THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503140284
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
THERE IS A famous scene in George Pal's ``The Time Machine,'' in which the viewer sits at Rod Taylor's cinematic elbow and witnesses the world across the street change as the actor takes a core sample of the cosmos.
It's like looking over the shoulder of Daily Press columnist Parke Rouse Jr. Upon his full-tilt armchair, the former director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation takes readers backward and forward over the Hampton Roads turf, from prehistory to the present.
Compared to him, Taylor was a temporal pedestrian.
In Rouse's arresting new collection of columns, Along Virginia's Golden Shores (Dietz Press, 200 pp., $19.95), we start with pre-Indian spear points in Dinwiddie County and move, entranced, to prospects for the 21st century survival of the bald eagle.
``Is pirate booty from Blackbeard's day buried along the shore of the Peninsula or along other waterways in Tidewater?'' the columnist muses in one installment. Then Rouse writes tantalizingly of a 1737 account by a rogue crewman that pointed to a site on the James River near Mulberry Island. ``This spot today would be near the Fort Eustis airstrip,'' notes Rouse.
He is equally compelling on the story of the Wolf Trap light, named for the British ship that ran aground on the shore of Mathews County in 1691; or when he recounts the history of root-beer-brown Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp, where Irish poet Tom Moore wrote in 1803 of a mourned maiden's ghost by night, paddling a pale canoe; or remembers the preserved wreck of the support ship Betsy, scuttled by General Cornwallis at Yorktown on the eve of his surrender in 1781.
Rouse summons up the specter of aviation giant Billy Mitchell, who learned to fly right here, at Coast Aeronautical Station by Newport News' Boat Harbor. ``The field was started to train flyers in 1915,'' reports the historian, ``by Glenn Curtiss, a Buffalo, N.Y., plane builder.'' Mitchell rose to brigadier general and raised such a prophetic ruckus, trying to convince the 1920s Army and Navy that air power was important, that he was demoted to colonel.
Mitchell experimentally bombed obsolete ships in the Atlantic off the Virginia Capes. The tests, conducted by the Army's First Provisional Air Brigade at Langley Field and by Naval Air Service seaplanes from Norfolk, proved aerial bombs could sink even steel warships - a revelation in 1921.
Rouse, 80, ``covered the waterfront'' for the Newport News papers in the press-card days when that phrase carried a cachet of romance. It was his first beat, after graduation from Washington and Lee University in 1937. He recalls days spent intent behind his notepad, ankling ``down to the C&O piers on the James River, then bustling with ships discharging bauxite, rubber, coffee and bananas.''
He saw history.
``Those were the days of gun-slinging Chesapeake `oyster wars,' and the frequent violence was front-page news,'' Rouse remembers. ``Alas, today the decline of the oyster industry has nearly ended oystering and its wars. As biologists had predicted, years of over dredging have reduced supplies of the `luscious bivalve,' and in the past five years the spread of oyster diseases has nearly finished them.''
Rouse lived history, too.
``I will never forget a dinner I attended in February 1939 with a group of Army Air Corps officers at Langley Field,'' he writes. ``One of them, Col. Walter Weaver, predicted that Adolf Hitler would engulf Europe in war within 60 days.''
Der Fuhrer did. And Rouse served with distinction as a naval officer in World War II, in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. He had already made it his habit to find excitement in the present as well as the past and future.
Now Rouse looks ahead with concern to the conservation of ``Virginia's golden shores.'' He, at least, is doing his part. The columnist has captured a sizable slab of them for us, pristine forever, between the covers of this, his 28th good book. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing of Parke Rouse Jr.
by CNB