Deep in the musty recesses of my noggin reside memories of stuff that I don't even remember, if that makes any sense. Few years back, when I worked for Metro Pulse, we did a story about Ft. Sanders. My contribution was a little piece about the Yardarm (as I recall, we were supposed to hold these pieces to 300 words or less; Barney Fife-like I obeyed Rule # 1 (Hardly anybody else did):

Here goes, lifted from M-P:

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It didn't look like much from the outside. It was a long, low building—a converted paint store, I believe—that stood in an odd triangular space that used be in the last block of Forest Avenue before it emptied into Western. But when the out-of-town media came looking for someone to talk to about the campus Vietnam war protests, they were generally directed to the Yardarm. It probably didn't look like much inside, either. The most memorable piece of interior decoration was a large original oil painting of a slightly deformed pirate that graced one of the walls in the side room. Not that the decor mattered to those of us who frequented it in the late '60s and early '70s. We were students, bikers, professors, dope dealers, war-protesting Dylan-quoting radicals, slumming frat rats, wastrels and wannabes. There was Big Sam, who claimed he was a mercenary and would disappear for months at a time, reappearing unexpectedly with proof of his profession like the bag of wizened leathery mementos he assured us were human ears. There was my dear friend Quintin Tippett, a strapping black man who must have taken pity on me after he sold me a $20 bag of oregano (which my friends and I tried to smoke), and ended up becoming my guardian angel for the first year that I came back home to go to college on the GI Bill after the death of my young husband left me a Vietnam-era widow. Quin was one of those arrested in the Billy Graham protests, and would end up being murdered a decade later in Detroit, I believe. We deployed from the Yardarm when we undertook to lower the flag on The Hill to half-staff in memory of the 40,000 Americans who had died in Vietnam at that point, and we met at the Yardarm to march on Washington. I met my second husband at the Yardarm, after auditioning several candidates for the position. I've always claimed impaired judgment due to excessive smoking of oregano.

—Betty Bean