Last week in this space I jumped the gun a bit by celebrating July 4th in advance. Today it’s actually here, which means I’ll continue the celebration. First, though, I’ll go back to Michael Pearson, the English historian with the dim view of some of the heroes of our Revolution. Two of his least favorite people were Samuel Adams, the Boston agitator who kept stirring up the people there against the Redcoats, and John Hancock, the wealthy merchant who bankrolled him. Adams was of course a “demagogue” and Hancock a rich dilettante who was pulling his strings. A proper hiding would do each of these wretches no end of good, God bless my soul, sir.

Another aversion of his was Benjamin Franklin, who proved himself not quite a gentleman when he opened some letters of Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts that came into his hands and sent them back to Boston from London, where he represented Massachusetts pre-war. The letters showed the governor to be demanding harsh punishment for his own state for resisting the King’s taxes, This resulted in a petition to the King for his immediate removal from office. Franklin refused to display any remorse for his naughty actions. Apologies weren’t in his line.

Another British writer from the turn of the century, George Trevelyan, thought otherwise about Franklin. He considered him justified in opening the letters since the British Post Office always opened his. He went on to describe Franklin’s career as America’s envoy to France as a triumph without parallel in diplomatic history. With no money and no assistants available he dazzled the French court and the Paris elite by personality alone and eventually had the satisfaction of seeing France recognize America as a free nation and sign a treaty of alliance in earnest of this. Three years later the presence of a French fleet and French troops at Yorktown enabled Washington and his men to force the surrender of Cornwallis and end the war.

Both the English writers, seventy years apart, came down hard on the French diplomats for their cruel deception of the trusting British in denying that they were shipping guns and ammunition hand over fist to the Americans long before the recognition in 1778. Inexcusable behavior, they called it. They seemed to forget that fifteen years before in the Seven Years’ War Britain had seized Canada, India and other territories from the French, which the latter could hardly be expected to swallow without some attempt at revenge. A century later in 1880 when a British general, Gordon, was killed in the Sudan, the British waited eighteen years before wiping out hordes of Arabs in retribution. Then they made movies about it.

The British writers are also inclined to dwell on the rebels’ alleged propensity to shoot and stab prisoners and remove their scalps as well when successfully ambushing them through “sneak” tactics. They don’t give equal space to the similar behavior of their soldiers, not to mention their wholesale looting. They even did this when running for their lives in ’75 on the road to Boston from Concord. The source for this is English.

There were atrocities on both sides, as in all wars. In particular the irregulars on both sides were guilty of this. The Patriots and the Tories as they were known were usually neighbors so the mutual hatred was intense. The result was a lot of dirty work by both sides when they got the chance to abuse prisoners. On the English side, though, the regular army was also involved in atrocities. The worst was the practice of confining prisoners in ships at their moorings, called hulks, where disease and hunger ran wild and killed large numbers. In 1777 Washington issued an order to his army that its prisoners were on no account to be treated in the British way. Today that would be called taking the high road. Washington was like that and he got the army to listen to him, mostly.

Washington’s policy of humanity proved itself at the end of the war when of the !3,988 Hessian soldiers who survived it, 3,194 (23%) elected to stay in the country rather than return to Germany. A number of those who returned only did so to collect their families and come back to America. Considering that the Hessians were well hated by the Americans as a lot of foreign mercenaries serving for money and loot alone, this speaks pretty well for Washington’s ideas, which originated with his capture of 900 or so Hessians at Trenton in December 1776.

Dwelling on the seamy side of American history is no way to celebrate July 4th. It certainly wasn’t when I got my introduction to history in grammar school way back when. (The school is the one shown from the outside in the movie “Doubt”. The interior scenes were filmed in another school.) We kids then were practically wetbacks, many of our parents having immigrated from Europe. Europe? Where was that? It got mentioned all right, but only in footnotes. History began and ended with America. Two pictures were on the wall in every classroom -- Washington and Lincoln. The Revolution was taught as Holy Writ. The Declaration; a masterpiece. The Hessians; outlaws. King George; a nut job. So it went. We were indoctrinated and we took to it like ducks to water. To tell the truth, I’m still swimming. Happy holiday!

Oh beautiful for baseball games

For happy days of golf

For tennis too if that’s for you ,

My TV’s never off.

We like our sports vicariously

We sit us down and root

And if we end victoriously

We hoist a Bud to salute.

(America, America, that wasn’t the pioneers’ way

They weren’t no couch potatoes

The game they played was the Indian raid

Where the winner scalped all the spectators.)

Americans, Americans,

Throw your remotes away

Get off your duffs and strut your stuff

And melt the fat away!

(When it disappears from between your ears

Now that’ll be an Independence Day.)

THE DEFAMATION OF INDEPENDENCE

July Fourth is here again and patriotism is busting out all over. My own is overflowing as you can see from the verse above, bursting with good advice for all and sundry. To stimulate it further I did some skimming in a book I’ve read already, but which has always been worth another look. It’s about the Revolution and it’s called “Those Damned Rebels.” The writer is named Michael Pearson and he examines things from the “British point of view.” This means that he makes it clear that he regards the Americans who dissed the Empire at that time as pretty much a gang of stinkers who would have gotten a jolly good thrashing if people like himself had been in charge of things.

This doesn’t fit in very well with the Brits erecting a statue of George Washington in London or graciously accepting our help in two world wars lest they be overrun by the Germans, but he’s entitled to his opinion, no doubt. Probably he believes America would have been even more useful to Britain if it had continued as a colony, but he can’t prove that, and the actual facts of the Twentieth Century don’t support his case.

He’s not obnoxious, just doesn’t venerate us as much as most historians and can be annoying at times with things like calling the Massachusetts Minute Men at Lexington and Concord “gunmen.” That means they were guerrillas not on his side. When on one’s side they’re not gunmen, but “patriots”, “freedom fighters”, “partisans”, “Maquis”, “irregulars”, “the resistance”, and so on. Definitely not “terrorists” or “assassins”. Not users of “sneaky tactics” either as Pearson avers about the Colonials.

One story in the book is worth more than all the battle pieces and strategic analysis it contains. It’s about the battle of Saratoga in 1777 and the plight of the Baroness Von Riedesel, the young wife of a Hessian general leading a brigade attached to the British army. Wives went to war with their husbands in those days, and in her case brought their three young children along too. The British were falling back late in the fight and the baroness found herself in charge of things in the cellar of a house full of wounded men on whom the army surgeons were working as best they could. Water was in great demand for young and old, but any soldier who tried to get it was in danger of death.

As the book says “At last, one of the soldiers’ wives offered to take the buckets down to the water, insisting the rebels would not kill a woman. With great courage, she walked to the river, but she was right -- they did not open fire on her.”

Hurray for our side. We did the right thing. Goes a good way to justify celebrating the Fourth. Where are my firecrackers?

SONG OF THE VAGABONDS

There were bills everywhere

But I never saw them coming

No I never saw them at all

Till they came due

There’s folks who’re calling me daily

With liens and threats and such

But they only see me quite rarely

I’m rather a bit out of touch.

There are still bills everywhere

Like bullets in a cowboy drama

To pay them I solemnly swear

As soon as I hear from Obama.

Recognize that tune? Telephones play it a lot. They put you on hold and try to distract you with music. Then a young woman comes on and tells you that a represenative will be with you shortly and by the way your conversation will be taped and anything you say or are likely to say will be taken down, altered, and used in evidence against you. (This is the Irish version of the famous English police warning from which we got the Miranda nuisance.)

I exaggerate this of course because the taping is done only for “comparison purposes” and has yet to result in the secret police paying a visit to my house. Young ladies who say “represenative” instead of “representative” are not an exaggeration. That first “t” floors them every time. I must admit that I listen for it and I’m disappointed when they actually get it right. This doesn’t happen too often however.

I hope no one will take the little verse above too literally and start sending me donations to keep my head above water. I’m surviving quite well, thank you, and hope to continue that way. If not, well as you can see, there is one in whom I repose my trust. He didn’t fail General Motors or Chrysler and he won’t fail me. His eye is on the sparrow, as they say.

The economic recovery we may (or may not) be starting to see obviously comes as a great disappointment to a surprising number of people. Reading between the lines in our remaining newspapers you can sense it. The Bush supporters think a really bad depression is just the thing to put Obama on the skids and bring people back to the Republicans. The Obamiites see it otherwise. A big dip will obviously have been caused by the previous administration, not by them, and it will put the Republicans out of business once and for all.

This is the message I’m getting from the political types who’ve got the ear of the public. I understand the satisfaction they take in the kind of outcome they predict. It certainly will be decisive one way or the other. One thing has been left out however. Won’t it be a little inconvenient for the general public to have to endure a depression just to prove that Party A or Party B is a prosperity-pooper that should no longer continue to exist? Couldn’t we do it some other way? One that would be less painful maybe? One without breadlines and home relief and all that? I remember those things all right but I can’t say I miss them so much that I want to see them back.

So much for neuralgia, I mean nostalgia. Writing this blog I’ve been continuously harping back to my childhood for the reason that it coincided with the Great Depression. The continual references to it that are called up by current conditions naturally trigger those memories. Think of childhood, you think of the depression. Think of the depression, you think of childhood. They’re inseparable. (No, I wasn’t depressed.)

I kid about it sometimes, telling people I was born just in time for the crash because I didn’t want to miss it. Then a sobering thought comes: could history be repeating itself? What about that grandson born…last year? Will it be the same for him? Will he have his character formed by hard times? In other words, will he turn out like…me?

I wonder if his parents have thought of this. Maybe I ought to remind them. Well, perhaps not. I don’t want to add to their burdens at a time like this.

I’VE BEEN WORKIN’ ON THE TEE VEE

As a well-known couch potato overfed on a TV menu of drawing-room comedies and domestic dramas I’ve often felt a need to get a little roughage into my entertainment diet by picking up on some of the he-man stuff that becomes available at times on the screen. The Kalahari and the Serengiti and their indigenous wildlife are always good for this kind of thing along with the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert and other such places. The animals provide the entertainment and the humans are simply there to do the reporting.

Lately a format has been established in which the humans take center stage and the reporters are there to cover their activities, not those of other species. The best known program of this sort is The Deadliest Catch, the crab-fishing epic of the Bering Sea. If ever there was a formula for bringing in the stay-at-homes to participate in the thrills of living dangerously, this is it. They can experience the whole range of high risk and hard-rock existence in a half-hour in front of the tube. Where else can you go through seasickness, inhuman fatigue, frigid weather, high winds, cramped quarters, slippery decks, icy surfaces and baths of freezing spray, all chipping away at your will to live? You finish watching this in the same condition as the crew -- you need a drink.

Clearly, anything so unpleasant has to be popular. A spectator has to feel better after watching it. He hasn’t been through the wringer like the boys clinging to the decks. They’ve done it for him. For that we thank them and we hope they get those big catches they’re looking for and the paychecks emanating therefrom. They’ve got them coming.

“Catch” is a grabber all right, but there are other ways of sharing pain vicariously. My new favorite for this is the lumbering industry. Two TV programs about it have caught my attention. The History Channel is offering us Ax Men covering the Pacific Northwest while the Discovery Channel has American Lumbering covering the state of Maine at the other side of the continent.

The main differences between the sort of operations to be seen are (a) the size of the mountains in the West; and (b) the variations in the West where lumbering is carried out by helicopter and by boat as well as in the traditional ways of just attacking the trees with deadly weapons and waiting for them to fall. East or West, though, it’s the same job with the same hazards, “leaners,” cut trees that have snagged on standing ones and have the potential to fall on someone below; and “widow makers,” trees with loose limbs likely to do the same. Weather, of course, is always a hazard from possible wind, rain, snow or just low temperatures. Unlike the fishermen, though, the lumberjacks don’t have to work at night. That is, they don’t unless they’re driving down a mountain road with a fifty-ton load of cut timber aboard their eighteen-wheeler.

It’s all very spectacular, particularly when the helicopter is hovering high above the tree tops attempting to land a cable in a cleared spot below where some cut trees are lying waiting to be lifted up to a landing place. The ground crew connects the cable to the “choker” or collar they’ve attached to each tree and the lift is made. Three or four fifty-foot tree trunks hanging below a mile-high helicopter is a sight that sticks with a viewer.

Before helicopters the only way to get tree trunks out of hollows in the hills would have been to hitch them to a team of horses -- a big team -- or later, a big tractor, and haul away. It wasn’t done in most cases, just because of the difficulty of getting the mover into place, not to mention the problem of lifting tons of weight up a sixty or seventy-degree incline.

The rest of the operation is more conventional if anything can be conventional where huge machines stand on little hillocks and swing booms around in a full arc reaching out to clutch a pile of logs here for de-limbing and another pile there for loading on a truck ready to take them to the mill. It’s a sight to see, putting me in mind of one of my favorite sayings “I love work. I could watch it all day.”

Another spectacular operation is aqua-logging, carried on by a man named Smith and his son, who battle like Ivan the Terrible and his son except that neither one has killed the other, yet. When at peace they cooperate in raising sunken logs from a river, where they have been soaking for years since floating them to the mill from the forest was prohibited. Now the impermeable ones have been well marinated and are estimated by Mr. Smith to be worth $10,000 apiece. The accessible ones stick up out of the water and can be “choked” like the helicopter logs and then dragged ashore by winching -- a lot. The latest on this is that the state of Washington says it’s unlawful because the logs are healthy for the river, but if that’s so, why were the log floats outlawed? Strange legal events take place out west, I’m afraid.

In northern Maine where the Discovery Channel records the work of the seven Pelletier brothers, the hills aren’t as steep as in Washington, but the trees are just as thick and the roads just as slick. There are monuments along them to commemorate the drivers whose trucks overturned on the way down, but the trucks keep coming just the same. The key to the Pelletier operation appears to be the huge ten-acre utility building they’ve erected where repairs can be carried out on machines disabled while contending with the trees and the resistance they offer to their amputation and dismemberment. Trees don’t go quietly, as the brothers remark while looking over another $20,000 clearer-cutter being brought in for major surgery.

In spite of my admiration for work as noted above I can’t say that my enthusiasm has reached the point of obsession. I respect Mike Rowe, the man who stars in the “Dirty Jobs” series on the Discovery Channel, but I’m not intending to follow in his footsteps. For that you’d need boots anyway. No telling what that guy is likely to walk through.

OUT OF THE PAST

Readers of this blog will be aware that I’ve often made reference to its inspiration, the late Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror from about 1927 until it went out of business in 1964. Dan had a huge following in New York, not only among sports fans but also among people who just appreciated his sense of humor which entered into his writing on subjects of all sorts.

Newspaper columns weren’t collected into books in Dan’s day the way they are today, so to find anything of his to reprint here I’ve had to go to the newspaper files kept on microfilm at the main office of the New York Public Library and try to explore the thousand-or-more reels containing his total output. That sound like mission impossible and probably it is but I’ll keep trying.

Actually by my calculations the entire collection could be kept on 200 reels or less if only one daily edition of each paper containing the column was filmed instead of the multiple editions that were*. Because of these multiples I found myself looking at each column five or even ten times until I had seen all editions of the paper for one day and the film moved on to the next. Why the Daily Mirror found it necessary to put out so many editions each day when most of them didn’t deviate by so much as a hair from the others is beyond me.

The newspaper files are unique in being the most extensive kept anywhere in the world with researchers coming from everywhere to consult them. There are twenty-five microfilm readers on hand for public use, each one of them running constantly in the service of truth-seekers like myself. In the categories of users, though, I would probably only classify as a hobbyist compared to others who are there on serious business. Yesterday, for instance, I had a feeling that I was rubbing shoulders with the CIA.

In my row of machines I found the adjacent ones were in use by two young men casually dressed along with an older man similarly dressed who was examining the Daily Worker on his monitor. The first two were checking out respectively a French newspaper, Le Figaro, and an Italian one, name unknown. Clearly they were interested in some Communist operation of some kind.

Seeing that there’s no longer a Daily Worker being published in America or Britain, it looked like some earlier event was being investigated for reasons unknown to me. That would be normal for Micro Row. Walking about, one will usually notice the kind of screen the neighbors are consulting, but won’t learn any more. The students keep to themselves and don’t converse with their neighbors. Questioning them about their business is clearly out of order. In a mystery novel or a Hitchcock movie though, I would have bribed the librarian to show me what boxes of tape were consulted and what information was entered on the requisitions submitted by the suspects. After that there would be surveillance and finally a car chase leading to the exposure of a gigantic subversive plot to actually put up buildings on the site of the World Trade Center.

Most of Dan’s product of course is not of much use in enabling me to fill up this space while escaping the labor of thinking up ideas for it on my own with no help from anyone. Dan had space to fill too and couldn’t be expected to write a short story or a comic skit every time he tackled the job. Just like every other journalist he had to supply news as well as views to his readers if he wanted to keep them. So his most common offerings were compendiums of minor items of sports news collected under the heading of “Impertinent Questions about Sports Subjects” “The Broadway Bugle” and similar captions.

As stated, I’ve had to wade through a lot of this ephemeral reporting to get to the kind of thing I’m looking for. I remember a ballad from my boyhood about horse players, ending with the refrain “he gave to the racing magnates all he had -- his shirt.” My knowledge of racing was negligible then and now, but good comic verse is always welcome to me. There was a razzle-dazzle account of the antics of Larry McPhail, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers; that stuck with me. There was a famous story of a fistfight between Ernest Hemingway and Hugh Casey, Dodger pitcher, who was a guest along with his teammates at Hemingway’s Finca Vigia villa in Cuba in the days when the Dodgers trained there and the two men decided to see who packed the most punch post-daiquiris.

There was also a column in 1950 where Dan found a sports angle in the battling in the United Nations over the conflicting approaches of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the outbreak of the Korean War. Dan described the tactics of Jacob Malik, the Russian representative, as a warmup for the next Olympics where he would compete in “putting the veto”, “the heel-and-toe walkout”, “hurling the invective”, and “the running high dudgeon”.

That’s the kind of thing that keeps me digging in the files.

*Since the Mirror was read mainly for its columns, which included Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, and not its news, it would have made sense to do this. But no one thought of it.

Second homes for instance. Probably when the rules were written governing the allowances, the writers were thinking only of London lodgings for legislators from out of town. But quite a few of the lawmakers who had modest places in London and expensive ones in their constituencies decided that the latter were their actual second homes, not the London places. This worked to their advantage since the upkeep, taxes and mortgage interest on the out-of-town houses were high enough to justify more reimbursement than the London spots. In time the location of the rural homes mattered less and one lady got expenses for a country home which was more than 200 miles away from her constituency.

The ingenuity expended on these “fiddles” as the British call them, should have been enough to keep the whole Empire going if applied to the purpose. “Flipping” is a word used a lot by Andy Capp as a substitute for the real word but it also has a meaning which is the same as it has here. It means quick sales of property for a price higher than the last sale. It usually carries an implication that some hanky-panky has taken place in connection therewith. In the English case “flipping” as practiced by the parliamentary prestidigitators involved the alternation of city and country homes according to which was in greatest need of subsidy at the time. So one year the out-of-town home would be the “second” or subsidized home and the next year the London home would be. Nothing to it once you got the hang of it. A chap named Ed Balls and his wife (Mrs. B?), both M.P’s, did it three times. Well, no surprise there.

Some serious lawbreaking was involved in all of this. At least four M.P’s. didn’t pay capital gains when they sold their places -- for six-figure profits. The profits were obtained by beautifying the houses beyond recognition using taxpayer money. There were also cases of avoiding local taxes on sales. There were several cases of claiming interest payments on mortgages which had expired. Jack Straw, the Lord High Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, somehow claimed reimbursement for full payment of local taxes when he only paid 50% of them as an official. He admitted “errors” saying accountancy wasn’t his long suit, ha-ha, even though he was a member of the National Statisticians Society.

Straight-out tax evasion like this is a criminal offense in any country. Ordinary citizens are arrested for it often. When they plead that it was all a mistake, they are laughed at. It’s considered strange that so many “mistakes” and “errors” occur and they’re always in favor of the taxpayer and never of the government. It looks like Straw has feet of…clay.

Most of the major politicians of the three leading parties have fairly clean skirts themselves. They took their allowances but kept their imaginations for their speeches, not for crazy claims for things like moats around their homes or “duck houses” twelve feet high or for flats never occupied by them but by their children, or “second homes” ten miles from their “main homes” or any other pie-in-the-sky fantasies normally confined to sweepstakes winners and meth fiends.

All the above swindles were worked by the honorable members and have now been condemned by their party leaders. At this time at least eight sitting M.P’s. have announced they won’t be running for re-election. Any accused M.P. who does run is more than likely to be defeated. He’ll be lucky if he’s not also mobbed, barracked, mafficked, ducked, gated and otherwise abused in a British way, possibly leading to a stretch in chokey. These things can’t all be defined but they sound bad.

Our American members of Congress have never gotten their housing costs in Washington reimbursed by the government, only their traveling expenses. These come in for criticism at times, but not often. George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff got into trouble for using a White House limousine to take a trip to New York for a stamp auction. He lost his job.

I myself once had a department car I wasn’t supposed to take out of the city. Naturally I adhered rigidly to this order at all times. The only time I had trouble was the night I went to Madison Square Garden with it. That was in the city limits after all. When I came out it wasn’t there. It had been towed. With the I.D. on display. With that kind of luck it’s just as well nobody ever offered to pay me for my housing expenses. I’d have had my fifteen minutes of fame all right.

.

BULLETIN FROM THE FRONT

From: Operations Officer, 107th Pct.

To: Chief of Field Services

Subject: Robbery-Homicide at 82-65 Parsons Blvd.

1. At 1800 hours on Dec. 31, 19-- a M/B unidentified, did enter 82-65 Parsons Blvd., a grocery store, produced a gun and said “Take it easy and give me all your money.” Perp. fired one shot into the wall behind the counter. Owner, John doe, m/w 55, dove to the floor. Owner’s son John doe Jr., m/w/25, moved to aid his father and was shot by perp. At this time the owner grabbed his own weapon, a .38 Titan Tiger, #007844, and shot perp. Numerous shots were exchanged.

2. Perp. was pronounced D.O.A. at 1915 hours by Att. Thompson from Queens General Hospital. M.E. case #6126 - Dr. Graff.

3. Perp. gun was a S&W .38 cal. #J379036. Wanted on Alarm No. 9089-105 Pct. Complaint No. 14127 of 12/28/19--.

4. Case handled by P.O. George Roe #2082-107th Pct.

Following this is a list of police notified and a P.S. with the identity of the robber shot down.

Lt. William Noe, 107th Precinct

All this is a literal transcript of an actual report of a serious crime in Queens during my time there. I have quite a few others like it. I have trouble understanding them. Were they actually accepted at headquarters? Why was one like this done by a lieutenant? A captain was notified. Did he do the real one?

No reason why a lieutenant couldn’t have done it actually, if he did it right and not like this. What’s so wrong with it? Let me count the ways. Nitpicking we will go.

First, the place of occurrence. It should have been “in the 107th Pct.” and not the address.  Using the address creates a presumption it was in the precinct. Presumptions aren’t wanted, facts are. And “did enter.” This isn’t an affidavit for the Old Bailey in London.

The first sentence scans okay. The second also even though we’d like to know why the gun was fired so soon. But let it go. Next sentence calls for a presumption, that the owner hid behind the counter. After that, was his son also behind the counter? Probably. Where was he shot? How many times? How bad? Where exactly did the owner get his gun, the Titan Tiger? Who makes it? I never heard of it. And for God’s sake, is there a license or isn’t there? We need that information.

“Numerous shots were exchanged.” How numerous? Where’d they land? Did the Forensic Unit come and recover the slugs, mark their location, photograph the scene, take all the guns for examination and in general pin down the evidence of what happened? Don’t think it can never be challenged. It can, especially if it’s ignored at the time.

Anything can be challenged even in an open and shut case like this. Maybe Allen’s family (that’s the name in the P.S.) will claim he was a mental case who should have been Tasered and not shot. But maybe the guy who reported the stolen gun three days before knew him and can provide information we can use.

Perp. (stop saying that or spell it out. Don’t use cop slang in a report) pronounced dead by Att. Thompson…Okay. How’d he get there? Who called him? And by the way, who were the first cops on the scene and how’d they get there? Didn’t just wander in, did they? And would it be too much to ask that mention be made of the presence or absence of, ah, witnesses? They can be important, you know.

Medical Examiner (M.E.) case no. 6126 - Dr. Graff. Where was the good doctor? Did he come to the scene? When? Did he examine the body there or order it removed to the mortuary?

“Case handled by P.O. Roe, 107th Pct.” “Handled.” What does that mean? It’s not an expression I’ve seen before. And why’d he handle it? Where was he working? Not a mile away, I hope. And if so, where were the local men? Don’t just tell me their names, give me the assignments. Foot patrol? What post? Radio car? What sector? Hours of work? Evening duty, I presume. But don’t make me presume anything. Tell me.

Finally, where’s the notification to the D.A.? This is a D.A. case if ever there was one.  He’ll have to submit it to the grand jury to get a finding of justifiable homicide. He might or might not want the old grocer arrested if he used an unlicensed gun.

I harp on this reporting stuff because it’s what I used to do. I got to like it. It was a challenge. It called for bringing order out of chaos. Fit the facts into a framework where they could be understood by the meanest intelligences, of whom we had our share. Then go home with the consciousness of a job well done. Is that all I did? Well, it was most of what I did. That’s a story that will one day be told when the graves yawn and give up their dead. Till then my lips are sealed.

THE FIRST AND THE LAST

It’s been one of those weeks. Family wiped out in Baltimore, girls murdered in Boston, pirate landing in New York (going to Execution Dock? No, they don’t have that anymore), Staten Island wife on trial for shooting her husband dead in bed, wow!

I had to mention these things so people won’t think I’m completely oblivious to what’s happening around us because I’ve decided to use this space for, yes, reviewing a book, which might be looked on by some as an escape from reality instead of an embrace of it.

Not so. This book is reality, so real that it touches the daily life of every parent in this country. It’s called “Outliers”, a statistical term for values that differ greatly from others found in a sample population, e.g., a cluster of .400 hitters in a baseball league where the overall batting average is .250.

The book opens with a prototype outlier story about an Italian village in Pennsylvania where a permanent golden age of peace and prosperity exists for no other reason that researchers could find than the congeniality of the inhabitants with each other going back to their shared roots in Italy. No other reason such as diet or heredity or climate could be found. Community was the answer, the researchers declared and left it at that.

The next “story” in the book isn’t really about outliers since it deals with statistics that are already familiar to most people and are easily explained to anyone wanting to investigate them. They are the meat of the book, though, and the most relevant to average readers, particularly parents. It’s an eye-opener like few books I’ve ever seen, so it’s no wonder it’s been on the best-seller lists for months. I hope it stays there and attention is paid to it. If so, I predict the following results:

A. The average level of athletic achievement for scholastic athletes will improve significantly through the development of talent previously overlooked due to poor selection practices.

B. The same will be true for academic achievement in schools.

These two predictions are based on the facts revealed by Malcolm Gladwell, the book’s author, in his chapter on the selection practices of high school athletic teams in Canada and elsewhere. In the ‘80’s a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley and his wife attended a junior hockey game in Alberta and Mrs. Barnsley spotted an anomaly in the program they were reading and pointed it out to her husband. Wasn’t it strange, she asked, that so many of the players were born in January, February and March and so few in October, November and December. Her husband was astonished. He began research on Canadian hockey generally, and found the pattern of first-quarter dominance prevailed all through the elaborate Canadian hockey structure right up to the National Hockey League. N.B. Don’t think all this is about Canada and hockey only. Everything said here applies to America with double force and to all American sports.

The explanation wasn’t far to seek. Selection, streaming and differentiated experience made the difference. Starting with boys of ten or so, the most mature ten-year-olds, the ones born soonest after the cutoff date of January 1st, generally were the top players in their year. The December boys were a year behind them in athletic development, though not necessarily in innate athletic ability. They might as well have been, though, because their elders were the ones given extra playing time, extra instruction, and selection for all-star teams and travel teams. They piled up an advantage which kept accumulating during their playing years and resulted in their domination at the highest level of the sport as it had at the lowest level.

All this was very natural, but also totally unfair because if all the boys of each year’s class completed only against others on the same level, there would have been just as high a proportion of standouts coming from the younger classes as from the oldest class. But with December forced to compete with January, no such results were possible. December went to the foot of the class forever. In any elite hockey group from pee-wee to professional October-December contributed ten percent of the players and January to March contributed forty percent.

Other highly organized sports which called for a dedicated playing area such as a rink showed the same results. Unorganized ones like playground basketball didn’t display it to the same degree. Anyone could play. But a close analogy to Canada can be found in Czechoslovakia where soccer and hockey are organized in the same highly structured way, with the same results, as the book shows.

The answer lies in reorganization. Split the boys or girls of one calendar year into four quartiles and let them compete with the quartile on each side of them only. This would cost too much? Then introduce a handicap system such as that used in golf or racing or boxing for that matter and credit the younger contestants with enough extra points to offset the superior height, weight and maturity of the older players. Give them the chance to get on the all-star team. Equalizing the conditions doesn’t mean equalizing the outcome.

Sports aren’t everything, we know. The discoveries made in sports have led to similar ones in other fields. The results of academic tests follow the same pattern as in sports. The children born closest to the startup date for their class get better marks than those who get into it just before the cutoff date. The January-December pattern is the same as in sports. As in sports it needs reconstruction.

Did all this affect me when I went to school? Well, I was born in December. That says it all if you read “Outliers.” You should read it and you should ask your local school board to read it and then tell you what they intend to do to correct the problems created by people looking for the easy way out. I would have twenty years ago.

I HATE TO PAY UP IN THE MORNING

Taxes again. I can't seem to stop. I see so many goofy observations on them in the public prints that I find myself answering back with no one to hear me. At least if I blog, they can read me. Here goes.

The first commentator to come to my notice was a professor -- again -- from the Department of Economics at Nichols College in Massachusetts. For an economist he's inclined to be quite emotional. At least that's what strikes me about the way he obsesses about growing income disparity as he describes it, and its effect on the economy. It bothers him a lot. Maybe I'm obtuse but it doesn't bother me.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm not meant to be a millionaire. This is annoying when you look at some of the people who are. When you look at some of the others, though, it's easier to accept. That's why there's been so little outcry against Gates as compared to what went up about Rockefeller a century ago. His achievement was relatively invisible to the average man, but everyone who has ever used a computer knows that Gates has revolutionized the world and, with others, created the Information Revolution after it had been talked of for years.

There's my explanation for the famous income gulf. The last time we had one of the dimensions pf today's was during the Gold Rush of 1849. Some men got fabulously rich out of it and towered over their competitors. The losers didn't like the winners any better than they do today, but they couldn't get around the fact that it pays to be a pioneer, or at least a successful one. In an age of pioneering these discrepancies spring up and only taper off as new arrivals appear to narrow the gap with the groundbreakers and bring about a gradual equalization and stabilization of income levels. The income gaps diminish and only return when progress again goes into overdrive and lurches ahead without regard to the hurt feelings of the stay-behinds.

Give the professor what he wants and divide every dollar of national income equally and what do you achieve? The poor will feel better and the rich won't of course. But how long will the rich, meaning the earners, put up with it? Remember, when we talk about the poor, we include millions of ne'er-do-wells in jail and out whom no society can equalize with actual producers and providers.

Sharing out wealth equally doesn't of course mean increasing the gross national product. It remains the same, only with the emphases shifted to the needs of the poor rather than to those of the prosperous. That sounds good, but the needs of many of the poor are for drugs, booze, promiscuous sex, pornography, AIDS cures and other such consumer goods. Some rich folks have these tastes too, but not to the same degree or they wouldn't be rich. Equal shares of a static GNP won't work and never have. Unequal shares of a growing GNP bringeth joy to the world.

In the same newspaper where I encountered the above professor I found another, from the University of Bridgeport business school, God help us, who also worries about the income gap, but even more about public resistance to taxes. He writes about a cottage industry of tax denial publishers who encourage individual refusal to pay income taxes. He doesn't suggest they're important, because they're not, but he seems to think they should be suppressed on general principles. You can never be too careful is his mantra. There used to be a lady in Connecticut named Vivian Kellems, who was a tax resister and got a lot of publicity for it, but eventually disappeared from public view. Possibly she frightened the professor in his youth and he has never gotten over it since.

He traces the opposition to taxes to the public's fear of debt, which will require taxation to pay it off. Don't worry, is his message, this debt will never be paid off at face value. The Federal Reserve will inflate the currency enough so that in twenty years the debt will actually be paid off at fifty cents on the dollar, the dollar by then having lost half of its value.

Has anyone told the bondholders about this, I wonder? If they believe this, won't they demand an interest rate that will offset the currency inflation and keep the government's liability at the same level? Assuming, of course, that the Fed actually does intend to inflate. They claim their highest objective is to prevent inflation. When their former chairman Alan Greenspan was asked what was an acceptable rate of inflation he answered "Zero!"

Both professors are of the opinion that unless the government pumps big money into the economy, business will stand still because the banks will simply "freeze" any money they have and hold it in their vaults out of fear of making bad loans. Don't the banks have to pay interest on their deposits? They will have to loosen up and actually make loans to someone or other to pay this interest.

Finally the professors both demonstrate a touching faith in the beauty of taxes and the blessings they bring on the world. There are places in their states not far from their schools where whole communities live on tax money. They should visit them sometime and afterwards ask themselves if there aren't after all some good reasons why so few people share their faith in the business of taking money from working people in the form of taxes and using it to pay for, well, bridges to nowhere?

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS

The work I do on this website sometimes gets me accused of living in the past because I do use material collected then to fill in the empty space that confronts me each weekend. That's when I go back to the file of police reports that are my fallback resource when inspiration gives out. There are eight million stories in the naked city, as the TV announcer used to say, and I have some of them.

First lets look at some of the short stories, just to illustrate the variety of incident I faced every time I stepped out of the station house to go and visit other station houses from one end of Queens to the other, in peace and quiet one night, in fire and flood the next. The work varied and the way it was reported varied even more. For instance, here's a robbery report from the 107th Precinct in Fresh Meadows. It tells us that two black males with guns hit the checkout lines at a supermarket and made two cashiers empty out their registers and then got away with the contents.

The interesting thing about this was the way the missing money was reported. There was $324.68 gone from one register and $394.40 from the other. I'd never seen such exact figures before and I've never seen them since. Were they included in the radio alarm, I wonder. "Be on the lookout for two male blacks with following cash in their possession..." "Yeh, we know it's an open and shut case, but you gotta find them first."

From the meticulous to the slapdash is only a step sometimes, as the next report reveals. It's the story of another robber who stuck up a grocery store not far from the one above and fired a shot into the wall behind the counter. The owner, unhit, dropped to the floor anyway, possibly pretending shock. His son ran to help him and he actually was shot. The father, though, terminated the robber with one shot from the concealed gun he'd gotten from under the counter.

That's it. The trouble was, it wasn't even the shadow of a report. A lieutenant made it, but a captain was notified. Probably he made a report in full, making this one a nullity. No reason for making it, even. It leaves out ...everything, damn near. First, the shooting victim. How is he? Where is he? What's his story? The dead robber. What's his cause of death? Who is he? Have we got his gun? Did he have a record? Was anyone seen with him? Have the detectives notified anyone about him? Have we got any witnesses? Has the scene been secured and examined? What cops got to the scene first? How'd they get the word? Any statement from the father? Is that gun of his licensed? If not we'll probably have to bust him. The public won't like it. You know, guy's a hero, for crissake. Maybe the DA will give him a break and just have him report to the Grand Jury. Has the DA been notified? He'll probably roll on this one. The Daily News is on the wire? Okay, I'll talk to them.

Believe it or not, I enjoyed this kind of a ratrace. I had no checkoff list of what every cop should know about an investigation, but I didn't need one. I knew it already. The thing that gave most men trouble were the requirements for notifying specialized units for incidents that concerned them. I had studied this assiduously preparing for examinations. So I was able to say oh yeah, notify the Center for Disease Control on this one or the Child Welfare Bureau on something else. If in doubt leave it out? No way. That's for novels. Here we include the kitchen sink.

Now we come to an actual incident where no one died but I gave it the full treatment and got up a production that would have done honor to a political assassination. One reason for doing it was the fact that it involved an off-duty cop, meaning that he was one of those whose activities always got the full attention of Headquarters, which lived in fear of them lest by some impulsive act they tarnished the fair name of the Department and caused us to blush and hang our heads with shame and remorse.

With this guy it could have happened. When we looked at his work record later on it turned out that he had once been fined ten days pay for losing his revolver and twenty days pay for failure to follow an order. When we talked to him he was on disciplinary probation and enrolled in the department’s alcoholism program. One thing was sure: an investigation like we were doing on him was nothing new to him.

In spite of all the presumptions against him that his record created, for once it seemed the facts were in his favor. He had finished work at a Manhattan precinct at midnight and then drove to a bar -- he would -- in his Queens neighborhood. By some miracle of self--control he drank Coca-Cola only and left after half an hour of conversation with a (drinking buddy?) no, a pal.

When he got to his apartment on the first floor of a two-family house and opened the door there was an onrush of youths stampeding out of it. They had been burglarizing the place. The cop grabbed ahold of one of them and wrestled with him while his accomplices tried to pull him away. The cop finally got to his gun, but this enabled his prisoner to free himself as an accomplice hit the cop from behind. Sager, the prisoner, appeared to be going for a gun so the cop hit him first with his gun, breaking his jaw.

These proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed cop who had seen everything from an elevated platform above the battlefield. Picking out the man with the gun as his first problem, he ordered the cop to drop it, so the assailants escaped while the cop was identifying himself. The ringleader was soon found, though, by cops answering an ambulance call at his home, whence they took him to Jamaica Hospital where his victim was waiting for him. Justice was served.

I’ve been raiding the files for these stories for five or more years now and I haven’t come to the end of them yet. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who had a few he never would tell, like the one of the giant rat of Sumatra, I haven’t any that I’m holding back because the world is not ready for them. The world should get ready already.

P.S. I haven’t forgotten it was a bad week for cops in America. May justice really be done for them.