Close Encounter

Frank Finn3 Comments

There was that song again, just like clockwork.

Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who stilled the water
Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who calmed the sea
Take a look at yourself
And you can look at others differently
Put your hand in the hand of the man
From Galilee

Every weekday night back in 1971, it was the same routine. As I arrived for my overnight shift as night auditor at the Ramada Inn in Williamsburg, Virginia, Smith & Wade, a local folk-rock duo who performed in the lounge, was closing their final set. And they always, always, closed with Anne Murray’s then-current hit, Put Your Hand in the Hand. 

Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who stilled the water

“Sing it everybody!” they’d shout. “Put your hand in the hand . . .”

Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who calmed the sea

“Oh brother!” I said to the guy at the front desk. I was his relief.

I set my thermos of coffee down and settled in to my duties. My friend Lyle, who turned me on to this job, was right: Being a night auditor was a sweet gig. You worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., answering the phone, checking in late-arriving guests, and closing the books for the day. Most nights, you could finish by 1 a.m., lock the lobby door, and snooze until your relief showed up at 7. You actually got paid to sleep! And with those hours, I could put in a 40-hour week at the Ramada Inn, take classes at William & Mary, and still have family time with my wife and daughter.

Over in the lounge, Cabot Wade and his sidekick, Dick Smith, strummed their guitars and harmonized earnestly, putting everything they had into the chorus one last time.

Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who stilled the water
Put your hand in the hand of the man
Who calmed the sea

I didn’t care much for this soft-rock pablum. Just two years before, I had joined the trek to upstate New York for Woodstock. Anne Murray didn’t play Woodstock. So Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, and the Rolling Stones were more my speed. Still, Smith & Wade had managed to get the crowd singing and clapping along for the rousing finish.

Take a look at yourself
And you can look at others differently
Put your hand in the hand of the man
From Galilee!

The crowd hooted and applauded with gusto, then tapered off into murmurs and laughs in that haphazard way an audience does when the show’s over.

Moments later, a group of five people spilled out of the lounge into the lobby, laughing a little too hard, or so it seemed to me. In their midst was an attractive blond woman who swept into the two-story lobby like she was taking the stage. I recognized her as Glennie Wade, Cabot Wade’s wife and the up-and-coming star of the William & Mary theater department.

The group settled themselves on the sofa and chairs in the center of the lobby, below the double-decker brass chandelier. Everyone but Glennie, that is. She stood before her admirers, a wide smile lighting up her face. And then she took a deep breath and began to sing,

The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk
Are secretly unhappy men because
The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk
Get paid for what they do but no applause.
They’d gladly bid their dreary jobs goodbye–for anything theatrical and why? 

Cabot and Smith had had their turn. Now it was Glennie’s time to perform, belting out Ethel Merman’s showstopping Broadway anthem. Right here in the Ramada Inn lobby.

There’s NO business like SHOW business like NO business I know
Everything about it is appealing, everything that traffic will allow
Nowhere could you get that happy feeling when you are stealing that extra bow

Ethel would have been proud. I was amazed at her display of chutzpah and one-upsmanship.

Not long after, Glennie and Cabot got a divorce. She graduated from William & Mary in 1974 and went to New York to launch her acting career. And thanks to the same talent, ambition, and charisma I witnessed on display that night at the Ramada, she made it big–really big–under her given name:

Glenn Close.

Hot Concrete

Frank FinnLeave a comment

In 1971, I was married, father of a baby girl, and a full-time student at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. In need of a job to support my new family, I first applied for a job waiting tables at the taverns of Colonial Williamsburg. Tourists flocked to these restaurants–King’s Arms, Chowning’s Tavern, and others–and the waiters reportedly made good money. But they turned me down. Why? Longhairs need not apply.

At the time, we lived west of town off Richmond Road, walking distance from Benson-Phillips, a building materials plant. They had an opening for a laborer, so I applied and got the job. The plant manager, Don, was willing to schedule my hours around my classes.

Benson-Phillips supplied brick, sheetrock, mortar, and other materials to builders in the area, but its primary business was ready-mix concrete. Between the work on I-64–still under construction between Richmond and Newport News–construction at William & Mary, and local contractors, the fleet of eight concrete mixers had a steady flow of orders to deliver.

I plugged away on the bottom rung of the crew for a few months, sweeping out the warehouse, riding along on non-concrete deliveries to unload materials, and occasionally driving the fork lift. I soon graduated to driving the massive front-end loader, getting a kid’s thrill out of moving gravel and sand around the yard in a full-scale Tonka toy.

Then one day the dispatcher, an ill-tempered redneck who drove a puke-colored Ford Maverick, quit. Don needed a replacement to take orders over the phone and send the drivers out on deliveries. He offered me the job. It meant a raise and working inside the air-conditioned office, so I accepted.

In my first week as dispatcher, things were going smoothly. But late that Thursday afternoon, Clarence, one of the ready-mix drivers, came into the office. He’d just returned from a delivery.

“C’mere,” he said, nodding to the end of the counter where I worked. “Here’s your cut,” he said, slipping me a crumpled 20-dollar bill.

“My cut of what?”

“The load I just took out,” said Clarence. He grinned as he looked around to make sure no one was listening.

“I don’t get it.”

fh05apr_ordcon_01

“It’s simple, man.” Now he was getting impatient with the not-so-smart college boy. “You wrote up the order for two yards, see, but Henry loaded the truck full–eight yards’ worth. I delivered the two yards, then I took the rest to a guy putting in a driveway. He paid 10 dollars a yard. That’s sixty bucks, and you, me, and Henry split it three ways.” Henry was the “batcher,” the guy who manned the booth under the towers full of sand, gravel, cement, and water, and pulled levers to load the right amount of each into the trucks’ mixers. The going rate for ready-mix concrete  in 1971 was $20 a yard, so $10 a yard was, yes, a steal.

Who knew that becoming Benson-Phillips’ dispatcher made me a partner in a black-market concrete scam? And a lucrative one at that. My $20 take in 1971 would be worth almost $120 today. That’s a lot of groceries.

“Uh, okay, thanks,” I mumbled, pocketing the twenty.

“No problem,” said Clarence. He looked at me warily as if to say, “You’re not going to screw this up for us are you?”

My crisis of conscience didn’t last long. I never seriously considered blowing the whistle on Clarence, Henry, and their co-conspirators. But I also knew I didn’t want to join their crime ring. So I returned the twenty to Clarence with a promise that I wouldn’t rat them out. Yes, I had visions of my body turning up in the James River wearing–what else?–concrete galoshes. And watching fully loaded ready-mix trucks leave the yard to deliver one- or two-yard orders made me nervous. So as soon as I could, I resolved the dilemma by quitting to take a job as the night auditor at the nearby Ramada Inn. Thus ended my brief career as a concrete black marketeer.

Early Days

Frank Finn5 Comments

Here’s the story of how my career as a writer/editor/publisher got off the ground, ICYWTK.

Where: Sports Department, Washington Daily News, 13th & K Streets, Washington, DC

WhenOld typewriter with copy space: Winter, 1967

Yes, this goes back almost 50 years. The Washington Daily News was the afternoon “commuter” paper, a tabloid that wasn’t much competition for The Washington Post and The Evening Star. Its sports department at the time had all the trappings you would expect: Teletype machines clattering away with news bulletins coming in from the wire services (AP and UPI). Jangling telephones. Reporters with Luckies or Camels dangling from their lips, pounding out stories on manual typewriters.  There was even a network of pneumatic tubes for sending finished articles–marked up, pasted together and stuffed into carriers–down to the composing room in the basement. Right out of The Front Page.

I was 16, a junior at Gonzaga High School in D.C., and through my girlfriend, Carol, I had landed a spot as a reporter on the News’ scholastic sports beat. That Friday night, I walked into the sports department fresh from covering some high school basketball game or another. I was preparing to do battle with my notes and a typewriter to wring out a decent report that wasn’t rife with cliches. Sports writing and short deadlines did not come easy to me.

Before I could reach a desk, my editor, Denny McAuliffe, intercepted me. Denny was a senior at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, the public school my girlfriend attended. Much savvier than I, he was headed to Vanderbilt on a full ride, having won the prestigious Grantland Rice scholarship, awarded annually to the most promising sports journalist in the U.S.

“Dave wants to see you.” By “Dave” he meant Dave Burgin, the Sports Editor. I followed Denny to Burgin’s glass-walled office. This was a first–I’d never been called to the Sports Editor’s office before.

“Have a seat,” said the notoriously gruff editor. I sat; Denny lounged against the door jamb.

“Frank, I got a call from the head coach of the men’s basketball team at GW about that story of yours.” GW’s coach was Babe McCarthy, in the midst of what turned out to be a 6-18 season.

The week before, I covered the game between George Washington University’s freshman basketball team and St. John’s, a Catholic high school squad. St. John’s beat the GW frosh. There was nothing especially remarkable about that, since any high school team has spent three or four years together, while the college freshman were still gelling as a team. But I made that my rather naive hook as if to say, “Gosh, how does a high school team beat a bunch of college players at an NCAA Division I school?” And I got several telling quotes from the GW players, including one who said, “To me, this is just another extracurricular.”

Burgin continued: “Coach McCarthy says your article has ruined his entire program. He wants to know how he’s supposed to recruit when you’ve quoted his players saying something like that.”

I didn’t know what to say. Burgin stared at me, deadpan, for a few seconds. Then he spoke:

“Keep up the good work.”

The rest is history. No, I did not go on to a brilliant career as a sports journalist. My stint at the Daily News taught me that I didn’t have the chops to write on deadline. But I did taste the thrill of seeing my byline in print, and the rush of knowing that my words could have an impact. I was hooked.