Skunked

Friday morning I went fishing early out at the Bonito Bar and got skunked.  My friend, Rick Blair, who was fishing with me, had an early hookup with a bluefish, but that was it for the day.  I had several follows and saw a few splashes from interested bluefish but no takes, nada, zip, nothing for me on the scoreboard.  It certainly was good to be out on the water, on a clear, crisp, beautiful day, but the fly fishing was tough.  We did not see much bait in the water at all, and casting was difficult with a very strong wind blowing from the east and northeast against the incoming tide.  Following the birds and fishing the rips along the way, we went up to Tuckernuck and Muskeget, too, but we had no luck for four hours on the water.  Windblown and tired, I went home and told myself that I should be posting a blog about something else other than fishing, about Safe On Third, perhaps, because my book, after all,  is what started this exercise.

And, as for my book, I do have something I have wanted to say about a new work of non-fiction that came out recently, not a work about fly fishing in salt water, but a book entitled Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World's Fair on the Brink of War, by James Mauro.  Mauro's book is a narative history of the the World's Fair of 1939-40, and I am eager to read this book because it describes in detail an event that is dramatized in Chapter 15 of Safe On Third,  the explosion of a time-bomb at the World's Fair on July 4th, 1940.  The bomb was found in the British Pavilion and two courageous New York City bomb squad detectives, Joe Lynch and Freddy Socha, were tragically killed when they tried to defuse it.

Mauro shows in his book how dangerous New York City was in the pre-war days described in Safe On Third, when there were many bomb treats and explosions, and a comparison with the post 9/11 world that we live in now immediately comes to mind, although I must admit that I wrote Chapter 15 long before the events of September 9th, 2001.