John Delach

We took delivery of our red Pacer on a cold night in early March of 1976 from an American Motors Dealer (AMC) located on Metropolitan Avenue less than three miles from our Middle Village home. After a flurry of last minute salesman mumbo jumbo, attempted add-ons and proposed warranties, we finally signed the paper work, made the deposit and were handed the keys.

Before we left the dealer’s lot, I handed Mary Ann the paperwork bundled in an AMC folder to put into the glove compartment. Mary Ann flipped the opener and the glove box proceeded to fall to the floor. Even though Mary Ann quickly re-seated the box in its proper place; we should have quit right there and then.

We’d traveled no more than a half-mile in our spanking new Pacer when the heater motor went bang in a puff of blue smoke. The smell of burnt electrical equipment filled the air confirming the death of the Pacer’s heater. The dealer deftly pronounced his “mea culpas” and managed to find a replacement for our new car and sent us home in a well-used Matador courtesy loaner. For the next week all the king’s horses and all the king’s men tried to replace our heater. Airplane mechanics call planes that are in constant state of repairs, “hanger queens.” This was our first realization that our Pacer was a lemon and a garage queen.

“Why a Pacer?”

It was different, quirky and neat. The contours from every direction were curved making for a friendly look. From head on, it looked like a big dog except for floppy ears. The grill’s horizontal bars looked like a smile and, it seemed to say, “Hello.” Huge windows, lots of light, wide, big doors and a hatch back providing even more light; Mary Ann and I fell for this curious car. In other words, we were young and stupid.

Several design flaws soon became apparent. We knew the passenger side door was four inches longer than the driver’s side door to facilitate back seat entry from the curb side. What we didn’t realize was the problems a door this big could cause. The Pacer was short but wide, intentionally so to retain roominess. But that passenger door turned out to be a weapon that would cover a wide swath of territory capable of striking unsuspecting people, other cars, garbage cans and trees. It also could dig into lawns if the surface was too high. We quickly discovered that our Pacer was terribly under powered making acceleration from a dead stop onto a highway a frightening adventure. Climbing hills was a losing crap shoot and we quickly learned to move into the slow lane sooner rather than later. Lastly, lack of power and all that glass negated any chance that its puny A/C could be effective. Despite the inadequate engine power, with all that weight, miles-per-gallon were horrible.

It was only when I set out to write this piece that I discovered why the engine was so awful. It seems, the then AMC chairman, Roy D. Chapin Jr. had become enamored with the Wankel Engine then all the rage. He committed AMC to equip all its vehicles including the Jeep division with this rotary engine at the time the Pacer was being engineered. This grand scheme never worked out leaving the Pacer left with a hand-me-down GM six-cylinder engine.

Our Pacer suffered numerous breakdowns, big and small. One of the more curious defects involved the internal handle on the driver’s side used to exit the car. A simple steel device common to almost all automobiles; you pull the handle toward yourself with your left hand to close the driver’s side door. A basic tool, one we should expect to be free of failure. Not our Pacer, on two different occasions, this handle and its replacement broke in two as I pulled on it. I recall those visits to an AMC dealer, once in Queens and once in Manhattan. Both seemed to be expecting me, had the handle in stock and neither asked what had happened.

Under big problems, I submit the following: One Sunday night we were returning home from Mary Ann’s mother’s home in Flushing on the Long Island Expressway. I was in the left lane as we passed Flushing Meadows Park when, with no warning, the engine quit. Somehow, I kept my wits, shifted into neutral, turned the key and the engine restarted.

It turned out this was just the first of several stalling repetitions. That’s probably when we decided to rid ourselves of this cursed car.

We replaced it with a 1981 Ford Escort station wagon. I recall the sales man making conversation asking about the Pacer:

“My brother-in-law needs a car; do you think this Pacer would be right for him?”

I replied: “It depends on how you feel about your brother-in-law.”

For the record, he didn’t question my reply.

We also heard from the new owner who found a gasoline credit card receipt buried under the folding back seat. He called us in desperation…Mary Ann took the call. He asked if it was a bad car. She could think of nothing to tell him that would offer comfort.

My friend Geoff Jones and his wife also had a baby blue Pacer that worked alright until it wouldn’t start on the day they were trading it in. Geoff explained: Our local mechanic decided it was the solenoid but he didn’t have a new one in stock. He did have a bunch of old parts and found one that he thought would work a few times. It worked, allowing us to drive it to the Jeep dealer. The sales man took the keys and one of their shop guys went out to drive it into their lot. We held our breathes until the Pacer started. We completed our purchase and we left the dealer as quickly as we could.           

Richard L. Green passed away on October 23, 2017 after a lengthy struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Dick was the finest insurance man I’ve ever known. He was honest, trustworthy and fair but exacting and demanding. It was both my honor and pleasure to work with him for almost twenty years.

I worked for Marsh & McLennan, Exxon’s corporate insurance broker. We placed a huge re-insurance policy for their in-house insurance company, Ancon, then located in Bermuda. Ancon insured Exxon’s world-wide operations. When I joined our Exxon team in 1978, Dick Green was one of Exxon’s senior insurance professionals. His office was in Houston, Texas, the headquarters for their largest and most important subsidiary, Exxon Company, USA.

Dick and his mates insured Exxon USA’s vast operations that included Alaska’s North Slope Pipeline. Exxon USA had its own insurance operation called, Petroleum Casualty Company (PCC.) Even so by 1978, PCC had been mandated by corporate to pass on their policies to Ancon. Nevertheless, PCC remained fiercely independent and maintained an adversarial relationship with Ancon and all doing business with Ancon including me.

No one bothered to explain this relationship to me. Too bad because one of my first tasks was to bring the PCC’s marine policies into line with Ancon’s. Someone at PCC had dissected the American Institute Hull Clauses (AIHC) a sacrosanct form not to be tampered with. They cut and pasted various clauses as they saw fit deleting those they found uninteresting or undesirable. (Could it have been Dick Green?) Changing the AIHC was akin to amending the United States Constitution. It is deliberately a difficult and complicated procedure.

Dick and his colleagues met with us in our home office at 1221 Avenue of the Americas as did Ancon’s people from Bermuda. Dumb and happy, I preached my sermon that the AIHC was not a term of art to be tinkered with, exploited, changed or deleted. Arrogantly, I noted that PCC was out-of-line and their policies had to be changed to reflect Ancon’s policies that accepted the AIHC in its entirety. Case closed, that’s the way it is.

Len Brown who worked for Exxon in several insurance capacities explained what happened next. (Note, Although Len wasn’t present in New York that day, he had his own experiences with the phenomenon that followed.) Len explained: “Every meeting would eventually get to a point where a voice would be heard from among the Exxon contingent uttering words in an Arkansas twang close to the following: ‘Just a minute, hold on, run that by me one more time will you? You gotta understand now that I’m just a little ol’ country boy, but…”

The speaker was Dick Green and what followed the “but” was a dressing down of biblical proportions. On that day it was directed at me. “Now, John, it seems to me that your position is based soley on your opinion. Do you expect us to roll over and make changes in our policy without any specific explanation of each change you are suggesting? I don’t think you’d appreciate it if I did this to you?”

I had no place to run and no place to hide as my arrogance quickly melted into humiliation.

Dick was relentless in his criticism and I saw my future slip sliding away. My only course for survival was agreeing to prepare a line-by-line analysis of the AIHC that I would present within a month to PCC at their office in Houston.

That meeting went reasonably well. I learned enough to listen to PCC’s demands as well as speak to them. The one exception was the so called “Continuation Clause.”  In plain English, it says that if a vessel is at sea when the policy expires, coverage continues until the vessel reaches a port.

Dick insisted this was a restriction while I maintained it was an extension. Back and forth we went, neither giving an inch until the day ended and we broke for dinner. I do recall it was a great evening at a superb restaurant (it well could have been Brennan’s Houston.)

Another lesson learned, Dick Green was a completely different person on and off the field. He could be a bulldog when business was the issue, but socially he was charming.

We went at it again the next morning. Finally, I said to Dick: “If you ask me to prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, I could gather scientific data from the US Geological Survey, newspapers and other sources to demonstrate that the sun will come up tomorrow. But, you and I both know that I can’t prove it. Guess what though, even if I can’t prove it, the goddamn sun will come up tomorrow!

That got Dick’s attention and he agreed to disagree and move on. I was exhausted, but I knew I’d survived to fight another day.

Twenty years later, we had been down so many roads, fought good fights, mostly on the same side and overcame the great SS Exxon Valdez disaster. We traveled roads to many places including, London, Paris, Bordeaux, Munich and Zurich.

One night in Paris, our host took us to a historical restaurant. He seated us in a large chair and explained that Napoleon and Josephine once sat there. Dick looked at me and noted; “John, here we are, you from Brooklyn, NY and me from Alma, Arkansas and we are sitting where Napoleon sat. Only in America!

RIP Dick Green.

Congress authorized funds to build the lead ship for the next generation of nuclear powered super aircraft carriers in 2008. By then the concept of building a new class of weapons incorporating “leap ahead technology” had been fixed in stone in the Pentagon’s procurement philosophy and this baby was a natural for it. It was decided that the lead ship for this class, CVN-78 would be named for our Thirty-eighth president, the USS Gerald R. Ford.

“Ford was designed under Bush (43) and Rumsfeld. The carrier was packed with major cutting-edge technologies including an electromagnetic aircraft launching system, an advanced arresting gear, a powerful dual-band radar, a new nuclear propulsion and power distribution system and advanced defensive weapon systems. In all, the ship incorporated twenty-three distinct changes and up-grades from the ten existing Nimitz-class carriers.”

The last Nimitz, USS George H.W. Bush, CVN-77, was completed in 2009 at a cost of $6.2 billion. Although commissioned on January 10, 2009, Bush didn’t become operational until May 15, 2011.

Bush was a direct descendant of the USS Forrestal, CVA-59 our first super carrier completed in 1956. Like the Forrestal, Bush’s technology included the angle deck and steam catapults both invented by the British. By the Rumsfeld era the problems associated with steam catapults were well documented. Steam was corrosive and required continual maintenance. The hydraulic landing system that controlled the arresting cables was also considered obsolete for future carrier operations.

Rummy and co decided that this class would have great leap forward technology so Ford and two planned sisters, CVN-79, U.S.S. John F. Kennedy and CVN 80, U.S.S. Enterprise incorporated these new toys. Thought was also given to retrofitting later models of the Nimitz class with these systems. Fortunately, this insanity was quietly abandoned once the cost became known.

Ford was authorized on September 10, 2008 in the waning days of 43’s administration with a price tag of $7.9 billion and an estimated completion date of 2015. Neither the actual price tag nor the delivery date came in anywhere near those estimates. Self-imposed budget restrictions were part of the reason but the real culprits were those “what if” systems particularly the new catapults the new power plant and the Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG).

These systems remained in development as construction of the hull at Newport News Shipbuilding (now Huntington Ingalls) progressed but timing slipped and costs soared as it became obvious that they didn’t work as intended. Ford wasn’t commissioned until July 22, 2017 at a staggering cost of $13 billion. But before you begin to shake your head in disgust, understand the ship will not be able to enter service until 2020 or 2021 and will cost an additional $780 million to be made operational.

This additional time is needed to get these damn systems to work properly. Current estimated cost for the launch system is at $961 million or three times the original price and still can’t be used to launch aircraft equipped with external fuel tanks needed for long-range missions. I kid you not, this is scary stupid.

The turbines have failed to produce the amount of electrical power the ship requires and the AAG does not perform up to specifications either.

Fixes are in the works but may affect the timetables for the Kennedy and Enterprise if corrections and solutions are not made sooner rather than later. Bryan Clark, a naval analysis noted:

“The navy is paying the price for attempting to incorporate too many new technologies at once. The Ford is an example of how short-lived strategic themes such as ‘transformation’ can create long-term problems. This is not a history we want to repeat.”

Ex-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus noted: “The Ford is a textbook example of how not to build a ship… (We were) building it while it’s still being designed…which results in costly do-overs of already finished components and trying to force unproven technology on it.”

Congratulations Rummy, you took three throws at the dice table, the Zumwalt destroyers, the

F-35 Lightning II and the Ford and you rolled craps each time.

During the second Iraq war Rumsfeld ended a press conference with an old service remark: “Good enough for government work.” These debacles don’t even qualify for that excuse.

Q: What do Mao Zedong and Don Rumsfeld have in common?

A: They both promulgated the concept of a “Great Leap Forward.”

Q: How did that work out for them?

A: “Furgeddabouit!”

We will not speak unkindly about Chairman Mao. Let the dead rest in peace even though his great leap forward resulted in the deaths of countless ordinary Chinese citizens. Let’s face it…The average day under Mao was usually not a day at the beach, and so it goes.

On the other hand, Uncle Don, as Secretary of Defense under Bush 43 insisted that our next generation of weapon systems then being budgeted must incorporate a new paradigm, “Leap Ahead Technology.”

The exact meaning of Leap Ahead Technology is lost to history. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan. Another instance where think tank, big brain so-called wunderkind analysts convince DC policy makers that their latest, greatest new-think weapons solution are in fact: “The way the truth and the light.”

The result; the Elmo Zumwalt class destroyers, the F-35 Lightning II fighter and the Gerald Ford nuclear aircraft carriers. I understand that Leap Ahead Technology would incorporate the next generation of technology into the new weapon by relying on unproven systems still in development. This amounted a crap shoot, betting that this technology would reach maturity before the weapon system was completed.

When I wrote about the Zumwalt’s in 2015, I reported: “Back in 2009, the GAO “…found that four out of 12 critical technologies in the Zumwalts’ design were fully mature. Six were approaching maturity but five would not be fully mature until after installation.”

So much went wrong that the navy cut the order from 32 ships to three and deemed that this trio would be utilized, “…as state of the art platforms for experimental weapons such as lasers and electromagnetic rail guns…” This way the navy could play with all the stuff that didn’t work as promised in the first place. Cost: $4.2 billion for each ship not including an additional $10 billion in development costs plus invoices still to come to make these systems workable.

In 2002, we touted the F-35, Lightning II as only one of two fifth generation jet fighters on earth, the other being our F-22. We invited every nation we considered to be friends and family to participate (i.e. help pay for) this the best tactical fighter jet on the planet capable of performing every conceivable mission for the rest of the 21^st Century:

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen; nothing up my sleeve. I present to you, each one of you the future of tactical military aviation. Tell you what I’m gonna do…if you sign up right now for your share at my low introductory price of $233.0 billion, you will be the first on your block to possess this gallant steed…sign up now as I shall not pass this way again…

And how they signed up: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom. Hello suckers, feel right at home. By 2007, the price had swelled to $278.5 billion, by 2012 to $395.7 billion and by 2017 to $406.5 billion. Oh, dear how loudly the Aussies, Canuks, Danes and Dutch squawked as each installment came due. You would have thought Uncle was to blame!

Did I mention that the cost of the helmet was not included? Whoops, well, its price tag of $400,000 each is an extra. But what a helmet! “It offers a 3-D scan, noise canceling headphones, night vision, a forehead-mounted computer, and a projector that displays live video on its clear visor.” The helmet comes in dark green and weighs about four to five pounds about the same as a football helmet. “When tethered to the plane, the helmet gives pilots the combined visual capabilities of Superman and Iron Man, if they were flying Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.”

Everything the pilot needs is shown on the visor and the pilot can see through the aircraft with a 360-degree view. It just took a while to get it to work the way it’s supposed to work but I have it on good authority that it’s now working peachy keen. (Did I mention that each pilot has his own one-of-a-kind helmet?)

The Lightning II comes in three models, A, B and C. Most buyers have ordered the traditional Model-A suitable for air force service at $94.6 million per airplane. The aircraft carrier capable Model-C navy version costs $121.8 per unit and the Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) Model-B favored by the marines comes in at $122.8.

The B has been a bitch and a half to get working right. Its second internal vertical lift engine really complicated the airplanes avionics and performance adding time, money and near nervous breakdowns to its development. It remains in development and is just now going into production. The C has had similar problems and delays due to the need for folded wings and added stress during catapult takeoffs and arrested carrier landings. Delays forced the navy to purchase 90 additional tried and true F-18E Hornets(fighter-bombers) and 80 EA-18G Growlers (electronic warfare aircraft) to fill the gap.

Fifteen years removed from the programs origin, only the USAF is operating 104 F-35As in an ongoing developmental and training role and the navy is testing a small number of F-35 Cs. Foreign partner pilots participate in the training program as production plans are updated. The best estimate that I can find is full production will begin in 2019 and our foreign partners will begin to receive their airplanes beginning in 2021.

So much for that great leap forward and in the words of one American general: “Think really hard before deciding on any future joint-service platforms.”

(To be continued with Part Two: Ford Class Carriers)        

Y.A. Tittle played the game of his life in a regularly scheduled afternoon contest against the Washington Redskins 65-years-ago this month on October 28, 1962. Fifty-one degrees at the 2:05 PM kickoff, bright and sunny with a mild breeze of 17 mph; a perfect day for football. A sellout crowd of 62,844 Giants faithful witnessed the event in Yankee Stadium.

The game didn’t start well for the Football Giants. Tittle had been beaten up by the Lions the previous Sunday, had a lousy week of practice and didn’t feel well as game time approached. His 36-year-old body wasn’t happy but he was determined to play. He convinced head coach, Allie Sherman, that he should start.

Tittle had joined the Giants the previous year after playing eleven years for the San Francisco 49ers. He had been a starter and a star most of those seasons but the Niners and their head coach, Red Hickey, had installed a new offense for, John Brodie, their young stud quarterback to run. Y.A. became superfluous and put on the trading block. The Giants were one of the few teams interested but only offered Lou Cordileone, a lineman, in return. Tittle wrote that on being informed of the trade he told Hickey: “Who the hell is Lou Cordileone?” He noted with sadness, “They didn’t even bother to trade a name player for me.”

Wellington Mara recalled Cordileone’s reaction: “Me, even up for Y.A. Tittle? You’re kidding.”

Tittle started the game against the Redskins poorly completing only two of his first six pass attempts. The Skins second-year QB, Norm Snead, completed a 44-yard touchdown pass to halfback, Bobby Mitchell, to take a 7-0 lead. (An aside of note, Bobby Mitchell was the Redskins first Afro-American player. Under pressure from the White House, the NFL forced owner, George Preston Marshall, to integrate his team. Mitchell was traded from the Cleveland Browns for Washington DC’s Number 1 Draft Pick the previous spring.)

Tittle retaliated with a drive of his own culminating in a 22-yard TD pass to Joe Morrison making the score 7 to 7 at the end of the first quarter. The Giants established a lead by the end of the first half with a score of 21 to 13. Y.A. threw two more TD passes, his first for five yards to Joe Walton and the second, to Morrison for one yard.

The third quarter belonged to the powerful right arm of Yelburton Abraham who threw three TD passes in the quarter, the first for 53-yards to Del Shofner, the second, a 26-yard toss to Walton and the third, a 63-yard bomb to Frank Gifford making the score 42-20. The game had turned into a rout. Sherman asked Tittle what he wanted to do since he’d already thrown six touchdowns.

Up until that time only two players in the NFL and one player in the AFL had thrown for seven touchdowns in a single game, Sid Luckman for the Chicago Bears in 1941, Adrian Burke for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1951 and George Blanda for the AFL Houston Oilers in 1961. Tittle elected to return for the fourth quarter throwing a six-yard TD to Walton to tie the record thereby joining the seven-touchdown quarterback club.

Even though the score was 49 to 20 Snead had enough time and talent to score two more times, one on a one-yard run and the other on a 35-yard pass to Steve Junker. Final score, Giants 49, Redskins 34. In all, Snead threw four TD passes and ran for one accumulating 316 passing yards. Tittle passed for 505 yards. Giants players and fans wanted Y.A. to remain on the field and go for that record-breaking pass but Tittle insisted that it just wasn’t the right thing to do.

Much later in life, an interviewer caught up with Y.A. to ask him about that memorable day. His answers appeared in a 2012 Football Giants documentary. This is Tittle in his own words:

“I really didn’t know if I could throw because I didn’t throw all week. The first seven passes were incomplete and badly incomplete. I knew any moment he (Sherman) was going to take me out, then I hit about 13 in a row. I don’t know why but everything went for touchdowns and 500 and something yards.

“We already had 49 points. For me to go out and throw the ball didn’t seem to be in good taste…then.

At this point in the film Tittle’s mouth widens into the smile of a Cheshire Cat. His eyes light up as the smile becomes a mischievous grin as he says:

“Right now,”

He pauses and licks two fingers on his throwing hand…

“I’d of thrown it.”

Y.A. Tittle’s death was reported on Monday, October 9, 2017. He was 90.

R.I.P. Y.A. Tittle, my first football hero.

Guest Blog by Helen Markey, Bill and Bob Christman

Charles and Margaret Rilling opened Journey’s End after World War II when vacations via automobiles were still a novelty. The Rillings owned a large parcel of land less than a mile south of NH Route 9, a two-lane paved road connecting Vermont to New Hampshire.   A dirt road with the name, Mountain Road, ran south to their property where it dead ended. Their property was sandwiched between the river and the foot of Mt. Wantastiquet.

The family home stood at the north end of their property. It became known by guests as, “the big house.” One by one the Rillings built a string of seven wooden cabins overlooking the banks of the Connecticut and named each after birds like Robin, Cardinal, Blue Jay and Bobolink. The scenic view included the Central of Vermont Railroad that ran south from Canada to Springfield and New Haven on the opposite embankment. Two other cabins, the Whippoorwill (rightfully: Whip-poor-will) and Raven were tucked into nearby woods at the base of the mountain. A small white house stood off to itself christened, the Starling. It was their son’s home. He lived with his parents in the big house during the summer season and rented out the Starling.

Journey’s End, aka The Country, aka Rillings, aka Chucks was located in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire on the Connecticut River opposite Brattleboro, Vermont. Explaining its actual location was too complicated so people were told it was in Brattleboro, VT. When Beth was a young girl she once described it to a friend as being, “Sort of like a resort.” That description is accurate.  

The Christmans began to vacation there in 1948; Uncle Bill, Aunt Helen and my three cousins, Helen, Bill and Bob. This will be the first of several blogs about Journey’s End and this one tells about the early days. I have selected Bill to narrate this story on behalf of Helen and Bob.

Our Maspeth, Queens, neighbors, Tom and Jean Mitchell discovered Journey’s End in 1947 and they must have loved their experience so much that our mom and dad signed up for a two week stay during the summer of 1948. For sure, our first experience was positive enough that we continued to vacation there for two weeks every summer until dad became too ill for us to continue this tradition in 1955. Our experiences that we are sharing are a composite over that time frame.

We were too young to remember all the logistics and preparation needed to make this 200- mile journey, how to stock the car with needed essentials to last two weeks yet leave enough room in the back seat of our 1941 Plymouth for the three of us to survive the trip. I’m sure the Mitchells gave mom and dad suggestions based on their own experience but our parents still must have made rookie mistakes especially that first year.

Dad would have the car serviced and make a final stop at Joe’s gas station on Friday night for a fill-up. Our stay was Saturday to Saturday, so mom and dad packed the car the night before except for perishables (kids included) and we started out early the next day. Helen remembers, “The car was tightly packed – including our blankets, not the cotton ones we use today, but wool, itchy wool. They were placed on the back seat meaning we sat on them in a non-air-conditioned car for eight hours in our shorts.

Our first stop after leaving home was Resurrection-Ascension R.C. Church, our home parish, one-mile away where we asked the Almighty to keep us safe and bless our journey. (One down, 199 miles to go.)

Dad made his way from the church to the Whitestone Bridge and into the Bronx. Our first task was to say the rosary so we could appeal to Mother Mary to add her seal of approval to this undertaking. Post rosary, Mom opened her treasure box, the first three of a trove of comic books she had collected over the preceding months to entertain us during the ride.

The Hutchinson River Parkway met the Merritt Parkway at the Connecticut state line and with Wilber Cross Parkway brought us to Meriden just north of New Haven where we ran out of any semblance of a divided highway for the rest of our trip.

We’d stop here at the Coffee Cottage, something so special to the three of us because we never, and I mean never, went to restaurants. The diner had table-side juke boxes and one year I remembered “Sh-Boom” by the Crewcuts that to this day takes me back to the Coffee Cottage.

Our eight-hour trip seemed to take four years to get through Connecticut alone. Dad didn’t believe in car radios so we didn’t have that distraction. We traveled over a series of two lane roads mostly along Route 15 and US Route 5. We passed through Hartford as Mom sat in the passenger seat with custody of a multi-page highlighted map to mark our progress. When she announced we were entering Massachusetts, it was like, “Yay-finally!”

Springfield, Northampton. Deerfield and Greenfield remained to be conquered, but the 55-miles through Massachusetts was nothing to compare to the dreaded Connecticut. Lunch was a picnic somewhere in route and I recall a gas stop in Springfield at a garage with a foul bathroom. Once over the Vermont line, Brattleboro was only 10-miles distant. Before reaching our finish line, our parents stopped at St. Michaels, Brattleboro’s RC Church, where we gave thanks to God the Father, Jesus and Mary to celebrate our safe arrival.

Three miles north, we made a left onto Route 9, crossed the Connecticut River and entered New Hampshire.

A roadside sign announced: Journey’s End, and so it was.

A curious obituary appeared in the Monday, September 25, 2017 edition of The New York Times. This obit ran practically a full page and it was the only one in that paper. Only one obituary on a Monday; unusual for sure. In the normal course of events, Monday’s Times repeats the obituaries for notables and celebrities who died on Friday and Saturday. Nobody (except a few news hounds like me) reads The Times on Saturday. So be it, Saturday deaths get swallowed in the maze of Sunday sections. The Times considers it the duty of the Monday’s paper to reissue important obituaries so that important deaths will not go unrecognized. Curiously, not this Monday; perhaps it was a slow weekend for recognizable deaths?

This unusual obituary concerned itself with the life and death of a loser, a man named Edgar Smith who not many people will recall or remember. A third oddity is personal, I knew immediately who Mr. Smith was. You probably do not but the obituary’s headline may help: Edgar Smith, an Infamous Killer Who Duped a Conservative Wit, Dies at 83.

That “Conservative Wit” was William F. Buckley (WFB) who came to the defense of Smith in 1965 when Smith was a resident of New Jersey’s death row fending off his execution dates for the 1957 murder of Victoria (Vicki) Zielinski. Ms. Zielinski, fifteen at the time of her murder, was a resident of Ramsey, NJ. Smith confessed to killing Ms. Zielinski when she resisted his advances. The Times Obituary noted: “Taken into custody and questioned for hours without a lawyer present – this was years before the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling requiring the police warn suspects of their right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during questioning – Mr. Smith confessed.”

The jury found Edgar Smith guilty and sentenced him to death. Following his conviction for first degree murder, Smith set out to educate himself about the law leading to a, “string of appeals that resulted in numerous stays of execution.” The Times noted: “One of Mr. Smith’s filings showed the ‘consummate skill of a seasoned practitioner,’ said the judge who presided at his trial.”

Smith also wrote a book about his conviction, “Brief Against Death,” that the Literary Guild, a book club, made an alternate selection. Coincidentally, I was a Literary Guild subscriber in the mid-1960s and I selected his book. Smith made his case for a re-trial to me and I came to believe that he was a victim of a rush to judgement, shoddy tactics and wrongful procedures by police and prosecutors. I also discovered I was not alone. WFB took up his cause and in 1965, wrote a piece for Esquire making the case that Smith had been wrongly convicted and was deserving of a new trial. He enlisted Edward Bennett Williams, the prominent DC attorney to take up Smith’s case. David Stout reported in The Times obituary what then occurred:

In 1968, the United States Supreme Court ordered the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to reconsider its decision to deny Mr. Smith a hearing that the confession was coerced and that the prisoner must be freed if prosecutors did not retry him.

On May 14, 1971, the Third Circuit so ruled. Without a confession, the Bergen County prosecutors knew they were in trouble so they offered Smith a deal; plead no contest to the lesser charge of second degree murder in return for a sentence of time already served. Smith pleaded accordingly on December 6, 1971.

When I read the news that Smith accepted this plea deal I thought to myself that this was wrong. I couldn’t understand why he took the easy way out. He had so eloquently proclaimed his innocence and so many high-powered individuals had gone to bat for him. It seemed to me that he owed it to them, but most importantly to himself, to clear his name. Granted, he had been on death row longer than any other person in the US penal system up until that time and granted, I was a kid of 21 who saw things in black and white with few shades of grey. But I just couldn’t understand how he could accept the stain of having to live with a permanent guilty plea for murder and not fight the last fight to free his name. Of course, it never occurred to me that he was guilty all along.

Smith faded from the spotlight, moved to California, married and divorced. On October 1, 1976, he abducted a 33-year-old San Diego woman. He stabbed her as she escaped from his car, stabbed her close to her heart, but she survived. Arrested and tried, he admitted during his trial that he had killed Ms. Zielinski. She too escaped from his car back in 1957 but he caught up to her in a stone quarry. “I picked up a very large rock and hit her on the head with it.” California sentenced him to life in prison for attempted murder and other crimes.

A sociopath, grifter and a con man, he bamboozled WFB, Bennett Williams and ordinary citizens like me. He died unnoticed on May 20, 2017. The Washington Post first published his obituary on September 24^th without noting how they discovered he had died. His ashes were scattered into the sea.

This is my 200^th Blog. The first, “An Incredible Story” appeared on October 16, 2013 and this followed a week later. Super storm Sandy will be five years removed this October but the flooding it brought to the Metropolitan area is reminiscent of the flooding Harvey brought to Texas and Louisiana and Irma to Florida.  

Pick your place of dreams, Rockaway, Staten Island, Long Beach, or the Jersey Shore. A place of quiet and charm, on the water, away from the noise, the clutter, the things that make Gotham intolerable to ever consider living there. Sure, the Big Apple provides the infrastructure, money, the halls of commerce inviting people to come on board. The opportunity is there to make a good living, to succeed, grow, prosper and seek to achieve the American Dream. But who wants to live there?

These places of refuge provide safe alternatives to leave it all behind when the work day, or, more importantly, the work week ends. Places where people let their burdens go, as their pressures and the frustrations drift away. When the ferry touches shore at St. George, or a car or bus or train crosses a bridge and reaches Broad Channel, Rockaway, Long Beach or towns along the Shore, escape is at hand. Soon these people will be home, safe, happy and in their own element.

But, there is a trade off. By choosing to live by the beach, the water dwellers accept the challenge of the unforgiving sea. This, their ultimate fear is subsumed by the challenges of every day life, relegated to the background, rarely discussed, even when state and City fathers need to drum up “Armageddon” scenarios at the start of each hurricane season. Poor garbage collection, ordinary post-storms power restoration and slow snow removal after a typical City snow storm are enough to worry about.

But this time, it all went wrong. The enemy was the sea. The one they always warned about, the one that was the unthinkable, the “what if,” doomsday storm. This time the jet stream left the coast unprotected. A combination of a full moon, high tide and Sandy slamming into southern New Jersey produced winds and a surge that drove the Atlantic west back into the Jersey Shore, through the Narrows into New York Harbor up the Hudson and East Rivers flooding coastal Staten Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

It clobbered the historic islands in the Upper Harbor; Liberty, Ellis and Governor’s destroying the low-lying buildings. Fortunately, the Statue of Liberty, Castle Clinton, Fort Jay and the Grand Hall did not suffer water damage, but the infrastructure was severely damaged.

Next, to flood; Lower Manhattan and the East Side. The surge claimed office buildings, the World Trade Center memorial, NYU and Bellevue hospitals, inundated most of the subway tubes and the two automobile tunnels under the East River. Eighty-six million gallons of the Hudson River poured into the Hugh Carey-Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. The surge covered runways at LaGuardia and JFK.

The engineers on duty that night at Penn Station saved their charge. When they received word of how high the surge would be, they made a conscience decision to open the flood gates protecting the two Hudson River tunnels to funnel the inundation into these passages to New Jersey and away from the station. Their actions closed these tunnels for three days. If not, the station, its signals, electrical equipment and switches would have been out for weeks.

Flood water swept the auto receiving yards and container docks at Port Newark and Port Elizabeth, raced up the Hudson River flooding trendy Hoboken wrecking PATH, the old Hudson and Manhattan Tubes. Still, further north, the Hudson topped Metro North’s Hudson Division flinging boats and debris onto tracks and flooding nearby factories and warehouses in Westchester.

Sandy sent a monstrous wall of water into shore communities along the length of Long Island crushing its barrier islands. Starting in the west at Sea Gate, it spread across Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, east along the entire Rockaway peninsular striking vulnerable Breezy Point where wind, rain and fire conspired to incinerate more than one hundred homes and water damage those that didn’t burn; R.I.P. Breezy Point.

Long Beach, Jones Beach and Fire Island were clobbered. Waterfront communities along Jamaica Bay and the Great South Bay were not spared; Broad Channel, Island Park, Freeport, Amityville, etc., Life that these folks signed onto ceased to exist. Even the train line to Long Beach and the subway line that stretched across Jamaica Bay weren’t spared. The surge destroyed electrical sub-stations, tore up the tracks and washed away the fill that supported them.

The beach communities along the North Shore and Connecticut received their dose of Sandy as the tide rose in Long Island Sound and winds pushed the surge west back towards the City drowning coastal sections of towns like Port Jefferson, Bayville and Fairfield.

Thousands of homes were wrecked, a plethora of cars destroyed and those beach life-styles, carefully planned, cultivated and developed erased, gone as if they never existed. The shore communities will never be the same. Homes may be rebuilt but minds cannot be and the daunting question will remain for all who live near the water and survived: “Do I stay, do I rebuild and what will happen the next time something this evil comes my way?”

Before I begin my tale of woe I would be remiss not to send a shout out to Jet Blue for the prompt action they took in the face of Hurricane Irma in capping the price for flights out of Florida at $99 a ticket. That is a fine example of what an airline can and should do. Jet Blue stepped-up and did the right thing.

Jet Blue began flying on February 11, 2000 with first flights to Buffalo and Fort Lauderdale from JFK. I first flew with them in January of 2001to Orlando and I become a regular flyer in 2003. Jet Blue became my airline of record because of their outstanding service by friendly staff on new airplanes with spacious leg room at reasonable prices

I understood why Jet Blue had an edge on those “so called” legacy airlines, American, Delta and United. Jet Blue, Frontier, Spirit and, to some extent, Southwest, didn’t have the burden of retiree benefits and pensions, current senior flight staff and ground crews most who enjoyed similar union contracts and benefits and old operating concepts. These upstarts had none of this baggage or burdens. Jet Blue and Southwest used this advantage to improve customer service while Frontier and Spirit settled on offering low-cost flying garbage cans.

Jet Blue grew and grew. They cast off the obsolete terminal at JFK inherited from the late TWA and built a super base surrounding the old historic bird shaped terminal. Time marches on and the burden of employee benefits is coming due. I saw the first indication of slippage when they announced that they would charge for baggage for the first time. Southwest now stands alone in advertising bags fly free. Admittedly, Jet Blue still gives you one free bag, yet I worry this a sign of things to come.

I didn’t waiver and Jet Blue continued as my preferred airline. Unfortunately, this commitment has been tested by a major glitch on a flight I scheduled from Tampa to JFK. Rather than explain to you what happened, I offer you the letter I wrote to their CEO and President, Robin Hayes:

Dear Sir,

This past June I booked four round-trip tickets on your airline for travel to Tampa, FL leaving on Saturday, September 30 and returning on Monday, October 2.

The New York Football Giants are playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at 4:30 on Sunday, October 1 and I will be attending this game with my son, Michael and his two boys, Andrew (17) and Matthew (15.)

Your airline has become my carrier of record since I retired in 2000 and I find the service to be better than any of the legacy airlines. I was pleased to find your schedule of flights to and from Tampa to be convenient. I was particularly happy with the return Flight 326 scheduled to leave Tampa 11:06 AM as this will give my family time to enjoy a post-game dinner. Therefore, I booked these flights through American Express.

You can imagine my shock and horror last Sunday when I received an email from AMEX advising that the ETD for Flight 326 had been changed to 6 AM. Seriously, is this your idea as to how to run an airline? A change of flight time of this magnitude is unconscionable just over a month prior to departure. Instead of a 9 AM wake-up call, it will now be for 3 AM.

For the record, your only other non-stop from TPA to JFK is #426 leaving at 8:55 PM.

Unfortunately, this is not my only bad experience with your airline. My wife and I were horribly delayed on both of our flights between JFK and Las Vegas last March, the first delay exceeding five hours and the second two hours.

I sense your quality of service slip-sliding away like so many others. Your new nickname should be JALA, Just Another Lousy Airline.

My daughter, Beth, prompted me to send an abbreviated version electronically to their customer relations department and two days later I received Jet Blue’s reply. Its essence was set out in the following sentence:

We’re able to offer accommodation on another JetBlue flight for the same or neighboring airport the day before, the day of or the day after your original flight.

I quickly ascertained Sarasota was nearest to Tampa but Orlando had multiple direct flights to JFK. I quoted that sentence to, Aaron, the Jet Blue agent I reached and as if by magic, I had four aisle seats booked on a flight leaving Orlando at 12:18 with no change in fare, add-ons or penalties. (I intend to fight rental car charges when all is done.)

Case closed, or so I thought but not quite. Enter Hurricane Irma! Everything hinges on Irma’s effects on Tampa…will Tampa be open for business now that Irma has passed? Two days ago, I would not be willing to bet the ranch on that. It appeared that despite my best efforts this could be a classic case of, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”

But the airport has re-opened and the Buccaneers confirmed this Sunday’s game against the Bears will be played at home in Raymond James Stadium. All I need now is to reach out to the Hampton Inn to confirm they are open and we will be good to go.

In March of 2012 I included the following excerpt in my piece entitled, “How We Name Things:”

A new bridge is being built across the Hudson River to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge. Its name appears up for grabs. Some pundits are petitioning that it be named after Pete Seeger in recognition of his work in cleaning up the Hudson River. A couple of problems with that. Ole Pete, despite his talents, was a member of the Communist Party and a life-long apologist for the Workers’ Paradise. Also, the existing bridge has already been christened with a politician’s name. It is the Malcolm Wilson-Tappan Zee Bridge named after Nelson Rockefeller’s lieutenant governor who became governor when Rocky became Gerald Ford’s VP. Alas Malcolm only lasted a year losing to the same Hugh Carey of tunnel fame.

But most importantly, if the new bridge is to receive a new name, it’s my bet that Andy Cuomo will name it after his papa, Mario.

All hail Delach for getting this right and all hail the new Super Mario Bridge. Traffic began to roll over a portion of this $4 billion project early on Saturday morning, August 25. When completed next year the bridge will have two separate spans each able to accommodate four lanes of traffic and two breakdown lanes. One will also support a bike lane and the other a pedestrian walkway. The part of the 3.1-mile bridge that crosses over the Hudson’s shipping channel is a cable-stayed design with the supporting cables anchored to the tops of the angled central reinforced concrete towers. Each span has four of these towers that artfully soar high above the spans in sharp contrast to the appearance of the old Tappan Zee, a worn-out erector set cantilevered bridge.

These spans have a curious reason for being located between Tarrytown and Nyack, New York. Its purpose was to connect the New York State Thruway (I-87) with roads leading to Manhattan.

Then Governor Thomas Dewey and Robert Moses (RM) didn’t want their thruway to enter New Jersey. If it did, the new bridge would belong to the Port Authority of NY and NJ whose charter gives it sole responsibility for all bridges and tunnels between these two states.

Construction began in 1952 during the height of the Korean War when steel was scarce and expensive. RM decided to build it on the cheap. Although the main steel truss span was built to code, the long low viaduct of almost 2.5 miles that took the span to Nyack was built on a wing and a prayer. Instead of using concrete and steel pilings to support the roadway, RM opted for wooden pilings. When it opened in 1955, the bad news was its realistic life-expectancy was 50 years, but RM brought it in at $81 million ($361 million in today’s dollars.)

Albany politicians began playing kick the can down the road as the sands ran out and 2005 came knocking on the door. They funded one band aide after another to keep the aging structure safe, all the while crossing their fingers that when the rent came due, it would be some other politican’s problem. They ignored the rotting those awful worms made as they made meals out of the wooden pilings. George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson ducked the bullet and kicked the problem down the road. Enter the second coming of a Cuomo, son Andrew:

You don’t always get what you want but it seems sometimes, you get what you need.

Andrew Cuomo loves engineering and infrastructure, the bigger and more expensive, the better. In 2013, he performed a modern razzle-dazzle routine to fund this project: he beat off environmentalists, activists, lobbyists and s*** kickers all the while sucking up to the unions, the Feds the NYS legislature and other special interests needed to start work on the new bridge.

Andy boy did it. He took the bull by the horns and cast the beast aside and we are on our way to having an outstanding new bridge. Robert Moses, master builder and master of the razzle-dazzle would have been proud. Andy deserves using his power as the Gov. to name it after his dad.

Sure, $4 billion is a tough number to swallow, but did you know, Bob and Ray that…” it came in $1 billion under what the state feared it would cost.”

This money will also come due in good time. Cuomo anted-up and bet on the future. Yes, he kicked another can with a nut of $2 billion down the road. But he must have learned from RM: Build it first and answer questions later.

Hoorah for the Super Mario Bridge and Andy boy who utilized his inner Robert Moses to pull it off.