South Sea Gold: Chapter Thirteen

Sleeping on a cot at the office, with his meals sent in, was not Tom's idea of the high life, especially with his family five hundred kilometers away. He phoned Kim and Morrie most evenings. The only exercise he got, those first days after his injuries, was walking the halls in the building, or out on the flat roof, in company with his guard. No going out on the street. When he complained, Jon merely shrugged. "We supply the men, but the police made the call. Ask your friend Kerro."

"How long do I have to have a nursemaid?" he then asked Jason when the inspector came to ask a few more questions.

"As long as we need to protect your back." advised Kerro. "The men all say they haven't seen any suspicious activity, so you'll probably be turned loose in another couple of days. We have some unidentified fingerprints from the letter the man gave your wife, but they don't match any in our files." Can you remember anything else about the attackers, now that your mind is clearer?"

"I remember some big guy sitting on my legs to pin me down while his friend kept kicking me hard in my chest and back. When they started working on my head I guess I passed out. No identities yet, huh?"

"Our usual informers say the street gangs don't know anything about these guys. That could either mean your attackers are from out of town, or that anyone who does know them is too scared to talk. For now, we'd better still keep your family where they are."

Matt and Sophia, just returned from the Owego Mine, paid him a visit that same afternoon. "You're looking good, for the shape you're in," observed Matt. "What did they do to you, anyway?"

"Gave me a week's vacation. I don't recommend it as an option, though. Where have you guys been?" Tom's grin was still a little lop-sided. "Hi, Sophia."

"Hi. You look like you've spent time in a cement-mixer."

"Thank the Lord they didn't add the cement," said Tom, "but yeah. That's about what it felt like at the time. What's new with you two?"

"You've missed all the fun, Tom," Sophia said. "Jon sent us down to the Owego Mine again, the day after you got beat up. It seems they've had another accident. Their slurry pipeline broke."

"I thought the pipeline was unbreakable plastic."

"So they said," answered Matt. "But they made some mistakes in construction. You remember that place where the hillside juts out, half way down from the mine to the village? They laid the pipe right next to the road there, where there's only two meters clearance between the hill and the road. Last week one night, heavy rains caused a landslide that pushed the pipeline out into the road. A bulldozer couldn't have done a neater job."

"And there's more," said Sophia, "a ten-tonne lorry came down the road in the dark, hit that thirty-centimeter pipe, flipped the loaded lorry on it's side and crushed the pipe. Didn't hurt the driver much. Maybe he'd had a couple of beers to relax him."

"Did you get pictures?" asked Tom.

"We did," said Sophia, "showing slurry still trickling out of the broken pipe after we got there hours later. Now if they had had a woman engineer design that pipeline, I bet she would have foreseen the problem and kept the pipe in the open field on the other side of the road."

"Just facts, Sophia," said Matt gently. "Leave out the speculation."

"Did you get a chance to take a sample of the pipe drainage?"

"Yup," Matt said. "While Sophia diverted the watchman, a local villager, with her conversation, I quietly emptied the water bottle I had been carrying, and held it under the trickle of slurry still coming out of the pipe." He produced a bottle half full of brownish mud and water.

Tom looked at it doubtfully. "Are you sure that's not a latte from the pub around the corner?"

"It has been in my possession since I filled it. Sophia is my witness. But you can taste it, if you want to."

"Thanks, but no. You could take it to the police lab, though. Jason can't tell you how much cyanide it contains, but he can tell whether or not it has any at all. What else did you learn at Owego?"

"We checked at the provincial land records office in Alotau. South Sea Gold Corp. does not control the whole island of Owego. Their lease covers about twenty hectares of land around the mine and the mill, plus the road to the dock. There are two other villages on the island, one is two kilometers along the coast, west of where the miners live, and another on the south coast, beyond the big mountain. You don't notice them from the air because of all the trees."

"The one to the west is quite pretty," said Sophia. "Palms hanging out over clear blue water. A woman there takes in tourists, and her son advertises scuba diving. We stayed there; didn't check out his scuba equipment, but the swimming was great. I don't think many people know about the place. I suppose all that will change, once the mine goes into full gear."

"Farsighted of you, to go there prepared for swimming," remarked Tom.

Sophia smiled shyly. "Tourism's just as important an industry as mining, along the coast. A good reporter is supposed to evaluate all the diverse options."

"She taught me how to use a sarong," explained Matt. Sophia smiled.

Tom didn't know how far he should pursue this topic. Somehow in his mind, Matt and Sophia were becoming a single item, Matt-and-Sophia, at a rapid pace.

Because Tom was still confined by his injuries he arranged for Matt to take the slurry sample to Inspector Kerro for the police lab that afternoon. Kerro was not encouraging. We'll test for cyanide, but it won't be dependable after standing this long. Traces of metals and other stuff in that mud you have there can change the free cyanide level. If you are concerned about the slurry's effect on the village fishing, I've heard that many kinds of fish are much more sensitive to cyanide poisoning than humans are."

"What should I look for in humans?" Matt asked.

"Other than living near a source of cyanide? Symptoms of chronic poisoning are not very specific. Weakness, confusion, difficulty breathing; things that can also be caused by a lot of other different problems that have nothing to do with cyanide. A person's skin can be unusually pink, for the same reason you saw in that miner who died of monoxide poisoning. Both cyanide and monoxide keep red blood cells from releasing the oxygen they carry. But that's a late sign, near death, and it's harder to see in us PNGeans, because of our darker complexion."

"But we can predict there will be trouble if there is still untreated cyanide in the slurry, right?" Matt said.

"If you have as much as a tenth of a milligram of cyanide per liter of sea water," said Kerro, "you are going to have trouble for most fish and a lot of other sea life, including the coral reefs. The best defense is regular chemical testing of water in the the waste pipe."

"So the responsibility for survival of the fishing industry lies with the DEC, then?"

"Right, unless the Department of Mines is willing and able to do it," said Kerro. "Trusting a mining company's word, or inspecting a site from a company helicopter, or getting paid to ignore the discharge, is definitely a conflict of interest."

"That's what the newspaper needs to know," said Matt. "Thanks, Inspector."

South Sea Gold: Chapter Ten

Tom received a phone call soon after getting to the office next day. "Good morning, Tom," said a friendly voice, "Jeremy Blake here. Our CEO, Mr. Li, and I would like to invite you to lunch with us, if you're free today."

With ulterior motives on the menu? thought Tom. "Jeremy, I usually eat lunch at my desk here at work," Tom said.

"Consider this a working lunch at our expense. Mr. Li wants to get to know you better, and hear your ideas." Jeremy urged. "It shouldn't take long; we know your time is valuable."

Might be a story in this, thought Tom. "Okay, Jere, I'd be glad to, thanks." They set a time and place.

When Tom entered the air-conditioned and tastefully decorated Chinese restaurant at noon, Jeremy and Mr Li had just arrived. A waiter led them to an alcove allowing them some privacy. "This place has excellent dim sum," said Li, when they were seated. Waiters circulated among the tables, pushing food trolleys, each bearing several Chinese delicacies from which the customer might try as many as he liked.

After they had made several selections, and hot tea had been poured, Li turned the talk to business. "I've been very interested in your recent series on mining, Mr. Akani," he said. "South Sea Gold has the controlling interest in three mines in PNG, with two more in the exploration and development stages. Jeremy has been describing your thoughts on limiting the spread of mine tailings. We've heard of paste back-fill methods, of course, but our parent company in Hong Kong has found tailings ponds and deep sea disposal more cost-effective."

"I'm an outsider in such matters, Mr. Li," said Tom, "but has your company considered the added long-range costs in PNG of traditional tailings dumping?"

"We prefer to consider the benefits that can result from our mining ventures, Tom―may I call you Tom?―such as the scholarships our company furnishes for deserving young New Guineans to study abroad, that are made possible by our mining activities. You have children, don't you, Tom?"

Tom nodded. "One, so far."

"Think of the increased opportunities available to him in later life, if you could choose to send him to any university in the world―Australia, UK, United States . . . "

"And how are these scholarship candidates chosen, Mr. Li?"

"An independent committee selects them from a list of nominees furnished by the corporation. The grants are quite generous, intended to cover cost of tuition, travel, and living abroad."

"The grant applications are not open to all high school students, then, based on merit?"

"The committee would consider merit, among other things, of course." Li's expression and tone were bland, but something seemed to change in his face; something more distant about his eyes, maybe, Tom thought.

"Mr. Li, that's certainly very generous of the company. Of course, my newspaper's focus has always been chiefly on those people adversely affected by mining. People whose farms were down-river from a collapsed mine tailings dam, for instance, or the failure of the promised school house to appear at your own Owego Mine in Milne Bay."

Mr. Li leaned forward earnestly. "Let me assure you, the Owego school has not been forgotten. At a staff meeting earlier this month, one of the top executives from Hong Kong directed that the school construction be speeded up. We expect it to be ready later this year."

Another thought apparently struck Li. "And that reminds me," he said, "our public relations weekly newsletter has recently lost it's editor. Would you consider working for South Sea Gold as editor, keeping our world-wide enterprises informed on new mining developments as they occur? It's a paid position, of course," he added.

"Let me think about it," said Tom," as they all got up from the lunch table. "I would have to clear it with my editor, to be sure there is no conflict of interest."

"Of course," said Li. "Let me know soon, so we can discuss salary and travel perks."

As he drove back to the office, Tom considered what he had just been offered. Clearly, it had been an offer. They had been talking about tailings disposal, until Li had suddenly switched to college scholarships and world-wide travel. He had never given much thought to his children's future education. He had always thought that university achievement depended about 20% on the university and 80% on the student's character and motivation, and he saw the University of PNG as the natural place to go. But what if he was wrong? What if local schools deteriorated so much under the current culture of greed and bribes that a local diploma fifteen years in the future would be worthless?

He recalled the advice from his mother, a minor government official well acquainted with bribe offers: "Tomaka, my son, if you don't want to be tempted, don't even unwrap the gift, no matter whether it's a bottle of whiskey, or money, or whatever. Temptation is much easier to resist if you don't gaze at it."

I won't solve anything by becoming part of the problem, he thought. And yet. . . .

"I've had quite a day," Tom told his wife when he got home that evening. "A free lunch and two bribe offers."

"Oh? Can we take that vacation in New Zealand, then?" She held out three-year-old Morris, who was reaching for his Daddy.

"That wasn't in the offer," he said, lifting his son to his shoulders, "but a full university scholarship for Morrie when he grows up, anywhere in the world, covering tuition, travel and living expenses. You want to go to school in New Zealand, Morrie?"

The boy nodded enthusiastically. "After dinner!"

"And the second offer?" asked Kim.

"A part-time editor's job with a mining newsletter. Good travel perks. I'm supposed to let him know soon, so we can discuss pay."

"And what do you have to do to merit all this?"

"He hasn't said yet, but I'm sure it will involve some message like, 'Mine tailings are good for you,' " He set Morrie down.

"Are you serious about this, Tom?" she gazed at her husband wonderingly."You've never spoken like this before."

"I don't know." He was thoughtful. "It would be interesting to see how far they are willing to go."

Tom was taking a coffee break with Matt Lin the next morning. "So, Matt, how much success did you have yesterday tracking down the Gender Issues Office?" Tom asked.

"Sophia and I finally found an office near Parliament House." Matt gently blew on his coffee to cool it. "Easier to find than anything in the Mining Ministry maze. It opened up a whole new aspect of mining for me―small-scale operations by a single family or person, gold-panning a stream or maybe working a sluice. One of the papers the gender people handed out estimates there are eight or ten thousand women trying to make a living this way, and four times that many men.

"It's mostly bare subsistence living," he continued, "and there aren't any national regulations, but the Mineral Resource Authority runs a Small-Scale Mine Training Center at some place called Wau. Sophia says she grew up in a village near there."

Tom grunted. "Morobe Province, south of Lae. Some of the mines there aren't working any more, but there are new, bigger ones a little farther south."

"The government people are mostly neutral about these little places," Matt went on, "I guess they can't really inspect and enforce rules at that many thousand small mine sites. But these are mostly amateurs, they may know that mercury can extract gold from the heavy sand in the bottom of their sluice, but they don't know the dangers of mercury poisoning. Maybe they don't wash after a long day's work, maybe they use the same pot to cook their food that they used to cook the gold mix to boil off the mercury. Almost surely they breathe some of the mercury fumes, and most of them dump the sand residue back in the river for the folks downstream to drink."

"So, if these small-time miners are uneducated and live in some other part of the country, what good does this school do them?"

"That's where the women's groups come in. Sophia talked with the women at this gender issues office for quite a while. Women's empowerment is her favorite subject."

"Yeah, I've noticed," Tom said drily.

"She's a remarkable woman. In many ways." Matt's voice trailed off as he gazed into space.

Tom brought him back to the subject at hand. "You were saying . . ."

"Oh. Yes, well, PNG women are starting to realize that there's more to life than gardening, cooking, and babies. Until lately, they weren't allowed to mine at all. But now, things have turned around. Most male miners out in the villages are glad to have their wives and children help with the work. That makes other problems, of course, like kids dropping out of school, if there's even a school near by. Sophia says that women have more instinct for business, in finding the best buyer for their bits of gold, or having an eye for chances to buy and sell items in demand in the village. Men in PNG, she says, usually have less interest in saving money. As soon as they sell their gold, they spend the money. Women are more likely to look ahead, willing to spend some for their kids education or other needs."

"My question was, " Tom prompted, "how does the miners' school at Wau help those who can't afford the travel or pay the school fees. I assume there is some cost involved, not to mention time away from work?"

"That's still in the planning stage. One source said satellite schools will be set up in other mining areas, another said there will be a traveling team that can go anywhere that has a road nearby."

"And what do they teach?"

"The center at Wau sets up two-week sessions each covering three or four topics. One of their main concerns is safety in handling mercury—it's a health problem for the miner, for his family who breathe the fumes, and for the villagers who drink the contaminated water. But it's the only way they can recover fine particles of gold from the river sediment. Cyanide, that big mines are trained to use, is so poisonous that it's out of the question for village use."

"But not out of the question for big mines to dump residue in the rivers and ocean, if they so choose," said Tom. "What else do they teach?"

"How to prospect for gold, so they don't waste energy tearing up whole hillsides; how to avoid physical injury, how to handle the business-end of the work, avoiding environmental damage, things like that. You know," continued Matt, "living in Singapore, and now working in Hong Kong, I haven't any idea how people out in tiny villages handle their banking and business matters."

"There have been micro-banking projects from time to time here in PNG," said Tom, "but none I know of that reach a large part of the country. Security against robbery is a big problem here."

"A friend of mine in Singapore tried bringing banking to the villages, I remember." Matt smiled in reminiscence. "His bank sent him to Africa to see a successful enterprise a few years ago. They solved the robbery problem with an armored car carrying a computer system with the bank's complete database for the thirty villages in that region. Some of their clients couldn't read or write, but each account was registered to a client's thumbprint. Deposits, withdrawals, and small loans could all be done just by the computer, through the person's thumbprint ID. They even reduced the payroll of one government department by half when they got rid of all the fake names on the roster that couldn't match a print. Four armed guards deployed at each stop discourage robbers.

Tom grinned. "We might have to add a feature for rural PNG. Have a second armored car with four more armed guards locked inside to protect the deployed four from being out-gunned by our raskol gangs. But thanks for the tips, Matt. They should make a good base for next Friday's feature article."

"I'll trade them for some information I want," said Matt."

Tom raised an inquiring eyebrow.

"Tell me about Sophia. She's a fascinating girl."

"Well, I only know her from working on a few projects here at The Journal. Twenty-seven years old, divorced, no kids. Aggressive reporter, looks for facts, verifies her material with at least two sources; that kind of stuff . . ."

"What happened to her marriage?"

"I've never asked her. I kind of assumed she had an abusive husband, but that's only a rumor."

"Do you know how she feels about Chinese?"

Tom smiled inwardly, tempted to answer, "she prefers pasta." But this wasn't the time.

"I've never heard her make any racial remarks. She has a temper, and doesn't suffer fools lightly, but you probably already noticed that."

"I'd like to ask her out. But I don't know the social customs here in PNG."

"Best way to test that is to ask her," Tom said. "I think she likes you." Actually, he had no idea whether she did or not, but a friend is a friend.

"Yeah. Well, thanks. See you tomorrow."

Mining, Medicine, and Writing

I am back to blogging after a several month absence while getting started on a new novel.. The plot is well started now, but I have to do a lot of research before I can flesh out the characters and background.

The setting is Papua New Guinea, same as my last story (The Samana Incident) , but the theme has changed from drug dealing and gun running to mining gold.

The late twentieth century witnessed several ecologic mining disasters in PNG. Chief among them, tailings impoundment dikes at the Ok Tedi mine broke, covering agricultural areas down-river with mud over a several hundred sq km area. The Panguna Mine on Bougainville Island dumped raw copper mine waste into rivers, prompting a full-scale armed revolt. Both mines are inoperative now, but foreign corporations want to re-open both.

PNG will be one of the chief mining nations of the twenty-first century. PNG suddenly finds itself with massive amounts of oil and natural gas reserves, and about twenty major gold/copper mines now active or in development, plus lesser amounts of silver, nickel, cobalt, molybdenum, and rhenium. With gold reserves exceeding one hundred million oz. (worth $1,600.00 per oz.) and copper and silver in demand at record prices, the foreign mining companies are not going to go away, Nor is Exxon-Mobil, and its 500 km gas pipeline and oil wells.

So why are the people of PNG discontent? They should be getting rich soon. There are several problems. Their government is not getting advantageous contracts with the foreigners. Much of what they are getting is reportedly siphoned off in graft. The Dept. of Mines is beginning to realize the need for more comprehensive mining laws, but I suspect they haven't enough mining inspectors to enforce safety for the miners or preservation of pristine coast lands and fisheries.

Why am I writing a novel if all this is true? Because most people read fiction more than dull facts, especially in a country whose college-educated people are a small minority.

I am pitting a couple of news reporters against a foreign mining corporation. For starters, five miners are found dead one night .Police Inspector Jason Kerro will also play a role, as he did in The Samana Incident. More developments follow.

In The Week Before Christmas

I questioned my patient's plan to move from northern Idaho to Colorado in the middle of winter, and near the ninth month of her first pregnancy.

"Joe found work down there, and we need to stay together," she explained. She seemed satisfied with her answer.

"What will happen if you go into labor in the middle of a Wyoming blizzard?" I asked gently. "Cars do break down sometimes, you know. If you must go, at least take the bus."

"Can't afford it until we get a paycheck. Anyway," she smiled at the rusty clunker parked outside my office window, "Joe just finished rebuilding the engine. And we'll carry a blanket. God'll get us there!"

The odds were strong against Jesus being born safely that night long ago, after a two-day journey from Nazareth. Mary must have had misgivings about the whole thing. Would a midwife be available? Or would the only one around be her husband? He was a good carpenter, but he didn't have much experience in assisting childbirth.

I think that perhaps we never have the right to demand miracles of God. But when there are no alternatives to taking risks, the knowledge that God is with us can sustain us in our endeavor. And God-directed endeavors can change the world.

(First written for "The Workplaces of Christmas"  1994, American Baptist National Ministries

Almost-a-doctor

I walked through the autumn leaves in the fall of 1950, toward my first day as a real medical student with a feeling of exultant expectation. Up till then, I had found that being a “pre-med” didn’t make as much impression as I would have liked. With girls, especially, the attitude seemed to be “Forget this one; he’ll be buried in the books for four more years.” But now my embryo medical career was finally on track. I had at least made it in through the door.
     Classes for first year medical students were all held in one building, across campus from my home. I joined seventy would-be doctors in the lecture auditorium that first day, all of us waiting with apprehension for the professor of anatomy to appear, who would rule our lives for the next five months. First semester in medical school covered only two subjects: Human Anatomy and Histology, which is anatomy viewed through a microscope.
     Dr. Phillip Armstrong was a deceptively bland man in his fifties, who made no effort to put us at ease. His aphorisms were memorable:
     “We will address you here as ‘Doctor’. For some of you, this will be the only time you will ever hear it applied to you.”
“Up until now, you have worked to achieve a well-rounded education. Here, we intend to flatten you out.”
     We spent that first day getting organized into working groups of four, and learning detailed instructions for the care and study of our cadavers. We took notes on everything; one nervous student even jotted down the professor’s “Good morning.” We entered the dissecting room that first afternoon, wondering what our reaction would be to studying the dead. We four, Onas Morgan, Tony Rivera, Tony Slivinski, and I, grouped ourselves around our dissecting table, and surveyed the motionless shape swathed in pungent, formaldehyde-soaked layers of sheeting beneath the yellow oil-cloth.
     Following the instructor’s directions, working one pair on each side, we laid bare the groin area and made a first incision along the inguinal ligament, surprised at the toughness of human skin, careful to go slowly and meticulously, exposing and identifying each nerve branch and blood vessel. We would spend most of the first week on the abdominal wall, laying open each muscle layer under the critical eyes of the instructors and Dr. Armstrong himself.
     Dissecting a dead person brought a feeling of awe, different from working with dead animals in my pre-med courses. All of us had a healthy fear of making a mistake in the work and earning Dr. Armstrong’s displeasure. Perhaps he kept us off-balance on purpose during these first uneasy encounters with death.
     “The name of the muscle is not pronounced ‘ili-op-soas’ as it is spelled,” he said. “Say ‘ilio-soas.’ The ‘p’ is silent. As in swimming.”
     Three students dropped out that first week. One fainted dead away. Another threw down his scalpel, cursing, and stalked out. We never saw him again. Rumor had it that the third decided to take his girl-friend’s advice to study pharmacy instead.
We compensated for our insecurity with a certain amount of dark humor. Medical students learn a large number of limericks and memory devices, ranging from the fate of nymphomaniacal Alice or the efficient young man from Bel-Air, to the names of the eight bones in the wrist or the sequence of the twelve cranial nerves.
     We four lab partners learned that our cadaver’s name had been Peter B_____, who had died in a state hospital of “old age.” Weeks later, deep in the abdomen, we found that undiagnosed urinary obstruction had destroyed his kidneys.
     A month after entering medical school, I had acute appendicitis. The operation went well, but spinal headaches from the anesthetic kept me on my back for a week. I still recall trying to study, holding the six-pound Gray’s Anatomy textbook on my sore abdomen. I also remember, when I was exhausted by the four-hour work sessions in the anatomy lab the following week, that even Dr. Armstrong had a compassionate streak. He stopped at my table to ask quietly how was I, and to tell me it was all right to take a rest break occasionally.
     We four, and most of the rest, survived that five months and the examination at the end. One of my tense friends panicked when the examiner thrust a skull at him, jabbed a finger at the large opening at the base and barked, “What goes through there!”
“Food!” the student blurted, then winced as he realized the answer should have been spinal cord. Our universal wish, we all agreed, was that we could repeat the whole course, now that we knew what we were supposed to be learning.
     We celebrated the end of anatomy the last weekend in January, a double milestone for me. That night I first met the girl I would marry.

Nottingham High

from "Bridge Ahead, A Medical Memoir" copyright 2008 Keith Dahlberg

High school is a time of many changes for any teenager. Still more so, if the teenager is a dissident. And I was a pacifist, in the middle of World War II.
I felt strongly about this. I took my cues from my Dad, whose sermons from the pulpit were pro-people, but against all war. To him, peace did not mean merely absence of war. He believed war went against the word of God and solved very few issues. It did not mean that a Christian should be a weakling or a doormat. On the contrary, Christians are expected to be strong in order to help the oppressed, enslaved, or lost to find a personal relationship with God, and so far as possible help them find a way out of suffering and injustice.
As a young man at the time of the first World War, Dad at first had refused even to register for the draft. He finally registered as a conscientious objector, although the draft board would have allowed him a clergy exemption. He continued to preach against war during World War II, even while he ministered to the needs of two hundred service men and women among his congregation in Syracuse. The FBI had him on their list for a while; they listened to him preach, and questioned the church members, but never found anything to even suggest that he was seditious or unpatriotic. (Years later, I read their conclusion in the FBI's dossier on Dad, released under the Freedom of Information Act.) His congregation, in fact, highly respected him, even though many members had questions about his message.
During World War II, a pacifist teenager was hard for most of my classmates and teachers to figure out. Following Pearl Harbor, the whole nation had mobilized to the war effort. Buy war bonds. If you can't afford a bond, buy war stamps each week until you have enough for a bond. Turn in your aluminum cooking pots to build airplanes. Plant victory gardens. Save gas. Knit sweaters. Write the boys overseas. The time I spent at Boy Scout farm camp, in 1942, weeding cabbage fields and picking beans, was to help the national effort to raise more food, and I had no problem with that.
But I had a decision to make on my own in wood-shop class in junior high school. The whole class was assigned the project of making scale-model wooden airplanes, about five inches long, used for training aircraft spotters and gunners in instant recognition. To me, that was supporting war and I told the shop teacher, Mr. Pepper, that I couldn't do it. "I understand,was his gruff reply, but I don't think he ever really did.
It got worse in high school, during home-room period each day. Students were expected to buy at least one war savings stamp (twenty-five cents) each Friday. If even one student in the whole school did not do so, the school could not display the 100% banner on the flag pole that week. Nottingham High never got to fly the banner when I was a student. Some of my classmates resented this, although most adopted a neutral attitude. Things improved after about a year when the school held a Red Cross fund drive one day. I figured up what I had not invested in war stamps over the past months, and gave it to the Red Cross, possibly more than the rest of my home room combined. A hostile classmate accosted me one morning, "How come you can give to the Red Cross but not to the war effort?"
I told him the Red Cross healed people. I added that I wouldn’t get any savings
investment returned after the war, like he would from his war bonds. He didn't like that at all; I thought he might hit me, but I stood my ground. The class president and his girlfriend were standing nearby; both took my side and told the guy to back off. After their endorsement, things got better.
During 1945, the Baptist Youth Fellowship at church became active in drama. I had a bit-part in Elmer and the Love-Bug, found that I liked acting, and when a drama club at school presented Why I Am a Bachelor, I got the lead role, playing a misanthropic lecturer. It was a corny play, but the student body liked it. In looking back, perhaps part of its popularity was their opinion that the role fit me exactly.
In my senior year, I happened to have Miss Frederica Smith as my English teacher. "Sister Smith was a middle-aged, self-possessed soul in horn-rimmed glasses who believed in getting the whole class involved. After we had studied poetry and verse-making for two weeks, Miss Smith announced that, tomorrow being Valentine’s Day, each student would choose some character from literature and write an appropriate valentine to him or her. After making sure that the Bible was considered literature, I submitted my valentine, from Samson to Delilah, with a straight face:
All the while I’ve been making your people feel blue,
Though I’m fighting with thousands, yet think I of you.
I’ve torn city gates from their place in the wall,
But your icy cold heart I cannot move at all.
In times of distress I’ve relied on my brawn,
But that’s no help at all when to you I am drawn.
Of all the Philistines I think you’re most fair
But Baby, I can’t keep you out of my hair.

The class, Miss Smith included, burst into laughter. To my surprise, I was later elected senior-class poet based on this offering, and was invited to join the staff of the school newspaper, but I never wrote any more poems worth remembering.
The year went by quickly after that, and on June 24, 1946 graduation night came for 256 of us. Our principal, Harold Coon, was graduating too, moving up to a post in the school district headquarters downtown. There was the usual procession to Pomp and Circumstance, speeches, awards etc. My mind was chiefly on summer vacation; I would go directly from school to the railroad station and catch the night train west for my second summer of work at Green Lake, Wisconsin, along with one of my classmates.
I was startled out of my reverie by hearing my name called at the tail end of the athletic and citizenship award presentations. Mr. Coon announced that the class had voted me the one they would most like to represent them in life. I hadn’t known there was such an award, but it’s the one I would most like to have.

Front Halves of Horses Sent to Washington DC for Assembly

That was one of the guesses about what was being manufactured at the super-secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee back in the 1940s. The closely guarded production turned out to be purified Uranium-235 for the first atomic bombs, but in a back-handed way the earlier guess has been quoted as a paradigm for thought processes in the nation's capital.
This was reinforced in my hometown of Kellogg, Idaho back around 1984, when the Cold War and atomic bomb threats were often in the news. Someone in the national bureaucracy, pondering how to save citizens' lives in case of atomic attack thought "Mine tunnels!" The Silver Valley in northern Idaho has more than 200 miles of tunnels underground, thought to be enough to accommodate most of the population of the city of Spokane (seventy miles away, it's true, but they had a super-highway.) Accordingly, 200 cots and a few initial supplies of food and medicine arrived for storage in our local hospital against the day of holocaust.
The bureaucrat's thinking was not entirely off the wall. An atomic bomb hitting Fairchild Air Force Base (ten miles the other side of Spokane) might conceivably give citizens an hour or two to take shelter from the radioactive dust that would be borne on our usual westerly winds. And after three weeks underground, people might (we were told) be able to survive in the diminishing radioactivity. When Mount St. Helens had blown up, four years earlier, the volcanic dust did indeed reach Kellogg and beyond. The local miners noticed that it only penetrated the mine tunnels about 300 feet before adhering to the moist tunnel walls, and it was reasonable to suppose that radioactive dust from a bomb might behave in the same way. Anyway, some of us had enough interest in the topic to spend some of our days off evaluating the suitability of mines as fall-out shelters.
After getting permission from the mine companies, four of us - a fireman, a public health worker, an instructor from the mine rescue training school, and myself (a doctor) - formed the core of a crew to map the mines, We pre-supposed that in any atomic attack electric power would be gone, and the mine hoists and ventilation fans would not be operating. So only entry level, horizontal tunnels would be accessible. (Try climbing twenty flights of stairs, the distance between one mine level and the next, and see how your legs feel.) There would be no light or food except for what could be brought in or stored ahead of time.
There is natural air circulation in many mines, and a warm enough temperature. Our public health man tested various underground water sources and found some of them drinkable. Some had drainage ditches that would provide sanitation. The tunnel floors are rocky and wet, and many of the mines had nothing but a vertical shaft access. We checked out ten or fifteen mines. It wasn't until we saw our mine rescue expert casting worried glances at some of the rotting mine timbers in a long-abandoned tunnel that we decided we had explored enough.
The mines of Shoshone County, Idaho, those with horizontal access, drinkable water and breathable air, had enough room to accommodate perhaps 1,200 people, if food, medicines, and electric batteries were stored ahead of time and people did not mind the dark, damp, sometimes dangerous surroundings.
But as is often the case, bureaucrats in the nation's far-away capital city had no clue about conditions in mines. Nor did they realize how much preplanning, and checking the facts of the local situation, was needed to provide genuine safety for the people on site. Our bureaucrats took no further action.
When I told some of my patients about our study, showing room in the mine tunnels for only about one-tenth the local population, let let alone 250,000 Spokanites, they were philosophic. One told me:
"Well, that's okay, Doc. If the bomb ever drops and we can't dynamite the river bridge in time to keep the city folks out, I'll just sit on my front steps with a six-pack of beer, and watch the fireworks."