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.

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.