The retired rear admiral treated the bookstore like one of his ships. He also sought to safeguard the English language, banning overused words such as “like.”
Jim Toole, a Navy rear admiral who commanded cruisers, destroyers and Mekong River patrol boats before taking charge of Capitol Hill Books, the Washington bookstore that became as well known for his endearingly grumpy presence at the front desk as for its stock of used and rare books, died Nov. 11 — Veterans Day — in the District. He was 86.Adm. Toole owned the shop for more than two decades before selling it to a group of longtime employees in 2018.
Adm. Toole’s system of “controlled disorganization,” as he called it, seemed unlikely to pass Navy muster. “The store is anything but shipshape,” Naval History Magazinein an otherwise admiring article. Some books were arranged in precarious Jenga-like stacks, including a “Tolkien Tower” and a “Wacko Stacko,” home to books by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, both fiery right-wing personalities. It was not unusual for stacks of paperbacks to collapse in a heap.
“He was just an incredibly generous person,” Burk added. “He was always the first person to buy people a round of drinks at the bar, to buy people dinner. You almost had to beg him to stop buying things.” By the time he graduated in 1966, he had been assigned to Vietnam, where he commanded more than 50 American patrol boats on the Mekong River near My Tho and earned the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star., who became the first commander of Navy SEAL Team 6.“Toole was an uncommon Navy boss,” Marcinko wrote in a memoir, “Rogue Warrior,” “a lean, mean, caustic, wry curmudgeon whose aggressiveness was a big bolster for morale at My Tho.
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