“Jesus was a carpenter’s son. I’m the son of a woodshop teacher, although I suspect he’s not my real father.”

- from the essay “Come Down off the Cross, We Can Use The Wood”
Delman Mangrove

The Layman’s Guide To Perspicacity

“Our Fire Department personnel were concerned that the decades-old buildings on Pleasure Beach posed a significant public safety hazard, especially after one of our deputy chiefs witnessed several kids running from one of the buildings during a routine … visit to the island. At the behest of our Fire Department, Burns Construction Co., which was doing some work on the island for the Town of Stratford, used their equipment to push the two buildings over. All involved recognize that the work should have been done with a demolition permit in place. We will take appropriate action to ensure that this situation does not occur again in the future. In the meantime, the Public Facilities department is determining how best to dispose of the rubble left from the buildings on the island.”

Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch statement on the Bridgeport Fire Department’s spontaneous and non-permitted demolition of the historic Pleasure Beach carousel and bumper car ride.

“Two days after it was discovered that two structures once housing amusements at Pleasure Beach were demolished without the apparent knowledge — or permission — of top city officials, Mayor Bill Finch said Friday the structures were “pushed over” free of charge by a construction company hired by Stratford to tear down abandoned cottages on adjoining Long Beach West.
Finch, who a day earlier said flatly, “We don’t know who did it,” said that a deputy fire chief determined about a month ago the abandoned and deteriorating wooden structures that once housed the carousel and the bumper-car ride were in danger of collapsing.
In a prepared statement issued Friday, the mayor said that he had learned the city’s Fire Department gave Burns Construction Co. the green light to tear down the buildings on the 35-acre beach.
Although Finch said he was in the dark about the last-minute demolition, he said he isn’t concerned that the Fire Department had failed to inform him. “I wasn’t completely shocked. I was uninformed,” he said.
“In a way I’m kind of glad they are down,” Finch said. “They were probably never built to code. They were carny buildings.”

Connecticut Post 09/05/09

Ah, Bill Finch. Bridgeport’s self-proclaimed “Green Mayor”. The mayor in charge of making Bridgeport shovel-ready for all those juicy stimulus project dollars.

Apparently Mayor Finch’s most pressing concern with this unauthorized Pleasure Beach action is what to do with the huge pile of wood left behind by the demolition. I guess that huge pile of wood creates a fire hazard. Most tellingly to the true nature of the mayor, being “uniformed” doesn’t completely shock him. It shocks me less than a joy buzzer in a candy bowl of electric eels.

Before we delve into the Case of The Shovel-Ready Mayor, here’s an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published memoir “My Life In The Black Market Government Cheese Trade”. Hopefully, this story will shed a bit of metaphorical light on the conditions that led to the non-permit destruction at Pleasure Beach. Sometimes it’s a long journey from one story to another, and sometimes you barely need to move a leg to get there.

Now let’s enter the Way Back Machine, boys and girls…

Back in my days at Chicago’s Lane Technical High School, all students were required to take four semesters of shop class. Being completely disinterested in any tool that didn’t grow on me, I developed an uncanny ability to worm my way into being appointed the shop tool room helper. This assignment allowed me to pass the class without doing any actual work. This practice worked well in electrical, machine and auto shops, but not in woodshop.

Our woodshop teacher, Howard Woodson (really), was more a hands-off kind of instructor. He spent the entire semester alone in the locked tool room, smoking his pipe and tossing out the occasional woodworking implement over the top of the security cage to an unsuspecting student who may not have been adequately trained to actually catch a ballpeine hammer spinning in mid-flight.

We were left to our own devices in woodshop. Mr. Woodson would remind us of his presence with the occasional verbal rant on poets who romanticized trees and assorted tree bi-products. He particularly hated Joyce Kilmer and Robert Frost, often shouting from the tool room, “Frost, that Yankee pantywaist. Good fences, good neighbors, my good ass! Melville, now there was a real writer. Saltwater of the earth, he was. Knew more about wood than a thousand high-falutin’ Hollywood ventriloquists gone to meet their maker.”

These outbursts were usually followed by a cry of “Heads up, pantywaists. Here comes a hacksaw”.

We were busy beavers in woodshop. As we had no set course curriculum, we were free to create anything from wood that struck our subversive or capitalist fancies. Some boys created chako sticks to beat the crap of either other in their best Bruce Lee mode. Some boys created one-hit hash pipes or bongs from the trunk of a small tree. Me, I was running a black market artificial limb business from lathe #4.

My Chicago neighborhood had a tragically high percentage of limbless Korean War veterans who were fed up with the endless paperwork and poor quality replacement limbs from the V.A. A large group of these vets attended our church and hung out at a local drunk bar posing as a VFW hall. I first encountered this high congregation of wounded local vets when trying to earn some money by shining shoes in every drunk bar in the area.
One of the limbless vets responded to my shoeshine sales pitch by saying “Forget my shoes, kid. Got any lemon Pledge for this termite-infested government issue cardboard leg of mine?”

I remembered that moment as I stood unsupervised in Mr. Woodson’s woodshop – lightning struck, a cash register rang, and a new business was born!

I sold my artificial limb creations at a reasonable price, used only the finest oak and teak, and best of all for the vets: no paperwork and no questions asked.

It was a good business for a high school kid. I carried my finished products home in a battered clarinet case, and no one was the wiser. Sure a few kids on the bus treated me like a band geek, but that’s the price of visionary entrepreneurship.

But the heady days of my black market limb business were not to last. One bleak February morning, I arrived at woodshop to find that Mr. Woodson had burned down the entire shop while he slept and smoked. It was rumored that when the fire department arrived, Mr. Woodson was still locked in the tool cage. He immediately began taunting the firefighters with cries of “Let it all burn, you axe-wielding pantywaists. Towards thee I roll, thou all destroying but unconquering whale. To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”.

That last part probably went right over the heads of the firefighters. Great guys in a crisis, but not so much for the classics.

We never learned what happened to Mr. Woodson. He was simply gone and never mentioned again. I didn’t really care. All I knew was that a half-dozen pre-paid limb orders were lost in those woodshop perdition flames. I ended up losing my ass paying back those vets. I took a job at McDonalds where I forced to wear a paper hat and was routinely told that I wasn’t “golden arches material”. Still, that job was my entry into the black market secret sauce trade. But, that’s another story.

So – what does this tale of Mr. Woodson’s woodshop have to do with the case of the shovel-ready mayor and Bridgeport’s demolition of the historic carousel and bumper car rink at Pleasure Beach? Nothing. Nothing at all. The Pleasure Beach demolition is unrelated and unaccountable to anything other than the unfathomable workings of Bridgeport politics.

EXCEPT- for that fresh pile of wood lying on the very spot where the Pleasure Beach carousel and bumper car rink so recently stood in defiance of the elements and years of neglect.

We’ve already seen that the future of that pile of wood is apparently Bill Finch’s primary concern in this matter. What to do? Hmmm, let’s think outside the box, shall we?

Here’s a solution, Mr. Mayor. Donate and deliver the wooden remains of Pleasure Beach to a local high school woodshop for the benefit of a new generation of teen entrepreneurs. You can even use the fire department to deliver the wood. Firemen love to deliver “Toys for Tots” to local tykes each Christmas. Why not branch out to local lumber-deprived shop students with a “Timber for Teens” campaign?

Think of it as an investment in the community, and in your own political future, Mr. Mayor. One local woodshop student entrepreneur may be the only one left to provide you with a limb to stand on when the voters cut you off at the knees in the next election.

Bill Finch has a shovel-ready mayoralty. Let’s use that shovel and bury it.

And I alone am left to tell thee…
Blogus Ridiculum
PT

Tags: Bill Finch, Delman Mangrove, Moby Dick, Pleasure Beach