid them. Cooper led a team of internal auditors in exposing $3.8 billion in fraud at WorldCom in 2002.
Prosecutors now tabulate the extent of the WorldCom accounting fraud at $11 billion.
The company, which only months before had lost its trademark founder and chief executive officer, Bernard Ebbers, soon saw its chief financial officer, Scott Sullivan, fired, and the company file bankruptcy after WorldCom exposed the $3.8 billion in financial misstatements.
Ebbers, Sullivan and other WorldCom employees were convicted or pleaded guilty to the fraud. Ebbers is now appealing his conviction and 25-year sentence. Sullivan got five years after testifying against Ebbers.
WorldCom's collapse hit hard in Cooper's home state of Mississippi, where WorldCom was the state's only Fortune 500 company, and around the investing world.
Cooper knew Ebbers, whom she calls a generous person; she knew Sullivan; she knew the accounting team her team ended up exposing.
Cooper suffered grief and depression. She lost weight. She couldn't sleep. To help her through, "my father would sit at the foot of my bed reading and rereading the 23d Psalm," she said in a speech yesterday to the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors. Despite the toll, Cooper said she would do it again. "The decision was easy," she said. "But doing the right thing doesn't mean there won't be any cost."
Cooper, who along with two other women who became whistle-blowers were named Time magazine's Persons of the Year for 2002, now delivers that message to corporate directors, companies and students in her new life as a speaker and corporate consultant. She left WorldCom after 10 years in July 2004.
"I think all the people involved in the fraud knew what they were doing," she said.
They went along for a variety of reasons, including fear of losing their jobs. But character, she said, is not forged in a crisis. "It is built decision by decision by decision. The small decisions
Exposing the fraud, she explained, created more tough times for her, her colleagues, and other WorldCom workers. "Thousands and thousands of coworkers were laid off, in wave after wave," she told the audience. "Thousands of people lost their life savings, including members of my family."
During the WorldCom investigation, gun-toting FBI agents showed up at Cooper's office, took her hard drive, downloaded her voicemail, and copied documents. Shredders were hauled away on dollies.
Cooper and her group realized their offices were being visited at night by investigators.
Ultimately, she saw Ebbers, Sullivan and others arrested. "I knew their families and their husbands and wives," she said. "I had celebrated the birth of the CFO's new baby at a baby shower." She still sees the director of accounting at church each Sunday.
Corporate directors can do a lot to help prevent or detect fraud, Cooper said. She recommends that large companies appoint ethics directors who answer to the CEO.
She also recommends that directors ask their auditors questions suggested by Warren Buffett in his 2002 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual report.
Among them: If you were responsible for preparing the financial statements, would you in any way have prepared them differently? And, if you were an investor, would you have received the information essential to your understanding the company's financial performance during the reporting period?
Cooper also recommends that directors ask the company's auditors if they deem any areas of accounting too aggressive. Do they have real-time access to the company's accounting system, or do they have to rely on management to provide the information? Is the firm one the auditor deems "high risk"?And, she said, more directors need to have "backbone.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: dumb as a date palm
Born six weeks early at barely more than 3 pounds, Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali got off to a poor start fighting back. Her older brother Mahad regularly picked on her and once pushed her into a feces-laden outdoor latrine. Her devout Islamic mother, who called her "dumb as a date palm," beat her throughout her childhood.
"Ma" tied Hirsi Ali's hands to her ankles with rope, put her on the floor on her belly, then whipped her mercilessly with a stick or wire.
When Hirsi Ali turned 5, a man came at the behest of her grandmother - though against the wishes of her more enlightened, absent father - and genitally mutilated her. He cut her clitoris and labia ("The entire procedure was torture"), then sewed up the area so the scar tissue formed a kind of "chastity belt."
Other not-so-sweet memories of childhood? Hirsi Ali's math teacher in Kenya beat her with a black plastic pipe. Her Kenyan Koran teacher, infuriated by signs of defiance, cracked her head against a wall, fracturing her skull and bursting a blood vessel in her eye. She had to undergo an operation on her skull.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't think she saw a toy until she was 8. She first used deodorant in her teens. Now, at 37, she appears on the cover of magazines like Marie Claire, a radiant beauty.
The great irony of Infidel, a memoir by the women's activist whose fight against Islamic oppression of women has made her an international human rights heroine, is that it's a tale of keeping the faith.
Faith that life can be free. Faith that a horrible childhood does not require a horrible adulthood. Faith that courage in life matters.
Last year, Hirsi Ali burst upon the world's media with a book and multiple controversies. The book, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam, documented her battles in the Netherlands where, as a social worker and later a member of Parliament, she faced death threats and experienced the 2004 murder of her fellow documentary maker, Theo van Gogh. Their crime? Bringing attention to the treatment by Europe's Islamic communities of their women. Controversies enveloped her on several fronts last year beyond her opinions on Islam. Critics charged (and she acknowledged, as she had before) that she had lied about her name, date of birth and refugee status when she originally escaped to the Netherlands. Her neighbors, inconvenienced and angered by the 24-hour security escort surrounding her, sued to evict her from her apartment.
Tiring of the controversies, and sensing greater opportunity and freedom in the United States, Hirsi Ali resigned from the Dutch Parliament and accepted a position as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Now, in Infidel, a No. 1 best-seller in Europe, she tells her harrowing personal story. Hirsi Ali's mother, Asha, born to a nomadic Somali clan, became a devout Muslim. Her father, Hirsi Magan, a Columbia University graduate in anthropology, helped lead the opposition Somali Salvation Democratic Front that opposed Somalia's post-independence dictator, Siad Barré, which meant he spent considerable time in jail and away from his family. The book comes poignantly divided into two parts: "My Childhood" and "My Freedom." Notwithstanding the death threats that came later, the first part is certainly grimmer.
"There were so many funerals in my childhood," Hirsi Ali recalls. She, her mother, sister and brother (another sister and brother died as infants) found themselves exiled to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Before Hirsi Ali reached her teens, she'd learned Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English in addition to her native Somali.
She "hated Saudi Arabia," where the teacher called her Aswad Abda, "black slave-girl." Ethiopia, by contrast, "felt like being free," though the poverty and the "frighteningly empty, creamy gray eyes of the blind beggar down the road" scared her.
In Kenya, she for a time refashioned herself as a devout Muslim, wearing the hijab. But she also began to read in English - the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Nancy Drew stories, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, even Danielle Steel - opening up the horizons of a Western life.
She began her pursuit of it when, at 22, she escaped a marriage arranged by her father to a Somali-Canadian she'd never met, and hopped a train to seek asylum in the Netherlands. She earned a political science degree, worked as a translator and political researcher, and gained election to the Dutch Parliament, even as other parts of her life - such as trying to help her depressed sister adapt to the West - came to tragedy.
It's plain that Hirsi Ali took her early bent toward "the world of reason" from her educated father, who "encouraged us to ask questions," who loved the word why? (which her reverent mother hated), "who taught us to be honest because truth is good in itself."
Hirsi Ali explains the arc of Infidel by stating: "I want to make a few things clear, set a number of records straight, and also tell people about another kind of world and what it's really like."
That she does. Infidel teems with amazing passages, whether it's how the Saudis taught their children to hate Jews, or how the Dutch, for all their virtues, recoiled from confrontation with immigrant values. To those who consider life harsh when their flight is canceled by bad weather, Hirsi Ali's tale of suffering provides context.
As if serving as official historian of her own life, Hirsi Ali painstakingly chronicles almost every memory - tactile, moral, emotional - she can. To those impatient for plot twists, her story may move slowly. For those who think: How did this unique woman develop?, the layers of detail make her memoir a magnificent feat of self-scrutiny.
"People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do," Hirsi Ali remarks in her introduction. "The answer is no. I would like to keep living."
That wasn't her wish when she swallowed "forty or fifty" pills from her mother's medicine drawer in Kenya, hoping to kill herself. Today she continues to challenge dogma, to help the very Muslim women pressured to revile her.
If Hirsi Ali is an infidel, she should consider it a badge of honor: a title we give someone who refuses to believe the worst that human beings can think. Yes, she needs bodyguards. But her two books and rising global stature have already immortalized her mind as a symbol of triumph over fear and ignorance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to prominence last year with "The Caged Virgin," an account of her struggles in the Netherlands as she brought attention to how Europe's Islamic communities treat their women. Her new book, "Infidel," tells of her Islamic upbringing in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)