Six Books End With The Machine Leaving America. It Came Back 43 Days Later.
Alvin J. Pentecost cleared the crate out of Port Newark in April 1978 and cleared it back in again in May. The return form is four folders further into the same archive box, and nobody has ever ordered it.
TOMS RIVER, New Jersey — Alvin J. Pentecost initialled something like thirty-four thousand customs entries in twenty-nine years at the Port of Newark. Six books quote one of them.
He died on 15 August at his home in Toms River, New Jersey, at 89. The cause, according to the Ocean County medical examiner's office, was heart failure.
The entry
Entry 78-114302 was filed on 4 April 1978. One crate. Net weight 41 kilograms, gross 58. Declared as electrical demonstration apparatus. Consigned to the industrial fair at Hanover, which opened on 19 April that year and ran nine days.
The exporter was the Corliss-Bramwell Electric Company of Kearny, New Jersey. The contents were the apparatus described in United States patent application 4,112,889 PX-1560, withdrawn in November 1979, which this newspaper has written about before.
In the inspector's column, in ballpoint: AJP.
Six published accounts, from a 1981 paperback to a 2019 hardback, give that entry as the last trace of the machine. Four quote the initials. Two reproduce the entry as a plate. The 2019 book has the number right and the date wrong by a day.
The second entry
On 17 May 1978, forty-three days later, the same port processed Customs Form 3311 — the declaration for free entry of American goods returned — for one crate of electrical demonstration apparatus, 41 kilograms net, under item 800.00 of the tariff schedules: articles previously exported and brought back without having been advanced in value or improved in condition.
The initials in the column are the same.
The form sits in the same record series as the first, in the same box, four folders further in. It has been on an open shelf since 1978. None of the six accounts cites it, and the archive's call-slip register shows eleven readers have ordered the April folder and none has ordered May.
The notebook
Inspectors then kept a personal working notebook, because they were personally liable for duty they failed to collect. His son Dennis, who is 62 and lives in Brick Township, found nineteen of them in a filing cabinet and lent us the 1978 volume.
The entry for 17 May is eleven words in pencil: 3311 — C-B Elec — same crate back — 41k — no duty.
That is all. In nineteen volumes there is no other mention of it.
What he remembered
This newspaper telephoned Mr. Pentecost in October 2023, while reporting on the patent file. He was 86, entirely lucid, and remembered nothing about the crate. He said so four times in eleven minutes, and apologised twice.
Then he did the arithmetic aloud: about forty entries a shift, about two hundred shifts a year, twenty-nine years.
We asked him about April. We did not ask him about May, because in 2023 we did not know there was a May.
After 1978
Corliss-Bramwell's records passed to the distributor that absorbed the firm in 1996, which answered our letter in nine days with one photocopied card.
Asset 2214, one demonstration cabinet and stand, acquired 1977 at $8,410, written down to nothing in 1984, disposed of on 11 September 1991 as a single lot of non-ferrous scrap weighing 38 kilograms.
What a form can do
None of this says the apparatus did not work. There is no test data in the patent file, no surviving laboratory notebook, and nothing in any customs document that could speak to the question. A form records that a thing crossed a line and came back. That is the whole of what a form can do.
What it removes is a disappearance. The machine did not vanish in 1978. It went to a trade fair, came home in the third week of May, sat on an asset register for thirteen years, and was sold by weight.
Mr. Pentecost is survived by his son, two grandchildren and a sister. He kept the nineteen notebooks because the rules obliged him to for six years and he then went on for twenty-three more, and he never, his son says, looked in one of them again.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
This began as a favour. We asked his son for a photograph for the obituary and he offered a filing cabinet instead. Once we had the 1978 notebook we went back to the archive for the box the six books cite, and then read the rest of the box, which took a further afternoon and cost $18 in copying.
Who we spoke to
- Dennis Pentecost, His son. Interviewed at his kitchen table in Brick Township, twice, and given the full draft eleven days before publication July and August 2026 Gave us the notebooks on loan. Took no payment and was offered none. His reply is printed at the foot of this page.
- Nineteen personal working notebooks, 1965–1994, Kept by the inspector himself, in pencil, one volume a year and two in 1979. Borrowed from the family, photographed page by page at 600 dots per inch, and published entire with this item August 2026 The 1978 volume carries one line about the crate and nothing else about it in twenty-nine years.
- Entry file series, Port of Newark, 1978, Consumption, export and free-entry papers, filed by month. Read at the regional archive over two days; both entries copied at the counter rate and published August 2026 The call-slip register for the series is public. Eleven readers have ordered the April folder. Nobody has ordered May.
- Property and disposal records of the Corliss-Bramwell Electric Company, Held by the distributor that absorbed the firm in 1996. Written request; answered in nine days with a photocopy of one asset card and a covering note August 2026 Asset 2214. Acquired 1977 at $8,410, written down to nothing in 1984, disposed of in 1991.
- Ocean County medical examiner's office, Public record. Written record request 18 August 2026 Cause of death recorded as heart failure.
Documents
- PX-1560 — Patent application 4,112,889 — 'Apparatus for Asymmetric Capacitive Displacement' — with examiner correspondence accepted
What we could not confirm
- Whether the crate that came back held the apparatus that went out. Both entries describe electrical demonstration apparatus at 41 kilograms net, and free entry under item 800.00 requires that goods return unimproved — but no officer is recorded as having opened either crate, and a declaration is a statement by the person making it. We have two pieces of paper that agree with each other. That is not the same as a witness.
- Whether his initials mean he inspected anything. The column records who accepted the entry, not who lifted the lid. His son says his father initialled entries all day that he never saw, and we could find no rule from 1978 that settles which this was.
- Why the 1991 scrap lot weighs 38 kilograms against a 1978 net weight of 41. Three kilograms is a rounding error on a shipping scale and it is also a whole component, and nobody weighed either lot in front of anybody. We note separately, and without any evidence connecting them, that the applicant destroyed his own laboratory notebooks in the same year.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE MAN WHO WAVED THE MACHINE OUT OF AMERICA DIES AT 89
Ran the death as the closing of a door, with the April entry reproduced across a page.
Had that we did not
The entry number, correctly, and a photograph of him at thirty in uniform that is better than anything we have.
Left out
The return. It is in the same box, in the same hand, and it costs nothing to look at.
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Signal & LedgerThe Working Notebook: How Personal Liability Shaped A Customs Desk
Read the nineteen notebooks as a trade story about why inspectors kept private records at all, and read them well.
Had that we did not
The clearest explanation in print of the personal-liability rule, with the statute and the repeal date.
Left out
The crate. They covered nineteen volumes of notebooks and never said what is written in one of them.
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They Buriedthis newspaperSix Books End With The Machine Leaving America. It Came Back 43 Days Later.
Took the notebook from his son, went back to the archive for the rest of the box, and printed what the second form cannot settle.
Had that we did not
Both entries in full, the company's disposal card, and his son's objection at his son's length.
Left out
We telephoned him in 2023, asked one question about one day in April, and never thought to ask what happened next. The finding in this obituary was three feet from our reporter's hand for three years, and the man who could have told us about it is dead. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Dennis Pentecost, son of Alvin J. Pentecost on 11 August 2026 in person, with the full draft, the two entries and the asset card on the table, and no deadline. Replied by email on 17 August 2026 and asked that it run whole. Printed unedited.
You have been straight with me and I am going to be blunt with you anyway, because you asked me to be and because I think you will actually print it.
You have written seven hundred words about my father and I have counted them. Rather more than five hundred are about a machine. My father is the hinge in somebody else's argument and I do not think you noticed you were doing it.
Start with the notebooks, because you have got them wrong in a way that matters to me. You call them a personal working notebook, which is what the manual called them, and you explain the liability rule accurately. What you do not say is what that rule felt like. A man on a government wage could be billed personally for duty he failed to collect. Not disciplined. Billed. My father wrote in those books every night of his working life because he was frightened, and the fear was the point of the rule, and when they repealed it in the eighties he kept writing in them anyway because by then he could not stop. Nineteen volumes of a man covering himself. You have turned that into a research resource.
Then there is your telephone call. You rang him in October 2023. He was eighty-six. He told me about it because he told me about everything by then, twice. He said a newspaper had asked him about one day in 1978 and he had not been able to help, and he was upset about it for a week. He apologised to you. He said sorry to a reporter for not remembering a Tuesday from forty-five years ago, and your standards editor has written a very handsome note about how you should have asked him a second question, and I would like to say plainly that I do not think a second question would have got you anything except a second week of him lying awake.
On the substance you are probably right and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The second form is there. I found the number in the notebook and I am the one who asked you what it meant, and you went and looked, which is more than the six authors managed. Fine. Good. Somebody should have.
But understand what you have established. My father did his job correctly on two days in 1978 out of about seven thousand days. That is your story. It is a story about six writers not walking four folders further into a box, and my father is in it because his handwriting is on the box.
So here is a fact about him you did not ask for, and I would like it in the paper. From 1971 to 1982 he took the Saturday overnight every week so that the men on his shift with young children did not have to. Nobody made him. There was no extra money in it after the first two years. It is not in any of the nineteen notebooks, because the notebooks are only for the things that could have cost him money.
Print the Saturdays.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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