{"id":9505,"date":"2014-02-14T16:34:25","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T21:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=9505"},"modified":"2014-02-14T16:34:25","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T21:34:25","slug":"whatever-happened-to-barbara-dininno-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/whatever-happened-to-barbara-dininno-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Whatever Happened to Barbara DiNinno?"},"content":{"rendered":"

February\/March 2014 | View this story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

The former Maine Maritime Academy midshipman was lost at sea. But who \u201closted\u201d her?<\/h3>\n

By Colin W. Sargent<\/p>\n

\"diNinno1\"<\/a>Whatever happened to that woman who got kicked out of Maine Maritime Academy for not wearing her uniform? Carelessly, you crack open a Portland Press Herald<\/em> and let your eyes wander until a small black square floats exotically to your attention about 360 miles from land, near the Persian Gulf port of Bahrain:<\/p>\n

We can only guess at what happened, guess and wonder what was in the sealed envelope that was found with Barbara DiNinno\u2019s neatly packed belongings after she disappeared on March 9 from the decks of the Military Sealift Command ship Courier<\/em>. I know what\u2019s inside the sealed letter, but before we steam it open, let\u2019s hold it up to the light and consider the person who addressed it.<\/p>\n

\u201dIt is to be noted that no life rings, life jackets, survival suits, etc., are missing. If DiNinno is overboard, which appears obvious, she is without any flotation assistance,\u201d writes the Courier<\/i>\u2019s captain in his mishap report.<\/p>\n

It is also to be noted that this missing person is the same Barbara DiNinno whose controversial expulsion from Maine Maritime Academy in Castine was the subject of newspaper articles across the state from October through December. Miles of ink were devoted to the fact that she refused to wear the Maine Maritime Academy uniform, but the issues behind her protest actions were lost in the shuffle.<\/p>\n

Then, inexplicably, we run into this anticlimactic little note listing her lost at sea<\/i>, surfacing like a bottle with a message in it bobbing in an ocean devoid of context\u2026 Where was Jessica Fletcher when we needed her?<\/p>\n

Barbara DiNinno\u2019s public mystery began in August 1984 when she transferred to MMA from the University of Washington. An exceptional student, she\u2019d won a scholarship to MMA from the Seafarers International Union, \u201cand until her last week at MMA (she was expelled on October 29 of her junior year, 1985), she had only seven demerits, with grades between 3.6 and 4.0, all A\u2019s and B\u2019s,\u201d says her husband, Ensign Arthur J. DiNinno, U.S. Coast Guard, a 1985 MMA graduate himself.<\/p>\n

A week later, Barbara DiNinno had accumulated 111 demerits (100 demerits and you\u2019re history), and her controversy was being considerably magnified by the media\u2019s lens.<\/p>\n

Arthur DiNinno\u2019s story of Barbara DiNinno\u2019s troubles at MMA reads like chapters out of Dress Gray<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201dIt started almost from Day One,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno from his station on Governors Island, New York Harbor, where he is Assistant Water Pollution Response Officer for the port of New York.<\/p>\n

\u201dWell, the issues she raised, she had to raise them. She had to do it. I truly believe in what she was fighting for. It really confronted her sense of right and wrong. The famous Nazi salute incident\u2013that was in the first week of school.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a transfer student entering MMA at the beginning of her sophomore year, the 30-year-old DiNinno still had to undergo a late-summer orientation week before the academic year began, supervised by a cadre of Sophomore Strikers\u2013MMA cadets who, like Barbara DiNinno, were about to enter their sophomore year themselves, but, unlike Barbara DiNinno, had spent their freshman year at Castine.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can imagine how laughable it must have been to a 30-year-old woman (world-traveled, with 11 years of commercial merchant marine sea time to her credit) to watch these little 18- or 19-year-olds pushing their chests out and squeaking commands,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno, who says that, undetected by many MMA officials, some Sophomore Strikers at MMA have evolved into a bizarre quasi-military sub-cult with rules of its own and subtly identifiable ways of souping up their uniforms:<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the Strikers know about being drill sergeants is from what they\u2019ve seen in the movies. If you\u2019ve ever noticed a state trooper with mirror sunglasses and a high-pressure garrison cover pulled halfway down over his eyes, with his chest swelled out\u2013that\u2019s the look they\u2019re imitating up there. It\u2019s ridiculous.\u201d The MMA regulations call for proper, loose-fitting uniforms based on Naval Reserve officers\u2019 uniforms, but this group of two dozen or so summer Strikers makes an extreme interpretation of the uniform regulations, says DiNinno.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the Strikers that first week, Shane Moykins, had Barbara\u2019s group of incoming students all lined up in front of a field where the MMA football team was practicing. Then he said the words Sieg Heil<\/i> and ordered the formation to sieg heil<\/i> with a Nazi salute in the direction of the football team. Barbara was appalled. She refused. She\u2019s not Jewish, but she\u2019s an extremely sensitive person; she\u2019d never think something like the Holocaust was an appropriate subject for humor or school spirit. She went through the chain of command in the student body and nothing happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen she went to the Admissions Officer at MMA, the person who\u2019d brought her to this school and had talked with her days earlier when she arrived, and brought it to his attention.\u201d Moykins was reprimanded, and the Strikers were furious, says DiNinno. \u201cA number of Strikers got together and assembled (the new cadets) in the MMA gym.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey told them, \u2018Watch what Barbara Malecek (her maiden name) is going to go through,\u2019\u201d says DiNinno. \u201c\u2018This is what happens when you put the heat on us!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

From then on, The Heat was on for Barbara Malecek. She was ostracized by many of the other cadets, even by some of the young corporate female midshipmen who may have been embarrassed by Barbara\u2019s intensity and lack of polish (pride goes down smooth, like oysters on the half-shell\u2013it takes a technique, one that Barbara never learned). As female cadet Eleish Higgins told the Maine Sunday Telegram<\/em>, \u201cYou have to go by the rules and regulations of this place.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course Eleish Higgins would say that,\u201d says DiNinno. \u201cHer father is a teacher in the school.\u201d What the story also neglected to mention was that Eleish Higgins had been Barbara DiNinno\u2019s roommate.<\/p>\n

Barbara DiNinno simply told the Telegram<\/em>: \u201cWho else is going to kick open the door for other women?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kicking open doors\u2013that\u2019s the difference between Barbara DiNinno and another media darling we got to know during the same period, Christa McAuliffe. They were famous during the same weeks. They disappeared during the same weeks. But Christa had opened her doors carefully, politely, biding her time in a way that pleased public sensibilities, while Barbara DiNinno\u2019s media persona emerged as a sort of inverse Christa from the wrong side of the tracks, a Christa McAuliffe with two black eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe if she\u2019d had a little more pizzazz and a little more personal ability to interact in polite society, she wouldn\u2019t have had to fight for the recognition she deserved, but the point is, she shouldn\u2019t have had to fight for it anyway,\u201d says her husband.<\/p>\n

\u201cBarbara was an extraordinary person. She needed to be formally recognized by an institution. She needed to be recognized by the system. She ached for it,\u201d says DiNinno. \u201cShe hurt. She hurt to be accepted and recognized. She needed the degree from MMA so she could come ashore and always be able to work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arthur DiNinno met Barbara Malecek \u201con a blind date of all things, early in the fall of 1984, right at MMA. Barbara had just started at school.\u201d A female friend of DiNinno\u2019s on the staff at MMA handed him a telephone and said, \u201cHere, take this telephone. This is a nice girl. She\u2019s new here. She\u2019s lonely. I want you to ask her out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d describe our first date as nondescript. Barbara was very neutral. She didn\u2019t let you get to know her very easily. It was a slow, maturing process for me,\u201d says DiNinno, 29. \u201cMonths later I asked Barbara, \u2018What did you think of our first date?\u2019 She thought for a while and said, \u2018You were nonthreatening.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That understatement was quite a compliment considering the tough crowd Malecek had grown up with. Born in 1955 on a dirt-poor Missouri farm, she\u2019d left home, married, and divorced by age 18.<\/p>\n

Floating through a series of odd jobs that brought her to New Orleans, she finally wound up at Harry Lundeberg\u2019s School for Merchant Seamen, says Arthur DiNinno, \u201cthe kind of place where some people end up because a judge says, \u2018You can be in jail in the morning or you can be at Harry Lundeberg\u2019s.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came from the streets\u2013a lot of minorities. There was high discipline because of the urban street people,\u201d he says, adding that after Harry Lundeberg\u2019s School for Merchant Seamen and a decade of ship time, where she was invariably the only woman on the ships she served on, the white Wonderbread world of the Strikers seemed somewhat absurd.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know what I was getting into,\u201d Barbara told the Maine Sunday Telegram<\/i> while at MMA. \u201cThe whole idea here is to take people out of childhood and introduce them to adulthood. That wasn\u2019t appropriate\u00a0 for me at all. I came here as an accomplished professional person. This was a second career for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is an abrasive lady who from the start has threatened us,\u201d countered Charles \u201cToro\u201d Goodrich, a senior and regimental commander at the time of her dismissal.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe didn\u2019t trust us\u2013she had no faith in us whatsoever,\u201d a wounded regimental executive officer (cadet) Paul Giguere told the Maine Sunday Telegram<\/i> in the same piece. \u201cShe could have come to us and gotten the regiment behind her. With the regiment behind you, you can do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the Nazi salute incident and the Turning On of The Heat, Barbara DiNinno became a public figure, alleging a series of MMA gender inequities and procedures on cruise assignments and commercial detailing options. In particular, she compiled a list of commercial companies working with MMA who she maintained had a tacit agreement never to be sent a woman for cadet cruises or duty after graduation; new women recruits are not told they have fewer billeting opportunities than male cadets. And she continued to receive excellent grades while stirring up all this \u201ctrouble.\u201d Troublemaker?<\/p>\n

Because of \u201cabrasive lady\u201d Barbara DiNinno, the MMA now sports an Affirmative Action Hearing Committee.<\/p>\n

Then came the biggest hullabaloo. In the summer of 1985, Barbara DiNinno earned a Coast Guard Third Assistant Engineer license for steam vessels. New territory again for the school. The qualification officially granted her status as a licensed merchant marine officer, effective September 13, 1985.<\/p>\n

As a way to dramatize her other issues at MMA (\u201cthe school had planned to simply let her graduate and have all her problems sail away,\u201d her husband contends), she abruptly stopped wearing the MMA cadet uniform, citing regulations that stated she would be impersonating a cadet\u2019s lower rank by wearing her old school clothes now that she\u2019d earned an officer\u2019s rank.<\/p>\n

She asked the academy for authorization to wear a uniform commensurate with her license, was refused, and so she began to wear civilian clothes and pass up regimental functions. The whole thing exploded into the predictable notorious woman\/uniform media iceberg tip, and the other issues, in spite of her work with Ellsworth attorney Anthony Beardsley, disappeared beneath the headlines.<\/p>\n

Now she\u2019s lost at sea, reported missing 360 miles from exotic Bahrain before we can even take stock of what happened here in Castine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still can\u2019t believe she isn\u2019t here. After she was reported missing I flew to Bahrain. She was only 4 days away from finishing her whole cruise! She\u2019d stopped at Yokosuka, Japan; Diego Garcia; Bahrain\u2026 She called me from Manila in the Philippines the day after Valentine\u2019s Day, when all the rioting was going on there. That\u2019s the last time I heard her voice,\u201d says DiNinno.<\/p>\n

Did the controversy follow her onto the Courier<\/em>? Was she pushed over the side at night-by someone who she pushed too far? Swallowed by the sea with the phosphorescent wake of the Courier<\/em> steaming for 18 hours before she was reported missing? She was quiet, private, stayed in her 6\u2019 x 8\u2019 stateroom.<\/p>\n

The stateroom is getting smaller, she wrote to her husband in early March.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the letter, asks a reading public who likes to tie up mysteries in a neat red bow?<\/p>\n

A number of newspapers have asked her husband what is in the letter, but he\u2019s only told me, perhaps because I told him I knew male versions of Barbara DiNinno while I went to the Naval Academy from 1973 to 1977, people who would speak up and get into a lot of trouble while I just glided on by and swallowed my pride. I admired them at the same time I feared to associate with them.<\/p>\n

I think of other notorious people who have fallen off ships in lore and legend, naughty Freddie Bartholomew in Captains Courageous<\/em> after bolting down six strawberry ice cream sodas\u2013that was his crime! Abrasive lady\u2013did we all think she somehow deserved<\/i> to be lost at sea because she was so threatening to our high-plumage cadets at MMA?<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a truly gifted and respected engineer. She had many friends and supporters at MMA, like faculty members Dr. Groves Herrick, Dr. Sue Loomis, and Dr. Donna Fricke,\u201d says her husband.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone was deeply moved at her untimely passing,\u201d says MMA staff attorney Robert Reagan. \u201cThe Superintendent himself, along with the Staff Executive Officer and a number of Academy employees, attended a memorial ceremony for her in Castine,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are just over a dozen nontraditional students\u201d currently at MMA, reports attorney Reagan. \u201cWe were all very saddened for Arthur.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe MMA Commandant, Capt. Steven Edwards, is the only person at MMA I hold strict malice towards,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno. \u201cThe others (who opposed her) are just ignorant.\u201d<\/p>\n

After being expelled from MMA, she and attorney Beardsley unsuccessfully appealed the case to MMA\u2019s board of trustees and then lost another attempt to be reinstated when Hancock County Superior Court Justice Robert L. Browne refused to order the MMA board of trustees to take her back.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were few clues about how or why DiNinno disappeared\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

On the plane to Bahrain to claim her belongings, Arthur DiNinno \u201cread every one of Barbara\u2019s letters 10,000 times. Was there a trend? Should I have known something? She wrote me a letter every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ocean Carriers ship Courier<\/em> was a lonely, hard-working assignment, with DiNinno the only woman aboard in a crew of 25. \u201cAt sea it doesn\u2019t take much to make your imagination run wild,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno. \u201cThe dangers to a woman are very real. Barbara never went on a deck at night. She was always where she was supposed to be. She truly had a distinct fear of being raped on a ship. She had to lock her door. She resented that she had to do that. She had to be very selective in the clothes she wore so they wouldn\u2019t show feminine characteristics.\u201d<\/p>\n

The meticulous DiNinno never went to the crew\u2019s lounge on the Courier<\/em> to see movies at night, because she said it was filled with \u201ccigarette smoke and rapist eyes.\u201d Sensing the dangers alone at sea, she worked out a coded system of telling her husband Arthur if she were in danger. \u201cWe agreed that if she wrote, \u2018Happy Birthday, A.J.<\/i>\u2019 to me in a letter and it wasn\u2019t January 11, I\u2019d know (that someone was out to hurt her),\u201d says DiNinno.<\/p>\n

At sea, when she wasn\u2019t standing watch, \u201cShe was doing correspondence courses and also reading things like Family Circle<\/em>. She was getting domestic. We were talking about having children.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen, her reading material ran out,\u201d says DiNinno. Next, she mentioned that feeling about her \u201csix-by-eight-foot stateroom getting smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony is, a lot of good news was coming her way. In a February 20 letter she wrote excitedly to Arthur DiNinno: \u201cI\u2019m sailing as an Observing 3rd Assistant, on my license.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis also means that after only 3 months on here (I\u2019ve already done almost 2) that I can sit for my diesel license.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat pleases me even more is that the Chief Engineer and the Captain did this [wrote recommendations and listed her as a QMED, Observing 3rd Assistant] to help me on my way after the First Assistant had spoken to them about my struggles with MMA and my determination to further my career. I had talked briefly with him one day, just conversation, about having been an MMA student and a bit about the lawsuit trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t understand why, if so many people, people who I work for, teachers at school and people in Castine, have so many good things to say about me and go out of their way to help me, why do a few administrators and a bunch of boys at MMA think I\u2019m as evil as the devil himself?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a living Catch-22, a three-way circle,\u201d says her husband. \u201cShe was a very loving and warm person. She gave much of her money away to things like Greenpeace. She was not the kind of beautiful fashion model you see on TV, but she was the piece that was missing in my life. Today I was thinking about her, walking outside on a sunny day with the azaleas out\u2026 I remember the world being such a bright place when I found Barbara, and now I feel like the most miserable son of a bitch ever to walk the face of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contents of the sealed letter? The red bow, the denouement, the Godiva chocolate you can pop into your mouth when you need that reassuring sense of closure?<\/p>\n

Not this time. Barbara DiNinno doesn\u2019t gift-wrap very easily. With tears in his voice Arthur DiNinno has told me that Barbara\u2019s letter didn\u2019t say Happy Birthday A.J. Rather, it leads him to believe that in a moment of absolute sadness and depression, when she tired of fighting in a way that can\u2019t be articulated here, she took her own life. \u201cBarbara was a very sensitive person. The more sensitive you are, the more you\u2019re aware of the beauties of your surroundings, but on the other hand, it equally shows you the dark side of the world,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Not Forgotten<\/b><\/p>\n

I was chatting with a Key Bank branch manager a few weeks ago. When she mentioned she and her husband went to Maine Maritime Academy, I swallowed. Barbara\u2019s searching eyes flickered into my head. I asked the bank officer, \u201cThen you\u2019ve heard of Barbara DiNinno? Because she opened doors for you. Some say she kicked them down.\u201d\u00a0 The recent MMA graduate said, \u201cNo, and that\u2019s strange, because I\u2019m interested in things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not surprised,\u201d says Arthur DiNinno, who\u2019s remarried (\u201c21 years ago\u201d), lives in Cape Elizabeth, and has three boys.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting. In Barbara\u2019s situation, she was bucking the tide with MMA. It would take a plaque to have her remembered, and that\u2019s not likely to happen. No one has contacted me with more information since her suicide. There was a note we found in her luggage. Dated a few days earlier, it said she was tired of fighting. She was bipolar and took meds. I was a newlywed at the time and didn\u2019t know the breadth of that situation. Today, you couldn\u2019t go to sea with those medicines. You couldn\u2019t have your license. Someone like that can have good days and almost mercurial changes on bad days. In the merchant marine, where so much is automated, you can get up, go on watch, go off watch, and never see another human being. On the ship, where there were few females, that loneliness was magnified.\u201d<\/p>\n

DiNinno is aware that Barbara\u2019s ship has been scrapped. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what time and salt water can do to a ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all these years, I notice something else in Arthur\u2019s voice, something I didn\u2019t hear in 1988, when things were darkest. His family has helped him to rediscover joy.\u2013Colin W. Sargent<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February\/March 2014
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