Features: Talk of Takoma • Howard Kohn

October, 2006

Saving one man's life:
A few minutes of difference

The exercise room at the Silver Spring YMCA was filled with leg-pumping men and women taking the cure. David Pierce (pictured below), a former commissioner of Takoma Park's soccer league, was pedaling a stationary bike with a book propped between the handle bars. Directly across, Dave Hedrick, one of the regulars in the concession stand at the Blair stadium, was pacing himself on a treadmill.

At some point the David Pierce noticed the friskiness go out of Dave Hedrick's legs. Dave's feet shuffled, shuffled again, and then he dropped in a free fall. The conveyor belt slammed his face into the base of the machine and rolled him off. A knee got pushed under a second machine.

David Pierce looked around. While he'd been reading the room had emptied.   "I didn't have time to think." For the next few minutes he applied the breath-in massage-chest methods of CPR he'd learned on the job at Hitt Construction. It was a little later, after a "Y' employee took over with a defibrillator, that he tried to appraise his actions. "I felt I'd failed. The man's face was turning blue. I thought I'd worked on a dead man."

Dave Hedrick had suffered a complete blockage of one artery and a three-quarters blockage of another. "If I'd been alone, I probably would be dead," he says. "Well, really, there's no 'probably' about it." The CPR kept his brain and vital organs from turning off. The defibrillator restarted his heart.

The two men got to shake hands in the intensive care unit at Washington Adventist Hospital. "I've never been in a hospital room with so much joy. It was amazing," says David.

That was a year ago. This spring David Pierce was given a hero's award by the Montgomery County firefighters, and Dave Hedrick testified before the state legislature in favor of placing defibrillators in every school.

When school opened in fall there were four new defibrillators on the Blair campus where Dave's daughter Emily entered the ninth grade. He was back cooking hot dogs at the stadium. The "Y" invited him to tell his story at a downtown Washington affair. "I was unfortunate to be the one who had the heart attack, but everything else about it was incredibly fortunate," he says.

David Corn's best-seller:
The passion of paranoia at the White House

What nerve it takes to analyze at book-length a war even as it lurches on and the war's most complex criminal case before it goes to trial, but then Takoma Park author David Corn isn't afraid of the bold stroke.

David's new book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (written with veteran Newsweek investigator Michael Isikoff), spent September on the New York Times and Washington Post best-seller lists and was the hit of review pages and blogs.

Still, it galled David, the longtime Washington editor of The Nation , to see one of his scoops seized on by White House officials who might otherwise have relegated the whole thing for a burning. The book reveals that the State Department deputy secretary, Richard Armitage - not White House chief of staff Karl Rove - was the insider who blew the cover of CIA officer Valerie Plame at a point she was trying to assemble dissuading evidence against the war.

This apparently lets Rove off the hook from a grand jury indictment, although his aide, Scooter Libby, remains accused of telling the grand jury a phony and convoluted tale about the leak and is scheduled to stand trial early next year, and there is a listing of dates and actions in the book that implicate Rove, Libby and others at the top of the government in a campaign to discredit both Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

"The President's people want to cherry-pick the one fact about Armitage as if it exonerates them," David says. "The truth is, they were on a complete tear to ruin Plame and Wilson."   According to the book, Rove told MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews that the couple was "trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back."

So full was their loathing for anyone connected to the couple that, David says, "Libby got this idea Chris Matthews was going to use Plame and Wilson for an anti-Semitic smear against neocons, who, of course, are all Jewish. One paranoia on top of another!"

After weeks of a mad wearying pace to communicate this and other points to the TV crowds and bookstore junkies, David took a break on a Sunday afternoon in late September to watch his daughter Maaike's soccer game at Jequie Park. "Definitely a high point. Her team scored six goals, and they never score goals."

Max's Highlight Video:
Right place, right time - finally!

The spectacular play that ends with the super jock at the bottom of a swarm of exultant teammates eluded Max Pollock during his growing-up years in the Takoma Park baseball and soccer leagues.   And at Blair, where Max switched to football, he didn't play until his junior year and was a bruiser and not a main event.

So when he left behind his folks, Ruth Kirpich and David Pollock, and their Poplar Ave. home - having rejected his best shot at a college varsity, overtures from Princeton and Yale ("I'm not playing football at the Ivies") - he seemed to be settling for the routine of homework, girls and intramurals at the University of Michigan.   Max's coach at Blair, Jimmy Short, though, pushed him to try out at Michigan even without a scholarship. He showed up at tryouts ("I liked the challenge") and made the team as a walk-on, unheard of at a university that has won more football games in the past 104 years than any other.

Max is linebacker, but his position was last guy on the bench. "You know what they call walk-ons," remembers his mom Ruth. "Walk-overs!" Michigan coach Lloyd Carr could not say enough about Max's "desire" and "heart," but when he gave advice to Max it was as much about English lit and political science as football.   The times Max got into games in his first three seasons were at garbage time.

This season, his senior year, Max made the travel team and qualified for an "M" ring, except he was preparing himself to get a ribbing at the presentation of the rings.   The custom is to flash a highlight clip on a screen for each player, and Max had no highlights.

On the September 9th season opener he was sent into the game with the opposing team, Central Michigan, in possession of the ball. Max lined up at left outside linebacker. The ball was snapped, and he had a vision of it coming straight at him. He later told his mom, "All I could think was why is their quarterback throwing the ball to me?"

Max picked the ball out of the air with his fingertips, a highlight interception, and rambled toward the end zone as fast as a 6-1, 218-pound guy can ramble. The ref signaled touchdown. Max was bent over, breathing hard. He could feel a heavy slapping on his back, much jostling, bumping and grabbing.   His teammates were mobbing him.

Coming home:
Across the river and into the woods

Since 1993 Todd Bolton (pictured at left) has been "trying to find my way back to the blue side of the river."

Todd's work was in Virginia, as a protector of natural resources with the Fairfax County Park Authority and more recently with the Virginia Department of Transportation, but his heart was in Takoma Park with friends Nadine Bloch and Beth Grupp and the others he hung out with at parties and dance socials.

In September he was offered and accepted the job as the city arborist. "I couldn't be happier," Todd says.

The fact that previous arborists typically caught blame for the loss of any tree in town is neither a surprise nor a detriment to him. "First of all, I was born and raised in Garrett Park, which was nuclear-free and tree-crazy before Takoma Park," he says confidently.

Todd wants us to see ourselves as living in a forest. "I'm a tree guy, and each individual tree is important, but far more important is the canopy of trees, the forest, and even more than that, the whole interdependent system. That's what has to be protected."

Takoma Parker recognized for heroic rescue

EGG HARBOR CITY, N.J.--On Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006, seven men were rescued from a life raft after they were spotted by a Coast Guard helicopter. The Coast Guard searched through the night and into the morning for the men on a fishing boat that left out of Indian River Inlet, Del.. The crew rescued the seven men after they spent two days adrift in a life raft following the sinking of The Chief, the charter boat on which they were fishing. A rescue helicopter crew from Coast Guard Air Station Atlantic City, N.J., transported the men from the raft to the 270-foot Coast Guard Cutter Tahoma. They all appeared to be in good health. Lt. Kevin D'Eustachio, from Takoma Park, Md., and Lt. Brian Potter, from Allentown, Pa., were the pilots of the rescue helicopter.

Above, D'Eustachio is commended--along with the other rescuers-- by the Egg Harbor City Mayor Joe Kuehner, Jr..

Comings & Goings

·  Advertised as "the most unique store in the universe," Madame X has moved into the former quarters of the Underground at 7000B Carroll Ave. in Old Takoma. Aside from vintage clothes, hardly unique in the local trades, Madame X is the place for "weird & scary medical antiques and curios, bar collectibles, out-of-print books, jewelry and retro accessories, and 45's."

·  The popular gathering place, Sangha, at 7014 Westmoreland Ave., is also now the Takoma Park outlet for the ever-changing artwork and artifacts of Silver Spring-based Alchemy, a rather fanciful shop in its own right. On sale are items created by the artists of Tibet, Nepal, Turkey, China and Africa as well as several who live within a few miles of Old Takoma.

·   The most magnificent of Takoma Park's Victorians, the Cady-Lee mansion at Eastern Ave. and Piney Branch Rd., is up for sale at $2.6 million. Directors of the non-profit Forum for Youth Investment, who bought the three-story, 22-room house for $1.1 million in 2002 and improved it with another $480,000, say they are willing to sell outright or share the space. The Forum's 15 staff members use it only during business hours.

·   On September 29th, one year after starting a search for a building to display and store Takoma Park's historical records and treasures Historic Takoma completed the purchase of the old Barcelona Nut factory at 7328 Carroll Ave. in the Takoma Junction.   Before the archivists can move in a built-out of the vacant 16-foot-high, 4000-square-foot space is needed. "But at long last we have our own building!" says Sabrina Baron, the president of the historical society.

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