Monday, August 28, 2017

From Socialist Alternative- NO Confederate Plaque - NO Death Threats & Intimidation! Solidarity Call-In Campaign

Friends,
In Ohio, Movement for the 99%, Socialist Alternative, and other community members are in a struggle against the Right and the local ruling elite over removing a plaque commemorating Robert E. Lee.

In this struggle, one of our community organizers has been targeted by the Right with death threats - the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, potentially members of a local militia, and the Three Percenters. We have Facebook video footage of them reading our organizer’s home address out loud, making threats of having his grandparents’ address, and bragging about attending KKK rallies and meetings.

Our community organizer has also been intimidated by the Vice Mayor of the City of Franklin. The Vice Mayor posted our organizer’s name and phone number on Facebook and appealed for people to call him in retaliation for leading the effort to remove the plaque. (See below for full background).

The Right is mobilized to protect the plaque and is emboldened by Trump’s incendiary bigotry and his pardoning of arch-racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio to threaten the Left.  
The far right has shown up to City Council and other government meetings in force, with confederate flags, wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, and some of them carrying guns. They have also physically and verbally confronted our organizers and community members opposed to the plaque.  We are asking for working people and youth across the country to help us with this struggle against the Right and their supporters in government.

We are launching a National Solidarity Call-In Campaign, starting on Monday, August 28 and ending on Friday, September 1 during business hours (9am - 5pm, Eastern Standard Time), that primarily targets the Mayor of the City of Franklin. (See script and contact information below). To track our progress, we are asking that everyone
 indicate on the Facebook Event Page that they called into or emailed the Mayor.

This solidarity campaign is vital for protecting this community organizer - but also for pushing back the intimidation tactics of the far right - as well as settling the removal of the Confederate plaque.  Across the country, the Right is recoiling from the overwhelming opposition to their bigotry and violence from virtually every corner of society. Democracy Now! recently reported that 64 so-called “free speech” rallies hosted by the Right-wing forces have been canceled over the past days.

We scored an initial victory with the plaque being temporarily removed from public view, but the fight is not over.  When the city originally removed the plaque, the local ruling class was reacting in fear due to the outpouring of anger at Trump and the events in Charlottesville. The simple call-in campaign initiated by our organizer made city officials quickly crumble and resort to deplorable intimidation tactics. Since then, the mobilization by the Right has stiffened their spines.
 This past Thursday, government officials committed to finding a new place for the plaque.

We are asking everyone to call the Mayor of the City of Franklin (see script and contact information below) beginning on Monday, August 28 and ending on Friday, September 1, during business hours (9am - 5pm, Eastern Standard Time). We are also asking for you to contribute $25, $50, or $100 for legal expenses, an emergency fund to protect our organizers against physical threat, and to help support a rally in the City of Franklin.


Who to call:

Primary Focus of Call-In Campaign:
Denny Centers - Mayor
937-746-9921 (office)
513-460-4100 (cell)

dcenters@franklinohio.org

If you have time we strongly encourage you to call or text the other members of the City Council:

Carl Bray - Vice Mayor
513-465-7772 (cell)

cbray@franklinohio.org

TEXT: NO Confederate Plaque! NO Death Threats & Intimidation! Posting organizer name & phone is unacceptable!  Bray Resign as Vice Mayor! & say NO threats & Plaque!

Brent Centers - City Council
937-620-1872 (cell)

bcenters@franklinohio.org

Michael Aldridge
937-704-0452 (home)

maldridge@franklinohio.org

Deborah Flouts
937-241-6562 (cell)

dfouts@franklinohio.org

Paul Ruppert
937-746-2237 (home)

rruppert@franklinohio.org

Todd Hall
937-746-7949 (home)

thall@franklinohio.org


Send text message to Mayor (or City Council member):

NO Confederate Plaque! NO Death Threats & Intimidation! VM Bray posting organizer name & phone is unacceptable! Remove Bray as VM & say NO threats & NO plaque!


Script:

“Hi, my name is [First name] and I oppose the City of Franklin returning the Robert E. Lee plaque for public display.

I’m also calling to express my outrage at the conduct of Vice Mayor Carl Bray. His intimidation tactics of publicly sharing the name and phone number of the community organizer leading the effort to remove the plaque and asking people to call him in retaliation is absolutely unacceptable behavior for an elected official, especially after the violence and murder committed by white nationalists in Charlottesville.

I call on you, the Mayor of the City of Franklin (or I call on you, a City Council member), to:
  • Make a public commitment to never put the Robert E. Lee  plaque back on public or private land and to
  • I call on you and the City Council to remove Carl Bray as Vice Mayor and to select a new Vice Mayor. (the council can do this). I call on you and the City Council to condemn Bray for using his office and authority to intimidate.
Finally, I call on you:
  • to issue a statement in solidarity with those who stood against the racist and violent white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville and condemn local threats of right wing extremism and violence directed at any resident of Franklin or the surrounding areas.
Will you do this?”


Background

On 8/16, an organizer with Movement for the 99% and Socialist Alternative initiated a call-in campaign to have a plaque dedicated to Robert E. Lee removed from the neighboring city of Franklin.

Responding to the call, people from across Ohio, primarily people associated with the group Indivisible, bombarded the Vice Mayor of Franklin’s office line with the demand to remove the plaque. Under pressure, the City of Franklin removed it in the middle of the night!

However, in retaliation, the Vice Mayor of Franklin put our organizer’s phone number on Facebook and encouraged people to call him. In short order, he started getting death threats.

On Monday 8/21 the City of Franklin City Council met to discuss the fate of the plaque. The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy mobilized their base, with 50+ right wingers showing up with confederate flags and some with guns. We have a video of some of them bragging about attending KKK rallies and meetings. They also talk about having our organizer’s home address and his grandparents address.

The organizer and a few other supporters went to the city council meeting to make the case for keeping the plaque removed. The chamber was packed to capacity with the Right. During public comment, our organizer lambasted the plaque and called out the Vice Mayor for his intimidation tactics and the resulting threats made on his life. The Vice Mayor responded by having the organizer removed by the police.

Outside of the meeting, the Right threatened our organizer. We have Facebook video footage of them sharing his home address out loud. Despite being overwhelmed and threatened by the Right, the police threatened to arrest our organizer no less than 4 times, for simply standing across the street!

On Thursday, August 24, the Township of Franklin met and again the Right was fully mobilized. The Township Trustees took a step toward returning the plaque to public display, but have not definitively said when and where the plaque will go.

In Solidarity,

Bryan
Organizer
Contribute
Share
Tweet
Forward

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

NYT: Trump Forges Ahead on Costly Nuclear Overhaul

2 attachments

Trump Forges Ahead on Costly Nuclear Overhaul

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/08/28/us/28dc-nukes1/27dc-nukes1-master768.jpg
An unarmed Minuteman missile at a former launch facility near Wall, S.D. The Air Force has announced new contracts to begin replacing the aging Minuteman fleet. Credit Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency
During his speech last week about Afghanistan, President Trump slipped in a line that had little to do with fighting the Taliban: “Vast amounts” are being spent on “our nuclear arsenal and missile defense,” he said, as the administration builds up the military.
The president is doing exactly that. Last week, the Air Force announced major new contracts for an overhaul of the American nuclear force: $1.8 billion for initial development of a highly stealthy nuclear cruise missile, and nearly $700 million to begin replacing the 40-year-old Minuteman missiles in silos across the United States.
While both programs were developed during the Obama years, the Trump administration has seized on them, with only passing nods to the debate about whether either is necessary or wise. They are the first steps in a broader remaking of the nuclear arsenal — and the bombers, submarines and missiles that deliver the weapons — that the government estimated during Mr. Obama’s tenure would ultimately cost $1 trillion or more.
Even as his administration nurtured the programs, Mr. Obama argued that by making nuclear weapons safer and more reliable, their numbers could be reduced, setting the world on a path to one day eliminating them. Some of Mr. Obama’s national security aides, believing that Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election, expected deep cutbacks in the $1 trillion plan.
Mr. Trump has not spoken of any such reduction, in the number of weapons or the scope of the overhaul, and his warning to North Korea a few weeks ago that he would meet any challenge with “fire and fury”suggested that he may not subscribe to the view of most past presidents that the United States would never use such weapons in a first strike.
“We’re at a dead end for arms control,” said Gary Samore, who was a top nuclear adviser to Mr. Obama.
While Mr. Trump is moving full speed ahead on the nuclear overhaul — even before a review of American nuclear strategy, due at the end of the year, is completed — critics are warning of the risk of a new arms race and billions of dollars squandered.
The critics of the cruise missile, led by a former defense secretary, William J. Perry, have argued that the new weapon will be so accurate and so stealthy that it will be destabilizing, forcing the Russians and the Chinese to accelerate their own programs. And the rebuilding of the ground-based missile fleet essentially commits the United States to keeping the most vulnerable leg of its “nuclear triad” — a mix of submarine-launched, bomber-launched and ground-launched weapons. Some arms control experts have argued that the ground force should be eliminated.
Photo
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/08/27/us/27dc-nukes2/27dc-nukes2-master675.jpg
A new nuclear cruise missile would extend the life of America’s aging fleet of B-2 bombers. Credit Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress in June that he was open to reconsidering the need for both systems. But in remarks to sailors in Washington State almost three weeks ago, he hinted at where a nuclear review was going to come out.
“I think we’re going to keep all three legs of the deterrent,” he told the sailors.
The contracts, and Mr. Mattis’s hints about the ultimate nuclear strategy, suggest that Mr. Obama’s agreement in 2010 to spend $80 billion to “modernize” the nuclear arsenal — the price he paid for getting the Senate to ratify the New Start arms control agreement with Russia — will have paved the way for expansions of the nuclear arsenal under Mr. Trump.
“It’s been clear for years now that the Russians are only willing to reduce numbers if we put limits on missile defense, and with the North Korean threat, we can’t do that,” said Mr. Samore, who is now at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “I think we are pretty much doomed to modernize the triad.”
At issue in the debate over the cruise missile and the rebuilding of the land-based fleet is an argument over nuclear deterrence — the kind of debate that gripped American national security experts in the 1950s and ’60s, and again during the Reagan era.
Cruise missiles are low-flying weapons with stubby wings. Dropped from a bomber, they hug the ground to avoid enemy radars and air defenses. Their computerized brains compare internal maps of the terrain with what their sensors report.
The Air Force’s issuing last week of the contract for the advanced nuclear-tipped missile — to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missile Systems — starts a 12-year effort to replace an older model. The updated weapon is to eventually fly on a yet-undeveloped nuclear bomber.
The plan is to produce 1,000 of the new missiles, which are stealthier and more precise than the ones they will replace, and to place revitalized nuclear warheads on half of them. The other half would be kept for flight tests and for spares. The total cost of the program is estimated to be $25 billion.
“This weapon will modernize the air-based leg of the nuclear triad,” the Air Force secretary, Heather Wilson, said in a statement. “Deterrence works if our adversaries know that we can hold at risk things they value. This weapon will enhance our ability to do so.”
The most vivid argument in favor of the new weapon came in testimony to the Senate from Franklin C. Miller, a longtime Pentagon official who helped design President George W. Bush’s nuclear strategy and is a consultant at the Pentagon under Mr. Mattis. The new weapon, he said last summer, would extend the life of America’s aging fleet of B-52 and B-2 bombers, as Russian and Chinese “air defenses evolve to a point where” the planes are “are unable to penetrate to their targets.”
Critics argue that the cruise missile’s high precision and reduced impact on nearby civilians could tempt a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse, they say, is that adversaries might overreact to the launching of the cruise missiles because they come in nuclear as well as nonnuclear varieties.
Mr. Miller dismisses that fear, saying the new weapon is no more destabilizing than the one it replaces.
Some former members of the Obama administration are among the most prominent critics of the weapon, even though Mr. Obama’s Pentagon pressed for it. Andrew C. Weber, who was an assistant defense secretary and the director of the Nuclear Weapons Council, an interagency body that oversees the nation’s arsenal, argued that the weapon was unneeded, unaffordable and provocative.
He said it was “shocking” that the Trump administration was signing contracts to build these weapons before it completed its own strategic review on nuclear arms. And he called the new cruise missile “a destabilizing system designed for nuclear war fighting,” rather than for deterrence.
The other contracts the Pentagon announced last week are for replacements for the 400 aging Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in underground silos. The winners of $677 million in contracts — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — will develop plans for a replacement force.
During Mr. Obama’s second term, the ground-based force came under withering criticism over the training of its crews — who work long, boring hours underground — and the decrepit state of the silos and weapons. Some of the systems still used eight-inch floppy disks. Internal Pentagon reports expressed worries about the vulnerability of the ground-based systems to cyberattack.
Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, has argued that the United States can safely phase out its land-based force, calling the missiles a costly relic of the Cold War.
But the Trump administration appears determined to hold on to the ground-based system, and to invest heavily in it. The cost of replacing the Minuteman missiles and remaking the command-and-control system is estimated at roughly $100 billion.
A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. to Overhaul Nuclear Arsenal Despite the Risk. ||

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MAPA Nuclear Disarmament" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mapa-nuclear-disarmament+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mapa-nuclear-disarmament@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mapa-nuclear-disarmament/10bb01d31ffd%24ece872c0%24c6b95840%24%40texnology.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

How Little We Know- With The Film Adaptation Of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have And Have Not” In Mind


How Little We Know- With The Film Adaptation Of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have And Have Not” In Mind




By Henri “Frenchie” Gerard As Told To Jasper Jackson

[Henri “Frenchie” Gerard had owned the well-known pre-World War II Gerard’s Café in Fort-de-France, Martinique, the French colony in the Caribbean, first under the Third Republic and then when France felt to the Germans in 1940 to collaborationist Vichy-control. Frenchie ran the place all through the Occupation at some cost to himself as a local Resistance leader and after the war until 1960 when he retired to his native Nantes in France. That same year he had found out through some old Resistance contacts that his old American friend Captain Harry Morgan, a fishing boat owner whom he had given work to, had had more than his fair share of drinks with in the old times, had passed away in New York City after a long bout with cancer. According to his obituary Harry left a wife, Marie, nee Browning, and three children, all teenagers.          

I had heard through a different source that Captain Morgan had although an American been active in the French Resistance in Martinique and eventually other places in the Caribbean. I had also heard that Monsieur Gerard was the last link to knowledge about Captain Morgan’s exploits and more importantly about how Harry and Marie Browning known affectionately as “Slim” in those days met and got out of Fort-de-France by the skin of their teeth. I contacted Gerard in Nantes about twenty years ago and he agreed to tell me what he knew about the affair, about the “skin of their teeth” and about anything else he might know around that initial meeting since “Slim” had gone on to be an editor of a high-end fashion magazine after she married Harry. Harry had become an agent-ambassador for Cunard out of New York. Below is in his own words the way Frenchie described the meeting and match-up between Harry and Slim. He did stipulate that I was only to use most of the information he provided after Slim passed on. Although I did produce a short sketch at the time using the authorized information I left most of the material as it was in note form and stuffed in a back file cabinet drawer. Slim died a few months ago and so here for the first time after a couple of months of unscrambling those long ago yellow note pad notes is Frenchie’s long ago take on that torrid war-time romance which seemed the stuff of legends. This piece is dedicated to Frenchie who passed away in 2007. Jasper Jackson]

“I had seen Marie first, had seen her as she came off the plane from I think that day Cuba, don’t quote me on stuff before the match-up between Harry and Slim because it is all vague and doesn’t add or subtract from the story except that she was an American girl working her way across the waters by herself, by herself mostly except when she wanted company from her dagger-eyed look. Lovely, got my juices flowing, tall and thin making me think at first she was French, maybe from my hometown of Nantes where they are built like that almost exclusively since she fit that bill. Had big flashing eyes, if she was a man I would say bedroom eyes, yes, bedroom eyes no question and those soft lustrous lips, ruby red. Wore her long hair over one eye like was the fashioned then, not like Veronica Lake, no, more like Lauren Bacall maybe in one of her early movies.     

“She had been up against it lately though, had had some kind of difficulties because with her almost too good looks it was strange that she came off the plane with a sort of threadbare tailored suit a little out of fashion that year and a small bag which told me she was on, how you Americans say her ‘uppers.’  [The irony later would be that she was a much sought after fashion editor for a number of high style New York publications and became known for her great sense of where the new look would come from. I’ll bet any photographs from those Martinique days have gone since seen the incinerator-JJ]

“By the way that “Slim” moniker for Marie and she called him “Steve” although everybody knew it was Harry thing was some intimate bed-time talk thing that I don’t know how it started since I wasn’t there when they messed up the silky sheets that first time. She was sure slim, no question about that, model slim so she might have been working that racket at some point, maybe private showings if you know what I mean. So maybe that is where Harry got his pet name for her from. I was also an agent for Air Martinique then so I grabbed her bag and offered to put her up at my hotel where most of the tourists off the flight stayed and I gave the airline a kickback for the business in the days before they started having package tours. She accepted without a murmur but not without an unspoken gratitude. My idea was that after she had settled in and I had bought her few drinks I could coax her into helping me out as an exotic flower bar girl for the American tourists who were flooding Fort-de-France looking for women, kicks, dope, gambling, and some fine deep sea fishing. I had her all lined up on that job so I had not been wrong that she had been on her uppers or that she had been familiar with the trade. Along the way I had my own ideas about jumping under the satin sheets with her although I was married at the time. Or maybe because I was married. Yeah, she was that kind of looker, that kind of dame who guys would take great risks for, would go to the mat for if things went like that.       
    
“Then Harry entered the scene and my day dreams were over. He had been out on a fishing expedient with a client named Johnson, one of those Americans looking for dope and some deep sea fishing, and some kind of deep sea fishing of another kind if you get my drift. This Johnson guy had had a shot at grabbing a big swordfish according to Harry but all he did was lose Harry’s fishing tackle in the bargain. So Harry wasn’t in a good mood when I asked him to go to his room in order for me to inquire about using his boat for some Resistance work that was coming up-bringing in some agents to get the great freedom-fighter Renoir off of Devil’s Island where he was being held by the Vichy bastards. He turned me down cold. Wouldn’t touch the thing then, didn’t give a damn who was fighting for or against who but wanted to keep clear of any controversy, keep his boat, his livelihood for one thing. So whatever he did for us later which was a lot didn’t get a leg up until Marie came in view.

“I had known Harry ever since he had come to Martinique to get away from some nasty business in Key West where he was from, or said he was from, and I let that ride. Harry had definitely been around the block, knew the score but I was always mystified about why the dames went for him, especially the French girls that hung around my bar. Harry must have been about forty, maybe forty-five then and his face and slumped shoulders showed the wear and tear. The best you say for him was that he was a man, a straight up with rugged looks and always would be a twice a day shave guy. Didn’t dress particularly well then [he would later under Marie’s influence and insistence -JJ] but he lacked for female company before Marie. Maybe it was like one of your American writers mentioned to me one time when I met him in Nantes after I came back to France that some women, some young women who have been buffeted about, maybe had no father-figure around the house go for older guys for that reason. But ask Freud or one of his kind about that.

“Here is how they met. While we, Harry and I, were talking about doing that Resistance job a rap came on the door and when Harry opened up the door there was Marie all dolled up and showered asking if anybody had a match. Harry flipped her his box of matches. Then she asked if anybody had a cigarette and said it in such a come hither way in Harry’s direction that I knew I was sunk. Harry threw her his pack of Luckies (unfiltered in those days) which I got for him on the black market since American cigarettes were hard to come by after the Vichy thugs took over the black market trade. She left and after Harry asked me who the hell she was and where did she come from. I left the room knowing that I was out of luck making a play for Slim. The only benefit I got from that “introduction” was that she did do some very good work for a few days as a bar girl and I got many dollars as my cut of her action. I swear I could have been a millionaire if she had stayed on the island.

“As a cover against the snooping Vichy cops who only looked for dough every chance they got and did not like bar girls since even they had to pay the freight for the pleasure of the company I also had her singing at night with Cricket my junkie piano player whose habit was getting him off-track, getting so he could hardly remember the songs. I found out in passing through the lounge area one afternoon while she and Cricket were singing that she could sing and look good doing it so I gave her that job and a cut of the proceeds. Funny about memories. That Cricket was a story in himself since he was on the run from some dope-dealers in the States and laying low in cheap dope Martinique for a while. He had written that song that would be a hit after the war when all the G.I.s headed back to America, How Little We Know. By then I think Cricket was probably six feet under the ground but I always laughed when I thought about that song title and those gullible G.I.s believing their sweeties had been true blue when they were fighting the Nazi scum. Yeah, how little they knew. 

“But enough of Cricket. Slim went to work after that meeting with Harry. Like I said she was good, grabbed eight hundred bucks off of that stupid fisherman Johnson, and gave me my four hundred without a murmur. Harry sitting at the bar later saw her in action that first night as she worked the room and was sore from what he told me the next day. Was very sore when that night Marie had after Johnson grabbed some Vichy naval officer for half the liquor on the island. Called her a tramp, a young pretty smart tramp but a tramp nevertheless. Here’s how you can never figure dames though see she was, having seen him for about two minutes asking for that match and cigarette foreplay, trying to make him jealous. Had spotted him looking her way just as she had expected. And he was only trying to pretend to be sore. That interchange if you can understand this psychology solidified their relationship. That night without as much as a by your leave they snuck under Harry’s sheets (or was it Slim’s, yes, it must have been Slim’s because I had left her a set of silk sheets for her bed when I had my own ideas about what I would do with her.)               
     
“Of course that budding affair with Marie business played directly into Harry coming over to work with us. That Vichy naval officer Marie took for a ride bitched to Renard, a bastard who was an official in the Third Republic colonial administration on the island and the day Vichy took over without missing a beat went to work for them as their hatchet man. He had me, Harry and Slim down at police headquarters for a few hours. Took my money, my four hundred from the Johnson con, Slim’s cut and for good measure Harry’s who had nothing to do with it dough too. That pissed Harry off. Also helped me to rope in Harry to the deal for his boat since he had no other dough.     

“That job should have been a piece of cake. Meet the agents who were going to get Renoir off of Devil’s Island in a quiet spot about twenty miles from Fort-de-France, bring them to town and then transfer them to other agents who would work out the details of the tough Devil’s Island caper. Of course in those days you took whoever was not a secret Vichy agent, anybody who had the guts to stick their necks out for the glory of France but it turned out the guys, or rather the guy and his fucking wife, the Dubois, what was he thinking, that they recruited for the job had feet of clay, had too much trouble worrying about his fretful wife. So Harry had run into a Vichy patrol out in the harbor. That patrol shot up Harry’s boat, shot up this Dubois guy and made things tough for all of us. Harry, no doctor, had to patch up the guy while holding off his wife from jumping on his bones. And holding Slim back from scratching Madame’s eyes out.  

“Made Harry something like persona non grata with Vichy, with Renard too once he figured the previously “don’t give a damn” had part in the caper. Renard , the bastard, figured out a way to prove that Harry was involved in the Dubois caper. Harry had this old rummy, Eddie, whom must have been his father or something the way he protected him. Renard had picked Eddie up and was holding him in the drunk tank until he crumbled and told what Harry’s role in the caper had been. Harry flipped out at this once Renard told him about where the missing Eddie was. With Slim’s aid he took on Renard and a couple of his henchmen, shot one dead as a doornail and made Renard after pistol-whipping him order Eddie back to my hotel. That is when Harry handed over Renard to me and decided that since Martinique was too hot for him and Slim, and Eddie that he would take Dubois and his wife to Devil’s’ Island to get Renoir out. I’ll never forget, have never forgotten how Slim shimmied her way out the door with Harry and Eddie carrying their bags behind them after Slim said good-bye to Cricket (and got little stash of opium for the road).     

“You know that Harry did get Dubois to Devil’s Island and that he eventually got Renoir to Europe to work with Victor Lazlo coordinating the Resistance when it counted. Did lots of other jobs too with the resourceful Slim in tow before heading to New York after the war. 

“Here’s something Harry told me before he and Slim left town. That first night they hit the sheets Slim, with a few drinks in her, was being very sexually provocative, had mentioned that all Harry had to do to keep her in line was whistle. Then she said in an unmistakably salacious way that “he knew how to whistle, didn’t he. Just put lips together and blow.” Harry assumed that she was using a sexual double entendre. He found out that night just what she meant as she took him around the world. Damn, that lucky son of a bitch Harry.      


Speak To Me Of Mendocino-With The McGarrigle Sisters Song On The Same Theme In Mind

Speak To Me Of Mendocino-With The McGarrigle Sisters Song On The Same Theme In Mind




By Zack James

Sid Lester had often wondered whether Lena, Lena of the Caffe Lena, the small coffeehouse that weaned many folksingers in the days when such activity was on deck, in the time of the now fabled early 1960s folk minute, now too but she the grey eminence had long gone to the shades and so that is not her bother had ever gotten to the Mendocino of her dreams and the song that the McGarrigle Sisters had reportedly written for her when she dreamed the dream of West Coast dreams. This was no mere academic question since Sid was asking it not only to himself but to his lovely companion, Mona Lord, who was accompanying him just that moment on the Pacific Coast Highway about fifty miles from that very spot, from the Mendocino of his dreams if not hers (fifty miles but probably about three hours given the hairpin turns that he increasingly hated to take along some very treacherous stretches of that beautiful view highway having almost gone down an un-guard-railed embankment to the ocean around Big Sur a few years back).

It was not like Sid had not been to the dreamland before, having made the trip up from the fetid seas of Frisco town (fetid in comparison to the Mendocino white washed breakers eroding the sheer rock at a greater rate than he would have expected) a number of times mostly with his old time now long gone to “find herself” Laura, Laura Perkins whom he had talked into going up those several times based on nothing more than that he liked the McGarrigle-etched song. Liked too that she, Laura liked it as well and would cover the song anytime she could find somebody to do a duo with her at folkie “open mics” and coffeehouse features depending on how she was feeling. Mona having heard the song exactly once (she didn’t like the fact that Laura liked the song and had been to Mendocino before she had and so would not listen when Sid tried to play it on his car CD player as they got closer to the place). Moreover she was reserving judgment on the relationship between the song and the place.

And that last point, the point for Sid anyway, was exactly how the song and the place connected. Was the real source of his wonder about old Lena back in the tired old East. Had she longed like he had to be done with Eastern pressures and pitfalls. To stop worrying about where the money would come from for rent, to pay the utilities, hell to pay the performers and stop them from having to play for the foolish “basket” like when they  had just started out on some forlorn street in Cambridge , Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Old Town or the Village. Stop all of that and head west, head to flat earth land South Bend for a minute, head over the majestic no hyperbole Rockies and suck in the breezes of the new land, of the new dispensation. Yeah, he bet though that she never got to the West, never could leave her cats, never could get that café out of her system, would probably fret even if she only went out for a week or so.


As they, Sid and his new Mona, approached the outskirts of Mendocino he wondered, seriously wondered whether Mona would ask him someday to speak of Mendocino, to let the place get under her skin. Yeah, speak of Mendocino.