Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Returning to “Go” With Will Rogers
It’s only the inspiration of those who die that make those who live realize what constitutes a useful life.–Will Rogers
I was lying on my back on one of the flat, gray concrete banisters that edged our front steps, watching the stars flicker to life in the Kansas summer twilight. The lightning bugs were in flight, and the rhythmic buzzing of locusts in the trees across the street filled the air.
Dad sat on our porch swing, quietly smoking his favorite cigar, a Roi Tan. From time to time, a trail of well-formed smoke rings expanded into the still air. Then for no apparent reason he asked the question I have so clearly remembered all these years: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Being a grown up was not as yet a burning concern for me. Although at times I did manage to see myself somewhere in the future as a cowboy, a fencing Musketeer, an African explorer and big-game hunter, a Mississippi river boat captain–all subject to change based on the next exciting adventure movie at the local Paramount Theater. Sometimes the image of a song-and-dance man in vaudeville slipped in, but only fleetingly. I knew vaudeville was not what it had once been. Besides I could not carry a tune. As for dancing, I’d never tried.
For the moment, however, Dad’s out-of-the-blue question touched a reflective nerve. I looked inside myself as deeply and as seriously as an eleven-year-old is able. As I gazed up into the darkening sky, thinking, Will Rogers, everybody’s hero, came into my mind.
He had seemed special to me for some time. So many things about him I liked. Not lost on me was that others liked him, too. Before he died, only a year or so before, much of the townsfolk’s conversation had included quotes from his newspaper columns and radio programs. Many of his sayings were still being repeated, always with the same effect: a smile and an approving nod. I never heard anyone say a bad thing about him.
“What do you call someone like Will Rogers?” I asked. “A humorist.” “That’s what I want to be–a humorist.” Even now I recall that those words revealed my deepest heart-
felt secret. I had just offered Dad my pearl of great price. However, as we were in the middle of the Great Depression, Dad’s response, although a disappointment to me, was probably predictable: “You need to be practical.” That ended our discussion about my future plans without either of us giving any thought to what being a humorist might have meant to me. Had I been asked I would have been hard pressed for an answer. However, I was aware that Will Rogers was a man who made people feel good and that he drew them together. At some level, I knew I wanted a part in that togetherness.
I continued to admire Rogers, but never to the point of idolizing him. I did have sufficient interest in the humorist to make him the subject of a college sociology paper. The prof scrawled on the cover sheet: “Good statement of a philosophy of life, but this was not the assignment. C–.”
Later, after college and out in the real world I read a couple of Rogers’ biographies. I could sometimes come up with one of his quotes when an occasion suggested it. My old conversation with Dad sometimes surfaced when I tried my hand at humor writing. Still, I found other humorists to be as enjoyable and of equal interest, if not more so, writers such as Robert Benchley, H. Allen Smith, James Thurber, O. Henry and Ogden Nash.
It was not until a half-century after my evening conversation with Dad that I began to realize how central Will Rogers must have always been in my life. This awareness came only slowly after I had decided to portray this great humorist and initiated the required research and study to do so faithfully.
My journey with Will Rogers began as a portrayal of the importance of play for the individual. Play is a resource to transcend the limitations imposed by society and life. In his autobiography, renowned psychoanalyst Karl Jung described a personal crisis during his mid-thirties. He discovered that reconnecting with the play of his childhood helped him clarify his thoughts and situation. He said of this reconnection, “That was the turning point of my fate.” I began to incorporate some aspects of play into my hospital counseling, and eventually developed a small-group experiential workshop I called Playlife: Rediscovering the Secrets of Childhood which was meant to introduce people to the importance of play in adult life. This effective program helped participants to revisit their own play experiences and bring them into the present, and showed clearly that playful energy can transform the humdrum and mundane, into thrilling, stimulating, creative events that excite the imagination. Playfulness belongs to all of life, not just youth.
I had a chance to put it to the test personally in the late 1970s. I had been working at a full-service hospital with over 400 beds. I was the entire chaplain department. For twelve years, whenever needed, I was present in emotional and traumatic situations. Suddenly without warning, I felt a gut-level message: “Enough!” I realized I could no longer deliver the quality of service that patients and hospital were entitled to, and I resigned, moving into an uncertain future. The transition was neither smooth nor swift.
Driving home following my last day of work, I realized my identity was no longer connected to the hospital. Another thought came and began playing tag with the first. This was the first time in my adult life my identity was unrelated to some institution, business, or organization. As the department head of a state mental hospital, the pastor of such and such a church, a U. S. Marine, a representative of a financial institution, or a university student, I always had identified myself in terms of something that was not me. It was a sobering realization.
What was my identity? Who/what was I–as a person–in my own right? The thoughts tumbled through my mind as I came face to face with one of life’s most confounding questions: What does it mean to be a human being? Or as it is sometimes asked: Who am I? Why am I here? What can I do about it?
Fast forward. Fall 1991. I am immersed in a book project to incorporate some hospital experiences and my independent studies in humor and play. But the very spirit the book was to celebrate seemed missing. It was simply pages of thoughts without soul. As in a failing marriage, my labor of love had turned into drudgery. I felt the irony in losing my way while trying to describe the very workshop I had designed to encourage playfulness and spur creativity, imagination, and ingenuity. The natural thought was to engage myself in one of my own workshop’s activities. If that didn’t bring renewed vitality to the writing, perhaps I had no business offering it to others.
I found myself making a “spider” from a pencil eraser, held by a bent straight pin, and wrapped with four dangling legs cut from a rubber band. The spider was suspended from a thread. Immediately I was transported back to the balcony of the local Paramount movie theater in the hometown of my youth. There I would tie the spider to an extra long piece of thread wrapped around a pencil stub. Leaning over the rail from the front row of the balcony, during the movie, I would lower it slowly in front of an unsuspecting moviegoer seated below. Gratified results guaranteed! Being smart for my age I never used the spider twice during any one show.
My spider triggered something else. The image of Will Rogers burst suddenly into my mind. Instantly, in an intuitive moment, I knew there was a connection to my moment of playfulness and Rogers’ special connection to the American people.
I immediately turned to re-read a biography I had not looked at in years. There I discovered, or re-discovered, halfway through the first chapter, that Rogers had learned to rope at the age of four. Roping each day was a normal part of his adult life, and he became one of the world’s most accomplished fancy trick ropers. I realized that Rogers, who had been thrust into my consciousness by some unexplained presence, had, throughout his life actually lived the play process.
Reading about Rogers’ childhood roping was my Eureka moment. It linked Will Rogers to my investigation and developmental work in the experience of play. The more I read, the more I discovered that Rogers epitomized every one of my theories concerning personal fulfillment. Often his life enlarged the concepts behind my theories.
I began to revise my presentations on the nature of play. I decided to incorporate, as best I could, a brief Rogers-style monologue, which I would script from published quotes, to convey his playful nature to those who had little or no knowledge of his Oklahoma cowboy persona. This would, however, mean learning to rope.
Finding a spinning rope became an adventure of its own. They were not stock items, even in western-wear stores. A trick roper could have given me the information I needed. But I didn’t know any trick ropers, and they are not hanging around just any street corner. I was on my own.
Eventually, I found a pre-packaged trick-roping kit. Printed across the top of the package were Rogers’ portrait, his autograph and an action picture of him doing a rope trick. Included with a 12-foot, 100% cotton spot cord rope was a 52-page instruction booklet: Will Rogers Rope Tricks, by Frank Dean, who had been a friend of Rogers.
One of my earliest Rogers presentations was given to my Lions Club, and I asked for the members’ written comments afterwards. One particular comment, from a friend of mine, was a turning point. He wrote, “We would like more of Will Rogers and less of you.” I first laughed, then thought: “Of course, why should I tell Will Rogers’ story? Let him tell it himself.” I found myself taking one of the most reluctant steps of my life: performing as Will Rogers on the stage.
As I continued to learn more about Rogers, I became more aware that the social dynamic embodied in the spirit of play was active in Rogers’ relationship to the American people. When children engage in spontaneous play, often without any or very little discussion, they intuitively group themselves around the essentials for any meaningful interaction: Fairness, caring, respect for one another, trust. Indeed, group play has its own ethics.. This, I realized, was what went on between Rogers and the people. It was this ethics that bonded Rogers and the people. The exuberance of his playfulness connected with the natural spirit of play that resided in others and they formed their own community of trust. The people gave him their trust, a trust he never violated. He in turn gave his to them, believing in the hopeful realities of a people-matter society.

If the ordinary folks of the land could not exercise their own playfulness as readily as Rogers, they could at least experience it vicariously through him. It was said the people could look in a mirror and more nearly see themselves as Will Rogers than as any other person on the American scene. Perhaps they could not execute the desire, but they could feel themselves freed from the negatives, freed from trying to control others, to control events, to control life– liberated from the trappings of power, status, position. And so freed, what else is there to do but to radiate hope, joy, trust, and seek satisfaction in the moment–just as Will Rogers did.
As part of my research into Rogers, I visited the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma and experienced another rediscovery: Will Rogers was part Cherokee and was raised on the Cherokee Nation. This heritage would prove to be a principal landmark guiding my future thoughts. When a friend recommended Forgotten Founders by Bruce E. Johansen, I came across a new insight into the American way, and into Will Rogers’ impact on the American public. Our cherished American way is in fact a blending of important American Indian cultural values and the emerging European value of individualism. I realized that the values Will Rogers expressed were inherent in the value systems of many American Indians. And that it was those values—fairness, tolerance, the importance of community, compassion and caring for others—that struck such a deep chord with the American people during the Great Depression. His commentary and observations were common-sense ways these values related to the events of the day, with people saying, “He’s right about that.” It resonated with their inner wisdom.
I found myself again looking at the importance of an active spirit of play in a functioning society. For Rogers, his playfulness grew naturally out of the values he learned from his Cherokee mother and others around him during his childhood. His spirit of play helped keep his people-matter values foremost in his living, even in desperate times. I began to understand that a healthy spirit of play also creates and sustains community. Together the playful individual and the caring community form an environment of trust in which human life flourishes. In Will Rogers one sees that personal fulfillment and creating a better world is a matter of child’s play.
As children, many of us were admonishing to “Grow Up!” And we did. Will Rogers showed us the wiser command would be, “Grow Young!” Fortunately, it’s never too late to do that.

Read more about WILL ROGERS and E. T. (Cy) Eberhart HERE.

Copyright 2010 E. T. (Cy) Eberhart. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Chapter 26. The Secret Life of the East Village Other
New York, 1968-69

If the title of this chapter makes little sense to you, it should perhaps be explained that from about 1967 until 1971, the East Village Other was the name of an
“underground” newspaper that swept fear and terror into the hearts and minds of uptown New Yorkers and Americans everywhere, though most, but not all, of its contents would seem fairly sedate today.

One of the paradoxes dearest to science fiction writers depicts the earth-born hero returning to his planet after a flight of several years’ duration at a speed approaching that of light. Due to a quirk in the Einsteinian cosmos, his own personal time has moved far more slowly than that on earth, and so he returns to a planet where everything has changed almost unrecognizably, where everyone he knew before he left is either dead or dying. Yet this fantasy can become close to a reality in one’s own lifetime, as anyone who has returned to his country after a prolonged absence well knows.

When Ilene and I stumbled back into Greenwich Village after seven years in Europe, we might just as well have been space travelers shot out of a “time warp.” We had no choice but to submit to a period of reverse cultural shock in readjusting to American manners, customs, and tempo. During this time our previous experience as Americans turned out to be of dubious benefit, for so much had changed in our absence. We were fore-warned of these changes by our assiduous reading of the underground press, but we were still not prepared for the full impact.

The America we had left in 1961 had been stately by comparison, formalistic, still nestled in its Fifties mythology. To the extent that a culture was evident, it had been the orthodox culture, whose adherents spoke in hushed voices and gathered in small enclaves for self-protection. Contacts between these enclaves and the dominant American life-style were rare and unsought on either side. Anyone who dressed the least bit strangely would be stared at, perhaps even heckled in certain neighborhoods. I can recall being stared at myself for wearing one of the first Russian-style fur hats in New York during the deep recesses of the Fifties, and I remember Ilene getting cat-calls even in Greenwich Village as late as 1961 for the large earrings she was fond of wearing.

But the America we were returning to in 1968 was so different that we could only rub our eyes with joy and amazement. What we were seeing was of course only New York, but the changes even here were so compelling that we had to extend them in our minds to the nation as a whole. To our astonishment almost every other person we saw looked weirder than ourselves. This was not only true of the East and West Villages but extended to some extent uptown as well. When we had gone to Europe, the East Village was a small defensive community of nonconformists. When we came back, it seemed unaccountably to have taken over.

After a fitful night’s sleep in a fleabag hotel, we stumbled into the offices of the East Village Other in the hope of orienting ourselves to what had been happening during our time with Rip Van Winkle. To my surprise, our sense of dislocation went totally unnoticed, and I was immediately asked to start writing for the paper on the strength of the work I had been doing in London and Berlin. And to my further surprise I found this quite easy to do, although I was walking into what appeared to me almost a foreign land, my every step of the way seemed assured, as though I had been rehearsing this role over a long period.

And in a sense I had been. I started writing my articles, brought them into the paper, and saw them in print a few days later, just as I had been doing in London. It was as though I had walked from one world into a totally different one without missing a step. After only two months I was firmly established as a fixture at the East Village Other.

Because this newspaper emanated from New York, still widely hailed as the nation’s cultural capital, and because it had preceded all other underground papers in the country, with the exception of one or two conventionally laid out papers which were called underground in retrospect, it was widely regarded by many as the chief spokesman for “the movement.” [FOOTNOTE 1] Universities and libraries had started to subscribe (as had other newspapers and even foreign embassies) on the theory that we were the cutting edge of the youth culture and had to be understood.

We were only in the EVO offices a few moments when Allan Katzman told us that he was being regularly courted by uptown reporters and commentators and had even been asked to speak at various press lunches on the significance of what we believed we were doing. Allan regarded this as something of a joke besides being a waste of time, for no matter what he would tell them, they were simply not in a position to interpret it correctly and integrate it with their preconceptions. This was how wide and real the gap between the two cultures was in late l968. As this gap was spread out over all of the twelve cultural and political areas (described briefly in FOOTNOTE 2), it is not really surprising that it often seemed to be an unbridgeable chasm.

As soon as I started writing for EVO, I too found myself being wooed by certain uptown media types, who seemed to believe that I possessed a key to opening deep cultural secrets, if only I would share it with them. And this attempt at rapprochement among media people, at courtship even, was going on during the height of the tensions surrounding the counter-culture, when demonstrations, arrests, and physical violence were a fact of everyday life. I believe that what Allan and I saw working was one of the mechanisms by which a society protects itself from dissolution. Fortunately for all of us it was to prove quite effective.

The East Village Other aka EVO at the time I formally joined it had already been in existence for over two years and had reached what was in many ways the peak of its power. It had been founded by John Wilcock, Walter Bowart, Sherry Needham, and Allan Katzman as a single sheet broadside which slowly and painfully began to put out larger and more frequent editions. It had originally been published from offices on Avenue A but gladly accepted the offer of free office space from rock impresario Bill Graham, and in 1967 EVO moved into its Second Avenue offices over the Fillmore East. During its early existence it came out twice a month at best, but shortly before my return to America it went weekly and for a while at least seemed to have no problems coping with this schedule.

The fights and duels between the various founders were already legendary when I arrived in New York. John Wilcock and Walter Bowart had allegedly broken up over a dispute concerning whether or not the work of Andy Warhol should be featured in the paper. This was at a time when Warhol was truly an underground and controversial figure. Wilcock was in favor of promoting him, but Bowart was unable to accept Warhol because of his homosexuality.

This story alone made me wonder how much real freedom the underground press was capable of, but the upshot of this feud was that both Wilcock and Bowart decamped, leaving Katzman mainly in charge of the paper. Bowart took off for the Southwest, and I was to see him only once, a few weeks after I returned to New York, when he arrived at the EVO offices accompanied by a lawyer.

He was impressive, tall and bearded, and reminded me in many ways of Jim Haynes in London. Soon he and his lawyer disappeared into the front office to talk with Allan, Sherry, and some of the other “official” directors of the paper. There soon emanated from behind the door shouting of such intensity and duration that I and several other writers left the building and went elsewhere to work. When we returned, we learned that there had been a battle over the custody of the EVO stock (I will deal later with the ironies of an underground paper issuing stock), and the
impasse had been resolved with Bowart being bought out and fleeing back to Arizona.

Although John Wilcock was no longer around the paper he was a considerable figure in his own right. He had originally quit the Village Voice when they criticized an article in which he had mentioned pot smoking, another indication of how much times were to change. Not only did he play an important role in starting EVO, but he was also one of those figures who were to catalyze many other papers and underground activities, achieving little for himself in the long run other than personal satisfaction. He had also been involved in the early stages of the Los Angeles Free Press, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and had even visited London during the summer when plans were being laid for International Times aka IT. He had a job writing for the well-known series of books on how to live in various countries for five dollars a day, which aided him greatly in moving around the world, and he is rumored to have played a role in starting papers in India, Japan and Thailand as well.

I soon became aware that the atmosphere of the EVO offices was far more turbulent than that of London’s underground paper. Despite our various problems with the police, there had always been a certain English gentleness and unhurried quality at IT. Whatever other international benefits the underground might be conferring, it had clearly not yet succeeded in eradicating national differences.

The best picture I can give you of our offices is to ask you to recall all the violence, turmoil, and confusion of the Sixties and imagine what the Chief Crisis Center of that era would have looked like, if there had been one.

There was in fact such a Crisis Center, and the East Village Other was it for New York and a large part of the Northeast. News of riots, arrests, and dope deals regularly passed through, and so did the dope dealers themselves, people sky-high on their products, street people, Black Power leaders, astrologers, gay power pioneers, commune members, Hell’s Angels, FBI agents (always easy to spot), ordinary policemen, people placing sex ads, runaway kids, all these and more were passing through the EVO offices on any given day, sometimes it seemed during any given hour.

These people came in all shapes, sizes, colors, mental states, and even age groups, though the young predominated. Because we were located directly above the Fillmore, there was often also the deafening sound of live rock music going on as the paper was being edited and prepared for the printer. How we brought out any kind of paper under these conditions was close to a miracle.

In the midst of these multiple comings and goings sat for a remarkable number of hours each week Allan Katzman, the principal editor. Allan was, for me at least, the ideal editor every writer dreams of finding but rarely does. Once he had decided on the basic abilities and merit of a writer, he let him have his own lead, trace out his stories in his own way. While he might question a word or an idea here or there, he rarely made extensive corrections, at least with my work. Where some editors will cavil over every word with a writer or need to withdraw to secret hideaways and rewrite every sentence in every article they publish, Allan simply let things happen. Rather, he encouraged them to happen. Maybe it was because he was himself a poet and felt secure as a writer, but envy and constant quibbling were not part of his makeup.

Perhaps the single most important element of the tension at EVO was a tall, heavyset young man named Joel Fabricant, who increasingly took on the role and duties of “publisher.” At any time of day Joel was usually quite loudly occupied in various administrative tasks. Although Allan was responsible for editorial matters, Joel had come onto the scene after the split between Bowart and Wilcock to coordinate, if that was the word, our business affairs.

Although Joel was very much into pot, rock music, vegetarian foods and all the other underground causes, I always felt there was something decidedly unreconstructed and Fifties-like about him. To me he looked like the typical fast-buck businessman glazed over with a counter-cultural wash, which frequently wore thin.

Although the EVO offices were spacious enough, Joel made them feel quite cramped, for he was always everywhere at once, shouting and laughing loudly, punching the men with mock boxing blows or striking karate poses, pinching the women with gleeful abandon, barking orders to everyone about advertising, circulation, printing runs, graphics, layout, and even editorial policy. While we all had to make some sort of peace with Joel’s presence, I know that many of the writers found him objectionable in varying degrees and did their best to avoid him whenever possible. And I suspect that Joel was one of the reasons that eventually led Allan to resign as editor.

The best that could be said about Joel was that his bustling was harmless and even ineffectual in the long run, for he rarely read a copy of the paper. He was mainly concerned with having a new issue to ship to the distributors each week, and he showed an interest in its contents only if there had been some negative feedback from the distributors or the newsstands where it was sold. I have already mentioned that this happened with one article I wrote (an illustrated review of a book on erotic art), which was so outspokenly sexual for its time (possibly because I entitled it Fucking Through the Ages and included some of the wildest drawings) that several thousand copies of EVO were returned from California, and suits against the paper were launched in two small New Jersey towns. Joel tried chewing me out over this, saw that I wouldn’t take it, and finally concluded that this sort of problem was good for our circulation in the long run.

The absolute peak in EVO’s power and influence came during the spring and summer of 1969, and if a few halfway competent decisions had been taken around that time, the paper might conceivably still be around today. But EVO’s success was just beginning to be counter- productive, for until that time the paper had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on raunchy material and sex ads in a newsprint format. Over the winter, however, a new paper had been launched in the form of Screw Magazine, and its appearance signaled that we had indeed, ironically enough, been successful in our battle against censorship. Yet our victory was to prove most useful to another sort of paper. While the underground press had included sex as only one part of its broad formula, Screw moved in to specialize in this area.

At first our stand was to support Screw, and we accepted their ads in EVO. Soon they grew so powerful that they launched a second paper called Gay for the other side of the sex scene now emerging. As our “publisher,” Joel was beside himself both with the threat this posed and the opportunity it offered. Within only a month or two, he responded to this challenge by publishing out of the EVO office not only our own separate sex paper called Kiss and our own gay sheet called Gay Power, but even a foray into astrology called the Aquarian Agent. And Peter Leggieri, another of our editors, soon started a comic strip tabloid called Gothic Blimp Works. For a while all of these papers were being prepared on the same premises at once.

These developments drove some of our writers up the wall. Not only were they being asked to turn out a popular paper with a political thrust under trying circumstances and with very little pay, but now they were being pressured into writing for the new papers as well. Many of these writers had chosen to write for EVO out of idealism in the belief that they were paving the way for a new society. And here was Joel Fabricant, as many thought, just trying to make money, with little thought for the future of EVO or the paper’s policies.

Several pep rallies were called that winter and spring, and Joel would explain the bright future ostensibly awaiting all of us if we would just keep writing, for he believed he was building an empire that would change the whole future of journalism. To an extent he was correct in this belief, but it turned out not to be his empire or any one’s for that matter. But for the time being it looked as if Joel was unstoppable. No one could contradict him or even argue with him for that matter. And yet it was at one of his own pep sessions that his fate was sealed. He met his defeat at the hands of a single artist. And the decisive blow was dealt not by a sledge hammer but by a simple symbolic act.

The entire staff, some thirty of us, were gathered in the front office beneath its custom-made stained glass windows showing Katzman and Bowart as glowing saintly presences. Everyone waited expectantly as Joel, seated next to the door, began his latest sales pitch for the combined papers.

He went on and on until we all grow numb. One person got up and left, muttering some excuse, and we all envied him. Joel was still holding forth a few minutes later when the door opened again. The cartoonist R. Crumb reached into the room just far enough to smash a gigantic Ratner’s cream pie into Joel’s face. Crumb quickly retreated. There was a moment’s pause, a dread silence before anyone, even Joel,
reacted.

Then Joel shouted one word at the top of his lungs:

“FUCK!”

The rest was a stream of obscenities punctuated with Crumb’s name. Joel had risen like a bolt of lightening and raced back into the layout room, where he imagined the cartoonist had fled. Fortunately for Crumb and the future of American comics, he had chosen to run down the stairs instead and on up Second Avenue. After a bemused interlude, Joel came back, still quite literally in a lather from the pie, and tried to resume the mood of the meeting.

But it was no use. No one could take anything seriously after that. And it was from that moment that we ourselves stopped taking Joel seriously.

I had been present a few weeks earlier at a small gathering in Joel’s office, where I think we all may have had a foretaste of his demise. Allan Katzman, his twin brother Don, and several other writers and editors were crammed together around Joel’s desk while he spoke on the phone to a relative, who happened to be a broker on the New York Stock Exchange. This being America, the original founders of the paper had issued themselves stock in the East Village Other Corporation, and now Joel had gotten it into his head that EVO’s promise and renown had become so great that considerable capital could be raised by “going public”,  reissuing the stock and selling it on Wall Street.

He had managed to corral the imagination of several other EVO workers in this vision, and they all sat there awaiting the final outcome of his phone call on this matter. I was an exception, as I just happened to be in the office at the time. I expect I was the only one present who was skeptical of this plan, but I kept my opinion to myself.

Slowly but surely we watched Joel’s jaw drop, as he absorbed the information from the other end of the phone. After he got off, he quietly explained that we appeared to have some slight communication problem with Wall Street concerning our “image.” Why, many of the brokers down there actually thought we were opposed to capitalist society, he announced in a flat voice devoid of humor.

I do not think it had really occurred to him to ever doubt until that moment that everything could be sold as a commodity on the market, including revolution.

———————-
FOOTNOTE 1:
A considerable debate would later arise as to which was the “first” underground paper. I opt for EVO, because it was the first to use a story content AND a
graphics layout treatment which became identifiably underground. Neither of the two Los Angeles Papers founded somewhat earlier (the Free Press and Open City) did so, nor did the Berkeley Barb, which beat EVO by two months. And the editors of the quintessentially “psychedelic” paper, the San Francisco Oracle, freely admitted EVO’s influence on them. Those interested in this sort of detail may wish to look at Robert J. Glessing’s The Underground Press in America, Indiana University Press, 1970.

FOOTNOTE 2:
It’s easy enough to explain these differences, and during the Seventies I devised a test or game for measuring how “counter-cultural” or “orthodox-cultural” various people were at various times (or even might be today). The test covered twelve specific cultural and political areas dividing the two domains: it was this thorough-going contrast in ideas over so wide a field that created the tension between the two cultures and held the potential for a real social breakdown. The twelve areas of disagreement I identified (others may occur to the reader) were acceptance and use of drugs of varying degrees of soft- or hardness, attitudes to rock music, openness of sexual attitudes (heterosexual), attitudes towards gay sexuality, interest in mysticism, I Ching, etc, the Vietnam war and/or militarism in general, commitment to feminism, interest in ending or limiting capitalism, desire to restructure government or society as a whole, the status of minority rights, desirability of new break-throughs in art, education & technology, and ecology/environmental issues. These issues are addressed in greater detail in Chapter 53.

Copyright 2009 Alex Gross. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Foreward

About four or five years ago, I happened to be riding on a train from Scranton to Carbondale with Alan Sweeney and four other respected rail historians. We were part of the Steamtown Lackawanna Heritage Valley crew for the “Santa Train,” a community celebration that Alan annually coordinated.

When the train left Scranton at 7:30 a.m., Alan asked a question: “Please tell what you know about passenger rail options from Scranton to metro New York during the glory days of our railroads.”

Two hours of non-stop, fascinating discussion took place, with each historian providing remarkable detail about routes, equipment, ferry connections, and schedules.

Historians were present on the next year’s Santa Train. This time, Alan asked the distinguished group: “Please tell what you know about the passenger rail service that once ran between Scranton and Moosic Lake.” Silence on a train is enhanced by the rich sounds of railroading itself. Hands went to chins, brows furrowed, but the silence continued. Not one of us could add much of anything in response to this open question.

Alan Sweeney asks very good questions. He and his wife Judy, a life long Moosic Laker herself, have combined to answer those questions which every resident and student of Scranton and Northeast Pennsylvania will want to know. As are so typical of Alan and Judy Sweeney, they have closed the information gap about this intriguing line.

Scranton had come a long way from 1840 to 1900. This railway typified the maturation of Scranton from a rawboned iron and coal production center in Northeast Pennsylvania hinterlands to, by 1900, the booming city that would attain distinction in many more aspects than its industrial output. The Sweeneys are going to reveal to the reader how railways that were built for improving lifestyle and for access to pursuits other than daily toil underscore just what a dynamic powerhouse Scranton was a century ago.

You will be glad you joined them for this trip to Moosic Lake, but first a postscript from my father, Robert J. Keating, who reminded me that my dear friend and best man is Timothy F. Burke, Esquire, great grandson of Timothy Burke, a man you will encounter in the pages ahead.

Dominic Keating

Dunmore, PA

Introduction

I came to Moosic Lake through family. Since the 1940s my wife’s family had been enjoying the tranquility of this spring-fed lake sitting high atop Moosic Mountain. From the start, its beauty captivated me. Each passing season, I photographed the lake in all its picturesque radiance.

While watching my children and their cousins, and now even second cousins, discover the lake where their grandparents brought them, my love of history has been piqued.

The Moosic Lake of yesterday was a place reached only by steam train, eventually replaced by electric trolley. Equipped with this information, I began exploring some of the rail beds and maps that at one time brought campers and Scranton residents to an outing at Moosic Lake. Having been a rail fan since childhood, each new discovery wet my appetite for more information. The more I discover, however, the more I am led to the conclusion that too little has been written about this special place. Bits and pieces exist in various publications, but the history of Moosic Lake has not had the attention it deserves. With this book, I hope to rectify this lapse in local history.

It is my hope that this book will offer a fuller story of early Moosic Lake, paticularly in regard to the role that transportation played in its discovery. The story exists so the generation of today will have knowledge of the lake of the past.

Alan Sweeney

Scranton, PA

Chapter One The Early Beginnings

Moosic Lake first appears on a map in 1873, on a map of Jefferson Township, published in the Atlas of Luzerne County by Pomeroy and Company. It also appears on the first United States Geographic Survey of Upper Scranton to Archbald Area, circa 1880. An undated map from the collection of the Lackawanna Historical Society shows the lake as Paupack Lake. Earlier local histories show the lake as Cobb’s Pond, and a smaller lake as Mud Pond. The small lake was a marsh area until a dam was put in to raise the water level. The small lake is shown on all maps, but no name is given other than Moosic Lake. Today’s maps show both lakes as Moosic Lakes.

H. Hollister’s History of the Lackawanna Valley 1869, provides some insight into the relationship between early settlers and the lake: “the Wurts brothers once planned to use Moosic Lake to supply water to a canal for transporting coal over the mountain.” The plan never came to pass. Instead, the Wurts constructed a gravity railroad to handle the coal from Carbondale to Honesdale. One wonders what the lake would be like today if the industrialization planned by the Wurts brothers had ever taken place.

In researching this book, we did not have the opportunity to do first-hand interviews of employees, day-trippers, hunters or hikers about the early area at Moosic Lake. But we did find, in the archives of the Lackawanna Historical Society, an oral interview with Florence E. Robertson, the granddaughter of one of the lake’s owners, Edward S. Dolph. Without this interview taken by William P. Lewis, we might not know some of the early history of Moosic Lake.

Here is an excerpt from the interview, in Mrs. Robertson’s own words:

Moosic Lake the beautiful is situated about eleven miles east of Scranton. Nestled among spruces and oaks, is one of the clearest sheets of water found in Pennsylvania, fed by springs. Also known as Cobb’s Pond, in its early days.

The Moosic Mountain’s early name was Moose Mountain, as moose were supposed to be there, with deer and bear, and also called Cobb’s Mountain, but Moosic Mountain is the present name and happily called by all.

The Indians used Moosic Mountain as a path from the Delaware River to the Lackawanna, a trail about east and west. Across the lake – at the highest point were built signal fires. Also there were direction marks at the top of the mountain … I remember seeing a tree bent for directions down over the mountain. An Indian spring along the railroad bed still babbles refreshing water.

A Mrs. Mary Grier Davis, of Danville, Pennsylvania owned the larger part of the lake. Her home was at the head of the lake where a doctor now has a house, and nearby Mrs. Davis’s brother, Isaac Grier, of Danville had his home (where Walter Burke lives at present).

Moosic Lake came to the Dolph family about 1841. Edward Dolph, my grandfather, along with Mr. Crandall W. Thompson, owned one quarter of lake property. They were interested principally in coal – thought the vein might run along the mountain from Marshwood, Pennsylvania, where there was a breaker. Several bore holes were put down, in the hill back of Mrs. Davis’s house – but no coal was found. Mr. Dolph thought coal might run to the Dolph coal mines, on the other side of the lake, about four miles from Peckville. A. Winton, a coal mine was a short distance from Dolph mines. The Dolph breaker built in 1884 – burned and was rebuilt in 1894.

During the very early years, Mr. Dolph fished the lake – fished and cooked his catch at the Point on the lake – always been called Dolph’s Point.

>From about the 1870s the Dolph families enjoyed camping at the lake – near the old log cabin site, at the upper end, where there was a spring and still is.

The families enjoy the lake, especially in summers – but not sight is more beautiful than in fall, when the leaves are aglow with their brilliant foliage, and all are thankful our grandfather found so lovely a spot.

The Pennsylvania Coal Company of Dunmore, Pennsylvania, ran a gravity railroad to Hawley, and in the Moosic Mountain Pass, a Scranton switchback called the Pioneer; this ran about two miles from the lake, crossing the roadbed leading to the lake. The families often went by the Pioneer train, stopping at crossings, and walked to the lake. Mr. Dolph would go by train, fish and start home. If the Pioneer was late, he continued walking home.

In 1874 the railroad company added more cars to accommodate the tourists wanting to go to the lake.

Mr. Dolph’s family was not the only campers at the lake – Mr. William Hull and family of Olyphant, pitched a tent, at the Taylor Boarding House, about where Mr. James Veras has his place.

Mr. Edward Beyea, an official of the Pennsylvania Coal Company, had a camp not far from the Grier house.

About 1890, Mr. Edward S. Dolph, built a small house at the point for his family and enjoyed going there until his death about 1939-1940. He was also a fisherman, as his father before him.

In 1893, a small cabin was built by Mrs. Elizabeth Dolph, widow of Edward Dolph. Later, around 1900, Mrs. Blanche L. Dolph built the present Dolphin on the same site now occupied by her niece.

The lake is about 2,100 feet on its western side.

A steam railroad was opened from Dunmore to lake, June 22, 1904. The line changed from steam to electric November 13, 1909.

The Catholic Cadet, camped at the lake for several years – about 1906 or thereabouts, with Rev. Father O’Connor and committee. Rev. O’Connor died some years ago. Camp was back of pavilion.

With train service and electric car service, there were many picnics held at the lake by churches, societies, and others – swimming was always enjoyed.

There were many cottages there now, but it is still the most beautiful spot to the Dolph-Robertsons.

The Dolphs’ interests were made up of several tracts of land – Abram Singer Tract, John Singer Tract, David Morton and John Morton Tract.

Late, September 17, 1959, I am sorry to be obliged to refuse your request of last, I am not capable of getting up a paper for your meeting.

Very respectfully,

Florence Robertson

People have had a fascination with lakes for centuries, attracted to them for different reasons. It may be solitude, rest, leisure, relaxation, or recreation. Our counterparts at the turn of the century shared these ideas, even though they were limited in spending time at lakes because of transportation.

In the pages ahead, we will continue to develop the history of Moosic Lake. In the course of doing so, we will uncover a transportation story that helped bring the idea of Moosic Lake to a reality for the working man as the gateway to the clouds and one of the most picturesque routes east of the Rockies.

Copyright 2008 Alan Sweeney. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

FOREWARD

So many of the wonderful early resorts, inns, farmhouses, cottages and hotels have passed into history, but the memories remain. Ghosts of the Past are still a part of what makes the Poconos a very special place!

When the “resort saga” began, around the turn of the19th century, it was more or less simply the beginning of the exercise of putting out the welcome mat for people who needed to escape from the cities. Factory smoke and enveloping heat made life in the summertime almost unbearable. Father would necessarily be required to remain at home during the work-week. But, thankfully, Mother and the children could come to mountain country, sometimes for the whole summer, to play, breathe, and survive. Weekends would bring the workingman for a two-day rest and recuperation before his necessary return to the hotbox that was the city.

It was a “saving grace” for the economically-depressed Poconos in those early days. Extra rooms in farmhouses were pressed into service. Family friendships, that lasted through the years, came about simply because the hosts made their guests feel so sincerely welcomed (at a very nominal fee, sometimes only $1 per week).

From this humble beginning came a multi-million dollar resort business that grew and prospered. The Pennsylvania Poconos could not have done it, however, without the beautiful bounty of a region blessed with forests, lakes, rivers, tumbling streams, fish, wildlife and a lovely natural beauty. There was even a wealth of rocking chairs for viewing and enjoying it all!

Yes, many of the early resorts and farmhouses are gone… but the memory, thankfully, lingers on. We know that a house built upon an insecure foundation cannot stand for long. It is evident that the foundation of the tourist industry must have been very secure, indeed.

Whether or not the 21st century attraction of gambling in the Poconos will equal the attraction of a naturally-beautiful vacation in mountain country remains to be seen. Time, alone, will tell.

Peggy Bancroft,
South Sterling, Pennsylvania

INTRODUCTION

My interest in resorts, hotels, boarding houses and inns started in 1969, when I attended a 4-H weekend conference at Monomonock Inn. Nestled in a forest of trees, Monomonock provided a wonderful view of the Pocono Mountains. The inn was charming, the food was great, and after attending the conference for a second year, I was hooked on resorts and the hospitality industry.

With my newfound passion, I headed to college to pursue a degree in hotel and restaurant management. During the summers, I returned to work in the Poconos. Upon graduating, I secured a job with a national hotel chain. For 10 years, I traveled and worked the East Coast, always searching out interesting hotels and resorts. My current career in the food industry has afforded me the opportunity to visit resorts and inns throughout the Poconos.

The past 25 years proved to be difficult for the hospitality industry in the Pocono Mountains. Sad to say, I have found that very few of the well known and not-so-well-known boarding homes, hotels, inns and resorts are no longer in existence. Most of those that remain have had to re-invent themselves and make many changes to their operation.

However, with the advent of the gaming industry, there appears to be a renewed and revitalized interest in reinvesting in the Pocono hospitality industry. I have been collecting postcards on various subjects for the past 35years. Using my collection, and those from friends, I have compiled a pictorial history, a tour of boarding houses, hotels, inns and resorts of Monroe County from Delaware Water Gap to Tobyhanna. This area was home to many famous, and some not-so-famous hostelries. Some are in business today, some are not.

To those who remember the Poconos of the past, enjoy. To those who are new to Monroe County, welcome. And to all who love seeing the present through the eyes of the past, I hope you enjoy the journey.

Alan Sweeney,
January 2007

CHAPTER 1
WATER GAP
ALTITUDE 390 FEET

Delaware Water Gap known as “The Gateway to the Poconos” is where we start our journey to visit the boarding homes, hotels, inns and resorts of the Pocono Mountains. The Indian name of this special place was Pohoqualin, meaning a stream between two mountains. Located in Smithfield Township of Monroe County, Water Gap started as a small hamlet in 1793 and by the 1830sthe popularity of the area’s natural beauty attracted visators to stay in homes. The area eventually blossomed into a vacation destination.

Situated alongside the Delaware River and nestled between the Kittatinny and Minsi mountains, the mountains rise over 1,000 feet from the waters’ edge. This part of the Blue Ridge range of the Allegheny Mountains is most picturesque. For the Victorian tourist of the era, this was a big attraction heightened by clean air and water.

It was originally named Dutotsburg, after Antoine Dutot the founder of the town. He was one of the first to build a small hotel overlooking the Delaware River. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad constructed a railroad through the area. It opened the area to the vacationing public. Water Gap in future years was known for its many fine boarding homes, hotels, inns and resorts. They led one writer to say, “Water Gap was the second largest inland resort town in the United States after the Civil War, and its clientele were the upper classes of Philadelphia and New York.”

The Water Gap train station served the hostelry of Minisink Hills and Shawnee. All trains were met with carriages, or as time went by buses, to take guests to their lodgings.

Water Gap was “The Gateway to the Poconos” for the tourists who frequented this majestic area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Once crossing the Delaware River from New Jersey, they found good clean air and hospitable accommodations. The region was a mecca for vacationers.

Delaware Water Gap
Water Gap from Winona Cliffs

Delaware Water Gap
The Gap from Route 611 along the Delaware River.

D.L.&W. Railroad
Route 611 and the double tracked Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, as it moved away from the Water Gap station.

Water Gap Station
The first Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad station at Water Gap was constructed in the 1800s. This station was destroyed by fire on March 2, 1902. It was replaced by a brick station between 1902-1903. The name Water Gap was officially changed to Delaware Water Gap in 1942. The Delaware House on the right was the closest hotel to the station.

Bellevue House
Bellevue House had two prior names, the Juniper Grove House and the Arlington House. The hotel housed 150 guests. It had a veranda measuring 1,500 feet. Situated on Delaware Street, it sat between the Howard House and the Forest House. The Bellevue like so many other establishments changed ownership and made additions over its years in business. The Bellevue was destroyed by the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.

Bridge View House
Built around 1890, the Bridge View House was situated on Mountain Road. This small hotel had 25 rooms and was operated by G. Edinger. It was enlarged.

Bridge View House
The enlarged Bridge View House now accommodated 35 guests. The Bridge View advertised all modern conveniences, large airy rooms, a good table, pure water and a garage. Around 1998, part of the hotel was destroyed by fire.

Buckwood Inn
Built in 1911 by C.C. Worthington, the Buckwood Inn had Spanish style architecture. It was constructed to be fire proof with 12 inch walls made from a new material called concrete. The inn was located in Shawnee and bordered the Delaware River. It had a golf course designed by golf architect A.W. Tillinghast. The inn accommodated 150 guests and had all the popular amenities.

Buckwood Lodge
Buckwood Lodge was part of the Buckwood Inn owned by C.C. Worthington. The lodge was open June to October.

Buckwood Inn
The Buckwood Inn was sold to Fred Waring in 1941. He changed the name to the Shawnee Inn. The Professional Golf Association had one of its first tournaments at the resort. Under Waring’s ownership, many notables golfed at the resort and enjoyed its entertainment. Today, the property is known as Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort. It is open year round.

Buttermilk Falls
Buttermilk Falls is located on a tributary of Marshalls Creek that flows into the Delaware River. Many other falls grace this section of Pennsylvania, Winona Falls on the Saw Creek, Indian Ladder on Levitt’s Branch, Paradise Falls on the Paradise, Resica Falls and Silver Thread on Dingmans Creek.

Caldeno Cottage
Caldeno Cottage accommodated 25 guests and provided an excellent table. It was located between Lake Lenape and the Water Gap House. This popular boarding home was destroyed when the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area purchased the land to make the Park.

Castle Inn
The Castle Inn was conceived and built by D.D. Drake in1905-06. It was constructed on a property bordering Delaware and present day Waring Drive. It was constructed of concrete, a new building material of the time. The Music Hall section was added in 1909. Entertainment and dancing were favorite activities. The inn accommodated 400 guests. It provided all recreational activities for guests’ use. In 1953, Fred Waring purchased the inn and recorded and conducted music workshops during his ownership. The inn suffered a fire in 1985. The Music Hall was lost. Today, business offices are all that remain of the inn.

Cataract House
The Cataract House started as a small boarding house in the 1860s. Many additions were made to the original home. It was located at Minisink Hills on Route 209. The inn accommodated 200 guests. In 1911, improvements included bowling, billiards, shuffleboard and a pool. It was also known as the Lakeview and later the Pocohanne. It was partially destroyed by fire on April 13, 1973. Today, apartments are all that remain of the once popular resort.

Delaware House
The Delaware House was a first class hotel built opposite the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad station. Built in 1900, it offered all modern conveniences such as cold-water baths on each floor, parlors, writing and smoking rooms. The hotel was beautifully furnished and hardwood encapsulated the interior. In later years, the property was known as Ma’s Hof Brau. The Delaware House was destroyed by the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission after they purchased it in 1951.

Delawanna Inn
The Delawanna Inn was located on present day Route

611. It was on the route of the Stroudsburg and Water Gap Trolley line. The inn had three stories and was set on a hill that sloped down and abutted the Forest House. In 1968, the Delawanna was destroyed. The land became part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The Del-Ray
The Del-Ray sat close to the corner of Broad and Main Streets in Water Gap. Its neighbor was the Rinehart. This three story brick home accommodated guests by the night or by the week at $7 or $14 respectively. Good home cooking and large, airy rooms were key attributes.

Drake’s Cottage
Drake’s Cottage, located in Minisink Hills, was a farmhouse converted to a boarding house. It accommodated tourists who were vacationing in the area. It was one and a half miles from the Water Gap station. Operated by Thomas Drake, the Drake Cottage offered home cooked meals.

Eagle Rock Cottage
Eagle Rock Cottage, located at Shawnee, offered all the modern conveniences including boating, bathing and tennis. All food was grown and raised on the property. This small boarding house accommodated 15 guests.

The Edgewood
The Edgewood was located on Minsi Drive in Water Gap. It was built in 1912 by the Newhart family. Originally it had 12 rooms. In 1918 when it was sold and enlarged, it had tripled its capacity. The inn was renamed the New Edgewood. Located next to the Caldeno Golf Course, the property was park like. Over the years, it changed hands many times. The hotel was destroyed by fire on July 7, 1979.

Eilenbergers Bungalows
Eilenbergers Bungalows typified the small vacation boarding house found throughout the Poconos. Located in Minisink Hills, this homey establishment was noted for its fine table.

Forest House
The Forest House was next door to the Bellevue on Delaware Street in Water Gap. Its advertising stated, “the most picturesque hotel in the business district.” The hotel was close to all attractions including swimming and fishing in the Delaware River. The Forest House accommodated 30 guests. Over the garage was an outdoor garden for eating and dancing. The property was purchased and demolished as part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area.

Gap Inn & Indian Head Park
The Gap Inn and Indian Head Park was located on Route 611 on the way to Portland, Pennsylvania. The inn accommodated 15 guests. It had a stand for early auto travelers to purchase food and souvenirs. In the early 1920s the D.L.&W. Railroad and the Stroudsburg Traction Companies line directly in front of the inn. The proprietor was Myrtle Williams.

The Glenwood
The Glenwood was located on Main Street in Water Gap. It was constructed in 1855, originally as the Delaware Water Gap Classical School for boys. After the founder was killed in the Civil War, the school continued for a few years before it was converted to a hotel. At its height in popularity, the Glenwood accommodated over 200 guests. It had a spectacular view, great food, its own farm, tennis courts and later a swimming pool.

The Glenwood
When the Glenwood was converted to a hotel, it was surrounded by 18 acres of well-manicured grounds. The activities not only included a swimming pool but croquet, boating, fishing and an attached livery stable. Today, the Glenwood remains in operation with its fine tradition of hospitality.

The Hillcrest
The Hillcrest was located on Delaware Street in Water Gap next to the Howard House. This four-story brick hotel was constructed in 1914 by the Frank Howard family. It was a stone’s throw away from the railroad station. After the demise of the vacation business, the hotel was converted to apartments. The Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission purchased the property. The hotel was demolished when the bridge was constructed.

Island Park
Island Park was opposite the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western station. It was a few feet from the shore of the Delaware River. The island was accessed by a walking bridge from shore. Bathing, canoeing and picnicking at Island Park were favorite activities of the guests of various hotels.

Karamac Inn
Karamac Inn was located on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River from Delaware Water Gap. It was accessed by crossing the river at Portland. Built in 1886 as the Far View, it was rebuilt after a fire in 1893. Noted for its fine food and large, airy rooms, the Karamac was a popular resort with all the amenities.

Karamac Inn
The Karamac did not have a pool even after additional alterations in 1923. Instead, guests frequented the shoreline of the Delaware River. This resort attracted a younger clientele than other resorts. Dances were held a few times a week and movies were an added attraction. The Karamac boasted the largest recreation hall at the Gap. After the National Park Service acquired the property in1968, the resort was closed. One year later in 1969, the hotel section was destroyed by fire.

Kittatinny House
Kittatinny House was the first boarding house built in Delaware Water Gap. Started by Antoine Dutot in 1829, it ended in failure. It was purchased by Samuel Snyder in1832. He completed the project into a boarding home that accommodated 25 guests. By 1841, it housed 60 guests after an enlargement by W.A. Broadhead. Improvements were added through the years by the Broadhead family. In 1884-1885, the building was torn down and replaced by the hotel.

Kittatinny House
The Kittatinny House became “The Queen of the Delaware Water Gap Resorts.” Sometimes called the “Kit,” it was the largest and most popular vacation spot on the Delaware River. The water fountain was located at the entrance and greeted guests for many years.

Copyright 2008 Alan Sweeney. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

FOREWARD

AUTHOR’S NOTE: On July 3, 1966, Scranton Times reporter William Cullen wrote about the evolution of power of the Mayor of Scranton since the city’s founding in 1866. I asked his son, Attorney Chris Cullen, to update his father’s treatise on the changing role of the Mayor of Scranton.

For the first 100 years of its existence, William Cullen wrote, the City of Scranton dramatically changed from Slocum Hollow to the “Anthracite Capital of the World.” At the same time, the demands of city life placed more and more challenges and responsibilities upon the City’s chief executive, the Mayor. While the electorate continued to expect more of its chief executive, the structure and organization of city government not only worked to prevent the Mayor from rapidly addressing the pressing issues of the day, but also compelled the Mayor to govern by personality and will.

The expanding role and power of the City’s chief executive in modern times lead to a concentration of power and established the Mayor’s Office as the virtual center of city government. Starting with Mayor Hanlon and continuing through Mayors Schmidt and Walsh the rapid increase of federal funding of city-related economic development programs, as well as the rise of television and press access to the public, provided modern mayors with necessary resources and power to shape and direct the present and future of the City of Scranton.

Mayor Eugene J. Peters greatly benefited from the infusion of Federal Revenue Sharing and the Community Block Grant program and Model Cities. These federal grant programs and others from the state of Pennsylvania provided not only critically needed revenue streams to stimulate and support economic development opportunities but also discretionary authority in the Mayor to direct and oversee program applications. Former Mayor Eugene F. Hickey’s administration capitalized on both the UDAG program and the opportunities presented in the use of program funding, in order to create citywide employment opportunities and to restore and renew the City’s neighborhoods. Mayor Hickey’s foresight in recognizing the crucial need to bring to the decision-making process the input and participation of the City’s neighborhood associations democratized both appropriation of the UDAG funding, and the allocation of the funds in the public interest.

In contrast, former Mayor James B. McNulty employed the Mayor’s Office as a means to address national issues as they related to those issues confronting the City. Mayor McNulty’s strength of personality coupled with his fierce determination only tempered by gift of promotion and imagery, forged for the City a new and improved identity as the city as an entrepreneur. With creative imagery harkening back to the City’s founding, an ample supply of federal funding, Mayor McNulty’s efforts brought about the restoration of the Lackawanna Station as a hotel/conference center and the development of Steamtown. Mayor McNulty’s efforts to promote the City of Scranton as the birthplace of the modern American railroad reached deep in the history of Lackawanna Valley and recast the City as a destination for residents and visitors alike.

With the start in 1986 of the “partnership” administration of former Mayor David J.Wenzel, the City of Scranton began to take stock of itself and plan for an expansive development of the downtown area. The City’s political as well as physical landscape began to change, and move in a positive direction. Mayor Wenzel linked partnership with development, added personal integrity to produce what came to be known as the “Steamtown Mall Project.” Putting the City first, Mayor Wenzel opened City Hall to the development of both the downtown area and the City’s neighborhoods, with beneficial results that continue to this very day. With dignity and fairness, Mayor Wenzel directed the City forward and harnessed the energies of his administration for the long-term beneficial interests of its residents.

Three-term Mayor James J. Connors continued the advance of the positive accomplishments of the preceding Wenzel administration. Mayor Connors consistently employed the power of personality and the nearly constant use of the media to promote his agenda. Mayor Connors oversaw the demolition of the site area for the Steamtown Mall and the Casey Hotel. Mayor Connors continued the work with the neighborhood groups and associations initiated by Mayor Hickey and refined by Mayor Wenzel in order to foster investment and renewal. Despite the City’s distressed status, efforts were made to streamline the delivery of city services, and to integrate community concerns into an overall agenda. Without fail, Mayor -sought to bring the Office of Mayor to community events and social gatherings. His commitment to reach out to every group in the City and tirelessly advocate their cause were hallmarks of his Administration. His lasting legacy is to be found in his deep and abiding love and respect of the people of the City of Scranton.

Mayor Christopher A. Doherty administration introduced a style of executive management over city affairs, reminiscent of the leadership model employed by the late President John F. Kennedy at the start of his 1,000 days. With business-like efficiency Mayor Doherty professionalized city government and instilled confidence and civility in the conduct of city affairs. Emphasizing job creation and the delivery of city services in neighborhoods, Mayor Doherty adopted a practical “it is what you do” approach in which action was to speak louder than words. Faced with recommendations issued by the City’s Home Rule Charter Commission, which significantly would have decreased the powers and authority of the Office of Mayor, Mayor Doherty embarked on a successful campaign to point out to voters that the changes recommended by the Commission would be harmful to the long-term growth of the City. Confronted by a highly publicized City Council, Mayor Doherty made use of city-based authorities like the Scranton Redevelopment Authority and the Scranton Parking Authority to by-pass City Council and to accomplish the goals of his Recovery Plan. Mayor Doherty continued the partnership approach first used by Mayor Wenzel to stimulate downtown economic expansion and job creation. Mayor Doherty’s focus on Nay Aug Park renovations and on the promotion of the Park as a major city asset served as a cornerstone of his commitment to restore city pride. Coupled with City sponsorship of various social and cultural events designed to attract young professionals and to showcase the City as a whole, Mayor Doherty improved the City’s quality of life and updated the City’s image. Restoration of the “Electric City” sign is but one of Mayor Doherty’s successful efforts to restore the pride.

Christopher P. Cullen, Esq.
Scranton, PA
September 2006
To my father, William T. Cullen, Jr.

INTRODUCTION

The American Civil War ended in April 1865. While a nation of war-weary citizens struggled to resume their lives, men of vision were planning to create new communities to meet the needs of a growing nation. So it was that the settlers of Luzerne County in the Lackawanna Valley had decided to merge the boroughs of Scranton, Providence and Hyde Park to form a new political entity, the City of Scranton. Pioneers of progress were ready to forge new frontiers and take the reunited nation into bold new territory. Scranton was going to get them there.

The population of Scranton in 1866 was about 25,0001 and the Lackawanna Iron Works owned by George and Seldon Scranton was the biggest employer. The mills turned out T-rails used for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, the greatest engineering feat of the 19th century. This achievement would unite the American empire from East to West. By the beginning of the 20th century, 5,000 men would be employed in these mills and the amount of steel produced in Scranton would be third in the world behind Birmingham, England and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.2

In 1866, anthracite coal was just beginning to be mined in large quantities.3 With the exception of small areas in New Mexico and Colorado, Pennsylvania had the only anthracite coalfields in the United States. The workable areas were further limited to Lackawanna, Luzerne, Carbon, Schuylkill and Northumberland counties in an area that only measured 500 square miles. From 1870 until the 1920s, this black gold from beneath the City of Scranton would fuel the industrial revolution and make Scranton one of the richest and most progressive cities in the United States.4 Scranton would play an important role in transforming an agrarian country of 65 million in 1866 to a nation of 100 million and the industrial leader of the world by 1900. With this bounty came a price.

In the early 1900s, when coal was king, life in a mining town was profitable but harsh. There were 20,000 men and boys who toiled daily in Scranton’s mines. Since 1870, over 31,000 miners have been killed in accidents in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania; some are still buried there.5 Labor strife, child labor, culm banks, mine acid runoff and the quality of life for those who worked the mines are all issues leaving legacies and scars that continue to this day. By 1914, almost 198 million cubic yards of material had been removed from beneath the city. In contrast, only 100 million cubic yards had to be removed during construction of the Panama Canal.6 This massive excavation caused surface cave-ins, which created havoc, especially in the West Scranton area. Because the coal companies showed little compassion, the responsibility for their actions would be argued all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

As the culture of coal receded, the challenge of maintaining a community was faced by men and institutions alike. The Scranton Plan became a model for communities who needed to attract new industries and keep their children from finding destinies elsewhere. The Scranton Plan would bring nation-wide recognition to Scranton with a new identity of “All-American City” during the 1950s.

Over the years, Scranton has undergone a series of identity changes: “Anthracite Capital of the World,” “The Electric City,” “The Friendly City” and today, “Steamtown USA.” Scranton now fights against the flight to the suburbs, the lure of the sun and surf, gated communities and the excitement of the big city. The challenge to keep Scranton as the financial, medical, educational, cultural and commercial center of Northeastern Pennsylvania is an ongoing challenge.

For 100 years coal and shale was dug out of the earth, creating a vast labyrinth of shafts beneath the ground. Then, for more than 50 years, culm was pumped back into the mines through flushing programs to stabilize the city’s foundation. Abandoned railroad beds are being developed into recreational trails.

The political history of Scranton has been forged against the backdrop of these and other issues. Over the past 140 years, men of vision and civic responsibility have stepped forward to lead the City of Scranton with the title of “Mayor of the City of Scranton.” This is the story of those men and their accomplishments.

Copyright 2008 David Wenzel. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

IT CAN BE SAID that each day is a drive through history. Ghosts of the past can be seen all around us if we just look deep enough. Clues can be found to link us to the past through locations, buildings, artifacts; even street names can point us to our rich past. This book is a labor of love for each of
us involved.

We realized that as more time passes, more buildings and sights of historical significance are being knocked down or built over. When they are gone, sometimes a bit of their memory escapes with them as well.

In a way, the purpose of this book is to reconnect the reader to the past. So many people are not fully aware of just how culturally rich our area is. Our intention is to show some significant buildings, events, famous residents and visitors of Olyphant, Pa., the “Queen City,” through the years – a town built upon by the famed anthracite mining industry.

Most importantly, it was built by the blood, sweat, and tears of countless hardworking coal miners. Many times, these very men gave their lives to those mines. As we see it, their sacrifices and hard work should never be buried and forgotten.

Therefore, this book is a testament and tribute to them, along with the monument that we have erected in their memory. Donation cards kept coming in to help us fund our memorial statue, and some included personal stories, which affected me deeply. I found myself tearing up as I read how so many fathers, grandfathers, brothers, and uncles were lovingly remembered by their families. If anyone gains knowledge and a deeper respect for the hard work that this town was built upon, then we have accomplished our goal. So, we encourage you to follow the clues, search the leads, and find the link to the rich culture of the “Queen City” – Olyphant, Pa.

Jay Luke
August 2009

CHAPTER ONE: ORIGINS OF THE QUEEN CITY

THE AREA KNOWN AS OLYPHANT HAS SURELY SEEN an abundance of culture since its inception. It has not been easy to track down the first people native to the area. One thing is certain; the very earliest settlers were undoubtedly the Native American Indians. How long they were settled in Olyphant is up for debate. We do know that long before the first white settlers roamed the area, there were tales of Algonquin Indians, along with the Iroquois, Lenape, and Munsee tribes living in the richly-wooded areas along both sides of the Lackawanna River at one time or another. They did not leave much tangible evidence aside from archaeological finds, such as arrowheads, pottery shards, or the occasional discovery of a campsite during random excavations. They did however leave us with many names that we still use today.

CHAPTER TWO: THE BEGINNING OF THE ANTHRACITE INDUSTRY

A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON HOW THE GRAVITY RAILROAD BEGAN proves to be interesting reading.

During the War of 1812, two clothing merchants from Philadelphia made their fortune by supplying the U.S. Government with military uniforms. These men were the Wurts brothers. Maurice and William Wurts decided to travel north when the war was over to hunt for wild game. They found  more than wild game when they discovered anthracite coal, or as they called it, “black rock.” William Wurts is widely credited for the first anthracite discovery in Lackawanna County. The anthracite was taken from the old Anderson farm, which was located close to the junction of Marshwood and Underwood Roads in Throop in 1814. The farm was a working farm until it was destroyed by a fire around World War I in the late 1920s.

The Wurts brothers founded the town of Carbondale, which is the fourth-oldest city in all of Pennsylvania. After some mocking from the locals, the brothers kept on searching for coal through the rocks and wilderness. They quickly realized these anthracite-rich grounds would be very valuable. Previous town names were “Ragged Island” and “Barrendale” before it was named Carbondale, which means “coal valley.” The Wurts brothers would eventually purchase thousands of acres of land. Here is where the story gets tricky; they used a man named David Nobles as a pawn.

While on a hunt in the woods, the Wurts brothers met Nobles, who was traveling with his dog and gun. Nobles, a hunter as well, was fleeing from doing jail time for his failure to repay debts he owed to a neighbor in Wayne County. Maurice and William struck a deal with Nobles. If he would point the brothers to areas of large coal quantities and help them to purchase the lands, the brothers would give Nobles the money he owed his neighbor to pay off his debt.

The Wurts brothers were anything but foolish. They realized the local folk were always reluctant to sell property to city folk, so that was where Nobles came in. The scheme was that Nobles would approach landowners and ask if they would consider selling some of their property in order for Nobles and his two “brothers” to start a farm. When the landowners were agreeable and ready to sell the property, Nobles called the Wurts brothers to seal the deal by putting up the funding.

CHAPTER THREE: LIFE IN THE MINES

AS YOU MAY NOW REALIZE, LIFE IN THE COAL MINES was anything but glamorous. The working conditions always left a lot to be desired; from long hours to low pay, and the very real threat that a gas explosion or mine cave-in might take a life at any time. In this section, we will try to shed light on what occurred in the darkness below the earth. As the industry flourished, mines were popping up all over. Coal was mined in the Underwood area near Marshwood. The Pennsylvania Coal Company controlled three shafts at the Underwood location, a breaker building, and the Eddy Tunnel. Mines were cultivated by forging passageways and air shafts. Many of the passageways were dug as close to the surface of the ground as they were permitted. The result would often be cave-ins. Another cause of cave-ins resulted in what was called “robbing the pillars.” As miners dug, they left pillars to support the roofs between chamber passages. These pillars ranged anywhere from 10 to 15 feet thick. After a mine had been used up years later, miners would come back to remove some of the coal that made up the pillars. This was a very dangerous practice and many men found themselves injured and often killed due to the ceiling coming down on them. To the miner, danger was ever-present and some men even worked in claustrophobic areas that were just 18 inches high.

CHAPTER FOUR: THAT SINKING FEELING

WHEN A MINE SHAFT WAS TO BE SUNK INTO THE GROUND, it was not done with machine power, but rather by the most skilled workers in the industry, called Sinkers. These men were the bravest to be found and courageously went headfirst into the worst conditions possible. In time, as they delved into the rock face, their lungs would slowly fill up with the coal dust they breathed, resulting in many early deaths brought on by the disease called Black Lung, sometimes known as “the curse of the mines,” and was the biggest risk to the miners. Some notable sinkers to the area were Pat McKenna, Mike McNamara, Frank Nichols, Dave Wasley, Joel Wasley and Frank Shanley.

Miners’ lives are detailed in stories and songs that were universally understood. Songs like “My Sweetheart’s the Mule in the Mines” were nationally popular and told the story of these rugged men and their daily lives. While some may seem like cheerful melodies, they depicted the hardships, dangers, and tragedies that went on during a hard day’s work shift. Tom Kearney of Olyphant penned “The Pancoast Disaster,” a song that recalled the famous mine disaster that occurred on April 7, 1911. A fire which originated in the engine room of one of the main gangways of the Pancoast mine suffocated 72 mine workers employed in that section of the mine. Copies of Kearney’s song were sold for 25 cents a piece.

CHAPTER FIVE: FIRE COMPANY HISTORY
compiled by Stephen Klem III

BEFORE THE ORGANIZATION OF FIRE DEPARTMENTS in the late 1800s, there were fire teams or fire brigades. Fire teams or brigades were small groups of men, resembling old style American Gangs. Men of these fire brigades were usually from the same ethnic backgrounds and wanted to protect and serve their individual communities. Coincidentally, they would also help put out fires in neighboring villages with the help of local villagers.

In 1887, a small group of men held a meeting which resulted in the formation of Olyphant’s first volunteer fire team. The first fire team consisted of a few men but would later grow to 50 in number. Three years later on May 14, 1890, the Olyphant Volunteer Fire Team changed its name to Excelsior Hose Company #1. These founding men have the honor of being the architects of the county’s first volunteer fire company.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FAMOUS RESIDENTS & VISITORS

OLYPHANT MAY BE CONSIDERED A SMALL TOWN by some, but it is not without its famous residents as well as famed visitors through the years.

NESTOR CHYLAK
National Baseball Hall of Fame umpire

AS MENTIONED IN THE STREET NAME SECTION, one of Olyphant’s proudest sons is Nestor Chylak. Born May 11, 1922, Chylak was of Ukranian heritage. After attending the University of Scranton, he joined the Army. During the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, shrapnel from an exploding bullet shell seriously wounded him. The injury almost cost Nestor his vision. For his time and heroism in the service he was awarded both the Purple Heart and Silver Star. Around the time the war ended he pursued a career in baseball as an umpire and also went back to college. His first games in the minor leagues were in 1947; it would not be until 1954 when he got to the American League.

CHAPTER NINE: THE OLYPHANT COAL MINERS MEMORIAL COMMITTEE

NEVER HAS THERE BEEN A CASE OF DIVINE INTERVENTION such as the collaboration of the minds involved in making Olyphant’s coal mining monument stand where it does today in Olyphant.

CHAPTER TEN: FRANK WYSOCHANSKY:MONUMENT ARTIST
compiled by Steve Lichak

Frank Wysochansky, 1915-1994

BETWEEN POST-WWII UNTIL HIS DEATH on September 14, 1994, Frank Wysochansky “Wyso” produced over 5,000 works of art and thousands of cartoons. He painted the life around him using a multi-media approach of pen and ink, watercolor, oil paints and crayon.

Copyright 2008 Jay Luke. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

PREFACE

Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys
because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops.

Martin Luther
1533

When I first read the above quotation several decades ago I wanted to know why anyone would say such a thing. What I discovered is that Martin Luther’s reflection was, and continues to be, the echo of ancient philosophical and theological conjecture about female inferiority. Luther was primed to believe this fallacy by centuries of both great and small minds that came before him.
Not much has changed in the years between Luther’s observation and the present day. The female half of humanity continues to be defined by limitations in politics, religion, and business because an undercurrent of belief in female inferiority persists, sometimes blatantly, oftentimes unthinkingly.
At a time when the known world seems to be collapsing, humanity stands on the threshold of awareness that balance between the sexes is a desired outcome. If social and economic structures are no longer viable as established, perhaps the feminine perspective needs to be applied. If the world no longer works properly with only half of humanity in charge, then the time has come to allow the other half to be equally represented in all things.
The lessons of history cannot be overlooked. One of these lessons concerns the disregard for the female role; women have been ignored as unimportant to world development except as “keepers of the hearth.” This is changing as many professionals of all stripes are reexamining the evidence and revising the historical record. How the female has been treated in history and by history is undeniably related to how we are treated now, but Martin Luther’s “weeds” are fast becoming flowers.
The theoretical grounding of this book is to show how women have been short-changed throughout history. It is intended to redress the status of women as inferior in mind, body, and, yes, even in soul, by presenting a bare minimum of facts that I hope will pique the interest of readers enough to investigate further. There is a wealth of material available now, thanks to dedicated male and female professionals who followed their hearts in searching for documentary evidence about women’s value in the history of the world.
In 2008 Americans overwhelmingly elected the first black man in history to serve as president of the United States. By doing so, a majority of the country blatantly and resoundingly rejected the stigma of racism and its consequences. The statement is shockingly overdue because even the country’s founding fathers could not bring themselves to repudiate either racism or slavery.
The barrier that did not fall in 1776, 1865, or in 2008 is the sexism bias. A poll conducted after the 2008 presidential election for The Daily Beast found that American women “overwhelmingly believe they are being treated unfairly in the press, in the workplace, in politics, and in the armed forces.”  The poll, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, revealed “sweeping skepticism about how women are viewed culturally, politically and in the workplace,” a conclusion that is backed up by 39% of male respondents who declared that men are “naturally more suited” to be president.
Female poll respondents undoubtedly viewed the historic election of 2008 as indisputable proof of the biased way women are treated after 233 years of struggling to be heard. More than sixty percent of those polled believe there is a gender bias in the media,  indicating a lack of trust in the way information is presented to the public.
The older generation of women, of which I am one, viewed the Hillary Clinton candidacy as irrefutable evidence disputing the long-standing criticism of emotionalism in women. The first woman to get close to a party nomination for president, Clinton demonstrated perseverance, tenacity, and determination, even when approaching defeat. Clinton’s demeanor while under fire fostered such a sense of pride in women that she likely did more to promote future women candidacies than any organized movement could have ever achieved. For younger generations, Hillary Clinton has invigorated women in the same way that John F. Kennedy  inspired a teenaged  Bill Clinton in 1963.
On the downside, Hillary Clinton was criticized for not running a “feminine” campaign in the way that Barack Obama  did. No one in the press conceded that the male campaign viewpoint, especially on military issues, has been the winning pattern in election history. Appealing to both the male and female perspectives, Obama introduced a new winning pattern by presenting a more balanced representation of issues.
The Clinton family mystique and its ambivalent history may have created more party hostility to Senator Clinton’s campaign than was warranted. Party leaders, begging anonymity out of fear of reprisals, criticized both Clintons in the press. Some state party chairmen anonymously declared her campaign to be “scary” because they anticipated an exhaustive GOP attempt to get out the vote against her. One of the most stinging rebukes came from critics who declared that no one wants another round of Clinton drama in the White House.
Senator John McCain’s selection of  Sarah Palin as his running mate changed the landscape in the Republican Party. Governor Palin’s presence on the GOP ticket as the vice-presidential nominee brought her rock-star status; yet it also brought emotionally charged criticism from many women both within and outside her party. Republicans have never been known for supporting women in the workplace, especially when children are involved. Palin may have changed that party attitude, at least for the time being.  Not only did the Republicans support her, they defended her as a working mother.
Partisan and non-partisan women, and many men, criticized Palin for her actions as a governor and mayor. One of the strangest accusations concerned the hiring of her friends, especially females, paying them more than they had been paid previously. No one saw this action as giving more women a chance to gain coveted jobs at the same pay rate as males.  Claiming she attacked critics, pursued vendettas, demanded loyalty and secrecy, and did not distinguish the personal from the political, Sarah Palin’s detractors never acknowledged, or did not notice, that these are common practices among all politicians.
The Palin and Clinton candidacies simultaneously transformed the political stage for all women by bringing attention to the kind of scrutiny female candidates are subjected to during political campaigns. The future for women in politics portends to be radically different now that public awareness has been raised about the potential for women candidates to be negatively treated or else positively neglected. Neglecting a woman’s candidacy includes discounting her viability as an informed candidate and successful fundraiser. Negative treatment of a woman’s candidacy can occur when issues are about the feminine and not the political.
When women candidates are, at long last, criticized on issue positions rather than for feminine traits or the so-called feminine faults (emotional, intuitive, irrational, etc.), the age-old belief that women are conditioned to follow rather than lead will be dispelled. Above all, theological arguments about nature designating women to always be in a state of subjection will be uprooted.
The subtle and persistent theory of female inferiority is seldom a recognized or conscious prejudice. As Malcolm Gladwell states succinctly in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,  human beings tend to make connections quickly between pairs of ideas the mind has already linked. Automatic and immediate associations may be totally unconscious and even incompatible with a person’s consciously stated values. Identifying males with leadership and women as followers and subordinates is a form of this unconscious decision-making, and builds upon the idea that the male is primary and the female is secondary.
The tenacious and consistent idea of female inferiority can be traced back in history through religion’s earliest written records. What gave it wings to fly unimpeded throughout the millennia can perhaps be attributed to the Jungian prototype of the collective unconscious. In plain terms, belief systems are perpetuated through thoughts and actions. If enough people think and act in the prescribed and culturally dictated ways of clans and tribes, eventually critical mass is reached in the acceptance of such ways. Once this occurs, these beliefs become a part of the reservoir of human experiences.
Universal archetypal and metaphorical concepts are a part of the collective unconscious. Images of males as leaders and women as followers, and usually in need of rescue, are ubiquitous in folk stories, fairy tales, and other morality narratives. The legend of Saint George and the Dragon, for example, is routinely viewed as a story of chivalry.  The fabled white knight slays a dragon with a great sword, thereby rescuing the princess, dressed as a bride, from a sacrificial death. In most versions, marriage follows the rescue.
Another interpretation of this legend portrays the knight rescuing the princess from herself. Saint George represents Christianity (good) and the dragon characterizes female sexuality (evil) in this account. The knight’s splendid virtue triumphs over the princess’ dangerous female sexuality. After being saved from her womanly inclinations, the knight then bestows validity upon the princess by marrying her, demonstrating that sexuality is acceptable only through marriage.
An opposing view depicts the legend as a metaphor for the rise of the sword and the ascent of patriarchy, also known as male control. Goddess cultures considered the dragon a defender of the feminine. Christianity dubbed goddess cultures as paganism and construed the dragon as a pagan symbol. This account can also be seen as the beginning of empire building because the sword, or warfare, is the rational way to achieve territorial expansion.
The legend of Saint George and the Dragon provides a compelling allegory accommodating the larger concept of religious thought concerning women. The symbolism renders a passionate depiction of good versus evil, or Christian virtue versus female wantonness. For instance, the sword used to slay the dragon is called Ascalon, derived from the city of Ashkelon in Israel. Ashkelon is noted in the Bible as the city where Delilah cut Samson’s hair to sap his strength, emasculating him. Naming the sword for the biblical city where dangerous female sexuality brought about male debilitation vividly illustrates the religious assault against women.
Yet another example of Ashkelon as a negative symbol for women took place during the first century CE, when a rabbi in Ashkelon reportedly executed eighty women for witchcraft. Witchcraft is the most common and most vicious accusation used against trouble-causing women in history.
It was centuries later before women finally began the fight against being labeled inferior and in need of male guidance. The struggle to be recognized as equal to the other half of humanity, at long last, began to make headway in the 20th century.

Following the Leaders
Those of us who came to maturity in the midst of the early women’s movement in the 1960s can recount many personal experiences in which women were always deemed to be followers of male leaders. The unfulfilled potential of women’s leadership capabilities underwrote many of the protests at the time, just as it did when women relentlessly demanded to be given the vote at the gates of the White House in 1918-1919.
Many women abandoned dreams due to their automatic assignment to the role of followers. My personal experience as a young college woman pursuing and then abandoning my dream is not an uncommon story. During the late 1950s, a time when few women were involved in the pursuit of journalistic achievement, I was selected as managing editor of the University of Arkansas’ student newspaper, The Arkansas Traveler, and as a member of the student-run Board of Publications.
Late one fall afternoon, as news staff was trying to meet deadline for the next day’s edition, the newspaper’s chief editor circled through the newsroom showing busy staffers a typed document. “Do you see anything wrong with publishing this?” he asked. Intent on finishing our stories, we glanced up and nodded no, the answer we knew he wanted. No one asked to read it and no closer look was offered.
The next morning I scanned a copy of the newspaper on my way to class, noting that the college budget filled the entire front page. As I walked into my business law class, I was oblivious to the unexpected consequences of publishing an unauthorized (by the administration) news story.
Shortly after classes, I rushed to the journalism building to get organized for the following day’s paper. At the door of the newsroom, the chief editor grabbed me by the arm and steered me out of the building. We had been ordered to the dean’s office immediately, he said, warning that I had better keep my mouth shut. Mystified, I asked why we were being summoned. The budget published on the front page that day had not been seen by department heads until now, he replied. He failed to tell me that a reporter seeking an interview with the college president had lifted the budget off the president’s desk when he turned to answer the telephone.
We were silently greeted at the dean’s office by the Dean of Men, the Dean of Women, a college vice president, and the journalism faculty advisor. Already squirming in my chair, I was completely startled when it was revealed that the budget had been stolen from the president’s desk. The dean looked to me as the only female and wanted to know why I did not stop this or report it to him before publication. After being threatened by the editor to keep quiet and then being questioned about my culpability by the Dean, I was too terrified to say anything in my defense.
The editor fully admitted to the theft of the budget and cited freedom of the press as a defense. The dean quickly informed us that there is no freedom in the press to steal documents and, thanks to us, henceforth there would be no freedom of the press without faculty supervision.
The outcome of the dean’s office meeting was predictable for the 1950s. The editor was kicked out of school, I was quietly admonished for not being more alert to shenanigans in the newsroom, and the Board of Publications suddenly became regulated by faculty.
In the future, I recognized the situation as a classic exhibit of cultural expectations. The editor knew I did not know all the facts and chose to threaten rather than communicate with me. The dean expected me to follow societal expectations of females by tattling on my editor, implying that I was not being a “good girl” otherwise. In both instances, to paraphrase the feminist author and activist bell hooks, the will to dominate won out over the will to connect, a course of action used for solving problems that continues in the 21st century.
My status as a journalist, however, quickly accelerated when, a few days later, the Journalism Department offered me the position of editor. This action confirmed my suspicion that the administration knew I had played no role in the document theft. To my future shame, I turned down the job with the declaration that women shouldn’t be editors, an unfortunate acknowledgement of my submission to the seal of social approval of the era. Too young and inexperienced to reason through this social muddle, I simply backed off, fearful of accepting an authoritative role. In a sense, because my confidence had been shattered, I confirmed my place in the world by refusing the editorship.
I did not forget the trauma of the event and eventually did what all my friends were doing—-got married and started a family. The banished former chief editor did not let this incident interfere in his chosen profession, of course, and he later became the editor of a major Oklahoma newspaper. And the “thief” reporter became a respected attorney in a western state.
Journalism never did become my chosen profession, even though I continued writing over the years. Politics eventually became the alternative because I grew up in a political family in South Arkansas. The problem with switching sides from journalistic “watch dog” worldview to political insider worldview is that the “watch dog” attitude cannot easily be erased, if at all. I found it impossible to become part of the insider crowd, given my aptitude for seeing insider and governmental actions from an investigative reporter’s perspective. To make matters worse, the office I was elected to, Auditor of State, handled the check-writing disbursement function for state government, entailing the keeping of paper records subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which I followed to the letter. Succinctly put, this was (and remains) intolerable to the political crowd.
When my editor husband died suddenly in 1984, it was readily apparent that I was now acceptable in the state Capitol building. At first I was included in insider discussions on financial issues—-until my true colors bled through. Once the insiders realized nothing had changed with me, I was once again distrusted by the power brokers.

Why I Wrote This Book
This book is the end result of my questioning the cultural and political status of women throughout history. Beginning in 1959, I wanted to understand why females were expected to “tattle” when things went awry. I wanted enlightenment about why males dominated rather than communicated. I wanted to know what motivated me to give up on a journalistic career after the incident with the stolen budget and the ensuing aftermath. Most of all, I wanted an explanation of why I could not leave home in 1960 as a single woman to pursue the career of my dreams instead of leaving the home of my parents as a new bride on my way to Ft. Benning, Georgia to be an army wife.
Considering that most of the females during that era went from home to college sorority house or dorm (with date calls), then to the marriage bed, it is not surprising that the “displaced homemaker” syndrome erupted in the late 20th century due to wandering husbands and/or the end of job security. When I accepted a two-year teaching job in the local parochial school in my neighborhood in 1963, I had no idea that I would eventually become a divorced woman and later a second-time wife.
As a convert to Catholicism married to a cradle Catholic, any questions I raised about birth control or deeper issues (such as secondary status of women in the church) were quickly squelched. Once I even gathered up the courage to tell a priest during confession that I had been practicing birth control for the two years I taught school. Never again would I make the mistake of confessing it! I thought the priest was going to drag me out of the confessional to publicly castigate me as a mortal sinner. My questions about Catholicism and its history were never fully answered by priests or husband or the nuns I taught with at the elementary school.
By the time our family expanded to three children and my husband began devoting most of his time to alcohol both on and off the job, I began to suspect I had to prepare for becoming the sole support of our family. Luckily for me, a family member hired me in the local prosecuting attorney’s office to serve subpoenas and handle partial record keeping. That fortunate event triggered the beginning of a sixteen-year career in Arkansas politics, as I soon ran for office myself and won.
This book is intended for women of all ages and for men who are willing to learn the facts about women in history. Readers will find many surprises in store, especially about some of our most revered (male) heroes. It is possible there have been an equal number of heroines in world history, but they have been left out until the last few decades. This is the most important reason why sexism is wrong: Women’s capacity to contribute fully to society has been damaged by the lack of value granted to us as citizens. When the most common summary about women’s presence in history becomes no noticeable role that history records (see Chapter 1), there is reason to believe that history as it has been reported is adulterated.
This book is set on purifying the record. Prepare to be both entertained and outraged. Regale others with the facts. Read passages aloud to daughters, mothers, sons, husbands, fathers, and to the person next to you on a bus or plane, or waiting in line at the bank. Help balance the assumptions of the collective unconscious so all future generations of women may express their unique capabilities and fulfill their cherished dreams.
Readers will never look at history again without thinking about the information in this “secret history of weeds.”
Good reading!

Read more about The Secret History of Weeds: What Women Need To Know About Their History and Julia Hughes Jones HERE.

Copyright 2008 Julia Hughes Jones. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt

Chapter Two: The First Man

This project began with the ambitious, but sincere goal of trying to explain some of the “myths” of the book of Genesis, dealing with each event as a separate story, and a separate project. The one basic assumption held throughout the book was that the book of Genesis is historically accurate, but that our traditional interpretations of the events described by it, were not accurate. If we could only interpret it correctly, it would fit with what we know to be true according to scientific data.

As the narrative progressed, a feeling was sensed that, instead of my determining the course of the book; the book was pulling me in a direction different from the path that was originally set out. Separate, seemingly unrelated, events were coming together and seemed to be pointing to a storyline that had previously gone unnoticed. The great events of Genesis were all connected by a common theme that is not casually revealed but was definitely present in the beginning, in the garden.

Earlier Biblical scholars, who did not have the benefit of modern research, and new knowledge that has just recently come to light, had missed it. The act of writing about it was revealing details that would help explain some of those mysteries, such as the flood of Noah, a better understanding of why the world had to be destroyed, the possibility of using DNA to find out who the REAL Adam was, the unexplained explosion of technology around 2200 BC, and the central reason for everything that happened in the book of Genesis.

There seemed to be present the undercurrent of a story that had remained hidden and untold until such a time when we were ready to accept and understand it. That time appears to be the present age. It seemed that the entire book of Genesis was playing out on a much grander scale than had, at first, been imagined.

If someone said to you that every word of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament is an accurate description historically of what happened between 3000 and 6000 years ago, most likely you would say “It’s just not possible”. There may even be some people of faith who would agree. Some have already concluded that the stories were either exaggerated tales or were misunderstood by the human writers of the books. Yet many good people of faith feel that the book is inspired, and struggle to hold on to the idea that the stories of the flood and other fantastic tales that were told to them in Sunday school are true and accurate.

Those who accept the standard “intellectually elite” position on evolution would say that the truth lies in the archeology and abundant physical evidence that man began to emerge from the animal kingdom around 2 million years ago.
What if you were told that both groups are right and that there is a way to explain how both versions of man’s creation could be true without violating the truth of the Bible? Is it possible that there is an explanation that would satisfy anyone who is searching for the truth and has an open mind? Most likely you would have serious doubts about any hypothesis or explanation that tried to cover so much ground.

The basic premise of this book was always that every word in the Book of Genesis is both true and accurate. Like others, this author had problems relating the incredible “stories” heard in Sunday school, to what had been taught in my studies of science and history. Instead of falling on one side of the fence or the other as usually happens in an issue so divided, the decision was made to reserve final judgment until enough evidence could be gathered to reconcile the issue.

It seemed certain that neither side knew all there was to know on the subject. It also seemed likely that the ingenuity of man would someday shed light on this and all other mysteries. Surely a way could be found to “explain” the book of Genesis without violating either the laws of God or the physical laws of the universe. It appeared that there was enough uncertainty in both arguments to allow for re-interpretation of the “facts”.

This author gets very upset when someone of high academic or religious standing says, “The Bible is not to be used as a history book”. I believe that they have given up too soon. Contrary to the position that some authors have taken, that Genesis is simply a beautiful allegory, I don’t believe God wrote the book of Genesis just to make a beautiful story for our entertainment! Either it is true and accurate or it is false. Truth does not belong exclusively to a category of science or religion. The truth, like water, will find its own level wherever it falls.

In the process of writing this book, which began as a collection of notes gathered from years of pondering the “mysteries” of the Old Testament, I stumbled, either accidentally or with some “outside help”, upon some insights, that we will cover in detail later, which could well explain these stories logically, and reconcile the differences between the “science” version of the creation of man and the Genesis version. There were always many things that I couldn’t explain, but I had faith that in time the truth would reveal itself, either through new discoveries or more informed insight.

It has to be understood by the reader that certain “interpretations” of facts will have to be radically changed for this to work, because many very intelligent people have worked on this problem over the last century and failed. The reason for this failure is two-fold. Either they didn’t have the courage to explore alternate interpretations of the Bible for fear of breaking tradition, or lacked the imagination to see them.
To accomplish this task, some of my most cherished ideas of religious tradition had to give way to new perspectives that have become possible only in the last 30 years. I reluctantly gave up on these views only when it was realized that the evidence was overwhelmingly against them and that it was possible that the traditional interpretation wasn’t what the original scriptures actually said anyway.

Alternately, some of the most respected and accepted opinions of science had to be compromised to some extent to allow for a hypothesis that proposes what most scientists find objectionable, that the Bible really is a true and accurate record of history.

There is a familiar saying that, “If you continue to do as you have always done, you can expect to get what you’ve always gotten.”

Any explanation that would bring together such opposing views of man and his role in the universe as science and religion, would naturally have to be something we have never imagined or tried before, else we would “get what we have always gotten”.

What happened next was unexpected to say the least. If my understanding of the story that was unfolding before me was true, it would dramatically change our perception of who we are and how “modern” man came to be. I have to confess that what I experienced internally was a certain amount of fear. Fear that this story was bigger than my ability to tell it.
Thus begins a story about God and His creation that, since writing it, has caused to emerge a strong feeling that I have stumbled onto the REAL truth about what happened 6000 years ago when a new form of man appeared, almost overnight, out of the darkness of ignorance, on the verge of an age of civilization and reason.

Each of the following “insights” will be discussed in-depth in later chapters.

The first “breakthrough”, or insight came while writing about the Garden of Eden and its relationship to the Creation and all subsequent events. This idea was only the beginning but probably is the one that set the tone for all that follows.

The first two chapters of Genesis describe two different events, separated in time by billions of years.

When the idea first occurred I re-examined my understanding of those events, and was suddenly stunned with a ‘What if …” type of thought process that demanded a closer look to see if the scriptures that followed supported this idea all along. Maybe we just didn’t notice it.

What if the book of Genesis, chapters 1 and 2, was describing two different events separated by a great span of time? Scholars have wondered for a long time why the creation story was repeated starting in Genesis 2:4 and have debated the reason for centuries. We have always assumed that the two chapters were the same event, but that the second account in chapter 2 was simply a closer look at the creation of man.

What if the events in Chapter 1 concerning the creation of the heavens and the Earth took place billions of years ago, and the events of Chapter 2 actually took place only 6000 years ago as a second “creation” event?  If true, then Genesis 1 and parts of 2 seem to reflect the modern scientific view of creation while from Genesis 2:4 on, describes the traditional religious view. The science community insists that the universe is over 14 billion years old and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, while fundamentalist Christians say man and history only began 6000 years ago, according to the Bible. Interpreting chapters 1 and 2 this way seems to say that both are right!
If that is true, then Adam would truly be the first man by the Bible’s definition and still allow for the existence of all the creatures described in our science books as having evolved, including a creature the science books call  “early man”.

Of course, the argument against this is that the Bible talks of the creation taking 6 days. There is a flood of irrefutable evidence that all of creation is billions of years old. The “days” mentioned in the Bible were spoken of as a time period before there was a “day” to measure it by on earth. We now define a day as the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once. What was the length of a day before man defined it this way? Using that as the standard, a day could have been any period of time before the Earth existed. Even the Bible supports this idea by declaring in several places that God’s time is not the same as man’s time, and that a day could be 1000 years.

There is a way that the 6 days can be true and still be compatible with science as we know it.

At the moment of creation, scientists say that an event took place that they call “The Big Bang”. This explosion resulted in the universe being created by an enormous expansion of not only matter, but space itself, so that everything that we can observe today was begun by this event. Space is a dimension, such as length, width, and height. It is hard to imaging space itself expanding but that is what they say happened. If space is a dimension and expanded, why not time itself, which is also a dimension, as accepted by most scientists and mathematicians? The idea of time expanding is one that I have not seen in any  papers or research theories, yet it is logical, since science says that “everything” expanded at the moment of the Big Bang.

When we blow up a balloon, the first breath of air seems to inflate it more than any other because further inflation results in less noticeable increases, until at maximum size, another breath is hardly noticeable. If time expanded in this way, like space and matter, then time should have expanded much faster in the earlier period of the universe than the present. The result would be that time ran faster then and is gradually slowing down as the universe ages., like a balloon that slowly reaches it maximum size.

The Bible says that God’s time is different to man’s time, therefore the description of time in Genesis would be according to God’s “clock” until time is established by man on the earth. If time ran faster in the universe early on, than now, but God’s clock is consistent, then while 1 billion years were passing in moments just after the creation of the universe, perhaps only one day was passing on God’s “heavenly” clock. As the universe, and creation, progressed further, this difference would diminish to where perhaps on the seventh day of God’s clock, only 1 million years of earth’s time passed. This would allow time for all the processes to take place that our science book say happened.

We still don’t know how our clock compares with God’s clock today but the bible 3000 years ago said that one day of God’s time was equal to 1000 years of man’s time.
If science says that man began as a  species on earth 2 million years ago, which was the 6th day on God’s clock, then we would have no conflict between the two.
At this point I began to understand another important concept.

There existed a primitive creature that the science community calls “man”, before Adam, that lived in great numbers around the world, outside of Eden.

This thought-provoking proposal, and perhaps the most controversial, is that there was a form of man that existed for millennia on this earth before Adam and that the man spoken of by the Bible in the Garden of Eden and afterward, was not the same creature as the man we read about in our science books of that time. They were two separate species and lived independently in different areas of the world.

If we read the Bible “literally”, man was created from the dust of Eden, not as a preexisting creature. Throughout our history we have taken the name for our species,” man”, from the Bible, and only in the last 150 years has the science community taken that term and applied it to a creature that did not originate in the Garden of Eden. Our science textbooks speak of man as the creature that was born out of evolutionary processes over two million years ago.

Is it possible that the two creatures may not be the same? Is it also possible that, since we don’t have all the characteristics that Adam had,  “modern man” as we know him didn’t exist until around 5000 years ago when the descendants of Adam (and Noah) mixed with primitive “man” who was already here, and created a new species? That new species is us, or modern man.

It is clear from the Bible that we are different from Adam, and I believe that we are also different from the species of man described in our classrooms as Homo sapiens, the man who dominated the Earth around 10,000 B. C. Could it be that the conflict between creationism and evolution is simply a matter of definitions, that the term “man” is used to apply to two different creatures and depends on whose definition you accept?

We speak of “man” today as if everything that ever lived that walked upright and made tools was “man”. That is the modern view. We have to realize that when the Bible speaks of “man” it is only referring to someone who is a descendent of Adam. Biblical scholars have talked of a “divine spark” that God put in Adam that is present in everyone who is a descendent of him. Genesis calls it the “Breath of Life”.  It is very possible that the “divine spark” is a genetic signature that becomes a part of everyone that is a descendant of Adam, and that it will only be discovered when we are able to fully understand the entire genetic code of the human race.

If we take the view that the term “man” can apply to two different creatures that were very different from each other, but lived in the same period of time, all kinds of possibilities open up and some of the greatest mysteries of the Bible are “solved”.

When Genesis 4: verses 16 and 17 state that Cain left Eden and took a wife, we now have an explanation for where she came from. The “man”, Cain, the Bible refers to, took a wife from among the creatures that our science books call “man”. These creatures look very much like modern man but lacked the genetic “Breath of Life” that God implanted in Adam. The passage above is conspicuous by its lack of information as to where the wife came from and does not say that she was of Adam, perhaps by design.

The scriptures that follow support this theory. Genesis 4:20-24 gives in detail the contributions that Cain’s descendants make to later history, such as music, iron and metalworking, etc. If all of his descendants had perished in the flood, this would have been unimportant and meaningless, as their work would have perished with them. Why bother to include this as part of the narrative if it is irrelevant or untrue?

The truth is that after Cain left Eden to dwell among the “primitive” man of our science textbooks, his descendants were spared the catastrophe of the flood, which was confined to the area called Eden. As I will show in detail later this was “the world” that was destroyed and not the whole planet Earth. God did truly destroy “man whom I have created” because the creatures living outside of Eden were not considered to be “man” by God, and were not destroyed. The phrase “that I have created” is only referring to the creation in the Garden of Eden, God’s final creation on planet earth. This was “the world” referred to in Genesis 7.

The “other” men are the creatures referred to in Genesis 1:26 when God said “Let us make man in our image”. This creature would eventually become man by God’s plan but was only the first step in the process of man’s creation. The final phase of this plan would take place when Adam’s descendants mixed his genes with those of this creature. Adam was not this man, but was the man God created from dust in the garden. Only then would “Modern Man” emerge and finally be present on the earth.

Stated another way, when the Bible says Adam was the first man, it is using God’s definition of man as created in the garden, and is correct, by definition. By this standard, Adam didn’t even have to look like us to be “man”. When our children read about “early man” in their science books, and those books say that the first man began about two million years ago, they are accepting science’s definition of “man”, not God’s. Who then was the “true” man if they were different? My argument is that both groups are right within their definitions of “man”. Modern Man is neither of these creatures but the result of the mixing of their genes.

As we shall see later, they were two very different creatures, both of which had some of the features of modern man, but in some ways both were very different from man today.

We read about Adam and his immediate descendents and think of them as normal, like you and me. Read Genesis more carefully concerning their characteristics and you will see that they were not like you and me. Specifically, the race of man from Adam to Noah and his immediate descendents was a very unusual “man” by today’s, or any period’s standards, in his longevity, immunity to disease, his ability to communicate with God, and other characteristics we will go into later.

If we accept the premise that God had something special intended for the “primitive” man that existed outside the garden, then this era suddenly becomes tremendously important. The period between the end of the Flood and the beginning of civilization was starting to take on a complexity and character that could legitimately be called a blueprint for the future of man
What happened then could not have succeeded without a great deal of coordination and forethought as to how it would be implemented. Its scope was to include every race and people on the planet.

The plan, at least in part, began when God said, “Let us create man in our image”. At that time there was no creature that resembled modern man alive. Science tells us that a creature they call Australopithecus suddenly appeared, and through the process of evolution, and in the millennia of time, developed into a form that resembled modern man.

God’s plan was to create a superior human being called Adam, instruct him to multiply and “replenish”, or repopulate, the Earth. What did He mean by “repopulate” the earth? In time Adam’s descendants would mix with the inferior habitants of this world to produce a race of beings that would develop a technological society and arrive at the point we now know and enjoy as the modern world.

A secondary meaning for the word replenish is to “replace”. The word replenish, as used here, was a command to re-populate the earth with a new kind of man that was to replace the previous or primitive race that had descended from Australopithecus. Re-populate means that there was something here before man.

The reason for this plan, and the end result, would be to create a large enough population of this “modern man”, as we now call him, from which to extract only those who are worthy to enter into what the Bible calls “The Kingdom of God”.

Jesus consistently referred to this domain and emphasized that it required not only understanding, but also a sensitivity and grasp of morals that the primitive man could never have achieved. It would be hard to see how anyone could argue how His message of “Love thy neighbor, and even thy enemy” could have impacted the world of man 10,000 years ago, yet this simple phrase is still affecting man’s thinking and is debated today. This was an idea that could not have come through evolution or the primitive man. This is proof that something in man had changed.

Misinterpretations of the message have admittedly resulted in some disastrously misguided efforts such as the Spanish inquisition, the Crusades, and the Salem witch trials. This is an indication that some of the primitive man who lacked understanding of the “love” message is still present in all of us.

This coordinated effort to introduce civilization and reason to the world of man will never appear in any school textbook because it would support the “religious” view of creation. The official position of the science community is still that civilization and progress all happened by accident through a few key developments in agriculture. They admit that these are still a puzzle, and are at a loss to explain the explosion of knowledge and language that took place just after the time of the flood, around 4500 years ago. During this period, man invented language, written alphabets, studied mathematics, learned to smelt iron, learned music, and constructed the first cities made of bricks. All of this occurred within a space of only 300 years!

When the “Eden” man mixed with “primitive man” after the flood, the very nature of man as a species was changed, as the genes of these “enhanced humans’, direct descendants of Adam, were assimilated into the gene pool of the existing creatures that science calls ‘man’. The result was a new form of man that was intelligent, artistic, and very creative. The bipedal hominid of our science books that had roamed the Earth for more than two million years was now changed to be a moral creature with the “divine spark”, at least in theory, if not in practice.

At this point a realization set in for what was becoming clearer with each chapter. I developed a deeper appreciation of the fact that everyone walking around on the Earth today has some of the genes, and is a descendant of, a real person named Adam. And, since those genes came directly from God, we could even call ourselves “children of God”.  We will find out later that some individuals even assigned an element of “divinity” to that title. Also, as “children of God” we acquired a “right of inheritance”. That right, as is true in all inheritances, is only valid if we claim it.

That right of inheritance makes us eligible for consideration to become members of the “Kingdom of God”. This helps to explain the verse in John 1: 12 and 13 in the New Testament concerning our right to be called “Sons of God”. It also confirms that every individual is special and is important to God because we all have his stamp, or seal of ownership, within us. I believe that this stamp, or brand, of God is contained in our DNA.

Is it possible that the writers of the New Testament had access to knowledge of this part of our history that we have not yet realized? There are several instances of the word “mystery” or “mysteries” being used in the New Testament to refer to knowledge that we will have at some point in the future.

The apostle Paul is very vague in a passage that has intrigued Bible scholars for centuries concerning the physical man and the spiritual man. This is contained in Corinthians 2:14, “for the natural man received not the things of the spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him…”. This is followed up by even more specific references to two kinds of man in chapter 15:47, “The first man is from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven… Just as we have born the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven”.

We could easily substitute the word “genes” for the word “image” in this statement, and retain the same meaning. This is a very powerful and timely statement from someone who had no knowledge of genetics. If the ideas presented in this manuscript are true then we all do bear the genetic image of both the primitive man of the science books as well as the image of the first man, Adam, who, because God “breathed the spirit of life into him”, is the only one who can legitimately be called a “man of heaven”.

There was at this time available to Paul, a library in Egypt, at Alexandria, which contained the sum of all knowledge then known in the ancient world. Perhaps Paul, being a very learned and literate person from that period, had read from texts that were stored in this library. Perhaps he acquired greater knowledge of man’s history after his conversion to Christianity.  It is well known that all of the written documents concerning mankind’s history from the beginning of written language were stored in this library, which was later destroyed by the Romans.

What could we have learned about our early history if those documents had survived to this day? Would we have learned that the flood story in the Bible was true and accurate? Would they tell of the origin of the “mythical” Gods who lifted the ancient civilizations, like Greece, out of the Stone Age? Would we now have a greater appreciation of the Old Testament accuracy if those texts could corroborate its authenticity?

I was now starting to comprehend the importance of the fact that all of the significant events that transformed man from a backward nomadic existence to a literate, cultured, citizen with an urban lifestyle, took place in a very small region of the world between 2200 and 2500 BC, a very short time period in which man and his world were re-invented and set on a course to become what it is today.

The flood of Noah was a local event, confined to a large area called EDEN. Throughout the book of Genesis before chapter 9, this area was referred to as “the world”.

As this document began to take shape, new evidence was just coming to light concerning the flood of Noah. This would later become a crucial piece in the puzzle. It led to a new perspective on that event that helped me to understand much better how and why it happened. I started to fully appreciate the tremendous effect it had on the Earth and the future of man. A full explanation of this event is given in a later chapter.

Even more important to our present society and civilization, it was becoming clear for the first time the staggering importance of the period and the events that took place just after the flood of Noah. This was the period that cast the mold for modern civilization.

The phrase “His way” as used in Genesis 6:12 should be taken to mean His plan, or blueprint for man’s development.

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were unprotected from the elements. Interestingly, it is at this time that the Bible gives us one of the most puzzling passages in the entire book. Genesis 6:1-7 describes beings coming from Heaven who take wives of the daughters of man. This results in offspring that are described as “giants”, who are obviously very different from the race begun by Adam. Because of this genetic corruption of Adam’s line God declares in no uncertain terms “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the Earth…for all flesh had corrupted His WAY on the face of the Earth”.

In reading the passage in Genesis 6:12 that said “God’s way was corrupted” I saw something else that had been passed over. The choosing of the word “way” for this passage is a little strange. When we “have our way” it usually means that we know where we are going. In other words, God had a preconceived plan that was being violated. God didn’t just create the world and put man in it just to see what would develop.

When I thought about that possibility, the events that followed made more sense than before, when we simply thought the word “way” meant His creation.

This significant use of the word “way” is a subtle change that has never been truly recognized, but is extremely important here. The phrase “His Way” did not mean His “Will”, or His “creation”, as we usually interpret it, but was specifically referring to a blueprint for man’s development. The word “way” is derived from a word meaning a “road” or highway such as “The Apian Way”. All roads lead to somewhere that is predetermined. God’s WAY was the plan He had set in motion for man and the Earth, even before He began the Garden project. It became a statement that God had a plan for man that went beyond just creating him and populating the Earth.

It has generally been accepted that the reason God created man was that “He desired companionship”, or “He wanted our love”. While these arguments may be true, they are speculative because we cannot really determine from the Bible why God created the human race. It could also be that God had more specific plans for man that went well beyond anything we could have imagined.

What if man was created for a different reason that we have not yet realized? Until this age of information provided the tools, the knowledge, and the insight to discern it, it has remained hidden from our view. This makes the statement in Genesis that “His way was corrupted upon the Earth…” a much more powerful message than the traditional interpretation that He was just angry that His creation had been defiled. Not only was He angry concerning man’s sinful behavior but their actions were also tearing down the wonderfully complex plan He had begun to execute in the Garden, for the benefit of all Mankind.

With that in mind a story began to play out in my imagination as the book of Genesis started to take on a new life that made more sense in our modern world. I started to realize that a picture was forming of a very detailed and complete story about God’s purpose for man on the Earth that began long ago at the foundation of the world, and is still coming together in our present time. I began to see our present world as not being so separated from the world of 6000 years ago, as the events described in Genesis suddenly became very real.

It is hard today for us to relate to a backward society, like the one that existed at that time, when we are surrounded by creations of our own, the technology and culture that runs our society and our lives. I thought about the intelligence and technology that must have been involved in the creation of The Garden of Eden, and that maybe it still existed on Earth immediately before the flood of Noah. Could it be that the technology that we have today is not entirely the result of our genius, but was predestined to happen long ago, in the time when the future of man was being molded?

For some reason, that we can only speculate about, God began, as the Bible states, at the “foundation of the world”, with his plan for mankind, a time when science tells us was about 4.5 billion years ago, when the earth was “gathered together” from the dust that circled a new sun. He made a deliberate and planned decision to return to a specific time in its development, 6000 years ago, to continue and complete its final phase.

Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to try on the idea, like trying on a coat, and see if there is any contradictory evidence or something that doesn’t “fit”. Lacking this you then examine all the available remaining evidence to see if it supports and ‘reads’ as if your original assumption is true.  If that test proves correct you sometimes find that what remains is an idea that fits your hypothesis like a glove. That was the case here.
This new hypothesis required accepting some basic assumptions that will be described later, assumptions that would go against centuries of tradition, and go against what many had accepted as truth all their lives. The result was a story that was continuous and logical, and had a much more important message for our generation than we had realized.

When the basic form of the plan was first realized, I started to research the hypothesis, looking for supporting evidence. Pieces of the puzzle began to come together, faster than I had expected. With every chapter and idea would come new insight that explained scripture that had been a mystery since I was very young. There had to be a reason that the story was coming together so well.

It was Noah’s descendents who were responsible for the myths of “Gods” in all the great civilizations of the world.

A study of the Gods of different cultures is a part of our history that has never been given the attention it deserved by biblical and historical scholars. Perhaps it is because all historians like to think that they investigate only those ideas that are acceptable to the establishment, and a research project to study “Gods” would border on religion and superstition. Biblical researchers consider such a study as pagan and irreverent.

The Bible clearly describes how the “nations” came to exist, and the role played by Noah’s sons and descendants. Before there were “nations” there were only isolated colonies of nomads and people who could only struggle to hunt for or grow enough food to sustain them. Because of Noah’s descendants these colonies of early humans gained knowledge and gifts of better crops, with more frequent and greater yields, and began to build cities. Historians and science scholars like to pretend that Noah and Genesis chapter 10 never happened.

Another reason that it has not been studied more carefully is for lack of information. To write this book required accepting ideas that would provoke controversy in both the academic and the religious camps. If we are to use all the information available concerning this period in time, we have to combine the knowledge that both groups have gathered concerning the history of man. One of the ideas that we never considered is that there might have been more than one species of man, an idea that has suddenly become acceptable in light of the discovery of the “Hobbits” race in Indonesia in 2004.

The first 3 or 4 generations of Noah’s descendents still had some of the traits of the pure line from Adam to Noah. They lived extremely long lives, were highly intelligent, immune to disease, and knew how to construct things no human had ever constructed before. Considering that the “other” man had a short 30 to 40 year lifespan and limited abilities, how would such a visitor as one of Noah’s grandsons seem to them? He would seem to be a God in their eyes.

It would not be hard to imagine that the Greek legends of human Gods who were strong and had superhuman abilities such as Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, and others, long considered as part of Greek “mythology”, were really stories about actual people who came to them as descendants of Noah. As these “super humans” inter-mixed with the primitive tribes, their offspring by mortal women would be accepted as Gods also, but only as 1/2 Gods, exactly as many accounts describe them, such as the epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Shumer. Gilgamesh was described in clay tablets as being only a 2/3 God. This lead to many royal lines being looked on by the people as divine.

This also explains the attempt of so many Egyptian rulers to keep the illusion alive of being divine and immortal long after these traits had been reduced through marriage and mixing with the original peoples, so as to be almost non-existent.

Had the events not taken place exactly as described here and later in this book, man today would probably still be a backward creature roaming the earth, hunting and gathering food as he did 6000 years ago, very primitive agriculture, no brick cities, and little or no written language.

Finally, but most important to today’s generation, the story I am about to reveal to my readers is a continuing story. That means that it isn’t finished yet. Anyone who can read will acknowledge that we are today experiencing an explosion of knowledge and enlightenment that is unparalleled in history. Yet in many ways it is very similar to what took place around 2500 B.C., just after the flood of Noah. Those events transformed man from a tribal, nomadic, subsistence way of life, into citizens of an age of urbanization and culture.

Why is that important? Because if that is true, then perhaps we too, are standing on the threshold of another new age for mankind that will lift him to a higher plateau of achievement and knowledge that we can only begin to imagine.

Copyright 2008 Allen Epling. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Excerpt
Preface

It is August 1989, and Frank Bargen is cleaning out the attic of his Manitoba home. He has been storing some of his parents’ belongings since they died twelve years earlier. Among the possessions is an old Campbell’s Soup box. In casual conversation with his younger brother Peter Bargen and his wife Anne who are visiting, Frank refers to “a box of old letters” in the attic that are “just cluttering up the place.” Peter finds the box, opens it up, and discovers hundreds of faded letters, some little more than scraps of paper. They are written in German gothic script and dated as early as 1930. To Peter’s surprise, his mother had kept all of these letters from Russia until she died.
The correspondence is from aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, neighbours and friends, who by choice or fateful chance remained behind in the former Soviet Union. Their letters describe the inhumane conditions under which millions lived and died: from the mother dividing meagre portions of black bread among her starving children to the father prepared to freeze to death in order to provide for his children. Although the writers’ words reveal human flaws and frailties, they also bring to light an elemental faith that united the Mennonite people for over 400 years.
It was only when the cardboard box emerged from the attic in 1989 that Peter began to comprehend the suffering of his people. For three years, he and Anne organized and translated 463 of the “pre-war” letters (1930-38). Peter learned of the events that took place in the hours immediately following his family’s flight in 1929, and the unthinkable horrors experienced by those left behind in Soviet Russia. Peter and Anne wanted their children, grandchildren, and extended family to know their own story, so they printed one hundred copies of the 463-letter collection in 1991.
Significantly, research has confirmed that the letters from Stalin’s Gulag comprise the largest international corpus of its kind to date. Also noteworthy is that these letters were written “in the moment.” Unlike many published memoirs written years later, after memory and the passage of time have possibly eroded the experience, (e.g. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Eugenia Ginsburg, Kseniia Medvededskaia) these letters capture the experiences of prisoners and villagers in actual time.
Clandestinely carried out of the country, the letters offer a rare glimpse into the bleakest chapter in the Soviet Union’s history. They open a previously obscured window into both the day-to-day existence in Stalin’s prison camps and the suffering of oppressed people in their home villages. Yet the letters also evoke the human spirit’s most enduring quality: hope.

Translation of the Letters
Translating the letters presented numerous challenges for Peter and Anne Bargen. In their 1991 published collection, they note the following:
1.    Many letters are unsigned and undated. We have done our best to estimate by whom and at what time they were written.
2.    Many words, phrases and sentences are illegible because of faint writing, faulty spelling, abbreviations, smudging and unknown Russian expressions. We have tried to express the substance of the communication accurately.
3.    Many unknown or illegible “place names” in either German or Russian language are used by the correspondents and are written as they appear to the translator; they may be grossly misspelled (i).

The Bargens explain that they tried to reflect the essence of the letters as precisely as possible, and did not “sanitize” the story. It is also my intention to present the letters accurately and to preserve the integrity of the writers. In publishing this book, I have insisted on keeping the letters intact. The writers do not need to be censored once again. However, to guide the reader, I provide contextual information, clarify family relations, and define some Russian terms and ethnic expressions. Most spellings of geographical locations follow the Germanic-Mennonite conventions used by the letter writers. In some cases, Library of Congress spellings (in non-Cyrillic alphabet) are used to represent Russian words used by the writers. Ellipses generally indicate either words that are missing in the original letter or handwriting that is impossible to decipher.

Overview
This volume begins with an introduction to the Mennonite people. It describes their journey from parts of Europe in the sixteenth century to Russia in the eighteenth century. It also narrates the odyssey of Mennonites from a golden age of relative peace and prosperity to the dark prisons of the Gulag in the twentieth century.
Chapter One begins includes the early letters of Jasch and Maria Regehr and their six children, recounting their arrest in 1930, imprisonment, and exile. Chapter Two presents the letters written from various prison camps to which the Regehr family was transported (1932-33). Chapter Three contains letters written in the following year (1933-34) which reflect a loss of hope after several deaths in the family. The number of letters drops dramatically after 1934; those in Chapter Four reveal the increasing vulnerability of the remaining family members. The letters stop in 1937. Decades of silence follow.
Then, after more than fifty years, two surviving sisters, Lena and Mariechen, “fill in the blanks.” Their letters are included in Chapter Five. Renewal is evident in this chapter, which recounts a meeting with Lena in 2005 in Cologne, Germany. The only remaining survivor of the Regehr family, the little girl who wrote a letter from her cramped space in a prison barrack, the woman who embodies the pain of an oppressed people, now radiates with hope for her daughter and two granddaughters. The Epilogue invites readers to respond to Jasch and Maria’s plea: “Remember us.”

Copyright 2008 Ruth Derksen Siemens. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

A ghost’s whisper

A
board falling flat to the floor is thunder to the heart. And so it was that when prison guard Clyde Sollars heard a hard clap, he stiffened in fear. For a few seconds he listened, breathless.
Sollars looked at his wristwatch, an anniversary gift from his wife. The hands showed almost four o’clock. He reached into the canvas bag he had carried into the prison from the main office across the street. Inside the tiny mailroom that was nothing more than a cubbyhole with shelves, wedged at the end of a short hallway, he sorted the day’s last letters. That noise, sharp and urgent, echoed in his head. The convict carpenters working with hammers and saws near the deputy warden’s office must have dropped a board. The day suddenly felt used and cold, like frost on a flower. Feeling a chill that he couldn’t understand, he worked faster.
An hour earlier, Sollars waited outside the prison’s rock walls, across the street, while his wife Helen censored the last letters. She was the new matron in the Women’s Unit, a small stockade behind the main prison. They told her that if she worked with the mail superintendent for a few weeks she would know the prison better. Every morning she and another matron marched eleven of the thirteen female prisoners from their quarters to their jobs in prison offices outside the walls. Clyde felt lucky to see her during working hours. He was one of two mail and transportation officers, alternating with another guard on road trips to return parole violators to Deer Lodge. The most recent assignment had been to North Dakota. The other guard asked for it, hoping to visit relatives along the way.
On this Thursday, April 16, 1959, Clyde Sollars might have been driving hundreds of miles to the east, free as a bird on the perpetual plains of eastern Montana. Instead he stacked mail into a bag, looked at his watch, and decided that before he ended his shift he would walk one more time into Montana State Prison.
“See you at home, Mom,” he had said to his wife. That was what he called Helen sometimes. They had two daughters, grown and gone, and it felt good to speak to his wife as if the children were still at home.
He had come to the prison in 1957. Like many of the guards before him, who found their way to Deer Lodge from the sawmills and the mines and the timber crews, he arrived at the prison with dirt on his heels. After leaving the Army after World War II he went to work in the grain elevators in Charlo, Ronan, Polson, Pablo and Paradise, all towns in northwestern Montana. Sollars was an ordinary blue-collar worker, as unadorned as the other guards who filed in and out of those imposing sandstone and granite walls. He was about to find out how plain men take on new worth in a crisis.
He swung the canvas sack onto his shoulder and walked forty paces across Main Street and into the lengthening shadows of two mighty cell houses. The fortresses stood four stories high. Castle-like turrets clawed at the pale sky from each of the eight corners. One cell house had been built before the turn of the century, the other, during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. They made an awe-inspiring sight to travelers who drove into town on Highway 10, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt, and stopped and pointed their Brownies to snap pictures. The forbidding prison, by some accounts one of the worst in the country, made for interesting vacation snapshots next to the more pastoral elements of Montana, like steaming geyser spray from Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.
Like most prison guards, Sollars saw little romance in the rugged architecture of the cell houses. He thought them ugly and wretched because he knew of the misery that they hid. He felt them staring at him with their troubled swollen eyes. The prison had eyes everywhere. The hundreds of prisoners watched and remembered all they saw, as did the guards if they knew what was good for them. The seven wall towers watched what was inside, and everything inside stared back. Eyes watched from everywhere. It was said that the prison’s ears heard all, even a ghost’s whisper.
Wind swept the scent of spring snow off the mountains that loomed like a painted backdrop behind the prison. The scent stung his nose but felt fresh and clean. Only when Sollars arrived at the looming stone entrance did he shiver. Instinctively he zipped his blue uniform jacket.
He tilted the bill on his police-style cap to shut out the sun, which already was fading behind the prison. Then he looked up. On the wall outside the tower, known as Tower 7 or the main gate, a guard stood with a loop of clothesline rope. He uncoiled it and let it drop twenty feet or so to Sollars, who unclipped from it a brass key that filled his hand. At the front of the tower, standing almost on Main Street where the cars rolled past, Sollars unlocked an ornate black grill door to enter the base of the two-story tower. Here, the easy innocence of small-town Deer Lodge dissolved into a dark cave of sandstone rock. A naked bulb cast dull yellow light that didn’t penetrate the corners. The room was cold and drafty. Sollars felt a change in him as he always did when he went inside.
He locked the grill door behind him. This time, the rope dangled through a round opening in the ceiling. The guard who had stood on the wall a minute earlier was now inside the tower, up in the eagle’s nest where he could see the guts of the prison through its broad windows. Sollars attached the key, tugged on the rope, and the guard above pulled it back. Seconds later the rope returned. A new key rattled inside the tin tube. Sollars used it to unlock a wooden door, as thick as his hand was wide, on the opposite side of the tower. He swung open the door, stepped into the prison yard, and locked it again. The other guard, standing outside on the wall again and facing the prison now, dropped the rope. Sollars surrendered the key.
He crossed a short courtyard to ten steps that led upward to another barred door. Behind it was Inside Administration, where guards brought their prisoner counts. Convicts came for medicine, or to get their teeth pulled in the dental office, or to shine the guards’ black leather shoes. In the photo office, they took pictures of the “fish,” the new men who arrived through the main gate and wrote descriptions of their scars and tattoos in case of escape. The visiting room was here, too. Inside Administration was the business district of this town of criminals.
The cell houses, like big brothers, pressed against the chalk-white Inside Administration on either side, dwarfing it. On the south end, to Sollars’ left, was the 1896 version. This cell house had buckets for toilets. Despite all the technological inventions before its construction, it more resembled a Civil War-era fortress with its galleys of wood and its cell doors that had to be locked individually. It was made of dark brick, the color of dried blood. Its round turrets had roofs that came to a point, where in the early days big flags flew. To the north, the 1912 cell house was much the same in its rectangular construction, although its brick looked more orange by contrast and its square turrets flared at the top. Even forty-seven years after it was built, guards called this building the “new” cell house because it had plumbing and interlocking cell doors.

***

None of the guards would doubt that this was Floyd Powell’s prison. The new warden from Wisconsin State Prison, a champion of reform, had proclaimed at his arrival eight months earlier that he would change this reputed hellhole into a model institution that would be the envy of every prison in America. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Some residents of Deer Lodge greeted his presence with skepticism, others with disdain. The town wasn’t accustomed to a warden of such outward determination, and the prospect of an improved prison was a new idea. In Wisconsin he had a reputation as a bit of a daredevil because he was willing to go into prison cells to talk inmates out of knives or other weapons. From childhood he lived a hard life and was determined to overcome it. As a boy, and the oldest son, he took over the family farm when his father became disabled in a car accident. He also hired out as a laborer to bring extra money home. He was a driven, determined self-made man.
The new warden arrived in Deer Lodge to repair decades of decay and mismanagement at the only prison in Montana’s vast landscape. It was an outpost of sorts, planted in a town of fewer than 4,000 residents in a tall empty county – Powell County, coincidentally – where Hereford cattle outnumbered people. The prison had stood at that spot along the Clark Fork River since Montana was a territory, when sluice miners crawled the snow-fed creeks and road agents fleeced them of their gold nuggets. It had been a familiar face to three generations of Deer Lodge folk who worked there. The old prison was a tolerated place, if not tolerable, a dark ripple in the stream of a good life. In a wide lonesome valley that felt like cupped hands beneath the heavens, the prison’s purpose was a spoiling, a footprint of humanity’s inevitable sorrowful deeds. Montanans liked their prison kept quiet, much like ignoring a sleeping dog for fear of its bite. With Floyd Powell’s arrival, that was about to change. There, between folds of the Rocky Mountain Front that wore some of the best forests in Montana on its flowing cape, his agenda for reform took shape.
As summer waned, Powell charged ahead with uncommon energy, trying to change everything at once. He recruited Ted Rothe, his friend and ally, from Wisconsin State Prison. To make the prison safer, he hired more guards. To know the troublemakers, he started classifying prisoners by crimes and behavior. He even fired the “con bosses” who had supervised their peers in the industries and shops. Powell was a whirling dervish. In his quest to bring the prison into modern times, he was upsetting the balance of power inside of it.
Clyde Sollars felt a haunting at the prison. The prison felt dead and ugly. Knowing the men held inside was like ripping open a psychological veil. Behind it were the inmates’ victims and their personal agonies. Civilization built prisons to hide what they didn’t want to see. Sollars and all the other guards discovered that in the midst of convicted men they met hell, exposed and raw and full of pain. Guards coped with two evils: real dangers and apparitions. They sensed in Floyd Powell’s vision a change in wind direction. It felt like a storm building on the mountain. To many Montanans, prison reform was worse than a futile gesture. It was a violation of faith.
If anything, a guard’s life was a fertile field for conversation. On the outside, off shift, guards cracked their foaming Great Falls Selects and smoked their unfiltered Camels and ranted of how it was, how it really was, and lamented Powell’s policies and the joint and the torment of their working lives.

***

At the top of the steps at the barred door into Inside Administration, Sollars pushed a button that sounded a buzzer. Officer James “Little” Jones, the second-shift turnkey, appeared at the door. He was as short as his nickname implied, but a muscled, wiry man, and his hair was thick and black. “Last trip for today?” he asked Sollars. He opened the door for Sollars to pass and then swung it shut. Metal crashed against metal. He turned the big key until the lock slid closed with a thunk. Jones made small talk before Sollars entered a little hallway to his right. He had been sorting the mail for fewer than ten minutes before he heard the noise that scared him.
Jones worked two grill doors that day. On the west side of the building, opposite from where Sollars had entered, two grill doors spaced twelve feet apart created a vestibule, where on most days one door would be locked before the other was opened. Those doors admitted convicts from the yard. Usually a second turnkey guard worked between the doors and had to work them with care to avoid being trapped with both sets of keys. Today Jones was working alone. On such days when the afternoon shift was short a man, the outside grill door was left open. Convicts who had business to do came up the steps from the yard on the west side of Inside Administration and walked right up to the second grill door in the vestibule. As a matter of policy, Jones would order them to step back before he unlocked the door.
Standing now inside his claustrophobic mailroom, Sollars was thinking again about the noise that bothered him. Like other guards he had become accustomed to listening beyond clanging doors and crude language for true and ominous signals of trouble. This noise had ricocheted around the jungle of concrete rooms like a clap of thunder. Had he heard a board falling flat to the floor, blasting the air away? Or had he heard something else? His suspicion grew.
For a few moments only silence came to his ears, and in prison, silence deafens. Here, a dictionary of sounds lay open in Clyde Sollars’ mind, as it did for every guard, ready for quick reference. In this prison of a thousand eyes, danger usually came first to the ears. Sounds that fill the prison alarm new guards. As months pass those sounds become a pattern of routine. The prison at its safest was a numbing routine and a guard was soon to learn that he should listen close when the routine changes.
From somewhere in the maze of rooms came an urgency of shoes on tile. They weren’t squeaks of new shoes but the warnings of a struggle. Sollars felt curious and then afraid. He crept into the lobby. Here in this gloomy room, where convicted men had tromped a trail in the linoleum, he saw no carpenters, nor did he see anyone else. Where was Jones, the turnkey guard? And why were both barred doors to the yard standing open?
That very second, as Sollars comprehended a guard’s greatest fear, a squat and sweating convict rumbled into the lobby from Deputy Warden Ted Rothe’s office. His big fist clutched a thin ugly knife, red with blood.
Sollars recognized him at once. He didn’t know the man well, in fact couldn’t recall a conversation with him, but in an instant Sollars sensed the man’s frightful confidence.

***

Like a mad bull, Jerry Myles snorted through a flattened nose that listed to the left. Rivers of purple and red ran across his flushed face. His bully scowl, accentuated with heavy eyelids and full pouting lips, promised trouble. His high forehead, where only a tongue of wavy salt-and-pepper hair remained, shined with sweat. He tilted his head backward a bit, daring Sollars to defy him. Sollars had heard this man was nicknamed “Shorty” and could see why. Myles stood only a shade over five feet, and despite thick arms and a chest as round as a rain barrel, his feet were dainty like a woman’s. His shoes seemed too petite for a man who propelled his stout body with such authority. He was a bull on tiny feet.
Although a common burglar, Myles had a reputation among the guards as a jocker, meaning he stalked young men for sex. They also called him “Little Hitler,” alluding to his remorseless and domineering behavior in the cell house. He courted violations of the rules in an effort to draw attention to himself, and when he was caught, tried to make amends in pitiful ways.
At 125, his IQ was far higher than most of his fellow convicts. He wrote poetry, enjoyed the strategic challenges of chess, and had learned to play the violin. Had he not been a psychopath, he might have been a scholar. Little good had come from his intellect. Other than occasional regret over his troubled loveless life, he reserved most of his thinking for petty hates and distorted illusions.
Sollars thought he saw a flicker of compassion in the eyes of this mad bull before him. When Myles spoke, his voice came softer than Sollars had expected. “This is a riot and if you want to live, Cap, do what I say,” Myles advised him.
At first Sollars didn’t understand that Myles was even more dangerous than he appeared. Prison was his home. Now forty-four years old, he had spent most of the past twenty-five years at Alcatraz Island and five other federal and state prisons. Mutinies came to him as second nature. He thought he knew prison life better than anyone who had guarded him. Myles was determined to impress on his captors that because of his long history of confinement he deserved special privileges. It soon would become clear to everyone in Montana that he desired to run the prison.
Myles stepped toward Sollars. He guided the knife in front of his short bulk like he was trying to clear a path with it. Sollars didn’t doubt that Myles would kill him. He raised his hands in surrender. Sollars had been to war and seen a few fights at the grain elevators but knew nothing about confronting armed convicts. Behind Myles came Lee Smart, the kid with eyes of ice. Sollars knew him as the teenage murderer. He was skinny and had a girl’s countenance but everyone knew he was a psychopath and gave him room. Smart had a sassy defiant way about him. He walked around the prison with his trousers drooping.
Between Myles and Smart stood Sergeant Bill Cox. Blood soaked the shirtsleeve on his left arm from shoulder to wrist. He had a jaw of rock that made him look fierce but now his strength was gone and his face white and dazed. Cox worked in the captain’s office between the lobby and Ted Rothe’s office. As Sollars tried to understand what he was seeing, he wondered for an instant why the scene didn’t include Deputy Warden Rothe. Then he looked closer at the boy.
Smart pointed a lever-action rifle at Sollars. He gripped the barrel not as a hunter would with a thumb on one side and fingers on the other for a clear view, but with his fingers wrapped all the way around. The ominous opening at the barrel’s tip looked larger than life. Sollars smelled gunpowder. He saw Smart’s other hand at the trigger, coaxing it. Sollars felt a violation of the basic order of life. He blinked hard behind his glasses. He wouldn’t forget Lee Smart’s blank cold face.

Read more about Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance and Kevin Giles HERE.

Copyright 2008 Kevin Giles. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.