When he kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter from the Marlborough Street home where she was staying, Clark Rockfeller came onto the local scene in a big, big way.
Initial reports indicated he kidnapped his daughter because of an exceptionally difficult divorce. His daughter had been living with her mother in London, making it very difficult for Rockefeller to conduct himself as a father, so people expected or assumed his kidnapping his daughter in Back Bay during a supervised visit was all about frustration.
And perhaps it was.
Ten days later, Clark Rockefeller, calling himself Chip Smith, and living in a home in Baltimore he purchased with cash a month before, is behind bars. His daughter has been returned to her mother, who has been living at the Four Seasons Hotel, and who apparently fainted when the FBI told her Rockefeller had been found and that her daughter was unharmed.
Rockefeller is now in jail without bail in Baltimore as police await the results of fingerprinting to determine if he is connected with any crimes. Law enforcement officials here will seek his extradition so he can face charges brought by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office.
News reports indicated Rockefeller used two aliases while in Balitmore, Smith and Clark Rock.
In Boston, where he was well known in small circles by more than a few Beacon Hill and Back Bay residents, he used the names Michael Brown, JP Clark Rockefeller, James Fredrick, and Clark Mill Rockefeller.
Those who met him or made his acquaintance were not put off by him, and even his wife didn’t know who he was after 10 years of marriage, a fact apparently mentioned in her divorce proceedings against him.
He appeared well bred, a man of the world who had apparently was widely traveled, a would-be intellectual who wore his polo shirts with the collars turned up.
Add to all of this his accent – believed to be part English and Madonna at the same time.
When he was initially hunted after the abduction of his daughter in broad daylight in the Back Bay, Rockefeller led some to believe he had a 72-foot yacht waiting for him on Long Island.
In the end, it was his day-sailer taking on water and kept in poor repair and docked near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor which did him in, that, and the erroneous belief he wouldn’t be caught by the FBI and the Baltimore Police.
In the end, again, he is this summer’s supreme master of deception.
He was welcome at the Algonquin Club, comfortable in Nantucket, a gentleman with an accent on Beacon Hill and all of this without a Social Security number, a driver’s license, a real name or anything that resembles a normal life and identity.
Who are you, Clark Rockefeller?

Mayor Thomas Menino wants to start regulating the proliferation of newspaper racks in terms of number and size in the City of Boston, and the City Council agrees with him.
Last week, the council voted unanimously to support Menino’s proposal to curb newspaper rack clutter in the city.
“This is something that’s long overdue,” said Menino. “The size and number of newspaper racks in the city has become more of problem now than in the past, and they have to be better managed by the publishers.”
Menino pointed to the corner of Bowdoin and Cambridge streets, where he said there are, over 15 newspaper boxes of varying shapes and sizes lined up. There are about 20 in front of the Copley Library as well.
“They block pedestrian access and handicap access on the sidewalk,” said Menino. “We are in no way trying to impede on any publishers 1st Amendment right; we simply want to start having a standard size like they do in other cities and cap the number of racks newspaper companies can put in the city.”
One way Menino and the council hopes to accomplish this is by imposing a fee on publishers for each rack they install. The application fee, according to a spokesman from the mayor’s office, would be $300 annually, plus a $25 fee for every newspaper rack that publishers install.
There would also be a cap limiting each company to 300 racks on city streets.
“It’s a quality of life issue,” said City Councilor Sal LaMattina, who represents the North End and sections of Beacon Hill. “In some places in the city, they are in the way for pedestrians, there are too many, and some have graffiti on them or papers spilling out onto the street. I think it’s a good plan.”
At the beginning of the month, publishers urged the city councilor to reject Menino’s proposal. Herald Publisher Patrick Purcell said the proposal "puts an unreasonable burden on publishers who are already struggling to fulfill their obligation to inform the public."
However, City Councilor Michael Ross, who represents the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, said during two working sessions between the council and publishers, the city was able to put out a plan with which everyone seemed happy.
“What we are aiming at is having a standard for these racks in the city that is a better product for both publishers and residents,” said Ross. “We did work on some of the language in the original proposal, and after two hearings and listening to the publishers’ concerns, I think we passed a plan that addresses both the concerns of the publishers, the city, and its residents.”

CAPTION: Tom O’Neill.

When I asked Tom O’Neill by telephone whether he enjoyed seeing the play about his dad, “According to Tip,” that appeared recently at Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown and is heading to Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston, in October his voice brightened.” It was a genuine reminder of my dad ..... It was terrific,” he beamed.
The one-man play written by award-winning author Dick Flavin, who worked for years with Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., longtime colorful, famous politician from Cambridge who died January 5, 1994, delighted audiences, leaving them wanting more. Others were disappointed they missed it – people who had worked with O’Neill in Congress, in his state offices, or grew up hearing wonderful stories about his accomplishments. One night, about 100 members of the O’Neill family, including son Thomas P. “Tom” O’Neill III, attended the show, and were mesmerized by actor Ken Howard’s realistic portrayal.
“It was a very eerie feeling,” says Tom O’Neill. “In the opening scene, when he [actor Ken Howard] turns around in the chair, he looks just like my dad. It was eerie.” Apparently, Tom’s sister Rosemary agreed. When Ken as Tip first turns and walks from the desk, she said she was welling up, tearing up. “It’s like seeing my father brought back to life. It’s almost scary,” she told producer Paul Boghosian, owner-president of HarborSide Films Faneuil Market in Boston.
Tom O’Neill, head of public relations-government affairs firm, O’Neill and Associates in Boston, has followed in his prestigious dad’s footsteps politically. While Tip O’Neill broke the party barrier in Massachusetts as the first Democrat to serve as speaker of the state House of Representatives and later in Congress, Tom served as lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1983; created and administered the Office of Federal-State Relations in Boston and Washington, D.C. and served on the U.S. State Department Ambassadorial Screening Committee and in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
O’Neill sits on the Board of Trustees for Boston College and chairs the Board of Trustees for North Cambridge Catholic High School, having graduated from both, received his bachelor’s degree from Boston College and his master’s in public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a school that his dad laughingly said he was allowed to enter– but not as a student.
For Tom O’Neill, seeing his father portrayed on stage was sheer joy. It was as though the immortal Tip were resurrected. “It did all of that, and even more. I didn’t want Ken Howard to leave the stage. I thought he was great,” says Tom. “Ken Howard’s portrayal was wonderful.”
O’Neill says author Dick Flavin did a meticulous job presenting not only several incidents and facts, but capturing his dad’s personality. “I couldn’t be happier for Flavin the writer and Howard the actor,” he says, referring to the play’s success in Watertown, and latest booking at the Stuart Street Playhouse from October to January. “It’s all true. The family feels genuinely grateful [for Flavin and Howard’s work]. The incidents of the family were very telling and pretty accurate, especially about my brother. I thought they did a great job.....” O’Neill says, referring to his brother Michael’s losing battle with substance abuse, over which his father anguished and blamed himself in the play. Tip was remorseful about not being home in Cambridge enough to raise his five children, coming home only on weekends, while he served in Congress, in Washington DC, for 20 years. However, Tom says his father had no reason to blame himself for anything. His brother and sister lived in Washington, close to their dad.
“He was a great guy,” he says. “I don’t remember my dad being around less. We saw him every weekend; he played ball with us, took us bowling; we went to church as a family. I think what he feels or felt most deeply about was being unable to solve my brother’s problems.
“Michael was in his 20s and 30s, and my dad felt some responsibility for him, but Michael had issues,” Tom says.
O’Neill says Flavin called him frequently while writing the play. “I talked to Dick 20 times over the life of the play and saw it in its original form,” he says. O’Neill was also moved when Ken Howard called to say he was portraying Tip.
“Ken Howard was nice enough to call me and wanted a nod of approval,” says O’Neill, and after watching Howard on stage, O’Neill was elated. “His work was terrific. He couldn’t be more gracious,” he says.
Besides showing Tip O’Neill’s human and family side, the play highlights his growth in the transitioning Mass. Statehouse, from a firm Republican grip to a Democratic stronghold, and his rapid rise in the US House of Representatives, including arguments with presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan.
Howard also mastered O’Neill’s mannerisms, his easy, offhand dismissals of people and issues, his breezy way of telling a fine tale, his lumbered gait, catchy chuckle, and his jarring truthfulness.

“I think people are looking for his heart, and we should reveal his heart,” Howard told me. “We know about his blarney and the songs he sang, but what was in his heart, what was he all about? What worried him, etc.?

“At the end, I want people to feel what made the measure of the man. I’m trying to imitate the man - sure I am. In the first part of the play, the audience has to go with the man, the look, etc. In shows like this, it has to be moment to moment, sharing the highs and lows....”
Tom O’Neill thinks Flavin, Howard and director Rick Lombardo succeeded here. “I think they all shared the same feeling, the warmth, the ability to get it, to capture the personality - the act that it was a metaphor for Americans’ century of politics - and the portrayal was great,” says O’Neill. “I thought it was a lot of fun, and in this political season, I think people will get a kick out it. It’s wonderful entertainment.”
Now, several others can share the joy of knowing Tip O’Neill, because of its new run in Boston, and potential future plans for shows in Chicago, Washington, DC, New York and, hopefully, Dublin, Ireland in 2009, says Boghosian. “It’s also wonderful theater and amazing to see somebody who could reach out to the young people.... he was a real man, fully dimensional. You have a full sense of the kindliness, the graciousness...of the man. It’s almost as though we channeled Tip O’Neill.”

Heating costs chill winter forecasts

On Beacon Hill and in Back Bay, brick row houses stretching down long streets for as far as the eye can see provide insulation against the cold for one another. Each structure heats the inner walls of the structure next to it when the temperature falls.
With this heating season coming up, all the insulation in the world won’t matter when it comes to paying the oil man or the gas company.
The cost for fuel is expected to be about 30 percent higher this year– an incredible leap, even by Beacon Hill and Back Bay standards.
By December and lasting through March, this coming heating season will be the true winter of our discontent. It will be the winter when even the well-to-do stare interminably at bills for heating oil and gas and wonder – can’t something be done?
Conservation is the only way, the old-time Beacon Hill residents will tell you.
Old-time Beacon Hill residents who grew up there, and Back Bay residents who came of age in bow fronts lining Beacon and Marlborough streets when the nation was a far different place than it is today, will recall their grandparents and even their parents, telling their children who complained about the chill inside their sprawling home to “put on a sweater”.
They will recall hearing that or hearing that too much heat is not as good for one’s health as a bit of cooler air – even in the winter.
The old-timers held the belief that heating their homes with fuel was like burning money – and money is to be saved or earned at interest, and that couldn’t be achieved if you were burning your money just for the sake of being a bit warmer.
Nothing will be saved this winter with heating oil right now at $4.70 a gallon and the price for natural gas rising commensurately.
Even condominium owners whose buildings are heated with oil are going to notice the markedly higher line item for fuel when it comes to paying this year’s increased fees.
There is no way out this coming winter. We are about to be fleeced, and rather thoroughly, with most of our heating dollars ultimately going to the Middle East rather than into our bank accounts.
What to do?
Wind turbines would be fabulous, but where would we put them?

Manny gone and Solzhenitsyn dead

Our world is brimming with incongruities.
Take, for instance, the past 10 days.
First, we are made to endure the loss of the ever insufferable Manny Ramirez, who told us he was too good for Boston before he was traded to Los Angeles. Perhaps the City of Angels will be better served by Manny’s antics than we were in the end.
Then came the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Those of us who recall his stirring speech at Harvard in the early 1980s came to understand his pain with his best-known work, “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”.
Manny is gone. Solzhenitsyn is dead.
What awaits us next?