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Hagerstown's population is mostly Mennonites (sp?), Appalachian Mountain people, and descendants of a bunch of Italian factory workers who came to the area when their factory moved from New Jersey.
The Mennonites are sort of like the Amish--Pennsylvania Dutch who avoid those sorts of technology which... err, strike them as being the sort of thing one should avoid. There's different, uhm, degrees of Mennonites. The "Plain" Mennonites are the full-on, king-hell bull maggot Mennonites. They won't wear fancy clothes. There's "Fancy" Mennonites, which also won't wear fancy clothes--except they can wear shirts with collars. And some other stuff, too. The Plain Mennonites think of the Fancy Mennonites as not really Mennonites.
A lot of the Mennonites have the last name "Martin". The good grocery in the city is "Martin's", which probably means that it's owned by a Mennonite family. If you need autowork done, you want a Mennonite to do it. Because they're honest and hardworking. When Kelly had her car accident, the appraiser came around to look at the damage. And Bob asked him for advice about where to get the work done. The appraiser mentioned one guy. Bob nodded. The appraiser mentioned another guy. Bob nodded. They looked over the car a bit. Bob pretty much kept his mouth shut. But was friendly. Finally, the appraiser said, you could take this to such-and-such-a-guy. He does good work. He's a Mennonite, you know.
Ah. So they take the car to such-and-such-a-guy. His garage is spotless, because there are Mennonite women keeping the place clean constantly. (What a great life for them.) I'm not sure that I can imagine a clean auto garage. Such-and-such-a-guy tells Bob and Kelly that he can't work on their car any time soon because he's already committed to a lot of other jobs. So he refers them to another guy. But warns them not to mention that he referred them to this other guy. Because Such-and-such-a-guy is a fancy Mennonite, and the other guy is a plain Mennonite. So a referral from a fancy Mennonite would be worse than nothing.
There are alien worlds within hours of the Beltway.
The new group of people appearing in Hagerstown's population makeup is the commuters. People who work in nearby cities but want to live someplace with more space. Bob and Kelly probably fall under the category of commuters--they didn't grow up in the area, and they don't work in town.
The Appalachian people fit a lot of what you've heard about them: they tend to be loners. Like, the Mennonites tend to keep to themselves, but community is ultra-important to them. They stick together. But the Mountain people don't even hang around with one another. They're averse to education.
Here's a map of the old town layout, showing the original four roads ==== and what lined those roads.
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Servants' and Slaves' Shacks
Big Houses
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Big Houses
Middle-Class Homes
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Middle-Class Homes
The Poor Section of Town
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The Poor Section of Town
It's like there was this one street for the bigwigs, another for the middle class. And all the rest was for peons of one description or another. How tidy.
We had lunch in a deli that was actually pretty good. I think it was on Potomac St. It had an Italian name. Good sandwiches. They had gourmet foods for sale there. Like, they had these little tetrahedral bags of beans for sale. A few dollars, and just the size of your fist. The gimmick was that each thing of beans came with spices and stuff so it would cook into some recognizable entree. And each entree had a story associated with it. If you read the outside of the package, you'd get the start of the story. If you bought the package, you could read the rest of the story inside. Bob, a storyteller who is still trying to figure out how one can make money at storytelling, was intrigued.
Did I mention that Hagerstown doesn't have much of a sense of how to show off their history to tourists? An old theater wouldn't let us in because there wasn't a show playing there at the time. There was a Historical Society in the old Miller building, which a Hagerstown History Museum on the main floor. I mean, I guess there was. There was a sign there announcing the presence of a museum. According to the hours notice, the museum was open. There was a 3x5 card on the door saying that we should ring the doorbell to gain entrance. Bob rang the doorbell. We stood around for a while. He rang it again. He walked down some steps to an outside entrance to the building basement. This was apparently the Society's reference library. There were two librarians present, but both seemed scared at the prospect of letting people into the museum. And the person who was supposed to just wasn't around.
There is a jail in the area. It is the city's largest employer. Many of the town residents are wives of convicts who have come to be close to their husbands. Apparently a lot of these wives hang out together. Perhaps they form something of a support network. I dunno. There was part of that church brochure that I didn't bother to copy here, the schedule of events for that year. Most of them looked like regular church parties. One caught my eye--"February 12, 1995: Mission Outreach with Pastor Charles Fredereick, Pastor of the Lutheran congregation of St. Dysmas ELCA of MD State Correctional System."
The Hotel Dagmar (which may be spotted by the word DAGMAR which appears high up on its walls) offers $25/night rooms and a jacuzzi. It looked sooo sleazy.
Back at Bob and Kelly's house, talk turned to Kelly's dad. That is, to Mary Jo's dad, Captain Kelly. (Actually, I think he reached rank higher than Captain, but went by that sobriquet. Or maybe that's just what his kids called him. Or maybe even they didn't call him that. I didn't take good notes on his rank. Bear with me, okay?). Like I said, he was a bigwig in the Navy's submarine-listening operations. Back before there really was such an operation, he was told to figure out how to do such a thing. He spent time researching the laying of the transatlantic cable, and the problems that cable-layers had run into. He read all that and then started researching advances in technology that had come along in the meantime.
When it came time to get funding, he and Admiral Rickhover would appear before the Senate. A lot of senators were veterans. They understood boats, guns, tanks, planes. They didn't think so much about better sources of military intelligence. Rickhover said that the U.S. needed more submarines carrying nuclear missiles. Submarines were better than land-based systems because the Russkies wouldn't know where the subs were. Captain Kelly would point out that the Russkies knew damned well where our subs were. Rickhover said that was impossible, that new submarine technology made the subs undetectable. Kelly responded with printouts from his listening stations pinpointing the locations of American subs. The U.S. was pretty sure that the Russians had similar listening systems. Kelly had a point, but Rickhover got the big funding. Kelly got along with two small cable-laying boats, setting up listening posts as best he could.
A few years ago, Mary Jo attended her father's funeral. A few officers came up to talk to her privately (Officers can talk privately, but if privates talk officerly is it against the Code of Conduct?) later. One of them said that though her father hadn't been able to tell her the details of his work, she should be proud of him because that work had been vitally important.
From another Naval officer, she got permission to visit a listening station at the Bermuda naval outpost, which was being--what's the word?--decommissioned? Disbanded? Pacified? Bob and Kelly had had a chance to see the room where soldiers had listened to signals coming in from the cables, listening for the distinctive sounds of the submarines prowling the waters. Maybe 15 people at a time had worked in that room at a time, and it was always staffed. Listeners would examine the data and pass the interesting pieces off to Norfolk. Thanks to improved electronic communications and the disbanding of the U.S.S.R., the personnel were being moved out and signals would just be directly relayed to Norfolk.
Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, gave a speech at the outpost with some interesting revelations about the Naval attitude towards intelligence and manpower. There had been 7000 navy troops there. Maybe about 150 had done work connected with the listening post. What were the other 6850 troops for? They were decoys.
Back when I was living on Edwards Street, I was walking home one afternoon when an elderly gentleman walked up to me. He showed me a magazine, some newsweekly thing. He pointed to the man pictured on the cover. "Do you know who this guy is?" he asked me. I didn't, and told him so. "Neither do I," he said, and turned around and kind of jogged down the street. It was very surreal. Later on, I realized that the man pictured on the magazine cover was Dick Cheney. Before that, my first instinct was to think that the whole exchange had been a sort of decoy. It was just so weird--I thought for sure it was some sort of distraction for a pickpocketing scam. Except it obviously wasn't--there was no-one else around. I dunno. It was just weird at the time. And here's Dick Cheney again, and again there's all this emphasis on distracting people from one's true purpose.
Hell, the name "Dick Cheney" is pretty distracting, if you have a dirty enough mind, which, as it happens, I do. But we didn't talk about any of these other Cheney incidents that night. We talked about the purpose of those 6850 extra troops in Bermuda. If the Russians had known exactly how many people at the outpost were working on cable-listening, they would have been able to make a pretty good guess as to how many cables we had in the area. Like, if they could extrapolate from 150 people that we must have between five and seven (I'm making these numbers up) cables going out from Bermuda, then they would know that if they could find and cut four cables in that area, then the U.S.A. would have been blind there. So we had 6850 troops conducting exercises, flying "patrol" flights, generally keeping up a hub-bub. But keeping quiet about what they were doing. So the Russkies would have a tough time figuring out how many personnel were listeners, and how many were fluff.
I'm not sure if the fluff were present at this speech of Cheney's.
All this conversation about listening for submarines was carried out over dinner. After dinner, it was time to head across a few state borders to Shepherdstown, West Virginia. There, at a bookstore just outside of campus, there was a book-reading club that met once a month to discuss a book. This month the book was The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. She also wrote The Handmaid's Tale. I don't really care for her stuff, no doubt because I am a male, insensitve to feminine, uhm, stuff. It was perhaps for similar reasons that my dad had decided he didn't want to attend this book discussion. And that it fell to Bob to keep us company in Shepherdstown.