Two Stories about my Grandmother

©2015 by John LaTorre

I didn’t know my grandmother well, sad to say. We never really communicated, because she preferred to speak to my brother and me in Italian, and seemed upset that we didn’t understand that language. I don’t ever recall her asking us what we were interested in, or what we’d been doing lately, or what we wanted to be when we were older. That may have been because all her other grandchildren grew up in Syracuse, and she was involved in their lives to a far greater degree than we were. But we moved away from Syracuse when I was four years old, and I only saw her intermittently after that … perhaps two or three times a year when we were in the States, and never when we were overseas, except for a few weeks every two years or so. We were strangers to her, and she to us.

There’s a picture of my grandmother surrounded by some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My brother is behind her, and I’m in the front, lying in the grass and trying to ignore the camera. In a strange way, it seems to symbolize our relationship to her, my brother out of her line of sight and I apparently wishing I was somewhere else.

But there’s no question in my mind that she loved my father, and he loved her. I would see the letters she wrote in a spindly script, beginning with “Caro figlio.” Dear son. The letters were in Italian. So were the letters he wrote back, beginning with “Cara Mama.” We’d get at least one letter a month when we were overseas. In those years when we were living in the United States, Dad would telephone her every week, if not more often.

Grandma was born Palma Mammella in Monopoli, Italy, in 1880, according to the family history my father left us. Monopoli was (and still is) an Adriatic seaport in the province of Bari. Her formal education lasted six months, but she taught herself to read and write. “She went to dressmakers school until she was fifteen years old,” Dad noted. “The teacher gave her extra work to take home so she could make a little money.” She became a professional seamstress. I have always found it ironic that, to my best knowledge, the only other person in our family who sewed for a living was myself; I was a professional sail maker and tent maker for twenty years. I wonder what she would have made of that. She taught my father to sew, and over the years he’d re-seam some of his cloths to suit himself, sometimes adding pockets or zippers. I do that, too.

Palma married Raimondo LaTorre, my grandfather, in “about 1903” as my Dad stated, although elsewhere in the history he had the date as 1904. Raimondo was a country policeman, who was raised on a farm and also worked at whatever jobs he could find. Palma gave birth to two girls (and a boy, who survived only five months) before the family left Italy in 1912. In the New World, five more children were added to their brood. Her husband worked at various jobs all his life, including two unsuccessful years as a farmer. (The farm no longer exists; its acreage is now buried beneath one of the southern runways of Hancock Airport.) I have no memory of Raimondo, since he died in 1949, when I was a baby. After his death, according to my father, “...my mother was determined to get her U.S. citizenship and went to school to get the necessary education to pass the exam. Which she did with great success. She ended up knowing more about American government and history than many native born Americans.”

I have only a few memories of Grandma, mostly playing cards with a skill and ruthlessness that separated me quickly from my pennies and gave me a lifelong aversion to gambling. She died in 1971, at the age of ninety-one. My parents and little sister were overseas, and my older brother Joe was doing graduate studies at the University of California. Since I was living in Maryland at the time, it was up to me to represent my father at her funeral, and I was one of her pallbearers.

Despite her supposed proficiency with the language, her lack of fluency sometimes caused some confusion. A classic example was when my father was enrolled at Syracuse University after World War II. One morning, the phone rang in my grandmother’s house, and she picked it up.

“Good morning, Mrs. LaTorre,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “I am the Dean of Students at Syracuse University, and I’m calling to tell you that your son Joseph has made the Dean’s List this semester.”

“I don’t care,” my grandmother replied. “He’s a good boy.”

I love that story, because it demonstrates her suspicion that boys, even good boys, will be up to mischief once in a while. But it also showed her fierce determination to love and protect her own, not matter what they may have done.

That protectiveness also shows up in my second story, along with a touch of what Sicilians call “omerta,” a concept now familiar to the world at large due to the stories Mario Puzo and Joe Valachi told about the Mafia. It may not have been as strong an influence in Bari as it was in Sicily, where (as Puzo wrote) it was unthinkable that a person would collaborate with anybody in authority or even converse with innocent strangers who were simply asking directions. My father told me of a time, when he was a very young boy, when a local criminal was living under the family’s porch for a week or so to hide out from the law. Whether my family’s reluctance to inform the police was due to fear of retaliation or dislike for the police, my father did not say.

It so happened that after graduating from Syracuse University, my father applied for a job with the Central Intelligence Agency. Because it involved a security clearance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent two agents to inquire of my father’s background. They interviewed some of my dad’s friends and instructors, and came at last to visit my grandmother. Let us imagine the scene in the parlor of 237 North Beech Street, as they introduce themselves:

“Mrs. LaTorre,” They begin,  “we’re from the government, and we’re inquiring about your son Joseph.”

“I got no son,” my grandmother replies.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. You’re Palma LaTorre, of 327 North Beech Street in Syracuse? We have you as the mother of Joseph LaTorre.”

“I got no son.”

“Well, then, we’re sorry to have troubled you.” They get up and leave. No sooner does the front door close than Grandma is on the phone to her oldest daughter Anna.

“Anna! Anna!” she says in Italian. “There’s some men from the government looking for Joe!”

“Oh, Ma!” says Anna. “Don’t you remember? Joe said that there’d be some people from the FBI to visit us for that job he wants in Washington!”

Grandma drops the phone. As two very confused FBI agents are opening the door to their car, the front door of 327 North Beech Street flies open, and there’s Mrs. LaTorre, running down the sidewalk toward them. She’s waving her arms and saying “Come-a back! Come-a back! I tell-a you EVERY THING!”

Incense and Radio Shack

©2015 by John LaTorre

For the past year or so, I’ve been jamming with some friends in a sort of open-mike situation at a local art gallery. The venue does not lend itself to unamplified acoustic instruments, so I’ve been building pickups into my most recent crop of instruments. I usually bring a guitar and a mandolin, and it’s been a problem having to plug both instruments into the house board. So I decided to acquire a little gadget called an A-B switch, which is basically a box that allows you to choose which instrument you want to run into the house sound system. You plug both instruments into the box and run another cable from the box to the board. Then you can simply flick a switch to determine which instrument you’re going to amplify, without having to unplug anything. Easy peasy.

I got online and found that these little gems can cost from forty to a hundred dollars new, and not much less used if you can find them. That price seemed steep to me, considering that it’s essentially three jacks, a switch, and a box to put them in. Sure, they’ve got little light-emitting diodes that tell you which instrument is “hot” and that requires a battery and a battery holder and a few more wires. But forty dollars?

As it turned out, I spent a lot less than that, because my local Radio Shack store was going out of business, as part of the sweeping downsize that followed that company’s recent bankruptcy. Everything in the store as at least half off, with many components going for almost a quarter of what their list price was. I walked out of the store with everything I needed for about ten dollars. The only thing that they didn’t have was the switch itself, which I bought for another ten dollars at another electronics store.

I am no stranger to soldering things together. When I was in college, I’d built several audio components from the kits that were widely available to the hobbyist at that time. Those were the days when a number of companies were offering high-quality electronic gear in kit form, and you could build them for a fraction of what they would cost completely assembled.

As I wired and soldered the various parts of those kits into place, my dorm room would be perfumed by the smell of the rosin that was incorporated into the solder I used. It’s very much like incense, that smell: sweet and musky at the same time, pungent and addicting. A well-made solder joint is a thing of beauty, with just the right amount of solder forming a satiny sheen over the wires and terminals, and without clumps or globs of excess solder. It also meant that the connection would be reliable and trouble-free, which is paramount to the success of the project. Over the next year or two, I would build a couple of audio amplifiers, a tuner, a pre-amplifier, a voltmeter, and a bewildering array of switch-boxes for hooking up the various components. Sometimes I’d need to adapt a project for some particular use, and a friend of mine, who was an electrical engineering student, would make a quick sketch of a circuit for me. It was up to me to translate that sketch into reality. But mostly I just built the kit straight off the plans that were provided by any number of companies. And, in those days, there were a lot of companies that sold these kits.

 Radio Shack sold a variety of kits under their Archer brand, mostly consisting of test equipment. Dynaco sold high-end components, in both kit and completed form, which competed with the best audio equipment that you could buy off the shelf. Allied Radio and Lafayette Electronics, who were the major players that Radio Shack was in direct competition with, had all sorts of kits for the audiophile and engineer, which could be bought by mail order or at any of the storefronts they maintained in major cities. Other manufacturers focused on the ham radio market.

And at the top of the heap, lording over the field, was the Heath Corporation, a company that started out building kit airplanes before World War II and drifted into avionics after the war. Their first kits, for test equipment like voltmeters and oscilloscopes, were instant best sellers. After that, they branched out into kits for audio components, musician’s electronics such as guitar amps and mixers, and finally computers, which put the latest in technology into the hands of any kid with a soldering iron. The Heathkit catalog, packed with page after pages of cool stuff you could build in any garage or dorm room, could be found in the hands of a hobbyist or student in nearly every high school and college in the land, and was probably studied as lasciviously as any edition of Playboy by the audiophiles and techies among us.

All those companies are gone now. Electronics kits, once a billion-dollar industry, are now relegated to simple gizmos like LED flashers, buzzers, and other toys tucked into the corner of your local electronics supply center (if there is indeed one of those in your town anymore).  You can buy more specialized things like power-supply kits on-line, but they are marketed to the techie, not the hobbyist. Ironically, in a culture where we are more dependent on electronics than ever, we have ceded control of the crafting of them to large companies and now receive them in the form of finished components.

I don’t know why. Maybe it had to do with the reduced scale of modern electronic components. When I started getting interested in electronics, before the days of the integrated circuit, semiconductors were the new kids on the block back, but most of the other parts in your average radio or hi-fi were the same ones that my dad grew up with: resistors, capacitors, tubes, potentiometers, and switches. Putting those parts together in different ways was how you got them to do different things. Now those parts have been reduced to invisibility, thousands of them crammed onto a microchip. When I pop open a radio nowadays, there’s scarcely a part I recognize. And I used to know them all. I could actually tell a resistor’s impedance by reading the color bands on it, without the need for a legend, thanks to my experience with kits.

One of my first jobs after I left college was working in an electronics parts store in Arlington, Virginia. It was technically a wholesaler, selling tubes and television antennas and such to the various television shops in the area, but anybody could walk in and buy stuff. If the customers didn’t know exactly what they wanted, somebody on the staff would ask a few questions and usually be able to sell them the right part. The Pentagon also had an account, since it was only a few miles from our store. Once in a while we’d get one of their telephoned orders for various electronics parts. We’d fill the order and, by and by, somebody in an Army vehicle would come by to pick them up and whisk them away, presumably to use them for classified projects. That was not the sort of thing we were supposed to ask questions about.

Due to my experience in building kits, I’d already had a passing familiarity with many of the components I sold, and I completed my education by taking a discarded television completely apart, resistor by resistor and capacitor by capacitor.  I would spend my evenings dissecting that television, filling the air with the incense of melting solder and noting what the pieces looked like so that I could provide the right part when asked for it. Of course, those were the days when it was actually worthwhile for a skilled technician to repair things like televisions and radios. Now it’s more cost-effective to simply replace them.

And that, I think, was what led to the demise of the kit industry. As integrated circuits took over, the cost of the electronics gear plummeted. You no longer could save money building a kit, because the parts themselves would cost more than the finished product, unless you could make your own integrated circuits. And your radio or boom-box or computer now comes with a warranty, something that no kit manufacturer could provide, since they relied for labor on clueless people like you and me.

So their market dwindled. Radio Shack bought out Allied Radio, and Circuit City bought out Lafayette. But the market was changing swiftly, and even these large companies found themselves competing with big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, and Best Buy, which treated electronics as just another commodity, like toilet paper or dish towels. Circuit City was out of the picture by 2009. (It appears that my old employer in Arlington closed down at about that time, too.) Radio Shack is holding on by its fingernails by promoting mobile phones and batteries, but continues to be a place where the hobbyist could buy a switch or a pack of resistors. I doubt if that will continue much longer, although I hope it will.

I finally got the A-B box built, sweetening the air of my garage with the familiar smell of solder, a scent that brought back memories of unpacking kits, checking their contents of neatly packaged wires and transistors and such, completing each step and putting a check-mark in the accompanying box to mark my progress. Now I was working from a schematic I downloaded from the Internet, but I didn’t need an instruction manual now. I found that I still had my soldering skills, and except for a minor wiring error that I easily corrected, all went well. I even built in a nine-volt battery to power two LEDs that tell me which instrument is going to be amplified. They’re not really necessary, but since they only cost me an extra buck or two, why not?

And some day I’ll find a use for those other parts I bought for forty dollars or so. I couldn’t pass up a 70% off deal like that, and I’m sure I’ll find a use for them somewhere. I’ve smelled the aroma of hot rosin again, and who knows what I might end up building?

[Note: since this article was written, it has come to my attention that there is still at least one purveyor of high-end audio component kits. It's called Akitika, and their web page can be found at http://www.akitika.com/index.php

I don't have any personal experience with them, but they're worth checking out, I think. The people on the various do-it-yourself electronics forums say good things about the company.

Another thing: the electronics store I mentioned in the third paragraph went out of business about six months after I posted the article. And our last Radio Shack in Sacramento is gone.  For parts, you have to go to Fry's Electronics here in Sacramento ... and the Internet, of course.]

Making the Bones -- A Christmas Meditation

© 2014 by John LaTorre

It is December, and as usual I am making “Ossi di Morte.” These little bone-shaped cookies come from southern Italy. Sources on the Internet inform me that they are traditionally made for the “Day of the Dead” in November, but my family has always regarded them as Christmas cookies, and I have followed suit.

They are not the easiest cookies to make. It's not the ingredients, which are simplicity itself: flour, eggs, confectioner's sugar, and baking powder. (Several recipes call for using just egg whites, and adding almonds, almond extract, or vanilla, but mine doesn't). The only thing I add to the family recipe is a teaspoon or two of water, which makes the dough easier to handle.

For this is where the difficulty comes in: to make them in the traditional way, you take a small handful of the dough, squeeze it into the approximate shape and size of a hot dog, and roll it out on an unfloured board, using only light pressure from the flat of your hand. Push too hard, and the roll crumbles. My Aunt Molly Guido, who taught me how to make these cookies, stressed this. “It's like petting a kitten,” she would say. “Light touch! Light touch!” Gradually, I got the hang of it.

Molly's name wasn't always Molly. When she was born, in 1914, she was christened Carmela LaTorre, after her mother's sister. She was the fourth child born to her parents, who had moved the family from Italy three years before. She had three older sisters, two born in Italy and one in the United States. Two boys and another girl would complete the family before the decade was out.

When the children entered school, they didn't know English. Perhaps to help with their assimilation into American culture, some were given non-Italian nicknames. Porzia became “Grace,” Carmela became “Molly,” Giuseppe became “Joe” and Vincenzo became, inexplicably, “Jimmy” (creating so much confusion in later years that he had it legally changed to “James”). Joe was my dad. None of the documents I'd ever seen ever referred to him as “Giuseppe,” only as “Joseph,” so perhaps that was his legal name from birth, but he was always called Giuseppe until he entered school. Only my aunts Anna, Antonia, and Angelina used the names they were given at birth, although the latter two preferred “Tony” or "Antoinette" and “Angie.”

I can picture Molly with her sisters, watching their mother make the “bones.” They would have talked in Italian – or more specifically, Barese, a dialect so different that my father had trouble speaking conventional Italian when he visited that country, although the farther south he traveled, the more familiar the language became. As I roll the dough down from the diameter of a hot dog to that of a Sharpie, I am wondering what my grandmother used for a metric, since she probably had never seen a Sharpie in her life. A finger's thickness? Which finger? Whose finger? It is too late to ask Molly, since she died years ago.

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

As I form the dough, I am thinking about my ancestors. My brother Joe has just sent me a CD with hundreds of pictures on it, all from my late father's photograph albums. Some of the faces are familiar to me, although they look impossibly young. There are many pictures of my grandfather, and I recognize him instantly, although I have no direct memory of him, since he died the year after I was born. But all his children bear some resemblance to him. He is usually shown seated. And there are many of my grandmother, in various stages of her life, gardening and talking and holding grandchildren.

Other faces are strangers to me. Their pictures date from the turn of the last century, and they glare out at the camera as if it would bite them. I wish I knew who they were. I'm afraid that their identities will be forever lost, since my father seldom took the time to caption the pictures he kept. Most of these pictures are cracked and faded. For that matter, most of the memories I have of my relatives are also cracked and faded, and some of them, like the smells of our family's summer house on Otisco Lake and the feel of my mother's winter coat, are lost forever. My memories are now inaccurate and can no longer be trusted for veracity. I have idealized my past.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of our black cat Sable darting out of the room. Sable died three years ago. There are many ghosts walking tonight.

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

I agonize whether to add a little more water to the batch. “Never add water,” Molly would say. “It makes the dough sticky.” Well, yes it does, but it also facilitates the shaping of the dough into a cylinder of ever diminishing thickness. I compromise by wetting my hands and then wiping them dry, hoping that the residual moisture will suffice to make the dough tractable. This is not the traditional way. There are all sorts of traditions wrapped up in the making of these cookies: beat the eggs for five minutes, let the cookies sit overnight for twelve hours (some recipes say twenty-four) before putting them in the oven, don't add water, bake at 325 degrees. What would happen if I beat the eggs for six minutes, and let the cookies sit out only eight hours, and baked them at 350? I don't know; I've never tried it. If I did, the magic might not work. Magic and tradition go hand in hand with this sort of things, commingled so tightly that they are impossible to separate.

I think all traditions are like that, at heart. As I work, my mind drifts to Christmas eves of past years, of midnight Masses in cold churches, of the Christmas music my parents played on their hi-fi or stereo. I am listening to some of that music right now. My father transferred most of his old Christmas records onto cassette tape, and my brother has transferred those tapes to CD. So I am listening not only to the music but to all the artifacts of that process: the pops of the record, the hiss of the tape, the unsteady “wow” of worn record changers and tape drives. If I listened to clean copies of those recordings, would they evoke the same nostalgia that I feel when I hear the flawed ones? Or would the magic not be there?

I roll the dough, I roll the dough.

On the CD my brother sent me, there are many pictures of my father as a vigorous young man, working in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps or sailing a canoe on the lakes around Syracuse. And there are pictures of my mother as a young woman, very glamorous. I see them on their wedding day, and in the first house they lived in as a couple. There are other photos of various aunts, uncles, and cousins on their wedding days. My brother's two weddings are pictured, but not mine. There are no pictures of my first wife at all. There are a few pictures of my present wife when she first visited Syracuse and New Port Richey in the mid-1990s, before we married. She had a chance to meet most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my father's side. Now all those aunts and uncles have passed away, along with my father and mother.

Many of my older cousins have also passed away now, and I find to my surprise that my cousins and my siblings and I have become the patriarchs and matriarchs of the family. I will mail a package of cookies to those who were closest to my father, to thank them for giving him so much support after he'd had his stroke. In a way, they were better children to him than I was, because they were closer, whereas I had to close my business down and travel the length of a continent to spend time with him for a week or two every season. It was they, not I, who saw to most of his daily needs, and for that I am grateful.

Finally the cookies are all formed and on the sheets, a hundred and twenty of them, waiting to stale for the requisite twelve hours. It has taken me three hours to get it all done, including the wash-up of the bowls. Every year, I think that this might be the last year I do this. It's a lot of trouble, after all. But it's still the best way I have for connecting to my family, and to my past, and to the ghosts who have gone on before. I am painfully aware now, as I never was when I was younger, that soon I will be part of that past; my own images and writings and perhaps a few guitars and mandolins will be all that survive me. My presence, like my family pictures, will crack and fade. Children unborn will look at those pictures and wonder who I might have been. I'm still trying to find that out myself. And that's a good thing, because it means that the journey isn't over yet.

Find a Penny, Pick It Up

©2014 by John LaTorre

I have been accused of overthinking things. I plead guilty.

For example, I had lunch a few weeks ago with my wife and some in-laws at a Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie said: 

Simple? For anybody else, possibly. But not for me.

"Well,” I thought, “Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds me that the sun is a star. So should I go and wish upon that as soon as I go outside? Or should I accept the more common reference to stars as suns that are many, many light-years away, and wait until evening? And if I do, and end up wishing on the evening star, which isn't actually a star but the planet Venus, will my wish be null and void?" This is the sort of thing that worries me. Of course, most of the people I know are not at all worried about this sort of thing. Instead, they worry that I worry about this sort of thing.

I encountered a similar conundrum when I discovered a penny lying on the driveway in my back yard. Ordinarily, I would have just picked it up. There's a saying that goes: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you'll have good luck.” I can always use a little luck. Even if I don't get any luck, at least I'll be one penny richer.

(This begs the question of whether picking up a penny is worthwhile anymore. The columnist Cecil Adams was asked about that once. He did some calculations, and reported in his column that, if it takes you five seconds to pick up a penny, you are paying yourself at the rate of $7.20 an hour. So it all comes down to how much you value your time. This is an important fact, as you will see.)

As usual, things got complicated once I tried to grasp the Whole Picture. The penny was lying there face-down. I was recently informed that the penny must be facing up if it is to give you any luck. If you don't see Abe, you must not pick it up. What you are supposed to do is turn it over for the next person to find, and that person will be rewarded for your efforts. That hardly seems fair now, does it?

This new wrinkle puts an entirely different slant on things. For one thing, it takes exactly the same amount of effort to reach down and turn over the penny as it does to pick it up and pocket it. Since half the pennies you encounter on the street can be expected to be tails up and therefore unpocketable, your hourly rate for picking up pennies drops to $3.60 an hour, making an unattractive wage even less attractive.

And there's another issue here. The penny was in my back yard. If I don't pick it up, but merely turn it over, who is going to pick it up? My wife? Not likely. My wife is not the kind of person who notices something like that; she takes little notice of anything smaller than a house-cat, unless it is moving. The guy who comes in once a week to cut the grass in the back yard? He missed it the last time he last cut the grass, and probably countless times before that. (Or maybe he prefers to work at a wage of over $3.60 an hour.) How many chances am I expected to give him before I declare the penny fair game for me?

I don't know when this heads-or-tails variation of “find a penny” sprang into existence. I never heard of it when I was growing up, but several people have assured me that it goes back at least to their childhoods. “This calls for more research,” I declared. I fired up the computer, but the Google results left me more confused than ever. I learned that there are regional variants. In the American south, it's said that if the penny is found heads-up, it goes in your pocket, but if it's found tails-up, it goes into your shoe. (If you are in the South and wear open-toed sandals, you may be in trouble.) In other places, it appears that not picking up the penny will bring you bad luck, regardless of whether it's heads or tails. Still other variations specify that you must give the penny away in order to receive the good luck. “Give the penny to a friend, and your luck will never end,” the incantation reads. So now other people are required in order for the magic to work. No wonder people these days are confused and stressed out.

I'm sure that this is the true reason why Canada and Australia and New Zealand have abolished the penny. There is some talk of discontinuing the penny here in the United States of America. It won't be soon enough for me. As for the argument from the penny-pushers that everything that costs ninety-nine cents now will cost a dollar, I think there's nothing to worry about. The only reason that prices end in ninety-nine cents is to make them appear cheaper. That won't change, so what is now $9.99 will not be re-priced at $10.00; it will be re-priced at $9.95. (It will also be twenty percent smaller, but that would have happened anyway.) This change seems to have already taken place in those countries that have abolished the penny. And their citizens are now blissfully free from the burden of picking up pennies, or not picking them up, or turning them over, or giving them away, or whatever inane variation happens to be holding sway in their neck of the woods. It remains to be seen whether the tradition will be transferred to some other coin of low value, like the nickel or whatever the hell they use over there. I surely hope not.

As for my penny in the back yard, I turned heads-up and left it there. After the lawn-mower guy failed to notice it yet again, I retrieved the penny and put it in my pocket with my other six pennies. And then I realized that I was supposed to pass the penny on to a friend. But which of the seven pennies was it? Does it matter? And is that luck-passing business only true in those areas where that variation is in effect? I would have taken all seven pennies out of my pocket and attempted to give them to friends, on the grounds that they were only pennies, after all. But I have come to know the look that crosses their faces when I do stuff like this. I told you how they worry about me.

So I guess I'll have to leave these pennies surreptitiously around the houses of my friends. So, guys, if you come across a penny in some unexpected place, you'll know where it came from. If I were an evil person, I would leave it tails-up and subject you to all my recent agonies, which you won't be able to avoid since, having read this far, you already know what the rules are. But I'm not, so I won't.

The Night The Birds Screamed

The Night The Birds Screamed

©2014 by John LaTorre

It was on a Friday evening that I heard a thousand birds screaming. Blinded by tear gas, they were screaming in pain and terror; their sightlessness prevented them from flying away, out of the toxic air. I could hear them, but I could not see them, because I was blind, too.

The place was somewhere in downtown Washington, D.C. I can't remember exactly where now. In fact, I wasn't sure where I was at the time I was gassed, although it must have been within a few blocks of Dupont Circle, in the north-west quadrant of the city. There used to be slaughterhouses there in the nineteenth century. Now it is a gentrified neighborhood, with boutiques and coffeehouses and comfortable old row houses. But on the night of November 14, 1969, it was not a good place to be.

The occasion was a massive protest against the Vietnam War, called the Moratorium March on Washington. The first Moratorium demonstration was a month before. It went peacefully enough, with no violence reported. Its success prompted a second, larger demonstration a month later. This time, people were expected to be coming in from all over the country. and its promoters had hopes that it would be as peaceful as the other demonstration. We hoped so, too.

By “we,” I mean the Langley Hill Friends Meeting, a Quaker congregation I was worshiping with at the time. Our meeting house was open to those who wanted a place to stay during the demonstrations, and the basement had been converted into a sort of dormitory. Several anti-war groups had made contact with us to arrange for space. That Friday night, I was on hand to make coffee and soup, and to offer whatever I could in the way of support.

When I arrived at the meeting house, I immediately noticed a tension in the air. Several people were crowded around a television set, which was reporting riots in downtown Washington. According to the news reports, some of the protesters had attacked policemen and the policemen responded with tear gas. “It looks like Chicago all over again,” one person said. It might be worth explaining that he was referring to the demonstrations that were attacked by policemen at the Democratic national convention the year before, an action later referred to as a “police riot” by those who were there.

The phone rang and rang and rang. We were getting calls from some of the groups whom we were to host. They had been separated from their parties and were lost in an unfamiliar city. We decided to drive some of us who were somewhat familiar with the area into the city, where we would meet up with these groups and guide them home somehow. I was assigned to a group who said they had a van, but whose driver didn't know the area. I was given the name of an intersection to report to.

When we got there, the car I was riding in couldn't approach the corner where I was to find my group. The streets had been blocked off to traffic. They let me out as close as they could, and I proceeded on foot. When I got there, there was no van. There were only hordes of people running toward me. They were escaping a tear gas barrage a block away. When they got to my location, the cops came and fired more tear gas canisters at us. It appeared that the cops had decided that the best way to control the crowd was to keep it moving and disorganized, and the best way to do that was to fire tear gas at anything that looked like a massing crowd. It was not the first time the location had been teargassed, I found out later; the first barrage had driven away the people I was supposed to rescue, and traffic barriers prevented them from returning once the gas had dispersed.

Well, I got gassed. I followed the crowd to another intersection, and got gassed again. That was when I heard the birds screaming. By that time I was pretty much blind myself, so I was aware only of the vague shapes of trees and cars and people and such. I realized that the birds were in as much pain as I was, but their terror was compounded by the fact that they couldn't escape it. Because they were blind, they couldn't fly. They could only cling to whatever perches they had found and scream in pain and fear and frustration. There were thousands of them. This was not birdsong, but an unrelenting howl of noise that waxed and waned as the clouds of tear gas drifted to and fro. I could no more escape that howl than they could escape their pain. Years later, I would hear the drone of cicadas as they emerged from their sleep. This noise was like that, but multiplied to almost deafening levels.

I'm not sure how long I staggered around the streets of Washington listening to that ghastly wail. It might have been an hour, maybe two. Somehow I made my way to a place where there wasn't much tear gas. Somebody put his hand on my shoulder, and asked me, “Are you all right?”

“I can't see,” I replied.

“Do you know the area?”

“I don't even know where I am right now, except that it's somewhere downtown. But, yes, I'm from around here, more or less.”

“Maybe you can help us. We have a problem.”

They turned out to be a busload of people who had come from Ohio. They had made arrangements to stay someplace in the DC area, but the guy who was supposed to guide them there had been separated from them by the tear gas attacks. They didn't know how to get to their assigned quarters, or even where or what it was. They'd been looking for their guide for an hour with no success.

I told them that I knew of a place where they could find shelter for the night. I couldn't drive the bus, of course. But I might be able to direct the driver there. I would sit behind him and listen to him describe where he was, and I would use that information to chart our course. All he had to do was follow my directions. That turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, because the traffic by then had been so thoroughly disrupted that neither I nor the bus driver was sure where we were. He was following traffic far out from the Dupont Circle area, reading out names of streets where he could glimpse them, names which meant little to me, as I had never been in that particular part of Washington before. Somehow, I got them to the Key Bridge, where we could get over the Potomac River into northern Virginia. I told him to steer his way to Falls Church, where I was living at the time. I knew that area fairly well, and could easily direct him to Langley Hill from there.

We spent the next half hour driving around aimlessly. He would describe what he was seeing, and I'd try to make sense of it. If there were any signs directing him to Falls Church, he missed them, and we ended up circling Arlington Cemetery and getting lost in the area just west of the cemetery. But then we crossed a road that was labeled with a route sign: “244.” That was Columbia Pike. I didn't know where we were along that road; nothing he described seemed familiar to me. But I had lived for a couple of years in an area just west of Arlington and a few blocks off Columbia Pike, and was sure that if we traveled west, we would pass some landmarks I recognized.

At this point, the driver must have lost any faith he'd had in my knowledge of the area. But he followed my directions, and as we drove down Columbia Pike he described what we were passing. Suddenly, it all made sense. I knew where we were. We were about a quarter of a mile east of a neighborhood called Bailey's Crossroads, heading west.

I told him to take a right onto Leesburg Pike, and described the businesses he would see on the corner there. (That place looks like a freeway intersection now, with cloverleaf ramps and all, but back then it was a simple crossing of two main drags.) I remember the relief in his voice when he answered that the intersection was just as I described it. We turned right and made our way up Leesburg Pike through Falls Church and onto Great Falls Street and Chain Bridge Road and finally to Langley Hill, with me describing from memory the landmarks we would pass and the turns we'd have to take. It took my mind off the pain in my eyes, and eased the mind of our driver. And that was how we navigated for the next half hour, with me referring to my mental map of the area and identifying the landmarks he would need to make his way to the Langley Hill Friends Meeting.

My vision had started to return as we approached the meeting house. I couldn't see stuff in the distance, but I could hold my eyes open long enough to make out my immediate surroundings. The driver parked the bus in the parking lot of the meeting house and guided me inside, where I explained his predicament to our hosts. It turned out that the van I'd been sent to guide had called the meeting house again, and another guide had been despatched to steer them back. The Quakers hadn't planned on my bunch, of course, but space was made for them. I spent the next half hour rinsing out my eyes, and then called home to tell my folks that I'd be very, very late. I spent some time listening to the radio and television reports. From what I heard from them, there was no mention of the tactics the police had used. I'd expected that; it had taken months for the truth about Chicago to come out. It was another hour or two before I saw well enough to drive home, even on the empty back roads I knew I'd be using.

I had planned on attending the Saturday demonstration, but felt that I'd already had enough excitement for one weekend, and spent that day instead at the Friends meeting after getting a good ten hours of sleep and letting my vision return to some semblance of normal. As it turned out, that day's demonstrations went off without a hitch. The crowd was estimated at about a half a million people, perhaps twice as many as the famous civil rights march in 1963. It was peaceful. There would be no repeat of last night's police riots with its throngs of tear-gassed, bewildered people and its thousands of shrieking birds. One of those nights was enough.