Search Results for: Robert F. Worth

The Strike: Chemicals, Cancer, and the Fight for Health Care

Ian Frisch| Longreads | April 2018 | 32 minutes (8,040 words)

When 59-year-old Jack Mack wandered from picket station to picket station to ask the Question, he tried as best he could to ease into the conversation. He didn’t want to scare anyone off. It was two months into the strike, and tensions were high. “You know, we handle some pretty nasty stuff in there,” he’d say. Or, if the guy was older: “C’mon, you’ve been here as long as I have! You know everyone!” Sometimes, if he already knew the person, he’d cut to the chase: “Wasn’t there a guy you worked with down there that was diagnosed with cancer a few years back? Did he make it through?” If they didn’t answer, staring instead at their steel-toed boots, Mack would lean in and say, “You know, I’m sure you heard, but I was diagnosed with cancer myself. Beat it, but — you know.” Then he’d turn toward the sprawling complex across the street — the site of the only job he’d ever had — and nod, adjusting the cap perched on his head. “Yup. Forty years.” He’d inhale deeply, nearly a sigh. “That’s a lot of hours around those chemicals.” He’d shake his head, unsure if he should blame himself or Momentive Performance Materials, the chemical plant in Waterford, New York, where he had dedicated so many years of his life.

Like Mack, many of the employees on the picket line had worked at Momentive for decades, and while they didn’t know for sure that working at the plant caused their cells to metastasize, the workers certainly knew of the inherent consequences that stemmed from handling carcinogenic chemicals on a day-to-day basis. That fear of a link is what troubled Mack and his cohort, and it’s why in November 2016, nearly 700 unionized workers at Momentive went on strike, protesting what they thought was an unfair contract — one that pushed for more expensive and restrictive health insurance for workers and the elimination of health care for retirees altogether, “many of whom,” according to leaflets handed out during the strike, “are suffering from job-related illnesses caused by exposure to dangerous chemicals.” For decades, the workers had mixed and churned chemicals in a variety of forms to produce an endless array of products, which included specialized goods such as F14 fluids and rubber stoppers on syringes along with items encountered on a day-to-day basis like exterior coatings for soft drink bottles and the rubber used to manufacture nipples for baby bottles.

Now, though, those same workers were walking out for the first time, and the union outfitted a defunct hot dog shack across from the plant into a headquarters. Nearly all of them had been picketing the plant’s nine entrances 24 hours a day, powering through snow squalls, huddling around burn barrels for warmth, trudging through slush puddles.

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Union strikers around a burn barrel outside Momentive’s Water Treatment Facility. (Jonno Rattman)

On the picket line, in rare close quarters with men who worked elsewhere in the massive plant, Mack learned his coworkers’ stories. He took a few minutes out of each day to ask strikers if they’d had cancer or knew anyone who did. Sometime after Christmas, Mack had started jotting down the names — current and retired, dead and alive.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers — spine, skin, stomach, and more. While these are cancers that do afflict men of a certain age—according to the American Cancer Society, one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer—the diagnoses outpace certain national averages. Brain cancer afflicts .006 percent of adult males, far below the roughly 2 percent of the strikers with throat cancer whom Mack surveyed. By mid-January, he had 85 names. Many of these men had worked in the plant for more than 20 years, which meant they’d tallied up decades of exposure to dangerous chemicals. (Of the scores of men on Mack’s list, I’ve independently confirmed the cancer diagnoses of two dozen, through interviews with either the men themselves or, in the case of 11 who died, with family and friends.) Mack himself had long known coworkers with cancer. To him and other employees, it was almost commonplace to know a guy who had been diagnosed. “Three other electricians I worked with in waste treatment also have cancer,” he told me. “Long-term exposure — in some of these buildings, there’s no way you can avoid that.” Mack, an electrician who works on the machines that process the plant’s chemical waste was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. His brother, who also works at the plant, was diagnosed with tongue cancer the next year. Their father, who worked at the plant for 36 years, died of cancer in 1994.

Mack’s oncologist, Dr. Kandasamy Perumal, who specializes in urology and has operated a practice in nearby Troy for 35 years, is no stranger to cases like his. “As time went on, more and more people came from that area with instances of malignancy, rather than Troy or Latham or other towns. My practice sees comparatively disproportionate numbers of tumors from people who live in Waterford and Mechanicville,” he said. “But do we know if they all worked at the plant? I don’t know for certain,” he added, explaining that his practice is not obligated to collect workplace information from patients. Momentive said that it was unaware of any chronic health problems among employees as a result of exposure to raw materials, and that their well-being is its highest priority. “The company takes all necessary actions to ensure strict adherence to all federal and state health guidelines,” said a Momentive spokesperson.

There were risks in taking on this kind of work, Mack knew. So did many of the men whose names were folded up in his pocket. But there had been some promise of security at Momentive, a belief that their jobs would take care of them — a good living, a secure retirement, health care. Today they’re not so sure. After the plant was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006, things took a dark turn. A decade of control by Wall Street brought pay cuts and a litany of increasingly rancorous labor disputes — culminating in the massive strike.

When I visited Momentive in January 2017, workers sat at the booths inside the hot dog shack wearing camouflage jackets, reading newspapers, drinking coffee, and eating hot dogs and stale pastries. One checked in picketers who, after nine weeks on the line, were eligible for unemployment. They were also paid $400 a week by the union. The 104-day walkout began November 2 and ended February 14, and during that time these men were constantly on edge, both about the security of their job but more importantly about the precariousness of the benefits they desperately relied upon. The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Bill Tullock, a 55-year-old senior advanced control operator, whose doctor had found a tumor in his throat during an endoscopy for acid reflux in 2015, maintains that he’d never have gotten the routine procedure that led to his cancer diagnosis without Momentive’s old health insurance. At the time, his annual deductible was $500; now it’s $3,500. Tullock doesn’t solely blame the plant for his cancer, but he’s adamant that were it not for the generous coverage, he’d never have known he was sick.

“I dodged a bullet,” Tullock said of his battle with cancer, which, thanks to the low deductible he paid courtesy of his previous health care coverage, was caught early. “With the new insurance, I am pretty confident I would’ve never had the endoscopy, and would’ve never known there was a tumor. Then it would’ve spread, and I wouldn’t have known.” Under the new contract, once he retires, he’s on his own. “I dedicated myself to this place,” he said during the strike in January, sitting in the basement of the hot dog shack, holding back tears. “I should have never started working here. And now they are trying to give us this shit insurance and just — what, ‘Go die?’” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Our health insurance is like the final firewall of personal protection,” he said. “It’s all we’ve got.”

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Bill Tullock was told by his doctor to get an endoscopy in 2015; it turned out he had a tumor in his stomach. Jack Mack sits down with his list of sick workers while on a break at union headquarters. (Jonno Rattman)

The men who’ve worked at the plant for decades and battled cancer — whether they think it’s from the chemicals they handled or not — now face a task familiar to millions, one from which they thought they had a reprieve: They must either sign up for the company’s onerous coverage or fend for themselves to get health insurance, with costs varying widely through the complicated, cumbersome public exchange overseen by the government — the precariousness of which is compounded by the Trump administration’s promise to gut the Affordable Care Act, leaving workers in an even more fretful state of uncertainty.

Like so many Americans, they’re threatened by a toxic triumvirate of lax chemical-safety regulations, costly health coverage, and growing pressures on Wall Street to perform — the latter of which has forced businesses to perform under expectations that set them up to fail, with employees taking the brunt of the downfall

The decade of private equity ownership had gradually worn down a generation of workers, stoking a divide between those who would be taken care of and those who would go without. “Sacrifices were made with the expectation that we would get adequate health care when we retired,” Mack said. “If you are going to work in environments like this, you are going to need affordable health care.” The strike marked dividing lines between worker and owner and financier, but it also revealed a rift so deep that it was often left unspoken: What do American workers owe to one another?

***

Waterford, New York, is one of a cluster of manufacturing towns situated north of Albany, where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson. It blossomed into a factory hub as early as the mid-1800s and was known for its paper mills. A reported stop on the Underground Railroad, it was even visited by Alexander Hamilton and Frederick Douglass. Drive into town from across the Hudson and you’re greeted by a memorial to Waterford’s veterans, including men who fought in the Revolutionary War. Keep driving north on Route 4, past the village center, and the Momentive complex flanks both sides of the road, sprawling across an 800-acre plot.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York. (Jonno Rattman)

The chemical plant is one of Saratoga County’s largest employers. First built by General Electric in 1947, it anchors the region both economically and culturally. For decades, the plant with its hundreds of union jobs offered its primarily male workforce a stable, middle-class kind of prosperity, one where high school graduates could eventually earn a six-figure salary. There was a sense of local pride: The soles of the boots in which Neil Armstrong took his one small step were made of silicone rubber manufactured here. “If you’re from here, this is where you work,” said Vinny Anatriello, a third-generation employee. “And if you don’t work here, you work in the school where all the guys’ kids go to, or you work in the doctor’s office where the guy’s sick wife goes, or you work in the grocery store.”

It’s no secret to the workers that materials used in Momentive’s Waterford plant can be dangerous. It’s been this way for decades. The plant sources silicone ore and, through reactions with various chemicals, produces materials used in consumer products ranging from shampoo and medical equipment to caulking and car parts. Numerous longtime workers say that the current operations use dozens of toxic chemicals, among them benzene, lead, mercury, and hydrochloric acid. The waste it has produced over the years — over 11.4 million pounds in 2015 alone — has at times included more than three dozen toxic chemicals, 11 of which are carcinogens, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

There used to be even more, workers say, decades ago when GE owned the plant. Numerous workers said that until the early 1980s, they cleaned their winter coats with pure trichlorethylene, now a known carcinogen, and used fiberglass and lead as fillers in chemical mixtures. For some processes, they weighed out raw lead by hand. “Back then we’d scoop it like it was salt,” said George LaMarche, 65, who retired in July 2017 after 44 years at the plant and whose doctor is closely monitoring his elevated prostate-specific antigen levels — potentially an early sign of prostate cancer. “We never wore any protection for that.” In a statement, a Momentive spokesperson said that the company provides all its employees with protective equipment, extensive training, and instructions in how to properly handle the materials they work with: “When employees act in accordance with the policies and procedures Momentive has in place, potential risks are mitigated.”

Millions of American workers are exposed to carcinogens, or possible carcinogens, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that researches and investigates workplace safety and health. In 2012 alone, upward of 45,000 diagnosed cases of cancer — and, since the agency is still investigating and uncovering potentially carcinogenic materials used by the American worker, perhaps twice that many — were caused by past workplace exposure. On average, nearly eight times as many people die each year of diseases acquired on the job as die from injuries sustained on the job.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers.

Since 1976, federal law has required all new industrial chemicals to be submitted for review by the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tens of thousands of industrial chemicals already in use were grandfathered in.) But after that initial environmental review, many industrial chemicals — which don’t necessarily have to get tested before being used in manufacturing — may never get a closer look by regulators. Once chemicals have entered the market, U.S. law only requires the EPA to collect data on the roughly 3,700 of them that are used at a rate of at least 500 tons per year. The data collected pertain mainly to their effects on the environment or the consumers of the products they produce — not on the workers who handle them.

“These chemicals are never sent back with actual information from the workplace,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s health program. “The regulations are focused on the end of the pipeline. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at that point. People are already affected.”

Updates to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was amended by Congress in 2016, mandated more pre-market testing for new chemicals seeking federal approval and required the EPA to review already-approved chemicals in widespread use. Ten of the most toxic of those are slated to be tested in 2018, but it’s unclear whether that deadline will be met. (Two of the chemicals have been commonly used at Momentive.) Since then, however, President Donald Trump has promised to scale back regulations broadly and has targeted federal agencies, the EPA chief among them, for sharp funding cuts.

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Momentive Performance Materials, a chemical plant in Waterford, New York (Jonno Rattman)

In May 2017, Nancy Beck, a former industry advocate and executive at the American Chemistry Council (of which Momentive is a member), was selected to become the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA unit tasked with implementing the updates to the toxic-chemicals law. Just two months earlier, she had gone before a Senate subcommittee as a then-executive at the ACC to push back against the review process. According to an investigation by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, the EPA has spearheaded “a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.” This included reevaluating plans to ban certain uses of two chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride and trichloroethylene, both of which have been used by Momentive employees.

Regardless of these policy reversals, tens of thousands of chemicals that have been in production for decades still need review. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental-advocacy group, estimated in 2015 that it could take 50 years to reevaluate 1,000 of the most toxic chemicals on the market. “Most toxins have not been adequately studied, employees have no tools to act on their suspicions, the companies have a disincentive to learn the full truth about what its chemicals do in terms of health impact, and the government is underfunded and doesn’t have sufficient tools to fully investigate,” said Dr. Steven Markowitz, director of the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College. “It’s a recipe for making the health consequences of working with toxic chemicals invisible.”

***

Tim Larson is a tall, broad-shouldered man who wears a musty cap tossed on his head. When I met him during the strike, he carried a megaphone that he used to shout chants on the picket line. His face lit up when he screamed, and his eyes — which seemed to hang out of his skull — bulged even further from their sockets. I stood with Larson most nights while I was there — he held the late shift on the picket line — and he explained that the plant is a complex of various buildings, each housing in a different part of the production line. You’re either breaking down raw ore, reacting the rock with chemicals, mixing together intermediate materials, packing products, or organizing them for storage and shipment.

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Tim Larson steps off a bus before a protest in Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s neighborhood in Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

Larson, a chemical operator, began working at Momentive in 1988 when he was 35 years old. He told me stories about the different parts of the plant, including Building 78. This area of the massive plant is home to the Waterford plant’s fluorosilicone manufacturing operations. There, a silicone base is reacted in roughly 100-gallon “dough” mixers at more than 240 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fluorosilicone gum for use in automobile gaskets and aerospace products. (The mixers are also used to produce “intermediates,” which are unfinished products that passed from building to building within the plant, and included different grades of polymers and fluids.) Long-term exposure to seven chemicals used in Building 78, according to Momentive material-safety data sheets, are suspected of or known to be reproductive toxins. Another chemical, Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphite, is a carcinogen. Workers call the building the One-Nut Club, for reasons that to them seem less ominous than inevitable.

When GE owned the plant, risks from fluorosilicone production had been on the company’s radar since the 1970s. In a “strictly private” 1977 safety audit, a safety specialist said that research had shown that materials created by these processes, when ingested — which could mean breathing in the chemical or having it touch one’s skin — shrank rats’ prostates and testes “and may have similar effects in man.” The specialist also wrote that tests showed that the chemical compound handled by workers was “probably not a carcinogen.” GE performed a similar toxicity review 20 years after its initial testing and analyzed several chemicals used to the produce fluorosilicones. “The data, although not definitive, did not give rise to any concerns over the potential for carcinogenicity,” the report concluded.

“Nobody admits there is a correlation, but we put stickers on the tanks that hold this stuff, saying that it causes cancer,” Larson told me, referring to the warning stickers that California state law required them to affix. (Many of their products are shipped to the Golden State.) “It’s right there in front of you.” 

“After six years, my eyes started bulging out of my head,” he told me, pointing to his face. He was diagnosed in early 1996 with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. “I had to get my eyelids sliced, because I couldn’t close my eyes,” Larson said. He knows he can’t prove a direct link, he added, but he is “convinced that all my autoimmune problems are directly related to working here.” Soon after his diagnosis, Larson transferred to another area of the plant.

The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Other workers voiced their concerns about Building 78. In 1998, a GE-employed research chemist named Herman Krabbenhoft wrote a letter to two operators who worked there, Joe DeVito and Dan Patregnani, explaining that the previous year he had expressed concerns to managers about the vapors released during fluorosilicone operations. Krabbenhoft wrote that GE’s health and safety manager was supposed to have initiated a study of how to measure the vapors’ concentration, but that after a year nothing had been done, adding that he was told by a colleague to “back off on pushing this because it might affect how GE’s managers viewed me and my performance.”

“Herman was on our side,” DeVito said.“He said, ‘Stay away from it. It’s going to kill you.’” Shortly thereafter, DeVito said, Krabbenhoft was fired. (Multiple attempts to reach Krabbenhoft for comment were unsuccessful; GE declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the plant’s current ownership, who also declined to comment on the specific incident.)

The building’s ventilation system was updated in the early 2000s, multiple employees who worked there said. The system was supposed to be air and temperature controlled. “It never worked, never sealed the room properly,” said John Ryan, who worked in Building 78 at the time, adding that temperatures could reach 110 degrees in the building due to the faulty system. In 2005, Ryan said he filed a formal grievance, asking to spend less time near the mixer, explaining that he didn’t want to be exposed to the hazardous mixture and its vapors. “But nothing changed,” he said. “And they never fixed the dough mixer either. Materials would come out into the air or spill onto the ground. That’s still going on, until this day.” In mid-2017, Momentive installed a second dough mixer to Building 78 to ramp up production, and though the machine suffered at first from issues relating to its packing seal, there haven’t been any recent health-related complaints. (Both the venting system and the initial dough mixer have also been serviced and are reportedly in working condition.)

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Joe DeVito was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2013. He worked in Building 78. (Jonno Rattman)

Now, DeVito said, workers must wear full-face respirators when they clean the mixers, which have to be pristine before the machine can be used to produce another product. The fluorosilicone is so sticky, Larson claimed, that he used to have to climb into the 100-gallon drum and scrape off any lingering substance with a razor blade. “Fluorosilicone is a highly resistant chemical — oil, water, you name it,” he said. “That’s why it is used on gaskets and car bumpers, or in rocket ships.” According to DeVito, “Momentive took more steps for safety over the years,” but the process itself and the chemicals used in it remained the same. Additionally, the company’s material-safety data sheets do not indicate whether the vapors produced from these chemicals are hazardous to humans, despite there being a warning that TFPA vapors, which are highly toxic, may evolve from the products used to make fluorosilicone gums and polymers. “The company raised certain health issues related to the chemicals used in this building, but despite a very incomplete knowledge base, they draw the conclusion that there is no cause for concern,” said Dr. Markowitz of Queens College, who reviewed the documents. “My conclusion would’ve been: ‘There’s a big gap in what we know versus what we don’t know.’ That’s the proper conclusion.”

DeVito was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer in 2013, after a bump on his neck swelled to the size of a golf ball. DeVito told me he knows of five other control operators who worked in Building 78 who were diagnosed with cancer. He told his doctor about his decades of exposure to fluorosilicone vapors. “She said, ‘It would take years to prove that it happened from work,’” he explained. “‘Take care of this and just move on.’” His treatment, radiation, and chemotherapy, were successful. He retired in early 2018.

Some workers, like Tony Pignatelli, who worked in the plant for 34 years, weren’t so lucky. Pignatelli was diagnosed with brain cancer in January 2000 and passed away three weeks later. “My dad knew the risks, but he did it because they took care of them with good pay and health care,” his daughter said. “But I can’t even begin to understand what those guys are going through down there now with this new contract.”

***

Employees accepted the risks associated with working in the plant, the backbone of their community, for over half a century. They felt taken care of: stable pay, a sizable pension, affordable and quality health care, good communication with management, camaraderie with fellow workers. But that all changed when GE sold its global silicone operation, with the Waterford plant as its centerpiece, to a Wall Street investment firm in 2006 in a leveraged buyout. “When it was GE, they treated you like family,” Jack Mack said. “After the sale, everything changed.”

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Matthew, Kenny and Vinny Annatriello—father, nephew, and son—on the picket line. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that manages $249 billion in assets, bought a controlling stake for $3.8 billion, then saddled the corporation (which changed its name to Momentive Performance Materials in December 2006) with $3 billion in financing debt while it collected a $3.5 million that first year for “financial and strategic advisory services.”

Many employees didn’t understand the implications of the sale until 2009, when nearly 400 production workers received surprise pay cuts. Brian Cameron Jr., a 34-year-old second-generation employee, was making $27 an hour as a chemical operator. He had just bought a house in Waterford and a new Dodge Ram pickup the previous summer. “Everything was going good. I paid my bills,” he said. “I thought I was set for life.” Then his wages were slashed to $17 an hour. He eventually took a higher-paying position at the plant, but his debt piled up too fast. “I thought if I moved quickly, I would be able to save my life,” he said. “But it was too late.” He lost his house, gave back his truck, and moved into a coworker’s apartment.

The cuts meant that his coworker Ron Gardner, then 53, and his wife, Donna, could no longer afford the $1,300 monthly payments on their two-bedroom ranch home in Grangerville. “We were struggling,” he said. A few years later, in 2013, they abandoned it and moved into a trailer park in Saratoga Springs, just two miles from Momentive’s current CEO Jack Boss’s $950,000, 4,375-square-foot home. They took out personal loans to pay for a $23,000 double-wide, then used savings and loans from family members to pay for the roof and the lot’s rental fees. Unable to sell their ranch, they filed for bankruptcy and began paying off their new debts.

The local union contested the wage cuts, and 18 months later, in 2010, with their contract soon to expire, Momentive agreed to settle by issuing back pay — more than $50,000 before taxes for some workers — while making the wage cuts permanent going forward. Gardner, Cameron, and others who had lost their homes or been pushed into bankruptcy by the cuts couldn’t turn down the chance to repay their debts. “People were so broke from the wage cuts, they voted yes for that contract,” said local union president Dominick Patrignani, who has worked at the plant for over 30 years and was the chief bargainer during last year’s strike. “They were given no alternative.”

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Ron and Donna Gardner lost their home, then Ron developed esophageal cancer. Dominick Patrignani, president of the local union, is the chief bargainer for the 700 strikers. (Jonno Rattman)

But Momentive wasn’t done. In 2013, the company froze pensions for workers under 50 and those with less than 10 years of service. “Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family,” Cameron told me during the strike. All of this is par for the course for private equity firms like Apollo. According to a study led by Josh Lerner, professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School, private equity buyouts lead to sizable reductions in earnings per worker compared with traditional companies, as well as modestly greater job loss, with a comparative decline of 4 percent over a two-year period.

“If a private equity firm needs to goose their returns, they will take it out of worker’s compensation — wages, pensions, benefits, all of it,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the co-author of Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street. To her, private equity firms only care about one thing: profit. “The fastest and easiest and least controversial way, in their point of view, is to cut compensation. They make a dollar every time they take a dollar out of workers’ compensation,” she said. “Private equity controls management and the board of directors. They can fire anyone at any time. They sit at both sides of the table. There is no one looking out for the workers.”

In 2014, still under Apollo management, Momentive filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, trimming its debt obligations from $3.2 billion to $1.2 billion. This is also a familiar tactic for the firm. “It makes sense [Apollo did that] because you create money out of thin air,” said Tony Casey, professor of law at the University of Chicago, who studied the Momentive bankruptcy case. “Apollo is an aggressive investment firm,” he added. “They are not shy when it comes to using bankruptcy to their advantage.” The company announced a public offering three years after it emerged from bankruptcy, but the offering was postponed. When it did, Apollo owned the largest stake of shares.

Taking advantage of bankruptcy courts is also a preferred method of President Trump, who counts Apollo CEO Leon Black as a friend. And while Trump boasts about his dedication to the American worker, the company he keeps deliberately erodes the foundation upon which the middle class is built. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, Trump said: “If you look at our great businesspeople today — Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis, Leon Black of Apollo — all of them have done the same. They use and we use the laws of this country, the bankruptcy laws, because we’ll buy a company. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. … You know, it’s like on The Apprentice. It’s not personal. It’s just business. OK?”

“Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family.”

During Momentive’s bankruptcy proceedings, GSO Capital Partners, the credit arm of Blackstone Group, one of America’s largest hedge funds — headed by Steve Schwarzman, who chaired President Trump’s defunct Strategic and Policy Forum — translated its bond investment in Momentive into public stocks, a 6.8 percent stake. (A spokesman for Blackstone said the firm sold its stake in Momentive on August 3, 2016 — the same day union workers voted to strike if a contract agreement could not be reached. The spokesman, however, could not provide documentation of the sale. The spokesman also confirmed that Blackstone senior adviser John Dionne is still on Momentive’s board of directors.)

In 2013, Blackstone had bought a 20 percent controlling stake in another longtime upstate New York employer, then-declining Eastman Kodak, which had already slashed retiree health care benefits and pensions (though the company did restore elements of its pension plan upon emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2013). When Carl Icahn, the recently ousted special adviser to the president on regulatory reform — whom Trump also counts as a close friend — came to Trump’s rescue and retained full control of his Taj Mahal casino through a bankruptcy proceeding, he shut down the operation rather than give the union employees better health benefits. Roughly 3,000 people lost their jobs. “It’s a classic take-the-money-and-run — Icahn takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of Atlantic City and then announces he is closing up shop,” Bob McDevitt, the president of the local union, said in a statement after the closing.

Others in Trump’s family and inner circle have deep ties with these Wall Street operators, whose business tactics, like those being implemented in Waterford, affect middle-class families. Blackstone has loaned Kushner Companies, the real estate empire of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, more than $400 million for real estate deals since 2013. The firm is one of the company’s largest lenders. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo, met with Kushner several times in 2017, at one point even discussing a possible job opening in the White House; by November of last year, Apollo would lend $184 million to Kushner Companies. (While Kushner is no longer CEO of the real estate company and has sold a chunk of his stake, he still reportedly holds properties and other interests in Kushner Companies — those investments are worth upward of three-quarters of $1 billion.) Kushner Companies is also on the clock to pay the $1.2 billion mortgage debt for 666 Fifth Avenue, a 41-story albatross in Manhattan that the company purchased in 2006, which is due February 2019.

Jack Boss joined Momentive as an executive vice president in March 2014, one month before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and he officially became CEO that December. The union believes that Apollo brought in Boss specifically to weaken the union during the next contract negotiation, which was slated for 2016. “They planned this entire thing,” Dominick Patrignani, the local union president, told me. “They knew what they were doing.”

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Dan Patregnani, a union member who worked in Building 78, and the headquarters of Apollo Global Management at 9 West 57th Street in. New York City. (Jonno Rattman)

In mid-January 2017, workers rallied outside the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that had bought their company more than a decade prior. About a month later, members of their parent union, the Communications Workers of America, also handed out leaflets near the White House as President Trump met with Schwarzman, whom he had named an economic adviser and head of the Strategic and Policy Forum during the early days of the strike. (The 16-member group would disband just months after this meeting.)

Jack Mack, the second-generation worker who compiled the list of employees with cancer, trekked down to New York City to participate in the demonstration outside Apollo HQ. He stood with dozens of other workers and supporters, and his hot breath crusted in the frigid air as he called out Leon Black by name. This was the first time I met Mack — the strike had just begun. As the event came to an end and the NYPD began to shuffle protesters off the street, I asked Mack what he planned to do next.

He looked me in the eye and said, “Go back up to the plant and stand out there until this whole thing comes to an end — until we get what we deserve.”

***

The labor negotiations broke down over the summer of 2016, and by August a strike seemed imminent. In early September, 85 percent of workers rejected an offer that would have forced current employees into more expensive health insurance plans and eliminated the much-beloved benefit for future retirees altogether. They officially went on strike November 2. Five days later they voted again, with the same result — they rejected the offer by a larger margin.

Ron Gardner retired on New Year’s Day 2015. He was 61. He’d already lost his home and moved into his trailer, and he’d spent much of the previous summer at Saratoga’s venerable racetrack, watching and sometimes betting on the races. “I won enough to keep going the entire season,” he said, seated at his dining room table, television game shows audible in the background. Soon after he retired, he changed his health insurance on Momentive’s recommendation, switching providers and opting for a plan that was cheaper from month to month but caused his deductible to rise from zero to $3,500. He wasn’t worried. “I had never been sick a day in my life,” he said. But shortly before he retired, right around Thanksgiving 2015, he began having trouble swallowing. “It scared me,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even swallow my own spit.” There was a nearly two-inch tumor in his esophagus: adenocarcinoma, a form of cancer.

Gardner had begun working at GE’s Schenectady plant in 1973 and transferred in 1988 to Waterford, where he held various positions over the years, including the production of chemical mixers for caulking After GE sold the plant in 2006, he worked for more than two years refining chemicals in Building 30, filtering out cloudy imperfections before transferring those same liquids into drums to be sold to consumers. “I often inhaled a lot of vapors,” he said.

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The water treatment facility at Momentive Performance Materials. (Jonno Rattman)

Gloves, Gardner said, weren’t required for the job. According to material-safety data sheets, gloves are required only if a risk assessment deems them necessary. “He would come home covered in this caulking shit, all over his clothes and his hands,” his wife, Donna, said. “It would be everywhere.”

He transferred five years later to wastewater treatment, where he ran presses that compacted hazardous waste into dry, disposable cakes the size of kitchen tables before dropping them into trailers for disposal. He had to clean up spilled waste by hand and scrape out the presses if the cakes didn’t fall properly. The plant, he added, didn’t require respiratory protection for that particular job. “I breathed that stuff in for three and a half years,” he said. By the time Gardner began his last job at Momentive, the white walls of the facility had long turned gray from the dust produced by the waste. “That’s where I think I got the cancer from.”

Starting in January 2016, Gardner began a six-week course of chemotherapy and a month of radiation, paying off the $3,500 deductible in installments. Despite the treatment’s apparent success, Gardner’s doctor pressed him to undergo an esophagectomy. The operation — which would remove part of his esophagus and reconstruct it with the upper portion of his stomach — would be risky, and one of his lungs would have to be temporarily deflated during the procedure. Gardner decided against it.

By October 27, 2016, his cancer had returned. He needed the surgery to survive. But now he was racing against two clocks: the cancer and the company. Labor negotiations had broken down months before; the strike would begin within a week, and his current insurance coverage would run out at the end of December. “Company-paid medical, dental, vision, and drug coverage will not extend for the duration of employee strike activity,” a letter to employees from Momentive said.

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.” He called his lawyer and had his will updated. He went into surgery on November 29, and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. “I wish I could’ve been out there on the picket line,” he said. “It was all such bad timing.”

Once home, Gardner was told by Momentive to sign himself and Donna up for new health insurance through Mercer, a private online benefits marketplace, where employees can choose from a variety of providers and plans. A 2014 Aon Hewitt survey found that despite accounting for only 5 percent of current plans, 33 percent of employers said they would begin offering insurance through private marketplaces in the next three to five years. In a 2016 report, Mike Gaal of Bloomberg BNA wrote that large employers pitch private exchanges to employees as a way for them to “buy down” to more appropriate levels of coverage. “While this may be true,” he wrote, “the reality is that the plan savings, in this example, are derived through shifting costs to employees through high deductible, copayments and out-of-pocket limits.”

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.”

The Gardners’ 2017 deductible would drop to $600 each, but their monthly premium soared from $262 to $1,152 per month — a hike Momentive promised to offset for already-retired workers under 65 with a $400 monthly subsidy. He got his first subsidy check on January 27, 2017. As a retiree, Gardner was one of the lucky ones. The younger generation was battling a contract that offered them expensive insurance while they worked — and nothing when they were finished with their working lives.

***

As the strike wore on, it drew the attention of elected officials in the area. Twenty-one Albany County lawmakers wrote to Momentive chief executive Jack Boss that the proposed contract seemed “to greatly hurt retirees and take too many health care and retirement benefits away from active employees.” State comptroller Tom DiNapoli reached out to Apollo; he has New York’s state-employee pensions partially invested through the firm. “I urge you to encourage Momentive to work diligently towards an expeditious settlement of this dispute on terms that are fair to labor and management,” he wrote. On the picket line in Waterford, one popular sign slung around the necks of strikers called out Apollo’s chief executive by name: hedge fund billionaire leon black, tell momentive: don’t destroy good jobs.

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Union strikers hold a sign outside of Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s home near Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

In early February 2017, likely facing pressure from the governor’s office and intense publicity around both the strike and Momentive’s high-profile shareholders, Boss contacted the union’s regional leadership, bypassing the local chapter, and offered to resume negotiations. Four days later, a tentative deal was reached. Governor Andrew Cuomo, in his first public statement on the strike, announced his support for the deal, calling it key to “investing in the [union’s] world-class workforce, restoring operations at the plant and keeping upstate New York moving forward.”

Under the proposed new contract, to be voted on February 13 and 14, Momentive would keep matching 401(k) contributions of workers whose pensions had previously been frozen and would pay each striking employee a $2,000 bonus upon returning to work. In exchange, the union would accept the proposed health care amendments for current workers — more expensive premiums and deductibles. The company, rather than provide health insurance to future retirees, agreed to give at least 100 veteran workers a $40,000 cash bonus upon retirement — around $23,000 after taxes — that would hopefully cover any medical expenses before workers were eligible for Medicare at age 65. Though this was a win for the union, the next round of negotiations, in 2019, could decide the future of whether retirees will continue benefitting from Momentive’s medical coverage. “We have the right to negotiate now, which we didn’t have before last year’s strike,” says Patrignani. “It was going to sunset, but it’s still a topic of bargaining for future contracts.”

“You either have a preexisting condition, or you have an underlying condition, or you have an undiagnosed condition because of the inherent risk of working in a chemical plant,” said Robert Hohn, a 55-year-old employee. “You would probably have to pay a high premium and a high deductible. Would $23,000 cover that if something went wrong?” Hohn’s wife has degenerative disc disease, which requires constant care, and chronic gastrointestinal inflammation. Under the new contract, Hohn would have to pay $74 per week for him and his wife, with a $3,500 deductible and an annual maximum payment of $7,000. (Most workers signed up for this plan, which is the cheaper of the two; the other option has a $12,000 out-of-pocket maximum for a family). “The health care is going to kill me,” he said the day of the vote. “With my wife’s condition, we will definitely be hitting the maximum every year.” When the new contract came up for a vote, he felt he had no choice but to vote no. (At the beginning of 2018, Hohn’s wife left the insurance plan; he now pays $36 per week and a deductible for himself of $1,750.)

But many other workers feared that if the contract didn’t pass, some would cross the picket line to return to work, giving up their representation and fracturing the union. “They are pitting us against one another and using that to their advantage,” one worker said as he waited in line to vote on the proposed contract. “People are scared, feeling forced to vote ‘yes,’ even though the contract isn’t much better than what we went on strike for.”

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A classified ad for temporary replacement chemical operators in the Saratogian newspaper on a table in the union’s break house.

This internal tension became more and more apparent as the strike wore on, endless weeks of picketing outside during the coldest part of the year for upstate New York. “When it comes to these guys losing their health care, I should give a fuck?” one Momentive worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, wondered aloud in January, before the new union contract was ratified. “Why should I care about you when you didn’t give a shit about me in the past?”

Like some other younger union workers at the plant, he was in the minority and had voted yes on the contract back in September, recalling the wage cuts and pension freezes of years past. To them, the older generation were on their way out; the younger workers needed this place to provide for their families for decades to come. They wanted a fair contract for everyone, but they didn’t want to ruin what they had already — a stable job — and were willing to sacrifice benefits in the process.

Apollo has shut down other manufacturing plants in the past, and that threat was real for workers on the picket line. Noranda Aluminum’s Missouri plant once employed over 800 union workers. Then it began a slow decline, and after Apollo sold its position in 2015, the plant shut down in early 2016. To some workers, a long and intense strike could make that possibility a reality. “To me, it’s not worth losing all of this. If they shut down, where will we go?” said another during the strike. “Stop whining and move forward. These old guys, they’ve had it so good for so long that they don’t want to give anything up. Sometimes, to me, it’s better to take one step back so I am able to still move forward — not like this situation now.”

The contract passed on February 14, 2017. The men went back to work within days. “They didn’t achieve everything they wanted,” said Bob Master, the union’s legislative director for the region. “But sometimes the fruits of victory don’t show up until later on, during the next round of negotiations, when the company remembers the spirit and determination of a united workforce.”

***

Robert Hohn and his coworkers are already anxious about what new concessions their next contract negotiation in 2019 might bring. Since the company’s sale to private equity a decade ago, men like Ron Gardner, who went into bankruptcy after leaving his home for a double-wide trailer and fought cancer from exposure at the plant, have watched as their Wall Street–backed corporation trimmed job benefits they’d counted on for decades — benefits all the more crucial now, as they face retirement tinged with the threat of cancer. This time around, it was health care for retirees. What will it be next time?

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Outside the entrance gate of the Momentive chemical plant. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo, meanwhile, announced in July 2017 that the firm had raised $24.7 billion for its latest global buyout fund, the largest sum of leveraged-buyout capital ever raised by a private equity firm, poised to pave the way for many more acquisitions like the one that created Momentive. Up in Waterford, there are whispers that Apollo is even trying to force the landlord to sell the hot dog shack — which the union still uses as it’s headquarters — and its surrounding land rights.

But despite these big-picture moves by corporate financiers, workers at the plant are still focused on their benefits — assets that are crucial to their survival. “I still don’t trust Momentive,” Gardner told me. The company had already cut his pay. What, he wondered, would prevent it from eventually taking away the insurance subsidy he received each month? If he lost the subsidy before he got Medicare, he explained at his dining room table, he won’t be able to afford health insurance. “After that, I don’t know what would happen,” he added, looking out the window. It was starting to rain. “If the cancer came back and I didn’t have coverage, I would die.”

***

Ian Frisch is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, Playboy, and Vice, among others. His first book, on magic and the secret lives of the subculture’s most prominent young magicians, will be published in 2019 by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. 

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Jonno Rattman

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Sean Cooper

Kara Walker’s Subtlety

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Natalie Hopkinson | A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance | The New Press | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,721 words)

* * *

Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Martin Carter

Inside the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in New York, the first thing that hits you is the smell: over a century’s worth of industrial grime, clinging to black, molasses-coated walls. At first whiff, it is kind of sweet, like stale cake. As you go deeper into the cavernous brick building, it gives way to a sour curdling. As my ten-year-old daughter, Maven, describes it: “It’s like how my cat smells when he throws up.”

Maven, my friend Izetta, and I are among more than a hundred thousand people who make a pilgrimage in the summer of 2014 to pay homage to the “Sugar Sphinx,” the seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-high creation of Kara Walker, one of the most important and provocative artists working in the United States. The sculpture is forty tons of sugar molded into a ghostly white apparition, part mammy, part sphinx. The line to see her takes more than an hour to travel and stretches out for four long Brooklyn blocks. I spot the writer Gaiutra Bahadur, whose recent book, Coolie Woman, explores the history of indentured sugar workers in Guyana. Bahadur’s research on sugar plantation life and its bitter aftertaste among Guyanese women speaks forcefully to the exhibit we came to see. I wave Bahadur over to join us in line.

The installation’s title, displayed in bold black type painted along the Domino Sugar factory’s brick façade:

A Subtlety

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the
demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

The original Domino factory—first built in 1850s Williamsburg— was being torn down, along with the stories of generations of lives that it touched around the world. The factory was just one stop in the sugar industry’s “triangular trade” that created the blueprint for the globalized economy. Investors came from Europe; labor came from Africa; the cane fields were located in points across the Global South. The Domino refinery was the final step before the sugar reached consumers. Raw sugar would arrive at Domino’s forty-thousand-square-foot facility. Through the magic of refinery, pristine white sugar would come out. The profits that followed made sugar a key fuel of Empire.

The title, A Subtlety, is taken straight from history. Centuries ago, “subtleties” referred to elaborate, edible toys made of sugar. These exotic treats and status symbols were first made in the Middle East and popularized among the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. These “subtleties” could be trees, architectural models, or depictions of peasants holding baskets of fruit. There was nothing subtle about them, given what a rare and expensive luxury sugar was at the time. Unveiled at dinner parties, these were ostentatious displays of the host’s clout. The sugar sculptures could also be used to send more subversive messages. “Sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems,” writes Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power. Read more…

What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists

(Photo courtesy the Auping family)

Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)

Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.

Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Workingby Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.

His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…

Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life

(Sankai / Getty Images)

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.

This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.

As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.

During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.

I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.

I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?

As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?

When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.

“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.

***

It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.

For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.

On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t  planned on having a husband or a house.

The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.

***

The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.

I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.

Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.

A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.

***

Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.

Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.

I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.

In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.

I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.

The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.

One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.

A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”

“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.

“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.

My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.

“Why must everyone match?” I asked.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?

But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.

So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.

Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?

I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.

Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.

I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.

***

A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.

Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.

The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”

I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.

I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that  I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.

At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.

I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.

“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”

“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.

One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.

P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.

His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”

“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.

I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.

“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.

If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.

“Can we please?” I said.

“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.

* * *

Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.

We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.

People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.

I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.

We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.

“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.

“That’s correct,” P.J. said.

“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”

“We’ll be leaving by bus.”

I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?

A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.

It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.

You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.

Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.

Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.

“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”

The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.

We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.

* * *

From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.

The Many Acts of Keith Gordon

Keith Gordon circa 2008. (Photo: Rachel Griffin.)

David Obuchowski | The Awl and Longreads | January 2018 | 34 minutes (8,481 words)

Our latest feature is a new story by David Obuchowski and produced in partnership with The Awl.

“When I first met him the only thing I really remember is that he looked familiar to me,” cinematographer Tom Richmond told me about Keith Gordon, the director and former actor. “We would walk down the street…and people would recognize him all the time,” said Bob Weide, an executive producer, writer, director and one of Gordon’s oldest friends. “He has one of those faces where it would be, ‘Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you, but don’t I know you?’ …Keith would always give them the benefit of the doubt and say, ‘Um, I don’t know. Do we know each other?’ They’d say, “Did you go to Brandeis?’ And Keith would say, ‘No, no, no, I didn’t.’ …They’d say, ‘Wait a minute, did you grow up in Sacramento?’”

“You know what it’s like, when you see him from that time,” recalled Gordon’s wife, Rachel Griffin, a film producer and former actress. “He looked like somebody you knew.” And it was often true, sort of: many people know what he looked like in the mid 1980s, because Gordon had been a very visible, successful actor in teen comedies and thrillers.

“They would rarely say, ‘Oh my god, you’re the guy in Christine, or you’re the guy in Dressed to Kill or whatever,” Weide said. “Sometimes I would actually just jump in and say, ‘He’s an actor, you’ve probably just seen him in one of his films.’ …It was just really painful for him. People thought they knew him, but he was always way too embarrassed or humble to say ‘I’m an actor, maybe you’ve seen one of my movies’.”

Maybe you have seen one of his movies, and not just one he’s starred in. Gordon has directed five feature films, as well as some of the most prestigious of prestige television, including but not even remotely limited to “Fargo,” “The Leftovers,” and “Homeland.” Read more…

Ten Books to Read in 2018

Books with hidden spines
Geography Photos / UIG via Getty Images

We asked writers, editors, and booksellers to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition last year. Here are their 10 suggestions.


Maris Kreizman
Writer and critic, former Editorial Director of Book of the Month Club

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Patty Yumi Cottrell, McSweeney’s)

There’s nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator, and the protagonist of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel is a doozy. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is the story of Helen, a school teacher from New York City, who casts herself in the role of lead detective on a very tough and personal case — her adopted brother’s suicide. When Helen returns to her childhood home of Milwaukee to investigate, truths about Helen and her family are slowly revealed, and we begin to realize that Helen may be worthy of scrutiny herself. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is both a clever and poignant exploration of the distance between how we imagine ourselves to be and who we truly are.

Read more…

The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder That Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty

The wooden bridge where the abandoned car of Adolf Coors III, millionaire brewer, was found in Golden, Colorado, Feb. 10, 1960. (AP Photo)
  Philip Jett | The Death of an Heir | St. Martin’s Press | September 2017 | 27 minutes (7,489 words)

Below is an excerpt from The Death of an HeirPhilip Jett’s absorbing new book of true crime, about the botched kidnapping of Adolph Coors III, the Coors brewery CEO, which launched one of the largest manhunts in US history and seems to have taken its cues from the Hollywood playbook. Our thanks to Jett and St. Martin’s Press for letting us share this story with the Longreads community.

* * *

At barely half a rod wide and three hands deep, Turkey Creek was not unlike hundreds of tributaries snaking their way through Colorado canyons. That would soon change. The creek flowed only a few miles, spanned here and there by rough-hewn lumber bridges like the one in Turkey Creek Canyon, with its crude railings and two wooden tracks burrowed in gravel, wide enough for a single car to cross. Fewer than half a dozen vehicles crossed Turkey Creek Bridge each morning. That included the local school bus and a milk delivery truck—and for the last month, the white-over-turquoise International Harvester Travelall driven by Adolph Herman Joseph Coors III.

The name fit for a crown prince belonged to the forty-four-year-old chairman of the board and CEO of the multimillion-dollar Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colorado, and first-born grandson of the brewery’s founder. Known simply as “Ad” to most who knew him, he was well-liked by associates and employees for his friendliness and reserve. And despite being the eldest successor to the giant Colorado beer empire and an accomplished man, Ad preferred the simple life on his horse ranch southwest of Denver, where he lived contently with his wife, Mary, and their four young children.

On the crisp, windy morning of Tuesday, February 9, 1960, Ad rose before sunrise and began his daily exercise regime. After showering, he dressed for work and joined Mary at the kitchen table for coffee. They talked as they did every morning.

Before leaving for the brewery, Ad headed outside to check his horses, pitching hay and breaking ice in their troughs. He soon returned to kiss Mary and his children goodbye, but his children had boarded a school bus minutes earlier. Grabbing a tan baseball cap and slipping on his favorite navy-blue nylon jacket, he stepped out onto the carport, started his Travelall, and headed down the driveway. He waved to his ranch manager as he passed. It was 7:55 a.m.

Ad’s normal route to the brewery, twelve miles away, would have carried him less than a mile to paved US Highway 285, but a section of the highway had been closed for construction since January. The closure forced him to detour along a winding, lonely stretch of gravel road for four miles to Turkey Creek Canyon, where it connected to a state road that led back to Highway 285.

As Ad drove along the secluded road that morning, his Travelall rambled around the last bend before reaching Turkey Creek Bridge, just out of view. Waiting on the bridge was thirty-one-year-old Joseph Corbett Jr., who had stalked Ad for many months awaiting the chance to carry out his scheme. The road closure and detour across Turkey Creek Bridge gave him that chance.

Corbett backed his canary-yellow Mercury sedan onto the one-lane bridge just minutes before Ad’s arrival. Handcuffs and leg irons lay on the back seat. A ransom note in an envelope ready for mailing later that day lay in the glove box. Concealing a pistol in his coat pocket, he exited the four-door car, leaving the driver’s door open. He opened a rear door and raised the hood, signaling engine trouble, and stood by the car, waiting for his victim. All he had to do was lure Ad away from his Travelall. Then the Coors CEO and heir wouldn’t be so rich and powerful. Instead, he’d be a hostage worth many times his weight in gold and, if all went according to plan, would make Corbett a very rich man by week’s end.


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As Ad drove around that last bend, he spotted the yellow Mercury stranded on the narrow bridge. It was 8:00 a.m. Just as Corbett had planned, Ad pulled onto the bridge behind the Mercury. He shouted through a rolled-down window, asking if he could help. Corbett shouted back his rehearsed reply. Eager to get going, Ad stepped out of the Travelall and shut the door, leaving the engine running and radio playing. He didn’t expect to be long. He figured he’d help push the stranded car out of the way and give its driver a ride to the nearest filling station.

But as Ad approached, Corbett stepped forward and drew his pistol, taking the beer magnate by surprise. Ad was an intelligent but stubborn man, not the kind to don shackles and meekly slide into an assailant’s car. As Corbett drew nearer, the six-foot-one, 185-pound Ad Coors seized his abductor’s hand that gripped the gun. The two, almost identical in height and weight, struggled. Ad shoved his younger assailant backward, and they slammed against the crude bridge railing. Ad’s baseball cap along with Corbett’s fedora flew into the creek. Ad’s eyeglasses fell, too, cracking the left lens on impact. Ad pushed his antagonist away and made a break for the Travelall. But Corbett, seeing his ransom trying to escape, extended the pistol and fired. The sound of shots echoed up the canyon.

Those two shots set off the largest US manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping.

“It was about eight o’clock,” Rosemary Stitt would later testify in the First District Court of Colorado. “Right after I sent my kids off to school, about twenty minutes after. First, it sounded like somebody hollered down at the bridge. I was sittin’ in front of my sewing machine by the window. It sounded like one or two words is all. It was two different people, I think. Then I heard a crackling noise like lightnin’ striking a tree. I looked out the kitchen window to see if a tree fell down out back but didn’t see nothing. So it was then I got to thinking it might be a gunshot. Just one shot. Or, it coulda been two really close together.”

Those two shots set off the largest US manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. State and local authorities, along with the FBI, burst into action, attempting to locate Ad Coors and arrest his kidnapper. Ad’s influential father demanded that the perpetrator be caught and his son returned, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover gave assurances that he would make it his top priority domestically. Once the evidence pointed to Corbett, Hoover backed up his promises by placing Corbett on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, describing him as the most hunted suspect since John Dillinger. The manhunt would span the continent and involve hundreds of law enforcement officers. Yet as months passed with little success, Ad’s tormented wife and children clutched tenuously to their hopes. Like them, everyone wondered where Colorado’s favorite son and his abductor could be.

The ranch home of Adolph Coors III (AP Photo)

Snow swirled past the windows outside Ad’s barn at eight o’clock on the night of Monday, February 8. Ad wanted to confer with his ranch manager about when they would auction the cattle. They decided to wait a bit, when the market was up. He also asked if his manager could accompany him Saturday to size up some horses in La Junta, and he agreed.

Mary called Ad to dinner. Afterward, Ad sat at the kitchen table near sweat-streaked windows, reviewing some of the ranch accounts. He was bushed and hoped to turn in soon. He’d been back from Miami for forty-eight hours, and his first day at the brewery had been a busy one, with more meetings and telephone conferences scheduled for Tuesday. At least his father was on vacation in Hawaii with his mother and wouldn’t return for another two weeks. Things wouldn’t be as tense with Mr. Coors away.

Cecily was seated across the kitchen table from her father with Spike seated beside her, both doing homework. The youngest of the Coors children, Jim, lay on the den floor in front of the fireplace with a toy truck and horse trailer he’d gotten for Christmas. Mary sat watching television with the volume low so not to disturb those at the table. She’d finished putting the dishes away earlier with the help of Brooke, who now stretched out in the hallway floor with the telephone.

Mary couldn’t help thinking how nice it was to be home with the kids and Ad and her fireplace and her favorite chair and everything feeling like it should. She wished she could freeze the moment and keep things just the way they were forever. She knew things at home were changing and the kids were growing up. What Mary didn’t realize was that night would be the best it would be, forever more.

“Three dollars—regular,” Corbett told gas attendant Lynn Westerbuhr at the Conoco Service Station on East Fourteenth Avenue, around the corner from Corbett’s apartment.

It was a cold night, and the young attendant inserted the hose nozzle into the automobile and turned the pump lever. He stomped his feet on the icy concrete and cupped his gloved hands, blowing on them to provide a little warmth.

“He stopped by regularly, usually once a week. He asked for three dollars’ worth of gas every time,” said Westerbuhr. “Never told me his name. Always paid cash.”

The attendant removed the hose and hooked it on the side of the pump. “That’s three dollars,” said Westerbuhr, waiting for Corbett to slip three bills through the sliver of open window. “Whatcha got back there? Moving?”

“A sleeping bag and tent.”

“You going camping in this weather?” asked the attendant, just like the clerk had at the Sears department store.

“Here’s your money,” said Corbett. He detested snoops.

“He was driving a dark maroon Dodge, ’tween a ’46 to ’49 year model, I think,” Westerbuhr soon would tell authorities. “Around Christmas, I seen him in a bright-yellow Mercury and again in January, ’bout through the second week of January, I’d say. I seen him in several cars over the last year, though—a light blue Ford wagon, gray-and-white Ford sedan. He liked cars. Most times, he was by himself. Sometimes with another man. A big fella, about thirty-five, usually in dirty work clothes, might ’ave been an Indian or an Italian, I don’t know.”

After leaving the station that Monday night, Corbett returned to his Perlmor apartment. Soon, metallic sounds filled the air. Gun chambers snapped, shackles clanked, and handcuffs clattered eerily in the sparse room. Corbett was making ready for the following day. He brushed his coat and spit-shined his shoes, like preparing for a job interview, a compulsion he’d picked up in prison. He’d gotten a haircut earlier in the day. A freshly dry-cleaned suit hung on a doorknob.

Later that evening, Corbett hurried down the back stairs to the first-floor hallway and out the back door. A pistol, a rifle, cuffs, and leg irons draped in a blanket filled his arms. A sedan waited for him across the alley behind his apartment with its trunk raised and front-and rear-passenger doors open on the passenger side. He’d already loaded blankets, canned food, water in glass jugs, and his Coleman stove, lantern, and other camping equipment in the trunk. He checked for anyone who might be watching him before stretching out the blanket and removing the pistol and placing it in the glove compartment.

“He seemed like he was in a hurry,” said Terrence Smith, a tenant in room 106. “I saw blankets on the back seat, two rifle cases, a telescopic case, and a pistol case, all zipped up along the side.”

Corbett slammed the trunk closed, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead, running his fingers through his hair that was soaked with sweat despite the cold night’s sleet pelting down. Scaling flights of stairs half a dozen times made him perspire, but he was also suffering from nervousness, anxiety, and fear of detection. He was afraid, all right, even though he’d spent months, almost thirty of them, planning this job. Despite being proud of his intellect (he’d been tested as having an IQ of 148) and his methodical, almost obsessive analytical approach to things, he knew he wasn’t infallible. After all, he had been captured for shooting a man and imprisoned in California a decade earlier.

To calm himself, he sat in his apartment and turned on the television to Peter Gunn. Soon, he pulled open a drawer and stuffed the letter he’d perfected into the pocket of his coat hanging in the closet. He planned to mail it the next day.

Corbett hadn’t seen his family for ages, and if the letter procured him what he expected, he doubted he’d have a chance to see them for a long time to come. He didn’t have a family of his own, not yet, only a father, stepmother, and stepbrother.

“It says here that he’s got a wife—name’s Marion,” said one of Corbett’s former bosses reviewing his unemployment records with an FBI agent later. “Some of the boys said Walt told ’em he was married. But later he said he was married to ‘Anne’ and listed her as his wife on his company health insurance policy. Seems to me a man should know the name of his wife, and polygamy is frowned on in Colorado.”

His female neighbors, however, never saw a wife or a girlfriend or any woman visiting, for that matter. If any woman said hello, she was lucky to receive eye contact from Corbett, much less a response. Many of his female neighbors who’d been rebuffed by Corbett’s shyness and abrupt exits referred to him as “Mystery Boy.”

“When we’d go to the city café to eat, which we did a lot, he’d never talk to the waitresses,” said one of Corbett’s coworkers. “Some were interested, but he’d never say as much as a how-do-you-do. He’d just order his food.”

“Women aren’t to be trusted,” Corbett would say. “They’re dirty, disagreeable, expensive, and worst of all, can’t keep confidential information to themselves.”

Corbett clicked off the television set. He had things to do tomorrow—confidential things. He stretched out on his sleeper sofa. It was dark, but trails of light passing through the metal venetian blinds laid stripes across a portion of the ceiling and one wall. He stared at the faint luminescent strands above him. It was late. His preparations had taken longer than he’d planned. But he wasn’t sleepy. Adrenaline pumped through his veins. Soon, his mind raced through the details of his plan. It was a good plan.

* * *

Golden is located on the Colorado Front Range, the first upwelling of the Rocky Mountains from the Great Plains. Founded in 1859 as part of the Colorado gold rush, the mining town became the first capital of the Colorado Territory and the seat of Jefferson County. After the gold panned out, German, Swedish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants stayed to make Golden their home. From 1860 to the 1950s, the population seesawed between 1,000 and 2,500 before swelling to more than 8,000 residents by 1960.

Residents of Golden enjoyed a traditional Western way of life. Men and women in boots and cowboys hats walked along sidewalks shared by those in suits and fashionable dresses. On Washington Avenue, the main thoroughfare, automobiles shared the road with horses and an electric trolley. Few communities can boast the picturesque scenery that surrounds the valley town—a river rushing through the middle called Clear Creek. Lookout Mountain to the southwest (where Buffalo Bill is buried), North Table Mountain on the north side, and to the south, South Table Mountain with its Castle Rock casting a crown above the Coors brewing and porcelain companies. And if its citizens wanted a change of pace from the serenity, Denver awaited only fifteen miles to the east.

On the morning of Wednesday, February 10, the citizens of Golden awoke to headlines on the front page of Rocky Mountain NewsADOLPH COORS III FEARED KIDNAPED! and The Denver PostADOLPH COORS III DISAPPEARS; FBI ENTERS SEARCH. They were stunned. It seemed unfathomable to them. The outpouring of concern and kindhearted remarks by the townspeople filled the airwaves and print.

“I don’t know of anybody who didn’t like Ad Coors,” said Walter G. Brown, Golden city manager.

Kriss Barnes, assistant vice president of Golden’s First National Bank, told reporters, “I can’t understand how anybody in the world would have anything against Ad Coors. He’s reassuring, mild-mannered, and considerate.”

“Ad is kind and generous,” said Pete Puck, who worked at the Coors Porcelain plant and helped out on Ad’s ranch. “This disappearance is a terrible thing, a terrible thing.”

Ad’s ranch manager, Bill Hosler, agreed. “He’s just as nice as can be.”

Many people in town knew Ad. They’d gone to school with him, hunted, skied, or transacted business with him. Many had a genuine affinity for the eldest Coors brother.

“He’d always smile and call me by my first name. Just a real nice guy,” said Louis Kubat, who played softball with Ad in the Arvada League when Ad played first base for Golden years earlier.

Almost anyone asked would say he was a good man. Good, despite the fact he was rich. But Goldenites couldn’t begrudge him that. He wore his wealth humbly. That was one of the things people liked most about the Coors family: their humility.

“Nicest guy you’d ever meet,” said Arthur Jensen, the chief brewer in the Coors kettle room. “Always wore a smile and said hello and called you by your first name, and let you call him Ad, not Mr. Coors or whatever. He always seemed interested in what I was doing, and I liked that about him.”

“Everyone in town knew my father,” Spike recounted as an adult. “He was just like Grandpa and Great-Grandpa, a complete workaholic, a financial success, active in the town, and respected by everyone.”

That’s why townspeople were in disbelief. At gas stations, taverns, and beauty and barbershops all around town, everyone was talking about the disappearance. To many, an attack on a Coors was an attack on Golden and everyone in it. Coors was Golden, and Golden was Coors.

Who would do such a thing? That was the question of the day at establishments all around town. Anyone who dared denounce a Coors now did so at his peril. Even a person who had no beef with a Coors could become a suspect just because he was peculiar. For instance, Jack Peters, in charge of Coors plant security, heard from a guard that a man named Robert Everhart should be checked out. Peters telephoned Captain Bray and told him that although he couldn’t put his finger on anything specific, there were “suspicious and odd circumstances surrounding Everhart, too numerable to mention.” He was investigated and eliminated as a suspect.

Others were more specific in their charges. Anyone who’d ever harbored ill feelings toward a Coors was suspected. Anyone in a dispute over property rights years earlier, or someone Ad may have cut off in traffic, or an employee that had been fired by a Coors, any kind of run-in was enough to raise suspicion. The theories and suspects abounded that morning and throughout the day. One possibility in particular made everyone in town a bit nervous: could it be a union man?

“Both major Coors industries have been embroiled in labor strife during the past few years,” reported Rocky Mountain News that day. “Colorado unions, in recent months, have placed an unofficial boycott on Coors products because of what they term unfair labor practices at Coors. . . . Bill Coors, however, did say Tuesday night that he discounted any beliefs his brother’s disappearance stemmed from labor difficulties at the Coors firms.”

“Ad was never a part of the difficulty at the brewery,” Walter Brown said.

Union leaders especially hoped a member hadn’t committed this crime. If he had, the news would drive a stake through Local 366 once and for all.

When asked about the possibility, Joe Coors scoffed. “All we want, all the whole family wants, is Ad’s safe return.” When pressed by a reporter, Joe said, “Ad’s received no threats from anyone, particularly labor. We are completely baffled. Bill and I are very strong in the feeling, however, that this has nothing to do with the labor movement.”

That same morning, a motorcade of four dark, unmarked sedans drove down Washington Avenue, passing beneath the famous banner that stretched across the street:

Howdy Folks!

WELCOME TO GOLDEN

WHERE THE WEST REMAINS

The FBI was officially on the case. Code name: COORNAP. Each sedan carried FBI field agents as unmarked as their cars—dark suits, ties, starched white shirts, fedoras, trench coats, trimmed hair, shaven faces, and sunglasses or eyeglasses. That was the directive from J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C., the agency’s director since 1924. Another fifty officers of the FBI Western Kidnap Squad were combing a thirty-mile radius. Hoover stamped the case top priority. He’d given Mr. Coors his private assurances. A quick resolution of the high-profile case would also give the agency a gold star just as the motion picture The FBI Story was playing in theaters around the country.

One of the bureau-issued sedans dropped two agents at Mr. Coors’s house and Joe’s home to man the telephone surveillance and recording devices that had been set up by Denver undersheriff A. S. Reider and Denver Police chief Walter Nelson, with the help of Golden Telephone Company employee Carl Horblett. Other agents stopped in Golden to question persons in town. The remaining agents stopped at the Adolph Coors Company to question anyone who might have useful information, particularly Bill and Joe Coors, who had returned to work that day.

Similar cars with agents headed to Bill Coors’s house in Denver to operate the telephone recorder and to Ad’s home near Morrison to question Mary and relieve the county deputies who were conducting surveillance inside and outside her home, watching for kidnappers who might be staking out the ranch to drop off a ransom note. One agent joined deputies standing on the road in front of Ad and Mary’s house, stopping all passing cars and trucks and questioning their occupants. Other agents drove to the sheriff’s office to question deputies and investigators, and to Turkey Creek Bridge to question anyone who lived nearby who might have seen or heard anything Tuesday morning.

Agents arriving at the bridge site were met by newsmen from Denver, Golden, and other Colorado towns, and by correspondents from national news services who’d flown into Denver the night before. Reporters in turn were met with a curt “No comment.” All questions were referred to Special Agent in Charge Scott Werner at the FBI office in Denver. “The FBI will maintain complete silence until the release of the victim,” said FBI special agent Edward Kemper. “Our interest is the safe return of Mr. Coors.” The FBI also instructed members of the Coors family not to speak to reporters.

County investigators had completed their collection of evidence at the bridge the day before the FBI’s arrival. The remaining task for the sheriff’s office at Turkey Creek Canyon was to find Ad Coors. Volunteers arrived early that morning and set up tables near the bridge with pots of hot coffee, doughnuts, sandwiches, and water for those men in the mounted posse and jeep patrol who had spent the entire night searching and for those who’d arrived at sunup to join or relieve them.

An H-19 helicopter sent from Lowry Air Force Base outside Denver hovered above the lifting fog, trying to spot a man stranded or hurt, or anything that appeared out of the ordinary among the rocky hills and ravines. US Air Force C-45 and C-47 airplanes and Civil Air Patrol Piper Super Cubs were standing by to take off if needed.

Despite all the manpower, horses, jeeps, and aircraft, there was no sign of Ad Coors. “We haven’t been able to find a thing,” said Captain Morris of the sheriff’s office. “We’re as baffled now as we were yesterday.”

Coors was Golden, and Golden was Coors.

The FBI took a different tactic. Agents, along with some county investigators, visited all houses in the Turkey Creek Canyon area and interviewed their residents.

“It was about eight o’clock,” Mrs. Rosemary Stitt said. “Right after I sent my kids off to school, about twenty minutes after. The bus picks them up around twenty till every morning. First, it sounded like somebody hollered down at the bridge. I can hear people talkin’ down there pretty plain most times. Hear their cars crossing over. I live only ’bout a quarter mile away. But yesterday the wind was blowing really hard so I couldn’t hear so plain. I was sittin’ in front of my sewing machine by the window. It sounded like one or two words is all. It was two different people, I think. Then I heard a cracklin’ noise like lightnin’ striking a tree. As a little girl, I heard lightnin’ split a tree in half right next to the house. That’s what it sounded like. I looked out the kitchen window to see if a tree fell down out back but didn’t see nothin’. So it was then I got to thinkin’ it might be a gunshot. Just one shot. Or, it coulda been two really close together.”

“What type of shot was it? Pistol, rifle, shotgun? Any idea of caliber?” an agent asked Mrs. Stitt.

“I talked to Bill about it last night, that’s my husband, and he asked if it sounded like a .22 that him and my son shoot at rabbits or like a .38 they shoot ever once in a while at targets they set up in the hills. I said it sounded more like the .38 ’cause it sounded like lightnin’. The shot came about a minute or two after I heard the hollerin’. I thought it might be poachers shootin’ game on the preserve. We’ve had some trouble with hunters up here. Or maybe some surveyors I seen workin’. I didn’t hear nothin’ else, so I went back to doin’ housework. . . . Later on in the mornin’, though, about ten thirty, eleven o’clock, I heard summore hollerin’ and a horn honkin’. About fifteen, twenty minutes after that, the milkman showed up and told me about a car blockin’ the bridge down yonder. He asked to use the telephone, but we ain’t got one. So he left and said he’d telephone the police at his next stop.”

Mrs. Pauline Moore, who lived with her husband, Cloyce, two and a half miles from Turkey Creek Bridge, told the FBI a similar story:

Right around eight o’clock yesterdee, I was hangin’ the wash on a clothesline out back. The wind was blowin’ real hard. I could barely get a clothespin on ’em. Then I heard a shot in the canyon real clear. I usually work on Tuesdays cleanin’ folks’ houses in Denver, but my boss called the night before and told me not to come in. The shot I heard was a far-off shot, not a close up, but a far off-shot, towards the bridge.

After hours of exhaustive interviews, the FBI learned that no one in the area had actually seen Ad Coors or his abductors on the bridge. No one could tell how many kidnappers there were. No one reported seeing a struggle or a shooting. No one saw the abductors’ car leaving the scene. Several did, however, report seeing suspicious vehicles at or near the bridge during the days before the disappearance. There was only one problem. They saw too many.

Mrs. Stitt told the FBI, “My husband said he seen a 1954 blue-green Ford parked on the bridge the week before, once with the doors open and lights on, but nobody around. Coulda been a 1955 or ’56, he said.”

Ranch hand Bill Hosler and Mary Coors’s maid told the FBI they’d seen a late-model green Dodge with red-and-white license plates parked near the ranch on Monday. Both said they saw at least two men in the car that appeared to be watching the ranch for at least an hour. One was tall and thin, and the other was short and stocky with a dark complexion. Hosler said the same car had been there the week before. They also stated he’d seen a yellow car there on more than one occasion.

Hilton Pace, who leased and worked a uranium mine near Turkey Creek Bridge, said he’d seen a man driving a white-over-gray Ford in the area a few times. He’d even spoken with him one day.

Janette Erickson, who lived less than a mile and a half from the bridge, said she’d seen a yellow car near the bridge on that Sunday. Charlotte Carter and Viola Ranch said the same thing. Other witnesses said they saw a car resembling a 1951 Mercury in the vicinity. Three said it was yellow; one said cream. Two said it was a solid color; two said it had a black top. Viola Ranch said it had a green cloth top.

Former Morrison town constable James Cable, a caretaker at the uranium mine leased by Hilton Pace, said he and his wife, Margaret, saw a yellow 1951 or ’52 Mercury near the bridge several times, including at eight o’clock Monday, the morning before the disappearance, about a hundred feet from the bridge. That was the morning Ad took a different route, driving to Denver before going to the brewery.

Miss Nadene Carder said she’d seen a yellow car parked near the bridge three consecutive days when she was on her way to work at the Colorado School of Mines the week before the disappearance. That was while Ad was in Miami.

Jim Massey said he often saw a yellow Mercury near the bridge. He told the FBI he’d seen it around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, with a man standing beside it wearing a brown hat and eyeglasses. His wife said she’d seen the car around 1:00 p.m. on Monday, a mere nineteen hours before the disappearance.

The one thing all eyewitnesses did agree on was that none had seen any of the cars since the disappearance.

But James Cable saw something no one else had. When interviewed, he gave the FBI a clue so important that without it the case may never have been solved. He had a partial license plate number. “It was a 1960 Colorado-style plate. Read AT-62,” he said. “It may have been AT-6205. I’m not a hundred percent sure about the last two numbers.” A was the county designation for Denver.

Agents hoped the plates weren’t stolen.

When newspapermen asked about rumors of car sightings the evening after Ad’s disappearance, FBI agents said, “Refer all questions to Special Agent in Charge Scott Werner at the Denver office.” When Bill was asked what he knew, he replied, “The FBI has requested that we make no further statements.” Sheriff Wermuth, however, was happy to oblige.

“We’re looking for two, possibly three assailants in a green Dodge that’s been seen parked near Ad Coors’s home,” the sheriff said to reporters. “That’s the strongest lead we’ve got in the case at the present time. . . . I believe we’ll have a break in the case by noon Saturday. . . . I’m basing that on studies of other kidnap cases. The crucial time in other reported cases is thirty-six hours to four and a half days after the abduction is made. . . . Yes, it’s my belief that Ad Coors is alive and held somewhere in the state. . . . According to a witness, the green Dodge had red-and-white license plates, which means it’s an out-of-state car, possibly Utah, Florida, or Ohio. . . . We believe they’ve split up. One of the three men is a good suspect centered around Denver. We’re anxious to check his movements. . . . I can’t tell you that right now. The other two are believed to be somewhere southeast of Golden.”

Reporters continued barking out their questions to the sheriff.

“No, I haven’t positively identified the blood yet. Lew Hawley telephoned me from Washington to tell me the blood found on the bridge is group A, but we haven’t located any medical records that show Ad Coors’s blood type. . . . No, the blood on Kipling Street was canine. That’s right, just a dog hit by a car. No connection there. . . . The tan cap and eyeglasses have been identified as belonging to Ad Coors. . . . No, we’ll keep the mounted posse and jeep patrol out there through tomorrow and then I’ll decide whether to suspend the search depending on the snowstorm they’re calling for late Thursday. . . . Yes, group A. Okay, that’s all I got for now, fellas.”

Amid the barrage of questions, Wermuth told reporters that Mr. and Mrs. Coors were due to land at Denver’s Stapleton Airfield that night. They had boarded a plane very early that morning to make the long flight home. Despite the earliness, reporters were waiting for them as they boarded.

“Mr. Coors! A few words about your son, sir! Please!” one of the correspondents asked, holding a pad and pencil.

The Hawaiian sun beamed on the tarmac at the Honolulu airport. Mr. Coors had telephoned FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who assured Mr. Coors he would personally oversee the investigation into catching the kidnappers and bringing Ad home safely.

“I am dealing with crooks who are in business,” Mr. Coors replied. A hot gust of wind almost blew the gray fedora from his head. “They have something I want to buy—my son. The price is secondary.”

“So you’ve been told your son’s definitely kidnapped?”

“No, but logic tells me he has been kidnapped. It’s a matter of now waiting for an offer. It’s like any other business transaction at this point.”

“You’re treating the kidnapping of your son like a business deal?”

“That’s what it is. Besides, I cannot be emotional about this.”

“Any idea who’d want to kidnap your son?” asked a different reporter.

“The union?” asked another.

“I don’t know. No, we don’t have any enemies in Golden. Excuse us, we have to board now.”

“Good luck, sir!”

FBI agents assigned to coordinate the exchange of evidence with local law enforcement were about to finish up around the bridge site. They’d walked the creek bank on both sides and in the middle. They’d scoped the typography and investigated a pit silo and a cave directly across the state road from the bridge. They dusted for prints, including inside and outside the Travelall, took additional soil samples and bridge scrapings, and reviewed the deputies’ reports. Dale Ryder had shown the agents where the Travelall was found by the milkman and where the cap and hat, eyeglasses, and blood had been discovered. He showed them sketches that county detectives had etched out using precise measurements that revealed the exact locations of the cap, hat, blood, scuff marks, and tire tracks. The last thing was to view the crime-scene photos. The two agents leaned on the hood of their sedan and observed as Dale Ryder flipped through the crisp black-and-white photos he’d taken the day before, one by one.

“The splash pattern was in that direction? Toward the southeast?” The agent nodded in a southeasterly direction as he asked about the blood spray.

“That’s correct,” said Ryder.

“I don’t know. That’s a—” The agent stopped as he spotted Bill walking up to the bridge. He was on his way back to Mary’s after work and saw the officers standing round and decided to stop.

“Go ahead,” said Bill. “Go ahead with what you were saying. I don’t want to interrupt.”

The agent introduced himself. “Now this is just my opinion, you understand, not the official FBI position.” The agent paused.

“Go on,” said Bill.

 

Mary held a ransom note in her hands. She put on her glasses, fearful of what the letter might say, but grateful to have it at all. She began to read:

Mrs. Coors:

Your husband has been kidnaped. His car is by Turkey Creek.

Call the police or F.B.I.: he dies.

Cooperate: he lives.

Ransom: $200,000 in tens and $300,000 in twenties.

There will be no negotiating.

Bills: used / non-consecutive / unrecorded / unmarked.

Warning: we will know if you call the police or record the serial numbers.

Directions: Place money & this letter & envelope in one suitcase

or bag.

Have two men with a car ready to make the delivery.

When all set, advertise a tractor for sale in Denver Post section 69. Sign ad King Ranch, Fort Lupton.

Wait at NA 9-4455 for instructions after ad appears.

Deliver immediately after receiving call. Any delay will be regarded as a stall to set up a stake-out.

Understand this: Adolph’s life is in your hands. We have no desire

to commit murder. All we want is that money. If you follow the instructions, he will be released unharmed within 48 hours after

the money is received.

Sitting in her chair in the den she enjoyed so much, Mary rested the letter in her lap, removed her glasses, and looked up at the FBI agents standing round. Her eyes were weak from lack of sleep and the dulling effects of sedatives. “Ad’s still alive,” Mary said. “He’s alive. All they want’s the money.”

FBI agents in their dark suits and ties said nothing. It was Wednesday. Ad had been missing almost two days.

Mary didn’t appreciate their silence. “It says right here,” she said forcefully, holding up the note. “‘We have no desire to commit murder.’”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bill spoke up. “Sure he’s alive. That’s the only way the lousy kidnappers collect.”

“Of course he is,” said Gerald Phipps, who’d joined Mary with his wife, Janet, to provide comfort and support on that terrible day. Gerald and Janet were close friends with Ad and Mary. They had hosted a wedding shower for Ad and Mary twenty years earlier, and they traveled in the same elevated circle of affluent Coloradans. Gerald Phipps’s father had been a US senator and an executive at Carnegie Steel. Janet’s father was the head of US Rubber. Also visiting were the elder Mrs. Coors’s brother, Erle Kistler, and the well-to-do Kenneth and Sheilagh Malo.

After hours of exhaustive interviews, the FBI learned that no one in the area had actually seen Ad Coors or his abductors on the bridge.

Mary reached for her gin and tonic on the side table and rose from her chair. “We’ve got to get the money ready. Bill? Joe? How do we do that?” Mary said, ignoring the agents. “Will you two deliver it?”

Special Agent Donald Hostetter, special agent in charge of the Detroit field office and head of the Western Kidnap Squad, interrupted. “May I please have the letter, Mrs. Coors? Thank you.” He handed it to another agent. It was a copy. The original was on its way to the FBI Laboratory. “You’re correct, Mrs. Coors. Your family should begin making arrangements to obtain the money immediately. We will assist you and your bank in coordinating the selection of denominations and recording the serial numbers. I’ll have two agents make the delivery. We don’t want anyone else in harm’s way.”

“But the letter,” said Mary. “It says if we call the police or FBI, or if you mark the money, they’ll hurt Ad. I’m sure we can find some friends or someone at the brewery to deliver the ransom.”

“The kidnappers already know the sheriff and FBI are involved,” Joe said. “It was in the papers this morning.”

“But . . .” Mary placed her drink on the table. “Oh, I don’t know what to do.” She lowered her head and shielded her face with one hand.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Coors. That’s why we’re here. We do know what to do,” said Hostetter. “All kidnappers say don’t contact the authorities. Most victims’ families do because it’s the proper thing to do. The kidnappers had to have known that by leaving your husband’s car on the bridge, law enforcement would become involved. And there’s no way they’ll know we’ve recorded the serial numbers. It’s scare tactics.”

“That’s right,” said Joe. “How would they know something like that?”

“Not possible,” replied Hostetter. “Now, when the time comes, my agents will handle the drop-off. We’ll dress them like ranchers or choose men who resemble your husband’s brothers. I haven’t exactly decided yet, but believe me, we’ll do whatever it takes to procure your husband’s safe return. That’s priority number one. Apprehension is always secondary in these cases.”

“I don’t know. I know you men are professionals at what you do,” began Mary, “but to tell you the truth, I don’t care about the money or if they’re caught. I just want Ad back. What do you think, Bill?”

“I think you have to trust the FBI,” replied Bill. “But I will say this: I agree with Mary that the main thing is getting Ad back. The family doesn’t want anyone, and that includes the FBI, doing anything that jeopardizes Ad’s safe return.”

“We don’t either,” said Hostetter.

Jefferson County investigator William Flint had intercepted the ransom note at the Morrison post office that Wednesday at 9:40 a.m. and immediately turned it over to the FBI, which dusted the envelope and letter for prints and made copies. Postal employee Joe Murphy said, “With the 3:00 p.m. Denver postmark on the envelope, the letter had to have been mailed in Denver on Tuesday, between 1:45 and 2:15 p.m.”

Agents were pleased to have the letter. It represented the first piece of physical evidence, other than the brown felt hat, belonging to the kidnappers. Agents in Denver would receive a report from the FBI Laboratory in Washington two days later detailing the lab’s findings:

In the lower left-hand corner of the envelope was typed the word “PERSONAL”; in the center of the envelope the words “Mrs. Adolph Coors III, Morrison, Colorado,” and on the upper right-hand corner of the envelope were typed the words “SPECIAL DELIVERY.” The envelope bore a postmark “Denver, Colo, 2 1960” on the outer circumference of the circular postmark and in the center of the postmark the letters and numbers “FE 9 3 PM” . . .

The envelope and note were treated for fingerprints by the use of triketohydrindene hydrate and silver nitrate. No latent impressions of value were found . . .

The typist is experienced and made no errors in punctuation or spelling; double spaces after a period, which is taught in typing schools; but does overuse colons and uses only one space after a colon rather than two as is the approved practice in typing.

The author is reasonably well educated; writes well . . .

The letter was typed with either a Hermes or Royalite portable typewriter; both are sold extensively in the United States. The Royalite has been on the market for less than three years. It is an inexpensive machine sold in large drug and department stores. Inquiry was made at the Royal McBee Corporation, manufacturer of Royalite typewriters, to determine retail outlets in the Denver area that sell the Royalite and the serial numbers of typewriters shipped. A representative of the manufacturer advised that two businesses sell the Royalite portable typewriter. They are the Denver Dry Goods Company, 16th & California Streets, and the May-D&F Company, 16th & Tremont. . . . This particular machine has a defect. The letter “s” is defectively applied. It is struck lower than all other type in the letter. . . . The typewriting on the envelope and note were compared with those in the Anonymous Letter File and the National Fraudulent Checks File. No matches were realized . . .

The envelope measures 4.24 inches in width and 9.37 inches in length. The paper has a substance weight of 20, measures 8.42 inches in width and 10.94 inches in length. Both contain the watermark, “EATON’S DIAMOND WHITE BOND BERKSHIRE COTTON FIBER CONTENT,” and are sold by the Eaton Paper Corporation, 75 South Church Street, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A code mark under the first “E” in “BERKSHIRE” indicates the envelope and paper were manufactured in 1959. A representative from the manufacturer advised subject envelope and paper were shipped in reams and boxes after February 10, 1959, to five businesses in the metropolitan Denver area. Only two stores sell both the paper and the envelopes. These are the Denver Dry Goods Company, 16th & California Streets, and the May-D&F Company, 16th & Tremont. Dates and amounts of purchase have been recorded. Interviews of sales clerks at each store to follow.

As Agent Hostetter left Ad and Mary’s home, he instructed two of his agents to relieve those who’d manned the recorder the night before. “I want to remind everyone not to say anything to reporters. If pressed, tell them the FBI told you to remain silent. Not only do leaks about our evidence, suspects, and theories compromise the investigation, more importantly, they put Mr. Coors in added jeopardy.” He would relay the same message by telephone to the foremost offender, Sheriff Wermuth.

More than a year later, Mary testified in a crowded Jefferson County court, “I felt a little bit relieved because the ransom note gave us hope that Ad could still be alive.”

Joseph Corbett, Jr., the FBI’s most-wanted man in 1960 (AP Photo/Ed Johnson)

* * *

From The Death of an Heir by Philip Jett. Copyright © 2017 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.

The Mastery and Magic of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Toni Morrison dancing at a disco party in New York City in 1974. "She wasn’t born Toni Morrison. She had to become that person," writes Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah in her 2015 New York Times Magazine cover story on the author. (Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

Cashawn Thompson created the hashtag #BlackGirlsAreMagic on Twitter in 2013 to draw attention to the accomplishments and resilience of black women in the public eye like Michelle Obama. With T-shirts, tote bags, videos, and news headlines, #BlackGirlMagic soon went viral. Like “(To Be) Young, Gifted, and Black,” a song written by Nina Simone, and “Black Lives Matter,” the affirmation “Black Girls Are Magic” creates positive associations with blackness and reconstitutes its possibilities. “Say it loud!” James Brown sang in his 1968 song “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” In other words, let us not cower — let us like ourselves.

Affirmations like #BlackGirlMagic are important corrective tools, especially now, with a president in office who weaponizes language to stir up policies that are hurtful for communities of color. Still, I worry that a focus on black women’s extraordinariness obscures the unfairness of what we overcome. I wonder if, along with a litany of archetypes that have lingered in the public imagination, #BlackGirlMagic fortifies an idea that black women can endure anything, that we don’t need protecting.

Read more…

American Sphinx

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2017 | 14 minutes | 3380 words

We had come to a place muted of light. Every day felt like a potential backsliding, the news unrelenting, as though the nation had finally given up pushing back against its own savagery — and every day felt like the held breath before the fall. I thought increasingly of Stefan Lux, a Jewish journalist from Slovakia: Aghast at the rise of anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and at the inability of Europe’s bureaucratic governments to respond, Lux walked into the General Assembly of the League of Nations and, before the gathered diplomats, fatally shot himself. His last words were “C’est le dernier coup.” This is the final blow. It was only July 3, 1936; the blows would keep coming long after Lux’s death.

The center was not holding; there hadn’t been any center for decades. It was a country of bankrupt politicians, of killings by police so commonplace they barely made the news. It was a country in which families were routinely broken up by early morning immigration raids, where men abducted for traffic violations and women arrested for misdemeanors were sent off to countries they hadn’t known for decades. It was a nation where young white men found solace drifting through rage and irony, and felt alive only by terrorizing others. It was not a country in open revolution, but more and more its people felt revolution would at least be the exhalation they’d been waiting for. It was a country waiting for the final blow.

Whatever rough beast Yeats had seen had already slouched its way out of the desert, laying waste to everything that fell under its pitiless, blank gaze. The body of a lion and the head of a man, the indignant desert birds circling around its slow thighs, it has laid waste to the veneer of civility and decorum that had once been papered over the country.

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Here at the End of All Things

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, based on cartography by Dyson Logos.

Adrian Daub | Longreads | August 2017 | 20 minutes (5,033 words)

1.

“The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars […].”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like.

Maps were my entrée into geek life, and they remained the medium through which geekdom moved: beat-up paperbacks handed around between school friends, boxed sets at the local game store — we probably spent about as much time poring over maps as we did reading or dreaming up the stories that took place within the worlds they represented. The science fiction we read did without them, but any cover featuring a dragon, a many-turreted castle, or a woman in a leather bra suggested you’d find a map the moment you peeked inside the book.
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