A Community With an Expiration Date

Their culture began disappearing 20 years ago, and by the end of this year it will be completely gone. No one even considered trying to save it.

Theirs was a tiny civilization of fewer than 1 million people that existed on a narrow strip of land for a few generations, not quite spanning the 20th century.

In fact, it was in many ways the ultimate expression of what has been called the American Century: a bit of Americana tucked into the tropics that, perhaps appropriately, will be erased with barely a trace on Dec. 31 when Panama takes over the canal from the United States. All that will remain will be the annual reunion party, a few Web sites and the rich memories of the people who call themselves Zonians, the inhabitants of the old Panama Canal Zone.

Extending five miles along each side of the waterway, the zone was the absolute company town, a U.S. territory that housed the people who ran and protected the canal.

For Panamanians, it became a slash that divided their country, a visible reminder of U.S. domination. The zone was officially eliminated in 1979, two years after then-presidents Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos signed a treaty promising that Washington would turn over control of the canal to Panama gradually over two decades.

That’s when the diaspora began: Retired electrician Robert Christenson moved to Texas, and Scott Foster, a fourth-generation Zonian, to Chula Vista. Dave Furlong joined the military and ended up in Guam. Some Zonians tried to re-create their community in Orlando, Fla., site of the annual reunion that draws 100 or more expatriates.

A few, like childhood friends Peggy Acker and Kay Hamilton, stayed in Panama to teach on the military bases that are all that is left of the zone. In May, when the last class graduates from Balboa High School, the teachers will be transferred to bases far from Panama.

“Even though we may no longer be here, the spirit is being kept alive,” Acker said. “Even just the word ‘Zonian.’ All of us growing up down here were such a close-knit, extended family. That is the spirit.”

Zonians themselves struggle to capture that spirit in words. “What is strange to me is everyone who doesn’t have that,” Christenson said. He acknowledged, with a catch in his voice, that he misses the zone “every waking minute.”

Days of Chewing Tar and Having Exotic Pets

Over the decades, Zonians developed their own culture, a mixture of Panama and Americana.

George C. Zidbeck, grandson of a machinist who arrived in Panama in 1907 to help build the canal, recalls a childhood of saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning and playing “tree tag” in the jungle in the afternoon. The banyan trees in his neighborhood grew so thick that children could jump from branch to branch, not touching the ground for hours.

Roads literally melted in the Panama heat, and kids picked tar off the street to chew. In addition to cats and dogs, favored pets included sloths, parrots and monkeys.

At twilight, children followed the trucks that drove through the neatly manicured streets of identical duplexes and quadruplexes, spraying DDT to keep down mosquitoes that spread malaria. Now that the risks of the insecticide are known, Zonians jokingly blame any memory lapses on those nightly chases.

Life here moved to a calypso beat, and even Zonians who barely speak Spanish take pride in their salsa dancing moves.

Patricia Egger, whose grandparents moved to Panama when her parents were children, discovered subtle divisions when she went away to college in 1963.

“Everybody in Panama had pierced ears,” common in Latin culture, she said in a telephone interview from her Virginia home. But at the University of Arkansas, “I was told that nice girls didn’t pierce their ears.” She had to wear clip earrings to be accepted.

Going barefoot and feeling safe are common threads in Zonian memory. Theirs was a well-ordered society, like some Greek city-state where troublemakers were banished.

“We were raised [thinking], ‘Don’t get into trouble, because your dad could lose his job and we would get shipped out,’ ” Egger said.

Luke Lambert, now in his 60s, knows that was no idle threat. When he was 16, he argued with a Canal Zone police officer. “He hit me with a stick, and I hit him back,” he recalled. “They deported me from the Canal Zone,” allowing his father to keep his job only on the condition that Lambert leave home.

Assimilating into Panama proper was no easy task for the third-generation Zonian, who attended Canal Zone schools and spoke little Spanish. Even after he got accepted back into the Canal Zone family, Lambert made sure that his own eight sons learned Spanish.

Zonians are reluctant to discuss some aspects of their society. Particularly delicate is “the enormous discrepancy between black and white society along the same jungle corridor,” as it was termed by David McCullough, author of “Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal.”

‘It Was An Extremely Segregated Place’

What McCullough calls a “rigid caste society” began with the canal’s construction. Unskilled West Indian laborers--recruited mainly from Barbados, Martinique and Guadeloupe--were paid in Panamanian silver balboas. Skilled Americans were paid in gold-backed U.S. dollars.

The “gold” and “silver” standards persisted throughout the zone’s existence, largely because they were nominally based on citizenship, not race. Americans lived in gold towns, with their own schools and playgrounds, and were eligible for better-paying jobs. Heavy labor was for the West Indian workers’ descendants, who lived in silver towns.

The soldiers and sailors who protected the canal, passing through on two- or three-year tours of duty, fell somewhere in between. Young women from Canal Zone families did not usually date military men.

“It was an extremely segregated place,” Egger said.

When Zidbeck was 12, back in 1943, one of his neighbors here in Balboa invited children from the silver community of La Boca, about a mile away, to play softball. Just as the game was starting, a playground director appeared and told the children they could not play.

“We were so disappointed that we didn’t think of an alternative,” he said. “We knew there was a color line, and we didn’t tempt it.”

U.S. Government Earned Great Loyalty

Lambert, who still lives in the quadruplex where he raised his family in the old silver town of Paraiso, said he feels no bitterness. His great-grandfather came to Panama from Martinique to work on a failed French canal-building effort at the end of the 19th century.

When the company went bankrupt, workers were stranded. They were relieved to sign on with the Americans, who arrived in 1904.

Lambert’s father and grandfather also worked for the canal, and once his disagreement with the canal police blew over, Lambert got a job in the maintenance division. After 30 years of service, he retired in 1987 as a $5-an-hour liaison for the security division, good wages for Panama.

“You were sure you would get a fair break, even though they had a double system,” he said. “I don’t have any resentment against the U.S. government because it made sure I had a job. That’s why we were so loyal to the U.S. government.”

For a place so regimented on issues such as race, the Canal Zone also had its progressive side.

“The Canal Zone was America’s experiment in socialism, and it was a very successful experiment,” Zidbeck said. “It was not utopia, but it was close. You weren’t rich, but you knew there was something to eat every day.”

“We were the children of tradespeople who were making very good salaries,” he said. Housing, groceries, schools and recreation--including swimming pools and tennis courts--were all subsidized by proceeds from canal fees.

“We weren’t raised from a capitalist viewpoint, so none of us ever had any push or drive,” Egger said. “I grew up in a town that when the pipes broke, you called maintenance.”

In fact, in the Zonian version of the old “how-many-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb?” joke, the answer is: “Two, one to pour the drinks and another to call the Canal Zone electrician.”

Zone Is Fast Becoming a Memory

This lifestyle of orderly concrete houses, shaded lawns and wide streets contrasted increasingly with the chaotic, deforested growth of cities outside the zone. Panamanian resentment was manifested in riots, beginning in the 1960s, that finally resulted in the 1977 treaty to turn over control of the canal to Panama.

Panamanians were to be hired and trained to take over canal operations. In 1979, the zone became part of Panama, except for the bases that until 1997 housed the U.S. military’s Southern Command. The last base will close when the canal is turned over to Panama.

Zonians like Egger, who had moved away but wanted to return, found they could not get hired. While those with seniority could stay on, there were no new jobs for Americans, just two-year contracts.

What hurt Lambert most was seeing what happened to his alma mater, Paraiso High School. The school was supposed to continue operating as part of the Panamanian school system, he said.

“We had a welding shop and a plumbing shop, probably $48,000 worth of equipment,” he recalled. “By December, there was nothing there.”

Panamanian employees took the lights from the ballpark, pried loose the air conditioners and replaced the cedar doors with plywood, he said. The school is now a government building, and students are bused to another location.

The last of the Zonians are now collecting mementos for a future museum in Florida. The Balboa High School plaque, a reproduction of the Canal Zone seal that numerous freshmen polished at the behest of seniors, was removed from the school in February along with several other class gifts.

Many landmarks will exist only in memories. The Balboa Yacht Club, the setting for many a first drink and first date in the zone, burned to the ground in February, provoking the suspicions of many Zonians.

And those memories are starting to fade. On Canal Zone Web sites with names like “lostparadise,” amid recipes for the rice dishes that West Indian maids once prepared and inquiries about old classmates, someone will post a request for directions to, say, the riding stables that no longer exist. Remarkably, someone else will respond with precise instructions--and often a quip about inhaling too much DDT.

“My hometown is on the Internet,” Egger said ruefully.

Because the land has been returned gradually, its sale being administered by a special agency of the Panamanian government, Zonians who still live in Panama have become accustomed to the loss of their hometown. But it is still hard.

“I drive through and expect to see Americans there,” Acker said of the old zone, in a soft voice cultivated through decades of comforting third-graders. “When they’re not, it’s a shock.”

Acker moved to the zone in 1940, at age 2. She left to complete her elementary teaching degree in Michigan and came home to the zone to teach in 1960.

Over the years, she adopted three children, two of them Panamanian. Hamilton also adopted two children, and the longtime friends helped each other raise their families.

When the zone reverted to Panamanian control, Acker and Hamilton continued teaching but lost the more spacious housing that seniority had earned them. Now, the pair are waiting to hear where they will be assigned for the next school year.

“We’re hoping that when we transfer, we’ll be together,” Acker said. “When you are going away from the only home you have ever known, you want support.”

“It’s going to be very difficult to leave,” she said. “But I am looking forward to the next chapter.”

El Salvador Bureau Chief Darling was recently on assignment in Panama.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Home on the Web

When the Panama Canal Zone was returned to Panama, Zonians put their hometown on the Web. Some popular sites:

www.lostparadise.com

www.CZBrats.com

www.CZImages.com

www.pancanalsociety.org

www.pmbc.panamanow.net

www.bhs88.com/