Southern Bookman

Jason Gay's rules for family touch football a Thanksgiving tradition

I fell into the Thanksgiving spirit reading another edition of Jason Gay's rules for family touch football.

The Wall Street Journal sportswriter has been doing the column for 11 years, and it's still fresh and funny.

Gay's annual rules column evokes the love and understanding of family get-togethers, the bittersweet travails of aging and the joy of new generations.

The touch-football rules column is now as much a part of the holiday as the Macy's Parade in New York City, turkey and dressing, and pro football games.

With political conflicts dividing families and Covid still hanging over the country, Gay's column celebrates shared traditions that still unite us.

The column brought memories of friends and loved ones who've passed away, and Thanksgivings of years past:

Furman Bisher's annual AJC column giving thanks for the blessings in his life.

The AJC's annual ad-heavy Thanksgiving paper.

Trips to Louisiana, Ohio and New York City. Years at home, hosting others.

Driving from Chattanooga to Atlanta with my then fiance and mother-in-law to be.

A family feast at the Waldorf Astoria and walking through snow past Radio City Music Hall to watch the Macy's parade, its famous helium-filled cartoon characters floating by, tossed by the wind.

Golf with my father at Baton Rouge's Sherwood Forest Country Club.

An LSU-Arkansas game at Tiger Stadium.

Taking my then small children to a Georgia-Georgia Tech freshman game at frigid Grant Field.

Late night trips to Hartsfield-Jackson Airport to pick up a child coming home from college and Joe, my late brother-in-law, flying in from New York City.

My now grown-up children home from school in Gainesville, Baton Rouge and Princeton.

Watching Alex Karras and the Detroit Lions beat Vince Lombardi's undefeated Green Bay Packers.

Family gatherings, the voices and laughter of so many now gone.

I'm thankful to be thankful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atlanta mayor's race leaves many voters undecided

A large number of voters remain undecided in the Atlanta mayor's race.

City Councilman Andre Dickens holds a slight lead over City Council President Felicia Moore in an AJC poll published Tuesday. But 20 percent of the voters remain on the fence. The numbers show Dickens' campaign gaining momentum, the AJC said.

Moore, a longtime City Council member known for budget frugality, is favored by the Northside, where a movement's gaining steam to make Buckhead a separate city. A Dickens victory over Moore would accelerate the secession push.

One element in the move to make Buckhead separate is longstanding resentment over the election of black mayors.

In the last election, Keisha Lance Bottoms edged perennial white candidate Mary Norwood by less than 1,000 votes.

While fulminating about black control of city hall, even as the city's white population has risen, Buckhead voters are notorious for not going to the polls. Some have suggested that the city should set up polling stations at Sea Island for rich Buckhead residents.

Norwood is headed back to City Hall, unopposed for a city council seat representing  the wealthy neighborhoods around Chastain Park. Longtime Buckhead City Councilman Howard Shook also was re-elected without opposition. His district includes Phipps Plaza and Lenox Square.

The mayoral campaign has come with the petty acrimony that characterizes Atlanta politics. In a bizarre throwback to 1950s racist politics, the Dickens campaign has accused a Moore PAC of darkening Dickens' skin in commercials highlighting his vote to cut police funding. Moore has blasted the effort, apparently aimed at Northside white voters. I'd thought such tactics had long vanished.

Meanwhile, Moore had to take down a social media post criticizing the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal, because it angered white voters. Dickens also condemned the verdict, but not on social media.

The AJC, which abandoned the city years ago for the suburbs, has adequately covered the mayor's race, while all but ignoring other city council contests. Reporters J.C. Capelouto and Wilborn P. Nobles III have given detailed coverage, and columnists Bill Torpy and Patricia Murphy have provided insightful analysis.

Unfortunately, the newspaper has given little attention to the city council president's race between former nonprofit executive Doug Shipman, the only white seeking citywide office, and city council veteran Natalyn Mosby Archibong. An Archibong victory will also stir Buckhead alienation from the city.

The battle for an at-large city council seat between businesswoman Jacki Labat and former State. Sen. Keisha Sean Waites has also been ignored.

Labat is the wife of Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat. Labat runs the Fulton County Jail, subject of an ongoing debate on whether the Atlanta City jail should be closed and the county jail receive more prisoners. Jail overcrowding is another issue receiving council attention.

Jacki Labat, known as the "first lady of the police," has an obvious conflict of interest. Full disclosure: I voted for her, despite those reservations.

Early voting ends Wednesday, with election day Nov. 30. With Thanksgiving approaching and the holidays starting, the race has not excited voters. Those undecideds might decide to stay on the sidelines, which would boost Dickens' surging campaign.

Farewell, Dave Hickey, the last gonzo

Dave Hickey like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson brought an intense personal sensibility to journalism.

The last of a generation that began with Wolfe and Mailer's "new journalism," Hickey gained cultish fame with his 1997 collection "Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy."

The essay collection champions Hank Williams, Liberace, Stan Brakhage, Norman Rockefeller, Chet Baker and other popular artists with the same attention he gives to Cezanne, de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In an essay on basketball, he praises Julius Erving and James Naismith's original game rules.

Hickey, who like Thompson and Mailer defined himself as an outlaw rebelling against prevailing cultural strictures, died Nov. 12 at age 82 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He'd been battling heart disease for years.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Hickey as a child moved with his family to Los Angeles. He ridiculed Texas' provincial boosterism, but never lost the state's contrarian viewpoint. When Hickey was 11, his father, a car salesman and jazz musician, killed himself, a major influence on Hickey's independent outlook.

Rootless as a young man, Hickey opened an art gallery in Austin called "A Clean Lighted Place," which struggled against the Texas capital's parochial aesthetic values. He then moved to New York City, where he managed a gallery, reportedly quitting in protest of a Yoko Ono exhibition.

Discovering himself as a writer, Hickey was editor of Art in America before finding a home as a professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, becoming the most famous representative of that school since Jerry Tarkanian's Runnin' Rebels.

In one of the best essays in "Air Guitar," Hickey celebrates Las Vegas for its freedom from New York City and Los Angeles' cultural dogmas. He also loved Las Vegas' wide-open entertainment and gambling culture.

"Air Guitar" and the influential chapbook "The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty," earned him a MacArthur "Genius grant," in 2001, the proceeds of which he fed into Vegas slot machines.

While he appreciated mass popular culture, he also called for a return to rigorous standards in judging artworks. He blasted the contemporary art world for its commercialism and turn from traditional artistic values.

Like his journalistic predecessors, Hickey was accused of machoism, although he considered underappreciated abstract painter Joan Mitchell the best artist of her generation. Feminist critics saw his defense of beauty as elitist. At the end of his career, he published "25 Women: Essays on Their Art." That too was viewed as paternalistic.

Hickey wrote for a variety of publications, including Art News, the Village Voice, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. Along with art and popular music, he also wrote about television and the movies.

In "Air Guitar," he recalled the Texas writer Grover Lewis, and Lewis' friendship with Larry McMurtry, ground also covered by a McMurtry memoir.

Hickey biographer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote a warm appeciation of Hickey for Texas Monthly, the first to report Hickey's death.

As Oppenheimer details, Hickey like other literary exiles remained stamped by his native land.

 

It was only a partial lunar eclipse, but a show for the ages

Good morning, moon.

Awaking at 3 a.m. Friday, I decided to venture into the predawn cold to view the partial lunar eclipse, the longest in 581 years.

As the old Cat Stevens song played in my mind, I marveled at the full moon shrouded by the earth's shadow, leaving a gleaming crescent sliver. Like spectators in a vast theater, stars and planets sparkled in the uncommonly clear sky.

I went inside to warm up for a while, then returned to see the eclipse at its peak coverage of nearly 98 percent at 4:03 a.m. The promised red glow was more a brown smudge, yet still majestic and mystical.

Beginning at 1:15 a.m. when the moon slipped into the earth's shadow, the partial lunar eclipse was the longest since Feb. 18, 1440. The next longest partial lunar eclipse, 2 minutes longer than Friday's, will occur on Feb. 8, 2669. If human beings are left by then, they'll probably be playing golf on Mars.

But we celestial extravaganza fans won’t have to wait long for more moon magic. A longer total lunar eclipse will occur on Nov. 8, 2022.

Going back to bed, I discovered that the moon had been visible all along through the bedroom window. Sinking toward sleep, I watched the lunar light advance against the receding shadow.

 

 

 

 

Investgation leads to exonerations in Malcolm X assassination

Two men convicted of Malcolm X's assassination were to be exonerated Thursday, according to a blockbuster report in The New York Times.

Like other shocking assassinations of the era, Malcolm's murder on Feb. 21, 1965 in Harlem's Audubon Ballroom continues to torment American history.

Muhammad Aziz, 83, and the deceased Khalil Islam were wrongly convicted of the civil rights leader's slaying because the FBI and New York Police Department neglected to disclose evidence that would have exonerated them, according to the Times report.

The Nation of Islam is still suspected of  instigating Malcolm's killing. The civil rights leader had become estranged from the group, moving away from its virulent anti-white rhetoric. Malcolm had planned in his speech to announce a new, less militant organization. 

William Bradley, an Nation of Islam bodyguard, has been identified as the likely killer. Another convicted assailant, Mujahid Abdul Halim, known as Talmadge Hayer at the time, confessed to involvement in the attack and said Aziz and Islam had not been involved.

A 22-month investigation into the case by New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance and Aziz defense attorney David Shanies found that the  excluded evidence proved their innocence. Aziz and Islam spent decades in prison, often in solitary confinement.

While conspiracy theorists have speculated about government involvement in Malcolm's slaying, the investigation found no evidence of an FBI and New York City conspiracy, although both law enforcement agencies had undercover operatives at the ballroom when the killing occurred in a hail of gunfire.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, told the Times that the case shows the legal system's racist bias and propensity to rush to judgment. A number of blacks falsely convicted of capital crimes have been freed through EJI's investigations.

The dismissal of a government conspiracy won't dampen suspicions of government involvement in Malcolm's death, as well as other 1960s assassinations, most prominently President John F. Kennedy's.

Conspiracy advocates like San Francisco author David Talbot have cast doubts on the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the Kennedy assassination. Talbot believes the CIA was behind the president's 1963 killing in Dallas. He also disputes that Sirhan Sirhan was Robert Kennedy's killer. Conspiracy adherents also claim government involvement in Martin Luther King Jr.'s death.

After the Malcolm slaying findings, pressure will build to reopen other 1960s cases. But it's unlikely that they will be concluded with the same certainty as the exonerations of Aziz and Islam.

Justice will at last be done in the case, but they spent the best part of their lives in prison because of the FBI and NYPD's dereliction of duty.

 

 

 

Not so fast: Merrick Garland takes aim at Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger

The U.S. Justice Department struck a blow for authors with an antitrust lawsuit seeking to block the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

"The deal would enable Penguin Random House to exert outsized influence over which books are published in the United States and how much authors are paid for their work," the Justice Department said in announcing the lawsuit filed Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

Penguin Random House, the largest U.S. book publisher, seeks to buy No. 3 Simon & Schuster in a $2.175 billion deal. As Authors Guild President Douglas Preston noted in a Washington Post op-ed piece applauding the suit, the transaction would reduce the publishing industry's "Big Five" to four.

Further consolidation will likely follow if the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster deal goes through. The huge publishing companies also control smaller imprints, which also compete for authors' work.

Preston helpfully noted that the merger would create a book market "monopsony," a dominant buyer, as well as a monopoly, a controlling seller.

Attorney General Merrick Garland noted that the deal would result in fewer books and less variety for consumers. Perhaps so, but it seems strange that the merged company wouldn't seek to print more books, likely weighted toward cooking, lifestyle, health, self-improvement and entertainment.

As Preston noted, Amazon dominates the e-book market as well as influencing book publishing. Preston's article included the obligatory disclosure that Amazon owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, who seeks monopoly and monopsony control over the U.S. retail market, owns the Washington Post.

The Justice Department a few years ago sided with Amazon in a suit against Apple and the book publishing industry. Preston risked Bezos’ ire by calling for the Justice Department to take action against Amazon's book industry power.

While the book publishers produce a stream of books from right-wing and left-wing perspectives, the industry favors celebrity authors and proven best-sellers. I'm amazed at the flood of books about the Trump administration that shows no sign of abating. Yet each book gives new revelations about Trump's apparent attempt to stage a coup on Jan. 6 and prevent President Biden from taking office.

As right wingers call for removal of books from school libraries, even the burning of books, I can imagine a new Trump administration or other GOP presidency suing publishers for printing books viewed as dangerous. Toni Morrison was targeted in the Republicans' victory in the Virginia governors' race. Can outlawing books be far behind? I'm sure Shakespeare and Dickens will soon be under fire.

Despite qualms about the precedent set by the government suing book publishers, the action will put off the inevitable day when one conglomerate publishes all of the books, newspapers and magazines in the world and sells all of the products. Perhaps our robot masters will ban books altogether, and we will chant "om" to immense computer screens.

 

 

Jack Nelson's posthumous memoir "Scoop" looks back on stellar reporting career

Legendary reporter Jack Nelson was still revered in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom when I went to work there in 1981, although nearly 20 years had passed since he'd jumped to The Los Angeles Times.

Even old-time Journal reporters who'd competed against Nelson's Atlanta Constitution back in the day lionized him.

Nelson in 12 years at the "South's Standard Newspaper" broke an astounding number of stories, including shocking abuses at the sprawling state mental hospital in Milledgeville. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his Milledgeville expose.

Establishing The Los Angeles Times Atlanta bureau in 1964, Nelson gained new heights as one of the courageous reporters covering the civil rights movement across the South. Nelson then moved on to the Los Angeles newspaper's Washington Bureau, where he broke key Watergate stories and gained fame as a television pundit and bureau chief.

Nelson's posthumous memoir "Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter" in the electric language of a good newspaper story traces Nelson's rise from humble origins in rural Alabama and Biloxi, Miss.  He had completed most of the book when he died in 2009 at age 80. His wife, journalist Barbara Matusow, finished the book, consulting his records and notes.

"Scoop" was the nickname Biloxi police bestowed upon the young energetic Nelson when he started his reporting career at the Biloxi Herald. Traces of that brash Southern boy remained in Nelson, even when he became a trusted confidante of presidents and esteemed Washington insider frequently seen on shows like "Washington Week in Review" and "Meet the Press."

After launching his career at the Mississippi gulf coast town where he spent most of his childhood, Nelson served in the Army, stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga. Nelson amusingly tells how he nearly escaped basic training by working as a public information officer. 

He'd attracted the attention of the Constitution with stories sent from Biloxi, and the Atlanta newspaper hired him when he left the army in 1952, at a weekly salary of $85, barely enough to support his family. Nelson colorfully recalls his grueling career at a newspaper notorious for its stinginess.

Atlanta during his years at Ralph McGill's Constitution was transforming from a mid-sized insular Southern city to a major metropolis. Many of Nelson's scoops exposed Georgia's transition from a corrupt rural-dominated state whose government sought to preserve white power.

While Nelson venerated McGill, he clashed with the famed editor. In one shocking case, McGill sought to protect one of his cronies who was the target of a Nelson expose.

Nelson praises the Constitution for fully supporting his investigative pieces. The Constitution's parsimonious and flinty Executive Editor Bill Fields comes off in the balance as a staunch journalist.

In a surprising revelation for those who know Athens as a progressive city today, Nelson recalls a time when the home of the University of Georgia was plagued with gambling and prostitution. Nelson exposed the corruption, receiving the enmity of city boosters and, he says, the UGA student newspaper the Red and Black.

Nelson also castigates Athens as a hotbed of Southern racism, revisiting the shocking killing of Lemuel Penn, a black Washington, D.C. educator and decorated World War II veteran who was killed while passing through the city. Two Klansmen were acquitted of the slaying in a trial in Athens. Nelson doesn't disclose whether the case is one of those civil rights slayings that should be reopened.

Outside of the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists McGill and Eugene Patterson, the Journal and Constitution shamefully did little to cover the civil rights movement outside of running wire stories, as Nelson acknowledges. He faults himself for ignoring the movement.

Nelson made up for that neglect at the Los Angles Times, traveling across the South with a courageous band of national reporters to cover key moments in Martin Luther King's campaign for civil rights.

In a memorable vignette, Nelson recalls the poignance of a lesser known moment in King's career, when he visited the rural community of Gee's Bend, Ala. and promised the poverty-stricken descendants of slaves that they would receive voting rights and recognition of their human dignity. 

Nelson in an amusing chapter discusses his fraught relationship with Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who singled out Nelson for abuse during press conferences. After Wallace was paralyzed from wounds in an assassination attempt, he turned away from his harsh racism. Nelson was among those with whom Wallace made amends.

While reporting on breaking stories, Nelson also used his investigative skills, notably uncovering police abuses and a coverup in the killing of three black students at South Carolina State University at Orangeburg, S.C., in a protest on Feb. 8, 1968. He also exposed FBI involvement in a complicated entrapment scheme in Meridian, Miss., drawing the hatred of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hoover carried out an acrimonious campaign to discredit Nelson, even after he joined the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau. Hoover made false claims and accusations against Nelson, which continued until Hoover's death.

"Scoop," published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2013, deserves recognition as one of the best journalistic memoirs of the South's transformation after World War II.

Nelson loved White House dinners and fine Washington restaurants. But he always remained a reporter.

 

 

 

 

Whitman, Lincoln seem present at Washington's historic 10th Street corridor

Walt Whitman Way runs off 10th Street in downtown Washington, D.C., a few blocks toward the National Mall from Ford's Theatre, where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

Whitman often walked through the theater's neighborhood, and revered the slain president. Whitman's "Speciman Days" gives one of the best portraits of the rough U.S. capital during the Civil War, and he wrote the impassioned elegies to Lincoln, "Captain, Oh My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed."

The past, present and future come together in the corridor, filled with museums, historic buildings, monuments, government offices and modern commercial developments.

Whitman visited wounded soldiers who lay in cots crowded into the U.S. Patent Office, now the National Portrait Gallery. He sought to raise the young men's spirits, telling them jokes and stories and bringing them pencils, paper and candy.

At Ford's Theatre, the future is represented by school groups that line up to tour the downstairs museum, with extensive exhibits on Lincoln's presidency and the Civil War.

A gallery gives an in-depth rendering of John Wilkes Booth's chilling plot to kill the president and members of his cabinet. Booth's co-conspirators are represented by ghostly statues.  The single-shot derringer with which Booth killed the president gives stark witness to history.

The presidential booth, decorated with bunting as on the night of the assassination, rises above the stage where plays are still performed.

On that pleasant spring night several days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attended the theater for a performance of  the comedy "Our American Cousin." Booth, a famous actor, gained entrance to the booth and shot Lincoln in the back of the head, leaping to the stage below and breaking his left leg. 

Lincoln was carried to the Peterson House across 10th street, and laid diagonally in a bed because of his height. He died at 7:22 the next morning. The house where the president died remains, but has been closed to the public because of the pandemic.

On nearby H Street, Booth co-conspirator Mary Surratt, executed by hanging, ran a boarding house. The street, leading to Chinatown and the Capital One Arena, pulses with bars, hotels and restaurants.

Lincoln, a Shakespeare admirer, would be happy that plays are still performed at Ford's Theatre. Along with books on the slain president, the site's gift shop honors the theater. I was pleased to find a copy of the Penguin Classics edition of Damon Runyon's "Guys and Dolls and Other Writings."

At the Ford Museum,  young students appeared enthralled by Lincoln's presidency and Civil War leadership. A salute to their teachers for bringing them to a place where history’s real.

 

 

Farewell, Max Cleland, whose U.S. Senate loss presaged Republican control of South

Max Cleland's defeat in the 2002 U.S. Senate race in Georgia marked the demise of the state's long dominant Democratic Party.

Although Cleland lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, he was defeated by the Republican draft dodger Saxby Chambliss in the post Sept. 11 hyper-patriotic frenzy.

A scurrilous Chambliss campaign ad impugned Cleland's patriotism, showing photos of Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, and Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind.  Republican U.S. Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel, both known for their heroic service in Vietnam, condemned the ad.

After the loss, Cleland battled depression and anxiety from the PTSD he had repressed while serving as a Georgia state senator, Georgia's secretary of state, head of the Veterans Administration during the Carter Administration and one term in the U.S. Senate.

Cleland died Tuesday at age 79 of congestive heart failure, according to the AJC and New York Times. The excellent AJC political columnist Patricia Murphy, who worked on Cleland's staff before her journalistic career, gave a warm portrait of Cleland's private side.

Chambliss' victory signified an impending GOP tide that swept over the South, a tidal wave that reached its fullest intensity in Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.

The Supreme Court declaring George W. Bush's victory over popular vote winner Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race began the Republican rise to dominance across the South, ending a progressive era that followed the region's resistance to intregration and civil rights. 

In Georgia, Cleland's loss presaged that of moderate Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes to Republican Sonny Perdue. Barnes' push to remove the Confederate battlefield insignia from the Georgia flag was a significant factor in Cleland's loss, and brought Barnes' doom.

Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida and even Mississippi and Alabama had seen Democratic progressives make gains in governors' seats and state legislatures from the 1970s through the 1990s.

But with Bush political guru Karl Rove guiding strategy following the Sept. 11 attacks, the GOP's malevolent political campaigns led to the party winning the South, finishing efforts begun by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.

For more than a century after the Civil War, the GOP barely existed in the South because of its connection to Abraham Lincoln and Republican rule during Reconstruction.

But following the virulent racism and intransigent opposition to segregation championed by Southern Democratic senators like Georgia's Richard Russell and Mississippi's John Stennis, the Voting Rights Act increased black political power in the Democratic Party.  The Republican Party, following Nixon and Reagan, turned violently to the right.

The right-wing Republican Party has ruled the South throughout the 21st century, repressing black voter rights, cutting taxes on the wealthy and slashing public services, and attacking women's abortion rights.

Democratic progressives have made significant gains in recent years, with Joe Biden winning Georgia over Donald Trump and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning U.S. Senate campaigns.

But Republican Glenn Youngkin's recent shocking victory in Virginia crushed rosy Democratic dreams of retaking the South. The GOP remains in control of state legislatures, giving them power over redistricting before the crucial 2022 midterm elections,

May Cleland's heroic career inspire a re-dedication to the ideals he championed.

 

 

 

An American story at Apple Carnegie Library in nation's capital

Covered by a thin blanket in the cold wind, she sat in the same position on the sidewalk day after day.

She bent over when sleeping, never stretching out on the pavement. Awake, she mumbled incessantly to herself. Her feet, clad in red, blue and yellow socks, poked out as people hurried by. Someone cared enough to bring her food; she ate from a plastic container.

Traffic stopped and started on K Street. People streamed by from the Apple Store, housed in the beautifully renovated beaux-arts Carnegie Library Building, set upon a hill behind her on Mount Vernon Square. Those favored by American capitalism ascended and descended the building's marble steps, stepping around her as she sat, barely moving.

Opened in 1903, the Carnegie Building at the corner of K and 7th Streets served as Washington's Central Library until 1972. The building sat vacant for six years, and was in jeopardy until the Historical Society of Washington established its DC Center there. Maintenance was costly, and a city museum closed.

Apple in 2016 reached an agreement to restore the building, refurbishing its Vermont marble facade and sculptures. The building reopened in 2019, housing one of the company's retail stores and the Historical Society's D.C. Center, a nice private-public synergy. The building rises blocks away from historic Union Station, and sits above one of the district's oldest commercial intersections.

On a splendid autumn afternoon, sunlight streams through a skylight and the building's majestic original windows as customers sit at tables to test the latest MacBooks and I-phones and consult with Apple "Genius" associates.

A grand marble staircase leads to the DC Center's upstairs gallery, gift shop and Kiplinger Research Library. A photo exhibit shows a 1930s visit to D.C. by Amelia Earhart  and teams from the 1924 World Series, won by the Senators of Walter Johnson and Goose Goslin over John McGraw's New York Giants. President Calvin Coolidge grins from the black and white picture, and hard-shell commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis glares. 

Downstairs on the basement floor, a gallery of photos looks back at the building's original history and steel baron Andrew Carnegie's funding of libraries around the county in the early 20th century.

The building is a marvelous display of America at its best, blending past and future, commerce and education. Looking at a photo of Mr. Carnegie seated at his old-fashioned cubbyhole desk in a three-piece suit and polished button-up shoes, I thought he'd be pleased at the shared endeavor.

Outside, the mentally ill lady on the sidewalk speaks her Cassandra's language.