Bucking the trend, New York City in 2012 experienced its first overall increase in major crimes in 20 years. But this time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have decisively fingered the culprit: It was Steve Jobs. Or, rather, the devices Apple produced under his watch.

According to New York Police Department statistics, there were 3,484 more major crimes in 2012 than there were in 2011. (These numbers compare the first 51 weeks of each year.) The rise in the total number of Apple-related thefts — which occurred during burglaries, robberies and grand larcenies — exceeded that number. (The N.Y.P.D. keeps track of seven categories of crime that it deems “major.” They are murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto. It keeps track of three categories of crime that it deems “minor.” They are petit larceny, misdemeanor assault and misdemeanor sex crimes.)

“If you took out thefts of Apple products — not Galaxies, Samsungs — just Apple products, our total [major] crime rate would be lower than it was last year,” Bloomberg told the New York Post.

Presumably New York City’s criminals are snapping up iPods, iPhones and iPads not because they prefer Apple’s battery-life management over that of its competitors but because the resale market for Apple devices is robust and predictable. According to The Wall Street Journal, high tariffs in countries like Brazil can drive up the price of a new entry-level iPhone 4s to $1,000, so used ones go for as much as $400 there. Here in the U.S., secondhand dealers buying in bulk on craigslist pay as much as $500 for a used iPhone 5. Demand is strong. Resale prices are high. There are millions of iPhones out there, but unlike so many other products in our age of plenty, they have not yet become too abundant to steal.

With other brands, theft is an iffier proposition. That snatchable, seven-inch, non-Apple tablet could have an initial retail price anywhere between $99 and $499, and there may not be much of a secondhand market. This magnifies crime’s inherent risks: No one wants to be the chump who earns a stretch in the Big House for strong-arming some cheapskate out of what upon closer inspection turns out to be a Nook Simple Touch.

Can New York City’s Apple-picking epidemic tell us something about crime in general? Most theories about America’s long-term crime trends share a common characteristic: They attribute the drop to some factor that has depleted the nation’s supply of criminals. One theory, for example, holds that because individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 tend to commit crimes at higher rates than people in other age groups, crime started dropping when the country’s median age began to rise, thus leaving fewer young people per capita to commit crimes. Another theory stresses the correlation between crime and high levels of lead in the bloodstream. When leaded gas was banned, this theory suggests, childhood exposure to high lead emissions began to drop as well, which eventually led to fewer adults with the sort of neurological damage that is associated with criminal behavior.

None of the major crime hypotheses pays much attention to the ways in which the material landscape of America has changed. Yet such changes obviously have at least some impact on crime.

Car theft wasn’t a problem until cars were invented. Apple theft barely existed in New York City a decade ago; according to Ray Kelly, the Police Department recorded just 86 Apple-related crimes in all of 2002. Since then, the company has made its products so portable they’re nearly ubiquitous in public, thus prompting New York City’s criminals to thug different. (On a more positive note, subway thefts involving boom boxes, Sony Walkmen and evening editions of the New York Post are doubtlessly on the wane.)

But if a new, highly desirable product can lead to a dramatic increase in crime, perhaps the opposite is true as well. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “There was a dramatic increase in obesity in the United States from 1990 through 2010,” exactly the same time in which the country began to experience a dramatic decrease in crime rates. Like the drop in crime, the rise in obesity has provoked many hypotheses but few definitive answers. One credible notion, however, is that waistlines have grown out of increasing affluence and abundance. Food got cheaper and far more accessible. Entertainment options and labor-saving devices proliferated. Life got easier, more convenient, and in many ways, far more pleasurable — so much so that we tend to opt for seconds of everything (more pizza, more video games, more social networking) as long as it doesn’t require much exertion.

Think about the ways life has changed since 1990, and specifically about the ways these changes affect young men, who historically have been the cohort most likely to commit crimes. TV sports programming has expanded exponentially. Video games have become far more plentiful and immersive. Hip-hop evolved into a multibillion-dollar lifestyle industry encompassing music, fashion and more. The Internet provided free universal porn. The rise of big-box retailers like Walmart and Target made a wide range of goods increasingly affordable.

Given that millions of well-paying jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors have been lost during the last 20 years, and that this loss has its greatest impact on the prospects of young men, these consolations may seem meager. Yet look at how young men are expressing their discontent. Murder rates have dropped. Rape rates have dropped. Property crimes have dropped.

Maybe this is all because of lower lead levels. Or maybe, in the same way that technologically driven abundance has made us fatter, it has also made us more content, giving us more opportunities for self-expression, more opportunities to develop meaningful social connections, and more material goods that are so easily obtainable that they blunt the economic imperatives of crime.

Consider what’s happening in New York City with all those non-Apple devices. Physically, they’re no harder to steal than Apples, and there are plenty of them to be found on New York subways. Yet because many non-Apple devices are so inexpensive, they are relatively easy to replace (or perhaps easy to live without), undermining the gadgets’ value from the thief’s perspective. So even as these items proliferate, the rate at which they get stolen is actually dropping.

Apple, meanwhile, is an ironic outlier. The creative tools with which it equipped the world’s designers, developers and media producers played a crucial role in enabling our new world of super-affordable material wealth. Yet despite the increasing ubiquity of iPhones and iPads, worldwide demand for these products remains so strong that they’re still not universally accessible. As a result, they’re still worth stealing.

Of course, if theft of Apple devices increases so much that their air of exclusivity begins to seem like a design flaw, a solution is readily at hand. By flooding the market with bargain-bin iPhone knockoffs, the company could instantly protect its marquee products in ways that anti-theft apps like “Find My iPhone” would be hard-pressed to match. In the end, abundance is the most powerful form of security.

Photo by Elissa Stein The Sixth Ave. Food Emporium on the morning of Fri., April 26.

BY CAROL GREITZER  |  R.I.P. Food Emporium — Sixth Ave. at 12th St. (a.k.a. the A&P). For those who don’t know, both chains — A&P and Food Emporium — are owned by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. The A&P — once the leading food chain in the country — came first; the Food Emporium stores were created much later and were an attempt to be more upscale. Or maybe that was an excuse for higher prices. The Village location started life as an A&P, only to be upgraded many years later to a Food Emporium. But habit dies slowly, and in my family it was always referred to as the A&P.

My first encounter with an A&P came when I was a little girl, long before supermarkets existed. In those days it was just a grocery store. This one was on 198th St. in the north Bronx. We didn’t go there often because it was pricier than the other groceries on the block, but I can still invoke the lovely smell of the coffee beans being ground right on the spot. No canned Maxwell House or Chase & Sanborn for us! Little could I guess back then that one day I’d be writing about the coffee and other A&P products for the ad agency that had the A&P account, and where I was a copywriter. But more about that later.

Years later, when I moved to Abingdon Square, there were no supermarkets in the West Village. At the intersection of W. Fourth and W. 12th Sts. there were three small food stores — a Peter Reeves grocery, another grocery and on the third corner, what was then called a “vegetable store.” But imagine my surprise to discover, in a time when large A&P supermarkets dotted the countryside, a relic of the past in the form of a little, old-fashioned A&P grocery on the east side of Hudson St., I believe between Jane and Horatio. To this day I recall with delight the sign on the front door informing customers: “Closed for lunch 1 to 2,” or maybe it was “12 to 1.” I’m not certain of the exact time, but I know for a fact that quaint custom did exist.

There was one other interesting food option for those willing to lug their packages to the West Village from Village Square (as the intersection of Greenwich and Sixth Aves. and Eighth St. was known). It was the old original Balducci’s — then just a vegetable store — on Greenwich Ave. (We hadn’t learned to use the term “produce” then.) There were no shopping carts, no plastic bags. You’d find a little ledge somewhere and collect your items there. One of the sales staff would come over, grab a brown paper bag and tote up your purchases, without identifying them. You’d see a row of penciled figures 89, 39, 22, 65, 47, 38, etc. for a total of $3.00 — maybe.

Happily, this store had food not found elsewhere. One day I picked up an unfamiliar bunch of greens and asked Mr. Balducci what it was. “Arugola,” he told me. “It’s like an Italian watercress.” He also introduced me to Cranshaw melon. It was delicious, worth the cumbersome 5-pound tote to Abingdon Square.

But back to the A&P. When the company opened the supermarket at 12th and Sixth, sometime in the late ’50s, the little, old-fashioned store on Hudson St. was closed, and soon the other corner stores followed suit, to be replaced by trendy restaurants. And other supermarkets moved into the far West Village. Somewhat later, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company saw fit to open a Food Emporium on 13th St. and Sixth Ave., making things very convenient for us. By then I had moved to 12th St. near Sixth.

Food shopping in New York City is not like shopping in other parts of the country. About 10 years ago we were visiting in California and happened to mention that we didn’t own a car, but rented when necessary.

“But how do you do your marketing?” asked one incredulous listener.

“Well,” I responded triumphantly, “within a block or two we have two supermarkets, and a couple of blocks further we have two gourmet food stores [Jefferson Market and Balducci’s]. So a few times a week on the way home from work we pick up any needed items.” She just couldn’t envision that kind of lifestyle.

Despite its preeminence in the field, there was a certain stodginess and marketing timidity about the company that might have predicted its ultimate decline. For example, the ad agency I worked for that had the A&P account also represented a large number of other food clients. For that reason, we had a test kitchen presided over by a professional dietician. So when A&P decided to launch its own brand of frozen foods, said dietician and I collaborated on the package copy. In flagrant opposition to the standard practice, at the time, of cooking vegetables to mushiness, our directions opted for short cooking times. The A&P brass (to a man) was horrified. When we gave these men a taste test of al dente green beans and peas, they acknowledged that the food tasted good…but no, they didn’t want to deviate from the longer preparation times that Bird’s Eye and Snow Crop frozen brands advocated. The only compensation was that they let me feature herbs and spices as serving suggestions.

Nevertheless, I will always be grateful to the A&P for something having absolutely nothing to do with food. The A&P taught my daughter how to read! Yes, it’s true. As a preschooler, she knew the alphabet and could even pick out the letters on the typewriter. We were driving past a commercial strip and she was calling out letters she saw on store signs. At one point she routinely sang out “A&P,” then, more excitedly, “A&P!” I could practically see the light bulb go off as she recognized A&P as a word. When we got home she rushed to the bathroom to pick up the big container of Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder.

“Baby,” she pointed proudly. From then on there was no stopping her.

So, for many reasons — notably the convenience — I will miss this store. But as I write this the company has yet to announce future employment plans for the employees, many of whom have worked there for years and are now middle-aged. I hope they will be provided for.

As soon as it was nine o’clock, I called my designer friend Beth, who was coming over later to help hang art. I still had paintings and posters strewn about my place, lined against the walls, waiting to be hung once my loft came together.

“I think you should have the bed facing the room,” she said confirming my new idea. Now I worried it would be sticking out too far.

In my first session of 2013, I’d told my shrink my big news, “I finally bought a bed.”

“Mazel tov,” she said. “That’s wonderful. Why are you focusing on the delivery?”

I was obsessing over my fears that the front desk would send the delivery men to the freight elevator and they would be unable to find my apartment in my confusing building complex.

“I feel unworthy, undeserving of having nice things,” I ventured. During 20 years of therapy, we’d discussed my intense Catholic education and how I viewed austerity as holiness.

“You have this conflict inside you that if you get something nice, you’ll be punished,” said Dr. R. “So you segue into worrying because it’s safer. Getting what you want terrifies you.”

At 63, I was much too old to be using a pull-out sofa. Since my gay divorce from the love of my life, I spent years sleeping on a convertible couch in a tiny studio in the West Village. I’d been single too long after the breakup of my 26-year relationship and realized I had to make one big change to bring love and sex back into my life. It was time to buy a real bed.

In the beginning, I used space as my excuse for not having one. But a year ago, I upgraded into a small (570-square-foot ) one-bedroom loft in my rent-stabilized complex. After shelling out money for the move, I was broke — my new excuse. When I caught up financially last summer, I decided I’d rather go to the beach. This past fall my building (Westbeth) got badly flooded by Sandy and I needed to focus on surviving in an altered environment.

I also wondered if my procrastination was fear of romance, of bringing a new woman into my life after my partner abandoned me. Not having a cozy place for two to sleep was a foil to romance. I’d been dating off and on but nothing materialized. Friends kept telling me I was sending the wrong message to the universe by not having a bed. I agreed. My astrologer said that 2013 looked promising for love, so I needed to be ready.

Then my mother gave me Christmas money and told me it was for a bed. Now I would feel guilty if I kept holding off. I had to laugh when my mother wondered if I’d get a twin because my place is not that big. I made it clear I needed room for another person. It had taken years for my parents to accept my being gay, and my mother had become way more open-minded after my father died, so I dismissed her slip.

Everything was on sale in January, and on New Year’s Day, I bought a full-sized platform bed and mattress from a Charles P. Rogers, a classy store in Chelsea. I had so much anxiety over this big purchase that I needed permission and had to act fast. After looking online, I dashed to the showroom, picked out a frame, tried two mattresses, set up a delivery date.

My doorman buzzed to tell me the men from the store were on their way upstairs. They brought everything in one trip on the main elevator next to my apartment. It took just five minutes for them to set everything up. Wow! My bed looked fantastic and was definitely facing the right way. I gave a generous tip and they were gone.

My friend Beth came over and admired my choice. We hung artwork and picked spots for the big paintings that would require me to borrow a taller ladder. Then she took me out to lunch to celebrate. That night, I was too wound up to sleep well on my comfortable new mattress with its fresh blue sheets.

The next morning I spent my entire therapy session discussing my anxiety over my fabulous new addition and obsessing over my process of designing a put-together New York City loft. Now I worried about where I’d put the items displaced from my bedroom — my bike, stereo system and four boxes of yoga and New Age books, still unpacked.

“Why can’t you just enjoy this?” Dr. R. asked. She suggested this was related to my father, a lovely man but anxious devout Catholic who disliked change and prayed compulsively every day. “Having a nice space puts you outside your comfort zone.”

I agreed my nervousness was related to my father as well as growing up in a frugal household (teacher father and stay-at-home mother), where we lived on a tight budget and only went out to dinner twice a year. I’d been deeply affected by parents’ concern about expenses. My shrink complimented me on venturing beyond my upbringing and reminded me that my mother, who had loosened up in her old age, gave me money for this purchase.

“It is so cool that I can see the Empire State Building while relaxing in bed,” I said, allowing myself to bask for a moment. I told her I’d ditched my original plan to put up a bookcase as room divider. “I love the open and airy feeling — and the view.”

“You have the kind of loft everyone wants,” said my shrink. “You need to chill out and be with having a great space.”

“Well it’s not that big,” I replied, immediately realizing I was negating my happiness.

We ended the session with my therapist noting, “Hold it in your head that you are afraid of change and worrying too much.”

The next day I began to relax and started to enjoy fixing up my place. The bed transformed my entire loft — it now looked bigger — and I felt like I had a real home. I went to ABC Carpet and used a gift certificate to buy a gorgeous fabric-art bedspread from Tibet. I picked out two new down pillows at a Macy’s bedding sale.

I moved a small table into my sleeping area to create a nightstand and this opened a space for my stereo cart. I started measuring corners and looking for bookcases. My super installed a pulley device to hang my bike from the kitchen ceiling. Then he helped me secure the big abstract painting high over my bed. That area looks fabulous. I could see myself with a date here. So I started obsessing again to take in all this good stuff. As I lay in bed gazing at the Empire State Building, I began to worry the art would fall on my head when I’m asleep.

It’s now the end of February. I’ve been sleeping peacefully in my bed for a month. The gay couple next door gave me a  vintage dresser (circa 1940s) in mint condition, with six drawers. I put my art deco lamp and old typewriter on top. My books are still piled on the living room floor, but my bedroom has art and antiques and extra dresser drawers for that special someone.

Let us turn it on and see — no, hear — what it has to tell us this morning.

Oh.

The radio is telling us that at 9:40 this morning — Friday morning — someone has shot and killed 26 people, 20 of them children ages 5 to 10 (later corrected as ages 6 and 7), at a little one-story elementary school in the Sandy Hook section of a small town called Newton, Connecticut, just across the border from the state of New York.

Now that’s culture for you. It’s even spooky. Sandy Hook. Hurricane Sandy.

Let us turn on the television and see what it is telling us, and showing us:

Automobiles parked any which way. Lots of them. Police cars. Ambulances. Lots of them.  A fire station. A schoolhouse. Gurneys. National guards. State troopers. F.B.I. persons. Local cops. People running. People struggling uphill. People hugging small children. People crying. Lots of them, of all ages.

It is a school killing in America the Beautiful, second only statistically to Virginia Tech (32 dead) back in the year 2007. Fits right into the template of slaughter by guns — by guns — by guns — by guns — at a Midwest shopping mall, in a movie theater, in a Sikh temple, in front of a Tucson, Arizona, supermarket, at another school, another school, another school…61 mass killings — and counting — since 1982.

Children, now the daily press is reporting on the armament carried into that schoolhouse by the young man dressed in armor-plated black who shot and killed those 26 human beings — 20 first-grade kids, six adults, one of them the much-loved principal — that morning. One wonders how the killer could even have walked, bearing all this lethal gear. And what, if anything, was he thinking?

A Bushmaster assault rifle.
A Glock handgun.
A Sig Sauer handgun.
A shotgun (found in the killer’s car)

And guess what, children. We are told that at least three of these weapons, among them the assault rifle, were purchased — quite legally — by the killer’s mother, a divorcée who lived alone in a good-sized house in Newton and may or may not have at one time been a teacher at that very school.

Whatever the case, she paid for those gun purchases through a bullet fired into her face that made her son’s first murder victim that ghastly morning.

All quite constitutionally kosher.

Look here, children. Read this. It’s only 27 words. It is the Bill of Rights Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted December 16, 1791. As follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

Gun lovers love the Second Amendment. They live and die by it. And make other people die by it, lots of them. Their N.R.A. — National Rifle Association — has nine-tenths of the politicians in this country shaking in their cradles because of it, for fear of it. Some old fogies around here can even remember when N.R.A. stood for something diametrically different, F.D.R.’s National Recovery Administration.

Children, it is distressing, it is infuriating — is it not? — that every person of authority in this country, up to and including an otherwise pitch-perfect president, is playing dodgeball with this question.

Every person of authority but one, it would seem. Who’d have thought that Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, so doggedly wrongheaded on so many things, would be so right on in demanding action, at long last — action, no more mealy-mouthed words — on this one.

Gun lovers decry any slightest hint of gun regulation whatsoever as a mortal threat to the Second Amendment.

Well, children, nobody is asking for repeal of the Second Amendment (or of any of our priceless constitutional amendments).

All one asks for — suggests — proposes — is an amendment of the Second Amendment. As follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of a qualified, certified, licensed, non-insane person to keep and bear non-automatic arms shall not be infringed.

We do that, or the likes of that, with dogs and fish and automobiles and the drivers of automobiles, not to mention airplanes. Why not with hunt-happy homo sapiens? Let ’em hunt. Just not hunt us. Or our children.

Class dismissed.

I was sitting at the end of a long expanse of seating, next to the center door. The taller of the two T.S.A. men carried what looked like a large wooden briefcase, the kind of case often used by artists to carry paints and brushes. He sat down next to me, on my right. Even with a long expanse of vacant seating space, he has to sit next to me.

The woman stands beside me and to my left, with her back to the door, facing across the carriage. The second T.S.A. man takes up his post. Standing, at a right angle to her, he is facing down the carriage and, incidentally, in my direction. With T.S.A. all around me I begin to wonder if I might not be on a “no-ride” list.

In an odd way, I am reassured when three members of the New York Police Department, two women and a man, enter the carriage. The man is about six-foot-two, the women maybe five-eight or five-nine and marginally overweight. The male officer carries a folding table. He stands with his back to the door, right across from me, the folded table’s legs facing outward. (I fancied that he was carrying an easel to match up with the T.S.A. officer and his case of artist’s materials. Is our Mayor Bloomberg about to embark on some new initiatives? Paint and lose weight, maybe?)

One of the two female police officers stands to the left of the table, facing in my direction. The second, the female lieutenant, stands to the right, also facing in my general direction

The three of them form a small semicircle directly across from me. There are no other passengers anywhere near us.

In 1980, while on vacation in Dublin, Ireland, with my wife and daughter, I decided to take a trip up to Belfast, in Northern Ireland, to see my father. I hadn’t seen him since 1955. I made a couple of phone calls and found out where he was living. Those were dangerous times in Northern Ireland, so it was decided that I should go by myself.

At the Border a number of uniformed personnel boarded the train, two of them with their weapons in the port position. (Shades of old black-and-white World War II movies: There’s the train, the officials, in their uniforms and black overcoats, and the terror of the guttural interrogatory, “Vayre are your papers?”)

I took one look at them and my gorge rose. All the ancient angers and resentments came to the surface. If I made eye contact I would betray myself. Worse, I might say something. (Detention without trial was commonplace in Northern Ireland. Even in Southern Ireland, in the Republic, they had been “interning” suspected I.R.A. members, without trial, since World War II). I had been reading a newspaper. I had read just about everything I wanted to read, but there was nothing for it now, only to put my head down and scan the obituaries. Soon, the moment passed, the officials left the train and we moved on.

On a second trip, in 1983, I again went to visit my father in Andersonstown, the Catholic enclave in West Belfast. This time, on the train, I kept my head down as we approached the Border. That evening, in the twilight time, I went out to buy milk, or bread or something. My father lived in an apartment in a public housing estate. The houses were nearly identical. It would be easy to mistake one street for another, even one house for another. I walked along, preoccupied with keeping track of where I was going. From around the corner of a house, a British soldier, in full fatigue regalia, jumped out in front of me. His rifle was at high port. He must have been waiting for me, playing his little game of surprise. I stopped, startled. “Good evenin’,” he said. I almost laughed. “Good evenin’,” I replied, and continued on.

A British solder in West Belfast is no surprise. But the T.S.A. on the C train? Who is minding the store at Kennedy and La Guardia? Is it a full moon? Are we in danger of being hijacked? The “Taking of the C Train” doesn’t have much of a ring to it but maybe they know something that we don’t know. (Prior to the events of Sept. 11, we are told, the C.I.A. wasn’t talking to the F.B.I. And neither one was talking to anyone else. Many of us New Yorkers, tacitly or otherwise, welcome the separation that exists between our own police force and the feds. Especially when it comes to immigration policy).

Now, on the C train, New York’s Finest seem distant, embarrassed, maybe, at being seen in the company of the feds. The feds, for their part, appear to be indifferent to the N.Y.P.D. Together, yet not together, they are a reluctant bride and groom.

So, what should I do? Put up my hands and take my chances with the N.Y.P.D.? Or take off my shoes and risk it with the T.S.A.? Once again I am saved by a newspaper. So surprised was I, by the sudden arrival of all the uniforms, that I had stopped reading. Now I take refuge in the sports section. Baseball will legitimize me with both feds and cops.

The two-minute ride from Times Square to Penn Station is forever. At Penn Station the three T.S.A. people, in good order, along with their case of artist’s materials, quickly leave the train. The tall N.Y.P.D. officer, carrying the easel/folding table, follows, with one of the female police officers right behind him. Not so the woman lieutenant. The conductor closes the train doors and she is caught in a squeeze. It may be love but the lieutenant is not amused. As she struggles to free herself, she glares down the platform, presumably in the direction of the conductor. She is probably embarrassed, in front of her colleagues and, more especially, in front of the T.S.A. people. And she is furious. She is in a difficult situation. We’ve all been caught in the doors, at one time or another. I feel a deal of sympathy for her.

Had the conductor closed the door on the T.S.A. he or she might have been whisked away to Guantanamo. It’s much safer to take a chance on the N.Y.P.D. Detention is not high on their agenda. Given a choice, in the case of a minor infraction, a police officer may well glare, rebuke you and tell you to move on — but, for the most part, they are practical, at least as long as you are white and passably middle class. They prefer just to go about their business and deal with more serious matters. The T.S.A. has a broad, and often petty, agenda and casts a much wider net.

The doors open. The lieutenant is released from captivity and the train moves on.

Freed now from the overbearing presence of the N.Y.P.D., the T.S.A. and, for all I know, the imminent arrival of the National Guard, I relax. It’s ridiculous but I feel as if I, like the lieutenant, have been released from captivity.

Reporter Albert Amateau at City Hall last month, covering a hearing on N.Y.U. A butterfly alighted on his chest. Photo by Tequila Minsky

BY ALBERT AMATEAU  |  When did it start? Age 3 going on 4, stomping through half-empty house, shouting, “Where’s my printing set?” Gave explicit instructions to mother and father not to forget it in the move from Kings Highway, Brooklyn to Utopia Parkway, Queens. Don’t remember finding it.

Copy boy, World Telegram & Sun (125 Barclay St. 1952?). Made friends with fellow copy boy a few years older who lived on Avenue A, Allen Ginsberg. He carried around a library book about the Mayans and said he was going to Yucatan to see the ruins, then hang out with friends in San Francisco.

Ginsberg tells me about visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s asylum in Washington, D.C. Shows me a typescript of his own poems with a short blurb by William Carlos Williams. I show him a poem I had written with some not-very-good rhymes. His critique: “Forget that tired crap.”

Copy boy on New York Post (75 West St., 1956?), working midnight-to-8 a.m. shift: July 25, 1956, city room frantic. Andrea Doria bound for New York collides off Nantucket with outbound Swedish-American liner Stockholm.

“[Post publisher] Dorothy Schiff’s grandson and ex-daughter-in-law, [film actress] Ruth Roman are aboard. Look for them. Take a copy boy with you,” says night city editor to man on rewrite desk, who takes me.

We do not find Ruth Roman. She lands the next day, rescued by the Ile de France. Her son, Richard Hall, 3, arrives July 27 aboard the Stockholm, which came in under her own power.

Andrea Doria capsized and sank, 1,660 rescued, about 50 were lost, including fi

Couple of hours ago I clicked on the tube, to see if there’d been any great old murals or statuary damaged by earthquake in Italy.

No murals, no statuary. No siree, Bob. Just what looked terrifyingly like a considerable dozens of human skulls being damaged by the nightsticks of a small army of the helmeted Chicago police.

Seems to me I’ve caught this flick before. Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight. Late August. The Chicago Riot, it was called. Police Riot, the  blue-ribbon Walker Commission later adjudged it.

Actually it was the second Chicago riot of that cruel year. The first one, in the largely black area Southside, had been ignited by the assassination, in Memphis, in April, of Martin Luther King, Jr. This one, in August, following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in June, was triggered by Mayor Richard J. Daley’s paranoid fear (or simulated fear) of a couple of Yippity threats to the national welfare.

That terrifying worldwide anarcho-syndicate conspiracy, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin & Co. (“Conspiracy?” Abbie would later remark, “We couldn’t agree on lunch”) also included one genuine young black revolutionary of sorts, Bobbie Seale, later bound and gagged and separated from his fellow defendants by the other Hoffman — the Honorable Judge Julius J. Huff-and-Puff Hoffman — at the Trial of the Chicago 8…no, 7…a year later.

But now, 1968, nobody who was there will ever forget it, and I was there for the New York Post.

Some things I viscerally remember:

The odor of stink bombs throughout the public places of the Chicago Hilton and other leading Windy City hotels. I can’t describe that odor, other than to say it is close first cousin to vomit. It lingers and is pervasive and will always be a Proustian memory, with a difference, whenever throughout this life I again see or hear the name “Chicago.”

And this:

Bandages on some of the broken heads and arms of the walking wounded — survivors of the big police bust in Grant Park the night before.

And this:

Governor Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut, on the floor of convention hall, his microphone cut off, deploring the “Gestapo tactics” of the Daley political machine, even as Boss Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago, on that same convention floor, stands red-faced and bellowing: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch!” at McGovern nominator Ribicoff.

Dan Rather and Mike Wallace being roughed up and prevented from reporting from that same convention floor. Walter Cronkite in the control booth saying: “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here.”

Jerry Rubin and folksinger Phil Ochs nominating Pegasus, a real live pig, for president of the United States of America.

Daley’s Chicago police clubbing beatniks and peaceniks and everybody else in sight for 17 minutes, on camera, as the demonstrators chant: “The whole world is watching,” which it was.

Myself for three days and nights in Chicago very carefully turning away from any block or corner or intersection at which I spied one or more Chicago cops in the distance.

Myself by daylight across the street from the Hilton, standing nose to nose opposite a motionless, rifle-bearing Illinois national guardsman young enough to be my son — well, nephew. He’s standing there in rigid ranks with hundreds of his fellow guardsmen.

Myself in the Hilton lobby watching the huge mass of bodies outside pressing against the hotel’s large plate-glass windows. And those windows will break.

Columnist Jimmy Breslin saying to me in the bar: “I guess your guy isn’t doing so good.” He meant Gene McCarthy, the gutsy guy I’d been reporting on for many months now. The guy who might really get us out of Vietnam, if elected. If nominated. Which he wasn’t going to be.

Back in New York, Norman Mailer would write that the United States was in the midst of a national nervous breakdown.

In Chicago, some parties purportedly unknown broke into the hotel headquarters of the Gene McCarthy campaign workers, upstairs in (I think) the Hilton and beat up everybody in sight.

On the streets of Chicago there was a closing-night candlelight parade. Murray Kempton of the New York Post, one of America’s all-time finest newspapermen, was among the marchers.

A year later I went back to Chicago for the opening week of the trial of the Chicago 8 minus 1. Crazy-like-a-fox Abbie Hoffman had the whole thing in his hand; also had Judge Julius J. Hoffman, that pompous horse’s ass, climbing a wall.

One day during an intermission I strolled over from the Federal Courthouse to the Chicago Art Institute, on the lake. And found myself facing a Van Gogh self-portrait that had the same mad, staring eyes of the real-life Jerry Rubin I’d just left. Seemed to me a sort of appropriate cap to the whole experience.

Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town…

On State Street, that great street, I saw a man dancing with his own wife!

Ah, Judy… .

To my mind, the protesters of today — the Occupiers, mostly — have a lot more diffuse set of evils to face. The evils change, the protesters change, but the Chicago police — like, now and then, some of their New York counterparts — will go on forever.

As does the perfume of stink bombs.

Photo by Clayton Patterson

An American military-style uniform made in China on sale in an army/navy store in Vienna, Austria.

By CLAYTON PATTERSON  |  A question to Donald Trump since he is presidential material and does business in our part of New York City. First, let’s agree that we differ in opinion about Occupy Wall Street. (See my Oct. 27 piece in The Villager, “O.W.S. has many messages: Ignore them at your own risk.”) And it is with our difference on O.W.S. that I bring forward this question.

The question is related to jobs. And it is the base of another reason why I don’t support these foreign wars inspired by special-interest groups. Included in the question is the idea of lost jobs, and who our military is fighting for if the uniforms are made in China?

A part of war is protecting one’s own resources, future and industrial complexes, like manufacturing and factories. Much of the stability of a country and a community is related to jobs for the masses. Most people are not lazy. They want an opportunity to work, have a family, buy a home, and attain all that is attached to the American Dream. But look on the Internet and see where America’s lost manufacturing base has gone — China. However, this latest example is an even more brutal reality.

I was in Austria and I spoke to a man who owned an army/navy-type store. He was having real problems getting American military uniforms to sell because of the “Made in China” label. Austrians do not want “Made in China” American military wear. I believe he was having a similar problem with Smith & Wesson knives.

Donald, as a Republican, how can you support the making of U.S.A. military uniforms in China? Why aren’t you vocal about this fact? Another reason for O.W.S. to exist.

And by the way, we — you and I — did have an interaction in 1989. On April Fools’ Day, April 1, the city of New York came in, evicted, then, in the same day, tore down a five-story tenement that was being squatted as their home by Tia Scot and her family. Tia was devastated. You put her up in the Chelsea Hotel for a month.

I came with Tia to your office in Midtown. I always remember your generosity and help in that situation. For Tia, an elegant lady, a shelter was the last, bottom-end option. So, thanks for that emotional and mentally stabilizing help. Your care sheltered a devastated woman.

Fred Fleck and Gloria Wasserman in Fairbanks, Alaska, at the end of their bicycle odyssey that had started on Pitt St. on the Lower East Side.

By Catherine L. Fleck

On Oct. 15, 2010, an article by Dan Barry was published in The New York Times entitled “Death of a Fulton Fish Market Fixture,” in which he sketched that bit of the life of “South Street Annie” — also known as “Shopping Cart Annie” — that he knew. In his article, Barry wondered just who this person really was, and presented what he characterized as an “incomplete, partially hidden” portrayal of Annie, whose given name was Gloria Wasserman, an account which had been cobbled together from “old photographs, faint remembrances and snippets of things once said to make sense of the life lived.”

In one of the memories brought forth in his sketch, Barry tells of how in the summer of 1947, Gloria, at the age of 22, accompanied a World War II veteran — her future husband, my father — Fred Fleck, on a bicycle trip to Alaska. But we are left wondering about this trip, about “Annie,” and about the person who accompanied her on that bicycle trip to Alaska.

Fred Fleck has now also died — on Jan. 19, 2011, at the age of 92. Like Annie’s, his is a story worth telling — that of another New Yorker who lived a very interesting life, during interesting and difficult times. In telling his story, a bit more of the lives that crossed with his become less hidden, and more of the history of those lives lived is revealed. What follows is another cobbling together of a life now passed, drawn from the memories of lifelong friends, and family.

Frederick Samuel Fleck was born in the Bronx on Nov. 15, 1918, four days after the end of World War I. Fred spent the next 24 years living and working in New York City. Graduating from Morris High School in 1935 — in the middle of the Depression — Fred’s jobs included working as a shipping clerk in a factory, selling butter and eggs door-to-door, selling coffee and sandwiches for 5 cents each from a truck to W.P.A. workers, and working as a porter in the New York City subway system. By 1942, he felt he had it made: He was working at a civil service job as a trolley motorman in Brooklyn.

In December of 1942, Fred was inducted into the Army’s Signal Corps. Earlier, during the fall of 1942, Fred had read a news story in the Bronx Home News that had piqued his interest; the Army had a need for a mountain division of ski troops, and was calling for applications. Fred applied, and after a month of basic training in the Signal Corps, at Ft. Monmouth, N.J., Fred was transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado. He had made it into the Ski Troops, the 10th Mountain Division. As Fred told it, “There, a life of excitement, adventure, travel, families, and different careers began.”

At Camp Hale in 1943, Fred became the squad leader in the first platoon, Company B, 86th Regiment, where he met and became friends with Ed Fancher. They were in the same barracks and the same company, and later served together in Italy. Fred earned several medals for his service, including the Purple Heart, and a Bronze Star Medal with one oak leaf cluster. The friendship between Fred Fleck and Ed Fancher that began at Camp Hale in 1943, lasted 68 years.

In a personal communication, Ed Fancher describes the time he and Fred spent in Italy:

“We were first quartered with about ten partisans in a stone farmhouse on a hill looking out over a valley to German positions on Mount Belvedere and Riva Ridge, soon to be our combat objectives. … A few weeks later, we made our famous night assault in the snow on Riva Ridge. Our company took our objective in our sector with only one casualty that night, but the next day, a group of our men were shelled by German artillery resulting in several casualties. Fred rushed down to help the wounded and he was himself wounded in the arm with shrapnel [Feb. 21, 1945]. Although wounded, he insisted on walking down the mountain alone to the first aid station. Luckily he made it down the mountain before shock set in too badly. The day Fred was hit I was sent down the ridge to Campiano, where we fought off counterattacks for five days.”

In this same communication, Ed Fancher recalls the summer of 1947, when both he and Fred were again living in New York City, after the end of the war.

“Fred and I and another 10th Mountain man, Rolland Osgood, were living in a tenement on Pitt Street on the Lower East Side. Fred and I had planned to go to the University of Alaska that summer, but I backed out at the last minute. Fred then decided to go anyway. …”

This was when Fred Fleck met Gloria Wasserman. Fred was visiting his brother-in-law, who worked for Harry Winston in the Diamond District of New York City, and, as Fred told the story, an acquaintance of his brother-in-law, Gloria, showed up to say she wanted to accompany him to Alaska. Taken aback, Fred said he’d have to test Gloria’s stamina for such an arduous trip; he later recalled that Gloria, after the two of them had vigorously bicycled about on their test of her stamina, had actually shown more than he had. So the two of them headed out for Alaska. As Ed Fancher described it, “[Fred] and Gloria set out from Pitt Street for Fairbanks on bicycles, while a family of Gypsies watched their departure in disbelief.”

More than 50 years later, in a personal communication in 1998, Gloria tells of that trip to Alaska, and of her long friendship with Fred Fleck, which survived well after they had divorced:

“We bicycled for nearly three months across the U.S. — up to Canada — the Yukon Territory, White Horse, and 3,000 miles of Alcan Highway. The American Army built that highway in the wilderness in 9 months during the 2nd World War.

“When twilight would fall we would put up a small nylon tent by the side of the road. Fred would recite poems from the ‘Leaves of Grass’ and ‘The Waking’ by Theodore Roethke and also read from Gibran’s ‘The Prophet.’ It was a happy and exciting time.

“Finally, we rolled into Fairbanks, 2nd largest city in Alaska. Only two streets were paved. It was truly the ‘last frontier’ in 1947. Fred went on to enroll in the University of Alaska, high on a hill, where he spent his free time skiing.

“He traded in our trusty bicycles for a small room in John and Lotti Pace’s house. The house must have been at least 150 years old. You had to be brave to get out in the minus 10 degrees weather to use the ‘outhouse.’ There was no modern plumbing. Another feature of that warm, loving home was an old fashioned wood stove in the kitchen. We enjoyed many a delicious meal with the Pace family.

“Fred and I have kept in touch throughout the years. He has helped me from time to time in family matters and I am proud and glad he is still in my life.”

The years following that trip to Alaska with Gloria, Fred traveled a fair bit, working and living in various places — from New York City, to the Alaskan tundra, to Arizona. From 1948 to 1953, he worked with Ed Fancher as a trucker in New York City, while attending the New School for Social Research. He worked as a school maintenance man in an Eskimo village in Kasigluk, Alaska, from 1951 to 1952. In the summers of 1951 to 1953, he worked as an Alaska tugboat cook on the Kuskokwim River, and as a longshoreman. During 1951 to 1953, Fred also worked as a social worker in Arizona, in Holbrook and on the White River Apache Indian Reservation.

Ed Fancher recounts this period in Fred’s life in a personal communication in 1998, when friends and family contributed to a book of memories, to be presented to Fred on his 80th birthday:

“When Fred returned from that Alaska adventure he went to Fordham where he finished his B.A. and then to the New School for Social Research, for his M.A. in psychology. We were both living on the $150 a month from the G.I. Bill of Rights, so we needed a little extra income. I had a 1937 Plymouth pickup truck at the time, so Fred and I started the Fancher and Fleck Trucking Company, shortened to F & F Trucking, to supplement our income. We did light moving in the Village mostly, but much of our business seemed to be moving 18-year-old girls from their families in Brooklyn or Queens to Village tenements where they could become ‘liberated’ and Bohemian.

“By 1955, after further adventures in Alaska, Arizona, etc., Fred returned to New York and became a student at the School of Social Work of Columbia University, where he succeeded in persecuting the school to the point of getting himself kicked out. While he was suing Columbia over his dismissal, Dan Wolf and I were planning to launch the Village Voice. Fred was our first employee.”

The first issue of the Village Voice, Vol. 1, No. 1, carried as its lead story, “Village Trucker Sues Columbia,” which told of Fred Fleck’s battle with Columbia:

“A 36-year-old Village trucker, expelled from the New York School of Social Work of Columbia University in March, claims that his expulsion was improper and is suing the University for $50,000. Papers in the suit were served Monday.

“Frederick Fleck of Christopher Street was expelled from the school on March 23rd of this year — the day after a signed editorial critical of the school’s training methods appeared in a student publication of which he was editor. Fleck claims — and the school’s spokesmen deny — that he was expelled because of his editorial criticism. …”

In 1956, while living in Greenwich Village, Fred met and married Judith Parke White, daughter of Margaret Marshall and Hal Saunders White. Fred and Judy drove across the country to Short Creek, Arizona/Utah (Short Creek spanned both sides of the border between the states) in the summer of 1956. In this polygamist village, Fred worked as a social worker and a teacher. Across the next decade, he continued to work as a school teacher in six different school districts in the four corners of Arizona, including such places as Ft. Huachuca, Naco, Douglas and Chinle. From 1965 through 1966, Fred studied at the University of Arizona in Tucson, receiving an M.A. in education.

In 1966, Fred and his family moved to Southern California, where he remained until his death. Fred worked as a reading specialist at Ontario High School until 1985, when he retired to take care of his son, who had A.L.S.

After moving to Southern California, where Fred and his family had somewhat “settled,” they continued to travel during the summers — across the country and to Mexico — for the next couple of decades. In the 1990’s, in his 70’s and 80’s, with his children grown, Fred maintained his pattern of traveling to visit family and friends — crossing the country to New York, driving to Mexico and traveling to Europe. Living independently until he was 87, Fred then moved to an apartment four blocks from his son’s house, where the family could help care for him. At 90, Fred moved into his son’s house in Granada Hills, Cal., where he spent the last two years of his life. Over the years, the memories that remained the most vivid, and which stood out the most, were those of that bicycle trip to Alaska and the time he had spent in the 10th Mountain Division.

Frederick Samuel Fleck outlived at least three of his four wives — Gloria, Judy and Ethel — and one child, Daniel. Fred is survived by his sisters, Sophie and Adele; his children, Barbara, Annie, Catherine, Mika, Carol and David; and his grandchildren, Nicolas, Ellie, Nathan, Zoe, Elliot and Ian.

On Sat., Jan. 22, 2011, a funeral service was held for Fred Fleck in Granada Hills. At this service — which was held in the home he had lived in for the last part of his life — Fred’s long, adventurous and well-lived life was celebrated, as was his passion for life, and his extraordinary and deep commitment to family and friends. He will be missed by many.

On the last day of boyhood — not youth, but boyhood — their big guy, Endicott (“Chub”) Peabody of Massachusetts, unstoppable defensive lineman of the Harvard Crimson, had almost single-handedly taken apart the Big Green 11 captained by our big guy, center Charles Milton (“Stubby”) Pearson of Minnesota.

Now, on the other side of the river, the Boston side, an hour or so after the end of the game on this aching Saturday afternoon, I was steering my overcrowded black 1940 convertible Ford Schpitfeuer straight into the mouth of a Mass Avenue shortcut tunnel, only to discover that it wasn’t a shortcut at all unless you were a streetcar of “the T,” Boston’s equivalent of the M.T.A. One such monster, bell clanging furiously, was headed at that very moment straight toward the nose of the Schpitfeuer Ford, not to mention toward myself and the six or seven or eight other guys — buddies, classmates, defeated invaders — who were distributed elsewhere in or on the vehicle.

I was at the wheel because only a half-minute earlier, Al Goldman, the corpulent, go-getting business manager of The Dartmouth, who’d been serving as driver because he knew the terrain, suddenly, right there in the middle of downtown Boston traffic, had jammed on the brakes, looked around, jumped out, said: “I left my car somewhere around here,” and disappeared forever into the crowd. Leaving me, the editor in chief, to, so to speak, take back the reins.

What did I do? I backed us out slowly, very, very slowly, with the streetcar moving voraciously forward by way of encouragement, inch by inch.

Why do I call that 1940 Ford a Schpitfeuer? Well, because all that spring of 1941, we of The Dartmouth, the oldest college daily newspaper in America, went out every so often in a couple of cars to the Bema, a grassy place just off the campus, to play dogfight in the skies over Britain, in honor of those who were truly great. …“Achtung, Schpitfeuer!”… “I say, old boy, jolly good show!” …as we hurtled and skidded our beer-drenched, overloaded autos this way and that way over the greensward. Babe and Craighead, DeSherb and Farb, Mitchbitch and Proc Page, even humorless old Joseph P., my second in command.

Newspapermen! A fraternity more binding than any traditional Greek-letter animal house.

Those Bema dogfight things were merely the letting-off of steam, of course — release of nervous tension — because 1941 was a very bad year indeed. During the course of it, Adolf Hitler continued to consume and destroy country after country, while we — in our faraway, isolated, protective little Hanover, New Hampshire, cocoon — were increasingly involved in several mini-wars of our own: the pacifist isolationists; subclass (a) radical or (b) reactionary, along with a sprinkling of America Firsters, versus the ever more heated and alarmed stop-Hitler interventionists. The latter meaning me, in that newspaper.

When the Germans, in April of that year, went from invading Yugoslavia to invading Greece, Charles Guy Bolté, the golden boy of the Class of 1941 — one year ahead of my Class of 1942 — brought me a manifesto he had just written in the form of an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Dear Mr. President,” it began, “Now we have waited long enough… .” It called on F.D.R. to quit stalling and at long last move against Hitler by force.

I ran it on the next morning’s front page — and the whole campus damn near blew up. What had been a 1,000 percent pacifist college paper when yours truly (then also an ardent pacifist) ascended to the editor’s desk was now all that and more of an interventionist college newspaper — the first such in this entire country, I have always believed. Listening to Edward R. Murrow broadcast the summer before from the rooftops of burning London had turned me 180 degrees around. That, and whatever new barbarism the Nazis were executing every day. I don’t think I ever used the word “Jew” except between the lines.

The Japanese? Well, they had raped an entire city — China’s Nanking — back in 1937, but we would have to get around to that someday in the distant future, when we had the time and the means to do it.

In the fall of the year before, 1940, on the night of the famous “Fifth Down” football game against Cornell, coach Earl Blaik reminded us at a big emotional bonfire that Dartmouth men always exemplified the idea of “Rugged, see!”

O.K., I’m only a college boy, a citified college boy who can neither skate nor ski — nor, God save us, play football. But so long as I have this newspaper, I’ll keep writing anti-Nazi, go-to-war editorials while Babe — associate editor and best friend Alex “Babe” Fanelli of Pelham Manor, New York — supplies the poetry.

In Boston, around midafternoon Sunday, the day after that disastrous Harvard-Dartmouth football game, I pointed the 1940 black Ford (a hand-me-down from my mother) north toward Hanover.

Several hours later, as I drew up and parked in front of Robinson Hall, the ancient and honorable edifice that housed the editorial and business offices of The Dartmouth, a kid came running out of — pouring out of — the building, I forget his name; it may have been Jessup. He was what was called a “heeler” — an underclassman bucking to become a full-time staffer of that newspaper.

“Jerry!” he was yelling. “Jerry, have you heard? The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!”

And like almost every other jerk in this country at that moment, I said: “Where’s Pearl Harbor?”

Forty-eight hours and three or four extra editions of The Dartmouth later, Babe and I were sleeplessly downing harsh black coffee in the Hanover Inn. Babe looked at me, took a swallow, and said: “I guess we’d better go, don’t you?”

And so we went, leaving the oldest college newspaper in America to the tender mercies of Joseph P. & Co.

Some six months later a postcard reached me at an anti-submarine airbase up the Demerera from Georgetown, British Guiana. It was from George Hanna, Class of 1941, a star on the Dartmouth basketball team and someone I’d never met. It had been mailed six months earlier. “So you went and did it,” it said. “Good for you.”

George Hanna, a distinguished New Hampshire lawyer, died only a couple of years ago. I never got to thank him for that postcard.

Charles Bolté left college, went to Canada, joined the King’s Royal Rifles, got a leg blown off at El Alamein, was a Rhodes Scholar, married a beautiful girl named Mary Elwell, founded and ran the American Veterans Committee, had a decent career in publishing, was a physical and vocal duplicate of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, and is now also gone.

Endicott Peabody won a Silver Star for gallant service on a U.S. Navy submarine in the Pacific theater of war. He served one two-year term (1963-’65) as Democratic governor of Massachusetts (and ally of John F. Kennedy), but was too racially and economically liberal — he refused, among other things, to send any human being to the electric chair — to ever again get elected to anything. He left us in 2009.

And Stubby Pearson? Big, amiable, earnest, decent, rough-complectioned Charles Milton Pearson of Minnesota? I knew him fairly well, as it happens, because he, too, believe it or not, in our freshman year had been a heeler, alongside me, though in his case for the sports pages of The Dartmouth. But instead of writing it, he ended up playing it — football and basketball, all-star captains of both.

Stubby was also the Class of 1942 Phi Beta Kappa valedictorian, though by that time I was not on the scene. (The war, in fact, was to save me from flunking out.)

I imagine that Charles Milton Pearson would have gone on to become a Rhodes Scholar himself, a college president, a senator, governor, a United States president, anything. But in late March 1944, Stubby Pearson plunged his Navy dive bomber down toward a Japanese destroyer in the waters off Palau, and died in the attempt, taking his gunner, T.W. Watterston, with him.

Does that do it, Mr. Blaik? Rugged, see! Give us the boy and we’ll give you the man.

This bonfire is for all those boys, in the embers of December 7, 2010.