| 15 November 2006 Trinity I was running late to Trinty, and I pushed the speed limit on Route 50 from Big Pink as much as I could. I don't know how I found the time to work for a living. I am so busy being unemployed, watching the workers digging out the water main next to the pool that failed abruptly on Monday. A friend recently joined the faculty of the school, and he was teaching a seminar to his seniors on the situation in the Gulf. Being a convincing fellow, he had managed to have some impressive government folks come out and explain some of the policy wrinkles about the war to his class. I screeched to a halt outside the two-story administration building on the campus, which was made up of a house and three or four assorted buildings that held the classrooms and the art department. Being between jobs- I hope it is just between- I had the time, and love to hear myself talk. The Trinity School came out of those loony Charismatic Catholics who started up after refusing the Vatican II reforms in 1965, and wanted to stay Latin and old-school. They did, starting down in South Bend, I understand, near the Notre Dame golden Dome, and with a couple churches and schools elsewhere. There was a crying need for private academies, outside the clutches of the Fairfax County School Board, since Brown V. Board of Education hadn't really changed much in the Old Dominion. In order to impose the spirit as well as the letter of the order of the court, busing was directed to break up the de facto segregation of the neighborhoods. That caused some stress, which I remember vividly. My family lived so deep in the suburbs that there was no one to bus. But that was not true here in Virginia. It was the end of American apartheid, and it is now remembered through movies like "Remember the Titans," the Hollywood version of the integration of T.C. Williams HS in next-door Alexandria. That was 1971, when Northern Virginia still paid allegiance to Robert E. Lee, and their back-to-basics tough education must have appealed to those families who were afraid of the changes that would come with integration. The two public schools that were built around that time were the last of their kind- the Luther Jackson High School for Negro Virginians, and the W.T. Woodson High School for Caucasian citizens. My kids went to W.T. Woodson, but any idea that it was the last segregated school constructed to be that was long gone. Trinty is just down the road from Luther Jackson, which is now a middle school, and never had the vast athletic campus that the white school did. I was to talk on the nature of the Spy business, particularly as it applies to the Middle East and the wars that are going on today. There were eighteen kids in the seminar, and I was immediately impressed by their youth, vitality, and precision of their questions. I have lectured frequently (though not nearly as often as a real educator) but I had no notes and arrived a bit frazzled from traffic. The girls wore identical green plaid kilts, and the boys uniform slacks and polo shirts. My friend who asked me to speak is fairly new to the faculty, and a retired Naval officer like his wife, who I have worked with down through the years. She was a pioneer in her own right, a member of the first Naval Academy class to accept women. That was the one that Jim Webb so bitterly opposed at the time. Both their kids go there, both of them exceptionally bright. The philosophy of the place has not changed from the beginning: basics are important, and source documents, not textbooks, are used for the literature and social science classes. The math and science classes have them, and Latin is a four-year part of the curriculum. They have left the charismatic dogma behind, but religion is still integrated in every facet of academic life, just as it was in the British Public School tradition. Of course, their "public" schools were private, just as Trinity is today. There are no tax dollars at work, just hard work to have their independence from the public school system. When they study the Constitution, or the Magna Carta, they read the original documents, not the words of others who tell you about them. I was impressed and disconcerted. My talk was prefaced by the Lord's Prayer, and I was not warned if it was the "debts" or "trespasses" version, which I understand is a big deal some places. They forgave me my stumbling over that part, as I launched into a description of my view of the second-oldest profession which incorporates the temptations of the first as an intrinsic part of the collection strategy. I had a grand time, and the kids were great. Afterwards, I was invited to join the student body for lunch, since it was a special occasion. When the weather is nice, the staff cooks hot-dogs outside and the 140 students can buy them hot off the grill and devour them at picnic tables before the next class. I should not have been surprised to see the wife of my former Flight Surgeon manning the cash box, and we embraced in surprise. She has a couple of her several children at Trinity, and she works hard to pitch in. It is very much a team effort. The "special" is five bucks: two dogs, condiments, small chips and a cold soda. It was the last hot-dog day of the year, since the weather is starting to turn in earnest, and it was most pleasant to sit out, and watch the kids interact. It is not so long ago that my sons were that age, the boys gawky and outsized in their new bodies, and the girls strikingly mature. I also got to meet most of the faculty, earnest folks, armed with bad jokes about cutting the mustard and relishing the curriculum. I got a chance to look in at the classes. They were small in number and the students got a lot of individual attention from the teachers. The kids are segregated by sex up through Senior year, when some mixed seminars are permitted. The all-boy and all-girl classes co-exist on the same campus. There is a Dean for girls and a Dean for boys, of the appropriate sex, and so are the instructors. Everyone seems to like the arrangement. My friend told me that the boys he taught were oblivious to just about everything, and the girls did not have to compete on the social playing field as they learned. I was then going to try to tie that together with the two funerals that will happen simultaneously, in Annapolis and Birmingham. I can only attend one of them, and it will not be the one in Michigan, which saddens me. I knew them equally well, which is to say that they were family and business associates, not men of my generation, and thus were a generation apart. They followed wildly different paths, but they typified their generation as well as any two of the vets, who with their wives changed our world. “Shap” Shapiro was an Admiral, and a very canny one. The quote that the Historian furnished the Post was from his testimony to the House oversight committee, in which he had to convince the Democratic members that a sensitive and risky program should be authorized, in light of the significant intelligence it would generate. Afterwards, one of the Members said that he did not want to see the Admiral selling used cars, because he was too good at it. The other guy Jim Alexander, who worked for my Dad at American Motors. Both he and Shap were in the Army Air Corps. Shap enlisted out of college to be in the Big Show, and Jim went in just as the guns were going silent. Shap was discharged and sought a commission through the Naval Academy, and Jim got out when he could and went to Detroit to be part of the dazzling world of auto styling, back when GM stood like a colossus over the world, and Detroit could do no wrong. Jim went over to American Motors to work with my Dad around the time Shap transitioned from being a ship-driver to being a Spook. Jim specialized in sizzle and speed. He was an auto-racing enthusiast, and on his own initiative linked up top American grand prix driver Dan Gurney with plastic mogul Ozzie Olson, who formed the famed "American Eagle" racing team. Jim was Mr. Dashboard, and his futuristic designs graced some of the weirdest autos of the seventies and eighties: the Gremlins and Marlins and Pacers. Jim was content to be in the business, and the interior studio at American Motors was just fine with him. Shap and Jim finished their days with the big companies in the mid-eighties. Shap was Director of Naval Intelligence, the 51st in the line, and Jim was the undisputed master of the dashboard. Both of them went on to consulting in the fields that they knew, and followed their outside loves right to their deaths. Just last year, Shap was presiding at the Naval Intelligence Foundation golf tournament, since he was the founding president, and Jim and his bride were traveling Northern Michigan in the five-wheeler camping trailer, his truck topped off by the custom adjustable spoiler he invented to make the wind flow over the rig more smoothly. It also looked cool. It happened to them both suddenly. Feeling bad, cancer diagnosis. Shap took a chance on surgery, only to find that the disease had spread too fast. Jim's fall was much more sudden, and he was abruptly too weak to make it through. Both of them died this week, talking to some of their friends and spouses almost to the end. Jim told my Dad he did not think he was going to make the night, and he was right. So, caught between the generations are we Boomers. The Greatest Generation is leaving, having changed the world. We have enjoyed the hell out of ours, squandering the patrimony we were given as though the world owed us our place, and it would go on forever. On our heels is the generation that is just about to emerge from school, and will have to bail us out of the mess we have made, and pay the bills we have run up in their name. It is a trinity, of sorts. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |