OLD SMOKEY, Bearing Climate Change

 

I have to tell you that, during the “carboniferous age”, our planet was far more flammable than it is today. About 420 million years ago the air was made up of almost 40% oxygen, compared to less than  20%. today.  All this “extra” oxygen came from the exultation of mosses and plankton which had run such a riot over the earth that they laid down the vast coal beds and oil reservoirs which we mine today. But this plant-foria also left behind extensive beds of charcoal, hinting at vast fires which had burned plants before they could become coal. 

Today, dead wood burns at 150 F. But with twice the oxygen available, that flash point was reduced to within a few degrees of 90 degrees F. The Silurian Age was not the kind of world a little bear cub could survive in for very long.  Which was, in part, why there were no little bear cubs wandering around 430 million years ago.  And damn little hard wood.

More recent charcoal records tell an equally interesting story. It seems that before the twentieth century there were a far more forest fires in North America than since. As long as there was a frontier, flames were used to conquer the land. Native Americans burned swaths of grasslands and forests to trap prey, and Europeans burned them to convert woods into farms and grazing lands and even steam. But with the closing of the American frontier – which happened in 1880 according to Professor Jackson Turner - all the land in America became property. It was owned by somebody or some corporation or the government. 

It was then that fire became not a tool but a threat. It was a brand new way of thinking about fire. For the first time in history, humans made the moral judgment that fire was usually a bad thing.  Because it was burning somebody's property.

In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act was signed by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison. It put 13 million acres of forest under Federal protection, so it could be managed to maintain water drainage and lumber resources. Wildfires still remained largely beyond human control, even when humans had started them. In Yellowstone, America’s first National Park, only those 6 to 10 of the wild fires which broke out each year along the park's roads, were contained.  Meanwhile  the 35 fires in the back country each year, usually started by lightning, were allowed to burn themselves out. Then came the drought year of 1910.

They called it The Great Fire. It was started by a lightening strike on Saturday, 20 August, 1910. There were  2,000 fires already burning in the forests of Idaho and Montana. The Great Fire by itself burned 3  million acres,  as well as the towns of Avery, Falcon and Grand Forks, Idaho, De Borgia, Haugan, Henderson, Saltese, Taft and Tuscor, Montana. The smoke was seen as far away as Watertown, New York.  Eighty-six humans were also killed, including 28 members of “The Lost Crew” of firefighters.

That fall Henry Graves, Chief of the Forest Service, decided the key to fighting wildfires was the quick arrival at the fire by an adequate, trained force , armed with the proper equipment. And by 1935 enough resources had been committed to this fast response that the new Chief, Ferdinand Silcox, could order that all wild fires reported must brought under control by 10:00 a.m. the very next morning. By 1939 the Forest Service had even established “Smokejumpers”, men who would parachute into remote back country and with shovels and hand axes, isolate a wild fire and tamp down any smoking embers. And that was when the story turned Hollywood.

On Thursday 13 August, 1942 Walt Disney released his fifth animated feature film, which was called “Bambi”.  In the climax of the movie the adult Bambi and his father struggle to survive a raging forest fire. The Forest Service thought they had a good fit with that dramatic sequence and hired "Bambi" for use on wildfire warning posters. 

Unfortunately the forerunners of the NRA protested this “insult to American Sportsmen,” since the movie showed hunters shooting Bambi’s Mommy.  Disney decided to withdraw the characters for the duration of World War Two, which meant that the Forest Service had to go looking for another animated spokes-figure.

At the time the most famous firefighter in America was “Smokey” Joe Martin of the NYFD, who had just died at the age of 86, in October of 1941.  So the Advertising Council, which drew up the posters for the Forest Service, decided any new spokes-figure should be named for him. 

The very first poster of the new figure was released on Wednesday, 9 August, 1944.  August which used to be the start of the "wild fire season".  The poster showed Smokey Bear (No “The” in the name) wearing blue jeans and a Forest Rangers’ hat, pouring water on a campfire. Three years later, in 1947, they added the caption “Remember, Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

On Thursday, 4 May, 1950, sparks from a camp stove started a blaze in the Capitan Mountain Range, of the Lincoln National Forest in northern New Mexico. It eventually burned 17,000 acres. One of the crews sent to deal with the conflagration was a unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas. 

Over a couple of days, while they worked, the men saw a black bear cub running around in the burning forest, and finally, on 9 May , they were able to capture him. He seemed to have been abandoned by his mother, was about 3 months old, and was burned and badly singed.

The crew named him “Hotfoot Teddy” and turned him over to local veterinarian Edward Smith. Smith and his wife Ruth had two children, 15 year old Donald and 4 year old Judy. Everybody fell in love with Hotfoot, except Judy, who according to her brother, kept expecting the bear to bite her. And yet it was Judy who was used as a prop when the photographer from Life Magazine showed up to take pictures of the little bear with the bandaged feet.  The little bear cub became an instant piece of merchandise.

Over night the little cute bear cub had his own comic strip and his own cartoons at the movies. The Forest Service recognized the value of Hotfoot, and he was flown to Washington, D.C., rechristened “Smokey Bear”, and given his own cage at the National Zoo. And there he resided, loping back and forth on his still tender feet until 1976, when he died at the ripe old age of 26. They buried the old guy back in New Mexico, in the forest of his birth. And about the time he died, so did the moral judgment about forest fires being all bad.

As the  Smokey Bear baby-boomers grew up, a more nuanced vision of fire in the wilderness has taken root. The Forest Service no longer uses the phrase “Forest Fire”, exchanging it for “Wildfire.” In 1965 , 94% of the public approved of the under control by 10 a.m. policy. By 1970 that percentage had fallen to 46%, and by 2004 only 6%. Part of that was probably the cost of fighting the fires; in an average year over 84,000 wildfires burn over 3 million acres, at a cost of over $540 million, and the lives of 16 firefighters.  But then, what is an average fire season anymore?

There is the perception that these numbers are going up, but it is hard to measure that based on something less than a century of hard data. After all, the “Great Fire” of 1910 burned 3 million acres by itself.  In 1988 Yellowstone Nation Park suffered 99,000 acres burned, 36% of the park. But nobody remembers the 1910 fire, anymore. There is very little film of that conflagration. Everybody remembers the fire of 1988. That’s human nature, and will never be cured. But...

...British and American statistical studies have come to the conclusion that, since the 1950's,  the fire season has gotten longer by 80 days.  Anthony Westerling of the Scrips Institution summed up the situation this way; “With the snowmelt coming out a month earlier, areas then get drier earlier overall...There's more opportunity for ignition.” As Thomas Swetnam, of the University of Arizona has pointed out, “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But...it's happening now…”

So poor little Smokey was actually lucky he was not born fifty years later, or he would have been in real trouble. That little cub had few tools for dealing with a fast moving forest fire, and none for climate change - but then neither do humans.  

And the 25,000 Koalas burned to death in the January 2020 Australian brush fires certainly could not handle the climate crises.   It would be helpful, I think, to remember we should not be worried about climate change because of what it might mean for Smokey, or Bambi, or even the Koalas  which are expected to become extinct within 30 years.  You should be worried about what it means for you. And your children. And your grandchildren.  And your great grandchildren.  They are not going to think very highly of  you, if you keep ignoring the reality of climate change.

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CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Seven

 

The heatwave was mercifully breaking. Nine days after Judge Joe Crater had disappeared on West 45th Street,  a cool rain swept the trash down the gutters of Italian Harlem along 2nd Avenue.  It was Friday, 15 August 1930, still two weeks before the judge's disappearance would be reported, when two men, their hats pulled low and their collars pulled high, shuffled up the back stairs of a speakeasy before slipping past the shadow holding the door open for them.

The larger man,  Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia (above), was carrying a nondescript brown leather bag,  instantly recognizable to 150,000 Italian immigrants squeezed into the slums between 96th and 125th streets, Lexington Avenue to the west and the turgid tidal inlet called the East River.

His shorter companion, Frank "Don Ciccio" Scalise (above), kept his hands in his coat pockets, as if to warm them. In truth each gloved hand cradled a loaded revolver.  Inside, they followed the stream of puddles across the floor of the "Speak's" offices,  past the bored looking hoodlums playing cards.

It seemed they had come like so many others to genuflect before the Peter "The Old Fox" Morello, (above)  waiting in the small room ahead, sitting behind his counting table, accepting the week's numbers take.  

The Fox, aka Giuseppe Morello (above in 1900), AKA "The Claw", was born with only one finger on his right hand. He had survived the heartless world of the Sicilian Mafia for 64 years by thinking faster than his physically fit enemies.  But age and greed had made him fat and slowed his thinking.  And as the pair approached the counting table, Morello's eyes were fixed on the bag swinging in Anastasia's left hand. Did it look heavy? Did it look full?  He failed to notice that the Sicilian, Scalise,  had paused as he closed the door behind them to turn the lock.  The signal was when the Italian Anastasia dropped the bag on the table. Morello's fixation allowed Scalise to free both his hands from his pockets and begin shooting into the Mustache Pete's chest from just an arm's length away. The last thought Peter Morello had was that they had not yet opened the bag.

Anastasia pulled a revolver as well and killed the guard, before joining Scalise in pumping more lead into the old man's chest. Once there must be no doubt the best brain in the Masseria mob was dead, Anastasia paused to sweep the pile of now blood spattered money into the bag. Richer by thirty grand,  the pair walked swiftly out the Speakeasy's front door while the guards were still breaking down the back door to the office to reach Morello.

It was all part of a "Mob War" engineered by Lucky Luciano.  With Morello eliminated, Luciano's boss, Joe "The Boss" Masseria  (above) was now isolated. 

He would die in another hail of bullets in the summer of 1931, while sitting in a Coney Island restaurant (above), thumbing through a deck of cards. Within a year Lucky Luciano would remake American organized crime in a far more profitable corporate image. 

One week after Morello's assassination  on Friday, 22 August, 1930, Jack "Legs" Diamond climbed the gangplank of the 27,000 ton Red Star liner Belgenland (above). With him came his loving wife Alice, and his red-haired girlfriend Marion "Kiki Roberts" Stasmick. 

Jack  (above) told the inquisitive reporters that he was going to sample the waters in Vichy, France. What made the slick waters of Vichy so attractive to Jack Diamond was two things. First Jack was under indictment for the murder of a New York upstate trucker.  And when news of Judge Crater's disappearance finally broke at the end of August, Jack, who many assumed had played some part in the Judge's vanishing act,  would be out of sight, and out of mind. 

However, one month later, Jack (above) would be back in America, after being deported by first the French and then by the German governments. As he stepped off the boat in Philadelphia, he was promptly then ordered to leave that town. He arrived back in New York City, only to be gunned down in his hotel room, on Sunday,  12 October, 1930.  Shot five times, Jack  now "The Clay Pigeon" Diamond (above with Alice) again survived, and was released from the hospital on 30 December,  

On 18 December, 1931, Jack's enemies came back, catching him asleep in his girl friend Kiki Robert's bed.  She was not with him at the time. But this time the assassins were taking no chances that Jack would leg out an escape. The pistol barrel was pressed so hard behind Jack's  left ear that it scorched his scalp as it propelled the three bullets into his brain.

 After the New York County Grand Jury had disbanded, on Sunday, 18 January 1931, Stella Crater (above) returned to her now vacant 40 Fifth Avenue apartment.  Three days later, while going through a dresser drawer, she "discovered" 4 manila envelopes containing $6,619 in cash - over $100,000 today - and her missing husband Joe Crater's will,  and two life insurance policies, and a 3 page note listing 20 companies and individuals who owed Joe money.  And at the bottom of that list, supposedly in Joe's handwriting, were the words, "Am very weary. Love, Joe." Stella says she decided to call the cops.

It was a smart move. It meant the money was not "hers" but "theirs", the taxes divided as joint property. But the cops were confused. They had searched that dresser several times, almost taking it apart. As of Halloween 1930,  there had been no envelopes in that drawer. To the cops it looked like a care package from a lawyer - perhaps from William Klein -  and they thought it was meant to buy off Stella, to keep her mouth shut.   If it was, it worked. 

Now she did not have to give up the house in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. And as quickly as she could, Stella Crater returned there, and returned to her $12 a week job as a local telephone operator.  

Over the next year the city and state of New York spent $4 million, looking for Stella's husband, Judge Joe Crater, They looked in Maine, in Canada, in Mexico, in Cuba and California. Good Time Joe was seen on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, in a Virginia Sanatorium,  shaved by a barber in North Dakota, gambling in a bar in South America and drinking cocktails at a European spa. 

But the tone of the coverage changed when one detailed tip claimed that Joe was holed up in a Montreal hotel room. The Mounties burst through the door to discover a couple enjoying their honeymoon.  That popped the bubble, and the snickering public began to laugh out loud.  Prohibition had made corruption so common the practiced ineptitude of the police and courts had become a joke. A year after Joe's disappearance, despite the headline, Judge Crater had still not been found.

In September of 1933,  First National Studios in Los Angeles, released a 76 minute long film titled, "Bureau of Missing Persons", staring Pat O'Brian and Glenda Farrell, with a young Bette Davis in a minor role.  

It was a police procedural detailing the techniques used to locate missing people like Joe Crater, and offered to pay Joe Crater $10,000 if he turned himself in at the Strand Theater box office during the picture's New York City run.  Needless to say, Judge Crater never showed up.

In June of 1936, 79 year old "Lucky Blacky" Blackiet (above) walked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and declared that he had "swapped yarns" with the Missing-est man in America, while out prospecting near his homestead at Santa Ysabel, four miles from Warner Hot Springs, California  The colorful "Lucky" said Joe Crater told him, "In one more year, I will be legally dead. I hope I can stick it out for that long."

Why the police would have believed "Lucky Blacky" is unclear, but it seems at least one San Diego Sheriff's Deputy thought the old prospector resembled the Crown Prince Archduke Johann Orth Salvator of Tuscany, who had gone missing off Cape Horn, South Africa  in 1911.  As proof of his campfire meeting with the judge ,  "Lucky" introduced 2 asses he claimed had belonged to Joe Crater.  County Commissioner R.A. Radifer,  two Los Angeles police officers and a couple of reporters went trudging off into the scrub bush mountains, following Lucky.   But after a week with the pounding August heat, swallowing dust and sleeping with scorpions  the expedition returned to civilization, firmly convinced they had been "had" by the old prospector.  Reduced to a laughing stock, they then suffered the gall of having "Lucky" present them with a voucher for $10 a day for his services as a "guide".  Needless to say, "Lucky" never got paid. 

In July of 1937, Stella won her petition to have Joe declared legally dead. She could now collect the $20, 000 in life insurance - over a quarter of million dollars today.  Stella moved to Elkton, Maryland, and married a wealthy electrical engineer named Carl Kunz (above). They took their honeymoon cruise on the French cruiser “Normandie”.  With Karl's money she could hire a lawyer to prove Joe had died violently, which would qualify for a double indemnity payout. 

Stella hired attorney Emil K. Ellis, who spent years tracking down the loose ends left by the Grand Jury.  One of the women who was subpoenaed but never showed up was a chorus girl named June Brice. She had supposedly met with Joe in her midtown apartment after he left West 45th Street on the night of 6 August, 1930. But June had vanished and never told her story under oath. Ellis eventually found a friend of June's, who told him, "Miss Brice said she was carrying a secret concerning the disappearance of Justice Crater. She said her life had been threatened."  

It was enough to keep Ellis digging until September of 1940, when he found June had been admitted to the Pilgrim State Hospital (above), in Brentwood, Long Island, New York, under the name of Jean Covel. 

Reporter Fred Menagh recorded the dramatic scene when a court order finally gave Ellis access to the mystery woman. "Four ghost-like figures," wrote Menagh, "shrouded from head to foot in spotless white surgical masks, caps, and gowns, gathered at the bedside of the hollow- cheeked girl with the glassy, staring eyes...Ellis, brief case clutched in one rubber gloved hand, stepped forward...His voice was slightly muffled by the gauze mask covering the lower half of his face, "Do you know what happened to Justice Joseph Force Crater?", he asked.

"The girl on the cot shrank back. She dug at thin, bloodless lips with claw like dreadful hands, so emaciated they seemed almost transparent against the light that streamed in through the barred and grated windows of her room. "We must not," she whispered hoarsely, "remember the things that make us mad." Ellis produced a packet of letters, clippings and photographs from his brief case. The girl's staring eyes darted from side to side in their deep sunk sockets. "Don't write letters," she admonished in her rasping voice, "They don't explain anything." 

"...the once beautiful showgirl, her once blond hair turned totally white, her gorgeous complexion now the color and texture of parchment, could remember only disjointed fragments of her past...June's most normal response occurred when Ellis...showed her a picture of herself as she looked when she was a Broadway butterfly. "I was pretty, wasn't I?" remarked the former showgirl, pathetically, a wisp of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth...Ellis, for more than an hour...vainly probed the fear-shattered mind o£ a once beautiful Broadway showgirl...At last he threw up his hands in despair. "It is no use," he said simply."  In 1942, June Brice died, her mind still confused.

During the 1930's, New York City Police Officer Charles Burn picked up a second job - as a bodyguard for one of the Brownsville Boys most prolific traveling assassins,  "Abe Kid Twist" Reles.  By 1939, Kid Twist had escaped 6 homicide charges. But while he was jailed for beating an African-American parking lot attendant to death, he realized the cops finally had the goods on him. Facing execution he decided to turn State's Evidence and admitted to committing 11 murders and provided information allowing for the closing of 85 more murder cases.  And suddenly, the secret operations of Murder Incorporated were public knowledge . Abe would prove to be an excellent witness, with an amazing memory for detail, and believable testimony.

One by one, The Brownsville Boys were convicted  and executed - Lepke Buchalter, Louis Capone, Mendy Weiss, Harry Strauss, Frank Abbandando, and Irving "The Plug" Nitzberg.  Abe even helped convict his childhood friend "Bugsy" Goldstein for murder. But on Wednesday, 13 November, 1940, he was to testify at the most important trial yet, that of Albert Anastasia, AKA "The Lord High Executioner", for the murder of a Longshoreman.  But unlike all the others, Albert was a "Made Man", a member of the Mafia with a seat at Lucky Luciano's unifying council.

About ten minutes after seven that Wednesday morning,  NY Detective Victor Robins entered Room 623 of the 14 story Half Moon Hotel, at West 29th Street and the Coney Island Boardwalk. He expected to wake Abraham Reles, to prepare him for his first day of testimony at the Anastasia trail. But the bed was empty. 

After a minutes long search of the suite of rooms,  Robins noticed a string of bed sheets tied to a radiator, and draping out the window (above). Looking down he saw a clump of clothing on the roof of the kitchen extension, four stories below. 

Upon closer inspection, the clump of clothing  proved to be the body of Abe Reles, the man who may have shoved an ice pick into Judge Joe Crater's brain.

 The newspapers named the dead killer, "The Canary who Could Sing but Could Not Fly".  Albert Anastasia was immediately released. Five of the officers guarding Reles were immediately demoted. But one of those cops was Charles Burns. Did he take the $100,000 being offered to kill Abe Reles? Or did Kid Twist mistake his bronchitis as cancer, and commit suicide?  In 1951, a grand jury concluded it was an accidental death during an attempted escape, and maybe that was the truth. But I do not think so.

And still stories about the missing Judge Joseph Force Crater kept floating across the public view. During the 1950's, a reporter in a San Antonio, Texas police station gave a cigarette to an filthy, raggedly dressed old man being processed for release. The reporter noticed the man's manicured fingernails. When asked about his background the man became taciturn. Later, the reporter found a note left in the bathroom, scribbled on a paper towel  and addressed to him.  It read, " “Thanks for the cigarette. You almost got a scoop. Remember that judge in New York?"

Stella never got the Double Indemnity payments, but she did squeeze another settlement out of the insurance companies.  After her 1950 separation from Carl Kunz - the couple never divorced - , Stella  made a modest living in New York City, off her husband's notoriety.  

In 1961 Stella finally co-wrote a book about about the man she now realized she had never really known. She called it “The Empty Robe : The Story of the Disappearance of Judge Crater,"  In it Stella painted a fond image of the vanished jurist. And every 6 April - Joe's birthday - for 39 years,  she stopped in the Club Abby, once a speakeasy and now just a Greenwich Village bar. She sat at a table in the back and ordered two shots of Royal Crown on the rocks. After finishing the first, she would then raise the second class, saying, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She would then swallow the second and quietly leave.

Eventually divorced, Stella Crater Kunz died in 1969,  at 70 years of age. And still, nobody has proof of what happened to her second husband, Judge Joseph Force Crater.

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