24 Hours to Life in Reno

First off, the statute of limitations on my crime has surely expired and one little inter-state move of a ‘quantity for sale’ of marijuana probably doesn’t matter as much now as it sure as hell did in 1970.   Second, jail is weird space.  If you haven’t been in, there’s no way to get it.  Time, logic, reality, and the very meaning of innocence is altered there.  This is the story of how one hippie first learned about the weirdness.  

This is July 1970.  The kid with me in the van knew about the dope I was carrying too, which could well have been a problem.  When I met him he was hitchhiking on I-80 outside of Salt Lake, headed west to Berkeley, part of the pulse of young folks toward California.  God bless them.  I picked him up.  He was a runaway, 16 I think, from Michigan.  We talked and smoked some of the dope and drove my green hippie van west, toward Berkeley, toward Reno.  

Now at that time — you have to imagine — the Interstate did not detour around every city and town it came to.  It went thru them on Main Street. In 1970 the Interstate had intersections and cross traffic and stop lights.  This story I’m telling surely would not have happened in later times. Because these days I would rocket right around Reno at Interstate speed.  Because nowadays I would not really ever have been in Reno, driving on the street.  Because  these days I would have dropped the kid at a freeway ramp and just gone on my small-time way down 395 toward Lee Vining and the back way to Yosemite. Because it was the Reno cop who had seen the bulletin about the armed robbery in South Lake Tahoe and it was he who, reasonably it turned out, figured that I and the kid were probably the armed robbers he was looking for and followed us down the street in the middle of Reno.  

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.

Campus Years

At its best, my childhood looked like Jean Sheperd's "A Christmas Story" with me as Ralphie.  I wanted the BB gun too, but also my school, the coal furnace, the front yard, clothes and snow suits… my life really looked like this.    Until I was ten we lived in Ann Arbor, the college town.  More than half of the time we lived at the campus.  

This is the late 40s in America.  Earth tones clothes, furniture and walls.  One telephone in the house, one electric plug per room.  Plastic was exotic.  No such thing as TV.  Behind our house was a lady who had about 30 cats.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, corner of State & Huron. In the picture, that’s it.  Dad’s Grace Bible is the ivy-covered stone building.  Our house, the parsonage, just next to the church.  Both buildings are now offices of an architectural firm.  My back yard of grass, clothes lines and rhubarb is now a parking lot .

   

This old native stone building was my playground, especially the tower.  Across the street in my time was Ann Arbor high school.

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.

Making Power

Much of the discussion of politics and policy -- on the left mostly, because the the right is just nasty -- much of the talk just seems so naive.... foolish.   The arguments that Pelosi should do this or Obama is a fake or a failure seem informed by some fantasy of what managing power is like.

So here's a story.  During the Carter Administration I ran into a friend at the White House.  Things like walking the hall at the White House were easier then and I was visiting to report a magazine piece,  she was on the National Security Council.  Said, 'hey.  How's it goin.' And this person, one of smartest and most capable I've known, she gave me a half focused look, and she said, 'It is unbelievably hard.  You would not believe how hard it is.'  Since I probably indeed can't believe how hard it all is, I've never fully digested her statement, but I think about it often.  And BTW, if it was hard then, it's surely harder now.

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.