J415 Feature Writing

"Writing to Feel Alive" by Walt Harrington

2009-09-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

AJR Features : FIRST PERSON

From AJR, December 1996 issue
Writing to Feel Alive

"One writes in order to feel: That is the fundamental mover." – Rita Dove, "The Poet's World"

By Walt Harrington
Walt Harrington, a former Washington Post Magazine staff writer, teaches journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Journalists are always talking about how they write to inform the public, to defend democracy, to champion the little guy against the corporate mogul, to create a better world. I began my career 20 years ago holding these high-minded rationales. But over the years, as I turned to writing about the everyday lives of people, it dawned on me that these explanations had become props: I no longer wrote stories in order to right wrongs or to change the world. I wrote stories, as poet Rita Dove says, in order to feel.

At first I told myself that I wrote stories so that others might feel. In journalism, it's always the readers who are our final justification for the great power we bear under the First Amendment. Without the defense of serving readers – the personification of "the public interest" – we in the press lose all legitimacy.

Over the years I wrote in-depth stories about the everyday lives of a retarded man, a fundamentalist family, a working-poor family, a grandmother struggling to care for her children and grandchildren, an elderly preacher, a homicide detective, a black Harvard-educated lawyer who had dedicated his life to defending death-row inmates, a teenage runaway, an aspiring gospel singer, a pro football player, a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter pondering how they have shaped one anothers' lives.

As I reported and wrote those stories, I told myself they were meant to make readers feel the lives of others, to take readers outside their busy, insular worlds and into the worlds of people they had neither the time nor perhaps the imagination to go meet, to take readers on a journey across the boundaries of race and class, gender, religion, occupation, age and education – the fiefdoms that so Balkanize us today. This was a variation on the old theme: I was doing good for the commonweal, bringing empathy to the public. I believe that's a worthy fallout of what I do. But, truth told, it also is pretense: I write stories for myself.

They remind me that I am alive.

Some people jump out of planes or climb mountains. Others pray deep and hard. Others deliver meals to the elderly or take poor kids to the zoo. Others run marathons. Still others cheat on their spouses, run stoplights late at night, bellow obscenities at football games, go to horror movies. I think all their motivations share a common root: These things make people feel, pinch them, touch emotions wired into human beings that life today seems to dull and desensitize.

I once met a man, a sociologist, who was running a huge study of women who'd been beaten by their husbands. Fearful that his emotions might cloud his scientific judgment, the man said, he didn't talk to the women himself but instead read the reports of interviewers who had talked to them. That human distance, he believed, was a necessity of his job. Then, in passing, without thinking the ideas were connected, the man mentioned that he had recently taken up fishing – what an authentic feeling it was, he said, to hold a strong, live fish in his hands as his small boat bobbed beneath a boundless blue sky.

I have a wife, children, friends who touch me daily. They are the best piece of my life. But, as is true for so many others, it's not enough. Doing journalism has become my personal answer to the hollowness, the human disconnect, of modern life. I'm not saying it's healthy or normal or good that I feel this way about my stories. I'm not saying it's a legitimate journalistic motivation.

I'm saying only that it's true. The words satisfaction or accomplishment don't describe the sensations I get reporting and writing stories – awe or amazement or communion hit closer to home.

When I stood just off stage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and Cookie Burrous, the aspiring gospel singer, twisted her body into a crouch, flung her arm behind her back and wailed out a line of gospel..when Shirley Rogers, the struggling grandmother who had waited months for her handicapped daughter to be placed in public day care, called the welfare office and told the woman she no longer needed her services, that her daughter was dead..when the mother of Bryan Stevenson, the black Harvard-educated death-row lawyer, described to me the first time Bryan, as a boy, was taken by the Holy Spirit and then said that soon afterwards she, too, was reborn while standing in her kitchen watching the sun rise..when pro football player Jim Lachey talked of how on a perfect block of an opponent he seems not even to strike the man but instead passes through him as if he were only an apparition..when Washington, D.C., homicide detective V.I. Smith threw back a dead man's coat to see a cocked Uzi and for the first time in his life felt fear...

ýt all those moments, as it does for a race car driver taking a turn at a hundred miles an hour, time slowed, bent and elongated, voices ran at dying-battery speed, and motion flicked a single frame at a time. At all those moments, I felt what I felt once while rocking my infant son to sleep in the middle of the night, half-dozing, when suddenly I dreamed or imagined or became my father, who was holding me decades before, when suddenly I dreamed or imagined or became my son who was holding his own son decades later. At all those moments, I felt what I felt as a boy after giving my confession to the priest and, instantly free of sin, walked out from the dimly lit church to a magnificent sun breaking from behind dark, ominous clouds. At all those moments I felt what I felt decades later when, no longer a believer, I sat in the tiny hospital chapel and asked any God or power in the universe to spare my father from the heart attack.

You know you are alive. You shiver, catch your breath. Your eyes tear, you blink, and inside your chest the light that is your life burns brighter, as if the electricity has surged. In such a moment is everything you ever felt that was humane or even holy, a moment when you know what it is to live beyond pride, foolishness, greed or self-pity. Naked, a moment at the heart of it, baffling and affirming. A moment of grace.

The instant passes, and the space it has created inside you fills up with clutter as fast as water replacing a hand pulled from a stream. But I believe we can re-remember. Long ago my childhood doctor, who was by then old, told me that the picture of the hand that hung on his wall had been a gift to himself, that its five fingers signified the 5,000 babies he'd delivered in his more than 50 years as a physician. If he set his memory to it, he said, he could recall each delivery. He paused, closed his eyes and said that he had just remembered my delivery, early one morning 25 years before. He smiled. I chose to believe him.

I've got a ritual: On a late evening after my stories appear, after the letters have arrived and readers have howled or praised, I wait until everyone in my house is asleep, leave on a single lamp in the back room, pour a glass of wine, sit down and read my story to myself. It is time to judge. The elderly Rev. James Holman stops in his tracks, glances back over his shoulder, touches the brim of his fedora and smiles. Do the words rekindle in me what I felt the afternoon I saw him stop, glance back, touch his fedora and smile? Do I feel the rush of it again, the connection? Do I shiver, catch my breath, blink back tears?

When grandmother Julia Shelton leans down and rubs the spot where her head hit the pantry door when she fell in her kitchen recently, and she and daughter Mary and granddaughter Karen, who are helping cook dinner, go suddenly quiet as they all realize that Julia is now old and will soon be dead, am I back in the kitchen hearing a silence that lasts forever?

When Dan Sullivan, the working- poor husband and father, brings his wife home a bottle of Manischewitz – all he can afford at $3.95 – to celebrate his new job at Radio Shack, do I feel his hope as well as the claustrophobia of his life?

The answer is..sometimes.

It is those sometime moments I've come to crave. And perhaps, if I can make myself feel those moments, readers will feel them too: Time will slow, bend, elongate, and they will sense, rub, re-remember a trace of the sensations they felt at whatever were their own particular moments when they knew they were alive.

That's a worthy fallout of what I do. But it's no longer the reason I do it. I do it because each story is for me a strong, live fish held in my hands as my small boat bobs beneath a boundless blue sky. In those moments, I comprehend what eludes me most of the time, what eludes most of us most of the time, and I am, for a redeeming instant, washed and purified in hope and in despair.

"The Girl in the Window" by Lane DeGregory

2009-07-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

Part One: The Feral Child

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

• • •

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

• • •

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."

• • •

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.

Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?

And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?

"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"

But the most pressing questions were about her future.

When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.

"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."

• • •

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.

"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."

Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.

In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.

"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"

That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.

In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?

• • •

The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.

Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.

White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.

White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.

Click.

Part Two: Becoming Dani

Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.

Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.

But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.

Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.

Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.

On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."

That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.

Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.

Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.

Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."

• • •

Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.

They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.

But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.

She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.

No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.

No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.

"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.

But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.

• • •

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.

Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.

He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.

• • •

Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.

So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.

They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.

All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."

When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.

In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.

• • •

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.

In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.

• • •

"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.

It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.

After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.

All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.

The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.

Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.

Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.

Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.

"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.

"Lucky?" Diane asked.

The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."

Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.

It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.

"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."

• • •

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She's lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.

"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."

Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.

She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.

Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."

• • •

William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."

He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.

William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.

He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.

They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."

After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.

He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."

Some day, he's sure, she will answer.

• • •

Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.

Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.

"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.

He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."

For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.

Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.

"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.

Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.

Part Three: The Mother

She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"Part of me died that day," she says.

• • •

Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.

Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.

Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

• • •

For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.

They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.

• • •

She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”

This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.

The caller continued:

“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”

It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.

The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”

Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.

Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?

“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”

The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.

“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.

“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”

• • •

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”

She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.

“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”

Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”

• • •

A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.

The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.

“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”

The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.

“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.

“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”

She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.

• • •

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.

Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”

“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”

She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.

“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”

After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.

She’s on probation until 2012.

She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.

• • •

When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.

She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”

She says she misses Danielle.

“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”

• • •

Is she okay?

Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.

In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.

Part One: The Feral Child

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

• • •

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

• • •

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."

• • •

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.

Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?

And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?

"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"

But the most pressing questions were about her future.

When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.

"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."

• • •

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.

"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."

Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.

In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.

"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"

That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.

In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?

• • •

The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.

Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.

White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.

White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.

Click.

Part Two: Becoming Dani

Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.

Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.

But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.

Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.

Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.

On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."

That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.

Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.

Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.

Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."

• • •

Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.

They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.

But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.

She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.

No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.

No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.

"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.

But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.

• • •

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.

Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.

He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.

• • •

Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.

So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.

They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.

All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."

When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.

In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.

• • •

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.

In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.

• • •

"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.

It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.

After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.

All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.

The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.

Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.

Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.

Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.

"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.

"Lucky?" Diane asked.

The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."

Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.

It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.

"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."

• • •

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She's lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.

"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."

Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.

She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.

Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."

• • •

William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."

He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.

William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.

He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.

They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."

After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.

He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."

Some day, he's sure, she will answer.

• • •

Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.

Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.

"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.

He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."

For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.

Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.

"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.

Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.

Part Three: The Mother

She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"Part of me died that day," she says.

• • •

Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.

Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.

Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

• • •

For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.

They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.

• • •

She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”

This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.

The caller continued:

“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”

It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.

The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”

Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.

Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?

“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”

The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.

“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.

“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”

• • •

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”

She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.

“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”

Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”

• • •

A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.

The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.

“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”

The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.

“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.

“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”

She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.

• • •

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.

Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”

“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”

She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.

“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”

After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.

She’s on probation until 2012.

She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.

• • •

When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.

She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”

She says she misses Danielle.

“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”

• • •

Is she okay?

Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.

In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.

Part One: The Feral Child

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

• • •

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

• • •

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."

• • •

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.

Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?

And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?

"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"

But the most pressing questions were about her future.

When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.

"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."

• • •

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.

"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."

Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.

In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.

"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"

That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.

In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?

• • •

The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.

Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.

White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.

White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.

Click.

Part Two: Becoming Dani

Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.

Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.

But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.

Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.

Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.

On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."

That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.

Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.

Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.

Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."

• • •

Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.

They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.

But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.

She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.

No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.

No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.

"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.

But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.

• • •

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.

Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.

He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.

• • •

Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.

So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.

They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.

All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."

When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.

In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.

• • •

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.

In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.

• • •

"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.

It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.

After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.

All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.

The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.

Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.

Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.

Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.

"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.

"Lucky?" Diane asked.

The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."

Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.

It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.

"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."

• • •

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She's lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.

"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."

Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.

She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.

Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."

• • •

William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."

He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.

William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.

He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.

They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."

After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.

He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."

Some day, he's sure, she will answer.

• • •

Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.

Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.

"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.

He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."

For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.

Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.

"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.

Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.

Part Three: The Mother

She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"Part of me died that day," she says.

• • •

Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.

Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.

Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

• • •

For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.

They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.

• • •

She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”

This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.

The caller continued:

“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”

It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.

The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”

Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.

Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?

“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”

The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.

“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.

“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”

• • •

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”

She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.

“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”

Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”

• • •

A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.

The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.

“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”

The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.

“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.

“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”

She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.

• • •

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.

Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”

“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”

She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.

“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”

After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.

She’s on probation until 2012.

She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.

• • •

When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.

She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”

She says she misses Danielle.

“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”

• • •

Is she okay?

Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.

In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.

Help a child
• If you think a child is being neglected or abused, call the anonymous toll-free hotline:
1-800-962-2873.
• If you need help taking care of your child, call the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay: (813) 234-1234.
• For information on adoption in Hillsborough County: (813) 229-2884; www.HeartGallery
TampaBay.org.
• In Pinellas/Pasco: (727) 456-0637; www.HeartGalleryKids.org.
• If you can't adopt, but want to help foster children in Pinellas or Pasco: (727) 824-0863; www.projectpatchwork.org.
• In Hillsborough: (813) 651-3150; sylviathomascenter.org.

About this story
St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.
The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.
In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Lane DeGregory can be reached at (727) 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

About this story
St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.
The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.
In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Lane DeGregory can be reached at (727) 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

"Colima struggles to recover."

2009-07-15T11:27:00.001-07:00

Colima struggles to recover
Relatives, homes, livelihoods lost

Pamela J. Podger, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003
More...
(01-24) 04:00 PDT Colima, Mexico -- In one moment, Rosa Elena Macias, 66, lost her sister, her house, her store, her future.

Three nieces helped carry the diabetic Macias, clutching her rosary beads for her nightly prayers, from her adobe home into the dirt street Tuesday night as the 7.8-magnitude temblor hit this stately colonial city, about 310 miles west of Mexico City.

She watched as her tiny corner store and her birthplace collapsed, the billowing clouds of dust carrying away her dreams and her sense of security. Then, she heard her 83-year-old sister, Maria, scream once as she was struck on the head by falling debris and killed in her nearby home.

"This is terrible," Macias said in hushed tones Thursday as she relived the drama. "It will take a long time to have my old life back again, if ever."

For 45 seconds, the world buckled and swayed here. The stalwart local residents, who live in the shadow of active Colima Volcano and are accustomed to seismic shakes, say they have jangled nerves and fear strong aftershocks.

Immediately after the intense quake, nurses ran out of the regional hospital with babies, and people spilled into the streets from century-old buildings. At least 21 lives were ended by falling buildings in Colima.

With the death toll at 28, authorities called off further rescue efforts Thursday, saying all bodies and survivors had been retrieved.

However, as many as 10,000 people were left homeless and 300 injured.

Amid the ruins, this was a day for shoveling debris into trucks. The rebuilding effort entered its initial phase as government engineers checked on the safety of cracked buildings and repair crews tended to less ambitious tasks.

Salad and sandwiches - subhead

City relief workers served macaroni salad and ham sandwiches from the backs of pickups to residents in the battered neighborhoods.

Lawyers in the state courthouse were edgy and nervous about working in buildings with hazards still unknown.

Indignation and frustration also began to well up as people faced the harsh prospect of fixing their destroyed homes.

Engineer Ignacio Parra de la Tijera, 34, scanned his almost demolished block, bricks strewn into the road and twisted metal stretching skyward. His home was badly scarred but still standing.

He railed against the National Institute of Anthropology and History for its ban on rebuilding using different materials from the original on any structures over 15 years old in heritage sites like downtown Colima.

"They consider these (adobe) houses as monuments. It is stupid," he said. "Only in Mexico."

The previous day, Soledad Nunez, 34, a neighbor of Macias, had heard President Vicente Fox and local officials promise bricks and mortar for the damaged homes and help for rattled residents. But she was skeptical that it will arrive any time soon.

They promise everything - subhead

"They promise everything but have not given us anything," she said. "They have words, just words -- like always."

At the regional hospital that serves people from the states of Colima, Jalisco and Michoacan, two nurses chatted in the hallway about the ordeal.

Doctors and nurses had worked all night after the earthquake, aiding the 128 wounded people rushed here and trying to save two people who were mortally injured.

By Thursday, a few cracks and loosened ceiling tiles were the only telltale remnants of the temblor.

"I ran around trying to calm the patients," recalled nurse Hilda Mojica, 30.

"We had people trying to get out of bed and run outside."

Another nurse, Judith Ruiz Guizar, 26, described how she, a co-worker and two fathers rushed six premature babies outside. She grabbed milk for the babies and blankets to keep them warm in the night air.

"At that moment, I was afraid because the glass was breaking," she said. "We all ran outside, and covered and protected the babies. Fortunately, we were safe."

Not far away among the tumbled-down homes along Calle Espana, Juana Veltran, 22, and her two kids watched cartoons and munched on sandwiches.

Sleeping in the garden - subhead

Veltran said the family has moved their beds into the back garden since their front room was badly weakened by the quake. Her husband, an auto mechanic, spent the day searching for another home to rent.

"This place is too dangerous," she said. "But it is hard to find another home that we can afford, and there is a lot of competition."

Cesar Nabarro, a 24-year-old homeowner, was angry. For five years he had waited for a city permit so he could reinforce his adobe home. Now, its corners have split apart, and the repairs will be costly.

"Around here, you cannot touch your house because the officials consider it part of the past," he said. "But in this condition now, I expect they will give me a permit."

The quake relief effort also branched out into the countryside on Thursday as military trucks rumbled along dirt roads lined with towering coconut palm trees and acres of lush citrus orchards, headed for rural villages.

One of the hardest hit places was Coquimatlan, 10 miles from Colima. Dazed residents loaded furniture, plastic laundry baskets full of clothes, blankets and food, and appliances into trucks.

Many headed to one of six temporary shelters set up by the government at schools or moved in with family members whose homes had not suffered as much damage.

treets full of debris

Coquimatlan's cobblestone streets were filled both with debris from collapsed structures and fallen oranges shaken from the numerous citrus trees by the quake. Many side streets where entire buildings had fallen were blocked off by police lines.

Family and friends of Juan Calvario Garcia, 73, who died when his home caved in on him, gathered around his white coffin in a covered plaza to the left of the cathedral in the center square.

The church sustained so much damage in the earthquake -- its bell tower toppled into a neighboring basketball court, and huge cracks ran through the ceiling in the nave -- that it would have been unsafe to hold Garcia's funeral there.

Other damaged structures in the outlying areas included factories that process the state's exports -- coconuts and limes -- into sugared candies and juices.

At Citrojugo, a citrus factory in Tecoman, 25 miles from Colima, half a dozen two-story cylindrical containers toppled over. A murky liquid with a pungent odor that burned the lungs -- which many residents said was ammonia -- leaked from the cracked silos and flooded the dirt road outside.

As the midday sun beat down back in Colima, Nunez and Macias hugged, their destroyed homes kitty-corner from where they were standing. Gone is the shop where Macias sold Chiclets, sodas, soap and beer for 20 years.

Nunez felt her neighbor's grief deeply, saying: "She lost her house, her livelihood. Now she has nothing and is alone."

But she was sure that Colimans would pull together. "We are very united in this neighborhood, and what happened to her happened to all of us."

Chronicle correspondent Renee Huang contributed to this story. / E-mail Pamela J. Podger at ppodger@sfchronicle.com.

"Jordan's War" - By John Cramer, The Roanoke Times

2009-07-12T17:10:00.000-07:00

Jordan's War
Roanoke native Jordan Sherwood is still a young man but already a combat veteran. Twice wounded in Iraq, he wonders: Will I go back again?

By John Cramer
Jordan Sherwood stares over the sandbagged side of his truck as it crosses the Euphrates River.
It's late morning, the sun nearly at its peak, baking the city and the desert beyond. A warm wind blows, leaving grit in his teeth. It's March 13, 2005, three weeks into his second tour in Iraq as a Marine lance corporal and combat cameraman.
He holds his rifle easily, his photography gear by his side. He watches the roadside, scans the horizon, looks for things out of place among the palm trees and bullet-scarred buildings. His Marine buddies jaw beside him in the back of the 7-ton truck, its big tires rumbling up reassuringly through the soles of their boots.
The truck crosses the murky Euphrates, flowing through the cradle of ancient civilization and the heart of modern war. Ahead is the 1st Marine Division's headquarters, a base nicknamed Blue Diamond, in the city of Ramadi in Anbar province, a hotbed of the Sunni Arab insurgency about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Ramadi is a dangerous place for Marines, who have taken hundreds of casualties and inflicted even more in some of the most brutal urban fighting of the war.
At this moment, it's quiet. Civilians mill about. Merchants hawk cigarettes from ramshackle stands. A few Iraqi soldiers stand sentry listlessly.
Just after the Marines' truck leaves the bridge, a roadside bomb buried in the dirt explodes. They are slammed in a whirlwind of shrapnel and shock wave. Their muscles contract spastically, eyes shutting, jaws clenching.
The truck grinds to a halt, tires blown out, gas tank punctured. Dust billows up, rocks rain down. Someone screams: Man down, man down!
Jordan looks at his sergeant, whose neck is slashed open, pumping blood. Holy s--t, the sergeant gasps, then closes his eyes and slumps over. A Navy chief has shrapnel jutting from his arm, but he tries to help the others.
Jordan, a 22-year-old Roanoke native, is closest to the blast. It reverberates through his lanky body, scrambling nerves, breaking apart bones, tearing open muscles.
He tastes cold blood, touches his face and flings away shredded skin. His right hand is mangled. He glances around for his missing finger but can't find it. His legs look fine -- his camouflage pants and boots are undisturbed -- but he can't feel them.

Someone's still shouting: Man down! And Jordan thinks: Are they talking about me?
There's confusion for a moment, scrambling, cursing, then order prevails. The Marines drag the wounded from the wreckage before it can catch fire. They radio for support. Jordan's ears ring from the blast, so the words are muffled. He spits blood through his reddened teeth. He looks at his friends, their rifles up, shouting orders, angrily looking for someone to kill. There's no one, just cowering civilians.
Jordan doesn't consider grabbing his camera or rifle. He can't stand up and his trigger finger is gone, so he lies on the warm ground, legs splayed out. He looks at the sky, feels himself breathing moistly, in and out, in and out, through the blood. He's suddenly cold, shivering in the acrid air, which smells of gasoline and smoke.
After several minutes, Jordan is loaded into another truck that retreats across the bridge, its steel girders flashing overhead in the sunlight. He wonders about the sailor and his sergeant. He's freezing now, his teeth chattering. He tries to move his throbbing legs -- the right one flops over woodenly, the left one doesn't move. But he doesn't think of dying, of being paralyzed, of being an amputee. He thinks: I'm all right, I'm all right.

The Marines can't get an IV going because of the lurching truck. They keep him conscious by asking urgently pointless questions: How are you, where are you from, what do you like to do at home? He can tell from their eyes that it's bad, but he manages a joke: Sir, I don't feel like answering your stupid-ass questions, sir.
They laugh, tell him to hang on. At the field hospital, a big soldier scoops Jordan up gently and lays him on a stretcher. The doctors and nurses and corpsmen cut off his clothes and drape him in a paper sheet. They take off his St. Christopher's medal, which his mother gave him for protection, and his dog tags -- two around his neck, another on his boot lace. They try to stop the bleeding, keep the shattered bones in place. Another millimeter, they say, and he would have been dead, at least lost his legs. When a nurse mentions he'll need extensive surgery on his nose, he wonders if it's been blown off.
He lies naked on the table, trembling, feels them pulling and prodding and poking. It feels as if they're working on someone else, talking about someone else. He looks at the ceiling, at the bright lights, at the serious faces hovering. He glances through the doorway, at the sunlight beyond, reflecting brilliantly off the sand as if each grain is electrified. He hears boots on gravel, a distant rumbling, the war going on without him. He drifts away.
Hours later, he awakens on a cot in a tent, the sun setting, the cold night coming on. His sergeant and the sailor lie next to him, and he thinks: We're alive. Then he closes his eyes and slips away into darkness.

"Climbing a Ladder Made of Lipstick" - Molly Hennessy-Fiske

2009-07-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Climbing a ladder made of lipstick
Altagracia Valdez and other Latinas are changing the face of cosmetics giant Mary Kay. They want better looks -- and finances.
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 15, 2008

Altagracia Valdez is dreaming of a perfect pink Cadillac. All she has to do to win it, according to her boss at Mary Kay Inc., is expand her list of conocidos.

Those familiar connections, she says, can adorn Valdez's 60-year-old hands with diamond rings, pump up her bank account with enough money to pay the bills, buy a house and help her finally enjoy some middle-class financial security.

If Valdez can recruit a sales force of 30 and sell at least $18,000 worth of cosmetics in four months, she can win a free lease and insurance for her first Mary Kay car -- not the signature pink Cadillac emblazoned with the Mary Kay logo, but maybe a Saturn Vue or a Pontiac Vibe that she can trade in for a Cadillac if she keeps meeting sales quotas. If she falls short of winning the car, she can still earn a promotion if her sales total $16,000. And she can always try again.

The women Valdez is counting on to broaden her direct-sales force are mostly Spanish-speakers she meets knocking on doors in Azusa, La Puente and West Covina, immigrants with little spending money but a burning desire to improve their looks and finances.

In a land of opportunity, cosmetic direct sales looks like a shortcut to the middle class, a corporate ladder whose first rung doesn't require a high school diploma or even English skills. As Latina saleswomen rise through the ranks, they are changing the face of Mary Kay, long associated with blond Texas founder Mary Kay Ash.

Mary Kay Inc. sees potential in the immigrants' battered apartments and modest tract homes. Both Mary Kay and rivals such as Avon have recently seen sales swell among Latino immigrants in California.

"Sometimes a woman can have an empty stomach, but she has to have lipstick," said Valdez's boss, Sandra Chamorro, a Nicaraguan immigrant and single mother with a house in San Gabriel and a new pale pink Cadillac convertible, the Mary Kay reward for top sellers.

"Maybe," Chamorro added, "you buy a little less milk."

In November, in the dim living room of a West Covina tract house, Valdez was making that case as she gave a facial to Mary Lee Mejia, 19, a striking Salvadoran with blond highlights, blue-gray eyes and porcelain skin.

"There are no limits -- a woman can work for what she wants," Valdez promised in Spanish as Mejia, who works in a recycling center, lifted a pink hand mirror to admire the results.

"And what about us?" asked Mejia's fiancé, a Mexican mechanic who was smoothing on hand lotion as his brother dabbed on face cream. "Can we sell too?"

Sure, Valdez said, reassuring the man that joining her sales team wouldn't interfere with his home life.

Valdez pointed to her daughter Cindy, 20, sitting beside her. Cindy is developmentally disabled, nonverbal and shy. Valdez takes her everywhere, even to her facial appointments and Mary Kay meetings. At first, Cindy hated the Mary Kay social gatherings, but she has grown to love the routine -- and the rewards. In the privacy of their one-bedroom apartment, Cindy models her mother's rhinestone crowns, prizes Valdez earned for her recruiting.

This is a family business, Valdez told Mejia and the men. "Mary Kay said first comes God, then comes family, then business."

Then Valdez made her pitch: Which items did Mejia and the others like best?

Silence.

They couldn't afford to buy anything. Mejia sank into her fiancé's arms, whispering about lotion. But they were saving for a wedding, and the $22 lotion was too expensive.

Valdez changed tactics -- maybe they could sell for her. To start, she said, they would each need $108 for a sample kit of cosmetics. Once they began selling, they could keep half of the selling price -- $11 for the $22 lotion, for instance, with the remaining $11 divided among Valdez, her boss and Mary Kay Inc. She passed out Mary Kay catalogs. Give them to co-workers during lunch breaks, she said. Show them the new colors. Ask them what they like. Friends become clients you can count on to pay.

Mejiawatched Valdez pull a gold satchel from one of her makeup bags, unzip it and withdraw pink sign-up forms.

They all signed. They would find the money.

Valdez guided Cindy back to her 2000 Ford Focus, which had been acting up. She was disappointed she didn't sell anything. But the new recruits, the consultoras, give her hope.

She was particularly pleased with Mejia, a delicate girl she first spotted through the window of a nearby apartment. La guera, she called her later, "the white girl."

"Can you see that lady selling Mary Kay? She is going to make money because everybody wants to look like her."

Valdez's skin is caramel-colored, lined with age and hard times that Mary Kay creams and lotions can't smooth away. But she has learned to use her grandmotherly looks to entice customers. Immigrant women welcome her into their homes like a relative, often during the day, to buy cosmetics while their husbands are away. They call her Alta, "tall" in Spanish, an ironic nickname for a diminutive woman who stands 5 feet 2, always looking up to somebody, always listening.

"It is a vocation, talking to people," Valdez said as she drove to visit customers on a chilly Sunday night. "Sometimes they just need you there to listen, especially women."

During their free facials, women vent to her about marriages, children, jobs, the stresses of life as some of this country's most underpaid and underappreciated workers. Valdez listens, gently reminding them between peels that they deserve better -- a job, say, where they can work on their own schedule, spend time with their children and end the day looking better than when they started.

She highlights the reasons why she joined Mary Kay two years ago: to support her children, get out of the house, become independent. She doesn't dwell on the darker details -- how desperate she was after she left her husband of 33 years, an illiterate construction worker who threatened to kill their children and once beat her so hard he broke her jaw.

Valdez doesn't tell them that many of the 1,000 other mostly Latina sales consultants in her local network earn significantly less than their boss, who is one of 500 national sales directors. Talented new consultoras earn about $2,000 a month without benefits. By comparison, Chamorro, their boss, earns a six-figure annual income and is eligible for group health insurance.

Valdez has been promoted higher than a regular consultora -- she's a "super estrella," or superstar. But she still needs one more promotion, to director, to make her eligible for health insurance.

Valdez doesn't tell her new recruits how torn she feels trying to move up the corporate ladder, to manage business and family, help her consultoras and please her boss.

Chamorro's top sellers gather by rank for their monthly meetings at a small office in Alhambra. The veterans sit up front, flaunting their $300 purple suits, black pumps and real diamond and gold pins. Then come the new recruits, recent immigrants, hair tied back, clutching pictures of their dream cars as they slip in late and sit on folding chairs at the back. There's Maria Sanchez, Carmen Torrez, Lorena Ramirez, Rosario Molina, Rita Villareal and Reynata Arradondo -- about 40 women, almost all mothers, some grandmothers.

If Valdez reaches her sales goal, she'll be sitting up front with the veterans, too.

At the November meeting, Chamorro assumed her seat at a pink table at the front, flanked by portraits of the late Mary Kay Ash, who once invited her to tea at her famous pink Mary Kay mansion in Dallas.

What was your dream when you came to the U.S.? Chamorro asked her top sellers in Spanish. A ranch house in the hills? A pool? A car? All you need to achieve those dreams, she said, is to sell.

Your children will bug you for rides. Your husband may not respect your work. Don't listen, she said. Stay focused on that dream.

Family is Valdez's weakness.

She has seven children. When her oldest daughter, a public school administrator, needs a baby-sitter, Valdez cancels facials. When her recently separated son has trouble with his kids, Valdez stops by instead of calling potential customers. When Cindy, her baby, gets sick, Valdez stays home.

"When it comes to the family, I just can't say no," she said.

Many of her consultoras and customers have the same problem.

At one stop, a tract house with cars packed onto the narrow driveway, Valdez was greeted by a pregnant woman, an undocumented immigrant. She wanted cream to treat the spots on her face, but her husband insists that she save for the baby. The woman gave Valdez $70 to buy her a crib instead, a favor her trusted superstar consultora agreed to in the hopes of future sales.

Sometimes, Valdez cuts corners to recruit poor consultoras. She helps them cover their start-up costs. She gives some of them free makeup kits until they earn enough to pay her back. She supplies others with a few items to sell. Instead of paying them in cosmetics and pocketing the difference, the way some Mary Kay managers do, Valdez lets the women keep half the selling price.

Her generosity binds consultoras to her and helps her feel better about using them to achieve her goal.

"She's really very good. Have you heard her on the phone?" said new recruit Esperanza Garcia, 21. Valdez was signing her up at Garcia's office, a West Covina payday loan store where neon signs in the window announce: "We Buy & Sell Pesos."

It was Nov. 30, Valdez's last day to meet her $18,000 sales goal, and it was pouring rain.

Customers were canceling facials. Garcia, whose first name means "hope," was the final recruit Valdez needed to meet her goal. The new consultora had $3,000 in sales lined up, but prospective sales didn't count toward Valdez's goal. She was about $2,000 short.

So Valdez slipped on her gold suit and climbed back into the car with Cindy, next to a pile of handouts her boss had made for her sales force.

"This is a decisive month for Altagracia Valdez to arrive at her goal," the handouts said in Spanish, urging consultoras to sell at least $200 worth of makeup.

"Remember, to give is to receive."

In the rain, Valdez approached locked apartment courtyards on Dora Guzman Avenue in La Puente, calling to children in Spanish to let her in. Inside, it smelled of Mexico -- cheap laundry detergent mingling with the sweet scent of simmering corn tortillas.

Valdez made her way through mud puddles, past garden Nativity scenes and apartments with pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe taped to the windows, to a rickety stone staircase. Cindy climbed ahead. Valdez, loaded down with pink Mary Kay cosmetics bags, sped up behind her on JC Penney pumps.

Just as she reached the top, she slipped and fell.

Almost instantly, Valdez was up again and smiling, reassuring Cindy that she was OK. She knocked on the door of a consultora, a pregnant woman who had promised to recruit customers. The windows were dark. Neighbors didn't know where the woman was.

Valdez tried a few other apartments, plodding with Cindy through the cold and damp. No luck.

Still, she didn't lose hope. To win a car, she said, "we have to put our hearts into this and pay the price."

Later that night, Valdez and one of Chamorro's deputies calculated her final sales tally. Huddled over a pocket calculator on Valdez's kitchen counter, they did the math to see if she had won the car.

In the end, she was $2,200 short.

There was some good news. Valdez was only $200 shy of her promotion. The deputy promised to make up the difference. Valdez will be crowned again with rhinestones, join the weekly managers' meeting in a new black uniform and become eligible for health insurance. Most important, she said, she will double her commission on her consultoras' sales, from 13% to 26%.

As for the Cadillac, she said, she will just have to go back to her conocidos and try again.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Dara Torres - NYT's magazine

2009-06-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

June 29, 2008
A Swimmer of a Certain Age

By ELIZABETH WEIL
NEAR THE WARM-UP POOL AT THE Missouri Grand Prix swim meet, in Columbia, a crop of Olympic hopefuls lolled around in practice suits and towels on a Saturday morning in February. Fully clothed among them stood some relics of Olympics past: Scott Goldblatt, who won a gold medal in the 2004 Games, wore an aqua sport coat and a striped tie and was doing on-air commentary for Swimnetwork.com; Mel Stewart, who won two golds and a bronze in 1992, wore the same goofy get-up, working as Goldblatt’s sidekick. Meanwhile, Dara Torres, who won the first of her nine Olympic medals in 1984, a year before Michael Phelps was born, stripped off her baggy T-shirt and sweat pants, revealing a breathtaking body in a magenta Speedo. She pulled on a cap marked with her initials and prepared to swim. Torres is now 41 and the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Tessa Grace. She broke her first of three world records in 1982, at 14, and she has retired from swimming and come back three times, her latest effort built on an obsessive attention to her aging body.

Torres’s retinue includes a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach, two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny, at the cost of at least $100,000 per year. At the Olympic trials, this week, in Omaha, Neb., she’s expected to swim fast enough to make her fifth Olympic team. If she does, she’ll be the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics (despite sitting out 1996 and 2004). She’ll also be oldest female swimmer in the history of the Olympic games.

Stewart walked over to give Torres a hug, but he stopped himself short. “I don’t want to mess anything up,” he said, laughing, patting the air around her torso.

Last November in Germany, Torres clocked 23.82 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle short course, breaking the American record and making her one of only five women to swim the event in less than 24 seconds. The day after she got home to South Florida, she had a bone spur shaved out of her shoulder. In early January, she had another operation, to deal with a torn meniscus in her knee. Now just five weeks after the latest procedure, Torres looked great. She flashed her wide-open smile at Stewart and dove in the pool. Stewart retreated to Goldblatt and shrugged. “Hey, we’d all be in there if we could be winning,” he said.

As Torres swam, her nearly six-foot frame stretching out across the water, her head coach, Michael Lohberg, checked her hip rotation and distance per stroke, while Torres’s two stretchers, who moved from Connecticut to Florida to aid in her training, looked for small asymmetries and tensions in her body. Torres treats her body the way a motorhead treats his car: obsessively tuning it up, sparing no expense. If you study Torres’s face and neck, you can see some faint signs of her 40-plus years. But barring the 13 small surgical incisions on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers, her physique looks nearly flawless. Rowdy Gaines, who in 1996 was the oldest swimmer (at 35) to qualify for the American Olympic swimming trials, recently described Torres to me as having “the perfect swimmer’s body; really, it’s the picture they’d draw in the dictionary.” Her posture is gangly, loose and cocky, like a teenage boy’s. Her proportions more closely resemble the long inverted triangle of Phelps — broad shoulders, long torso, slim hips, long arms — than the more tightly muscled curves of two of the biggest names in American women’s swimming, Natalie Coughlin and Katie Hoff.

Torres is known for being both competitive and compulsive. Each year, on her mother’s birthday, she tries to beat her siblings to be the first to call. In February, when a group of swimmers appeared on “The Today Show” to promote the new Speedo LZR suit, a Speedo rep offered $100 to the first athlete to say www.speedo.com; guess who won the money? Torres’s partner, David Hoffman, a reproductive endocrinologist, who is Tessa’s father, describes Torres’s personality as “not type A. She’s type A + +.” As if to explain, one evening, over dinner with Torres, her mother and me, Hoffman mentioned how challenging it can be to do any kind of physical exercise with Torres. “When we go on bike rides, she’s gone,” Hoffman said.

“That’s not true!” Torres objected. “I wait for you!”

Hoffman raised his eyebrows, resting his case.

After her swim, Torres returned to her hotel to eat lunch, nap and tear two LZR swimsuits worth $1,000 — Speedo failed to send Torres’s size, 27 long, and suggested she squeeze into 26 regular. Then she headed back to the aquatic center in the late afternoon. Gone was the morning’s big smile. Torres was now 149 pounds of focus. Her body kept warm in a knit cap and Ugg boots, she lay on a yoga mat in the gymnasium, readying herself for the preliminaries of the 50-meter freestyle. Most swimmers prep for races by pinwheeling their arms and trying to relax. For Torres, the chore is far more elaborate, as her two stretchers work in tandem to contort and flex her body, in a 20-minute preswim version of the two-hour sequence they do three times a week at her home.

Swimmers refer to the 50-meter freestyle as “the splash and dash.” You dive, hit the water, go all out for about 20 seconds and then reach for the wall. In the preliminaries, Torres streaked down the pool in 24.89 seconds, placing second behind the 22-year-old Kara Lynn Joyce. She was pleased with her performance.

The next morning, back at the aquatic center for the finals, Torres appeared more interior. As her stretchers made last-minute adjustments — during competitions they stretch her five times a day — she stared at the ceiling, listening to her iPod. Up on the blocks, Torres looked taller and fitter than the seven other women, who were between 12 and 20 years her junior. Torres dried her block with a towel, bent down to start and this time touched the wall in 24.85 seconds, just ahead of Natalie Coughlin and again behind Joyce.

Within minutes, the three women stood on a podium. A college kid hung a silver medal around Torres’s neck.

“Can I see it?” a high-school swimmer asked Torres after she stepped down.

Torres does not relish coming in second. “Sure,” she said. “You can have it.”

TORRES LOVES TO WIN, but not as much as she hates to lose. Growing up in Beverly Hills, the fifth of six children and the older of two girls, Torres started following her brothers to swim practice at the local Y.M.C.A. at age 7 and later joined the Culver City swim team. As a kid, Torres didn’t have much of a work ethic, but she did do whatever it took to come in first. Torres’s mother, Marylu Kauder, a former model, told me that one of her earliest memories of her daughter swimming was watching Torres during practice swim halfway across the pool and then stop and turn around so she could beat her teammates back to the wall. Torres lived a privileged life — her childhood home had 10 bathrooms. Still, when she broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle, at 14, the achievement didn’t seem to impress or surprise anyone much in the Torres household. As Torres recalls, her brothers said, “Congratulations, whatever.” Torres’s own response wasn’t far more pronounced: “Someone told me I was the fastest in the world, and I thought, O.K., that’s neat. But those things really don’t stay with me.”

During her junior year in high school, Torres moved down to Mission Viejo, Calif., to train for the 1984 Olympics with Mark Schubert, who was coaching one of the best teams in the country and who is now the head coach of the U.S.A. Swimming National Team. “There are some athletes who love to train but are afraid to race,” Schubert explained to me. “In high school Dara was the opposite. I wouldn’t say she loved to train. But when it was swim-meet time, that’s when she’d really shine.” Despite this, the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles did not go as planned for Torres. At one point, she recalls, she peeked out to the pool from the athletes’ tent because she wanted to see her friend Rowdy Gaines swim. “I remember lifting up the bottom and seeing 17,000 people and I just freaked out. I got hot, I had to go to the nurse’s station, they were putting ice packs on me.” Torres swam so poorly in the preliminaries of the 4X100-meter freestyle relay (the 50-meter freestyle did not become an Olympic event until 1988) that the coaches even considered whether they could substitute a veteran for Torres in the finals that evening. But that afternoon a team captain took Torres back to the dorm to watch soap operas and managed to calm her down. In the finals, Torres swam her leg in 55.92 seconds, a personal best, and the team won a gold medal. Still, Torres describes those Olympics as “just scary.”

At the University of Florida, which Torres started attending in 1985, practice became a much more prominent and difficult part of her life. The coaches routinely weighed all the swimmers, and if a swimmer didn’t make weight, he or she had to swim extra morning workouts. At Florida, Torres earned 28 N.C.A.A. all-American swimming awards, the maximum number possible during a college career, but she also became bulimic, forcing herself to throw up to make weight. In the summer of 1988, between her junior and senior years of college, Torres was ranked No. 1 in the world in the 100-meter freestyle. But as she puts it, she “just couldn’t get it together” in Seoul at the 1988 Olympics, Torres placed seventh in the 100-meter freestyle; again she won medals only in relays, a silver and a bronze. Near the end of the games, Torres overheard the East German swimmer Kristin Otto, who won gold medals in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle, tell a reporter, “I thought I’d have more competition out of Dara Torres.” “That was a knife in my back and my heart,” Torres told me.

Once her college career ended, Torres decided to retire. But before long she felt the urge to compete again and was elected an Olympic team captain for the 1992 games in Barcelona. With her bulimia in check, she won a gold in a freestyle relay, yet it was her only event. “I would say 1992 was less than stellar by her standards,” Schubert told me, adding sympathetically, “I don’t ever remember her being good enough for her.” Torres had no individual medals to her name, and her growing collection of relay medals presented a complicated prize. She kept them under her bed in her apartment in New York, where, she told me, they turned black with tarnish.

After 1992, Torres lived what appeared to be a glamorous life. She became the first athlete model in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, married and divorced Jeff Gowen, a sports producer, kept fit running and cycling in Central Park and playing basketball at the Reebok gym. But in the spring of 1999, despite not having been in a pool, except to cool down, in seven years, Torres decided she wanted to compete in the 2000 games and moved to California to train. After only five months, Torres’s time in the 50-meter freestyle was 0.3 seconds faster than the world record she set in that event more than 15 years earlier. In Sydney in 2000, Torres, then 33, won three individual Olympic medals — bronzes in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly. She won two gold medals in relays as well. Though she instantly missed the intensity of training for the Olympics — she told me she cried on the way to the required urine test after her last race, sad that it was over and unsure what to do with her life — she came home and again retired. “I felt like I really didn’t have anything else to prove to myself,” she told me. “Plus, I thought 33 was really old. And I was tired.”

Over the next five years, Torres married and divorced again, this time an Israeli surgeon named Itzhak Shasha, and was inducted in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. (Torres’s father, Edward Torres, a real-estate developer, was Jewish, and she converted before marrying Shasha.) She also became the first woman to win the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach car race; when asked to explain why she entered the event, she replied, “I’m so freaking competitive it’s unbelievable.” Then, in the fall of 2005, after struggling for years to have a baby, Torres finally became pregnant with Tessa. At the time, she began swimming again for exercise, because, she says, she had terrible morning sickness and she’d “rather throw up in the pool gutter than next to the StairMaster.” But predictably, Torres soon found herself racing “whoever the middle-aged guy happened to be in the next lane,” even when she was noticeably pregnant. Three and a half months postpartum, she raced at the Masters World Championships. Fifteen minutes after nursing Tessa in the bathroom, she swam the first leg of the 50-meter freestyle relay in 25.98 seconds — fast enough to qualify for this week’s Olympic trials.

A WEEK AFTER THE MISSOURI GRAND PRIX, in the muggy South Florida haze, Torres rolled up to the Coral Springs Swim Club at 7:45 a.m. for an 8:00 practice, because, as she explained in a text message: “. . . hate getting there last! You’d think I would have grown out of that, but I still hate anything to do with being last!!”

As a swimmer of a certain age, Torres takes much longer to recover between workouts. In college she swam 10 practices a week, for a total of about 65,000 meters. Now she swims five, totaling around 25,000 meters. In the water, she does the same workouts as the other sprinters on her team — timed sets, kicking and drills — and she dispatches each with her signature flawless technique and the happy-to-be-there enthusiasm of a woman who was supposed to have hung up her Speedo many years ago. “Isn’t he nice to look at?” Torres whispered to me, cocking her head toward her training partner, the 6-foot-4, well-muscled, 28-year-old Bulgarian Ray Antonov. At the end of practice they kissed each other four times on the cheek. “It’s a Bulgarian thing,” Torres said, laughing.

Torres’s innovations for keeping her body in top shape as she advances deeper into middle age are almost entirely out of the pool. In Florida, after her two-hour water workout, Torres changed into a black workout top and shorts and met her strength coach, Andy O’Brien, in the gym. Over the past year and a half, O’Brien, who is also the strength coach of the Florida Panthers hockey team, has switched Torres’s focus away from heavy, static weightlifting and geared her training toward balanced, dynamic exercises that stimulate her central nervous system. “The idea is not to isolate muscle groups but to get muscles contracting together in the right sequences,” O’Brien explains. Weight training, he notes, grew out of bodybuilding, and that low-rep high-weight tradition is ill suited for a sprinter since a body comprised of big muscles that have been trained to produce force only individually wastes considerable energy trying to move. O’Brien says speed derives from highly coordinated movements and fluid timing. Under his tutelage Torres is 12 pounds lighter, stronger and more cut than she was in 2000. Torres told me that it took her head coach, Lohberg, a little while to embrace O’Brien’s program, but she says, “I’m swimming really fast now, so he can’t complain.”

Torres does her weight training for 60 to 90 minutes, four times a week. On this day, O’Brien coached Torres through a series of exercises that she did while lying on a large exercise ball — lifting weights, doing crunches with weights behind her head. She also performed cross-body pulls with another large ball in her arms. Throughout, O’Brien kept his eyes on Torres’s shoulders and upper back (and several of the young men on the team kept their eyes on O’Brien, unable to afford his services themselves but eager to see what they could learn). Nearly everyone in Torres’s orbit is in awe of her body — its beauty, its strength, its form. “Look at the way her scapula is traveling!” O’Brien enthused, noting the place where she just had an operation. “Dara repairs 10 times faster than most athletes. Considering her age and the length of time she’s been training, it’s pretty amazing.”

After grabbing a steak salad for lunch, Torres drove home (fast) to be stretched. Torres puts as much energy — and money — into her workout recovery as she does into her training. Nearly everybody I spoke to for this article struggled to find a way to say gracefully that Torres’s considerable financial resources — sponsorships from Toyota and Speedo; money she has earned from modeling, TV work and motivational speaking; plus a private sponsor for training expenses — are helping her gain speed. Torres books a massage three times a week and visits, as she needs to, a chiropractor, who works his bald head to a frothy sweat as he tries to stick his hand under her shoulder blade. This afternoon, however, she was getting her two-hour stretch. BlackBerry in hand, pink flower bolster from Tessa’s bed under her legs, Torres lay on her kitchen floor gossiping with her stretchers, as they used their bodies to guide her limbs into precise angles and knead knots and sometimes small pieces of scar tissue out of her muscles.

“Dara and I haven’t seen each other in like 10 hours, so we have to catch up,” Anne Tierney, one of the stretchers, explained as she sat on a chair near Torres’s head. Her partner, Steve Sierra, sat on a chair near Torres’s side, and the two proceeded to “mash,” or massage Torres’s shoulders and legs with their feet — sometimes standing on her body — so their hands wouldn’t tire and they could apply more force. After 45 minutes, they began Torres’s resistance-stretching sequence, a series of maneuvers that looks like a cross between a yoga class, a massage and a Cirque du Soleil performance. The concept behind resistance stretching is that muscles can gain more flexibility if they’re contracted and stretched at the same time. At one point Torres rolled onto her stomach, tucking one leg underneath her chest (in what yogis call pigeon pose). Then Tierney leaned her torso against Torres’s slightly bent back leg, pushing it toward Torres’s glutes, as Torres worked to overcome Tierney’s force and straighten out that leg. Later, Torres moved up onto a massage table and Tierney and Sierra worked on her tensor fascia latae, a muscle that starts on the outside of hip and extends down the leg. Sierra used his hands and shoulders to rotate Torres’s thigh externally; Tierney stood at the foot of the table, pulling outward on Torres’s calf near the ankle.

Torres calls resistance stretching her “secret weapon.” Bob Cooley, who invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres “from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America.” The secret to Torres’s speed, Cooley says, is that his technique not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they produce greater power and speed. “What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?” Cooley asks. “They don’t spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that’s what resistance flexibility is doing for Dara — increasing her biomechanics.”

Moments from the end of Torres’s workday — her swim workout, her gym workout and her two-hour stretching session nearly complete — Tessa ran into the kitchen, shouting, “Mama!” The toddler clearly takes after her mom: even at age 2, she’s working on driving her plastic car between the Mini Cooper and the Lexus S.U.V. in the garage, while standing up. Tessa distracted herself in the living room full of toys while Sierra finished with Torres, first working his fingers under her rib cage, a painful technique that, unexpectedly, helps with shoulder rotation, and then pressing very firmly with the heels of his hands on Torres’s solar plexus, as if doing CPR. None of this is comfortable — I had the distinct pleasure of being stretched by Tierney and Sierra myself — but Torres has a very high threshold for pain and the willingness to endure it.

“O.K., Tessie!” Torres finally yelled, standing up from the table and sliding on her flip-flops. “Outside? Race ya!”

UPON HEARING THAT TORRES is likely to make the Olympic team at age 41, many people have the same question: How is this possible? Kinesiologists counter with a different query: Why are you so surprised? “Dara is extremely impressive, but she’s not as unique as people think,” says Michael Joyner, a competitive athlete and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic who writes scholarly papers about aging and sports. “Ted Williams hit .388 when he was 39. Jack Foster did very well in the Olympic marathon when he was 40. Karl Malone earned a triple-double in an N.B.A. game at 40. Jeannie Longo won a French time-trial championship in cycling at age 47.” Torres’s events — short swims — are also well suited to competitors of advanced age. Compared to, say, running, swimming is more technique-intensive and produces fewer injuries. Sprints are also kinder to older athletes, in that strength falls off more gradually than aerobic power. In April, at 37, Mark Foster, a freestyle sprinter in England, came out of retirement and earned a spot, for the fifth time, on the British Olympic swim team. “For those of us who pay attention to this stuff,” Joyner said, “Dara’s performance is unusual but not totally unexpected.”

So why do we assume a middle-aged swimmer must be all washed up? Because for nonelite athletes, sporting achievements fall off precipitously with age. Body composition changes toward more fat and less muscle. Strength and aerobic capacity decrease as well. But a primary reason that athletic performance degrades in adulthood is changes in priorities. People tend to devote more time and energy to jobs and families than to sports. Even committed athletes downgrade their workout goals from achieving personal bests to staying in shape. Academics refer to this reduction in physical activity as hypokinesis. The phenomenon is not limited to humans. A 1985 study showed that rats with unlimited access to running wheels exercised less as they aged. “But look at people who maintain activity levels,” says Joel Stager, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University. “It’s a different story! A lot of what we assume is aging is just progressive hypokinesis. How many people at Dara’s age have maintained their training consistently? I’m going to say there are very, very few.”

Even childbirth needn’t be a sports-career killer. In 1972, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, E. Zaharieva published a study of 13 women who were pregnant and then competed in the 1964 Olympic Games. Most resumed serious training between three and six months after giving birth. All said, Zaharieva wrote, “they became stronger, had greater stamina and were more balanced in every way after having a child.” Last September, Lindsay Davenport was back on the pro tennis tour and winning just three months after giving birth, while in November, Paula Radcliffe won the New York City Marathon less than 10 months after having a baby.

So how long can peak athletic performance last? Hirofumi Tanaka, the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, found that both elite and nonelite runners and swimmers could maintain personal bests until age 35, after which performance declined in a gradual, linear fashion until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for swimmers. Deterioration was rapid from there. Tanaka also found that swimmers experienced more modest declines than runners and that swim sprinters, like Torres, experienced the smallest declines of all. At Yale University, Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on aging and peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair Model. The model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to take a personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to take to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming he or she has continued to train at the same level). According to the Fair Model, a woman who swam a personal best 24.63 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle at or before age 35 should expect to clock 25.37 seconds at age 41. “I am struck by how small the deterioration rates are,” Fair wrote in a paper titled “How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?” “It may be that societies have been too pessimistic about losses from aging for individuals who stay healthy and fit.”

Historically, the economics of swimming have also contributed to the preponderance of young champions. Little sponsorship money existed for swimmers until about 10 years ago, which tended to mean that once a swimmer graduated from college, the gig was up — it was time to get a job. But now Speedo and TYR, among other companies in the swimming business, make it possible for elite American swimmers to train full time and continue to be competitive well into their 20s and 30s. This can’t fully counteract “black-line fatigue” — burnout from spending too many hours staring at the bottom of a pool; Phelps insists he’s retiring at age 30 — but the money is pulling elite swimmers’ ages up. Economists who study sports, like Raymond Sauer at Clemson University, note that if athletes are economically motivated enough — if, says Sauer, they have “low wealth and poor income-earning alternatives”— they can stay in sports until a quite advanced age. Stager, at Indiana University, notes that the average age of competitors at national swimming championships increased from 16 in the 1960s to 20 in 2004.

Despite evidence that older athletes can remain competitive longer than many imagine, Torres’s achievements have provoked consistent rumors that she must be doping. These began at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and have been so persistent in Torres’s latest comeback that last September Torres flew to Colorado Springs, Colo., to meet with Travis T. Tygart, C.E.O. of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Tygart acknowledges that since the high-profile steroid scandals involving Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, the onus has fallen on athletes to prove that they’re clean, and that that’s nearly impossible to do. “Can U.S.A.D.A. give Dara or some other athlete the stamp of cleanliness?” Tygart asks. “No, the science isn’t there yet.” Every athlete who is training for the Olympics is subject to testing at any time, in or out of competition. But Tygart was able to offer Torres the chance to volunteer for a pilot program that tests more broadly blood and urine for signs of doping and presumably will catch a much higher percentage of dirty athletes. Torres said yes. (Jones, among others, passed less-sophisticated U.S.A.D.A. tests while using performance-enhancing drugs.) Tygart has not yet released any data on Torres’s testing. But he says the fact she volunteered is significant. “I think a dirty athlete would be crazy to volunteer for this program,” he told me. He was also heartened that Torres did not ask how the pilot’s protocols worked or what drugs they would be looking for.

EVEN TORRES KNOWS that if she manages to earn one of the two spots available on the Olympic team for the 50-meter freestyle, or one of the six available on the 100-meter freestyle (which includes a relay team), this will be her last trip to the Games. Mark Schubert, the national team’s coach in 1984, told me he’s sure Torres will hold master’s swimming records in freestyle sprints at age 50 and 60 and 70. But — let’s face it — compared with the Olympics, even the Masters World Championship is a glorified losers’ round, and holding a master’s world record is hardly an exciting achievement for an athlete who hit the world stage just as she entered high school and who has nine Olympic medals to her name. Driving home one night from a sushi dinner, Torres’s partner, David Hoffman, admitted that he’ll be relieved when Torres emerges from her Olympic training tunnel. “We don’t spend as much time together,” he told me as he idled his car outside their home. “We can’t go on a vacation.” Torres had driven home separately with Tessa. Hoffman watched the swimmer standing in their driveway at dusk, her mind clearly turned toward getting Tessa to bed, so that she could get nine hours of sleep herself. “I can’t wait until this is over,” Hoffman sighed. “It’ll have been two years.”

Still, the next morning Torres rolled back up to the pool, chipper and early as usual. “Hey, Dara,” one of her teammates called, “I heard you were going up for ‘Dancing With the Stars’?”

“I can’t dance,” Torres laughed, dipping her goggles in the pool. “No way if I’m going to be the first one off!”

And with that, Torres grabbed her workout sheet, stuck it to the side of the pool and got down to business. The mood at practice was calm, and as Torres warmed up, her lean frame stretched out among the 16 other spectacular bodies, it was easy to forget that before last year nobody believed that a 41-year-old mother of a toddler, coming off a six-year hiatus, could swim this fast.

According to her coach, Michael Lohberg, Torres should feel less pressure than his other, younger swimmers. “What’s the worst thing that can happen to her?” he asks. “She goes home to her daughter and her partner. Her whole sense of self-worth doesn’t come down to tenths and hundredths of seconds in a pool.” But Torres doesn’t necessarily agree with that opinion. She takes seriously her new role: hero of the middle-aged. About an hour into the morning’s workout, all the swimmers gathered in the center of the pool for a much-loathed drill, vertical kicking. The task at hand was to hoist one’s torso out of the water, using only a flutter or dolphin kick, for 40 seconds, 12 times, with 35-second breaks between each rep. For the last 10 seconds of each vertical kick, the coach yelled, “Streamline,” meaning the swimmers, while still kicking, had to extend their arms straight overhead, one hand on top of the other.

At first Torres led good-natured griping among the swimmers. But after five kicks, the sets were done in silence, all of the athletes too exhausted and miserable to complain. The coach even stopped yelling, as his swimmers’ eyes were on the clock; everyone knew when to pop up and when to come back down. Yet each time, Torres rose to her vertical kick a second before everybody else, and there she was, rising out of the water, for a few moments longer at the end.

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article was about single-sex public-school education.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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The Economist - Ann Wroe

2008-12-02T13:42:00.000-08:00

Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, grandes dames of New York, died on August 13th and 20th respectively, aged 105 and 87

THE concept of richesse oblige has various dimensions. The bottom line is that those who have come into oodles of money should give some of it back; the second-to-bottom line is that they should cut a certain style while doing so. Both Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley, who died within a few days of each other, gave millions of dollars away. And their similarities ended there.

Mrs Astor was as small, delicate and fine as a Meissen cup, her tailoring exquisite and her jewels unobtrusive. Mrs Helmsley, though not large, favoured loud trouser suits and chunky diamond clips, with her mouth made big and cruel by scarlet lipstick. Mrs Astor set great store by good manners, civility, kind remarks and the careful handling of umbrellas; Mrs Helmsley believed in loud words and elbows. Mrs Astor had dogs as well-behaved as herself, silky and smooth-haired to pose for photographers or to have their portraits in her 19th-century collection on the staircase of Holly Hill, her weekend retreat. Mrs Helmsley had a Maltese bitch called Trouble, tied with pink ribbons and small enough to stuff in a purse, who sniffed at diners' legs in her restaurants and nipped their heels until they bled.

The Astor money, more than $120m by the time it was Brooke's to disburse, was old, from New York land and the fur trade. The Helmsley money, $5 billion by the time Leona got her hands on it, was pretty new, from property speculation. Both fortunes came from late third marriages to cunning husbands. But whereas Mrs Astor, aside from writing features for House & Garden, merely let the markets increase her pile and relished spending the capital (something, she admitted, that John Jacob Astor would have thought as outrageous as dancing naked in the street), Mrs Helmsley worked like a dragon to build up and expand her husband Harry's hotel empire. As a Manhattan hatter's daughter with several competitive siblings, she was used to graft and struggle. Mrs Astor, a solitary and dreamy child who had come by money almost magically, treated it like fairy dust to the end of her days.

Both, in their wildly different ways, were peremptory. Well into old age, Mrs Astor wore out the staffers of the Astor Foundation with her insistence on seeing every group and project that was asking her for money, and visiting them frequently to check that things were done as required. A run-down section of 130th Street in Harlem, Astor Row, had to have its porches and decorative brackets immaculately restored; a start-up furniture service for the poor had to include tea-cups and saucers. Meanwhile, at Helmsley hotels across Manhattan, underneath giant portraits of the “Queen” herself, quaking bellhops with huge armloads of laundry submitted to the scarlet, pecking fingernails and the icy tiara smile. “I won't stand for skimpy towels; why should you?” cried Mrs Helmsley's adverts in the New York Times.

Gloves and paper cups
The arrogance of big money, Mrs Astor wrote once, “is one of the most unappealing of characteristics”. Mrs Helmsley, though fun to her friends, was arrogance personified: “Rhymes with rich”, was Newsweek's caption for her portrait on its cover. “We don't pay taxes,” she was said to have told a housekeeper once; “only the little people pay taxes.” Mrs Astor, a gentle soul, was upset when her first father-in-law, a colonel, yelled at his secretaries. Mrs Helmsley believed staff existed to be barked at, slapped and called fags if appropriate; two of them sued her for firing them because they were gay. On visits to underprivileged areas Mrs Astor, gloved and immaculate because this was what the ordinary person expected of the rich, would happily sip from a paper cup and praise the hot-dog mustard on her paper plate. At the sight of a paper-cup-carrier in any of her reception areas, Mrs Helmsley would get her doormen to throw the offender out.

Vulgar showiness was also seldom seen in the Astor household. True, the glasses, silver and finger bowls bore the Astor initials or the Astor crest, but it was not half as obvious as the “H” on Leona's plastic soap-compacts. Mrs Astor could sport massed sapphires if one-upmanship seemed called for; but she owned only two country houses, not several, and her birthday was never marked, as Leona's once was, by a display of red, white and blue lights on the Helmsley-owned Empire State Building. Vulgarity led to trouble; which was why Leona, accused of “naked greed” by the judge, spent 18 months in Camp Fed in 1992-94 for tax evasion, when it was fairly clear that her real crime was to be both abrasive and rich.

New York gained hugely from both women. Mrs Astor gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller University, the Bronx Zoo and, her special favourite, the New York Public Library; Mrs Helmsley gave to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the Weill Cornell Medical College and, her spell in prison evidently softening her, to poor children and hurricane victims. Both ended sadly, left alone with their dogs and the ghosts of their husbands in dust-draped city apartments or empty summer homes. But in the memory of most New Yorkers one was a saint and the other a sinner. Richesse oblige

"The Answers in the Wind" - by Tamara Jones Wpost

2008-04-20T19:04:00.000-07:00

ISaturday, May 12, 2007; C01

GREENSBURG, Kan.

Matt Deighton grabs a broom and starts sweeping the living-room floor, a chore clearly more cathartic than practical in the ruins of his childhood home. The cozy little bungalow is a heap of splintered wood, jagged glass, broken brick and shredded drywall now, like everything else in this heartland town that disappeared a week ago when a 200-mph tornado tore through just around bedtime.

Greensburg is gone, all but a few of its 1,500 residents homeless, left to shovel and bulldoze and sweep entire lifetimes into piles of debris. Sometimes treasures are discovered -- a widow's wedding band, a little girl's favorite teacup, a beloved Bible -- but mostly it's just trash. Insurance adjusters drive up, take one glance and write "total loss" on their work sheets. The homeless homeowners nod their heads, sign the papers, then go back to sifting.

Once the Deightons started digging, though, three generations of them, something they couldn't describe seemed to be set in motion, and they found themselves reluctant to stop long after it became clear that nothing more could be salvaged. And so they kept digging, for hours and then days, from morning until the evening curfew, because what was being unearthed in the rubble of Sycamore Street was more important than any possession they had lost.

Sometimes, they learned, the wind takes away what we need to give up but can't, things invisible and intangible, wrestled from a stunned heart's grasp.

* * *

Arlene Deighton sits on a folding chair in her driveway, watching the artifacts of her 76 years pile up around her. The noonday sun blazes down on the floppy white hat her older daughter, Sheri, insisted on getting at the Wal-Mart 30 minutes away. Arlene, her four grown children, a granddaughter and a handful of in-laws are living in the clan's two RVs now at a county lake that's always been a favorite retreat for them.

Arlene sometimes forgets what happened that Friday night eight days ago, when her younger boy, Matt, rushed her through the hail into a neighbor's fortified basement across the street. Matt, 44, moved back home a few years ago to get his bearings after his catering business failed in Texas, and he became his parents' caregiver. Jim Deighton died of lung cancer last summer, but Arlene insists it was three months ago.

Sheri, her sister Lori and Lori's 23-year-old daughter, Lacey, took Arlene to Wal-Mart after the siblings found her and Matt unharmed in an emergency shelter in the neighboring town. Sheri, 51, remembers how irritated her mother was as the girls kept piling things into the shopping cart -- a hairbrush, underwear, shampoo, cheap clothing. "I don't need those things!" Arlene protested. "Put them back, I have all that at home!" No you don't, the girls kept saying, remember the storm? Back and forth they went, until finally Sheri lost it. She wishes now she hadn't been so harsh.

"Mom, if it's not in the cart in front of you, you don't have it."

Now Arlene wears her new Wal-Mart pantsuit and chats with the public health nurses who are walking through the streets giving everyone free tetanus shots. Ambulances cruise slowly past, their crews offering cold water and Gatorade. The Red Cross truck comes by with ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Arlene's older son, Mike, 57, who flew in from Florida to help, emerges from the foul-smelling basement wearing a rubber Bob Dole mask.

"You know, through all this, we found out you can still laugh," Arlene remarks. "No use crying."

Arlene says she isn't sure whether she'll rebuild, but the decision isn't hers alone to make anymore. She has emphysema and arthritis. Her children worry about the dementia that's still in its early stages, suddenly making her forget what a toothbrush is.

At night at the campground, the kids discuss her future. Maybe it's time for assisted living. "I mentioned I might like to come to Florida," Arlene later reports, "and Mike said, 'C'mon down!' But I imagine once I got there, I'd just want to turn right around and come home." The kids aren't sure how much of this she truly grasps. "Mom's kinda in her own little happy place so we're just leaving her there," Sheri says.

Another snowy-haired survivor sits in the driveway with Arlene. Lori Deighton married the boy two doors down, and Ora Ellen Doyle, her mother-in-law, was still living there. What the tornado didn't destroy, rainwater and burst pipes did. The sodden floors and collapsed walls are about to give way completely, and it's not safe to go back. Ora Ellen can't bear just sitting here in Arlene's driveway, though, and they keep finding her poking through her life's debris with her cane.

"Every time I go over to my house, here comes my son," Ora Ellen complains after Lori's husband, Jerry, has fetched her back yet again.

"They don't want you there in that rubble," Arlene replies tartly.

"I haven't fell yet," Ora Ellen answers.

Arlene's yard is starting to look like an apocalyptic flea market. "This was a family where you were brought up never to throw anything away," Mike explains dryly. Matt and his mother were the most avid collectors, both nostalgia buffs who used to enjoy yard sales and the rural auctions where they could bid on vintage pieces like the three Victrolas that survived the tornado. Matt found the John Deere pedal-tractor he had when he was 5, and the old wooden highchair with puppy cowboys on it is unscathed. Arlene doesn't exclaim or cry or even say much about any of the things recovered. Her lack of sentimentality dismays Ora Ellen, who wants whatever she can reclaim, no matter how damaged, of the papers and photos and belongings that were once her own parents' and grandparents'. "I just like those things," is how she explains it.

"I had it long enough," Arlene says of her belongings, "it's time to move on. There are so many things I want to tell him." Her husband, she means. His overcoat is hanging from a rack in her front yard. "I know he's not coming back," she says. This loss is nothing compared to that.

Her children keep surfacing with more things they've recovered. Cheese graters and old toys and the newspapers with Kennedy's assassination. Mike finds his football trophies, and Matt rubs his leg at the sight of an old lawn-dart game, remembering the time Lori accidentally speared him. Their mother watches them idly.

"There's some good tea towels," Arlene tells Matt, spying some dishrags in the mess of her twisted kitchen.

"You're getting new ones, Mom," he replies. "These went through the insulation and have asbestos on them, they're dangerous."

Arlene sees an unopened bag of kibble. "Matt, would you be afraid of that dog food?" she wonders. His Dalmatian, Molly, is safe at the kennel.

"Yes," he says with a laugh, adding, "Can you tell Mom went through the Depression?"

Ora Ellen jumps in.

"Not really," she snaps. "She don't want to save nothing, and that's not Depression."

She bends down to pick up something glistening in a mound of Arlene's rubble. It's a tiny glass deer, unbroken. She holds it up to Arlene, her voice half-challenge, half-lament: "You want it?"

Arlene shrugs elaborately and scowls. "Probably," she says curtly.

Ora Ellen gently places the figurine on a cracked table and goes back to her chair, waiting for the chance to slip away again, to her own ruins.

* * *

"C'mon in, sorry the house is such a mess!" Matt calls out to everyone who wanders up, never tiring of the joke. He is the emcee of this little open-air amphitheater, the one who jubilantly points out the ugly brown folding chair that he and his father found in a New Orleans alley when driving home from a Florida trip a couple of months after Katrina. The chair survived this beating, too. Matt is starting to feel like the Katrina chair himself. Losing his business, taking care of his parents, his dad dying, a great-nephew drowning, now this. Matt's voice is too loud, too buoyant, when he tells friends on his cellphone: "I have no tears left."

He goes for a tour of the demolished Main Street. Here was the old Rexall drugstore with its old-timey soda fountain, where the same guy had been making Green Rivers and Black Cows since he got the job as a teenager. Now Dick Huckriedy is 73, and the wind took away what he couldn't give up. Next door was the print shop where Matt hollered hello every morning to the buddy who ran it, and across the street was the town's beautiful art-deco gem, the Twilight Theatre. Movies were shown on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The last title up on the marquee was a comedy: "Are We Done Yet?" Matt can't help but laugh at that. That tumble of bricks was the high school, this concrete cave was the beauty parlor.

The sun never felt so hot, so punishing, in May before. Those skeletal trunks were big shade trees -- chestnuts and cottonwoods -- now stripped of leaves and bark. Thirteen people died in the storm, and everyone says it's a miracle there weren't more. Survival has no rules of logic. Five chocolate cupcakes can be seen intact in the rubble of a home with absolutely nothing else left.

The insurance adjusters are coming, and they'll cash out Mom's house. That's what the siblings have decided. Matt is worried. Do they get it yet, that he's a victim, too? He drives past the National Guard checkpoint to the next town, 18 miles away, where he spends five hours filling out forms for federal disaster relief, Salvation Army vouchers, unemployment, a new driver's license, a post office box. His brother has been telling him to get a job, move on with his life, but Matt feels rooted here.

Back at the house, the women are digging with bare hands through a teetering pile of debris, oblivious to the jagged wood and jutting nails.

"It's here, Matt, I can feel it!" Lori cries. "It's right here." She and Sheri have been searching for days for the heavy white ceramic teapot their mother always kept atop their fridge. "It had Dutch people on it," Lori recalls. The kids were forbidden to touch it, growing up. Lori is determined to find it now.

"I guess I never realized the significance of it," Lacey admits, joining her mother and aunt in the treasure hunt.

"It was The Teapot," Sheri explains. "We could never touch it."

An insurance adjuster is trekking through the debris, too, using a laser device to measure what used to be the dimensions of what used to be a house. It was a modest place, two bedrooms and a basement, 1,200 square feet, by the adjuster's calculations. Arlene doesn't remember what they paid for it when they moved here in 1976, but it was a pretty little place, she says.

Lori suddenly lets out a little yelp. In her hand is a tiny plastic doll, which she winds up. "On my sixth birthday, I got a dollar, and I went to Robinson Hardware and got this little baby for 88 cents and she's still crawling." Lori chokes up, and Mike, the big brother, pauses from his work.

"You got the change?" he deadpans.

Mike is the authority figure here, "the one who thinks he's the boss," his mother says with some amusement. The tension between Mike and Matt is palpable. Sheri usually finds a way to intercept with a pleasant family memory or an offer of sunscreen. Lori is the fixer, a role she's taken on literally now, collecting pieces of even the cheap china with fervent vows to glue everything back together. She and Sheri like to make stained glass, so what can't be repaired, they promise to re-imagine and give a new life. Shards will become sun-catchers.

Mike wants Matt to help him drag a fallen wall away, to give them better access to the bedrooms. And they should roll back that wet carpet. Maybe Mom's diamond ring is hidden in the fibers somewhere. They found her gold band sparkling on a stair the first day. Maybe they'll be lucky again.

They've been sifting for four days now, and it's Lacey who observes that most of the digging "is just to occupy the time so you don't have to think about it."

The tornado has been strangely liberating, Lacey thinks.

"I hate to be a part of this, but at the same time, I'm very humbled by it," she says. She sees a strength of character she never really appreciated before in the two homeless grandmothers sitting beneath a vast Kansas sky full of promise one moment and menace the next. Lacey starts nursing school in two weeks, and the volunteer effort she's witnessed in Greensburg this week has made her think about going into disaster relief.

She and her Aunt Sheri went for a long walk together, stopping to chat with people clearing out their own debris. "It's like walking around in Mayberry," Lacey says, "no phones, no Internet, no TV. It's the simple life, and every once in a while, you need to live it. The world has slowed down." They've all been robbed of the illusion of control, scoured clean, left no choice but to start fresh.

When Sheri spots a butterfly, she swipes at the tears that roll down her cheeks again, moved by the flash of color in this sepia-toned moonscape. "Where did you come from?" she asks.

* * *

The insurance company has sent out a second representative, a young man whose business card reads "Scope. Appraise. Replace." He's here to inventory and put value on every item lost. The Deightons borrow a game room at a friend's farm, sitting around a poker table trying to remember everything.

How many waffle irons? the adjuster asks. How much were the bean pots worth? Any rolling pins?

"Mom was a really, really good baker," Matt says, remembering chocolate cake with white frosting.

"Tea towels," Lori adds to the list. "Aprons."

"Aprons, aprons, aprons," adds Sheri.

"She loved aprons," Matt agrees.

On and on they go, itemizing one family's history, salt shaker by salt shaker. Arlene and Ora Ellen are back at the lake. Everyone will decamp this weekend. Both the grandmothers will be going to Oklahoma, it seems. A house went on the market next door to Lori's, and Ora Ellen will lease it for a year. Arlene will go to an assisted-living home.

Matt's only plan is to stay behind, to keep churning through the ruins of Sycamore Street, not looking for anything in particular, just digging until the wind whispers that it's time now to go.

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"A Living Memorial" By Ian Urbina

2008-04-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

April 15, 2008

JONESVILLE, Va. — After their daughter, Austin, was killed in the Virginia Tech shootings last year, Bryan Cloyd and his wife, Reneé, asked that donations in her honor be sent to a program that repairs dilapidated houses in the poorest parts of Appalachia. To the Cloyds’ surprise, the program received nearly $70,000 in gifts almost immediately.

“We realized there was no better therapy than doing more of that,” said Mr. Cloyd, an accounting professor at Virginia Tech, who began organizing trips for students to work in the hollows of Virginia.

But for the Cloyds, the trips were not just an attempt to heal. They were also a chance to redefine the memory of their daughter, a process that set an example for a university still struggling to move forward as the first anniversary of the worst campus massacre in American history approached on Wednesday.

“For us, this has become a way to remember these students, many of whom were very involved in activism and service,” Mr. Cloyd said. “They should be known for how they lived rather than how they died.”

This year, the Cloyds have ushered about 150 Virginia Tech students and faculty members on five weekend house-repair trips, and they plan to continue running regular trips from now on.

In the classroom, Professor Cloyd, 47, has shifted beyond his typical focus on taxes and begun offering an honors class titled “Inventing the Future Through Our ‘Ut Prosim’ Tradition,” a reference to the university’s motto, “that I may serve.” Students in the class spend one weekend working with the house-repair project and the rest of the semester developing proposals for other types of service.

In Jonesville, the Cloyds’ efforts brought 69-year-old Louella Moore to tears.

“Honestly, I don’t know how to thank these people,” she said, shaking her head as she peered shyly through her window, watching Mr. Cloyd and his students dig holes for corner posts that would soon support her new front porch.

A year ago, Ms. Moore said, her house seemed to be caving in around her. The water heater broke, then part of the roof and the foundation started to collapse. Ms. Moore said she had little money to do anything about it. Her life, too, seemed to be closing in, she said, as a daughter died of a heart attack, a brother-in-law died of a brain tumor, and her husband died of unknown causes, all in about three years.

But Ms. Moore stopped crying when asked about the Cloyds.

“What they have gone through, and now they have started all this,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It just makes me strong.”

For the Cloyds, repairing the homes of others was a way to restore their sense of humanity, they said.

It was this message that they took to university officials late last year, encouraging them to step up efforts to get students involved in public service. In response, the university started a program in October called V.T.-Engage, which asked Virginia Tech students and faculty and staff members to perform at least 10 hours of service each, for a total of 300,000 hours, in honor of the victims of the April 16, 2007, shootings, which left 33 dead, including the gunman. Members of the Virginia Tech community have already completed more than 200,000 hours this year.

“Purpose and hope — the raw ingredients of happiness, right?” Mr. Cloyd said, taking a break from offering support to two English majors who were trying to stand firm in foot-deep mud as they steadied a 16-foot pole in concrete at a house in Lee County.

Mr. Cloyd said Austin had gone on four weeklong trips with the Appalachia Service Project when the family lived in Champaign, Ill. More than any other experience, he said, those trips shaped her desire to become an international studies major and pursue a career in social service.

By honoring Austin’s passion for social justice, Ms. Cloyd said that she had been able to stay connected to her daughter’s friends, many of whom have joined the weekend outings.

“Really, we’re the ones who benefited from all this,” she said.

Like many of the victims who were involved in political issues or social service activities, Austin had an intense interest in raising awareness about the ethnic killings in Darfur and working to stop mountaintop removal, a controversial method of coal mining, Mr. Cloyd said.

Since its founding in 1969, the Appalachia Service Project has helped repair more than 13,000 homes in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. The trips are run year-round, and volunteers pay about $100 for a weekend trip and about $300 for a week. The fees help cover room, board and building materials.

“Over the years, we’ve drawn our volunteers predominantly from church groups,” said Susan C. Crow, the organization’s chief executive. “What the Cloyds have helped us do is better tap into the college student demographic, which is important because these young people are at a key moment when they are shaping their career and other priorities, and that’s when we want to push them to consider service.”

For Lauren Patrizio, a sophomore political science major, this push to reconsider priorities was proving to be disorienting.

Looking at the half-finished porch that she was helping to build, Ms. Patrizio said the tangible sense of accomplishment, the friends she made on the trip and the conversations she had with Ms. Moore had left her second-guessing her plans to go directly to law school after graduation.

“When you see what a concrete difference you can make for the better in a real person’s life, you start wondering about law school and where it will take you,” said Ms. Patrizio, 20, who was a lifeguard with Austin Cloyd at Virginia Tech.

“I don’t know — the whole experience has rattled my plans a little,” she added.

Told of Ms. Patrizio’s comments, Mr. Cloyd paused and smiled.

“Reflection on life can be really tough sometimes,” he said. “I know that firsthand.”

"A Small Town Mourns 21 Dead" by Ken Moritsugu

2008-04-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

1997 Pulitzer Prize winner - spot news
Newsday

Montoursville, Pa. -- They knew them as the girl who spilled the fries in the car. Knew them as the boy who shot baskets and lighted the candles at church. Knew them as the girl who wrote poetry and played the piano.
In this small central Pennsylvania town they knew them all, knew them as the kids who sold them pizza or a hoagie or washed their cars to raise the money for a trip to France - a trip that ended in tragedy, when TWA Flight 800 exploded, taking the lives of 21 people from this tight-knit community.
"Everybody knows everybody," said Ron Paulhamus, a print shop owner.
And now everybody grieves. Sixteen dead high school students, five dead adults. Twenty-one dead friends.
"There will be very few people not affected by it," said Paulhamus, whose 16-year-old son, Ross, attends the local high school.
Ross's mother, Ginger, said her son is devastated. "These are kids he grew up with and he's known and pals around with everyday ... Everybody you know has either a friend or a family who's been affected."
Ginger and Ron Paulhamus attended a hastily called noontime prayer vigil with other community residents at Bethany Lutheran Church for members of the high school French club and their adult chaperones who boarded the fatal TWA flight to Paris Wednesday night for a 10-day trip during summer break. Some victims were high school athletes. Others, musicians. One was an acolyte at the Methodist church.
They left behind sisters and brothers, girlfriends, boyfriends and best friends.
The crash was like a knife through the heart of this central Pennsylvania community of about 5,000.
"I'm still shaking," Michelle Follmer, 19, told friends outside the high school late Thursday morning.
"Brock lost his girlfriend," Josh Lewis, 17, told her, speaking about a mutual friend.
Follmer already knew: "She was in my car Tuesday night. She spilled her fries all over my seat," Follmer said, forcing a laugh.
They were talking about Michelle Bohlin, 16, a swimmer who had just finished her sophomore year. They recalled how excited Michelle had been about the trip. And the others: Jody Loudenslager, a distance runner on the girl's track team. There was Rance Hettler, the church acolyte and a basketball player and Wendy Wolfson, who played the piano and wrote poetry. The airline had not released their names, but several residents and friends identified people they knew who had taken the trip.
And then there were the adults: Judith Rupert, a secretary at the school practically since she graduated in 1961. Rupert was asked to join an overseas school trip for the first time after enthusiastically helping so many classes with fund raisers; French teacher Debbie Dickey and her husband, Douglas, a salesman. The couple left behind two children, ages 5 and 7; two others include a former school board member and a mother of one of the students on the trip.
BrenDena Trick, 27, an assistant girls track coach at the high school and a 1987 graduate, heard the news on the radio as she and her husband drove to work. "I just couldn't talk, I felt like someone punched me in the stomach," said Trick. "We went on to work," she continued. "We were just a wreck. We were in tears."
By the afternoon, a somber mood had descended on this community, just east of Williamsport, where many residents work. There was a holding out of hope, with many of the bodies not yet identified, of someone miraculously surviving the crash. There was disbelief. And there was shock.
Experts said it was a lull before the full outpouring of grief that will undoubtably come.
"It's been eerily quiet in there," said Dan Chandler, the high school principal. "You almost think too quiet. It's early in the process, we're told, and I think there will be much more grieving later."
"We really didn't believe that all was lost," said Gary Hettler, whose younger brother, Rance, was aboard the plane. "We never really gave up hope and we still haven't given up hope yet." As of Thursday afternoon, Hettler said his parents still had not received the official confirmation from the airline that Rance had been killed. "I just couldn't believe it happened to such a perfect role model student as my brother. He was the epitome of a role model."
At the high school, which has 800 students for grades 9 to 12, counselors talked to grieving students and adults as the media hovered outside. The flag was at half staff, and students tied red and white ribbons and blue and gold ribbons around the flagpole and nearby signposts. A few bouquets of flowers were left outside the entrance.
Downtown, walking distance away in this compact community, the mood also was subdued. At Turkey Hill Minit Markets, a gas station and convenience store, clerks said that they had bought a sympathy card for their manager, who had a niece on the plane. One customer said his cousin was a passenger. And a worker from the tire shop across the street said his friend's wife also was aboard. "I don't know anybody in this town who isn't thinking about it," said Tanya Kelley, one of the clerks.
The students were described almost universally as an outgoing, fun-loving crowd, the types who never hesitated to raise their hands to volunteer for this or that project. The trip cost $1,200 to $1,500 per person, Chandler estimated, and the students paid for it with their fund-raising and family contributions. None of the money came from the school.
"They are an amazing combination of talent," Chandler said. "We look at them as real leaders, both in our school and in our community."
Fourteen of them were still in high school, and two had already graduated. The French Club tries to take a trip to France every three or four years, so each student has a chance to go during his or her high school career.
The community pulled together for the victims and their families. Clergy planned to hold another prayer vigil in the high school gymnasium last night. A local bank offered to set up a relief fund and a memorial fund. Local hospitals sent psychotherapists to the school to work as counselors.
The crash followed an unusual number of tragedies for the community this year. A January flood caused $1.5-million in damage and took eight lives in the surrounding county. One high school student dropped out and committed suicide. Another died in a car crash on an icy night. And a third-grade student was killed by a school bus.
"Stuff don't happen just in the big towns," said Josh Lewis, a 17-year-old student. "It happens in Montoursville."

Olivia Winslow contributed to this story.

"Thomason is glowing in the glare of the game" - by Shannon Ryan

2008-04-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - February 2, 2005

When Jeff Thomason attended Super Bowl Media Days in the past, he usually sat in the stands, bored, wondering if anyone would interview him.

As a tight end for the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowls XXXI and XXXII, occasionally a reporter or two would ask him a bizarre softball question.

"Which do you like better: Twinkies or Ding Dongs?" Thomason recalled.

As the newest member of the Eagles, Thomason was not lonely in the stands yesterday. He answered more than random questions about junk food, too.

About 1,000 media members conducted interviews at Alltel Stadium in preparation for the Eagles-Patriots meeting Sunday. Many of them chatted up Thomason .

From hard hat to helmet, Thomason has become the Super Bowl's feel-good story, one every media outlet wants to tell. And think, just a week ago, he was working in a trailer at a construction site.

After retiring from a 10-year NFL career two years ago, Thomason was brought back by the Eagles for one more game. It just so happens that his last hurrah is the Super Bowl. Thomason replaced tight end - and friend - Chad Lewis, who suffered a foot injury during a touchdown catch in the NFC championship game.

The scene yesterday was a glimpse into the whirlwind celebrity that has enveloped Thomason . For an hour, he sat at one of 14 podiums reserved for star players. Terrell Owens had one. So did Donovan McNabb.

Freddie Mitchell did not. Neither did David Akers.

But Thomason did.

At least 15 reporters surrounded him, sometimes as many as 30, during the hour-long session. News outlets from Shanghai to Denmark, Britain to Mexico, Orange County to South Jersey peppered him with questions.

Thomason , a happy-go-lucky sort by nature, beamed through it all.

"I don't belong up here," he said. "It's a dream come true. How many guys sitting at their desk get a phone call to come play in the Super Bowl?"

He was asked about two dozen times to detail the phone call he received from Lewis. By comparison, only twice was he asked about the Patriots' defense.

The Eagles' belief in his skills got him to the Super Bowl. His circumstances, however, placed him in the spotlight. He has appeared on the Today show, Good Morning America, and CBS's Early Show. An upcoming feature on 60 Minutes will air on him.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy wanted to remake him. ESPN stopped at the construction site to involve his crew in a segment.

Hollywood movie producers, Thomason said, have approached him about developing his story into a film.

He knows how he would cast the part. No, not Brad Pitt.

"I'd like to play myself," he said.

It would be his third gig in a month.

After previously talking about how he had requested vacation time from Toll Brothers construction company, his boss called and let him off the hook.

"He said anyone who makes the NBA Finals, the World Series or the Super Bowl gets two weeks off," Thomason said with a laugh.

He was asked three times if he felt as if he had won the lottery. Each time, he said yes - with emphatic sincerity.

Media Day for Thomason also had its strange moments.

A Texas radio station gave him a golden microphone trophy, asked him to make a fake acceptance speech, then took the trophy back. A country music station asked him to shout out "Free Bird" in honor of an upcoming Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He obliged and was asked to do it again - but with more feeling this time.

Thomason is a 35-year-old husband and father of three from Medford. He is a project manager in Chesterfield. Both towns are in Burlington County.

Lately, he has even been defining himself more as a triathlete than as a football player. He was asked about that as well. From his best time in an Olympic triathlon (2 hours, 50 minutes) to his next event ("Escape From Alcatraz" in June).

Thomason 's next - and last - big workout is Sunday.

Until Monday, he is a professional football player. After that, he answered repeatedly, it is definitely over.

While Thomason is taking his duties seriously, he realizes his story is the hot topic. That's fine by him.

"This is my 15 minutes," he said. When the game is over, "I go back to my desk, and I sit there and zone off and wonder what happened to me over the last two weeks."

Contact staff writer Shannon Ryan at 215-854-5503 or sryan@phillynews.com.

"Small Town, Big Heartache" - By Pamela J. Podger

2008-04-06T16:26:00.001-07:00

AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT: Sept. 11 - July 18
Small town, big heartache
Rebuilding New York City's devastated fire truck fleet fell to a tiny town in Wisconsin.
San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, July 18, 2002

(07-18) 04:00 PDT Clintonville, Wis. -- Inside a sprawling, salmon-brick plant at Seagrave Fire Apparatus, Connie Crain's grease-stained hands install pump gauges and control lines on a fire truck headed for New York City.

One of 54 engines ordered urgently by the city's devastated fire department,
the truck is part of a $25 million contract to replace the vehicles destroyed Sept. 11.

"It seems, when you're working on the trucks, that you go back to that horrible day. It's an eerie feeling," said Crain, a 29-year-old mother of three. "You want to get done as fast as you can because you know these trucks are really needed. But you just don't know what will happen next in our country."

Seagrave has delivered fire trucks to the Big Apple since 1918, so New York officials naturally turned to this small Wisconsin city of 4,734 people, about 40 miles west of Green Bay, for help in rebuilding its fleet.

Strong ties have grown over the years between New York's firefighters and the residents of this four-stoplight city, where days are measured in factory shifts, Little League games and dairy milkings. This is a place of cube steak, frozen custard and 75-cent beers. Folks often stop to fish in the Pigeon River, which bisects Main Street, a thoroughfare lined with tall brick buildings and light posts adorned with flags and flower baskets. It's a town with an equal number of bars and churches.

As the city's largest employer, with 360 workers, Seagrave is entwined in Clintonville's identity. There's the annual Fireman's Festival in August, where spectators watch water-hose fights aimed at whiskey barrels. There's the Trucker's mascot for the new $23 million high school -- which 15-year-old Nick Keller jokes will require maps and a global positioning system when his freshman class moves there in December.

The company's CEO, James Green, says Seagrave workers took pride when they heard stories about their trucks -- pulled from ground zero with broken windshields and flattened metal, but still able to pump water. One government official in New York told him that 37 firefighters, ducking for shelter in the sturdy cabs of several huge Seagrave trucks, had survived the falling debris from the collapsing twin towers.

THE MAKING OF A FLEET

Seagrave has revved up its annual 200-truck production of fire trucks to meet the task of rebuilding New York's fleet. Managers and workers are pulling together to donate a $353,000 pumper. Factory hands have given cash and are working through their vacations to complete the order by the end of the year.

"For the folks here, we were given an opportunity to help," Green said. "9/11 had a devastating effect on the plant and on all of us because there is such a personal connection between us and the city of New York. The response was inspirational, and signs went up in the plant, 'Whatever it takes, we'll do it.' "

Green says progress is steady on the replacement trucks, each outfitted with a commemorative

9/11 medallion. When the first handful of replacement trucks left Clintonville on Jan. 22 -- including one with a large mural of a firefighter and an American flag -- crowds cheered them off at 6 a.m.

Clintonville, said Tom McDonald, New York City's assistant commissioner of fleet services, "is small, but big in heart." A frequent visitor to the city and the Seagrave factory, he posted 140 condolence notes from a Clintonville eighth-grade class outside his office door for a while to boost morale.

SEAGRAVE'S RAPID RESPONSE

After the terrorist attack, he said the city's fleet was in "very, very bad shape," and they were forced to use older reserve trucks. The department appealed to Seagrave for a rapid response.

"Now, the trucks are rolling through our doors," McDonald said. "You just don't start delivering trucks at that pace without everyone in the factory stepping up."

Away from the plant -- known locally as "The Drive," a reference to Seagrave's parent company, FWD Corp., the original patent holder of four-wheel- drive technology -- the effects of Sept. 11 linger in Clintonville. Factories cast off workers or closed third shifts, said Mayor Dick Koeppen, 61, and some, already struggling from the recession, buckled after the attacks.

But any remnants of hard feelings from a short 1999 strike at Seagrave quickly dissipated.

"There was no more bickering and pitter patter -- everyone just wanted to do their jobs," Koeppen said. "Before 9/11, New York was so distant from the little bitty Clintonville. But then it was like the big brother in our family was attacked."

On the city's southern outskirts, Randy Erickson milked his Holsteins at 4 a.m. one recent morning, listening to a trivia call-in show on the local radio station, as his wife, Carol, bottle-fed several calves.

One of their sons, Matthew, 22, is a National Guardsman, and the prospect of war is a constant threat. Carol commented on other changes she's seen in her friends: Folks are more cautious about flying, and they listen closely to the news.

"There were a lot of people who were laid off around here because of the trickle down," said Carol, as a cat lapped up spilled milk from the dairy parlor floor. "People aren't spending as much anymore, or they think about it more.'

Across town, LaVerne Keller, 76, was holding a rummage sale. A $150 snow blower in "greate" condition stood in the driveway, and shoppers bought boxes of ribbons, canning items and church hats. Keller recalled how she had been baking an apple pie in her kitchen when she first heard about the attacks.

"It is like when Kennedy was shot -- you know exactly what you were doing," Keller said. "I just couldn't believe it. I said a prayer then -- and I still do for all of them."

That same prayerful sentiment has driven a steady stream of Clintonville citizens to ground zero over the past 10 months to mourn lost friends and relatives.

CLINTONVILLE'S GROUND ZER0

Tending her bar on Main Street, Cindy Beery, 41, has shared friendly banter for more than a decade with many of the New York City firefighters. In February, she went to ground zero to say goodbye to some of the firefighters she had befriended, visited on birthdays and shamelessly plied with her secret 10-shot drink.

"I lost 39 friends in 9/11, and the monsignor told me I needed to go grieve over the coffin," said Beery.

She pointed to the stool where New York City Fire Chief Peter J. Ganci, 54, who frequently joshed with her over frosted mugs of Miller Light and a krautburger, liked to sit -- "the one closest to the beer tap." Ganci, a 33- year veteran, was at ground zero just minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower and perished as he tried to get his men to safety.

Beery is a prankster who mercilessly switches off lights in the men's bathroom with controls under the curved wooden bar. Tired of painting the wall above the urinal, she installed a headrest -- and occasionally inks it fire- engine red -- to tag the foreheads of unwitting visitors who lean against it for support.

DONATIONS TO THE BAR

As word spread of her connection with the firefighters' families, letters with donations started to arrive at her vintage bar. The total eventually reached about $2,000.

"When I called New York and talked with the firefighters and their families,

I tried to be their support block. When I was at the bar, I tried to be strong," Beery said. "But one day, the day that (New York Gov. Rudolph) Giuliani spoke, I just locked myself in my house and bawled."

Another who made the trip to New York is Joel Ratlaff, 52, who on a recent day sat outside the Clintonville Lanes bowling alley. Ratlaff said his niece had died on the 103rd floor of the South Tower on Sept. 11, about the same time that his brother was loading windshields at the Drive.

The men and women "in this town are putting the fire trucks together, and I know that with every bolt they put in, they feel the pain," said Ratlaff, drawing on his Camel Light. "It is something, how many people are traveling to find out about Sept. 11. This is something that just won't die."

"Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old" - By Laura Holson

2008-04-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

March 9, 2008

AS president of the Walt Disney Company’s children’s book and magazine publishing unit, Russell Hampton knows a thing or two about teenagers. Or he thought as much until he was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Katie, and two friends to a play last year in Los Angeles.

“Katie and her friends were sitting in the back seat talking to each other about some movie star; I think it was Orlando Bloom,” recalled Mr. Hampton, whose company produced the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, in which the actor starred. “I made some comment about him, I don’t remember exactly what, but I got the typical teenager guttural sigh and Katie rolled her eyes at me as if to say, ‘Oh Dad, you are so out of it.’ ”

After that, the back-seat chattering stopped. When Mr. Hampton looked into his rearview mirror he saw his daughter sending a text message on her cellphone. “Katie, you shouldn’t be texting all the time,” Mr. Hampton recalled telling her. “Your friends are there. It’s rude.” Katie rolled her eyes again.

“But, Dad, we’re texting each other,” she replied with a harrumph. “I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying.”

Chastened, Mr. Hampton turned his attention back to the freeway. It’s a common scene these days, one playing out in cars, kitchens and bedrooms across the country.

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.

Innovation, of course, has always spurred broad societal changes. As telephones became ubiquitous in the last century, users — adults and teenagers alike — found a form of privacy and easy communication unknown to Alexander Graham Bell or his daughters.

The automobile ultimately shuttled in an era when teenagers could go on dates far from watchful chaperones. And the computer, along with the Internet, has given even very young children virtual lives distinctly separate from those of their parents and siblings.

Business analysts and other researchers expect the popularity of the cellphone — along with the mobility and intimacy it affords — to further exploit and accelerate these trends. By 2010, 81 percent of Americans ages 5 to 24 will own a cellphone, up from 53 percent in 2005, according to IDC, a research company in Framingham, Mass., that tracks technology and consumer research.

Social psychologists like Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the social impact of mobile communications, say these trends are likely to continue as cellphones morph into mini hand-held computers, social networking devices and pint-size movie screens.

“For kids it has become an identity-shaping and psyche-changing object,” Ms. Turkle said. “No one creates a new technology really understanding how it will be used or how it can change a society.”

Marketers and cellphone makers are only too happy to fill the newest generation gap. Last fall, Firefly Mobile introduced the glowPhone for the preschool set; it has a small keypad with two speed-dial buttons depicting an image of a mother and a father. AT&T promotes its wireless service with television commercials poking fun at a mom who doesn’t understand her daughter’s cellphone vernacular. Indeed, IDC says revenue from services and products sold to young consumers or their parents is expected to grow to $29 billion in 2010, up from $21 billion in 2005.

So far, parents’ ability to reach their children whenever they want affords families more pluses than minuses. Mr. Hampton, who is divorced, says it is easy to reach Katie even though they live in different time zones. And college students who are pressed for time, like Ben Blanton, a freshman who plays baseball at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, can text their parents when it suits them, asking them to run errands or just saying hello.

“Texting is in between calling and sending and e-mail,” he explained while taking a break from study hall. Now he won’t even consider writing a letter to his mother, Jan. “It’s too time consuming,” he said. “You have to go to the post office. Instead, I can sit and watch television and send a text, which is the same thing.”

But as with any cultural shift involving parents and children — the birth of rock ’n’ roll or the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for example — various gulfs emerge. Baby boomers who warned decades ago that their out-of-touch parents couldn’t be trusted now sometimes find themselves raising children who — thanks to the Internet and the cellphone — consider Mom and Dad to be clueless, too.

Cellphones, instant messaging, e-mail and the like have encouraged younger users to create their own inventive, quirky and very private written language. That has given them the opportunity to essentially hide in plain sight. They are more connected than ever, but also far more independent.

In some cases, they may even become more alienated from those closest to them, said Anita Gurian, a clinical psychologist and executive editor of AboutOurKids.org, a Web site of the Child Study Center at New York University.

“Cellphones demand parental involvement of a different kind,” she said. “Kids can do a lot of things in front of their parents without them knowing.”

TO be sure, parents have always been concerned about their children’s well-being, independence and comportment — and the rise of the cellphone offers just the latest twist in that dynamic. However it all unfolds, it has helped prompt communications companies to educate parents about how better to be in touch with their children.

In a survey released 18 months ago, AT&T found that among 1,175 parents the company interviewed, nearly half learned how to text-message from their children. More than 60 percent of parents agreed that it helped them communicate, but that sometimes children didn’t want to hear their voice at all. When asked if their children wanted a call or a text message requesting that they be home by curfew, for instance, 58 percent of parents said their children preferred a text.

“Just because you can reach them doesn’t mean they have to answer,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which is studying the impact of technology on adolescents. “Cellphones give teens more of a private life. Their parents aren’t privy to all of their conversations.”

Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation’s version of pig Latin. For dumbfounded parents, AT&T now offers a tutorial that decodes acronyms meant to keep parents at bay. “Teens may use text language to keep parents in the dark about their conversations by making their comments indecipherable,” the tutorial states. Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS (“parent over shoulder”), PRW (“parents are watching”) and KPC (“keeping parents clueless”).

SAVANNAH PENCE, 15, says she wants to be in touch with her parents — but also wants to keep them at arm’s length. She says her father, John, made sure that she and her 19-year-old brother, Alex, waited until high school before they got cellphones, unlike friends who had them by fifth grade. And while Savannah described her relationship with her parents as close, she still prefers her space.

“I don’t text that much in front of my parents because they read them,” she said. And when her parents ask who is on the phone? “I just say, ‘People.’ They don’t ask anymore.”

At first, John Pence, who owns a restaurant in Portland, Ore., was unsure about how to relate to his daughter. “I didn’t know how to communicate with her,” Mr. Pence said. “I had to learn.” So he took a crash course in text messaging — from Savannah. But so far he knows how to quickly type only a few words or phrases: Where are you? Why haven’t you called me? When are you coming home?

When his daughter asks a question, he typically has one response. “ ‘OK’ is the answer to everything,” he said. “And I haven’t used a question mark yet.” He said he had to learn how to text because his daughter did not return his calls. “I don’t leave a message,” he said, “because she knows it’s me.”

Savannah said she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. “I can’t ask him questions because he is too slow,” she said. “He uses simple words.” On the other hand, her mother, Caprial, is more proficient at texting and will ask how her day was at school or how her friends are doing. (Her mom owed her more facile texting skills to being an agile typist with small hands.)

Early on, Savannah’s parents agreed that they had to set rules. First, they banned cellphone use at the dinner table and, later, when the family watched television together, because Mr. Pence worried about the distraction. “They become unaware of your presence,” he said.

Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and hand-held video game players can be to family relations. “I see kids text under the table at the restaurant,” he said. “They don’t teach them etiquette anymore.” Some children, he said, watch videos in restaurants.

“They don’t know that’s the time to carry on a conversation,” he said. “I would like to walk up to some tables and say, ‘Kids, put your iPods and your cellphones away and talk to your parents.’ ”

But even he has found that enforcing rules is harder than might be expected. He now permits Savannah to send text messages while watching TV, after he noticed her using a blanket over her lap to hide that she was sending messages to friends. “I could have them in the same room texting, or I wouldn’t let them text and they would leave,” said Mr. Pence of his children. “They are good kids, but you want to know what they are up to."

Other families face similar challenges.

In 1999, Marie Gallick got a family plan for her and her three children and found that each of them had a different approach to cellphone use. One of Ms. Gallick’s sons likes to talk, she said, while her other son, Brandon, who lives near her home in Raritan, N.J., preferred to text. How much they communicated with her, she said, depended on their mood. And she found she had to be careful about what she said and how.

“There is emotion behind it,” she said. Once, one of her sons didn’t answer his cellphone when she called, so she sent him a text saying, “NICE OF YOU TO TURN ON YOUR PHONE.”

“They thought I was mad,” she said. Ms. Gallick did not understand that using capital letters was the same as yelling. (She said she had the same problem when she began using e-mail, which, perhaps, makes her problem as much about adapting to digital shifts as it is about communicating with children.)

Brenda Ng, vice president for consumer insights at T-Mobile, the cellular provider, said her company’s studies show that while cellphone use can cause division, it, too, is “the glue” that cements relationships. “It may seem mundane, but they keep people together,” Ms. Ng said.

Consider this: Brandon Gallick, who is 23, recalled a night last year when he was driving home on a country road near Hillsborough, N.J., and a large donkey ran in front of his car. He couldn’t wait to get home to call his mother. “I had to text my mom right away,” he said, noting he sent text messages to friends, too. “I wanted to tell her about it because it was so funny. We don’t see many donkeys in New Jersey.”

Ms. Gallick appreciated the message. “I like it when he does that,” she said. “It makes me feel special.” But again, the unintended consequence was more miscommunication for her.

“It took five texts before I thought he really meant it,” she said. “What I find is that you have to text each other more to understand each other than if you just picked up the phone. You are constantly asking, ‘What did you mean?’ It is a form of alienation but at the same time it is keeping us in contact.”

In fact, texting appears to be easier than talking for some cellphone users, providing yet another distraction for them inside their cars. Mr. Blanton at Vanderbilt, like many of his peers, texts his mother and friends even when both of his hands should be on the steering wheel.

“I can text without looking at the phone,” he said. “It’s definitely not safe. Sometimes I’ll look up and I don’t remember where I’ve been driving.”

MS. TURKLE, the M.I.T. professor, says cellphones offer another way for the Facebook generation to share every life experience the second it unfolds.

“There is a slippage from ‘I have a feeling I want to make a call’ to ‘I need to make a call,’ ” she said. “You don’t get to have a feeling before sharing that feeling anymore.”

Ms. Turkle recalled a vacation with her daughter in Paris, where she hoped to immerse her in the local culture and cuisine. “Part of the idea of Paris is being in Paris,” Ms. Turkle said. But during an afternoon stroll, her daughter received several calls and text messages on her cellphone from friends back in Boston. Her daughter, she said, felt compelled to return every one.

When Ms. Turkle asked why she didn’t turn off her cellphone and enjoy the city, she said her daughter replied, “I feel more comfortable talking with my friends.” But her daughter’s friends didn’t even really want to talk. “They just want to know where you are,” Ms. Turkle said. “It’s a new sensibility.”

It is a new sensibility on many fronts. Jan Blanton said her relationship with her son, Ben, is closer because cellphones make reaching out so simple. And that has caused her to reflect on her relationship with her own parents.

In the early 1980s, when she left home to attend college, Ms. Blanton said, her relationship with her parents was frayed. “We didn’t have open communication,” she said. “I wasn’t close to them. Maybe once a week I’d call. My parents were happy when we were out of the house.”

Ms. Blanton wonders if things might have been different if they had text messaging back then. Her son now sends frequent text messages to his grandfather, discussing baseball and fishing. “I can write better than I talk,” said Ms. Blanton, whose relationship with her parents is now close. “I think we would have had a better experience.”

It is likely that in just a few years, younger members of the digerati will consider cellphones like those the Blantons are using to be relics. While many consumers have become fashion-conscious about the latest in technological devices, analysts say that young children and teenagers are particularly so and more likely than their parents to continually gravitate to something new.

Mr. Hampton said his daughter Katie recently asked for a BlackBerry so she could better send e-mail to her friends and have unfettered access to the Internet.

“I said no,” he recalled. “It’s not necessary.”

But then again, Mr. Hampton said, he may change his mind. “No one is teaching kids how to use these things,” he said. “But in fairness, adults don’t know how to use them, either.”

"The Immortal Scarecrow - Ray Bolger" - By Tom Shales

2008-03-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

Washington Post - January 16, 1987
Author: Tom Shales, Washington Post Staff Writer

"I think I'll miss you most of all," Dorothy whispered in theScarecrow 's ear. We shared her sentiment. The Cowardly Lion was funny, the Tin Woodman was dear, but theScarecrow had soul. Oz wouldn't have been the same without him.

The rest of the world won't be the same without RayBolger, the lanky and vivacious vaudevillian who played theScarecrow, his role of roles, in " The Wizard of Oz.

Yesterday in Hollywood, at the age of 83, RayBolger died. He was the last surviving star of " The Wizard of Oz" -- made in 1939 but never far from the public eye -- and even if his appearances grew rare in recent years, you knew he was around, and you felt that, just like you and the kids, he might have been watching the movie during its annual telecasts.

Bolger never expressed anything but gratitude about being known best for this one part, despite the many others he played on stage and screen in his long and rambunctious career. In 1976, he looked back on the film and said, "It's a great American classic, and after I'm gone, it will be -- and I will be -- remembered. And very few people can say they were remembered for anything in life."

RayBolger can be remembered for even more than this well-loved triumph. He electrified Broadway, dancing George Balanchine's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" in the finale of Rodgers and Hart's "On Your Toes" in 1936. The dance was constructed to become more and more frenetic, and Bolger said later that he fainted "many times" after his nightly performances. It, too, is an American classic, and so, really, was he.

When he appeared in Frank Loesser's "Where's Charley?," a Broadway musicalization of "Charley's Aunt," Bolger had, and made the most of, another fabled show-stopper, the song "Once in Love With Amy," so infectious and lilting that audiences began singing along with him. Sometimes, he later recalled, they demanded so many encores that he would finally bring the singing to a halt and announce, "This is a play. We have to finish it "

"Amy" is a moonstruck anthem to a first love. "Once you're kissed by Amy, tear up your list; it's Amy," Bolger sang. In real life he was once in love with Gwendolyn, always in love with Gwendolyn -- Gwendolyn Rickard. They were wed in 1929 and the marriage lasted until Bolger 's death.

In person as on stage, Bolger was the picture of ebullience. Even in his seventies, his eyes shined a buoyant, youthful, crystalline blue. He was not easily lured into racy gossip about the early days of Hollywood, and he denied stories that the older stars on the set of "Wizard" became irritated when they thought that young Judy Garland was upstaging them. He was, it appears, that seeming contradiction, a Hollywood gentleman.

He started dancing at the age of 16, saved from a life in the insurance business by the urge to perform. He learned some of his first steps, he said, from a night watchman who had once been a hoofer. For a time, he toured the vaudeville circuits as half of an act called "Sanford & Bolger , a Pair of Nifties." Roaming New England as a vaudeville performer was, he said later, "my education."

His comic dancing style was his alone, facilitated by a pair of legs that, he was once told, "seem to start under my arms." In films like " The Harvey Girls," in which he starred with Garland again, he performed singular specialty numbers full of impish brio and gravity-defying displays worthy of the great silent-moviecomics. He knew how to make people smile and how to leave them happy.

His efforts in television, in addition to 30 years of annual telecasts of " The Wizard of Oz," included an early ABC sitcom called "Where's Raymond?" in which he played a Broadway hoofer much like himself. More recently, he popped up on the occasional "Love Boat" or even on sitcoms like " The Partridge Family." He had tremendous energy, loved to work, and once wrote, "You can never stop learning in television; the medium is limitless."

Only last Sunday night, the Arts & Entertainment Channel, a cable network, reran a mid-'60s "Bell Telephone Hour" that Bolger hosted. Though in his sixties, Bolger reprised a taxing adaptation of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." When he danced lyrical passages, his arms floated in air, and they seemed just as much a part of the dance as his lengthy legs were. It was the juxtaposing of balletic slapstick and moments of elegant grace that made his dancing style his own.

One other Bolger television show was short-lived but memorable, a Sunday afternoon variety hour in the '50s called "Washington Square." Bolger danced on a studio set made to resemble a Greenwich Village neighborhood. An Italian woman would sing operatic arias from her tenement window. And Bolger introduced a novelty tune, " The Song of the Cricket," that became a national hit.

In 1976, he returned to TV for a straight dramatic role in a remake of John Osborne's bitter play " The Entertainer," cast as aged ex-vaudevillian Billy Rice. The production was poor, but Bolger was golden. He had a climactic dramatic dance routine that made it all worthwhile.

"People just don't know what entertainment is any more," Billy Rice grumbled. Bolger said he didn't agree with that remark, but with his death, the era of vaudeville and all its dauntless, resourceful troupers fades still further into history. When " The Wizard of Oz" is shown each year, it really is a one-night stand of old pros, a two-hour vaudeville revival, a chance to see and share a form of magic rarely practiced today.

It is a cliche' to say we shall never see its like again. But does anybody honestly think we will?

Every child knows that theScarecrow played by Bolger asks the Wizard of Oz for a brain, not knowing he has had one all along, and is given an honorary degree at the end of his journey: "Th.D, Doctor of Thinkology." Delighted almost beyond words, theScarecrow puts his finger to his head and declares, " The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side."

Then he exclaims, "Oh joy, oh rapture I've got a brain " He asks the Wizard, "How can I ever thank you?" and the Wizard replies hurriedly, "Well, you can't." No matter how many viewings are under one's belt, it's joy, and rapture, every time. How can we ever thank RayBolger ? Well, we can't. But immortality, he felt, was thanks enough. It is his.

"Richard A. Colvin" - By Gerald S. Goldstein

2008-03-09T19:57:00.001-07:00

Richard A. Colvin,
former police chief

By GERALD S. GOLDSTEIN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

NARRAGANSETT -- Former Police Chief Richard A. Colvin, who in more than 30 years of public life here displayed the political savvy of a wardboss and the compassion of a parish priest, died Tuesday in the Grand Islander Health Care Center, Middletown. Colvin, 66, was the husband of Lorraine L. (Francois) Colvin.
In his stormy, 16-year tenure as chief, which began in 1963 during his term as president of the Town Council, Colvin was constantly embroiled in controversy, much of it generated because he ran his department more by the heart than by the book.
Some said his unorthodox ways -- he had no police experience when he took the job -- contributed to lax discipline and low morale; others said Colvin was ahead of his time and was more interested in helping townspeople than in putting them in jail.
Once, the Town Council suspended him without pay when it learned that instead of taking juvenile offenders to Family Court, he was giving them the option of coming into the station on weekends to wash floors and police cruisers as punishment.
Some of the youngsters liked Colvin so much that they volunteered for extra weekend duty, even after he told them that their term of indenture was up.
Resembling a Thomas Nast caricature of Boss Tweed, Colvin looked, and in some ways acted, the part. He loved smoking big cigars, driving big Cadillacs, and flourishing the thick bankroll that he always seemed to have in his pocket.
But even as a businessman -- he owned the Cozy Corner restaurant at Point Judith from 1946 to 1968 -- his compassionate side was evident. When Hurricane Carol struck with a fury in 1954, Colvin opened the restaurant to area residents who had been forced from their homes, feeding and sheltering them for three days.
But it did not take a hurricane to spark Colvin's generosity. For years, he routinely invited reformatory youngsters, who were on outings to the nearby state beaches, to the Cozy Corner for clamcakes and chowder -- and to a banquet that he put on for them at the end of the summer.
Colvin was also known to drive elderly residents around so they could do their shopping or keep doctors' appointments, and he helped some of them financially, as well.
Colvin had a particular rapport with young people. Once during the turbulent 1960s a near-riot broke out at Scarborough Beach; he responded with his men and helped defuse the situation by asking one guitar-toting instigator to sing songs with him.
He once assigned a patrolman 10 hours' extra duty for using profanity in a dispute with a citizen.
Colvin's gentle nature followed him in his initial months as police chief -- he was so uncomfortable around guns that he refused to wear one; after several months went by, his men chipped in and bought him a Smith & Wesson police revolver. Once Colvin got used to it he was rarely seen without it.
Colvin thrived as much on influence and power as he did on helping others. In fact, he was accused of masterminding his own appointment to the vacant police chief's job when he was leader of the Republican-dominated Town Council in 1963.
The appointment outraged a number of townspeople, because of its political tinge and Colvin's lack of police experience, and it drove a wedge through the Republican Party, alienating some of its other leaders.
And Colvin could be opportunistic, as well -- sometimes, it seemed, more to impress others than to benefit himself. When the Blizzard of 1978 buried Rhode Island in snowdrifts, Colvin applied for and received emergency food stamps along with several other Narragansett officials, and then reportedly bragged about it, waving the stamps around at a regional meeting of police chiefs.
The action prompted one Town Councilman to say he was embarrassed to be associated with the town. Colvin, who could be tough when he needed to be -- one acquaintance described him as "an iron man in a soft suit" -- responded that it was "nobody's damn business" whether he had received food stamps.
Despite such run-ins with his bosses, Colvin always emerged a survivor, retiring in 1979.

"Clifford E. 'Duby' Tucker" - By Gerald Goldstein

2008-03-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

1/20/98
Clifford E. 'Duby' Tucker, 101,
lifelong resident of South County

By GERALD S. GOLDSTEIN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- Clifford E. "Duby" Tucker, 101, of 273 Pond St., a classic swamp Yankee who dined on fried eels and delighted in reminiscing beside his potbellied stove, died Sunday at the Westerly Health Center. He was the husband of the late Margaret (Holgate) Tucker.
A wiry figure who barely topped out at 5 feet, Mr. Tucker lived his entire life in the South County region, wringing a living from it by running a fish market, spearing eels, crabbing and laboring in textile mills.
Even at the age of 100, the elfin Mr. Tucker was a familiar sight behind the wheel of his Mercury station wagon.
On the road, his only concession to age was a refusal to make left turns across oncoming traffic, because "I don't trust the other guy." So whatever his destination, Mr. Tucker drove a circuitous route that would get him there with turns only to the right.
Born in 1896, when Grover Cleveland was president, Mr. Tucker delivered the old Evening Bulletin to earn enough for his first car, a used Ford that he bought for $15 in 1919.
Required as a boy to support six younger siblings when his father died suddenly, he learned early to be resourceful with a dollar. And true to his Yankee heritage, he was just as economical with words.
Mr. Tucker downplayed the observance of his 100th birthday in 1996, saying "birthdays are not good for you."
In providing his recipe for cooking eels, he said, "First you parboil 'em, then fry 'em. Never eat eels that's just plain boiled -- a boiled fish is a spoiled fish."
Noting in his later years that eels had declined in popularity at dinner tables, he mused, "The world's gone daffy."
Asked about longevity, he advised: "Throw away those damn cigarettes." He attributed his long life to his avoidance of tobacco and liquor, and to hard work.
Mr. Tucker, who lived with a niece, whiled away his hours in a rocking chair near the woodstove in his garage workshop, which was awash in dusty model shops, fish nets, eel spears and coffee cans brimming with nuts and bolts.
He loved to tell visitors about his beloved Boston Red Sox, recalling that he saw them play the New York Giants in the World Series of 1912 -- the year Fenway Park opened. Mr. Tucker, then 16, took the train from Peace Dale to Boston, then walked the remaining two miles to Fenway Park, where he bought a 50-cent ticket that gave him standing room on the perimeter of center field, patrolled by Boston's immortal Tris Speaker.
Explaining where he got the nickname Duby, Mr. Tucker said that he had been a cutup in school and "my teacher kept telling me, 'Clifford, do be quiet. Do be still. Do be this, do be that.' "
Asked once why he had never lived anywhere but South County, Mr. Tucker replied, "There ain't no better place."
Mr. Tucker was born in Wakefield, a son of the late William and Nancy (Whipple) Tucker.
He leaves two nephews, Arthur Malenfant of Cambridge, Mass., and Clifford Malenfant of Elpena, Mich.; and two nieces, Marjorie Stevens of Wakefield, with whom he made his home, and Nancy Maziarz of Hopedale, N.J.
The funeral will be Monday, Jan. 26, at 1 p.m. in the Avery-Storti Funeral Home, 88 Columbia St., Wakefield. Burial will be in Riverside Cemetery, Wakefield.

"A Cold and Blustery Morning" by Donna Alvis Banks and Anna Mallory

2008-03-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Roanoke Times, The (VA)-April 22, 2007

Gene Cole silenced the alarm Monday at 3 a.m., stumbled down the narrow hallway of his trailer in Belspring's Eagleview Mobile Home Park and fixed his coffee.

He likes it with a little cream.

In a couple of hours, he would start his workweek.

Now 52, Cole joined VirginiaTech 's housekeeping department 21 years ago. Before that, he pumped gas at a filling station.

On the thin walls of his tidy mobile home are framed certificates marking 10, 15, 20 years with the university. He has one noting his certification in portable fire extinguisher training. He has pictures of Jesus retrieved from his mother's home after she died. He has pictures of his mother.

Cole lives alone. He grew up with six brothers and a sister in McCoy, a rural community on the outskirts of Blacksburg.

"I didn't go very far in school," he says, noting that he attended Prices Fork Elementary School. "I couldn't learn that good."

But he enjoys being around some of the world's most brilliant minds in his daily grind, one that starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 1:30 p.m.

By 4:15 a.m. Monday, he was in his '89 Mazda pickup, driving in pre-dawn twilight to his custodial job at Tech 's Norris Hall.

A blustery day. The wind tried to push him back.

Outside Harper Hall, a Tech dormitory built in 1999, the same year 13 people were killed in Colorado's Columbine school shootings, it was the first day in three that rain hadn't poured. Cold, gusty winds were ushering in snow flurries. It was a cold that Seung-Hui Cho had seemingly carried in his heart for a long time.

It was nearly 5 a.m.

Cho, a 23-year-old senior English major, was awake about half an hour earlier on this morning than most in the past year. Usually, he'd go to bed early, about 9 p.m., save for the nights he watched wrestling. Sometimes late at night, he'd ride his bike around campus, always alone. He'd usually wake up about 5:30.

But lately he'd been lifting weights at the gym, sometimes twice a week. He'd tossed aside his thick, gold-rimmed glasses from the past, adopted a close-cropped haircut and even started dotting acne medication on his blemishes.

During downtime, he'd type on his computer. When his roommates vanished from the shared suite at the end of the corridor, he'd record videos.

On this morning, Cho climbed from his twin bed for the last time, surrounded by the blank walls that had encased him since August.

Clad in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, he walked into the bathroom the young men shared in Room 2121.

Karan Grewal, his roommate, was there. Cho went around him, saying nothing. No emotion.

That was the way it was with Cho, a man who liked to call himself "Question Mark."

Today, those secrets would surface.

April 16 was his day, time for the planned "revolution" to begin.

Before midday, his rage would stain the stately Hokie stone in what would be described as the deadliest shooting spree in modern U.S. history.

Five professors. Nine graduate students. Four seniors. Two juniors. Three sophomores. Nine freshman. Plus, 17 other people wounded.

The world would watch.

Three years ago, Rowan Webster was walking down the hallway of an unfamiliar school when a pretty girl with deep blue eyes came out of a nearby cooking class, saw him and handed him a cupcake.

"What's your name?" Emily Hilscher asked.

That was Webster's first contact with Hilscher, a fellow Rappahannock County resident who eventually became a close friend. The moment stuck with him.

Hilscher was part of a close-knit group of friends from the tiny county, which has a population of 7,000 and not a single stoplight. Together they would climb Old Rag Mountain or trek to hidden swimming holes on warm summer nights. Among that group was her boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, a slender, dark-haired 19-year-old Radford University student.

"The only love interest I knew in her life was Karl," Webster says. "She gave me advice on my own relationship, which was a long-distance relationship, and I told her: 'Karl will make the drive for you. He loves you and you love him.'

"As far as I know, they never had any troubles. Some minor quarrels, but they were completely in love with each other."

At Tech , Hilscher shared Room 4040 with Heather Haugh in West Ambler Johnston Hall, a seven-story coed dorm known as West AJ that houses 895 students. Their room was vacant last Sunday evening, as it often was on Sundays, when Hilscher and Haugh typically visited their boyfriends off campus. They had agreed to meet at their fourth-floor room Monday to walk together to their 9 a.m. chemistry class.

Hilscher, an animal and poultry sciences major, aspired to be a veterinarian. She had a particular love of horseback riding -- a popular pastime in Rappahannock County -- and was a member of the VirginiaTech "B" equestrian team.

She was next scheduled to ride at 3:30 Monday afternoon.

Before daybreak, Gene Cole was in Norris Hall, ready to start his cleaning. First, the dean's office. Then he headed for classrooms to tidy up before students began arriving for class.

One of the older campus buildings, made from the school's trademark Hokie stone, Norris houses the university's engineering science and mechanics offices, as well as the dean's office for the College of Engineering. There are laboratories in Norris, as well as classrooms for engineering, mechanics and foreign language studies.

A thin, wiry man with a face that becomes animated when he's excited, Cole likes his job here. He likes the people.

VirginiaTech 's professors, he says, are "real friendly. They talk to me all the time."

And the students?

"I get along with them real good. A lot of them is real nice."

That's why he tolerates their deficiencies. They're messy, he says, especially the engineering students who "cut paper and everything else up on the floor."

On Monday, Cole was expecting the usual mess.

But he was in good humor.

"I just went to work. I didn't know nothin' was going to happen."

It was on the fourth floor of West AJ, the world would soon learn, where the horror began.

Not in a room, but in a common area. A place where anyone could see the horror unfold. It happened just after 7 a.m., while most students remained snuggled in bed.

Pop.

Pop.

In an instant, bullets struck down Emily Hilscher, before she could meet up with her roommate for their walk to class. Before her planned afternoon horseback ride.

Also hit was Ryan "Stack" Clark, a resident adviser known for his academics and fun-loving nature.

Just as quickly, the shooting ended.

Or paused, as the world also would learn.

The shootings were the climax of a grueling few years for Cho.

Fifteen years ago, his mother and father had brought him and his older sister to America from South Korea.

His father had said he wanted to go to a place where no one knew their name.

After bouncing around, they landed in the affluent Northern Virginia suburb of Centreville.

As his parents toiled at a dry-cleaning business, money surrounded them. The teenager began using the Westernized version of his name, Seung-Hui Cho.

His sister had gone to the equally affluent world of Princeton, and later got a job with the U.S. government.

Throughout school, Cho also had performed well.

Straight A's in math, but less success at friendship. No one at Westfield High School -- which had a student body of some 3,000 -- was close to him when he graduated in 2003.

He applied and was accepted to VirginiaTech , an in-state school four hours from his family. He would major in English, despite his proficiency with numbers.

Cho's final two years in Blacksburg had been particularly intense.

In 2005, during renowned poet Nikki Giovanni's poetry class his junior year, students had protested his presence.

In that class, he regularly wore sunglasses and a hat that Giovanni repeatedly made him remove. He'd snap pictures of female classmates from under his desk with his cellphone. His writings disturbed her.

"It was the meanness that bothered me. It was a really mean streak," Giovanni said.

If he weren't removed, Giovanni told department head Lucinda Roy, she'd leave the university.

Although Cho insisted his writing was just satire, Giovanni's threat forced him into individual tutoring with Roy until the end of the fall semester that year.

Roy tried to counsel him. He confessed to her how lonely he was.

Outside of the class that semester, the troubles continued. He began following female students on campus, showing up at their doors and phoning incessantly. In November 2005, one of the women complained to campus police, but Cho avoided criminal repercussions because she filed no charges.

Instead, police warned him and sent a referral to the university's discipline department.

A second complaint of harassment came the following month. That same day, his roommates told police he was suicidal.

Cho was compelled to see a professional counselor. When he did, a Montgomery County judge signed off on a temporary detention order that landed Cho in a behavioral facility outside Radford.

In mid-December he spent one night at the center, where doctors determined that the college student was an imminent danger to himself or others.

But a psychologist decided that, although Cho was "flat" and his mood depressed, he had normal judgment.

Cho returned to Tech .

In August 2006, Cho moved into Harper, a suite-style dorm where he had five roommates. He didn't get to know them and ate meals alone.

The fall semester passed. The holiday break. January.

On Feb. 9, 2007, he visited JND Pawnbrokers, about a 15-minute walk from campus in downtown Blacksburg, and picked up a .22-caliber Walther P22 pistol he had bought online -- a gun that typically costs about $300 and can fire 10 bullets before being reloaded.

On March 12, he bought another gun at Roanoke Firearms on Cove Road. Cho presented his blue and white Virginia driver's license, checkbook, green card and a credit card. The transaction was for $571 and was captured on the store's video surveillance camera.

He left with a box of 50 cartridges and a 9 mm Glock 19 -- a gun that holds 15 rounds and one in the chamber.

Privately, he spent time in the following month making videos and video photos of himself with the guns.

The images showed off his new buzz haircut and some other weapons, including a knife and hammer.

He began compiling a scrapbook of sorts, with printed photos from the videos. Eleven images in all.

In some of the portraits, he pointed the guns and weapons at his head. In others, he aimed at the camera.

He lined up boxes of hollow-point ammunition purchased from Wal-Mart and Dick's Sporting Goods in nearby Christiansburg and attempted artistic close-ups.

"Don't you just wish you finished me off when you had the chance? Don't you just wish you killed me?" he wrote below the picture.

On the videos, he read from an 1,800-word rant against "hedonistic brats" and "sadistic snobs."

"I didn't have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled," he said into the camera. "But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them."

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" -- a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School killers.

He saved it all to his computer.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

And a final written message on one of the 11 printed photos: "Let the revolution begin."

Professor Liviu Librescu was always smiling, always pleasant, always in a hurry.

For a 76-year-old aeronautics engineer, he seemed to be flying high.

His students loved and respected the Romanian-born Holocaust survivor, a man who had been imprisoned in a labor camp and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a ghetto in Focsani, Romania, during World War II. After immigrating to Israel, he left for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year and then permanent residence.

On Monday morning, Librescu greeted his students in 204 Norris Hall. Then he started his class.

Solid mechanics. The theory of elasticity -- a branch of physics that governs the response of solid material to applied stress.

Fascinating stuff for budding engineers.

Police responded to the fourth floor of West AJ. Two victims, later identified as Emily Jane Hilscher and Ryan "Stack" Clark, had been shot.

Rooms were quickly cleared and students were taken down to the third floor as police performed their investigation. Hilscher's roommate, Heather Haugh, had not been with Hilscher when she was shot. She told police that Hilscher's boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, owned guns. Haugh had even been to a shooting range with Thornhill. Investigators suspected a lover's quarrel that turned deadly and set out to locate Thornhill, who lived in a Blacksburg town house.

By 9:30 a.m., word of the dormitory shooting had spread, even though many West AJ students were waking up with no knowledge of a crime scene inside their own hall. Police believed they had good leads. They already had a suspect.

Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum briefed university officials on the status of the investigation. At 9:26 a.m., the university sent out a campuswide e-mail alerting students and staff of the incident:

"A shooting occurred at West Ambler Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact VirginiaTech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case."

Fourteen dollars and 40 cents.

That's the amount the clerk asked for at the small, brick post office on North Main Street, just off campus in downtown Blacksburg. The amount to mail a package to New York City -- overnight. The handwriting on the package was scrawled, maybe hurried.

The package was addressed to: NBC 30 Rockefeller Ave.

The ZIP code was wrong. 101102, instead of 10112.

As the return address: A. Ishmael, 88 Revol Dr., Blacksburg, Va. 24060

$14.40.

The time stamp on the package: 9:01 a.m.

Inside, the final compilation -- 27 video files on a DVD.

In one of the videos, these spoken words: "This is it. This is where it all ends. End of the road. What a life it was. Some life."

About 9:25 a.m., Cole slipped out the back of Norris Hall for his morning smoke.

He had just finished cleaning the men's bathroom on the third floor, even though that short professor with the foreign accent had interrupted him as soon as he had gotten his mop and bucket out.

It happened every day.

Cole didn't know professor Librescu's name -- only that he showed up each morning in an awful hurry.

"I gotta go! I gotta go!" the perky professor shouted cheerfully as he raced by the bucket. He always took time, though, to ask Cole how he was doing before he hustled back down to Norris 204 to teach his solid mechanics class.

"You better slow down," Cole hollered after him. He finished his cigarette and stepped back into Norris.

His supervisor, Johnny Long, was on the first floor looking for him.

Long fussed at him. Cole had left the door of the third-floor broom closet unlocked.

Long's warning: You're going to have to keep the door locked because of these bomb threats. You know, they can make bombs out of these chemicals we keep.

Cole knew about bomb threats that had closed part of the campus on April 2 and again on Friday, April 13. In his years on campus, he had come to expect such things. Student pranks, he reckoned.

He promised Long he would take care of the closet.

He didn't get the chance.

Suddenly, there was banging, popping, screaming on Norris Hall's second floor. Someone had a gun. Shots were being fired.

On the first floor, no one knew what was happening overhead. Long told Cole to get upstairs and look for Pam -- Pam Tickle, his co-worker, who was cleaning the second floor.

Cole jumped in the elevator and punched a button. When the doors slid open, he began hollering for Pam.

Something on the floor made him stop in his tracks.

He saw some sort of book bag. Beside it, a body.

He inched closer.

The person was quivering. He was sure it was Pam.

Before he could bend down to check, a motion at the corner of his eye caught his attention.

He looked up and spotted a figure standing far down the hallway.

The man had both hands wrapped around a gun, pointed right at him.

Cole had unknowingly walked into a methodical shooting spree.

Cho was going from room to room.

His killing spree had started in Room 206, professor G.V. Loganathan's small class of civil engineering students. Without speaking a word, he began firing his Glock and his Walther into his scattering victims.

Survivors say Cho's near-blank expression didn't change.

He left the dead and dying behind, moving on to Room 207, a German class taught by Jamie Bishop. Some students ducked under desks as Cho methodically fired and killed.

Then to Room 211, a French class where professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak had heard the shots and shoved a desk in front of the door. Cho still managed to force his way in, and he delivered another deadly volley of gunfire.

Cho headed back to 207, where three students had pressed themselves against the door, anticipating the gunman's return. He fired four shots through the wooden door before giving up.

Tech President Charles Steger's crisis leadership team had assembled in his Burruss Hall office after the West AJ shootings. Campus police had informed the president that they had a suspect.

Just after 9:45 a.m., the meeting was interrupted by a report of another incident. This one was at Norris Hall. As the call sounded over the small radio clipped to Lt. Joey Albert's lapel, the sound of gunfire was unmistakable to Steger and everyone else in his office.

"I think I need to get out of here and get on the scene," Albert said.

Soon after, at 9:50 a.m., the university blasted another e-mail alert across campus.

"Subject: please stay put

A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows."

The police didn't have to go far. Norris is next door to Burruss, in the heart of Tech 's sprawling, 2,600-acre campus.

In Room 205, Haiyan Cheng, a doctoral student subbing for her adviser, stood at the lectern and talked. She'd been talking about the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations for more than half an hour.

When Cheng and the 10 seniors in attendance first heard the loud pops, they ignored them.

It was construction next door, they thought.

So Cheng prepared to launch into a new lesson.

But the popping continued, and it grew closer.

Cheng and a female student looked into the corridor.

From across the hall and to the left, Cho appeared from another classroom.

The women darted back into the room and closed the heavy, solid wood door.

An Indian student suggested blocking it.

Four male students pushed a rectangular table against the door as a barricade. Students dropped to the floor, cowered behind the lectern, tables and desks.

For a moment, the shooting outside stopped.

Cheng heard the clink of an empty gun magazine falling to the floor.

Cho pushed against the barricaded door. But the weight of the table and the strength of the students pushing back was too strong.

Cho fired into the door. Bullets smashed through the old wood and metal. One lodged in the lectern.

More shots.

But not into the door. They were echoing down the hallway.

Cole got away from the body on the hallway floor and started running.

"I felt bullets going by my head."

He ran toward the back stairwell.

"I was scared to death. I didn't think I could run that fast."

Down the steps and out the door. He joined in the crush of people fleeing and took refuge in nearby Randolph Hall.

"I just wanted out of there. I knew I was going to die."

Room 204 -- Librescu's class -- would be Cho's next stop in Norris.

The gunshots outside interrupted a slide show lesson.

At first they didn't know what they were hearing. Junior Alec Calhoun said it sounded "like an enormous hammer."

Then screams and more steady pounding.

The reality of danger hit.

Librescu's students dropped to the floor, turned over desks to shield themselves. Some began kicking out windows after deciding to risk a 10-foot leap.

Librescu blocked the door of his classroom with his body and shouted for his students to hurry.

Many of them began jumping.

Richard Mallalieu climbed out the window, hung from the ledge for a moment and let go. Caroline Merrey followed. Calhoun -- the last to jump -- looked over his shoulder and saw Librescu, still guarding the door.

"The two people behind me actually got shot, so it's really lucky that I got out to start with," Calhoun would later say.

The first shot Cho fired when he burst through the door hit Librescu in the head.

Matthew Webster and a few remaining students hit the floor. The 23-year-old Webster instinctively curled up and pretended to be dead as Cho stood over him with both guns. Cho fired at Webster's head, too.

The bullet grazed Webster's skull and ricocheted into his right arm.

When Cho left Room 204, Webster and two other students were the only survivors.

Aislynn Ribbe liked to get to Norris Hall early for her 10:10 a.m. Spanish class. The 20-year-old sophomore from Pearisburg was on her way there Monday when she decided to take a 10-minute detour to Squires Student Center for a cup of coffee.

She drove to the Drillfield, parked and walked toward the fortress of gray limestone buildings. She headed up the concrete steps next to Patton Hall, the building directly in front of Norris. Suddenly, a police officer came at her from the direction of Norris, yelling.

"Get out of here!"

She heard the sound of gunshots from Norris. She ran down the steps to her car and tore away, just as police cars came pouring into campus.

Officers from Tech , Blacksburg, Montgomery County and the Virginia State Police fanned across the Drillfield, clearing it in minutes.

The first 911 call had been received by Tech police at 9:45 a.m, followed by more calls. By the time the first officers arrived, gunshots were cracking and students were leaping out of the tall, narrow second-story windows onto the grass and into boxwoods.

Police discovered that the doors at the building's Gothic-looking main entrance had been chained shut.

Police burst through the chains as gunshots continued to explode upstairs.

EMTs quickly radioed fellow responders for help with the words: "mass casualty incident."

Outside Norris and the adjacent buildings, people were ordered indoors.

Students and staff had grown used to lockdowns. The school year began with a double homicide just off campus that forced students to remain locked in buildings for hours. In the past two weeks, two bomb threats had prompted evacuations and building closures. Now this. What a year.

It didn't take long to realize this was different.

Police with high-powered rifles encircled the buildings. Somewhere, a loudspeaker repeatedly blared the announcement, "This is an emergency ... clear the sidewalk." Over and over. "This is an emergency ... clear the sidewalk."

Then came the ambulances. They came from everywhere. The names on their doors read like a Southwest Virginia road map -- Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Longshop-McCoy, Newport and seemingly every town and community with a rescue squad. Tech 's own rescue squad, staffed mostly by students, rolled up from just down the street.

The upper floors of McBryde Hall provided a view of the police and rescue personnel. Martin Arvebro, a student visiting from Sweden, shot video with a small digital camera. He turned the camera toward his fellow Swede, Carl Nordin, and asked: "So, Carl, how do you like America on the second day? It's just like the movies."

Amid all this, Cho finished with the promise he had made. "End of the road."

He put one of his guns to his head and pulled the trigger. Moments later, police stormed over him and someone yelled, "Shooter down! Black tag!"

Over the police scanners, a voice soon after recited a spectrum of other color codes that indicated the conditions of Cho's victims. Greens, reds and yellows were enumerated, citing victims who needed medical assistance but were still alive. Another color sounded far grimmer.

"Twenty-nine black," the voice said.

In all, 32 students and faculty were killed.

"Miller finds Rhythmic Solace" - By Pamela J. Podger

2008-03-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

Roanoke Times, The (VA)-August 19, 2007

Girls hit tennis balls as cicadas whir in the heat, familiar
sounds for Heidi Miller as she gathers strength at a Shenandoah Valley
camp before Virginia Tech's start of classes Monday.

Camp Strawderman place is a touchstone for Miller, 19, a camp
counselor and tennis instructor at a rustic, all-girls camp where she
has summered since she was 8.

This time, she also traveled three times a week to Harrisonburg
for physical therapy for wounds inflicted in Seung-Hui Cho's April 16
rampage when he killed 32 people on Tech's campus.

Miller, who was in Room 211 in Norris Hall for a French class,
was shot three times in her left side. She has a titanium rod in her
femur, screws in her shattered knee and a bullet in her lower abdomen
that doctors will remove later, if necessary.

"Here, I can be Heidi Miller the camp counselor, not the victim
of the Virginia Tech tragedy," she said, sitting by the courts on a
recent muggy day. "I haven't tried to figure it out or make more out of
it. I'm moving on. What happened that day doesn't define me."

While some of those injured replay the events and search for
meaning, others such as Miller yearn for life to get back to normal.

At the 78-year-old camp, the greatest perils are relentless
gnats and wayward tennis balls.

The predictable rhythms at camp have been a sanctuary, a place
for Miller to heal and absorb all of the changes in her life since
April. For the first time, she and her younger sister, Wendy, 16, had only
two weeks at camp together instead of one month. Her family's ties to
the camp are strong -- her mother was a camper, her grandmother a
counselor and her parents got engaged on the property.

"I really wanted to make sure I could come, even if it was
going only for a week or two weeks or a weekend. It was something that was
normal, and it was what I was supposed to do," she said. "I keep
reminding myself that, for a while, this will be something that will be in my
life every day. But there will come a time that it will be a chapter."

Miller is excited to return to Tech, where she will be a
sophomore and intends to double major in geography and international studies.
Her body will be stronger, and she's eager to see friends and root
for the football team. She has been in touch with several injured
classmates and has visited Blacksburg four times over the summer.

She also has some qualms.

"I'm apprehensive just to see how everyone acts," she said.
"Thus far, everything that's come to me that has been a challenge, I've
been able to overcome. The really big one is going back to class and to
sit there and not think the worst possible scenarios every time. I'm
nervous about that."

The plucky young woman doesn't want to be regarded differently
and has worked hard -- physically, mentally and emotionally -- to be
seen as the same person she was before the shooting. She's tall and
easygoing, with hazel eyes, and blond hair tied in a knot at the nape of
her neck.

"That's her biggest question: Will they want to be my friend
because this happened?" said her father, Dennis Miller, 48, who's an
accountant. "I told her she would have to be careful of that type of
situation. And she already knew that, too."

The camp has been an intermediate step between returning to
Tech and her recuperation in her parents' Harrisonburg home. For the first
six weeks after she left Montgomery Regional Hospital, Miller was
totally dependent and couldn't put any weight on her left leg.

Her mother, Lolly, 46, who works with older people in
preventive care, said she's learning to respect her daughter as an adult.

"It isn't the way you expect to see your child after her first
year at college. Usually they are home for a meal and then off with
friends," she said. "Our family likes the imagery of a butterfly, and this
is the beginning of that -- breaking through a cocoon to a life that
has changed.

"In the months that have gone on, I've been very careful that I
don't answer for her. She wants to take charge of this. This is
probably one of the biggest tests in her whole life."

Heidi Miller seems to have adjusted well to her injuries and
has made steady progress since April.

"Emotionally, from the day it happened, she seemed to have a
pretty good attitude, and it made it easier for me," Dennis Miller said.
"If anyone asks questions, she'll answer them. My only concern in the
future is, I guess, certain sounds or smells will probably make her
flinch or take her back."

At the camp's Meddilark cabin, Miller watches five 14-year-olds
with co-counselor and friend Amy Bankert. After lights out, they'll
talk about their day. Sometimes Miller shares her frustration about a
tough exercise in physical therapy, where she pushes her muscles and tries
new challenges such as climbing a rock wall. At this point, her
doctors say her body is healing well and she needs to grasp that point
mentally.

"They say the last piece of physical therapy is getting your
agility back. I can almost jump rope and hop. I just have to trust that
my leg is going to support me," she said.

"The thing I appreciate is people here don't treat me like I'm
fragile. I know if my knee almost gives or if I stumble, everyone isn't
going to gasp or [start] running over. I've always been independent."

On Miller's first hike since she was shot, all her cabin girls
cheered when she made it down the steep incline.

Margaret Gouldman, camp owner and director, didn't hesitate to
take Miller back as one of 25 counselors for just part of the summer.

"She's a wonderful girl who is upbeat and outgoing," Gouldman
said. "We love her. We decided this would be the best place in the world
for her because we're family."

Miller said the camp -- complete with pit toilets and cabins
decorated with pink and yellow flowering vines -- has been a good place
to recover from the intense physical therapy. She appreciates the
timelessness of the setting, a giant meadow surrounded by green forest and
plum-colored mountains in the dusk of the day. She rarely uses her
e-mail, and she's sheltered from the media that she knows will be
plentiful on the Tech campus as the fall semester begins. She knows people
here will listen, but she doesn't want to burden them.

"She keeps plugging -- sometimes she wants to talk about it and
sometimes not," said Dee Shaffer, who oversees the three tennis
teachers. "She's not going to let it rule her life. She's just picked herself
right up."

Bethany Teachman, an assistant professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia, said good social support, realistic expectations
of progress and visiting a trauma site are predictors of whether
people will recover well.

"There isn't one right way to react to a trauma like this.
Research shows that the body has amazing natural recovery mechanisms, and
we should let those work," she said. In general, "it sounds like she is
doing all of the things that would help her adapt well. It is a real
testament to her strength and resilience."

Miller is on the tennis courts again, mostly serving or tossing
balls. But she isn't yet playing the way she once did and sometimes
she can't get a shot she could have reached six months ago.

"I was glad to be in an environment where it was almost like my
life hadn't changed so drastically," Miller said. "Especially with the
older girls, I used to be able to play and give them a run for their
money and now I can't. I can play at a certain level, and I look forward
to coming back here next summer."

Staff writer Donna Alvis-Banks and research librarian Belinda
Harris contributed to this report.
)

Jarrett Lane and Narrows - By Beth Macy

2008-03-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

Roanoke Times, The (VA)-April 20, 2007

Grandmothers planted pansies.

School and town maintenance crews laid mulch, hung memorial
ribbons and went around Narrows High School putting on coats of touch-up
paint.

An old bedsheet flapped from a nearby railroad trestle with the
words "We'll Miss U Jarrett" painted in blue.

It seemed that Jarrett Lee Lane, the 22-year-old Virginia Tech
senior killed in Monday's massacre, didn't just belong to the mother
and grandmother who raised him. He belonged to the entire
3,000-population town.

And for two solid days, the town has prepared to say goodbye to
him.

"Nobody had to ask anybody to do any of this," said athletic
director Don Lowe, as the last of the weeds were being pulled.

"People have just been showing up to help."

So many people are expected to attend Saturday's funeral,
scheduled for 2 p.m. in the school auditorium, that chairs will be set up in
the gymnasium with closed-circuit television to serve the overflow
crowd.

Gathering at the high school felt right, said school employees
and volunteers, because Narrows High was definitely Jarrett's home away
from home:

The place where he caught the 6:30 bus to attend the Southwest
Virginia Governor's School in Dublin;

The place where he played four sports -- and where coaches had
to kick him out of the gym long after practice was over.

The place he still visited when he was home from Tech on break.

Thursday afternoon, friends and teachers wandered in and out of
the school entranceway, contributing items to the memorial display or
stopping by to look and pray. Clyde Turner brought a photograph to
add: a copy of the Little League basketball team he had long ago
coached, with fourth-grader Jarrett front and center, his little shoulders
hunched, his freckled face grinning huge.

Between classes, students signed a memorial bulletin board,
writing goodbye notes to Jarrett. National Honor Society members helped
arrange Hokie paraphernalia -- a rug, a table, a hand-made quilt -- and
pinned school-colored yellow and gold ribbons on visiting alumni and
friends.

Todd Lusk, one of his basketball coaches, hauled out several of
Jarrett's No. 24 jerseys from storage and arranged them on a table. A
trombone from his band days was laid on top, next to copies of the
2003 Narrows yearbook, in which Jarrett was voted "most likely to have
his head stuck in a book."

A framed picture of Jarrett as the 2003 class valedictorian was
displayed on an easel, behind which his National Honor Society sash
was draped.

When he was finished tying bows on the trees out front, school
maintenance worker Sonny Frazier stepped inside to pay his respects.

He'd been Jarrett's Little League football coach in the seventh
grade and recalled him as the "kind of kid, you could hug him even
when he got older. Do you know what I'm trying to say?" he asked, choking
up.

People talked about his ever-present smile. They speculated
about the number of hours he slept between his rigorous Governor's School
homework, playing all those sports and doing all those activities at
First Baptist Church.

"Every day after practice, he'd say to me, 'What can I do to
get better and to help the team get better?'" coach Bryan Patteson
recalled. "He wasn't the best player on the team, but he was the best team
player you've ever seen."

Jarrett was crazy about this school and this town, Patteson
added, and the whole town took a part in raising him.

Today's visitation at the school will be closed to the media,
at Jarrett's family's request. Earlier in the week, national media
presence had been so intense -- with reporters banging on Jarrett's mom's
door -- that local police stationed themselves in front of Tracey
Lane's home.

"Katie Couric called me on my cellphone," complained Roger
Shepherd, Jarrett's brother-in-law, as he stopped to look at the school
memorial. "How Katie Couric got my cellphone number, I have no idea."

Down the hall, junior Gage Dent showed off a text message he'd
received from Jarrett just hours before a gunman stormed his
engineering class and changed life in this small, close-knit town.

Jarrett had gone home to attend church with his family, as he
did every Sunday, and to share the recent good news: that he'd just been
offered a full ride to the Coastal Engineering Graduate program at
the University of Florida with a graduate assistantship to boot.

After church, he gave Dent a pep talk about following his dream
to play college baseball. Later that night, from his Blacksburg
apartment, he took time to send the young ballplayer this text message:

Gage if I had any advice 4 u itd be to acknowledge ur talent
and run w it. Focus on ur pitchn, if u wanna play n college then go 4 it
all out.

"I'm keeping it forever," Dent said of the message.

Several blocks away, Carleena Blankenship walked door to door
amid the downtown Narrows businesses. She hung up Hokie-colored bows --
the same kind of ribbons the Junior Women's Club posted along the New
River bridge earlier in the week.

The wind picked up and the rain started to drizzle, but
Blankenship stuck to her task. "I didn't have a son, but if I ever did, I'd
want him to be just like Jarrett," she said.

"The Messenger" by Matt Chittum

2008-03-05T09:52:00.000-08:00

Roanoke Times, The (VA)-September 1, 2007

The voice leapt above the hum from the waiting room television
at Montgomery Regional Hospital.

News of the shootings at Virginia Tech was not two hours old,
and the network chatter was already relentless.

But the voice distinguished itself because the people in the
waiting room recognized it.

It was the voice of Derek O'Dell, the very man O'Dell's aunt,
uncle and girlfriend were waiting to see.

They knew only that he had been shot, was not seriously
wounded, and they still didn't know exactly how it had happened.

Yet there was his voice, quiet and calm, telling the story of
how Seung-Hui Cho had entered his classroom and sprayed bullets through
it.

O'Dell had been unable to speak to his parents or girlfriend,
other than to send a text message.

He had been bandaged and tended to, yet no one had asked him
what had happened.

Until the call came from MSNBC.

At last, someone was asking.

He could tell the true story of what happened in Norris Hall,
he thought. Maybe his mother, in Colorado on business, would hear him
and know he was OK.

If nothing else, he could release the horror of what he had
seen and survived.

So the ordinarily quiet, attention-shunning O'Dell began to
talk.

And for the next days, weeks and months, he kept on talking.

To reporters, to friends, to his old high school.

To his psychologist, to the widow of his professor. He talked.

To the guy who sat feet from him and whose blood he saw spill
out, he talked.

It was by accident, but before wounds had ceased to bleed,
O'Dell seized on just what he needed for his wounded psyche.

He would talk.

The trauma had not set in, the search for answers had not
begun, and already he was changing.

And it wasn't all bad.

The trauma

Joanne Hawley was two-thirds of the continent away from
Blacksburg when she heard. The story came to her fully formed: the mass
shooting; 33 dead, including the perpetrator; numerous wounded; and her son,
Derek, a sophomore who had just turned 20, among them, and alive.

She had been in a conference all day in Colorado, ignorant of
the events at Virginia Tech.

She emerged to see a cousin, who spun the terrible yarn for
her. Hawley, a post-traumatic stress disorder counselor, knew right away
what her son could be facing, "the whole constellation of symptoms."

The flashbacks.

The nightmares.

The jumpiness.

The constant vigilance and sense of danger.

As a psychologist would later tell her and her husband, Roger,
what used to be normal in all their lives was gone. There would be a
new normal.

Hawley arranged for her son to meet with a psychologist just 26
hours after the shooting.

"That's the only thing I could do from 2,000 miles away," she
said.

What she longed to do was hug her quiet boy, the skinny kid
with round shoulders and remarkable blue eyes who demanded his parents
remove insects from their home rather than swat them, even wasps.

O'Dell had been raised in a peaceful home by pacifist parents.
He decided at 10 to become a veterinarian after he saw a dog hit by a
car and was helpless to give it aid. He played soccer at Cave Spring
High School, but he excelled at a more cerebral game: chess. He seemed
wired for the game's calm intensity, predisposed to thinking moves ahead
and to analyzing every match after it was over.

He was a state champion, but shunned the attention it earned
him.

"He didn't want extra attention that other people didn't have,"
his father said.

Unlike his war-protesting father who is prone to questioning
the establishment, Derek O'Dell always sought the comfort of the group
and felt warmth in his associations -- his high school, his university.

He rarely played with toy guns as a child. The only weapons in
the O'Dell home are Civil War relics Roger O'Dell inherited -- a sword
and rifle over the mantel.

Before April 16, he had never been in the presence of live
gunfire.

The face was male, Asian. Just a sliver of it visible when the
door to Room 207 cracked open 20 minutes into class and closed again
quickly. Probably some kid confused about which room was his. Minutes
later, the same face appeared at the door again.

"Why are you looking in here again?" O'Dell thought, annoyed.
"You just looked in here."

Jamie Bishop continued his lesson in German grammar until the
next interruption.

"Is that what I think it is?" someone asked. No, it must be
just more construction noise.

Later, O'Dell would think, "That was my first mistake."

The messenger

In the days after the shooting, O'Dell craved details.

He scoured news reports, Web sites, television for new nuggets
of information to help him re-create the event.

This was real-life game analysis. The chess player was trying
replay the match in his head.

Did Seung-Hui Cho come to Room 207 second or third? How much
time did he and his classmates really have to react? Did he do all he
could to help?

If he couldn't know the why, at least he wanted the what and
how.

When he wasn't searching for details, O'Dell was talking. In
the first two weeks after the shooting, he was interviewed dozens of
times by reporters.

It seemed to help. He told his mother, "If I'm talking about
it, I'm not thinking about it."

His psychologist would later tell Hawley that this seemed to be
part of O'Dell's healing.

It was a therapeutic role he adopted for himself: the
messenger.

Yet, he couldn't bring himself to say his assailant's name. He
wanted to forget the killer, yet worried that if he blotted the man
from his memory, he might also lose the memory of those who died.

The event that would forever mark the before and after in his
life, he referred to only as "that day."

The clap of a woman's flip-flops on stairs made him jump.

When he returned to class the Monday after the shooting, he
would not sit near the door, as he had in Norris 207. When he took his
seat, he quickly formulated an escape plan.

Thoughts of how he could defend himself leapt to mind
involuntarily: "This isn't only a laptop. It's a weapon." He knows it doesn't
make sense.

And then, two weeks after the shooting, one of his roommates
made a jarring discovery.

The fleece jacket O'Dell wore when he was shot bore not only
the holes where a bullet passed through his right arm, but three others.

Two between the collar and right shoulder indicate a bullet
missed his neck by inches.

And a single hole near the zipper seemed to show a bullet had
narrowly missed his midsection, perhaps even his heart.

He had come even closer to death than he realized.`

This must be some sort of criminal justice class experiment, he
thought. Later, someone would come and ask them what they saw to test
the validity of eyewitness accounts, right?

The wounded professor staggered toward the shooter, was shot
again. Just feet away, blood erupted from Sean McQuade's neck.

O'Dell scrambled under his desk. A shell casing rattled to
stillness on the floor near him.

This was real.

He crept toward the rear of the room, trying to put as much
distance as he could between himself and that gun.

Gunfire roared in his ears. It was all he could hear. Where was
the shooter? From beneath a desk, he caught only glimpses of his feet.
He followed the sound of the gun. The shooter was walking through the
room firing rhythmically. Classmates fell into the aisles as they were
hit.

And then it was quiet.

The recognition

The May trip to the beach was no escape.

The O'Dells and the family of Derek's girlfriend, Laura Jones,
arrived at their rented beach house on the Outer Banks to a cheerful
banner that read, "Surf or Sound Realty Welcomes Derek O'Dell!"

Inside the house were baskets of baked goods and gift
certificates from businesses for miles around -- well more than you could spend
in a week, his parents said.

He's like a star, his mother remarked. People recognized him --
at a roadside fruit stand in North Carolina backcountry, at Mass at
the Catholic church in Buxton, where the Cape Hatteras lighthouse is.

O'Dell's churchgoing had slipped in recent years. Now, he
wanted to go to Mass all the time. He had survived when others hadn't. Why?
What did God have in store for him?

He didn't trust he would be so blessed again.

Every night at the beach, he locked his bedroom door.

The door! What if the shooter comes back?

He leapt across the desks to reach the door. His right arm felt
numb. A bullet had passed clean through his biceps. He peeled his
jacket back, fashioned a tourniquet from his leather belt, felt for his
cellphone and dialed 911.

"Quiet! Quiet!" Trey Perkins, a classmate, told him. "He might
come back."

O'Dell's right shoe was missing. It had come off during his
crawl to the back of the room. He had to have it back. If he had to run,
he thought, he didn't want to be hindered by slipping in his socks on
the slick floor.

Perkins tossed it to him. He slipped it on, braced his back
against the wall, and jammed his foot beneath the door like a wedge to
keep the killer out.

The appreciation

"I was involved in the incident at Virginia Tech," O'Dell said
with remarkable understatement, but he assumed the audience already
knew.

He returned to his old high school, Cave Spring, in June, but
not to talk about the shooting.

Rather, it was to lead a panel discussion where he and, as
Principal Martha Cobble put it, "people who had survived their first year
of college" would reveal the secrets of college life to seniors.

Take a hammer and a screwdriver.

Make boyfriend/girlfriend visitation rules with your roommate.

Don't be embarrassed when your parents cry on move-in day.

O'Dell, who had not necessarily been anonymous at Cave Spring
but was not homecoming king either, had offered to organize the event
when Cobble mentioned it to him.

He tucked "Virginia Tech tragedy" at the bottom of the list of
topics he distributed. But the shooting lurked in the room, waiting for
discussion.

At the end of each session, he gave a brief summary of his role
in the shooting. Once he mentioned his attacker by name. "Cho
Seung-Hui," he said, pausing as he realized he had the names out of order. "Or
however you say his name," he added dismissively.

He implored the students to appreciate their professors. Five
died on April 16, he said. "They're amazing people. Be grateful for
everything they do for you."

Then he pulled out his fleece jacket and passed a pencil
through the bullet holes in a strange kind of show-and-tell.

"Without God, I know I wouldn't be here," he said.

The door handle jiggled, then turned. It came unlatched. The
shooter pushed the door, forced it open a few inches.

O'Dell stood on the hinged side of the door, his left leg
stretched across to secure it. Katelyn Carney stood in front of the door,
pushing on it with both hands. They forced it closed again.

Bullets ripped through the wooden door. One came through
Carney's hand. The door shook with every gunshot, like someone pounding on
it. Every bullet came closer to O'Dell than the last.

He closed his eyes, prayed for it to end. And for the moment,
it did.

All around him, people were bleeding, dying or dead. Sean
McQuade listed over. O'Dell wanted to help, knew how to help.

But the door. He couldn't leave the door.

The absolution

It was late July, and O'Dell stood outside a building at the
University of Virginia. He was there for the public comment session of
the Virginia Tech Review Panel appointed by the governor.

It was the kind of atmosphere that put him on high alert.

He stepped into the building lobby, which bustled with people
during a break in the meeting. Who were they? He studied identification
badges, trying to sort out who was who, why they were there.

In the auditorium, he noted exits to the left and right of the
stage and took his seat in a row near the front. Hours later, he could
recount that eight people sat on his left, three to the right. One row
back, there were only two people -- that would be his escape route.

For weeks it had been as normal a summer as it could be. The
reporters didn't call much anymore. He worked at his regular job at the
Cave Spring Veterinary Clinic, hung out with his girlfriend, Laura,
cooked her pasta for their third-anniversary dinner.

But there, with the panel onstage before him, and parents and
spouses of those who died around him, his happiness left him.

As speakers took to the lectern, he looked down, his eyes
searching a blank sheet of paper on his lap. He fiddled with his pen.
Another speaker was called: "Dave McCain."

He looked up, and the tears began. He knew Lauren McCain, who
had sat just in front him in the German class, was dead. But until now,
it was just information. When her father rose from the row in front of
him, the reality of her death broke through.

Later, McCain asked to speak to O'Dell privately.

These meetings were always awkward at first, and for O'Dell,
guilt-laden. What could he say to someone whose child was dead when he
still lived?

Without fail, the parents recognized his feelings and absolved
him. "We're glad you're here," they would say. "You have a purpose."

If it's a parent of someone who died in Room 207, they often
want details -- anything to help them know if the one they lost suffered.

It started a week after the shooting, when he met with the
widow and parents of his slain professor, Jamie Bishop.

He also met with his classmate, Sean McQuade, who had no memory
of the shooting. It was O'Dell who first told him the details.

McCain asked some questions about his daughter and thanked
O'Dell, not only for speaking with him, but for what he did in Room 207.

He used a word that both makes O'Dell uncomfortable and eases
his guilt: hero.

Again he came back, again the bullets pierced the door. And
again the killer was thwarted.

Inside Room 207, they could hear the echo of gunfire fading
down the hallway. Minutes later, voices -- the police.

The police hurried them out, but O'Dell couldn't help feeling
he was abandoning those left inside. And where was the shooter?

They crept down the stairs to the front door of Norris Hall. A
police officer blasted a chain from the handles, and they were out.

O'Dell sprinted through the wind and snow, took six steps in a
single bound, hurdled a wall. The shooter could be anywhere out here.

They flagged a police car, were delivered to an ambulance,
which delivered them to the hospital. The ambulance doors closed and it
pulled away. Only then did he relax.

The first days back

"I might have to stop at some point," O'Dell warned the police
lieutenant.

He wanted to know what the lieutenant could tell him. He
expected to see drawings of where the bullets came through the door. He
didn't anticipate a trip back into Norris Hall.

The lieutenant told him they would take it slow, so he agreed
to press on.

Like others, he had vowed not to be defined by what happened to
him. But he added a corollary: Let your response define you.

He returned to school Aug. 16 -- four months to the day after
the shooting -- feeling weak, vulnerable, unsure what school would be
like now. Would he be able to concentrate?

In his first days back, all the major network news
organizations interviewed him. So did several local affiliates.

Some people might look askance at his apparent thirst for
attention, he knew. But he didn't seek the interviews.

When a reporter asks for his help, he feels obliged to respond.

"He's gathering something from it," Hawley said.

He was changing, and it was not only the trauma that had done
it.

He spoke up often now. He carried himself with confidence. He
felt it.

People around him had noticed it, too. The veterinarian he
worked for once worried about O'Dell's ability to communicate with pet
owners. Not anymore.

"This is not the old Derek at all," his father said.

O'Dell took his strength where he could get it.

Twice during the first day of classes, he returned to the arch
of stones memorializing the April 16 fallen. He prayed with them, told
them about his day. He told Bishop about the new German professor. He
asked them for strength.

He has largely forgiven Cho, and manages to forget him most of
the time, too.

Still, he has an urge to meet Cho's family and do for them what
the families of the dead have done for him so many times, to release
them from their guilt.

That might be a last step in O'Dell's own healing. In the
meantime, he had taken another major step.

He walked slowly by the lieutenant's side to Norris 207.

The door was brand-new. Inside, the room was pristine white,
sanitary. The lights gleamed, the walls shone.

He entered doing what came naturally. He told the story again,
every detail.

He was scarred, yes, but with the scars came a recognition of
something in himself he had not known before.

Don't be defined by the experience. Be defined by your reaction
to it.

He stood in the spot where he made his stand that day. No fear
rushed back to him, no weakness.

He felt strong, not only for the triumph of returning to that
spot, but because what he did there at that door showed him his
strength, revealed to him his courage.

"This," he thought, "is my conquering spot."

"Unlikely Ambassador" - by Beth Macy

2008-03-05T09:50:00.000-08:00

Roanoke Times, The (VA)-August 19, 2007

The night of April 16, the poet sat staring at her computer.

She wanted to write a great poem, a message that would weave in
springtime in Appalachia and make the Virginia Tech community feel
whole again.

She wrote "We are Virginia Tech" in a single sitting. It was
sparse, simple, repetitive -- just 258 words.

When she read it back to herself that night, Nikki Giovanni
found it pedestrian. Not the symphonic elegy she had hoped for. She showed
it to no one, hoping inspiration might strike in the morning.

The next day came, but the words didn't. Had she been a student
in one of her own writing workshops, she might have snapped: "Ms.
Giovanni, I'm not finding a suitable metaphor here."

She didn't feel like her usual brave, vocal self. She felt
terrified.

It didn't occur to Giovanni that what she had to say would soon
appear on T-shirts and billboards across the nation, as emblematic of
the Virginia Tech shootings as the self-portraits of Seung-Hui Cho
pointing his gun.

But Giovanni's words and her surging, passionate delivery of
them that afternoon gave people permission to grieve and to go on. And
they did something even more unlikely: They made the radical, outspoken
activist the voice of the conservative university.

Interviewed countless times since April 16, Giovanni, 64, isn't
through speaking yet -- about her former student Cho, about the
shootings, about the responsibility she and others have to keep asking the
question: What might we have done differently?

'I know who did this'

Even in her trademark suit and man's tie, the university
distinguished professor seems softer now. She still has her platinum-dyed
hair. She still has "Thug Life" tattooed on her arm in memory of Tupac
Shakur.

But Giovanni seems almost vulnerable, like someone who's spent
a lot of time under police protection, which in fact she has.

People are tense at Tech, she said, especially in the English
department, where some professors' lives were threatened in the wake of
the shootings. Giovanni herself wasn't released from police watch until
early July.

"I go into the bathroom, and I listen first to see who might be
in there," she said. When someone emerges from the stairwell near her
corner office at Tech, she listens to make sure the footsteps
continue on down the hall.

Though she normally takes the summer off, Giovanni regularly
went to her office this summer -- to be with her colleagues, to reaffirm
to herself that this was her place and her home. Not something that
Seung-Hui Cho could forever spoil.

It's been four months since her former student killed 32
students and faculty and himself, and people still stop to hug her in Kroger.
She finds herself standing in front of the Bing cherries with tears in
her eyes.

"People forget; it hasn't been very long," she said during a
July interview in her office, amid posters of Tupac, Bob Marley and
herself. "It's still incredibly sad.

"Right now we're still in the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other
mode. We're all still holding each other up."

She was in transit when the shooting began, having begged her
way onto the red-eye from San Francisco after a speaking gig. She
didn't hear about the rampage until her plane landed in Roanoke at 11 a.m.,
when a young woman sitting nearby checked her phone. "My God, there's
been a shooting at Virginia Tech," she said. An airport TV confirmed
that 21 were dead.

Driving to Blacksburg, Giovanni flipped her radio dial,
searching for news, but she could only find music. It reminded her of being in
Africa during a political coup, when the government radio switches to
music. "It was the worst feeling, it really was. ... It felt worse
than 9/11 to me."

A media truck from Roanoke flew past her on the interstate, and
eventually she found a newscast. The number of dead kept growing.

Somewhere on Christiansburg Mountain, it hit her:

We are Virginia Tech, and we are sad.

At home, she juggled three phone lines the rest of the
afternoon: friends calling to check on her, Larry King's people wanting an
interview, Paula Zahn's people wanting a quote. The victim toll kept
rising.

When Virginia Fowler, her longtime partner and fellow English
professor, arrived home later that day, police still hadn't identified
or described the shooter. But Giovanni didn't need them to.

"Ginney, I know who did this," she said.

'An evil presence'

By now, the creative writing workshop story is legend: Troubled
student refuses to participate, intimidates others and is removed from
class. English department chairwoman tutors him instead.

For the first half of Giovanni's fall 2005 semester, Seung-Hui
Cho came to class with an attitude that said: Leave me alone. He wore
reflective glasses so he wouldn't have to make eye contact. He wore
ball caps and pulled his sweat shirt hood tight around his face.

"I deal in emotional knowledge, I'm not a scientist," Giovanni
said. "To me, it was simple: Cho was an evil presence."

A few weeks into the semester, he wrapped a scarf around his
head -- "like Lawrence of Arabia," she said.

Giovanni describes it as a daily ritual, her pleas to get Cho
to participate in class:

"Mr. Cho, please take your glasses off.

"Mr. Cho, please take your cap off."

She remembers counting -- "ten-thousand one, ten-thousand two"
-- while Cho slowly removed the offending accessories. He was equally
obstinate about suggestions to revise his work.

"Mr. Cho, I'm not being able to identify any changes here,"
Giovanni recalled saying.

He mumbled his responses in monotone, she recalled, and
repeatedly turned in the same poem -- about women's panties -- without
changing a word.

Later, a class discussion about the ethics of eating turtle
soup inspired him to write a poem lambasting Giovanni. He ended it with a
veiled threat to eat the class.

"I don't know what to do with that one, Mr. Cho," she
remembered saying. "Mr. Cho, I think all of us took that as a threat."

Cho mumbled something about Giovanni missing the irony in his
work.

When class attendance dropped markedly, she pulled another
student aside to ask what was going on.

That's when she learned that Cho was surreptitiously
photographing women below desk level. Giovanni considered that a violation, a
kind of rape. It troubled one student so much that she asked to meet with
Giovanni privately rather than face Cho in class.

Giovanni told Cho -- in front of the other students -- that he
needed to withdraw from her class or find another teacher.

He refused.

"Mr. Cho, this is not column A and column B. One of us must
leave," she recalled saying. "Mr. Cho, either you're gonna leave my room
or I'm gonna resign."

Again, a quiet monotone: "You won't resign."

"You do not, sir, know me well at all."

No connecting the dots

The rebukes never seemed to faze Cho, said Tracey Vaccarella, a
recent graduate who had three classes with him. "That gave you a very
odd feeling.

"There was maybe an undercurrent that he didn't get the
attention from girls that he wanted," she added. "He'd read his poems, and you
didn't know whether to laugh or what."

Halfway through the semester, Giovanni wrote then-department
chairwoman Lucinda Roy to say she would quit if Cho wasn't removed from
her class. Roy said she would tutor him one-on-one.

Some students thought Giovanni was overreacting, Vaccarella
said. But most were relieved when Cho left.

Giovanni wasn't really satisfied, at least not in retrospect.
"I was never asked about Cho again," she said, shaking her head. While
Roy reported the incident to administrators and the Cook Counseling
Center, "There was no connecting of the dots" between Giovanni,
counselors and higher-ups, Giovanni said.

That communication breakdown clearly weighs on her. She views
Roy's tutoring of Cho -- rather than kicking him out of class entirely,
or expelling him -- as a statement that "Nikki couldn't handle the
job."

"Look at it this way," she said. "The car's stuck in the mud
and somebody else comes along and says, 'See? I got the car out of the
mud.'

"Well, as it turned out, of course, the car had a bomb in it.
So maybe it should have stayed in the mud."

Roy declined to comment on the decision to tutor Cho.

"I believe that Nikki's energy and passion help to keep the
community strong," she wrote in an e-mail.

Giovanni recalls feeling very alone during that time, a sadness
exacerbated by grief over her mother's and sister's deaths earlier in
the year.

"Maybe I was patient with him for so long because I wanted to
make sure I wasn't neglecting him. ... Maybe if Mommy and [sister] Gary
hadn't died, my emotional state would've made me afraid of him."

Maybe then she'd have taken it to the dean herself.

Maybe if professors did a better job discussing troubled
students with one another.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. ...

Such what-if scenarios echo for everyone who crossed paths with
Seung-Hui Cho.

What Giovanni knows for sure is this: "We don't ask parents to
send their kids to school so we can send them back in a box.

"If there had been any way we could have stopped this from
happening -- and I mean any one of us, up to and including the professors
that took the bullets ..." Tears stream from her eyes.

"Every one of us ... would've taken those bullets if we could
have saved one student."

'Don't punk the president'

Giovanni hoped her voice wouldn't crack. It was the afternoon
of April 17, convocation day, and she wore her favorite black suit and
tie, her rhinestone Hokies pin, her mother's diamond earrings.

There was a sea of tearful students, looks of agony on their
faces.

There was President Bush, seated in the front row.

What would Giovanni say? Administrators were nervous, Giovanni
knew. After all, she'd flayed Bush many times in speeches and in
print. As she said on her 2002 Grammy-nominated compact disc: "I've always
felt free to complain about white people when they get on my nerves."

("Mercurial," is how Tech's lead spokesman, Larry Hincker,
described the poet. Asked if administrators were nervous about Giovanni's
performance, he chuckled and said, "I'll never be on the record about
that one.")

The president and the poet acknowledged each other with a nod.

But Giovanni knew this was no time for politics.

She had already crossed out the 22nd line of her poem: "Neither
does the Iraqi teenager dodging bombs."

It would appear in the later printed version, but she wouldn't
speak it today.

As Gov. Tim Kaine spoke and then Bush, Giovanni tapped her foot
in a steady cadence, a trick honed decades ago to help her nail the
rhythm of a poem.

She thought of the prayer Alan Shepard said as he was about to
become the first American in space: "Please, dear God, don't let me
[expletive] up."

She added her own line to the prayer: "Please, dear God, don't
let me punk the president off."

We are Virginia Tech

We are sad today

She had no idea she was being broadcast around the world.

We do not understand this tragedy

We know we did nothing to deserve it

She wanted to connect the world's grief with the students'
grief.

But neither does the child in Africa

Dying of AIDS ...

She jabbed her arm, waved her fist.

The cadence grew stronger, louder -- a crescendo wave of grief
and loss and conviction and hope.

We will prevail

We will prevail

We will prevail

We are

Virginia Tech

She dared the audience to believe anything less.

The performance was a contrast to everything that preceded it
-- the prayers, the news conferences, the panic that had gripped the
campus only one day before.

Giovanni wasn't sure she had nailed it at first. But when she
raised her arms in a shout-out to the people behind her, students began
to chant: "Let's go, Hokies."

As the chants grew louder, Giovanni spun in a circle, her arms
still raised. She pumped her fist in time to the clapping.

"Good job," Bush said, as they filed out of the coliseum.

Onward and unafraid

Hokies United, a student volunteer organization, raised more
than $200,000 for the Hokies Spirit Memorial Fund from sales of "We Are
Virginia Tech" T-shirts. Giovanni gave the rights to the poem to
Virginia Tech.

Strangers in airports who know nothing about her activism or
her civil rights poetry have approached her with, "Aren't you that
Virginia Tech poet?"

Giovanni's 10-year-old neighbor asked if she was famous enough
now to get him free football tickets on the 50-yard line. (She's
working on it.)

Not long ago, Tech alumnus Sam Scarborough stopped her near the
Drillfield to shake her hand. A teacher in Virginia Beach, he had
brought his wife and children to see the April 16 memorial, then under
construction.

"The day you got up on stage ..." he said, his voice cracking.
"I cry every time I think about it."

Friends have given her DVDs of the convocation, which she's set
aside. She hasn't been able to watch it yet.

One day soon she'll write the parents of sophomore cadet
Matthew La Porte, one of her favorite students. La Porte was killed as he
tried to grab Cho from behind.

"Matty had the typical boy problems -- he could be a goof-off
-- but he'd joined the corps and was really starting to settle in.

"He was just like a flower on the brink, the kind of kid you
could see being governor some day."

Even though summer's leaves block her from seeing it clearly,
Giovanni catches herself looking toward Shultz Hall, the building where
she taught Seung-Hui Cho. The blinds in Room 109 are drawn for the
summer.

"Being afraid of Virginia Tech is like being afraid of your
home," she said. "You just can't do that."

When she returns to Room 109, the blinds are going up.

Nikki Giovanni

n Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni in 1943; reared in
Cincinnati.

n Educated at Fisk University.

n Emerged as a voice in the black arts movement of the 1960s,
heralded by some critics as the most read black poet in America and
the "Princess of Black Poetry."

n Author of more than 20 books, mostly essays and poetry,
including "Black Feeling Black Talk," "Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day" and a
children's book about Rosa Parks.

n The poems in her recent collection, "Acolytes," range from
odes to the singer Nina Simone to a meditation on the best midnight
snack.

n Joined Virginia Tech faculty in 1987, now one of 14
University Distinguished Professors.

n Called a "national treasure" by writer Gloria Naylor and a
"living legend" by Oprah Winfrey.

n Has one son, Thomas, a lawyer in New York City.

n Lives in Christiansburg with English professor Virginia
Fowler, two dogs and a pond full of fish.

n Wrote "We Are Virginia Tech" the evening of April 16,
inspired by the desire to convey that "what we do is more important than what
is done to us." At the next day's convocation, the poem brought a
somber crowd to its feet.

"It's Been in the Family for Weeks" - by Tom Connor

2008-02-25T06:56:00.000-08:00

September 10, 1998

NOT since the 1920's has the New York region witnessed estate-building on the scale and pace of the late 1990's. These aren't the dinky 10,000-square-foot McMansions that are crowding the suburbs; they're serious turn-of-the-21st-century manor houses of 15,000, 25,000 and 40,000 square feet and more.

One problem with the new estates, however, is that they seem so, well, new. But this isn't a problem if you have lots of new money. Because as more and more well-heeled homeowners are discovering, you can simply pay architects, contractors and landscapers to make the places look as if they'd been there forever.

One popular 1990's makeover is instant ivy implants -- the equivalent of ear-level hair plugs and comb-overs for bald pates. Two years ago, Ceci Brothers, a site-management company in Greenwich, Conn., installed 100 two- to three-year-old ivy plants on the walls of a 17,000-square-foot, hand-cut granite house on 20 acres in North Greenwich for a 31-year-old investment banker and his wife.

''Masonry's a wealthy touch,'' Mike Ceci said, ''but the house looked very cold and stiff.'' Working from extension ladders, his crew hammered inch-long masonry nails into the mortar between the stone, then wrapped galvanized wire around the heads of the nails and painstakingly connected each runner or tendril. Each plant took up to three hours to install and cost about $250.

Nabel's Nurseries in White Plains supplies mature ivy to Ceci Brothers and other landscapers. To get a vigorous, estate-worthy plant, Rudy Nabel, whose father started the nursery in 1942, packs 15 strong cuttings into a seven-gallon pot. In two years' time, the ivy can grow as high as nine feet, with each cutting producing up to 30 tendrils.

''This was a nonexistent crop five years ago,'' Mr. Nabel said. ''It's because of the instant gratification that consumers want these days.''

While on the grounds of the granite house in Greenwich, Ceci Brothers also laid down a half million dollars' worth of topsoil, eight acres of sod, a truckload of old boxwood plants and hundreds of perennials -- carrying out a design by the Manhattan landscape architect Edmund Hollander.

''It's different now than in the mid-1980's,'' said Mr. Hollander, whose firm in recent months has designed some 50 gardens and exteriors for estates in Fairfield and Westchester Counties and in the Hamptons. ''This is less splash and more tradition and elegance. A lot of what's going on now is a repetition of the 1920's.''

But it's 1920's tradition at 1990's speed. ''I can't say to a client, 'This landscape's going to look great in the year 2015,' '' he said. ''That's not going to go over well.''

One tactic is to start planting vines and shrubs as soon as construction begins; another is to build the house close to really old trees. Frank Newbold, a broker with Sotheby's International Realty in East Hampton, noted an imposing Adirondack-style house on Jericho Lane there that ''is so close to a huge tree that it looks as if it'd been built at the same time the tree was planted, when in fact the house went up last week.''

''I think people are looking for roots,'' said Francis Fleetwood of the East Hampton architectural firm Fleetwood Lenahan McMullin, which over the last 18 years has designed the majority of the shingle-style mansions in Southampton and East Hampton. ''They'd all love to be born into a grand old house that had been handed down through the generations. So would I.''

Mark Finlay, an architect in Fairfield, Conn., also designs what he calls ''brand-new old buildings.'' ''It's all in the details,'' he said. ''It's custom windows and sills of four-and-a-half-inch-thick bluestone. It's the way the mortar's done. It's the color of the mortar -- sandy rather than gray.''

Mr. Finlay recently designed a fieldstone house in New Canaan, Conn., to look like an early colonial that had been added onto over the years. For a brick mansion in Greenwich, the architect ordered flat, untooled, rough-looking joints. ''If you look at old brick in Europe, it's really sloppy, because,'' he said, ''half the masons in Europe were drunk.'' Mr. Finlay recalled telling the masons on the project: '' 'Go have lunch and drink a couple of beers, then go to work.' They thought I was nuts.''

Another European look especially popular in the Hamptons is the massive chimney that stands on the horizon like the mast of a tall ship.

''Chimneys were once a focal point because that's how they heated homes,'' said Frank Dalene of Telemark Construction in Bridgehampton, which recently built a 17,000-square-foot, cast-concrete house with three 35-foot-high stacks. ''Now, they're the focal point because they've become architectural details.''

As with the new mansions themselves, homeowners want their chimneys with old details: intricate patterns in the brickwork, ornate corbeling and multiple decorative clay pots on top. Mr. Fleetwood favors ''snow washes'' -- up to 16 inches of mortar mounded over the chimney caps.

The shingled-down Hamptons are also experiencing a demand for historicity. Ben Krupinski, an East Hampton contractor specializing in big houses, is building three outsize stucco-and-limestone mansions. He adds brown pigment to the raw concrete for an old color and tone and sandblasts the limestone to make it appear weathered.

Even Mr. Fleetwood has begun using stone in the foundations and columns of his shingle houses. ''Stone implies permanence,'' he said. ''Most people like stone. We like stone.''

Of course, nothing quite gives stone an old, weathered look as much as old, weathered stone. Mr. Hollander imported several thousand square feet of ''antique'' wall and paving stones from estates being broken up in England to use in terraces around an elegant house on a private island off Long Island. And for the grounds of a new 40,000-square-foot stone house in Westchester, he took moss- and lichen-covered boulders harvested from a Connecticut field and arranged them in the middle of a 100-foot stream he's creating behind the house. ''You can't start with new rock,'' he explained.

Meanwhile, back in Greenwich, the ivy implanted last year is now 15 feet high and thickening. If left alone, the air roots will begin pulling the mortar away from the granite. Then the homeowners must either pay to have the house given a light trim three times a year, as estate owners did in the past -- or build a new mansion and start all over again.

"When Whippersnappers and Geezers Collide" by Lisa Belkin

2008-02-23T19:11:00.000-08:00

July 26, 2007

By LISA BELKIN
SHORTLY after they reported for work this summer, groups of interns at Ernst & Young were invited to an orientation program that included a PowerPoint presentation titled “Hello. W U?!”

For those out there who need translation, that’s how Generation Y, to which these 20-somethings all belong, might ask “What’s up?” in a text message.

And this meeting was all about translation. “Strategies to Connect With Baby Boomers” was the title of one of the slides. Its advice? When the boss comes in to complain that the young team is “spending too much time text-messaging each other and listening to iPods,” it is just not the best time to explain that you have to “leave early to meet your volunteer commitments.”

Summer is the season of culture shock in the working world, when the old guard comes face to face with a next wave of newcomers, and the result is something like lost tribes encountering explorers for the first time.

Add to this the favorite fact of human resource managers everywhere: this is the first time in history that four generations — those who lived through World War II, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y — are together in the workplace.

Managers tell stories of summer associates who come to meetings with midriffs exposed, baring a belly ring; of interns who walk through the halls engaged with iPods; of new hires who explain they need Fridays off because their boyfriends get Fridays off and they have a share in a beach house. Then there is the tale of the summer hire who sent a text message to a senior partner asking “Are bras required as part of the dress code?”

“They have an attitude toward work that looks like laziness and looks like impatience,” said Janice Smith, who leads the Ernst & Young seminar, carefully putting the best light on Gen Y qualities that are flummoxing managers, “but they don’t understand that’s how it looks.”

There have always been overconfident 20-year-olds, just as there have always been elders to say, “When I was your age. ...” Perhaps poetically, the last group to upend the working world with its ambition and drive are now looking down from the C-suites at their children, Gen Y, who are as single-minded in their search for balance as their parents were in their quest for success.

Surveys over the last few years have found that this group is looking for work that includes a “flexible work schedule” (92 percent, according to a Harris Interactive poll), “requires creativity” (96 percent) and “allows me to have an impact on the world” (97 percent). And when the polling firm Roper Starch Worldwide did a survey comparing workplace attitudes among generations, 90 percent of Gen Yers said they wanted co-workers “who make work fun.” No other generation polled put that requirement in their top five.

So the de rigueur summer event at many companies now, as much a part of signing on as the human resources forms and the ID card, is a seminar designed to close this generation gap. At Arrow Electronics it is “Generations in the Workplace,” while Michelle Marks, an expert on organizational behavior at George Mason University, calls hers “Managing the Challenges of the Gen X and Gen Y Work Force.” Aflac has “Generational Differences.” All are less than two years old.

Much of the purpose is to teach Gen Y the basics, which have often been neglected along the way. “They all have amazing résumés,” said Mary Crane, the founder of a Denver-based consulting firm and part of a new crop of experts teaching companies to navigate generational conflicts. She has been traveling the country “taming” Gen Y at workplaces from the law firms of Dewey Ballantine and Simpson Thacher, to the Orange County Employee Benefit Council.

These young employees, she said, had to overachieve to get through the most competitive college admissions process in history, so they don’t feel particularly inclined to pay their dues. “They have climbed Everest and excavated Machu Picchu,” she said, “but they have never had the experience of showing up for work at 9 a.m.”

When speaking to this group, Ms. Crane lays out scenarios. When you e-mail a client, do you use his or her first name in the salutation? Only if he or she has indicated that would be all right. At a business lunch, who sits in the chair pulled out by the waiter? “The client always goes first,” she said, “unless that seems to make the client uncomfortable, in which case, just sit down.”

Some of the blame for this knowledge gap lies with the very elders who are scratching their heads.

“This is the largest, healthiest, most pampered generation in history,” she said. “They were expected to spend their spare time making the varsity team,” not working part-time, Ms. Crane said. Their parents, she said, showed their love by staying late at the office to bring home more money. The children expect to be home for dinner. Career dominance, their thinking goes, can be achieved by 5 p.m., can’t it?

Billy Warden, an account director at the marketing company Capstrat in North Carolina, learned all this anew recently when he was being interviewed by an intern who was working on a booklet about Gen Y and work. The topic was job interviews, and, as Mr. Warden remembers it, the 20-year-old was explaining “that job interviews are a two-way conversation, where the company puts out what they want and expect from me, and I put out there what I want and expect from the company.”

Mr. Warden didn’t think that’s what interviews were. “Maybe in 10 years you’ll get to state your expectations,” he said he told the intern. “Right now, you’re a box of cereal and you’re going to have to sell yourself and hope that someone decides to put you in their grocery cart and give you a try.”

It is a concept that has all but disappeared from internship programs, where employees make it clear they have no patience for busywork.

“I walked away from one internship because it was a waste of my time,” says Ryan Healy, who last spring founded Employee Evolution, a Web site that gives advice to Gen Yers entering the work force. “We have limits.” He is 23.

For all the talk of teaching Generation Y, with a worker shortage looming, workplaces everywhere are bending to their needs.

So while Ernst & Young is teaching its Gen Y employees how to talk politely to partners, it has also started teaching those partners how to send text messages. Similarly, Liggett Stashower, an advertising and public relations firm in Cleveland, encourages summer interns to blog about their experiences. Deloitte & Touche runs a summer film competition (the winner will be posted on YouTube), on the theory that this is an area where interns in particular can show off. And the technology company Avnet changed its internship program so that interns spend the entire summer in one department, a response to suggestions from previous groups who felt they weren’t doing enough substantive work.

Which leads to the question — who exactly is grooming whom?

A quick tally would seem to show Gen Y in the lead, setting the life-work agenda. But it would be rash to underestimate the Me Generation. As boomers learn to text more quickly and interns learn to wear suits, the only sure bet is that the tug of war between these generations will shape the workplace for decades to come.

"Move Over Oil, There's Money in Texas Wind" by Clifford Krauss

2008-02-23T19:07:00.001-08:00

February 23, 2008

SWEETWATER, Tex. — The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades that span as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.

“That’s just money you’re hearing,” he said as they hummed in a brisk breeze recently.

Texas, once the oil capital of North America, is rapidly turning into the capital of wind power. After breakneck growth the last three years, Texas has reached the point that more than 3 percent of its electricity, enough to supply power to one million homes, comes from wind turbines.

Texans are even turning tapped-out oil fields into wind farms, and no less an oilman than Boone Pickens is getting into alternative energy.

“I have the same feelings about wind,” Mr. Pickens said in an interview, “as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” He is planning to build the biggest wind farm in the world, a $10 billion behemoth that could power a small city by itself.

Wind turbines were once a marginal form of electrical generation. But amid rising concern about greenhouse gases from coal-burning power plants, wind power is booming. Installed wind capacity in the United States grew 45 percent last year, albeit from a small base, and a comparable increase is expected this year.

At growth rates like that, experts said, wind power could eventually make an important contribution to the nation’s electrical supply. It already supplies about 1 percent of American electricity, powering the equivalent of 4.5 million homes. Environmental advocates contend it could eventually hit 20 percent, as has already happened in Denmark. Energy consultants say that 5 to 7 percent is a more realistic goal in this country.

The United States recently overtook Spain as the world’s second-largest wind power market, after Germany, with $9 billion invested last year. A recent study by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., projected $65 billion in investment from 2007 to 2015.

Despite the attraction of wind as a nearly pollution-free power source, it does have limitations. Though the gap is closing, electricity from wind remains costlier than that generated from fossil fuels. Moreover, wind power is intermittent and unpredictable, and the hottest days, when electricity is needed most, are usually not windy.

The turbines are getting bigger and their blades can kill birds and bats. Aesthetic and wildlife issues have led to opposition emerging around the country, particularly in coastal areas like Cape Cod. Some opposition in Texas has cropped up as well, including lawsuits to halt wind farms that were thought to be eyesores or harmful to wetlands.

But the opposition has been limited, and has done little to slow the rapid growth of wind power in Texas. Some Texans see the sleek new turbines as a welcome change in the landscape.

“Texas has been looking at oil and gas rigs for 100 years, and frankly, wind turbines look a little nicer,” said Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner, whose responsibilities include leasing state lands for wind energy development. “We’re No. 1 in wind in the United States, and that will never change.”

Texas surpassed California as the top wind farm state in 2006. In January alone, new wind farms representing $700 million of investment went into operation in Texas, supplying power sufficient for 100,000 homes.

Supporters say Texas is ideal for wind-power development, not just because it is windy. It also has sparsely populated land for wind farms, fast-growing cities and a friendly regulatory environment for developers.

“Texas could be a model for the entire nation,” said Patrick Woodson, a senior development executive with E.On, a German utility operating here.

The quaint windmills of old have been replaced by turbines that stand as high as 20-story buildings, with blades longer than a football field and each capable of generating electricity for small communities. Powerful turbines are able to capture power even when the wind is relatively weak, and they help to lower the cost per kilowatt hour.

Much of the boom in the United States is being driven by foreign power companies with experience developing wind projects, including Iberdrola of Spain, Energias de Portugal and Windkraft Nord of Germany. Foreign companies own two-thirds of the wind projects under construction in Texas.

A short-term threat to the growth of wind power is the looming expiration of federal clean-energy tax credits, which Congress has allowed to lapse several times over the years. Advocates have called for extending those credits and eventually enacting a national renewable-power standard that would oblige states to expand their use of clean power sources.

A longer-term problem is potential bottlenecks in getting wind power from the places best equipped to produce it to the populous areas that need electricity. The part of the United States with the highest wind potential is a corridor stretching north from Texas through the middle of the country, including sparsely populated states like Montana and the Dakotas. Power is needed most in the dense cities of the coasts, but building new transmission lines over such long distances is certain to be expensive and controversial.

“We need a national vision for transmission like we have with the national highway system,” said Robert Gramlich, policy director for the American Wind Energy Association. “We have to get over the hump of having a patchwork of electric utility fiefdoms.”

Texas is better equipped to deal with the transmission problems that snarl wind energy in other states because a single agency operates the electrical grid and manages the deregulated utility market in most of the state.

Last July, the Texas Public Utility Commission approved transmission lines across the state capable of delivering as much as 25,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2012, presuming the boom continues. That would be five times the wind power generated in the state today, and it would drive future national growth.

Shell and the TXU Corporation are planning to build a 3,000-megawatt wind farm north of here in the Texas Panhandle, leapfrogging two FPL Energy Texas wind farms to become the biggest in the world.

Not to be outdone, Mr. Pickens is planning his own 150,000-acre Panhandle wind farm of 4,000 megawatts that would be even larger and cost him $10 billion.

“I like wind because it’s renewable and it’s clean and you know you are not going to be dealing with a production decline curve,” Mr. Pickens said. “Decline curves finally wore me out in the oil business.”

At the end of 2007, Texas ranked No. 1 in the nation with installed wind power of 4,356 megawatts (and 1,238 under construction), far outdistancing California’s 2,439 megawatts (and 165 under construction). Minnesota and Iowa came in third and fourth with almost 1,300 megawatts each (and 46 and 116 under construction, respectively).

Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and Oregon, states with smaller populations than Texas, all get 5 to 8 percent of their power from wind farms, according to estimates by the American Wind Energy Association.

It has dawned on many Texans in recent years that wind power, whatever its other pros and cons, represents a potent new strategy for rural economic development.

Since the wind boom began a few years ago, the total value of property here in Nolan County has doubled, and the county judge, Tim Fambrough, estimated it would increase an additional 25 percent this year. County property taxes are going down, home values are going up and the county has extra funds to remodel the courthouse and improve road maintenance.

“Wind reminds us of the old oil and gas booms,” Mr. Fambrough said.

Teenagers who used to flee small towns like Sweetwater after high school are sticking around to take technical courses in local junior colleges and then work on wind farms. Marginal ranches and cotton farms are worth more with wind turbines on them.

“I mean, even the worst days for wind don’t compare to the busts in the oil business,” said Bobby Clark, a General Electric wind technician who gave up hauling chemicals in the oil fields southwest of here to live and work in Sweetwater. “I saw my daddy go from rags to riches and back in the oil business, and I sleep better.”

Wind companies are remodeling abandoned buildings, and new stores, hotels and restaurants have opened around this old railroad town.

Dandy’s Western Wear, the local cowboy attire shop, cannot keep enough python skin and cowhide boots in stock because of all the Danes and Germans who have come to town to invest and work in the wind fields, then take home Texas souvenirs.

“Wind has invigorated our business like you wouldn’t believe,” said Marty Foust, Dandy’s owner, who recently put in new carpeting and air-conditioning. “When you watch the news you can get depressed about the economy, but we don’t get depressed. We’re now in our own bubble.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of an article Saturday about the growing use of wind power in Texas left unclear the amount of money that Louis Brooks is paid for having 78 wind turbines on his ranch on the outskirts of Sweetwater, Tex. It is $500 a month for each, not $500 for all of them.

"The Bride Wore Very Little" by Ruth La Ferla

2008-02-23T19:04:00.000-08:00

February 21, 2008
THE gown was almost wanton — fluid but curvy with a neckline that plummeted dangerously. “It makes me feel sexy and beautiful,” said Natasha DaSilva, who slipped it on for a fitting last week.

Cut away at the rear to reveal a tattoo at the small of her back, the dress suggested a languorous night in the honeymoon suite.

Except that Ms. DaSilva, who will be married on Long Island in September, plans to wear it at the altar.

“Why not?” she asked. “I want to look back in 20 years and feel like I looked hot on my wedding day.”

Ms. DaSilva, 26, thinks of herself as adventurous, but not so brash that she is about to cross a line. Dressing for a wedding as if it were an after-party is accepted among her family and friends. “For my generation, looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even,” she said. “Who cares about that part anymore?”

Ms. DaSilva is typical of a growing number of brides flouting convention by flaunting their curves. More vamp than virgin, many are selecting gowns that bare a generous expanse of cleavage, midsection, lower back or thigh, temptress styles that may be better suited to a gala or boudoir than to a church or ballroom.

“Brides today absolutely want to look sexy and glamorous,” said Mara Urshel, an owner and the president of Kleinfeld, the venerable Manhattan bridal salon. In recent months, the store has seen a spike in demand for plunging necklines and negligee looks, one that has only intensified since the spring bridal collections began arriving in stores. For brides shopping now for gowns to wear at summer or early fall weddings, “there is a lot of freedom of choice, and these girls exercise every bit of it,” Ms. Urshel said.

Determined to look torrid on their wedding day, they are picking dresses modeled, say, on the one worn by Christina Aguilera, who was married in 2005 in a gown with a plummeting neckline and ruffled fishtail hem. Or maybe the hope is to emulate Sarah Jessica Parker, who, in the forthcoming film version of “Sex and the City,” spills out of the front of her wedding dress.

“Young women increasingly look to the red carpet for style ideas,” said Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine. “They are very aware of how they look,” she added. “They diet, they work out. And when they marry, they want to be the celebrity of their own event.”

To accommodate them, the once rigidly corseted bridal industry has loosened its stays. At the spring bridal shows in New York last October, tastemakers like Vera Wang, Oscar de la Renta, Reem Acra, Angel Sanchez and Carolina Herrera unveiled a preponderance of strapless styles, trumpet shapes and even a few above-the-knee looks. More-daring designers offered filmy peignoir dresses, two-piece looks and skirts slit all the way to the hip.

Some of these va-voom confections seem tailor-made for the bride who envisions the march down the aisle as a long-dreamed-of photo op, and the reception as an after-party on the scale of Oscars night.

“Women now are looking at their weddings more like a movie premiere,” said Jose Dias, a designer for Sarah Danielle, a New York bridal house.

These steamy fantasies extend to their choice of location. “It used to be that unless you married at home, you were married in a church,” Ms. Bratten said. But today fewer weddings take place in a house of worship, and fewer still in the bride’s hometown.

According to a 2006 survey by Condé Nast Bridal Media, 16 percent of couples choose a destination wedding — a fourfold increase from a decade ago. The same survey found that only 46 percent of brides are married in a church or synagogue, down from 55 percent the year before. With weddings transported to other locales comes a loosening of conventions.

Whether they marry in a walled garden, on a tennis court, on a yacht or at the beach, “brides are more focused on the after-party, and on personalizing it,” Ms. Bratten said.

Beginning with the gown. Today the prevailing fantasy is no longer, “ ‘I want to be a princess in my ball gown,’ ” Mr. Dias said. “A lot of women have done that already for their prom.”

Mr. Dias, who is based in Los Angeles, accommodates clients’ desires for dresses that echo runway trends with halter-tops and off-the-shoulder gowns that are more emphatically provocative than the strapless looks that have become commonplace. His dresses are cut to appeal to the bride who is “confident in her sexuality,” he said.

Similar considerations prompted the designer Monique Lhuillier, a favorite in Hollywood, to fashion a dress with an Empire bodice, wide lace straps and a wispy chiffon skirt — features more often found in a nightgown. A hit of Ms. Lhuillier’s spring bridal collection, the dress is available at Kleinfeld.

Yielding to clients’ demands, Pnina Tornai, an Israeli-born designer, specializes in patently vixenish gowns. Only a couple of years ago Ms. Tornai’s dresses — often cut from semi-sheer panels of lace — met with a chilly reception in New York. “When I first came to show my collection at Kleinfeld, I was thrown out the door,” she said. Undaunted, she modified her dresses and several months later returned. Today her gowns are among the store’s best sellers.

For brides who want to maintain the traditional modesty during the wedding ceremony but cut loose at the reception, there is the increasingly popular option of topping the dress with a shawl, stole or bolero.

When Jana Pasquel, a New York society figure and jewelry designer, said her vows in a convent in Mexico City last November, she wore bouffant dress by Vera Wang; effusively romantic, it was traditional except for the neckline, which revealed more than Ms. Pasquel cared to show.

Her father, who is Mexican, “is a traditional Catholic,” said Ms. Pasquel, 31. “He would not have liked me to walk down the aisle like that, so I had the designer make a cover-up, a kind of a bolero, very full and infanta-looking. It came all the way up to my neck.”

At a second marriage ceremony later that week on a beach in Acapulco, Ms. Pasquel thought only of pleasing herself. Inspired by a trip to India, she wore a tiny midriff-baring bodice and an abundant skirt made of gold leaf. More sensuous than brazen, it made an impression, she recalled. “People talked about it — a lot.”

Catherine Cuddy, an insurance analyst in New Jersey, was similarly focused on turning heads when she married in Bryant Park in New York last October. She dispensed with the customary long, fitted sleeves and train in favor of a halter style that dipped to the small of her back.

Even a veil was too much for her. “I didn’t want to cover up my dress,” said Ms. Cuddy, 33, a self-described Rita Hayworth type. Or the torrents of curls that rushed past her shoulders. Or, for that matter, her gym-toned back.

To get in shape for her gown, a white lace sheath that appeared to have been turned on a lathe, she stepped up visits with her trainer from one to three sessions a week. Ms. Cuddy had no thought of defying tradition or making a statement of any kind. She simply wanted to make the most of her curves, she said.

When she marries in Long Island City next fall, Ms. DaSilva, too, will dress as she sees fit — and with her mother’s blessing. “My mom loves my gown,” she said delightedly. “She thinks it’s very figure-flattering.”

Would her male relatives object?

“Oh, no, no, no,” Ms. DaSilva said. “Besides, in my family, we’re mostly women. It’s pretty much — we’re in control.”

"For 'EcoMoms,' Saving Earth Begins at Home" - By Patricia Leigh Brown

2008-02-17T15:33:00.000-08:00

February 16, 2008

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — The women gathered in the airy living room, wine poured and pleasantries exchanged. In no time, the conversation turned lively — not about the literary merits of Geraldine Brooks or Cormac McCarthy but the pitfalls of antibacterial hand sanitizers and how to retool the laundry using only cold water and biodegradable detergent during non-prime-time energy hours (after 7 p.m.).

Move over, Tupperware. The EcoMom party has arrived, with its ever-expanding “to do” list that includes preparing waste-free school lunches; lobbying for green building codes; transforming oneself into a “locovore,” eating locally grown food; and remembering not to idle the car when picking up children from school (if one must drive). Here, the small talk is about the volatile compounds emitted by dry-erase markers at school.

Perhaps not since the days of “dishpan hands” has the household been so all-consuming. But instead of gleaming floors and sparkling dishes, the obsession is on installing compact fluorescent light bulbs, buying in bulk and using “smart” power strips that shut off electricity to the espresso machine, microwave, X-Box, VCR, coffee grinder, television and laptop when not in use.

“It’s like eating too many brownies one day and then jogging extra the next,” said Kimberly Danek Pinkson, 38, the founder of the EcoMom Alliance, speaking to the group of efforts to curb eco-guilt through carbon offsets for air travel.

Part “Hints from Heloise” and part political self-help group, the alliance, which Ms. Pinkson says has 9,000 members across the country, joins a growing subculture dedicated to the “green mom,” with blogs and Web sites like greenandcleanmom.blogspot.com and eco-chick.com. Web-based organizations like the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md., advocate reducing consumption and offer a registry that helps brides “celebrate the less-material wedding of your dreams.”

At an EcoMom circle in Palo Alto, executive mothers whipped out spreadsheets to tally their goals, inspired by a 10-step program that urges using only nontoxic products for cleaning, bathing and make-up, as well as cutting down garbage by 10 percent.

“I used to feel anxiety,” said Kathy Miller, 49, an alliance member, recalling life before she started investigating weather-sensitive irrigation controls for her garden with nine growing zones. “Now I feel I’m doing something.”

The notion of “ecoanxiety” has crept into the culture here. It was the subject of a recent cover story in San Francisco magazine that quotes a Berkeley mother so stressed out about the extravagance of her nightly baths that she started to reuse her daughter’s bath water. Where there is ecoanxiety, of course, there are ecotherapists.

“The truth is, we’re not living very naturally,” said Linda Buzzell, a therapist in Santa Barbara who publishes the quarterly EcoTherapy News and often holds sessions in her backyard permaculture food forest. “We’re in our cars, staring at the computer screen, separated most of the day from the people we love.”

“Activism can help counteract depression,” Ms. Buzzell added. “But if we get caught up in trying to save the world single-handedly, we’re just going to burn out.”

Like many young women, Ms. Pinkson’s motherhood — her son Corbin is now 6 — coincided with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and the advent of treehugger.com and grist.com. A favorite online column is “Ask Umbra,” whose author weighs in on whether it is better to buy leather shoes or “pleather” ones that could contain solvents.

Shaina Forsman, a 13-year-old daughter of eco-mother Beth Forsman, said the alliance branch in San Rafael helped her mother take action at home. Her mother turned the thermostat down so low that Shaina sometimes wore a jacket inside, she said proudly. She was also monitoring time spent in the shower, so as not to waste water.

Shaina said she tried to get her mother to compost, but “we got ants.”

One of the country’s wealthiest places, Marin County, is hardly a hub of voluntary simplicity; its global footprint, according to county statistics, is 27 acres per person, a measure of the estimated amount of land it takes to support each person’s lifestyle (24 is the American average).

Members of the EcoMom Alliance “are fighting a values battle,” said Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., and the author of “The High Price of Materialism.” “They are surrounded by materialism trying to figure out how to create a life more oriented toward intrinsic values.”

Wendy Murphy, 41, a member of EcoMoms in San Anselmo, became an activist after she noticed that the new tablecloths in her children’s preschool contained polyvinyl chloride. She and a fellow mother, working with the Green Schools Initiative, a nonprofit in Berkeley, developed green guidelines for shopping, like buying chlorine-free cleaning products, low-formaldehyde furniture and toys made of natural materials.

The matter of toys is particularly thorny. At the EcoMom party in San Rafael, women traded ideas about recycled toys for birthday presents and children’s clothing swaps. Then there is the issue of the materials used in imported toys. “It’s ‘Mom, these come from China,’ ” Pam Nessi, 35, said of her daughters’ recent inspection of two of their dolls. “It can be overwhelming. You don’t want them to freak out.”

At last year’s Step It Up rallies, a day of environmental demonstrations across the country, the largest group of organizers were “mothers concerned about the disintegrating environment for their children,” said Bill McKibben, a founder of the event and author of “The End of Nature.”

Women have been instrumental in the environmental movement from the start, including their involvement in campaigns a century ago to save the Palisades along the Hudson River and sequoias in California and, more recently, Lois Gibbs’s fight against toxic waste at Love Canal.

In public opinion surveys, women express significantly higher levels of environmental concern than men, said Riley Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.

Lately “local lifestyle activism,” much of it driven by women, has been on the rise and is likely to continue, Dr. Dunlap said. “Just belonging to a national environmental organization, which seemed effective in the 1970s and ’80s, doesn’t work anymore, particularly in an era of government unresponsiveness,” he said.

Ms. Pinkson and her colleagues are well aware of “the mom demographic,” as they call it, in which, according to surveys for the Boston Consulting Group, women say they “influence or control” 80 percent of discretionary household purchases. Thus far, their thrust has been more about being green consumers than taking political action.

The eco life can occasionally spawn domestic strife.

Julie DeFord, a 33-year-old mother in Petaluma, said the high cost of organic produce prompted serious “conversations” between her and her husband, Curt, a lawyer, especially after seven nights of chard.

And ecomotherhood is not always sisterly.

At the EcoMom party recently, some guests took the hostess, Liz Held, to task for her wall-to-wall carpeting (potential off-gassing), her painted walls (unhealthful volatile organic compounds) and the freshly cut flowers that she had set out for the occasion (not organic). Their problems with the S.U.V. in the driveway were self-explanatory.

All the new eco-perfectionism did not seem to faze her. “I look around my house and think, ‘I haven’t changed all my light bulbs,’ ” she said. “But it doesn’t fill me with guilt. I think about all the things I’ve done so far. I just try to focus on the positive.”

"Marketers Are Joining the Varsity" - by Stuart Elliott

2008-02-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

June 11, 2007

Athletes, if they are talented, train hard and get a break or two, can climb the sports ladder from high school to college to the pros. Madison Avenue, sensing a lucrative opportunity, is heading the other way.

Decades after marketers began selling products by capitalizing on consumer interest in professional teams, then college teams, they are becoming big boosters of high school sports.

Big media companies are getting into the market as well, in part by offering high school competitors a taste of the exposure that is typically lavished on college and pro athletes. In March, the CSTV Networks division of the CBS Corporation — the “CS” stands for college sports — acquired MaxPreps, which operates a Web site (maxpreps.com) and has more than a million high school athletes in its database. Last month, CSTV began creating video-on-demand television channels under the MaxPreps brand carrying high school sports programming.

Another media giant, the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, formed an alliance in December with Takkle, which operates a social-networking Web site for high school athletes (takkle.com). Visitors to the site can nominate students for the familiar “Face in the Crowd” feature in Sports Illustrated magazine.

“High school kids are more sophisticated than a generation ago,” said Mark Ford, president and publisher of Sports Illustrated in New York, “and brands like Nike and Gatorade are on this, reaching athletes at a much earlier stage than they previously have.”

The goal is to gain favor with student athletes and also their coaches, teachers and principals — not to mention their fans, friends and families.

“Energy for student athletes, and the moms who keep up with them” is, for instance, the theme of advertisements for EAS AdvantEDGE nutritional bars and shakes, sold by Abbott Laboratories.

High school athletes buy all the obvious products — sneakers, gear, sports beverages — along with general items like grooming aids, magazines and video games. Many high schoolers shop for the family while their parents work, so they may be buying groceries along with items for themselves.

Students can also influence the purchasing choices of their parents in important categories like cars, cellphones and computers.

For example, in 2005 Allstate Insurance started coordinating a program for local agents “to demonstrate their support of high school athletes,” said Lisa Cochrane, vice president for integrated marketing communications at Allstate in Northbrook, Ill. Today, the brand is present in more than 700 high schools where agents sponsor teams and make donations to athletic departments.

“In many, many communities, high school athletics is one of the premier events,” Ms. Cochrane said, adding: “Teenagers themselves are not big customers for insurance, but their parents are. And they will be, in the future.”

The trend is also visible in the popular culture, as two TV series — “Friday Night Lights” on NBC and “One Tree Hill” on CW — are centered on high school teams that play football and basketball, respectively. Both have attracted sponsors willing to pay to weave their brands into plot lines; among them are Applebee’s restaurants, Cingular Wireless and Secret deodorant.

“We’ve spent more than 30 years building our relationships with customers,” said Jeff Webb, chief executive at Varsity Brands in Memphis, which specializes in goods and services for high school cheerleading and dance teams. “In the last 10 years, our programs with consumer marketers have expanded dramatically.”

Companies like Bic, S. C. Johnson & Son, Nike, PepsiCo and Playtex Products work with Varsity Brands, which sends 300 field representatives to high schools across the country to give away product samples and coupons and operates cheerleader camps that draw about 280,000 high school students each year.

“They’re trying to find unique ways to reach the teen audience,” Mr. Webb said of marketers, adding that cheerleaders and other student athletes are especially attractive because “they’re visible, they’re leaders and they’re influential.”

The ardor among advertisers to go back to high school coincides with the rising national attention to junior sports. Examples include the basketball star LeBron James appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was still in high school, coverage of high school sports tournaments and all-star games in mainstream media, and programming on CSTV devoted to “Generation Next” high school football and basketball players (and which colleges might recruit them).

One reason that high school is getting its own chapter in the sports-marketing playbook is the large number of athletically inclined students in grades 9 through 12.

Call them Millennials, Generation Y or baby boom babies, the 7.2 million children who played sports in high school during the 2005-6 school year, as estimated by the National Federation of State High School Associations, represent a target market that has grown 80 percent since the 1971-72 school year.

“We’re seeing sports becoming increasingly important for young girls as more and more of them are being empowered through athletics,” said Lela Coffey, associate North American marketing director for the Tampax brand of feminine hygiene products owned by Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati.

Another reason that advertisers are crowding high school gymnasiums is their newfound ability to use the Internet, in the form of social-networking Web sites, to unite what had been diffused audiences.

“Technology allows you for the first time to aggregate small, fragmented communities in one place and try to reach the athletes themselves,” said Brian Bedol, president and chief executive of CSTV Networks. “It’s a very different approach from fan-based college and pro sports.”

The eagerness among marketers to clamber down the sports ladder worries those who are concerned with the intensifying presence of marketing in the American culture.

“Youths are overwhelmed with commercial messages,” said Robert Weissman, managing director at Commercial Alert in Washington, a nonprofit advocacy organization that decries what it considers to be creeping commercialization.

“To the extent possible, schools should be a haven from those pressures,” he added.

Most marketers turning their attention to athletes in high schools already “are linked up with sponsorships at the professional level and the college level,” Mr. Weissman said, “so they get to exploit the kids on the cheap.”

And by sponsoring local teams, advertisers “get the benefit of seeming to be part of the community,” he added, even when they are not.

Needless to say, the companies involved with high school sports describe themselves as sensitive to the potential pitfalls.

“We don’t want to be too intrusive,” said David Birnbaum, chief executive at Takkle in New York, which is owned by investors that include Greycroft Partners and the Wasserman Media Group.

For instance, no ads appear on the takkle.com home page, Mr. Birnbaum said, because “it’s not just about the dollars.”

And although “I’m not going to say we wouldn’t” ever accept sponsors that peddle products like candy or soft drinks, he added, the intent is to run “the ads that the athletes want to see, that speak to their passion and engage them the way they want to be engaged.”

(When Varsity Brands works for PepsiCo, employees distribute Propel Fitness Water to high school cheerleaders rather than soda.)

As Under Armour, the maker of athletic apparel, completes plans for a campaign to begin on July 15, carrying the theme “Team Girl,” the inclusion of high school athletes with their college counterparts is being handled carefully, said Steve Battista, vice president for brand marketing in Baltimore.

Female high school athletes were assembled in focus groups to gather opinions, he added, which led to changes in marketing approaches.

For example, “we’ve had a women’s campaign featuring Heather Mitts, a women’s soccer star, on her own, not with the rest of her team,” Mr. Battista said, “but the girls said they want to see her with her team.”

As CSTV adds MaxPreps to its operations, Mr. Bedol of CSTV said, “often it comes down to judgment calls” when determining how to speak to students younger than the college students.

“We need to be vigilant,” he added, “and make sure we’re responding to the needs of our audience, not just to the needs of our marketers.”

What about going even younger? “I don’t think we’re looking to go into middle school or younger,” Mr. Bedol said.

At the cheerleader camps that Varsity Brands operates, however, Mr. Webb said, about 25,000 students who attend each year are from junior high and middle schools.

"Online Schooling Grows, Setting off a Debate" - by Sam Dillon

2008-02-17T15:27:00.000-08:00

February 1, 2008

MILWAUKEE — Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school.

Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.

One of the sharpest debates has concerned the Weldies’ school in Wisconsin, where last week the backers of online education persuaded state lawmakers to keep it and 11 other virtual schools open despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union. John Watson, a consultant in Colorado who does an annual survey of education that is based on the Internet, said events in Wisconsin followed the pattern in other states where online schools have proliferated fast.

“Somebody says, ‘What’s going on, does this make sense?’ ” Mr. Watson said. “And after some inquiry most states have said, ‘Yes, we like online learning, but these are such new ways of teaching children that we’ll need to change some regulations and get some more oversight.’ ”

Two models of online schooling predominate. In Florida, Illinois and half a dozen other states, growth has been driven by a state-led, state-financed virtual school that does not give a diploma but offers courses that supplement regular work at a traditional school. Generally, these schools enroll only middle and high school students.

At the Florida Virtual School, the largest Internet public school in the country, more than 50,000 students are taking courses this year. School authorities in Traverse City, Mich., hope to use online courses provided by the Michigan Virtual School next fall to educate several hundred students in their homes, alleviating a classroom shortage.

The other model is a full-time online charter school like the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. About 90,000 children get their education from one of 185 such schools nationwide. They are publicly financed, mostly elementary and middle schools.

Many parents attracted to online charters have previously home-schooled their children, including Mrs. Weldie. Her children — Isabel, Harry and Eleanor, all in elementary school — download assignments and communicate intermittently with their certified teachers over the Internet, but they also read story books, write in workbooks and do arithmetic at a table in their basement. Legally, they are considered public school students, not home-schoolers, because their online schools are taxpayer-financed and subject to federal testing requirements.

Despite enthusiastic support from parents, the schools have met with opposition from some educators, who say elementary students may be too young for Internet learning, and from teachers, unions and school boards, partly because they divert state payments from the online student’s home district.

Other opposition has arisen because many online charters contract with for-profit companies to provide their courses. The Wisconsin academy, for example, is run by the tiny Northern Ozaukee School District, north of Milwaukee, in close partnership with K12 Inc., which works with similar schools in 17 states.

The district receives annual state payments of $6,050 for each of its 800 students, which it uses to pay teachers and buy its online curriculum from K12.

Saying he suspected “corporate profiteering” in online schooling, State Senator John Lehman, a Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, last month proposed cutting the payments to virtual schools to $3,000 per student. But during legislative negotiations that proposal was dropped.

Jeff Kwitowski, a K12 spokesman, said, “We are a vendor and no different from thousands of other companies that provide products and services to districts and schools.”

Pennsylvania has also debated the financing of virtual charter schools. Saying such schools were draining them financially, districts filed suit in 2001, portraying online schools as little more than home schooling at taxpayer expense. The districts lost, but the debate has continued.

Last year, the state auditor found that several online charters had received reimbursements from students’ home districts that surpassed actual education costs by more than $1 million. Now legislators are considering a bill that would in part standardize the payments at about $5,900 per child, said Michael Race, a spokesman for the State Department of Education.

The state auditor in Kansas last year raised a different concern, finding that the superintendent of a tiny prairie district running an online school had in recent years given 130 students, and with them $106,000 in per-pupil payments, to neighboring districts that used the students’ names to pad enrollment counts. The auditor concluded that the superintendent had carried out the subterfuge to compensate the other districts for not opening their own online schools.

“Virtual education is a growing alternative to traditional schooling,” Barbara J. Hinton, the Kansas auditor, said in a report. Ms. Hinton found that virtual education had great potential because students did not have to be physically present in a classroom. “Students can go to school at any time and in any place,” she said.

But, she added, “this also creates certain risks to both the quality of the student’s education and to the integrity of the public school system.”

Rural Americans have been attracted to online schooling because it allows students even on remote ranches to enroll in arcane courses like Chinese.

In Colorado, school districts have lost thousands of students to virtual schools, and, in 2006, a state audit found that one school, run by a rural district, was using four licensed teachers to teach 1,500 students across the state. The legislature responded last year by establishing a new division of the Colorado Department of Education to tighten regulation of online schools.

The Wisconsin Virtual Academy has 20 certified, unionized teachers, and 800 students who communicate with one another over the Internet.

The school has consistently met federal testing requirements, and many parents, including Mrs. Weldie, expressed satisfaction with the K12 curriculum, which allows her children to move through lessons at their own pace, unlike traditional schools, where teachers often pause to take account of slower students. Isabel Weldie, 5, is in kindergarten, “But in math I’m in first grade,” she said during a break in her school day recently.

“That’s what I love most about this curriculum,” Mrs. Weldie said. “There’s no reason for Isabel to practice counting if she can already add.”

In 2004, the teachers’ union filed a lawsuit against the school, challenging the expansive role given to parents, who must spend four to five hours daily leading their children through lesson plans and overseeing their work. Teachers monitor student progress and answer questions in a couple of half-hour telephone conferences per month and in interactive online classes using conferencing software held several times monthly.

A state court dismissed the case, but in December an appeals court said the academy was violating a state law requiring that public school teachers be licensed.

The ruling infuriated parents like Bob Reber, an insurance salesman who lives in Fond du Lac and whose 8-year-old daughter is a student at the academy. “According to this ruling, if I want to teach my daughter to tie her shoes, I’d need a license,” Mr. Reber said.

Not so, said Mary Bell, the union president: “The court did not say that parents cannot teach their children — it said parents cannot teach their children at taxpayers’ expense.”

The Weldies and 1,000 other parents and students from online schools rallied in Madison, the state capital, urging lawmakers to save their schools. Last week, legislators announced that they had agreed on a bipartisan bill that would allow the schools to stay open, while requiring online teachers to keep closely in touch with students and increasing state oversight.

"Short on Labor, Farmers in U.S. Shift to Mexico" - by Julia Preston

2008-02-17T15:26:00.000-08:00

September 5, 2007

CELAYA, Mexico — Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”

A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, more so since immigration legislation in the United States Senate failed in June and the authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants. An increasing number of farmers have been testing the alternative of raising crops across the border where there is a stable labor supply, growers and lawmakers in the United States and Mexico said.

Western Growers, an association representing farmers in California and Arizona, conducted an informal telephone survey of its members in the spring. Twelve large agribusinesses that acknowledged having operations in Mexico reported a total of 11,000 workers here.

“It seems there is a bigger rush to Mexico and elsewhere,” said Tom Nassif, the Western Growers president, who said Americans were also farming in countries in Central America.

Precise statistics are not readily available on American farming in Mexico, because growers seek to maintain a low profile for their operations abroad. But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, displayed a map on the Senate floor in July locating more than 46,000 acres that American growers were cultivating in just two Mexican states, Guanajuato and Baja California.

“Farmers are renting land in Mexico,” Ms. Feinstein said. “They don’t want us to know that.”

She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the ready work force and lower wages. Ms. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a new guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers.

In the past, some Americans have planted south of the border to escape spiraling land prices and to ensure year-round deliveries of crops they can produce only seasonally in the United States. But in the last three years, Mr. Nassif and other growers said, labor force uncertainties have become a major reason farmers have shifted to Mexico.

While there are benefits for Mexico, as American farmers bring the latest technology and techniques to its crop-producing regions, American farm state economists say thousands of middle-class jobs supporting agriculture are being lost in the United States. Some lawmakers in the United States also point to security risks when food for Americans is increasingly produced in foreign countries.

Tramping through one of his first lettuce crops near Celaya, an agribusiness hub in Guanajuato, Mr. Scaroni is more candid than many farmers about his move here. He had made six trips to Washington, he said, to plead with Congress to provide more legal immigrants for agriculture.

“I have a customer base that demands we produce and deliver product every day,” he said. “They don’t want to hear the excuses.” He acknowledges that wages are much lower in Mexico; he pays $11 a day here as opposed to about $9 an hour in California. But without legal workers in California, he said, “I have no choice but to offshore my operation.”

The Department of Labor has reported that 53 percent of the 2.5 million farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants; growers and labor unions say as much as 70 percent of younger field hands are illegal.

As the American authorities tightened the border in recent years, seasonal migration from Mexico has been interrupted, demographers say. Many illegal farm laborers, reluctant to leave the United States, have abandoned the arduous migrant work of agriculture for year-round construction and service jobs. Labor shortages during harvests have become common.

Some academics say warnings of a farm labor debacle are exaggerated. “By and large the most dire predictions don’t come true,” said Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. “There is no doubt that some people can’t count on workers showing up as much as they used to,” Professor Martin said. “But most of the places that are crying the loudest are exceptional cases.”

But some recent studies suggest that strains on the farm-labor supply are real. Stephen Levy, an economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, in Palo Alto, compared unemployed Americans with illegal immigrant workers in the labor market. “The bottom line,” Mr. Levy said, “is that most unemployed workers are not available to replace fired, unauthorized immigrant workers,” in part because very few of the unemployed are in farm work.

Mr. Scaroni said he started growing in Mexico reluctantly, after seeing risks to his American operations. At peak season his California company, Valley Harvesting and Packing, employs more than 1,000 immigrants, and all have filled out the required federal form, known as an I-9, with Social Security numbers and other identity information.

“From my perspective everyone that works for me is legal,” he said. But based on farm labor statistics, he surmises that many of his workers presented false documents.

An impatient man in perpetual motion, Mr. Scaroni marches through his fields shouting orders to Mexican crew leaders in rough Spanish while he negotiates to buy new trucks in Mexico on a walkie-talkie in one hand and to sell produce in the United States on a cellphone in the other.

Frustrated with experts who say that farmers with labor problems should mechanize, he plunges his hands into side-by-side lettuce plants, pulling out one crisp green head and one that is soggy and brown. After his company invested $1 million in research, he said, “We haven’t come up with a way to tell a machine what’s a good head and what’s a bad head.”

He also dismisses arguments that he could attract workers by raising wages, saying Americans do not take the sweaty, seasonal field jobs. “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I did that I would raise my costs and I would not have a legal work force,” Mr. Scaroni said.

Still, transferring to Mexico has been costly, he said. Since the greens he cuts here go to bagged salads in supermarkets in the United States, he follows the same food-safety practices as he does in California. Renting fallow Mexican land, he enclosed his fields in fences and installed drip-irrigation systems for the filtered water he uses.

He trained his Mexican field crews to wear hair nets, arm sheaths and sanitized gloves, and held drills on the correct use of portable toilets. In the clean-scrubbed cooling house, women in white caps scrutinize produce for every stray hair and dirt spot.

By now about one-fifth of Mr. Scaroni’s operation is on five farms approaching 2,000 acres in Guanajuato. A few of his Mexican employees came from California, like Antonio Martínez Aguilar, a field manager who worked there for 15 years but could never get immigration documents.

“I tried everything, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do to make me legal,” Mr. Martínez said.

Negotiated among growers and unions over seven years, the agricultural measure in the failed immigration bill, known as AgJobs, had wider bipartisan support than the bill as a whole, lawmakers said. Its supporters have said they hope to bring it before Congress this fall, perhaps attached to the farm bill. [It was hurt by last week’s resignation of Senator Larry E. Craig, the Idaho Republican who was one of its chief sponsors.]

Mr. Scaroni expects to recover his start-up costs because of the lower wages he pays here, although he says Mexican workers are less productive in their own country.

“It’s not a cake walk down here,” he said. “At least I know the one thing I don’t have to worry about is losing my labor force because of an immigration raid.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Desperate Days at the Merlin: Donald "Joe" Peak - by Julie Sullivan

2008-02-12T17:17:00.000-08:00

February 25, 1990

By Julie Sullivan
Staff Writer, The Spokesman Review

Joe Peak's smile has no teeth.

His dentures were stolen at the Norman Hotel, the last place he lived in downtown Spokane before moving to the Merlin two years ago.

Gumming food and fighting diabetes have shrunk the 54-year-old man's frame by 80 pounds. He is thin and weak and his mouth is sore.

But that doesn't stop him from frying hamburgers and onions for a friend at midnight or keeping an extra bed made up permanently in his two-room place.

"I try to make a little nest here for myself," he says.

Chock-full of furniture and cups from the 32-ounce Cokes he relishes for 53 cents apiece, Peak's second-floor apartment is almost cozy.

A good rug covers holes in the kitchen floor, clean-looking blankets cover a clean-looking bed. Dishes are stacked neatly in the kitchen sink.

But cockroaches still scurry across his kitchen table.

"I live with them," he says with a shrug. "I can't afford the insecticides, pesticides, germicides. I don't have the money."

With a $500-per-month welfare check and a $175 rent payment, Peak follows a proper diet when he can afford it. He shops at nearby convenience stores where he knows the prices are higher but the distance is right. He has adapted to the noisy nightlife in the hallways and sleeps when he is too exhausted to hear it.

Part Seminole Indian, Chinese, and black, the Florida native moved to Spokane 20 years ago to be near relatives in Olympia. He quit school at 13 to help earn the family income and worked a string of blue-collar jobs. Along the way, someone started calling him Joe.

His voice is lyrical, his vocabulary huge, but Peak's experience with whites is long and bitter.

When conditions at the Merlin began worsening three months ago, junkies and gray mice the size of baby rats moved in next door. He hated to see it, but he isn't worried about being homeless.

He's worried about his diabetes. He's frightened by blood in his stool and sores on his gums. He wonders whether the white-staffed hospitals on the hill above him will treat a poor black man with no teeth.

Fighting for Life 50 Floors Up - By Jim Dwyer

2008-02-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

By Jim Dwyer
Staff Writer, The New York Times

Now memories orbit around small things. None of the other window washers liked his old green bucket, but Jan Demczur, who worked inside 1 World Trade Center, found its rectangular mouth perfect for dipping and wetting his squeegee in one motion. So on the morning of the 11th, as he waited at the 44th-floor Sky Lobby to connect with elevators for higher floors, bucket and squeegee dangled from the end of his arm.

The time was 8:47 a.m. With five other men -- Shivam Iyer, John Paczkowski, George Phoenix, Colin Richardson and another man whose identity could not be learned -- Mr. Demczur (pronounced DEM-sir) boarded Car 69-A, an express elevator that stopped on floors 67 through 74.

The car rose, but before it reached its first landing, "We felt a muted thud," Mr. Iyer said. "The building shook. The elevator swung from side to side, like a pendulum."

Then it plunged. In the car, someone punched an emergency stop button. At that moment -- 8:48 a.m. -- 1 World Trade Center had entered the final 100 minutes of its existence. No one knew the clock was running, least of all the men trapped inside Car 69-A; they were as cut off 500 feet in the sky as if they had been trapped 500 feet underwater.

They did not know their lives would depend on a simple tool.

After 10 minutes, a live voice delivered a blunt message over the intercom. There had been an explosion. Then the intercom went silent. Smoke seeped into the elevator cabin. One man cursed skyscrapers. Mr. Phoenix, the tallest, a Port Authority engineer, poked for a ceiling hatch. Others pried apart the car doors, propping them open with the long wooden handle of Mr. Demczur's squeegee.

There was no exit.

They faced a wall, stenciled with the number "50." That particular elevator bank did not serve the 50th floor, so there was no need for an opening. To escape, they would have to make one themselves.

Mr. Demczur felt the wall. Sheetrock. Having worked in construction in his early days as a Polish immigrant, he knew that it could be cut with a sharp knife.

No one had a knife.

From his bucket, Mr. Demczur drew his squeegee. He slid its metal edge against the wall, back and forth, over and over. He was spelled by the other men. Against the smoke, they breathed through handkerchiefs dampened in a container of milk Mr. Phoenix had just bought.

Sheetrock comes in panels about one inch thick, Mr. Demczur recalled. They cut an inch, then two inches. Mr. Demczur's hand ached. As he carved into the third panel, his hand shook, he fumbled the squeegee and it dropped down the shaft.

He had one tool left: a short metal squeegee handle. They carried on, with fists, feet and handle, cutting an irregular rectangle about 12 by 18 inches. Finally, they hit a layer of white tiles. A bathroom. They broke the tiles.

One by one, the men squirmed through the opening, headfirst, sideways, popping onto the floor near a sink. Mr. Demczur turned back. "I said, 'Pass my bucket out,' " he recalled.

By then, about 9:30, the 50th floor was already deserted, except for firefighters, astonished to see the six men emerge. "I think it was Engine Company 5," Mr. Iyer said. "They hustled us to the staircase."

On the excruciating single-file descent through the smoke, someone teased Mr. Demczur about bringing his bucket. "The company might not order me another one," he replied. At the 15th floor, Mr. Iyer said: "We heard a thunderous, metallic roar. I thought our lives had surely ended then." The south tower was collapsing. It was 9:59. Mr Demczur dropped his bucket. The firefighters shouted to hurry.

At 23 minutes past 10, they burst onto the street, ran for phones, sipped oxygen and, five minutes later, fled as the north tower collapsed. Their escape had taken 95 of the 100 minutes. "It took up to one and a half minutes to clear each floor, longer at the lower levels," said Mr. Iyer, an engineer with the Port Authority. "If the elevator had stopped at the 60th floor, instead of the 50th, we would have been five minutes too late.

"And that man with the squeegee. He was like our guardian angel."

Since that day, Mr. Demczur has stayed home with his wife and children. He has pieced together the faces of the missing with the men and women he knew in the stations of his old life: the security guard at the Japanese bank on the 93rd floor, who used to let him in at 6:30; the people at Carr Futures on 92; the head of the Port Authority. Their faces keep him awake at night, he says.

His hands, the one that held the squeegee and the other that carried the bucket, shake with absence.

"Sweet Providence" - by Beth Macy

2008-02-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

SWEET PROVIDENCE
Roanoke Times, The (VA) - November 23, 2006
Author: Beth Macy beth . macy @roanoke.com 981-3435

"Laborare Est Orare."

(Work is prayer ) Latin sign found in an old Rockbridge Mill and replicated on the wall of Sweet Providence Farm Market

"Outhouse Rules: Shut Door So Chickens Can't Get In."

-- sign in Sweet Providence bathroom

Is this reality or some kind of Norman Rockwell mirage?

People who stop in to shop at the Sweet Providence Farm Market -- a cross between Fresh Market and a country store -- are never quite sure.

Witness the cacophony of food prep and farm chores on a recent weekday, all of it choreographed by two parents and pulled off by a team of seven children, 125 free-range turkeys, 2,000 chickens and a pet milk cow named Luisa:

n Eighteen-year-old Ann Houston sets bread dough in the warmer to rise, then mixes a batch of lemon biscotti.

n In the shed out back, 8-year-old Mary cleans chicken gizzards. Three-year-old Henry helps his dad stack the bananas, one of the few ingredients sold here that's not regionally grown, while 12-year-old Cora -- who can "gut a chicken like it's a work of art," according to her dad -- tends the cash register.

n Five-year-old Catherine watches Henry, and 10-year-old Thomas helps 16-year-old John William with "chicken killing," which is usually performed to the soundtrack of Brahms' "Hungarian Dance No. 5."

The question isn't so much why did John Paul Houston, at the age of 41, chuck a cushy paycheck and a career in sales to become a sustainable agriculture pioneer, but how did he pull it off? And how do they all work together without driving one another crazy?

"John Paul is almost a 'Green Acres' kind of deal, and yet he's innovative at the same time," said George Slusher, a Floyd insurance agent and longtime friend.

"Some of the old-timers laughed at him at first" and criticized his natural farming methods. "But you watch, in five or 10 years, that's where local agriculture will be headed."

Stuff doesn't equal happiness

Eight years ago, the Houstons lived in a four-bedroom Cape Cod-style home, with 5 acres and a creek out back. The master bedroom had 21 cubic feet of closet space alone.

Out of 22 Virginia Farm Bureau Insurance offices, John Paul ran the most profitable agency in the company. But he worked long weeks and traveled constantly.

Even then, his wife, Rainey, says, he was cheap. He never ordered an L.L. Bean sweater if he could buy a used one at Goodwill. He eschewed car payments, driving old beater cars and trucks with 150,000-plus miles. "He never let us spend money," Rainey recalled. "Even his business cars were used."

That's because he had a plan. John Paul dreamed of buying a farm : He'd have Christmas trees, some beef cattle, maybe some chickens and eggs. To pull it off, he knew the family would have to live beneath its means.

"I had clients who were making $200,000 a year but they were dead-busted broke," he said. "They had three car payments and a boat payment, and I realized: All that stuff doesn't give you happiness; it gives you stress.

"It hit me that the people who had a lot of money tended to zip it up in the pocket of their Pointer bibbed overalls."

Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska's "Simple Living" convinced him he was on the right track; it reaffirmed that having more wasn't a solution to anything. A business book, called "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't," taught him that a person's true calling lies at the intersection of three traits: passion, money-making ability and natural talent.

"If the most important thing I have to do in my life is to glorify God -- and I think it is -- then I had to ask myself, how?" said John Paul, a Baptist.

"What could I do that would incorporate the things I love and have a passion for with the gifts God's given me: my family?"

What the Lord gave him: seven children, a natural talent for sales and a willingness to take risks.

"Anybody can make good money on insurance," John Paul reasoned. "But trying to raise seven kids on a farm ? Now that would be a challenge."

Trial by fire

Eight years ago, the Houstons bought a 70-acre farm with a 1,700-square-foot farmhouse. Their closet space shrank from 21 feet across to four. When life felt too austere, they reminded themselves that the first farmer to live in the house raised 12 children in it.

Quiet time is so rare, according to Ann, that "if I ever am alone, it feels really eerie."

The first summer, the family raised 25 chickens and sold eggs from the back porch. But farming wasn't the natural fit they'd imagined.

Rainey was on her way to a ballet recital with the kids when she noticed that a dog had gotten into the chickens. John Paul was flying in from Mississippi on a business trip, and she didn't know what to do.

"Do I butcher them? What do I do? I had no clue!" she recalled. She wrapped the injured chickens up in towels, put them in the bathtub -- and went to the ballet.

When John Paul arrived home, he went to the bathroom and was greeted by ... a tub full of dead chickens in towels. "We were so stupid about things; we didn't know anything," Rainey said. "But you just have to learn. You just have to put your feet in and do it."

To learn the art of Christmas-tree trimming and cutting, John Paul worked alongside a crew of Mexican farm workers on a nearby tree farm . ("They make those axes sing," he marvels.) As his interest in sustainable agriculture grew, so did his ability to keep the dogs away from the chickens. He constructed a portable device that cooped up the chickens and allowed them to fertilize the pasture at the same time.

In order to make a comfortable living farming, he realized he needed to net more than the average farmer, who earns 18 cents for every $1 of product sold. "It just makes more sense to me that if you sell it directly to the customer, you eliminate the middle man."

Selling locally grown produce and meat directly to the customer flies in the face of standard agricultural practice: The average number of miles your food travels to reach the dinner plate is 1,500 miles and generally was picked five to seven days before you bought it, according to organic-farming experts, including writer Barbara Kingsolver, who's writing a book on the topic.

"We've learned that people want to know the people who grow their food," John Paul said. During the recent E. coli-contaminated spinach scare, Sweet Providence sold out of its Floyd -grown spinach, grown organically by nearby Waterbear Mountain Farm . "I know the guy who grows it and bags it; I've seen his operation, it's clean, and people around here know and trust him, too."

The Houstons also know the growers of the four varieties of Floyd apples they sell -- at 59 cents a pound, about half the supermarket cost -- just as they know the nearby farmers who grow their leeks, peppers and squash. Sweet Providence even has its own coffee label, imported by a Grayson County roasting company.

While area growers supply vegetables and packaged items such as local honey and jam, daughter Ann provides the bakery goods. She became the inspiration, in fact, behind her parents' decision to expand the store beyond the planned metal shed when she asked if she could go to culinary school last year.

"Why?" her dad asked her.

"Because I love to bake," she said.

"Why don't I build you a bakery instead?" John Paul said, and the store concept was born.

Overcoming fears

Two years ago, John Paul finally took the plunge and quit his Farm Bureau job -- "the scariest day of our lives" Rainey said. With the help of friends and neighbors, they spent the past year building the red-roofed, timber-frame store , which opened in August. Sixteen-year-old John William knew the ins and outs of construction from the year he spent, at age 14, helping the family's pastor build a house.

"You can do things like that when you're home schooling," John Paul said. "We figured he could make up what he was missing from school later, but that opportunity would only come along once."

Another homebuilder friend just happened to stop by the day the Houstons were about to assemble part of the frame -- the wrong way. "Every time we messed up, somebody would show up to help us before it got too bad," John Paul said.

"Some we paid and some we didn't. It was like God was saying, 'I'm not going to let you mess up too bad.' "

The name of the store came to the family one night during the dinner prayer .

"I said, 'Thank you, Lord, for your sweet providence,' and we all just looked at each other like, well, that's it. That really says it all," John Paul said.

From Roanoke to Grayson County, about 125 Providence shoppers are sitting down today to pre-ordered, free-range turkeys raised at the farm . There's not a bird among the group that wasn't personally tended by the Houston kids.

When the Houstons sit down at their own table, they won't lament the missed vacation to El Salvador for a relative's wedding, or the fact that it takes John Paul a week to earn what he used to earn in a single morning, or the 401(k) he cashed in to pay for the store . He's grateful beyond measure.

"You'd either say of me, 'He's the luckiest person in the world' or 'God has blessed him,' depending on your perspective," he insists.

"But you'd have to say one of those two things."

John Paul Houston's spending rules

n Avoid debt. "If you don't have debt, it takes the pressure off your income. You can live just fine on $35,000 a year if you don't have any debt."

n Live beneath your means.

n Avoid car loans.

n Never finance a vacation on credit. "Just don't go. It's better to save up and go on a doozy vacation next year."

n "Don't buy into the notion that if you spend more money or have more material things, you'll be happier or more fulfilled."

n Adds wife Rainey Houston: "Sometimes you just have to jump out without your parachute on and trust that God will take you where he wants you to go."

"Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss - excerpts

2008-02-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

... Do you like
green eggs and ham?

I do not like them,
Sam-I-am.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.

Would you like them
here or there?

I would not like them
here or there.
I would not like them
anywhere.
I do not like
green eggs and ham.
I do not like them,
Sam-I-am.

Would you like them
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?

...
Could you, would you,
with a goat?

I would not,
could not,
with a goat!

Would you, could you,
on a boat?

I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain.
I will not eat them on a train.
Not in the dark! Not in a tree!
Not in a car! You let me be!
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I will not eat them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them ANYWHERE!

....

"Life is Short- Autobiography as Haiku" - WPost

2008-02-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

1) LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page D01

I come from Tehran and no, there are no camels where I come from. There are cars and honking taxis that pass women in black veils or short, colorful scarves that barely cover their heads. In this beautiful prison of banned dreams, there certainly isn't a statue of liberty; men and women liberate themselves with cafes, cigars, smuggled drugs and secret relationships. In America, I am a writer. I can imagine, dream, live, breathe as an Iranian, an American. I can add color to anything; if only I could paint the gray streets of Tehran with my words.

Elaheh Farmand

2) LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page D01

For many years, children were just short things I saw occasionally in shopping malls. I was a software engineer, cut down at age 23 not by the dot-com crash but by weak wrists. After a long interval where I, like Richard Kimble, toiled at many jobs, I now find myself guiding a classroom of preschoolers: 20 little dynamos between the ages of 3 and 6, each one half-animal, half-angel. My friends say, "You'll be really prepared when you have your own children!" I reply, "How could anyone ever be prepared for that?"

Adam Cooper

3) LIFE IS SHORT | Autobiography as Haiku
Sunday, July 22, 2007; Page D01

My teenage son was scanning the pantry. I asked him what he was looking for. "Mayonnaise." Hopeful that he would make his own lunch, I told him to look in the refrigerator. He shrugged and, expending as little effort as possible, walked to the fridge, opened its door and quickly declared, "It's not here." I knew it was there. I joined him at the refrigerator, immediately saw the mayonnaise, grabbed it, shoved it into his hands and asked, "Are you blind?" He stared at the jar. "No, are you deaf? I was looking for Band-Aids."

Maria McIntosh

4) LIFE IS SHORT
July 22, 2007
What I need: round-trip bus tickets to New York, Advil, gas in my car, more money, a birthday card for Jean, to stop eating ice cream for breakfast, a way to move a futon to Boston, textbook money, a plan, a kitchen table.

What I want: new shoes, to lose five pounds, a nap, free everything, my cat on my stomach, better social skills, cooking classes, someone else to do the dishes, beer money, cheese fries, to smack some people, fewer doubts, to be there already.

What I have: two jobs, one more year of college, too much choice.

Christine Bath

5) LIFE IS SHORT
May 6, 2007
We have plans to keep our children safe and prepared. We have fire drills. We have tornado and hurricane drills. We even have a protocol with a "to-go bag," in case of any emergency lockdown. Our Annandale preschool is vigilant. The explanations, with age-appropriate information, reassure and calm the children.

After this latest tornado drill, the all-clear sounded. Everyone did a good job listening and following directions. Mission accomplished. Thumbs up and high-fives all around!

Three-year-old Clay asked one important question. "When it comes, how big will the tomato be?"

Elizabeth Maguder

Woodbridge