Mingling with spies in DC

During the late Cold War years when I lived there, the thing about residing and working in the District of Columbia was, even if you couldn't watch The Americans for another twenty-five years, you knew that spycraft was going on all around you. You knew because some of that spycraft was obvious and clumsy. I probably would have - and should have - been frightened by the spies I didn't see. (Ref: The Americans) But, I wasn't. Spies were a fact of life. A humorous fact of life.

Everyone knew there was a man sitting in a top-floor window across from the Soviet Embassy. I don't think I am misremembering when I say that he was visible. The way I recall it, he would sit on the window ledge of an open window with a long-lens camera in his hand. I don't think that is accurate except as a visual metaphor - although that technique would certainly have kept spies from going in and out of the embassy’s front door.

What do I mean by clumsy spycraft? My favorite incident involved a laundry truck. One Sunday night I was taking relatives on a tour of DC at an hour when the streets were not usually crowded with laundry trucks. Nonetheless, we seemed to be encountering the same one repeatedly circling Georgetown but never stopping to deliver laundry. At one point, we were behind the van and as it made a left turn at a speed that allowed the curtains on the back windows to swing open. We could see inside easily. What we saw in the well-lit area was not rows of hanging cleaning or stacks of boxed shirts, but a wall of electronic equipment and a team of men monitoring it. Okay, it might have been an American spy vehicle. I hope it wasn't. I would not want my safety to rely on a bureaucracy sophisticated enough to design state-of-art electronics, but too dumb to install a rod at the bottom of the window in order to keep the curtains from falling open.

Of course, it was possible for one's imagination to run amok. After the Russians killed one of their enemies on the streets of London with a poisoned umbrella tip, waiting on the corner for the light to change became a harrowing experience although I knew of no enemy - foreign or domestic - that wanted me dead. 

I may have overreacted once on a Sunday stroll through the Kalorama neighborhood, home to many bigwigs and diplomats. As I walked down the street a mailman in uniform came down the path from an impressive house - as I recall the only kind in the area - after making a delivery. He gave me a hello along with a big smile. I returned the greeting and passed as he hopped into his truck. I had not even walked another block before it occurred to me that there was no Sunday mail service. I picked up the pace and headed for home along an illogical route all the while keeping an eye out for the mail truck and its assassin driver. He knew I had seen him. He had no choice. He had to kill me.

When I went to work on Monday, I found out that perhaps I had over-reacted. The Post Office had started Sunday delivery of Express Mail.

Okay, I saw spies where there were none, but I bet I didn't spot spies where they were. I wish I had seen The Americans before I moved to DC. I would have seen spies everywhere.

NOTE TO SELF: You had other brushes with espionage in Monte Carlo, Charlotte and London. They are written up separately.

UPDATE:

Years later I got to know a man who worked with Georgi Markov, a defector from communist Bulgaria, who worked at the BBC and left work early one day because he didn't feel good. He had been poked by an umbrella on London street corner and later died, assassinated. Two degrees of separation. Well, two degrees and forty years.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

And then everything looks so normal . . . after the RFK assassination

The other day I was reading an article that mentioned in passing that Andy Williams had been staying in the Kennedy suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the ballroom below. It occurred to me that I had, at very different times, encountered several people who had been present at that event. I was not. I was starting my summer job that week. I was not at the site until close to twenty years after the assassination. 

I am sure it was sometime in the 1980s that, sitting at a conference dinner in the ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, I became amazed that, although it was just a ballroom like dozens of others where I sat through after-dinner speeches, it had been the scene of a major event in the history of America in the 1960s. If there was a historical marker, I didn't see it. 

I was simply sitting at another business event when I looked up and wondered if the lighting fixtures - not fancy enough to call chandeliers - were covered with the same dust on June 5, 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan waited to shoot the winner of the Democratic California primary in the pantry for the kitchen behind the ballroom where I assume our meals had been prepared. When Robert Kennedy said his last public words, "On to Chicago and let's win there," on the same stage where conference speakers discussed the world's information needs. When Americans had a few moments left before they would need to clarify which Kennedy assassination they meant. 

I am not being ridiculous. There was a lot of dust. The room is no longer, torn down along with the hotel although the lobby lives on in many TV shows and movies.

I never saw Bobby Kennedy. On the day word went around the school cafeteria that he was coming to speak in Broomall, I was interested in cutting class to go. The only problem was none of us from the other side of Philadelphia had any idea where Broomall was. I wasn't upset. I figured I'd have another chance. Of course, I didn't.

I thought about how many people I had run into who were somehow connected to the RFK assassination. The first I recalled was Roosevelt Grier, NFL legend and Kennedy supporter. I stepped into a hotel elevator in New York - I think it was the New York Hilton - and found him leaning against the back wall. He was smiling. I think Rosey Greer was almost always smiling.  

I never speak to celebrities but Rosey spoke to me. For the entire ride. He said what a great day every day was and he hoped I felt the same. He said he felt blessed.  He gave off a contented vibe. At the time, I don't think I put him together with the assassination. The encounter was so upbeat that I forgot this was the man who was said to have wrestled the murder weapon away from Sirhan Sirhan.

It wasn't until the movie Mank came out in 2020 that I put Frank Mankiewicz together with the Hollywood Mankiewiczes and with the Robert Kennedy assassination. Memories can get a bit muddled as the years go on and mine did. I know that Frank Mankiewicz, at the time a middle-aged, Caucasian, political advisor, was not often confused with Julian Bond, at the time a dashing, young, African-American civil rights activist. It isn't that I can't keep the two individuals straight. I can't quite get a handle on our interactions. A friend and I were charged with escorting both of them to an event at our college, picking them up at the airport, dining with them, getting them to the lecture on time. I clearly remember Julian Bond in the car. I clearly remember Frank Mankiewicz at dinner. The rest all jumbles together. At far as I know, Julian Bond was not in LA at the time of the assassination, but Frank Mankiewicz announced the death of Robert Kennedy on June 6, 1968.

Of course, Ethel Kennedy was there with her husband. I ran into her with Andy Williams whose presence in LA got me thinking about this "theme." The circumstances were the opposite of the assassination and require some context. My brother used to work in Nassau, a frequent docking locale for the Christina, a yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis who married Jacqueline Kennedy only months after Robert Kennedy's assassination. One evening a friend and I were on the dock when a group of bicyclers swarmed off the boat.  Among them were Ethel Kennedy and Andy Williams. (For the record, the others I recall were Williams’ wife Claudine Longet, Christina Onassis, Mountaineer Jim Whittaker and his wife.) Not exactly meaningful contact. Actually no contact at all.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did not come out to ride bikes that night but I ran into her on other occasions around New York when I lived there. She was present when RFK died.

Even more tenuous connections are two Kennedy children. Robert Kennedy Jr. was in LA with his father. Rory Kennedy was present in the sense that she was expected at the time and born almost six months after his death. I've heard Rory speak. I only ever ran into RFK Jr. in the Stamford train station with his family. The surprising thing about him to me was that he has incredible blue eyes. 

There is nothing significant about these encounters. These coincidences are more like an unpleasant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. There is nothing magical. If there were, I would have run into George Plimpton and I have no recollection of ever seeing him.  The number of brushes with people who were connected just strikes me as odd.

NOTE TO YOURSELF:  In fact-checking Julian Bond, you discovered you and he share a birthday.

NOTE TO YOURSELF: You were exhausted from your second day at your summer job at Home Life on June 5 and went to bed shortly after dinner. You had no idea that there even was a California primary that day. When you woke up you remembered a dream. Robert and Ethel Kennedy were running an ice cream shop in a building that was shaped like a coffin. A windowless brown box on top of a chrome base. The ice cream store was inside the base. The shop was on a hillside without other buildings around. At the time you figured someone had a television on that you could hear and that put thoughts of the Kennedys in your mind. For proof that you were not psychic, see your story about Christopher Reeve.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

Cocktail hour with the Kellys

When most kids were collecting bottle tops, I was collecting little paper umbrellas from cocktail lounges. Eventually, the collection wore out and was discarded but the sentimental attachment remains. To this day, I am surprisingly at home in a bar.  Especially for someone who barely drinks. 

Just about any drinking establishment will do, but I do have a preference for a place that stocks paper umbrellas or the 21st century equivalent. Cocktail lounges. Lobby bars. Places with comfortable chairs clustered around low tables. They are my favorites. The kind of place where you linger and the visit is not about alcohol as much as relaxation and conversation. Where you feel at home. At least, I do. Possibly because our living room became a cocktail lounge every afternoon.

My parents were fifties parents. Strong believers in cocktails. Every night when my father got home from work, they would appear in the living room with a large silver tray stocked with cocktails and their favorite hors d'ouevres: cheese and crackers. I say they because they prepared the tray together. There was no hint of the little woman waiting patiently with a cocktail for her hubby returning from the business wars. They might have been fifties parents, but my mother was never a fifties housewife.

Originally, the cocktails arrived in a silver cocktail shaker that might well have been a wedding gift in 1937. Then, they received a lovely silver-trimmed pitcher as a gift. Very elegant. A lovely tradition, until they discovered that Skippy Peanut Butter jars had measurement markers on the side. At that point, the pitcher disappeared to be replaced by two Skippy Peanut Butter jars--one for her, one for him--that held perfectly mixed drinks. 

My mother would have to run to the kitchen occasionally to make sure dinner didn't burn but for the most part the next hour was devoted to conversation. I would hang around sometime, but I don't recall ever interrupting. I did, however, snack from the tray as the two friends chatted over Manhattans (I got the cherries), martinis (I never wanted the olives) and Gibsons (I was thrilled when they switched to cocktail onions). To this day, cheese and crackers are comfort food to me. Cocktail hour was far more important to me in my formative years and as a memory than dinner.

My parents really enjoyed each other's company. They shared a friendship of the type that modern research tells us is so important in a couple. They never ran out of conversation.

My father outlived my mother by less than three years. I don't think I ever realized until this moment how painful cocktail hour must have been for him without his best friend. I don't recall his ever having a pre-dinner cocktail after she died.

NOTE: A little irony. On March 7, 2020 I was lingering after an MWA New York meeting with some friends and told them that was my favorite way to spend a Saturday afternoon, sitting around a table, this one in a pubby-like bar, having good conversation. By the next Saturday, no one was hanging out in any bars. Over a year later, I still haven't been able to do that again. I don't miss the drinking. I do miss the conversation. It just isn't the same on Zoom.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

My mother and the man from the bleachers

Within the past few years, I was walking through a store and noticed that little, round, plastic, blow-up pools were on sale for $.99. $.99! I cannot tell you how much I wanted one of those pools as a child, but my parents never relented. I, who was overindulged in more ways than I could list, was never given a simple plastic pool. That sale got me wondering why. 

Parents in the early 1950s were understandably fearful of polio and there was a relationship between swimming pools and transmission, but I don't think plastic pools no more than 48 inches in diameter were the issue.  Also, I think my desire for a plastic pool extended beyond the polio scare. I did not understand. And then it hit me. Baseball. Not an actual baseball. The idea of baseball.

My parents loved baseball. I am pretty sure that baseball had not been routinely broadcast on television for many seasons when I started asking for a blow-up pool. Realizing that made me understand. It wasn't that my parents didn't want me to have a pool. They didn't want to sit outside and watch me in it. Not when there was a Phillies game on. And, if recall from childhood memories of baseball sounds flowing onto the street through the windows of mostly unairconditioned houses, there were a lot of televised games.

Just as an aside, denied a blowup pool, I spent the summer digging a pool in the back yard. I was completely focused on my construction project. Well, that and the tile collection I assembled from the dirt I excavated. My efforts evolved into both a construction and an archaeological project-- all to the accompaniment of roaring crowds and the click of a bat hitting a ball (although not that often when the Phillies were at bat).

My mother loved baseball. Truly loved the game. My interest has always been superficial. However, I have always loved an underdog. (If you were going to be any kind of sports fan in Philadelphia you had to develop a love for underdogs.) So when New York got a new team with an impressive stream of losses, I had to love the New York Mets. And since I was entering my teen-age years, some sort of infatuation had to factor in. I developed an affection for Ed Kranepool. How I don't recall, but I was devoted to him as well as to Troy Donahue, Edd "Kookie" Burns and, inexplicably, Walter Pidgeon.

So, my mother, always interested in a trip anywhere new, got tickets for a Mets' home game at Shea Stadium. She got three so we could take along Debbie Shettsline, now Wernert, a true baseball fan as well as an admirer of Ed Kranepool. However, Debbie got sick and had to bow out at the last minute leaving my mother with an extra front row, box seat, along the first baseline. I don't know if she could return it, but I don't think she ever thought of doing that. Instead, we lurked near the ticket office until my mother saw a man headed for the box office. I suspect she could see that he was going to buy one ticket for the bleachers. Being a teenaged girl, I might have kept my distance as she sidled up to him and asked if he'd like to use our ticket. Not buy it. Use it.  

I still remember what the guy looked like. Average. Summer clothes appropriate for the ballpark. Nothing fancy about him. The kind of guy who likely stopped by his neighborhood bar on the way home from work. I don't know why but he struck me as single, no kids. Maybe because he was alone at the ballpark on an afternoon when most people were working.  It's easier to say what he did not look like. A doctor. A lawyer. A judge. Since it was a weekday afternoon, he probably did not work on Wall Street.

When we took our seats, this man thought he had died and gone to baseball heaven. He pointed out the bleachers where he thought he'd be sitting. He and my mother made easy conversation and he taught us all about the Mets. He bought us drinks and snacks. The three of us had a wonderful time together.

It was a great afternoon at the ballpark. The weather was gorgeous. The Mets won. Partially because in the first inning Ed Kranepool came up second in the Met lineup and hit a home run. My mother enjoyed making me happy, but she also took great joy in making that man happy. I am sure we knew his name at the time, but I have long since forgotten it. I would suspect that he is no longer on the planet, but I bet until the day he passed on he remembered his day at Shea Stadium with my mother.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

My story about Beirut where I've never been

 As it says in the heading, I created this blog for two reasons:

   1) For myself, to be able to read my stories when I can no longer remember them.

   2) For others, so that instead of making them listen to my boring stories, I can direct them to my blog where they can read my boring stories.

An opportunity arose yesterday to take advantage of the blog for the second purpose when the topic of Beirut came up, but I had not yet recorded my Beirut story. So here it is before I forget it again.

In 1976, I was doing a month-long, solo Eurail trip across Europe before meeting friends in Spain. Notice I did not say backpacking trip. Although I could foist my bag on my back it was leather and contained little of the standard backpacking gear such as a well-worn copy of "Europe on $5 a day." I was spending $5 a day on Coca-Cola and five times that much on English reading material. I sometimes slept on the train, often slept in cheap hotels but took an occasional break at a four-star if not a five-star hotel. Frugality was never my strong suit.

Nonetheless, I was not staying at the Hotel de Paris during my stay in Monte Carlo. It was way out of my budget and my budget was pretty loose. I found what I determined was the only cheap hotel in the city, or the country of Monaco for that matter, since, as far as I could tell, the two were the same. (Technically, they are not.)

My modest hotel did, however, have a dining room and the dining room had a maitre d'. A maitre d' who asked me if I would like to share a table with one of their long-term guests. I have no idea why I said yes aside from the fact that I have trouble saying no now let alone back then. At any rate, the host led me to a table where a young man about my age was sitting. At that point, I suspected the maitre d' was trying to play Cupid. I knew before I sat down that wasn't going to work, but I did sit down.

It wasn't long before I realized that the maitre d' had finance, not romance, on his mind. At the time, there was a bitter, and complex, civil war going on across the Mediterranean in Lebanon. It turned out that my dinner partner was living in this hotel and making radio broadcasts from his room back to Lebanon for the Christian faction. I concluded the maitre d' was working with him and the point of putting us together was to provide the hotel guest with the opportunity to hit me up for a donation. 

A ludicrous plan if you ask me. I was staying in what was one of the cheapest hotels in a very affluent city. There had to be a lot better prospects to hit up all over town. But, I guess he was playing the cards he was dealt. At least, I was an American. I learned on that trip that people held onto some odd stereotypes about Americans.

My dinner partner, let's call him Yusef, told me about his life and his project. He explained his politics, his goals, and his technology. (I wonder if he had to move to the roof to broadcast, but I have no memory of his saying that.) I don't recall his asking me anything, but, let's face it, his story was far more interesting. 

I was waiting for THE question about a donation when a friend of his arrived. Fresh off the plane from Lebanon. The conversation took a sharp turn. Yusef told his friend that he wanted to return to Lebanon. His friend responded that was a bad idea because "they" would kill him the moment he stepped off the plane. "You are a wanted man."

Now, I won't call myself a free spirit, but I don't have a lot of rules for life. However, I do have a few, one of which is never hang out with anyone who is a target for terrorists. This is not a simple guideline. It is a rule. A rule enacted and enforced that evening. I skipped dessert, excused myself and returned to my room and my English reading material.

I'll admit I was happy to be away from the terrorist targets. I was enjoying my evening reading-- although in retrospect I wonder why I was in my room instead of seeing the sights. Then, I heard them. Coming along the hallway. Chatting loudly as they passed and opened the door to the next room. Yusef's room. The room from which he broadcast into a war zone. Their loud conversation continued. It passed easily through the walls. If anyone came looking for them, they would be easy to find.

I thought I was crazy to worry about being collateral damage. I mean, really, who would blow up two enemies--okay, two enemies and a radio transmitter--in their hotel room?  I told myself not to worry. Besides, I was checking out the next day.

For years, I thought I had been neurotic. Then, I saw the movie, Munich. 

Check it out.

HANDY TIP: Try not to book a room next to a target for terrorists of any sort.

NOTE: I was a little surprised that during my trip to Monaco, although my passport clearly stated that my last name was Kelly and I was from Philadelphia, no one asked if I was related to the other Kelly, Grace, who was currently living in the palace under the aka Princess Grace. Perhaps because I wasn't hanging around the palace and only got to go there on a tour. And, maybe they asked where I was staying.

NOTE: This was years before a librarian at a Florida University suggested an answer to a frequently asked question (except in Monte Carlo): are you related to Grace Kelly? His suggestion:  Odd, you noticed the resemblance. FYI - there is none.

NOTE: My mother died before Civil War broke out in Lebanon. After her death, we found an article she had stashed in her dressing table: The Ten Best Hotels in the World. One was on the beachfront in Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East. She would have been horrified to see what was happening to the city.

NOTE: Yusef was on the Christian side of the conflict.

NOTE: You also got close to a target when you ran into Meir Kahane. Check out that story.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

Riding with Bill, Gates that is

Many, many years ago, I went to the annual Microsoft conference which was probably a mismatch since I was a lot more involved with data than technology. I blush now to think about what probably went over my head even though technology was pretty simple back in the 1980s.

This is not about technology. This is about my brief encounter with Bill Gates.

I got on an elevator at the hotel where the convention was held. I did not realize that Bill Gates was in the back of the elevator car. When the elevator made its first stop, he politely made his way to the front. After he'd stepped off and the door closed behind him, a man told this story about a previous elevator ride with Bill Gates. This is his story, not mine.

As on this ride, the elevator was packed and the people who got in later did not realize that Bill was jammed into the back of the car. One of the people in the front began to bad-mouth Bill. A lot. When the elevator made its first stop, Bill made his way out. However, as he passed the man who had been bad-mouthing him, he said "excuse me" and put a light hand on the man's shoulder so he could slide by. Slide by and see the name on his badge which he appeared to memorize.

There is a lesson to be learned here. If you are the last one into an elevator, keep your mouth shut until you've checked out everyone who is riding with you. I don't imagine Bill Gates rides in a lot of crowded elevators with strangers anymore but you never know who does. Alternatively, if you can't keep quiet, at least be smart enough to take off your badge.

NOTE: I went back to the Microsoft campus once for a reason I've long forgotten. I bet the guy wearing his badge in the elevator never did.

© 2021 Jane Kelly

What do Richard Burton, Peter Frampton, Walter Mondale and G. Gordon Liddy have in common?

A few months ago, social media was all abuzz about The Queen's Gambit. I am always into the minutia in films with historical settings from my lifetime. I have come to accept the painful truth that there are historical settings from my own lifetime and try not to let that fact interfere with my enjoyment of the show.

Given my nearly obsessive interest in minutia in the background, I was thrilled to hear Richard Burton's voice (The Robe was on TV in the background). It brought to mind the time I ran into him and his then-love Elizabeth Taylor when they were being constantly stalked by paparazzi and fans.

Waiting for Liz and Dick outside the Broadway theater where he was playing Hamlet had become a sport. Hundreds of people had gathered daily to catch a glimpse of the star just passing by. Usually accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor.

My parents and siblings and I had just seen Hello Dolly when we ran into the couple. We were on our to a restaurant when Liz and Dick (no combo names back then) walked in front of us on their way into Sardis. I felt a little guilty that hundreds of people had waited for a glimpse of the couple and they walked three feet in front of me. A little.

Back then Liz and Dick could not make a move without the press in tow, but now his name and face just appeared in the background of a hit series without recognition.

Fame is fleeting.

I felt the same way about Peter Framptom.  A summer or two after HIS summer, I waited behind him in line to check out of a hotel in a Texas suburb. Houston? Dallas? Not sure. It doesn't matter. He was still touring but without a frenzy. He was alone, at the front desk.  Settling his group's bill?  I wasn't sure but I was sure I was the only one who noticed.

Fame is fleeting.

And, my favorite, Walter Mondale. A man who in the summer and fall of 1984 had been greeted by cheering mobs everywhere. This is an exchange I had in 1985. I only know the year because of the content.

Me: I ran into Walter Mondale at the airport yesterday. Didn't he run for president once?

Friend: Last year.

Fame is fleeting.

And, apparently, so is notoriety. 

I was once in line for the DC/New York shuttle behind G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy. He walked away and left his ID on the counter. I stepped up and realized that I could see his home address and phone number. Fifteen years before that might have been worth a lot. But in the eighties? No one cared. The stigma of what he did might have stuck but as far as being the center of attention? He no longer was.

Notoriety is just as fleeting as fame.

UPDATE: April 2023. Shirley Temple’s name just came up online. When I saw her pulling her own suitcase through Dulles Airport sometime in the 1980s, I didn’t think about her early years when she would have been mobbed by fans. She was active in government service and well-known, but no one seemed to notice her. Probably a relief for her. 

NOTE TO SELF: You had actually seen Elizabeth Taylor at a distance earlier. Apparently, she had been with Richard Burton until he went on stage, left the theater and came back to meet him for dinner before his evening performance.

© 2021 Jane Kelly