Making the Piper Pay
On September 21 a police officer gave him a warning. “He was a nice fellow,” says Currie. “He said, ‘Commander [William] O’Donnell is pretty upset, and he wants me to write you a ticket.’ I asked, for what? He said, ‘Disturbing the peace.’ I was thinking, whose peace am I disturbing? He said, ‘I don’t want to, but if I get one more complaint I’ll have to write you a ticket.’”
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Then he got one. “I was playing, and a policeman said, ‘You’ve got to move on,’” he says. “I said, ‘I’m not going to move on. Write a ticket.’ He went away, and 45 minutes later he returned with the city’s noise ordinance.”
By training, Kreinberg’s a historian. He’s good at digging through obscure reports and documents to find evidence of unjust, wasteful, or simply boneheaded policies. And he was good at getting reporters to write about what he found.
“We lost it all,” says Tyler. “My record collection–thousands and thousands of records. Our books–oh, God, so many precious books. And countless mementos, manuscripts, pictures that mean so much. All gone. Yes, we’re grateful that we’re still alive, and believe me, I know other people have suffered even more–our whole village was wiped away. And we thank the Lord that we’re still here. But it still hurts.”
