May 31, 2002

Nancy Drew and the FBI

Two unrelated items in the news caught my attention.

The creator of Nancy Drew died, and the FBI is now allowed to surf the Web. I didn't know they couldn't, but first, Nancy.

I was not an eager reader for the first two years of my education. "Run, Spot, Run" and "The Adventures of Dick and Jane" were not exactly spellbinding reading material, at least to me.

(My schooling predates kindergarten, back in the dark ages.)

Then, as I began the third grade, our first trip to the library as a class was a real eye-opener. For the first two years, first- and second-grade students were confined to what was called the "little library." In the third grade, we were allowed into the "big library" where the selection did not include Spot, Dick and Jane.

And the first thing my eyes laid on was a whole row of books, all about this young girl named Nancy Drew, a teenage detective.

I checked out the first one that day, and the adventure began.

In fairly short order, I had worked my way down that entire row, spellbound as Nancy Drew solved mystery after mystery.

And I've never stopped reading since, nor shall I ever do so.

I give a lot of credit not only for my success in formal education, but my lifetime continuing education through books, to Carolyn Keene, the author of the Nancy Drew books, who got me started as a voracious reader early. Actually, Keene was a pen name for Mildred Wirt Benson, who went unknown for decades after writing the first 23 books of the series. She died last week.

Benson's role as the creator of the series was revealed in a court case in 1980 involving the Nancy Drew publisher, which had bound her by a contract from ever revealing her identity.

And the same publisher paid her the grand sum of $125 per book, and not a penny of royalties from the book sales, movies, board games or any more of the rich stream of Drew revenue.

The publisher took the series away from Benson and gave it to his daughter in the 1950s, and Nancy Drew has been updated countless times and is still published today as modern stories.

Benson died with her boots on, still writing at 96, working on her weekly column for The Toledo Blade newspaper when she fell ill last week and died later that same day. She had been battling lung cancer since 1997. Now there's a role model for any writer.

My other thought is how in the wide world did the FBI ever get hamstrung by internal rules that prohibited agents from surfing the World Wide Web?

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Thursday that henceforth, FBI agents can surf the web for information about Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

Internal rules dating back 25 years or more -- long before the Web was born -- had been interpreted as not allowing an FBI agent to type "bombs" into a search engine and click "search."

How stupid can our government get? Is it any wonder that Sept. 11 occurred, with such silly rules tying the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? It seems it has become the FBB, the Federal Bureau of Bureaucrats. Perhaps one good outcome of Sept. 11 will be to take the handcuffs off the FBI and other security agencies who were obviously not ready for Osama.

Already some of the liberals are screaming Ashcroft's ruling "goes too far." I personally don't see allowing the FBI the same freedom as the rest of us to surf the Web as a great assault on my personal liberty. But then, I'm not a liberal, so I have no idea how their minds work anyway.

I do know this. Nancy Drew would have been ready and waiting on Osama, at least one step ahead of his schemes, instead of a mile behind.