Nancy Drew, USN

Let me start with a simple fact:  The Hardy Boys books were much better than the Nancy Drew books.  I can say this on the basis of having read 40-odd Hardy Boys books and one Nancy Drew book.  That’s a more than adequate sample size if you are both prepubescent and male.

My parents learned that, for $1.98, they could throw me a cheap mystery book and I would be (mas o menos) well-behaved for several hours.  This was peace and quiet at a price they could afford.  I later understand this concept very well when, at the age of eighteen, I ran a small café on the South Texas border and the eatery, unfortunately, had a jukebox.  After listening to Freddie Fender singing Wasted Days and Wasted Nights approximately a million times, I put a blank record in the jukebox and titled the two songs, Life After the Bomb and After Infinity.  For only a quarter, I could purchase fifteen minutes of peace and quiet.

One day (evidently because the only bookstore in our small town was out of the Hardy Boys series), my mother bought me a Nancy Drew book, written by Carolyn Keene.  Though I never told my mother, I enjoyed the book.  I still preferred Hardy Boys books, but the book was okay.  At that age, reading a book “written for girls” was like riding a mini-bike—it might be okay, but you don’t want any of your male friends seeing you do it.

I doubt that any boy ever read all 178 of the Hardy Boys books, or that any girl ever read all 175 Nancy Drew books.  Depending on how you count the books in each series, there may be many more than that, since the books were written, rewritten, restarted, and issued in hardback, paperback, and graphic novel format several times.  This is not counting the multiple movie, television series, and video games that have appeared since the first book was published in 1930.

That brings up the usual question:  Did the Hardy Boys appear before or after Nancy Drew?  Neither, both series are publications of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.  In 1896, the first series, the Rover Boys, was established along a set formula:  Each series featured set characters, a formulaic plot, a fictitious pen name for an author, and a ghost-writer who was paid a pittance to flesh out an outline handed to him by the syndicate.  The first series was so successful, that many more followed.  The Bobbsey Twins started in 1904, Tom Swift in 1910, the Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew began publication in 1930.  The latest new series from the company is the Three Investigators, which began in 1964.  All of the above series are still in publication.

After the success of the Hardy Boys series, Stratemeyer approached the same publishers and offered them a new series, featuring a young female detective named Stella Strong.  The publishers accepted the offer and the first three novels were contracted out to Mildred Wirt Benson.  Following a strict outline, Benson wrote the stories for a flat fee of $125 without royalties.  The series was immediately successful and Benson was contracted to write five additional books for the same price.

By the time of publication, Stella Strong had turned into Nancy Drew, who was a blue-eyed blonde who had graduated from high school at sixteen, and who was the daughter of a wealthy and successful lawyer whose clients frequently paid the expenses as Nancy solved crimes associated with the cases her father defended.  Of course, that was the original series—Nancy changed over the decades.  In the early series, Nancy drove a roadster and by the fifties she drove a convertible, but in the latest books, she owns an electric car.

Note.  Somewhere, over the years, I lost most of the those early Hardy Boys Books, possibly because of how cheaply-made the books were.  I gave one of my last remaining copies to my nephew, who eagerly read it.  About forty pages into the book, he had a question, “What’s a jal-o-py?”  Now that I think of it, I wonder how many of today’s readers know what a “roadster” is?

Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first eight books, but when the depression hit   Stratemeyer realized that, with so many writers out of work, he could lower the pay offered to his ghostwriters.  When Benson learned that the new fee would only be $75, she quit, so Stratemeyer needed a new stand-in for Carolyn Keene.

Walter Kariq was an American art student in Paris when World War I started in 1914.  Kariq wanted to fight, but the United States wouldn’t join the war for three years, so he joined the French Foreign Legion, ending the war as a Captain of Infantry.  When the war ended, Kariq worked as a writer, a columnist, and a cartoonist while he traveled the world.  He visited Mexico and Canada, spent weeks in Japan in 1935, and sent dispatches back from the Philippine Islands, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Italy, and France. 

Somehow, in his spare time, Kariq wrote twenty books for children, under a variety of pen names.  And, as you probably have already guessed, he was the next Caroline Keene, writing volumes eight through ten of the Nancy Drew series, starting with Nancy’s Mysterious Letter.  

When World War II started, Kariq joined the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of Captain.  During the war, he wrote numerous battle reports and articles, as well as serving on the USS Texas.  By the war’s end, he was an aide to Admiral Nimitz.  After the war, Kariq remained in the Navy, writing history books and some of the scripts of the Victory at Sea television show.  Following the war, Kariq also continued writing novels, including one of my personal favorites, Zotz!, which was made into a movie of the same name.

Walter Kariq, a combat veteran of the French Foreign Legion, a naval captain who served on convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and who was an aide to Admiral Chester Nimitz—somehow managed to serve over a decade in the US Navy without anyone ever knowing that he was the author of several Nancy Drew books.

One last point:  In 2025, it will be 95 years since the first Nancy Drew book was published, meaning that the copyright on the name expires and anyone can publish their own Nancy Drew novel. Nancy Drew in Space. Nancy Drew CSI. Nancy Drew in the Dallas Cowgirls.  You should start now.

The Last Bombing

When was the last time aircraft dropped bombs on the United States?  When was the last time Americans at home were targeted and killed by attacking aircraft?

Certainly, thousands of Americans were killed by aircraft on September 11, 2001, but that is not what I am talking about.  When was the last time military aircraft attacked Americans at work or in their homes with bombs?

Pearl Harbor immediately comes to mind.  On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes attacked American military targets on Hawaii, propelling the United States into World War II.  Less well known is that shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands, bombing Dutch Harbor before invading Kiska.  

In September, 1942, in the Lookout Air Raids, a Japanese submarine with a watertight hangar, the  I-25, launched a single floatplane off the coast of Oregon, that dropped two incendiary bombs near the town of Brookings.  One caused a small fire that was spotted by fire watchers in a lookout tower and was quickly extinguished; no trace of the second bomb was ever discovered.  The following day, the plane dropped two more bombs, neither of which ignited any forest fires.

Far less well known is the Japanese Fu-Go balloon attacks of World War II.  The Japanese launched 9,300 paper balloons that were filled with hydrogen; each carried four incendiary bombs and a single anti-personnel bomb.  After traveling in the jet-stream from Japan across the Pacific Ocean, a timer was set to  release the bombs over the Pacific Northwest, with the intent of starting large forest fires that would divert manpower from the war effort.  The Fu-Go was the first intercontinental weapon ever deployed.

The program was a failure, however:  No forest fires were started by the bombing program, in part because the bombs were falling during the rainy season.  Out of 9,300 bombs launched, approximately 300 were later located.   These were not exactly “smart bombs”, since the remains of the balloons were found in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest and Yukon Territories, and at sea.  One of the balloon bombs did kill six civilians in Oregon—a party that included a pregnant woman and five children on a Sunday School picnic, who were the only civilian casualties of World War II in the contiguous United States.  

This, however, was not the last time that aircraft bombed targets in the United States.  That occurred in October, 1950, in Puerto Rico, which was an American protectorate.  Though the targets were American citizens on American soil, the bombs were dropped by American planes flown by American pilots.  In other words:  We bombed us.

Puerto Rico became an American territory in 1898 when Spain ceded the island in the Treaty of Paris.  (If you are ever on a game show and asked to name the treaty that ended a specific war, just say the Treaty of Paris, there are more than a dozen such treaties so chances are you’ll get lucky.).  By 1917, Puerto Ricans officially became US citizens—mostly so they could be drafted to serve in World War I.  They can vote for president, if they are residing in one of the fifty states at the time of the election.  (Since only 40% of Puerto Ricans still live on the island, this isn’t much of a problem.)

Though technically part of the United States, we haven’t always treated the islanders fairly, nor have the Puerto Ricans always enjoyed the protections promised them by our constitution.  While many of the islanders wanted independence—a desire that is perfectly legal under our laws providing that such desire is expressed peacefully—our government has usually reacted to such expressions in a draconian fashion.

The problems started back in the 1930’s.  The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party advocated for the island to become independent, much as Cuba had done.  Though this advocacy was legal, the US-appointed governor of the island began cracking down on the organization, arresting the leaders under the charge of sedition.  After two farcical trials—the first was declared a mistrial after the jury refused to convict and the second had a hand-picked jury—the leaders were sent to federal prison for ten years.  A few years later, the police opened fire on a Nationalist parade, killing 19 in what became known as the Ponce Massacre.  Though the police started the shooting and killed unarmed civilians, the President of the Nationalist Party was tried and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

In 1948, the governor signed a law that became known as the Ley de la Mordaza (gag law) that made it a crime to “print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent.”  You could be fined $10,000 and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for singing a patriotic song or displaying the Puerto Rican flag.  (And remember, those were 1948 dollars, back when a new Cadillac was $2,900.)

Needless to say, this law is a complete violation of the US Constitution, particularly the First Amendment.  Feeling that they had no recourse left, the Nationalist Party called for an armed revolution, for independence to begin in 1952, on the date that the United States was going to legally change Puerto Rico from a territory to a commonwealth.  Before the uprising was set to start, the Puerto Rican police began surrounding the homes of the party’s leadership, opening fire without warning, killing several people, and arresting anyone inside the homes, charging them with ambushing the police.

The uprising started on October 28, 1950, in San Juan and seven small towns and villages.  Other than holding a few small villages, cutting a few telephone lines and burning down a post office, the revolution was a total failure.  The heavily armed police had several days’ advance warning of the revolution and were not at all hesitant to use overwhelming force to put down the revolution, usually before the Nationalist Party even acted.  Those who were not killed were prosecuted.  Typical of the results was one party leader’s  being sentenced to 20 years in federal jail for the possession of a Puerto Rican flag.

The governor declared martial law.  The United States sent ten P-47 fighter planes to drop 500 lb. bombs on the town of Jayuya, a small town with a population of 9,000.  While the planes then strafed the town, hitting almost every building, the Puerto Rican National Guard moved in, attacking with artillery, mortars, and grenades.  The town was destroyed.  There were 28 deaths in Jayuya, but there would have been much more if the townspeople had not fled.

The revolution was over almost before it was started.  A few years later, the remaining revolutionaries attempted to assassinate President Truman followed by an attack in the House of Representatives, both attacks were unsuccessful.  President Truman later reduced the lengthy prison sentences for those revolutionaries still in jail, at least one of whom had been sent to Alcatraz.  The last of those still in prison were pardoned by President Carter.  

Today, over 85% of Puerto Ricans  prefers that the island remain part of the United States, perhaps because the island residents participate in Medicare and Social Security but do not pay federal income tax.

Enema U After 55 Years

Fifty-five years ago, I was a college student.  Though still in high school, I took a single class at the community college two nights a week.  Today, I’m retired and I am once again a college student, but there have been a few changes in the last half century.

Perhaps the best change in education in the last fifty years is that college is multicultural today.  Enema U is in the arid deserts of New Mexico, but there are students from everywhere—literally from all around the world at the university.  And there are students from every imaginable background attending, too.  There were a lot of barriers to a good education back in the sixties, and thankfully, most of them have now been lowered dramatically, if not eliminated.

But I want to talk about the other changes to college.  These are mostly just the things I see as I attend class, study in the library, or walk across campus to hear a really good lecture about the painting styles of Hieronymus Bosch.

First, the classrooms are absolutely different.  In 1969, the classroom had bright fluorescent lights, open windows, a couple of fans, blackboards, and  (frequently) ash trays on the tables.  Today’s classrooms are dimly lit by LED bulbs so as not to wash out the electronic screens and projected images.  White boards and smart boards have almost completely replaced the blackboards.  And while there are still a few smokers on campus, they have all been moved to the entrances of buildings where their second-hand smoke can be enjoyed by everyone.

Today, an air-conditioned classroom with windows that still work is a rarity.  One of my classes was moved to a zoom meeting last week because the classroom’s air conditioning had failed and, though it is a beautiful classroom, due to its modern design, it would have been intolerable without air conditioning.  This is new to me:  thinking back, I believe I was a sophomore at the University of Houston before I ever saw an air-conditioned classroom.  

The most obvious change, of course, is technology.  The most sophisticated thing I owned used to be a slide rule, which is something so useless today that even my instructors have never heard of one.  Today’s students have calculators, computers, iPads, and smart phones.  The number of students still taking notes by hand on paper is a small minority.  In both of my classes today, some of the students attending are physically hundreds of miles away.  In my art history class, one of the students—previously a friend of mine—was attending a zoom class from a bench in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  He was actually sitting in front of a painting by the artist we were studying.  (Bill, I’m so jealous I’ve decided to hate you for a few weeks!)

With only two courses left before completing my degree in Economics, I have yet to purchase a textbook in that field.  All of my course work has been delivered electronically, with online sources.  Once they’ve graduated, if any of the former economic students needs a reference book…. Well, evidently books are becoming irrelevant.  Students do their research online, rarely using the library anymore.  In a few decades, if you look up the word ‘library’ in the dictionary, the definition will say:  “li-brar-y (noun) Warehouse of yet to be scanned bound paper.”

There is a little noted side effect of all this technology:   No one can do math anymore.  In my economics class, we work with fairly complicated formulas, but in working with them you still have to know how to do simple math—something that today’s students simply cannot do in their heads anymore.  As I grew up before calculators and my instructor grew up in Kurdistan where calculators were relatively scarce, we found no problem performing simple math problems like multiplying 16 by 22 in our heads.  The rest of the class looked like they had been asked to perform magic—every hand reached for a phone to use the calculator.  After class, one of the students told me his elementary school no longer taught the multiplication tables.  If there is ever a shortage of batteries, the world will return to the dark ages in a week.

There is another  change brought about by technology:   I never hear any music on campus anymore.  There are no students playing guitars on the quad, no music in the student center, and as I walk by the dorms I hear no one playing their stereo too loud.  That’s not to say the students aren’t listening to music—they are—but it is all being done with wireless ear pods.  You see students everywhere (even during classes), sitting there with little white buttons in their ears.  Whatever they are listening to doesn’t seem to make them very happy, as they have a look of intense concentration as they live in their private worlds.

Students are different these days, too.  Back in 1969, it was the middle of the protests against the Vietnam War.  There was a general sense of involvement—students were engaged and truly believed that they were changing society.  Even at Enema U, students believed that their protests were bringing about change.  If you look at the sidewalk just outside of the administration Building, Abattoir Hall, you can dimly see scratched in the sidewalk the words “Stop the Bombing”.  Evidently messing up that freshly poured concrete worked, since it’s been more than fifty years since the US Air Force bombed any part of Southeast Asia.

Today, I can’t imagine a single cause that riles the students into a fury.  The university has raised the tuition into the stratosphere, has leased out the cafeterias to a company that serves swill at high prices, has turned a thriving bookstore into an empty t-shirt shop, and has generally ignored the welfare of the students.  All without a student protest.  I’m not sure these students would protest if you set fire to them.

Fifty years ago, students were dirt poor.  Today, a walk through the student parking lot shows a whole lot of very nice, expensive cars.  According to the Wall Street Journal, more students today are working while going to school—perhaps because of the higher tuition.  Despite the stories of students surviving on bottom ramen, every student seems to have an expensive phone and a relatively new laptop.  Perhaps this is because of the ready availability of student loans.

Okay, enough comparisons.  Who has/had it better—students today, or students half a century ago?

Well, I have to take the Vietnam War and the draft out of the equation.  There was a certain pressure to pass that calculus exam so as not to lose your student deferment back in the sixties that has no parallel today.  There was nothing to motivate a study session like knowing that if you blew the exam you would get drafted.  

Other than that, I think being a college student in the sixties was easier than today, if only because it was more affordable.  Even with the advances in technology that exist today, I think the opportunities to learn are about equal.  I guess there is one thing that has never changed:   if you apply yourself, and you work at it, you can still get a good education if you want it bad enough.

The Royal Principality of Enema U

Late night television the other night was airing the Cary Grant movie, To Catch a Thief.  It’s a great old classic, but what grabbed me was the scene where Grace Kelly was driving her car a little recklessly down a twisting coastal road.  Twenty-five years later, Princess Grace died when she missed a sharp turn on a similar road and her car plunged off a cliff.

This, of course, got me to thinking about Monaco—the tiny, strange, little kingdom that served as a home to Princess Grace.  Then, from Monaco, I started thinking about Enema… What can I say?—I have a mind like a ping pong ball (which, if you have been reading this blog for long, you already know).

In any case, it turns out that Enema U and Monaco have a great deal in common.  Once that occurred to me, the similarities became obvious.  In reality, Enema U is a small medieval fiefdom.

First off, there are the matters of size and content.  Monaco is a small, self-contained little country with its own government, laws, permanent population, police department, fire department and a migrant work force—all fitting into 482 acres.   Enema U, in comparison, has its own governing body, with separate laws, a permanent population, an independent fire department, a police force, and a migrant work force—all fitting into 900 acres.  

Yes, Enema U is slightly larger than Monaco, but this is a ag school, so we need a little more room for the cows.  

Monaco has an art gallery and a museum.  Enema U has an art gallery and a museum (as well as an excellent art department).  Monaco has a hospital, a clinic, and doctors.  Enema U has a hospital, a clinic, doctors, a medical school, and a nursing school.  Monaco has fine restaurants and hotels.  Enema U has a hotel and…. Well, Monaco is ahead on that one.  No one outside of administration has ever said that Enema U had even fair dining facilities.  The campus restaurants are leased out to a company that specializes in providing food for universities, airports, and prisons.  (I’ve always suspected that the best food goes to the prisons:  after all, no psychology major has ever shivved a cafeteria worker because there wasn’t enough ketchup.)

For centuries, Monaco has been ruled by the head of a royal family, the Grimaldis, with various ministers under him to set policy.  While Enema U does not have a royal family, we do have royalty.  Enema U has a football coach, who must be the ruler, since he is the highest paid employee on campus.  Under His Royal Coachness, there is a bus load of minor officials:  a chancellor, a provost, a dozen deans, and enough vice-presidents to form a healthy chorus of yes-men.

Monaco has a state flag and a national anthem and it is a voting member of the United Nations.  Enema U has a school song, a mascot, official colors, and is a full-fledged member of the NCAA—an organization that is far more powerful than the United Nations.  Monaco is multicultural and plays host to people from around the world, many of whom speak languages from all over the world.  Enema U has both students and staff from all across the globe and even teaches a variety of foreign languages.  

Monaco has a luxurious casino that provides most of the operating capital to run the monarchy.  Enema U would open a casino in a flash if the state government would allow it—it could be run as a joint operation by the Math Department and the Economics Department.  Until the state gives the green light, the school has a foundation that collects donations from alumni, but how the monies are spent is kept so secret that the CIA could take lessons in security.

Once a year, Monaco has a spectacular Grand Prix auto race.  Enema U has almost daily races by the students all over the surrounding community.  Hell, one student even managed to roll his car in the parking lot—let’s see Monaco top that.

Monaco has thousands of tourists daily, whose sole purpose is to spend money and leave quickly.  Enema U has the same thing, but they are called students.  Monaco has a large workforce that lives outside its border.  Enema U has a small army of staff members who commute daily, work for small wages, then leave the campus to return home.  Monaco has limited housing, but there are thousands who live within the small realm.  Enema U has thousands of freshmen who are required to live on campus in housing that is, at best, limited.

The main business of Monaco is gambling.  People come from all over the world to play the games of chance, winning and losing large sums of money in a palatial casino.  And here is the biggest difference between Enema U and Monaco.  While Enema U has a palatial football stadium where games are played, the cost is at such a high price that there are only losers.