* Churchill and Boy: Tackling New York

A Boy's Adventure in New York







Can nearly half a century have gone by since this naive 16-year old dared to tackle New York City on his own? ( I should mention that I was 6'2" tall and wore a black suit on this three day venture, so I looked older and more poised than I was.)

I could clean up the prose of the following description I wrote at my father's request immediately after the event at age 16, but I won't.

Here it is (after being filed away for 48 years) : naivete , superlatives , fragments , run-ons , missing apostrophes , hyperbole , stuffy prose , gushing earnestness , incorrect spellings and all*.

I cringe.

* I will not indulge in using "[sic]" to let you know I know better. I didn't know better then, and that's that.

NB: My parents must have been crazy (thank heavens) to let a 16-year-old country boy go to New York alone. (Especially when you consider another of my blogs http://yaledisappearance.blogspot.com/ "Sam Todd:Fugitive from God, Country and Yale?" about the disappearance of a Yale Divinity student in New York New Year's eve 1983/4, twenty-three years after my New York adventure!)

_______________________________________






























Churchill being assisted to his seat on the Christina





























Muriel Thompson, nurse, and Sir. Winston































The Christina steams up the Hudson
































Maria Callas and Onassis debark


































Churchill and Onassis depart in limousine




















Churchill and Bernard Baruch in Manhattan



A Boy's Adventure in New York


(For my friend, Jane Ridgway Littlemoon, who requested it.)

(And for my friend Michele McCarthy and her late father, Mac, who told this story for years)


About seventeen weeks ago I started to watch the Winston Churchill series [The Valiant Years, narrated by Richard Burton] on television. I was impressed with this man; his brilliance, wit, and agility. So, naturally, when we were assigned a term paper in Hamden High history class on a man of the last century I chose Churchill.

Two weeks ago when I heard the 'old man' was in Florida I devised a plan to get down there to see him. I called the press to find out where he was, how long he’d be there, and how I could get there. I looked in the personal ads for someone who wanted to share expenses on a journey to Fla. I was then pleasantly surprised by the Associated press who informed me that Churchill would come from Fla. and dock in New York Wednesday the 12th and fly to England the same day.

The weekend of the 8th I worked avidly around the neighborhood to earn train fare and expenses to New York.

At 6:50 Wednesday morning my mother dropped me at the New Haven Train Station. I was late and missed the 6:50 train to Grand Central Station. This turned out to be an advantage as a 7:05 train to Penn Station would get there half an hour earlier and would be closer to my destination.

At 8:30 I arrived in New York. I called radio station W.M.G.M. and asked for Dick Defrietas. He told me where Churchill’s boat would dock. I was told to go to the 79 th street Boat Basin. I hopped a cab with a Portuguese driver who had been driving for ten years. He said he didn’t know where the Boat Basin was so he shut his meter off for a couple of blocks until I found out from another cabby that the Basin was by Riverside Drive. I asked my cabby how much the fare would be and he said “. . . it’s forty blocks so it won’t be more than a buck.”. We drove for 30 blocks, no 28, and the meter hit $1.00. Quietly, the meter was shut off by my overly generous and kind cabby. I’ll never forget this. It was exceptionally kind of him and I gave him a 50[cent] tip.

From 79th street I walked across Riverside Drive to a wall. To the right of the wall, which overlooked the pier, I saw two men putting up a street sign. It read ‘Winston Churchill Drive’. I walked down the long curved steps and sat down on a bench facing the pier with a 125 ft. yacht, the Eda, tied up along side it. I asked two ladies sitting along side of me if Churchill had come ashore yet. The reply was no. When I told them I had come from New Haven to see Churchill, they were quite impressed. (to my surprise) One a widow in her fifties gave me a tangerine. Lucille the other widow of the same age gave me handful of candy.

For two hours we talked and became quite friendly. Twice I saw a heavy set bald man appear at the helm of the Eda. The second time I remarked to my new acquaintances that it looked like Churchill. Lucille laughed and agreed. So then astonished me by telling me that this wasn’t Aristotle Onassis yacht and consequently Churchill couldn’t be aboard it. I nearly fell over. Kitty then told me that Mr. “O’s” yacht the ‘Christina’ would steam up the Hudson.

In 45 minutes the police began to congregate around the pier. After I had bid farewell to my lady friends I stationed my self at the entrance to the pier at the street side. Only cameramen, reporters, and officials could venture to the end of the pier. Soon a fireboat came up the Hudson with a huge spray going. The 325 ft. yacht of shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis, the Christina, followed 10,000 yards behind.

Unfortunately Churchill was asleep below and missed the official New York City welcome. Police launches took the reporters out to the middle of the Hudson where the Christina was anchored. They were not allowed aboard but just circled the ship to take pictures. Churchill, aided by nurses, came on board the deck and was seated. He posed for pictures with his famous V for Victory sign and then went below.

As I waited on pier, a lady came up to me with a 22 year old daughter and whispered “I don’t want to say anything but I have the official word that he’s coming ashore at this spot.” I asked the cop to corroborate her story but he said that Sir Winston would not come ashore until tomorrow (Thursday) morning. My heart sank. I had only enough money to, I thought, stay one day. I had already bought my round trip ticket. At that moment my mind began to form a counter plan.

Later another lady came up to the dock. She was a 70 year old spinster with plenty of time on her hands. She talked to everyone. As an important name came up she ‘knew him, had met him, was a friend of him, was related to him.’ Although I’m not an expert on these things it seems to me that 70 years wouldn’t have been long enough for her to meet all the people she said she had met.

We talked and she said she was a native of New Haven. I told her I was from there and she was astonished and delighted. She thought it was a shame I had come all this way to be disappointed. I mentioned to her that my late Uncle, Harold G. Stagg, Editor of the Army, Navy Airforce Times, was a friend of [U.N. Ambassador Adlai E.] Stevenson. She suggested that I call his office and mention my relation and predicament and see if he couldn’t do anything toward getting me aboard to see Churchill. I tried this and while I was on the phone Stevenson came on board the ship. The lady had kindly mentioned my Uncle and my situation but before Stevenson could reply he was engulfed in a circle of reporters.

I came back to the pier and it was 1 p.m. I waited for three hours. Stevenson came ashore, recorded for the reporters and came toward me. I shook hands with him, mentioned my Uncles name, and my situation. He spoke hurriedly to me and nothing concrete resulted. We parted.

























(U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson returning from visit with Churchill on the Christina, before the gale blew in)





I went over to the mobile unit and listened to the interview Stevenson had given.

Speaking to my eccentric lady friend, after that, I told her of my plan to stand by the pier all night, with the intent of seeing Churchill the next day as he debarked. She told me it was supposed to pour all that night and that I’d die of pneumonia. Later I called my mother and told her there was a boat house by the pier that I’d sleep in all night. (That was abit of a white lie) She very hesitantly agreed and before she could retract her decision I bid her farewell.

I went up Broadway, had dinner, bought a two dollar rain coat, and went back to the pier. I waited by the pier and became acquainted with Onassis American representative [ J. Peter Grace] who sympathized with my cause.

About eight o’clock Bernard Baruch came on board the ship. I was immensely impressed with his stature. At 90 he was standing straight as a board, was sure footed, and patient with reporters.

At 9 oclock one of Sir Winstons nurses came ashore. I rescued her from a reporter who was nagging her about an autographed picture of Sir Winston.

I told her of my own situation and she sympathized. She went on board one of the crisscraft and in 5 minutes came ashore. She gave me a special Churchill cigar, a note Sir Winston had written [on House of Commons stationery], and some matches from the ship Christina. I will never forget her generosity. She said she hoped this would make up for some of the time I had spent. She then went back on the Christina.

[ Forty years later I read that Churchill prepared and carried such notes with him precisely for such instances, because as a child his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had refused to sign autographs for Churchill’s own school chums. The note in his handwriting read: "Thank you so much for your kind message. It gave me much pleasure. Winston S. Churchill" Artfully ambiguous for all occasions!]

It was pouring now. I got to talking with the Greek pilot of the ship who could speak English. He invited me aboard the crisscraft while it rained. At 945 he and I went up on the pier. A telegraph messenger handed me a telegram from the President of the United States to Sir Winston. I gave it to Johnny who signed for it. It was then taken to the ship.

At 11 oclock Baruch came ashore. I shook his hand and we talked cordially. I asked him how the old man was and he said “He’s still a teenager in my book.” [Churchill was 86 in 1961; Baruch 90]

At 12 oclock the nurse, Muriel Thompson, and Onassis Am. Agent, and Churchill Private Secretary, Antony Montigue Brown came ashore. Montigue Brown left. The agent and his wife gave Muriel and me a lift (in a Cadillac limousine) up Broadway for coffee. [I later learned the “agent” was J. Peter Grace, president of W.R. Grace Steamship Lines]

We talked for about two hours about her life with Churchill and other aspects of her career. I must say it was a thrill to be so close to someone who was so close to greatness. Churchills handkerchief was given to me by her at this time. In England Churchills laundry mark is no. 20. [Miss Thompson showed me hypodermic needles she carried with her at all times which she injected directly into Churchill’s heart in a cardiac crisis. I did not feel I could reveal this information when I was 16 years old. Oh, the days when privacy reigned!]

We walked down Broadway in pouring rain and 70 m.p.h. winds[youthful exaggeration?] for 15 minutes looking for a police car. Finally we hailed one. I told them it was Sir Winstons nurse and we’d like to get back to the ship. We were immediately brought there.

We looked for a crisscraft to take us to the yacht. Only one was there and it was waiting for Onassis and couldn’t leave. The rain was to[o] hard to wait. So we woke up the men in a police launch and they took us out. As we approached the side of the Christina a quick current caught the launch and our mast smas[h]ed in to the Christinas flag pole. Then one of the engines conked out. The current carried us and half of Onassis flagpole down the Hudson. $250 worth of damage was done. Finally we got Muriel aboard.

All the way back the men grumbled and cursed ‘…this what happens when you try to do someone a favor.” I told them apologetically that I threw no weight around here but that I would intercede with Muriel in the hopes that she had some influence over Mr. “O”. After all he pays $4400 a day to keep his ship running so what’s a mere $250 to a man like that? [What gall I had. I didn’t have a chance in hell of interceding with Muriel Thompson!]

I walked up to Broadway in a pouring rain coupled with gale force winds. I had no idea where I’d go or what I’d do. Finally I went to a subway station and took a jaunt. I went from 108th street to Brooklyn at least 15 times that night. At 5:30 I went to Pennsylvania Station and tried unsuccessfully to get a couple of hours sleep.

At seven I walked down Broadway in 70 m.p.h. winds [this is the second time I wrote this: maybe it is accurate!] and a combination of every type of precipitation known to man. With my last 12 [cents] I had a cup of hot chocolate and then went to the pier.

I stayed with the reporters until noon and watched tugboats and crisscraft make several attempts to get near the Christina. At last they gave up and Montigue-Brown announced the delay of Sir Winston’s disembarkment by 24 hours.

I was disgusted and exhausted and I went home. I ate dinner and talked to my Uncle, Charles Crook a Hamden pharmacist, who agreed to refinance my return trip to New York.

I was overjoyed. I took a hot bath and went to bed at eight oclock that night.

However, if it hadn’t been for my mother I never would have returned to New York. Something awoke her at three that morning. Then she woke me from a VanWinkle slumber at five. If she hadn’t I would have missed the train. I took the 6:05 and was in New York at 7:30. I hopped a cab and payed $1.50 fare to the boat basin. I ran down to the pier and nearly had triple heart attacks. The yacht was no where in sight.

I ran up Riverside Drive and tried to hale a taxi for ten minutes. When I finally got one who knew where the boat was and took me there. I gave the cabby a buck for a 65 cent fare and asked for the change. He said no so I let it go.

I nonchalantly walked by the security guards right up to the gangplank. I waved to my Greek sailor friends and saw Aristotle Onassis.

In 15 minutes Churchill was assisted off. Everyone cheered and I was within a foot of him. He got in the limousine and I talked to the nurse. She had asked him to shake hands with me but she was so far behind him she couldn’t point me out. I bid her a fond farewell.

I ran up to the Churchill limousine, pushed my head through the bulwark of police, and with a beaming smile gave the ‘Old Man’ his famous V for Victory sign. With a nod and a chuckle he flashed it right back to me.




















Right then and there all my efforts were rewarded. It was the crowning joy of my sixteen years on this earth.


















TEXT of HAMDEN HIGH SCHOOL SCROLL presented to Sir Winston Churchill by the U.S. Ambassador to Britain
This, Mr. Churchill, is a manifestation of the sentiment of a representative segment of the youth of America. This document, in recognition of your American citizenship, should not grant to us the opportunity to beam with foresight, but rather to capture for ourselves the spirit of freedom which you have indeed perpetuated with such valor and dignity. Accept, fellow citizen, our congratulations. Prosper then, with the ideals you have sustained and vitalized.


(Note: Scroll on parchment rendered in script by Crimilda Pontes, scribe for Yale University Press.
Text of scroll composed by student Raul Ponce de Leon, Class of 1963, Hamden High School.)
____________________________________________________________________________________ >

* The Eye of the Ear: Lordship of the Genetic Code

The Peabody Museum, New Haven, Connecticut (Yale University)



















The Planned Parenhood Office three blocks from the Peabody was the scene of 24/7/365
Rosary recitation vigils.

The blogger on his deck in the Green Mountains, 2008.

Music critic Jurgen Kesting refers to "the eye of the ear". Anyone who has ever listened to a radio program and fleshed it out in imagination knows exactly what Kesting is talking about; the ear sees.

For Helen Keller it was: the fingers see (and hear).

I am reminded of this reality of the senses poignantly this autumn on my mountainside home in Vermont as the radiant sheaves of gold and bronze and crimson flutter to the ground. My neieghbor, a pleasant man in his early sixties, who has waved to me on my way to work every day for 18 years, has lost the sight in both his eyes from diabetes: First, one eye a year ago, and now the second.

As I watch his devoted wife lead him from the car to house on our quite steep mountain road, I am suddenly grateful for this miracle of vision.

It has begun to astound me at my ripe age, that a perfect human being can be reproduced in only nine months and sometimes with relative ease. I took this miracle of human reproduction for granted for fifty years until the genetic code was cracked, and then I started to realize the astonishing complexity of that 9 months.

Even as a child, when I went to the Peabody Museum at Yale and saw the 9 - jar exhibit of zygote, embryo, fetus in formaldahye (one jar for each month of 9 month of pregnancy) I just thought, somewhat simplistically: Yeah, it does grow a lot.

BTW:That Peabody exhibit was probably banished after Roe v. Wade for fear the Museum would be burned down. I can still recall the 24-hour/365 day Rosary protest vigil in front of the Planned Parenthood office three blocks away when Griswold v. Connecticut was being fought a decade before Roe.





































The trillions and trillions of sub-atomic functions which must be performed by the lordship of the genetic code in that nine months are simply incomprehensible. They are one process for which the word miracle is neither trite nor overstatement.

Miracle-- and a living breathing one at that -- is what we are.

We are the eye of the ear; we are the gleaner of the galaxies.

* The Sissy Factor

It isn't fear of being called a pacifist which will keep Barack Obama from sending more troops to Afghanistan, or withdrawing them entirely. It is fear that being called a pacifist really means being called a sissy, especially since he hasn't packed a pistol for Uncle (not Aunt) Sam, himself, and because he is surrounded by a family of women.

Can schoolyard cruelty really be the subconscious determinant in sending thousands of men to their deaths (and now, women-- Equal Opportunity Death: let's kill the gooose that lays the golden egg too, eh)?

We will find out 10,000 or so victims from now, I am afraid.

Am I being unpatriotic the Day after Veterans' Day? I don't really know. Robert MacNamara lied to us throughout the Viet Nam War and beyond. Colin Powell was the instrument (perhaps unwitting instrument) of Administration lies about the need to send soldiers to their deaths in Iraq. And Condoleeza Rice? A mouthpiece too.

And the Great Emancipator, the loftiest speech writer in the English language who sought to operate "with malice toward none, with charity toward all"?

He used Divinity to excuse his slaughter: "For every drop of blood from the lash a drop of blood from the sword" is the Divine Equation that Lincoln concluded the Creator was using in permitting the horrible slaughter of human life on American soil: 'We're payin our divine dues for the inhumanity of slavery.' seems to have been Lincoln's self-justifying reasoning.

Poor man.




















How could he sleep otherwise? He wasn't a Stalin or a Mao even though the Civil War's slaughter statistics are rival to theirs in terms of human suffering, if not of proportion.

And please don't tell me that battle is not slaughter.

* Martha Eve-Washington: The Feminist Conundrum

Martha Eve-Washington
but not Eve-Washington, D.C.



















The Feminist Conundrum





Choosing a marital name: Somehow feminists have convinced themselves that retaining their maiden (virginal?) name is an act of liberation from male domination. Think again. All last names are male names. They all came from fathers. Retaining your father's name is no less an act of submission to male domination than taking your husband's name. Such is the feminist conundrum.

This debate raged during my years at Yale Divinity School (1976-80) and contnues in a lower tone today. I proposed a solution then which I repeat today: Women should put the prefix "Eve" (for the first Woman) before whatever last name they take, or keep.

And by the way the very term "woman" comes from the medieval "wifman" itself a term of submission: Wifman's Liberation?

During my days at Bread Loaf School of English (l991-97) one longtime faculty couple who married belatedly in life tried to solve this problem by creating a third name from syllables of family last names from either side of the marital equation. And example of this might be Smith marries Jones and takes the new name Smones. The conundrum remains: Even syllables from previous family names incorporated into a new name derive from male last names.

All-------------repeat all-----------last names come from males.

My solution while awkward does at least amount to a declaration of indpendence from maleness. Martha Eve-Washinton; Mary Eve-Todd Eve-Lincoln; Sally Eve-Hemmings, Michelle Eve-Obama.

And Barack Eve-Obama?

What about husbands? If they concur, they could be Abraham Eve-Lincolns and George Eve-Washingtons too.

And Washington, D.C.?

No change.














But Seattle?

Definitely Eve-Washington.

* Cargoon Catharsis: Disney's Puny "Poetics"

Name this actor (_____)


Michael
Barrymore



Reginald Owen








Name this actor (______)




Alistair Sim





Jim Carrey

































































Somehow the Disney Digital Deception, A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey, seems almost silly. Tiny Tim looks like a rubbbery, goony Alfred E. Newman on Carrey's shoulder in this photo, and Carrey's nose makes Cyrano, Shylock, Pinnochio and Scrooge all swim in the same genetic pool. Disney was at his best with fairy tales and myths and cartoons, but this Scrooge and Company are cargoons, not cartoons.

I tried to find the original A Christmas Carol black and white film I watched on television in the 1950's but it seems not to be on Google images or wikipedia. I was looking for that original and most convincing hatchet faced Scrooge to date and couldn't find him. The best I could do is the 1935 Alistair Sim and a later Scrooge who looks like Felix Unger's sloppy roommate or Carl Malden or one of those actors with a torn pocket for a face. Even Patrick Stewart, who managed to turn the towering evil of Melville's Ahab into a baldheaded twit, elicits more respect from me than Disney's digital disaster, at least in the one photo I could find of Stewart as Scrooge.

And there was Lionel Barrymore, about whose Scrooge more need not be said than Barrymore.

What Disney fails to realize, is that our ability to be moved by this curmudgeon's transformation, depends on his being a real human being, not Jim Carrey wrapped in a digital shroud. Even the round-faced Sim or the Carl Malden look-alike version shown above grab me because they could be me.

Disney's Digital Deception just doesn't do it. It lacks the possibility for identification and thus the pity and fear necessary for catharsis.

It's just another silly Disney rubber duckey.

And if there's one thing Dickens is not, it's silly.

* Raising the Dead: Thanksgiving, 1963

President John F. Kennedy as matchbook cover




Samuel Pepys as paper doll






















Somewhere in the 2 million word, 9 volume Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sam, the author of what has become the most famous autobiography of all time, writing around age 30, describes the funeral of his brother and then, back to the office a day later, exclaims, "Oh, Lord! How soon we forget the dead" (or words very similar to these).

Since November 22, 1963 (46 years ago) I have watched the most famous man in the world dwindle to little more than the name on a performing arts center or airport, or the face on a matchbook cover. All of the television-watching world was almost physically stricken with grief on the Thanksgiving weekend of his assassination, but now that event, and even his life and presidency, are barely resuscitate-able, even by the medium of documentary film.

Such is the necessary nature of human memory. We must push events and emotions further away lest we remain paralyzed in the ecstacy or anguish of their present.

The eulogizers intone from the pulpit at funerals, "We will never forget him (or her)" but this is a social lie we must tell each other in order not to feel barbaric at what we know will happen to our dearly departed: dilution----infinite dilution.

The answer to a trivia question informs me that at this very moment an atom from the last breath breathed by Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. is in this room or any room in the world since atoms disperse infinitely.

That is the only immortality one can expect on this planet.

Off this planet---who knows? Everything has been promised from an Emerald City in the Sky to an Eternal Furnace on the lowest level of a triple decker universe.

The ancient Greeks say immortality is "living on" in the memories of survivors. Look what 2000 years has done to Joshua ben Joseph (aka Jesus Christ)in the memory of survivors and followers.

There is a fleet of Jesuses put forth by Roman Catholic,Catholic,Orthodox Christian, European Protestant and hundreds of American Protestant and evangelical Christian sects.

One of the great debates in New Testament scholarship is that represented by the latin phrase the ipsissima verba Jesu: the very words of Jesus.





















Some scholars says those ipsissima verba Jesu number in the hundreds , even thousands, of words in the New Testament. Others say that at the most, only 31 words can be traced back to the mouth of the reputed messiah and even those 31 words were set down (written) no closer than forty years after his death. So much for preserving the memory of a god, let alone a human.




















The very chemicals racing across synapses in my brain to produce this keyboarding will some day cease and becomes like Caesar's last breath: atoms infinitely dispersing into other atoms.

That is the most I can verify about post-mortem existence on this globe we call Earth.

All else is faith.

* "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" (For Jane and Walter)

Skull and Bones's secret society building, Yale University: Home of Geronimo's Skull









Prescott Bush as member of Skull and Bones










































My childhood friend, Jane Ridgway, and her husband, Walter Littlemoon have written a book, They Called Me Uncivilized, about Walter's childhood experience as a native of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and as a Lakota.

It is not so much about the original Wounded Knee Massacre,although there is a indelible image made of a similar 1876 event (Northern Cheyenne massacre at the Powder River near the Big Horn Mountains) when Walter tells of his great grandmother's relatives gutting ponies into whose cavities they stuffed their own children and babies so that they could keep them warm in a blizzard as they escaped the military slaughter. Several froze to death anyway.

It is not even about the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, although one chapter effectively and efficiently untangles that complexity with simple truths and a "resident's eye view" of the Second Wounded Knee a century after the First.

And "childhood experience" is a limp euphemism.

This book is about Walter's being "abducted" to an Indian Boarding School (to quote the preface by Harvard psychologist Jayme Schorin) and being "tortured and beaten", to use Walter's words, until his soul was numbed,a phenomenon which, with its subsequent triggers, Schorin calls "Complex Traumatic Strees Syndrome".

No,like Oliver Twist without the pompous 19th century words and interminable subordinate clauses, this book is about cruelty to children and its lifelong impact, a cruelty systematically dispensed by the Indian Boarding Schools, whose military founder, Henry Pratt, had as his motto: Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

It should have read: Kill the Soul, Save the Shell.

What Walter and Jane do in this remarkable little book is document Walter's rebuilding of the soul.

This is a short volume, 92 pages, like its thin brothers before it: Hiroshima by John Hersey, Night, by Elie Wiesel,and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass. It packs the same whollop that those brief books do too, and one senses that this moving volume might join their company.


















































For, me there is an irony in Jane's assistant-authorship, which may not strike others. Jane and I met at ballroom dancing school at the High Lane Club as teenagers in Hamden, Connecticut, four miles up Whitney Avenue from Yale University.




























This was long before Jane thought of marrying a member of the Lakota and moving to Wounded Knee. But as we danced our childhoods away at the High Lane Club in the Blue shadow of the Ivy League university up the road, a Secret Society at Yale named Skull and Bones, was conducting some of its sacred rituals around the skull of the Apache Chief, Geronimo, stolen from its grave by Prescott Bush (the father of the first President Bush and grandfather of the second, and, after his own graduation from Yale, U.S. Senator from Connecticut)and other Skull and Bones members.




As residents of Hamden, as Jane and I were, who shopped in New Haven, as Jane and I did, we had to confront the architecture of those secret society buildings from the moment Whitney Avenue, the main drag between Hamden and New Haven, split into two, one-way-streets , divided by a triangulated piece of property: That triangle was dominated by a huge white windowless tomb silently thumbing its nose to all outsiders as traffic entered the city, Yale, and the New Haven Green.



































That Secret Society building still stands sentinel in defiance of traffic today----a reminder of the often racial elitism which has gone into building Yale for 300 years.





























Walter Littlemoon ends his preface to They Called Me Uncivilized with a sentence of poetic beauty: "Now I stand naked before you all. This is my sweatlodge. This is my vision seeking.This is my Sundance. Remember, restore, reach out."

May The Moccasin Telegraph and the Internet send these words around the world.


PS: Jane Ridgeway tells me that the photo and building I have presented here as "standing sentinel" as town merges to gown in New Haven, are actually a Protestant "religious" secret society building not associated with Yale. I'm not sure my "white elitism" critique would not still pertain even if they I am incorrect in building identification since Yale has been for most of its three centuries a fortress of Protestant, white, elitism.