MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS Note: Once again I apologize for not appearing on time last week. Technical difficulties, I'm afraid. Things are now looking up and I count on having something new here every Monday from now on. People who have been reading this pillar of piffle, as my role model Mr. Parker used to call his column sometimes, but he didn’t mean it and neither do I, will have noticed that, since I have so far eschewed politics as a subject, I have a few other sources of material that I draw on for themes for my weekly essay. One of the themes is the continually unfolding story of the hijinks of the educational establishment out here where I live, whose members are continually being exposed for their free and easy ways of handling the school funds at their disposal, which they manage to divert to uses that have a lot more to do with recreation than education. This week for instance we had a guilty plea in the case of Mr. Sonedecker, formerly the head mullah of the Three Villages school district here. Being the next of kin to the wayward wind, his wanderlust led him to take at least 42 trips out of town in four years which he charged to the district to the tune of $157,000. Among his destinations were Palm Beach, Las Vegas and London, where he inspected strip clubs and other educational institutions. There’s a lot more to come. Last year was the year of investigations and indictments. This year they will continue in the districts still under examination, but for the ones that have already been exposed there will be trials. There ought to be a rich haul of material for use in this space. Another source of material I tap into is the county government setup of this country, which nobody looks at, but which supports 3,351 separate governments, some of them in counties almost devoid of human habitation. There’s something wrong about this, or at least weird, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it yet. But I’ll keep trying. I do other things as well, like reviewing books and movies a bit, but my real goldmine for anecdotes for reprinting is my personal archive of action reports from my police days. I find lots of nuggets like this one: “Perpetrator of Liquor Store Robbery Fatally Shot by Pistol Licensee in 110th Precinct”. This was December 16th, 1975. The storeowner, Mr. X, and his brother were in the back room watching television when they heard a customer come into the store. Mr. X went out to meet him and found a young white man holding a Walther automatic on him. “Give me the money!” he said and he emphasized it with a blow to the head with the pistol. He followed up with more raps to the head, but noticing X’s brother coming to his help, he missed what X was doing -- reaching down to an ankle holster for his Colt. He got it out and pumped five shots into the robber’s chest. A fast-moving fifty seconds was over. One man was dead and another man was covered with blood. This was one of the easy ones. Only three people involved and two guns, the Walther with only two rounds in it. The thief had been running a bluff with it. The victim’s pistol license was completely in order and there were no perjurors around to accuse him of violating anyone’s civil rights. I never found out who the dead man was. Follow-up wasn’t my job Another who didn’t follow up, in the sense of taking heed of the lesson imparted above was William Lamplight, who along with his friend Gregory Carmichael held up two liquor stores at gunpoint ten minutes apart, but allowed himself to be spotted driving away and was found hiding in his mother’s apartment. William too flourished a gun and actually fired a shot in one robbery but luckily didn’t hit anyone and didn’t get hit himself. More than likely the unlucky fellow on Northern Boulevard had a few narrow escapes himself before his time ran out, but he didn’t draw any lessons from them, and I doubt that William did either. My collection runs the gamut, not just of liquor store robberies, but of all other kinds too, as well as fire, floods, hangings, drownings, murders, suicides, accidents, rescues, escapes, recaptures, and all the other ups and downs of life in the big city. A woman gets released from Elmhurst Hospital after being treated there for the dose of pesticides she swallowed in a suicide attempt and what do you think she does when she gets home? She commits suicide. Two cops go out patrolling in their radio car and get a call on a robbery nearby. They begin heading over and what happens? They wrap up the radio car. Time and time again. I know. I was there. Here’s another one Two detectives stage a decoy operation one evening on Jamaica Avenue. One window-shops while the other follows him on foot. Suddenly the first man is surrounded by a “roving gang”, who rough him up and grab his wallet. Not worried, they walk away. The detective pursues, holding up his shield and calling after them. Apparently relying on moral force alone, he doesn’t show his gun. The boys split, now with the two detectives after them in their radio car. Two are overtaken quickly, but Bethea, the leader, isn’t. He cuts through some back yards, then conceals himself in the shadow of a wall and ambushes the detective chasing him as he vaults over the wall. Bethea hits him from behind and concusses him momentarily. The next thing hde knows is that he’s on his back with Bethea straddling him and pulling his revolver from its holster. He has it in his hand and in the cop’s face as he tries to pull the trigger while the cop clutches his hand. The gun goes off but the shot goes wild and is heard by the cop’s partner who’s been holding on to the two prisoners. He arrives in time to rescue the first man from another beating and to subdue Bethea. A wild night. But I throve on them. Not the physical part, I didn't have the kind of second sight that would have enabled me to predict where incidents would break out. but the reportorial side appealed to me. My inner Ernie Pyle came out. Not, though, until after I got over the sinking feeling from the realization that I wasn’t going home on time that night after all. Resigning myself to this, I let the adrenalin take over and plunged into the investigation. When? Where? Who? What? How? and Why? was the sequence the department wanted and it was the one I followed through many a bum steer and up many a blind alley. Eventually though, the story began to take shape and make sense and I put it to bed in the sure and certain hope of annoying various administration characters I didn’t like by confronting them with a job of work they couldn’t match on the best day they ever had. The story was clear and the trimmings were attached in the proper order; the names and numbers of the records made, the offices notified, the copies distributed, the steps left to be taken. Halfway though my career I had learned to type in self-defense. Reports had to go out in the morning mail, which meant that too many nights found me sitting with a typist who couldn’t handle my handwriting, requiring me to dictate to him. Typing meant I could write a story double-spaced and leave it for the typist and go home. In the dawn maybe, but still home. And I was owed time-and-a half for all the overtime I’d put in. It was begrudged -- your application needed three signatures -- but that was the law and no one’s above the law, now are they?
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