Innovation in Power Hawaii is emerging as America's alternative energy laboratory. The state's annual $1,300 million biU for imported fuel makes energy saving a matter of economic survival. And Hawaii has to fight the battle without any known fossil fuel reserves, offshore oil, coal or natural gas; nor are there any nuclear power plants or a link to a regional electric grid. Hawaii's innovations in the field of alternative energy, however, are proving to be trend setters. The state government and private firms have committed millions of dollars toward research in biomass (which provides 12 percent of the state's total energy mix), solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, ocean tbennal energy conversion and, most innovative of all, volcano power. One of the hottest geothermal reservoirs in the world is on the island of Hawaii. That power is tapped to provide electricity by drilling wells deep into the active volcano of Kilauea, pumping water into the wells and using the resultant steam to generate electricity. This volcanic heat, specialists believe, may produce megawatt centuries of power. The volcano project and other alternative energy innovations now being put into practice may prove to be the kiss of economic life for Hawaii. Above, a geologist collecting lava samples uses a shield for protection.
September 1986
SPAN VOLUME
xxvn NUMBER 9
2
When Employees Become Owners by Corty Rostn, Kathtrmt J Kltm arrd Karen M Young
7
Precision Irrigation by Computer by Dennis Senft and Lynn Yarris
10 The Pacific A short story
by Mark Htlprm
16
The Fight Against Drunk Driving by William A Henkin
20
On the Lighter Side
21 Art in Roosevelt House
29
William H. Rehnquist The Chief Justice-Designate by A.E. Dick lloward
32
A Tribute to the King of Swing by Soli J Sorab1u
34
Airborne Medics
36 Focus On ...
38
Living Indian Sculptures bi John R1L11dl
42
Narayan's World A Rev1e1< by
Jucq11e/111t
A 1;s1111
44
Playful Designs by Richard Wulkomtr
Publisher James A. McGinlcy Editor Warren W McCurdy Managing Editor Himadri Dhanda A~\1stan1
Managing Editor
Krishan Gahrani
Senior Editor
Aruna Dasgupta
Copy Editor
N1rmal Sharma
Ed11onal ,\,\!Mani
Rocque Fernandes
Photo Editor Avinash Pa,richa Art Director
Nand Katyal
A'sociatc Art D1rci;tor
Kanti Rm
Assistant Art Dirccl<lr
Bimanesh Roy Choudhury
Chief of Production
Awtar S. Marwaha
Circulation ManaAcr
Y P. Pandhi
Photographic Service
USIS Photographic Services Unit
Photographs: Front cover-Annash Pasricha . ln\lde front covcr-J. D Grigg' 2-3-Sui.an Gilmore. courtesy of Qu;id Graphics 1986. 7-9 Robert C. Bjork, U.S Department ot Agriculture. Agriculture Re· ~can:h Service. 10-counesy Mothers Again\l Drunk Driving. 17 top-Dick Doddridge. courtesy M.A.D.D.; center left-© Terry Michael; nght-Robcrt K. Hamilton. courtesy The Baltimore S1111; tmnom-The White House. 18-19 (clockw1~e from top lcft)-D1sulled Spints Council of the U S • © 1982 Baccardi lmpom Inc.;© 1973 The I louse of Seagram. coun.:'} Governor's Safct} Council (2): Barry rit7g\'rald; Terry Grave' 21-28-Avioasb Pasricha 32-courtesy Soli J. Sorabjee. 34-35 Chuck Zovko. The Morning Call. 36 top-R.K. Sharma. 42-T.S. Saty;tn .W-48-RicharcJ Howard. Inside back cover and back cover-Lee Da11aglia Published by the United State~ Information Service. American Center. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 11()()()1, on behalf of the American Embassy. New Delhi. The opinions expressed 111 this magazme do not ncccs~anly reflect the v1cw\ or policies of the U .S Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited. Faridabad. 1laryana. lhc of srAN articles m 01her ruhJ1ca11on\ t"'i encouraged. ~'1.:ert when cop)'righ1cd For pcr1n1~,ion wmc to 1he Editor Pncc or ma~i.mnc . one year ·s ~ub~rip11on '12 1'\..~u«) R'\. 25~ s1nl!lc: copy . R'- 4 For change of Jddrc'' ~nJ .mold address from a recent \PAN trwelopc a.long ~uh ncv.. addre'' JO Cnculo11on !'.ldnaicr WAN m1~>71n<!. 24 Ka>lurl>• Gandhi MJJg. Ne"' Delhi 111••11 Sec chang~ of addre'\.\ form on r·u~c 48b.
Front cover: Bucking Horse by Constance Whitney Warren ( 1888-1948) is pan of the art collection of Roosevelt House. the rtsidence of the American Ambassador in India. See pages 21-28. Back cover: A youngster and his entry ~ct out for a callle-judging contest at the State F:iir of Oklahoma Sec also inside back cover
A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER After much joint planning, an innovative bilateral program that promises to produce viably commercial, technical products and processes in India and the United States got officially under way last month with a board of directors meeting and press conference in Bombay. Called the Program for Advancement of Commercial Technology, or PACT, the new enterprise establishes a fund, initially of $10 million, to underwrite promising joint research and development ventures by private Indian and American firms. The fund is a grant from the u.s. Agency for International Development to be administered by the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) in Bombay. The assistance furnished by the PACT fund will be mainly focused on the development side of R&D, taking the form of a grant with no equity or technology patents required. If the effort results in the successful production and marketing of the item or process, a predetermined royalty will be paid back to ICICI; however, if the venture is not successful, no repayment need be made. So PACT provides venture capital to encourage the Indian private sector to combine India's formidable research capabilities with American corrmercial and marketing skills. Another key corrp:ment of the PACT program, that almost guarantees its success, is the agreement of the prestigious Battelle Memorial Institute to serve in the role of "matchmaker" between Indian and American firms that have a commonality of interests and ambitions. Founded in 1929 in Columbus, Ohio, the independent, nonprofit research and innovative organization has a solid reputation for doing first-category work in a dozen different fields, and especially in the develoÂľnent of new products and processes. The total volume of contract research conducted at the institute's major research centers in the United States and abroad is more than $440 million. Eleven Indian firms have already applied to ICICI for grants, which can range up to $500,000 each for approved ventures. To shepherd the new organization over the early crags and around the crevasses, a binational, blue-ribbon board of directors has been selected--five from India and five from the United States. Each is eminently successful in his or her own field of corrmerce. On the Indian side are Dr. A.S. Ganguly, Chairman of Hindustan Lever Ltd.; P.R. Latey, Acting Secretary and Director General for Technological Development with the Goverrnnent of India; M.S. Patwardhan, Managing Director of National Organic Chemical Industries Ltd.; Ratan Naval Tata, Chairman of National Radio and Electronics Co., Ltd., as well as Director of Indian Resort Hotels Ltd., Tata Oil Mills Co., Ltd., and Tata Sons Ltd.; and N. Vaghul, Chairman and Managing Director of ICICI. The American board members are Dr. Bruce Merrifield, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Productivity, Technology and Innovation; Janet Tanner, President of Tanner Capital Corp., and one of the top women executives in the United States; Dr. J.E. Goldman, retired Senior Vice-President and Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corp.; Donald w. Collier, retired Senior Vice-President for Corporate Strategy at Borg-Warner Corp.; and Robert s. Understein, President of his own firm of certified public accountants. At a press conference following the first board meeting, Dr. Merrifield offered an insightful analysis of global economic realities, past and future. A sampling: There is an incredible wealth of advanced but underutilized technology and we have unparalleled opportunities to expand the global economy taking advantage of that basic knowledge. Putting it together in ingenious ways, we can adapt it to commercial needs. It is important to understand that together we can build indigenous capability here in India that can be self-energizing and self-sufficient. In the process, we multiply the market potential because, with two markets like the United States and India for the same investment, that is a win-win situation." 11
Dr. Merrifield has so much more to contribute to the discussion that we have invited him to write a full ar.ticle for the October 1986 issue. --J.A.M.
When Emnloyees Become ners
by COREY ROS E N, KATH ERINE J. KLEIN and KAREN M. YOUNG
People Express Airlines, one of America's fastestgrowing transportation companies, calls its employees "managers." Quad/Graphics, among the most successful print companies in the United States, refers to its workers as "partners." W .L. Gore Associates, a 4,000-employee high-tech manufacturer, insists that it has no employees at all, o nly "associates. " These companies are not unique. More than 8 ,000 firms in the United States now share some ownershjp with more than ten million employees. In at least 1,000 companies, employees own the majority of the stock. Employee ownership can be fo und in every industry, every size firm and every part of the country. Americans can eat in e mployee-owned restaurants, fly e mployee-owned airlines, read employee-owned newspapers, shop at employee-owned supermarkets, use computers made by employee-owned computer firms and feed their pet dogs fro m cans made by an employee-owned steel Harry Quadracci, president of Quad/Graphics, one ofthe most successful U.S. employee-owned companies. poses with some of his partners (see page 4).
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WHEN EMP.LOYEES BECOME OWNERS continued
company- all things they couldn't do even ten years ago, when employee ownership was little more than a curiosity in American business. The growth of companies in which most or all employees share ownership of the firm has been fueled by two major factors: government policy and the growing realization that employee ownership is a good way to run a business. Since 1974, the U.S. Congress has passed more
than a dozen laws to encourage companies to share ownership with employees. Most of these laws provide tax incentives for employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) . In an ESOP, companies make taxdeductible contributions of stock or cash to a trust fund to buy stock. The stock is then allocated to the employees who acquire an increasing right to stock as they gain seniority. When they leave or
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SPAN SE PTEMBER 1986
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prints more than 100 magazines and catalogs, mcludmg Newsweek, Playboy and Harper's. Its president, Harry Quadracci , founded the company in 1972 with ten others and a 1,850-square-meter plant with one press in Pewaukee Wisconsin. One of the largest magazine printers in America to~ day' it boasts 1_nore than 1,800 employees, more than a 92,000square-meter m floor space and new operations in Wisconsin and on the East Coast. The company has maintained a compound sales growth rate between 30 and 40 percent a year though the industry average is less than LO percent. Quadf ?raphics makes its own ink and has a self-supporting truckmg fleet. Quad/Graphics' employees own 37 percent of the company through the ESOP. But that is only the beginning of Quad/ Graphics' efforts to make employees feel and act like owners. New workers have a mentor to school them in company culture. Performance is the key to success , they are told, and success is defined in terms of both job performance and personal satisfaction. Each spring, Quadracci puts his managerial philosophy, his en:ipl~~ees and his company to the test. During the "Spring Fling, all managers take one day off for a special management retreat, leaving the company in the hands of the rank and file. Anything could go wrong, from a misplaced advertisement to a ~niscalculated ink hue on millions of magazine covers. The risk 1s worth it. "Responsibility should be shared," Quadracci says. "Our people shouldn't need me or anyone else to tell them what to do." This is "Theory Q"-management by walking away. Theory Q trains employees to be owners of the company. Theory Q also trains managers to manage. Quadracci believes that the managerial function at any level is to coordinate, not control. Since Quadracci feels that "managers should be vi~tually indistinguishable from those they manage," Quad/Graphics has only three reporting levels. The workweek at Quad/Graphics is short: just 36 hours in thre_e d~ys . Two shifts keep the presses going 24 hours a day. In8t1tut1on of the three-day workweek increased productivity 20 percent and saved tremendous amounts in overtime pay. These and other innovative management practices have ~arned Quad/Graphics numerous awards, including a spot m The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. For ~uad/Graphi cs' employee-partners, working at the company is its own reward, both financially and personally. D
retire, they receive their stock and either sell it on the market, if there is one, or sell it back to the company. The typical ESOP will eventually own about 40 percent of the company, aJthough the percentages run from 1 to 100. The trend toward employee ownership is likely to continue, but will it really change the way people think about work? For years American labor relations have been based on the assumption that capital and labor are adversaries, despite their common interests. What happens when employees become owners and work , at least in part, for themselves? Does it make work more satisfying, more motivating? If it does, what makes the difference-financial rewards, management attitudes, a feel ing of participation? In 1981, with partial funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, we set out to find the answers. Four years and 45 case studies of employee-owned companies later, we have a clearer picture of how employee ownership works and what distinguishes firms that succeed in creating a culture of ownership from those in which employee ownership is seen as little more than an overhyped benefit plan. By the end of 1984, we had interviewed managers and surveyed almost 4,000 employee-owners in 37 ESOPs, five worker cooperatives and three companies with unusual forms of employee ownership. Because ESOPs are by far the most common form of employee ownership in the United States, we focused mainly on them and on the opinions of the 2,804 employeeowners who responded to our 140-item survey. The survey covered many aspects of the 37 organizations, from employeeowner satisfaction with work and with the ESOP to their feelings about how much influence they had on working conditions, pay, hiring and firing, selection of supervisors and company policies in general. (See box on page 5.) Our first research task was to learn what employees think of owning stock and how it affects them. Do they believe it encourages them to work harder, gives them more influence within the company or makes them pay more attention to the company's financial performance? To find out, we asked employees how much they agreed or disagreed with 15 statements about employee ownership. (See box on page 6.) We found a common
pattern in all the companies we studied. The greatest agreement was on the general value of employee stock ownership, particularly its financial benefits. Their answers suggest that an ESOP alone does not make employees work harder or enjoy their day-to-day work more. Finally. employees do not think that an ESOP increases their influence in company decisions or their job status. Taken as a whole, the results remind us that an ESOP is , first and foremost , an employee benefit plan and that employees see it as such. They are most interested in making money. lf this is true, why doesn't owning stock make them work harder? We see two main possibilities. First, the connection between how hard employees work
today and how much their ESOP accounts will be worth years from now is remote and therefore not very motivating. Second , employees may not want to admit that they work harder when they own stock. That would suggest that they were not doing their best earlier. Since many ESOPs do not provide stock voting rights and many ESOP companies are not very participative or egalitarian , it is not surprising that employees don' t feel that owning stock gives them more power in company decisionmaking. The finding does, however, contradict previous assumptions about the importance of decision-making power in ESOPs. Our results show that employees like to own company stock even if the ESOP does not give them all of the rights
Employee Stock-Ownership Plans For the most part , the 37 firms we studied are ordinary. Except for their employee-ownership plans (the firms ranged from 2 percent to 100 percent employee-owned, with an average of 42 percent), they are a cross section of American business. The firms include manufacturing, sales and professional service companies that employ from 15 to 7,000 people (an average of 514). Their annual sales run from $830,000 to $1,000 million with an average of $16 million. Thirty are privately held, seven publicly traded. Contrary to popular impression, ESOPs are rarely used to save failing firms (such as the employee buyout of Wierton Steel, now one of the most profitable steel companies in the United States), or to compensate for wage concessions (such as at Eastern and several other airlines). Nor are they offered to help management prevent a hostile takeover, such as at Dan River, wh~re the ESOP now owns 70 percent of the firm. Combined, these account for perhaps 2 percent of all plans. More commonly, ESOPs are set up in profitable firms for many of the same reasons most of the 37 firms we studied set up their plans: as a means for a tax-favored and company-financed transfer of ownership from a departing owner to the firm 's employees, a way of borrowing money relatively inexpen-
sively , to fulfill a philosophical belief in employee ownership or as an additional employee benefit. The degree to which employees actually control their companies varies greatly , in firms we studied and in other ESOPs. Most employee-ownership plans are structured so that employees receive the financial benefits of ownership but do not actually vote their stock or otherwise participate in managerial decisions about jobs or company policy. On the other band, about 30 percent of all plans do provide for full voting rights (13 of our 37 ESOPs did so) , and employees own enough stock in hundreds of other companies to have the potential power to play a decisive role in company affairs. Our average company contributed an amount equal to about 8 percent of each participant's salary to the ESOP in the year preceding our survey, although some gave as much as 25 percent. That contribution plus the change in the value of company stock largely determine the size of each employee's account. Company stock typically performed well , averaging an annual gain of about 9 percent. An employee who made $20,000 a year could expect to accumulate $25,000 to $37 ,000 of company stock after 10 years. In some ESOP companies, employees leave with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
typically associated with ownership. These findings tell us a lot about employee reactions to employee ownership. What they don't tell is why people in some companies rave about it while workers in other employee-owned firms are indifferent and even cynical. Answering this question was our second task. We started with seven hypotheses about what makes an ESOP truly motivating. All seemed plausible, but when we compared the answers we got from employees and managers with how their ESOPs were set up and run , we found that four of our hunches had nothing to do with employee job satisfaction , commitment or loyalty. The irrelevant four were: â&#x20AC;˘ The ESOP should own a large¡ per-
Studies by the National Center for Employee Ownership, the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and others indicate that employee ownership is strongly associated with corporate performance. Employee-owned firms have been shown to be 150 percent as profitable and to have twice the productivity growth rate of conventional companies, for instance. Firms that are mostly employee-owned generate three times more new jobs than do their competitors, while bightech companies that share ownership widely grow two to four times as fast as those that do not. Publicly held companies that are at least 10 percent employee-owned outperform from 62 to 75 percent of their competitors, depending on the measure being used. While these studies cannot prove a causal relationship between employee ownership and success (perhaps successful firms are simply more likely to set up ESOPs), they are suggestive , especially to managers of other companies looking for a way to compete more effectively. And they fit in well with currently popular management thinking. In his book, The Year Ahead, John Naisbitt (see SPAN August 1985) argues that ownership will be a key emerging business trend, "because it works," while management psychologist Tom Peters, in A Passion for Excellence, cites a "sense of ownership" as a striking characteristic among employees at successful firms. 0
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
WHEN EMPLOYEES BECOME OWNERS comi1111ed
S SPAN
centage of company stock. Perhaps employees would be more enthusiastic if the ESOP owned, say, 60 percent of the company instead of just 7 percent. • Voting rights could make a difference. If they couldn't vote their stock, employees might think that the ESOP was just a management gimmick. • The reason a company established the ESOP could be important. Employees might be wary if their company's main purpose for installing an ESOP was to get tax benefits. • The value of company stock should
ESOP ATTITUDES AGREE: 1. Owning stock in this company makes me more interested in the company's financial success.
2. I'm proud to own stock in this company.
3. It is very important to me that this company has an employee stock-ownership pla n. 4. Owning stock in this company ma kes me want to stay with this company longer than I would if l did no t own stock.
5. Employee owne rship at this company gives me a greater share in company profits. NEITHER AGREE NOR DISAGREE:
6. l am more careful and conscientious in my work because I own stock in this company. 7. Because of employee ownership, my work is more satisfying.
8. Employee ownership at this company makes my day-to-day work more enjoyable.
9. Because of employee ownership, people he re try to cooperate more. 10. l work harder on my job because I own company stock. 11 . I fee l like a real owner in this compa ny. DISAGREE: 12. Because of employee ownershi p, managers treat workers more like equals.
13. Employees he re have more influence in company decision-making than they would if they did not own company stock. 14. Employees have more say in company decisio ns because they own stock. 15. I really don't care about the e mployeeownership plan in this compan y.
SEPTl'MBl'lt 1986
be stable or increasing. Who wants stock in a sinking ship? Three other factors do make a difference. Unless an ESOP firm meets at least one of these criteria , its employees are unlikely to be moved by their ownership possibilities. • When a firm makes large contributions to its ESOP, employees stand to make a lot of money through stock ownership if they stay with the company. They respond with enthusiasm and commitment. These results may seem obvious, but five years ago no researcher had even suggested that monetary aspects of employee ownership might be an important factor. Worker control and worker involvement were considered the important benefits of such ownership. Our study shows that financial benefits are important for both practical and symbolic reasons. Practically, an ESOP can provide employees with a very valuable nest egg. Large company contributions introduce an element of hope and excitement into what otherwise can seem to be a dull, uninspiring plan . " If the company does well,'' an employee suddenly realizes, "I could earn a lot of money." Employees may also view the ESOP contribution as an indication that management appreciates them. We learned that companies that give the largest ESOP contribution are not necessarily the most financially successful firms. Because companies can contribute newly issued stock, they do not need to have cash on hand for the ESOP contribution. Sometimes companies face legal or tax obligations that require them to make a certain level of contribution to the ESOP, regardless of company profits. • Managers who are committed to employee ownership see it as a critical part of the company's corporate culture and identity. They say employee ownership plays a major role in their managerial philosophy and they translate this commitment into action in concrete ways. The company may give employees stockvoting rights. Managers may give employees informatio n about the financial performance of the company. They may offer employees opportunities for participation and influence in company decisions. But whatever the specific action, managers let employees know that they really are owners, people that the company values and respects. And em-
ployees respond accordingly. • When a company goes to great lengths to educate and inform employees about employee ownership , they become conve rts. Good companies "sell" their employees in a variety of ways: playing up the issuance of annual stock certificates, which are legally required; holding employee stockholder meetings; posting employee-ownership placards; including pertinent information with payroll checks; me ntioning employee ownership in the company letterhead and distributing ESOP newsletters. Regardless of the communication methods, more is better. The more employees understand ESOPs and think about them, the better their attitudes. There are several legitimate reasons for this. First, ESOPs can be quite complicated and technical. Witho ut education about them, employees may be suspicious or simply uninterested. Second, ESOP benefits to employees arc longterm and distant. Unless the company constantly advertises and explains the ESOP to employees, they may be apathetic or resentful. Third, an extensive ESOP communications program seems to be part of the best companies' management practices. Companies that have an extensive communfoations program usually also give employees more influence in company decision-making and more information about the financial status of the firm. Money, management, communications .. . according to our research , these are the stuff of which the best employeeowned firms are made. When a company combines a financiall y-rewarding employee-ownership plan with supportive and participative management practices and education about the ownership, employees know they have a good thing. They are no longer just employees, but people who, since they are treated as owners, become psychologically as weU as financially invested in the firm . This commitment shows in their attitudes about the job and translates into high morale and low turnover. D About the Authors: Corey Rosen and Karen M. Young are executive director and managing director, respectively, of the National Center f or Employee Ownership in Arlington, Virginia. Katherine J. Klein is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Precision Irrigation by Computer Text by DENNIS SENFT and LYNN YARRIS Photographs by ROBERT C. BJORK
Electronic systems, which not only detect when and how much water plants need but automatically switch on and off irrigation, are helping Anierican farmers to save water and energy, and produce bumper crops.
rrigation is one area of agriculture in the United States that has taken off on the wings of technology. Complex , versatile, yet "user-friendly," the computer is making possible increasingly precise irrigation based on very detailed crop and soil information. Automation by ever lighter and less expensive electronics is pushing the days of manually controlled irrigation into the past. Besides saving the farmer the toil and hard labor, such precision translates into savings of water, energy, money and time. Agriculture is the largest single consumer of water in the United States, and irrigated agriculture accounts for more than 24 million hectares of farmed land . Research to develop lowcost methods for improving the efficiency of water-distribu-
I
An agricultural engineer programs a new telemetric system that provides farmers with an efficient, low-cost, timer-controller irrigation of their fields. The solar panel at left powers the system's batteries. tion systems is, therefore, extremely important. Scientists have developed a computer system that, on signal from a utility company, shuts down irrigation pumps in specific fields which it knows can go without water for a while. Dale F. Heermann and fellow engineer Harold R. D uke, both of the Agricultural Research Staff (ARS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture at Fort Collins, Colorado , built the system around a computer program that is already being used for irrigation scheduling in many areas of the Great Plains, a semiarid region east of the Rocky Mountains.
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
7
PRECISION IRRIGATION conti1111ed
To qualify for lower e lectric rates, some growers have been scheduling irrigation in cooperation with utility companies . Whe n power d e ma nd nears a peak , the utilities transmit an e lectronic signal to receivers that control cutoff switches on irrigation pumps. The new syste m features a compute r that intercepts the cutoff signals a nd functions as a central control unit. The compute r monitors the center sprinkler pivots every 15 minutes, a nd knows whe the r they are on, o r off due to malfunction o r a planned shutdown . The compute r also polls a weather station in the fie ld , which informs it of wind velocity, te mpe rature, humidity and solar radiatio n. Finally, the compute r also knows how much water has been applied to each fie ld , the soil type and what is being grown. When the first signal from the power company is intercepted , the compute r sends its own signal ordering individual pumps to stop . It automatically selects the fields that are in the least need of water. If second and third signals are received , the compute r selects additional fie lds to be taken out of the irrigation p rogra m. T he re is a manual override in case irrigato rs wish to continue irrigating a particular crop ra the r than the o ne the computer selects. As. the demand for power decreases, the compute r picks up utility company signals and restores irrigation to crops in the seque nce most advantageous to to tal crop production. Altho ugh the pumps may have been idle for several ho urs, the computer has continue d to receive information from the weathe r station and has up-to-date knowledge of crop needs. " I estimate that we've saved three hours a day and 90 kilometers of driving by relying on the computer," says Duane Foxhoven , farm foreman at the Condon Ranch near Sterling, Colorado, where the system was used recently. The Ranch has 15 center-pivot sprinklers that irrigate 900 hectares. The most distant pivot is about five kilomete rs from the computer-control center. " W e use d to drive o ut four to five times a day just to check o n the center pivots," says Foxhoven. " Now we can just look at a warning light atta ched to the computer. When it comes on, we know one or more o f the sprinkle rs has been shut down because o f a malfunction o r because of a powe r sho rtage. A quick check of the compute r screen tells us what is happening and where. " In the first year of o peration confidence in the system was so high that during a b usy two-day harvest a ll monitoring was done re motely via the computer. The system has also resulte d in energy savings. Peak dema nd for power usually occurs on lo ng, hot summe r days whe n e ne rgy use is high fo r air cond itio ning. Whatever this peak d e ma nd is, it de te rmines the e lectric rate for the e ntire year. Agreeing to automatic irrigation shutdowns during peak demand reduced the Condon' Ranch's e lectric bill by 14 percent. Crop yields also benefit from such sophistica ted irrigation sche duling. Under the sta ndard agreement for utility-controlled pivot shutdowns , a ll power could be shut off every third day and irrigation cou ld not resume until the uti lity cou ld guarantee e nough powe r for a whole day. The resulta nt wate r stress spelled trouble for some crops. With compute r control, the utility requires that no more than 50 percent of power be shut off to pumps at a given time. And pumps can be starte d back up whenever more power is
8
Sl'AN Sl¡. l"l loMJlf l{ 19~6
This weather station on the Condon Ranch near Sterling, Colorado, is part of a computeroperated sprinkler system that awomatically shuts off irrigation during periods of peak power demand. thus enabling farmers to qualify for lower electricity rates.
A test plot of maize at the Northern Colorado Research Demonstration Center is auJomatically controlled for trickle irrigation by a sophisticated computer Located in the shack (foreground); all the water needs of the project are met from the pond.
available. Even before compute r control , irrigation scheduling on the Condon Ranch contributed to increasing yie lds of an average 30 quintals per hectare during the past 12 years. The computer on the Condon R anch is commercially available for about $2,000. Agricultural engineer Gera ld Buchleite r at Colorado State University worked with H eerma nn and Duke to deve lop the software programs tha t operate Condon's system . These programs would work on o the r similar systems as well . The team is also putting the final touches on a program that indicates the exact position of the pivots. This will make it easier to reach the m for making repairs and readjustme nts. Like childre n crying o ut at night for some thing to drink , plants give sig nals when they want water. Scientists have known for about a century what these signals are, but on ly recently has sophisticated equipment been developed to put the information to use. Plant physiologists Edwin L. Fiscus and Stan D . Wullschleger at the ARS combi ned an o lde r techno logy (a mass flow porome ter) with new techno logy (sensitive e lectronic measuring devices and a compute r) to detect when plant sto ma ta are beginning to close-ind icating the onset o f stress caused by water deficiency. " By de tecting when plants are just beginning to enter a
a porometer to a maize leaf that measures plant response to waterdeficiency stress. This information feeds into a computer that triggers irrigation when the plant reaches a predetermined stress level.
stress phase because of insufficient water, we can halt further progression by irrigating. This gives a potential twofold benefit-greater plant growth because plants never have to be in stress, and decreased water use because it is applied onJy when the plants indicate they need water, not when an irrigator thinks they need it ," says Fiscus, who works in Fort Collins. In the summer of 1983 the scientists harvested an average 87 quintals of maize per hectare on small test plots near Greeley, Colorado, by using their porometers to trigger a trickleirrigation system. Plots arbitrarily irrigated every two to three days averaged 96 quintals per hectare but these plots received twice as much water, 82 instead of 41 centimeters. (Trickle irrigation also contributed to the large increase in waterapplication efficiency by holding down evaporation.) The porometers were clamped to maize leaves and attached to sensitive electronic equipment that could take 34 different measurements related to plant stress. Another cord leading to a small computer terminal transferred the measurements from the porometers to the computer every ten minutes during the day. The computer, using programs written by Wullschleger and Fiscus, analyzed this information at midnight and turned on a pump to supply water to the test plots if stress had been detected. Fiscus and Wullschleger programmed two different values
into the computer to trigger irrigation. One was fairly high and resulted in about 41 centimeters of water being used during the growing season. The other was more conservative and used only 31 centimeters. Both settings produced equal water-use efficiencies but the lower setting resulted in maize yields of only 66 quintals per hectare versus the 87 quintals for the more liberal irrigation. The tests were run using a trickle-irrigation system but, Fiscus says, any irrigation method that uses electricity for pumping water or regulating flow could be linked to the porometer and results should be comparable. Systems for controlling irrigation that are now in use commercially were designed primarily for sprinkler or drip irrigation systems. They do not meet the special needs of surface irrigation installations that are still in use on about two-thirds of the irrigated areas in the United States. Automation of surface irrigation is worthwhile , however, because water-use efficiencies comparable to those of sprinkler systems can be achieved, and at lower costs using less energy and labor. Now, a new system that uses touch-tone telemetry-like that in modern telephones~can provide surface irrigators with efficient, low-cost, timer-controlled irrigations. The system is designed with all the timing, programming and control functions concentrated into one versatile central controller. The remote field stations contain only the circuitry necessary to decode commands from the central controller and activate the irrigation valves. This design enables the central controller to be quite complex since only one is needed for a given irrigation installation , while the number of individual field
stations can be expanded easily and at small cost. A single, three-conductor, 1.25-millimeter cable connects all of the field stations to the system's central controller. Each station contains a tone code receiver/decoder which responds to a specific address-assigned-to that station , in the same manner a telephone responds to its own assigned number by ringing. Commands from the central controller pass through all field stations, and at each station these commands are decoded and compared with that station's address. If the two match , the station opens or closes its irrigation valves. Assigning the same address to different field stations can provide great flexibility in both the amount and pattern of water application. The new system's central controller can be programmed to control the date and duration of irrigation and the sequence of operation for a large number of remote stations. Information on soil , crop and weather conditions, water supply limitations and irrigation scheduling can also _be programmed into the computer. The new automated telemetric irrigation controller also has a low power requirement-it can be run on batteries, solar power, or wind power-and has already been successfully tested at three different locations in the United States under three different types of automated surface irrigation systems. According to the system's designers, if the software in the controller is modified, the system could also be used for multiple irrigation cycles such as surge irrigation , a technique gaining increased prominence for efficiency and soil conservation benefits. 0 About the Authors: Dennis Senft is a reporter and Lynn Yarris is a science
writer. Both are based in California.
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
9
ePa cific
A short story by Mark Helprin
This was probably the last place in the world for a factory. There were pine-covered hills and windy bluffs stopped still in a wavelike roll down to the Pacific, groves of fragrant trees with clay-red trunks and soft greenery that made a white sound in the wind, and a chain of boiling, fuming coves and bays in which the water- when it was not rocketing foam- was a miracle of glassy curves in cold blue or opalescent turquoise, depending upon the season, and depending upon the light. A dirt road went through the town and followed the sea from point to point as if it had been made for the naturalists who had come before the war to watch the seals. sea otters, and fleets of whales passing offshore. lt took three or four opportunities to travel into the hills and run through long valleys onto a series of flat mesas as large as battlefields, which for a hundred years had been a perfect place for raising horses. And horses still pressed up against the fe nces or stood in family groupings in golden pastures as if there were no such thing as time, and as if many of the boys who had ridden them had never grown up and had never left. At least a dozen fishing boats had once bobbed at the pier and ridden the horizon, but they had been turned into minesweepers and sent to Pearl Harbor, San Diego, and the Aleutians. The factory itself, a long low building in which more than five hundred women and several hundred men made aircraft instruments. had been built in two months, along with a forty-mile railroad spur that had been laid down to connect it to the Union Pacific main line. ln this part of the state the railroad had been used heavily only during the harvests and was usually rusty for the rest of the year. Now even the spur was gleaming and weedless, and small steam engines pulling several freight cars shuttled back and forth, their hammerlike exhalations silencing the cicadas, breaking up perfect afternoons, and shattering perfect nights. The main halls and outbuildings were only a mile from the sea but were placed in such a way. taking up almost all of the level ground on the floor of a wide ravine, that they were out of the line of fire of naval guns. And because they were situated in a narrow trench between hills, they were protected from bombing. ··But what about landings?" a woman had asked an Army officer who had been brought very early one morning to urge the night shift to maintain the blackout and keep silent about the work. Just after dawn the entire shift had finished up and gathered on the railroad sidi ng.
10
SP1\N SFPTEMBER J986
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"Who's speaking, please?" the officer had asked, unable to see in the dim light who was putting the question. "Do you want my name?" she asked back in surprise. She had not intended to say anything, and now everyone was listening to her. Nor had the officer intended to ask her name. "Sure." he answered. "'You're from the South." "That's right.'' she said. "South Carolina. My name is Paulette Ferry." "What do you do?" "I'm a precision welder." That she should have the word precision in her title seemed just. She was neat. handsome. and delicate. Every gesture seemed well considered. Her hands were smallbardly welder's hands, even those of a precision welder. " You don't have to worry about troop landings," the officer said. " It's too far for the Japanese to come in a ship small enough to slip through our seaward defenses, and it's too far for airplanes, too." He put his hands up to shield his eyes. The sun was rising. and as its rays found bright paths between the firs, he was blinded. "The o nly danger here is sabotage. Three or four men could hike in with a few satchels of explosive and do a lot of damage. But the sea is clear. Japanese submarines just don't have the range, and the Navy's out there, though you seldom see it. If you lived in San Francisco or San Diego, believe me, you'd sec it. The harbors arc choked with warships.'' Then the meeting dissolved, because the offi cer was eager to move on. He had to drive to Bakersfield and speak at two more factories, both of which were more vulnerable and more important than this one. And this place was so out of the way and so beautiful that it seemed to have nothing to do with the war. Before her husband left for the South Pacific, he and Paulette had found a place for her to live, a small house above the ocean, on a cliff, looking out, where it seemed that nothing would be between them but the air over the water. Though warships were not visible off the coast, she could see from her windows the freighters that moved silently within the naval cordon. Sometimes o ne of these ships would defy the blackout and become a castle of Lights that glided on the horizon like a skater with a torch. "Paulette." he had said, when he was still in training at Parris Island, ··after the war's over, everything's goi ng to
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be different. When I get back-if I get back," he added, because he knew that not all Marine lieutenants were going to make it home- "I want to go to California. The light there is supposed to be extraordinary. I've heard that because of the light, living there is like living in a dream. I want to be in a place like that- not so much as a reward for seeing it through, but because we will already have been so disconnected from everything we know. Do you understand?" She had understood, and she had come quickly to a passionate agreement about California, swept into it not only by the logic and the hope but by the way he had looked at her when he had said "-if I get back." For he thought truly nothing was as beautiful as Paulette in a storm , riding above it smoothly, just about to break, quivering, but never breaking. When he was shifted from South Carolina to the
Marine base at Twentynine Palms, they had their chance to go to Cal ifornia, and she rode out with him on the train . Rather than have them suffer the whole trip in a Pullman with stiff green curtains, her parents had paid for a compartment. Ever since Lee had been inducted , both sets of parents had fallen into a steady devotion . It seemed as if they would not be satisfied until they had given all their attention and everything they had to their children. Packages arrived almost daily for Paulette. War bonds accumulated for the baby that did not yet exist. Paulette's father , a schoolteacher. was a good carpenter , and he had vowed that when Lee got back , if they wanted him to, he would come out to California to help with his own hands in building them a house . Their parents were getting old. They moved and talked slowly now, but they were ferociously determined to protect their children and though they could do little more than book railway
SPAN SEPTEMllE.R 1986
]
THE PAC IFIC continued
compartments and buy war bonds, they did whateve r they could , hoping that it would some how keep Lee alive and prevent Pa ule tte from becoming a widow at the age of twenty-six. For three nearly speechless days in early Septe mber, the Marine lie ute nant and his young wife stared out the open window of their compartme nt as they crossed the country in pe rfect weather and north light. Magnificent thunderstorms would close on the train like (American] Indian riders and then withdraw in favor of the clear. Oceans of wheat, the deserts, and the sky were gold , white, and infinitely blue, blue. And at night, as the train charged across the e mpty prairie, its spotlight flashing agai nst the tracks that lay far ahead of it straight a nd true, the sta rs hung close and bright. Stunned by the beauty of all this, Pa ulette and Lee were inte nt upon re me mbering, because they wa nted what they saw to give the m stre ngth , a nd because they kne w that should things not turn out the way they wa nted , this would have to have been enough . Distant whirlwinds and dust storms, mountain rive rs leaping coolly against the sides o f their courses , fou rhundred-mile straightaways , fifty-mile bends, massive canyons and defiles, still forests, and glowing lakes calmed the m and set them up for their first view of the Pacific's easy waves rolling onto the deserted beaches south of Los A ngeles. Paulette lived in a small white cottage that was next to a n orange grove, and worked for six months on instrume ntation for P-38s. The factory was a mile away, a nd to get to it. she had to go through the ranks of trees. Lee tho ught that this might be dangerous, until one morning he accompanied her and was amazed to see several thousand wome n walking sile ntly through the ora nge grove on their way to and fro m factories that worked around the clock. Though Lee had more leave than he would have had as an e nlisted man, he didn't have much, a nd the occasional weekends, odd days, and one or two weeks when he came home during the half year at Twentynine Palms we re as tightly packed as stage plays. At the beginning of each fu rlo ugh the many hours ahead (they always broke the time into hours) seemed like great riches. But as the hours passed a nd only a few remained, Lee no less than Paule tte would feel that they would soon be parting as if never to be reunited. H e was stationed only a few hours away a nd they knew that he would try to be back in two weeks, but they knew as well that someday he would leave fo r the Pacific. When his orders finall y came, he had ten days before he went overseas, and when Paulette came home from work the evening of the first day¡ and saw him sitting on the porch , she was able to tell .iust by looking at him that he was going. She cried for half a n hour, but then he was able to comfort her by saying that though it did not seem right or natural tha t they shou ld be put to this kind of test in their middle twenties, everyone in the world had to face
12
SPAN Sl¡P1EM1ll¡R 1986
death a nd separation some time, and it was finally what they would have to e ndure anyway. On his last leave they took the train north a nd then hitchhiked forty miles to the coast to look at a town and a new factory to which Lockheed was shifting e mployees from its plants in Los Angeles. At first Paule tte had refused to move the re, despite an offer of more money and a housing allowance, because it was too far from Twentynine Palms. But now that Lee was on his way overseas, it seemed perfect. Here she wo uld wait, she would dream of his re turn , and she would wo rk so hard that, indirectly, she might help to bring him back. This town , isolated at the foo t of hills that fronted the sea , this out-of-the-way group of houses with its factory that would vanish when the war was over, seemed like the proper place for he r to ho ld he r ground in full vie w of the abyss. After he had bee n gone for two or three weeks, she packed he r belongings a nd moved up there , and though she was sad to give up her twice-daily walks through the orange groves with the thousands of othe r women, who appeared among the trees as if by magic, she wanted to be in the little house that overlooked the Pacific, so that nothing would be between the m but the air over the water. To withsta nd gravitational forces as fighter planes rose, banked , and dived , a nd to remain intact over the vibrations of 2,000-horsepower e ngines, buffeting crosswinds, rapid-fire cannon , a nd rough landings, aircraft instruments had spot welds wherever possible rathe r than screws o r rive ts. Each instrume nt might require as many as several hundred welds, a nd the factory was in full production of a dozen diffe re nt mechanisms: altimeters, air-speed indicators, fuel gauges, attitude indicators, counters, timers, compasses, gyroscopes-all those things that would measure a nd confine objective forces and put them , like weapons, in the hands of the fighter pilots who attacked fortified islands and fought high over e mpty seas. On fifteen production lines, de pending upon the instrument in manufacture , the course of construction was inte rspersed with anywhere from twenty to forty welders. Amidst the welders were machine-tool ope rators, inspectors, assemblers, and supervisors. Because each ma n or woman had to have a lot of room in which to kee p parts, tools, and the work itself as it came down the line, and because the ravine and , therefore, the building were narrow, the lines stre tched for a quarter of a mile. Welders' light is almost pure. Despite the spectral differences between the vario us techniques, t he flash of any one o f them gives rise to illusions of depth and dimension. No gaudy showe rs of dancing spa rks fall as with a cutting torch, and no beams break through the darkness to carry the eye on a wave of blue. One secs only points o f light so faithful and pure that they seem to race into the mselves. The silvery wh ite ness is like the imagined birth of sta rs o r souls. Though each fla sh is beautiful and stre tches out time. it seldom lasts long. For despite the
magnetizing brightness, or perhaps because of it, the flash is born to fade. Still, the sharp burst of light is a brave and wonderful thing that makes observers count the seconds and cheer it on. From her station on the altimeter line, Paulette could see over gray steel tables down the length of the shed. Of the four hundred electric-arc or gas-welding torches in operation, the number lighted varied at any one time from twenty or thirty to almost all of them. As each welder pulled down her mask, bent over as if in a dive , and squeezed the lever on her torch, the pattern of lights emerged, and it was never the same twice. Through the dark glass of the face plate the flames in the distance were like a spectacular convocation of fireflies on a hot, moonless night. With the mask up, the plane of the work tables looked like the floor of the universe, the smoky place where stars were born. All the lights, even those that were distant, commanded attention and assaulted the senses-by the score, by the hundreds. Directly across from Paulette was a woman whose job was to make oxyacetylene welds on the outer cases of the altimeters. The cases were finished, and then carried by trolley to the end of the line, where they would be hooded over the instruments themselves. Paulette, who worked with an electric arc, never tired of watching this woman adjust her torch. When she lit it , the flame was white inside but surrounded by a yellow envelope that sent up twisting columns of smoke. Then she changed the mixture and a plug of intense white appeared at the end of the torch , in the center of a small orange flare. When finally she got her neutral flame-with a tighter white plug, a colorless core, and a sapphire-blue casing- she lowered her mask and bent over the work. Paulette had many things to do on one altimeter. She had to attach all the brass, copper, and aluminum alloy parts to the steel superstructure of the instrument. She had to use several kinds of flux ; she had to assemble and brace the components; and she bad to jump from one operation to the other in just the right order, because if she did not, pieces due for insertion would be blocked or bent. She had such a complicated routine only because she was doing the work of two. The woman who had been next to her got sick one day, and Paulette had taken on her tasks. Everyone assumed that the line would slow down. But Paulette doubled her speed and kept up the pace. "I don' t know how you do it, Paulette ," her supervisor had said, as she worked with seemingly effortless intensity. " I'm going twice as fast , Mr. Hannon," she replied. " Can you keep it up? " " I sure can ," she answered. "In fact , when Lindy comes back , you can put her down the line and give her work to me. " Whereas Lindy always talked about clothes and shoes, Paulette preferred to concentrate on the instrument that she was fashioning. She was granted her wish. Among other things , Hannon and just about every-
one else on the line wanted to see how long she could continue the pace before she broke. But she knew this, and she didn't break. She got better, and she got faster. When Paulette got home in the morning, the sea was illuminated as the sun came up behind her. The open and fluid light of the Pacific was as entrancing as the light of the Carolinas in springtime. At times the sea looked just like the wind-blue mottled waters of the Albemarle, and the enormous clouds that rose in huge columns far out over the ocean were like the aromatic pine smoke that ascended undisturbed from a farmer's clearing fire toward a flawless blue sky. She was elated in the morning. Joy and relief came not only from the light on the waves but also from having passed the great test of the day, which was to open the mailbox and check the area near the front door. The mailman, who served as the telegraph messenger, thought that he was obliged to wedge telegrams tightly in the doorway. One of the women , a lathe operator who had had to go back to her family in Chicago, had found her telegram actually nailed down. The mailman had feared that it might blow into the sea , and that the9 she would find out in some shocking, . incidental manner that her husband had been killed. At the factory were fifty women whose husbaqds, Like Lee, had passed through Twentynine Palms into the Second Marine Division. They had been deeply distressed when their men were thrown into the fighting on Guadalcanal, but, miraculously, of the fifty Marines whose wives were gathered in this one place only a few had been wounded and none had been killed.¡ When her work was done, knowing that she had made the best part of thirty altimeters that would go into thirty fighters, and that each of these fighters would do a great deal to protect the ships on which the Marines sailed, and pummel the beaches on which they had to fight, Paulette felt deserving of sleep. She would change into a nightgown , tum down the covers, and then sit in a chair next to the bed, staring at the Pacific as the light got stronger, trying to master the fatigue and stay awake. Sometimes she would listen to the wind for an hour , nod asleep, and force herself to open her eyes, until she fell into bed and slept until two in the afternoon. Lee had returned from his training at Parris Island with little respect for what he once had thought were human limitations. His company had marched for three days, day and night, without stopping. Some recruits, young men, had died of heart attacks. "How can you walk for three whole days without stopping?" she had asked. "It seems impossible." "We had forty-pound packs , rifles, and ammunition ," he answe.red. " We had to carry mortars, bazookas. stretchers, and other equipment , some of it very heavy, that was passed from shoulder to shoulder.'' "For three days?" "For three days. And when we finally stopped, I was picked as a sentinel. I had to stand guard for two hours
SPAN SEPTEMBER 198(,
13
TH E PACIFIC co111i1111ed
while everyone e lse slept. And you know what happens if you fa ll asleep , God help you, on sentry duty?'' She shook her head , but did know. "Article eighty-six of the Articles of War: 'Misbehavior of a sentinel. '"' H e recited it from memory. ' ' ' Any sentinel who is fo und drunk or sleeping upon his post , or leaves it before he is regularly relieved , shall , if the offense is committed in time of war, suffer death o r such other punishment as a court-martial may direct. ' "J was so tired . .. . My eyelids weighed ten thousand pounds apiece . But I stayed up, even though the only enemies we had were offi cers and mosquitoes. They were always coming around to check." "Who?" she asked . "Mosquitoes?" " Yeah,'' Lee replied. " And as you know, officers are hatched in stagnant pools." So when Paulette returned fro m her te n-hour shifts, she sat in a chair and tried not to sleep , staring over the Pacific like a sentinel. She had the privilege of awakening at two in the afternoon , when the day was stro ngest, and not having to be ashamed of having slept thro ugh the morning. In the six ho urs before the shift began, she wo uld rise , bathe , eat lunch , and gathe r he r garden tools. Then she walked a few miles down the winding coast road- the rake , hoe, and shovel resting painfully upon her shoulders- to her garden. No shed was anywhere near it, and had one bee n there she probably would have carried the tools anyway. Because she shared the garden with an old man who came in the morning and two fa ctory women who were o n the second day s hift, she was almost always alone there. UsuaIJy she worked in the strong sun until fi ve-thirty. T o allow herself this much hard labor she did her shopping and eating at a brisk pace. The hours in the garden made her strong and fit. She was perpetually sunburned , and her hair became lighter. She had never been so beautiful, and when people loo ked at her, they kept on looking. Seeing her speed through the various and difficult chores of cultivation , no o ne ever would have guessed that she might shoulder her tools. walk home as fast as she could , and then set off for ten hours on a production line. "Don' t wri te about the garden anymore ," he had writte n fro m a place undisclosed . " Don't write about the goddamned altimeters. D on't write about what we' re going to do when the war is over. Just tell me about you. They have altime ters he re, they even have gardens. Tell me what you' re thinking . Describe yourself as if we had never met. Te ll me in detail exactly how you take your bath . Do you sing to yourself? What do the sheets on the bed look like- I mean do they have a pattern or are they a colo r? I never saw them. Take pictures, and send them. Send me your barrette. (I don't want to wear it myself, I want to keep it in my pocket.) I care so much about you, Paule tte. I love you. And I'm doing my best to stay alive . You should see me when it gets tight. I don't throw myself up front , but I don't hold my breath either. I run around
14
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
like hell , alert and listening every second . My aim is sure and I don' t let off s hots when J don't have to . You'd never know me, Paulette, and l don't know if the re's anything left of me. But I'm going to come home. " Although she didn't write about the garden anymore , she tilled it deep. The rows were straight, and not a single weed was to be seen, and whe n she walked home with the tools on her shoulders, she welco med their weight. They exchanged postscripts for two mo nths in letters that were late in coming and always crossed . " P.S. What do you eat?" he wrote . " P.S. What do you mea n, what do I eat? Why do you want to know? What do you eat?" "P.S . I want to know because I'm hungry. I eat crud. It all comes fro m a can , it's very salty, and it has a lot of what seems to be po rk fat. Some local vegetables haven' t been bombed , or crushed by heavy vehicles, but if you eat them you can wave good-bye to your intestines. Sometimes we have cakes that are baked in pans four feet by five feet. The bottom is cinder and the top is a raw dough. What happened to steak? No o ne has it here , and J haven' t seen one in a year. Where are they keeping it? Is there going to be a big barbecue after the war?" ¡' P.S. You' re right , we have no beef around here and practically no sugar or butter , either. I thought maybe you were getting it. I eat a lot of fresh vegetables, rice , fish that I get in exchange for the stuff in my garden , and chicken now and then. I've lost some weight , but I look real good. I drink my tea black , and I mean black, because at the plant they have a huge samovar thing where it boils for hours. What with your pay mounting up in one acco unt , my pay mounting up in another, and what the parents have been sending us lately, when the war is over we' re going to have a lot of money. We have almost four thousa nd dollars now. We' ll have the biggest barbecue you've ever seen. " As long as she did her work and as long as he stayed alive, she sensed some sort of justice and equilibrium. She enjoyed the feminine triumph in the factory, where the women, doing men's work , some times broke into song that was as tentative and beautiful as only women's voices can be . They did not sing often. The beauty and the power embarrassed them, fo r they had their independence o nly because their men were at risk and the world was at war. But sometimes they couldn 't help it , and a song wo uld rise above the productio n Lines, lighter than the ascending smo ke , more luminous than the blue and white arcs. The Pacific and California's golden hills caught the clear sunshine but made it seem like a dream in which sight was confused and the dreamer giddy. The sea , with its cold colors and foa ming cauldrons in which seals were cradlerocked , was the northern part of the same ocean that held ten thousand tropical islands. All these thi ngs, these reversals, paradoxes, and contradictions, we re burned in day by day until they seemed to make sense, until it appeared as if some great thing were being
accomplished, greater than pe rhaps they knew. Fo r they fe lt treme ndous veloci ty in the way they worked , the way they lived, and even in the way they sang. O n the twentieth of November , 1943, five thousand men of the Second Marine Division landed on the beaches of Tarawa. T he action of war, the noise, smo ke, and intense labor of battle, seemed frozen when it reached home, especially fo r those whose husbands or sons were engaged in the fi ghting. A battle from afar is only a thing of silence, of souls ascending as if drawn up in slow motion by malevolent angels fl oating above the fray. Tarawa , a battle afar , seemed no more real than a painting. Paulette and the others had no chance to act. They were forced to listen fitfully to the sile nce and stare faithfully into the dark. Now, when the line broke into song, the women did not sing the e ne rgetic popular music that could stoke production until it glowed. Nor did they sing the graceful ballads that had kept them on the line when they would otherwise have fa lte red. Now the songs were from the hymnal, and they were sung not in a spirit of patriotism or of productio n but in prayer. As the battle was fo ught on Tarawa, two women fell from the line. O ne had been called from her position and summoned to what they knew as the office, which was a maze of wavy-glass partitions beyond which other people did the paperwork , and she, like the lathe operator from Chicago , simply dropped away. Another had been given a telegram as she worked ; no one really knew how to tell anyone such a thing. But with so many women working, the absence o f two did not slow their industry. Two had been beaten . Five hundred were not, and the lights still flickered down the line. Paulette had known from the first that Lee was on the beach. She wondered which was more difficult, being aware that he might be in any battle, or knowing for sure that he was in one. The first thing she did when she got the newspaper was to scan the casualty lists, dropping immediate ly to the Fs. It d id no t matter that they sent telegrams; te legrams sometimes blew into the sea. Next she raced th rough reports of the fighting, tracing if she could the progress of his unit and looking for any mention of him . Only then would she read the narrative so as to judge the progress of the offensive and the chances of victory, though she cared not so much fo r victory as for what it meant to the men in the fi eld who were still alive. The line was hypnotic and it swalJowed up time. If she wanted to do good work , she couldn't think about anything except what was directly in front of her, especially since she was doing the work of two. But when she was free she now dreamed almost continually of her young husband , as if the landings in Tarawa , across the Pacific, had been designed to make her imagine him. During these days the garden needed little attention , so she did whatever she could and then went down to a sheltered cove by the sea, where she lay on the sand , in
the sun , half asleep. For as long as her eyes were closed and the sea seemed to pound everything but dreams into meaningless foam and air. she lay with him , tightly, a slight smile on her face , listen ing to him breathe. She would awake fro m th is half sleep to fi nd that she was holding her hands and arms in such a way that had he been there she would have been embracing him. She often spoke to him under her breath. info rming him , as if he could hear her, of everything she thought and did-of the fact that she was turning off the fl ame under the kettle, of the sunrise and its golden-red light Hooding against the pines, of how the ocean looked when it was joyously misbehaving . These were the things she could do , the powers to wh ich she was limited , in the town on the Pacific that was probably the last place in the world for a factory or the working o f transcendent miracles too difficult to explain or name. But she fe lt that somehow her devotion and her sharp attention wo uld have repercussio ns. that, just as in a concert hall , whe re music could o nly truly rise within the hearts of its listeners. she could forge a connection over the thin air. When a good wave rolled against the rocks of the cove, it sent up rockets of foa m that hung in the sun , motio nlessly and- if one could look at them hard eno ugh to make them stand still- forever. T o make them a target, to sight them with concentration as absolute as a burning weld, to draw a bead , to hold them in place with the eye, was to change the world . The fa ctory was her place for this, for precision. devotion, and concentration. H ere the repercussions might begin. Herc. in the darkness, the light that was so white it was almost blue-sapphire-colored-flashed continually , like muzzle bursts, and steel was set to steel as if swords were being made. Here she could push herself, drive herself, and wo rk until she could hardly stand- all for him. As the battle of T arawa became more and mo re difficult , and me n fell , Paulette doubled and redoubled her efforts. Every weld was true . She built the instruments with the disciplined ferocity that comes only from love. For the rhythm of the work seemed to signify something fa r greater than the work itself. The timing of her welds, the bl inking of the arc, the light touch that held two parts together and was then withdrawn , the patience and the quickness, the generation of blinding flares and small pencil-shots of smoke: these acts, qualities, and their progress, like the repetitions in the hymns that the women sang on the line, made a kind of quiet thunder that rolled through all things, and that , in Paulette's deepest wishes, shot across the Pacific in performance of a miracle she dared not even name-though that miracle was not 0 to be hers.
is the author of A Dove of the E ast, E llis Island & Other Stories, Refiner's Fire and Winter's Tale.
About the Author: Mark Helprin
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
15
The Fight Against I
run Until the 20th century, drunkenness was a relatively minor social problem in the United States, because drunkards were rarely in any position to cause serious damage to anyone but themselves. Drinkers might brawl in the bars and public houses, or cause family strife, o r upset an applecart on a wild horseback ride through town , but for the most part a chronic drinker was more to be pitied than scorned, and certainly was not cause for government concern . With the introduction of the automobile, however, the drunkard became a menace to everyo ne within reach of his desire to travel. About half of the 50,000 car accidents in which people die on American roads each year involve alcohol , and alcoholrelated traffic accidents are the number one cause of death among Americans under the age of 40; about 35 percent of these accidents involve drivers between 16 and 24. In recent years, a new awareness of the dangers of drunk driving has been emerging in America, thanks largely to a housewife from northern California named Candy Lightner. For this young mother , the abstract question of what to do about drunk drivers turned painfully concrete at 1:30 o n the afternoon of Saturday, May 3, i980. At that time, Lightner's 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was walking with a friend to a church carnival a couple of blocks from her home in the Sacramento, Califo rnia, suburb of Fair Oaks. A car swerved into the bicycle lane where the girls were walking and hit Cari, hurling her 35 meters through the air. She was dead within the hour. T he driver of the car that hit Cari , 47-year-old William Busch, drove off without stopping but was arrested four days later by the California highway patrol. The investigation that fo llowed Busch's arrest determined that he had been drunk at the time of the accident.
16
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
by WILLIAM A. HENKIN
I
r1v1n
Outraged by the nominal sentence given to the drunk driver who killed her daughter Cary (above), Candy Lightner has been in the forefront of a successful nationwide crusade for tougher laws against such criminals. Moreover , Busch had been arrested for drunk driving three times in the preceding four years , and when he killed Cari, he had been out of jail on bail for only two days after having been involved in another hit-and-run drunk-driving accident. In spite of Busch's record, and the fact that he was charged with three felony counts in Cari's death , he was allowed to plead "no contest" to a single charge of vehicular manslaughter, and all other charges against him were dropped . He was sentenced to two years in prison, and his driver's license was suspended. He
spent three months in a work camp and then moved to a halfway house in Sacramento, from which he was released in September 1981, just 16 months after Cari's funeral. The month before Busch was to be freed , the California department of motor vehicles informed him that he could have his driver's license back if he could get liability insurance. When Busch was arrested, Candy Lightner expected that he would go to jail for a long, long time. But an experienced policeman warned her that it was unlikely that he would go to jail at all , because at that time drunk drivers were not per~ ceived as criminals. Rather, judges and juries regarded drunk drivers as ordinary people like themselves , who had simply had an unfortunate accident after a couple of drinks. But Cari's death "was not an ' unfortunate accident ,"' says Candy Lightner. "Cari was the victim of a violent crime. If my daughter had been raped or murdered , no one would say of the killer, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' Death caused by drunk drivers is the only socially acceptable form of homicide. " Unwilling to permit her daughter's death to be meaningless, Candy Lightner quit her job selling real estate and , with several other concerned citizens, founded an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). She donated her time and most of her personal savings, as well as insurance money from Cari's death, to provide more than 60 percent of MADD's first-year budget. She supported herself and her two other children- Cari's twin sister, Serena, and a younger son, Travis-with help from her former husband and her widowed father. For three months, she studied laws and social policy concerning drunk driving; then she and MADD went public, armed with statistics and information that most people did not want to hear. Carrying the message that Ame rica
..
A few months after her daughter was killed by a ~ drunk driver (in May 411 ~ 1980), Candy Lightner formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Within months MADD had won nationwide recognition and support. Top: fo August 1980, she took part in a demonstration in favor of tough drunk-driving laws in Sacramento, Califomia,
and canvassed television audiences to join her campaign. Above: Lori Gaskins and Tommy Hicks were among several Americans who joined a vigil at the State House in Annapolis, Maryland, in support of MAD D's objectives. Left, above: In May 1981, Lightner appeared before the U.S. Congress and spoke in favor of a proposal by Senator
Claiborne Pell (sitting to her left) for mandatory suspension of driving licenses ofpeople convicted of drunk driving. The bill became law in October 1983. Left: On July 17, 1984, Lightner was present when President Reagan signed a law denying some federal high way funds to states that permit people under 21 to buy alcoholic beverages.
17
DRUNK DRIVING continued
must get its drunks off the road, Lightner appeared on radio and television programs, was interviewed by newspapers and magazines. gave lectures and held workshops. She told her audiences that 25,000 Americans die from drunk-driving accidents every year; that a million Americans are crippled or maimed by drunk drivers every year; that drunks account for half of America's traffic fatalities every year; that on a Friday or Saturday night one in every ten drivers is legally drunk; that a drunk driver has only about one chance in 2,000 of being apprehended; that the average police officer in California makes only two drunk-driving arrests per year; that most drunk drivers who are arrested neither go to jail nor lose their driving privileges; and that among those drivers whose licenses are revoked or suspended for repeated arrests. more than two-thirds continue to drive anyway. When the statistics are broken down to manageable proportions, they become even more horrifying than numbers in the millions can be. In the United States, nearly 70 people die each day (approximately one every 20 minutes) as a result of drunk-driving accidents, and another 2,750 (more than 110 per hour) are seriously injured. It has been estimated that one of every two Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related automobile accident during his or her life, and that one of every six children born today will be injured or killed in such an accident. When Candy Lightner began her work with MADD in 1980, she thought her crusade would take a couple of years to get moving. Instead, in about two months it had achieved nationwide recognition and support. She had laid bare an issue that touched the lives of nearly all Americans, and people rallied around her courage and her cause. Early the next year, in March 1981, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and· U.S. Representative Michael Barnes of Maryland introduced legislation proposing mandatory suspension of driver's licenses for people convicted of drunk driving, a bill that was signed into law in October 1983. Other grass roots organizations opposed to drunk driving, such as Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID) and Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD), sprang up all over the United States. and MADD grew to nearly 100 chapters in more than 30 states by 1983.
18
SPAN SI 1'1 l:MIJF.R 19&1
1
Bocmdirum mi-.wilh ~thil..
Approximate Blood Alcohol Content IOOY l'tl(;HT IN IOUlS
l l
0.04 0.08
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90
100
110
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The chart above shows that as the percentage of alcohol in the blood rises, a person becomes increasingly drunk, buJ people with greater body weight require more alcohol than those with lesser body weight 10 reach the same levels ofinebriation. In this chart one drink is presumed equal to 30 ml of JOO-proof spirits, 360 ml of beer, or 120 ml of table wine. Subtract 0. 01 percent for each 40 minutes of
drinking. Thus a person weighing 40 kilos would have an alcohol concentration level of 0. 03 if he took 40 minutes over his first drink. When blood alcohol concentration reads 0 . JO, the legal definition of drunk driving in most American states, a driver is six times more Likely to cause an accident than when he is not intoxicated at all. At 0.15 he is 25 times more likely to cause an accident.
Public attitudes toward drunk driving also began to change. In a 1982 survey, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asked if respondents agreed with the statement that drunk driving is a serious problem worth doing something about; 34 percent agreed and 64.8 percent strongly agreed. In the spring of 1982, President Reagan appointed a Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, of which Candy Lightner was a member. One of the commission's findings was that the states were beginning to tackle the problem: In the year preceding the commission's investigations. for example, 39 of the 50 states had
enacted improved drunk-driving legislation, and 41 bad established task forces or commissions to examine alcohol-related accidents. A 1983 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans (including 58 percent of those between 18 and 20) supported setting 21 as the legal minimum age for purchasing alcohol throughout the country. Presumably, the population was responding to findings that in every state where the minimum legal drinking age had been raised from 18 years to 21, there had been a significant drop in the death toll of young people on the roads. Congress put the force of the federal govern-
The party begins.
JL~~/~J~~ 2 drinks later.
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Joining lhe campaign to spread awareness about the dangers of mixing drinking with driving, several American organizations (government and private, and even some distilleries) have prepared posters, stickers and advertisements that convey the message. Schoolchildren (far left) are taught about the debilitating effects of alcohol in classrooms.
The more you drink. the more coordination you lose. That's a fact, plain and simple. Still, people drink too much and then go out and expect lo handle a car. When you drink too much you can't handle a car. You can't even handle a pen. The House of Seagram
MIU Hill YOU BE
1HOUSIUIDS Of DRUHM DRIVERS GET GROUltD£I> EVERY YERR.
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ment behind this movement in 1984 by passing legislation that would deny some federal highway funds to states that keep their drinking age under 21. At the signing ceremony for this bill , attended by Candy Lightner, President Reagan said he was convinced that the legislation would "help persuade state legislators to act in the national interest to save our children's lives." However, the problem is far from being solved. "The enormous danger lies in the possibility that these necessary changes will be mistaken for the ultimate solution to the problem," said the Presidential Commission's report. "Laws
alone will not dramatically change the drunk-driving problem. The individual and society, as a whole, must be active partners in this effort if we are to see changes over the long haul that will be sustained by future generations. Society bas shown itself to be willing; we must provide long-term leadership and innovative solutions." Soon after MADD went public, Los Angeles city attorney Burt Pines said, "It is time to recognize that a drunk driver is just as dangerous as a loaded gun." Today, members of such organizations as MADD are working effectively to change people's thinking and feelings, and the
nation's laws as well. They strive to make authorities increasingly accountable, they monitor courtrooms where drunk drivers are on trial, they lobby among legislators and they hold news conferences. MADD has produced real change. Only two years after Cari Lightner's death, drunk-driving arrests by the Maryland state police were up nearly 50 percent and highway deaths were down nearly 20 percent. In Maine, which instituted mandatory jail terms for convicted drunk drivers, alcohol-related traffic deaths fell almost 50 percent. In several states, local governments are supporting the antidrunk-driving campaign in innovative ways. Maine introduced a new tax on alcoholic beverages that is expected to yield $2 million to $3 million a year, to be spent on prevention and treatment of alcohol-related problems. In South Dakota, large signs reading "X marks the spot. ..THINK" have been placed at some 600 sites where drunk drivers have caused fatal accidents in the past four years. And at the end of September 1982, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill to set up a national driver register that would provide grant money to those states that agree to suspend the licenses of drunk drivers on their first convictions, and to jail them thereafter. However, according to Candy Lightner, new laws alone are not the answer. "I don't care how many laws there are," she says. "Until people actually change their thinking and feeling on drinking and driving and consider that they can kill themselves and others, legislation will be only a deterrent to the social drinker." California's former governor Edmund Brown, Jr., is in substantial agreement with her and sees the law as just one part of the solution. He says: "A large part of the problem stems from the social acceptance of drinking and driving, but public recognition of this problem is growing and with it demand for increased action from public officials. Government alone cannot change people's attitudes, but once society decides it will no longer tolerate the needless loss of thousands of lives each year, government can implement that policy through a concentrated effort to remove these drivers from our highways." D About the Author: William A. Henkin is a free-lance writer from Larkspur, California.
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
19
ON
THE LIGHT ER SIDE C 1985 Universal Press Syndic.ate
t¢.
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T~E
.JllPANESE
HAVE 'J>oNt IT AGAIN!!!
In God's kitchen. cartoon by Gary Latson.
© 1984 Bill Lee.
J
"His classmates were right. In high school he was voted most likely to become chairman of the bored. " Cartoon by Lo Linkert.
"It really wasn't my fault, Your Honor. I was led lo believe I was above the law. " Drawing by Joseph Fams, <!:) 1986 The New Yorker Magnone, Inc.
Art in Roosevelt House PHOTOGRAPHS BY AVINASH PASRICHA
In tribute to the American President after whom the Ambassador's residence in New Delhi is named, a bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt (right) by Jo Davidson (1883-1952) is placed at the entrance, welcoming visitors to the house.
The simple elegance ofthe central hall is the perfect setting for Frank Stella's graphics, Shartsville and Cato Manor (above). Born in Boston in 1936, Stella now lives in New York and has emerged as one of America's most success/ui abstract painters.
SPAN Scl'TEMOER 1986
2J
Roosevelt House in New Delhi, the residence of the American Ambassador in India since the 1960s, has over the years acquired an added dimension-as a repository of American art. The works on display in each room of the house reflect the vitality and vigor of contemporary American arts and the aesthetic tastes of its residents. Most of the paintings and sculptures are on loan from various American museums and private collections, under the U.S. Government's Art in Embassies Program. Each ambassadorial family also brings along its own private collection of mementos from all over the world, giving art in Roosevelt House an international flavor. Says Martine Dean, wife of Ambassador John Gunther Dean, "These things add that personal touch you need when you move from one official residence to another. They make our living here part of a continuous process. Each item has memories for us. They also make visitors to the house see it as a home." Pointing to some exquisite old books and silver objects, Mrs. Dean adds, "These are our friends that have been with us wherever we have gone."
JOSEF ALBERS
Renewed Hope (left, above) and Homage to the Square (left), oil on masonite, each 61 cm x 61 cm . The paintings are part of a series Albers began in 1949, using the square as a basic form to experiment with the organization of color. Born in Bottrop, Germany, in 1888, he died in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 25, 1976. Albers came to the United States in 1933 and taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1933-49), and at Yale University (1950-60). Honored with several awards, Albers is best known for his development ofthe principles of design and color.
MARTY MANNING HINMAN
Yellow Orchids (facing page), watercolor, 66 cm x 81 cm. Hinman has developed a technique of doing batik on Japanese rice paper; she now works primarily in that medium and in watercolor. Born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1948, she now lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
22
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
23
TAPESTRY AND TERRA COTTA The focal poim of the sitting room (right) is a tapestry woven in Arras, France (circa 1590), depicting Moses striking the rock to get water. On the right, in a glass case, is the Deans' collection of terra-cotta vases from the Mediterranean region.
NEW YORK, 17TH CENTURY This copper engraving of the New York harbor (below) was discovered in Europe.
Sll..VER BOXES The Deans' colleCJion of Oriental silver boxes (left) includes exquisite Indian comainers f or betel leaves and condiments.
INDIA, 17TH CENTURY
ALICE BABER
Ancient maps of India, with Dutch (left) and French (far left) markings, were gifted to the Deans by their children after their India posting.
The Path of the Sun Leads to the Piper, oil on canvas, 228 cm x I22 cm (above). Baber, who died in 1982, had group shows all over the United States, France, Germany, Au.stria, Holland and England. She was born in Charleston, Illinois.
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
25
HANS HOLBEIN
PORTRAITS (Facing page)
A Portrait of Queen Mary, 16th century (right). Holbein (1497-1543), a German painter who lived in England, hailed from a well-known f amity ofpainters. (His elder brother was also named Hans.)
1. Portrait of a Man, F. Vander Mijn (Dutch, 1719-83). 2. Lady with a Comb, Louis Corinth (German, 1858-1925). 3. Portrait of a Lady, F. Vander Mijn. 4. Portrait, Pellegrini (Italian, circa 1700).
READING PLEASURE Mrs. Martine Dean in the Roosevelt House Library (below). The Deans' collection of books includes an autographed copy of Thomas Paine's Le Sens Commun (1792), The Holy State by Thomas Fuller (1648) and handwritten (in Turkish and Arabic) pages ofan 1870 Koran. To her left are autographed porirqits ofall the American Presidents Ambassador Dean has served.
MEMENTOS OF JAPAN A series of Japanese wood block prints (above) by 18th- and 19th-century artists line the wall of the Deans' private sitting room.
TAUNI DE LESSEPS
THE RETURN OF GEORGE WASHINGTON The portrait of President Washington by Gilbert Stuart, presented to an Indian merchant in 1801, hung for more than a century and a half in Calcutta before being sold to an American collector. Ambassador Dean had it brought back to India, on loan. The unveiling
ceremony in January this year was attended by prominent Indian artists, including M.F. Husain (seen with the Deans, below). The portrait now hangs in the main hall of Roosevelt House (below, left).
Paul Revere, bronze sculpture, 61cmx99cm. French-born Lesseps, who now lives in New York, began sculpting in 1963. Untrained in art, she is also known -as an author, model and fashion editor. The sculpture of Revere pays tribute to an American patriot, silversmith and engraver, and immortalizes his famous ride to Lexington, Massachusetts, in April 1775 to warn his compatriot freedom fighters about British troops.
WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST
The Chief Justice-Designate by A.E. DICK HOWARD
Before he was nominated Chief Justice by President Reagan last June, Rehnquist had been a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 15 years. Here, a professor of law examines his record on the bench. Richard Nixon, who put him on the Supreme Court, had some trouble remembering his nominee's name; once he called him "Renchburg." Critics of the nomination, however, had little trouble remembering William H. Rehnquist's name. Delving into his political activities and philosophy, they were quick to condemn. The minority report filed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee declared that Rehnquist had "failed to show a demonstrated commitment to fundamental human rights," that he was "outside the mainstream. of American thought," and therefore should not be confirmed. Once on the Court, Justice Rehnquist soon became known for his willingness to stake out a position in the strongest of terms. Within months of taking his seat , Rehnquist began arguing that the Court should confine its uses of the 14th Amendment (enfranchising former slaves) by consulting the intent of its framers. Thus he argued, for example, against making alienage a "suspect classification" for the purposes of 14th Amendment review. Sugarman v. Dougall, 413 U.S. 634 (1973). Nor was Rehnquist deterred by finding himself the only dissenter in a case. For example , he was the sole dissenter when the Court overturned, on equal protection grounds, a Louisiana statute that denied unacknowledged illegitimate children recovery rights under a workers' compensation statute on their father's death. Here, as in the alienage case, Rehnquist found the majority's use of the 14th Amendment devoid of "any historical or textual support." Weber v. Aetna Casualty and Surety, 406 U.S. 164 (1972). Yet, for all his detractors, perhaps no justice at the Court generates more genuine warmth and regard among both his colleagues and others who work at the Court. A former law clerk to Justice Byron R. White describes Rehnquist as "the
nicest person at the Court. Within a few weeks of the term's commencement, Justice Rehnquist knew all the clerks by their first names." A ju~tice says of him, "Bill [Rehnquist) has an exceptional mind. No member of the Court carries more constitutional law in his head than he does." Examples include the Iranian assets case, the decision rejecting an attack on all-male registration for the draft, and decisions limiting the reach of the Miranda doctrine and of the Fourth Amendment's prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. Professor Owen Fiss and writer Charles Krauthammer have declared that there is a "vision" that informs the work of the Burger Court and that the "source of that vision" is Justice Rehnquist. What are some of the qualities that William H. Rehnquist brings to his work as chief justice of the Supreme Court? One is a powerful intellect. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an opponent of Rehnquist's confirmation , paid him the compliment (intending irony, no doubt) of being "a man with a quick, sharp intellect, who quotes Byron, Burke and Tennyson, who never splits an infinitive, who uses the subjunctive at least once in every speech . . .. " Students of the Court's opinions see a good mind at work. Professor Shapiro calls Rehnquist "a man of considerable intellectual power and independence of mind." Those who work with Rehnquist at the Court recognize bis intellectual qualities. A former law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan comments that he found Rehnquist to be "a fantastic writer, one who knows his own mind." Another key to Rehnquist's place on the Court is his well-formed jurisprudence. The Court during Rehnquist's time has not been noted for the coherence and consistency of its opinions. Sometimes judicial restraint seems to be the hallmark
Reprinted with permission of ABll Journal, journal of the legal profession
SPAN SEPTEMBER 19)l6
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CHIEF JUSTICE continued
(as in refusing to use the equal protection clause to decree that independent existence." States' rights had won. National League of Cities was a bold stroke, but subsequent states must correct imbalances in school financing between rich and poor school districts). Other times, judicial activism seems events revealed that Rehnquist lacked the votes to give his 10th to be the order of the day (as in finding a right to privacy that Amendment views firm grounding. In case after case after 1976, includes a woman's decision to have an abortion). Often the a majority of the justices rebuffed federalism attacks on acts of decisions of the Burger Court have been characterized by Congress. Then , in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 105 S.Ct. 10005 (1985), a majority of five justices shifting and unpredictable voting partners. In a Court often given to ad hoc and pragmatic decisions, a ruled that if the states "as states" want protection they must justice of firm, focused views stands out. Just as Hugo L. Black look to Congress, not the courts. National League of Cities was fashioned a comprehensive jurisprudence in another era on the overruled. In a brief dissent, Rehnquist made it clear that he Court, so does Rehnquist have a set of precepts to steer his hoped some day to see Garcia's demise. But for the moment, at least , that decision represents a rebuff to his efforts to give votes and opinions. Central to Rehnquist's views is his objection to the kind of genuine content to the 10th Amendment. Justice Rehnquist also found himself in dissent when the judicial activism often encompassed by the phrase, "the living Constitution." In a 1976 lecture , Rehnquist objected to the Burger Court began making increasingly active use of the notion that "nonelected members of the federal judiciary may dormant commerce clause to strike down state regulations address themselves to a social problem simply because other affecting commerce. When the Court in 1981 struck down an branches of government have failed or refused to do so." For Iowa ¡(aw largely banning 20-meter double trailers on its Rehnquist, such a freewheeling approach to constitutional law highways, Rehnquist complained that the Court's opinion "seriously intrudes upon the fundamental right of the states to is incompatible with a democratic society. Fidelity to the "original intent" of the framers is a pass laws to secure the safety of their citizens." Kassel v. cornerstone of Rehnquist's constitutional interpretation. For Consolidated Freightways, 450 U.S. 662 {1981). The Burger Court has been especially active in voiding state Rehnquist, the Constitution's language is not infinitely elastic, to be shaped to the perceived needs of succeeding generations. restraints on exports of a state's natural resources. In earlier Interviewed for this article, Rehnquist summed up his belief in cases, the Supreme Court has tended to sustain state preferthe centrality of original intent as a search for "what the words ences for local use of natural resources, but recent cases have struck down state restrictions on the export of such commodthey (the framers) used meant to them." Thus Rehnquist has emphasized that the principal purpose ities as minnows, hydroelectric power and groundwater. Rehnof those who drafted and adopted the 14th Amendment was to quist would prefer a more deferential stance toward state prevent invidious discrimination on the basis of race. Hence, policies, one that recognizes a state's "substantial interest" in the Court has no warrant extending the reach of that amend- preserving and regulating its resources. In line with his efforts to give local institutions breathing ment to other problems without historical evidence that the in which to handle local problems, Rehnquist has sought space compass. amendment's the within them framers meant to place lower federal courts' equity powers in institutional curb to runs that leitmotif a is Belief in the virtues of federalism Sometimes he has been successful, as in Rizzo litigation. reform both invokes He consistently through Rchnquist's opinions. 362 (1976). There Rehnquist reversed a U.S. 423 Goode, v. Court's the historical and structural arguments to support order to the Philadelphia Police Departcourt's district federal protection of the prerogatives of the states. The s.tructural on solely rely not does it for for dealing with complaints about police plan a interesting, submit to especially ment argument is the that maintains Rehnquist rested his opinion squarely on considRehnquist Constitution. misconduct. the language of the system federal the within erations of federalism-the need to allow a local government "implicit ordering of relationships" inmuch "as are that agency to do its job without undue judicial interference. yields "tacit postulates" of federalism " provisions. ln school desegregation cases, Rehnquist has had less grained in the fabric of the document as its express in curbing judicial power. Reviewing a district court success an One should not overemphasize the extent to which in "agenda" shapes the work of a justice, including Rehnquist. As order Dayton, Ohio, Rehnquist ordered the case remanded be puts it , "This is basically a reactive job. You take what in 1977 because of the disparity between the evidence of comes and do the best you can." Nevertheless, one cannot read constitutional violations and the lower court's "sweeping his opinions or speeches and miss the force of ideas, of history , remedy." Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman , 433 U.S. 406. of a jurisprudence of judging that informs bis work. Two years later, however, with two Ohio cases before the That being so, the question arises: What views and doctrines has Justice Rehnquist sought to have the Court adopt? And to Court (one of them the same Dayton litigation), the majority took a generous view of lower courts' equity powers, affirming what extent has he succeeded? Rehnquist's efforts to have the Court respect the values of remedies that Rehnquist , in dissent, described as being "as federalism have produced a mixed scorecard. Recalling how a complete and dramatic a displacement of local authority by the 1942 opinion dismissed the 10th Amendment as a mere federal judiciary as is possible in our federal system." Columbus "truism," Rehnquist has succeeded in making the issue of state Board of Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449. autonomy a serious question on the Court's agenda. The ¡ Two of the great battlegrounds of constitutional law , high-water mark of this effort was National League of Cities v. especially during the Warren and Burger eras, have been the Usery, 426 U.S. 833 (1976), in which the majority decided that due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th AmendCongress may not exercise its commerce power in such a way as ment. Rehnquist has sought to limit the Court's expansive use to displace functions essential to the states' "separate and of the clauses, but with limited success. Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S.
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693 (1976), is perhaps Rehnquist's most noted effort to curb the due process clause. There he held that an interest in reputation urged by the plaintiff (who had been named by the local police as an "active shoplifter" in flyers distributed to local merchants) was neither "liberty" nor "property" protected by the due process clause. And in Kelley v. Johnson, 425 U.S. 238 (1976), Rehnquist used a deferential standard of review to reject a policeman's challenge to his department's regulating the length and style of his hair. Despite Rehnquist's efforts, however, substantive due process has prospered in the Burger Court. Dissenting in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), Rehnquist argued in vain that the 14th Amendment's drafters never intended to withdraw from the states the power to regulate abortions. In a heated dissent from a 1977 decision invalidating New York restrictions on the sale and distribution of contraceptives to minors, Rehnquist thought it '"not difficult" to imagine the reaction of the framers of the 14th Amendment if they could have lived to sec "enshrined in the Constitution the right of commercial vendors of contraceptives to peddle them to unmarried minors." Rehnquist likewise has dissented from the Court's use of heightened due process review of laws affecting marriage and the family. The Burger Court has been less fond of the equal protection clause than was the Warren Court. But in at least one notable area-gender discrimination-the Court in recent years has vastly expanded the opportunities for judicial intervention. In gender cases, Rehnquist has fought, in effect, a series of delaying actions. In Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976), Rehnquist, dissenting, argued for the application of the traditional rational-basis test in reviewing allegations of gender discrimination, but the majority opted for a higher level of scrutiny. Applying an "intermediate" level of review, Rehnquist has written opinions rejecting an attack on California's statutory rape law (punishing the male but not the female participant) and upholding a federal statute authorizing the President to require the draft registration of males but not females. Gender discrimination cases have separated Rehnquist from his conservative colleague, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who in a 1982 opinion (from which Rehnquist dissented) shaped perhaps the Court's most rigorous gender discrimination language to date. Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. 718. In First Amendment cases, Rehnquist tried but failed to prevent the Court from bringing commercial speech under the amendment's umbrella. Dissenting in Virginia Pharmacy v. Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976), Rehnquist complained that the decision elevated commercial intercourse "between a seller hawking his wares and a buyer seeking to strike a bargain" to the same plane as the "free marketplace of ideas." Rehnquist has left an unmistakable stamp on criminal justice cases. Hints dropped in early Rehnquist opinions for a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule have taken root. Rehnquist has pushed successfully for other limitations on the rule's reach, such as the inevitable discovery and public safety exceptions that he spelled out in New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984). Similarly, he has been able in recent opinions to restrict the scope of Miranda requirements and the penalty for noncompliance. Rehnquist also has written opinions curtailing standing to assert exclusionary claims, such as the
Court's 1978 decision that passengers in an automobile lack standing to challenge the search of a glove compartment. Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128 (1978). ln Fourth Amendment cases, Rehnquist has expanded the scope of allowable searches by restricting the definition of what constitutes legitimate expectations of privacy or by balancing the privacy claim against societal or police efficiency interests. A central theme is deference to, and a presumption of, the validity of police actions. Illustrative Rehnquist opinions are INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210 (1984), holding that cordoning off a factory and interviewing workers is not a "seizure," and Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213 (1983), abandoning the Aguilar-Spinelli test for assessing informants' tips for a more relaxed "totality of the circumstances" approach. When prisoners have asked federal courts to intervene in prison administration, Rehnquist consistently has deferred to the discretion of prison administrators, writing a number of the Court's major opinions in this area. Similarly, in habeas corpus cases Rehnquist has taken a restrictive line. Rehnquist's major habeas corpus decision is Wainwright v. Sykes, 433 U.S. 72 (I 977), which instituted a "cause and prejudice" standard for failure to object during a state court trial, a standard that makes federal habeas more difficult to obtain. By limiting habeas availability to claims of guilt or innocence, Rehnquist seeks to promote the effective administration of justice, finality in criminal proceedings, and minimization of friction between state and federal courts. Section 1983 has been the font of many claims that some justices, Rehnquist among them, consider picayune and mcritless. Rehnquist has led the effort to curb the uses of 42 U .S.C. (Section) 1983. In 1981, he found that the availability of an adequate state remedy foreclosed a Section 1983 cause of action. Parratt v. Taylor, 451 U.S. 527. In 1986 he brought together a majority to hold that the mere negligence of a state official is not enough to sustain a Section 1983 action. Daniels v. Williams, 106 S.Ct. 662. A review of Justice Rehnquist's opinions reveals that no one on the Court writes with more style, force or assurance. It is hard to match Rehnquist's agility in shaping a record and marshaling arguments to reach a conclusion.' One is struck by the recurrence of certain basic themes. Prominent among these is federalism-a belief that federal intervention into the affairs of a state requires convincing justification and ought to be the exception to the rule. Other themes include an adherence to the framers' original intent, a skepticism about judges setting out to solve social problems, a deference to legislative judgments and to the political process, and a belief that judicial review ought to be kept well within defined bounds. Jn each Supreme Court era, there have been justices who tended to shape the ground on which the issues were debatcdBlack and Frankfurter are examples. la the Burger Court, Justice Rehnquist has gone from being the "lone dissenter" to being a key fighter in many of the major battles. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost. But when the history of the Burger Court is written, Justice Rehnquist will be recognized as a 0 catalyst to many of that tribunal's great struggles. About the Author: A.E. Dick Howard is a professor of law and public affairs at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
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Jl
hen news came that Benny Goodman passed away in his sleep on the afternoon of June 13 this year, at the age of 77, J experienced a deep sense of loss. Goodman , who, with his clarinet and his big band led a generation of music fans into the Swing Era of the 1930s, had become an everlasting presence in the world of jazz. His music and my love for jazz brought us together. Though I did not meet Goodman till 1972, we had been close "friends" through our shared music since 1944. His was a household name with jazz fans of my generation. What he said or did or recorded were matters of personal concern to us. The first jazz tunes I heard were "Tiger Rag" and "Sweet Sue" by the Benny Goodman (BG) T rio and quartet. More than Goodman's technique, it was the tone of his clarinet that was captivati ng, full and mellifluous in the slow numbers-especially in the low register-and fiery and impassioned as he soared high above the band, and, of course, the tasteful nasal filling-ins accompanying the vocalist or intermixing with Teddy Wilson's piano solos . Goodman's long musical career which commenced at the age of 10 in 1919, with his imitation of Ted Lewis's version of "When My Baby Smiles At Me," continued till the end. In May 1986, a month before he died , when he appeared at Columbia University to receive an honorary Doctor of Music degree, he responded to his citation by playing " Body and Soul ," as beautifully as ever. Benny never retired or fad ed from the musical scene, though jazz took a number of turns and evolved in many ways strange to the swing music of the 1930s of which he was styled king. He warmed the hearts of his fellow Americans with his music in countless Jive concerts countrywide and through radio,
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and, later, TV and film. He thrilled jazz fans by his presence and music in Europe, Australia. parts of Central America and Asia. It was a memorable event in 1956 when the King of Swing jammed with the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej, who played the altosax; according to the laconic Benny, "for a king, he was pretty good." Benny did not perform in India despite my ardent persuasion; an unforgivable failure of advocacy on my part. Goodman's musical beginnings were in the classics At the age of 9 he was given a clarinet by a synagogue in Chicago. When his father, a Russian immigrant Jew who eked out a precarious living as a cutter in a clothes factory. realized that Benny showed musical promise, he sent him to an old German teacher named Franz Schoeppc, who was a rigid classical disciplinarian. At the age of 10 Benny made his classical debut playing a Haydn transcription in a small concert with a little girl accompanying him at the piano. His double life in jazz and classics had started. Goodman's first encounter with classical musicians was in 1934 when he was barely 25 He had rashly set a date to record the Mozart quartet in Chicago with the brilliant Pro Arts String Quartet. He arrived in Chicago at 6 a.m. from Wisconsin after a one-night stand there. At IO a.m. he breezed into the recording studio, met the members of the group for the first time, took out his clarinet with the same reed with which he had played the "One O'clock Jump" the night before and barged right into the Mozart quartet-and right out of the studio a few bars later. Goodman records that his coperformers were surprisingly decent "and did nothing to add to my humiliation." There was no repetition of this musical disaster.
ATribute to the King of Swing by SOLi J. SORABJEE
The president of Jazz India's Delhi chapter reminisces about jazz wizard Benny Goodman.
Later he commissioned clarinet concertos by Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith and performed them, as also works by Weber, Debussy, Brahms and , of course , Mozart. In 1940 he established his position as a classical concert artist, when he performed a Bella Bartok work , "Contrasts," at the Carnegie Hall accompanied by Bartok on piano and Joseph Szigeti on violin. Two years earlier in January 1938 the same hall had resounded to the music of his full-scale jazz concert, the first of its kind and the highlight of Goodman's musical career. Oddly enough, Goodman was unsure about the concert's success. He did not think it would draw a full house and waited until the last minute to get tickets for his family only to discover that the house was completely sold out. He had to buy tickets from the black market. The Carnegie concert was a landmark for jazz, a recognition that this music was to be taken seriously as a new and vibrant art form. The watershed in Goodman's musical life was the night of August 21 , 1935, when he arrived at the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood, dejected after a disastrous cross-country tour during which the response to his band ranged from bewilderment to annoyance. On thjs historic night, Goodman, fearful of another flop, decided to play his favorite Fletcher Henderson arrangements. " If we had to flop," he said later, "at least I'd do it playing the kind of music I wanted to." The band played with gusto. When Bunny Berigan's trumpet solo in "King Porter Stomp" sent resounding waves across the ballroom, the crowd stopped dancing and gathered around the bandstand with a roar which for Goodman was "one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard in my life. " That was the birth of the Swing Era. Swing music was not in-
vented by Goodman. There grown around Goodman, most were other great swing bands of them about his supposed like those of Jimmy Lunceford, tight-fistedness. His povertyDuke Ellington ("It don't mean stricken youth explains his attia thing if it ain't got that tude to money. The story he swing") and the most swinging recently related at the Colof them all, the Count Basie umbia University function is a Band. But thanks to Fletcher good example of it. When Henderson's excellent arrange- Goodman was about 30 and ments and the National Broad- earning $90,000 a year, a unicasting Company's coast to versity asked him to be its dean coast radio program, Let's of music. "How much does it Dance, the Benny Goodman pay?" he asked. About $20,000 band made the greatest impact. he was told. "I told them I A crucial date which is apt to thought I'd just continue doing be forgotten is July 13, 1935, what I was doing," he said. when the first trio sides were But there are stories too cut. With these recordings, about his generosity and helpGoodman introduced a new 'tulness. Harry James received dimension to jazz in the form of a royalty check when some a soft, subtle chamber music Goodman records, on which style of play. Benny, on clar- he played, were reissued. "He in'et, was accompanied by Ted- didn't have to do it at all ," said dy Wilson on piano and Gene Harry James. "Those records Krupa on drums. The¡trio soon were his." Goodman gave became a quartet in 1936, when Glenn Miller money to get Lionel Hampton joined on the married and had forgotten about vibes. Some of these record- it completely until years later ings, "Who," "Sunday Sweet- when Miller wanted to return heart," "China Bay," "Moon- the money. glow," are pure delight for In the 1960s Benny assumed their exquisite arrangements the role of "International and wonderful improvisations. Ambassador with Clarinet." More important, the formation For many years Soviet officialof the group marked the begin- dom looked upon jazz with a ning of the dismantling of racial jaundked eye. When, finally, barriers in the world of jazz they decided to officially permit music. According to Lionel this form of music in their Hampton , "It was instant in- country, only Benny Goodman tegration. Black people didn't was acceptable to them. They mix with whites then." Benny could not have made a better summed up his attitude in one choice judging by the thundersentence: "l sell music, not ous ovation the Goodman band prejudice." received. Nikita Khrushchev Goodman was a strict disci- and his wife attended the openplinarian and a perfectionist. ing concert in Moscow. Good"If you are interested in music, man later recalled his lively you can't slop around. I ex- argument with the Soviet leadpected things and they had to er: "When Khrushchev said he be done." That was Goodman's didn't like jazz, I said, 'That's musical code of conduct which your privilege. But you've got he applied to all and most to let people play it. Artists strictly to himself. This made have to be allowed to work him unpopular with some musi- at their art, otherwise you cians who played with him. wouldn't have a Pushkin MuThey well remember his search- seum.'" Benny thought that ing glare, the notorious "Ray" Khrushchev "was a straightwhen someone goofed a note or forward person, a nice guy." spoiled a passage. Goodman's last major conQuite a few legends have cert was in 1978 at Carnegie
Hall- 40 years after his first concert. He had aged and this concert did not capture the spirit and atmosphere of the first one. Teddy Wilson was conspicuous by his absence. I first heard Goodman live just a year earlier- in May 1977 at the Belmont Race Track in New York. Goodman was in top form then , and so also were Buddy Tate on tenor sax and John Bunch on piano. Though Goodman had a reputation for being reticent and short-tempered, I found him friendly , relaxed and in a good mood when I met him for the first time in August 1972 in New York. He talked, played a small tune and I got myself photographed with him (SPAN, October 1985). He', had a wry sense of humor. I P~[ticularly remember our telephonic conversation in October 1976 when I was in London. I told him I was rather depressed at the eclipse of civil liberties in India during the emergency. Benny Goodman paused and said, "I know what. I will compose a good tune for you and call it 'Blues for Habeas Corpus.'" And he laughed! Another fond memory is of Goodman's 70th birthday party in New York on May 30, 1979. There were members of his family, his doctor, his attorney, some musicians and the attorney general of the state of New York who played the clarinet a la Goodman. Favorite Goodman tunes were played and Benny joined in a few numbers. The last time I met him was in October 1985 in New York. We talked about India and its young Prime Minister (who , he was delighted to bear, is also a jazz fan), the growing violence in the world, and, of course, about musicians, old and new. The king is dead, but not his music and his memory which will live long in the minds and hearts of those to whom he brought unfailing joy and cheer. 0
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Airborne Medics PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHUCK ZOVKO
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I
n cases of life-threatening injuries, sur- version of a hospital intensive-care unit. vival often depends on how soon a It is crammed with medical equipment victim gets expert medical atte ntion. and supplies-cardiac and bloodThis is the mission of trauma centers, a pressure monitors, oxygen masks and relatively new kind of emergency-care other breathing devices, bronchoscopes, facility- to treat severely injured persons bottles of blood and intravenous soluas quickly as possible and improve their tions, arrays of plastic tubing, syringes, chances of survival. drugs and bandages. Specialized care of trauma- injury Michael Rhodes, the hospital's trauma caused by accident or personal vio- chief and director of the MedEvac prolence- is one of the fastest-growing areas gram, estimates that 75 of the trauma of U.S. medicine . Trauma centers, usual- patients-about 15 percent-brought to ly hospital-affiliated , first appeared in the hospital by helicopter in one recent America a decade ago. Today, more than 18-month period would have died before 60 full-fledged trauma centers are in arriving if the airborne service had not operation nationwide. existed. Ambulances and helicopters, specially Rhodes set up the trauma center after a equipped and manned by medics skilled year of study with R. Adams Cowley, in life-saving techniques, rush patients director of the Maryland Institute for from accident scenes to trauma centers 24 Emergency Medical Service Systems in hours a day. Helicopters are used mainly Baltimore. Cowley is one of the nation 's for speedy transport of the most serious pre-eminent authorities on trauma care. cases from outlying areas. Time is the essential element in treatA typical trauma-care system is that of ing trauma , Rhodes says, citing computer the Lehigh Valley Hospital Center on the analyses by Cowley showing that people outskirts of Allentown in eastern Penn- who reach a trauma center within one sylvania. The hospital's trauma unit was hour of being injured have an 85 percent established in 1978, and its helicopter chance of survival. After o ne hour, the service- called MedEvac, an abbreviation survival rate drops sharply, declining by from the first syllables of "medical 12 percent every 15 minutes. evacuation"-began in 1981. The heliRhodes says the importance of prompt, copter and its three-person crew-nurse, expert trauma care cannot be overstated. paramedic, pilot-generally operate Trauma kills more than 165,000 Amerwithin a 100-kilometer radius of Allen- icans annually and permanently disables town. Overall, the MedEvac team con- at least twice that many. It is the fourth sists of seven nurses, six paramedics and leading cause of death in the United four pilots, who work rotating shifts States, after heart disease , cancer and round the clock. stroke, and the number one cause of The MedEvac helicopter is a miniature death among those under 38. T he work of the MedEvac team can be exhilarating, when a life is saved, or dispiriting, when a life is lost. But it is always challenging and mostly satisfying. Eileen Pozzi, 37, the bead flight nurse , says: "Some of the victims may have made it without us , but for the ones you can look at and say they survived because we got them here in time, it really makes you feel good. " 0 A MedEvac unit takes care of an accident victim within minutes of a crash. At left, paramedic Joe Golden uses a Laryngoscope to examine him at the site. Then, a helicopter lifts the victim (left above) to the trauma center of a hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Inside the craft, paramedic Paul Zondio helps the patient to breaihe by rapidly squeezing a rubber bag filled with oxygen (facing page).
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FOCUS
â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ Sister-City Bonds
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This Is New Delhi Calling On the eve of India's 39th independence anniversary on August 15, 1986, India and the Un ited States forged yet another important communications link when Minister of Communications Ram Niwas Mirdha telephoned U.S. Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige in Washington, D.C. , from New Delhi. They were inaugurating India's direct-dial telephone service to the United States. (With Baldrige at the ceremony were Ambassador John Gunther Dean and H.P. Goldfield, assistant secretary for trade development in the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce who is scheduled to visit India soon to give a new th rust to bilateral business links.) After his ten-minute talk with the Indian minister, Baldrige said, "The direct-dial service will contribute significantly to further expanding the close commercial relationship that is developing between the United States and India." He also noted that he was glad that America had worked closely with India to develop 36
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the system . "The United States has a vital interest in India's quest for a better telecommunications system," Baldrige said. Minister Mirdha also expressed the same hope: "There is a lot we can do to cooperate in the area of telecommunications. We are on the threshold of a great expansion in this area." The system has 200 circuits linking India and the United States. Seventy-five of these first connect India to Europe, via a satellite over the Indian Ocean, and then to the United States through a transatlantic cable. The other circuit lines reach the United States via Malaysia. Minister Mirdha's voice first traveled to England and then to France, from where it was carried by the transatlantic cable to New Jersey, then to New York and finally down the local trunk route to Washington. The direct telephonic link will also be a great boon to the Indians who have relatives and friends in the United States.
In July, more than 1,000 delegates from 25 countries gathered in Los Angeles, California, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Sister Cities International (SCI). A voluntary, nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., the SCI grew out of a suggestion by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. Its mission has been to foster international understanding through promoting people-to-people contacts between America and the world. In three decades, the SC I has forged lasting, friendly ties between 750 American cities and 1,100 cities in 86 countriestranscending the geographic boundaries and the cu ltural differences that separate them. Among these are seven Indian cities: Mercara (Karnataka) with Darien (Connecticut); Banga10.re (Karnataka) with Cleveland (Ohio); Bombay (Maharashtra) with Honolulu County (Hawaii); Ahmedabad (Gujarat) with Warren (Michigan); Shimla (Himachal Pradesh) with Carbondale (Illinois); Salem (Tamil Nadu) with Salem (Oregon); and Madras (Tamil Nadu) with Denver (Colorado). In 1982, the program got a further fillip when President Reagan initiated the Sister Cities International Youth Exchange project, under which four boys and six girls from Denver visited their sister city, Madras, earlier this year. They were headed by Ms. Frances M. Walloch and Ms. Padmin i Durr. During their two-week visit as state guests, they stayed with Indian families, met the governor and the chief minister, attended lectures and audiovisual shows on Indian culture, toured Mahabalipuram, Pondicherry, the temple town of Kumbakonam and the bird sanctuary at Vedanthangal. At the end, Walloch said, " We are overwhelmed by the hospitality. It was a great educative experience meeting Indian people firsthand and living with them. We are now in a much better position to appreciate the problems, the aspirations, the pro~ress India has made. The boys and the girls are very excited and are already thinking of coming back to see the rest of this vast country. I think these exchanges are the most effective way toward international understanding and peace."
A Time Freeze An unusual exhibit at the railroad museum in the city of Galveston, Texas, is a collection of 39 plastic sculptures called "A Moment Frozen in Time." Made from real-life characters, the figures encapsulate the times, the mores and the lifestyle of a bygone era. In the early 1930s, two New York artists, Elliot and Ivan Schwartz, saw a motley crowd at the Galveston railway
A Piano Wizard "A piano artist of highest order .... Uncommon skill and facility .... Great dexterity on keyboard . . .. Belongs in the list of pianistic greats .... " At 44, Roman Rudnytsky has won the acclaim of critics, the respect of his peers and a following of enthusiasts all over the world. He has given piano concerts throughout the United States, Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Central America, Pacific and Caribbean islands, and throughout Asia, including India in 1982. Rudnytsky, who is now
back in India, has also won ten prizes in some of the world's major piano contests, including second prize in the International Leventritt Competition - the most prestigious in America. His other awards include second prize in the International J.S. Bach Competition in Washington, D.C ., and laureate of both the "F. Busoni" and "A. Casagrande" competitions in Italy. On his second concert tour of India, Rudnytsky gave a piano recital in New Delhi late last month. This month he will perform in Calicut (10th and 11th), Pondicherry (18th) and Calcutta (20th).
station-conductors impatiently watching the time; businessmen, sports enthusiasts, parents and children waiting for the train; a photographer awaiting the arrival of a beauty queen; porters carrying fuggage; and a politician making small talk. They were so fascinated by the diverse, lively crowd that they decided to portray them in sculptures if they agreed to be their models. To the artists' pleasant surprise, they all agreed.
Born in 1942 in New York into a musical family, Rudnytsky began to learn how to play the piano at age 4 and gave his first full recital when he was only 7. He studied music at the Juilliard School in New York, the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria and attended master classes in Italy and California. He did his doctoral work at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Since 1972, Rudnytsky has been a member of the piano faculty of the Dana School of Music at the Youngstown State University in Ohio. â&#x20AC;˘Earlier, he taught at the Indiana University School of Music. SPAN SEPTEMBER 19~~
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GLivir/g GJridiaii Sculptures by JOHN RUSSELL
"Indian terra cottas have ... a rich, direct and immediate physicality, as if finger and thumb had worked overtime to capture the very stuff of Indian life and legend." Happily for us, there seems to be simply no end to the Festival of India that was inaugurated by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in June 1985 and is scheduled to keep going well into this year. By that time, and short of living the life of a lighthouse keeper in Alaska or a nomad in the Nevada desert, virtually every interested person in the United States will have been exposed to an Indian temptation. And in that context, very few people say "No." Many New Yorkers have learned from the festival exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, and at the Asia Society gallery, to love the inventive color, the compositional acrobatics and the delight in a good story that characterize Mughal painting. One such exhjbition, called "Painted Delight: Indian Paintings from Philadelphia Collections," was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April. Organized and cataloged by Dr. Stella Kramrisch, the museum's muchFrom Thâ&#x20AC;˘"'"" York Tunn. Copyright@ 1986by the New York Times Company.
Recently, the Brooklyn Museum in New York held an exhibition, "From Indian Earth: 4,000 Years of Terracotta Art." Facing page: Male Head with Turban, Kausambi, circa A. D. JOO to 300. terra cotta, height 12.5 cm. (Collection of the Allahabad Municipal Museum.) Left: Standing Female Figure, northwest India, circa 1st century, Lerra cotta, height 17.5 cm. (Collection of the Brooklyn Museum .)
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INDIAN SCULPTURES cominued
venerated emeritus curator of Indian art, it offered a brisk review of Indian painting from 1432 to around 1875, with particular and gorgeous emphasis on the great period of Mughal painting. As titles go, " Krishna and Balarama Take a Meal of Rice Boiled in Milk" may not strike you as a grabber , but the painting o f that name in Philadelphia will give you quite a new idea of that simplest of dishes. Meanwhile, we in New York had a change of pace, in that late io February, and with minimal fuss , two spectacular consignments of Indian sculpture came into town . They complemented and sometimes contradicted the riot of high living that was the keynote of "Costumes of Royal India" at the Metropolitan Museum. At the Brooklyn Museum there was an exhibition called "From Indian Earth: 4,000 Years of Terracotta Art," and at the Asia Society on Park A venue at 70th Street there was a reduced but still majestic version of " Kushan Sculpture: images From Early India," which was organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and first seen there last winter. The Brooklyn exhibition was predicated on the belief that "terra cottas may have more to tell us about lndian life than any other single art form. " lndian terra cottas have been a specialty of the Brooklyn Museum ever since the pioneering ethnologist Stewart Culin toured India on the museum's behalf in 1904, and it now has more than 200 of them in its permanent collections. The exhibition , which was organized and cataloged by Amy Poster, the museum's associate curator of Oriental art, consisted of more than 140 sculptures (chosen , as it happens, from a field that numbered more than 10,000). It was a tribute to Dr. Poster that 60 of the pieces in question came from India, together with a massive representation from public and private collections both in Europe and in the United States. Indian terra cottas have none of the finicky , fragile distinction that is sometimes associated with European terra cottas. They were made of the most basic of materials-wet earth-and with those most basic of instruments , the human fingers and thumbs. Whether in relief or plaque form, or as freestanding sculptures, they had a rich, direct and immediate physicality , as if finger and thumb had worked overtime to capture the very stuff of Indian life and legend; captured its essence. Furthermore, the Indian terra cotta had a universal, manifo ld and everyday function. It was a part of life from infa ncy onward. (Two of the earliest pieces in the Brooklyn show, dating from 2500to2000 B.C., were a toy whistle and a two-wheeled toy cart.) Baked clay figurines did duty as votive offerings, household gods or magical charms. Whether sacred or secular in their function , they have to this day a broad constituency throughout lndia. The Brooklyn exhibition came to a close, for instance, with a seated figure of four-armed and potbellied Ganesha that relates to the festival of Ganesha in August and September, and two little figures of horses and riders that relate to a Hindu festival during which roosters are sacrificed by the hundred. These particular traditions are still very much alive. In that and other ways, and though its popularity has been eroded on the mass market by the impact of cheaper and easier materials, terra cotta
40
SPAN SEP'lT::MBER 1986
Head of a Youth, Gandhara region, 4th century A.D., red terracotta, height 28.3 cm. (Collection of Samuel Eilenberg.)
sculpture in India has still much to say. It had also, at one time, an architectural function. Professor Vidya D ehejia of Columbia Unive rsity reminded us in the catalog that although terra cottas of one kind or another have often been within the reach of poor people, "terracotta is not necessarily a poor man's art." It was a favorite with Indian monarchs-above all in the Gupta period- who liked to build their tall temples of brick, and ornament them with terra-cotta plaques. As early as A.D. 636 a Chinese traveler in India reported seeing a brick temple, over 65 meters high, that had been embellished in that way to unforgettable effect. The sculptures that we saw in Brooklyn had, of course, been taken out of their original context. Terra cotta is a fragile material, no matter how powerfully it has been worked, and many of the sculptures on show were no longer intact. They came to us as survivors, and in some cases as victims, but they spoke without exception in a firm clear voice, and they brought with them insights into the Indian psyche that have an unfailing fascination . It is also relevant to the individualized and idiosyncratic impact of these sculptures that they are collected not only by museums in the West but by private collectors who are people of unusual interest and diversity . Many of the finest loans from New York City came, for example, from the collection of Samuel Eilenberg, a retired professor of mathematics at Columbia University who has
Yakshi , north or eastern India, I st century B. C., red molded terra-cona plaque, height 12 cm. (Private collection.)
been collecting Indian terra cottas for more than 40 years. Some of the liveliest of the 20th-century pieces are owned by Harry Holtzman, painter and sometime friend of Piet Mondrian. Others have recently entered august public collections in the United States. (A fine example, at once stately aQd frolicsome, is the fragmented 6th-century relief of Ganesha that is now in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth .) The high proportion of unpublished material in the show suggested that the dossier of the India terra cotta will remain open for a long time. The contribution of terra cotta to the "Kushan Sculpture" was in no way outclassed by the sculptures in bronze, sandstone, ivory and gold that made up the bulk of the show. Nor did their local and democratic character put them at a disadvantage in relation to the sophisticated and sometimes exotic imperial society that flourished from A.D . 100 to 300. Looking at the ewers, urns, reliquary stupas, rattles, ivory chair legs, doorjambs, railing pillars and red sandstone capitals that were a feature of the Kushan show, we got a powerful sense of the complex and eclectic society that was established by nomads who started out from the weste rn borders of China and proceeded toward India and Afghanistan, settling eventually within reach of the trade routes between the Mediterranean and India and China. Ports in the delta of the Indus River made it possible for them to be in contact with Rome. There was nothing
Dog, Pudukkottai (Tamil Nadu), early 20th century, red, hand-modeled terracotta, 29.8 x 30.5 cm. (Collection of Harry Holtzman.)
limited or essentially provincial about the Kushan empire, and that fact shows up in its art. It should also be said that many of the Kushan sculptures at the Asia Society were outstandingly voluptuous, even by the high standards that have always prevailed in India in that regard. In a graver vein , there is at least one sculpture that looks forward to the Gothic sculptures that were to be produced in Europe around 1,000 years later. The elegance and precision of the gold coinage, the witty and yet formidable figure of a red sandstone lion and the wealth of early Buddhist sculptures-all point to a society that had energy, ambition and an innate feeling for the monumental. It also drew heavily upon the passage of strangers - to be precise, of the merchants who would come to a city like Mathura, on the banks of the Yamuna, and hole up for quite some time before resuming the rigors of their long and very slow journeys. It was a cosmopolitan society that made them welcome-one in which race and religion were a matter for civilized tolerance and the merchant would be encouraged to leave some of his wealth behind him. It is thanks in part to that sponsorship that " Kushan 0 Sculpture" has so eclectic an impact. About the Author: John Russell is chief art critic of The New York Times and au1hor of several books including The Meanings of Modern Art and Erich Kleiber: A Memoir.
SPAN SEPTEMBER 1986
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shows the random visitor his town from the inside: the fall of a fruit from a drumstick tree is not just an insignificant act of gravity, of the season, but a complex of major yet unlabored exchanges. The human, the natural, and the artificial are one. Narayan's heroes, whether storytellers, working folk, beggars, or saints, never force the reader to feel like a tourist. Malgudi's statue of Sir Frederick Lawley is no Statue of Liberty; the Boardless Restaurant, as comfortable as it may be for the regulars, does not serve thousand Dante's Cafe varieties of cappucino; and the Mempi Hills can't boast the tallest crags, the most significant prehistoric artifacts , or the fiercest tigers in the world . Instead, Narayan's phenomena find their essence in a gentle, unpushy, seamless humanism. Because of the way details are seen and used, Malgudi's dust and noises, enmities and revelations simultaneously thrill and comfort, educate and entertain. "Narayan has a knack with people," says the Six years ago, when Narayan was honored by the author in this review of seven of his novels. American Academy of Arts and Letters, he mentioned Like Faulkner's Yokna- circumference behind it in that he could glance out any patawpha County, R .K. periodic puffs of smoke. In window at the Chelsea (his Narayan's fictional south the time it takes the train to favorite New York hotel) Indian town of Malgudi mo".e five kilometers, to un- and see Malgudi. " I find it seems, at first sight, both load two passengers and a wherever I go." In 12 novels small and sleepy. On an ac- chicken , and embark for the and almost 200 stories, writti ve day, the calls of vendors outer world , the sun-gleam ten over the past four decompete only with the cries on the tracks shifts from their cades, Narayan bas not only of birds. A few boats drift east side to their west. For described almost every leaf lazily past the north side of suburbs, Malgudi offers one in his kingdom, he has made town, on the meandering mildly coruscating jungle, Malgudi universal. But some Sarayu River; the owners are three or four lackadaisical readers, including this one, satisfied when they catch a villages, a couple of molder- like to take a writer's universingle fish. From the highest ing temples and a rather slow sality for granted and enjoy, roof, at Albert Mission Col- racetrack. Yet Malgudi com- instead, those particularities lege, a patient observer pensates for its lack of that make Malgudi so Indimight notice a train chugging p"hysical grandeur in the an, so emphatically not West south over the line of boats, quality and intimacy of its 23rd Street. Narayan has a knack with then west, and then back history. Narayan notices every cor- people. Annamalai, the north , trailing the town's tiny ner of his world and gives its gardener protagonist of a tiniest moments worth. He story in Under the Banyan Copyright Š Village Voice 1985.
Narayan's World
Tree, grows evocative mysteries as well as exotic poo11 chedi (flowering plants), within a plot structured on small events and seemingly casual contacts. In Annamalai's world, "evil plants" throw out their poison on the air and willfully give small children the stomachache. Annamalai's 15 years of service in the narrator's garden hasn't led to intimacy (why should it?). The narrator's basement is as good a place as any to light a cooking fi re; one lives by bizarre rules of conduct which are, it seems, dictated directly by Nature. In daily conversation, Annamalai talks to the wall , especially if he's defending himself from accusations. The narrator says, " No one is listening. Why do you address the wall?" Annamalai answers, "They are crouching behind it, not missing a word anyway." It is not that he's strange and paranoid, rather that his dignity and personality define their own terms. The narrator, a conventionally intelligent and perceptive man , is far more interested in Annamalai than Annamalai is in him .
T.
ch""'°'
clash of of personal style, even of world view is a common theme in Banyan Tree. "House Opposite" features the memorable obsessions of a hermit who can't keep his eyes or thoughts from the prostitute across the road. "Her hips were large, thighs stout like banana stalks, on the whole a mattresslike creature on which a patron could loll all night without a scrap of covering- 'Awful monster! Personification of evil!' He felt suddenly angry. Why on earth should the creature stand there and ruin his tapas: all the merit he had so
laboriously acquired was draining away like water through a sieve ." In "A Horse and Two Goats," Muni , the decrepit protagonist, is accosted by a red-faced foreign motorist as be sits in the shade of the town statue. Under the impression that he's selling the stupid foreigner his goats, Muni accepts Rs. 100-an immense amount for him. but a pittance for the tourist; what he has really sold is the statue. The bargain, as offkilter and misunderstood as it can be, symbolizes all human communication. The foreigner asks (from prejudice, or misguided sensitivity), "Have you any religious or spiritual scruples against English speech?" Muni does not understand a word he's saying. The traveler continues on and on about his work on the 40th floor of the Empire State Building, and about a recent power failure. " All the way in the train I kept thinking, and the minute I reached home in Connecticut I told my wife, Ruth, 'We will visit India this winter, it's time to look at other civilizations .... '" Neither Muni nor the foreigner can even see the other person before him, much less conduct a reasonable conversation, yet, as is typical in Narayan, everyone ends up with precisely what he deserves. Nambi, the old storyteller who closes Banyan Tree, is one of the most touching examples of the tragedy, and comedy, inherent in attempts at human contact. After pleasuring his fellow villagers for decades with at. least one ten-day-long story a month, Nambi's mind and tongue run dry. The Goddess, he feels , has withdrawn her inspiration. At the story's beginning, Nambi " ... never repeated the same kind of story or brought in the same
set of persons, and the village folk considered Nambi a sort of miracle, quoted his words of wisdom, and lived on the whole in an exalted plane of their own , though their life in all other respects was hard and drab. " By the story's end, Nambi has made a decision. He goes "up and down the viliage street shouting, 'I have a most wonderful tale to tell tonight. Come one and all ; don't miss iL .. "' The tale? Silence, now and for the rest of Nambi's days. These characters might be findable in New York-by Narayan. The clash of generations and cultures may occur ev'!rywhere; the fate of one person may be controlled by the decisions of another. But in Malgudi, these transactions depend on such factors as the way a man reads the Bhagavad Gita, the way another kidnaps an innocent bystander and makes him privy to hyena- and tiger-poaching, the way a divorced couple accidentally meet, in the rain , in the shelter of an enormous banyan tree. Time, place and character are all expressions of one reality in Malgudi town. Vasu, the raving taxidermist of The Man-Eater of Malgudi; Daisy, the highm.inded yet sexy birth-control specialist of The Painter of Signs; Mali, the wastrel with the grand plan of selling novel-writing machines (The Vendor of Sweets) - all are minor characters who nearly destroy the protagonists of their tales. It doesn't take the death of a king to transform Malgudi: trees and trains, shop signs and armchairs, clucking chickens and lowing cows can change the face of the world . Each citizen, each bit of the landscape, is part of a vast interconnecting network that shifts whenever another citizen begins to act
or even when a drumstick tree decides to drop its fruit. Each act multiplies all the others and defines them. It would be fair to call Narayan the Faulkner of south India if that label were not so ethnocentric, if the two writers were no t so different in other ways, if Narayan were not so charmingly, gently funny. Faulkner had his moment, particularly in The Hamlet and The Town (for example, when Stamper sells Ab his own old horse, painted and fattened with air from a bicycle pump). But nobody would accuse Faulkner of being a side-splitter. Narayan may share Faulkner's taste for the grotesque, but he keeps his readers smiling- his grotesqueries are more folklorish than nightmarish. Vasu, Daisy, even Raju , the cuckolder turned i,ruru (in The Guide), are all. like Faulkner's people, creatures tricked by fate to become their fundamental selves-but their tragic flaws evoke a compassion of laughter, not a shiver of horror. Malgudi's melodramas may share some motivating factors with those of Yoknapatawpha County, but the sensibility in charge is a far less tortured one.
Narnyoo's
â&#x20AC;˘oke is
musical, like Faulkner's, but it doesn't resound. He mixes a natural Wt and flow with a kind of reflexive prep-school stammer, as when the protagonist, a tiger, first has his say in A Tiger for Malgudi: "The leopard was not the last of my worries. r could ignore him and go on my way. Not so a female of our species, whom I encountered beyond those mango groves .... I tried to throttle her, with the sort of hold that would make a wild buffalo limp in a
second. But this lady surprised me by throwing me off her back with a jerk. My claws were buried in skin, but that did not make any difference to her as she turned round and gashed my eyes .. . ." Narayan tends to stick to a simple diction, derived from oral tradition: his fanciest technique is to alternate chapters in fi.rstperson and third-person narration, doubling certain details and locutions to heighten the feeling of being absolutely present everywhere all the time. In the vast panorama of Narayan's Malgudi novels and stories, he has returned readers again and again to the same streets, the same sites. Through the eyes of different characters, he has created vastly different impressions. Mempi Hills , Sir Frederick Lawley, Albert Mission College and the Untouchables' Village are at once multiple realities and sustained, singular ones. Nataraj the printer, Raman the painter of signs, even the dog that slinks time and again after the blind beggar, are all as different in their various incarnations (each of them appears in several stories) as they would be if their neighbors had written down the gossip, the wandering impressions, every time these characters walked by. This quality of intimate affect, combined with an engaging style, a pointed plot, a gently ironic delivery and a thorough sense of location, has made Narayan 's world a compelling one. Malgudi's strongest feature- sameness in multiplicity, pointedness in seeming diffusion- is also Narayan's greatest writerly virtue. D
About the Author: Jacqueline Austin is a free-lance writerfor American publications¡ like Village Voice and The New York Times.
Text by RICHARD WOLKOMIR
Photographs by RICHARD HOWARD
Architect Bob Leathers's playgrounds are designed in brainstorming sessions (above) with the children who will use them. And the builders.are the youngsters, their parents and their teachers.
swarm of kids and 350 beaming adults stood on the lawn of the Mount Vernon , Iowa , elementary school one bright Sunday evening in April 1985. In unison, they counted down: " ... tennine-eight-seven .... " At "zero," the kids whooped. And then, like Crusaders storming the walls of Jerusalem, they ran full tilt onto their new playground, finished just ten minutes before, a crenellated, turreted, ramped, bridged , cubbyholed and passagewayed complex of transmogrified tires, salvaged telephone poles and sanded pine boards. The children clambered up the playground's castle turrets and they slid down and around a corkscrewing slide. They spelunked in tractor-tire caves, bounced across a rubber bridge , manned the steering wheels (detached from junked cars) of the spaceship-clipper-racer-whatever-you-want creation at the playground's center, and slid yelling down the fire poles, while the Mount Vernon High School "Wonder Band" oompahpahed. Mothers, fa thers, teachers and neighbors, who had just finished sawing and nailing the playground together, watched with extremely broad smiles. In the middle of the uproar, powdered with sawdust, ebullient as a new daddy about to pass out cigars, was Bob Leathers, a gray-mustachioed architect with a frin ge of shoulder-length graying hair, who wore battered Nike running shoes, jeans, a denim jacket, a frayed Israeli Army work hat and a big, boyish grin. Leathers is the godfather of Mount Vernon's two new playgrounds and of approximately 250 others across the country, each the product of a 1980s variation on an American tradition: the community barn raising. From his offices in Ithaca, New York, Leathers goes Johnny Appleseeding across the country, planting vacant lots and school yards with playgrounds concocted from heaps of donated lumber, nails and general flotsam, built by brigades of volunteers. Visually , the playgrounds are stunning, perhaps because they are constructed, chiefly , of a rare intangible-community 'Spirit. Leathers's playgrounds are designed, to a
surprising extent , by the children who will use them. They are funded , largely, by donations of money and materials from local citizens and businesses. And they are constructed by hundreds of turned-on kids, moms, dads, teachers and neighbors, many of whom have never before wielded a hacksaw or even heard of a boom auger, which drills holes fo r telephone poles. "Kids are great. but what really gets me is the community thing, maybe because 1 grew up as an only child in Bangor, Maine , maybe because I spent seventh grade alone at home paralyzed , only temporarily, with polio-and certainly because I'm a product of 1960s communalism." says Leathers. As a child, when he wasn 't helping at his father's Bangor gas station , he was building tree house after tree house, some two or three stories high, with a troop of friends. "The woods are still the best playground there is," he says. And his mother remembers him at the beach, constructing intricate sand villages, from which other children were banned . "They had no respect," Leathers grumbles. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965, he joined a large Oregon architectural fi rm , designing office buildings. He and his family lived in one of that era's flourishing communes, and he spent time designing lightand-sound "happenings" for rock groups. "1 worked at a community theater, which 1 continued when my family and I moved to Ithaca , but then 1 discovered that, for bringing a community together, even better than theater is a real happening-a playground ," he says. The discovery was serendipito us. In 1970, when his three older children were still tykes, he volunteered to design an Ithaca school playgro und . Then other nearby schoo_ls persuaded him to do the same for them. An admiring visitor wanted a playground for his Long Island community and that Jed to more requests even fart her afield. Until 1981 the playgrounds were a nonprofit hobby for Leathers, who has all the energy of a hyperactive 11-year-old . His wife says, "He even sleeps at 150 kilometers per hour. " Even so, at approximately 40 playgrounds a year, he has had to incorporate the projects into his regular architectural practice . Playgrounds now make up 40 percent of bis firm's output. He charges less for them- his fees for designing, organizing and supervising the construction of a playground range from $1,500 to $6,500. He still insists on community effort, even for such unlikely clients as Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the pandas in Washington's
Reprinted from th¢ Smi1hso11ian magazine. Copyright
©
National Zoo, for whom he recently designed an outdoor play and exercise structure. " In this case," he says, ·'hundreds of volunteers turned out to build something for these national treasures." Leathers "met" with his "clie nts," observed thei.r antics, talked with their keepers, studied their naturaJ environment and consulted with zoo experts. Then , in wood , he created a structure inspired by the ridges and ledges of the Chinese mountains where wild pandas climb. A more typical playground project got under way at Jack Elementary School, in the Munjoy Hill area of Portland, Maine, one sunny Thursday morning of April in 1985. On this "Design Day," Leatherswearing his customary denims and a red T-shirt with a sketched playgrQund captioned "We Built It Together"-sat at a cafeteria table, his pencil poised over the half-drawn plan for a playground . Sixteen wide-eyed kindergartners crowded around him , hands raised and vibrating. "OK, now this playground is going to have a lot of bouncy bridges, and a big tower, and over here's a tunnel, and there are rings for you to swing on , and a big dinosaur you can climb-anyone want anything else?" Leathers asked. " A slide?" suggested a towhead, wearing a Celtics sweat shirt. " OK, see this dinosaur"s tail?'' said Leathers, pencil darting at the plan. "That's going to be a bumpy slide that goes right into this cave full of .. . MONSTERS!" "A curvy slide?" asked a freckled redhead in green. "That's a good idea," said Leathers. " Let's see if we can make this bumpy dinosaur-tail slide a curving slide, too ." His pencil darted and the dinosaur's tail acq uired a dramatic curve. After the kindergartners' teacher led them away, a class of first-graders crowded around the architect. " You know what's under this bridge?" he asked. "You know the three Billy Goats Gruff?" "A TROLL!" clamored th e children. "We're going to build this in four days," said Leathers, "and do you know who's going to build it?" " WE ARE!" the children cried . Meanwhile, school principal Cheryl Jensen showed a visitor the school's corridors, plastered with playground artifacts , from a drawing of smiling stick figures swinging hammers to playgrounds modeled in clay and sheets of paper listing "our ideas." "This is Portland's inner city, and 91 percent of our pupils come from low-income families ," Jensen said. "For many of them,
198S. Richard Wolkomir.
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PLAYFUL DESIGNS continued
the school is the most stable thing in their lives. Many have never been on a bus, to the beach, or even out of the neighborhoodfor them, this playground could be a real enrichment." That evening, 150 dubious parents filtered into Jack Elementary's gymnasium. Bob Leathers took the microphone and showed slides of some of his completed playgrounds. One man worried that the playground soon would be vandalized into rubble. " When the kids and the community build these projects themselves, the good feeling lasts," Leathers said, with a preacher's fervor. "We've put up these playgrounds in tough sections of New York City, and they're still doing fine." By meeting's end, the audience had learned that two playgrounds-one at Jack and one at nearby Adams School-would cost more than $200,000 built commercially. However, with volunteer labor , loaned tools and donated supplies, it would be about $35,000. They would be able to raise the money, Leathers assured them. "I wanted to keep costs down for a playground in Sodus, New York, where a lot of the people are very poor-migratory apple pickersbut they said, 'We don't want a second-rate playground .' I told them that if they could raise $5 ,000 it would be a lot. They raised more than $30,000!'' Applause broke out and people began signing up. Meanwhile, 1,600 kilometers to the west, Mount Vernon , Iowa-atop a hill , with a population of 3,500, including 1,100 students at Cornell College-was out to prove that a community really could build its own superplayground. Leathers had blown in the previous September, staying with a local family to cut the community's costs. He had met with students, designed playgrounds for Washington Elementary School and Mount Vernon Middle School, whipped up enthusiasm and buzzed out of the nearby Cedar Rapids airport , leaving pre~ise guidelines for committees to be formed, money to be raised , and materials and tools to be begged, borrowed or, only as a last resort , bought. Project coordinator
Above: In the new playground at Mount Vernon's elementary school, Anne Halsey, I 1, intently practices for a contest to see who can stay the longest on a platform swing. Below: Catherine Hileman, 2, squirms out of a tire ladder as Steven Steggalt eagerly awaits his turn.
Clockwise from top left: Just a few phone poles are in place at 7 a. m. on Thursday at Mount Vernon's elementary school. By 6 p.m. , the poles and posts are set and the maze floor begun. By Sunday, volunteers have begun to put the finishing touches to the structure to get the playground ready by that evening.
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PLAYFUL DESIGNS continued
Jackie Martin , a preschool teacher and author of children's books, and fellow volunteers found themselves responsible for making two community playgrounds. Over the winter, Mount Vernon's playground enthusiasts dug in. "First we did 'Buy-a-Board,' with kids collecting donations for the playgrounds' wood , $3 for each board- they raised more than $7 ,000," says Mrs. Dillard , a homemaker who cochaired the all-important fund-raising committee. ("I went to the initial meeting just to see what was going on and walked out the treasurer. ") Her daughter Sarah, in grade three, alone sold 40 boards. One sunny October day, 35 kids gleaned a farmer's fields for unharvested corn, tossing two tons of ears into a pickup truck for sale to a grain elevator. Then there was the monster "garage sale" in a big auction hall , when Mount Vernon's citizens gathered to buy back the various castoffs they had previously donated, everything from water heaters to a pedigreed black-and-white rabbit, which went for $9. The sale netted another $5,500. A Cornell social group raised about $300 collecting deposit cans and bottles. And there was a chicken dinner, raffles and a Rotary versus Lions basketball game, plus individual and business donations. Suddenly it was spring and the playground committee found , to its astonishment , that it had raised
$40,000. By April 23, 1985, when Leathers flew back with two assistants-Ernie Bayles and Barry Segal-Mount Vernon's playground activists, besides raising large sums, had, wizardlike, caused donated equipment to accumulate in magnificent heaps. Materials chairwoman Connie Boettcher ("This Is No Ordinary Housewife You' re Dealing With," said the legend on her football jersey) stood on the Cedar Rapids wrecking company's trailer that served as her on-site headquarters, presiding over her hoard of carriage bolts, eyebolts, machine bolts, drill bits, sandpaper, duct tape, nuts, nails , washers and caulk donated by local stores. She also commanded tubs of custom-cut washers supplied by the Mt. Vernon Steel & Wire Co. for bolting together the 40 tractor tires, 100 truck tires, and 300 car tires that Connie , six other adult volunteers and ten kids had collected in Cedar Rapids in an all-day downpour, hauling them home on a truck furnished by Wilkin Elevator of nearby Lisbon. Now a tractor donated by a carpenter was scooping up sod from the playground site. Cedar Rapids' Plaza Paint had contributed gallons of paint, sealer,
48
SPAN SFPTEMBER 1986
thinner and six cans of spray paint, which Barry Segal was using to color code scores of embedded stakes indicating spots where the boom auger, on loan from Linn County Rural Electric, should drill boles for the telephone poles, from Northwestern Bell , that would hold up the playground. On Thursday- cloudy, windy and cold - a steady stream of volunteers was signing in at the registration tent. By now a forest of poles stuck up starkly from the ground, evoking the aftermath of a forest fire. Stoically surveying this unpromising scene, a frecklefaced third-grader named Tim Jones
100 extension cords, 300 hammers, six chain saws, two backhoes, a front-end loader, 40 levels, 50 scrub brushes , 25 electric drills, 30 rakes, 20 wood rasps, 12 belt sanders, four disk sanders, 45 circular saws, 60 sawhorses, 20 screwdrivers, 40 shovels, 35 framing squares, 15 combination squares and eight wheelbarrows, not to mention socket wrenches, open-end wrenches, electric impact wrenches , crescent wrenches, utility knives, torches, tin snips, tape measures, table-saws, handsaws and hacksaws. Connie Boettcher, presiding over this arsenal assembled by her husband and a middle school teacher, maintained contact via walkie-talkie with the two site supervisors. "When the kids and the "I knew we could do it, but I didn't think community build these projects, we could do it this well,'' commented Stephanie Frantz, holding a hammer. "Did the good feeling lasts." you know that a grandparent donated the oak tree that became the big beam to hold said hopefully: "Well, it looks like a pretty up that tire swing?" good playground so far." Tall, blond Ed Bjork , an architectural Work started in the mornings at 7 and hardware consultant, having finished work usually continued until about 10 at night, atop one of the castle's towers, took a under lights. A carnival atmosphere set in to shortcut and whizzed down a just-assembled the music of construction, with several slide. Iowa Department of Transportation hundred hammers providing the percussion special investigator Kerry Kirkpatrick, who and circular saws screeching the tune. Con- had a decided limp as the project progressnie Boettcher mashed her thumb and the ed, said, "It hurts , but it hurts good." doctor thought it was broken, but she was And then it was Sunday evening, the back quickly , handing out tools with one community had counted down in unison, the hand in a cast. Dorsey Chambers, a Cornell kids had charged onto the completed playCollege sophomore from Chicago, had two ground and the project was over. Long blood blisters, a big sliver in one finger and a after dark, with children still rampaging sore back from leaning over a sawhorse all through the playground, after the celebraday sanding, but she was having a good tory potluck supper, the standing ovation time. " In Chicago I don't even know any of for Bob Leathers, Barry Segal and Ernie my neighbors,'' she said, bolting together Bayles, and the presentations of memento tires with Tom Madson, the high school T-shirts ("Mt. Vernon: One Hill of a principal. Nobody knew exactly what the Town"), everybody stood around dazed. tires were for. Nobody knew why they were Bob Leathers swung on a suspended nailing what they were nailing, or digging tire , watching the kids swarm over the where they were digging. Only Barry Segal playground and grinning beatifically. " I'm and Ernie Bayles knew, but they were too already experiencing postplayground letbusy to explain. And so was Bob Leathers, down ," sighed attorney Darrel Morf. Tom racing between the elementary school and Wilkinson , a foreman at Rockwell Graphmiddle school sites in a borrowed jalopy ics, had a cure. with no muffler. "I hear they're working on a project just In fact, the jumble of posts and boards like this in Portland, Maine," he said, was taking shape. At one end, to the watching his children climbing the towers astonishment of those who had been work- under the lights, jouncing across the rubber ing on it, a castle was rising. Bolted-together bridge and hanging from a horizontal ladtires, now topped with wooden platforms, der. "l think I may take my vacation up had become tipsy seats to ride. A corkscrew there next autumn and give them a slide was half-assembled. And that con- band. " D veyor belt was becoming a bouncy bridge between two platforms. About the Author: Richard Wolkomir, a freeHundreds of volunteers swarmed over lance writer who lives in New England, is a the site, wielding loaned tools. T here were frequent contributor to the Smithsonian magazine.
A Fair to Retnetnber
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEE BATTAGLIA
Sporting fancy headgear, a young American Indian awaits his tum to perform a traditional dance. A cowboy tries to keep his balance on a bucking bronco at the rodeo championship. Farmers admire a new soil mulcher. A monorail takes passengers on a six-meter-high, two-kilometer-long tour. Pickup trucks take part in test-of-strength contests. Watching all this, a grizzled cowboy-part of the 1.5 million crowd reflected in his sunglasses-smiles. Welcome to the State Fair of Oklahoma, one of the largest ex-
positions on the North American continent. These vignettes sum up the range of attractions this tenda y fair offers every year. The livestock section has exhibit classes for horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and poultry. In the championship rodeo the excitement of the tough sport is enhanced by performances by top country and western singers. The International Show (with duty-free status) spotlights a wide variety of exhibits to promote tourism and national products. A carnival- the world's largest- presents more than 100
rides, shows and games. Over 7 ,000 entries are judged here each year in arts, crafts and hobby competitions running the gamut from the "Fastest Needle in the West" to the "Working Mother's Casserole." Some of the exhibits are housed in the 28 buildings that are part of the fair's permanent 176-bectare site. There are separate buildings for Youth Activities, Food and Fiber, Travel and Transportation, Gardens and Flowers. Together they present a vibrant, exciting picture of Oklahoma. The fair was
chartered in 1907, the year Oklahoma achieved statehood, as an outgrowth of the Territorial Exposition first held in 1893. Oklahoma is also the first American state to open a trade office in India. Governor George Nigh of Oklahoma, who was in New Delhi recently, has appointed Mrs. Leila Gurcharan Singh (E-18 Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024) as the state's representative to facilitate contacts in a wide range of areas: commerce and trade, educational and vocational training, and cultural and social activities.