08 May 2009
 
Star Trek

(Starship Enterprise)

I know the Buckingham Swim club was there in 1996, just northwest  of the corner of Henderson and 5th Road North. I saw it in overhead imagery of the neighborhood that is on file at the central library.
 
I don’t know how many old Spooks they have in there, probably more than let on, but I was ready to ask for a light-table and some automated mensuration tools to precisely measure the length of the deep end.
 
There would have been chain-link fence on the west end of the pool complex, so the Nazis from Randolph Street could have seen through it, or anyone for that matter, though it was hard to tell from directly overhead.
 
The pool itself looked like a handsome, a staggered double rectangle from overhead with two smaller circular pools for the kids and a changing facility.
 
The picture only had the year annotated. I had to make some deductions. There did not appear to be people in the picture, but there were mature leaves on the trees. I concluded  that the photo was taken after school started that year, which would have been just before the Action Coordination Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs made their march in October, and right around the time the first season for the sci-fi show “Star Trek” aired.
 
A blockbuster prequel Hollywood movie using the backstory of the crew that boldly went where nobody went before is going to open today.
 
I understand the special effects are pretty exciting, which they were not in the original series. I think everyone loved the transporter device that dematerialized the Enterprise crew. Apparently the dazzling effect was created by mixing glitter with water, then agitating the solution and incorporating it into special camera effects.
 
That is a little lame by today’s computer graphics standards, but really amazing back in the day. It was almost as amazing as the real theme of the show, which was about race relations. The only way we could have a national dialogue about it at the time was to pretend it was five hundred years in the future.
 
There was a lot that was amazing in 1966. The Air Force asked the Coast Guard to install their Long Range Navigation System (LORAN-C) in SE Asia, to improve the precision of the bombing campaign and to facilitate search and rescue operations for the aircrew that were shot down in the process.
 
So, along with the return of Star Trek, LORAN-C was in the news this morning, as the President announced that he was going to cut the program out of the budget. He didn’t call it by the real name- that would be too detailed for the sound byte.
 
The shut-down will save all of $36 million in the FY10 budget, and a little less than
 
He called it a World War II era relic that is outmoded by the Global Positioning System that operates in low earth orbit.
 
I don’t know about you, but I have an idea about the vulnerability of low-power systems in space, and redundancy in navigation- space-based and terrestrial- is one of those things I believe in almost as much as the Constitution.
 
There have been times in a dark night on a big ocean when LORAN-C briefly meant a lot more, but the President doesn’t strike me as much of a sailor, and it probably isn’t one of the things he thinks about much.
 
The navigational budget cut is lumped in with the elimination of the Educational Attaché in Paris, and there is an uproar about any tampering with existing programs, regardless of how ridiculous. It illustrates the difficulty of stopping anything the government does, and to which people have come to believe they are entitled.
 
Things do change, though. A lawyer pal was here in town in 1966. He was a wiry little guy with dark hair and sparkling brown eyes at the time. He worked for a powerful member of Congress at the time, one of the legion of young people who live on old cold-cuts and pizza, and provide the foot-soldiers in the endless legislative wars that carve up our money and spread it around.
 
He remembers the heat of the 1966 summer, and the coolness of the cafeteria of the brand-new Rayburn House Office Building on the southeast corner of Capitol Hill. It was the only relief from the stuffy snake-ranch at 19th and S Street he shared with several other young staffers.
 
The District was on the edge of blowing itself up that year, but had not tipped over the gasoline can yet.  He says the border between white town and brown-town then was Connecticut Ave. The NE side was white and the SW side was black, sort of like the first season episode of Star Trek where two mirror-image but otherwise identical aliens were in a deadly struggle. Their conflict was about being black and white, or white and black, and producer Gene Rodenberry wanted us to realize it was all sort of stupid.
 
Washington was kind of stupid at the time. My pal recalls there was one crummy laundromat on the white side—it was a pig sty, with two inches of soapy water and lint on the floor all the time, broken, rusty machines, etc. and it was always full of the young white folk who worked on the Hill.
 
One day my pal  discovered a spotless, shiny new laundromat across Connecticut Ave. that boasted stainless steel machines, immaculate floor, furniture and tables. The owner was a grandmotherly, gray-haired black woman who was  always in attendance.
 
The place was never busy, because the white folks would all go to the crummy “white” Laundromat on the NE side of Conn. Ave. Anyway, my pal was from Long Island where the racism was different.
 
Up North, they used to say, “No one cares how big the negroes got, so long as they didn’t get too close. Down South, they didn’t care how close they got so long as they didn’t get too big.

Seems like a saying from a strange and distant universe these days, doesn't it?
 
DC was always an uncomfortable collision between north and south, and it was represented then by that chasm across Connecticut Ave.
 
My pal took his laundry to the nice black lady. To his surprise, she told him not to wait around, and that she would put the clothes in the dryer and fold them when they were ready. So he could leave, do something else, and come back later to pick them up. He thinks Washington was not used to integration then, as all the white people he told were appalled when he told them he patronized the “black Laundromat” on the wrong side of Conn. Ave. That left him with a funny taste for the city, which he still feels whenever he visits.
 
He was in SE Asia himself a couple years later, in the days when a Princeton man could find himself in public service toting an automatic rifle, and some of the navigating he did there was supported by LORAN-C, which is being replaced by a space-based system as futuristic as Star Trek.
 
I felt chills all over, like walking into the Rayburn cafeteria out of the sweltering Washington summer. Laundromats play an important part of this story, incidentally, since it was after 1966 that a lot of people began to get shot, and one of them at the Econowash right up the street. Star Trek was in the back ground, gently trying to reason with us.
 
That is when people began to say “Beam me up, Scottie,” and they weren’t kidding.
 
Looking at a later image of the intersection at Henderson and Glebe, there is a whole new street there, and the pool and part of the Buckingham complex was gone, just as if it had been transported to some distant universe without a back-up navigation system, never to return.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com