Mary Reinholz’s “Exit From Eden” Continues
This is Mary (left) with a dark haired yippie friend in East Village, 1970, shortly after returning from a Black Panther convention in D.C.
Chapter 11
“You won the derby,” Jason Slade said in an early morning telephone call to my room at the Chelsea Hotel. His tone was breezy as he explained that I had been picked out of a field of 10 competitors to write a column on women’s liberation for the Daily Bugle’s Sunday magazine. “We like your style,” he added magnanimously, invoking the royal “we“ as if more than one guy in a corporate cubicle had read my writing samples. “Now the fun begins.”
I mumbled something inane. Other writers might have babbled joyously on learning from a top editor that they had been given a forum at a daily newspaper whose Sunday circulation was the largest in the U.S. But unbeknownst to Slade, I was also a fugitive, mainly worried about staying out of jail for offing a man in Arkansas. This column was a feather in the cap of a career girl, but it could bring me into fierce contact with the law. I felt tension gathering, like a metal band clamped around my forehead.
Just the other day, I had heard the crackle of a police radio outside my door. At first I expected the worst: NYPD boys in blue sent by the Feds to arrest a killer girl hiding in a world famous Bohemian haunt. Then I heard a woman sobbing, “It’s my fault,” and a man trying to comfort her. Read more
THE SPY NOVELIST IMPOSTER WHO RESCUED OUR PUBLISHING CONFERENCE
Book jacket of “Fourth Codex” with inset photos of imposter spy novelist and publishing exec victim
By Bob Vickrey
It was late on a Thursday afternoon when I looked around the large rectangular table in the Charles Hotel ballroom and noticed several of my co-workers’ drowsily nodding off as our company’s marketing director addressed plans for our lead book title that season.
The long week had begun to take its toll on those of us who had gathered for our publishing company’s tri-annual sales conference which was being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts that year. Sales representatives had assembled there from across the country, along with our editors and publicity, marketing, and production members, who would attempt to gather and disseminate pertinent information for our forthcoming seasonal catalog.
After sitting at the same table for five straight days, fresh ideas seemed very much at a premium at this point in the week. The approximately sixty people on hand appeared as if they were present in body only—and whose minds had departed the building hours earlier. Read more
L.A.’s Flawed Oil Oversight System
Parkland section of Freeport-McMoRan Murphy Drill Site, facing 27th Street. Under LA Planning Department conditions in place since 1961 this is to remain undeveloped. December 2013 Zoning ruling, now being appealed, allows Freeport to build a 29 foot high enclosure 60 feet long by 25 feet deep up against the ivy covered wall at the far back.
Leslie Evans
Three oil company drill sites in the West Adams section of South Los Angeles, operating more than 100 underground wells, have been the center of recent citizen protests, ramped up government inspections, a City Attorney lawsuit, and complaints that the city’s Zoning Administration has violated municipal code and possibly state law in fast-tracking oil company expansion plans. These events have raised broader questions as to the competence of the city’s oversight of an industry that deals in toxic, explosive, and flammable materials but has been allowed, from the days in the late nineteenth century when there were few zoning rules, to establish thousands of wells in residential neighborhoods throughout the city. Since the early 1960s most of these have been slant drilled underground, with scores of pipes emanating in all directions from anonymous compounds hidden behind high walls.
The recent West Adams complaints first arose in 2010-11 around Allenco Energy’s drill site at 814 W. 23rd Street in the University Park neighborhood north of USC, adjacent to Mount St. Mary’s College. Allenco purchased the operation in 2009 and boosted production 400%. Soon, neighbors began experiencing chronic nosebleeds, respiratory problems, headaches, and nausea. By late 2013 the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) had received 251 complaints. Community protest meetings drew several hundred people. The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent inspectors, who were made ill and determined that leaks of petroleum fumes from badly maintained equipment were the cause. Allenco voluntarily shut down on November 22, under pressure from U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer. On January 7, Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer filed a lawsuit to prevent Allenco from reopening until they comply with all applicable health and safety regulations.
Subsequently, two drill sites acquired last year by the giant Freeport-McMoRan Oil and Gas company became the subject of community complaints. Read more
GETTING OLDER, NOT ALWAYS GRACEFULLY
By LIONEL ROLFE
Getting older was supposed to be easier than this–more like a wonderful long vacation. But of course it hasn‘t been that way. My wife left me just before I turned 70 and I’m still not getting along with it too well a couple of years later. I don’t have enough on social security to survive, so I still am working part time at my old high-stress journalism job. And becoming something of a lonely and grumpy old man in the process.
Yes, I have a lot more aches and pains than when I was younger. I am sometimes painfully slow traversing the hallways of my apartment and getting on the clanking elevator going down to my car. The good life in my dotage is eluding me. I don’t just jump out of bed to face the young day with a great deal of enthusiasm. I groggily wake up each morning, gulp my coffee and hope for an easy time in the bathroom.
I suppose a good love affair would fix everything right up. But my last marriage was romantic, wonderful, exotic and adventurous for the first years. I traveled half way around the world to meet her. I am not optimistic enough to think that will ever happen to me again. I know abstractly it would make me feel alive again. I notice that on those rare occasions we meet and walk somewhere, my step gets a spring in it I otherwise don’t have. But she’s gone, and I’m essentially alone again, and it’s not like when I was 19 and there was always someone else coming along, for better or for worse. Still, I have to believe in this big, bad world there is somebody for me. I’m not looking for her duplicate. I also know that married men don’t cope with being alone as well as women, who are more communal creatures than us. But life goes on for us as well.
Raining On The Ukrainian Parade
Alexander Nevesky Cathedral In Sofia, Bulgaria
By LIONEL ROLFE
I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but let’s get off this thing about poor picked on Ukraine standing up for freedom against the big evil Russians.
Would you feel sympathy if poor picked on Texas decided they wanted to secede? Maybe that might not be an entirely bad idea, given the reprehensible politics of the place. But still we’d probably object.
My best insight into Ukraine a couple or so years back when I stood in front of the National Library in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. I was fascinated by the statue in front of two brothers, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, credited with inventing the Cyrillic alphabet which is used not only in Bulgaria but in Russia and a lot of other places. Read more
Mary Reinholz “Exit from Eden”: The Saga Of A Female Fugitive Continues
The author in photos from the era she’s writing about
BY MARY REINHOLZ
CHAPTER 8
The white princess phone was ringing when I got back to Phoebe Whistlethorpe’s East Village flat at noon. It was my hostess on the line, calling from the green fields of Connecticut to say she’d be returning to New York in two days and asking me to pay the telephone bill “or those robots from Ma Bell will turn off service before I get home.”
She sounded breathless and more scattered than usual. Then she dropped a shit bomb that could put me at risk for a murder rap and serious jail time for killing Jed Scott while he was choking me to death in Arkansas.
“And oh, by the way, Joanna–sorry, I mean Cassandra,” she went on in a syrupy voice. “I met this divine man at a jousting match who used to work at a gallery in Pasadena…he remembers you from the Los Angeles Free Press as a sexy red headed reporter who covered the Renaissance Faire in Simi Valley. This is really funny– he said you tried to get him to pretend he was Robin Hood and to shoot arrows at a Sheriff’s Deputy. Did you really do that? I love it! Anyway, I told him, ‘Oh no, she’s not crazy like that any more. She dyed her hair this mousy brown and she’s very much the straight laced working girl in New York.’ I shouldn’t have said all that, should I?” Read more
A VETERAN BOOKMAN’S ROAD TRIP CONFESSIONS
Red Dog Saloon, Juneau, Alaska
By Bob Vickrey
When I walked through the swinging doors of the Red Dog Saloon, everyone in the dimly lit bar seemed to stop what they were doing to check out the stranger who had entered their private domain.
I found an unoccupied seat at the crowded bar and ordered a Kodiak Ale on tap. The bartender studied me before asking where I was from. Back then, the citizens of Juneau could easily recognize a stranger in town. This was in an era when Juneau was still a relatively isolated place, and long before the Princess Cruise ship invasion brought thousands of international tourists to its shores. Read more
Is My Mother Calling Me?
By Beatlick Pamela Hirst
Before Daddy died, I can remember Mama at the ironing board, ironing sheets. This was before air conditioning and the white nylon sheers puffed wisps of warm atmosphere through the bedroom window, which was dim to my eyes, after leaving the dazzle of June daylight.
I could smell the new steam iron for which she bought special distilled water. No tap water. Mama was a nurse, she made hospital corners and she had a way of turning down the sheets and fluffing up the pillows that made my bed look so inviting. I just wanted to jump in, asked if I could and she generously nodded. Read more
Gaza without Cement!! For How Long Will This Last?
By Mohammad Arafat
Our Gaza Correspondent
While walking west through the streets and lanes of Gaza to my university I noted something that was out of the usual. I noted that many of the homes were only partially constructed. Stanchions were there supporting the unfinished ceilings because there was no cement to finish them.
Gaza has become a place without cement. You don’t stop to notice such things until you realize something important is missing. At the entrance of one building, there was a guard I know named Abu-Osama. He had made a chair to sit on from two stones. He was boiling unsweetened coffee in a small kettle.
“Hello Abu-Osama,” I said.
“Hello Mr. Mohammad, you are so welcome,” he said. I took a seat, also made of two stones, beside him. Read more
Fritz Joubert Duquesne: Boer Avenger, German Spy, Munchausen Fantasist
“Col. Fritz du Quesne, a fugitive from justice, is wanted by His Majesty’s government for trial on the following charges: Murder on the high seas; the sinking and burning of British ships; the burning of military stores, warehouses, coaling stations, conspiracy, and the falsification of Admiralty documents.” He carried on hostile operations against the British government in various parts of the world under the following names: Fred, Fredericks, Capt. Claude Staughton, Col. Bezan, von Ricthofen, Piet Niacud, etc. His correct and full name is Fritz Joubert Marquis du Quesne. Prior to the war he was known as Capt. Fritz du Quesne, a big game hunter, author, explorer and lecturer.
-London Daily Mail, May 27, 1919
He is one of the most desperate and daring criminals we have ever had here.
His adventures read like a romance.
– Abraham I. Rorke, New York City Assistant District Attorney,
New York Evening Post, August 21, 1920.
On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a Nazi spy ring headed by Frederick Joubert Duquesne were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison. They were brought to justice after a lengthy espionage investigation by the FBI.
-Federal Bureau of Investigation, Duquesne Spy Ring, March 12, 1985
- Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, Boar soldier, circa 1900
Leslie Evans
Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne (1877-1956) was a South African Boer who led an astonishing life on both sides of the law. Officer in the Boer army in the war with England, many times an escaped prisoner, pimp, newspaper reporter, foreign correspondent, novelist, spy and saboteur in South America where he blew up British ships during World War I, adviser on big game hunting to Theodore Roosevelt, publicist for Joseph Kennedy’s movie business. He feigned paralysis for five months to avoid deportation to England where he faced execution for the deaths of British seamen. And finally, he was the best known member of the largest Nazi spy ring broken up by the FBI during World War II.
Beyond his real exploits, Duquesne lived under some thirty aliases. He invented and reinvented his past at will, claiming to have been the greatest swordsman in Europe, attaching his ancestry to this or that aristocratic clan that momentarily appealed to him, granting himself military titles and medals, and producing endless accounts of battles, some of which he actually took part in. His most famous claim was to have guided a German submarine to sink the HMS Hampshire in 1916 at the height of World War I, killing Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War and the head of Britain’s armed forces. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
