The New York paper (specifically our friend Carol Pogash) today reports that the people who run the Golden Gate Bridge will finally for heaven’s sake, install a suicide barrier.  The average last year of about one successful and two foiled jumpers per week is apparently, at last, too many.  So good.  And about darn time.

And here’s a story about a jumper not so widely known.  

Charles Rudnick introduced me to the late Nate Cohn, a wonderful old-school criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco. He was of the Mel Belli - Jake Erlich school of colorful courtroom artists, just the guy you want if you’ve done something stupid and want not to go to the gas chamber for it.  

He, Nate, told us that for a time he represented Show People of America which was the guild of movie stunt people, one of whom (I've got the name here someplace) needed to raise money to pay off an amiable divorce. Naturally, being a stunt person, he thought of making some money with a grand, attention-getting trick and convinced himself he could jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and live, have the stunt filmed, and make money selling the movie.  Nate represented the widow in the murder case that followed. 

Here is her picture, with Nate the balding guy on her left. 

Nate told us the DA charged the divorcing wife because she was to be the beneficiary of the stunt, had it worked; the money to be made selling the movie of the jump was for her. The reason the trick didn’t work, in spite of careful preparation and practice, is that a Highway Patrol Officer grabbed at the performer as he jumped and threw him into an uncontrolled spin. So, you know, he was killed.... not that he wouldn't have been anyway.  Nate got the widow off, during the inquest as I recall, by demonstrating that the 'murder' was really an accident.

PS.  the film of the fatal stunt may still exist, a possibility that sometimes entertains me late at night.

And PPS.  there's a whole book of Nate's stories -- although maybe not this one, I think.  It's called Murder He Liked and was written by Rory McGahan.  Lovely book.

JFK

Today another story out there about who killed President Kennedy.  Fifty years ago.  Like maybe who or what did it is still alive and ready to confess.  Or that finally confirming this or that version changes anything.  It's my sense that all these whodunit pieces in print and TV are created by people who weren’t alive when JFK was shot to death in Dallas.  That they have no idea what mattered and what the story was.  

They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Virtually every person conscious that day, November 22, 1963, every one of us remembers where he or she was when they heard.  Exactly.  I was in an English class at college.  The class ended abruptly.  Silent except for the sound of people crying.

There are not many moments where most of the people on this planet share an experience.  Pearl Harbor for my parents’ generation was like that, I gather.  Surely 9-11 and the planes flying into the Towers.   It is the electric minute, all of us with our fingers in the same plug, horrible and thrilling. If you are young now, and you imagine telling your offspring one day about 9-11, do you think you will talk about the conspiracy or the terrorists or some guy reading a children’s book to a kindergarden class?  I’m guessing not, rather that you’ll tell your children where you were and what you felt when you heard.  I’m predicting that what will stick over the next years is that instant of awful connection, of the burst of impossible information, that bite of the god-like fruit of pure knowledge, of suddenly, involuntarily knowing something you do not know how to know.  

A Thanksgiving Tale

I got an assignment back then to do a Thanksgiving piece for NPR and soldiered off by phone and car to make a little radio story about turkeys.  They raise turkeys in the Central Valley down the hill from our Mariposa house and I figured the audio from a turkey ranch — twenty thousand anxious birds in one place — would carry me a long way. 

Don’t remember much of the finished piece which I recorded on a Sony cassette 110A machine and edited on a Sony reel-to-reel on the living room table.  But I remember this one part.

The manager of the Armour turkey ranch just outside of Planada lived across the highway 140 from his birds, thousands and thousands of anxious birds bred for fast growth and weight gain, and with no skills except to eat.  We stood in his yard looking at them all, in pens just a few yards from the road.  And I asked him didn’t anybody ever steal one of his turkeys and what did he do about turkey rustling.   

Oh, he said, it pretty much takes care of itself.  I’ll see a car stop and a guy’ll run over to the pen and grab a bird and throw it in his car.  Then, maybe quarter mile down the road, I’ll see the car pull over, the door open, and the bird come flying out.  

Still makes me smile, imagining inside that station wagon, a freaked out 25-30 pound bird screeching, flapping and shitting, kids crying, wife screaming.  

Happy Thanksgiving.

why I no longer work for NBC News ever

Back then, early oughts, I was field producing live shots for the Today Show.  Not much money, but kinda fun way to spend an early morning.  Usually pretty good stories, and the glamor.  That too.  So one night in April the crew booker called from Burbank – this would be maybe 8 pm Pacific – said there was a Rasputin dog (my language, not her's) in Clear Lake and that Matt (Lauer, we're all on first names here) Matt wanted to interview the dog.  

Okay.  The story was that the dog, a 10 month old female mixed breed named Dosha, had slipped out of her yard collarless and been hit by a car.  And the responding police officer, seeing the animal as badly injured and in distress, had shot the dog.  In the head.  Put her down.  

Dosha's body, in an orange body bag, was put in the animal morgue cooler or something.  Whatever, a bit later, couple of hours I think, the shelter staff found Dosha standing up in the refrig, still in the body bag, and quite alive.  (The officer's a very bad shot, Dosha's vet whispered to me later.)  I have met this animal and can say that all things considered she was in pretty good shape and in a better mood than I would have been.  

So Matt wanted to do this story and I went to Clear Lake, arriving a bit after midnight Pacific.  We were to go live at 7:40 Eastern with dog and vet.

At the vet's office where the dog was and where we, the Today Show, had booked an interview with the vet, there were two satellite trucks.  One for me, along with two cameras, and one for ABC GMA.  Competition isn't unusual and I said hey to the GMA guys whom I knew and didn't think much of it.  However, a bit on when I told the Today Show producer in New York – a person sitting in a warm office with plenty of coffee and snacks – when I told her that there was an ABC crew in Clear Lake too, well, she went batshit.  She told me I represented NBC News! and was to tell the ABC crew that we, Today, had an exclusive.  I told her that I guess I'd do that but that it wouldn't work and that they'd think I was stupid.  But, you know, I went in where they were setting up and told the GMA producer that Today had an exclusive.  It went about as I said -- they thought I was a jerk and they continued to set up.

Incident at Beban's Coral

The foolish young men who in 1976 kidnapped a bus load of twenty-six school children and their bus driver, and locked them all in a buried truck body were, it was said, planning to use the five million dollar ransom to finance a movie project.  The really sad thing is that what they did, how the kids escaped, and how the idiots were captured really was the movie.  I covered the story for the San Francisco Examiner from the first day so in a way I was in the movie too.  

Press Conference after Children Escaped

The kidnapped bus was from Chowchilla, California, a small agricultural town in the Central Valley.  So when the first kidnapper was arrested, the fine newspaper I worked for sent me back to Chowchilla to cover his arraignment, the first court appearance of the many that would send him to prison where he spent more than thirty-five years.

So, in Chowchilla, waiting for the alleged to arrive from his first cell a couple of hours drive away.  Spent that wait with my pal Wayne King at Beban’s Coral, a bar on Robertson Blvd, the main drag of Chowchilla.  Wayne worked for the New York Times, usually in Atlanta, but he’d been in San Francisco for a bit helping out and we’d covered stories together before.  So we were sitting at the bar mostly, and then Wayne went to the back to use the pay phone and I was sitting at the bar by myself.

Forest Fires

I remember being frightened, but I don't think I was ever as afraid as I should have been.  

Started fighting and covering wild fires in about 1973, first on casual crews out of the Forest Service station at Jerseydale, then for whoever would pay me to go watch and report back.  So, mostly then it was humungous campaign fires, the ones that totally blew out to burn down subdivisions and this and that thousand acres of timber.  Fires you could see from ten miles away when bowls of fire popped out of a ridge.  Not the scary part.

If you've been smoked by a campfire or fireplace sometime and done that hold-your-breath-and-dodge thing, that's the scary part, only on a wild fire there's no place to dodge.  The smoke suddenly blinds you and worst case there's no information about which way to run.  And it's always steep, so not so much run as scramble.  And you can't see.  Or breathe. Kind of a dry waterboarding I'd guess.  Pretty bad.  I never walk past a hillside of Bear Clover, as my suffering family knows, without thinking what a freaking misery it is in a fire.  Just a ten-inch-tall little plant, hardly worth looking at, that produces in fire a godawful dense oily smoke.  Makes my throat catch to remember it at all.

Night shift

The private plane went into the Lake Michigan trying to land on Christmas Eve.  I was working evenings, 6 to 2 AM so I was there when it happened and the city editor sent a photographer went over to Meigs Field which was on landfill off downtown.  Meigs is no longer an airport, but is very big in the world of video games.  It was on a peninsula, so it was easy to land in the Lake if you were careless, or drunk, as this pilot probably was.  We sent a photographer over who said the cops told him it had been the woosy end of an office Christmas party, that there had been three aboard, and that the young woman had been pulled out of the water alive but not the two guys.  They were dead.

So back at the paper we had to find and call the families at home on Christmas Eve to discuss the violent, and probably scandalous death of husband/father.  Boss handed out the names.  I got one.

Usually the papers print language like – 'Authorities have not released the names pending notification of the next of kin.'  Actually, at least then, we got the names about as quickly as anybody knew them.  At Meigs Field that night I think they gave the names to our photographer.  There was no question of waiting for some official to get around to finding the families because there was another newspaper in town, the Tribune, and they bloody well were not waiting.

Dope

There was a try to legalize marijuana in California in 1972.  Voters whomped the initiative 2-1.  But it was fun.

The pro-dope campaign was run as straight as possible, all suit and tie.  Guy I dealt with there was a Brownell, grandson of Eisenhower's attorney general.   The public face of the pro-effort was intended to reassure straights that dope was not threatening.  1972.

On the other side of the straight-bent debate was my friend Keith Lampe.   Knew Keith in NY before I came out west.  Keith thought straights were never gonna vote for legal weed and that dopers had to be motivated to turn out.  Brownell and company stayed clear of him and he them.  But he mounted his own rump press conference campaign -- Mothers for Marijuana, Jocks for Joints.  Stuff like that.  Wonderful theater.

One day Keith called to say he and Arthur Okamura, a sculptor from Bolinas, were going to put on a stoned ping pong match... to prove that being high didn't interfere with judgment and reflexes or whatever, totally ridiculous in my experience, but whatever.  Anyway,  I was a TV reporter in SF and he, Keith, wanted me to be fair witness that Keith and Arthur were actually high and I was to do that by eating marijuana cookies with them half an hour before the press demonstration.  I was supposed to testify to the other reporter types that indeed, you know, the players were stoned.

I did eat the cookies, as did Keith and Arthur.  They played splendidly, I recall, very impressively, but I was way too ripped to do my part.  Could barely speak at all.  They were really good cookies.

Catastrophe porn

from Bay Citizen story  today on the San Bruno gas explosion and fire that killed four and burned several dozen homes:

"Those who called Crestmoor home -- many for decades -- know that nothing here will ever be the same."

For example, from now on in Crestmoor mastodons will roam the streets and nothing will ever seem to grow.  Nights will be full of the sounds of moans and screams.  And the spoken language will probably be Hungarian.

This raises again the misuse of 'tragic'.  This awful accident wasn't tragic -- unless it turns out that, say, one of the dead people was in charge of pipeline safety for PG&E.  I would argue this might be a calamity, but tragedy needs the involvement of destiny or fate, damnit.

Other words proscribed by Tom in this coverage:
-- nightmare  
-- heartbreak

Do I have to do everything around here?

Being civil

Lots of kerfuffle about President Obama dissing the Supreme Court during the State of the Union. Oh, my. but really, he fits right in. Letterman, O'Brien and Leno are being rude to each other in public; TV ads call the competition liars by name; a Reep called the President a liar right out loud during another Congressional speech. It's absolutely trendy to be impolite. Gonna get worse too.

Nails It!

Robert Redford (quoted by Ebert)

"Paris Hilton doesn't have anything to do with anything."

Dope for the little ones

I'm due to attend a meeting of a non-profit next week. they think I know how to get them in the news and I like what they do. But it reminds me:

I was working for a non-profit, doing some movies, and sat in on their Board meeting to make a report or something. Group, which did good deeds in public schools, had reached a fund raising agreement with Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Mail the specially marked ice cream carton top to Ben or Jerry and my organization gets 25 cents for its work with school children. Something like that. So I'm half listening as the ExDir reports that they've decided on a name for the Ben and Jerry boxtop promotion. It will be called 'Lids for Kids'. I woke up to tell them I thought that might not be a good name for the program.

Sometimes I wish it had gone through. Just to see what happens.

A Dog Story

One May night in 2003 the Today Show sent me to a veterinarian's office in Clear Lake to deal with a dog. Dosha, the rasputin dog. Dosha had escaped from her yard, been hit by a truck, shot (that is, put down) by a cop, put in the animal morgue and left for dead. (Her picture is borrowed from People) But Dosha was alive, and pretty well, all things considered, and Matt Lauer was booked to do a live interview about it.... Matt in his studio in New York City, me and Dosha and the vet in Clear Lake. Our slot was 7:40 AM Eastern, 4:40 AM in Clear Lake California.

When I got to the vet's there was a satellite truck in the parking lot and I said hi to Phil, the operator. Phil and I had done this a lot. But Phil said he was there for Good Morning America. (Actually, we're cool people so Phil called it 'GMA'. More insider stuff.) So ABC was gonna see the dog too, at 7:20 Eastern. And my truck and crews (two cameras) arrived. GMA got one examining room and I got one. Lights, cables, audio stuff. We're working away in the night. And at some point I told the control room producer in New York that GMA was there too.

And the control room producer went berserk. Seriously off. Very bad language. And she told me I was to tell the ABC crew that 'Today has an exclusive.' So I'm supposed to go tell these other guys who've been working along side us much of the night that they should pack up and leave because, you know, we have an exclusive with the dog. So I did. With not a lot of passion, and kind of pushing it off on the crazy person in New York.

The ABC people did not pack and leave, and of course, they concluded I was a jerk. Fun.

Then the control room producer -- who runs the on-air show -- called to tell me I was to produce Dosha for a 7:20 'live tease.' Of course -- and the producer knew this as well as I -- at 7:20 Dosha was gonna be on TV, live on GMA, the competition. It was surely unnecessary for me to have pointed that out, but I did. And she said, 'Get. The. Dog.'

There are in fact a handful of people in America who do watch all the morning shows and pay attention to who has what, and who has it first. The NBC producer's boss at 30 Rock is one of that handful.... of what, twenty people? Thirty? What had happened here was a Today booker had nailed down the vet, a very nice person named Dr. Sally, but did not nail down the dog. I hid Dr. Sally in my satellite truck so ABC couldn't get her, but, you know, GMA got Dosha.

Anyway, I groveled, and bugged the ABC people, who hated me very much, and I got Dosha back, not at 7:20 Eastern, but in time for a 'live tease, dog only' just before the local news break at 7:25. And we had the dog for a live picture during the Today Show news at 7:30. And Matt Lauer had a very nice chat with Dr. Sally and admired Dosha who had altogether much better manners than the control room producer and under much more trying circumstances, having been run over, shot and frozen and all.

We cleared air and the producer and I went at it by cell phone. She told me essentially I was a disgrace to NBC News and my profession. I said back really intemperate things, beginning with 'it's JUST a DOG,' and ending with 'go fuck yourself.' And I got fired. I am no longer hired to stay up all night for 300 bucks baby sitting dogs, heroes, nut cases, violent death, cute children, and the other things that make the Today Show producers happy. I do not miss it, but do feel a bit sorry about being rude to the over-caffeinated, under-experienced, silly producer who has to deal with considerably worse people in her chain of command. But I win, because she's probably still doing it, and I'm not.

Airplane Noise

Virtually all World War II film was shot silent, MOS is the insider term. So when you watch movies of dogfights and so forth, the burning plane trailing smoke heading for earth, the whining sound is faked. Sweetened is the insider term. I owe this wisdom to Chris Koch and don't think about this much. But now CNN is on the air covering a plane crash in Buffalo and asking a witness to compare the sound of the plane coming down with those World War Two movies and I'm mumbling to myself again. I mean, not only does he not know enough, he doesn't even register that the Buffalo crash was a jet and all that faked sound from WW2 on TV he's seen was prop noise. Lordy.

Guy Owes Me a Thousand Bucks

In Beban's Coral, a bar in Chowchilla California, a guy offered me a thousand dollars to kill a lawyer, one he didn't know. The lawyer was defending a kid who had helped kidnap a bunch of local children from a school bus. The kidnappers stashed the children in a buried truck body and frankly the kids probably would have died there except that they escaped. Anyway, at Beban's Coral a bunch of the local boys had convinced themselves -- not unreasonably, if you think about it -- that crafty big city lawyers were going to get the kidnappers off and they didn't like it. So I was a stranger and this murder for hire idea was justice, as far as the guy was concerned.

My friend Wayne King came outside the bar looking for me and I told him about the deal. Wayne worked for the New York paper and was there like me to attend the arraignment of the kidnapper (then still the alleged, but later the convicted and still imprisoned, so the murder was not really going to be necessary as it turned out). Wayne, being a Southerner, had a really different sensibility about all this than I. He figured that sooner or later somebody in Beban's would get drunk or greedy enough to actually do the assassination and he, Wayne, wanted me to tip the police. This is just exactly how it happens, he said, it being the kind of horrific humN violence a reporter in the American South had seen way too much of. So Wayne insisted, in fact, kind of forced me and I did warn the Chowchilla Chief of Police. And nobody killed the lawyer, or to my knowledge even tried.

But once in a while I think about this, and leave a message for the lawyer that in a way he kind of owes me a thousand dollars. I don't want the money so much as I hope it might occur to him that he has a reporter to thank for his life. Wayne, not me. Not that I'd have done any killing of course, but I didn't really know much about small towns, and ole boys drinking Salty Dogs at ten in the morning, and rage. Wayne knew that stuff.

I am looking for network news I can watch -- without screaming. I've given up on my old employer NBC. Way too 'local' and foolish. There's the Lehrer Report, I know, but I don't get a good PBS signal in Mariposa... and I don't need the depth. I already do a lot of reading and don't need the nice folks at PBS to rehears what I've already heard. I want to participate in mass culture. See what my fellows are seeing. Does anyone have a favorite they can defend?

We need a new plane crash

US Air 1549 ditched in the Hudson on Jan 15. That is, as we speak, ten days ago and has become the Story That Won't Go Away. On Crash Day NBC gave the story the entire first segment, eleven minutes. Seemed excessive then, and it was just the beginning. Today they had voice over of the bird-struck engine being lifted out of the water, and full package treatment for Hero Captain Sully being welcomed home in Danville. I've marked the day, Jan 15, 2010 in my calendar so to watch for the one-year-later, where-are-they-now stories, and I now believe the networks will cover the birth of children to survivors.

The Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on the other hand, haven't been covered for days.

On the problem of determining sanity

Charlie Smith was the over-night assistant city editor at the Sun-Times in Chicago when I worked there.... you know, a while back. Charlie came in just after midnight and baby sat Chicago until the next morning, mostly with darn little to do. It was a just-in-case kind of slot. There was a single desk assistant too, sometimes me, to go to the library and make beat calls and that. Not much happened.

So Charlie read books. He bought them used and went through several every week.

One night he called my attention to the book he was reading and pointed out that a previous reader had underlined every line -- every single line on every page -- with a ruler and pencil. I admired. And Charlie told me that he had concluded that the person was insane. I agreed. Charlie was a wise man, and my boss.

A little later I noticed across the desk that Charlie was erasing the underlines, all of them.