Student winners
Obsession	By Anne Saita First prize, national competition Non-fiction Magazine Article Society of Professional Journalists 2001

I have trouble, still, picturing Andrew driving off into darkness in a car that was not his, with her photograph on the passenger's seat. I'm sure he used his own camera to take the picture and maybe developed it in some makeshift darkroom, touching up the flaws to better reflect his vision of perfection. I wonder how many times he handled the print, running over the image with his fingers, wishing his own life had the same persistence of memory. He might have sat a long time in the rental car with Virginia plates, staring at the apartment where he had once lived before pulling out of the parking lot with boxes of clothes in the back and a gun within reach. I wish some nosy neighbor had grown suspicious of that unknown car idling in front of Andrew's old home and called the cops.

Saturday is my housework day, where I go room by room and do just enough cosmetic cleaning to keep the bugs at bay. On Saturday, Sept. 4, I was midway through dusting the living room furniture when the telephone rang in the kitchen of my Cape Cod home. The clock on the freshly scrubbed microwave read 10:42.

"Hello?"

"Anne?"

"Yeah," I said, speaking slowly to buy me a few seconds. The familiar voice suddenly registered; it belonged to an old friend from Harrisonburg, Va., whom I hadn't talked to in a couple of years.

"Hey, Pam!"

"Hey," she responded, more subdued. "Listen, you might want to sit down. I have to tell you about something really awful and terrible that happened to Andrew."

Andrew had formed a friendship on the Internet, one with deadly consequences. Like millions of others trolling the cyber-world, Andrew thought he'd found a way to divulge his secret fantasies and hidden lusts without sacrificing his identity and risking his reputation and marriage. What Andrew and the woman he came to love &emdash; as well as countless others &emdash; frequently discover is that the loss of inhibitions in the virtual world can come at a cost in the real one. Casual chat-room messages and eagerly anticipated e-mail can create a safe, satisfying intimacy between two people who otherwise may not have been attracted to each other in the physical world. Dialog is contained to the computer screen for days, months, even years. But for others, like Andrew, an Internet romance can create grief so strong that it consumes and eventually destroys a person.

It was steamy like any other late summer evening in Washington, D.C., when Andrew Paul Tolliver headed north on the interstate. Did he have the air conditioner running? The windows rolled down? Was the radio blasting? And if it was, was he really listening to it? No, I believe he was thinking too hard about plans past and present, about the picture on the passenger's seat of a woman with dark brown, shoulder-length hair.

Abby Maisonave was 39, and, I'm told, had a less-than-perfect figure that may have come from bearing three children in the past 10 years and spending a lot of her days and nights sitting in front of a computer. She had a husband, Ismael, who she once promised to leave for Andrew. He met Abby two years ago when he entered an America Online chat room and found a woman with the same, secret desires. I'm not sure how the two pseudonyms found each other, but something clicked. Marvelously seductive words shared on a screen later led to telephone talks. I wonder if the same phrases that flowed so freely between them in cyberspace stopped momentarily at the initial sounds of each other's voice. Andrew must have liked Abby's voice, and what she had to say, because the two decided to meet in person. I'm not sure how much time had lapsed by then. In any case, the pair set up clandestine, weekly trysts at hotel rooms in New Jersey's Ocean and Monmouth counties. The curious cyber-romance became a sexual obsession for Andrew, so powerful it ate him up whole. He put her on his company's payroll, though her job description was vague. Then someone else in the company noticed irregularities in the accounting records and called Andrew on them. I'm not sure if he ever confessed to the crime or not. But the embezzlement charge became public several months later, when newspapers in New Jersey were writing about him. Andrew also began to retreat from his friends in northern Virginia. He never answered his phone and returned their calls only when he was sure they weren't home. For the past year Abby had been a preoccupation. Now, with his job in jeopardy and his passion overwhelming, he did little else but press her to leave her home and her life in New Jersey. She said she'd think about it, but he realized she wouldn't. She broke off the affair in March of this year, but Andrew continued to pursue her relentlessly. He was fired from his company, Physicians Transport, but he still had a part-time position as an auxiliary sheriff with the Falls Church Sheriff's Department. He helped with court appearances and keeping order in the suburban town of 10,000. Public service was where he seemed most comfortable, anyway.

On Sept. 1, Andrew was supposed to be heading to his new home in Cincinnati, where he'd moved in an effort to repay his debts and repair a life in shambles. Three weeks before, on his 41st birthday, Abby had sent him a restraining order, well earned after months of harassing e-mails and telephone calls from Andrew that forced her to come clean with Ismael. Two days after being ordered to stay away from the Maisonave house, Andrew lost his job at the sheriff's department. His boss never did publicly explain why he'd fired him; instead, he told the press the dismissal broke his heart. Less than a week after the firing, a judge granted the divorce to end his seven-year marriage to Marilyn Tolliver, who filed the papers after learning of her husband's affair. The two had not spoken for almost a year by the time the dissolution was final.

"I wouldn't say that Andrew was ever violent towards me," Marilyn told a woman from one of the New Jersey newspapers. For further questions about her ex-husband, she referred the press to Mrs. Maisonave.

Andrew got a $7-an-hour manual job for a Detroit-based furniture liquidation company with offices in Washington and Baltimore. It would help pay the $2,500 in monthly alimony he now owed Marilyn. He had confided to a friend he was determined to turn his life around. Instead, he turned the rental car with Virginia plates around, toward Howell, N.J.

Ninety-six minutes into our Saturday morning telephone conversation, Pam and I decided we'd done enough pondering about a talented life wasted, one perhaps eternally doomed from the moment Andrew entered that AOL chat room.

The three of us &emdash; me, Pam and Andrew -- met while working for The (Harrisonburg) Daily News-Record, a morning newspaper in the heart of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Among Harrisonburg's 35,000 residents in the mid-1980s were Old Order Mennonites, modern Mennonites, working-class families and 11,000 college kids attending James Madison University. Surrounding Rockingham County also had a lot of chickens, enough to make it the poultry capital of the country. It was not uncommon to find feathers flowing down two- and four-lane highways linking the Tyson and Wampler and Marval plants to venerable neighborhoods, new apartment complexes and Mennonite farms on the edge of town. It was not unusual to stand in checkout lines with people in loose-fitted plastic caps, their fingers still pickled from handling hens' body fluids all day. Once, when I wasn't with them, the News-Record gang got drunk after work and tried to get into a private party down the road for some poultry processors. Pam and the others, including Andrew, tried to convince the doormen they worked at the plant, then known for having few African-American employees. Andrew's mocha-colored skin and kinky hair gave the news crew away.

Many of the reporters and photographers at the newspaper had family ties to the Valley. Andrew, born in Germany, was raised in Harrisonburg's northeast section, what we used to refer to as "the black section," by an aunt and an uncle on Myrtle Street. Someone told me they'd died about six years ago. He grew up with college basketball star Ralph Sampson, also from the same neighborhood. His dad, Andrew "Poochie" Tolliver, worked at the Reynolds sheet metal plant in nearby Grottoes. His sister went on to join the Army. By the time I arrived in June 1984, Andrew had been a photographer at the newspaper for several years. He'd joined the News-Record after he finished Harrisonburg High School and taken a few years to prove he was competent enough to be a full-time photographer, with benefits, despite the lack of a B.A. He dressed more nicely than the other photographers, preferring khakis to jeans and crisp, button-down Oxford shirts to wrinkled flannels. He wore jewelry and cologne, was always clean-shaven and sported a mustache. He looked like he invested a lot in his appearance but didn't want anyone to know it. He called the look casual.

During my first six months at my first real journalism job, I rarely worked with Andrew on assignments. My coverage of two sleepy towns and a housing authority didn't merit many photographs. Then I moved to the courts beat, and Andrew showed up more on the scene. He was working a side job as an on-call firefighter, and I enjoyed listening to his tales of late-night fires and close brushes with death, even if I suspected they were greatly exaggerated. Our conversations usually steered clear of the personal. Andrew made me laugh and got me to think, but he didn't inspire me to confide secrets or ambitions. I knew he had a girlfriend in northern Virginia named Marilyn, that they'd dated awhile. He told me she had a good job and would never move to Harrisonburg. I met her, briefly, when she and Andrew were out on a Sunday drive, and I was playing Frisbee with a friend by a lake. She was pretty, that's all I remember about her.

One winter day Andrew and I commandeered the company van and drove aimlessly for an hour until we came upon a single-car accident on a divided highway that lead to a ski resort. I hated chasing ambulances and writing about wrecks and asked Andrew to just drive on. But he steered the car onto the shoulder, grabbed his camera and quickly exited the driver's seat. He'd discovered a way to justify our trip; I wasn't nearly as motivated.

He came back several minutes later and ordered me out, saying the state police were ready to talk to me. He lied. The trooper was too busy when I walked up to him, so I just stood there trying to avoid looking at the female driver, about 25, on a gurney in the grass median. She was pretty banged up and covered in bandages but still conscious. She was talking to paramedics as Andrew clicked his camera just four or five feet from her face.

He rushed up to me, grinning. "They asked her if she was on any medication," he whispered, cupping a hand over his mouth to avoid being overheard. "She told them she was on birth control pills."He burst out laughing, forcing me to chuckle. Now the trooper would never talk to me, seeing only a callous reporter. "Come on," I told him, clearly irritated. "You've done enough."

Soon I found myself seeking out Andrew for my assignments, and we'd fill the time between photo ops with idle talk. I learned a little about his family life and his devotion to Marilyn. He learned I was engaged and owned a car that conked out at least twice a week. I discovered he loved being a firefighter far more than being a photographer. He discovered my collie Sheppie had a loose-bowel problem.

We started collaborating on enterprise stories, assigning ourselves to look into crime in Harrisonburg with the aid of his sources on the fire department. Then one afternoon we were both summoned to Dick Morin's upstairs office. I'd never been to the editor-in-chief's palatial spread that took up a fourth of the floor. Mr. Morin, as we were to refer to him, wanted to know if it was true we were working on a story about drug abuse at Harrisonburg High School. It was, we answered. In fact, we had just interviewed several students who used cocaine regularly, then the "in" drug on the nearby college campus. He demanded we turn over the names of our student-sources to local police, who'd taken in interest in our inquiry. We refused and left. "Morin's an asshole," I whispered as we walked back to the newsroom. Andrew agreed. For weeks we talked about our dilemma &emdash; over dinner, over drinks and over deadlines. Morin had hinted we'd be out of a job if we didn't cooperate. I left anyway, to marry. Andrew started lobbying hard for a full-time job as a firefighter, which he got in 1988. He was a jailer, too, in the early 1990s.

Three weeks before my wedding in July 1986, I realized I needed a bridal portrait for the newspaper announcement. There were other things I'd forgotten about, too, like lining up a musician for the ceremony and tracking down my sister for one of the readings. These, I thought, were a bigger priority, but Andrew disagreed and quickly volunteered to take some photos at the office on the Saturday afternoon of my choosing. I opted for the weekend I wasn't busy getting married.

For an hour before the photo session, in her dining room, Pam tried to put my hair in a loose bun, but the silky texture of my waist-length locks kept moving the mass of hair to one side or another. Finally, in exasperation, Pam threw in the brush and declared, "It's the asymmetrical look. It's all the rage."

That's the first thing I repeated to Andrew when I saw him at the empty News-Record newsroom that afternoon. That and, "Don't laugh."

He'd converted the conference room into a makeshift studio and for almost two hours positioned my head, fixed my lace collar, arranged my floral bouquet, made me laugh when I was supposed to be serious and forced a smile when I was ordered to "look happy." He made me reapply my lipstick, which I'd decided, after borrowing it from Pam, was not my color. He ended up taking 110 pictures on four rolls of film and developing them right after I changed out of my bridal gown and let down my hair.

I followed him into the dark room and, for the first time, watched him work. He kindly explained each step of photo processing to a fascinated audience of one. After the contact sheet was done, we agreed on one of the more serious shots that didn't leave as many questions about my lopsided look. This compromise did not come easily. Andrew was adamant that we use one of the half-smirk shots for my wedding announcement. It was an awful picture, but he didn't think so. He insisted it captured my essence. I insisted I looked like a loser. He said I looked beautiful in it. I said he was full of shit.

Something bothered Andrew as soon as my face and fancy hairdo emerged on paper. He grabbed some type of wand and began waving it over a strand of my hair that had fallen out of place. He tried again and again to diminish the dangling lock, but it was no use. "Damn," he said. "Damn. Damn. Damn."

I assured him I loved it, but he didn't pay me any attention. For days, he tried to make a better print. Once, while rummaging through a stack of photos left in the darkroom, I found several of the same bridal pictures torn up in the wastebasket.

Did Andrew get out of the car and walk coolly to the front door of 9 Garden Way? Or did he rush, adrenaline pumping? We'll never know.

Abby Maisonave was reading the newspaper in her kitchen in the kind of neighborhood described as quiet, with never any trouble before, when reporters came knocking. Her three children, ages 10, 6 and 5, were playing in a nearby room. She looked up around 9:15 a.m. and saw Andrew come through the front door wearing a hateful look and a fanny pack filled with two magazines of ammunition for the .9-mm gun in his hand.

She stood and yelled for him to get out.

The shouting drew the attention of her children, who rushed to the kitchen to see what was happening to their mother. As Abby tried to reason with Andrew, her elder son calmly called 911 and in a clear, steady voice told the dispatcher, "There is a man with a gun in my house."

Nick Maisonave gave his address and a description of Andrew, noting that he was his mother's old boyfriend.

"She was supposed to get married to him a long time ago," he said into the phone. "The man wants my mom to divorce my dad."

The dispatcher, Laura Donato, asked to speak to his mother, and Abby took the phone, speaking in codes after Andrew warned, "If 911 has been called, you're all dead before they get here."

Abby cried and begged Andrew to leave, trying not to let on that she was talking to police. Suddenly, her hysteria heightened.

"Oh, please don't! Stop, please. No, Andrew, please don't to this! Don't please!" she shrieked. Then the line went dead.

Andrew dragged his former lover upstairs by her dark brown, shoulder-length hair. By then, police had reached the house. As they stormed in, Andrew ducked into a downstairs bathroom. A patrolman named Mark Troutman grabbed the bathroom door just as Andrew tried to shut it. Andrew shot at him through the door, hitting his bullet-proof vest in the shoulder.

"Shots fired…officer hit," a policeman shouted into his two-way radio.

The officer heard another shot. This one Andrew fired into his own mouth, dying immediately.

Pam and I both think that the instant he shot the officer, who survived with just a bruise, Andrew had a moment of clarity and saw what he had become. Pam says she thought of this a lot as she sat with 75 others in Lindsey Funeral Home in downtown Harrisonburg that Sunday evening, waiting to hear how the priest would handle this. He talked about the Andrew before Abby, the one everyone in the room could relate to. He talked about the direction Andrew's soul had taken. For those wondering if Andrew is in heaven, he said, think of the person he was and how much he was loved, and you'll have your answer. There were only six people with ties to the Daily News-Record in attendance, including Pam, now a JMU alumni magazine editor; a guy from circulation; a former reporter named Nick, who served as a pallbearer; and two photographers. The sixth person was Mr. Morin.

"How do you make people understand this was a person who was kind and who you loved when he committed this horrible act?" Nick said when we talked on the telephone about a month after the suicide. Nick had been Andrew's best friend and took the news hardest.

Nick had been to Marilyn's house in northern Virginia to help her clear out the rest of Andrew's belongings, the old boxes of pictures from his News-Record days, copies of police logs, dispatches and fire calls and other odds and ends stored in some remote section of the house. "Hey, did you and Andrew ever work on a story about winos?" he asked me. I told him we had thought about it but never got around to it. "Well, he took the pictures. We found them in a box when we were cleaning up."

The last time I saw Andrew he was with Nick, and we were all at the Harrisonburg Moose Lodge to celebrate our old managing editor's retirement in March 1997. Nick and Andrew and Pam were the first people I ran into, right there in the lobby. We hugged all around, grabbed a beer and sat down for the next two hours catching up on the last 10 years. I asked Andrew about Marilyn, and he said they'd been married going on six years. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at Nick and chuckled, like there was some inside joke. Nick said the only thing he knew Andrew to do was golf. After Andrew walked away to visit another table, Nick told me Andrew had become real successful and was running ambulances for Fairfax County Hospital. Later in the afternoon, when I passed Andrew on my way to the restroom, I told him I'd found out what he was doing for a living, not realizing then he was actually part owner of the company. "So, I see you're still stopping at wrecks," I said with a smile. "And I bet you still don't," he responded and asked me what it was like to work at one of the big papers. I remember he looked so nice in his sport jacket and crisp, button-down Oxford shirt that carried the faint scent of familiar cologne. I thought to myself, he hasn't changed at all.

He met Abby online about six months later.

I have read and reread the articles from the newspapers that tell of a troubled, gun-brandishing Virginia man who stormed into the New Jersey home of a former girlfriend and threatened to kill her and her three young children before shooting an officer and then himself. I cannot, even after all these months, reconcile that man with the one I once knew. I cannot understand why the outrage and hatred I normally express toward deranged gunmen who seize a household and threaten to kill was so easily supplanted by sympathy and confusion. Andrew did, after all, do some very bad things to a fair number of innocent people that day at 9 Garden Way.

After the funeral, Pam said she kept an eye out for anyone with a notepad. She didn't want to have to talk with reporters. I would have talked to them. I would have told them, as Dan McCauley (who I can't believe is still at the News-Record) did right after the shooting that "he was a very witty guy with a good sense of humor." I would have added that he had been generous with his time and talents. That something went wrong when he entered that chat. I asked a friend who met her husband online what they did right, and she said they stayed away from chat rooms. She and Phil had both noticed each other's names on several unrelated news groups and started an electronic correspondence that two years later led them down the aisle. Chat rooms are meat markets, she said with disdain, and the place where pervs like to hang out. I told her I'd once been in a Yahoo chat room, and I didn't find the female dental technician from Annapolis, Md., I talked to for an hour particularly perverted. I queried experts about Internet addiction, but I don't think Andrew was hooked on the technology, nor was he socially isolated. No, his obsession was more deeply rooted to a woman he could not have and who, he somehow came to believe, needed to suffer some consequences.

I am keeping the news clippings in the same box where the contact sheet of my bridal pictures are stored. It's in the basement, unlike the picture we'd chosen together from those rolls of film. That one, with the stray strand of hair that drove Andrew crazy, is in a 14-carot gold, 8-inch-by-10-inch picture frame resting on a glass table in my living room. It's also been placed prominently on a bedroom bureau, fireplace mantle and entertainment stand during the past 13 years. It has outlived all the other items on display from my wedding, except my ring. I stop to look at it each Saturday when I'm doing my usual housework and dusting the living room furniture. My hair was full and silky, my skin much tighter back then. That lipstick, though, is still not me. I'm grinning slightly, but I'm not sure if that was supposed to be a serious pose or not. For a couple of weeks after the phone call from Pam, I cried a little every time I looked at that picture. Now, I just stare at it and half-smile, remembering the day it was taken and the man who took it..

It's the image of Andrew I chose to remember.

	The Nurse That Hurts by Eliza Wilmerding Best Sports Story (Boston Phoenix) New England PressAssociation

 Monique Ward punches the air with a wrapped fist and lets out a sharp "TSSS," then snaps her fist back to guard her face before the next release. She shadowboxes in the front corner of a warm-up room for fighters before their bouts. Focused boxers turn away from each other, jabbing faster than the beating hip-hop. Monique leads with a jab, throws a straight right, a straight left, pivots, and ends with two furious tight hooks. Clean black hair flies around her shoulders. She rips the 5-punch combination in less than 2 seconds. Suddenly she turns my way. Eyes glaring from her tight angular face, she snaps off a series of straight throws "TSSSTSSS." I can't help but hold my breath and tighten. That vicious energy and power can thrust out of the shoulder of a small woman is startling, thrilling.

Ringside. Boys and men with beer bellies and Budweisers fill the rows at Somerville's Good Times Emporium. Latecomers stand in the back by the paramedics and the bar. Everyone watches two men in the ring. They explode jabbing into each other, only to be pushed apart by the ref in order to hit again. Some spectators talk and laugh as they wait to see a friend fight. Others sit silently, their eyes glued to the ring, hearing every leathery slap. Some are fighters without a fight. Several of them fought years ago. Many are there for the intensity, but would never get into the ring themselves. Steve Biaccari calls them armchair warriors.

In the warm-up room, trainers coach their fighters. "That's it Monique," Steve says, chomping on his gum. She pivots, ducks, then "TSSSTSSSTSSS," her defined muscles ripple through another combination. He runs his thick hands over his buzz cut and watches her. She's the best female flyweight in New England, a 5'3" powerhouse who thinks she looks like the girl next door, but whose arms are half as thick as her tight torso. Steve and Monique have been training for 3 months since her last bout. "She's gonna steam roll her," he says, pointing with his head at the gangly woman dancing and jabbing across the room. "TSSS." Monique rotates her hips mid-uppercut for the maximum power. He nods "Yes. Nice." His jaw muscles bulge.

Hours earlier, she had carefully cleaned torn skin and wrapped fresh gauze around an old man's sagging arm. She'd rolled the medical cart in and out of HealthSouth's hospital rooms in Braintree, handing out paper cups of daily pills. She had monitored an irregular pulse, checked the oxygen streaming through thin plastic tubes into a man's nose. She'd gently pressed her ear to a woman's abdomen, listened for bubbly bowel sounds, and had talked sweetly with the patient whose cloudy blue eyes looked sad that day, but didn't let him skip therapy.

"I never thought I'd go to college let alone be a nurse," she said. After high school she worked as a secretary, but quit after 3 years. "It became predictable. I wanted a change, a challenge," she said. She joined the National Guards. After 10 weeks of basic training, she flew to San Antonio where she learned to be a medical specialist. She went on to nursing school, then started boxing. Her two lives address passions imbedded in most of us. The furious informs the gentle. She heals, then fights on the same day. Her friends call her 'the nurse that hurts,' but nobody tells the patients.

* * *

"OK, stop," says Steve. He grabs her gloves. Monique shakes out her arms, shrugs, and puffs out her cheeks with a long exhale. She always waits until the last minute then ties up her hair. "I think I look like a boy with it up," she's said. She applies makeup before work and it doesn't come off until her post-training shower. "I feel naked without my lipstick," she says shrugging, "I'm a female; I like to look good." She wears lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner, and refuses to trim down her bright red nails. If she punches hard enough, they dig through to her wrapped palms and draw blood.

The night of a bout is the only time you'll see her without her makeup because, she says, "it takes away from the fight." Spectators might wonder whether she's in the ring to look beautiful or to box. It's a serious performance and she's there to win. "Plus," she adds with a smile, "mascara can get in your eyes."

* * *

Steve holds out one competition glove, then another. She slides into them. Standing, head to head, he ties and tapes the laces. "You're ready; you've covered everything," he tells her. She glances across the room at her shadow boxing opponent. "She's got nothin'," Steve snaps, following her gaze. "You're going to fold her up like a lawn chair; I mean look at this hardware!" He points to her round biceps. She smiles and rolls her eyes. He slides on her headgear. "Just remember," he says massaging her shoulders, "point your shoulder and get down on that punch and you'll be all set."

Some box because they want to prove that they're tough. Toughness is not only the strength, skill, and speed to beat another, but the courage to take a beating. Others hit to release aggression. Win or lose, the ones in the ring have more guts than the spectators, says Steve. Boxing is a vicious addiction says Steve. "But, when you're a fighter in top shape, you feel above it all. Nothing can touch you."

For reasons she can't explain, Monique says boxing fits into her life like a puzzle piece. "Just like nursing," she says, "it feels right." She wanted to box since she was 5 years old, but her father told her it was something that girls didn't do. Since the sport became open to women in 1993, there are approximately 25 female amateur boxers in Massachusetts who are registered to compete. There are almost 1900 registered in the country. "I think it's taken off simply because women were given the opportunity," says Monique. Women can be aggressive and want to fight, just like men she says, shrugging. She doesn't ask her friends or family members to come to her bouts. "I don't need them to be there," she says shrugging. "I do it for myself." She likes being strong and she likes the struggle.

* * *

They walk through the crowd, past the two women in Budweiser bathing suits, who wait to strut with round signs at the bell. The crowd quiets. "Mooooonniiiique Waaaaaarrd," yells the announcer. They clap, but not enthusiastically. She steps through the red ropes into the bright lights and faces her opponent, Jackie Walsh in the opposite corner. Someone says, "Awe, don't they look cute." The bell shrieks. Neither looks cute mid-lunge.

Two years ago Monique walked into O'Mally's Boxing Gym in Quincy and told the old fighter behind the desk that she wanted to learn. She didn't see any women training that day. The place smelled like rotting leather and old sweat. The rug was in shreds, cups of spit lay on the ground. She didn't care. If anything, she was a little embarrassed. "I had these big gloves on and pencil thin arms," she remembers with a laugh and she was in a gym full of boxers who didn't just train; they fought. Her punches sounded like thuds. Now they make loud, leathery slaps.

Monique has awesome strength and talent, says Steve, who feels her punches every day. She can move more pounds for her weight, than most of the men in the gym, and he's never seen anyone learn new styles so fast. He asked her once, "why don't you act more cocky?" "Why do I have to act like that?" she asked.

* * *

Monique delivers frenzied punches, drilling Jackie with aggression you'd never suspect until you saw it raw. "Don't fight, Monique; box," yells Steve. She recovers her composure, picks her punches, setting up to throw Jackie off balance for a knockout. A jab, straight right, a left, and four powerful straight hits. Slam! She connects and Jackie's head snaps right, left. "She punches like a demon," mutters a man in the front row.

"I don't go in the ring and think 'win,' or 'I'm gonna kill this person,' but that instinct just comes out and takes over," Monique tells me after sparring one day. "You do what you have to in order to survive." She says being hit "is just part of the sport" and often doesn't even feel it until after the fight. "I'll feel bruises forming that I don't remember getting," she says, "but I always remember ice packs." And she'll lay them on tender spots, so she'll bruise less for work. "I'm a registered nurse; I don't want to have to tell the story 25 time a day or get looks from my patients."

* * *

Jackie throws random punches. Her long arms wing from the outside. Her gloves nick and tag Monique's headgear, but not hard enough for a real head snap. She's outmatched. "Take her out, Monique," Steve yells, his hands gripping her white towel. Monique crouches low. She delivers a tremendous right hook into Jackie's lanky body, folding her down to her level. Monique explodes with 3 hard punches.

Monique doesn't like to explain to people where the bruises come from or why she fights. "People are surprised to hear that I box because I'm petit and feminine looking. They think I should look manly. But, physically and mentally I feel very strong. Anything I ever did in my life I did it to the fullest; I didn't waste my time. I don't give up. I take boxing very seriously, and in the ring I'm very aggressive." She has no time for non-fighters who don't understand.

* * *

WHIPSNAP! Jackie's head snaps back. She veers backward, off balance.

"Some think it's cute. They don't know that you can get a broken nose, or a broken jaw, black eyes, or a fat lip," Monique says. "Or, some just ask incredulously, 'why would you want to get hit in the face'?" "It's the best workout, I look and feel better than I did at 18," she'll tell them like an infomercial model. "I don't really go into it, it's not worth it," she says, because they won't understand.

"TSSS" another punch. Jackie stumbles, off balance, reaches to the canvas to stop her fall. Jackie' hand hits the canvas and her arm bends with her weight of her body. She bounces up, but the ref blows his whistle and the fight is done in less than two minutes. Steve smacks the palm of his hand with his fist.

Steve says he's always been aggressive. Only certain people need this kind of outlet and he says he's one of them. He used to train attack pit bulls professionally, when he wasn't in the ring. "If it isn't a pit it ain't shit; any other dog will quit on you," he says. If he were a dog he'd be a pit. If he were a woman, he'd be Monique. "That's me with long hair," he says, pointing to her with a grin.

Fighters will tell you Steve knows a lot about strength training, physical therapists even ask him questions. But, they will also say that he keeps to himself. Before working with Monique, he wouldn't help anybody with their conditioning or boxing technique. Because, "to be honest with you," he tells me, "nobody helped me." He was just another tough guy. "One day a great trainer said to me, 'yeah, you're a tough kid, one of the toughest I've seen. That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.' But, Monique's a girl, said Steve, raising his eyebrows, "a novelty." He stopped resenting her when he watched her take a serious beating from a fighter who was better skilled. "Out of sheer will," he says tightening his fist. The audience gave her a standing ovation that night, and she went home with two black eyes.

One day at the gym she asked Steve if he'd help her. He's planned her every workout since, "because she works harder and improves faster than anyone I've ever seen," he says, shaking his head. "I wouldn't waste my time if she didn't." In many ways, he says, "I do more for her than for anyone else because she's a fighter."

* * *

Monique lets the ref lift her arm in victory, but steps out of the ring without even an expression of relief. "What, did you want to knock her out before the fight even started?" He asks smiling. If she does something well once, she wishes she did it twice, he tells me. She always wants to be better. "Perfect doesn't exist," she'll say." And that's why she's so good," says Steve.

*

Two months pass and it's fight week. Time to taper. They jump rope, she drills the speed bag, and shadow boxes through her combinations. He watches every movement. She finishes with an uppercut. "Pivot like you're grinding out a cigarette with the ball of your foot," he calls. They spar and she jabs hard into his rib protector. Shaking his head, he says, "you have no idea how good you really are; you're gonna kill this girl." She gets nervous and calls Steve on the phone 4 times a day. "Relax," he tells her; "you've done your homework." Every fight is like the first, he says. Being nervous is good. It keeps you fast. If you're not scared you're in trouble, but if you're too scared, you won't move.

* * *

They've drive 2 hours to fight and her opponent's too heavy. "She'll be no more than 120," her trainer had said on the phone. The scale read 127. "That's not 120," Steve says, stiffening. Monique had put on weight to fight tonight and was barely 115 pounds. The other trainer sighed and said his girl couldn't drop weight all week. But Steve knew that was a lie; fighters can loose five pounds in a day if they want. This guy figured they'd fight anyway, said Steve.

"Well, your girl is a better fighter," the man said. It wasn't the point, Steve told me later. "If they were going to lie to my fighter, they ain't gonna think nothin' of robbing her of a decision." Steve knows the crookedness of the sport and wasn't surprised. But, Monique said she was frustrated and quiet for a week. "Hey, Jen, we drove all the way down here," Monique said sharply out in the parking lot, "I'll fight you any time." Call me when you make the weight."

*

Another month passes. Tomorrow night is the New England Golden Gloves tournament. Monique won last year, beating Alison King for the second time. "We just got a call," Steve tells me in the morning over the phone. "Alison said she sprained her wrist last night and backed out. It's hard enough finding fights. If she won't fight Monique, no one will." The next night they spar. Monique's combinations are harder than ever. "All dialed in and no where to go," he says later, pulling off his gloves. "I'm disgusted; I wanted it so bad I could taste it." Monique was quite. She'd take a week off, shadow box in front of her wall length mirror at home, and think about what's next.

She can compete at the professional level. Recruiters have seen her. They want her and Steve knows he can call them any time. But, Monique would rather stay at the amateur level for more experience. But, to do that, O'Mally's trainers will talk to boxing people they know in New York, and try to set up a bout. In order to stay in the game, let alone go to nationals in April, she'll have to travel where more women fight.

"I'm not going to take the jacket if I win by default," Monique mutters, pulling on her sweat-shirt. "They're black with gold lettering; really ugly," she says to me smiling. Last year's championship jacket is stuffed in her closet. "I wouldn't be caught dead in it." "Millennium one would have been nice, though," Steve says. "Yeah it would," agrees Monique.

	One Maine by Maureen Woon First Prize, National Competition, Non Fiction-Magazine Article Society of professional Journalists 2000

Fifty-three year-old-Peter Gould never thought he would end up sitting at home, looking after his grandchildren more than a decade before his scheduled retirement. Neatly dressed in a cotton plaid shirt and dark polyester pants, Gould looks more like a bank officer on his day off than a onetime foreman at Eastland Woolen Mill in Corinna, Maine, hoping for a lucky break to rescue him fromtwo years of unemployment.

"I have been looking for a job since the mill closed way back in 1996,,"' said Gould, who is divorced.

"I did the training and did some computers, but I have never done it before. Then the classes ran out on me two months ago and so did my unemployment checks. Now I don't have anything except this house and my daughter and son-in-law to help out," he explained, nodding toward his grandchildren as they pranced around the dining table while feeding three pet parakeets. "I guess I am more fortunate than most people. If it weren't for my family, things would be pretty bad and I wouldn't know what to do."

Gould is one of 350 people laid-off when the 86-year-old mill went out of business two years ago. The closure of Eastland Woolen Mill is emblematic of the problems facing traditional industries such as textiles, shoes, and pulp-and-paper which have abandoned many small towns in Maine for cheaper overseas labor. However, the state government, in an effort to solve the problem of foreign competition, has redirected its energies toward service sector job creation. The strategic plan "OneMaine" calls for reducing economic disparities between urban and rural Maine. The service sector job that holds the greatest potential for rural Mainers is telemarketing. Although many Americans regard telemarketers as irksome dinnertime callers, the job is a lifesaver for many displaced Maine workers, even if it pays poorly and comes with a nightly dose of hollering and swearing.

The largest employer in Corinna

While Eastland had earned a hard-won reputation as a leading woolen winter coat producers, competition from Russian and Ukrainian manufacturers dealt it a severe blow. A Russian-made wool coat of similar quality retailed for less than $100 while Eastland's was priced at $250. Eastland declared bankruptcy in 1992, briefly restarted its business with state assistance, and shut its doors for good in 1996.

Though silent now, Eastland Mill remains the central landmark of downtown Corinna, population of 600 and falling. A green, hulking, corrugated steel structure, the mill was built right over the Sebasticook River which at one time powered the mill's machinery. Fifty years ago when the population was nearly 1,800, Corinna bustled with activity from mill workers and those they supported. Across from the mill was a row of shops, including an ice cream parlor a convenience store, an auto parts dealer and a hardware store, A quarter of a mile north of the town's single flashing traffic light lay Fernald's Supermarket, and overlooking the entire downtown, is the Stewart Free Library, an imposing, late-Victorian building.

Because Eastland was Corinna's largest manufacturer and chief employer, its shutdown severely affected other services. Within months of the mill's closure, Fernald's Supermarket went out of business. Today, the downtown is nearly deserted except for Henderson's convenience store. Ironically, owner Daryl Henderson said that the mill's closure actually helped his business because the demise of Fernald's left residents with no other place to shop for groceries. But cigarettes and soda sales plummeted as the once steady stream of Eastland workers petered out.

While some of Eastland's displaced workers have managed to secure employment in other manufacturing plants such as nearby leather and shoe factories, most have had no choice but to work in jobs wholly unrelated to their experience. Most workers are now employed outside Corinna in service sector occupations ranging from telemarketing to home health care to greeting customers at the Walmart in. Newport, six miles from Corinna.

Training programs in computer skills

Unlike Gould, Muriel Malone, 63, a former payroll clerk at the mill, considers herself "lucky." Malone's husband died two years before the mill shut down, leaving her with the security of a widow's pension. "That made a great difference, knowing that you had some income and unlike unemployment benefits, it would not eventually run out on you even if you didn't get a job," she said. When Eastland closed in 1996, Malone could survive on part-time employment, an option unavailable to many of-her coworkers with families to support. Malone first worked for a year in a telemarketing office before joining the Training and Development Corporation (TDC), a state government-sponsored training program set up to cater to laid-off Wasteland factory workers. Funded by federal money, the TDC also drew most of its temporary staff from among Wasteland's former workers, including part-timer Malone.

When a factory downsides or closes, TDC steps in to provide transitional assistance to unemployed workers. 'TDC conducts training in computer word-processing and database programs," said Sheri Towel, spokesperson for the TDC Corinna office and herself a former Eastland office worker. "'We also have programs to teach resume writing and interview skills, and we try to boost the self esteem of laid-off workers by counseling."

For other workers, TDC tackles more fundamental needs by working with local schools to administer high school GED programs. And for those like Gold, who fall among the estimated 10 percent of Mainers who cannot read, TDC offers adult literacy training through volunteer literacy -programs.

"I only made it to the 8th grade," Gold grinned. "I came from a family of 11 kids and 40 years ago after one got through grammar school, that was about it. They [my parents] wanted to get rid of me so I worked in a couple of farm jobs before getting a job as a weaver at the mill. That's the only job I have ever had except for the time when I did some janitor work." With Gold's limited education, he is ill-equipped to take advantage of TDK's heavy emphasis on computer training, and it's impossible for him to read telemarketing scripts or to key in data.

TDK's effectiveness in helping displaced workers secure new jobs is open to question. According to Towle, of the 350 people laid off, 160 applied for the training and 72 were successfully placed in at least part-time jobs. For those workers who have yet to find a job, the task is even more difficult because TDC now functions solely as a place for printing resumes and making interview cans. The two-year funding for TDK's more ambitious educational programs at Corinna expired this summer.

Since 1970, Maine has lost manufacturing jobs at three first day of work stood nervously at the door waiting for the times the national rate and has become increasingly reliant on service sector jobs. "These jobs range from development of inland tourism, retirement services, to telecommunicationsintensive and back office industries (the state government's euphemism for telemarketing)," said Department of Economic and Community Development's Commissioner Thomas McBrierty. Telemarketing is by far the largest new employer in rural Maine. According to McBrierty, the ICT Group based in Oxford is the 10th largest outbound call center in the United States and has recently hired about 250 people in Maine. The former Air Force base in Loring is now home to Sitel, another telemarketer, and MBNA also has set up its headquarters in Presque Isle. "Telecommunications industries can locate anywhere in the country, but they have chosen Maine because our labor force is hardworking, dependable, and inexpensive," said McBrierty.

Inside a Telemarketing Den

The ICT Group set up a small operation this February in Pittsfield, a town 12 miles south of Corinna, which sits adjacent to Interstate 95 midway between Bangor and Augusta. "There has been a lot of support from the state and local government in courting our business and other related ones to Maine," said ICT Center Manager Mark Bilodeau. "One of the good things about locating in Pittsfield is that recruiting people has been extremely easy. We don't have to print flyers or set up job fairs. All the hiring is done out of advertisements and most of our employees are older, in their 30s and 40s, and have been laid-off from major factories or other jobs in the area."

On a Saturday morning when most offices are closed the nondescript ICT office, sandwiched between a Shop' N' Save supermarket and a pizza shop, is buzzing with activity. From its clean blue carpet to the empty booths yet to be installed with computers and telephones, the office is concealed from outside by ceiling-to-floor blinds. The configuration of the booths, explained Bilodeau, is hexagonal to allow easy monitoring. The workers, mostly middle-aged women, sit intently in their booths, one hand holding the receiver, the other keying in information. Four glass monitoring rooms encircle the booths and in the middle is a station where floor supervisors holding hand phones periodically listen in on the workers' calls.

As the three supervisors patrolled the booths for signs of inefficiency, Bilodeau explained operations amid a crowd of curious faces. An alarm bell sounded for a five-minute break and a woman emerged from a booth looking dazed and exhausted, while a white haired woman reporting for her first day of work stood nervously at the door waiting for the manager.

"We offer full-time jobs with paid benefits and don't disqualify anyone from working here as long as they can read a script and perform well." assured Bilodeau. "We have an inhouse training coordinator and after a week's training, our workers are all set to begin. Our turnover rate is high at about 10 percent in the first week, but our older workers are the ones who usually stay longer at the job than the kids fresh out of school, he said.

Nancy Clark, 57, worked for Dexter Shoe Corporation, in Dexter, Maine, until she lost her job early last year. Located just nine miles north of the Eastland NU, Dexter Shoe is well-know4 for producing classic American footwear such as penny loafers, saddle shoes, and suede bucks. Much of the company's manufacturing capacity has already shifted to Puerto Rico. In May, Dexter Shoe laid-off an additional 20 workers, blaming foreign competition. A homemaker all her life until the death of her second husband, Clark was forced to take on a factory job in the late 1980s. Nearly a decade later, she found herself facing another difficult transition after being abruptly laid-off. Like many of the Eastland's workers, Clark attended TDC programs in Corinna, went through a career assessment, and learned the usual computer word-processing skills. Under the same program, Clark applied for and attended a 12-week personal care attendant course and received her diploma this February. "It was ten months after I was laid-off that I finally found a job as a home health care attendant. But I only worked six hours a week and it was temporary, so I had to work as a telemarketer to support myself," said Clark. When the ICT opened its newest branch in Pittsfield, Clark was one of the first recruits. "I worked from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. every weekday and alternate Saturdays. For one week, I would try to sell credit cards to customers, another week it would be gift certificates for shops like Sears. It's not the greatest job in the world, but it helps to pay the bills until I get more home care assignments," she said.

Although telemarketing jobs offer displaced workers a measure of security, many use it as a stopgap measure until they find a better job. "It's not the kind of job that you are looking to work for the rest of your life," said Nancy Shibles, a 49-year-old former hair stylist and former L.L.Bean customer service representative. "For me it's a-part- time job until I can find another beauty salon job. Right now I don't mind it so much because its pays $6 an hour and it's just 10 minutes from my home. The problem with it is we don't get good training like at L.L. Bean and the supervisors are people that they pulled off the street. Also, they are not very good at paying you the benefits." Shibles explained that although the job comes with full benefits, workers have to put in a minimum of 300 hours before becoming eligible for them.

While biding her time at ICT, Clark began to garner more home health care jobs. Her first client was an elderly man in his 80s who lives nearly an hour's drive from her home. Then in May, she began working for an elderly woman who lives in nearby Newport. "Helen's 82 but her mind is still very sharp, and she would sometimes joke with me while watching me do the chores," said Clark. "I work for her seven days a week, two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, but it's a job and a good job too," she said. By July, Clark had left her telemarketing job and is now working with five elderly clients in three different towns. Although Clark is earning the same wages as in ICT, she says that it is definitely a step up because as a home health care attendant, she has more independence and freedom to make friends as she did at Dexter Shoe.

While Clark stumbled into a niche of the nation's booming health care industry, Lloyd Boldstridge, 46, another former Eastland worker, has had his eye on the medical field all along. "Although I have been with the factory for 27 years, I always had a keen interest in the fire department and dreamed of being a firefighter," said Boldstridge."So in 1981, 1 started to work part-time in the Corinna fire station and a year later, I joined the ambulance service." Boldstridge explained that a friend's accidental death prompted him to take up medical training which ultimately paid off when Eastland closed. "My buddy was killed in an auto accident and after that I made up my mind to get some medical training. I took my Emergency Medical Training in 19821- and in 1988, 1 became the director of ambulance service in Corinna. When the mill shut down, I told myself that here's my chance to go into the fire and ambulance services full-time and so I continued, with the help of TDC, to advance my training."

Boldstridge is one of the fortunate few who has made the transition from working in the factory to successful fulltime employment in another field. Others like Philip Nye, 56, chose to remain in manufacturing. "The closure of Eastland did me a lot of service, really," said Nye. 'Me and a couple of guys bettered ourselves by leaving and we made more money outside. When I got done at Eastland, they were paying me at Cascade Woolen Mill, I walked in on $8.59. It's an, awful, thing to say but I wished it had happened 20 years ago. At Eastland I worked overtime and made good money but at Cascade, I didn't have to stay day in and day out to bring home a decent check." But the Cascade mill in nearby Oakland closed two months after Nye started and he was once again left searching for another job.

Undaunted, Nye drew upon another contact to get a job at Irving's Tannery in Hartland, a town 15 miles west of Corinna. "I like it better at Irving's. It's piecework and you are not jumping every minute for speed. It's really an excellent place to work. The people get on well, the money is good, and they use you like a human being, rather than up here in Eastland where you worked for pennies and they were never satisfied," explained Nye.

But even the work at Irving's, according to Nye, is threatened. "There is a lot of fear going around all the time. I am sure it's coming to everything in the state of Maine. Even at the tannery, things are moving slower and at Dexter Shoe they have laid off people again. It's like tomorrow if the tannery closes, where would I go? To start looking for a job again at 56 just scares me," he said.

Proximity to Boston and job creation

Taken together, the problems faced by towns such as Corinna, Dexter, Oakland, and Hartland contrast sharply with the otherwise good news on Maine's booming economy. "We are experiencing one of the lowest unemployment rates in years," said Dennis Bailey, communications director for Governor Angus King. "Overall, we are doing well because of Portland's proximity to Boston. Last year alone, Maine recovered all the jobs lost due to closure of factories. We created more than 11,000 jobs, but unfortunately, not manv of these were available to the people who used to work in the shoe factory or the mill. It's just that we have these pockets of poverty. This is our biggest and toughest challenge: to find jobs that people can take, especially after a huge factory or main manufacturing plant closes," said Bailey.

More than 30 years ago, manufacturing industries in Maine began a shift toward the South and even outside the country in search of cheaper labor. "Not many shoe or textile factories exist in Maine today," said Ralph Townsand, chairman of the economics department at the University of Maine in Orono. "At one time, there were dozens of these factories all over Maine, but it is not economically efficient to sustain these factories in the, United States any longer." In recent years, many big name companies such as Nike, Gerber, Bass Shoe, and Kimberly-Clark have relocated their manufacturing plants to China, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Indonesia, or South Korea where workers are paid a fraction of U.S. wages and are not unionized.

Still the persistent unemployment in the area means a steady supply of new recruits for companies such as ICT. According to the State Department of Labor, Maine's unemployment rate is 4.5 percent. "The overall state unemployment figure is deceptive. As you go up north, there exist pockets of poverty because of the eroding away of old economic niches like shoe factories and textile mills, plus the lack of good transportation and low education," said David Terkla, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

"It isn't so much an issue of northern or southern Maine but rather the distance from Boston and Route 128," said Townsand. "If you look at southern New Hampshire, it is doing economi cally better than northern New Hampshire.

It's just that a larger area of New Hampshire is in the south while Maine is skinny at the bottom and big up top," he said.

There also are fewer people per square mile in northern Maine, and the numbers are steadily declining as people migrate to the south and out of Maine. "In the past decade, more than 2 percent or 3,000 people have left Penobscot County. Within the same period, Aroostook County has witnessed a population decline of 10 percent," said Townsand. "The towns around Corinna such as Dexter, Exeter and Newport have been a depressed area for some time. A hundred years ago, these were thriving towns, but today, there is hardly anyone there."

Corinna's inhabitants seem to view their town's plight with resignation. "When they say that Maine is a Vacationland, they are talking the truth," said Nye. "When the government tells you how good the state is doing, I am sure they are talking about down south. King should come up here and look around, look at Corinna and compare it to 25 or 30 years ago. It boomed. It was a little trading center. We had a grocery store, a hardware store. Now, if you want to screw in a bolt, you got to go to Newport to get it," he said.

"Eastland Mill will never be used again because there is nothing special about its location or economically advantageous about the mill," said Townsand. "These days, for a town to survive, you've got to ask what the town has to offer that is unique. For example, Guilford in northwestern Maine, has managed to carve out a niche. It is the only textile factory that has had a new plant in the last five years and they have a specialty market making textiles for offices like coverings for room dividers."

Another New England textile firm which has done well recently, Malden Mills Industries of Lawrence, Massachusetts, shares a common history with Eastland.

Malden Mills was founded by Henry Feuerstein around the time James Striar started Eastland. Two generations later, both firms declared bankruptcy under Chapter 11, which allowed them keep some assets in order to reorganize their businesses. But there the similarities end. Malden Mills went into partnership with several sports and outdoor equipment companies and later spent $ 100 million in research and development to invent Polartec, a synthetic fleece used to line windbreakers and jackets. The super lightweight polyester fabric is now used in almost every imaginable article of clothing from underwear, socks, hats, gloves, to jackets, and pants.

'Malden Mills is an example of a company that has successfully incorporated technology in retooling its business to stay competitive," said Treacle. The company expects to sell $500 million worth of fleece this year, and Malden's Californian partner Patagonia will begin to use the Polartec label on its new fabrics.

In stark contrast, Eastland was not able to carve out a niche for itself and became a victim of the textile industries' winds of change. Although owner Steven Striar tried to diversify its woolen coat production by manufacturing polyester, wool-blend apparel. and furniture upholstery, the machinery used at Eastland was obsolete. Financial support from the government also was not forthcoming as Striar felt that the Financial Authority of Maine (FAME) and the Arizona-based financial company, Finova Corp., conspired to push Eastland out of the textile business. "We were doing good business running the MM six days a week on three shifts," said Striar. "We weren't making any money but we weren't losing any either. But the government decided not to back us and after 16 months, recalled their loans." With no money to invest in research and technology, Striar was unable to regain a competitive edge for the family-owned business.

The solution: Industry that does not depend on location

To revive Maine's ailing manufacturing sector and alleviate its regional unemployment, the DECD devised a rural development program called "OneMaine". Established in February 1998, "OneMaine" is a blueprint for a new economy in rural Maine and targets the funds necessary to make it happen. Although the telemarketing companies are tapped to be the largest employer at the moment, Bailey explains that the government has not completely given up-on manufacturing. Part of OneMaine is to prevent factories from closing or to assist them in their expansion. Among the program's early successes were the establishment of a New Balance shoe factory in Norway, Maine, and the rescue of a textile factory in Fort Kent, Maine, that had been slated for closure.

According to McBrierty, the DECD develops a block grant which provides much needed financial assistance to companies on a verge of closure and also serves as a central clearing house to facilitate the involvement of other organizations such as FAME, USDA Rural Development, and local banks. "'Right now, there are over 160 businesses all over Maine that are in different stages of development, and we try to help them in any way we can. In the case of Kent Textiles, the new owners bought the original factory site and they came to us to help them out with banks loans and other finances," said McBrierty.

The decision of New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. to set up a factory is perhaps an even more surprising success story. New Balance established its third factory in Norway after Norway Shoe recently closed its operations. Since taking over Norway Shoe's site, New Balance has hired 50 employees and hopes to increase its labor force to 200 by the end of 1999. Two other New Balance factories", in nearby Skowhegan and Norridgewock, employ 264 and 340 workers respectively

New Balance's corporate policy is the reverse of other shoe companies. "Part of our company's philosophy is to create a strong manufacturing-based economy for the United States and to keep manufacturing in the United States instead of moving overseas because we have a high quality labor force," said Katherine Shepard, New Balance's marketing communications manager. Shepard explained that New Balance's long history of shoe manufacturing and the highly skilled nature of its workforce. "We have a good- employee base in Maine. The workers are known for their hard work, and we have no difficulty finding former shoe factory workers to take the jobs."

But New Balance is the exception among shoe manufacturers. Despite the government's efforts to retain and create some traditional manufacturing jobs, many say they can no longer be considered the backbone of Maine's economy. "Take Aroostook County where Loring Air Force Base has closed its operations. It's way up north and a long ways from any market," said Townsand. "There may be cheap labor force, but it's too far from Boston for the location of any high tech industry. You need an industry that doesn't need to be near transportation lines, but instead one which can rely on a literate, articulate, and hardworking work force. This gives people in Maine an advantage over foreign workers," he said. Telemarketing fits the bill.

"It is also not always the case," said Bailey, "that these huge call centers are not good employers. Some of these jobs pay above minimum wage with benefits, and for a factory worker who has always been laboring in the heat and in the midst of pollutants, an office, air-conditioned job may be a welcome change," he said.

Clark, who used to glue soles on loafers, could not get used to working in a call center. "At least at the factory, I can feel proud of what I make," she explained last May when she was still working at ICT. "Here, I always feel bad trying to sell things to people who don't want to buy them or who can't afford to buy them. Other times, it's difficult getting used to the abuse of customers," she said. "The other night," she said dropping her voice to a whisper, "a man called me a bitch and told me to get a life. I told him calmly that I am from Maine and that this is my life."

As the government fuels Maine's economic growth by assisting ailing manufacturing companies and offering tax incentives to telemarketing companies, others contend that the future of Maine lies in providing Mainers with better education. "I think it's time we stop telling young people that working in factories is the best way to make a good living. It is the wrong answer because you are condemning them to a life of hardship, and of working for a bankrupt company with long bouts of unemployment," said Townsand. 'The strategy has to be in retraining of the workers whether it's computer training for an office job, going back to school to et a college degree, or even learning tobe a carpenter's helper."

Then perhaps workers Peter Gould and another former Eastland worker who sweeps the streets in a nearby town will have a chance at being hired. "With them training and my education, I am hoping for something to come out," said Gold optimistically. "On my own, I'm trying to get into carpentry. I'm hoping they'll give me a chance and I've asked them for an option of work on a trial basis of $5 an hour. I think they are giving me the chance, but I ain't going to guarantee nothing." 'If it doesn't work," he said his eyes rolling up, "maybe you can get me one."

	The Sex Trade: Butterflies of the Street by Juleykja Lantigua First Prize, Magazine, Investigation and analysis, AEJMC 2002

Fifty thousand Colombianas work in the sex industry in Europe and Asia. According to Colombia's Department of National Security (DNS), every day two more leave from Bogotá's El Dorado Airport, destined to join them. The top three destinations are Japan (40%), Spain (30%) and Holland (20%). Latina sex workers, known as "butterflies of the street," have been part of Japan's robust sex industry since the '70s when Chilenas and Argentinas made up the first crop. El Tiempo, Colombia's premier newspaper, credited these women with "launching an industry" now controlled by international smuggling rings.

For many women it's a decision made based on simple economics. In Colombia, women earn 85 per cent of men's earnings. With more than 12 per cent of its 37 million inhabitants unemployed, the country is still crawling toward fiscal stability. "People don't stop to think about the reasons that pushed us into this or the regret that we carry around or the shame we feel every time we recognize a client outside our work area," a sex worker told International Press (IP), an independent journalism agency based in Tokyo.

The Lure of the Yen

Japan has money. Its economy is the second largest globally. It lends more money to more countries than any other nation, according to a 1999 country profile prepared by Walden Publishing. Latinos discovered its gold-paved streets in the mid-80s. In 1991, the Latino population hit a peak of 137,000. They continue to seek fortune in the isolated island nation, with over 105,000 entering the country in 1998. Colombians hold a less-than-privileged place among newcomers.The Japanese Justice Ministry and the National Police Agency estimate that 3,000 Colombians (men and women) arrive in Japan each year and about 200 of those are involved in prostitution or other illegal activities. However, according to the Colombian Embassy, there were only 2,170 Colombians in Japan as of December 1999. The disparity between the official count and the actual population creates crevices into which many Colombians fall indefinitely, women especially. In an attempt to get more realistic figures I contacted the Colombian Embassy in Tokyo. Via an anonymous email an official recognized that "a large number of Colombians choose to live clandestinely." The more I interacted with them, the clearer it became that not all Colombians have disreputable jobs. In most cases men work the assembly line in car factories. Others work in food processing plants or in the textile industry. The embassy's unidentified staff member emphasized that, "Although most of these people are illegal, they live orderly and dignified lives, mostly away from major cities. They live on limited resources and can therefore send money back home."

"Because they relocate within Japanese territory, it is very difficult to find and follow-up with them," continued the unsigned message. After responding "No Comment" to repeated questions regarding the situation of many Colombian women in Japan, the official's final word was: "The activity with the greatest number of Colombian women is prostitution. This is an [issue] I will not comment on because it is extensive and complex."

The issue is not so complex for Mario Castro, a reporter with the IP, who told me about the death threats he receives due to his continued coverage of prostitution. As his reporting on Latina sex workers has evolved, he has moved away from referring to Colombians specifically. "I don't want to further stigmatize Colombian women who live in Japan. Here, as soon as anyone meets a Colombian woman he thinks she's a whore." One of the women who spoke to Castro on the condition of anonymity admitted: "I don't want to feel sorry for myself or to make myself look like a saint or helpless because I'm not. Many of us get used to this and don't want to or know how to do anything else. The truth is, I think we're butterflies whose wings have been broken so we can't fly away."

Hunting for Butterflies

An intricate scheme makes a Colombiana's arrival in Japan possible. There are four main players: the recruit, the recruiter (broker or scout), an escort and a manilla (handler, derived from a mispronunciation of "manager" in Japanese). In some cases the venture involves additional staff in Colombia and some Asian countries. Many recruits come from the coffee-growing regions, with Risaralda and Quindió providing a disproportionate number of potential workers. Others are recruited from cities like Bogotá, Pereira, Medellín, Barranquilla and Calí, "the prostitution capital of Colombia" according to El Tiempo.

Recruiters approach women they think are likely to accept an offer for work abroad. Targets include poor adolescents, single mothers, daughters of indigent parents, and women willing to take a gamble for money. Recruiters also hit the college circuit, attracting educated and enterprising students who dream of fame and success as models in a foreign country. Marcela Mendéz Castelar, an Argentine anthropologist in Japan, recently completed the first comprehensive study of Latina sex workers. Titled "Migrant Latina Sex Workers in Japan," her thesis contends that these women know what they're doing. A myth Mendéz Castelar wants to dispel is that they are ignorant. More than half the women she talked to had "a high cultural level" "and some even spoke English."

Alarmingly, in the last few years, recruiters have evolved from complete strangers to people close to the women. In 1999 DNS reported that fathers, brothers, best friends and brother-in-laws enticed women into this line of work. Usually between 18 and 25 years old, women are often led to believe they will work as dancers, singers, waitresses or tour guides. Adolescent girls are wooed with promises of modeling contracts and scholarships to study public relations, fine arts or dance.

Some recruiters place advertisements in local newspapers: "Excellent opportunity for young women who want to work or study abroad." The ads include directions to interviews or auditions. "These girls leave their homes and tell their families they're going to work in [Bogotá]. Their families really believe them and, sometimes through the handlers or by their own doing, a system is set up so that families can write to them in [Bogotá] and from there the letters are sent to them here," admitted a sex worker. As part of the pre-travel arrangements, recruiters give women cash to prove to Japanese authorities they can afford their visit. The financial risk is real for the handlers. If a woman is denied entry, they absorb the cost of her travel and paperwork. The money lost is tacked onto the next woman's debt. On average, each woman is forced to "borrow" 5 million yen ($46,000) from a broker. DNS estimates that many women pay five or six times the original debt because they don't know the actual currency value.

Money Begets Money

Japan's Mainichi Daily News reported that a 48-year-old Japanese man boasted his smuggling ring was the "largest broker of Colombian women in the country" after bringing about 200 women at a profit of 450 million yen ($41 million). "Japanese Antonio," as his recruits called him, paid 1.5 million yen ($14,000) for each woman. "The Colombian broker received 200,000 yen, their counterpart in South Korea 500,000, the broker who smuggled the women into Japan 100,000 and the remainder was used for airfare and expenses," the article continued. In turn, each woman was indebted to him by 4.5 million yen, giving him a personal profit of 3 million yen ($28,000). This sophisticated plot involved sending groups of women to South Korea where they received a crash course in Japanese language and culture. Lessons included phrases for negotiating prices.

As a cautionary measure women were taught to act like delegates representing international human rights organizations arriving in Japan for a conference. If any problems arose they would demand to be let in the country, accusing Japan of violating their human rights. After clearing airport security, escorts would deliver them to manillas throughout the country. In 1997 four handlers were arrested for smuggling over 100 Colombian sex workers. In a raid the same year, police brought 60 foreign women into custody, 24 were Colombian. In 1999 police arrested 70 people as part of a massive crackdown on groups that smuggle Colombian women.

Mario Castro, who is Peruvian, has lived in Tokyo for ten years and was the first Latino reporter to investigate smuggling and prostitution. He confirmed that women are often recruited and managed by former Colombian sex workers. "A lot of the time mafias are not involved in the trafficking of women. Instead, former sex workers who paid off their debt, who married and are not professional smugglers, become manillas to earn extra money. Most of the time, they bring one or two women once and never do it again." They're called manillas de ocasión because it tends to be a one-time deal for them. Another successful scam is for Colombians to obtain black-market passports in Lima, Peru that identify them as half-Japanese. Peru, like Brazil, enjoys a long history of immigration to and from Japan, including interracial marriages and generations of mixed-race individuals. Recently, the same scheme has been successful at forging Mexican identities.

Japan's Sexual Buffet

Although prostitution has been illegal in Japan since 1958, living there I realized that if sex is the issue, Japanese society covers its face with wide-opened hands while peeking through. In 1998 Asahi News Service proclaimed "Japan's reputation as a center for international prostitution." Japan's sex underworld is a veritable buffet offering treats for every appetite and proclivity. There are the "hotetoru," illegal massage parlors, in the pink districts where mostly Japanese women service businessmen. Some Latinas work in this softer side until they pay off their debt. In Tokyo's crowded Shibuya commercial and entertainment district I often passed life-size posters of women in the entrances to such places. While they work here --for set rates and set hours&endash;their handlers guard their investments. At the end of their shift those who live outside Tokyo, in places like Nakano, are driven home in vans.

In describing the most common venues for this type of work, Mendéz Castelar offered the following: "Many others work indoors. For instance at 'take-out' clubs called 'omise' [literally 'shop' in Japanese], strip-tease parlors called theaters (where the customers can bet to win the chance to have sex on-stage with the performer; at massage parlors called 'soaplands' where for a 'plus' the customer can request sexual intercourse; and also as taxi-girls from an 'agency.'"

After paying their debt, women become freelancers, walking the streets of the seedier districts around the center of Tokyo and negotiating their rates. As sex entrepreneurs, they have to fletear (from the Spanish for "freight," here meaning "to solicit work") for clients. Prices range from $100-$200 per client. On a busy night a woman can service five men, earning up to $1,000. From that, she pays a protection and rental fee of about $50 per night to a local yakusa for letting her work in his territory. In many instances, the yakusa's fee is a few hundred dollars, including commission, rent, food and "other services."

Roppongi, the principal red light district, has "Gentleman's Clubs," known for their mostly white (Canadian, European, Australian, Russian) hostesses who, according to what some women who worked there told me, "sit at the bar with a client and persuade him to buy [the equivalent of hundreds of dollars in] drinks." There are also live sex theaters, "pinkos" or blowjob clubs and "offices," where women are requested by phone based on advertisements in catalogs. At a pinko women earn $100-$120 per customer. In a single shift they can service anywhere from 7 to 15 men. Offices are more selective about their clientele. Mostly reserved for Japanese patrons, such places seldom admit foreign men, especially not Latinos. To facilitate the work and aid the pleasure, Japan's sex districts and dance areas are dotted with "love hotels," brownstone-size buildings that charge hourly rates for sparsely furnished rooms. At 4,000 yen ($40) for two hours, real couples, aroused club-goers and sex workers and their clients let the night come to its agreed upon end.

"The money is so good"

In 1998 Colombia's DNS estimated that the smuggling business generated $486 million dollars around the world, with $432 million resulting from the sale of women and another $54 million in Colombia alone. Col. Gallego made the following declarations to IP: "We have a registry of Colombian women who leave the country fully aware of their true destination and the activities they will participate in. But we also have instances in which young women who have no intention of committing these acts are deceived." Judy, an 18-year-old Colombian sex worker told Tokyo Classified, a weekly entertainment magazine, "it's funny, the money is so good once your debt has been cleared that most of the girls stay in the business."

"In the end I think we all know that what we're doing is wrong but we're not hurting anyone by doing it. And just like everyone else who came to this country to find a better life, we also want to save money and return home to our families," another sex worker commented. In her conclusions, Mendéz Castelar asserted: "I have found that different to what is emphasized in the cases of Thai and Filipina sex workers, Colombian women are 'consensual' sex workers. This means that the majority of them know and choose Japan as a destination, because they know how much money they can make and in what time, but they are surprised by the violence they have to endure from their manillas."

In Demand

Latinas are coveted in Japan's sex market. Prized for their exotic looks, ample bodies and fair skin, some earn between $200 and $250 per hour while their Asian counterparts (mostly Thai, Filipino and Taiwanese women) earn a fraction of that. In my visits to nightclubs I noticed that many Latina sex workers dyed their hair blond to stress their whiteness. Colombianas are especially coveted. In an article for IP Col. José Gallego, Director of the Anti-Narcotics unit of the Colombian National Police, said Colombianas "are famous for being pretty, gracious, affable and tender. These seem to be the main attractions."

Mendéz Castelar paints a more complex picture. "It is beyond question that Japanese who look for the services of Latina sex workers subscribe to the stereotype that Latina women are hot and skilled about sexual techniques. However, I have found in the field that some Latina women are promoted as Russian in magazines for men because their hair is dyed blonde." She also mentioned that "pimps have women's teeth pulled in order to make the most of their sucking skills."

Yakusa: "Servants of the town"

The affiliated Japanese gangs commonly referred to as yakusa have evolved over a 300-year history that started with local shopkeepers who stood up to traveling thugs during Japan's feudal period. Calling themselves "servants of the town," the yakusa's predecessors took up arms and defended their villages from raids by bands from neighboring towns. The term yakusa came into use in the late 1700s. Members played a game in which cards were handed out in groups of three. The point was to avoid any combination that added up to 20. A dreaded loosing combination was 8-9-3, ya-ku-sa in Japanese. It came into vogue to refer to something useless--like a loosing hand--and to the gamblers who were seen as useless.

After World War II, and the ensuing American influence, the yakusa assumed a new look. Imitating American movie gangsters, they began sporting sunglasses, dark suits and ties with white shirts. A lack of inventive costumes aside, the yakusa are to be taken very seriously. In the early '80s the largest of the affiliated gangs had over 13,000 members divided into 600 smaller gangs, with a presence in 36 of Japan's 47 prefectures. Today, 77 of those gangs are registered as businesses or religious organizations. They even published a book: How to Evade the Law.

"We Colombians Stick Together"

Like any immigrant enclave, some Colombian sex workers have developed a community that extends beyond streetwalkers. "We Colombians stick together. If you get a disease or get pregnant there is a Colombian lady doctor who is nice and who can help you. There is a Colombian food store in Nakano and even a restaurant where they make bentos [Japanese boxed lunches] to deliver to the girls in sex shops all over town. We stick together, we celebrate, have parties and take care of each other," Judy explained. The Colombian diplomatic corps is part of the fragmented network. In 1996 the General Consulate established an Oficina de Asistencia Social to help victims of domestic and conjugal violence and sex workers. Every month the specially trained staff sees between 20 and 30 women. Omaira Nagatsuka, a Colombiana married to a Japanese who heads the unit, told Mario Castro that women go to her after "being abused for refusing to do certain job-related things, if there's money involved and after trying to escape."

If a woman escapes, the yakusa send people after her. If they can't find her, they threaten to harm her family back home. In one case, a young woman disappeared and, when she called home, her mother informed her that someone had broken her 12-year-old brother's leg. If her keepers find her, they may elect to sell her to another gang for more money than she owes. In such cases, she will be forced to pay off the total sum of the purchase and the initial debt still lingering from her arrival. Sometimes the total comes to several million yen. Most of the women who visit the office live and work in Tokyo, Nagoya (where the 1996 winter Olympics took place) and Yokohama (where the U.S. has a military base with over 16,000 officers). No woman is turned away or reported to authorities. Instead, her paperwork is handled, enabling her to return home. Nagatsuka has "had cases involving girls who on their second day realize what they've gotten themselves into and run away. On the third day they're on an airplane back to Colombia."

Myths Shattered

Although most of them don't enjoy their work, the researcher does not consider it prostitution. She asserts that, just as other Latinos are performing assembly-line work rejected by the Japanese, these women are supplanting Japanese women in a work area they refuse to occupy. "Japanese women work from the door in while most foreign women work from the door out," she asserted. Another finding is that not all the women come from humble backgrounds.

These women are not easy. They have very specific reasons for doing this type of work. Putting a sibling through school, paying for a father's operation, building a house or just supporting their family are among the more common goals women set for themselves when they enter the industry. "Regardless of whether they meet their objectives, most women get to where they want to go or get pretty close," added Mendéz Castelar. Although she refused to paint them as victims, Mendéz Castelar stressed the need to protect women in the sex industry. She sees them as easy prey, incapable of asserting their rights. Rafael Reyes Ruiz, a Colombian anthropologist who commented on the status of sex workers added: "This is a problem of perception because even the girls think what they do is wrong, which keeps them from asking for help or from trying to get out of it. They marginalize themselves."

Last-Minute Hope

In a last-minute attempt to prevent more women from joining the thousands already absorbed by the international sex market, Colombia instituted a ground level prevention program at El Dorado Airport. Security and clearance personnel are trained to detect at-risk women and contact Fundación Esperanza, a non-profit social services agency. Volunteers try to convince women not to board the airplane. They talk about what may happen once they cross the international timeline. Sometimes volunteers succeed and teary-eyed women turn around and go home. Most of the time volunteers give them an unwilling send-off.

Working Solutions

Pedro Felipe Valencia, a former Colombian ambassador to Japan, offered a point-by-point plan for attacking the issue of smuggling and prostitution. First an office in charge of prosecuting those involved the trade must be set up, followed by a social services office that would aid women. Eyewitness accounts and personal testimonies must be taken from people who can identify those involved in the sex trade. Valencia believes there must be serious diplomatic pressure on Japan to establish laws and criminal procedures to punish those involved.

Juan Pablo Campos, the current Colombian Consul General to Japan, told IP that his administration is "worried about the human aspect, the abuse women receive" more than anything else. His office takes in women who want to leave the business. They handle the paperwork and arrange for her to flight home. Few questions are asked. At the end of 1999 the Luis Felipe Velez Foundation, a non-profit organization founded on Pereira, Colombia, launched a fundraising campaign in Japan. Funds collected from private and public entities were earmarked for the Foundation's "Girls of Today, Women of the 21st Century" project. The objective is to prevent girls from the marginalized sectors of Colombian society from succumbing to the lure of easy money. Colombian and Japanese authorities set up national and bilateral entities to address the complexity of smuggling and prostitution. In 1998 the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department sent a delegation to Colombia to meet with local delegates.

 For all their combined efforts, a subtle truth belies their work. "The women come from the same capital cities of the districts mentioned (before). This speaks about the long presence of recruiters in those areas, but also about the knowledge of the situation by part both of the authorities and of the residents," according to Mendéz Castelar's research.

 Eye of the Beholder

 Juan Pablo Campos, the Colombian General Council in Japan, asserted to IP that, "not all Colombians who live in [Japan] are up to no good. Colombian women do not represent a mayor problem for authorities in terms of public health issues." He emphasized that both countries are working toward meeting two goals: dismantling the bands of smugglers and guaranteeing the safety of women who have been victims of these operations. Writing in Being A Broad, Anita Bradford de Castro, a journalist in Tokyo, reflected on one night she spent in the Shin-Okubo area, another dark forest these butterflies inhabit.

 "I do not know what it feels like to be deceived into leaving your country, to be raped upon arrival, to live in one room with four or five other girls and to be forced to cook and clean for your pimp while you work off the price they have put between you and your freedom. To be sold again to another pimp if you complain or do not produce for the first. To be jailed when you try to leave the country, to be hunted down if you attempt to do so before paying off your debt. To have your young children or aged parents threatened if you do manage to escape. Or worse to become accustomed to all of it and accept it as the best that life has to offer you."

 Judy, the young sex worker with the mind of a social scientist and the practicality of an economist, put it thus:

 "We're bought and sold like any other imported product. I may not have a college education but it doesn't mean I have no value. I had no other choice. That's why I wanted to talk to [the reporter]. I want people to know what is happening here. Here in Japan they just don't care because we're foreigners from a developing nation. If this same thing was going on with [North] American girls and the press found out, I think Japan would be in trouble. But as it is, nobody knows we exist."

 

	Speaking for the Dead by Kathy Kelly First Place (Region One) Magazine Article Society of Professional Journalists

Only a Herculean effort can derail Julie Johnson-McGrath's train ofthought. Especially when the train is on her favorite track. But that' s exactly what happened in Atlanta on a snowy Tuesday afternoon last winter.

After delivering her presentation "Science and Law" to an audience of academic historians, the gregarious Harvard University professor was schmoozing with a cluster of enthused listeners. "Ohhhh," gushed one, as if he'd just recognized a celebrity. "You're the coroner lady."

Silence fell on the small group, as all eyes turned first to the gusher, then to Johnson-McGrath. She opened her mouth to speak, to adroitly deliver a witty comeback. This was one of the few times, she recalls, that her erudite humor failed her. Mouth agape, eyes blinking as if to dissipate her self consciousness, Johnson-McGrath decided to come clean with the group.

"Well, uh, yeah," she faltered. "That's right. Some colleagues call me that."

One particular colleague coined the name during her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A prominent history professor at UCLA, Edward Monkkonen, had read her articles on forensic pathology. In a rash moment of lame academic humor, the widely-read Monkkonen dubbed JohnsonMcGrath the coroner lady on an electronic bulletin board. The misnomer has followed her since.

But now, relaxing in her kitchen, Dr. Julie JohnsonMcGrath sips Irish breakfast tea from a Limoges china teacup. It's just one of the dozens of small treasures she's uncovered at Saturday morning yard sales. Except for an X-Files calendar tacked to the door, there's no hint that she has any out-of-the ordinary interests.

Overwhelming evidence that she enjoys cooking hangs from a wrought iron rack. Skillet, sieve, steamer, colander, grater, ladle, whisk and more dangle over the stove. Seasonings, spices, herbs and extracts from five continents are ajumble on the shelves of a bookcase. When neighbors run out of cream of tartar, or cardamom, or white peppercorn, they come to JohnsonMcGrath.

"I'm really an American historian," Johnson-McGrath explains. "A historian of medicine. I look at the role of science and technology and medicine in American culture and society."

Scientific crime detection most intrigues her, especially the goings-on outside the crime lab. How do criminal ists convince the police that the evidence they have can be useful in pinpointing the suspect? Can the police use the evidence to coax a confession from their suspect? How does a state prosecutor decide whether the evidence is strong enough to stand up in court? These issues pique Johnson-McGrath's curiosity and are the focus of her ongoing research. They also pique the interest of the public, in such high profile cases as the "Nanny" trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and, of course O.J. Simpson.

While developing her dissertation on forensic pathology (Entitled "Speaking for the Dead," it examines the use of forensic evidence in murder trials.) at ,the University of Pennsylvania, JohnsonMcGrath read extensively about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. "That's when my interest really broadened beyond just coroners and medical examiners, and into scientific crime detection in general and its role in society."

Charles Lindbergh was a true American hero after his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. Five years later, 20 month old Charles junior was kidnapped from his nursery. The kidnapper left a ransom note on the bedroom windowsill, and the Lindberghs received 17 more over the next few weeks. The family paid a ransom of $50,000, but did not see their son alive again.

Three months after the child's disappearance, the badly decomposed remains of a young boy were discovered in woods a few miles from the Lindbergh's rural New Jersey home. A nursemaid identified the baby's clothing as the sleepwear she had last put on young Charley.

"There were no eyewitnesses," says JohnsonMcGrath. "If you don't have eyewitnesses, how do you prove who did it? Are you going to let somebody get away with it because they were smart enough not to do it in front of witnesses? You can't do that. People have to be punished for their crime. So you have to start looking for other ways to prove that somebody did something.The "other ways" are circumstantial evidence, which led to the kidnaper's conviction.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested and charged four years after the kidnapping. He became a suspect just days before his arrest, when he paid for gasoline with a twenty dollar gold certificate. The certificate's serial number matched one of the bills in the ransom paynment. More ransom money - $14,570-was found at his home. Hauptmann claimed a friend, Isidore Fisch, had given him a shoebox for safekeeping. The accused denied knowing the box's contents. Fisch could not corroborate this. He had died several months before Hauptmann's arrest.

Police had theorized that the kidnapper entered the baby's secondfloor bedroom by climbing a folding ladder found near the Lindbergh home. The ladder's design was somewhat complex, and would have required considerable carpentry skill, such as Hauptmann had. Some of the ladder's white pine lumber showed minute imperfections that were caused by a defective planing blade. Arthur Koehler, director of theU.S. Forest Service's Product Laboratory (known then as the "Sherlock Holmes of wood") traced this wood to a mill in McCormack, South Carolina. From there it was sold to, among others, a building supply company in the Bronx, NY. Bruno Richard Hauptmann purchased lumber there on December 31,1931,

 The handwriting in the ransom notes matched Hauptmann's, according to the state's expert. No other handwriting expert was willing totestify otherwise in Hauptmann's defense, in part because of the public's angry outcries against the crime and the accused criminal.

"Cute baby, sweet mother, hero father. The public was outraged by this crime. Basically Hauptmann was the only guy they had. They had to nail him. And so they used scientific circumstantial evidence to convict him" says Johnson-McGrath.

"I thought, 'What a travesty this was! That they convicted this man on this kind of flimsy evidence. And it frightened me, and made me think a lot about how the justice system worked. It really was a turning point in my thinking about forensic science, because I think I hadstarted with ... 'Isn't it cool what you can infer from the circumstances? And isn't it great that the bad guys can't just get away with it?' But the Lindbergh case made me realize that forensic science had a dark side to it as well. It really depended on how it was used and who was using it and to what end."

The international press covered the kidnapping case, as they did the Simpson trial. Each was described, in its day, as "the trial of the century-" But the similarities end there, says Johnson-McGrath, who believes the Lindbergh case was the more captivating of the two.

"It had elements that OJ's trial didn't have," she begins. "For one thing, the victim. There was no way that really anybody could paint little darling Charles Lindbergh jr. in any kind of negative light. Also the fact that it remained a mystery for so long. The body was found two or three months after the baby was kidnapped. So for two or three months you didn't know what had happened to the baby, whether the baby was alive or dead. Then they found the baby, and they found him dead, but they had no leads on who had done it for two years. I think that gave time for interest to build. And, again, the victim was so innocent. And Hauptmann didn't engender the same kind of sympathy that OJ did. Bruno Richard Hauptmann hadn't been a famous sports star. Instead he was an illegal German immigrant who had been a petty thief in Germany. He spoke broken English. He was not a sympathetic guy, and he also had a very inef fective defense."

Johnson-McGrath pauses to sip her tea. cups her chin in her hand, and silently stares out a window. "So I think that, worldwide, it still would have been the Lindbergh case that got more attention. And maybe the best: argument for it is, as far as I know, amidst all the ridiculessness of the OJ trial, no one was outside the courthouse selling little souvenir gloves. Whereas outside the courthouse in tiny, tiny littleFlemington, New Jersey, they were selling little souvenir ladders."

Now the conversation flows to the Simpson trial. Johnson-McGrath points her forefinger at me and says emphatically, "I think the Jury did exactly what they were supposed to do, based on the evidence presented and the rules they were given about how to evaluate that evidence."

In California, one of the rules given to all juries pertains; to potential doubt about the evidence. A juror unsure of the validity of any part of the evidence must weigh that piece in the defendant's favor. Johnson-McGrath picks her next words carefully. "If we're going to play by the rules that we've set up for ourselves, and if we're going to give forensic sdence the type of power to completely alter somebody's life, or maybe even take it away, then we absolutely have to hold it to the highest standards, even if it means acquitting someone who we feel very strongly is guilty"

"I'm interested in proof," she says. "How we decide what we're going to believe. Theoretically, nothing is indisputable. Scientific evidence - even though we think of science as absolutely precise - it's still circumstantial evidence."

Which means it must be interpreted or inferred, even though it is based in science. Conceivably, scientific evidence can be interpreted in more than one way, and there's considerable latitude in interpreting such data.

Johnson-McGrath emphasizes her point with this example. A woman comes home from work and finds her husband mortally wounded on the kitchen floor. She dials 911, then begins to treat the wound. When help arrives, the man is dead and the woman's hands and clothes are drenched with his blood. This becomes circumstantial evidence, which can be interpreted differently by different observers. To the police, the evidence incriminates the woman in her husband's murder. To the woman's closest friends, the evidence indicates she tried to save her husband.

Johnson-McGrath moves on to a real-life case. Somerville teenager Edward S. O'Brien, jr., recently convicted of the stabbing death of his neighbor Janet Downing, was portrayed by the prosecution as a sociopath who would likely kill again. One piece of the circumstantial evidence prosecutors presented was an issue of the Boston Herald. Police found in O'Brien's bedroom, apparently open to a news story about teenage murderers. Johnson-McGrath points out, 'This seems to be incriminating, but it also can be quite innocent."

O'Brien's attorney astutely entered the entire issue as evidence, creating a plausible, innocent scenario. An investigating officer examined the Herald during his testimony, and agreed with the defense attorney that it contained many more sports stories than murder stories. Then the officer described some of the other things found in the search of O'Brien's bedroom. These included sports memorabilia such as baseball trading cards.

The police officer appeared, in courtroom parlance, as an ordinary witness: one who only can testify to what he or she saw or heard. An expert witness, on the other hand, is allowed to offer opinions and interpretations.

***

Fifteen expert witnesses testified in the recent murder trial of British au pair Louise Woodward. Nine were called by the prosecution, including a specialist in head trauma, a pediatric neural surgeon, a consulting radiologist, a pediatric radiologist, a forensic neuropathologist, an opthamologist,two pediatricians, and a medical examiner. Testimony for the defense was heard from a forensic neuropathologist, a raddiologist, a biomechanics expert, a neurosurgeon, a pediatric neurosurgeon, and a forensic pathologist. What specific conclusions did these scientists state? Virtually none, as reported by the Boston Globe, UPI, ABC News, offered plenty of beliefs, feelings, and inferences:

"There are no findings to specifically indicate that ......

....symptoms indicated the injuries more likely came from.. - "

.... a previous injury could bleed spontaneously..."

"... the fracture appeared not more than three to four weeks

old..."

"the injuries were'characteristic with' but not 'diagnostic of child abuse."

"... the fracture could have resulted from a fall of only 32

inches."

"I believe his condition was irreversible."

"She based her opinion on the absence of swelling

"... expressed his opinion that the retinal hemorrhaging was not from - - - ."

"In his opinion, the baby died from head trauma. . - "

"My opinion is that this is a classic picture ..."

"My opinion is that all of the injuries ... "

"My opinion is that..."

The witnesses did exactly what they were supposed to do, examined the evidence, and weighed it against his or her expertise. Then each offered an individual interpretation of the evidence.

"And that's what the defense has been saying - that these types of injuries can be produced by something other than shaken baby syndrome," explains JohnsonMcGrath. "They're not saying there's never been a baby who was shaken to death. They may not even be saying that there's no way that Matthew Eappen was shaken to death. What they are saying is that there are other ways in which Matthew Eappen could have died, ways other than being shaken.,,

The expert-witness system has its problems, admits Johnson-McGrath. "There's always a suspicion about defense experts, because you can see the money that's being spent on the defense. So they tend to think that the experts on the defense - they're just hired guns. And this leads to people's refusal to believe that there can be two, or three or more completely valid interpretations of the same physical phenomena. The evidence whether it's the head wound, or the body itself, or the blood stains on the floor it can't speak for itself. It can't offer direct eye witness testimony. It's got to be interpreted."

That's why expert witnesses often offer such dramatically different testimony. These differences are not unusual, says Johnson-McGrath.

By its nature, science allows for various interpretations of one set of facts. "It's perfectly natural in science that there can be different theories about what certain types of data mean."

When played out in an emotionally charged murder trial, an honest disagreement between scientists can become a tool for manipulating the jurors. Both prosecution and defense counsel often are guilty of exploiting their opponent's testimony by insinuating that the expert witness has lied.

Defense experts routinely are perceived as being unobjective. Many casual courtroom observers believe that a defense attorney can shop around for an expert willing to testify in the defendant's favor. JohnsonMcGrath emphatically states that the expert-witness process does not and cannot work this way. "If an expert interprets things one way in one situation, then turns around and says exactly the opposite thing the next time he's an expert witness, his previous testimony can be used to impeach his current testimony. So experts aren't just going with the wind and saying whatever it is the defense wants them to say .Because it will be held up to them, and their usefulness as an expert witness will be destroyed. Now if the prosecutor is smart, he'll bring it up and say 'Didn't you testify in the Woodward trial, and didn't you say that something other than shaken baby syndrome could produce certain symptoms? And the expert will have to say, 'Yes, and that case was really very different from this case. The things that made other interpretations possible in the Woodward case - they're not here."

No suspicion of bias clings to the prosecution's expert witnesses, who often are state employees. "Although it's very definitely there," Johnson-McGrath says candidly. "You've probably gone into criminal justice in the first place because you want to see justice served. You want to see the bad guys put away and you don't think that it's at all surprising because of this activist role that you see yourself having, and because your reputation depends on being right and being able to prove other people wrong that maybe you come down sometimes a little bit harder on the side of the prosecution than maybe you should."

She recounts a news story about an overzealous medical examiner in New Jersey, who was dismissed from his job for falsifying some autopsy results. Later he was hired by the family of a young man, whom authorities suspected of hanging himself. But the family suspected foul play. Now a private consultant, the former state medical examiner was to perform another autopsy for a fee. He didn't complete the procedure. He was discovered in the act of breaking the victim's hyoid bone (located in the front of the throat), which would make the death look like a strangulation. Johnson-McGrath concludes her tale with this observation: "I think he's an example of the extremes to which this desire to be the expert on the side of avenging justice can go."

Becoming a historian of scientific crime detection was not Johnson-McGrath's first career plan. Instead, it was to follow her father into law. Her studies began at Bryn Mawr, where she learned two things that shaped her life. The first was that she didn't especially like the kinds of people who were preparing for law school. (She found them "egotistical, obnoxious and materialistic.") The second was that she didn't especially like Bryn Mawr. It was too small to offer the academic variety she wanted.

Dropping out in her sophomore year, JohnsonMcGrath headed south toWinston-Salem. Dryly calling this her "junior year abroad," she waited tables in the Old Salem historic district. But the future Dr. JohnsonMcGrath wanted very much to resume her education. She moved back to Philadelphia and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania.

She majored in American Civilization. Her first professor in that field was a dynamo named Murray Murphy, who gave her attitude toward history a 180 degree spin.

"It was so boring in high school," says JohnsonMcGrath. "You know, 'the battle of this' and 'the treaty of that'. What really, really fired me up about Murray's class was I got really, really excited about learning again." Murphy's discourses on social history and cultural history engrossed this born again scholar. In addition to her major, she packed her course load with the history of science, the sociology of science, and urban technology. Soon she was immersed in the history of science. "I guess I got hooked," is her uncharacteristically brief summary.

Graduate school was her next challenge. But which to study: American Civilization or the History of Science? Her decision came down to money. Some financial aid was available to study American Civilization. A lot of financial aid, in the form of a four year National Science Foundation fellowship, was offered to study the History of Science. Johnson-McGrath happily followed the money.

Four years ago, a faculty position opened in Harvard's History of Science department. Coincidentally, the departing teacher was a University of Pennsylvania alum, and Johnson-McGrath says there's a strong connection between the two universities. One connection led to another, and Johnson-McGrath began teaching at the Extension School of Harvard University in the fall of 1993. "They just couldn't get rid of me. I stayed."

**

Emerson Hall is at the edge of Harvard Yard, just a few steps from Quincy Street. Professor Jobnson-McGrath sketches a diagram of humoral pathology (a two thousand year old explanation of health and illness) on the blackboard. Wearing dark clothes, sheis nearly indistinguishable from the slate, and the 20 feet high ceiling makes her five and a half feet frame seem small. Her features are typically 'black Irish: dark brown hair, brown eyes and fair complexion. Casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, she looks more like a student than a professor.

Tonight's class is "The History of American Medicine." In the spring she teaches "Science and the Law." Mostipf her 70-plus students are pursuing degrees, at the undergraduate or graduate level. She also acts as a thesis advisor to a half dozen more students.

"I like to teach. And I've always liked sharing what I've learned with people, and telling stories, and helping people make the same kind of connections that I've made. And I think it's that that got me interested in teaching. Teaching is really sort of the lowest priority in a lot of places, especially research universities like Penn and Harvard. I started teaching as soon as I could in graduate school. And people looked at me like I was crazy Why would I want to teach?

But I wanted to teach. So I did."

Her first professorial triumph was the History of Medicine in America. She moved on to a Technology in the City class. "Then I developed my Law and Science in America class. And that's the first class that I taught that I hadn't already taken myself "

JohnsonMcGrath researches and writes about scientific crime detection in her home office. It's a spacious room in a tripledecker apartment. Much of the hardwood floor is lost under stacks of books, piles of magazines and journals, and sheaves of papers. Compared to this, the desk is as neat as a nun. It holds only a laptop computer and photos of family and friends. A summons for juror service is tacked to the window frame above the desk. "I'd really like to serve as a juror, but no right thinking lawyer would want me," JohnsonMcGrath sighs.

Indeed not. Her library of research books numbers about 350 volumes. Ina quick glance they look ordinary, but a lingering gaze on any one can bring a chill to the reader. They Escaped The Hangman and Violent Death In The City are among the more arresting titles. A few comparatively mundane textbooks Problems, Cases And Materials On Evidence, Police Practices And The Law are mixed in as well.

Perusing the shelves, Johnson-McGrath points out the volumes she found especially interesting. Then she makes a surprising revelation. "I don't look at the pictures. I think if I did, I'd have nightmares. But I don't look at the picturews and don't have visual images of this, and I think that helps." Within moments she qualifies her statement. Her dissertation research required her to study crime scene and autopsy photos. "Gross and disgusting" though they were, she slept soundly. Somewhere between then and now her tolerance eroded. "I haven't figured this part out myself. I don't like dead bodies. I'm scared of dead bodies. But despite all that, you know, I study what I study."

Recently her studies brought her before television cameras. Johnson-McGrath was interviewed by the A&E network for a biography of Lucrezia Borgia. Ms Borgia had a reputation, perhaps undeserved, for bloodlessly dispatching her enemies, and Johnson-McGrath knows all about fifteenth-century poisons. This led to a subsequent appearance in a program about novelist Mary Shelley, where the topic was nineteenth century medical technology.

While these television gigs were entertaining diversions, Johnson-McGrath doesn't see them as new branches on her career path. Instead, she'll continue writing for scholarly journals, such as the Scientific Evidence Review and the Legal Studies Forum. Two books are in theworks as well.

Scheduled for completion first is an encyclopedia of forensic science. Besides reallife forensic cases, definitions and history, it will reference fiction that features forensic scientists. JohnsonMcGrath hopes this will extend its appeal to mystery readers and writers.

A history of twentieth century scientific crime detection is underway. "Early on a lot of police really didn't believe in this scientific crime detection. They felt it was more important to have street smarts and to know the community. They didn't think that all this dust collection and stuff could really prove anything. So I'm going t look at how much truth there was to assertions that science is the best weapon against crime."

The coroner lady is collecting evidence and building a case, and she's let her readers interpret the information and draw their own conclusions. "It just gets back to what I was talking about before. That science is really about interpretation.

	A Year in Lake Arthur by Gaby Grekin Mark of excellence award, First place, Magazine Writing Society of professional Journalists

 Armadillos never die right side up. Their uneven weight distribution causes their substantive, armor-covered bellies to flip over, and there they lie on the road with their four little legs pointing straight up, devoid of any pride they may have once owned. Since they decompose slowly, especially on the asphalt of Route 26 where they so often die, they are subject to this dishonor far longer than anyone would consider desirable. Armadillo road kill is not an uncommon sight in rural Louisiana, where I lived and taught for two years. In fact, armadillos inspired the first joke I ever created.

I used to wonder where jokes came from. Who had time to sit around and invent jokes? After two years of living in Lake Arthur, LA, a town with an eight page phone book, I no longer wondered.

Why did the armadillo cross the road? Because it saw a car coming.

I lived in Lake Arthur as a Teach For America corps member. TFA is often considered a domestic Peace Corps, started with funding from Ross Perot, among others. Recently incorporated into President Clinton's National Service Plan, its premise is simple; encourage recent college graduates who might not otherwise consider teaching to commit two years in extremely rural and urban school districts suffering from severe teacher shortages.

The rationale? Why shouldn't the nation's most educated students give back to the system from which they have benefited? Many would-be doctors, lawyers, and MBA's actually change their minds after their teaching experiences. So do some would-be teachers.

I was uncertified, unqualified, and inexperienced. On the other hand, I was enthusiastic, open-minded, and committed. I wholeheartedly embraced TFA's assertion about the irrelevance of the certification process in creating good teachers. Still, corps members never take positions away from certified teachers. We merely fill in the gaps when they are unavailable.

I craved the challenge of inner-city teaching, having worked with at-risk urban kids as a camp counselor. I requested placement in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore and Washington DC. I was idealistic, to be sure, but nonetheless practical in recognizing my need for a social outlet, and my desire for an active, cultured urban life like I had known in Boston as an undergraduate at Tufts.

I was assigned to be an elementary French teacher in rural southwest Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country.

My mother was somewhat negative from the start. She loved the concept in theory. She would just prefer other people's children enact it.

Corps members receive a summer's worth of training and student teaching before their first school year. Our training was in Los Angeles. As my mother and I packed my stuff, it became confusing which boxes were going to LA the city, and which boxes were going to LA the state. My mother started labeling them to avoid confusion. I noticed half the boxes were labeled 'LA', while the other half were marked 'RFL.'

"What's 'LA?'"

"Los Angeles," she answered.

"What's RFL?" I asked curiously.

"Rural Fucking Louisiana."

The sight of an upside-down dead armadillo evoked that first we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore feeling. The second came on the first day of school.

We, the more than 300 teachers of Jefferson Davis Parish (affectionately called "Jeff Davis") spent the first afternoon of the school year crammed into the Jennings High School Auditorium. With a population hovering around 10,000, Jennings was the only recognizable city in the parish. Using the quintessential southern measurement of a town's size, Jennings had a Wal-Mart.

The first week of school consisted of half days for the students with afternoons of "in-service" training sessions for teachers. As explained to me, this was to placate the local rice farmers, who needed their kids' help in the fields during the height of the harvesting season. Simply put, it was hot in rural Louisiana in August. Forget metaphors. It was raw, intense heat. Vacation from school for work in the rice fields was not the cause for adolescent celebration one might assume.

As I looked around the auditorium, I saw more African-American teachers than I expected. I saw very few young teachers, and until I noticed and heard them from the segregated center front section they conspicuously occupied, I saw very few male teachers.

They were the coaches. There were maybe 20 of them, all male, all addressing one another as Coach. Everything about them was conspicuous: their volume, their baseball caps, their back-slapping locker-room banter.They were the class clowns in a room full of teachers, seemingly enjoying the attention their behavior invited. Sitting directly behind them, I felt self-consciously young and female in their presence, as I would for the next two years.

I later learned that Coach is a revered title. One need only coach a season of little league to qualify for coach status. Once earned, it comes with a life-time guarantee. More respected than the titles reserved for doctors, judges or politicians was the honorific designation granted to the men who admirably educated the town's male youth in the world of sport. Even the high school principal at Lake Arthur High, where my TFA roommate Leigh Anne taught, was referred to as "Coach Smith," to be given his rightful respect.

Finally, after the coaches quieted down, Mr. Whitford, the school superintendent, took the podium. A small, yet dignified man with thinning, graying hair, he resembled Bob Barker if Bob Barker wore polyester pants. As he began to speak, Leigh Anne and I self-consciously scanned the room, still fascinated by the faces and forms of our newly-assigned peers, and overcome by an indisputable sense of pride.

"If everyone would please stand, I would like to begin the new school year with a prayer," Mr. Whitford announced. Leigh Anne and I looked at each other and felt the warm feeling of inclusion subside. Just as I recognized the discomforting conflict between church and state, Mr. Whitford lifted his already bowed head to add, "And I don't give a hog's ass what the Supreme Court says."

We looked at each other incredulously, but before we had a chance to speak, we were deafened by the enthusiastic and heartfelt shouts of "Amen! Praise the Lord!"

And so the school year began.

It took until a plane ride home at Christmas Break before I internalized my new role. Up until that point, whenever anyone asked me where I worked or what I did, I would generally go into a convoluted response about TFA and domestic peace corps and two-year commitment and go where you're needed and blah, blah, blah. On this particular day, during an infuriating flight which took me from Louisiana to Texas in order to get to Florida, when the woman sitting next to me turned and asked, "Now what is it you do, dear?" I responded simply, "I'm a teacher."

Those words had never before passed my lips. Up until that moment, I really didn't buy it. Sure, my kids called me Miss Gaby (as southern tradition dictated) or Mademoiselle Gaby (as I requested), or Miss Mademoiselle (as their habit of putting Miss in front of everything persisted, despite my explanations that they were essentially calling me "Miss Miss"). And sure, I had the power to tell a child, no, she or he couldn't go to the bathroom, a very strange power to have. And yes, on parent-teacher night, kids brought their parents to come talk to me. But having graduated from college just three months earlier, it was still tough to buy.

By the time Christmas break rolled around, I bought it.

There are some things I just couldn't know starting the school year. During the first week of school students asked me if they could sharpen their pencils. Was I supposed to care if they sharpened their pencils? Did I care? I quickly learned to care. When kids told me they had a tummy ache (about every two and a half minutes), was I supposed to send them to the nurse? If I did send them, did they need a pass? Should they go alone?

When one little girl told me she felt sick, I was amazed that I thought to put my hand on her forehead. Good thinking, I thought. Only now what was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to tell if she was sick or not by touching her forehead? It always worked for my parents, but there I sat with my hand on her forehead trying to determine whether this eight-year old was on the brink of death or whether she was a miserable faker trying to ditch my class. Her forehead revealed nothing. Suddenly I was the one who felt feverish, as 23 sets of eyes stared at me, waiting for a grand pronouncement as to whether or not Lacie was going to live.

Perhaps one of my worst ideas were the old family trees. I'd felt golden that week. We had been studying French terms for family members and in my most objective self-analysis, I had brilliantly created displays for each term with photographs of my own family members, knowing how curious my kids were about my prior life. That part worked. Then I decided to let them create family trees in French. I'd asked them to label their grandparents, parents, and siblings, which should have been completely manageable for my very precocious third graders. I even drew the tree for them. Their French was impeccable. The problem was their families.

"Miss Gaby, my paw-paw has eleven brothers and sisters, do I list them all?"

"Mademoiselle Gaby, how do you spell Ocemae? That's my maw-maw."

"Mademoiselle, my mommy lives with a boyfriend and my daddy doesn't know that since I haven't seen him in a long time. Who should I put as my daddy?"

"Miss Mademoiselle, my daddy's in jail. Does he still count as my daddy?"

And the one that made me gulp the loudest, "My mommy had an abortion, but she named the baby, so does she count as my sister?"

A lesson learned. Never, never do family trees. They were not meant for the 90's.

Perhaps the saddest part about my placement was the need for it at all. Why, in the one place in the country with native French speakers would there be a shortage of French teachers? In a valiant effort to preserve its francophone heritage, Louisiana mandates that all elementary students take French. Many native Cajun speakers do not read or write the language and therefore cannot become certified to teach it.

To satisfy the state mandate, parishes turn to teachers from Belgium, Switzerland, and, in my case, upstate New York to teach their Cajun children to speak their ancestral language. Of course, none of the imported teachers speak Cajun French and so the state has accepted, and in some cases, grown to prefer, that its students learn "standard French," or what many Cajuns troublingly call "real French."

A heated controversy within the state and within the Cajun community itself exists as to which language should be taught - the one which ties Cajun children to their rich and often under appreciated cultural history, or the one which offers them the potential for global communication.

As I discovered, the reality of Cajun French in Louisiana today is analogous to that of Yiddish. Most of today's Jewish grandparents speak Yiddish fluently, and many grew up with it as a first language. Their children generally don't speak it, although they can understand much of what they hear. This generation of Cajuns were, in fact, punished for speaking Cajun French in Louisiana's public school systems. And the grandchildren, on whom the future of the language rests, don't speak or comprehend the language at all. Some years my students have had French teachers, other years they haven't. I soon realized the historical magnitude of the responsibility I was given. I had 164 students, in the 3rd-6th grades, whom I taught in eight 30-minute classes a day.

Leigh Anne picked up where I left off providing a satisfying continuity between us, teaching French to the town's junior and senior high school students. In many cases, she taught the older siblings of my students. Between the two of us, we taught most of the town's children. As we discovered, knowing the children of a town was a natural extension to knowing the parents and grandparents of a community.

We also learned the visible and highly respected role teachers play in the rural south. Perhaps because fewer people are college-educated, perhaps because there is a more rigidly defined transference of respect towards elders in a place where children still refer to women as 'ma'am' and men as 'sir', or perhaps because people knew we'd come from so far to be there, we were the recipients of constant deference.

When I, in my Subaru with a New York state plate, was pulled over for no apparent reason, as I often was, previously belligerent policemen became respectful and apologetic upon discovering I was a teacher.

I learned there were few places I could go in town where I wouldn't be recognized--often affectionately, often curiously-- as one of "the Northern French teachers."

I saw my students and their parents everywhere--at the Cash 'N Carry grocery store, at Video Town, at the Calcasieu Marine Bank, at The Shop, a crawfish restaurant and country dance establishment housed in an aluminum warehouse. On the rare occasions I went to a town bar, my students' parents or Leigh Anne's students were there. (There were 11 bars to choose from --about one-and-a-half per telephone book page, not including the drive-thru daiquiri shop where the only applicable law stipulates that straws go in bags, rather than directly into the styrofoam cups). I felt as though I was never off-duty.

As exhausting as that could be, I never tired of seeing a smile form on the face of one of my students upon that magical moment of recognition. "Mom," they would whisper as they saw me in the cereal aisle, not bothering to contain their joy, "that's my teacher!"

Such star treatment began the first day of school, and I couldn't imagine what I had done to deserve such affection. In some ways, I benefited from the fact that my third graders hadn't yet learned to dislike school. In others, I benefited simply by being from an exotic place.

"I have a cousin from up north," one student told me.

"Really?" I asked excitedly, "Where from?"

"Arkansas," he said proudly. "You think you know him?"

And I certainly benefited from being young. We could discuss 90210 and they loved my clothes, youthful, I suppose, compared with their other teachers. Nonetheless, they were the toughest audience for whom I would ever dress.

"Miss Mademoiselle, don't you think you should have ironed that?"

"You're wearing that again?"

"Why is everything you own black?"

And when I crossed a line, they were sure to tell me.

"Gaw, Miss Gaby, that skirt's short!"

"That shirt is just a little too tight for a teacher, Mademoiselle."

It's sad when your self-esteem is dependent upon the fashion feedback of nine-year-olds.

Early on, issues of race came to be stressful, infuriating and uncomfortable. Lake Arthur has a racially segregated ,noticeably run-down area called, "the Hood," where the majority of the African-Americans lived, prayed, and shopped. It was a deceivingly urban term for a town of 3,000. About 10% of the population was black, and divisions extended to religion. Most African-Americans were Baptist and most Cajuns were Catholic.

Two months after we had arrived, the Murphy family invited us to their home to welcome us to the community. The mother, Titi, was a kindergarten teacher in my school. Leigh Anne taught her high-school aged daughter, and I taught her niece. Titi cooked a Cajun feast: shrimp pie, crawfish fettucine, pear pie, and some very potent homemade wine. I was amazed that someone who knew so little about me would go so out of her way to make us feel welcome. Her entire extended family was there.

Half-way into what was turning out to be a truly enjoyable evening, the issue of race came up as randomly, as it often seemed to in Lake Arthur. I discovered that many people felt the need to introduce their feelings about race as they introduced themselves to you. It was practically, "Hi, I'm Gummy and I own Knot's Corner Restaurant and here's how I feel about blacks..."

Completely out of context, Titi informed us how she felt about "the coloreds." She thoroughly explained that, "There's nothing wrong with 'em or anything. 'Course I'd never let one in my house. And Laura would never be allowed to have one sleep over. Not unless it was a school function.Well, then there's nothing I could do about it, but never socially, of course. They're just not as clean as we are." Her son, Nick, a college sophomore, proceeded to explain in grammatically-impaired English how "quotas" are really just discrimination against whites, because a black person who is equally qualified would get into McNeese (a local university with a practically open admissions policy) before he would.

A funny realization swept over me as I listened, digging my finger nails deeply into the skin on my thighs. Clearly, the only reason I had been invited to dinner was because I was white. Had I been black I would not have been welcomed into my colleague's home. And yet, she knew nothing about me. I felt scared. Scared as to how she would react if she really discovered what I was about --my Judaism, my pro-choice sentiments, my affection for and admiration of Hillary Rodham Clinton (and both her last names). And I felt angry. Angry that a woman with these views was allowed the privilege of teaching kindergarten students--white and black.

How could I start espousing my personal views when this woman had just cooked for me a four-course meal? How could I not? I remained silent the rest of the evening, thanked her for the generous meal, and said goodnight.

One of the few times I got into a conversation with a white person about race was with my friend Carla, the mother of one of my 5th graders, who I had gotten to know from doing aerobics together at Lake Arthur's own "Shape Scene Aerobics," a wood-paneled shack with home-built, hand-painted personalized wooden aerobic steps.

She was using the word 'nigger' and I explained my discomfort to her. She tried to explain that black people were different down there than they were up north and that's why people up north weren't bothered by them. Down here, she explained, they're lazy, dirty, uncivilized alcoholics. She said she hated being at the supermarkets and seeing them niggers using their food stamps and having more food in their carts than working whites could afford. I tried pointlessly to explain that the problem was that so many white people in Lake Arthur identified black people by their race rather than by their behaviors and that their race as a whole had nothing to do with the behaviors of some. I pointed out that there were unemployed, lazy, alcoholic white people as well. "Oh, we got words for them too," she said. "They're white niggers."

By far, our earliest success in school was our French Christmas caroling trip. Leigh Anne and I spent the week before Christmas break drilling French Christmas carols into our students' hearts and souls. We planned a caroling excursion throughout town. About 65 students showed, ranging in age from 7-18. Since the majority of those who showed were third graders, each older student was assigned two third-graders for whom they were responsible. We caroled around town, intentionally stopping at the kids' Cajun Grandparents' homes so their maw-maws and paw-paws could hear them singing in French.

After singing, we invited all the kids back to our house for hot chocolate and cookies, where my Matisse nudes ("Ooh, Miss Gaby's got naked girls on her wall!) became the highlight of the party.

The secret to my living and teaching in rural Louisiana was to master a very delicate balance between self-assurance and self-restraint.

I was being entrusted with the children of a community to which I did not belong. I learned that in the same way I would be furious if a KKK member were teaching my child, it would be just as frightening for that KKK member to entrust his or her child to someone of my political persuasions.

A distinct challenge for me was being able to learn from my colleagues' enviable experience without emulating what I often saw as methods of mediocrity. How to take from them the valuable lessons they offered, while still existing as an alternative to them? In my continuing struggle to be accepted into the community, I came to define a moment of success as a moment where I didn't offend anybody but hadn't sacrificed my ideals either.

I often felt as though control was the number one priority of my fellow teachers. Not engendering student empowerment, self-awareness, or the fostering of creativity, but unquestionably control. Teacher needs often seemed to come before student needs. Some teachers spoke of the good old days when there was no talking allowed at all in the cafeteria. The teachers in my school respected those teachers with total control. Needless to say, I don't think I was one of the most respected teachers in the school.

Corporal punishment was accepted and expected. Many teachers had paddles in their classrooms, some with their names engraved on them. In what I could only assume to be a humanitarian gesture, the paddles of second grade teachers and below had cushions attached. When I would discipline a student, other students in the room would encourage me to "whip" him. "Give 'em some licks, Miss Mademoiselle, it's the only thing that'll stop him," they shouted. I never heard of a single incident of a female student being paddled.

It was often confusing for my students to discover my initially unspoken refusal to use corporal punishment, a term with which they had no familiarity. After a while, they recognized my reluctance and inquired about it. I explained that I wouldn't want someone bigger than me to physically hurt me, and so I wouldn't subject them to it. That's how corporal punishment felt. Besides being borderline abusive and clearly ineffective, there was a bullying mentality to it--an abuse of those with power inflicted on those without it. It became increasingly difficult to give meaning and value to my alternative methods of discipline when these methods were continually contradicted for the six and a half hours outside my class.

When given the choice between a licking and missing a week's worth of recess, students consistently chose to subject themselves to physical discomfort. The pain was over faster, they figured.

Giving them the option seemed cruelly manipulative. It seemed to me a way for authoritarians to blame their victims, as in, "Here it is, you chose it" --a way for grown adults to rescind any responsibility in what they were doing. Parents would often urge me to send their kids for a paddling if their children were misbehaving. Like doctors perpetuating the agony of medical school with each succeeding generation, parents reasoned being paddled had worked for them, it should work for their kids.

Early in my second year, my school was investigated by the Jeff Davis school board for using abusive disciplinary methods. A fourth grade class had apparently not been doing its homework and then performed poorly on a math test. Their teacher, Nit Thibodeaux, required them to take their exams home to be signed by their parents to ensure parents were aware of the poor grades. The next day, only half of the students remembered to return signed exams. Their punishment? In 93 degree heat, the entire class had to kneel outside on the hot cement sidewalk with their noses touching the brick wall they faced for the duration of recess. Most of the kids, the majority of whom were my students, had been wearing shorts. Unsurprisingly, given the unlikelihood that 9-year-olds can rest their knees on cement without fidgeting, several knees were scratched and bleeding afterwards.

Upon discovering her daughters' bleeding knees as she exited the school bus that afternoon, one parent was angry enough to file charges.

The staff passionately supported Mrs. Thibodeaux. They wrote letters to the local papers and to the school board. They passed around a letter of support to be signed on her behalf. In one of my few public stands against the status quo, I did not sign the letter. Shaking, I said, falsely, that I wasn't comfortable signing it because I was unsure how I felt about the incident and corporal punishment in general, given the relative rarity of its use, indeed, illegality, where I came from.

This was a lie. I knew exactly how I felt about both the incident and corporal punishment, but lacked the secure voice with which to express that view. Was I allowed to disagree with any of them yet?

The large majority of the parents made clear their firm support for the schools' right to use whatever methods deemed necessary to discipline students. Many parents of the children involved wrote letters to the town paper defending the teacher's actions. The girl whose mother had filed the complaint became the target of considerable resentment among teachers. During this period, she, a student of mine, cried in my presence several times.

Mrs. Wallace, the angry, civic-minded mother who filed the suit, was fired from her Sunday School teaching position a few weeks later. She said it was because of her complaint. Everyone else, including the press, said it was because of pornography and child molestation charges pending against her. The Board completed its investigation and found that "no inappropriate action was taken by any member of the staff..."

Life in Lake Arthur seemed at times to be entirely un-related to any reality I had ever known. This was one of those times.

The absolute low point came after a visit from my friend Corey, a fellow TFA corps member who was African-American. Throughout the course of the weekend, we took several walks and I showed him most of town. A blues musician, he played for a few of my students, who he couldn't believe had just dropped by to visit on Sunday afternoon.

At school on Monday, the other TFA teacher came to me to tell me that a delegation of teachers had asked her that morning if I was dating a black man. When she said no, she asked them why they thought so. "Well, Mrs.Thibodeaux saw Miss Gaby at the video store with a black man, and Mrs. Broussard saw Miss Gaby walking down by the lake with a black man, and Mrs. LeBauve saw Miss Gaby at the food store with a black man."

When she realized they were talking about Corey, she explained that he was a friend of mine from TFA. Then she asked if there would be a problem if I had been dating him, to which they responded, "Well, you just tell Miss Gaby that's not done here. It's just not done, and ain't no one gonna accept it of a teacher cause it's just not done."

One of the most disturbing racial comments I heard came from a third grader named Jason, whose grandfather, I had been told, was in the KKK. There were two African-American students (a typical distribution) in this particular class, Genee and Randall. I had always had trouble with Genee's (Juh-nay) name because in the class before her was a girl named Shanee (Shuh-nay), and in the class with her was a girl named Sheena (Shee-nah). It was a mess.

Randall had the attention of a gnat. Don't get me wrong, I adored him. He was sweet and gentle with a smile that could light up the room, but the kid just could not focus. We had been practicing French numbers all week and he was really starting to fall behind. As we went over #5-10 orally, I kept noticing that he wasn't doing them with us. I explained to him that if he didn't join in, the only way I would be able to know if he knew them was to have him recite them alone. Still, no lip movement from Randall. I decided to go row by row to give him a chance to count with a small group. Still no movement.

"Okay, Randall, I need to hear you do it alone, because you're still not showing me if you know them or not," I said, hating myself but not knowing what else to do. He failed miserably.

"Randall," I said, "do you understand why you're having trouble? Before class started today, nobody else knew their numbers from 5-10 either, but they've been practicing all during class while you have just been sitting there. It's not that they're smarter than you, the only difference between you and them is that they have been paying attention and you haven't."

At this point, Jason shouted, "No Miss Mademoiselle! That's not the only difference between him and the rest of us! His skin color is different and that could be why he's having so much trouble."

My jaw dropped so much that I felt it pull down, giving in to the potent laws of gravity. I couldn't believe what he had said. In a voice full of horror I was torn about hiding, I said, "Jason, that is a really silly thing to say. What makes you think that a person's skin color has anything to do with how well they can speak French? Or how well they can do anything for that matter? I want to show you something..." at which time I marched to the front of the classroom and pulled down a map of the world.

"Does anybody know what continent this is?"

"Yes, Mademoiselle. It's Africa," said a few, following random guesses of Canada and Australia.

"Well, on this continent there are millions and millions of black people who speak French as their own language, and don't you think that they can speak it better than anybody in this room, me included, since they grew up speaking it and it's their language? The color of your skin has nothing to do with how your brain works or has nothing to do with who you are inside..." and on and on and on until they answered my rhetorical questions of, "Can somebody with green eyes do social studies better than somebody with blue eyes?" with choruses of, "No, Mademoiselle! Of course not!"

"Can somebody with long hair do math better than somebody with short hair?"

"No, Mademoiselle! No! No!"

After a moment, I saw how my tirade had terrified Jason, and I concluded with, "So, Jason, I don't ever want to hear you say something like that again, because it just doesn't make sense."

After I'd taken a breath, not knowing whether I'd just enlightened the class or permanently damaged them, I turned to look at Randall to see how he was holding up, something I probably should have done much sooner. He sat, rather stoically, looking entirely unemotional (marvelously, if that had been his intention).

At the end of the class I reiterated, "I know I got very upset before, but I just want to say one more thing about the comment that was made earlier. There is nothing that makes me more angry than when people think that the way somebody looks on the outside affects who they are on the inside, because who you are on the inside is all that really matters."

Someone shouted, "That's your soul, Miss Mademoiselle, like they talk about in church!"

"Yes," I said. "That's your soul."

As I began to leave the classroom, a few kids came up to hug me, as they often endearingly did. Physical contact was rare for me during the two years, and I got as much from their warmth as I hope they got from mine. For the first time ever, Jason came to hug me too.

As he approached me, his arms open wide, I bent down to his level, held him away at arms length and looked at him straight in the eyes. "Jason, you know what? I'm still very upset about what you said earlier, and I don't think I feel like hugging you right now. I'm not angry at you, but I am angry at what you said. And if you are feeling badly about what you said (which he clearly was), than something you can do that might make you feel better is to apologize to the person whose feelings you might have hurt."

He turned and looked at Randall and said, "I'm sorry."

Randall looked at him, and walked away.

When my father flew down for a weekend visit, I drove him about 90 minutes south to see the Gulf. Though it took me a while to find the open, flat, swampy landscape of southwest Louisiana beautiful, I undoubtedly did. The birds--herons, anahingas, and roseate spoonbills, were legendary. During the winter, Louisiana was like a natural airport, with busy rice field runways filled with constant landings of the nation's migrating birds.

There were visible off-shore oil rigs, where many of my student's fathers worked for two weeks at a time. Just as we were at the peak of nowhere-ness, with the Gulf on our left, driving due west into a beautiful sunset, lights lit up my car's dashboard, indicating what we learned to be a broken fan belt. There was neither a person nor house in sight, but a map showed a town called Johnson's Bayou about 12 miles ahead.

We drove 10 miles an hour to keep the car from overheating. When we finally came to the one-store town, Phil, the 40-year old son of the country store owner, diagnosed the problem as a frozen water pump and sympathetically informed us that new fan belts would just keep breaking until we fixed the pump. Young's store was "fixin' to close," but stayed open long enough for us to make some phone calls. Phil's father was a French-speaking Cajun who was thrilled to find out what I was doing in Lake Arthur.

AAA was worthless. As it turns out, their free towing policy is only good for the first three miles, which would have gotten us, simply, three miles east of nowhere. Local towing companies were going to charge roughly $200 to get the car to the closest garage, not including the cost of their 60-mile ride to us.

We walked around the store, gathering a depressing assortment of junk food to pass for dinner, preparing for what could potentially be a long night. As I searched for bottled water, I felt that inevitable lump in the throat which forms just before my eyes start to water. It was Saturday night, and few garages would even be open until Monday morning. Even so, after months of enduring stress by myself, I appreciated the convenience of having my father with me.

Suddenly, Phil informed us that he would like to take us. At first, I thought he meant he would like to take us to the towing place, to save us the cost of the tow truck coming out to get us, but I soon realized he intended to drive us all the way back to Lake Arthur. Dad readily agreed as we discussed it, explaining that he prefer the money go to someone who had already been so helpful.

When Phil went home to get his cattle trailer, and "the big truck" (as opposed to the normal sized pick-up in front of the store), Mr. Young made us ham and cheese sandwiches for which he refused to charge us. Dad then drove my car, which Phil had equipped with a temporary utility belt intended for lawn motors, onto the trailer. It fit by the smallest of margins. Our luck had turned.

Charlene, Phil's chatty wife, sat with me in the back seat of Phil's enormous truck. We talked the entire two-hour drive home. Dad and Phil talked about cattle. We spoke of New York and Louisiana and cars breaking down and crawfish, and I was impressed with my father's ability to find common ground with perfect strangers from another world. Dad spoke of his work as a psychotherapist. Phil spoke of his work in the oil industry. Charlene spoke of hurricanes, specifically Audrey, which had directly slammed Johnson's Bayou in '57 .

When we got back to Lake Arthur, Phil refused to take any money from dad other than the money dad had paid to fill the tank up with gas. Dad said he really pleaded with him to take it, but Phil had firmly refused.

At 9:45 p.m. they turned around and headed back to Johnson's Bayou, pulling their empty trailer and beginning their two-hour journey home.

When my grandfather, the man who was most afraid of my going to Louisiana ("Don't tell anyone you're Jewish!") found out what the Young's had done for his son and granddaughter, he sent them a thank you note, along with a gift of his handmade brass candlesticks.

He said over and over that he couldn't believe that southern strangers would be so kind and generous to his family.

Perhaps one of the most difficult periods was the weeks leading up to Martin Luther King Day, a holiday which my school seemed to refuse to acknowledge. Of the eight rooms in which I taught, only one classroom, the one in which an African-American teacher presided, had any display for the holiday on the walls. The displays of choice in the other rooms were hearts, hearts, and more hearts in anxious anticipation of Valentine's Day.

The school had nothing planned and the kids' ignorance of and hostility towards the holiday was particularly troubling. Several kids complained about getting the day off from school, because, "We shouldn't get no nigger's birthday off," as one said. "Ain't nothing worth celebrating," noted another.

While the other TFA teacher insisted we should plan a school-wide celebration, I was admittedly reluctant, wondering how we, the white northern French teachers, could justify taking responsibility for the school's celebration of the holiday. She responded simply, "Because no one else is." Her directness convinced me, but when we approached our school principal with some ideas for a school assembly, he shot them down immediately, explaining, "Too controversial."

When I asked, "Mr. Lapointe, shouldn't the fact that it's controversial be reason to do it rather than reason not to?" He responded, "People got strong feelings 'bout race down here. They don't feel it's somethin' to be discussed in the schools."

But how could we not do anything in a town where kids would rather come to school than celebrate the accomplishments of a black man and get the day off?

While he refused any school-wide proposal, he gave us permission to do whatever we chose within the confines of our own classrooms (which, of course, weren't really our own classrooms, since we traveled from room to room). Desperately struggling to justify any discussion I might have as relevant to the subject I taught, I finally stopped trying, and let the relevance of the national holiday speak for itself. This was only the second year Louisiana acknowledged the occasion as a state holiday.

I decided to play Harry Belafonte's version of Abraham, Martin and John for each of my classes.

Has anyone here seen my old friend, Abraham?

Can you tell me where he's gone?

He freed a lot of people, but the good they die young,

I just looked around, and he's gone.

We started our conversation by trying to figure out who the four men were. (There's a fourth verse, remember, for Bobby Kennedy, and the kids were particularly bothered that he wasn't named in the song's title).

Most knew Abraham Lincoln, but when I asked who he freed, only one or two kids in each third-grade class could answer "slaves" with any degree of certainty. When I told them John had been a president, I was pleasantly surprised by how many knew Kennedy to be his last name. Martin was obvious because of the holiday. I figured they wouldn't know Bobby Kennedy, and they didn't. A few ventured guesses--Bobby Brown and Bobby Bonilla--to which the others responded, "No, stupid! They didn't die young!" When I tried to give them a hint, and told them he was the brother of one of the other three, they shouted, "Bobby Lincoln! Bobby King!"

They were devastated to learn of the death of the two brothers, and were furious at what they perceived to be Bobby's stupidity for not realizing he too would be shot.

In the end, I made a terrifying discovery about kids. When the day was over, I had them ready to march on Washington for civil rights. They are incredibly malleable - more so than I ever imagined. All it takes is words coming from an adult they trust to change their minds. That was a frightening as well as empowering reality.

The fostering of meaningful personal lives was a continuing struggle. We made a lot of acquaintances, but just a few close friends. Opening up felt risky, as though one slip could cost us so much. It was as if we made the decision that we'd worked so hard to be accepted that we were not willing to risk sacrificing an inch of that hard-earned acceptance, even in exchange for meaningful human interaction. We soon learned not to say, "Oh, my God," since our students would admonish us for taking the Lord's name in vain.

One night our two close friends were over, both young, single, childless teachers--a rare combination of traits in Lake Arthur. The phone rang. "Now who could that be?" Joseph asked. "All your friends are here."

We learned that early on there were rumors circulating that we were lesbians. When we asked our other friend, Johnette (who was supposed to have been born a boy), why people thought so, she enumerated three specific reasons: first, because we did everything together (which we did) and would often say we needed to check with the other before committing to plans; second, because we frequently turned down offers to date men in town (they were all related to our students--as fathers, brothers, step-fathers, etc.); and third, perhaps most condemning, because we'd been asking around for a female gynecologist.

Not to mention the nude Matisse women.

That night, Leigh Anne, in a bit of a drunken stupor, changed our answering machine message to, "No, Gaby and Leigh Anne aren't here right now and no, we're not gay for anyone who might be wondering." Since no one ever called there seemed little risk in this rare display of playful disregard.

The next night, while we were at the movies, two of Leigh Anne's students called, along with the grandfather of one of my third graders.

It was the last time we allowed ourselves the luxury of playful disregard.

Little pleasures came to mean a great deal, and more and more I realized they would come from the town's children, not adults. One of my third-graders, Hope, invited me to her birthday party. Since I pronounced all of my students' names with a French accent, and since the h's are silent in French, she had to endure being called, "Ope." For the occasion, I made her a big card that said, "Appy Irthday Ope." The memory of her slowly emerging giggle as she read it got me through the next month.

At a point, I asked my principal, Mr. Lapointe, to write me a recommendation. I was applying to teach at TFA's summer training to help train incoming corps members. The first part was very straightforward and a bit generic, but towards the end, he wrote something that touched me deeply: "Gaby's efforts to understand a different culture have gone a long way towards her acceptance by the community."

I was thrilled, having had no idea, of course, that I'd been accepted by the community.

More and more, I found myself invited to community events. I attended the bridal shower of a fellow teacher's daughter. There was a satellite dish in the backyard painted with Ross Perot's face in front a large waving American flag.

I was also invited to an "Aloette party" by the mother of one of my 6th graders. Aloette is a make-up company that sells its products like Tupperware. I accepted, half out of guilt, and half out of genuine curiosity. If there had been any halves left, I would have to admit to feeling both flattered and excited. I brought cash with me, because I knew I'd feel awkward if I didn't buy anything.

The party was filled with mothers and grandmothers of my students, and was in the mobile home of one of my third graders, hosted by his very young, very petite, chain-smoking mother.

One rather old woman was chosen to be made-over, while the rest of us sat, watched, and talked. The conversation started out light, led by the Aloette sales lady. "Who knows how many days you age if you don't properly cleanse your face before going to sleep?...Seven days, y'all!"

She then addressed the apparently age old controversy as to whether or not southern women really were more beautiful than the rest of American women. Many of them emphatically agreed that they were, until the old woman being made up in front of us suggested that everyone look at me, for a comparison, since I was a token northerner. My skin, she insisted, glowed like none other's in the room, so how could they believe that southern women were more beautiful? she demanded.

The tide changed, and suddenly the masses challenged the Aloette representative for a come-back, since the assertion of southern superior beauty had originally been hers. Thankfully, she insisted that since I was young, single, and childless, I was inappropriate for use of comparison.

What was really noticeable, she said, was the difference in older women. Women in the south don't age as quickly as women in the north because of the humidity, she explained. Terrified by my position in the spotlight, I was appalled as all eyes returned to me once more when a woman offered a definitive end to the conversation by asking me, "Well, you've seen women in the north, and women in the south. Who do you think are more beautiful?"

I now had the unenviable position of having to feign both knowledge, interest, and passion for something about which I'd never given a moment's thought. "I don't really know about that," I babbled nervously, "But I do know that at home in New York my skin would get really dry from the cold in the winter and from our wood stove in the house, and I do find that I use a lot less moisturizer since I've been down here."

That made them very happy. I, on the other hand, was miserable. Who and what had I become?

Soon, the conversation turned to Lake Arthur Elementary School and how awful it was. I felt awkward once more, as they trashed the work of my colleagues, mostly because I agreed with what they were saying. I knew I found my students' education lacking. It hadn't occurred to me that their parents did as well.

I listened, smiling when appropriate, nodding when appropriate, and remained silent for the entire conversation.

The discussion took a racial turn, as griping sessions amongst white Lake Arthurians inevitably did, and I started wishing I hadn't come to the "party" after all. The mothers agreed that the schools' black teachers were the downfall of the public education system.

One mother told a story about Mrs. Gant, in whose 3rd grade class I taught. She said she had seen Mrs. Gant in class one day, with her hands on her hips, saying to a child, "Aks faw pumission buhfaw you say dat." Emphasizing the accent, to a roomful of laughing and shaking heads, the mother repeated the teacher's words over and over. "And this woman's supposed to be a teacher y'all! Aks! Aks! Dat! Dat!"

Mrs. Prejean, the mother who had invited me, then added that we all (me included, apparently) wouldn't believe this, and to listen up. One day, she said, Mrs. Istre, a 6th grade teacher who she volunteered for, asked her to put up a bulletin board showing two girls doing math. I immediately recognized the bulletin board to which she was referring, because I taught in Mrs. Istre's classroom, and had loved that bulletin board. I loved that it showed two girls doing math, and I loved that one of the girls was African-American. Mrs. Istre was a preacher's wife, and seemed to me to be the most progressive white teacher by far. I interrupted Mrs. Prejean to tell her that I remembered the display. I said how much I liked it and that I never knew she had done it.

She interrupted me back and said, "But wait until I tell you what Mrs. Istre made me do, y'all. She made me put a black girl in it. Can you believe that? She insisted I put a black girl on the bulletin board. Is that the stupidest thing? And listen to this, she said if she didn't, Mrs. Bell (a 6th grade black teacher), would complain. Can you believe that? I'm tellin' you those black teachers are runnin' the place!"

I had that old familiar sinking feeling in my stomach as everyone in the room seemed to agree, her son, my student, included. I had just started thinking of Mrs. Prejean as a friend, and was sorry to learn that we now had so little in common. I also found myself wondering about Mrs. Istre. She had always impressed me as one of the best teachers in the school, one who had real expectations of her students. I found myself hoping that Mrs. Istre had made up the comment about Mrs. Bell just to shut Mrs. Prejean up, and that Mrs. Istre really wanted the black girl up on her wall and had only used Mrs. Bell as an excuse to get what she wanted.

The conversation moved to how black students get everything they want and how the (white) administration favors them over their "own type," a laughable assertion, given that our vice-principal was the most racist man I'd ever met.

They brought up a specific example about which I'd given a lot of thought. It was unfair, they said, that black kids are favored because they get to wear Malcolm X clothing, "which is for black power," but white kids don't get to wear anything that says David Duke, "which is for white power." So, they said, "black kids get to wear the X caps even though they are for prejudice, but white kids can't support David Duke."

The simplistic power of the analogy was disturbing. Of course Duke supports the continued suppression of an oppressed minority, while Malcolm X supported the empowerment of that oppressed minority. It wasn't a distinction I had the courage to share.

Then they all shook their heads, expressing regret that racial relations had gotten so bad in recent years. "You just can't be friends with 'em, because they've got such attitude," said Mrs. Prejean's 6th grade son.

They all seemed to agree that it was the fault of the black parents for teaching the black kids to be this way, because, they noted, you can't blame the kids for how their parents raise them.

Sixty-seven dollars later, and a pending delivery of astringent, lipstick, an eye liner, and face powder, I left.

yed a wonderful moment with one of my less stable 5th graders. Lester had an admirable fighting spirit, but there was a great deal of anger in him. When it arose, I couldn't help but see the very mean adult I feared he would become. It frightened me to anticipate how some of my more volatile kids would turn out as adults. It frightened me that their future character could be determined at such a young age. Our relationship had been somewhat precarious, but it seemed to steadily improve.

Right before Christmas in my second year, we did a project where each student made a poster of what they wanted for Christmas, and had to use a French dictionary to find out the French word for whatever it was they wanted, and then write the word under a picture they had drawn. The class would then collectively study all the words as that week's vocabulary. They came up with a lot of expected things (although there were a few more guns than I would have preferred), and some unexpected things (peace, love, a job for my mother, the death of Santa Claus). But Lester's was my favorite.

Lester wrote, "chasser avec mon pere" - to go hunting with his father. When I smiled at him, and told him (foolishly) that I was pretty sure that if he told his father, it could probably happen, he shook his head and scowled his famously exaggerated Lester scowl and said that no, it hadn't ever and wouldn't ever happen and walked away.

We had a few talks about it, but then after Christmas when many of the kids were showing me what they had received and were especially enthusiastic when they got what they'd wanted in their French drawing, Lester never mentioned his wish, and so I never brought it up.

A few weeks later, he eagerly rushed up to me as I was walking to school, as if he'd been waiting for me to turn the corner. "Guess what, Mademoiselle? I got what I wanted!"

I wasn't sure at first what he meant, but when I realized, my face slowly erupted in a smile big enough to match his own. I felt as happy as I did at any other singular moment during the two years.

Two days later, he stayed home from school and hunted with his father.

It was a moment I felt I had earned. Not that I made the event happen, but that I deserved to feel the pride I was feeling by virtue of the joy and enthusiasm with which he shared his pleasure with me.

I recall a conversation I had early on with a 6th grader named Scotty Landry, who was as proud of his Cajun heritage as any kid I knew. Leigh Anne called him the Fig Man, because at Christmas he had given us fig pies, which we resisted eating until there was not a single other morsel of food in the house. Turns out fig pies are pretty good.

Scotty's other claim to fame was having parents with married siblings. His aunts and uncles were "twice family." Three sisters, one of whom was his mother, had married three brothers, one of whom was his father.

One day Scotty asked me if I'd ever eaten boudin."Never tried it Scottie," I admitted.

"Gaw, Miss Gaby, you never had boudin? See it's pig's intestines and they grind 'em up and stuff 'em with rice and stick 'em in skin..."

"Never had boudin, Scottie."

"How 'bout cracklin'?" he asked.

"Never had cracklin' before, Scottie."

"Miss Gaby! How could you never have cracklin' before? See what it is they fry the fat and - you sure you never had cracklin'?"

"Never had cracklin' before, Scottie," I said giggling.

"Ever have bald crawfish?"

"Bald as in hairless?" I asked.

"Bald, as in they cook 'em in hot water," he said laughing.

"Not yet," I said. "But I will. You have to understand, Scottie. I come from a different place with different foods and different traditions. Give me a chance. I'll try it all, I promise."

He thought about this for a second, and turned and looked at me with earnest concern.

"Hey, Miss Gaby," he said, suddenly. "You ever had ice cream before?"

"Yeah, Scottie. I've had ice cream," I said, as I turned to him and smiled.

	Parole Hearing by Ross Doman First Prize, National Non-Fiction magazine Article Society of Professional Journalists

On June 8, 1981, Darcy Lowe was convicted of second degree murder and given a life sentence at MCI Walpole. Did this felon deserve another chance? Or did society and his victim's blood cry out for his life to be spent behind bars?

The room feels flat. It offers neither the idealized good-government timbre of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, nor is it an interrogation bunker with a tiny window and inmates grinding butts under their heels. Its fluorescent lights bake the air as yellow as the walls and the carpet color is intended [e tracked dirt. It suggests a last-choice motel conference room. Entirely unlovable. Its passive-aggressiveness matches its purpose.

Seven microphones perch across a long table at one wall. A card table and chair face that. Today, supporters of both parties wait. They've been carefully instructed which side of the room to occupy and no glances are exchanged across the aisle. A couple of attendants flit , including a woman in the corner simultaneously operating a video camera and a tape recorder that is huge, like the whirring tin-man contraption of the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s.

Into this enclave, two or three times a week, murderers in new shoes are brought in chained at the ankles from prisons around Massachusetts and seven people predict whether they will ever kill again.

All eyes are on the inmate. Ever been so close to a killer ? A real bloodthirsty, chopping, grunting, foaming, murderer? Ever sat on a barstool. next to Darcy Loew ? Then you may have seen a man capable of the act. You wouldn't recognize him.

His hands look tired and his hair is thinning and gray. Lowe's been in stir for 15 years, waiting for this day. He looks frail. His chances to get out begin now, because he's in for life unless he can convince the board to parole him.

Lowe looks more like a dad than a killer. He has reading glasses and wears a fuzzy gray sweater and knit pants. His voice is halting and soft. He received a masters degree in humanities from Boston University while in the joint, and his thesis advisor is in attendance to testify behalf. (Something about the oratory powers of Plato. Four of his five children are present, as is his wife, chaplain, even Lowe's mother, looking numb and in over her head She releases an occasionalmoan. They had arrived early, dressed for church, and had chatted in the waiting room, in the hushed tones and nervous laughs of an Easter service.

On the other side of the room are the victim's kin. They too, will testify. The Grazianos came down from Vermont and sit with grim, determined faces. They had smoked nervously all the way down and in the waiting the young man in the Marlboro T-shirt had cracked his knuckles. (The inmates' families always dress better he victims'). This isn't easy. It was revealed in the trial that it was likely Mary Beth had turned a couple of tricks before she was murdered. She liked the money.

There were too few seats, just a couch and a couple of chairs. So some stood and waited, lightly fanning through the Government Administrator magazines spread on the coffee table before them. Eventually, the Grazianos were offered name tags by a friendly young man and politely ushered into the hearing room.

Three minutes later, Darcy Lowe's ftunily had entered the empty waiting room and plopped down on the still-warm seats.

Now Mary Beth's sister and cousin weep and the Massachusetts Victim Counselor pats their hands and leads them out of the room and back in.

High noon at the Massachusetts Parole Board.

This year, The American Probation and Parole Association (APPA) published a book called Abolishing Parole: The Emperor Has No Clothes. The group is aware of the current public relations problem. Virginia recently abolished parole entirely and it appears South Carolina may follow suit. The APPA maintains it's a bad idea. Unlike the public perception, the group believes, the existence of parole actually makes a sentencing system tougher. It calls parole "one of the strongest, most far-reaching weapons the system has to control violent and dangerous criminals. "

Lee Gartenberg, the director of Inmate Legal Services at Middlesex County Jails agrees. "With parole there's supervision and direction because parole officers are in the position to direct somebody to get involved with treatment and make sure they're working, to make sure they're paying restitution, and whatever other requirements their parole has. If you just let them out without any strings,then we have the situation where there is no accountability. The next time you hear from somebody is when he commits a crime. That's not what we want, "Gartenberg says.

It's much more expensive to keep someone in a jail cell. In Massachusetts, the estimates are currently going up to $30,000 per year per prisoner. Parole, which is a form of intermediate sanctions (some type ofsupervision outside an institution), costs in the area of $4000- 10,000 per year. There is no question a person serving a day on parole is going to cost the state less than a person serving a day in jail- assuming he or she is successful on parole and there aren't other costs. Like inappropriate behavior.

The APPA states in its hard-sell tome, "parole provides constant review of the criminal in prison; continual re-evaluation of the risk that criminal presents to society; leverage over criminals before they are released to assure good behavior in the community; careful supervision after their release; and the potential to re-imprison those who appear a threat to the community."

In short, parole has to be earned.

At 9:35 a.m., members of the board begin filing in, each carrying an identical orange case folder. They're chatting about the previous weekend- tales of woe, blown tires, laughs and vacations. It seems odd, this simplest act of co-workers catching up, familiar with each other's lives. Then they sit, one to a microphone, cough and drink water from glasses on the long table. After they'ie all seated, Lowe is called over and for the first time since morning is outside arms' reach of a guard. After 15 years in jail, he swears to be truthful, lowers his hand, sits down, and faces the board like a priest performing mass with his back to the parishioners. Families are privy fully to only one-half of the proceedings. If at any time an inmate attempts to address the audience, he is admonished and instructed to look ahead. No good inciting the crowd when the victim's mother is only a few feet behind. There are often screams.

Everyone else in the room who planned to testify is asked to stand and take the oath and only the prison guards remain seated.

As the scene unfolds now, there's an expectation, and a certain desire for booming recriminations, a star chamber self-righteousness and anger towards the inmate. A demand for explanations. A God's voice. Or at least the earthly voice of "The Man! " Tell us what you got, Darcy, and why the hell should we let you go! Why Darcy? Boom boom boom.

It's not like that. Sheila Hubbard starts things off smoothly and in a civilized vein. There is a format to follow, based largely on her faith that human behavior is mostly patterns; the hope that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So they look a their criminal's history. They look at what he did in the institution. Usually, the inmates go to different levels of security during their stay, all the way down to minimum and prerelease. If the criminal makes prerelease, he's out working in the community, so if he can't last there...

"They've had a life that's led them to this point, and it's important to see if they've addressed things," says Hubbard, "It's important to get a sense of the person. The nuances of a person's personality, what his criminal history was, what his institutional adjustment was, what his family life was, what we're hearing from the victims - all of that is important.

"When I review a case, after I finish going through the information, the question I ask myself is: If I were to parole this person, what would I like to see? So I come in and try to elicit that information - I want to know if there was substance abuse involved; I want to know if they realize they have a problem; they need to be able to tell me they know what addiction is; they need to have done the proper programming; they need to be able to tell me what would put them in that place again; I need to know that they accept responsibility for the crime. If you can't realize you have a problem, then your ability to address it is going to be limited. Recognizing where your weaknesses are is important, like anything you do."

There are three standards by statute on which the board has to evaluate people, according to Hubbard. "One, we are not to give parole based solely on positive institutional adjustment. So just because a criminal is a good inmate does not mean he gets out. But he better be a good inmate, or he won't.

The expectation is that they will go in there and do their time the right way. Two, they are not in our 'risk to re-offend' category - that we feel they will go out there and live a law-abiding life, and third, that it is in the welfare of society that they are released.

"It's very humbling. You literally have someone's life, their freedom, and public safety in our hands. So we have accountability, responsibility, and we are residents in the state so we have vested interest as well. People get paroled who live in our neighborhoods"

The Parole Board also requires some kind of a plan from an inmate. He has to have a place to live and he has to have a job. In Massachusetts the parole officer has to approve the job before he goes out. There are a lot of questions to answer.

 "I think that if a parolee gets involved in a good treatment program with ties to the community and ties to their family, and gets some positive feedback about doing the right things when he's out and there's follow-up when community, learning life skills, and getting a job paying restitution, that certainly reduces recidivism,"says Gartenberg. "If the system has a way of insuring that. In the ideal world,parole could be a mechanism of doing that. Because there are consequences if you are not doing what you're supposed to do."

Hubbard's voice hits the back wall quickly through the microphone, as she begins. "We're here for the 15-year hearing for Darcy Lowe."

"That's S," Lowe corrects her.

 "OK, Darcy S. Lowe, you're serving a second degree life sentence for murder effective October 11, 1980. Briefly, the way we'll proceed today - I'll allow you to make an opening statement to the board if you have one. Following that, we'll discuss things that happened prior to incarceration, we'll talk about the offense, we'll talk about any prior criminal history and any other aspects to your life prior to incarceration that might help the board ultimately make a decision in your case. Then the board members will have an opportunity to question you about that period.

 "Following that, we'll discuss your institutional adjustment, we'll look at your programming and disciplinary report, any work or security issues which may influence the board's decision. The board members will be able to ask questions again. Then I'll open the hearing to public testimony. Following

that, you'll have the opportunity to make a closing statement."

Hubbard is the chair of the Massachusetts Parole Board - this whitey is a black woman. And this is not your father's parole board. In Massachusetts, it consists of two black women, a Hispanic woman, a white woman and a white man. There are several vacancies at the moment that, according to state statute, must be filled by people from the criminal justice field, such as probation officers, attorneys, psychologists, social workers or parole officers. Hubbard worked as a deputy attorney in one of the governor's legal offices before she was designated by Weld as chair three years ago.

 Yes, it's a full-time job - and the board wants you to know this is not an aging phalanx of Great Society men running an underground railroad out of the joint. She's aware that bad public attitude is threatened by erroneous press reports."When a parolee commits a crime, we take extra steps to make surethe information is accurate, because often it's not;' says Hubbard. "We get misrepresented by the press all the time, and we're trying to change that. A lot of people don't know what we do here, so we've got to get out andtalk to people and the media and get them to come to the hearings so they understand."

The Parole Board sits as a full body of seven for two to four hearings per week at the offices on Wormwood Street. This is only for people serving a second-degree life sentence, nearly always for murder. These are open to the public and the inmates' supporters and victim's families can come and testify. The board needs four agreeing members to determine the outcome.

Executive - or full board - sessions meet twice a month to make the decisions on the lifers. "We all come from such varying backgrounds," says Hubbard, "Sometimes we walk in and hear the name read and everyoneknows what they're going to do. It's very easy. Other times we discuss cases for 30 minutes or an hour."

In all, the board hears three types of cases. Clemency matters, which are pardons and commutations, are less frequent than parole cases. These are all constitutional powers of the governor, but like all states, a board isdesignated to act as his advisor to make recommendations.

 As for Darcy Lowe, his troubles began a long time ago. On June 8, 1981 he was convicted of the second degree murder of Mary Beth Graziano and given a life sentence at MCI Walpole. According to the case citation, it began, when "early in the morning of Saturday, October 25, 1980, the Quincy police, answering a call, found Mary Beth Graziano, age nineteen, lying dead on the floor of her bedroom at the front of her second-floor Quincy apartment. She lay on her back with a single bullet hole in her chest. A single.22 caliber discharged cartridge casing was found on the bedroom rug, but the weapon which fired it was never discovered There was no sign of struggle. On the floor near Graziano was a woman's purse with a wallet protruding from it. In a side pocket was a $50 bilifolded in quarters. No other money was found in the wallet..."

Lowe's opening words in his hearing are contrite.

"I'd like to thank everyone for the opportunity to be here today. I realize my actions were the direct cause of Miss Graziano's death. I'd also like to say that at no time in my relationship with Miss Graziano, did I harbor any ill feelings towards her - any malice tovards her - or intend her death."

Contrite and impertinent, considering the case. Admitting the crime at this point and apologizing seems the best course."Even if they do come in and say 'yeah, I did it,' that doesn't mean they're going to get out," says Hubbard later in her office. She says the reason inmates don't tell the truth is complicated, but there is no set method to getting paroled.

"We have people who do try to come in and do that and they are lying through their teeth, saying, 'Oh yes I did it' and what they think we want to hear," says Hubbard. "The problem is, we often have much more information than they have about what really happened. So if they're lying we know it.

"The relevance depends on what the board feels they are not being truthful about. Is it something that goes to the core of what they've done and therefore impacts their rehabilitation process or is it something moreperipheral? Some things you realize you'll never get them to admit. Is it something that is central to that process? Are they really rehabilitated or are they playing games with the board?

"We can have someone come in and confess and everything, but there's no formula. You can't really try to figure the Board. We have things we look at that are consistent, but how it's going to cut for you. . . "

No one knows. "Why do people lie? Perhaps they've made it up in the last 15 years in the institution and when they come in with the story, and we start poking, they don't have time to regroup and they start contradicting themselves. We often have inmates who come in, say something, and as we start poking holes in it, start contradicting what they said. But we have it on tape and play back what they said and they get all discombobulated. Because they're lying. And that comes from, one, we have a lot of information and, two, we have a lot of experience. We're looking at inmates all the time, every day, and there are patterns to criminality, so you start seeing these things and knowing the types of questions to ask"

"I regret the fact that we have to be here at all," continues Lowe, his voice almost a whisper, "I realize my actions were wanton and reckless and displayed a gross disregard for the proper consequences. And I am deeply sorry. " He lifts his glasses away and wipes at his eyes with the back of one hand. That completes his opening statement.

The words killed and murdered are rarely mentioned by an inmate testifying before the board. Even for those confessing, it's most often, "the tragic death:' or "the terrible accident" Often, this is the first time the inmate's family gets to hear the whole story and they've certainly never had to confront the victim's family. Usually, the inmate has pled down to second-degree murder, avoiding a trial, so this is the first real airing of the crime.

Gartenberg says that parole is much less a factor in plea-bargaining today. "The parole rates were in the 50-60 percent range in the early eighties, when I first got involved:' he says, "and defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges,would fashion pleas on the assumption that the house of corrections sentences, for example, parole at half time was a likelihood * "

Roughly 40 percent of those who appeared before the board in 1994 received parole. Taking into account those eligible who didn't appear, the figure drops to around one quarter. A lot of inmates recognize the changing attitudes and simply waive their right to a hearing. Others would rather avoid it entirely.

"In some cases, their discharge dates aren't far enough beyond their parole dates to make it worth it:' says Gartenberg, "They'd rather finish up and have no strings attached. Also, by the nature of our sentencing laws,sometimes if you're paroled, you may be on parole much longer than if you'd wrapped up. When people do that calculus they determine they'd much rather not be responsible to the system.

"People have to remember, when you're on parole, you're serving your sentence on the street.You're not free and clear. Time comes off your sentence, but if you screw up, you go back."

Gartenberg views parole as a constantly evolving "laboratory," based on the swings of the social and political pendulum. "It's an evolutionary process. It has to do with changing attitudes about parole, about getting tough- and people who were likely parole candidates in the past are no longer receiving it. There are increased concerns about public safety and systemic accountability about protecting victims. All of that's powerful stuff."

The Department of Corrections has canceled further college classes past the Master's degree - furloughs are history in Massachusetts - and Gartenberg recognizes that the pendulum has been swinging more towards getting tougher in recent years. He acknowledges the role of public sentiment.

"I think that certainly there is a desire by the public that they be very tough about parole," says Gartenberg,"and that there be a lot of accountability and a lot of consideration to protecting victims. I think that because of headlines that have involved some very unfortunate crimes that have occurred when people are on parole, there's a reaction to toughen up and make sure that doesn't happen. And I think that's reflected in the reduction of the percentage of people being paroled"

But can it be measured by the make-up of the parole board? "You hope that in the quasi-judicial function that they hold that they pretty much play it straight as a judge would," he says, "but I think there's no question that they're sensitive, and probably the personnel that gets appointed reflects more their philosophy. Hubbard agrees.

"Historically in criminal justice, there's always the pendulum swinging, from the left to the right, and the whole system feels it. Some of us might feel it more than others," she says. "We certainly give cases the same level of seriousness and accountability, but we are affected by the swings."

Parole has the potential to have a lot of hooks on people, and be an effective means to supervise people, says Gartenberg, "However, I wonder if the perception of parole as being easy and the concern about public safety and the fear of ending up as a bad headline might shortcircuit that. It is much better to parole people and have accountability and supervision than not parole them and have overcrowded prisons and-have the courts tell administrators they have to let people out"

Darcy Lowe's hearing is taking a bad turn. The "touchy-feely" public perception of the proceedings only comes close to reality at the beginning, when the inmate is asked to describe his life before meeting the victim. Grousing is encouraged and most inmates are instinctively good at it. Lowe had been married nine years, worked as an electrician when he could find work, and had fathered five children with his wife. He sounded like a real family man. Hubbard wonders if he knew the kids'ages.

He reveals he was separated when he met Graziano. It is also determined he was not working as an electrician when he met her. Hubbard's voice is neutral through the series of questions. The other board members appear heavy-lidded,with chins in hands. There is a question of whether he had ever been arrested before.Lowe describes what he calls an altercation where he was arrested for beating up a paperboy. Hubbard asks him to define altercation.

"I'm not really very clear on it, but as I remember there was a bunch of us, and money was taken."

"Did you take part in the beating?"

"No ma'am, I was only part of the group and we were all charged.

I just stood and watched."

"Your idea?"

"No ma'am."

The members begin taking notes. "Anything else?"

"In 1973 or '74 or '76 1 was - someone charged me with assault and battery. To this day, I don't know who that person is." Lowe explains he was at home watching television when he was called down to the police station and informed of the charges and was told when to show up in court. He explains that he went, and he doesn't even remember the name of the person the judge read as the plaintiff, but he never showed up.

"What did they say you did?" asked Hubbard.

"Assault and battery - a fight - I don't even know who it is.

"Weapons?"

'A fight. A fight!"

"What were the circumstances?"

"I don't know. I was just told to turn myself in."

"Is it possible you were involved?"

"It's possible, ma'am."

"How can you say that? How can you not remember?"

"I might have had an argument, I might have had a fight, I don't remember that. They never showed."

"What kinds of things did you do that made you not remember if you were involved or not?"

"I can't say - it could have been someone I had an argument with.. "

"Did you get in other fights at the time?"

"No ma'am. I don't know what the circumstances are. I would like to find out who this person was."

"But you can't say it wasn't you."

"Drugs?"

"No ma'am, I don't even know what the charge is.

"What were you doing that you don't remember?

"I don't remember"

"Had you had arguments at the time?"

"I don't remember. This is the first one I know about."

And on and on... Hubbard remarks that Lowe wouldn't have gotten assault and battery for an argument and scribbles on a pad. He admits he carried a knife at times. Hubbard is losing patience. "When did you start carrying guns?"

"Oh... around 1979 or something like that."When asked why he started carrying a knife, Lowe can't remember. But it was only a boy scout knife. And he never pulled it out.

"Mr. Lowe, surely you understand how important your veracity is in our decision?"

"Yes ma'am." Hubbard pauses and asks Lowe to explain how he met Graziano. The viciousness of the crime is a large problem for Lowe. This is a board filled with women.

... an autopsy revealed that a .22 caliber bullet had entered Graziano's left breast centimeters to the left of her mid-breastbone line.. From the pattern of unburned gunpowder around the place where the bullet entered the body, it could be inferred that the gun was fired from a distance of between one and two feet away... if a wman of Graziano's height were holding a.22 caliber handgun in her right hand one to two feet from her body, she could not discharge it in such a way that the bullet would enter her left chest at a thirty degree angle going from her left to her right side. Graziano's mother testified that she was righthanded. The Commonwealth's expert in forensic science concluded from the amount of antimony and barium found on Graziano's left hand that she either discharged a firearm with that hand, or that hand was in close proximity to a discharging firearm... a State trooper who took fingerprints from Graziano's body observed a large blackand-blue area on the upper portion of her right cheek..

His explanation for their meeting corroborates the trial's account. He admits meeting her at the club Narcissus in Kenmore Square. Lowe also admits at that time he was "engaged in prostitution."

When asked how he got started, Lowe can't remember the name of the person who introduced him to the life. He is evasive about the amount he made and his overall involvement. He says he intended to introduce Graziano to "the life" but she declined, so they merely dated. Lowe says they parted as mutual friends.

"I can tell you right now that my life has not gone unexamined. I am not the same person as I was."

"How are you a changed person?" asks Hubbard, "You were a family man, then all of a sudden you were in prostitution. Why is that?"

"Bad choices, ma'am, bad choices."

"That may be true, but in terms of this board being able to predict your behavior, we've got nothing to go on"

Lowe speaks of his family, and his lack of appreciation. He deliberately chose "the lifestyle" because it was exciting and good money, throwing away his marriage and occupation. But that's changed. He wants to get out so he can help others.

"I rejected everything I knew that was right. I'm ashamed to admit that," says Lowe. "I'm sorry. But I know for a fact, that given the opportunity, if I have anything to do with it... (he pauses)... a minute ago you said I earned a degree at the taxpayers' expense, but it was a little bit more - a LIFE! A life of a person, and there isn't an institution in the United Staes that charges that high of a price! But my education, I can use that to keep another Darcy Lowe from being in front of you. If I can turn someone around and save someone, then I think this experience has been well-served time."

Virtually every inmate talks to the board about getting out and helping people. Lowe was running. This is the velvet hammer. The board looks for holes to exploit and pushes when the inmate's off-balance. Occasionally, it's a subtle corral, but before a board full of women, a pimp who kills an uncooperative woman creates an effect like water on a toaster. Now the other board members get their chance to ask questions. They ask about any counseling he received in prison, but he insists on discussing his plansto help others.

"I'm not suggesting it should be trivialized - this is a terrible situation - but if any good can come from this, I would like to be the one given the opportunity to prevent someone else from sitting here."

The board is facing Lowe with raised eyebrows and are leaning towards him with the anxiousness of a murderers' row stepping into the box against a tiring pitcher. He's showing no real remorse, no real comprehension of the crime.

They have the gruesome details of the case in front of them in the case citation. After Lowe met Graziano at the club, Narcissus, they drove off together to a party.

.. shortly before Graziano's body was discovered, a neighbor in

an adjoining apartment heard a commotion and a long argument but could not make out any words. She then heard a gunshot. After the gunshot, the voices ceased Within three minutes thereafter, he heard someone coming down the stairs in a great rush. He looked out the window and saw Darcy Lowe leap over three steps leading from the piazza of the apartment house and run down the walk to the street. As he did he looked over his shoulder at the upstairs window. He then got in a car and drove off in a hurry.

Mary Beth Wasik, asleep in her bedroom at the back of the apartment she shared with Graziano, was awakened by a "big bang." She jumped out of bed and went to her closed bedroom door Standing there, she heard Graziano say, "Oh my God," in a very faint voice. She then ran out of the bedroom and heard Graziano say "Oh my God," faintly again. She ran down the stairs to a neighbor's apartment and asked them to call the police.

Lowe reasserts he meant no animosity towards Miss Graziano.

Hubbard, chin on fist, asks him why he didn't help her after the gun discharged. "Panic;' is all Lowe says.

..there was evidence from which it could be inferred beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally shot Graziano or that he intentionally performed an act creating a plain and strong likelihood that she would be killed It could be inferredfrom the angle of the bullet's path, and the fact that she was right-handed that Graziano did not shoot herself.

Michael Warren, Lowe's counselor in prison for the last ten years, testifies first. When asked if he were concerned with the official version of the crime and Lowe 's version he says, "I try not to make judgments"

Lowe's thesis advisor, Tom Flescher, speaks of Lowe's hard work and his growth on the emotional and intellectual level during the research. "He was an outstanding student:' says Flesche, "I'd like to see him as a teacher somewhere. "

Lowe's wife, Sandra, and children each speak before the board, pledging their support and Lowe holds his head and wipes at tears. His mother-in-law reveals she never wanted him to marry his daughter, "but I believe he loved her in his own Aay. As much as he is capable. I would not want his release if he would hurt my daughter in any way, but I think Darcy discovered there is no such thing as an easy life." Hubbard stares at her and remarks after her testimony that no mother-in-law would request this for her son-in-law if she didn't feel he would be a fit member of society.

Finally, Lowe's aged mother rushes to the microphone and tells of her broken heart and how she cries everyday. She is then led, moaning, from the room.

At last, Graziano's family gets to speak. Mary Beth's mother rises, and repeating, "Oh no, my God my God" over and over, says she doesn't think anyone got the message, that Lowe still claims the whole thing was an accident.

At her turn, Mary Beth's sister rushes to the dais and places a large photo of her dead sister in front of her, facing the board. "Mary Beth would love to be here, but she can't," she says. She says her sister had been very excited by her move to Boston and her new life. She had called and talked about this man she'd met, 'You may not like him, but he's an electrician. All I want to do is get married, have babies, and go on with my life,' Mary Beth had said. Then, next call, she's dead.

Mary Beth's brother, Tony, reveals that Mary Beth told him, also, that she had met a nice guy who bought her things. He ran an escort service and wanted her to join. And Lowe murdered his sister because she wouldn't go along. Tony felt that paroling Lowe would dilute the meaning of his sister's life. "The only thing education has done is make him more dangerous," says Tony Gmziano.

Called up for his concluding statement before the board, Lowe again apologizes to the families. "I regret what happened," said Lowe, "Now the burden is squarely on me. I will use parole to make amends. Thank you. "

Then the deputies lead him from the room.

…the defendant was arrested about 10 p.m Saturday. October 25, 1980, as he was leaving an apartment in Framingham. When he came out of the apartment he was carrying a box containing .22 caliber ammunition and a .22 caliber revolver. After the defendant had been informed of his rights and was being driven to Quincy police station, he was asked if he had a driver's license. The defendant replied, "No, and I probably won't need one for about fifteen years."

 

	A Savage Enemy by Emma Waverman First prize, Non-fiction magazine Article Society of professional Journalists   NE-NY Region

Jessica, Bartell, 22, was standing outside her apartment when her hair started to blow away. She rubbed her hands over her head and laughed as she watched her hair swirl in the wind. Soon most of it was gone. She calls that day her "nuclear fall-out day", and it was just another day in her fight against breast cancer

That afternoon, Jessica called a barber and had the little that was left shaved off.. Losing her hair was just another milestone in Jessica's fight with breast cancer. She had long stopped worrying about what she looked like and concentrated on defeating the "monster"that was eating away at her whole body. By the time her hair fell out she had already gained and lost 60 pounds of water, developed stretch marks that would rival those of a mother of quadruplets and been so weak she could not move. She had found and lost and found hope and she had beaten the odds.

The chance of someone under 25 developing breast cancer is incredibly slim, approximately one in almost 20,000. But young women do get it and often doctors ignore the warning signs. Is it on the rise? Jessica Bartell thinks it is. But she is just one victim.

Many clinicians think they are seeing more young people with cancer but they cannot pinpoint if that is because of better identification techniques or because more people are affected by the disease. The statistics can be hard to read, grouping ages zero to thirty in one age group. Leukemia, which is a form of bone cancer, skews the statistics because it strikes young children.

Diseases such as lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease which strike the lymphatic system are more prevalent in people under 25 than any other cancer. Doctors do not know why that is, says John Glick, directorthe University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center and a leading breast and lymphornatic cancer specialist. He stresses that most cancer in young adults is treatable and curable, and the likelihood of developing an adult-type cancer is still very small.

Jessica Bartell, who was bom in Norwood, Mass., hopes to be so lucky. Her cancer is inoperable, she only has the healing power of deadly chemicals and personal strength on her side. The chemicals are running out but her hope is not. "Hope is very real to me:' she said. "I have hope and some people may see it is a false hope. But false hope is better than no hope."

Jessica is easy to spot in the chemo infusion unit of Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is by far the. youngest person in the room. Her jean jacket and the bright pink bandanna wrapped around her bald head stand in contrast to the middle-aged greying patients. She says she wants to tell me her story, but what she really wants, she admits is to have someone to talk to while receiving chemotherapy.

Jessica waits for the results of a blood test that will indicate if her body is healthy enough to receive the chemotherapy. Although her demeanor is nonchalant she taps her paper cup nervously as she waits for the doctor to tell her everything is ok. She peppers him with questions about her treatment and the small achievements that her body has made. He in turn, asks about how she is feeling, not just physically but emotionally as well. Jessica does not ask if the tumors which occupy space in her back, liver and breast have disappeared. She already knows the answer to that.

In March of 1993, Jessica Bartell had done something that she had always wanted - she had a breast reduction. Her surgeon took off over three pounds of tissue from her breasts and alleviated most of the physical and emotional burden that went with it.

Generally, a breast reduction reduces the risk of breast cancer because of the amount of tissue that is removed and because the tissue is routinely checked for cancer.

Three months after her reduction, Jessica's left breast got hard.

She returned to her surgeon who thought that an infection caused the hardness and placed Jessica on antibiotics.

By September her breast still had not healed, but Jessica had other things on her mind She was moving in with her lesbian girlfriend in upper New York state and they had their new apartment and their marry pets including two cats, five birds, a rabbit, guinea pig and fish tank.

She saw another surgeon who was concerned about the possibility of a tumor and sent her to get a mammogram. The mammogram came back positive showing the possibility of a tumor Perhaps, becausemammograms are not good diagnostic tools for women under 30 with dense breasts, the surgeon did not react to the result.At this point she also had a "feeling of urgency" about her breast and was trying to get an appointment for an open biopsy. She could not get a referral, though and was told that she would have to wait

The second surgeon recommended a biopsy to Jessica but he did not want to treat her. She returned to the to first doctor who told her that she was too young to have breast cancer and reluctantly performed a needle biopsy The test did not reveal an abnormality.Despite the anxiety that she was feeling , Jessica put her faith in her doctors and continued working.

During the fall, she worked as an auditor with UPS. while still taking antibiotics to heal the alleged infection. Although it was not heavy work she threw out her back in November. "I just bent over and something went out:' she said.

Between the problems with her breast and her back, much of her time was spent in doctor's offices. She saw four doctors about her back, all of whom had a different opinion about treatment. One doctor said it was a ruptured disc, another said it was muscle strain, a third doctor said to put heat on it, and another said cold All the doctors recommended painkillers and bed rest. Although Jessica was forthcoming with the problems she had been having with her breast, none of her doctors put it all together Her age seemed to rule out cancer, even though at this point the disease had attacked her bones.

Late one night she was rushed to the hospital after she slipped on the kitchen floor and lay in pain unable to move. The hospital shot her up with pain-killersand sent her home.

"If I knew then what I know now, I would be able to diagnose myself," she said.

By December, Jessica started to get bloated as her liver shut down. She began hallucinating as the calcium from her 'bones started to float in her blood stream at toxic levels.

Finally, she called her sister Jennifer, a nurse at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Jennifer was frightened enough to drive the three hours to New York to pick her up and take her to the hospital.

When Jennifer reached Jessica, she knew something was terribly wrong. Her sister was yellow with jaundice and in pain. The nurse in her told her what was wrong but she did not say anything to Jessica.

That night, December 21, Jessica had an open biopsy in Boston and was diagnosed with breast cancer. It took four months, a number of tests and six doctors before Jessica was properly diagnosed with breast cancer, Each doctor told her she was too young to worry about cancer.

Breast cancer kills because the tumor does not stay in the breast.It metasticizes; into other organs in the body, eating away until the body can not cope any longer. The younger the person, the more aggressive the disease--meaning while it can be treated more easily it can also spread faster.

By the age of 21, most women have spent a lot of time thinking about their breasts, their size, their shape, their ability to attract. Before they reach their biological imperative, their sole use is decorative. Theyare too big, or too small, they are an excuse to wander into Victoria's Secret or a reason to wear that bulky sweatshirt.

Occasionally, they are worthy of a fleeting notion that they need to be watched and examined, especially as your mother goes for her first mammogram. But young women don't think of their breasts as possible launching pads for a killer disease.

By the time, doctors diagnosed Jessica Bartell on December 21 there was a tumor on every vertebrae of her spine and on her scapula. Only 30 percent of her liver functioned, which caused the jaundice and bloating. Her cancerwas so far advanced that removing her breast would not have made a difference. Chemotherapy was her only hope.

At first, they started Pumping Jessica full of saline to rehydrate her.. She gained 60 IN of water and grew bloated to the point that she looked like she was carrying twins. She tries to remember the sequence of events, but her memories of this time are very foggy. She was in intense pain and emotional turmoil. She has little recollection of the hospital or the tests she knows she must have undergone.

The doctors let her go home four days later, for Christmas Eve, thinking that it would be her last family holiday.That night, she broke her arm shutting the car door because her bones were so porous. She caught her reflection in the mirror and scared herself, "I looked into the mirror once and

I promised that I would never do it again. I was a skeleton face with a big belly. I looked like a Cambodian child."

She carries pictures of that night with her to the hospital. She laughs as she points to her extended belly and long blonde hair. I can hardly reconcile the picture in front of me with the person sitting beside me. The difference having hair makes to her appearance is striking. She looks like a different person - she probably was a different person. She looks older, prettier, with her long blonde hair framing her face. Her girlfriend, Wendy, sits beside her laughing. Her family sits all around her as they are opening presents, as if it was just another Christmas eve. Nowhere in the picture does fear or sickness show.

The day after Christmas, Jessica returned to the hospital and her doctor from the Dana Farber Cancer Institute gave her a choice of quality of life or quantity. She could have chemotherapy which may extend her life temporarily but could make her very sick, or she could choose not to fight it.

"At first I said no to the chemo because I figured it was just going to make me sicker. My family was told, although I was not, that I had a few weeks, maybe months to five"

And then Jessica had an experience that she cannot quite identify. "I felt that someone, a woman, came andsat at my bed and told me to go through with the chemo," she said. And she changed her mind.

"I figured that if I'm going to lay in this bed and rot, what did I have to lose?"

Jessica's sister was not very hopeful. "My sister told my family that I was going to die. She is very medically geared and she looked at the statistics."

Doctors chose the most aggressive form of treatment that is available, a mixture of cytoxin, adnomyacin and feverfew (CAF). When Jessica started her first treatment she weighed 198 pounds because of the retained fluid and needed morphine for the pain. During the first week of 1994, she had her first round of CAF which is given on an 18-week cycle every three weeks.

The cherno made her sick, she would wake up in the middle of the night choking on phlegm. Her doctors maintained their poor prognosis and sent her home "to be comfortable". A euphemism, Jessica says, for going home to die.

After the first month of treatment she started to pass five pounds of water a day, a sign that her liver was starting to function better She said she couldn't go five minutes without stopping for a bathroom break. Her side effects slowly subsided and she was soon performing daily tasks without any help.

"As soon as I could I started to do things for myself. Anything I could do, like getting food for myself, or doing some laps around the apartment. But I still couldn't do things like pick things up, it hurt too much and if Ifell on the floor I couldn't get back up "

In March, after two months of chemotherapy, Jessica spoke at a fashion show for the American Cancer Society. She told the audience that young people can and do get cancer and there is hope for recovery. It was a milestone'for her. Right afterwards she got in her car and drove home to resume her life in New York. It was also the beginning of her crusade, as she calls it, to tell people that young people can get cancer.

Her chemotherapy ended in April and the doctors said they were impressed with how much the tumors had shrunk. They had not disappeared but there was nothing more they could do. Jessica was sent home toNew York with good wishes and an appointment in a few months.

"After the good news they send you on your way," she said.

We sit waiting in the chemo-infusion unit of Brigham and Women's Hospital, a Large area filled with grey leather recliners and IVs. Patients sit and talk to each other about the latest sales. Juice and home-made goodies are being passed around. The nurses chime into conversations and joke around with the patients. Private rooms are available, but most of the patients prefer to lounge and chat with each other as they receive their chemotherapy.

It takes three hours for all of Jessica's treatment. First she has a blood test to insure that her white cells are high enough to take another round of chemo. This waiting is period is difficult because it is a sign of how well her body is accepting the treatment. While she waits for the doctor's verdict she is hooked up to an IV full of saline to rehydrate, her. After the doctor delivers the good news she settles into a recliner and waits for her nurse, Christine, to put in the drug feverfew. Because Jessica receives so much treatment she has a porta-cath sewed into her chest, above her heart. The needles fit into this small box which delivers the medication straight to her bloodstream..

The feverfew is a clear liquid and it slowly drips into her body.

Most of the other patients are surrounded by spouses and children, everyone putting a brave face on what is a horrible disease. Jessica is the only one who wears a bandana around her bald head proudly. But she also the only one without family and friends accompanying her.

Jessica says she doesn't mind losing her hair, she has watched with interest as it grew in black and fuzzy and then fell out again. She says that she hates that people stare at her, though, and avoids crowded places like the subway. Laughing, she says the only time she hasn't been stared out was at a women's festival in Provincetown. The fellow lesbians thought she was making a statement and never looked twice at her.

Hair loss is just one of the many body image issues that young adults face when they are fighting cancer, says Katie Dobbin-Binda, a social worker who runs a support group for young adults with cancer: "Imagine what it is like for a young woman to lose a breast:' she said. "It is a time in your life when you want to be part of a group and you have no control over your body."

Twenty-somethings are not supposed to be faced with their mortality, their bodies are not supposed to break down. When most young adults are considering where to take their first job, cancer victim are wondering if they,ii have the energy to get to their doctors appointments. Jessica said that she was just figuring out who she was. She was committed to school for the first time in her life, she had finally met someone who provided her with the support and love that she had never had as a child. When she was diagnosed with cancer all her energy went into getting well, but it also helped her figure out what was important.

While she is undergoing treatment, Jessica has to depend on her family for support for the first time since she was a teenager. She lives pan-time with her father and part-time in New York with Wendy. She has grown closer to her dad than ever before but anger about her childhood still bubbles close to the surface. While she was staying with him, her father suffered a mild heart attack. Instead of changing his lifestyle to avoid another attack, Jessica said her father still sat around the house eating junk food. Jessica thought she would have provided a positive role model on how to fight a disease. "I thought he would change. I though he would fight because ....because of me," she said.

Parents and their children often have to reinterpret their issues of independence, says Jessica's social worker. Often the patients move back home and become dependent on their parents for the first time in years. The battles over who makes the difficult treatment decisions have a lot more meaning than the old fights about curfew.

Jessica still angers when she thinks of the number of friends who abandoned her in her time of need. She says that it was the people who she least expected to stickaround that turned out to be her strongest supporters.

Her relationship with her partner, Wendy, was difficult at first because Wendy did not know what to do."She wanted to do everything for me. She even peeled my banana for me until I grabbed it out of her hand and yelled

'Let me do the things that I can do for myself, because there aren't that many things that I can do."

Jessica has searched her family tree for other cancer victims but she is the only one. She wonders what it was that made her body susceptible. Jessicas family life was always difficult. Her parents divorced with she was eight and she has only spoken to her mother twice in seven years, once during her illness.She says her mother was mentally abusive and wonders if the sum of her childhood encouraged her cancer to grow.

There are no scientific indicators to link stress and cancer but Jessica looks for reasons all around her. "I think about how many hot dogs we ate when we were poor and I wonder."

She is surprisingly fatalistic about her disease. "I believe I was meant to have cancer. You are only given as much as you can bear," she said.

Jessica still searches for answers. "I've read about people who manage to stop asking why. I haven't. I have to think there is a purpose to this but I haven't found it yet." "I've always said that I've had a luminous black cloud with a silver lining following me around. A lot of bad things. have happened to me but one good thing has always come out of it"

Dobbin-Binda believes that most people do find that something good does come out having cancer. What that is, is different for every person, she says.

Jessica gets angry with her family, and angry with her doctors. But she does not feel angry about her cancer. She has gone through her mourning period, and now she focuses on the good things - her pets, her relationships and her small victories. But how do you deal with the fact that your Body has become your worst enemy?

Jessica says that when she was very sick she separated her mind and her body. "It was like I was floating above my body. It was the only way I could deal with it."

Even now, Jessica never says that she is sick, she says she was sick.

Jessica sent a letter to the Oprah Winfrey show, hoping to take her story to a wider audience, Not just her of cancer, but her life story., "I could be on Oprah for a hundred different reasons besides having cancer I grew in an abusive home, I'm a lesbian, I was poor."

Growing up, she lived all over Massachusetts and could not stick to school. She moved out as a teenager and held a number of blue-collar jobs. She moved to New York state and was in destructive relationships for years. But by the fall of 1993, she had begun to trust the happiness that was part of her daily life. She finally settled into a sciences program at a community college, she had a supportive relationship - and then she was diagnosed.

One constant in her Iife has been her love for animals. She wanted to be a veterinary assistant but she could not handle seeing animals in pain. Her many pets have given her a sense of strength throughout her life and motivated her to get better quickly so could spend more time with them.

When she returned home to New York, she could devote her time to getting healthy. Luckily, her employer, UPS, had good health insurance that has sustained her through her illness so she does not have to work. Dobbin-Binda says that many young people are not so lucky and they have to fight for health insurance as they fight for their health.

"Having a pre-existing condition like cancer at a young age is very problematic:' said Dobbin-Binch. Even after the cancer is gone, the issue of health coverage can live on forever.

Jessica stopped her treatment in May, only four months after her diagnosis.. In June, she and Wendy visited a friend in Key West where they went swimming with dolphins. Her eyes shine and her hands go to touch the dolphin earrings she wears as she talks of their experience. She says the dolphins treated her with an extra degree of gentleness and all three gravitated towards her, The trainer told Jessica that the dolphins can tell when a person is sick and treats them with special care.

Unfortunately, that luminous black cloud was still following her. In July, she started to get persistent headaches. She had been seeing a holistic doctor regularly who told her it was an allergy and changed her combination of vitamins. One week later she started to get bloated and she called her

sister in a panic Her sister once again drove to New York, picked her up and drove her immediately to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Her Catscan that night showed that she had a tumor at the base of her brain.

"My immediate reaction was horror. I always said that I could

handle anything but brain tumors, it iust leaves so much to go wrong. I'm more scared of going blind or deaf than of dying," she said.

Jessica immediately started radiation to shrink the tumor in her head. Chemotherapy was delayed because person's body can not undergo radiation and chemotherapy at the same time. While she was undergoing radiation treatment the tumors in the rest of her body continued to grow. Once again

Jessica grew bloated beyond recognition and her back started to hurt.

Everyone knew that the first round of chemotherapy did not eradicate her tumors but they had hoped that the tumors would have been zapped into submission for more than two months.

While receiving chemo, she -shows her "war wounds" to Christine to prove that four months later the skin on her stomach still looks like old tissue paper and the stretch marks on her legs are like river beds.

Christine starts Jessica's round of Adriomyacin, cancer's most effective killer. The nurse is wrapped in a blue paper and plastic shield as she inserts the drug into Jessica's IV. She laughs as she takes extra precaution not to touch the drug which could bum her skin in seconds.

"What's good for you is not good for me," she says as Jessica winces when the medication starts to enter her vein.

"I couldn't watch them do any of these procedures before:' she said. "Now I have the stomach for anything, except this " She gestures to the red Kool-Aid looking syrup which drips from the IV. Adriomyacin is Jessica's best friend and worst enemy. It is the most aggressive drug in the war against cancer but it also has a very dangerous side effect. Long-time exposure to the drug weakens the heart muscle and Jessica is now two weeks away from her life-long limit of adriomyacin.

Doctors tried Taxol, another kind of cancer fighting drug, on Jessica following her radiation. She did not respond quickly enough and kept getting more and

more bloated as her liver shut down. Her doctors decided that a second round of CAF was the better option. Jessica tries not to worry but she knows that after this round she is at risk of her tumors growing back and she does not trust TaxoI to work.

Her nurse tries to reassure her by saying that TaxoI worked on her cancer, it just did not work fast enough. And she had been running out of time,

It seems that Jessica and her medical staff are concerned, even resigned, to the fact that her tumors will grow again. Jessica knows that she had beaten all the odds so far, but she is worried. As her second round of CAF comes close to a close, her doctor gives her good news. A new drug has come onto the market which will combat the heart-weakening effects of adriornyacin. She is visibly

buoyed by this news. Unfortunately, good news about a drug's side effects, and not about her health, is all Jessica has to hold onto.

But, Jessica's health is relatively good. As she finishes her second round of CAF, her liver functions well, her tumors have shrunk and the only side effect from the chemo is a slight nausea.

Jessica continues with her holistic treatment. Her vitamins , she swears, are making her feel energetic and healthy. "I feel better than I ever have before, better even than before I was sick:'

She takes shark cartilage and asiac tea as well as combinations of vitamins. Her doctors neither encourage nor condemn the practise, saying that she should do anything that makes her feel better.

Jessica does not turn away any form of help. She says she has people praying for her from all religions. She wears a cross and an angel pendant despite the fact she does not in believe in organized religion. I need everything on my side that I can get:' she says.

She's right, of course. Her prognosis is not good. Her tumors have not disappeared and in all liklihood will reappear in a few months, or hopefully years. "I do not believe in putting a timeline on anyone's life:' she says, often.

Jessica, however, continues to have faith in her body and in the spiritual presence that visited her once before. She never asks her doctors how much time she has, leaving those kinds of questions to her sister the nurse. She

looks at the future in six-month intervals. It may be a cliché but she lives for the moment. She tells the nurse excitedly of a new leather jacket that she bought. "I can't afford it but hey... " The thought trails off unspoken, punctuated by a barely noticible shrug.

Jessica rarely mentions the word death or dying. Jessica sets up

a silent rule that her life span is not to be discussed. Yes, she thinks about it, how could she not? She said death "is always at the back of my mind:' She gestures to the older people in the room. "Its at the back of everybody's mind. Everyone in this room thinks about their mortality."

When she has a bad day, she lets it all out. "When you have a bad moment you have to pick yourself up and wake up. You can't live in fear because its going to ruin the rest of the days you have."

She eagerly drives in once a week for her support group. Even though she is the "farthest one along" she needs to know that there are other young adults out there who understand what she is going through.

"I think that will be my crusade. There must be other 20-year- olds out there whose doctors are telling them that they are too young to get cancer I want to tell people that cancer touches everyone, everybody across the board. And its not a death sentence "

Soon, Jessica will be sent on her way to give her body a break from the chemotherapy, her doctors and nurses, her family and friends will be waiting for the next sign that the monster once again lives in her body.

Jessica still believes that she can again beat the odds. "I have broken every rule about cancer. Sure it will take a small miracle, but I'm hoping for a miracle."

* * *

Unfortunately, Jessica Bartell ran out of miracles. On Christmas Eve, two years exactly after she was diagnosed Jessica was re-admitted to the hospital. Her tumors had grown to the point that she was paralyzed For the first time during her illness, Jessica refused to talk to the people around her She was sent home to her father's house to die She died in mid-January. Her girlfriend Wendy said she knows that Jessica is in heaven working with animals, "only there are no litter pans to clean up."

Two hundred people came to her memorial, mourning a young woman who died of breast cancer.

IT'S SATURDAY, 6 a.m. What the hell am I doing in New Hampshire?

More to the point, what the hell am I doing&endash;awake, no less&endash;in a YMCA gymnasium in Manchester, N.H., on a frosty early February morning? It is, as the locals say, ass-cold outside. Unfortunately, it is also ass-cold in the gymnasium I've fitfully slept in: some maintenance man forgot to turn on the heat at the end of his shift last night. Luckily for him, the room he left frigid is populated by hundreds of young, labor-friendly liberals, in town to stuff envelopes for Bill Clinton's nascent reëlection campaign. The New Hampshire primary&endash;the first in a bludgeoning series of grass-roots elections lasting roughly from now until the rapture, you'll recall&endash;is less than two weeks away, and though the President has no major opposition for his party's nomination, everyone in the gym nonetheless seems to agree that it's important for the Democratic party to show solidarity and vote.

That's Bruce's opinion, anyway. Bruce is one of several people in charge of the New Hampshire branch of the Clinton-Gore '96 campaign, and it's soon apparent that no hour is too early for Bruce to begin. Bruce is loud and large, in that order. What Bruce wants, I surmise, Bruce gets. And what Bruce wants now more than anything&endash;more even than an extra hour of sleep, apparently&endash;is for Bill Clinton to be reëlected President of these United States. Now.

"Let's go!" Bruce barks, a randy dog in political heat. "There are still eight Republican candidates out there. And they're already awake!" You get the idea that if Bruce orders his steak well-done and the waitress brings it medium-well, said waitress would summarily be subjected to a cataclysmic tirade that would send her hastily to the kitchen, dropping salty tears all over the haute cuisine. Bruce speaks in italics and exclamation points. He's in your face. He's volatile. But he doesn't give a fuck. Or, as he puts it, "Wake up, you young Democrats! I know I'm in your face! I know I'm volatile! But I don't give a fuck!"

• • •

THE BIG GUY himself was here the night before. Clinton and his endless entourage rolled into Salem, N.H. last night, where the President spoke at Salem High School to a decidedly partisan crowd. In sum, the speech will turn out to be a no-brainer, a shorter and flatter redux of the scintilating State of the Union address he'd given only a few nights before. But that he is here at all speaks volumes; Clinton knows he'll get trounced in New Hampshire come November. New Hampshire is one of the most conservative states in the union, a state that loves its guns, a state without income tax, a state where a felon could probably run and win as long as he promised to repeal thre Brady Law and leave people's pocketbooks alone.

But the president can hardly ignore New Hampshire, so there he was, stumping and orationg, shaking hands and kissing babies, looking alternately bemused and statesmanlike--in short, all the things a presidential candidate must do, even if he's already president. I came to Salem, to paraphrase a popular campaign-season line, on a mission for the heart and soul of America. I came to hang out with young people for a couple of days, to follow them around as they went door-to-door and made phone calls, to listen in on their conversations and to take stock of their opinions.

But mostly, I came because I wanted to find out if young Americans are indeed as apathetic&endash;and thereby pathetic&endash;as the conventional wisdom seems to hold. Americans below the age of twenty-four went to the voting booths in droves in 1992, and overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Bill Clinton. The former Arkansas governor's election was seen as a watershed, a harbinger of a future in which the flannel-clad masses actually took part in their civic duty by voting, regardless of for whom. For the first time since the voting age was lowered to eighteen, America's youth in 1992 were seen as a tangible voting bloc, a chunk of the populace that had something to say and actually wielded some clout. And young Americans, as anyone who has spent much time on a college campus can tell you, tend to vote liberal. Democrats were ecstatic.

But then came the Republican revolution of 1994, when the young essentially told the political system it could go to hell. Few voted, and&endash;whoosh&endash;the GOP was ushered into the majority, vowing all the way to cut student aid and ransack education programs that, surprise, tend to benefit the young. Would the 18- to 24-year-olds of America, I wondered, having been duly blindsided in '94, put in the work this year to get their peers out to vote, even in a state as famously right-of-center as New Hampshire?

• • •

THINGS SEEM MODERATELY promising when I arrive at Salem High School. The lengthy line outside, each standee waiting to be frisked and metal-detectored to the guards' content, offers a wide sampling of people, from the I-still-soil-my-Pampers set to the geriatric. In between are a fair number of Gen-Xers, replete with dyed hair and a healthy dose of attitude. "Let us in already!" someone yelps. "It's cold as hell out here!"

Indeed it is. But the gym inside&endash;a bit tiny for this kind of thing, it seems&endash;is a boiling cauldron of pro-Clinton hysteria. The partisan crowd has erected a massive (and massively ugly) blue banner reading, creatively enough, "Salem, N.H. Welcomes President Clinton." Red, white and blue balloons hang in large nets strewn across the ceiling, and the Salem High School band is in full force, stirring up a musical brew that is as inspirational as&endash;well, as inspirational as a band that only knows four songs can muster. "America the Beautiful" and a couple other love-your-country ditties spew forth from the trumpets and trombones and claviers&endash;yes, some kid has a clavier, not the first or last strange sight of the evening&endash;of the nattily-attired band. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. By the time Clinton actually strides to the podium twenty feet in front of me, I estimate that I have heard America the Fucking Beautiful approximately thirty times, and I want to strangle each and every one of those blessed children in the band.

But at partisan political rallies, you check your baser instincts&endash;along with your keys, your spare change, and your homemade bombs&endash;at the door and immediately enter into a bizarre kinship with everyone in the room, the idea being that if the person next to you is going to vote for the same guy you are, well, he's your friend, or at least someone you shouldn't give the finger to after he's stepped on your toes for the umpteenth time. The atmosphere is exceedingly communal and downright jovial as hardy Democrats, young and old, take part in what is turning out to be a pre-speech party, right here in the Salem HS gym.

At any major rally, though, before the main attraction can take the stage, he has to be introduced by a cavalcade of local dignitaries. The trouble with local dignitaries is that they tend to be overly dopey in their big moment, perhaps afflicted with Listless Blather Syndrome when they look to the back of the room and, instead of seeing the lunch lady like they usually do, they see Wolf Blitzer. By God, this is big! Wasn't he at the Gulf War? And so the speeches commence, one local fop after another exhorting local Democrats to take to the polls en masse in the upcoming primary and cracking a variety of moribund jokes that would make you laugh only if you were addicted to nitrous oxide, something I heartily recommend if you're going to do this sort of thing for a living.

Clinton, waving and preening, takes the stage to wild applause. One more introduction is left, though, and this is made by Larry Belair, a long-time activist in the Salem Democratic party. Belair is, to put it only moderately politely, not the most telegenic man in Salem, but he obviously relishes the fact that he has been given the lead-in to Clinton's speech, and therefore has about ten minutes to foist himself on the C-Span junkies currently tuning in to see what nuggets of firebrand wisdom Clinton will utter this evening.

Belair makes some snappy rah-rah remarks before ending his speech with a joke that is, admittedly, far funnier than anything Clinton will say in his ensuing hour-long talk. "The Republicans," he begins, "are going to raise funds to balance the budget by selling Republican bonds. The Dole bonds have no interest. The Buchanan bonds have no principal. The Forbes bonds are all stamped tax-free." He pauses, displaying a masterful sense of comic timing that would have made Henny Youngman moist with envy. "And the Gingrich bonds," Belair drawls, "have no maturity!" Ba-boom! The crowd goes ape. Clinton merely smiles politely, probably aware that significant political folderol would doubtless ensue if the national media caught him in uproarious laughter at such a line. This is the kind of thing you have to do when you're President, and it's probably one reason Clinton always has bags under his eyes.

Clinton then takes the podium to thunderous cheers and much waving of flags and ribbons. He launches into his speech, which is unusually slow and banal for the first twenty minutes or so before he really gets rolling, harping on the need to preserve education, to help working families, to cut big government while at the same time ensuring it remains large enough to lend a hand when needed. It's standard Clintonese, warm and brotherly yet stern and intellectual.

The speech offers only one joke, though, and it comes while Clinton is nattering about the (admittedly serious) problem of poor standards for testing beef. The President assumes his most somber and earnest face, while at the same time espousing the tried-and-true political rule that says if you must be in Serious Paternal Mode when you tell a joke, well, that joke had better be about meat. And the Prez carries it off like a seasoned pro: "We were inspecting beef the way dogs do, by sniffing it!" he cracks, sending the flag-wavers into orgasmic mirth before tsk-tsking them back down to harsh, salmonella-plagued reality. "Yeah, it sounds funny until you think about it happening to you." I make a mental note: stop eating steak.

Later Clinton tries to be wittily poignant, an effort that, sadly, falls flat. Invoking the state-champion 12-0 Salem High School football team as a metaphor for governmental teamwork and responsibility, Clinton, making his standard I-care gesture by thrusting his fist forward, thumb up, says, "There's not a halfback in the world who can run without a line." He pauses for a long, long time, and the entire gym is silent, perhaps expecting a laugh line or something more meaningful. They don't get it. "You simply can't do it," Clinton says before quickly changing the subject. He wraps the speech up, says his goodbyes, and is off the stage in a flash, working the masses&endash;shaking hands and smiling as the flash bulbs explode. I press forward into the madding crowd, but my only vision of the President comes when I spot a gray tuft of his voluminous hair rising above the fray a good ten feet in front of me. After five minutes of palm-slapping and jocularity, Clinton is whisked out of the gym by the Secret Service to go wherever Presidents go after campaign speeches.

Where I go after campaign speeches is usually home, but tonight I'm to hop on a van to Manchester, half an hour's drive away, to shack up in the YMCA. The team of Clinton-Gore volunteers has three vans&endash;red, white and blue, as it happens&endash;and since I've made Bruce's acquaintance earlier in the evening, I go to his. While we're waiting for the arrival of the guy with the keys, Bruce engages me in a violent snowball fight. Several minutes later, we're both wet and cold, and no closer to getting into the van. Bruce sees my weariness and claims victory.

"Truce, Brian," he says.

"Truce, Bruce," I say.

I turn around, and a moment later feel a wet mass collide&endash;paff&endash;with the back of my neck and run down my shirt. "Gotcha," Bruce howls. It is, I assume, this kind of fighting spirit that will be put to use in the upcoming campaign&endash;hit Dole or Alexander or Gramm with a rhetorical snowball when they least expect it. I wipe off my neck, curse the son of a bitch, and climb into the van.

Are the youth of America woefully apathetic and apolitical? This was my first chance to find out, riding in a van with a dozen specimens. I figured that anyone willing to come see a Presidential address and then sleep on a cold gym floor would be decidedly with it, able to spout off policy specifics at me until I was blue in the face. Bruce begins by soliciting everyone's name and goals.

"I'm Nancy," says a girl sitting directly in front of me. "I'm a junior at Boston University, and I, uh, have no real goals right now."

"I'm also Nancy," says her seatmate. "I'm also a junior at BU, and I don't really have any goals either."

The rest of the van is a cross-section of students from local schools&endash;a Harvardite here, a Northeasterner there&endash;and, aside from the goalless Nancies, everyone seems to have at least a vague idea what they'd like to do with their lives. But no one wants to go into politics. They want to study it (political science), make fun of it (stand-up comedy) or cover it (journalism), but no one seems to have a real passion for the down-and-dirty trenchwork that any campaign, especially a Presidential one, requires.

No one, that is, save Bruce and his three enthusiastic, youngish compatriots in the front two seats of the van. They are, of course, all working diligently on the effort to get Bill Clinton a second term in the White House. It is, as Aaron, the van's driver, tells me, a full-time job, and then some. "I generally work upwards of fifty hours a week, driving this van all over the place to rallies and such," he says. "It's important that we get the message out, because people in New Hampshire need to know that the Democrats are solidly behind Bill Clinton. He's the first Democrat not to have a primary challenge in years, and that might make people lazy. We have to make sure they go out and vote on primary day, to send that message of solidarity."

"Rallies and such"? "Message of solidarity"? Still so young, and already Aaron and his cohorts are speaking the language of the wonk, throwing around terms and discussing boring policy&endash;what the Fed should do about interest rates, for example&endash;like a herd of junior Stephanopoulouses. Even when they have fun, they do it in a reserved way, like they're afraid that too much revelry will compromise the seriousness of their task. Bruce suggests a van singalong, which might give the Nancies something to focus their energies on, at least temporarily.

Aaron loves the idea. "Does anyone know the French national anthem?" Scarily enough, Bruce and the other two staffers do, and they begin singing it at top volume while the rest of us sit in slackjawed incredulity. This is what passes for a young liberal today? Whatever happened to taking over a professor's office and burning your bra?

Bite your tongue, Aaron tells me. "This is too serious, and there's too much work to be done," he says. "We leave the demonstrations to the others." Presaging Bruce's cantankerous performance the next morning, Aaron tells me to "be ready to get up early tomorrow. Tons of work," he says. "Tons of work." Caught up in patriotic French grandeur, Aaron accidentally swerves a bit, and we nearly get puréed by a merging snowplow. "Whoopsie," Aaron says, a word I find difficult to picture coming out of the mouth of, say, Bobby Seale.

Yes, America, this is your modern young liberal. Welcome to the future.

ANNE, A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD volunteer, hears Bruce's high-octane wake-up call, rolls over from her gym mat and rubs her eyes. "If I were at home," she grumbles, "I'd still be in bed, sleeping off a hangover." Anne is a political science major at Boston University whose personal political leanings could best be described as to the right of Mao, but only slightly. "I'm flirting with socialism," she tells me, as though it were sitting at the bar stool next to her. "I'm not satisfied merely being a Democrat."

But for the purposes of getting Bill Clinton reëlected, being a Democrat suits her just fine. One of the many ironies of the campaign season is that Anne's last name is Gingrich. She is, however, quick with a qualifier. "It's pronounced Ging-RICK," she says, "which is actually how Newt's should be, too. It's just that his moron constituents down in Georgia can't handle it that way."

Gingrich (the student, not the Speaker) occasionally serves as good evidence to back up the claims of those who say that the left and right ends of the political spectrum are pretty much the same thing these days, that real political discourse gets lost in a sea of rhetoric and childish invective&endash;the ideologies may differ, but the primitive mudslinging used by each party is identical.

I hand Gingrich a recent newspaper opinion piece concerning the death penalty. The piece's writer is a latter-day Hammurabi, extremely pro-capital punishment&endash;as in, chain-gang-'em, hang-'em, disembowel-the-filthy-bastards, whatever it takes to exact revenge and, therefore, justice. Gingrich quickly reads the piece, frowning all the while.

"I can see so many holes in his argument," she seethes, "so I'm not even going to begin. What an ass."

But Gingrich's convictions are solid: she's volunteered on several political campaigns since high school, starting with school board elections in her hometown of Palmyra, Penn., a sleepy Pennsylvania-Dutch town a few miles from Hershey. "I began working on the school board campaigns in large part because my local school board was full of fascist, authoritarian assholes," she says. "My family was one of the liberal black sheep of the town&endash;it was the Scheers, the Lesmerises, the Jacksons, and us. And that was about it as far as Democrats go. So it was tough to get anywhere with the school boards, and the good guys didn't win until now," she says, referring to recent elections that plopped a couple of liberals in the midst of so much conservatism. "It was getting ridiculous. Nineteen-eighty-eight or '89 was the last time they raised taxes&endash;you can't do that with public schools. The teachers had been working without a contract for three years. Ridiculous."

Gingrich later worked on the campaign of Ed Krebs, a candidate for Pennsylvania's congress. It was her first winning effort, but a Phyrric victory in that "Ed became a Republican once he was in office, the bastard. Pfff. But his name is fun to say, huh? Ed Krebs. Ed Krebs. Ed Krebs."

Shortly after arriving at BU, Gingrich volunteered on the Congressional campaign of the less-mellifluous Charles Collier, in what turned out to be a losing effort. "I started out in small-town community stuff, because that's what affected me. When I first came to Boston and found out about Charles' campaign, that was great, because it was an opportunity to do something that much bigger. I must've stood out in front of Beacon Supermarket seven million times, holding signs and talking to people. It was really great, though, because everyone involved was so young"&endash;Collier himself was 28, and his campaign manager, Patricia White, daughter of former Boston mayor Kevin White, was a spry 24&endash;"and there were a ton of student volunteers.

"Losing sucks," she says, completing the thought after pausing for a few seconds. "Charles was so young and was running against people who had such deep roots in Boston politics. But what the hell&endash;the night we lost, we had a huge party and got really drunk. Even Charles." She laughs.

Gingrich bristles at her peers who fail to get involved, who simply tolerate the status quo for reasons of boredom, sheer apathy, or something else. "Why should people get involved? Because it does affect you," she says, almost pleading in a please-buy-my-logic manner. "The little things I started doing in my hometown, for example&endash;the new school board is having a positive effect on a school my sister still goes to. And even though the results are less and less tangible as you get to higher levels of government, things still affect you. You should give a shit, because the decisions made at the top do have an effect on you."

"Less and less tangible at higher levels of government" aptly describes what happens on Saturday, post-YMCA, in New Hampshire. The "tons of work" Aaron alluded to the night before turn out, apparently, only to be shuttling from campaign office to campaign office, drinking Sunny Delight from (environmentally-unfriendly) Styrofoam cups and munching donut holes by the boxful, because that's all we do. "This is crap," Gingrich says. "We should be doing more work." A brief inquiry to someone who looks vaguely like he's in charge reveals the following: no one is really sure what's going on, where we'll go next, or what the rest of the weekend will hold. Gingrich and the three pals she came with surreptitiously split, grabbing the next one-way Greyhound back to Boston.

"I hated to leave," Gingrich says later, "because it sort of compromises what I say&endash;like I'm not putting my money where my mouth is. But I have never seen anything so disorganized in my life. Small campaigns lend themselves to stability and organization, and this just didn't have it&endash;we were never told what we were supposed to do or where we were going. I guess I'd prefer to work in a campaign headquarters instead of being driven all over the place like that. Thankfully, I don't think it's reflective of the Clinton campaign as a whole. Maybe just New Hampshire, because they know he has no chance of winning there anyway."

We play a game: irritating guy yaks up a laundry list of current hot topics; campaign volunteer gives her off-the-cuff responses. Paging Dr. Freud...

Welfare.

"It needs to be reformed. But it's definitely necessary, because it helps the people who need it far more than it is abused by those who don't."

Hillary.

"I love her. She's a great example for women."

Ronald Reagan.

"I am totally unimpressed by anything he ever did."

Health care.

"Should be universal."

Bosnia.

"It confuses me, honestly. It's so tangled up. Every time I think I understand something, I get bugged by something else. What a mess."

Louis Farrakhan.

"He scares me. I think he's crazy, but in a way he's sort of like Rush Limbaugh&endash;what he's saying is blatantly wrong, but he's got enough followers to make him scary."

Contract With America.

"Republican propaganda that we surprisingly don't hear much about anymore."

Marijuana.

"Should be legalized."

Tim McVeigh.

"He just seems so disturbed. If he did what everyone thinks he did, he's the closest thing America has seen to its own monster."

O.J. Simpson.

"Guilty. But he was found not guilty, so leave him alone."

School prayer.

"No. I don't believe in it. Keep religion in any form out of the schools."

Gingrich answers everything immediately, so I try to stump her by bringing out an obscure politician who no modern student could possibly know much about. No such luck, Buster&endash;she is, after all, a poli sci major.

Millard Fillmore.

"Preceded Pierce as President of the United States. Followed Taylor."

• • •

A HORDE OF suit-wearing, rhetoric-spewing, fist-pumping Republican Presidential candidates descends on Manchester, N.H., at 8 p.m. on February 15, a scant five days before the nation's first primary. By this time, Phil Gramm, the toad-faced Texas Senator who was considered an early favorite, has dropped out of the race, and eight candidates stand before us, primed to answer the usual morass of questions about health care, education and perhaps the now-legendary boxers-or-briefs query that propelled Clinton to cult-hero status in 1992. For that speaks of one key issue in this campaign, at least concerning the young vote: can any of these guys possibly compete with the saxophone-playing, MTV-savvy Clinton for the favor of America's youth? One of the President's gifts is his ability to gauge his audience and tailor his message accordingly. While the young are not the primary constituency in anyone's political strategy book, their votes count as much as anyone else's and thus cannot be ignored&endash;can any of these GOP hopefuls convincingly claim that he represents the best interests of the young? This debate, it seems, will offer the first chance to find out.

Dramatis Personae:

•Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor who has been campaigning in a red plaid shirt to show his connection with voters. He's also been walking across New Hampshire, echoing a years-ago campaign for Tennessee's highest office, in which he walked across the entire state, during which promenade he was hit by a truck. Years later, he looks no worse for the wear.

•Pat Buchanan, whose unique brand of ultra-conservatism has won him a faithful following among the Christian right but whose exclusionary politics make more moderate Republicans scared of him. Buchanan delivered a speech at the '92 Republican convention in San Diego so stultifying in its right-wing fervor that Dallas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins, a well-known bugbear to Republicans of any magnitude, cracked that the speech sounded much better in the original German.

•Bob Dole, the 72-year-old Senate Majority Leader from Kansas who has emerged as the preëmptive favorite but whose distinct lack of charisma&endash;as animated as a brick, Dole is&endash;could turn off some people who would like their President, at the very least, to be in possession of a pulse.

•Bob Dornan, a U.S. Representative from California who has almost no core support and is nicknamed "B-1 Bob" for his violent tirades on the House floor.

•Steve Forbes, the rich-kid publishing heir with a face like a piece of pumice who has been spending millions of dollars of his own fortune in an effort to get elected and enact a flat tax of 17 percent, which, it turns out, will save Richie Riches like himself a mint but which might force lower-income families to pawn their children for food stamps.

•Alan Keyes, a fire-breathing former U.S. Ambassador who is the first African-American to seek the GOP Presidential nomination. Keyes is going nowhere fast, but sounds extremely impressive doing it&endash;he talks a mile a minute and has gained a modicum of support with his save-the-fetuses campaign, all delivered in a slick preacher's oratory style.

•Dick Lugar, Indiana's senior Senator, who was snubbed in 1988 when George Bush picked his subordinate&endash;goofy guy named Quayle; perhaps you've heard of him&endash;for the vice-presidency. Lugar is earnest and grandfatherly, and also unfailingly polite and gentlemanly: in short, he has absolutely no place in the New Hampshire follies.

•Morry Taylor, an Illinois businessman whose primary qualification for the Presidency appears to be that he has sold a tremendous amount of radial tires. He promises to do for the country what he did for the Illinois tire industry, and who couldn't be inspired by a message like that?

It's extremely difficult to picture any of these guys as the fifth face on Mt. Rushmore, but I decide to keep my eye on Lugar, if for no other reason than because he seems so sincere, so out of place&endash;someone who might remind youngsters of their kindly old uncle, perhaps. He looks like a ventriloquist's dummy, his creased face barely changing expression as he spouts his roster of foreign-policy expertise and pragmatic solutions for America's future. It becomes increasingly clear as the night wears on, however, that no one really gives a damn, preferring instead the vitriol of Buchanan, who usurps Keyes by making mention of the "screaming unborn" in his opening statement, or the craggy, wizened stature of Dole, who incessantly panders to the voters and can't seem to answer the question of why he wants to be President, after all, except to say that he's earned it, by Christ, because he's seventy-two years old and probably won't have another chance. This is your modern Republican Presidential candidate? What happened to men of stature, men like Lincoln or Ronald Reagan or even pre-Watergate, Golden-Door-opening Richard Nixon? The United States has never had, and probably never will have, a President named "Morry." Is this what selecting a candidate has come down to?

Well, yes. Churchill once said that democracy is the worst political system except for all the others, and America proves that aphorism daily. The eight candidates strewn before me and the world on this cold New Hampshire evening, in the studios of Manchester's Channel 9, are the Peter Principle brought cruelly to life, thrusting their blemishes toward the cameras for all to see.

Dick Lugar is, in truth, not a man of many blemishes. Unfortunately for his election hopes, he's not a man of much else, either. He's on the wrong foot from his opening statement, in which he trumpets a bunch of meaningless statistics about health care and the federal budget before ending by calling himself "alternative"&endash;in the sense that he's alternative to Dole, I presume, and not that he has his nipples pierced and sports a Kurt Cobain poster on his office wall.

Throughout the debate, Lugar performs flawlessly, in a soothing voice reminiscent of honey poured over gravel, but with all the vigor of a soggy peanut butter sandwich. At times, he even seems like someone the Clinton campaign has smuggled in&endash;is Bruce nearby?, I wonder&endash;to tweak his GOP rivals into a froth:

Moderator: How do you respond to charges that the Republican-majority Congress is far too radical and extreme for most Americans?

Dick Lugar: Well, we have mismanaged quite a bit.

The good Senator then comes out in favor of Environmental Protection Agency regulations and strict environmental safety nets that will, for example, help keep businesses from dumping toxic chemical waste into school playgrounds, an idea not wholly embraced by the GOP Congress. What the hell is he doing here?

Later, Lugar, by now rendered completely ineffectual by the others, who at least have something moderately concrete to say, gets his big chance to make an impact when he eloquently rails against negative campaign advertising. "I don't need negative ads," he says, "because I appeal to both Republicans and Democrats." Huh? Lugar then elucidates the general esprit de corps of his campaign, and actually has the nation raptly watching him as he discusses his values. And when it comes time for him to deliver the inspiring closing line, his Why-I-Should-Be-President mantra, he drops the ball. In a major way. "A vote for Dick Lugar," he says, voice rising with emotion for the first time, you suspect, since the birth of his first child, "is a vote for clean campaigning!"

Oh.

Five days later, the voters pummel Lugar at the polls, handing him a meager 7 percent of the vote. The genteel Indianan is thus relegated to the electoral scrap-heap, down in Morry Taylor country, where no self-respecting politician should ever find himself. The Granite State further cements its reputation as the state with the most wackos as it gives Buchanan a close victory over Dole, 29 to 27 percent. Lugar formally drops out of the race on March 7 after gamely holding on for fourteen primaries despite wallowing in a miasma of few votes and shrinking funds. Bracing as ever in his withdrawal speech, Lugar movingly tells reporters that "I'd say the momentum is suspect. And the money is gone." In truth, I'll miss him.

• • •

I WENT TO a meeting of the Boston University College Republicans organization to find out if young conservatives say things like "I know I'm in your face! I know I'm volatile! But I don't give a fuck!"

My hunch was no. Any 21-year-old willing to believe that Lamar Alexander is the best man for the Oval Office, I assumed, would be more apt to talk about the financial implications of the Maastricht Treaty than to utter the F-word in anything approaching mixed company.

But then, I considered, it's doubtful that a meeting of Republicans, even in college, could be called "mixed company." I expected that a demographic pie chart of the BUCR would not have many slices. I assumed I'd see nothing but hyperactive rich white kids, eager to tell me why being on welfare is a sin and why every American should 1) fear God, and 2) own a gun. Guess what? I was wrong&endash;sort of.

I stride in ten minutes early, the first in the room. Of the eight people who finally show up, only three are white, and only four male. This, apparently, is not your father's Republicanism, a Republicanism of grey felt hats and drab suits and practical suburban homilies along the lines of The world will be okay, son, if we just cast our vote for the good Senator Goldwater on Tuesday...

So the look of modern young Republicans is a little different, but, in fact, the ideology looks to have remained markedly the same. The BUCR counts roughly 315 members, according to Matt Fiorill, who is on the BUCR's executive board, and for the ten who have bothered to show up this evening, talk quickly turns to the Presidential race. Dole's campaign has not caught fire yet&endash;it will, in a little over a week&endash;and the possibility that Pat Buchanan could be the party's divisive nominee, while championed by one or two in the room, is clearly a matter for concern.

"You know what's going to happen?" says Matt Wood, Director of Communications for the BUCR. "We're going to have a brokered convention"&endash;a unprecedented situation where no candidate secures enough delegates to guarantee nomination, and an enormous battle ensues at the convention&endash;"and Jack Kemp will get the nomination. I know it."

Jack Kemp? The former Buffalo Bills quarterback and ex-head of Housing and Urban Development who makes many Republicans foam with delight but who has repeatedly insisted he doesn't want to be President, at least not in this century? Surely Wood is joking. But he's deadly serious: "He'd pull our asses out of the fire, boy."

"I heard Kemp is gay," someone remarks. "Is that true?"

A lengthy discussion ensues as to what, exactly, Jack Kemp does within the walls of his bedroom. "That rumor's been going around for years," says Fiorill. "I don't care. I'd support him anyway."

How sporting. That Kemp's sexual orientation is even up for discussion highlights a distinct problem for young Republicans: what do you do if you're fiscally conservative&endash;hands off my wallet, Bill&endash;but socially liberal, or at least moderate? Is there a home in the GOP for someone who believes homosexuals aren't sinners, or that a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her pregnant self? Sarah Sanchez, BUCR's chairperson, sees no tangible moral obfuscation. She's 20, a senior majoring in Mechanical Engineering. And she once worked in a (stop the presses!) federally-funded AIDS clinic in Los Angeles, her hometown.

\"The Republican party is inclusive, period," she says. She should know: she's half-Spanish, half-Mexican, and was raised, for the bulk of her childhood, in a one-parent home. "I worked for my money, on my own, and I took care of myself," she says, explaining her political convictions. "I didn't want my money taken away and given to people who didn't work. Everyone has an opposition to work, but you need to go out and do it."

Hard work appears to be Sanchez' lingua franca. She has no use for affirmative action or glass-ceiling policies; they just reward lassitude and handout-takers, she says. "The way things should get done is through hard work. Hard work will always get you through."

Yet she doesn't hedge in the slightest when discussing her own views. "I'm extremely conservative. Fiscally and socially."

Pat Buchanan recently made waves in Republican circles when he insisted that the entire nomination ticket&endash;both President and Vice-President&endash;must be pro-life. He was seconded by Ralph Reed, the boyish leader of the Christian Coalition, whose members help comprise the single-most powerful special-interest group in American polity today. "Someone who is a good nominee and pro-life would be best," Sanchez says. "But if it comes down to someone who wouldn't make a good nominee but is pro-life, or someone who is a good nominee but not pro-life, then obviously you have to go with the good nominee."

When the conversation swings to the alleged apathy of the young, Sanchez sighs, like a parent aware that her kids are a little on the lazy side but not really certain what to do about it. "I don't think we're completely apathetic. People my age definitely have a lot of views, though whether or not they get involved is another story. They don't think it affects them&endash;think it's enough that their parents vote, or whatever. A lot of them don't work, so it doesn't affect them. But everybody has to work eventually, so it affects everyone."

The ability to go from Us to Them is a neat trick, one Sanchez executes with much aplomb in the above opinion. It's a tactic that everyone uses, but none more effectively than the Republican party&endash;Those lazy slobs on welfare are stealing our money; Those heathens are corrupting the good moral fiber of our America. But that kind of polar-opposite confrontationalism implies a solid set of beliefs, at least, something of which Dole&endash;who will be the party's November nominee, it is by now clear&endash;appears to be bereft of. I ask Sanchez if Dole is simply too old for people her age, either us or them. She hedges, pausing for ten or fifteen seconds before stammering an answer. "It has a lot to do with what they believe," she says. "I think the generation gap is a factor, but it shouldn't be. The ideas stay the same regardless of young or old you are. Everyone is of solid beliefs," she continues, anticipating the question: But does Bob Dole?, "but I think when you get into politics a lot of your beliefs and convictions get overthrown by the need to compromise. Bob Dole's ideas affect everyone, so they have to affect us in some way."

Same game, different player:

Welfare.

"Make 'em work."

Hillary.

"Whitewater."

School prayer.

"Should be allowed. Absolutely."

Louis Farrakhan.

"He's crazy."

Tim McVeigh.

"Murderer."

Bosnia.

"Terrible. We shouldn't be there."

Contract With America.

"It gets things done. People need to be aware of what it says&endash;they think it's much harsher than it really is."

Marijuana.

"Shouldn't be legal."

O.J. Simpson.

"Leave him alone. He didn't do it."

Ronald Reagan.

"The best. The absolute best. That's all I have to say."

• • •

MY BASIC CONCLUSION from so much talk, so much rhetoric, so many contradictory opinions and notions and theories, is that American politics is at a real crossroads, the kind of critical juncture seldom seen before. In 1986, Time magazine awarded its "most effective negative ad" award (I had no idea such a thing existed) to a piece called "Hats," in which Colorado's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Bill Henson, accused incumbent Roy Romer of&endash;you may want to sit down for this one&endash;changing his mind on several issues. (A man of many hats. Get it?) This is roughly equivalent to pious 19th-century schoolmarms getting their bustiers in a bunch over use of the word "hell" in a particularly saucy schoolbook. Ten years later, attack ads are the norm. Bob Dole cannot simply be the wrong choice for President, but he's a liar, an obfuscator, a man of no convictions who probably kicks stray dogs on his way home besides. Where is all this heading? It took me to New Hampshire and, God forbid, to Republican meetings, but it's leading the United States to somewhere altogether unfamiliar and scary.

But exhilirating. Consider Lugar's anemic attempt at an inspiring message&endash;"A vote for Dick Lugar is a vote for clean campaigning!"&endash;and you get the essence of the lamer side of modern politicking. Can you possibly imagine, say, FDR ever saying something that thuddingly banal? But it only follows that Lugar got hammered at the ballot box, because he simply could not elaborate on his vision: he struck no chord with voters, and they summarily rejected him. It is often difficult to give the American voter even a modicum of credit for possessing even the good sense God gave the family dog, but in the end some of the cream will rise to the top, because it must, and the American who cares about his civic responsibility will take the basic step of familiarizing himself with the issues that matter.

Ditto the young. Are they apathetic? Some are, to be sure. Anyone&endash;you, me, Ed Krebs&endash;is aware of that. But the college students on either end of the political spectrum I hung out with all displayed an almost maniacal fervor for the process. Take Matt Wood, the BUCR's Communications Director, who, in the span of ten minutes, promptly offered to volunteer his time on six different BUCR projects. "Matt, take it easy," his cohort Fiorill chided. "Don't flunk out of school or anything on account of this."

"Yeah, whatever," Wood said. "This is so much more fun."

Politics is dead; long live politics. Onward, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century.

	When Being Born is A Crime by Jill Hoffman First Place, Investigation and Analysis AEJMC

Roberta Devers-Scott sat at a table in the bistro she had recommended for lunch and watched her housemate and the state prosecutor chatting amiably. They were discussing what it was like to be a physician and what it was like to be a prosecutor. Roberta wasn't hungry. So she watched as the other five people at the table ate.

They were at the bistro because there had been an hour between booking her and arraignment. "We need to have lunch and you need to come with us," one of the officials had told her, "and we don't know Syracuse." So Roberta said there was a "a lovely little place" they could go to around the corner. They had just come from the booking where Roberta watched as three fat little police officers stood around a computer trying to enter the charges against her. No one had ever heard of the charge of practicing midwifery without a license.

"Was that a six dash two A?" said one of the officers.

"Hey Harry! Do you know how to get practicing midwifery --"

"Mid-what?"

Roberta watched this like a movie. And she thought to herself that if anybody else could have seen this, no one would believe it.

Roberta had found herself in the middle of a tangled legal battle in New York State over whether direct entry midwives could legally practice their profession. Direct entry midwives, who attended pregnant women in home births, learned their skills by apprenticing to other midwives rather than going to nursing school. Even though such midwives had to pass an exam monitored by an national organization, and could legally practice in 22 states, the situation in New York State was muddled. As a result, direct entry midwives there were caught in a confusing tangle of bureaucracy, and they believe, deceit.

Right before booking, the party of five had stopped by Roberta's office, where the four officials, with their search warrants, rummaged through her files and boxes of paper. Then, without her knowledge, part of the group paid a visit to Roberta's back-up obstetrician to interrogate him about his involvement with her illegal activities.

"You must be providing her with her equipment," they insisted. "You must be providing her with oxytocics." The doctor hadn't though. Roberta bought these things through a midwifery supply company. When Roberta's back-up obstetrician spoke to her afterwards, he told her, "There was Gandhi and now there's you." Later on, Roberta said about the comment, "That's sweet," with the slightest hint of a sardonic I'll-try-to-remember-that-when-I'm sitting in-the-slammer tone. At least one of this obstetrician's children had been born in a home birth, and in private, he was quick to step out of the Old Boy's Network to say I know the truth about midwifery. He even said, after her arrest that he would testify for her in any court in the land if it came down to it. But when it came down to it, and the politics of medicine started to bear down on him, he became very quiet. Roberta knew about the politics. She had been in a personal relationship with a doctor once for a long time. And she knew the subtle ways in which power was woven and how it could affect a person who had every good intention of standing up and saying what the truth was.

"When it comes time to vote for the head of the OB/GYN department and you are standing up for an illegal direct entry midwife in this state, ya don't get voted," she said. "When it comes time for somebody to cross-cover your practice so you can go away for a weekend skiing trip, people don't cross-cover. And when it comes time for somebody to stand up for you in a grand jury situation when you're accused of malpractice, they don't stand up for you."

After lunch, the fivesome returned to the police station for arraignment. Roberta was released on her own recognisance, because she wasn't a threat. She had never even had one speeding ticket in her entire life. She didn't have to go to jail. No bail bond posted. No money. Just go home, she was told. And come back on this day for an oral argument. Roberta always tells people that it's interesting this happened to her. She tries to go the speed limit. She tries to obey the law unless the law is really, really wrong. She just doesn't do anything too duplicitous. In fact, she says she's "kinda boring."

When Roberta returned home from the police station, there were about 20 messages on her answering machine from friends and other midwives who had already heard what had happened. The following day, eight pregnant women and their families gathered at her house. Roberta told them not to say a word, and that she was going to pass a piece of paper around the room for everyone to read. But they were not to say anything out loud. She didn't know if one of the officials had bugged her house yesterday. On the piece of paper were code words telling them what they would say when they went into labor. For example, one couple was supposed to call and say Jane's house burned down. "It was like the abortion issue all over again," said Roberta.

And so, after being arrested, Roberta continued to practice midwifery illegally in New York State, just as direct entry midwives had done since the beginning of the state's history. And just as midwives had done throughout history. Even in the early nineteenth century, during the rise of the medical profession, when midwives were being portrayed as dirty, unsafe practitioners (despite the fact that their infant morality rates were often lower than obstetricians), they continued to practice midwifery. Even when they found themselves at the center of what some individuals have defined as a very real plan to eliminate them.

"...great danger lies in the possibility of attempting to educate the midwife and in licensing her to practice midwifery..." stated Charles Edward Zieler, MD, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Pittsburgh, in a verbatim transcript during the transactions of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality in 1912. "If she once becomes a fixed element in our social and economic system...we may never be able to get rid of her."

In the history of her 12-year career as a direct entry midwife, Roberta had only had one complaint. It was from a woman she had appropriately transported to a hospital who was attempting to deliver a fully-breached baby. At the hospital, the woman had a Cesarean section. She was fine and her baby was fine, but the woman thought Roberta could have done more to have given her a home birth. Roberta didn't believe that breached babies should be delivered at home. The woman tried to sue both Roberta and the obstetrician who did the Cesarean, unsuccessfully. She then went to the state to complain.

"The woman had no forum by which to bring her grievance," said Roberta."My heart still goes out to her because she deserved an appropriate forum." Roberta felt the woman was betrayed as much as she was. Because there was no unbiased panel of individuals to hear her complaint and provide her with accurate information about her transport. But Roberta says there is no such thing as an unbiased forum in New York State. When a midwife slips out of line, even a little bit, she says it is the proverbial witch-hunt. "The only thing this woman could do after she exhausted the other resources was to go to the state and say, 'We heard she's not licensed.' And that wasn't fair to her."

Shortly after the initial complaint was filed, there was an incident at Roberta's midwifery practice.

Sometime during the fall of 1995, a husband and wife showed up at Roberta's office for an appointment they had set up earlier. When they originally called Roberta, they said the usual, "We're pregnant. We'd like to come in for a consult." So when they arrived for their appointment, Roberta proceeded to do the consultation that she'd done countless times before. And somewhere in the course of the conversation, the husband was seeming more and more curious. All of the people that came to Roberta were extremely well-read. Home birth was not a choice couples made easily and they usually had very clear reasons for why they made the choice. People came to her and said things like, "We've read a study from Holland about home birth, and we think we would like one," not "We think it would be groovy." And these two people were stupid, Roberta thought. The husband had given her some story about his wife being an EMT and that he thought it would be great to catch the baby. He said he had done it years ago. But she knew something was wrong when he asked if he could attend another woman's birth before the birth of his own child. No father had ever asked this. Why would a family allow a stranger to come to their birth? thought Roberta. It wasn't adding up.

So Roberta asked him, "What do you do for a living?" She had never before asked a couple what they did for a living, because their economic status, their religion and their culture was not important to her. So for the first time in 12 years, Roberta asked the husband what he did for a living.

"I investigate fires," he says."And do you investigate midwives?" says Roberta. "You seem to me to be from the health department."

The husband turned beet red. Roberta looked at him and he looked at her.

"I'm feeling very much that we have to call this meeting short," said Roberta.

She heard nothing more about the incident for a few months. However, about a year earlier, other midwives in New York State had begun to get letters from the New York State Education Department Office of Professional Discipline stating that they had been practicing midwifery without licenses and that they better stop. While Roberta was concerned about her colleagues, it never occurred to her to stop practicing midwifery. She knew she was in a profession in which people risked their families, their lives and their homes because they believed in what they were doing. In fact, Roberta teased the other midwives when she heard they were getting letters. She said she was starting to feel left out.

On December 13, 1995, Roberta rose in the morning to go to her part-time job at a family planning agency. She arrived at work, same as any other day. But at about 9:30 am in the morning, she was called to the front desk. There waiting for her were the two investigators from the Office of Professional Discipline who had posed as a husband and wife in her office earlier that fall, an undercover police officer from New York City and a prosecutor.

"You are under arrest for the unlicensed practice of midwifery," one of the officials said. The charge, a class D felony, carried with it a maximum of four years in jail.

"Thank you," said Roberta almost without flinching. "Let me get my boots." It was winter in Syracuse and Roberta wanted to put on her snow boots.

As she pulled them on, she thought to herself, Well this is gonna be a lot of work. But she also thought, This is great. Let it come. It will give us a platform, finally, to get up and shout about this. I'll really get to do this right.

Roberta was willing to go to jail to stand up for direct entry midwifery. If this was what needed to happen, than she would go there. She was willing to have her face plastered all over the local news and daily papers. And this was not a decision she'd made easily, as the mother of a young son.

"I know what's happened here," she says, like a parent to a child who's done something mischievous. "I know what fear has done to those people who want to speak out but feel they can't. They're constrained by the fear of losing their jobs. They're constrained by the fear of imprisonment. They're constrained by the fear of peer pressure, and all of the fear prevents them from saying what needs to be said. And someone must say it."

She wasn't initially handcuffed. Then one of the officials asked her where her car was. They wanted to search her car for midwifery equipment.

"I can't speak to you until my attorney is present," said Roberta.

"Where is your car?" the official asked Roberta again"

"I will repeat myself. I can't speak to you until my attorney is present."

At that point the undercover officer said, "If that's the way you want to be," and shoved Roberta into the corner. The handcuffs went on.

In the police car, the male investigator from the Office of Professional Discipline who had posed as the husband in Roberta's office during the sting operation, asked Roberta how she knew he was lying about who he was.

"Because you were so stupid," she said. "My birth clients are smart."

Three weeks after Roberta was arrested, Hilary Schlinger, a midwife in Syracuse, received a letter from the New York Department of Education Office of Professional Discipline stating that her midwifery practice was in question and that she was under investigation. The letter was essentially saying cease and desist any illegal activity. In fact there were many other midwives getting these letters too.

It's all coming to pass, thought Hilary. They are going to systematically, one by one, try to shut down everyone's practice. They'll use whatever information they can garner to prosecute people in the ways that they can. Even so, Hilary didn't think they had information about her that was on the level of being able to arrest her. Not like they had with Roberta. The wrong pieces had fallen into place for Roberta at the wrong time. And they were using her as an example.

Hilary quaked momentarily when she read the letter, but she wasn't one to get scared. She was more a person of action.

In fact, both she and Roberta had been taking action for some time.

Prior to 1992, Roberta and Hilary were two of several direct entry midwives (DEMs) in New York State who had come together to form a group called the Midwives Alliance of New York (MANY), a spin-off of their mother organization - the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). MANY formed so New York DEMs could fight for the passage of a bill that would provide them with a mechanism to licensure. Members of MANY, most of them poor, illegal midwives, pooled their money to hire a lobbyist because they wanted to make sure that individuals in the Senate office who were putting a midwifery bill together, would include DEMs in it. As it happened, one of the individuals in the Senate office who had been working on the bill retired right before it passed, but a legislative aide who had been working in his office, assured MANY they would be represented on a soon-to-be-formed Board of Midwifery. He said there had been some last-minute changes to the bill which wouldn't allow a DEM to sit on the board, but that a DEM would be able to able to apply to sit on the board's consumer seat and midwifery educator seat.

But in last-minute backdoor sessions before the bill was passed, DEMs were excluded from the bill without their knowledge. Instead of being made legal, they were going to be studied like lab rats by the board. The bill called for a study to be completed by November 1993 on the efficacy of direct entry midwifery and the educational roots thereto.

"We went from being as good as in the bill, to being studied," said Roberta.

In addition, neither of the two open seats on the Board of Midwifery had been filled with a DEM. The entire board was comprised of obstetricians, family practicians and certified nurse midwives. And though certified nurse midwives (CNMs) sat on the board and shared the name "midwife" with DEMs, they could not have been more different in the eyes of DEMs. CNMs wore the same white coats as doctors, were educated in the same institutions and worked in the same hospitals. The "nurse" part of certified "nurse" midwives merely signaled to a DEM that the individual knew about disease and pathology, and midwifery was not about pathology. CNMs couldn't even practice at home. Worse yet, many of them wanted to be autonomous, and independent of doctors, but they wouldn't fight for their autonomy. Roberta says the place where CNMs and DEMs come together is if you ask a room full of CNMs, "Do you want to become autonomous?" they say, "Yes yes yes yes yes." But if you say, "What are you gonna do about that?" They cringe and shrink back in their seat. She says they have to stand up, all of them and say, We're just not gonna take this anymore. Roberta could be singing a Helen Ready song when she says this. The medical monopoly is over. We're going to become autonomous and we will collaborate appropriately with doctors over things like hypertension and gestational diabetes like CNMs do in every other state. But she says, they're afraid.

Around the time the midwifery bill was passed, Roberta had been building a brand new home in New York with her long-time partner. Before they had started to build, her partner said to Roberta, "We can move anywhere in the entire country. Where do you want to go?" And Roberta said "Oh no no no. I've waited 12 years for a mechanism for licensure and I believe we're moving in that direction. Look, California just got legal. If California can do it, New York will surely follow suit. And they have to have this study produced by November 1993." She would say to her colleagues, some of them doctors, at the family planning center she worked at, "It's not going to be long now you guys. We'll finally be able to have legal practices where we submit ourselves to the licensing cop. We will complete the additional educational requirements as the state sees fit and we're finally going to be legitimate."

Even after the 1992 midwifery bill excluding DEMs was in place and the midwifery board with no DEMs on it existed, DEMs still felt that redemption wouldn't be too far away. They had the 1993 study, called for by the midwifery bill, to hold out for. And if the study was unbiased, the DEMs knew the empirical evidence would be overwhelmingly in their favor.

They continued to practice and wait for the study. But 1993 came and went. No study. Nineteen ninety-four came and went. No study. And the DEMs started to grow antsy. So they went to the Board of Midwifery and said things like, "You know. We're out here' practicing midwifery illegally. The 1992 Midwifery Practice Act made this a felony. It's not a misdemeanor anymore. We can't continue like this. There has to be a mechanism put into place for licensure." No one was covert. The DEMs were regularly attending all of the board's meetings in Albany.

Finally, the acting chairperson of the board, Lawrence Mokhiber, who had been given temporary secretary status because of a hiring freeze in New York, approached Hilary and gave her applications to hand out to her friends. DEMs could now apply for licensure.

But Hilary wasn't so quick to jump. "You know Larry, if they apply for licensure there are multiple charges they can be faced with."

Roberta's memory clearly remembers Larry looking at Hilary and saying the women were not going to be used as targets. He told her, she says, that the board was having some problems with the process, and only wanted to see what kind of experience the women had. He assured her, she says, that she could hand out the applications without worrying.

So 13 midwives applied at about $300 a piece. And nearly all of them were investigated or arrested. And rejected. Hilary's rejection letter came two weeks before her cease and desist letter. She says the timing was impeccable. Roberta's rejection letter arrived two days after she was arrested. The letter said she had not completed the requirements because she had not been to an approved midwifery educational institution and that she must go back and do that. Hilary Schlinger was told that she hadn't completed any of the nursing requirements, even though the midwifery bill that was passed was supposed to have separated nurse midwifery from direct entry midwifery. And the only avenue DEMs could take to gain those skills was nursing school, which was in direct conflict with their philosophies about birthing.

"There had been an understanding that we had not been through educational routes that were degree-granting," said Hilary. "We were told that our health skills, nurse skills and federal health skills would be evaluated. That our licenses would be evaluated on an individual basis."

But for The Board of Midwifery to evaluate the individual skills of DEMs, they had to understand the process by which DEMs educate themselves. They had to acknowledge the years DEMs spent apprenticing with senior midwives before attending their own births. They had to be familiar with the North American Registry of Midwives (NARM), an international certification agency created by midwives in 1987 to validate the knowledge, skills and experience necessary for a DEM to responsibly practice midwifery. They had to honor the NARM exam, psychometrically examined and approved, and used to license DEMs in 22 other states. They would need to remember their midwifery history. That in 1990 a group called the Interorganizational Working Group on Midwifery Education (IWG) met to discuss midwifery in the United States. And in those meetings, members of MANA and the American College of Nurse Midwifery (ACNM) worked together to come up with an accurate description of midwifery in the United States. The group eventually released a statement saying that there were two pathways to midwifery in this country - nurse midwifery and direct entry midwifery - and they would both be considered separate but equal. People going through the nurse midwifery route would take an exam administered by the ACNM for certification and people following the direct entry midwifery route would take an exam given by NARM. The board would have to appreciate that before direct entry midwives even had time to exhale, the ACNM was pushing to oversee direct entry education, as many of the IWG members turned out to be nurse midwives from New York.

But the board, made up of obstetricians, family practicians and nurse midwives chose to ignore these issues or didn't place any weight on them when making their decision. In fact, the board returned Roberta's $300 application fee. But what they never said was how DEMs could get licenses.

"We have no ability nor do we have any desire," says Lawrence, now the executive secretary of the board, "to go out and reconstruct what might have happened in a preceptorship model or in a program that has no accredidation by any national accrediting bodies."

Inside her peaceful home in the woods of Vermont, Roberta talks about the truth of what has happened to DEMs in New York State with the slightly acrid humor not quite touching on bitterness of a woman who can now write "midwife" as her profession on dental forms and be proud of it. She talks with the knowledge that she now lives in a place where she can advertise her profession.

If New York State was serious about getting educational roots in place that would lead to licensure, Roberta says, it could have made two phone calls. One to NARM and one to MANA. But the state didn't do either one of those things. "I don't think there was ever an attempt on a national level or on a New York State level to give professional status to DEMs," says Hilary. "There was a lot of lip service going on, but if you look again and again at the things that were said verses the actions that were taken and the promises that were broken, I think it becomes clear." What is going on in New York State, according to Roberta and Hilary, has nothing to do with safe practice. It has nothing to do with consumer protection. They say that if the state was truly concerned with safe practice, it would be looking for ways to have midwives fully practice their profession, so that midwives are not prosecuted for bringing women into the hospital when they need to be transported. So there is a cooperative relationship between midwives and the obstetric community.

The situation of DEMs in New York State is about two things, as far as Roberta and Hilary are concerned:

power and control

It is about people retaining a control of a process, they say. It is about the medical profession keeping practitioners out because they don't fit a description. It is about tracking down midwives. Why else would the New York State Education Law state that, "...Midwifery shall be practiced in accordance with a written agreement between the midwife and a licensed physician who is board certified...or a licensed physician who practices obstetrics...or a hospital..." That practice agreement, they say, is the way the medical profession controls midwives. And why else would the law state that a midwife must "submit evidence of a license or certification, the educational preparation for which is determined by the Education Department..." and not explain exactly what that educational preparation is. That ambiguity, they say, is the way the state controls midwifery.

And now, when the executive secretary of the board tells Roberta that one DEM has been licensed in New York State as of March 12, 1997 and appointed to the board as of July 1, 1997, and four other DEMs have signed written practice agreements, Roberta says, "Don't tell me some people can get licensed. Four DEMS do not serve the state of New York." And when he tells her that she can enroll in a program of study at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Brooklyn (which happens to be overseen by the ACNM) to "remediate any deficiencies" she has as a midwife, and graduate with a degree that will allow her to apply for licensure, she says, "This is not a process about the truth of education. This is a process by which women become controlled. This is about keeping women in their place and saying that what they are are glorified nurses and not an autonomous profession."

At Roberta's sentencing, subsequent to her arrest, the judge offered her the plea bargain of attempting to practice midwifery without a license. Initially, during the oral argument, the judge had decided that the 1992 Midwifery Practice Act would stand as constitutional and her charges would stay. However, if Roberta took the plea bargain, her charge would then become a misdemeanor with no waiver to appeal. So they aren't going to tell me that I can't appeal, she thought. Roberta and her lawyer discussed the offer and decided they had to get Roberta's case to a higher court where somebody could look at it objectively. Roberta took the plea bargain.

Roberta has already submitted her appeal, heard back from New York State, and submitted one counter response. Now that the state has set a date in February for her appeal to be heard, Roberta is busy working to find hundreds upon hundreds of people who will be willing to come out and talk about midwifery. While she doesn't like the fact that there's a charge now associated with her name, she says that is always secondary to what she and many other individuals are going to say about midwifery. She knows that sooner or later the truth always prevails.

Meanwhile, Roberta is busy studying for the California Challenge Process so she can eventually become licensed as a DEM in the state of California. Although the process is costing her a few thousand dollars, she thinks it's worth it to have one more notch in her belt. And as she continues doing home births in Vermont, she knows that things are not perfect there for DEMs. The situation is tenuous because, although DEMs are not illegal in Vermont, there is no legislation governing them either. But things are better than in New York State. "Let's not kid ourselves. We knew that every time we went out to do a birth (in New York State) after 1992, it was a felony."

But even when Roberta was practicing midwifery illegally in New York State, she never felt guilty. Not even for a second. "Midwifery is part of who I am."

"You have to be willing to stand there and say that this is my life's work and for some reason I've been called to stand in this and this is what I have to do."

And as Roberta goes back to helping women in the ritual of birth, she says it's the smallest things in her profession that make the difference - the friendship and support and the ability to see each woman in the context of her life. Because in the ritual of birth, how women see their bodies and how they live their lives is as integral as their blood pressure.

Outside of Roberta's peaceful house in the woods of Vermont, there is a sign which reads midwife. It is a notice to the world that a direct entry midwife is practicing her profession. She won't be on the local news at night or in tomorrow's paper. Nor will she be in a police station getting booked. She will merely be inside delivering babies to women who want to birth at home.

	A Hero's Reward ($2.75 an hour, free cigarettes, and all the ravolis you can eat.) by Tim Cebula First place, Magazine Article AEJMC

 Ron Wilson knows a frustrated teacher when he sees one. For eight

years, Wilson has been headmaster of the Kildonan School for dyslexic boys, where severe frustrations are as much a part of a teacher's day as chalk dust and inkstains. And when he senses that one of his faculty members is nearing a breakdown, he calls that teacher into his office and delivers the legendary "Ernst Speech."

On the wall behind Wilson's desk, tucked in among framed diplomas and pictures of former students, hangs a small, rectangular brass plaque engraved with a quote from Winston Churchill: "Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never been invested."

Churchill is Wilson's second favorite dyslexic. The plaque was a gift given to him in 1986 by his favorrite dyslexic, a boy named Ernst.Wilson shifts in his white wing chair and fingers the perfect dimple of his rep tic, searching for the words. In his tenure at Kildonan, he has given the speech countless times: at commencement exercises, faculty meetings, and most

often, one-on-one pep talks. Yet no matter how many times he repeats it, he always launches it with all the freshness and urgency of a maiden voyage.

"Teaching dyslexics," he begins, "sometimes seems like nothing more than an exercise in futility." He tucks his horn-rimmed glasses into the breast pocket of his blazer and massages his eyes, conjuring the , image of Ernst. "I'll admit that perhaps there are- some boys even our school cannot help.

But we can never give up on a boy once he's here. Kildonan never abandoned hope for Ernst."

Ernst was the most plainly abandonable boy in Kildonan's history. Sorely neglected by his natural parents, he was put under the care of foster parents by the age of eight. His childhood had left him emotionally and intellectually stunted. By fourteen, the freckled redhead had been moved through six different schools within his home state of Montana.

Each school dismissed him as a hopeless dyslexic and an incorrigible savage (In his sixth school, he had bitten two classmates and a teacher). Still, his testing indicated an I.Q. of140. In desperation, the Montana Board of Education agreed to send him on a grant to an experimental New York State boarding school: an intensive care unit for dyslexics-- the Kildonan School.

When a state board sends a boy to Kildonan, it also sends his Individual Education Plan, a custom designed teaching method to facilitate progress. Ernst's IEP suggested that Kildonan build a cage in which to keep him during his daily tutoring sessions. "We promptly filed his IEP under 'Suggestions to Avoid at All Costs'," says Wilson, "and proceeded with the Kildonan plan."

For his first month at Kildonan, Ernst refused to speak in complete sentences, or even whole words. Grunts were his only form of expression. He had to be walked like a dog from class to class. Once he tried running away, only to be picked up three miles down the road by Wilson himself.

"He made no friends. He spent his free time among the squirrels, climbing trees, and hiding in bushes," Wilson says, without even a hint of humor or hyperbole. Kildonan is Wilson's business, and he takes business very seriously.

"And yes," he continues, "we were frustrated, and yes, we even thought of shipping him back to Montana. But we persevered. Two years later, he graduated from Kildonan, and now..." he puts his glasses back on and twists halfway around to admire the plaque ," he's compiling information for a book on famous dyslexics." He turns back, leans forward on his desk, and smiles triumphantly. Kildonan, the Champion of the Downtrodden, and Wilson himself - the pariah's Messiah. "We have a unique method that allows us to succeed where other schools fail.."

The Ernst speech is intended to be the ultimate elixir for stress buildup. Ernst is, undoubtedly, the finest example of the wonders Kildonan can work. Diana King, who founded the Kildonan School in 1968, once told the faculty in a year-end address, "This school saves lives, and in that sense, every teacher here is a hero~" A lovely sentiment, but the perennial problem for Wilson is that most "heroes" don't stay longer than two years. And converting new teachers into disciple s of the "unique method!' seems to get harder all the time.

While only 70 students are enrolled in grades seven through 12, the school employs nearly 30 teachers.Each year, close to one-third of them quit. The school has no shortage of incoming.resumes and inquiries. But when prospective teachers come on campus, most find the school to be... well, not what they expected. Faculty assigned to give tours to prospectives are known as the "P.B.'s'!-- poor bastards. "We are in the unenviable position:' says one P.B., "of pointing to a pile of shit and calling it home."

Kildonan's unconventional, rough-hewn style permeates all aspects of the school, right down to its buildings. Twenty-four years ago, the building that is now the main schoolhouse was a big yellow barn. Now it is a big yellow schoolhouse. But it has had extensive renovations in the past two decades. It may look like a barn from the outside, but just walk inside, down the central hallway, and you'll see that the classrooms lining the hall look like . . . horse stalls. But nice horse stalls, with desks, and chalkboards, and greenish-reddishbrown wall-to-wall carpeting.

The second floor of the schoolhouse holds a small gym. Here, the renovations have been more extensive. The gym looks nothing like the grain storage area it once was. It looks much more like a cavernous attic stripped of its pink insulation.

Two of the school's five dormitories are creaking, drafty, white-clapboard farmhouses. The other three were built in the late sixties by people who admired the Creaking Drafty Farmhouse style of architecture, but wanted to give it a twist, and so added spiral outdoor fire escapes and blue vinyl siding.

Hot water is in short supply during the winter. Rats and field mice scratch their way along the hollow walls seeking warmth and crumbs. Teachers live in the dorms with the students. Prospective teachers do not like to hear this.

At Kildonan," prospective teachers are told, "the students are more important than the buildings."

This is absolutely true. Each student's $25,000 tuition check goes directly into his education, not into maintainting doric-columned, heat-sucking, ivied-brick behemoths, as some schools would have it. Unfortunately, the buildings are more important than the teachers,financially speaking.

The school has no endowment, so it relies entirely on tuition money. The bulk of the money goes to educational supplies like computers, books, and laser disc visual aids. The next chunk is reserved for buildings and grounds maintenance, and minor renovations. The remainder is split among the crew of 30 teachers, according to seniority. A first-year teacher's salary for the year, figuring in 16-hour workdays, comes to about $ 2.75 an hour.

But Kildonan does have one obvious selling point. Buildings notwithstanding, the campus' setting is a landscape artist's dream. Nestled at the foot of the Berkshire mountains, the grounds stretch and roll over 100 acres of woods and fertile farmland. To walk through it on a sunny day - with its narrow creek that winds through rounded hills, and its pond rimmed by willow trees - is enough to make a grown man skip like a pixie, reciting Whitman poems as he goes.

Still, the lure of nature has its limits. The bottom line is that Kildonan cannot be too picky about who it hires. Most new recruits come fresh out of college with no prior teaching experience. Tom Mack, a veteran 10-year teacher says, "Nobody comes to Kildonan because they want to teach dyslexics, they come because they got offered a job." Mack is one of only eight faculty members who have been at the school for more than five years. They call themselves "lifers," and they are the school's most ardent supporters. "It's not easy to sell someone on the virtues and benefits of teaching here," he says, "but some of us couldn't dream of teaching anyone but dyslexics."

Many new teachers have little idea what dyslexia is before they arrive at Kildonan. But they learn quickly, beginning with a Department of Education brochure entitled, " 18 million Americans are dyslexic. Are you?"

Dyslexia manifests itself in a number of different ways.

Essentially, it is a neurological disorder which impairs the brain's ability to decode information. Most common is the dyslexic who sees letters or entire sentences reversed and jumbled on the page. The word CAT might appear to them as ACT, or they may read the sentence THE CAT RAN as RAN CAT THE The teacher must remember that dyslexia is not a disease to cure, but an impairment for which to compensate. The student may always read CAT as ACT, so the teacher strives to make him understand that when he sees

ACT, the word is actually CAT. Simple enough, but the same student may read the actual word ACT without any jumbling or reversals. Dyslexia follows no logical pattern. Unfortunately for dyslexics, neither does the English language.

"An eighth-grade boy raised his hand in study hall, and pointed to the word 'their' in his book," says Mack."'What word is this?' he asked. I told him. 'Oh' he says, 'I thought that was spelled t-h-e-r-e.' 1 told him it can be spelled both ways. In fact, I told him, it can also be spelled 'they're.'

His eyes glazed over and he gave me that classic defeated look. These poor kids feel like the language is out to get thern:'

In his first week at Kildonan, Tom Mack learned the extent to which some dyslexics, are stymied by the written word. He gave his United States history class a 10-question quiz on the three branches of government. When he collected the quizzes, he noticed that the boy who was the most active in class discussion had only written three words down on the quiz: "I don't know." Mack talked to the boy after class.

"You know this stuff cold," Mack said.

The boy nodded.

"What branch makes the law?" Mack asked.

"Legislative."

"What branch enforces the law?"

'Executive."

"Those are the first two questions on the quiz," times seven

dollars

Mack said.

The boy nodded again and shrugged. Then Mack realized the boy simply couldn't read the quiz. He read the rest of the quiz aloud, and the boy answered every question correctly.

"What got me was that he would rather make it seem like he didn't know the material than admit that he couldn't read it," Mack recalls.'even so, I think I was even more embarrassed than he was. I quizzed that class orally for the rest of the year."

But if oral quizzes were the answer, there would be no need for a school like Kildonan. The problem goes beyond reading disabilities. Dyslexia aw even jumble the spoken word. If a teacher says, "Sit in the ' front row of desks," the dyslexic may hear, "Sit in the desk front of rows." Sometimes the aural confusion causes mispronunciation. Three years ago, one tutor noticed that his student was consistently pronouncing "breakfast' like "breftix." The tutor hoped that etymology would solve the problem.

"You see, breakfast is a compound word," he said, "composed of the words 'break' and 'fast'. It is the meal that breaks the fast of the long night. So now, we call it 'breakfast."'

The student shook his head in disapproval. "If the words are 'break' and 'fast', but together you pronounce it like..." the boy closed his eyes in concentration, then very slowly brelcrist'. Then what's wrong with calling it breftix?"

The teacher couldn't argue with this reasoning, and so put the problem aside for another day.

Dyslexia can also affect sense of direction, which becomes evident during Kildonan's soccer, basketball or lacrosse games. Unfortunately, Kildonan players sometimes shoot on their own goal. More unfortunately, they often score.

Over half of Kildonan's students are considered "severe" dyslexics, boys who suffer from a combination of visual, aural and directional impairments. One of the more severe cases in recent years was a 19-year-old senior with a second gradereading level. While the other seniors read selections from

Hemingway's "In Our Time," he read Maurice Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen."

Kildonan students take typical high school courses, modified to meet their needs. In literature classes, the teacher reads aloud in class, and students are not expected to read for homework. Math students are) required to use calculators at all times. Each boy attends a daily individual tutoring session, which emphasizes the rudiments of language - phonics,spelling, syllabication. But since Kildonan's main academic goal is to arm students with the self-esteem they will need to

succeed in the mainstream, grading is flexible. They are not graded in their tutoring sessions, and sometimes numbers are fudged to improve grades in other classes.

"My first year here," says Mack, "the history department head looked at my gradebook and pointed to a C I gave one kid for the term. 'He got an A in history last year,' he said. We went through his work for the term, decided that I had graded 'too rigidly,' and gave the kid a B+."

Mack feels that new teachers become "disillusioned" when they realize that education sometimes takes a backseat to issues outside of class. "These boys have discipline problems just as big as their learning problems. And before we can teach them anything, we've got to straighten them out."

Of Kildonan's 70 students, about 50 either graduate from Kildonan and go on to college, or switch into mainstream high schools. The other 20 sometimes meet with much less desirable fates.

Mack can list a handful of his former students who are currently in jail. "I tell my students that 90 percent of the nation's prison population has learning disabilities. They say, 'Aw, man, are you callin' us criminals?' and I say 'Hell no, but you've got to realize that the cards are stacked against you.

This school is your last chance, and if you don't make it here, who knows what can happen."'

Like Ernst, many of Kildonan's students carry what the headmaster

calls "emotional baggage." Mack hates that term. "If you want to put it like that," he says, "it's more accurate to say that most of these kids arrive with emotional U-Hauls.~

Considering the student's histories, emotional problems are to be expected. Most of the students have been through at least three schools before Kildonan. Many have been put on prescription drugs like Ritalin, Lithium and Cylert in a desperate attempt to stabilize them. Parents and teachers label them "lazy" or "stupid." By the time they get to Kildonan, they despise adults, school and usually themselves.

One year, a 16-year-old student named Johann, made it clear to the Kildonan faculty that dyslexics often fear success. Johann had been to four schools before Kildonan, and failed out of each. At Kildonan, he had a C or better in every class going into midterm examinations.

But on the morning of his first midterm, Johann's desk was empty. Twenty minutes into the exam and he still hadn't shown up. His teacher got a sub to proctor the exam, and went to Johann's dorm.

The teacher found Johann in his room, hiding under his bed."I hate exams," Johann said. "I'm not taking any exams.""You'd rather fail?" asked the teacher."I don't care. I'm not taking any exams."

The teacher sat on the bed and asked Johann to get up so he could explain things to him eye-to-eye.

"You don't like this school, do you?" he asked Johann.

Johann said he did not.

"What you don't understand," the teacher said, "is that Kildonan is not like any of your other schools. You don't get out of here by failing. The way you leave Kildonan is by doing well."

Johann understood this, and he eventually took his exams and passed all of them. But he continued to be far more comfortable with failure than with success. The next semester he began to fail his classes. Some teachers believe he floundered deliberately. After two suicide attempts in the late spring, he finally got his wish. His parents withdrew him from Kildonan and checked him into Hartford's Institute of Living.

A student's first step toward success at Kildonan is starting to shed his "emotional baggage." Unlike most high schools, Kildonan has neither a school psychologist nor a guidance counselor. Instead, the school relies on its extraordinary mix of discipline and leniency. Teachers must play both drill sergeants and therapists, roles which come more easily to some than others.

* * *

At 64", 235 lbs., Tom Mack is a drill sergeant straight from Central Casting. He is a mastodon, with a booming voice that bellows across classrooms and fills errant students with the fear of God. "No 16-year-old boy wants that much black man shoved in his face," he says. "They give me a pretty wide berth." While you won't catch him singing lullabies, he insists that he can be "patient and understanding."

"Sometimes when the boys least expect it, I'm a softie. It's all part of the program- surprises around every corner." For the students, surprises begin with the student handbook.

On the night before fall classes begin, students crowd into the miniature gym to hear Wilson review the student handbook, item by item, for almost two hours. Muffled groans and whimpers follow every rule and regulation, as the student body collectively realizes they have forfeited their right their right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The "Dining Hall Etiquette" section of the handbook can be particularly painful. "Hamburgers and sandwiches," it says, "must be eaten with one hand only; if two hands are needed, the portion is too large and should be cut in half." Then, "Salt and pepper must be passed together, never separately, even if only one is requested." Also, "When eating soup, the motion of your spoon should begin at the rim of the bowl nearest you, skimming the soup on its way to the other side." It is generally believed that if Emily Post were to dine at Kildonan, she'd be found guilty of a dining faux pas inside of five minutes.

But the final dining hall rule causes the greatest uproar by far. "Complaining about school food, or making insulting comments on its quality or condition is a punishable offense and will not be tolerated." (This also includes suggestive jokes about hot dogs and beef stroganoff.) In one bold sentence, the Kildonan School has denied its students what may be the most cherished pastime of school students the world over. This is an extremely severe measure, and requires much more restraint than most students can muster, considering that lukewarm raviolis are served nearly three times a week.

Even Wilson himself recognized the excessiveness in this particular rule. Four years ago, he unwittingly initiated what was to become a Kildonan tradition of culinary criticism.

A prospective teacher had joined the school for lunch in the dining hall. Visitors to Kildonan's insular campus naturally draw plenty of attention, so Wilson played off the curiosity, stood in the middle of the meal and announced, "My guest is a food critic from The New York Times and he's going to write a raving review of our food."

A student in the back of the hall broke the baffled silence and replied, "Rave all you want. We can't read."The students broke into hysterics and chanted, "TIES FOOD SUCKS!"

Now, whenever a visitor comes to a meal, Wilson dutifully makes the announcement and allows the students a few precious moments to raucously pan the food. The kitchen staff hates those days.

The handbook continues into the "Residential Life" section with a warning that faculty members reserve the right to search dorm rooms merely on the basis of suspicion. They also have the right to confiscate any contraband. At Kildonan, contraband includes gum, chips, soda, vitamins, aspirin or cold medications, posters or pictures of alcoholic beverages, and Scotch Guard. Scotch Guard gets a groan by those students in the know; gum can't get you half as high. The list of contraband also includes typical items like beer, cigarettes, buck knives, compound bows and explosives, but the amount of seemingly harmless

items is absolutely phenomenal. Students are given no explanation of why such items are prohibited, because no adequate reason exists- it's a smokescreen that Kildonan has used for 23 years.

Paul Loughlin is a lifer who has put the smokescreen to good use in his dorm. "Thee idea is, if you worry them about sneaking pretzels and Mountain Dew into their rooms, they're much less likely to even bother with cigarettes and beer."

Usually, this is true. When students smuggle contraband, they usually start at the bottom of the list. But even when Loughlin does find chips, he never reports the student. "I cat them right in front of their face. I think some of them would rather get turned in- it's an effective deterrent.

Still, there are some students worried about more than Mountain Dew. One-third of the students have smoking habits. Loughlin knows exactly who they are, and what brands they smoke. "Smokers hate living in my dorm," he says,and for good reason. He smokes too. "I haven't had to buy a pack of cigarettes during the school year since 1988."

Because of the difficulties of smuggling and hiding them, cigarettes are usually in short supply. A student who sneaks a carton on campus can sell the packs to classmates for five, sometimes seven dollars apiece. At that price, cigarettes are almost a Kildonan student's most precious commodity, second only to leisure time.

During the week, the boys rise at 6 a.m. for mandatory breakfast. Classes begin at 8, continue until 3. They practice sports between 3 and 5:30. Dinner is at 6 p.m., study hall from 7 until 9:30, and lights out is promptly at 10:30.This leaves each student with exactly one hour and 20 minutes of leisure time a day. And the punishment for all minor offenses is loss of leisure time. "It's a simple, very effective way to keep them on the straight and narrow," says Loughlin.

Punishment for major offenses is not so simple. Possession or consumption of alcohol or drugs, stealing and fighting are all listed in the handbook as "leading to immediate expulsion." But the way Kildonan actually handles these offenses is what truly separates it from other schools. It is also what separates many teachers from Kildonan.

Two years ago, a student was caught selling marijuana to two seventh graders. The student was given a three-day, in-school suspension. Last year, a 17-yearold student broke the nose of a 12-year-old in a fight. His punishment: a two-day, in-school suspension. Later in the year, a bottle of vodka was found in the same student's room - no punishment.Kildonan does occasionally expel a student, just often enough to remind students that rules are rules.If the school sticks to the letter of the law with chips andsoda, why not with pot and vodka? "If we kick them out, they've got nowhere to go.' says one lifer. "'This is the end of the road for them." She feels that ultimately, a student who is pardoned is more likely to become responsible than a student who is given no second chance. "The whole world has already come down hard on these guys. If we show some mercy when they need it, they'll count Kildonan among their blessings." Kildonan's controversial philosophy is simple: Give the students a lot of rope. Some will hang themselves, but others will use it to climb.

Many teachers do not buy into this philosophy. Sarah Kuhlman taught at the school for three years. She left after a student who broke into her apartment went unpunished. "Kildonan teachers are expected to turn the other cheek for the greater good of the students," she says, "and to an extent, that's fine. But you have to draw the line somewhere."

Kuhlman admits that a certain degree of leniency builds trust, but more often it backfires. 'You tell a student he's busted. When he gets off scot free, you've lost your credibility. Try to bust him again, and he'll just laugh. I had a kid call me a "Fucking asshole" to my face, and when I demanded disciplinary action, I was told not to take it so personally."

Tom Mack understands how some teachers can be at. odds with the system. 'Not many people are willing to just pardon lawlessness. But here, you have no choice. That's what draws the line between lifers and transients. Lifers are no martyrs, but we'll take it on the chin for a kid, because in the end, it works."

Kildonan takes kids no other school will tolerate. And, as Wilson says, they will "never give up on a boy" once he is there. The school is not one hundred percent effective, any lifer will admit that. Indulging them may not always be the answer, but there are a handful of people who think it's worth a try.

Tom Mack's frame nearly fills the doorway to the study hall room. He stands looking out.into the hallway, arms folded, waiting for the last of his wayward seventh period flock. 'Me other five boys are already seated, talking quietly among themselves. They lean lazily over their desks, pulling down their ties and undoing the top buttons of their wrinkled shirts. Seventh is the last period, but it's the longest; a dreary hour of quiet study before they race to their rooms to change for sports.

Mack thrusts his arm out, checks his watch and calls down the hall to the tardy member of the study hall. "You better move it, fool. You're almost late," he warns, then steps into the room, leans on the edge of his desk, and taps his foot.

Presently, fool rushes in, closing-the door behind him..

"Take a seat, John, you're holding us up," Mack says.

John is an extremely tall boy with sleepy eyes. His limbs seem to

wag just beyond his control. He bumps his knee squeezing himself into his desk, and mumbles something under his breath.

Mack checks his watch again. "All right. I want to see six heads staring down at six pieces of paper with six pencils writing on them, and I want to see it now!" And in less than a moment, that's exactly what he sees.

For one full hour, the only sound to be heard is the scratching of lead on pulp; yellow Faber number two's furiously filling blanks in workbooks, developing sentences, adding, subtracting and dividing. -

Three minutes before the end of the period, Mack goes from desk-to-desk checking work. One by one, each student puts down his pencil and hands over his completed work for inspection. One by one, they get a grunt and a nod - theMack seal of approval. Then he gets to John.

John is still writing. Mack stands right next to him, looms over him, breathes so deep and hard it warms the top of his head. John has written "Kildonan sucks" on five and a half pages, and he's not stopping now. He's not the kind of worker to cut corners, each page has it written in two perfectly, aligned columns, using every line, even the half line at the bottom of the page. Surely even the most dedicated Kildonan-bashers would have packed it in at three pages, or at least taken- a rest. But he does not stop, even as Mack speaks.

"John, your penmanship has really improved."

The other five turn to each other. A compliment? Out loud, in front of everyone? How un-Macklike

"And you've spelled everything correctly. But John," he says, sighing, "we seem to have a grammar problem here."

John's face is in his hands. Nothing worse than criticism on a work-in-progress.

"You see," Mack says, calmly, slowly, "your problem is that 'sucks' is a transitive verb here, and requires a direct object." John looks up, puzzled. Then Mack throws down the gauntlet. "What the reader has to know is, what does Kildonan suck?"

All eyes are on John. The right answer would get him at least detention, but it would put him in the Wiseass Hall of Fame. He stares straight ahead, weighing his decision.

"Does it suck ... doorknobs?" Mack prompts.

John shakes his head.

"Eggs?"

Wrong again.

The last bell rings. The kids pack up to go, still watching John. They slowly file out of the room leaving him alone with Mack.

John picks up his papers and moves to the door.

"Something on your mind?" Mack asks. Without a word, John strides

out the door, down the hall.

Mack goes back to his desk. Bad end to a long day. Then comes the

voice from the end of the hall.

"Kildonan sucks my dick!!!"

Later, in the faculty room, he tells his colleagues the news.

"He's definitely making progress," he says, smiling, proud. "Last month he would have said it to my face."