Will there be jobs?

Last night, I was at Washington & Jefferson College speaking to a group of students about what they will do when college is over. I was a panelist for a discussion called, "What Can I Do With an English Major?" I was asked to participate because I am a W&J gad who was an English major and managed to find a job in which my education was useful.

While the other panelists talked about graduate school and internship, I scanned the faces, detecting here and there a wince or a widening of the eyes that betrayed bewilderment, even dread. It's understandable; it's a tough world out there now, where no one seems to be hiring.

These kids are under a lot of pressure to choose a course in life. Many of their parents are insisting that their college education be practical and vocational. I was there to defend liberal arts, to talk them out of switching their majors to accounting.

I told them how lucky they were to be able to learn about so many different things – languages, history, psychology, art – and that they should soak up all of this that they can. As English majors, they will go out into the working world as effective communicators, so necessary when abbreviated text messages just won't do. And as English majors they study literature, and in doing so they learn so much of the human condition. Anyone who is an effective communicator and has a good understanding of the human condition can do anything he or she chooses.

I'm not sure I got my point across; in the end, there were few questions. But if they take advantage of all the knowledge that's offered to them now, and if they are willing to start work at the bottom, they'll be just fine. Even now, when things seem so bad.

Honest, you will be OK.

Today's gripe

Today isn't one of them, but on warm days in spring, it's a given that the peace will be disturbed by someone driving up Main Street with the stereo up full blast, the bass speakers creating vibrations that imitate an earthquake, and the lyrics are the staccato obscenities of gangsta rap.

It's not so much the volume that bothers me, but the message. Ever listened? Here are a few lines from the rapper Mdc:

Let's kill all the cops and throw 'em in bags
Set it on fire on a pile of rags
Time for a little anarchy on the streets
Doesn't really matter if we all get beat
'Cause the world is really going to hell in a handbasket...
So let's kill all the cops, kill all the
cops, kill all the cops today
Let's kill all the cops it has a certain ring
They are not really real human beings
They got a job a uniform and a gun
Of course they are stupid and devoid of fun...

Oh, what a world we live in.

Complaints and questions

C: I am writing to you about your biased reporting on the gamblers that your paper has crucified. Their names have appeared in your paper so many time you make them sound like thugs. They are good people who didn't pay enough taxes. They never forced anyone to bet and yet their names have appeared more than any murderer, any rapist, any drug dealer. - A.C.

A: Believe it or not, we stock no crosses and nails here. And we don't have the power to charge and arrest people, or try them in court. In this case, it was the state police and the Internal Revenue Service who filed the charges, and the federal court that did the sentencing, which, by the way, fell a little short of crucifixion.

We report the activities of the police and courts. We have suggested before in editorials that the enforcers of the law might spend a little more energy pursuing murderers, rapists and drug dealers, rather than concentrating their efforts on crimes in which the victims, if you can call them that, are at least willing. Nevertheless, these are the criminals they choose to pursue, and so we report that.

Fathers, Part 15

(Four generations, photographed in 1977)

Some families are made differently. In them, a business is started, and it is handed down for generations. This newspaper is a good example; right now it is being run by the fourth generation of family members. Some editors in this 200-year-old business have ended up sitting in the same chairs once occupied by their fathers.

If there could be an opposite to this, my own family would be an example. In keeping with tradition, what I have passed down to my children is a path NOT to take. They chose instead to follow their mother. After college, both went to work and then put themselves through graduate school, both earning master’s degrees in fine arts. They live frugally, as painters must do.

Had things worked out a little differently, they might not have to worry so much about money and might not be so burdened by their grad-school loans. After all, the Burroughs family at one time had great wealth, way back before 1929. There was still a considerable estate left after the death of A.H. Burroughs and the market crash, but my wayward grandfather was effectively disinherited and benefited little. Nothing of that fortune trickled down to my generation or to our children.

In the early 1950s, Woodlawn, the estate in Irvington, N.Y., was sold and Florence – A.H. Burroughs’ widow – moved to Ashville, N.C., where she died at the age of 97. Woodlawn was demolished and replaced by an apartment complex.


(The Lynchburg house buned in August 2006)

Florence and her husband and the remains of several of their children, including my grandfather Alfred, are entombed in a mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, right next to the old Dutch cemetery through which Ichabod Crane fled the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

The grand, castle-like house that A.H. Burroughs built in Lynchburg, Va., suffered a long, slow deterioration. It was used for a while as a fraternity house, then divided into apartments. It was destroyed by fire just a few years ago.

So goes the march of a family through history.
As fathers, we are glad to have made the walk.

THE END

Letters from Siberia

You may remember Misha Zelenchukov, the former Russian journalist now working as a security guard, though infrequently paid, and living outside Novokuznetsk in an old house with no running water. Here's the photo I received from him today, with a note explaining that his dog had "perished," but that now he has this new dog.

Fathers, Part 14

Letting go is tough. It’s hard enough taking your kids to college and leaving them there, but at least they’re still living at home during breaks. It’s quite another thing when they leave for good. This column is from September 2000:

Cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates filled with shoes, clothing, books and makeup were piled on the landing and stacked at the top of the stairs. The man worked his way around them in the predawn darkness and entered his daughter’s room. At the foot of the bed he found and ankle and gave it a vigorous shake.
“Wake up!” he said to the sleeping lump beneath the comforter. “It’s time to go. Your childhood is over.”

The man and his wife were used to packing her off to college every fall, but this was different; college was over. Now she was moving away for good.
Had she been moving down the street or across town, or to another town in the same state, the event would not have seemed so ominous. But she was moving to New York, the great black hole of the American galaxy of cities, where the density of its 8 million souls is so great that not even letters home can escape its gravity.

The couple and their daughter drove all morning, mostly in silence, and in the static electricity of their anxiety.
Across the Delaware River and into New Jersey, the man began to feel the pull of the city, the traffic converging on ever-widening highways, swirling faster and faster in a vast whirlpool of speeding machinery.
Half a century ago, he thought, his own father had felt the pull of the great metropolis, too. To him, living and working in New York was what gave life meaning. And so, most of the man's own childhood was spent around the city. Maybe that's why, given the chance, he escaped from New York, fleeing on this very route to Western Pennsylvania and college, never looking back.
He raised his children in the country where, when the farm animals are not in an uproar, the nights as are quiet as death and the sky is a hood of black velvet sparkling with tiny diamonds; where there is solitude, where there is peace, where there are few people.
It’s no wonder she wanted to leave.

Just outside the Holland Tunnel, 16 lanes of traffic merged to two in the carbon monoxide haze of Jersey City. On the other side of the river, the traffic poured out of the tunnel and onto Manhattan Island, where signs for Brooklyn, Uptown, Downtown and Canal Street flashed by, and in a panic accompanied by a chorus of honking horns, he chose a direction, a ramp that dumped them into a maze of narrow, twisting alleys jammed with stationary cars and trucks over and around which swarmed a mass of people, racing about their business like fire ants.
For 40 minutes they inched through the steaming, teeming crush of the city.
“Where are we, exactly?” his wife asked. “I have absolutely no idea,” the man admitted. His knuckles became white as he clutched the steering wheel, and he fought an urge to leave, just get out of the car, leave it in the middle of traffic, just leave and find some movie theater or bar, or another job, and never, ever return.
“Why in the hell would anyone ever want to live in this place?” he fumed.

Eventually, they found their way clear of the mess and managed to get to the tip of the island, into another tunnel and on to Brooklyn. By the time they reached the apartment where the girl would be living with friends for a while, the man really needed to be restrained and hosed down.

But he calmed down. He had found a parking space right away. The apartment was on a quiet street, right around the corner from an outdoor cafe. There were kids zooming by on scooters, parents pushing strollers, people everywhere, different people of every conceivable color and nationality. This was a neighborhood, a place with a sense of community.
The couple knew they could leave their child in that place and not feel terrible about it. It was not their sort of place, but it was interesting. As they had shared their daughter's anxiety, now they shared her excitement about being young, about starting fresh in life.
And about living in the center of the universe.
And about not being a child anymore.

Fathers, Part 13

From a column published Nov. 11, 1990...

Oh, my father takes such delight in my parental misery.
I talk to him about teenager troubles. I expect a little sympathy, maybe a little advice. Instead, he rubs his palms together and grins. His eyes twinkle, and he has to suppress laughter. This is the joy of revenge.
I say: “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the kid, Dad. He wears combat boots and a motorcycle jacket. I think his role model is Sid Vicious. And his hair!”
My father snickers. He says: “You can’t imagine how good this makes me feel. Now you know.”
I say: “What am I supposed to do when I tell the kid he has to be home no later than a certain time – absolutely, not a minute later – and he shows up two hours later? And when I confront him, he puts on this puzzled look, glances at his watch and shrugs. What am I supposed to do?”
My father says: “Ha ha ha.”
He puts his arm around my shoulder, gives me a poke or two in the arm and says, “Now you know.”

Yes, now I know what the punishment is for being a troubling teenager: You goof on your parents, and 25 years later it comes around and hits you in the back of the head like some nuclear-age boomerang.
I can recall, back in 1965, a dinner-table exchange that went something like this:
Father: “If you would get that ridiculous hank of hair out of your eyes and off your face, maybe you could actually see what you’re eating!”
Son: “I can see just fine. We’re eating bourgeois food in a bourgeois house.”
Father: “There’s that communist talk again.”
Son: “Oh, Dad, the communists aren’t such bad guys. They’re just like us, and they want to be our friends.” (Yes, I really did say that.)
Father: “Oh, they want to be our friends, do they? And I suppose those things on top of their intercontinental ballistic missiles are just invitations to a garden party.”
Son: “That’s a typical imperialist reaction, but I can’t argue this anymore – the band is coming over to practice.”
Father: “Oh great. And I was looking forward to an evening of peace and quiet. Well, at least I can take off my socks and stand in the kitchen, above the basement, and get a foot massage from the vibrations.”
Son: “We have to play loud. The volume is the music, but I don’t expect you to understand that.”
(A long pause ensues in which the elder silently counts to 10.)
Father: “You’ll see. Oh, you’ll see.”

So, 25 years later, I see. I come home from work, put my hand on the doorknob and feel the tickle of vibration. I open the door and am blasted with noise from the stereo. I cup my hands to my face and yell, “WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?”
He yells back, “JANE”S ADDICTION.”
I’m puzzled. “NO, I MEAN WHAT GROUP ARE YOU LISTENING TO?”
“JANE’S ADDICTION! THAT IS THE GROUP.”
I yell: “WELL, COULD YOU TURN IT DOWN A BIT?”
“WHAT?”
“OH, NEVER MIND!” I yell in disgust and storm out of the room. Then I turn, rub my palms together and yell back, “YOU’LL SEE!”

Fathers, Part 12

My father and I manage to see each other once or twice a year now. We’ve discussed that adventure in Biscayne Bay several times over the years, but I think my dad would rather forget about it; it was too embarrassing for him. But it will always remain a fond memory for me.

A few years after that, I began writing a column for the Observer-Reporter in which I frequently shared my experiences in raising our children. For 15 years, my kids had their personal lives exposed in the newspaper. Some of those columns were reproduced on this blog in the story, “Dreams of My Children,” which can be accessed in this blog’s archives.

Neither of my children chose to follow me into journalism. When they were young, I worked nights and long hours and saw them not nearly enough. When they saw me, I was often weighed down with the frustrations of my job, harried by angry readers, and they wanted no part of that. They chose, instead, to emulate their mother, an artist of considerable talent. (My children share deep roots in this area with their mother, whose family – pioneer Scots-Irish and Dutch – arrived her in the late 1ate 18th century.) They would develop their own talent and become artists themselves. Like all the other Burroughs children before them going back to the 18th century, they chose a different path than their father.

Fatherhood was a frequent theme of those old columns in the 1980s and 1990s. I’ll share a couple of them with you this week. Tomorrow’s installment first ran in 1990 under the headline, “It took 25 years, but Dad’s finally getting his revenge.”

Fathers, Part 11

We had grounded our boat on the Featherbed Banks at high tide. As the sun dipped toward the western horizon, the water around us became shallower with the ebb. We radioed the Coast Guard. They would contact a private towing company to send a barge to pull us off the bar, but that would not be possible until the next high tide, at 3 a.m.

And so began our family excursion to Key Largo. It was the first time we had seen my father since my mother’s funeral. It had been a difficult time, but we seemed to be getting through it OK. In a way, this was our voyage out of mourning. We were anxious for it to continue. What if the barge did not arrive in time? How long would we be stranded? What would happen to us if the weather turned bad?

Darkness fell. In the faint light of a crescent moon, I could see sand poking above the still water off the bow. “I can’t believe the boat is still level,” I yelled to my father as I stood by the rail. “Look. You can see the bottom; it can’t be more than six inches deep here.” My father, wife and son came to the railing to see for themselves, and our weight was enough to cause the boat to list to starboard, nearly hurling us all into the bay.

We spent the rest of the night at a 30-degree angle, crab-walking the deck, the kids sleeping flush against the hull in the starboard bunks. My father and I did not sleep. We peered into the darkness over the stern, looking for lights, listening for the distant hum of engines.
The barge arrived sometime after midnight and anchored a quarter-mile away. My father conversed with the captain on the crackling marine radio. Slowly, the boat began to right itself. A couple of hours later, the barge moved within 100 yards, and men arrived in a dinghy to attach the tow line. And then, with a jolt and a hiss of sand against hull, we were free. Well, the rescue service was hardly free. The mistake proved to be a costly one.

We approached Key Largo as dawn was breaking portside, the two of us red-eyed and punchy from lack of sleep. It had been a difficult night, but we had come through it, and now everything was OK. And as we idled toward the dock the water was as still as a mirror, and the rising sun splashed its fiery light on the trunks of palms and through the portholes onto the faces of the children, still deep in sleep.

Fathers, Part 10

The wide, white wake of the boat is a foamy path reaching to the horizon, toward the tall buildings of Miami that have now set below the vast expanse of blue-green sea. We are cruising across Biscayne Bay under a cloudless sky. We pass the last shacks on stilts and are now surrounded by nothing but water and air.

My father examines the charts. It is a straight shot to the Florida Keys. He chooses a compass point and sets the autopilot.

It is March 1979. My son, nearly 5 years old, is playing with his Hot Wheels in the galley. Alice has taken our 9-month-old daughter, Caitlyn, to the aft stateroom for a nap. My father and I climb to the flying bridge. We converse in shouts over the noise of the rushing wind, the pounding of the hull against waves, the rumble of the exhausts. Since my mother’s death less than a year before, my father has devoted much time to the boat and the constant maintenance it requires. He has a new radar unit, which we are fiddling with as the boat steers herself south-southwest. He goes below to adjust something, and I am looking at the screen on the bridge.

It is then that I look behind us, and suddenly the wake is no longer white, but brown. In a panic, I yank back the throttles. The roar of the twin diesel engines dies; the stern lifts and we surf our own wake. I cut the engines, and all is quiet except for the ominous sound of hull sliding across sand.

Had I not noticed the brown wake we might have been fine, but in cutting the engines, I managed to place our 52-foot craft at the top of Featherbed Banks, a shallow area that becomes a sand bar at very low tide. This I learn as my father pores over the charts. “Dammit! How did I miss this!” he mutters to himself. We share the blame for our predicament.

I don a diving mask and jump into the water, surprisingly cold and not quite waist deep. In the murky dark beneath the stern, I see the propellers half-buried in the sand. We decide it is too risky to turn them. And with the tide going out, it will only get worse.

Here is the moment that has not happened before, when father and son look to each other for help, when the boy is no longer the son, and the man is no longer the father, when they are just two people, equally in trouble.

Fathers, Part 9

Three years after leaving boarding school, just after my junior year at Washington & Jefferson College, I was married. Alice and I moved to Florida, and then back to Pennsylvania in 1972. Two years later, our son was born.

We thought long and hard about a name. I had a boyhood friend named Broderick Washburn, Brody for short. We liked the sound of it. “Are you sure you don’t want to name him Alfred Parker Burroughs IV?” Alice asked me at the last moment. I was wavering, but I said, “No, he should have his own name, be his own person. Let’s call him Brody.”
We compromised, though, and gave him Parker as a middle name.

There was disappointment, even a little outrage in my family. Lulie – my grandfather’s sister – was in a huff. My mother was peeved. “How could you possibly name a child after that horrible, horrible man at the ranch in Mexico!” she complained over the phone when I called from the hospital.
“Who?” I asked, completely puzzled.
“That awful man with the scars all over his face, the body guard, the one who guarded our house, Brodie!” she said.
“I was too young to remem…”
“Broderick would have been OK,” she interrupted, “but now every time I see this child I’m going to think of that awful, awful man!”
Gee, thanks Mom.

The boy certainly looked like his own person. I could detect no resemblance. Of course, many people said the infant “looks just like his father.”
“What!?” I’d say. “Huh? “He weighs like 8 pounds. My nose is bigger than his face. How can he look like me?”

I never did see him as part of me, part of my body. From the beginning, I saw him as this wonderful little stranger that came into our lives. Maybe that was my inheritance, the fathering ways handed down to me from the previous generations. I was content from the start with him being his own person, with his own name.
And like all the other Burroughs men before him, he would find his own path through life.

Complaints and questions

C: Today's (Tuesday's) front page picture of the mobile home certainly added nothing to the story of the home invasion; the same picture showing all the junk in the yard was totally unnecessary. What a picture your paper paints of people who live in Greene County!
Also, while I'm on the subject - the featured story of the 2 pregnant sisters from Greene County in a recent Sunday edition glorified them and their (underage, I believe) pregnancies. Again, what a picture of Greene County residents.
I realize nothing noteworthy ever happens here (except the almighty Walmart's opening), but why do you always find it necessary to magnify our imperfections on your front pages? - C.S.

A: You know, it is what it is. Where the attacked couple lived is relevant; it's not exactly the most promising target for a robber. You kinda have to wonder. Murder is news, and what we do here is to cover the news. Social problems – like teenage pregnancy – are news too. We are a newspaper, not the Greene County Tourism Promotion Agency.

Whine, whine, whine

C: If a Letter to the Editor is sent, the whole letter should be published, not half of it like was done to my husband last year. Letters to the Editor are exercising Freedom of Speech. It's supposed to be a Democracy. Your Editor chose to discriminate. - T.M.

A: As we state on the editorial page, letters are subject to editing for length, clarity and taste. We also correct what might be considered embarrassing errors in grammar and spelling.

The newspaper is not a public utility. You have no constitutional right to express your opinion in someone else's newspaper. You do have a constitutional right to express your opinions, which means you can publish your own newspaper and say whatever you want in it.

And of course editors discriminate. That's their job: to decide what to print and what not to print. We take a tiny portion of all that is happening in the world and publish it each day. If we were not discriminating, the newspaper would be too heavy to lift and too expensive to buy.

Fathers, Part 8

(Boy Scout camp-out, 1959)

In April 1951, Al and Irene’s first daughter was born in New Haven, Conn. His work as a time-study analyst at Winchester enabled them to purchase a tiny, two-bedroom house in West Haven. After Winchester merged with Olin-Matheson Chemical Corp., Al was transferred to Manhattan and the family moved to New York, where they would remain until the late 1960s.

Unlike my father’s childhood, mine was as normal as peach pie, with loving, involved parents who stayed married to each other. My mother had a tendency to force me into activities for which I had little interest, like piano and ballroom dancing lessons. My father, though, preferred to allow me to develop my own interests and activities, and encouraged me by not interfering or offering instruction. He put up with the underground forts and tarpaper shacks I built in the backyard, biting his tongue rather than complain about the eyesores, or advise me as to how to dig a hole or hinge a door. Let him figure it out himself, he must have told himself many times.

I think he dreaded me entering Boy Scouts but put up with it anyway. His only error was in requiring me to play youth baseball beyond the time when I had lost interest.

His idea about punishment was not to stress the painful consequences of bad behavior, but to teach responsibility. He could be moved to anger, but he never raised a hand to me or any of his children.

Hard work and business decisions, both wise and risky, proved fruitful, which made it possible for me to follow in the footsteps of both my father and grandfather, to leave home for boarding school.
My father’s experience at Taft had molded him. That is where he matured, where he developed confidence, where he established his independence. He wanted to offer me the same experience.

Although I would disappoint him and flunk out of his alma mater after one year, I would manage to get though the next three years at another boarding school. The experience was enriching, and I thought at the time that I would do the same for my own son, should I ever have one. But marriage and fatherhood seemed like such a long way off then.
Little did I know.

Fathers, Part 7

(En route to Connecticut from Mexico, 1951)

The younger Alfred became a ship’s electrician and ended up with the occupation forces in Japan at war’s end. After his discharge, he returned to Connecticut to marry Irene, the Polish girl from New Haven whom he had met while at Taft and who had worked throughout the war as a telephone operator.

They bought a small trailer, hitched it behind their old Chrysler and headed west. It was their first home, parked first in Bloomington while Al attended Indiana University on the G.I. bill, and later in Santa Monica, Calif., while he studied at U.C.L.A.

In January 1949, Irene gave birth to a boy. They named him Alfred Parker Burroughs III. That would be me, and the trailer was my first home, too. Later, we’d move to university housing. I would become sort of a mascot, an honorary pledge, of Delta Kappa Epsilon, my father’s fraternity.


(Al and his son on the plantation, 1950)

After graduation, we went to Agua Buena, Mexico, where my father would work for almost two years on the sugar cane ranch. By then, my grandfather had married for a third time, this time to a Brazilian bombshell named Dee. Among my mother, Dee and the Mexican nursemaid, I learned to speak in a mish-mash of English, Portuguese and Spanish.

By 1951, Irene was pregnant again, and the political and social climate in Mexico had become dicey. Unrest had crept close to the plantation, necessitating a guard armed with a Thompson submachine gun outside our quarters at night. Irene vowed she would not have her baby in Mexico, and so they loaded up the car and headed for Connecticut.

It was there that Al began making his own way in the world. He would eventually become successful as a business executive, stockbroker and capital investor, but he started out walking around with a stopwatch in the Winchester gun factory in New Haven.

Fathers, Part 6

(The Alfreds, junior and senior)

Soon after their divorce, Dorothy married Harry Achenbach, a career Navy man. The first of their four children was born in 1930. They called him Bobs. Wherever Harry was transferred, Dorothy and Alfred Jr. and his new brother followed – to Indiana, Illinois, California and Panama.

Meanwhile, Alfred Sr. abandoned the idea of practicing law in the U.S. and sought business opportunities in Mexico. He remarried a woman who, according to family lore, was a wealthy socialite – the complete opposite of Dorothy – and started the Agua Buena Sugar Co. in central Mexico. A daughter, Betty, was born in 1933.

The younger Alfred saw his father rarely, usually on summer vacation visits to the sugar cane ranch in Mexico. His family was constantly on the move, and it was difficult to form friendships when he changed schools so often. The death in childhood of his half-brother, Bobs, robbed him of his closest companion.

At age 13, young Alfred was sent to the Taft School in Watertown, Conn. His father thought it would do the boy good to be on his own and away from home, in a place where he could stay put and make friends, to experience independence and to grow up in an all-male environment that would prepare him for the world, as he had done himself at Lawrenceville.

For the next five years it would be Alfred’s home, except for summer breaks. It would be his home until January 1944, when he would enter another nearly all-male environment that would prepare him for the world: the Navy and the war in the Pacific.

Fathers, Part 5

(Alfred and his mother, Florence, in Holland, March 1930)

While visiting his brother’s mining operation in Seattle, Alfred enrolled at the University of Washington. He met a girl named Dorothy McCully, from nearby Bainbridge Island, and married her. They had a son, whom they named Alfred Parker Burroughs Jr., in September of 1925, and Alfred continued on to law school.

Alfred and Dorothy (right) were my grandparents. They died in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and the reasons for the breakup of their marriage in 1929 went with them. Their son – my father – was just 4 years old at the time of their divorce, and he would begin an odyssey around the country and Central America, accompanying his mother and her new husband – a Navy man – and visiting his father, who would seek adventure and fortune in Mexico.

The market crash of 1929 undoubtedly depleted the wealth that A.H. Burroughs had accumulated but had not obliterated it. However, Alfred would see little of what remained, having been for the most part, disinherited.

In 1930, the newly-divorced Alfred and his newly-widowed mother departed for Europe. Their tour of cities like Cairo, Venice and Amsterdam was a voyage of distraction, a time to forget, an opportunity to start anew.

Without the financial advantages of his older brothers, without a father to offer guidance, without a wife to lend support, he would need to make his way independently. But that, of course, was what his own father had done, and his grandfather as well. Independence was becoming a theme in the Burroughs line.

Complaints and questions

We received many comments on our Web site and several angry phone calls yesterday concerning our front-page story Sunday, the first installment of our "Teens Today" series.
The article was about the spike in teen pregnancies recently in Washington and Greene counties and was accompanied by a photo of two pregnant teenagers who are sisters.

One caller, saying that she represented "20 people here at the hospital," said she was appalled that we would write such an article "endorsing" teen pregnancy. She said she was afraid young girls would see this article and assume that it was perfectly all right to run out and have babies. She said that instead of promoting teen pregnancy, we should be writing about how to prevent it.

I pointed out that we do that on a regular basis – weekly, in fact – with Mary Jo Podgurski's column. Podgurski has for many years taught sex education here and runs Teen Outreach. "That hasn't worked," the caller insisted.

Sorry, lady, but it has. Podgurski is responsible for the dramatic decline in teen pregnancy (about 60 percent) from 1990 until just recently, when the numbers began to inch up again. The reason for that rise, Podgurski said in the article, is complicated by shifting social attitudes and economic conditions.

We hardly "endorse" teen pregnancy. I, and everyone I know and work with, is appalled by the idea of girls in middle and high school having babies. This is a problem, and it's our obligation to bring that problem to our readers' attention. Problems are never solved by ignoring them and pretending they don't exist, or by quietly tucking them on a back page of the newspaper, without photos, without thought- and anger-provoking quotations, where the information can be overlooked, particularly by those teenage girls so ready to throw their lives away at the direction of their hometown newspaper.

Fathers, Part 4

(The family at Meadow Wood Park near Roanoke, Va., in the summer of 1910, Clockwise from lower left, an unidentified servant, Lulie, mother Florence, Emily, Davis, Florence and Alfred.)

As the youngest of seven children, and with three older brothers – Ambrose, Whitney and Davis – it’s unlikely that young Alfred received much attention from his father, who had become chief counsel for the giant American Tobacco Co. Spoiled by the family’s financial circumstances and the doting of his much older siblings, Alfred, according to family lore, was a bit of a hellion.

In 1911, American Tobacco was broken apart by the government’s trust busters, and A.H. Burroughs moved the family to New York. His Fifth Avenue law firm handled corporate clients, and the family resided on a sprawling estate called Woodlawn, overlooking the Hudson River north of the city, in Irvington.

Alfred was soon sent off to prep school, to Lawrenceville in New Jersey. After that, he attended Princeton University, but was soon asked to leave (again, according to family lore) for staging a prank that went bad. Whether that’s true or not, Alfred’s behavior had certainly gotten his father’s attention. A.H. amended his will, leaving Alfred, for the most part, out of it.

Avoiding further conflict at home, Alfred headed west, to Seattle, Wash., to visit his oldest brother, then involved in a mining operation. Eventually, father and son would make peace, but before he had a chance to again amend his will, A.H. Burroughs died in June 1929 of pneumonia at age 70. Shortly after his death, the New York Times reported that he had left an estate of some $4.2 million, most of it in securities – a huge fortune at the time.

Four months later, the stock market crashed.

So long, Clarke

Somehow, I hadn't heard about Clarke Thomas' death Feb. 21 and missed the obituary that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's a shame to lose him. He was a bit of a contradiction: a kind, thoughtful and gentle person, and a great newspaperman at the same time.

He spent 43 years in the business, in Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma before coming to Pittsburgh and editing the editorial page. Although he retired some time ago, he kept writing for the P-G as senior editor until very recently. He published a book, "Front-page Pittsburgh," in 2005.

Clarke went with a group of environmentalists from Pittsburgh to Siberia in 1994. While there, the journalists at the Kuznetsk Worker in Novokuznetsk sought help from him and the P-G. They were searching for a sister newspaper in the U.S. to teach them how to survive as a business independent of government. Interest at the Post-Gazette was not high for such a project, so Clarke contacted us at the Observer-Reporter. That's how our newspaper's Siberian adventure began, and how so many journalists, students and teachers were able to experience life in another country from 1996 to 2004.

When environmental journalist Rita Stachovich came her for the first time in 1997, her first request was to visit Thomas, and to give him presents and thanks for making possible the relationship that helped save her newspaper. We had a delightful dinner at the home of Clarke and his wife, Jean.

I kept Clarke posted on our business in Novokuznetsk over the years, and he became a regular contributor to the charitable organization I formed – Books for the World – which in 2000 sent more than 17,000 books to schools and libraries in Novokuznetsk.

I will always remember Clarke as an example of this simple truth: Sometimes even the smallest acts of kindness and consideration can result in great achievements.

Fathers, Part 3

(The house at 220 Madison St., Lynchburg, Va.)

The younger A.H. Burroughs started his practice in Lynchburg, not far from where he was born in 1859, in Leesville. He became the city’s solicitor, and eventually the Commonwealth’s Attorney. He and his wife, Florence, began raising children and in 1895 built a handsome Victorian-style home on Madison Street.

Meanwhile, another Lynchburg resident by the name of James Bonsack, just a few months younger than Burroughs, was making his way up in the world in another way. In 1881, Bonsack received a patent for his invention: a cigarette-rolling machine. Ever since the Civil War, cigarettes had become a popular way to smoke tobacco, but all were still rolled by hand. Bonsack’s machine could do the work of 48 human rollers.

The inventor retained A.H. Burroughs as his attorney and investor and formed the Bonsack Machine Co. It would take more than 10 years to improve the machine’s function and reliability, but once it was put into use by the American Tobacco Co., the number of cigarettes produced quickly passed the billion mark.

Burroughs quickly amassed a fortune, and in 1899 moved his growing family into a new home at 220 Madison more resembling a castle. The couple’s last of seven children was born in that house in 1904. They named him Alfred Parker Burroughs, in honor of two Episcopalian ministers, Dr. Alfred and Dr. Parker.

If the wealthy attorney, in choosing that name, had any hope that his son would follow his grandfather’s spiritual path, he was in for a disappointment.

Fathers, Part 2

Who knows if the Rev. A.H. Burroughs, the “marrying clergyman” of Franklin County, Va., had time to spend with his children, so busy he must have been riding the circuit and marrying all those couples. Little evidence can be found about the man until late in his life, when a remarkable incident gave him entry to history books.

In “Booker T. Washington and the Adult Education Movement,” Virginia Lantz Denton wrote of Washington’s tour of the South and a certain stop at a train station in Greenville, Tenn., in the fall of 1909: “Rev. A.H. Burroughs came to the station to see the group’s departure. He told Washington that he was from the Burroughs family in Franklin County, Va., Washington’s former owners. Washington turned to the crowd and exclaimed, ‘Why, Dr. Burroughs and I belong to the same family.’ As the train pulled out, Dr. Burroughs exclaimed over and over: ‘What changes time does bring. Just to think of it. The great man once belonged to our family. I’m proud of him, sir – mighty proud of him!’”

His father had worked the land with the human beings he had bought and owned. A.H. Burroughs had chosen a much different path – following the Lord. And his son, also named Ambrose Hammett, would likewise go in a completely different direction – the law – in search of luxury and the filthy lucre his father’s sermons most likely warned against.

Fathers, Part 1

Even with slaves doing the heavy work, farming was a hardscrabble existence for landowners in the hills of western Virginia before the Civil War. Near Hale’s Ford, James and Elizabeth Burroughs (left) owned 207 acres, but less than half of that was arable.

The place was called a plantation, but the Burroughs were neither wealthy nor affluent; their equity was of the human variety: about a dozen slaves. One of them was called Jane, who, impregnated by a white man from a neighboring plantation, gave birth to a boy on April 5, 1856. He would be known as Booker T. Washington (below right), who would one day become a great educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute.

Elizabeth bore James 14 children. When war came in 1861, most of the boys went off to join the Confederacy, some of them never to return. The ones who came back stood on the porch of the big house in 1865 as the Emancipation Proclamation was read to their family’s slaves, among them 9-year-old Booker.

“All of the master’s family were either standing or seated on the veranda…” wrote Washington in his 1919 autobiography. “There was a feeling of deep interest, or perhaps sadness, on their faces, but not bitterness… They did not at the moment seem sad for the loss of property, but rather because of parting with those whom they had reared and were in many ways very close to them.”

Among those standing on the porch was returning soldier Ambrose Hammett Burroughs and his 6-year-old son, the boy to whom he had given his own name and who had grown up in all these years of his father’s absence.

At his death in 1861, James Burroughs’ estate was listed at just over $7,000, about $5,000 of that being the value of his slaves. With their freedom, not much was left, and the plantation would disappear, just as Hale’s Ford would evaporate from maps.

Jane and her son, Booker, would leave immediately for West Virginia, where he would work in the mines before leaving to begin his education at the age of 16 at the Hampton Institute.

The confederate veteran A.H. Burroughs would go on to earn a doctorate in theology and become the “marrying clergyman of Franklin County,” for the more than 3,000 couples he would unite.

His son would take a much different path.

A new story

Men can’t help but think that fathering children is a good thing; it’s nature; it’s the way our brains are built. And so, after the children are born, it’s only natural that men should think that being a father to them, for the rest of life, is a good thing, too, and should be joyous. We men are expected to cherish those monumental moments: the births, the graduations, the marriages. And we are expected to be proud and happy, and often we are. But just as often, we feel a twinge of regret. Regret, that we have not had a closer relationship with our own fathers. Regret, that we are not emotionally closer to our children. We think of all the child-parent activities we begged off from and feel shame for not having been the dads we could have been, or should have been.

Some dads seem so close to their kids. They are the weeping dads, the huggers, the ones who always seem to be with them or on the phone with them, in regular communication about the simplest things, long into the offspring’s adulthood. Sometimes, I envy their bonds, their mutual dependency, because it has always been different in our family.

I learned fatherhood from my father; he learned it from my grandfather, who learned it from his father. It goes back much farther than that, but I know the history back to the 19th century, which is when this story begins.
As always, I know how this story starts, but not exactly where it’s going or when it will end. Please feel free to comment about your own experiences with fatherhood. The comments are just as interesting as the story.
This one starts tomorrow. We’ll call it “Fathers.”

Today's gripe

I've been gone for a few days, mooching off my Florida family and applying golf therapy to my sore back...

There's no excuse for a four-putt green. To all of you non-golfers, let me explain. When you land your golf ball on the putting green, the idea is to put the ball in the hole, usually in two strokes. If you are far from the hole, your first putt gets it close enough for your to sink it on the second putt. Occasionally, you screw up and don't get your first putt close enough to the hole, and then you miss the second putt. This is murder on your score.

But putting four times on the same green is beyond screwing up, beyond unlucky; it's a hint that you have no business being on a golf course.
On Friday, I four-putted three greens – three of the first five holes I played that day.

But of course, I have an excuse. I haven't been playing golf that long. In fact, I only started playing in 1962.

Gone fishin'

I'll be out of this blog until Monday, March 9. Hope you're still around when I get back. Actually, I won't be fishin' anything other than my errant golf balls out of a pond teeming with alligators on the golf course in my father's backyard in Florida. I woke up last Sunday, looked at the couple of inches of snow that had fallen overnight, and decided to cash in my frequent-flyer miles and go mooch off the family.

On another matter, I failed to mention previously that "Enter, With Torches" will not be available in bookstores, other than those in the immediate vicinity of Washington, Pa., so if you plan to buy it, please do so online. And if you hurry up, you can get the discount. (End of hideous, shameless self-promotional commercial!)

The Farmhouse, Part 13

So many of the young men who sought refuge and recreation at the farmhouse in those few years are not around to remember it. Several members of the Skull House died young. One collapsed and died while jogging; one took his own life; one was killed in a bar fight, and all within a few years of graduation.

Two fraternity brothers are missing. Maher returned to the Middle East just before the Yom Kippur war and was never heard from again. Abbas Bayat was believed to have been back in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979.

Warren Dodge, Abbas’ happy-go-lucky roommate, went on to become a flight attendant, the perfect occupation for his buoyant personality. Warren was aboard TWA Flight 800 when it took off from New York bound for Paris on July 17, 1996. He was one of the 230 souls to perish when the plane exploded and fell into the Atlantic off Long Island.

Izzy, Maher’s heavy-smoking and unlikely roommate, died of natural causes not too long ago. At about the same time, Big Bob killed himself.

Richard, who had tempted Death by screaming at the sky from the top of the silo in the middle of a thunderstorm, became a stone mason and fathered three daughters. A fall from scaffolding seriously injured him and left him in constant pain. He ended his own life more than 20 years ago.

Most surprisingly, Ted survives. He started on heroin while still in college and battled the addiction for many years.

After our wild college days, many of us settled down to be productive citizens and fathers. Chas finally replaced that silver tooth with a white one, married, and formed his own manufacturing company. He has sailed his boat several times from New York to Bermuda, but sticks close to home these days so that he and his wife can care for their daughter, who was paralyzed in a swimming accident while away at college.

About five years ago, when Chas returned to this area for a funeral, he drove out toward Marianna to see the old farmhouse. He told me he wasn’t sure that he saw it, though, and that he couldn’t find the driveway up which we had hauled so many armloads of wood during hell week so long ago.

I took a drive there a few weeks ago and had no better luck. If there is still a barn, silo, and house on the hill, it is too obscured by vegetation to see it now. Perhaps the whole place burned down many years ago. Regardless, it is as inaccessible to us today as are Maher and Richard and Warren and Abbas.
Houses, no matter how old they may be, are temporary. Just like the lives inside them.

THE END

The Farmhouse, Part 12

Late one night, state police and narcotics agents quietly crept up the long driveway toward the lighted farmhouse on the hill. They surrounded it, then knocked on the door. The sole occupant of the house on that night put aside his textbook and warily cracked the door. The narcs burst in, handed him a warrant and began turning the house upside down. After two hours, the search ended. All that was found was a partially-smoked joint and a few seeds inside a shoe in the closet. Nevertheless, the student was cuffed and hauled off to the pokey.

The bust was very much a bust. Everyone in the fraternity knew that the narcs must have been after Ted, who had become quite big in the drug business. But Ted wasn’t at the farmhouse that night; the nabbed student unlucky enough to be using the quiet house for study could barely be described as a social smoker; in fact, he was the son of a judge in a neighboring county.

The unfortunate student would get off lightly, but the bust was the end of the farmhouse, as far as the Skull House was concerned. The Skulls had been careful to be sure that the house was rented in the names of several individual students, and not the fraternity, but the college administrators weren’t stupid, and holding onto the farm could jeopardize the fraternity’s existence on campus.

Ted, meanwhile, continued to do business, and although the narcs could not catch him, something else would: a bullet in the abdomen. In a drug deal gone bad, Ted was shot through his side, the bullet somehow missing vital organs.

To our amazement, Ted was able to march with us at graduation. It wasn’t his physical condition that surprised us, but his academic achievement. Ted’s grade-point average was even lower than mine, and he had hardly attended any of his classes the whole semester. We imagined that the college, faced with having to deal with him for yet another semester, decided it was best he be graduated and be done with forever.

Whatever became of the farmhouse and the characters who frequented it in those years? There’s both mystery and tragedy in that answer, which you’ll have to read about tomorrow.

Today's gripe

It's annoying enough to witness drivers completely ignoring the rules of the road; it's disturbing when those drivers are the ones who are supposed to be enforcing those rules, or at least setting a good example.

Case in point: the County Sheriff's patrol car today that I had to brake for as the driver rolled through a stop and pulled in front of me, then failed to use his turn signal at the next intersection.

The Farmhouse, Part 11

As we progressed through our junior year, Chas and I noticed how our pledge brother, Ted, had veered away from us. Chas and I were derelict goofs; how else would you describe people who arranged their class schedules so as to be free at 11:30 a.m., when the reruns of “Bewitched” were aired daily? Sure, maybe we would drink a pony bottle or two of Rolling Rock while watching the program, but at least we weren’t constantly high, like Ted, who was rumored to be supplying half the campus with marijuana and who knows what else.

At the end of the second semester, Ted took off for Arizona, returning a month later on a Harley chopper. He moved into the farmhouse, where Maher was already living. Poor Maher didn’t have enough money to return to Lebanon or enough desperation to stay with Uncle Beirut in Detroit.

Unbeknown to his fraternity brothers, Ted started cultivating pot at the farm. I suspected as much when I stopped at the farmhouse in September and found a colander smeared green in the dry sink on the back porch. We also suspected that Ted had himself moved onto far more dangerous drugs. He had become alarmingly thin and was almost never comprehensible.

We knew he was headed for a crash, and we felt helpless to do anything about it.

You asked for it

Over the past three years, some of you have suggested that we publish some of my serialized stories in book form. "I'd buy it," some of you wrote. Well, here's your chance.

If you haven't noticed the ad at the upper right of this page, take a look. You can order "Enter, With Torches" online, and it's cheap, comparatively. I've given the stories a slightly different treatment, added a few things and a whole lot more photos.

This book is for you, loyal followers of the G.O.E., but not for you alone. It's also for this newspaper, the Observer-Reporter, which could use a little help right now. As you well know, newspapers are going through some pretty tough times, and this newspaper is not immune. In the past couple of weeks, I've lost 7 valuable professional employees from the news department to retirement and layoffs.

The O-R, like everyone else, has to find new ways to make money so it can continue to employ us. This is one of them. I won't make a cent from this book, but hopefully, the good company that has employed me these past 36 years will. This may sound corny and sentimental, but I owe an awful lot to the company that has paid me regularly all these years and given me the opportunity to express myself, in print and online, and expose it to the consequences of my opinions.

So, criminy! Buy the book, and when it's sent to you in April, turn off your computer for a while and read it. And while you're at it, buy another for a friend.

The Farmhouse, Part 10

If you read “How to Break an Ankle” on this blog last year, then you might recall my friend Richard. He was the guy from my hometown outside New York who shared my apartment during the summer of 1969, attending summer school and annoying all the neighbors on North Avenue with his melancholic, feedback-punctuated electric guitar solos blasting through open windows.

Richard had been in a deep, self-destructive funk since breaking up with his longtime girlfriend and was in the habit of medicating himself with gin and whatever drugs he could get his hands on. We tried to keep a close watch on him, because his behavior seemed suicidal.

Richard and I took our amplifiers, guitar and bass to the farmhouse for the party in July, and that night forced the others to endure our renditions of the Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” and “All Along the Watchtower.” The music was loud and not good, and the reception cold, which made Richard even more depressed and surly. By the time the thunderstorm struck, we had quit playing. The lights flickered and went out for a while, and we lighted the house with candles. Then someone asked where Richard had gone.

Not finding him inside the house, I walked around it, dodging the large, stinging raindrops. No cars had left the driveway, so I figured that the only place he could be was in the barn. As I headed there, lightning flashed, and in the blue-white strobe I saw him ascending the ladder of the silo.
I screamed for him to get down, that there was lightning, that he’d be killed, but he ignored me. The rain came slashing in the gusty wind, and after each crack of thunder I heard his crazy laugh. I saw him through the splatter of the storm, standing at the top of the ladder, head thrown back. “This is just like ‘Night on Bald Mountain’!” he yelled. (The Mussorgsky composition was his favorite classical piece. He liked to smoke hashish and listen to it over and over again, for hours.)
Frantic and sure that he would be electrocuted, I ran back to the house (“Maybe he’ll listen to someone else,” I said,) and then back to the silo with a few others. “Richard, please!” we hollered over and over again, before giving up and retreating. There was nothing we could do.

When the storm subsided, we heard him come in the back door, whistling and humming and acting annoyingly normal. I remember his profile in the living-room doorway, arms akimbo, water dripping from his elbows, the lighted kitchen behind him.
He could not see us glowering in the dark.

Edgar Sawtelle

Seldom have I felt cheated at reaching the end of a long novel, and David Wroblewski’s “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is long. Too long.

Early in the reading, I snuggled into this book and felt comforted by the author’s poetic phrasing and graceful storytelling. I can’t recall another work in which the characters of dogs were so well developed, or in which the thought processes of dogs were so well drawn and explained.

Unfortunately, the human characters in this novel are much weaker, their behavior most often incomprehensible. Midway through the book, the author seems to wander off, just as his title character does. The wandering goes on for more than 100 pages before descending into melodrama and a hyperbolic climax that is too disappointing to be even laughable.

This might have been a great little book had the writer spared us his attempt at a 20th-century Hamlet and what he must have figured were the obligatory tornadoes, fires, ghosts and murders. The Wisconsin farm, and all of its beauty, life, love and heartache, would have been enough.

The Farmhouse, Part 9

Washington & Jefferson College was still all-male in 1969, and so we had to import women for party weekends. The Skull House seniors had, well, seniority, and thus first dibs on the bedrooms of the farmhouse, so Warren and Abbas and their classmates bedded their dates there and pretty much monopolized the place. Once they graduated that May, the farmhouse became more accessible to the rest of us, especially those of us compelled to attend the summer session.

No one had farmed the land for years, and so the hillside fields had grown up with berries, poke berry, wild rose and sumac that began to hide the farmhouse from the road far below. No other house was even visible from the top of the driveway; we could make as much noise as we wished, and no neighbors could hear us.

It was a perfect place for parties. One blistering July afternoon, we drank and sprawled on blankets in the yard, speakers set in bedroom windows blaring the Rolling Stones. A dozen of us piled into and atop a Jeep wagon for a jaunt through the more open fields across the road. Plowing a sea of waist-high grass at the edge of a shallow ravine, the Jeep’s right front wheel dropped into a hole. Riding on the roof, I felt the radio antenna whip down my face and my chest as I and another person flew into space and down into the ravine. Uninjured because of our relaxed state of inebriation, we lay there laughing, looking up at the vehicle so ridiculously posed with its left rear wheel lifted like a dog’s hind leg at a fire hydrant. Had the Jeep not come to an abrupt stop but had instead rolled into the ravine, we would have been crushed to death. This did not occur to us at the time. Years later, we would shake our heads and wonder at the vastness of our stupidity.

That particular hot day would end in a typical July thunderstorm, and with someone else tempting Death in an even more bizarre and stupid manner.

Today's gripe

I've often complained about the parking meters here in Washington. Don't let me do that again. This past weekend, we were in Philadelphia, where the predatory meter people patrol seven days a week, until 8 p.m. You get all of 7 and a half minutes for a quarter in Philadelphia meters. So, if you're planning on visiting the Old City and maybe having lunch, be prepared with a roll of quarters, because you'll need 24 of them for three hours!

Questions and comments

Q: My great grandfather had a long career in the newspaper industry. In his obit the final sentence reads: "It is with genuine appreciation of his early effort and his long career in the profession that the local newspaper fraternity writes “30” after the name of Samuel Longood." Could you please tell me the significance of the term “30” in the newspaper industry? - A.L.

A: Back when I started newspaper work in 1971, all articles were written on typewriters. I was told to end stories with " -30- ." It signaled that it was the end of the story and there were no other pages. No one could tell me why we used -30- then, and no one can tell you why now. Nobody knows for sure. But here's a link to an article from the American Journalism Review that will help you.

The Farmhouse, Part 8

Late in April 1969, as we approached the end of the semester and final exams, I became desperate about my coursework and felt a need for long hours of uninterrupted study. It was impossible to do this in the Skull House, with another class of pledges running likes hounds through the halls, day and night.
They were an odd mix young men: the Kahuna, Big Bob, Little Bob, Maher and Izzy, to name a few. Maher Abugazzaleh was a Palestinian who received “Care packages” containing the most bizarre pornography from a relative in Detroit known as Uncle Beirut. “What sort of woman would have sex with a pig?” Chas often asked, his lips twisted in disgust. Strangely enough, Maher became close friends with his pledge brother Izzy, the chain-smoking, gravel-voiced Jew. Despite their animated arguments about Middle East politics, they would eventually become roommates.

At any rate, the Skull House was no place to study, and the college library was not much better for a student like me, who saw it as a place filled with tens of thousands of distractions, all lined up neatly on shelves. And so I packed my books, a toothbrush and a change of clothes and headed for the farmhouse.

The house was cold and the lighting – from bare ceiling bulbs – was stark, but there was little to distract me, once I had poured a bowl of milk for the cat that one of the brothers had adopted. Sometimes, no one showed up at the farmhouse to feed it for days. But the mice were plentiful.

I pored over my botany and Spanish texts and my copy of James Joyce’s “The Dubliners” while the house rocked and creaked in the spring gales. Noises, like the banging of a loose door on the barn, kept distracting me. An intermittent rain splattered drops on the siding that I mistook for gravel crunching under tires, sending me anxiously to the window several times.

The farmhouse had little personality; it held no evidence of the humans who had occupied it for perhaps a century other than the few jars of canned fruit in the cellar. I walked with a cup of coffee through all the rooms, reassuring myself of my solitude but feeling no sense of the eerie. Edgy I might have been, but not because of shadows and spirits within the house. I was more fearful of the forces outside – the weather, and the murdering thieves that might be attracted by my burning lamps shining from the distant hill.

When my eyes grew heavy, I turned out the lights and curled under a blanket on the couch. No sooner had I dropped off than I woke with fur on my lips. The cat had curled around my face for the warmth of my breath. I threw it to the carpet, but time after time, it returned to sit on my neck and purr, only to be hurled again.
I did not banish the cat to the cellar, though. Too tired to rise and too unwilling to listen to its pathetic cries all night, I let it stay. Better to battle the cat, I thought, than to fall into nightmares of murdering thieves.

The Farmhouse, Part 7

Hustled from the farmhouse in the dark of night, our captors drove us back to town. “God, do you pledges stink!” they kept saying. We hadn’t showered in a week. We still had the odor of smoked oysters about us.
We entered the new fraternity house in the quad like skittish, beaten dogs and were ordered to strip. Then we were led, naked and blindfolded through “stations” in the house, where brothers, some of them drunk, some of them intoxicated with the opportunity for sadism, conducted exercises vaguely intended to instill in us trust for our soon-to-be brothers.

Some of these exercises were disgusting, but harmless. Take, for instance, the brick drop. We were ordered to stand on a chair and then handed a string and told to tie it to a certain part of our anatomy. Then we were handed a brick – a rather large and heavy one – and told to lift it upward. As we lifted the brick, it was apparent to us – blindfolded as we were – that the string attached to our anatomical part was also tied to the brick. Then they ordered us to drop the brick.

You can just imagine how fearful we were and how detached from reason were our brains, having been deprived of sleep and nourishment for so long. We dropped the bricks, which thudded to the floor, unaccompanied by any part of our anatomy. We gasped; they laughed.

At one station, we lay on our bellies on the floor and were told not to move. If we moved, we would be beaten. WHACK! A rolled-up magazine struck my back. Chas and Ted must have flinched at the noise. WHACK, WHACK! And then we were pummeled from head to foot. When we left that station, we probably looked as if we had fallen asleep while sunbathing in the nude.

Eventually, it was over, and we were inducted and endowed with all the secret, spooky information of the Skull House, and welcomed as brothers by our tormentors.
I suppose that we were meant now to feel a special bond with these people, one as strong as family, having endured so much. As I stumbled up the stairs toward my room and awaiting bed, I felt relief, but also bitterness and resentment.

We would never again respect those members that had taken such glee in our suffering. We could not see who was beating us with magazines, but we knew them by their voices, and their behavior would not bring them closer to us but rather create a distance that would last forever. Chas and Ted and I vowed that no one in our house should ever be subjected to that kind of hazing again.

And they were not, although we can’t claim all the credit for that.

The Farmhouse, Part 6

In order to keep us alive enough to move furniture, scrub pots and detail their cars, the brothers fed us soup. If we performed our tasks well enough, they promised to even heat it for us. The younger brothers, especially the ones who had pledged immediately before us, were the cruelest and most sadistic. But they supervised us in shifts, and sometimes we were left in the care of older, mellower members.

Warren and Abbas were seniors and the oddest and most unlikely roommates. Their night with us was a respite from hell.
Warren, blond and balding, possessed the enthusiasm and outlook of a cruise-ship activity director. A cheerleader and font of optimism, Warren dressed for fraternity parties as if he were headed to a picnic at the beach – T-shirts, flip-flops and those really tight, small bathing trunks they wore in the 1950s.
Abbas came from a wealthy family in Iran, then ruled by the Shah. He had been educated in proper English boarding schools and spoke with a patrician British accent. He dressed impeccably and as if he were a member of the royal family. He enjoyed fast cars and the company of fast women and was similar to Warren only in his sweet and affable nature.

Warren and Abbas amused themselves by quizzing us in the Greek alphabet and fraternity facts and trivia. Correct answers earned us bits of food and hours of uninterrupted sleep. We had been reduced to dog-like behavior. We would never forget their relative kindness to us.

When the shift changed, the hell resumed. One night, we were given smoked oysters for supper, but we had to place them in our underwear and do calisthenics before we were allowed to eat them.

Time was blurred. We seemed never to be more than semi-conscious. I became alarmed one day when I discovered that my urine had turned dark brown.
“This is such crap!” we muttered among ourselves and considered walking out of the farmhouse and out of fraternity life forever. But the fear of being labeled as cowards kept us there, along with the fact that we had been kidnapped and were being held captive. But we could have quit at any time, and we were taunted with this often.
On about the seventh day, I found myself telling the Pledge Master an outrageous lie: that I suffered from epilepsy and without my medication, more sleep or food, I was likely to experience seizures. I did not have epilepsy, and even as I spoke I wondered how this ridiculous lie could be tumbling from my lips.
The Pledge Master told me to quit the bullshit and get back to work. He could not tell me what I needed to hear – that Hell Night, the conclusion of our ordeal, was just a few hours away.

Comments and questions

C: I subscribe to the OR & the Post-Gazette. I also daily look through the OR On-line. I also look at/read 12) a dozen - or more papers on line. ie the NY Times, Chicago Times, Phoenix, and also papers in San Diego. LA, the Navaho-Hopi Nation, Wheeling, WV, and many others. Is it fair that I read these papers on line for FREE ?, given the expenses of these organizations? Surely not!!! I've been doing it for a long time for FREE. But know what? I think it's just wrong, I should be paying..."something." Somehow, you guys must establish a cost for all of this wonderful on line information that is available to ME..for FREE. The future..in whatever form...cannot be free!!!!! You and your industry must establish a billing system and a cost. Hey, maybe it's only 5 cents or 10 cents a day.It should be a daily charge, not how many I times I look at the site each day. But you newspaper guys/editors/owners...must get it done. NOW is of the ESSENCE! - J.A.

A: Charging for content online does not work at the moment - few people seem willing to pay for news online. We do get income from our online edition in the form of advertising, which is based on traffic; the higher the traffic, the more we can charge for advertising. If we made you pay for the content, the traffic would fall off dramatically, and with it the ad revenue.
But that does not mean that our content is not valuable, and that you won't ever pay for it. When we, as an industry, can come up with an easy way for people to pay for our content - like the micropayments your describe - we will have a much better chance for survival.

The Farmhouse, Part 5

A late-January thaw had melted much of the snow; what was left lay on the hillside and fields in an icy crust after the weather turned frigid again. We marched from the farmhouse toward the woods beyond the barn, each step slow and difficult as our feet broke through the crust.

Time after time, we gathered armloads of firewood and carried them back to the house, then returned to the woods, scooping up snow an ice along the way to melt in our mouths. Our fingers and toes hardened and numbed. “Faster, you worthless peons!” came the cry.

In the fading light of afternoon, we carried wood from the road up the deeply rutted red-dog driveway, several hundred yards to the farmhouse on the hill. When the piles were finally moved, they marched us – hungry, exhausted, frozen and dehydrated – back to the house. Visions of Clark bars and Three Musketeers danced in our heads.
Kicking off our boots on the back porch, our Pledge Master appeared in the kitchen doorway, munching on one of our secret candy bars.
“Thought you could pull a fast one on us, huh?” he said, showing us a trash can filled with the rest of our hidings. “We found everything that the mice didn’t get to first. For your deceit, no supper for you tonight!”
And just for good measure, he led us in another long session of calisthenics, before banishing us to the cellar.

Next morning, our tormentors slept late. We found a candy bar that had escaped their search, but it had done little to relieve our hunger. Bright sunlight streamed in through the high, dusty cellar windows and splashed upon cobweb-covered shelves. Jewels of reflected sunlight caught my eye. On one shelf I found broken glass and three or four Ball jars and rusty lids, and behind them three or four full jars of canned fruit.
“How long do you think these have been here?“ I whispered.
“Who cares? Open them!” Chas answered.
“If the seals have broken, the botulism could kill us,” Ted opined.

Hunger overruled judgment. We chose the jar with the most recognizable fruit, wiped the dust from it and screwed off the ring. The flat cap was stuck, so Chas worked on it with the claw of a hammer. The rim of the jar cracked when the cap came off. I scooped the broken glass from the thick syrup and we fished out the sweet, soft, yellow apricots with our fingers and devoured them.
The fruit did not kill us, but in the coming days we wondered if the brothers would.

The Farmhouse, Part 4

Our hell week began with the traditional “pledge meal,” supposedly intended to fortify us for the tough week ahead. We walked a gantlet of brothers screaming in our ears things like, “You are the lowest bottom-feeding suckers of slime!” and “You are the dingleberries in the hairy crack of ignorance!” Entering the party room of the new fraternity house, where our dinner was to be served, we were first led in an especially long session of calisthenics, during which we were pelted with eggs and gobs of mustard. Insults continued to be shouted above the blaring rock music.

At last, they seated us at a table. We were each given a large raw onion and told to eat it as we would an apple. When we had finished that “salad course,” our “entrée” arrived. Cans of Alpo dog food were emptied into bowls and then smothered in a gravy of Pepto Bismal.
The room rocked with uproarious laughter each time one of us, pale and splattered in bright yellow, gagged and then vomited in the waste cans placed beside us for that purpose.

When they had tired of this amusement, the brothers threw us into ice-cold showers. After we dressed in dry clothes, we underwent another hellish exercise session before being hustled into a car and driven to the farm. While our masters drank and warmed themselves by the fireplace that evening, we scrubbed the filthy wooden floors, over and over again. Eventually, we were allowed to sleep – on the floor – but were wakened every hour to perform more push-ups and jumping jacks.
When dawn arrived, I felt a sense of satisfaction that we had made it through the first night, and perhaps the worst of it. We feasted on bowls of dry cereal and then the Pledge Master told us to prepare ourselves, because the “hell” of hell week was about to begin.

The Farmhouse, Part 3

My pledge brothers and I grew close in our semester-long ordeal. Ted, who lived down the hall from me during our freshman year, had come to W&J with the intention of going on to medical school. At first, he was a serious student who spent most of his time at the library or in his room. He wore neat slacks and V-neck cashmere sweaters and listened to Johnny Mathias records. By the end of the year, however, he had changed. I think marijuana had a lot to do with that. And by the fall of 1968, his hair was long and stringy, his eyes bleary, and he was always saying, “Far out, man.”

Chas was gregarious and never in a bad mood. His laugh was infectious. A combination of natural athletic talent and the privileges of being raised in a well-to-do New England family and attending the best schools made him an excellent skier, swimmer and sailor, none of which he took seriously. Like me, he did not take his studies seriously enough. He disdained pretentiousness and embraced the proletariat. When a front tooth went bad, he replaced it with a silver one because it was cheaper than gold or a false white one and just as functional. Rather than buy a new belt when his only one broke, he held up us pants with a length or rope or an old extension cord.

From what we had heard, the worst things about hell week were the deprivations of sleep and food. We couldn’t prepare much for lack of sleep, but food was another story. One night during finals, when all members of the fraternity were holding their monthly meeting, we were excused to go to the library but instead drove to the farmhouse. The doors were locked, but standing on Chas' shoulders, Ted was able to open and climb into a window. We raced through the house, hiding candy bars, bags of nuts and pepperoni sticks in the corners of closets, under sinks, in the floor joists in the basement ceiling, in flower pots and taped behind the headboards of beds.
We felt good. We knew that we might be tortured, but we would not starve.

How were we to know that every pledge class before us had tried the same trick?

The Farmhouse, Part 2

My miserable academic performance as a freshman prevented me from joining a fraternity until the fall of 1968, my sophomore year. When you are asked to join a fraternity, you become a pledge and are subjected to humiliating servitude at the hands of the membership for an entire semester in order to prove your worthiness to become a brother. At the end of the semester, pledges undergo “hell week,” which may or may not include sadistic torture, after which the survivors are inducted and immediately take on the role of sadistic torturers of the next pledge class.

I and two of my classmates whose academic performance was equally miserable comprised the pledge class of the fraternity known informally as the Skull House in the fall of 1968. The name came from the skull and crossbones of the fraternity’s insignia.

Previously, pledges did not live in the fraternity house until they became members, which meant that they could occasionally escape persecution in the confines of their own dormitory. But we three moved into the new fraternity house right along with our masters and were thus enslaved continuously.
For the brothers, pledges were the people who shined your shoes, ran your errands, cleaned up your messes, and amused you by doing push-ups and jumping jacks every time you ordered them to.
“Pledge!” one of the brothers would yell.
“Yes Sir?”
“When my alarm rings every morning, I want you to come to my room and tell me if the surf is up or if it is calm before I open my eyes.”
“But Sir, there is no surf in Washington, Pa.”
“That’s not my problem, pledge!”
That sort of nonsense went on all the time.

In those days at W&J, final exams for the first semester occurred after Christmas vacation, and then there was a week-long break in the end of January before the second semester began. We pledges were told that our hell week would take place during the semester break, and that we would be undergoing most of it at the farmhouse.

We had heard horror stories about hell week and dreaded its arrival. At the same time, we were anxious for our servitude as pledges to be over and done with. In our elevated state of anxiety, we made preparations for the tribulations that awaited us. We knew there were things we could do to make our hell week less grueling, but doing them would mean a daring and dangerous break-in of the Skull House’s sacred hideaway.

The Farmhouse, Part 1

Fraternity life, as several generations of Washington & Jefferson College students knew it, came to an end in the fall of 1968. That’s when 10 of the 11 fraternities were compelled to give up their off-campus houses and move into the 10 identical buildings constructed by the college in the area between Beau and Wheeling streets. Phi Gamma Delta, the only exception, was already housed in a building on campus.
More than half of W&J’s students were members of fraternities at the time, and many of them had lived in and taken their meals in old Victorian houses scattered around town. By design, the fraternities lost much of their independence with the move.

The college had good reasons to gather the fraternities onto campus. Neighbors of the frat houses complained about loud music, juvenile behavior and raucous parties, and the houses, outside the jurisdiction of the college, were poorly maintained and fire traps.

Some would say the new structures resembled artillery bunkers. Each was equipped with a kitchen, party and living rooms, and an apartment for a house mother. The houses were grouped so tightly that it was possible to throw, say, a water balloon, from the window of a room in one house through the window of a room in a neighboring house.
The new facilities were clean, functional and convenient, but fraternity members accustomed to hiring their own cooks and regulating their own premises bristled at the new and sterile arrangement. They felt as if the personality and identity of their brotherhood had been stolen, and that they were now under the constant watch of campus security.

The disgruntled seniors in one of the fraternities concocted a remedy for the situation: a home away from home. They brought before their membership a proposal to rent a farmhouse about 15 miles from Washington. The house could be used by the brothers to escape the pressures of campus life and as a refuge for study. It was also argued that such a remote retreat, away from the scrutiny of the dean, would be ideal for conducting initiation activities. It would also be a great place to party and to shack up with girlfriends.

And so, that December, an old farm high on a hill, long vacant and just beginning to give in to the beatings of the elements, received new life.

A new story

My friends from college like to joke that they would love to reminisce about the old days at W&J if only they could remember them. It is true that I have lots of blank spaces in my memory of 1967-1971, but a few recollections remain. Some of them have to do with fraternity life.

In the late 1960s, Washington & Jefferson College was all male and the majority of students belonged to fraternities. The situation is entirely different now, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Despite the associations with partying and hijinks, fraternity life had a dark side.

When the college moved all fraternities into new and identical buildings on campus, mine found a way around the new restrictions by renting a retreat in the country - an old farm near Marianna. It was necessarily a secret place. It's time to tell some of those secrets.

As with all of the stories, this one is true, although my memory is hardly perfect, some of the names have been changed, and although I know how this one begins, I do not know how or when it will end.
We'll call this one "The Farmhouse." It begins tomorrow.

Count your blessings

Some of you around Washington may remember Misha Zelenchukov, the Russian journalist who has visited here several times as a guest of this newspaper and of Jon and Kathy Stevens. Misha started his journalism career as a police reporter for our sister newspaper in Siberia, the Kuznetsk Worker. He then moved on to television but lost his job a couple of years ago. He's now working as a security guard at a furniture factory. No longer able to afford his apartment in Novokuznetsk, he's now living in a village outside the city, in a house with no running water and heated by a coal stove.

Misha wrote to the Stevens recently and wondered how they were faring in this harsh winter and trying economic conditions. There's something to learn from the comparisons. A few excerpts from from Misha's letter:

"Such cold (minus 42 F) was last week in my region. Each day I must go beside the small shed, where I store the reserves of coal, and bring the minimum of three buckets of coal to the house..."
After running out of coal in January, he purchased 2.5 tons for $150 U.S.
"This is expensive sum for me. To me they again detain wage. I did not obtain wages for three weeks of November and entire December...
"To have a house in the village - this is much work each day. I must clean snow, pump cold water from column (well), drop snow based on the roof... I do not buy firewood. I guard furniture factory and I take wooden withdrawals from the garbage. Large problem - to attend toilet during the terrible frost. Toilet - this is small house in the vegetable garden, it has thin walls and does not have heat inside. Cold makes my visits to the toilet short and rapid...
"There was last week terrible cold... water in the pump froze and for several days I could not pump water..."

"If you please, report to me about the weather and economic situation in your city."

Language, please

Try as I might, I've never been able to become fluent in another language. But I keep trying.

I've been working at Russian for almost 15 years and still can hardly speak it, so you'd think I'd give up by now, but I can't seem to quit. My bathroom reading is exclusively Russian, and this month it's short stories by Chekov.

The great thing about reading literature in another language is that you can sometimes experience a different perspective on the human existence. Our view of the world – our experience in it – is limited by the language with which we can express that experience. Reading in an another language can reveal interpretations of our world rooted in very different and ancient cultures.

Take this morning, for instance. I stumbled on a word: gori. In the context of the sentence, it meant "sorrows," but I stumbled because there are so many words in Russian with the same root: gor. There are gora (mountain), gorets (to burn), gorlo (throat) and gorky (bitter), and gorney (heavenly), just to name a few. The interesting part is when you begin to see a relationship among some of these words.

Connect the words and you see mountains reaching up toward heaven, and streams flowing from those mountains like tears of grief. Goryouchiye sleozi means "scalding tears."

We look at mountains and see majesty and strength and challenge, because our language, our culture and heritage have always described them in this way.

Reading in other languages is indeed a mind-expanding exercise.