THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 10, 1995 TAG: 9503080014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By DAVID NAAR
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
I was born in 1931 in the small rural town of Ossining, N.Y., a town of yesteryear much like the town named Onancock of today. It was a peaceful town on the shoreline of the Hudson River, named after an Indian tribe.
I remember telling other kids at Boy Scout camp, when asked where I lived, that I came from Ossining, N.Y. They had never heard of it, as I had never heard of Scotch Plains, N.J., or Newcomb, N.Y., or many other places, like Cape Charles or Nassawadox, Va. This phenomenon followed me throughout the rest of the 50 years in which I lived there, unless I coupled the name Sing Sing prison with Ossining. Then everyone knew where it was. ``The joint, up the river, the slammer, the can, where they fried you in the chair if you were bad'' - where the Rosenbergs were incarcerated and one was put to death, or where notables like Al Capone went for unscheduled vacations.
The prison complex itself sat on one of the prettiest sites in the town, overlooking the river with a western view of the setting sun and, on a clear day, New York City. The warden's house sat atop a hill looking down on the prison. The prison was, I guess like most other maximum-security prisons: machine-gun towers linked together with 20-foot cement walls topped with barbed wire; cell blocks of different vintages, all with barred windows; and standing out from all of them the ``death house.''
Every kid in town knew what it looked like, and every kid had, at some time, some morbid reason to walk home from school that way in order to see it. Maybe they were hoping to hear the screams of someone who was being marched to his death, not knowing that those who were on their way were heavily sedated, nor realizing that most executions took place in the early hours of the morning before people were awake.
Many of the kids I went to school with had parents who worked at the prison. Some were guards, some were maintenance people, some worked at the warden's house. None of them were highly educated, none were paid well, and none who I ever knew wanted to talk about their employment there. They worked in shifts around the clock and quietly tended their gardens after hours or drank sullenly and alone in the local bars.
Of course there were exceptions. I ran around with a local girl whose father, a wonderful, gentle man, raised orchids in his home-built greenhouse. He retired after 20 years of manning a machine gun in one of the towers. As much as I tried, he would never tell me about any of the prison events. It was as if he was embarrassed to admit that he worked there.
I was engaged to be married to a girl whose father worked at the prison and who died quietly under strange circumstances.
I was married for 14 years to the daughter of the prison doctor, who stitched up my foot after I stepped on a broken bottle. He died an alcoholic, hating his job.
Several of the fathers of my friends were suicide victims - two were guards, one was a maintenance man. One of those friends became a lawyer and a judge but did himself in with alcohol.
My father was the editor of the newspaper, and I can remember how he acted and looked after he witnessed an execution in the electric chair. Even though there was never any official announcement made prior to an execution, it was always broadcast via the grapevine, and everyone in town swore that the lights went dim when another one was fried. That was only morbid story-telling, as I was to find out in later years, since the prison had its own generating station and did not draw from the local grid.
World War II came and went, and the prison population fluctuated with the bad and good times. There were breaks on occasion. I remember my friend the school-crossing guard, who was shot and killed by an escapee. There was a mass said for him, for he was a hero. That didn't bring him back, though. His nephew was in my class in grade school.
I returned from the Korean War and was deputized one night when an escapee was spotted in the woods near Maryknoll, a Catholic Mission. He was found hiding under a tree and returned to the prison.
A few years later, two murderers serving time on death row escaped and forced a local fisherman to row them across the river in his boat. They then shot him. One of the escapees was shot and killed by the Rockland County police, the other was returned to death row to be later executed.
I remember that during the war when the air-raid sirens went off, there was always apprehension as to whether it was an air raid or a prison break. After the war the system was revamped, but I can still hear on a dark, foggy night, the sirens for a fire and wonder if maybe there has been a break. I never realized until recently what an influence living in a prison town had over me. There was always the element of fear, and one never walked at night without looking over his or her shoulder.
A few years ago I fell in love with a dream called ``the Eastern Shore,'' mainly because it was like going back in time to the gentle place where I was raised, but minus the specter of a prison hanging overhead and without the sense of foreboding triggered by its presence. A place where honest, hard-working people labor growing food, fishing, boating. Of course, there are employment problems here, but they are no worse than any other place.
As far as I can see, there is no possible good to be gained from having a prison in an area such as this. The jobs which might or might not come about are dead-end, boring, mean jobs, paying poorly and without dignity. How can anyone who works as a prison guard hold up his head and say at the end of his tour that he feels good about his job? What do prison guards tell their children at the end of the day? What do they say to their wives in the intimacy of the bedroom about their work? Unless this prison is a lot different from the one which I grew up with, there is no dignity to their jobs, they can't say anything to their children and they don't talk to their wives about their work.
I can only hope that my dream has not come to an end and that the Northampton County supervisors will vote a resounding ``No'' for a prison on the Eastern Shore. MEMO: Mr. Naar lives in Cape Charles. by CNB