Times Archives

IT USED TO BE CALLED “THE MORGUE.” It was the newspaper library where every story in each day’s publication was clipped by librarians and distributed to sometimes dozens of different file envelopes, typically labeled by subject matter and the names of writers sharing the bylines. Fortunately, old stories never die, not even those published way back, before computers replaced most of those newsroom librarians. Some of Bill Rempel’s career favorites from that long-ago era (the last century) have been retrieved for this section. Here are four favorites from the morgue:

RACING TO AMERICA

One rust-bucket of an old ship with a passenger manifest filled with “undesirable aliens” defies a stormy Atlantic and swelling anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. to beat out richer and more acceptable migrants in The Great Quota Race of 1923. It was a time much like today with raging debate against admitting the poorest and most desperate foreigners and with alarmist political forces quarreling over how to sharply limit immigration. Among the “undesirables” of a century ago were displaced Eastern Europeans, Armenians, Greeks, Russians, Jews, and pacifist Mennonites from Ukraine, and the author’s family.

ARIZONA PRISON BREAK

Three kids break their father out of fortress-like Arizona State Penitentiary in hopes, however unrealistic, of reuniting their family in freedom somewhere across the border. The Tison clan’s escape plan is carried out in broad daylight without firing a shot. No one gets hurt. It’s a brilliant plot, the perfect escape, the stuff of Old West legends — until Dad revealed his dark side. In violence that followed over eleven days, six innocent victims died, along with the dreams of those three brothers. As a reporter for The Times, the author covered the case from jail break to multi-state manhunt to murder trials to sentencing, exploring what turned out to be the dark side of family love and loyalty.

BOMB MYSTERY IN NYC

After a terrorist bomb attack, how do federal investigators piece together bits and fragments of seemingly worthless rubble to find markers that might identify who did it? The author gains special access to the crack ATF forensics team with that mission, the team that did, in fact, unravel that very mystery almost overnight — idenifying groups and indivuals behind the deadly World Trade Center bombing of 1993. Unknown at the time, however, was how much their expert sleuthing would also help identify some of the players behind devastation still to come on September 11 nearly eight years later.

BLACK GOLD FROM ALASKA

Aboard the supertanker SS Arco Juneau, we were three days out of Valdez on a voyage to the California port of Long Beach loaded with nearly 35 million gallons of Alaskan crude oil. Overnight, a hurricane-force storm rose up. In the morning light, our massive ship seemed reduced to a bathtub toy. Green cliffs of foam-marbled sea water crashed across the decks, carrying away railings and light posts, mangling a “safely” stowed gangplank. Meanwhile, the captain steered a course to minimize damage and serious danger to the ship by temporarily angling into the waves — sending us for half a day toward Japan. It was supposed to be a reporter’s plum ride-along assignment, to see and experience the Alaska oil shuttle that promised a new level of energy independence for the U.S. No one could have known then, nearly a decade before the Exxon Valdez oil spill, that our eventful trip would foreshadow a range of risks lurking along the newly expanded Alaska oil route.