On my first day in Clarksburg, I headed to the public library, always a place to go when first landing in a new place. As luck would have it, I was directed to the library's annex, which turned out to be a stately old 1839 mansion where I met David Houchin, the special collections librarian.
Houchin not only presided over a wide space of dusty old books and slanting bookshelves and oblong and odd-size maps and boxes filled with books and desks and tables piled with more books and more maps and … you get the idea, but he even had an ancient card catalog.
A middle-aged man, Houchin is rumpled perfection and a walking encyclopedia of local lore and history. He began by telling me that we were standing in the Waldo P. Goff house and that next door is the old Waldo Hotel, a ten-story brick structure that was, in its day, a seat of luxurious hospitality. Goff, said Houchin, was a failed businessman from Coventry, Rhode Island, and Clarksburg was a starting-over place for failed businessmen. As he went on, I realized that I had tapped a gold mine of information, very useful on a four-day assignment.
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When I arrived at the information center of the FBI complex, the woman behind the counter looked a bit shocked. I could see her reaching under it, probably pressing an alert button. She looked nervously to her side. At first I wasn't sure what was wrong. Then suddenly I realized that this was the same woman who had been there the previous summer, before I had this assignment, when I had wandered in as a tourist but asked lots of journalist-type questions. She was much relieved to learn that I was on assignment, and we both had a good laugh. |
The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) gets a couple thousand pieces of mail a day. Lots of fingerprint cards. People applying for permanent resident status. So, naturally, I wanted to see the place's post office.
Phil Jackson, a material handlers supervisor, said the facility gets lots of prisoner mail. He's not exactly sure why, but inmates write to CJIS to proclaim their innocence, or other prisoners' guilt. They want to make deals, offer tips about drug transactions, complain about death threats, or make a few.
Things ratcheted up a bit after 9/11 when biohazard gear rolled in. All packages get x-rayed on a device similar to an airport luggage-screener. Then they go into a separate sealed room where eight men in elbow-length plastic gloves methodically open each one while seated at two rows of biological safety cabinets, tables with exhaust hoods above them. If something spills out, the hepafilter above screens out more than 99 percent of it. So far nothing dangerous has come through the center. "Just weird," said Jackson. "Blood samples from Pakistan. A severed finger. Foreign mail with wax stamps." Then somebody offered that Saddam's sons' prints passed through here. Steve Fischer, my guide, gave a look indicating that they don't talk about terror-related activity.
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