B4

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Late-night phone bandit bombards the D.C. area

by Annys Shin

The first call came at 3 a.m. Sat-

urday. Andrew Pang was asleep in his Arlington County home. He dreaded answering; a call in the middle of the night usually means bad news. He didn’t recognize the 307 area code on his caller ID. When he picked up, all he heard was si- lence — then click. The phone rang again at 5:20, 7:30 and 9, al- ways from the same number. The mystery caller plagued thousands of other residents in Arlington and Alexandria, and in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties over the weekend, as well as elsewhere across the country. The calls from the num- ber with the Wyoming area code began nearly a year ago and re- cently have attracted the atten- tion of phone companies, police, and state and federal regulators, none of whom has been able to identify the caller from 307-459- 1039. “The most frustrating thing is when you answer, there is no one there,” Pang said. “You can’t fig- ure out what they want or ask them to stop.” The caller’s identity remains a

mystery. In some older com- plaints on Internet message boards, recipients reported that a heavily accented man or woman told them that they had won a va-

cation or tried to sell a time share. In March, the Wyoming phone bandit blitzed Connecticut. Resi- dents figured out the number is registered to Level 3, a Colorado company whose fiber-optic net- work serves phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T. Level 3 spokesman Vince Hancock said the calls probably don’t originate in Wyoming. Most likely, the number was hijacked in a prac- tice known as caller ID spoofing, in which a call looks as if it is coming from a different number. Level 3 ended Connecticut res- idents’ misery by blocking the number. But the phone bandit struck again on a different net- work, Hancock said. On Monday, after complaints from the Wash- ington area flooded in, Level 3 blocked the number on all of its networks, as did Verizon, which should stop most of the calls. In Virginia, causing a phone to ring with intent to annoy is a mis- demeanor. But no one knows who is doing the annoying. A Federal Communications Commission spokesman said the agency is try- ing to find the source. And the Federal Trade Commission can’t do much about hang-up calls un- less telemarketing is involved. “Unless these people are trying to sell something, we don’t have jurisdiction,” FTC spokesman Pe- ter Kaplan said.

shina@washpost.com

LOTTERIES

April 26

DISTRICT

Mid-Day Lucky Numbers:

Mid-Day D.C. 4: Mid-Day DC-5: Lucky Numbers: D.C. 4 (Sun.): D.C. 4 (Mon.): DC-5 (Sun.): DC-5 (Mon.): Daily 6 (Sun.): Daily 6 (Mon.):

MARYLAND

Day/Pick 3:

Pick 4:

Night/Pick-3 (Sun.): Pick-3 (Mon.): Pick-4 (Sun.): Pick-4 (Mon.):

Multi-Match:

8-7-7 6-6-9-7

5-7-8-3-3 7-1-3

7-9-1-6 8-6-6-4

5-8-6-2-2 4-9-8-7-0

18-19-23-29-36-38 *17 2-5-12-18-26-39 *9

1-6-6

7-2-0-1 0-6-0 9-6-3

5-7-6-5 4-0-9-8

Match 5 (Sun.): Match 5 (Mon.):

VIRGINIA

Day/Pick-3:

Pick-4: Cash-5:

Night/Pick-3 (Sun.): Pick-3 (Mon.): Pick-4 (Sun.): Pick-4 (Mon.): Cash-5 (Sun.): Cash-5 (Mon.):

N/A

5-12-17-30-39 *25 4-12-13-18-21 *35

7-3-8 2-3-5-2

14-15-24-29-31 5-0-0 N/A

6-5-1-3 N/A

9-10-20-23-30 N/A

*Bonus Ball All winning lottery numbers are official only when validated at a lottery ticket location or a lottery claims office. Because of late drawings, some results do not appear in early editions. For late lottery results, check www.washingtonpost.com/lottery.

KLMNO

The Civil War, seen through new lens

archives from B1

The exhibit, designed to launch

Washington’s celebration of the coming 150th anniversary of the war years, seeks to explore more of the little-known aspects of the battle and glimpse some of the dimmer corners of the conflict that remade the country and that so many Americans think they know so well. Yet 150 years later, the anniver-

sary of the war that tore the na- tion apart finds a country that re- mains racially divided, politically fractured and historically split — even over the causes and legacy of America’s most wrenching con- flict. The governors of two Southern

states, Virginia and Mississippi, sparked controversy this month by neglecting or sounding dismis- sive of the role of slavery in the war. And one noted Civil War his- torian says the nation might be too divided to properly mark the key unifying event in its history. “I think it’s going to be impos- sible to get all the American peo- ple to gather to commemorate a portion of American history that’s so important to the country,” said Virginia Tech’s James I. Robert- son Jr., who 50 years ago directed the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission. “People just aren’t that together anymore. “The nation is far more polar- ized and politicized now than it was” in the centennial, he said. “Every subject seems to become an issue.”

But another scholar disagreed.

Princeton historian James M. Mc- Pherson said that the Civil War centennial coincided with the civ- il rights movement. “On the issue of race, I think there was much sharper polarization then than now,” he said. McPherson said recent uproars point to “the way in which the war still resonates in American culture.” “Issues having to do with race

and slavery and regionalism and federalism — all of those are hot- button issues in American poli- tics and American culture, and the Civil War looms over all of them,” he said. The war, which began in 1861 and ended in 1865, claimed more than 600,000 lives — 2 percent of the population then. Today, that

MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST

Senior curator Bruce Bustard calls the exhibit, complete with touch-screen displays, a “guided research experience.” It is designed to mark the 150th anniversary of the war years.

would mean 6 million dead, his- torians say. One battle in 1862, near Sharpsburg, Md., killed four times the number of American casualties on D-Day in 1944. But the archives’ exhibit seeks to probe beyond the sagas of the grand battles that pack the shelves of bookstores. It will present, for instance, an

earlier, and long forgotten, pro- posal for what could have been the 13th Amendment to the Con- stitution. The actual 13th Amend- ment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States. But in December 1860, Congress pro- posed a very different version. Although never ratified, it read: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will . . . abolish or interfere, with- in any state, with the domestic in- stitutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state.” This was a 13th Amendment that would have protected slavery, instead of abolishing it, archives historians say. The exhibit, which is free, fea- tures reproductions of recruiting posters, letters and photographs, including one haunting portrait

of an African American drummer boy from a Union regiment of black soldiers. The exhibit also uses touch- screen computer technology to il- lustrate chapters of the war. The saga of the notorious Confederate commerce raider, CSS Alabama, which preyed on Union shipping until it was sunk in 1864, is told as a touch-screen “graphic novel” with comic book-style cartoon panels. The tale of the vengeful execu- tions in Missouri is rendered with a touch-screen tour of the docu- ments found in the archives’ stacks. “It’s kind of a guided research

experience,” said senior curator Bruce Bustard, “where the visitor will be able to follow the research through the steps.” It is not a pleasant story. “It struck me as not the way I re- membered the Civil War growing up, which is generally pictured as great armies clashing on a battle- field like Gettysburg,” he said. The tale begins with the killing

of six Union POWs and their com- mander, Maj. James Wilson. They had been captured in a skirmish at Pilot Knob, Mo., on Sept. 27,

1864. But their captors handed them over to a rebel guerrilla commander named Tim Reves, or Reeves, Bustard said. There appears to have been bad blood between Reeves and Wil- son, Bustard said, but the record on that is not clear. Documents indicate that Wilson and his men were killed by Reeves and his band Oct. 3. After the bodies were found weeks later, outraged Union offi- cers ordered the execution of the six rebel POWs at a prison in St. Louis. And on Nov. 8, Confederate Maj. Enoch O. Wolf was selected to be shot in retaliation for the killing of Wilson. Wolf proclaimed his innocence, condemned the killing of the Union soldiers by a “bush whack- er” and in a letter to a Union gen- eral requested time “to prepare for death.” Somehow, word of his plight reached the White House, whose chief resident — and the Civil War’s main protagonist — was known for staying executions. Bustard duly found in the ar- chives a scrawled note on War De- partment stationery dated Nov. 10, 1864. It read:

“Suspend execution of Major

Wolf until further order, (and) meanwhile, report to me on the case. A. Lincoln.” Wolf was spared, survived the

war and lived well into old age.

ruanem@washpost.com

Admission is free. The exhibit will be presented in two parts. The first runs April 30-Sept. 6, the second Nov. 10-April 17. National Archives hours: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., March 15-Labor Day, and 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., day after Labor Day-March 14.

Seeds of volunteerism planted early at Gonzaga

gonzaga from B1

the shelter for a week or deliver meals to nearby families. In the decades since the

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McKenna Center was founded — one of the only shelters in the country that operates in the mid- dle of a private-school campus — thousands of students have volun- teered there. Some try it grudg- ingly. Some come back occasion- ally. And some find themselves re- thinking how they want to live their lives.

Value of volunteering

Over the past 20 years, the number of young people volun- teering nationally has increased significantly, said Andrew Furco, associate vice president for public engagement at the University of Minnesota. But experts don’t know what

impact all this volunteering has on needy people and communi- ties, or on the people who are try- ing to help. If there are important lessons to be learned, do those les- sons stick?

By one measure, at least, there has been a profound shift. As more students volunteer during their teenage years, the percent- age who plan to continue helping in college has shot up, increasing by more than 80 percent in less than 20 years, according to a sur- vey by the Higher Education Re- search Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Researchers have found a link

between those who volunteer and the value students place on social and political involvement in their communities. Nearly 70 percent of college freshmen said it’s very important or essential to help people in need, one of the highest rates since 1970. “There’s a changing student propensity to volunteer in college and to think that is something im- portant,” said Linda DeAngelo, a researcher at the institute. At Gonzaga, those seeds are planted from the first day. “I had heard of poverty,” said

Jerry Cardarelli, who studied there in the late 1980s, “but going

JAMES M. THRESHER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Gonzaga College High School junior John Sullivan, 17, looks over food for filling bags to hand out. At left is freshman Brian Frey, 15.

downtown to high school you’re face to face with poverty every day.” It is a shock for many stu- dents, especially those who have grown up in wealthy suburbs. “I had the lens of a privileged

kid,” said Gary Hines, who was at Gonzaga in the 1970s and remem- bers thinking, “Who are these folks? My dad’s paying a pretty penny for me to go to this school.” Then he spent part of the sum- mer of 1976 living and volun- teering at an orphanage in Mexico City with a priest from Gonzaga and a few other students. That was when he began to think about poverty as a lack of opportunity. He saw parents working long hours but unable to ever get out of the corrugated-tin shantytowns where sewage ran through gullies in the dirt.

Still, it took many years — and a much more brutal kind of educa- tion — for many of the lessons to sink in. He went to college, be- came a consultant and got hooked on cocaine in the ’80s. The first time he returned to the church on campus, where the McKenna Cen- ter was established in the early

1980s, it was to get help, not give it.

“Cocaine had gutted my life at

that point,” Hines said. While classmates had become doctors, lawyers and engineers, he had lost jobs, friends and his home. Gradually, after years of quit- ting and relapsing, he began working with the McKenna Cen- ter, first as a consultant, then as a fundraiser and now as the center’s associate director. One of the les- sons Gonzaga tried to teach — to become a man for others — “just had a literal impact on my life.” Now he likes to see students get their hands dirty and keep com- ing back until it’s routine. For the students, volunteering is optional until they’re seniors, when they take a social justice course and have to log 40 hours. On a recent lunch hour, four freshmen in khaki pants and fleece jackets scooped spaghetti from big tinfoil trays and handed out warm slices of garlic bread to a steady line of men holding out plates, eyes down as they moved along the linoleum floor. “How you doing today?” 15-

year-old Joseph Fitzpatrick asked as he ladled meat sauce onto slick piles of noodles. Sometimes a man would pause and smile. “Not bad, not too bad.” It was a short glimpse of the worn paint, rat traps and sad sto- ries of McKenna, but one that left an impression. “I definitely want to do it again,” said Patrick Myers, a student from Bethesda. “I’m not quite sure why. It just felt good, to help someone who didn’t have much.”

A lifelong commitment

John Sullivan, now 17, isn’t sure

what prompted him to sign up for a week-long immersion program at the McKenna Center his fresh- man year. Maybe it was the guilt he felt walking by homeless men on his way to school. He slept at the church at night and helped prepare lunch during the day. One thing shocked him: He felt a connection with them right away. “They’re just regular people, just like us,” he said. Last summer, he volunteered

every day, scrubbing dishes, cook- ing spaghetti and sorting through boxes of donated zucchini with so many rotten ones that the smell made him gag. Staff members watched him change from an un- certain kid into someone they re- lied upon. He kept coming back because the need was so obvious, he said. And it changed the way he thinks about people — not just those needing help at the center, but also his classmates, everyone. He echoed Hines’s words: “Folks are folks.” He plans to work at McKenna again this summer, before his sen- ior year. Eventually, he wants to come back to the city and help somehow. If he studies eco- nomics, maybe he’ll advise people trying to start their own busi- nesses; if he studies English, may- be he’ll write about poverty. He will always volunteer, he said. “I was taught to love thy neigh-

bor,” he said, “and that is some- thing I will carry with me for the rest of my life.”

kinzies@washpost.com

TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2010

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