02 November 2007

Missing Link


The family called the lanky dark-haired kid Link, and the name stuck. The other one he liked was “Commander,” which was the rank he made in the Navy, flying carrier aircraft in the days before jets. He was pretty good at it, which means that his reflexes were quick and he enjoyed an adrenaline rush.

That gives me some insight to Link, since that aspect is lacking in most accounts of his life. His fame came mostly from something so repugnant that it makes me want to go wash my hands. Link's full name was George Lincoln Rockwell, and his dream was to become the first Nazi President of the United States.

He washed up here in Arlington in the late 1950's, in the same manner that many of us transients do. After living all over in his military career, he came to the Capital to pitch an idea for a magazine aimed at the spouses of service members. It actually made it into print, with a staff of thirty.

Link actually looked a little like Hugh Hefner, another struggling publisher, but Hef had the better product, or at least one with more enduring interest. Link struggled with the magazine, even as he wrestled with some powerful intellectual demons. He did not like what was happening in the County, and he saw it as part of something fearful happening all across the country.

At the time, the County was changing. The last of the Buckingham Garden Apartments had been completed in 1953, the ones that the Hispanic workers are ripping down now.

I walked by last night, and saw that they have spray-painted numbers on the tall mature oak trees that they are going to save. I have a picture of Number 52, a particularly stalwart version of the species, and it is old enough to have stood tall when there was nothing but scrub brush and trees across Pershing Street, a sort of barrier against the sound and confusion of Route 50.

The guy who installed the plantation shutters on my efficiency unit in Big Pink grew up in the Forest. He remembered playing Capture the Flag in the woods, and he remembered Frances Freed in the back of the big Caddie limousine, and her driver Mickey.

What he said echoed what Fat Eddie said. Frances was the Queen of Buckingham, and with the vision of that part complete, she began to think of what might be next on her 120 acres of Arlington, and her 1800 rental units.

Her office was the entire second floor of the strip mall at the intersection of Glebe and Pershing. The florist is the only business that has made the transition in the neighborhood. The Drug Fair pharmacy has become a CVS; Kabob restaurants are on both sides of the street, and the Rin Con Cito Chapin diner and the Chinese and Thai places are on either side of the Cassiana Spa where I get my hair cut.

South of the intersection, the Buckingham Theater with the proud pillared portico has become the world's slowest US Post Office. Most of the people who use the place are interested in the most arcane functions of the Postal Service, the money orders and complex tasks that have to be completed in Spanish.

Ben the Morrocan gives the area's best haircut, which I remind myself to get every month or so. I stopped in yesterday, and took the chance to go upstairs to see the old Paramount Communities headquarters. The Immigration Lawyers whose suite is up there is dusty and vacant, and there is a sign informing me that I can rent the space at an attractive rate.

I wonder if Socotra LLC could be happy there? It must have been something, back in the day, with the limo downstairs, and the world at the stiletto of your high-heeled shoes. Frances was looking around for something to follow the triumph of Buckingham.

Arlington's population growth was increasing dramatically. At the turn of the century before this one, there were less than 10,000 Arlingtonians. In 1940 there were only 57,040 of us. By 1950, the total had doubled, and was on pace to triple by 1960.

High-rise buildings were starting to sprout along the Virginia side of the Potomac River, and in Rosslyn at the Arlington end of the Key Bridge. Change was in the air in Arlington, and the folks down in Richmond were having none of it.

In 1954, the U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., was the King of Virginia, just as Frances was the Queen of Buckingham. He was alarmed at the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court, and formulated a "Southern Manifesto" of massive resistance to integrated schools.

A hundred southern politicians signed the document in 1956, and a slate of restrictive laws was passed in the Commonwealth in 1958 to enforce it. Pupil Placement Boards were created to assign students to particular schools, tuition grants were provided to students who opposed integrated schools, and the fiscal hammer was a provision to cut off state funds to any school district that agreed to integration.

Arlington went ahead and began to integrate anyway. It was a principled stand, and an honorable one, but not unopposed. That, and the end of racial covenants in places like the Buckingham neighborhoods made Link take a dramatic public move. He joined the radical right fringe, took up the swastika and created the American Nazi Party.

He established his Wolf's Lair on a hill on the south side of Wilson Boulevard in a shabby farmhouse on the big hill on the way to Falls Church. The site became known locally as "Hatemonger Hill." Depending on your estimate of success, he never had more than a couple hundred “storm troopers” who paraded around in make-believe Nazi uniforms with pistols and shotguns.

You have to say that it was an attention-getter. Link had two offices in town, one on North Randolf street up from my Mercedes dealer, just eight blocks from where Frances decided to erect Big Pink. It is likely that Link's Hate Bus occasionally passed the black Freed limousine. Link ran small rallies on the National Mall in 1960 that resulted in a stint in the loony bin, and a leap to the national stage.

By all accounts, he never was able to muster more than two hundred "Storm Troopers” on his active roles, but he was always good for an inflammatory speech to a college crowd. He made over a hundred of them. He even dallied with fellow racists in the Nation of Islam, who likewise believed in separation of the races, and addressed them in 1962.

For all the publicity, it was not a particularly good career move. Liberal Arlngtonians were appalled, of course, and the Navy stripped Link of his pension. The Storm Troopers didn't live well, and the house was a dump. Even food was a problem, and at one demonstration in Clarendon, the Party described the Arlington Barracks was reduced to "eating stale bread and ten-cent a pound meat intended for dogs."

Rent caused Link to move the headquarters to a small house in Clarendon. It is the most popular of the Nazi relics in town, since the structure now houses the Java Shack, a relaxed place that proudly states it is “Gay Owned and Operated.”

Frances Freed made a commitment to grow with Arlington, and signed the papers for a design study on a luxury apartment complex to be constructed in the forest on the edge of the old formal entrance to the Buckingham Neighborhood.

It was anathema to her husband's dream of low-density garden apartments, but the times were changing and she was determined to change with them. The Big Pink complex would be eight stories, towering above the garden complex, and would feature a health club, Olympic-sized pool, tennis courts, and fancy marble lobby. She personally selected the pale rose color for the brick and contracted to have them custom-fired to a delicate glaze.

There was going to be plenty of free parking, since in the modern world, everyone had a car, and the blacktop would surround the building. I'm sure Link saw the place, driving downtown to make his speeches. It was one of the most impressive bits of construction in the area in 1964.

Link never thought he would be able to live that way, and he was prepared to make sacrifices. The farmhouse did not have a washer or dryer, and he was forced to cross the road to the Dominion Hills strip mall to wash his Nazi uniforms.

I know the feeling. Frances had not fully thought through the demands of the future, and Big Pink featured a shared legacy with the Buckingham apartments, which was the placement of communal washers and dryers on each floor. I watch like a hawk, and swoop down to do my laundry when the machines are unoccupied.

It was on a similar trip to the Laundromat that the Arlington Fuhrer met his end. In late August of 1967, Link went across the street from Hatemonger Hill to do a load of dirty clothes. Two shots were fired from the rooftop of a beauty salon at the west end of the complex. Two bullets went through the windshield of blue and white Chevy, and struck him in the head and the chest.

He died instantly.

The Pentagon refused to allow Link's body to be buried in the national cemetery at down at Culpepper, since the Storm Troopers refused to take off their swastika armbands. The body was returned to Arlington, and the leadership of the American Nazi Party decided to have the remains cremated before the authorities confiscated the body.

The ashes were never accounted for, so like the original Fuhrer, we have a case of the missing Link.

Fat Eddie told me that everyone raced up to the shopping center to gawk as soon as the word spread that the Nazi had been shot, and some were not prepared to forget. Malcom X had threatened him in a telegram, and it would be a better story if it had been the Fruit of Islam, bodyguards to Elija Mohammed, that had it out with the arch racist. It was not that way. It was another disaffected fascist that shot Link, just as it was Muslim brothers that gunned down Malcolm.

His surviving followers used to paint swastikas on the precise place in the parking lot of the strip mall where he fell, but the practice has fallen out of favor. I had a hard time finding it the last time I was there.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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