A Police Story: Spring 3100

I was a New York City policeman for 20 years: from 1967 to 1987, seminal years in the modern history of the NYPD, during which I rose from Probationary Patrolman to Lieutenant of Police. When I look back on that time, see again the faces and events, I remember how a writer-friend once described my career as “intersections with history.” Maybe, he had a point.

---

It was August, 1969 and I’d been a New York City Patrolman just two years and three months. I was working nine-to-five in a suit, Monday to Friday, with an occasional Saturday substituting for one of the weekdays (my choice). I was assigned as a reporter/writer on SPRING 3100, the official Magazine of the New York City Police Department, which boasted on its masthead that it was The Magazine Written For And By Patrolmen. That was true: the Editor who brought me on was a Patrolman who’d spent his career on the Magazine; there were two other writers like myself and the Art Director who laid out the magazine and handled production—all of us lowly Patrolmen, except for the old photographer who’d been there even longer than the Editor and somehow had managed to rise up one rung to Detective 3rd Grade, the lowest of the detective ranks, without having ever detected anything except a good photo ‘opp’. (In the NYPD, like Life, it was who you knew.)

SPRING 3100 was a choice assignment, a secret closely guarded and not spoken of outside ‘the City Room’, what we called the large open room that accommodated our desks, the Art department and files, on the top floor of 400 Broome Street, a/k/a The Police Annex. Police Headquarters then was just across Broome at 240 Centre Street in a grand old building done in the monumental Beaux Arts style with a Dome, pediments and marble columns over the entrance facing on Grand Street. I once believed that I’d gotten to SPRING 3100 by pure chance, but don’t any longer.

I was a beat cop walking foot posts by myself (the custom then) in the 9th Precinct on East 5th Street in the East Village. As a rookie with just fifteen months on the Job, I was usually assigned to patrol on the down-and-out Bowery or on the battleground streets of ‘Alphabet City’ (Avenues ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’) when I read in SPRING 3100 that there were openings on staff for Patrolmen-Reporters. I applied, out of curiosity, although I was still caught up in the romance of being The Man on the Mean Streets of the City. I had been a professional reporter and editor for business magazines for the three years prior to taking the Police Test. I applied and The Editor of SPRING hired me on the spot, thinking he’d gotten a bargain in me, I’m sure, although he was to learn over the next three years that I was definitely a mixed bag.

240 Centre Street

My first assignment as roving reporter was to do a feature piece on the Police Aviation Unit that was celebrating its 40th Year in the air in 1969. I drove out to the Base in Floyd Bennett Field at the ass-end of Brooklyn in an “unmarked” Department car (That’s what we called the Chevys and big-ass Plymouths that were garaged in the basement of 400 Broome. We’d just call ahead and the car was gassed up and waiting.) My partner on the assignment was Charlie (I’ll call him that), the new photographer, my age. At the Base, they took us up in a Bell Jetranger helicopter. Flying over all the boroughs of the City, under the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges, up and down the East River out to the Harbor, I sat in the copilot’s seat behind the glass nose of the copter so that passing over the Statue of Liberty I felt that if I stepped out and down I’d set foot on Her Torch.

Spring 3100 was a 50-page, 8-1/2x11-inch, professionally-written—abundantly illustrated with photos, occasional art and a dab of color on the front cover—slick magazine that had come out every month since 1929. Its size was purposeful: folded lengthways, it fit snugly in the rear back pocket of its readership, the uniform cop on the street. Distribution was a stroke of genius: bundles delivered by Motor Pool trucks to every Precinct, Headquarters and Administrative Command in the City. Every cop paid $1.80 per month for the magazine which was included in “House Tax,” a small sum he had to kick in monthly at his Precinct, that also underwrote the shoe shine machine and store of polish available to him in the Muster Room. If the New York Journal-American had had a setup like ours, it might have survived.

I earned my spurs with ‘Cops In the Blue’, the Aviation story, one of the longest SPRING had ever run, dramatic photo spreads showcasing the old biplanes and their heroic pilots. I’d researched the hell out of the story for a month; the photos came out of the magazine’s archives or The New York Daily News’s morgue. In recognition, the Editor assigned me to write ‘All In the Day’s Work’, a dramatic log of street heroics by cops all over the City—starring rescued animals, people, and perpetrators’ arrests ripped from the pages of the daily papers, illustrated by photos from their morgues, written from an omniscient third-person point of view with commentary (mine). Each month, I’d open the column with an apt quotation, like: “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.—Amelia Earhart Putnam.”

My other assignment was the column, “The Retired Ring In” (‘Ring In’ is a term of art referring to the foot patrolman’s duty to call in to the Precinct Switchboard from a Police Call Box on the street at a designated time each hour). Retired cops living in places all over the country would “ring in” their doings with ample photographic documentation. And sprinkled throughout: news of the Departmnent’s doings with plenty of headshots of the Top Command (Bosses loved SPRING where their Over-Bosses would see their pictures and, hopefully remember they existed), a Law column, an Inquiring Photographer, a Cop Captions Contest, Obituaries, Want Ads, and the clincher, ‘Looking Them Over’—reports of arrests, personal foibles, meaty tales (the doer’s name in boldface type) by the Precinct Reporter, a Patrolman in that Precinct, in every Precinct in the City. Liberally illustrated with photos, of course. Pure genius.

Then, one day our Patrolman-Editor retired (frustrated that after all those years he’d never been promoted to Detective 3rd Grade), a tone-deaf Sergeant replaced him and the clock ran out on the rest of us.

© 2013 Robert Knightly
all rights reserved

The Common Reader

Over the years writers have heard and read about the importance of reaching that phantom held fast in the minds of publishers, agents and booksellers: the average reader. You know the guy (I always think of the average reader as male though statistics suggest otherwise). He needs to be captured by the first sentence and must be propelled effortlessly through a compelling narrative. The writer must not linger too long over any detail as the average reader has many bids on his attention and needs to get on with it.

I never imagined that such a person existed. If such a person did exist, I thought, I certainly wouldn’t want to be in his company.

Reader, I married him.

An exchange about a book marked our first date.

“Have you read Julian Jaynes?” Bob asked.

“Do you mean The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?”

The rest is domestic history.

But our discovery of each other’s literary tastes was not all skittles and beer. Early in our marriage I presented Bob with a mystery I had enjoyed very much, Robert Goddard’s Into the Blue. A while later, I found Bob reading. I don’t remember what it was but it wasn’t the Goddard.

“You didn’t like it?”

“Two pages of introspection and not a thing happened.”

I felt a cold chill. Could I have married a man who didn’t like mysteries?

I continued to buy the books I liked (my library is vast) and I watched what Bob picked out. I discovered that my husband is a great re-reader and he goes over favorite passages in a way I do not.

His favorites?

Dick Francis. Bob likes the way every word seems to serve to drive the plot forward. I’m tempted to say something here about galloping to the end but am resisting. Above all Francis does not blather. Mr. Francis was also a great favorite of Robin Hathaway’s and Bob and Robin enjoyed discussing their favorites. (Robin’s was Nerve; Bob has not committed to a favorite.)

Georges Simenon (the Maigret novels). Bob notes that Maigret is smart about people and focuses attention on those whose lives have largely been failures. He eschews forensics and relies on conversation. I like the fact that Maigret’s job allows him to spend a lot of time dropping into bars and drinking Calvados. Simenon does not blather.

Carl Hiaasen. You get a good mystery and serious issues are raised, but you’re laughing so hard you may not notice. Hiaasen’s madcap plots tend to blend together for me, but Bob actually remembers in which novel a particular plot twist or bit of business occurred. Hiaasen does not blather.

Elizabeth Peters (the Amelia Peabody mysteries). Bob once worked as an archaeologist and he admires Peters’ knowledge of Egypt and archaeological practices. He also enjoys her humor. I used to come home from mystery conferences with books set in the ancient world and Bob would say, “You get me these things, but they don’t really grab me.” I’ve pointed out to Bob that Peters, while she does not blather, is a touch more discursive than his usual favorites.

“Well, everybody goes on about something; you just have to like what they go on about.”

As I type, Bob is reading The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell. This is most uncharacteristic as Bob is not much for Scandanavian brooding. “I do tolerate a lot in the Wallander novels that I wouldn’t normally put up with in other books,” he says.

So, what lessons should you draw from all of this?

They’re isn’t an average reader no matter what publishers, agents and booksellers imagine. But don’t blather unless you’re very funny or Swedish.

© 2013 Stephanie Patterson

The King's Men

On Tuesday evening of this week St. Andrew's, Lambertville, was host to a concert by a subset of the renowned King's College Choir. Once known as the Collegium Regale, the group now call themselves the King's Men. Having them come to our modest little church, which seats fewer than 200, was as surprising and delicious as a visitation of angels.

Choral scholars at the college, undergraduates, they sing a capella. They rehearse for three hours every day. Their ensemble is exquisite, crisp, precise. St. Andrews was built in the late nineteenth century, before electronic amplification, and designed on purpose to have excellent acoustics. It's a wonderful place to sing, even for those of us who don't sing all that well.

"From Byrd to the Beatles," their program was called, and it ranged from fifteenth century sacred music to charming arrangements of pop hits. Between numbers they clowned a little, being fun-loving young fellows. An organist came with them but did not accompany them. He played a couple of numbers by himself, brilliantly. They were all brilliant. I wish I could tell you their names. I wish I had counted them. There must have been about fifteen. There were no printed programs, and I was too stupefied by the beauty of the experience to take any notes.

Still I wanted to tell you about it in my incoherent way. They were so beautiful! They were so young! And the group was so ephemeral. Although the choir was founded during the reign of Henry VI, the young men who sing in it will graduate and be off doing other things in a very short time. Others will take their places. All the while I was listening to them I was thinking, this will never happen again in quite this way. There's no way to capture it, no way to hang onto it.

Nevertheless I offer you this YouTube recording, made in another church a couple of years ago, of some of them singing Tutti Venite Armati, which they also sang in the program at Saint Andrews. A pale shadow.

Kate Gallison

The Historian Sleuth

Triss Stein, multi-talented mystery author, is a bright star in the firmament of mystery writing. A former native of Watertown, New York, after degrees at Brandeis and Columbia in history, classical studies and library science, she embarked on a fascinating career that would provide material and talent for future exciting novels, including consulting for McKinsey and Company, children's librarian, and staffs of publishers DC Comics and Conde Nast.

Her successful novels, Murder at the Class Reunion and Digging Up Death, paved the way for her current popular novel, published by Poisoned Pen Press, Brooklyn Bones.

Active in MWA-NY and SinC, Triss recently managed the SinC research study on mystery readers.

We are delighted to welcome this gifted, creative New York writer here today!

Thelma Straw

---

I have a confession to make. I might be the only woman mystery writer in the US who never liked Nancy Drew. My interest in mysteries did not come from my childhood fiction reading at all, but I am beginning to suspect that it might have come from my interest in history and archaeology.

Think about it. The historian or the archeologist digs down through the facts, documents and artifacts to arrive at the truth. Or anyway, “A” truth. Or at least a narrative. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The PBS program, History Detectives, shows us how they do it, and naturally I adore the show. Of course I know that in the show they take a few short cuts, but that’s television. And I have on my desk a 1968 book called The Historian as Detective: Essays as Evidence, edited by Robin Winks, who was all of the following: a distinguished Yale history professor, a mystery fan and an Edgar winner for Best Critical Work.

Real history is full of real unsolved crimes. What did happen to those princes in the Tower? Did Robert Dudley’s wife fall down the stairs or was she pushed, and how much did Queen Elizabeth I know? Poe’s lost last days? Meriwether Lewis’ questionable demise? And who can forget Judge Crater?

In fact, I started Brooklyn Bones not with a sleuth but with a crime—old bones in an old house—and a historian came to mind as the right person to solve it. I made her an urban historian so she would naturally be interested in the context—the time and place—of the crime. I gave her a partly-written dissertation about the dynamics of neighborhood change in Brooklyn because I live in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, so does she (not coincidentally, the same one), and the old house with the bones is hers. I gave her a child, because I wanted to write about being a parent. I gave her a teen-age child because—well, conflict is good for plotting!

As she came alive in my mind and started talking to me, I realized I had found my perfect heroine. She’s younger than I am, has a completely different background, she’s a lot more impulsive, a lot less worldly, a lot more street smart. But I know what drives her and I can send her to research life in the past in a way that smashes right into conflicts of life in the present. The mini-mansion mausoleums of historic Green-Wood cemetery? The Jewish gangsters of Brownsville? The Brooklyn Navy Yard when it was operating around the clock to help save the world? The lost and found freed slave community of Weeksville? Erica is never going to run out of old Brooklyn stories to research. And because there are more than bones in those mausoleums, Brownsville still has gangs, and the later fate of the Navy Yard, a large piece of waterside real estate, was much debated, I am never going to run out of modern crimes.

Asking questions. Digging up answers. Understanding what happened then and how it affects now. A historian sleuth makes a lot of sense to me.

Triss Stein
TrissStein.com

Everybody's Corrupt

You may not know that Theodore Roosevelt once served as police commissioner for the City of New York. As a student of muckraker Lincoln Steffens and a life-long fan of T.R. I knew a little about it. I knew he had trouble with the police culture of New York, the corrupt Democratic machine, and the way things were generally done in the city. But I didn't know the details, or how badly things went for him, until I read Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, by Richard Zacks.

It was the Protestant preachers, in particular the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, who first cast the light of general scrutiny on the sin that New York loved: prostitution, drink, and gambling. Parkhurst went out one night with a flash fellow of his acquaintance and took a tour of the low places of the city in order to denounce them from the pulpit. He was so horrified that he went out again the next night, and the night after. He soon roused the respectable people of the city, which is to say, the Republicans, to demand that the city be cleansed of sin. No illegal activity could take place without the complicity of the police. The Lexow commission hearings revealed them to be on the take, a great public scandal.

The aroused citizens voted out the Tammany mayor. The new mayor appointed the high-minded Theodore Roosevelt to the Police Commission to clean up the town. He started by creeping through the bad neighborhoods at night in disguise, getting the dirt on all the negligent cops he saw there. They began to shape up and look sharp. He forced them to raid all the brothels. No one was safe. He decreed that snitches were no longer to be paid for information, since they were criminals themselves and didn't deserve it. No undeserving person was to have a break. Homeless? Get a job. No longer would the homeless be allowed to sleep in the basements of police stations, on bare planks. They must report to the homeless shelter run by Protestant clergymen, where they would be forced to chop wood for three hours for their night's lodging.

Roosevelt closed all the bars on Sundays, because that was the law, handed down by the Republican legislators in Albany. Now in those days Sunday was the working man's only day off, his only solace a drink of beer. New Yorkers began to yearn for the return of Tammany. But Theodore Roosevelt was stiff-necked. Political expediency was never a part of his vocabulary. Right was right, and the law was the law. In vain did thirsty newspaper writers point out that the rich folks could drink at home on Sundays, or in their pricey hotels.

Then the wife of a prominent and powerful citizen was robbed of her jewels.

Without a stable of underworld informers to ferret out the thief, the police were helpless. Now it became apparent that virtue didn't work, not in New York City, perhaps not anywhere. Everyone, high and low, benefitted from the slimy network of corruption and bribery that the city ran on in ordinary times, and they wanted it back again. The rest is history. Roosevelt went on to become President of the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Kate Gallison