Max’s War earned two honors:
- It was selected as a Notable Indie Book in Shelf Unbound Magazine’s 2024 Best Indie Book Awards
- It was a finalist in the 2024 Hemingway Book Awards novel competition for Wartime Fiction
If your organization is interested in a presentation about the Ritchie Boys before and during WW2, contact libbyfh@libbyhellmann.com
A Local News Story
So there I was in the Apple Store at Old Orchard Mall on the North Shore, waiting for my Genius Bar appointment. Finally, a young woman came over.
“Libby?”
“That’s me.”
I’d barely uttered my name when a wave of people from the front of the store surged toward us.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Someone in the crowd said, “There’s an emergency at the mall, and we’re going into lockdown,”
I followed at least 75 people into a narrow hall behind the retail area, and we all stumbled into the Employees’ Lounge, a long but narrow room with what looked like a small glass booth at one end, the sort of thing you see for guards in prison wards.
It turns out that the emergency system connecting all the stores at Old Orchard had a report of a man with a gun in the mall and notified all the stores. Apple closed and locked its outside doors, put us in a back room, and locked those doors too. As far as I know, all the stores in the mall closed as well.
A woman with dark hair was in charge. She told us we couldn’t call out. There were too many phones in the room. However, we could text our families to tell them where we were. That was the only time I felt unsettled. I couldn’t get the thought of the victims on the 9-11 planes out of my head. But I called my daughter in Philadelphia, who immediately freaked out. I’m not sure I made a wise decision there… but she finally settled down.
The woman in charge (I never did get her name) updated us regularly, but there wasn’t much to tell. After about thirty minutes, the staff put out water and cups. We were asked if anyone was diabetic. No one apparently was, so a few minutes later, they opened the vending machine and let us take what we wanted. The staff circulated regularly asking if we needed anything.
All told, we were in the employee lounge for about an hour. Nothing materialized with the so-called man with a gun. Later, some reports said it had been a conversation about a man with a gun, not the real thing, and someone called the police. At any rate, we were “freed” and we all went back to our tables to wait for our Genius to arrive.
I do have to commend Apple for its calm, thoughtful crisis plan. The system worked very smoothly. The staff was great; the woman updating us was too, and while the experience was an annoyance, I was never alarmed (except when they told us to text our families.)
But I have to wonder – is this the norm now? Has gun violence become so embedded in our society that merchants are now expected to protect their customers at the slightest hint of trouble? I’m not complaining – Apple did their job. But look at what’s happened. Merchants develop emergency crisis plans, and we adhere to them. We’ve lost the sense of safety and freedom in our own neighborhood. Our own city. Our own country. We’re playing defense. In that sense, the bad guys are winning.
And that’s just plain sad.