66 dan-political impresario, Clinton coun- sellor, Powell friend-says bluntly, "It's got to fuck your mind up." Certainly the idea gives disquiet to Alma, as she makes clear on my second visit. "Soon as he would decide to run, you can bet that somebody somewhere would decide that it was his patriotic duty to shoot him," she tells me, hold- Ing a bath towel around her shoulders to cover a blue-and-white-striped bathing suit. We're in the marble foyer, waiting for the General to arrive "But it is his decision," she adds. There are others, too, for whom it is not a soothing prospect "He's a phan- tom candidate," the Reverend Jesse Jack- son snaps when I first brIng up the pros- pect of a Powell candidacy. 'We can all have positive assumptions, but we still don't know." There is a surge of ire in Jackson's voice. 'We do know that very right-wing white people can trust him. They can trust him to drop bombs. We know that Reagan could trust him. His- torically, there's been this search-whites always want to create the black of their choice as our leader. So for the white people this nice, clean-cut black military guy becomes sometlung really worth sell- ing and promoting. But have we ever seen him on a picket line? Is he for unions? Or for civil rights? Or for anything?" Un- til now, Jackson has been the sou] of magnanimity-or, at least, forbearance- in his public remarks about Powell. The Reverend has been so very good. For the moment, his bewilderment at what he sees as Powell's free ride in the press has boiled over into outrage. He has been good long enough. "So you get some nice platitudes out of me," Jackson says, evi- dently marvelling at the unfairness of it all. "But, I mean, what is this?" N OT a question, that, to be lightly disregarded. But, of course, we do know some things about Colin Powell. He was born in Harlem, on April 5, 1937, but grew up on Kelly Street in Hunts Point, in a South Bronx neigh- borhood known as Banana Kelly. His parents were both Jamaicans, who had immigrated to this country years before, and Powell owns to the complex blood- lines common among West Indians. He ticks off Mrican, English, Irish, Scottish, JewIsh, and probable Arawak Indian an- cestry. It was appropriate, then, that he spent his childhood in a multi-ethnic neighborhood: the Powells' neighbors in Banana Kelly were Jewish, Irish, Polish, Italian, black, and Hispanic. Never a dis- tinguished student, Powell did excel in his duties at the local Episcopal church, where he was an acolyte and a subdea- con. He tells me that in the ritual and the structure of the military he found "a little bit of the ritual and structure of the Epis- copal Church." That church, along with much else, is now gone. The Kelly Street of Powell's memory is as far from the Kelly Street of today as McLean is from the South Bronx. On the block of Kelly Street be- tween Westchester Avenue and 163rd Street, near the Rafael Hernandez School, the eight-family, four-story tenement where Powell grew up has been replaced by a housing project. The ethnic mixture of the old days has been supplanted by a wave of Puerto Rican arrivals. Today, the building façades are festooned with art- ful graffiti, largely the work of someone who signs himself"Bio Nicer." The leg- d " p . , P R " d " c . d en s eplno s, . . an OqUltO e Puerto Rico" have been carefully lettered on the brick. The grocery store at the comer of Kelly and Westchester caters to an island palate, its bins filled with plan- tains and yams It's a block where tat- tooed men with swollen bellies sit in folding lawn chairs or lean against build- ings, drinking out of brown paper bags. The Powells don't live here anymore. In 1956, soon after Colin Powell en- tered the City College of New York and its R.O.T.C. program, his father won ten thousand dollars playing the numbers and moved his family to the relative Arcadia of Elmira Avenue, in the Hollis section of Qyeens. Certainly that neigh- borhood can have changed little since the fifties. Drive from Kelly Street to Elmira Avenue today and the first thing that strikes you when you arrive is a feeling of calm and tidiness. Late-model Ply- mouths and Oldsmobiles and a Volvo or two fill the driveways. Only Qyeen Es- ther's Pentecostal Church and a billboard ad for N ewports featuring a black man in a red-white-and-blue military uniform betray the fact that you are in a predomi- nantly black neighborhood. The houses here are two-story red brick bungalows, dìstinguished from one another by different patterns of ornamental ma- sonry. The old Powell house (the Gen- eral himself sold it to the current occu- pants just twelve years ago) has an inset THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 25, 1995 of shale and granite among the red bricks. Impatiens, hosta, forsythia, hem- lock-all planted by the Powells, the woman who lives there now tells me- decorate the yard. Down the street, there are kids playing tennis. Everywhere, there are squirrels chasing squirrels. And there is quiet. Booker T. Washington, historic champion of the black working class, would have been proud. He would also be proud of the Gen- eral, whose career seems to epitomize Washington's bootstrap philosophy. And, as it happens, Powell bears an un- canny physical resemblance to the Wiz- ard of Tuskegee. It's the same haircut, of course, but also the same sort of face- light-skinned and blunt-featured. (There are even uncanny echoes between the two men's autobiographies. Powell's boyhood account of taking a summer job mopping floors for the local Pepsi -Cola bottling plant, and doing it so skillfully that, the next summer, he was promoted to the "white" jobs, calls to mind the fa- mous passage in ''Up from Slavery" about the young Washington sweeping the floor at the Hampton Institute with such dedication that he was granted admis- sion) But whereas Booker T. Wash- ington's eyes always appeared to be on the lookout for any potential black rival, Powell's face has a sort of yearbook openness. You can see why people trust him and feel comfortable around him. And you can see why Powell's military career was poised at an angle of ascent from the start, when, as an undergradu- ate in the R.O.T.C., he achieved the rank of cadet colonel. His narrative of those years is a succession of errors made and learned from-mistakes transmuted into maxims. In time, he was happy enough to skip the mistake part. Though it's something of a journalis- tic commonplace to dismiss him as a "political general," Powell can point to two tours of active duty in Vietnam, where he incurred serious injuries and from whIch he returned a decorated vet- eran. His account of the war is a devas- tating indictment of high-level stupidity and low-level brutality; and he is impas- sioned when he describes the experience of returning to a nation buffeted by race. 'While I had been off fighting for the freedom of foreigners, four little black girls had been killed by a bomb planted in Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church," he recalls in his memoir
(Norfolk, VA, July 6, 2002) — Decipher’s The Lord of the Rings™ Trading Card Game was awarded Best Trading Card Game (TCG) of 2001 and Best Graphic Presentation of a Card Game last night at the 28th Annual Origins Awards ceremony in Columbus, Ohio. The prestigious awards were presented by many celebrities including John Rhys-Davies, who portrays "Gimli The Dwarf" in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Decipher’s TCG Studio Game Designer Joe Alread was on hand to accept the award for Best TCG of 2001, while Decipher Marketing Manager Kendrick Summers accepted on behalf of the Art Group for Best Graphic Presentation for a Card Game.
“We are very proud to have these industry honors bestowed upon us for a game that we believe in so strongly,” said Warren Holland, Decipher’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Our game designers worked extremely hard to develop a trading card game that would stay true to the lore of The Lord of the Rings™ while incorporating some of the most innovative game mechanics of any TCG available. The work of our art department on this game speaks for itself.”
Voting for the Best Trading Card Game of 2001 was open to the public, while Best Graphic Presentation of a Card Game was voted on exclusively by members of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design.
These Origins Awards are the most recent accolades received by Decipher for its The Lord of the Rings™ Trading Card Game. Earlier this year, The Lord of the Rings™ Trading Card Game was the recipient of the first Nigel D. Findley Memorial Award for Outstanding Card Gaming Product of the Year. In addition, InQuest Gamer Magazine fans named The Lord of the Rings™ Trading Card Game “Best CCG” in the June 2001 issue. InQuest staff awarded The Lord of the Rings™ Trading Card Game the title of “Best Movie-Based CCG of All Time” in the May 2002 issue.
The Origins Awards, which are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design, celebrate the best in board, roleplaying, miniatures, trading card games, professional and amateur magazine publications, game-related fiction, play-by-mail game design, and gaming accessories and supplements.