"The world is too much with us;

...late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in nature that is ours."

"I'm sitting here la la. Waiting for my Ya Ya Ah huh. Ah huh."

Merry Christmas to all.

Let it snow, let snow, let it snow (not...)

Here is some good morning warmth and good cheer for our chilly and exhausted family on Crosby Road.

We love you and are relieved that you are all safe.






Thank you for visiting.

"What a difference a day makes.."

A Hong Kong sunrise from my window on a (almost) smog free Sunday morning.

...and, of course, the requisite picture of Miss Muffet.

Thank you for visiting.

"Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross..

Thank you for visiting.

"Here's lookin' at you, kid..."

She IS a show-stopper!

If you don't tell 'em, who will?

Thank you for visiting.

"I call your name, and you're not there..."

There is a main street in Fort Lee, New Jersey named Bruce Reynolds Blvd. It runs parallel to and above the confluence of highways that flow into the George Washington Bridge.

Being new to the area, I wondered who Bruce Reynolds was and why Fort Lee had named a street in his honor.

I found the answer in a New York Times article dated Dec 5, 2001. It is reprinted below in its entirety:

New Daffodils for Garden That Outlived a Creator

J. A. Reynolds knew that a mesh bag of daffodil bulbs had been sitting under a tree at the corner of his block since October, awaiting him, his trowel and his bent back. A Dutch businessman had sent a million bulbs to New York residents, a gift that has kept hands busy across the city during an anxious season.

Although the ration of bulbs for Isham Park was only a two-minute walk from the home of Mr. Reynolds, the master of his community garden, he just could not face it. "I'm surprised that I am able to sit in the apartment all day and not be bored, just B just melancholy," Mr. Reynolds said. "I've been avoiding people. When I go out, naturally, everybody wants to talk about him."

That would be his son, Bruce Reynolds, who died Sept. 11 at the World Trade Center. The whole neighborhood knew him.

The Reynoldses were probably the first black family to move to the Park Terrace section of Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan. They arrived in 1965 from Pittsburgh and loved how the streets rolled high and low along the Hudson, against parkland, in sight of the Palisades.

"I felt it was the perfect playground, the perfect community for my son," Mr. Reynolds said.

Yet he worried for his young son, as the first of his race and an only child.

"If we didn't get involved in the community, it wouldn't be an ideal place for Bruce to go out and play, considering the singular position he was in," Mr. Reynolds said.

So the Reynoldses set their eyes on a trashed lot in a northeastern corner of Isham Park, at the end of their street. All the benches had been burned. Teenagers drank beer, smoked, cursed. Mr. Reynolds, a social worker, had a plan. He organized the children, nearly all Irish-Americans.

"Little by little, we cleared the rubble," he said. "Then we began planting. Once they were organized and directed, like any group of kids, they responded beautifully."

Bruce Reynolds worked the garden with his father. His parents sent him to private schools. Mr. Reynolds worked for the city, then for the Fashion Institute of Technology. His wife, Geri Reynolds, also a social worker, worked with the elderly, wrote a column for the neighborhood paper and helped administer the business of the garden.

"Even though Bruce was younger, they knew who he was," Mr. Reynolds said. "They respected what my wife and I did. The neighborhood is fabulous, as far as we're concerned. We had no bad incidents. As a result of the garden, Bruce became very well known."

In the apartment, they built a cage to the ceiling for lovebirds. The floor in Bruce's room was left bare of carpet so that he could run Matchbox cars along it. They built a loft, so their only child could have two friends sleep over.

When Bruce Reynolds was very young, his father took him to the woods in autumn to collect leaves. They brought them home in bouquets, and compared their colors to the skin tones of the family.

"We would compare the oak leaves to each other, and we could compare them to his mother's coloring and to mine," Mr. Reynolds recalled. "He was totally unintimidated about being African-American, about being black or being Negro. He never felt he had to apologize for being a man of color."

When money for seeds was scarce, Bruce Reynolds propagated ivy by putting the cuttings into jars of water until the roots grew. Then he laid them as ground cover beneath the tall trees. With his own earnings, he bought cherry plum trees. He attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, studied advertising and communications, then became a ranger in the city parks. He joined the Port Authority police force in 1986.

"I didn't want him to go into law enforcement," Mr. Reynolds said. "We had spent all that money on education, but that's what he wanted."

Then love brought him to peat bogs in Ireland. He met Marian McBride, an immigrant from County Donegal. They married and bought a house in western New Jersey, where he could fish in the streams and they could raise their children in the country. He joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Hudson County. The family traveled often to Donegal, and Officer Reynolds sang in the pubs, drank Guinness and walked the bog with his father-in-law, Patrick McBride. In July, the couple celebrated the first birthday of their son, Michael. On Sept. 8, they had a party for their daughter Brianna's fourth birthday.

Assigned to patrol the George Washington Bridge, he and his partners sped to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He was last seen helping a woman burned by flaming jet fuel. Then he was lost, along with 36 other Port Authority police officers. He had turned 41 in July.

"I feel anger and bitterness because of what the world has done," said Mr. Reynolds, 78. "A world we thought we really were not part of."

Since then, the days have run across him, usually with great tenderness, at times mercilessly. He cannot bear the word "hero." Mrs. Reynolds has had surgery for a difficult case of arthritis. Thousands of people went to memorials in New Jersey and Donegal for their son. At a diner in Fort Lee, he and Marian Reynolds discovered that a cheeseburger special had been named for Officer Bruce Reynolds, bringing them to tears. He worries that he did not fully grasp the breadth of his son's life.

"Now I have a different perspective on him," he said. "I would rather have my son. I wish I had a lot more children now. I guess it wouldn't have made any difference. Bruce is Bruce. I pray that one day, I am able to let go, to enjoy his memories, to keep his life everlasting."

He has started to leave the house. The other day, Mr. Reynolds took his granddaughter, Brianna, to Inwood Hill Park. They found a bouquet of oak leaves in autumn browns. At home, they compared them to the tones in a picture of her father. "I want her to be aware of how beautiful color is," Mr. Reynolds said.

The thought came to him this week that the Isham Park share of daffodil bulbs, part of the vast shipment to the Parks Department from Hans van Waardenburg of B & K Flowerbulbs, would soon begin to rot if they were not put in the ground. So yesterday afternoon, he headed for the garden they started so long ago, father, son and friends, back when they set out to grow good things in a good place.

Through the steady misting drizzle, he toted his pick, his shovel and his trowel. He has no son to bury, but he had flowers to plant.

Thank you, Fort Lee and the New York Times for the introduction.

Thank you Bruce Reynolds. You are the best of us all.

Thank you for visiting.

Blocks

What's the point of hauling 20 pounds of blocks from Fort Lee to Hong Kong??!!

Thank you for visiting.

Incheon

I've just landed in Incheon, South Korea on my way to Hong Kong.

It is a most historic place for United States Marines. 

Three ultimate truths were pounded into our skulls before the sun rose to our first morning of boot camp.  They were Incheon, Chosin Reservoir, and Chesty Puller.

As told in Marines.com

The Cold War escalated when communist North Korea invaded South Korea in what was seen as a global military challenge. As the head of UN forces, Army General Douglas MacArthur relied on the amphibious capabilities of the Marine Corps to reclaim South Korea's occupied capital, Seoul.

In a surprise attack, Marines landed behind enemy lines on the heavily defended shores of Inchon. Moving from landing ship tanks, they climbed the seawall with gunfire support from helicopters above. 
 
Within hours, the Marines cleared the beach and began moving toward Seoul. In two weeks, they reclaimed the capital and put the North Korean army on the run.

Puller is the most decorated Marine in history, having received the Navy Cross (one below the Medal of Honor) five times.  

Semper Fi, Chesty with thanks from a grateful country and legions of fellow Marines living and dead.

Thank you for visiting.

"Over the river and through the woods..."

May we give thanks for our dear friends, families, and those who are struggling so.  

We share a remarkable country that has given enormously to us.  

We are blessed.

Give thanks as well to those who are currently serving and those who have served.  To them we carry a debt that cannot be repaid.

Over the river and through the woods, indeed.

Veterans Day 2008 4pm

"They left their childhood on every acre..."

The Battle for LZ Loon occurred on June 4,5, and 6, 1968.  

The three days are the centerpiece of my soon to be released book, Loon - A Marine Story. 

www.amazon.com/Loon-Marine-Story-Jack-Mclean/dp/0345510151

Among the horrific events of those days was the crash of a helicopter that was attempting to evacuate members of our Company.  Most on board were killed, several survived, and four have been missing for over forty years.  As described in the Department of Defense press release below, the four have finally been recovered and identified. 

 

News Release 

Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (Public Affairs) 

Washington, DC 20301-2900 

Phone: (703) 699-1169 

IMMEDIATE RELEASE                     

 Nov. 5, 2008 

 

MARINES MISSING FROM 

VIETNAM WAR ARE IDENTIFIED 

 

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of four U.S. servicemen, missing from the Vietnam War, have been identified and will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors. 

They are Lance Cpl. Kurt E. La Plant, of Lenexa, Kan., and Lance Cpl. Luis F. Palacios, of Los Angeles, Calif.  Remains that could not be individually identified are included in a group.  Among the group remains are Lance Cpl. Ralph L. Harper, of Indianapolis, Ind., and Pfc. Jose R. Sanchez, of Brooklyn, N.Y.  All men were U.S. Marine Corps. Palacios will be buried Friday in Bellflower, Calif., and the other Marines will be buried as a group in the Spring in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. 

 

On June 6, 1968, these men were aboard a CH-46A Sea Knight helicopter that was attempting an emergency extraction of elements of the 1st Battalion, 4th Regiment, 3rd Marine Division then engaged against hostile forces in the mountains southwest of Khe Sanh, Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. 

 The helicopter was struck by enemy ground fire and crashed, killing 12 of the 23 crewmen and passengers on board.  All but four of the men who died were subsequently recovered and identified.  

 

Between 1993 and 2005, joint U.S./Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) teams, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), investigated the incident in Quang Tri Province, interviewed witnesses and surveyed the crash site three times.  The team found a U.S. military boot fragment and wreckage consistent with that of a CH-46 helicopter.  In 2006, a team began excavating the site and recovered human remains and non-biological material evidence including La Plant’s identification tag.  While at the site, a Vietnamese citizen turned over to the team human remains the he claimed to have found amid the wreckage.  In 2007, another team completed the excavation and recovered additional human remains, life support material and aircraft wreckage. 

 

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons in the identification of the remains.   

 

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO web site at www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703) 699-1420. 

 

As I write this, Cpl Luis F. Palacios is being buried at Forest Lawn Cypress in Los Angeles. 

These are actual photographs of  LZ Loon. The one on the left is looking down at the crash site.

There has been wide national press this week related to the of recovery including a piece on page A29 of today's NY Times.  

Following is an excerpt from Loon - A Marine Story describing the moment of the crash. 

Within minutes, a CH-46 helicopter and a protecting Huey gunship appeared on the horizon and banked toward LZ Loon across the ravine.  We were ordered to lay down as much fire as we could in that direction, but to avoid the LZ where Sgt. Brazier’s former squad and the 81mm mortar squad were mustering for evacuation.  The CH-46 banked in quickly and hovered just above the ground while the 13 Marines quickly climbed in. 

We kept up our covering fire, at once relieved and wistful to see them getting evacuated and filled with hope that perhaps we would be next.  At least we knew that we had someone's attention in the rear. 

Our eyes were fixated on the chopper as it lifted and banked, but it didn’t seem able to gain altitude.  We began to cheer for it.

“Come on, get up, get up, get UP.”

 But it was not able to elevate. 

It had been shot. 

It was going down.             

Having reached the edge of the far side of the hill, we watched in horror as the mortally wounded helicopter hit the tree tops, began to roll, and then disappeared from sight.  Seconds later the explosion came.  There was smoke and then there was silence.  

Thank you Kurt.

Thank you Luis.

Thank you Ralph.

Thank you Jose.

Semper Fidelis.  May you rest in peace.

You have been wrapped deep in our collective hearts for over 40 years.  

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Find the Cost of Freedom..."

John McCain is on my mind this morning.

The reason is the following email from my son-in-law:  

I just recently had some of my negatives scanned from when I was living in Vietnam.

Surprisingly, in a roll were some photos from a visit to the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, better known as the "Hanoi Hilton."

Designed and built by the French to house political prisoners then converted to house American POW's, 2/3s of the site was demolished to make way for, get this, serviced apartments, basically a hotel which is where I usually stayed while in Hanoi.

They've preserved some of the prison as a museum, hence my visit there one weekend afternoon while I was there.

While the Vietnamese try to sugarcoat the way US prisoners were treated there, and emphasize the awful conditions that Vietnamese were subject to while there under the French, just visiting the place gave me an uncomfortable sense of dread.

I wasn't quite sure who to share these with, but figured you were the one closest able to appreciate these.

Thank you, John.

The Presidential race is in its final days.  Barak Obama has an increasingly commanding lead and John McClain appears to have lost his rudder. Should the lead hold, may we pray that Obama proves to be the best person to govern our country during these impossible times. The task will be daunting.

But John's email brings me back to John McCain. Not  the presidential candidate or senator, but the American role model who served us all with such distinction.

The son and grandson of US Navy Admirals, John McCain graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1958 and went on to become a naval carrier pilot.  

Nine years later, in July 1967, McCain nearly lost his life during a horrific fire on the deck of the USS Forrestal that did kill 134 sailors and wounded 161 others.  Hs Phantom jet destroyed and his carrier critically damaged, the war could have been over for John McCain.  

It was not to be.

McCain lobbied, influenced, begged, and used all that he could muster to be reassigned to a new jet on a new carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin - a highly improbable accomplishment.  Three months later, in October 1967, McCain's new jet was shot down while on a bombing mission over Hanoi. He was severely injured, captured, and, as we all now know, imprisoned in North Vietnam for the following five years.

John McCain is worthy of our admiration and thanks for his service on a wide variety of levels. Foremost in my mind, was his selfless determination to get reassigned to a combat support carrier after the Forrestal tragedy.  

Now, that took courage.

Thank you John McCain.

Thank you for the pictures, John.

And, thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Those were the days, my friend..."

Ah, the 50's, I thought wistfully. Now there was a time! We were at peace, banks were solvent, jobs were aplenty, and cars had fins.

The catalyst for my mental wandering was a plaque before me that bore the inscription:

May 17, 1957 * Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam

I was walking up the stretch of lower Broadway known as the "Canyon of Heroes," so dubbed, as it was the site of New York’s renowned ticker tape

 parades. Since my last visit years ago, the city had placed individual plaques for the honorees in ascending chronological order along the street’s eastern sidewalk.

Diem?

A ticker tape parade?

At first it struck me as random. Few New Yorkers back then had heard of Vietnam and fewer still could have known of its new President. Yet, upon further thought, I began to smile, and softly uttered philosopher George Santayana’s notable phrase, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Diem, Catholic and a fervent anti Communist, was able enough, but his family was fabulously corrupt. Regardless, he garnered enthusiastic support from the United States as a symbol of Indo-China’s cold war resistance to Communism and, consequently, was greeted personally by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when he arrived in the US in 1957.

The rest, as they say, is history. Diem was assassinated in 1963 (reputedly by the CIA), North Vietnam continued their incessant pressure on the South. In the summer of 1967, ten years after Diem’s triumphal ticker tape parade down Broadway, I joined 550,000 other American boys to fight for the “International War Against Communism” in Vietnam, of all places.

The political insanity that began with Eisenhower, but did not end there.

No thanks to:
Dwight Eisenhower
John Foster Dulles
John Kennedy

Robert McNamara
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
Henry Kissenger

Republicans? Democrats? 

There was plenty of blame to go around.

There will be again.

Thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Money for Nothing..."

Before there was Lehman Brothers.  Before there was Bear Sterns. Before there was Merrill Lynch.  Even before there was AIG. There was:

Brown Brothers Harriman

Private Bankers 

59 Wall Street

estab 1818  

To say the firm was venerable would be understatement in extremus.  Its partners, descended from the Mayflower, went to Yale, and professionally slid back and forth between Wall Street and Washington - making money and making laws.  Life was good. 

They sat behind roll-top desks and, best I could determine, had a license to mint money. They alone legally operated outside of the restrictive bounds of the Glass-Steagall Act for 75 years. That meant they could act as a commercial bank and an investment bank at the same time. Whoa!

Several years ago, in a fit of irrational exuberance and a tsunami of lobbying pressure, Congress repealed most of the more onerous provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act thereby allowing everyone else to get into the game.  

The rest, as they say, is history.  

When I arose this morning, the news was of foreign financial markets that had really tanked. Today could be a record setter on Wall Street - not in a good way.  As it was yet another matchless fall day I, like a moth to a flame, grabbed my camera, walked across the George Washington Bridge, hopped on the A Train and headed south to Wall Street where (presumedly) the action was. 

I once worked on Wall Street, but hadn't been since before 9/11, so I was struck when I emerged at the corner of Broadway and Nassau - struck by what I didn't see.   The view in the picture to the right never existed.  The towers of the World Trade Center blocked the two buildings behind which were, by the way, built on the landfill created by the World Trade Center's excavation in the 60's.

It was now starting to sink in.  This relatively small piece of Manhattan Island had now been an international ground zero twice in less than a decade.  

I'd come to Wall Street to snap pictures of modern-day bankers, brows furrowed, shoulders sagging, world at an end.  I'd be an invisible observer in the middle of a hurricane.  

What I got was beyond what I could have imagined.  Wall Street 2008 is a post-9/11 theme park.  Most of the street is  blocked off, some with those big steel come-out-of-the-road things that you see all over Washington.  Flak-jacketed police with machine guns were ubiquitous, including several in front of the formerly sacred grand entrance to the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company which was now slathered with available real estate signs akin to an abandoned waterfront warehouse.  

And bankers?  I saw these two on the left.  Period.

The old Brown Brothers is a Pink shirt retail store (pictured above) and the second floor (where I will now confess my first office was) is a fitness center. The old limestone, granite, and marble bank facades are condos, retail stores (Tiffany & Co.) and a garishly renamed - The Trump building at 40 Wall! Gasp!  Gone are the bankers, traders, and age old denizens of the street that once huddled around incoming schooners to transact the nations brokerage business.

Really gone.  

Like the rest of tourist New York, it is choked with class trips, foreign tourists, and in Wall Street's case gawkers like me.

The structures remain the same, but all else is changed from the Wall Street that I first saw as a rookie bank trainee in August 1972.  The stoic age old institutions that I naively felt worthy of staking my fledgling career, are crushed, dismembered, or significantly altered.

One institution, however, happily remains the same...

"sine 'em up, young man, shine 'em up."

The shoe-shiners in front of the Trinity Church Cemetery on Broadway.  

Wall Street a block in front of you.  The World Trade Center a block behind you.    

Good Lord, what you have seen.

Thanks fellas.

And thank you for visiting.

Jack

"Last night I took a walk after dark..."

As anyone over 50 knows, the next line by Freddy "Boom-Boom" Cannon was a swingin' place called Palisades Park.  
Palisades Park enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the town of Fort Lee - mostly hate.  

The Park was certainly the most popular destination in Ft. Lee New Jersey for most of the 20th century (it's no bother, it's no fuss, take the Public Service bus.)

Cannon, a native of Lynn, Massachusetts, had his career launched at the Park.  Several other 60's bubblegumers  were also there discovered including Bobby Rydell (Wild One), Leslie Gore (It's my Party), and Little Anthony & the Imperials (Goin' out of my Head). 


There were a number of serious fires over the years in addition to the obvious problems inherent in having such a neighbor.  (We lived nearby, but our parents never made it a destination for the McLean children.)

The Park was built  in the early 1900's by the Bergen County Traction Company which ran trolleys in the area.  As their electricity charges were on a flat rate for seven days a week, they created the Park to help generate otherwise limited weekend revenue.   

The trolly company (and thereby the Park) was eventually bought by Public Service Electric & Gas in the early 1970's which, noting decreased attendance and soaring real estate prices along the Palisades, sold it.  

Its fate became that of other local attractions of the time (Ebbits Field and the Polo Grounds) - high rise apartment buildings.

If you are still reading, you either have an abiding interest in me (thank you) or Fort Lee. If the latter, here is another fun fact.  

Fort Lee was America's original movie capital. The dense woods and the spectacular cliffs of the Palisades were considered to be dramatic backdrops for the burgeoning silent film business.  It is also the birthplace of the term "cliffhanger".

The phrase comes from the classical end-of-episode situation in silent film days in which the protagonist (usually a woman in distress) is left hanging from the edge of a cliff.

An episode of the Perils of Pauline, filmed in 1914, ended with Pearl White, the title character, literally hanging off the cliffs of Fort Lee’s Palisades.  Her eminent demise would somehow be resolved at the beginning of the next episode.  

And thank you for visiting.

Jack