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."
Saturday, July 28, 2007
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.
Aung San Suu Kyi: unsung hero
In Burma, Democracy's Price Can Be LifeBy Fred Hiatt
Post
Monday, June 27, 2005
No prime ministers took note when Aung Hlaing Win was seized on May 1 while sitting at a market food stall in Rangoon, the capital city of the totalitarian state of Burma
The Nobel Peace Prize committee issued no statement when police cremated his badly bruised body days later, without allowing his young widow a viewing.
And neither the U.S. Congress nor any European notables objected when, just two weeks ago, a court in Burma ruled that Aung Hlaing Win, a 30- year-old member of the National League for Democracy, had died of chronic liver illness while in custody, not from beatings he received during interrogation.
Aung Hlaing Win's private tragedy was unfolding while the world's worthies were lavishing attention on the head of his democracy party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who on June 19 marked her 60th birthday while being held incommunicado under house arrest. There were tributes and calls for her release from President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, fellow Nobel Peace Prize winners and leaders across the globe.
Those tributes were appropriate, and necessary. Aung San Suu Kyi is the Nelson Mandela of Asia. But there were risks also in the world's focus on one individual in Burma, for -- as she has often said, during her intervals of partial freedom -- the movement for democracy does not depend on any one person.
For, if Aung San Suu Kyi represents one great mystery of humanity -- its seeming ability to produce great leaders at moments of great need -- young Aung Hlaing Win represents another, perhaps even greater mystery: the willingness of ordinary people to risk everything for freedom, knowing that their sacrifice will be recorded in no one's history textbook.
Aung San Suu Kyi possesses the birth lines of leadership: Her father led Burma to independence from imperial Britain after World War II. But she married a British academic and raised her two boys in Oxford, without aspiration or training to lead a nation.
A visit home to her ailing mother in 1988 coincided with the rise of student opposition to the ruling military junta, and Aung San Suu Kyi was pressed to play a role. The dictators, with the usual clueless faith of their kind in their own popularity, called an election in 1990, which they lost in a landslide to Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League, though even then she was under house arrest. The generals never allowed the parliament to sit; many elected members to this day sit in prison instead.
Yet Aung San Suu Kyi remains the Burmese leader whom the world knows and reveres. Through a decade and a half of persecution, she has maintained a dignity, a serene steeliness, that every day rebukes the small-minded cruelties of her captors. The insults they shower upon her in their state press befoul them in ways they dimly perceive but never entirely understand.
We know little of her condition today; not even the Red Cross is permitted to visit her increasingly shabby lakefront house. We know even less of the 1,300 or more political prisoners and of the thousands more, in this nation of 50 million, who, like Aung Hlaing Win, stand up for liberty. The junta does its best to prevent any honest reporting from the country -- even unauthorized ownership of a fax machine is a crime -- so we can only guess at the drama underlying the few reported lines on his case.
Did he have an inkling of what was coming as he ate his noodles in that stall May 1? Did the judge who certified his death as accidental go home that night and mutter his secret shame to his wife? Did Aung Hlaing Win's friends warn him: Don't join the party, what good can it do?
In a way, that is the real mystery. The unsung fighters for democracy, whether in Burma or Belarus, Kazakhstan or China -- they do not ask themselves, What good will it do? Their calculations are made in some deeper place, hard to fathom for those of us spared such choices.
But over the coming months, many people in our fortunate outside world will face choices that could affect the answer to that question. The European Union, Japan, Burma's democratic neighbors in Southeast Asia and India -- these for the most part have followed a policy of "engagement" with Aung San Suu Kyi's captors, though she and her party consistently have warned that such a policy could only strengthen the repression.
Whether they have been motivated by genuine hope that the junta would reform, or by more cynical attraction to Burma's oil and other resources, doesn't really matter. It's clear that the policy has failed.
Now they could opt for a harder-headed policy of coordinated, sustained pressure on the regime to release political prisoners and begin a political dialogue. It's likely, though not assured, that setting such a price to Burma for being received in polite international company would have an impact. It's certain that birthday cards won't suffice.
fredhiatt@washpost.com
Eddie Jacobson: failed haberdasher
The papers of Edward Jacobson document his business and personal affairs, and particularly his long friendship with Harry S. Truman. Through this friendship, Jacobson-a Kansas City haberdasher who never sought public office in his life-played an important part in the founding of the modern state of Israel.
Eddie Jacobson and Harry Truman met in Kansas City as young men and renewed their acquaintance during World War I, when they served together in the 129th Field Artillery. While stationed at Camp Doniphan in Oklahoma, the two men operated the regimental canteen with such success that they decided, upon their return from Europe after the Armistice, to go into business together. The Truman & Jacobson haberdashery opened for business on November 28, 1919, at 104 West 12th Street in downtown Kansas City, a prime location just across the street from the Muehlebach Hotel. The store ran into financial difficulties during the postwar economic recession and finally closed in September, 1922, leaving Truman and Jacobson heavily in debt. For the next two decades Jacobson worked as a traveling salesman of men's clothing. In 1945, he was able to open his own store in Kansas City, Westport Menswear.
Jacobson's friendship with Truman survived their business failure and continued through the 1 930s and 1940s, as Truman advanced from county administrator to U.S. Senator to Vice President and, ultimately, President of the United States. As one of Truman's closest Jewish friends, Jacobson lobbied the President in behalf of a cause that was very important to him: the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. On a number of occasions, often at the behest of Jewish leaders who were aware of his close ties to the President, he corresponded or met with Truman to urge that the United States support this cause. During a memorable face-to-face encounter at the White House on March 13, 1948, it was Jacobson who persuaded Truman to meet with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement. Two months later, on May 14, 1948, the United States became the first nation to grant diplomatic recognition to the new state of Israel.
The Correspondence File consists of correspondence and other items, much of it documenting Jacobson's relationship with Truman and his involvement in the founding and early history of the state of Israel. This series contains approximately forty letters from Truman to Jacobson, and copies of fewer than ten letters from Jacobson to Truman, dating from 1945 to 1955. Although most of this correspondence is personal in nature, a few letters touch upon the Palestine issue. Especially notable are Jacobson's letter of October 3, 1947, supporting the United Nations partition plan for Palestine, and the President's letter of February 27, 1948, expressing his frustration over the refusal of Jews and Arabs to reach a peaceful settlement. Subsequent letters between the two friends concern such matters as a proposal, made by a Kansas City Jewish leader in 1952 and immediately dismissed by Jacobson, that Jacobson be named president of Israel ("I'll say that he couldn't nominate a better man," Truman wrote, "but I sincerely hope you won't take it, for your own welfare and benefit.") The last communication between the two men in Jacobson's papers is a handwritten letter from Truman, dated June 30, 1955, in which the former President describes his plans to visit Israel, perhaps in the company of Jacobson. Jacobson died soon thereafter, and Truman never made the trip.
They'll do it themselves, thanks
March 11, 2007 PARENTING
By MICHAEL WINERIP
GREENBURGH, N.Y.
I LIKE it!” said Yaniv Gorodischer. “What a night!”
It was a big, big night at the group home. The three residents — Mr. Gorodischer, 29, Jason Kingsley, 32, and Raymond Frost Jr., 28 — along with an entourage that included their group home supervisor, Ernest Daniels, and their parents, were going to the Town Board meeting to present a petition to get a sidewalk for their busy street, Chatterton Parkway.
All three had put on neckties. “For Town Hall I want to look decent,” Mr. Frost said. “Handsome and decent.” He’d practiced his speech six times. “I’m going to say, ‘My name is Raymond Frost Jr.’ And I’ll say that we got our neighbors to sign the petition, and 28 signed and 2 didn’t want to.”
And Mr. Gorodischer said: “First off, I’ll say, ‘My name is Yaniv Gorodischer.’ And I can remember, I remember ... shoot, I forgot.”
For that reason, Emily Kingsley, Jason’s mother, had written a speech for them to read. “Just in case,” she said, handing it to her son.
“We won’t need it,” he said. “We know how to say it.”
Several weeks before, Ms. Kingsley had drawn up the petition and accompanied her son and his two roommates door to door. All three men have Down syndrome and cannot drive, but they are striving to be as independent as possible, and that means walking to their jobs along this street with its steep hill, its blind curve and cars that whiz by.
Ms. Kingsley, 67, had stood in the driveways while the three men knocked on doors, collecting signatures. “Most people were very nice,” she said. “When one man refused, they got confused. They couldn’t understand someone would say no to them. He was an old guy and said if he had
a sidewalk he’d have to shovel snow. They said, ‘We’ll shovel it for you.’ And he says, ‘No, you won’t.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we will.’”
Since the group home opened in September 2002, the three have worked hard to be good neighbors. “Tell the story how you called me about baking a cake for your new neighbors,” Ms. Kingsley said.
“I don’t know that story,” her son said.
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s coming back,” the son said. “We asked to bake a cake for the new neighbors across the street. That was nice of us, to give them a little treat.”
“And you called me for help with the cake,” the mother said. “And I said, ‘All three of you are on a diet.’”
“Not for us,” her son said. “For the neighbors.”
“Chocolate cake,” Mr. Frost said.
“We all helped,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Three Musketeers,” Mr. Frost said. “Now four beautiful years living in this house.”
“Almost five beautiful years,” Mr. Kingsley said.
“A very big environment,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Because we all three guys looked out for each other,” Mr. Frost said.
“And what is the meaning of brotherhood?” Mr. Gorodischer said. “We can stand tall and be united. Meaning we can win over Town Hall!”
Then someone said it was time, and the three piled out the door and down the stairs and squeezed into Ms. Kingsley’s sedan, heading for Town Hall to see if they could get themselves a sidewalk.
WHEN Jason Kingsley was born, on June 27, 1974, the doctors told Ms. Kingsley and her husband, Charles, to put him in an institution. “They told me he wouldn’t be able to distinguish us from other adults,” she recalled. “They said, ‘Never see him again, and tell your friends and
family that he died in childbirth.’ They were so sure I would institutionalize him, they gave me pills to dry up my milk.’”
Ms. Kingsley couldn’t have known it then, but her son was born right at the great divide between the dark years, when the mentally retarded were hidden away in state institutions, and modern times, when most of those institutions have been shuttered and the developmentally disabled live among us, in supervised group homes and apartment programs.
Two years before Jason’s birth, in January 1972, Geraldo Rivera had sneaked into Willowbrook, a snake pit of an institution on Staten Island that was home to 5,400 mentally retarded people. He filmed a ward of 60 emaciated children, many naked, some in straitjackets, surrounded by walls smeared with feces and supervised by a single attendant. His televised exposé led to a federal class-action lawsuit, which Gov. Hugh L. Carey could have settled by promising to improve Willowbrook. Instead, Mr. Carey set off a social revolution. In a 1975 consent decree, he pledged to move the residents out of Willowbrook and into state-financed community housing. Decades later, Mr. Carey would say it was the one thing he’d done as governor that he could really hold on to.
At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes.
Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand — the most severely disabled — in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies.
In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason’s room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. “We surrounded him with motion and music, and we’d talk and talk to him,” she says. To “wake up his senses,” she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in.
“I had people tell me that he wouldn’t be able to read,” she recalled. “He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn’t do, he was doing.”
Jason’s parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he’ll burst into a verse of “Singing in the Raymond” or “Some Enchanted Yaniving.”
The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. “Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn’t apply,” she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for “Sesame Street” — she has won 17 Emmys — and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones.
Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. “I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,” she said. “But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated and streetwise, picked up nuances about relationships that he could not.
“Jason was great at parlor tricks, he could count to 10 in 12 languages,” she said. But when she put him in a youth soccer league, he too often ran the wrong way. He mastered the mechanics of reading but struggled with comprehension. “He learned, but took longer than regular kids.” Regular kids would say, “Do we have to have him on our team?”
“I realized this was in fact a child with D.S.,” she said, “and as hard as I worked, it would not go away.”
Thanks to his mother’s background in television, the son had opportunities most never get. At 10 he appeared on the TV show “The Fall Guy”; at 19, on “Touched by an Angel.” With his mother’s help, he and his friend Mitchell Levitz wrote a book about Down syndrome, “Count Us In,” published by Harcourt in 1994.
But when Mr. Kingsley was no longer young and cuddly, things were harder. Having mingled with the stars, he grew impatient with mundane work. He had a job shelving videos at a library, and came up with his own system for reorganizing the collection. “It made perfect sense to him,” his mother says, “but nobody could find anything.” He now delivers mail in an office building, though he still lists his career goal as “directing animated feature films for the Disney corporation.” His roommate Mr. Gorodischer works in the mailroom of a law office. Mr. Frost is a clerk at Petco, specializing in fish and small animals.
The Kingsleys set their son up in his own apartment in the late 1990s, but over time, he became isolated, the apartment grew messy, and he stopped shaving and bathing regularly. “We were too optimistic,” Ms. Kingsley said. “He needed more structure.” The group home, which is run by Westchester Arc, a nonprofit agency, has counselors on duty from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. to provide both oversight and routine. It’s a comfort for the mother, who will not live forever.
RSSAS they walked into Town Hall, Mr. Gorodischer lagged behind, and Mr. Frost yelled, “Yaniv, move up, you’re with us.”
Inside, Channel 12 was waiting. “How long have you been fighting for this?” the reporter asked.
“This is our first time,” Mr. Frost said.
“But you have petitions?” the reporter said.
“We hope to win over Town Hall,” Mr. Frost said.
They launched into a “Three Musketeers” cheer — all for one and one for all! — that caught Channel 12 off guard. “Hold on, we missed that,” the reporter said. “Let’s do it again. Quiet ... action.”
Before the meeting, Paul J. Feiner, the town supervisor, told the men he supported the sidewalk and credited them with forcing the Town Board to develop a sidewalk policy, but said it could be two years before there was any action.
They were first on the agenda, and it must have been more nerve-racking than they had expected, because, after a few hems and haws, Mr. Kingsley pulled out the speech his mother had written, and each of them read a few sentences.
“You should go home tonight feeling very, very proud,” Mr. Feiner said. “You’ve already accomplished a lot, and I’ll work hard to make your dream of sidewalks a reality.”
The whole thing took about three minutes, and soon the entourage was back at the group home with everyone gathered around the dining room table eating cake. While the guests chatted away, Mr. Frost and Mr. Kingsley slipped upstairs. It was getting late, and they had work in the morning.
By MICHAEL WINERIP
GREENBURGH, N.Y.
I LIKE it!” said Yaniv Gorodischer. “What a night!”
It was a big, big night at the group home. The three residents — Mr. Gorodischer, 29, Jason Kingsley, 32, and Raymond Frost Jr., 28 — along with an entourage that included their group home supervisor, Ernest Daniels, and their parents, were going to the Town Board meeting to present a petition to get a sidewalk for their busy street, Chatterton Parkway.
All three had put on neckties. “For Town Hall I want to look decent,” Mr. Frost said. “Handsome and decent.” He’d practiced his speech six times. “I’m going to say, ‘My name is Raymond Frost Jr.’ And I’ll say that we got our neighbors to sign the petition, and 28 signed and 2 didn’t want to.”
And Mr. Gorodischer said: “First off, I’ll say, ‘My name is Yaniv Gorodischer.’ And I can remember, I remember ... shoot, I forgot.”
For that reason, Emily Kingsley, Jason’s mother, had written a speech for them to read. “Just in case,” she said, handing it to her son.
“We won’t need it,” he said. “We know how to say it.”
Several weeks before, Ms. Kingsley had drawn up the petition and accompanied her son and his two roommates door to door. All three men have Down syndrome and cannot drive, but they are striving to be as independent as possible, and that means walking to their jobs along this street with its steep hill, its blind curve and cars that whiz by.
Ms. Kingsley, 67, had stood in the driveways while the three men knocked on doors, collecting signatures. “Most people were very nice,” she said. “When one man refused, they got confused. They couldn’t understand someone would say no to them. He was an old guy and said if he had
a sidewalk he’d have to shovel snow. They said, ‘We’ll shovel it for you.’ And he says, ‘No, you won’t.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we will.’”
Since the group home opened in September 2002, the three have worked hard to be good neighbors. “Tell the story how you called me about baking a cake for your new neighbors,” Ms. Kingsley said.
“I don’t know that story,” her son said.
“Yes, you do.”
“It’s coming back,” the son said. “We asked to bake a cake for the new neighbors across the street. That was nice of us, to give them a little treat.”
“And you called me for help with the cake,” the mother said. “And I said, ‘All three of you are on a diet.’”
“Not for us,” her son said. “For the neighbors.”
“Chocolate cake,” Mr. Frost said.
“We all helped,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Three Musketeers,” Mr. Frost said. “Now four beautiful years living in this house.”
“Almost five beautiful years,” Mr. Kingsley said.
“A very big environment,” Mr. Gorodischer said.
“Because we all three guys looked out for each other,” Mr. Frost said.
“And what is the meaning of brotherhood?” Mr. Gorodischer said. “We can stand tall and be united. Meaning we can win over Town Hall!”
Then someone said it was time, and the three piled out the door and down the stairs and squeezed into Ms. Kingsley’s sedan, heading for Town Hall to see if they could get themselves a sidewalk.
WHEN Jason Kingsley was born, on June 27, 1974, the doctors told Ms. Kingsley and her husband, Charles, to put him in an institution. “They told me he wouldn’t be able to distinguish us from other adults,” she recalled. “They said, ‘Never see him again, and tell your friends and
family that he died in childbirth.’ They were so sure I would institutionalize him, they gave me pills to dry up my milk.’”
Ms. Kingsley couldn’t have known it then, but her son was born right at the great divide between the dark years, when the mentally retarded were hidden away in state institutions, and modern times, when most of those institutions have been shuttered and the developmentally disabled live among us, in supervised group homes and apartment programs.
Two years before Jason’s birth, in January 1972, Geraldo Rivera had sneaked into Willowbrook, a snake pit of an institution on Staten Island that was home to 5,400 mentally retarded people. He filmed a ward of 60 emaciated children, many naked, some in straitjackets, surrounded by walls smeared with feces and supervised by a single attendant. His televised exposé led to a federal class-action lawsuit, which Gov. Hugh L. Carey could have settled by promising to improve Willowbrook. Instead, Mr. Carey set off a social revolution. In a 1975 consent decree, he pledged to move the residents out of Willowbrook and into state-financed community housing. Decades later, Mr. Carey would say it was the one thing he’d done as governor that he could really hold on to.
At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes.
Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand — the most severely disabled — in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies.
In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason’s room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. “We surrounded him with motion and music, and we’d talk and talk to him,” she says. To “wake up his senses,” she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in.
“I had people tell me that he wouldn’t be able to read,” she recalled. “He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn’t do, he was doing.”
Jason’s parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he’ll burst into a verse of “Singing in the Raymond” or “Some Enchanted Yaniving.”
The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. “Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn’t apply,” she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for “Sesame Street” — she has won 17 Emmys — and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones.
Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. “I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,” she said. “But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated and streetwise, picked up nuances about relationships that he could not.
“Jason was great at parlor tricks, he could count to 10 in 12 languages,” she said. But when she put him in a youth soccer league, he too often ran the wrong way. He mastered the mechanics of reading but struggled with comprehension. “He learned, but took longer than regular kids.” Regular kids would say, “Do we have to have him on our team?”
“I realized this was in fact a child with D.S.,” she said, “and as hard as I worked, it would not go away.”
Thanks to his mother’s background in television, the son had opportunities most never get. At 10 he appeared on the TV show “The Fall Guy”; at 19, on “Touched by an Angel.” With his mother’s help, he and his friend Mitchell Levitz wrote a book about Down syndrome, “Count Us In,” published by Harcourt in 1994.
But when Mr. Kingsley was no longer young and cuddly, things were harder. Having mingled with the stars, he grew impatient with mundane work. He had a job shelving videos at a library, and came up with his own system for reorganizing the collection. “It made perfect sense to him,” his mother says, “but nobody could find anything.” He now delivers mail in an office building, though he still lists his career goal as “directing animated feature films for the Disney corporation.” His roommate Mr. Gorodischer works in the mailroom of a law office. Mr. Frost is a clerk at Petco, specializing in fish and small animals.
The Kingsleys set their son up in his own apartment in the late 1990s, but over time, he became isolated, the apartment grew messy, and he stopped shaving and bathing regularly. “We were too optimistic,” Ms. Kingsley said. “He needed more structure.” The group home, which is run by Westchester Arc, a nonprofit agency, has counselors on duty from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. to provide both oversight and routine. It’s a comfort for the mother, who will not live forever.
RSSAS they walked into Town Hall, Mr. Gorodischer lagged behind, and Mr. Frost yelled, “Yaniv, move up, you’re with us.”
Inside, Channel 12 was waiting. “How long have you been fighting for this?” the reporter asked.
“This is our first time,” Mr. Frost said.
“But you have petitions?” the reporter said.
“We hope to win over Town Hall,” Mr. Frost said.
They launched into a “Three Musketeers” cheer — all for one and one for all! — that caught Channel 12 off guard. “Hold on, we missed that,” the reporter said. “Let’s do it again. Quiet ... action.”
Before the meeting, Paul J. Feiner, the town supervisor, told the men he supported the sidewalk and credited them with forcing the Town Board to develop a sidewalk policy, but said it could be two years before there was any action.
They were first on the agenda, and it must have been more nerve-racking than they had expected, because, after a few hems and haws, Mr. Kingsley pulled out the speech his mother had written, and each of them read a few sentences.
“You should go home tonight feeling very, very proud,” Mr. Feiner said. “You’ve already accomplished a lot, and I’ll work hard to make your dream of sidewalks a reality.”
The whole thing took about three minutes, and soon the entourage was back at the group home with everyone gathered around the dining room table eating cake. While the guests chatted away, Mr. Frost and Mr. Kingsley slipped upstairs. It was getting late, and they had work in the morning.
Branded from day one
It would have been easier for Bruce Yamashita to remain silent and quietly move on, but that would have been a grave mistake for Bruce and for the entire United States military.--Norman Mineta, Secretary of Transportation and former Member of Congress, speaking at the commissioning ceremony for Capt. Yamashita
When Bruce Yamashita arrived at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, one of the first things he heard was a staff sergeant yelling, "You speak English? We don't want your kind around here. Go back to your own country." Another sergeant ridiculed him, saying, "we have no tea and sushi here, Yamashita." Another spoke to him only in broken Japanese. The racial and ethnic harassment continued for all nine weeks of the program until, two days before graduation, Bruce, along with three other minority candidates, was kicked out of Officers Candidate School
He didn't make that mistake. He spoke up, and fought to right the wrongs he had suffered to make sure others like him wouldn't suffer in the future. It took years, but Bruce Yamashita finally uncovered the secret that brought him justice. It was a secret that proved he wasn't alone. A secret the Marine Corps didn't even realize it was keeping...
He uncovered data that proved a pervasive, consistent pattern of discrimination against minorities at Officer Candidate School for years and years. It was evidence so persuasive that Congress and the White House couldn't ignore it.
And when his findings became key to a "60 Minutes" investigation, the Commandant of the Marine Corps fueled the fire with his comments that, "minorities don't shoot as well as non-minorities...they don't swim as well, and when you give them a compass and send them on a land navigation exercise, they don't do as well at that sort of thing either."
Weeks later, Bruce Yamashita became Captain Yamashita, and his case became the catalyst for statutory and procedural reform to prohibit racial and ethnic discrimination in the Marine Corps and in all the branches of the military service.
It was, as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy observed, "a vindication not only of Capt. Yamashita, but a vindication of the process of a democracy." And it was, as Sen. Daniel Akaka noted, "a victory for civil rights in this nation."
An Einstein strings theory
By Ariel Dorfman, ARIEL DORFMAN'S latest book is "Burning City" (Random House), a novel he wrote with his son, Joaquin. Website: http://www.arieldorfman.com/.
AS A CHILD, I was sure that Albert Einstein was the most famous violinist in the world.
The confusion stemmed from a photo of the great man that adorned the New York Times in the late 1940s — let's say 1948, to conveniently and coincidentally make me 6 years old, the very age when Einstein, in 1885, started his violin lessons. So … that morning in 1948, my father opened the paper in our home in Queens and pointed to the man with the bushy mustache and wild hair and gentle laughing eyes. "The greatest man of our time," my father informed me solemnly. "And I met him several times, when I was at Princeton in 1944. He even invited me to his house, served me tea. And how he played the violin!"
And that was enough — the awe with which my father pronounced those words "he played the violin" — for me to believe for many years that the most eminent physicist in history was renowned primarily for his ability to coax notes out of a musical instrument.
In time, of course, I came to realize the error of my ways. Einstein began to appear on my horizon when my adolescent brain staggered to understand that mass and energy can be manifestations of the same phenomenon, and then loomed even larger as my adult brain began to pen stories in which the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. And he appeared in all his metaphorical glory when, growing older in a world defined by what Einstein had discovered, a century torn by the forces that this wonderful man had unleashed, I found my life splintered as if it were an atom.
And through it all, I also came to admire Einstein as a man of peace and wisdom and, yes, a prankster — with that illustrious tongue of his sticking out at us from his most notorious photograph, demanding that we not take him all that seriously.
So many images, so much influence, and ever less the original impression of Einstein as a musician.
And yet, now that we are well into a new century, now that we celebrate 100 years of that moment when the young Einstein reached his epiphany of E=mc2, I have started to wonder if my first intuition about the great Albert was not correct after all. I wonder if those violin lessons in 1885 — for a boy who had not yet started to really enunciate words, who was a tardy speaker of German — were not the sweet fire in which his mind had been forged and tempered. If it was not in the mass of that wooden musical instrument filled with a baffling energy that resonated inside every electron of his being; if that was not where and when and how he first conjured up the laws of cosmology.
I wonder if the design of the universe was not contained in the emotion he wrested from those strings. And if it was not a heart tuned by Mozart that gave birth to his certainty that the quantum leap of the imagination is always more important than the dreary accumulation of knowledge. Can it not be — my final wonderment — that Einstein's theory of relativity owes more to an aesthetic revelation than to his overwhelming mathematical intelligence?
Because this he did know, really knew — and said it: "We all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." And because he understood this mystery, that distance, this invisibility, that piper in a deeper and more humane way than most of those who, full of uncertainty and bewilderment, have danced ever since in the luminous shadow of his music and his mind.
Here's to you, Uncle Albert — the greatest violinist in the world
Unsung Fortunes: a rich man's secrets
Untours' founder lives abundantly on little as his wealth aids world.
By Art Carey
Inquirer Staff Writer
MAX LEVINE
Hal Taussig, 82 is devoted to living a simple life। Taussig gave away his last car to a hitchhiker in 1973 and commutes to work on a bicycle। (Max Levine / For the Inquirer)
Hal Taussig wears baggy jeans and fraying work shirts that Goodwill might reject. His shoes have been resoled three times. He bought his one suit from a thrift shop for $14.
At age 81, he doesn't own a car। He performs errands and commutes to the office by bicycle.
He lives on the outskirts of Media in a narrow wood-frame house that was built for mill and factory workers.
And he has given away millions।
Given the fortune that Taussig has made through Untours, his unique travel business, and has given away through the Untours Foundation, you could call him the Un-millionaire. If he so chose, he could be living in a Main Line mansion and driving a Mercedes. But he considers money and what he calls "stuff," beyond what he needs to survive, a burden, an embarrassment.
"He really walks the talk," says Judy Wicks, owner of the White Dog Cafe and a fellow member of the Social Venture Network, which applies capital to enterprises that reduce poverty and advance social justice।
"A lot of people donate money to the less fortunate but live in high style themselves. Hal sacrifices in his own life by living very simply in order to have more money to give away."
In many respects, he's a 21st-century Thoreau। "Let your capital be simplicity and contentment," the sage of Walden Pond wrote. "Those are my sentiments precisely," says Taussig, who has three children, five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Taussig works three jobs:
He cares for Norma, his wife of 61 years, who was crippled by a stroke in 1999।
He helps run Untours, a tour-planning service that enables vacationers to experience foreign places deeply।
He directs the Untours Foundation, into which he pours all his profits - $5 million since 1992. The money is used to make low-interest loans to ventures and projects that help the needy and jobless - from a craft store in Hanoi to a home-health-care cooperative in Philadelphia.
"If capitalism is good, it should be good for the poor," Taussig declares। "I invest in entrepreneurial efforts to help poor people leverage themselves out of poverty."
As a boy, Taussig lived like a pioneer, in a log house on a cattle ranch in Colorado। His mother made his underwear from flour sacks. His Jewish grandfather married an evangelical Christian. Taussig was reared in a household where no one dare gainsay the Word of God, as plainly revealed in the Bible.
He was sent to Wheaton College in Illinois, "the Harvard of Evangelicalism," where he became a champion wrestler। Cursed by an independent mind, he balked at the story of Creation. It was preposterous, and he said so to God.
The Lord gave Taussig a pass, freeing him to craft his own faith.
"God created human beings in his own image। That is the heart of my faith," says Taussig, who now attends the First United Methodist Church of Media.
After college, Taussig returned to Colorado, where he and his brother resumed cattle ranching - and went broke।
"The cattle market took a nose-dive," Taussig says। "We invested in a sterile bull. We paid $5,700 for him, and sold him for hamburger."
Rather than feel ashamed, Taussig felt cleansed. He wanted, he says, to "own the failure."
"In America, we worship success, and making our way up, and leaving the masses behind," he says। "It's a shoddy ethic that leads us to value who we are by what we are."
In 1957, he came East to pursue a doctorate in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania। During the day, he taught seventh grade in Upper Darby and later 11th grade in Springfield, Delaware County. After 10 years of teaching, he took a sabbatical, and drove a VW Beetle all over Europe.
Back home, Taussig wrote a book about his adventure, Shoestring Sabbatical। It inspired an idea: a travel agency that would enable tourists to get to know a place intimately by staying at least two weeks in a rented cottage, apartment or farmhouse. With a $5,000 loan from a friend, Taussig launched Untours in 1975.
"Europe is so enriching and rewarding, I decided to help others have a similar experience," he says। His ulterior motive: forging connections and understanding between people and cultures.
In the early '80s, Taussig was making more money from the tour operation than he needed or wanted। He decided to accept about $20,000 a year for his basic expenses.
First, Taussig gave the excess profits back to his customers। The next year, he split the profits among his employees. Finally, he decided to channel them into a foundation.
The motto of the Untours Foundation is "a hand up, not a handout।" It provides low-interest loans, here and abroad, to create jobs, build low-income housing, and support fair-trade products: goods such as coffee that are sold at a price that guarantees producers and workers a fair wage and decent livelihood.
The loans, usually pegged to the U।S. inflation rate, range from $6,000 to $250,000. Over the last 15 years, about 50 individuals and organizations have benefited from Untours seed money. Some examples:
Home Care Associates of Philadelphia, a business cooperative of mostly former welfare recipients who provide health care to the homebound, $250,000।
A shop in Hanoi that provides a market for crafts made in Vietnamese villages, $8,000.
A water-bottling company in England that uses its profits to bring clean water to developing countries, $130,000।
A construction company in Media that builds handicapped-accessible housing while training the formerly unemployed, $275,000।
Along with the successes, there have been failures, but Taussig is heartened by the many ventures that have taken root, paid off their loans, and blossomed। In 1999, Untours received the Newman's Own/George Award for being "the most generous business in America." The award from Paul Newman and John F. Kennedy Jr., the late publisher of George magazine, came with a $250,000 prize, which the Taussigs donated to the foundation.
"He's authentic," says Elizabeth Killough, the foundation's associate director। "He has never tried to be famous or call attention to himself. For the first eight years, he didn't tell anyone about the foundation. It's always been very personal for him."
Taussig and his wife live on Social Security and savings from the modest wages Norma earned as a school secretary and Untours bookkeeper।
"In a world gone mad with greed, he really believes in the common good," says Bob Fishman, executive director of the nonprofit social service agency Resources for Human Development, who has worked with Taussig on several projects। "He doesn't do it to say 'I'm right and you're wrong,' but rather to show, in his own sweet way, that there's another path. By his example, he gets all of us to think, 'can't I do more?' "
Taussig does not consider himself heroic or saintly।
"This is my way of finding meaning," he says. "This is how I get joy out of life. The widening gap between the rich and poor is not sustainable. I fear there will be a violent revolution if we don't find a solution to poverty in the world."
By Art Carey
Inquirer Staff Writer
MAX LEVINE
Hal Taussig, 82 is devoted to living a simple life। Taussig gave away his last car to a hitchhiker in 1973 and commutes to work on a bicycle। (Max Levine / For the Inquirer)
Hal Taussig wears baggy jeans and fraying work shirts that Goodwill might reject. His shoes have been resoled three times. He bought his one suit from a thrift shop for $14.At age 81, he doesn't own a car। He performs errands and commutes to the office by bicycle.
He lives on the outskirts of Media in a narrow wood-frame house that was built for mill and factory workers.
And he has given away millions।
Given the fortune that Taussig has made through Untours, his unique travel business, and has given away through the Untours Foundation, you could call him the Un-millionaire. If he so chose, he could be living in a Main Line mansion and driving a Mercedes. But he considers money and what he calls "stuff," beyond what he needs to survive, a burden, an embarrassment.
"He really walks the talk," says Judy Wicks, owner of the White Dog Cafe and a fellow member of the Social Venture Network, which applies capital to enterprises that reduce poverty and advance social justice।
"A lot of people donate money to the less fortunate but live in high style themselves. Hal sacrifices in his own life by living very simply in order to have more money to give away."
In many respects, he's a 21st-century Thoreau। "Let your capital be simplicity and contentment," the sage of Walden Pond wrote. "Those are my sentiments precisely," says Taussig, who has three children, five grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Taussig works three jobs:
He cares for Norma, his wife of 61 years, who was crippled by a stroke in 1999।
He helps run Untours, a tour-planning service that enables vacationers to experience foreign places deeply।
He directs the Untours Foundation, into which he pours all his profits - $5 million since 1992. The money is used to make low-interest loans to ventures and projects that help the needy and jobless - from a craft store in Hanoi to a home-health-care cooperative in Philadelphia.
"If capitalism is good, it should be good for the poor," Taussig declares। "I invest in entrepreneurial efforts to help poor people leverage themselves out of poverty."
As a boy, Taussig lived like a pioneer, in a log house on a cattle ranch in Colorado। His mother made his underwear from flour sacks. His Jewish grandfather married an evangelical Christian. Taussig was reared in a household where no one dare gainsay the Word of God, as plainly revealed in the Bible.
He was sent to Wheaton College in Illinois, "the Harvard of Evangelicalism," where he became a champion wrestler। Cursed by an independent mind, he balked at the story of Creation. It was preposterous, and he said so to God.
The Lord gave Taussig a pass, freeing him to craft his own faith.
"God created human beings in his own image। That is the heart of my faith," says Taussig, who now attends the First United Methodist Church of Media.
After college, Taussig returned to Colorado, where he and his brother resumed cattle ranching - and went broke।
"The cattle market took a nose-dive," Taussig says। "We invested in a sterile bull. We paid $5,700 for him, and sold him for hamburger."
Rather than feel ashamed, Taussig felt cleansed. He wanted, he says, to "own the failure."
"In America, we worship success, and making our way up, and leaving the masses behind," he says। "It's a shoddy ethic that leads us to value who we are by what we are."
In 1957, he came East to pursue a doctorate in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania। During the day, he taught seventh grade in Upper Darby and later 11th grade in Springfield, Delaware County. After 10 years of teaching, he took a sabbatical, and drove a VW Beetle all over Europe.
Back home, Taussig wrote a book about his adventure, Shoestring Sabbatical। It inspired an idea: a travel agency that would enable tourists to get to know a place intimately by staying at least two weeks in a rented cottage, apartment or farmhouse. With a $5,000 loan from a friend, Taussig launched Untours in 1975.
"Europe is so enriching and rewarding, I decided to help others have a similar experience," he says। His ulterior motive: forging connections and understanding between people and cultures.
In the early '80s, Taussig was making more money from the tour operation than he needed or wanted। He decided to accept about $20,000 a year for his basic expenses.
First, Taussig gave the excess profits back to his customers। The next year, he split the profits among his employees. Finally, he decided to channel them into a foundation.
The motto of the Untours Foundation is "a hand up, not a handout।" It provides low-interest loans, here and abroad, to create jobs, build low-income housing, and support fair-trade products: goods such as coffee that are sold at a price that guarantees producers and workers a fair wage and decent livelihood.
The loans, usually pegged to the U।S. inflation rate, range from $6,000 to $250,000. Over the last 15 years, about 50 individuals and organizations have benefited from Untours seed money. Some examples:
Home Care Associates of Philadelphia, a business cooperative of mostly former welfare recipients who provide health care to the homebound, $250,000।
A shop in Hanoi that provides a market for crafts made in Vietnamese villages, $8,000.
A water-bottling company in England that uses its profits to bring clean water to developing countries, $130,000।
A construction company in Media that builds handicapped-accessible housing while training the formerly unemployed, $275,000।
Along with the successes, there have been failures, but Taussig is heartened by the many ventures that have taken root, paid off their loans, and blossomed। In 1999, Untours received the Newman's Own/George Award for being "the most generous business in America." The award from Paul Newman and John F. Kennedy Jr., the late publisher of George magazine, came with a $250,000 prize, which the Taussigs donated to the foundation.
"He's authentic," says Elizabeth Killough, the foundation's associate director। "He has never tried to be famous or call attention to himself. For the first eight years, he didn't tell anyone about the foundation. It's always been very personal for him."
Taussig and his wife live on Social Security and savings from the modest wages Norma earned as a school secretary and Untours bookkeeper।
"In a world gone mad with greed, he really believes in the common good," says Bob Fishman, executive director of the nonprofit social service agency Resources for Human Development, who has worked with Taussig on several projects। "He doesn't do it to say 'I'm right and you're wrong,' but rather to show, in his own sweet way, that there's another path. By his example, he gets all of us to think, 'can't I do more?' "
Taussig does not consider himself heroic or saintly।
"This is my way of finding meaning," he says. "This is how I get joy out of life. The widening gap between the rich and poor is not sustainable. I fear there will be a violent revolution if we don't find a solution to poverty in the world."
First Man to the Summit - A Native American
Walter Harper 1913
After many delays and frustrations, including non-arrival of previously ordered technical climbing gear—which forced Karstens to improvise critical equipment—the party left Fairbanks in mid-March 1913 by dog team. At the Nenana mission they picked up two teenage Indian lads Esaias and Johnny Fredson, along with another dog team. These young students at the mission school proved invaluable assistants, both of them helping in the supply relays up Muldrow Glacier before Esaias had to return to Nenana, and Johnny remaining as the lonesome base-camp and dog-team keeper during the month-long absence of the climbing party.
Following established trails to the Kantishna mining camps (where final consultations with Sourdough climbers took place), the party broke trail past Wonder Lake, crossed McKinley River, and, on April 4, set up a wood-cutting camp at the last good spruce stand up Clearwater Creek. While wood was being gathered, Karstens went ahead and located the base camp at the forks of Cache Creek, just below McGonagall Pass. After transfer of the wood fuel up Cache Creek and preparation of rich mountain rations from caribou meat and marrow, the company began trailbreaking and supply relays up Muldrow Glacier on April 16.
The success of this pioneering expedition would be based on Karstens' pioneering experience and never-say-die toughness; on the shared knowledge of route and climbing conditions provided by his Sourdough-climb friends as well as Belmore Browne's recently published magazine account; and on the foresight, determination, and improvisational abilities of its members. Native foods in ample supply, locally hunted and processed for mountain transport, plus plenty of fuel and good bedding assured energy-rich nutrition and sleeping comfort throughout a long and storm-assaulted climb. Improved snow-goggles saved them from painful blindness. The climbers were mentally in the struggle for the duration, and they had the physical means to preserve their strength for the final push at high altitude.
Their way was not easy. Because this was no quick dash to the top (they knew they could not count on the Sourdoughs' luck with the weather), the immense physical labor required to assemble and transport equipment, supplies, and wood-fuel (the latter to the 11,000-foot camp) took its toll even in rare good weather. In the prevailing storms these labors were doubled. Storm-bound days confined to camp sapped will and gave rein to frustration. In these conditions even the best of friends get testy. Karstens and Stuck, because of temperament and style clashes, were hardly the best of friends.
Then there was the fire at their Muldrow camp: tents, socks, mitts, food destroyed or damaged. The devastation shook them. The expedition, so well prepared, faced defeat, victim of a stray spark and whipping winds. But Karstens said "Forget it," and the party improvised, making tents from sled covers, socks from Stuck's camel-hair sleeping bag liner, and so on. At one point, with the men sitting around sewing, the camp looked like a sweat shop. Deprived of such luxuries as sugar, powdered milk, and dried fruit—all burned—they still had the basics and they forged on.
Next they took on the access ridge, Karstens Ridge as named by Stuck. The steep and sheer, yet practicable pathway described by Belmore Browne was no more. Rising above them was a primordial shambles. Fringing the 3,000-foot high Harper Icefall, the ridge connected to the high basin formed by Harper Glacier. There was no other way to the final heights. They stared at the shattered ridge in disbelief, even as it dawned on them that the 1912 earthquake had created this chaos. They saw great blocks of ice, bigger than buildings, some the size of city blocks. They leaned, balanced, and honey combed on each other on a thin ridge that fell more than 1,000 feet to Muldrow Glacier and 3,000 feet to its eastern branch, the Traleika.
For 3 weeks, as storms allowed, Karstens and Harper spent most of their time probing through this jumbled nightmare and chopping steps—3 miles of them—out of the concrete-like ice. They avoided the nearly sheer flanking slopes as much as possible, for avalanche danger was great, and the overhanging, unconsolidated blocks of ice balanced in defiance of gravity. In his diary Karstens noted that some of the blocks would fall if someone whispered at them. Stuck and Tatum began supply relays with backpacks as soon as the icy staircase reached flat spots where goods could be cached.
Finally, at 15,000 feet they passed beyond the ridge into the basin, above which rose Denali's great peaks. On June 3, at mid-point on Harper Glacier, Walter Harper spotted the Sourdoughs' flagpole on the North Peak. With the glasses everyone saw it, thus confirming the Taylor-Anderson ascent and McGonagall's hauling of the pole to nearly 19,000 feet.
In deliberate stages the men now advanced from camp to camp, always getting higher and closer to the South Peak. Their last camp at 17,500 feet—almost directly below Denali Pass between the peaks—put them about 1,000 feet higher for the final assault than Parker-Browne had been the year before. This was a critical advantage for 50- year-old Hudson Stuck, who was feeling the altitude much more than the youthful Harper and Tatum and the mid-thirties Karstens. At that they still had nearly 3,000 feet to go vertically. But with all hands reasonably healthy, plenty of food, good bedding, and ample gas fuel for their stove, their objective was attainable.
Next morning, Saturday June 7, came on clear and cold, good weather for the climb. But except for Walter Harper, the men were suffering. For dinner the night before Harper had cooked noodles to thicken the caribou stew; at such altitude and lacking baking powder—also burned—the noodles were a half-done mess that wreaked havoc upon all digestive systems except the chef's. This, plus the last few day's extreme efforts at high altitude and excitement over the next day's climb, had made sleep impossible. Alone with his thoughts in the early hours, huddled over the gas stove, Stuck had stared at failure. All but Walter looked upon the new day with bad stomachs and wracking headaches. Karstens would have stayed in bed except that this was the day of the climb.
After a very light breakfast Karstens assigned the lead to the sturdy Walter, and at 4 a.m., with sun shining, a keen wind, and the thermometer marking minus 4 degrees F., the sorry company followed the indomitable young Indian toward the utmost heights. They carried lunch and scientific-instrument packs only. First they traversed the snow ridge that rose above their camp, then headed toward the final rises that still hid the summit. It was step by gasping step in bitter cold, which, aided by the wind pierced their layered clothing and numbed their heavily clad hands and feet. Stuck relates that Karstens beat his freezing feet so violently against the packed snow that two of his nails later dropped off. On the margin between life and terrible damage or death by freezing, they pushed on. Behind a ridge, partially sheltered from the wind, the ascending sun gave a little warmth. Lunch and a thermos of hot tea helped.
As confidence grew, however, so did altitude. Hudson Stuck's oxygen deficiency nearly overcame him several times. He would black-out, then rest and recover. Walter Harper relieved him of the bulky mercurial barometer that Stuck had insisted on carrying.
At last, with Harper still in the lead and the first man there to stand, they got to the very top. Stuck, on the verge of unconsciousness had to be braced the last few steps by his companions.
After a few moments of recovery the climbers shook hands and gave thanks to an Almighty who seemed very near on this high place. Then the party set up the little instrument tent and began their measurements—temperature, altitude, and others. From later expert calculations of their readings, the mountain's altitude averaged out at 20,700 feet.
One of the experts, U.S. Geological Survey topographer C.E. Giffin, figured 20,374 feet above sea level, closest to the true 20,320. [38] (A 1909 Coast and Geodetic Survey observation had placed the altitude at 20,300, only 20 feet off the mark.) [39]
After many delays and frustrations, including non-arrival of previously ordered technical climbing gear—which forced Karstens to improvise critical equipment—the party left Fairbanks in mid-March 1913 by dog team. At the Nenana mission they picked up two teenage Indian lads Esaias and Johnny Fredson, along with another dog team. These young students at the mission school proved invaluable assistants, both of them helping in the supply relays up Muldrow Glacier before Esaias had to return to Nenana, and Johnny remaining as the lonesome base-camp and dog-team keeper during the month-long absence of the climbing party.
Following established trails to the Kantishna mining camps (where final consultations with Sourdough climbers took place), the party broke trail past Wonder Lake, crossed McKinley River, and, on April 4, set up a wood-cutting camp at the last good spruce stand up Clearwater Creek. While wood was being gathered, Karstens went ahead and located the base camp at the forks of Cache Creek, just below McGonagall Pass. After transfer of the wood fuel up Cache Creek and preparation of rich mountain rations from caribou meat and marrow, the company began trailbreaking and supply relays up Muldrow Glacier on April 16.
The success of this pioneering expedition would be based on Karstens' pioneering experience and never-say-die toughness; on the shared knowledge of route and climbing conditions provided by his Sourdough-climb friends as well as Belmore Browne's recently published magazine account; and on the foresight, determination, and improvisational abilities of its members. Native foods in ample supply, locally hunted and processed for mountain transport, plus plenty of fuel and good bedding assured energy-rich nutrition and sleeping comfort throughout a long and storm-assaulted climb. Improved snow-goggles saved them from painful blindness. The climbers were mentally in the struggle for the duration, and they had the physical means to preserve their strength for the final push at high altitude.
Their way was not easy. Because this was no quick dash to the top (they knew they could not count on the Sourdoughs' luck with the weather), the immense physical labor required to assemble and transport equipment, supplies, and wood-fuel (the latter to the 11,000-foot camp) took its toll even in rare good weather. In the prevailing storms these labors were doubled. Storm-bound days confined to camp sapped will and gave rein to frustration. In these conditions even the best of friends get testy. Karstens and Stuck, because of temperament and style clashes, were hardly the best of friends.
Then there was the fire at their Muldrow camp: tents, socks, mitts, food destroyed or damaged. The devastation shook them. The expedition, so well prepared, faced defeat, victim of a stray spark and whipping winds. But Karstens said "Forget it," and the party improvised, making tents from sled covers, socks from Stuck's camel-hair sleeping bag liner, and so on. At one point, with the men sitting around sewing, the camp looked like a sweat shop. Deprived of such luxuries as sugar, powdered milk, and dried fruit—all burned—they still had the basics and they forged on.
Next they took on the access ridge, Karstens Ridge as named by Stuck. The steep and sheer, yet practicable pathway described by Belmore Browne was no more. Rising above them was a primordial shambles. Fringing the 3,000-foot high Harper Icefall, the ridge connected to the high basin formed by Harper Glacier. There was no other way to the final heights. They stared at the shattered ridge in disbelief, even as it dawned on them that the 1912 earthquake had created this chaos. They saw great blocks of ice, bigger than buildings, some the size of city blocks. They leaned, balanced, and honey combed on each other on a thin ridge that fell more than 1,000 feet to Muldrow Glacier and 3,000 feet to its eastern branch, the Traleika.
For 3 weeks, as storms allowed, Karstens and Harper spent most of their time probing through this jumbled nightmare and chopping steps—3 miles of them—out of the concrete-like ice. They avoided the nearly sheer flanking slopes as much as possible, for avalanche danger was great, and the overhanging, unconsolidated blocks of ice balanced in defiance of gravity. In his diary Karstens noted that some of the blocks would fall if someone whispered at them. Stuck and Tatum began supply relays with backpacks as soon as the icy staircase reached flat spots where goods could be cached.
Finally, at 15,000 feet they passed beyond the ridge into the basin, above which rose Denali's great peaks. On June 3, at mid-point on Harper Glacier, Walter Harper spotted the Sourdoughs' flagpole on the North Peak. With the glasses everyone saw it, thus confirming the Taylor-Anderson ascent and McGonagall's hauling of the pole to nearly 19,000 feet.
In deliberate stages the men now advanced from camp to camp, always getting higher and closer to the South Peak. Their last camp at 17,500 feet—almost directly below Denali Pass between the peaks—put them about 1,000 feet higher for the final assault than Parker-Browne had been the year before. This was a critical advantage for 50- year-old Hudson Stuck, who was feeling the altitude much more than the youthful Harper and Tatum and the mid-thirties Karstens. At that they still had nearly 3,000 feet to go vertically. But with all hands reasonably healthy, plenty of food, good bedding, and ample gas fuel for their stove, their objective was attainable.
Next morning, Saturday June 7, came on clear and cold, good weather for the climb. But except for Walter Harper, the men were suffering. For dinner the night before Harper had cooked noodles to thicken the caribou stew; at such altitude and lacking baking powder—also burned—the noodles were a half-done mess that wreaked havoc upon all digestive systems except the chef's. This, plus the last few day's extreme efforts at high altitude and excitement over the next day's climb, had made sleep impossible. Alone with his thoughts in the early hours, huddled over the gas stove, Stuck had stared at failure. All but Walter looked upon the new day with bad stomachs and wracking headaches. Karstens would have stayed in bed except that this was the day of the climb.
After a very light breakfast Karstens assigned the lead to the sturdy Walter, and at 4 a.m., with sun shining, a keen wind, and the thermometer marking minus 4 degrees F., the sorry company followed the indomitable young Indian toward the utmost heights. They carried lunch and scientific-instrument packs only. First they traversed the snow ridge that rose above their camp, then headed toward the final rises that still hid the summit. It was step by gasping step in bitter cold, which, aided by the wind pierced their layered clothing and numbed their heavily clad hands and feet. Stuck relates that Karstens beat his freezing feet so violently against the packed snow that two of his nails later dropped off. On the margin between life and terrible damage or death by freezing, they pushed on. Behind a ridge, partially sheltered from the wind, the ascending sun gave a little warmth. Lunch and a thermos of hot tea helped.
As confidence grew, however, so did altitude. Hudson Stuck's oxygen deficiency nearly overcame him several times. He would black-out, then rest and recover. Walter Harper relieved him of the bulky mercurial barometer that Stuck had insisted on carrying.
At last, with Harper still in the lead and the first man there to stand, they got to the very top. Stuck, on the verge of unconsciousness had to be braced the last few steps by his companions.
After a few moments of recovery the climbers shook hands and gave thanks to an Almighty who seemed very near on this high place. Then the party set up the little instrument tent and began their measurements—temperature, altitude, and others. From later expert calculations of their readings, the mountain's altitude averaged out at 20,700 feet.
One of the experts, U.S. Geological Survey topographer C.E. Giffin, figured 20,374 feet above sea level, closest to the true 20,320. [38] (A 1909 Coast and Geodetic Survey observation had placed the altitude at 20,300, only 20 feet off the mark.) [39]
Christopher Reeve wasn't Superman
Far from flying, he probably knew he would never walk again.
Reeve, who died Sunday at 52 of a heart attack, was one of Hollywood's best-known actors when a 1995 equestrian accident rendered him a quadriplegic. With eloquence and determination, he became a spokesman for the optimism that can transform the lives of people with spinal column injuries.
But that transformation is of a limited sort. Optimism has its limits. Here's what it can and can't do.
Optimism can help organize people, money and resources to seek new treatments. And Reeve did. He created foundations, raised awareness, addressed Congress. Thanks to him, more people became aware of spinal cord injuries, and more scientists studied them.
Optimism can help injured people take control of their post-injury lives. In those very different lives, these people can teach themselves ways to endure, to thrive, to own every new second. Optimism can light the hard road to healing, on which each step is a triumph of the human will.
Reeve was the ultimate symbol of such triumphs. In films, commercials, television shows, he was active in more ways, in more venues, than ever before. He was a leading, and damaging, critic of curbs on federal funds for stem-cell research. He reminded those with spinal cord injuries that they can live lives with passion and impact.
But optimism cannot cure. We are nowhere near a cure for what happened to him, nor are we likely to be for many years. Reeve often spoke as though he expected to walk again, but he probably knew he wouldn't. Survivability rather than recovery is the word. We are far from the operation or the drug that can reverse paralysis; we don't know enough.
It would be terrible to mislead anyone, especially the 250,000 to 400,000 people a year who are paralyzed by spinal cord trauma, 30 new cases each day. It would be irresponsible to hold out a hope that does not exist.
Scientists have begun to make strides, especially in animal-based research. But what our children's generation will see, is a mix of therapies, each aimed at increasing function a certain amount. Perhaps this mix of therapies will make heartening differences for thousands of people. That is wonderful, but that is far as anyone's prediction should go.
Too often it takes a Christopher Reeve or a Michael J. Fox, some stricken celebrity to put a medical condition on the map, to attract attention and dollars. Such is the paralysis of a health-care system in which the dollar speaks louder for some conditions than for others.
People can't fly. They are bound to their bodies and their world. Yet even when they cannot deny their limitations, they can defy them. When they do, as Reeve did, they fly high indeed. That's the superhero in us all.
Reeve, who died Sunday at 52 of a heart attack, was one of Hollywood's best-known actors when a 1995 equestrian accident rendered him a quadriplegic. With eloquence and determination, he became a spokesman for the optimism that can transform the lives of people with spinal column injuries.
But that transformation is of a limited sort. Optimism has its limits. Here's what it can and can't do.
Optimism can help organize people, money and resources to seek new treatments. And Reeve did. He created foundations, raised awareness, addressed Congress. Thanks to him, more people became aware of spinal cord injuries, and more scientists studied them.
Optimism can help injured people take control of their post-injury lives. In those very different lives, these people can teach themselves ways to endure, to thrive, to own every new second. Optimism can light the hard road to healing, on which each step is a triumph of the human will.
Reeve was the ultimate symbol of such triumphs. In films, commercials, television shows, he was active in more ways, in more venues, than ever before. He was a leading, and damaging, critic of curbs on federal funds for stem-cell research. He reminded those with spinal cord injuries that they can live lives with passion and impact.
But optimism cannot cure. We are nowhere near a cure for what happened to him, nor are we likely to be for many years. Reeve often spoke as though he expected to walk again, but he probably knew he wouldn't. Survivability rather than recovery is the word. We are far from the operation or the drug that can reverse paralysis; we don't know enough.
It would be terrible to mislead anyone, especially the 250,000 to 400,000 people a year who are paralyzed by spinal cord trauma, 30 new cases each day. It would be irresponsible to hold out a hope that does not exist.
Scientists have begun to make strides, especially in animal-based research. But what our children's generation will see, is a mix of therapies, each aimed at increasing function a certain amount. Perhaps this mix of therapies will make heartening differences for thousands of people. That is wonderful, but that is far as anyone's prediction should go.
Too often it takes a Christopher Reeve or a Michael J. Fox, some stricken celebrity to put a medical condition on the map, to attract attention and dollars. Such is the paralysis of a health-care system in which the dollar speaks louder for some conditions than for others.
People can't fly. They are bound to their bodies and their world. Yet even when they cannot deny their limitations, they can defy them. When they do, as Reeve did, they fly high indeed. That's the superhero in us all.
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