WILLIAM  ECENBARGER

Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine
© copyright William Ecenbarger


            On the sunny, pleasant evening of June 6, 1993, a makeshift motorcade of four cars--a dark blue Pontiac Trans Am,  a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass, a black Plymouth Horizon and a maroon Chrysler LeBaron convertible with a white top--winds past the old Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Co. mill in Monessen, Pa., and begins climbing the narrow, hilly streets of the residential section.

                Up, up, up they go, in tight, purposeful formation, to Clarendon Avenue, where they stop quietly just short of No. 440. Two men emerge and walk to the back of the house. The others, perhaps a dozen or more, get out noiselessly and wait behind a hedge out of view. It is about 6:30 p.m. Danger gathers with the shadows.

                Inside the house, 34-year-old William Michael Lucas--known to everyone as Mike--is watching television with his girlfriend, Maria Hughes. He is sprawled on the gray living room carpet nibbling his favorite food, popcorn; she is curled up like a cashew in the big orange chair. There is a knock at the back door.

                Mike Lucas gets up and sees his longtime friend, Chris Garry, 22, through the screen. He thumbs his hat back and says, "Hey, man, what's up?" Lucas opens the door, but the man accompanying Garry holds a revolver to his side and orders him to walk out front.

                Several days earlier, Chris Garry had been watching television with Mike Lucas in the same living room. Garry had joked with Lucas' mother about the old days when he came here as a child for lunch and dinner. But now Garry is the local drug dealer, and he has stolen about $10,000 worth of cocaine, which he has hidden in a cherry tree behind his house. To explain the shortage to his suppliers, Garry has claimed it was stolen--by Mike Lucas.

                The three men come around to the front of the house where the others are waiting. When Lucas sees the group he turns to Garry and says, "Chris, why are you doing this to me?" Terror is baked on his face like a physical deformity. The men form a circle around Lucas. There are quarrelsome voices climbing over each other. Then someone hits Lucas in the head with a pistol, and he falls to the sidewalk.

                A few minutes later, Maria Hughes looks out the living room window and thinks she sees a group of young men playing football. But in fact they are taking turns kicking the head of Mike Lucas. After about 10 minutes, a neighbor yells, "What are you doing? Stop! Stop! Stop!" The attackers jump into the cars and the motorcade roars off, leaving a blue vapor of exhaust fumes.

                Maria Hughes looks out the window again and sees Lucas on all fours, trying to stand up. The entire upper half of his body is crimsoned in blood. She runs for towels, and when she returns Lucas has begun staggering up the 32 steps to the front porch. A neighbor asks if he's okay, and he nods affirmatively. Together Maria and Mike struggle to the bedroom, where she wipes off his bloody head with a towel....

                                                                                              
                About this same time, some 150 miles to the east, Gov. Robert P. Casey and his wife, Ellen, are attending Sunday evening mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Harrisburg, and kneeling in the flickering light of the altar the Caseys are especially prayerful because, for the first time in nearly two years, there is hope. The 61-year-old governor is struggling with familial amyloidosis, a rare genetic disease that causes his liver to spew out poisons that are slowly killing him.

                Casey has been feeling badly for several years, but in recent months there has been a drastic change for the worse. He is experiencing dizziness, and his weight had dropped from 185

to 152. The bottoms of his legs are blue from failing circulation, and he sometimes has trouble negotiating steps.

                Back in April he had cut his right shin badly while emerging from a van to make an economic development commercial. A state trooper bandaged the leg on the spot, and Casey finished his day's work. Later the wound took six stitches at the Hershey Medical Center, but it bled all night long. The next day Casey made an appearance on behalf of a new children's health insurance program, and before he even started his right shoe was filled with blood.

                Just weeks before his son, Matt, had graduated from Notre Dame. There was a Phi Beta Kappa ceremony for him about 100 yards from the hotel where Casey stayed--but the governor was too tired to attend.

                Now, despite the pain and the misery, Casey keeps up a busy schedule of official duties. Last week he spent two days and a night in a whirlwind tour of Hazleton, and then came home and worked until midniight because the Legislature had approved the budget.

                Increasingly, however, Casey's health is not only Topic A, but Topics B, C and D as well. No matter how many times he shuffles his thoughts, the knowledge that he is dying keeps coming to the top of the deck. Casey scoured medical journals, called the nation's most prestigious medical centers, seeking the scientific breakthrough that would save his life. All the experts had the same death sentence: Amyloidosis is progressive, incurable and untreatable.

                But then, out of nowhere, a glimmer of hope appeared, and on June 4 Casey sat at his desk with a yellow legal tablet and black felt pen; he made two columns--one headed "risks", the other "benefits." At the top of the latter column, he wrote, "Can't get any worse."

                                                                            
                Frances Lucas comes home from work about 8 p.m. to find her son's left shoe and hat lying in the street. A trail of blood leads up the steps to the front door. Inside, her son is standing with his head swathed in a blood-soaked towel. The police have arrived, but there is confusion over getting an ambulance. She decides to drive him to the hospital herself.

                He starts to walk down the steps to her car, but he passes out. She and Maria drag him to the car and prop him in the front seat. He awakens and with an earnest, pinched face says, "Why did they do this to me, Mama? I didn't bother nobody. We gotta find out who did this." It's five miles to the hospital, and on the Donora Bridge Lucas' body goes limp. His mother stops in the roadway, runs over to the passenger door, shakes him awake, leaps back in the car and speeds off. Two minutes later she has to do the same thing.

                She fights off the rising lump of panic in her chest, but she can't get a single thought out of her mind. Oh, Lord, it can't happen again. Not to me. Once is all I can bear. Please, God, no. Twenty-one years ago, Frances Lucas' son, Eugene, was shot in the back and killed on a Monessen sidewalk.

                She ignores a red light and roars into the emergency entrance to Monongahela Valley Hospital, where she works as a receptionist. Luckily, there's an empty wheelchair. Somehow, she gets her staggering, drooping 200-pound son into it and pushes him inside.

                "Frances, what happened?" asks Dr. Michael Waters. He looks at the battered head. "I don't think there's brain damage, but we'll have to run some tests." She goes off to telephone her daughter, and when she returns, Waters is downcast.

                "His brain is hemorrhaging. We need to airlift him to Allegheny General immediately." Michael Lucas, wrapped in bandages and pain, teetering on the rim of consciousness, is placed aboard a helicopter. The last thing he says is, "Mama, would you run home and make me some popcorn?"


                It was back on April 14 that the book arrived in the Governor's Office; along with several other gifts that day, it was placed in a storage room at the Executive Mansion, waiting to be logged in. Under the state Ethics Code, all unsolicited gifts must be recorded and their value assessed. If it's worth more than $100, it is sent to the state museum or, if edible, to a homeless shelter or similar institution.

                Though the book carried a price tag of $24.95, to Robert Casey its value would become incalculable. But it sat one floor below his bedroom, in the so-called gift pipeline, along with other books, fruit baskets, homemade fudge and jam, recipes, plaques making the governor an honorary Boy Scout, paintings, portraits, photographs, sculptures, chairs, one stained glass window and hundreds of t-shirts.

                There it would have stayed were it not for a followup telephone call on May 24 from State Treasurer Catherine Baker Knoll, who had delivered the book to the Governor's Office some six weeks before.

                "By the way," she asked at the end of an unrelated conversation. "What did you think of the book?"

                "What book?"

                "Dr. Starzl's book. We call him the Miracle Man out in Pittsburgh. You really ought to read it."

                Casey sends for the book, which is a 364-page autobiography entitled The Puzzle People by Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, the world-renowned liver transplant pioneer. The title page is inscribed in an energetic looping of black ink: "To Governor Robert P. Casey with admiration for your efforts to improve health care in our state of Pennsylvania." At the bottom of the page there is a postscript: "I hope to meet you sometime in the future."


                On May 24, about two weeks before Mike Lucas's savage beating, Dr. Thomas Starzl drives his 1978 Honda Prelude--the same vehicle that brought him from Colorado to Pittsburgh in 1980--and parks behind his office, which is on the second floor of a  Pizza Hut near the University of Pittsburgh. It is a neighborhood of graffiti, vacant storefronts, bail bondsmen, astrology readers and regular drug busts.

                Starzl began researching liver transplants in 1956 in a garage in Florida. No one else thought such a thing possible, but he stuck with his belief that it could be done through failures, ridicule and vilification from his peers. When Starzl performed the world's first liver transplant 30 years ago, the patient, a three-year-old boy, died on the operating table. The next four patients did not live long enough to leave the hospital.

                Today, to many of his patients, he is St. Starzl. His successes attracted enough patients and medical talent to make the University of Pittsburgh the transplant capital of the world. Before he retired from surgery, Starzl trained a whole generation of liver swappers, who are spread across the nation. He now heads the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Transplantation Institute.

                Starzl, whose lean and trim physiognomy belies his 67 years, sits down at his institutional steel desk behind a Pisa of file folders. Thin-lipped and intense, Starzl looks like a man who takes the Hippocratic Oath seriously. The heat and the window air conditioner are battling to a draw, and as Starzl is loosening his collar, there's a call from the governor of Pennsylvania.

                Casey thanks him for the book and the kind words of the inscription. They discuss the book for a few minutes, and Starzl thinks, I can't waste any more of this guy's time. He's busy.

                "Well, Governor, I certainly appreciate your call. It was an honor to talk to you." Starzl injects a terminal inflection in his voice, as though the call is over.

                "Wait!" says Casey. "I have amyloidosis. What do you know about it? Is there anything you can do for it?"

                Starzl asks Casey for details of his illness. He is amazed at the depth of the governor's knowledge.

                "I'll call you back in five minutes."

                Starzl runs up to the third floor bookcase and pulls out a red volume entitled, "The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease. It is a hulking ark of a book, barnacled with footnotes, but Starzl quickly turns to page 2448, reads for a few minutes, then calls Casey back.

                "God, a liver transplant will cure you," he says.

                                                                                                    

                The fifth floor Trauma Intensive Care Unit at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh is a cave of noise; there is the cacophony of an over-populated marsh--clangorous conversations between doctors and nurses, screams of anguish from the afflicted and of grief from the beloved. Every room holds a tragedy--traffic accidents, shootings, suicides and, in Room 548, Mike Lucas.

                The page-a-day on the wall calendar says June 11, and tomorrow is Frances Lucas' 65th birthday. She sits at the bedside of her son, where she has been for six days except for brief and fitful periods of sleep on a sofa in the waiting room. Doctors have been trying to save Lucas' life all week, including two operations to relieve bloodclots from his brain, but hope is fading. He is being kept alive on a respirator. 

                Lucas' sister, Yvonne, has come here from her home in the Washington, D.C., area, and she spends hours talking to him in a one-way conversation. Vonda Frezzell, the mother of Lucas' 13-year-old son, sings hymns and reads to him from the Bible. But most of the time there is silence save for the hum of the air conditioner, the beeping monitors, the low ZZZZZ of fluorescent lights, and ticking of the clock--the inexorable drip-drop of time; the hourglass spills its treasure....

                School photographs of Mike Lucas show a 300-watt smile and graceful, gentle features that seem to demnd that a violin be placed in his hands. But bad luck stomped through his life like a hairy werewolf dripping gore.

                He was a terrific basketball player in grade school, and seemed a sure bet for a college athletic scholarship someday; but at 12 he broke his hip and leg playing football and was in a body cast for six months. He went on to play sports at Monessen High, but in the grandstand they said Mike Lucas had lost his nerve and was afraid of getting hurt.

                He is remembered by most of his high school classmates as very friendly, very bright and very unmotivated. He had a gang of friends--when gang meant something good--and they would get together regularly to sample adult corruptions--alcohol and cigarettes. Endlessly, they would imitate the scene from the 1975 movie about black adolescence, Cooley High by drinking to "the brothers who aren't here."

                He came from a solid, middle class family that attended the Wayman AME Church in Monessen regularly. His father and his gradfather worked in the steel mill, and his mother was a receptionist at the hospital. The Lucas home was a refuge for other troubled children in the town, white and black.

                Mike was the youngest of five Lucas children; Yvonne was six years older and Gene was 10 years older. He was close to his sister, who would talk to him regularly about the problems of growing up. They called it "gettin' deep."

                But it was Gene--athletic, extroverted, kind--who was his idol. When Mike was 13, Gene was gunned down outside a tavern in a dispute with the bar owner over a loud jukebox. Mike never got over his brother's death, and for the rest of his life he carried the tragedy around with him like a wounded bird, hugging it closely to his chest.

                After graduating from high school in 1977, Lucas held different jobs and studied for different careers, but he never quite got it all together. He moved back and forth between Monessen and the Washington area, where his sister lived. He would enroll in a school of some sort, but then an attractive job would come along and he'd drop out to take it. The cycle repeated.

                But everyone remembers him as a kind, decent human being. He loved children, and always carried candy is his pocket to hand hout. He loved to cook, and his forte was spare ribs in a special sauce whose recipe he would never reveal.

                In 1987, Lucas got a fulltime job at the National Children's Hospital in Washington as a data entry clerk; later, he did paralegal work in a Washington office and attended a community college. When he lost his job in 1988, he became a crack user. After pleading with him for more than a year, Yvonne and Frances confronted him and ordered him to go home to Monessen.

                By 1992 his mother and sister believed he had overcome his cocaine habit. He had a job with a telemarketing company, and he was spending time with his 12-year-old son, Eugene Frezzell. Living at home with his parents, he cooked meals, read the Bible every day and set out with religious fervor for a job he felt was commensurate with his ability.

                Now, in Room 548 of Allegheny General, Mike Lucas lies unconscious. His mother stares out the window at a parking garage across the street. The hours drag by like centuries. There is a video screen with green, blue, yellow, red and purple lines waving through it like little points of lightning. They monitor her son's blood pressure, heartbeat, brain waves and other vital signs. Green, yellow and black tubes run into his head, feet and chest, and an intravenous bottle drips like an icicle in the sun. On the television, a game show audience shouts advice.

                                                                                                      

                Had Frances Lucas any inclination to watch the news that day, she would have learned that Gov. Robert P. Casey was holding a news conference to announce that he will go to Pittsburgh over the weekend to be evaluated for a liver transplant.

                Two days before, there had been a super-secret meeting in a suite at Pittsburgh's William Penn Hotel. Attending were the governor, Ellen Casey, Starzl, Dr. David Leaman, Casey cardiologists, and an official of the Pitt transplant program.            Casey opens the meeting with a blunt statement: "I know somewhere there's a book of rules about who gets an organ and who doesn't. I want absolutely no preferential treatment, and I want those rules followed to the letter."

                Then Leaman has a shocker. "If you're going to get a liver, you're almost certainly going to need a new heart, too," he informs Casey.

                The governor is stunned. His bushy eyebrows dive to his nose in frown. Ellen Casey feels a hard fist of fear in her stomach and thinks she is being twisted into an emotional pretzel.

                "Wait a second!" Casey says. "This is out of the blue. I came here to talk about one organ. Now I need two organs?"

                Leaman hedges, and Casey drops the subject.

                Starzl is scheduled to be in Paris that day, and as he is about to leave the meeting for the airport Casey motions him into a side room. Casey is seeking reassurance, but Starzl is still reeling from the information that Casey's cardiac index is 1.6, which he considers to be incompatible with life. Starzl thinks they've made a mistake in the test.

                "Am I going to need a heart, too?"

                "I'm not sure you can survive any surgery. My best advice is that you throw both dice, but let's get you into the hospital right now for an evaluation. There's no time to waste."

                "I can't do that. I can't just zoom into the hospital. I have a public responsibility, and I have to explain what's happening at a press conference."

                "Okay, but hurry--or you won't have any reponsibilities of any kind."

                That night the Caseys are driven back to Harrisburg in a state car. It's raining heavily, and staring out into the darkness, Ellen Casey wonders if her husband is doing the right thing. Two days later Starzl is in Paris, where he receives an urgent call from the Governor's Office.

                "Gov. Casey is going to hold a news conference at 1 p.m. today to announce his plans for a transplant to the public; he wants you to be there."

                "I can't get back in time."

                "Yes you can. You've got a ticket on the Concorde."

                It's 10 a.m. in Paris when Starzl leaves on Air France's supersonic jet, and when he gets to New York it's only 8 a.m. He flies to Harrisburg and has lunch with Casey before the news conference.

                                                                                                      

                A scant two miles from the room where Frances Lucas keeps a vigil at the bedside of her comatose son, Robert Casey is awaiting further tests in Room D-462 of University-Presbyterian Hospital. It's Saturday afternoon, June 12.

                It's a basic room, no different from any other except for the plainclothes state policeman stationed just outside the door. Warm slices of sunlight are coming through the Venetian blinds, and there is an air of optimism. Finally something is being done.

                But the light vein suddenly turns varicose when Starzl appears, grim-faced, with Dr. John J. Fung, transplantation chief at the Pitt Medical Center, and Jeffrey Romoff, president of the medical center.

                "I don't have to see any more tests," says Starzl. "You're in grave danger of sudden death. You'll need a heart and liver transplant."

                It is a lathered moment, and the air seems incapable of sustaining anything inconsequential; but Casey takes a bite of cheesecake, gives his voice a determined upward slant, and says, "Well, if that's what we have to do, let's go."

                "You're in for the fight of your life," says Starzl. "This will make your worst campaign look like a walk on the beach. But you're going to win."

                "It could take months to find a donor," warns Romoff.

                "Wrong!" says Starzl, leaning up against the door. "One week--maximum."

                "Tom," protests Romoff, "that's on the outside of optimism."

Starzl points his finger at Romoff and says, "One week." He wheels and disappears down the hallway. Starzl keeps close tabs on organ availability in the Pittsburgh region, and he knows thatunder the existing rules Casey will go very high on the list.      


                That night Casey is placed on an organ waiting list, becoming one of 31,000 Americans to await a donor organ. Each day, seven of them die without finding one. But under the prevailing policy at Pitt, Casey is jumped high on the list because first consideration goes to patients needing dual transplants.

                The governor falls asleep with the uncomfortable feeling that his survival depends on someone else's untimely death. Human beings have become useful to each other in ways never imagined 50 years ago, but the world of organ transplants relies heavily on tragedy. Seatbelts and airbags in cars, handgun controls and improved emergency medicine all work against the transplanters.

                Starzl has overseen four heart-liver transplants, and none of the patients is still alive, but new drugs to fight organ rejection make Casey's prospects more promising.

                Nevertheless, Starzl encounters determined opposition within the Pitt establishment; there is concern that the institution itself will be harmed if the surgery fails and two organs are wasted. Casey is too old, and too sick, it is argued.

                Starzl announces he doesn't want anyone on the transplant team who doesn't believe the surgery will be successful. There are several doubters, including one who offers to resign. Starzl accepts. Starzl gets rid of all defeatists, and assembles an all-star team of surgeons.

                "If I'm going to go to the South Pole on a sled, I don't want anybody along who doesn't believe we can make it," he explains.

                                                                                                      

                Frances Lucas finally went home on Saturday, her 65th birthday, after spending six days and five nights at the hospital in Pittsburgh. But about an hour after she got to Monessen, she received a telephone call informing her that her son has "taken a turn for the worse."

                And thus on Saturday night, June 12, two women sat beside hospital beds two miles apart, inextricably linked by grief and hope, and two men hovered between life and death. There was a common denominator between them--Monessen, Pa.

                America's once mighty steel industry pulsed all up and down the Monongahela River, and Monessen, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, was an industrial boom town. The mill ran along a two-mile strip on the river bank--a hot, noisy place that shaped the destinies and paychecks of everyone in town.

                But the mill closed in 1986, and today, Monessen is just another decaying steel town; its population is about 9,000, half of what it once was, and unemployment is twice the national average.

                The mill, visible from nearly every place in town, sits there muted like something geologic, a Superfund site--broken glass, cracked bricks, dangling wires, weeds, spiders and rats. Dreams gone to rust. A graveyard of hope populated only by shadows. Monessen is a mill town without a mill, high on the misfortune 500.

                Monessen has always been a wide-open town, and for most of its 100-year history, it was one of the most politically corrupt cities in America. In the boom days, the major acitvity was gambling; while the cops and the politicians blinked, busloads of people came in from other Pennsylvania towns, and from Ohio and West Virginia, for poker, blackjack and craps. So widespread was the activity that many people in Monessen didn't even know gambling was illegal.

                But today idleness hangs over the city like a biblical curse, and there is only one thriving enterprise in plain view--drugs are sold on street corners, day and night, to sulking young men, stone-eyed with boredom, trapped in the rubble of failure.

                For Robert Casey, Monessen was a symbol of Pennsylvania's fallen economy, and he made the revival of towns like Monessen the keystone of his 1986 gubernatorial campaign. And on his first full day in office in January, 1987, Casey came to Monessen and promised to do everything in his power to help towns all across Pennsylvania hard-hit by the closing of mills and mines.

                Within the limitations of his power and the state's resources, Casey made good on his promise--building highways, assisting new businesses and creating job services centers like the one on Schoonmaker Avenue in downtown Monessen. Mike Lucas spent a lot of time here in 1992 and 1993, enrolling in a training program and firing out applications for more than 100 jobs.

                Then weeks before he entered the hospital for a liver transplant, weeks before Mike Lucas was savagely beaten and left bleeding on his sidewalk, Casey came to the jobs center to give awards to five former welfare recipients who had gotten jobs through the center. Casey saluted "people who get knocked down by the winds of economic change and get back up again...People who don't know the meaning of a 10-count."

                But by this time, Lucas had become discouraged. A near-job with Bell Telephone had fallen through at the last minute, and he dropped out of a local business school. Hope was a doused fire.      Mike Lucas became just another victim of the scourges of American society--unemployment, drugs and violence.

                And as they lay in their hospital beds, there was a very  important difference between Robert Casey and Mike Lucas: Part of Casey's evaluation for a transplant was sardonically called the "wallet biopsy." In the world of transplant surgery, money not only talks, it keeps up a running conversation--and anyone who either lacks the necessary insurance coverage or cannot come up with a down payment of about $150,000 will not be transplanted--no matter how near death.

                Casey has the gilt-edged health insurance plan that covers all 85,000 state employes, and he passed the wallet biopsy with flying colors. Mike Lucas was unemployed and among the 35 million Americans without health insurance. Had the roles been reversed, Lucas would not have qualified for a transplant from Casey.

                                                                                                      

                At 9:30 Sunday morning, the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE) in Pittsburgh is notified that a potential donor is nearing death at Allegheny General Hospital. Two hours later, CORE approaches Frances Lucas about using her son's organs for transplant. "I just don't know," she says, "I just don't know...." Statistically, only about half of all family members approached to authorize organ donation agree.

                For the rest of the day, tests are run on Lucas to see if he has any brain function. All tests are negative, and at 6:31 p.m. William Michael Lucas is declared brain dead and becomes another drop in America's Niagara of homicides. If the law of averages prevailed that night, 75 other American citizens were shot, stabbed, beaten and otherwise killed by fellow human beings.

                There is no greater pain than having a son or daughter who die before their time, and now Frances Lucas felt that pain for a second time. It grabbed her by the throat; it had mass, density, and it slammed into her over and over again. The sadness beyond all telling. The sorrow for which there is neither a name nor relief.

                Gently she is approached about the organs. She wants to get the question off her mind. She wants one less thing to think about. "Okay," she says. There is a full-length novel in her sigh.

                It is about 11 p.m. She doesn't know who will get the organs, and she doesn't plan to tell anybody about her decision. At least not now.

                                                                                                      

                About this time, Ellen Casey is getting ready to retire for the evening in the hospital room just across the hall from her husband. Two Casey sons, Matthew and Patrick, are preparing to leave the hospital.

                Suddenly, Dr. John Fung, the Pitt transplantation chief, appears in the doorway wearing powder blue surgical scrubs and in a state of high agitation. He is talking about the National Basketball Asociation playoff game between the Phoenix Suns and Chicago Bulls, which has just gone into triple overtime, but his words are tripping over each other and clearly something else is on his mind.

                Finally he calms down, clears his throat, and says, "We have a donor." Little zephyrs of excitement sweep the room.

                "Where."

                "Right here in Pittsburgh."

                Casey is afloat on a sea of good luck--he is the only patient in the Pittsburgh area awaiting a multiple transplant. It is a stunning coincidence that the organs have been found so quickly and so nearby.

                Ellen Casey looks down at Fung's surgical clogs; they are battered and blood-spattered.

                "Nice clogs," she says."

                "They're my good luck clogs."

                About 1:30 a.m., Casey signs over his gubernatorial powers to Lt. Gov. Mark S. Singel, surrendering the office he has spent most of his adult life trying to reach. The other six Casey children are notified and summoned to their father's bedside. Margi and Mary Ellen drive from Connecticut to Scranton, where they join Bobby, Erin and Kate on a flight to Pittsburgh. Chris has just driven from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., and he promptly drives up in a rental car, arriving about 3:30 a.m.

                The Casey clan, mother, father and eight children ranging in age from 23 to 40, crowd into the tiny hospital room and stay up all night talking. Margi, the oldest child, barks out an order to the others, "Don't you dare cry." Then she begins to cry.

                Tension seems to whistle out of the duct work and swarm over the room like angry bees, and for relief they begin talking about old episodes of the "Honeymooners," the 'Fifties television show that starred Jackie Gleason. At one point, Casey, Matt and Patrick are having bronco-spasms of laughter over the one where Ralph witnesses a crime near a pool hall and....

                Then the blue and white privacy curtains are drawn around Casey, and he is prepped for surgery. About 6 a.m., the children come in one by one to say goodbye to their father. Ellen Casey says "I love you. I'll see you when you get back." She hopes she's right, but she's not at all sure.

                Casey is placed on a gurney and wheeled out of the room. Ellen and the eight children follow him down to the hallway with a security aide, State Police Sgt. John Kulick, who gives him a St. Joseph's prayer card that he carried into battle in Vietnam. It is a prayer for deliverance from danger. Casey reads it. Casey is pushed into Operating Room No. 6 through the big double door, which closes behind him.

                                                                                                      

                A few hours before, Dr. Adrian Casavilla made a neck-to-abdomen incision, and then a foot-long incision across the abdomen of Mike Lucas' body. A beating heart, a healthy pink liver, and two kidneys are exposed. Casavilla snips and hands each organ to a nurse, who immerses them in a cold solution. The organs then are placed in an Igloo cooler--the same kind you'd use to take beer and soda to the beach--and rush to UniversityPresbyterian Hospital in a CORE van. The ventilator that has kept Lucas alive is turned off; his body is then stitched up and washed while the nurse calls the funeral home.

                And thus Mike Lucas, an unrepeatable existence, is now dead and will be buried in Monessen; he is giving the gift of life to the governor of Pennsylvania, who once tried to help him.

                                                                                                      

                Starzl has assembled a team that includes an American born in Russia (Dr. John Armitage), a Vietnamese refugee (Dr. Si M. Pham); the son of a Chinese immigrant (Dr. Fung), a Japanese (Dr. Satoru Todo) and a Greek (Dr. Andreas Tzakis). They will attempt to transplant the heart and liver of an African-American into a Irish Catholic. The organs were removed from the donor by an Argentine (Dr. Adrian Casavilla).

                The seventh heart-liver transplant ever attempted in the United States begins about 7 a.m.; Armitage picks up the Bovie, an electric knife known to surgeons as the firestick because it simultaneously cuts and cauterizes, and makes a foot-long vertical incision down Casey's chest. Now there is no turning back; it's a nervy, life-or-death adventure in which all five surgeons are taking a considerable professional risk because of the doubters among their colleagues.

                They find a heart so diseased that it is able to pump only one fourth the normal amount of blood and could have failed at any moment. Scrubbed, gowned, masked and gloved, Armitage and Pham work confidently. The only sounds are chirping monitors and chatter among doctors and nurses--"this way.... sorry... hold it... that's it... thank you... okay, okay...."

                Casey's old heart is removed about 10:30 a.m., and by 12:45 p.m., the heart that first beat inside the womb of Frances Lucas 35 years before was inside the governor of Pennsylvania, competently sending his blood on its appointed rounds through his body.

                The Casey family is waiting in the hospital room, watching the television for bulletins on the surgery. It reminds Matt Casey of an election night, waiting for returns to see whether his father has been elected. About 1:30 Armitage comes to the door, mouth in a crescent of pleasure, and says to Ellen Casey, "How 'bout a hug?"

                Later Jeffrey Romoff, the administrator, stops in, eyes brimming with tears. "I've never seen anything like it," he tells the family. "Usually we have to pump the heart to get it started. We just touched it with a drop of warm blood and it started up."

                But back in the operating room, Casey has a foot-long incision in his abdomen, and the liver team headed by Todo has taken over. On a small table Mike Lucas' liver, looking rather like a large roast in a butcher shop, floats in a stainless steel pan.

                The liver's very name is derived from the verb "to live," and Shakespeare ranked it with brain and heart as "those sovereign thrones" in Twelfth Night. It is a virtuoso, jack-of-all-trades, a prodigious holder and processor of blood that performs 500 vital metabolic functions in a single day.

                Transplanting a liver is considerably more involved than transplanting a heart. Tucked beneath the body's rib cage, the liver is much more difficult to reach and there are more arteries to tie and sever. Mozart, the choice of Todo, wafts over the speakers in the operating room--music, because of its soothing effects, is considered a vital part of the operating room environment.

                Around 7 p.m.--12 hours into the operation--Fung goes over to the table, picks up Lucas' liver and carries it the way a waiter carries a souffle. "Here's the liver. Everybody back." When the liver is in place, the heart is still beating regularly and evenly--and the liver is "pinking up," a sign that it is getting an adequate blood supply.

                Casey is brought into the recovery room about 8:45 p.m. Later, Starzl comes in as he is awakening from the anesthetic. Casey, his arms and hands encumbered by intravenous tubing, reaches up and touches Starzl on the cheek. No words are spoken.

                Within a day of his death, the mortal remains of William Michael Lucas--heart, liver and two kidneys--were pumping, filtering and metabolizing in the bodies of the governor of Pennsylvania, plus an unidentified 61-year-old man and an unidentified 36-year-old man--commingling in a common pulse of being.

                And in a world of oil spills, serial killers, starving children and ethnic cleansing, there has been an affirmation of the moral immensity of a single soul.

                                                                                                      

                When the Lucas family arrives at the Wayman A.M.E. Church at 11 a.m. on June 18, it is overflowing with more than 300 people; indeed, there are more mourners standing outside than there are in the packed church. People are politely asked to step back so the family can go up front near the casket, where the body of Mike Lucas lies; he is dressed in his favorite black dress hat to hide his wounds.

                The church, which Mike Lucas' great-grandfather helped to build, is small and does not have air conditioning. The congregants fan themselves, but heat pours through the open windows like melted butter. Because of the large gathering, the service starts late, but at 11:25, the piano and the choir lead the multitude in song.

                If you wanna know where I'm goin'

                Where I'm goin'

                I'll soon be gone

                If anybody asks you where I'm goin'

                The impress of faith is everywhere, and there is the comfort of being with others who believe that Adam and Eve were real people and that the Red Sea parted precisely as the Bible describes it.

                Where I'm goin'

                I'm goin' up yonder

                I'm goin' up yonder

                I'm goin' up yonder

                To be with my Lord.

                The old Cooley High gang is there--Delvan Miller, Jeffrey Hill, and JoJo Heath, all still living in Monessen, and Willis Love, who works for the Olympics organization in Atlanta; Mark Hall, a USAIR employe in Newark, and Craig Giles, a minister in suburban Pittsburgh who is conducting the service.

                The Scripture reading is from Second Kings: "In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. And Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, came to him and said to him, 'Thus says the Lord, 'Set your house in order; for you shall die and you shall not recover....'"

                In his eulogy, Giles seesaws between sadness and anger. In low fathoming tones, he says, "Mike was not perfect, Mike was no angel. But Mike was a good man who loved life and loved people. The last time I saw him was at my grandmother's funeral. He said he was looking forward to a new beginning...."

                Then his voice flares like a match. "We've got to change things from within as well as from without.... Our children can rap but they cannot read, our children have gold chains but no jobs.... Every four hours an African-American male is murdered--and 90 per cent of the time the murderer is another African-American male.... We keep poisoning one another with addiction.... The Ku Klux Klan is no longer the No. 1 enemy; today, it's the Boys in the 'hood...."

                In closing, Giles attempts to sing the theme song from Cooley High, but he breaks down in tears. Instead, he reads the lyrics, and the words come out in agonizing slowness, like drops from a faucet.

                How do I say goodbye to what we had?

                The good times that made us laugh outweighed the bad

                I thought we'd get to see forever

                But forever's gone away

                It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday

                Frances Lucas and Yvonne Lucas tuck the blanket around the body, and the casket is closed. A long stream of cars heads toward Belle Vernon Cemetery, where Mike Lucas is buried next to his brother, Gene.

                When everyone else has left, the gang stands around the grave holding hands and praying. Then, just as they had done as adolescents, they repeat the lines from Cooley High.

                "This is for the brothers who aren't here."

                                                                                                   
EPILOGUE

                Robert P. Casey was released from the hospital on July 27, 43 days after his surgery. He battled infections and viruses for five months, but on Dec. 21 he reclaimed the governorship, and he expects to serve out his term, which expires in January. His doctors say there is no reason he cannot live at least another 10 years.

                Christopher Garry, the man who led Mike Lucas' attackers to his door, was convicted of third degree murder and sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Other charges have been filed, but no one else had been tried in Lucas' death [need to update at last minute].

                Frances Lucas, 65, has postponed plans to retire because she is still receiving medical bills for her son's hospitalization and treatment. She cannot afford a headstone for his grave.

Reader's Digest
© Copyright Wiilliam Ecenbarger
    From the rim of consciousness, Thomas Dutton felt his life draining away. His breath was reduced to a wheeze, and his heart worked harder and harder to pump blood through his lungs, which were filling up with fluid. Double pneumonia. Tears streamed down his face from a pain in his chest that words could only hint at.

          On the stormy  night of Nov. 24, 1995, Dutton was strapped in a gurney  aboard an airborne ambulance. The twin-engine Beechcraft streaked across the starless sky above the Australian Outback at 310 miles per hour. There was a drumroll of rain on the fuselage, and the  dangling, clear plastic IV tube was being jostled by rough weather. Seated beside him was Nurse Jane O’Connnor of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Her forehead was lined with concern as she checked his vital signs. His body temperature was 104 degrees. Nevertheless,  he was shivering. He was vomiting blood.

          About 3:30 a.m., the vibratory hum of the engines decreased as the plane throttled down. The flaps dropped, landing gear rattled, the wheels thumped the wet runway, there was the whoosh of reversed props and then the plane taxied over to the waiting ambulance. .

          Fifteen minutes later Dutton was being pushed up a ramp and through double doors under a big red sign, EMERGENCY ROOM. There were urgent discussions between doctors and nurses, and in the background the ticking of a clock, the chirping of monitors and the low ZZZZZ of fluorescent lights. Dutton was put on a respirator and given antibiotics. He was moved to the Intensive Care Unit. He was lucky. Gradually, he recovered his strength. He was feeling better  a week later when the doctor came into his room.

          “We’re going to release you tomorrow, Mr. Dutton. But I want to warn you--if you don’t stop drinking you’ll be dead within a year of liver failure.”

          Thomas Dutton, once the brightest child in his pre-school class, once a rugby player who many thought would become a high-paid professional, was left to ponder the rubble of his life.  He had dropped out of school at 15. He was functionally illiterate. He was unemployed--indeed he had never had a job. He was an alcoholic.

          In two weeks he would have his 24th birthday.

                                                                      

          Over the past 45,000 years, some 1,800 generations of Aborigines have lived in Australia, and since the coming of the white man a mere 200 years ago, they have endured the kidnapping of their children, diseases to which they had no immunity, the loss of their land, genocide and racism. White men have given them poisoned flour and blankets infected with smallpox, raped their woman and organized hunting parties to shoot them for sport. 

          Somehow they have survived. But the last two generations of Aborgines are being subjected to something they may not outlast: A welfare system that creates dependency and destroys self-respect. What began as a safety net and a helping hand in 1972 has been transformed into lifelong support.

          Currently,  there are nearly 200 government programs for Aborigines. But despite more than $32 billion spent specifically on Australia’s 300,000 Aborigines  since 1973, many indicators point toward a decrease in the general condition of Australia's indigenous people--and there is a growing feeling among Aboriginal leaders that many of these welfare programs could be doing more harm than good.

          For the Aborigines of Wilcannia, a dying outback town about 900 miles west of Sydney, welfare swooped down like a strong wind, blowing away everything that wasn’t securely fastened down. They even had a name for it: Sit-down money.

          And for people like Thomas Dutton the values of self-reliance and hard work have been wiped away by a government that gives them everything except hope and dignity.

Thomas Dutton was born on Dec. 12, 1971, when Wilcannia was on the brink of radical change. Just a generation ago, it had been known as the “Queen City of the West”--a sheep-farming and opal-mining center where crime was virtually unknown.  Its streets were lined with elegant churches, stores and a theater.  A generation before that, the nearby Darling River  was thick with paddle steamers, off-loading wool for shipment by carriage to Southern Australia, picking up supplies to take back up to the sheep stations. There were 40 stage coaches a week, three dance halls, and 14 hotels. Now only the rotting wharves were left at the river. People still left their doors unlocked and the car keys in the ignition, but crimes against property were increasing. In 1974, Thomas Dutton’s father, irretrievably enmeshed in the welfare system, left his common-law wife and seven children and never came back home. Thomas was two years old.

          By the time he was three, nearly everyone who knew him thought Thomas was special. His intelligent brown eyes burned like two pilot lights. His teachers at the mission pre-school run by the Catholic Church took particular interest in him, and it was thought he would rise to an important position of leadership in the community. He knew all the  Dreamtime stories, which form a kind of oral Old Testament describing how the Aborigines cqme into existence: Why the Tribes Speak Different Languages, How the Red Dust Came to Blow, the Dog and the Kangaroo, and the Origin of the Bull-Roarer.

          He loved the mission school. There were lots of windows, and many classes were held outdoors under the cool gum trees. The pastel walls were painted with kangaroos, boomerangs and warriors. It was a place where barefoot, happy children came to celebrate this moment in their lives. The teacher would ask a question of the class, and if no one else knew the answer, she would turn to Thomas and say, “Do you know, Thomas?” He always knew.

          One reason young Thomas was held in such high esteem is that he was George Dutton’s grandson, and to discover how everything went so wrong for him we must go back.



          George Dutton was born on a sheep station in 1885. His mother was an Aborigine and his father was a white man whose name he took. His father was killed in an accident when George was an infant, and his mother died when he was seven. George was raised by his step-father, a half-white, half-Aborigine whose occupation was an itinerant stockman, a kind of all-purpose hand who mended fences, broke wild horses, and herded livestock.

          George Dutton became a drover, which is the Australian equivalent of an American cowboy. He made epic, transcontinental journeys of some 1,500 miles, bringing cattle south from Queensland to the lush coastal pastures, where they would be fattened for market. There were usually about 1,200 head of cattle and only six drovers. He  would awaken before sunrise and breakfast on tin mugs of tea and damper--unleavened bread cooked over the campfire, which was served up with butter and Cocky’s Joy Golden Syrup. All day long he rode behind the herd, choking on dust under an inferno of a sun that could push temperatures up to 115 degrees.

          By sunset, wet with honest sweat, Dutton would finally get off the great barrel of his horse and eat a dinner of more damper and tea. He would sleep out in the open, under a sky carbonated with stars, on a square of canvas.   His pillow was a pillowcase with his clothes stuffed inside. Three hours a night he would have to take a shift guarding the cattle and singing to them to keep them calm. The drovers made about 10 miles a day, and the trips took between five and six months.

           It was hard work, but well suited to his talents and experience--and it gave him a sense of dignity. He took great pride in his ability to handle the cattle better than the white drovers. He adopted an American cowboy style of dress;  he had his denims and bright shirts custom-made, wore long-necked spurs and carried a kangaroo hide whip. The idea of government welfare was unimaginable to George Dutton. During the Depression, he refused a government offer to live with his family on a settlement where all basic needs would be taken care of without the necessity of working. For the rest of his life, he spurned the uninvited attentions of government welfare.

          George Dutton continued to work well into his Sixties. When his body could no longer handle the rigors of stock work, he spent his time helping linguists and anthropologists, dictating the Aboriginal languages and stories into tape recorders hour after hour. In his wide travels, he had mastered about 40 Aboriginal dialects. Though nearly blinded by cataracts, he recorded histories, songs and stories--knowing that if he didn’t, his knowledge would die with him. He died in 1968 at the age of 83.

 

          Thomas Clark was born in Menindee, about 100 miles southwest of Wilcannia, in 1938 or 1939--he’s not sure which. Sometime around 1960 he became the common law husband of Norma Dutton, daughter of George Dutton. He fathered seven children--four sons and three daughters. Because the couple wasn’t legally married, the children took their mother’s name, but Clark gave one of the sons his first name. This was Thomas Dutton.

          While there were many social barriers to blacks in Australia at this time, work was not one of them. If you could perform, you were hired--not just for lowly tasks, but for relatively high-paying ones. One of the best jobs was sheep shearer, and it was how Thomas Clark provided for his growing family.

          Work began at 7:30 a.m. in the tin shearing shed. In the summer, the walls were  too hot to touch, and they vibrated from the steam engine that provided power for the shears. There was a fusillade of sound--the engine noise, the shouts of the shearers, the shriek of blades being sharpened--that made the shed reverberate like a great drum. There was a confluent odor of sheep dung, grease, sweat and engine oil that got inside your mouth and coated your teeth and tongue.

          About 160 times each day, Thomas Clark would throw a sheep to the ground, hold it between his knees, and begin shearing at the neck. Then the belly, legs and sides. After about three minutes, he would release the shorn, bleating animal from the pen and add it to his score. He would stop only on occasion to stick his head out the door for a breath of fresh air, count his sheep and calculate his earnings. When he quit about 5:30 p.m., his wool shirt was drenched with sweat.

          When he lost his job in 1970, Clark had no choice but to find work elsewhere. He took a job on a government road-building gang that was surfacing the main highway between Wilcannia and Cobar, some 85 miles to the east. First it was pick and shovel work, then spreading tar from 250-gallon steaming kettles. Passing trucks whipped up the red dust, wind-blown sand stung Clark’s arms and face. It was so hot the water bags had to be kept covered with tarps to prevent the water from evaporating. Clark’s overseer remembers him.  “His name was good all through the district, and everyone knew that Thomas Clark was a good worker.”

          But something important was happening throughout Australia that would have a profound impact on Wilcannia and Thomas Clark. In 1972, a new national government came to power and set up an extensive welfare system. There was a modest relief program before this, but fewer than half of the eligible people used it because they thought it was unethical to do so.     

          The government had the best of intentions--to ensure no Australian lived in poverty.  The dole, so the thinking went, would help people who were temporarily disadvantaged or unemployed over tough times.  "It was never meant o provide lifetime pensions for large numbers of people," says Dr. Alan Tapper, a widely recognized authority on welfare and senior lecturer in philosophy at Perth's Edith Cowan University.

 But what happened, says Tapper, is that welfare began to entrench a money-for-nothing mentality in a country once famed for its rugged individuals.  In just a few years, the number of welfare recipients doubled, then doubled again.  

          So generous was the new program (every married person was eligible for about $80 a week every two weeks) that many Australians found it irresistible. One of them was Thomas Clark, who quit his road job. Another was Norma Dutton, his wife, who stopped going off every summer to pick grapes at nearby vineyards. The difference between what they could earn working and what they could get for doing nothing just wasn’t great enough to warrant continuing to work.

          Thomas Dutton was barely one year old when both his parents went on welfare. A year later his father was gone from home. 



          At the age of five, Thomas transferred to kindergarten at the public school. It was built like a fortress, huge blocks of sandstone with very few windows, and surrounded by a chain-link fence. He despised the principal, Mr. Hoey, who was very strict with the Aborigines, often accusing them of things they didn’t do and hitting them in the knuckles with a ruler. Thomas felt like he was in jail, and he began to chafe almost immediately.

          He faced a parade of grim-lipped teachers, most of them in their first year and forced to live in one-room flats or hot trailers. Many were here only because it was a hardship post and they got credit for two years in seniority for teaching one year at Wilcannia. An unhappy person, poorly housed and inexperienced in a job, is not an effective teacher. There was a constant turnover, and the schools lacked continuity.

          Thomas often skipped school, swimming in the Darling River where the paddle steamers used to come. It was muddy, but cool, and at water’s edge the eucalyptus trees leaned over, seeming to look at their reflections. Studies, Mr. Hoey and time itself were forgotten. Instead Thomas and his friends spent the days seeing who could stay under the water the longest, who could swim the farthest underwater, and throwing objects in the deepest part of the water and retrieving them.

          There was another world--a papery, wordy world. Words were everywhere. They informed, entertained, dissuaded, encouraged. But for Thomas Dutton, they did little. He would try to read. There would be a few words he recognized, then some that looked familiar and then some strange ones. If he read a sentence four or five times, he might or might not get the meaning of it. He occasionally opened his school books, but the words fled the page before his mind could detain them. By the time he was 10, Thomas Dutton was well along the road to illiteracy.

          The few times that he did attempt to study seriously, it was nearly impossible. His mother was now on welfare, and his home was overcrowded with adults drinking at all hours of the day and night. It was difficult to get enough sleep, let alone concentrate on homework.

          Often he was seen around town with an empty Campbell’s soup can hung around his neck by a string and suspended just below his nose. In it was a small amount of gasoline, and he sniffed it to get high. It gave him red eyes and a runny nose, made him nauseous, and occasionally he passed out. But it was a brief phase, and he was moving on to something even more dangerous. By 12 he was getting adults, who were usually drunk themselves, to give him beer and wine. He was bored, and drinking seemed the only thing left to do.

          Only one thing interested him. The dice toss of chromosomes had given Thomas Dutton enormous athletic ability, and he quickly learned that the sports field, rather than the classroom, was the way to acceptance by his peers and his elders. At the annual school athletic carnival in 1983, he won the 100-meter run, the high-jump and the long jump. The following year, at the age of 12, he set school records in freestyle swimming and the 100-meter run. He was an accomplished boxer, and he used this ability to protect girls, both black and white, who were being teased or bothered by older boys. A National Geographic photographer on assignment in the Wilcannia area saw him and was so impressed by his appearance and athleticism that he came back a few months later specifically to photograph him for his files.

          In 1983, the school newspaper, The Paddle Wheel, asked selected students what they would do if they were rich. Eleven-year-old Thomas Dutton gave this reply: "If I had a lot of money I would buy my mother a house and a car. Then I would put the rest in the bank, and when I got married I would buy a house and every Sunday I would buy my wife beautiful flowers."

          By this time most adult Aborigines in Wilcannia were on welfare, and a generational cycle was well underway--illegitimacy, fatherlessness, crime, alcoholism and dependency. Thomas noticed that a few families managed to hold on to their self-respect, including the Lawsons, an older couple who lived across the street and were raising their grandson, Brent.

          Brent went to school every day wearing clean clothes. He always had chores to do, and his grandmother put a daily list of them on the refrigerator. Wash the dishes, sweep and mop the floor, hang the wash out to dry, clean your room. The Lawson’s neat house seemed a reproach to the shabby neighborhood. Brent Lawson had to be home by dark. There were no such rules for Thomas Dutton. Brent’s grandfather had worked all his life, and he had contempt for people on welfare, whom he called “bloody bludgers.”  Several times Thomas had heard Brent’s grandfather say, “You got to work for your money. You don’t just put your hand out and take it, and then go to the pub and drink all day.”

          Thomas was keenly interested in the career of Evonne Goolagong, the Aborigine tennis player who had won the Wimbledon in 1971 at the age of 19. She had been born and raised in Barellan, a town about the size of Wilcannia just 240 miles to the southeast. Like Thomas, she was the offspring of a sheep-shearer whose coach had seen her potential early. At 14, Thomas still had dreams, and they revolved around the game of rugby.

          He played for the school team when he was 14, one of the youngest players. When he was in the game, it seemed like there was no one else on the field. He could outrun everyone. He was the center of everything. Where Thomas was, the play was. Every movement seemed to be oiled. He would stop suddenly, throw a hip fake at an opponent, dance past and then explode in speed. He overcame his short stature by leaping like a deer. Rugby is a bloody game of tackling without pads or other protective gear. Thomas would get up after the most bone-crushing of tackles, smile at his antagonist, and never let him see his pain. He had all the marks of a great rugby player--speed, sure handedness, anticipation, change of pace and confidence. His coach is convinced even today that he could have been a professional.

          But all the while Thomas Dutton was increasing his drinking. His growing dependency led him to steal beer from a store when he was 14. His home life had deteriorated to the point where meals were seldom served, and he lived on an unhealthy diet of hamburgers and french fries. He hated the work of rugby--weight training, calisthenics and running. “Too hard. Too boring. I just want to get on with it,” he told his coach. He vandalized the school and slashed tires on teachers’ cars. Finally, at 15, he quit school. Like most Aborigine children, Thomas Dutton was lost to education, swallowed up by easy money and booze.



          Five months later, Thomas Dutton celebrated his 16th birthday by getting drunk. He was also celebrating the fact that he automatically qualified for an unemployment benefit of about $225 every two weeks--even though he had never worked. The money was tax-free, and he spent most of it to purchase as many hours of alcohol oblivion as he could.

          Sometimes he would wake up, desperately full-bladdered,  in the park by the river, with the sun-streaming in his face. Sometimes he would awake under the huge Moreton Bay fig tree in front of the pub. The tree, with its leathery, dark green leaves, seemed to be weeping. Sometimes he would wake up in a strange bed with a strange person, so dizzy he could barely stand up. But most often he would awake in his mother’s house. He began putting a liter container of mosey--moselle wine--next to his bed so when he awakened he could take the edge off. His hands trembled as he reached for the wine.

          Locked in his prison of alcohol, Thomas was urinating every hour except when he was too drunk, and then he would wet himself. He had violent vomiting from his nose and mouth. The drinking was robbing him of huge blocs of consciousness, and his memories from these post-school years are blurred. There were blackouts, ranging from one hour to 10 hours, about which he had no recollection. He would stop talking in mid-sentence and forget what he was saying. Strange figures moved in the shadows that weren’t really there. But none of it mattered, for nearly everyone he knew was experiencing the same things.

          He turned down innumerable offers for farm work. “That’s hard graft, and it’s my right not to do it,” he said. To an offer of a job picking grapes, he replied, “Too bloody hard. Too bloody hot. Too bloody dirty.” His attitudes had been seeded in childhood and watered nearly every day since. He was constantly told by the adults in his life that Aborigines were entitled to welfare because of past treatment by the whites. He was roused from sleep one morning in front of the pub by the sound of Bill O’Connor sweeping up the broken glass and other debris from the night before.

          “How much do you get for this,” he asked.

          “Hundred-twenty a week.”

          “Why don’t you just go on the dole?”

          “I like to work for me money, Mate.”

          Thomas Dutton couldn’t understand this attitude. Life seemed a steep cliff with slippery rocks and no handholds. There was nowhere in the world that he fit except where he was, and there was nothing in the world he could do except what he was doing.

          He did manage to keep playing rugby for the town team, the Wilcannia Boomerangs, which was composed mostly of young adults who would play similar squads from the surrounding towns of Menindee, Broken Hill and Bourke. Often he would show up at game time drunk, and at halftime he’d have a few belts of mosey. Drunk or sober, he was still the best player on the team. But this was a long way from the professional leagues, where the top players made up to $1 million--and Thomas Dutton was approaching what should have been his peak performance years with a muffled awareness of everything around him.



          During these years, Wilcannia itself deteriorated right along with Thomas Dutton. Technological advances in the wool industry drastically reduced the need for shearers. People who preferred working to welfare moved to other towns to find jobs. Those content with the dole stayed on. One by one, stores began closing down. The Ruelynn Fashion Shop. Wilcannia Rural Supplies. Plaza Supermarket. The slow, inexorable cataclysm of neglect seized the town. Windows were broken and walls lined with spray-can anarchy--black, curling graffiti.

          Today, other white business people want to leave, but they can’t sell their properties. Vulnerable  to crime and vandalism, they go about their lives like fish in an aquarium, wide-eyed and stony faced, staring outward. The only thriving enterprises are the three pubs--the Wilcannia Hotel, the Queen’s Head and the Court House. Day and night a gallery of welfare indolents is draped around each establishment. Twice a week the big semi-trailers, covered with red dust, roll in from Broken Hill bringing the two best-selling products in Wilcannia--green cases of Victoria Bitter beer, and four-liter cartons of Coolabah moselle wine.

          Violence is never more than a sip away, as much a part of life as breathing and eating. Many women have what is called “defense ulna fracture”--broken arms suffered when they tried to ward off blows. The big injuries among men are broken teeth and broken knuckles from fist fights. Last year Thomas Dutton and a group of his friends were drinking on the porch of his Uncle Bill’s house when Uncle Bill staggered to his feet and went inside. He returned in five minutes carrying a bloody butcher’s knife and announced he had just stabbed his wife. She died on the way to the hospital. It was Lynette, Thomas’ favorite auntie. He called her “Mum.”

          Meanwhile, the runny-nosed children of Wilcannia, who made such a dreadful choice of parents, have no living relatives who have ever worked. They grow up amid flyblown squalor in disrupted, violent households. Breakfast is at school free, and they get lunch at a youth center for about $2.50. That leaves the parents responsible for dinner, and they seldom get it. The youngest ones  scream for food in their prams outside the pubs. If  they’re lucky, they get a bag of chips. They get no help with homework because their parents can’t read or write. Police pick up eight- and nine-year olds at the school playground at 4 a.m. and bring them home--only to be greeted by angry parents, roused out of their chemical stupors. More and more children are being born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, with the telltale small heads and rat-like features.

          The statistics at the Wilcannia Courthouse tell a story: Between 1991 and 1995, the town saw 122 births and three marriages.

                   Not only welfare payments generous, they often exceed union wages.  A typical sheep-station overseer receives $375.40 a week, but an unemployed man living with an unemployed woman and two children in Wilcannia receives a dole payment of $404.55 a week -- tax free -- and can qualify for extra allowances like $38 a week "rental assistance."  These handouts, among the highest in the world, "discourage many Australians from seeking work," according to the 1994 annual report of the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

          In Wilcannia, children as young as 12 are on welfare. Up until 16, they get paid $570 a year for attending classes, but at 16 they get $100 every two weeks for attending classes. Thomas Dutton’s sister, Vicky, had an illegitimate son at 17 and immediately qualified for $80 a fortnight in addition to her regular $230 check for welfare and other allowances. Vicky is now 25. Her son has moved away, and now she spends her days drunk or wandering around Wilcannia begging for more money to buy booze.  She has never had a job.

          Last year, less than two week’s after he received a death sentence from the doctor at Broken Hill hospital, Thomas Dutton resumed drinking to celebrate his 25th birthday. He gave it up for three weeks, then started again on New Year’s Eve. Then he quit and went off to Sydney with plans to get in shape and come back and play rugby. Withdrawal was difficult. He had night sweats, agitation and insomnia. After about a month he felt better. His hands stopped shaking. His memory improved. His liver, no longer pre-occupied with alcohol,  resumed its normal functions.

          But a map is not a journey. By early spring of this year, he was back in Wilcannia drinking again. “Only on weekends and to celebrate friends’ birthdays,” he said.

          For Thomas Dutton, most of life’s door are sealed as tight as the pyramids. He’s forgotten the Dream stories. He is illiterate. His three brothers are in jail--two for beating their wives, one for murder. His best rugby years are behind him. And every other Thursday, as he’s done for nearly 10 years now,  he picks up his welfare check of $202.50. 



          Every other Thursday is welfare day in Wilcannia--the day that the cash is handed out down at the busy offices of the Department of Social Security. The dole starts about 10 a.m., and by mid-morning the main street pub is crowded with unemployed men and women. They sit at the bar like shipwrecks on a reef. They chug their beers and their cigarettes glow in the dim light. Country music is turned up just short of the threshold of pain. The heat and the air conditioning battle to a draw.

          Outside, the day cooks slowly in the hot streets. Prams, perilously close to the highway, are lined up in front of the pub. In the prams, infants are restless in the 100-degree heat. A huge, double-trailer truck rumbles past, rocking them in its wake. Other children, their legs scabbed and pitted by insect bites,  are shooting off in all directions, like untended plants. There is an undertow of crying.

          A pall of wretchedness hangs over the town. Three adolescent girls idle on a park bench. One has a condom hanging from the rear pocket of her jeans. Adults wearing shorts and plastic thongs swig moselle from plastic Coca-Cola bottles. A man staggers up to Wilcannia’s monument to its World War I veterans and urinates on it. These descendants of people who revered the earth are tossing beer cans into the river. Children descended from some of the best hunter-gatherers the world has ever known are scavenging in trash cans for scraps of food.

          Thomas Dutton’s namesake, his one-year-old nephew, is diapered and crawling on the pavement in front of the pub. He sets his hand in dog feces and wipes it on his shirt. He picks up an empty beer can and cuts his finger. He beings crying. His mother, drunken and staggering,  picks him up. She sees that he has bled on her blouse. “Bastard!,” she slurs and slaps him hard in the face.

          Thomas Dutton’s father, Thomas Clark, returned to Wilcannia 10 years ago but he never returned to his family. Today he is seated on a bench nearby sipping moselle from a flowered mug. His left leg is propped up and in a cast. He broke it several weeks ago when he fell through the pub door.

          Thomas Dutton, grandson of George Dutton,  is in the park, drinking moselle. It’s not the weekend, and it’s nobody’s birthday.

Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine
© CopyrigWilliam Ecenbarger
                The solitary, robed figure writes at a desk, intent as a monk copying sacred texts. A pewter-colored cross holding a writhing Christ rests near his left hand, and on the wall behind him is a framed likeness of Jesus. There is sombre music, and twitching candles bathe the room in a fragile, semi-darkness, silhouetting the graying, avuncular man with a face like a benediction....

                But this is no monastery. The room is festooned with Confederate flags, swastikas, knives, swords, daggers, revolvers and helmets with the stylized thunderbolts of the Third Reich. The music is by Richard Wagner, the Jew-hating genius beloved by Hitler; it bespeaks bloodshed, demons and death.

                And this is no monk. He is Roy Frankhouser, who for the past 40 years has dreamed of the day when men will be judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

                Much of his life has been spent here, in this tiny house he inherited from his father in a frayed-sleeve, out-at-the-elbow section of Reading, Pa. Link by link, he runs down the iron chain of memories. THE FIRST-FLOOR FRONT ROOM SMELLED OF VITALIS AND BAY RUM WHERE MY FATHER CUT HAIR AND WARNED ME ABOUT NIGGERS AND KIKES AND THE BACK ROOM WAS WHERE I LIVED AFTER THEY LET ME OUT OF THAT GODDAMN ORPHANAGE AND HERE ON THE SECOND FLOOR JUST ABOVE THE WINDOW ARE THE BULLET HOLES FROM WHEN THE BLACK PANTHERS TRIED TO KILL ME BUT ONLY HIT THE PLASTIC TURTLE BOWL AND RIGHT ABOVE ME HERE ON THE CEILING ARE THE BLOODSTAINS FROM THE TIME POOR DAN BURROS BLEW HIS BRAINS OUT....

                With his only eye, Frankhouser glances at his watch. Abruptly, he snuffs the candles and descends the steep stairs for the weekly meeting of the Reading-Berks Pale Riders, Ku Klux Klan.



                In his 54 years, Roy Everett Frankhouser Jr. has been arrested about 75 times; he has endured almost as many beatings, including one that cost him his left eye in 1965. He has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 30 times before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his FBI file runs upwards of 50,000 pages. In 1987, the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'Rith devoted its newsletter to him, calling him "Mr. Extremist."

                In his hometown of Reading, Frankhouser is known by nearly everyone. His fame, like the Kennedys', has outstripped his deeds; he is famous for being famous. "That's Roy Frankhouser," they'll whisper when he walks by, as if no other explanation is needed.

                But Frankhouser's renown extends well beyond Reading. In the world of extreme right-wing politics, he is bigtime. He has been on an intimate, first-name basis with virtually every national leader over the past 40 years: George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi party, who advocated exterminating American Jews and sending Afro-Americans back to Africa; the never-smiling Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America ("I don't hate niggers, but I hate Jews. A nigger's a child, but the Jews are dangerous people"); J. B. Stoner, chairman of the National States Rights Party, who believes AIDS is a gift from God to rid the earth of gays and blacks; Robert Bolivar DePugh, head of the Minutemen, the anti-Communist guerilla force that built up hidden arsenals all over the U.S. in the 1970s; Robert Miles, founder of the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ, which preaches that whites were put on earth by God to seize it from alien people made of "dirt, dust and mud"; George Wallace, the former Alabama governor ("segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"), and Lyndon LaRouche, fringe presidential candidate whose view of a world conspiracy includes the Queen of England as a drug dealer.

                Frankhouser's standing in America's pantheon of hate was achieved despite a 10th grade education; his assets include a booming stentorian voice that seems to swell and fill all available space, a memory like a microchip, and a well-honed skill at manipulating human beings--indeed, Roy Frankhouser is the kind of guy who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first.

                Frankhouser has bits of knowledge from everywhere. He recognizes a Beethoven sonata, knows the year the Spartans and the Persians fought at Thermopylae, and can recite an Allen Ginsberg poem. But this large, untidy store of information seems unsynthesized. His ideas are perfectly square blocks in solid colors; there is no asymmetry, no nuance, no mystery.

                For the past five years, Frankhouser has had more crosses to bear than to burn. He has spent most of the time in various prisons for various reasons. Though he was designated "Klansman for Life" in 1991, many younger leaders of the current white supremacy movement don't even know him. He might be content with a role of eminence gris--though perhaps der alte is the more appropriate term. But instead he's attempting a comeback, and Roy Frankhouser, who joined the Ku Klux Klan at age 14, is working with young people.


                                                                                     
                As prescribed by the Kloran, the official book, the local unit of the Klan meets in a Klavern, which in the case of the Reading-Berks Pale Riders is the front room of Roy Frankhouser's house. All of the windows have been painted over. About 30 folding chairs are lined up in rows of five facing the red-draped altar. On the altar is a red wooden cross illuminated with small light bulbs; the Klan symbol--an unsheathed sword with a drop of blood in the middle, and a Bible opened to Chapter 12 of Romans in which St. Paul enjoins the faithful: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them....Live in harmony with one another....Repay no one evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble...live peaceably with all....Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay,' says the Lord."

                Behind the altar is a closed door marked, "White Only."

                About 25 people are present; most are males and most appear under 21. There are two women and three adolescent girls who look as wide-eyed and innocent as deer frozen in headlights. Three young men exchange collusive whispers. They have swastika tattoos on their arms and wear camouflage fatigues and combat boots. Two older men have a backwoodsy look, with jeans and red flannel shirts, and they squint like cowboys in a cigarette ad.

                Satiny robes rustle as they are slipped from hangers covered by plastic dry cleaning bags. Some reek of kerosene from past  nocturnal cross-lightings. The Klansmen and Klanswomen help each other with their robes, and then peer through the slits of their cone-shaped hoods.

                Patrick, 11 years old, is aglow and resplendent, as though he had just donned a new Easter outfit. Frankhouser helps him on with his hood and says, "Always remember as you grow up, Young Man, stick your hand up in the hood to get rid of the stiffness before you put it on." Patrick is rapt with attention, feeding gluttonously on each word.

                Tara, 17, tucks her ponytail outside her hood as Frankhouser asks if she remembers the night three years ago when she was initiated into the Klan under a tall, flaming cross. "Yeh," she says. "That was great." THESE YOUNG MEN AND YOUNG WOMEN ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO GENUINELY CARES ABOUT THEM, AND I DO. THEY'RE TIRED OF BEING PUSHED AROUND AT SCHOOL BY BLACKS. MANY OF THEM HAVE PROBLEMS AT HOME. THAT'S WHY THEY SEEK STRENGTH FROM SOME OUTSIDE ORGANIZATION. SURE, I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH A FEW OF THE PARENTS. WHAT I TELL MY KIDS IS TO TELL THEIR PARENTS THAT IT WAS THEY WHO MESSED UP THE WORLD TO THE DEGREE IT IS TODAY, AND NOW IT'S UP TO THEIR CHILDREN TO TRY TO STRAIGHTEN IT OUT. THAT USUALLY WORKS.

                As the meeting time approaches, Frankhouser is issuing crisp orders, and finally he shouts, "Ten-Shun!" The meeting is called to order; there is a prayer ("Keep ablaze in each Klansman's heart the sacred fire of a devoted patriotism to our country and its government"), reports ("We marched in three cities, suffered two casualties and lost one vehicle") and announcements ("The convoy leaves for the cross-lighting immediately after this meeting"). The lights are dimmed for the closing ceremony. Left arms are extended fully and tilted upward, Nazi-style, and Frankhouser shouts, "White Power!" The klansmen, in a single melting voice, repeat, "White Power!" The feeling of belonging is tangible, and reality and fantasy seem to have merged.

                Outside the front door, Frankhouser encounters two leather-jacketed adolescent boys who have come by out of curiosity. He gives them KKK matchbooks, decals that say, "The Ku Klux Klan Is Watching You Right Now and We Don't Like What We See," and a booklet entitled, "Great Achievements of the Negro Race"; it is filled with blank pages and on the back cover is the acronym SPONGE--"Society for Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything." The boys snicker. Frankhouser invites them to the next meeting. "We'll have some pizza and show you a movie." They stand there sullenly, sucking on Marlboros, and say they might make it.



                 Just before World War II, Reading, Pa., was a hotbed of pro-German activities. The entry of the U.S. into World War II was sternly opposed, and a corollary was the fear of an international Jewish conspiracy against white Aryans--an idea that began 200 years ago during the French Revolution and had been brought to America in the 1930s by Henry Ford, the auto tycoon, who was rewarded with a favorable mention in Hitler's Mein Kampf. Charles Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer, made several trips to Germany just before the war and was presented a medal by Herman Goering, Hitler's air minister and founder of the Gestapo. When the U.S. declared war in 1941, Lindbergh blamed the "Jewish-owned media."

                Many Americans agreed, and one of them was Roy Frankhouser Sr. MY FATHER IDOLIZED LINDBERGH. I ALWAYS TRIED TO EMULATE MY FATHER. I'D SEE HIM IN THE BARBER SHOP, LISTENING TO HITLER ON THE SHORTWAVE RADIO, AND HE'D SAY, "WE'RE IN THE WRONG WAR. WE SHOULDN'T BE FIGHTING GERMANY." WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG I WENT TO VISIT MY GRANDMOTHER IN WEST CHESTER. SHE TOLD ME NOT TO PLAY WITH THE BLACK BOYS, BUT I DID ANYWAY AND THEY BEAT ME UP IN AN ALLEY AND TOOK MY MONEY. IT WAS JUST A FEW PENNIES. I WAS 5 OR 6.

                The elder Frankhouser was an anti-Semite and racist. THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER HEARING HIM RANT AND RAVE AGAINST NIGGERS I WAS PROBABLY ABOUT FIVE YEARS OLD. I SANG FOR HIM A SONG I HAD LEARNED IN SUNDAY SCHOOL. IT WENT SOMETHING LIKE, "BE THEY YELLOW BLACK OR WHITE, THEY ARE PRECIOUS IN HIS SIGHT." HE GOT REALLY ANGRY AND STARTED SLAPPING ME AROUND.

                Frankhouser's parents got divorced in 1949, when he was 10 years old, and during an ensuing custody battle the boy was sent to the Berks County Children's Home for three years. THAT'S WHERE I LEARNED TO REBEL AGAINST AUTHORITY. I DEVELOPED A TERRIBLE HATRED FOR TYRANNY AND INJUSTICE. I WAS BEATEN MANY TIMES. I HATED THE PLACE. THEY WOULDN'T LET ME READ COMIC BOOKS, AND I LOVED WAR COMICS. I GOT CAUGHT READING A COMIC BOOK IN THE SHOWER, AND THE MATRONS SICCED TWO BOSTON TERRIERS ON ME. THEY BIT ME REPEATEDLY. I YEARNED TO LIVE WITH MY PARENTS. I CAME TO ADMIRE STRENGTH. I LIVED IN A SOCIETY THAT SEEMED TO BE ABSOLUTELY WEAK. THEY COULD BREAK UP MY FAMILY AND THROW ME INTO A HOME SO WHERE WAS THE ALL-AMERICAN LIFE? WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY WAS THIS?

                He left the home when he was 13 and lived alternately with both parents. The following year he went to a classic film series at the Reading YMCA and saw "Birth of a Nation," a 1915 production considered a technical masterpiece for its inventive uses of the camera. But it also romanticized the Ku Klux Klan and painted its members as noble-minded knights who resort to violence only as a last resort. In the film's climax, a demure girl leaps to her death to avoid being raped by a sex-crazed black man, who is then pursued by the guys in the white robes--the Klan. I BECAME A RACIST WHEN I SAW THAT MOVIE, AND I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE KU KLUX KLAN. I STILL SHOW IT TO YOUNG PEOPLE ALL THE TIME, AND THEY NEVER FAIL TO APPLAUD ALL THE WAY THROUGH IT. Frankhouser joined the Reading Klan in 1954--the year the U.S. Supreme Court ordered public school integration. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I FELT LIKE I BELONGED.

                Meanwhile, Frankhouser had inherited his father's love for Germany. After school he would go to the homes of World War II veterans, bowing politely and asking them if they had any old Nazi flags, helmets, swastikas or Iron Crosses that they could give him. I GOT A LOT OF STUFF JUST BY ASKING FOR IT. SOMEONE EVEN GAVE ME A GERMAN GENERAL'S UNIFORM. MY MOTHER THREW OUT MY GERMAN HELMET--SHE WAS AFRAID I'D GET NITS. His love has never dimmed. In 1972 he arranged a birthday party in honor of Adolf Hitler that featured the "largest swastika-decorated cake ever." MY ONE CRITICISM OF HITLER IS THAT HE BURNED BOOKS. WHENEVER YOU BURN KNOWLEDGE, NO MATTER HOW YOU LOOK AT IT, YOU'RE DESTROYING YOUR ABILITY TO MAKE CHOICES IN ORDER TO SURVIVE....I DON'T BELIEVE THE GERMANS HAD ANY SYSTEMATIC PLAN TO DESTROY THE JEWS. THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT THE WORLD BEETHOVEN AND BRAHMS COULDN'T DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT. I'M NOT FOR THE ANNIHILATION OF THE JEWS. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE JEWS. I ADMIRE THE ISRAELI ARMY. THEY'RE THE REAL NAZIS OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

                BUT NOT EVERYBODY FEELS AS I DO, AND I FEAR FOR THE JEWS. IF THE JEWS KNEW WHAT WAS COMING--AND, BELIEVE ME, IT'S COMING SURELY AS THE DAWN--THEY'D REALIZE THAT WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN IN AMERICA WILL MAKE NAZI-GERMANY LOOK LIKE A SUNDAY SCHOOL PICNIC. WE'LL BUILD BETTER GAS CHAMBERS, AND MORE OF THEM, AND THIS TIME THERE WON'T BE ANY REFUGEES. THE AVERAGE AMERICAN HAS ONLY A THIN VENEER OF CIVILIZATION SEPARATING HIM FROM THE SAVAGE, YOU KNOW--FAR LESS OF A VENEER THAN THE GERMANS HAD. WHEN THAT'S STRIPPED AWAY AND HE REALLY GOES WILD.... YOU CAN SMELL THE GAS, CAN'T YOU?.

                At the age of 17, Frankhouser's mother signed papers allowing him to join the Army. He became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. But after Frankhouser had been a soldier for about a year, President Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school desegregation. I TOLD MY COMMANDING OFFICER I CANNOT SERVE IN AN ARMY THAT FIXES BAYONETS AGAINST ITS OWN CITIZENS. He was honorably discharged.



             About 45 crow-miles from the Liberty Bell, in a flat, fallow farm field near Rising Sun, Md., some 200 people have assembled on a Saturday evening; they represent klaverns from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. The place is crawling with klexters, klokans, klarogos, kleagles, kludds, klokards--it's a veritable who's who of klandom. You can hear the traffic whizzing by on Interstate 95. Cars and pickups, most of them older models and some of them rusting out, are in the makeshift parking lot, which is marked by a Confederate flag. Towering over the gathering, like a village cathedral, is a 50-foot log cross wrapped in kerosene-soaked rags.

                A few klansmen have donned their robes, but most still wear black combat boots, camouflage fatigues and black t-shirts. Nearly everyone, including the women, is tattooed--blue-purplish serpents crawl up arms, and swastikas shriek from the shaved skulls and the backs of hands. They stand talking in small groups, their voices arched like the backs of cats.

                Frankhouser, who in 1966 addressed a KKK rally in this very field, BLACK POWER IS A PLOT TO KILL EVERY WHITE CHILD!, has set up a folding table and is selling Klan paraphernalia--t-shirts, caps, rings and earrings (dangle or pierced). He does his Jewish merchant impersonation, saying, "Oy, veh, I make you sotch a deal. Reguluh thirty dollas, f'you, t-venty-five." He asks a pretty freckled woman, "Would you like a nice ring?" and without waiting for her answer he suddenly pops his left eyeball out and shows it to her. "Wouldn't that make a great ring?" She steps back, in mock-horror, and laughs. Then he sticks the plastic eye on the tip of his nose, and she is convulsed with laughter.

                He's also selling pocket knives that open with a flick to expose a three-inch black blade ("sharp to the tickle"). I'D RATHER STAB SOMEBODY THAN SHOOT THEM. I LIKE THE LOOK OF SURPRISE ON THEIR FACE....LIKE, 'OH, YOU'VE STABBED ME'--AND THEN THEY SEE THEIR GUTS TRICKLING OUT. Stepping from behind the table, he gives two teenagers, a boy and a girl, a demonstration of the proper knife-fighting technique. "You never fight with a knife like this"--he cocks his arm as though he is about to stab them--"the proper method is to never show the blade and slash, like this...." He slashes, expertly. HAVE I EVER KILLED ANYONE? I'M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU BECAUSE THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS NEVER RUNS OUT ON MURDER.

                A swastika-sleeved man, wearing a black Nazi SS uniform and jackboots, greets Frankhouser. He walks with his feet splayed outward, duck-like, and he is fat--a mountainous jello of jowls, chins and paunch. Beneath a musketeerish moustache, he twitchy-smiles, but his eyes are blank and give nothing away. He begins a tirade about the ACLU, which he calls the UCLA; Frankhouser corrects him. He shrugs and says, "What's the difference? They're all Jewish motherf---ers."

                "Lemme tell ya a great story, Roy. You'll appreciate this. We was comin' home one afternoon and passed a bus with a Star of David on it. We couldn't believe it. A kike-mobile! Well, we slowed down and started givin' 'em Heil Hitlers and shouting 'Six million more! Six million more!' and you know what those hook-nosed bastards did? They started crying. Imagine. We cracked up. We couldn't stop laughing. A whole busload of hysterical kikes, screaming, pounding on the windows, tears running down their cheeks. And then the frosting on the cake--the bus driver was a nigger! When the nigger saw our armbands, his eyes bulged out and that bus took off like a rocket. We couldn't stop laughin'...."

                Within earshot, three little girls and two little boys, somewhere between the ages of three and five, are catching frogs and lightning bugs in jars. One of the girls has pink ribbons in her hair and wears a black KKK t-shirt, and one of the boys has a red t-shirt that says, "Hey, Nigger" and depicts a white hand giving a middle-finger salute. 



                The Klan was formed as a social club in Pulaski, Tenn., in 1866, by six young Confederate veterans. These founding klansmen were no more political than modern college fraternity men; their stated purpose was "to have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public." One of the targets of their pranks were the newly freed blacks, whom they teased by dressing up in sheets and declaring, "We are the Confederate dead." But the prank so terrified the former slaves that the practice was seized upon by violent Southerners. By 1867 there were hundreds of local KKK units that formed an "Invisible Empire"; they were armed and bent on keeping the races apart and maintaining white superiority.

                Federal troops clamped down on Klan violence in 1871, and it dissolved--only to be revived in 1915 in Georgia, with the scope of its hatred widened to include Jews and Catholics. By 1920, almost six million Americans were members and it had an annual budget of $75 million. Klan ranks included police chiefs, mayors and state legislators. President Warren G. Harding was a former KKK member, as was former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and current U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Klansmen were elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas in 1922 and Colorado in 1924, and to governorships in Colorado in 1924 and Alabama in 1926. In 1924 the Democratic National Convention was split down the middle on a motion to condemn the Klan by name, and it finally defeated the idea by a narrow margin.

                The second Klan went into rapid decline after 1926, but the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision gave the splintered Klan a new call to action and many new recruits, among them Roy Frankhouser.

                One of Frankhouser's heroes quickly became Robert Shelton, the Alabama salesman who became the tough, violent leader of the Klan during the civil rights movement and whose followers beat black and white freedom riders on public buses in Birmingham and Montgomery. I USED A CROWBAR. I BEAT THE SHIT OUT  OF THOSE FREEDOM RIDERS. Shelton was looking for leadership in the North, and he saw Frankhouser as a bright young man; so he made him Grand Dragon of Pennsylvania--head of the state Klan.

                Frankhouser was arrested repeatedly for his anti-civil rights demonstrations--in Baltimore while making a segregation speech in front of a newly integrated swimming pool, in Pittsburgh for passing out hate literature, in Atlanta for kicking a police captain at a KKK rally, and in Philadelphia dressed in a storm trooper uniform and passing out anti-semitic literature to Christmas shoppers near City Hall. FRANK RIZZO ARRESTED ME FIVE TIMES. HE WOULD ALWAYS GRAB ME BY THE COLLAR, DRAG ME INTO THE SQUAD CAR TO PUT ON A SHOW FOR THE REPORTERS AND  PHOTOGRAPHERS, BUT THEN WE'D JOKE AROUND AND HE'D TELL ME NOT TO WORRY. I LIKED RIZZO A LOT.

                He kept strange company in New York's Greenwich Village and in Philadelphia at folk clubs like the Gilded Cage, where he mingled with singer Bob Dylan HIS NAME WAS BOB ZIMMERMAN THEN and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg WE SANG CIVIL WAR SONGS AND THEY LIKED THAT.

                Another hero was George Lincoln Rockwell, who had recently organized the American Nazi Party. I CALLED HIM UP AND HE SAID COME DOWN TO WASHINGTON. FOUR OF US WENT DOWN FROM READING. WE BROUGHT OUR GERMAN HELMETS, RIFLES AND BAYONETS. WHEN ROCKWELL WALKED IN THE ROOM, I SAID "ACHTUNG! PRESENT ARMS." WE ALL DID, BUT IT WAS A LOW CEILING AND OUR BAYONETS STUCK IN THE PLASTERBOARD. HE SLAPPED ME ON THE HELMET AND SAID, "ENOUGH OF THIS HOLLYWOOD CRAP. I'LL TEACH YOU HOW TO BE NAZIS" AND HE SENT US TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO PASS OUT LEAFLETS. EVENTUALLY I SPENT ABOUT 6 MONTHS AT HIS HEADQUARTERS, AND GOT FAIRLY CLOSE TO HIM. HE WAS A GREAT MAN. DEDICATED TO THE CAUSE. I CRIED WHEN HE WAS ASSASSINATED.

                Frankhouser became close friends with another fast-rising star, Daniel Burros, a Rockwell Nazi who, like Frankhouser, learned about the Klan by seeing the movie "Birth of a Nation," at a classic film festival at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The two met frequently in New York and Reading. They would talk about the need to preserve the white race in America and discuss ways to achieve it while listening to music, especially Wagnerian operas. Burros had some minor artistic talents; he enjoyed drawing pictures of Jews dying, and he usually carried with him a small bar of soap labeled "From the Finest Jewish fat."

                Burros was leading the New York Klan's anti-Jewish crusade when the New York Times dropped a bombshell: Burros was half-Jewish. The story broke while Burros was in Reading, and on an October Sunday morning in Roy Frankhouser's house, Burros seized his host's revolver and shot himself, first in the chest and then in the head, in full view of Frankhouser and Frankhouser's girlfriend and future wife, Regina. His last words were, "Long live the white race. I've got nothing more to live for." Wagner was playing on the hi-fi.

                I WAS ANGRY BECAUSE HE BROKE MY BED AND MY GUN CABINET. THEN HE SAW THE REVOLVER ON THE BUREAU AND HE GRABBED IT. GOOD GOD! AT FIRST I THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO KILL REGINA. THEN BANG! HE'S SHOT HIMSELF. IN THE CHEST. BUT THEN HE WAS STANDING THERE AS IF NOTHING HAPPENED. I THOUGHT HE MISSED. THEN I SAW THE HOLE IN HIS SHIRT. HE WAS SWAYING, SORT OF. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE? IT WAS SURREAL. IT ALL SEEMED TO BE HAPPENING IN SLOW MOTION. THEN HE RAISED THE GUN AGAIN, THIS TIME TO HIS HEAD. SHOT HIMSELF RIGHT IN THE TEMPLE AND FELL ON THE FLOOR. REGINA WAS SCREAMING, ALL THE WHILE, WAGNER WAS PLAYING....GOD, IT WAS AWFUL. HE WAS MY BEST FRIEND.



                While the sun is a ball of blood low in the Maryland sky, the aliens are summoned to the sacred altar, which is a waist-high table covered with a Confederate flag, for the ceremony of naturalization. There are nine of them--a young man, a young woman and seven teenagers--five boys and two girls. In their robes, they look like a choir. For this naturalization ceremony, Frankhouser, also robed, takes the part of klokard, or teacher. The observing klansmen stamp out their cigarettes and shuffle to attention.

                Frankhouser, his face crimsoned by the retreating sun, reads from the Kloran and begins asking a series of questions; each requires an affirmative response from the aliens. "Are you a native-born or naturalized white, Christian American citizen?....Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?....Louder! I can't hear you!....Do you believe that this is a white man's country, and should so remain, and will you do all in your power to uphold the principles of white supremacy and the purity of white womanhood?...."

                In a 15-minute ceremony, the aliens swear obedience, secrecy, fidelity and klannishness. They promise secrecy for all fellow klansmen (except in cases of treason, rape, malicious murder or violation of the Klan oath) and they commit themselves to uphold America's flag, its Constitution and laws. At the end Frankhouser declares them fit for the Klan. "By virtue of the authority vested in me, I dub the klansman, the most honored title among men." Each is tapped on the shoulder with the flat blade of the sword. The aliens have passed through the mystic cave to become citizens of the Invisible Empire, gaining access to the Klan's ceremonial language, greetings and responses, avowals and warnings. Each robed figure stands in mysterious oneness with their fellow klansmen.

                The sun drops below the horizon and jerks the world into night. An owl fills the field with questions.

  

                 In the 1970s Frankhouser became intelligence chief and Pennsylvania coordinator for the Minutemen, the para-military group headed by Robert DePugh. He maintained a secret underground weapons cache in Schuylkill County that included semi-automatic weapons, explosives and rockets; it had an underground generator with electric light fixtures, two bunks for sentries to sleep in, racks of rifles and four-foot long, red-tipped rockets.

                Frankhouser was charged with stealing dynamite in 1973 that was used to bomb empty school buses being used in a school desegreation program in Pontiac, Mich. But he managed to beat the rap by claiming at his trial that he was actually a government informer and that he participated in the sale so he could continue in that role.

                Government records show that Frankhouser was an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for about two years--indeed, his superior wrote several memos describing him as an excellent infiltrator and confidential informant capable of "great personal risk."

                About this same time, Frankhouser was sent on a mission to Canada to infiltrate a group of Black September Arab terrorists who were planning to kidnap and kill American Jewish leaders; the mission was approved by the National Security Council and the Nixon White House.

                When word of his undercover activities reached his right-wing brethren, Frankhouser was ousted as Grand Dragon, and his glass eye was auctioned off for $5 at a KKK rally in Greenville. S.C. IT WAS AN EXTRA ONE, AND I DONATED IT TO THEM SO THEY COULD RAISE MONEY FOR THE POOR.

                There are some lingering suspicions today among right-wing extremists over Frankhouser's government activities in the 'Seventies. He calls it "that old informant bullshit." I HAD TO ACT AS A DOUBLE AGENT TO FIND OUT WHAT WAS GOING ON. I KEPT A LOT OF PEOPLE OUT OF JAIL BY WARNING THEM WHAT THE FEDS WERE UP TO.

I WARNED DOZENS AND DOZENS OF KLANSMEN WHO WERE ABOUT TO GET POUNCED ON. THE FBI LEAKED THE INFORMANT CRAP TO TRY AND GET ME KILLED. IF I REALLY WERE AN INFORMER, I WOULDN'T BE HERE TODAY, I'D BE LONG DEAD.

                In 1975 Frankhouser began an 11-year association with Lyndon Larouche, the right-wing presidential aspirant, serving as a political and security consultant. Larouche was drawn to Frankhouser because of his ties to the intelligence community; Frankhouser served as a middleman between Larouche and a top CIA operative named "Mister Ed." His influence grew with the Larouche organization, and he was sent to Germany on the Queen Elizabeth II to overhaul LaRouche security operations in Wiesbaden.

                Some authorities now believe that most of the information from Mister Ed was made up--as was Mister Ed. MISTER ED WAS ACTUALLY A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE, AND THE INFORMATION WAS SOLID. LAROUCHE JUST DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THE INTELLIGENCE. HE BENT IT THE WAY HE WANTED IT TO GO. HE DIDN'T WANT TO BE CONFUSED BY THE FACTS.

                In 1985 the federal government began investigating complaints from Larouche contributors that amounts were charged to their credit cards far in excess of those that they authorized. In February, 1988, Frankhouser was convicted of obstructing justice for his part in the scam, and he spent nearly three years in federal prison.

                Less than a year after his release, Frankhouser was involved in the stabbing of a young Klan member at a meeting in suburban Harrisburg. THE GUY WAS A CHILD MOLESTER. I CHECKED HIS RECORD. I WENT IN TO THE MEETING TO TRY TO GET HIM REMOVED FROM THE KLAN. HE WAS A DISGRACE. HE SHOVED ME. I SHOVED BACK. HE THREW A CUP OF HOT COFFEE ON ME. I UNLIMBERED A LITTLE COLD STEEL. I JUST CUT HIM. I MISSED HIS HEART. I SHOULD HAVE KILLED THE CREEP.        Awaiting trial in Cumberland County Prison on aggravated assault charges, Frankhouser quickly got in a fight with a black prisoner. HE CAME OVER TO ME AND SAID HE HEARD I WAS IN THE KLAN. I SAID, YES I WAS. HE SAID THAT MEANT I DIDN'T LIKE HIM, AND I SAID, "IF YOU ACT LIKE A NIGGER, I'LL TREAT YOU LIKE A NIGGER." HE PUNCHED ME IN THE NOSE AND I BLED ALL OVER THE PLACE. Frankhouser was placed in solitary confinement. IT'S THE MOST DREADFUL THING IN THE WORLD. I WENT CRAZY IN THERE.

                He was sent to a state mental hospital for evaluation. I WAS TERRIFIED THEY'D SAY I WAS INSANE AND KEEP ME THERE FOREVER. THEY CAN DO THAT, YOU KNOW. But Frankhouser was declared fit to stand trial and last April--nearly a year after he was detained--a jury found him innocent because he had acted in self-defense.

                In addition to his legal problems, poverty and loneliness have dogged Frankhouser throughout his life. He lives a marginal existence in Reading, holding down a variety of part-time jobs, including livestock auctioneer and janitor. I FINALLY GOT SOME OIL IN THE TANK SO I COULD HAVE SOME HEAT. I GOT TIRED OF WATCHING MY OWN BREATH. He is divorced and the father of three adult children whom he seldom sees. I'VE ALWAYS TRIED TO SHIELD THEM FROM MY POLITICAL ACTIVITIES, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE THEM MORE OFTEN. THIS HURTS ME VERY MUCH. WHY DON'T THEY JUST STOP BY? BUT MAYBE THEY DID STOP BY AND I WASN'T THERE--



                On the moon-drenched field in Maryland, the klansmen stand in disordered ranks like shipwrecks on a reef, listening to guest speakers. The first is Barry, pastor of the New Covenant Church of God, wearing camouflage trousers, combat boots and a black shirt with a clerical collar. "...niggers are raping our women with impunity....we're sick and tired of it all. Let's go get that filthy kike out of the White House....the nigger in this country is a disease....a gorilla...he has no morals, no principles....lives under filthy conditions." 

                Then Bob, leader of a Delaware klan, huge tattoed arms, goatee beard, black t-shirt and jeans; he might be central casting's idea of a rebel biker. "...Clinton, our-faggot-loving, Jew-loving president. Those Jews who would like to murder white Christian children....We made America, and now we ride around in old cars while the Jews and kinky-haired faggot niggers ride in Mercedes...."

                Scholars of racial prejudice say that children get their first indoctrination from language--specifically from certain powerful words freighted with emotional impact--like "nigger." Dave is 19, lives near Reading, and is Frankhouser's favorite protege.

                "My father hated niggers. My whole family...my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all hated black people. They remember when Reading was all white and prosperous.... everybody had jobs. Then the niggers moved in and Reading went down the tubes. You can't walk the streets at night....it ain't safe." DAVE IS ONE OF MY MOST PROMISING YOUNG PEOPLE. THERE ARE MANY OTHERS. MOST OF THEM HAVE PROBLEMS AT HOME, AND THEY SEEK STRENGTH FROM SOME OUTSIDE ORGANIZATION. WE'RE THEIR SECOND FATHERS AND MOTHERS...."

                Dave's eyes are double barrels of liquid rage. He speaks in a low monotone. "I'm a high school graduate, but I can't find a job. I have applications everywhere....the niggers are getting all the jobs.  It disgusts me....I'm livin' at home. I go to the supermarket and I see them buy steaks. They drive up in Mercedes and BMWs. You wonder, where do they get their money? Well, a lot of them are dealing drugs. These people have no morals or anything...." His eyebrows descend and nearly unite in disgust.

                "I feel like part of a lost generation. No one cares what I think or what I believe in. Here in the Klan, they care. I feel a kinship with those Confederate soldiers who started the KKK. They were left out just like I've been. The South was saved by the Klan, and now it's time for the Klan to save the whole country.

THE HUMAN RELATIONS COMMISSION GOES ON THE AIR MAKING APPEALS FOR RACIAL HARMONY, RACE MIXING IS BEING TAUGHT IN THE SCHOOLS....WE HAVE A RIGHT TO THE YOUTH, TOO.

                "Mr. Frankhouser is a really good person. He taught me the truth, the real truth, about my ancestors....that there was actually no Holocaust....that the Jews made the whole thing up so they could get back at the Aryan people...."

                He isinterrupted by an insistent voice from the altar. "....Hey, Roy! Roy Frankhouser! Come on up here and say a few words....Folks, this here's Roy Frankhouser...."

                Frankhouser steps up to the altar. At first he is reserved, reluctant, almost shy, but before long he has turned as mean-looking as a Gestapo thug, and he is is ranting like an evangelist with a full tent. "...You're damn right I'm a racist, and I'm proud to be a racist...." His voice seems to slip into just the right vitriolic pitch, like a needle in a groove. His cheeks quiver with rage. "We need to say, 'Niggers, we can't stand this smell anymore....'" The cheering comes in salvos, there is a fusillade of hurrays, damn-rights and amens. A wave of applause washes over him like a Waikiki wave. Frankhouser basks in the warmth.

  

                Frankhouser's Pale Riders are part of one of many Klan factions across the nation (United Klans of America, Confederate Knights, White Knights, Territorial Knights), and the Klan itself is part of a white supremacist coalition that includes the Posse Comitatus, the National Association for the Advancement of White People and the shock troops of the entire movement, the skinheads--splintered into such groups as White Aryan Resistance, the Fourth Reich Skinheads and the Confederate Hammer Skins.

                There are about 300 such groups nationwide, and their members are mostly low-income, poorly educated whites who see racial purity as the only salvation in an increasingly desperate situation and as a source of a sense of belonging, identity, and importance. These groups are usually led by individuals who are intelligent, likeable and articulate--sequoias among saplings.

                Frankhouser runs his klavern with a military hand, referring to his fellow klansmen as "the troops" or "my men" and to their activities as "missions." He regularly hands out medals for "heroism" among klavern members, and if someone is injured the medal comes with a "wound cluster."

                The klavern's missions usually involve a public protest aimed at various grievances, with a goal of maximum publicity. WE DEMONSTRATE, EDUCATE AND AGITATE. Frankhouser is careful to inform police well in advance of any public activity--both as a means of protecting himself and his followers and of attracting the press and onlookers; as he learned from George Lincoln Rockwell, the more hecklers, the better the publicity. Last fall klavern members journeyed to Auburn, N.Y., to take part in a white power march, but they were met and driven out of town by a mob of some 2,000 counter-demonstrators. Several of Frankhouser's members, including a woman, were injured. WE GOT OUR ASSES KICKED. I NEED TIME TO RESTRUCTURE THEM MENTALLY. I DON'T DARE TAKE THEM INTO THE FIELD NOW. EITHER THEY'LL BE TOO AGGRESSIVE OR TOTALLY COWERED.

                The telephone answering machine has become a popular tool for white supremacists, and Frankhouser is no exception; his home telephone doubles as a "speech service" that offers callers regular diatribes against blacks, gays, Jews and other minorities."

                Frankhouser also makes full use of public access cable channels, which are intended to be a kind of electronic Hyde Park Corner, where anyone can get up on a soapbox and espouse any view whatsoever. Throughout the nation these channels have become a forum for radical groups--neo-Nazis who want to exterminate Jews, black racists threatening to kill all white people, white racists who want to send the blacks to Africa. Cable companies say federal laws give them little choice but to air programs put on by these groups. 



                Although even klansmen refer to the ceremony as a cross-burning, Klan purists call it a cross-lighting to avoid any appearance of sacrilege.

                The cross-lighting was not part of the original KKK, but became a Klan ritual about 1915. The idea apparently was adopted from Sir Walter Scott's poem, "The Lady of the Lake." in which burning crosses were used by family clans in Scotland to signal one another.

                Frankhouser, holding a blazing torch, begins the ceremony by barking a series of dismounted drill orders to the robed klansmen and women, who are assembled in ranks. "Halt! Right Face! Left Face!" Frankhouser's orders are snappy and precise, but the response is disorganized and almost comic.

                At Frankhouser's command, the klansmen converge on the cross, each taking up an unlit torch from a pile near the base. They form a wide circle and rotate around the cross slowly; as they pass Frankhouser, he lights their torches and says, "I give you the sacred light. Proceed." When all the torches are burning, they stop, and Frankhouser says: "Behold, the fiery cross is still brilliant. All the troubled history has failed to quench its hallowed flame." He ignites the cross. Flames leap up the post and spread over the horizontal bar; the Klan members step forward and place their torches at the base of the cross.

                Frankhouser, his one eye borrowing glitter from the fire, intones: "We light the cross with fire to signify to the world that Jesus Christ is the light of the world. Where the holy light shall shine, there will be dispelled evil, darkness, gloom and despair. The light of truth dispels ignorance and superstition as fire purifies gold and silver, but destroys wood and stubble so by the fire of the cross of Calvary we cleanse and purify our virtues by burning out our vices with the fire of his word.... Who can look upon this sublime symbol or sit in its sacred light without being inspired with a holy desire and determination to be a better Man?"

                "Amazing Grace" plays over the loudspeaker. "...how sweet the sound...." The cross continues to burn. The heat of the cross can be felt 30 feet away, and the Klan members sweat under their heavy robes. They spread their arms and legs, Christ-like, and look into the sky filled with acrid smoke, hatred baked on their faces. "...I once was lost but now am found...."

                The landscape seems hallucinatory, as though overseen by an unsocketed eye. The sound of the flames licking at the cross is ghastly, like laughter in hell. "...Was blind but now I see...." The air is varnished with the smell of kerosene and burning wood. Large black tatters of burned burlap flap from the cross like vultures haggling over a skelton in a Bosch painting. Up in the evil, miasmic sky, the moon is impaled on a pine tree. "...how precious did that grace appear...." There is an overwhelming sense of Wagnerian violence and doom.

                Frankhouser asks, "What's the solution?"

                "White Revolution!" comes the chorused response.

                "White Power," shouts Frankhouser.

                "White Power," comes the response.

                "White Power!....'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far...."

                "White Power!....and grace will lead me home.

                "White Power!"

                "White Power!"

                Frankhouser stands silhouetted against the burning cross. Some 20,000 miles overhead, satellites in geosynchronous orbit are relaying telephone calls and television programs. Less than a mile away, Americans are speeding along Interstate 95 on their way to ballgames and family reunions, unaware that nearby significant events are taking place and important rites are being celebrated. On the Klan Kalendar, it happened on the day of Desperate in the month of Sorrowful in the year 78 A.K.

                                                                                                  

Reader’s Digest
© Copyright William Ecenbarger

                In Taipei’s West Gate area, a 14-year-old girl wearing a school uniform–a white blouse and dark blue skirt–emerges from a convenience store. She tears open a package of Virginia Slims, lights one; then she opens and sniffs the bottle of perfume that came with it as a “gift”.  .  .    On Jonker Street in Malacca, Malaysia, teenage girls flock to a free fashion show that includes performances by popular “boy” bands.  The sponsor is Salem, and everywhere there is
the unmistakable green logo of Salem cigarettes. . . .

                In China’s Yunnan Province, an international women’s volleyball tournament is sponsored by the nation’s largest cigarette manufacturer–and as part of the experience, players and coaches are invited to tour the company state-of-the-art production plant. . . .

                In the Philippines, the tobacco companies take advantage of the nation’s strong ties to Catholicism by handing out promotional calendars featuring the Virgin Mary praying over a cigarette pack. . . .

                And in Japan, recent graduates of a women college receive free, unsolicited packages of cigarettes in the mail. . . .

                To make up for lost customers in Europe and the United States, tobacco companies have taken dead aim at a new, vast and relatively untapped market: some 750 million  teenage girls and young women in Asia. Currently, only about 5 per cent of Asian females smoke, compared to 25 per cent in the West.

                The international cigarette makers, like Philip Morris,  are bringing to Asia the same aggressive marketing tactics  that persuaded the previous generation of Western women to take up smoking. But in many Asian nations, women are also being lured to tobacco by their own governments.

                The impact is already being felt throughout Asia. Smoking rates among teenage girls have doubled in Japan and Hong Kong, quadrupled in Korea and risen fivefold in Malaysia. Increased rates of smoking by young women are reported in China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Indonesia. Cambodia and Vietnam. Even in  Singapore, which has the toughest anti-tobacco laws in the world, twice as many teenage girls are smoking now than five years ago.

                “The story of this campaign to make tobacco addicts out of the women of Asia is one of the most disturbing chapters in the entire sordid history of tobacco,” says Dr. Hatai Chitanondh, director of the Thailand Health Promotion Institute.

 SELLING EMANCIPATION

                On a recent Sunday afternoon in the trendy Shinchun area Seoul, a 19-year-old university student with coffee-brown eyes paused at the entrance to a coffee shop and was given a package of Mild Sevens, a Japanese brand, by a woman who is handing out free samples to passersby. The girl found a table inside and ordered a soft drink. When it arrived, she opened the package, extracted a cigarette and lit it. “I smoke off and on, but I think I’ll take it up permanently,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke.“I don’t want to be a good girl like my parents want me to be. Smoking makes  me  feel independent, open to new ideas. . . .”

                The cigarette makers are capitalizing on social change; Asian women are emerging  from secondary roles by asserting their independence, taking jobs once reserved for men, and earning more money. 

                Current cigarette advertising in Asia carries a common theme for women–smoking is a passport to being modern, independent, liberated, alluring and slim. Smoking is associated with being adventuresome and willing to break away from old lifestyles. In Japan, Virginia Slims, the world’s No. 1 women’s brand, ran a campaign urging women to “be you.” It showed an attractive woman who is saying, ““I’m going the right way, keeping the rule of the society, but at the same time I am honest with my own feelings. So I don’t care if I behave against the so-called `rules’; as long as I really want to.” Ads for the Capri brand show professional women, such as a dress designer, who says, “The dress I design represents my own way of life.”

                Research in Thailand shows that young women think smoking makes them more sophisticated. In India, “Girls and boys believe that the only way to become rich is to start smoking because every woman they saw smoking was well dressed and wealthy,” says Mira Aghi, of the International Development Research Center in New Dehli.

                Smoking by women is a social taboo in some Asian nations, but this had not deterred the tobacco companies. In Sri Lanka, where fewer than 1 per cent of the females smoke, the Ceylon Tobacco Company hands out free samples and gifts to women at universities and shopping malls.                                                                                                                

BRAND-STRETCHING

                On weekday evenings, hundreds of Malaysian adolescents come to the Suria KLCC Shopping Center in Kuala Lumpur’s Golden Triangle to shop and socialize. They stroll past all the international logos that are part of the youth culture–Reebok, Levi, Ray Ban, Guess, Gap. And Salem Cool Planet, where flashing fluorescent lights beckon and teenage singer heartthrob Richie Ren Hsian Chi is played at a thousand decibels.  A girl in tight jeans and a Chicago Bulls Tshirt pays for a CD. There are no cigarettes for sale here, but when the girl purchases a CD, the clerk places it in a plastic bag bearing the unmistakable green logo of Salem cigarettes.

                Many Asian nations have enacted restrictions on tobacco advertising in recent years, and to counter these public health measures, the cigarette makers are using subterfuges to evade these bans and place their enticing messages before Asian women.

                There are seven Salem Cool Planet outlets in Malaysia, and the music store also regularly sponsors concerts featuring bands that are popular with adolescent girls. It is a prime example of “brand-stretching,” a practice used by tobacco companies to circumvent laws against advertising cigarettes. The strategy is to link the name of the cigarette to fashion, music and leisure. Direct advertising of tobacco products has been banned in Malaysia since 1992, but today the familiar logos of popular cigarette brands are everywhere. Only the word “cigarette” is missing. There are billboards for “Salem Holidays,” clothing stores called “Winston Eagle,” and travel agencies called “Peter Stuyvesant” and “Camel.” The “Benson & Hedges” Bistro in Kuala Lumpur is a popular youth hangout where patrons are served a special “Benson & Hedges” coffee by waiters uniforms that resemble gold-colored cigarette packages.

                “The aggressive manner in which the tobacco transnationals have been targeting young girls is insidious,” says Mary Assunta, Malaysia’s top anti-tobacco leader. “They use music, fun and good looks to seduce teenagers to accept tobacco brands. In a culture where smoking among women is still frowned upon in society, these companies are linking smoking and cigarettes to aspects of the good life–holidays, fashions, sports and night life. After that, to get them to smoke is easy.”

                While Malaysia currently is the world’s brand-stretching capital, there are “Camel Trophy” clothing stores in Thailand and “Marlboro World” products in China. In India, the government tightened advertising restrictions this year, and the nation’s largest tobacco company responded with a brand-stretching program that includes some 50 designer clothing stores named “Wills” for its flagship cigarette brand.                                                                                               

SPONSORSHIPS

                Another way the tobacco giants get around national advertising restrictions is by sponsoring events popular with girls and boys. This is particularly effective in poorer countries, where funds for athletic and cultural programs are always scarce. College scholarships and artistic awards are favorite targets of the cigarette makers’ generosity.

                Music tops the list, and tobacco companies are prominent sponsors of concerts, discos and “top 50" programs. Admission could be gained to a 1998 concert in Hong Kong by Leonlai, a favorite singer of adolescent girls, by turning in three empty Salem packages. The Marlboro Music Hour is broadcast throughout China and features Western pop music. Benson & Hedges sponsors disco dance parties and Sri Lanka, and tobacco companies sponsor live concert telecasts in Cambodia.

                Nor have sports, another teenager preoccupation, escaped the cigarette makers. The Hongta Tobacco Company, China’s largest cigarette manufacturer, sponsors a girls’ tennis team and hosts the Women’s Volleyball Grand Prix Tournament. Not to be outdone, the Kunming Cigarette Factory in southwest China used a photo of Wang Junxia, a famous woman long distance runner, in a full-page newspaper advertisement. (The woman sued, and a court ordered the company to pay her nearly $100,000 (800,000 yuan). An annual feature in Hong Kong is the Salem Open Tennis Tournament.

                The tobacco companies offer young people t-shirts, caps, umbrellas, handbags and other items with their logos and colors prominently displayed. Some are sold, but others are given away at sponsored events. Marlboro’s “Challenge” program, popular with youth in Vietnam, enables participants to get backpacks, t-shirts, radios, swatches and other non-tobacco items by collecting empty Marlboro packages. 

WOMEN’S BRANDS

                An attractive blond Nordic-like woman towers over Tokyo’s Shibuya district from a billboard. It is touting a Salem brand called Pianissimo, which is an Italian word meaning “very softly”–and therefore a brand few boys would ever smoke. Like many ads for women’s cigarettes in Japan, it features as Western model.

                As part of their effort to lure women to smoking, the tobacco companies are rolling out new brands that, by design, packaging and marketing, are aimed women. The most successful of these is the venerable Virginia Slims, which Philip Morris created for the U.S. market in the late 1960s. Today Virginia Slims must compete with brands like Esse, and Finesse, Capri,  MS, Vogue and Eve (“Every inch a lady”). In Japan, a brand was launched called “Kawahi,” which  means “cute” and is often use to describe teenage girls in a positive way. Taiwan’s tobacco company created a brand called 520, which sounds like the Chinese words for “I love you.” In case anyone missed the message, the 520 had a red-heart-shaped filter. Whenever a new brand is launched in India, free samples are distributed in colleges and secondary schools; although rural Indian women have smoked for centuries, their urban counterparts didn’t take up the habit until women’s brands were introduced.

                The women’s brands usually are accompanied the designation of “light” or “low-tar”–with the implication that they are less harmful.  However, many studies have shown that even if the “light” cigarettes contain less nicotine, smokers compensate by smoking more of them or by inhaling deeper. In Japan, Salem advertises its light brand as being not only lower in nicotine, less odorous–“less smoke, less smell.” The feminized cigarettes are thinner than men’s brands and come in boxes with pastel colors and floral designs.

                Gift cigarette packs and cartons are used to attract women smokers in several Asian nations. On Taiwan, Virginia Slims offers perfume and make-up brushes, Salem provides an umbrella and Cartier Lights come with a wooden jewelry box. In Japan, Mila Schon, a local brand, comes with a chance to win a ladies watch or handbag. These packs and cartons are displayed prominently on the counters of convenience stores.

GOVERNMENT PUSHERS

                In China, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Japan, most cigarettes are sold by state-owned or state-controlled enterprises–and women are being trapped into nicotine addiction by their own governments. These government entities are potent revenue producers, and a frequent argument against anti-smoking campaigns is that they will be harmful to the public treasury.

                The Taiwan Tobacco and Wine Board, and Thailand Tobacco Monopoly and the Korean Ginseng Tobacco Company all sell brands aimed directly at women and regularly come out with new ones to boost sales. Japan Tobacco, Inc., which is a private firm but controlled by the government, seeks new customers by mailing free samples to women when they graduate from college or when they reach their 20th birthdays.

                By far the biggest government operation–indeed the largest cigarette maker in the world–is the China National Tobacco Corporation, which produces nearly one in three of the world’s cigarettes (about 1.65 trillion last year). It paid taxes that provided nearly 2 per cent of the entire national budget. About two in every three adult men smoke but only one in every 25 women smokes. The Chinese tobacco monopoly has recently introduced two low-tar brands that target women. One of them, Yuren (“pretty woman”), is slim with a white filter and is promoted as being mild. The government has launched a belated anti-smoking campaign, but ignorance remains a potent ally of the tobacco companies. One study found that one in every three students thought smoking was beneficial to human health.

                If China is admitted to the World Trade Organization, it would open up the world’s largest cigarette market to the transnational firms, which already are jockeying for their anticipated entry. The major global producers are Philip Morris, which is the largest producer and maker of Marlboro, the world’s best-selling cigarette; British American Tobacco ( BAT), a close second with such popular brands as Lucky Strike, Kent and Rothmans; and Japan Tobacco, Inc., which purchased R..J. Reynolds’ international business in 1999, bringing under its wing such well established brands as Salem, Winston and Camel.

                These transnationals are increasing their production capacity to meet expected increased demand as more and more women smoke. Philip Morris is investing US$300 in the construction of a new cigarette manufacturing plant in the Philippines; BAT is building new production facilities in Korea and Cambodia. not only are tobacco companies beefing up promotion in old markets, they are moving into new ones.

                Today the Marlboro man squints down on the streets of Phnom Penh, free samples of Wills Gold Flakes are handed outside schools in Bombay, British American Tobacco is sponsoring rock concerts in Sri Lanka, and Surya cigarette ads featuring young women are pasted on public buses in Kathmandu. 

                The industry is optimistic that its women’s strategy is working. A 1998 editorial in Tobacco Reporter, an industry publication, cited the underlying strengths” of the emerging Asian women’s market–“Rising per-capita consumption, a growing population, and an increasing acceptance of women smoking continue to generate new demand”

                The cigarette companies deny that they are targeting girls in Asia. They contend that their advertising is aimed at women over 18 years old who are already smokers and is intended to persuade them to change brands.

                “Nonsense,” says Dr. David Yen, president of the John Tung Foundation, an anti-tobacco group in Taiwan. “Study after study has shown that most smokers started as teenagers, and that’s who the tobacco advertisements are reaching and persuading.”

                The World Health Organization forecasts that 500 million women, most of them in developing countries, will begin smoking in the next generation, and 200 million of them will die prematurely from smoking-related diseases. Smoking women are subject to the same diseases as smoking men–lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease. In addition, babies born to smoking women are more likely to be physically unhealthy, handicapped and retarded. Some studies suggest that women are more susceptible to tobacco carcinogens than men, and that it is more difficult for women to quit smoking. Dr. Mackay warns of “a coming global disaster” and adds: “There are enormous consequences on health, income, the foetus and the family. If women smoke like men, they die like men.”

                Not long ago, in a smoking cessation clinic on Queen’s Road in Hong Kong, a pretty girl with her jet black hair in a ponytail awaited the start of a group session. “This my third time here. The first time I lasted a week. The second I made it through 11 days. I started two years ago. It seemed so cool; it made me feel sophisticated and grown up. Very chic. I really want to quit because I know it’s bad for my health. But it’s so difficult. . . .

                She is 14 years old.