Death of a Friend

My friend Henry Myers died on New Year’s Day, at his home on Peak’s Island, Maine, just a month short of his eightieth birthday. The following Saturday, Joy and I drove to the Portland Quaker Meeting House for his memorial service. Nearly two hundred of his friends and former colleagues showed up to remember him and to console his wife Mary. Speaker after speaker reminded us of Henry’s basic decency, his endless curiosity, his love for Mary, his enjoyment of sailing, and his undying impatience with fools, liars and incompetents. More than one summoned the image of Diogenes in search of an honest man.

Henry was dismayed  by the demands of politics that led otherwise decent human beings to compromise on matters where they really knew better. And of course he had no patience with politicians whose moral or ethical standards fell short of his own, or whose beliefs and principles he did not share. Henry was not a prig; he was just a very decent, honest man. He must have written thousands of letters to those politicians, and to the editors of newspapers and news directors of television and radio stations, expressing his concerns about perceived wrongs. If he learned that a subject he cared about was to be discussed or a political figure was about to be interviewed on a television or radio show, he would send penetrating questions to the interviewers or news directors to be put to the scheduled guest. Almost invariably he would be disappointed that his questions were never asked, or that the interviewer never came up with the follow-up question he would have asked. Every now and then, however, an interviewer would follow his advice and rattle off the questions he had suggested. The subject of the interview might not be as obliging, however.

Henry produced an email newsletter, the Casco Bay Observer, which he mailed to dozens of correspondents, expounding on his concerns over the shortcomings of public figures or depressing developments abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Articles about deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian relations were headlined “On the Edge of the Abyss.” He would often fly an idea past me (and I’m sure many others) before launching it as a CBO mailing. Almost always he hit the mark. All too often, nobody in a position of power noticed.

I met Henry in Washington, in 1962. A physicist, a graduate of MIT and CalTech, he worked on nuclear weapons testing issues in the Science and Technology Bureau of the newly formed Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where I looked after the Arms Control Agency’s intelligence needs, keeping its senior officials apprised of breaking developments abroad and assisting key staff members like Henry. Later I left the State Department and joined Henry in the Arms Control Agency. We shared an office whose inside door opened behind the desk of the agency’s chief scientist Herbert (“Pete”) Scoville. None of us, Pete included,  cared much for bureaucratic protocol, but Pete’s secretary Julie Krenzel did, and it used to drive her wild when Pete would open his door to consult with Henry – and sometimes me – just as she thought he was supposed to be in a meeting somewhere else or entertain an important visitor. (Pete also kept bottles of gin and vermouth in a wall safe behind his desk, and  would occasionally violate State Department rules by breaking them out to observe with other privileged officials what he perceived were important ceremonial occasions. Sometimes we were included as well). 

Working with Henry was a treat. As noted, he had little patience with pompous bureaucrats or dissemblers, and was forever looking for the Honest Man who too seldom appeared on the scene. But he was endlessly polite, if not always patient, with fools and incompetents. He strongest criticism of sloppy work was often “it isn’t clear” what  a writer of an endless report or a briefer at a conference was saying, when what he really meant was “this is pure crap.”  But when he set out to perform a study and produce a useful report of his own, he was always thorough in setting forth the points he was trying to make. His arguments were carefully documented, and his conclusions seldom challenged.

Working with him was fun, too. Channelling Shakespeare, Henry one day announced that working for the government was akin to being in an endless theatrical performance, and would often allude thereafter (at least to me) to “another act in The Play”  in response to particularly absurd events in the daily routine.  In 1967 the magazine “Scientific American” sponsored a “Great Paper Airplane Contest,” and Henry was quick to respond. He and I tinkered with many designs in our office, but finally concluded that the most aerodynamic and interesting design already existed in a Styrofoam coffee cup. We would poke holes in the cups, add and remove fins, but the best and most capable flyers turned out to be the basic unadorned cups themselves. Henry (or I) could get impressive performance out of one by holding it at arms length, dangling down from the shoulder, then rapidly flinging it forward with an underhand throw, releasing it with a spinning motion. We got a satisfying amount of distance out of our various designs, even if they did not go into elaborate acrobatic maneuvers.  Neither Julie nor Gladys Cleek, our ever-patient secretary, were amused, however, particularly when our contrivances flew out the door and into the corridor, startling important bureaucrats on important business.

After we both left ACDA, Henry first tried consulting on his own, establishing “Myers Associates” in his tiny Georgetown living room. Joy designed a brochure for it, but it did little business. In the tumultuous 1968 Presidential election campaign, Henry joined  Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy and helped develop position papers and press releases for the candidate. While he was in Chicago for the infamous Democratic convention, he wisely stayed out of the streets when Mayor Daley’s police went on a rampage, beating up McCarthy supporters.

Henry then worked for the US Congress, on the staff of the House Interior Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, concentrating on nuclear energy. He was at the center of investigations of the Three Mile Island and Brown’s Ferry reactor accidents, and endless debates over nuclear waste disposal. He was frequently at odds with accepted wisdom on nuclear policy, both domestic and foreign, particularly when the latter involved the Israeli nuclear weapons program. He became convinced, and argued persuasively, that Israel had received clandestine shipments of enriched uranium from a Pennsylvania plant, but domestic politics complicated all his efforts to expose the diversion.

When he left the Interior Committee, he moved to Maine, and to the surprise of his friends, bought a lot on Peak’s Island, just outside Portland Harbor, and built a house there. Then, to the even greater surprise (and delight) of all his friends who had became accustomed to the likelihood that Henry would be a bachelor all his life, to the age of 65 he married a wonderful Island dweller, Mary Lavendier. They settled in on the island, though they also bought and restored two old houses in Waldoboro, on the mainland.  In Portland, Mary, an accomplished artist, maintained a studio while Henry rented office space on a wharf where he went each day to crank out his occasional newsletter, The Casco Bay Observer. He and I were in email correspondence almost weekly, usually to explore how he might turn his latest grievance into a pithy CBO editorial on war and peace, the endless impending disasters in the Middle East, the laudable (a few) and incompetent (many) politicians, from the Maine State House to Capitol Hill to the White House, and a wide assortment of economic, political, and environmental outrages. There was never a shortage of material on which to comment, and Henry did it well.

Henry loved to sail. Early in our acquaintance he became the joint owner with other friends of an ancient 26-foot wooden yawl named “Voyager.” “Old V,” as he called her, was fun to sail, and I had the pleasure of many good day-sails on Chesapeake Bay, both with Henry and on my own with my family (his partners seldom seemed to use the boat, and were happy to let it be used, even if one of the owners wasn’t aboard). Old V leaked a lot, and the engine was persnickety, but she was fun to sail.

Henry also developed a fondness for a succession of cantankerous cars. The first one I knew was a green Triumph TR3 sports car. He called it “Old Green”,  and when it gave up the ghost it was followed by a gray SAAB – “Old Gray”, of course.  When “Old Green” was retired, Henry fantasized that it might be nice to take it to a wrecking yard, have it compressed into a cube and use it for a coffee table. Wisely, he never did.

After he moved to Maine, Henry found he had not shaken the sailing bug, and a few years ago bought a fiberglass Cape Dory sloop that he kept in Rockland, down the coast from Peak’s Island. His co-owner told me at the memorial service that Henry would often get great pleasure out of just sitting in the cockpit, enjoying the day, without bothering to leave the dock or hoist sail. I could identify with that.

There was a lot to love about Henry Myers. 

Henry Richard Myers,  2/1/1933 - 1/1/2013

Memorial Day

The first Memorial Day parade I remember was in Dedham, MA, probably around 1938 or 1939, when I was 4 or 5. There were the doughboys with their flat dishpan helmets, Springfield rifles and puttees, and the marching band from Dedham High School, but most of all I remember the open car going slowly by, with a frail old man in the back, wearing a Civil War uniform, and gently waving a transparent, bony hand at the crowd — the last local survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic. 

And I remember my own active duty Army service (1954-1961 — a rare period when Americans were not at war somewhere), which began with my feeling that my personal qualities were being recognized at last in a way I had never felt before, either in my family or in school, and ended much too long after I had recognized that as an Infantry officer my job was to lead men to kill one another up close and personal. 

Those memories came back when I was a selectman in Manchester, MA (1986-91), and each year marched at the head of a parade through town, stopping at each cemetery in town, ending at one where each year the same rituals were performed: a high school student (who might soon die in Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t know it yet) reciting the Gettysburg address, a gray-haired former Army nurse from the American Legion Auxiliary reciting the maudlin “In Flanders’ Fields,” someone else reading a war-glorifying “Reply to ‘In Flanders’ Fields’,” a bugle blowing taps, and a ragged volley fired in salute by a squad of portly legionnaires who the other 364 days of the year were recognizably the Fire Chief, a grocery clerk, a plumber and a policeman. Then we all went to the harbor where the Auxiliary Legionnaire threw a bunch of poppies into the water (if it was low tide they lay in the mud until the tide came in). There were no GAR veterans or World War I doughboys, but a handful of WW II and Korean War veterans, and few more from the Vietnam War. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so it goes.” But Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, right?

A few days ago I read an obituary of Paul Fussell, Jr.,  a clear-thinking military historian whose work I admire. He too had recalled how much he had enjoyed the infantry (he was a lieutenant in combat in France just after D-Day), until he became aware that the purpose of the infantry was to persuade young men like him to kill as many other young men like him as possible. He went on to write The Great War and Modern Memory and many other books and articles that I wish many politicians would read before they send young men and women off to yet another war.

Love and long life to all. Maybe even a few years of peace.

ABOUT "BEAM REACH"

“Beam reach” is a sailor’s term: when the wind is blowing more or less at right angles to the course he wants to sail (the wind is not coming from ahead, or astern, but abeam), the helmsman trims his sheets to catch the breeze so his boat will move forward efficiently and speedily.  If the wind is blowing from the right direction, it will take him home. If not, at least it will take him somewhere fast.

He is not beating to windward, with the breeze almost on his nose, the hull banging into each oncoming wave and the salt spray flying back in his face; nor is he running free, with the wind astern, pressing the boat forward, surfing up the back of each wave and down its other side, the sails flapping when he’s in a trough and bellying out when on the crest of the next sea, the hull rolling and pitching, and the mains’l threatening to jibe (to sweep unexpectedly across the cockpit, only knocking off his hat if he’s lucky) if he bears off the wind a bit too far. Between beating and running comes reaching; when the wind is abeam, you're on a beam reach.

Beating is exhilarating but wearing, both to boat and skipper, while running free before the wind is also taxing, and not the most efficient way to make the boat move fast through the water.

But a beam reach takes full advantage of the shape of the hull and keel as well as the cut and set of the sails.  All combine to use the force of the wind and the motion of the hull through the water to maximize speed. A well designed boat, carrying the right amount of sail for the prevailing wind, will move through the water quickly, steadily and comfortably.

On a beam reach the sailor has a sense that he’s in control. He can sit back and take satisfaction with the way his vessel is performing, and perhaps at the way his acquired skills have helped it to perform well.  And he has the feeling he’s getting somewhere. As my wife Joy says, “It’s the sweet spot of sailing.”

OK, you can see the metaphor coming: this blog will be a place for me to sit back in the cockpit, keeping an eye on the set of the sails and the state of the weather, and to reminisce about the high (and not so high) points of a lifetime that is approaching 80, to comment on events, from the state of the world to the state of our back yard, and to share some of my past writings and drawings, and maybe a poem or two.

I have been working off and on for more than a decade on a memoir, focusing on my life in Washington and beyond, where I spent a career working on arms control and disarmament. Its tentative title is A Footsoldier of the Cold War.  I might try out some of it on my blog readers from time to time in the course of writing. 

I also have a couple of other books on a very back burner, if there is such a thing, and will share some of those works in (fitful) progress with you too. One is a biography of an ancestor who fought in the War of 1812, went on to run several textile mills (in one of them he had the dubious distinction of inspiring the first women’s labor walkout in America) and managed one of America’s first railroads until his accidental death at the age of 42 (when they heard the news, the mill girls all cheered). Another is a sort of illustrated logbook – or annotated set of drawings – from thirty years of cruising the coast of Maine with my friend Richard Dudman.

I don’t plan to make an entry every day, or even every week. In other words, this is likely to be as irregular a production as most of the other blogs you follow.  But for now, it’s time to hoist the sails, cast off the mooring, and see where the wind will take me.