George Noory, who recently argued in favor of allowing the two American Ebola victims to die in Africa, counseled his listeners this morning to be polite to policemen because they might let you off when you have broken the law. There is little doubt that this technique might work, but there is another side to the coin.

The guys who protected and served with me in the MP Company in Sandia Base, NM, in the early seventies were a peculiar bunch. For the most part we were grateful that we had been assigned to an area with no rice bogs covered by invisible sniper fire, but most of us had no interest in police work, and we hated just about everything about it.

There was almost no crime on the base. The time spent on patrol almost always involved nothing more than driving around with an occasional stint as escort for the proprietors of the BX (Base Exchange – like a Target or Walmart) or the commissary (grocery store) to bring the day’s receipts to the bank. Occasionally the bosses would decide that we needed to do something about speeding in a specific area, and they would order us to set up radar. Otherwise most of us generally left the people alone.

There were a few exceptions. One of them was a guy in our platoon who asked us to call him “Duke” because he was a big John Wayne fan. I remember that my first day on patrol was with him. After he drove out to feed an apple to some horses that for some reason lived on the base, he told me that he was going to show me how to give tickets. He disclosed that he had a few favorite spots in which he would hide the cruiser. From these locations he could see whether people came to a complete stop at a stop sign, but they could not see the police car or truck very well.

The first time that he saw one of these miscreants he flipped on the siren and gave chase. When the offending vehicle had come to a stop, he deposited ours behind it and, before he opened the door, he said to me, “Watch and learn.”

He held his head tilted back a little as he walked and pulled his cap down over his forehead. His gait was a reasonable impression of John Wayne’s amble. “Good morning,” he opened. “Do you know what a stop sign is?” When he returned his ticket book was one ticket lighter.

We returned to our hiding place, and before too long another criminal appeared. After we chased this one down, the Duke told me that I should give him a ticket. I refused, which really annoyed him, but there was not too much that he could do about it. We were the same rank.

The Duke was not a hard-liner. Whether he gave the subject a ticket or not depended not so much on the egregiousness of the crime as the attitude exhibited by the driver. If he treated the Duke with the respect he deserved, he usually got off. If she treated the Duke with respect, she always got off.

One of the Duke’s favorite spots was outside of the Officer’s Club. At the club’s closing a fairly large number of cars would exit, and there was a stop sign there that the Duke liked to monitor on the midnight shift. One night a very drunk senior navy officer blew right through the stop sign and was pulled over by the Duke. Occupying the passenger seat in the subject vehicle was a young lady with a reputation for making her living by providing extracurricular services to military personnel. The odor of alcohol was overpowering.

Needless to say the officer was very polite to the Duke, and he was rewarded with a warning and a simple “Please be more careful, sir.” The Duke did not provide him with a police escort, but neither did he confiscate his keys.

Most of the drivers whom the Duke stopped got a ticket because they had the temerity to question the wisdom of his actions in insisting on enforcing the letter of the law in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. So, in fact, in the Duke’s system there was a negative correlation between the severity of the offense and the likelihood of getting a ticket.

I don’t know if there are a lot of cops with the Duke’s attitude, but I do know that he was one of the very few in our company who intended to become policemen in civilian life.

I took my new Canon SX50 camera out for a spin in Cooperstown, NY. Here is a photo of a pond and the parking lot of the Alice Busch Theater, home of the Glimmerglass Festival, taken from the benches in front of the theater. The parking lot is on a hillside on the other side of Highway 80.
The red oval (in the center of the photo just to the right of the telephone pole) indicates a picnicking area, which contained three tables, one of which at that moment was being used by three people. If you can’t see the oval, click on the photo to enlarge it. Here is what the camera showed me when I zoomed in on that table:
This thing is awesome.

Like most people I greatly appreciated Robin Williams’ sense of humor. He reminded me of Babe Ruth, who, before Major League Baseball decided to allow black people and then steroids into its game, was the all-time leader in both strikeouts and home runs. All of the manic performances by Williams were bound to include a few swinging strikeouts, but you could also count on him to clear the bases at least once.

One of the two or three most startling moments of my life occurred in June of 2002, when the Bush Administration was making noises about invading Iraq. The Nation magazine of June 10 featured the following cover:

I immediately dashed off a very short letter to the editor:

Cartoon fans might appreciate a different caption on your June 10 cover: “Be vewy quiet. I’m hunting tewwowists.”

The letter, which was published in the July 15 issue, is still on the internet. You can view it here. I was, of course, pleased that they had decided to use it, but it was not a highlight of my life. I had previously had a few letters published in newspapers and magazines.

A few days after the issue arrived in my mailbox an employee of mine name Harry announced at the office that Robin Williams had stolen my joke. Harry had seen Robin Williams appear live on HBO in a live special. According to Harry he had quoted me verbatim without attributing the source.

We did not subscribe to HBO, and so there was no way to verify Harry’s account. A short time later we happened to be at a friend’s house at the same time that the Robin Williams special was being rebroadcast. I watched the entire show, and, sure enough, at one point he definitely said “Be vewy vewy quiet. I’m wooking for tewwowists.” You can read the script here. This is what Alexandra Petri wrote recently in the Washington Post about that show:

For me, the moment that I find myself returning to was his 2002 HBO stand-up special. As a high schooler enamored with comedy, I listened to it over and over again. There was such an immense playfulness and quickness to it. It’s hard to convey in words. It was so fully three-dimensional, so exuberant and so giddy in pursuit of every possible joke and gag and impression and face. He was fearless to the point of inviting parody.

Was I upset to hear my well-crafted lines so blatently plagiarized? Are you kidding? The great Robin Williams had stumbled across exactly one joke that I had written, and he considered it good enough to insert into his act. What an honor! Besides, he added a “vewy” and changed “hunting” to “wooking for.”