Flacks: 1973

By T.R. St. George

This is the seventh in a series of nine satiric, comedic novels (The Eddie Devlin Compendium)that follow a gaggle of characters, Edward Temperance Devlin foremost among them, from the Stock Market Crash of 1929 through the Great Depression, World War II, the post-war years, the Kenneedy assassination, Watergate, etc. to the Millennium and beyond. With illustrations by the author.

Books:

Flacks (1973)
Bringing Chesty Home (1948)
Clyde Strikes Back (1963-64)
Deadlines (1984-85)
Old Tim's Estate (1929-35)
Replevy for a Flute (1956)
The Bloody Wet (1943-44)
The Survivors (1999-2000)
Wildcat Strike (1939)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 13, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465334381

T.R. St. George

T.R. St. George spent 39 months in the Southwest Pacific in World War II, by turn a private and private first class in an Infantry reconnaissance platoon, a corporal and half the staff of a division newspaper and, eventually a sergeant, a reporter for YANK, the weekly Army magazine published around the world.

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Copyright © 2002 by T. R. St. George.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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FOR BRENNA, CARLIN, MEGAN, HAYLEY AND NORAH

Flack(s) (Amr. Slang) A person (or persons) employed by or under contract to a firm, organization, political party or individual (usually a politician or celebrity) for the purpose of presenting through wide use of the various media and other means the firm, organization, political party or individual in the best possible light for public consumption: and/or, conversely, concealing from the public information adverse to this public image. See also Press Agent, Public Relations.

This is the seventh in a series of nine satiric novels that follow a gaggle of characters, Edward T. Devlin foremost among them, from the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the Millennium and beyond. The previous titles, also published by Xlibris, are: Old Tim’s Estate (1929-35), Wildcat Strike (1939), The Bloody Wet (1943-44), Bringing Chesty Home (1948), Replevy for a Flute (1956) and Clyde Strikes Back (1963-64).

1

Wednesday, January 24, 1973. A sullen winter dawn in breaking under a heavy overcast in the vicinity of 45 North and 92 West, out where the Swedes and the snowmobiles roam, when the cracked plastic radio Edward T. (Eddie) Devlin salvaged in the Devlin vs. Devlin divorce settlement snaps itself on in the dark and vomits:

Seven-oh-two! That’s Happy Howard time, folks! On the Happy Howard Show! Six to eight-thirry daily on WVMW The Voice of the Middle West! Eight-three-oh on your radio dial! The temmerchure! Eighteen bee-low! With a northwest wind gussing to thirty-five m p h! The Wind Chill Index! Fiffy-five bee-low! Following an overnight low of twenny-two bee-low accommanied by four inches of new snow bringing the Seasonal Accumuration to a Near Record sixxy-six inches! Better bunnel up today, folks! The Forecast! Continued cold and cloudy with a high today near ten bee-low! And now The News! Followed by Number Niner on Happy Howard’s Top Forty! Bud the Stud and His Stallions’ smash hit! Ten-Car Pile-Up! But first this word from Friendly Fuckemall Dodge and Banzai!

Eddie Devlin, a thin white male in his middle years curled up under three blankets and his car coat in a spavined Furniture Rental fold-a-bed in his frigid third-floor studio unit in Bldg. 1 at Paradise Manor, a large frame cheaply built suburban apartment complex, stirs and groans. Happy Howards come and go on WVMW somewhat more frequently than migratory fowl but they all sound the same: seventeen, with terminal adenoids.

A Desperate Situation, folks! Fair Freddie Fuckemall has got to make room for all those brand new Sevenny-Threes! Those Sevenny-Twos got to go go go, folks! So get right out to the big Desperation Sale at Friendly Fuckemall Dodge and Banzai! And now The News! President Richard Nixon beginning his Second Term pledged his Administration will seek peace with honor in Viet—

Eddie Devlin, no admirer of Tricky Dick, gropes for the radio on the floor beside his fold-a-bed, throttles Happy Howard and surmises, grimly: eighteen bee-low, his goddamn little Banzai (the former Mrs. Devlin got the Pontiac in the settlement) won’t start.

Thirty minutes later, it won’t. The goddamn little Banzai, Hiroshima’s revenge, sullen and inscrutable under four inches of new snow in the Tenant Parking Area, will only make a noise like rurururu rururu ruru ru. Then no noise at all.

No go, huh? Harry Strzazki, caretaker, the Voice of Paradise Manor, bundled up in a dirty Army surplus parka, leaning on his snowblower, says. Yah, welt, it’s colt enuff a froze duh balls offen a marbled discus trunner. But nebber fear, yer Color fren is here.

Praise Allah! Eddie’s Color fren and next door neighbor, Ibn Abu Hashim Muhammad el Hir Sahida, hereinafter known as Ibn, first son of sheik, heir to a Middle East oil fortune, late of the Sorbonne, a grad school student in Economics at Land Grant U, drives a fire-engine red ‘73 Thunderbird, rents one of the Garages Available and owns jumper cables.

They jump the Banzai, a popular Midwestern winter sport. What’s the score, Eddie, nursing the Banzai’s feeble sputter while Ibn coils his cables, says.

Wan-hondred-and-zerty-wan.

Right on!

Ibn beams. A heavyset young man with a hawk nose in a round brown face, he looks like a bear in a long fur coat, fur cap and mittens. But Ibn is not hibernating. He is busy fulfilling a sacred vow. Before he returns to el Hir Sahida at the end of Land Grant U’s winter quarter, he aims to scrooze 152 American women, none of them known hookers if he can help it, one for every well, dry or producing, an American oil consortium has scroozed into his father’s sands. And he has a question for Eddie. How eez Meez Kitty?

Fan-tas-tic!

Geev her my I say ‘ello. Beaming still, Ibn climbs into his ‘Bird and departs at high speed in a swirl of new snow. Eddie follows him, slowly. There is something wrong with the goddamn little Banzai’s goddamn little transmission. Kitty is Miss Katherine Kammerfuss, an elementary school teacher with whom Eddie is having an elementary affair.

It is 8:05 Happy Howard Time, the goddamn little Banzai’s goddamn little radio functions now and then, when Eddie eases off the Governor Marcus Diptill Memorial Expressway onto the Company exit and into the Employee Parking Area. By then, the Company is big on getting to work on time meaning 8 sharp, Lots 1 through 8 are full. Eddie finds a slot on the far fringe of Lot 9, Outer Siberia, where the goddamn little Banzai’s goddamn little engine dies with a noise like a death rattle. Which it may be. All the new snow, Knute Knute the Snowplow King hard at work since 4 a.m., has been removed from the Parking Area and added to a pile beside Lot 9 that looks like the Himalayas.

A long cold mush now confronts Eddie. Looming up through the blowing snow beyond Lot 1 is the Main Administration Building, Bldg.1 on the Central Facilities Map stuffed in the last Annual Report, also World Headquarters of the mighty moneymaking Greedy Manufacturing Co. Inc., though technically, for tax purposes, Greedy Manufacturing is a Delaware Inc.

Main Admin. Fourteen stories of glass and steel and pre-cast concrete, it rises sheer out of the Midwestern prairie in a suburb that gave it a whopping tax break, esthetic as a can of antifreeze, crowned with the Company logo, a green neon blur in the blowing snow, Dollars Rampant Giving Birth to Profits. The tallest man-made structure, it is said, not counting broadcast antennae and Forest Service fire-towers, between Saginaw Michigan and Grant’s Pass Oregon. In a straight line.

A living monument! G.K. Whiner, Corporate VP for Communications, with more enthusiasm than accuracy, often tells the yahoos at Chamber of Commerce conclaves. To the American Spirit of Free Enterprise!

Employees disgruntled for one reason or another call this structure Fort Greedy, the Glass Menagerie, the Piranha Pool, the Funny Factory or, a little corporate humor here, Kapstan’s Last Erection in memory of the late Casper Kapstan, Corporate VP for Capital Expenditures during its construction. At a cost of $11 million. With no frills in the Employee Lobby.

No frills but when at last Eddie claws through doors opaque with frost the Employee Lobby is blessedly voluptuously warm. Eddie begins to thaw. A member of the Custodial Engineering Staff (and old codger with a mop, the Company is big on euphemisms) is wiping up the overshoe tracks. Eddie dodges the old codger’s mop. A sign at the Security Desk says Persons Attempting Entry Without a Valid Employee Pass Will be Detained. The Company is very big on Security. Half a dozen Security (mainly ex-servicemen, former lifers, uniformed like bus drivers, armed with flashlights and walkie-talkies) are standing around at parade rest alert to Detain Persons Attempting etc.

Eddie flashes his Valid Employee Pass and lopes down the hall to the elevator bank. There are eight elevators. Two bear discreet signs, Executive Express 14th Floor Only. Another whisks Eddie up to 10-South. Installed there are Corporate Communications (which means public relations, in which Eddie is a Junior Publicist), Government Affairs (the lobbyists’ lair), Stockholder Relations and Civic & Community Affairs.

Oh, Mister Devlin! I have a messidge for you! Donna (Schulzie) Schulz, this is, the Clerk I (no shorthand, not much typing) Eddie shares with Klint Kleet and Wint Wood, other Junior Publicists, a girl thin as a stick just turned twenty, graduate of a business college, with a bouffant like a wasps’ nest. He said, Mister Whiner said. He wants to see you in his office at nine o’clock!

Did he say what for? A dumb question. Corporate VP G. (for George, a.k.a. Little George) K. Whiner does not share his thoughts with Clerks I. No, Donna says. Eddie plucks the Telephone Message Form from her bony fingers and goes into his office.

Well, office. Eddie’s office is a six-by-six foot cubicle with walls of pressed metal and no roof. There are twenty-seven other cubicles exactly like it back-to-back in two rows down the middle of 10-South, mostly occupied, a few are empty, by what Whiner calls the professional staffs. Professionals, that is, below the rank of assistant supervisor. Assistant supers, supers, assistant managers, managers, project directors, the Company is big on titles, have real offices (with windows for supervisors and above) along Main Admin’s exterior walls. Secretaries, Clerks I and II, the Typing Pool, females all, work at desks jammed between these Chiefs and the Indians in the cubicles in what is jocularly known as No Man’s Land. G.K. Whiner as befits a corporate VP has an executive suite, a corner office with a carpet and a private john and adjoining space for his very own secretary. So does his archrival in the corporate guerrilla wars, T.B. (Teddy) Swindell, Corporate VP for Civic & Community Affairs. Both suites, separated by a Conference Room, overlook the reflecting pool at Main Admin’s main entrance. Now buried under 66 inches of Seasonal Accumulation.

The Government Affairs and Stockholder Relations VPs, ranked higher in the Company hierarchy, have offices on the 14th (Executive) Floor.

The professional staffs call their cubicles the Glass Menagerie, the Funny Factory, etc. Each contains a metal desk and file cabinet, two metal chairs, one a swivel, a metal wastebasket and a typewriter, all a bilious Company green, the color of money. Desk and file cabinet, this a Communications Department Policy and there are frequent memos about it, are supposed to be Securely Locked At All Times When Not in Use. Little George Whiner is a Security Freak. He is pretty sure half the occupants of No Man’s Land are sleeping with spies beholden to Monsanto, Dow, Alcoa, Xerox, du Pont, Minnesota Mining or Gulf & Western and a lot of goddamn government regulatory agencies and he’s not so sure about some of the professionals either.

Eddie kicks off his overshoes, hangs his car coat on the hook on his cubicle door, unlocks his desk, removes the Company History he is rewriting, updating and expurgating and rolls paper into his bilious green IBM Selectric. Should anyone barge in it will appear he is hard at work expurgating. Then he sends Schulzie for coffee, there are machines beside the elevators, borrows Klint Kleet’s morning Monitor Union and skims the headlines. Jet Skyjacked. Clues Sought in Yablonski Slaying. Amtrak Reports Loss. Angola War Toll 2 Million. Watergate Probe Continues. Draft Office Torched. Kissinger Sees Light at End of Tunnel. Tofte Raps Greedy Suit Delay. A loyal employee, he reads:

Tofte Raps Greedy Suit Delay

By Peter P. Hohn, Monitor Union Capitol Reporter

State Rep. Helen Two Bears Tofte yesterday charged State Attorney General Lester Skinner with dragging his moccasins in the on-going litigation involving the Greedy Manufacturing Co’s. North Shore taconite operations.

If the Attorney General were hunting deer, Tofte told the House subcommittee on pollution abatement. He would die of starvation and good riddance.

The state at Tofte’s urging when the DFL (DemocratFarmer-Labor Party) controlled the Legislature filed suit against the Greedy Manufacturing Co. eight years ago in an effort to curtail or restrict the dumping of tailings from the firm’s North Shore taconite plants into Lake Superior.

Tofte and others contend the tailings contain asbestos fibers that, they contend, pose a threat to both humans and marine life. The Greedy Manufacturing Co.

has challenged that contention and Skinner said last week the litigation currently is on hold pending a proposed study designed to determine the exact composition of the tailings.

Tofte called the proposed study a political ploy and said the Greedy Manufacturing Co. has Skinner in its pocket, bought and paid for with campaign contributions. Skinner could not be reached for comment, but a member of his staff termed Tofte’s statement ridiculous.

The subcommittee later voted 6-5 along party lines to table a bill authored by Tofte that would have imposed stiffer restrictions on the disposal of industrial wastes.

So Two Bears Tofte is on the warpath again. The first Native American elected to the State Legislature and still its only Native American (well, half a Native American, her father was a Norwegian, but you only need a Native American great-greatgrandparent to join the American Indian Movement), Helen Two Bears Tofte is an on-going sharp stone in the Company’s moccasins. Taconite is low-grade iron ore turned into high-grade ore pellets in plants the size of steel mills on Lake Superior’s North Shore, the pellets then shipped via lake carriers to Gary, Indiana, Cleveland, etc. But Helen Two Bears is not Eddie’s problem. The Indian War is conducted at a higher level by the Legal Department with occasional help from G.K. Whiner, T.B. Swindell and the honchos in Government Affairs.

Eddie also reads the sports section, largely devoted to basketball and the upcoming Superbowl, and a few used car ads, the goddamn little Banzai is failing fast, until 8:55, then locks his desk, dons a sincere alert concerned expression and reports to G.K. Whiner’s executive suite.

Gentlemen, Whiner, hunkered down behind his massive genuine mahogany desk, meaning Eddie and C. S. for Clarence Seaton (Whitey) Swett, says. Coffee? Tanyaaaa!

Tanya Wobig, Whiner’s very own secretary, a busty number in her middle thirties, pops in, collects the coffee orders and pops out again. Swett fires up his pipe. A gaunt man in his mid-forties with pale frightened eyes, prematurely white hair and a receding chin who has spent all his adult life in the Communications business and been with the Company for eighteen years, C. S. Swett is a full-fledged supervisor. He supervises Communications’ Outlying Plants & Facilities Section (OP&FS) and in that capacity commands, timewise, one-andfive-sixths personnel: all of Eddie, half of Bertha Appenzeller, a tough old bird and veteran secretary who knows where the bodies are buried, and one-third of Klint Kleet.

Whiner leans forward in his genuine leather swivel chair and gets busy choosing some words. On the wall behind him, looking over his shoulder so to speak, is a framed life-size color photo, bald head and shoulders, signed Best Wishes to a Loyal Employee, A.D.G. II. Avarice Dividend Greedy II, A.D. to all who know and love him, a fourth-generation entrepreneur, is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the mighty money-making Greedy Manufacturing Co. Inc. and in Whiner’s religion the Lord God Almighty sits at A.D. II’s right hand, lucky to be there.

We just may have, Whiner, having chosen some words, says. A delicate situation upcoming. The way I read it.

Two Bears, Swett, who also reads the Monitor Union, says. Dammed squaw.

No, Whiner says. Two Bears is Government Affairs’ problem. And Legal’s. Next election, we’ll send her back to the Reservation. This is another situation and it’s our baby.

Swett promptly clears for action, props a legal pad on his knee, cocks his trusty ballpoint. He’s one of the world’s great note-takers. Eddie, who forgot his legal pad, looks especially sincere alert and concerned.

The Noodleville Plant Dedication, Whiner, capping those words as befits a major Company event, says. "Is set for March twenty-eight. That’s Confidential but it will be Official next week.

That’s the good news. The bad news is the principal speaker, the head honcho, will be our old friend, everybody’s favorite executive, J.C. Adamant."

Oh jeezuzz! Swett drops his legal pad. Smoke rises in clouds from his pipe, signaling the way Eddie reads it mayday, the international distress signal.

Right, Whiner says. Mayday. But let me fill you fellows in. In a minute. Tanya, a non-professional, thus not entirely trustworthy, is back with the coffee. While she figures out who gets the black, the black-with-sugar etc., Whiner’s fingers drum his desk blotter.

A small pear-shaped man in his late fifties is G.K (Little George) Whiner, with a face like a ferret if this ferret spent an hour a day under a sunlamp in the 14th Floor gym, shifty little eyes and dark thinning hair he frequently plasters flat across his brown scalp. A 4F in the Last Big War (ingrown toenails, an uncle on the Draft Board, the story is), he began his working life with the local Community Chest but has been with the Company for going on thirty years, a loyal employee with an imitation gold 25Year lapel pin it’s said he also wears on his pajamas, and Corporate VP for Communications for five years. That puts him up where the stock options are: a real American Success Story. Always immaculately dressed, he is wearing his sincere manure-green suit with matching accessories today. He also wears, most of the time, a thin veneer of