Then there was the arrival of I-95. Eisenhower had signed into being the bill which launched the building of the Great Interstates that now knit our PC-strangled land - but till that time, superhighways were yet unknown. I well remember when I-95 came to Connecticut. It's right-of-way, in fact, crossed right in front of Cleworth's old building (we had left West Putnam, and were now down in the Old Palmer Cider Mill, which our gang had also rebuilt into modern offices). In fact, even this very day, I-95 all but passes through George's old office on the second floor... I think there is some kind of "Tennis Club" or yuppie venture of some kind in there now. Time moves on...

    At this point, you might ask,

    "How did the magazines get out every month, if all your time was spent in nefarious building and salvaging operations?"

    It's a fair question. And here is the answer. From the day I started with the company, George made one thing clear (Chuck already knew it, as did all the others). We were editors with editors' responsibilities. Putting out a "book" every month took talent - lots of it - and lots of hard work. Copy to write, a field to follow, plants to visit, people to interview, copy to mark and send to the printers (we did our own production), galley proofs to read - and as the inexorable deadlines approached, dummies to paste up and "imposition" nightmares to unravel (being non-mathematically inclined, I never really got the hang of "imposition"...).

    The "books" must appear on their issue date - complete. How we did this was entirely up to us. If, for instance, we wanted to stay drunk and sleep all day for 29 days in a row - no problem. (And we had editors who did this. The prevailing spirit at times being that of a Hearst publication before the turn of the century, when Ambrose Bierce slept unseen inside his roll-down desk, and so on). But on that thirtieth day, we had best be up and doing early. For if the "book" did not appear tomorrow - on schedule - we got fired! No negotiations, no "hearings", no pleas as to race or ethnicity, or lack of earlier advantages or achievements or handicaps or anything else whatever.

    We got fired. Period. We got our asses fired right out of there! There was no "safety net" to catch our falling forms, either. Likewise no waiting welfare arms to shelter and provide for wives and children. Pestiferous central government was less a factor in our lives back then, and its concerns were mainly with the "communist threat to the nation" in those halcyon days.

    Otherwise our time was our own (rather our time - much of it - was George's!). That's the way it was. And that's the way it worked.

    But ... I-95. Think on it! Entire neighborhoods were condemned wholesale. People's homes were sequestered - taken from them! The sound of the bulldozer was loud in the land. The countryside began to look like France in the First War. I remember the newspapers that Spring and Summer: every day they listed new swaths that were to be taken: everyone out! The courts were jammed with disputants. Old ladies were carried bodily from their homes in rocking chairs. Their pictures were in the paper! Roads were detoured. Muffled dynamite blasts rent the air. Not since King George's lobsterbacks harassed the citizenry back when, had this region come so close to insurrection.

    But what a field day it was for us! There were so many goodies everywhere we were like kids in a toy store! Sometimes alone even, operating only in our own self-interests and sometimes together where "heavy lifting" might be needed we scoured that countryside like partisans that year! Oh! the joy of it! Once I found a string of rare cut effigy beads left behind in a house and had to jump from the second floor with it to escape the wrecker's ball... Chuck got a loom (which I envied). George got ... everything else! Everything was grist for his mill.

    One morning I had come to work early and went into his office seeking him. He wasn't there. I chanced to look out the window and across the street. There stood a little old house from the last century - now closed up only yesterday, it's owners having fought their remove as long as possible. Curtains still hung in the windows. Something drew my eye atticward to a fanlight window set just under the peak - with nice 19th century, triangular, leaded panes. Pity to think of something like that being ground under foot.

    But wait! Something was moving. Then Pow! right through the wall about 6 inches out from the window burst the tip of a chain saw! Snarling and grinding, the saw quickly zipped all around the skylight - and it toppled inward at last where a dim figure could be seen lowering it to the floor. Then a furtive head - that of my boss! the Senior VP and part-owner of the prestigious publishing company across the street! - stuck furtively out - looked about quickly - and withdrew...

    Later, we did have our conference. But my editorial concerns were quickly over-ridden.

    "Some stuff for you and Chuck to collar across the street," rumbled the gravel. "Truss 'em up so they don't break and load them in the truck...".

    And so it went all that Spring and Summer. And the warehouse filled with skylights, and fanlights, and whole doorways yanked out of fine old homes - like gold teeth out of a corpse... Chuck 's tastes, be it said, were often driven by desparation and outright practicality. He was always broke, so he and Maggie often lacked the simplest things: like soap, matches, and the like. As we hit house after house, Chuck often went right to the kitchen cupboards and the abandoned bathroom cabinets where he would fill burlap "scrounge" sacks with toothpaste tubes left by the inhabitants on the very sink edges!, soap still in the soap dishes, and so on. Man! father and son, they were like a whole flock of locusts just in themselves.

    Chuck's impoverishment was inversely related to his advancement in the company. As we each moved up the ladder of management, Chuck slid further and further into debt. Several options presented themselves - of which he availed himself of each in turn...

    One of the best was the day he read in a law book somewhere about "Pauper's Oath". Wildly excited, he sought my counsel.

    "Bernie - it says right here that if you go down to the Courthouse and take out a "Pauper's Oath" , they have to declare you a "Common Pauper" before the Law - and you don't have to pay any of your debts or anything. What do you think?"

    As sometime Consigliere to this familia, I considered this proposal from its several sides as far as my limited experience in these matters permitted at the time, and then in my best "e pluribus unum" - counseled that maybe - what the heck! - "sounded like a great idea to me (at this or any other time!). I, too, occasionaly heard howls outside my door of a night... I would watch Chuck's experience from a distance and maybe...

    And so he did it. He went and had himself declared a Common Pauper Before the Law in the City of Greenwich, Connecticut. And all would have been well, except that the newspaper published it the next day and George read about it on the front page! And creditors descended on the office in droves. And trucks came to Chuck's house to pick up time sales merchandise. And I want to say Maggie was shunned in all her social circles (but of these, of course, there weren't any!) and the children were taunted by their schoolmates, too - but this may be only hyperbole. George's wrath was real though and his stock as father of a Common Pauper (read it in the paper!) didn't enhance his social standing with Bill Cleworth's wife, who had always had it out for him ever since he and Bill got drunk one afternoon and disassembled her entire Grand Piano all over the floor in a futile attempt to tune it...