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VETERANS DAY: A remembrance

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Photo: ©IBIT/G.Gross

November 11 is a day to reflect on where we’ve been as a nation, and remember the men and women who serve and suffer in our names.

A lot of thoughts cross your mind on Veterans Day, especially if you live in one of the cities that has a national cemetery.

Like San Diego, where the tombstones stand precisely arrayed across Point Loma, overlooking the Pacific Ocean on one side and San Diego Bay on the other.

You think about your friends and family members who’ve been in “the service,” where they were, what they went through. Like my father, a Navy Seabee in the Pacific during World War 2. Like my Uncle Salty, a World War 1 doughboy on the Western Front in Europe.

If you yourself are a vet, perhaps you think of those who served with you, those who made it back with you, and especially those who did not.

If history is one of the reasons why you travel, you think about the Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington DC, and its famed Tomb of the Unknowns.

You also might think, if you know of it, of another memorial a short drive away — the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, a small courtyard outside the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria VA.

For me, though, this is a day to think about Michael Davis O’Donnell, a captain who commanded a US Army helicopter squadron in Vietnam. Young guy, very bright. Seemed almost destined to end up as a poet laureate at some prestigious college, maybe in his native state of Illinois.

Destiny had other plans.

On March 24, 1970, Capt. O’Donnell led two Huey helicopters out to pick up a Special Forces long-range recon team in Cambodia under heavy pursuit from an elite North Vietnamese force specially trained to stalk and kill those teams.

He insisted on flying in alone to get them. He had them all and was flying away when his helicopter was blown out of the sky by a rocket-propelled grenade. Searchers who returned to the area later reported finding no piece of the Huey larger than a basketball.

There are more than 50,000 American stories like this one from Vietnam. Their names cover the black memorial wall in Washington DC. So why does this one stand out for me?

On New Year’s Day 1970, Capt. O’Donnell had led a memorial service for members of his helicopter company lost in combat. He wrote a poem for the occasion.

He never gave it a title. I’m not even sure he thought of it as a poem. But there’s no question that it is poetry.

It says, in fewer words and far better than I could, why this day matters:

“If you are able,
save them a place
inside of you
and save one backward glance
when you are leaving
for the places they can
no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say
you loved them,
though you may
or may not have always.

Take what they have left
and what they have taught you
with their dying
and keep it with your own.

And in that time
when men decide and feel safe
to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace
those gentle heroes
you left behind.”

This is a day to remember all our gentle heroes — even the ones we only see fleetingly, under the bridges and freeway on-ramps that too many of them call home.

As for Maj. O’Donnell, he’s buried at Arlington. He shares his tombstone with the names of the Special Forces soldiers he tried to save.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
Never forget

AMTRAK: History rides the rails

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The past is not dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner, 1897-1962

History is not static. A nation’s past can move you, literally. For black Americans, a rail vacation can take you deep into your own heritage.

Earlier this spring, Amtrak trotted out a special exhibit in Philadelphia on The Great Migration, the movement of millions of black Americans out of the rural South to the industrial North.

It was meant to celebrate National Train Day, but the response was so great that Amtrak is bringing it back — first to Washington DC and later to Baltimore.

You can read all about the exhibit and how it came about in the Washington Post story here.

The exhibit’s a fine idea — as far as it goes — but it doesn’t actually go anywhere.

With a little bit of planning, however, this is one piece of black American history that can literally take you places.

America’s Great Migration of African-Americans came basically in two waves. The first took place between 1910 and 1930. The second began with World War 2 and didn’t end until about 1970.

My own family was involved in both, and as a kid, I experienced the second one myself.

In the first one, my ancestors, including some ex-slaves, left the farms of Mississippi for urban New Orleans.

When American industry began gearing up for World War 2, a good year of so before Pearl Harbor, millions of working-age black men saw their chance and went for it, traveling both north and west.

That’s how my Uncle Curly ended up in Oakland, CA, taking the old Key System trains across the Bay Bridge to work in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco.

Two decades later, he’d join the crew that built the Oakland Coliseum.

In the 1950s, my mother followed Uncle Curly to Oakland, and brought me with her. By train.

It couldn’t have been easy to leave everyone and everything that you knew, even if what you knew wasn’t all that great, and move across a continent with little more than hope and a willingness to work your butt off.

That took more “heart” than your typical gangsta rapper knows anything about.

It also took something currently in short supply in this country — a stubborn optimism and abiding faith that no matter what, you could still better your life.

Today, you can retrace those journeys via three different Amtrak trains — all of which, coincidentally, originate in New Orleans.

One is the Crescent, which swings north and east from New Orleans to New York. The second is the Spirit of New Orleans, celebrated in song by Arlo Guthrie, that follows the Mississippi River north from the “Crescent City” to Chicago.

Last but not least is the Sunset Limited, which runs west from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

(My family’s migration path required a fourth train, the Coast Starlight, from LA to Oakland.)

I can’t tell you much about my trip on the City of New Orleans to Chicago. I pretty much slept through it.

What do you want from me; I was four years old.

Chicago looked and felt like science fiction. Never mind Carl Sandburg’s “big shoulders,” this was some kind of sprawling, hulking universe. An energetic, powerful, we-ain’t-playin’ kind of place. Even the amusement rides loomed over me.

The only things that seemed to come down to my level were the fireflies.

What kind of town was this, where even the insects were electrified? Did they plug into the wall during the day to recharge?

The Sunset Limited was next. This time, I was determined not to sleep.

Eventually, I did, of course, but I saw more than enough to get me hooked forever on travel.

Many years later, I finally followed the path of the Crescent through the Deep and Dirty South — Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, into DC.

I’d grown up with the Civil Rights movement. The televised images of the Freedom Riders and Selma were all burned into my mind. Cross burnings. Church bombings. Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman, Viola Liuzzo on one side of history. George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Bull Connor on the other.

A lot has changed for the better since those days. Not everything, but a lot. Still, a part of me felt as if I were riding through not just my ancestral home, but what once had been enemy territory.

You can still ride the routes of the Great Migration — from Bay St. Louis, MS to St. Louis, MO, from Camden, SC to Camden, NJ, and scores of other stops along the way.

You can see the places your ancestors came from, and arrive in their new worlds as they did. And you’ll arrive in better shape than many, because a lot if those original journeys weren’t on passenger trains. They were in freight cars.

Think about that as you ease your reclining seat back after returning from dinner and drinks in the dining car.

We tend to think of history as a textbook, a statue, a museum — static, silent, dead. That’s not history. That’s just our approach to it.

History lives, with lessons to teach and stories to tell. It lives in your very DNA, in the collective memories of your elders, in scrapbooks packed with yellowed newspaper clippings and fading photographs with smudged notes scribbled on the back.

And because Amtrak survives, it still rides the rails of these United States.

ADDENDUM
Look closer at that pic up there at the folks waiting in “Colored Waiting Room” in some American train station. Everybody “suited and booted,” men and women alike, dressed to the nines. Wonder what they’d think about today’s kids “sagging,” with their “pants on the ground” and their butts hanging out?

the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

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A roundup of the good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

fall colors

© Shawn And Sue Roberts | Dreamstime.com

A CASCADE OF COLOR
The Labor Day weekend is fast approaching, signaling the end of summer. But for those of you thinking about a trip to drink in the beauty of America’s fall foliage, it’s time to get busy planning.

We’ve all seen the spectacular photographs like the one above, acre upon acres of trees clothed in blazing hues as they prepare to shed their leaves for winter. But if you’ve never seen this natural phenomenon for yourself, you’re depriving yourself of one of nature’s simple, silent joys.

The first time I saw it was when I went back to Connecticut to visit my friend, Walt. We spent a weekend cruising through CT, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine.

Have you ever seen something so intensely beautiful that it was hard for you to breathe? That’s how it was. A 24-hour sunrise and sunset, growing out of the ground.

Now, if you live in fall foliage country and have to rake or vacuum up millions of dead leaves every year as fall turns to winter, I’ll understand if you don’t share my enthusiasm for this time of year. But for the rest of us, this is something special.

If you’ve ever wondered why the leaves turn colors like that, this site gives a pretty good explanation.

You can find fall colors across much of the United States, especially in the Great Lakes area and even out west, as well as in Canada. But the region most often associated with fall foliage is New England.

You can do your own driving tours through fall foliage country. There are tons of guidebooks and Web sites devoted to the subject, and AAA can provide you with maps for your own self-guided tour.

Lots of hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfast houses offer fall foliage packages that include everything from meals to massages.

If you’d rather concentrate solely on the view — and isn’t that the whole point? — there are fall foliage bus and rail tours.

The bus will nearly always be cheaper, but being 6’3,” I gravitate toward trains. When it comes to legroom, it’s no contest.

So pack your bags, load your camera — and prepare to spend a lot of time saying “Wow!”

AIRFARE ALERT: Fall sale to Africa
IBIT reader, colleague and namesake Tracy Gross spotted this on the Web from ASAP Tickets Service — a fall sale from the eastern United States to 11 African destinations that stretch the length of the Mother Continent, from Cairo, Egypt to South Africa and Zanzibar. The sale runs through Sept. 15.

The US departure cities are New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The African destinations are:

  • Abuja………………..$1,019
  • Accra………………..$1,049
  • Cairo………………..$ 997
  • Dar es Salaam…………$1,439
  • Entebbe………………$1,049
  • Johannesburg………….$1,069
  • Kilimanjaro…………..$1,439
  • Khartoum……………..$ 989
  • Lagos………………..$1,019
  • Nairobi………………$ 969
  • Zanzibar……………..$1,439

According to ASAP, these round-trip fares that include all taxes and fees. Those prices are so good, it almost feels as if there has to be a catch somewhere.

And there is: You can’t book any of these fares yourself online. These guys actually want you to call them up and talk to a live human being. Their phone number is (877) 335-0223.

In addition to this sale, they also say they can hook you up with flights to 30 other African cities.

You’ll find more details on the ASAP Tickets Service page here.

ASAP Tickets is an arm of the International Travel Network, headquartered in San Francisco. The Better Business Bureau gives them an “A” rating (the highest you can get is “A+”).

Maybe I should ask them what they can do for us West Coast folks who’d like to visit Africa — but who don’t own a bank.

ALLIES IN THE AIR
Waiting to take off from Terminal 5 in London’s Heathrow airport, I caught sight of a British Airways jumbo jet on taxi. Only you had to look twice to tell it was a British Airways jumbo jet. The name that covered half the fuselage was oneworld, the name of the airline alliance to which BA belongs.

That was just weird, okay? But I figured it was just a “one-off,” as our British cousins say.

Only it isn’t. Seems there are quite a few airlines doing that these days, using their own planes to tout their alliances and pushing their own identities into the background.

What’s up with this? Is the alliance tail starting to wag the airline dog? And if so, what does that mean for you and me?

You’ll find out tomorrow, right here on IBIT.



And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

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AIR
from BBC Travel
A tale of two Portlands — Maine v. Oregon. The charms and attractions of each.

from USA Today
Another argument for a truly balanced transport system: The big airlines really don’t want to bother with small or isolated markets. Witness Delta’s pullback.

from msnbc
More silliness from the TSA. A black woman gets her hair searched at the airport. Her hair? Really? VIDEO

LAND
from Frommer’s
The world’s most walkable cities. See the world and get healthy at the same time. What’s not to love?

from Independent Traveler
Tips for beating brutal summer heat when you travel.

SEA
from USA Today
Costa Cruises drops Egypt and Tunisia from its 2012 itineraries due to “persistent negative perception” in the wake of political upheaval in both countries. Rgypt? Maybe? But Tunisia? Why? They’ll be switching to European destinations and Israel instead.

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AFRICA
from allAfrica.com
The Zimbabwean government looks to push tourism as a way to break down barriers across cultures.

-0-

AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN
from The Guardian (London UK)
With its bloody US-fueled drug war and its own lingering homegrown insurgency pushed to the background, Colombia is making a major comeback as a travel destination. And as you’ll see in this story, its capital city of Bogotá is one of the venues leading the way.

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ASIA/PACIFIC
from Lonely Planet
If you’d rather go farther afield for your fall foliage trip, consider Japan.

from Budget Travel
How about a nice 9-day vacation package to Afghanistan? There’s a Canadian travel company that will hook you up. No, I’m not kidding…and even more incredibly, neither are they.

-0-

EUROPE
from the Los Angeles Times
Florence, the Italian city that gave the world the Renaissance, is having one of its own.
​

AIRLINES: West Coast gets the Spirit

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© Ivan Cholakov | Dreamstime.com

The Florida-based airline known for rock-bottom ticket prices, tons of add-on fees and utter disregard for its passengers is now in California. Oh, be joyful…

Normally, when an airline begins serving a new region, it’s good news for the region, right?

In this case, not so much.

Don’t look now, but Spirit Airlines has entered the West Coast travel market, flying out of San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland, OR to Las Vegas.

Did I say they had entered the West Coast market? Infected is more like it.

It’s hard to imagine a US-based airline with a worse reputation among consumers than Spirit. They’ve been called America’s version of Ryanair.

Believe me, that’s not a compliment.

This is the airline that not only charges you fees to check your bags, but even for your carry-ons. They’ve got plenty of other add-on charges as well, including an extra fee for a seat that reclines.

If you’re willing to endure the aerial equivalent of a 19th century passage in steerage, you can do just fine on Spirit, and they’re still in business because there are lots of folks who do. If you want your Spirit flight to achieve a level of comfort and service comparable to the other airlines, you pay the fees.

Oh, they’ll give you breaks on their fees if you join their Fare Club — and pay them nine bucks first.

By the time you’re done with Spirit’s fees — and they’re done with you — you’re paying about the same as you would for a flight with one of Spirit’s competitors. Still, there’s no denying that when it comes to their base airfares, you’re often paying next to nothing.

Just remember one thing: When it comes to customer service from Spirit, you get what you pay for.

Which is next to nothing.

Stories about Spirit indifference towards customers, especially if something goes amiss with one of their flights, are both legend and legion. They’ve been fined six figures by the federal government for the way they treat their passengers.

Web sites like Consumer Affairs and Airline Complaints have multiple pages devoted to gripes about Spirit.

One online travel reviewer went so far as to create a “Spirit Airlines Survival Guide.”

Seek redress from their customer service department? Don’t bother; they closed it three years ago.

When asked about his company’s cavalier attitude toward its customers in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Spirit CEO Bill Baldanza not only didn’t deny it, he didn’t even bother trying to sugar-coat it:

“For years, in this industry, if you whined, we gave you something. You yell, we waive a fee. That’s created a general expectation that airlines will break their own policies — and we don’t.”

You can read the entire Times story here.

To get a different perspective, I got in touch with Joel Smiler. He’s the director of a complaint hotline for a non-profits consumer group called FlyersRights.org.

I’ll just let him tell it:

“If we allow for the size of the airline, I can guarantee you we get two or three times more calls about them than anybody else.

“If anything goes wrong (with their flights), it really goes wrong. If a flight gets cancelled, you can be stuck where you are two or three days before they can get you on another flight. They don’t even think about putting you on another flight on a different airline.

“I really have nothing good to say about Spirit Airlines.”

In addition to the way they treat their customers, you also can tell a lot about a company by the tone of its advertising. Over the years, Spirit has offered up such inspiring ad campaigns as its “Hunt for Hoffa.”

(For those too young to know the history, Jimmy Hoffa was a controversial union leader with ties to organized crime who vanished back in 1975, supposedly enroute to meet a couple of known Mafia bosses in Detroit. His body has never been found.)

Remember the BP oil spill last year in the Gulf of Mexico, the one that did untold environmental harm to the gulf and killed 11 men? They ran an ad urging people to “Check Out The Oil On Our Beaches” and declaring “We Believe in Offshore Drilling,” both featuring women in skimpy bikinis to complete the pun.

You tell me which is worse — their two “MILF” sales, which they said stood for “Many Islands, Low Fares,” or their Valentine’s Day promotion featuring a model with a candy heart over her crotch, bearing the initials “VD.”

Real classy outfit we got here. This is not an airline. This is Walmart with wings.

San Diego to Vegas on Spirit? I’d sooner walk.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
Spirit strikes again
WTF: Pay for your carry-ons?
More luggage lunacy from the airlines
Have you ever bum-rushed an airliner?

OUT THERE: A voice from London

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One of an occasional series on black travelers and their Web sites

SITE: Spinster’s Compass

LOCATION: London, UK

OPENED: Oct. 2010

MACRO-SIZED CHANGE IN A MICROWAVE WORLD
One of the great things about creating IBIT is that it’s made me some terrific new friends, one of whom is Porsche, the young lady who writes this blog. She’s a black American living in London, and she literally lived through the recent riots.

Photo courtesy of Spinster's Compass | All rights reserved

Much of the time, she writes on travel and her life as an expat. Since the riots, however, she’s devoting a lot of her time and blog space to conversations with folks in her London neighborhood (at her request, I’m not saying which one) about what happened there — and more importantly, what needs to happen there, and the rest of Britain.

“We live in a microwave society – people want things done in 90 seconds or less…macro-level change does not happen as quickly as a microwave society wants it to.” —Porsche, “Spinsters Compass

She posted a fair number of images during the riot itself, but it’s what she offered up in the aftermath — the messages left on an open-air community billboard and her own on-the-street chats with locals — that give a true feel and provide the greatest insight on the ugliness, its roots, and just maybe, some solutions.

These are the kinds of convos you’re not likely to find in the mainstream media, on either side of the Atlantic, which makes her blog worth a read. Nor is she shy about including her own opinions and insights, which include some unsettling parallels to our own history and experience in this country as black Americans.

Porsche is our eyes and ears on the ground in London town. When you’re ready to go beyond the headlines and the sound bites, give Spinster’s Compass a digital spin.

IBIT ON THE CHEAP: Hop on the bus, mate!

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ONE OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES

©Greg Gross

Hop-on, hop-off tour buses are a handy but pricey way to orient yourself in a major city you’re seeing for the first time. Consider regular city buses instead — especially in a city like London.

You’ve seen them. Every big city that considers itself a tourist attraction has them. The hop-on, hop-off tour bus.

They make continuous loops through town, most lasting about an hour, hitting the major tourist sites — or at least the places local tourism officials would like you to think of as the major tourist spots — with running commentary from the bus driver or a tour guide on board.

They invariably are double-decker buses, usually with the upper deck open. And for a set price, you can ride any time during a 24-hour period, get off at any of the stops along the route, and jump on the next bus when you’re ready to leave.

Liverpool | ©Greg Gross

If you’re new to a place, it’s a good, quick way to scout out the town, even if you don’t get off the bus. You can make notes, mental or otherwise, on the spots or the neighborhoods where you want to spend more time later or one subsequent days, whether they’re on the tourist maps or not.

The downside is cost. The fare on a hop-on, hop-off bus can vary greatly, from $13 in Liverpool UK or $20 in San Francisco to $37 in Paris and $43 in New York City. Even though kids’ fares are lower, it can still add up to a pretty hefty fee.

In many cities around the world, however, especially British cities or countries that used to be British colonies, there is a low-cost alternative — the double-decker city bus.

London is famous for them, of course, but you’ll find them throughout the British Isles and as far away from Europe as Hong Kong.

Take London. Granted the local red double-deckers of the Transport for London municipal service run a lot of specific end-to-end routes through the city, as opposed don’t just do fixed loops through tourist areas — but is that really a disadvantage? You get to see not jut tourist London, but more of real London, which can hold just as much fascination as the tourist zones.

And you can do it a hell of a lot cheaper. Riding one of these from one end of a line to another is £2.20, or about US$3.65. Compare that with that $37 charge for a hop-on, hop-off bus in London.

London skyline | ©Greg Gross

And if you get one of their Oyster card passes, it’s not only cheaper still, but incredibly easy to use. More on that in a minute.

If you’re on a double-decker bus and your aim is a cheap bus tour around the city, you obviously want the seats at the very front on the upper deck. Unlike the tour buses, the upper deck is covered, but once you take that front seat up top and take in the view, trust me, you won’t care about that.

It’s like being in the driver’s seat, without having to drive. You have a 180-degree view of everything.

If you plan to score these seats, however, you need to be aware of two things:

  1. These seats are popular.
    Locals and tourists alike prize the front upper-deck seats, so your best chance of finding them empty tends to be early, or late, or on less-popular routes. London divides its public transit map into six zones, and virtually all of the “tourist stuff” is in Zone 1. This is where the competition for those seats will be at its most intense. Don’t plan on sleeping in.

  2. These seats aren’t the most comfortable.
    Double-decker buses, not only in London but everywhere, are not known for their legroom. The seats upstairs are tighter than the ones downstairs, and the seats up front on the upper deck have the least legroom of all. If you’re taller than, say, 5’9,” comfort will be an issue. Just keep telling yourself the price is right and the view is worth it.

MAKE LONDON YOUR OYSTER
As cheap as public transit is in sprawling-but-congested London, transit passes makes it even cheaper, and the best pf them is the Oyster card.

It’s a smartcard with one of those RFID chips embedded in it. You buy it pre-loaded with a certain amount of money;the minimum is &£5.

The regular price £2.20 price of a London bus ride drops to £1.30 when you use it. Make as many trips per day as you want.

When you board the bus, just touch the card against the touchpad near the driver. That’s it, you’re good to go. And the same card works the same way for subways and trams within London. Touch the card to the touchpad and you’re in.

If your Oyster card runs low or runs out, you can easily “top it up” with a fresh infusion of cash at any London Underground station or designated shops all over the city. And if you register it, you can get it replaced if it’s lost or stolen — and no one else can use the old one. Sweet.

Charles L. Gittens, Secret Service 1928-2011

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Thugs, pimps, “players” and wanna-bes — you can all sit down. This is what a real “bad” man looks like.

The only thing tougher than being black in America in the 1950s was being black and being first.

Charles L. Gittens was both.

Mr. Gittens was the first black man ever accepted into the US Secret Service as an agent, and the first to head up its prestigious, high-profile and high-stakes Washington office.

He suffered a fatal heart attack July 29. Word of his passing only became widely known in the last week.

I don’t know if the guys who wrote the novel and screenplay for “Shaft” had Mr. Gittens in mind, but he very well could’ve served as a model for their fictional Harlem detective.

Because from all accounts, Charles Gittens was a “baaaad mutha-shut-yo-mouth.”

He joined the Secret Service in 1956. Two decades later, at an age when most supervisors are content to run their offices from the office, he was on the streets with his agents, literally chasing down and tackling counterfeiters.

Waiting for his younger agents to catch up didn’t seem to bother him any.

Still, when you think Secret Service, you think Presidential protection, something Mr. Gittens had a hand in for every President from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter.

Do you know what kind of a badass you have to be to make a living stepping into Harm’s way on behalf of the most powerful men on Earth?

Especially in an era when being black in America could still get you lynched?

Even after retiring from the Secret Service in 1979, he wasn’t done. Instead, he joined the US Justice Department — as a full-time Nazi hunter for the Office of Special Investigations.

Not too bad for a man who almost got passed over by the Secret Service because the guy who gave his oral exam claimed he couldn’t speak in coherent sentences.

You can read his full story in the Washington Post obituary here.

Traveling with Presidents means you get to see a lot of world — even if the “sights” you’re looking for aren’t the kind you find on souvenir postcards. I would loved to have talked to Mr. Gittens about some of his travels as part of Presidential security.

And not just the dangerous stuff.

Remember that now-famous film clip of Marilyn Monroe breathlessly serenading President John F. Kennedy for his birthday, with all that that implied? Somewhere in the darkness, out of frame but not out of range, was Charles Gittens.

I can’t imagine what he must’ve thought of all that, but whatever he thought, he kept it to himself.

Actually, I suspect there were a lot of things associated with his job that Mr. Gittens kept to himself.

Like his feelings about going into a Dallas restaurant as part of President Lydon B. Johnson’s security detail — and being told he couldn’t be served because he was black (he eventually did get served).

As far as his treatment within the Secret Service was concerned, Mr Gittens said he never felt discrimination or racism on the job. Maybe he was just lucky in that respect. Maybe he worked in offices where his white colleagues were more enlightened.

Or maybe they were just afraid he’d kick their asses if they disrespected him.

In any case, he seems to have been the exception in that regard. Others have spoken of white field agents telling “Negro” jokes in their presence, or having a noose hung over their workstation.

Then there was that episode in 1993 when a half-dozen black secret Service agents, in uniform, were “dissed” at a Maryland Denny’s restaurant — and that was 14 years after Mr. Gittens had blazed his pioneering trail.

“Mr. Gittens’ legacy of accomplishments will live on with all of those who knew him, as well as all of us who benefited from the path he created and the standards he set as the first African-American agent in the Secret Service,” said US Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan.

“His contributions to this agency and this country cannot be overstated.”

A fine sentiment, although it makes you wonder why, to date, a search of the Secret Service Website finds no mention whatsoever of Mr. Gittens or his passing.

Maybe they’re still mulling over that oral exam.

Charles Louis Gittens would have been 83 years old on Aug. 31.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
Cec Thompson, 1926-2011
Eleanor Joyce Toliver-Williams, 1936-2011

No Digest — too much information

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There will be no Sunday Travel Digest this week. I’m too busy running amok in and around London, and trying to absorb all the news popping off around Europe in the last few days:

  • Norway mass-murder terrorism by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist nut.
  • The death of Britain’s über-talented and equally troubled singer Amy Winehouse.
  • The phone hacking scandal gnawing at the ankles of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
  • The economic soap opera of Greece and the European Union.

An American politician once famously proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” The awful events in Oslo remind us that extremism in the name of anything is madness.

Among the stated ambitions of this self-styled defender of European “purity,” according to news reports from Norwegian investigators who’ve been through his computer, was to create “a cultural Euro-Tea Party.”

Things that make you go “Hmmm,” among other things.

Meanwhile, if you ever feel you’re being called by God to commit murder in His name, do yourself and the world a favor.

Hang up the damned phone. It’s definitely a wrong number.

Amy Winehouse has been referred to as Britain’s Billie Holiday, sadly for more than one reason.

We don’t yet know whether her death in her Camden home is directly tied to her long struggle with there twin demons of alcohol and drugs, but when you’re found on the floor of your own home at the age of 27 and foul play was not involved, that’s probably the way to bet.

Among brilliant talent, gone too soon.

The phone hacking scandal has set off a debate of sorts in London over its relartive importance. Is it worth all the attention being focused on it, or is this a bit of over-hyped “inside baseball” within the news media that’s diverting people from more important things like the desperate drought-famine in Somalia?

For better or worse, this story “has legs,” as the saying goes. Those legs have already reached across the Atlantic and there are some public figures in the U.S. news business whose names may yet come up in it.

In any event, it casts an unflattering light on the news culture in which being first with a story trumps all else, including professional integrity. The only thing uglier than that is the realization that for a time, the practice of reporters hacking people’s voicemail in Britain was actually legal.

And for all the breast-beating of the former News of the World about their history of bringing to light political chicanery and dirty deeds, it seems that most of their journalistic skullduggery was devoted to sleaze, determining who was sleeping with whom and the like.

Or perhaps there’s another reason why Londoners referred to News of the World as “News of the Screws” or “Screws of the World.”

All this has almost pushed to the background the second financial bailout package approved by the EU for struggling Greece. The media here follow every tick of this story, since what happens with Greece (and other Eu members teetering on the financial edge) has the potential to send shocks through the whole of Europe and even beyond.

As an aside, folks are watching with bemusement the antics in Washington over raising the debt limit. Many seem to sum it up as a bunch of children behaving badly in high places. As an American, I wish I could argue, but I can’t.

Okay, enough of that rot. Back to London.

London to Liverpool

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My first UK venture outside of London takes me to the land of the Fab Four and Britain’s first black community, courtesy of an Italian train.

Left from London Euston station aboard a Virgin Trains express train. The destination is Liverpool. Home of the Beatles and Britain’s oldest black community.

Your First Class seat comes with a place-setting with cup for your coffee or tea, a glass for your cold drink and a small plate for your sandwich, all of which comes with your ticket. It’s more like a small cafe on wheels.

Wheels that turn very fast —125 mph, a speed that most Amtrak passengers can only dream of). They also turn very smoothly and nearly silent.

They’re Italian Pendolino trains, designed to tilt as they go into turns to keep up their speed without doing a number on the passengers.

(The irony here is that tilt-train technology was first developed here in Britain, but it was the Italians who were the first to actually make it work.)

Among the differences between riding trains in Europe and the United States is that on this side of the Atlantic, freight trains share the right-of-way with passenger trains, but they tend to run on their own separate rails. That means no pulling off onto a siding to stop and let a freight train go by.

That one statement may bring tears to the eyes of a thousand regular Amtrak users.

Trains literally take you through people’s backyards, which can tell you a lot about a city, or a country. What you learn about Britons is that they’re seriously into gardening, front their tiny rectangular backyards to block-sized community gardens big enough to keep a whole neighborhood in vegetables.

You even see find a communal garden next-door to a centuries-old church and its graveyard.

London’s a huge city. It takes awhile for the row houses and blocks of apartments and “council estates” (translation: “the projects”) to give way to green, rolling hills picturesque little hillside towns and narrow, winding canals lined here and there by narrowboats, slow, slender canal barges that used to the the live blood of British commerce.

Nowadays, they’re vacation vessels for about 200,000 people a year, permanent homes for about 20,000 and working barges for a hardy, stubborn few.

Two hours and change lagter, you pull into Liverpool Lime Street station, which drops you basically into the heart of the city.

Staying at the base2stay Liverpool, an old brick warehouse near the waterfront converted into short-stay apartments for travelers. Everything inside is coolly and slickly ultra-modern, from the brushed-aluminum fixtures and the flat-screen HD television right down to the chip-embedded card key that you have to use even to get the elevators to work.

The free wifi isn’t bad, either.

Ended the day with a bottle fro the local brewer, Cains, that I just hadCains Fine Raisin Beer (as opposed to Cains ordinary raisin beer, perhaps?).

I had to leave San Diego and fly halfway ’round the world to run into a British beer made out of California raisins.

Liverpool was one of the key points in the triangular trans-Atlantic slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americans, which is why tomorrow, I’ll be checking out the International Slavery Museum before hopping the Pendolino and tilting my way back to London.

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London calling!!
My London ‘hood

My London ‘hood

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South Kensington is more than just a pleasant neighborhood within easy reach of a lot of London attractions. It’s an ideal base for exploring and mastering the rest of London — and it’s been serving that role for decades.

Back in my old London neighborhood, South Kensington.

Cromwell Road. Gloucester Road. Collingham Road. Being on these streets again feels like reuniting with old friends. Each name brings back a memory, a smile.

The sidewalks bustle with people of every nationality. Travelers flow up and down the thoroughfares, towing wheeled suitcases bearing tags from the airlines of a dozen nations from Europe, Asia and Africa.

My friends Jay and Irene Berman introduced me to this neighborhood a decade ago. It’s what I call a “travel base,” one of those neighborhoods that ideally suited as a base of operations for the visitor.

South Kensington has served that role for tourists, business people and foreign students for decades, and it’s easy to see why.

It’s strategically located to the rest of the city. You can get subway trains of the London Underground to virtually anywhere from the Gloucester Road Tube station. It’s got everything you need within easy walking distance — restaurants, pubs, grocery stores, banks, post office, laundromat, Internet cafes, hardware stores.

There are some nice sites close by, as well — museums like the Victoria and Albert. Parks like Kensington Gardens and Green Park. Harrods, for those of you out there with the shopping gene.

Walk south for a few blocks and you’re at the Thames River.

But South Kensington has taught me to look not for touristy things, but for the things that give you what you need and want to make your trip a success.

In other words, the things that make you feel at home, when you’re not.

But they’re more likely to be older cities like London, built to a human scale, rather than a place like Los Angeles, which was built around the automobile. Easy access to good public transportation is one of the hallmarks of every good traveler’s hood.

There’s another factor in my choice of neighborhoods when I travel, and that’s lodging. Regular IBIT readers know I prefer apartments over hotels when I travel. Staying in apartments rather than hotels is more likely to put you in a real neighborhood like South Kensington than in a hyper-commercial downtown district.

It can cost a little more than a hotel per night, but apartment stays come with some benefits that save you money over the course of your stay. Having a kitchen to prepare your own meals, and a washer and dryer for your clothes saves you money on restaurant bills and baggage fees, not to mention making your luggage a lot lighter.

I’ve since learned that just every great metropolis has a neighborhood like this, and the truly gigantic cities in the world have more than one.

In New Orleans, for instance, there are neighborhoods along or near the St. Charles streetcar line that are just as functional as South Kensington, and have the added “perk” of being beautifully scenic, besides.

New York City has several of them, in each of its five boroughs, and you New Yorkers out there probably can and should tell the rest of us where they are. Ditto for Chicago, Atlanta and Washington DC.

Indeed, easy access to public transit is one of the hallmarks of a traveler’s ‘hood.

What would you look for in your ideal travel base? Have you ever found such a neighborhood yourself when you traveled — and if you have, where was it and what was it like?

Okay, off to the Imperial War Museum. I’ll add some pics to this entry once I’ve had a chance to shoot a little bit.