Gordon Freeman Quotes

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Acting Captain Warms was still unaware that at least one lifeboat had been launched without his authority and that passengers were jumping into the sea. The calmness which a few hours before had impressed the purser and First Officer Freeman was gone.

On August 11, 1934, Stanley Ferson walked off the Morro Castle when she docked in New York. His sudden departure baffled Alagna and a number of ship’s officers; thirty-seven years would pass before the extraordinary circumstances behind Ferson’s resignation were revealed. With his departure, Rogers became chief radio officer, Alagna regained his old position as first assistant radioman, and Maki—absent during the furor—returned to complete the team. As far as Maki was concerned, “Rogers ran an easy shop. You did your job, and you relaxed the way you liked.” Alagna, on the other hand, found it difficult to relax. He had started to get “the creeps.” He believed somebody was trying to waylay him, possibly even kill him, for the trouble he had caused. “I thought several times that I heard footsteps hurrying along behind me in the shadows of the deck. But each time, when I swung around to investigate, the deck would be vacant. I could neither see nor hear anyone when I was sure someone had been there but a moment before.” It may have been this stress which finally sealed the fate of George Alagna. On this trip, one day out of New York, as the Morro Castle steamed through the Florida Strait on her way to Havana, Alagna had been on radio duty. Suddenly he raced to the bridge and accused the watch officer, Second Officer Ivan Freeman, of tinkering with the radio compass on the bridge, jamming the main radio transmitter. It was a ridiculous allegation; moreover, it offended Freeman’s sense of propriety. Junior radiomen did not come to the bridge unless it was with a specific message; they certainly did not assail the officer of the watch. Freeman complained to Chief Officer Warms, who reported the incident to the captain. Captain Wilmott sent a signal to the Radiomarine Corporation demanding the immediate removal of Alagna on their return to New York.

The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.