Final Four

Basketball is over, finally, the Women’s Championship decided decisively by the Lady Bears of Baylor over the Spartans of Michigan State. I have a family connection to the latter, and that is why I watched with a fatalistic attitude as MSU fell ten points behind, then more.

A lot more. The woman’s game is interesting, and hard. The outside shooting was superb. But the Spartans did not have it last night. Nor did the Men’s team, which likewise lost convincingly to North Carolina in the culmination of the Final Four.

Two teams in two Final Fours. A good season for both programs, even if the end is bittersweet.

That is how I felt, looking up at the column in the circle on Plume Street in downtown Norfolk. It commemorates another Final Four, and that is a curious thing. My reservations to the NATO Netcentric Warfare Conference were made long after the deadline had passed, and so I am at the Marriott a few blocks away from the Sheraton Riverside.

I walk to and from the conference, which is about digital battlefields. I thus have the opportunity to study the cityscape of this once gritty waterfront place.

They have done a marvelous job on refurbishing the place.

I have to be honest. I spent a long time ducking an assignment in Norfolk. To the west, on Hampton Roads proper is the World’s Largest Naval Base. For all intents and purposes, it is the Navy on the East Cost, and I was appalled by my comrades who created an insular little community, moving every few years from shore command to ships and back again, all in the cloying air of the brackish Tidewater.

I thought you joined the Navy to see the World.

But never mind the rant of an old sailor of other oceans. Norfolk is a natural place for the Navy to be. It is located on the southern end to the Chesapeake, and the great rivers that drain the interior of Virginia all meet here. The land is invaded by tongues of water.

The British formed the Virginia Company of London in 1606, and came to the Peninsula the next year with a few more than a hundred men and boy on three little cockle shells. They landed at Cape Henry, where the lighthouse stands now, and followed the river inland to settle at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America.

It was a near thing, Jamestown was. But against the odds, the little colony survived.

It was the kindness of Pocahontas saved them, twice, and whether or not she saved the life of John Smith that first year by interceding with her powerful father Powhatan, it is certain that she fed the Englishmen.

And with survival came the cultivation of the cash crop that made Virginia, the golden tobacco.

John Rolfe, not John Smith, was the man who won the heart of the Indian princess. He had intended to come to Norfolk with his young English bride, but their ship was wrecked near Bermuda in a wild storm that might have been the model for the one Shakespeare described in The Tempest.

His wife died there, with his infant daughter. Rolfe picked up some Bermuda tobacco seeds, and when he got to Virginia, he cross-bred them with the harsher Virginia tobacco. The Mild hybrid became the fabled golden leaf, and was a sensation in England. The struggling Virginia Company hit the jackpot.

To protect the harvest from the raiding Dutch, and from pirates, a fort was constructed not far from the Marriott in the shape of a half moon on Four Farthing Point in 1673.

No trace remains of it, but it remains as the site of downtown’s Town Point Park.

Norfolk emerged as the primary transportation point for tobacco from the plantations up the rivers, which could be navigated as far as Richmond and Front Royal. In 1682, 50 acres of land along the Elizabeth River were purchased from Mr. Nicholas Wise for ten thousand pounds of tobacco, and the “Towne of Norfolk” was established. For nearly a century Norfolk was the reliable source of Virginia’s riches for London.

But trouble was brewing. The long war with the French caused the King to look around for additional revenues, in part to defray the expenses of defending the colonists against the French and their Indian allies. In 1775, Norfolk’s newspaper was shut down by Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, and the presses carried to ships lying in the anchorage near downtown.

The city was shelled on New Year’s Day in 1776 on the orders of the Governor. The ensuing conflagration razed most of the city, though part of Borough Church survived. It was rebuilt and is now known as St. Paul’s. It has a cannonball embedded in the wall.

Norfolk was incorporated as a City in 1845 and commissioned a beautiful new City Hall to befit its new stature. It is still there, and it saw the Yankees seize the strategic port early in the War Between the States. But the occupation did not come until the alarmed Federals had evacuated the city. At the Naval Yard was the 4636-ton steam frigate USS Merrimack, former flagship of the Pacific Squadron. The fleeing officers ordered the ship torched, and she burned, but only to the waterline.

Below that, though, the ship was strong and her machinery salvageable. The innovative Rebels re-christened her the CSS Virginia and covered her upper works with thick steel plate. The ships that patrolled the world ocean were never the same after that.

City Hill is just down the street from the Marriott, and the column rises in front of it. It contained all city offices until the 1890s, and served as a courthouse until the 1960s. It became the MacArthur Memorial in 1964, the final resting place of five-star Army General Douglas A. MacArthur. They have placed his armored limousine from his time as the Shogun in Japan there, and his desk from Korea, complete with a situation map from after the audacious landing at Inchon.

I have a thing for MacArthur, part aversion and part fascination. He was a man of peculiar conceits, who successfully demanded the award of the Congressional Medal of Honor, so that he could have the same decoration that his father won in the Civil War. But he was a Five Star General, and larger than life.

The limousine is behind glass and you can’t sit in it. But I sat once in one of his chairs, which with two small framed pictures are the sole remaining artifacts in his one-time office at General Headquarters of the Occupation in Tokyo. It is the Dai Ichi Insurance Company again, which it was before, and I don’t know if they still let people wander in from the street to see it.

Norfolk hit the skids in the 1960s, just like a lot of downtowns did. It felt edgy to be downtown a few decades ago, and the businesses that survived catered to sailors and shipbuilders and the homeless. That was the Norfolk I avoided getting orders to.

But the town fathers have turned it around.

Now there is glass and glitter on the high-rises, and the mild climate, proximity to the water and the surviving historical structures have made it a hot tourist destination. The proud battleship Wisconsin was towed here in 2002, and the waterfront is lively and interesting.

Walking out of the Sheraton yesterday, I could see the column nestled in between the new high-rise buildings. I walked that way from the waterfront up to Plume Street.

The Column is so tall that only from a distance can you discern the Confederate at the top, in the characteristic stance that was favored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The gallant rebel is hatless, his face resolute but downcast at the memory of his fallen comrades. His hands grip the barrel of a percussion-cap rifle, with the butt of the weapon at his feet.

You can see these memorials to Our Confederate Dead across the South. But Virginia was the heart of the Confederacy. The monument in Alexandria, just across the river from Washington, appears to have the Rebel solider looking at the Dome of the Capitol.

I looked up the shaft of the column, shielding my eyes from the light of the sinking sun. I was surprised to discover that the column was a commemoration to the Final Four. It was dedicated on the occasion of the final re-union of the Confederate Army. Four old soldiers were wheeled out here in Norfolk in 1951, the last encounter of a generation that changed their century and changed a world.

1951, I thought. The year I was born the Confederacy was finally passing away. I walked off onto Plume Street and almost into traffic. I had to come up short to avoid being hit. I felt a little dizzy from looking up at the inscriptions of the names of the Final Four, and the Stars and Bars of the battle flag.

There is a bus stop in front of the MacArthur Memorial, or City Hall, and the people waiting were all African American.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

Go Back