Years ago, I was working at the old Sheraton Hotel at 17th and JFK, and one of my coworkers was a big old maintenance man named Bill McC. Bill was a jovial giant, not an intellectual one, and was prone to using the same jokes endlessly, which sometimes, and in his case, has the effect of making them funnier each time they're repeated. Every time someone would enter the lunch room, Bill would cry out ' Look at the head on that!' and everyone would laugh, but no one louder than Bill himself. He had a jailhouse tattoo on his right forearm that said "BOB" in crude letters. He made no attempt to hide it, but I never heard anyone ask him about it.
One of Bill's previous jobs was as a guard at the old Eastern State Penitentury, and was there when Willie Sutton was incarcerated there. Mr. Sutton was probably the most celebrated bank robber of the 20th centuary, and a crackerjack escape artist to boot. He escaped from Eastern State while Bill was a guard there, and he told me they picked Willie up in a bar on Fairmount Ave. a couple blocks away, sitting there sipping cold ones, waiting for them to show up. Eastern State was supposed to be escape-proof. Willie had just wanted to show them that it wasn't.
But Willie Sutton's most famous quote was in response to an interviewer who asked why he kept robbing banks. "That's where the money is,"he replied.
So it is that if you make things out of wood, sooner or later, because of price or quantity, or to find an exotic species, you will end up at a sawmill. That's where the wood is.
In my case, I was looking for Holly, which is plentiful on the stump in South Jersey, but almost unavailable in lumber form. I'd heard of it's remarkable light, even color, and its workability. I don't remember what project I had in mind when I was looking for it, maybe to make a miniature model of the HOLLYWOOD sign out of it, just to make a pun in wood. I remembered passing a sign that said "Sawmill' on Rt 47, on one of many trips to the shore. Most of the time I would take Rt 347, the new bypass, but often would take old 47 past the state prison in Bayville, because it's actually shorter, and much more scenic.
So one Saturday morning, I talked my son Travis into going down there to see what we could find out about the sawmill, and the availability of holly.
We turned off Rt 47, just past the prison and just past the "Sawmill sign, onto a narrower road or driveway, which gradually got even narrower, and eventually gave way to gravel paving, and then to dirt. Soon it had become two dirt ruts, with foliage closing in to the point where it was brushing both sides of the truck. Off to one side sat a derelict London double-decker bus, whose origins and arrival in this place we would puzzle over years later. But we saw a clearing up ahead, and since we couldn't possibly turn around at that point, we pushed on.
When we got to the clearing, and got out of the truck, it took a couple minutes for our eyes and our minds to adjust to what we saw. There was a saw, the type you see in old cartoons, where the villian ties the damsel to a log, and a huge (in this case, 6 foot) saw blade slices dangerously close. It looked to be a hundred years old, but had obviously been kept in working order. There were piles of logs, not recently cut, and dozens of junk cars. Two tiny children ran barefoot onto, under and into the cars, involved in some game of their own device, until one of them noticed us and ran into a trailer calling for"Daddy!"
But before Daddy came out, all we could do is stare in astonishment at what stood behind the trailer. It appeared to be an 80 or 90 foot boat, built of steel plates, and, most remarkably, with a gap in the middle, creating what was in fact two boats, one with a stem, and one with a stern, connected by some type of apparatus and rods and such. A huge banner was draped across the whole thing that read "The John Birch Society.
The John Birch Society was created at the height of the Cold War, a paranoid anti-Communist group whose mission was to warn the underinformed masses of America that the Communists were a secret brotherhood of some sort, whose goal was to steal everyone's refridgerator. I thought it had probably ceased to exist after the people of the Soviet Union threw the Communists out of power in a bloodless revolution in the polling booths, thus tarnishing some of their conspiratorial luster. Apparently not with this bunch.
When "Daddy" came out of the trailer, he asked us our business in a thick Australian accent. When I told him, he answered' Oy blieve Oy've got some 'olly 'ere," and proceded to jump, barefoot, mind you, over the junk cars, over piles of logs, like a demented wood sprite, until he finally called out from the distance, "Right here! Yessir!"
When he climbed back, I asked him about price, and he said I would have to ask the owner about that, he just worked there. The owner was away.
It was the ownwer's ship, he told us. He planned to sail it around the world spreading his message of fear and suspicion. Its unusual construction was due to its design as a wave powered, self charging electrical ship, run by batteries that would be charged by the wave motion rocking the two halves, moving the generators that were attached to the connecting arms. There were only two problems that I could see: that a ride on that boat would be a trip to hell, sure to give the saltiest dog on the sea a case of the heaves. Also, laws of physics being what they are (immutable and stuff) it's unlikely that you could generate more power from the waves than it would take to overpwer them.
So we left, both quite satisfied by the adventure, and we reminisce often, to refresh our memories of one of the most surreal mornings either of us has had.
I spoke to the owner by phone the next week, he gave me prices that i thought were too high, or else quantities that I couldn't imagine using. Fifteen years later, the sign for the sawmill is still there. I don't know whether the sawmill is, or the people, but I know for sure that the boat is still there, maybe in overgrown brush, but there was no way to get it out...the area was landlocked, and no truck big enough could get back there to pull it out. But I've heard of no Communist enclaves forming in the pines of South Jersey, so its effectivemess as a propaganda tool is beyond dispute.>
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