Grand and ornate, the nine-foot-tall, decorative marble urns for decades flanked the stage of Arlington National Cemetery's Memorial Amphitheater, adjacent to the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Next weekend, however, the two urns, designed by the same firm that built the New York Public Library and the Russell Senate and Cannon House office buildings, will stand not at the forefront of one of the nation's most venerated shrines but rather are set to be up for sale at the Potomack Company, an Alexandria auction house.
The urns are literally "a piece of history," as the antiques dealer who now owns them likes to say. But their historic value - evident in photos of presidential visits since Woodrow Wilson dedicated the memorial in 1920 - is exactly why preservationists were stunned to learn that they are being sold to the highest bidder.
"It's alarming to see portions of our national legacy being sold off," said Robert Nieweg, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's southern field office. "It raises some red flags for us, and we have some very significant concerns about the cemetery's stewardship of this extraordinarily historic place."
How the urns, witness to so many public ceremonies, landed in private hands is something of a mystery. Under the strict procedures the federal government has adopted to protect its property - and particularly artifacts with historic and artistic value - the urns should have been restored or put in a museum, not put out on the open market, preservationists say.
Since 1997, the urns have been at DHS Designs, an antiques shop in Queenstown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Darryl Savage, the owner, is closing his store and auctioning off his inventory, which includes 14 marble balusters that were part of the railing that rings the amphitheater.
In an interview, he said he acquired the urns from another dealer, whom he would not identify. That dealer, Savage said, acquired them from a company that renovated the amphitheater in the mid-1990s. Savage said the company replaced the urns with modern replicas and was allowed to take away the originals.
NAWA, Afghanistan -- The baby’s name was Norzai, her father said, after pausing to remember.
The reason he’d brought her to the Marine base medical clinic was her feet, he said. They weren’t healing.
Not yet 3, her hair an orange hue possibly indicating malnutrition, she lay on the examining cot in a fuzzy pink top and a black bracelet and cried.
Lt. Colin McCormack, the Navy doctor who runs the clinic at Patrol Base Jaker, looked closely under the big light at the girl’s tiny, ruined feet. Third-degree burns on both soles glowed bright red. All 10 toes were gone.
“What happened?” McCormack asked through an interpreter.
“She just dropped into the cooking fire,” her father replied. It had happened three months ago, he said, and he’d sought medical help then. She’d been in a hospital for two weeks in Lashkar Gah, he said. Then they sent her home, and her toes fell off.
There was no sign of infection, McCormack said, and so there was little more that could be done for the child than to clean her feet, apply a thick coating of antibiotic cream, bandage her up and hand her back to her father.
But McCormack and his medics weren’t happy about it.
“Once again, the mechanism of injury and the explanation doesn’t make sense,” the doctor said. “I suspect something else happened.”
He noted that the burn went all the way around one ankle, like a sock — a “circumferential” burn strongly indicating someone had held her leg in boiling liquid and that the child had not been able to recoil from the pain.
“More likely than not,” McCormack said, “this was punishment.”
According to a 2009 U.S. State Department human rights report on Afghanistan, child abuse is “endemic” in the country, based on “cultural beliefs about child-rearing.”
“In extreme examples of child abuse,” the report said, “observers reported several instances of deliberately burned children in Paktia; the children sustained burns after their parents submerged them in boiling water.”
I’m one of the lucky ones.
War destroys without regard to what’s fair or just. This isn’t a new or terribly profound revelation, but witnessing it, and sometimes participating in it, makes it seem like both. In a professional military, the entire point of training is to minimize the nature of chance in combat. But all the training in the world will never eliminate happenstance in war, or even render it negligible.
I returned from Iraq with all of my limbs, most of my mental faculties and a book deal. I wake up every morning in an apartment in New York City. I’m working toward a graduate degree. I have a beautiful fiancée who reminds me to slow down when I’m drinking. And every day I feel more and more detached and removed from the Iraq dustlands I promised myself I’d shed like snakeskin if I ever got back home.
Like I said, one of the lucky ones.
Meanwhile, the black bracelet on my wrist carries the names of four individuals who weren’t so lucky. One got shot through the armpit with a ricocheting bullet and bled out on an outpost roof. Two drove over the wrong piece of street at the wrong time and likely didn’t even know it was a roadside bomb that ended it all. The last one made it through 15 months of war only to get drunk one night back in the States and shoot himself in the face during an emotional breakdown.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time.” Much of the novel focuses on Pilgrim’s experience of the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, something Vonnegut himself survived as an American prisoner of war. Like many American literature students, I was required to read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in high school, and if memory serves, I even enjoyed that assignment at 16. But I didn’t really appreciate the concept of becoming unstuck in time until I returned from war. Just like anyone who poured blood, sweat and tears into missions in faraway foreign lands, I left part of myself over there, and it remains there, while the rest of me goes about my business 6000 miles away — a paradox of time and space Vonnegut captured all too brilliantly.
I’ve walked by manholes in New York City streets and smelled the sludge river I walked along in north Baghdad in 2008. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks to watch a street hawker in Midtown, a large black man with a rolling laugh and a British accent, who looked just like my old scout platoon’s interpreter. And I’ve had every single slamming dumpster lid — every single damn one — rip off my fatalistic cloak and reveal me to be, still, a panicked young man desperate not to die because of an unseen I.E.D.
Despite these metaphysical dalliances with time travel the names on my black bracelet are, in fact, stuck in time. Or, more accurately, stuck in memory, where they’ll fade out and disappear like distant stars before becoming shadows of the men we served with and knew.
So it goes.
Quote by wickedpam:
Why is it that the Dems seem like the ones reaching out for their Speech date?
Quote by TriSec:
Morning, comrades!
The media wouldn't be planning on legitimizing the unauthorized pee tartie response tonight, would they?
Quote by Raine:Quote by wickedpam:
Why is it that the Dems seem like the ones reaching out for their Speech date?
Because I believe this was a Dem idea? I am sure the Repubs are doing the same, they just dont want people to know they are doing the asking as well. I'm gonna need some tums for tonite seeing the Boner sitting next to Joe Biden.
I like that they are doing this, but it is starting to get just silly. Why should it be that hard to sit with a member from another party?
Quote by wickedpam:Quote by Raine:Quote by wickedpam:
Why is it that the Dems seem like the ones reaching out for their Speech date?
Because I believe this was a Dem idea? I am sure the Repubs are doing the same, they just dont want people to know they are doing the asking as well. I'm gonna need some tums for tonite seeing the Boner sitting next to Joe Biden.
I like that they are doing this, but it is starting to get just silly. Why should it be that hard to sit with a member from another party?
I think your gonna need sunglasses too - Biden's got some shiney white teeth and Boner is so day-glo orange
Quote by Raine:
Pretty sure this isn't what the bible -- or jesus-- teaches.
*******VERY DISTURBING STORY*******
Quote by wickedpam:
Awesome!
Next year, you should come over for the SOTU. Stay the night!!!
that's just too much work can't we just
oh btw had me an oktoberfest in January - twas yummy and I felt like such a rebel
Quote by BobR:
I know this is a crappy job, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway...
Quote by Raine:Quote by wickedpam:
Awesome!
Next year, you should come over for the SOTU. Stay the night!!!
that's just too much work can't we just
oh btw had me an oktoberfest in January - twas yummy and I felt like such a rebel
Quote by BobR:
I know this is a crappy job, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway...
Quote by Raine:
Did Rush REALLY say that?
"With great fanfare, it was reported last week that the current health advice about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is outdated, and that scientists now believe that eight portions is more beneficial." And with no more than that, people will believe it because it shows up in the media. And scientists wouldn't lie about this, why would they anyway? Jack LaLanne was a vegetarian, look what happened to him? He died. Jack LaLanne was a vegetarian exercise freak and look what happened to him. He passed away. It's amazing, isn't it? "While many people grumbled about how on earth they would manage those extra portions, I allowed myself a wry smile." This is Zoe Harcombe writing. "For more than two years I’ve known that the 'five-a-day' mantra we’re all so familiar with is nothing but a fairytale. Of course, they are tasty, colorful additions to any meal. But in terms of health and nutrition, fruit and veg have little to offer, and telling us to eat eight portions a day is compounding one of the worst health fallacies in recent history.
"Surprised? Many people will be, and no doubt some dieticians and nutritionists will reject my arguments. But science backs me up. The latest findings come from a European study into diet and health looking at 300,000 people in eight countries. It found that people who ate eight or more portions of fresh food a day had a 22 per cent lower chance of dying from heart disease. Yet just 1,636 participants died during the study from heart disease, which is about half of one per cent. Out of that very small proportion, fewer people died from the group that ate more fruit and veg. However, the researchers cautioned that these people may have healthier lifestyles generally. They may be less likely to smoke; they may eat less processed food; they may be more active. What we should not do is to make the usual bad science leap from association to causation and say 'eating more fruit and veg lowers the risk of dying from heart disease.'" If you want to believe it nothing's gonna talk you out of it. And that's fine, if you want to believe it, go right ahead. Just remember Jack LaLanne. But feel free, just keep it to yourself.
Quote by livingonli:
Good morning everyone. Rush has just gone completely insane between all the ethnic cracks (especially the recent Chinese ones) and just all the other BS that he spouts.
Quote by Raine:Good afternoon, Liv.Quote by livingonli:
Good morning everyone. Rush has just gone completely insane between all the ethnic cracks (especially the recent Chinese ones) and just all the other BS that he spouts.
How are things going for you?
Quote by BobR:
okay, this is just getting stupid now...
Quote by livingonli:Quote by Raine:Good afternoon, Liv.Quote by livingonli:
Good morning everyone. Rush has just gone completely insane between all the ethnic cracks (especially the recent Chinese ones) and just all the other BS that he spouts.
How are things going for you?
Hanging in there. Looking at cars and the prices makes it look like I will have to wait until I can take out a 401K loan in order to get a new one. Of course it doesn't help that I will be without a car during wintertime.
Quote by wickedpam:Quote by Raine:Quote by wickedpam:
Why is it that the Dems seem like the ones reaching out for their Speech date?
Because I believe this was a Dem idea? I am sure the Repubs are doing the same, they just dont want people to know they are doing the asking as well. I'm gonna need some tums for tonite seeing the Boner sitting next to Joe Biden.
I like that they are doing this, but it is starting to get just silly. Why should it be that hard to sit with a member from another party?
I think your gonna need sunglasses too - Biden's got some shiney white teeth and Boner is so day-glo orange
Quote by trojanrabbit:Quote by wickedpam:Quote by Raine:Quote by wickedpam:
Why is it that the Dems seem like the ones reaching out for their Speech date?
Because I believe this was a Dem idea? I am sure the Repubs are doing the same, they just dont want people to know they are doing the asking as well. I'm gonna need some tums for tonite seeing the Boner sitting next to Joe Biden.
I like that they are doing this, but it is starting to get just silly. Why should it be that hard to sit with a member from another party?
I think your gonna need sunglasses too - Biden's got some shiney white teeth and Boner is so day-glo orange
My hair is brown, my eyes are blue and my skin is day-glo orange. If these colors don't look right to you, you're not seeing this on an RCA Color Television.
Quote by trojanrabbit:
Somewhat little known fact that ONLY the earliest color sets accurately reproduced the original NTSC color range. Only problem was that the red phosphors at the time were not bright enough. Once the later sets went to brighter phosphors, color reproduction would always be a little off.
Quote by Raine:Quote by trojanrabbit:
Somewhat little known fact that ONLY the earliest color sets accurately reproduced the original NTSC color range. Only problem was that the red phosphors at the time were not bright enough. Once the later sets went to brighter phosphors, color reproduction would always be a little off.
That is rather fascinating, As a former graphic arts person, I always struggled with color reproduction. RGB, CMYK were always a problem.
Red ALWAYS bothered me, to be honest.
Quote by Scoopster:
OK time to have some fun.. It's time for the hidden meanings behind six big-ticket movies!
I was laughing my butt off at Iron Man 2.. You'll see why.
Quote by BobR:Quote by Scoopster:
OK time to have some fun.. It's time for the hidden meanings behind six big-ticket movies!
I was laughing my butt off at Iron Man 2.. You'll see why.
Awesome!
Quote by Raine:So many good things have come from fucking with comic book nerds.Quote by BobR:Quote by Scoopster:
OK time to have some fun.. It's time for the hidden meanings behind six big-ticket movies!
I was laughing my butt off at Iron Man 2.. You'll see why.
Awesome!
Quote by trojanrabbit:
WARNING : Boring Color TV history ahead
There are about 30 working 1954 vintage RCA CT-100 color sets using the original RCA 15GP22 CRT and only a couple Westinghouse H840CK15 (which actually beat the CT-100 to market by a few months, using the same RCA CRT) working sets.
Unlike the CRTs we're used to where the screen is integral to the glass, the 15GP22 screen was hand made with about 500,000 phosphor dots and it was suspended inside the glass tube. Since glass to glass seals were unheard of in 1954, the glass screen was bonded to the glass neck via a metal cone. Even then, the glass-metal seal had a very limited life, and once the seal fails, the CRT is ruined. So while there may be hundreds of CT-100s around, most have CRTs where the seal failed.
There was a long going effort on trying to rebuild the 15GP22. In general all efforts resulted in failure because it is not known how to heat and cool the CRT during the air evacuation process as there is no information available from RCA. And sadly, the company that was assisting with the rebuilding efforts closed up shop last year, there are no more US companies that rebuild CRTs used in antique TVs. The Early Television Foundation purchased the rebuilding equipment and it is hoped that they will at least be able to rebuild the old B&W CRTs again, as that is a much easier process.
Meanwhile in France, RACS did succeed in rebuilding a 15GP22. So there is still hope that at least the 30 operating pieces of history can be kept running into the future.
Quote by Raine:
So, trojan, what are you gonna do with the time off?
If you and the mrs have time, we have space. you are more than welcome to stay here if you need a weekend away.