Felicity or doom

Elysium is as far as to
The very nearest room,
If in that room a friend await
Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming foot,
The opening of a door!
[Emily Dickinson]

Happy Thanksgiving, Dan. I'm sorry you didn't call.

Call me or write me before Christmas, and let's get together then for lunch. We'll find a place open, even if I have to boil some spicy shrimp and bring it and some cocktail sauce down to Banneker Park at noon so we can sit on a park bench and eat overlooking the DC Waterfront. The hour would surely go swiftly, seven years is a long time to catch up on! I hope you and your two older brothers are doing well on this day of solicitude.

Love, Dad.

That Day in Dallas

Forty-six years ago I was sitting in math class at Edwin Markham JHS 51 on Staten Island when school principal Miss Anapole came on the school intercom system and in what I now recognize was a hysterical voice announced, "The President has been shot! He's dead! President Kennedy is dead!" One student broke into a cheer and Mr. Guzio yelled at him, "You shut your mouth!" Tension and oppression immediately settled over us seventh graders and we sat in shocked silence. Those were in the days before they sent grief counselors to the schools.

We were called into the school auditorium where Miss Anapole harangued us some more about the event in a shrill voice. I remember the loudspeaker system humming as she shrieked and glared at us. Then we were turned out of the school shortly after noon and we all went home. It was a long walk home on that gray, cold November afternoon.

At home I lay on my parents' bed for awhile, listening to the radio. That was how we mostly got our news in those days. It kept replaying Walter Cronkite's intonation that it was confirmed, the president of the United States is dead. I cried for awhile, quietly and alone, because I thought that was the right thing to do.

When I visited Dallas last summer and toured the Texas School Book Depository, where the fatal shot came from, people around my age were asking each other where we were on that fateful morning. That's a reference us baby boomers can relate to, sort of like do you remember what you were doing the moment you heard that the Challenger had blown up (shopping at Target in Boulder and I saw it on a demo TV) or when you first heard about 9/11 (at Metro Center waiting for a Red Line train and Metro announced that trains were running slow due to "the attack" at the Pentagon). I was only eleven the day JFK was shot but I remember it quite clearly.

The fatal shooter

On my visit to Dealey Plaza in Dallas last summer, I stood on the Grassy Knoll contemplating that terrible day forty-six years ago when President Kennedy was shot. Looking up at the corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, I could see that the distance the shot traveled wasn’t so great. It was easy to imagine that a sharpshooter up there with a sniper’s scope and a stable platform upon which to steady his rifle could score a head shot on an unsuspecting target sitting immobile in a car that was slowly moving away. It wasn’t shooting fish in a barrel but it wasn’t the stuff of fantasy either.

Then a number of Segways rolled up and people in a tour group dismounted and ascended the grassy knoll. I could tell from their accents that they were Brits. The tour director wore a jacket saying "Dallas Tours." I sidled over to listen so I could get the benefit of her expertise for free. (Right: The Warren Commission said the fatal shot, the Magic Bullet if you will, came from up there, the corner window one level down. From it's original velocity of traveling 2,200 feet per second upon leaving the barrel of the rifle, the bullet would be hurtling onwards at 1,800 feet per second when it arrived here six feet above street level.)

Using sweeping arm gestures, she explained how on that fateful morning the presidential limousine had just executed two awkward ninety-degree turns and was slowly traveled down the middle lane in the broad roadway below us. She pointed out the window where the shots had come from, above and behind the car. She engaged the tourists by asking them what they would expect the driver of the limousine to do when he heard the first shot.

“Get the 'ell out of there, Luv?” one ventured in Cockney.

“No, actually, he slowed down further.”

“G’wan!”

“He did, he practically came to a stop. Some people have said that was so the agents in the Secret Service car following could come forward to protect the president.”

She had me engrossed now. My thought was that the driver panicked and his reactions froze.

“Another shot rang out. Still the car crawled slowly away. The president was hit by now and bleeding.”

Everyone’s eyes were shining as they stared at the road and looked up at the window. She had us hanging on her words.

“And then,” she said, gesturing her arm in the opposite direction to the far corner of the grassy knoll where it meets the overhead railroad viaduct, “the fatal shot came from there. It entered the president’s skull through his temple. That’s the shot that killed him”

(Left: The fatal shooter was standing in the little triangle framed by the lamp post, the sloping line of grass meeting the cement wall and the bottom level of leaves on the trees, to the right of center in this photo.) Everyone’s heads snapped around to look for that phantom shooter. Forgotten was the specter of Oswald up in his sniper’s perch.

Aha!

“Now the car sped up. Only now did they rush off to the hospital with the already-dead president. Meanwhile a police line advanced across the street towards the Grassy Knoll, to seal it off."

Our heads snapped back to scour the roadway for the spectral police phalanx.

“That was to give the shooter time to escape.”

Ahh! (Right: The fatal shot came from here. It looks like a difficult shot to me because the target would be moving across the shooter's front, causing him to to swivel the rifle barrel to track it.)

“It was the CIA,” she added gratuitously.

Now I know.

The fatal shot

Last summer I was in Dallas and I visited Dealey Plaza, the spot where President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. The goodness that flowed into America out of the magnitude of its effort to overcome the badness of World War II seemed to filter through that moment in time, and nothing was the same thereafter. Vietnam, Watergate, Irangate, trickle down (ketchup as a school vegetable!), Monica, W. We still don't have universal health care. (Right: Dealey Plaza. The Grassy Knoll is in the exact center of the picture. JFK had only a few seconds to live when he unsuspectingly encountered this vista.)

Driving down Elm Street in Dallas, as soon as I topped the rise leading down into the Plaza I recognized it instantly. The wide expanse of the split-roadway slope leading down to a highway underpass has been seared into the memory of every American who was a school child in the early 60s through countless published photographs of the event. Like a suddenly developed Polaroid photograph, there it all was. The Texas School Book Depository with its sixth floor sniper's perch, the broad roadway flowing past and under that window, the Grassy Knoll beyond.

I believe something more was going on that day than just a lone-wolf political-nut shooter taking out the President by a blind convergence of luck and circumstances. Additional shooters? I didn't know. My nagging doubt always centered upon the difficulty, nay, impossibility of three shots being fired with such great accuracy from a bolt-action rifle at such extreme range. The difficulty of distance was what impressed me from the numerous pictures I had seen of the place. (Left: The Texas School Book Depository is behind me. Although I am not in the roadway, imagine a sniper with a scope in the right corner window one level below the top row, trained upon me. Completely doable. A slow moving car in a parade procession would be traveling directly away from the shooter, not across his front, so he needn't swivel the barrel to track the target.)

In person I instantly saw that it was very possible. Actually seeing the site, the distances compressed. For a good shooter with a stable platform, that was a likely shot. Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine sharpshooter.

In the next post I'll disclose the official Dallas version of the shooting, to which I am now privy.

Access Denied

I had a cathartic visit this weekend with an old running buddy of mine, Bex, who moved away to California a couple of years ago. I admire her and listen to her counsel closely. She advised me to move on. (Right: Bex at the Lake Tahoe Relay.)

So I am not going to post the long memo I sent last summer to the club's director of training outlining my vision for the club's training program, the one he ignored and actively subverted with the assistance of his buddies. I am not going to relate the details of the profane late-night phone call I received, or how the president's blog was removed from the front page of the club's website, or answer the charge that I engaged in "passive-aggressive attacks on other board members." (It was a novelty to have a man accuse me of being passive-aggressive.)

Contractual information was withheld from me, I couldn't get information about who suddenly published different bylaws on the club's website, and the club veeps I asked declined to assist me in getting the president's blog restored to its traditional spot. They also refused to investigate and report to me on whether there'd been co-mingling with a club account.

My presidential authority having thus been rendered nugatory, this month's board meeting became a debacle when I had four club members openly dissing me practically to the point of a melee. I took full responsibility for the breakdown of the meeting because I was the president. I resigned.

I'll reaffirm a truism--bullies are cowards.

Everyone there made their choices that day. I'm moving on.

Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno.

The controversy that led me to step down from the presidency of my running club last week had its genesis in a dispute over who would direct the upcoming training program that is currently closely associated with a national marathon in the area. Briefly, the club’s director of training, one of three club veeps I inherited, chose himself to be director of this complex program. However, acting in the best interests of the club and after personally conferring with him last summer, I appraised him in a lengthy memo that I was appointing the director of the then-ongoing club 10-Miler Training Program to be the new program’s director instead. Briefly, that program director's credentials and track record were far superior to anyone else's in the club. The club's director of training had no track record.

I requested the training director to instead direct the much less complex upcoming 10K Program as his initial foray into directing club training programs. He hadn't ever directed a training program before, nor even been a site director.

Tomorrow I’ll post the memo I sent him, with names edited out for the sake of privacy, showing that I didn’t undertake the decision lightly. It’s very long. I stated several compelling reasons for the choice. I had unstated reasons also, that centered upon the director of training personally. He was inexperienced and I lacked confidence in his judgment and reliability. In my opinion, I was acting in the best interests of the club and he was acting in the best interests of himself. He absolutely ignored the memo and took actions in undercutting it that absolutely roiled the club.

Some other characters are about to enter this story. Called straight out of an Alexandre Dumas novel, three other board members (one's position is disputed and unconfirmed), all well under thirty, rode to this early-thirties veep’s rescue. (I'm approaching sixty.) Here's the crucial fact--these three amigos, all very close friends. absolutley and totally control the club's website all by themselves.

Yeah, that's me.

If I write the Access Denied series explaining why I resigned last week, you’ll need to know the persons involved. Here are the qualifications I brought to the club when I became president in May.

2005
Participant in the club’s initial 10-Mile Training Program

2006
Volunteer Coach, 10K Training Program.
Volunteer Coach, 10-Mile Training Program.
Volunteer at some club races.

2007
Director, 10K Training Program.
Director, 10-Mile Training Program.
Director, Reebok SunTrust Half Marathon Training Program (along with the club president, I helped create the Reebok SunTrust National Marathon Training Program).
Recipient of the Justine Peet Outstanding Volunteer of the Year Award.

2008
Club VP, Director of Training.
Director, 10K Training Program.
Director, 10-Mile Training Program.
Director, Reebok SunTrust Half Marathon Training Program (under the club president, who remained as director of the overall program).
Obtained RRCA Coaching Certification.
Club representative at the RRCA 50th Annual Convention.
Obtained CPR and 1st Aid Certification, completed additional course work in Sports Psychology and Lactate Tolerance.
Volunteer at various club races.

Winter/Spring 2009
Finished directing the Reebok SunTrust National Half Marathon Training Program.
Race Staff at the SunTrust National Marathon.
Director, 10K Training Program.
Finalized the deal bringing the ATM Training Program to the club and set up that training program’s leadership structure.

General—I conducted some hill workouts, scheduled some speakers for the training programs, participated in numerous club races and programs, developed a body of volunteer coaches and acted as the informal historian of the club’s 10K, 10M and Half Marathon Training Programs by weekly blogging. The last three years have been exceedingly busy for me. For instance, I devoted forty-seven out of fifty-two Saturday mornings last year to actively participating in the three training programs that I directed. Detailed planning and administrative work were routinely required each week.

Basically, I came from the developing training side of the club, as opposed to the traditional, long-established racing side of the club. There is a tension between the two. My training director credentials were first rate.