A-Mazing to the End

A blog post by JMM Executive Director Marvin Pinkert. To read more posts from Marvin click HERE.

Last weekend I gave one final tour of the Mendes Cohen exhibit and the finish to our story is as bizarre and awesome as the life of Mendes himself.

Special Mendes Visitors
Some very special visitors to The A-Mazing Mendes Cohen.

In our penultimate Mendes Cohen program we invited Dick Goldman, co-chair of the Jewish Genealogical Society to speak about the Cohen family tree.  Dick looked at our statement that “Israel Cohen has no known living descendants” as a challenge rather than a fact.  Using somewhat unorthodox methods he was able to uncover the fact that Alan Mordecai Cohen III was not the end of his family tree!  It seems that Mr. Cohen married a member of Hungarian royalty (surname: Buda) and in compliance with her wishes converted to Catholicism and changed his family name to Clarke.

The newly-named Clarkes raised a son and a daughter, both of whom went on to have children of their own. Alan’s daughter Bertha is still very much alive today, enjoying her eighth decade.  The man in the photo above is Bertha’s son, Ronald A. Brown.  When Dick contacted Ronald last Wednesday, he discovered that Ronald was in the process of moving from Baltimore to Gettysburg.  Dick told him that the exhibit was closing on Sunday – what a piece of timing! So it turns out that the very last visitor to the exhibit was a direct descendant of Israel Cohen, Mendes’ father.

But that isn’t the most incredible part.  The most incredible part is that Ronald’s cousin Richard Clarke and his uncle Alan Clarke formed a business called Marcor Remediation here in Baltimore in about 1980.  Here is a description of Marcor from the Baltimore Sun in 2006.  I have highlighted the part that floored me in red.

Marcor’s primary business is garden-variety asbestos removal and demolition. But in recent years, the company has been the Forrest Gump of environmental cleanup, stumbling into some of the biggest headline-grabbing disasters in recent memory.

Some people make history, and others are witness to it.

Marcor is its janitor.

The company was tearing down walls and removing asbestos in the basement of the Pentagon when terrorists struck with an airliner on Sept. 11, 2001. Days later, its crews were first on the scene at the Fresh Kills landfill in New York’s Staten Island, where hundreds of workers labored for 10 months to sift through every scrap of rubble from the World Trade Center.

During that period, they assisted contractors decontaminating the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington after a second anthrax attack forced lawmakers and staff from their offices. And with about 700 employees spread nationwide, Marcor has been on the scene after just about every major hurricane of the past two years, from Ivan and Charlie to Katrina and Rita.

It’s all in a day’s work for a company that got its first job – removing asbestos from a Baltimore County elementary school – on the day Mount St. Helens exploded in Washington state in 1980.

“It’s almost like, `What is it that needs doing that nobody else is doing?'” said Richard Clarke, who founded the company with his father, Alan Clarke. “And that’s where we want to be.”

It is the ultimate a-mazing finish to the story.  Mendes was sent into the powder magazine at Fort McHenry when America is under attack in 1814 to secure the facility from harm.  His familial descendant Richard Clarke went into the World Trade Center 187 years later to remediate the explosion when America is attacked again.  I thought that this type of coincidence only happened in the movies.

I also learned from Ronald Brown that his grandfather Alan Mordecai Cohen was 6’5” – suggesting he was a beneficiary of the same gene that produced Mendes’ impressive height.  Ronald also said that his son possessed a documented history of the Cohens that his uncle created in the 1980s.  We’re hoping to get a copy for our collection.

We hope everyone has enjoyed following along with The A-Mazing Mendes Cohen and his continuing adventures as much as we have – he is certainly going to be missed here at the Museum.

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Past Exhibits

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