Bedbugs, a Modern Plague

     Bedbugs have invaded thousands of Philadelphia homes and institutions

 and the situation is serious. Philadelphia, in fact, is one of the worst cities in

 the nation for bedbugs. Don’t ask me why our fair city is plagued with these

 creatures. Is there something in the water here, or do Philadelphians have a

 special problem that people in other cities do not have?

  The pest-control company, Orkin, compiled a list of the 50 worst American cities for bed bugs and Philadelphia has been ranked as number nine. Orkin based its ranking on the number of bed bug treatments they performed on residences and businesses in urban areas between 2015 and 2016.

   “We have more people affected by bed bugs in the United States now than ever before. They were virtually unheard of in the U.S. 10 years ago,” Orkin’s Entomologist Ron Harrison told CBS3.  

      Bedbugs begin life as microscopic entities and then, depending on how

 much human blood they consume, they increase in size and weight until,

 in some instances, they become as large as a small or medium sized cockroach.

 Bedbugs do not fly but they climb or jump onto things, mainly wooden and

cloth surfaces where they then take great delight in laying their despicable eggs.

      If they happen to find a home in your mattress, they will bite you during

 the night. They bite in clusters of three, meaning you will notice three little

 dots or bruise like blemishes on your skin. One bite is never enough for

 these creatures although they can live off their first 3-bite meal for a long

 time before their blood lust returns. It doesn’t take all that long for them

 to grow from micro hard to see bugs into significant creepy crawlers.

   Welcome to my nightmare, as a famous rocker once intoned.  

      These athletic pests can even jump on you and hitch a ride on your

 jacket or sweater and then jump off later when you enter a new house

 or residence. More spaces to colonize, after all. When they park themselves

 in a new place they begin their cycle of destruction all over again, laying

 eggs and hiding in mattresses, woodwork, sofas and curtains until something

 or someone exposes them. Then you’re likely to see them exit en masse, often

 in large shocking streams that rival the congestion of ant farms.

      One does not have to be dirty or a lowlife sleaze to get bedbugs. Bedbugs

were common in colonial America and throughout Europe. In many cases

 people learned to live with them. Growing up, I had elderly aunts tell me

 before going to bed, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” as if bedbugs were sweet

 little things with smiley faces and antennas made of chocolate that helped

 you sleep.  I had never seen a bedbug as a kid so I had no idea what my

 aunts were talking about. Ticks, bees, spiders and moths I knew, but

 bedbugs seemed to be a Grimm’s Fairy Tale concoction. 

   Until I moved to the city…

   When my friend Sean showed me a bedbug for the first time I could

 barely make out its shape it was so small. We were moving furniture

into his new house when he went to move his bed headboard and a bed

 bug crawled out. A swarm of bugs followed, much larger in size. 
 Sean was so disgusted he went into the bathroom to wash his
 hands and exclaim loudly before the mirror: “Oh no, not bed bugs!”

  Sean is such a clean fanatic that people entering his house 
are required to take off their shoes and put on special booties 
so that they won’t dirty up his floors.  When he had a 
number of contractors working on his kitchen last spring he
 made them all take off their boots and put on these wrap
 around booties that tie up in fancy bows. 

      Shockingly, the contractors complied like little children.  
Half of Sean’s living room furniture is covered up in plastic so 
every time you sit down in his house you hear a series of crinkles.
Generally he hates having people into his house because he
 equates people with dirt. 

   So how did someone this clean get bedbugs?

       He got them from living in Philadelphia, of course, because at any point

during his travels about the city he could have touched a railing or

 banister or even brushed up against someone’s curtains or coat when

 an eager to jump bed bug leaped on him and hitched a ride back to

 his house where it then deposited its eggs.

    Sean, of course, had to throw out the bed’s headboard but this was

 only the beginning. He did a thorough house check and found small

colonies of bugs in some uncovered pieces of furniture. He waged

 an expensive, never ending war: he sprayed, vacuumed, washed and

 rewashed and then he wrapped the as yet uncontaminated pieces of

furniture in air tight plastic wrap so the bedbugs couldn’t claim it as

 their own. Some of his good furniture had to be thrown away.

    Bedbugs have only recently become a city plague 
because over a decade ago there was an effective killer spray
 that killed them in aPhiladelphia minute. This powerful spray
 nicked the problem in the bud and saved countless valuable
 pieces of furniture from the trash heap. Then there was the
 "awful" discovery that the killer componentin this spray
 was DDT, a cancer causing agent.  The effective, miracle

spray was then banned with nothing of any value to replace it despite

the rash of so called sprays that promise to do the job just as effectively.

   All lies, of course.

       As The Daily Caller reported, “…Why are bed bugs back?

Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient

 Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the

 invention of pesticide DDT. There were almost no bed bugs in the

United States between World War II and the mid-1990s. Around

when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major

pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes

of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.”

  Thank you, Bill Clinton.

 The new sprays, as Sean discovered, do little or nothing because

 they simply aren’t strong enough. It also doesn’t help that bedbugs

 go into winter/cold weather hibernation, a despicable deep coma

sleep in which they dream of sucking blood once the warm weather
 approaches. In the hot weather, they reemerge unless you do the heat 
ventilation route. Heat remediation requires only one treatment. It 
utilizes fans and heaters to raise the temperature of the infested 
area to 120 degrees. The temperature is maintained for hours to
 ensure that the bed bugs and the eggs are killed. This is a cumbersome 
and expensive process.

 

        Homeless shelters are notorious for bed bugs despite the fact that they

 undergo periodic exterminations.  The constant influx of new people

 in shelters all but guarantees new incarnations of jumping bugs eager

 to inhabit a fresh piece of wood in which to build their nasty nation of

 blood sucking bottom feeder vampires.

  

       The most troubling part of this story is that there’s no solution to the

 bedbug problem unless we bring back the all powerful DDT spray.

Some cities and municipalities are considering doing this because their

 bed bug problems are that great. It’s sad to think that  DDT may be

 the only real answer, especially in our hometown where bed bugs

seem to be everywhere, most notably on the coat of the person

sitting next to you on the Frankford-Market El. 

      Today, Sean is bedbug free but the experience has made him

even more of a clean fanatic. Visitors to his home, even those

 contractors I mentioned, have to go through a doubled up vetting

 process. While Sean hasn’t gone to the extreme length of asking

 people to remove their clothing or demand that they put on double

 booties and gloves, I fully expect that this will be the case if he ever
 gets bed bugs again.

                   

Mother Divine

       On March 14 of this year, The New York Times ran the following headline: Mother Divine Who Took Over Her Husband’s Cult, Dies at 71. Mother Divine actually died on March 4 but it took The Times a while to print an obit.   

       I met Mother Divine some years ago when I visited her estate at Woodmont in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. At that time I teamed up with an artist friend who wanted to set up his easel and paintbrush and paint the Woodmont mansion for a possible book project.   Mother was gracious during that visit. We were not only invited to dinner—Mother’s followers called it a Holy Communion service—but we were told that we could have a special interview with Mother after the meal.

    

              The mansion is a multi-room French Gothic masterpiece, designed by Quaker architect William Price for Philadelphia industrialist Alan J, Wood, Jr., in 1892. After the demise of the Gilded Age and the selling off of many of Philadelphia’s old mansions, it was sold to Father Divine for a relatively humble $75,000.

            Woodmont then became the headquarters for the Peace Mission Movement.

       The Peace Mission Movement began as a force for peace and goodwill between the races. The movement, as Mother Divine noted, was to make people “industrious, independent, tax-paying citizens instead of consumers of tax dollars on the welfare rolls.” 

             Since the passing of Father Divine in 1965, the Peace Mission Movement has been under the direction of Father Divine’s second wife, Edna Rose Ritchings, a white Canadian woman he met in 1946.  

            Father Divine’s greatest contributions are probably in the area of Civil Rights. As early as 1951, he advocated for reparations for the descendents of slaves and for integrated neighborhoods. Decades before the Civil Rights Act, before the NAACP, Stokley Carmichael, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers, Father Divine preached peaceful non-violent social change.   Unfortunately, Father Divine’s “preaching” work on behalf of Civil Rights is a mostly understated fact.

 Father Divine’s marriage to the second Mother Divine (the first was an African American woman named Peninniah, who died shortly after the Woodmont purchase) was a celibate affair, as members, both married and unmarried, are prohibited from having sex, or using alcohol and tobacco. 

        When I first saw Mother Divine she was descending the grand staircase in the mansion. She was dressed in a full blown white 19^th Century ball gown while being escorted by a sentry dressed in red who also wore a small red beret tilted to the side in the style of Che Guevara. The sentry was a thin black woman and Mother was white--- she had Arctic snow hair and skin much paler than the color of Dove soap. She carried herself with a confident elegance, her head erect and her eyes focused on some invisible point on the horizon. Her walk down the staircase was so slow it called to mind the walking styles of European aristocracy, namely Queen Elizabeth II of England. 

        Emblems of royalty were very evident in the mansion, not only in the grandiose architecture and design of the place but in the studied attentiveness and seriousness of Mother’s other sentries, who also wore cocked berets. The sentries were stationed throughout the house like Swiss Guards in the Vatican. The atmosphere definitely evoked the formality of a royal court because it was obvious that the sentries would not tolerate any foolish action, like presupposing it was okay to sit on the furniture, which of course we did not do. 

     In situations like this, the human tendency is to be formal yourself even though I longed to see just one of the sentries smile or show some warmth. ‘Feel good’ camaraderie is not in the Woodmont style book, however. The sentries, when they did smile, did it in a fixed way as if they were ready to retract it and turn it upside down at a moment’s notice. I knew this to be the case when I asked one of them, a Miss something-or-other, if I could take a photograph. My request was met with a stern “No, you may not take photographs,” as if I should have known better. I replied with a somewhat stunned “Oh… okay,” the ‘Oh’ in my reply signaling my dismay at such a silly rule, since what could possibly be wrong with taking a snapshot?

     Often the ‘secondary’ people around any high ranking leader have an inflated sense of self importance and behave in a manner that may “out-formalize” the personal style of the big boss, the very person one would expect to flaunt attitude. Mother Divine had an easy and light spirit and it was easy to see a mischievous glint in her eyes. She was quick to smile and laugh but yet she was surrounded by stiff wooden Cigar Store Indian types who were quick to scold. .

         Dinner began when Mother rang a large hand bell. A female cook in a white uniform produced the platters from a small kitchen directly behind Mother. Numerous platters of salad items, including a wide assortment of vegetables, condiments and sauces, set the pace for more complicated platters offering meats and fish, rice, potatoes, breads, more vegetables and meats until at last diners could devote their attention to the business at hand, eating, rather than the elaborate ritual of passing platters.

            When platters were passed from one diner to another, they never touched the table. Diners were not allowed to hold two platters at the same time, so the synchronization of the plates had the movements of a dance. While this was going on, diners listened to old audio tapes of Father Divine sermons. The mostly elderly crowd, men in suits and women in Peace Mission uniforms, combined eating with the singing of hymns. A few elderly white women, European by birth, clapped their hands in sing song fashion in between mouthfuls, reminding me of the antics of patients in a mental institution.

       After dinner, Mother invited my artist friend and me into her private office where she showed us old photographs of Father Divine. A sentry stood beside her as the four of us chatted. I found myself occasionally looking out of Mother’s office window at the tomb of Father, believed by followers to be God incarnate. The conversation was not profound but filled with cursory pleasantries. There were even several photo ops in which Mother snuggled up against my artist friend and I. Photographs were no longer an issue because the sentry who greeted us in the foyer was not the one standing by Mother’s side.

    By the time my friend and I left Woodmont we had the feeling that the sentries around Mother were much like a covert army. It was like the feeling you get when you visit a couple who are in a bad marriage but who put on a happy face when company comes. You can somehow feel the tension and repressed emotion coming from the couple but there’s no way you can prove that it exists.  Mother, after all, was sitting on a vast fortune and a huge empire. She was elderly and had to be helped around the mansion on her daily walks around the estate.

       While in a cab leaving the estate, we passed Mother as she began her daily walk, escorted by several dour looking sentries. During our chat with Mother she appeared strong but seeing her outdoors was a profound change. She not only looked weak and vulnerable but she seemed to be almost totally under the care and direction of the women propping her up.  

        The word ‘care’ in this sense can also be a code word for power and control. We have all heard stories of what happens to some elderly mothers when their care is relinquished to their children, and how one child can claim power of attorney and have the mother committed to a nursing home while her assets are funneled into other family bank accounts.  

      My friend and I were certain that Mother liked us and so we were very surprised when we were turned down by a secretarial sentry when we called later to schedule a follow up interview. The sentry told us that we were not permitted to visit. No reason was given but it was obvious that we were no longer welcome at Woodmont.  

        Since that time we have both felt that Mother was really a prisoner behind pearly gates and that she was not acting as a free agent.

       This is why I think it is a good thing that The New York Times called the Peace Mission a cult.

   

Mother Divine: The Real Philadelphia Story

THE REAL PHILADELPHIA STORY

By Thom Nickels

       Contributing Editor

Woodmont is not only a world set apart, it is a world with a history. Located in Montgomery County, this 72-acre estate is the home base of The Peace Mission Movement, started by Father Divine in 1919 in Sayville, New York.

 The mansion itself is a multi-room French Gothic masterpiece, designed by Quaker architect William Price for Philadelphia industrialist Alan J, Wood, Jr., in 1892. After the demise of the Gilded Age and the selling off of many of Philadelphia’s old mansions, it was sold to Father Divine for a relatively humble $75,000.

                Woodmont then became the headquarters for the Peace Mission Movement.

                As the rush of 21^st century events seems to pummel the world towards some kind of catastrophe, Woodmont has remained outside the fray. Since the passing of Father Divine in 1965, the Peace Mission Movement has been under the direction of Father Divine’s second wife, Edna Rose Ritchings, a white Canadian woman he met in 1946. 

                The Peace Mission Movement began as a force for peace and goodwill between the races, as an incentive to make-- as Mother Divine notes in her small book, “The Peace Mission Movement”-- people “industrious, independent, tax-paying citizens instead of consumers of tax dollars on the welfare rolls.” In the area of theology, many of Father Divine’s followers believe that he was/is God. In the past, this fact has annoyed many members of the press and resulted in bad publicity for the Movement.

                Father Divine’s greatest contributions are probably in the area of Civil Rights. As early as 1951, he advocated for reparations for the descendents of slaves and for integrated neighborhoods. Decades before the Civil Rights Act, before the NAACP, before Stokley Carmichael, Angela Davis or the Black Panthers, Father Divine preached peaceful non-violent social change.   Unfortunately, Father Divine’s “preaching” work on behalf of Civil Rights is a mostly understated fact.

 Father Divine’s marriage to the second Mother Divine (the first was an African American woman named Peninniah, who died shortly after the Woodmont purchase) was a celibate affair, as members, both married and unmarried, are prohibited from having sex, or using alcohol and tobacco. 

                An invitation to attend the monthly Sunday banquet at Woodmont, which the Peace Mission Movement considers a Holy Communion service, was extended to me and Philadelphia artist Noel Miles because of a book we are working on.  Miles had gone to Woodmont before, with brush and canvass, to capture the marvelous interiors for our project when Mother Divine extended the invitation.

                When the day of the pilgrimage arrived, we boarded the R-7 for Bryn Mawr, and then hailed a cab to Gladwyne, where Woodmont is located. Our cabbie, a rather youngish urban type who seemed more suited for a city taxi than navigating the lost vistas of Montgomery County, had no idea where Woodmont was, but, like a true shyster, he tried to hide this fact by driving fast.

                When it became apparent that he was winging it, Miles made him get his bearings. By happenstance or miracle, we happened to notice the Woodmont address etched simply and unobtrusively on a stone wall. The taxi then took the long rustic driveway through a corridor of trees. Along the road to the mansion I noticed a few clumsily etched hand carved road signs, the kind you’d see in a Boy Scout camp circa 1960.

 A wide clearing in the brush brought the mansion into view.

                .

At this point, the cabbie could barely suppress an “Ahhhhh!”

Holy Royal Family Highgate! Or was this some unnamed palace on the Thames transferred via UFO to fairly predictable Montgomery County where the only queen had been Hope Montgomery Scott? I spotted an elderly white man sitting on a chair—or was it a tree stump?—near what looked to be a shed. A watchman of some sort, very polite. Did he sleep in the shed? I was full of questions.

The cabbie let us off in the middle of the massive semi circular drive.

                 A small black woman in a beret and white gloves with a “V” embossed on her blouse, waved to us as we approached the mansion. She was perched several heads above us, sentry-like, on the portico landing. Shades of Buckingham Palace formality. Her smile was beatific but steely; her thin body conjuring images of self denial. Introductions were made and up the steps we went, the cab idling as if the cabbie wanted a longer glimpse. 

                “Call if you want a pick up,” he shouted from the cab.

                We were not banking on a pickup but a ride home, or at least a ride to the station from one of the dinner guests.

                 

               

 Inside the grand reception room, we saw museum quality gilt framed paintings, lush carpets and oak woodwork. Miss Faith, the sentry of the steps, explained the history of the house.

               

                We noticed a mammoth framed portrait of Mother and Father Divine hanging over the reception area like an iconostasis in a cathedral.

                “My one aim is to live a virtuous life under the Personal jurisdiction of FATHER DIVINE,” Mother Divine wrote in 1952. “My Marriage to FATHER has brought the fulfillment of this desire and I can most assuredly say that in these past four or more happy years that I have been married, FATHER’S Virginity has been more firmly established in my consideration, for I have not seen anything about Him that reflects that of a man.”

                “May I tape our conversation?” I asked Miss Faith.

                “Oh no, you may not,” Miss Faith said, looking at me in disbelief.

                This was a perfectly natural question for a journalist, but Miss Faith’s reaction somehow made me feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. Was I now a besmirched house guest who had to be watched?

                 I would later discover that in years past journalists delighted in taking advantage of Mother Divine’s generosity and then went on to butcher her in print. It’s the way journalism is these days, where stories about suburban teachers having sex with seventeen year olds is considered breaking news.

                Without any sort of announcement, namely the ringing of chimes or a small hand bell, my eyes were drawn to the top of the magnificent central staircase.

                 

A woman in a long white beaded dress who was being escorted down the central staircase by an elderly woman in a beret. It was one of those cinematic moments, half Royal Family, half an exciting ‘new’ story that has yet to be told.

 “Who are these people?” I heard Mother Divine whisper to the aide. When she was reminded who we were, Mother approached Miles first, extending a hand.

When Mother turned to me, I took her hand and said that it was an honor to meet her.

 After all, this was the brave woman who, in 1972, issued the Rev. Jim Jones and his followers, his marching orders. Mother Divine ordered Jones to leave the Woodmont estate after he attempted to take over the Peace Mission Movement, claiming that he was the reincarnation of Father Divine.  Some 200 of Jones’ followers had arrived from California, “pretending,” as Mother states, “a sincere desire to fellowship with members of the Movement.”

                Mother asked them to leave when “his distaste for the government of the United States and the establishment, and the prosperity of the followers in general began to be expressed in casual, then more deliberate remarks he made to Mother Divine and others.”

                Several years later would come the insanity of the People’s Temple in Guyana.

                In my quest to find out more about the Mission, I asked Miss Faith “where the chapel was, the place where you have services.” My question was met with puzzlement. “The banquet is the holy communion service,” Miss Faith said.

                I would understand the mechanics of this very soon, once the banquet got underway.

                The lush, white banquet table sat about 60 people. A swan on a “lake” of glass was the centerpiece, in addition to fresh flowers. Women outnumbered men about 10 to one. Mother sat at the head of the table; beside her was a setting for Father Divine. An attendant stood behind my chair and Miles’ ready to assist us during the meal.

                Dinner began when Mother rang a large hand bell. A female cook in a white uniform produced the platters from a small kitchen directly behind Mother. Numerous platters of salad items, including a wide assortment of vegetables, condiments and sauces, set the pace for more complicated platters offering meats and fish, rice, potatoes, breads, more vegetables and meats until at last diners could devote their entire attention to the business at hand, eating, rather than the elaborate ritual of passing platters.

                When platters are passed from one diner to another, they must never touch the table. Diners must also not hold two platters at the same time, so the entire synchronization of the plates had the movements of a dance. While this was going on, diners listened to an old audio tape of a Father Divine sermon. The mostly elderly crowd—men in suits and women in Peace Mission uniforms—beret, and a jacket embossed with a V—combined eating with the singing of hymns. A few elderly white women, European by birth, clapped their hands in sing song fashion in between mouthfuls.

                The plate passing started up again when dessert was served: huge cakes, pies, jello molds and ice cream were passed in the same fashion, all homemade, all luscious, and yet not a single person at the table looked to be overweight.

With synchronization worthy of the Rockettes, additional platters kept being delivered to both sides of the table. Diners were expected to take only what they could eat. I ate all of what I put on my plate except for a little bit of Salmon skin. The food was marvelous, the vegetables among the best I’ve ever tasted.

                After dinner, Miles and I were asked if we wanted to say a few words to the assembly. I mentioned that the dining experience reminded me of the time I spent in Catholic monasteries, when you would eat in silence while listening to a monk read from scripture or the lives of the saints.

The Catholic connection, as it turned out, was not that far fetched. A woman from Saint Paul’s parish in South Philadelphia told me to look out for a lineup of Catholic saint statues around the parameter of the Peace Mission dining room.

I counted ten or more Catholic saints positioned some ten feet above the heads of the diners.            

                For me, the hymns and hand clapping that occurred during the banquet raised a red flag: “Here’s where biting journalist types like Christopher Hitchens have a really wicked time ripping into Mother and all things Divine,” I thought.  

                But Woodmont, in rapidly deteriorating world, is actually more of a treasure than not. It’s quiet, isolated, beautiful, a mansion with many rooms and good food, an empire with its own benevolent queen, a masterful lady with a piercing glance.

                After dinner, Miles and I were told that Mother wanted to see us alone, in Father Divine’s office.

                The office, as it turned out, is a dead ringer for the oval office in the White House. Miles and I stood with Mother by Father’s desk, an aide not far away.  Directly in front of the window was Father Divine’s shrine and tomb. For a few moments things were very quiet, then sunlight hit Mother Divine’s face.

                We both agreed, on the train ride home, that here was the real Philadelphia story.