Patricia Cohen: Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50.
Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.
“He found another one just like this,” a portable Olivetti that looks practically brand new, Mr. McCarthy said from his home in New Mexico. “I think he paid $11, and the shipping was about $19.95.”
Charlie Pierce: Tiger Woods and I go back a long ways. A little bit over twelve years, truth be told. Back then, I wrote a profile of him just prior to his winning the 1997 Masters, the first major accomplishment of his professional career. Over the course of a day's worth of interviews, which were themselves the result of negotiations with his People at the International Management Group that were so protracted they should have been moved to Panmunjom, Tiger made some distasteful remarks and told some puerile and sexist jokes. Seeing as how they occurred during my limited interview time, I included them in my story, along with some not-overly-subtle intimations that Tiger had a reputation even among golfers as something of a chaser. The quotes were a Media Thing for a brief time, and the ensuing dust storm looks positively charming compared to what's certainly coming after the events of this past weekend, which already appears to be something between Al Cowlings on the highway and an episode of The Real Housewives of Gated Communities. Back then, all that happened was that Tiger's People at the International Management Group accused me of wiretapping a limo driver. (Me and Gordon Liddy!) And that Tiger's father, Earl, whom I still miss, told Charlie Rose he hoped my story wouldn't do permanent damage to his son's career, and that Charlie Rose waved a copy of the magazine and told Earl he intended never to read the story. This is why Earl was an entertaining con man and Charlie Rose is a salon-sniffing Beltway yahoo.
Carl Sessions Stepp. ou stepped into your first newsroom, and some tectonic plate of destiny shifted. You slid into a new dimension, like Harry Potter at Platform 9 3/4, rematerializing in a parallel realm, previously unimaginable, then life-altering.
Enchanted maybe, but gritty too. Newsrooms in their heyday were bundles of contradiction: palaces of power and temples of tomfoolery, swaggering with certitude yet endearingly insecure, cynical but inextinguishably idealistic. They were loud, cocky and randy. They radiated energy at a near sexual level. Typewriters clattered, teletypes rang, scanners crackled. Reporters hectored sources over rotary phones with hopelessly twisted cords. Editors yelled. Whiskey bottles leaked from desk drawers as cigarette butts smoldered in trash cans.
Peter Baker (thanks, Ramsey): WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.
How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.
The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan.
Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.
Giant thanks to Ramsey, who's typing up old Jimmy Breslin stuff so we all may share. He brings up a good suggestion, btw: "I'd like to see more people doing this. That is, finding things that exist in print, only in print, only hardcopy, and getting them onto the web. I think we've lost a lot when we went digital. That is, I don't think we've taken enough with us yet. There are tons of great magazine and newspaper stories that simply can't be found on Nexis or in the web archives. And I know people have them. (Or maybe they don't. Maybe I'm imagining this.) If they are out there, we should find a way to share them."
Any ideas?
A Death in Emergency Room One
By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
November 24, 1963
DALLAS -- The call bothered Malcolm Perry. "Dr. Tom Shires, STAT," the girl's voice said over the page in the doctor's cafeteria at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The "STAT" meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital's chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And Shires, Perry's superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.
"This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires' page," he said.
"President Kennedy has been shot. STAT," the operator said. "They are bringing him into the emergency room now."
Perry hung up and walked quickly out of the cafeteria and down a flight of stairs and pushed through a brown door and a nurse pointed to Emergency Room One, and Dr. Perry walked into it. The room is narrow and has gray tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling. In the middle of it, on an aluminum hospital cart, the President of the United States had been placed on his back and he was dying while a huge lamp glared in his face.
John Kennedy had already been stripped of his jacket, shirt, and T-shirt, and a staff doctor was starting to place a tube called an endotracht down the throat. Oxygen would be forced down the endotracht. Breathing was the first thing to attack. The President was not breathing.
Malcolm Perry unbuttoned his dark blue glen-plaid jacket and threw it onto the floor. He held out his hands while the nurse helped him put on gloves.
The President, Perry thought. He's bigger than I thought he was.
He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband's blood all over the front of the skirt. She was standing out of the way, over against the gray tile wall. Her face was tearless and it was set, and it was to stay that way because Jacqueline Kennedy, with a terrible discipline, was not going to take her eyes from her husband's face.
Then Malcolm Perry stepped up to the aluminum hospital cart and took charge of the hopeless job of trying to keep the thirty-fifth President of the United States from death. And now, the enormousness came over him.
Here is the most important man in the world, Perry thought.
The chest was not moving. And there was no apparent heartbeat inside. The wound in the throat was small and neat. Blood was running out of it. It was running out too fast. The occipitoparietal, which is a part of the back of the head, had a huge flap. The damage a .25-caliber bullet does as it comes out of a person's body is unbelievable. Bleeding from the head wound covered the floor.
There was a mediastinal wound in connection with the bullet hole in the throat. This means air and blood were being packed together in the chest. Perry called for a scalpel. He was going to start a tracheotomy, which is opening the throat and inserting a tube into the windpipe. The incision had to be made below the bullet wound.
"Get me Doctors Clark, McCelland, and Baxter right away," Malcolm Perry said.
Then he started the tracheotomy. There was no anesthesia. John Kennedy could feel nothing now. The wound in the back of the head told Dr. Perry that the President never knew a thing about it when he was shot, either.
While Perry worked on the throat, he said quietly, "Will somebody put a right chest tube in, please."
The tube was to be inserted so it could suction out the blood and air packed in the chest and prevent the lung from collapsing.
These things he was doing took only small minutes, and other doctors and nurses were in the room and talking and moving, but Perry does not remember them. He saw only the throat and chest, shining under the huge lamp, and when he would look up or move his eyes between motions, he would see this plum dress and the terribly disciplined face standing over against the gray tile wall.
Just as he finished the tracheotomy, Malcolm Perry looked up and Dr. Kemp Clark, chief neurosurgeon in residency at Parkland, came in through the door. Clark was looking at the President of the United States. Then he looked at Malcolm Perry and the look told Malcolm Perry something he already knew. There was no way to save the patient.
"Would you like to leave, ma'am?" Kemp Clark said to Jacqueline Kennedy. "We can make you more comfortable outside."
Just the lips moved. "No," Jacqueline Kennedy said.
Now, Malcolm Perry's long fingers ran over the chest under him and he tried to get a heartbeat, and even the suggestion of breathing, and there was nothing. There was only the still body, pale white in the light, and it kept bleeding, and now Malcolm Perry started to call for things and move his hands quickly because it was all running out.
He began to massage the chest. He had to do something to stimulate the heart. There was not time to open the chest and take the heart in his hands, so he had to massage on the surface. The aluminum cart was high. It was too high. Perry was up on his toes so he could have leverage.
"Will somebody please get me a stool," he said.
One was placed under him. He sat on it, and for ten minutes he massaged the chest. Over in the corner of the room, Dr. Kemp Clark kept watching the electrocardiogram for some sign that the massaging was creating action in the President's heart. There was none. Dr. Clark turned his head from the electrocardiogram.
"It's too late, Mac," he said to Malcolm Perry.
The long fingers stopped massaging and they were lifted from the white chest. Perry got off the stool and stepped back.
Dr. M.T. Jenkins, who had been working the oxygen flow, reached down from the head of the aluminum cart. He took the edges of a white sheet in his hands. He pulled the sheet up over the face of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The IBM clock on the wall said it was 1 p.m. The date was November 22, 1963.
Three policemen were moving down the hall outside Emergency Room One now, and they were calling to everybody to get out of the way. But this was not needed, because everybody stepped out of the way automatically when they saw the priest who was behind the police. His name was the Reverend Oscar Huber, a small seventy-year-old man who was walking quickly.
Malcolm Perry turned to leave the room as Father Huber came in. Perry remembers seeing the priest go by him. And he remembers his eyes seeing that plum dress and that terribly disciplined face for the last time as he walked out of Emergency Room One and slumped into a chair in the hall.
Everything that was inside that room now belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy and Father Oscar Huber and the things in which they believe.
"I'm sorry. You have me deepest sympathies," Father Huber said.
"Thank you," Jacqueline Kennedy said.
Father Huber pulled the white sheet down so he could anoint the forehead of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy was standing beside the priest, her head bowed, he hands clasped across the front of her plum dress that was stained with blood which came from her husband's head. Now this old priest held up his right hand and he began the chant that Roman Catholic priests have said over their dead for centuries.
"Si vivis, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen."
The prayer said, "If you are living, I absolve you from your sins. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, amen."
The priest reached into his pocket and took out a small vial of holy oil. He put the oil on his right thumb and made a cross on President Kennedy's forehead. Then he blessed the body again and started to pray quietly.
"Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord," Father Huber said.
"And let perpetual light shine upon him," Jacqueline Kennedy answered. She did not cry.
Father Huber prayed like this for fifteen minutes. And for fifteen minutes Jacqueline Kennedy kept praying aloud with him. Her voice did not waver. She did not cry. From the moment a bullet hit her husband in the head and he went down onto his face in the back of the car on the street in Dallas, there was something about this woman that everybody who saw her keeps talking about. She was in shock. But somewhere, down under that shock some place, she seemed to know that there is a way to act when the President of the United States has been assassinated. She was going to act that way, and the fact that the President was her husband only made it more important that she stand and look at him and not cry.
When he was finished praying, Father Huber turned and took her hand. "I am shocked," he said.
"Thank you for taking care of the President," Jacqueline Kennedy said.
"I am convinced that his soul had not left his body," Father Huber said. "This was a valid last sacrament."
"Thank you," she said.
Then he left. He had been eating lunch at his rectory at Holy Trinity Church when he heard the news. He had an assistant drive to the hospital immediately. After that, everything happened quickly and he did not feel anything until later. He sat behind his desk in the rectory, and the magnitude of what had happened came over him.
"I've been a priest for thirty-two years," Father Huber said. "The first time I was present at a death? A long time ago. Back in my home in Perryville, Missouri, I attended a lady who was dying of pneumonia. She was in her own bed. But I remember that. But this. This is different. Oh, it isn't the blood. You see, I've anointed so many. Accident victims. I anointed once a boy who was only in pieces. No, it wasn't the blood. It was the enormity of it. I'm just starting to realize it now."
Then Father Huber showed you to the door. He was going to say prayers.
It came the same way to Malcolm Perry. When the day was through, he drove to his home in the Walnut Hills section. When he walked into the house, his daughter, Jolene, six and a half, ran up to him. She had papers from school in her hand.
"Look what I did today in school, Daddy," she said.
She made her father sit down in a chair and look at her schoolwork. The papers were covered with block letters and numbers. Perry looked at them. He thought they were good. He said so, and his daughter chattered happily. Malcolm, his three-year-old son, ran into the room after him, and Perry started to reach for him.
Then it hit him. He dropped the papers with the block numbers and letters and he did not notice his son.
"I'm tired," he said to his wife, Jennine. "I've never been tired like this in my life."
Tired is the only way one felt in Dallas yesterday. Tired and confused and wondering why it was that everything looked so different. This was a bright Texas day with a snap to the air, and there were cars on the streets and people on the sidewalks. But everything seemed unreal.
At 10 a.m. we dodged cars and went out and stood in the middle lane of Elm Street, just before the second street light; right where the road goes down and, twenty yards further, starts to turn to go under the overpass. It was right at this spot, right where this long crack ran through the gray Texas asphalt, that the bullets reached President Kennedy's car.
Right up the little hill, and towering over you, was the building. Once it was dull red brick. But that was a long time ago when it housed the J.W. Deere Plow Company. It has been sandblasted since and now the bricks are a light rust color. The windows on the first three floors are covered by closed venetian blinds, but the windows on the other floors are bare. Bare and dust-streaked and high. Factory-window high. The ugly kind of factory window. Particularly at the corner window on the sixth floor, the one where this Oswald and his scrambled egg of a mind stood with the rifle so he could kill the President.
You stood and memorized the spot. It is just another roadway in a city, but now it joins Ford's Theatre in the history of this nation.
"R.L. Thornton Freeway. Keep Right," the sign said. "Stemmons Freeway. Keep Right," another sign said. You went back between the cars and stood on a grassy hill which overlooks the road. A red convertible turned onto Elm Street and went down the hill. It went past the spot with the crack in the asphalt and then, with every foot it went, you could see that it was getting out of range of the sixth-floor window of this rust-brick building behind you. A couple of yards. That's all John Kennedy needed on this road Friday.
But he did not get them. So when a little bit after 1 o'clock Friday afternoon the phone rang in the Oneal Funeral Home, 3206 Oak Lawn, Vernon B. Oneal answered.
The voice on the other end spoke quickly. "This is the Secret Service calling from Parkland Hospital," it said. "Please select the best casket in your house and put it in a general coach and arrange for a police escort and bring it here to the hospital as quickly as you humanly can. It is for the President of the United States. Thank you."
The voice went off the phone. Oneal called for Ray Gleason, his bookkeeper, and a workman to help him take a solid bronze casket out of the place and load it onto a hearse. It was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Yesterday, Oneal left his shop early. He said he was too tired to work.
Malcolm Perry was at the hospital. He had on a blue suit and a dark blue striped tie and he sat in a big conference room and looked out the window. He is a tall, reddish-haired thirty-four-year-old, who understands that everything he saw or heard on Friday is a part of history, and he is trying to get down, for the record, everything he knows about the death of the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
Eric A. Stern (thanks, Todd): HELENA, Mont. — In Montana, a rabbi is an unusual sight. So when a Hasidic one walked into the State Capitol last December, with his long beard, black hat and long black coat, a police officer grabbed his bomb-sniffing German shepherd and went to ask the exotic visitor a few questions.
Though there are few Jews in Montana today, there once were many. In the late 19th century, there were thriving Jewish populations in the mining towns, where Jews emigrated to work as butchers, clothiers, jewelers, tailors and the like.
The city of Butte had kosher markets, a Jewish mayor, a B’nai B’rith lodge and three synagogues. Helena, the capital city, had Temple Emanu-El, built in 1891 with a seating capacity of 500. The elegant original facade still stands, but the building was sold and converted to offices in the 1930s, when the congregation had dwindled to almost nothing, the Jewish population having mostly assimilated or moved on to bigger cities.
There is a Jewish cemetery in Helena, too, with tombstones dating to 1866. But more Jews are buried in Helena than currently live here.
The Moscow Mauler couldn't sleep Sunday. On the night before one of the biggest days of his life, the 37-year-old professional wrestler lay in bed in his South Tampa home, staring at the ceiling, replaying scenes from his boyhood in the USSR: roughing up his buddies, discovering a golden-haired American hero on TV, hatching a dream. And now, on the eve of everything coming true, he was anxious. Excited. Maybe even — it was hard for him to admit it — nervous.
This 6-foot-6, 310-pound monolith of a man, who is known for choke-lifting his opponents with one hand, never trembles in the ring. But this performance was going to be different. This wouldn't be Vladimir Kozlov smacking down some opponent on live TV.
This was Oleg Prudius. The real guy no one has heard of. The athlete/actor who plays the evil Russian agent wrestling fans love to hate.
Joanna Connors: "To Whom it May Concern: If this letter has been opened and is being read, it is because I have been seriously injured or killed by my son, Sky Walker."
No one knows for sure when Trudy Steuernagel wrote that letter.
She read it to her ex-husband, Scott Walker, in the spring of 2008, when their autistic son, Sky, had grown so violent she sometimes had to barricade herself in a closet.
Walking with a practiced regal grace from Liberty Square to Frontierland, from the newly Obamafied Hall of Presidents to the riverboat home of Disney's newest princess, Kennedy Johnson is the very price tag of progress.
As her twin brothers keep Mom and Dad on swivel-headed alert, 5-year-old Kennedy is in a blissful dressup daze. She is begowned in a lily-pad-green dress ($90) and tiara ($20). She holds a doll ($17) wearing the same sparkly outfit and, a first, the same brown skin. She just left the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, where wee royals-in-training get gussied up for as much as $190.
"This is a very important day," says Treza Johnson, 37, gazing down at her daughter. A pricey day, too. Visiting from Johns Creek, Ga., the Johnson family "switched the dates of our stay so we could be here for this."
Delivered in terrifying fashion by Michael Kruse: Before Abraham Shakespeare became the most famous missing man in Central Florida, before he won the lottery, before he went on a spree of either stunning generosity or profligate stupidity, before a co-worker sued him saying he had stolen the ticket, before a woman showed up late last year and ended up living in his palatial home after he had disappeared — before any of that — the lanky black man with the dreadlocks was the broke son of a citrus picker.
Janine Anderson: RACINE - Word was out: Something was up at the King Center.
It was early afternoon on Monday, April 29, 1991.
Young men in cocked baseball caps and women with sculpted bangs stood in bunches across the street, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Hamilton Street.
Someone looked up. What's Little Terrance Simpson doing on the roof?
Crouched over the front door, the 11-year-old Simpson saw people looking at him. He raised a finger to his lips. Shhhh.
Wright Thompson: MIAMI -- The old man opens the door and shuffles into a familiar room. The air smells of stale beer and discount brand cigarette smoke. The tables are taken by men with no names. They are all friends. They are all strangers. A different journey brought each of them here, to the pool hall on NW Second Avenue, but that doesn't matter anymore. Their journeys are over. Most don't share the details, not even their last names. Some don't remember the year, or how long they've been coming here. They have no past.
The old man walks clumsily to a table. He has a story. The act of telling it, of having people hear it, keeps him from disappearing forever. One night, he says, he fought Muhammad Ali. Almost won, he brags. Some believe him. Some don't. Most don't care. He's just another wacko wandering the streets with some tale about how his life could have been different.
They ignore him, pretending he's not even there. He's got to show them.
The old man gets up and throws punches into the air.
Todd Frankel: EAST ST. LOUIS — The shades were drawn against the morning sun, as though Rodney Dukes were trying to block out his doubt about the $1 million bill. The room was dark. It was hard to see the dishes in the sink, the unpaid bills on the table, the gray in his black hair. The TV was muted. The only sound was the occasional beep of a smoke alarm battery dying.
Rodney often thought about the bill while sitting in the darkness of his daughter's place in the Villa Griffin public housing project. A million dollar note. A life-changing sum in a scrap of paper. A bill he had discovered five months earlier on the street — his ticket out, away from all this.
At first, he was certain the bill was fake. Or stolen. Just another false promise in "this dead-ass, beat-down town." He hadn't held a steady job since working as a parking lot attendant six years ago. He and his wife recently lost their house. Now they were staying with his daughter. Rodney, a father of three, was a man close to bottom, a place where even dreaming of escape can feel like too much weight to bear. Better to let it go.
Doctors said Chase Kear's survival was impossible.
After he hit his head on the ground in a pole vaulting accident last year, they sawed off a third of his skull to relieve the pressure on his swelling brain.
They told his family that all hope was lost.
But Chase's family lives near Wichita, where a farm kid named Emil Kapaun was ordained a priest 69 years ago. The Kears prayed thousands of prayers to the soul of Father Kapaun, asking him to bend the ear of God. They chanted his name like a mantra.
And Chase woke up.
And he arose and walked.
His baffled doctors said his survival defied medical science. They told the Vatican later that it was a miracle.
So Chase became the latest chapter in the improbable story of Emil Kapaun, dead since 1951.
The story might become more improbable: The Army has recommended Kapaun for the Medal of Honor. The Vatican might make him a saint — if it decides he performed miracles.
Did he?
Mike Dowe and William Funchess starved and shivered with Kapaun in a North Korean prisoner of war camp. So did Herb Miller and Bob Wood and Robert McGreevy.
They say Kapaun sometimes swore like a soldier. They say he gave away his own food as he starved.
They say that when all hope seemed lost, he rallied hundreds of filthy and ragged men to embrace life and forgive their enemies.
They don't consider themselves experts on miracles.
Lane DeGregory: BUSHNELL — The two teenagers got to the cemetery first.
He wore his dark green dress uniform from the National Guard. She wore a long black dress.
They stood on the edge of the road, across from rows of matching military headstones, waiting for the funeral of the man they had never met.
Mike Colt, 19, and his girlfriend, Carol Sturgell, 18, had driven more than an hour from their Tampa homes on Wednesday to be at Florida National Cemetery.
They weren't really sure why they had come. They just knew they had to be here.
"It's kind of sad, huh?" asked Sturgell, scanning the sea of white gravestones.
Colt nodded. "Yeah, but it feels kind of important."
At 7:56:59 on a Sunday night in November, a citizen known only as Steve called 911 to report a fire in the Curtis Park neighborhood. Flames were rising from the back porch of a handsome old house, burning so hot that the tall bamboo shoots in the backyard were popping like warning shots.
The alarm abruptly ended the light after-dinner conversation inside Station 6, propelling its firefighters into another race against a voracious opponent that doubles in size every minute. But their race tonight would not include their best weapon, the station’s water-bearing fire engine. To save money, it would remain idle.
This would turn out to be a routine house fire, if there is such a thing; no deaths, no injuries. But the fire occurred in Sacramento, the budget-challenged capital of budget-challenged California, where city officials have been forced at times to test the boundaries of a particular factor in their fiscal calculations: risk.
Even a routine fire, then, becomes a study in the worth of seconds.
Alex Zayas: TAMPA — For the first time in history, it allowed a human to tap a backspace key and make a mistake go away.
Called "Selectric II," it was conceived when Richard Nixon was president, when IBM made typewriters and when a hand-typed card catalog tracked every book at Tampa's downtown library.
Librarians got machines for the public, giving each a room of its own with walls the shade of an avocado. The workhorses spit out labels for spines of books and stamped Dewey decimals on paper cards. They typed resumes, got people jobs.
Mark Bowden in Vanity Fair: Detective Michele Deery works in a cubicle in the basement of the Delaware County courthouse, in Media, Pennsylvania. The only window is high on the wall, over a tall filing cabinet, and opens into a well, below ground level. The space feels like a cave, which has always struck Deery as about right, because her job is to talk dirty online to strange men.
We stay in the Shandalee Lake Inn in Livingston Manor, N.Y., for a long weekend, talking shop and getting better at journalism. Writers bring reported material with the goal of working one on one with a coach and getting the story in publishable shape.
Anthony Shadid: THULUYAH, IRAQ -- Recitation of the Koran, mournful but consoling, played from a scratchy cassette as the men gathered in the funeral tent for condolences. They sipped bitter Arabic coffee, only enough to leave an aftertaste. As they smoked cigarettes, an American helicopter rumbled overhead, its rotors sounding the familiar drumbeat of war.
The men had arrived on this day in June 2003 to pay their respects to Hashim Mohammed Aani, a chubby 15-year-old who was one of three people killed a day before in a U.S. raid through this lush region on the sweep of the Tigris River.
An omen, a soft-spoken former judge called the shy boy's death. Other mourners called it a tragedy. To the rest of Iraq, it was little more than a statistic, incidental in the killing fields the country would soon be reduced to. The raid itself was a footnote.
Adam Bosch: Mary Taylor starts her Friday night routine by arriving at the bowling alley one hour early, dropping her bag near one of the lanes and heading outside for a smoke.
She walks down the dim corridor toward the double-door exit and passes the cluttered trophy case where her name is pegged twice in little white letters for high scores. She goes past the plaques that celebrate her as a league champion and past the oiled lanes where she has rattled pins since 1955.
Outside Pat Tarsio Lanes, she smokes a cigarette with friends and fellow bowlers as dusk settles over Newburgh. When a longtime friend hands Mary an invitation to the annual Hall of Fame Tournament, she grabs the envelope and heads toward her car.
At the same time, a silver Honda coupe pulls into the bowling alley lot and parks along Route 52. The driver glances at her rearview mirror and sees a closer spot along the bowling-alley facade. She shifts the car into reverse.