Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott: Celebrating Labor Day

Bill Newcott shares his favorite clips of the working man and woman, from Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times Meryl Streep in Silkwood to Michael Peña in Cesar Chavez. Let us know your favorite! 

See all Movies for the Rest of Us. 

Featured image: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain) 

News of the Week: Back to School, Twitter Insults, and Here’s the Right Way to Pronounce ‘Gyro’

Sorry Kids!

Where I live, school doesn’t start until after Labor Day, and every year I’m always surprised to find out that they start school in August in many parts of the country. August! Some places started school two weeks ago! It’s just not right to make kids carry backpacks and worry about long division in the dog days of summer. There should be a logical point where summer ends and school begins, a definite line, and when I was growing up, that line was always Labor Day.

It reminds me of this classic Staples commercial. It’s a shame they don’t run it anymore. It perfectly captures what it feels like for both kids and parents when the new school year starts (though shopping for new school supplies was always one of my favorite things to do).

The kids in the commercial probably have their own kids now.

All the News That’s Fit to Quit

People are often called nasty names on Twitter. Most of those words are too extreme to repeat in America’s oldest magazine. Being called a “bedbug” is way, way down on the list of unacceptable names you can call a person on social media. There must be, what, 70,000 to 80,000 insults ahead of it?

Not according to controversial New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens. He was called a “bedbug” by a professor at George Washington University (the Times had a bedbug infestation last week and the professor compared Stephens and his writing to the annoying insect). Stephens promptly freaked out, which is odd, because the professor didn’t even use Stephens’s Twitter handle in his tweet, and the tweet originally only got a handful of likes and no retweets (God, I can’t stand social media). Stephens either got a heads-up from someone who saw it, or he’s the type of guy who searches Twitter or Google to see if anyone is talking about him.

That practice is rather innocuous, but what Stephens did next wasn’t. He could have just written a snarky tweet back or forgotten about it, but he went ahead and sent an email to the professor telling him to come to his home and “call me a bedbug to my face,” CC’ing GWU’s provost and the Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs. That’s right, Stephens snitched on the professor.

In an appearance on MSNBC that just made things worse, Stephens said he wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble when he sent a copy of the email to the professor’s bosses. Alrighty then.

The professor, Dave Karpf, wrote an essay for Esquire about the controversy and how he felt when it went viral.

I will say that I agree with Stephens on one thing: Everybody should quit Twitter.

Farmer’s Almanac Predicts Bad Winter

When I read a headline like this, my first thought is, “Oh no, it’s going to be sunny and humid?” Because that would be my definition of a “bad” winter. Of course, that’s not what the Farmer’s Almanac means. They mean it’s going to be colder and snowier than usual.

Example #2517 Why We Need the Oxford Comma

Newt Gingrich, a three-star Air Force general and former publicist for Michael Jackson and Prince want to create a $2 billion sweepstakes to see who can establish and run the first lunar base https://t.co/Pp40LUqZ7x

— POLITICO (@politico) August 19, 2019

RIP David Koch, Jessi Combs, Charles Santore, and Neal Casal

David Koch was the head of Koch Industries, the multi-billion-dollar global company that deals in everything from finance and energy to natural gas and ranching. Koch also gave millions to cancer research, education, and the arts, including PBS, as well as to conservative political organizations. He died last week at the age of 79.

Jessi Combs was a professional speed racer known as “the fastest woman on four wheels.” She was also a fill-in co-host of the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. She died this week attempting to break a speed record in Oregon’s Alvord Desert. She was 36.

Charles Santore was an acclaimed artist and illustrator known for his work on children’s books, including a well-received 1991 edition of The Wizard of Oz. Earlier in his career he did illustrations for advertisements and TV Guide, including a great cover of Peter Falk as Columbo. He died earlier this month at the age of 84.

Neal Casal was an influential guitarist who not only released many solo albums, but also worked with artists such as Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, Shooter Jennings, and Lucinda Williams. He died last week at the age of 50.

Quote of the Week

Little bit of a conflict of interest that Lucy is both Charlie Brown's therapist and his biggest bully.

— Nathan Rabin (@nathanrabin) August 26, 2019

This Week in History

The Fugitive Finale Airs (August 29, 1967)

The Harrison Ford big-screen adaption of the ’60s David Janssen series is often described as a “great” movie. It’s … okay. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but when you’ve seen the original series and know that Dr. Richard Kimble was on the run for four seasons, it’s a whole different thing. The ending of the movie doesn’t pack the satisfying punch of the two-part series finale of the TV show, which everyone tuned in to watch.

Author Mary Shelley Born (August 30, 1797)

It amazes me that Shelley was only 20 years old when her classic monster novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published. She started writing it when she was 18.

This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Wet Camp Counselor (August 27, 1949)

It was the end of the summer. The kids had put up with too many orders, too much bullying, too much yelling from the head counselor. That’s when they decided to push him into the water. And life at Camp Crystal Lake was never the same after that …

Sunday Is National Gyro Day

It’s that time of the year when we all need to remember how to pronounce gyro, and I used the word year to give you a big clue. The correct way to say it is “YEAR-o,” and not “JAI-ro” or “GEAR-o.”

Here’s a recipe for Gyro Meat with Tzatziki Sauce from Alton Brown, and here’s one for a Homemade Greek Chicken Gyro from The Mediterranean Dish. I can pronounce Mediterranean, but I always forget how to spell it.

And while we’re talking about how to say certain foods, let me just add that daiquiri is pronounced “DAK-ari,” açaí is pronounced “a-sigh-ee,” and bruschetta is pronounced “bru-SKET-a.” You’re welcome. And if you don’t agree with me on how to say those words, I invite you to come here and say them to my face.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

Labor Day (September 2)

I miss the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon.

Newspaper Carrier Day (September 4)

Not to be confused with International Newspaper Carrier Day, which is in October, this day celebrates Barney Flaherty, the first paperboy, hired by The New York Sun in 1833.

I hope you subscribe to a print newspaper, get it delivered to you, and tip well. In another 10 or 20 years it might be one of those occupations that goes the way of switchboard operators and bowling alley pinsetters.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com.

60-Year Bath

That summer, the gender-neutral change room changed everything. The university, accused of being behind the times, finally put one in. For Professor Mulligan, it was amnesty enough to come around on purchasing a campus aquatics membership. It was a way to avoid the posturing, the testosterone, the groupthink of “bros” in the men’s room. Not to mention the mindless, aggressive music spewing from Bluetooth speakers in there these days. Also important: private stalls. You weren’t out in the open. You weren’t exposed.

The professor, a portly fellow, portlier in fact with each passing semester, didn’t undress in front of people. There was a vulnerability, a certain shame in being on display. That afternoon, in his stall, Mulligan loosened his tie, unclipped his suspenders, and unbuttoned his sweat-stained dress shirt, unleashing mayhem. To the tune of two bulging rolls of belly fat and a pair of droopy breasts, all of it topped with matted gray chest hair. This wasn’t who Mulligan was supposed to be — he felt out of place in his own body. Did he have regrets? Who didn’t?

“Professors of psychology don’t have any fewer demons running around inside than anyone else,” Mulligan was known to lecture. “We’re able to identify them, put names to them, that’s all.”

And he didn’t necessarily mean clinical names. Mulligan gave his demons people names. Harley, for example, was the part of Mulligan that ate too much, the part fixated on consumption, on overconsumption. The addict. As a child, it was food. As a teen, as an adult: cigarettes, alcohol, then opioids. Now, as a senior — after nicotine patches, Alcoholics Anonymous, and three stints in drug rehab — Harley was back to food. Harley, the gluttonous slob, was effective, though. Damage control was a tough racket, but Harley was a world-class trauma assassin, burying fear and insecurity beneath thick greasy mounds of fast food and potato chips. It sounded silly, but personifying internal psychological processes, caricaturizing them, somehow made it feel like there was a team within, somehow made Mulligan feel less alone. In a weird way, it helped him understand who he was.

Mulligan pulled on a black T-shirt because going out onto the pool deck topless was not an option. Imagine if one of his Gender and Development students saw him in such a state, half-naked, defenseless like that.

Swimmers in goggles and latex caps filled all eight lanes of the Olympic-sized pool. Their strokes varied, but all cut through the water expertly. One end to the other and back again. With purpose.

Mulligan turned to the therapeutic hot pool. It was empty. The sign there suggested consulting your doctor before entering. It warned that more than 10-15 minutes in the hot pool was potentially detrimental to your health, that prolonged “enjoyment” could cause disorientation.

The lifeguard, a muscular kid in a mesh tank top, watched Mulligan in a way that made Mulligan feel like he was doing something wrong. Was it the T-shirt? Were T-shirts not allowed? Mulligan raised his hand and the kid nodded at him like the two of them had known each other forever.

The first step into the scalding water immediately reminded Mulligan of the baths his mother ran for him as a young boy, how unbearably hot she always made them, how long it took for him to ease his way in, how impatient she was with the whole ordeal. This is a bath, she’d say. Baths are hot. This is how you get clean.

Mulligan took another step — down to knee depth — and stopped again. He stared out the window at a tree, a thin stick of a thing by the walkway to the parking lot. Scraggly branches and wilting leaves drooped in the sweltering heat. The twig-like tip flopped to the side — like it was giving up.

One more step and the water was all the way up Mulligan’s thighs, perilously close to his scrotum. He stood there for what seemed like hours, and he would have stood there a few hours more had a swimmer not gotten out of the main pool, peeled off his goggles and cap, and walked over to the hot pool behind Mulligan. Feeling the pressure to get out of the guy’s way, Mulligan took the final step — waist level — and his hands instinctively moved to his submerged crotch. It was futile protection — screen door on a submarine came to mind — but Mulligan’s hands stayed there. It was psychological.

The swimmer stepped all the way in and sat right down, waterline at his nipples. Just like that. Like it was nothing. Mulligan, XXL shirt stretched tight across his belly, took a deep breath — then a few more — working up the nerve to sit.

Then he sat. Nerve endings across his body — a hundred thousand of them — under siege from the intense heat, sent a hundred thousand distress signals to whatever part of his central nervous system was in charge of pain management. There was a rush of blood to his head, a pleasant tightening around his brain — reminiscent of a warm opiate buzz. Then a sort of weightlessness, a drifting of consciousness, an altered state: Mulligan overload. He turned to the sign on the wall: No person having a communicable disease or open sores shall enter the pool. Suddenly drained, Mulligan’s eyes rolled back in his head.

Communicable disease. Mulligan’s mother had died of pneumonia. All that time she spent in the hospital. Weeks. But it felt longer than that. Like years. He stayed with her, all night, every night, at her bedside. Those nights were long. Time had a torturous way of stretching out. The sound of his mother struggling for breath, the crackling of her windpipe, it was unbearable. All Mulligan could do was sit there. Watch his mother wither, sink into the bed. And through all of it, he never worked up the nerve to talk to her, to really talk to her, to explain to her who he really was. Morbid maybe, but his secret would have been safe; it would have died with her. Instead, she died and there was an entire part of her only son she never knew.

Mulligan opened his eyes.

The water in the pool was still very hot, but he’d at least gotten over the shock. He’d acclimatized. He’d get out soon — more than 10 to 15 minutes was potentially detrimental — but for now he enjoyed it.

Another lifeguard, a young woman in a canvas fishing hat, whistle in mouth, flutter board under arm, patrolled the deck. She paced with self-assuredness. Comfortable in her own body. Reminded Mulligan of Pauline, a student in Gender and Development. He admired Pauline. She was sure of herself. She knew who she was.

Mulligan was in the hot pool alone. The guy, the swimmer who’d peeled off his goggles and cap, gotten into the hot pool with Mulligan, was gone. The waterline was at the guy’s nipples. The waterline was at Mulligan’s nipples. And everything underwater moved on its own. His shirt rippled with the current of filtered water shooting out of jets. His liver-spotted arms floated and bobbed, a dissociation of the limbs, a disconnect between movement and conscious thought. Mulligan was an expert on dissociation: authored a textbook, had personal experience, invented a character to represent the part of him responsible for disconnecting from thoughts and feelings, the part that spearheaded efforts to check out mentally when Mulligan was triggered. This was Spencer, the scrawny trembling twerp who always had an escape plan, who always had the white flag cocked and ready. Spencer, second in command in Trauma Suppression, dealt with what Harley couldn’t bury beneath food. Mulligan was open about his internal cast of characters — his team — in class.

“You’re allowed to make a little light,” he was known to lecture. “Take this stuff too seriously and you’ll cripple yourself under the weight of it.”

What Mulligan wished he’d have been open about was his identity. He wished he’d never kept it a secret in the first place. Pauline, the young woman in Gender and Development, wasn’t afraid to open up about her identity. She came to see Mulligan during his office hours, went right into it, told him everything. Pauline had been born Paul. But even as a child — for as long as she could remember — she knew that wasn’t who she was. She knew she was a girl, a young woman. And she told people about it. Without hesitation. It would have been safe for Mulligan to reciprocate, to open up to Pauline about his own identity, but he couldn’t work up the nerve. Instead she left Mulligan’s office and Mulligan envied her from a distance.

Soaking in the hot water made Mulligan feel healthy: blood flowing, pores sweating out toxins. He pictured little particles — nicotine remnants, lingering alcohol and opioid debris — exiting his body, his inner custodian, Dana, the unappreciated diligent worker, toiling away, deciding what stayed and what went. This was a bath. This was how you got clean. And 10 to 15 minutes wasn’t going to do it: Mulligan had 10, 15, 30, 60 years of damage to undo. Maybe he’d just stay. Maybe he’d soak for as long as it took. He’d already been here a while. Look how dark it was getting. Look how chilly: students pinching coats shut, hurrying to the parking lot. Look at that tree by the walkway, its branches stripped clean of leaves. Look how it stood firm in the whipping wind. Mulligan sank down, shoulders in the water, happy to be in out of the cold, and breathed easy.

Mulligan had breathed easy when he finished AA. He wasn’t a model member. He went through with it, said all the right things, but never took any of it seriously. Everything about it: the patronizing tone, the Jesus stuff, the sheep who ate up the Jesus stuff, the general embarrassment of being there, being one of those people. Mulligan thought of himself as the rogue member, the outsider, the one who was above it, who didn’t need it. He got sober, though — his inability to identify with group members who’d lost jobs and gone to jail minimized his own problem. And showing up, going through the motions, participating when prodded was somehow enough.

The three boys across from Mulligan in the hot pool were drinking. They sipped from cans of All Nighter, an energy drink the university had banned from campus ages ago. Mulligan looked at the lifeguard, a scrawny kid in a ball cap, to see if these boys and their drinks were going to get the boot. The lifeguard, meek and nervous-looking, watched the hot pool from afar. He saw what was going on. Didn’t have the stomach to do anything about it. Like Spencer, Mulligan’s inner escape artist, his coward extraordinaire. The boys drank their sugar-loaded drinks, their testosterone fuel, and raged about the difficulty of their commerce courses: taxation this, inventory accounting that.

Making a “searching and fearless moral inventory” was Step Four. They had circle time in AA. Talked about their feelings. Mulligan made up a bunch of stuff about having a family, being divorced, drinking because he lost custody of the kids. What else was he going to do? Spill his secret? Expose what Harley and Spencer had spent a lifetime supressing and avoiding? To that room of real-life Harleys and Spencers? Because those were the people who were going to understand what it was like to live a lie? Okay, maybe they were exactly the people to understand. The point was: the AA gang — generously tattooed, excessively pierced — wasn’t the gang Mulligan wanted on his side, the first to know that he felt like an alien in his own body, that this god they were all so fond of screwed up with Mulligan at birth, that Mulligan, crippled under the weight of everything, never worked up the courage to live his life the way he was supposed to. Maybe Mulligan should have told them though. Times were changing. Kids nowadays knew who they were and they were coming right out with it, addressing gender dysphoria like it was nothing. Like goddamned heroes.

This was the best Mulligan felt in a long time. Just needed a good long soak to loosen him up. His shirt seemed to be loosening up. This was what it felt like to be in shape: your shirt wasn’t stretched tight, you had some breathing room. It was dark outside and Mulligan could make out his reflection in the window. And — weird — he didn’t hate what he saw. He almost looked young. Almost looked clean.

Every so often, new people appeared. And, just like that, they were gone. Some would push the button to start the jets. The jet at Mulligan’s lower back numbed the base of his spine.

Lifeguards came and went. Alternating watches. Rotating shifts. Periodically sampling the water, testing chlorine levels. It was a constant fight with the pH, a delicate balance. They all knew him by name: Professor Mulligan, The Soaking Man.

Nights would be the hardest. When distractions disappeared. When you were alone with your thoughts. When time had a torturous way of stretching out.

Then there was the winter. It would come with a vengeance. Blizzards, squalls — storms of people’s lifetimes. There would be a tree outside, a thick beast of a thing by the walkway to the parking lot. Snow would pile on its sturdy branches but they’d hold the weight. Those branches were in it together: units with roles, cogs in the machine, contributing to the whole. A team. Forging an identity.

Mulligan sank down, water at his chin, a vantage point that made it look like the water level had risen, like the tide had changed. His shirt rippled with the underwater current. Mesmerizing how it moved on its own. Reminded Mulligan of how he often felt: passive, affected, lacking any say in the matter. It certainly summed up suffering through puberty: having no control over the way his body transformed itself. It was during puberty that his mother stopped letting him into the women’s change room at the public pool. You’re too old for that, she said. They’ll think you’re a pervert. So then it was the men’s room. Where grown men undressed in the open. Where everything hung out. The overwhelming wrongness of that.

Mulligan fixed on his rippling shirt, letting the current happen to it. Felt nice that the shirt was loose on him, that he was swimming in it. Felt nice to be young, to be healthy. Felt invigorating. And he wasn’t going to take it for granted this time.

Soon spring would come. That tree would bud again. And — even if just a little, even if imperceptibly — it would be stronger than it was before. After enough time it would grow taller than the building. Out of its shadow. Cast a shadow of its own. Because showing up, going through the motions, was somehow enough.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Preview Our September/October 2019 Issue

In the most recent issue of The Saturday Evening Post read about the importance of teaching history to our children and grandchildren, the untold story of Annie Oakley’s fierce rival, Hunter the rescue dog, plus books, recipes, health tips, everyday heroes, and more.

Featured image: Robin Moline / SEPS.

America’s First Opioid Epidemic

For thousands of years, doctors relied on opiates to relieve suffering. It was one of the few compounds that could offer immediate, guaranteed release from pain. And opiates have always played a role in America’s story.

The first opiates probably came to America in 1620, arriving in the trunk of the doctor who had sailed on the Mayflower.

Opium was still in use during the Colonial Era. Thomas Jefferson, for example, relied on opiates to ease his suffering in his final years. (Ever far-sighted, he planted opium poppies on his property. They continued growing at Monticello until the 1990s, when the Drug Enforcement Agency pulled them up.)

In the 19th century, the most common opiate was laudanum, a mixture of opium and wine. It was widely available (without a prescription, of course) and it cost less than alcohol.

In those early times, there was no stigma attached to its use, or abuse. The Post, in 1833 recommended it for treating bee stings or persistent coughs (combine molasses, vinegar, wine mixed with with 40 drops of laudanum).

It could also be used on children who were teething. But adults also found laudanum was an easy way to get their infants and older children to sleep, especially since the side effects were little known at the time. In 1858, The Post reported that one lady in New England solved her baby-sitter problem by putting her children into a deep sleep with laudanum so she could attend nightly prayer meetings.

In an 1864 Post article on factory towns, the author described the desperate state of child day care. Working women might leave their offspring with elderly caretakers who dosed the children with laudanum so they’d remain quiet and manageable.

The majority of opiate addicts in the late 1800s were middle- to upper-class women. They turned to laudanum because, in the Victorian era, they had limited access to alcohol. No respectable woman could buy liquor or enter a saloon.

Laudanum was considered a source of inspiration for artists, composers, and, especially poets. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were all familiar with, if not addicted to, laudanum.

In the post-Civil-War years, opiate use rose sharply.  Many wounded veterans, who’d been given the painkiller in military hospitals, became life-long addicts.

But there was even greater use among civilians, some of whom became addicted when trying to escape the pain of a chronic illness, bankruptcy, unemployment, or the death of a loved one. This heavy use of laudanum caused the death of thousands. And deliberate overdosing became the most common means of suicide.

Later in the century, the dangers of the drug were becoming more obvious, as reflected in the Post’s coverage. An April 6, 1872, article stated, “A careful inquiry among druggists reveals the fact that there are in New York city about 5,000 confirmed users” (out of a population of less than 100,000).

In a later article, the editors wrote:

The use of laudanum as a drink is fast increasing. In most cases it is used with alcohol to lessen the irritating effect of this drug, or the result of excessive alcohol, as a sedative, or as a stimulant. In England a favorite preparation used after drinking is called a “Pick me up.” In some large cities, druggists give compounds of laudanum and ginger under fanciful names, and these are resorted to always after, in place of alcohol. This accounts for the enormous sales of opium, of which not over one fifth is used in medicine.

Laudanum abuse wasn’t just a big-city problem, either. An 1894 editorial reported, “Anyone who doubts the continued prevalence of the opium-taking habit would soon be convinced if he glanced over the chemists’ preparations for a rural market-day.” Country folk, it continued, took laudanum not to alleviate pain, but to bring “artificial excitement” into their sedate, rural lives.

Doctors had been alerted to the dangers of addiction starting in the 1870s. But the warnings had little chance of reaching doctors living in the country. Even among physicians who knew better, it was difficult not to prescribe laudanum for their patients in agony; there simply was nothing else. And opiates continued to be the prescription of choice for patients.

Even as America awoke to the dangers of opiates, little was done to discourage its use. Between 1898 and 1902, the opium and morphine business more than doubled. The rate of addiction was nearly three times higher than in the mid-1990s.

A reforming spirit emerged among Americans in the 1900s. One of the chief areas of concern was the unhealthiness of food and drugs, many of which included opiates.

Another factor was an outcome of the recent Spanish-American war. The U.S. had taken over the administration of the Philippines, which had a thriving opium trade. President Theodore Roosevelt requested an international opium commission to exert some control over opiate traffic. But he realized the U.S. couldn’t control drug traffic in the world if it couldn’t control it at home.

In 1909, Congress finally criminalized the importation, possession, or smoking of opium. Later, the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act required all importers, manufacturers, or dispensers of any opium product to register with the government.

The opioid epidemics of then and now are similar in many ways, but there is one great difference. Doctors and opioid addicts in the 1800s could plead ignorance of the dangers within these substances. We don’t have that excuse today.

Featured image: “The countess, having taken a dose of laudanum nears death” Engraving by Louis Gérard Scotin after William Hogarth, 1745. (Wellcome Collection gallery, CC-BY-4.0)

In a Word: Cracking Open the Walnut

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Trees in the genus Juglans have been cultivated, both for their wood and their nuts, in continental Europe for so long that their historical distribution cannot be accurately tracked. It took some time, though, for them to make it to Great Britain. When the English finally got their hands on these nuts, they called them, in Old English, wealhhnutu — that’s wealh “foreigner” + hnutu “nut” — to differentiate them from their native hazelnuts. Over time the name was simplified to walnut.

Walnuts are literally “foreign nuts.”

So the wal- in walnut has nothing to do with walls, nor is it the same as the wal- in ­walrus. (Walrus is of Scandinavian origin and literally means “whale horse.”) But that Old English root is shared with a couple of other words you might not expect.

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded what we now call Great Britain, wealh (“foreigner”) and its adjective form wælisc (“foreign”) are what they called the island’s native Celts — which, yes, is ironic considering they were the invading force. The words stuck, and over time, those labels became Wales and Welsh.

The Welsh don’t call themselves foreigners, of course. In the Welsh language, the country is Cymru and the people are Cymry. Both words are pronounced “KUM-ri” and derive from an older word meaning “compatriot.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

The Accidental Beekeeper

As the mild San Francisco morning sun fills the back of my station wagon, I wrestle with two stacked boxes buzzing with a low hum. I can’t afford to slip or drop them: Inside is a colony of honeybees.

Until recently I was a helpless city slicker, prone to startling and swatting at anything buzzy. I couldn’t even tell a bright yellowjacket from a striped honeybee. Yet here I am, veiled and covered up, hugging two supers — wooden boxes making up a hive — full of bees, wax, and honey. I’m now one of many amateur beekeepers fostering the winged creatures in urban and suburban communities around the country.

Numbers vary widely from study to study, some citing upwards of 120,000 Americans looking after honeybees on rooftops and in backyards. There may be no way to compute an accurate number, according to Dr. Dewey M. Caron, a University of Delaware entomologist, but nonprofessional beekeepers are thought to own up to 10 percent of all bee colonies. “Now, that may not sound significant,” he says, “but backyard beekeepers are some of the most active individuals in influencing legislators and policymakers. They serve a crucial part in maintaining bee populations.”

I had no eureka moment or activist manifesto. Over the years I read about the bee’s crucial role in pollination — and therefore human survival — and slowly began daydreaming about lending them a spot to live: my idea of low-commitment community service, perhaps. I read a few beekeeper blog posts, fell into a YouTube rabbit hole, and took a weekend class. Once I was reasonably confident, I answered a call to adopt a hive.

My bees were rescued in Silicon Valley, 50 miles south of where I live, the last block before the foggy city gives way to the Pacific Ocean. Having stealthily nested behind a boarded-­up window in an abandoned house in Palo Alto, this colony was about to become homeless when developers decided to fix up the building. (If ever there was a place for a joke about the Bay Area’s ever-worsening housing shortage, this would be the punchline.) Just in the nick of time, three volunteers went in to take apart the stalactite-like mass into sheets of waxy comb, full of honey, bees, and soon-to-hatch babies, placing them into a Langstroth hive, a commonly used box to keep bees.

“My beehives are like pets,” she says as she helps me install the hive in my yard. “They’re a part of my family.”

My friend Cheryl Chang was one of the rescuers. Though master beekeepers spend their lifetime honing their skills, picking up the basics is less intimidating than most people might think. Cheryl has gone from a complete novice to being capable of capturing wayward swarms by dedicating a few hours a week over two short years to this hobby.

In Mountain View, better known for tech giants like Google than bucolic pursuits, the philanthropic service professional keeps a tidy garden of avocados and pear trees, lemon verbena and pineapple guava bushes. Tucked in the corner by the fence, her two hives whir with activity year-round, producing gallons of honey more fragrant than anything I’ve bought from a store. As a matter of fact, some studies claim bees, who forage for miles each day, are healthier and plumper in cities and suburbs, where they have access to diverse ecosystems offering a wider array of diet than monocultural farmland where there are only, say, bitter almond blossoms. In turn this can lead to higher honey yields.

But Cheryl’s not in it for the sweet nectar.

“My beehives are like pets,” she says as she helps me install the hive in my yard. “They’re part of my family.”

Quite a statement for creatures you can’t teach to roll over on command. And forget stroking them or snuggling up with them on the couch. I couldn’t have understood her comment until now.

As soon as we remove the netting that kept the hive sealed for the car ride, dozens of bees spill out and hover around the hive’s entrance, trying to take in their new environs. A few bees form a line on the landing strip of the entrance and start what could only be described as twerking.

“They’re fanning out the hive’s scent,” Cheryl tells me. “So the other bees from the colony can find their way back.”

Right away I’m smitten. Then everything clicks in my head. I’m less a landlord or an amused dilettante than a guardian. The responsibility for these lives suddenly weighs down on me. To stave off an imminent anxiety attack, I concentrate on what I’ve learned about bees.

A few months back, I sat with about 30 people, mostly under 35, around a long table in a warehouse doubling as the classroom for San ­Francisco Honey & Pollen. We were attending an introductory beekeeping class, and for most of us, the translucent comb being passed around was the first we’d touched of this marvelously geometric structure that bees build with their secretions.

By trade, John McDonald retrofits homes for earthquakes, but he’s also what the honey industry calls a sideliner, a part-time enthusiast who derives some income from keeping bees. He began keeping a few hives in the back of his lumber workshop as a hobby, and by 2006 he was selling honey and sharing the knowhow he’d picked up. Now he teaches upwards of 1,200 students a year.

The surging popularity arrives at a critical juncture, as honeybees today have it harder than ever. Coming into public prominence in 2006, the massive disappearance of bees known as Colony Collapse Disorder kills up to half of all hives in some areas, with some beekeepers reporting 90 percent of their stock perishing. But despite the urgency — and the subsequent popularity of amateur beekeeping — only a select few actually pursue the hobby.

“I’d say only about 1 percent of the attendees go on to start beekeeping,” John said.

Right away I’m smitten. Then everything clicks in my head. I’m less a landlord or an amused dilettante than a guardian.

Who were these curious onlookers spending their hard-earned day off in beekeeping suits? A couple next to me revealed that they were on a second date. A dyed-in-the-wool Berkeley baby boomer declared, “We all should help bees save the world.” Another woman confided that she was really just there for the honey tasting. Many had come, from the sight of it, to snap selfies in white overalls and black veils.

For the next few hours we got a crash course, part biology, part veterinary medicine, and part petting zoo. A colony, we learned, is led by one queen who takes to the sky only for a few days in her first spring in order to collect sperm, and spends the rest of her years continuously laying eggs. Some of these eggs become drones, or male bees whose sole purpose is to mate with a queen from a different hive (and, oh cruel nature, immediately die). But most become female worker bees who devote their lives to labor, from feeding hatchlings to pampering the queen. Their tasks evolve as they mature, not unlike human workers who get promoted, and they learn to guard the hive from intruders before they take to the skies to forage for nectar, pollen, and water. They will work themselves to death in as little as six weeks, perpetually replaced by the next generations that they raised.

As with any other animals, it’s tempting to anthropomorphize these critters. Some hives are genial, others downright mean — as broad as the spectrum of human personalities. Among the dozen hives in the yard, we were steered away from one containing aggressive members while McDonald, in only shorts and a veil, cracked open others that were so docile that his hands were left ungloved. The queen’s genetics and pheromones determine her colony’s personality, and it’s not unheard of for a seasoned beekeeper to commit regicide and set up a new royal if the subjects are deemed too violent.

Callous as it may sound, few things shatter the myth of benevolent Mother Nature like witnessing bees’ Machiavellian tendencies. In the yard behind the warehouse, I watched in horror as one bee struggled to cling on to another that was hauling it out of the hive and dropping it on the ground. Sick or dying bees, we learned, get cleared for the common good.

 

Lucky for me, the hive that comes to my yard turns out to be very mellow. I fret about everything — whether to keep feeding them sugar syrup to ease their transition, whether they’re hovering around the hive too much, and whether I should actively fight ant intruders with cinnamon — prompting my friends to say that I sound just like the nervous first-time moms that they used to be. Stop worrying you might kill them, they advised me, and just enjoy.

In the weeks following their arrival, they learn to soar high above the house to head toward the Golden Gate Park, a veritable buffet of prime forage. I worry less and less about these gentle newcomers attacking neighbors: A relief because, although cities from New York to Los Angeles have been changing laws to allow beekeeping, many urban dwellers understandably fear any creatures equipped with stingers. By law San ­Francisco explicitly allows its residents to keep bees without permits, while other municipalities require written permission from the neighbors. In many cases, beekeepers crawl into the don’t-ask-don’t-tell closet to keep things under wraps.

“I was told to paint the hives green, tuck them between greenery in the corner, and never tell the neighbors,” says Gigi Trabant, who is president of the San Francisco Beekeepers Association and another hobbyist I meet along the way. She began taking beekeeping classes the month after she retired from a career in nursing in 2011. But her attempts at stealth ended when one half of a colony decided to pack up and leave.

“Swarming is a sign of too much success,” she says. “A new beekeeper may not keep track of how fast a colony is growing. When the bees run out of space, the hive splits.”

One warm spring day, thousands of Gigi’s bees whipped themselves into a frenzy and moved en masse across the block in the foggy San Francisco borough of the Richmond.

“And my neighbors actually loved it!” Gigi says, laughing. Today her neighbors count as some of her bees’ biggest champions, inquiring after their well­being. But she still takes care to schedule regular hive inspections, which involve opening up the boxes to check for the colony’s health, only on weekdays when her neighbors’ children are at school. And she passes around jars of honey at holidays.

I’ve discovered that few things calm me like having hundreds of bees buzz about me.

For every happy ending like Gigi’s, you’ll hear a nightmare story of miffed neighbors threatening to sue. To avoid such potential conflicts, father and son Anton and Andrzej Krukowski set up their hives away from their home on a dense residential street and used a family friend’s property without neighbors.

Finding the installation site was just the beginning. Andrzej, then only 8, wanted to get over his fear of getting stung by choosing beekeeping as his independent learning project at school. “I was reluctant going in,” says Anton. “I thought it was overambitious for a fourth-grader.”

But Andrzej has the articulate maturity befitting a son of two teachers and approached the project with ­seriousness.

“Being around bees can be unnerving at first,” says Andrzej, now 12. “When they fly around you and even sting you through the suit, it really does something to your ­confidence.”

Tending to their hives has become a bonding experience for the duo over the past three years. Lately, though, Andrzej has been feeling a bit unmotivated: “I still enjoy it once we go there, but now it feels more like a responsibility than a privilege. Video games are much easier.”

If his son’s enthusiasm has fluctuated, Anton has grown all the more interested. “There’s something very hypnotic about opening up a hive and seeing them,” he said. “When they’re not overwhelming us, it becomes a meditative activity.”

And I know exactly what he means. Sure, it hasn’t been smooth sailing: I’ve gotten stung, including once on the forehead that ended up growing a tumor-like swelling. Battling ants is a constant struggle, and during one routine check, I dropped a frame full of honey, destroying months’ worth of bees’ labor in one smash. Late in the season, my hive came down with an epidemic of varroa mites, the common parasites that feed on the young, destroying colonies when untreated.

But to my surprise, once I got over my initial anxiety, I’ve discovered that few things calm me like having hundreds of bees buzz about me. Ever the reluctant Californian, I’ve never been one to use words like mindfulness, but beekeeping gives me a taste of the serenity that meditation enthusiasts extol. The bees’ murmur drowns out all the competing thoughts in my head — about the home renovation that’s going all wrong, loved ones’ recent health diagnoses, and work deadlines crashing down on me at once. Even at the end of the worst day, I calm down when I sit by the hive and watch the bees at work, gracefully taking off and soaring along the paths only decipherable to them. When I need comic relief, I look out for the ones returning home, heavy with nectar or pollen. They collide with others or miss the landing by an inch, comically traipsing down before floating again.

In a few short months the bees have provided more solace than any electronic gadget or self-help book. They let me feel at one with nature and time, as I watch them sustain the world, one flight at a time. I breathe without thinking about anything at all, and soon I realize I can simply be. It’s a cliché, I know, but by adopting these rescued creatures, I was saved.

Chaney Kwak is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

To learn more about keeping bees, contact your local beekeepers association. You’ll find a directory at beeculture.com/directory.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com.

Does Our Primitive Survival Instinct Still Work in the 21st Century?

Our survival instinct, which has served us so well since we climbed out of the primordial muck eons ago may now be failing us. Why? Because the fight-or-flight reaction that arises in response to a threat to our lives is often no longer effective in a world that is far more complex, unpredictable, and uncontrollable than that of our primitive ancestors’ from which the survival instinct arose. In this article, I want to explore this disconnect between our survival instinct and what kind of new survival instinct might work better today.

At the heart of fight-or-flight are what I call the “Big Three” crisis reactions : fear, gloom, and panic.

Fear

First, the emotional reaction of fear is instantaneous and intense, ensuring that we pay attention and respond to a perceived crisis. In other words, fear causes us to act fast! Fear paralyzes our ability to think clearly, identify problems, and make deliberate decisions because thinking takes time and there just wasn’t enough time back in the cavepeople days for that; the only viable options were to fight or flee, immediately!

Unfortunately, many of today’s threats can’t be fought because there is no readily confrontable enemy (think terrorist attacks, climate change, and job loss). And they can’t be run away from because many are diffuse rather than localized; you can run, but you can’t hide. And burying your head in the sand may work for ostriches, but for humans, it leaves a very important part of the body exposed!

Gloom

Second, gloom can work if the crisis is clear and present. In prehistoric times, focusing on the negative dimensions of a threat — namely, what can go wrong in the near term — ensured that we stayed vigilant to the most relevant dangers, allowing us to respond most quickly. By focusing on the negative aspects of the crisis during primitive times, our ancestors had the simple choice of fighting or fleeing. These primitive threats were also usually short lived — for example, an attacking animal or rival tribe — so gloom had no long-term implications.

But today’s crises are often amorphous, distant, and long lasting. So the initial gloom, which had short-term survival benefits, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that can worsen the threat. We saw this play out during the Great Recession. Many people distrusted the stock market, many businesses had little confidence in their own survival, and governments lost faith in their ability to overcome the crisis. In all these cases, an attitude of gloom led to behavior that may have actually worsened the financial crisis.

Panic

Third, panic produces immediate and frenzied behavior. Panic was quite functional back in prehistoric days because it triggered in our ancestors either a furious attack or a frantic retreat from the threat. Panic in reaction to many of today’s crises, however, produces actions that are more ill-advised and destructive than helpful. Where there should be patience, there is haste. Where there should be reasoned deliberation, there is irrationality. Where there should be calm, there is, well, panic.

In the panic after the fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and the stock market crash that followed, many people fled the financial markets, many businesses drastically cut costs by letting go of employees, and governments went into austerity mode at the worst possible time. All of these efforts were intended to ensure everyone’s respective survival, but such panicked behavior was short-sighted and had the exact opposite effect in the long run.

A New Survival Instinct

If these instincts that are so deeply woven into our DNA no longer fulfill our most basic needs to survive, what new form of survival instinct do we need to evolve to help us to endure in the concrete, metal, and hard-wired jungle in which we now live? As with earlier stages of evolution, we need to adapt to our surroundings and produce a response that will be more effective than the fight-or-flight reaction that helped us survive for hundreds of thousands of years.

But we can’t wait millions of years for evolution to do its job and ingrain a new survival instinct in us that is more functional for the modern world. In fact, we can, to paraphrase a well-known adage, take evolution by the horns and bend it to our will with a new survival instinct that is the antithesis of the time-worn fight-or-flight reaction. Instead of overwhelming and uncontrollable fear, a crisis should trigger courage, which isn’t the absence of fear — it’s impossible to not to experience fear in the face of a threat — but rather the ability to confront the fear and act proactively and deliberately despite it. It involves being able to manage negative emotions, such as fear, anger, frustration, and despair, and to generate helpful emotions, including hope, inspiration, excitement, and pride.

Instead of gloom, we should engage in rational thinking that includes calculated risk-reward analysis, in-depth problem solving, and effective decision making. It means being cognizant of the threat, but focusing more on finding solutions to overcome it. In a crisis that encompasses a group (e.g., work, family, team), this reasoned thinking requires that people set aside differences, communicate openly, establish priorities, and work together — because that is the rational thing to do in the face of significant societal crises — to produce answers to the pressing dangers that today’s threats present to us.

Finally, we don’t need to wait for evolution to adapt our survival instinct to today’s challenges. Rather, we already have the capacity to override our primitive survival instinct. We are already capable of experiencing courage, thinking rationally, and acting deliberately. That is the gift that evolution has also given us; it’s called the cerebral cortex.

Tips For Responding to a Crisis

Instead of panic, we should take calm and measured action that is directed and purposeful.  This new survival instinct can increase our chances of surviving during periods of crisis. What results is a psychology—what I call an ‘opportunity mindset’— that is diametrically opposed to and entirely more effective than the survival instinct that now dominates our DNA and our lives.

Of course, the real challenge involves how to resist those millions of years of evolution and stop the instinctive flight-or-flight reaction before it takes complete control of us. Here are a few tips for ingraining a more evolved response to a crisis:

• Stop!: Instead of a knee-jerk reaction to a threat in your life, take a break and gain some physical and emotional distance from the threat. With this separation, your survival instinct will diminish and make it easier for you to engage the higher-order thinking of your cerebral cortex.
• Relax: When your survival instinct is triggered, it activates your ‘sympathetic nervous system’ which puts your body into overdrive with increased heart rate, blood flow, and adrenaline. This reaction helped in the past, but doesn’t do much good with most present-day threats. Take some deep breaths, relax your body, and center your mind.
• Seek support: Crises of all sorts, whether a saber-toothed tiger or the loss of a job, are more manageable when you know that you have others in your life who can support you. So, when a threat arises, look for people who can provide you with emotional and practical support to address the crisis.
• Focus on what you can control: The nature of many of today’s threats is that they aren’t always within your control. But, there are always some aspects of a crisis that you can control, most notably, your reaction, attitude, and response to it. When a crisis arrives, identify what you can control about it and direct your attention there.
• Identify the problem/find a solution: At the heart of every crisis is a problem. If you can identify the problem, you may be able to find a solution to the crisis (of course, not all present-day crises have immediate solutions to resolve them).
• Set goals/make a plan: Crises often result in feelings of loss and destabilization, both of which are truly unsettling. Goals and a plan can provide you with clear direction and tangible steps to overcome the crisis with which you are faced.
• Take action: When presented with a threat, running away from it rarely works these days. Not only is the crisis still there, but you feel even more helpless to confront it. Rather than withdrawing from the threat, choose to take action aimed at overcoming it. You’ll feel more in control, less stressed, and, the big bonus is that you may actually resolve the crisis and remove the threat.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

An Interview with Our September/October 2019 Cover Artist Robin Moline

Saturday Evening Post: Can you tell us more about what inspired you to paint the image that appears on the September/October 2019 cover of The Saturday Evening Post?

Moline: This painting was originally commissioned for tapestry art, but I decided to go ahead and create an image that I could also sell for prints and as a stock image. So I basically went to town, put myself into the scene and tried to imagine what the look and the feel of that kind of day would be. The painting had to tell the story and transport the viewer there too.

Post: You describe your style as “a surreal look with an often folksy twist.” Many of your illustrations pay homage to or are reminiscent of Grant Wood. I would describe them as “Grant Wood on acid.” What attracts you to that style of illustration?

Moline: I have heard my artwork described like that before. I’d like to think that I take Regionalism imagery and that folksy style and amplify the colors to make my artwork have a more contemporary feel. What attracted to me to this style is hard to say. I suppose first I always enjoyed painting landscapes from an early age and often they were of rural subject matter of places I’d been and farms I visited. When I first saw Grant Wood’s work I felt a connection maybe because they felt familiar and maybe because I always wanted to be in his paintings. I eventually bought a Grant Wood art book, studied it a lot, and decided I wanted to try to paint like that myself. So I did and eventually it has become what you see today.

Post: Who else are you inspired by?

Moline: There are other Regionalist artists’ work I also really love. Marvin Cone’s sensual landscapes of that same area in Iowa are spectacular. The color and movement in John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton’s work I always find inspirational. Other non-Regionalist artists that stand out are the whimsy, detail, and subject matter of Charles Wysocki paintings. Some of my early favorites were the surrealist Artists Henri Rousseau, René Magritte and Salvador Dalí and the romantic look and thermal colors palette of Maxfield Parrish. I of course enjoy a wide range of artists going back to other centuries as well. While on my honeymoon back in 1980 I saw Botticelli’s large scale paintings and was in total awe. Recently while in Italy I saw again the work of Pinturicchio and his mythological scenes and detail in Sienna’s Duomo; I could have looked at that artwork all day long. Of course there are plenty of other artists to draw inspiration from including many peers but the above stand out in the top tier.

Post: What media do you typically work in?

Moline: My traditional style is I paint on illustration board. I generally do an acrylic airbrushed underpainting then go in with fine tiny acrylic brushes to finesse the art and add detail and texture.

Post: How did you get started in your illustration career?

Moline: I pretty much decided to freelance right out of my college years at The Minneapolis College of Art & Design. I was lucky to start out when I did. There was a lot of local work and I was able to get a representative early on. In the ’90’s after I had established a more consistent style and fine-tuned my skills, I then looked for a national representative and broadened my field.

Post: How is painting for yourself different from painting for a client?

Moline: I do enjoy both. I love the challenge of working with a client and the problem solving involved, whether it be a book or magazine cover, an editorial, a poster, map, or product design. I always love seeing the end result when a client is involved because I am working with other creatives and my work gets to be woven into a bigger picture. I also don’t mind a deadline; of course the longer ones are more welcome. When I work on a painting for myself it’s hard to know when to stop, and that can be a problem. Also when I have a set client there is incentive to get the artwork done because I get paid sooner. So that’s a big motivation as trite as that might sound. Of course painting for myself I only have myself to please and I can experiment and not have a client expecting that specific look they are after based on seeing previous work.

Post: What is your favorite thing about being an artist?

Moline: Honestly being my own boss and working out of my home and not dealing with a commute is the best. Working with so many wonderful creative people I’ve met along the way and that there is always a challenge and rarely a dull moment. Being an artist has made me grateful that I have a way to express myself and that it has allowed me to expand my imagination. Hopefully through my work I can move others emotionally and intellectually and to be able to share some of my inner world and imagination.

Post: What’s the most fun thing you’ve painted?

Moline: That’s a hard one to pick over the 40 years of painting. So I’ll give you a few that achieved a few levels of satisfaction. The Farmer’s Market Stamp project stands out…I loved the art director and I had a luxurious long deadline. It was first thought that I’d be doing some of my signature landscapes, but in the end I was painting every kind of fruit, vegetable, food, and plant you might find at a neighborhood farmer’s market. It was definitely a job that evolved over time, but I enjoyed the whole process and it also included a trip for the unveiling ceremony in Washington, D.C.

As far as landscape art goes I was lucky to work with HOK architects/engineering in the early ’90’s and did some big projects with them. The second was mural art for the new John Deere Pavilion in Moline, Illinois. The actual painting is a bit of a blur — the deadline was pretty fast considering the amount of painting involved, but the end results still please me to this day. I also fondly look back at an ongoing series I did for a high profile marketing group out in Hollywood called the Ant Farm. I created a group of ant characters for them that were pretty busy and active doing fun things mostly taking place out in L.A. Again, the clients were great to work with, too.

Post: What advice would you give to aspiring artists?

Moline: Patience and practice above all. You are not going to know your full potential, hidden talents, or fine tune your artwork right away. That takes time. Your artwork, as life itself, is an evolving process…and a gradual unveiling of yourself and your story. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different mediums and subject matter. You will make mistakes and you might disappoint those you work with now and then but you will learn from that. Don’t fear those periods of time when you don’t feel an ounce of creativity surfacing. When that happens, it will take time to observe and reflect and do whatever else you are being pulled toward…travel, read, relax and pick it up again when you are reenergized and the creative tap starts flowing again. Whatever you do don’t compare your work to others… if you are enjoying what it is you do and are growing as an artist, that is number one. Also accept that not everyone is going to like your art. Some will be critical, but if you love your work and you find a niche and even a few people love what you do as well, then you’ve made it. At that point smile and pat yourself on the back!

Post: Is there anything else you’d like Saturday Evening Post readers to know about your work?

Moline: Looking back on my career, a day that tickled me the most was when I was Googling some of Grant Wood’s work, my image came up and someone had mistaken it as his. Just last year I was asked to do a show down at the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa. That was another highlight of my career — to be standing in front of that house that had been parodied endlessly, and that my work that was on display inside was inspired by my favorite muse. I’ve told numerous people before that in fun I like to call myself Robin Wood. I think it has a nice ring.

To find out more about Robin and her work, visit robin-moline.pixels.com/.

Featured image: Robin Moline / SEPS.

Cartoons: Play Ball!

Want even more laughs? Subscribe to the magazine for cartoons, art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want even more laughs? Subscribe to the magazine for cartoons, art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

Featured image and all cartoons: SEPS.

Considering History: Emmett Till’s Casket and the Worst and Best of America

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present. 

In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted and lynched Emmett Till near the small town of Money, Mississippi. Till, who had just turned 14 years old a month earlier, lived in Chicago with his single mother Mamie; Mamie’s parents had left Mississippi as part of the Great Migration when she was just two years old, and in the summer of 1955 Emmett returned to the area for the first time, staying with Mamie’s uncle Mose Wright and his family. On the morning of August 24 Emmett and his cousin Curtis visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant was working by herself; according to Bryant’s testimony at the time, Emmett accosted her both verbally and physically. When her husband Roy returned from a fishing trip on August 27, Carolyn told him her version of the encounter, and he and his half-brother J.W. set out on a mission of revenge and racial terrorism that ended with the brutalizing and murder of Emmett.

Virtually every detail of Till and Bryant’s initial encounter remains in dispute, not least because Carolyn Bryant herself has in recent decades recanted some crucial aspects of her testimony (such as the physical side to the altercation). Roy and J.W.’s lynching of Emmett was never in dispute, yet the two men were acquitted on all charges by an all-white jury in a high-profile September 1955 trial. All those histories tell us a great deal about Mississippi, the South, and America, in 1955 and in our own moment. Yet there is another vital side to our collective memories of Emmett Till, one captured by his moving memorial at the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

The centerpiece of the NMAAHC’s Till memorial is his casket — not a replica, but the actual casket in which Till was buried after his early September funeral in Chicago. The Department of Justice exhumed Till’s remains as part of a 2005 investigation into his kidnapping and murder, and he was re-buried in a new casket; the old casket was stored at the cemetery and discovered in 2009. The NMAAHC, still in development at the time, acquired the casket soon after; as Director Lonnie Bunch III put it, “It is an object that allows us to tell the story, to feel the pain and understand loss. I want people to feel like I did. I want people to feel the complexity of emotions.”

When I visited the NMAAHC with my sons and my parents a couple weeks ago, it was indeed the Till memorial that most affected us all (which is no slight on the whole of this must-visit museum). We did feel that pain and understand that loss, as it’s impossible not to contrast the exhibit’s photos of young Emmett (as a baby, as a young boy alongside his mother, and as a smiling teenager just months before his murder) with the photos and stories of his lynching and, most potently, with that adolescent-sized casket, past which visitors to the memorial walk as if at a funeral service.

As that casket reminds us, the pain and loss of Emmett’s lynching was felt with particular force by Mamie. She had already lived through more than her share of struggle, including her family’s migration, her parents’ divorce when she was 13, and, especially, her abusive marriage with Emmett’s father Louis Till. They were only 18 when they married in 1940, and he was consistently abusive, culminating in his choking Mamie to unconsciousness in 1942 (when Emmett was about 1). After that assault she took out a restraining order on Louis, and when he violated it repeatedly he chose enlistment in the army rather than prison. In July 1945 Louis was court-martialed and executed in Italy for murder and rape, leaving Mamie and Emmett as a pair of survivors, a tight family unit on Chicago’s South Side.

For a parent to lose their child in any way is a tragedy; for Mamie to lose her only child in this sudden and brutal manner is a trauma too horrific to imagine. Yet as the museum’s open casket likewise reminds us, Mamie responded to that trauma with a pair of stunning and crucial choices: making Emmett’s funeral service public and, most potently, insisting on an open-casket service. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she argued, and tens of thousands of mourners did see Emmett’s brutalized young body (with photographs being seen by millions more). Mamie then embarked on an NAACP-organized speaking tour, sharing her loss and trauma and son and voice with audiences around the country.

As the NMAAHC’s exhibit highlights in depth, Mamie’s choices became hugely inspirational for the nascent Civil Rights Movement and some of its most significant figures and actions. As Myrlie Evers put it, “Somehow [it] struck a spark of indignation that ignited protests around the world. … It was the murder of this 14-year-old out-of-state visitor that touched off a world-wide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi’s racism.” Or, as Rosa Parks put it more succinctly, when describing to Mamie Till herself the moment when Parks refused to move to the back of that Montgomery bus, “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.”

The recent launch of the New York Times’s 1619 Project has prompted renewed debate about whether and how to remember our nation’s most violent and oppressive histories. Critics of the project (those not blatantly advancing white supremacist talking points) argue that dwelling on these painful histories is divisive and destructive to our present and future. Yet until we can feel the pain and understand the loss, how we can possibly grapple with not only the histories themselves, but the nation that has featured them so consistently and centrally? We can only do so by standing before the casket — and when we do, we can also remember the ways in which figures like Mamie Till, Rosa Parks, and so many more have experienced and yet transcended our worst, modeling the best of what we might still become.

Featured image: Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Bradley, ca. 1950 (Alamy)

“The Thread of Truth, Part IV” by Erle Stanley Gardner

When he died, in 1970, Erle Stanley Gardner was the best-selling American fiction author of the century. His detective stories sold all over the globe, especially those with his most famous defense attorney protagonist, Perry Mason. His no-nonsense prose and neat, satisfying endings delighted detective fans for decades. Gardner wrote several stories that were serialized in the Post. In Country Gentleman, his 1936 serial “The Thread of Truth” follows a fresh D.A. in a clergyman murder case that comes on his first day on the job.

Published on December 1, 1936

 

The shabby little man, registered as The Reverend Charles Brower, died in Room 321 of the Madison Hotel, murdered by a deadly sleeping tablet. District Attorney Douglas Selby of Madison City, elected on a reform ticket, must find the guilty person, for he knew that the Blade, newspaper of the ousted gang, awaited the chance for a vicious attack.

But Mrs. Brower, come from Nevada to the California town near Hollywood, declared the slain man was not her husband. Yet the few effects in Room 321 were all identified with Brower, all save an expensive camera, a movie scenario, newspaper clippings of the screen favorite, Shirley Arden, and more clippings relating to litigation over the local Perry estate.

Working desperately, Selby learned that Shirley Arden had been a guest of the Madison Hotel the night of the murder, that a man had called upon her, and that a perfumed envelope containing five $1,000 bills had been left in the hotel safe in Brower’s name.

The Blade screamed for action on the case. Selby questioned Shirley Arden, discovered that her distinctive perfume did not tally with that of the envelope, and that she could not remember clearly the name of the man who had called for her aid in selling his scenario. She convinced Selby of her innocence; she even won his reluctant admiration and his promise of protection against the harm that connection with a murder case would do her career.

Then the first break. Spectacles found in Room 321 belonged to a Reverend Larrabie of Riverbend, upstate California town. It was the name Shirley Arden had been trying to recall! Selby and his staunch ally, Sylvia Martin, girl reporter on the friendly Clarion, hastened to Riverbend to return with Mrs. Larrabie. The slain man was her husband, but his murderer was yet to be found.

Then Brower appeared at the hotel to demand the $5,000 envelope, but refused to talk when taken into custody. Next Selby discovered that young Herbert Perry, one of the Perry estate litigants, had knocked on the door of the minister’s room the night of the murder. And then, to Selby’s dismay, Sylvia Martin pointed out that Shirley Arden had suddenly changed the brand of perfume she used — and the change coincided with the time of the minister’s death.

 

XIII

Events during the next few minutes moved in a swift, kaleidoscopic fashion.

Frank Gordon entered the office very much excited. There had been a shooting scrape down on Washington Avenue. A divorced husband had vowed no one else should have his wife and had sought to make good his boast with five shots from a six-shooter, saving the sixth for himself. Four of the shots had gone wild. The woman had been wounded with the fifth. The man’s nerve had failed when it came to using the sixth. He’d turned to run and had been picked up by one of the officers.

Held in jail, he was filled with lachrymose repentance and was in the proper mood to make a complete confession. Later on he probably would repudiate the confession, claim the police had beaten him in order to obtain it, that he had shot in self-defense and was insane anyway. Therefore, the police were anxious to have the district attorney present to see that a confession was taken down properly.

“You’ll have to go, Gordon,” Selby said. “This will be a good chance for you to break in. Remember not to make him any promises. Don’t even go so far as to tell him it would be better for him to tell the truth. Take a shorthand reporter with you and take down everything that’s said; ask the man if he wants a lawyer.”

“Should I do that?”

“Sure. He won’t want a lawyer — not now, when he wants to confess. Later on he’ll want a lawyer, or perhaps some lawyer will want him in order to get the advertising. How bad is the woman wounded?”

“Not bad; a shot through the shoulder. It missed the lung, I understand.”

“If it isn’t fatal he’ll plead guilty,” Selby said. “If it kills her, he’ll fight to beat the noose. Get him tied up while he’s in the mood.”

Gordon went out, and Sylvia smiled across at Selby.

“If cases would only come singly,” she said, “but they don’t.”

“No,” he told her, “they don’t, and this Larrabie case is a humdinger.”

The telephone rang.

“That,” Selby said, squaring his jaw, “will be Ben Trask.”

But it wasn’t Ben Trask; it was Harry Perkins, the coroner, and for once his slow, drawling speech was keyed up to an almost hysterical pitch.

“I want you to come down here right away, Selby,” he said, “there’s hell to pay.”

Selby stiffened in his chair.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “A murder?”

“Murder nothing. It’s ten times worse than a murder,” he said, “it’s a dirty damn dog poisoner.”

For the moment Selby couldn’t believe his ears.

“Come on down to earth,” he said, “and tell me the facts.”

“My police dog, Rogue,” the coroner said; “somebody got him, with poison. He’s at the vet’s now. Doc’s working on him. It’ll be touch and go, with one chance in ten for the dog.”

He broke off with something which sounded very much as though he had choked back a sob.

“Any clues?” Selby asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to look. I just found him and rushed him down to the veterinary’s. I’m down at Doctor Perry’s hospital now.”

“I’ll come down and see what can be done,” Selby said.

He hung up the telephone and turned to Sylvia Martin.

“That,” he said, “shows how callous we get about things which don’t concern us, and how worked up we get when things get close to home. That’s Harry Perkins, the coroner. He’s been out on murder cases, suicides, automobile accidents and all forms of violent death. He’s picked up people in all stages of dilapidation, and to him it’s been just one more corpse. Tears, entreaties and hysterics mean nothing to him. He’s grown accustomed to them. But somebody poisoned his dog, and damned if he isn’t crying.”

“And you’re going down to see about a poisoned dog?” Sylvia Martin asked.

“Yes.”

“Good Lord, why?”

“In the first place, he feels so cut up about it and, in a way, he’s one of the official family. In the second place, he’s down at Doctor Perry’s Dog and Cat Hospital — you know, Dr. H. Franklin Perry, the brother who stands to inherit the money in the Perry Estate if young Herbert Perry loses out.”

“Well?” she asked.

“I’ve never talked with Doctor Perry,” Selby said. “The sheriff’s office found he didn’t know anything about the man who was killed, and let it go at that, but somehow I want to take a look at him.”

“Anything except a hunch?” she asked.

“It isn’t even that,” he said; “but if that morphine was deliberately mixed in with the sleeping tablets, it must have been done by someone who had access to morphine, and who could have fixed up a tablet. Doctor Perry runs a veterinary hospital and … ”

“Forget it,” she told him. “That whole thing was a plant, along with the letter. Larrabie never took that sleeping medicine. Not voluntarily, anyway. His wife said he never had any trouble sleeping. Don’t you remember?”

Selby nodded moodily.

“Moreover,” she pointed out, “when it comes to suspicions, you can find lots of people to suspect.”

“Meaning?” he asked.

“Meaning,” she said, “that I’ve never been satisfied with this man Cushing’s explanations.

“In the first place, the way he shields Shirley Arden means that in some way she’s more than just a transient customer who occasionally comes up from Los Angeles. In the second place, he didn’t disclose anything about that five thousand dollars in the safe until pretty late. In the third place, he was so blamed anxious to have it appear the death was accidental.

“Now, whoever wrote that letter and addressed the envelope was someone who didn’t know the man’s real identity. The only thing he knew was what he’d picked up from the hotel register.”

“Therefore, the murderer must have been someone who had access to the information on the hotel register. And, aside from what he could learn from that register, he didn’t know a thing about the man he killed. Therefore, he acted on the assumption that his victim was Charles Brower.

“He wanted to make the murder appear like suicide, so he wrote that letter and left it in the typewriter. If the man had really been Charles Brower, nothing would ever have been thought of it. The post-mortem wouldn’t have been continued to the extent of testing the vital organs for morphine. And, even if they had found some morphine, they’d have blamed it on the sleep medicine.

“Now, the person who would have been most apt to be misled by the registration would have been the manager of the hotel.”

“But what possible motive could Cushing have had for committing the murder?”

“You can’t tell until you find out what the bond is between Cushing and Shirley Arden. I can’t puzzle it all out, I’m just giving you a thought.”

His eyes were moody as he said slowly, “That’s the worst of messing around with one of these simple-appearing murder cases. If someone sneaked into the room and stabbed him, or had shot him, or something like that, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but … Oh, hang it, this case had to come along right at the start of my term of office.”

“Another thing,” she said, “to remember is that the person who wrote the letter, and probably the person who committed the murder, got in there from 319. Now, there wasn’t anyone registered in 319. That means the person must have had a passkey.”

“I’ve thought of all that,” Selby said. “The murderer could hardly have come in through the transom, couldn’t have come in through the door of 321, and he couldn’t have come in through the door of 323 — that is, what I really mean is, he couldn’t have gone out that way. He could have gotten in the room by a dozen different methods. He could have been hiding in the room, he could have walked in through the door of 321, he could have gone in through 323. After all, you know, we don’t know that the door wasn’t barricaded after the man had died. From what Herbert Perry says, someone must have been in the room some two or three hours after death took place.

“But when that man went out he had only one way to go, and that was through the door of 319. If he’d gone out through 323, he couldn’t have bolted the door from the inside. If he’d gone out through the door of 321, he couldn’t have barricaded the door with a chair. There was no chance he could have gone out through the window. Therefore, 319 represents the only way he could have gone out.”

“And he couldn’t have gone out that way,” she said, “unless he’d known the room was vacant, and had a passkey, and had previously left the communicating door unlocked.”

“That’s probably right.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s up to you, but personally I’d be inclined to look for an inside job around the hotel somewhere, and I think Cushing is tied up too deeply with this motion-picture actress to be above suspicion. It’s a cinch she was the one who furnished the five thousand dollars.”

“You might,” Selby told her, “do a little work along that line, Sylvia. I wouldn’t want to get hard-boiled with Cushing unless I had something to work on, because, after all, we haven’t the faintest semblance of a motive. We … ”

“How about robbery?”

“No, I’ve considered that. If it had been robbery, it would have been an easy matter for Cushing to have taken the envelope with the five thousand dollars out of the safe and substituted another one. He could have made a passable forgery of the signature. Since it wasn’t Brower’s signature in any event, there wouldn’t have been much opportunity to detect the forgery.”

She started for the door, turned to grin at him and said, “On my way. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

“The devil of it is,” he told her, “this isn’t like one of those detective stories, which you can solve by merely pointing the finger of suspicion at the guilty person. This is a real life, flesh-and-blood murder case, where we’ve got to produce actual evidence which can stand up in a court of justice. I’ve got to find that murderer and then prove he’s guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.”

“And if you don’t do it?” she asked.

“Wait until you see The Blade tonight,” he said gloomily. “I have an idea Sam Roper is going to make a statement.”

She laughed and said, “Afraid you can’t take it, Doug?”

“No,” he told her. “That’s not what’s worrying me. I know damn well I can take it. What’s worrying me is whether I can dish it out.”

She grinned, said “Go to it, big boy,” and closed the door behind her as she left his private office.

Ten seconds later the telephone rang.

To Selby’s surprise, it was Shirley Arden, herself, at the other end of the wire.

“I think,” he told her, “there are some things we need to have cleared up.”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “I’d be only too glad to talk with you. It’s going to be very difficult for me to come up to Madison City, and you know the position I’m in after the nasty insinuations the newspapers have made. If I showed up there now, they’d have me virtually accused of murder. Couldn’t you come down here?”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“Where?”

“You know where my house is in Beverly Hills?”

“Yes,” he told her, his voice still savagely official. “I once went on a rubberneck tour. Had an old-maid aunt out from the East. She wanted to see where all of the stars lived. Yours is the place that sits up on a hill, with the fountain in the front yard and the stone lions in front of the porch, isn’t it?”

“That’s the one. Could you be there tonight at eight?”

“Yes.”

“We can have a quiet little dinner — just we two. Don’t say anything about it. In other words, don’t let anyone know you’re coming to see me.”

“Do you know what I want to see you about?” he asked.

“Haven’t the least idea,” she told him cheerfully, “but I’ll be glad to see you under more favorable circumstances than the last visit.”

“The circumstances,” he announced, “won’t be more favorable.”

Her laugh was a throaty ripple as she said, “My, you’re so grim you frighten me. Tonight, then, at eight. Good-by.” She put the receiver on the hook.

Selby grabbed for his hat and started for Doctor Perry’s Dog and Cat Hospital.

…

Doctor Perry looked up as Selby came in. He was in his fifties, a man whose manner radiated quiet determination. A police dog was held in a canvas sling in a long bathtub. His head had drooped forward. His tongue lolled from his mouth. His eyes were dazed.

Doctor Perry’s sleeves were rolled up, his smock was stained and splashed. In his right hand he held a long, flexible rubber tube connected with a glass tank. He slightly compressed the end of the tube and washed out the sides of the bathtub.

“That’s all that can be done,” he said. “I’ve got him thoroughly cleaned out and given him a heart stimulant. Now we’ll just have to keep him quiet and see what happens.”

He lifted the big dog as tenderly as though it had been a child, carried it to a warm, dry kennel on which a thick paper mattress had been spread.

Harry Perkins blew his nose explosively. “Think he’ll live?” he asked.

“I can tell you more in a couple of hours. He had an awful shock. You should have got him here sooner.”

“I got him here just as quickly as I could. Do you know what kind of poison it was?”

“No, it was plenty powerful, whatever it was. It doesn’t act like anything I’ve encountered before.”

“This is the district attorney,” Perkins said.

Doctor Perry nodded to Selby and said, “Glad to meet you.”

Perkins said, “Doug, I don’t care how much it costs, I want this thing run to the ground. I want to find the man who poisoned that dog. Rogue has the nicest disposition of any dog in the world. He’s friendly with everyone. Of course, he’s a good watchdog. That’s to be expected. If anyone tries to get in my place and touch anything, Rogue would tear him to pieces. He’s particularly friendly to children. There isn’t a kid in the block but what knows him and loves him.”

The veterinarian fitted the hose over one of the faucets in the bathtub, cleaned out the bathtub, washed off his hands and arms, took off the stained smock and said, “Well, let’s go out to your place and take a look around. I want to see whether it’s general poison which has been put around through the vicinity, or something which was tossed into your yard where your dog would get it.”

“But why should anyone toss anything in to Rogue in particular?”

The veterinarian shrugged his shoulders. “Primarily because he’s a big dog,” he said. “That means when he scratches up lawns, he digs deep into the grass. It’s not often people deliberately poison any particular dog unless he’s a big dog, or unless it’s a little dog who’s vicious. Small, friendly dogs are mostly poisoned from a general campaign. Big dogs are almost always the ones who get singled out for special attention.”

“Why do people poison dogs?” Selby asked.

“For the same reason some people rob and murder,” the veterinarian said. “People in the aggregate are all right, but there’s a big minority that have no regard for the rights of others.”

“To think of a man deliberately throwing a dog poisoned food,” Perkins declared, “makes my blood boil. I’d shoot a man who’d do it.”

“Well, let’s take a run over to your place and look around,” Doctor Perry suggested. “You say the dog hasn’t been out of the yard? We may find some of the poison left there and learn something from it.” “How about Rogue? Can we do him any good staying here?”

“Not a bit. To tell you the truth, Harry, I think he’ll pull through. I’m not making any promises, but I hope he’s over the worst of it. What he needs now is rest. My assistant will keep him under close observation. Have you got your car here?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We’ll drive over with you.”

The three of them drove to the place where Perkins had his undertaking establishment, with living quarters over the mortuary. In back of the place was a fenced yard which led to an alley. There was a gate in the alley.

“The dog stayed in here?” Doctor Perry asked.

“Yes. He’s always in the building or here in the yard.”

Doctor Perry walked around the back yard, looking particularly along the line of the fence. Suddenly he stooped and picked up something which appeared to be a ball of earth. He broke it open and disclosed the red of raw meat.

“There you are,” he said; “another little deadly pellet. That’s been mixed by a skillful dog poisoner. He put the poison in raw hamburger, then he rolled the hamburger in the earth so it would be almost impossible to see. A dog’s nose would detect the raw meat through the coating of earth, but your eye would be fooled by the earth which had been placed around it. Let’s look around and see if we can find some more.”

A survey of the yard disclosed two more of the little rolls of poisoned meat.

“Notice the way these were placed along the sides of the fence,” Selby said to the coroner. “They weren’t just tossed over the fence, but were deliberately placed there. That means that someone must have walked through the gate and into the back yard.”

“By George, that’s so!” Perkins exclaimed.

“That’s undoubtedly true,” Doctor Perry agreed. “Now, then, if the dog were here in the yard, why didn’t he bark? Moreover, why didn’t the poisoner stand in the alley and just toss the rolls of meat in to the dog?”

Perkins turned to the district attorney and asked, “What can you do to a dog poisoner, Selby?”

“Not a great deal,” Selby admitted. “It’s hard to convict them, if they stand trial. And when they are convicted a judge usually gives them probation.”

“To my mind,” Perry said, “they should be hung. It’s a worse crime than murder.”

“That’s exactly the way I feel about it,” Perkins agreed emphatically.

They walked back through the yard into the back room of the mortuary.

“We’d better take a look around here, too,” Perry suggested. “This commences to look like an inside job to me. It looks as though someone you’d been talking to had casually strolled around here and planted this stuff. Can you remember having had anyone roaming around the place, Harry? It must have been someone who planted the poison right while you were talking with him.”

“Why, yes,” Perkins said, “there were several people in here. I had a coroner’s jury sitting on the inquest on the man who was murdered in the hotel.”

He turned to Selby and said, “That was yesterday, while you were gone. They returned a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown. I presume you knew that.”

“I gathered they would,” Selby remarked. “It seems the only possible verdict which could have been returned.”

He turned to Perry and said, “I’m wondering if you knew the dead man, Doctor.”

“No, I’d never seen him in my life — not that I know of.”

Selby took a photograph from his inside coat pocket, showed it to Doctor Perry.

“I wish you’d take a good look at that,” he said, “and see if it looks at all familiar.”

Doctor Perry studied it from several angles and slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “The sheriff asked me about him, and showed me the same picture. I told the sheriff I’d never seen him, but now, looking at this photograph, I somehow get the impression I’ve seen him somewhere. You know, the face has a vaguely familiar look. Perhaps it’s just a type. I can’t place him, but there’s something about him that reminds me of someone.”

Selby was excited. “I wish you’d think carefully,” he said. “You know the man had some clippings in his briefcase about the litigation you’re interested in.”

“Yes, the sheriff told me that he did,” Perry said, “but lots of people are interested in that case. I’ve had lots of letters about it. You see, quite a few people got interlocutory decrees and then went into another state to get married. They’re worried about where they’d stand on inheritances and such. That’s probably why this man was interested … But he reminds me of someone; perhaps it’s a family resemblance. Let me see what clippings he cut out, and I may be able to tell you more about him. I must have had a hundred letters from people who sent clippings and asked for details.”

“Ever answer the letters?” Selby asked.

“No. I didn’t have time. It keeps me busy running my own business. Paying off the mortgage on this new hospital keeps my nose to the grindstone. I wish that lawsuit would get finished; but my lawyer says it’s about over now. I couldn’t pay him a regular fee, so he took it on a contingency. He’ll make almost as much out of it as I will.”

“Hope he does,” the coroner said. “He owes me a nice little sum on a note that’s overdue.”

The coroner took out the briefcase, suitcase and portable typewriter. “By the way,” he asked, “is it all right to deliver these to the widow? She was in to get them a while ago.”

“I think so,” Selby said, “but you’d better ask the sheriff and get his okay.”

“I did that already. He says it’s okay by him, if it is by you.”

“Go ahead and give them to her then. But be sure the inventory checks.”

The coroner opened the suitcase, also the briefcase.

“Well,” Selby said, “I’m going to be getting on back to the office. Perhaps Doctor Perry can tell us something after his examination of those poisoned scraps.”

“Wait a minute,” the veterinarian said, laying down the newspaper clippings the coroner had handed him. “What’s that over there in the corner?”

Perkins stared, then said, “Good Lord, it’s another one of the same things.”

They walked over and picked it up. Perry examined it, then dropped it into his pocket.

“That settles it,” he announced. “It was aimed directly at your dog and it’s an inside job, someone who’s been in here today. Can you remember who was in here?”

“The last man in here today,” Perkins said, “was George Cushing, manager of the Madison Hotel. It’s a cinch he wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

“No,” Selby said, “we’d hardly put Cushing in the category of a dog poisoner.”

“Who else?” the veterinarian asked.

“Mrs. Larrabie was in here, the dead man’s widow. She looked over the things in the suitcase and in the briefcase. And Fred Latteur, your lawyer. He came in to tell me he’d pay off my note when he had your case settled. He wouldn’t have any reason to poison the dog.”

“Let’s take a look around and see if we can find some more,” Doctor Perry said. “Each one of us take a room. Make a thorough search.”

They looked through the rooms and Selby found another of the peculiarly distinctive bits of poisoned meat.

“Anyone else been in here today?” Selby demanded. “Think carefully, Perkins. It’s important. There’s more to this than appears on the surface.”

“No … Wait a minute, Mrs. Brower was in. She’s on the warpath,” the coroner said. “She thought I had five thousand dollars that had been taken from the hotel. She insists that it’s her husband’s money.”

“Did she say where he got it?”

“She said Larrabie had Brower’s wallet, and that the five thousand-dollar bills had been in Brower’s wallet. Therefore, Brower was entitled to them.”

“What did she want you to do?”

“She wanted me to give her the money. When I told her I didn’t have it, she wanted to take a look at the wallet. She said she could tell whether it was her husband’s.”

“Did you show it to her?”

“The sheriff has it. I sent her up to the sheriff’s office.”

Selby said abruptly, “You can give the rest of the stuff back to Mrs. Larrabie, Harry. I’m going to take that camera. Tell her she can have the Camera in a day or two, but I want to see if there are any exposed films in it. They might furnish a clue. I’ve been too busy to give them any thought, but they may be important.”

“A darned good idea,” the coroner said. “That chap came down here from the northern part of the state. He probably took photographs en route. Those camera fiends are just the kind to put their friends on the front steps of the capitol building at Sacramento and take a bunch of snapshots. You may find something there that’ll be worthwhile.”

Selby nodded and pocketed the camera.

“You let me know about that dog,” Perkins said anxiously to the veterinarian. Then he turned to Selby: “I want something done about this poisoning. At least drag these people who’ve been in here for questioning. And I’d start with Mrs. Brower. She looks mean to me.”

“I’ll give you a ring in an hour or two,” Selby promised. “I’m pretty busy on that murder case, but I have a hunch this poisoning business may be connected somehow with that case. I’ll do everything I can.”

“It’s commencing to look,” Doctor Perry said, “as though this wasn’t any casual poisoning, but something that had been carefully planned to get Rogue out of the way. I’d guard this place day and night for a while, if I were you, Perkins.”

Selby said, “Good idea,” and left Perkins and the veterinarian talking as he started for his office.

 

XIV

Selby felt absurdly conspicuous as he parked his car in front of the actress’ residence. There was something about the quiet luxury of the place which made the stone Peiping lions on either side of the porch stairway seem as forbidding as vicious watchdogs.

Selby climbed the stairs. The vine-covered porch gave a hint of cool privacy for the hot days of summer.

A military-appearing butler, with broad, straight shoulders, thin waist and narrow hips, opened the door almost as soon as Selby’s finger touched the bell button. Looking past him to the ornate magnificence of the reception hallway and the living room which opened beyond, Selby felt once more that touch of awkward embarrassment, a vague feeling of being out of place.

That feeling was dissipated by the sight of Shirley Arden. She was wearing a cocktail gown, and he noticed with satisfaction that, while there was a touch of formality in her attire, it was only the semi-formality with which one would receive an intimate friend. When she came toward him she neither presumed too much on their previous acquaintance, nor was she distant. She gave him her hand and said, “So glad you could come, Mr. Selby. We’d probably have felt a little more businesslike if we’d dined in one of the cafes; but under the circumstances, it wouldn’t do for us to be seen together.

“The spaciousness of all of this is more or less a setting. I have to do quite a bit of entertaining, you know. Just the two of us will rattle around in here like two dry peas in a paper bag, so I’ve told Jarvis to set a table in the den.”

She slipped her arm through his and said, “Come on and look around. I’m really proud of this architecture.”

She showed him through the house, switching lights on as she walked. Selby had a confused, blurred recollection of spacious rooms, of a patio with a fountain, a private swimming pool with lights embedded in the bottom of the tank so that a tinted glow suffused the water, basement sport rooms with pool, billiard and ping pong tables, a cocktail room with a built-in bar, mirrors and oil paintings which were a burlesque on the barroom paintings of the nineties.

They finished their tour in a comfortable little book-lined den, with huge French doors opening out to a corner of a patio on one side, the other three sides lined with bookcases, the books leather-backed, deluxe editions.

Shirley Arden motioned him to a seat, flung herself into one of the chairs, and raised her feet to an ottoman with a carelessly intimate display of legs.

She stretched out her arms and said wearily, “Lord, but it was a trying day at the studio. How’s the district-attorney business going?”

“Not so good,” he told her, his voice uncompromisingly determined.

The butler brought them cocktails and a tray of appetizers, which he set on the coffee table between them. As they clicked the rims of their glasses, Selby noticed the butler placing the huge silver cocktail shaker, beaded with frosty moisture, upon the table.

“I don’t go in for much of this, you know. And, after all, this visit is official,” Selby said.

“Neither do I,” she told him, laughing, “but don’t get frightened at the size of the container. That’s just Hollywood hospitality. Don’t drink any more than you want. There’s an inner container in that cocktail shaker, so the drink will keep cold as ice without being diluted by melting ice. You can have just as much or as little as you want.

“You know, we who are actively working in pictures don’t dare to do much drinking. It’s the people who are slipping on the downward path toward oblivion who hit it heavy. And there are always a lot of hangers-on who can punish the liquor. Try some of those anchovy tarts with the cream cheese around them. It sounds like an awful combination, but I can assure you they’re really fine. Jarvis invented them, and there are a dozen hostesses in town who would scratch my eyes out to get the recipe for that cream cheese sauce.”

Selby began to feel more at home. The cocktail warmed him, and there was a delightful informality about Shirley Arden which made the spacious luxury of the house seem something which was reserved for mere formal occasions, while the warm intimacy of this little den gave the impression of having been created entirely for Selby’s visit. He found it impossible to believe her capable of deceit.

She put down her empty cocktail glass, smiled, and said unexpectedly, with the swift directness of a meteor shooting across a night sky, “So you wanted to see me about the perfume?”

“How did you know?” he asked.

“I knew perfume entered into the case somewhere,” she said, “because of the very apparent interest you took in the perfume I used.

“As a matter of fact, I changed my perfume either one or two days before, I’ve forgotten which, on the advice of an astrologer. You don’t believe in astrology, do you?”

He didn’t answer her question directly, but asked, “Why did you change your perfume? “

“Because I was informed that the stars threatened disaster, if I didn’t … Oh, I know it sounds so absolutely weird and uncanny when one says it that way, but there are lots of things which seem perfectly logical in the privacy of your own mind which look like the devil when you bring them out into public conversation. Don’t you think so?”

“Go on,” he told her. “I’m listening.”

She laughed and flexed her muscles as some cat might twist and stretch in warm sunlight; not the stretch of weariness, but that sinuous, twisting stretch of excess animal vitality seeking outlet through muscular activity.

“Do you know,” she said, “we are hopelessly ignorant about the most simple things of life. Take scent, for instance. A flower gives forth a scent. A man gives forth a scent. Every living thing has some odor associated with it. I can walk down this path” — and she made a sweeping, graceful gesture toward the patio beyond the French windows — “with my feet incased in leather. Each foot rests on the ground for only a fifth of a second, if I’m walking rapidly. Yet my life force throws off vibrations. The very ground I have walked on starts vibrating in harmony with the rhythm of my own vibrations. We can prove that by having a bloodhound start on my trail. His nose is attuned to the vibrations which we call odor, or scent. He can detect unerringly every place where I have put my foot.

“Women use scent to enhance their charm. It emphasizes, in some way, the vibration they are casting forth, vibrations which are emanating all the time. One scent will go fine with one personality, yet clash with another. Do you see what I mean?”

“I’m still listening,” Selby told her. “And the anchovy tarts are delicious.”

She laughed, glanced swiftly at him. There was almost a trace of fear in her eyes and more than a trace of nervousness in her laugh.

“There’s something about you,” she said, “which frightens me. You’re so … persistently direct.”

“Rude?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “it’s not rudeness. It’s a positive, vital something. You’re boring directly toward some definite objective in everything you do.”

“We were talking,” he told her, “about the reason you changed your perfume.”

“For some time,” she said, “I’ve known that I was — well, let us say, out of step with myself. Things haven’t been going just right. There were numerous little irritations which ordinarily I’d have paid no attention to. But recently they began to pile up. I began to lose that inner harmony, that sense of being in tune with the rhythm of existence — if you know what I mean?”

“I think I understand, yes.”

“I went to an astrologer. She told me that my personality was undergoing a change, and I can realize she’s correct. Now that I look back on it, I think every successful picture actress goes through at least two distinct phases of development. Very few of us are born to the purple. We’re usually recruited from all walks of life — stenographers, waitresses, artists’ models. We’re a peculiar lot. We nearly always have a wild streak, which makes us break loose into an unconventional form of life. I don’t mean immorality. I mean lacy of conventional routine.

“Then we get a tryout. We’re given minor parts. We are given a major part. If it’s a poor story with poor direction and poor support, that’s all there is to it. But occasionally it’s a good story with good direction, something outstanding. A new personality is flashed on the screen to the eyes of theatergoers, and the effect is instantaneous. Millions of people all over the world suddenly shower approval upon that new star.

“On the legitimate stage, if an actress is a success, she receives a thunder of applause from the five hundred to fifteen hundred people who compose an audience. The next night she may not be doing so well. The audience may not be quite so responsive. If she does achieve success, it will be through constant repetition before numerous audiences. But, in the picture business, one picture is made, the moods of an actress are captured, imprisoned in a permanent record. That record is flashed simultaneously before hundreds of thousands of audiences, comprising millions of people. That’s why acclaim is so rapid.”

He nodded.

“Let me fill up your cocktail glass.”

“No,” he told her, “one’s plenty.”

“Oh, come on,” she coaxed, “have half a one. I want one more and I don’t want to feel conspicuous.”

“Just half a one, then,” he said.

She didn’t try to take advantage of his acquiescence, but was scrupulously careful to pause when his glass was half full. She filled her own, raised it to her lips and sipped it appreciatively.

“I’m trying to tell you this in detail,” I she said, “because I’m so darned anxious to have you understand me, and to understand my problems.”

“And the reason for changing the perfume,” he reminded her.

“Don’t worry,” she remarked; “I won’t try to dodge the question — not with such a persistent cross-examiner.

“Well, anyway, an actress finds herself catapulted into fame, almost overnight. The public takes a terrific interest in her. If she goes out to a restaurant, she’s pointed out and stared at. On the street, people driving automobiles suddenly recognize her and crane their necks in complete disregard of traffic. The fan magazines have published article after article about the other stars. Now they’re crazy to satisfy reader demand for a new star. They have perfectly fresh material to work with. They want to know every little intimate detail about the past.

“Of course, lots of it’s hooey. Lots of it isn’t. People are interested. I’m not conceited enough to think they’re interested entirely in the star. They’re interested in the spectacle of some fellow mortal being shot up into wealth, fame and success.

“Every girl working as a stenographer, every saleslady standing with aching feet and smiling at cranky customers, every waitress listening to the fresh cracks of the wise-guys in some little jerkwater, greasy-spoon eating joint, realizes that only a few months ago this star who is now the toast of the world was one of them. It’s a story of success which they might duplicate. It’s Cinderella come true.

“No wonder a star’s personality changes. She emerges from complete obscurity, drab background and usually a very meager idea of the formalities, into the white light of publicity. Visiting notables want to lunch with her; money pours in on her; there’s pomp, glitter, the necessity of a complete readjustment. An actress either breaks under that, or she achieves poise. When she achieves poise, she’s become a different personality, in a way.”

“And why did you change your perfume?”

“Because I’ve passed through that stage and didn’t realize it. I’d been using the same perfume for months. And during those months I’ve been undergoing a transition of personality.”

She pressed an electric button. Almost instantly the butler appeared with a steaming tureen of soup.

“Let’s eat,” she said, smiling. “We’re having just a little informal dinner. No elaborate banquet.” He seated her at the table. The butler served the soup. When he had retired, she smiled across at Selby and said, “Now that that’s explained, what else do we talk about?”

Selby said slowly: “We talk about the brand of perfume you used before you made the change, and whether you were still using this same brand of perfume on last Monday, when you stayed at the Madison Hotel. And we once more talk about why you made the change.”

She slowly lowered her spoon to her plate. The elation had vanished from her manner.

“Go ahead and eat,” she said wearily; “we’ll talk it over after dinner — if we must.”

“You should have known,” he told her, “that we must.”

She sighed, picked up her spoon, tried to eat the soup, but her appetite had vanished. She was conscious of her obligations as hostess, but when the butler removed her soup dish it was more than two-thirds filled.

A salad, steak, vegetables and dessert were perfectly cooked and served. Selby was hungry, and ate. Shirley Arden was like some woman about to be led to the executioner and enduring the irony of that barbaric custom which decrees that one about to die shall be given an elaborate repast.

She tried to keep up conversation, but there was no spontaneity to her words.

At length, when the dessert had been finished and the butler served a liqueur, she raised her eyes to Selby and said with lips which seemed to be on the verge of trembling, “Go ahead.”

“What perfume did you use on Monday, the old or the new?”

“The old,” she said.

“Precisely what,” he asked her, shooting one question at her when she expected another, “is your hold on George Cushing?”

She remained smiling, but her nostrils slightly dilated. She was breathing heavily. “I didn’t know that I had any hold on him,” she said.

“Yes, you did,” Selby told her. “You have a hold on him and you use it. You go to Madison City and he protects your incognito.”

“Wouldn’t any wise hotel manager do that same thing?”

“I know Cushing,” Selby said. “I know there’s some reason for what he does.”

“All right,” she said wearily, “I have a hold on him. And the perfume which you smelled on the five thousand dollars was the perfume which I used. And Cushing telephoned to me in Los Angeles to warn me that you were suspicious; that you’d found out I’d been at the hotel; that you thought the five thousand-dollar bills had been given to Larrabie by me. So what?”

For a moment Selby thought she was going to faint. She swayed in her chair. Her head drooped forward.

“Shirley!” he exclaimed, unconscious that he was using her first name.

His hand had just touched her shoulder, when a pane of glass in the French window shattered. A voice called, “Selby! Look here!”

He looked up to see a vague, shadowy figure standing outside the door. He caught a glimpse of something which glittered, and then a blinding flash dazzled his eyes. Involuntarily he blinked and, when he opened his eyes, it seemed that the illumination in the room was merely a half darkness.

He closed his eyes, rubbed them. Gradually the details of the room swam back into his field of vision. He saw Shirley Arden, her arms on the table, her head drooped forward on her arm. He saw the shattered glass of the windowpane, the dark outline of the French doors.

Selby ran to the French door, jerked it open. His eyes, rapidly regaining their ability to see, strained themselves into the half-darkness.

He saw the outlines of the huge house, stretching in the form of an open U around the patio, the swimming pool with its colored lights, the fountain which splashed water down into a basin filled with water lilies, porch swings, tables shaded by umbrellas, reclining chairs — but he saw no sign of motion.

From the street, Selby heard the quick rasp of a starting motor, the roar of an automobile engine, and then the snarling sound of tires as the car shot away into the night.

Selby turned back toward the room. Shirley Arden was as he had left her. He went toward her, placed a hand on her shoulder. Her flesh quivered beneath his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s just one of those things. But you’ll have to go through with it now.”

He heard the pound of heavy, masculine steps, heard the excited voice of the butler, then the door of the den burst open and Ben Trask, his face twisting with emotion, stood glaring on the threshold.

“You cheap shyster!” he said. “You damned publicity-courting, doublecrossing … ”

Selby straightened, came toward him. “Who the devil are you talking to?” he asked.

“You!”

Shirley Arden was on her feet with a quick, panther-like motion. She dashed between the two men, pushed against Trask’s chest with her hands. “No, no, Ben!” she exclaimed. “Stop it! You don’t understand. Can’t you see … ”

“The devil I don’t understand,” he said. “I understand everything.”

“I told him,” she said. “I had to tell him.”

‘Told him what?”

“Told him about Cushing, about . . .”

“Shut up, you little fool.”

Selby, stepping ominously forward, said, “Just a minute, Trask. While you may not realize it, this visit is in my official capacity and … ”

“You and your official capacity both be damned!” Trask told him. “You deliberately engineered a cheap publicity stunt. You wanted to drag Shirley Arden into that hick-town murder inquiry of yours so you’d get plenty of publicity. You deliberately imposed on her to set the stage, and then you arrange to have one of your local newshounds come on down to take a flashlight. “Can’t you see it, Shirley?” Trask pleaded. “He’s double-crossed you. He’s … ”

Selby heard his voice saying with a cold fury, “You, Trask, are a damned liar.”

Trask pushed Shirley Arden away from him with no more effort than if she had been some gossamer figure without weight or substance.

He was a big, powerful man, yet he moved with the swiftness of a heavyweight pugilist and, despite his rage, his advance was technically correct — left foot forward, right foot behind, fists doubled, right arm across his stomach, left elbow close to the body.

Something in the very nature of the man’s posture warned Selby of that which he might expect. He was dealing with a trained fighter.

Trask’s fist lashed out in a swift, piston-like blow for Selby’s jaw.

Selby remembered the days when he had won the conference boxing championship for his college. Automatically his rage chilled until it became a cold, deadly, driving purpose. He moved with swift, machinelike efficiency, pivoting his body away from the blow, and, at the same time, pushing out with his left hand just enough to catch Trask’s arm, throw Trask off balance and send the fist sliding over his shoulder.

Trask’s face twisted with surprise. He swung his right up in a vicious uppercut, but Selby, with the added advantage of being perfectly balanced, his weight shifted so that his powerful body muscles could be brought into play, smashed over a terrific right.

His primitive instincts were to slam his fist for Trask’s face, just as a person yielding to a blind rage wants to throw caution to the winds, neglect to guard, concentrate only on battering the face of his opponent. But Selby’s boxing training was controlling his mind. His right shot out straight for Trask’s solar plexus.

He felt his fist strike the soft, yielding torso, saw Trask bend forward and groan.

From the corner of his eye, Selby was conscious of Shirley Arden, her rigid forefinger pressed Against the electric push button which would summon the butler.

Trask staggered to one side, lashed out with a right which grazed the point of Selby’s jaw, throwing him momentarily off balance.

He heard Shirley Arden’s voice screaming, “Stop it, stop it! Both of you! Stop it! Do you hear?”

Selby sidestepped another blow, saw that Trask’s face was gray with pain, saw a rush of motion as the broad-shouldered butler came running into the room, saw Shirley Arden’s outstretched forefinger pointing at Trask. “Take him, Jarvis,” she said.

The big butler hardly changed his stride. He went forward into a football tackle.

Trask, swinging a terrific left, was caught around the waist and went down like a tenpin. A chair crashed into splintered kindling beneath the impact of the two men.

Selby was conscious of Shirley Arden’s blazing eyes.

“Go!” she commanded.

The butler scrambled to his feet. Trask dropped to the floor, his hands pressed against his stomach, his face utterly void of color.

“Just a minute,” Selby said to the actress, conscious that he was breathing heavily. “You have some questions to answer.”

“Never!” she blazed.

Trask’s voice, sounding flat and toneless, said, “Don’t be a damned fool, Shirley. He’s framed it all. Can’t you see?”

The butler turned hopefully toward Selby.

“Don’t try it, my man,” Selby said.

It was Shirley Arden who pushed Jarvis back.

“No,” she said, “there’s no necessity for any more violence. Mr. Selby is going to leave.”

She came toward him, stared up at him.

“To think,” she said scornfully, “that you’d resort to a trick like this. Ben warned me not to trust you. He said you’d deliberately planned to let the news leak out to the papers; that you were trying to put pressure on me until I’d break. I wouldn’t believe him. And now — this — this despicable trick.

“I respected you. Yes, if you want to know it, I admired you. Admired you so much I couldn’t be normal when I was with you. Ben told me I was losing my head like a little schoolgirl.

“You were so poised, so certain of yourself, so absolutely straightforward and wholeheartedly sincere that you seemed like pure gold against the fourteen-carat brass I’d been associating with in Hollywood. And now you turn out to be just as rotten and just as lousy as the rest of them. Get out!”

“Now, listen,” Selby said; “I’m … ”

The butler stepped forward. “You heard what she told you,” he said ominously. “Get out!”

Shirley Arden turned on her heel.

“He’ll get out, Jarvis,” she said wearily. “You won’t have to put him out — but see that he leaves.”

“Miss Arden, please,” Selby said, stepping forward, “you can’t … ”

The big butler tensed his muscles. “Going someplace,” he said ominously, “besides out?”

Shirley Arden, without once looking back over her shoulder, left the room. Ben Trask scrambled to his feet.

“Watch him, Jarvis,” Trask warned; “he’s dynamite. What the hell did you tackle me for?”

“She said to,” the butler remarked coolly, never taking his eyes off Selby.

“She’s gone nuts over him,” Trask said.

“Get out,” the butler remarked to Selby.

Selby knew when he was faced with hopeless odds.

“Miss Arden,” he said, “is going to be questioned. If she gives me an audience now, that questioning will take place here. If she doesn’t, it will take place before the grand jury in Madison City. You gentlemen pay your money and take your choice.”

“It’s already paid,” the butler said.

Selby started toward the front of the house. Trask came limping behind him.

“Don’t think you’re so much,” Trask said sneeringly. “You may be a big toad in a small puddle, but you’ve got a fight on your hands now. You’ll get no more cooperation out of us. And remember another thing: There’s a hell of a lot of money invested in Shirley Arden. That money buys advertising in the big metropolitan newspapers. They’re going to print our side of this thing, not yours.”

The butler said evenly, “Shut up, Trask; you’re making a damned fool of yourself.”

He handed Selby his hat and gloves; his manner became haughtily deferential as he said, “Shall I help you on with your coat, sir?”

“Yes,” Selby told him.

Selby permitted the man to adjust the coat about his neck. He leisurely drew on his gloves, and said, “The door, Jarvis.”

“Oh, certainly,” the butler remarked sarcastically, holding open the door, bowing slightly from the waist.

Selby marched across the spacious porch, down the front steps which led to the sloping walk.

 

XV

Selby found that he couldn’t get the developed negatives from the miniature camera until the next morning at nine o’clock. He went to a hotel, telephoned Rex Brandon and said, “I’ve uncovered a lead down here, Rex, which puts an entirely new angle on the case. George Cushing is mixed in it some way, I don’t know just how much.

“Cushing knew that the five thousand dollars came from Shirley Arden. He’s the one who warned her to change her perfume after he knew I was going to try and identify the bills from the scent which was on them.”

“You mean the money actually did come from the actress?” Rex Brandon asked.

“Yes,” Selby said wearily.

“I thought you were certain it didn’t.”

“Well, it did.”

“You mean she lied to you?”

“That’s what it amounts to.”

“You aren’t going to take that sitting down, are you?”

“I am not.”

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, make her say something.”

“Unfortunately,” Selby said, “that’s something which is easier said than done. As was pointed out to me in a conversation a short time ago, we’re fighting some very powerful interests.

“In the first place, Shirley Arden’s name means a lot to the motion-picture industry, and the motion-picture industry is financed by banks controlled by men who have a lot of political influence.

“I’m absolutely without authority down here. The only way we can get Shirley Arden where she has to answer questions is to have her subpoenaed before the grand jury.”

“You’re going to do that?”

“Yes. Get a subpoena issued and get it served.”

“Will she try to avoid service?”

“Sure. Moreover, they’ll throw every legal obstacle in our way that they can. Get Bob Kentley, my deputy, to be sure that subpoena is legally airtight.”

“How about the publicity angle?”

“I’m afraid,” Selby said, “the publicity angle is something that’s entirely beyond our control. The fat’s in the fire now. The worst of it is they think that I was responsible for it. Miss Arden thinks I was trying to get some advertisement.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone — I suppose it was Bittner — took a flashlight photograph of me dining tete-a-tete with Shirley Arden in her home.”

“That sort of puts you on a spot,” the sheriff sympathized.

“Are you telling me?” Selby asked. “Anyway, it’s absolutely ruined any possibility of cooperation at this end.”

“How about Cushing? What’ll we do with him?”

“Put the screws down on him.”

“He’s been one of our staunchest supporters.”

“I don’t give a damn what he’s been. Get hold of him and give him the works. I’m going to get those pictures in the camera developed, and then I’ll be up in the morning. In the meantime I’m going out to a show and forget that murder case.”

“Better try a burlesque, son,” the sheriff advised. “You sound sort of disillusioned. You weren’t falling for that actress, were you?”

“Go to the devil,” Selby said. “ … Say, Rex!”

“What?”

“Give Sylvia Martin the breaks on that Cushing end of the story. She’s the one who originally smelled a rat there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Talk with her. Get her ideas. They may not be so bad. I thought they were haywire when she first spilled them. Now I think she’s on the right track.”

Selby hung up the phone, took a hot bath, changed his clothes and felt better. He took in a comedy, but failed to respond to the humor of situations which sent the audience into paroxysms of mirth. There was a chilled, numb feeling in the back of his mind, the feeling of one who has had ideals shattered, who has lost confidence in a friend. Moreover, there was hanging over him that vague feeling which comes to one who wakes on a bright sunny morning, only to realize that the day holds some inevitable impending disaster.

After the show he aimlessly tramped the streets for more than an hour. Then he returned to his room.

As he opened the door and was groping for the light switch, he was filled with a vague sense of uneasiness. For a moment he couldn’t determine the source of that feeling of danger. Then he realized that the odor of cigar smoke was clinging to the room.

Selby didn’t smoke cigars. Someone who did smoke cigars was either in the room or had been in it.

Selby found the light switch, pressed it and braced himself against an attack.

There was no one in the room.

Selby entered the room, kicked the door shut behind him and made certain that it was bolted. He was on the point of barricading it with a chair, when he thought of the similar circumstances under which William Larrabie had met his death.

Feeling absurdly self-conscious, the district attorney got to his knees and peered under the bed. He saw nothing. He tried the doors to the connecting rooms and made certain they were both bolted on the inside. He opened the window and looked out. The fire escape was not near enough to furnish a means of ingress.

His baggage consisted of a single light handbag. It was on the floor where he had left it, but Selby noticed on the bedspread an oblong imprint with the dots of four round depressions in the corners.

He picked up his handbag, looked at the bottom. There were round brass studs in each corner. Carefully he fitted the bag to the impression on the bedspread. Beyond any doubt someone had placed the bag on the bed. Selby had not done so.

He opened the bag. It had been searched hurriedly. Apparently the contents had been dumped onto the bed, then thrown back helter-skelter.

Selby stood staring at it in puzzled scrutiny. Why should anyone have searched his handbag?

What object of value did he have? The search had been hasty and hurried, showing that the man who made it had been fighting against time, apparently afraid that Selby would return to the room in time to catch the caller at his task. But, not having found what he looked for, the man had overcome his fear of detection sufficiently to remain and make a thorough search of the room. That much was evident by the reek of cigar smoke.

The prowler had probably lit a cigar to steady his nerves. Then he had evidently made a thorough search, apparently looking for some object which had been concealed. Selby pulled back the bedspread.

The pillows had lost that appearance of starched symmetry which is the result of a chambermaid’s deft touch. Evidently they had been moved and replaced.

Suddenly the thought of the camera crashed home to Selby’s consciousness.

He had left the camera at the camera store, where the man had promised, in view of Selby’s explanation of his position and the possible significance of the films, to have the negatives ready by morning. Evidently that camera was, then, of far greater importance than he had originally assumed.

Selby opened the windows and transom in order to air out the cigar smoke. He undressed, got into bed and was unable to sleep. Finally, notwithstanding the fact that he felt utterly ludicrous in doing so, he arose, walked in bare feet across the carpet, picked up a straight-backed chair, dragged it to the door, and tilted it in such a way that the back was caught under the doorknob.

It was exactly similar to the manner in which the dead minister had barricaded his room on the night of the murder.

 

TO BE CONTINUED (READ CONCLUSION)

 

Featured image: Selby looked up to see a vague, shadowy figure standing outside the door. (Illustrated by Dudley Gloyne Summers; SEPS)

Your Health Checkup: Vaping and Serious Lung Problems

“Your Health Checkup” is our online column by Dr. Douglas Zipes, an internationally acclaimed cardiologist, professor, author, inventor, and authority on pacing and electrophysiology. Dr. Zipes is also a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post print magazine. Subscribe to receive thoughtful articles, new fiction, health and wellness advice, and gems from our archive. 

Order Dr. Zipes’ new book, Damn the Naysayers: A Doctor’s Memoir.

I just returned from a family vacation in Positano, a charming seaside Italian village on the Amalfi coast built into the rugged cliffs that overlook the Tyrrhenian Sea … wonderful food, friendly people, and breathtaking landscapes. There were hundreds of stone stairs to climb between our villa and the beach, so I got my daily exercise dose! That, plus eating a Mediterranean diet, made for a healthy vacation.

Except for one shortcoming: smoke. Italy and many other European countries still harbor large populations of smokers, who now not only smoke cigarettes but also vape.

I wrote previously about the hazards of vaping in April and October of 2018, and stressed that the activity was associated with an increased risk for heart attacks. The surge in its popularity, particularly among young people, and the recently publicized pulmonary toxicity have prompted me to write about vaping again.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has noted a cluster of people — primarily adolescents and young adults — developing serious lung problems linked to the use of e-cigarettes. Almost 200 cases of severe respiratory illnesses related to vaping have been reported in 22 states in the U.S. All of the cases occurred in people vaping with either nicotine or tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in marijuana responsible for the “high.” Often people vape with both nicotine and THC, making it difficult to determine which compound might be the culprit.

According to the CDC, in 2018 more than 3.6 million U.S. middle and high school students said they had used e-cigarettes in the past thirty days. More than a third of twelfth graders reported vaping in the past twelve months. The nicotine content in vaping can be much greater than that found in combustible cigarettes. Teenage brains appear particularly vulnerable to the addictive effects of nicotine, perhaps making them more susceptible to other kinds of substance abuse in the future.

Individuals developing lung problems start out with infectious-like symptoms. They complain of severe respiratory symptoms such as difficulty breathing and shortness of breath, often with fever, cough, chest pain, vomiting, headache, and fatigue. Those most seriously ill require hospitalization — sometimes in an intensive care unit — and treatment with oxygen. Some need intubation and spend days on a mechanical ventilator. Whether or how much of the lung damage is reversible is uncertain at present. Recently, one death from pulmonary failure associated with vaping was reported in an Illinois adult.

Numerous ingredients in the vaping aerosol in addition to nicotine and THC could be responsible, such as ultrafine particles, heavy metals like lead, volatile organic compounds, and cancer-causing agents. E-liquids include propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, and more than 7,000 choices of chemical additives for flavoring, some of which have been tested for toxicity in the laboratory, while most have not.

Multiple counterfeit or adulterated products — some from China — have also entered the market, adding to potential risks because they can contain unknown and untested ingredients. Recently, more than 1150 fake Juul pods from China were seized in Philadelphia.

No consistency exists so far in terms of a common product or device responsible for the lung problems. Even though it is still uncertain whether vaping is definitively the culprit because the short and long-term risks associated with vaping are still being determined, the number of affected individuals who vape appears to be increasing, making a link likely.

What should you do? Stop vaping, of course. This will be difficult for many who are addicted to the nicotine ingredient in e-cigarettes. The development of chest pain, difficulty breathing, unexplained fever, or symptoms noted above should generate an immediate visit to a physician.

To paraphrase Paul Dudley White, a famous Boston physician, death before 80 years is man’s fault, not nature’s. Don’t tempt the fates with vaping.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com.

The Party Planner: Celebrating the Birthdays of Disadvantaged Kids

Thirty-two squealing kids play birthday games on a basketball court in a Richmond, Virginia, community center. They’re smacking balloons with the party’s 17 volunteers, competing in sack races, shooting baskets, throwing footballs, jumping rope, and screeching and yelling and dancing, pausing only for face-painting before yelling some more. ­Remarkably, despite the chaos, only one balloon pops.

BANG!

Make that two balloons.

No one is having more fun than the party’s jubilant host, 23-year-old Julia Warren. She’s the founder of Celebrate RVA, an organization that throws birthday parties for disadvantaged kids, most of whom have never worn party hats or blown out candles. (“Sometimes they’re confused about why I lit their food on fire,” she says.) The kids love her. When we entered an elementary school that afternoon to gather children celebrating April birthdays, her young admirers swarmed her, offering smiles, hugs, and high-decibel hellos.

“It’s my shining stars!” she said to the kids. “Are you ready to celebrate birthdays?”

Warren formed the nonprofit in 2013 when she was 16 years old. Since then, Celebrate RVA has hosted more than 280 parties for around 3,250 kids. “She’s younger than me and I look up to her — she’s done all of this on her own,” says Paige Sigler, 29, the organization’s part-time (soon to be full-time) program coordinator and its only other employee.

So what inspired Warren to become a Mother-Teresa-meets-Chuck-E.-Cheese do-­gooder when she was barely old enough to drive? As a junior in high school, Warren was tutoring kids at an elementary school. One day she was chatting with a child and asked, “How old are you? When were you born?” The response changed her life: “He looked up and said, ‘I think I was born when it was cold outside.’”

“Every child deserves the right to experience joy.”

Warren was stunned. She talked to the school principal. He said the school didn’t have time to recognize birthdays, though sometimes they might give a child a pencil. Sad, right? So Warren used babysitting money to host birthday parties on her own. Soon she was contacted by local agencies and nonprofits. “Having these professionals say, ‘This is a real need, and we’re willing to invest resources to make this happen,’ I realized that this was going to be a lot bigger than myself.”

As she served the city, she was also thinking about college and considering two options: 62,000-student Texas A&M, which was half a country away, and Randolph-Macon College, with 1,400 undergrads, about 20 miles from Richmond. If she went to Texas A&M, she would need to put Celebrate RVA on hold. Then, at a birthday party, a gentleman arrived to pick up a child and said, “We have to find a place for him to sleep tonight.”

The man was the boy’s counselor. A few weeks earlier, the boy had watched as his mother was shot and killed in their home. No family member had yet offered to care for him.

“It stopped me in my tracks,” says Warren. “I thought, this child has gone through more than I will ever go through in my entire life. And yet for the past hour and a half, we’ve been able to celebrate him and let him try and forget the horrific things he has seen, and just be a child. And I knew that this is where I was supposed to be.”

She attended Randolph-Macon for two years and then devoted a year to Celebrate RVA. Her parents were both proud and concerned.

“When this started and I was throwing a few birthday parties, they said, ‘Oh, that’s great, Julia!’ And then when I said, ‘I think I need to turn this into a nonprofit,’ my parents were like, ‘Well, shouldn’t you pass algebra first?’”

After attending a few parties, her parents became her biggest supporters. But Warren had much to learn. She was a privileged, private-school girl throwing inner-city birthday parties. “The first few parties, I felt like an outsider,” she says. “I had no relationships in this community. I hadn’t proven myself trustworthy.” She realized she needed to listen and accept feedback. Now, she says, she’s not only been accepted, but parents call her at all hours. She also learned that her parties could wound parents’ pride. “Most parents are truly hurt that they can’t provide their child with a birthday experience,” she says. To address that, she always seeks parental involvement, whether it’s decorating party rooms or lighting the candles.

Cynics may question her work. Cupcakes and streamers are great, the party poopers say, but don’t disadvantaged kids have bigger needs?

“Every child deserves the right to experience joy,” Warren explains. “But a lot of our kids don’t know how. We’ve got elementary schoolers being recruited by gangs.They’re rejecting the idea that happiness is something they can attain.”

Warren grasped the transformative power of parties at one of her first events, held at Safe Harbor, a domestic violence shelter. Members of the city’s pro soccer team, the Richmond Kickers, attended as volunteers, but their presence frightened the women and children. “The last time they were touched by a man, it was probably extremely violent,” says Warren. The players, however, spoke softly and bent down to eye level with the kids. They played in sprinklers, engaged in sidewalk chalk-drawing, and sang “Happy Birthday.” When the party was over, the women and children extended their arms for hugs.

“I had to hold back tears because I saw what an hour and a half of celebration and joy can do,” says Warren. “We’ve talked to teachers who say, ‘My kids keep their birthday card on their desk year-round. It’s their only birthday card and they love to look at it and read the special message.’”

“I said, ‘I think I need to turn this into a nonprofit.’ My parents were like, ‘Well, shouldn’t you pass algebra first?'”

Warren is finishing her education yet continues to expand the organization and recruit volunteers, such as Alisa Feliciano, who volunteers monthly with her husband, 11-year-old daughter, and 14-year-old son. Working with Celebrate RVA, Feliciano says, has strengthened her family. As the kids assume more responsibilities at parties, they’ve become more respectful and responsible at home.

“Julia knows how to empower people,” says Feliciano. “She can inspire a 5-year-old as easily as a 60-year-old.”

Next up for Warren: Celebrate RVA is building a community center that will open in 2020. But parties remain the organization’s focus, and for Warren, the most emotional moments come after the children make birthday wishes. Inevitably, one or two kids keep their eyes closed. “They keep making a wish for like 30 seconds,” she says. “And they’re muttering to themselves. All I can do is wonder what they’re wishing for.”

Warren knows she can’t rescue these kids. But she can give them moments of happiness and love that continue to burn, she hopes, like a candle on a cupcake. And that is Julia Warren’s birthday wish.

Featured image: Shine Photography.

7 Mocktails for Grown-up Tastes

The hottest new trend is… sobriety? With “sober bars” popping up in Los Angeles, Austin, and Brooklyn, people are discovering the joys of a night out without the looming hangover. What’s more, mocktails are getting better. A dry crowd yearning for complex tastes without the booze is demanding more than a Shirley Temple. You could grab a bottle of nonalcoholic spirit (like Seedlip or Kin) to craft your virgin concoctions, or you could go with these creative takes on the classics.

Pineapple Ginger Fauxjito

Ingredients:

• Pineapple, peeled, cored, and chopped
• 10 mint sprigs
• 1 oz. lime-ginger simple syrup (recipe below)
• Club soda
• Lime slices, for garnish
• Lime-ginger simple syrup:
• 1 cup granulated sugar (or substitute ½ cup agave syrup)
• 1 cup water
• 2-inch knob of ginger root, peeled and sliced
• 1 lime

Directions:

1. For the lime-ginger simple syrup, add water, sugar (or agave syrup), and sliced ginger to a pot. Add zest and juice of one lime. Bring the pot to boil, then lower to simmer. Let simmer for 45 minutes to an hour. Strain and chill.
2. Muddle 3 pineapple pieces with 8 mint leaves in a rocks glass. Add ice, simple syrup, and top with club soda. Garnish with lime wedges, mint leaves, and pineapple leaves.

NoPaloma

Ingredients:

• 4 oz. pink grapefruit juice
• 1 oz. lime juice
• ½ oz. simple syrup
• Mineral water (like Gerolsteiner or Topo Chico)
• Chili salt (or substitute Himalayan pink salt)
• Dried grapefruit slices, for garnish
• Rosemary sprigs, for garnish

Directions:

1. Fill a shaker with ice. Pour in grapefruit juice, lime juice, and simple syrup. Shake thoroughly (until the shaker is too cold to hold comfortably).
2. Fill a saucer with lime juice, and another with chili salt (or Himalayan pink salt). Turn over a Collins glass first into the lime juice then into the salt to coat the rim.
3. Fill the Collins glass with ice. Strain the contents of the shaker into the glass. Garnish with dried grapefruit slices and rosemary sprigs.

Salt Lake City Mule

Ingredients:

• 1 oz. fresh-squeezed orange juice
• Lime slices
• Blood orange slices
• Fresh basil
• Non-alcoholic ginger beer (like Fever Tree or Gosling’s)

Directions

In a copper mug, muddle an orange slice, a lime slice, and one basil leaf with orange juice. Fill with ice. Top with ginger beer and garnish with citrus slices and basil leaves.

Blueberry Kombucha Smash

Ingredients:

• ¼ cup blueberries
• Lemon slices
• ½ tbsp. brown sugar
• Kombucha (like GT’s Synergy or Health-Ade Ginger-Lemon)
• Crushed ice
• Cherry, for garnish

Directions:

In a rocks glass, muddle blueberries, a lemon slice, and brown sugar. Fill the glass with crushed ice, and top it off with your favorite kombucha.

Flaming Virgin Mary

Ingredients:

• 4 oz. tomato juice
• ½ oz. lemon juice
• ½ tsp prepared horseradish
• 10 dashes hot sauce (like Tobasco, Sriracha, or Cholula Chipotle)
• Fresh ground pepper
• Habanero salt
• Celery stalks with leaves, for garnish
• Possible garnishes: lemon wedge, pickled carrots, shrimp

Directions:

1. Fill one saucer with lemon juice and another with habanero salt. Dip the rim of a tumbler into the lemon juice then the salt to coat it. Fill the tumbler with ice.
2. Combine tomato juice, lemon juice, horseradish, hot sauce, and pepper in a shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly and strain into tumbler. Garnish with anything your heart desires!

Lavender Lemonade

Yield: one pitcher

Ingredients:

• Lavender simple syrup (recipe below)
• 2 cups fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• 5 cups water
• Lemon slices, for garnish
• Lavender simple syrup:
• 1 ½ cups water
• ¾ cup granulated sugar (or substitute ½ cup agave syrup)
• 3 tbsp dried lavender

Directions:

1. Combine ingredients for lavender simple syrup in a pot. Bring the pot to boil, then simmer for about 30 minutes. Chill.
2. Combine water, lemon juice, and lavender simple syrup into a pitcher. Stir and chill. Serve on ice and garnish with lemon slices.

Optional: Add red and blue food coloring to make this mocktail as purple as the fields of Provence.

Off-White Russian

Ingredients:

• Coffee ice cubes
• 3 oz. milk
• 1 oz. heavy cream or half and half
• 2 drops of hazelnut extract

Directions:

1. Make the coffee ice cubes ahead of time. Fill an ice cube tray with drip coffee and freeze overnight.
2. Fill a rocks glass with coffee ice cubes. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir lightly.

Featured image: Oleksandra Naumenko on Shutterstock

6 Shocking Sports Retirements

Andrew Luck shocked the sports world on Saturday night when he suddenly retired as quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts. Though he had informed the NFL of his intentions and planned to hold a press conference on Sunday, word leaked out and hit social media even before the end of the Colts’ pre-season game against the Bears. Luck took to the press podium after the game to confirm the news and offer a version of the speech that he would have given the next day. It was a stunning moment, ranking with several other surprise retirements in sports history. We look back at six of the biggest, one for each (complete; 2017 doesn’t count) season that Luck played in the NFL.

Lou Gehrig

Lou Gehrig’s Retirement Speech (©MLB)

When “The Iron Horse” benched himself on May 2, 1939, after playing 2,130 consecutive games, fans knew that something was wrong with the Yankees slugger. He would never take the field as a player again, as in June he was diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which kills the neurons that controls the muscles of the body. The diagnosis went public on June 19, 1939; the Yankees designated July 4 as Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. At the ceremony, Gehrig delivered perhaps the most famous speech in the history of baseball, wherein he declared “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” He was given a special rush election to the baseball Hall of Fame in December of 1940, and died at his home in the Bronx on June 2, 1941. Though ALS has afflicted other giants in their fields, like physicist Stephen Hawking, ALS is frequently and colloquially referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

Jim Brown

Considered one of the most accomplished and dominant rushers of all time, Jim Brown would later parlay his no-nonsense, bone-crushing style of NFL play to a long-term career in film, notably featuring in action roles in The Dirty Dozen, Slaughter, and more. Brown was the first player to rush for more than 10,000 yards; he set both the single-season and all-time rushing records in his career. After nine years and still in prime shape, Brown abruptly retired from the game after Browns owner Art Modell threatened to fine him for every day he was absent from training camp due to production overruns. Brown decided to simply retire and focus on film and other endeavors, like social activism.

Magic Johnson

The Announcement: Magic Johnson (©NBA)

Earvin “Magic” Johnson was, quite simply, one of the greatest players to ever step foot on the basketball court. A fierce competitor and a passing genius, the wars between Magic’s Lakers and Larry Bird’s Celtics immediately became the stuff of legends. On November 7, 1991, Johnson brought almost the entire world to a halt when he announced that he had tested positive for HIV and would retire from basketball that day. Nevertheless, the fans loved Magic, and they voted him into the 1992 NBA All-Star Game; he scored 25 points and was named MVP.  He was subsequently asked to join The Dream Team, the 1992 Olympic Men’s Basketball team; along with Bird, Michael Jordan, and a roster of legends, Magic brought home the gold medal. Johnson’s attitude had changed by 1994, and he returned to the league for two more years, as well as a brief stint in Europe in 1999. Johnson proved that HIV did not equate to the death sentence that it was perceived as at the time, and continues to thrive today as a business figure and activist.

Michael Jordan

As the most popular basketball player on Earth, Michael Jordan had excelled as an All-American in high school and an NCAA champion at North Carolina before setting the world on fire with the Chicago Bulls. In 1993, Jordan led his team to their consecutive championship, a vaunted “three-peat.” Unfortunately, His Airness didn’t get to enjoy that feat for long; his father was murdered by carjackers in August of that year. In October, Jordan announced his shocking retirement from basketball while expressing a desire to play professional baseball (something that his father had always wanted him to do). Jordan signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox and entered their minor league system. He played in 1994 and 1995; however, the 1995 MLB strike led to his decision to return to the court. Though the Bulls were ushered out of the playoffs by Orlando, despite Jordan’s return, they had the last laugh as the reinvigorated squad went on to put together a second “three-peat.” Jordan announced his retirement again in 2001, recanted, and played until 2003.

Barry Sanders

One of the great running backs in football, Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions led the NFL in rushing four times in the 1990s. He was even named the league’s MVP in 1997, when he posted a gaudy 2,053 rushing yards. Sanders was beloved for his trademark elusive running style, filled with an almost balletic footwork and tremendous ability to shake defenders; that showmanship stood in contrast to his generally humble attitude, as he wasn’t given to attention-getting on-field celebrations. His sudden retirement functioned in much the same way, as he first announced it with a fax to The Wichita Eagle, his hometown newspaper. Although he’d played 10 years, observers noted that he could have still had many more productive years on the field. Sanders later went on the record in the book Barry Sanders: Now You See Him…His Story in His Own Words that the major element in his retirement was frustration that the Lions organization was not committed to building a winning team around him. In that atmosphere, Sanders decided to walk away from the game.

Pat Tillman

In the shadow of 9/11, many young Americans felt compelled to join the military. So did Pat Tillman, the safety for the Arizona Cardinals. After completing his contract in 2002, Tillman and his brother Kevin (who had signed to play baseball with the Cleveland Indians) joined the Army. The idea that Pat Tillman turned down a new multi-million-dollar contract to joined the armed forces came as a surprise, but he was lauded as an American hero for putting his feelings of duty above celebrity and money. Both Tillman brothers finished Ranger Indoctrination Training and were assigned to the 2nd Ranger Battalion. After serving in the opening stages of the invasion of Iraq, the Tillmans finished Ranger School in Fort Benning, Georgia. He was given the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2003 ESPYs. Pat Tillman was deployed to Afghanistan; unfortunately, on April 22, 2004, Tillman was killed in a friendly-fire incident, an event that sparked numerous investigations and Congressional inquiries. In 2008, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform reported that, “It is clear, however, that the Defense Department did not meet its most basic obligations in sharing accurate information with the families and with the American public.” Today, Tillman’s legacy serves as an example of a person that’s willing to do the hard thing because they believe it is right, rather than do the easier thing in comfort.

Featured image: Jamie Lamor Thompson / Shutterstock.com.